Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

“Hang on.” Riley had his phone in his hand. He tapped the screen a few times and lifted it to his ear, then said, “Hi babe, it’s me. I have a weird favor to ask.” Silence. “Bring some groceries over, most especially a motherfucking big container of salt? Andrew’s sick, so I’m gonna cook him dinner. And we’re out of salt. Okay, good. Thanks.” He hung up.

  Andrew cracked one eye to regard his flagrant, stilted falsehood with disdain. “Which one was that?”

  “Ethan, I ain’t stupid enough to pull that kind of thing on Luca. She’d see through it and have my ass,” he said.

  “Good for her,” Andrew grunted.

  He slipped into helpless drowsing until damp fingers touched his palm. The chair skidded an inch with the power of his reflexive jerk. Riley sat crouched outside the salt line with a first-aid kit, watching him. Andrew allowed him to wipe the wounds with antibacterial cleansing cloths, alcohol stinging as the beginnings of scabs flaked off. The gouges were shallow, as Riley has said, but also long and grislier for it. Riley smeared ointment on them before wrapping gauze over the whole mess. White cloth on tan skin, as if he were mummified.

  Andrew flexed his fingers. “I’m going to lie down.”

  “Not in his bed, you’re fucking not,” Riley said.

  “I’ll sleep in mine,” he said. “This circle thing isn’t going to do much, even if it was real.”

  “Why not?” Riley challenged him.

  Andrew scuffed his shoe through the line, scattering salt. The present, constant heartbeat in his chest thumped a steady reminder. He said, “I’m the conduit, it’s coming from inside me. I don’t think drawing a circle around me is going to keep the thing out.”

  Needing assistance up the stairs galled him, but it was either lean on Riley’s shoulders, hips bumping each other and the banisters, or crawl to his room. The synaptic feedback from brain to limbs was on the fritz. He fumbled the doorknob on first attempt, roommate’s arm around his waist, though he succeeded on the second attempt. Stale air wafted out in a gush.

  “Text if you need me,” Riley said.

  Andrew rolled to the center of the mattress, toed off his sneakers, and grabbed one edge of the comforter. The door shut with a creak as he bundled himself in. Soft pillows surrounded his face. Eddie’s final dissolution had come in the trunk of his car, wrapped in a cheap tarp with his own blood soaking his clothes. The oak tree, in comparison, made for a serene place to rest.

  Not two minutes later a text from Riley arrived: you were convulsing and i couldn’t wake you so i got the pitcher from the kitchen. i don’t know how long you’d been laying there. getting kinda tired of playing nurse so take it easy

  The clock on his phone read 7:48. Startled fear sloshed across his nerves. If he’d finished meeting with West around five-thirty, and Riley found him closer to seven-thirty, that was two hours unaccounted for. Two hours spent in haunted limbo, collapsed behind his fucking house unresponsive to the world, shaking apart at the atomic level. It wasn’t the first or even second time he’d been rescued from himself or the revenant by one cousin or the other. He’d set a hell of a pattern, and it was getting nastier each time.

  Six nights after their return from the cavern he’d climbed on top of Eddie in his neighboring twin bed, buried his face against his slender neck, and sobbed until it hurt while eerie hissing shadows clawed at the corners of the bedroom. Eddie had murmured it’s nothing, just pretend it’s not there, it can’t bother you. He had gotten used to their curse and what it could do in the years since, and that had made him complacent, but now he was scared again. The version of Eddie lingering under the rattling of the windowpanes, the hush of the air conditioner, offered no succor and kept no promises to him. The bandages on his itching arms proved that.

  * * *

  Expected to see you when I got in from work

  You good?

  Got one more interview lined up for you later

  Andrew considered the messages Sam had texted him in the middle of the night, and decided to sort himself out before he answered, rolling himself free of his pillow nest to face the morning. Under harsh bathroom lighting, the unwrapped gouges scrawled across his forearms spelled a message of violence. He ran his thumb along the edge of one, a millimeter short of the soft scab. Firm pressure worsened the itching. Long sleeves in the miserable heat of summer’s last gasp would provide camouflage if not comfort, so he crossed the hall to Eddie’s room and snagged a lightweight, pastel green Henley from the closet. Fabric caught on the scabs with miniscule stinging yanks. He rolled the sleeves up to his elbow.

  Aside from the revenant waiting to drag him under, what else might be hiding in the Challenger that he hadn’t noticed before? Bodies left traces behind; he’d listened to enough true crime podcasts to know that. The house was empty when he descended the stairs. Another quick tap on his phone screen to remind himself of the day of the week; on determining the date, he realized he was due in class later in the afternoon, if he so chose. With practiced motions, he turned on the single-serve coffee machine, filled a glass with ice from the dispenser, popped a pod of grounds in place, and tapped the button for OVER ICE.

  While it rumbled through the brewing process, he dug the list of names out of his pocket and booted up his laptop. Sam had left him three to research; two had bullshit nondescript names he had no idea how to locate, but the older couple—the last ones, the ones Eddie had missed out on—seemed easier. Sure enough, some lazy social media stalking and googling led him to their contact info in the digital phonebook by the time the coffee maker beeped completion. His arms burned as he scribbled the number onto the Post-It.

  No part of the investigation process seemed particularly real to him, but digging up some elderly couple’s phone number through their Facebook accounts was exceptionally weird. Sorting through a script in his head for what he’d say, he grabbed his iced coffee and stepped onto the porch. Grim and sleek, the Challenger waited behind the house, a blot on the greenery of the alley under the broad blue sky. Before he approached, he texted Sam: I’m fine. going to reach out to some people on my list.

  Daylight rendered the haunt marginally more inert, or so he had to hope, despite recent encounters. After a bracing sip of bitter, watery coffee—homemade, never as good—he popped the trunk again. Trepidation slowed his crunching steps across the gravel; he set the glass off to the side, wedging a little hollow into the rocks to support it, and bumped the lid all the way open. As before, he saw the spare tire and the Armor All, streaked now with a crust of dried gore from his indiscreet supernatural bullshit.

  “Well, shit,” he grunted.

  If Eddie’s murderer had left real traces behind, his own attempts had covered them over with fresh, gruesome leavings. Andrew sat on his ass on the gravel, then flopped backward, letting the searing pebbles dig into the meat of his shoulders and legs. What the fuck am I doing, he thought.

  One task left for the morning. He let the crest of his miserable irritation drive him to tap in the McCormicks’ number. To his surprise, after three rings, a woman picked up with a friendly, “Hello, this is Lisa.”

  “Uh, hi,” he sputtered, sitting up straight. The sun beat hard on his long-sleeved shirt. “My name is Andrew, I’m—sorry, this is going to sound dumb, but did a guy named Eddie Fulton reach out to you about doing some interviews? Local folk stories?”

  She hummed on the other end, responding, “Yes, actually, about a month ago. What’s this about?”

  “I’m a friend of his, and he—well, he passed, and I’m trying to finish up his work?”

  “Oh,” she said, obviously startled. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  A long pause hung between them.

  “Would you be willing to talk to me instead?” he asked.

  “Sure, sure, hon,” she said. “I’ve got nothing else going on this afternoon, would you like to speak to me and my husband then?”

  Clarifying that she had a man around the house, Andrew
realized wryly. “That sounds great. Thank you.”

  After another awkward pause, he wrote the address she gave him on his Post-It and hung up. He wasn’t cut out for police work. He grabbed his coffee and fled inside out of the heat, sweating from armpits to knees. In the fridge he found an assortment of pre-packaged salads, deli lunchmeats, and a plastic carryout container full of chicken wings with an electric blue sticky note on top that said “eat these Andrew.” He’d never laid eyes on such bounty at Capitol Street. While microwaving the wings, because the idea of preheating the oven to wait for them to crisp again amounted to torture, he opened his university email. Troth waited at the top of the inbox.

  Hello Andrew,

  I would advise speaking with me directly about your continuing research as Thom is busy in his own process at the moment. I did not want him and Edward to influence each other or be in competition, and have in the past guided them both toward separate arenas. I’ve instructed him to pass along relevant questions to me and to focus on his own dissertation. I’m happy to work with you as he pursues his own projects.

  Best,

  Jane Troth

  The front door banged open at the same time the microwave beeped. Andrew stood in the center of the room with brow furrowed, re-reading her email and ignoring both, until Sam called out, “Hey, princess, you here?”

  Andrew stuck his phone in his mouth and jerked both shirtsleeves down to his wrists as footsteps approached the kitchen. He took one long leap to the microwave. Sam rounded the corner of the doorway. Andrew sat his container of wings on the table and took his phone from between his teeth. One glossy patch of spit streaked the screen.

  “Hey,” he said, belated and stiff.

  “It’s your house, so I’m not judging.” Sam’s eyes glittered with mirth. “Perfectly good table right there to put your phone on though, just saying.”

  Andrew picked up a chicken wing, stomach sour with hunger and nerves. “I texted you.”

  “I was already heading over,” Sam said. “What’s the plan? I’m off work, at your disposal all afternoon.”

  Andrew said, “I set up an interview, with the last people Eddie was supposed to talk to. You coming?”

  Sam took the address from his hand and said, “That’s a hell of a drive, huh. But yeah, sure, why not.”

  “Now?” Andrew swallowed his relief with a mouthful of chicken.

  “Bring those,” Sam said with a gesture to the box of wings.

  Five minutes later he was in the passenger seat of the WRX eating his second piece of chicken, air on full blast, speakers blaring a hideously distorted EDM track. Sam stole a wing from the container on his lap and ate it in two motions, one tearing gnash of teeth for the thickest chunk of meat and a complex suction maneuver that pulled the rest off the bone. A straggling bit of sinew was all that remained when he popped the bone free and tossed the scraps out his cracked window. Effortless and practiced. He waggled his fingers, and Andrew lifted the container to let him steal another.

  There was no need to speak. Pressure receded from behind Andrew’s eyes, the tension he carried from his blackout easing a fraction. Sam drove while he finished the leftovers. Whenever he let himself slow down, the monumental weight of his unanswered questions started to crush him to dust, so the drive and his company for it were both a relief and a torture. After an hour on the interstate, Sam punched in an address on his GPS.

  The same highway led to the park with the oak tree, but this time, the route took them off an exit and through a cluster of trailers by a gas station. The red line on the GPS wound deeper into sparsely forested nothingness, a rural road spitting out the occasional unmarked driveway to either side, some paved and some dirt. The McCormick mailbox whipped past them around a blind curve, and Sam had to slam on the brakes and put the car in reverse.

  The double-wide at the end of the drive had a painted tan deck and yellow window trimmings, with box planters full of flowers on the stoop. A mid-nineties Chevy pickup sat out front. One big tree shaded the whole house.

  Andrew said, “All I told them is I was a friend of Eddie’s, that he’d died, and that I still wanted to come talk to them about shit. These people were supposed to be his next interview, but he put them off for some reason—found something else, I guess.”

  “I hear you,” Sam said as they mounted the steps.

  The doorbell pinged, audible from the porch, and a woman’s voice hollered, “Just a minute!”

  Andrew stuck his hands in his pockets, Sam loitering behind him with his best good ol’ boy smile buttered onto his lips. The door opened, leaving the storm glass pane between them and a lady in her seventies at minimum, white hair in tight gramma curls around a plump tanned face. Appliqué flamingos dotted the breast pocket of her pink shirt.

  “Hi, ma’am,” Sam said.

  “I called this afternoon,” Andrew clarified, as if she couldn’t guess.

  With a nod she opened the storm door and gestured them inside, smiling. “You boys are here to get the good gossip, huh?”

  The den had a big television and a small couch, barely more than a loveseat, with a handful of homemade throw pillows on it. Andrew and Sam perched there with equally delicate discomfort, broad shoulders and unruly knees all wrong in the cozy space. Lisa McCormick planted one hand on her hip to look them up and down.

  “Y’all want something to drink?”

  “I’m good,” Andrew said.

  “Yeah, please,” Sam said.

  “All right, let me get Rob too.” She went farther into the house. “Hey hon, those boys who called are here!”

  Andrew wasn’t too accustomed to dealing with the elderly. He hadn’t visited his surviving grandfather in months. Last time he had, it was with Eddie in tow to take the old man from his condo to a Hooters for his birthday. Riley said Sam had been raised up by their grandmother, though, which didn’t explain his tense seat on the edge of the couch. Maybe he was bad with strangers. It was odd to see him polite and almost demure. The sound of a sliding door opening and shutting came from the other room.

  An older man who must’ve been Rob entered the den in the midst of wiping his hands on his jean shorts. “Hey there. Was out picking tomatoes, we got too many growing this summer to keep up with.”

  His wife popped her head around the corner and said, “Come sit at the table where we can all see each other.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sam said.

  He stood first. The low ceiling of the double-wide made him appear taller. Andrew wracked his brain for his segue, his conversation points, and realized he had none. Other than that they’d known the Fultons, and their land backed up to the estate, he didn’t know what the hell Eddie would’ve asked them about.

  Sun streaming in through the glass doors to the yard lit the kitchen-slash-dining room brightly. The garden out back was full of tomato bushes and cabbages and zucchini. Sam and Andrew sat across the table from the McCormicks. Lisa handed Sam a tall glass of tea and kept another for herself.

  “What relation are you to that young man from before, again?” Lisa said.

  “Eddie and I grew up together, he was my best friend,” Andrew said. “There was an accident and I’m following up on some things he meant to do, before he passed.”

  Sam nudged him, boot-tip to ankle, under the table. The McCormicks made sympathetic noises with twin frowns, the way couples do who’ve been together for decades, separate faces with the same expression.

  “I’m damn sorry to hear that, with as young as y’all are. You in school too?” Rob asked.

  “Yeah,” Andrew said.

  “And what about you, son?” he said to Sam.

  “I’m a mechanic, sir,” he said. “Also a friend of Ed’s.”

  “My name’s Andrew,” he added. “And this is Sam.”

  “Oh, hell, I remember that face now,” Lisa said. She propped her chin on her hand. “You and the Fulton boy were the ones that got in trouble out in the woods back there, weren’t you? He said he
was curious about his family, and we’ve been here for years, my mama and her mama before that.”

  Andrew nodded, glancing out the doors again. A steep hill rose up at the edge of the yard, shale sticking out of the crumbling dirt and grass, straggling trees tumbling and growing on the slope. A curious tremble ran up his fingers into his sore arms.

  “So I guess you’re here about the curse too, then,” she said.

  22

  “Curse?” Sam asked first.

  “The Fulton curse,” Lisa McCormick repeated. She sipped her tea and glanced between the boys at her table. “It’s a grim subject though, considering your friend’s accident.”

  “No, I want to hear,” Andrew said.

  “He asked us to meet a little while back, but then he rescheduled. I think he had some detail or another on the family history he wanted to chase down before he interviewed us,” Rob interjected.

  “There’s a couple different versions of the story,” she said. “I heard it from my mama, who must’ve heard it from someone else, and so on. But I guess it’s too backwoods for people to be putting in books.”

  Andrew crossed and recrossed his arms on the table, finding the safest angle to support his wounds. He settled with a thumb tucked into the crease of his elbow on one side and the other hand resting on his bicep. Sweat prickled the divot of his pectorals. Sam and Mrs. McCormick sipped their tea.

  Andrew said, “What’s the curse about, then?”

  “Well, it’s more or less what you’d expect, but it’s a good story. Legend has it,” she started, hill-rolled accent deepening, “that the second son of James Fulton fell head over heels for a delicate girl from up north he met when he was at schooling. So against the family’s judgment, given he had prospects down here, he marries the girl and brings her home to the estate his daddy built.”

  Mrs. McCormick gestured out past the slope of their yard. The sympathetic tingle in Andrew’s skin rippled. He was closer to the Fulton land than he’d been in eight years. When he’d checked a GPS map before the drive, he realized that the McCormick forest joined the Fulton forest some distance from the trailer with its flower boxes. He owned the land across that invisible line. He wondered if he’d recognize the moment he stepped across the divide.