by Rex Hurst
“Is Jon in a lot of trouble?” she asked.
“No, dear.” Mother’s tone twisted to doting parent mid-syllable. “Why don’t you get a popsicle for being a good girl and watch cartoons.”
“Okay.” But she didn’t leave. No cartoon could beat the show in the basement.
“Why can’t you ever follow simple directions? It’s not much. It’s not fucking rocket science. I ask you not the kick the door open, but that’s too difficult for you. I send you to get some Hellman’s mayonnaise, you get some other goddamn brand. I tell you to cut the lawn a quarter of an inch, you cut it half. You’re so incompetent. When are you gonna pull your head out of your dumb ass and stop being the biggest fuck-up in the world?”
Anger. Hurt. Depression.
It would be so satisfying to break her face. He could almost feel the crunch of her teeth across his knuckles. The rules of society held back his blow. One just didn’t hit their mother, did they? No matter what she did, she was still a mother and that meant something. So he took the emotional wounds, withstood the verbal battering, without complaint. He became the proverbial whipped dog since society left him no other options.
Despite his resolution, Jon was not the type to do absolutely nothing. Robbed of using violence, the only thing he could manage was tears. That made him hate himself more. He wanted to be a man, be strong, but . . .
“Holy shit. Are you crying, you little wimp?”
Eyes downcast, a sniffle wiped away. “No.”
“Yes, you are!”
Why was his life like this? Why couldn’t she be a normal mother who cared for her children? Cared about them as people, not just about their basic needs. Father supplied him with clothes and food, but not much else.
“Time to step up and start being a man. No one loves a pussy,” she continued on without missing a beat. “That means doing what you’re told. And why the hell are you bleeding?”
A little pool of blood had developed in the webbing of his hand. It spread over the lines of his knuckles. He had forgotten it under the abuse. Only after it was pointed out to him did he feel pain. That and the nausea.
“Well?” she demanded.
He mutely pointed to the sink. She stomped over and screeched. “Why is there a half-dead animal stinking up my good basement?”
“I . . . I . . . ”
“What?”
“I kind of hit it with my bike.”
“Jesus fuck, so you bring it home?”
“It’s not dead.”
“We’ll see about that.” She grabbed the squirrel and dashed its head open against the bottom of the sink. This time the nausea overwhelmed him, and he vomited on the slate floor.
***
Jon retreated into his inner thoughts. In his room, he scribbled furiously away in a spiral notebook. He had labeled it “geometry notes” to prevent any curious snooping, but it really contained his secret diary—or journal. Yes, journal was more masculine—where he raged against his parents, his insecurity, his lingering virginity, and whatever was left in the world.
It had taken him an hour to clean up the puke and dispose of the squirrel carcass, All the while he endured vicious barbs and nasty giggling from the two females who had decided to “supervise” rather than help. The dead animal was all but forgotten now, only hate rattled around his brain.
If that stupid bitch wants me dead then she should just shoot me, but that would mean she would have to get off her lazy ass and do something besides whining out of her cunt. She can’t do anything but complain that’s why she never gets anything done. She just complains and waits for someone else to fix it because she’s such a lazy whore.
This was one of his escapes. Not the big one, but a minor oasis to deal with the garbage of life. A place to expel the venom from his soul. With each word he tossed out, he felt a cathartic warmth, a rush of pleasure, which stabilized his mood. Pressure slowly decreased.
And it’s only ME! She doesn’t treat Michelle or Catherine bad. And it’s not just because I’m a boy. She has some special hate in her heart for my presence. She won’t talk like that to Father. Or anyone else! Bitch is always looking for some excuse to attack, like I’m ruining the house that’ll be mine.
He paused. Technically, Mother was right. The place probably would go to him as the only male heir. Michelle was older, but considering her toxic waste lifestyle, it would be turned into a crack den five minutes after her claws snatched up the deed. Father would never let that happen. The house’s legacy was very important to him.
Their home had been in the St. Fond family ever since Jon’s great-great-grandfather ordered the two-story house out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue in 1922—The Puritan, model no. 3190—paying the princely sum of $1,947 for the whole thing. Once the thirty thousand pieces had been shipped down the Erie Canal, the old patriarch had the dwelling installed over a pre-existing cellar. He must have been a cheap bastard because he refused to shell out for frills like plumbing, electricity, or a boiler. The old time ways were the best to him apparently, including having to wipe your asshole with your own hand. All of the staples of modern life had been added later by less sturdy descendants.
While being forced to write some stupid essay about his family, Jon had stumbled on a whole box of old papers detailing his great-great-grandfather’s legal troubles over the construction. The old man would hire a crew for a day, fire them without paying, and then hire a different crew for the next day. He kept this up until the house was finished. Eventually, the various crews banded together and sued for their wages. The old man refused to settle and strung the proceedings out for six years before finally settling on a quarter of what they were owed. The land appeared to have belonged to the family for longer than the house stood, though most of the records had been destroyed by some flash flood in 1959.
And even if I will inherit it, there’s some horrible thing just waiting underneath. I know it. They always half-ass it with me. Like there’s a lot of taxes owed on the house or it’s on a sinkhole or something like that. That’s how they work. Catherine gets all the latest Barbie crap, but when I ask for that new VHS copy of Star Wars, they get me some knock-off episodes of Jason of Star Command, the shittiest of shitty sci-fi shows.
The phone rang. Someone else answered, then his mother squawked up the stairs that the call was for him and he needed to hurry the hell up. Jon stashed the book in its hiding place under a small black and white TV on his desk. That was another way his parents screwed him. Michelle had a massive twenty-five-inch Zenith television with cable hookup—the little snot got thirteen whole channels right to her room—while he had been given this crappy ten-inch Mexican knock-off with rabbit ear antenna that he had to wrap half a yard of tinfoil around to get even the lousy PBS channel.
He snatched up the receiver and waited for the other extension to click off. It didn’t. Jon breathed heavy and waited, and waited, and waited some more. God damn it . . .
“Mom, can you hang up?”
“I don’t think so. If you need to talk, go ahead. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t listen in. I mean, are you talking about drugs or robbing a bank? No? Well then it doesn’t matter if I hear.”
“It’s okay, dude,” the caller chimed in.
Michael Dutch was on the other end. Jon’s oldest friend. His non-biological brother. Michael also had the distinction of being one of the few people with a worse home life than Jon. His parents were self-absorbed assholes just like Jon’s, but they also had the added handicap of being poor. A hand-to-mouth existence had been Michael’s entire life. He needed an escape as much as Jon did.
“Are we still on?”
“Definitely.”
“All right, I’ll meet you in a bit.”
“Remember, you have to do all your chores first,” butted in Mother. “I’ll be double-checking and reporting to Father. Anything not done well and you’re not going anywhere, mister.”
Jon slammed down the phone and panted a while in near-rabid frenzy. Fuck her! Thi
s was one of her little games. No matter how much he scrubbed the floor or how long he vacuumed the rug, there would always be a problem, real or imagined. It didn’t matter.
He was going out and she could shove the chores. If she did tell Father . . . a cold dread seized him . . . it was a problem to deal with later. Right now, Jon needed to get away.
He gathered up a number of hardbound books with bits of loose-leaf paper sticking haphazardly between the pages and put them carefully into a backpack. These were precious objects, holier than any ancient script. They were the tools and keys with which Jon escaped the world. They were how he kept his sanity and maintained stability in his soul. They let him be . . . something else.
He donned a baseball cap and sauntered down the stairs. The Girl Scout gear stowed away, Catherine was now decked-out in a brightly colored leotard. She pranced around the living room with the best ballerina flats money could buy adorning her feet. As she spun, an infectious grin of true joy broke out over her face. Mother clapped, pure maternal love leaking from her smile.
“Beautiful. Just beautiful,” she muttered.
And it was. For a split second, he forgot all about the horrible snitching and lies Catherine had made up about him and took in her happiness. There wasn’t much grace, but her laughter made up for all that. It was a side of his sister that only occasionally snuck out. Then she saw him and evil reclaimed her face.
Mother joined her in the stare. “Are you going to make a stand or something?” she mocked Jon.
“Nope, I’m just going.” He strode past them.
“Fine,” Mother said, shaking her head, “you’re the one who’ll deal with Father, not me.”
He slammed the screen door behind him and yanked his Huffy from the garage. There was still a smear of blood down the center of his front wheel. The guilt stabbed him again. Just an accident, he reminded himself. Jon gave a brief salute to the trash can which was the animal’s final resting place. Then hesitated, thinking there should be more that he could do.
Inside, Mother heaped praise on Catherine. “When we go, you’re gonna be number one. Oh, I know it! You’ll be the prettiest girl there. Everyone will be jealous.”
Mother and daughter spent a lot of time touring the child pageant circuit. The pair primped and preened, teased up hair, rubbed Vaseline on teeth, danced, and sang. Many times Jon had come home to see Catherine standing on the kitchen table practicing cute quips to say to the judges or reciting rote speeches on how much she loved herself some Jesus. Catherine did fairly well, too. A shelf on the upper walkway was loaded with ribbons and trophies. Rather than be jealous, Jon was all for it. It got them out of his hair.
His mother went on and on in her praise of her youngest child.
Jon spat. Nothing like that had ever been thrown his way. The squirrel’s soul would have to migrate on without any more salutations. He stomped on the pedals and rode off into the night.
CHAPTER 2
The Tragedy of Man
Buffalo was the faded queen of old New York, the leftovers of an industrial era ground to shit. It had once been a showpiece of culture and success, industry and shipping, where the working slobs could pull down beer money and the educated snobs could twitter their noses at a host of artistic feasts. It wasn’t fully gone, but the city was quickly fading into a new Detroit or Baltimore—hubs of corruption and squalor. As opportunity slowly leaked away, so did Buffalo’s best and brightest. More and more vanished each year, leaving behind only those who were too lazy or stupid to get the hell out. Nowadays, all the city had to boast about was a chronically losing football team and the invention of Buffalo wings.
If the city proper was that bad, Jon’s home of Black Rock, the area he now pedaled through, was its retarded cousin. Once the berg had been a commercial rival for its dominant sister and had nearly been the chosen terminus of the Erie Canal. The War of 1812 changed everything. While it was raging on, Buffalo got the nod for the canal exit, as it was further away from the enemy’s forts. This turned out to be good planning as the township of Black Rock was razed and raped twice by blood hungry Canuck marauders.
The township took its name from an outcropping of black limestone along a nearby river that was blown up by engineers in the building of said Erie Canal, adding insult to injury in the minds of its low-wage residents. Nowadays the typical Black Rockian barely sported a high school diploma and lived paycheck-to-paycheck from an ever-shifting menagerie of minimum-wage jobs. Their dreams of bettering themselves revolved solely around hitting it big on the lottery, rather than actually working toward a goal.
Their dwellings reflected their poor life planning. Cardboard squares duct-taped in place of broken windows. Screen doors with the mesh half hanging out. Red brick stoops that were missing a few bricks. Old paint jobs with flaked-out gray splotches like leper spots. These were common sights. Last decade’s broken down Chevys and germ-ridden public transportation were the rides of choice. Dented corner bars. Cheap wing shacks. Gas stations with rusted nozzles. All of this was Jon’s world.
Which begged the question as to why his parents insisted on staying in the area, despite the fact that they could easily afford something ten times as luxurious. Well, it was the land, the family land that anchored them all to this dead spot. Father had an uncharacteristic soft spot for his heredity, so everyone else had to suffer because of it.
Jon pulled up at Michael Dutch’s house. It was a crumbling brick affair, a thrown together cheap structure, shoved at the very back of a dead end street. The cement stairs to the front door were bare. The iron railings, embedded in the stone, had been twisted off years ago. A barebones carport, just a roof and poles to hold it up, lay to the right, with a beat up truck missing the front tires underneath. The truck’s forward plate dangled by a single stripped-out bolt.
Jon tapped on the front door. Mrs. Dutch answered and, without acknowledging Jon’s presence, yelled for Michael. He came to the door quickly, a backpack slung over his shoulder. Jon was glad of that. He didn’t want to linger inside. It seemed like the Dutch family never cleaned their carpets and the house constantly stunk of cheap cigars and fried bologna. That night was no exception.
He peeked inside as Michael laced up his sneakers. A three legged dog gnawed a rawhide bone. The youngest child rattled the bars of his playpen with savage determination. Mrs. Dutch went back to singing unharmoniously along with the radio. Michael’s dad sat in his boxer shorts and hole-ridden undershirt, swearing at the game on TV. A slab of greasy pizza oozed over his leg.
“God damn losers. Get the ball!”
Michael slapped on a ball cap similar to Jon’s and said, “Let’s go.”
You didn’t have to tell Jon twice. He had plenty of bad memories of the place, and he didn’t even live there. Who knew what barnacles Michael had sticking to the bottom of his soul. They got Michael’s bike out of the back, negotiating through a clump of dropouts sniffing gasoline from an aluminum container. Shaggy hair and shaggy brains, they were friends of Michael’s older brother, an eternal doper who was finally kicked out of the ninth grade at the age of twenty. Michael shouted into the house that he was leaving and didn’t even receive a grunt in reply.
It was a miracle he still even bothered. Michael was shooting for the moon if he thought his parents were going to change. Neither of them had progressed beyond the idiot high schooler’s need to appear tough. They took every new idea as a challenge against them personally, as an attack on their ego, and the easiest way for them to deal with something and still “look cool” was to shit all over it. As if anyone was paying attention.
Jon remembered in the fifth grade they had to do a diorama for their science class. The projects had been all laid out in the school atrium and parents, teachers, and the principal sauntered by and judged them. Michael had worked for days on his, adding all sorts of glitter and streamers, the accoutrements that make an elementary school project pop. He won first place and got a little ribbon to go along with the honor.
He was so proud and raced home to show off his achievement. Jon followed him along.
“Look, Daddy,” he had said, heart pounding with pride, “I won this.”
The elder Dutch had half-glanced at the award and snorted, “What the fuck you want me to do?”
The light had switched off in Michael’s eyes. Downtrodden, he slumped out of the house, the project dragging on the ground behind. He had lugged it with a limp hand, glitter sparked up over every bump, like the dying gasps of a fairy. Michael had tossed the whole thing into the trashcan and sat down by it, staring at ants making their rounds.
Jon had tried to cheer him up by buying him an ice cream, the one true cure all for an eight year old’s ills, but nothing could shake him from this slump.
This was just one of many soul-crushing incidents. Michael never spoke about his parents after that, just focused on his studies, hoping that school was his ticket away. To deal with stress, he composed limericks. No, really. Actual limericks. The dirtier the better. It was a side of him that you might not have otherwise known existed.
“There was a young fellow named Simon,
Who tried to discover a hymen,
But he found every girl,
Had given up her pearl,
In exchange for a single fake diamond.”
“Sounds about right for Black Rock,” Jon sneered. “Heard they’re adding a maternity ward to the middle school.”
“Yeah,” Michael laughed. “The girls around here are all dumb sluts. They spread for anyone.”
Except me! They both lamented silently.
Dusk was rapidly running at them. A crisp autumn wind shot down the street. They pedaled through old roads designed for horses and buggies, half the streetlights were out. The pair stopped at an unassuming house surrounded by a tired chain link fence. A figure detached from a porch swing and leapt onto the small patch of lawn.
“Thought y’all might not be comin’,” the figure drawled.
“Well, we’re here.”
“Yep, ya’ll here,” the boy said and picked up a bike.
