Thunder Falls

by Michael Lilly

  Have my actions been worth it? Has there been a net increase of comfort and safety and happiness in the world due to my vigilantism, or have I spent almost a year poking at a wasp’s nest with no real promise of eradicating the swarm?

  No, indeed, to invite them to accompany me on this last dangerous endeavor strikes me as selfish and outright ludicrous. Beth and Todd have had my six throughout this entire ordeal. Sometimes I have asked them for help, and other times it has been at their insistence, but now, as with my departure from Albuquerque, I can’t ask them to accompany me. And beyond that, I can’t allow them to accompany me.

  My adventure’s collateral destruction ends tonight.

  To my relief, Todd seems to understand.

  “Do what you need to do, Remy,” he says. An uncharacteristic unrest befalls him, manifesting in his clenched jaw and tepid movements. Once again, his universe is demanding that he let me go without the guarantee of my return, and once again, he surrenders to it.

  On the same mental notepad on which I promised to return to my mother as soon as possible, I vow never to ask Todd to make a decision like this again.

  “What?” Beth’s protest begins to escalate. I’ve seen this woman on the tail end of a kidnapping and hostage situation, but this moment is the most unraveled I’ve ever seen her.

  In the borderline telepathic communication that’s become Todd’s signature, he looks at Beth and tells her, Even if we come out victorious, Remy won’t be able to live comfortably knowing he asked us to risk our lives for him any more than he already has.

  Beth takes a moment to receive the message, then looks back and forth between Todd and me, wrestling with her hysteria even as her eyes well up.

  “Fine,” she says. She folds her arms, sniffles sharply, and looks away—first at the floor, then to the ceiling, then around at the walls, as though watching a ghost zip through the house’s rooms, unseen by the rest of us.

  At last, my gaze shifts to Trina, whose being has been tugging quietly at my attention for the past minute.

  “It’s all so real now,” she says. “No more pretending that it never happened, or that this—”she gestures in a vast circular motion—“is a made-up town, or that what happened here all those years ago isn’t a part of me today. I guess in order to acknowledge that it’s all coming to an end is to acknowledge that it happened in the first place. All of this, on top of what’s going on with Mom… It’s a lot to process. I keep thinking I’ll walk through a doorway into the next part of some psychedelic dream, then I’ll wake up in my apartment and go back to my old life.”

  “I don’t think so, sis,” I say. I put a hand on her shoulder. “I think that whatever happens tonight will mark the start of a new era for both of us.”

  Thirty-Two

  Big events have a way of splicing one’s life with the same efficacy as a new act in a play. Things are notedly different, and the context and mood we associate with act two are markedly different than those we associate with act three. And now, this play is entering its final act, the one that swoops back to the beginning to finish the journey like a roller coaster settling back in to its station. Thank you for riding, please wait for your lap bar to release, and enjoy the rest of your day in Riverdell.

  A couple of unceremonious minutes later, I step out the door and into the inky night. My joints feel stiff and inflexible, but I know that sensation will melt away after I’ve been moving for a minute. It’s only a few minutes’ run from Todd’s house to my childhood abode; the ideal distance to get myself warmed up without expending too much energy.

  There’s very little light pollution that emanates from Riverdell, which on many nights allows for a breathtaking view of the stars, but thick clouds coat the sky tonight, heavy and pregnant and full to bursting. Indeed, before I’ve cleared two streets, I feel the beginnings of rainfall. By the feel of it, this isn’t our normal, coalescing-in-midair rain, either. These are fat, substantial drops—the kind you’d be more likely to encounter in Hawaii than in the mainland northwest.

  Riverdell’s geography unfolds in my head as much as, if not more than, under my feet. One of my goals in moving to Wometzia with Todd was to take an axe to my roots in this town. From what, specifically, I couldn’t be sure, nor do I think I could have chosen individual things from which to separate myself. My childhood, certainly. But as I traverse these familiar streets underfoot, my wellspring of memories erupts, and on every corner, I see myself or Beth or Todd. I see us eating sandwiches on park benches and dripping ice cream from cones outside of the café.

  An unfamiliar emotion streams steadily into me. Resentment? No, not quite. Longing? Partially. Perhaps this emotion is my soul reacting to me trying so hard to cut off a part of the town where it was cultivated. I’ve spent much time telling (and re-telling) myself that it’s only a matter of geography, but the painful truth is that it’s far more significant than anything that can be represented by maps or GPS.

  And after identifying this emotion, I feel an unexpected one bubble up: a quiet but deep appreciation for this place: Riverdell, its town, its people, and even my history here.

  I don’t want to lose my focus, but curiosity and a wan sense of insecurity prod me to look upward to better perceive the clouds.

  They move with an uncanny gusto, eager to rain their rain and perhaps strike their lightning. As I think it, I smell the telltale odor of ozone—the olfactory version of what it tastes and feels like when you put your tongue to a nine-volt battery.

  As I cross north through the park, the rain picks up with uproarious swiftness, like a higher power had dumped a jug of Drano down through the clouds to clear out the plumbing. Maybe this is to be a reminder of the dark deed I committed in this very park. The raindrops plink into the pond’s surface and, reflecting the few lights cast from lampposts and storefronts on main street, they look like a school of tiny golden fish, eager and frenzied at feeding time.

  I’m only two streets away from the house now. Home sweet home. Back where it all began. Not nine months or a year or two years ago, but decades ago. As a whole, my life has been colored with the blacks and blues of despair, but the recent chapters in my life have taken on the brighter, furious hues of retribution.

  As if the strength of the storm pulses from my childhood dwelling, each step I take (squish squish plit plit) seems to crank up the intensity of the deluge. When I round the next corner, I see the first dazzling flash of light, from a bolt that touched down who knows how far behind me. It illuminates the suburbs before me like a low-budget horror film, and even amid the battering rain, my soaked clothes, and my fired-up muscles, I feel a current run through my spine, as though some of the lightning’s charge splashed away from its striking point and found the next target over.

  Thunder follows the lightning rapidly, amplifying the sensation.

  During my college days, I found an app that came in quite handy in helping me sleep. Its function was simple, but effective: It simulated ambient noise, such as rain, a ticking clock, a whirring fan, a crackling fireplace, thunder, whippoorwills, a babbling creek, or white noise. The volume for each individual effect could be adjusted, as well as the frequency of the occasional effects like thunder or the call of the whippoorwill.

  However, one day, as I finally drifted off toward the relief of unconsciousness, I picked up on a sound within the ambient noise, one I had never noticed before. It was a rhythmic plit, plat, plit, plat that made it sound like an anxious person was pacing back and forth in the puddle, up and down, up and down, toward me and away again. While I was pretty sure it was all in my head, it still made me uneasy enough that I had to turn the app off and begin my journey toward repose anew.

  Now, I delight in a sense of beautiful irony that my own rhythmic plit-plat-plit-plat, splashing away through the rainy streets, may well be the sound of my adversary’s impending demise.

  Will be, I remind myself. I have no room for self-doubt here.

  And there she is. Two stories, sta
cked thick and deep with unsavory memories.

  With no logical alternative, I make a beeline for the house.

  I normally operate according to the more prudent faculties of my mind (which scream at me to take it slow it’s a trap what are you thinking you’re going to get shot as soon as you open the door), but the more emotionally inclined portion of my brain (though only recently reawakened, admittedly) knows that Jeremy Keroth is one for spectacle and drama.

  He won’t kill me right away. He’ll want to point a gun to my head and monologue for ten or fifteen minutes first. Even if he’s booby-trapped the entire house, I’ll be debilitated at the worst upon entering. As I cross Ripple Drive, lightning strikes again, once more framing my old home in ghostly white against its oily black surroundings. (Was that a person in my old bedroom window? Was that Keroth?) Thunder follows the lightning strike almost immediately—that could have been as close as the park.

  I pull out the spare set of lock picks that I had left at Todd’s house when we moved—though it’s not so much a set as it is a tension lever and two flimsy picks. But, before I even draw the aluminum pieces from their leather pouch, I find that the door is unlocked. Come, then, and meet your demise!

  The storm door swings and thumps against my back as I swing the proper door inward. I step inside.

  Before the last echoes of the door’s closing have faded away, a voice speaks from the darkness. I expected as much, but it still does a lot to accentuate the chill already coursing through my veins.

  “Old friend,” says Jeremy Keroth. I panic at first, unable to locate him, but lightning strikes again and the left half of his figure is illuminated, rocking in my dad’s old recliner—Keroth knows this. Spectacle and drama, I say.

  His hands rest neatly on his lap, his legs crossed daintily underneath. Certainly not the hardened version I expected to see on this side of his (albeit shortened) prison time.

  “Sure, let’s go with that,” I say. “Old friend. Dad’s old friend, I guess. Mine? No.” Uh-oh. I feel myself getting heated.

  I cross the small dining room in three strides (Was it always so small? When did it get so small?) to where it borders the adjacent living room, where Keroth sits. He continues rocking in the worn chair, right at home in the old bastard’s favorite spot.

  Keroth cuts me off. Good—I need a second to cool off. “What, after all we’ve been through? Oh, and I heard you met my offspring.”

  “Offspring, huh? Sounds like you two are close.”

  “Some of these whores just don’t believe in Plan B anymore. Most of them will fuck off after a while, but not that one.”

  “Such a tragic, beautiful romance. Better copyright the idea before Nicholas Sparks gets ahold of it.”

  “I see you’re still as elegant and respectful as ever,” says Keroth. He folds his arms and I wonder if he has a gun tucked at one of his sides, now inches away from his fingers.

  “I’m sorry, what exactly have you done to earn my respect? Was it when you and my pops bonded over pedophilia? Was it the lifetime of trauma and nightmares? Was it the sense of being repulsed by the very thought of intimacy? Was it the emotional roadblocks? Was it the bright and shining gift of never being enough? The guilt? The abandonment?” Without realizing it, I lifted my voice right out of the ‘hushed but firm’ range, and now I’m bordering on a yell.

  Keroth maintains a cool façade, but I can almost watch my mighty waves of rage wash over him, each one bathing him in a fresh coat of fear. Most likely, he expected me to float through this encounter emotionless, calculating, methodical, and level-headed, per my reputation. He’s never seen me tap into emotions—and boy are there a lot of them.

  I draw breath to begin again, but he’s been waiting for this moment. He grins and I watch as, in slow motion, he pulls a revolver out from his side—he had been concealing it between his hip and the armrest, as I suspected.

  Fortunately, I’ve been waiting for this moment. He thought he could take advantage of my emotional state by catching me off guard, but I was ready. He rolled a Trojan horse on in through my open gates, but little did he know I had an army ready to slaughter the invaders the second they emerged from the mighty wooden steed.

  I step forward at an angle as Keroth aims, fires, misses. I hear the round pock as it burrows into the ceiling and the subsequent hiss of plaster showering down. The fear in his eyes is more prevalent now. He tries to adjust his aim, but I cover the distance too quickly. In his seated position, he’s quite easy to overpower and I wrestle the firearm out of his hand with ease. I slide the cylinder out of the frame and rap the piece against the nearby end table to shake loose the remaining ammunition.

  As the rounds tink onto the table and fall to the floor, Keroth pushes at my torso which, combined with the unsteady rocking of the recliner and his bucking hips, is enough to unseat me and send me careening backward. I roll onto my back and Keroth lunges at me with his fists clenched and a bloodlust in his eyes, visible even in the minimal light.

  I draw my legs to my chest and kick at him with full force, but he steps aside and swats my legs away. I’m unable to retract them before he lands on top of me in full mount, his face twisted into a monstrous horror and his fists cocked and ready. He pummels at me, but without accuracy or power. Using my legs, I push my hip upward—Keroth teeters at being unweighted—and turn, tossing him aside as I go.

  Capitalizing on that momentum, I roll up on top of him and prepare to unleash the same flurry of blows he tried to deal—only with power and technique. Instinctively, Keroth covers his face, which at this angle is a frightened, ghostly white. That’s fine—a right hook doesn’t give a shit about your stupid nose.

  I connect with his temple, knocking his head to the side, out from underneath his protective forearms. I follow this blow up with a left hook, which lands just above his cheekbone. I pummel him for a few seconds before becoming aware that I’m speaking (growling? yelling?) again.

  “This is from Trina.” Right hook. “This is from Mom.” Left. “This is for dad.” Three jabs in succession. “This is from me!” I seize his lapels in my clenched fists, stand up, take a big step backward and, turning, I hurl him right over the top of the chair he occupied only a minute ago.

  He collides with the wall in a mighty crash. Some thrift store paintings drop to the floor and join him in his pathetic heap. Even in the dark, I see blood pooling around him. I’m not sure whether he acquired more wounds from the throw or the blood is just from my beating him, but I don’t care—the more the better.

  In a sense of calm that strikes me as eerie (but necessary), I step back toward the revolver and the discarded ammunition. I pick up the gun and a single round, then marry the two properly.

  Keroth is losing more and more blood from his head wounds; the point where his head hit the wall is marked by an immodest amount of it. He’s still crumpled on the ground, making a sound that can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a whimper or a growl.

  Now it’s my turn for a dramatic spectacle.

  “I can’t change what you did in the past. I can’t change the effects it had on me, my sister, or my mom. I can’t change what you’ve done to countless innocent children since then, nor can I change what you doubtlessly did to myriad kids prior to that. But what I can do is make damn sure you never do so again.”

  Still face-down, Keroth lifts a shaky arm and flips me the bird.

  I pull the trigger.

  Ten months ago, when Keroth went to jail, I felt a sense of closure. Doors were closing on chapters and sub-chapters of my life, each with a satisfying finality marked by the echoing thock of a deadbolt shooting home.

  But those chapters were shorter. Those were the chapters I started only a year prior. They would be titled Plotting Dad’s Death and Executing Dad and Discovering Sexuality and Emotions are Things I Have.

  The doorways marked Childhood Trauma and Abandonment Issues still stood wide open, equally uninviting, and with no signs of moving anytime soon
. Cobwebs formed around their handles, and if you poked your head into either of them, you would see only darkness and hear the isolated cries of a child in tremendous turmoil.

  But now, with Keroth gone—permanently—those doors creak shut, their decades-long yawns finally ending as they slam into their respective jambs.

  Tension I didn’t know I had eases up and down my spine. I take a deep breath. Scores of blocked-up emotions pour forth, pinging all over the spectrum.

  It’s over.

  Lightning illuminates the room again, followed by the growling rumble of rolling thunder.

  I drop the gun without pause or ceremony; it thuds on the floor, impotent and powerless.

  Outside, the rain has maintained its heavy and steady fall. I inhale deeply. Ah, yes. My first breaths of air drawn from a world without Keroth. It smells sweeter than it did before. More alive.

  Lightning rips through the clouds, forking and forking and forking until it’s a brilliant, dazzling web weaving through the thunderheads. The subsequent thunder cracks and booms and shakes. I take this as an applause for a job well done.

  The journey back to Todd’s place is more leisurely, but I hurry anyway, so as not to keep my family waiting too long.

  Rather than burst in, I knock at the door, to avoid startling Beth and taking a bullet to the face. Such a victorious night would be marred by dying at the end of it.

  Within three seconds, Todd flings the door open and pulls me into a rib-bruising hug. Beth and Trina join us shortly afterward, the four of us bunched in an awkward clump like Antarctic penguins huddling against the cold.

  As I relate the story to the others, I notice, with fascination, that the parts at which they individually grow tense varies from person to person. Beth borders on losing her shit when I tell her about Keroth lunging after me. Todd’s height of suspense came when Keroth fired his first shot at me.