Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3)

by J. Davis Henry

  Chapter 9

  “Oh man, I’m flipping out. Were we just chased by some crazy hallucination? What was that all about? Who were they?” Audrey was cowering low in her seat, a noticeable shiver running the length of her body.

  “Cadillac had some bad vibes.” I felt my unlit cigarette still hanging from my mouth, stuck to my lower lip. Audrey removed it and shakily lit it.

  Nervously, looking for some normalcy, she flicked on the radio.

  “Strangeness is watching

  Strangeness is here,

  It’ll ruin you

  And your lazy day,

  So please come out,

  Come out

  And we’ll all play”

  “Where are we?” She placed the cigarette back into my mouth as I shifted gears and turned onto a two lane highway.

  “I know exactly where we are.”

  And I did. I recognized the outskirts of town, the stone buildings, the fortress-like library tower of the campus and found myself turning onto the street where my mother’s old friend had lived. The wooden house was the same color as fifteen years earlier, and the fence separating the back yard from a wooded path and neighbor’s lawns was looking uncared-for, but still there.

  I set the car in neutral and idled in front of the house where the old man in baggy pants had asked me to explain the theory of Zobes.

  Three Zobes. A kid’s imagining about how nothing is something. Einstein had told me to build three.

  It’s not coincidence I slid off the highway to end up here.

  What about these Zobes?

  The whole concept of Zobes was that they weren’t something until they became nothing. If I remember right, Betsy thought they sounded like antimatter wormholes, meaning a passage that went from nothingness to nothingness. So there’s that. Plus, the god tunnels fit the definition of a regular wormhole. Hmm, a nothing-tunnel? I can’t make any sense of it.

  Einstein... let’s see, it’s been so long... seemed to be interested in the idea of nothingness being part of existence and leaving traces.

  But they’re genius scientists talking theory. I was just a kid playing a nonsense game. Now I’ve met a god, tunnel-jumped, and know a magical feathered-dog and star gesture that gets results.

  And what is that all about? What’s the connection? Why am I here?

  What was Einstein musing about? Three Zobes. Why?

  I cocked my head to listen to a faint rumble. It reminded me of the early moments after I had consumed my first magic mushroom. I had likened it then to a distant call for my attention.

  “Is that thunder, or highway traffic?”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  Could there be a portal nearby?

  That dude, the one always screaming at me in the hospital and showing up as an hallucination in the jungle, said something about “one more.” Did he mean one more portal? That would make three I knew of and match Einstein’s curious suggestion.

  Could my involvement in this game of gods and demons have been in motion as I played in a sandbox as a child?

  Yes.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  We cut across the front yard of the neighboring house, hugging the fence past brittle, leafless bramble, scooting quickly to the path behind the target house. The sandbox was still there, its paint worn down to bare wood. The play area looked sad, neglected, unprepared for winter. Ice and dirty snow piled in one corner, a rubber ball half-buried in it.

  Remembering the old, wild-haired man from years ago opening the gate, I did the same.

  “Wait here.”

  I moved stealthily to the box. Frozen clumps of sand, stained dark brown, lay scattered amidst bare patches of dirt and spindly dead grass. I bent down and dug out a handful of stinging-cold sand. It held together as one solid chunk.

  My eyes went to the kitchen window. I had been spotted. There was Mom’s friend, face contorted in surprised anger, looking back at me.

  I waved, smiled like I belonged in her sandbox.

  The back door flew open, and she poked her head out.

  “What are you doing here? Get out of my yard. I called the police.”

  “I forgot something.”

  She frowned, stepped back, and closed the door.

  “Get out of my yard.”

  “It’s all right, Missus Tribbling. I just forgot to take some sand with me last time I was here.”

  I heard a siren scream a few blocks away and ran back to the gate. Giving her a wide beaming smile this time, I waved again. “Thanks, it’s for a good cause.”

  We passed the police coming in the opposite direction, and I used my knowledge of the area to trace backroads to Trenton and across the Delaware River.

  “Why did you take the old lady’s sand?”

  “Don’t know. Felt like the right thing to do. Like it’ll help me figure something out.”

  “Was that a magical sandbox?”

  “Ha, ha, yeah. Yeah, that’s what it was. Magic sand. Far out, Audrey.”

  “It looked like a giant kitty sandbox.”

  “I’d like to see the police report. Frozen chunk of magic cat sand stolen from sandbox. Ha ha.”

  I turned onto a wooded road, winding up a low hill that traced alongside the contours of the river.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My parents live near here. We’re going to have to wait until dark, park in the woods, then sneak into my old art studio. We can crash there. We gotta be quiet and not turn on any lights though.”

  “Parents. They don’t get it.”

  “Yeah. It’s just that I escaped from the looney bin and don’t want to get sent back.”

  “You did? Me too.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We escaped from Bellevue together about a week or so ago.”

  “What? You were with me?”

  “Yeah. We climbed out a basement window.”

  “Oh man, I must have been zonked. This just ain’t clicking with me. You sure it was me?”

  “Positive.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Deets.”

  “These pants and jacket are warm, Deets.”

  Chapter 10

  We approached my studio cabin, sneaking past the main house which stood ablaze with light from every window.

  “It looks like a party,” Audrey whispered.

  “Pretty sure it’s not today, but they must be celebrating Thanksgiving.”

  The holiday argument had to be over who was the most guilty—the escapee Deets or the fugitive Richard? Slurred lamentations from Aunt Maddie, declarations of our innocence from my Mom, worried logic from Dad, all while Uncle Ted tried to ram my betrayal of Richard and my acts of violence down everyone’s gullet. Stephanie would chime in for my defense, telling everyone that I had just survived living in a jungle and couldn’t be expected to be cooped up in a hospital, and if I had hurt anyone, then it was in self-defense.

  I turned on the electric baseboard heat, gave Audrey a comforter, and found my stash of two ancient joints hidden inside an empty tube of paint. We smoked one, turned on the radio very low, and talked about how hungry we were for turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, succotash, and cranberry sauce.

  She licked her lips when I said, “I could eat a whole pecan pie with whipped cream right now.”

  Sleepily, she folded herself up on the sofa. I settled on the remaining space, curling up along her thighs, using her bony ass as a pillow.

  The next few hours were maybe the loneliest in my life. The forlorn feeling wasn’t like the singular fear of the black jungle ni
ght, or the isolation of lying in a mental hospital cell, the air tainted by old urine and cries of desperation. Nor was it from being with a woman who couldn’t remember me. Or laying on her cheeks and neither of us groping for the other, despite the tension inside me to do so. It stemmed from the warmth of another body and it not being Teresa, combined with unbearable waves of pain emanating from Audrey that were collecting in my heart. I ached to reach her by trying to comfort her physically and knew she would have given in without protest, but I was stopped by her words in the hospital cellar. Don’t you want to ball me? Everybody else does. Now they seemed like words of protest, not an invitation for a carefree time with a wanton woman. No, I could feel chains on her soul. She had been defeated by someone and thought she could get him back with sex. Or maybe escape him.

  I feigned sleep so as not to hear her say those words again. Despite my unease, exhaustion and marijuana overcame me, and I finally drifted off.

  Sometime deep in the night, I awoke to the radio singing to me of a dream that Audrey was wrestling with.

  “Inside, everything is black

  Maybe I’ll close my eyes

  And the truth will go away

  The world, the sun

  Just color them black”

  I stood and opened the door, knowing a visitor had approached. All the lights were out in the main house—the guests gone, my family asleep. A heavy snow illuminated the night, except for an area near the edge of the woods where a blackness waited. I could see the Shadow Creature’s outline where white flurries disappeared behind its shoulders and the crown of its head.

  “How do I help her?”

  “Use your symbol. You’re waking, starting to see. She’s sleeping. Enter her dream.”

  Suddenly a flash of gold light surrounded the dark figure. Immediately my right hand tingled with an energy that had nothing to do with blood or muscles or nerves.

  I knelt on the floor next to Audrey. Her mouth twitched out puffs of stale breath. I couldn’t see her face. It was lost to the void of night and her nightmares. I traced my winged-dog and star symbol above her head. My hand began to sparkle blue light.

  Enter her dream.

  She moaned fitfully.

  A rapid movie crashed through my mind. A man in a grimy uniform, filthy sweat on his brow, snarled, then shook so violently he became a blur. He wore a helmet with a pack of Winstons stuck in a band circling it. A loud thumping and interminable banging surrounded him. Wherever he was, he could look down upon children running across a series of shallow blood-red pools. The sky around him burned.

  His arms glistened with sweat as he pulled Audrey’s panties off her. Then my old buddy Greg, wild-eyed and in uniform, was breaking down a blood-stained door, rifle in hand. He helped spread her legs and held her down. The other man was also a soldier. He climbed between her legs, reached for his cock, then grunted as he squeezed the trigger on the machine gun he gripped. The rain of bullets cut apart the children running below him before they had reached safety. As the chopper he was in banked, cartridges rattled across the floor of the helicopter, tumbled through the air, and landed on the tattered bodies of the children sinking beneath the crimson-flooded rice paddies.

  Though she was wrapped in the comforter, I swept my glowing right hand down the contours of Audrey’s body, stopping when it passed over her forehead, heart, and vagina. I could feel the pain of the soldier, the dead, and the violence beating at her. Rays of golden light radiated forth from the three areas I had touched my hand to.

  A screaming lump of darkness fell into my palm as it rested near her vagina. I jumped back, startled, but settled into a trust that whatever had just happened was meant to heal. The scream turned to a wailing cry, then ascended as a desperate plea following the ghosts of the dead children, now rising from the red water. The specters carried the pained voice higher, up past helicopter blades, higher and higher to a place where their calls were transformed into a hallelujah.

  In that moment, the clarity of an untainted thought shone inside me.

  She was raped. By her father. Her baby’s father is her father.

  I squeezed my hand into a fist, and the terrifying murders and rape gnawing at Audrey’s soul seemed to pop and disappear out into a nothingness the universe offered. I heard a mournful weeping from the woods, and though I couldn’t bring myself to look, I remembered the night in the jungle when Shadow Creature’s eyes had born the despair of never-ending suffering. They haunted me now. I wiped at my eyes to slow the trickle of wetness finding its way across my cheeks.

  When the morning light announced itself, I sat cross-legged and worked for about two hours on a drawing of Audrey sleeping. Putting my pencil down, I lit a cigarette and watched her sleep as I wondered what had been accomplished during the Shadow Creature’s visit. Her eyes fluttered open, closed, then opened fully.

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  I handed her the drawing. “I haven’t completed any artwork in a while.”

  She studied it sleepily. “Wow.”

  Lights came on in the house. I stashed a good chunk of my money in the studio, loaded my knapsack with colored pencils, junked my old Polaroid, and we left, our footprints following us across the snow-covered yard.

  When I reached the woods, I turned around, wondering if I should say a quick hello to my family. Stephanie paused before her window. I could see her profile as she said good morning to herself in her mirror. Checking for pimples. Planning how to pretty herself up for the day.

  She looked only a few years younger than Audrey must have been when her father raped her.

  “Let’s split.” Maybe I had to go solve the world’s problems. Maybe I couldn’t face the yelling and disapproval that awaited me in my parents’ house. Maybe I feared contaminating the picturesque scene that lay around me. Maybe the sadness that lingered with the dawn mist threatened to settle into me if I didn’t move. “Steph’s up early. Must be a school day.”

  Audrey slept most of the ride. Sometimes I thought I saw little blue lights pop off her like sparks.

  Chapter 11

  The faded gray letters jutted up on a structure of steel rods atop the rust-streaked colossus of a building. The black behemoth dwarfed Audrey’s neighborhood of three-story tenements climbing the adjacent hillsides.

  “Anaconda Steel.”

  “Stop at the next corner.”

  “Sure, which is your house?”

  “It’s up the hill.”

  “I’ll take you up there. Man, these streets are steep.”

  “No, just stop here.”

  “No sweat.” I pulled over to the curb. A small pile of snow was covered in soot. A blackened newspaper page protruded frozen and stiff from under it.

  Audrey sat nervously tugging at her fingers, looking out the window, up the slanted sidewalk as if it was the last place she wanted to go.

  “You’re real nice, Deets.”

  I shrugged. “What’s bugging you?”

  The pallor of her skin turned milk-white. “I get scared. Were you really in Bellevue too?”

  “Yep. Your dad, is he still in Vietnam?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And your baby?”

  Audrey nodded uphill.

  “Which house?”

  “The one with the red side door. The top floor.”

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  She pointed at a nearby playground, told me about how she used to play on the swing and was afraid to climb to the top of the jungle gym, until one of the neighborhood kids kept blocking her path off the seven-foot tall structure. All she could do was climb higher. She stayed there until the bully went home for dinner.

  And down the street was the neighborhood store where she once had stolen a bunch of grap
es when she had been locked out of her house and her parents hadn’t been around.

  “I think they were in jail.”

  “Yeah? What for?”

  “Drunk somewhere. Probably at Gilly’s.”

  I lit a cigarette. “It must be tough to be a perfect parent for a kid.”

  She burst into tears. I reached out and took one of her hands. “Sorry I didn’t mean...”

  “No, it’s all right. I don’t know if I want to see my baby. It’s my Mom’s trip. She...she...”

  “Does she know?”

  Audrey turned her eyes to me in bewilderment. “Know? You mean... my dad? But... how do you know about what my dad did? I didn’t tell you already, did I?

  I shook my head. “No, I just understand something about you. I really don’t know what happened.”

  “I was fifteen. I came home. All the rooms were dark. At first, I thought he was a stranger, a burglar or something. He grabbed me from behind and forced me onto the couch, face down. He...my father...did all sorts of things to me... y’know... back there. The bastard. I was a virgin and...and... I can still feel his hands on my tits and the pain in my....” She gritted her teeth. “Goddamned cunt.” One of her hands went up to her heart. Her mouth remained clenched. “I smelled the beer on his breath as he whispered into my ear. He called me Angel. That’s my mother’s name. Angelina.”

  “Was he so drunk that he thought you were her?”

  “No. When he lay on my back, all exhausted, he said he had two angels now. All I could think of was how I had to reach the top of the jungle gym the whole time he was raping me.”

  “And the baby? What’s your mother think?”

  “He started doing it to me all the time. She had to know, even if she lay in a drunken stupor while he came into my room.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Lets go climb to the top of that jungle gym.”