We Are Always Watching

by Hunter Shea

  “He’s coming now. Looks like he went out for a walk or something.”

  His mother cast a quick glance.

  “He’s having a heck of a conversation with himself, too,” she said.

  He looked angry, hands balled into fists, lips moving furiously, occasionally breaking into a tight grimace. The breeze had blown his hair this way and that, an indignant Einstein on the prowl.

  “I’m going to lie down,” his father announced, pushing his chair away from the table. The legs screeched like frightened mice. He hobbled to the bedroom, closing the door.

  His mother stopped unpacking, crossing her arms over her chest, looking back out the window. “Help me get these last few things put away.”

  Boxes of cereal and rice were stacked in a cabinet next to rusted cans of condensed milk and a jar of honey that looked to be older than the house. West remembered that honey was the only food that never went bad. Honey buried with Pharaohs was still edible.

  He wondered who would be fool enough to test that theory and down a spoonful of three thousand year old honey.

  When they were done, his mother said, “I have to get my stuff ready for tomorrow. You can hang in your room or go outside and explore a little.”

  “It’s nice out. I think maybe I’ll see what’s around the house.”

  His mother made it out of the kitchen just as Grandpa Abraham came in the back door. West was trapped under his narrow gaze.

  “What are you up to?” Grandpa Abraham huffed.

  He steadied himself. His grandfather looked truly demented. Half his stained shirt was untucked from his pants. There were holes in the knees, and most of the belt loops had broken off. His hands were filthy, as if he’d been making mud pies in the field.

  “We did some food shopping. I was helping put everything away.”

  “Did you get tuna fish? I asked your mother for tuna fish.”

  “I thought I saw some cans. I think we put them in there.” He pointed to a cabinet behind his grandfather’s left shoulder. The old man looked at it but didn’t bother opening the door.

  “You better not have moved my stuff,” he grumbled, washing his hands.

  What stuff? Talk about the cupboards being bare.

  West decided it was probably best to head for the safety of the outdoors. This whole moving the family together was like introducing a new cat to the house. You had to keep the old and new cats separated for the first few days until they became acclimated to each other’s presence.

  And speaking of cats…

  “Hey, are all those cats your pets?”

  Grandpa Abraham whipped his head around. “What cats?”

  West took an involuntary step back. “The ones you fed outside. I counted ten. I bet you get a lot of strays out here.”

  He stormed past West, bounding for the front door. “I don’t feed any goddamn cats.”

  Despite every cell in his being urging him to walk away, West found himself following his grandfather. He slammed the screen door open and stood glaring at the empty bowls.

  “You didn’t put these here?” Grandpa Abraham said.

  “No. They were there when we got home.”

  West’s shoulders jerked back when his grandfather kicked the bowls off the porch. They shattered on the ground, shards of ceramic sprinkling the glass like hail. His eyes swept left and right, either looking for the cats or the person who dared to feed them.

  “You see any cats again, don’t go letting them in the damn house, you hear me?” he bellowed. “I’m allergic to the damn things.”

  “I…I won’t. Who do you think was feeding them?”

  He was too afraid to even bring up the note under the bowl.

  “You see a cat, you have my permission to shoot it,” was all he said before stomping back into the house.

  ***

  West wasn’t afraid to admit, to himself at least, that his grandfather’s outburst scared him just a little. He didn’t just seem worried about the cats making him allergic. No, it went deeper than that. West really didn’t know the man at all, but he knew what fear looked like. Grandpa Abraham had it in spades.

  Of course, he wasn’t the friendliest guy on the planet. It wasn’t a stretch to consider that someone who had crossed his path had decided to have some fun at his expense. It could have been a neighbor or even kids like him, fucking with the weird old guy who lived on the farm that produced nothing but weeds and stray cats.

  He went for a walk, hoping some fresh air would clear his head. A little walking would also help him digest that mongo burger. There was a moment back at the diner when he felt the meat sweats coming on. But it was so good, he’d powered through.

  Shuffling until he came to the back of the farmhouse, he was amazed by how far he could see without spotting another house or road. Swaying fields of some kind of tall grass undulated like the wave pool at Splashdown Park.

  There was a rotted picnic table and benches just before the overgrown greenery started. West tested his weight on a bench with one foot. When the wood didn’t crack or give way, he dared to stand on it with both feet. Feeling bold, he did the same with the table until he was sure he could stand on it without demolishing the whole thing to splinters.

  Splinters that’ll end up in my ass!

  Back home, their real home, his neighbor’s houses were less than ten feet away. The street they lived on had twenty-three homes – eleven on his side of the street and twelve on the other. He knew because he’d counted them over and over again on walks to and from school or the corner store. Most of them were multi-family houses and he knew just about everyone who lived in them. People didn’t move out very often, and when someone died, their kids usually moved back to continue a family tradition of ownership. There were always people outside, especially in the summer. Mrs. Hanrihan played cards with her friend Sister Martha in front of her house, two folding chairs set up on opposite sides of a portable aluminum table. Sister Martha was retired, living in the convent by their church two blocks away. West had heard that she and Mrs. Hanrihan were childhood friends. They’d taken their vows together, but sly Mrs. Hanrihan had fallen in love with the widowed father of a student when she taught at the same grammar school – St. Eugene’s – that he went to. It must have been one hell of a scandal back in the day.

  There were lots of kids on the block, most of them younger than West. They made pests of themselves, but at least they gave the neighborhood life.

  Lawns were always being mowed by men in plaid shorts, black socks, and sandals. The Lawn Geeks, as West had named them. Cars rolled by every few minutes, traffic increasing after five p.m. on weekdays as everyone headed home.

  The neighborhood was a breathing entity, a place of comforting familiarity. It was his home.

  Out here, on the farm, there was nothing but a circling turkey vulture a hundred yards away. West wondered what it had its eye on. He hoped it wasn’t a cat.

  He spotted a giant pile of cracked and rotted lumber fifty yards out, close to the line of apple trees that looked to stretch on forever.

  “At least we’ll have fresh apples in the fall.”

  His foot crunched on a three-foot long stick. It was gnarled and thick, a perfect walking stick and weed slasher. Whisking it back and forth, he swatted at the wild vegetation, heading for the woodpile. It would make a great bonfire. He’d never been to one in person, but he’d seen plenty in movies, especially the flicks from the 80s with teen campers in peril. West loved those movies, especially the parts where girls took off their shirts and either went skinny-dipping or had sex in the woods or an empty cabin. Actresses took their clothes off a lot back then. He’d never even seen a naked boob until Anthony showed him this strange astronaut/vampire flick called Lifeforce. The girl vampire was totally naked, front and back, for half the movie. West’s mind was blown. Horror, sci-fi, and his first naked woman. The constant flip-flopping between arousal and terror left him both exhausted and too tired to sleep that night.

>   Something crashed through the brush to his left. He stopped, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

  There was a garbled growl. The sounds of two cats tussling gave his nerves sweet relief. Not wanting to get in the middle of their fight, he veered to the right.

  Closing in on the haphazard mound of wood, he realized what it was.

  The farm would have had a barn at one time. It must have collapsed decades ago. The old walls and floorboards were blighted by the sun and elements. The stench of decay grew stronger with each step. Weeds grew through the gaps, some of them so thick, they hid whole sections of the former barn.

  “I wonder what took you down,” he said, lifting boards here and there with the tip of his sneaker. The ground beneath it was black as pitch and had an odd smell, like something scorched and long forgotten.

  Could have been a fire. Or maybe it was a storm, some hurricane that sent people to their cellars.

  That is, if hurricanes happened in this part of Pennsylvania.

  Did Grandpa Abraham’s place have a storm cellar?

  And what about a fruit cellar? He heard about them all the time, especially when it came to places for crazed killers to hide bodies. What was the point of a fruit cellar? Why stick your fruit in some hole?

  There was sudden movement in the brush behind him. He waited for one of the cats to slink into view.

  The sound didn’t repeat itself and no cats came out to play.

  West felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He had the very uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched. Out here, surrounded by the tall grass, anyone could be lurking.

  He closed his eyes and saw the words on the ceiling over his bed.

  WE SEE YOU

  West was suddenly very uncomfortable. All of this was so alien to him, he felt as if he’d stepped into a place where he didn’t belong.

  “Time to go back inside.”

  He trudged away from the collapsed barn, unable to shake the feeling that there were eyes at his back.

  Chapter Five

  Getting up at five in the morning hadn’t been easy. Debi Ridley dragged herself out of bed, shuffling like a wounded zombie to the bathroom. She looked at her hollow-eyed reflection in the mirror, wincing at the deep pillow lines on her face. Just a few years ago, those lines would disappear by the time she got out of the shower. Now, it would take an hour or more, the youthful elasticity of her skin giving way to the doughy sag of middle age.

  “Welcome to your dream commute,” she said soft enough so Matt couldn’t hear. He’d had a rough night – part of a long succession of rough nights – his vertigo making it difficult to keep his eyes closed.

  When it got bad like that, his mood darkened, even more so than usual.

  ***

  He used to be so much fun. They laughed all the time. Debi’s friends envied the fact that she’d married a man who was more than her husband. He was her best friend, the kind that went out of his way to pick her up whenever she was down. And it was hard to be down around Matt.

  It’s not his fault.

  It seemed to take forever for the shower to run hot, and when it did, it didn’t last long. Debi jumped out of the tub the second the water turned to ice, conditioner still in her hair. She had to rinse the rest out in the sink.

  It was pitch black when she got in the truck, her thermos filled with hot coffee. She’d been worried that she’d run into Abraham, but he was either asleep or keeping to his room to avoid her. Matt had said he’d always been an early riser, keeping farmer’s hours while avoiding the actual labor needed to run the derelict farm.

  She pulled into the lot in Marshall’s Creek and waited for the bus to take her to Manhattan. With ten minutes to spare, she poured a cup of coffee, the caffeine helping to prop her eyes open.

  When the bus pulled up, she and several dozen others emerged from their cars. The commute to the city was supposed to take just under two hours. She’d made sure to pack a book and several magazines.

  Settling into a plush seat near the front, she leaned back and stared out the window as the bus merged onto Route 80. The same people must take this bus every weekday, but no one was talking. It was too damn early for idle chit-chat.

  Four hours on a bus every day.

  Debi didn’t know whether it would be a blessing or a curse. It would be time to herself, hours away from her problems. Getting up super early and arriving home late every day was a big con. When New Yorkers flocked to the Poconos for affordable houses twenty years ago, the early pioneers, as they liked to be called, said the commute was worth the money they saved and laid back lifestyle they enjoyed in the mountains and valleys of Pennsylvania.

  Cut to five years later, and the lamenting began. Houses were sold or converted to summer homes.

  It was a hell of a trip, five days a week.

  More than anything, Debi worried about West. With her gone for so long each day, he was stuck with a father who could barely hold himself together and a grandfather who, on a good day, was as warm as an igloo.

  Please don’t let this last long, she thought, the rock and sway of the bus tempting her to fall back to sleep.

  Maybe I could find a job in PA. But then what happens when we rebuild our finances and it’s time to get out of Dodge? I’ll have to find another job in New York and who knows how long that’ll take. We’ll be right back where we started.

  As much as she disliked it, logically, she had to keep her job.

  Sure, an administrative assistant position wasn’t particularly lofty, but she did work for a private equity firm in midtown. The pay wasn’t the best but the benefits were decent. God knows, that had become more important than ever.

  Leaving teaching behind for this had seemed exciting a year ago, for more reasons that simply embarking on a new chapter in her life. The rewards of being with her second grade class of beautiful young minds were far outweighed by the burdens of teaching in the modern age.

  Of her twenty-one students, fourteen were on prescription meds for ADHD, social anxiety, and other disorders. It broke her heart to see them shuffle into class, listless as the living dead – dull and silent, like the people in the seats around her. Children were supposed to be boisterous. How could you teach kids whose brains were dulled by pharmaceuticals?

  And then there were the parents – helicopter moms and dads who questioned every poor grade, demanding she change it because their child was smarter than any other child in the world. She, and all of the schools in her district, was at their mercy. Threats of lawsuits or pulling their kids – and the tuition dollars – from the school left her and the other teachers little more than hostages.

  When common core was introduced, Debi was almost relieved to be let go. It was one less hill of bureaucratic idiocy she had to climb. She pitied the teachers and students who had to wade through that mess.

  Working in an office had taken some time getting used to. She no longer had little people looking up to her, hanging on her every word.

  But there were other perks. Attention from people old enough to tie their shoes was a big one.

  The sign for Denville whizzed by. Forcing herself to stay awake, she turned the small overhead light on and opened a magazine.

  At least the bus was comfortable.

  ***

  The first time Matt tried to get out of bed, the ceiling slipped beneath his feet. He fell back, tangling himself in the sheets. He lay there for a while, fixating on the overhead light, trying to maintain some sort of focus. When his head felt steadier, he slowly sat up, grabbed his cane from beside the night table and stood.

  Every little damn thing was a process. Some days, the process was more complex, the act of simply standing near impossible.

  He hated his brain, his betrayer. Why couldn’t it heal itself? Did it enjoy this existence? He couldn’t count the number of times he fantasized about cracking his own skull open, dredging up the damaged bits with an ice cream scoop and tossing them in the toilet. Only then
could he flush this waking nightmare away.

  Good riddance. I hope the fish eat you quick and shit you out.

  It was an insane image. Frustration gave him a lot of crazy thoughts. Standing in his childhood bedroom, the one place he never wanted to see again, was crazier than anything his seething mind could conjure.

  The floor creaked overhead. West must be awake.

  Day one of the three Ridley men at home, cooped up together. He couldn’t tell if the knot in his stomach was from the usual nausea or the sinking reality of where life had dumped them. Swallowing hard, he resolved to make it a good day.

  Just think happy thoughts.

  Yeah, right.

  The moment he opened the bedroom door, he smelled eggs and coffee. The kitchen was empty, but in the sink were the frying pan, one plate, one bowl, a coffee cup, fork and knife. His father must have already eaten. Debi ate breakfast at work and West hated eggs.

  He wondered where the old codger was. Had to be outside.

  Looking out the kitchen window, he saw a piece of paper fluttering in the early morning breeze. It was clipped to the clothesline.

  “Give the kid a break,” he said, heading for the door.

  Growing up, Matt found notes all over the house daily, each one outlining a chore that needed to be done. His father never verbally told him to do anything; it was all communicated by notes, with scribbles of allowance to be earned. He always did the work, but rarely saw the allowance.

  Room and board. That’s your allowance. You like to eat, don’t you? I sure as shit don’t see you thumbing our nose at your mother’s cooking!

  You like that bed? How about the roof and walls when it’s raining or cold outside?

  Now clean that shit up like I wrote down and stop talking nonsense about getting paid. You’re not some Jew lawyer. This ain’t a courtroom. You can plead your case to the walls if you like.