by Hunter Shea
Just thinking about saying it released some of the pressure she’d felt settling in between her shoulders.
“You guys want hard or soft shells?” she asked.
“Soft for me, with lots of refried beans,” West answered, his nose deep in the magazine.
“Did you hear what I said?” Matt asked.
She rounded on him, the spatula pointing at his chest like a greasy gun. “I did, Matt. I’m sorry you had a bad day. What can I do to help?”
There was no softness to her words. They came out as a dare, asking him if he had the balls to drone on about his vomit after she’d been out of the house for twelve hours and was now standing over a stove making dinner.
He stared into her eyes, then headed out of the kitchen. “Nothing. Call me when dinner’s ready.”
His legs went wobbly and he had to reach out, his palm flat on the wall. Debi watched him hobble away, wondering what had happened to her. Why couldn’t she bring herself to have even an ounce of sympathy for her disabled husband?
Maybe because you’re exhausted and it would be nice to not have to do everything.
West saved the day by saying, “You want me to chop up the tomatoes and lettuce?”
She wondered if West knew how she truly felt at this moment, her patience worn too thin to show simple empathy. If he did, she guessed he understood.
“Make the lettuce into long shreds,” she said. “Use that chopping block and the butcher knife.”
“I know what I’m doing. I watch the Food Network.”
He opened the drawer and instead of a knife, he removed a single sheet of paper.
“What is that, one of grandma’s old recipes?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No.” West handed it over to her.
HAVE YOU CHECKED THE BASEMENT YET? – YOUR GUARDIANS.
“What the hell is this?” she said, the paper fluttering in her shaking hand.
“It’s kinda like what was on the mirror,” West said.
“Matt, can you come here a second?”
“What?” He sounded very irritated.
“I need you to come here,” she shot back, using the same tone she had on West when he was five and liked to run off in department stores.
“I know dinner can’t be ready this fast,” Matt said, his cane thumping into one of the kitchen table legs.
She held out the paper for him to see. “West found it in the knife drawer. Should we be worried about your father?”
His eyes flicked to the basement for a split-second.
“Have you ever heard him talk about being a Guardian? This is some weird, crazy stuff, Matt.”
“I agree,” he said, nodding. “And yes, I am worried about him a little.”
She studied the paper, the strong capital letters in precise alignment.
“Is this his handwriting?” she asked.
West tried to take it from her but she jerked it back. It was bad enough he saw it already.
“I have no idea,” Matt said. “The last time I saw his handwriting was on a check he handed over to me when I left for college. I can look around and find stuff he’s written recently.”
He looked pale, but then again, his face was often pasty. Recurring nausea and his reluctance to go outside for fear of falling was turning her husband into a ghost.
But the bleeding of what little color was in his flesh seemed different this time. He knew something and wasn’t telling her.
Debi crossed her arms over her chest, crumpling the paper. “You need to talk to him about this.”
She followed it with a look that said we need to talk about this later, when West isn’t in the room.
“I will. I will.”
Something crashed in the basement, causing them all to jump. It was followed by a muffled, “Damn son of a bitch!”
“Maybe he wants us to check on him in the basement?” West said. “He does spend a lot of time down there.”
Matt said, “He always did. It was his man cave before there were man caves.”
Debi almost shot West’s theory down, stopping herself short. If thinking that made him feel easier, she couldn’t take that away.
She glared at her husband. Matt stared at the floor, as if he could see through tile and wood at his possibly unhinged father.
Matt took a deep breath. “I promise, I’ll talk to him. If he’s losing it, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Chapter Eight
The strange noises in the house kept West awake until well past the witching hour. There was a steady wind that caused the usual pops and creaks in an old house. It was unseasonably cold. He’d had to shut the window, the thick pane of glass threatening to break with each gust.
Under the whistling cacophony were other noises – scuttling sounds, the dull whack of something hitting the floor, and most chilling, what sounded like a girl crying – those are what prevented him from closing his eyes.
At one point, he’d turned on his light and started recording the various sounds in a notebook, along with the time. It’s what they did on some of those ghost hunting shows. He hoped that methodically cataloging things would ease his growing fear.
The crying is what bothered him the most. It had only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to make every hair on his body stand on end. Slipping out of bed, he got down on all fours, pressing his ear to the dusty floor.
No, it hadn’t been his mother.
When the breeze died down, so did the other sounds. It would be easy to chalk it all up to a rotting house protesting the intrusion of the weather.
If it wasn’t for that crying.
Maybe it was an animal. West was no wildlife expert. He wouldn’t know the difference between a bleating deer and a whistling bat.
Was Grandpa Abraham’s house haunted?
That was the question that wouldn’t go away. He knew what his grandfather would say. And what his father would say. Somewhere in the middle lay the truth.
It was hard to hear the soft sobs and not think about his long dead Aunt Stella. She was young when she died.
So, maybe he wasn’t as brave as he thought, living in the suburbs, surrounded by neighbors and normalcy.
The total silence that ensued didn’t make matters better.
Just stop thinking about it. Take your mind off this effed up house.
Now, what to direct his thoughts to?
Faith.
***
He got so worked up thinking about Faith Simmons in her bikini, her sunkissed skin, the way she smiled at him, that sleep retreated even further. It took masturbating twice to finally shut down, his brain and body so exhausted, he barely had time to clean up before passing out.
He woke up still thinking about her, a million questions flitting around his brain.
Would she be there today? Would he be able to find his way to her special spot?
Should he play it cool? Would he look like a stalker if he showed up today at the same time? Or maybe he should wait until the afternoon, when her summer school was over. Maybe then she’d have more time to hang out.
He was a mess.
Sure, he’d had crushes before, especially Gina Michaels in seventh grade, but nothing like this. The most Gina had ever done was tell him to get out of her way in the school halls. She barely knew he existed, and on one level, he was fine with that. Unrequited lust had a kind of simplicity.
No girl had ever talked to him like Faith. Or looked at him the way she did. Just thinking about her eyes and dazzling white teeth sent his heart galloping.
“Where are you off to today, Mr. Explorer?”
Grandpa Abraham came out of his bedroom door as West headed downstairs. He was dressed in a pair of jeans so old and worn, they were barely blue anymore. At least his white shirt was clean. West’s mother had done a load of laundry the other night after dinner.
“I don’t know,” West said, stopping on the top step, hand wrapped around the newel post.
“I need you to help
me with something.”
West didn’t try to bother hiding his disappointment. Whatever help Grandpa Abraham needed, he hoped it wasn’t something gross or time consuming. West’s prime directive was to get back out to the field and find where Faith did her sunbathing. He even had his swim trunks on under his shorts, just so he wouldn’t weird her out standing in his regular clothes while she lounged in her bikini.
“Okaaaay,” West said. His legs wanted to keep on moving, right out of the house and deep into the wild field.
Grandpa Abraham brushed past him. “It’s about time you sang for your supper anyway.”
West followed him, the stairs making an unholy racket. “What does that mean?”
“It means you need to earn your keep.”
‘Hi, Dad,” he said, giving his father a nod as they walked past the living room. His cane was across his lap. The newspaper was in a heap. Sometimes, it was really hard for him to read, the words swimming all over the page like drunken goldfish, as his father might say. The state of the paper always bespoke the level of the spins. The lump of paper said it was an average day, at least so far.
“Hey, where you two headed off to?”
“He said he needs my help.”
The back door slammed shut.
“Looks like he’s starting without you,” his father said.
West jogged to catch up. For an old guy, Grandpa Abraham could move fast when he wanted to.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Whatever chill the night had brought was long gone. Grandpa Abraham stood under the kitchen window holding a dented, metal toolbox.
“See that hose?” he said, pointing to a coiled up garden hose on the ground.
Did he think he was blind?
“Yeah, I see it.”
“See all that water leaking from it?”
It was sitting in a sizeable puddle of mud. Steady drips of water squeezed out of the connector to the house.
“It’s leaking pretty bad,” West said.
“You’re going to change the washer for me.” He dropped the toolbox onto the ground. The tools inside rattled and clanged loud enough they might be heard in New Jersey.
West looked at the toolbox. “I don’t know how to change a washer.”
Dragging an aluminum chair over, his grandfather settled into it and said, “I figured as much. That’s why I’m here. I can’t bend down that low. You just do exactly what I tell you and we’ll be fine.”
In another family, at another time, this might be considered a tender moment between grandfather and grandson.
“Capice, short stuff?”
This wasn’t that family or time.
“I don’t like being called that,” West said, opening the toolbox. All of the tools inside were either covered in grease, rust, or a combination of both. Grabbing a wrench, his palm turned orange.
“Well, neither did I. Taking in a little ribbing puts hair on your balls.”
West reddened. Did old people say stuff like that, especially in front of kids? He couldn’t remember his friends’ grandparents ever saying such a thing. Just thinking about Grandpa Abraham’s balls made him want to puke.
“Now, first thing you gotta do is take the hose off. Just unscrew it counter-clockwise. Good rule of thumb – lefty loosey, righty tighty. You got that?”
On his knees in the muck, all West could think was that he’d need to shower and change before he even thought of looking for Faith. It took a lot of effort, but the hose finally started to unscrew. Warm, putrid water poured out of the end onto his hands. It smelled like low tide at the beach and something dead.
I wonder what diseases are in this nasty water!
He tossed the hose aside in disgust.
“Good. That was the easy part,” Grandpa Abraham said. He rummaged around the toolbox and tossed a can of household oil. “Just squirt that all over the faucet there and we’ll give it time to loosen up. I’ll bet that mother is rusted tighter than a gook’s eyes.”
“What’s a gook?”
“Never you mind.”
West may have never heard the word before, but he knew it had to be some kind of awful slur. They flowed from his grandfather as easily as the funk water running from the hose.
The smell was making West sick.
“Can I get rid of this?” he asked.
“That’s a perfectly good hose. You’re not throwing it out.” He swatted at a fly.
“Well, can I at least move it somewhere else? It stinks real bad.”
With a roll of his eyes, Grandpa Abraham said, “Fine. Just drop it by the side of the house. But you have to hook it back up when you’re done.”
West looked up to see his father watching through the kitchen window. He had a glass of water in his hand. West raised his eyebrows and smirked, as if to say Gee, I’m having a great time out here with grandpa of the year! His father shook his head, probably happy it was West doing this and not him. Not that he could.
Traipsing through fat bumblebees dancing through the wild flowers that sprouted everywhere around the house, West held the hose at arm’s length. He noticed that the remaining water dripping out was red, like diluted blood.
He dropped the hose unceremoniously on a brown patch of grass. Wiping his hands on his shorts, a pungent odor, different from the ichor in the hose, caused him to look up at the side of the house.
“What the heck?”
Someone had written on the house in big swaths of shit. The smell and preponderance of flies were the only clues he needed to know about what had been used to scrawl the words.
“Grandpa Abraham! You gotta see this!”
Between the first and second floor windows it said:
THIS IS OUR HOUSE. WE HAVE GUARDED IT FOR 4 GENERATIONS. YOU MAY NOT HAVE OUR BLOOD.
“What happened, you see a spider?” Grandpa Abraham grumbled. Following West’s stare, he stopped, his mouth dropping open.
It looked like the words were alive with so many flies devouring the message of festering shit.
Whoever did it would have to have been on a ladder. The words were painted between his and his parent’s bedroom.
It wasn’t here yesterday. He’d walked by this side of the house. There was no way he could have missed it. The stench alone would have stopped him and made him look.
This meant someone had done it last night, while they were sleeping.
Had he been awake when it happened, tossing off, thinking about Faith? Did whoever wrote it see him?
He felt sick to his stomach.
“What happened?”
West’s father joined them, using two canes this time. He only did that when he was in a rush and wanted to make sure he didn’t face plant in the process.
“Look,” West, pointing. “What does it mean?”
Grandpa Abraham cleared his throat. “It means we have to fix that hose and clean that shit off the house.”
He stormed off, hands thrust deep in his pockets.
“Dad?”
His father looked down fast, hissing with pain. His body swayed. West was quick to put a hand on his arm.
“Dad, who would do something like this?”
His father turned to him, the flesh of his face like freshly poured wax. He opened his mouth and vomited, chunks of last night’s tacos splashing on West’s bare shins.
***
First West had to help his father inside and get him on the bed with a new shirt. Then he had to clean himself off, putting his sneakers in a plastic bag. He hoped his mother knew some mom-alchemy to save them. They were his only pair.
“You okay?” he asked his father. He was sitting up in bed with a cold washcloth on his face.
He nodded, his voice muffled by the hand towel. “I’ll be all right. I’m sorry, buddy. I know that was beyond disgusting. Looking up and then back down so fast really sent me for a loop.”
“Now I know what you and Mom went through when I was little,” West joked.
“Hey, Stretch, where’d you
go?” Grandpa Abraham shouted from outside.
His father, face covered like a wet mummy, said, “Stretch?”
“I told him I didn’t like it when he called me short stuff.”
West jogged outside.
“Hope you didn’t take a quick shower. There’s bound to be some blowback from that shit when we hose it off,” Grandpa Abraham said with a grimace.
He hadn’t thought of that. As much as he’d like to run upstairs and grab a bandana to cover his mouth and nose, he knew his grandfather would kick up a huge fuss if they waited any longer.
They took turns powering the strange words off the house. Water and flecks of shit filled the air as well as their hair and clothes. A couple of times, West felt like puking himself. It was a miracle he didn’t automatically barf when his father lost it.
I wonder if it’s animal or human shit.
Why would it matter?
Well, a human definitely put it there.
Now that the madness of the past fifteen minutes had died down, the reality of the vandalism hit West hard. He suddenly felt like there were sets of eyes all around, hidden, waiting.
“Has something like this ever happened before?” West asked, arcing the spray to wipe out the word GENERATIONS.
“Oh sure, my house getting crapped on is an everyday occurrence.”
West eased off the hose’s trigger, the water reducing to a trickle. “It is?”
The old man looked like he wanted to slap him. “I thought all New Yorkers understood sarcasm. Guess I was wrong. Come on, let’s get it off before the sun bakes it in.”
“Do you know who would do it?”
Grandpa Abraham took the hose from him, getting closer to the house to concentrate the stream more. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
That was less than comforting. How could he not worry about someone writing strange ass stuff like that all over the house? Did this same person write on the mirror, in the house?
“Tell that to Mom when she finds out,” he said. “This is freaky, like scary freaky.”
When Grandpa Abraham turned to him, his faced was speckled with brown spots. Flies zipped in and out of the halo of tainted water around him.
