Black Violet

by Alex Hyland

  ‘We’ll leave it here with Dillon,’ he said.

  ‘You trust him?’

  ‘He’s a pain, but he won’t fuck us over.’

  I felt uncomfortable leaving the necklace with anybody, but Dillon was probably our best bet. I handed the necklace to Geary. As he wound it around his fist, he continued to stare at me.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He gestured toward Ella. ‘We can’t afford this shit now. I mean it. Get your head together.’

  He turned and headed back up the cabin.

  As he disappeared into the cockpit, I gazed thoughtfully at Ella. I watched as she studied the schematics of the yacht – images of missile towers and helicopters scrolling across the screen in front of her. I sighed – Geary was right. We didn’t need any more trouble than we already had.

  I took a deep breath, then headed up the cabin and sat down beside her. She kept her eyes on the laptop screen.

  I glanced uneasily at her. ‘You did what you thought was right, I know that,’ I said. ‘I just...I wish you’d spoken to me. Given me a chance to tell him myself.’

  She looked at me, but said nothing.

  I shrugged. ‘I guess the truth was always coming though, one way or another. I can’t blame you for that.’

  She stayed silent.

  I waited a moment, but she returned her attention to the laptop screen.

  ‘Alright,’ I said.

  I got to my feet and turned to head back to my seat.

  ‘He called you a couple of times,’ she said.

  I glanced at her.

  ‘Jon,’ she said. ‘He called you, but didn’t leave a message.’

  I nodded. The hollowness opening up in me again.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him, Ella.’

  I rubbed some life into my face, then stared at the Bragers’ yacht on the laptop screen.

  ‘I’m trying to do what’s right here, OK?’

  ‘Are you?’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted you to kill them. Not in his name.’

  She kept her eyes on me. She nodded thoughtfully to herself for a moment, then ran her hand across her stomach.

  ‘The guys who did this to me,’ she said. ‘There were three of them. It took me eight months to find them. Whatever you’re hoping to feel by killing the Bragers…justice, relief, escape. You won’t feel it.’

  ‘I’m going to kill those fuckers, and I’m going to feel good about it, believe me.’

  ‘Michael...’

  ‘You really see them standing in court, answering for what they did? I don’t.’

  ‘Then you’re no better than they are.’

  ‘Good. We’ll be on an even playing field.’

  She slowly leaned back in her seat – a bemused expression on her face as she gazed at me.

  ‘You’re so far from anything Jon stood for,’ she said. ‘Why is that?’

  I eyed her carefully. But it wasn’t something that I was going to get into with her.

  I shrugged. ‘It happens.’

  ‘And your parents?’ she said. ‘What would they have wanted you to do?’

  ‘My parents?’

  ‘Is this the path they’d have chosen?’

  I may have wanted to smooth things out with her, but she was pissing me off again.

  ‘You don’t know anything about my parents,’ I said.

  ‘Jon told me a lot.’

  I laughed. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘They stood for something.’

  I closed my eyes. I was done with this.

  I turned, headed back down the cabin and slumped into my seat. I grabbed the coin and spun it. Watched it dance across my fingertips – its spinning faces. Their whirling silver light calming the anger flowing through me now.

  I loved my parents more than anything. I’d never have done anything to let them down. Growing up, most of my friends hated their parents, and I used to think there was something wrong with me because of how I felt about mine.

  But my mom and dad were just cool – there’s no other word for it. They owned this little book-store in Noe Valley called ‘The Brilliant Tree’ – all whale diaries and guides to solar-powered living. It was never going to make them rich, but they didn’t care about that. Family, freedom and the environment, that was it for them.

  My mom, Angie, was this suburban flower child – politically minded, but relentlessly positive with it. She might have missed Haight-Ashbury by about twenty years, but she was all Ginsberg, poetry and silver linings. My dad, Richard, adored her, and vice versa. The only problem there ever was between them was that mom was a strict vegetarian, and dad wasn’t. She used to get really pissed whenever he’d sneak me and Jon out to McDonald’s for our birthdays. But he’d just laugh it off. He used to joke that the country had spent so long looking for the commies under the bed, they’d forgotten to look for the hippies in the refrigerator.

  But that was my dad all over. Happy-go-lucky. He wanted to be an actor when he was younger – he was a good-looking guy – but it didn’t really happen for him. He did a couple of commercials, but that was about it. He was never fixated by the way he looked though – he dressed like a slob most of the time. His shirt buttons never seemed to be tied in the right holes, and no matter what he did with his hair, it always looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. His only concession to conservatism was a brown briefcase that he’d occasionally take to the book-store with him. Beyond that he looked like a homeless guy. But he didn’t give a crap – he had the smile, and it carried him.

  As free-thinking as he and mom might have been, they lived a pretty run-of-the-mill suburban life in San Rafael, on the western side of San Francisco Bay. They had a Spanish style bungalow on this leafy block in the north of the city. A lot of open space. It was a good place to raise kids – dull, but pretty. One of those neighborhoods where every street you turned down seemed to have the sun setting at the end of it.

  Then when I was twelve, Nick Parry was shot dead in his parents’ garage, two streets from our house. He was seventeen. He’d been selling smack – some deal that had gone wrong. I remember how shocked I was to hear it, but more than that, how freaked mom and dad were by it. Mom had always wanted to move to somewhere more rural, but dad wasn’t so keen. After the shooting, he agreed to move.

  A few months later they bought the farmhouse in Sonoma. It needed a lot of work, and would be an hour-and-a-half’s drive to the book-store each way, but it was country living and there was a good school nearby.

  Jon and I didn’t want to move. We had a life in San Rafael. Friends. Plus I had Jarrod Hayes to think about. Jarrod was this awkward kid at school – a freckled rake with the largest teeth you’d ever seen. He’d talk and it looked like he was trying to swallow an ice tray. But he was a talented kid, and he and I had big dreams.

  Jarrod had started the magic club at school. It wasn’t a huge success – I was the only other member. But we both loved it, and had plans to put a stage act together. Violet and Hayes. I’d handle the close-up, sleight of hand stuff, and he’d do the big prop magic. We were convinced we were going to make it big. We used to watch Penn and Teller, and dream how they’d come to see us and be so impressed that they’d offer us a spot in their show. Me moving to Sonoma was going to be a big bump in our plans, and I explained this carefully to mom and dad.

  Still, gunshots rule the world, and mom and dad took ownership of the farmhouse that November. We weren’t going to move until the house was ready, but we spent Christmas there anyhow, painting and fixing the place up.

  And I have to say it was the best time that I can remember.

  The four of us worked on the house that Christmas, and it was like an adventure. Jon and I knocking down walls and stripping floors. Mom and dad up in the attic, fixing the roof. The hills around us dark and empty, but the kitchen burning bright downstairs. Our new neighbors visited with their daughter, Laurie, and it was like a revelation. Laurie was my age and about as cute as anything I’d ever seen – brow
n bobbed hair and flushed pink lips. I’d just turned thirteen, and her arrival was like the starting pistol for my hormones – they were racing around me like idiots, it was fantastic. I showed her my best coin tricks. I still remember the touch of her hand as she tried to figure out how I’d done it – her tiny, perspiring fingertips cool against my skin.

  She might have been my first taste of budding romance, but everything about that trip felt special to me. I’d work with Jon on the house during the day, then at night I’d lock myself away and finish the Christmas present I was going to give dad that year.

  It was a framed picture of a knight – a brass rubbing that I’d taken from a cathedral in England that summer. It was a clean image – finely detailed armor, sword and shield – but it made me smile. I don’t know whether the paper had moved while I’d taken the rubbing, but the knight was leaning slightly to one side. He looked kind of casual, like he was just hanging out. He reminded me of dad – this effortlessly cool hero. And so instead of filling in the background with my usual mix of dragons, maidens and castles, I filled it with things that reminded me of him. Briefcase. Frank Zappa CDs. These furry Tibetan hats that he’d wear. All this stuff was just floating around in the background – but it was him. And he loved it when he opened it. Jon and mom too.

  We spent two weeks at the farmhouse that Christmas, and it flew by. I didn’t want to leave, but the school semester was starting and we returned to San Rafael in the new year. The farmhouse wasn’t finished, but I felt better now about the idea of moving. Jarrod was still a worry, but mom and dad had said that it was cool for him to come and spend weekends with us once we’d settled.

  It was a Saturday night when I went to see Jarrod. I told him about the weekends and he’d sounded excited by it – like traveling out to Sonoma meant there was a real plan and direction to this.

  He showed me a new trick that he’d built over the holidays – a black wooden box that was going to hide a dove. Perfectly dark with hidden mirrors, it was beautiful. He’d taken the plans for it from Joe Golden’s Atlas of the Other – this book on magic that he loved. It was written like a comic book – all dramatic frames and speech bubbles as the hero, Pico, tried to save the day with nothing but illusions. As the story unfolded, these complex illustrations explained the mechanics of the tricks. Jarrod gave me a copy soon after I joined the club. I remember him saying that I could have been the ‘Other’ of the book’s title. That I had a gift beyond my years that separated me from everyone, including him.

  We spent that evening thinking about what else we could hide in the box. We toyed with a few ideas, then wondered if we could fit a radio-controlled car inside that could just drive out. It would be a fresher idea than a dove, plus we wouldn’t have to feed it. I had a radio-controlled car at home, and we decided to go and get it.

  It was nearly ten at night when we walked to my place. I didn’t live far from Jarrod, maybe half a dozen blocks. As we strolled toward my street, we heard the sound of dance music thumping out of a house on the corner ahead of us. A party at Pete Renner’s place. We didn’t know him that well – he was older. Sixteen. Prior to Nick Parry getting shot, Pete was considered the blight of the neighborhood – a rough kid with rough friends.

  As we neared his house, I heard yelling. A kid then sprinted out of the front yard, tailed by this truck of a guy who was pounding after him. Jarrod and I decided to avoid the house – we might look like an easy target to a bunch of drunk assholes. We hung a right toward the park and took the back route toward my place – an extra ten minutes. We neared the corner by the park, and I looked back – four guys were standing outside Pete’s house, staring at us. As Jarrod and I cleared the corner, the guys climbed into a navy Toyota.

  Jarrod and I scurried along the sidewalk – no people anywhere. The Toyota then pulled into the street behind us. It slowed to a crawl about ten feet behind Jarrod and me, and just followed us. I was scared as hell, Jarrod too. The car crept steadily behind us, headlights blazing – these guys needed to be sure that we didn’t live in one of the nearby houses before they did anything. But home was three streets from here. I pretended to look for my keys, like my house was the next one along.

  Jarrod kept his eyes fixed ahead of him. ‘Let’s just knock on one of the doors,’ he said.

  But the houses looked dark. I didn’t know what these guys would do if we rang on a door and no one answered. As the car purred behind us, I stared at the street corner about a hundred feet ahead.

  ‘A friend of my dad lives in the first house around the corner,’ I said. ‘We stay cool until we reach the corner, then we run.’

  I didn’t know if my dad’s friend, Tony Sullivan, was in, but there was a hedge on his front lawn that we could hide behind – a yard door by the house that we could scale if we needed. Patio windows at the rear. If the guys followed us over the yard door, I’d smash the windows. Sullivan had an alarm – these guys were looking for a fight, not the police.

  The car kept creeping behind us. Jarrod and I reached the corner and calmly turned left. The second we were out of view, we sprinted – I heard the car screeching behind us as it tore for the corner. We tumbled over the hedge at the front of Sullivan’s house, and laid low in the dirt. We listened as the Toyota sped past us. It then ground to a halt and its doors clunked open – these guys weren’t buying that we lived in any of these houses. I stared at Sullivan’s house – no lights. I listened to the guys checking the yards just up the street, my heart racing as I heard one of them heading toward the hedge. I glanced at Jarrod – he had tears in his eyes. The yard door behind us was seven feet tall. Fuck it – I grabbed Jarrod and we ran for the door. The guy behind us yelled at the others. Jarrod and I leaped at the door, all four guys tearing after us. We clambered over the top, tumbled onto the garbage cans on other side, then scrambled into the back yard. A light from the patio windows lit the lawn – the sound of Tony Sullivan’s voice. I ran out in front of the patio windows, and Sullivan stared at me from the living room sofa. I slowed to stop. Sitting opposite him was my dad – his briefcase lying open on the coffee table in front of him.

  ‘Michael!’ he said.

  Dad flipped the briefcase shut and stood up. Jarrod skidded out onto the patio and stood beside me – but all thoughts of being chased had disappeared from me. I kept my eyes on dad’s briefcase. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen inside. Tiny plastic bags full of grass, like the ones he and mom tried to hide from us. Other ones, larger, and full of gray and white power. But sticking out from underneath some kind of notepad was what I swear looked like the barrel of a gun.

  Dad slid open the patio doors. ‘Michael, what are you doing here?’ he said.

  Jarrod panted. ‘These guys were chasing us.’

  ‘What guys?’

  I gazed at dad for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Watching the game,’ he replied. ‘What guys?’

  I heard the Toyota pull away down the street, but I didn’t care now.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Dad asked me.

  I nodded.

  Jarrod caught his breath. ‘These guys from Pete Renner’s house.’

  ‘Alright,’ said dad. ‘Alright, it’s fine. Relax.’

  Tony stepped out onto the patio.

  ‘You want me to drive them home?’ he asked my dad.

  ‘Yeah,’ said dad. ‘Tony will take you back. It’s fine now.’

  As Tony headed inside to grab his car keys, dad strolled through the yard door to see who was out there. I watched him for a moment, then stared back at his briefcase lying closed on the table.

  For days later all I could think about was what I’d actually seen. I kept replaying the moment in my head, trying to grab a clearer picture. I knew he and mom smoked grass. I didn’t know if they took anything stronger, but the thought that they might didn’t scare me nearly as much as the gun. The thought that dad might be selling drugs. That he was the local dealer. The distant fear tha
t it might have been him who shot Nick Parry.

  I didn’t believe for a moment that he could ever kill anyone, but the thought wouldn’t leave me. He’d never do it in anger, I knew that. But if he was scared, if Nick Parry had pulled a gun first, tried to rob him or something. I couldn’t shake it from my head. As sick as the thought made me, there was something about it that kept drawing me toward it. A live wire that I just had to touch.

  The days rolled on, and dad didn’t mention anything about that night at Sullivan’s house – he just carried on as if nothing had happened. But I was quiet, and he and mom could see it. They kept asking me if I was OK, and I said that I was.

  I wanted to talk to dad about it more than anything. I wanted to breathe again as he explained away every little doubt and trouble in my head. But I was scared that I might think he was lying – or worse, that he’d tell me the truth.

  I couldn’t mention it to Jon. He idolized dad as much as I did, and I wasn’t about to pollute that with suspicions that I couldn’t even be sure of myself. I kept reading the local paper, trying to see if there was anything in it that would put my mind at ease – a lead, or description of the guy who’d killed Nick. A story then appeared that mentioned a witness who’d come forward – who’d seen a guy running out of Nick’s house toward the park. The witness hadn’t seen much, but the guy running had been carrying some kind of briefcase. My heart faded as I read the word. I tried to rationalize it – plenty of people carried briefcases. But the guy had been running – and I couldn’t help wondering who turned up to a drug deal by foot. Some addict with no car. Or someone local.

  I couldn’t sleep. Thoughts about the house in Sonoma began turning over in my head. Mom and dad had closed on the house and we hadn’t even sold our bungalow yet. We owned two properties, and on the back of what? It was a small hippy book-store – even I knew it didn’t pay that much. At best my dad was a drug dealer – at worst he’d killed a kid. I was terrified. It was like I’d lifted the curtain on an illusion and seen its frightful mechanism.

  It was a Thursday evening when dad sat me down and insisted that I tell him what was going on with me. I wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I told him that it was just the guys from Pete Renner’s house, that they’d shaken me up. He said that he’d speak to Pete’s parents, and find out who the guys were. And I regret telling him that more than anything. I wish that I’d spoken to him openly then, because I didn’t get another chance. That weekend he took mom to Santa Cruz for her birthday.