His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Thirty

  Saturday Sherry had to work, and Steve drove to Anaheim to see his mother. She was getting ready for her big move, and the only things in the house that had remained unchanged were her bed and the kitchen table. Elsewhere, there were boxes of dishes on countertops, piles of clothes on the living room couch, sewing materials in bags atop the old console TV set. She’d originally intended to hire a mover instead of allowing him to help—out of spite, he figured, more than anything else—but when Steve had told her that he, Jason and Dennis could do it all for free, her miserly nature had won out and she’d agreed to let them move her.

  That date was still a week or two away, but Steve thought it would be a good idea to get a head start and, whenever possible, start taking some of the small stuff over a trip at a time.

  He’d been helping his mother pack, hoping to come across forgotten belongings of his father’s that might shed some light on the old man’s secret life, but so far nothing had turned up. The house was now pretty well cleaned out, but there were still a few loose ends in the garage that needed to be organized, and it was here that he’d been spending most of his time. The frayed piece of rope hanging from the beam still haunted him, and each time he returned, he couldn’t help looking up at it and wondering. Today, he found his mother in the garage, sorting through an oil-stained cardboard box he had not seen before.

  She looked up as he entered, an accusatory expression on her face. “Did you know about this?”

  “About what?” he asked, crouching down next to her.

  “This!”

  He had to smile as he looked at the skin magazine she held in her hand. It was old and very tame by to day’s standards, a sub-Playboy publication forthrightly called Naked Ladies. He took it from her, but the pages were stuck together by the same black oil that had leaked out from somewhere else and soiled the box. Digging through the pile of magazines, he saw that they were all Naked Ladies except for one titled Busty Ladies.

  “It’s no big deal, Mom,” he said.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “No,” he told her. “Of course I didn’t. Do you honestly think Dad would share that with me?”

  “I have no idea what that man would do,” she said.

  Steve reached the bottom of the box, and beneath the magazines, stuck to the cardboard and stained with oil, was a flat cardboard dress-up doll that looked uncomfortably like Shirley Temple. The doll was naked, although the skin was smooth, with neither breasts nor pubic area delineated. Surrounding it and also stuck to the box were colored cardboard pieces in the shapes of girls’ underwear, each with folding side tabs that would allow them to be affixed to the doll.

  That was a little more disturbing.

  He stood up, embarrassed. This was definitely not something he wanted to think about, and not something he wanted to discuss with his mother. “I’m going to get a drink of water,” he told her. “I’m thirsty.”

  He’d passed through the house on his way to the garage, but he’d been looking for his mother and had noticed only the generalities of her packing and cleaning. He saw now, though, that there were items laid out on the floor of the living room, between the couches, that he hadn’t seen before.

  A sword, a machete, knives.

  Steve paused. Instead of continuing on to the kitchen, he walked over and stood looking down at the array of weapons. Had his father gotten these in Vietnam? It seemed the most likely explanation. Steve had seen none of them before, but that was not a surprise. His father had always kept his war years secret, and Steve knew next to nothing about that time in his dad’s life.

  He reached down and picked up the machete, heft ing it in his hands. It was heavier than it looked, and he tried to imagine himself hacking through a jungle, the way he’d seen men do in movies. Unless he did a hell of a lot of exercise to build up his muscles, he’d have to use two hands just to cut through a single vine.

  The blade was shiny, and the edge looked sharp. All of the blades looked shiny, and Steve wondered if they had ever been used.

  “Those were your father’s,” his mother said behind him.

  Startled, he nearly dropped the machete. He hadn’t even heard her approach.

  “I found them when I was packing. He kept them in our closet. In our bedroom.” Disgust and disapproval dripped from every word, and it was hard to believe now that before his father’s stroke, he had never heard his parents argue. They had often been mad at him but never at each other, and he could not have guessed that this sort of resentment had been building beneath the surface.

  He could not have guessed a lot of things that had been going on beneath the surface.

  Steve put the machete down carefully. “I guess he got these in Vietnam.”

  “I don’t know where he got them. I don’t know where he got anything. And I don’t care.”

  “He’s dead now, Mom,” Steve said gently.

  “So? That doesn’t excuse who he was. Or what he did.”

  What he did?

  Steve’s heart was pounding. He licked his suddenly dry lips. “Mom . . .”

  “Don’t ‘Mom’ me.”

  “But—”

  “Why do you keep defending him? Your father was a monster!”

  A monster?

  She knew.

  Steve froze. Slowly, he turned to stare at his mother. She was looking not at him but at the display of weaponry on the floor, and the expression on her face was one of hatred and disdain. It was the expression of a victim viewing the corpse of her tormentor, a look at once deeply wounded and completely pitiless.

  This changed everything. He didn’t know what his mother had experienced or what she had seen, but she knew what his father had done, and he couldn’t trust her to keep quiet. Her anger led her to blurt out accusations without thinking, and she had a temper that, aside from her interactions with his father, she’d never been able to control, along with a religious fanatic’s certitude that whatever she did or said was part of God’s plan—otherwise why would He allow it?

  She had to go.

  But he’d known that already, hadn’t he? Even if he hadn’t been spending his time thinking of specific ways in which to kill his mother, he had been aware of the fact that she would die soon, that she needed to die soon, and that he would have to be the facilitator. He didn’t want to do this, but as with the people he had dispatched before, this was a necessity. It was not merely his father’s good name he was protecting now; it was his own life. If the authorities found out what his dad had done, it was only a short leap to learning about the murders that he himself had committed.

  “You don’t know what your father was really like,” his mother said. “No one does.”

  Steve nodded in vague agreement, thinking fast. She was old. And she’d had a lot of trauma in her life lately, what with her husband’s stroke and his attack upon her, then his death. It would be understandable if the pressure became too much to bear, if she decided that it would be easier to just end it all.

  But how?

  There were a lot of prescription pills in the house, both his mother’s and his father’s. There were the ones they’d had already for their various ills and ailments, plus the painkillers and antidepressants his mom had been given after the attack. That was the way most people committed suicide, wasn’t it? An overdose of pills? It was clean and relatively painless, and it was much easier to pull off than a hanging or wrist slitting.

  Steve took his mother’s hand, intending to lead her into the kitchen, where most of the medicines were kept. She yanked her hand away, frowning. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “Well, show me, then.” She kept her hands to herself but followed him through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  As a precaution, he pulled down the shades.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  He didn’t answer, but opened the far right cupboard above the sink counter. Row after row o
f white-capped pill bottles filled the bottom shelf.

  He was home free.

  He started opening pill bottles, using the flat of his palm to turn those annoying childproof caps. He dumped the pills into his hand: small, medium and large; round and oval; white, blue, red and yellow.

  “Steven!”

  He turned. His right hand was full of pills, and he used his left hand to push down on her shoulder, forcing her to the ground.

  “Steven!”

  She was flat on her ass now, and in a matter of seconds he’d pushed her onto her back, pinning down her arms with his knees. This was the single worst thing he had ever done. Assaulting his mother like this went against everything he had been taught, everything he was. It was all he could do to soldier on and not run away in shame and humiliation.

  But this had to be done.

  He held his mother down and pried open her mouth. She tried to scream, and he punched her in the gut. That would leave a bruise, he knew, but old people bruised easily, and for all anyone knew she could have tripped and fell, or bumped into a chair. It would be a stretch to think her son had punched her in the stomach to shut her up so he could shove pills down her throat.

  His mother lay gasping beneath him, and he started dropping pills into her mouth. She spit out the first few, but he dropped in some more and then held her mouth closed. She fought against him, still trying to catch her breath, but holding her mouth shut made her swallow, and then he let her open up again and dropped in some more. He didn’t know what kind of pills they were or what they were supposed to do, but suddenly, after swallowing the third batch, she began thrashing around beneath him. He wasn’t sure whether it was a reaction to the medication or some sort of self-preservation instinct kicking in, but she started bucking like a horse, as though trying to throw him off, and the whites of her eyes grew wide.

  He was no longer dropping in pills; he was shoving them in, forcing them past her lips.

  “It’s your fault!” he started screaming at her, pushing the pills in one after another after another. “It’s your fault!” He kept repeating the accusation over and over, but he didn’t know why, didn’t even know what was her fault. For some reason, however, he couldn’t stop, and beneath him her body went into convulsions. Spittle flew from her mouth as her head whipped from side to side.

  And then it was over.

  She stopped thrashing, stopped bucking; her head lolled to the left and thick vomit leaked over her lips, down her cheek and onto the floor. He stood. Her eyes were still open far too wide, and there was a trickle of blood oozing out one of her nostrils. He should have felt something—sadness, guilt, horror—but his mother was nothing to him at that moment, was just an obstacle he had overcome, a problem he had solved. The anger he had felt toward her only moments before, the furious animosity that had come over him and that he still didn’t understand, had fled, leaving behind a weary numbness.

  He looked around, thinking. His fingerprints were all over the house, but that was okay, because it was his mother’s place. It made sense that he’d been here. He needed to take them off the pill bottles, though, and he grabbed a paper towel from the rack, wet it in the sink and used it to wipe off each of the bottles before placing them on the kitchen table to make it look as though his mother had emptied them and left them there.

  The room was beginning to smell of the vomit that had continued to leak out of his mother’s mouth and was now forming a puddle on the floor. Holding his breath, Steve left the kitchen and made his way toward the back of the house, wondering what was the best way to leave without attracting undue attention. His plan was to come back tomorrow and “discover” her body. He didn’t know how accurately science could pinpoint a time of death, but he would swear that she had been fine on Saturday afternoon when he left and that she must have killed herself Saturday night. Science wasn’t infallible and wouldn’t trump an eyewit ness, so they’d probably split the difference and assume she had swallowed the pills immediately after he’d left. Just to be on the safe side, though, he wouldn’t “find” her until late tomorrow afternoon.

  But right now he had to get out of here. He passed through the dining room, stopped for a moment in the living room, wondering briefly if he should take his father’s weapons before deciding it would be safer to leave them as they were, then hurried on.

  He stopped almost immediately.

  His father was standing in the center of the hall.

  Startled, Steve sucked in his breath. He had not expected this. He never expected to see his father, but somehow at night, in bed, awakening from a dream state, it seemed more plausible, more understandable. Seeing him in the daytime like this was . . . wrong.

  It was midafternoon, but the shades in the rooms were drawn to keep out the sun, and the hallway was dim. His dad was not bloody this time, and he looked much the way he had the last time Steve had seen him before the stroke: casual slacks, short-sleeved shirt, loafers. There was an expression of sadness on the old man’s face, and suddenly Steve felt ashamed. You tried to kill her, too! he wanted to shout, but he was too embarrassed and, besides, he was not even sure if his father’s ghost was really there.

  The figure turned and walked down the hall to the far end. Steve knew he was supposed to follow, but he couldn’t. Although this house had been his home, its rooms were alien to him now, and he was afraid of what might be in them. He watched the figure of his father stride through the open doorway of the guest room and disappear into the gloom. Steve turned to go in the opposite direction.

  And the doorbell rang.

  He nearly panicked and ran through the television room and out the back door, but that would be a suspicious move and a sure indication of guilt.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Followed by a knock.

  What to do? His second impulse, after fleeing, was to lie low, pretend no one was home. That would screw up his story, though. And, besides, his car was in the driveway. Whoever was out there knew that someone was here, especially if the person stopping by was a neighbor.

  He had to answer the door.

  Steve hurried quickly to the front room, stood there for a moment gathering his wits, then took a deep breath and opened the door. An older woman stood there, a woman he didn’t know but who was approximately his mother’s age. She smiled. “You must be Steven. I’m June. I’m here to see your mother.”

  June . . . June . . . He racked his brain trying to remember whether either of his parents had ever mentioned a woman named June, but he and his parents had so seldom spoken that when they did it was always in broad generalities about subjects all three of them had in common. He knew next to nothing about their lives, just as they knew next to nothing about his.

  Had known.

  They were dead now.

  They were both dead.

  June was obviously a friend of his mother’s, and obviously expected to be invited in. He had to think quickly. “My mom’s sleeping now,” he said.

  June waved a hand at him. “Oh, you can wake her up. She won’t mind.”

  “She doesn’t feel well,” he said, hoping the anxiousness in his voice was not as apparent to her as it seemed to him. “I think she’s sick.” From the corner of his eye, he saw his mother’s feet on the floor of the kitchen, toes pointed upward like those of the Wicked Witch of the East.

  The thought made him want to giggle, and as he looked into June’s eyes, he realized with horror that he was smiling. He quickly wiped the expression off his face.

  The woman frowned. “I just saw her this morning and she seemed fine. What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just know she doesn’t want to be disturbed. I’ll tell her you stopped by, though.” He wanted to close the door but realized that would seem too suspicious, so he continued to stand there, waiting. His eyes looked over the woman’s head, searching for a car parked next to the curb, but he saw none. She had to be a neighbor. That was good. A casual visitor was much
easier to turn away than one who had made a special effort to come here.

  “All right,” June said uncertainly. “I guess. Will you tell her I’ll stop by later?”

  “I will,” Steve promised. “I will. And it’s nice to meet you,” he added.

  “Nice to finally meet you too,” June said.

  Right, Steve thought. His mother had obviously been talking to this woman about him. He didn’t know what she had been saying, but whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

  He watched the woman walk down the porch steps, waved at her when she looked back, then closed the front door. His hands were shaking, and he stood there for a moment, leaning his back against the door, taking deep breaths and trying to calm his nerves. Glancing toward the kitchen, he saw his mother’s still body lying unmoving on the floor. He couldn’t seem to get away from killing the people around him. As much as he wanted to, as hard as he tried, he could not break the cycle or escape from this loop in which he was trapped.

  Maybe he had been fooling himself. Maybe he had no higher purpose. Maybe he was simply the victim of bad genes and bad luck, condemned to murder people because his father had been Joseph Nye, unsung serial killer.

  It was a depressing train of thought but one he could not dismiss.

  Steve locked the front door, then walked through the house to the back door, locking it as well. He closed up the garage, then walked as casually as he could out to his car. As an added touch, he waved at the front window of the house before driving away. He did not know whether anyone on the street had been outside or had seen him, because he had not looked at them. He never did.

  He drove away, feeling better as he left the neighborhood, feeling good as he pulled onto the freeway. He would practice being shocked and grieving tonight. Tomorrow afternoon, he would return and call the police.