Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  I remembered Marla mocking my sister when we were in junior high school, what was that about? I couldn’t remember, but I did remember my sister stiffening in pride, holding up her chin while her cheeks flushed red and her eyes filled with bitter, angry tears. I wanted to do something, but my sister grabbed my arm in a death grip and whispered, angrily, “Don’t.”

  I smiled and held out my hand. “My room key?”

  She flushed and handed me back my credit card and license. She didn’t look at me as she activated a key card. “You’re in 233. Turn left when you get out of the elevator.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  The room was clean, smelled of pine cleaner with maybe a hint of lavender. It was decorated in all the shades of brown. I unpacked my bag, put the clothes away in the battered-looking dresser, stored the bag in the closet, put my shaving kit in the clean little bathroom. I pulled out my phone and called the public defender. “Hey, it’s Chanse MacLeod. I’m going down to see my brother. Maybe we should talk first?”

  Her voice sounded tired. “Yeah, that’ll work. There’s a Starbucks on Arkansas Street, at Seventeenth. I can be there in about ten minutes.”

  “See you there.”

  The Starbucks was where a gas station used to be, and as I parked on the street a few doors down I wondered if the big gasoline tank had been removed or if they’d just built over it. I used to buy gas at that station sometimes. Some of the stoner kids, the ones with the black heavy-metal T-shirts and tight jeans, used to hang out there. By the time I was driving I was a football star, and most of the kids who’d made my life hell when I was a kid left me alone. But I still remembered their names, still remembered their faces. I remembered one of them, Stinky Parrish, even worked at the station. Maybe that was why they hung out there. He probably let them buy beer or slipped them cigarettes or let them have whatever they wanted. I bought gas there because I wanted to see if they’d have the balls to ever challenge me, try to bully me again.

  They never did.

  A pretty young woman, maybe thirty, got to the front door at the same time I did. From the way she was dressed—business attire, hose, skirt, matching jacket, pumps, silk blouse, hair pulled up into a bun it was trying to escape—I took a leap as I held the door open for her and asked, “Siobhan O’Connor?”

  She looked at me and smiled. She wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup, or it had worn off over the course of the day. There were circles under her brown eyes and her lips were a little chapped under the lipstick. “Chanse?” She shook my hand. “You’re—you were a football player, right?”

  Which, I supposed, was a kind way of commenting on my size. I nodded. “Used to be.”

  She gave me a weak smile. “People still talk about those state championship teams,” she said as we walked to the counter. “I guess those were the last good times this town had.”

  “Those times weren’t that good,” I replied as a shiny-faced girl with Mercedes on her name tag greeted us. We both ordered a small dark roast of the day—I always refuse to use their pretentious size names, my little way of sticking it to the corporate man—and I paid for both of us.

  We carried our cups of too-hot coffee over to the condiment bar. I watched her sprinkle a heavy layer of vanilla powder on the top, add a couple packets of pink sweetener and a dollop of half-and-half. She stirred the potion with a wooden stick and we headed to a table as far away from the counter as possible. There was no one else in the place, and the bland middle-of-the-road crooner’s voice singing jazz standards through the speakers hanging from the ceiling was making me miss silence.

  We had a good view of the drive-thru from our table, which was doing a fair business, cars full of teenagers backed up all the way to the street. I recognized the black-and-red letter jackets, the white chenille CW letters outlined in red thread and sewn onto the left side. I used to have one of those jackets. My sister sewed my letters on, our mother too drunk on cheap gin and too busy watching her afternoon stories to be bothered. My jacket was probably in a box in my storage space, the same box that held things like my high school yearbooks, my fraternity composites, and all my football memorabilia from LSU.

  Yeah, I needed to clean out my storage space.

  “So, my brother is supposed to have killed this Bobby Cassidy?” I said while watching her stirring her coffee, trying to dissolve the vanilla flakes. “Why would he do that?” My brother had always been getting in trouble. He could lie with the brightest, most sincere smile, lie right to your face even though you both knew he was lying. But it was always penny-ante stuff, shoplifting a candy bar here and there, breaking and entering, moving on to some minor drug dealing—never anything stronger or more dangerous than marijuana. He’d always been a good-looking kid, had probably grown into a handsome man.

  And don’t ever believe for a minute that good-looking people don’t get away with things less attractive people can’t.

  “It’s pretty open and shut. Me representing him is just a legal formality.” She nodded, blowing on her coffee before taking a tentative sip. “They argued, he grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed him. No premeditation, no other fingerprints on the knife other than your brother’s. I’m hoping to plea it down to manslaughter. The DA seems open to avoiding a trial.” She gave a little half-hearted shrug. “I’m sorry. There’s a witness, and he confessed—not much of a confession, to be honest, just says that he did it. There’s not really much for me to do besides get the best deal for him I can.”

  “I appreciate your calling me.” A Mustang pulled into the drive-thru, a good-looking blond kid behind the wheel, his arm draped around the pretty redheaded girl in the passenger seat. They kissed, and I looked back at Siobhan. “Why was he over there in the first place? Was Ash working for Bobby?”

  My brother was a carpenter, claimed he was a good one. It was hard for him to get bonded because he’d been arrested any number of times over the years for possession. He never did time—the charges were always dropped, and he claimed he just dealt a little to pay for his own weed habit. But it was enough that no one would bond him, and that made getting work hard. That was the last I’d heard, so who knows? He may have moved on from dealing a little weed to heroin for all I knew.

  “No, he’d been laid off from his last job, was just drawing unemployment,” Siobhan replied. “I guess—I don’t want to get into a lot of this—but the Cassidys had apparently split up. Your brother was seeing Mrs. Cassidy.” She made a helpless gesture. “Mr. Cassidy stopped by the house when your brother was there, and it got ugly. That’s all I got.”

  “Thanks.” I got up. “Thanks for meeting me, and for helping my brother. I appreciate it.”

  “Thanks for the coffee.” She gave me a weak smile. “I wish I could do more. I just have this gut feeling your brother didn’t do it, Chanse.”

  I resisted telling her that she wouldn’t be the first woman my brother had fooled.

  The Cottonwood Wells police department was still on Prairie Street, according to my phone, and the building looked pretty much the same, only more tired. The whole town looked more tired than I remembered, the boarded-up windows of the stores on Commercial Street and the empty parking spaces more apparent. I made a game out of trying to remember what the now-empty stores used to be. This one used to be the shoe store, that one was a diner, and that one used to be a sporting goods place. Now they were empty, forlorn For Lease flyers stapled to the plywood covering the windows.

  The police station smelled like stale sweat and lost hope.

  I told the tired-looking woman at the desk I wanted to see my brother. She looked at me warily when I told her his name and showed my ID. She directed me to have a seat and to help myself to coffee. I did and regretted it.

  “Chanse?”

  I got up and put down the Texas Monthly I was reading. The man who’d said my name looked vaguely familiar. He was wearing a white dress shirt and an ugly maroon tie. There were wet spots at his armpits. He had what I used to think of as th
e redneck body, big upper torso and belly, narrow hips and scrawny legs. His brown polyester dress pants had seen better days, and he had an enormous belt buckle underneath the swell of stomach. His cowboy boots clicked on the tired linoleum floor.

  I didn’t recognize his face, blasted brown by the sun and deeply lined, the small brown eyes alert. The overhead lights reflected off his brownish-red scalp. He held out his hand and took mine in a tight, hard, dry grip, shaking it vigorously. “You’re looking good, man,” he said in his East Texas accent. “Me, I let myself go. Nothing to do about it now but wait for death.” He grinned, crooked yellow teeth slightly masking the smell of stale coffee and cigarettes. “Aw, you don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “Sorry.”

  He dropped my hand but the smile stayed in place. “Well, I’ve changed a lot. Larry Michalak.”

  To say the years hadn’t been kind was an understatement. Larry was older than me. We grew up in the same trailer park. My mother used to give him a buck every now and then to keep an eye on us while she went to the liquor store. I’d forgotten he’d become a cop once he was done with high school. His mom waited tables at the diner on Commercial Street and his dad had run off when he was a kid. He’d always been nice to us, I remembered, letting us watch whatever we wanted on the television, willing to throw a football around with me.

  He was one of the few good memories of my childhood. Back then he’d been skinny as a rail, rangy, all loose energy and live nerves.

  “Good to see you, Larry.”

  He nodded. “You’re here about your brother, I reckon. Come on.” He used his ID badge to unlock a door and I followed him into a back hallway painted beige. I followed him into an office with bare paneled walls. It was sparsely furnished, a big metal desk, a couple of file cabinets, some uncomfortable chairs. There was a file on his desk. He waved me into one of the chairs. It was even more uncomfortable then it looked. He sat down behind the desk and opened the file, put on a pair of cheap reading glasses.

  “It’s pretty cut and dried, Chanse, I’m sorry to say.” He didn’t look up. “Your brother admitted it, had Bobby Cassidy’s blood all over him, and his fingerprints were on the knife.”

  “What kind of knife?”

  “A butcher knife, from the set in the kitchen. We don’t think it was premeditated, just one of them wrong place at the wrong time situations that got a little out of hand. The Cassidys were separated, Bobby was staying at a place in one of his apartment buildings he owned on the other side of town. Bobby stopped by the house and caught Ash with his wife, and words were exchanged and things escalated.”

  “Ash was having an affair with Mrs. Cassidy?”

  He looked at me over the top of his reading glasses. “I know you haven’t been around much, Chanse, but how much do you know about your brother?”

  It was supposed to sting, I guessed. It didn’t. “Other than calling to say Merry Christmas every few years, I haven’t spoken to Ash since I left for college. And yes, this is my first time back in town since then.”

  “But that’s been almost twenty years!”

  “Twenty-four, to be exact. Next year is my twenty-five-year class reunion. We weren’t exactly a close family.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He cleared his throat. “So, are you here to bail him out? The bail was set pretty high.”

  “I’m not bailing him out.” Siobhan had mentioned the half-million-dollar bond on the message she’d left for me. I leaned back in the chair, which had no lumbar support. “I’m just going to ask some questions, find out if he did it or not. And then I’m going back to New Orleans.”

  “Just like that?”

  I nodded. “Just like that.” I didn’t add that I’d regretted coming as soon as I took the off-ramp from I-10, or that every exit along the highway since New Orleans had triggered an internal debate about turning around and heading home. “I don’t know my brother anymore. You could tell me he was head of a huge international drug cartel and it wouldn’t surprise me. Ash always had an abusive relationship with the truth. But something doesn’t sit right with me about this, and that’s what brought me here. So, Ash was having an affair with Mrs. Cassidy?”

  He nodded. “Ash and Becky Harlan go way back—”

  “Becky Harlan is the Mrs. Cassidy in question?” I whistled. That changed everything. Becky Harlan.

  Now it all made sense.

  I remembered Becky Harlan. The Harlans also lived in the Hook ’Em Horns Trailer Park where I’d grown up. An image of a little blond girl with pigtails following my little brother around like a puppy dog when she couldn’t have been more than eight years old flashed through my mind. She had a little sister, too, but that name was lost to the years. I remembered her mother used to sit around and drink sometimes in the afternoons with mine, while they watched One Life to Live and General Hospital and Edge of Night. It usually fell to us to take care of Becky and what’s her name. “I don’t remember Bobby Cassidy.”

  “He wasn’t from here.” He rubbed his eyes. “Come on, follow me.” He jangled his keys and opened the door he came out of, gesturing for me to follow him. I did, into a long hallway of yellowed linoleum and fluorescent lights, down past some doors and then another door he had to unlock, talking the whole way. “Bobby came to town about twenty years or so ago, had the Arby’s franchise out by the highway. He bought some land, put up apartment buildings, made some investments, did pretty well for himself. He married Becky about sixteen years ago. She was bartending at Sam’s Place. Caught everyone off guard when he married her. She and your brother had been off and on for a long time, and Bobby swept her off her feet, I guess, during one of the off times. They’ve got a couple of kids. Best we can figure it, her and Ash started back up again when Bobby moved out, maybe even before. Becky’s not talking much about any of this, other than saying Ash did it. Bobby walked in and caught ’em together, Ash stuck a knife in him.” He made like he was washing his hands of it. “Open and shut.”

  I sat down in an uncomfortable brown plastic chair at the table. There was a mirror against one wall, which I assumed was one way. I only waited for a few moments before he led my brother in. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and was shuffling; his wrists and ankles were cuffed, and they were connected by a long chain in the front. He grinned at me as he slid into a seat.

  “I’ll be right out here when you’re ready,” Larry said. “Just knock on the door when you’re done.”

  “It won’t be long,” I replied.

  “Nice of you to come,” Ash said. “Been a while.”

  Ash and I looked alike, always had, even when we were kids. He had the same brown hair, the same gray eyes, the same frame. He was just shorter than me, never been inclined to sports. He’d always been too lazy. Our parents hadn’t been the best parents—but he’d been the baby. He always got away with murder, just by letting his gray eyes fill up with tears and making his lower lip tremble.

  Well, he wouldn’t get out of it that way this time.

  “What brought you back this time?” Ash asked. “Suddenly you care?”

  “Curiosity, I suppose, more than anything else.” I folded my arms. “You going to plead out?”

  “That’s what everyone seems to think I should do.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I did it.” He held up his shackled hands. “You and Rhonda have been bitching at me my whole life to take responsibility, so I am.”

  I looked at him. “Something doesn’t make sense to me.” I leaned across the table. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re taking responsibility for something you did wrong for the first time in your life, but I’m not sure you did this. And I don’t understand it.”

  He gave me a sour look. “Larry, we’re done here,” he yelled.

  I waited for Larry to get back from taking him to his cell. As Larry walked me out to the lobby, I said, “Looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  “Probably won’t even go to trial, unless Ash g
ets stubborn. The DA’s looking to plead him out.”

  “Ash always was stubborn.” I shook his hand again. “Thanks, Larry, for your help.” I opened the door to the lobby, stopped, and looked back at him. “Didn’t it strike you as a little bit odd that the only fingerprints on a kitchen knife were my brother’s?”

  He looked at me, confused.

  “Not many knives in many kitchens don’t have any fingerprints on them.” I smiled at him. “It’s like it had never been touched or used, isn’t it?”

  I shut the door as that sank in and walked back out to my car.

  The Cassidy place wasn’t hard to find. It was out near the country club, across the street from where my old friend T. J. Ziebell had grown up. I stopped at the foot of the Cassidy driveway and looked over at the Ziebell place. It looked different. It took me a minute to realize there was an addition on the left side, and the house had also been expanded over the three-car garage. The little trees and bushes his mother had planted in the front yard had grown, and there was now a fountain bubbling in the front lawn. The mailbox said O’Reilly now. I wondered what ever had happened to ole T. J. He’d been my best friend and my first crush.

  And that had ended badly.

  I turned into the Cassidy driveway and pulled up to the front of the house. Like so many other Southern people who’d come into money, Bobby Cassidy had built himself a replica of an old Southern plantation house, complete with the obligatory enormous columns and a veranda that ran around the whole house. There was an upper gallery as well, disappearing around the corners of the house. The Cassidys didn’t have a fountain in their front yard, but there was a summer house off to the right of the house and the driveway also curved around to go back, which was where the garage was probably located. I got out of the car and climbed the steps.

  A teenage girl about sixteen or seventeen answered my knock. She was pretty, with long blond hair falling down her back, a snub nose, and bluish-gray eyes. She was tan, with darker freckles sprinkled across her nose and below her eyes. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and from the disappointed look on her face when she saw me, she was clearly expecting someone else. She looked familiar to me, but then, I knew her mother.