Bad Man

by Dathan Auerbach

  “Take him in, Kell,” Jacob snapped.

  Kell Cotter dragged Ty back in the house, closing the door with her foot. But it wasn’t thick enough to completely muffle the yelling. Almost lost to Ben’s ears was the sound of what must have been the Cotters’ daughters, crying as their parents fought.

  “Don’t let Ty bother you none. Blames everyone in the whole damn world for what happened to his cousin, ’cept the man himself, of course. That’s family, I guess.” Jacob shrugged and turned back toward his own home across the dirt road.

  Ben stood there for a moment, trying to take stock of what had just happened. Trying to decide if he was mad or just confused. The blinds rustled to his right and then were pulled away and replaced with the face of a little girl. A deep scar disfigured her right cheek. She looked at Ben until the yelling returned, then she ducked back into the room.

  Ben plucked the wadded flyer out of the weeds and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked past a small and intruding tangle of trees and into what Jacob had said was Darlene’s yard. The sun was growing tired, but its powerful glow still caught on the aluminum foil that covered the window at the left corner of the house. Gaps large enough for thick fingers had formed between the warping wooden boards, the barrier between this family and the world slowly rotting. Ben’s shoe knocked against bricks from an old landing buried in the dirt at the base of the porch. The first step leading up to the door was completely broken.

  The screen door leaned against the side of the house, attached to the frame by a solitary and bent hinge. Ben knocked and then stepped back so that he could be seen through the window. A rogue breeze tumbled across Ben’s back and then disappeared entirely, as if to show him the air didn’t have to be so thick; it simply wanted to be.

  A thin woman with dark hair appeared between the door and its jamb. She looked at Ben with weary, reddened eyes. A cigarette hung from chapped lips. When she pulled it out of her mouth, smoke rolled over and across her nicotine-dyed teeth.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you Darlene?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. My name’s Ben. I was in the neighborhood—”

  A child cried in the background. The woman turned her head back inside the house and yelled for the noise to stop, but the cries grew louder, almost savage.

  “And?” She turned back to Ben.

  “And…” Ben collected himself. “I was just wonderin if you’d seen this boy anywhere.” Ben held up the flyer of Eric.

  Her eyes barely even took the time to look at the picture before she responded. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Could you please look at it for just a second?”

  “Me lookin for longer ain’t gonna make it so I seen him.” She took a drag off her cigarette. Ben saw a blond boy pass behind her, moving from one room to another.

  Ben held out one of the photocopies, the paper slightly warped by the sweat from his hand. “Yes, ma’am. If you could just—”

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” she muttered before turning back into the house. “Hey! Come take care of this.”

  The blond-headed boy peered from the hallway and then disappeared into the house.

  “What is it?” a voice called.

  Ben wiped his hands on his kerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. He turned and surveyed the rest of the neighborhood, trying to figure if he could reach them all before it got too dark to knock on people’s doors anymore. As a boy, he learned that it was rude to call someone’s home after nine in the evening; he wondered if that rule still held if he was calling on them in person.

  Behind him, the door creaked back open.

  “Ben? What’re you doing here?” Marty stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door closed in the same motion. Ben held up the flyers, and Marty lowered his eyes and lit a cigarette. The door opened again, and the blond boy stepped outside.

  “What do you want?” Marty asked the boy, the cigarette seesawing in his half-closed lips. He shoved at the boy’s bare chest, his thin frame retreating before lunging back toward Marty as if they were connected by a spring. Marty wrapped his arm around the boy’s head and rubbed his knuckles against it. The kid’s arms flailed; Marty’s chest muffled what might have been shouts.

  “This is Aaron,” Marty mumbled, his right eye squinting at the smoke. He turned his brother loose and deflected an insincere barrage of fists and open slaps. “Go wash up for dinner. Chef Marty’s on top of it.”

  Aaron huffed in disgust.

  “No good? Eat summore of them boogers then,” Marty said, reaching for his brother’s nose.

  The kid smacked Marty’s hands away with a bashful smile before disappearing again. Voices rumbled quietly behind the thin walls. The cry returned and became a scream.

  “Everything okay?” Ben asked.

  Marty looked at him quizzically until the crying returned. “Huh? Oh, yeah, everything’s fine. That’s a neighborhood kid. Nags to come in and then cries because he wants his momma. Bounces around like a Ping-Pong ball.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “Always is. What was my momma goin on about?”

  Ben waggled the stack of papers in his hands.

  “She take one?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “You talkin to everybody ’round here?”

  Ben nodded and gestured to his left. “Just came from the Cotters’ place.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Marty said. “He try to score off you?”

  Ben shook his head and squared his stack of papers against his stomach.

  “Did…did you tell my momma what I told you?” Marty asked weakly.

  A Jeep pulled up onto the lawn and stopped over a large, circular patch of dead grass.

  “Shit…” Marty whispered.

  Ben turned to see a man of about forty-five climb out, his boots stepping heavily on the brittle grass. His thinning hair hung down in untamed wisps that bobbed as he bounded past the missing step, lightly shaking the entire porch.

  “Heya, Marty,” he said. Marty flinched as his cigarette was plucked from his mouth. “Relax, kid,” the man huffed, placing the cigarette between his own lips as he walked into the house.

  “That your dad?” Ben asked.

  Marty pushed air out of his mouth. “Shit no. That’s my momma’s boyfriend, Tim.”

  Ben decided not to press the issue. The murmuring that Ben could hear crescendoed until the voices were shouting. With a half-smile likely born of mild embarrassment, Marty grabbed the doorknob and pulled until the sounds were quieter.

  Ben told Marty that he had looked through the woods, and Marty nodded solemnly at Ben’s mentioning that he’d found nothing. A scream followed by a crash sounded from inside the house.

  “I gotta go, man,” Marty said abruptly. “See you at the store?”

  “Yeah, I’ll see you up there.” Ben turned toward the broken step.

  “Hey,” he heard over his shoulder. Marty was holding out his hand. “Gimme a few of them flyers.”

  Ben thumbed through the papers and handed Marty a stack.

  “Sorry, my momma…just sorry is all. For everything.”

  Ben watched as Marty disappeared into the riot of his home. The steps creaked under Ben’s weight as he walked away. His left leg throbbed with pain, hobbling him; he’d need to ice it before his shift if he was going to be any use at all. He made his way to the next house and then the next one after that, trying to remember which ones he’d need to return to and trying to ignore the whispering voice that said it wouldn’t matter.

  A few hours later, he walked back to his house with a thinner stack of paper. He had a long way to go, a lot of doors to knock on. But he was off to a good start. There wasn’t a home in either neighborhood surrounding those woods that Ben didn’t visit.

  And there wasn’t
a home in either neighborhood that remembered a recent visit from the police that had anything at all to do with a missing boy.

  17

  Ben hurled the cordless phone across his room. It smacked against the wall, sending the battery tumbling across the carpet. James Duchaine had actually laughed. It wasn’t a big belly laugh, but Ben heard it in his voice all the same. “I think someone’s playin games with you, son” was all Duchaine could offer. Duchaine was lying. Or Marty was.

  Sitting on his bed, Ben found it hard to orient himself, to make out what he felt. Or maybe it was just hard to admit. Ben never thought that Eric was dead, not once in the last five years. But as strange as it was, it had been a long time since he considered that Eric might actually be alive, that something good might happen instead of nothing bad. But what stirred inside Ben sure felt a lot like despair.

  Ben had found peace. He hadn’t known it until now, but as sure as he had lost it five years before, he’d found it again and in the same goddamn place. It didn’t look like what he might have expected, but it was something. But now, Ben could feel it slipping from his grasp, and he clung to it with the feverish grip of a thief—because that’s what he was. He hadn’t earned a thing. He wasn’t vigilant, dedicated. He hadn’t handed out a flyer in almost a year. And now there was a sickness in his gut; not because Marty’s news had come late, but because it had come at all.

  Ben didn’t want to think, and he didn’t want to sleep. He started transferring addresses from the back of the new flyer to the back of his sketchbook, got frustrated, then turned some pages. With the pen cradled loosely against his fingers, he tried to figure out what was wrong with his drawing, what was wrong with the eyes staring back at him. A trench of gutted pages attested to Ben’s failed attempts. He wanted to make some progress, but almost ten minutes had passed since he’d last marked the page. Ben closed the cover and his eyes, but he tried not to sleep. He fought it like he was behind the wheel of a car that couldn’t stop.

  Ben couldn’t remember how many times he’d had the nightmare; it had been dozens at least, probably hundreds. And as bad as that first time was, the second appearance had been worse, because that’s when he knew it wouldn’t stop, that his mind had built something special for him. Before long, nights, which offered the only real respite in his life, had been taken from him completely, destroyed by the promise of the dream’s return.

  But the dream stole more than sleep. It stole his memories. Less than a year after Eric disappeared, it started to become difficult to remember what he looked like. More and more, Eric’s features seemed to sit just out of focus, like a melody floating just out of reach. The dream had confused Ben. It had replaced Eric’s face with a rotten puzzle, shifting and writhing, as slippery in Ben’s mind as the skin had been on Eric’s bones.

  Out of desperation, Ben started carrying Eric’s picture with him and that helped to clear the fog. He’d bear down and force himself to see his brother’s face, giving up only when the effort became too painful. But Eric’s face always came back, peeking out of the corridors of Ben’s brain like a nervous animal. It always came back. Until the day that it didn’t.

  Ben had sat at his desk, clutching his head in his hands, trying to will himself to remember. But he couldn’t. The picture wasn’t helping. Just as soon as Ben would set it down, it was like he hadn’t even looked at it. Each time he tried to conjure Eric back, he seemed to slip further away, until Ben was picturing faces he wasn’t sure he’d even seen before, wasn’t sure even existed. His teacher’s words suddenly didn’t make any sense to him. Nothing about that room or any rooms in the whole damn building made sense. Maybe they hadn’t for a long time. So Ben left. He just walked out.

  By the time Clint found out that Ben had stopped going to school, he was already destined to repeat a grade for the second time in his life. In the grand scheme of things, Ben found it impossible to care.

  And it seemed like Clint didn’t care either. The man never asked where Ben had been spending his time, never saw the catalog of addresses in the back of Ben’s sketchbook. New residents. Suspicious neighbors. Vague stories. He wrote them all down. Dozens of names and addresses. Walking five miles a day, then ten, then too many to figure—hundreds of miles. Kept walking. Kept writing. Long after he figured out that he’d be scratching them out later, having learned nothing. Found nothing. Done nothing.

  But Ben had done something with the front of his book. For every wasted walk and fruitless conversation, there was a drawing. Ben drew Eric’s face so many times, he didn’t even have to look at the picture anymore. Drew it until a piece of his mind hardened and turned so inflexible that all it could do was remember. Ben carved his brother’s face into his brain.

  And it worked. Ben never forgot again.

  As he lay in his bed, dragging his thumb against the soft edges of filled pages, he could see Eric’s face, dancing beneath his eyelids like sunspots. He tried not to think of the new drawing he had started. The one he just couldn’t get right. The one with the bad eyes.

  Ben dragged his knuckles against the wall above his head. She was in there now. Ben could hear her moving. And he could feel himself slipping. Over and over he stopped himself from stumbling over the edge of consciousness, his heart thudding in his chest each time he’d snap back. But he couldn’t hold out forever. Maybe this time he could stay in the forest. Maybe just this once.

  * * *

  —

  “Be My Baby” was the ninth track on the Bay City Rollers CD in Ben’s stereo alarm clock. The fact that he was hearing it meant that he had overslept. The fact that it was the fourth CD on the carousel meant that he had overslept by quite a bit. Ben lay in bed feeling the slow creep of stiffness climb back into his body. He fought with his eyelids, commanding them to stay open and attempting to rub out their insubordination with his knuckles.

  Scraps of the nightmare pulled at his mind, and he did what he could to resist. Wearily, he let his eyes observe his room, and only then did he realize that no sunlight burned through the drawn blinds; the darkness was nearly absolute, contested only by the faint wisps of light meandering from a neighbor’s porch light. The clock on his stereo read 1:26. He was late.

  Ben groaned and rolled away from the bright clock and dark window. He was reaching for his box cutter when he saw a small boy standing in his doorway.

  Ben steeled himself. No matter how many times it happened, Ben was never ready for it. He never really expected to see Eric’s ghastly face peering at him from the black, snickering like it was a game, like he had snuck into the waking world through the door Ben had left open when he climbed out of the dream. All Ben could do was hold his breath and watch the mirage fizzle like vapor under the heat of his stare. But this shape was more than just a face. And it didn’t fizzle.

  Warm tears built in the corners of Ben’s eyes and blurred his vision. He shut his lids hard and tried once more to reset the world, as if the figure were a stain on his cornea that could be wiped away. It was only an outline, a silhouette, a looming shadow with no features or expression, but it was enough to glue Ben to his mattress. There was a trembling in Ben’s throat, and he felt like he might scream or cry hysterically, but he did neither. Ben lay there stewing in sweat and the sour feeling that was spreading from the center of his stomach.

  “Eric?” Ben whispered.

  The shape tore from the threshold, slamming the door as it moved. Small footsteps thudded in the hallway. Ben felt faint as he struggled to get out of bed, his legs tangling in the sheets. He rolled onto his carpet, striking a table with the side of his head. Ben rose and flung his door open. The hallway was empty. He moved deeper into the house and tried to listen, but he could hear only his stereo.

  Eric’s door was open, but his room was empty. So was the bathroom. Carefully, he pressed his ear against his parents’ door. No noise. His father would be at work now. Gritting his teeth, Ben squeeze
d the doorknob and turned it slowly. With a creak, the door swept into the room. The small amount of light that spilled past Ben was enough to make Stampie’s eyes glint in the dark. They seemed to dance as Deidra stirred in bed.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Sorry,” Ben said as calmly as he could.

  “What is it?”

  He felt a throb in his palm. If he were any stronger, he might have crushed the knob. “Nothing,” Ben said. “It’s nothing.”

  The latch clicked back into the frame, and Ben rolled his feet against the carpet to keep his steps quiet. Weak moonlight speared through the living-room blinds and cast the furniture in gray. The more time that wedged itself between what had stood in Ben’s doorway and what stood before him now, the less sure Ben was about what he’d seen.

  Reaching for his back pocket, Ben found his handkerchief missing. After a few moments of patting, he realized he was wearing only boxers and a shirt. He slunk back into his room and got dressed.

  The still, dark air of the open world felt uncomfortable as he hustled along the overgrown shoulder toward the store. The only sound accompanying his grass-muffled footsteps was the blended screech of countless crickets.

  In the distance, beyond the trees to Ben’s left, a confused rooster called out, and for a few seconds afterward there were no real sounds at all. Except for one. And it was very, very close.

  Ben stopped and turned toward the rustling woods, though there was nothing he could see; the trees at the edge of the copse sparkled in the pale light but shielded everything beyond themselves. That there had been a ruckus in the undergrowth meant nothing to Ben, but that it had stopped when he did made Ben feel noticed, and he didn’t like that.

  Stooping, Ben squinted into the trees, and when he saw more of the same nothingness, he took a step forward, and this time the darkness acknowledged him.

  Leaves and sticks cracked and snapped. A shadow moved within itself, and then the black was still. The noise plunged deeper into the trees, and Ben bounded toward it, his heart pounding, but his feet stopped sharp at the tree line. He could see his brother’s face, crooked and wide-eyed, sneering and begging. There was nothing but blackness before him, but Eric’s face danced in his mind and arrested his legs.