Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  “Paint me!”

  She stood in candlelight, head high, smiling, the scent of Possession pouring off her in waves of heat and there wasn’t a soul among us who so much as shifted where he sat or stood, just Sam and that ungodly screeching noise, and then it was as if some huge hand just lifted her, six feet up, and I suddenly remembered what she’d said to me, that she’d never met a man as tough as she was and remembered what I’d felt from him just minutes before when we first sat down, because she hung in the air a moment, mouth open in surprise, and all she said was ooops. I swear it. Ooops. Like she hadn’t counted on this at all and then he tossed her. Stage right, into the wings.

  We heard a crash and Sam went suddenly silent.

  Then all we heard was paint dripping.

  It was merciful, I’ll give him that much. The angle of the head against the wall told you that. She hadn’t suffered.

  And he’d painted her, all right.

  If we’d thought that was going to be the culmination of it, going to be end of something, it wasn’t. The Parrot did not stop being haunted. Far from it.

  The cook still has to search around for his colander or his spatulas from time to time and has to watch his stuffings for unlikely substances and Bernie finds scotch bottles hidden in the damnedest places, and we still have to arrange the tables nearly every morning when we open up. We’ve thrown out the Ouija board, of course. We lay off the hard loud rock ’n roll now and play country music instead, which he seems to like a whole lot better. And nobody paints naked girls anymore in deference to Mary.

  I keep smelling Possession in every corner of the club.

  It’s the damnedest thing.

  I will allow the man has taste.

  Sam has taken to winking into nothingness now, and leering into shadows.

  Megan’s Law

  Well, what the hell would you do?

  A cop walks up to your door, knocks. You look out the window and see his squad car parked in front of your house. You open the door and this kid half your age with a gun and cuffs and bullet pouches on his belt and a pad, pencil and some flyers in his hand says ’scuse me, sir, good morning, Mr. Albert Walker? and you say yes, what can I do for you, Officer? and he introduces himself and proceeds to inform you on this fine sunny summer nine-thirty Saturday morning smelling of fresh cut grass and dew that there’s a goddamn rapist moved in two doors up, a fucking child molester by the name of Philip Knott, a tier-three high-risk sex criminal and he’s informing you by order of the county prosecutor’s office.

  He tells you that he understands you have a twelve-year-old, Michelle, is that correct? and you say that’s correct. He asks you to take precautions. He’s consulting his notepad to make sure he gets this right. He says we’re asking parents in the neighborhood to reinforce general instructions about staying away from strangers and to treat Mr. Knott in particular as a stranger, to tell their children and their children’s caretakers to make certain you know where they are at all times. We’re asking them to tell their children where Mr. Knott lives and what he looks like. And here he hands you a flyer.

  You’re looking at a mug-shot. Front-view and profile.

  Taken six years ago, says the cop.

  From the front he isn’t bad-looking. Late twenties, dark hair. High cheekbones, strong jaw, a cleft in the chin and a wide, sensuous mouth. The eyes look haunted though. Scary eyes. Dark circles beneath them as though the guy hasn’t been sleeping well or maybe drinks too much. And then in the side-shot there’s the long weird Bob Hope nose and that spoils everything. The guy’s not good-looking at all. From the side the smudges under the eyes look even darker.

  He goes on to say that should my daughter be approached by Mr. Knott for any reason whatsoever I should report this to the police as I would any other case of suspected criminal activity. Then he tells me what I can’t do. First, I can’t convey any of this information to anybody else in the community. That’s the job of the prosecutor’s office and local law enforcement. I’m not even supposed to discuss it. And any actions taken against Mr. Knott, he says, including vandalism of property, verbal or written threats of harm and/or physical violence against Mr. Knott personally or against his family or employer will result in arrest and prosecution. I understand that, don’t I? He’s warning me against vigilantism. I hear him loud and clear but I have some questions of my own now.

  “Hold on. We’re talking about the new guy in the Hadley place, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He moved in a week ago. And you’re only now getting around to telling me?”

  “I understand your concern over the delay, sir. I can only say that these things move slowly sometimes. Paperwork, bureaucracy, all that kind of thing. But I’d guess he’d be pretty busy with the move anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about this?”

  “You can take precautions, sir.”

  “I mean about getting him out of here.”

  He shrugs. “Man’s got to live somewhere, doesn’t he. He’s done his time. He’s got to see his probation officer every week and verify his address with the prosecutor’s office every ninety days. Other than that he’s free to go wherever he wants, just like anybody else.”

  “Just like anybody else.”

  “Sorry. That’s the way it is.”

  The kid does look sorry. I give him that.

  I look at the mug shots again. Beneath the photos are the guy’s name, description, address, the make of his car—white Ford Escort—his plate number, his place of employment—Gene’s Garage, I know it well—and a description of his offense. Aggravated sexual assault.

  “You mind telling me what he did?”

  “Afraid I can’t do that, sir. I’d be violating his civil rights.”

  “But you know, don’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was pretty bad, wasn’t it.”

  The kid just looks at me. The answer’s in the look.

  “This really stinks.”

  “I can’t argue with that, sir. Have a talk with your daughter. Most of these guys, they don’t want to mess around in their own neighborhood anyway. They go elsewhere. Just tell her to be careful and I’m sure things will be fine.”

  He tells me to have a good day and walks down the steps to the sidewalk and over to Fred Grummon’s place next door. I wonder how Fred and Susan are going to take this. Their daughter Linda’s eighteen but Fred Junior’s only ten. Knott lives in the house right beside them, third one up on our little dead-end street. He knocks at the door. I don’t want to watch this. I go inside.

  It isn’t fair. I’m worried damn near all the time now.

  In some ways it’s worse than fucking Rahway. In Rahway I had Jumma to protect me and even if the price for that was so fucking high I’m lucky I can walk straight, here I got nobody. Nobody I can trust to watch my back. The guys at the garage, I trust the owner but not the rest of those dumb white-trash assholes. They know I’m a damn good mechanic but they’d just as soon kick my ass as look at me.

  It’s all too new. Maybe that’s it. Only one goddamn week in this town. I can’t even look at my neighbors.

  This Megan’s Law thing. It fucks you up! Out in California they firebombed this guy’s car, torched the poor bastard, burnt him to death. In Connecticut they got this other guy, about twenty-five of them, beat the shit out of him, somebody they thought did stuff but it was a case of mistaken identity, they fucked up, they got the wrong guy. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so fucking scary. What people are capable of.

  It’s not fair.

  Shit, I did my time. Six years. I paid my debt to society. My slate’s clean.

  Will it stay clean?

  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

  So what the hell would you do?

  I talked to her, all right. I talked to Michelle that very morning. Showed her the flyer and told her about the guy and I could tell she was scared and I hate that, I hate when Mich
elle’s scared like she was of her crazy rumdumb miserable excuse for a mother but in this case I had to scare her, scaring her was my job and I could tell it took. You see this guy, I told her, he says word one to you, you tell me and I call the cops. You don’t talk to him, you don’t go near him. He comes around school and you see him you tell your teacher. Then you call me at the office. Okay?

  Okay, Dad.

  I love this little girl. She had a terrible, awful time with her mother. I guess Judy was a little nuts when I met her at school thirteen years ago but she wasn’t drinking then, she was studying economics and she was bright and pretty with the same fine delicate blond hair and bright blue eyes she gave our daughter and she was a total banshee in bed, she was wild. I married that wildness and our daughter tamed it. Or maybe it’s more precise to say that what tamed it was having to take care of her. Having to love her. I don’t know.

  By the time Michelle was seven I was coming home from the brokerage firm every night to find Judy smashed on vodka. Passed out in the living room if we were lucky or screaming at Michelle if we weren’t. By the time my girl was ten she was dead, lying on the floor, her damn fool neck broken against the rim of the kitchen sink. Michelle was the one who found her. I remember her schoolbooks, notebooks and papers scattered across the floor in the hallway. Horror’s fallout. The debris of disaster.

  For all this time I’ve been her only protector.

  First against my wife, then against the rest of the world.

  I wasn’t about to stop now.

  I got Michelle a sitter that night and went over to Turner’s Pub on Myrtle Avenue. If anybody in town had the straight dope on Philip Knott it would be Tommy. Everybody talked to Tommy. City councilmen, cops, lawyers, dentists, gynecologists. You almost couldn’t not talk to him. A more affable Irishman never lived in my opinion. And Tommy took care of you, poured stiff and solid when you were sober and cut you off dry and arranged for a ride home if the time came that you were not.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Tommy said. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it.”

  “You know exactly what he did, Tom?”

  He gave me a look. Ice-blue eyes under ginger eybrows.

  “You don’t want to hear about it, Al. Honestly.”

  “Oh yes I do. Jesus, Tommy, wouldn’t you?”

  He sighed and leaned on the bar.

  “All right. Lerner was in a couple days ago after his shift. Said it happened in Livingston back in Autumn of ’92. Little girl ten years old’s riding her girlfriend’s spare bike home from school, her own bike’s busted. She’s pedalling hard, going slow up a hill. Knott stops her on the sidewalk easy as pie, puts his hands on the handlebars, tells her he needs to use her bike a minute, he’ll bring it right back. She says it’s not mine, it’s my friend’s. Knott punches her in the face, knocks her off the bike and then drags her and the bike into a culvert. Leaves the bike and takes the girl off into the woods. There’s nobody around. You sure you want to hear the rest of this, Al? It gets rough.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He leaned in closer.

  “The bastard strips her and rapes her, stuffs dead leaves into her mouth so she won’t scream, does her with a goddamn broken stick for godsake. When he’s done he leaves her unconcious and walks back to the culvert, gets the bike and rides off with it nice as you please.”

  “Christ. How’d they get him?”

  “Had a prior for wagging his dick in a playground. And his prints were all over the bike. The stupid sonovabitch, he just left it there on the sidewalk about half a dozen blocks away. Plus the bite marks.”

  “Bite marks?”

  He nodded. “All over the poor thing. Matched ’em to Knott’s teeth. Lerner figures the girl’s lucky she survived. That kind of luck, personally, I’m not so sure of.”

  “You talk to anybody else about this, Tommy?”

  He poured me another scotch.

  “Your neighbor across the street. Norm Green. You might want to have a word with him. I would.”

  The cop had said I wasn’t supposed to discuss the matter with my fellow citizens.

  This citizen figured, fuck that.

  Doc Stringer says I can control this thing if I want to. Stay on the meds, stay with the meditation program and no drinking. I kinda hope he’s right. One more screwup like last time and I’ll have some nigger pole up my ass for the rest of my natural life. Or unless I get so old nobody wants to bother anymore.

  It’s a bitch, though. You do it the first time, you just naturally want more. And me, I’ve done it four times. Though obviously not in a real long while.

  My favorite was the second one, the redhead. A real redhead too. Eighteen, nineteen maybe. I never did find out how old she was because that one never made the papers. I looked for it, God knows. But I guess she didn’t tell.

  Tough little bitch.

  I wonder how she explained the missing nipple to her boyfriend or her parents or whoever.

  I hate my job.

  I hate this stupid goddamn little town.

  I want to fuck something silly. I want to fuck something till it screams.

  I couldn’t believe it. I talked to Norm Green and he wouldn’t do a thing. Nothing. Not so much as a get-out-of-town call from a pay phone. He said he was just going to go with the program, however much he damn well hated it. And Norm and Beverly have a daughter, Clara, who’s exactly my daughter’s age. If she didn’t go to St. Philomena’s Catholic school she’d be in the same classes as Michelle. I talked to Fred and Susan Grummon too and though Susan was obviously terrified Fred said the same thing as Norm, basically. The guy will either fuck up or he won’t. If he does they’ll put him away again. If he doesn’t, no problem. We talked to our kids and the kids know all about him. They’ll be careful.

  Bullshit. A guy like that is a running sore.

  What you did with a running sore was stop it.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes I kept seeing this guy leaning on my daughter’s bicycle. Punching her out. Dragging her into the woods. Tearing off her blouse, her jeans. And worse.

  Michelle doesn’t even ride a bicycle anymore.

  I got up feeling groggy but angry too. This guy was not going to fuck with us. No way. Not if I could help it.

  Well, what would you do?

  All day Sunday I kept looking out the window, watching for a glimpse of a white Ford Escort. Looking for the guy strolling down the sidewalk. I kept staring at the mug shots. The face looked really sinister to me now. The temptation to just walk up the street and knock on the door and beat the living shit out of him when he opened it was strong as the winter wind around here but I resisted. I resisted calling him too. His number was probably unlisted anyhow. When Michelle and some girlfriends went to an afternoon matinee at the Colony I resisted following them.

  I was suddenly all will. All purpose and design.

  I’m not due at the office these days until ten but Monday I got up early and planted myself on the front porch with a glass of orange juice, some toast and a cup of coffee and watched the street. I figured Knott would probably have to be at the garage by nine and I was right. At quarter to nine I saw his car pull out of the driveway and roll on down the street. I took my breakfast back inside. Michelle was still asleep.

  I went out again and walked up to the old Hadley place which was now the Knott place and paused just long enough to reassure myself that what I remembered about the house was right. No matter where you parked in the driveway you had to cross at least a dozen or so feet of lawn along a fieldstone pathway once you came off the front porch steps and the same would be true if you used the back steps and had parked your car in back. Either way was doable.

  I went home and showered and shaved and went to work.

  Tuesday I got up earlier. This time I skipped breakfast and showered and shaved and brushed my teeth right away and except for my tie and sport jacket, dressed for work. Two years ago a group of us at the office had attended a manage
ment seminar at Stowe, Vermont and I still had the ski mask in my drawer so I took that and a pair of leather gloves and my tie and jacket with me and drove to the mall.

  I worked my way through college. Every kid in my family did. My brother. My cousins. I worked for my uncle as a repo man. It’s no big thing to jimmy a door and hotwire a car once you know how. Back then I got so I could do it in thirty seconds flat. I was a little rusty. It took me forty-five.

  The vehicle was a Jeep Wagoneer. I figured four-wheel drive might be handy. It was eight thirty-nine exactly when I pulled up to the curb of the Lindsay place across the street from Knott and a little way down. I left the Wagoneer in gear with my foot on the brake and put on the ski mask rolled up like a hat, ready to pull down. I wasn’t worried about being seen parked there. The Lindsays had a summer home in the lakes district up in Sparta. They’d be there until September. It occured to me that for the Lindsays none of this would have happened at all. It’d have no reality whatsoever for them. If a tree falls in the forest. . .