by Aaron Dries
(“please, stop. I beg you—”)
“I’m a murderer,” he said aloud, and there was nobody around to disagree or to judge him. Well, nobody that he could see. But that was the point of The Forgiveness—to draw the attention of God.
“Oh, Jesus,” he began, “let this work. Let this work. Bring her back to me.”
(“please, God, please!”)
Joe was on his knees, his bulbous stomach resting on his legs. He breathed into his fists, which we pressed against his forehead. He got up and shuffled to the laundry to find some clothes.
He hadn’t touched his food. There was a time when he could think of nothing else.
Joe was dead tired but he fed the pigs their daily slops anyway. They fought and scrambled for the shit, their backs steaming in the crisp morning air. Afterwards, he sat among the trees behind the spare shed. He plucked grass from the earth and twiddled it between his fingers. A toothpick jutted out of his mouth; it was a poor substitute for a cigarette, but it’d have to do. Days like this he wished he’d never quit. There was a time when he wouldn’t have left home without a pack of Camels tucked up the sleeve of his shirt. But like Marline’s rocker, those days were through.
The trees swayed. He could make out the sky through the foliage. The day may turn sour before long but it was peaceful for the time being. The birds and the cicadas were trying to out-sing each other. It was nice enough.
Joe wondered if he wasn’t really being watched.
All of his life he’d been told that God was in everything; if that were so, then why wasn’t He in the trees that gave him shade, or in the birds who made him smile? Was God present in the fact that Marline had not died? Or had He turned His back on them by turning her into a shadow of her former self?
“Oh, boob, I dunno,” Joe said, spitting out the matchstick. “I really don’t. I thought I did, but I’m just a fool. A big, fat fool.”
He pushed his fingers into the dirt and ground the earth between his palms. The smell of soil was soothing, always had been. Now he really wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t had one since the morning of the first murder—his last active participation in the torture rounds.
Man, where’d that time go? he wondered. And look, nothin’s changed.
It disturbed him. He wondered how much longer they could keep this up; things had already started to go wrong.
One witness, some Jap bitch. Still missing.
And the man last night. Broke a window and tried to escape.
Joe wondered what prison was like. Was it everything he saw on television? If so, he didn’t want to go there.
They were careful. Meticulous. Neither of them wanted to be caught. But they were only human after all, and as Joe had come to understand better than most, humans made mistakes. They slipped up. They left a footprint where they shouldn’t have; they didn’t hide a vehicle well enough; they fell asleep at the wheel and drove their cars off the road and became vegetables overnight.
Yeah, Joe knew about mistakes.
A bird flew down and picked up the matchstick he’d been chewing on. It flapped its wings and dove into the bushes. It made him smile, but it didn’t last very long. They rarely did anymore.
God wasn’t in the trees, for the trees were rotting and would fall.
God wasn’t in the birds, for they carried diseases and would die.
God wasn’t watching him, for Marline had not been returned to him.
Joe shuffled to his feet, his head spinning. His touched the bark of the tree next to him and a soft chunk tore away. Termites swarmed over his fingers.
“Another day,” Joe said, squeezing his hands together and listening to the insects pop and snap. He went into the shed and came back with a long handled axe, the words: THE PEACEMAKER burnt along the side. It felt heavy, as though its duty gave it extra weight. He walked back to the tree and leveled the blade against it. He swung The Peacemaker over and over, until the bitch went down. Two squirrels ran for shelter, leaves carried away on the breeze.
Joe dropped the axe and the chipped blade embedded itself in the soil.
(snapping the bones was the hardest, sometimes he had to use a hammer to divide a thigh or upper arm)
He could hear the pigs screaming for more food.
(the way they scrambled for the disembodied chunks of meat, their snouts draped in intestines)
The sounds burrowed into his brain. He wondered if there were termites in his head, crawling around, looking for something soft to chew on.
Joe sat beside the fallen tree and stewed in his own sweat. Soon he would get up and drive the man’s rented car farther into the woods at the far edge of his property. There, past trees strangled by ivy and stinking of mildew, was a pool of water at the bottom of a ravine. He would sink the car there, but first he would remove the license plates and those he would burn along with any identifying remains of the man’s identity.
Joe didn’t look forward to it. The worst part would be walking back through the forest. He wasn’t afraid of shadows, or of bears. It wasn’t the tall Douglas-firs that set him on edge, or the ankle-high grass, which may—or may not—hide poison ivy, either. He wasn’t worried about getting lost.
No, he wasn’t afraid of any of these things. Joe just didn’t like walking home alone—this more than anything else. Not even God would accompany him.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Time didn’t exist in the basement. Marshall may have been down there for days or hours. There was no way to tell.
A pinch had tightened between his shoulder blades from sitting upright for so long. He tried to ignore it. Marshall was pretty sure it would get a hell of a lot worse before it got better.
It’ll get darker before it gets lighter.
That was a line from something. He tried to remember what it was.
And then it came to him: The Wizard Of Oz—Noah’s favorite movie as a kid. The owner of the video store had given them the VHS to keep and when the VCR had eventually chewed it to pieces, Noah had come to him with tears in his eyes. It was like someone had died. Up until that point, the death of the video was the great tragedy in his son’s life. They had never invested in a pet—not even a damned goldfish—and Marshall regretted that now.
A boy should have a dog. It was Marshall’s father who’d said that.
His thoughts turned to the collie he’d had as a kid and how he’d loved the mutt with every ounce of his being. Indy was a beautiful thing—and dumb to boot. It could break your heart with a glance. The little guy got away with everything, even when he chewed up Marshall’s school shoes.
Then one day, Marshall woke up and Indy didn’t come running when he opened the back door. No. Indy was lying in a ditch near their house with his spine snapped in two, the bones piercing up through his fur. Later, his father put a bullet through the dog’s brain. The final flinch, a whispered prayer. Marshall had shaken hands with death.
Nice to meet you.
Sir.
Marshall wondered if things would have turned out different if he’d bought Noah a pet, an Indy of his own. All pets die in the end, and it may have taught his son a much-needed lesson: when you’re dead, you don’t come back. It’s a one way ticket. Read it and weep.
Indy.
Back in the days when his life was good—back when he had a job, a wife, a son—Marshall would climb into bed and ask Claire to work her fingers through his back muscles. “Pwease, baby, you got the touch. You got the magic fingers,” he would say in the baby voice he reserved just for her, the voice she yielded to every time. And Claire would accept, the bedsprings singing as she rolled him onto his stomach and straddled his waist.
Claire had a wry strength to her. She didn’t give any simple Swedish massages. She had taken a class in Thailand a week before they met and as a result, her idea of therapy was sweat inducing—for both them.
Marshall could almost feel her knuckles now.
When finished, the pinch would be gone and she would wrap her arms aro
und him from behind. Her fingernails running over his nipples. Locks of her auburn hair falling over their faces, a private shield. “I love you,” he would say. “Cujo.”
Marshall’s head was spinning. He tingled all over. He wondered what it was like to die.
Marshall was amazed by how quick the human body could prepare for the worst. He would be floating between awake and asleep, when the basement door would open and he would burn bright.
Burning.
Every sense rolling white, like the eye of a shark breaching water.
Preparing for the worst didn’t equate to being prepared for death; it was just that your defenses rose as your hope receded.
The pinch came back. Twisting hard. The person coming down the stairs was not the man who’d kidnapped him. It was the teenager. He was carrying a tray. Something hot—steam swirled from the bowl. The boy stepped onto the flag at the bottom of the staircase, stepped into silhouette.
The light bulb buzzed—a constant electric whine.
The boy stepped closer. He gripped the tray as hard as he could but Marshall could still see him shaking.
Dot to dot, Marshall thought. Put this shit together. I don’t want to die not knowing what’s going on.
Marshall inhaled. Began.
DOT A: the man.
DOT B: the boy, the man’s son. He is being made to bring him food against his will.
That’s good, Mars. Now draw the line between the two. Bring out the bigger picture.
The boy was bait to lure DOT C, me, to the park.
The boy stood still, the rise and fall of their chests were the only movement in the room. The tableaux: two people, divided by years yet united by fear—a fear so tangible it could be seen in their eyes. It could be smelt in their skins.
A united fear of Dot A.
The boy wore nothing but black, like a theatre stage assistant, and was barefooted. The iPod earbuds dangled from the V-neck of his shirt, clicking together, only there was no music this time. Marshall took in the kid’s features—fine freckles across a face the color of sea salt. Skinny arms. Eyes that unequivocally confirmed the boy as the insane man’s son.
Marshall wondered where the mother was. He had seen photographs of a woman in some of the frames upstairs. An out of focus blur through the drug haze.
There was a sudden, blinding memory, as violent and bright as a sun flare: the contorted body of a woman within the jar in the upstairs closet. Her hair swam in the smoky liquid; her lips pressed against the glass in a pantomime kiss.
Marshall had almost forgotten about her.
Mother, father, son—a perverted trinity.
The boy, as quick and elegant as a dancer, set down the tray and sat at Marshall’s feet, his hair fanning across his face. But Marshall could still see the dark eyes. The rattle of a spoon. The bowl was lifted.
“What’s your name?” Marshall asked, cringing at the foulness of his own breath.
The boy didn’t answer, remaining instead on his haunches, head cocked to the left, studying Marshall as though he were an abstract painting on a gallery wall and not a man strapped to an old hospital chair. This second tableaux broke when the boy refocused his attention on the bowl. Marshall couldn’t help hating the boy for the dismissive way he broke eye contact; as though he meant nothing.
I’ve got no ally in this kid. Marshall didn’t bother asking for his name again.
And just as the image of the woman in the jar had come to him, another memory shot into his mind. Marshall jolted in the chair, the metal frame pushing against his bones. He winced as the printed conversation appeared before him.
The photograph of a boy Noah’s age. Straight fringe swished across his face. The startling dark eye. Shallow cheeks. He wore a shy smile and looked straight into the camera. It looked like a school photograph, the background a decorative blue wash. It was a scanned image from a creased, pre-existing print, not a digital copy.
HelveticaBoy: Do u see it?
NeedaArk11: Yep. Goin 2 save it.
HelveticaBoy: Good. Do I look how u thought I would?
NeedaArk11: kinda. How old is it?
HelveticaBoy: Taken last year.
It was the same boy. There was no mistaking the broken quality in his expression. The sadness. Only he had lost a lot of weight.
“HelveticaBoy?” Marshall whispered.
The same dark eye looked up at him from beneath the fringe, the pupil slit with a glimmer of green light. The spoon was inches from Marshall’s mouth and he could smell the powdery mashed potato. His stomach growled. But the spoon no longer moved—it lingered before his face, quivering.
“HelveticaBoy,” Marshall said.
The door opened, banging against the wall.
The boy jumped upright. The spoon and bowl fell from his grip and shattered against the floor.
The man’s heavy feet boomed down the stairs, two at a time. A callused hand ran the length of the unvarnished railing.
A draught of wind blew through the house and sucked at the basement air. The mobiles hanging from the ceiling began to twirl, the light bulb swung at the end of its cord, bleaching the room with shifting multicolored light.
The boy scrambled to pick up the pieces of broken bowl and messy food, but gave up when his father reached the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were full of panic. The boy dropped the remains and scuttled into the far left-hand corner of the room, like a scolded Indy after his mother found his chewed up school shoes. His head was bent low and he crouched down against one of the mattresses, the thorns of a cactus stabbing into his thigh. Above him was the decorative cloth with the Mona Lisa face printed on it.
That smile.
The man came to stand in front of Marshall, dressed in a white singlet top and the same mud-speckled trousers. He looked at the messy floor, bent down and began to play with the pieces, his fingers pecking around like a bird, revealing the firm curve of his neck and upper shoulder.
If I could just reach, Marshall thought, I’d bend forward and sink my fucking teeth into him.
Marshall wondered what it would be like to kill the man, to feel the blood gush up into his mouth, swallowing it down. Some of the man would be inside him. Vampire. Ripping at his flesh. Punishing him for all the hurt he’d done to him and his family.
Whimpering interrupted Marshall’s train of thought. Both he and the father turned towards the sound and looked at the boy, huddled in the corner of the room with his back to them. The boy then proceeded to wrap his arms around himself and pull his shirt up over his head.
The light bulb continued to sway. Father and captive saw the boy’s skin in semaphore exposure.
Light. Shadow. His back. His back in shadow.
There were interconnecting cuts and whip marks woven into his flesh. It looked like the roots of a tree, stretching from the base of the neck to down beyond the cleft of his buttocks. Scars on top of scars; some were so old and well-defined, they cast their own shadows.
Then there were the fresh ones.
“Not now,” said the man. “Get your shirt on. Go upstairs.”
The boy turned around to look at them, tears running down his face.
“I said now.”
Marshall saw the fear in the kid’s face.
He thinks it’s a trick. Son, I don’t think your old man fools around. No sir, not at all. Do as your dad says.
The boy looked at his father. At the staircase. At his father.
Go! Marshall screamed in his mind. Run. Please. Don’t piss him off.
Marshall blinked and in that mini-second of darkness he saw the boy as a child, looking just as innocent and dim-witted as Noah, in his father’s shadow. He saw the boy as a teenager being whipped with a belt, the buckle tearing through layers of skin to draw fresh blood. Bright red on his milky skin. He saw the door to the boy’s room—
(only that room looked like Noah’s. The teddy bear tossed to the floor in the night)
—opening just as the door to the basement had
. With a long, drawn-out creak. The sound crept across the room; it was a sound to be feared. The boy would lie in his bed, no more than a child of twelve, sleeping. Or pretending to sleep. Marshall knew as well as any man, that kids have a way of sensing what they have coming…sometimes they sense it a wa-aaaay off. But what kids don’t realize is that parents are never fooled; even a bad parent knows a sleeping child from one who is playing possum. You can’t fool a fool, as Marshall’s mother used to say. So the boy’s eyes would open, squinting against the hallway light; and in the pit of his pupils, upturned and distorted, would be his father’s reflection as the man crept closer to the bed. They would be huge, ungainly steps. Like a puppet on a string.
The blink was over and the basement returned.
The sight of the scars changed everything. It changed the room itself, the entire house. Those scars confirmed Marshall’s worst fear: torture and pain were the foundations of this building. Screams didn’t stop echoing in this place. Under the dust were fingernail scratches in the floorboards.
I’m in the basement of a mother-fuckin’ madhouse. Oh God. Buried underground. Buried alive. In the mausoleum.
I’m dead already.
The boy held his shirt to his chest, the iPod cords dragging across the floor as he crossed the room, almost bent double. The father leapt after him, moving fast.
“No!” Marshall yelled.
The father grabbed the teenager by the elastic waistline of his pants and yanked him down. The boy rolled onto his back, his hands covering his face. Another gust of wind blew hard and the light swung harder. The room swayed red, blue, green, yellow.
“Get upstairs, now, you fuck,” growled the father, his finger jabbing into his son’s pronounced rib cage. “Get upstairs and go to your momma. You go to her and tell her that you’re a fuckup. You couldn’t even spoon-feed a stranger, you white maggot.”
“Stop,” Marshall said, sounding futile. He didn’t know what else to say.
But the father continued. “You go up and tell your momma what a fool she shat out. You tell her that, huh? White maggot. White maggot.”
