by Aaron Dries
“She said I was a mistake. ‘I want to forget about you.’”
A Cheshire grin bloomed.
“She told me his name, Marshall.” Napier winked, a conspiratorial nod. “Said she’d married you and took your name. A name that I remembered from our conversations in the hotel room. Noah Deakins. That name and the postmark on the letter helped me track him down.”
Napier’s face was hard as granite. Eyes full of spite.
“It took a long, long time but I got him. I never gave up. It wasn’t so hard once technology caught up with me, I just had to be patient. Zabasearch turned up some good shit, way better than your average Google hit. My best lead came from a story about this girl in Noah’s class who found a note in a bottle in her backyard. ‘To Bud from Prudence, dated 1933.’ A good year for me, it seems. There was an appeal to get information about who it might’ve been from and to who. Such a mystery! It must have been very exciting for the two school kids who were taking on board such a task. A girl and a boy. The boy was Noah—there was even a photo of him. Handsome kid. There was this photo and an email address.”
Rage swept through Marshall and he fought against it just as hard as he fought the ropes. He’d never hated any one thing more than he hated the man kneeling before him.
“It was the most luck I’d had in years, but I wasn’t sold. It was too risky. Ever heard of Intelius? It’s a pay-for-play investigative service.”
Napier twitched again and then settled. He clicked his tongue.
“Any person of sane mind should fear how accessible their lives are to others,” Napier whispered.
Marshall’s felt as though he were aflame. The man’s insane, he said to himself, over and over, although the reaffirmation brought no relief.
“There came a point when I was satisfied,” Napier said whilst chewing on a fingernail. “Only then did I take the gamble and use the email address I’d found.” He spat onto the floor.
Don’t say it, Marshall thought, his stomach rolling. Stop telling me what I already know.
Napier grinned. “I was well within my right to do what I did,” he said, wiping his face. “It’s a father’s duty to destroy his sons.”
“You’re insane,” Marshall said. “You killed him. You killed my boy—”
“No! Not your boy. My boy, Marshall.”
“No—”
“Yes. You know it’s the truth. That’s why you’re here.”
“Oh, God!”
“You said it.”
“Fuck you!”
“He will know my name.”
“You murdering sack of shit.”
“I will eat you once you’re dead. You’ll be bittah!”
“Stop!”
“Then again, I might not wait that long.”
Marshall lowered his head. He was sickened, both by the man and by his yearning for his old life. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to work out. Marshall thought of his parents. Pain consumed him.
He had no idea how you could lose so much in so many ways, over and over.
Marshall raised his head and met Napier’s gaze, matching it for intensity. He saw shifting madness in the man’s eyes; that hardness shamed and crippled him. Marshall was alone now, more alone then he’d ever been or ever could be.
“I pretended to be Sam,” Napier said as he stood up. He paced back and forth across the room in fidgety strides. “I asked if he had any leads regarding the letter. Nope, no leads. I—no, Sam asked, if they could be friends.
“I remember sitting in front of my computer and my hands, my hands were just…shaking. I’d never felt so close. I knew that this’d bring Him back to me.”
“And did it?” Marshall snapped. “Did it? No, it fucking didn’t. You failed. You—”
“Oh, it brought me closer, Marshall. Deakins.”
“You’re still here, you fuck. You’re still looking, knocking off people, taking me… You’ll never find Him because He isn’t there!”
A startling punch against the side of the face. Napier stood with his mouth open, jaw tense, his knuckles drawing back into place. Marshall hardly felt the blow at all, only sensing the damage when he blinked and saw bright white stars.
“Does it hurt?” Napier asked. “Oh, I bet it does. But a punch is nothing compared to what I’m telling you, isn’t it, Marshall Deakins? Yeah, it’s alllll small fry. And it’s supposed to hurt. I’m here to hurt you. You’re here to be hurt.”
Marshall coughed, racking heaves against his restraints.
“Noah needed me. He was so easy to break.”
Marshall fought away the throb of the punch.
Napier’s story was setting like concrete, the truth of it solidifying. The longer Marshall remained lost between what he was hearing and what he didn’t want to believe, the weaker he became.
“You’re disgusting,” Marshall said. “You, you—”
“Oh, aren’t you just a pitiful thing. Bah-bah-bah, you-you-you! Please. You’re pathetic—but that’s okay. I want you to be pathetic. I’m your mirror now. Look at me and you see how pathetic you really are.”
“I’m going to kill you!” Marshall growled. The ropes cut into his arms and legs. He thrashed against the chair.
Napier laughed. “Imagine what it felt like when his head smashed against the floor. When he went splat! Well, that’s nothing compared to the pain he felt when I took that friendship away. And trust me, Marshall, I know what pain feels like. After all, that’s what He did to me.”
The concrete was dry. Marshall searched his mouth for spit, found it and hocked a wad of phlegm at the man. “You pig! I’m gonna rip you apart.”
“DOES IT HURT?!!!” Napier screamed, the spittle dangling from his brow like an icicle. “Does it?”
“No, it doesn’t!”
“White maggot.”
“No!”
“Yes, it does. I’m the doctor of pain.”
“You spineless cunt.”
“Oh, the vocabulary! Well, you can’t be blamed. Claire was the one who could spin the words.”
Claire. Claire. Claire. Every time Napier said the name it was a stab to the chest.
“Does it hurt?” Napier asked again. “Tell me the truth.”
Tears rolled down Marshall’s face. His body convulsed. “Oh, God…”
“Louder, Marshall.”
“OH, GOD!”
“There! That’s it. Say it loud enough for Him to hear.”
“GO-OOOODDD—” It was a great, racking cry. Hopeless and wan.
Napier spun around and looked up the stairs. “Do you hear?” he whispered. “Rescue him, Father. Save your son. Save him, otherwise I’ll tear him apart. Hear him. Me.”
Marshall waited for the man to speak, waited for something—anything. He drifted on memories of Claire and Noah, on a world that had been shattered into fragments, only none of those pieces belonged to him.
Napier moved quickly to the stairs. His ankle caught on the extension cord and the projector slid sideways off the tabletop, crashing against the floor. Sparks flew. The projector didn’t die, lingering still, spewing flashes of strobe light over the room. Napier slipped behind the stairs and returned, the rattle of wheels over the concrete following close behind.
Marshall watched Napier roll a silver, operating trolley into view. He couldn’t quite make out what was arranged upon its surface, knowing only that whatever lay there, glittered in the flashes of light. Metal. And sharp.
“I can’t find my Bowie knife,” Napier said, scratching his head. “I misplace things, sometimes. When I get all worked up and excited.” He laughed. “Not to worry, there’s still plenty of ouchies here to keep us—”
Napier’s hand shot to the trolley, latching on to something black and coiled.
“—going.”
There was the scrape of metal. The crackle of leathery fingers. Napier flung the whip. Sparks continued to fly. The sizzle of electricity. Among the meter-long lashes of the cat-o-nine-tails
there were tied razor blades.
A shallow breath. Marshall didn’t even flinch. The whip tore across his chest, gouging long gashes through his flesh. His nipples were sliced off, exposing layers of skin and fat like the innards of Noah’s teddy bear—from where the boy had torn open its back to accommodate the secret USB.
Marshall exhaled, babbling noise. Delirium. Whatever came from him had the cadence of speech, but none of it made sense.
Napier danced in the flashing lights, shaking himself from side to side. The whip flickered through the air. The razors scraped against the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard. A childish scream escaped from his hulking body. “Don’t flinch, son. Gonna throw the ball,” he said, his voice softened and alien. “You hit it and the ball will go a-sailin’. But don’t you flinch. Don’t you flinch!”
The whip flew for a second time. More raw wounds raked upon other raw wounds in a scarlet crisscross. Blood splashed over the floor. Marshall screamed this time.
Napier pulled his weapon back; the twittering sounds of leather. His faced twitched. “You hear me? Do you? DO YOU?”
Each bloodied gash, a stroke upon which he might count the number of days he had yet to live.
Another swish of the whip. More sparks. This blow opened his kneecaps, exposing the white of his bones. One razor was embedded in his flesh. Napier pulled hard and the small flint of metal at the end of the leather talon came free.
Pain. Pain unlike any other. It seemed to take form. To grow wings and fly around the room like a trapped bird, bouncing off the walls and diving in and out of his body.
Napier dropped the whip, and moaning, spurting orgasmic noises, he plucked a ring of barbed wire from the trolley. In two blue flashes of the projector, Napier stood before Marshall, the ring held high above him. He brought it down on Marshall’s head, the wire teeth welding with brow and scalp to fashion an immoveable metal crown.
Adrenaline drowned the glare of agony. Marshall felt the weight of the wire, nothing more. He shook his head like a dog shaking water from its fur, but the crown held firm. It was one with him now.
“‘I’m waltzing with the wrecking ball—’”
Marshall looked up at the sound of the song but all he saw was red.
“‘—’Cause this ain’t my home anymore.’”
The clink of metal being lifted from the surface of the trolley. Footfalls on the concrete. The sound of something being punctured, very loud and very close—it reminded Marshall of the sound one heard when cutting up watermelon. The initial hollow thunk as the blade pierced the skin.
Marshall looked down and through the veil of red and saw the short-bladed knife sticking out from between his ribs on the right-hand side. The handle glimmered in the strobe light, bloody fingerprints printed against its surface.
“Ouch,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. The word had no meaning, a wasted exclamation.
Ouch. He laughed.
That familiar, huge hand, full of calluses and strength, swooped in and grabbed the handle. It yanked hard and the four inches of blade came away clean, leaving behind a slit that spilled darkness.
Marshall passed out. There was to be no other mercy that night.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Guy Melvin Napier was born with shit in his mouth, and a mean case of croup. But even the foulest shit washes out and sometimes, croup is cured, as it was with Napier.
The cough that had caused so much trouble in those initial months faded with time, and to the surprise of many, Napier didn’t cry once as a result of it. The only sounds that filtered from his nursery were the twinkles of his stars and moon mobile, stirring in the wind. He was silent even as a toddler, crawling around on hands and knees, picking up bugs with his fingers.
There wasn’t even laughter.
Bored by peek-a-boos, Napier was at his happiest sitting in front of a plant or some other inanimate object, staring at it with a strange, adult smile.
His mother spent those preliminary years with a potent fear held close, the fear that her child might “you know, be a…tardy, like one of those box packers over at the Austin mill.”
Just as some children were cured of croup, some didn’t grow up to be tardies. This too, came as a huge relief.
“Yessum, your boy’s shy, but he certainly ain’t blunt, Missus Napier,” Napier’s kindergarten teacher once said over a lit cigarette. Water on burn relief filled the room and both teacher and parent had shared a smile, veiled in cobalt smoke. “Kid’s got smarts, he does. Seems like a rare thing these days.”
The Napiers were a small, close-knit bunch. There was only Guy and his parents. Juliet, his mother: tall and lean, hospitable though fiery in temperament. His father, Boris: an impassive man.
Napier’s parents would both die at the hand of a fourteen-year-old boy wearing his grandfather’s boots, brandishing a gun he’d found in a trash can. The police never found out where the kid got the bullets from—though they undoubtedly knew where they ended up.
“It’s all a bad business,” said the Leander County Constable at the time. “’Twas a nasty case of wrong place, wrong time; and all over a matter of forty big ones. A cryin’ shame.”
Juliet and Boris Napier were buried in Baghdad Cemetery, not far from where Guy watched Tobe Hooper and his crew filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in ’72, even though they had moved to New Orleans by then. Leander had always been home and the Napiers had always intended to be laid to rest there. Only they never intended to be there quite so soon.
Napier was an orphan at eighteen.
To the anger of his grandparents, he didn’t move back to Leander, returning instead to New Orleans, the remainder of his belongings packed into two neat boxes.
He found an apartment the size of a cigar box and scraped by on odd jobs. He bought a fold-out couch and enough electrical appliances to see him through. Someone left old, yellow candles in his mailbox once a month for two years, wrapped in faded newspaper every time. He never knew the identity of the Samaritan.
What little luxuries he allowed himself were spent on travel books and paperback fiction. His clothes were tidy and economical, earthy in color. Once a month he would eat at a nice Cajun restaurant, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of others. Those close to him saw Napier as a Rodin in blue jeans—a heavy thinker distinguished by his sharp, Texan humor. His silver tongue. He never took a girlfriend. The only love he seemed to have in his heart was reserved for grief, which he held with pride, and for his God. He believed, more than anything else, that he was loved back.
Napier would spend hours in second-hand book stores, prowling the shelves. He loved the smell of paperbacks. Dust and mothballs. Mildew. Mouse shit. He would sit and read in the semi-dark. There were adventure stories set in far away countries. Napier’s face was sometimes empty, unfulfilled. Looking at him, some saw a great wrongdoing. Something tilted and unfair.
Napier’s loss sank him like an anchor at night. But this was the way he wanted it. His loss reaffirmed his faith.
His decision to travel was fuelled by the death of his grandparents. He left Louisiana for Leander at their dying request. “Come back to your own bed, Guy. We got us the sicks. A young’un would do us good.”
They both had cancer and died within three months of each other.
Their house reeked of urine and hospitals.
His sadness clung to him. Leander had grown small and claustrophobic. He promised himself he would never come back—and he never did.
South America.
Napier was a waking sleepwalker. The beaches and jungles couldn’t be real. This must be a dream, he thought. He was escaping and he was content in knowing that whatever shore he walked, in whatever part of the world, he didn’t walk alone.
God was everywhere, following the footsteps he left in the sand.
At Lake Titicacca in Peru, he tore up one of his fiction travel books near the shoreline and made fifty paper boats that he set to sail—one by one—across t
he water. He chanced a look at them as he walked away, birds in the air and sweat rolling down his face. Some had sunk. But most had not.
Napier met Rosemary Krause in Bogotá, Colombia.
She filled him with electricity. He could feel her power flowing through him. He tingled in places he’d never tingled before. It frightened, and excited him. The night after they met, he dreamed that he was six years old again and back in Baghdad Cemetery, peering at the film crew from behind a headstone.
Dead bodies thrown around like playthings. They looked so real.
Melted faces. Smiling corpses.
The young men and their cameras. They all had beards. They laughed.
When he woke that night he was covered in sweat. Texas sweat, he thought to himself. Stinks of dirt and roadside barbecue.
When he was nine years old he murdered a stray cat. He lured it in with a piece of chicken and snapped the animal’s neck with his greasy fingers. Napier hated the sound. The crack of bones. That final hiss. The cat had looked up at him, confused and lame. How could you do this? read its expression. All I wanted was food—
Napier poked out her eyes with a stick so he wouldn’t have to look at them any longer. He cut off her legs with a pair of hedge trimmers and arranged the remains on a tree stump in a field near his school, the cat’s body propped up with an old boot. He felt naughty, but excited. He knew good kids didn’t play with dead things.
Napier and Rosemary’s first kiss was an awkward mashing of faces. But they fought through it and found passion on the other side. She knew her power over him and the upheaval she was causing. Napier suspected that she liked it.
She took his cock in her mouth. In that wet place between her legs. He felt things he’d never felt before. And he liked it. Oh yes, he liked it. She made his head spin, his stomach churn. He felt humbled. Normal.
They were wed in sin, the union witnessed by a Seattle Justice of the Peace. Napier and Rosemary would read together for hours on end, cook for each other and sketch on the same pad, one picking up the line of the drawing the other left open. They fought every so often, and once, Rosemary hit her husband in the face, breaking his nose. Most of these fights were over the topic of children. Napier didn’t want any. Rosemary did.
