by Alan Russell
“I used to dream about him. They were wild dreams. I was the only one who could tame the beast in him. That’s how I pictured us, beauty and the beautiful beast. But not the fairy-tale version.”
Caleb reached for his pants. He wanted to cover himself, but Earlene collected his hands into hers.
“You look like him, Cal.”
“Do not.”
“Oh, you surely do. You have his same hair and teeth, and you’re already growing into his build.”
“We’re nothing alike.”
Earlene scrutinized him, pinned him like a prize butterfly to some matting, and was satisfied with what she saw. “Only thing that’s different is your eyes. He had cat eyes. Wild.”
“We better get back.”
“Not yet.” She moved her hips in a soft roll and closed her eyes. “I want you,” she said.
It’s not me you want. Caleb knew that. He wanted to just put on his pants, but Earlene reached for him and brought him atop her. He could have pulled away, but he didn’t. Caleb felt himself responding. He wanted that amnesia again and was willing to pay the price. All his father had ever brought him was pain. He deserved a few moments of pleasure, even if they weren’t real.
Earlene started moaning. She kept saying, “Gray, Gray.” It was the name Caleb had been born with, but it was no longer his name. It was his father’s name. She was calling out to him.
Their pushing into each other became more frenzied. The passion brought out her calls. Between gasps, Earlene kept saying, “Squeeze my neck.”
Her words became rhythmic and demanding, exclamations offered between her moaning and thrashing.
“Squeeze it! Squeeze it! Squeeze it!”
Her command was ever more frantic.
His hands rose. They traveled up her body but stopped at her shoulders. Earlene was bucking, crying.
“My neck,” she said. “Squeeze it.” Between her pants she rhythmically repeated her command: “Squeeze it. Squeeze it.”
He did squeeze, but only her shoulders. He gripped them with a fury, pressing his fingers into her flesh, letting his anger come out in his hands while he spent himself inside of her.
Caleb found himself straining against his bonds. Squeezing his hands. The present intersected with the past. Earlene was on the television. She was heavier, but the extra weight added to her voluptuousness. Her eyes had lost none of their magic. Even through a camera’s lens, they beguiled.
“I made the mistake of going on a date with Cal when I was in high school,” she said, “and I almost didn’t live to tell about it. I came home with black and blue marks all over my shoulders and neck.”
Squeeze it. For years Earlene’s cries had haunted him, had made Caleb even more afraid of himself. She had initiated him into the mysteries of sex but had tainted that experience by bringing his father into their lovemaking.
By bringing his father back from the dead.
That’s what had scared him most—that she had summoned Shame like some spirit and that he had been there with them.
All the following week Earlene had worn sleeveless blouses to school, blouses showing her black-and-blue shoulders to maximum effect. They were her badges of honor, of her brush with death.
Rumors of how she got the bruises were whispered around school. Earlene dropped a few details to friends, told them how she had fought off the son of Shame’s animal advances, how his fingers had come perilously close to her neck.
Caleb was used to being the pariah. Earlene’s revelations made him that much more of an outcast, but that was something he could live with.
What was harder to live with was the memory of Earlene’s words. “Squeeze it,” she had kept saying.
And he had wanted to. God help him, but he had.
22
CALEB TRIED TO find a comfortable position, but there wasn’t one. He hated being tied up. Not being in control was almost more than he could stand. He had designed his life to have that control, but now he had to rely on someone else. Worse, he was at her mercy.
Lola noticed his contortions. “Can I get you a pillow?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Are you all set to make that call?”
“I ought to be. We’ve been over it three times.”
“Remember, don’t give her your name. Don’t even give her your sex.”
“That explanation would probably take too long anyway.”
“Make everything short and sweet. Just say you’re my friend. You can identify yourself as an intermediary.”
“I think I prefer the word in-between.”
Her pun made Caleb frown.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go by the script,” Lola said. “I’ll ask her why she identified you as her attacker.”
“It had to have been a publicity ploy,” Caleb said, as if trying to convince himself of that.
“And then I’ll ask her if she has had any luck in finding anything from your father’s past that could tie in with what’s occurred.”
“Tell her I’m carefully reviewing her book. But what I need are the stories that aren’t in the book.”
“And last, you want me to ask about your wife and children, find out if she’s helped them, and how they are.”
“Maybe you should take a checklist with you.”
Lola shook her head emphatically. “Santa Claus might need to make a list and check it twice,” said Lola, “but I don’t. I’m a performer. I’ll remember my lines.”
Caleb shrugged. Tied up as he was, that was about all he could do.
“But I guess I’ve got Santa’s job, don’t I?” Lola said, suddenly serious. “I’m the one who’s going to have to determine who’s been naughty or nice.”
Their eyes met, took in one another beyond their usual furtive glances. She wasn’t what he expected. The only drag queens he’d ever seen had been on television, and all they had wanted to do was make spectacles of themselves. Lola wasn’t that way.
He looked away first. It wasn’t only the duct tape that made him uncomfortable. Lola did. She was wearing a tight black dress with sheer sleeves.
“Do you always wear women’s clothing?”
“Always. Except on Halloween. Sometimes I dress like a man.”
“But you are a man.”
“My soul, my anima, is feminine, while my parts are masculine. I have no problem with that union, even if others do. It unsettles some people, offering them possibilities that scare them. To be different is to be suspect.”
“No argument here,” said Caleb, opening a small autobiographical window.
“I watch faces as I perform,” said Lola. “I see lots of civil wars going on out there, men both attracted and repulsed by me. Oh, how those faces talk.”
“Have you always been a performer?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t think I’m qualified to do anything else except maybe sell cosmetics, and I don’t think too many department stores would want me working behind the counter.”
“Do you like your work?”
“Ever hear of a diva that didn’t? Most of the impersonator revues are just lip-synching, but I get to do some of my own singing and my own editorializing.”
With a cappella ease, Lola did her best Smokey Robinson snippet, singing the words “tears of a clown.” Her voice was clear and vibrant, and the four words seemed to mean a lot to her.
“Drag queen national anthem,” she said. “It’s usually sung as our makeup’s being removed.”
Caleb raised his tied hands. “You’ll have to imagine my applause,” he said.
Lola reached her hand out, stopped just short of touching his bonds and his hands. “I don’t feel good about leaving you like this. What if there’s a fire?”
“What if you untie me and there’s another murder?”
Lola didn’t answer. There hadn’t been time enough for either of them to come up with an alternative to tying him.
“I can stand it for a few more hours,” Caleb said.
“Imagine
your father having to put up with it for his entire childhood.”
“I don’t know much about that,” Caleb said.
“It’s in the book.”
“I skipped ahead. I didn’t see how his childhood could be relevant to my situation.”
“You don’t know your Alice.”
“Alice?”
“In Wonderland. When the Duchess says, ‘Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.’”
“I’m more interested in finding a clue than a moral.”
“Maybe they go hand in hand,” Lola said. She looked at her watch, made a frightened little noise. “I’ve got to go.”
“Break a leg.”
“You sure you don’t need anything else?”
“I think you’ve thought of everything.”
The table in front of him was stocked with food ready to be grazed, opened drinks with straws, and a portable phone. Lola had set up the MP3 player for him to listen to Shame. Even with his restricted mobility, Caleb could move his fingers and press buttons. And at his feet was a chamber pot. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.
“Maybe I should have thought about tying up my sailor boy,” Lola said. “He always told me he’d be here waiting, but he never was.”
She sighed, announced she’d be back by one, and then walked out of the room. Caleb listened as the door opened and closed. With Lola out of the house, he examined his bonds, flexing against them. She had made the mistake of tying his hands in front of him, or maybe it was just her way of trusting him, at least up to a point. But duct tape had made a professional out of a non-Boy Scout. There was little, if any, play in the binding. Still, he could move his arms, could even get up and hop around if he wanted. Lola had to have known that.
He reached over to the MP3 player. Over the speakers Elizabeth Line started narrating.
Why’d you lie? Caleb wondered. Why did you tell the world I attacked you? It didn’t make sense. She didn’t need to sell any more books, and her false accusations rankled.
He decided that he should listen to his father’s childhood, at least for a little while.
Winona Parker was always worried about the evil out there.
Her “out there” was a nebulous but all-encompassing place. She worried for herself, but mostly she worried for her boy Gray.
Gray was the baby she had prayed for, her change-of-life miracle born to her when she was forty-seven. Winona believed herself to be a modern Sarah and her husband Abraham. Gray was her blessing, or at least her mixed blessing. Winona had always dreamed of having a little girl. She liked to describe her son as “both a miracle and my cross to bear.”
Winona’s husband, Gray Sr., didn’t see anything miraculous about the birth. In fact, becoming a father seemed to be a remarkably uneventful occurrence in his life. He worked as a field representative for a carpet company and had been on the road when his son was born, but even when he was home, Parker never appeared interested in his boy, treating him more as a curiosity than his own flesh and blood. All child-rearing duties were his wife’s domain, a situation that delighted Winona.
Gray was Winona’s doll—her girl doll. She dressed the baby in pink and continued dressing him in girls’ clothing until he was five. Winona grew his hair long. Those who didn’t know his sex often commented on “what a beautiful girl” Gray was. And they were right. With his light blue eyes, long, dark locks, and perfect features, he was beautiful. Winona dressed him in lace and frills and adorned his tresses with ribbons. Gray was given dolls and encouraged to play “house” and have tea parties. Winona kept a close watch over her child. She did her best to keep him away from “bad influences,” which included all little boys. But despite her best efforts, “evil” found Gray.
From his window, Gray watched troops of boys pass by his house. They wore boys’ clothing and did boys’ things. He wanted to join them but was ashamed to go out dressed like a girl. Besides, his mother wouldn’t let him. So Gray became an observer, watching the world from his window, but he found ways to rebel, including the acting out of his anger on the dolls his mother brought him. Some he beat the stuffing out of; others he disfigured; most he dismembered.
When Gray was five, his father finally objected to Winona’s trying to make the boy a “sissy.” He bought Gray boys’ clothing and forbade Winona to dress his son up like a girl. It was the only time Gray remembered his father ever intervening on his behalf. Three years later, when Gray was only eight, his father died of an aneurysm in his brain.
After her husband’s death, Winona became more unbalanced. Family, friends, and neighbors had long been aware of her eccentricities but chose not to intervene, even when they became more pronounced. Winona began to see evil everywhere, except where it was truly rooted: in herself.
To protect Gray, Winona took to tying him up. Gray raged against the treatment but was helpless against the bonds. On several occasions Winona had to revive her unconscious boy, her constraints all but strangling him. Occasionally Gray slipped out of the ropes and chains and reveled in his short time of freedom, but he always paid the price when his mother caught up with him. She was sure that the evil had tainted him and did her best to beat it out of him.
Caleb suddenly realized his eyes were tearing. With his bound hands, he wiped harshly at his cheeks, then punched at the MP3 player, forwarding the narrative of his father’s life along. He took up the story as his father left behind Heidi Ehrlich, his third victim, in Chimayo.
While driving away from the Santuario de Chimayo, Parker said, a change came over him. He decided that he would no longer try to fight his impulses. He said that a part of him recognized that he had degenerated into a monster, but a larger part of him only wondered why it had taken him so long to become that thing.
His father’s epiphany chilled Caleb, touching his every insecurity. He replayed the passage over and over, each time getting more upset. For most of his life he’d been afraid that one day he would give in just as his father had.
Caleb took a few deep breaths and tried to clear his mind. He needed to concentrate on the murder of Linda Harper, his father’s fourth victim, needed to be dispassionate while listening to his father kill. As her story unfolded, he tried to break the narrative down to its essentials: she was a freshman at the University of Texas, a pastor’s daughter experiencing her first taste of rebellion. A short-lived taste. Linda had attended a Theta Pi beer bash. A few of her friends had noticed her talking with a man, but their memories were hazy. Everyone had been drinking.
Her body had been left in the brush near the fraternity house. She had been stripped and marked like the other victims, but Linda’s death signaled a new phase in his father’s predations: his murders became more hurried and opportunistic, less ritualistic.
The monster had emerged.
Caleb looked for parallels in the attack on Elizabeth but couldn’t find any. Physically Linda was nothing at all like Elizabeth. She was short and on the heavy side, with brown hair. It was possible, Caleb supposed, that the copycat had felt there was no need to imitate his father beyond the third murder. But it was also clear the attack on Elizabeth wasn’t some random act. There had to be some explanation or reason to attach to it.
He listened to Linda Harper’s story a second time. Something was nagging at him. No, it was doing more than that. He felt sick, had a feeling of impending doom that weighed on his chest and made his breathing labored. He listened to the details of her life and death once more, but nothing came to him, and that only added to his frustration. He knew there was some connection he should be making and was certain it was important. In his mind’s eye Caleb charted the details, mentally marking the words in red.
Preacher’s daughter.
Too much drink.
The stranger, his father.
The fraternity.
Pledge week.
University of Texas.
Her body left in the bushes near another fraternity house.
Shame.
&
nbsp; Shame.
Shame.
Try as he might, the answer wouldn’t come. In frustration, Caleb strained against his bonds, pushing at them until his arms and legs shook with the effort. He wished he were wearing chains. At least he could have rattled those. Tied up, he couldn’t think. A sound escaped him—guttural, angry, like a gorilla’s bark. He sank his teeth into the duct tape and tried to shred the fabric, but when he pulled his mouth away, he could barely see the indentations of where he had bitten. His failure to wreak any damage frustrated him all the more, made him feel weak and helpless. For so long he’d tried to do everything right, to be above reproach. Growing up he’d tried to be perfect, thinking that would keep him from being like his father. His secret formula. But the only thing it had kept him from was being himself. Maybe Lola was right. Maybe he didn’t know who the hell he was.
As his rage diminished, the writing in his mind began to fade, the emblazoned red words cooling, disappearing. He closed his eyes. Only a few words remained.
Fraternity.
Pledge week.
Shame.
His father had always been attracted to university settings. During his reign of terror, he’d kept more lights on in dorms and sororities than anything short of a calculus final....
The connection, or at least part of it, came when he wasn’t expecting it. For a moment, Caleb’s world stopped. Elizabeth Line’s sorority sisters had been murdered. That’s what had been grabbing at him. His father had lured his fourth victim away from a Greek Week party.
The attack on Elizabeth suddenly made sense. She was the Kappa Omega who had gotten away, and the new Shame had wanted to rectify that.
Caleb was certain of it. More than that, he had picture proof.
He jumped up, forgot that his legs were tied, and crashed into the table, knocking everything onto the hardwood floor. Pushing himself to his feet, he hopped to the guest room. Brandy Wein’s pictures were in his coat pocket.
He’d looked at them only that one time in his truck, had never wanted to see them again. Most of the photos were close shots, but there were also two full body shots, one with Brandy posed on a lawn with her legs spread, the other with her in a car, her head propped against the glass as if she were staring at something outside.
