Dark Star

by Paul Alexander

  “But—but, I love you.” He pleaded with her to change her mind.

  “I’m sorry, JD, I thought you understood. What we had was sport sex. It was forbidden and exciting, but I have a little boy to consider. We need a man to take care of us. I’m sorry.”

  *****

  Eleven years after James David Jones left high school and his home, he was unable to remember his final conversation with his father. He could not recall the last thing his mother had said to him. Haunted by the look of shock on her face, branded on his consciousness were the three parting words he wrote on the note to his mother: I am leaving.

  *****

  JD burned too many bridges; all lay in ruin. He mostly walked the day he wrote the note. He managed to catch a few short rides on the state highways, which wound through the hills and led him to the edge of the Ozarks. The last car dropped him at the top of an eastbound on-ramp. He walked wearily down the incline; the sign on the shoulder of I-44 read St. Louis 70 miles. “May as well be a thousand,” he said dejectedly.

  Cars and trucks raced past seemingly indifferent to his outstretched thumb. It was nearly an hour before the old brown car braked hard and swerved to a stop. “Where ya headed, son?” The driver shouted above the howl of passing trucks.

  JD tossed his duffel on the back seat, and slipped nimbly into the front. “St. Louis, sir,” he said with intentional respect. “I’m very grateful for the ride.”

  “That’s where I’m goin’. Looks like I can take you all the way.” The man smiled. Deep wrinkles drew long lines across his thin leathery face. Bushy gray hair protruded from the band of the worn brown fedora casually cocked on the back on his head. “We’ll be there in no time; traffic ain’t bad t’day.”

  “That’s great. I really do appreciate the lift. Been standin’ there nearly an hour; nobody even slowed down.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much. I stopped ’cause I thought you might be a soldier headed home from the Fort. I really appreciate what all you boys do, especially after all that shit in the Gulf.”

  “I’m just goin’ to visit some friends.” JD lied. “I just got outta high school, haven’t thought much about the military.”

  “That’s fine. You seem like a nice young man. I’m glad to help anyway. I’m goin’ to visit my mother. She just turned ninety, and she ain’t doin’ too good. Don’t wanna miss out on what little time she’s got left. Old gal gave up a lot for me. I owe her.”

  JD squirmed uncomfortably.

  “What’s your story?” The man asked. He glanced over and caught JD’s twitching eye.

  Hell, JD thought. He seems nice enough; what do I have to lose. In less than an hour, he told the quiet stranger his life’s story.

  “Good luck,” the man said as he stopped in front of the youth hostel. “I’ve heard this place is nice.”

  JD felt the frown crawl across his face. I wonder what it costs. He fingered the fourteen one-dollar bills, and rattled a few coins, in his jeans pocket.

  The stranger looked, knowingly, into JD’s big brown eyes and smiled. “Maybe this’ll help.” He said as he passed over a tattered twenty-dollar bill.

  “Sir, I can’t take your money.” JD protested weakly.

  “Sure you can. I just hope someday you’ll go see your old mom. When you do, think of me.”

  The twenty dollars lasted four days. Every one of those he looked for work. The answer was always the same, “Sorry, we only hire graduates.”

  *****

  Star del Rio took pride in the well-written newspaper articles. Both buried on the sixth page, the two articles appeared on two separate days. This is cool, she thought. She touched the words on the page and felt connected.

  The same reporter wrote both stories. However, he mentioned no connection between the two, which pleased Star. In the first story, he reported that the police had found a known prostitute who had died of a blow to the head. They had yet to determine if it was a homicide. There was strong evidence found at the scene, which was consistent with heavy cocaine use. Star spread the paper out on the breakfast table, and admired the brief three paragraphs.

  On the following day, she found the second story. A neighbor had discovered the body of a well-known pimp, also killed by a blow to the head. Star read aloud the first line of the second paragraph. “The suspected murder weapon was found at the scene.” She paused gloating. “The police recovered a large obsidian ball, a common volcanic by-product typically found in Mexican handcraft markets.” Next, she thought as she closed the paper and took a delicate sip of hot espresso from a demitasse cup.

  Nearly a year before, on her eighteenth birthday when she walked out of the salon with newly blonde hair, the plan first came to her. The same afternoon she purchased a chic spaghetti-strapped summer dress and heels. She kept them wrapped in plastic in the back of her closet. At least once each week, she took them out, put them on, and admired herself in a full-length mirror. In her mind’s eye, she saw Star making small talk at a cocktail party or getting seductively into the back of a black limousine. She imagined the intoxicating leather interior, and a bubbling glass of champagne freshly poured by a generous man.

  The day before she left the barrio, she dropped all of her old wardrobe in a dumpster. That night was a full moon, and the barrio was crazy. The next morning she dressed in the crisp summer dress, carefully applied her make-up, and walked casually down the street without a care in the world. Her oversized shoulder bag, stuffed with banded stacks of one hundred-dollar bills and a bag of Mexican chocolate, was a comforting burden.

  *****

  For JD, everything changed the day his money ran out. It was as if the motorcycle shop appeared out of nowhere. One minute he was walking, dejectedly, down the street, the next he was peering through the plate glass showroom window. A voice told him to push open the door and go in. What do you have to lose? The voice asked. JD swallowed hard, touched the last lonely coins in his pocket, took a deep breath, and entered D-K Choppers.

  *****

  “Woman,” Reverend John Jones harshly began again, “how can you just sit there day after day? You seldom eat, I never see you sleep, and you have not uttered a word. Is your silence supposed to teach me a lesson? Do you want me to suffer even more than I already am? How can you blame me? The boy was always a rebel. I—we did the best that we could with him. Sometimes it just turns out this way. You know good kids from bad homes, and bad kids from good ones. Was I not always a good father? Have I not provided a good home? I tried to set a good example. Why would he do this to me?”

  His words varied only slightly from one day to the next. The general context and meaning of the minister’s litany of justifications and excuses, describing how and why he was not the reason James David had run away, were always the same.

  The second day of James David’s absence, Grace had moved silently around the house systematically closing the curtains and methodically pinning them shut. Not a single ray of natural light breeched her self-imposed prison.

  That job finished, she had taken residence in her favorite chair next to the sealed living room window. There she sat, day and night, in total silence for four weeks. The tiny scraps of food, which she forced down, were to ensure that she had the strength to suffer.

  The Reverend came and went. Every time he opened the door to the outside, spring came crashing in. The intermittent drone of lawnmowers, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass, and bright invigorating sunlight, a cacophony of the season, all rushed into the dark room. Grace sat unmoving, indifferent to everything except her self-recriminations.

  She blamed the Reverend, but not as much as she blamed herself. It was me, she reasoned, who did my husband’s bidding. She had fetched her son when ordered to do so, knowing the demand meant a terrible punishment. On every occasion, she had stood in the next room listening, suffering, but never intervening. It would have been so easy to intercede, to invite the wrath of the Reverend upon herself, but she did not. She could not.

 
This is your fault! Her mind screamed at her. The sound of her own voice was deafening. I should not have been so timid. I could have stood up for myself, put my fears aside, and defended my son. If I had, he would still be here, and we would be happy.

  During those weeks of silence, another thought occurred to her many times. We could have just left; I could have taken James and gone anywhere, anywhere, but here. We could have gotten out of this awful house.

  She imagined a life free of tirades fueled and sanctioned by select passages from the Bible. She wondered how she might have found the inner strength to tell her son the secret, the truth about his birth. She believed, in her moments of self-deprecation, that it would have been better. After all, she reasoned, wasn’t keeping the secret a lie.

  She believed things would have been different if she had it to do over again, starting with the day they brought the tiny dark-haired baby home from the hospital. I shouldn’t have spent so much time apologizing for my actions and my feelings. I’m human, too. I have desires. I make mistakes. If I repent and God forgives me, shouldn’t the Reverend also forgive me?

  Reverend Jones repeated his words, only this time, much more loudly. “Why would he do this to me?”

  Grace snapped back to consciousness. Towering over her slumped figure, he stood in front of her chair. For the first time, in a very long while, she looked directly into her husband’s eyes. Incensed with the Reverend for his self-pity, disgusted with herself for long years of ambivalence, and angry with God for his lack of guidance, she was suddenly furious. He had never once answered her prayers.

  “Why would he do this to you?” Her outburst carried an amazing strength of passion. “Would you listen to yourself? How can you think that you, that we, are absolved of all guilt in this? All those times you punished that child in your sacred study, I stood by allowing it to happen. We were preparing him for the day when he would turn his back on us. Every time he asked a question about his Uncle David and we answered with a lie, we pushed him further away.

  “Of course, we justified what we did by telling each other it was for his own good. We should have told him the truth about everything as soon as he was old enough to understand. If we had done that, and if we had really been good parents, it would not have mattered. He would have forgiven us; he would have forgiven me.” She let out a heavy sigh laden with twenty-eight stark days of emotion. “He would still be here today.”

  *****

  The Reverend stepped back. “How can you say that to me?” He looked upon her in awe; the raw truth and simplistic reality of her words mesmerized him. What she said held much closer to the true intent of the Bible than his calculated interpretation. Intellectually, he knew that she was right and he was wrong, but a lifetime of pride prevented him from saying so.

  “I was always there for him, for both of you. What I did, I did to protect you both. I could have refused to take him into this house. I could have allowed them to label him a bastard. Instead, I defended him against the evil of the world. I gave him everything that any child could hope for, including my name. All I ever expected in return was a little respect.”

  In his heart, he knew he should have told her he loved her, but he never had. He had never told her, or anyone else, he was sorry. He had never admitted he was wrong. When the truth about anything became too personal, or got too close, he had always run away.

  “I have forgiven you for what you did, for what you felt,” he said. “I have struggled every day since to forget all of that. Burned in my mind, on the night he was born, is the look on your face when you begged me to accept him and to raise him as my own. In spite of everything that happened, I did as you asked.”

  “That’s not true. You never forgave me, just like you never forgave your brother. He went to his grave with that knowledge. You say you gave my son everything, but did you ever love him? Did you ever show him even a little affection? Don’t you think one of the things that help a child love a father is the father’s demonstration of his love?”

  “Woman, I am not his father!” He said adamantly, but with a weak voice.

  “You promised we would never speak of this,” she sobbed. “We agreed. You gave me your word. We both know, and we knew then, we agreed that parenthood is a state of mind. You could have been a father to him if you had wanted, if you had really tried. Had you done that, he would have loved you back. The truth would not have mattered to him. All he ever wanted from us was love, and we never gave it to him.” She spoke without breathing; the strength of her words began to wane. “You promised to protect me, I promised to protect your precious ministry, and we promised each other that we would protect James David, no matter what. We let him down, Reverend Jones. We failed.”

  “Perhaps you let him down, but I never did.” He disagreed with insincere conviction. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. I demonstrated my love to him through discipline. The problem was always with him. He has an evil essence; it is a terrible, black thing that is impossible to clean. Mark my word; he will end up in a six by eight cell, exiled from the world. As far as I’m concerned, he has set the course for his own destiny. To me, he is dead. I have no son. I have no brother. I have nothing.”

  “Then, sir, neither do you have a wife. I have no choice but to stay with you; I have built my life around yours. I have washed your clothes, cooked your meals, run your errands, and done my duty in the church. We have been a package. There is not a single congregation, to whom we have ministered, which would have believed for a moment that they were not getting their money’s worth. They expect me to teach Sunday school, organize church socials, and sing in the choir. Your career has become my shared responsibility. Because I have spent every waking hour supporting you, I am now ill prepared to make my own way in the world. My only chance of survival is with you.”

  She lifted her emaciated frame from the chair; her unguided hands trembled as they brushed the wrinkles from her cotton dress. “This time it is me telling you. We shall live in the same house, and I will continue to carry out my church duties. To the outside world, everything will seem normal, but we will not sleep in the same room. I will no longer cook your food or wash your clothes. To me, when we are alone, you are dead, and so you shall remain until God decides to judge us both for our sins.”

  Grace kept her word. The only occasions during which she spoke to her husband were in the presence of others. The manner in which she carried out the facade was unquestionably perfect. Anyone would have thought the Reverend and Grace were the happiest of married couples. She keyed off her husband’s conversations at exactly the right moments, and finished his sentences with finesse. She spoke fondly of him when the occasion presented itself, and was a model church member. At home, however, she slept alone, she ate alone, and she lived in a world where only she and memories of her son and his father existed.

  *****

  Edward Williams’s mother was dismayed when she found her young son, in the middle of his bedroom floor, with his brand new robot completely disassembled, parts scattered everywhere. “Edward, what are you doing?” She asked hysterically. “That toy is brand new.”

  “I’m makin’ it work better, Mommy.” He answered without taking his eyes from his task. “You’ll see, I’m gonna make it faster.”

  Mr. Williams arrived and laid a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder. Edward looked up when he heard the deep familiar voice. “He looks like a surgeon, hon. Maybe we should call him Doc.”

  *****

  Doc Williams stood in the center of the cramped showroom floor, surrounded by a chrome sea of custom motorcycles, pleased with what he had accomplished. It’s been a long time coming, he thought.

  A customer entered wearing his cut. Doc admired the colors sewn on the back of the leather jacket. The three-inch-wide white upper rocker, trimmed in crimson-red, looked like a fat horizontal parenthesis open on the bottom, and served as background for Sons of Darkness, the club name Doc and six other originals chose for themselves seven y
ears before. This member was one of nearly fifty who proudly wore the colors; all were Docs’ friends and customers.

  Parenthetically, between the upper and lower rockers, the Grim Reaper’s stark-white skeletal profile lurked in the shadow of his own black hood; a single, empty eye-socket glared. He held his sickle, ominously, in front of his macabre visage; the business end curved backward, suspended threateningly above the dirty shroud.

  Doc touched the buttons of his own cut, a black-leather vest. He closed his eyes and saw identical colors with Doc embroidered in the center of the lower rocker as were all the members’ road names.

  “Doc.” Dawg, the parts man called out.

  Startled, Doc snapped back to reality. “Yeah, Dawg.”

  “Somebody on the phone fer ya, boss.”

  Doc lifted the black plastic receiver from the heavily scratched, stainless-steel counter. The caller asked when the repairs on his custom bike would be finished. “You can pick her up this afternoon.” He answered, pleased to fulfill a promise made the week before. “We’re finishin’ her up right now; she’ll be better than new.” He smiled sheepishly, thinking of his mother and the robot.

  The showroom door inched open and a cool spring breeze rushed in. A frightened young face appeared followed by a lanky frame. The nervous young man loitered for a time, then timidly approached, stopped at a safe distance, and waited.

  Doc studied the boy as he moved about the showroom. The caller thanked Doc for the news and hung up. Fascinated, Doc, with the receiver still clamped to his ear, continued to monitor the young stranger who studied each of the motorcycles. He seemed awestruck by the machines. Finally, Doc noisily dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

  The young man immediately approached. “Sir, I am JD Jones, and I am looking for work.” He said clearly, without breathing; he extended his right hand.