Bloody Bloody Apple

by Howard Odentz

  Mr. Berg survived, but he wasn’t there that day. I think everyone agreed he wasn’t going to get within ten miles of Annie ever again.

  I kept staring at her until she looked up and found my eyes. I mouthed I’m sorry to her, and she did the same to me.

  She wasn’t saying she was sorry because of our mutual tragedies. She was saying sorry because of the bandages on my arm.

  The bandages were courtesy of a last minute decision on my part. After I stood in the backyard for what seemed like days, I snapped myself out of it and realized that my grandfather and Becky were truly gone. I went inside the house, dumped the rest of the pills down the toilet, then took the butcher knife and sliced my arm without hesitation. I made my cut ragged and angry, as though I were fending off an attacker. Then I dialed 911 and started crying hysterically. The crying wasn’t pretend. It was as real as the blood that was dripping down my arm and soaking my jeans.

  An ambulance and a police car were sent. They found me sitting in a sea of red on the floor in the kitchen. My head was woozy. I was barely able to speak. Still, in my stupor, I told them that my sister had killed my grandfather, destroyed my mother’s pills, attacked me with a knife, and killed herself in my father’s garage.

  It was easy to lie, because I wasn’t lying. It was the truth. Mostly.

  I remember flashes of what happened after that, like me staring at the ceiling of the ambulance, or the white shirts with red patches that the paramedics wore while they kept telling me that everything was going to be okay.

  I remember the slew of stitches in my arm, and my dad wanting to light a cigarette in the hospital, but a nurse telling him he couldn’t because it was a safety hazard.

  My father chose to cremate my grandfather and Becky and have a private service. I barely remember it, except for creepy Father Tim, who I somehow couldn’t help feeling a sick sense of resentment toward.

  I blocked out his words and concentrated on the throbbing in my arm until everything was over. Then we went back home to our house, minus two fifths of my family.

  Annie and I talked a lot on the phone those first few months. Her aunt made her get real help for her cutting, and she finally stopped. She told me she was going to get her GED and go on to junior college. Things worked out great for her at her aunt’s, and she blossomed there, a thing that would have never happened if she stayed in Apple.

  Eventually, our calls slowly tapered off until they turned into texts that went from daily to every few days, to once a week, to less than that, then nothing. I was happy for Annie. She got out, and that was the important thing.

  They say if you love something you should set it free. If it comes back to you, then it was meant to be. I hope Annie comes back to me some day, but I don’t think she’ll ever come back to Apple.

  Newie was a different story. I don’t blame him, but he just didn’t know what to say to me after everything happened. It was like someone had taken a sledgehammer and smashed apart the bond we had forged together over the years. I guess the next best port in the storm of his life was Erika Tenzar.

  They started dating, and what I mean by dating is screwing like rabbits every chance they got. Newie and I stopped hanging out altogether. It was strange at first, but I got used to it. I even got used to seeing him in the halls at school, holding hands with Erika and not saying hi to me when I walked by—or me him.

  I think sometimes life gets too painful, and the best way to handle it is not to look at the pain.

  Actually, around Valentine’s Day, I found out from Mark Zebrowski that Erika was knocked up. Of course, that was taken care of over a sick day, and Newie showed up at school with a black eye, courtesy of his father. I think the chief had a boatload of his own issues to work out, anyway, because Mary Jane got knocked up, too, and moved out.

  My mother started on real depression pills and broke free from her dark prison after a really long sentence. She began walking, then talking, then even smiling. Things started happening in the house that never used to get done unless I did them. Grocery shopping happened, although the fish case at Tenzar’s was closed for months, and if you could afford fresh fish you had to drive to the supermarket in Bellingham. Dinners were made before I got home from school, and laundry was washed and folded.

  Sometimes even candles were lit in every room.

  Through everything, my father was the one who really didn’t change at all. He still worked hard every day, came home, led the three of us in prayer over whatever my mother cooked for dinner, and spent his evenings in the garage.

  Eventually, he finished the big cross that Becky hung herself on. It was planted right-side up in the backyard come spring.

  We all went to church every Sunday, and I continued to tune out everything that creepy Father Tim had to say, but somehow, people started being a little nicer to our family. I’m not sure if it was out of pure Christian charity, or because they felt bad for everything that happened to us.

  My father was even asked to make a few custom crucifixes, which he solemnly agreed to do, but I know it secretly made him happy.

  As for me, I spent so much time up in my grandfather’s rooms, reading his book over and over again, that my parents finally told me I could move up there, if I wanted. I was going to need my own place come graduation, anyway, and you couldn’t beat the rent. Up there, I felt free and alive, with no one looking over my shoulder as I pored over the years of my grandfather’s sadistic reign, all without ever telling a soul.

  There was no one left to tell, and no good would come of it, anyway.

  Right after graduation, my mother told me that Mary Jane, the chief’s old girlfriend, lost the baby she was carrying, which I think was a huge relief to the chief. He wasn’t the best at being a dad.

  Newie started bagging groceries at Tenzar’s and told anyone who would listen that he was going to marry Erika when he finished the police academy.

  I took a summer job in the tobacco fields. Most of the other guys kind of stayed away from me, probably for the same reason that Newie and I drifted apart. No one knew what to say. I can understand that.

  I ended up reading a lot. I asked creepy Father Tim for a Bible, which made him almost pee in his pants with excitement, and I spent a lot of time examining the words, blackening out with a pencil the ones that I thought were complete and utter bull, and circling the interesting ones.

  I started carrying around a gym bag with me with both books nestled inside, so that I could read them when I wanted—the one from Father Tim and the one that my grandfather had created. Over that hot summer while I picked tobacco, a new picture started to form in my head.

  I couldn’t see it clearly for the longest time, and it bothered me. Even after I left tobacco to take a full-time job in the cider mill at Apple’s Apples, every waking moment was consumed with that picture. It took the first leaves of autumn to start falling for it to finally come into focus so I could understand what it was.

  I had a belief. It wasn’t my grandfather’s, and it wasn’t my father’s. It was my own, and I knew that everything would be okay.

  Late one night, after my mother and father went to bed, I took a walk down the street to the dead end with my gym bag in tow. I pushed through the tangle of woods and came out at the railroad tracks.

  Underneath the clear, moonless sky, I gathered some dead leaves together and stuffed them inside the gym bag all around both books. I piled some twigs into a little teepee and put the gym bag on top of it and lit a fire.

  That flame was for everyone my grandfather had ever murdered. I lit a fire for Claudia Fish and Ruby Murphy and Mrs. Berg and horrible Ralphie Delessio. I even lit a fire for my grandfather, but mostly that fire was for Becky.

  I missed my sister terribly, but she was at peace now, and I could handle that.

  After I watched all the horrors of the years burn to
nothing, I said a silent forever-goodbye to the past and slowly walked home.

  The next day after dinner, I went upstairs, picked up the phone, and punched in familiar numbers.

  “Hello?” said a voice on the other end.

  “Hey, fuckwad.”

  “Hey, back,” Newie said. “Are you over yourself yet?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good,” said Newie. “What are you doing? Wanna go to the tracks and smoke a bone?”

  I laughed. “Aren’t you, like, a cop or something?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Some things never change. “How about we just go to the tracks and talk.”

  “Or that. What about the freaky guy with the gym bag?”

  “That was last year,” I said. “I think everything’s okay now.”

  “If you say so,” Newie snorted and hung up the phone.

  Yeah, I say so. I grabbed my jacket off my father’s coat rack and headed out the front door.

  Everything would be okay.

  Two days later, the first body of the year was found on the Giant Steps in High Garden.

  The End

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  Acknowledgements

  As always, I would like to thank David Gilfor for reading over my shoulder, chapter after chapter, to make sure my story and my characters remained authentic.

  I would like to thank Shira Block McCormick for assuring me that, indeed, she had to leave her house after she finished my transcript because it freaked her out that much.

  I would like to thank my readers, Tamara Fricke, Lauren Levin, Sherrie Gilfor, Jeremy Gilfor, and my mother, Joline Odentz, for wading through the smorgasbord of creepy that is the fictional Apple, Massachusetts.

  In addition, I would like to thank Lois Winston, Ashely Grayson, Debra Dixon and the team at Bell Bridge Books for their tireless support, especially Danielle Childers who coined the phrase, “Poodles—you can’t eat just one.”

  Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to my eighteen-year-old nephew, Nicholas Gilfor, who is the most brilliant, brutal copy editor I could ever hope to have. His dedication to keeping my writing grammatically correct and my story grounded in reality was both humbling and inspiring. I hope to have as good a grasp of the English language as he does when I grow up. One can only dream.

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  Please visit these websites for more information about

  Howard Odentz

  howardodentz.com

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  Dead (A Lot)

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  About the Author

  Howard Odentz is a life-long resident of Western Massachusetts. His love of New England, along with the lore of the region, usually finds their way into his stories. Influenced by decades of reading thriller and horror novels, his writing often delves into the more psychological aspects of those who are thrown into unique or otherworldly circumstances. In addition to writing fiction, Mr. Odentz has penned two full length musical comedies. In Good Spirits is inspired by the real-life ghostly experiences of a local community theatre group and their haunted stage. Piecemeal tells the backstory of Victor Frankenstein’s Hollywood-created protégé, Igor.

  Howard’s first novel, Dead (A Lot), was released in 2013.

  Visit with the author on Facebook and at howardodentz.com.