Kind Nepenthe

by Brockmeyer, Matthew V.

  “Whoa-we. That’ll get you going. Here, give you a try of it.”

  He scooted the mirror forward and handed Calendula the rolled bill, which Calendula noticed was an ancient twenty. Reluctantly, Calendula put the bill to his nose and took a snort.

  Applause rang out and then there was laughter. There were others here now, bearded bikers, a tall man that looked like a cowboy, a bunch of hippies, even a dog. It was a party and Calendula sat back in the warm sound of chattering voices, hands slapping his back, the Eagles crooning over the stereo how they were living it up at the Hotel California.

  And when Calendula looked up, out the window, he could see the little boy looking in at all of them. Smiling.

  9

  Once they were safely out on the backroads, DJ grabbed up the bundle of cash and tossed it over to Katie. “Ever see thirty-two grand before?”

  “No.” She lifted the bundle. “It’s so heavy.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Then she gasped and cried out. “Oh, DJ. It’s not real.”

  DJ slammed down on the brakes with both feet, the tires screeching and the big truck lurching dangerously to the right for a moment before it skid to a stop on the side of the road.

  No, no, no, he thought as he grabbed the bundle of cash from Katie.

  He frantically pulled the rubber bands off and ripped the bundle apart. It was nothing but cutup newspaper with a few hundreds on either side. He let the paper rectangles roll off his hands and scatter. Inside, something broke. He felt his face crumble and began to shake uncontrollably as tears welled in his eyes. He couldn’t fucking help it, he was whimpering like a baby. And she was taking him in her arms, holding him and rocking him as his head slipped down onto her lap. He couldn’t speak. In his belly was a heaviness he had never felt before—enormous, crushing—threatening to heave itself up his throat and choke him.

  “What am I going to do? My daddy’s gonna want his money.”

  “I never heard you call him your daddy before.”

  And suddenly the sadness was gone.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  The heaviness turned to something else. He sat up, wiped the tears from his eyes and felt stupid. His mind began to churn, scrabbling for some way out of this.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He pounded the steering wheel with his palms.

  “You’re going to have to just be honest with him. He’ll understand.”

  “No, he won’t. It’s you who doesn’t understand. I’ve gotta come up with the money. Gotta pay him back.”

  “But how, DJ?”

  “Fucking Coyote. That scumbag’s been ripping my family off for years. I’ll take it from him.”

  “DJ—”

  “That weed at the chef house should be nearly done.”

  “DJ—”

  “Get in there, get the weed and a few grow lights.”

  “No, DJ. It’s only going to get worse if you do something like that.”

  “Yo, Katie, why can’t you support me, huh? Why you always got to shoot down every idea I have?”

  “I do support you, baby. I do. But we’ve just got to be honest with Pops. It’s the only way—”

  That’s when he hit her. Square in the left eye. Striking so fast it surprised both of them.

  “See what you made me do, you stupid bitch? Now keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you!” And then she was slapping him. Hitting him. Swinging blindly, and he had had enough.

  Enough of it all.

  And that thing inside him, that heaviness, turned red as he clenched his hands into fists and, grinding his teeth, eyes burning in their sockets, he decided to teach this bitch a lesson.

  10

  Rebecca had the dream again last night. It seemed like every night the same awful dream returned. She was on a hillside, looking down at the river, and Megan and a little black-haired boy were walking hand-in-hand along the shore. She could see the little boy was dead: his skin cyanotic blue, his elbows and knees rotted away.

  She wanted to call out, to get up and run, but she was frozen, paralyzed. She struggled to move, to scream, anything, but could not. And then she would awake, gasping, with an ache of despair in her chest so powerful that she would have to literally tell herself over and over: It’s just a dream. It’s not real. It’s just a dream.

  To forget the dream, she drank. She’d drank nearly an entire box of wine when the idea of a sacrifice came to her. The notion that she had to give something up.

  And scissors wouldn’t work. She’d have to use a knife.

  She went to the big mirror in the hall. She barely recognized herself. Her face seemed distorted and strange, a pale remnant of who she used to be. Even her lips looked white, the year-round, San Diego tan long gone. She lifted the butcher knife and gazed at it.

  She could hear Megan in the kitchen, laughing at some old sitcom that had gone off the air years and years ago.

  She cringed, then lifted a long, knot of hair, a snickering voice within her head saying, Do it, do it. Taking the knife, she cut into the base of the dreadlock, sawing back and forth until it was free of her head and dangling in her hand. She dropped it to the floor, lifted another, and began to cut, nicking her scalp.

  A rivulet of blood trickled over her forehead and down her face. So red, so impossibly red. A deep scarlet against the ivory white of her skin.

  When she was finished, every thick tangle of hair gone, she looked at herself and laughed.

  Uneven clumps of hair stood up on her head; streaks of blood smeared her face. She looked like a lunatic. An escapee from the local mental hospital. She wrapped both hands around her nearly full, quart mason jar of wine, fingers interlocked, knuckle upon knuckle. Then she lifted her vessel upwards, and bringing the glass to her lips, she began to drink.

  Slowly at first, delicately, but then chugging it down. A trickle began to spill down the right side of her mouth, then the left, but she kept on gulping, lifting the glass up and pouring it down her throat, hot and ugly in her belly, letting it all spill out till there was nothing left. Then she put arms down, barely noticing the empty jar slipping from her grasp and tumbling to the floor, her laughter waning as her reflection began to tilt and rock.

  For there in the mirror, directly behind her, she saw the black-haired little boy. Smiling, eyes twinkling delightedly. She knew then that he was real, had always been real, had always been here.

  11

  Katie wandered down the road, holding her belly, past copses of oak and cedar and pastures full of heifer, cattle guards and rusted-barbwire fences held aloft with rotten boards. The asphalt was cracked and broken, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. When the occasional pickup or dirt bike came whipping past, she turned to the forest, ashamed to show her broken face.

  Already her left eye was swollen shut. Her lip a shredded piece of meat.

  But that was nothing. This was the worst of it. This. The abandonment. Walking alone. She could take the hitting. When it had started she just curled up against the door as he wailed on her, protectively guarding the baby inside her, thinking somewhere deep within that she probably deserved it as his fists rained down. But when he leaned over, grasped the handle, and swung the door open, kicking her out onto the road, that’s when the real pain started. Watching him tear away in a cloud of diesel exhaust, wheels kicking up dust and grit, while she lay there on the hard pavement all alone.

  And now what was she going to do? She had no one. No friends. No family. Her life just one long string of abandonments. The only one she could think of was Pops. He’d put his number on the iPad he’d g
iven her and told her to call him anytime. But now the iPad was gone. What was that number? If she could just remember his number. As she stumbled forward, the Last Chance Market coming into view around the bend, she concentrated, trying to remember.

  12

  Rebecca turned from the mirror. Her long dreadlocks, which she’d been growing for nearly a decade, lay in a jumbled mess about her feet. She shambled forward down the hall, drunkenly falling into the wall and then leaning heavily against it. Feeling the eyes of the ghost upon her, she pulled herself along, scraping against the cheap wood paneling, the floor bucking like a ship in a storm. She slid around the corner and into the kitchen. Megan sat at the table eating Jiffy peanut butter with a spoon straight from the jar and watching Thunder Cats.

  Megan’s eyes left the TV, and grew wide. The spoon paused.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  She was gripping the wall, fighting to stay up. “Nothing, baby. Just watch your show. Mommy’s fine.”

  “But your hair, Mommy. What happened to your hair?” Megan began to whimper, tears spilling down her face, the spoon still hanging there before her mouth.

  Rebecca fumbled over her words, fighting to push herself from the wall and navigate the room which spun about her grotesquely. “It’s okay. Mommy needed…a change. Mommy just needed a change.”

  She took a deep breath and shut her eyes. She was going to puke, the tumult in her belly causing her mouth to water and her skin to prickle in cold sweat. She was distinctly aware of her teeth—they felt mildly electric, pulsing in her jaw.

  I have to get outside quickly, she thought, but instead she fell to her knees and unleashed a torrent of deep-red vomit onto the kitchen floor. She watched the puddle of puked-up wine spill out across the linoleum, thinking how much it looked like blood. She could hear Megan screaming, leaping up from the table and running from the room—yelling “Help!”—but was unable to do anything beyond comprehend it. And then even that was too much and she sank down onto the floor and curled herself up into a ball, clutching her knees to her chest and shivering, the acidic stink of her sick heavy on her face.

  Calendula was working on clipping back the large fan leaves that were blocking light to the lower branches, trying to find patterns in the foliage, crowded places that needed thinning, when Megan started pounding on the big metal door, hollering.

  “What?” He eased himself up, his spine stiff and his numb feet stinging.

  “Mommy’s hurt and has no hair.”

  No hair? He couldn’t be hearing her right. He deftly guided himself through the maze of tubes and buckets, careful not to brush too hard against any plants and break any branches.

  “Help. Help. Hurry.”

  Jesus. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  Finally, he reached the door, swung it open. There was Megan, hysterical and babbling, reaching in to grab him by the hand and pull him out of the grow room, tugging him through the bedroom, down the long, dark hall, and into the kitchen where Rebecca lay curled in a ball on the floor. And, yes, all of her hair was hacked off.

  “Oh my god, Rebecca.” He knelt beside her. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  “Go away,” she moaned.

  “What happened to your hair?”

  “I needed a change.”

  “Come on, baby. Let’s get you up. We’ve got to get you cleaned up.”

  “I said, Go away! I hate you.”

  “Aw, baby. You don’t know what you’re saying. Look how drunk you are.”

  “You knew. Knew all along and did nothing.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Knew. Knew that this place is haunted. Dangerous. Knew all along.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ghosts.”

  “There is no such thing as ghosts and this place is not dangerous. It’s perfectly safe.”

  He looked at Megan, who sat in the doorway staring at them, big eyes bulging from her mop of curly hair, gripping her bunny stuffy to her chest. Calendula gave her his best reassuring smile. “We’re almost done, anyway, and then we can leave. I promise.”

  “Liar. You’ll never let us leave.” Her ragged mess of hair gave her a diseased look, like a sick animal losing patches of fur. Her eyes narrowed to fierce slits and she locked them with his. “What about Sunbeam? If this place is so safe, then what happened to Sunbeam?”

  Calendula bent down so that his face was inches from Rebecca’s, looked into her eyes, and whispered low so that Megan couldn’t hear. “Who the fuck cares what happened to that stupid dyke cunt, anyway?”

  Then he burst out laughing.

  13

  Coyote was in a strip club in LA, working some new customers—a crew of surfers who were wearing sunglasses even though the place was dark as a mineshaft at midnight—when he got the call from Sunbeam. He was immediately sorry he took it.

  “What do you mean you want to get paid?” He set down his scotch and soda and signaled with his free hand that he’d be right back as he pushed away from the table. Head honcho gave him a nod. “You left on your own. The job wasn’t even finished.”

  Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer” blared from the speakers as a girl in leopard-skin lingerie pranced across the black plywood stage and threw herself onto a gleaming silver pole, spinning round it, one leg clamped tight around the shiny, floor-to-ceiling cylinder, the other lifted high above her head.

  The noise—screeching music and jeering crowd—was deafening, and he ducked into a dark hall that led to the private rooms. The bass boomed right through the walls and he clamped the phone to one ear and covered the other with his hand.

  “Whatever, dude,” Sunbeam said. “You had your crew there to finish it. I did the work. You better pay up.”

  A naked blonde slinked by, leading a guy in a business suit by the hand. The guy’s shoulder knocked into Coyote as he passed. Coyote shot him an angry glance and watched as they disappeared into a curtained doorway framed in hazy red light.

  “Yeah, well, even so. I don’t know about no four grand. No one pays two hundred bucks a pound anymore.”

  “Fuck you, Coyote. That was the deal.”

  “Fuck me? Whoa, little lady, kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “Let’s just leave my mouth out of it. I need that money. I’ve got some plans.”

  “Whoa, big plans. What’cha up to?”

  “Just you never mind about that.”

  “You know I’ve always felt protective toward you, baby. Fatherly even.”

  “Fatherly? I distinctly remember you trying to fuck me before you realized I wasn’t into guys.”

  “Well, let’s just say a deep concern.”

  “I thought you’d be ecstatic at having one less trimmer to pay. Except, you know, you’re gonna pay.”

  “Sunbeam, honey, do I really come off that callous to you?” He eyed the ass of a redhead strolling by—fishnets, garter belt, G-string he wanted to reach out and pluck. “Anyway, I’m not in the area.”

  “You’re coming back when?”

  “Couple of days.” The redhead looked over her shoulder and caught him eyeing her. She turned around slowly, and slipped up beside him, gently placing her hand on his shoulder as she swayed and rocked to the music. Coyote couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was drop-dead gorgeous: angular face, cat-like eyes, tits to die for. “Look, I gotta go. Call me back later.”

  “I want my money, Coyote.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ll get paid. Don’t worry.” Coyote thumbed the end call icon.

  “You want a lap dance, mister?�
� The redhead dropped her chin and tilted her head to look at him coyly. Her heavily made-up lips gleamed black in the dim light. Her eyes fluttered and she danced closer so that her left breast brushed briefly against his arm.

  Coyote looked at her and smiled.

  14

  The binoculars DJ was using to peer down at the compound kept fogging up from his breath and the heat of his face. Not that they would’ve been much help anyway. Fog was rolling in heavy from the river and it was dusk on a dismal day, so all there was to see down there in the gray abyss of the valley were the squares of light from the windows of the chef house and shadows.

  He lay flat on his stomach in a patch of tall, wet grass between two boulders. A gust of wind howled through the valley, bending trees and flattening the tall grass around him for a moment, then it was gone.

  He squinted, spat, and squinted again, and thought he could just make out the generator shack and the fuel tank poking out of the fog. Beneath the moan of wind and the patter of tiny rain drops, he could just discern the hum of the generator if he concentrated.

  He’d been casing the place since early morning. From his calculations, based on what intel he’d been able to ascertain, the grow should be nearly over. Now was the time to strike. Coyote was nowhere to be seen. With him out of the picture the place would be easy to hit.

  About forty minutes ago he’d crept down to the generator shack and loosened the nut on the fuel tank’s drain so that diesel trickled out. Any minute now and the generator should come shuddering to a halt.