by L C Barlow
Roland laughed a low, jazzy laugh. "It takes a lot more than simply running to stop me."
Cyrus nodded his head. "I'll give you that. ...Do you think anybody else was helping them?"
"No. No, I figure that if there were others, they would have been there tonight to help partake in beating you to death. Nobody could resist getting a chance to hurt you if they really wanted it."
Cyrus chuckled quietly. "I think Jack has become one of my most trusted advisors, Roland." I looked up to him, and he smiled. I could smell the sweet alcohol and blood in his breath.
"Yessir," said Roland. "But I could have told you that from the beginning."
Cyrus furrowed his eyebrows and asked me, "Jack, do you still have that gun?"
"Yes," I said, and I retrieved the uncomfortable metal from behind me. I handed it to Cyrus, and he handed it to Roland. Roland twisted it round in his hand and smirked thoughtfully.
"God made all men, but Smith and Wesson made them equal," Cyrus said, and then he started to hum. "Hmm.. hmm.. hmmhmmhmm." He went in time with the music - a soft piano piece that made me feel as though the night was finally drawing to a close. Cyrus's voice became softer and softer, and the reverberations in his throat seemed to travel down his arm, so that I felt them resonate in his whole being as I settled more comfortably against him and closed my eyes.
"Better," he said in a whisper, "Stronger. That's what we have to be. Even if it kills us." Then he chuckled again as though finding one of his thoughts extremely entertaining, and he continued to drink and hum.
I nestled still further beneath his wing, and without a second thought, I slept.
Chapter 11
MEND
Years ago, before I ever started college, I visited my sister after I was released. It happened only once. She would have nothing to do with me.
Nothing has ever hurt worse than that. Her condemnation went straight through my side - made my insides cook and glisten.
I had gone to the clean white house in the nice neighborhood with the picket fence, where she still lives, where I had sent her the night of all nights, and I was in awe. What I had imagined had only been a ghost in comparison to the perfection.
She was just twelve when I had sent her off in the car on that deserted road like a kid on a training bike. I had watched her go, fade away, slip beyond the hill, and then I had done what I needed to do.
But Kat had either forgotten or repressed the boiling, horrendous froth of her first twelve years of life. She was sixteen and a bitch with blonde hair, blue eyes - exactly the sort of button nose and red-cheeks girl Cyrus preferred.
She has dimples by her mouth and a few freckles on her face. And she is so blonde. And, yes, a bitch. But she's still my sister bitch, my bitch kid sister, and truly, after I lick the wounds she inflicts by ignoring me, I don't give a damn. She is alive.
Her Father and his current wife don't give a damn about me. I'm not sure I would like them if they did.
The one time that I did visit, before David and Karen would allow me to see Kat, I was brought to David's sparse white office with its four windows looking to the side yard and its overhead fan on so high it seemed it might lose grip of its propellers at any moment. I could see the fan swinging violently over David's head like a sword held up by a string, and David began the conversation as soon as we sat down by telling me, "I want you to know that, though I am in fact Kat's father, I'm not yours. I'm sorry for that, but I can't help you. I have no idea who Alice was with before me. She never would tell me."
So kind of you, I thought, to distance yourself from me as soon as we meet. All I said to him was, "It wouldn't matter if you were my Father. That's not why I'm here."
"I know," he said. "But that needed to be out in the open. So does this. I am both sorry and not sorry for... I mean, she did have a right to visit you, but... considering the reasons for your being committed, I believed it would be best to let you grow, get past what had happened, heal yourself."
"Did she want to visit?"
"In the beginning."
I saw a slight grimace on David's round face, but he hid it well. When he looked out the window, I eyed his comb over, his tiny brown eyes, his plump cheeks, his double chin.
He wore a tie, and the bottom of it lapped like a tongue at his desk whenever he moved. It reminded me that Cyrus had actually worn a tie The Night, and had actually been sitting at a desk as well. It had been thin, though. David's was quite fat.
"I think that Kat has... gracefully moved on from what had unfortunately been done to both of you. She told me some of the things she had remembered... some things she imagined. She talked about them avidly at first. But then, over the years, less and less. Of course, we had read about you. We knew what had happened. But, realities do fade. For Kat, it's good. And..."
"And?"
David looked me dead in the eye. "Nothing should change that. Ever."
I nodded my head slowly. "I agree."
He smiled as though we were on the same page, but the smile melted when I added, "If Kat wants to talk to me, though, or know me again, or see me, you are not the type to be able to stop me."
David drummed his fingers on the desk one time and frowned as he looked at its top. All the nervousness had evaporated from him. "That will not be the case."
He wasn't wrong.
* * *
The night that Patrick had suggested that he might pay me fifty grand for helping him... it was a year after visiting David and Karen and Kat, and all I could do was think of them again and how I could give her the money. It seemed to me that I had yet another chance to push her towards a better existence.
She was so close to not being tainted by our early life that this money just might brush off the residue of the Cyrus years. Yes. This money had her name on it before I had the job.
Besides, the money would be wasted on a person such as me. It cannot make me better, and it smells like Cyrus. I have no use for it anymore.
Something about Patrick made me miss her, though. I think it was the optimism he had. It made me feel optimistic, too.
I think that's why I stayed with him.
Patrick was, after all, not gloriously intelligent - though he was socially apt. Nor was Patrick as good as I had first imagined him to be - the drugs and money and drilled their holes into his personality, after all, as they do with most. More importantly, though, Patrick was not as dark as I had once believed. In the beginning, he seemed so capable of living the oddities I had lived. I read myself into him.
I was wrong, though. Patrick has his passive dangers. He might end up dead in a ditch some day, but he does not kill. Comparatively, he is clean. Not good, but capable of it. His best attribute is he is harmless, and he will always be - incompetent and humorous, ineffective and experienced. He works his way through drugs and girls, and that is all. Not good, but not me. I have nothing to fear.
Realizing these things one night made me decide, all the more, to hold true to our agreement. I would help this creature retrieve his items from the chimney, and he would help me feel something beyond myself, whether he knew it or not. He would tangentially help Kat - another positive force.
The fact he lent me his Maserati for the day didn't hurt.
When my trip to see Kat was over, I dropped the car off at Patrick's, slid the keys under the door when he didn't answer, and went to my apartment. Again, my roommate was not there.
After about an hour of sleep, there was a knock on the door that woke me. I opened my eyes, feeling much better, and looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. There was another knock.
I turned on a lamp from the desk beside my bed and got up. I went to the door and opened it, and there was Patrick, smoking a cigarette with a devilish haircut and grin. "So where'd you go?" he asked. "You put quite a few miles on Mackenzie today. Six hundred or so in fact."
I rubbed my sleepy face with my hands. "You call your car Mackenzie?"
"Today," he replied. "The car cha
nges when the girl does."
"Went to see my sister," I said. "Come in."
"Didn't know you had a sister," Patrick said, flicking his cigarette to the concrete and following me inside. I sat on the bed, trying to wake up. "Is she hot?" he asked.
I raised my eyebrows. "She's sixteen," I said, still numb from sleep.
"Ah!" he said, shaking his head. He pulled up a flask from his left side that I hadn't seen before and drank from it. When he was done he said, "Youth and vulnerability do give a certain beauty to a girl." My eyes flicked to his face, and he wiggled his eyebrows back and forth. I didn't say anything. "I'm kidding!" he shouted. "I'm kidding."
"Fuck your kidding," I said, falling over on the bed, tired. "What do you want?"
He laughed, and the sound of his voice hit every wall and all the corners of the room. He plopped on the bed beside me. "I want to know how it went."
My mind went grazing on the hours before. How Kat's room had been filled with pink and lavender and other colors that I didn't normally see throughout my day, and how this had not necessarily bothered me, but reminded me. Reminded me of...
I brushed this thought away.
"She's a cheerleader now," I said, confused. "She's a Christian."
Patrick chuckled. "You say it as though she's dead."
"No," I replied, and I sat back up on the bed beside him, sliding my hands together as though to warm my words with them. "The way we were raised..." I thought about how Cyrus had preferred cheerleaders, but I did not mention this. "Christianity was looked down upon."
"Oh?" Patrick asked. "Mormon?"
"No," I replied. "Not anything." Another memory of that night struck me so hard, it felt as though a nail pierced my skull. I placed my hand against the skin to cover the wound.
"What?" Patrick asked.
But it was as though he was no longer there. I was in Kat's bedroom again. It was right before I had left. As soon as I had grabbed the doorknob, she had spoken my name. "Jack?"
I turned to her.
"Please. Tell me. I've been wondering all these years... It's stuck with me. What did Cyrus and Alex bury under my bed?"
Her words sliced away the rest of the world. I had released the door handle and heard it click. "What?" I asked.
"Remember? The night they came to our house when I was like ten or eleven. They sawed through the floorboards, sent me to your room. They were there all night. Took them two days to finish. What did they bury down there?"
I had not thought of that in years. "Oh," I said then, the strangeness of that night hitting me like a train. "I remember now." It plopped itself before me - the sounds of them entering the house in the middle of the night. I had had my .45 on me and went into the hallway, expecting intruders, but it was them. "Don't worry about this," Cyrus had told me. "Go back to sleep." And it hadn't bothered me. Kat had crawled into bed with me, and I had slept quite soundly that night, knowing Cyrus was in our house with me - someone was awake and there. There was a monster in my place. I never slept well at my mother's house.
"I don't know what the hell they buried down there," I told Kat in her bedroom. "Haven't thought of that in years."
"Really?" she asked. "You seemed quite obsessed with it then."
"Was I?"
"Yes. I mean..." she shook her head. "Nevermind."
I had stood there, trying to decide if I should push her to ask me or let her be. She asked anyway. "Do you remember," she said, "when you took an axe to my door in the middle of the night? Scared me to death. You had said you heard me screaming. You couldn't get the door open."
I had heard the high-noted shriek again like it was fresh, and I was still in the dark of my room - remembered bolting from my bed and leaping into the hallway, taking the few steps to her door, unable to turn the knob, and pounding, pounding. Throwing myself against it. Slamming my body into it until the force flung me against the opposite wall. How I had finally gone to the garage, felt the handle of the axe in my hands, brought it to her room, and then... But there had been another voice, too. One that I had never told her about. A deep, gurgling woman's voice. It had whispered like it was right on the other side of the door. "Mother loves you."
How could I forget that? I asked myself. How could this slip by me in the millions of things I had told my shrink when I was in the institution?
"Jack?" Kat had said.
I had looked at her, taken aback. "Hm?"
"Do you remember that?"
"I do."
She had motioned with her hands in a questioning gesture.
I shook my head, shrugged, and gave her nothing. I would not discuss that piece of our past lives. Not in that house, not with the pom poms and crosses. "I did a lot of drugs in high school, Kat. I was almost never clean."
"Right," she said, her eyes distancing. "I remember the needles." That made me wince.
"I love you," I told her, and I didn't wait for a reply. "It's good to see you again." She shook her head at me. Her eyes remained dark.
I thought of all of this, yes, but I would never in a million years tell Patrick. Though there were no pom poms near us, and the only cross in the room hung about Patrick's neck, I preferred to keep it buried. I didn't want to speak of it. Ever.
"Nothing," I replied to him, thinking to myself that it was true. That I had not ever really met my sister that day. I hardly knew who she was anymore, might never know again.
"Tell me how your night has been. You're drunk. I can smell it. Tell me how that's going."
"Well," he said, "gloriously. I was walking through the park. Drinking, of course. And then..." he scratched his head, "and then I was drunk. It started raining, and... And I sat in the rain for a while. And then it was so quiet out, and I came to a bridge. And the rain that had fallen on the wood had soaked it until it was gleaming in the electric lights, and I thought to myself, 'Now that is beauty.' Like Paris. And then I thought, you know, after we did what we planned to do, we should go there. Together. Will you go with me?"
"I will go wherever you will pay for me to go," I said, and I patted his leg.
He laughed. "You'll have fifty grand."
"I hold my position. I'll go wherever you pay for me to go... But I need to get some sleep tonight. I have a test tomorrow."
He goaded me for a while, but when I refused to give him any more attention, "Well, alright," he said. "I should be getting back to the party anyway."
"There's a party?" I asked. "Where?"
"Brian's," he said.
"Tell him 'hello' for me. Wait... better yet, give him the finger."
"I will." He took another swig from his flask. "You sure you don't want to go? Debauchery awaits." And, before I could answer, "But you'll be there tomorrow, right?"
I nodded my head amidst the warm covers. "Right," I said.
And then something else odd happened. I felt a slight whip of warm breath against my left cheek, and then the soft planting of lips against my cheekbone. I heard the soft suck of a kiss. My eyes opened in the dim room, and as I looked to Patrick, he jumped off the bed like a cartoon character shocked to life. He laughed a few short hoots, and then said, "I am so fucking drunk." He shook his head, almost tipped over, steadied himself, and then went to the door. But then, quite soberly, he said, "Two days. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes," I replied.
"God you're fucking great," he replied. He turned in circles and left through the door.
I lay on my bed wondering if I should follow him, should make sure he got back safe, should maybe even ask about the kiss. I decided, instead, that I would simply chalk it up to business.
An employer's kiss. Yes. That's what I had been given.
Before I fell asleep in my black and silver sheets, I thought again of my day with Kat and the odd goodbye I had been given at the door by David. He had had quite the smile on his face by then, for I had let both he and his wife drive Patrick's Maserati. But that smile had transformed to something - not a grimace, but
something earnest.
Before I could open the door, he hurried to me and held it closed.
"What are you doing?" I asked, adrenaline beginning to pump.
"Shh," David had hushed me, and he looked in the direction of the kitchen, where Karen was starting dinner. He looked vulnerable. "Jack... I am a Christian man. I am. But I want to thank you for doing what you did to get Kat back to me."
I looked down, somewhat unsure of him. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
He pushed harder against the door, leaned in closer to me, and his whisper seemed so quiet so as to escape even God's ears. "Thank you for everything." I looked at him as I would at a rat juggling, unsure of why he was telling me this, what he was hoping to achieve. "And I know... just what I'm thanking you for," he said. "In fact, I deserve a bit of hell for being so damned thankful. But Jack," he put his arm on me, and I looked at it against the black jacket of my left arm, "something needed to be fucking done."
This touched me deeply. I placed my right hand on top of his. "Sometimes insanity and logic achieve the same things," I replied. I wanted to tell him more than this, like "thank you," like "these words do me good," but I said nothing more.
His hand felt very warm, almost shaky under mine. Then, I saw movement from my left and looked down the hall to see Karen peeking around the corner from the kitchen. David and I broke our connection, and he opened the door for me. With a smile from him, a speck of strange tenderness, I went out into a world that felt very different. As I drove back by myself, I did not feel so alone.
Chapter 12
DESIRE
The problem with Cyrus is that he was the real thing. More so than I think even he could conceive. And real things can never be put into words.
He was effective. He was conniving. He was believable. He was a murderer. He was wealthy. He was wealthy. He was powerful. He was evil.
He saved me.
And all of his followers loved him and praised him and worshipped him, and I was born into this.
