Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  Tom kept rubbing. Then he let his hand fall from his head. Out the dirty windshield of Zeke’s municipal truck, the town was mostly dark. They were higher than town and the faint outline of the cove and its harbour were there. The last ferry of the night was pulling away. A few lights twinkled down Main and up Broadway. Tom thought about how peaceful the town looked, while that man writhed in pain back up there in that house. How wrong was that, he thought and then he shoved that idea down.

  “Fine,” Tom said. “The hot pool. Let’s go.”

  Can’t think, can’t think, can’t think. He rolled up a fist and smacked himself in the head.

  Zeke looked over at him, startled.

  “Can you drop me at the turn-off for the beach?” Tom said to Zeke, talking to him like an adult for the second time since he’d known the man. Then, he policed himself and made it clear. “Do you know where that is, Zeke? Neckline Beach? The turn off from the main road?”

  “Course,” Zeke said as if it was a matter of fact. He hunched forward and whitened his knuckles on the wheel.

  They headed up on a side road which would meet the main one heading for all parts north and west of the island. This one led to the turn off for both Neckline and Nameless, plus Daddy’s acre.

  When they got to the turn for Neckline, Zeke eased off the gas and drifted them to the shoulder, un-cut and growing with weeds for about two or three feet until the dense brush and thick forest started. The road to Neckline was a winding path through it on the west side. Tom could probably walk it in 20 or 25 minutes. He welcomed the time to be out of the stinky, sweat-smelling cab of this truck and to think about what he saw. Who needed to know what, and what it all meant, these were the ideas streaming around and around in Tom’s head.

  “How you gonna get home?” Zeke said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Tom said. “Don’t much care if I get back there tonight.” He climbed out and stood staring at Zeke who was sweating and clearly troubled. “What about you, m’man?” He lightened his voice and tried to be his old self with Zeke.

  “I just need to take that swim,” Zeke said, looking into the bleak fullness of the trees.

  “You don’t get lost again, okay?” Tom said. A pang hit him. He shouldn’t be letting Zeke go anywhere. Not after all this craziness. But, in truth, Tom Mason didn’t have the mental maturity to make that call. Not now, not with all these emotions swimming in him. He didn’t realize it but he was clenching his stomach against a pending cramp. He was dripping with sweat but hadn’t paid his body any heed since seeing the body of Christopher Banatyne strapped down to his bed under the weight of those two malignant tumours.

  The deeper truth was that he couldn’t get the images out of his head either. And soon, those images would be brought to life on developer paper—that is, if he could find a place to print his shots. He was about fifty percent sure that when he did, he’d find all of tonight’s shots spoiled or blank or stark white. They would be that way because the shots of Christopher Banatyne in that back room weren’t real. He dreamed it up. He was still sleeping or hit his head or had a bad accident in Zeke’s truck. It was all make believe—

  Headlights burst onto Tom’s face. They grew fast. Someone was coming down the highway the same way Zeke had brought them.

  “Be careful,” Tom said to Zeke. “Use your flashlights and come straight home after your... swim.”

  “Kay,” Zeke said. Tom slammed his door and Zeke rammed the shifter behind the steering wheel into Drive with a lurch. He hit the pedal and spun a bit before leaving a cloud for Tom to stand in. He waited for the coming headlights to pass. But they didn’t.

  They came to a stop, gently, about five feet from him.

  He made a rolling gesture with his hands, still confused and allowing it to blot out his thoughts with irritation. “Go ahead!” he shouted. “Drive!”

  Then a car door slamming, then a figure blurring in the headlights. Then Farrah standing with him.

  “Whatcha doin’ way out here, College Boy?”

  “Just going for a walk,” he said, shielding his eyes from the headlights.

  “Forty-odd miles from town?”

  Nothing from Tom.

  “I’m going to the bonfires. You have the night off?”

  “Something like that,” Tom said.

  “Well, I’m not going to ask you to come with me,” she said. “Not again.”

  Tom hesitated. Then he said, “Can I come?”

  She took a step toward him, blacking out much more of the light and revealing her pleasant expression.

  “Please?” he said.

  “Sure,” she said, as if she’d just won an argument. “Get in.”

  As they swam through the twin lights back to the car idling in the dark, she said, “Daddy’s sleeping. I took it without asking. Don’t tell. I’m in for the shit when I get back anyway.”

  Tom smiled at her. His guts heaved as he climbed in but he didn’t say anything. Just put his head back as the pain hit him and as Farrah spun off and turned them left off into the woods which would open up to the sprawling beach known as Neckline.

  The next several hours were swallowed by campfire smoke, by the sound of one guy strumming his guitar doing Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel covers. He sat on a log next to Farrah who talked with him occasionally. She smoked cigarettes shared by her friends. Tom denied offers of beer and hard stuff, declined the ciggys too.

  “You’re with that guy lots, huh?” Farrah said.

  “Who? Zeke?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s one of the... uh... patients?”

  “He is,” Tom said, looked out at the dark surf and listening to the babble of high schoolers. He regretted coming out here. It was all too familiar, even though it was a thousand miles from where he was in high school.

  “Most people don’t realize it,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Zeke’s way smarter than anyone gives him credit for. They throw around the word ‘retard’—”

  Farrah blushed but Tom didn’t see it in the firelight.

  “—But he’s really bright. He’s just missing a few of the major building blocks. All of them are smarter than they get credit for. Nurse Karen, she owns the joint. I wouldn’t be surprised if she stuck regular people in Ocean View—just to jack her revenue stream.”

  Farrah said nothing to that. She matched his look off to the pounding and regular surf.

  He kept going. A small rant of sorts. “Fuck, I bet she and hubby would put their own mothers in Ocean View if they could get some dough for it. And let me tell you, she’s a fucking liar. She is. She’s lied to my face. And she treats me like shit, treats everyone like shit. And those kids—they’re not really kids. Mary and Smitty. Ingy and Dar—she treats em all like garbage, like second-class folks when she’s this cream of the crop. Well, that’s bull. You hear? They’re just as good as all of us. Their brains are a bit damaged. But they’re good people. And they look at the world better than Karen fuckin’ Banatyne.”

  She smoked the end of a cigarette and they sat together in the chatter of the group.

  She asked him several times if he was okay. He kept saying he was. She stopped pressing it.

  He felt like he was going delirious. The fire was blisteringly hot on his front, his face, his legs. But it was icy cold wind off the ocean on his back and neck.

  Was this part of the dream? The first part was Chris Banatyne in leather straps. Some kind of hallucination—his mind resolving who the hell Chris Banatyne even was, because Tom had never even met the man. But now, this second part, it was the vision of a rotting Chris Banatyne dissolving into this weary pound of surf and guitar, this icy hotness of hell?

  Finally, Farrah said, “I’m gonna head. Wanna ride?”

  Rubbing his temples, Tom stopped and looked up at her. “Mikey Dean’s mom is the principal.”

  “Yeah,” she said, in a no-duh-Sherlock tone.

  “He’s pissed and being an ass. I can
’t develop my pictures at the school anymore. Not without Mikey.”

  “You know my dad’s pretty connected, right?”

  Tom looked like he’d just been punched in the gut. “Connected, as in, he—or maybe you—can you get me into the school?”

  “Yeah,” she said again. She shrugged. “Sure.”

  He stood and tottered. He leaned down and reached for his camera case sitting in the sand beside his feet. She reached out to steady him. He looked and acted like he’d had five or six, but he hadn’t had any since she’d picked him up.

  She’d mistakenly believed that this might be their do-over. That finding him in the road and him asking to come with her to the fire tonight, that it was, well, kismet. They would have their second chance.

  He stood and stared at her while the fire flickered on his face. Around them, the crowd of teens had thinned out. The guitar had faded off and anyone left sat and talked in groups of two or three. She had no idea what time it was.

  And still Tom looked at her, the orange twinkling in his eyes.

  “What, you mean now?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, some semblance of clarity coming into his face. “Can we?”

  Sure champ, she thought but didn’t say. She remembered him calling his retards that and thought it might not go over so well. She was angry.

  “Come on,” she said, exasperated. “The key’s on the ring with my dad’s car keys.”

  At a quarter past two in the morning, all of Tom’s anxiety left him.

  He was in a dark room and watching his photos come to life on the developing paper he felt he probably should pay the school for. The dark parts darkened and the light parts sharpened.

  Farrah left him there after saying something about how she just didn’t get him and that he just didn’t get her. Tired and pissed about this guy who apparently couldn’t read any feminine signs on the roadway of life, she made sure he knew what he was doing, reiterated that he should slip out the side door which would lock behind him, and went home to bed—and to return Daddy’s Porsche before he woke up and even knew she’d taken it.

  The next couple of hours were a blur. Tom would remember adding the developer fluid and washing the prints, hanging them to dry. He would remember sitting on the floor and eventually laying on its cold tile, only aware of the “Mikey Bruises” at a distant periphery of his body. He’d remember pain in his belly, extending up into his chest and down into his bowels too, but that was a distant sensation. When he was working on his photos, everything else sat in a pale back seat of his concern.

  He’d remember Farrah leaving, Farrah scowling as she did so. And he’d remember finding envelopes big enough to slide in the finished prints. He also would have glimpses of the brisk, windy walk home in the blackness of night while the camera case banged on his thigh.

  But what he wouldn’t remember was what was actually on the printed photos.

  18

  “Waky, waky.”

  It was a woman’s voice. But it swam in darkness, only the occasional, blurry colour accompanied it. It was female, but half-close to a little girl’s.

  And when he did open his eyes, he was surprised to find it was Mary Smithson. Her big, overbitten teeth showed mismatched grey and corn-on-the-cob yellow. She grinned down at Tom and he struggled to come up to consciousness.

  He was bathed in sweat but didn’t know it. Only felt the chill of air hitting wet skin and the cling of similarly moist shirt and shorts.

  Looking down his body, his white bony knees and then his toes pointing from the tips of his sandals. He was in his own cot in the basement. Beside him and Mary, the old boiler furnace stood in a rusting, greasy hulk.

  “Smitty helped you,” Mary said with a prolonged grin.

  “Oh yeah?” Tom said, hitching himself up on his elbows. She eased away from him.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, getting serious. “You were banging and banging on the big wood door, Mr. Tommy. Smitty got you in and to bed. You was sick. Like we all got sick... but you was way worser. Way way WAY worser.”

  His head spun. He felt hungover.

  “Everyone was sick?”

  “Yeah, Docky-doc, he come over and he said it was foo-poise.”

  Tom’s body creaked. “Food poisoning?” he said.

  Mary scrunched her brow, then relaxed it, broke into a smile. “Yeah! That thing!”

  “We all got food poisoning?”

  “Uh-huh. Nurse Karen is so mad at Fidela. Bad fish.”

  “Hmm,” Tom said, considering. His stomach rolled around, but it was hunger, not anything more violent.

  “Yeah,” Mary said, like a girl intent on telling everything she knew to show just how much she knew. “Docky-doc, he took all’s our blood and pee. Not yours. You were sleeping for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How long was I sleeping?”

  From behind Mary, came another voice. “Two days, give or take. Wasn’t here when you got home though.” Mary moved so that Tom could catch a view of who it was.

  It was Nurse Karen standing on the top step behind the bulk of some of the ductwork. “Mary,” she scolded. “I told you not to come down here by yourself. You remember. You shouldn’t be alone with Tom.”

  Mary looked like she would cry. She bit her pouted lip and got up. She rushed past Karen and up the stairs.

  “Feelin’ rough, I bet,” Karen said. Her voice had its standard smugness. But there was something else.

  “Yuh,” Tom said. He realized he was nervous. On his nightstand, he spied the envelopes from his latest excursion with Farrah to the basement dark room at the school. The other envelopes were in his dresser drawer under socks and underwear—

  “No, they’re not,” Karen said.

  “What?” Tom said, squinting his eyes in disbelief.

  “What you’re looking for isn’t in the bureau,” she said. From behind her back, she produced a stack of three or four thick manila envelopes. They could have been Tom’s, but they could have been mortgage papers for the house north of the creek for all he knew.

  But he was sure they weren’t mortgage papers. He was sure he knew what they were. And his empty gut filled with a heavy boulder. It sank down to the bottom of his belly and then bled into his groin. He had to piss now. And he worried it would leak without his say-so.

  “Come with me,” Karen said. “If you can walk. If you can’t, figure it out. You’re a bright boy.”

  She turned and went up the stairs—quietly, quickly and as relaxed as if it was a day like any other at Ocean View.

  An image came to Tom’s mind. Christopher Banatyne.

  He scrambled up from the wet sheets of the bed and pawed at the remaining envelope, the one he’d brought back in the wee hours... how many nights ago? Two? Could he have really slept that long?

  He summoned strength and went up the stairs. He banged against the wall—there was no railing—and concentrated enough to make it up to the sunny kitchen. Fidela was not here. He had no idea what time it was—or even what day, so he just followed Karen.

  She went down the thick hallway and turned into the seldom-used dining room. He followed her in, fighting a dizzy spell. She startled him by being suddenly behind him. She slid the panelled door behind him and clicked a latch.

  “Sit,” she said. “It’s been quite a couple of days.”

  “I’ve had to let Fidela go. She poisoned us all and I just can’t have that kind of negligence on the payroll. We were all sick as dogs. You seem to have gotten off the lightest. No work and only sleep. Must be nice. Rest of us were all puking our guts out. The house is getting an airing out, that’s for sure.”

  Tom did feel a chill but he didn’t know if it was the breeze from open windows in the house, feeding it with an out-of-character cool day in late August, or if it was a remnant of his illness.

  Karen sat. She took a cigarette from a pack on the table. It looked like she had set herself up in here as a temp
orary office. There were tidy stacks of folders, papers and mailing envelopes with a blotter, pens and a tape recorder at the head of the dining table. She lit her cigarette and eased back in her chair.

  “I said sit,” she repeated, and then took a long drag.

  Tom slid the chair out at the opposite end of the long table with a squawk on the hard wood. He sat in it, his bony ass feeling the hardness and the coldness of the wood.

  “Your hobby is gonna get us all in a lot of trouble,” Karen said. She put her cigarette down in a tin ashtray and reached for the top envelope. She slid out a stack of big ones, their white backsides facing Tom. His heart fluttered again. His guts threatened to heave but he knew they were beyond empty. It would be a set of dry, throaty lurches if anything.

  Karen looked through the pictures. She picked up and smoked her cigarette again.

  “Here’s what we know,” she said. “Day after you come back from getting my benzies off-island, Mary Smithson arrives back at this house in the late evening. Took a ride from a tourist in a rented car. Couldn’t remember anything before that. So clearly upset and in her bathing suit. In her bathing suit, of all things!”

  Karen was conversational. She used the same sales-pitch tone she used with people like James Roundtree, people she needed to like her. It was badly out of place now. This wasn’t coffee with the gals. This wasn’t a finance meeting to get more money from some regulatory agency.

  “Thing is, I pressed that girl, Mary. I pressed her.”

  She took a drag and held it.

  She let it out as she spoke and the smoke took a hidden breeze away from her face. “And she finally told me that you were out at that hot spring with her. She says, ‘Tommy-Tommy snap-snap me.’ That’s what she says. ‘He snap-snapped me!’ You were taking pictures of her, weren’t you, Tom? In the buff, nothing on? No sense lying—” She looked down at the stack of envelopes and set the exposed ones on top. “I have all the evidence I need right here. And you know what she says when I ask her what else happened with ‘Tommy-Tommy?’”