by Anna Roberts
“Everything’s going to be all right,” said Grayson, changing his tune as he placed a calming hand on Reese’s shoulder.
“What’s in the box?”
“Just some things - ”
“ - things? I’m not doing it, Grayson. I won’t and you can’t fucking make me...”
Charlie tuned Reese out with a practiced ear. The smell of imminent death was now so strong he could hardly see straight.
Lyle was on the bed. Someone had put a blue plastic sheet over it to protect the covers, towels draped on top to absorb whatever came out of him when the moment came.
“He’s blind now,” said Reese, in a voice like he couldn’t believe this was happening. “He couldn’t see anything yesterday and then he said ‘I’m done,’ and that was the last thing he said.”
Charlie approached the bed. There was blood crusted at the corners of Lyle’s mouth; Reese said his teeth had been falling out. The near skeletal figure on the bed was wearing a stained old t-shirt and a pair of checked pajama pants, neither of which did anything to hide the angles of his bony, broken frame. He had been a big man once, both physically and by reputation, holding the neighboring packs in check by threat of violence and murder. The mad dictator, Grayson said, and Charlie thought of those smashed palaces in Iraq and Libya, tacky as shit like Lyle’s old place, with that coffee table that was just a sheet of smoked glass somehow balancing on the tits of three gilded plaster mermaids.
God, Lyle had loved that that fugly-ass house, right up to the point where he could no longer stand to be in it any longer. No wonder everyone was talking about the Black Dog; the whole thing had been straight up spooky. First there was the smell, then the toilets started backing up and flies started appearing from nowhere, until by the end they were swarming so thick on the insides of the window panes you could hardly see out. Before that Lyle had gone round the house with a sledgehammer, smashing lumps out of the plaster and the Spanish tiles he’d once been so goddamn proud of, screaming that he was going to find whatever dead thing in the crawl space that was causing all of this.
“It’s a goddamn possum,” he’d said. “Or a fucking cat. Y’all quit looking at me like I’m cursed or something.”
Only he was, and they all knew it. He’d messed with the wrong wolf witch.
Charlie touched Lyle’s hand. “Hey. Lyle. It’s me. Charlie.”
Lyle’s breathing didn’t even change; it kept to the same steady, snoring rhythm as before. His skin was clammy and cool, and when Charlie lifted his hand to take his pulse, the hand had a strange weight all of its own, like a foreshadowing of the dead weight it would be in a matter of hours. Or maybe even less.
“He can’t hear you,” said Reese.
Dammit. There’d be no final whispers, no satisfaction in telling Lyle just why he’d suffered this way. And like Gloria had always said, without the why there was nothing. Just a dying man hanging onto the last rags of life. “No,” said Charlie. The inside of his ribs felt scooped hollow, his stomach the same lead balloon it had been when Lyle had told him just what was on the end of that fork. “I think he’s in a coma.”
“Oh my God.”
“Reese, quit saying that. It’s not going to help.”
Reese let out a loud, snotty gasp. “Help what?” he said. “Nobody can help. My dad is dying and nobody’s doing a damn thing. They’re just circling the place like buzzards. They won’t even let me take him to the hospital.”
“Yeah, that’ll work,” said Charlie, not for the first time wondering just how the hell they were going to pull this off. The kid was spoiled, soft, and so out of touch that he even thought the hospital was an option. “They’ll poke him around and ask how he got like this in the first place. You really want to answer those questions?”
Reese wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. Grayson handed him a tissue. They stood there for a moment, all listening to the rasping sounds of Lyle’s dying breaths, all caught up in their own private thoughts. None of them pleasant. Things had started to fall apart as soon as the news got out that Lyle was sick. Fights, robberies, kids testing their mettle. So far nothing awful had crawled out of the Okefenokee, but it was only a matter of time.
Lyle made a gurgling sound. His mouth fell open, exposing a pale brownish tongue and the bloody dark sockets where his back teeth had used to be. Charlie watched, amazed to find that he felt nothing. The mean glee of watching Lyle flail around the house with a hammer felt like a dizzy childhood dream. This was real. Cold, flat, and finished.
His chest moved a couple more times and then stopped. His eyes were open just far enough to see the fresh vacancy there. Reese let out a wail and ran for the door. Charlie stepped in his way, but Reese kept moving, like a doughy human battering ram. Charlie felt flesh squish against him and wondered how that even happened; how did you even get to that size without thinking ‘Hey, my ass feels like a sackful of silly putty. Maybe I should put down the fork’?
“Sit down, Reese. This isn’t helping.”
“I’m not doing it,” said Reese. He was crying again, thick tears pouring down his cheeks. He flailed out with both fists. Grayson tried to hold him but Reese reeled back against him, sending Grayson stumbling back against a chair, cracking his hip in a way that was surely no good for a geezer of forty-two. Charlie had a brief, ugly vision of this whole thing turning into a fist-fight over Lyle’s still warm corpse, and he fought down a sudden urge to laugh. There’s your dignity in death, you evil old fart.
But Reese stilled, like he had no more fight in him. He’d never had much to begin with. He dropped down into a cheap pleather armchair and settled down to cry, like a person. Like a child who had just lost his father.
“Ow,” said Grayson, glaring daggers.
“Give him a break, will ya?”
Reese looked up. “You have to,” he said. “My daddy just died. You can’t make me do shit.”
Charlie sighed. Just once could the kid quit acting like such a goddamn maggot? His father had barely got done wasting oxygen and already he was attempting to play the whole thing for sympathy. Flat out manipulative.
“Come on, Reese,” said Charlie. “I know this is hard, but we’ve known this was coming for a long time. It’s your time to step up.”
The pleather creaked, an intention to run thwarted by Reese’s bulk. A panicky look scurried over his face once more and the tears started again. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t. I swear. I never did. Just let me go, Charlie. I’ll leave the state. I won’t get in your way; you can have it. You can have it all.”
Charlie stared at him for a moment. “North Florida?” he said.
“Yeah. All of it.”
“You’re offering me your old man’s old turf?”
“Yeah.” Reese nodded frantically. “It was always you, Charlie.”
Charlie laughed, shocked to find himself experiencing a whole new emotion; regretting that Lyle was dead. And the poor dead prick wasn’t even cold. If only he’d hung on for a couple more minutes he could have watched his precious son and heir hand over his legacy to an outsider.
“Kid,” said Charlie. “You know where I’m from, right? I could have had the Keys. Fucking paradise. Not to mention an actual wolf witch to settle this kind of thing; we don’t chew on hearts like swamp trash down there, Reese. Because we leave the coronations to the old lady.”
Reese snuffled. “Please.”
“No. I don’t want it. What the hell made you think I ever did?”
“I don’t know,” said Reese, in a mopey, childish voice. “You were always there. You put up with all his...bullshit all those years. I just figured...”
“What? That I wanted to be next in line?” said Charlie. “Dream the fuck on, kiddo. Let me tell you something. I had a nice little coke operation going, okay? I had an apartment. I had money. I’d even put down money on a business property. Yeah, that’s right – old Charlie was going legit. I was going to spend my days frying up snapper and mahi-mahi and hosing the tourists
for it. And you know what happened? The minute it got out that your old man was sick? That he might be losing control of his turf?”
Reese shook his head.
“Bunch of little shitbag kids,” said Charlie. “Fucking infants. Came around and set fire to it. Lost my deposit. Lost any chance of putting down cash on another property on account of the arson. And you know why they did that?”
“Uhuh.”
“Because I was loyal, Reese. Because they thought I was next in line. They wanted to send a message.”
Grayson cleared his throat. “You’re not exactly selling this, Charlie.”
“Fuck selling,” said Charlie. “What do you want to do, Gray? Ease him into it? There’s no time for easing. He needs to get the hell out there and show those people that the second verse is the same as the fucking first, even if he has to do it Okefenokee style with barbeque sauce. Son follows father. No regime change. Same deal.”
Reese sniffed. There was a second when it looked like he might have actually been thinking about what he had to do, but then he glanced over at Lyle’s body and started to whimper again. “I’m not doing it.”
“Please, Reese,” said Grayson, weighing in as the good cop. “How many more times do we have to explain the consequences to you? This is the only way the swamp wolves are ever going to accept that you’re in charge.”
“I don’t wanna be in charge.”
Charlie exhaled. “Oh my God, what are you? Five? I don’t want to do a lot of things. I don’t want to change into a goddamn wolf every time the full moon rolls around, but I don’t get any choice in the matter.”
“I can’t,” said Reese, blubbering all over himself. “I can’t eat...”
“You’ve eaten worse,” said Grayson, with a sharpness so sudden that even Charlie flinched. “Usually deep fried and swimming in fucking corn syrup.”
Reese stopped sniveling and stared.
“Wow,” said Charlie, glancing at Grayson with a new respect. “Really?”
“I’m old,” said Grayson, moving over to the bed. He slid his hands under Lyle’s lifeless shoulders. “I’m tired. And I really like that new couch.”
Finally. Someone was doing something. “Here, I’ll take the top half,” said Charlie. “Get his legs.”
6
“Can I ask you something?” said Blue, swinging her beer bottle between her fingers. Maybe it was because she had drank half of it too fast, but the rocking of the boat bothered her less now.
“Sure. Anything,” said Gabe. “Twenty questions. Hit me up.”
“When you said your grandfather knew about the eyes on the boat...was he from Cuba?”
Gabe shook his head. “Nah. Born in the USA. His old man was from Cuba, though, so according to the one drop rule I’m not totally white trash.”
“You are not white trash.”
He grinned. “I’m off-white trash. Your average all-American mutt. Little Cubano, splash of Italian, drop of the Irish and a whole heap of Cajun.”
“Your parents still around?”
He shook his head. “Mom’s dead. Dad is...I don’t know. Only thing he ever gave me was a last name and a Y-chromosome.”
“Same here,” she said, and then realized her mistake. “Minus the Y-chromosome, obviously.”
He narrowed his eyes in an expression of comic confusion. “I was gonna say. You look pretty...female in that bikini.”
“Was that a compliment?”
Gabe scrunched up his nose. “Maybe? I’m not good at these things.” He was actually blushing. “Ask me something else.”
“Okay,” said Blue, willing to go along with the game for now. “Did you grow up around here?”
He nodded again. His bare feet, stretched out along the seat, were almost touching her. “I was born in Tavernier. The only time I ever lived outside the Keys was when my mom got married and dragged my ass up to Tampa.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve, I think,” he said. “My stepdad is one of those kind of clappy evangelical types, you know? My mom was crazy for him; he looked like a movie star in those days. We were Catholic but that didn’t matter. They had us rebaptized in some purpose built pool at their church; the thing stank of chlorine.”
“Fun.”
“I know, right?” said Gabe. “It was like some kind of cult. After being dipped in chlorine for the Lord we had to go to church every Sunday and pretend to speak in tongues and shit.”
Blue leaned back in her seat. His feet were so close that she thought about pulling his feet onto her lap, but that would just be strange. Too fast. “How long were you in Tampa?” she asked.
He exhaled and glanced up at the sky. “Oh, I don’t know. Couple of years, maybe? Mom was trying to turn us into the Christian Brady Bunch but it was more like the frickin’ Munsters. He wanted to move back to Kansas, where he grew up. Back to his old church, which was even loopier than the one in Tampa. Seriously. They got into snake handling and stuff.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah, that was when I ran away for the first time. Didn’t get very far, but I told her straight that there was no way I was going to fucking Kansas and dicking around with a bunch of venomous snakes. I was like ‘You might not believe in Darwin any more, but I sure as hell do, and I’m not getting taken out of the gene pool early because Pastor Jim Bob or whoever thinks I should test my faith in the Lord by cramming a diamondback down my pants and trusting to dumb luck.’”
Blue laughed, relieved to know she wasn’t the only one with crazy relatives. The lightness that had swept over her on the beach that night hadn’t yet diminished, even though it sometimes served as a sobering reminder of just how little of her twenty-two years had been spent actually being young. “What did your mom say?” she asked.
He gave a short, hard laugh. “She signed me up for this ‘Christ Camp’ thing. Kind of like a brat camp but with added Jesus. They tossed you out in the middle of Montana with a handful of sticks, a roll of toilet paper and a shovel. Luckily I got a break before they packed me off out there.”
“How come?”
“My grandfather showed up,” he said. “Perfect timing on his part. I’d never even met him before; Mom had made out like he was the Devil. I know he hadn’t been there for a lot of when she was growing up – I swear, deadbeat dads run in our family or something – but the deeper she got into this church she started telling more and more lurid stories about him. Like he was the high priest of a satanic cult down in Key West, and that the cult members had raped her over and over again and made her eat her own aborted fetuses.”
Blue stared at him.
To her intense surprise he laughed. “Yeah, you think that’s fucked up,” he said. “But get this; none of it was true. Which is even more fucked up when you think about it. Like, how messed up in the head do you have to be to even invent things like that?”
“Very,” said Blue, appalled that anyone would feel the need to borrow trauma when there was more than enough to go around in the world.
“It was like a sickness,” Gabe said. “Ran through the whole church. It was like they had a group persecution complex or something. Totally nuts. We would sit around and pray and try to ‘remember’ the various gruesome ways the secular world had abused and hurt us, and it turned into the most fucked up kind of one-upmanship you can imagine. Everyone was trying to come up with a worse story than the one before, and my Mom – who, sorry to say, was always a drama queen – managed to get herself crowned Queen of Pain by coming up with all this Rosemary’s Baby bullshit. She had a scar at the top of her butt crack where she’d had a big cyst removed one time, and I swear I saw her baring her ass to the group and crying so hard she could barely talk. And you know what she told them?”
“No.”
“She said that was where one time ‘they’ had sewed a live snake to her butt to give her a ‘tail’ in the hope of making her more desirable, so that the Devil himself would come and give her a rape baby.”
&nb
sp; Blue laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Gabe, I’m sorry – but that’s ridiculous.”
“I know. And apparently my Pops was the evil ringleader of this rape baby satanist abortion cult. When he showed up part of me expected him to have horns. It’s crazy how this stuff gets into your head; I knew logically that it was all complete crap, but when you’re totally surrounded by people who never stop talking about Satan and rape and incest and murder – and this is gonna sound really fucked up – you sort of get used to it. You start thinking the world is like that, you know? I don’t know.”
“How did you get out?” she asked. “Obviously you did, because you’re here...”
He sighed and smiled. “Pops was the one who hammered it home to me,” he said. “And he didn’t even have to say more than three words to do it. What it was that when he came to Tampa, he swung by the house, right? I opened the door, he looked at me and said ‘Are you Gabriel?’ and I said yeah. And he said ‘Hi, I’m your grandfather.’ Then my Mom came to see who it was and you know what she said when she saw him?”
“No.”
“She said ‘Dad, what are you doing here?’ In that exact same tone of voice. Annoyed, tired – like she was expecting him to want to borrow money. Maybe not the best tone for a grown daughter to take with her father, but a totally normal one.” He ran his fingers through his drying hair. “And that just blew my mind right there. Because the way she’d talked about this guy in church, I don’t know. Let’s just say it was not the reaction I’d expected. Like she should have hit the deck and started thrashing and screaming like one of those chicks in Salem, you know?”
“I think so.”
“I actually confronted her about it after dinner. I was like ‘You seem pretty chill around Pops considering all the terrible things he did to you.’” He smiled at the recollection. “And she said ‘That’s how you know. They brainwash you into acting normal. The more normal a family seems, the more likely it is that they have satanic abuse going on.’”
“What?”
Gabe laughed. “I know. It was insane. On one hand Pops was clearly a satanist because he was a dysfunctional drifter who rode a motorcycle, okay? And on the other hand, the most ordinary whitebread nuclear family were also secret satanists because their boring ass blandness was like a cover or something. It was like ‘What the fuck? Is everyone a goddamn satanist now?’”
