Gilchrist: A Novel

by Christian Galacar

  “No, just him. Looks like he was alone, poor kid.”

  “How?”

  “Prolly just going too fast.”

  “Was he drunk or something?”

  “Might’ve been. Not really sure, to be honest. They’ll test his blood and find out.” Billy’s eyes went serious, and he pushed himself up even straighter. “It’s hard to think about. I never thought this sort of thing would bother me so much, but I guess it does.”

  Is that really what’s bothering me? he thought. Or is it the other thing I don’t want to look at?

  She put her hand over his and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’d think you were strange if it didn’t bother you, Billy.”

  He looked at her.

  “Oh, I feel just terrible now,” she said, seeming to change gears. “I feel so foolish. No wonder you’re distracted. And here I am, being so… I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Really,” Billy said. “You didn’t know. I think I just need to go home and get some rest. It was a long night.”

  “How ’bout I make you some breakfast first? How do eggs, toast, and coffee sound? I have some potatoes for home fries, too.”

  “You don’t have to do—”

  “No, I do. I’m afraid I must insist. One way or another you’re leaving here satisfied,” she said, giving him a playful look. “Otherwise you might make a gal feel completely useless, and I can’t have that. I do have my pride, you know.”

  Before he could refuse again—and he really didn’t want to refuse again—he was looking at her naked body standing at the foot of the bed. Her arms were raised as she gathered her dark-blond hair into a ponytail. A blade of morning sunlight coming through the window caught the side of her face and gave her an angelic glow. He studied her small breasts, the perfect curve of her waist and butt, and her pale smooth skin.

  She sat down on the bed, grabbed Billy’s white undershirt off the ground, and put it on. She turned and gave him a smile. “Mind if I borrow this for a bit?”

  “Go right ahead,” Billy said, leaning back and lacing his hands behind his head. For a split second, if he pushed away all other thoughts and kept his mind entirely in the present, this felt like a life that might actually be theirs and no one else’s. This was their home. He was lying in their shared bed. It was his wife about to make him breakfast.

  “How do you like your coffee?” she asked, furthering the illusion.

  “Milk and sugar.”

  “And your eggs?”

  “Over easy, I guess. Or scrambled. Make it a surprise.”

  “Okay, comin right up,” Sarah said, and winked at him. “I’ll bring it here so you can enjoy a nice breakfast in bed. That always used to cheer me up when I was kid.”

  Wearing only his undershirt, she left the bedroom. A few minutes later, Billy heard the sounds of cooking start up in the kitchen. It was comforting. Yes, this was a nice little taste of what could be. What should be.

  But the fantasy didn’t last. Reality crept back in as he stared up at the ceiling, listening to the fake sounds of home. And with it came all the worries. All the realizations that this wasn’t his life. That he was only stealing another man’s place for a while.

  He grabbed his pants off the floor and got his pack of gum from the pocket. He popped a piece of Teaberry in his mouth and started chomping, trying to pound and grind the flavor out of it. For as long as he could remember, that had been his habit. It was something he did, almost to the point of compulsion, to release anxious energy. He supposed there were worse things than chewing gum when he was upset. He didn’t drink. Most of the men he knew did, but he didn’t.

  After a few minutes, the smells of cooking started to find his nose: toast, coffee, and fried potatoes. He started to feel a little silly about sitting there under a bedsheet, completely naked. Apparently sex wasn’t in the cards for him, so what was the point of being all dressed up in his birthday suit with no party to attend?

  He got up and put on his clothes, sans the undershirt he had on loan to one Sarah Blatten, then lay back down. A copy of Field & Stream sat on the bedside table beside him, along with a stale glass of water, a bottle of aspirin, and a tube of Brylcreem. It had to be Dave’s side of the bed. Billy picked up the magazine and found an article on how to catch late-season bass. He wasn’t much of a fisherman, but he thought he might like to be someday.

  Halfway through it, he heard the soft sound of bare feet patting up the hall. He hadn’t realized how powerful his appetite was until Sarah appeared in the doorway with the tray of food she had made for him. It made sense, though—he had puked up his dinner last night and hadn’t eaten anything since.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” she said as she crossed the room.

  “Look at this,” he said, dropping the magazine on the bed. “I must’ve died and gone to heaven. I’d swear it.”

  “I love cooking, but Dave says I’m no good.” She handed Billy the tray, and he took it carefully. The coffee was steaming, and he didn’t care to see what it might feel like dumped on his lap. He set it across his thighs and made sure it was stable.

  “I’m sure he has no idea what he’s talking about,” he said. “It smells mighty fine to me.”

  “Should you tell him that, or should I?” Sarah said with humor, and went to sit at her vanity, still wearing nothing but his white T-shirt. She started putting on makeup.

  Billy’s attention switched to the food. His stomach grumbled in anticipation as he took a sip of his coffee. “Hot, hot,” he said, realizing he still had gum in his mouth. He took it out and got rid of it, then ran his tongue over the burn on his lip.

  “You okay?” Sarah asked, distracted.

  “I couldn’t wait to taste it.”

  She laughed softly. “Well… how is it?”

  “I’ll let you know when I’m done. Coffee’s hot, though. That’s a good start.”

  Sarah continued to do her makeup. And between bites of eggs and toast—rye wasn’t his favorite but still quite capable of hitting the proverbial spot—he stole glances of her while she got ready for another long day of sitting around the house and being Dave Blatten’s unappreciated wife.

  By the time he was cleaning up the yolk on the plate with his last bite of toast, he knew he loved her. He always had.

  8

  Laura Dooley and her son were playing. He was six years old and loved Sunday mornings because Mommy let him come into her room and play Cave Explorer in her bed while she got dressed. It was his favorite game. What he liked most about it was that it always turned into hide-and-seek. So really it was two games.

  That wasn’t the only reason he was so fond of it, though. He liked it because, before his father had died of a harp attack—heart attack, his mother always corrected—they used to play it, and it reminded him of Daddy. In fact, Daddy’s the one who showed him how to be a cave explorer and how to search for lost treasure under the covers of the bed, which Jake Dooley, the boy’s father, had always called the Blackwater Mines. And when he said it, he’d always used that spooky voice that Kevin thought was funny but also a little scary.

  Daddy had shown him other things, too. He had shown him how to use his other eyes. He said there were lots of people like them in the world. Some were born with it, and some acquired it. But they all had one thing in common: they had special equipment. Daddy said it was kind of like x-ray vision… only different. Mommy didn’t have it, but that was okay because Kevin did, and he could use it to help her when he needed to, like when he had helped her win at bingo once when they’d needed money to repair the car. But he knew that had been wrong. She had told him so, too. She hadn’t been mad, of course—she had laughed and giggled as they skipped back to the car through the church parking lot that Saturday—but when they got in the car and shut the doors, she had told him they shouldn’t have done it. Still, they had celebrated with ice cream and pizza, so he figured it must not have been all that bad.

  Laura was brushing her hair, watching in the mirror’s ref
lection as Kevin knelt on the bed in his favorite pajamas: the bright-red ones with the fire engines. He was about to crawl headfirst under the blankets to head into the caves and see what gold treasure he could find. He wanted to find something nice to give to Mommy.

  “I’m going in,” he said. “It’s gonna be the longest exedition ever.”

  “You think you can dig up something for Mommy?”

  He nodded. “I can try. What do you want?”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes as if to mull it over. “How about something shiny. Keep your eyes peeled for diamonds and rubies. Mommy likes those. But don’t stay down there too long. I don’t want to have to come find you. It’s awfully dark in those caves. And if you do”—she turned around and made a snarly face, lifting her hands and hooking them into claws—“the monsters might smell you and get hungry for children.”

  “Not if you have one of these,” Kevin said, and adjusted the hairband he was wearing around his head. It was his pretend headlamp, the kind cave explorers wore. “The monsters hate the light. It banshees them.”

  Laura’s face returned to normal, and her posture straightened. “You mean banishes, sweetie?”

  “That’s what I said—it banishes them.”

  “Okay, kiddo. Good. I have mine right here, too,” she said, and picked up another headband that was sitting beside her.

  “Okay, Mommy, I’m going esploring for treasure. The monsters won’t get me. Don’t worry.”

  He sucked in a huge breath, puffed out his cheeks, and dove headfirst under the covers. He started working his way down into the caves, which, of course, were located near the foot of the bed, where the sheets were tucked in and the space got tight and claustrophobic. When he reached the end of the mattress, where everything was cool and constricting, he turned his body ninety degrees and started crawling lengthwise along the foot of the bed. It was so quiet down there, and he could barely see. The only thing he could hear was the sound of his own breathing. In his pretend world, the caves were vast echoing chambers and his headband illuminated the whole place.

  Kevin continued slowly inching along the foot of the bed until he reached a corner. Then he managed to turn himself around and start doing a second pass back. That was when the monster came for him.

  “We smell children,” his mother said. “We want fooood.” Only in that moment, she was not his mother; she was the monster.

  Kevin started to crawl faster under the covers, going back and forth and zigzagging as fast as he could to avoid being caught in the monster’s grip. It was on the bed now. Its claws kept coming down on top of him, sometimes catching him briefly, squeezing his ribs and tickling him. Whenever that would happen, the monster would say, “I’ve got you. You’re mine, and now I will eat you up.”

  But Kevin would always get free and crawl away to the opposite side of the bed, trying to hide among the ripples and bunches in the thick quilt. Or at least blend in with them. That was around the time the cave exploring game usually turned into hide-and-seek, when his goal would change from hiding to making a break for safety. He would try to make it out of the caves once the monster started to really close in on him, once it began to attack and catch him more and more frequently. When the time was right, he would scurry out from underneath the covers, run out of Mommy’s bedroom, and hide somewhere in the house. And when the monster did sniff him out, it would make him French toast and bacon and let him watch an hour of television. Kevin loved Sundays. And Kevin loved the monster.

  He was curled up in a tight ball, hiding on the very edge of the mattress beneath a giant heap of blanket, when he sensed an attack coming. His position had been found. This would be the last attack before he fled for the laundry room in the kitchen and hid behind the ironing board or maybe underneath a pile of dirty laundry.

  “I smell you, child. You can’t hide from me,” the monster said in a gravelly voice. “Fee, fi, fo, fum.”

  Kevin took off crawling. He was scrambling as fast as he could for the head of the bed, where he would ascend the caves and burst forth into daylight. The hairband slid off his head, but he didn’t care; he wouldn’t need it once he was out of the caves. He felt the monster bounding across the bed, trying to get a hold of him. Then something rather peculiar happened, something that had never been a part of their game before. As if the space around him had just opened up, he was no longer in a small place. It was still pitch-black all around him, but the feeling of being confined had disappeared. The air was cooler, too. Not just cool, but frigid. The smell of something burning, the smell of smoke, became so strong it made his eyes sting.

  Is something on fire? he thought. Stop, drop, and roll. Stop, drop, and roll…

  He continued crawling toward the top of the bed, his hands clawing out in front of him, grabbing fistfuls of the sheets, waiting for one of his frantic hands to find the opening and break free into familiar space. Mommy’s bedroom should be there waiting for him. But it never came. He kept going, moving faster and faster. Now he was completely up on his hands and knees, charging toward where he thought the head of the bed should be. And it should’ve been there. But it wasn’t. The blankets were no longer on top of him, enfolding him. Where was he? Where was the top of the quilt? Where was the quilt at all? He couldn’t get out.

  His lungs ached. He was running out of breath. Panic was overtaking him.

  “Mommy? Mommy, where are you?” he cried out. His words echoed—but not as if he were in a cave. The reverberation seemed to stretch on to infinity, building into a violent crescendo that sounded like a million tiny metallic shrieks.

  He couldn’t feel his Mommy on the bed anymore. He couldn’t hear her pretending to be the monster. Where was she? Better question: Where was he?

  9

  Laura was kneeling on her bed in her bathrobe, chasing her son around as he crawled back and forth under the covers. Every so often, she would pounce on top of him and tickle him through the quilt, then let up and allow him to scurry to another corner and hide there. He loved playing, and she supposed she did, too. Having an excuse to act like a child once the responsibilities of adulthood had sapped away her silly side was one of the better parts of being a parent. Although sometimes she had to remind herself that twenty-three wasn’t that old. It just felt old because of the turns her life had taken.

  Now she was looking at a giant lump in the corner of the bed, where she knew Kevin was hiding. Any moment now, he would make a break for it and crawl out from under the blankets, giggling and squealing with joy before going to hide somewhere in the house. The laundry room was his favorite.

  “I smell you, child. You can’t hide from me,” she said, starting toward him. “Fee, fi, fo, fum.”

  The shape under the bed started to move, and she fell on it, prepared to give the tickling to end all tickles. Something was wrong, though. She wrestled with the blanket for a moment, trying to find a body beneath it to grab, a set of ribs to tickle. But there was nothing. Somehow he had slipped through her arms and gotten away, crawled behind her. She pushed herself up and scanned the bed, her mood sobering. There were a few lumps under the blankets, but nothing big enough to be her son. Still, she patted her hands down on top of them, deflating each one, just to be sure.

  “Kevin, kiddo, where’d you go?” she said, confused.

  This was the first stirring in her that something wasn’t quite right. It was a small feeling, as if a single icy hair had been dragged across the back of her neck. He had probably already snuck out of the bed and gone to find a hiding spot in the house. That must be it. Another part of her thought maybe it was more than that, though. Maybe it had something to do with her son’s strange gift. The same one her husband had possessed.

  “Ready or not, here I come,” she called out.

  Half an hour later, after she had searched every single place—inside and out—she came to the realization that she was in an empty house. Her son had simply vanished. All that she had found was the hairband he’d
been wearing.

  10

  George Bateman was opening the bar for the day. He had already picked up the ground beef and a couple pounds of thick-cut bacon from Metzger’s Butchery. Carter wasn’t there to shoot the breeze like he usually was. The kid running the shop this morning, Kip Clap, told him Carter had a family emergency. Apparently his son had been in a car accident the night before. A bad one. Kip didn’t know whether he was okay or not. So George bought the meat, then went on down the road to the bakery and picked up a half dozen sleeves of freshly baked hamburger buns. That was all he would need for the day. He ran a simple operation.

  He liked to buy his ingredients fresh each morning. That was what made a Dale’s Delight cheeseburger so damn delightful. The toppings, too—onions, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and cucumbers for his wife to make her famous pickles—those were all locally sourced from farms within Gilchrist County lines, when the seasons permitted, of course. He didn’t have a fancy menu, no list of entrees and appetizers for customers to choose from. It was only burgers and fries down at Dale’s Tavern, the way his father, Dale Bateman, had always done it.

  And it worked. People kept coming back to eat, so he kept making the food the same way it had always been made. He firmly believed, as his father had, that the secret to succeeding in any venture was to do one thing and do it well. That way, the hard work had a far better chance of paying off. In the case of the tavern, he was right. He wouldn’t change a thing for as long as he owned the place. If he and Mrs. Bateman ever had children—and there was always the idea kicking around in the backs of both his and his wife’s minds that they still might someday, even as they both approached forty—then he would make sure his son or daughter understood the golden rule of business: don’t mess with success. On some level, he wondered if that was the exact reason why he and Beth never tried harder for kids when they were younger, before the idea started to seem less and less realistic.

  George checked the wall clock hanging above the juke. It was just after ten.

  I got time, he thought. That’s one thing I know I have—time. And right now this is my time. I like that I can hear the clock ticking. The front door is locked, and everything stays out until I invite it in. That’s power, isn’t it? Hearing the ticking if it’s only that I have to listen hard enough? Not letting others drown out the details? If I keep this time, this place, for me and just me, isn’t that power? Isn’t that important?