by Jason Mott
“I want you to help me,” Sam said. “I’ve tried a lot of things for a long time. But I need you to help me.” He sat back on his knees and put his hands together. “Please,” he said, looking up at Ava. “Please help me. I won’t hurt you. I wouldn’t ever hurt you. But, please, you have to help me. Make me better so that I’m not an embarrassment anymore. Make it so that he’ll be proud of me.”
“He who?” Ava asked.
But Sam did not reply. He reached forward and grabbed both of her hands tightly and jerked her forward. He pressed her hands on the sides of his face—just as he had done in the street. “Please,” he said, again and again. “Please help me.” Finally, the fear and confusion was too much for Ava. She screamed for her father. Over and over she called and, as she did, Sam held her hands tightly and pleaded for her to help him.
Macon came through the bedroom door in a blur of motion and confusion. He tackled Sam and rolled the man onto his face and placed his knee on the man’s neck. There was yelling and Sam cried and, mingled into it all, was the sound of Ava yelling to her father, “Don’t hurt him.”
* * *
It was almost dawn by the time Macon arrived at the police station with Sam. The state police, who had been stationed at the end of Macon’s driveway at the base of the hill, wanted to take the man in—if only out of some misplaced feeling of guilt over the way Sam had gotten past him and made it onto the property and, ultimately, into the bedroom with Macon’s daughter. But Macon refused and told the man that there was nothing to feel guilty about. “You can’t guard the whole mountain,” he said, easing Sam into the back of the squad car.
“I can only imagine how else this could have come out,” the officer said.
“It’s better not to even think about it,” Macon said.
But, of course, Macon did think about it. He thought about it the entire way to the station house. He thought about it during the drive, each time he looked back in the mirror and saw Sam’s face. There was a small line of blood coming from Sam’s lip, a by-product of their scuffle. And whenever Macon saw it, a part of him thought that it was not enough. He imagined Ava waking up with the stranger on her bed, holding her down. And he wanted more blood from Sam.
When they arrived at the station, there were crowds of media awaiting them. They took photos as Macon drove into the station house parking lot and they yelled questions about who the man was and how he had gotten into Macon’s house and if he had done anything to Ava. When Macon asked them how they knew so quickly what had happened, they did not answer. They only pelted him with more questions. And his reply was simply to lower his shoulder and force his way silently through them.
It was perhaps an hour later, once Sam was settled in his cell, that the front door of the station opened. The officers sitting out front stood and, even before he saw the man, Macon knew it had to be Reverend Brown. The man entered the office and Macon couldn’t help but notice that there was meekness in his body language, as though he had made himself smaller in the time since Macon had seen him last.
That evening after the reverend had ambushed Macon into joining his church, the two of them spent nearly an hour arguing once they were away from the stage, away from the crowd and the eyes of the world. Macon had very nearly punched the man. But after the arguing, after the yelling and everything else, the fact was that the decision had been made. For better or worse, the two men were linked to each other now.
“Ava’s fine,” Macon said immediately, predicting why the reverend had come.
“I know,” Reverend Brown said. He sat in the chair in front of Macon’s desk and straightened his back. “I’ve actually come to inquire about the other side of the equation, the man who broke into your house.”
“Oh,” Macon said, surprised. He sat back in his chair. “Do you mind if I ask why you’re curious? Do you know him?”
“He’s a member of my church,” Reverend Brown said.
The reverend wasn’t holding eye contact the way he had in previous meetings. Before, whenever Reverend Brown had come to speak with Macon, the man was always very direct, never letting his gaze stray from Macon’s. It was both slightly unsettling and oddly reassuring at once. He gave off the impression that, whoever he was talking to, they had his full attention. They were the center of his world and of great importance. It was a look that made a person want to trust him, and Macon had always thought it sincere. He was beginning to trust the reverend. That is, until he betrayed him.
But now the man was unsettled. He had trouble maintaining the eye contact that was such an important part of his presence. There was something on his mind. “So you know him?” Macon asked.
“Very well,” Reverend Brown replied. “And I’d like to see what I can do on his behalf. If at all possible, I’d like to see about taking him out of here.”
“Do you do that for all the members of your congregation?” Macon asked. He understood the suspicion in his own voice, and he wished it wasn’t there, but old habits are slow to soften, and can rarely be broken.
“I don’t do it for all of them,” Reverend Brown replied.
“Well, what makes this one so special?” Macon asked.
Reverend Brown finally took the seat in front of Macon’s desk. He looked down at his hands. “Because he’s my brother,” Reverend Brown said.
“Your brother?” Macon had trouble believing it. A part of him thought, only briefly, that the church leader was speaking in the figurative sense: “brothers in faith.” But the more the sheriff studied the reverend, the more he saw the truth of it. Even though Sam was larger and more muscled, the lines of his face weren’t far removed from Reverend Brown’s. They both had strong jawlines and a softness around the corners of their eyes. They both had a skin tone that suggested long days in the sun during their youth, and there was a similarity in their smiles.
On the drive from the house to the station, as Sam sat handcuffed in the back of the car, he had smiled often at Macon. Macon watched him in the rearview mirror, unsure what to make of the smile. But there was a genuine innocence in it. Something that said the man did not fully understand the distances to which his actions could reach. He looked like a man who could only see the moment before him. Whatever existed beyond it did not seem to matter.
“He wasn’t always like this,” Reverend Brown replied. His voice was soft. “Once upon a time he was a star athlete. A football player, and a damned good one. Made it through half of high school and he was building a name for himself.” He smiled at the memory of it. “And then he was in a car accident.” Reverend Brown shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of talk about what the cause of it was but, in the end, none of that really matters, does it? It was almost two decades ago.”
Macon leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. He had a question he wanted to ask, but he decided to wait and see just how much Reverend Brown was willing to volunteer. He had been a sheriff long enough to know that the best way to have a question answered is simply to keep a person talking, and most times keeping a person talking was just a matter of not saying anything.
“He was with some friends and his car went off a bridge and into a river. He hit his head pretty hard and, try as they might, it took them a while to get him out of the seat belt. All the while, he was underwater, drowning.” Reverend Brown sighed. “You know, to this day I sometimes dream about that moment. I have this dream that I’m buckled into my seat belt in a car and there’s water rising up around me and I can’t get out.” He made a motion with his hands to indicate water rising around his head. “Absolutely terrifying,” he said. “I’m sitting there, struggling for everything I’m worth, giving it everything I’ve got, and I can’t do anything about it. I can’t change anything. Next thing I know I’m underwater, sucking it into my lungs.” He finished his story with a clearing of his throat. “And then I wake up gasping for air.”
Reverend Brown looked down at his hands again for a moment, then he looked to Macon. “It’s not his fault,” he sa
id.
“Has he ever done anything like this before?” Macon asked. He didn’t want to believe the reverend and his story, if only because he already knew where it was ultimately leading.
Reverend Brown shook his head. “He’s not violent,” he said. “He has never hurt anyone and I can’t believe he ever would.”
“But has he done anything like this before?”
“He has never done this specific act,” Reverend Brown said. “But he’s made mistakes, just like the rest of us. But his mistakes get put under a finer microscope because of his mental state.”
“And what exactly is his mental state?”
“He’s not a danger,” Reverend Brown said. “He’s just impulsive sometimes. And he can get confused easily about certain things. But that doesn’t make him a threat to anyone. It just makes him a man who will always make mistakes and who will always struggle to understand the world. Is that so terrible?”
“I appreciate you telling me all of this,” Macon said. He sat forward and placed his elbows on the desk. “And I suppose we both know where this conversation is heading, don’t we?”
“I’ve always taken care of him,” Reverend Brown said. “I always will.”
“So you’re here to take care of him now.”
“I’m here to take care of both of us.”
Macon nodded, understanding. “I suppose your church doesn’t know about him.”
“They know about him, but they don’t know about us. He uses our mother’s maiden name, and few people know that. So he’s just a member of my congregation, a member of my church, who comes with me whenever I travel.” He looked Macon in the eyes. “I’m not asking you to do anything illegal,” Reverend Brown said. “I’m just asking you not to press charges. I’m just asking you to let him come home.”
“How can I know that this won’t happen again? Ava told me that this was the second time he’s done this. She says he caught her in the street when she and Carmen were at the doctor’s. I’ve got a family here, Reverend.”
“Of course you do,” Reverend Brown said. “And so do I. And I’m trying to do right by him. He hangs upon my word. I’m everything to him. I’m all he has. All he ever does is try to do right by me, Sheriff. And do you want to know the worst thing about it all? Do you want to know what’s worse than having someone believe in you that much?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s having someone believe that you won’t help them because they must have done something wrong by you. Even when all they’ve ever done is make you proud. Sam thinks I’m angry with him, or ashamed of him, and that’s why I won’t help him.” Reverend Brown’s voice softened, like music being taken out of earshot. “I’ve done everything I can, Macon, and I haven’t helped him. And he blames himself for it.”
Macon considered the man before him. This was not the Reverend Brown that he had known: powerful, confident, intimidating. It was not the leader of one of the largest churches in the country. It was simply a man mourning the brother whom he had lost in a car crash all those years ago. It was a loss the reverend wept for daily, Macon thought to himself. Perhaps it was not too far removed from the feeling that Macon felt in the wake of Heather’s suicide.
“Okay,” Macon said.
* * *
Sam was brought into the house through the back, away from the reporters and the masses of people who were not as informed about Reverend Brown’s church. The reverend was in the study of the Andrews House. It was a large, sprawling room with a high ceiling and several large leather chairs placed strategically around the room. On the north wall was a map of the old world—a map made when it was still believed that there were coiling monsters in the lengths of the ocean. It was a map that told of the way things could be when a world was still inclined to imagine. Perhaps that was why Reverend Brown was drawn to it the way he was.
While in Stone Temple, he spent his quiet time, what little there was, sitting in front of the map, staring up at it from the leather chair. More than once, since he had come to the Andrews House, when he was supposed to be working—crafting the next sermon, keeping things organized within his church—he would lose himself in the map. There was both simplicity and complexity to it.
Reverend Brown was seated in a leather chair, looking up at the map and the large serpent breaching the water in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. And although Reverend Brown thought of it as a serpent—because of its long, slender body—he also thought of it as something else. Not quite a dragon, but something more primal, something older and not yet crafted into the mundane angles of iconography. It was a raw, visceral image. Unpolished and flawed in its beauty.
And that was something the man could not look away from.
When Sam was brought in, it had been several hours since the reverend’s visit with Macon, but the time was needed to be sure that there was little correlation between his visit to the sheriff and Sam’s release. He trusted that Macon would not disclose why he had arrested the man or who the man’s identity was.
“I’m sorry, Isaiah,” Sam said. He had been brought in by one of the reverend’s security men. The man was gentle with Sam, having helped him often over the years, and he left the room without a word. Sam stood by the door, looking down at the floor, with his hands at his waist, as though he could make himself small enough to disappear from the world. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Reverend Brown stood and walked to his brother and wrapped his arms around him and hugged him warmly and sighed into his ear. “It’s okay, Sam. It’s okay.”
“Really?” Sam replied sheepishly.
“Yes,” Reverend Brown said. “There was no harm done to anyone, and that’s all that matters.”
“But you told me not to bother her again. You told me to leave her alone and I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“No more talk about any of that,” Reverend Brown said. He took a step back and held Sam’s face in his hands and, gently, he kissed his brother’s brow. “We don’t have time machines here, so it’s best to move forward. What have I always told you?”
“That you’ll always take care of me,” Sam said. Finally, he lifted his eyes from the floor.
“And what else?”
“That there isn’t anything you can’t fix.”
“That’s right,” Isaiah said. “There’s nothing I can’t or won’t fix for you, brother. And why is that?”
“Because we’re all we’ve got.”
“That’s right,” Reverend Brown said. Then he placed his arm around Sam and the two of them walked into the center of the library. Sam mumbled apologies, which Reverend Brown left unanswered. The man was always in a state of apology. It was simply his way.
“She really is wonderful,” Sam said when they had reached the leather chair where Reverend Brown had been sitting.
“Sit here,” Reverend Brown said, guiding him into the chair. “I’ll get you something to drink and then I want to take a look at you.”
Sam removed his jacket. “She’s nice,” he said. “And her father is nice, too. He didn’t mean to do this,” he said, pointing to the bruise on his lip. “I think he was just scared. Parents get scared sometimes.”
“So do little big brothers,” Reverend Brown said, returning with a carafe of water and a glass. He filled the glass and watched as Sam sipped it gingerly, wincing when the glass touched the bruise on his lip.
“And you’re my little big brother,” Sam said, grinning.
“Ad infinitum,” Reverend Brown said with a flourish of his hand. “Now, let me have a look at you.”
Sam removed his shirt. Apart from the wound on his lip, there was a large red mark on the back of his neck and his wrists were ringed with a bruise from when the handcuffs were placed there. But the skin was not broken and there was no indication of any serious injuries. “You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” Reverend Brown asked when the inspection was finished.
“The toughest,” Sam said, and for a moment his voice was that
of his youth, when he was a football star with a splendid life sprawled out before him.
“Of course you are,” Reverend Brown said. He handed Sam back his shirt. The man dressed and sat again and looked at his brother. The moment of clarity, the moment of happiness that had brought back memories—for them both—of the way things had once been, passed.
“I wanted her to fix me,” Sam said slowly. “So you wouldn’t have to take care of me. So I could help you. So you wouldn’t be ashamed of me.”
“I’m not ashamed of you, Sam,” Reverend Brown replied, sitting in the chair across from his brother. Above them both, the map of the world persisted.
“I try,” Sam said. “I try to get things right.”
“I know,” Reverend Brown said. “I know you do. And she’ll help you. I know she will. I’ll see to it. Just be patient.” He patted Sam’s hand lightly. “But for the next couple of days, I’m going to have one of the security men stay with you. I’ll make sure it’s someone you like. Probably Gary. You like Gary, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Sam said gently. “Gary’s good. He’s nice, too.”
“Yeah,” Isaiah said. “He’s a good guy and he’s going to help make sure you’re safe for the next couple of days. Just until things settle down. He’s going to stay with you, and the two of you are going to hang out here at the house, okay?” He turned away and gazed up at the map.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said yet again, and his voice was more childlike than Isaiah Brown had ever heard before.
“You know I love you, don’t you, Sam?”
“I know,” Sam replied. “I know. And you know I try, don’t you, Isaiah?”
“I know,” Isaiah replied. “What do you think of this, Sam?” Reverend Brown asked. He pointed at the map.
Sam looked up at it. He thought for a moment. “It’s the world.”
“It is,” Reverend Brown said patiently. “But what do you think of it?”
Sam looked again, and considered the map more closely. “I like it,” he said. “But why is the dragon drowning?”
