Psycho Save Us

by Huskins, Chad

  Something occurred to Spencer, though. He couldn’t go to Motel Quick now, because Mac had recommended it and would know he was going there. Mac might tell the police. .And Basil didn’t answer his fuckin’ phone. Which means he may not even be in the state. But Mac had told him Pat’s Auto was on Terrell Street. He could go there, lay low, especially if Pat himself was there. After all, a favor was owed, and Pat, asshole that he was, had never balked on repaying one. And Mac probably wouldn’t mention Pat’s Auto to the police, since it wasn’t the kind of place one wanted the cops to know one was associated with. But then again, he might, Spencer thought. He seemed awfully concerned about those girls.

  But Pat’s the only guy I really know in this town.

  He took a quick right turn on Holcomb Bridge Road and said out loud, “Fuck it, I gotta take the chance.” Spencer punched in the street name on the GPS. Terrell Street came up, whereas Pat’s Auto never had. Patrick Mulley didn’t advertise, and kept his little chop shop from coming up on most searches.

  Spencer took a left turn onto McKinley-Parke Drive, toking on his cigarette and turning up the radio. Blue Öyster Cult was advising everyone not to fear the Reaper, and the voice of his stolen GPS said, in its usual fragmented way, “Go—two—miles—then—turn—left—on—Winston—Street.” The smoke felt good in his lungs. He exhaled, singing along to the music, remembering the hilarious “more cowbell” sketch Will Ferrell had done on Saturday Night Live with Christopher Walken, like, what, back in 2000, or 2001? Back before the towers had even fallen, he thought. That led him to think about what Will Ferrell had done since then. Associative thinking like this took him down more roads than he drove that night, and the only time he thought of the black girl in the green sweater again was when he considered how she had stolen glimpses of him while paying for her food.

  Spencer thought back to those piquant eyes. Why had she kept looking at him? Not just at him, but looking him in the eye. She hadn’t looked him over out of curiosity, she had watched him. Like she knew him. Crazy fuckin’ nigglet, he thought, and turned the music up some more. The universe was full of random encounters. So much going on in what that Carl Sagan guy had called the cosmic fugue (inside Leavenworth, Spencer had read Sagan profusely, particularly Cosmos). Things happened randomly. Indeed, the very event that kick-started life on this planet was random in itself—random interactions causing haphazard chemical reactions just so happened to synthesize some amino acids and other organic compounds from inorganic precursors.

  Tonight’s encounter had been no different.

  “Come on, baby,” he sang. “Don’t fear the Reaper, baby take my hand, don’t fear the Reaper, we’ll be able to fly…”

  Echoes…

  The dreams were spotted and menacing. She came and went. Sometimes, she was in the back of the car, and other times she was treading water. No, not water. A viscous liquid; dark shapes swimming just beneath its surface. She swam in a dark room with tenebrous shadows that fell over her, no, reached for her.

  Echoes…

  People were calling to her. She looked around to see who it might be. There was her mother, despondent and alone on her couch, crying for Kaley’s father, Maury, wishing he would come back home. The pipes she smoked from were made out of glassblown Pyrex tubes or light bulbs. In this vision, one was now in her hand, burning the powder and transforming it into a substance of magical fumes that made Mom feel so good…but the dream also revealed to her those desperate times when Mom had to heat it in aluminum foil over a flame. Like the time she had gotten so angry with little Shannon for running around and playing with their cat Mr. Peps and stomping on her pipe. “Shan! I told you, stupid girl, watch yo step!” Mr. Peps mysteriously vanished the next day.

  On some level, Kaley knew. Nobody’s gonna come for us. My mother’s a meth addict and she’ll probably wake up not even knowing she sent us to the store. The thought echoed, and with it, pain. This was common. Mom gave them a chore, or sent them to their Aunt Tabitha’s, or saw them walk out the door to catch the bus, and woke up not knowing where they’d gone. It was Kaley who prepared their school lunches now. It was Kaley who collected Shan’s laundry and washed it all. Mom had become a word sometimes uttered around the house to refer to the husk that roamed about their home, occasionally burning something and occasionally issuing an “I love you” in their general direction. Nobody’s going to save us.

  Echoes…

  “Romeo and Juliet…are together in eternity…we can be like they are…”

  Who’s singing?

  None of her thoughts had much substance, because Kaley didn’t even know where she was, or why she was so worried. Part of her knew that she was now in the clutches of bad people. The worst people. She knew it, and not because it felt so real, but because it felt so surreal. Her black, liquidy, nonspecific dream of echoes was loaded with the knowledge, and the intense feeling. The feeling a person got when they felt like they had stepped into someone else’s life. This doesn’t happen to me, one thinks to oneself. This is supposed to happen to someone else, but not me.

  That had happened at Nan’s bedside. The feeling of disbelief that her Nan had felt had washed over Kaley, causing her to feel death. The actual coldness of it, and the utterly despairing part of her grandmother reaching out to someone, anyone, finding only the granddaughter who shared the charm with her. Kaley had shared in death, had felt pulmonary functions ceasing, had felt the lungs shutting down. She hadn’t been able to feel her feet. This can’t be happening, her Nan had thought. And Kaley had shared the same thoughts on the matter. I can’t be connecting to death, she had reasoned. No one can do that.

  But she had. Just as she had connected to the feeling that emanated from the white man in Olympic Park who had been bursting with excitement over proposing to his girlfriend, so much so that Kaley had caught it like she were a sail and his enthusiasm the wind. It carried her, and filled her.

  Echoes…

  Her thoughts were carried by those dark currents. Directionless and without origin, but everywhere and altogether paramount. Sometimes they were like voices, but with tangible weight. The sounds were heavy and weighed her down. Other times, they were light whispers carrying in a cavern.

  Somewhere in the cave, Shan was crying. Kayle struggled weakly, but the current was too strong, holding her fast and carrying her deeper. She wanted to fight the current, to try and swim against it, but she could not summon the strength to do so. Somewhere in her unconscious mind she could feel the bonds holding fast against her wrists and legs. Still, Shan was crying, but her voice didn’t echo like all the other sounds. Her voice was very, very close, and didn’t carry. But still there were others.

  Echoes…

  “Seasons don’t fear the Reaper…nor do the wind, the sun or the rain…we can be like they are…”

  That singing again. Who was doing it?

  More uncertainties crept in. Those were the most terrifying things of all. Was she awake or was she asleep? Was this real or was this imaginary? Parts of it are real, she decided. The parts that are the worst.

  There was the sound of a baby crying. Crying loudly. It sounded like it was pain.

  Kaley’s eyes opened. She was pretty sure the world she was seeing was real this time. But she could still feel that dark current moving around her, threatening to carry her with it. She could still feel the movements of the shadowy bodies that swam beneath its surface.

  She was on a floorboard, seated between two heavyset men, one white and one black. She looked up, saw the white man looking down at her. He smiled and then looked away. Her kidnapper actually smiled. “Where’s…?” She wanted to ask where Shan was, but her words wouldn’t work. The current surged with that smile, and took her voice away. That smile washed over her like a thick sludge. She could taste it in her mouth, its rotten smell invading her senses. She could feel it in her mind. In that smile, she could feel the pride of earning something and yet being humored by the notion that someone else had to suffe
r for it. It was the smile of thinking about tasting the goods before they were sold. It was the murky, messy smile of a mind that had never learned to pick up after itself, and had left litter out in the streets, cluttering avenues of thought and morality.

  It was the smile of the big, bald white man. Him with the red bear tattooed on his right arm. It was the smile of his lust. His lust in all things.

  The smile echoed…

  And it carried her away, dislodging her from whatever fragment of reality she clung to. Deeper, again the current carried her deeper.

  Kaley had learned all about lust. She had known about it long before she got her first period. Her cousin Tyrese had taught her all about it, though he never knew it. It was Christmas, they had traveled to Memaw’s house—her Nan’s nan, in the last year of her life. Ricky, Kaley’s ex-stepdad-to-be, wasn’t even her mom’s boyfriend back then. Shannon was inside her mother, but nobody knew it yet. Kaley was very small. She drank a lot of Coca-Colas that night. Her bladder had warned her that if she didn’t get to a bathroom very quick, she would need a mop. Kaley hustled to the bathroom at the end of the hall, but it was occupied, locked. She found a paper towel roll in the kitchen and went outside, in the dark, all alone. Out there was Tyrese and his two older brothers. He followed her, though she hadn’t known it at the time. She hadn’t known it until she got out in the woods and dropped her pants and squatted. She had been cleaning herself up when something hit her. It was the charm. She felt…curious. Curious about someone else. She felt wanted, too. Emotions that she wouldn’t understand until she was in her twenties had swirled and coalesced. She pulled her pants up quickly, because something else made her shiver, and it wasn’t the cold December wind. Kaley remembered turning around, looking back towards the house with the lights on, and seeing Tyrese’s silhouette there. He was twelve years old at the time, and he was coming for her. He didn’t even know it yet, but he was. He thought he was just curious. He thought he was only going to see how little girls peed, maybe see what their plumbing looked like. “Hey, Kaley,” he said. He might as well have screamed, “I’m here to kill you!”, because she gasped, stood, and ran. She couldn’t go back to the party because he was in her way, and he would stop her, talk to her cousin to cousin. Tyrese would laugh and convince her there was nothing to be afraid of. And Kaley would believe him. She would doubt her charm, just as she usually did. In that moment, she knew she couldn’t let that happen.

  That night, Kaley ran from him. She ran deeper into the woods. She came out onto another street and got lost quickly. Later that night she would get a mean spanking after the cops were finally called and found her wandering blocks away. Mom demanded to know why she’d done it, but Kaley hadn’t told her. In truth, she hadn’t known, either. How does one explain a premonition that they doubted had really happened themselves? Kaley felt stupid, and part of her had determined to never make herself look that stupid again. She now realized that that night had been the beginning of her new, sanity-saving programming, the programming that told her not to listen to such stupid “feelings” again or else she would suffer more humiliation. For proud girls like Kaley, saving dignity was everything, and that placed her at constant odds with her charm.

  She had listened to her charm back then. It had probably saved her. I should’ve listened to it tonight.

  Echoes…

  There was that crying baby again. Someone really needed to do something about that baby.

  Now, her dream became displacing, and she had no idea of where she was or what she had been doing. She wasn’t even sure this was a dream. Kaley suddenly realized she needed to be some place, she knew that inherently. But where? She had forgotten. It was important. It was vital that she get there. Yet, what good was being there if she couldn’t even recall what she needed to be there for? So she remained. She remained where she was, with neither the ability to choose nor the will to choose. She remained. Deep, deep within herself, there was the ghost of panic haunting her. She felt constricted, and she always would. She knew it. On some fundamental level, she knew that she would always be confined somehow.

  And then, all at once, she saw him. The smiling man. Pale. Pale as bone. Pale and black-hooded, and with kind eyes. He smiled across at someone else. He was torturing somebody, and he was delighted. It wasn’t the torture he was enjoying, though. Her charm told her this much. Her charm, or the fancifulness of her dream. No, he was enjoying…freedom? Yes…yes, that was it. He was free and he hadn’t been for a while. But he was free now and loving every minute of it.

  Then, she saw it.

  Oh God, she thought. He’s going to kill everyone.

  She parted her lips and groaned, “Please…please, we have…we have to go…we have to run…far away…from him…”

  The big bald white man glanced down at her. He smiled again, and she felt the wash of lust. “Shhhh. Just relax. It’ll all be over soon.”

  “We have…to go…please…you don’t understand…he’s…” Her eyelids felt so heavy. So very, very heavy. “He’s…he’s going to kill…and the imps…he’ll bring the imps…and the chains and the…the…briars…”

  Somewhere in the car, someone’s phone rang.

  And someone was…singing.

  “Come on, baby…don’t fear the Reaper…baby take my hand…don’t fear the Reaper…we’ll be able to fly…don’t fear the Reaper…baby I’m your mannnnnnnn…”

  2

  People found out about Spencer Adam Pelletier when he was thirteen years old. He was still in the fifth grade, having failed two years in a row despite having breezed through all previous four grades with straight A’s. During that time, he had been the kind of kid who was prone to acts of kindness, sharing his lunch with poorer kids and sometimes just giving his lunch money away to the kind of kids that didn’t eat at all and had to keep pretending that they’d lost their lunch money every day, or that they just weren’t hungry.

  Teachers had commented on just how terribly good Spencer was in all things, and found it refreshing to talk about a child who was so giving. He never mocked other kids, and stood up for those that were getting made fun of. If he couldn’t do anything about it himself, Spencer made sure to tell a teacher. He actually did this three times in a row in his third-grade year, enough to be put on a school poster. Beneath his face had read the words BULLYING IS NOT ACCEPTABLE: BE LIKE SPENCER, IF YOU SEE SOMEONE TREATED UNFAIRLY, BE SURE TO REPORT IT.

  Before he was ten years old, many kids were already calling him a narc. But that was fine, because Spencer enjoyed it. You see, long before anyone else in the world or in his family found out the truth about Spencer Adam Pelletier, he’d found out about himself. He hadn’t been doing the right thing because he found it moral. No. Not at all. He’d been doing the right thing because he liked the look on the faces of those who thought they could get away with something when they suddenly realized they were not going get away with it.

  That’s a slight distortion. Spencer didn’t just like seeing this look on people’s faces. He relished it. He relished it the way a person well-versed in tantric sex will relish the build up to the finish, with almost no attention at all paid to the final squirt at the end. And, like a person versed in tantric sex, it took practice to become good at it.

  Spencer understood that there were all kinds of people in the world. That there were those who were born with a certain powerful or beautiful body type, which allowed them to look down on others and society gave them the okay to do so, no matter how many anti-bullying campaigns were launched. Other folk were prone to kind acts because, being bullied themselves, they could empathize with those who were pushed around. It was a survival mechanism: We should band together. United we stand, divided we fall.

  But no matter which of these personalities a person happened to be, no matter what their body or personality type, they will almost always do what they do because of a perceived consequences and rewards system. And Spencer understood that system to be based off of what a person bel
ieved they could reasonably get away with.

  And that’s why few people understood Spencer Adam Pelletier. Turning in a bully was never about getting a pat on the head or his face on a poster. Quite the contrary, Spencer had perceived those “rewards” as drawbacks to what he liked best—chopping people down. Chopping down a teacher off her moral high horse, or chopping down a mob boss in B cellhouse of the prison rotunda’s east wing. There was never any reward for that. In fact, there was almost always punishment for it.

  But another facet of Spencer’s personality that his mother and father would come to find disgusting was his blatant masochism. He thought pain was funny, interesting, and, quite frankly, a turn-on.

  An understanding of this concoction was what was essentially missing when folks tried to suss out why Spencer did what he did to Miles Hoover, Jr. in the school library during his second repeat of the fifth grade. And why things had only escalated thereafter.

  Presently, Spencer sat in a new stolen Ford Aerostar minivan outside of Pat’s Auto—he’d ditched the Tacoma thirty minutes and six miles ago because he figured Mac would give the po-pos his description as well as the truck’s—inhaling deeply of his last Marlboro and exhaling ostentatiously, thinking back fondly on Miles Hoover, Jr.

  In those days, he’d been quite the angel, and undoubtedly his parents’ favorite amongst their three sons. Fast-forward fifteen years, he was a murderer on the loose and his brothers, Brian and Collin, had become a lawyer and a nightclub owner, respectively. Brian Pelletier was working on cases for old people who had undergone hip replacement surgery and now needed to sue their medical providers for giving them artificial hips that had been recalled, Collin was battling cancer while facing low customer turnout in a bad economy, and Spencer was waiting on lights to flick on in the windows of a chop shop. O, the paths we take.