The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  “Your dad’s one of the managers at the Empire, isn’t he?” Johnny asked.

  “Yeah. And Mom’s an accountant there,” Owen said.

  “What’d you do to get her so pissed?”

  “Breathing would piss her off.” Owen lifted his eyes from the floor. “She hates how fat I am. No one wants to have a porker for a son. That’s what she calls me. The Porker. She puts me on all kinds of diets.”

  “I guess trick-or-treating isn’t exactly Weight Watchers approved.”

  “Yeah, she didn’t like that at all.”

  Above, Nate could just make out the banisters of the Century Room. Legend had it that Morton Strong and Just June once threw a meddling do-gooder from its heights to the bar below. Maybe the planks upon which Nate’s stool sat were the same ones that had shucked the woman’s brain from her skull.

  Morton Strong and Just June were the Lake’s most infamous villains. They were the bad guys in the stories that most haunted the Night Ship. They were murderers, thieves, and extortionists, yet there was still something to admire in them. Because imagine shaking loose the restrictions of law and goodness and rightness. Imagine tearing loose of other people’s expectations and other people’s rules.

  Imagine being free.

  “So you were hiding from her?” Tom asked.

  “I wasn’t hiding.”

  “You were standing in the dark by yourself in the rain,” Johnny said. “Or is that normal for you?”

  “Give him a break, Johnny,” Tom said.

  The Lake’s stories weren’t the same as truth. The kind of lore that mythologized the Night Ship was the type that grows from teller to teller. Stakes are heightened and nuance is lost. Events are polarized until all that’s left to see is black and white. Every story needed villains, but Morton Strong and Just June had once been people, and no single word could sum up the true nature of a person. Even if it could, you had to remember that people are always changing.

  Kindness is Spackle. Tragedy, a chisel. The shape that’s left is who you are.

  This made Nate wonder what kind of people June and Strong had been before the Night Ship. It made him wonder what had turned them into the Lake’s most celebrated monsters.

  “Come on, tell me, O,” Johnny said. “Why’re you hiding? What does she do?”

  Nate sometimes possessed searing focus; at other times his thoughts wandered landscapes of circuitous paths. His consciousness occupied more than one time and space, as if the accident in April had hammered more than his ribs and arm into shards, as if more than just his shoulder had been dislocated. Sometimes he had near-impossible insight, while other times he missed things that were right in front of him. Perhaps that’s why he only now became aware of the change in the room’s weather.

  When he glanced at Johnny, he didn’t recognize the look on his friend’s face. This wasn’t some trick of the alien lighting. His irrepressible friend was gone. Someone else was in his sodden clothes.

  “Tell me what she does,” Johnny said again. He put his hands on Owen’s shoulders.

  “ ‘What she does’?” Owen frowned.

  “To hurt you,” Johnny said.

  “It’s just she cares a lot about what people think, you know?” Owen said. “And—” He hesitated. “Forget it, you wouldn’t get it, anyway.” He turned back to study the floor, but Johnny used his palm to force Owen’s gaze back upward.

  “Oh, you think my dad likes toting around the only kinky-haired kid at the club? You think this black mark that stares back at him from every family photo warms his ice-blue blood?”

  “Johnny—” Tommy said.

  But Owen nodded. “I guess it’s sort of like that.” His head bobbed faster as he chewed it over. “Yeah, I mean, not exactly, obviously, but—you’re right.” In the odd light, his blush was orange. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that you wouldn’t—”

  “It’s fine, O. But since I do get it, you gotta tell me what she does.”

  “Everything’s just so beautiful at the Empire, you know? So at home everything’s got to be exactly right. She spends every weekend on her rose garden because she knows the neighbors are jealous of it. She takes her dogs to the groomer once a week.” Once he’d started, it poured like water through a crumbling dam. “Everything in her life is perfect. Everything but me. The Porker. She likes it when I’m not around,” Owen said. “Then she can pretend she’s got the life she wants.”

  Nate waited for tears to pool Owen’s eyes, but the boy’s gaze was dry. The weight Owen carried in his face gave him a cherubic look, but in the strange light, it looked like a mask.

  Owen’s story was unpleasant, but that wasn’t what hooked Nate’s attention.

  “Why, Johnny?” Nate asked.

  Johnny talked about movies and video games. He lived for sneaked liquor, prurient humor, and basement parties that ended in a closet with a girl and a stopwatch. He didn’t assail acquaintances with soul-baring questions. It wasn’t who he was. Something was wrong, and it had nothing to do with Owen or his mother.

  Johnny’s face clouded with something. Doubt. Fear. Whatever it was, Nate didn’t think it would last. The thing about secrets is that most of them want to be told.

  “Show me.” Sometimes Nate understood things he couldn’t possibly know. He’d never claim the ability to read a person’s mind, but sometimes he thought he could feel its texture.

  Johnny didn’t say anything, but when he grabbed the hem of his soaked scrubs there was already something like relief in his eyes. He pulled his shirt over his head and stood bare-chested before them. He hugged his shoulders in the cold and looked at the floor before turning around.

  Tom gasped.

  Though Johnny stood in the full illumination of the glow stick, Nate first thought a shadow had fallen across him. Three black stripes divided his back. The space between them was mottled, its true colors impossible to discern in the tinted light.

  “I came home Tuesday and found Dad in the kitchen,” Johnny said. He kept his back to them, but turned his head to speak. “He’d pulled everything from the fridge onto the floor, and he was rooting through it, looking for something. The mustard, he said. What did I do with the goddamned mustard? I don’t even eat mustard, but that doesn’t stop him. He starts ripping into me. The usual stuff: I don’t respect his things, I’m an ungrateful cockroach. The worst thing that ever happened to him. Possibly second only to my whore of a mother. I know—no one ever accused him of originality. I try to walk out, but he doesn’t like that, either. He pulls me back, and I shove him away. I shouldn’t have done that. He’s wasted, obviously, and falls right over. He gets lo mein on his suit. He throws me against the counter. I try to run and he hits me with a kitchen chair.” Johnny started to slip his shirt back on. “I slammed into the wall headfirst. The chair broke, but a new one appeared a couple days later. The wall was patched up, too. Maya cleaned up the mess, like she always does.”

  “Johnny.” Tom’s hands were clasped over his ears as if what had been said could be unheard. As if forgetting could make it untrue. “You know you can sleep over whenever you want, right? With Nate, too,” he said, looking over at Nate.

  Nate’s own arm and side had been similarly bruised after the accident. Even from the depths of tranquilized shock, he’d registered the extraordinary color on his side where three of his ribs had broken. Every touch met with a dagger of agony and an alien firmness. Looking through red eyes at his skinny body, at the bandaged incisions under the plastic sheath over his arm and the expanding nebula of subdermal hematomas, Nate understood truly and completely that he’d one day die. That no matter the infinities of his mind, this meat and bone was all that tethered him to this earth.

  And look at how tenuous that connection was: a hair’s breadth from being undone by a baseball and the promise of a peach pie. And he’d been the lucky one. The lake returns what it takes, but he was the only one given back in time for it to matter.

  Johnny’s shirt was back on,
but Nate could still see the ruin of his back. He could imagine his friend being chased by a man twice his weight. A man who was supposed to love him. He felt the breath knocked from Johnny when he crashed against the wall. That surge of pain as his stunned body took its inventory of the damage. He watched the childhood drain from Johnny as he lay on the kitchen tile, replaced with something cold and numb and knowing.

  It’d be easy to despair at how unjust the universe was, but that wasn’t Nate’s way. He’d spent energy taunting Lucy and being baited by her, but he now understood that this had been childish. They were both victims. Their pain had been mighty, but their wrath had been misdirected.

  There were true monsters here at the Lake. Lucy wasn’t one of them, and they didn’t infest the halls of the Night Ship. Beasts like Mr. Vanhouten and Owen’s mom were the real enemy. They infected this town—and like any disease, they had to be treated. Like the pain they caused, they had to be burned away.

  “We’ll get him, Johnny,” Nate said.

  The others turned to him.

  “Your mom, too, Owen.” He felt his mouth crease into a smile.

  “What do you mean?” Tom asked.

  Nate decided that neither he nor his friends would ever be victims again. He grinned because he understood that while misery was an affliction, wrath was a tool. While anguish was weakness, fury was power.

  He smiled because at last he knew what to do with his unquenchable rage.

  Five

  Medea was coming.

  Nate could feel this in the wind and see it in the webs of electricity flaring within the soaring topography of the sky. No storm of his youth came close to what Medea was about to inflict upon the Lake.

  In its deep place, a part of Nate twitched in its sleep.

  He wasn’t far from the Empire’s entrance when a small figure detached itself from the shadows of a side street. Against the gray of the pavement, it was a silhouette of pure darkness. The way it was slumped made Nate take notice. A kid, he thought. Suspicion pricked across his neck. This wariness wasn’t just from the knowledge that vandals once again haunted these streets. Looking at the shrouded person, dressed in black, standing in the rain, an old thorn caught in a tangle of memories. There was a lacuna in Nate’s mind, right in the center of the worst day of his life. He was rarely reminded of this absence, but this was one of those times.

  He slowed his pace. As he did, whoever it was stopped to stare at him. Something was wrong. What Nate had first taken for a long raincoat was actually a mismatched collection of shirts and sweaters. The clothes were strange, nearly rags, and it was difficult to see where one layer ended and another began.

  Then the person slid back the hood. An old woman.

  “You,” the woman said. Her voice was hushed in astonishment. Then she crooked a single finger at him. “You!” She was a wizened thing, and her face stretched into a furious grimace. The mass of wiry white hair that her hood had concealed shot from her head in all directions.

  “I’m sorry?” Nate heard himself saying.

  “After everything, you come back here? You ruined it!” she screamed. “You ruined everything!”

  Nate was familiar with the insanity of strangers. His ER rotation had been a master class in everyday madness, and his trips via the subway were refresher courses. This woman had martyr’s eyes, blazing with righteousness and resignation. He gave her a wide berth, his hands raised in surrender.

  The woman’s face changed as he moved. Lucidity took grip. For a moment it seemed as if she suddenly had become afraid of him. Then she donned her hood and bolted. She cut across the road with surprising speed, her footsteps breaking the shining palette of the street.

  Nate looked around, but the sidewalks were bereft of witnesses. The woman was gone, the shadows on the other side of the street absent even a hint of movement. He might as well have imagined her.

  He hurried to put the encounter behind him.

  As he made his way to the house on Bonaparte Street, he was caught between the need to rush there to protect it and the desire to submerge himself in the rhythms of the storm and let it guide him to the vandals who’d fallen upon the Lake.

  Walking these rain-scoured streets gave Nate the sense of homecoming he’d been missing. This was an all-sensory revelation: the wetness of his cuffs clinging to his socks, the scuff of his steps through puddles, the thousand shades of dark that marked the squalling night.

  The only thing that wasn’t right was that he was alone. Again, he’d left his friends behind.

  Despite his umbrella, Nate was soaked to the knees by the time he got to Grams’s house. The home looked the way it was supposed to. The lights in the living room were on, and his grandmother’s car was in the driveway.

  The door was locked again, and he had to ring the bell.

  “I meant to give you a key,” Grams said as she opened the door. She looked him over. “Don’t tell me you walked, boy. I thought you’d get a ride with Tommy. I’d have picked you up.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be back so early.” When he’d lived here, Grams rarely returned from the Union before two in the morning. He shucked off his shoes and peeled away his sopping socks.

  “I let the managers lock up on weeknights.”

  “Good. You’re not going to be young forever, you know.”

  Grams snorted. “I don’t suppose you actually ate anything. Got some fish and chips warming in the oven. That a suit you’re wearing? Is the Academy Awards in town? Mailman must have lost my invitation again.”

  As Grams went into the kitchen, Nate climbed to his bedroom. He changed from his suit into jeans and a sweater. Back downstairs, he flicked on the outdoor lights and surveyed the front lawn from the panels of the door. Raindrops glistened across the grass, and branches shuddered in the wind.

  In the kitchen, an aluminum pan filled with breaded fish and French fries was at the center of the table between two place settings. Bottles of ketchup and tartar sauce were close by.

  Nate sat at his old place.

  This was how they’d eaten in his last years of high school. Grams would come home around six, and they’d share something from the Union’s kitchen before she headed back to the pub in time for the drinkers’ shift.

  Grams asked how things had gone at the Empire, and Nate told her how great it had been to see Tom and Johnny. How he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed them. Maybe he’ll come back to town again soon, he said. Maybe he’ll bring the whole family.

  It’s what she wanted to hear.

  “You should have told me about the window at the Union,” Nate said once they’d finished eating.

  “Now why’d Tommy go and bother you with that?” She started to gather the dishes. “I didn’t want you to worry. It was only a window. Just had it boarded up snug and tight to keep the inside dry. Nothing to fuss about.”

  “A window here was broken, too.”

  “What? Where?”

  Nate could believe that she hadn’t noticed it. If she had, it would have been cleaned up. Grams started for the stairs, but he was quick to spare her the climb.

  “My bedroom. I swept up the glass and boarded it with cardboard. Tommy’s having someone fix it tomorrow.”

  “We have the funeral tomorrow.”

  “And the hurricane. Don’t want to go into it already down a window. The funeral’s not until late morning?”

  “Eleven o’clock.”

  “I don’t know when the worst of Medea is going to hit.”

  Grams flicked on the kitchen’s little television. The screen came alive with data and scrolling weather advisories. Medea was the only news.

  The meteorologists had honed the hurricane’s projected path. Its trajectory would take the eye north of the city but south of the Lake. The coast would see the worst of it, but the storm had a diameter of over five hundred miles, so the Lake would get more than a glancing blow.

  Nate tried not to let himself be lulled by the footage of shattered boar
dwalks and inundated towns. Surf churned where islands had been. Rain-glazed lenses filmed abandoned shore communities. This time tomorrow these places might not exist at all. When this was over, they might be only names on an obsolete map.

  The universe didn’t care. It never had.

  Shootings, wars, diseases, bombings. You had to work not to be dulled by the ceaseless repetition of tragedy. Because Nate knew it wasn’t enough to witness the pain of others. To make it matter, he had to feel it.

  “Poor people,” Grams said. On the screen, sheathes of roofs cut through the ocean like breaching whales. “We’re so lucky, boy.”

  Lucky that they didn’t live on the shore. Lucky that they didn’t want for food or shelter or so many other things. Lucky because of all the people they loved who’d been taken, they were still here.

  “We are, Grams.” No matter what had happened, this was undeniably true.

  Nate was grateful for the family he had and the life he lived. But he’d lost too much to ever feel safe.

  Medea couldn’t be fought any more than reality itself. But this wasn’t true for everything. Drunks who ran families off cliffs, bullies who tortured the weak, vandals who attacked grandmothers.

  They could be resisted. They could be stopped.

  They could be punished.

  November 30

  I thought this journal was just another one of Dr. Karp’s stupid ideas, but I’ve got to get this down somewhere.

  It started at the boutique. Or maybe way before then. Halloween? April?

  I don’t know. It’s hard to track it all back to one thing. Karp says perspective can only be achieved by treading a path of time along an incline of self-awareness. Seriously, that’s what the guy said. Like he’s trying out slogans for crappy inspirational posters. Headshrinkery aside, I get that it can be hard to get a handle on things, especially while you’re still drowning in them.