The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Do you have kids?” she asked.

  “A daughter.”

  “Children misunderstand love. They think a parent’s love is a normal emotion.”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “Children take your existence from you. They don’t even say thanks.”

  A sudden rain hit the roof. It smacked the windows and struck the shutters.

  “I’m a terrible teacher, you should know.”

  “It looks like you make a living,” he’d said, and rubbed his eyes. By that point he was getting weary of such crap.

  She looked at him inquiringly. “I teach piano,” she said. “It’s not investment banking.”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Do you?” She stood up suddenly. Angry about something, coldly inflamed, no longer playing princess. “Do you know when it all started, what’s happening to my son?” So she started to tell him about the accident and the surgeries, the recoveries, the limp, the vast monies spent on medical bills. But he knew it already so he asked, to end things more quickly, “So what were they doing out there, at the lake?”

  She paused. “My husband was owed money. By a quote-unquote friend of his.”

  “Who?”

  “Ben Barrett. Now there’s a guy you should be looking into. I don’t know why the police don’t lock him up out of habit.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s an asshole. He’s the worst person in town. That’s what Nick always said.”

  “Worst how?”

  “They were drinking buddies. Nick used to tell stories about Ben’s ‘business ventures.’ He ran a strip club in the woods. A sex club, if you’ll believe it. I assume it’s still there. It’s popular with your local ex-cons.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “I made Nick take me once. The Purple Panther. A total shithole. But I said, if he was going to be the sort of guy who went to places like that, he’d better get used to having the type of wife who came along.”

  “And you think Mr. Barrett could be connected to your son’s case somehow.”

  She came to a halt. As if she hadn’t thought of it before. She frowned. Shaken. With so much noticeable need to keep her world together, he quickly felt bad for pointing it out.

  She looked him dead in the eye, and he couldn’t look away.

  “My son has a hard time staying out of trouble. That’s the truth. Especially when it’s not his fault. But he’s innocent.” Then a full ten seconds’ hiatus. She looked around the room. Her breathing was light and fast. “I’ve been searching online. For news. You won’t believe the things people say.”

  “You should stay off the internet.”

  “Women I’ve known my whole life. Bragging how their kids would never be involved in this kind of thing.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t take it.”

  “Mrs. Toussaint, this Barrett guy. Is that why you wanted me to visit? Because if you have any idea how he’s connected—”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know.”

  “I am sorry about Nick,” he said a couple seconds later.

  But she didn’t hear him, she was done, recomposed, regal again. “Give me one reason,” she said with an icy tone of detachment, facing away, “why my son would do any of the things he’s accused of.”

  “I understand, believe me. The trouble is he confessed.”

  “And you’re the idiot who helped him write it down. Without a lawyer in the room. I’ll take you to court when this is done. You want to do something? Try fixing the mess you’re responsible for, how about that?”

  And so, two hours later, in the sodden woods, in the darkness, he watches men go in and out of a door cut into the side of a double-wide trailer. Less like men, more like goblins. The whole thing wasn’t so much a club as a case study in contemporary redneck architecture, four trailers soldered together in an arc. The design school of Circle the Wagons.

  And when the door opens, out comes a booming soundtrack. Bumpers gleam in the purple light from the neon sign. There’s a kid’s BMX bike under the stairs leading up to the trailer door. A bouncer looks him up and down, from behind sunglasses. He smiles.

  At first it’s too dark. Once his eyes adjust, the interior’s just as makeshift as the outdoors, but more modified: a portable nightclub. Beer signs. Strings of patio lights. How many people can they fit in there, forty? A young woman gyrates against a pole at one end. A couple of twenty-something guys, with subelectrical twitches, sit at a plywood railing and watch.

  A bar, two feet wide, built into a corner near the bathroom, is staffed by a weathered young woman, with a homemade haircut and an ample spare tire revealed by her shirt. Is she sixteen? Fourteen? Do her parents know she’s here? She stares at something on her phone and laughs.

  He says, over the music, “I’m looking for Ben Barrett.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Surprisingly her voice is sturdy. Maybe she’s not as young as she looks. He pulls out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I’m in town for work.”

  “No shit.”

  “Is Mr. Barrett around?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  The music quiets. The dancer gets down off the pole. The men withdraw from the stage, as much as there is one. Men who, to Martin’s eye, aren’t just dead inside, but look like they buried the bodies themselves. A new song cues, hip-hop this time. He tries a different line, memories from vice-squad PowerPoints. “A guy downtown told me I should come by here. Ask around about getting a date for the night.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.” The girl looks up at him with mistrust. “Who downtown?”

  “Guy at a bar. A dive bar near the beach.”

  The girl returns to her phone. “So you want a beer or not?”

  For ten minutes he watches the audience watching the show and ignores the pain in his back. He tries to lose himself in the raucous music. He actually likes a lot of rap, more than he likes strip clubs at least. Why can’t he just enjoy the show? He was in New Orleans once for a sergeant’s bachelor party, he drank five Sprites and turned down every lap dance the boys offered. Lillian would’ve put his balls in the microwave.

  He squirms on his stool during the next break between dancers. He enviously watches the young guys drink. Then the door opens, and two guys walk in, with tattoos he remembers from training seminars. One’s got on a green polo shirt from Ralph Lauren, wrinkle-free, and a shamrock tattooed on his cheek. The other guy’s younger, gleaming bald, with a neck like a chicken leg.

  Sometimes a shamrock’s just a shamrock. But sometimes not.

  “Can I help you?”

  Martin turns around. “Ben Barrett?”

  The guy with the shamrock. “You a cop?”

  Martin laughs. “No.”

  “So what’s funny?”

  The guy doesn’t want an answer. He’s got a Boston accent so thick it sounds like he’s playing a prank. Up close, the tattoo looks hand-done. The guy says, “So you’re the type of guy who looks for a thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I was looking for something a little more than this.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Martin.”

  “Where you coming from, Martin?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “That’s nice. What’re you doing way up here? I mean, this is the boonies, compared to New Jersey.”

  “I’m in town for business. We’re trying to land New Balance,” he announces. He deliberately shrinks his shoulders, tries to look nervous. “It’s pretty boring.”

  “I bet it is.” The guy licks his lips. His nostrils were recently pollinated. “You know, normally this isn’t how this goes.”

  “How does it go?”

  “How about this: have a good time tonight,” the guy says. “But don’t come back.”

  The man turns around without a word. His friend follows him back outside. Martin’s about
to leave when a pretty girl appears. Much too pretty for this dump. He’d guess she’s topless, but he can’t really tell. The plumage of an Indian headdress flaps around her shoulders, with several white feathers hanging down over her breasts.

  “Hey, good looking. Care for a dance?”

  He smiles, if only for the bare-bones appeal. The music begins again, somehow louder.

  “I don’t dance,” he shouts.

  “What?”

  “I don’t dance!”

  “It’s not that kind of dance.”

  He says, “I like your hat.”

  She leans in. “I think,” she says loudly in his ear, “that you’re going to buy you and me some drinks.”

  She returns a minute later with what looks like champagne, more likely is ginger ale with a drop of vodka, twenty bucks, from what he knows of strip-club economics. He puts his cup on the rail. She doesn’t touch hers, either. They have to shout to be heard.

  “What do you do?”

  “Software.”

  “That’s boring.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’m taking an internet class.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “I’m going to launch my own platform.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Dance on the internet,” she says. “But for myself.”

  “How does that even work?”

  The music gets louder.

  She says loudly, “You’d be dumb not to see me dance.”

  “You seem confident about that.”

  “I’m really good.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’ll change your life.”

  So he accepts defeat, gets up with a sigh, a prayer, while she gives a noticeable nod and says something to the bartender. Martin orders himself to honor her persistence—and who knows, maybe he can interview her afterward about her boss, get her to say something he can use for the case.

  And therefore is he lightened of money, led away, self-conscious for being twice the young woman’s size, a pet Volkswagen taken for a walk.

  They proceed to the trailer next door, through a curtain of beads. Pink lights, pink darkness. Three folding metal chairs. There’s a candy jar full of condoms on a shelf. A narrow porch swing hangs from the ceiling on big bolts, in front of an oil painting of a dead elk. The elk glows in the cast-off glare.

  When they walk in, one chair contains a good old boy in denim shorts. A young Hispanic woman, fully nude, writhes on his lap. He’s got five hot dog fingers clamped on her ass, the other five mounted on a breast, like she might come apart and he’s holding her together. She rubs his groin through his shorts. Then the song changes, the girl dismounts, grabs a towel from a doorknob. The man-child stumbles out after her.

  The music becomes something more sinister, a male singer hissing.

  The headdress woman leans into Martin’s ear.

  “You want something like that, you picked the wrong girl.”

  “I get it.”

  He lowers himself into the tiny chair. Worried more about the chair than anything else. She begins to dance, no hesitation. He groans, he can’t help it; his lower back is clenching, on fire. How long has he possessed a failing machine? And how old is this woman anyway? Is she his daughter’s age? Younger? He strains to make his face at least semienthusiastic. Her little nipples catch the light. She climbs up, balances herself on his thighs. No. His back won’t take much more. While her abdomen ripples like a sheet in the wind, flesh come to life. And no matter that her body is tiny, so supple, and she’s good at her job, even just her minuscule weight as she gyrates goes straight to his vertebrae, and he’s about to complain about the pain when she tips them slightly backward in the chair, and the angle shoots a rocket up his spine.

  He seizes out of the chair and knocks her over.

  “What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He clutches his spine and squirms.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s my back. It really hurts.”

  To the point he’ll soon be seeing stars.

  He throws himself down on the ground. It smells horribly. He’d laugh at himself or apologize more but it’s all he can do to breathe.

  “You could have said something.”

  “Here—take the money—”

  He reaches for his wallet but even that’s too much. He grimaces in pain. She starts to laugh. The music rages. It’s all too ridiculous. He starts to laugh, too, as little as he can manage. From a loudspeaker hanging off the ceiling the singer says he wants to fuck someone like an animal—and that’s what he is, a fucked animal, a father and husband, completely unrecognizable in the current situation.

  “My ex had back problems,” the young woman says. “Just move over.”

  She drapes a clean towel on the ground. He does as he’s told, shifts to the towel. She removes her shoes, then walks on his back. He yelps, but it’s alternately wonderful and excruciating. She hikes up and down his spine through that song and the next one, and the result is so painful, so heavenly, he closes his eyes. Then she’s gone, with fifty bucks that he pays gladly.

  He must fall asleep for a minute. He looks around in a daze. The room’s empty. He didn’t ask the girl a single question about the case. There’s a door with an exit sign, the sound of motorcycles outside. Why did he spend all those years at the chiropractor, not in redneck strip clubs? He lumbers outside, into the dark, like a bear on the loose. He stops abruptly. Two motorcycles roll away. Inside, they tell him Headdress just left. He’s about to ask for her number, then realizes how that sounds. He walks back out, through the storage center, to his car. His back starts to cramp again. The desire to drink is a drip in the back of his skull. In the truck, he kicks off his shoes while Eagle Mount comes to mind, the sandwich shops, the clothing shops, the coffee joint where Lillian liked to meet for breakfast, the town he once swore to protect, where time was he had a life.

  And all of a sudden the girl appears, the dancer, his mind’s eye focuses on her tongue, his lizard mind pictures what such a tongue can do.

  When he scrubs the image, it’s replaced by the night his father grabbed him by the tongue. He hasn’t thought about it in years. He was taking a bath when his dad stopped in the doorway. Often he worked nights. They didn’t have much money. For once he’d gotten home early, and Martin, from his pleasure to see his father, stuck out his tongue. Just as a joke, a tease. His dad glowered, told him to pull in his tongue or he’d rip it out. So he stuck it out again, smiling. Seven years old, still dumb about the world. In a flash his father’s hand whipped across his face. Grubby, big fingers entered his mouth, pinched his tongue like a pair of pliers. The pain was scalding, electric. He was yanked upright in the bathtub, he almost slipped and crashed. And still with the tongue in his grip, his father dragged him out of the tub like a dog, pulled him down the hall, dripping, dancing, running naked through fire. He tried to yell for his mother but he couldn’t speak without his tongue so all he made were choking sounds. While his father laughed.

  * * *

  Al ill assume you saw that new vid on YT it looks really bad are you ok??

  hey al hate to say i think the same thing rly not up to ur normal standards lol

  Yeah thanks for your “concern” guys but things are a huge mess. It’s a long story and really complicated legalistically so I’m talking to lawyers and we have multiple requests to get the mirror copies down. But that course of action is ongoing and taking for fucking ever, so I ask everybody please understand that this takes some time, just give me the benefit of the doubt.

  HEY WHAT R U TALKING ABOUT?

  Al so sorry for you. Hate to say it but I saw the video on the WUNH homepage, I think it’s trending.

  Yea except that video was uploaded without my knowledge, not meant to be shared ever. It’s the footage from Denny’s I told you about, but I was only interested in posting the edited video, obviously, which I did, however the original movi
e UNEDITED was automatically posted to my YT channel by virtue of privacy settings on my phone that I didn’t know about, that apparently by default are set to their MOST public levels when the app’s bundled with the OS, meaning the phone’s been uploading everything I’ve filmed the whole time without me knowing

  I JUST FOUND THE GIF OF U ON REDDIT U WENT BATSHI!!!!! WOW LMFAO

  * * *

  Friday evening, Emily wakes up to the sound of Father’s car pulling into the driveway.

  She’d gone home to pick up more clothes, lain down in bed for a quick nap.

  The car door opens and closes. Boots clomp up the yard. The front door opens and closes, the basement door opens and closes. And from the basement come the flowing sounds of woodworking tools. He’ll have seen the truck. He knows she’s there. She double-checks that her bedroom door is locked, opens the window and rummages in her backpack, and tells herself she’s no longer afraid.

  The previous week she got stoned for the first time with Meg, while Alex was at work. Alex had quit her job at the hardware store, taken a waitressing gig at Scones by the Sea, a teahouse for old-lady tourists. Alex said it was because she wanted to get waitressing on her résumé for college, plus she needed to make more money. Emily had a guess at an additional reason: the new job meant that Alex was mostly unavailable to Emily and Emily’s problems at pretty much all hours. She’d also gone unusually quiet on texts, and Emily couldn’t fathom why, not completely—why, in her worst time of crisis, with her boyfriend locked in jail, her best friend had basically decided to vanish—without reaching some extremely bad conclusions.

  But Meg was there. On the couch, in the kitchen, giving her a ride to work. And she didn’t appear to mind that Emily basically lived on their pullout couch on a permanent basis.

  Then, the previous week, Meg had gotten home from another surf session with her new friend-boy, stretched out on the floor, and packed a bowl. She offered Emily some once it was lit. For once, she didn’t decline. She was surprised to feel touched, even cared for. She felt like someone had noticed how awful she felt. And it did have healing properties, Meg said.