Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  “How can I laugh? I don’t even have a passport.” The silly cat settled down to sleeping between my crossed legs; I guess he hadn’t ever really been afraid.

  She wiped the back of her hand over her face. “Then . . . I don’t know. Logan came along. Mom got all this attention for being pregnant with him, but then she didn’t really want him. Or me. And I started getting big boobs even when I was eleven, and then it was like those were leprosy, and I had to be a big girl and stay home, and . . . well, and for a while they came back a lot, but then that stopped, and after the big thing with Logan . . . do you know what he did? It’s the only thing I’ll ever love about the fucking little bastard.”

  I shook my head.

  “About a year after they put him in foster, the county tried to take him back and return him to Mom, and make her promise to spend a lot of time at home. And in the courtroom, Mom was trying to explain to the judge that she needed to spend a lot of time discovering the world, and that was when that dumb little shit figured out they were going to take him away from the Taylors, who are this awful, awful hillbilly family down in Lima with like six other kids in a big dirty house with like cars in the yard and everything—the dad fixes cars, so no kidding, they have like ten of them in the yard all the time—and Logan lets loose with sobbing and crying and screaming he doesn’t want to go back to Mom and he doesn’t want to go back with Dad and he doesn’t want to go back with me. Fucking beautiful. Stupid kid pissed all over Mom and Dad and the money and wants to be a goddam redneck hillbilly. They send pictures almost every month, him in his Little League uniform and the Boy Fucking Scouts and just, you know, out-of-it shit. But that was the best thing he ever did. Yelled it right in everybody’s face that he’d rather be with his hillbilly fosters than put up with Mom and Dad’s shit.” She wiped her eyes again. “He was always useless.”

  “Anyway,” she said, slumping, her rage apparently used up, “there you have it. I’m going to be an artist, people are going to know me, I’m gonna be solid cool with all that shit my mother thinks is cool.”

  “I think you’re cool,” I protested.

  “Well, yeah, you think I’m cool. You’ve never left Lightsfuckingburg and all you want is a job away from your crazy mom, of course you think I’m cool. But my parents are so embarrassed. Because I’m too old for them to be as young as they pretend they are. Mom throws crying jags over anybody finding out she’s over forty, you know.” Then she leaned back, putting her hands behind her, which made those big breasts really stand up, and cocked her head like she was pretending to be all whimsical. “How can you stand to have that thing touching you all the time?”

  It took me a second to realize she meant Hairball. “Uh, he’s my friend?”

  “You like him better than you like me.”

  “It’s not like that. I wanted to, Darla—shit, I still want to—but Hairball trusts me, and I can’t kill a friend just to get laid. You know?”

  “I never even had goldfish,” she said.

  “I didn’t till after my dad died. He just said having pets meant having animals in your house and he didn’t want to live in a damn animal pen. I guess Mom always had pets growing up.”

  “She sure has them now.”

  “She’s crazy,” I said. Hairball rolled over and rubbed the back of his head on my thigh.

  “Ewww.”

  “Come here and pet him,” I said.

  “No way. All hair and spit and teeth. Be a gentleman while I get dressed, hunh?”

  So I turned my back, and kept petting Hairball, and it sounded like she was crying. I asked if she was okay.

  She kicked me in the back, hard but not on anything vital, and yelled, “Fuck you, you stupid bastard, fuck you,” loud enough they must’ve heard her in Canada.

  Then she ran buck naked out of the hollow, clutching her clothes in a heap to her front, jumped in her car, threw it in gear, and peeled out in reverse, getting like halfway up the road before she made a turnaround. The first stupid thought I had was, well, she’s got a garage door opener and an attached garage, I guess as long as the cops don’t stop her, she can probably get home without anyone seeing. My second thought was wondering if this was going to be a story for her after all. And my third thought was, wow, my back really hurts.

  I was just feeling at my back and deciding I didn’t have anything worse than a bad bruise and a hole in my T-shirt—when I had an odd sensation of someone watching me. I looked up, and there was Stacy, leaning over the bridge railing.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I waved at her, feeling like Pancake Pete, and she half-waved at me, like she was stunned, and then pulled her head back from the bridge railing and was gone.

  I was figuring she would probably wear out the dial on her phone tonight.

  “Come on, Hairball,” I said. “We really should go home.” He didn’t want to go back in the pillowcase, so I let him climb onto my arm and put his forepaws on my shoulder. All the way home he hung on like that, purring like a crazy bastard. Tears poured down my face, just as if Hairball was dead, and as if I couldn’t feel him digging his claws into my T-shirt and scratching my shoulder, or his back paws pushing down on my arm and tiring out my triceps, or his idiot head thumping against mine.

  I came in the door, and went to drop him on the couch, but Hairball sank his claws in and meowed—he had discovered he liked riding this way, I guess, and figured he’d just do it for the rest of his life. So I ran up the stairs, still carrying him, to change out of my torn T-shirt and get a look in the mirror at the bruise I was sure I had on my back.

  When I found my room door wide open, and Mom in there with her back to me, I nearly screamed. Not another one of my cans, not so soon after the last one—

  She turned around, stared wildly at me, and said, “Uh.” Then her eyes focused on Hairball and she said, “You brought him back. He’s alive.”

  How could she have known what I planned to do?

  But she knew.

  Then I saw the shredded remains all over my bed, the yellow notebook paper that had already been dry and crumbly, now a pile of loose bits of paper, lint really, if that. Just three corners, from different pages, remained on the wall, clinging to the thumbtacks.

  She had torn up Dad’s directions for taking care of the house. Torn them to shreds and beyond, might have torn them all the way down to dust I suppose if she’d had enough time.

  Sure as shit, I didn’t know what to say, and going by her expression, neither did she. We both just stood there, both knowing all the facts, somehow, without knowing anything that was true. I think if I could have said something about Indians baseball or if she’d said something about flying saucers, we’d both have sighed with relief and babbled for an hour. But we just stood, stared, tried to figure out what we’d be saying if we knew what to say.

  After a real long time, she pushed her hair back from around her face and made herself look me in the eye. “I’m sorry. I thought you were going to kill him like you killed the others. It says in a book I was reading that when a teenage boy, um, when he gets to be . . . the way you are, his cycle gets shorter and shorter, and you killed two just in the last two days.”

  Hairball squirmed, turned, dropped to the floor, and padded out, probably having decided that whatever was going on between the can-opener operators, it would doubtless work out just fine for the cat.

  “I didn’t kill any of your cats,” I said. “I never did. It was a raccoon, like I said.”

  Her eyes welled with tears and she wiped her face. “First it was Lemondrop, and then Sunblessing, and there was only half of Silvercloud left—”

  “Mom,” I said. “Mom.”

  She stared at me.

  “Mom.” I didn’t know what to say beyond that. I dropped the bag on the floor, and it made a telltale thud, but I didn’t care, I grabbed her and hung on like she was the only tree for a hundred miles and I was surrounded by bears. “Mom, I am telling you the truth. The old raccoon killed them. I jus
t buried them for you.”

  Her hand rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ve been having nightmares for years. Officer Williams told us what you did to that rabbit, and I have awful dreams about you doing that to Mrs. Fuzzyworth—she was my favorite, of all time, and she just disappeared—”

  “Mom, I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Fuzzyworth, either.”

  She went on like she didn’t hear me. “—and I can’t wake up and I have to watch you and I can’t wake up. And the dream just goes on all night. I know you did it to other cats, too, but Mrs. Fuzzyworth was special, I loved her, and I see you cutting her up—”

  “I never did that to anything but that rabbit, Mom.”

  She pushed my head back and looked into my eyes, and it was like a tiny, sane bit of my old mother, the one that protected me from Dad, the one I could tell anything to, for just a second. Then she grabbed up the pillowcase and shook it. The garden shears and the box cutter fell out.

  It felt like my heart was right there next to them.

  And I sat down on my bed, and grabbed my head with both hands like I was going to tear it off, and looked down at the floor, and told her everything—Spooky Darla, that weird idea that Darla had that I slashed up cats, that she was going to have sex with me, the shit on my bed, about getting to see Darla naked and realizing I didn’t want to do it, couldn’t do it in a million years. I even told her why Darla wanted to do it that way. I finished real stupid, just saying, “I was just real angry.”

  She didn’t speak for so long that I finally looked up, afraid she’d have walked out of the room, afraid she was about to tell me to leave forever, even afraid that she was going to call over a bunch of the super super ladies and they were going to chant to drive the grays out of my room. I mean, it was Mom. Anything was possible.

  Instead, very, very softly, she said, “I know where she got the idea that you’ve been cutting up cats, Karl. I’ve been worried sick about you. I thought . . . Neil likes to read these books about killers, you know, it’s like murderers are his hobby the way mine is UFOs and astrology? Only he’s not as serious as I am, but his apartment has all these books. And he said that in all those books, the serial killers start with animals, when they’re teenagers, and they’re fascinated with weapons and violence, and loners, and they have trouble with girls.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “And I was afraid, Karl. Afraid of you. Afraid for you. Afraid that my little son was . . . well, you know what I was afraid you were.”

  “Didn’t you ever ask, you know, a hunter, or a trapper, or just someone who knew—”

  “They’re all full of male energy and I’ll-tell-you-the-truth-little-lady. I felt like I couldn’t trust them. Some of them tried to talk to me, I guess because they heard the things Neil was saying—”

  “I think I want to kill him.”

  “He got a lot of it from me, Karl. I didn’t know what to do and I was too afraid to do anything. That nice psychiatrist said you were all right, and your father and I thought you were, but then we got the cats after your dad died, and it was only like three months later that I found Lemondrop all torn up in the yard. And you know, I know you don’t like Neil, but one thing he did that Doug never did, he listened.”

  He also talked, I thought. “So everyone’s been arguing behind my back whether I’m a crazy killer or it’s just a raccoon?”

  “Not really everyone, just the people at parties. Which is probably where Darla heard it, because, you know, she comes to a lot of parties.”

  “Yeah.” I sat there for a while, trying to see what it felt like to keep breathing. “You must’ve been scared to death of me.”

  She shrugged. “Never really scared of you. Scared for you. Scared you’d do something terrible. Scared you’d be caught.” She sighed. “There’s something else I guess you’d better see, too. I thought—Karl, that cat should be special, he loves you, he’s yours. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you taking him down the stairs, you were going to kill Hairball, I couldn’t believe you had gone so far evil so I—well, I lost my temper and I got all full of angry energy and—you better see this.”

  She walked past me and I followed her downstairs, like I was a little boy, or maybe like I was a puppy who had messed the rug.

  In the backyard, all five of the glazed and primed storm windows were lying in the wet grass, some of their shattered panes knocked all the way out, littering the yard with hundreds of bright glints in the sun.

  “You like to be barefoot out here,” I said. “This is really stupid.”

  “I wasn’t thinking real clearly.” Mom looked it over and said, “I know this was important to you. Will it take much to redo it?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll need to buy some glass and get a friend with a car to help me move it here. Maybe old Browning would help me out, I kind of like the idea of pulling up a hearse in front of Wilson’s place.”

  Mom made a strangled noise, then coughed way too much like Wilson, then growled, “Goddam undertakers.”

  I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh, and so did she, and we went back inside, almost friends I think, until we got back up to my room.

  At first we thought that that sad pile of torn paper could be put back together like a puzzle. But it quickly turned out to be hopeless; the dried-out pieces broke in our hands, that old gravity furnace made it so hot up in my room, and so dry, that four winters had pretty much destroyed it. After a while we both gave up; there was no way to get it all laid out and then tape it together.

  “I’m so sorry, Karl,” she said. Her eyes were clear and calm, like the Mom I remembered; I almost cried right then.

  “It’s okay, really,” I said. “I pretty much have them all memorized. I’ll miss them but I don’t need them.” It was true; even now, just telling Mom about it, I could see all of the four notebook sheets in my mind’s eye, and read all sixty-two tasks, spaced two lines apart in case he wanted to add notes (which he sometimes did up till he died), all in Dad’s neat bookkeeper’s hand lettering. In fact, right now, it would have been so nice to just sit and look at them, or even to stretch out for a nap and read them till I fell asleep.

  “Sweetie?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah, Mom, I’m just kind of absorbing that it’s really gone, right now.”

  “Tiger, I’m so sorry, this is the kind of thing that happens when we let anger get into our energy.”

  “I guess it is, Mom.”

  “This is the kind of thing I wanted to protect you from.” She sighed and wiped her eyes. “Actually I don’t protect you from much, do I? And your father didn’t either, I guess neither of us could.” She looked at me, straight and clear and sane as anything, and said, “I’m sorry, Karl. These last few years must have been awful for you.”

  And something just broke. Not like a dam, crashing slowly down, but like the whole world just ceased to be. I was there in the void with nothing at all, and before I knew it I was running down the stairs, running like a crazy bastard, vaulting over Hairball, out the front door, and on down the street. I didn’t hear her call after me or anything. Probably she didn’t, come to admit it, but it would have been nice if she had, I can tell you that. It would have been fucking nice.

  I ran and ran; like Dad used to say, “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” I ended up in City Park, sitting on a bench, breathing like I’d just come up from five thousand fathoms, hands on my knees, panting like a pervert with a peephole into the girls’ locker room. I was two miles from my house, and I’d probably just broken all my previous records—speed, distance, and lunacy. I wanted to cry but I was breathing too hard to do anything but breathe.

  I stayed on that bench, by the pool, which had been closed for the season and drained that week. I was a long way from the playground or the basketball courts, just among the picnic tables, but with the cold and rain the day before, no one had planned a picnic I guess, so there was nobody in sight. I sat there because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, and stayed until
my breathing was slower and I started to come back to myself a little.

  It got dark after a while, and I was getting hungry. I looked at my watch, not sure what to do, and saw I had time enough for some basics, and my wallet had enough, so first I walked the mile and a half back to the downtown, taking side streets where I didn’t know anybody so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  Come to admit it, I was kind of ashamed of how I’d behaved, and really having a hard time figuring out how any guy could be as fucked-up as me and still remember to breathe. Mom acted okay for the first time in years, and I just lost it and ran out on her. Shit-jesus, God only knew what that might have sent her off into. Maybe she was smashing the rest of the windows and looting all my money cans, or more likely she was off with the super super ladies now getting really drunk, even more weird ideas, seriously horny, and a lot of sympathy. I’d have to go home eventually, but I admitted to myself I was just too chickenshit to think about that now, too afraid of what I could find.

  Plenty of cash in my wallet. Kathy had let me do my shift without my McDorksuit before, when I’d been locked out or not able to go home; I should find a pay phone and call her.

  I could get a single room at the Carrellsen tonight; probably Paul wouldn’t be able to smuggle me into his basement, and there was nobody else I felt comfortable asking, and besides, this was Marilyn’s night on the front desk, and she was a real bud. Getting a room would set me back a couple days’ work but it beat trying to get by on four hours of McSleep.

  I took a deep breath and kind of put it in perspective; by dawn Mom would be passed out drunk for sure. I had reset the window sash lock earlier that day. I could sneak in and get what I needed for school, neat and easy, at around eight in the morning or so. Then when she got home from work tomorrow I could try to have it together enough to tell her . . .