I shook my head. “No.” I don’t think he realized I wasn’t humoring him.
“Yeah, well Roger’s gonna help me out. He said in another year or so he’d talk to Universal and try to get me a shot at directing my own flick. How’s that for unbelievable?”
“Pretty incredible.”
“I know.” Ricky frowned and tilted his head. “Wait, you don’t sound too happy for me.”
I frowned, as well. “Sorry. Nothing personal. It’s just been a rough year.”
“Oh?” His smile returned. “So…what’s been going on? Still single? Write any good flicks yet?”
“No and no. My career’s been slow, at best.”
“Huh. That so? Then what’re you doing here? This stuff’s pretty expensive. It’s even a little outside my budget, and I’m pulling in some bank.”
Just as Ricky was saying this, Wendy’s twenty-something assistant Katherine strolled out of the back room. She was an uptight, humorless, and driven girl – the perfect employee, a less-than-perfect social animal. I didn’t like her, and the feeling was mutual.
“He’s not buying anything,” she said as she passed by, wearing an evil smirk on her face. “This is his wife’s store. He works for her.”
Ricky grimaced. “Oh.”
I dropped the magazine to the floor and sighed. I felt my cheeks flush from embarrassment. “It’s not so bad as that,” I said.
“Of course it’s not,” answered Ricky.
“I mean, the store’s making a ton of money.”
“That’s good.”
“It is. And I’m working on a new screenplay, too. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s gonna be a good one.”
I hoped beyond hope he couldn’t see through the lie.
“I bet it will be,” he said after a long pause. “You were the best writer I met in school. I thought for sure you’d be huge. But there’s still time, I guess.”
I nodded. “That there is.”
We both stared off into the distance for a few uncomfortable minutes after that. I didn’t want to look him in the eye, and I’m sure he felt the same. I was starting to bounce from one foot to the other when Ricky finally reached into his pocket and handed me a business card.
“It’s been good seeing you, Ken,” he said. “Can you tell your wife I’d like to order one of those vases against the wall in burgundy instead of aqua? They’re really nice and my mom will love it. My info’s on the card. Just call me when it’s ready.”
With that, Ricky spun on his heels and walked away. “It’s been fun,” he shouted over his shoulder as his squat body wobbled out the front door. He didn’t even turn around to wave.
I spent the rest of the day miserable. My attitude dipped lower than ever and my interactions with the customers were touchy, at best. I tore up Ricky’s card and scattered the remnants on the front sidewalk. Looks like someone’s mom isn’t getting the vase they want. I passed the remainder of my duties off on Billy, who was more than eager to comply. I moped in the corner and watched him work, and a fatalist realization came over me.
I’d wasted my life.
During the car ride home that night, Wendy asked me what was wrong. I didn’t answer her, just kept watching the world as it flashed across the windshield. In no way did I want to tell her how disappointed I felt. I didn’t want to fall back into old habits, old emotions, or old fears, but they didn’t seem to want to go away no matter how hard I tried.
The Great Decline had begun.
12
I heard voices as a child. They weren’t clear in any way, not like an imaginary friend or something of that nature. No, this was more like three or four people talking into my brain at the same time. I could never understand the words, but they were there. I know it might sound strange to say this, but in a way I found it comforting. Other than my sister, I really didn’t have that many friends, but as long as these voices spoke to me I never felt lonely.
I told my parents about them when I was eight or so. They immediately brought me to a child psychiatrist, who said I may be suffering from early-onset schizophrenia. They monitored me for months, until finally I learned to lie and said the voices had disappeared. They really hadn’t, of course, but it was better to let the adults think everything was fine. That way, I didn’t constantly have doctors prodding me.
Over the years, the voices dissipated. By the time I was a teenager they were gone. When I told my physician about it during the physical I had to get before Wendy and I married, he shrugged and said I was probably suffering from a defect of the inner ear that ended up healing itself.
Another of my childhood maladies didn’t fade away once I got older – depression. I’ve dealt with it my whole life, even to this day. When things go wrong in my head, they really go wrong. I fall into a deep funk and it takes a great amount of effort from those I love to pull me out of it.
In June of that year, I fell into perhaps the deepest one ever. The weather was hot, much hotter than usual, with the thermometer hitting ninety degrees every day. We had a spell of eighteen days without rain, and the grass in our backyard turned from green to a gloomy shade of brown.
I couldn’t sleep at night. All the incidental noises surrounding me, from the rattle of the air conditioner to the crickets outside, conspired to keep me awake. I developed deep, dark circles around my eyes that became larger with each passing day. I saw Ricky Davenport everywhere I looked, complete with his smug expression and fancy designer clothes.
That hack made it, my brain repeated, and you didn’t.
My laptop sat open on the kitchen table at all times. After The Spinning Wheel closed I’d sit in front of it with no lights on and allow the glowing screen to turn me into a ghost. I was driving myself mad. Every sentence I wrote, every scene I tried to create, was a bottomless black hole. The only story I could think of was the one I’d started the day Wendy and Cyan went camping – the tale of some strange man named Paul and the even stranger child who greets him. To even call it a story was preposterous. It was only four lines, written over and over again, empty words followed by empty space.
Weekend trips to the dog park brought the only pleasure I experienced over that span of time. I would greet my new friends and sit on the fence for up to six hours, watching our beloved animals chase each other around the browning field. These moments allowed me to feel at least slightly peaceful, as if Silas had taken his innocence and lust for life and used it to plug the hole in my heart. But sure as the day is long, once it was time to go home the demon of failure would return and I’d tread right back down the path to despair.
My relationship with Wendy faltered yet again. Enraptured by her success, she didn’t seem to notice my downward spiral. I grew to loathe every smile, every bright-eyed expression of delight that crossed her pretty face. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be, I told myself. I’m the man of the house. I should be supporting her, not the other way around.
In one of my more unfortunate moments, I decided to tell her just that.
“Wendy,” I said over dinner one night, “I hate this.”
“Hate what?” she replied, her mouth full of spaghetti.
“This life.”
She swallowed hard and dropped her fork. “What?”
“I hate this life,” I repeated.
Her eyes narrowed. “Why would you say that, Ken?”
“Look at me,” I said. “I’m nothing. I’m not even your husband anymore. I’m your employee. And worst of all, that’s how you treat me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Sure it is. It’s all, ‘Ken do this, honey take care of that, the customer over there needs help.’ I can’t stand it.”
Wendy, tears in her eyes, shook her head and stood up. “I’m not having this conversation,” she said.
“Yes we will have it!” I screamed. The look of shock on her face should have stopped me but it only fueled my fire. I continued, “This isn’t the way it was supposed to be! You think you’
re all great, don’t you? You can sit there with Cyan and your other bitch friends and joke about how pathetic I am all you want. Don’t give me that look. I know what you guys do, how you talk. It’s just priceless for you, isn’t it? ‘Look at Kenny, he’s my cute little puppy. Fetch, Kenny. Roll over, Kenny.’ You think I enjoy being your lapdog? This family already has a dog, and it ain’t me.”
Wendy’s throat hitched. “Why are you saying this?”
“Because it’s true. You’ve got your dream. What do I have? Oh, that’s right, I’ve got your dream, too. What about me? What about what I wanted out of life? Huh?”
“You,” she said, now bawling, “are an asshole.”
“Says you.”
Wendy stormed out of dining room. I heard a chorus of sobs as she ran up the stairs. “Serves you right,” I muttered. A part of me wanted to chase after her, to scream some more and build upon my well-deserved, self-destructive rage. I tried to fight against it, but the sensation was so addicting I couldn’t let go.
I heard Silas moan as he slithered from his spot beneath the table. He loped to the doorway and stood there for a moment, looking perplexed. My anger receded a little bit. “C’mere boy,” I said, and slapped my knee. Silas didn’t move, glancing first at me, then in the direction of Wendy’s sobbing, then back at me, as if it was the most difficult decision he had to make in his short life. The doggie smile that usually traced the side of his jaw disappeared. His jowls sagged and he appeared despondent. It scared me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
His lips then drew back, exposing his incisors. He growled, a low, aggressive sound, unlike anything I’d heard come out of him before. After that he bolted down the hall and up the staircase.
In that flash of shimmering fur I realized the gravity of what I’d done. I bowed my head and caught my reflection in the butter knife that sat next to my untouched plate of food. A frightening-looking individual I barely recognized stared back. With a swipe of my hand I knocked the knife – along with the plate – off the table. The plate smashed. The silverware clanked. I cradled my face in my hands and cried.
It wasn’t one of my prouder moments.
* * *
I woke up on the couch the next morning and went into the kitchen to see Wendy standing there, dressed in a light blue pantsuit and sipping a cup of coffee with a newspaper tucked under her arm and a blank expression on her face. I knew something was up.
“Don’t bother getting dressed,” she said. “You’re not coming today.”
After a night’s sleep I felt guilty for my actions, and I tried to tell her how sorry I was for the horrible things I’d said. I promised I’d be better, that I’d try to work through this, if only she’d let me come with her. I didn’t want to be alone. Wendy was having none of it. “I’m giving you the day off,” she declared. “Why don’t you use this time to think about whether the terrible life we have together is worth your time.”
With that she walked out the door, abandoning me to solitude. I felt something brush my leg and looked down. Silas had sidled up to me, tail wagging and tongue lolled to the side. He’d obviously forgotten all about the stress of last night, and for that I was thankful. I didn’t think I could handle it if he was still mad at me, too.
“So, what’re we gonna do today, boy?” I asked. He barked and his tail thrashed even harder.
“My thoughts exactly.”
During the drive to the park, Wendy was all I could think about. I beat myself up for acting the way I had, knowing that my exploits were nothing new. I thought of Belinda, one of my old girlfriends, and what she told me the day she broke off our relationship.
“The problem,” she’d said, “is you’re all about you, Ken. You have this mirage of masculinity you can’t see beyond. It scares you when a woman takes control. Deny it all you want, but you have to realize the truth in what I’m saying. Until you can figure out that success is a relative term, that any woman can be just as triumphant as you, I don’t think you’re ever going to be happy. So goodbye.”
We were sophomores in college when this one-sided conversation occurred. She’d had an article published in the UHart newspaper while the one I offered up was rejected. I took it pretty badly. I guess some things never change.
That’s when I realized that if there was any hope for my marriage, it was me who’d have to change. Make the effort, my mom used to say, and you’ll reap the rewards.
For the first time ever I understood what she meant.
We neared the entrance to the dog park and Silas yipped with excitement. “I know, boy, we’re here,” I said. I pulled into the parking lot and smiled, Wendy still on my mind. I decided right then and there that it was time for me to make that effort, in both my marriage and career. A good stroll and laugh with my buddy was a good enough place to start. Then things would get better. They had to.
Unfortunately, the real world had other plans, for a platoon of construction equipment cast their large shadows over my optimism.
Cranes, bulldozers, and dump trucks sat idle on the dog park’s torn-up grass. The slotted wooden fence around the area had been removed and replaced by one made of steel and topped with razor wire. Future Site of Big Y, a sign proclaimed in menacing black letters. I groaned and my mood once more plunged. A damn supermarket. As if there weren’t enough of those already.
“Well, boy,” I said. “Looks like we have to find somewhere else to have fun.”
13
As fate would have it – and over the years I’ve learned that fate really does shove its dirty little hands where it doesn’t belong on a rather consistent basis – the closing of the dog park was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it set the course for the rest of my life, a curse for exactly the same reason.
Thirteen miles from my house, in the town of Stafford, there was a defunct tobacco farm owned by an old recluse named Bruce Mancuso. I’d always thought the place to be a bit of a dump. Broken-down, derelict trucks from the 1920s were stacked in the side yard of a farmhouse whose roof looked about ready to collapse due to decades of negligence. Every once in a while a random batch of Christmas trees or Indian corn would sprout up in the adjoining fields. Wendy assumed he rented out his unused land for extra cash when he needed it. I wondered how he could pay his bills at all, considering the farm had been inactive for at least as long as the five years we lived in our house.
“The guy’s worth millions,” Wendy explained a couple days after our encounter, when my constant groveling and chivalrous deeds succeeded in chipping away at her irritation. “My parents knew him. Bruce was an only child, and when his father passed away he left everything to his son. In the late seventies, his last tobacco crop developed a virus and died. I guess that was the last straw for him. He’d served in World War II and worked those fields for most of his adult life, so he decided enough was enough and closed up shop. Ever since then, if he’s not vacationing in Peru, he’s holed up in that house. He’s a celebrity at the local market, though. They swear by his generosity, even if they call him ‘Lazy Crazy Bruce’ behind his back.”
“So in other words he’s a bit eccentric,” I said.
“You could say that.”
“But do you think he’d mind if I took Silas there?” I asked. “I mean, the boy needs his exercise, and walking around the block doesn’t cut it.” I pointed at our rambunctious Lab as he ripped apart one of my old moccasins. “It’s Saturday. If he doesn’t get rid of that pent-up energy by the time we go back to work, I’m pretty sure our furniture’s gonna go bye-bye.”
Wendy giggled, and I remembered how much I loved that sound. “You might be right,” she said. “I don’t think Mr. Mancuso would have a problem with it. I’ve heard he’s not too keen on dirt bikes and quads, but I assume dogs are fine. Heck, my aunt Laura’s been taking her border collie there for years. Never even asked permission. She said he comes out sometimes and offers her a cup of coffee when she’s there in the mornings before work. Let
me call her and see what she thinks.”
“Cool,” I replied while petting Silas, who was still busy chewing my moccasin. “You hear that, bud? We might have a new place to run around. How’s that for excitement?”
He lifted his nose and rubbed the side of his face against my leg.
“Yeah, thought so.”
Wendy, on the phone with her aunt, gave me the a-okay. I packed Silas’s things – a Frisbee, his favorite stick, two towels in case he found a pond or mud puddle, two bottles of water – and tossed the bag in the car. Silas waited patiently in the driver’s seat as I did so, taking his usual position with paws on the steering wheel. It was another scorcher outside, and sweat poured down my forehead. Bringing along another water bottle would be smart. I didn’t want the excited rascal to overheat.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him – as if he could understand – and went back in the house.
After taking the extra water bottle from the fridge, Wendy stopped me on my way back out the door. She held my arm firm.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I just want to let you know I haven’t forgotten about the other day,” she said. There was something funny about the tenor of her voice. “And just because you said you’re ready to come back to work, just because you’ve been all gentleman-like, doesn’t mean it’s just going to go away. There’s still a lot we have to talk about. Nothing’s going to get solved if we ignore the problem.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” I said. “Do I sense a yeah but coming on, though?”
Wendy winked. “I just wanted to let you know how happy I am you and Silas have become so close. At first I thought you’d never like him, but I guess he’s grown on you. I’m glad, too, even if it makes me a bit…jealous. Sometimes it seems like he loves you more than me now. And I’m his momma!”
I glanced at the truck. Silas stared back, tongue dangling in anticipation of our journey. His eyes sparkled as he watched us.
Silas: A Supernatural Thriller Page 5
