A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  He smelled the stationmaster’s sweet musk aftershave before he heard or saw the attendant. “You’re a hard nut to crack,” he said, then tsked, shook his head, and ended by laughing. “Toughing it out, I see. Still no replacement for you?”

  Matteo checked the platform for passengers, closed the doors, shut the window with a sharp slam. In the glass, his reflection and the stationmaster’s face merged for a moment. He pulled back from the window, from the picture of himself as station master, detective, bearded man.

  The stationmaster pressed his face against the window. “You keep this up and you might be due a promotion.” He raised an eyebrow, stepped back, took off his cap and performed a grandiose bow.

  The train pulled out of the station. Matteo sagged against the compartment wall. A trick. Another betrayal. He had played into their hands by acting out the violent vision. He was becoming one of them. It was inevitable. The path was as clear and inescapable as the tracks laid out before the train. He wished he had hung on to the gun. But, of course, without bullets, it would only have served to torture him, like the station masters and detectives, and all the suspect passengers who moved on, cleared of responsibility for the burden he carried.

  The train sped through tunnels. Lights blinked past occasionally in the window. Matteo avoided the glass, afraid of recognizing the stubble of fresh growth he felt on his face, dreading the acknowledgement that he was like all the bearded men working in the subway, fearful of the single word haunting him with the cold resolve of a suspect who would not, could not, admit his guilt.

  ASH MAN

  Today, we live in a different house. The season is not the same. But the scenario hasn’t changed. There is a father, and his daughter. At least today, I know who I am. Back then, sadness whispered in my heart. Not in Gloria’s voice, husky and seductive at the beginning, shrill and angry and terribly hurt by the end. Not in Nina’s, innocent like a melody without closure.

  My sadness was a whine, a mosquito perpetually ready to sting but never drawing blood. I’d lived with it since I was a little kid, and at some point in my miserable adolescence I decided if I was going to have any fun I couldn’t listen to that sad little cry, so I didn’t.

  The voices of other demons sang truer. I heard them more clearly, and allowed them to teach me. I pursued school and the perfection of grades, athletics and the satisfaction of performance. Then there were girls, parties, job interviews, the first apartment, then Gloria, the house, Nina when she came.

  Most of all, the career.

  There was always too much to do. Too many responsibilities. Noise. More than enough to drown the whisper of sadness, except in those still moments which grow and ripen more frequently, lately, in the silences between Nina’s laughter.

  I don’t know why I’ve always had a sad demon inside me. The other demons, hungry for life, never drove me to find out. Now, of course, it’s too late. Maybe it was always too late.

  Right now, it’s much easier listening to Nina laugh as she plays on the swing set. My sadness finds its voice in the squeak of metal on metal as her weight pulls down on the chains grinding against the crossbar rungs, but it can’t sour the song of her joy. Her laughter shatters the world’s silence, blazes against the darkness coming.

  You can’t hear. You’re too far. As I was, before.

  There’s a carpet of brown, red and yellow leaves on the dead grass beneath her. Her mother’s golden hair glows against that backdrop, frames the dimples of her cheeks, brings a sheen to her white teeth.

  She’s wearing the kind of jeans, sneakers and top her mother would’ve wanted her to wear, all very fashionable and expensive. There are twigs in her hair, and her sweat shirt is stained from her play in the yard.

  The air nips at the tender bits of flesh around my neck, at my ears and the tip of my nose, even in the afternoon.

  Two years ago, the other lawn was green, the sun was warm, the shadows stark.

  Nina was four, then, smaller, of course, but just as model-cute, running outside, chasing an imaginary friend. Her clothes were dirtier — her mother was more comfortable with a child’s chaos, more confident she could snap everything back into its proper place and appearance. Nina kicked and jumped over and tripped on toys she’d left all over the yard as if they were obstacles in an army training course. She never cried, she never bawled for me or her mother, just got up and kept running, oblivious to everything except for the imaginary playmate eluding her.

  She was too quick, too focused, for her age. Her energy was frightening. She overwhelmed other children in preschool with stories and facts, wore them down on the playground until she was the last one standing. I remember wanting to ask Gloria if she thought our daughter was going to be an Olympic athlete, and then the first woman President of the United States.

  That day I was curious, for an instant, about what drove her, what she saw and felt and, most importantly, wanted, at that moment.

  But I was on the phone, on hold, with a roofing contractor, and suddenly he was back on the line and we began haggling. In front of me, the bills were spread out on my office desk, and my computer was on and connected to the office and I was scrolling through program test results that looked wrong. Even though it was a beautiful spring afternoon and my daughter was playing by herself in our yard.

  I remember thinking Nina needed somebody to play with. Where was Gloria?

  I listened to the laughter, but not to what was going on. I heard only the hungry demons inside me pushing to get a better deal on the roof, to talk to Gloria about cutting down some of our expenses, to catch the glitch in the code so I could come in to the office on Monday the hero and edge ahead of the pack just a little bit more.

  What did Nina hear?

  After two years, there’s still no one for Nina to play with.

  Age is flesh and spirit and mind transformed through the revelation of a single truth: time. But there are other truths, other transformations. Other ways to grow.

  Terror is one truth.

  I left Gloria. I forgot that, in leaving her, I was also leaving Nina. The two were one in my mind, both other, both female. Inconvenient.

  My body housed a riot of frustrations. Too young for a mid-life crisis, I felt like I’d made a mistake marrying in my twenties and chaining myself to an existence that was already suffocating me. Maybe Nina’s energy infected me. Perhaps the abandon in which she embraced everything, from a car trip to pre-school to lunch, reminded me what life was supposed to be. My dick had something to do with it, too. There were still seeds to be planted in younger, fresher, more beautiful women. How many more Nina’s could I make? How many more Gloria’s could I seduce? How much time did I have left before my power over the womb was gone?

  My demons howled. Sadness whispered only in dreams.

  Gloria and I argued. Appetite smashed against appetite, demon against demon. What did she want? I can’t remember. I never knew, didn’t care. Still don’t. I’m sure she was all about love and family and raising Nina and having more kids, visiting family and building the vast, constricting nest of an extended clan that would have me forever smiling for pictures and driving to gatherings and pushing harder for more money, not for the pleasure of victory in the office wars or buying the latest trophy prizes, but to extend the nest even further and build a future and satisfy the responsibilities I never quite realized I’d acquired. All that mattered to me was what I wanted.

  One day, my sadness roared. It was as if every other part of me had exhausted itself and there was only this last, single, regiment of strength left in reserve. The sound it made rose above all the demands made by my other appetites, the instructions of my other demons. The sound of that sadness, dry, brittle, a wind through chitinous canyons, shocked me. Beat Gloria back.

  I was the one who cried as I screamed at her. She could only flinch, raise her arms to shield her face, blink, tremble, shape her lips to the noise inside herself she could not let loose. In the end, she had no answers to my sad
ness.

  What did Nina hear? What was the sound of our battles like for her? There was terror in Nina’s eyes when I left. I thought there’d be relief.

  Nina has caught her imaginary prey. She straddles an invisible body on the carpet of dead leaves, talks to air, listens to a response. She’s stopped laughing.

  In the silence, my sadness is a moth fluttering in my chest, trying to escape. I keep my mouth shut.

  I am cold.

  Death is another truth. In Gloria’s case, fire was its revelation. The house burned down. A neighbor called to let me know what was happening. I rushed over. Trucks and ambulances blocked the street. A state trooper refused to let me near my old house until the mail man vouched that I used to live there and my family still did.

  The flames burst through the pitched roof as soon as I got there. The fire had been going for an hour; it filled every window and door, licking even out of the basement exposures. The siding was black, and smoke rose like a worm gorged on the carcass of our family. People had gathered from throughout the neighborhood to watch, hardly talking to one another, mesmerized by the sight of the annihilation of one of their own. Water gushed from hoses as the firemen continued to pour water on the flames and on the houses next door. The smell of the water startled me as it haunted the thicker, acrid stench of burnt wood and metal and plastics.

  Nina escaped, but Gloria didn’t.

  Nina is standing, but she’s not looking at the house. She’s staring at the woods, at the leaves ravished by light, blazing in a final fit of glory. She’s so still. Is she breathing?

  Pain is flesh turned to ash by a single truth: fire.

  The flames consumed everything. All the furniture, the bookcases I’d built, the bedroom set we spent a summer shopping for, my old attic office, Nina’s swing set, all her clothes and toys. The heat was strong enough to make me sweat behind the line of firemen struggling to contain the inferno.

  The enormity of what was happening barely touched me. I felt regret in a piece of my history being destroyed, but I wasn’t losing anything real and current of myself. My clothes and books and records were in my own apartment, and though I felt sorry for Gloria’s loss there was also just a touch of a demon’s satisfaction in her punishment for not standing by me, even if! was the one who had driven her away. She didn’t matter, I only cared about what was mine.

  I started looking around for Gloria and Nina. Ashes flew through the air like flies from maggots that had consumed where we had lived as a family. The ashes made everything black, and seasoned the air with charcoal and plastic. Suddenly, I didn’t know what to say to anyone, and they didn’t know what to say to me, other than a chaplain, who gave me to God’s care.

  A sheriff from the local police department brought me to the ambulance where Nina was being treated. She took my hand and squeezed it as she sat up on the stretcher in the vehicle, an oxygen mask by her side. Her yellow sweat suit with flowers and butterflies showed only a few grass stains. She must have been playing outside when the fire hit.

  She didn’t cry, or hug me. I asked where her mother had gone, thinking she was outside trying to get in touch with me.

  One of the EMT’s stuck his head into the back of the truck and told me my daughter was in shock. He signed for me to come over, and whispered that Gloria had not made it out of the house.

  He whispered in the voice of my sadness.

  Nina was suddenly next to me, and then past even as I reached out to hold her. She wiggled out of the EMT’s grasp and took a few steps away from the truck. Before either of us could reach her, she touched something on the ground, then put her hands to her face.

  Smearing ash across her face as the light from the fire played across her face, reflected in her eyes, she said, “The Ash Man is coming.”

  The medical technician cleaned her face and threw me a harsh glare, as if I’d failed my own daughter.

  Truth danced in Nina’s eyes.

  Looking back, of course, I see where I could’ve done things differently. I might have made an effort to reconcile our conflicts, gone to a marriage counselor, engaged in family therapy. Played the game of relationships by the rules of our cultural etiquette. That way, I could have left in stages, reassuring Nina, allowing her to mourn the loss of her world gently while hunger drove the adults in her life apart. Maybe it would’ve helped.

  Maybe not.

  “Who’s the Ash Man?” I asked Nina afterwards, when she was safe in my apartment. I thought she meant me, the one who burned and destroyed her life.

  “A man,” she answered, not looking at me. The bag of clothes we’d bought at the shopping center sat next to the ones donated by the Red Cross, along with the paper bag of stuffed animals and dolls. “What kind of man?” I bit my lip on that one, thinking she was going to give me the sarcastic reply, `a man made out of ash, daddy.’ “A man who does what he wants.”

  Yes. A demon. “You said he’s coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s he coming from?” She pointed to her chest. “And where is he going?”

  Again, she pointed at her chest.

  I wanted to ask if that was her heart she kept pointing at, but I wasn’t sure if she’d understand the question. I didn’t want her to say yes.

  “What does he want?” I asked, thinking that was a better question. But as soon as I spoke it I knew I didn’t want to know and I tucked her into bed and read her a story.

  Here we are, father and daughter, each listening to our sadness, worlds apart within sight of each other.

  What does it whisper to her?

  Mine clicks in its armored carapace and rustles metallic wings. It tugs at invisible webbing with a terrible claw, daring its maker to come forward. It is a jealous sadness that imagines Nina dead, so it can have me all to itself.

  What does Nina’s sadness whisper to her?

  I found a house with a yard to rent so Nina could have her own room and a familiar environment, and so child welfare wouldn’t take her away from me. I dropped her off at school, picked her up from after school programs, set up play dates with other parents, mostly mothers. Weekends were filled with activities. I cooked, cleaned, read to her at night, woke her up in the morning. When she came to me crying in the middle of the night, I held her until she fell back asleep. I was Nina’s mother as much as her father, which was, of course, more than I’d ever been to her, before.

  The life I’d left Gloria to pursue evaporated. The girlfriends, the parties, even the career, fell away before the consuming need of a child dependent on me for everything. I became Nina, empty and aching, desperate for love. And she was my most powerful demon.

  Somewhere in the mix, one of the single mothers of the girls in Nina’s social group began talking to me outside the realm of our children. The relief I felt in being able to open up about the stress of being a single parent, of losing my social life, watching my career disintegrate until I was no longer a “comer” but a “has been,” was intoxicating. At last, somebody understood what I was going through, and cared.

  We became involved. I tried to hide the relationship from Nina.

  Nina’s energy scattered, flared, became violent. She got into fights. Play groups became battlegrounds, classes and trips adventures in war zones. She tore her clothes up, smashed her dolls, ripped stuffed animals apart with savage frenzy at night. Feeding her dinner, I felt like a handler at the zoo, throwing meat at a lion brought in from the jungle that would just as soon take my arm.

  My sadness took its voice from her fits of screaming, her tantrums and inconsolable weeping. The amount of hurt seething in her little body taught me the truth of my own terror. The wound seemed bigger than Nina, larger than anything I could contain myself; she was something like a walking black hole, an engine of annihilation, destroying everything around her in her own self-destruction.

  I could never survive the pain she was experiencing. I couldn’t even live in its vicinity.

  The woman did me a favor and
picked up Nina when I had to work late and, for a change in my Nina-centered pattern, didn’t wiggle out of the obligation. My other demons were rising, awakened by fear, fed by Nina’s wildness. As the adult, I tried to discipline her. But as the man I was and am, I felt if she could do what she wanted, so could I. I wanted to save my career.

  There was a crash. A fire. The woman died, and her daughter. Miraculously, Nina survived.

  I lost control of Nina long ago. That’s obvious. Should I have accepted responsibility for her when I left Gloria? Taken custody of my daughter?

  Or should I have punished her, left her neglected and forgotten, abandoned as so many other fathers do with their children, and so given her a reason to hate me? Would that have made it easier for Nina’s heart to heal, to grow both little older and wiser with her loss?

  Did my sadness infect the wounds I made in her, or did I pass that demon on to her at her conception?

  Either way, that part of her that is most like me, and that separates her most completely from me, is the legacy I passed on to her. We share that much.

  Terror is the destruction of innocence by betrayal.

  The house is different, and the season. But the scene is the same as it ever was. Father and daughter. Gloria is not around, but the drama was never about her. She never got the chance to hurt Nina the way I did.

  All my demons have run away, or died, or been consumed, except for the sad demon, which whispers in rasps and clicks and on occasion in the insect drone of a hive of one that eventually metamorphoses into high-pitched scream.

  Some Dads take their kids camping, or get involved in their sports. They read bedtime stories and sing songs to them. Dads and kids watch cartoons and movies and television shows together, which can be mind-numbing for the adult but wonderful and life-changing for the child. Dads take their kids shopping, and let them win at games, and watch them run mad in the playground.