by Paul Flower
“You never could do nothing right, know that? Never.” Mom’s voice pattered in his ear. “I should’ve known better than to expect you to not muck this up like you mucked up the other thing.”
He reached again for the key and groaned. “I’ll come, Mom. I’ll be right there,” he whispered. This had to work. He thought a prayer, a small one. Please God. Make this work, mysterious though you are. “I’ll be there.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. Know what? I’m going to tell you something here. I’m calling me a cab and I’m going to tell him to take me home,” she said, her voice warming.
“Home?”
“To my own house. And I’m sitting on the porch like the old days. We’ll talk all about this then, like we always talked. Before you took me away, sent me off like a chicken in a cage.”
“Wait. No. No. That’s stupid.”
Monahan had fallen again, this time to his knees, one arm slack at his side. Kid-cop, bent over, had a hand on the elbow of Monahan’s good arm, helping him up. Monahan jerked the elbow free. Kid-cop slipped on the grass and went down on his belly.
“You don’t call me stupid, ‘cuz you know who the stupid one is. The stupid one is the one that was always going to be a man but wasn’t. Should have known better than to send a boy to a do a man’s job. I’m always best off doing stuff myself. Always. I come down here for you but now I’m doing what I should of done a long time ago. I’m going home because I want to, then I’m gonna get all this straightened out.” The line went dead.
Monahan was standing again, one hand holding the opposite shoulder, face red, bellowing obscenities at the kid-cop, who was now on his knees like a sinner in church, alternating pleading for mercy and attempting to brush the mud from the front of his uniform. Mom’s words echoed in Jesse’s head, bumping into snatches of Monahan’s tirade. Home. Going home. Why? Asshole. Boy. Man’s job. Rookie. Should have done a long time ago. Bastard. Stupid. Doing stuff myself. Something Mom said, he’d missed. Jesse felt it crawling up his belly. Something big. For a long time, he’d sensed it. But. But what? What had he missed?
Jesse kicked the gas pedal and turned the key. The phone rang again. Jesse slammed his fist against the steering wheel. He answered. “What?”
“Jesse?”
“Of course. It’s my phone number, isn’t it?” Silence, then the voice registered. “Is that… Sorry, honey. Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Ah… yes. Yes. I’m fine.” He wiped a hand across his face. Unexpected, tears chugged to his throat. “I’m okay,” he croaked.
“You don’t sound okay.”
“No. No. They’ve just been working me hard here is all.”
Monahan and kid-cop were now nose to nose.
“I’ve been so worried. We haven’t heard a thing from you, and you took so many clothes and things and there’s been a policeman calling here, and—”
“What did he say?”
“He was asking questions about you and where you were and about when you were younger. I don’t get it. I don’t know. I don’t. You’ve been acting so weird lately, and I told him that and he started asking things that didn’t make sense but did and now I’m just, I don’t know. I’m here.”
“You’re where?”
“Here. In town.”
“What?”
“I’m… don’t get mad.”
“Robbie? He okay? He with you? Where are you? Why are you here? Why? Why did you come here?”
“Robbie’s fine. He’s staying with the Spencers. He loves their dogs, you know. I was going to drive, but then the car wouldn’t start. Jesse, you’ve been so, so strange. And I’ve been, I’ve been thinking a lot, and the policeman, and you cleaned out—I mean, cleaned out—the closet.”
“Gretch… what were you thinking?” He groaned. He had to get the car started and get going. Up the road, Monahan was on his knees, bent over, retching. Kid-cop put his hand on Monahan’s back. Monahan straightened up on his knees and swiped at the kid-cop’s hand. Kid-cop held both hands out, palms out, in self defense. “Gretch, why? What’s wrong with the car?”
“I don’t know. It just wouldn’t run and I got so frustrated and scared and, I took… I got a stupid bus ticket I was so mad and rode over here with these sweaty, smelly people. But,” she paused. “I had to come, Jesse.”
“You couldn’t call a mechanic? Service comes with the lease; I told you that. Why did you… a bus? You don’t ride a bus. Why didn’t you rent a car? Or borrow a car? Why are you here?”
“I’m here because, I don’t know, of you. I wasn’t thinking at all. I just, I guess, panicked. Something’s wrong, Jesse, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone we know. I just wanted to come. Something’s wrong. I know there is. Something’s always been wrong, hasn’t it?”
Jesse gritted his teeth. This could not be. He closed his eyes and imagined her. He felt her voice—“Jesse? Are you there?”—pressing against his heart. Comfort, surprising and cool as mist, whispered through his tired brain.
Gretchen. Oh. Man. Gretch. Wrong? Something wrong? Let me tell you. He treated her like the enemy most of the time. He held her at arm’s length. But she’d always been his salvation, hadn’t she? Yes. He wanted her now, wanted just to talk, to reason things through. But he didn’t need her here. Not yet. Jesse Tieter ran the trembling edge of a fingernail along the spine of his hand. He pictured her. On a bus. Staring out the window. Arriving. Here. With a bunch of flannel-shirted idiots. Wrong. Her. Here. On a bus. A bus? He sat up, his blue-gray eyes wide.
“Where are you?”
“The bus station.”
“You mean right downtown.”
“Yes, the one—there’s this tiny bookstore here. Why, is there another bus station?”
The bus station. How could she? How could this happen?
“Jesse, listen. I’m… we… have to… to talk.”
Jesse stared out the dirty, pitted windshield and thought he saw his mother’s face. Wrong. All of this. What else? What else had he missed?
Monahan was coming his way. He was scuffing along, holding his shoulder, kid-cop behind him with a hand on his holstered side arm. No. Not this. Not now. Jesse reached for the key in the ignition. From far off, another siren yodeled to life. There was a blur in his peripheral. He turned. Elvis was standing there, chest heaving.
Elvis yanked on the door handle; the door wouldn’t budge. He gritted his teeth. “Open the door.” His breath blushed the window.
Jesse shut off the phone and clawed at a hand. No. No way.
“Open it.”
Jesse turned the key in the ignition. Nothing.
The siren, mournful and still far off, was growing louder. Monahan’s flushed face looked determined, his kid-cop partner anxious. Jesse turned back to his brother.
You.
You.
Mom.
Lavern. Gretchen.
Donnel.
The bus station.
Gretchen. Lavern.
He’d missed something.
Mom.
He’d missed. Something black.
The fox.
Their eyes met.
The past.
Remember.
Now.
No.
Yes. Something heavy and swinging in the shadows, in the sunlight and the shadows; both saw it. A black thing swinging through his field of vision. Both closed their eyes for a second—to fight it away or to see it more clearly?
The siren. Louder. Monahan just thirty yards away with the fresh-faced kid-cop.
The bus station. She’s there. My wife.
This thing. Something in his eyes.
He gets it, Jesse thought. He freaking gets it. But do I? What did I miss?
; Go. Move.
Hurry.
The car wouldn’t start.
A silver Mercedes rocketed past, bucking the Cordoba. Elvis’ hair seemed to explode then settle back into place.
No.
Wait. Not now. Not NOW.
The siren. The bus. Her. Him. Who? When?
Before Elvis could react, Jesse was out of the car, brushing past and running. Jesse stopped and threw a wild look back. Mistake. His shoulder screamed and he squeezed it in place with one hand. Elvis stood by the car, mouth open. Just a few feet to Elvis’ right, Monahan and kid-cop froze, mouths open too. From up the road, there was a squeal of tires as the silver Mercedes ground to a stop. The thought hit Jesse then––my car? The backup lights blinked on and the car began careening wildly back toward him. Jesse, gripping his aching shoulder, half-ran, half-slid down the steep ditch, up a slight incline and into the woods.
For Elvis, the world tipped and teetered and the memory blipped above the cockeyed horizon. It was. Him. In his brother’s eyes. He’d seen him. Elvis felt the tears and swallowed hard.
The siren whooped. The cruiser skidded to a stop behind the Cordoba. Harvey Monahan, just a few yards away, holding his shoulder, was bleeding. The driver, young and big, looked scared.
Elvis had no clear thought of what to do next. His head ached. His stomach churned. Wet with the cold, damp sweat of the memory, he trembled. He closed his eyes and saw Lavern, his brother’s eyes. Those other eyes. Oh. It ached. His head. His heart.
You’re letting him get away.
He ran after his brother.
****
In the quiet, in the nothing that followed the BWAAM, the boy-Donnel sat there, spattered by blood, bawling and deafened. In the dust and the sunlight, inside himself, under the crushing weight of the BWAAM, he cried. Slowly, he heard sounds fading in. A whisper of wind in the trees, then Elvis’ own sobbing, then the other things, the sounds that scared the bejeesus out of him. They came out of somewhere a long ways off, some things low and ugly turning to groans and an awful reeling eerie crying—great, big agghnnnnnns. These sounds were like something from outer space or a huge and ugly animal, something furry and wet and red-throated and angry. They were from him, from Donnel.
Donnel hadn’t saved Elvis from the fox.
Now, driving the Mercedes, a block of hardened sadness floated in his chest. It was an old feeling, familiar and worn smooth by the years but heavy still, moored against his heart, leaning against it, heavy, so heavy. Heck, he could still hear that sound, the BWAAM, then the sounds from his chest, could still feel the way they sounded. He could see his husky-blue-jeaned legs, cuffed and shoved up above the socks and black tennis shoes, all the dust on the shoes and the jeans and brown powder on his chubby calves. The chubby boy-Donnel, unwadding, turning and following Elvis’ eyes, staring away from the awful twitching fox body, and there she was: chubby-cheeked, dark-haired Lavern, that gun in her hands, lips pressed in a hard pink line, walking through the dust and stopping over what was left of the animal. The front half of it, the head and the shoulders, were there, looking like a fox-front taking a nap. The back half was a jumble of fur and blood and open, raw muscle and bone—naked, whitish bone. Donnel didn’t want to look. It made him sick. As she bent down, Elvis yelled, “Don’t touch it. Get away. Don’t touch it.
“DON’T TOUCH IT. GET AWAY. DON’T TOUCH IT.”
Don’t worry. It’s okay, her face said. And Donnel, the boy, had so felt that gush of relief and pain that he’d wet himself, and he’d done something worse: he let Lavern do what he should have been big and strong enough to do. But there she was, Lavern, looking at the two of them and smiling. He was so happy and so, so sad and jealous and guilty, yeah man, guilty.
Donnel could see her, the sweetest thing on God’s sweet earth, and could still feel the thing against his heart. He shook his head and tried to focus on the road, but the memory came on stronger, accompanied now by a siren. The siren, he was vaguely aware, was here, behind him on the road. But in front of him, in the windshield or somewhere between him at the glass, was Lavern, the girl-Lavern. It was all he could do to keep the car pointed in the right direction. The girl-Lavern picked up the monster, the dead fox, the front half flopped over one arm, the snout and the closed eyes looking at the ground, the back half—the sick, awful half—draped over her other arm. The girl Lavern’s back was arched against the weight of it, her face all bloated and red and strained as she took the fox back to its burrow. Her clothes, the shorts and shirt and those chubby legs were gooey with its blood. Donnel could see her, hear her, telling Elvis how she’d run the hundred yards or so to her house and got her dad’s rifle so she could shoot the fox. Then she bent over and dumped the fox in the hole, shoved on it with her shoe. She was smiling and yes, yes, Lavern was crying too. The tears were sliding through the dust on her cheeks as she stomped, stomped, stomped, stomped on the fox, each stomp sending a shiver up her chubby, bloody body. It didn’t make sense, what she was doing, and it made Donnel feel funny to see it—good and warm, safe but guilty. He watched Lavern stomp until the thing was pushed, squeezed back down inside. Part of his heart squeezed. He should’ve done that. He should’ve put the fox in its place.
Caught up in the daydream, Donnel was past the Cordoba before he recognized it. He hit the brake hard and slammed the Mercedes into reverse, then twisted around to face the rear as a police car roared over the hill and angled toward Elvis’ beat-up car. Someone broke away from the Cordoba and started for the woods alongside the road. Elvis. It was Elvis.
Donnel wound the wheel to the right and parked the Mercedes at a wild angle on the shoulder. He threw open the door and struggled out of the car. A cop in uniform and another guy were stopped on the shoulder, frozen like statues, staring after Elvis. Yes. Yes. It was Monahan, holding his shoulder, his one arm limp, shouting something at the uniform cop, then stumbling off, almost falling, going after Elvis. Donnel watched Monahan make it to the trees and disappear into the woods.
Donnel ran after Monahan.
****
There were no customers in the ancient book store. The girl working the counter—one of the Shanleys but Lavern didn’t know which one; there were a slew of Shanleys—gave her a vacant nod. Lavern returned the greeting with a smile and tipped her head toward the rear of the store.
“Bus?” she said.
The girl nodded and managed to return a weak smile, ground herself into what was, apparently, a comfortable position on her rickety stool, then returned her gaze to a magazine she’d flattened open on the counter.
Lavern made her way through the cramped quarters, frowning at a rack of porno magazines; one called Holsters had a cowgirl on the cover that looked an awful lot like someone she’d gone to high school with, but Lavern couldn’t place her. At the back wall, next to a long wooden table leaning under the weight of hundreds of VHS tapes, a narrow doorway opened to a tiny room. Lavern’s legs were suddenly heavy. She stopped.
Inside, two women waited, each seated on a plastic chair. Between them was a coffee table with a cheap-looking Mr. Coffee coffee maker and a tired pile of—what else?—more magazines. One woman partially blocked Lavern’s view of the other; both were staring through the room’s big window at the bus belching smoke in the parking lot. The one closest to Lavern was middle-aged and classy: tall, thin and pretty. She was a red head in black slacks and a leather coat, with a suitcase on wheels on the floor next to her chair and a garment bag on top of the suitcase. The woman beyond her twisted away from Lavern and toward the window, to get a better look at the bus. She was old with messy reddish-gray hair; she looked cold in a blue sleeveless dress and was playing with the ratty handle of a big purse. Something about her seemed familiar. Before Lavern could consider what it was, the younger woman turned and smiled.
Gretchen?
“Lavern?” Miss Classy said, rising, looking relieved. Lavern
felt the weight drop away. Smiling, she crossed to the woman and held out her hand. Gretchen ignored it and opened her arms, tears suddenly shining in her eyes.
Lavern accepted the embrace, momentarily overcome by tears of her own.
“There’s a lot to do still,” Lavern said, sniffing.
“I couldn’t wait any longer. I couldn’t.”
“That’s okay.”
“I know but, it’s just, I’m so sorry, me hauling over here like this, I couldn’t…”
They released each other. Gretchen, eyes on the floor, fumbled for something in her coat pocket, pulled out a wadded up tissue and dabbed at her eyes and then her nose. Lavern watched the puffing bus in the parking lot, wiped her face with the palm of her hand and sniffed. There was a chill in the waiting room. She wondered if the heat was on.
“I talked to him on the phone just now. I told him. He knows I’m here.” Gretchen said.
Their eyes met.
“You talked?”
“Yes, just a little bit ago. I’m sorry. I just…”
Lavern frowned.
“I told him everything you said, everything you told me, trying to, like, jar him, you know? But someone came, I think, I think it was Elvis.”
“Elvis?” Beyond Gretchen, the elderly woman had turned and was staring, her eyes black marbles in a yellowed and wrinkled face. Something that felt like glass shattered in Lavern’s chest.
“I got a boy, Elvis,” she said. “He’s named for the King. Got a twin brother Jesse, named for the King’s dead brother. Get it?” She laughed and shook her head. “Used to live around here. Not far from here at all. Out in the country. My cab’s coming right now to take me there. You know an Elvis, too?”
