by CS DeWildt
“Tell me you did it,” the man said again. The gun had steadied a bit. The man’s face softened. It was not an order, but a plea. “Tell me that.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Lloyd said. The words floated around him, as if spoken by another. He tried to piece together the state of the Bohls, Terry and Zeke, the others. He looked at Chief. “How did I kill Grandpa?” Lloyd said.
“Cut his oxygen line and let him choke on kerosene fumes. Could almost say it was a nice way to go out, comparing it to what else you’ve done.”
Lloyd nodded, looked at the man. Lloyd’s eyes quit begging for belief; he stood. The man’s eyes were still soft as Lloyd stepped to him; he wanted to step back but remained planted as the gun shook and clanked against the bars. They were both broken in different ways. To Lloyd, Keith looked like a man condemned, a soul sent to wander for eternity and then unexpectedly finding his home. Lloyd saw a man on the cusp of a salvation thick with catharsis and fire. Lloyd closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. He wished for the blindness, his only wish. But he knew it would not return to him, if she had ever really come at all.
Lloyd looked at the gun. “I did it,” he said. He looked at Chief. “All of it.” Silence hung for just a moment. The coffee maker in the kitchen gurgled steam as it continued to brew. Keith unloaded the gun, eyes no longer upon his savior, but his tormentor, a demon. He was a bad shot, and it took Lloyd a long time to die. The kill shot ripped apart his pancreas, spilling the digestive enzymes over all of his insides. The protein catalysts ate him alive. He’d taken a total of two belly shots and one to the groin area. Three bullets had missed.
Chief pulled out his own weapon and shot Keith Philips in the face. He felt the warm misty spray of blood and put another pullet through Keith’s heart. He left the dead and dying in the holding area as he kicked in the front glass door of the station and then called in the county boys to help clean up the mess. He passed the time by catching up on the day’s paperwork. He added the knife to the evidence.
So much left to be done. That was what Chief thought as he searched for another bottle. His pain would not subside, and it pushed him to hurry, to grab a pen and write up everything just as it had happened, before he could wake and find it had all been a beautiful dream.
Lloyd felt the wind from somewhere, cold and cutting into him. His vision faded, and he slapped his hands over the concrete floor, felt the air, searching for the girl from the park. She could not leave him to die alone. She could save him. If she were an angel, she would show herself. If she were truth, she could take him away.
But what was an angel in the eyes of a demon? What value is the truth to the damned?
And would she come?
Before
The boy left the house early that morning, a while after Dad left for work. Dad was angry with the boy and the boy was angry too, with reason. As he walked with his paintball gun in tow, he thought about shooting his father it the face with it. It would hurt like a son of a bitch and then he’d be sorry. He saw his old man tied to a chair, naked, covered with paint and welts. He could make him cry, he bet. He could do it when Dad got home. Then Mom. He would shoot them both to death with paintballs, carve them up with kitchen knives.
The boy walked the frosted creek bed early in the morning, the sun barely peaking beyond the black-shingled roofs of his neighborhood. There were so many houses where only two years ago had been a sort of wilderness, not deep but true, an edge awaiting further encroachment. The boy missed specific objects he’d cut from the ever flowing reality cloth: a tree house, a pit where he used to tell other kids blue racers lived and then dared them to cross the log spanning the six-foot hole. But he didn’t morn the loss of nature. He could morn for nothing beyond himself.
If not for progress, the boy would have not discovered the junkyard. He simply followed the trail of sunken cement basements and wooden frames. He broke pristine windows still bearing the manufacturers’ stickers. He blasted holes in vinyl siding with rocks. His destruction accompanied the march of progress always.
The junkyard was beyond a field, blocked from the progression by old and rusted barbed wire affixed to rotting wood posts, the metal had stretched and wrinkled to an elderly core of its former shine and menace. A feeble claw of iron oxide grabbed the boy’s T-shirt as he stepped between the wires; it crumbled to dust.
The boy learned the ways of the birds in school. He was fascinated not with flight, but their vision. He imitated a robin, standing perfectly still, head cocked, eyes glazed as they looked at the earth and then beyond it. Just as the robin sees the slightest wiggling worm pop onto its paralyzed retinal screen, the boy saw the opossum. He gave chase across the field, prepared his weapon. The distance was too great for the opossum, having traded scrambling ability for arboreal prowess, and the boy caught up quickly. He began shooting at point-blank range, one shot after another in a relentless staccato of popping paint. The marsupial rolled, shrieked, screamed “murderer” under pink and blue flashes. Repeated headshots took their toll. The tiny brain in the tiny skull swelled as the animal twitched and seized, twitched and seized. The boy watched until all movement ceased. He moved on. He thought about the scaly tail and decided to return later in the day with a hatchet. He would bring it in to share with the class, the leathery, rotting trophy from his hunt. He would bring a paw as well. He did that often, brought pieces of animals to school, earned points by presenting a juvenile lecture on the life histories and anatomy. He’d kept his favorite pieces in a lock box in his room: a sun-rotted frog represented the local population he’d decimated over the summer, a squirrel skull, the shrunken withered ear of a beagle whose hidden carcass he still visited. The box smelled of death and the pine tree air fresheners he’d bought with his allowance.
“Why do you want to spend your allowance on air fresheners?” his dad had asked.
“I like the way they smell,” he’d said and thought the conversation finished, but his dad had found the box while searching for drugs, the only explanation. Keith Philips would have preferred drugs to the macabre collection his son had acquired. He beat the boy senseless, bruising him for the first time. He destroyed everything in the box, chopping up the tiny bones and tissues in the garbage disposal. That was the night before. Mom had said nothing. The boy could only sob and mourn the loss of his treasures. His pain was hot and became rage before sleep came to the shivering, sniveling boy.
Now at the dump, the boy had the strong urge to defecate. He dropped his pants and set the gun at his side. He pushed his boy penis back to avoid spraying his pants with any accompanying urine. He examined his pubic hairs, still a novelty, and wondered how he would incapacitate his parents. He didn’t see the silver car with the T-tops sitting just beyond a pile of scrap metal and trash. Terry and Zeke had been there all night and were just now rousing as the hardier of mosquitoes foraged in the crisp air. Terry slapped his neck and woke up quickly, confused, still drunk. He slapped his chest for a cigarette, finding a cracked and bent single in his shirt pocket. He broke off the filter and waited for the car lighter to glow orange like the sun and then took it into his hand. He felt the glow radiate as he sucked the fire into his lungs. The cold morning air carried the sound of the 7:50 freight from across town. The sound settled into the background, fading slowly, the whistle becoming audible again and again as the train moved west across the intersections. Terry knew the train when Horton had been a major stop. Now the train yard was empty, no furniture to haul, no nothing. He remembered watching his daddy work in the rail yard many summers ago, he and Zeke on BMX bikes watching their old man “bring home the bacon” with hundreds of others, practically every able-bodied man in Horton. From a distance, it was an ant farm, but the Cutters always knew Daddy’s red flannel shirt. They watched the men sweat and laugh and drink, so alive while working. And then so dead, like Horton itself, when the trains quit stopping, when there was nothing to move or load.
Terry pushed such thoughts away a
nd leaned out the window. He hawked up a hard, brown snot mass and spat. He followed the flying wad with his eyes and saw the boy, squatting, shitting, partially hidden behind a smashed oak hutch. The boy was looking at him.
“Zeke!” He slapped his sleeping brother. “That little shit is taking a shit!”
The boy watched the pair step from the car. He pinched off the loaf and stumbled away, pants and underwear still between knee and ankle as the men approached. Terry and Zeke stopped at the paintball gun at their feet laying next to the steaming feces. Terry snatched it up the gun as the boy disappeared behind a large junk pile. Terry and Zeke laughed their asses off and began taking turns with the gun, pelting the debris.
Inside the womb of the old refrigerator, the boy listened to the sound of his gun being fired into and through the junk piles. He hoped they wouldn’t shoot him. He soon realized they were interested in the gun and not him. Then he heard the car doors slam, an engine rev, they were leaving. He breathed and felt the warmth of the sweet cereal expulsion on his face. It was much warmer than it was outside, and in the pitch-blackness the boy began to feel safe.
He hoped the men had not taken the gun with them. But his hopes weren’t worth a sack of sand. He thought of his parents, his revenge. He laid out his plans and smiled in the darkness.
About the Author
CS DeWildt lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of shorts.
His work has been showcased on sites like Bartleby Snopes, Word Riot, The Bicycle Review, Writer’s Bloc and Mobius Magazine.
