Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  As soon as he dropped three of Janine’s quarters into the coffee can where he kept his stash, he started on the kitchen and the living room. They weren’t usually worth much – a coin now and then under a cushion.

  He went very lightly through his mother’s things, not wanting to handle her clothes or bathroom items. His father shared this bedroom, though, and he was Undie’s cash cow – sloppy and careless, with rumpled bills and coins in all his pants pockets. Even in his shoes sometimes – as if he stood barefoot in front of the shoe shelf and emptied some pockets into the dish there, but got careless and dropped some of the coins into shoes. Typical, Undie thought, shaking his head, helping himself to the gleanings. He was getting less and less nervous about going through his father’s clothes – the window by Lyle Underwood’s closet was right above the driveway, so Jason could watch for arriving vehicles while he rifled his father’s wardrobe.

  When he had as much money as he dared to take at once, he walked into his own room and sat in front of his computer, thinking.

  He had a little math homework that he knew he could finish in a few minutes. But as he sat there, the excitement of a more complicated task began to tug at his brain. He checked his watch – it was only five past four. Let’s give it a go.

  He went into his father’s study – that was what the whole family called this room, although Undie had never seen Lyle study anything weightier than Sports Illustrated until three years ago, when he got a new computer and started taking lessons online. The study was on the second floor, across the hall from Undie’s bathroom, and his father always kept the door locked. His mom had her own key because she did all her own housecleaning and Lyle required a lot of picking up after. Undie had his own secret key, as he did to every door in the house. He always worked with the door open, but got out and locked up at the first sound of a car in the driveway.

  He sat down in front of his father’s computer and entered the code he had learned to cheat the firewall. He was careful not to leave footprints when he invaded the old man’s terrain like this – although, knowing his father’s lack of expertise, he felt he was not in much danger of detection. He wasn’t after anything specific today, but thought he might learn whether the sheriff’s office was making some drug busts that would explain why the supply chain was empty.

  He scrolled through files he knew quite well – arrest records, jail records, vehicle accounts. Nothing today was as striking as the recent discovery of the sneaker in the tree, and finding the body in the ashes near the tree. There was a new entry in the sheriff’s daily log, about the visitors who came to see the shoe – interesting story, but not useful to him.

  He continued scrolling idly until he saw a title he hadn’t noticed before: Expenses/Sales. When he opened it, he thought his father must have been put in charge of some section of the sheriff’s business because the amounts were large – hundreds of thousands of dollars in the expenses column, and between two and ten thousand dollars in each sales entry.

  The initials at the head of the pages didn’t make any sense to him: BT and MB. He scrolled down to another section of the record labelled Rope. It was subdivided into three sections – Oco, Fyl and Prt. The amounts in these columns were much smaller than on the first two pages he’d visited.

  Undie had enjoyed only a few weeks as a user, but he’d been a math freak since first grade. Numbers stayed in his brain, curled up comfortably, waiting to be recalled. He looked a while longer at the numbers in this file and a picture began to form.

  As he let his imagination roam freely over the pages, he realized that the larger numbers were about right for dealers’ shipments of uncut heroin and packages of opioids. Then his brain seemed to vault across empty space and land on familiar terrain. BT, he saw, could stand for black tar, and MB for Mexican Brown. He felt his pulse begin to beat a little harder and he swallowed an acidy hot spot at the back of his tongue. His brain felt bigger than usual, pushing against the inside of his skull. He breathed carefully, trying to slow everything down.

  The smaller amounts, he thought, on the second and third pages – couldn’t they be for three different grades of pot? Or pills? Opioids, maybe. Yeah, couldn’t Oco stand for Oxycodone? That was the great high he’d started with, wasn’t it? And Fyl … wasn’t Fentanyl one of these so-called opioids? Hard damn word to say. He’d never seen any Fentanyl, but he remembered reading the name when he was looking up something else … Hey, and Prt, I bet that’s Percocet. The pills that Crow-Bait found in his folks’ bathroom. The golden glow that made us all sure we wanted something with more buzz than pot.

  Now, why was his dad keeping a file on this stuff? Could he be running a sting for the sheriff?

  Nah. No way was Lyle Underwood the man anybody would pick to run a sting.

  Sure?

  Absolutely.

  Why are you so sure?

  And then it all came spilling out into the quiet room where the afternoon sunshine slanted across the carpet – the shameful reason why Undie had been so angry for so long, almost choking on his rage. Why he had to stay behind the wall and keep building it higher, to keep from screaming and breaking things and then shouting it in plain English, out loud in front of everybody, that his father was a mean bully who browbeat his family, especially his only son, the smallest and quietest of his children. Because he of course had to cover up the fact that he was a dipshit of a dad, a pitiful parent with an ugly face half covered by a purple scar that could never be acknowledged. That he had to hurt everybody with his cruel tongue to keep them cowed, so they wouldn’t make fun of the way he looked.

  Jason tried out some of the phrases he had always wanted to use. You are a cowardly misfit, a weird-looking jerk-off who can barely hold onto your job because nobody wants you around where they have to look at you all day. You know your wife is smarter and better liked than you are, too good for you in every way. You punish her endlessly for that, and you’ve always been mad at me because she loves me.

  And I’m the pitiful coward who’s been hiding out from this stupid tyrant my whole life, letting him turn me into a creepy nobody who hides behind a wall and has no friends, so that none of this will ever have to be said out loud. Because then all the walls that are holding this house up would come tumbling down and we would all be standing naked out in the street in the bright light of morning, just like in the dream, the neighbors pointing and laughing.

  He realized he was crying, big, fat tears running down his cheeks and plopping onto the desk, barely missing a stack of papers. In a panic, then – what if he stained something and couldn’t wipe it off? – he held his breath until the weeping stopped, mopped his eyes with tissue so he could see, backed out of his father’s computer carefully and walked quickly back into his own room. He sat down at his own desk and breathed carefully so his heart wouldn’t stop.

  He glanced at his watch. It was four twenty-five. His mind was so full of his new insight that at first he didn’t grasp the full significance of the time. But after he’d blinked a few times, he looked again at his watch and laughed. His whole world had changed in twenty minutes.

  He still had at least an hour alone in this house before either of his parents got home. He laughed again, louder.

  Time seemed to have slowed down to give him time to digest the news.

  Which was what, really?

  Mostly, that he didn’t need to be afraid of his father any more. Wasn’t, in fact. Had become Undie Unafraid, if the truth were known.

  Because sure, his father was an ugly troll who took the joy out of everything, but so what? He, Undie, had survived against all odds in this miserable house, and soon he’d be old enough to leave it and make his own way in a world full of chemical pleasures as yet undreamed of. He said it again to himself: Undie Unafraid, if the truth were known.

  That thought stopped him, so he had to sit still and breathe carefully again for a while. Because what if the truth became known … how was he going to handle that? His personal compute
r – the one between his ears – was crunching through a lot of new information at blazing speed, using up oxygen so fast he kept running out of breath. What if he overtaxed his heart and fell over on his desk like a dead rat? Undie Unafraid would be Undie Unalive then.

  That was so ridiculous that he laughed out loud again and couldn’t seem to stop. He got up and walked into his bathroom, where he watched his mad-looking face laughing, stretching little-used muscles until his face hurt so much he found he was crying again.

  A little eternity of this kind of hysteria passed before he looked at his watch again. It was four forty-three. He still had three-quarters of an hour before his mother was expected, and his father would be later than that.

  Something about this slow-moving universe steadied him down. He splashed cold water on his burning face until it cooled, and dried himself without looking in the mirror. He stared dully out the window, watching a flock of tiny birds land on the spiky bush in the backyard. Suddenly his brain began to work usefully on its own and asked him, What if that’s a list of drugs he’s storing in this house?

  What? Why would he be?

  I have no idea, but wouldn’t you like to know if he is?

  Yes.

  Well, don’t just stand there. You’ve only got a little over half an hour.

  He opened the bottom left-hand drawer in his desk, and lifted out the ring of keys that hung from a hook he’d installed on the outside of the back panel. It had long been a secret point of pride with him that there was not a door in his house he could not open – no lock that could keep him out. His mother, the good housekeeper, kept her keys, labelled, on a corkboard in her tidy broom closet, and whenever she added or changed one, Undie made a copy.

  He knew every quirk of their house, too – which windows stuck or did not quite close properly, and which steps creaked on the basement stairs. He got special pleasure from his thorough knowledge of places his father thought were his private domain – his tool shop in the basement where he kept a pint of vodka in an empty paint can, and the pegboard in the garage where a Christmas decorated brandy bottle hung behind an old wooden tub on a wall covered with hoses and bungie cords, rakes and clippers and a leaf blower.

  After years of lonely afternoon prowling, he knew his family’s house like a well-thumbed Bible. So when he thought about a drug stash he did not go searching, but stood still and reviewed what he already knew, asking himself, Where?

  The answer was clear almost at once. In the slime file.

  He had named it the first time he saw it. In the basement tool shop, a metal cabinet with a double row of drawers held wrenches, pliers, nails and bolts and washers – all the tools a man needs to keep a house in good repair. Lyle was as sloppy with his tools as he was with his clothing and money, so most of the drawers were a jumble of mismatched tool sets, with many duplications since he often couldn’t find the tool he needed when he wanted it, and bought another. All these drawers had small Yale locks that were never locked; the keys hung on a single ring in the top right-hand lock. But the bottom drawer on the right-hand side was two spaces deep. The top section, which slid out easily, held screwdrivers with matched handles in graded sizes. The bottom section was jammed somehow and wouldn’t open.

  Jason was still in grade school then and talking to his mother. He made up a story about wanting a tiny screwdriver to fix a toy, and asked her why the bottom drawer wouldn’t open.

  ‘Oh, that’s a file your dad bought at a yard sale, and that bottom drawer was always jammed,’ she said. Then she added, ‘Better not use your dad’s tools without asking, honey; he doesn’t like that.’

  Jason was just getting started on his career as the family snoop when he figured out that the catch that was holding the drawer shut must have been installed from the back. And he never forgot the thrill of that first time he slid the drawer open, and realized he had just matched wits with his father and won.

  For a couple of visits, he found the contents of the drawer exciting, too, but he soon came to regard Lyle’s secret hoard as disgusting: magazines full of vile pornography, a vibrator, some kind of flavored vodka. Enough to make you barf, actually. His father must have been enjoying it surreptitiously at times when his wife was at card games or one of her craft clubs.

  Soon Jason felt embarrassed about even looking at the stuff in the slime drawer, and hardly ever opened it. When he did, he saw that all the magazines that had been there were gone, the vibrator was gone, and there was a new set of vile pornography in the drawer now, really shocking, kiddie porn. All this stuff seemed sad as well as disgusting. He didn’t want to think about how awful it was and he usually skipped the slime file when he prowled his father’s tool shop.

  He rarely handled the tiny needle-nosed pliers now that opened the catch on the bottom drawer. But he kept the tool with the rest of his keys, and spent a couple of hours every month going through the whole collection, polishing with fine sandpaper, cleaning with soft cloths. It pleased him now to observe that the pliers still slid snugly into the opening and turned the catch, and the slime drawer slid open without a sound.

  But all the kiddie porn was gone now too. All that was in the drawer was a neat stack of spreadsheets – accounts that resembled the ones on his father’s computer upstairs, but much larger amounts.

  His father must be into big-time dealing. But how? He wasn’t this clever, was he? Unless … this was too crazy to believe, but how else? The sheriff must be in on it with him. But how were they getting away with it, in such a small town? Look at the amounts. Too many people would have to know.

  He said softly, to himself but out loud, ‘God damn.’

  A car drove by, slowly, didn’t turn in but made Undie look at his watch. Five o’clock. Time to go. He was very careful about locking up the slime drawer, made sure he’d left no marks on the cabinet and padded up the steps from the basement like a cat, leaving no trace he’d ever been there. Now he was back in his own room and the key ring and pliers were hanging on the outside hook he’d installed on the back of the drawer, where it couldn’t be seen even if you opened the drawer.

  He sat in his desk chair, breathing carefully so his chest would not explode. His brain continued to shape phrases like sneaky sonofabitch, crazy bastard and who’d’ve thought, but none of these thoughts seemed capable of becoming a sentence. Slowly, one grudging thought crept in: Not dumb, though, really. Now, where have they got the actual stash?

  After another small eternity, just when he was beginning to breathe somewhat easier, he heard his mother’s car turn into the driveway. He sat at his desk, listening as she opened the door and called, ‘Jason?’ He walked into the kitchen as she put one heavy sack on the counter and turned back toward the rest of the supplies.

  ‘I’ll get the groceries,’ he said, and walked past her surprised smile quickly before she could hug him. When he came back in the house with his arms full, she had an apron on and was getting out pans.

  As the smell of beef and onions filled the kitchen, he began to set the table, careful to look calm but not too friendly. He was not ready to talk to her about the afternoon’s discoveries, if he ever would be. But he felt a need to stay close to her – the blameless wife of the sex-crazed drug addict. Who was also dealing. Really? It seemed hard to believe. His dorky Dad. Does she know? He sneaked a glance at her, so pretty at the work table, chopping onions. Nah. Not her, not ever.

  He was a little worried that his mother’s face was like a neon sign flashing my son is being nice to me. He wanted to keep the feeling in the house low-key, just a nice spaghetti dinner in the deputy’s house, nothing too unusual, but peace for a change. He needed time to think about the best way to use what he had discovered.

  Because he was going to use it – that he knew for certain. He was going to get what life owed him now. He had not decided exactly how – it was too soon, his brain so full of new information he could hardly think at all – so he didn’t know how it would happen or when. But it was coming, that
gloriously triumphant moment when the locked slime drawer slid open and the tyrant heard his own son’s voice behind him, saying the word that would start his personal nightmare: ‘Gotcha.’

  He trembled when he thought about it, though. His father had never shown any remorse about hurting Jason’s feelings, and criticized his mother when she tried to shield her son. But Undie’s father had never spanked or struck him. Undie had always assumed that his father had a breaking point where his rage boiled over, but he had never seen it. If threatened, did Lyle get violent? He’s so much bigger than me! Thinking about that, Undie shivered with fear.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘I think it feels like snow tonight,’ Stuart said as they walked home in the chilly dusk. After three more steps, he said, ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Alice’s mind wasn’t really on the weather.

  ‘Forecast was pretty firm for snow this weekend. We didn’t get any today but I’m betting on tonight.’

  ‘You sound like a guy who’s got his ski boots ready.’

  ‘Better believe it. Judy too. All we need is a little cooperation from Mother Nature.’

  ‘In Montana? Surely you jest.’ She stomped through a drift of dead leaves that the afternoon wind had piled against the Hendersons’ retaining wall, enjoying the crackle. ‘You know, I made a list of those questions we asked each other when we were showing off for Mort this morning.’

  ‘Is that what you think we were doing? I’m not sure I’m ready to cop to that.’

  ‘Ready or not, that’s what we did. And Mort called it, didn’t he? We were trying to show him we work so well together he couldn’t possibly fire one of us – namely me. Thank you for your help with that, by the way.’

  ‘You’re welcome. We have been doing pretty well on the story of the dead man, haven’t we?’

  ‘Sure. But what I’m trying to say now is that all those questions are still valid.’