Redhead

by Jason McIntyre

  4.

  I pulled in at dusk on a Tuesday. I had started taking clients again and was usually ready to puke all over them by the time I had even half of them near the finish line. Problem was, I needed the money. My Little Dippers’ account didn’t get much smaller. But it hadn’t gotten bigger either, not since Sean. I’d seen him once more since the day in Harlow’s with his finger-wagging wife. Well, let me clarify. I’d seen his truck at the stop light on Broadway and I ran to catch up to him. By the time I’d stepped into the intersection, all I’d gotten was the horn from Mrs. Troyer in her husband’s Buick. I gave her the finger and that garnered me a dirty look but no more honking. By the time our little exchange had ended, Sean was pulling a left and off he went. I shouted after him, but he kept driving. His window was open a crack and I saw that he was smoking. I couldn’t see much more. Just his shades, a shock of his red locks, and the grey-white tendril from what I knew would be an Export A snaking out the window peep.

  It had turned cold, worse than I’d remembered of any October in my years in DC. I hadn’t gotten out my cold clothes yet and I stood hugging and rubbing my own arms on the front stoop of the Ketwood house, the nicest of the duplicate little ranchers in that dead housing development north of the creek. I think some conglomerate had hoped to get blue-collar families an affordable place to live so they could reopen the power plant, but I wasn’t sure if it ever took flight. The plant was still closed. The Ketwoods benefited from the cheap housing. And it sure looked it.

  The door frames were press-board and the windows were all single-pane. I didn’t know anything about construction, but I could tell cheap when I saw it. I wished that Sean and his boys had more than this. I hadn’t taken much money from Sean, certainly none in the last two weeks we were together...but I felt an instant shame at the money I had taken from him.

  Wifey came to the door a minute or two after my second ring. I wasn’t showing yet. That would have been a hoot, expectant whore on the doorstep with her palms open to the sky.

  But I wasn’t here for money. I wasn’t here for anything—other than an understanding of Sean’s wishes. This tot that Doc said was growing in me was his. Goddamn it, I was so “Young and the Restless” that I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with me.

  Wifey wasn’t angry. There was mild surprise when the wooden inside door opened to reveal the likes of me on the other side of her aluminum screen door. And then that ceded to an exhaustion that was palpable. It was all over her face and in her shoulders. Bags of grey and purple blotted the patches under both eyes. She opened the screen and I spoke before she could.

  “I’m not here to make a fuss, ma’am,” I said. I could hear the boys, either in a back room or the basement, making noise. Nothing raucous, but it was a game of some intensity.

  All she said was, “Step in. Just for a sec, though.”

  Surprised, I gave a simple and curt, “Kay.”

  I did as she asked. The smell of cooking hamburger and onions wafted. I heard the hiss of them on a stove somewhere beyond the living room. And that’s where I stood. A simple ash book case separated the entryway porch from a modest (but bowling alley-esque) living room. A TV was on at the other end, perched on a green rug. Taking up a long gold couch, Sean lay half under a blanket with his eyes closed. He’d fallen asleep watching mainland’s evening news.

  Wifey let out an exhale of fatigue. “I’m cooking supper. I don’t aim to yell at you any more than I already have. Sean’s sick. He’s real sick. Doc doesn’t know what’s up with him. We got uh, uh—” she scratched at her scalp, a liberal cliché of someone who’s forgotten the key to life after winning it in a poker match. “Uh, some specialist in Portland, name’a Morrow, he’s looking at test results and hopes to get us some answers back this week—”

  My stomach lurched. I felt it do a heavy thud down into the pit of my guts. Colour left my face and I felt my neck burn a polar opposite of fire and brimstone. I must have looked a shock because Wifey asked if I needed to sit down.

  Speechless, I shook, no. But I reached out for a brace on that wooden book case. I saw it was filled with encyclopaedias and Childcraft Annuals. The boys had two parents who were doing their best.

  I felt like all the blood was leaving my head. I would have fallen over if Wifey hadn’t reached out like a crutch for me. She braced me and I got a grip on reality again in a moment or two.

  Sean looked grey. A bit of drool had seeped from the corner of his mouth. I could hear a light, gentle snore from him. I guess Wifey had turned the volume knob down on their Zenith once he fell asleep. In flashed silent movies of talking heads, troops in the dessert, and a Wall Street ticker.

  “Hardly eating,” she said, pursing her lower lip and surveying her gaunt husband from beside me.

  I was wordless. But after a minute of looking at his greying skin and pale hair, I said something about how I was so sorry to bother the missus and that what I had to say could keep.

  It did. I left Mrs. Ketwood to her supper of Hamburger Helper and onions.

  And I didn’t come back for a month.

  5.

  The third week in November, my heart skipped a beat when I pulled up to the gravel lane in front of the Ketwood house and Sean’s green truck was nowhere in sight. I let my imagination run for a brief sec, and then I reined it in by telling myself that he was likely feeling better. He was back at work, that’s all, I said to myself. And he was working a late job. He’d called from the site and asked Mrs. Ketwood to keep a plate warm for him and to kiss the boys goodnight, that he’d be back around eight.

  Only this time, it wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t with me, not like he’d been all summer. This time, he really was working late at a job.

  But for some reason, I couldn’t help myself. Instead of going round and up the steps to ring the door bell at the front, I followed the long gravel driveway down the side of the house. I couldn’t hear the boys playing, nor could I see them. I finally had my long coat dug out. The chill of the ocean air coming up and over the Cove and then across to this patch north of town was bitterly cold. The trees had shed their leaves.

  Out in the distance, way back beyond the house and mingled in with the tall, tan grass, was the weight of Sean’s work house. I thought I saw the shape of his truck next to it. And there was an unmistakable zag of chimney smoke caught in that icy wind.

  I started walking.

  6.

  I don’t think he heard me at first. The door to the work house gave a deafening squawk against the silence but he was unmoved by it, standing motionless over by the wood stove and draped in an old grey blanket. I doubted the blazing stove covered the sound of my entry. The colour of his hair had lost its depth. It was nothing but a faded, thin gauze where once it was piping red and luxurious. I remembered running my fingers through it.

  He’d surely brought the truck because the walk from his house was too great. I could see his skinny frame beneath his drape as he finally turned to me.

  “I thought you’d come,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  I stuttered at first, a mirror of how I’d reacted when his wife had greeted me at her front door a few weeks back and I’d seen him on the living room couch. “I came before,” I said. “You were sleeping.”

  “Haven’t been feeling well,” he said and gave me a wan smile. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks sucked into his face until they looked shallow and leather-like.

  I leaned against a workbench by the door. It was roasting hot in here. The fire in the wood stove roared. No wonder he didn’t hear me at first. But it was like he’d...sensed...me as I came in. “Do you have any more answers? From the doctors, I mean?”

  Sean chucked a broken spindle of firewood back into the pile of logs over by the back wall. “Naw,” he said with equal measures of disgust and impatience. “Damn doctors have never been good at their jobs. Never met one who knew his asshole from a gopher hole. Doc Sawbones gave me three or four referrals. There’s this one,
Morrow, he’s an oncologist. As clueless as the rest. You want to know what it is?”

  “What?” I said. I remember this. I said it with genuine expectation. That he’d really tell me and that it would really make sense, that it would all become clear.

  “It’s the king,” he said. “He’s done this to me. I’ve, uh, what’s the phrase, ‘outlived my usefulness.’” He snorted at that, like a man three times his age. He looked it too, in that instant. The rest of the time, he looked maybe seventy. Not the thirties I knew he was.

  “Oh come on,” I said. “Sean, you have to stop with this nonsense about this...this king.” I pushed a pile of loose breakers away from me on the dusty work bench. “It’s not doing you any good.”

  Like the time Denny Munn flew into his jealous rage and beat me senseless, I expected that this was exactly the wrong thing to say.

  But Sean didn’t rage. He only huffed at me. He turned and shuffled over to an antique cabinet. He hunched himself over in his grey shawl and squeaked open a door on the lowest part. It looked like quite the effort for him, and from back here, I strained at the struggle, almost going over to help him.

  He pulled out a gallon ice cream pail, one of those old ones made of tin. He tossed it with incredible grace, considering the heft of it—and the look of him.

  It landed—and skidded—across the counter top of the work bench, its furthest reach from me.

  “Lookie here,” he said and then turned back to the open wood stove. He picked up an iron poker and started messing with the fire.

  A bit like my draw to Sean from the start, I felt a magnetic pole pull me towards the pail. I knew it was not a good idea, but I went anyway. Like Sean, there was an allure I couldn’t fight.

  Maybe it was like the romance Sean had first spoken of when he’d told me about the king.

  What was in the pail? A severed hand? Some kind of stone Sean had passed and was keeping so he could show his oncologist?

  No. Inside the tin pail were a handful of frogs. They were moving but not much. They were sick. One was at least the size of two of my fists together. Another had an extra hind leg. It was the most active and kept springing that extra leg out as if it was on two cups of coffee—but that only made the little guy spin in endless, loopy circles amongst the others in the pail.

  The others lolled their tongues out and stared up at me behind oversized eyes congealed with yellow jelly. There was some kind of dark, chunky goo in the pail with them. It made me recall the vomits I’d had in the early part of October when my morning sickness peaked.

  The most memorable part of this collection of half-living amphibians? They were all different colours. Yes, they had the spots and stripes of every wood frog I’d seen in my life...but these ones wore bright blue, pink, green and orange. They glowed, making their dark parts heavy like sunspots on your retina. The glowing team of sickly frogs rang out against the old scuffed up sides of the ice cream tin in a gaudy circus cavalcade of colours. It was a Technicolor dreamcoat in there.

  I put the lid on the pail and stepped back towards the door.

  I was about to say something but Sean beat me to it.

  “The island goes in cycles,” he said. “The king, he’s in touch with these cycles. He manages them as best he can. We’re in for a cold winter. Coldest yet, maybe. Even colder than the one when Munn took his bullet.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but, again stopped short. What interrupted me was the thought of that icy night in January in ’65 or ’66 when the stranger came in for his two beers and told me who he was looking for.

  Then I looked back at Sean—really looked at him. That took me to the night a couple months back, after we’d made love on the beach under the brilliant pinholes in the black sky. Right now, he stood about the same distance as he had when he’d confronted the pack of dogs out on the gravel road. That road had led to the power station just north of here. I looked at his gaunt figure and couldn’t believe it was the same man. Who knew where this road led.

  “So the king,” Sean went on. “He’s smart. Fancies himself a bit of a scientist. Thinks he can manipulate things and make a better product than...well...than God.” Sean prodded at the fire and billows of smoke started to draw into the room instead of going up the black chimney. My eyes stung and started to water.

  Sparks flew out on to the old wood floor and I worried some would catch but I didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve come to the end of my road, I think. Nothing I can do about it.”

  “Sean,” I said. “If this is—Come on. If you’re so worried. If this...whatever you say it is...has such a hold on you, then just leave. Get on the late ferry tonight and go.”

  Sean whirled around at me and I saw the reds of his eyes as his words bit into me. “Don’t you think I would?” he snapped. “If I damn well could?”

  He trudged over to the wood pile again. I stood in silence while he seemed to be choosing yet another log.

  “Can’t get warm,” he said. “The house...has too many memories. All she does is try to get me to eat but I can’t keep anything down...” He was speaking of his wife. That made me recall what I’d truly come here to tell him. Surely he understood. I was starting to show.

  He turned and looked at me. Sure enough. He did understand. He looked at my belly, mostly hidden by my long winter coat. “And you think you’re telling me something I don’t already know,” he said with more impatience, more disgust.

  “I—”

  “Well, I got news for you, kind madam—” he used my playful nickname in a hurtful way. “—This is nothing that the king didn’t plan and execute. With precision. You can bet on that. And he used me to do it.”

  Again, I had nothing to say. I wanted to run. I wanted to just turn and run out of there. I saw his eyes. They were the black I remembered from our time together. The whole frame of flaccid grey face, cheekbones and sprawling forehead were different, but those eyes were the same. I realized then that the baby blue eyes I’d seen in Harlow’s that day—the same ones I’d seen flicker on him after his dreams—those were his. These black ones—if the king really did exist—the dark ones were the product of his influence.

  Right now, Sean was channelling that thing. It made no sense and I wanted to push the idea away. But somehow, it was true. And I knew it. When he had been with me, he wore the black eyes. When he had been with me, he had belonged to the king.

  “King likes pairs, y’see,” Sean said. He stood more upright than he had the entire visit, as though he’d seen a back specialist who cured his crooked spine with magic. “He wants duos. I didn’t have a second, you see, so the king, he’s smart. He wanted to go after my boys. They would be the perfect pair for him. Young enough for the king to mould. And then he went after Denny but Denny had no match either. But the king has a new plan. He still wants pairs but he’s going to build something perfect for his purposes. It doesn’t make much sense to hear it from me, you’d have to see it to believe it. But you’ve seen the tree frogs. You can get a whiff of where this is going...”

  He trailed off, as if he was hearing a radio that wasn’t tuned right, one that only he could hear, one that squealed and made him cringe, no matter how badly he wanted to listen.

  “But I can’t leave,” he said. “I can’t fight. And I can’t let him have my boys—”

  Out from under his grey blanket, Sean hoisted a long brown and black hunting rifle. He aimed it squarely at me and my breath hitched. I felt that same need to reach for support as I did when I’d first seen the gaunt redhead on his living room couch.

  “—I’ve got exactly two choices. One is...I figure if I take away what he wants, he might just give up on me and regroup. Maybe he’ll get another ponce to help build him his...army.”

  I backed up, accidentally kicking a pail over. The sound of it was shocking and loud. I bumped back up into the door behind me. “Wait, Sean—Why are you—?”

  “Why? Goddammit, Dollars, I put King’s kid in your belly,” he
said. “If I destroy what he wants, put a couple of shells right through that belly of yours, well, I figure, he knows I’ve won and he has to let me go. Maybe then I can save my wife. And my boys.”

  I asked him the only thing that I could think of. And I don’t rightly know where the question came from.

  “You said you were tagged. When you were a kid. Am I tagged? Am I, Sean? Are the boys?” I was sarcastic. I was hunting for cracks in the facade I just knew his mind had created.

  “Nope. The boys aren’t. Neither are you. King doesn’t want you. But what’s in your belly is tagged. Whatever’s tagged always come back. You can bet your ass he wants what I put in you. Wants it bad.”

  Sean’s arms started to quiver. And then it turned to tremors.

  “Goddamn you,” he shouted at the ceiling. “Don’t you stop me! You can’t!”

  I shouted back at him, trying to regain some control of the situation. There was a dirty window facing back towards the house. I looked through it desperately, I don’t know, for any sign that Mrs. Ketwood was coming out with a plate of food or a cup of tea, to check up on her husband, to save me from him. But there was nothing. Only the endless, waving fronds of sweetgrass and the waning light in the cold sky.

  “Sean,” I shouted. “You’re not talking sense. This is—this is madness. This is not you—”

  “You’re damn right, it’s not,” he shouted back. “You’re damn right it’s not me. It’s the king. It’s him.”

  His rifle wavered. The tremors were violent. I’m not sure he could hit me from where he was.

  “The dreams,” I called to him. “You weren’t remembering the time with your dad, were you?” Again, I was digging, hoping my excavation would unravel what his damaged mind had surely concocted.

  Now he was crying while the rifle waved and weaved. He looked like he was struggling against a ghost that was trying to get him to point the weapon anywhere but at me.