Do-Overs and Detours - Eighteen Eerie Tales (Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out Book 4)
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“Want a beer?” Artie asked, glancing at Will to see if it was okay, even though it was probably Artie who had paid for the beer.
Will nodded his head so slightly that Sam almost didn’t see it move, just a notch or two that could be caught only if you were watching closely.
“Sure,” Sam said.
Artie knelt and retrieved a beer from the cooler. He passed it to Will who handed it to Sam.
“Here you go,” Will said.
Sam reached for the beer.
Will wouldn’t let go.
“How come you were late?” Will asked. “She keep you?”
Sam shrugged.
“Snooze alarm kept begging to be hit,” Sam said.
Will snorted derisively.
“You still using that damned clock radio of hers?” He asked.
Artie tried to intercede.
“Sam likes to wake up to his baseball, don’t you Sam?” Artie said.
“That’s a fact, I do.” Sam said. “A day without horse hide is like a day without sunshine.”
Will nodded, another half notch or so and let Sam have his bottle.
“Probably slept through the first inning, thanks to that damn snooze button,” Will said. “You ought to get yourself a good old fashioned alarm clock like me. I got a big old brass bastard, goes off like a fire alarm and I’m out of bed at five every morning, sharp as steel nails.”
Will slammed the head of the bat down against the pine floor boards for emphasis.
Don’t flinch, Sam told himself.
It was too late for that. Both he and Artie jumped slightly at the sound of the impact.
Sam swallowed slowly.
“You’re right, Will. I ought to get myself a good old fashioned alarm clock, by God.”
“I’ve got one I can give you,” Artie said with a nervous laugh. “Bastard keeps going off, five sharp every morning. I’d like to slam it with a baseball bat some day.”
Sam laughed but Will didn’t think it was all that funny. He swiveled his gaze towards Artie and nailed him with a look as hard as a ball peen hammer.
“Somebody ought to slam you with a baseball bat, Artie.”
Will raised the bat and let it drop within his grip, bouncing it three or four times against the floor boards.
Artie choked on a swallow of beer.
Sam watched the two men closely. The morning sun had just begun to climb towards noon and it beat down mercilessly upon Sam’s bare head. The other two men wore ball caps but Sam worried too much about his receding hairline to risk a cap. Will bounced the bat again and it sounded easier, like he was getting ready to relax.
“Any of you girls see the game last night?” Will asked.
Artie grinned, glad to be let off the hook.
“Cardinals kicked ass,” Artie said.
“Yankee’s ass begged to be kicked,” Will corrected. “Yankee’s ass has been begging to be kicked ever since they let that damned Puerto Rican faggot take over as team manager.”
Sam spoke up without thinking.
“It isn’t always the manager’s fault,” He said, and then suddenly wished he hadn’t.
Will turned to him coldly.
“It’s always the manager’s fault.” Will said.
He grinned fiercely.
“A damned fine sacrifice brought two men in,” Will observed.
And then, without looking towards Sam he asked, “You finished with Susan yet, Sam?”
Damn it, thought Sam.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
Sam stayed silent.
Artie finished his beer and leaned over carefully to place the empty bottle between his feet.
Sam could feel the sun burning into his scalp. He tried not to look away. He wanted to dig his toe into the ground, like a small boy who’s been found out at some mischief.
“Not yet,” He said finally.
Will nodded as if he’d been expecting that answer.
“Have to be soon,” Will said, nodding towards the boys playing in the field. “Soon, before she makes too much more of an impression on the boy.”
Sam closed his eyes wearily.
“She’s his mother, damn it.”
Will remained obstinate.
“Don’t matter. You know it’s got to be done,” Will said. “It’s for the boy’s own good.”
Again, another nod towards the distant boys.
“We’ve talked about it enough,” Will said. “You girls sit here, while I go teach your boys how to swing a bat.”
He jogged out towards the field without looking back.
Artie bent and picked up his empty beer bottle. For a moment it looked as if he were about to fling it at Will’s back.
Then he quietly replaced the beer bottle, without saying a word.
The two men watched Will in the field, already shouting instructions at their sons.
“It won’t be easy, letting go of her,” Artie noted.
But I’ll have to, Sam thought. That’s what you’re really saying. I’ve got to, because he says so.
They stood quietly for a while.
“Little Artie dreamed of his mother last night,” Artie said in a half embarrassed tone.
Sam wasn’t listening.
“He does that sometime, although I don’t think he really remembers her.”
Sam nodded absently.
“I don’t think he remembers his sister at all,” Artie went on.
He looked down nervously at his shoes, like he’d suddenly noticed something dirty on them and then he stared out towards the field.
“Don’t tell Will, okay?” He asked.
Sam nodded, only half listening.
“About the dream, okay?
Sam nodded again.
The silence simmered between them.
Sam heaved a heavy sigh.
“Damn it, what about Samuel?” Sam snapped.
He looked out towards the boys but he couldn’t make out one from the others in all the running confusion.
“He’s a big boy,” Artie said. “He can take it. He’ll grow out of it. Hell, he’ll probably grow because of it. You know what Will says. Take the woman out of the boy and the boy’ll become a man.”
Sam nodded slowly.
More silence.
They watched Will clouting out pop flies and the boys hooting with joy.
“What if he grows away from me?” Sam suddenly asked. “What if he grows towards him?”
Artie didn’t have an answer.
The two men stood there in silence, staring out at Will and their sons.
“I’m not going to do it,” Sam said quietly.
“Artie looked at Sam.
“You...you can’t back out now,” Artie said. “You’re in too deep.”
He paused, stealing another look at his shoes.
“We both are,” He added.
Sam looked out at Will.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Sam said.
As if he’d heard Sam’s quiet declaration, Will turned to look towards the porch. There was something in that slow and dangerous turn of Will’s head that reminded Sam of a tank turret.
Will started in from the field, advancing on the two men. The three boys were at his heels, begging for a chance at the bat but he held it high on his shoulder, too high for any of them to reach. As he got closer Sam bent and picked up a baseball. He threw it at Will, as hard as he could.
He was aiming for Will’s head.
It missed. The boys ran off after it, bent on retrieving it. By the time they’d caught up with the ball they had already forgotten the men standing on the porch.
If Will noticed the throw, he showed no sign.
He tipped his hand up in a beer drinking gesture at Artie.
Artie hadn’t waited. He was already kneeling by the cooler in the shadow of Will’s porch.
Will carried the beer towards Sam.
“You made up your mind?” He asked.
Sam nodded defiantly.
Will nodded like he’d been expecting it. He tipped the beer up and drained the bottle in one long measured methodical chug.
Then all at once he brought the emptied beer bottle down like a blackjack against the back of Sam’s neck.
Sam dropped to his knees. He tried to rise but Will was too damn big and fast, slamming the butt of the bottle again and again against Sam’s head, neck and back.
From behind, Sam felt Artie joining in, using his own beer bottle on Sam’s defenseless back. Some inside part of his vision saw his own son running towards the porch but the other two boys caught the boy in mid flight.
“Samuel!” Sam shouted fearfully from out of the cloud of his own agony, the blood in his mouth slurring his words.
Will stopped the beating just as suddenly as he’d begun it.
He turned towards the boys.
“Little Sam!” Will called out. “Don’t worry about your father. We’re just playing a grown up game, is all.”
Then he turned back to Sam.
“Tell him you’re okay,” He growled. “Tell him you’re okay or I’ll sic the other two boys on him.”
Sam shook the pain off.
“Daddy’s okay, Samuel,” Sam said hastily.
“Call him Little Sam,” Will added.
“Daddy’s okay, little Sam,” Sam reiterated.
“Little Will! Little Artie! Little Sam! You three go on back to your playing.”
The two older boys coerced little Sam reluctantly back into the game.
Will stepped back from Sam.
“Stand up,” He ordered.
Sam stood up, trying to hide his pain in case his son was still watching.
“Get him a bat,” Will ordered Artie.
Artie picked up a bat from behind the beer cooler and handed it to Sam.
Sam looked at the bat, dangling limply from his hand. He thought about using it on Will.
“Try it, and your boy will pay,” Will said as if he could read Sam’s mind.
Sam dutifully shouldered the bat.
He stared dully at Will, awaiting his orders.
“You go and do what I’ve told you to do. What we agreed you’d do. You go ahead and deal with Susan, once and for all. You defy me and we’ll bury your boy out there with all the others. We’ll bury you and we’ll bury Susan but we’ll bury the boy first.”
Sam thought of the three quiet wooden crosses huddled together in the far part of the field, next to the back woods where nobody would find them. The two wives and Artie’s unfortunate daughter.
He nodded, painfully.
He’d made his choice.
Will dug a baseball cap from out of his hip pocket. He carefully placed it on Sam’s head.
“There,” He said. “You’re a man, now.”
Sam didn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear a thing. He shouldered the baseball bat like a soldier marching off to war and walked slowly back towards his home.
The two older men stood on the porch, watching him leave.
“He’s a good man,” Artie said. “He’ll do what he has to do.”
Will took a couple of practice swings with his own bat, aiming roughly at head level.
“He’d better,” he said.
After Sam was out of earshot, Will called the three boys in.
“You boys get shovels. We’re going to play pirate.”
The three boys stared up at him like a litter of puppies staring up at their chosen sire and then ran eagerly off to fetch the shovels.
I Know Why the Waters of the Sea Taste of Salt
My father swore I was born with a full set of teeth. He also claimed that my birth cord twisted like an eel in the midwife's hand, biting her as I bit my way out of my mother's womb. I can remember that taste. It tasted of salt. It tasted of tears.
It tasted of sea water.
I was born in Okinawa and moved to Tokyo to live with my grandfather. My mother was Chinese but my father claimed she was Okinawan. I sprang from many waters - Okinawan, Japanese, Chinese. No wonder my father cursed me.
All that I have to remember my father by is a letter scrawled in my mother's blood and a small sculpture. A netsuke, we called it in Japan. A practical Chinese man would call it trash. My Okinawan father was a fisherman. He wrote in that letter - I was born of the sea. Not on the sea or in the sea but of the sea.
"Your mother fell asleep by the water, waiting for me to come home one night and in the morning she awoke with child."
Years later I soared over the waters of Okinawa in a small Ohka kamikaze plane. Nothing more than a pair of thin wooden wings, a trio of solid fuel rocket engines and a cockpit strapped about the body of a 1200 kilogram bomb. We call it Ohka, cherry blossom, because it is said that a pilot who successfully crashes his plane into the belly of an American ship will fly up to heaven like the petals of a cherry blossom on a divine wind. The Americans call the plane Baka or fool and maybe they are right. I have seen ashes flying in the wind as well.
A light rain fell upon the waves, kisses from the sky showered down. In the distance I saw puffs of smoke, the guns of the American invasion fleet pushing like gray metal waves towards the Okinawa shoreline.
The waves were forever. They were always coming. Forward, forward, like the wind they must forever return. War was forever. It would never end. It was in men's nature to butcher themselves over imagined slights - to fight for a bit of dirt, a handful of water, a dream.
When I dreamed my memories tasted of amniotic salt and a mother’s tears.
I knew the Americans were out there. I saw their ships like great beasts, pushing towards Okinawa. Their planes like angry birds raped the clouds and cut the sky. Their soldiers stood like an army of heavy apes, lined up at the breeding trough.
I was unafraid. I was ready to die. It would not be a bad way to die, here in my plane. I have always loved flying. I remembered early years flying dragon kites upon the mountains around my village. I imagined myself looking down from a long way up, my thoughts as high and large as a mountain, swooping down upon the people below me.
They never dreamed I could be so large.
I remembered one morning when I was only nine years old, standing on the mountainside flying my dragon kite. The mountain opened up and spoke to me. A great dark stony jaw opened in the shadows of the mountain. It spoke to me in words that sounded like waves smashing upon the rocks. I did not know what the mountain said to me. I did not know what its strange words meant.
But I listened.
I fingered the piece of netsuke my father left me. My grandfather gave it to me on my sixth birthday. A serpent painted soft green, its arcing curve artfully sculpted into the sway of a charging rampant wave. Not a dragon but a serpent as large as a dragon nested in my open palm.
Okinawan, Japanese, Chinese - I was a river born from many streams. My life was a mirror of sea water flowing backward, the time and tide slipping away like a long burning fuse. I was a moment in search of experience. I was a dream awaiting to be awoken. I was dying of the future, I am dreaming of an unremembered past.
"You are neither land nor water," My grandfather said. "You are the wind moving over the waves. The clouds pissing down upon the dirt. The lightning stroke, the laughter of thunder. You are a storm blowing hard and fast and gone before you know it. All go and no stop, that is the way of young men always and for you young Toryu that is the way of your life. I give this bit of netsuke to you. Touch it when you are lonely. It will bring you strength."
I did not know who carved this small netsuke. My grandfather said it was found on the seashore where my mother slept. It was carved of a wood that felt like stone as smooth as a small polished egg - a seed of darkness waiting to grow. My father left instructions along with his bloodstained letter, bidding my grandfather give them to me on my sixth birthday.
"Sixes are lucky," My father wrote. "And you will need all the luck the skie
s can give."
I touched the release button that would cut me loose from the great Hamaki bomber that bore me out over the sea. Soon I would be close enough to the American fleet to see their ships. Soon I would hunt and hurtle myself down upon them like a hawk, like a wind, like a thunderbolt.
I would crash and burn but my soul was as light as a chrysanthemum petal caught in the wind. I may die but my heart shall float upon the waves, my eyes will burn in the sunrise and my spirit will dwell in the mountain hall of heroes.
What do ashes know?
"Higher," I urged into the tinny static-clogged speaker phone that linked the bomber and I. "I need to be higher."
A man could see forever if he only climbed high enough. That is what mountains reached for. That is why clouds dreamed of heaven. The sea drank from the tears of the sky.
We hurtled forward, my bomber friend and I nested below like a shadow, like an echo, like a bomb. He rode above me in his airplane, a great eagle, the Hamaki long and cigar-shaped and beneath its fuselage my Ohka, an egg waiting to be born, an explosion waiting to soar.
I have waited for this moment forever. The dream has haunted me for as long as I have breathed. I saw myself rising from the waves and sweeping down over the enemy, a great monsoon of meat and metal and vengeance.
I was too young to fly with the great heroes who pounced like tigers upon the sleeping dreadnaughts of Pearl Harbor. I was too young to have flown at Midway. We were tigers, winged tigers, roaring upon our enemy. The Americans could not stop us.
And then we came to a corner in our path. Something turned, something bent and we began to lose. The battle turned like a tide. I was young and foolish. I almost cheered when our country's circumstance grew so dire that they were forced to allow even the youngest men a chance to fly. I joined the navy despite my grandfather's wishes. He had been a soldier and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps.
"There are planes in the army, too," He said.
He was right but the planes of the army were saved for reconnaissance. They only looked and spied where I would rather act. They were not generally allowed the chance that was given to the navy fliers.
I followed darker dreams; dreams old beyond my grandfather's years.
Now I would finally have my chance.