The Summer Job

by Cesare, Adam

  “And she’d be okay with you killing your father?”

  “No.” Eden’s face felt flushed. Like she knew that she’d made a mistake by saying this to Davey.

  “No, I don’t think she would,” Davey said. “That’s why you’d have to be prepared to kill your mother if you killed your father. Either that or I’d have to end up rescuing you. Your mother might have to die then too. If it were her or me, I’m going to defend myself.”

  They didn’t talk about her parents any more after that.

  *

  Eden didn’t live in the camper with Davey. Not anymore.

  When she wasn’t back home with her father and mother, she lived with Jeb.

  Jeb spent all his nights in his tent. He didn’t go home anymore either.

  Jeb had set up the tent a comfortable distance away from the fire pit.

  There were still nights that the fire grew too large and Jeb had to collapse the tent to keep it safe from the floating embers. As it was, Eden woke every morning to the pinpoints of light that had been melted into the ceiling of the old tent.

  Being with Jeb was like living with a wild animal. Not that he was dangerous, not to Eden, but because of the growling.

  His words were growls, his yawns were growls and his sexual come-ons were growls.

  Eden was already awake, lying still for forty minutes, when Jeb woke with a growl.

  He lifted his arm to scratch at his beard, freeing eighty-five-pound Eden from his fifty-pound arm.

  She felt love for everyone in their group. It was a requirement, but somehow she loved Jeb the least.

  Jeb tucked his privates back into his denim overalls and pulled the straps up over his shoulders with both thumbs. He unzipped the door to the tent and walked out into the mud of the campsite in his bare feet. Once outside he growled a hello to whoever else was already awake.

  After she listened to his heavy footfalls slouch off in the direction of the woods, Eden riffled through their clothes pile. She chose a simple yellow sundress with a greenish stain at one corner and slipped it down over her small breasts.

  The fabric felt pleasant sliding over her nipples and the sensation made her think of Davey.

  Thinking of Davey made her think of his new girl. The one girl in the camp she refused to love.

  That girl, the tall one with the hourglass shape and perfectly even tan, was the one person Eden hated as much as her father.

  All the boys wanted the girl. The morning that Tobin had brought her to camp, Eden watched their expressions. Their mouths were practically watering over her blonde hair, breasts impossibly large and high. It made Eden sick to think about.

  She rarely left Davey’s camper when they ate dinner, but last night she had. Eden was seated on Jeb’s lap and she could feel him stiffen underneath her when the girl joined the circle. She had pretended not to notice their stares, seating herself right next to Davey and taking his hand as they said Grace.

  During last night’s Grace, Eden had prayed for violence. She prayed for the new girl’s fiery death, for every act of evil she’d ever witnessed to be visited upon this girl.

  You weren’t supposed to wish for things like that, not inside of the group. It was one of the rules. They only had a few rules, but they were told to follow them to the letter.

  Eden lifted the flap and stepped out into the morning light. A small fire crackled in the pit. Someone had slung their wet socks over the flames to try and dry them. The toes were black with smoke.

  There were two people outside. A county boy named Flint slept near the generator. He was curled into the fetal position with his jacket pulled up over his head and arms. It would probably be a few more hours until he was awake.

  The other was Davey.

  He sat on the steps that led to his camper. There were only two steps, so his knees were up even with his shoulders. He was so tall and skinny that sometimes he looked like a scarecrow.

  She could feel his eyes on her as she walked to the Igloo cooler for a drink of water.

  “Good morning,” he said. She looked over and could see that he was whittling, the shape of the stick in front of him indefinable from where she stood.

  “Morning,” she said, picking up a cup and filling it with water. The water was cold, a few withered ice cubes clinked at the top of the cup. Yesterday, there was only ice and beer cans in the cooler, this morning they had water. Praise be.

  “Come ’ere,” he said, waving her over with the pocket knife. “I feel like it’s been forever since we had a sit-down.”

  Craning her neck, she looked around for Jeb.

  “He’s gone. I’d say for a good thirty minutes,” Davey said. There were people, the people of the town, who claimed Davey was a fake. They said that he couldn’t see the future or read minds because those weren’t gifts that He chose to impart on man. “Does a Jeb shit in the woods?” he asked, smiling at his own joke and waving her over again.

  Sliding down to make room, he dusted off a spot on the step for her. She sat, but didn’t speak.

  “How are things with you and Paul Bunyan?” Davey returned to whittling as he spoke. She could see the design now. It was a face. She watched as he shaved off flecks of wood. They floated to the ground like summer snow.

  “Things are good,” she said. What she didn’t talk about were the bruises, dark black fingerprints in the flesh of her thighs, the hurt she felt when he was inside her.

  “That’s good to hear. You’re cute together.”

  It was a strange conversation to have, strange in that it sounded so normal. This was the kind of conversation she would have had with a boy before coming to live in the woods.

  Davey pressed the knife into the soft wood and made lips in the stick.

  They were full lips. He was carving a woman’s face.

  If he carves her face, I don’t think I could stand it.

  “You know that things are always changing, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not just between people. Like what happens between me or you or Tobin or Jeb. But, like, cosmically.”

  “Yes,” she said, trying to concentrate now. She felt that she was about to hear something important, and if it was not important, at the very least it would be difficult to understand.

  “You also know that things are bound to change between us and the town,” he said. He carved eyes now. “You know that that’s already started, in a way.”

  She nodded, her eyes on his knife, on the tender work he was doing. “I’m aware,” she said, sounding more like a sullen little girl than she wanted to.

  “Good. So if you know that, like you do,” he said, starting on the hair, “then you also know that there are some aspects of our lives that’ll stay the same, will always stay the same.”

  Davey would do this often: tell you one thing right before telling you the exact opposite without quite contradicting himself. It was a gift, one of the things that made her believe.

  “I guess,” she said. “Mountains stay the same. They’re always there.”

  “Even mountains move and crumble. It takes a long time, but they do,” he said. He flicked out a chip of wood that landed in his beard. She reached over and brushed it off.

  “The things that stay constant are not earthly concerns. They’re ideas and feelings.”

  She looked away from his hands now and studied his face. When she first met him, she would spend hours looking at his face, trying to tell just what percent of him was bullshitting her at any one time. His beard hadn’t been so unwieldy then.

  As the months turned to years, she’d stopped looking for the bullshit. She’d seen too much by that point. She’d seen him preach and kill. Watched him grow into the man he was born to be. The challenger. The agitator. She loved him.

  “Oh, I understand what you mean now.”

  He stood, blowing on the carving, sending a fine dust raining down over her.

  “That’s good that you get the concept,” he said, offering her the s
tick.

  She took it, the bark rough against her small hands. It was heavier than she’d expected. The wood was moist and the cuts were green where Davey had gone deep enough.

  “Because one of the things that’s never going to change is how much I love you. I hope you know that.”

  She looked down at the carving in the branch. It was her own face staring back at her.

  Even though the eyes were still, they seemed to sparkle, the moist wood catching the morning light as it slashed through the trees.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Roy loved cooking with dog meat, but getting the meat off smaller dogs was frustrating.

  This wasn’t something that he could have Claire help him with, either, so it would be the first time he’d be filleting without a fingertip.

  All his life, the world around Roy had made him aware of his shortcomings. When he was a boy, girls had shied away from his rough looks. In elementary school he’d struggled and he never finished high school.

  Roy was dumb and ugly, but—up until last week—he could cook. He could cook well.

  Before that fucker had shot his right pointer finger off.

  He would kill Tobin. That much was certain—that much Ms. Brant had promised him. It was only a matter of when.

  He was going to kill him and eat him. That was one kind of meat he’d never prepared. Whatever Roy was, he wasn’t a cannibal, but when he thought of killing Tobin, all his mind could focus on was what to do after. He decided that he would hollow out his chest cavity like a deer and then cook his heart.

  Death was too good for the man that had taken his finger, that had left him unable to hold a knife properly.

  Over the years he’d honed his skill with a knife to an art form. His hand felt complete with a blade. He could debone any fish, work with any cut of beef, dice and chop any fruit or vegetable. The important thing, he’d learned, was that all your control came from applying pressure with that first knuckle, the one that he didn’t have anymore.

  He tried working with his left hand, but that didn’t work.

  In order to hold the knife in his right hand, he had to press harder against the shattered stump of his knuckle. Even through the oxy he’d had Dwyer prescribe (small town general store and pharmacy, no doctor required), pressing the knife handle against his knuckle caused him great pain.

  To reduce the pain, he piled gauze on top of his wound. The problem then becoming the thicker he wrapped the dressing on his wound, the more dexterity he lost.

  He pressed harder now, trying to separate a lower leg from an elbow. The knife slipped and he ended up cutting a deep gash in his left thumb.

  “Damnit!” Roy yelled and tossed the knife across the kitchen. He imagined it sailing through the air like a laser and sticking to the opposite wall with a satisfying thunk. The throw had been clumsy, though, so the knife slapped against the wall with the flat of the blade, clattering to the floor and leaving a faint splotch of dog blood.

  If Roy hadn’t been so comforted by what really awaited him in the afterlife, he would consider this new deformity as his own private hell. Tobin had taken away the one thing he was proud of. The boy had done it so clinically, yet so nonchalantly. Had he known what he was doing when he pulled the trigger?

  It seemed unlikely, but something inside Roy told him that he had done it on purpose. There was a cleverness to Tobin that Roy could never hope to aspire to.

  After he’d emptied out Tobin’s guts and strung up his hide to dry, he would burn down his shed, the one that he’d tried and failed to keep secret from the town. He would burn down that outhouse of a home and cook Tobin’s heart over the flames.

  Then piss on the embers as he chomped into the heart like an apple.

  Roy ran his thumb under the tap, taking it out from under every so often to check if the blood had slowed.

  “Screw this,” Roy said to himself. The bleeding wouldn’t be stopping soon enough, so he grabbed a dishtowel, wrapped it around the cut and watched the edges bloom bright red.

  Checking his left coat pocket for his keys, he slid the half-butchered dog into the lunch fridge and locked it.

  He didn’t need to check his pockets for the baton because he could feel the weight of it tugging at his pocket. The baton had been special ordered from Canada. Roy took it with him everywhere, even though a concealed weapon was no good to get caught with. He thought of his last big mistake, cracking that kid’s windpipe with the end of the baton.

  To err was human, but to err often seemed to be particularly Roy. When the weight of his accumulated mistakes got too heavy, he needed to escape the kitchen and clear his mind. This practice didn’t originate out of a Zen attitude of self-discovery, just the observation that his mistakes would sometimes snowball if he did not allow himself time to cool down.

  The way things had been going, Ms. Brant may not allow him to live through many more mistakes.

  He needed to calm down.

  *

  Roy didn’t have a car and it was hard to find a safe, secluded place within walking distance of the hotel.

  It’s not that Roy didn’t have access to a car. He did. At last count, there were thirty-seven that he could still get the engines to turn over.

  He didn’t dare take any of these cars out for a spin, though. Aside from the obvious trouble it would cause if a state policeman ever pulled him over while he was riding in one, the trouble he would get in with the old woman would be even worse.

  No one could make a move in Mission without that move being reported back to Ms. Brant. Even though he could never drive them, he did like to visit them from time to time.

  On days like this, when he couldn’t get away but had to get away, Roy would visit the cars.

  Roy was the head caretaker of the car garden. While they were his greatest release, they were also his biggest responsibility.

  When a new car came in, he would drive it to the garden at around two in the morning. The garden was two miles from the center of town, far enough from the northern woods that Davey or his kids wouldn’t mess with it, hopefully would never find it.

  Once at the garden, he would strip the inside of the car down. Fuzzy dice, travel mugs, maps, registration, brochures, and the stuffed animals kids placed on dashboards. Roy would take all of those things and throw them in a large black garbage bag.

  Next he would search the car for a GPS. If there was one, he would smash it with a hammer until it couldn’t power on, then he would put the pieces in the plastic bag with the other trash.

  These days it was getting more difficult because cars were coming with on board computers and geo-locators. Those cars he would have to disassemble until he was sure that there were no electronics left on board. That was always a pain in the ass.

  Once he had everything in the bag, he dug a hole and set the bag on fire. Once the fire went out, he pushed the dirt back over the hole.

  He had a small tractor to help with this work. He’d asked for a new Caterpillar backhoe, something compact that could still get the job done in a third of the time, but he was told that it wasn’t in the budget.

  The cars were spread over a few acres of land. Some he parked in the shade of trees, others he half covered with debris after spray painting the roofs and hoods black.

  There were no local airports and no flight paths crossing through Mission. It was highly unlikely that the cars would be spotted from a plane or helicopter, but Roy took no chances with his car garden.

  In his search for the perfect spot to squirrel away a car, he often had to use the tractor as an impromptu tow truck. When that wouldn’t work, he’d have to use an actual truck. There were three in his collection.

  He kept two other collections. One was a lockbox full of keys and the other was a stash of license plates. His dream was to one day having a plate from every different state, or at least those in the continental U.S.

  He used a bench vise to bend each one in half before burying them all in the same plot of land.
There were only eight states represented, too many duplicates for his taste.

  Sometimes he felt like a dog, digging holes and dropping in his treasures.

  But there was a meditative quality to the act of hiding something away, patting the dirt down the best you possibly could so nobody could ever get your goods.

  Roy didn’t keep maps of his collection. Paperwork was a liability. The breadth of his collection and his diminished memory meant that he was rediscovering cars every time he visited the garden.

  He placed his hands against the black Elantra in front of him. Black was his favorite color for cars. It meant that instead of spray paint, all he had to do was spread a thin layer of dirt and pine needles over the top to reduce the shine of the finish.

  Claire’s friend had owned this car, but her parents had probably paid for it, he decided.

  Claire was fine, but her friend had cost him a finger and got him a massive reaming from Brant.

  Well, in actuality it was Daisy who had done both of those things.

  He knew she didn’t have the guts. Roy knew better than to judge a book by its cover, but it was more than her chubby cheeks and lisp that told him Daisy wasn’t a hardened killer.

  He’d never say it out loud, but he swore that she got squeamish when she visited the basement. She’d never stood alongside him and the others as they completed the blood sketch. That was a big no-no. Nonbelievers need not apply as far as the ceremonies were concerned.

  She’d begged the old lady to be the one to take care of Allison, though. Once she’d given her permission, there was nothing Roy could say or do to stop that train.

  He’d armed Daisy with a syringe and a knife. That was his first mistake. Both weapons were too final for Daisy. When she’d gotten cold feet about having to depress the plunger, she’d panicked.

  The way she told it, she’d dropped the syringe and alerted the girl, Allison, to her presence, so she picked up the nearest knickknack (a burnished bronze rabbit statue, what else?) from the hallway table and smacked the girl in the mouth with it.

  Not content to have fucked up that badly, the silly bitch had then dragged the girl out into the woods to finish the job, before pussing out and running back to the house for help.