by Newman,James
Mom stared off toward the rain again, sighed wistfully.
“Today it’s as easy as getting an abortion,” she said. “Just scrape that baby out of you, and no one’s the wiser. Not like it used to be.”
I squirmed in my seat as she rambled on.
“How could he have been so stupid?” Mom exclaimed. “That’s what I wanna know! I always thought your brother had such a good head on his shoulders. He was so smart. Not like all the other teenagers in this town, who only think about smoking pot and screwing up at Storch’s Rim any chance they get.”
I blushed.
“Christ, did he prove me wrong.”
“What happened?” I said. “Tell me.”
“He had it all, your big brother. And he still does. But he almost didn’t. The basketball scholarship. Julie. The fool almost lost everything, Kyle. You know, I always gave Danny a hard time about that girl, Julie, but it’s only ’cause I love him. I don’t suppose she was so bad, when it came right down to it. She did seem to care about your brother, didn’t she? I guess I just couldn’t get used to Dan showing another woman besides me all of his attention. But the thing with kids these days, Kyle…and remember I told you this, because it won’t be too many years till you start sniffing around the opposite sex…they don’t know what love is. They can’t. They think they do. But it’s just their hormones talking.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“Danny had it all. But he screwed it up. For all I know he might have married Julie one day—they may still, although I think this college thing will probably put a crimp in that, just you wait and see—but that never would have been if Cassandra Belle Rourke had fucked it all up. If I’d let her fuck it up for Danny.”
I licked my too-dry lips, began to gnaw at my fingernails as she went on.
“That’s all it takes, Kyle. One teeny tiny mistake. And everything you have can go down the drain like that.”
She snapped her fingers, and the sound seemed very loud in our small kitchen. I flinched.
Mom scowled down at the table then, as if she could see Cassie Belle Rourke right in front of her and wanted to slap the dead girl silly. Her hands balled into tight white fists, and her voice grew a bit louder as she explained…
“Cassie Rourke’s little crush on your brother started two or three years ago. Remember when he worked the concession stand at the skating rink? She used to hang out there a lot, from what I hear, and she got this…this thing for Danny that wouldn’t go away no matter what. Even then she was way too young for him. She would have been around your age, I guess. Dan was fifteen. But it didn’t matter to her. She kept on and on, always bugging him. Always calling, asking for him. Dan was always so polite, told her he had a girlfriend, but I could tell he liked it. Deep down inside. He liked the attention. I told her she didn’t have any business calling here for him, but she wouldn’t listen. Little sluts like her never do. She started sending him these dirty little love letters, every other week or so. Dan thinks I didn’t know, but I did. I knew all along. Don’t ever forget, Kyle—no matter what you get yourself into—that it’s not easy keeping secrets from the person who does your laundry day in and out.”
“Um…okay,” I said.
“I can’t fault Dan for being a typical man. He can’t help he’s got two balls between his legs. That’s the way God made him. But I just hope and pray he learned his lesson after this little scare.”
I said nothing. Just waited for her to continue. Thunder rumbled overhead like the horrible truth of this whole situation crashing down upon me.
“Always remember how much trouble your penis can get you into, son,” Mom said. “You’ll do that for your mother, won’t you?”
I cleared my throat, looked away into the darkness of our living room. Blushed again. “Umm…y-yeah. S-sure.”
“Good. Good boy. My precious Kyle…”
Finally, Mom opened up her bottle of Wild Turkey. She poured about three fingers of it into the glass before her, set it back down. She didn’t drink from it, though. Not yet.
Beside Mom’s bottle I again noticed that piece of yellow paper sitting on the table in front of her, beneath the matches she had used to light the candles. My curiosity got the best of me.
“Mom?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Oh. This?”
She slid it across the table to me. The candlelight twitched and shifted on the walls like a living coat of paint. Our shadows danced around us.
My eyes grew wide when I saw what was on that piece of paper. My lips worked soundlessly as I tried my damnedest to make sense of it all…
In one trembling hand I held the results of a pregnancy test, as given by Dr. Jim R. Falconer across town. The date at the top read 7/12/77. The patient was one Cassandra Belle Rourke, 15. She had tested positive, and at the time of the diagnosis was about five weeks into her first trimester.
In bold blue ink, someone had written SEE!!!!! across the bottom of the page, in all capital letters. The word had been underlined several times, so hard the pen had nearly torn through the paper.
“I found that in his pants,” Mom said.
She studied her amber glass of whiskey for several long, awkward seconds. Licked her lips. Finally, she gave a little shrug, raised her eyebrows and drank deeply. Loudly.
“Dan screwed up, Kyle. He screwed up bad. He gave in to that little tramp, he cheated on Julie, and he let his penis do his thinking for him. He slept with Cassie Rourke, at some point—I don’t know when, but of course a mother can’t keep dibs on her boys twenty-four hours a day, can she, not when she has to pay the bills and put food on the table too—and you see what happened.
“What Dan didn’t realize is that this slut held his entire life in the palms of her frigging hands. Because…not only would he lose everything he had worked so hard to achieve, if word got out about their dirty little tryst…your brother could have also gone to prison.”
“P-prison?”
“She was only fifteen. Dan is a legal adult now. What he did…it was statutory rape.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Didn’t matter how bad she wanted it. Didn’t matter that the little tramp had been begging for it for years. Dan would have gone to prison. He would have lost everything.”
Mom took another sip from her glass, then slammed her glass back down on the table. Some of the whiskey splashed onto her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I couldn’t let that happen, you understand.”
A single tear tickled its way down my cheek and dripped onto the table. For the umpteenth time, I said, “Oh, God…”
“He screwed up, yes. He did something that was very stupid. But you’ve got to understand where I was coming from, Kyle. It was up to me to see to it that my first-born son’s perfect life wasn’t flushed down the toilet because of one persistent little bitch who had basically…seduced him. Who had been chasing him since she was twelve years old, for God’s sake.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at the tabletop, numb.
“That’s why I set Cassie Rourke up with the sheriff’s son,” Mom said. “I knew I had no choice.”
“What?” I looked up at her. “What do you mean? How—”
“The sheriff and I…you know we’ve been seeing one another for the past few months.”
“Uh…yeah,” I said, wondering if her love for alcohol had killed every last bit of her memory.
Her gaze averted from mine, went to the candle between us. She twirled a curl of her long brown hair around one finger as she explained, “Well, one night…we…we had a bit too much to drink. Burt and I.”
You? Too much to drink? I was tempted to say. But I didn’t.
“He took me to see a movie. Annie Hall. We stopped in at Lou’s Tavern for a few drinks on the way home. We didn’t plan to stay long. I told him I had to get home to my boys. But Burt’s really good friends with the owner, Lou Raintree. We eventually lost track of the time, and the sheriff just talk
ed Lou into letting him close up shop. We could stay as long as we wanted, and all our drinks were on the house. Before I knew it, it was two or three in the morning, and the night still seemed so young.”
“Okay,” I said, though it came out a disgusted grunt more than anything.
“We shared a lot of secrets that night. I’ve never been able to just…talk with a man, like I can talk to Burt, you know? I learned about his wife, Connie, how she had been in the hospital for almost two years with ovarian cancer. She died the same day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, apparently. Now, Burt said, all he had was his boy. Henry. I sure could relate to that. I felt so sorry for him, Kyle…he went through a lot, back when all that happened…it almost reminded me of those first few years after your father died, and all the shit we went through…”
I just sat there, not allowing my expression to give away how I felt about Burt Baker at all. Or how it compared to my own situation.
Mom said, “He also told me about how Henry had gotten himself into some trouble with the law a few years back, when Burt was Sheriff in Gastonia.”
“Deputy—” I started to correct her, but then I shut up.
“Seems Henry messed around with some girl back in the day. Burt told me his son was very ‘high-strung,’ that he liked to get a little rough during…er…in the sack, so to speak. Sometimes…sometimes he hit them. The girls he went out with. Burt said he’d always wanted to get help for his son, but with his career he was always too busy. He thought Henry was all better now, anyway. It’d been years since one of his ‘episodes’…and even the last one he wasn’t really sure what happened, if anything did happen at all, ’cause the girl recanted her story before it even got to court…”
Mom stared through me.
I stared back at her.
“Still, I thought, there had to be a way.”
I slowly began to shake my head, and I did not stop until after she was done…
“I thought about that a lot, Kyle, during those sleepless nights when I laid there staring into the darkness wondering how Dan was gonna get himself out of this mess. I thought about what Burt had told me about his son, and I knew that an answer to your brother’s problems lay somewhere in the things Henry Baker had done before he moved to Midnight. The solution was there…so close…but I couldn’t quite put the pieces of the puzzle together…”
“What did you do, Mom?” I whispered. “What did you do…”
“First and foremost, I’ll have you know that I did not hold a gun to his head,” she said, frowning. As if I had already accused her of doing something like that. “I was the catalyst. That’s all. I hooked them up. I didn’t make that boy do anything.”
“Tell me,” I said. I had a hard time looking at my mother for the next few minutes. She made me sick. Though she seemed remorseful of the things she had done, there was something about the way she spoke as her story met its terrible denouement that seemed defiant, cold, as if she dared me to question the love she felt for her sons, or the unimaginable lengths she would go to protect us.
“That little slut had the nerve to come up and introduce herself to me one day in the Big Pig Grocery. As if I couldn’t wait to make her acquaintance. I was standing in the meat department, I remember. I’d been thinking about asking Julie over for a cook-out, believe it or not. Thought we could all get together and talk and pretend everything was gonna be okay. But then I saw her. Cassie Belle Rourke. She had the nerve to walk up to me in her tight little blue-jean shorts and ask me in this voice that was so sweet it made me want to puke, ‘You’re Dan Mackey’s mother, aren’t you?’
“I should have denied it. Should have told the bitch I didn’t know Dan Mackey from Little Richard. But before I even thought about it, I was smiling at her, saying, ‘yes, sweetheart, and you are?’ all the time wishing I could claw her eyes out. And it hit me, just like that. All of the pieces suddenly clicked into place. I realized this was Dan’s only chance. By the time I got up to the front counter, and saw Henry Baker standing there bagging groceries the next aisle over—this was when he first started working as a bagboy at the Big Pig—the plan was already formulated in my brain. The possibilities of what could be, knowing Henry’s history with young women.
“That’s why I introduced them. Oh, I did such a wonderful job of it, Kyle, the way I took her hand and put it in his. I could tell there was something between them even then. I saw Henry’s eyes glance over her perky little breasts—she wasn’t wearing a bra that day, I remember—and he obviously liked what he saw. As for her…well, Henry’s not a bad-looking boy by any means, you know, even if he does have those nervous twitches every now and then. I could tell the way they looked at each other, there was something there. I had done my part. Now I just had to sit back. Wait. And hope that if she couldn’t have Dan, she would throw herself onto the next best thing.”
“Oh, God,” I wept. “Mother…”
“Six days later, Cassie Belle Rourke was dead.”
“That’s so…awful…”
“I never meant for her to die. I just thought maybe…maybe he would…cause her to miscarry or something…that’s all…”
“Jesus, Mom!” I cried.
“I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
“Yes. You do.”
“Is that punishment enough, you think?”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
Mom buried her face in her hands again. But if she had begun to cry anew, her sobs were soft and soundless.
“I think I’m going to quit drinking,” she said when she was done, even as she raised her glass of Wild Turkey to her lips.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes. Really.”
She set her glass back down on the table. It glistened almost prettily in the candlelight.
“I’m going to try, anyway.”
“Good.”
“I’m tired of living like this.”
Again she took a drink. But this time from the bottle. I suppose she meant she would try to stop eventually. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after that.
“Do you hate me, Kyle?” she said. “Please…tell me you don’t hate me…”
“I don’t hate you, Mom,” I said.
I got up to leave the room.
“I just…”
“What?” Desperation burned in my mother’s eyes. She wiped at her mouth with the back of one shaky hand as I pushed in my chair and shuffled into the darkness of the hallway, toward my bedroom.
Again I said, “I don’t hate you.”
And I left it at that for now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I don’t remember actually going to bed that night. I shouldn’t have been able to fall asleep in the first place, I suppose—after everything that had happened during the last few hours—but eventually fatigue must have outweighed even my fear. I could not fight it any more. I soon drifted off on top of my covers to the sound of the storm outside, and might have slept for days had my slumber not been interrupted a few hours later…
Somewhere in the middle of a dream about Mom, Dan, a braless Cassie Rourke, and a screeching baby with a dead blue face lying in the meat department of a pitch-black grocery store, I was awakened by a terrible stinging sensation about my cheeks. Like needles sliding in and out of my flesh, or an angry swarm of bees stinging my jaws, over and over.
I came to slowly, realized someone was slapping me awake. Rough hands gripped my shoulders, shaking me back and forth in my bed.
“Wake up. God damn you, wake up.”
I knew that voice. I knew it.
Oh, Jesus.
All of the blood seemed to rush out of my head once my eyes adjusted to the deep blue-black darkness of the room, when I saw who stood over my bed.
“Wake the fuck up,” said Sheriff Burt Baker.
Lightning flashed in the window behind him.
He had come for me at last, a massive black shape in the night.
“Hey! What are you�
��” I started, trying to sit up.
His humongous hand slammed over my mouth. It was rough and work-calloused. It scratched at my lips like steel wool, smelled of sweat and leather and—faintly—beer. It pinned me to the bed like a thousand-pound weight.
With his other hand, he held up a fat brown finger.
“Shut up,” he said, in a voice just above a whisper. “Don’t speak.”
“Mmm!” I cried, trying to call out for my mother though I knew she could not help me. “Hnghh!”
He slapped me again.
“Did you hear what I just said? Make another sound and I will snap your fucking neck.”
A single tear collected in one corner of my eye, trickled down my cheek onto his hand. At the same time, a drop of dirty rainwater dripped from the bill of his hat onto my forehead.
“Now you’re gonna cry?” he taunted me. “Not so fuckin’ brave anymore, are you, big man?”
Behind him, the clock on my nightstand read 1:11.
I stared at him, so sure that my eyes were going to pop out of my head any second. His hand was like a vise around my cheeks…squeezing…squeezing…
P-p-please, I tried to reason with him, but beneath his gigantic hand all that came out was: “Mm-smm-mmmmsh…”
He grinned at me, and his teeth were very white in the night.
“I think it’s time you and I had a little talk, Kyle. Don’t you?”
He took his hand off my mouth. Stepped back.
His khaki uniform was rumpled and wet. His badge was crooked. It caught a hint of soft blue glow from my Spider-Man night-light across the room and seemed to wink at me.
“Not now, though,” he said. “Not here.”
His monstrous fist seemed to explode right in my face then.
Everything went black, and I felt as if I were falling into forever…
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Creedence Clearwater Revival. On the radio. “Someday Never Comes.” Close, but muffled. As if through an old dirty sock. Accompanied by the off-key sound of someone singing along. Tentatively, though. As if he likes this song a lot, but doesn’t quite know all the words.
