Blood in the Water (Kairos)

by Catherine Johnson

  BLOOD

  IN THE

  WATER

  The Kairos Series

  Book One

  By

  Catherine Johnson

  FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  Blood in the Water © Copyright Catherine Johnson

  2014

  All rights reserved

  Catherine Johnson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Susan,

  Who does everything she can to keep me writing.

  And to my kids,

  Who do everything they can to keep me from writing.

  Also, with thanks to the Freaks who helped make sure that this was worthy of belonging anywhere other than the hard drive of my laptop.

  Kairos

  (’kI-ros)

  The perfect, delicate, crucial moment; the fleeting rightness of time and place that creates the opportune atmosphere for action, words, or movement.

  PART ONE

  1984

  Paul dragged himself up the splintered wooden steps to the door of the dusty trailer that served as his family home. Family? That was a laugh. He didn’t know who his pa was. It was just him and his mom, at least most of the time, some of the time. There was usually some fella that he was supposed to call ‘Uncle’ around. Sometimes they stayed for a month or more, but they never did stick around for long. His ma thought he didn’t know what was going on, thought he was too young to figure it out. He thought maybe he didn’t understand it all the way through, but he understood enough.

  He let himself in, being real careful with the door as he stepped inside. If you didn’t keep hold of the door it swung back and hit the wall behind it with a loud bang, since the trailer wasn’t leveled quite right on its supports. Until he was sure it would just be him inside, he’d try to make no more noise than a mouse. The latest ‘Uncle’ had a real bee in his bonnet about noise. Any sound earned Paul a yelling at or a beating, depending on where his ‘Uncle’ and Paul’s mom were up to with the booze or their pills. Yeah, he understood enough.

  He crept into his home and shut the door behind him with the barest hint of a click to announce his presence. He hadn’t heard any voices from outside, but that didn’t mean nobody was home. No one was sitting on the couch. Yeah, that was funny too. The couch was actually padded benches that ran round the three walls of the trailer at one end. The trailer was roughly divided into three parts. The couches with the fake wood table in the middle that did double duty as both desk and dining table made up the living area. The middle third of the trailer had the kitchen on one side and the toilet and stand-up shower opposite. The last bit of the trailer was taken up by his mom’s bedroom. Paul slept on the couches, covered in a ratty, stinking throw. When he was younger his mom had let him share the bed with her, but then the long line of ‘Uncles’ had started to arrive and he’d been told to sleep on the couch instead.

  He left his school bag on the table and tiptoed to his mom’s bedroom door. It wasn’t locked. He opened it with well-practiced silence and peeked into the room. It was dim inside; the daylight had given up trying to get through the curtains that were sagging off the rail. His mom and his latest uncle were passed out face-down on the bed, still fully dressed this time at least, shoes and all. He went back to the table and got his homework out. At least he could get it done before the yelling started.

  He’d managed to finish all his homework tasks and still there were no signs of stirring from his mom’s room. Looked like he was making supper, then. He made sure to put his school bag away where it wouldn’t be tripped over and then started to make mac ’n’ cheese from a packet mix. He made enough for himself and then some. Chances were that his mom and her friend wouldn’t want any, but if he didn’t make enough for them they’d call him selfish and lazy. If they didn’t want it they’d say he wasted food. He couldn’t win either way, but it made him feel better to make some food for his mom at least.

  While he was waiting for the food to heat through he ran through in his head the list of chores he had to do. All the surfaces needed wiping down, and the floor was beginning to need a mop run over it. The laundry needed doing sometime soon, too. All his clothes might be hand me downs from neighbors or from the Goodwill basket at the local church, but he still took care of them when he could scrape the change together for the laundrymat machines. If he left it to his mom they usually got left in the basket. She just kept forgetting about stuff like that. Ever since that teacher had sat him down and quietly explained why it was that none of the other kids wanted to sit near him in class he’d made sure he got the money to keep his stuff clean. Doing a few chores for Mrs. Pitt in the next trailer over on a Saturday usually got him enough change for a couple of washes.

  Supper was nearly done when the door to his mom’s room opened.

  “What’re ya doin’ ya skinny li’l shit?”

  His Uncle’s voice was a bit slurred. Whether it was sleep or something else Paul couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that the tone didn’t sound good. And he’d tried so hard not to make too much noise.

  “I’m fixin’ supper, sir.”

  “You done woke us all up with all that bangin’ and crashin’. Ya make one hell of a racket, boy.”

  Paul didn’t think that was fair at all. He hadn’t made hardly a sound, but he knew better than to try and argue. He hung his head. He didn’t want the man to see how angry he was, and he really wanted to avoid getting in more trouble if he could.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  It didn’t work. He could almost feel the rage building in the man that stood in the bedroom doorway. Paul didn’t even try to run. It would only make it worse if he did. The guy was huge as far as he was concerned. He was tall, and he had this big pot belly that hung over his jeans. It was covered in a stained beater that might have been white once. Paul thought it was gross when the man walked around with his belly hanging out and no shirt or anything on.

  He didn’t look up even when the man grabbed his arm and dragged him over to the couch. He waited patiently as the man unthreaded his belt and went limp when his ‘Uncle’ sat down and pulled him across his knee. He felt his jeans and underwear being yanked down, and then the first fiery brand as the belt landed. He jerked, but he didn’t cry out. In this at least he knew very well that any sobbing or tears would only mean more thwacks with the belt. He was relieved a little bit that this one used the belt folded up. One of his mom’s previous friends had like to make him stand in place and taken swings at the back of his legs with buckle end. That had stopped when one of his teachers had come round one night. The next morning that ‘Uncle’ had disappeared and his mom had been real mad at him for making him go away.

  At the fifth stroke Paul dared to lift his head a little, just to see if the loud snick of the belt hitting his skin had maybe woken his mom up. It had. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning one hip against the frame, her arms crossed. She looked real disappointed. Maybe he must have made more noise than he thought. He really wanted his mom to say something, to make the man stop, but she wouldn’t, she didn’t. His mom looked kinda tired. Her hair had come out bright yellow last time she’d dyed it and it was all stuck up in every direction like those cartoons when they put their finger in a plug socket. Her makeup was smeared; there was a whole mess of black stuff around her eyes. She’d looked like that yesterday too. Paul didn’t think she noticed what she looked like too much any more.

  Ten strokes. That
was pretty standard. The man pushed him roughly off his knee and Paul gingerly pulled his jeans back over his raw backside. If he winced or something he’d likely earn himself a cuff on the ear. He kept his head down so no one would see how much it hurt.

  The man was heaving himself off the couch now. He was out of breath from the effort of the whipping.

  “Fuckin’ noisy brat. Keep fuckin’ quiet next time. Don’t need ya wakin’ us up when we’re sleepin’.” He turned to Paul’s mom. “Come on ya dirty whore. Ma head is splittin’ like a truck’s runnin’ through it. I need a drink. Don’t know why ya can’t keep any booze in the place.”

  Paul thought that the reason that they couldn’t keep any booze in the place was because the man kept drinking it, but he didn’t say so. He kept very still as they stumbled out of the trailer, slamming the door shut behind them. His mom hadn’t said a word.

  Now that they were gone he was free to screw his face up and hiss at the pain when he moved. He didn’t even realize himself that there were tears streaming down his cheeks. The mac ‘n’ cheese had pretty much boiled dry and welded itself to the pan. He managed to salvage a couple of mouthfuls that would stop the painful rumbles in his tummy for a little while at least. He scraped the pan out as best he could and made sure to fill it with hot water and dish soap to try and soak the burnt bits off. He went to leave it in the sink then thought twice. If his ‘Uncle’ saw it he’d probably be mad that Paul hadn’t cleaned it already. Paul lifted it gingerly, he didn’t want to spill any water on the floor, and took it outside. He hid the pan in the crawlspace under the back of the trailer. He’d come collect it tomorrow when the water had softened the gunk up and he could wash it properly.

  His backside was still burning as he climbed carefully onto the couch and pulled the smelly throw over him. The benches weren’t well padded and between the pain from the beating, the hard surface and the stink of the cover he struggled to get any kind of comfortable. He didn’t have any pajamas to change into, and he wouldn’t have bothered if he had. There wasn’t much in the way of heating in the trailer and it got awful cold at night. He’d just change all his clothes tomorrow before school.

  This last weekend he’d snuck into the movie theater in town and managed to watch Return of the Jedi without being spotted and thrown out. He wanted to be Han Solo so bad. That looked like a good life, to have his own spaceship and be able to fly wherever he wanted in the whole galaxy. His small chest ached at the thought of all that freedom, of having control over his one life, being able to choose his destiny. Before he fell into an exhausted sleep, nine-year-old Paul wished himself happy birthday.

  1991

  As far as birthdays went, Paul didn’t think that this one sucked the worst out of all of them. He’d never had what was usually considered a conventional birthday, with cake and candles and all that shit, but some had been better than others. The ones that he’d spent on his own he’d enjoyed most of all. His fifteenth when he’d popped Maddy Fisher’s cherry was right up there as one of the best. This one, his sixteenth, stuck in solitary in juvie... it was okay, not the best, not the worst.

  In fact, if he’d thought about it, he would have planned it. It was sure worth breaking that little sneaking shit’s face to get some peace and quiet. He hadn’t even realized what day it was until the guard had made some snarky comment when he’d delivered what they laughingly referred to as lunch. He might be stuck in a concrete box every hour of every day until someone decide he’d learnt his lesson this time, but he got time to read without being hassled. As long as they kept the books coming it was all good. He’d spent more time in solitary than out of it so far.

  He had a feeling he was learning more in the concrete box through those printed pages than he ever would if he bothered to attend school. He didn’t get a choice in what they brought him, and he wasn’t in the fortunate position of being able to ignore anything he didn’t like, so he read it all from Orwell’s Animal Farm to Teach Yourself Spanish. School had been a good thing for a while. At least when he was there he wasn’t at home. Even when the other kids in class didn’t want anything to do with him, it was still better than the alternative. Paul didn’t like to dwell on that too much, though; some of those early years held humiliations that still stung even now. Something had changed somewhere, a teacher, the other kids, a combination. Somewhere along the line school had become as torturous a place for him as home and he’d devoted all of his energy to avoiding both places.

  Yeah, being in juvie didn’t suck all that bad. Apart from reading he had a lot of time to work out. Push ups, sit ups, squats; there was plenty he could do in the tiny cell without any equipment and it was all paying off. He’d never known his pa, but he figured he couldn’t have been a skinny shit, ‘cause now Paul had extra time to put the effort in, he was putting muscle on pretty solidly. He’d asked his mom, but she wasn’t giving up the skinny on his sperm donor. He had little clue to his actual genetic makeup other than that he wasn’t entirely Caucasian. His mom was fair skinned and... who the hell knew what color her hair really was, it was bottle bleach yellow most of the time; and she had blue eyes. Paul’s skin was deeply olive-toned and his eyes were such a dark brown they were almost black. His hair was dark too. Most of all that had to have come from someone other than his mom.

  He fucking hated that thinking about that bitch brought a lump to his throat. The succession of ‘uncles’ was all her doing. And never, not fucking once, had she lifted a finger to stop one of them when he was getting a beating. As long as they kept her in booze and whatever else she was into at the time she hadn’t cared. All his life he’d been little more than an inconvenience to her, something in the way, underfoot. And that was when she’d even bothered to remember he was there at all.

  Being inside was infinitely preferable to watching her fade to fuck all in that shitty little tin can trailer that was down as his official address on all the paperwork. The years of drinking, sniffing, pill-popping and shooting up hadn’t dented her. She was real skinny, but all the alcohol, pills and powders seemed to have preserved her. Even when the middle of her nose, the septum he thought it might be, even when that had fallen out from sniffing everything in sight, she hadn’t stopped.

  The docs were undecided about the cancer that was killing her. They thought it might have something to do with all her addictions, but there was also a chance it had something to do with the chemicals in the job she’d had at a dry cleaners back when Paul was too young to remember. That was just a fucking joke, the cosmos taking a stinking dump on his life. There was something very unfunny about the one honest job she’d had killing her just as surely as all the years of drugs and booze.

  It was her fucking fault he was even in here in the first place. He’d been pretty proud of the fact that whatever he’d gotten up to, he’d always managed to avoid getting caught. There wasn’t an inch of the town and the area around it he didn’t know. He was always able to outrun the cops; he was fast on his feet, and he had a few people he could call in on who’d swear that he’d been with them the whole time. Then he’d decided, against his better judgment, to drop in on his mom to see how she was doing, and her latest live-in boyfriend, pimp, whatever had decided to try and throw him a beating for telling his mom that she might want to ease up on the booze some. Paul might not have been packing the muscle that he was now, but he hadn’t been a small kid since a growth spurt somewhere in his fourteenth year. He’d beaten the shit out of the cocky fucker boning his mom.

  It wouldn’t have been a problem, it was unlikely anyone would have cared about the arrogant cocksucker, but his mom, his own fucking mother, had called the police. He hadn’t even heard her do it. One minute he’d been pounding the whimpering shit into so much raw meat, feeling pretty good about teaching him a lesson and maybe getting his own back for all the beatings he’d endured at the hands of these transient bastards; the next there were lights and sirens and he was being dragged back and cuffed. Apparently he’d done enough
damage to warrant a prison term even though it was technically his first offence. Well that’s what having to use the shitty public-appointed defense lawyers got you.

  His mind had been made up that day. He wasn’t going back to that trailer, not ever again. And if his mom wasn’t dead when he got out he wouldn’t be making any effort to go and see her before the ground took her. As far as he was concerned she was already gone. She hadn’t come to his hearing and she hadn’t tried to visit him, either. When he got out he’d go and see some of the friendly faces he knew. School could go fuck itself, too. It was time for him to be earning steady money. He knew he had almost zero chance of getting an honest job, but that was okay; he knew plenty of people who would be more than happy to find him something dishonest to do.

  If this, being inside, was supposed to be a deterrent, it wasn’t working. There were some things he missed. The warm sunshine on his skin, that was a good feeling you didn’t get in solitary and didn’t get much in Gen Pop either. Pussy, you didn’t get that inside at all and he missed tapping some of the sweet young things that hung around the bad neighborhoods looking for a hookup. The food wasn’t even close to being a joke, he wouldn’t have fed it to the rats, but it did stave off the hunger pangs.