FALSE FRONT
Page 4
“Is Fredrick dead?”
She presses her cell phone against her small circular ear, breathing loud and hard into the speaker.
“Dead?”
“Your son, Ma’am? Is he dead?”
Ignoring the dispatcher’s questioning, she screams out the name Brees.
“Ma’am, are Brees and Fredrick your sons?”
She continues to hustle down the street, shouting the same name.
“Ma’am?”
“Faye.”
“Faye is your name?”
“Faye Knightly.”
“Good, Faye. Where are you located?”
“I’m running.”
“Where?”
“The street.”
“Did this happen nearby?”
“The front yard.”
“Where is your yard, Faye?”
“I’m Faye Knightly. I run the 1982 foster home at 3293 NE Capote Court. In Vivacity,” she says, short on breath as she continues to run frantic through the neighborhood.
“That’s good, Faye. Thank you.”
Faye trips over a sidewalk curb and collapses hard into another neighbor’s front yard. Her fall launches her cell phone across the lawn. Her wet palm slides, spreading red across the grass. She darts a single eye around the natural floor, scanning the area. She spins around in frenzied circles. Searching on her hands and knees, she swipes around at the ground beneath her and collects grass and dirt on the knees of her jeans.
“Faye?” The voice calls from the glow of a screen shining bright in the dark. Faye springs upright on her knees and aims the gun at the voice.
“Faye, are you okay?”
She crawls towards the voice.
“Faye?”
She gathers the phone. Wiping her hands over her cardigan, she blends fresh earth with the previous stains of lost life.
“Faye?”
“Are you coming?”
“Help is already on the way.”
“Tell them to hurry.”
“They are, Faye.”
“Tell them I’m going to kill whoever did this if I find them first,” she says, and climbs back to her feet.
A patchy grey bearded man, scratching at a bulging woolly belly, opens his front door and peers out into the darkness.
“Faye, what’s going on out here?”
Faye spins toward him, aiming the gun at the man’s shaggy round face, and yells, “Brees? Have you seen Brees? My son?”
The man holds his hands up next to his large ears and shakes his head. She keeps the gun on him for a moment, stepping back before darting down the street.
“Help is on the way, Faye. Just calm down, okay? You don’t want to do anything you regret,” the dispatcher says.
Faye drops the phone from her ear and squeezes it in her shivering palms, like she’s trying to crumple paper into a ball. She mumbles silent hopes and pleas to herself as she pumps her aging, reduced arms and legs, yelling the missing boy’s name over and over as she sprints down the neighborhood road.
“Faye, breathe. Just breathe. Wait for help.”
Several porch and bedroom lights flick on, brightening the bizarre evening darkness eating at the suburban neighborhood. Vivacity had a rare hot first day of summer, but now the beauty of the day is lost to something bleak and lurid.
Faye places the cell phone back against her ear and through her severe wheezing says, “I’m losing him. I can feel it. He’s getting farther away.”
“Faye, we’ll do everything we can. Now try and remember everything that happened. Every detail can help the police when they get there. I promise.”
“Remember?”
“Yes. Don’t forget anything.”
Her wobbling legs slow her and she stumbles to a stop, almost falling over.
“I won’t ever forget.”
“Faye?”
Her lips pull inward around aged coffee-stained teeth. Her chin pulls up. Her eyes slam closed. Gleaming grey brows drop over her closed eyelids, and her forehead wrinkles like palms of hands in water too long. Everything on her face squishes in around her nose in aching anguish, aging her by several years in just a moment. Her abusive breathing bends her over. She clutches at a slim row of ribs, as several violent gasps punish her aged body. Opening her scar-free eye, she observes the area round her, and sweat rolls down the sides of her face, carrying with it specs of blood that drip to the asphalt below.
“Faye?”
“Why would someone do this?”
“The police are close, Faye.”
“Fredrick was a good man. Brees is just a boy.”
“Any minute they’ll be there.”
She lifts her t-shirt, kneading at her hurting sides and exposing flesh not roasted by the sun in years.
“He was outside. Just outside on the front lawn with Fredrick for a minute.”
“Are Fredrick and Brees your sons?”
“Fredrick.” And when she says that name again she bends farther, and her head drops downward to her waist.
“See them, Faye?”
“Fredrick’s stomach was opened up.”
“What?”
“Parts of him are all over the fucking place.”
“I’m so sorry, Faye.
Faye stands looking down the street from where she ran. Red footprints, lines of blood, and drops of Fredrick follow her path to where she stands.
“Any second the police will be there, Faye.”
“Fredrick’s dead. Brees is gone. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Faye?”
She spins in slow delirious circles, raising the gun above her head. She claws at her thick, lustrous, grey hair. Hair that looks like a luminous full moon. Hope fades from her brilliant blue eyes. The sparkle found there dissipates. What would normally be a strong, athletic, but heartwarming face twists into a droopy, weak, helpless look of misery. She screams, tossing the blood soaked phone away, and it shatters against the ground.
She imitates her phone by collapsing to the street. When she lands on the ground, she erupts into cruel screams.
“They will do everything they can to find him, Faye,” the dispatcher’s voice echoes from the fallen phone.
Faye digs nails into her face and thumps the handle of the gun against the side of her head.
“Faye?”
Her screaming shifts to chaotic incomprehensible whispers of nonsense from a wounded soul.
“Faye?”
“He’s gone forever.”
“Faye?”
“We’re too late.”
“Faye?”
“Gone.”
A car’s headlights shine on Faye as it drives toward the grounded woman. Faye’s smudged, strained expression illuminates under the glow of the car as she turns and faces off with it, aiming the revolver at the windshield. She stands and charges the vehicle.
“Where is Brees?”
The car comes to a rolling stop. The driver presses on the horn with both hands, but he watches Faye slam a dirty palm down on the hood of his white sedan. Her ordinary eye bulges and her mouth drops. She shrieks until she overcomes the blasts from his car. He places the back of his hand against his mouth, as if he’s going to be sick.
Faye points the gun at the man, letting it sit on him for a bit, and then lifts it above her head, aiming it at the blackness above. She squeezes the trigger and deafening bursts erupt, five in a row. The cracking of the .38 dulls every other noise throughout the neighborhood except for Faye’s screams.
Turning his head away from the dream-haunting contortion on Faye’s face, the driver raises his hands in arrest.
“Faye, the police will be there soon,” the dispatcher’s voice calls out from the distance of a shattered screen.
Faye continues to wail until nothing’s left. Until her cords shred. Until she gives out. Until nothing but sick silence remains throughout the neighborhood.
Faye’s mouth still hangs unhinged, and strings of spit leak from her lips. Her raw eyes a
re unblinking and swelling as she looks into the vehicle. She’s frozen like that, and the driver keeps his hands raised, blocking the view.
Curious neighbors wander out of their homes. Everyone watches her agony from their porches, their front lawns, and from the secure windows inside of their homes. Some of them on the phone tell VPD dispatchers what they are witnessing.
Faye presses the hot tip of the gun against her temple, biting her flesh. Her finger shutters, and she takes a deep breath.
The sobbing of a troubled child pierces a silent street.
“Mama?” the child says through wailing sobs.
Faye drops her chin to her collar and the gun shakes in her hand.
“Mama?” several boys yell in the distance.
Lowering the gun back to her side, she says, “If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”
Two police cars enter the block with blaring sirens and flashing red and blue lights. One car stops at the 1982 foster home and the other comes to a stop behind the white sedan. A built officer steps out of the squad car and examines the scene in front of him. He places his hand on the handle of his .45 and asks, “Everything alright?”
The scared bald driver of the sedan leans out his window and points to the front of his car.
“Ma’am, can you to put the gun down?”
Faye breaks from her paralyzed posture and slides down the hood, smearing blood, tears, spit, and snot over the white paint. She collapses to the street and her back rests against the front bumper. She scratches the warm tip of the gun against her legs and yanks them into her chest. She’s bawling and holding her wet distraught face in her hands.
“Okay,” she whispers in a cat-clawed voice.
“Faye Knightly, is that you?” The officer asks.
She forces a nod from her hidden head.
“Why don’t you toss the weapon away, Faye?”
She tilts her head around the car, glaring at the young officer. He does his best to force a sympathetic smile. She tosses the gun to the asphalt to her side. He nods at her and begins to move toward her.
He stands over her and places a sad hand on her shaking shoulder and then talks into the mic on his own shoulder.
Just down the street from where Faye ran, a black, glossy, wooden front door with Est. 1982 in gold above, is blown back and forth from an increasing wind. Four children of varying ages cry, standing just outside of the doorframe.
“Can I call someone for you, Faye?”
“Gypsy firs—”
But she breaks off her request.
“Who?”
“Gypsy’s gone.”
“Who, Faye?”
“First Gypsy. Now Fredrick. I’ve lost another son.”
“Faye, everything will be okay.”
She glares up at him.
A voice echoes from the officer’s shoulder informing him a search is going on at 82.
The fellow officer who stopped in front of the house flings his car door open, leaps from his vehicle, and blitzes to the front yard.
“You boys stay right there, don’t move. Everything is going to be okay,” he says.
But his courage fades in a flash as he slips to a stop, tossing his hands out like someone’s taking a swing at his face. Below him, his boots leave sliding tracks in a pool of blood. Gruesome violence buckles his knees, nearly knocking him out.
“What the fuck? What the fuck?”
One of the boys screams, tears pouring from his scared brown eyes.
The officer squeezes his eyes shut, turning away from the butchering. He gags and puts a hand over his mouth. Backing up from the scene, he coughs a few times into his fist, trying to hold back what’s forcing its way up. He gags a few more times and takes several deep breaths. He chokes again, but coughs it away.
“Boys close your eyes. Don’t look. Just close your eyes.”
“Mama went that way,” one of them says, appearing to be the oldest. He points toward the track of bloody steps.
“I’m going to bring her to you. You just stay right there and close your eyes. Close your eyes and don’t look.”
The four boys close their eyes, still crying and mumbling.
After gaining his composure while cursing everything around him, he inhales fresh evening air and faces it again. Fumbling forward, he squats down next to a young man lying gutted open and lifeless on his back in the grass. The layers of raw flesh look so thick when unzipped. He checks for a pulse.
Because people do weird things when they’re traumatized.
But the pulse has been torn out of him like the rest of him.
“What the fuck happened to you?” The officer asks the dead man, scanning over the body, looking for it to speak to him. He tilts his shaved head toward the victim, crawling his frightened eyes all over the brutality before him.
“Someone carved you like a pumpkin.” The officer stands up over the body to get a different perspective. He steps away from the body, getting a bit of distance, and surveys the victim again.
Two deep jagged connecting triangular marks with the letters Y and P in the center of them are carved across the man’s exposed torso. A slash just below the belly creates an upside down kangaroo-like pouch where it looks like all of the man’s insides were clawed out of him. Chunks of flesh from the mutilated body are tossed around the yard. Fredrick’s right hand, extended and stiff over his head, has his two center fingers hacked off.
“Holy Fuck,” the officer says, and leans his face into his shoulder mic. “He’s all. He’s all torn to shit, man. I don’t know. We need. We need everyone. Assistance needed. Bring everyone. Homicide at—” He looks around the yard and up at the house from his squatting position, and his eyes stop on the golden numbers. “Homicide at the 1982 Foster Home.”