“Presumed Dead”
I attended a book club meeting not too long ago—they were discussing my novel Dark Corner—and we got into a conversation about people who fake their own death. One of the ladies shared a story about a guy from her hometown who did just that. He drove his car into the lake, and dropped out of sight. Everyone thought he was dead—until he showed up back in town a few years later, and someone recognized him.
I think this happens more than we realize. People fake their own demise to escape bad marriages, heavy debt, and other burdens that seem inescapable.
However, if I was such a person, I would think that the temptation to go back home—just once, to see how things have changed—would be nearly overwhelming.
This story is my take on why, if you leave town under false pretenses, maybe you should never go home again.
“The Last Train Home”
This is another of those “this could really happen” stories, set in Zion, Illinois, my hometown, in the dead of winter. I used a train station setting with which I’m personally familiar. (However, for the purposes of the story, I took numerous fictional departures in regard to the train schedules and the finer physical details of the station.)
But Tonya could be anyone. The lady at the grocery store, the woman dropping off her child at school ... the dedicated employee working overtime to help make ends meet. She is an ordinary woman—placed in an extraordinary situation.
During times of extreme adversity, we find out what we’re really made of. And if we survive, we’re forever changed by the experience. Always, I think, for the better.
Enjoy the following excerpt of Brandon Massey’s new thriller,
THE OTHER BROTHER,
available July 2006 in paperback
wherever books are sold.
Standing at his bedroom window watching a thunderstorm building in the evening sky, the man touched the glass and thought about Death.
Death comes stealing like a thief in the night, he thought. It comes without warning, without preamble, breaking into mansions and inner-city projects, taking away the young and the old alike. No one is spared. And no one is ever safe.
Indeed, the veil separating life from death is as thin as the dust-streaked windowpane on which his fingers rested.
He pursed his lips, took his hand away from the window. Ordinarily, he did not contemplate such macabre thoughts. But today, he couldn’t avoid them.
It was like that when you expected that someone was coming to kill you.
He was dressed in loose-fitting Levi’s, black leather boots, and a gray button-down shirt. The ends of the shirt flowed over his waist—concealing, he hoped, the bulge of the Glock 9mm handgun that he wore holstered on his hip.
Mama knew that he owned guns, but she didn’t like for him to carry them around the house. Tonight, he didn’t dare go anywhere unarmed, not even in his own home.
There was a rap at the door. He spun, quick as a cobra, hand flicking to the Glock.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mama said, behind the door.
He relaxed. “Be there in a minute.”
He turned back to the window.
The churning May sky, resembling the countenance of a troubled god, offered him no comfort. The brewing storm made him edgy. And the urban wasteland beyond the glass—the dilapidated houses, trash-strewn sidewalks, and pothole-riddled streets of Chicago’s Southside—fired up his anger.
We deserve a better life than this. We never should have been here.
A battered oak desk stood beside the window. Photographs—clippings from glossy magazines and newspapers—covered the desktop.
Many of the photos depicted two black men standing together, dressed in expensive business suits, one older, one younger, clearly father and son, the consummate family entrepreneurs. Other pictures featured only the son, a dapper guy in his late twenties who had life by the balls—and his wide grin showed that he knew it, too.
One photograph—framed and placed at the edge of the pile—showed the father when he was younger, with a pretty black woman wearing an Afro. They were sitting at a table in one of those Japanese hibachi restaurants, smiling as if they would be young and beautiful forever.
He didn’t know why he’d pulled out the pictures. Looking at them had the predictable effect of stoking his anger. Always had. He supposed that he was in an introspective mood; ruminating on his life and how it was so unfair that it had turned out this way.
He picked up the framed photograph. The glass front was cracked—that had happened when, in a rage, he’d slammed the frame against a wall.
He double-checked that his shirt hid his gun, and then left the bedroom, taking the photo with him. He glanced both ways along the dimly lit hallway before proceeding into the kitchen. Looking for a hidden intruder. No one was in here. It was just him and Mama, like always. Mother and son against the world.
Mama sat at the kitchen table smoking a Newport. The table was set for dinner. But she hadn’t eaten. Delicious aromas—fried chicken and other foods—rose from the pots and pans on the counter and stove behind her.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” he said.
“It’s Sunday,” she said, as if that explained everything. And it did. Mama believed in sit-down family meals on Sundays, and he obliged her.
She believed in attending church services on Sundays, too, but he refused to go along with that. He believed in God. But he no longer believed God cared about people like him. His initial awareness of God’s indifference to his plight came during his first stint in juvenile detention, when two teenage bullies, beating him, laughed mockingly when he cried out for God to help him.
And his faith hadn’t been helped when, as a teenager, he’d seen the pastor of their church—a married man with three kids—hurrying out of Mama’s bedroom one night, yanking up his slacks around his waist.
Fifty-two years old but looking much older, Mama hadn’t lured any philandering pastors or other men of note into her bedroom in a long time. She was far removed from the beautiful young thing in the photo at the Japanese restaurant. Years of hardscrabble living, cigarettes, and drinking had taken the luster off her looks, dulled the shine that had once enlivened her large eyes.
Mama rose, with effort, and began to fix plates for both of them. She didn’t normally get his food for him. But ever since he’d been released from prison, two months ago, she’d given him extra care and attention, as if he was a wounded bird that needed TLC before he could spread his wings again. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d never flown.
He didn’t like for Mama to cater to him, but she’d snap at him if he resisted, so he sat at the head of the table and waited. He looked around at the fancy new things she’d recently bought. The bone china and silverware and glasses. And he thought about the stuff in the other rooms: the suede furniture, the cherrywood tables, the wide-screen Sony television, the opulent draperies and high-priced vases and oil paintings. The kind of stuff she’d always wanted, but never had been able to afford. The items were pathetically out of place in their cramped, crumbling house—it was like putting a new Alpine stereo system in a rust-bucket car fit only for a junkyard—but who was he to tell her what to do with her money? When he’d given her the check for fifty thousand dollars, the stay-out-of-my-life payment that his father had sent to him, Mama had shrieked so loudly you would’ve thought she’d won the Powerball lottery.
He hadn’t taken any of the money for himself. He didn’t deserve it. Mama did. She’d sacrificed so much trying to raise him right that she deserved fifty grand times a thousand.
A rumble of thunder barreled through the night, clinking the dishes on the table. Wind tested the windows, like fingers trying to pry inside.
He cocked his head, listening for sounds of an invasion, aware that the thunderstorm might provide covering noise for intruders. But there was nothing. Yet.
Mama returned to the table with his plate. She’d heaped it with fried chicken, spaghetti, turnip greens
, and a hunk of cornbread. Good, old-fashioned soul food. She took a glass pitcher out of the refrigerator and filled his tumbler with extrasweet KOOL-AID Lemonade.
“Thanks, Mama,” he said. “Looks good.”
“Tastes better,” she said, her customary response. She got her own plate and sat across from him. Reaching for his hand, she bowed her head to pray.
He bowed his head, too, but only for her benefit. He’d given up praying after his first beating in juvie detention.
Thunder rocked the world as his mother prayed in a steady voice. He never understood how she managed to pray as if she was so certain that God actually listened to her and cared. He wanted to shake her sometimes, scream at her that she was wasting her time. But he kept his mouth shut and allowed her to nurture her illusions. Everyone had to believe in something.
She concluded the prayer and picked up her fork. He reached into his pocket and placed the photograph on the table.
Mama’s lips twisted into a scowl. “Why’d you bring that in here? You know how much I hate that damn picture.”
He shrugged. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d brought it, just as he wasn’t sure why he’d dragged out all of those other photos sitting on his desk. Maybe he was indulging in self-flagellation.
“Put it away,” she said.
But he left it there. “Do you ever wonder how things might’ve turned out if you’d married him?”
She did not look at the photo, or at him. Her gaze drifted to the wall, and her eyes hardened as though she didn’t like what she saw there. “Never. He was married to someone else, you know that.”
“But what if he’d left his wife for you?”
“Then we’d be living in the lap of luxury in Hotlanta, wouldn’t we? You would’ve gone to college instead of prison, and I’d be spending all day getting my nails done and shopping at Bloomingdale’s. Right?” She turned to him. Fire flashed in her honey-brown eyes, and he caught a glimpse of the feisty woman she’d been before life beat her down. “I’m gonna tell you one last time—put that picture away. It makes me so sick I might lose my appetite.”
“Sorry, Mama,” he said. “Sometimes, I just wonder, that’s all.”
“Ain’t no use in wondering, baby. We’d better be happy he gave us what he did. It ain’t fair, but that’s life, huh?”
He nodded. He wasn’t satisfied with her answer, but there was no other answer to be found. He reached for the photo.
Thunder cracked again, and it almost masked the sound that he’d been preparing himself for: the front door banging open as if struck with a battering ram.
He slid his hand away from the picture, and grasped the Glock.
They had arrived.
“They” were a couple of thugs with whom he’d gotten into a scuffle at a party last Friday night. Held in a cramped project apartment, it had been a typical ghetto house party: a two-dollar cover charge to get in, dark as midnight, music so loud your heart pounded in sync with the beat, blunt smoke thick in the air, drinks being passed freely, and wall-to-wall brothas and sistas, their horny bodies emanating cologne, perfume, and funk.
He had been talking to a fine sista with cocoa skin and a banging body, and she was digging him, encouraging him, devouring his words as if they were the sweetest taffy—when suddenly, a guy with dreadlocks popped up and claimed to be her boyfriend. Dreads ordered him to step the fuck back or he’d knock him flat on his back. Never one to back down from a fight or allow another man to disrespect him, he’d gotten in Dreads’s face. Threats flew, followed soon by fists. He punched Dreads in the jaw; someone slammed a fist into his ribs; Dreads’s baldheaded partner came at him, and he dropped Baldie with a blow to the kidney. Then, someone in the background drew a gun and fired, shattering a window—and the partygoers fled the house like roaches caught under a heat lamp.
The party was over. But that hadn’t been the end of it. On the streets, grudges didn’t die—they multiplied. He’d known that Dreads and Baldie would be coming for him. It was only a matter of when.
All because of a woman. It was stupid and petty. But black men died over trivial shit every day.
Footsteps hammered across the floor. From the kitchen, he couldn’t see the intruders, and they couldn’t see him, either. The kitchen was at the end of the hall, and the table was in the corner, tucked away from the doorway. But they would find him any minute.
Mama looked at him. Her eyes were huge and scared.
He hated that she’d been pulled into this situation. He could have stayed with a lady friend, laid low for a while. But the danger in doing so was that these guys might hurt Mama to get back at him. He’d seen it happen too many times. He had to stay home to protect her.
“What have you done?” she asked, in a whisper that nonetheless held a note of accusation.
He hadn’t told her anything about the fight at the party, about the thugs who were coming for him. Trouble had shadowed him all his life. Mama would know from bitter experience that he was mixed up in another mess.
“Go down to the basement,” he whispered. He motioned to the narrow door behind the table; it led to the cellar. “I’ll handle this.”
She shook her head, tears streaming down her face. How many times had she wept for him? It amazed him that she had any tears left.
“Please, Mama,” he said. “Hurry.”
Choking back a sob, Mama quickly pushed away from the table. She opened the cellar door and descended into the darkness beyond.
He heard the thugs at the front of the house, overturning furniture and tearing through the bedrooms. Something broke. Probably one of those expensive vases Mama had bought.
Anger stitched a frown across his face. Mama didn’t deserve to suffer for his deeds. He was going to take care of these clowns.
Standing, he lifted his shirt and closed his hand around the Glock’s cold grip. He’d paid a lot for this piece. Now, it was time to see what it could do.
He moved to the kitchen doorway and peered around the frame.
One of the thugs was coming down the hallway. It was a black man, dark as midnight and wide as a refrigerator, a black doo-rag capping his dome. Not Dreads or Baldie, but a different brother, another member of the crew. Doo Rag’s eyes were bits of onyx.
Doo Rag had a gun, too. The gun in his hands looked like a cannon, at first, but it was really a shotgun, sawed-off, probably a 12 gauge, nonetheless an absolutely lethal weapon.
Doo Rag spotted him, and pulled the trigger.
So did he.
The gunfire was deafening in the house.
The shotgun’s buckshot plowed into the door frame, wood splinters flying—and part of the buckshot spray ripped into his shoulder. He screamed and staggered sideways, knocking against a counter. He didn’t feel any pain yet, but he knew it was coming, an express train of agony on the way.
But he noted with satisfaction that he’d drilled the thug between the eyes. Doo Rag lay sprawled on his back in the hallway, lips parted in an unfinished prayer. Dead.
He felt nothing—no sorrow or pity. Although it wasn’t the first time that he’d killed a man, each time he did it, he felt less for his victim, and in his moments of introspection, that bothered him, made him wonder if he’d lost his humanity.
But he didn’t have time to think about that right now. There were, by the sounds of it, at least two more men in the house. One of them poked his head into view at the end of the hall. Baldie.
He fired the Glock at Baldie, and the thug jumped out of sight. He’d missed him.
Pain gnawed deep into his shoulder. Dark blood dampened his shirt. Dizziness swam through him, and he gritted his teeth, determined to stay alert.
But he was fading fast. His legs buckled, gave way. He spilled onto the linoleum tile like a drunken uncle. His hand hooked around the table leg, and he pulled it, fuzzily thinking he could use the table as a shield. The table crashed to the floor, hot food and lemonade spattering around him.
He hauled the table in fro
nt of him, propped his back against the row of cabinets, and positioned the Glock atop the edge of the table, to steady his aim.
His vision was beginning to get blurry. The pain intensified; it felt as if someone had packed his shoulder with kindling and set it aflame.
Ahead of him, the hallway was dark, a tunnel of death. But he knew they were out there. He felt their eyes on him.
Gotta hold on.
A door creaked open. Mama rushed out of the basement, to his side. Her eyes were red from crying.
“Get away,” he said, but his voice came out as only a hoarse whisper.
“Not letting my baby die,” Mama said. Her eyes were steel. She wrapped her arm around his waist and started to drag him across the floor, toward the basement door.
Gunfire rang out.
Warm blood sprayed against his face. It wasn’t his blood.
Mama.
“No!” he cried.
She slumped against him, her body as limp and heavy as a sandbag. He tried to hold her against him with his good arm, but he was too weak. She slid out of his grasp and thudded to the floor. Blood pooled around her lips, and for an absurd moment, it looked as if she was okay, as if she’d merely fallen asleep wearing too much red lipstick.
He wanted to believe that she was only asleep. The urge to deny what had happened to her was nearly overwhelming.
He crawled to Mama, touched her chest. It was still; she wasn’t breathing.
She was gone.
Grief squeezed his heart like an iron fist.
The photo of Mama and his father, happy during their brief affair, stood nearby, mocking him with the dream of what could have been.
He reached out with his good arm and snagged the picture in his quivering fingers. He fixed his gaze on the man, his father.
This is your fault, and I’m going to make you pay.
If his father had done right by them, they never would have been here. They wouldn’t have been living here, he wouldn’t have grown up in and out of trouble, and Mama never would have led such a hard life. None of this would have ever happened to them.
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