The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

by James Lincoln Collier

  “You oughta have seen the look on your face when you started off home, Yewgene. You was grinning with a smile this wide, and chuckling and jiggling around all excited. I never seen you like that before. Something had got hold of you, I could see that clear enough. I figured I better follow you home.”

  “It was the strangest thing, Sonny. I was somewhere outside of myself, watching what I was doing. It seemed like fun, kind of interesting, like I was watching a movie.”

  “It ain’t no movie. It was real enough. I never seen no one like that before.”

  “I’ve got to sit down, Sonny. All the steam’s gone out of me.” I sat down on the kitchen stoop. I was feeling dead tired and shaky. “It must have been like that with your dad, Sonny. Just seemed real interesting to him to walk off that lumber platform into midair.”

  “You think that’s the way it was for Mr. Samuels, too? Just seemed real interesting to drive into a tree?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Then I heard a car drive up out front. In a minute Mom came into the kitchen and saw us out back. She swung the kitchen door open. “What’s the matter, boys? Something wrong?”

  I jumped up. “Nothing wrong, Mom. Just tired from playing ball.”

  “I got to go,” Sonny said. “Mrs. Richards, better keep an eye on Gene.” And he went off around the house, carrying the bat.

  “What did Sonny mean by that?” Mom said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was feeling a little sick after we played ball and he walked me home. I probably ought to go to bed early tonight.”

  She nodded. “It’s been hot. You might have got a little heat exhaustion.”

  “I think I’ll lie down for a while before supper,” I said.

  “That’s probably a good idea, Gene. I don’t often see you looking this drained and gray.”

  So I went up to my room and lay on my back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting, for I knew the specter would come. And in five minutes I began to feel the familiar tightening in my chest and the little animal movements in my gut. “I knew you would come,” I said.

  “I’m not very happy about what happened, Gene. Not very happy at all.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” I said.

  “You should have been more cautious. You should have realized that Sonny might suspect something when you went home with the bat. I’m very angry about this, Gene.”

  I didn’t care anymore. “Be angry,” I said. “I don’t care what you do anymore. Do what you want. Nothing matters to me.”

  “I think I can make things matter, Gene.”

  “Are you going to make me do it all over again?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I might try something different this time. For the sake of variety, you understand. The spice of life. We don’t want to do the same thing over and over, do we, Gene? Very boring. Not much amusement in it. So long as there’s a little blood splashed around. I must be satisfied, you know.”

  “Whose blood? Grampa’s?”

  “No. Not him again. Somebody else, I think.”

  “Who, then?” I said.

  “I haven’t decided yet. There are several people I can think of.”

  “Me? Is it me?”

  “You said that, not me,” the voice said.

  “What are you going to do? Make me dive in front of a car? Take poison? Walk into midair from a high window just because it seems like an interesting thing to do?”

  “Did I say it was you? Perhaps there’s somebody else who might satisfy me.”

  I lay there thinking. “Who else? It has to be me.”

  “It’s true that I’m very angry with you, Gene,” the voice said. “But perhaps I can think of someone more satisfying.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me. Do what you want. Just go away and leave me alone.”

  “For the moment, yes. Then we’ll see.” And it was gone.

  I dozed off. Around eight o’clock I woke up. I knew I had to pretend everything was normal, so I went downstairs. Grampa and Mom were in the living room listening to Amos ’n’ Andy. “How do you feel, Gene?” Mom said. “I decided not to wake you up for supper.”

  “Better,” I said. “I think it must have been the heat.”

  Grampa was looking at me carefully. He knew from the conversations we’d been having that it wasn’t heat exhaustion, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. “I can see you need a good night’s sleep, Gene.”

  “You should eat something,” Mom said.

  I wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t feel like arguing. We went into the kitchen and I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drank a glass of milk while Mom sat and watched. Then I went on up to bed. I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but in fact, for the first time in a couple of weeks, I felt kind of relaxed. Sad, but relaxed. It was over. I wasn’t going to fight anymore. I was sick and tired of the whole thing. Let the voice do what it wanted. If it wanted me to dive in front of a car, I’d do it, just to get it over with. And I slept through the night and didn’t wake up until I heard Mom and Grampa moving around in the kitchen, getting breakfast.

  I got up and went downstairs. I was feeling a little better—not so sad and washed out. I was hungry, too—ate a big bowl of oatmeal and two pieces of toast, and that picked up my spirits a little more. I wasn’t feeling like my old self, not by a long shot. But I wasn’t quite so ready to give up as I had been.

  I had got my schoolbooks and was giving Mom a kiss good-bye when there came a knock on the door. Grampa went to answer it. In a moment he came back. “It’s Sonny and Sam,” he said. “They wanted to see if you were okay.”

  That made me feel even better. I went to the door. They were standing by the stoop. “I’m okay,” I said.

  We set off for school. “Sonny told me about it,” Sam said. “Was it awful?”

  “Not when I was doing it,” I said. “At the time it seemed kind of funny. Something to laugh about. I can’t figure out how the specter makes you feel that way, but it does.” I shook my head. “Afterwards I felt awful.”

  “Do you think it’s going to make you try it again?” she said.

  “He said he wouldn’t. He said he wanted to try something different. Go after somebody else. I figure it’s going to be me, but the specter said he hadn’t made up his mind. He said it might be somebody else.”

  “Who?” Sonny said. “Did he mention any names?”

  “No. He likes to keep you guessing.”

  “It could be one of us,” Sam said.

  “Maybe,” Sonny said. “But he already took care of my dad and your dad, so I reckon it’s Gene’s family’s turn.”

  “We’ve got to do something,” Sam said. But then we got to school and didn’t have a chance to discuss it anymore.

  Sam had Girl Scouts after school. I wasn’t ready to go over to Snuffy’s, and I sure didn’t feel like playing baseball—didn’t want to hold a baseball bat in my hands for a while.

  “What are you gonna do?” Sonny said.

  “Try to talk to my dad,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you knew how to call him.”

  “I don’t. But I think he can hear me if I talk to him.”

  Sonny gave me a look. “You sure about that, Gene?”

  “No. I’m not sure. But I think so. I’m going to try it. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  However, I didn’t feel like going home, either. So instead I wandered along through town to the park, climbed up onto the bandstand, and sat down on one of the benches that went around the sides. There was nobody close by—nobody on the bandstand, nobody near. Off in the distance some mothers sat on park benches with baby carriages in front of them. A couple of little kids were playing in a sandbox a ways off.

  Then I noticed a man sitting on the bandstand benches about fifteen feet from me, watching me. I was startled, because I hadn’t seen him come up, hadn’t heard any footsteps. There was something strange about him: he seemed a lit
tle faint, not quite clear and solid, as if he were made of lightly colored air. Nice-looking fellow, I thought, maybe thirty-five years old or something, with a neatly trimmed mustache and brown hair that was going back at the forehead. Dressed well—shirt and a necktie, a shine on his shoes, at least as far as I could make out, for everything about him was a little vague and hard to see.

  “Hello, Gene,” he said. His voice was a little light like the rest of him.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “I tried to phone you the other day, but you weren’t home. I wanted to talk to you before it was too late,” he said.

  “How did you know it was me sitting here?”

  He chuckled. “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen you a few times before.”

  “What? How?”

  “Oh, I got back to St. Lou from time to time for one reason or another. Business, mostly. Sometimes I’d drive out to Magnolia and have a look around. I usually knew where to find you.”

  “Out at the field where we play ball, I guess.”

  “That’s it. I’d sit in the car and watch for a while. I saw you hit one into the trees once. It made me feel mighty proud. Sometimes I’d take a few pictures.”

  “Why didn’t you come over and say hello, Dad?”

  “Lot of reasons. I wasn’t too happy about how things worked out for me in Magnolia. A lot of people here wouldn’t want to see me around. I didn’t want to stir up trouble for you and your mom. I’d caused you all enough trouble as it was.”

  “I wish you had come over and said hello, Dad. You wouldn’t have stirred up any trouble for me.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “Well, maybe. Maybe I should have. But I don’t know as it wasn’t for the best this way. I’m not sure as I was cut out to be a family man. You’ve got Grampa. He’s been pretty good to you.”

  I wasn’t sure if I ought to ask, but I wanted to know. “Dad, what happened with that oil swin—oil business. Did you know there wasn’t any oil there?”

  He chuckled again. “No, Gene. I didn’t know. I believed in it. Of course, I ought to have looked into it harder. Ought to have done a little more investigating into Gallen. But I didn’t. You know how it is—sounds great and you don’t want to think that there might be something wrong with it, so you don’t.”

  “Gallen fooled you, too.”

  “I suppose I fooled myself. You do something stupid, it usually costs you. I can’t say he deserved what he got, that wasn’t right. But if he hadn’t been out to take money from people who couldn’t afford to lose it, none of it would have happened.”

  “Dad, what am I going to do about him?”

  “Gene, that’s what I’ve come to tell you. You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “I don’t have to worry about the voice?”

  “No. Where I am now, I can take care of him. I’ll see that he doesn’t bother you. You won’t hear from him again.”

  “Or Grampa?”

  “No. He won’t bother any of you. I can see to it now. I couldn’t before, but I can now.” He looked at his wristwatch—or so it seemed, from the way he turned up his arm, for I couldn’t make out the watch very clearly. “My time’s up, Gene. I have to go.”

  “Will you come back again?”

  “I don’t know, Gene. I’d like to. But it won’t be up to me. We’ll see.” Then he began to fade away and in a moment he was gone.

  I had an awful lot to think about, and for a long time I sat there on a bench on the bandstand, just looking around at the trees rustling in the breeze, the sounds of little kids in the sandbox shouting, watching the birds swoop and dart here and there. Slowly it began to get dark, and I realized that I’d better get home.

  So I walked on through town, down our street, and into the house. Grampa was sitting in his easy chair. Mom was sitting on the sofa. She had a handkerchief balled up in her hand and her eyes were red. “Gene, sit down,” she said. She patted the sofa beside her. “We have something to tell you.”

  Grampa nodded. “Gene, we have some bad news.”

  “I already know,” I said. “Dad’s dead.”

  They stared at me. “How’d you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  They didn’t say anything for a minute. “A friend of his out there in California called a half hour ago. A buddy of your dad’s. He knew all about us, he said, because Tom talked about us to him from time to time. He found our phone number in your dad’s phone book. Your dad was killed in a car accident. This fellow said that he was driving along one of those highways they have out there, perfectly clear day, traffic not particularly heavy, and he went off the road. Hadn’t been drinking, hadn’t had a blowout.”

  I looked at them both. “You and Mom think he committed suicide, don’t you?”

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Grampa said, “A lot of people are going to think that, Gene. But we needn’t. We don’t know.”

  “He didn’t commit suicide,” I said.

  “How can you be sure, Gene?” Mom said.

  “I am sure. I know.”

  They looked at each other and decided to drop it. “Gene, this fellow, this friend of your dad’s, said he found a few pictures he was going to send us. A picture of you and your mom when you were a baby. And some pictures of you playing baseball. I can’t imagine how he got them.”

  “He used to visit Magnolia sometimes,” I said. “He used to watch me play ball. Sometimes he took pictures.”

  They stared at me. “Gene, that can’t be right,” Mom said. “He may have had one or two old friends here he kept up with. They might have sent him pictures.”

  “No,” I said. “He took them himself.”

  They didn’t say anything for a minute. Then Grampa said, “Gene, your mom wants to have a little service for your dad at the church tonight. Do you want to go?”

  “Yes, I want to go.”

  “It’ll be private,” Mom said. “Just us. I don’t think many of your dad’s old friends are still around here.”

  What she really meant was that there were still people in Magnolia who hadn’t forgiven him. “That’s fine,” I said. “Just us.”

  When we got home from the service, Mom put out some cake she had made and we sat in the kitchen eating cake and drinking iced tea. “Mom, can we talk about him now?”

  “Yes, I guess there’s no harm now.”

  “What was he like?” I asked. “A kind of happy-go-lucky guy?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mom said. “He was fun, Gene. He was always fun. But there was no future with him because it was always now, it was never tomorrow. That was fine when we were courting and weren’t thinking about the future. We were young—I was eighteen years old. But then we married, you came along, and here came the future, ready or not. Oh, Gene, I was tempted to take him back a few times. I knew you ought to have a dad. But it would have been the same old thing again. I didn’t think any of us needed that.”

  So that was the end of it. Or almost the end.

  A couple of weeks later Sam and Sonny and I were down at the bandstand wasting time. Sam said, “They’re going to condemn the old Toffey place and tear it down. At least my dad says they are.”

  “How come?” Sonny said. “I kind of like thinking of that noose and them bones lying out there watching the sun go down and the moon come up every night.”

  “Well, they’re going to. Dad says there aren’t any bones and noose out there and never were. He said we could go and look for ourselves.”

  “Well, if they ain’t there, they must have flew off by themselves,” Sonny said. “They was out there once, plain enough.”

  “Somebody took them,” Sam said.

  “Somebody took them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “And I know who did it, too. Dad and Gene’s grampa. They went out there, cut down that noose, and buried the bones, clothes, everything.”

  “How do you know that, Sam?” I said.

  “The day after Dad got his ca
st off he told Mom he had to see Judge Adamson. He drove off. He came back a couple of hours later. I happened to be looking out the window when he got out of the car. He was carrying a shovel and a pick, and a big knife was sticking out of his back pocket. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that those bones and that noose aren’t there anymore. Your grampa and my dad buried them.”

  “So they’re gonna keep the thing covered up?” Sonny asked.

  “I guess they figured now that we knew they had to. They were afraid we might talk about it with other kids. Word would get out, and people would start talking whether they knew anything about it or not.”

  “That’s so,” Sonny said. “Especially if they didn’t know anything about it. They’re usually the ones who are sure they got facts right.”

  “Are we going to drop it?” Sam said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  We thought about that for a minute. Then Sonny said, “Know what? I’d like to go out there, find where they buried them bones, and dig a couple of them up. I think I got a right to a little souvenir of it. Nothing too grand—no skull or nothing like that. Just a little finger bone, toe bone. Might make a nice ornament for a key chain, if I ever own anything worth locking up.”

  So we agreed that we might do that someday. And we might. But I didn’t think we would.

  Also from Bloomsbury by James Lincoln Collier

  The Empty Mirror

  Copyright © 2008 by James Lincoln Collier

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

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  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  First published in the United States of America in August 2008

  by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers

  E-book edition published in April 2011

  www.bloomsburykids.com

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