Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  It was time for the truth.

  He had…sexual desires…for children.

  And that was all the reason anyone needed to put a bullet in his brain.

  So, big deal! Everyone fantasizes. That can’t be changed. That’s the way it is. But he had never done anything.

  And shit, he had never had fantasies about Missy. Missy was his kid, and he loved her, loved the hell out of her, loved her the way a father was meant to love a kid—and that was all there was to it.

  But what was with Missy?

  Hell, what was with him, turning it into something it wasn’t?

  He decided he was okay—drunk as a skunk, but okay. He put the pistol back in the drawer. He didn’t need it. He was okay.

  He told himself that with every step he took downstairs. It was his final thought as he passed out on the rec room sofa.

  — | — | —

  Fifteen

  It was four in the morning. Vicki Barringer was asleep, dreaming she stood before the throne of the Lord. God was not white-robed and bearded, but looked something like Walter Cronkite, only with more compassionate, less analytical eyes. Vicki had a confession to make.

  “I was unfaithful to my husband.”

  “Yet he is still your husband, and you are yet his wife. Do what you must to earn your husband’s forgiveness, but first, you will have to forgive yourself,” God said in a pleasant voice that had no trace of thunder rumbling in it. God nodded, as though indicating she was to move along to the next item.

  “I haven’t spoken in years to Carol Grace, my own sister,” Vicki said. “I’ve cut her out of my life. I hardly even think of her. I thought she was intolerant, but I’m being no less intolerant of her than I accused her of being of me.”

  “Yet she is still your sister, and you are yet her sister. Love her so that she will love you.”

  A deep calm settled on Vicki as she slept and dreamed and had moments of understanding. She said to God, “I turned away from You.”

  God said, “But here I am. And I have not turned away from you.”

  Four hours later, when the alarm buzzed, Vicki was not able to recall the details of her dream. However, she did feel a sense of peace within her, as though everything that was wrong in her life could be set right, as though there was always something she could rely on no matter what.

  The child was not dreaming. She was not asleep, but neither was she awake. She was not Melissa Barringer. She understood that. She had no choice but to accept it and do what she had to do.

  She slowly got out of bed. In the ethereal glow of the night light, she took off her underwear. Naked, she left the bedroom.

  In the dark hall, she paused a moment, then moved to the stairs and descended without the need of holding onto the bannister.

  In the kitchen, she did not turn on the light. She went to the counter and opened the drawer by the sink. Face expressionless, she took out a steak knife and touched the blade with her thumb. She rejected it. She chose a long carving knife.

  The fingers of her right hand wrapped around the knife handle, she opened the door to the basement with her left. Soundless and surefooted, she walked down the stairs.

  Warren lay snoring on the rec-room sofa.

  She glided across the floor. With each step, she raised the knife a bit higher until it was right before her face, and she stood over Warren Barringer as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each breath he took.

  — | — | —

  Sixteen

  “Evan?”

  On his knees at the side of the bed, eyes red, lower lip chapped and scaly, Evan Kyle Dean did not respond to his name or the knock at the door. His hands were clasped for prayer, but he was not praying. A prayer came from the heart, but his heart was dead, a heavy black stone in his chest.

  Across the room, the nine-inch color television on the dresser chattered away. Two women, their faces too pink, happily compared the absorbability of paper towels. He needed the television’s gibberish, since he couldn’t stand the awful silence of the room and the hurricane rushing—of the thousands of thoughts in his mind.

  “Evan, may I come in?” Carol Grace called through the door.

  “No,” he said. For the past week, they had not been sleeping together. She’d moved to one of the guest rooms.

  “Are you all right, Evan?”

  He heard the concern in her words. “Yes,” he lied. “I just need to be alone. I need to think.”

  “Could I fix you breakfast?”

  “No.” He had eaten—when was it?—yesterday? The food’s melted cellophane taste had sent him staggering to the bathroom to throw up.

  In the eight days since he had broken down at True Witness Church, Evan Kyle Dean had lost 20 pounds. He had slept perhaps ten hours total. He could not turn off his mind. In all that time, minute by excruciating minute, thoughts raced through his brain like tracer bullets, but when he tried to catch one and hold it long enough to make some sense of it, it turned to smoke.

  And he could not pray. He simply could not pray.

  “Evan, are you sure…”

  “Please, just let me be!” he curtly called out, instantly regretting it. He suppressed a groan, as with his hands on the unmade bed, he lifted himself to his feet.

  Retying the belt of the blue terry cloth robe he wore over his pajamas, he went to the door and opened it.

  The sickly, frightened look on Carol Grace’s face knifed into him, cutting into his own pain and adding to it. He tried to smile. “I…I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I don’t mean to be short with you.”

  “Evan,” Carol Grace said, “we have to…”

  “See a doctor?” he concluded the sentence for her. “Or a psychiatrist?” He gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “No, dear, this is something I have to work out on my own.”

  Unlike numerous others who healed through God’s power, or claimed to, Evan Kyle Dean did not disparage doctors and psychiatrists. Their minds and their talents were God-given, and in their own ways, they were as much God’s workers as any preacher who cast out unclean spirits by the power of the Holy Name. But a doctor’s task was to heal afflictions of the body, and a psychiatrist’s, afflictions of the mind.

  His affliction was of the soul.

  “Carol Grace,” Evan said softly, “my own wife, good and true.” He gently took her face in his hands. “Our union is based on trust, our trust in one another”—his mouth was dry “—and our trust in God. What’s happened…what is happening to me is part of the Lord’s plan. I know that. I don’t understand it yet, but I trust Him. I beg you to trust me now. And to remember that I love you.”

  The smile she tried did not quite work. “All right, then,” she said, “I’m going to the store. While I’m out, I think it would be good for you to get cleaned up and dressed.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “I’ve been brooding. I need to get on with the business of living.”

  “Good,” Carol Grace said, “and when I come home, I’ll put together a nice breakfast for us.”

  “Yes,” he said, although bile rose in his throat.

  He sat in the chair by the bedroom window, watching Carol Grace take the Lincoln out of the garage and carefully back down the long, winding, tree-lined driveway. The Lincoln, this year’s model, was one of their three cars—three cars for the two of them. He often found himself missing the old Chevrolet Impala, even with its 112,000 miles, most of them tallied up in taking the message “God is love” from one small town to another back in the old days. The Chevy had performed beautifully. It was a faithful servant.

  But a beat-up Chevrolet was not suitable for an evangelist with his own weekly television show, a minister whose message was slanted toward yuppies. In his rational, easygoing way, Marvin Michelson, head of the Christian Communications Consortium, had explained it to him. And please, Michelson wasn’t suggesting by any means that Evan drive a Jaguar or a Mercedes or a Rolls! Heavens, no! That would be ostentatious, a potential turn-off rather than a tu
rn-on to those people who needed to hear God’s word. But a good, solid American car was needed, a car that subtly reminded people Evan Kyle Dean could relate.

  Evan had been persuaded of that by Marvin Michelson, just as he had been persuaded about the need for a fitting house. The Deans simply could not go on living in that mobile home. Why, if nothing else, his wife deserved better. Nor could he very well live in a six-room, tract house. Nothing gaudy, but a good solid piece of real estate. Why $300,000 for a home and three wooded acres was reasonable in this day and age, with the average cost of a single-family dwelling being $117,000!

  What hadn’t Marvin Michelson persuaded him of? No, that was not fair to Michelson—or the truth. He had allowed himself to be persuaded, allowed himself to be convinced, to be talked into, to be gently pressured to be flexible in his thinking about so many issues.

  He ran a hand over his chin. He badly needed a shave. He would shave and shower—in a minute. He didn’t feel like getting out of the chair, didn’t feel like moving just yet.

  He turned his weary eyes to the television set and saw a Mighty Mouse cartoon, with the Mouse of Steel rescuing the Mouseville Symphony Orchestra from the music-hating cats. Mighty Mouse whirled two hapless cats overhead by their tails, then sent them crashing into the kettledrums. He ran another through the strings of a harp, bloodless cartoon slices of cat emerging. He stuffed a cat down the bell of a tuba, then the Mouse’s lungs of steel blasted and the cat went zooming off to the moon

  Wasn’t that what people wanted God to be, expected Him to be? God was Mighty Mouse who always arrived in the nick of time to save the good little mice and to beat the stuffings out of those wicked cats.

  Mighty Mouse hates cats—and so do we.

  And maybe people did envision God as an abstract but infinitely more powerful Mighty Mouse in the sky, but that was not the God whose love once had filled Evan Kyle Dean, not the God of compassion, mercy, forgiveness and healing. That was not the God Evan Kyle Dean had served before he became a servant of the television camera.

  The inhuman television camera saw everything, recorded everything and felt nothing. Evan Kyle Dean preached to the camera, acted for the camera, even lived for the camera.

  And so he had forgotten people.

  He had forgotten their Father and his Father.

  Weeping, he pushed himself out of the chair and dropped to his knees. Keenly aware of the painful hammering of his heart he folded his hands in prayer.

  “Father,” he said simply, “forgive me.”

  — | — | —

  Seventeen

  She got a wake-up call at eight o’clock Monday morning. Yawning, she propped herself up on the pillows and with the remote control on the nightstand turned on the television. She watched a brief Today show interview with Gore Vidal. Vidal was cosmopolitan, witty, sarcastic, and bitchy—his usual self. She had a sense of displacement, as though she were back in New York. Then there was a break for a local commercial. In fluorescent red pants and a pullover blue shirt that vainly battled a beer belly, a horse-faced man urged, “Y’all come awn down to Joe Billy Keeler’s for once in a lifetime deals on R-V’s. Keeler the Dealer will do ya like yore own daddy would...”

  She was centered again. She was in Mt. Franklin, Alabama. She belonged here. She had a purpose. She was going to kill a man.

  Today!

  The waiting was ended. She knew all she needed to know. She’d done her homework these past several weeks, never trying to ingratiate herself with the locals but staying on the periphery at the stores and the restaurants, so she could hear things and pick up messages from the grapevine without actually being plugged into it.

  With Evan Kyle Dean’s not appearing yesterday at True Witness Church, there were already rumors circulating that something was wrong with Mt. Franklin’s own big-time miracle man. That was vehemently disputed by true believers. Nothing could be wrong with Brother Evan, no way. He had not preached because…Well, he had his reasons, and so did the Lord.

  Emerald Farmer had her reasons, too.

  She didn’t get out of bed until 8:30. She felt no need for haste, showering leisurely. She smiled to herself as she selected her clothing for the day. What was the proper attire for murder? Blue jeans and a too large, badly faded, plaid flannel shirt.

  It was Randy’s shirt. Wearing it made her feel as though he were with her.

  Damn, she was calm about it, utterly nerveless. She understood that. The trick was to think of yourself not as dying, which she was, but as already dead. Dead, you had total license, complete freedom of action. Nothing was forbidden.

  “We belong dead.” The line, spoken by the enduring monster in the classic film, The Bride of Frankenstein, had become her philosophy, her mantra, her motivation. Randy was dead. She was dead. Evan Kyle Dean was dead. He did not know it yet, but he was dead.

  Sitting on the bed, she took her gun out of her purse. It was a Colt .38 caliber, two-inch barrel, with a grooved, nonslip trigger and a custom hammer shroud to prevent hang-ups when drawn from pocket or purse.

  She’d bought the pistol when she enrolled in a defensive shooting course after she’d been mugged on the subway. It had boiled down to a choice between the Colt and an automatic, the Smith and Wesson M61, a five-shot. With hollow-point ammunition, the Smith and Wesson’s man-stopping capability was about equal to that of the Colt, and it was a much more easily concealed weapon, but she didn’t trust automatics. An automatic could jam. The precisely engineered Colt revolver, with its fewer working parts, had no temperament. The cylinder turned, a bullet was chambered, the firing pin struck, and the bullet flew.

  She swung out the cylinder and checked it; it revolved easily. The ejector mechanism worked smoothly, unloading the six shells. The gun was clean and ready, Emerald Farmer thought.

  She stood at the foot of the bed, seeing herself in the mirror above the vanity at the end of the tiny hall by the bathroom. She casually raised the weapon. She didn’t aim; she pointed. The pistol was not a thing separate from her but an extension of her hand, a stunted index finger. She dry-fired. A hit, she was sure. At 25 feet, she could group six shots in the kill zone every time.

  She had practiced and practiced and practiced. In the defensive shooting course she had learned, “If you reach for your gun, you have to be ready to use it for what it was made for. There’s only one reason for pulling a handgun, and that’s because you need to kill somebody. Not frighten him. Not wound him. You need to kill him.”

  She needed to kill Evan Kyle Dean.

  She dry-fired five more times, then loaded the Colt without a suggestion of a tremor in her fingers. Deathly calm, she thought.

  She put on her trench coat. It was inappropriate for the weather, but it was the coat she had to wear.

  She stepped out of the motel room into the sun. The door, metallic and heavy, clunked shut behind her.

  It was time.

  She should get home as soon as possible, Carol Grace told herself, as she rolled the cart down the paper goods aisle at Cor-Mar’s Supermarket. Evan might need her.

  But she could not force herself to hurry. It was a relief to be away from home, out in the everyday world, doing something as commonplace as shopping. She picked up a six-pack of toilet tissue, a sale item, noting she was saving 22 cents.

  Not that there was any need to practice economy. They had plenty of money now. For that matter, there was no need for her to do the shopping, the housecleaning, or the cooking; they could easily afford domestic help. When they had first moved into the new place, Evan had suggested just that. He even thought it the right thing to do, providing employment for people who…

  No, thank you, she had insisted. In their house, she was the housekeeper. Evan had laughingly agreed with that.

  Evan, she thought, as she turned the cart into the next lane. He was so tormented, so depressed and despairing.

  Trust in God, she told herself. God’s eye was on Evan, as it was on the sparrow and every living thin
g in His vast and wondrous creation.

  God kept His gaze on all his children. She had no doubt He knew her worries, saw her now as she played whatever part in His plans He had ordained.

  As Carol Grace Dean reminded herself that God watched over her, the narrowed eyes of an armed woman followed her around the store.

  Emerald Farmer put a bottle of soy sauce in her cart. Four products down, Carol Grace Dean took a yellow plastic container of mustard from the shelf. In the breakfast cereals section, Carol Grace selected a box of Bran Flakes; Emerald Farmer got Sugar Pops.

  Emerald was certain the evangelist’s wife had no idea she was being followed. Why would she? Who expected to be followed in a supermarket in Hicksville, USA?

  She needed Mrs. Preacher.

  Carol Grace Dean completed her shopping and went to the checkout lanes. Emerald tracked her, abandoning the cart and regretting the extra work she’d cause the stock boy who’d have to return her items to the shelves.

  With Carol Grace Dean at the cash register, Emerald stepped outside and waited. The day was hot and humid, promising to become hotter still as it progressed. In her trench coat, she was sweating and uncomfortable, but the coat had the right kind of pockets. Wasn’t that why motion picture private eyes wore trench coats? They needed a place to stash their gats, their heat, their pieces.

  Damn, she felt oily and dirty. In the small shopping center lot, the sun snapped off the few parked cars in brittle diamond reflections. She was nauseated. Her breath was rancid; she could taste it.

  She had to remind herself this was all real. It all felt too much like a play, as though she were now awaiting her cue to say words that were not her own, to do things the real Emerald Farmer would never do. Yes, only a play, and what she was feeling was nothing but stage fright.

  There was her cue. Carol Grace Dean, carrying two sacks of groceries, walked out of Cor-Mar, and Emerald followed her.