Fook

by Brian Drinkwater

  “What did you hear?” Jennifer, frustrated, watched as he fixed his pants and quickly made his way to the doorway, disappearing into the hall.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d heard but he knew that it wasn’t just thunder. Driven by adrenaline, Bill made his way along the dark hallway, the absence of light doing little to prevent him from making his way toward his son’s bedroom. The nursery door was shut, just as he’d left it, Oliver’s name proudly displayed on the plaque created by Jennifer’s oldest sister and given to them during the baby shower two weeks earlier.

  Bill placed his ear to the door, fearful that his worried imagination had created the sound and that he was about to burst into his son’s room unnecessarily. The room seemed quiet and then there was a faint thud.

  “Bill, there’s a noise in Oliver’s room!” Jennifer cried from the bedroom.

  That was all he needed to reaffirm his suspicions. Quickly, Bill burst through the door, no longer worried about waking his sleeping son. The room was just as he’d left it. The fluffy white clouds, painted across the bright blue walls, seemed to dance around the room as always; their soothing presence topped only by the abundance of stuffed animals innocently resting upon the shelf lined wall beside the dresser and changing table. At the far end of the room stood Oliver’s crib, the very same crib in which he’d spent his first years of life, nearly thirty-six years earlier. In it rested the colorful, Loony-Tunes bumper they’d picked out to prevent young Oliver from hurting himself on the wooden rails. Above it dangled the matching, animated mobile to provide sleep inducing comfort, and beside it stood a man, dressed in black, who was leaning over the low rail with a stuffed bunny in hand, suffocating the young child who had been innocently trying to sleep.

  “Hey!” Bill yelled as he charged his son’s assailant, struggling to pull the man away from the crib.

  Seemingly undeterred by his discovery, the man continued to hold the soft pink bunny over the child’s face, struggling to stand his ground as the angry father delivered blow after blow to his ribs and head. In the meantime, beneath the large stuffed animal, the young child’s little legs seemed to slow in their struggle, the lack of oxygen finally taking its toll on the infant’s failing lungs.

  Panicked by the noises she’d heard, Jennifer appeared in her son’s doorway to find the strange man standing over her son and her husband doing all he could to free him from the stranger’s murderous grip. She screamed.

  The distraction of the blood curdling scream seemed to momentarily startle the mysterious assailant, allowing Bill to finally pull him away from the crib and knock him to the floor with a swift right hook. With the intruder temporarily separated from his son, Bill turned back to the crib but Oliver was gone. Only the plain white onesie he’d been wearing remained in his place.

  Quickly the assailant got to his feet and scrambled for freedom, knocking Jennifer to the floor as he scurried toward the front door before Bill could even process the impossible disappearance of his son.

  More concerned with her son’s well being than the man who’d attacked him, Jennifer got to her feet and ran to her husband’s side, baffled by the empty crib.

  “Where is he?” she cried.

  “I don’t know! He was just here!”

  Just then, the unmistakable sounds of a terrified infant echoed from across the house. Both Bill and Jennifer turned simultaneously and ran from the room, following the new, yet familiar cries of their son.

  The end of the hall opened up into the large livingroom. The front door stood wide open; the unwelcome visitor having apparently exited through it only moments earlier, and on the floor, in the center of the room, lay terrified little Oliver, naked but unharmed, screaming for the comfort of his horrified and bewildered parents.

  “I’ll call the police,” Bill declared, frozen by confusion as Jennifer rushed to comfort their son.

  TWO

  Why do people feel the need to do this to themselves? What joy can come from a complete loss of self control and the possibility of making a decision that could utterly destroy the fabric of one’s life?

  These were just two of the many questions that seemed to always run through Jason Fook’s head whenever he found himself in the presence of alcohol and it’s enthusiastic consumers. Needless to say, he hadn’t exactly been big with the popular crowd in high school. Stereotypes exist for a reason and he was living proof.

  Nerd, Dweeb, Geek, Four-eyes…before and after he’d gotten contacts. He’d been the target of all those names. He’d worn his lunch a time or two and had been sprayed with water to make it look like he had wet himself. They’d even tried to hoist him up the flagpole one time. It had been before school and the flag hadn’t yet been raised, so if they’d been successful, he at least wouldn’t have had long to wait for the janitor to come by for his daily morning duty. Unfortunately, the janitor had been the one to place the hook around his belt loop. Luckily, Dockers hadn’t accounted for a 128 pound belt so it had only taken one tug and an inch of air between his feet and the ground to set him free.

  High school hadn’t been the time of parties and fun that Hollywood always makes it out to be…at least not for him. He’d gone. He’d excelled in his studies. But when it came to any real, worthwhile interaction, he really couldn’t think of one time that he’d stood out in any meaningful way. Looking back on those four years of his life, he’d often thought of high school as nothing more than a form of purgatory, a temporary layover on a road toward greater things, but now he was beginning to wonder if the layover had ever really ended. Sure he was a senior at M.I.T. and in a couple of months he would graduate at the top of his class, but what had he really accomplished. He was almost certain that, if he were to spend an entire day walking around campus, not one person would be able to guess his name, even with such a common name as Jason. And, if someone did manage to pull out the right name it would probably be one of those prick, fraternity guys who only knew who he was because of his last name’s misfortunate similarity to the common four letter profanity.

  “Yeah! Massive wiener!” a drunken patron yelled from the other side of the restaurant, drawing laughter and applause.

  “I just don’t get it,” Jason quietly mumbled to himself. In actuality though, he was grateful for the sudden burst of vulgarity. Often his brain was his worst enemy. It was always looking for stimulation and more often than not, when left alone to wander, it did just that.

  The departure of his date to the bathroom nearly fifteen minutes ago had left him in the situation of retrospective self evaluation. The short hallway leading to the bathrooms was in clear view on the other side of the restaurant, just beyond the bar and its sea of obnoxious lingerers. The door to the ladies room was only visible whenever it opened outward to welcome a new patron, or bid farewell to a freshly powdered female. Thirteen had entered in that time span but only twelve had exited. That bit of information was the only thing keeping him at the table, sitting across from a hardly touched, blackened chicken salad with no onions or tomatoes and a small cup of peppercorn ranch dressing on the side.

  Though sad to admit, this wouldn’t have been the first time that a girl had ditched him mid-date. Becky Tillmore had amazingly slipped away in line at “The Back Cracker”, a popular roller coaster back home in Cannon, Massachusetts...or at least it had been until a few years later, when it had lived up to its name and crippled a woman by the name of Margery Millboro. Though just about everyone equated the accident to the key fact that Margery was a sixty-eight year old woman who’d just undergone extensive spine and neck surgery, somehow her lawyers had persuaded the jury to award her thirty-two million dollars. A few years later, “Cannon Amusement Park” closed and one more form of entertainment was yanked away from an already boring little town.

  The loss of the rollercoaster wasn’t that big of a deal to Jason though. He’d hated roller coasters at the time and after being tricked into getting on “The Back Cracker” alone, he still hadn’t become a fan.

&
nbsp; Two more women made their way into the bathroom as Jason continued to watch for the reemergence of his date, but the door swung shut once again with no sign of Miss Martin. “She was way out of my league anyway,” Jason thought, beginning to accept the likely truth of the matter. Removing the napkin from his lap, he flagged down the waitress.

  He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t met Bethany on his own. They hadn’t run into one another in any social setting. They didn’t share any classes together. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that she went to the same school or whether she was in college at all. The silence that had dominated their date right up to the point when she’d excused herself to the bathroom was so deafeningly quiet that he really didn’t know a thing about her, other than how she ordered her salad.

  Derek, his roommate, had set them up. “You need to get out there. Live a little. Dust off that lightening rod you keep tucked away in your pants,” he’d said.

  Though he hadn’t been fond of Derek’s implications, he was right. It had been nearly a year since he’d managed to somehow convince a woman into bed with him, if you could even call it convincing. She had been the less than attractive friend of the girl Derek had lured back to the dorm that night and based on the vulgar and, at times, repulsive things that came out of her mouth during the act, he’d gotten the impression that she probably would’ve given it up to just about anything with a pulse. The next morning he’d visited the school clinic and had every test known to man. Out of all the tests he’d taken up to that point in school, the results of those are still, to date, his favorite.

  “Done so soon?” Lacey, as her name tag indicated, questioned, staring at the hardly touched food.

  “Yeah, my date wasn’t feeling well so I think we’re going to go,” he lied, not entirely sure why. It wasn’t like he knew this girl and the likeliness of running into her again in a city of 617,594 people over the age of eighteen was—

  “—She looks okay to me,” Lacey stopped him before he could calculate the odds.

  Jason turned to find Bethany standing on the sidewalk just outside the restaurant window, holding her phone in front of her as her fingers feverishly pecked away at the tiny screen. “Apparently the concept of glass and its transparent quality was beyond this girl’s comprehension,” he thought as he continued to watch her deeply, engrossing texting session. “Definitely does not attend M.I.T.”.

  “Would you like me to wrap this up for you?”

  “What? No...it’s fine. I’ll just take the check."

  “She’s not worth it anyway. You seem like a nice guy. I think you could do much better,” Lacey offered her kind assessment with a smile before disappearing back into the busy restaurant.

  That would’ve been a nice sentiment, Jason thought as he withdrew his wallet. Given that she was working for tips, he wasn’t going to be fooled into reading much more into it.

  *****

  The March air was crisp, winter continuing its stubborn hold on the city, as Jason watched his texting date from the doorway of the restaurant.

  Waiting for the waitress to return with his credit card and receipt, he’d contemplated what he was going to do about his deceitful date on the other side of the window. At first he’d decided to just wait her out and remain at the table until she’d gone, but as the girl continued to stand on the sidewalk, stubbornly refusing to put an official end to their date, he’d grown more and more frustrated. By the time Lacey had returned with his check he’d been fuming inside.

  How could someone do that to another person? Sure he was on the shy side and a bit awkward. He wasn’t the overtly fun type of guy that she was probably used to going out with but was it really that terrible to spend just one night with someone a little different? Hell, she was getting a free meal out of the deal. It wasn’t like he was asking her to fuck him in return. He wasn’t even expecting a hand-job or anything remotely like that. He’d just wanted to spend one evening with someone other than his roommate or his computer. Was that really too much to—?

  “Excuse me,” an elderly voice interrupted his internal rant.

  Jason turned to see an older couple attempting to slip around him and through the doorway which he was blocking. “I’m sorry,” he replied, stepping out of the way and fully outside as the door shut behind him. The anger that had been welling up inside began to subside and he contemplated once again just forgetting about the entire experience. What good would come from confronting the rude girl? He would probably end up saying something that would make him look even worse than she obviously already thought he was. There was no point.

  Unfortunately, he now had to figure a way past the girl without being seen. Since he lived in the city there was really no need for a car. He’d walked to the restaurant from his dorm just a few blocks North, which would require him to stealthily slip past his ex-date if he didn’t want to circle the entire block.

  Shifting as close to the window, behind which he’d previously been seated, he began to slide along the building’s exterior. Luckily, Bethany was still engrossed by her phone, making him feel more at ease about turning his slinking shuffle into more of a casual walk. As he passed the girl he attempted to catch a glimpse of the conversation but since he was trying to avoid detection, he was hesitant to get any closer and therefore wasn’t able to obtain any more information about the secret conversation other than that it was taking place on an iPhone.

  With Bethany now to his back he began to feel more at ease. She hadn’t known him for more than an hour at most, so it was very unlikely that she could identify him from the back of his head or the clothes that he was wearing. His slow, cautious walk became more relaxed as the distance between them increased.

  “Where have you been!?” Bethany shouted.

  Jason froze, knowing that he’d been spotted. Instantly he began running the conversation that was about to take place through his head. “Where have I been?” he imagined his response as he remained frozen on the sidewalk, his back to the girl. “Where the hell have you been? I was sitting at the same table while you took the longest pee in history or did you even have to go at all? And, how the hell did you get outside without me seeing you? You think you’re so god damned special that—?"

  “I had to climb out the bathroom window to avoid that weirdo.”

  Confused, Jason turned as Bethany quickly lowered herself into the passenger seat of a blue, Ford Mustang. It was clear now that she’d been addressing the driver, an attractive girl of similar height and build, with the same long blonde hair and dimpled cheeks as his date. “Probably her sister,” he thought, turning to shield his face as the car sped away.

  “Weirdo,” Jason repeated the familiar name aloud as he turned and continued home.

  THREE

  “You said he was standing next to the crib when you entered the room?” Officer Eric Sanchez reconfirmed as he moved into the spot where Oliver’s assailant had been standing forty minutes earlier.

  “Yes. When I entered the room I saw a man standing beside my son, suffocating him with a stuffed animal,” Bill again explained the attack for what seemed like the hundredth time to the middle aged officer.

  “The bunny, right?” the officer motioned to the deadly pink plaything laying face down in the far corner of the crib.

  “Yes,” Bill, annoyed, reconfirmed.

  “You mind if we take the bunny with us?”

  “No, but what do you expect to get from that?”

  “Probably nothing but just in the off chance that one of the man’s hairs or some other evidence might have ended up entangled in the animal’s fur. We’re also going to want to dust the crib for fingerprints.”

  “Is that really going to work on wood?” Bill questioned, in no way an expert but familiar enough with crime scene investigations from television and books to know the basics.

  “Probably not, but this plastic strip along the rail might lend a decent print,” Sanchez tapped the rail with his pen.

  “I need to grab a few thing
s. I’ll be right back. Just don’t touch anything, okay?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Bill agreed as the officer moved past him and disappeared into the hall, his presence replaced by Jennifer, still protectively clinging to Oliver in her arms.

  From the moment that they'd discovered the young child on the living room floor Jennifer had refused to let anyone remove him from her grasp. Even as the paramedics had been conducting their exam of the child, she'd refused to let go. Her reaction was completely understandable given the terrifying events that had just occurred but Bill couldn't help thinking that his wife might now, never let go of Oliver again. Instantly, an image of his wife sitting at a school desk with seventeen year old Oliver on her lap, taking his S.A.T., popped into his head.

  "They must think we're nuts," she whispered as she moved closer to her husband.

  "Yeah, I got the same impression."

  Oliver's eyes bounced back and forth over his bottle at his parent’s exchange.

  "Can you really blame them though?" Bill added. "I mean, if someone told me a story like that and I hadn't been there to witness it, I'd probably think the same thing.”

  "I know, but we're not making it up. We're good, upstanding, professional people. We're not the types to make something like this up for attention.”

  "They don't know that. They have no idea who we are. Besides...," lowering his voice even more, "...are we really sure about what we saw?"

  "Yeah, I'm pretty damn sure." Jennifer paused, looking down at the pair of innocent eyes and ears intently focused on her. "I know what I saw. That psychopath was trying to kill Oliver." The tears, which had only tapered off ten minutes earlier, once again began to gather.

  "I know. I'm not denying that. Hel...heck I was fighting the guy off. I mean..." Quiet again, "How did Oliver end up in the living room?"

  "This will only take a few minutes," Officer Sanchez reannounced his presence as he reentered the room with a small box in hand. "Everything alright?" he questioned the couple, apparently sensing the intensity of the conversation, or perhaps having heard the tail end of it.