That graduation afternoon marked our first definite experience with the supernatural. The occult term for Jack’s ability is a glamour, which basically refers to a deceptive image projected into another person’s mind.
“Let’s go,” Jack said. “I can’t wait to try this out on a bigger audience.”
I refused to get into the car until he repeated my First Rule, and made a serious promise not to break it.
#
After a short drive, we parked in the shadow of giant yellow arches. A bench offered limited seating next to the restaurant’s side entrance, mainly because a clown statue occupied half the available space.
Jack did a number on that clown. He stared at it first, memorizing the contours of the fiberglass. Then I guess he imagined what it would be like if a real clown sat there all day, instead of a statue. Bright yellow and red overalls faded into filthy rags. His varnished swirl of hair became an unwashed clump of straw dappled with bird droppings. Sweat poured down the face, smearing greasepaint into a gray, tragic mask.
In an especially perverse touch, Jack added a priapus effect to the clown’s seated lap.
(You’ll have to look that word up later, Celia. Maybe next year when you’re in high school.)
A family with two toddlers approached from the parking lot, and I was glad Jack had sense enough to turn off that last effect, at least. Even so, the clown was too disturbing. Instead of the supposedly loveable mascot, Jack’s version looked like an escaped mental patient. He wasn’t a statue. He remained motionless to trick unwary children, waiting until they moved within reach. An evil gleam in his eye suggested he fantasized about an epidemic of childhood obesity. He’d snatch kids away from their parents, lock them in a dank cellar and bloat them up with sugar water and greasy, unhealthy food.
That family should have rushed past the bench. The terrified kids should have burst into tears. Instead, the dad opened the glass door and they all walked calmly into the fast food restaurant.
“Humph,” Jack said. “Guess they were too hungry to notice.”
#
“That creepy clown was a bit much,” I told him. “Try something a little more subtle.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He turned the area behind the counter into a slaughterhouse. Where fast-food employees usually flipped meat pucks on a grill or scooped potato sticks into waxpaper sleeves, one employee positioned a metal spike over a live cow’s forehead, while his aproned coworker lifted a sledgehammer. A skinned carcass, hook wedged deep through its flayed haunch, hung upside down over a metal bucket frothed full with gore. Nearby, a teenager in a paper hat lifted chunks of bloody flesh and gristle and bone into the funnel-mouth of a grinding contraption.
“I hear their burgers taste really fresh,” Jack said.
Too much. People will start screaming. He’ll cause a riot.
The cashier said, “Can I take your order?”
The family ahead of us in line asked for two burger meals and two kid meals. Dad handed money to the teenage boy behind the register, who rang up the purchase and then gathered their food into a large blood-soaked sack and two cardboard cartons for the toddlers. Mom handed the kiddie meals to her son and daughter, instructing them not to spill anything even as flecks of raw meat dripped out of the cartons onto the floor.
They walked to the exit. All the other customers placed their orders without protest.
Jack was so disappointed; he didn’t even want to order his food.
(You’re right, Celia. Worst superpower ever. This wasn’t close-up magic with card tricks or foam balls under plastic cups. He’d constructed an elaborate stage illusion, like those with wooden cabinets, ropes and swords and mirrors and smoke bombs. A full-sized, blood-spraying cow instead of a tired dove from a felt hat.
All that effort, and nobody in the restaurant could see it. Nobody but me.)
#
We sat in a plastic-coated booth and picked at our food. I ate my fries first, since they weren’t any good once they got cold.
I’d never seen Jack sulk like this. He looked like somebody who’d won the lottery, made shopping lists and planned elaborate vacations, chose a new house and car, wrote a resignation letter to his a-hole boss complete with satisfying curse words . . . only to find out that he misread one of the numbers.
“You can’t expect to win the lottery twice,” I said. Jack understood exactly what I meant—another example of how well we followed the track of each others’ minds.
“You saw it, right? The cow and the grinding machine and all that?”
“It was pretty impressive, Jack. Kinda explains why I’m not that eager to unwrap my sandwich.”
“I mean, I’ve never really been to a slaughterhouse, so I just made some of that stuff up.”
“Looked real to me,” I said.
He took a bite of his double cheeseburger. He chewed vigorously, unaffected by the images he’d conjured earlier. “Maybe we could tour with a mind-reading show. You know, a Mr. and Mrs. Mindreader act, where I draw something and put it in a sealed envelope, and you can guess the picture because I’ll show it to you.”
“Mr. and Mrs.?”
“You know what I mean. I’m not that crazy about the plan, actually. Everybody would think you’re the brains of the act, even though I’d be the one making the trick work.”
“You never want to play second fiddle.”
“Nope.” He took another bite, slow this time, lost in thought. “Mister and Missus,” he said after a swallow of Coke. “That explains it.”
I didn’t follow.
“Well, we can’t be that. Not Mister and Mister, either. Not by law. So we get this instead.”
Here was Jack’s reasoning: his strange gift of communication, and the reason only I could see his images, was a tribute to our close relationship. It resulted from all the secrecy of our senior year in college, when we’d essentially created our own world together. We were connected in ways that other couples never dreamed of. We weren’t allowed to get married, not in 1985, but our relationship had something unique and meaningful. A kind of psychic consolation prize.
The idea was beautiful.
Then I realized something. “I’m happy about this private bond we share, sure. You know, scary clowns and falling through a bridge, creepy old faces staring from a rock. But can you make anything look nicer for me?” I unfolded the wrapping around my burger. “I wouldn’t mind if this food was a little more appetizing—especially after your slaughterhouse show from earlier.”
I lifted the bun. A stain of ketchup and mustard soaked the underside. Pieces of onion, fine-chopped into crescents, were scattered like fingernail clippings over a dry brown circle of meat.
Jack concentrated on the hamburger patty. I waited for crisp grill lines, béarnaise sauce drizzled over a juicy, thick-cut tenderloin. My mouth watered.
A few clipped fingernails blinked aside as a cow’s eye opened in the center of the burger. I recognized the eye from Luis Buñuel's classic film, Un Chien Andalou. A razor stretched across the eye, slitting it open. Blood and eye-yolk oozed over the meat and onto the wax wrapper.
(That image inspired my Second Rule: Don’t mess with food, ever.)
#
Jack respected my rules, but that also meant if he got bored in a restaurant, he’d sometimes use his gift on the decor or on ineffective wait staff.
That’s how trouble started at a truck stop eatery in southern Virginia. It was the first summer of our Great Journey after college, when we hadn’t yet discovered a practical use for Jack’s gift.
This time, it might have saved his life:
#
Jack would insist that truck stops had great food. Truckers know what’s good to eat, he’d say. Good local cuisine, and those places are usually nice and clean. Find a place off the highway with a full parking lot and you were bound to get huge portions of meat and potatoes, covered in gravy—and gravy never hurt anything.
He didn’t add that the food w
as inexpensive—that point was always a given. Jack wanted to conserve money, so our Great Journey by VW Beetle would last as long as possible.
(Now’s as good a time as any to explain what funded our trip. When Jack graduated from Chesapeake, he won the school’s Lydia Overstreet Prize in Humanities. Overstreet was a wealthy alum who granted the college an extravagant gift in her will: the sum from interest and investments was awarded each year to a student with the best Senior Project, as voted on by a committee of faculty members.
Jack didn’t think he had a chance. Editing the school newspaper had never counted as a Senior Project—previous committees gave the prize to a final thesis or art portfolio, rather than work with an ongoing publication. Plus, a few of Jack’s editorials criticized the school: their inconsistent tenure policy, mismanagement of food services, budget improprieties. He hadn’t made a lot of fans within the administration or faculty.
Still, he printed out some of his best articles and opinion pieces, bound them together into a book, and submitted it to the Overstreet committee.
A million-to-one shot, practically. Turns out, Jack’s cumulative work really impressed the committee. He’d given the newspaper his own voice that year—more than previous student editors had done.
Oh, you want to know the exact amount, Celia? Well, Overstreet’s initial gift was $500,000. In 1985, interest rates were pretty high, and the college invested the money well—which made the prize bigger than that rich gal ever could have imagined. When Jack walked across that graduation stage and shook President Kessler’s hand, he got a check for $35,000.
That money bought a lot of gas and motel stays and cheap eats. Thirteen months’ worth, as it turned out.
You see what I meant earlier, when I said Jack couldn’t expect to win the lottery twice?)
#
Now, let’s get back to that truck stop in southern Virginia. For singles, there was a counter with the kitchen area behind; families and other large groups occupied a row of booths beneath a stretch of tall windows overlooking the parking lot; between the window booths and the counter was another stretch of booths intended for parties of two.
That left Jack and me pretty much in the middle of the restaurant. The booth dividers were so tall, we couldn’t see if other customers were seated in our row. The dividers were covered with the thin wood paneling people used for their basement workrooms.
The place was clean, but you couldn’t say the same for all the customers. One guy at the counter offered an unappetizing flash of butt crack. A woman dragged three unkempt children past us on the way to the restroom. At the window booth across from us, a man sat alone in front of three plates of food. He was too heavyset to fit at the counter or in one of the smaller booths in the center. He wore an ill-fitting white T-shirt and jeans, and smelled of gasoline and tobacco.
“Check out that pig,” Jack said. And it was a pig sitting there, a county fair prize-winner stretched into a T-shirt and bending his snout over a trough of food.
Now, when a friend tells you to look at somebody else in public, you sneak the glance, try not to be too obvious. Trouble was, when Jack did a glamour like this, I couldn’t see the real person—as I looked at Jack’s projected image, I might be staring directly into the other guy’s face without realizing it. I hadn’t yet learned to revise my surreptitious glances, so probably wasn’t as subtle as I’d hoped. Consider, also, that Jack would study his subject for a while to develop his caricature. No surprise, then, if we came across as a couple of rude college kids from out of town.
Because we were rude kids, a few weeks after graduation but still clinging to college habits—where we ate in dining halls, talked and laughed as loud as we wanted, made gentle fun of people at other tables. We hadn’t yet perfected our “public” manners, didn’t fully understand how to behave in an unfamiliar place where people weren’t already predisposed to make excuses for our behavior.
The woman with her three children returned from the restroom. They looked like they’d bathed in the toilets. Stink lines, like in cartoon strips, wavered from their soiled clothing. Horse flies hovered over their heads.
I reminded Jack he edged dangerously close to breaking the Second Rule. “Remember, we still have to eat here.”
“Okay. I’ll give it a rest.”
Good, because I didn’t want to see what he’d do to butt-crack guy at the counter.
The waitress brought our drinks then asked what we wanted to eat. Our orders were straightforward—one special, and one number eight plate with baked potato instead of fries—but it took her a long time to write it all down.
Before the food arrived, Jack riffed a bit about southern stereotypes, maybe wondered aloud about how smart the waitress was—and he didn’t mean anything by it, just passing the time, really—and we were both sweet to her when she brought the food, even though Jack got crinkle fries instead of the baked potato he asked for.
But later when I glanced aside, the large guy in the window booth was scowling at us. The pig glamour was gone, of course, but some fresh drops of ketchup stained the front of his T-shirt.
He kept looking at us. Maybe we’d been too loud. Comments about the waitress and her accent could seem like insults to everyone in the diner.
They’re probably all related, Jack might have joked earlier. Maybe pig-guy is her cousin.
This guy was huge, and we weren’t fighters. He could take us both on, and do a good bit of damage.
Judging from his expression, too, the guy was mean.
He burped. “You boys getting dessert?”
A wave of relief washed over me. But the friendly question didn’t make sense. I was only a few bites into my meatloaf, so why ask us now about dessert?
“Take your time, Biggs. We’re in no rush.”
The raspy drawl came from the booth behind Jack. That’s who the big guy was talking to, not us, and I’d simply misjudged the direction of his stare.
So, no problem—right? Then I realized how the booth behind Jack had seemed empty, yet the voice from that section was so easy to hear—as our voices would have been for anyone seated behind. They had eaten in silence, listening to us the whole time.
What had Jack and I talked about? My thoughts raced back through insensitive jokes about the diner and its customers, but also private recollections from our senior year—the relationship we’d hidden, and how glad we now were to escape that burden of secrecy.
I found myself wishing we’d been less free with our comments.
“They could hear us,” I whispered, pointing to the booth partition behind him.
Jack responded at a normal volume. “So what? Stop being paranoid.”
He got kind of mad at me for the rest of the meal. I tried to steer our conversation to the food. Then I threw out some correctives to our earlier remarks: things like, You know, Virginia is a beautiful state, and a lot of famous Americans were born here. Kind of obvious stuff, straight from a tourism brochure.
“They filmed Deliverance here, too,” Jack said. But for the most part he let me blather on, since he knew it would make me feel better. I ate fast, so we could finish up and leave. Neither of us ordered dessert.
In the window booth, the big guy finished a banana split with about a dozen scoops of ice cream.
I needed to use the restroom. Jack said he’d pay and meet me out front.
#
I walked out to our car. I couldn’t remember where we parked, but the lot was well lit, and a red Beetle is pretty easy to spot.
There, at the back of the lot. I remember Jack hadn’t minded the lousy space. Popular, which means the food’s good.
I walked toward the VW, midway between two tall lampposts.
And I was furious. First Rule, don’t mess with the car—but he’d been mad at me from dinner, as if I’d scolded him, and as punishment his projected image showed a shattered window on the driver’s side, with a heavy dent pressed into the door. He’d flipped up the hood, too, like at the end o
f the Bay Bridge vision that precipitated my rule to begin with.
“Not funny, Jack.”
It really wasn’t. Especially the stain on the dented door, a wet spatter of new, darker red against the original paint job.
Another stupid glamour, of course, but it sent a thrill of fear through me and I picked up my pace. No sign of Jack as I ran closer. Had he ducked behind the door, curled on the seat in a cushion of illusory glass shards?
My hands were in front of me as I reached the car. Please, let me touch a flat pane of glass. Let the metal door be smooth and dry beneath my fingertips.
My right palm stopped flat at the windowpane beneath Jack’s illusion. Then it went through.
I pulled my arm out, avoiding the jagged edges of smashed glass. I felt the door, its dent like the shape of Jack’s head. My fingertips brushed through the stick and smell of his blood.
I thought about the big guy at the window booth, and his friends that we’d never seen. What had they done to Jack? Where was he now?
This section of the lot faced away from the interstate. A small bed of gravel framed the edge of the asphalt, but there was no guardrail where the ground sloped down into an overgrown stretch of woods. A few unformed paths led between unruly bushes and thick tree trunks.
The correct path was obvious. A heavy smear of blood led away from the front of our car and over the gravel bed. So much blood, as if Jack’s clothes were soaked through, his body dragged dripping over the crushed rocks.
The smear of blood continued off the gravel, indicating a tamped path beside an overgrown tree stump. I panicked. How much blood could a person lose? Did I have time to get help from the diner, or should I try to save Jack on my own?
Next to the tree stump, the bright trail of blood ended abruptly. In the point of an arrow.
I kneeled down to pat the ground. The bloodstain crackled like dry leaves; it smelled like dirt and mulch. The arrow was as perfectly formed as the lines painted down the middle of a road.
A sign from Jack, and one that only I could follow.
I ducked beneath an overhanging branch and ran into the dark woods.
#
Odd Adventures with your Other Father Page 2
