Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

  I wasn’t sure exactly what they were talking about, but I thought I had a pretty good idea. I wasn’t supposed to be hearing this, and I didn’t want to hear it, and I plugged my ears and hurried down the hall to the bathroom. I was afraid to flush the toilet after I was through, afraid they’d hear me and know that I’d heard them talking, so I just snuck out of the bathroom and padded quickly back to my bedroom.

  I heard my father say, “Do I have to do it myself again?” Then I closed my door and hopped back into bed and covered my ears with the edges of the blanket and willed myself to go back to sleep.

  In the morning, everything was fine, everything was normal. Or at least they pretended it was.

  I pretended it was, too.

  I was sick again a few weeks later, this time with an ear infection. My mother took me to the doctor, then left me at home in bed while she went to the drug store to get my prescription. I was restless, antsy, and did not feel like lying in bed, so as soon as my mother’s car pulled out of the driveway, I got up to wander around the house.

  I found myself drawn to my parents’ bedroom. I had spent a lot of time in their room when I was little—sleeping in their bed when I had nightmares, talking to my father as he dressed for work—but over the past few years there had been between us the unspoken understanding that the room was off-limits to me.

  Now, as I entered the bedroom, it was as if I were trespassing on private property, treading on sacred ground, and the guilt and exhilaration I felt as I walked over to the once-familiar bed was that of breaking a long-observed taboo. I sat down on the bed, looked around the room. It seemed different to me somehow, its character changed though the physical objects within it had not.

  I stood, walked over to the nightstand next to my mother’s side of the bed and began looking through it. Almost immediately, I found a book. I picked up the volume, opened it. It was a book of pictures. Pictures of naked people. Only they weren’t just naked, they were…doing things. I turned the pages slowly. This was sex, I knew, and although I was aroused by the photographs and would have loved to look at them if they had been shown to me by Terence or Billy or one of my other friends, the fact that the book was my mother’s bothered me. I saw a woman, smiling, squatting down, holding a hand between her legs. I saw a man standing there with his…thing sticking out. Another of a woman kneeling before a man, kissing him there.

  I quickly put the book away, not wanting to see anymore. My hands were shaking. I felt ashamed and sickened and excited at the same time, and it was a disturbing, unsettling feeling. I thought of my mother buying the book and looking at the pictures.

  I forced myself to think of something else.

  I was back in bed by the time my mother returned with my medicine. I sat up in bed as she spooned it into my mouth, and I wondered if that was what she did during the day when I was at school and my father was at work—look at the sex pictures. I stared at her, and she suddenly looked different to me than she had before. She no longer looked to me like a mother. She looked like a woman pretending to be my mother. I let her feel my forehead, take my temperature, ask me how I felt, but I was grateful when she finally left.

  I ate lunch in bed, took a nap, and when I woke up, she was on the phone in the kitchen, talking low. She stayed on the phone for a long time, and though part of me wanted to sneak into the hall and hear what she was talking about, part of me didn’t.

  She came into my bedroom after she got off the phone, to give me my medicine again, and she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me for a while. There was something strange about the way she looked at me, and I couldn’t tell if she was sad or angry. I wondered if she knew that I had seen her book of pictures, if that was what was making her seem so strange, and I grimaced and held my ear and pretended to be sicker than I really was so she wouldn’t get mad at me.

  “Are you happy?” she asked finally.

  I looked up at her, thrown off by the question, not really understanding what she was getting at. “Yeah. I guess.”

  She stared into my eyes. “Do you think we’re happy? Your father and I?”

  I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to have this conversation. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  “Do you think we’re a happy family?”

  I wanted her to go away, and I scrunched up my face and lay back down on the pillow. “My ear hurts,” I said.

  She nodded, smoothed back my hair, gave me a kiss on the forehead. “I know.”

  I noticed, that night at supper, that my parents didn’t talk much to each other. They talked to me—or, rather, they talked at me, telling me to eat my salad, to eat my peas, to clean my plate—but they didn’t seem to talk directly to each other.

  Had they ever?

  I couldn’t remember, and that bothered me. This was my home, these were my parents, we ate together like this every day. Yet I couldn’t recall if they usually talked to each other or if they had never done so. It was as though my mind had been washed clean, my supper memories beginning with today’s meal.

  I pretended that my ear had flared up again and excused myself early from the table and went into my bedroom and went to bed.

  We went out again one more time that season, my father and I, this time just the two of us, and it was the best hunting trip we ever had. We didn’t shoot anything, didn’t even shoot at anything, but simply tracked and walked and watched and listened. It was as if we were not intruders in the wilderness but were part of the wilderness, and it felt good, it felt right. We did not see another person for nearly a week, and by the end of that time, our camp felt more like home to me than our real home did, and I did not want to go back.

  We did go back, though, arriving home in the early afternoon, and I unpacked my gear in my bedroom while my father washed the car in the driveway. I was putting away my unused underwear when I heard my mother call my name. It sounded as though she was in her bedroom, and I walked down the hall, but the bedroom was empty. The wastebasket next to the door was not empty, however. It was filled with wadded up Kleenex, so much so that it overflowed onto the floor, and I stared at it. Was it from my mother? Had she been crying? Had she missed us that much? I felt better all of a sudden. I looked down at the Kleenex and, between two wadded tissue balls, protruding from the chaos of white, I saw what looked like a deflated yellowish balloon. I bent down to pick it up, but it was sticky to my touch and I dropped it instantly.

  “So now you know.”

  I turned around and my mother was standing in the doorway behind me. She looked angry for some reason. “Happy?” she said.

  I wasn’t happy, and though I didn’t know what she thought I knew, I wished I’d never looked into the wastebasket. I wanted to tell her that, wanted to tell her I was sorry, but I hadn’t been accused of anything and I didn’t really know what I was being sorry for.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  I maneuvered around her and hurried back to my bedroom. I didn’t know why she’d called me to begin with, but she didn’t call me back or come looking for me, and I stayed away from her for the rest of the afternoon. I saw her again at supper, and I pretended like nothing had happened, but I felt uncomfortable around her even with my father there. I realized that I no longer felt like her son. I felt like a boarder, someone who happened to live in the same house as her.

  And I was afraid of her.

  The fear did not go away the next day. Or the next. Or the next.

  Whatever had happened between us, it had put us on opposite sides, pitting us against each other, and I did not know enough to be able to bring things back to the way they were.

  I felt sorry for my father somehow. I didn’t know why, but there seemed something sad about him, something that hadn’t been there before our trip, and I wondered if it had to do with those secret Kleenexes in my mother’s wastebasket. He and my mother hardly talked at all now, were seldom even in the same room together, and I tried to be with my dad as much as possible, to help him in the gara
ge, to sit next to him on the couch, to show him that I was on his side and supported him, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  I was on my way home from school a week or so later, when I saw Gary Knox’s car parked a few houses down from ours.

  I knew instantly that he was with my mother.

  I stood for the longest time on the sidewalk at the foot of the driveway, not wanting to have my suspicions confirmed but needing to know the truth. I thought of running back to school, of going to one of my friends’ houses, of going to the park, but instead I walked up the driveway and, as carefully and quietly as possible, opened the front door.

  I stepped inside.

  They were not where I’d hoped they’d be—sitting on the couch, drinking coffee and talking. They were not in the dining room or the kitchen. I took off my shoes and walked down the hall toward the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. I stood there for a moment, leaning against the wall, feeling as though I’d been punched in the stomach. I could not see them but I could hear them perfectly. “Mmmmmmm,” Gary Knox said. “You smell so good.”

  Ain’t nothing like the smell of a woman.

  My mother laughed. Then she made a noise like a gasp and a cry at the same time, and though it sounded like she was in pain, I knew she was not. I could not hear Gary Knox at all anymore, but my mother started to moan in a strange rhythmic way I’d never heard before. I knew what was happening, and I felt sick. My head was pounding. I thought of that book in my mother’s drawer, that book of naked pictures, and suddenly I hated my mother. I wished she were dead. I wished she’d never been born.

  Her moaning grew louder, more animalistic, more disgusting, and I inched away from the closed door and walked slowly down the hall to my bedroom. I thought for a moment, then slammed my bedroom door as hard as I could.

  The noises were silenced.

  A few minutes later, Gary Knox hurried down the hallway and out of the house. I watched him through the drapes.

  My mother did not come to see me.

  I did not leave my room.

  I waited for my father to come home.

  I didn’t tell my father anything. But he must have found out somehow because the next time he went on a hunting trip, the last time, he didn’t invite me along, and when I asked him if I could go, he stared at me for a long time, and then shook his head and said quietly, “No.”

  It was not until the next day that I realized hunting season had ended the week before.

  THE PIANO PLAYER

  HAS NO FINGERS

  (1996)

  It started with a double-cross.

  The way it usually starts in Arizona.

  Ed Hernandez had paid all of the legitimate fees and the illegitimate bribes, and he’d been promised by Jim Fredericks, the planning commissioner in one of our newer suburb cities, that the project was a go, that he would be the one to get the development. But then the Sunworks Corporation, the conglomerate responsible for most of the lookalike peach and pink condos now littering the desert west of Phoenix, had put in its bid, and Ed’s done deal was history. Fees were returned, bribes were kept, and Fredericks and Sunworks were in business.

  So, Ed walked into city hall with a twelve-gauge and blew Fredericks away.

  That’s the way it usually ends in Arizona.

  Only Ed’s a pal of mine, and I didn’t quite buy it. Ed had a shotgun, yeah, but he wasn’t the type to use it on someone, no matter how much he hated him. And a bureaucratic double-cross sure didn’t deserve the death penalty. Slashed tires, maybe. A wife-fuck, perhaps. Petty vandalism and sleazy revenge.

  Not murder.

  It was a sweeps week, though, and the local news programs needed ratings, so they made old Ed look like a crazed and dangerous killer, a ticking time bomb that had just been waiting to go off.

  I couldn’t help thinking how royally the media could screw up the picture of me if I ever stepped in it.

  So, I went down to County for a visit. Ed hadn’t called me, probably hadn’t even thought of me since he’d been arrested, but I knew I could do him some good, and I called in a favor one of the deputy DAs owed me, getting myself an audience.

  We met in an interrogation room: me, Ed and his lawyer.

  Ed looked bad. It had only been a few days, but he obviously hadn’t slept and he appeared to have lost weight. There were bags under his eyes, and his lips were the same pale color as his skin. He walked in with a defeated shuffle, and when he and his lawyer sat at the table opposite me, he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “They rough you up?” I asked.

  He nodded silently.

  “Inmates?”

  A shake of the head.

  “Pigs?”

  A nod.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” the lawyer demanded. “I could’ve—”

  “Can it,” I told him. “You couldn’t’ve done shit. Ed’s a crazed killer and a Mexican besides. You think anyone in the system’s going to have pity for him?”

  “We could sue the county,” the lawyer said.

  I looked at him admiringly. “That might work.”

  Ed met my eyes for the first time. His face and arms were clear, and I knew they’d purposely left bruises only in places that could not be seen by TV news cameras.

  Fredericks had friends with pull.

  “Did you do it?” I asked.

  “Don’t answer that,” the lawyer commanded. He faced me across the table. “I don’t know who you think you are, but if you expect my client to—”

  “I did and I didn’t,” Ed said.

  “I told you!” the lawyer shouted.

  We both ignored him.

  “What happened?” I prodded.

  The lawyer’s face was red. “If you’re—”

  “Shut up!” Ed shouted at him.

  The lawyer lapsed into silence.

  “Me and Fredericks had a deal on the subdivision. He screwed me. I was ticked off, so I went out and got drunk, tried to think up some way to throw a monkey wrench into the project and maybe get it back for myself, and the next thing I know, I’m going home, taking out my shotgun, loading it and driving over to city hall. I knew what I was doing, and I’m thinking those thoughts, but…it’s not me. Something’s forcing me to do all this, and…” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “It seemed like…Mart. Some of the words I was saying to myself, the way I was thinking, it was like Mart.”

  “You think it was her?”

  “I think she forced me to do it.”

  “I’m not following this,” the lawyer said. “Run that by me again.”

  Ed looked at me, frustrated by the lawyer’s incomprehension.

  “He thinks his ex-wife did it,” I said.

  “Isn’t she dead?”

  “She is,” I replied.

  The lawyer’s ears pricked up. “Insanity plea?”

  “I don’t think he’s insane.”

  There was a long, irritated exhalation of breath. “You’re both insane.”

  “What if I can prove it?” I asked him.

  “This isn’t goddamn Miracle on 34th Street. You’re not going to convince the court that a ghost possessed him and made him kill someone.”

  “Not a ghost,” Ed said. “A demon.”

  Even I perked up at that one.

  “Mart’s a demon,” he told me. “And I’m not so sure she’s dead.”

  “Hold on there,” I said. “I was at her funeral, remember? It was an open casket. She was in there. She was dead and then she was buried.”

  “But she might’ve got out. I never told anybody she was a demon. Didn’t want anyone to know. And when she died, I was so broke up over it that I didn’t…” He took a deep breath. “She told me what to do if she died. There were words I was supposed to say, things I was supposed to do to her head. I didn’t do any of ’em.”

  “But how could she possess you? And why would she?”

  He shook his
head miserably. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll find out what’s what,” I said, standing.

  The lawyer snorted. “The piano player has no fingers.”

  “Huh?”

  “That dog won’t hunt.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a dead end. It won’t fucking work.”

  I looked at Ed. “Tell that asshole to shut up,” I said.

  He turned to his lawyer. “Shut up, asshole.”

  “I’ll find out,” I promised.

  “Go see Sutton,” Ed suggested.

  “Why? You think he knows something?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But he was hinting around to me about Mart last time I saw him. I ignored him because I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s a place to start,” I said.

  “Good luck.”

  ****

  Gil Sutton was working on Van Buren, managing one of those hooker hotels. Probably managing more than that. He’d been legit when I first met him, a buyer for Checker Auto, but even then he’d been borderline, always on the lookout for some scam. He’d been fired from that job for faking invoice receipts and substituting copycat parts for the real thing. The last time I’d had any contact with him, a year or so back, he’d been working part-time as a trainer at the dog track, running numbers by night.

  I drove east, following the flow of traffic. At the far end of the Valley, the Superstitions were visible for the first time this week, a jagged bluish mass, individual features flattened out and obscured by smog. Time was when the mountains could be clearly viewed any day of the year from any point in the Phoenix area. But that was before all the people and the polluters, before the general public had been conned into believing that the price of individual freedom was allowing power companies to pump toxic shit into our air. Now it was a point of pride. This was the west and we were westerners, and no bureaucrat in Washington was going to regulate what our companies did in our state. So, we gulped down hot smog and pretended like we enjoyed it because we were too fucking stupid to look out for our own best interests.