by R.M. Haig
SIXTY-TWO
Uninvited Guests
January 15th, 1997. 4:30PM
Burlwood, Indiana
Jake's boots were heavy with ice and melting snow as he plodded his way home from school for the afternoon, but their weight was negligible as compared to the steady and constant pressure he felt squeezing and pushing on his overburdened heart. Tracy and her family had left Burlwood behind three weeks ago, and he'd felt the sting of their departure from the moment he watched them turn on to Route 4 and speed away into the rest of their lives.
Nick had offered to take him along once more since the day he found his young crush crying out on her porch, but he had given the same answer in kind. He couldn't leave his mother, she needed him in some sick and twisted way. Now, she was all he had... and she wasn't enough.
Chucky was working nearly full time, Louie had been out of touch since the incident with Timmy, and Donnell was busy, well... doing the deeds of Ron Boudreaux. If there was anything to be grateful for in general, it was the fact that good ol' Deputy Ron had listened when Jake ordered that he keep his distance from Janet Gigu?re forever. He'd been conspicuously absent, taking their loud naps and meth smoking with him. Jake's mother never said anything about him, as though she knew that Jake had banished him, but she still seemed high most of the time somehow.
Jake didn't understand how that was possible, as he never saw or smelled her smoking and she never left the house to score any drugs. She had no visible means of getting her hands on the dope without her boyfriend, so it was all a great mystery to him that he couldn't decipher as easily as he would've liked. A mystery that he took little time to think over, as he really didn't give a shit about her anymore because she'd been effectively out of his life for several years. He had no mother, just a woman with his name that he had to babysit most nights to be sure she didn't kill herself like his father had, intentionally or otherwise. No more and no less was expected or offered by either of them.
In the absence of a mother/son relationship, the absence of time with Tracy, the absence of any friendly relationship whatsoever with anyone, Jake felt the January chill in places deeper than his bones as he made his way home this day. He didn't intend to be in his trailer for long this afternoon, as the pond behind the trailer park office was frozen and a natural ice rink that was open and operating. It was hockey season, and he took every opportunity he could to build his skills so that he could contribute to The Burlwood Bees Varsity squad, which he had been a shining star of for the past two years. He would go home, say hello to his stoned out mother, fetch his skates and be on his way. That was the plan for the day... that was the plan nearly every day.
As he walked through the park towards their street at the back on this afternoon, though, he found himself deep in reminiscence. For one reason or another, he seemed to be seeing and hearing ghosts of what his life had been up to this point everywhere he looked about the landscape. He saw The Burlwood Boys searching the streets for a dark blue vehicle on the trail of Nathan Dawson. He heard Chucky crying on his porch about Rusty. He saw Donnell out on his porch, hiding from his parent's arguments. He saw little Timmy Lane building snowmen and carving out their faces. He smelled the shit in the close quarters of the shed behind his trailer when he found his father swinging at the end of a rope.
All of the things he'd seen, done and taken part in during his time in this community churned and bubbled in his mind, and most of it was uncomfortable to relive. By the time he was passing Applewood, his experiences with Tracy and The Swetes were trying to lift his dark and tortured spirit. Even the warmth of the memories that lived at that intersection couldn't bring him solace, as those days and those times were over. They were what they were, and now they were gone. Those days and those feelings would never come again.
Reeling in the turbulent waves of sorrow and sadness, he continued his walk until he was approaching that patch of trees the boys once called Booger Woods. They seemed much smaller now than they had before, much more insignificant than they'd been on that sunny day when the gang found the remains of Joshua Banks hidden in their leafy arms. They seemed far less scary than they had been when he watched the police carrying small bags filled with Joshua's parts out of them from his bedroom window.
Just off of the woods, of course, was the trailer that Jake called home -- which seemed much smaller than it had in his youth just as well. He climbed the steps of the porch, remembering the day he'd been forced to smash his way in at the expense of his shoulder. This time, he dug through his pockets for the key that would unlock the door and carry him into the dank and musty world that was his day to day life.
To his surprise, though, as he extended his key towards the doorknob and attempted to insert it into the lock, the door swung wide open on its own. It hadn't been locked at all, it hadn't even been entirely closed. That was completely unusual, as his mother was an agoraphobe who feared everything and trusted nothing. She would never leave the door unlocked, let alone see it not completely latched. Immediately Jake knew something was wrong, and it didn't take more than a look into the living area to know that there was trouble afoot.
There, standing with his back to the front door, a cellphone pressed to his ear as he jumped around like a frog in an oven to pull his shorts up, was Launchpad. Donnell was terrified, that much was obvious before he even turned around at the sound of the door to see Jake standing there. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he did see his old friend, and he dropped his phone in the shock as his eyes grew impossibly wide and his mouth fell incredibly agape.
"Jake!" He cried out in surprise, looking back and forth between the bedroom that had held his attention before and the young man he had known as Darkwing in a previous life frantically.
Seeing his terror, feeling his fear, Jake was immediately horrified at what must be waiting for him beyond the bedroom door. Dropping his backpack with haste, he looked into the bulging brown eyes of his old friend and begged for information nonverbally.
"Donnell," he began slowly, fearfully. "What's going on, man?"
Donnell gave no answer, trying to gather his faculties instead and bending down to pick up his phone in terror.
"Hello?" He whined more than spoke into it. "Are you coming?"
Not having to ask or wonder who he was speaking to, Jake pressed passed his old friend toward the bedroom and tried to prepare himself for what he might see. He knew what business Donnell was in, and he now knew where his mother was getting her goods since Ron Boudreaux was ousted. Donnell was now her pusher, and the fact that he was there in this condition, mortified and on the phone, meant that something was terribly wrong. And that something could only be bad for his mother.
"No, Jake!" Donnell cried as he put his arm that wasn't holding the phone around him and squeezed.
Jake didn't have time for that, his mother possibly didn't have time for that, so he quickly and violently threw the arm off of him and marched defiantly into Janet Gigu?re's bedroom. There, he saw a sight that all of the mental and emotional preparation in the world never could've readied him for. His mother was naked and laying half off of her disheveled bed. Her legs, which were spread wide, were pointed at the window on the opposite side of the room.
Her face, which was upside down and staring at him, was the image of vacancy. Her eyes were as wide as Donnell's, and it was clear that she was utterly and entirely absent of them. Her hair, dirty and sweaty, hung lazily down to the filthy carpet on the floor where her hands were also resting. Her arms were spread as wide as her legs, her breasts sagging down toward her chin in a desperate attempt to be a part of what Jacob knew was her death mask. Studying her arms as they hung loosely, he saw a syringe stuck in the crook of her elbow that was dangling in place, buried in one of her veins. On the nightstand next to her was an overturned spoon, the bottom of it burnt black, presumably by a lighter that was sitting just beside it.
Peeling his eyes away from the horror, wrestlin
g to shut off his mind to what he was seeing, he looked back to Donnell -- and he saw, where his old friend had been standing, an African American incarnation of what he knew to be the devil.
"You!" He growled, spittle flying from between clenched teeth. "You did this!"
"It wasn't my idea, Jake!" The creature sobbed, "She wanted to try it!"
"You fucked her, and then you killed her!" Jake condemned him, hatred boiling in his veins as meth had boiled within his mother's. "You son-of-a-bitch!" He shouted. "I should fucking kill you!"
"Please, Jake!" Launchpad begged. "I thought I knew how to do it! I guess I gave her too much, I didn't think --"
Whatever Donnell didn't think, whatever he thought he could possibly say in his defense would never be heard on the planet Earth. Before the words could ever be spoken, Jake was on top of him the way he had recently been on top of Jake's mother. The difference, in this case, was that it was violence raining down on him instead of sex, it was tightly clenched fists instead of what was on offer earlier this afternoon. Jake pummeled him with all the hate in his heart, beating him with as much fervor and anger as he had beaten the center of the Blackmoor Wizards while The Swetes watched on from the stands long ago, beating him with enough savagery to kill him, which was exactly what he intended to do. There would be no zebra to come to Donnell's rescue, no referee or linesman to protect him from Jake's rage, no hope that Donnell Hughes would survive the assault that he'd earned with his actions.
It was as these thoughts raced through his mind, his fists starting to sting with the pain of dealing damage, that an official did come to scoop him off of his helpless and hapless prey. This was not a man on ice skates wearing the black and white stripes, though, it was a ghoul wearing combat boots and police khaki with a gun belt around his waist. It was Deputy Ron, of course, and he was acting to protect his assets.
"Get off 'im, boy!" He shouted as Jake swung wildly at the air, desperate to finish the job he'd started in putting an end to Launchpad once and for all. "Sweet Santa Muerta, you fuckin' lunatic!"
"I'll kill you!" Jake shouted. "I'll fucking kill both of you!"
"Calm down!" Boudreaux ordered, though his orders meant nothing to Jake. "Calm down, the ambulance is coming!"
"What the fuck is an ambulance gonna do, Ron?" Jake fired back. "She's fucking dead!"
As the officer struggled to restrain his quarry, Donnell found a way to get back to his feet. As he stumbled and staggered, the deputy quietly instructed him to get outta here, and his employee took his advice.
"Now you listen to me, boy, you listen good!" Boudreaux advised the still furious new orphan. "If you tell about this, son, if you run that little mouth of yours, you're gonna hurt a lot of people! In light of that, I'm gonna suggest to you that you hush up, just like last time. Do you understand me?"
"Hurt who?" Jake shrieked back, still fighting to get free of the Deputy's grasp so he could unleash his anger on him. "Who do you figure I've got left, you piece of shit?"
"You've got you, Jake!" Boudreaux replied, his threat more than plain. "And they'll never believe you anyway! Did you stop to think about that? You think you can accuse the town Deputy of being involved in something like this and have people believe you? Why, that's just crazy, son!"
"I'll tell them about SSF," Jake countered. "I'll tell them everything!"
"Oh, please, boy!" Boudreaux chuckled. "You think I'm that stupid? You think I left any sign of our presence in that building? You can send them there if you want, but you are the one that's gonna look like the fool! You've got nothing to work with, Jake! Your mother, a known addict, has OD'd. She did it all by herself, while you were at school, and that's just all there is to it! That's all there ever will be to it, son! So when Sheriff Rambo gets here, I want you to tell him that you just found her here. There was nobody else here, until I drove by and you flagged me down. That he'll believe. You tell him anything else, and I'll make your life a living hell. I'll see you in jail, boy, but you won't see your friend Donnell or I there! It'll never stick, Jake, and I think you know that!"
Nothing else was said between them in the minutes before the sound of a distant siren signaled the approach of an ambulance and the Sheriff. Jake was prepared to tell him everything about the way things had unfolded on this particular afternoon, he was prepared to tell him about SSF and all the criminality of Ron Boudreaux... but what would've been the point?
He knew the deputy was right...
He knew no one would ever believe him, and even if they did that there would be no way to prove what had been done...
So, he told Clyde Rambo exactly what Boudreaux had told him to... he felt he had no other choice.
Clyde seemed to know, he seemed to intuit that there was more, but Jake kept his mouth shut. There was no need for more turmoil. There was no need for more suffering. It was over, and it was bound to end this way from the beginning. This was just the natural conclusion to an old and tattered script, there was nothing else to be done.
Once the body had been removed by the coroner, Clyde sat Jake down for a second discussion. This one had nothing to do with what had transpired in his trailer that day, it was more forward looking than back. It was about what would become of young Jacob Gigu?re, it was about Nick Swete and how he was already half-way back to Burlwood to pick him up. It was about foster care and the welcoming invitation of a family that wanted him more than they wanted methanphetamines.
It was about the rest of his life and what he would do with it...
It was about leaving this place behind in the search for greener pastures.
SIXTY-THREE
