Chiral Mad 3 Page 7

  leave her face.

  as I swallow them,

  one by one,

  careful not to

  spill a drop

  from the

  glass.

  THE AGONIZING GUILT OF RELIEF ( LAST DAYS OF A READY-MADE V I CTIM )

  PAUL MICHAEL ANDERSON

  BEN RACED down Mitchum Street, last year’s boots pounding the shoveled sidewalks, trying to outrun the brightening streetlamps. Not for the first time, he wished he had a car.

  Goddammit! he thought and didn’t know if he was cursing the school therapist or himself.

  The street blurred by, houses closed off with curtains and blinds, their Christmas lights dark. The corners of months-old Clinton/Gore and Dole/Kemp lawn signs poked out of the snow, reaching for him.

  The tall fence of McMillian Elementary reared up, and his boots slid on a patch of ice. A quick grab of a post saved him from a bone-rattling crash. He dashed across the lawn on a diagonal, kicking up clumps of snow, hoping he wasn’t too late, hoping—in spite of the twenty-degree day—Jude had waited like Ben asked.

  He skidded to a stop at the edge of the playground, taking in the empty swings, the barren slide, the abandoned merry-go-round.

  “Fuck,” he panted, his exhale a white puff. A stitch burned in his side, matching the molten core of anxiety in his stomach.

  Jude hadn’t waited—of course Jude hadn’t waited. How could Ben expect Jude to wait when he was over an hour late on the last day before Christmas break?

  Which meant Jude was at home, with their father, who’d bragged about early shifts all week.

  “Fuck,” he panted again, the stitch abating, the anxious core growing, spreading tendrils to his limbs.

  He knew he needed to run, but a darker part whispered that he was already too late, so why hurry? What could he possibly gain? Wasted effort.

  He was starting back across the yard when he heard the thunk of a metal door closing and a woman’s voice: “Ben? Ben Sheever?”

  He turned to see a young woman, holding a large pile of children’s workbooks and construction paper, on the other side of the playground area, in the near-empty teacher’s lot. “Hi, Ms. Quinn.”

  “Looking for Jude?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said through his teeth, then made himself stop. Ms. Quinn had at least tried to help, had been the one adult who had tried to do the right thing. “Yes, Ms. Quinn.”

  “You just missed him,” she said, walking to her car. “He left a few minutes ago. Thought of inviting him back in, but I knew he’d say no.”

  She shot him a look that, even across the playground—and a part of him felt ridiculous to stay on one side, to not go over and help, but that would put him farther away from Jude and Dad and home—he read loud and clear. Jude inexorably always loved his teachers, even if his teachers didn’t love him back, but Jude had soured on his third grade teacher, in the midst of the meetings and statements and counselors, by the time Halloween rolled around.

  He started back towards Mitchum Street, the idea he might catch Jude before the boy reached home squirting much-needed adrenaline into his muscles, banishing the dark whispering.

  “Thanks, Ms. Quinn,” he said, meaning it.

  “And, Ben—?” she called and her voice was a fishhook; his head turned, saw the look on her face, and stopped. He wondered if the school board president had come to talk to her, as he had come to talk to Ben’s father. Ben didn’t doubt it, but it wouldn’t have been over beer in the kitchen, with statements like “I’ll take care of it.”

  The school board president wasn’t Ms. Quinn’s friend, as he was Ben’s father’s.

  “Take care of Jude,” she said now.

  “I will,” Ben said and started running.

  He heard a startled cry of pain as he reached the house, and he sprinted faster, taking the porch steps three at a time and banging through the front door.

  “Oh great,” he heard his father say from down the hall, “the goddamn cavalry.”

  He burst into the kitchen. A tableau from hell in front of him: Jude crumbled against the refrigerator in one corner, holding his arm as if it were broken; their father at the kitchen table in the other, the top button of his Cobb County Sheriff’s Office uniform undone, holding a bottle of Rolling Rock and glaring at it.

  “Jesus,” Ben breathed, and went to Jude. Jude burrowed into his chest. Ben felt the arm under the long-sleeve—a too-large hand-me-down from Ben—and didn’t feel a break, although Jude grunted when Ben’s probing fingers squeezed.

  “Look up, dude,” Ben whispered, tilting Jude’s chin. Their father had clipped the boy along his right cheekbone, not hard enough to break—their father was good like that—but enough for the skin to swell and darken. It reminded Ben, absurdly, of water in a balloon—the gentle sloping rise. He didn’t press against it.

  Rage thrummed through his bloodstream. At his father for doing this. At himself for not getting to Jude in time.

  At Jude, for not knowing this would happen.

  He’s getting bad again, a voice murmured in the back of his mind.

  “What the fuck, Dad?” he yelled, his anger belied by the crack in his voice.

  “Watch your language,” Marcus Sheever muttered, not looking away from the Rolling Rock. Ben saw that Marcus’s knuckles were chaffed and his head rang.

  “What happened? ”

  Still their father wouldn’t look up. “Caught him playing with my beer.”

  Jude sniffed against Ben’s shirt. “I was getting him his drink. That’s all.”

  Ben looked back and didn’t miss the flicker in Marcus’s eyes. He could see it all: their father coming home, Jude—against all logic—excited and eager, running to the fridge to get Marcus his one beer of the evening, Marcus getting annoyed, grabbing at the bottle but Jude not letting go quickly enough, Marcus winding up while jerking the beer from the boy.

  Ben saw it so clearly, it could’ve been happening right now.

  Marcus finally looked up, and Ben saw no satisfaction in his father’s gaze, no challenge, no troll-like belligerence. Marcus wasn’t a stereotypical child-abuser like on a Made-for-TV movie. It would have been easier—to hate him, to bring it all to an end back in September—if he was.

  But he had never done this to Ben, had never harmed their mother (not that their mother stuck around long enough).

  Just Jude.

  He got his arm around Jude’s shoulders, helped his brother up. The molten core of anxiety was cooling—the worst was known—but not disappearing. Instead it hardened, settled in, made it impossible to take deep breaths.

  “C’mon, Jude,” he said, glaring at their father, and feeling useless in his inability to do anything else. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  He led the boy to the upstairs bathroom and examined him.

  The bruises along the shoulder were dark; a little more pressure, if Jude had been holding onto the beer a little tighter, and the shoulder would’ve popped from its socket.

  Yes, their father was good. A popped socket could be home-mended, but it would still require a temporary sling, which was noticeable.

  The shiner on Jude’s face was also noticeable but … well, Jude was always getting punched at school, wasn’t he? This could’ve been just an early Christmas present from the tormentors of McMillian Elementary.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time their father had used that excuse.

  He’s getting bad again, the interior voice murmured.

  Ben got Jude back into his shirt and led him down the hall. Jude asked, “You wanna come read comics with me, Benny?” His eyes were dry now, the shiner coming along nicely, making one eye squint as he looked into his bedroom.

  Ben followed his gaze, taking in the neatly organized books on the bookcase, the comics on the desk, the action figures from Toy Story and the X-Men cartoon show lining his windowsill—a ready display for friends who didn’t exist.

  He looked back at his brother’s open, earnes
t, small—they were nine years apart—face. He had the face of a bull’s-eye. Every school, every class, had one. The ready-made victim. The one who just didn’t fit. The one whose timing was off, whose answer was either too right or too wrong, whose interests and look weren’t in. They weren’t obnoxious, or toxic, or even ugly in a broad sense of the word. They were just wrong, and everyone knew it. The one even the wallflowers of school felt impunity to pick on.

  Ben had one in his senior class—Amanda Hofsteader. Not dumb, not bright, not pretty in the most generous sense of the word. She got it worst from the girls, who seemed to imbue Amanda with all their worst nightmares. She drifted through the halls of Ben Franklin High School, never seeming to know it was as bad as it was, or, if she did, burying it so deep as to make herself almost beatific.

  Much like Ben imagined Jude at McMillian Elementary. But Jude got it worse because he kept trying to get along in a nerve-wracking turn-the-other-cheek way, which seemed to rile everyone.

  “You all right, Benny?” Jude asked.

  He looked like their mother. Which was part of the problem with their father. In all sorts of ways.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice thick.

  “So, you wanna read comics?”

  “Sure,” Ben said, and his throat clicked, and then it was normal again. “But no Spider-Man, though. I’m sick to friggin death of Spider-Man.”

  Jude grinned, and Ben just felt sick.

  Ben watched his father sleep on the couch.

  Behind them, the television was on, sound low, with NBC playing through the end of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The light from the screen threw Ben’s shadow, long and menacing, across Marcus’s slack face.

  He’s getting bad again, the internal voice murmured.

  Ben’s fists clenched at the end of rod-stiff arms that couldn’t do anything.

  Marcus snorted in his sleep. He didn’t look evil, or monstrous, or anything but what he was—a man. A county sheriff’s deputy. Liked by everyone. And when Ben and Jude’s mother took off with that undergrad, everyone just clucked their tongues and said, well, what do you expect from Alana Sheever, nee Thompson? Everyone knew the Thompsons were a flighty bunch.

  But at least Ben and Jude had a good father.

  And what good father beat his youngest son?

  He slowed down when he was almost caught, the voice went on, but now he knows he’s safe and he doesn’t have to worry, anymore.

  Ben wanted to shake his head until he rattled the voice out of his skull. No, that wasn’t true, wasn’t true. That gave hint to some kind of animal cunning and malevolence in Marcus Sheever and he wasn’t like that. Was he?

  Wasn’t that why Ben had gone to talk to Ms. Quinn, and then one of Jude’s principals last fall? Because Marcus was just getting worse—his irritation mounting, the time he was a normal father fading, the sharp, over-correcting jabs more common, double rations if Jude tried to make up for whatever negligible thing he had done wrong? It’d taken Ben time to see the increase, but it was there. The hits were creeping up from Jude’s chest and onto his face. It was this last bit that had made what Ben said palatable to Ms. Quinn. Jude might’ve been an every-day target for the bullies at McMillian, but there were cafeteria and recess monitors to halt things.

  Not at home.

  And it showed.

  Ben’s jaw clenched until the pressure sang in his ears.

  Not that it mattered much, did it? the internal voice said. Send the balloon up, and it got popped by the school board president. And suddenly …

  And suddenly the questions from the counselors were focusing more on Ben and his relationship with his father. The protocol Ben had learned from television—tell adults and they would come in and fix everything—was going off the rails. Suddenly Marcus was there, looking at either Ben, or Ben and Jude, or Jude alone, during these questioning sessions. Suddenly, Ms. Quinn wasn’t there to help, and Jude …

  “Jude backed you up,” Ben hissed, softly.

  Jude, who’d never been fully on-board with what Ben was doing, never corroborated. Yes, it was the bullies at school. No, Marcus was nothing but what he appeared to be: a loving single father.

  He didn’t do it out of fear, Ben thought, but out of his essential Jude-ness. The Jude that saw only the good in people (he’d once explained to Ben that a particular bully happened to be a very good artist, as if that made up for the fact that he’d made Jude eat sand). That quality in Jude seemed amplified when it came to their father; it reminded Ben of how he’d seen Marcus in the years before Jude was born and their mother ran off. Back then, Marcus was just … a dad. Attentive, but not domineering. An authoritarian, but not a dictator. Caring.

  And that quality that everyone hated got Marcus out of the fire, got Ben slammed into counseling because of course this all stemmed from teenage angst and upcoming graduation and repressed anger over the absence of his mother.

  Marcus grunted in his sleep, turned over, exposing the nape of his neck. Ben stared at it, imagining getting a kitchen knife from the drawer and—

  He shook the thought away. That was useless—more Made-for-TV-Movie garbage. As useless as “telling an adult.”

  What are you going to do? the interior voice asked.

  Talking hadn’t helped, obviously. Any other idea Ben might’ve had was strictly the domain of television—not that his school therapist wouldn’t have loved to hear about them.

  And what happens after graduation? What happens when—

  “Shut up,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut, like a kid scared of the bogeyman. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  And, for a wonder, the voice did.

  He felt that hard lead ball of anxiety in his gut, felt the weight of hopelessness and the future settling onto his shoulders and, for the first time, became truly aware of the pressure he was under, like a deep-sea fish finally coming to realize the sheer tonnage of water surrounding him, waiting for a weak moment to crush him.

  Between the pressure on his shoulders and the pressure in his gut, he was stuck in a huge vice, slowly turning, slowly tightening. He wanted to scream, just to release some of the pressure, but he was a boiler with a busted vent. No relief.

  “Something will change,” he breathed. “Something will give. It has to.”

  His father offered a throaty snore. Behind Ben, a syndicated Top 40 music program played on television. Sheryl Crow was asking, if it makes him happy, why the hell was he so sad?

  He went upstairs and checked on Jude, who lay facing the window, the moonlight flickering with falling snow, reflecting off the bruise.

  When he went to bed, he avoided looking at the open envelope on his desk, but the voice was there, waiting in his head: What are you going to do after graduation?

  The scrape of metal on concrete and Jude’s delighted laughter brought Ben up from a thin, scratchy sleep.

  He cracked an eye open.

  Eight-thirty, according to the nightstand clock.

  He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. The world outside his window was coated in rounded white edges of fresh snow. Marcus and Jude were at the mouth of their driveway, shoveling, their laughter coming out in white streamers from beneath thick winter caps.

  Ben stood, a vein throbbing in his head. Marcus tossed a loose shovelful at Jude. Jude staggered, but kept upright, and tossed a shovelful of his own. His gloves looked comical—they were Ben’s old ones, still too large for his hands.

  Ben waited for the snow to sting Marcus’s cold face, for it to get in his eyes, and for him take the flat of the shovel up the back of Jude’s head.

  Instead he dropped the shovel, grabbed a handful of snow from a mound, squeezed it, and lobbed the ball at his youngest son. Jude returned the favor. Their laughter rang like church bells.

  Ben let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

  It’s okay,” he said.

  The envelope on his desk caught his eye. He stuck his English assignment—Grende
l, by John Gardner—on top of it, got dressed, and headed downstairs.

  He entered the kitchen as the back door opened, Jude and Marcus walking in.

  “We thought we were gonna have to come upstairs and throw a snowball at ya!” Marcus said, rolling his shoulders free of snow. Behind him, the winter screen fogged.

  “Dad said we’re gonna have hot chocolate!” Jude said, grinning, stopping in front of Marcus. “Want some, Benny?”

  Ben’s mouth stretched into what he thought was a grin—the right side of Jude’s face was dark, not as swollen as last night, but enough to make the core in his gut roll forebodingly. “Sure, bud.”

  Jude hunkered down to unlace his snow-caked boots.

  Marcus tried moving around him, but couldn’t. “You sleep okay?” he asked Ben. “Got bags under your eyes.”

  Ben’s jaw tightened. “Not as much as I would’ve liked.”

  He wanted to scream—at Jude, at their father, at everything: Why are you acting so fucking normal? Did last night not happen? Look at Jude’s goddam face!

  “Hot chocolate will fix ya up,” Marcus said, and tried to move around Jude again, but Jude was oblivious, working the soggy knot of his boots with numb fingers.

  Ben saw the flicker in Marcus’s eyes, the hardening.

  “Move! ” Marcus grunted and shoved Jude aside. Jude stumbled, his one foot half-in-half-out of his boot, and connected with the kitchen table hard enough to shove it a few inches along. He rebounded and went to his knees, hugging his side.

  “Jesus!” Ben cried, zipping over to Jude. He got his arm around Jude, whose face was red with trying not to cry.

  Marcus clomped around them to the stove, dropping puddles of melting snow, heels squeaking over the lino. “Should’ve gotten outta the way,” he said, but low, the fatherly tone gone. He sounded robotic. He stared at the teakettle on the stove burner like he’d never seen such a thing.

  Ben got Jude standing, his feet back into his boots. “C’mon,” he said. “I wanna get some air to wake me up. Walk with me.”

  Jude nodded numbly and Ben led him outside, snagging his own jacket off the hook by the door. He spared a hot look back at their father. Marcus was still in the same position. His eyes were squeezed closed, as if struck with a sudden pain in his head. He reminded Ben of a toy that’d run out of power.