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We crossed the Mississippi on the third of May. I sat in the car worrying about dad’s behavior; he’d become increasingly agitated in the past weeks. Sometimes I’d hear him in the night through the walls, moaning in his sleep, I’d catch a word or two. Usually something like "no" or "geaway!" but about two nights before our planned road trip I heard something crystal clear through the six inches of hollow drywall that separated our rooms. "He is sloping out of the gloam." I learned then that night terrors were sometimes as palpably terrifying to the witnesses as they were to the participants. I was worried that he’d loose his mind to these dreams. As worried as I was though, I did not go into his room. I had tried that once when the terrors had started and the look that he gave me before he told me that everything was all right and to go back to bed was the worst thing of all. It was the look of a man who’d been taken from some all too familiar place to somewhere alien and strange and it was the look of someone or something that not only was not afraid but had never known fear in the course of it’s existence. I figured this because it was like a newborn baby looking at the world for the first time, but at the same time it was the look of a shark it was wide eyed, cold and blank. My father was a Doctor of Sociology who made his money by writing books about human behavior and how it related to the natural world. Kind of like a Michener for social development. His next book would be about the Midwest and how the towns therein were fast becoming carbon copies of one another. Every town had a Wallgreen’s then a Chilli’s then all the other chains and franchises would spring up like mushrooms. He related this behavior on a fundamental level to anthills and termite mounds and how one of these constructs was never too dissimilar to another. A somewhat mundane observation at the outset but the devil was in the details. He would take every little thing about the mentality of the franchise culture and how it related to that of the insect. "The human being has only one known predator you know." He was saying as the bridge carried our ford Taurus gently over the river that flowed through the country like an aorta still carrying supplies to many industries. Who, although many of their kind had faded with the passing of time, still proudly churned out steel, textiles and paper in the memory of the great ages of development they had seen rise and fall around them. "What’s that?" I said. My interest suddenly peaked by the slight incongruity of his sentence. "The Virus." He smirked. "The virus is the only thing that human beings have to call their predator. I’d say it’s a fairly effective if not selective one." "What do you mean?" I said. I was almost going to say, what about cancer, but I didn’t want to bring up memories of mom for either of us. Besides cancer was not a separate entity although it is somehow inconceivable to me even now two years after witnessing cancer at work on my mother. That something so well designed as the human body could wreak such havoc upon itself. There, in the car on that Friday afternoon on the Iowa boarder twenty-four months after she died the image of her dying form was still too painful to bear and so I pushed it away. "Well, the flu virus alone accounts for twenty thousand deaths in the US every year. These are mostly old and infirm or they are young and weaker then their peers. So you’d think that the virus behaves like a wolf culling the heard and ensuring the strength of the species. To that I say no because aberration in humans is a far greater weakness then that deficiency which a virus takes advantage of. Furthermore aberration compounds itself over generations. A child who is molested will grow up to be a molester without help. One who is beaten will grow up resorting to violence to solve their problems and in most cases beating their own children. And who knows what sort of behavior went into these women who kill their children. Aberrant behavior is the weakness in the heard that you see around you. And there is no predator to cull it." "In other words a predator who understands us, and how we behave. Our myths are full of these creatures capable of selective hunting in the population. The Vampire, the Werewolf, the Creoles have their Bokor the native Americans have the Wendigo eaters of flesh and soul..." The thing I remember most about that summer is the heat the heat and humidity rolled in around early April and kept going till well into September without much letup. When I spotted one of the majestic storm fronts that made their way across the skies of the Midwest like waltzing debutantes, I would close my eyes in anticipation of a blessed relief from the heat. No storms heady breeze could compare to the chill I felt as my father uttered those words in his innocent analytical tone. He is sloping out of the gloam He talked on about how, if the human race had some sort of selective, social predator it would improve the species as a whole. I sat worrying about the lines down which he was thinking. Every time I thought I knew what twisted doctrine he was subscribing to he would cite them as a specific weakness in our society. They were all there; the Nazis, the KKK, wife beaters, gay bashers, child molesters, drug dealers, gang members, thieves, pimps and many more. "... But herein lies the paradox, how does one stare into the abyss without the abyss staring into him also. The answer I think is in the modern concept of the anti-hero. A being that has not only looked into the abyss but embraced it a being who has become a monster to fights monsters. One who follows a doctrine of rage and only in that does he differ from his pray." He sounded like a movie trailer but he was smiling in a very self-deprecating manner so I assumed that he was playing devil’s advocate and was just fielding a whimsical idea for our amusement so I played along. I think in retrospect that it is this kind of complacency that facilitates disaster. "What about mercy what about the possibility of redemption?" Hollywood had equipped my well for this argument. "Well the anti-hero has forsaken redemption, therefore if there is no redemption for him then how can there be mercy for his pray?" Out across the low rolling Iowa countryside there was a roll of thunder. "There’s a storm coming." I said excited that maybe I’d see a twister. "Yeah..." Was all Dad said as the tires hummed against the asphalt carrying us farther west. That night we stayed at a ‘Super 8’ in some bland Iowa town dad had spent the afternoon in surveying and taking notes in his Ti-book. At sixteen I got my own room on our trips, for two reasons. Firstly dad said a boy of my age needed privacy and second was that dad stayed up working most of the night. Though the third, unspoken reason was the dreams. That fateful night was the first that I made the acquaintance of the man who was to become my savior. I turned on the TV at eight o’clock after we’d come back from TGI Friday’s and was affronted by a man who could only be described as a charlatan and a thief; the reverend Joe Pias. Now Joe’s rhetoric was no worse then any of his counterparts. The thing that struck me, though, as soon as his smarmy grinning countenance affronted my eyes was the purely obvious way in which he plied his trade. He looked like a car salesman on the home-shopping network as he hawked his shitty overpriced merchandise, and begged for donations that he might spread the word of Jesus. The funny thing was that in all the time I stared at old Joe in morbid fascination, like an onlooker to a car crash, never once did he say anything remotely to do with morality and never once did he quote from the bible. I was reminded of what dad said about organized religion. He held that everyone had it in them to be a good person and you didn’t need to pay some moron to tell you how you should live. There is a voice inside all of us and all you have to do is decide whether or not to listen to it. I didn’t know it at the time but I would be seeing a lot more of Joe, he was syndicated almost everywhere we went, and like I said he would become my savior. The next few weeks were a trip through a Midwestern landscape that rolled on under majestic summer skies. There’s a lot to be said for a place where you can see all of the sky. In the sunsets are beautiful and when there are storms you can see them in separate places in the sky like sovereign islands in some celestial sea. My father and I talked and laughed on those long car rides. Our relationship had always been good but we’d gotten closer since Mom passed. I started to feel like everything was going to be ok. One night I was lying in my room in a Motel 6 about thirty miles north west of Omaha Nebraska. The day had been a scorcher and the A/C in the room was broken. I couldn’t sleep and had been tossing and turning for about two hours when I heard my Dad’s door open and close. I went to the window and looked down at the parking lot. I could see the Taurus glinting in the overhead lights. Dad crossed the parking lot and got in the car. I would have thought very little of this but for what he did next. He leaned over and opened the glove box. He didn’t know that I knew this but there was only one thing kept in the glove box, a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and a box of ammo. I went numb watching him I was sure that he was going to put the gun to his head I was sure that he’d broken down and that this was it. My heart raced in my chest and my body went cold. It seemed that I would take off as the adrenaline made my body seem lighter like a basketball that had been submerged and now was popping to the surface of a pool. I sat frozen unable to see what he was doing with the gun. Then he seemed to put it back and started the car. I watched the parking lot for about an hour waiting for, something anything I had not moved and then the car came back, Dad got out and walked across the parking lot. I realized that he was whistling. It was half passed two in the morning. Then next day at breakfast, he was absolutely radiant. Full of the joys of spring as he said himself. "My air conditioning was broken last night." I said in conversation. "didn’t get much sleep" "You saw me go out then huh?" He wasn’t even phased. "Yeah I did, what was up with that?" "Well I haven’t been sleeping well for a while and driving around helps me relax. This isn’t a good area around here either." He knew that I knew about the gun. What was more, I knew he was lying to me. You don’t spend the best part of a month in a car with someone without knowing when his or her manner becomes irregular. His manner was very irregular right at that moment. The rest of breakfast was eaten in silence. I knew he was keeping something from me. By the time my scrambled eggs and bacon were making their way through my small intestine I decided to find out what it was. I stayed up every night for about a week to see if he would go out again. After eight nights, he did. I’d been listening at the wall in silence for an hour or so. Then all of a sudden he rose and went into the bathroom. When he did this I ran out of my room as quietly as possible and down to the car. I’d made sure the trunk was open earlier in the day but had not looked inside. When I opened the trunk I saw that there were local papers from many of the towns we visited. He was always reading one of these papers I hadn’t realized he kept them. I never put my bag in the trunk, always in the back seat. I supposed it was for research or back up material or even funny little anecdotes for his book. I climbed in among the papers, found the emergency opener inside the trunk then closed the lid. It was like a coffin inside. The car started up and we were away. After what seemed like an hour in the dark the car stopped. Dad got out and walked off into the sounds of the night. When I was sure he was gone I opened the trunk expecting to find the hotel parking lot. Instead we were in the driveway of a farmhouse. I got out of the trunk an approached the house cautiously. As I got near the porch a loud crack sounded from inside the house. It was the first time I ever heard a gunshot in real life but I knew what it was. Someone came to the front door and I dived into the bushes to hide myself. My father walked out of the house and got back in the car he left me there terrified in the bushes. I looked at the house and then at the direction the car had gone. It was as if someone else was directing my movements but I walked into the farmhouse. Now I knew why in those movies those stupid people always went into the scary house with the murderer inside. It was that they just didn’t have a choice. There was a hallway inside and the only sound was that of a TV coming from one of the bedrooms. I walked toward the sound and into the room the TV was playing Pornography. But I was not looking at that I was looking at the man in the bed. His face was concave like someone had cracked the side of a boiled egg with a spoon. Blood was running down onto the pillow, he was still alive. His body jerking in breaths with a staccato rhythm, spasmodically holding on to life. Then suddenly he stopped and I was allowed by my nervous system to move again. I looked, then, at the TV and wished that I had not because after a second of adjustment I realized that one of the participants in the act that was being filmed could not have been more then eight years old. I must have blacked out because when I came too I was outside in a puddle of my own puke and the sun was coming up. I walked to the nearest road where there was a gas station. I washed off most of the puke and asked the lady behind the counter where the motel was from there. She told me I had quite a walk, but then she took pity on me and gave me a ride seeing as she was going that way and she was just finished her shift. I got back to the motel and into the shower before my Dad got up and was just toweling off. When he called me for breakfast. That was another quiet day. He asked me many times if I was sick because I looked pale. That night after my fill of the money grubbing thief Joe Pias I slept and in that sleep I had a dream. I was an Indian boy I was dressed like the Iriquoi that I studied in my eight grade Indian project. The elders of my village were all gathered around me. They told me that I must sit all night in the forest in the dark unarmed. This was to be my right of passage into manhood. So I went to the forest and sat in the place that was prescribed all-night I sat unafraid. Then the sun rose and I looked around me as the sun came up I began to see a figure in the gloam. It was coming slowly toward me with the dawn. I looked as the figure came into the dawn light and I saw its face. It was my father, and he was smiling. I woke up screaming, bathed in sweat. He is sloping out of the Gloam. My father did not check on my nightmare, instead I sat alone in the neighboring room afraid to go back to sleep. I watched the sun come up over the interstate. The next time he went out I would go and stop this or at least get some answers. I did not have to wait long. Two days later I went on another trunk ride. This time I was fast out of my hiding place and ran into the house, a well-appointed ranch back from the road. Dad already had the couple at gunpoint in the kitchen. "Dad, what are you doing? What is this?" he didn’t even look at me, he wasn’t even surprised. "This is how I find peace son." "Please Dad don’t do this. Why are you doing this? Why did you kill the other man in the farmhouse Dad why?" I was getting hysterical. "Did you see what he was watching? That man was getting married in a week to a woman with two young children. Did you think I was going to let that happen? Or let it happen to some other poor child?" he still had the gun pointed at the couple they were too terrified to speak they were in their early fifties and looked like they’d been preparing for bed. Dad’s tone was cool and level. "Look Charlie, I’m going to give you a choice. You can walk away from this and go back to Chicago you’ll be taken care of financially, I’ve seen to it. Or you can stay on the road with me and carry on this work. Before you make this decision I want you do go down into the basement and look at what’s down there." "Dad…" there were tears streaming down my face now. But I did as he bade me I went down the basement steps. There was a funny smell down there like a big litter box. I looked around the unfinished basement then I saw her. She was chained by her neck in a corner she was awake and wide eyed she looked very scared. A girl about my age emaciated and clothed in dirty rags. She was terrified, I approached and she passed out. I undid the chain with a key that hung in plain sight just out of her reach. Then I took her in my arms, she must have weighed less then eighty pounds and I carried her up to the kitchen. "What’s going on here Dad?" I could only manage a whisper, I didn’t know if that was because of the unconscious girl in my arms or because of sheer emotional exhaustion." "These people are her adoptive parents. They adopted her when she was just a baby Mr Well adjusted here has a conviction for attacking an abortion doctor so I flagged him. When I was researching this town then I found the adoption record, and then I cross referenced that with the school records and found that Amy here had never been registered for class in the United States. The rest I put together myself. There was lax after adoption examination and the parents of the century here found that they were emotionally and practically incapable of raising a child so they took to locking her in the basement. Then after a while it looked like less trouble to just leave her there. She’s been down there for about fifteen years." He turned and produced a second gun from his belt. He handed it to me and took the girl. "Make your choice son, whatever you do I’ll understand." I had no intention of killing anyone but I didn’t want these people to get away. They should go to jail for a long time. I pointed the gun at them and looked around the room as they begged me to call the police. Then I noticed the display plates over the kitchen sink. They were the Joe Pias commemorative set that had just been released last week. There were other Joe Pias trinkets all around the room. I thought about how pretty their daughter would have turned out if she’d been let live her life. I thought about fifteen years of never walking in the sun. Then I thought about the storms and how terrifying they must have been to her and that she’d never see how beautiful a storm could be, that she’d never seen a sunset in a Midwestern sky. Lastly before I pulled the trigger I thought of these people who thought that Joe Pias had saved them. Well the only person who Joe Pias ever saved was me and my question for you is, Joe who the fuck is going to save you?’ Joe Pias was tied in his office chair. He’d listened to the boy for an hour telling his story getting more and more terrified. He was not gagged there was no one on the estate to hear him call out anyway. There was just him and Charlie, and Charlie was done. ‘Is your soul saved Joe? Will you sit at the right hand of the lord?’ Joe shook with fear and he managed to say in a tiny voice. ‘No.’ Then he heard the hammer of the thirty-eight fall, but you never hear the shot that kills you. THE END |
