With a single finger, I slide the little door along the track with a wush until I hear the thuck. I peer through the lattice, where just another pixilated form kneels, hands clasped together. His dark eyes are veined and sunken in small pools of loose-looking violet skin. A sand-paper shadow spills out across his chiseled face and his lips tremble as his hoarse, wavering voice piggy-backs his whiskey breath. In Southern drawl he coughs up the prescribed words, "Forgive me father, fer I have sinned," words that serve as the real-world parallel to "Once upon a time," the dawning words of the anti-faerie tale.
I ask him how long its been since his last confession. He croaks, "Jeebus, goin' on twenty-three years," and considering the personality and the elapsed time, you can bet your money this is going to take awhile. I can see the straw-colored mess of hair atop his head, saturated in sweat. Some strands have melded, turned to curled spears that seem to pierce his leathery skin, while others are plastered to his forehead and ears. Though that could be sweat that rolls in rivers down his downcast face, I think he's crying. "I have done horrible things to my own flesh and blood," he says. "To my only blood."
I breathe in the worlds of each person through their words here and give them permission to exhale. That's the nature of my life's work. Here in this box of secrets I become the psychological voyeur, peering into souls through my ears as each strips down deeper than flesh. My role is that of Atlas. People put the world on my back one pebble, one boulder at a time, and for good reason. The church trains people, domesticates them. Guilt is the yank of the leash, the command to heal against natural resistance, and the people come to me to heal the hurt brought to them by the yanking.
And everyone confesses to the priest, but where, you might wonder, does the priest go to confess? Nowhere, officially. Its against the rules. My gift is taking without giving. I eat their shadows and digest their darkness and never shit out my mouth so much as a tootsie-pop turd of their tales. I am the world's toilet, backed-up and never to be flushed. I am the ocean that all rivers flow to, but nothing is to flow out of. Knowledge, that wretched book says, is sin -- but I am the tree, understand, and the tree must bear fruit. And so as I'm alone in my abode late at night, bathed beneath the glow of candlelight, I take the weight off my shoulders. My own weight and that which the aching congregation has donated to earn their promised salvation. There, in the dark, I secretly flush the emotional toilet I've become. My soul bleeds, staining smooth sheets bound in skin like a serpent's that shines in the glow of the flickering flame. That leather-bound book, that is where Atlas drops his load. It is an antidote for my idle hands, my spinning head. Hidden beneath my bed where no one knows and no one goes, it has remained now, save for a few hours a night, for eight long years. Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, when some unknown hand plucked from the limb, partaking of the fruit, leaving behind a shiver that has reverberated this tree down to its very roots.
"In order to be forgiven," I say, but its just a skipping record, "you must be specific, and you must be penitent for your sins."
Its disappearance, his re-emergence; each out of the blue at once. It cannot be coincidence.
"Oh, I am," he says through a half-sob, "I am penitent, father, save fer one sin... an', an' a sin which I'm 'bout to commit, too. I wanna return somethin' I stole from my brother, last thing I ever stole, but I can't find it in me t' do so 'thout sharin' it with the world. Its the best for 'im. Fer everyone. An' it'll help 'em, though he might not see it. His true soul must be seen, 'preciated, an' this is why I come to ya, father. I feel guilty fer not feelin' guilty, ya see. Tell me, father, does that not count for somethin'?" A lump swells, pulsates, and threatens to choke me behind my tight, black-and-white collar. My heartbeat quickens beneath black fabric as my face goes pale in the dark. "Forgive me for what I done, what I'm t'do, brother," he says, then sighs sharply as if to cuss himself, shaking his head rigorously as he tightens and then releases his eyes and swallows, "I mean, I mean, father."
This is the all-too-typical, all-purpose plea for a happily-ever-after. And this is my chance to be the father I never had, the daddy who lets the idiot children believe in Santa when it is he who fills the stockings, puts the gifts under the tree. The stockings are stuffed with scriptural garage, of course. Beneath the fancy paper, the promising shape, there are just empty boxes. The morning they tear into them is the moment of death, however, and its the anticipation I help create that makes life worth living. Its about giving life meaning. That's my job. To say, "There, there, my children. Tell daddy what big bad boys and girls you’ve been, spill your guilt so you're sure to get your piece of the big pie in the sky when you die."
I say, "You bastard." Sometimes you're so connected with people that your secrets cannot be exposed without exposing the damaging secrets of others. This is what I tell him. Sometimes the truth sets you free, I say, but sometimes it only liberates the contents of Pandora's Box. And all alone, hope is dead. Silence is not a lie and the truth can destroy everything. People talk about hard love, I tell him, sure, but people also talk about what the road to hell is paved with. Take that into consideration. And tears bleed down his face now. He gets up, runs out the confessional, leaving an olfactory shadow of whiskey in the wake of his sprint. I can hear gasps from the congregation from outside. His sobs grow as the volume fades, finally cut off by the closing door. And then, with a flip of the wrist and wush and a thuck, all is silent once again. For a moment. Then, "Father?" says a new, muffled voice. The next voice through the revolving door. And then a knock. And I think, Just go away, Daddy's contemplating. "Father? I've come to confess. Father?" Knock-knock. But Daddy's shaking. Skin crawling beneath his holy garb, his collar's like a noose now, choking him.
After being relieved from confession, I decide to take a walk to clear my head. Out the back door, which I find open and unlatched, I scold Emily for not tying up her dog. Always the dog's running around, chew-chew-chewing on boots, doors, something. This little girl, with her blond pigtails and sad blue eyes, with her hands cupped behind her back, she bows her head and says, "Sowry, fatha Will'um." Truth is, she feels for that poor, abandoned creature and doesn't want to tie it up in the backyard like a prisoner. As an orphan, she empathizes with the creature greatly, just as greatly as I empathize with her and the rest of fatherless humanity. Between clenched teeth I sigh, passing her by.
When I was young, I used to take walks in the closest I ever came to a hometown. I'd walk among the hills and through the forest and one day, when I was nine, I, too, came upon a cute little puppy abandoned by its mother. It had one blue eye, one brown. Hungry and ill, it whimpered, keeping a cautious distance from me. You could see it wrestling inside between terror and the desire to trust as I approached, as I attempted to draw it near. I was permitted to take the animal back to the orphanage, where I worked on nursing it back to health. I named him Sakti, after the forest in which I'd found him. In time, the dog became my best friend, my only friend, but then some idiot child left the back door open one day. This stupid little shit, he forgot to tie up the dog, and my friend was never seen again.
Out of that ugliness had come beauty, however. Through a sort of death came a sort of rebirth. Like a blubbering baby I'd cried over the loss of my beloved mutt, and Sister Anna-Rue had been there to comfort me. She walked with me about the hills, through the forest as the morning sun rose. My inner wounds healed as we tumbled through the grove, as she opened my eyes to wonders of life my young brain had never before been able to conceive.
Then it all came crashing that one early morn. It was a week between when I'd lost my friend and when the orphanage burnt down. There, in the warm center between horrors, in the eye of the hurricane I thought had finally passed, water lightly trickled down my hand as I lifted it to touch my face. On the floor beside the tub rested the brush. For a moment I just let myself soak and smile, but then there came a tapping on the door. At first a light rapping, it then grew frantic.
"Willy," said a familiar voice in an urgent whisper, "Willy," said the voice of Freddy, my brother, also nine, "Willy, its Sakti. He came back. Me an' the boys, we was on our way back from playin', an' I see him runnin' up towards the hill in the back." And then I heard the pitter-patter of his feet as he ran away. With his words my heart was lifted higher, higher still than it had only two hours before in the grove. Eyes welling with tears, I leaped out of the tub, slipping on the wet around the brush that lay on the tile, almost falling, and wrapped a nearby towel around my waist. Sprinting out the door, down the hallway, I threw open the back door, soared down the porch. I could feel the lush grass between my damp toes, the bright sun, feel the warm wind embrace me with invisible arms as I made my way. I could feel the ache pound, pound within me as my sprint slowed to a still, my eyes staring out at the barren hill before me. My dog, my best friend, he was nowhere to be seen.
A sea of giggles came from behind me, which I noticed just seconds before the towel was yanked off my body with a snap. Turning, I saw the back of one of the boys, towel waving behind him as he ran. Behind the open door was my brother, giggling, motioning for his friend to hurry, hurry, patting him on the back as he made his way inside. Sure to first throw a devilish grin at me -- yet pausing an extra second, smile temporarily fading as he looked below my waist, perplexed -- he closed the door. Before I was able to turn my body completely to run towards it, I heard it latch. Terror echoed through me, scattering my mind and blurring my senses. Why was Freddy doing this to me? It wasn't my fault that he had forgotten to tie up the dog, that the sisters had taken it out on him so harshly. I knew they babied me, that it wasn't fair, but I never caused the ruckus my brother and his band of little bastards did, either. They were always playing tricks on the sisters, tearing through town, stealing things, and I just kept to myself. As they were out in the woods behind the orphanage playing cowboys and Injuns, I was alone, up in my tree house to the side of the orphanage. As they pretended to spill each other's blood with sticks and toy guns, I'd smear paint on the canvas with brushes, trying to fill the hole left behind in the absence of my lost friend. The Magnum Opus of my heart and soul, it would be the first and last painting I'd ever make. The thick, leather-bound book with blank pages -- the book that Sister Anna-Rue, who had encouraged my painting, had given me for sketches -- it would in time be filled with secrets expressed in words, not in pictures.
Fists slamming on the door in a rapid drum-beat, screaming my brother's name, it elicited nothing but a cacophony of giggles from the other end. I stepped back in rage, in horror. Feeling the blood rush to my face, my nails digging into my palm, I hurried along the back of the church, crossing the side, coming to the front. Nearly forgetting how good they had me. Forgetting I was dripping wet and naked. Ignorant, for the moment, for what I wore on the lower half of my twelve-year-old skin.
When I made it to the front and found members of the congregation outside by the dozen, awaiting the wedding ceremony to be held there, I immediately froze. Locked between fight and flight like a scared animal, I died as those eyes bore down upon me, as a sea of started faces reacted to my naked form. Some giggled much like the boys behind the locked door had only moments earlier, others gasped, still others were unable to say a thing, mouths agape. Some looked away in disgust, in shame; others gawked bug-eyed, still others just inspected with an amused curiously until it dawned on them. Until they saw the marks. One pointed. A trembling, extended finger eclipsing a blood-red face. His head bald and blaring in the sun. And I looked down at what I knew to be there.
The soft of her auburn hair, the sweet smell, the way she eased my pain on the waves of her melodious moans, these they would never see, but below my chest evidence was scattered. Scratches stretched along my sides, ovular marks where her lips had graciously puckered around my young skin. Souvenirs from the time and bodies spent at the grove, these marks of the enlivening, beautifully blasphemous moments between Sister Anna-Rue and I, they were now held up for the world to see. That day they would sit me down, ask me questions I refused to answer, but they put the pieces together. "Someone has committed unspeakable evils upon this young boy and embarrassed the church," they said, angrily, "now, who has been alone with him?" All fingers would point to Sister Anna-Rue. On my skin, the bare truth. My nakedness was hers, my exposure was her exposure. My body a book on which the damaging truth was etched. It was her ruin. They couldn't yank her leash, she felt no guilt, and so they stoned her. And straight to hell, they all hoped.
My brother had done it all before. He had stolen and destroyed, used me as a target and a tool, and the little bastard was about to do it again. And I couldn't, couldn't let him.
My feet bring me to the swinging doors of a building in which I've never been. My head knows the reason, but it is not the part that has lead me here. I can feel my cold hands trembling. As soon as I step in, not a bottle clinks, not a soul breathes. Even smoke from cigars seem to just hang in the air, pausing in hesitation. Its not a slow, murmuring dive from blaring noise into quietude, either, but an abrupt, cut-at-the-throat kind of quiet. It is a deathly still. People who have seen me every week a decade now eye me with suspicion as if I am some harbinger of death.
Deep in my pocket, the revolver feels hot and bloated. The trembling of my hands escalate, but once in my pocket, after my fingers are able to worm around the surface of the gun, the convulsions subside.
I approach the bar. From behind it, the bartender, pouring whiskey into a glass held by some hunch-backed man whose face is covered in a bush of whiskers, nods politely. His eyes, expressionless, lock on mine. "Wet your whistle, father?" He asks this in a friendly manner as he puts down the bottle, and the old man for whom he'd just poured the drink turns to look at me with eyes wide as saucers. "God damn," he says involuntarily, and then, realizing immediately what he has just said and to whom, his dirty hand flies to his fuzzy mouth with a muffled slap. Embarrassed, he fumbles off the stool and runs a crooked path out the door. My eyes meet the bartender's as if in apology, and he returns with a look that speaks of amusement mixed with a strange sort of sympathy. It strikes me that he, too, is a sort of light attracting moths, a pile of shit attracting flies. He, too, is a sort of confessional with a pulse.
Scanning the bar, it doesn't take long for my eyes to fall upon him, the man sitting quietly in the corner, lifting a foaming mug ever-skyward. Patting the bar with cold-sweat palms, I slowly approach him. He puts the mug down, looks at me with glazed-over eyes and lets out a half-laugh that rumbles his body and threatens to knock him off his stool. "I left the South, came West," he says, moving his arms from the left to the right, and then holds them up in the air, shrugging his shoulders, laughing, "an' still I feel so damn Southern, ya know? I dunno whether to call ya brother or father."
I sit first, then study him for a second before asking why he's in this town, but he doesn't answer. Instead, he throws the mug back, finishing the quarter of brew in a single swig. He places the mug down gently, looking around me, trying to steady his line of sight. He finally puts his hand on my shoulder. "Jeebus, its-a been a long time, fa-brother," he says.
"So it has," I nod. "Look, let's get you home. Where have you been staying?"
The bartender breaks in, looking at me and pointing up. "Rented a room on the floor above, Father," he says.
I nod in thanks, put his arm over my shoulder and guide him away. The bartender watches for a moment before loosing interest. Up the creaking steps we go. When we get to his room, I find the door closed but unlocked, and I kick it open with a wush. Carrying him a ways into the darkness, I let him collapse, finally, on the bed. I walk out onto the deck, put my hands on the railing. "Freddy?" I say to him.
"Yeah?" He says, pushing himself up a little and resting on his elbows.
Between tightened lips and a locked jaw, I try to relax. "I need, need you to give it to me. I know you mean well, but this won't help me. It will destroy me. Destroy everyone."
As it has always been, he hardly seems to hear me. "Got some friends," he says, pushing himself up, managing to stand, though unbalanced, on his own two feet. "Told 'em about it and they seem interested. Help me show the world your talent. I'm a-goin' to see 'em tomorrah. Givin' `em yer masterpiece. So its good as done. I'm doin' what's best for ya, bro," he laughs, "I mean, daddy."
Nails digging into the railing, I tighten my eyes and shake my head. "I can't let you do this to me. Not again."
He walks up behind me, places his hand on my shoulder. "Whatcha talkin' `bout, fa-brother?"
I shake his hand off, grab him by the shirt, and place his face close to mine. "This isn't a joke." I'm growling now, snarling. "Do you have it here? Where the hell is it? This isn't a fucking game."
He just smiles. "'Course it is," he says. "You think ya need to score points, so yer hiding b'neath the wings a that-there church, but yer better'n that. I gotcher ticket t' recognition."
I pull the revolver out my pocket, hold it to his temple, use it to guide him to his knees. "You see this gun?" I growl. "Nine nights out of ten I go alone into my room, put a single bullet into this gun, spin the cylinder and point it at my head. Do you know why? I lost everything. And you took it from me. I'm finally getting a life again and you come and want to destroy it -- again. All you do is destroy everything I love."
"Yer over-reactin'," he laughs, "but if ya need, spin yer chamber. See if that-there bullet's got my name on it."
So I aim the barrel down, spin the cylinder, then dig it in his temple again, pulling the trigger. The sound of the hammer clicking against an empty chamber sends him into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Even as I pistol-whip him across the face, as I watch the teeth fly out his mouth and hear the tap-tap-tap as they skip across the floorboards like flat stones across water -- even then, he continues to laugh. With the gun turned to club turned to paintbrush, our bodies and the room become the canvas. Giggling continues to erupt out his blubbery lips in gurgles as I beat him bloody with the barrel. The squashing sound as I slam it into his flesh, the echoing pangs of the gun up my arm as it beats against bone, all are fed and bred by the background of his soundtrack of morbid glee.
Finally, I just let him fall to the floor. As a pool of rich, red essence forms a slowly-expanding liquid shadow around his head, I find that the shower of blood, sweat and tears hasn't cleansed me. It was all useless as a baptism.
"Where is it?" I ask the bloody, mangled mesh on the ground, "Where is it?"
With a trembling finger, a smile, with great effort lifting both, he points to the end of his bed. There, on the ground, rests a trunk. His hand falls limply, landing on the wooden floor with a thuck. I look back at him for a moment. Hands full, I leave the door open. I leave him lay there and I don't guide his eyes closed.
Finally home, I find the back door has been left open again. I don't care. With silent, soft footsteps I walk to my abode. Just outside my door, Emily's dog lays in the shadows, panting, but I don't yell. I carry the chest to my bed, put the revolver down beside it. I don't even shut the door behind me. After digging in my dresser for a knife, I sit down, pick the lock, hear it click. I open it. Inside, there is one, lone thing. Something square wrapped in newsprint. On it, two labels: a return address for Freddy's apartment and an address for an art studio in a small, Kentucky town. Closest thing him and I ever had to a hometown. My mind tugs me back to the orphanage. The night flames bellowed out the doors and windows, spitting entrails of smoke slithering into the evening sky. After loosing my dog, my only love, I lost everything I'd come to know as home. Even the tree house was swallowed up in the fire. I only walked away with an empty book.
Blade to the sides, I cut off the newsprint, peeling it away. As my fingers rub across the rough surface of the canvas inside like a hand of a blind man, my heart sinks. Its a painting of a dog, a mutt with one blue eye. Its the only painting I'd ever done, my Magnum Opus. The one I'd thought had been consumed by the fire.
With a stone face, I close the trunk with a thuck. At the doorway, I see Emily's dog. It smacks its wet lips, chew-chew-chewing on what I now see to be a familiar, leather-bound book. My black-and-white collar tightens, feels as though its about to snap my neck. My fingers worm around the revolver, dampened with my brother's blood.
I ask him how long its been since his last confession. He croaks, "Jeebus, goin' on twenty-three years," and considering the personality and the elapsed time, you can bet your money this is going to take awhile. I can see the straw-colored mess of hair atop his head, saturated in sweat. Some strands have melded, turned to curled spears that seem to pierce his leathery skin, while others are plastered to his forehead and ears. Though that could be sweat that rolls in rivers down his downcast face, I think he's crying. "I have done horrible things to my own flesh and blood," he says. "To my only blood."
I breathe in the worlds of each person through their words here and give them permission to exhale. That's the nature of my life's work. Here in this box of secrets I become the psychological voyeur, peering into souls through my ears as each strips down deeper than flesh. My role is that of Atlas. People put the world on my back one pebble, one boulder at a time, and for good reason. The church trains people, domesticates them. Guilt is the yank of the leash, the command to heal against natural resistance, and the people come to me to heal the hurt brought to them by the yanking.
And everyone confesses to the priest, but where, you might wonder, does the priest go to confess? Nowhere, officially. Its against the rules. My gift is taking without giving. I eat their shadows and digest their darkness and never shit out my mouth so much as a tootsie-pop turd of their tales. I am the world's toilet, backed-up and never to be flushed. I am the ocean that all rivers flow to, but nothing is to flow out of. Knowledge, that wretched book says, is sin -- but I am the tree, understand, and the tree must bear fruit. And so as I'm alone in my abode late at night, bathed beneath the glow of candlelight, I take the weight off my shoulders. My own weight and that which the aching congregation has donated to earn their promised salvation. There, in the dark, I secretly flush the emotional toilet I've become. My soul bleeds, staining smooth sheets bound in skin like a serpent's that shines in the glow of the flickering flame. That leather-bound book, that is where Atlas drops his load. It is an antidote for my idle hands, my spinning head. Hidden beneath my bed where no one knows and no one goes, it has remained now, save for a few hours a night, for eight long years. Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, when some unknown hand plucked from the limb, partaking of the fruit, leaving behind a shiver that has reverberated this tree down to its very roots.
"In order to be forgiven," I say, but its just a skipping record, "you must be specific, and you must be penitent for your sins."
Its disappearance, his re-emergence; each out of the blue at once. It cannot be coincidence.
"Oh, I am," he says through a half-sob, "I am penitent, father, save fer one sin... an', an' a sin which I'm 'bout to commit, too. I wanna return somethin' I stole from my brother, last thing I ever stole, but I can't find it in me t' do so 'thout sharin' it with the world. Its the best for 'im. Fer everyone. An' it'll help 'em, though he might not see it. His true soul must be seen, 'preciated, an' this is why I come to ya, father. I feel guilty fer not feelin' guilty, ya see. Tell me, father, does that not count for somethin'?" A lump swells, pulsates, and threatens to choke me behind my tight, black-and-white collar. My heartbeat quickens beneath black fabric as my face goes pale in the dark. "Forgive me for what I done, what I'm t'do, brother," he says, then sighs sharply as if to cuss himself, shaking his head rigorously as he tightens and then releases his eyes and swallows, "I mean, I mean, father."
This is the all-too-typical, all-purpose plea for a happily-ever-after. And this is my chance to be the father I never had, the daddy who lets the idiot children believe in Santa when it is he who fills the stockings, puts the gifts under the tree. The stockings are stuffed with scriptural garage, of course. Beneath the fancy paper, the promising shape, there are just empty boxes. The morning they tear into them is the moment of death, however, and its the anticipation I help create that makes life worth living. Its about giving life meaning. That's my job. To say, "There, there, my children. Tell daddy what big bad boys and girls you’ve been, spill your guilt so you're sure to get your piece of the big pie in the sky when you die."
I say, "You bastard." Sometimes you're so connected with people that your secrets cannot be exposed without exposing the damaging secrets of others. This is what I tell him. Sometimes the truth sets you free, I say, but sometimes it only liberates the contents of Pandora's Box. And all alone, hope is dead. Silence is not a lie and the truth can destroy everything. People talk about hard love, I tell him, sure, but people also talk about what the road to hell is paved with. Take that into consideration. And tears bleed down his face now. He gets up, runs out the confessional, leaving an olfactory shadow of whiskey in the wake of his sprint. I can hear gasps from the congregation from outside. His sobs grow as the volume fades, finally cut off by the closing door. And then, with a flip of the wrist and wush and a thuck, all is silent once again. For a moment. Then, "Father?" says a new, muffled voice. The next voice through the revolving door. And then a knock. And I think, Just go away, Daddy's contemplating. "Father? I've come to confess. Father?" Knock-knock. But Daddy's shaking. Skin crawling beneath his holy garb, his collar's like a noose now, choking him.
After being relieved from confession, I decide to take a walk to clear my head. Out the back door, which I find open and unlatched, I scold Emily for not tying up her dog. Always the dog's running around, chew-chew-chewing on boots, doors, something. This little girl, with her blond pigtails and sad blue eyes, with her hands cupped behind her back, she bows her head and says, "Sowry, fatha Will'um." Truth is, she feels for that poor, abandoned creature and doesn't want to tie it up in the backyard like a prisoner. As an orphan, she empathizes with the creature greatly, just as greatly as I empathize with her and the rest of fatherless humanity. Between clenched teeth I sigh, passing her by.
When I was young, I used to take walks in the closest I ever came to a hometown. I'd walk among the hills and through the forest and one day, when I was nine, I, too, came upon a cute little puppy abandoned by its mother. It had one blue eye, one brown. Hungry and ill, it whimpered, keeping a cautious distance from me. You could see it wrestling inside between terror and the desire to trust as I approached, as I attempted to draw it near. I was permitted to take the animal back to the orphanage, where I worked on nursing it back to health. I named him Sakti, after the forest in which I'd found him. In time, the dog became my best friend, my only friend, but then some idiot child left the back door open one day. This stupid little shit, he forgot to tie up the dog, and my friend was never seen again.
Out of that ugliness had come beauty, however. Through a sort of death came a sort of rebirth. Like a blubbering baby I'd cried over the loss of my beloved mutt, and Sister Anna-Rue had been there to comfort me. She walked with me about the hills, through the forest as the morning sun rose. My inner wounds healed as we tumbled through the grove, as she opened my eyes to wonders of life my young brain had never before been able to conceive.
Then it all came crashing that one early morn. It was a week between when I'd lost my friend and when the orphanage burnt down. There, in the warm center between horrors, in the eye of the hurricane I thought had finally passed, water lightly trickled down my hand as I lifted it to touch my face. On the floor beside the tub rested the brush. For a moment I just let myself soak and smile, but then there came a tapping on the door. At first a light rapping, it then grew frantic.
"Willy," said a familiar voice in an urgent whisper, "Willy," said the voice of Freddy, my brother, also nine, "Willy, its Sakti. He came back. Me an' the boys, we was on our way back from playin', an' I see him runnin' up towards the hill in the back." And then I heard the pitter-patter of his feet as he ran away. With his words my heart was lifted higher, higher still than it had only two hours before in the grove. Eyes welling with tears, I leaped out of the tub, slipping on the wet around the brush that lay on the tile, almost falling, and wrapped a nearby towel around my waist. Sprinting out the door, down the hallway, I threw open the back door, soared down the porch. I could feel the lush grass between my damp toes, the bright sun, feel the warm wind embrace me with invisible arms as I made my way. I could feel the ache pound, pound within me as my sprint slowed to a still, my eyes staring out at the barren hill before me. My dog, my best friend, he was nowhere to be seen.
A sea of giggles came from behind me, which I noticed just seconds before the towel was yanked off my body with a snap. Turning, I saw the back of one of the boys, towel waving behind him as he ran. Behind the open door was my brother, giggling, motioning for his friend to hurry, hurry, patting him on the back as he made his way inside. Sure to first throw a devilish grin at me -- yet pausing an extra second, smile temporarily fading as he looked below my waist, perplexed -- he closed the door. Before I was able to turn my body completely to run towards it, I heard it latch. Terror echoed through me, scattering my mind and blurring my senses. Why was Freddy doing this to me? It wasn't my fault that he had forgotten to tie up the dog, that the sisters had taken it out on him so harshly. I knew they babied me, that it wasn't fair, but I never caused the ruckus my brother and his band of little bastards did, either. They were always playing tricks on the sisters, tearing through town, stealing things, and I just kept to myself. As they were out in the woods behind the orphanage playing cowboys and Injuns, I was alone, up in my tree house to the side of the orphanage. As they pretended to spill each other's blood with sticks and toy guns, I'd smear paint on the canvas with brushes, trying to fill the hole left behind in the absence of my lost friend. The Magnum Opus of my heart and soul, it would be the first and last painting I'd ever make. The thick, leather-bound book with blank pages -- the book that Sister Anna-Rue, who had encouraged my painting, had given me for sketches -- it would in time be filled with secrets expressed in words, not in pictures.
Fists slamming on the door in a rapid drum-beat, screaming my brother's name, it elicited nothing but a cacophony of giggles from the other end. I stepped back in rage, in horror. Feeling the blood rush to my face, my nails digging into my palm, I hurried along the back of the church, crossing the side, coming to the front. Nearly forgetting how good they had me. Forgetting I was dripping wet and naked. Ignorant, for the moment, for what I wore on the lower half of my twelve-year-old skin.
When I made it to the front and found members of the congregation outside by the dozen, awaiting the wedding ceremony to be held there, I immediately froze. Locked between fight and flight like a scared animal, I died as those eyes bore down upon me, as a sea of started faces reacted to my naked form. Some giggled much like the boys behind the locked door had only moments earlier, others gasped, still others were unable to say a thing, mouths agape. Some looked away in disgust, in shame; others gawked bug-eyed, still others just inspected with an amused curiously until it dawned on them. Until they saw the marks. One pointed. A trembling, extended finger eclipsing a blood-red face. His head bald and blaring in the sun. And I looked down at what I knew to be there.
The soft of her auburn hair, the sweet smell, the way she eased my pain on the waves of her melodious moans, these they would never see, but below my chest evidence was scattered. Scratches stretched along my sides, ovular marks where her lips had graciously puckered around my young skin. Souvenirs from the time and bodies spent at the grove, these marks of the enlivening, beautifully blasphemous moments between Sister Anna-Rue and I, they were now held up for the world to see. That day they would sit me down, ask me questions I refused to answer, but they put the pieces together. "Someone has committed unspeakable evils upon this young boy and embarrassed the church," they said, angrily, "now, who has been alone with him?" All fingers would point to Sister Anna-Rue. On my skin, the bare truth. My nakedness was hers, my exposure was her exposure. My body a book on which the damaging truth was etched. It was her ruin. They couldn't yank her leash, she felt no guilt, and so they stoned her. And straight to hell, they all hoped.
My brother had done it all before. He had stolen and destroyed, used me as a target and a tool, and the little bastard was about to do it again. And I couldn't, couldn't let him.
My feet bring me to the swinging doors of a building in which I've never been. My head knows the reason, but it is not the part that has lead me here. I can feel my cold hands trembling. As soon as I step in, not a bottle clinks, not a soul breathes. Even smoke from cigars seem to just hang in the air, pausing in hesitation. Its not a slow, murmuring dive from blaring noise into quietude, either, but an abrupt, cut-at-the-throat kind of quiet. It is a deathly still. People who have seen me every week a decade now eye me with suspicion as if I am some harbinger of death.
Deep in my pocket, the revolver feels hot and bloated. The trembling of my hands escalate, but once in my pocket, after my fingers are able to worm around the surface of the gun, the convulsions subside.
I approach the bar. From behind it, the bartender, pouring whiskey into a glass held by some hunch-backed man whose face is covered in a bush of whiskers, nods politely. His eyes, expressionless, lock on mine. "Wet your whistle, father?" He asks this in a friendly manner as he puts down the bottle, and the old man for whom he'd just poured the drink turns to look at me with eyes wide as saucers. "God damn," he says involuntarily, and then, realizing immediately what he has just said and to whom, his dirty hand flies to his fuzzy mouth with a muffled slap. Embarrassed, he fumbles off the stool and runs a crooked path out the door. My eyes meet the bartender's as if in apology, and he returns with a look that speaks of amusement mixed with a strange sort of sympathy. It strikes me that he, too, is a sort of light attracting moths, a pile of shit attracting flies. He, too, is a sort of confessional with a pulse.
Scanning the bar, it doesn't take long for my eyes to fall upon him, the man sitting quietly in the corner, lifting a foaming mug ever-skyward. Patting the bar with cold-sweat palms, I slowly approach him. He puts the mug down, looks at me with glazed-over eyes and lets out a half-laugh that rumbles his body and threatens to knock him off his stool. "I left the South, came West," he says, moving his arms from the left to the right, and then holds them up in the air, shrugging his shoulders, laughing, "an' still I feel so damn Southern, ya know? I dunno whether to call ya brother or father."
I sit first, then study him for a second before asking why he's in this town, but he doesn't answer. Instead, he throws the mug back, finishing the quarter of brew in a single swig. He places the mug down gently, looking around me, trying to steady his line of sight. He finally puts his hand on my shoulder. "Jeebus, its-a been a long time, fa-brother," he says.
"So it has," I nod. "Look, let's get you home. Where have you been staying?"
The bartender breaks in, looking at me and pointing up. "Rented a room on the floor above, Father," he says.
I nod in thanks, put his arm over my shoulder and guide him away. The bartender watches for a moment before loosing interest. Up the creaking steps we go. When we get to his room, I find the door closed but unlocked, and I kick it open with a wush. Carrying him a ways into the darkness, I let him collapse, finally, on the bed. I walk out onto the deck, put my hands on the railing. "Freddy?" I say to him.
"Yeah?" He says, pushing himself up a little and resting on his elbows.
Between tightened lips and a locked jaw, I try to relax. "I need, need you to give it to me. I know you mean well, but this won't help me. It will destroy me. Destroy everyone."
As it has always been, he hardly seems to hear me. "Got some friends," he says, pushing himself up, managing to stand, though unbalanced, on his own two feet. "Told 'em about it and they seem interested. Help me show the world your talent. I'm a-goin' to see 'em tomorrah. Givin' `em yer masterpiece. So its good as done. I'm doin' what's best for ya, bro," he laughs, "I mean, daddy."
Nails digging into the railing, I tighten my eyes and shake my head. "I can't let you do this to me. Not again."
He walks up behind me, places his hand on my shoulder. "Whatcha talkin' `bout, fa-brother?"
I shake his hand off, grab him by the shirt, and place his face close to mine. "This isn't a joke." I'm growling now, snarling. "Do you have it here? Where the hell is it? This isn't a fucking game."
He just smiles. "'Course it is," he says. "You think ya need to score points, so yer hiding b'neath the wings a that-there church, but yer better'n that. I gotcher ticket t' recognition."
I pull the revolver out my pocket, hold it to his temple, use it to guide him to his knees. "You see this gun?" I growl. "Nine nights out of ten I go alone into my room, put a single bullet into this gun, spin the cylinder and point it at my head. Do you know why? I lost everything. And you took it from me. I'm finally getting a life again and you come and want to destroy it -- again. All you do is destroy everything I love."
"Yer over-reactin'," he laughs, "but if ya need, spin yer chamber. See if that-there bullet's got my name on it."
So I aim the barrel down, spin the cylinder, then dig it in his temple again, pulling the trigger. The sound of the hammer clicking against an empty chamber sends him into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Even as I pistol-whip him across the face, as I watch the teeth fly out his mouth and hear the tap-tap-tap as they skip across the floorboards like flat stones across water -- even then, he continues to laugh. With the gun turned to club turned to paintbrush, our bodies and the room become the canvas. Giggling continues to erupt out his blubbery lips in gurgles as I beat him bloody with the barrel. The squashing sound as I slam it into his flesh, the echoing pangs of the gun up my arm as it beats against bone, all are fed and bred by the background of his soundtrack of morbid glee.
Finally, I just let him fall to the floor. As a pool of rich, red essence forms a slowly-expanding liquid shadow around his head, I find that the shower of blood, sweat and tears hasn't cleansed me. It was all useless as a baptism.
"Where is it?" I ask the bloody, mangled mesh on the ground, "Where is it?"
With a trembling finger, a smile, with great effort lifting both, he points to the end of his bed. There, on the ground, rests a trunk. His hand falls limply, landing on the wooden floor with a thuck. I look back at him for a moment. Hands full, I leave the door open. I leave him lay there and I don't guide his eyes closed.
Finally home, I find the back door has been left open again. I don't care. With silent, soft footsteps I walk to my abode. Just outside my door, Emily's dog lays in the shadows, panting, but I don't yell. I carry the chest to my bed, put the revolver down beside it. I don't even shut the door behind me. After digging in my dresser for a knife, I sit down, pick the lock, hear it click. I open it. Inside, there is one, lone thing. Something square wrapped in newsprint. On it, two labels: a return address for Freddy's apartment and an address for an art studio in a small, Kentucky town. Closest thing him and I ever had to a hometown. My mind tugs me back to the orphanage. The night flames bellowed out the doors and windows, spitting entrails of smoke slithering into the evening sky. After loosing my dog, my only love, I lost everything I'd come to know as home. Even the tree house was swallowed up in the fire. I only walked away with an empty book.
Blade to the sides, I cut off the newsprint, peeling it away. As my fingers rub across the rough surface of the canvas inside like a hand of a blind man, my heart sinks. Its a painting of a dog, a mutt with one blue eye. Its the only painting I'd ever done, my Magnum Opus. The one I'd thought had been consumed by the fire.
With a stone face, I close the trunk with a thuck. At the doorway, I see Emily's dog. It smacks its wet lips, chew-chew-chewing on what I now see to be a familiar, leather-bound book. My black-and-white collar tightens, feels as though its about to snap my neck. My fingers worm around the revolver, dampened with my brother's blood.
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