Bad Man

  “Ben—”

  “I catch him lookin at me sometimes,” Ben continued. “He don’t see that I see. Standin at the end of the aisle, just starin at me. I can see him out of the corner of my eye.”

  “Do you have any sense that Bill Palmer knows who you are?”

  “Nosir. Never said nothin to me about it.”

  “Your parents know? About you workin there?”

  “They do. Listen, I felt funny about the place ever since I started there. And then this morning…” He reached for the bag.

  “Funny like how you felt about Bob Prewitt?”

  Ben stared at Duchaine but did not speak.

  “Son, I wanna ask you to bear with me here, okay?” Duchaine sighed, then leaned forward in his chair. “Now, about a month or so ago I get a call from someone who tells me that some big fella showed up at his door, says he wants to talk to him about a missing person. That he keeps him on his porch for about thirty minutes, talkin about his lost brother, talkin about the town, talkin about how he knows they’re new to the area, talkin about all kindsa things, really. And all the while he’s glancing past him into the house where his stuff is still sitting in boxes. Along with his pregnant wife, who’s standing in the hallway listening, scared to death that this big guy might decide to just walk right on in.

  “That’s not the only call like that I’ve gotten. Now, that’s fine. I’ll keep on takin them calls, but I think you might be heading down a path here,” Duchaine continued. “Why in God’s name you would work at…Anybody in the world who’d been through what you been through would have a funny feelin about that place. We had Bill Palmer down here, okay? More than once. He’s got all the grace of a pigeon, but…listen, how things seem to you and the way they really are can be very different things. And that store ain’t doin you no favors when it comes to seein things straight.”

  “Ain’t nothin doin me no favors in any damn thing,” Ben said. “And it wasn’t no thirty minutes.”

  “Son, I just think that you need to slow down and not work yourself up too much. It’s not—”

  “Not work myself up…” Ben muttered. “Maybe I could get myself a big desk, hmm? And I could just sit at it, just wait for everything to work itself out. Why don’t you just finally say it? Just say that you’re done.” Ben struggled to get his voice back under his control. “You came into our house, took a bunch of his clothes and pictures and toys. And then you just gave up.

  “And now, first time you had to see me in years, and all you wanna talk about is how long I keep people on their porches? You ever think about Eric? He ever even cross your mind when I’m not talkin to you about him?”

  “He does,” Duchaine said, squaring some papers on his desk and scooting them to the side. “Bob Prewitt ever cross yours? You sounded just like you’re soundin now, you know that? When you told me about him peeling out of that parking lot. Refresh my memory, Ben. How’d that turn out?”

  “That’s not on me,” Ben snapped, punching the chair’s armrest. “Not the whole thing. I got it wrong, but—”

  “Got it wrong?” Duchaine’s voice pitched. “You lied, Ben. Right to my face. That’s what you did.” Duchaine shook his head and said almost whimsically, “All that wasted time.”

  Ben stood, squeezing the plastic bag in his fist. “You don’t punish my brother for that. You don’t do it. And you don’t get to blame me for everything. Not when you lied to me too. You looked me right in the face,” Ben grunted through a tight jaw, “and said that you’d find him. That no matter what you’d keep lookin. That’s what you said.

  “But you ain’t lookin anymore. Not none of you are.” Ben turned toward the deputy at the front, who was looking back toward the commotion now. “Would he even know who I was talking about? Hey!” Ben shouted to the deputy. “My little brother’s missing.” Ben’s voice broke as he fished the photograph out of his back pocket and held it up. “His name’s Eric. He’d be almost eight years old now. Have you seen him? Have you ever even fucking heard of him?”

  The three men were quiet for a little while. Ben stuffed the photo back in his pocket. Duchaine wasn’t looking at him anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Ben’s steps were slow and painful as he walked home. Although the sun was at his back, he still held his hand in what looked like a sloppy salute to shield his eyes from the light skipping off the dewy asphalt. The town was awake now, and each time a car shuddered by, Ben had to turn away from the dirty cloud churned up by its tires. He held the bag on his right side to guard it further.

  Every few minutes, he found himself glancing inside the plastic sack again, but his thoughts were on Duchaine, not Eric. Ben had gone there to give the police the stuffed animal, to give them what might be the first piece of new evidence anyone had seen in years. Even if it was only evidence that the toy had been in the store since Ben had lost it, Ben was prepared to hand it over, and James Duchaine had managed to talk Ben out of it. Without ever seeing the rhino, he’d managed to convince Ben that Eric’s favorite thing would be stuffed into the same box that held his favorite shoes and God knew what else—a whole collection of things the police had taken and kept, saying they needed them for the scent dogs that were coming from some other department or county or state. Scent dogs that they never got.

  Ben wouldn’t be surprised if Eric’s whole file could fit on an index card. Apparently, Ben’s convictions were a currency, and he’d spent everything he had on Bobby Prewitt.

  “Fuck!” Ben screamed as loudly as he could.

  When he approached the entrance to his neighborhood, Ben stopped and stood on the side of the road for a few minutes. Maybe more than a few. He didn’t need to look at his watch to know that his father would be home by now, but he still glanced. Despite everything, Ben knew that his dad was right—his working at the store was bad for Deidra. Ben could admit that. He’d known it since before he put in his application. But what his father seemed to either overlook or ignore was the fact that nothing much at all seemed to be very good for Deidra. If that was just the way it was, then there was really no arguing against it, but there wasn’t a whole lot Ben could do with that information.

  But maybe he’d already done what he needed to do.

  His front door moaned when he opened it. The television was on, as was the kitchen light, but there was no sign of Deidra. Ben didn’t have to wonder where she was, though.

  Her voice drifted through Eric’s door, a soft song for a summer morning. Ben listened for a while. Even as he shut himself into his own room, he could still hear her through the thin wall. Melancholic. Alone.

  As quietly as he could manage, Ben slid the stuffed rhinoceros out of the plastic bag. Its large, shiny eyes skewed and bent the world like black fun-house mirrors. After he’d had it long enough to stain and fray, Eric had asked Ben if his stuffed animal was real. Obviously it was real, just not alive, but neither of those things seemed to be what Eric was getting at. It was an odd kind of question, but one that Ben could tell made perfect sense to his baby brother, and that had been good enough. After a moment, Ben had grabbed a pair of scissors, and Eric watched as the tag was carefully snipped from the back of the rhinoceros’s leg. “Now he is,” Ben had said.

  Ben could still feel the old ragged strings from the amputated tag. Eric had been too young to know what kind of beast the toy was. Stampie never crashed or rammed anything; he was too much of a friend to be an animal. Ben might have made him real, but Deidra had made him Eric’s. And as much as Ben wanted to—as much as he thought he probably should—Ben couldn’t bring himself to ignore that fact.

  The bed squeaked as Ben stood and walked to his door with the stuffed animal. In the hall, he couldn’t hear Deidra’s singing anymore, but he knew that she was still in Eric’s room. He would explain where he found it. There was no real way to know how Deidra might react, but Ben hoped tha
t she’d smile. At him. And, most important, because of him.

  Deidra didn’t say anything when Ben knocked or when he opened the door. Even when she saw Stampie, she didn’t speak. Which wasn’t to say that she was quiet. It was just that the noises Deidra was making weren’t quite words. And whatever was twitching onto her face wasn’t a smile.

  11

  A misty yellow glow replaced the usual white sterility of the store. Ben looked at the face of a man he felt he knew but didn’t recognize at all.

  “He’d be older now,” Ben said as he held out the photograph. He wasn’t sure if he’d said anything before that, but it felt like he had. It felt like he might have said a great deal indeed.

  “Are you sure?” asked the stranger, who crumpled the piece of paper and let it fall to the ground.

  “I think so,” Ben muttered, looking at the jagged paper ball in the spindly grass. Ben wanted to crouch down and grab the photograph, but he didn’t. A light breeze tousled his hair.

  “Ask him. He might know.” The stranger pointed to a man leaning against a register, his eyes aimed so directly at the ceiling above him that his mouth hung open slightly.

  “Have you seen this boy?” Ben asked, again holding out the photograph.

  “Oh, sure,” the man replied without lowering his gaze. “I’ve seen him lotsa times. Lots ’n lots ’n lots. Hey, waddya think’s in there, anyway?” He gestured above him, but Ben did not look.

  “When did you see him?”

  “How long’s it been there, I wonder. Seems like maybe a long time. A long, long time. I keep on waiting for it to move. You think it will? I reckon it will.”

  “When did you see him?” Ben repeated.

  “You were just talkin to him.”

  Ben turned and saw that the store was empty. Of course, he couldn’t see the whole store, behind the shelves and around the corners, but he knew, somehow he knew. He turned back to face the cashier, who had lowered his head. His lips moved as if he were speaking, but there was nothing to hear. Ben stared into the hollow black socket and felt the cool air that seemed to seep out of the fleshy cave. The lips kept bending and pursing in silent conversation, and finally there was a voice, but it wasn’t coming from the man’s mouth.

  “You didn’t see him, didja?”

  Ben looked up and followed the ghost of the man’s gaze into the mossy, overgrown forest floor that sat where the pipes and fluorescent lights should have been. Among the angled greens and straight browns stood a taut mass of curved white. It seemed to grow closer, and all at once Ben could feel brittle leaves under his feet. Pearlescent ribbons of frayed cloth stretched tightly over what Ben knew was a body, but still he touched it with the fearful curiosity of a child discovering sea-foam for the first time.

  As soon as his fingertips grazed the fabric, it seemed to disappear. He could hardly see the sheet now. Something was wrong with his vision. Something had happened to his eyes, his sight. It was slipping away. No. No, his sight was fine; it was the world that had blackened. The darkness seemed to have come all at once, as if someone had shut off the sun like a gas lamp. I don’t like this part. He couldn’t move his legs. Ben shivered in the cold forest. Leaves shook in the cool wind. Something happens here. He wanted to leave. It was time to leave. But there he stood. Something happens. What is it? And as he lingered, he could feel something in the darkness noticing him.

  There was no noise at all now. No breeze. No birds or bugs. Maybe there had never been any to begin with. Maybe none of this was real. Ben’s legs wouldn’t work, wouldn’t move at all. He had the thought to clap his hands together, to clap noise back into the world, but his arms had quit too. In fact, Ben couldn’t feel his arms at all. But he could feel his hands. And as small fingers wrapped around one of his own, Ben realized that this was as real as anything that had ever happened.

  “Can I come home?”

  Startled, Ben’s eyes darted to the voice. Eric was so small, smaller than Ben expected. He was older, but he didn’t look it. There was something wrong with his face, like someone had made a skin mask from an old memory. Then it moved. I know what happens. Not like it was supposed to, though. Not his jaw or brow. It was the whole face. Cheekbones, skull. The boy’s features shifted slowly as if to age before Ben’s eyes, and then they clicked back into place. Ben could hear them reset. I know what happens now.

  “Can I come home?” The fingers tugged.

  Ben felt pressure inside his body; he wanted to kneel, to scoop the boy up, to hug him. But there he stood. Yes! Oh, God. Yes, of course! his mind roared. “No,” his mouth said.

  “Please? Please, can I come with you?” Eric’s bulging eyes glistened in the moonlight. “I’m sorry.”

  Ben struggled against his own mouth, screaming at it to obey. Don’t say it. Don’t say it to him. “You gotta stay here, bud.”

  The boy pouted. “But I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna stay.”

  There was a loud pop, and Ben felt a tremor in his grip. Eric’s wrist had broken, now bent and curved like a goose’s neck. His hand trembled in Ben’s, and Ben felt himself pull away from Eric’s grasp. Something twisted in Ben’s stomach at the pain on his brother’s face. Pain that had nothing to do with the broken bone.

  “Will you stay here with me?”

  I’ll never leave you, Ben’s heart sobbed. Tell him. Tell him that I’ll stay with him forever. Even if that means neither of us can never ever leave, I’ll stay. Please hear me. Please, I need you to hear me. Tell him, you piece of shit!

  “I can’t,” Ben’s lips said.

  Eric sat on the rags. They were silver now. That was new. “Will you sing me asleep?” He lay down.

  “I don’t know the songs.”

  “Please,” Eric blubbered.

  “Little boy blue…” Ben’s voice cracked. “…come blow your horn…”

  Eric’s shoulder dislocated and jerked toward his face. He smiled sweetly and closed his eyes.

  “…The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in…”

  Ben could hear more bones cracking and grinding as Eric wrapped his arms around himself with new joints. His skin grew taut, rising in peaks where bends weren’t supposed to be.

  “…the corn. Where is the boy who looks after the sheep? He’s…”

  The boy’s skin seemed to be getting thinner, like peeling away layers of tissue paper. Finally, there were no layers left, and Ben could see withered muscle and old bone as his brother settled. Ben soon ran out of words, so he hummed the melody until Eric seemed to sleep. As he stroked his brother’s hair, he realized somewhere in the back of his heart that the boy looked too asleep to just be sleeping.

  “Good night, bud,” Ben said with a hitched breath; he gritted his teeth to shut in a sob. Don’t leave. Don’t leave him there. Not like this! Ben turned to go. There was even less light in this direction, but Ben could still see, not that there was anything to look at. Behind him he heard shifting leaves under shuffling feet. No. I don’t want to see.

  Ben pivoted on the cold ground and saw Eric standing now, his body crooked and disjointed. Each step was an unnatural hobble that Ben could practically feel in his own bones. But what Ben felt the most was disgust at just how profoundly afraid he was that Eric might catch him.

  “Do you see me?” the boy whined, his face a puzzle of bad bones and sagging skin. “Are you lookin?” The thing limped faster now, its eyes angry, every movement a struggle. Like an insect, it shuddered toward him, chattering, losing its balance, falling, shambling. “I’m here, brother. Don’t go. It’s me. It’s me. Itsmeitsmeitsmeitsme.” Ben tried to step backward, but he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t work.

  Suddenly, Ben was on his back, the cold ground driving its chill into his spine. There was a pressure on his chest. Ben felt the scrambling of limbs. A small voice squeaked against the struggle. Eric’s eyes were jaundiced,
his teeth cracked and eroded.

  “IT’S ME.”

  Ben’s heart hammered in his ears. He sat up in bed and he struggled to catch his breath, as if the nightmare had been on another world with a different atmosphere. Leaning over the edge of his bed, Ben snatched the waist of his jeans and fished Eric’s picture out of his back pocket. Moving it until it caught some stray light, Ben stared at his brother’s face.

  Still fogged with sleep, Ben tried to orient himself. Needles danced against his palm when he squeezed his hand into a loose fist. Numb and clumsy, Ben tried to shake the life back into his extremity, his movements no freer here in what appeared to be the waking world. He looked at the ceiling for a long while and at last decided that he was awake and resolved to act as such.

  Sitting up in the gloom, Ben looked at his clock and saw that it was just past eight in the evening. Cautiously, he dragged his eyes across the darkness of his room, chasing shadows out of his peripheral vision, worrying that one might linger, that one might move and grin and speak. His legs wobbled under him as he stood. A dull throb pulsed in his left thigh; Ben gritted his teeth and pushed his palm into the muscle.

  His room was in shambles. Ben had to step over and around his scattered belongings. His cheek was still sore. There was a moment when Ben thought maybe that had all been a dream too. He hadn’t even moved when Deidra screamed and struck him. Even when she started using her fists, he hadn’t moved. He’d just watched—watched her curled lips, her swinging arms. Watched her eyes glow with the same mad fire that had torn through his closet and dresser and bookshelves looking for other hidden things. As if she might find a whole cache of Eric’s belongings that Ben had stolen away. Stupid as it was, Ben had actually wanted to help her look, help her rummage through everything he owned in search of imaginary treasures. But he’d just watched her until his father had come home.

  Ben picked up and sniffed his shirts until he found one that was clean. He turned away from his mirror to put it on, and as the box cutter rattled home into its holster, the silence of the rest of the world grew conspicuous. Ben listened hard for the expected hum of the television, the voices of his parents. But there was nothing more than the whispering of his ceiling fan.