The Orphan (26 page)

Tommy Berkley’s father’s suicide weapon of choice had been J&B Rare scotch, which claimed to be a blend of forty-two whiskies, roughly the number of years old Randall Berkley drank at least three glasses – and sometimes as much as a bottle and half – of the stuff per day. He ordered it by the case, delivered from a wholesaler in Denver, and then would transfer the bottles to a series of wooden crates once used for antique soda pop.

He kept some of these crates in the kitchen, others in the barn, a few in his bedroom closet, one under each bathroom sink, and half a dozen more in the horse stables. He wasn’t hiding them, except perhaps from himself, so that when he ran out of one supply, he could almost always count on stumbling into a reserve stash, if he was willing and able to search long enough.

Four days after the funeral, Tommy took an inventory of everything his father owned and noted it in a spiral notebook of the sort he had used in junior high, a three-subject job with manila dividers, college-ruled. He counted everything from socks to cans of oil in the barn to farming equipment to Mason jars of jam in the pantry his mother had canned years ago, and of course the J&B Rare. He searched every room, cupboard, closet, desk drawer, file cabinet, laundry basket and hidey-hole on the property, and while not every bottle was full or sealed, he found more than he had expected, which had been quite a lot.

A hundred and sixteen bottles of J&B Rare, all of them green with the famous yellow and red J&B label that had become as familiar to child Tommy as Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes.

Tommy himself had been an alcoholic for many years, and he guessed he still was, even after he met Charlotte and found strength in wife and church. But he didn’t crave the stuff like he used to, and went off on a bender only once every two or three years. Even then he stuck to beer, original Budweiser, twenty or thirty cans of it when the occasion called.

The day he rounded up the scotch, he had been grieving, heavy with the burden of taking over the farm, the good old days of shootin’ and fishin’ and talking about gals with his old man gone for good. He spent over two hours staring at the hundred and sixteen bottles all lined up in the barn, imagining the absolute rocket-fuel burn he could set off inside himself by wading into them non-stop. When the one sixteen were gone, he’d be on the other side of a lot of what he felt now. His lips dripped with want of the brown booze. His belly grumbled. The immediate damage would be offset by other benefits: he’d cut back on all the food and probably end up losing over a hundred pounds within the year. Might save his heart. His wife might want to sex him up again, the way she used to. He’d be closer to his old man one way or another, in spirit or beside him in the graveyard.

In the end he poured the sauce into the dirt, out behind the barn, hoping the stuff would kill off the weeds thickening up back there. He said a prayer for his pop every time another bottle gurgled dry, and then dropped the empties into one of three oil drums where he broke them up with a broomstick. A dozen crates of booze, thousands of dollars worth, enough to make Christmas presents to friends for years to come. He got rid of it all.

Except for one bottle.

One green glass beauty, its red seal unmolested by the sweaty hands of his father’s disease.

This last he kept not as a warning against temptation or a test of his willpower, the way a man who has kicked smoking will keep a single butt on his desk for the next twenty years. He kept it as a symbol of his pop’s presence, a sort of headstone in the house, or in lieu of ashes. It even looked like an urn, sitting up there on the mantle. Some mornings as Tommy passed it on the way to get his coffee he’d quip, ‘Morning, Pop,’ or ‘How the ladies treating you up there today, you old coot?’ and start his day with a smile.

For all that history, not one day had passed since Tommy found the old man – face-down in the third horse stall, blood leaking from his mouth, literally dead drunk – with the mantle of temptation hanging over the son. Tommy never craved a sip of that final bottle, and it had been six years since he’d let himself do a Bud blowout. He had kicked the juice for good.

Until tonight, the night that followed Darren Lynwood’s visit to his farm.

After midnight now, and Tommy couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t used to being alone in the house, no women about. Charlotte was visiting her mom and sister down in Colorado Springs till Sunday. Trisha, Dawn and Renee – the organic farmers who rented the smaller house – were especially quiet tonight. Sometimes one of them would stop by and see if he wanted dinner, invite him over for a bit of dessert. But only one of the two cars they shared was parked in the round, and only one light was on in their place, so he guessed they were out with friends. They stayed in Boulder quite a bit, or up in Nederland. With other lesbians or members of the gay community, he assumed but never asked.

Tommy licked his lips, thirsty again. The tap water tasted flat tonight, too many minerals in the well. He began to sweat, though he wasn’t warm.

It had been a hot day, but he was trying to hold off on using the air-conditioning until the real heat patch hit in July. The house should be baking by now, but he felt chilly, maybe coming down with a bug. A couple of hours ago he actually caught himself thinking about putting together a fire, and that was the first time his eyes had darted up to the mantle where the green bottle with its yellow and red label stood centerpiece, throwing off a touch of the come hither.

‘No thanks, Pop,’ he’d said, and went back to his dinner of leftover meatloaf pasted with horseradish and smashed between a baguette.

God bless it. He never should have agreed to let that suckhead onto his property. Lynwood. Was a jerk back then, even more so now. With his money and his bikes. Of course he was back in Boulder. All the rich bastards were.

There was no good reason to open up all that stuff about the Burkett family. Tommy had made his peace with it twenty years ago. As surely as he’d helped lower his old man’s casket into the dirt, Tommy had bedded his guilt for the role he had played in tormenting an already tormented kid and spying on the sister as if she were a carnival freak show. He was only twelve when all that stuff happened, and wasn’t the one who’d trashed the runt’s bike anyway – Lynwood had set it all in motion.

So, why was he still alert as a bat going on one in the morning? He was upstairs in the large bedroom his parents had shared until the drinking got out of hand and Doris made her husband move into the guest house. Tommy had splurged on a new mattress but it was the same bed frame and headboard, a family heirloom that creaked like a pioneer cart on the wagon trail every time Tommy rolled his three hundred pounds over or elbowed his pillow. Tonight that was a lot of creaking, because he couldn’t get comfortable, not in any position.

One drink would put an end to this bullcrap. Three fingers straight and down the slide you go, Tommy John Berkley. Sleep, and no bad dreams.
 

But why should he lose sleep over whatever happened to Adam Burkett thirty years ago? To any of them?

It wasn’t just Adam, that was why.

Something was wrong with Darren Lynwood too. Tommy hadn’t seen it at first, but he’d sensed it. Soon as Darren rolled up in his vintage Firebird, the ’79 with the two-tone black on yellow paint, Tommy knew something was off. It was in the way he walked, the way he carried himself, and the way he never took off his sunglasses except once to wipe his eyes near the end. Like he was hiding something.

The man didn’t look like anyone who’d built a successful business and sold it off for millions. To Tommy he looked like a strung-out midlife crisis on wheels, clinging to the glory days twenty years after the party had ended.

His speech had been off too. Not in the inebriated sense, but timing-wise. He spoke lucidly but his cadence was all over the place. Rambling like he was on speed as he filled Tommy in on what he’d been doing the past twenty years, like he couldn’t get through it fast enough. Then slow and awkward, distracted as he responded to Tommy’s recap of the Adam years. He had smiled at the wrong times, like when Tommy was telling of the night he spied on Adam’s sister, which wasn’t funny then or now. And it had not been a natural smile, Tommy thought. More like a politician’s.

The girl in the trailer, pushing womanhood despite her stunted size. Her pale skin streaked black all over. Breasts encircled in spirals, stars down her belly, chains of symbols woven around her waist like a belt. Black slashes along her ribs like tiger stripes. The thick growth of pubic hair filling out, blending into the perverted symbolism of the black-tentacled vines.
 

Oh, Tommy wished he’d never seen that business. Because you couldn’t wash that from your mind. It had been bad enough at age twelve, thrilling though frightening and wrong. To recall such things now made him feel like a pedophile. And damn it, he was a good man. He took care of his wife and lived a righteous life, or tried to best he knew how. And then the way her eyes had opened at the end, lost and searching. She’d looked like a baby raccoon who’d been drugged and then slapped awake in a strange forest, abandoned by its momma.

Wished he’d not followed Brad Cader to see it then, wished like hell he hadn’t let that asshole Lynwood pry it out again today. Because tellin’ the story, which he thought was so far in the past its potency had been watered down, like a glass of J&B Rare his daddy had lost and left sitting on ice all night, brought it all back in vivid detail. Some things you don’t think about for so long, you assume they’re harmless. Tommy had wandered into that little funhouse of his boyhood self like a man recalling a prank from high school, something that’d happened to someone else.

By the time he finished with it, his skin felt like it was being tunneled by a couple hundred red ants. His heart goin’ like it was countin’ down from a hundred, and when it hit zero it was gonna stop. Or explode.

He couldn’t get her out of his mind.

Sheila.
 

That was it. He finally remembered her name. Wished he didn’t. It seemed to confirm something dire about himself.

One thing he’d left out in the telling, something he probably could have admitted, because such things happen to kids whether they mean for them to or not. And even that creep Lynwood would have gotten the mechanics of it. But he hadn’t been able to say it aloud because he had been ashamed to remember it, was still ashamed, and now this wouldn’t leave him alone either.

Seeing her there, Adam’s sister naked as a Greek statue and vandalized by adult wickedness, Tommy had experienced the most fearsome erection of his young life. He wasn’t sure he’d had one like it since. The hell of it was, he knew he hadn’t been up there on the milk crate for more than twenty, thirty seconds, hardly enough time for his blood to start surging, let alone make him ache that way. But in the midst of his fear and the urge to run away, his little pecker had jumped up like a stepped-on rake. Five seconds later, ten at most – just about a blink before the girl dropped to the floor and started yowling – Tommy had spurted into his pants.

God sakes, that was unnatural. Like something delirious and toxic and way, way too adult had been shot into his bloodstream, triggering a physical reaction that had been at once an ecstasy and something like rape. Of her, and him. Seeing her in that trance had been a violation of both of them. The girl cuz of whatever her parents had done to her and cuz of Tommy spying. Himself for whatever black art had gotten inside him, wrenching the nut from him like a dentist pulling a tooth.

Running away he felt
assaulted
, like it was her fault.

Goddamned little rainbow barrette in his pocket. God
damned Brad Cader, Darren Lynwood, all of them, to Hell with all of them.
 

Tommy sat up in bed, disgusted with himself because – and this was no surprise – it was back. Well, not
it,
not the
one
. But another steamboat willy. Nearing up on two in the morning and the poison was in his loins, his brain. He got up to use the bathroom again, this time to throw some cold water on his face and down his shorts.

He was halfway across the second floor hall, on the staircase landing, when he heard the front screen door creak open and then click shut.

He froze near the top of the stairs, scalp itching, nutsack tightening. He listened, afraid to take another step. Charlotte wouldn’t have driven all the way back from Colorado Springs at this hour unless it was an emergency, in which case she would have called ahead (and he would have heard her car pulling in). Wouldn’t be the organics, either. For while they frequently let themselves into the main house, they never did so after dark, respecting his privacy as much as he did theirs.

Footsteps patted across the wooden floors below. Slowly. A few at a time, then a pause. A few more, another pause. Definitely footsteps, delicate ones, but not the footsteps of someone going out of their way not to be heard at all.

In the sixteen years since Tommy had moved back to the farm, he’d never once locked the doors.
We don’t live like that out here
, his pop had told him many times, when Tommy asked why his friends in town all locked their houses but their own family never did.
This is the country. Our neighbors are welcome anytime. And people who aren’t our neighbors, your criminal sort, they know to leave well enough alone around a farm unless they want to get their head blown off.

That’s when Tommy thought about going back to the bedroom for his shotgun. He might have gotten there too, if the sound of girlish laughter hadn’t reached up the stairs and found him first.

Beth heard voices.

Or was it one voice talking over itself, overlapping in streams? Either way, she couldn’t tell whether the voices were coming from inside her dream or if she was still awake. She did not recognize her surroundings. Wherever she was, it was dark, perhaps inside a house, a small room at the bottom of a narrow corridor. It might have been a stairway she found herself looking up.

The voice was young, a boy’s, and this alarmed her.

Murmuring in a monotone, like incantations.

Darren, she thought in sleepy panic, I have to check on Darren. Something’s wrong with him. I knew it all these past couple weeks, and after what Rachel told me, there’s no question. Where is he? Where is my husband?

She was lying on a floor, hard against her belly, made of wood. She turned her head sideways and peered up the corridor, eyes counting stairs going up, up, up. A big man was standing at the top, with a huge belly, looking down at her in either terror or rage. She didn’t recognize him but felt as though she should. He had one hand braced against the wall.

Wake up! You were supposed to stay awake, looking after him! You fell asleep, idiot, now wake up!
 

The big man backed away from the stairs, shaking his head, no, no, one hand out to stop whatever was coming for him. From Beth’s point of view, he looked frightened of her, warning her off.

Where is Darren?!?!?!?!
 

Beth bolted awake.

She was in bed, her own bed, at home. The room was dark. She could still hear the voice, the talking, murmuring, but the words remained just out of reach. She squinted, turning her head. The voice sounded like it was coming from the living room, at the end of the bridge.

…
he has no past no past no past my childhood it’s gone he took it away dead now I’m dead and I want my life back he has no past it’s a lie Darren has no childhood I want it back he took it away Darren has no past he took my childhood
…
 

Darren, it was Darren’s voice. He was the one talking, but in a little boy’s voice. And suddenly she knew this was the voice that had come texting through Raya’s phone, and the voice of laughter she had heard after. There hadn’t been any boy here in the house, only Darren, talking like a crazy person. A child. And maybe he had sent her the texts, or she had picked up something from his mind using the same conduit responsible for her hunches. In most ways, this was scarier than the idea of a boy visitor, even a ghost.

She couldn’t stand it anymore. He must be having a nightmare, another episode.

She turned to wake him up, frightened and angry, but when her hand reached out it landed on a cool spread of sheet.

Darren was gone.

She pushed herself off the bed to go find him. She turned toward the hall and nearly ran into the bathroom door. Wrong way. She was disoriented. Too dark in here. She reached back for the lamp on her nightstand, under the shade, fingers searching around the socket. She found the plastic dial switch and turned it once – click.

The light did not come on.

That’s right, you had to twist it two clicks to go on and two more to turn it off.

She started to turn the dial a second time and a small cold hand grabbed her by the wrist.