The Vanishing (3 page)

There were other bodies in the room as well, but he had no idea who they were or who they could be. Too many hands and feet littered the crimson carpet. The butchery had obviously been going on for some time, probably all day, and Victor stared in horror at the extent of the carnage. This was so far beyond anything he had seen in even the goriest slasher movie that his brain felt numb and heavy and slow, overloaded by the sight. The smell was overpowering, a terrible noxious stench unlike anything he had ever encountered before. The only reason he wasn’t throwing up all over his shoes was because the numbness had engulfed all of his senses.

But that wasn’t the worst thing.

No, the worst thing was in the far corner of the room.

His dad.

Victor stared at his father. The old man was naked, his bare chest streaked with smears of blood, handprints visible in the thick crimson patina that covered his hairy skin, his arms so drenched with gore that they appeared to be skinned. Machete in hand, grinning crazily, his dad bounced from foot to bloody foot, his arousal evident in the large erection that bobbed with each jounce.

Only . . .

Only something was wrong. Very wrong. Victor’s eyes were drawn to his father’s midsection where, beneath the red wetness, the skin of his stomach looked white and slimy and wormlike. On the sides of his abdomen grew thick, coarse hair, and beneath the overlarge penis, where testicles should have been, was a rounded bony protrusion, like a rhino’s horn with the point softened. He tried to remember whether or not he had ever seen his dad naked before. Surely he would have remembered something this unusual, something this extreme—unless it was new, unless it was the result of some bizarre disease or a plastic surgery effort that had gone horribly awry.

No. He knew even as he thought it that that was not the case. This was who his dad was. His father was hideously malformed and had no doubt been born this way. Victor glanced automatically at his mother’s limp, empty body. She’d known all along that her husband was like this.

How could she have brought a child into the world, knowing it might inherit its father’s genes?

Thank God he took after her.

His dad was still bouncing from foot to foot, but he was moving forward as well, approaching Victor with the machete extended and an excited gleam in his eye. ‘‘Hi, Vic,’’ he said in that singsongy voice. ‘‘Hi, Vic.’’

Whether or not his father had always been deformed, he had not been psychotic. This was something new, and Victor backed up, slowly reaching for his cell phone, not wanting to make any sudden moves. He wondered where the craziness had come from, whether it had been gradually building or had arrived full-blown. He didn’t recall any unusual behavior over the past few days. Glancing down for a moment at the keypad of the phone, he heard the wet slap of feet, saw a blur of red in his peripheral vision.

‘‘Hi, Vic.’’

His father was standing right in front of him, grinning, machete raised.

Victor tried to run.

And then his dad was upon him.

Tom Lowry didn’t want to leave his lair, but when the night passed and then the day and then another night and another day with no one coming to visit him, no new victims arriving, he decided to venture out of the room and out of the house.

The result was liberating.

He found a sparrow on the lawn, crushed it in his fingers, feeling the guts ooze between his knuckles. Then he ran through the overgrown bushes on the edge of the property, blade in hand, hopping the fence that led to the Akkads’ lot next door, snaking along the perimeter of their property and sneaking into the next yard down the hill. A guard dog came after him, and he cut off the animal’s head with one swipe, reveling in the blood as it gushed from the gaping wound. Before anyone could come out to investigate, he was gone, onto the next property, where he drank water from a birdbath and ate half a dozen mosquitoes. Branches slashed his buttocks, thorns scraped his erection, but he continued down the hill, house to house to house. In this way, he made it onto Sunset, slinking silently through the shadows, moving purposefully toward the lights of the strip.

And other people.

He was hacking up a girl in a Hamburger Hamlet parking lot when the police finally took him down.

Two

It had been nearly a decade since Brian Howells had been home, and what surprised him most as he headed up the Central Valley was that it had not grown the way Southern California had. If anything, the Valley seemed to have shrunk. There weren’t miles of pink- and peach-colored Spanish-style tract homes and condos; there were no new golf courses or open-air malls. There were only dirty oleanders and eucalyptus trees lining a deteriorating too-narrow highway, and periodic clusters of old restaurants, trailer courts and industrial agriculture buildings that had been in use the last time he’d passed through here but were now abandoned. It was as if the already sparse population had constricted even further as ranching families went bankrupt and younger generations moved to the cities in the South.

Brian didn’t care. There was something comforting about being in a place that was real, that wasn’t always in the process of reinventing itself and expanding. He felt curiously reassured by the dying, dusty farm towns, and he was glad that he’d decided to make this trip home.

He drove past a peeling billboard advertising a local Ford dealership. He’d been living in Orange County ever since graduating from college, and though his mom had come down a few times to visit him, and they’d all spent holidays at his sister, Jillian’s, house in San Diego, he had not been back to Bakersfield since winning the scholarship and leaving home the summer after high school. Part of it was logistics. Although he’d had two days off work each week, they’d rarely been consecutive, and even then he’d usually been on call. Not to mention the fact that he’d never trusted his crappy car enough to drive it out of Southern California. But now, after three years at the
Register
and two prestigious journalism awards, he’d been hired by the
Los Angeles Times.
There was a one-week gap between his last day at the
Register
and his first day at the
Times,
and he’d decided on the spur of the moment to rent a car, visit his mom and spend a few days with her. When he called his sister and told her, she’d offered to bring her family up as well, but he let her know politely that he wanted to do this alone. He needed to spend a little quality time with his mother.

Because the truth was, it hadn’t been merely practical considerations that had kept him away from Bakersfield. That rationalization was legit as far as it went, and it made him feel better to think those were the only reasons, but in actuality he was the one who’d always insisted that they hold their get-togethers at Jillian’s house, he was the one who’d invited his mom to come down and visit him whenever she tried to entice him back home, and he was the one who made his mother’s few brief stays so physically uncomfortable that she couldn’t wait to leave.

Was it his mom he’d been avoiding? His hometown? Or both? He wasn’t sure. But he was determined to find out and to confront the problem head-on.

Bakersfield, as usual, was encased in smog, the series of concrete overpasses that bridged the sunken highway blurred by a haze of white.
Bakersfield has two seasons,
his sister liked to joke,
smog and fog.
There was more than a little truth to that, and as he pulled up the off-ramp and turned right, his eyes began to water, and he cranked up the air-conditioning.

His mom still lived in the old house. What used to be the field on the corner was now a vacant lot, and old man Murphy’s chicken ranch across the street was gone, replaced with a cul-de-sac of unsold spec homes. Back in Southern California (or SoCal, as he was going to have to start calling it now that he was a
Times
staffer), his Bakersfield roots seemed cool. The town’s connection to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, both perennially hip among people who didn’t actually listen to country music, gave him cultural cache. But in truth, the town was a dumpy lower-middle class community with gang graffiti spray painted on the sides of stucco houses and weedy yards enclosed by cinderblock fences. Downtown was a jumble of indistinguishable businesses interspersed with grimy gas stations and fast-food joints. He remembered now why he’d been so anxious to leave.

Still, it was nice to see his mom again, and over lemonade in the living room he caught her up on the details of events that he’d only outlined over the phone. Friends of hers who’d known him as a child dropped by, obviously invited by his mother and just as obviously warned to make sure their visits seemed casual and completely spontaneous. He didn’t mind. It helped to have a buffer between him and his mom. He needed time to work up to the discussions he knew they had to have.

At night, after taking his mother out to dinner (she’d insisted on Denny’s because she liked their chicken-fried steak, even though he’d tried his damnedest to get her to go to Souplantation or someplace even moderately healthy), they drove home the back way, past the Baptist church she used to drag him to when he was young. Like everything else in town, the chapel looked shabby, as though it hadn’t been painted or fixed up in years, and Brian found that depressing. He’d never liked church— particularly
that
church, where his ever-changing teenage hairstyles had been the object of ridicule and scorn from the tight-assed pastor—but, still, the sorry state of the building left him feeling melancholy. He wondered if his mom continued to attend services there. He didn’t want to bring up the subject, because he knew it would lead to a lecture and an argument, but as they turned left beyond the edge of the church parking lot, his mom said, ‘‘Reverend Charles asked about you the other day.’’

‘‘Really?’’ he said noncommittally.

‘‘He knows you’re a writer and thought you might help us out with our letter-writing campaign. The school board refused to allow science teachers in the district to talk about creationism
or
intelligent design. We’re trying to get that changed.’’

‘‘Mom . . .’’

‘‘Don’t worry. I told him you wouldn’t be interested.’’

‘‘Okay, then.’’

‘‘But it
is
important.’’

‘‘Yeah, you’re right. They should be teaching religion at school and leave that controversial stuff like science for parents to teach their kids at home.’’

‘‘Don’t you start blasphemin’ with me.’’

He sighed. ‘‘I’m not, Mom.’’

‘‘I didn’t raise you to—’’

‘‘Let’s just drop it, okay? I’m sorry.’’

‘‘Well . . .’’ She mumbled to herself the rest of the way home, but he purposely didn’t listen because he didn’t want to take the bait. His mom had always been religious, but she’d never been nutty. He wasn’t sure that was still true. He remembered when he was a teenager and his mom had first voiced the then-shocking opinion that she didn’t believe in evolution. He’d asked why, if that were the case, people living closer to the equator were darker than people who lived in northern climes. Since, theoretically, everyone was descended from Adam—or, more correctly, Noah—didn’t that imply that they had adapted to their environments and
evolved
? She’d laughed and said simply that God worked in mysterious ways.

He wasn’t sure she would have the same reaction now. She seemed much more serious, much more set in her opinions these days. And disbelief in evolution was no longer just a fringe viewpoint. An antiintellectual, anti-science attitude now seemed to hold permanent sway over vast sections of the country.

The thought of that made him even more depressed.

He pulled into the dark driveway. He’d forgotten how black the night was away from metropolitan areas. ‘‘You should get a light with a motion detector out here, so it turns on when you come home.’’

‘‘I never go out at night.’’

They walked up to the front porch in silence. Brian had the feeling that she was mad at him, and he marveled at how quickly the shared joy they’d felt at seeing each other had faded. He tried to think of something to say that would bridge the gap, but nothing came to mind, and as his mother slammed her purse down on the breakfront next to the door, he walked silently into the family room and turned on the television.

After several minutes in the kitchen, she joined him.

They sat in separate chairs, watching the news.

When a commercial came on for a new Dodge van, his mother shifted in her seat and turned toward him. ‘‘I got a letter from your father,’’ she said.

Brian felt as though he’d been sucker punched in the gut. ‘‘What?’’

‘‘At least I think it’s from him.’’

‘‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t you say anything?’’ He stared at her in disbelief, then took a deep breath, forcing himself to remain calm. No one in the family had heard from his father in more than twenty years. It wasn’t one of those situations where a guy goes out for a carton of milk and never returns, but neither was it a typical separation, because, although his dad had informed his mom that he was leaving, he had not said where he was going. And once he had gone, it was as though he’d never existed. He’d never called or written or contacted the family in any way.

Until, apparently, now.

His mom sat there, unmoving, watching the television now that the news had come back on. A reporter was interviewing a health professional who was saying that America suffered from an obesity epidemic. Brian reached for the remote and turned off the TV. ‘‘Aren’t you even going to show it to me?’’

His mom sighed heavily. ‘‘I don’t know what good it’ll do. There’s no return address on it or anything. There’s no real information—’’

‘‘Jesus, Mom!’’

‘‘Okay, okay, I’ll get it.’’ She pushed herself out of the chair. ‘‘But no more swearing in my house. You understand?’’