Prodigal Blues Read online

  PRODIGAL BLUES

  Gary A. Braunbeck

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 Gary A. Braunbeck

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd & Kurt Criscione

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Image provided by: Deena Warner

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  I would like to thank Geoff Cooper, Alex Aminoff, and Lucy Snyder for their invaluable assistance, expertise, and support during the writing of this novel.

  Dedication:

  For Ed Gorman, one of the finest human beings and writers it has ever been my privilege to know; and also, with respect and admiration, for Stephen King, who may not have invented the road-trip horror story, but most of that particular dark highway was paved by him; thanks for letting me travel in your tire tracks.

  "…at some stage a machine which was previously assembled in an allover manner may find its connections divided into partial assemblies with a higher or lower degree of independence."

  —Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings

  "Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword shall pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadow of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?"

  —Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

  "When I face myself I'm surprised to see

  That the man I knew don't look nothing like me…"

  —John Nitzinger, "Motherlode"

  1. The Biggest Part of the Mess

  I was in a bar called The Blue Danube on the OSU campus that was filled with too many, too-loud, too-pretty trust-fund college snots, all of them pulling hernias as they sucked on their clove cigarettes and tried to impress each other with how terribly individual and iconoclastic they were; one prick in particular, his mesmerized harem of prickettes in tow, was holding court near the end of the bar where I was seated. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the words I SWEAR I DIDN'T KNOW SHE WAS 3! printed in big white letters across the chest. To emphasize the depth of this wit, a pair of baby booties dangled from the exclamation point. One of the harem whispered, "He's so controversial!" to the prickette beside her, then both went back to staring at him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed; viewed from the right angle, when the light hit their eyes, I could actually see the backs of their skulls.

  Until the guy noticed me, he'd been spouting opinions about everything from Skinner to Faulkner to Kierkergaard and Hayo Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Then he happened to glance over his shoulder, recognize me, and grin.

  "Hey, I've seen you around campus, haven't I?"

  "Probably."

  He stared at me for a moment, then tilted his head to the side the same way a dog will when it happens upon a virgin fire hydrant. "You're one of the maintenance dudes, right?"

  "That's right." Actually, I'm the supervisor of the entire maintenance department, but I didn't think he'd find that little tidbit of much interest.

  He looked at his harem, gave a quick wink, then turned back to me and said: "I got a great joke for you, the other guys on your crew are gonna love this:

  "A pederast is walking through the woods one night with a six-year-old. The kid looks around, then whispers: 'These woods sure are dark. I'm scared.'

  "The pederast looks at the kid and says: 'You're scared? I gotta walk out of here alone!'"

  The assault charges were thrown out after the judge (an ultra-Conservative—first time in my life I'd ever been glad of that) listened to the guy repeat the joke through what was left of his mouth, but I still have to pay the emergency room bill, plus all follow-up medical expenses (within reason) for the next six months.

  Money well-spent.

  When she came to post my bail that night, Tanya, my wife, wouldn't even look at me. It wasn't until we were driving back to the house that she gave any indication I even existed: her right hand flew out like a stone from a slingshot and hit between my nose and mouth.

  "That's for the embarrassment you caused me tonight, forget about the money—which, in case you haven't glanced at our bank balance recently, we can ill-afford."

  "Ouch?" I said, rubbing my face.

  "Look, Mark, I'm sorry I did that, okay? But... dammit, you haven't been yourself for a while now. You don't just pummel someone like that—I'd expect it from any of those goons you work with, but not you. This is twice you've hit someone since you got back. What's made you react this way? You're not a violent man."

  I muttered something under my breath—an old tactic I use whenever I don't want to talk about something—but she was having none of it.

  "Oh, you will not pull that with me, buster, understand? I'm your wife and I deserve better than to be treated like this. You haven't been the same since you came back from Kansas. You're not eating, you've been going to bars way too much—you've drank more in the last ten days than you have in all the ten years we've been married—your sense of humor's been in the toilet, you don't sleep worth a damn and when you do, you have nightmares…

  "I've been good about it so far, haven't I? I haven't pushed you about things and I haven't bugged you. You told me not to worry about the broken nose you walked in with; you told me never mind the cuts on your face and the bruises on your arms and wrists; you said forget about the blood on your shirt, you'd explain everything to me, you just didn't feel like talking about it then. I've respected that—I haven't liked it, not one damned bit, but I've respected your wishes. Well, guess what? It isn't then anymore! I just pulled your ass out of the slammer and Tanya's 'respect-his-wishes' gauge just hit 'E'! My patience has been stretched to its limit, I am all out of understanding, and I'm done being quiet about this. Something terrible happened to you during that trip; I want to know what and I want to know now."

  "I wouldn't know where to begin."

  She sighed. "Pretend you're cleaning one of the buildings, then: start with the biggest part of the mess and work down to the details."

  "That's a good analogy, I'm impressed."

  "I went to college and actually did something with my degree. That's how come I get to be a Property-Pricing Analyst and have fantastic insurance for your sorry ass. College people make impressive analogies. Now, are you going to ruin my dental work as well or can we talk like a civilized married couple?"

  "That part about the degree was kind of a cheap shot."

  "I figure I'm entitled tonight—stop trying to change the subject. And quit pouting. I found it cute when we were dating but right now it just annoys the shit out of me."

  Don't think from this that Tanya and I don't get along because we do. She knows me better than anyone ever has or ever will and still loves me. Go figure. I knew I'd been a pain in the ass lately so I had at least one good punch coming. This was the first time Tanya had ever done anything like that. She's the most level-headed, pragmatic person I know, and if she was mad enough to hit me, then it was more than just anger and irritation; she was hurting. This was a
woman who worked a forty-five, sometimes fifty-hour week at a tedious job where no one appreciated what she did, and for her week's efforts came home to find that her pearl-of-a-human-being hubby—who for the last ten days or so had worn a jackass suit that fit so well you'd swear it was tailor-made, who hadn't so much as kissed her in a week, and who, instead of parlaying his English degree into a teaching position, decided he'd rather mop up after students than instruct them because somewhere along the line whatever spirit he had for things packed its bags and took the long and winding road—this glittering prize she permitted to be her husband had gotten himself thrown in jail.

  I had hurt my wife's feelings, and in my eyes that's just as low as if I'd hit her or worse.

  I reached over and placed my hand on her leg, then gave it a little squeeze. "I'm sorry, hon."

  "Uh-huh...?"

  "I love you."

  "You'd better." Her voice still sounded hurt but she managed a little grin.

  We stopped for a red light. Still too ashamed of myself to meet her gaze, I glanced out at a telephone pole that was covered in fliers advertising everything from dating services to Goth bands to tattoo parlors and pizza delivery specials; most of these were ragged and torn and discolored, but one flier, deliberately placed on top of all the others so it faced the street, was new, and had been stapled in about a dozen places to make sure that the wind wouldn't tear any of it away.

  I squeezed her leg a little harder.

  She turned toward me. "What?"

  "Look at that."

  She leaned over and stared out the window. "What? What am I supposed to be looking at?"

  I pointed toward the flier. "The biggest part of the mess."

  2. From the House of Heorot

  You see their pictures everywhere these days; they're so ubiquitous that, after a while, you force yourself to stop paying attention to them because they've become a perpetually sad and sick-making part of the background; this kid's face on a rectangular card lost amidst the rest of the junk mail—Have You Seen Me?—or that child's badly-photocopied picture on a homemade poster hanging inside the Post Office; maybe another kid's face stares out at you from a piece of paper thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board by the entrance and exit of your local grocery store; sometimes, if the parents and friends have exhausted all hope, you'll even see these fliers stapled to telephone poles or taped onto windows of abandoned and condemned buildings because, well, you never know, do you, who might have seen them in what god-awful parts of this city or the next?; if you're one of those who use the Internet like most people use oxygen, then you know there are websites dedicated to displaying these photographs along with their age-progressed counterparts (This is what Aaron may look like now, at age 10); whatever the source of your encounter, odds are you give the photo an at-best perfunctory glance (like I used to), then toss aside the card or look away from the poster or surf on to the next and less depressing website. It doesn't make you a bad or unfeeling person; it only reaffirms your helplessness as an individual to do anything about it: after all, how many kids do you see on a daily basis? How many children do you pass at the mall, on the street, in the lobbies of movie theaters? Every so often one of these kids might make a brief impression—a prolonged moment of eye contact, waving hello, giggling at a face you make because you want to see if you can get a laugh out of them—but most, if not all of them are in the company of an adult; so how are you supposed to tell if this adult is a parent, an aunt or uncle, an older sibling, or some monster who stole them away however many days, weeks, months, or years ago? And in all honesty, how long does the image of that particular kid's face stay fixed in your memory?

  Have You Seen Me?

  Maybe, possibly, could be; but I'm damned if I can remember.

  So you look away—if you look at all—and try not to think about it. If you have children of your own, maybe you hug them a little tighter than usual when they go to bed that night, look in on them a couple of extra times while they're sleeping, and watch them go all the way through the school's doors when you drop them off the next morning on your way to work. You try not imagine how you'd feel if it was their face on the cards, the fliers, the websites. These are your kids we're talking about here, after all, not one of the missing, and while you might feel bad for the families of those card-, flier-, and website-children, you have to look out for your own as best you can, and you don't need these constant reminders in the sad, sick-making background that ultimately, like it or not, you have no control over what happens; that anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, regardless of how careful and watchful you are, a hand could reach out of the crowd, take hold of your kid's arm, give it a tug... and you're out stapling homemade fliers to telephone poles before dinner. So you look but you don't see because you can't think about it.

  This does not mean you are a bad or unfeeling person. It means you love them. It means you are concerned.

  It means you are afraid.

  And you damned well ought to be.

  I probably think about this far too much than is really healthy, but I can't help it. Tanya says I need to "see someone" about what happened, and she's right... but I'm not sure I'd know where to begin. I distract too easily these days; if we pass a car on the road and I see a crying child with their face peering out at me from the window, my first thought is always: They're scared to death and need help; if I see a kid in a store struggling to pull away from the adult who's got hold of them, I immediately wonder if they've only moments ago been snatched away from their mom or dad or other family member; if I hear a child yell or scream in the evening when our street is filled with children at play, it never occurs to me that the sound might just be one of glee or excitement or good-natured Let's-Scare-So-and-So because they're such a wuss—no; in my ears it is the sound of a terrified, helpless child being yanked into a stranger's car and shrieking for someone they love to come save them, please, please, Mommy, Daddy, somebody, anybody please help me.

  I react this way because I am afraid, and when I tell this to Tanya she touches my cheek, smiles while trying to understand, and says: "How could you not be, after what happened?" Despite the strain it has put on our marriage (we were planning to have a child soon but now, I just don't know) she remains for me a rock, and I love her all the more for it, yet as soon as she says, "How could you not be...?" I snap back to that first phone call and it starts all over again....

  His name was Thomas Davies and he was eleven years old.

  He had been eight when Grendel stole him away.

  During those three years, Thomas, one of the youngest children from the House of Heorot in the burg of the Scyldings, underwent one of the worst transformations afflicted upon any of them: burned skin hung about his neck in brownish wattles; one yellowed eye, looking like a rotten boiled egg, was almost completely hidden underneath the drooping scar tissue of his forehead; his mouth twisted downward on both sides with pockets of dead, greasy-looking flesh at the corners; and his cheeks resembled the globs of congealed wax that form at the base of a candle. His only normal-looking facial feature was his left eye: it was a startling bright blue, an azure gemstone. Buried as it was in that ruined face, its vibrancy seemed a cruel joke.

  He looked nothing like the smiling, pink-cheeked boy from his second grade school picture, the one his parents circulated after his disappearance.

  Thomas rarely spoke; mostly he sang to himself, a lullaby his mother used to sing when he was very young:

  "Sleep my child and peace attend thee,

  All through the night.

  Guardian angels God will send thee,

  All through the night.

  Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,

  Hill and dale in slumber sleeping,

  I my loved ones' watch am keeping,

  All through the night..."

  Except Thomas never once sang it correctly (I knew this because my mother used to sing the same lullaby to me when I was a kid). He did fine until the "Hill and dale
" line: every time he got to it, he sang, "Bill and Dale look dum-ber sleeping..." I asked him why he sang it that way when he knew the actual words.

  "It was a joke. Mom always laughed when we sang it together because I messed up the words on purpose."

  When it came time to deliver him I was the one who remembered that, and as reward for my good memory found myself standing behind an oak tree on the opposite side of the street on which Thomas's parents lived. It was three in the morning and there was a chunk of panic in my throat, a cell phone in my hand, and the glowing red point of a laser-sight scope centered on my chest; at the other end of the vein-thin infrared beam, hidden somewhere among the foliage garnishing this middle-class Midwestern neighborhood, a young man holding a .45-caliber Heckler and Koch USP Tactical pistol with a silencer attachment was watching my every move, steady and focused.

  I stared at the phone in my hand as if it were some small, dead thing I'd picked up from the middle of the road. In a minute or so I was to punch in a number, and hopefully someone on the other end would answer. If I said anything other than what I'd been told to say, if I deviated even slightly from the context, if I so much as hinted that I was being forced to do this, the young man holding the pistol would squeeze the trigger and my torso would open up like some grisly flower.

  I stood in silence, well out of reach from the streetlights' gleam, watching as a young woman named Rebecca came around the far corner pushing Thomas in his wheelchair. Even from where I stood—some twenty yards away—I could see the seepage below Thomas's knees where his legs had been removed ten days ago. Thomas's arms were shaking and he kept reaching up to rub his eye. Rebecca pushed him past several darkened homes, then turned up the walk to an old but impeccably-maintained Victorian. She stopped, bent down, set the brakes on the wheelchair, and then came around to face him, setting two large brown grocery sacks in his lap.