A Guardian of Innocents (16 page)

And now it was working; at least most of the way. The emotional dam I’d built up for myself was now cracking and springing leaks I couldn’t patch up fast enough.

Desiree’s mild worry turned into genuine concern. “Hey sweetie, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said, my voice cracking. “Just gonna miss you. That’s all.”

I was barely holding on, slipping off the edge of a cliff, futilely digging my fingernails into the rocks trying to find some purchase. My chin was quivering sporadically now, as the tears threatened to spill.

“Ahh, sweetie, I’m gonna miss you too,” she said as she leaned over and hugged me. The right side of her head touched the right side of mine. And... oh, God. . . Something. Something was transmitted.

She had kept her word. She had pulled nothing from me. It was my own fault. The floodgates just couldn’t take the pressure anymore and they had buckled long enough that it didn’t matter if they stood now till the end of days. The game was over.

I didn’t hear what went on in her mind as this knowledge was passed to her. I was too busy regrouping my defenses. What I did feel was her entire body stiffen against mine. Her hands reflexed by curling into claws, one of which had a hold of a good-sized chunk of the back of my shirt.

I was terrified. Strangely more so than I’d been on the night I killed Jack. I still cannot comprehend (even as I’m writing this years later) why the hell I was so damn scared of telling Desiree that I love her, of letting her know. I wasn’t ashamed of my feelings for her. I know that.

She pulled me away and glared at me with large eyes that appeared to no longer trust me.

“What?” she whispered, as though out of breath.

A uniformed airline employee announced from Gate 31’s intercom that Flight 98 to New York was now boarding.

I’m sorry,
I said telepathically. If I had spoken those words out loud, it would have sounded like a frog’s croak.

“Sorry?” The look on her face was incredulous. She reverted from verbal language to telepathy,
You hide something like this from me for years and all you can say is you’re sorry?

Hey, I just found out myself about two weeks ago. Do you think I could have hidden something like this from you for two freaking years?

She sighed, “And you can’t handle the fact that I’m leaving. Is that it?”

“There’s really not much I
can
handle right now,” I said out loud, “Including this. I’m sorry but I really have to get out of here now. And you’ve got a flight to catch.”

What I felt coming off Desiree sickened me. It was pity.

“I’ll call you when I get to the hotel, alright?”

I nodded my head.

“Will you answer the phone when I call?”

“Of course,” I whispered, my voice raspy.

“Okay,” she said as she stood up, leaned down and then gently kissed me on the forehead, “Take care of yourself.”

My eyes were fixed on the floor. I couldn’t bear to look up until I knew her back was turned to me as she presented her ticket to the flight attendant and walked down the aluminum hallway leading to the plane.

I stood up, ready to leave. A true romantic would have wanted to watch her flight take off. I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there, go home and lock myself in my room for a few decades.

Chapter 10

It’s amazing how your perceptions are altered once you begin suffering from a deep manic depression. The colors of the world fade into a lackluster mediocrity. You can still tell blue from red and green from yellow, but it’s as if everything your gaze falls upon has been placed under an ashen gray shadow.

No matter what good fortune is bestowed upon you, you’ll find no joy in it. Your attitude is we are all going to die and burn in hell; we’re just drifting through this earthly purgatory till we get there.

So when I received some lottery scratch-off tickets in the mail from an aunt on my birthday, my disinterest led me to just drop them in the top drawer of my desk and forget about them. Most guys would have immediately taken a quarter and started shaving the thin gray film off of each one.

But I just didn’t give a fuck.

One day, a few weeks later, that aunt calls and talks to Doris for an hour, then decides she wants to say hi to me for about ten seconds (this is typical of most my relatives.)

“So did you win anything with those scratch-offs I sent you?”

“Uh, what? Oh. Oh! Nah, I didn’t win anything. But thanks for sending them. That was nice.”

From more out of guilt than curiosity, I sat at my desk after the phone call and scratched off the first of the three tickets with a pocketknife. It told me I’d won three dollars and I knew right then it was going to be the only winner.

But then the second one said I could add ten dollars to that, which would put my winnings at thirteen bucks. Two out of three. Holy shit.

As I wondered what the odds were on that, I also began to secretly hope I might be able to pull off a hat trick and maybe win a buck off the third one. I slid the pocketknife back and forth, picking up the pace a bit, but my hopes were dashed as the numbers were slowly revealed. It was one of those ‘match the numbers’ games; whatever number you get a pair of is the amount of money you win.

What I had so far out of six numbers was:

5,000               20                    1

100               5

I knew I coulnd’t even hope the last number on the bottom right corner would be a 5,000. I was viewing the world through those ashen gray sunglasses after all. I figured if it was anything, it just had to be another 1.

But as I removed the metallic film and blew away the little slivers it left behind, I saw a 5.

Woohoo. My winnings totaled eighteen bucks. But the 5 looked out of place; it wasn’t evenly spaced with the rest of the numbers... And there was still some gray to the right of that little 5.

*          *          *

Winning $5,000 hadn’t perked me up much (although I have to admit, it did perk me a little) and all I did was deposit it into my savings account at the bank immediately after my visit to the Texas Lottery’s Fort Worth branch office.

Dez and I still talked on the phone, but long distance was expensive and Doris bitched about it after the first month’s bill came in, even after I offered to pay the
full
phone bill, long distance and everything else.

I was stumped as to what to do with the money. I thought about using some of it to visit Dez, but decided against it when I realized I would just come back more depressed and melancholic than ever.

I thought about getting my own apartment, but with a seven dollar an hour job, I knew the $5K wouldn’t last long, especially since the $5K had actually only come to just a little over $3,200 after the teller at the Lottery office had deducted the taxes from my winnings.             

I couldn’t get a real job because I still wanted to go to school, even though I was only taking about nine to twelve hours a semester. It was just easier to stay home with free rent and free food, a place where someone else does your laundry for you. All in exchange for doing a few household chores every week.

So I saved the money and watched it grow in tiny, infinitesimal increments in my monthly bank statements. But eventually it did get put to good use.

At least,
I
felt it was a good use.

On Friday, October 31
st
1997, that money helped me kill twelve men in a bloody rampage, all in one night.

*          *          *

After several failed attempts at convincing me to get my mopey ass out of the house and raise some hell with the boys, Bo called and told me to get dressed.

“I am dressed,” I said with a yawn, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I meant get dressed in some nice clothes, dipshit. Bunch of us are going out to Dan & Bruno’s for Nancy’s birthday.”

I sighed, “And why would I want to go since I hardly know Nancy?”

Bo snorted. “Hey, it’s not from her lack of trying! You know that better than I do and you know she’s gonna get stone fuckin’ drunk tonight and you of course could play the gentleman and drive her home and then screw her fuckin’ brains out... She’s got her own place.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered. Maybe I
was
just being a ridiculous asshole, but the last thing I needed right now was Nancy Kellerman (a needy and slightly dumpy looking girl) sinking her claws into me and smothering me with an insatiable need for attention.

“Listen, I don’t want to hear you sigh, moan, bitch or complain. I already told Nancy you’d be there and I saw how big her eyes got. Now do you wanna be an asshole to Nancy on her birthday? Good. Now go get some nice clothes on and meet us all down there.”

The decision to go wasn’t so much his as it was my own, although Bo was one hell of a persuader when he wanted to be. I don’t think he would have stopped at anything short of kicking down my front door, snatching me by the scruff of the neck like a dog and throwing my ass into his van. He had lost a best friend just before high school graduation to suicide, and the way I was acting, the way I was retreating into myself, reminded him too much of the way his friend had behaved shortly before he’d taken a swan dive off the roof of a three-story apartment building.

I arrived at Dan & Bruno’s purposefully late, but apparently not late enough. There were only four others who had arrived before me. I made conversation as best I could while I mentally cursed Bo for being late, at least later than I was. Nancy was the only one I knew even vaguely. The others were friends of hers from outside school.

I silently prayed for Bo to show up soon. Hell, I’d even settle for Lloyd. Nancy was already halfway finished with her second hurricane and the goo-goo eyes and hair-tossing laughs were already being aimed my way.         

Out of desperation and an uncomfortable level of awkwardness, I excused myself and strolled over to the bar to order myself a drink, preferably something that would be hard to make. I gave them the excuse that I wanted to make sure the bartender made it correctly, why I didn’t want to just let the waitress bring it to me.

As I approached the bar, an unsettling, ominous feeling stole over me, like I was a priest walking along a dark alley amongst murderous thugs, protected only by the whiteness of my collar. This was by no means a low-class establishment, in fact, quite the opposite. There was no reason why I should suddenly feel this way; I’d been to this place several times before.

Was the phantom stranger about to make an appearance? That was the last shit I needed right now.

I made it to the bar, waited for one of the bartenders to notice me and ordered a mudslide. About seven feet or so away from me to my left were two men, probably in their forties, dressed in business suits.

I didn’t like them. As soon as I saw them, I knew I didn’t like them. The one closest to me was portly, with beet-red lips. The other guy was taller with a little gray coming into his hair, just around his temples.

“So what time are we supposed to be there?” the fatboy on the stool asked.

The taller man, who chose to stand at the bar rather than sit, answered, “The official party starts at eight, but the show won’t start until after everyone else leaves, which probably won’t be until sometime after one.”

“Is the show really like what the other guys say it is?”

I saw images then, as the taller man thought back to a series of Halloween parties that had been going on steadily for several years. My mind’s eye was inundated with the pictures, sounds and memories of these parties—and what happened after each party was declared officially over.

Their boss, Mr... I hadn’t caught his name yet, threw a Halloween party every year where only employees were invited. No families. Only a few select men from the company were allowed to come to the after-party after the last non-select employees had left.

The after-parties had started off innocently enough. The boss, Mr. (Milford, Miller?) would buy some callgirls for the night and let his boys have at ‘em in any of the five guest bedrooms they chose. The boss would choose one for himself and retire to his master suite.

“Depends on what you heard,” the tall guy answered, “You should see his place. Huge mansion. Got a real life secret chamber like he’s Batman or something.”

His thoughts of that underground chamber triggered another flash of imagery from his psyche. He was scared.

He was scared because he didn’t know what to expect this time. He didn’t know how far Mr. (Milton, yes, I think that’s it) would go this year.

Each year, Mr. Milton’s after-parties had become more brazen, more outrageous and more illegal than the one prior. Three years ago, he had started a special show that would take place before his boys would choose their girls.

In an underground theater below Milton’s house, two pairs of college-age looking kids stripped down live on stage and proceeded to fuck each other. Two guys, two girls, changing partners a few times. It seemed like nothing worse than live porn.