The Next (34 page)

Paul stood in the kitchen, a rifle butted against his shoulder and his eye pressed against the scope. He was targeting Graves.

Graves, bent his head around to look at the kid with the rifle and grinned, cocksure as a motherfucker.

“Takes a man to take a man, boy,” he said.

Graves kept his eye trained on my skinny brother in his white underwear holding a rifle horizontally as best he could in his trembling arms. Graves licked his lips as he eyed Paul and muttered, “Looks like you’re as ready as I am, kid.”

Paul’s underwear was tenting outward, fully erect. He looked down. His face turned red. He started gushing tears. He looked right into my eyes for help—scared, ashamed, confused, and mortified.

I did not have the presence of mind to assure Paul that his reaction was natural. Perhaps it wasn’t. I had no understanding of the sexual conditioning of Paul’s twelve-year-old noggin given my own youth. More tragically, I did not understand years later that our inability to address his erection would create a rift we’d never even be able to acknowledge.

“You’re gonna like this,” grumbled Graves toward Paul with a pleasure that rumbled from his soul, his gut, and his groin.

Paul cocked the rifle. In spite of his fright, a summer of training had reinforced his ability to prep for a firing so many times that he was able to cock that rifle assuredly and swiftly without even removing his eye from the scope.

I had to stop Paul from committing a crime that he’d regret for the rest of his life. But as I was about to scream at Paul to stop, I felt Graves grab hold of the waistband of my thin underwear and rip them off my body.

Graves leathery lips smothered mine, his tongue prying his way onto the other side of my teeth. My arms tightened like rods and my fists clenched, locked down hard into the mattress. The metal springs of the pull out bed cut through the fabric and sprang into the air. I tried to pull my groin away from him, but his battery would not let up.

Suddenly Graves lifted his head.

Paul had put the barrel of the rifle against Graves’ skull. His face was no longer that of a frightened child. He was full of a fury I’d seen before from only one other. He was full of our father’s fury.

Even more blood curdling, Paul was not looking at Graves’ eyes. Paul was objectifying his target as he would any varmint, raccoon, or deer, and stripping it in his mind of life for a more efficient, systematic kill. Just as he had been trained every day for a summer.

“Paul! No! Put it down!” I shouted loudly.

Click.

The bullet thundered into Graves’ head, then exited the other side and continued through the back of the couch and into the wall. Blood spattered across the radius of the room, the white walls sprayed with droplets on all sides. Blood stung my eyes and dotted the taste buds of my open mouth.

I felt the immediate freeing of my limbs as Graves lay dead on top of me. I kneed his groin upwards with all my strength and pushed his body off of me. I wiped the sweat, tears, and blood from my eyes.

Paul was no longer in sight.

I put my weight on my good leg and hopped down the hall. My other shin surged with pain. Paul was in the closet, wiping down the barrel of the rifle with his white underwear in a nervous thoroughness.

His voice was high-pitched and sincere as he asked, “Do you think Grandfather will be angry at me for using his rifle?”

Grandfather’s rank superior lay on our bed with his brains blown out, and Paul was worried about returning his rifles without a blemish. I realized how natural this reaction was for Paul. Our Father’s punishment had never fit the crime, and often wasn’t even related. When we once dog-sat a relative’s Irish setter for three days, we quickly learned that the only way to keep Father from blaming us for dog shit left on the road and going off the deep end with the silver snake buckle belt on our asses was by cleaning
every
pile of dog shit we encountered whether or not she made it. We picked up eighty-four piles of shit over those three days and continued picking up shit for months after just in case. This was the underlying fear that prevented us from waking our father up even when the neighborhood was burning down. The same fear that caused Paul to worry as much about the cleanliness of the rifle as the bloody dusting of a neighbor.

I rested my hand on his shoulder and was about to reassure the focused boy when I saw our shiny red Swiss Army knives right in front of our noses on the shelf.

Why would Grandfather hide our knives here?

We heard the crunching of gravel as a car pulled into the driveway.

Paul looked up at me with alarm.

He pulled me out of the closet and closed the door, but he had no keys to lock it. That’s when it occurred to me…
how the hell had Paul opened the closet to begin with?
The deadbolt was not broken into. The frame was not splintered. The door must have been unlocked! By the same token, how had Graves entered the trailer in the first place? We had not entered or exited the front door at all since Grandfather left, having jumped through the bathroom window.

Grandfather must have left it unlocked as well…

The screen door opened.

Paul put his arm around my waist, and we hobbled back to the living room to meet our Grandfather.

The door opened.

We stood at the kitchen, arms around each other in our nakedness, bracing ourselves for one dooming whopper of a reaction.

Grandfather entered…

He surveyed the room with surprisingly steady eyes. First he assessed the two of us, then the masses of ricocheted red spots streaking across the white walls, and then Graves, facing down on the mattress with his firm yet pruned bare ass smiling at the ceiling and a chunk of his cranium blown off. Wet pellets of gore still glooped sporadically off the wall to the carpet. Grandfather returned his gaze to us.

For the first time ever, we experienced an expression in his face we’d never seen before. His lips curled upwards ever so slightly as his eyes glazed over with the thinnest film of moisture. He was not angry. He was profoundly pleased. And I was profoundly confused in that moment by that reaction.

But now…now…

Yappity yap yap.

My eyes opened and darted right to the two silver, gleaming framed photos of my parents as children. My eyes were open, but my brain was arriving at a conclusion like a tourist on his first visit to Niagara Falls in the late spring. The Vastness. The Torrent. The Invasive Spray. The Inescapable Roar. The Destruction of Nature. The Construction of Nature. The Coalition of Both. The Inevitability of Everything.

Minnie sounded the alarm again, but I could not yet break my train…

Grandfather wanted Graves dead
.

Specifically, Grandfather wanted us to kill Graves…

Whatever code of honor Grandfather and Graves lived by, it would have been unthinkably disloyal to blow out the brains of the man who stuck his hand in your stomach for seven miles in the back of a Jeep to prevent you from bleeding to death. He couldn’t kill the man who saved his life in Korea. But he could live with getting others to kill him, especially if they killed him in self-defense. That’s why we were taken out to the woods and taught to shoot from the first day we arrived. That’s why we were trained to shoot progressively larger and larger animals. That’s why Grandfather taught us to shoot handguns.

Grandfather had been training assassins.

And while he was training us, he’d been setting a trap. We’d been set up as targets from day one. He’d seduced Graves night after night by parading his nubile grandsons in front of him and leaving open the one curtain that looked directly into Graves’ kitchen. Graves wouldn’t even be able to clean the dishes without viewing Paul and me. He was being tantalized all summer, repeatedly, only feet away. He’d made sure Graves had a clear view of Paul and me in bed when Graves prowled at night. Grandfather had the trap wound up until all he had to do was let it spring.

He uncharacteristically organized that poker game. He invited Palmer to the game to remove any neighbor who might possibly impede what had to occur that night. He changed the lock on the bathroom to eliminate any place to hide. He left the closet unlocked for the first time ever to give us complete access to the rifles and handguns. He removed our Swiss Army knives to increase the odds that we’d kill Graves, not merely wound him. He left the front door unlocked to give Graves free access to his targets. And then he drove away, with the gravel announcing loudly to Graves that his grandsons were now left alone.

Grandfather thought of everything that would increase the chances of Graves’ assassination. As I looked at my parents’ gleefully carefree childhood photos on the shelves, I remembered that day in the woods when we’d blown the photos of our parents as miserable, sluggish adults away. Suddenly I realized exactly what tragedy lay between the two sets of photos, and therefore exactly why Grandfather wanted Graves dead.

Graves had molested Mom and Dad when they were young as well.

It made too much logical sense for it not to be true.

Soon after Graves and Grandfather became Palmer’s neighbors, Graves’ pedophiliac proclivities surfaced when my parents came to stay some summer in the early 1960’s. Having his life saved in the Korean War by Graves, Grandfather would have been in no place to confront him and, in the 1960’s, it was possible Grandfather hadn’t even the vocabulary to truly comprehend the horror of an adult neighbor desiring children sexually. Grandfather had no recourse, and no path towards justice that he could enact—until the day Paul and I had been sent to stay with him. A plan surfaced. With military precision, it was covertly executed.

But, as with every war, fallout could not be avoided. Grandfather knowing and doing nothing mangled the development of my parents until they evolved into the creatures Paul and I knew. And, then, years after Graves’ assassination, the mangling of my brother and my development…

Yappity yap yap yap.

I was refocusing on the present, but the clarity of the past left me breathless. I was filled with anger at this man who involved Paul and me into his twisted plot of revenge, yet I was simultaneously overcome with compassion for a man who suffered horribly under the weight of loyalty, duty, honor, and forbearance. It became clear that the central collateral damage of the battle between Graves and Grandfather was, of course, Grandfather himself. A man who hardened with restraint every minute of his life, two thin metal walls away from the man who committed irrevocable atrocities on his own flesh and blood. Yes, he could have moved to another trailer park after Graves had first touched his son, but Grandfather was a man imprisoned by the need to exact justice on his neighbor as much as my parents had been imprisoned by their
inability
to exact justice. Just as much as my brother and I were imprisoned by our inability to understand injustice, and therefore our inability to forgive when it was finally exacted.

Until now.

The clarity forced its way through my fogginess and burst out of my eyes in a sheet of tears. I had so much I wanted to explain to my brother. So much I still needed for him to understand, let go, and hold on to. To forgive himself. To forgive me. But I was too late. Instead, I could spill it all to the one person miraculously thrust into my little life that would, could, and wanted to understand as much about me as I could muster spilling….Marzoli.

Marzoli…shooting…the Layworths...shit!

I jumped up and looked out the window. Marzoli was still slumped on the chair. He was unconscious but breathing.

Thank fuck!

Mrs. Layworth was still a bloody dead mess behind him.

Then I realized Mr. Perfect was nowhere to be seen.

My blood turned to ice.

Yappity yap yap yap.

The silhouette of two feet appeared under my front door.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The doorknob turned.

It was pushed in a centimeter in a failed attempt to open the locked door.

Then the silhouetted feet disappeared.

Where was he going?

I remained absolutely silent and listened for any and every sound.

A honking horn two blocks away. Jennifer Lopez on a television faintly defending her choice of dress as articulately as she was able. Two dogs claiming territory on a grey patch of sidewalk. Justin Timberlake electronically stuffing his message that what-goes-around-comes-around into some teenager’s brain via the entire courtyard. The ho-hummm of a busy city drifting in and clouding the courtyard.

Then I heard it.

The click of Ruben and Nathan’s door upstairs being opened.

Only two people had the key to that apartment now. Me, with the contents of Marzoli’s pocket in a neat cluster on my desk, and the Layworths, with the contents taken from the pocket of a dead kid in their closet.

I heard the faint footsteps above me cross to the window, and then it opened. I looked at my own window, shattered from the first bullet, now framed with sharp little triangles. The outside could enter unimpeded. I was a sitting dick of a duck.

I called 911.

A chunk of snow fell in front of my nose as a foot landed on the fire escape landing above me.