The Uninnocent (21 page)

The only time I felt free from the so-called freeman these days was when I was with Mollie. Much the same way the rich like hobnobbing with other rich people, loners are drawn to loners. Mollie and I were living proof of this. One might think that with his wife having run off on him, Ralph would have been extra strict about letting Mollie out of his sight. But from the first he seemed to trust and like me, so my meandering off from the cemetery to the pond with his daughter, our spending every spare hour we had in each other's company, didn't bother him. I felt like we had his silent blessing, and while he was rough-edged, unshaven, and stained by melancholy, I thought of him sometimes as a surrogate father, though I never told him so. Besides Ralph, nobody knew a thing about me and Mollie, because nobody cared. It was the only part of my life I inhabited with perfect independence, and as such it was my greatest joy.

Once, as I was lying in the tall grass with Mollie, secluded from everyone and everything but a redtail hawk circling high overhead, she asked me, “How come you hate that man living in your house so much?”

“I never said I hated him,” and kissed her again, hoping that would be the end of it. Franklin was the last person I wanted to talk about here with Mollie.

When she pulled her lips away to breathe, she said gently, “But you don't need to say it in words, Wyatt. Whenever he comes up, the look in your eyes says it all.”

Mollie wasn't someone I wanted to lie to, so I told her, “Hey, he just gives me the creeps, all right? He treats me like I'm his slave or something, and my grandmother goes along with it all. I just need to get out of there, the sooner the better.”

“What's he done to give you the creeps? You don't seem to be afraid of anything, from what I know.”

I told her about the night in my bedroom, and how every time Franklin was near me he got too close. I told her how even the way he smoked his cigarettes had a wickedness to it, how his endless stories seemed like a madman's fictions, and that every favor he'd done for us seemed to have strings attached. “It's like he's a virus, taking over our lives and making us sick. I feel like I'm living in his house now, instead of the other way around.”

The concept I'd been harboring, and the mounting hatred that fueled it, took a giant leap in a more dangerous direction when my sixteenth birthday rolled around. Franklin got it in his head that this was too important a milestone in my life not to celebrate it in grand style. I'd have preferred to eat pizza out of a box, but he would have none of that.

“We're throwing you a party,” he announced a couple of weeks before the big day, knowing it was the last thing I wanted. “Oh, yes. Cake, candles, champagne, the works.”

“I don't care if he is turning sixteen, Wyatt's still too young for champagne,” my grandmother objected, if meekly.

“Bosh,” was Franklin's response, not even bothering to look in her direction. He had her, by this time, utterly under his sway. She said nothing further.

When the question arose as to whom we might invite to this proposed party in the newly refurbished dining room, Franklin had a ready answer that floored me.

“Well, of course we'll ask over some of the neighbors who've known you for years. The McDermott clan, the Riordans. I guess there's nobody at school, but maybe the minister and his wife might like a nice slice of homemade cake and a glass of spiked punch,” he said, ticking these off on his fingertips. “Oh, and you'll want to invite that girlfriend of yours, Mollie.”

Grandmother Iris jolted wide awake suddenly, and said, “Why, I didn't know you had a girlfriend, Wyatt.”

My arms crossed, astounded, fuming, I stared at Franklin, who calmly returned my gaze with one of shameless triumph.

“That's because I don't,” I snapped.

“Well, however you want to label her,” Franklin said, waving off my denial as if it were a casement fly. “I'm sure she'd love to come. You can bring her father, Ralph, along, if you think he owns a bar of soap to clean himself up with first. He can help chaperone you two lovebirds.” These last bits about soap and lovebirds, meant for me alone, Franklin said under his breath.

Iris confirmed she'd missed it by adding something trite like, “By all means, let's invite the lucky young lady and her father. Wyatt, shame on you for keeping this a secret from your poor grandmother.”

Looking back over the years, having had plenty of time to think about it, I've come to believe this was the instant when Franklin sealed both our fates. I couldn't have known it for a fact just then, as I excused myself, rose from the dinner table, and fled the house to walk to the pond in growing twilight. But what I did know, with blinding clarity, was that I had not been hallucinating on several recent instances at the cemetery when I thought I'd seen somebody, or something, lurking in the grove of oak trees near the McKearin family plot, or prowling in the weeping branches of the huge willow that hunched over the Wylers near a brook whose waters emptied into Grover's Mill Pond. And this somebody or something was clearly spying on me, hoping not to be seen.

I hadn't wanted to admit it to myself, in part because a reasonable voice inside assured me it was a madness not unlike my mother's, but in that moment I also knew for certain that on one particular occasion, when I saw Franklin's shadow cast on the fresh-mowed graveyard lawn, it had not two legs but three. I might have dismissed this out of hand had not Mollie too seen the shadow that afternoon, and agreed that the person hiding behind the big Dutch elm did seem to have three legs.

“Optical delusion,” she later judged it, making a little pun to try to leaven things.

I wasn't so sure.

Down by the pond that evening after Franklin had revealed himself as a menace, a true nemesis of mine, I tramped slowly around the pond—my pond, on which I'd always been able to rely. Bile pumped through my heart as I tried to breathe in and out to calm myself, but the stagnant air only stung my throat. Franklin had done everything he could to usurp the roles of my father, my mother, my grandfather, and now had in essence declared himself my babysitter, my watchman, my warden. What was clear to me, clear as the shimmering full moon that floated on the face of the water, was that if I simply used Ralph's wages as I'd intended—to run away, whether with Mollie beside me or not—Franklin would track me down. He seemed to know every inch of the world like the back of his bullying hand. Had me convinced there was nowhere I could hide but that he'd rout me out, like the woodpeckers in Van Nest Park rout out bugs secreted in tree trunks. No, I couldn't afford to delude myself on that front. And if my hunch was right, that he was one of the invaders left behind after the Halloween eve attack half my lifetime ago—one who somehow escaped death, immune to the microbes that exterminated the others—then it would be all the easier for him to seek and find me. They have their extraterrestrial sensory powers, after all.

There are four ways a person can die. Natural causes, accidental, suicide, and murder. And while I don't like to think of myself as someone drawn to death, by that time I had firsthand knowledge—and, in these waters, firsthand experience—of all of the ways to heaven or hell but one. It fell to me, I believed deep down, to complete the cycle. What did I have to lose? Mollie would still love me, I was sure. She would understand. So much for the aphorism about death coming in threes.

My father owned a service revolver that I inherited upon his death, along with his war medals, his gold watch, and other mementos. I stored these in his locked steel box, the key to which I kept hidden along with my stash of money in the back of my closet. There were also half a dozen bullets in the safebox, and though they were pretty old, all I needed was for one of them to work.

Suffice it to say, I didn't invite Mollie or her father to my birthday party. Why should I subject them to Franklin's humiliations? And after what had happened to Claude, I couldn't risk it. Instead, I left the house, which smelled admittedly wonderful with a chocolate cake baking in the oven, and met Mollie as usual in the cemetery. Knowing it was my sixteenth birthday, Ralph had given me the day off, and since Franklin was caught up with his party preparations, I knew she and I could while away our hours in private. I had already hidden the revolver, loaded and ready, wrapped in a camouflaging green T-shirt of mine under a juniper bush by the pond's edge. So my day was free and clear.

I had asked Mollie not to buy me a present. Better, I told her, to save her money. She did, however, produce a small rectangular box wrapped in shiny paper, which she presented to me with an excited smile.

“It's not much,” she said.

“No, it's beautiful.”

“You haven't even opened it up yet, silly.”

“I mean just everything. The shiny paper, the ribbon, you.”

“Stop,” she said, with a blushing frown. “Open it.”

Inside was a pocket-sized field manual on the trees and wild shrubs of the Northeast. I was thrilled, but said, “Hey, you promised you wouldn't spend any money.”

“Don't worry, I got it cheap at the thrift shop. Besides, I know how much you love to be outdoors, so I figured you might want to know what everything's called,” she said. “For your next birthday, I'm thinking about a bird book, or maybe one with all the insects.”

“It's the best present anybody ever gave me,” I said, and we shared a long, yearning kiss.

Mollie and I spent the next hour lying side by side in a hidden clearing, marveling at the names we read together—flowering dogwood, staghorn sumac, sourgum—and the color illustrations beside each description. In my life I had never felt so deliciously sheltered from the world, alone and yet so complete and contented, and when I set aside the book and began kissing Mollie again it was the most natural possible act for us to make love, and so we did, each of us losing our virginity that afternoon as the sun crawled down the sky.

The ache I felt when saying good-bye to her, moving just as naturally though nowhere near as blissfully into my next important inevitability of the day, was painful, to say the least. I had no idea whether I'd ever see Mollie again. The chances were good that Franklin wouldn't be fooled by my ruse, that he'd overpower and possibly do to me exactly what I planned to do to him.

The party was supposed to begin at six. Glancing at my father's watch, which I'd worn today in his honor, I saw that it was already five thirty. As I walked to the place where I'd hidden the revolver, my afterglow of happiness and euphoria began to dim just like the cloudy sky itself, moving toward sunset and the end of the autumn day. Franklin and Iris, I imagined, were getting pretty anxious by now. “That kid will be late to his own funeral,” I could hear my grandmother rue with a cluck of her tongue. Franklin's comments would not be as colloquial or forgiving. I pictured him pacing from room to room, steaming mad. I could almost hear him from here at the pond swearing I was the most ungrateful little punk he'd ever met in the four decades and seven continents of his experience.

My guess that he'd angrily throw on his jacket—my father's, that is—and march in a snit down to the pond to find me was dead accurate. Loitering in full view, pretending to be sulking, brooding on the shore, I waited for him to come, service revolver shoved into my coat pocket. There was a breeze over the water, rippling it like a melted washboard. A flight of starlings, black tatters blown along, swarmed above. Soon enough, here came Franklin, a determined look on his vile face, his jaw set, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. I saw he was wearing a colorful cravat, one of my grandfather's.

“What's the big idea, birthday boy?”

I didn't say a word. Just wanted to let my silence draw him closer, like he was a kite and I was reeling him in on an invisible string.

Predictably, he just kept talking, scolding me as he neared where I stood. “Don't you have an ounce of respect for others? Your little harlot Mollie and the rest are probably already back at the house waiting for Mr. Boohoo. Well, this game of yours is going to end. I know places far away from here where delinquents like you can be sent for rewiring. Get you a brand-new personality. Tomorrow—” and I pulled out the revolver when he was two strides away and pulled the trigger, putting a slug right into his heart. He dropped before me without so much as a groan, eyes widening, on his knees in an attitude that looked for all the world like someone shocked into prayer, and I shot him once more, this time in his face.

Methodically following my plan, I removed my clothes and swam his limp body out toward the middle of the pond, where I sank him as well as the revolver. Back on shore, I dried myself off quickly with the shirt I'd used to wrap the gun, dressed, and walked back home, numb and amazed.

“Oh, there he is,” Grandmother Iris cried out.

Franklin had been mostly right about the guests having already arrived, though of course he'd been mistaken about Mollie and her father. I accepted a glass of punch from the adult bowl, the one with champagne added to the cranberry juice, and did my best to engage in conversation with the neighbors.

When Iris asked, “Where's Franklin?” I answered, “How should I know?” though I could hear my voice quaking. Not from guilt, but something more akin to excitement. I couldn't believe I had summoned the courage to carry through with my plan. To say one is proud of taking a life is fundamentally unethical, morally wrong—I know, I know. But Franklin had become, for me, a saboteur, a guerrilla, an enemy combatant, and taking him out of the picture seemed more an act of domestic warfare than anything else. I held to the belief that my father would have approved.

“He went out looking for you, you know,” she went on, a raspy reproach underlying her words.

My charade didn't last long. After several more trips to the punch bowl, I decided, woozily, to confess to the minister what I'd done. My grandmother was by then beside herself worrying about Franklin and I thought there was no point in dragging out my little pantomime. From my perspective, I had rid myself and the world of a scourge. A scourge that threatened not just me but every one of us. I had, in the end, nothing to hide.