The Legend of Devil's Creek, page 32
“I thought I—”
“No. No. Where’s the butter, Boyd?”
“I thought it was in here.”
“You’re fucking shitting me. You’re not telling me we have to eat nine fresh crab with no butter. Where’s the butter, Boyd?”
Boyd said nothing.
“Riddley was ‘beer man,’ and look at all the beer we have. All you had to do, besides iron your sweatshirts, was to bring the butter.” Boyd stared like a deer caught in headlights. “You stupid assho—.”
“Looky here, boys!” Sandhurst strode into camp with a silvery three-pound steelhead in his hands. “I told you there were fish in there.”
“Beauty, Sandhurst,” Chapman said. “The only problem is we don’t have any butter to fry it in.”
Sandhurst looked at the dejected Boyd, then back at Chapman. “That’s alright. I can smoke it a little bit with some alder and then roast the filets over the fire. It’s better that way anyway.” Sandhurst dropped his fish and gear at camp and climbed back up the cliff to find wood.
Fifteen minutes later, he came back cradling a bundle of green alder branches, none more than an inch thick, and set to work whittling several of the thinnest into sharpened stakes. Riddley watched him expertly fillet his steelhead, run three of the sharpened stakes up through the length of each fillet, rub each with salt, and then stick them upright in the ground near the edge of the fire. He took the remaining alder branches and dumped them, en masse, onto the bonfire, all on the side nearest the fish, so that they were piled nearly a foot high, and seemed likely to smother the fire underneath. But within a minute or so, tiny tendrils of dense white smoke began to creep from the branch pile. They grew slowly, and before long, a thick column of aromatic smoke rose from the branches, enveloping the staked steelhead fillets leaning over the pyre. At last, as the first licks of yellow-orange flame began to burn through, Sandhurst pushed the pile over to the far side of the bonfire, exposing a bed of red-hot coals directly under the fish. He let the fish roast over the coals for what Riddley figured couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before he pulled the stakes out of the ground and announced to his rapt audience that it was time to feast.
They kicked back on big pieces of driftwood they’d dragged into a ring around the fire as Lazko passed out paper plates and Sandhurst made his way around the group distributing large portions of his beautiful fish. When he got to Riddley, he said, “Here, have the tail section. It’s the best.”
“It is?”
“There aren’t any bones. And it’s the part with the most fat in it, so it’s the most delicate and flavorful. Just like with steak.”
“Thanks.” Riddley had never tried steelhead before. The first bite blew his socks off. It was cooked perfectly, the salt and alder smoke flavor giving it a rich complexity. Riddley couldn’t believe such wonderful fish could be made with such simple technique. He looked up to see Sandhurst watching him with a knowing and pleased expression. “This is the best fish I’ve ever had in my life,” Riddley said. The rest of the group echoed his sentiments.
“I’m glad you like it.“ Sandhurst beamed with a happiness Riddley had never seen on his face before.
Lazko set up the pot to boil his crab, and before long, the group was enjoying its second course, cracking crab legs and washing down the fresh, succulent meat with cheap beer. Lazko complimented himself. “See boys, the key to perfect crab is not to overcook it, and to use saltwater. So many people ruin perfectly good crab by cooking it for twenty minutes or whatever, and in plain old tap water. All that does is boil out all the good flavor and make the meat stringy. You might as well buy crab that’s been frozen for six months if you’re gonna do that.”
The fire crackled away as they drank their beers and passed around a bottle of decent tequila Chapman had packed in. Then Boyd passed out gigantic Churchill cigars he’d brought along and they all lit up. Riddley was more cautious this time around. He watched everyone else for clues as to proper technique. Nevertheless, when Boyd came around with his lighter, Riddley drew full puffs straight into his lungs trying to get it going. In seconds, he felt nauseous.
“Riddley, man, you’re turning green,” Boyd said. “Don’t inhale it. Just puff.”
It took the better part of an hour for his stomach to settle.
The sun began to go down, and Riddley spotted the bow of a Navy destroyer just rounding the point at the north end of the beach. “Look at that!” The group turned to see the ship steaming into full view, not more than two-hundred yards offshore, a razor of grey painted steel, silently slicing through the unusually glassy surface of the Sound. As close as it was, they could all see the details of its superstructure—its massive phased array radar, its empty forward missile launchers pointed ominously toward the sky. Riddley wondered where it was coming from.
The group watched the ship’s progress in silence as it steamed on, eventually passing out of sight behind the cliffs that walled in the southern end of the cove. Something about its passing out of sight, leaving the shipping lanes in undisturbed darkness, reminded Riddley that the air was growing truly cold. It’s January. What the hell are we doing tent camping? He shivered and slid up as close to the fire as he could without melting the soles of his boots.
Boyd was more talkative than usual. In fact, he was a chatterbox. Riddley wondered whether he hadn’t snuck off earlier to snort cocaine. It certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. He prattled on and on about how he thought his mother walking out on the family when he was young left him feeling unworthy of love. That this was probably the root of his obsession with female attention.
“Boyd,” Chapman said when he could get a word in, “we’re red-blooded American college boys. We all have a billion milligrams of testosterone coursing through our veins. We’re all obsessed with female attention.”
But Boyd assured them that in his case it was different—the constant need of affection, of reaffirmation that he was loveable, and his consequent self-destructiveness in relationships with women. His endless cycle of bending over backwards to win a girl’s affection and, once convinced the girl had real feelings for him, discarding her to begin his quest anew.
“Maybe they just start to bore you,” Lazko said. “They usually start to bore me.”
“Maybe you have a subconscious fear that if you become emotionally attached, they’ll up and leave you like your mom did,” Chapman said. “And you don’t want to expose yourself—don’t want to risk having to experience that feeling again. You pursue them, because everybody is driven to find love. But then, when it starts to feel serious, you drop them like a hot rock.”
“Maybe,” Boyd said as he lay back against the log, seeming to finally calm down, gazing up at the stars. “Maybe.”
Riddley never ceased to be amazed by this sort of conversation. He’d never been with people who were anywhere near as open about their thoughts and fears.
“So, Sandhurst.”
“Boyd.”
“Tell us more of your story.”
“My story.”
“Yes, your story. For months, the group of us here has been together, drinking beers, sitting around fires, telling stories, describing our childhoods and all that shit. But it occurred to me that you haven’t said much along those lines.” Sandhurst sat stone-faced and mute. “In fact, the only story I’ve ever heard you tell was about your stepfather burning your last picture of your real dad.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Your story.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“No. Just anything. Give me anything. What was your family like? What’s behind your bouts of depression? Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“Oregon.”
“Come on.”
Boyd’s persistence made Riddley uncomfortable. If Sandhurst wanted to talk about that shit, he would. Who did Boyd think he was, anyway? A dime store psychologist, pushing some sort of open communication thing he learned from his own family therapy sessions way back when? He could be such an ass.
Then it occurred to Riddley that he didn’t really know much about Sandhurst’s background either.
“Look, I told you before, you don’t want to hear about all that.”
“Actually, I do.”
“It’s not a happy story.”
“Well, neither was my childhood, but at least I trust my friends enough to be open about it with them.”
Boyd’s comment seemed to get to Sandhurst. He looked startled. Almost hurt. Riddley still didn’t expect him to take the bait and open up. He hardly ever had before. Yet as Sandhurst sat there staring into the fire, he seemed to be thinking about it, maybe working himself up to answering. If he were, it seemed a great struggle for him. The earlier happy glow had already faded from his face, replaced by a hardness. And as he continued to sit there quietly, his face went on changing. With glacial slowness, his expression grew dark—dark and sad, then dark and angry—his eyebrows furrowing, the corners of his mouth turning down.
Boyd saw the change too, and seemed as troubled by it as Riddley was. “Hey, I’m just giving you a hard time. If you don’t want to talk about it, no worries.”
Sandhurst remained still as a statue, as though he hadn’t heard a word Boyd just said. But the ferocity of his expression was now downright frightening. He lifted one hand from the knee on which it rested and, for just a moment, turned it palm-up as though in a gesture intended to accompany some statement, though he remained silent. He returned the hand to its original resting place on his knee.
At last, he spoke, still staring into the flames. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, his voice subdued, heavy, angry. “A story that’ll put it in a nutshell for you. After that, if you want to hear more, just say so.”
“Oh. Uh, okay.”
Sandhurst picked up a smooth beach stone and squeezed it in his right hand. “One Autumn,” he began, “when I was maybe six years old, a black Labrador puppy followed me home from school. For several days, I tried to find its owners but didn’t have any luck, so my mother said I could keep it. She was a sweet puppy, maybe five months old. A little ball of fluff. I named her ‘Daisy.’ I built her a little house out of scrap wood I found in town. Even gave her the pillow from my own bed and went without. Every day at school, all I could think about was getting home to play with her. We had a game where I’d lie face down on the ground and cover my head and she’d try to stick her nose in to lick my face and get me to sit up so she could jump in my lap and cuddle. She was the sweetest thing. I loved her.”
“Anyway, one day I came home from school and found my stepfather sitting on his piece of shit old piss-smelling wingback chair, drunk as usual, staring off into space. As I go to tiptoe by him, he says, without even turning to look at me, ‘boy, if you want dinner tonight, you’d better go out back and bury your dog.’ I remember standing there, my feet frozen to the ground, my heart racing as I comprehended what the bastard had just told me, when he says ‘little bitch wouldn’t stop crying. You shoulda taught that bitch not to cry.’ That was it. Then he closed his eyes, and I swear the motherfucker was smiling to himself.”
“For whatever reason, I have this vivid memory that it smelled like fried onions from whatever he’d cooked himself for lunch. When I finally willed my feet to move, I went out back, opening the door slowly, afraid of what I’d see. And there, in the middle of our weedy yard, lying on her side in a little pool of red, was my beautiful Daisy, dead, her mouth open, her little pink tongue hanging out, her fur all wet with blood and flaps of skin torn open so that you could see her insides. He’d shot her with his shotgun. And a dirty six-inch length of her intestine was strung out along the bloody earth behind her. So you see, she hadn’t died right away. She’d tried to get back to her shelter. To the little doghouse I’d built for her. I scooped up her little body and held her tight in my arms, nuzzling her ear—” His voice broke. Riddley saw a tear run down his cheek. “It was years ago, but—”
Sandhurst tipped his head to wipe the tear on the shoulder of his coat, taking a moment to master himself before continuing with a gruff impersonation of his stepfather: “‘There’s a shovel in the shed,’ he told me when I turned to see him standing in the frame of the back door. He stood there staring at me with his colorless devil’s eyes, and the bastard was grinning.” Sandhurst shook his head. “Right then, I knew I was looking into the eyes of pure evil. All I could think was ‘why?’ What had created this evil? Where had it come from? I hated that man. Truly hated him. I fantasized about pouring gasoline on his passed out, drunk body, setting him on fire, and laughing as he runs screaming out of the house and down the street, slowly burning to death.”
He extended an index finger and stared at it. “But you know what the worst thing was? It was that my mother just stood by and let it happen. Not just that time, but over and over again, stood there and did nothing. It wasn’t just that she was afraid. It was that she didn’t care. Didn’t love me. It took me a long, long time to realize that. I didn’t want to realize it. But when I couldn’t deny it anymore,” he shook his head again, “I didn’t want to live.”
Sandhurst sat quiet for a moment, then added, in a pleading, disbelieving tone, “I was a child. Just a child. How could somebody—” he broke off again, got up and walked off into the darkness.
Riddley shot Chapman a worried look.
“Let him go,” Chapman said.
The group sat silent. Riddley could scarcely believe the things his friend had endured as a young child. How could Sandhurst, such a kindhearted person, have lived through such hell and ended up so normal and so good? How could anyone bear such horrible memories?
“It sounds like my folks and Sandhurst’s folks should get together for pinochle,” Chapman said. “They could compare stories of assholeness.”
“No shit,” Boyd said. “They could probably give James McNeil’s folks a run for their money for ‘assholes of the century. Along those lines, Chapman—talking about fucked up parentage and childhood—I want to know how you didn’t end up a psychopath serial killer.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“Really now.”
“I was lucky, I guess. Goodness intervened.”
“What goodness?”
“My best friend in grade school was this guy Kyle Austin. He lived down the street and we played on the same baseball team, smoked a lot of dope together, all that good stuff. Anyway, when things were really going to shit with my family, his family more or less took me in and treated me as one of their own. Gave me all kinds of emotional support. Let me sort of hide out.”
“What a lucky break,” Boyd said.
“The funny thing is I had nothing to offer them in return. I mean nothing. I was so screwed up back then. So pissed off at the world. I hated my family, school, my teachers, pretty much anybody who got in my way. But the Austins took me in anyway. Treated me like family. It was like my just being friends with their son was good enough for them.”
“So you give them the credit?“
“They helped, that’s for damn sure. Who knows where the fuck I’d be if they hadn’t been there for me.“
“Does it all come down to random chance?“ Riddley asked. “The luck of where you’re born, the DNA you get, the shit that happens or doesn’t happen to you? Is that really all there is to it?“
“Good fucking question,“ Chapman said. “I was definitely lucky that I was friends with someone whose family had room in their hearts for me. But sometimes I wonder about shit like what if my mom had gotten to that bar five minutes later than she did, and never met my asshole second stepfather, and instead met some great guy who loved kids, you know? Or what if James McNeil’s father had caught the flu so he couldn’t go out fishing on the day he drowned, and instead got to raise his son to manhood? Or what if one of us had to live McNeil’s life? Walk in his shoes? Would we have ended up as killers?”
Eventually Sandhurst came back and the conversation took a welcome turn for the mundane: favorite bands, stories of diarrhea attacks, how many girls Boyd had hooked up with, and so forth. But their talk was more subdued than usual, and Riddley had the sense that they were all emotionally worn down from talking about their parents. Even when they laughed along at the funny stories being bandied about, their laughter sounded hollow, and their eyes betrayed a certain darkness and fatigue.
As usual, they all drank a lot of beer. And as usual, Lazko and Sandhurst drank more than the rest of them, both growing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the evening wore on. As conversation started to wane, Chapman and Sandhurst each got up to go take a piss. When they failed to return after twenty minutes, Boyd wondered aloud, “Where the fuck are those guys?” He and Riddley left a passed-out Lazko by the fireside to go look for their friends. They walked from one end of the little cove to the other, but Chapman and Sandhurst were gone. “They must have climbed out,” Boyd said.
“Sandhurst? As drunk as he was?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I wonder what the hell they’re up to.”
Riddley and Boyd returned to the fire and cracked open a couple fresh beers. Riddley tried to stay awake until his friends returned. But he eventually grew cold and began to shiver. Visions of being warm and cozy in the thick winter sleeping bag waiting in his tent beckoned to him. Finally, exhausted from shivering and chilled to the bone, he crawled off to bed.
*****
The next morning, Chapman and Sandhurst were back. Seeing the two of them drinking coffee by the fire after popping his head out of his tent, Boyd asked, “Where the hell did you two go last night? We thought you drowned.”
“We just hiked around a little bit,” Chapman said.
“For more than two hours? In the middle of the fucking night?”
“We compared childhood memories a little bit, too.”
Don’t ask, Boyd, Riddley thought. Just don’t ask. While Riddley’d felt a little left out when Chapman and Sandhurst wandered off the night before, he was now thankful he hadn’t been included. Heaven knew what dark and depressing things they’d talked about. Looking at their faces now made him even more grateful he’d stayed put. They both looked truly downtrodden. Of course, that could have been because they’d been up half the night drinking and smoking cigars. But Riddley was sure there was more to it than that. Fortunately, Boyd didn’t press them for further detail.
“No. No. Where’s the butter, Boyd?”
“I thought it was in here.”
“You’re fucking shitting me. You’re not telling me we have to eat nine fresh crab with no butter. Where’s the butter, Boyd?”
Boyd said nothing.
“Riddley was ‘beer man,’ and look at all the beer we have. All you had to do, besides iron your sweatshirts, was to bring the butter.” Boyd stared like a deer caught in headlights. “You stupid assho—.”
“Looky here, boys!” Sandhurst strode into camp with a silvery three-pound steelhead in his hands. “I told you there were fish in there.”
“Beauty, Sandhurst,” Chapman said. “The only problem is we don’t have any butter to fry it in.”
Sandhurst looked at the dejected Boyd, then back at Chapman. “That’s alright. I can smoke it a little bit with some alder and then roast the filets over the fire. It’s better that way anyway.” Sandhurst dropped his fish and gear at camp and climbed back up the cliff to find wood.
Fifteen minutes later, he came back cradling a bundle of green alder branches, none more than an inch thick, and set to work whittling several of the thinnest into sharpened stakes. Riddley watched him expertly fillet his steelhead, run three of the sharpened stakes up through the length of each fillet, rub each with salt, and then stick them upright in the ground near the edge of the fire. He took the remaining alder branches and dumped them, en masse, onto the bonfire, all on the side nearest the fish, so that they were piled nearly a foot high, and seemed likely to smother the fire underneath. But within a minute or so, tiny tendrils of dense white smoke began to creep from the branch pile. They grew slowly, and before long, a thick column of aromatic smoke rose from the branches, enveloping the staked steelhead fillets leaning over the pyre. At last, as the first licks of yellow-orange flame began to burn through, Sandhurst pushed the pile over to the far side of the bonfire, exposing a bed of red-hot coals directly under the fish. He let the fish roast over the coals for what Riddley figured couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before he pulled the stakes out of the ground and announced to his rapt audience that it was time to feast.
They kicked back on big pieces of driftwood they’d dragged into a ring around the fire as Lazko passed out paper plates and Sandhurst made his way around the group distributing large portions of his beautiful fish. When he got to Riddley, he said, “Here, have the tail section. It’s the best.”
“It is?”
“There aren’t any bones. And it’s the part with the most fat in it, so it’s the most delicate and flavorful. Just like with steak.”
“Thanks.” Riddley had never tried steelhead before. The first bite blew his socks off. It was cooked perfectly, the salt and alder smoke flavor giving it a rich complexity. Riddley couldn’t believe such wonderful fish could be made with such simple technique. He looked up to see Sandhurst watching him with a knowing and pleased expression. “This is the best fish I’ve ever had in my life,” Riddley said. The rest of the group echoed his sentiments.
“I’m glad you like it.“ Sandhurst beamed with a happiness Riddley had never seen on his face before.
Lazko set up the pot to boil his crab, and before long, the group was enjoying its second course, cracking crab legs and washing down the fresh, succulent meat with cheap beer. Lazko complimented himself. “See boys, the key to perfect crab is not to overcook it, and to use saltwater. So many people ruin perfectly good crab by cooking it for twenty minutes or whatever, and in plain old tap water. All that does is boil out all the good flavor and make the meat stringy. You might as well buy crab that’s been frozen for six months if you’re gonna do that.”
The fire crackled away as they drank their beers and passed around a bottle of decent tequila Chapman had packed in. Then Boyd passed out gigantic Churchill cigars he’d brought along and they all lit up. Riddley was more cautious this time around. He watched everyone else for clues as to proper technique. Nevertheless, when Boyd came around with his lighter, Riddley drew full puffs straight into his lungs trying to get it going. In seconds, he felt nauseous.
“Riddley, man, you’re turning green,” Boyd said. “Don’t inhale it. Just puff.”
It took the better part of an hour for his stomach to settle.
The sun began to go down, and Riddley spotted the bow of a Navy destroyer just rounding the point at the north end of the beach. “Look at that!” The group turned to see the ship steaming into full view, not more than two-hundred yards offshore, a razor of grey painted steel, silently slicing through the unusually glassy surface of the Sound. As close as it was, they could all see the details of its superstructure—its massive phased array radar, its empty forward missile launchers pointed ominously toward the sky. Riddley wondered where it was coming from.
The group watched the ship’s progress in silence as it steamed on, eventually passing out of sight behind the cliffs that walled in the southern end of the cove. Something about its passing out of sight, leaving the shipping lanes in undisturbed darkness, reminded Riddley that the air was growing truly cold. It’s January. What the hell are we doing tent camping? He shivered and slid up as close to the fire as he could without melting the soles of his boots.
Boyd was more talkative than usual. In fact, he was a chatterbox. Riddley wondered whether he hadn’t snuck off earlier to snort cocaine. It certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. He prattled on and on about how he thought his mother walking out on the family when he was young left him feeling unworthy of love. That this was probably the root of his obsession with female attention.
“Boyd,” Chapman said when he could get a word in, “we’re red-blooded American college boys. We all have a billion milligrams of testosterone coursing through our veins. We’re all obsessed with female attention.”
But Boyd assured them that in his case it was different—the constant need of affection, of reaffirmation that he was loveable, and his consequent self-destructiveness in relationships with women. His endless cycle of bending over backwards to win a girl’s affection and, once convinced the girl had real feelings for him, discarding her to begin his quest anew.
“Maybe they just start to bore you,” Lazko said. “They usually start to bore me.”
“Maybe you have a subconscious fear that if you become emotionally attached, they’ll up and leave you like your mom did,” Chapman said. “And you don’t want to expose yourself—don’t want to risk having to experience that feeling again. You pursue them, because everybody is driven to find love. But then, when it starts to feel serious, you drop them like a hot rock.”
“Maybe,” Boyd said as he lay back against the log, seeming to finally calm down, gazing up at the stars. “Maybe.”
Riddley never ceased to be amazed by this sort of conversation. He’d never been with people who were anywhere near as open about their thoughts and fears.
“So, Sandhurst.”
“Boyd.”
“Tell us more of your story.”
“My story.”
“Yes, your story. For months, the group of us here has been together, drinking beers, sitting around fires, telling stories, describing our childhoods and all that shit. But it occurred to me that you haven’t said much along those lines.” Sandhurst sat stone-faced and mute. “In fact, the only story I’ve ever heard you tell was about your stepfather burning your last picture of your real dad.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Your story.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“No. Just anything. Give me anything. What was your family like? What’s behind your bouts of depression? Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“Oregon.”
“Come on.”
Boyd’s persistence made Riddley uncomfortable. If Sandhurst wanted to talk about that shit, he would. Who did Boyd think he was, anyway? A dime store psychologist, pushing some sort of open communication thing he learned from his own family therapy sessions way back when? He could be such an ass.
Then it occurred to Riddley that he didn’t really know much about Sandhurst’s background either.
“Look, I told you before, you don’t want to hear about all that.”
“Actually, I do.”
“It’s not a happy story.”
“Well, neither was my childhood, but at least I trust my friends enough to be open about it with them.”
Boyd’s comment seemed to get to Sandhurst. He looked startled. Almost hurt. Riddley still didn’t expect him to take the bait and open up. He hardly ever had before. Yet as Sandhurst sat there staring into the fire, he seemed to be thinking about it, maybe working himself up to answering. If he were, it seemed a great struggle for him. The earlier happy glow had already faded from his face, replaced by a hardness. And as he continued to sit there quietly, his face went on changing. With glacial slowness, his expression grew dark—dark and sad, then dark and angry—his eyebrows furrowing, the corners of his mouth turning down.
Boyd saw the change too, and seemed as troubled by it as Riddley was. “Hey, I’m just giving you a hard time. If you don’t want to talk about it, no worries.”
Sandhurst remained still as a statue, as though he hadn’t heard a word Boyd just said. But the ferocity of his expression was now downright frightening. He lifted one hand from the knee on which it rested and, for just a moment, turned it palm-up as though in a gesture intended to accompany some statement, though he remained silent. He returned the hand to its original resting place on his knee.
At last, he spoke, still staring into the flames. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, his voice subdued, heavy, angry. “A story that’ll put it in a nutshell for you. After that, if you want to hear more, just say so.”
“Oh. Uh, okay.”
Sandhurst picked up a smooth beach stone and squeezed it in his right hand. “One Autumn,” he began, “when I was maybe six years old, a black Labrador puppy followed me home from school. For several days, I tried to find its owners but didn’t have any luck, so my mother said I could keep it. She was a sweet puppy, maybe five months old. A little ball of fluff. I named her ‘Daisy.’ I built her a little house out of scrap wood I found in town. Even gave her the pillow from my own bed and went without. Every day at school, all I could think about was getting home to play with her. We had a game where I’d lie face down on the ground and cover my head and she’d try to stick her nose in to lick my face and get me to sit up so she could jump in my lap and cuddle. She was the sweetest thing. I loved her.”
“Anyway, one day I came home from school and found my stepfather sitting on his piece of shit old piss-smelling wingback chair, drunk as usual, staring off into space. As I go to tiptoe by him, he says, without even turning to look at me, ‘boy, if you want dinner tonight, you’d better go out back and bury your dog.’ I remember standing there, my feet frozen to the ground, my heart racing as I comprehended what the bastard had just told me, when he says ‘little bitch wouldn’t stop crying. You shoulda taught that bitch not to cry.’ That was it. Then he closed his eyes, and I swear the motherfucker was smiling to himself.”
“For whatever reason, I have this vivid memory that it smelled like fried onions from whatever he’d cooked himself for lunch. When I finally willed my feet to move, I went out back, opening the door slowly, afraid of what I’d see. And there, in the middle of our weedy yard, lying on her side in a little pool of red, was my beautiful Daisy, dead, her mouth open, her little pink tongue hanging out, her fur all wet with blood and flaps of skin torn open so that you could see her insides. He’d shot her with his shotgun. And a dirty six-inch length of her intestine was strung out along the bloody earth behind her. So you see, she hadn’t died right away. She’d tried to get back to her shelter. To the little doghouse I’d built for her. I scooped up her little body and held her tight in my arms, nuzzling her ear—” His voice broke. Riddley saw a tear run down his cheek. “It was years ago, but—”
Sandhurst tipped his head to wipe the tear on the shoulder of his coat, taking a moment to master himself before continuing with a gruff impersonation of his stepfather: “‘There’s a shovel in the shed,’ he told me when I turned to see him standing in the frame of the back door. He stood there staring at me with his colorless devil’s eyes, and the bastard was grinning.” Sandhurst shook his head. “Right then, I knew I was looking into the eyes of pure evil. All I could think was ‘why?’ What had created this evil? Where had it come from? I hated that man. Truly hated him. I fantasized about pouring gasoline on his passed out, drunk body, setting him on fire, and laughing as he runs screaming out of the house and down the street, slowly burning to death.”
He extended an index finger and stared at it. “But you know what the worst thing was? It was that my mother just stood by and let it happen. Not just that time, but over and over again, stood there and did nothing. It wasn’t just that she was afraid. It was that she didn’t care. Didn’t love me. It took me a long, long time to realize that. I didn’t want to realize it. But when I couldn’t deny it anymore,” he shook his head again, “I didn’t want to live.”
Sandhurst sat quiet for a moment, then added, in a pleading, disbelieving tone, “I was a child. Just a child. How could somebody—” he broke off again, got up and walked off into the darkness.
Riddley shot Chapman a worried look.
“Let him go,” Chapman said.
The group sat silent. Riddley could scarcely believe the things his friend had endured as a young child. How could Sandhurst, such a kindhearted person, have lived through such hell and ended up so normal and so good? How could anyone bear such horrible memories?
“It sounds like my folks and Sandhurst’s folks should get together for pinochle,” Chapman said. “They could compare stories of assholeness.”
“No shit,” Boyd said. “They could probably give James McNeil’s folks a run for their money for ‘assholes of the century. Along those lines, Chapman—talking about fucked up parentage and childhood—I want to know how you didn’t end up a psychopath serial killer.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“Really now.”
“I was lucky, I guess. Goodness intervened.”
“What goodness?”
“My best friend in grade school was this guy Kyle Austin. He lived down the street and we played on the same baseball team, smoked a lot of dope together, all that good stuff. Anyway, when things were really going to shit with my family, his family more or less took me in and treated me as one of their own. Gave me all kinds of emotional support. Let me sort of hide out.”
“What a lucky break,” Boyd said.
“The funny thing is I had nothing to offer them in return. I mean nothing. I was so screwed up back then. So pissed off at the world. I hated my family, school, my teachers, pretty much anybody who got in my way. But the Austins took me in anyway. Treated me like family. It was like my just being friends with their son was good enough for them.”
“So you give them the credit?“
“They helped, that’s for damn sure. Who knows where the fuck I’d be if they hadn’t been there for me.“
“Does it all come down to random chance?“ Riddley asked. “The luck of where you’re born, the DNA you get, the shit that happens or doesn’t happen to you? Is that really all there is to it?“
“Good fucking question,“ Chapman said. “I was definitely lucky that I was friends with someone whose family had room in their hearts for me. But sometimes I wonder about shit like what if my mom had gotten to that bar five minutes later than she did, and never met my asshole second stepfather, and instead met some great guy who loved kids, you know? Or what if James McNeil’s father had caught the flu so he couldn’t go out fishing on the day he drowned, and instead got to raise his son to manhood? Or what if one of us had to live McNeil’s life? Walk in his shoes? Would we have ended up as killers?”
Eventually Sandhurst came back and the conversation took a welcome turn for the mundane: favorite bands, stories of diarrhea attacks, how many girls Boyd had hooked up with, and so forth. But their talk was more subdued than usual, and Riddley had the sense that they were all emotionally worn down from talking about their parents. Even when they laughed along at the funny stories being bandied about, their laughter sounded hollow, and their eyes betrayed a certain darkness and fatigue.
As usual, they all drank a lot of beer. And as usual, Lazko and Sandhurst drank more than the rest of them, both growing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the evening wore on. As conversation started to wane, Chapman and Sandhurst each got up to go take a piss. When they failed to return after twenty minutes, Boyd wondered aloud, “Where the fuck are those guys?” He and Riddley left a passed-out Lazko by the fireside to go look for their friends. They walked from one end of the little cove to the other, but Chapman and Sandhurst were gone. “They must have climbed out,” Boyd said.
“Sandhurst? As drunk as he was?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I wonder what the hell they’re up to.”
Riddley and Boyd returned to the fire and cracked open a couple fresh beers. Riddley tried to stay awake until his friends returned. But he eventually grew cold and began to shiver. Visions of being warm and cozy in the thick winter sleeping bag waiting in his tent beckoned to him. Finally, exhausted from shivering and chilled to the bone, he crawled off to bed.
*****
The next morning, Chapman and Sandhurst were back. Seeing the two of them drinking coffee by the fire after popping his head out of his tent, Boyd asked, “Where the hell did you two go last night? We thought you drowned.”
“We just hiked around a little bit,” Chapman said.
“For more than two hours? In the middle of the fucking night?”
“We compared childhood memories a little bit, too.”
Don’t ask, Boyd, Riddley thought. Just don’t ask. While Riddley’d felt a little left out when Chapman and Sandhurst wandered off the night before, he was now thankful he hadn’t been included. Heaven knew what dark and depressing things they’d talked about. Looking at their faces now made him even more grateful he’d stayed put. They both looked truly downtrodden. Of course, that could have been because they’d been up half the night drinking and smoking cigars. But Riddley was sure there was more to it than that. Fortunately, Boyd didn’t press them for further detail.
