Are You Afraid of the Dark?
‘I snuck out,’ Reggie said.
The man nodded solemnly, as if considering something of immense importance.
‘You maybe … shouldn’t help me … anymore,’ he said, his voice gaining resolve, becoming stronger, more assured.
‘Why not?’ Reggie asked.
‘I’m not a good … person,’ the man said, choking back a cough, leaning to the side and spitting. Reggie looked at the spit, saw it was tinged with blood.
Then he looked back at the man.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
For a time the man said nothing.
Then he turned back to Reggie and did just that.
***
‘I kill people,’ he began.
‘Why?’ Reggie asked, mildly shocked by the man’s admission, and at the same time immediately interested. A part of him knew he should be scared if the man was telling the truth. Knowing the man was telling the truth, however, didn’t bother him as it should.
Reggie had seen death, close up, on a parking lot’s asphalt. And countless times afterward, replayed in night terrors. Its constant assault over the past year had numbed him.
‘For money,’ the man said.
‘Good people or bad people?’
‘Any people,’ he said. ‘Whomever I’m paid to kill.’
‘How many people have you killed?’
‘Many,’ he said slowly with a small nod of his head, as if confirming the answer. ‘Many people.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘A long time,’ he said with another nod. ‘A very long time.’
‘Does it pay well?’
‘What?’ the man said, a slight note of surprise in his tone.
‘Killing people,’ Reggie asked. ‘Does it pay well?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t need the money anymore.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t.’
‘So why do you keep doing it?’
He didn’t answer immediately. It was as if speaking gave the man strength, but in pausing his body rattled with laboured breathing. When he spoke again the tremors passed.
‘I guess it’s all I know how to do,’ he said.
‘Do you like it?’ Reggie asked.
‘Do I like it?’ the man repeated, taken aback once more.
‘My dad did many jobs until he found what he liked doing,’ Reggie said. ‘Then when he found the job he liked, he never left it. We don’t have to do things we don’t like. So you must like doing it.’
The man said nothing.
‘You must like killing people,’ Reggie said.
‘There’s a power in it,’ the man finally said. His hand roamed and found his gun, stroking it, almost as if he wasn’t aware of it. ‘Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands. That you can end them and the world will continue as if they’d never existed at all.’
Reggie nodded as if he knew what the man was talking about.
But he didn’t speak. Waited instead for the man to continue.
‘There’s a thrill,’ the killer said, ‘a rush when I pull the trigger or tighten the wire around the throat or sink the knife in the belly. There’s no one to tell me what I can and can’t do. I answer to no one.’
‘Have you killed women?’ Reggie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you killed children?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What about God?’ Reggie said.
‘What about Him?’ the man asked.
‘What about hell?’
The man shook his head slowly. He smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile or even a smile of amusement, like he thought what Reggie said was funny or stupid or both. It was a sad smile, like he missed something he’d once been fond of.
‘I’ve never seen anything that would make me believe in a heaven or a hell,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen cruelty, and greed, and men and women pushing and manoeuvring to make it to the top. Only to find that when they’re at the top there’s somewhere else they want to be. Somewhere higher.’
‘Will you kill me?’ Reggie asked.
The man stared at him long and hard.
‘I haven’t yet, have I?’ he said.
‘That’s because you still need me,’ Reggie said. ‘You’re not healthy enough yet to get along on your own.’
The man smiled again and nodded sagely.
‘That’s very perceptive,’ the man said. ‘Always mind the details.’
‘Will you kill me when you’re better?’ Reggie asked.
‘No,’ the man said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we have a deal,’ the man said. ‘And in my line of work, a deal’s a deal. A man’s word means everything.’
‘What if I break it?’ Reggie asked. ‘What if I call the police?’
‘You won’t,’ the man said, looking at him intently, as if he were reading fine print on a contract.
Under such scrutiny, Reggie had to look away.
Not because he was scared, though. And not because of any suggestion of threat beneath the man’s words should the deal be broken. But because, Reggie realized, he knew he wouldn’t call the police.
He’d made that decision the moment he’d run up to help the man and hadn’t turned away even after seeing the gun beneath the jacket.
Reggie looked away because the killer, having known him only a few hours, already read Reggie like a book. This was the kind of insight that only a close family member had.
Someone like a mother … or a father.
They were quiet for a time, looking across the space at each other. The lantern was lit but carried hardly a few feet. Outside the open windows of the tree house the night was heavy and dark. As if the two of them were in the last habitable space in an abyss.
The man looked at his abdomen, then out the window nearest him, then at Reggie again. He looked tired, aware, and restless all at the same time, like how Reggie felt when he had a big test the next day at school. Something important that much else depended on.
‘You should probably go to bed,’ the man said.
Reggie nodded and moved to the ladder.
‘I think I’ll need something for infection,’ the man said.
Reggie looked back and nodded again.
The man gave him the names of some drugs. Some for pain, stronger than the aspirin, he told Reggie he could find in a store. Others, he’d have to look around at home, maybe search his parents’ medicine cabinet. The man told Reggie to be back as soon as possible in the morning with them.
Reggie nodded again and started down the ladder. Then he paused and poked his head back up.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Ivan,’ the killer said.
‘I’m Reggie,’ he said.
The man nodded in his direction.
‘Good to meet you, Reggie,’ he said.
‘Are we friends?’ he asked.
The man smiled that same sad smile for the third time.
‘I guess we are at that,’ he said. ‘Now get along to bed.’
Reggie gave a little wave and descended the ladder. He jumped down the last few steps and turned back towards home.
The distance and darkness from the woods to the house seemed immense; shadows everywhere where things could hide. Yet he wasn’t frightened at all. He felt as if there was something watching his back. Something protecting him. Something that killed and wasn’t afraid of hell and didn’t answer to anyone.
In fact, the walk back was quite peaceful.
2.
Reggie awoke rested and energetic. He ate his breakfast fast and enthusiastically and this seemed to please his mom. He told her the pancakes were great and swallowed them down with a large glass of orange juice. This made her smile.
Dropping his dishes into the sink, he told her he was thinking of riding into town. This seemed to make her even happier.
‘It’s good for you to get out and do things,’ she said. ‘You’ve been holed up in this place too long.’
No doubt she assumed a trip to the comic book or video game store was his destination. Reggie said nothing to make her think otherwise. He just smiled back and walked out of the kitchen.
Upstairs, he showered, dressed, then left the house, wheeling his bike out of the garage for the first time in months. He checked the tyres, hopped on, and was soon down the road and turning onto the highway. The desert road twisted downwards, a serpentine thing, and the town out there ahead of him, miniscule but growing. Like a toy model magically rising to human dimensions.
A mile down the road he saw the sirens, flashing red and blue.
To either side of the highway desert fields stretched to the horizon in great white expanses. Sparse cacti and trees and bushes dotted the bone-white stretches like stragglers of a great migration. Periodically, ditches and arroyos dipped the surface like moon craters. Men and women in police department blue and sheriff’s department tan spread out to either side of the highway, moving further from the road and deeper into the fields. Some lingered by the shoulders of the road and leaned against open patrol car doors and spoke into radios.
A young deputy flagged him with a wave when Reggie rode near and he braked in front of the man. Reggie squinted in the morning sunlight and visored his eyes with a hand to look up at the deputy.
‘How’s it going, kid?’ the deputy asked. He chewed gum or tobacco like cud as he spoke, and hooked his thumbs in his belt like a movie marshal swaggering into town.
‘Fine, officer,’ Reggie said, being respectful as his parents had raised him to be.
‘Where you off to?’ the deputy asked, not really looking at Reggie as he asked the question. He looked this way and that to either side of the highway, like he wanted to be out there with the others, and not on the sidelines directing bicycle traffic.
‘Town,’ Reggie said. ‘It’s summer break.’
‘Yeah,’ the deputy said, turned and spat a large black wad, ‘well, just be careful.’
‘What happened?’ Reggie asked, following the deputy’s lead and turning and looking out into the barren desert fields where others were fanning out, checking ditches, peering behind pathetic gnarled trees and rocks.
The deputy looked at Reggie for the first time. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth.
‘There’s a dangerous man out there,’ he said, not doing a good job at keeping the amusement from his tone. ‘A really bad, dangerous man.’
‘That so?’ Reggie asked, trying to sound interested and worried at the same time.
‘That’s so,’ the deputy said, grinning.
‘What’d he do?’ Reggie asked.
The deputy looked to either side again and then leaned in confidentially, as if he was sharing a secret. He motioned Reggie forward and Reggie pushed the bike closer with his feet on the ground.
The deputy cupped a hand conspiratorially around his mouth.
‘He raped and killed a woman and killed her kid,’ he whispered.
Reggie didn’t say anything.
‘You know what rape is, kid?’ the deputy said, speaking above a whisper now, but not by much.
Reggie nodded.
‘Do you really?’ the deputy said, cocking his head a bit like he didn’t believe Reggie. ‘Because I don’t think you really do unless you’ve seen the results.’
Reggie shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘We’ve got pictures,’ the deputy said.
Reggie didn’t know what to say.
‘Of the crime scene,’ the deputy elaborated. ‘I can show you, if you want.’
Reggie started pedalling again, steering around the deputy.
‘I’ve gotta go,’ Reggie said, his heart beating fast.
‘Stay on the road where people can see you!’ the deputy called after him.
The asphalt rolled along under him, the town drawing closer. The laughter behind him grew vague and distant and was gone. Leaving Reggie alone with his thoughts of pictures of raped women and dead children.
***
He chained his bike in front of the drugstore and walked in, the whoosh of the air conditioning meeting him in a cool wave. Brilliant white and sterile walls and floor made the place seem dreamlike. As he passed by the checkout area a clerk waved to him and said hi and Reggie said hi back and moved deeper into the store.
He found the pharmacy and drug aisles towards the back. A line mostly of old people stood in front of the window, behind which clerks in white lab coats browsed shelves for bottles and passed them over to the old people.
Walking past, Reggie peered down an aisle where a teenaged boy a couple years older than him was trying to discretely peruse the rubbers. He saw Reggie looking at him, and Reggie hurried past.
In the aisle with the aspirin and sinus and cold medicine he found some of what he’d come for. He had the names on a slip of paper in his pocket and pulled that out to compare it with what was written on the labels.
The man in the tree house had told him some of the drug names on the list wouldn’t be available over the counter, but Reggie thought he recognized them from bottles in the medicine cabinet at home. He grabbed a couple boxes off the shelves in front of him and headed back across the store to the checkout area.
Passing the aisle with the rubbers again, he saw the older kid and the kid looked up again as Reggie passed by. Reggie saw the torn box in the other kid’s hands, saw him moving as if to shove something in his pocket, before he stopped and looked up at Reggie.
‘What’s your problem?’ the bigger kid said. ‘Mind your own fuckin’ business …’
His words trailed off as Reggie moved past him and back towards the front of the store. He found the ten items or less express lane and put the packages on the counter. The clerk, maybe the same one who’d greeted him when he came in, said hi and smiled and Reggie said hi and smiled back.
He felt more than heard someone step into line behind him.
Reggie didn’t want to but looked.
It was the bigger kid who’d been stealing rubbers.
The bigger kid smiled at Reggie, and Reggie turned away, pulled out some money from his pocket, paid for the medicine. He thanked the clerk and headed out of the store and to his bike.
Bending, turning the dials on the lock to unchain his bike, he heard footfalls coming up behind him. Heard them stop very close. He could also hear the breathing of the kid behind him, like the puffs of breath from a prank caller.
‘Ain’t you the kid that cried last year?’ said the older boy.
Reggie ignored him and finished putting in the combination of his lock.
‘Hey,’ said the condom bandit. ‘I’m talking to you.’
Looping the chain out from around the spokes of the tyre, refastening it around the seat bar, Reggie rose and lifted a leg to swing over onto the bike. Caught off balance, the otherwise light shove of the older boy’s palms against his back sent Reggie toppling over.
His temple struck the wall the bike rack was bolted into.
Tangled with his legs, the bike clattered along with him and the pedals and spokes scraped him good along the calves and thighs. Pushing away from the bike, disengaging himself, he stood on shaky legs and touched his head where he’d hit it. His fingers came away without blood, but his temple throbbed smartly.
‘What the hell’s your problem?’ he said to the bigger kid, wishing he sounded braver and less pitiful.
‘I said ain’t you the kid that cried last year?’ the older boy said. He had a lazy smile on his face like this was nothing more than another day.
Reggie knew what he was talking about but didn’t say anything.
The older boy seemed vaguely familiar, like maybe he’d seen him around school. But being a couple years older, a senior most likely, Reggie probably hadn’t seen him much and couldn’t put a name to the face.
‘I don’t want no trouble,’ Reggie said. ‘I gotta go.’
He pulled his bike up and looked around the parking lot. There were people walking to cars and walking from cars, but none of them were terribly close by.
‘Yeah,’ the older kid said, ‘you’re him all right.’
He chuffed a wicked little sound that was something between a laugh and hocking a winner of a snot bomb.
‘You were walking to the office and crying,’ said the bigger kid. ‘Crying like a little faggot.’
Drugstore bag of medicine in one hand, gripping the handlebars, Reggie tried to steer away. The older kid stepped in front of him, placed a hand on the handlebar, a foot on the front tyre.
‘Did you poop your diapers that day?’ said the older kid. ‘Or did your boyfriend dump you?’
Reggie wanted to leave. His heart was thudding, pounding against his chest like a beast shackled. His vision blurred and reddened. He wanted to leave but the bigger kid was in front of him.
For some reason he thought of the man in the tree house. He thought of the crumpled bullet dug out of him. He thought of the shiny black gun.
Something in Reggie loosened. The pounding stopped. The blurry and red vision cleared. His formerly white-knuckle grip on the handlebars relaxed. He looked up at the older kid, looked him square in the eyes.
‘My dad died,’ he said.
The other kid blinked. His mouth worked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t know quite what.
‘So why don’t you go back to stealing your rubbers,’ Reggie said. ‘And while you’re at it, find someone with a dick who could actually use them.’
And just like that the older boy’s flustered moment was gone.
His fist found Reggie’s eye and down he went again, bike on top, hard sidewalk beneath. The older kid leaned over him and grabbed a fistful of Reggie’s shirt.
‘You watch your fucking mouth, dip shit,’ he said and shook him, making Reggie’s head bounce against the concrete under him.
‘Hey! What’re you kids doing there?’
The older kid looked up, let go of Reggie, turned and ran.
Reggie, slowly standing, touching his throbbing eye gingerly, saw the store clerk who’d greeted him jogging his way. He got back on his bike, turned it, and started pedalling. Across the parking lot, onto the street, the long way home before him.
3.
He handed Ivan the medicine and a bottle of water. The man didn’t look good. He was still pale and clammy, but he was conscious and alert, which Reggie took to be a good sign despite the pasty flesh of the man’s face, and the shakes that occasionally passed over him.
The man downed a couple of the Amoxicillin tablets Reggie had found in his mom’s medicine cabinet, coughed and spit up some of the water, wiped his mouth, and looked at Reggie. He pointed at Reggie, touched his own temple and eye in indication of Reggie’s.
‘What happened?’ he asked, reaching for the antiseptic cream and Ibuprofen Reggie had purchased at the drugstore.
‘Some asshole from school,’ Reggie said.
‘Why’d he do it?’ the man asked.
‘I told him he had no dick.’
Ivan smiled, and this made Reggie smile. Though a smile on Ivan’s face didn’t look so much like a smile, as it did a crocodile or shark showing its teeth.
‘That’s likely to piss someone off,’ the big man said. ‘Why’d you say it?’
‘He made fun of me crying once in school,’ he said.
‘Why were you crying?’ Ivan asked.
‘My dad died,’ Reggie said.
Ivan looked at him a long moment before he said anything. Reggie wasn’t sure he liked those blue eyes staring at him so. They weren’t like eyes at all, just as his smile wasn’t exactly a smile. His eyes were like gems, bright but lifeless.
‘Tell me about it,’ the killer said, and to his surprise, Reggie did.
***
‘My father died doing that job it was he liked doing so much,’ Reggie said.
‘The one that took him awhile to find?’ the killer asked.
‘Yeah,’ Reggie answered.
‘And what was it?’ Ivan asked, trembling briefly with a pained breath. ‘What was it that made him happy?’
‘He was a minister,’ Reggie said, watching the man’s face closely for some slight indication of how this made him feel. What killers thought of ministers was something that suddenly piqued his interest.
The killer said nothing; gave only a small nod.
Reggie continued.
‘Dad used to say that he was confused much of his life,’ Reggie said. ‘That he never knew quite where his life was going. As a kid in school he got Cs and Bs, completely average, never excelled at anything. He didn’t play any sports. Didn’t do any after-school stuff either.’
Ivan nodded.
‘I’ve been there before,’ he said. ‘Confused.’
‘He said his parents were worried,’ Reggie said, ‘but didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like their son was misbehaving or falling in with the wrong crowd or anything like that. So they couldn’t yell at him or punish him or nothing.’
‘So they left him be?’ the killer asked.
‘Yeah,’ Reggie continued. ‘He got through high school, did some college, but eventually dropped out. He went from job to job, worked at just about everything a man could work at. Construction, retail, clerical; he even went back home at one point and did nothing but volunteering, living off Grandma and Grandpa again, saying there wasn’t any point in making money.’
‘But none of it made him happy?’ Ivan asked.
‘No,’ Reggie said, shaking his head.
‘And how’d he come about finding God?’ the killer asked.
Reggie searched the man’s tone for any sense of mocking or contempt, but found none. The gut shot man seemed genuinely interested, but Reggie kept watching, intent, wary of the man and interested also.
‘Dad used to tell me Grandma and Grandpa were what he called social Christians,’ Reggie said. ‘They went to church because that was what people were supposed to do. But they never really talked about church stuff, never went to any functions. There was a Bible around the house that found itself moving from table to table, shelf to shelf, but no one ever read it.’
The killer was like a child at a campfire ghost story, rapt and attentive.
The words came easier than Reggie would have thought, talking to a stranger about his dad. Almost as if they had always been there, waiting to be said.
‘Until one day Dad did,’ Reggie said. ‘He read it cover to cover on his time off from jobs or volunteering. Then when he was done, he read it again. The third time through he started taking notes, cross-referencing things he read.’
Ivan was nodding again.
‘I’ve known people like that before,’ the killer said. ‘Get caught up in religion. Only to give it up again.’
Reggie nodded.
‘That’s what Dad said too,’ he said. ‘He’d talked to co-workers, heard people at church or in public praising God for everything from cancer remission to baseball games. And that’s why he never really took it seriously as a kid.’
The killer nodded his agreement.
‘Then he read the book for himself,’ Reggie said. ‘And things changed. He said much of the scripture made no sense at first. But some of it did. And as he kept reading and rereading, more of it did.’
Reggie paused, looking at the killer. The expression on the man’s wan face seemed pensive, attentive, and Reggie waited for the big man to ask a question or say something. When he didn’t, Reggie continued.
‘Eventually, Dad said, it got to where the more he learned, the more it seemed there was to learn. Frustrated but committed, he figured he’d try to strip it down to the basics. He figured the most important stuff had to be what the faith was named after. So he started to focus on the Gospels, the things Jesus said.’
‘I’ve listened to that sort before,’ the killer said, almost speaking over Reggie. ‘Jesus this and Jesus that. How we’re all sinners and it’s the grace of God that saves us. How there’s an end to things coming and a new thing starting.’
‘What do you think of it?’ Reggie asked, cautiously, hearing a note of annoyance in the big man’s voice.