Chapter 34

1

She’d spoken to the last of them and closed the door, thanking God it was over. Thanking God she’d at least done something. It was a selfish venture, in a way. Because she understood that if she’d just let her father’s finality rest the way it had without at least trying to celebrate his life, a hungry guilt would have pestered and gnawed at her like a rodent swallowed alive followed by a chaser of cheese. The food platters were picked clean, the foldable chairs (something she kept in the garage and had once erected during her husband’s many readings during their old life) sitting empty and purposeless. Again. As they would remain, she figured. She stood in the foyer for a moment, leaning against the closed door, wanting with everything in her soul to break down, to cry, to thank the stars she survived the event. But she knew Adam was hurting. Because she was. She was embarrassed, but a part of her knew this would happen. A part of her wanted it to happen.

            Do you really say so? Yes. She thought so. Because their lives had been a whirlwind; they lived in a bubble, what she would learn to believe had been an elitist bubble, and once that economist at Harvard finally pricked it, all manners of hell could finally somehow squeeze their way in. Like the men in the suits who’d broken Trevor physically after his mind was seemingly vanquished in front of the cameras. That life of excesses, that life of materialistic fortitude, finally ground down to a certain reality Trevor had hidden from her: it was all temporary, an illusion. You took it for granted.

            She had. Coming here was the slap in the face she needed to truly appreciate what she’d had. But she had never once during those frivolous escapades stopped to consider what it might mean to Adam to exchange the worldly goods for a real family. For a man he would be proud to call his father. That’s what Lew was for him. That’s what this all came down to. You sent Adam to give a speech about watching what was normal, what was ideal for him finally come crashing back down to reality; it would be like Trevor having you speak about that same life you once had after it was gone, to speak openly and honestly about being betrayed by someone you trusted, about a man pulling you and your son from a closet just to have you contact your daddy because he was assured the man would pay the loan owed by the liar you once thought you knew sitting tied to a chair. How do you think that speech would go? Would you be able to censor your honesty? Would you? Back then, no, she didn’t think she would. No, when those bad men left after she called her father, and after Lew spoke to the man with what she thought had been peppermint breath, she found her husband in the front room with a broken hand and a face that turned her eyes away and had her shielding Adam from seeing; because that man was not the one she married under the Redwoods. You can’t be mad at Adam. Not for being honest and for finding an audience to relay his candor. You just can’t. Because of what he’s been through. Because of the therapy, because of the dreams. And because you thought it might be different here. You were convinced taking him away from those bad dreams, actually re-locating him, would save this family. Would save your idealism, or at least your idea of it, what you’ve held onto for this long.

            Barb went up the stairs, aware that she was trembling. Aware that her history, that her family’s history, was always wavering like a bad dream, in and out of focus all the time. A reminder. She went to his bedroom door and wondered what she could say. She knew he was likely embarrassed. That his honesty would likely get him in trouble.

            She knocked on his door and didn’t hear an answer from him. He fell asleep crying. That’s what any normal kid would do after expressing so much, after opening the floodgates. She tried again and then opened the door.

            Adam was sitting on his bed. He was watching something on television. Something grainy, muted. He didn’t turn to look at her. She thought he might have been ashamed to.

            “Are you okay?” He didn’t answer, didn’t turn. She didn’t think he was being rude. She knew, after so many therapy sessions, after so many bad dreams, that he didn’t want to appear shaken. That his friends here at Reedy Creek likely took him for something unbreakable. “Look, I’m not mad at you. At all. I understand why you said what you did, and really…I think a part of me knew you would be open. I think a part of me wanted you to be open. For the both of us. But please, Adam, you need to talk to me. I’m hurting too. He was my…he was my father.”

            Adam finally did turn to her. He wasn’t crying. She saw he was holding something in his hand, sort of curled in his palm. “Mom, tell me what you see.”

            “What?”

            He motioned for her to sit down. The gesture was gentle. Polite. She stepped into his room and she felt a sudden warmth. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she would later think it was hope. She thought that sounded crazy on its face, but Adam’s eyes were lit with wonder. “You need to watch this. And tell me what you see.”

            She sat down next to Adam on his bed. It was as if he’d never given the speech, had never wandered off during the service, had never let Trevor know just exactly how he felt. “You don’t want to talk about what happened?”

            “Mom, please,” he said, without looking. He was rewinding the tape in the VCR. When he pressed play she saw the front of their house, saw the sheet of rain battering the roof, saw the windswept leaves and the flashes of light as the world played its guttural drum.

            “Adam, what is this? Where did you—”

            She saw the front door open, basking the wet and dreary front porch with light from the foyer; she saw her father standing there, alone, looking out into the wilderness and she felt her heart shudder. It was the night of the storm. The last night of the man’s life. “Adam, what is this?”

            Adam rewound the tape a bit and let it play again. “I told you I would find proof.”

            “Proof of what?” she said, still looking at the screen, feeling the warmth in the room now like blatant electrical pulses.

            Adam quickly reached forward and paused. Right as her father opened the front door, as he’d done in the last showing. As he would continue to do every time the tape was played.

            But this time Lew wasn’t there. Wasn’t in view. Because there was somebody else, frozen but there, between the squiggled white lines of static like lightning tears in the tape.

            “Who do you see?” Adam’s voice was somewhere in the distance now. Somewhere far.

            I know who I see. I know who I see but I don’t believe who I see. I know but I don’t believe.

2

“Oh my God,” Adam said, turning the page in grampa’s photo album. Seeing is believing. That’s what magic amounted to. It always did.

            The picture behind the plastic sheet was of a woman with dark hair, staring from the sides of her eyes at the camera as it snapped the photo, her profile absolute and perfect, and so familiar, her lips pursed and playful. He knew those eyes, knew that mouth. He’d seen them frozen already on his television, staring back at him, knowing almost, certain he would find this picture, certain he would amble into the room and turn the pages of a picture book to land on this one. Because answers were always accessible in Reedy Creek where somebody was watching.

            He peeled the picture out of the book, being careful not to fold it, to harm it, to put a crease through that face, because now he understood the power of this place. The magic.

            Grampa had written:

My guardian angel. She saved me from war. She will save me again. She made me that promise.

            The caption was naked now beneath the empty spot where the photo had once been, and Adam felt guilty for removing it. But it was his answer, it was, and he had to make sure once and for all.

            “There you are.” His mom had come into grampa’s room as he was on the bed, close to tears but enthralled by the possibilities. By what his grampa had actually opened the door to and his intentions for even coming to this place. To this place he said would become his grave.

3

“Mom.” Though she thought she said mommy. Certain of it. Because the woman she was looking at on the television, the woman staring back at her, was her mother the way she used to look. Way back when. Before the hospital, before those dreary eyes would regard her with thankfulness for visiting but horrified expectation for what came next; before her father would become waifish sitting in that room and living on coffee and packaged crap from the vending machine. This was the mommy that would sit with her at night when she was having a bad dream, the mommy who whistled when she made Saturday morning pancakes, the mommy who would garden in the backyard in her sundress, smoking a cigarette and speaking to the neighbors, the Constantines, over the fence as she pruned her geraniums while little Barb ran around in the grass and laughed and the world was open before her, was one large possibility not yet stamped out by the realities of choices and mistakes; this was her mommy the way she would always remember her, so youthful and beautiful, so pristine and above reproach.

            “I don’t understand…Adam…I don’t…” She couldn’t really speak. Couldn’t form words. Because they were choked back, lost in that place where memories sometimes overpower the present. Or at least make the now more palatable.

            “Grandma was his guardian angel,” Adam said, and Barb’s chest was suddenly warm, was suddenly flush with emotion and she felt her body welling. “Grandma came and took grampa away.”

            “But…it…doesn’t…” She wanted to say make sense. She did. But the words wouldn’t come. Because maybe she saw Adam’s hope for what it was. And maybe she understood now what her son was talking about; that kids were vessels of a different kind of sight, of a perception she couldn’t even begin to understand now. Not as an adult, not as the woman she’d become, so mesmerized by what Trevor’s intentions inferred; she’d forgotten over time just how powerful the face of that woman on the screen could be, just how captivating those memories truly were. “You…you saw this, didn’t you? The night of the storm…you saw this…” She didn’t look at Adam. She couldn’t. Because she saw in his eyes when she first walked in a level of belief that intertwined with his hope that was far too much for her to cope with.

            “Reedy Creek is magic, mom. This is why we even came here. This is the reason those bad men, the…the Low Breed, why they even came into our lives. So grampa could save us. So he could come to this place and be a part of it.”

            “Of what?”

            “Of what makes it special. There are so many doors here. So many. I’ve seen them. And grampa found one of them that took him to heaven.”

4

In the history of bombshells, this was perhaps the biggest.

            Eddie Hilton.

            It was a name that had become almost sacralised over time, that had inherited as part of its history a totemic draw that had Danny even dreaming about a guy he’d never knowingly met. Because it was his father’s bully. But was that how it even worked anymore? Was it? Because a tree was enormous above the surface and followed the laws of nature as part of its imprinted utility, but beneath there were a series of roots, so calculated and purposeful, and he figured Reedy Creek was the same; he figured this town was a tree, and the roots beneath, the arterial tunnels traversed by a man named Grimwood, watched now as the leaves began to die, as their sins leeched like parasites to the withering branches until the torpid and twisted trunk began to peel and shed. And Danny had access to those roots. He had access to the place beneath the sickness. And he thought that was somehow very spiritual, that he and his friends had stumbled upon and opened a connection that normalized coincidences, that invited the opportunity for a sight beyond practicality. He wasn’t even sure what that could be called: in Star Wars it was the Force, and Tolkien would have called it the magic of the One Ring; Stephen King even wrote about a telepathic kid with the Shining, and he thought all of these were strangely correct in their own way. That they were different answers to the same question.

            Maybe that’s why you turned Grimwood into the bogeyman. Why each of you turned him into your individual bogeymen. It was your last defense against getting pulled into this, getting swayed by something supernatural, something like Reedy Creek’s Force or Shining, something like its magic or influence. That all makes sense. Because none of this mattered before. None of this was applicable when you just played ball, when you were Ron Guidry and Adam was Jim Rice. Then it was just the game, it was just what you had. And then you found the farmhouse. Then you found the clearing and the stink of death, and you felt that door under the stairway and let the hum of a powerful generator, some machine, rattle into your bones and intrigue you. That’s what this has always been. Intrigue. And you let it pull you, you let it influence you. Not because you’re weak, but because in the end you just had to see what was behind the curtain. You might have said no to what was asked of you, to what the Wizard of Oz expected of you, but the intrigue, the influence, what is happening to the Creek as a result of your turning down the offer of the Force, it was far too powerful in the end for you to just forget it. Wasn’t it?

            All of that was true. He knew it. And it was all he could think about as he rode his bike toward Woodvine. Answers were more important to him right now. Not just because he felt betrayed by his father, but because the intrigue of knowing why his father came to Reedy Creek was too promising. Answers were addictive. Like the coke Robert Wilson snorted when he thought nobody was watching.

            Danny wouldn’t make grampa’s service. He had every intention of going. He did. But when he saw the name on that magazine subscription. The name of a man he’d had a dream about so recently, a man he would later meet in the boys’ change room, he understood he and his friends had found that farmhouse for a reason. That they’d entered it for a reason, and they’d watched those tapes for a reason. He was just relenting to the intrigue. The influence. To Reedy Creek.

5

There was somebody standing on the front porch, sort of hunched on the railing over the clearing, looking out at the handiwork of time. Danny had ridden past the arcade into Fenway and carried straight toward the highway; he didn’t want to see that place right now, to see those flowers laid in the grass, reminding him of where he should be. He listened to the trucks on the 34, listened to the whir of motors, and he rode in the dirt toward the access road grampa had taken when they first brought him into their circle. When Reedy Creek finally took the man into its fold and worked its sickness through him.

            He wasn’t sure how long it took him. He didn’t care. His legs were tired, his breathing tempered, but the feel of the breeze against his face, the feel of the sunlight bearing down on him, reminded him that outside the sickness of this place there was an entire world free of the rot. He could see the familiar jut of the farmhouse’s chimney, caught wafts of the death-pit where old carcasses went to decompose, buffered mostly by thick strains of pines; he pedalled through coarse grass and felt the weeds brush against his jeans, felt the ground itself trying to slow him, to divert him. He thought it seemed silly, but at the same time he figured there was some truth to the assumption. That some underlying power would warn him against venturing too close to the Force, the Shine, the One Ring.

            Grimwood was standing on the porch, his fedora pushed back some to show the lines in his forehead. When he saw Danny riding in from the south, through the field that hadn’t been tamped at all, he casually came to the stairs and waved at the boy.

            He knew you were coming, didn’t he?

            That wasn’t the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Danny had avoided the open pit by riding further east, looping northwest when he could clearly see the front of the house, the old jalopy on cinders, the overgrowth and the cornfields that, to Danny, were some sort of protection, some mechanism that meant to turn away interlopers by suggesting the place was up and running as part of the ethanol machine. Maybe that’s why there’s new windows, why Grimwood looks like a goddamn farmer standing up there with his pants hitched by suspenders and that fedora perched on his straw hair, his forehead almost sunburnt beneath the brim even though you know he never leaves the roots, never leaves the basement. Because he has you. He has you to do it for him. And you owe him a favor.

            He rode up to that back porch and those memories of summer flooded back. Throwing Adam that inside heat and watching the baseball disappear into the woods. Understanding, deep in his gut, that the mistake wasn’t just the pitch but what might come after. What might come as a result of breaching the deadwood, the border drawn in an arc around their Fenway; that was where the protection ended, where their imagination no longer held sway. Maybe that’s where Danny was different from his friends. His anger, his upset, it wasn’t all about being beat, of throwing the cherry; it was somehow knowing that would be the last pitch. That it would turn their attention from the game, from what they’d created, in honor of the exploration of shadows, of that place where they shouldn’t be.

            The clearing in front of the farmhouse was mostly bare. There were a few crows scattered throughout the grass like inkwells, and he thought he saw some squirrels near the forest line where cameras were mounted to trees with cut wires. Because what happened here, it was Grimwood’s secret. Danny hopped off his bike and walked it toward the stairs up the stoop. The man standing there, waiting for him, only watched as he leaned his bike against the rail.

            He’d thought long and hard about what he might say. But that didn’t matter now. He never expected to find Grimwood waiting for him. He probably watched you ride this whole way in his situation room. He knows where you are at all times. You let him in your life. He needs that, doesn’t he? Whoever he is, he needs you to let him in. He finds something you want, something you need, and he creates the quid pro quo. Is that even the phrase? The eye for an eye.

            “Did you check his mail, Danny?”

            Danny only nodded. Being back here, back at the place that spoke to him the first time he ever stepped foot inside the house, whispered to him in the tormented tone of one relinquishing something pure, something good for misfortune, invited the same opportunity of communication. The house had nearly made him violent, had unleashed something in him that first time. He remembered it clearly. Remembered wanting to attack Adam. To hurt him. And it was the same now. It clutched at your desperation, pulled it closer to the surface.

            “Are you surprised by what you found?”

            Danny was clenching his fists, feeling his wrists tremble with the strain. “I don’t…I don’t understand it.” That was the truth as clearly as he could see it.

            “Then let me show you something.”

6

The wall of monitors was abuzz with Reedy Creek as it existed in the insectile roots of the rotting tree above: images of people walking down Main Street, of the dispersing media caravan as what amounted to a press conference ended and vans drove this way and that, clogging the usually sparse roadways; along the top row he saw flickering images of his school, of students in a classroom, of the front lobby, the payphones and corn display; on other monitors he saw the interiors of what was normal to him, his hang outs, Buddy’s Hobby Shop, the fat man twiddling his pony tail as he leaned over his counter, playfully picking something from his teeth, and the movie theater’s lobby, empty and dark now, but with the promise for future showings as the popcorn maker waited to feed the next batch of dreamers. What Danny saw in this place was the decorated rituals of a small town laying bare their secrets to the men below watching all. It was the very source of the rot, that polyp on the root growing wider and longer, ever-reaching, taking one sin and another in an endless stream until the moral vacuity of privacy could unfurl the good intentions of mankind in the public world and prove its falsities, cutting deep, past the veneer of altruism, of selflessness to find the sociopathic truth that lies beneath, that coats the bone like lichen on a felled tree.

            But two rows of monitors near the center of the wall, just above the sight line of Steve and Bernard at their table, beneath the haze of cigarette smoke, didn’t show Reedy Creek but something familiar, something he’d seen many times now, something that proved memories were not just of experiences but perhaps even conversations and connections. That what his own father had told him about in the past, what he’d overheard or gleaned from conversations he wasn’t a part of, what he absorbed like the sponge that was a child in a world he was just beginning to see and understand, had all formed a unique reality in his own mind he could access when he had to. When he wanted to.

            These monitors showed the New York City skyline, before the World Trade Center towers were built, back when it was the Empire State Building commanding the horizon like an art deco needlepoint among the clustered rendition of man’s artistic genius. For whatever sickness you’ve discovered in this place, man can still rise above his barbarity to create, Danny thought, looking at that image, the way New York once looked, decades ago, the way it always appeared in his dreams. But that wasn’t true. It was the way New York appeared to him in his dreams ever since coming to Reedy Creek. Ever since finding this place.

            “I’ve watched people do evil things for as long as I remember,” Grimwood said, looking up at the monitors. “The point of surveillance isn’t just to protect the innocent, to deter crime, it’s to study humanity, to find an answer to those questions philosophers have tried to answer since Socrates badgered students and rewarded ignorance. Maybe that’s what I am, Danny. Something of a philosopher. But I am not a sophist in that I take what I’ve seen and turn it into a treatise on the human condition. No, because that would take the air out of our sails. How could we progress and achieve those monumental innovations that make even this project a reality, if we focused only on the darkest affirmations of our souls?”

            “Why is my father here?”

            “What happened to your father, Danny, is what happens to any one man who focuses his efforts on the darkness.”

            “I don’t know what…”

            But then he saw. Danny saw on those monitors above splaying out an older version of New York suddenly come to life, suddenly show movement as the cars began sputtering, old Studebakers and Plymouths, the kinds of cars he loved seeing on Happy Days reruns, or when Marty McFly sported around in 1955 for a jaunt that had Danny understandably perplexed as it centered its story around a mom with the hots for her son. And he could hear them, their engines, so loud and powerful, could hear the city as it would always sound, no matter the year: alive and electric. But beyond that street, whose name he could not see or would likely never know, was an alleyway, fire escapes jutting from the Brownstone like skeletal fractures, and beneath them in the moldy shadows the rows of dumpsters that Danny could smell even now—the rotting, fishy remains of diversity, of so much heaped trash sweltering in the humid tang of an Atlantic heat wave. And then the perspective switched, jumping from one camera to another, this one closer at street level, but focused still on that alley, the way Danny remembered it from his dreams. As if his mind had taken a paintbrush and copied its very essence on the canvas of his imagination.

            There was a teenager walking along the street, carrying a knapsack and wearing ape jeans that flared some over his shoes, his hair curly and long, washing over his shoulders with the sort of indifference that meant it was intentional. He looks like you. Put on a pair of Converse and a Yankees cap, and shit, that is you.

            But it wasn’t.

            It was his father. His father back then. His father from ago.

            “How the hell do you have this?”

            “Maybe I knew you’d want to see it, Danny. Maybe surveillance and memories are not that different. Maybe one might replace the other. Maybe machines will think for you one day. That is where progress is heading.”

            Danny remembered Grimwood said New York was a testing ground for the first full range surveillance project. 1968 in Olean, or something like that. He wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was the impossibility of this particular set up, of the technology, of his ability to hear with acuity every sound in that picture. Is it some sort of trick? Part of this place’s Shine or Force or whatever the hell you want to call it?

            His teenaged father walked into that alley, and every part of Danny knew that was wrong, knew he should have stuck to the main street where those cars veered and honked, where the world was at least civil, because in that dark and dank place he knew there was evil. Danny knew it. He could taste it on his tongue, had seen it. Had experienced it. Because he knew what would happen next; the bigger boy would appear from between those dumpsters, the boy named Eddie Hilton, the boy with a future ahead of him filled with ammonia and tittie pics.

            David Greenfield walked into that alleyway and Eddie Hilton stepped out from between the dumpsters. The way he was supposed to. The way history had written it. The way David’s son would dream it.

            “Hey Christ-killer.”

            “Shit.” Danny heard his father mutter this. It was a plaintive mutter, but something tangible as well, something real and afraid.

            “You little fuck. You know your cock-snipped pops talked to mine, right? I got a lashin’ ‘cross my fucking ass so red you’d think I was a savage. But he did it to prove a point to me. That if ya get caught by the Jews, if ya so much as invite spicion, ya deserve the payback, cause I wasn’t careful. Told me you fucks are good like that, y’are.”

            “I didn’t say nothing, Eddie.”

            “The fuck you didn’t,” he hollered, and his voice was horrible. Throaty and deep, like the bellow of a monster from some deep swamp. And Danny would think of the man with the mop, the man as he looked standing in the change room, his eyes almost dumb but cunning at the same time. “You half dick.”

            “I swear, Eddie, man.”

            “Your nickel nosed daddy told my pops I wanted to carve a Nazi…fuck…what is it? Swasi something or other on your forehead.”

            “You did!”

            “That was our secret. You fucking kike! I wanted to, but I didn’t. I didn’t. Cause we friends. Right?”

            “Eddie…I just want to go home. Please.”

            Eddie had moved so close to David now that Danny could see the guy’s eyes with clarity. And they were the same then as they were now. The same madness, the same vacancy. Run, dad. Please. Just run. But he didn’t think that was how it would go. He didn’t think his dad was being honest to him for all those years. He didn’t think his father could be honest. Eddie had extracted a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. David looked down at that blade, and there was hesitation as he nearly retreated, as he nearly hightailed toward the mouth of the alley. But he didn’t. Danny believed his dad was frozen there. That if Eddie had once threatened to carve a swastika in his dad’s forehead, he figured running and getting caught would only make the decision easier to make.

            “What happens?” Danny asked, not looking at Grimwood but aware the man was staring at him. Watching him.

            “And tell your daddy again. Your oven-escaping daddy. Didn’t his pappy and mammy see the business end of a gas nozzle?” Eddie laughed. “You’re walkin’ on their bones, snipcock, you are. Every step crunches their fuckin’ bones even if they’re buried somewhere in the…Ukraine or whatever. Buried like dogs. Cause that’s what ya are, Jew. An animal. Not like me. Like those people on the street. They don’t care a lick what might happen to ya, cause you’re just a New York rat. And I stomp rats.”

            Eddie grabbed David and threw him against the dumpster. His backpack fell into a puddle and ripped open, spilling out papers and a thermos. Something Danny’s grandma likely packed for him.

            “You’re gonna piss and cry to your pops. Ya skinned your knee. Your bag got wet. Your panties twisted up your bung and your dickhole got plugged with garbage water. Wah wah. Cause that’s what Jews do. They fuckin’ whine. They make up stories. They make up things like the Holocaust.” Eddie kicked David in the stomach and Danny watched his father writhe, skidding back against the dumpster and pulling his knees into his chest as his bully swung his blade this way and that, always reminding him that he was holding it. “My dad says the Holocaust never happened. Says the World Almanac even proves it was horseshit…says there were more o’ you Jews in ’48 after the War than before. Says Hitler was a fuckin’ scapegoat so you could take Israel from the sand niggers. You’re storytellers an’ bankers. Ya lie with our money, you little fuckin’ mockey.”

            “No…that’s not…true,” David forced out. “Leave me alone…please…”

            “What happens?” Danny asked again, watching as Eddie stepped forward and took his father under the arms, dragging him into the slatted darkness between the dumpsters.

            “You owe Hitler an apology, kike. You owe my uncle an apology. He fuckin’ died in France. Fightin’ for God’s Chosen. Why would God’s Chosen murder God? Why, huh, why? Why?” Eddie swiped out with the blade and Danny watched its business end slit through his father’s belt; he watched the leather splay one way and another. And his father was so quiet. He was so silent. Danny couldn’t see his face, but he watched as Eddie stuck his blade into his back pocket and pulled David toward him, hiking down his pants. Danny watched his father squirm, watched as Eddie clasped the belt loops in his father’s jeans as he sidled them down the teen’s thighs, exposing them to the murk, and a part of him understood what was happening. A part was seeing this as one segment of a longer story, of a history between the two that would prove his father might have had enough, might have believed Eddie was really going to carve a swastika in his forehead, so he told his father, and David’s father went to Eddie’s and a chain reaction was set that resulted in something far more debasing than a physical scar. No, his father was always right when he said Eddie had bullied him mentally. That was never a lie. Danny had just put the lie in its place.

            “Jesus…Jesus Christ,” Danny whispered, wanting to close his eyes as he watched Eddie wrestle his father toward him with one arm and unbuckle his own belt with his free hand, the tip of his switch still jutting from his pocket but meaningless now. He watched as the waist of Eddie’s jeans shimmied down his ass; he watched as his father kicked back and Eddie struck the boy, knocking him on his stomach. He watched as Eddie stroked his father’s back and told him he was going to fuck the Jew out of him. That he wanted to see what power looked like, what Zionism felt like, what Jewry smelled like, that he was going to wear his father like a puppet.

            “Turn it off. Please. Turn it off.”

            And then the monitors along this row, beneath the colorful cornucopia of a Reedy Creek in motion, went black.

            Just before Eddie Hilton raped Danny’s father.

7

“He’s carried that weight since he was young. That psychological scar never healed. They never do. Never. Because dark acts are toxic. They require you to forget them, to repress them. Some people have that luxury. Children who were abused can grow up as functioning adults, because they understood that threshold between mental anguish and sanity was a small step. And life’s far too short.”

            “Eddie Hilton…he ruh—ruh…” Danny couldn’t finish the sentence. Grimwood had already excused Steve and Bernard from the room, and the television monitors were blank now. The room was eerily silent, just the circuitous pumping of the world’s machine somewhere in the distance, keeping the power on, keeping this experiment alive. He turned to Grimwood, tears welling in his eyes now. It was all so real. So palpable and thick. He could still feel the New York humidity on his skin, could taste it, could smell the garbage and hear the swish of that switchblade over the sound of a fire hydrant funnelling a water chute out onto the street for screaming children. “What happened to my father?” he finally demanded. He knew the answer to what he’d just watched. That he knew. But he didn’t know what happened after. He didn’t know what was true anymore.

            “Your father remained thirsty, Danny. He focused on one dark act for an incredibly long time. Eddie lived near your dad for seven years before his pops picked up and moved into America’s interior to try his hand on the Rust Belt. Racism trickles down, like rain down the leaf and stem of poison ivy. Eddie took his beliefs from his father. And his father from his. Hatred is usually a reflection.”

            “He did this more than once, didn’t he? Didn’t he?”

            “To know what your father’s done to get here, to finally find Eddie, would assume he’s expended much effort to right a wrong. I apologize you had to see what you did, Danny, I do. But sometimes seeing is believing. I’m not sure you would have understood if I just told you. If I’d just told you your school’s janitor abused your father years ago. Because the notion sounds rather cinematic. And I think your father is playing out his own role in a story now.”

            “He wasn’t transferred here. Was he?”

            Grimwood only shook his head. “Your father’s been playing a game for some time. Feeling out the world for intelligence, to find bad men who don’t want to be found. We’ve both noticed this place, Reedy Creek, draws a certain type into its fold. And maybe Eddie Hilton understood, because guys like that, they seem to understand when the shit’s going to hit the fan. Who’s to know your father was the only one he ever abused? Men like Eddie sate their appetites on the fear of others, who they believe are their lessers. Your father was not transferred to Reedy Creek, Danny. He doesn’t hold a job here. Doesn’t go to the plant day in and day out to crunch numbers the way he once did when he brought you to work with him in New York. But even then I’d suspect he wasn’t working the ledgers but mapping the footprints of the one from that alley. Your father is consumed, much like the Jews who suffered German occupation, who watched their families slaughtered by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, who watched these men who oversaw the camps, who raped and beat them, who de-humanized them like Eddie did to your father, face no punishment greater than a fine or confiscation of already plundered property. The greater part of the German army should have been sentenced by a world tribunal, publicly hanged or gassed. The Nokmim were avengers, Danny, like your motley crew of superheroes in the comics, but they were real. They sought vengeance where legal recourse had failed them, where geopolitics had failed them. I know that might sound like nonsense to you, but in the world of adults, government negotiates the terms with all manner of bad people. The US knew the Soviets were bad, but they remained friendly in order to ally against the Nazis. And then they became the bitterest enemies in a war of stalemates that lingers even now. Adults are just as childish as you’d think: their petty differences and hostilities burgeoning decades of inconsistency, of a world on the brink of nuclear winter. What these Jewish Avengers did was become the judge, jury, and executioners their world leaders had failed to become; they found ex-SS officers, some even civilians now, and hanged them, or cut their brakes, disguising their deaths as suicides or accidents because the civil world didn’t need to know what happened in the shadows. That revenge was often best when it was secret. They passed judgment throughout the world, wherever these war criminals found sanctuary. Your father is the same, Danny. He is a Nokmim.” Grimwood went toward the table where Steve and Bernard had been sitting, their ashtrays filled with butts and their coffee cups still steaming. The Commodores rattled their endless streams of numbers and information. The man picked up a file and brought it to Danny.

            “You promised me a favor, Danny boy.”

            “You have to tell me more. Please…what is my dad going to do? What?”

            Grimwood smiled. “The timing is up to him now. It’s taken many years, but he’s finally found his man, hasn’t he? And I think a part of him preferred the chase. The hunt. Because there was nothing definitive about it; he could stew in his hatred and create a monster out of a memory. But he’s seen Eddie the way he lives now. And he is pathetic, is he not?”

            Danny only nodded, thinking of the janitor’s ramshackled place at the edge of town, of the barren yard and the pin-up posters of women creating an idealized world into which his outside ugliness could disappear to the garish beauty of something fake. Something of his own making and control.

            “Does my mom know?”

            “It’s your father’s secret to tell.”

            Danny felt hollow. He felt his family disappear to the reality of this story. Of this revenge tale. He took the file from Grimwood and opened it. There were pictures, lurid images, of a large man with young boys. Sometimes two or three at a time. He didn’t know these boys, didn’t recognize them from school or from around town, but he understood what he was looking at wasn’t right. That the man in the pictures was evil, just like Eddie. “What is this?”

            “I want you to leave this folder at the address inside. Just on the front steps.”

            “For what?”

            “It’s what we do, Danny. We help each other. I gave you the opportunity once to work with me. To assist me. Maybe I wasn’t direct enough. Maybe I should have shown you your father’s memories earlier. But I didn’t, and maybe that’s my fault. I have a reason to be here, just as your father does. Mine is for a different kind of revenge. Reedy Creek hasn’t long for this world if we do not help it.”

            “And this will help?”

            “Did you know your father hasn’t gone unnoticed?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I see everything, Danny. I don’t often give forewarning to those who’ve been recruited as candidates, but you’re doing me a favor so I must oblige. The council knows about your father. They’ve seen him acting in the shadows, because his privacy has always been on display in this place. The Conspirator, they call him. The council has turned this town into its own game; if your father acts as judge, jury, and executioner, it will only provide the bad people in this town with a reason and ammo to take action. There’s your fair warning.”

            Danny’s heart hammered his rib cage. He looked at the photos, some of them on the verge of the sort of illicit act that required he take them to the police. But he didn’t think that was in the cards. He didn’t.

            “It was obvious, when you think about it. His coming to this small town on the brink of national success, but without noticeable employment. His lies, to you, to your mom, they only go so far. Your father has paid for your time here the only way he knew how to, beyond the miniscule dividends owed him on the few successful investments he’s made when his mind was actually into business and not on the trail of his tormentor. He’s sold cards to that snivelling man in the Hobby Shop, who has his own secrets. His own demons. He’s sold that man many cards, old cards, those very gems you often smear the glass display with your nose when you press your face against it. The Goudey Babe Ruths. The 1948 Leaf Jackie Robinson. For a pittance of what the proprietor is asking for them now. The only cards your father is not willing to cede are his Mickey Mantles. Because the best parts of his childhood he still cherishes. And maybe he assumes once Eddie is gone for good, he can finally live again. He can breathe again.”

            Danny thought about all of the times the collector accosted him to ask about the ’52 Topps, their conditions, and how he might be able to convince the man to unload a few. Because the two were already mutually in a business relationship that was paying for their life here as his father loaded and unloaded a Beretta outside the house of a rapist. A racist and rapist. He swallowed.

            “I hate to be the purveyor of bad news. But it’s my lot in life considering what I’m made to watch: the world’s bowel movement.” Grimwood smiled. It was inhuman and gigantic, but at the same time it was kind. Or trying to be kind.

            “Will my dad be okay? If I talk to him…do you think?”

            “You know your father better than I do.”

            “I don’t think that’s true. Not anymore.” It was the saddest thing he’d ever said. And he would think about it as he rode his bike to the address in that folder. He would think about not knowing the man in his home, the man he talked box scores with every day and tried to fool with trivia. Because that man’s secrets made him a stranger.

            He rode his bike to the bungalow on a nice street called Deer Tail Road, its streets flanked by elms and slotted some in their shadows, showing only intermittent glimpses of sun, leaving the road blotted by individual golden rays. There was a ramp leading up the front door. For a wheelchair, he could only assume. He set the folder on the front step and noticed there was a note clipped on the inside. Something he hadn’t seen before when he was in Watchtower, when he’d watched his family and history change so suddenly to something unreal. As unreal and powerful as the Shine or Force in the Creek. He opened the file and saw a piece of paper. Printed on the top, in dark blue, it read:

            FROM THE DESK OF M. NAPOLITANO

            And written below, in pen:

            I know. And soon the people will decide what to do with you.