FALSE FRONT (6 page)

Turning
his head away from the dream-haunting contortion on Faye’s face, the driver raises
his hands in arrest.

            “Faye,
the police will be there soon,” the dispatcher’s voice calls out from the
distance of a shattered screen.

            Faye
continues to wail until nothing’s left. Until her cords shred. Until she gives
out. Until nothing but sick silence remains throughout the neighborhood.

Faye’s
mouth still hangs unhinged, and strings of spit leak from her lips. Her raw
eyes are unblinking and swelling as she looks into the vehicle. She’s frozen
like that, and the driver keeps his hands raised, blocking the view.

Curious
neighbors wander out of their homes. Everyone watches her agony from their
porches, their front lawns, and from the secure windows inside of their homes.
Some of them on the phone tell VPD dispatchers what they are witnessing.

Faye
presses the hot tip of the gun against her temple, biting her flesh. Her finger
shutters, and she takes a deep breath.

The
sobbing of a troubled child pierces a silent street.

“Mama?”
the child says through wailing sobs.

Faye
drops her chin to her collar and the gun shakes in her hand.

“Mama?”
several boys yell in the distance.

Lowering
the gun back to her side, she says, “If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must
I can.”

Two
police cars enter the block with blaring sirens and flashing red and blue
lights. One car stops at the 1982 foster home and the other comes to a stop
behind the white sedan. A built officer steps out of the squad car and examines
the scene in front of him. He places his hand on the handle of his .45 and asks,
“Everything alright?”

 The
scared bald driver of the sedan leans out his window and points to the front of
his car.

“Ma’am,
can you to put the gun down?”

Faye
breaks from her paralyzed posture and slides down the hood, smearing blood,
tears, spit, and snot over the white paint. She collapses to the street and her
back rests against the front bumper. She scratches the warm tip of the gun
against her legs and yanks them into her chest. She’s bawling and holding her wet
distraught face in her hands.

“Okay,”
she whispers in a cat-clawed voice.

“Faye
Knightly, is that you?” The officer asks.

 She
forces a nod from her hidden head.

“Why
don’t you toss the weapon away, Faye?”

She
tilts her head around the car, glaring at the young officer. He does his best
to force a sympathetic smile. She tosses the gun to the asphalt to her side. He
nods at her and begins to move toward her.

He
stands over her and places a sad hand on her shaking shoulder and then talks
into the mic on his own shoulder.

Just
down the street from where Faye ran
,
a black, glossy,
wooden front door with Est. 1982 in gold above, is blown back and forth from an
increasing wind. Four children of varying ages cry, standing just outside of
the doorframe.

“Can
I call someone for you, Faye?”

“Gypsy
firs—”

But
she breaks off her request.

“Who?”

“Gypsy’s
gone.”

“Who,
Faye?”

“First
Gypsy. Now Fredrick. I’ve lost another son.”

“Faye,
everything will be okay.”

She
glares up at him.

A
voice echoes from the officer’s shoulder informing him a search is going on at
82.

The
fellow officer who stopped in front of the house flings his car door open,
leaps from his vehicle, and blitzes to the front yard.

“You
boys stay right there, don’t move. Everything is going to be okay,” he says.

 But
his courage fades in a flash as he slips to a stop, tossing his hands out like
someone’s taking a swing at his face. Below him, his boots leave sliding tracks
in a pool of blood. Gruesome violence buckles his knees, nearly knocking him
out.

“What
the fuck? What the fuck?”

One
of the boys screams, tears pouring from his scared brown eyes.

The
officer squeezes his eyes shut, turning away from the butchering. He gags and
puts a hand over his mouth. Backing up from the scene, he coughs a few times
into his fist, trying to hold back what’s forcing its way up. He gags a few
more times and takes several deep breaths. He chokes again, but coughs it away.

“Boys
close your eyes. Don’t look. Just close your eyes.”

“Mama
went that way,” one of them says, appearing to be the oldest. He points toward
the track of bloody steps.

“I’m
going to bring her to you. You just stay right there and close your eyes. Close
your eyes and don’t look.”

The
four boys close their eyes, still crying and mumbling.

After
gaining his composure while cursing everything around him, he inhales fresh
evening air and faces it again. Fumbling forward, he squats down next to a
young man lying gutted open and lifeless on his back in the grass. The layers
of raw flesh look so thick when unzipped. He checks for a pulse.

 Because
people do weird things when they’re traumatized.

But
the pulse has been torn out of him like the rest of him.

“What
the fuck happened to you?” The officer asks the dead man, scanning over the
body, looking for it to speak to him. He tilts his shaved head toward the
victim, crawling his frightened eyes all over the brutality before him.

“Someone
carved you like a pumpkin.” The officer stands up over the body to get a
different perspective. He steps away from the body, getting a bit of distance,
and surveys the victim again.

Two
deep jagged connecting triangular marks with the letters Y and P in the center
of them are carved across the man’s exposed torso. A slash just below the belly
creates an upside down kangaroo-like pouch where it looks like all of the man’s
insides were clawed out of him. Chunks of flesh from the mutilated body are
tossed around the yard. Fredrick’s right hand, extended and stiff over his
head, has his two center fingers hacked off.

“Holy
Fuck,” the officer says, and leans his face into his shoulder mic. “He’s all.
He’s all torn to shit, man. I don’t know. We need. We need everyone. Assistance
needed. Bring everyone. Homicide at—” He looks around the yard and up at the
house from his squatting position, and his eyes stop on the golden numbers.
“Homicide at the 1982 Foster Home.”