They (17 page)

They approached MacArthur Boulevard, and Vince directed Frank across the intersection. The park was just ahead of them, to the right. Frank pulled the Saturn into a parking slot away from other cars and killed the engine. Outside, a group of kids played scratch baseball in the open field of the park. To their right a group of women were seated at a picnic table scurrying about like busy bees, unloading baskets of food and talking as children played around them and on the playground. In short, it was a normal summer afternoon in the park.

Frank turned toward Vince, his mirror shades menacing in the closed space. “Okay, I think we’ll be cool here.”

“Nobody followed us?” Vince asked. He felt silly asking, but it seemed like a joke to him. He tried not to let his skepticism creep into his tone of voice.

“No,” Frank said. Then he jumped right into the subject at hand. “Do you remember any part of our childhood?”

“I thought you were going to tell me about my mother?” Vince asked, the cockiness of their earlier encounter at the restaurant creeping in. “And what do you know about Laura being—”

“First things first,” Frank said, holding up one leather clad hand to halt Vince’s flow of questions. “I’ll get to your questions as soon as I can. I promise. Please, just bear with me. How much of our childhood do you remember?”

Vince sighed and backed off from his confrontational stance, rea
lizing it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Might as well play Frank’s game his way. “I just remember snatches of it.”

“Like what?”

Vince shrugged. “Kindergarten through second grade basically. I remember playing with a bunch of other kids after school. I think you were one of them. There was a little girl with blond hair…our parents were friends with her parents—”

“Nellie,” Frank said. At the mention of that long lost childhood name of the little girl Vince had played with, he felt a sense of nostalgia.

“Yes,” Vince said.

“What else?”

“I remember…” Vince thought hard about this, dredging up long buried memories. “Just various people that used to come by. I don’t remember who they were.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“Just you and Nellie,” Vince said, trying hard to dredge his memory. “I remember a guy named Tom…I think he was your father.”

“He wasn’t my father,” Frank said, almost spitting the words out. “He had a hand in raising me, but he
wasn’t
my father.”

“I remember an older guy. An Uncle I think.” His searching mind unearthed the name. “Sammy, I think his name was? Uncle Sammy? That sounds weird, but—”

At the mention of Uncle Sammy, Frank turned away from Vince, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He appeared to be visibly affected, as if he’d just heard a set of fingernails being scratched against a chalkboard. “That’s Samuel Garrison,” he said, softly. “Yeah, you got that right. What else?”

Knowing that the mention of Samuel Garrison bothered Frank immensely and wondering why, he plunged on. “There were others, I don’t remember all their names. There was an older couple named Paul and Opal…that’s an old fashioned-sounding name, isn’t? Opal? I remember a black guy, real thin, friendly…a real cool dude. Sharp dresser. I think his name was Bobby. There were a couple of young guys that my dad used to hang out with. Maybe it was my mom’s boyfriend. I’m still not so sure who my dad
was
. They looked like hippies. A lot of the people that used to come around were kinda hippie like, but they were also respectable. You know, normal looking.”

Frank was nodding. “You remember more than I thought you would then. Much more.”

“I remember you and I used to play together,” Vince continued. “We used to play with Nellie and a couple other kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes there were kids whose parents our folks hung out with. I don’t remember their names.”

“I remember them, too,” Frank said. “I don’t remember names much myself. I had to dredge them up with the help of regression therapy.” He motioned to Vince. “What else?”

Vince shrugged. “Just…it all ended. We moved, and you weren’t around anymore for some reason. I don’t remember why. Or maybe it was you and your folks moved.” He concentrated, trying to remember. “Yeah, I think that’s right. My mother told me you and your folks moved.” He looked at Frank. “Is that right?”

“Pretty much,” Frank said, looking out the window idly, as if he didn’t want to answer Vince’s question. He turned to Vince. “Anything else?”

Vince tried to remember but he couldn’t. The images floated in his mind, intermingling with the dreams: the darkness dream, the dream in which the weird man tried to kill him. They all swirled in his head like a kaleidoscope. He felt weird telling Frank all of this, especially since he barely knew the man, but then it
was
Frank Black, his childhood friend. There’d been a bond between them twenty-five years ago, almost brotherly like, and despite the long gap of not seeing him he felt he could tell Frank everything. He told Frank a watered down version of his mother suddenly packing him up in the middle of the night and moving back east. He related what he remembered about the drive. “Now that I think back on it, I get the feeling that my mother was running from something out here,” he said. “What she was running from, I don’t know. But I remember how nervous she was during the drive. Her determination to put as many miles down every day, her insistence that we stay in out-of-the-way motels, our changing cars every few states.”

Frank nodded through the narrative as Vince continued. He summed up their arrival in New York, then their move to Toronto, and then the move to Pennsylvania. He left out the stuff about his mother becoming increasingly fanatical in her religious views. He didn’t want to taint Frank’s ears with his theory that he believed mother had skipped California so suddenly because she’d angered some cultish hippies. It was his own pet theory he’d developed in the last day or two and he wanted to see what Frank knew about his mother before he voiced this opinion.

“That’s it. What about you?”

Frank looked out at the park, noting the activity around them. He looked in the rear and side view mirrors, as if checking to see if they were being observed. It made Vince a little uneasy. Then he keyed the ignition to activate the battery and pressed the power window button; it slid down. He turned the ignition off and settled back in his seat, twiddling with the keys. “When you say that you thought I’d moved,” he began, “it isn’t really the whole truth. The truth was, I was taken out of my home and placed in foster care and my parents were jailed for abusing me.”

It didn’t surprise Vince. Maybe it was the air of dysfunction that seemed to permeate around the man. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Frank’s mother, Gladys, and his stepfather had been pretty strict. He remembered thinking to himself once that he would have hated to live with them. While he never actually saw them physically strike Frank, the implication was always there. Mom used to always say Frank was “a bad kid,” and he certainly remembered the older boy as being sullen and troubled. This new revelation explained it.

Frank took off his shades. His eyes were dark brown and piercing. They were haunted, liquid pools of pain. “What I have to tell you is pretty heavy stuff. It’s…going to sound pretty crazy to you.”

“Nothing sounds too crazy,” Vince said, thinking back on the past week of hell he went through regarding his mother’s death and the attempt on his life.

Frank looked at Vince, then cast his eyes out at the circle of women around the picnic table, as if contemplating how to begin. “Before I was sent to the foster home something really weird happened that…I guess sort of precipitated the beating I received that eventually led to the arrest of my parents. A classmate of mine, a guy I remember quite well named Larry, was with me one day after school. I was in the third grade. We were playing together outside and my dad came home. He was furious that Larry was at the house. I wasn’t supposed to have guests over unless they were what he termed ‘pre-approved’; you and Nellie, kids that were the progeny of our parent’s friends. Kids from the neighborhood or from school were a no-no. He blew his top and began wailing on me. Larry got scared and ran into the house—
my
house. That neighborhood we lived in, if you remember, consisted of older homes.”

Vince nodded.

Frank continued. “Some of those houses had little basements. Ours was one of them. Larry made his way to the basement where I later found out he stumbled upon a woman’s corpse.”

A sharp intake of breath from Vince. “Jesus,” he said.

“He scrambled back up the stairs and out the back door just as my step-dad was dragging me into the house. He beat me up real bad, and when it was over the police were there. Larry’s folks had called them.” He looked up at Vince. “Guess what they didn’t find?”

“The body,” Vince said.

“You got it,” Frank said, almost deadpan. “They didn’t find a body. I had no idea until later that that’s why they came to the house. How my stepfather managed to get rid of it before the cops showed up, I still don’t know, but—”

“Wait,” Vince broke in. “How could you even be certain there
was
a body in the basement. Maybe this Larry kid was just…scared and out of his mind with what he saw happen to you.”

“That’s what I always used to think,” Frank said. “Until just lately.”

A slight shiver coursed down Vince’s spine.

Frank continued his narrative. “They didn’t find a body, but they
did
find evidence of physical abuse against me. They took me out of the house and placed my folks under arrest. I was in and out of foster homes for three or four years. When my folks got out of jail, they sent me to El Paso, Texas, to live with my paternal aunt and uncle and their kids. I didn’t know them very well at the time, since I rarely saw my dad’s side of the family. In fact, I barely remember my real dad. It’s only been recently that I’ve learned more about him.”

Vince’s heart was thudding. Could it be that their fathers were the same men? “What about your father?”

“Long story,” Frank said, dismissing it with a wave of one leather gloved hand. “I’ll get to that in due time. The basic story I got was that my father left my mom when I was three. That’s all I knew. It’s only been within the last year that I’ve discovered that my father didn’t leave so much as that he was…
driven
away. I’m…still doing some research on this, and don’t want to go too much into it now, if that’s okay.” He cocked a glance at Vince.

Vince shrugged. “Fine.”

“Okay.” Frank sighed and continued. “I went to live with my dad’s sister and her husband and my cousins, and I eventually left for Hollywood when I was sixteen. I wanted to be a musician, and I was in a band that came out here to try to make it in the music industry. To make a long story short, I lived on the streets for a while, sold drugs, became an alcoholic and a heroin addict, spent time in jail—the whole nine yards. I used people and people used me. I’m not proud of it.” He paused briefly, as if those memories of his past life were causing pain. “I lived in New York City for awhile and later moved to New Jersey. When I got clean, I came back out here. I’ve always had a knack for telling stories and writing, and I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, probably as a psychological method of escaping what I was going through. Makes sense, now that I think about it. Most of my stuff is fantasy and science fiction. Anyway, I started selling stories professionally when I was nineteen, and was already building a pretty reputable name for myself as a science fiction writer when I blew it with my addiction. I managed to get it all back, and now I’m doing pretty good. I’ve got a short story collection coming out this summer, and the third installment of a trilogy due out next winter. I’ve just started a new novel, and a screenplay I wrote has been optioned. I’m married to a beautiful successful woman who I adore above all of God’s creations. I have a three-year old son and a baby daughter. Things are going better for me now than I can ever ask for. And I wonder why I would want to jeopardize all that by…finding you and going through with all this.”

His voice became brittle, verging on that cracking edge of anger and despair. He turned away from Vince and rested his arms against the steering wheel. His breathing became heavier. “All this….stuff just started emerging during therapy over the past six months. I haven’t seen or spoken to my mother or stepfather in almost twenty years, and I remember the names and faces of my childhood with such clarity that it’s almost as if I can step back into that world and relive the horror I thought I’d escaped. It’s pretty surprising considering the amount of dope I shot up to deaden those images.” He paused, his face quivering as he looked out the windshield. “Goddamn,” he muttered, tears pooling in his eyes. He slammed his fist down on the dashboard. “Goddamn, goddamn,
goddamn
!”

Each “goddamn” was punctuated with a pounding of his fist on the dashboard. He lowered his head to the steering wheel, his long black hair draped over his heavily tattooed arms and shoulders, struggling to compose himself. Vince felt leaden, as if he was a spectator in a film he’d been cast in that he hadn’t rehearsed for. He felt awkward sitting in this car while the owner, who looked like he could snap the vehicle in two with his bare hands, struggled to keep from weeping. Vince sat still while Frank reined his tears in, trying to not seem so conspicuous.

When Frank was finished he wiped his eyes with the back of his gloved hands and smoothed his hair back. He turned to Vince. “I’m sorry. It’s just that…thinking about this…remembering the hell I went through…what it
made
me, just…” He let it drift into an incomplete sentence, as if he didn’t know how to finish.

Vince nodded, uncomfortable. “It’s all right. I’ve been going through my own personal hell as well. But I guess you already know about that.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, looking out at the park again, then back at Vince. “I do.” His deep brown eyes held secrets that wanted to spill forth.

Vince was going to try asking Frank what he knew about his mother and Laura’s death, what he knew about the attempt on his own life, when the bigger man began again. “Do you have dreams about being in a dark room and candles are burning all over the place? And there’s a strange humming sound and black hooded figures move closer to you? And they’re chanting?”