David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

She joined in, searching up and down the county for Jesse. The thought of the boy out there alone, with only a wild woman on drugs to fend for him, it haunted her. And, privately, she felt pangs of guilt- if not for her, the boy’s mother wouldn’t have snatched the boy and run.

Together, she and Frank stapled handbills to telephone poles, pinned them up on community service message boards or tucked them under windshields at supermarket parking lots. They checked emergency rooms and SRO dives, questioned liquor store clerks and streetwalkers and chatty tweaks. This went on for nearly two months. Then one day a couple of detectives showed up, telling Frank to collect his coat and come along.

At the station the detectives had Frank identify some clothing found out on the rim of Honker Bay. “Kid’s corduroys, woman’s blouse and bra. Give it a sniff, chief. Tell us something.” Trembling, Frank inspected the stuff and said yes, he recognized it. That earned him free admission to an interview room. He spent the next four days in there, being grilled, the detectives convinced his wife and Jesse were dead. And Frank was the killer.

Frank was not the kind to bear up well under such scrutiny. Bad enough his boy was gone. Now death was all but certain, and though they couldn’t accuse Frank into confessing to a murder he didn’t commit, they did shame him into a craven mess.

Shel had her hands full keeping his head on straight once they finally were done with him. Talking him down from screaming jags. Wrapping him three-deep in blankets to fight cold spells she couldn’t convince him were just in his mind. Hiding the car keys, the money, the razors.

Finally the real murderer, some drug-addled freak Frank’s wife had fallen in with, succumbed to a lightning bolt from God. Showing up in the Antioch sheriff’s station, he announced he had something he wanted to show everybody. He led three deputies out to the spot where he’d buried the bodies. He’d crushed the boy’s skull with a hammer, making the mother watch. Then he’d killed the mother.

“She said she was gonna leave me,” he confessed.

Over the next year, Shel saw Frank in and out of the hospital after psychotic breaks. She found him hiding in the shower with a baseball bat. Curled up naked beneath the dash of his truck. Once he just stood in the doorway to his room, screaming, “Hey wait, I hate this movie.”

When asked by intake nurses, “Your relationship to the patient is…,” Shel usually resorted to “sister.” It gave her privileges “girlfriend” didn’t, she lacked the gold band that would’ve made “wife” credible, and besides, sister wasn’t such a reach. Frank was her damaged little stepbrother. They’d become family when Mother Mercy had hooked up with Father Fucked.

Outside the hospital, she did her best to steer him clear of the lowlife sorts he returned to when things broke down, the kind who played him like a fool. She reminded herself that this was the man who’d given life to Jesse, and using that for inspiration, she found ways to get Frank up and walking toward the better side of his character. The backslides could be brutal, though, requiring a special vigilance. Every year, at about this time, he went through the anniversary spooks of Jesse’s death, and that was not a sight for weak minds.

She heard Frank turn on the shower. Throughout the old house the water pipes banged and groaned behind the walls from the sudden flood of heat. It seemed heartbreaking, that sound.

Frank wasn’t the only one with a problem. She was lost. She’d taken a wrong turn, and now found herself engulfed in a haze, unable to retrace her steps. Worse, she felt robbed of the will to try.

It wasn’t like her. She’d been a feist, a firecracker, the Devil’s own redhead- at least she had been long ago. Now, she thought, chuckling sadly as she folded a piece of nameless lunch meat, now you’re the sadder but wiser girl.

First there’d been the arrest in Oregon, and all the tangled-up guilt, fury and humiliation it entailed. Next came prison, where the counselors harped and hammered on you about the notorious knack female offenders had, once free again, of inflicting more damage on themselves than anyone else. Then, after her release, the relentless, all-too-familiar life of dreary jobs and drifting town to town. It felt, at times, like her life with Danny and the happiness she’d known had all been a mirage. Nothing had really changed, except she’d grown older, life was harder. The loneliness had become more vicious and personal.

And so it was cheap to blame Frank for anything. She’d been heading toward Frank, toward Jesse’s death and the awful aftermath, all along. Besides which, what she saw that absolutely no one else did was that once, before his son’s murder, Frank had been capable of a great love. And great loves- like between her and Danny- they were rare indeed. Frank had possessed a true, selfless devotion for his boy. And that devotion had been savaged in a way all the naysayers dared not imagine. Shel herself recoiled from the images when they erupted, unbidden, in sleep, or an unguarded moment. Well, that nightmare belonged to Frank like the blood under his skin. And when its worst moments hit, there was no one- no one- in the world to talk him down but Shel.

Sure, he was a shadow now of who he’d been. A loser in a tailspin. Cut him loose, she imagined people telling her. She couldn’t do it. Because in her mind’s eye, she saw the hand with the knife was not her own, and the life plummeting into the abyss wasn’t Frank’s. It was hers.

Once, during one of her trips to ER with Frank, a doctor had taken her aside, grilled her a little. Saying she should stop worrying about Frank’s head and deal with her own, he prescribed intensive therapy and pills. Once he left her alone, she balled up the prescription slip and ash-canned it. She knew girls in their teens and twenties for Christ’s sake, hardly enough of a life to bitch about, already swearing by Prozac or Zoloft or some other pharmaceutical cousin, tossing them down like they were Rolaids. Like any emotion south of chipper was death itself. Not me, she told herself. I ain’t depressed, or at least no more than anybody would be on a good dose of what I’ve been through. I’m just stuck. Badly positioned in the swirl of things. Nothing to do but soldier on.

If I could just find the steam.

As if all that weren’t enough, now Danny was out. A tangle of wants she’d thought no longer existed had begun to surface, just in time for the third anniversary of Jesse’s murder. Frank would be going off like a bottle rocket sometime soon. You had to laugh, she thought. That or get “depressed.” And hell, what’s depression anyway but the thing that happens to you when you decide not to go totally fucking nuts.

“What’s the joke?” Frank asked from behind.

She turned around, startled. Fresh from his shower, he’d dressed and combed his wet hair away from his face. He looked like a boy.

Jesse.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking to myself.”

“Talking to yourself,” Frank corrected. “First sign of being crazy.”

Sleeves rolled up and shirttail out, he went to the fridge, collected a beer, twisted the top off and tossed it in the trash. Putting the bottle to his lips he slid into the breakfast nook and eyed her. She served him up a bowl of soup, cut his sandwich in half, placed it on a plate and came to the table.

As soon as she set down his lunch he curled his arm around her hip, pulled her to him and, lifting her T-shirt, ran his free hand across her belly. He kissed her navel, closed his eyes and placed his cheek against her skin.

“God I love the way you smell,” he said.

“I thought you were hungry.”