Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

“Go ahead, Eddie. Cry entrapment. Tell them how I planted the evidence. Nobody’s going to hear anything you say.” The old man cranked his head back and laughed through the metal cage. “Done you same as we do the niggers. Nobody hears them either.”

Desert twilight crept like a sepia claw toward the end of the hallway where Eddie cowered outside of his parents’ bedroom. He strained to hear the voices on the other side of the door, primed for violence.

He knows . Eddie screwed his mind down on the thought, rejecting it. Impossible.

Then the door opened and the old man loomed over him in the shadows. Eddie tried to look past him to where his mother waited in the room. Surely she would defend him. He was just twelve. How could it be his fault? “Mom?”

She averted her gaze, giving him up to the old man.

“Shhh, boy.” His father’s face cracked into an indecipherable jigsaw of emotions. Eddie could see anger, fear, and hate clamoring to escape. “She can’t talk to you.”

Slowly, the old man raised his fist, showing Eddie the torn and frayed lamp cord coiled around it like a whip. “This is going to hurt you a whole lot more than it will me.”

The old man let it out then, a shrieking fit of laughter that grew louder with each successive crack of the cord, until even Eddie’s screeches were lost to it.

“I’ll protect you. I swear.”

“Just hold me.”

“Like that?”

“Put your hands down. Lower.”

“Here?”

“Lower. Oh, that’s nice.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Please. How does that feel?”

“It tickles, kinda.”

“Now?”

“You’re soft.”

“Don’t stop.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because you make me feel beautiful.”

“You are beautiful.”

“And you won’t ever hate me, Eddie?”

“Never.”

“And you promise you won’t ever leave me?”

“No. I love you, Mom.”

Eddie crouched beside a yucca, unable to pull his eyes from the girl’s window. He’d imagined squalor and Third World filth, a ghetto repackaged into an East Mesa ranch house. But the girl’s room shined pastel princess beneath decorative fixtures, all canopy, ruffles, and lace.

It looked, well, normal. They lived better than Eddie. Not like niggers at all.

The girl, whose name was Rhonda and shared Eddie’s sixth-grade class, glided through the pink and white fairy tale, her face a caramel question mark beneath a frizz of black hair. Eddie resented the fluttery feeling she gave him. He wished she were white. He’d followed her home to prove to himself that she wasn’t worthy of his affection, to see the urban decay her kind would bring to his neighborhood, the way his father always said.

Voices charged him in the darkness. “Peeping mother-fucker! Get him!” Eddie was lifted off his feet and thrown into the yucca’s spiny fronds. He could see faces in front of him. Black faces. “Whatcha doing perving on my little sister?”

Eddie’s heart hammered with the old man’s warnings. The niggers were flesh eaters. Savages. They had tricked him with their pretty house, pretty girl. But he could smell their violence, the blood and mud from where they spawned. He struggled to break away and a voice growled, “Keep doing that and we’ll fuck you up more, white boy.”

Eddie started crying. “Daddy, I’m sorry.”

The blond skank jitterbugged in the spotlight.

“Vampire,” Ed Keane, Sr. said, chasing her with the beam. “Turn to ash if she don’t suck pipe before sunup.”

Eddie cringed at the palsied ghoul-whore. But he was excited too. “Shouldn’t you arrest her or something?”

“What for? She’s no threat. Except to your dick.”

Saturday morning ride-along. Eddie in the shotgun seat of his father’s shop, touring Mesa’s underworld. The only time he enjoyed being with his father. Before the day, and the drinking, got hot. They were in the avenues off Mesa Drive. A menagerie of stucco and cinder block fortified with iron bars and junked cars. Speed bumps that once protected kids at play now protected drug dealers from police raids.

“Real people used to live here. Families. Back when I was a kid, before old Mesa High burned down and the mud people took over.” The old man hit the steering wheel. “Politicians have turned their back on the city. Call it good growth. It’s abandonment. Of course, they’ll deny it. Hold out their little Main Street shops as proof. Expect us to defend it.”

Eddie loved watching the old man work the streets, holding dominion over the freaks and the loons. Bust them or blast them, help or hurt. Decided on an arbitrary scale that his father called justice. The old man patted his leg. “Can I tell you something?”

“Okay.”

“You remember when I shot that guy last year?”

“The rapist. Yeah.”

“What if I told you I shot him in cold blood?”

“I thought he came after you. With his knife.”

“He had a knife, all right. But he wasn’t holding it when I shot him.”

“So you killed him for no reason. Why?”

“Because I could. It gave me satisfaction.”

Eleven-year-old Eddie did not see the fire in his father’s eyes, only the power of its glow. He swelled with pride at the knowledge he’d been entrusted to guard.

“Are you still one of the good guys?”

“I’m still wearing the badge, aren’t I?”

“You think maybe when I grow up I can be a police?”

Eddie sat ramrod straight, arms folded in his lap. His mother sat across from him at the table. They stared at each other over their untouched plates of food. Had been that way since his father sat down at the table, pulled out his handgun, and set it beside his utensils. “I’d appreciate a little quiet time tonight,” he said.

A domestic-violence lullaby put Eddie to sleep. Woke fast when the book bag tied to his doorknob rustled. Early Daddy Defense System. In the light from the hall he saw his mother slip into the room. She knelt before his bed, face pitted from abuse. She kissed his forehead, sobbed, kissed his mouth. Her breath was copper-hot with blood and alcohol. Awkwardly, Eddie tried to embrace her.

That first time couldn’t really be called sex. But as she pressed herself against him, Eddie saw relief spill into his mother’s features. Terror replaced by a strange and haunting nothingness. Eddie decided he would do anything to see that look of peace on his mother’s face. In the morning he wasn’t sure if he had dreamed the episode.

“Eddie, get out of bed,” she called. “Oatmeal’s getting soggy.”

The puppy’s neck had been twisted so severely that its dead eyes were staring back at its haunches. Its body lay on the patio next to a scattering of dead leaves. A stain on the carpet and the smear on his father’s polished shoe told the story.

“I asked you to start picking up after your dog!” the old man yelled. “Now pick up your dog. Trash bag and shovel are waiting for you.”

His dog’s name was Bandit. Eddie had carried him home on his bike from the store, made a house out of cardboard and towels, snuck him in at night, and let him chase his toes under the covers. He tried not to look at the creature, whose only crime had been reliance on Eddie. Tears filled his eyes.

“Don’t you dare cry, boyo,” his father said. “Dog’s a lesson. Everything gets taken away.”

The house breathed pain. The wrongness of it stopped Eddie cold at the back door. Bandit must’ve sensed its threat too.

The dog sniffed and nipped at Eddie’s shoes, growling defensively as he tried to get past.

Eddie bent down and stroked Bandit’s fur, overcome by sadness at what was to become of his little friend. He thought of how the spade vibrated as he tamped down the dirt around the trash bag. He picked the dog up and pressed his face into its fur.