John Burley - The Absence of Mercy

She motioned for him to remove his headphones so she could talk with him, and he did so with the normal reluctance of an eight-year-old boy. She stepped inside the room, set the basket of folded clothes on the floor, and closed the door behind her.

“I found the dead rat behind the shed,” she told him matter-of-factly, “the one you nailed inside the plastic container.”

She didn’t know what she’d been expecting his response to be. Denial, perhaps. Or anger. Lying. She was even prepared for tears. What she got instead was: nothing. He lay on his back in bed, his head propped up on one hand, and regarded her blankly, waiting for her to continue—waiting for her to say something of some significance.

When he made no reply, she continued. “You tortured and killed that poor, helpless creature. I want to know why.”

He continued to regard her, his face devoid of emotion.

“Are you sick, Thomas? Do I need to put you in a hospital? Is that what needs to happen here?”

Nothing. His green eyes remained disinterested. It was unsettling, the way he looked at her with that empty, dispassionate gaze. His response scared her, probably because it confirmed what she’d already feared. Suddenly she wanted to slap him. She wanted to cross the room, grab him by the shoulders, and shake him violently back and forth until some emotion— any emotion —registered on that face. She wanted to scream, “ Fuck you for what this means! Fuck you for putting me in this position! ” Instead, she picked up the basket of clothes and dumped them on the floor. It was a meaningless, pathetic act.

“You listen to me carefully,” she told him. “I won’t tolerate anything like this again. Ever . If you have a problem, you need to deal with it. If you need help dealing with it, I will get you help. But you need to ask for it. You need to show me that you want to get better. Because if you continue down this path, it will not end well, Thomas. I guarantee you that.”

The boy said nothing in response, showed nothing discernible in his expression. She turned and left the room, moving down the hallway and descending the stairs to the family room, nearly tripping over her own feet as she went. Her vision blurred slightly as tears of frustration threatened to spill over her lower lids, and she made a beeline for the front door, needing to take a walk and get away from the house for a while. As she passed by in the hallway, Ben glanced up from the kitchen table, where he was sorting through bills.

“What’s the matter?” he called to her.

“Nothing,” she said. It was the first time she lied to him regarding their son, but it would not be the last. “I’m going for a walk.”

“You want company?” he asked.

Sweet, sweet Ben, she thought to herself angrily. So well-meaning, and yet so completely oblivious . She tried to remind herself that it wasn’t fair to cast him in that light. How was he supposed to know? She considered taking him up on his offer, considered asking him to join her. But she knew that if she did she would end up telling him the whole story of the wood rat and their oldest boy’s newfound hobby. That would start a chain of events beyond her ability to control, and she wasn’t ready for that yet. She wasn’t ready to involve him. She needed time to think, and to observe what happened next. Yes, she would keep her horrible knowledge to herself for the moment. It seemed like the course of action with the least number of variables, and right now that strategy made sense to her. Perhaps it was the only thing that did. She had no way of knowing then how that decision would change the course of the years to come, or how the simplest decisions are sometimes the most important ones.

“No thanks,” she’d called back to her husband as she grasped the knob on the front door. “I need to be by myself for a while.”

All of that seemed like such a long time ago. Life moved on, as it always did, and she watched her boy grow older and more mature with the passing years. For nearly two years after the incident with the wood rat, she’d discovered no further evidence of similar behavior from Thomas, and she dared to imagine that her confrontation had paid off—that he had somehow gotten better. It wasn’t until shortly after his tenth birthday that she noticed the home-made signs stapled to several telephone poles in their neighborhood. Lost cat, they read, identifying the wayward feline as Mr. Tibbs, who was orange with a broad white stripe along his underbelly. Reward if found!! the sign promised, and gave a phone number and address to contact. The address belonged to Susan’s neighbor three houses down.

The first thing she’d done after reading the sign was to return home and look behind the tool shed. She didn’t think there would be… well, she didn’t know what she thought, exactly. But of course there was nothing there. That night she’d casually mentioned during dinner that she’d seen the signs alerting people to the missing cat, and she’d watched Thomas closely out of the corner of her eye for a response. He barely seemed to have heard her, which offered her little relief. What if he hasn’t gotten better at all? she wondered. What if he has only gotten better at hiding his true nature?

Several days passed. That weekend, while Ben and the boys were off at one of Thomas’s baseball games, she decided to pay their neighbor a visit. There was a cake-decorating class Susan was thinking about attending that summer, and she wanted to know if the mother, Annie, would be interested in joining her. They talked for a while, and as she was getting ready to leave, Susan mentioned that she’d noticed the signs regarding Mr. Tibbs, and she inquired as to whether he’d been found.

“Not a sign of him.” Her friend shook her head. “He was always an outdoor cat. Liked to wander through the woods out back, I suppose. Liked to stalk birds, too, although I don’t know what he’d do with one if he ever caught it. Sometimes he stayed out all night. I never paid it much mind.” She offered Susan a thin smile. “He always showed up at the back door for breakfast and dinner, though. That guy could eat. Most afternoons he slept inside on the windowsill.” She pointed toward the vacant sill, which looked sad and deserted in the cat’s absence. “Sally’s been pretty upset about it. She sure loved that cat.”

“He’ll show up,” Susan assured her, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt.

“I hope so,” Annie said. “I hope he didn’t get hit by a car or anything. If Sally came across him in the roadway, I’d have a pretty traumatized little girl on my hands.”

”Don’t think that way,” Susan responded, reaching over and squeezing her friend’s hand. “Cats are very resourceful animals. They know how to stay out of harm’s way.” She tried on a smile and found that it almost seemed to fit.

When she arrived home, she went to the tool shed, wanting a second look around. She found the door to the shed locked, just as it should be. She retrieved the key from the kitchen, removed the padlock, slid the door open, and stood inside. The interior was stagnant, and smelled vaguely of the combined scent of oil and earth. Being there reminded her immediately of the day she had discovered the wood rat. Recently cut grass clung to the wheels of the lawn mower. The bags of topsoil she’d purchased two years ago for her gardening were long gone. In their place was a spade-tip shovel, leaning against the far wall. Its tip was caked with dirt. She ran her fingers thoughtfully along the wooden texture of its long handle. The tool seemed to be the only thing out of place in the neatly arranged shack. Acting more on instinct than anything else, she picked up the shovel, exited the shed, and proceeded into the woods behind their house. It took her twenty minutes to find the recently dug grave, and only two minutes to exhume the body. Her right hand automatically went to the back hip pocket of her jeans, pulling out the heavy-duty black plastic bags she’d absently brought with her. She had no recollection of grabbing the bags from the shed, but she’d obviously done so. She must’ve known all along what she was bound to find.