Rob Thurman: Slashback

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

“Our neighbor is a serial killer.”

It was that kind of day.

There had been tutoring no-necked football players lacking enough in brain cells that I was surprised they didn’t have calluses on their knuckles from walking on them. It would’ve gone well with their gorilla grunting. Following that had been the food poisoning caused by a casserole brought in by Mrs. Dumpfries. The teachers’ lounge had been liberally labeled a biohazard. The color of which is not orange like they tell you, but the bile green of nonstop vomiting. I stood witness to that. I’d gone through three mops.

And now we had a serial killer.

Or so said my little brother.

I closed the door behind me and locked it, not because I was immediately on board with the serial killer comment just issued, but we rented in a bad neighborhood. For us, an average neighborhood would be a more truthful way to put it. We’d not lived in better and we’d sometimes lived in worse. This cramped little house with a pronounced lean, no insulation, and cracked windows in east New London, Connecticut, was nothing special in one way or the other. When we didn’t stay anyplace longer than five or six months, thanks to our mother’s “occupation,” it was all the same. I put my duffel bag containing my schoolbooks and janitor uniform by the door and took off my worn, but warm, Salvation Army coat to hang it from a rusted hook by the door.

With everything in its place I moved to the kitchen table, which wobbled, where my little brother with pencil and paper sat in a chair, which also wobbled. I lightly ruffled his black hair, shaggy in length but with a gloss like silk. Thanks to Cal being a good brother, he let me without complaint.

“Where’s Sophia?” I asked. She had given birth to us and I used the word “mother” sometimes, but the truth of it never quite fit in my mouth.

“Gone. With her suitcase.” The pencil kept moving and he didn’t look up.

With her suitcase. . that meant she would be gone anywhere from three days to three weeks. If business was slow in the area, she went looking for it elsewhere. She told fortunes, picked pockets, ran scams, whored herself out if the price was right. There was only so much whiskey you could shoplift before the local liquor store owners became suspicious and you had to actually start paying for it. Yes, life was hard for Sophia. I swallowed my anger as I’d been taught. I wouldn’t let Sophia have that kind of power over me.

And truthfully, the times she was gone were the best times.

“Are you doing your homework?” I asked with a little disapproval for him to hear. It was six p.m.-although I couldn’t make it home at the same time he did, I made it there before dark. Always.

The homework-he should’ve been done with it by now. There was also a pan crusted with burned SpaghettiOs in the sink, some less scorched fake pasta in spots on the cracked linoleum floor, and a purple handprint, grape soda probably, on the door of the groaning refrigerator. Cal was a good brother, but there are all sorts of definitions for good when it came to an eleven-year-old.

“Yes, Nik. I’m doing my homework. Watching the serial killer made me get behind.” I didn’t have to see his eyes to know they were rolling with the disdain and sarcasm only an eleven-year-old could manage, and I gave him a gentle swat to the back of the head.

I took the other chair and sat down. “All right. Tell me why our neighbor is a serial killer,” I said with a patience I didn’t have to fake. I listened to Cal when he had something to say. I always listened to him. I had even when he was three and thought a monster lived under the bed, because in our world. .

In our world, there was every chance that he wasn’t necessarily wrong.

I also listened to him as he’d had to grow up very fast and deserved the respect and dignity that came from surviving a harsh road that I hadn’t been able to change nearly as much as I wished. There were times I could close my eyes and see the small bloody footprints on that blackly grim path. That my larger ones were beside his every step of the way didn’t help. Didn’t absolve.

I was fifteen and I was smart. More than smart. I could admit that because it wasn’t boasting. Being more than smart meant knowing too much. If I’d had a choice, I would’ve chosen to be less smart. I would’ve chosen not to know all about absolution and how hard it was to come by.

Impossible on some days.

As for right now. . I’d grown up as quickly as Cal, but if I hadn’t-if I’d been a normal fifteen-year-old, I would still know this: you show respect to a warrior. For Cal to have survived our childhood, he was a warrior. I gave him his due. Anything else would’ve made me less of a brother.

He put down his pencil and raised his eyes from the carelessly rumpled paper. I swallowed the sigh and reminded myself that there were worse things than a messy nature. Cal was a good brother and a good kid when, if they’d lived his life, other children would be feral as wild dogs and amoral as sharks at dinnertime. Cal was amazingly, painfully human in comparison and not once did I overlook that.

I reached over and gave him an encouraging tap on the back of his hand as he hesitated, something he rarely did. Cal knew his own mind about generally everything under the sun and all the other suns in at least half our galaxy. “Go on, grasshopper. Tell me.”

Gray eyes, the same as mine and that of our mother, Sophia, blinked; then he shrugged. “I smelled it. On him.”

That’s where the discomfort entered the picture. Cal didn’t like admitting he could do something other people couldn’t. He didn’t want to be different. I told him that sometimes different is good, sometimes it’s better. It was one of the few times in his life he hadn’t believed me.

“Okay,” I said, calm as if that was something I heard every day. I pretended not to see the flush of shame behind his pale skin. He wouldn’t want to talk about it and if I tried, it would make it worse. On certain matters Cal was determined that no positive spin could be put on it and that was that. Stubborn, so stubborn. “What exactly did you smell?”

He shrugged again. “I got off the bus at the corner with the other kids.” To say that Cal could take care of himself better than your average eleven-year-old was something of an understatement, but I made certain he played it safe all the same. That he stayed with a crowd or a group of other people if he could. “I was walking home and he was at his mailbox by the sidewalk. When I passed him, I smelled it. He smelled like blood. A lot of blood. After he went inside, I snuck around to his backyard and got close to the house. There are tiny kinda half windows to the basement. I think they’re covered up with cardboard on the inside or painted because I couldn’t see anything.” He made a face. “But I could still smell. It’s like roadkill. His basement smells like a mountain of roadkill.”

He gave a third shrug, a habit I was going to have to break and soon while I was still sane. “He has a basement full of dead bodies,” he declared, “and that means he’s a serial killer.”

End of story. Which was my brother’s way. If he became a lawyer when he grew up, he’d have the most succinct closing arguments in any court system in America.