J.T. Warren - Remains

I stood up and walked to the refrigerator. I got a few more cubes of ice from the tray, and walked back. I took the bag from him, and put them in. When I handed the bag back, he said “I know, it sounds a lot like that show with the guy detective who believes in flying saucers and stuff, and the woman who’s always trying to find a rational explanation or whatever, but it’s true.”

“What is it you’re trying to say?” I asked.

He set the bag of ice down once more, “I think that the Sheriff has been forcing himself on just about anyone he wants in this town for at least twenty years.” I sat down, again. “I don’t have any way to prove it or anything; I’m not a doctor or a scientist; but look at the facts. Almost every kid born in the last thirty years has been a boy, and they all have headaches and nosebleeds and most stutter when things get rough—.”

“The sheriff doesn’t stutter,” I interrupted.

“He doesn’t, no, but one time—,” he started, but then stopped. I waited. “This one time,” he continued, “he wasn’t—rough—or anything. He didn’t hit me or whatever. After, he just—he held me and talked. It wasn’t like he was talking to me, he was just talking. I think—I think his little brother had just died. He said something about how his little brother used to stutter so bad that his father couldn’t understand the kid. He said his father used to think that a demon had gotten into the boy, so he beat the kid every night while the mother stood over him and quoted bible passages. He said that, back where he came from, they called it a ‘cure’. They beat the kid so much, he said, that he tried not to talk to anyone for fear of stuttering. The only person he’d talk to was the sheriff.” He put the ice pack back against his cheek, with a sharp inhale over his teeth.

“I still don’t know that I understand,” I said.

“That little boy that went missing, the McPherson kid—,” he said.

“Randy,” I said.

“Yeah, him; you were close to him, right?” he asked. I nodded. “What color hair did he have?” he asked, and I flinched. Even though he’d been dead so long, hearing the past tense in that sentence shocked me.

“Black,” I said.

He nodded, “What color hair does Pete McPherson have?”

“Brown,” I said.

He nodded, again, “Gwen McPherson is a brunette, too,” he said, “you had high school biology, Mikey; do the math. There is almost no chance that the child of two people with brown hair could turn out with jet black hair,” he paused, then said “he had nosebleeds, too, huh?” I nodded. Something clicked inside me, and my whole body tensed.

“That would mean that—that—that you think I—that my mom—,” I stammered.

His eyes didn’t move from my face. He didn’t say anything.

“More like at least half the town, Mikey,” he said after a while.

I found I was sitting down, though I didn’t remember doing it. My body was going crazy, and my head felt like something heavy was sitting on it. I thought my eyes were going to pop out from all the pressure behind them. He stood up, and stared at me for a second, then walked to the sink. He dropped the ice pack in; the loud thunk made me jump. He stood there at the sink, watching me. I still felt like I had to come up with some reason that he was wrong, and that I could do that if only I could get my brain to relax some, but it wouldn’t.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, “I can tell. Thing is, you don’t have to believe me. There’s someone else who can tell you.”

“Who?” I asked after a moment.

“Get your clothes on, I’ll show you,” he said. That was when I looked down long enough to realize that I was completely naked. It seemed logical; he’d woken me, stashed me in the closet, all with no time for dressing. Since coming out, I hadn’t even noticed that I didn’t have any clothes on.

I stood and walked back to the bedroom. While I dressed, he came in. When he dressed, he didn’t put on underwear. He slid into his shirt differently than I did. His motions seemed somehow graceful and awkward all at the same time. It was like someone who danced alone all the time suddenly having to dance for an audience. Some writer would probably describe it much better, but his dressing seemed like something incredibly private that I shouldn’t be seeing. He put on his shoes without socks, and my mind, still reeling from everything we had spoken of, fixated on that.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting calluses?” I asked.

“No,” he said, standing, “I’m almost never in my clothes long enough to worry about it.” With that, he walked into the other room, and I was alone, sitting in the dark on the bed where everything had changed.

“Where are we going?” I asked. He stood up as I walked into the living room. I followed him to the door.

“The Hospital,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. He fished in his pocket and came out with his keys. He handed them to me.

“Why—?” I started to ask.

“Because I like it when someone else drives,” he said, and opened the door. I opened the driver’s side door, and it squeaked loudly. I sat down and began to adjust the seat. I hadn’t noticed how much shorter than me he was. As I was adjusting the mirror, he opened the glove compartment and took out a tiny white plastic bottle. As I started the car, he opened the cap and sniffed, then closed the top. “Want some?” he asked, offering the bottle my way.

“What is it?” I asked.

He grinned in a way that made my stomach tense.

I took the bottle. The label said Video Head Cleaner. “This is the stuff you use to clean the readers on your VCR,” I said.

He leaned back against the seat, his face relaxed and clear. “No, it’s not; just like it says on the label, it’s to clean your head,” he said, and giggled, “Drive.” He took the bottle back and kept it in his palm. I wanted to say something, but realized anything I could say would sound like some lecture. It was that moment above all others in my life, sitting there in the car with the ruin of a boy who had once terrorized me, that I realized I knew nothing about how life works. I started the car, and backed out onto the tiny dirt road.

“Did you want him?” Kevin asked as I made the turn onto Hitt road from the trailer park.

I looked over at him; his head was turned toward the window, and he was staring blankly at the trees and houses as the floated by. The window fogged every time he exhaled.

“Who?” I asked.

“The little boy,” he paused, “Randy.”

“What?” I asked.

His head rolled lazily over toward me as I pulled to a stop light. “The McPherson kid; did you want to touch him?”

“No!”

He smiled at something, and his head rolled lazy back over toward the window. He took the bottle, opened the cap, and sniffed again. He rubbed the back of his head against the headrest, and his eyes closed. The light changed, and I drove. I turned on the stereo, and that same voice came on.

“What is it with this guy?” I asked.

“Who?” Kevin asked from somewhere far away.

“Johnny Cash or whoever; what is it with this guy?”

Kevin inhaled loudly in that way someone does when they think a question you’ve asked is stupid, and said “He’s lonely, Mikey.” On the stereo, the man was singing about how hard it was to walk a straight line.

“So why do you want to listen to him?” I asked, turning off Hitt road onto Cadence. The hospital wasn’t far away.

“It’s nice to know that someone is as lonely as me,” he said. “After the hospital,” he said, inhaling loudly again, “you’ll understand.”

“Who’s at the hospital?” I asked.