Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Not this sheriff’s deputy.

His name was Larsen.

Years later he would run for sheriff.

His campaign speech probably didn’t include driving his knee into my side, so that I ragdolled over into the paneled wall. He probably didn’t put on any of his posters the way he didn’t let me fall but held me up with his left hand, for his right fist to drive into my teeth.

I was a murderer, though.

Killers, they deserve what they get, don’t they? You cash in your rights when you start blowing people away like I just had.

By the sheriff’s deputy’s third punch, my mom was riding his arm.

Me, I was on the carpet by then, my head turned to Dino’s open doorway.

He was standing in it, his face slack, a thin line of clear water seeping down from behind his ear.

I took a picture of him in my head to save for later—for all the jail and cameras and whatever was coming.

It’s a picture I’ve still got.

None of us left the house the next day. Not me or Dino for school—it’s not like we had grades to wreck, really—and not Mom, for work. It would mean she’d have to get another job, probably something at night instead of day, but that was all for later.

We sat on the couch and watched whatever the television gave us.

There was so much static we could hardly tell who was who.

When Mom finally turned it off with the bulky old controller, the curvy green screen reflected the three of us back at ourselves.

The sheriff’s deputy—I didn’t bother knowing his name until high school—wasn’t there.

Mom hadn’t just scratched him. She’d grown up on the reservation, I mean. She’d started fighting on the playground, had moved on to parking-lot scraps, and had even crashed a vase into someone’s face at a wake once. When the sheriff’s deputy had finally left, he’d left limping, and had to crank the window on his door down with the wrong hand.

And no more deputies showed up. Not the sheriff either.

I stared at my shape in the television screen, sure that next time we turned it on, that outline would stay but it would get filled in with my face. NATIVE AMERICAN ALMOST-TEEN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR OVER PETS, or something like that.

But. Except.

Where was everybody?

Why was I still here?

Did it have to do with the fact that I’d used the sheriff’s deputy’s drop-piece—I knew the term—and not his department-issued service revolver? Would turning me in mean he was turning himself in?

It didn’t track.

For most of the night I’d been in a daze, Mom trying to get my lips and nose and ear to stop bleeding. It wasn’t shock, but it wasn’t being completely awake, either.

Now I was awake. All the way awake, my heart pounding.

When the sheriff’s deputy had left, he’d left alone.

He’d left once before with the dead—evidence—shoveled into the back of his truck.

This time he’d just left it for us to deal with.

For me to deal with.

I wormed away from Mom and the blanket, guided Dino’s arm onto her leg instead of mine, and went to the sink first, for the coffee cup of water I didn’t want. But I needed an excuse to untangle from the living room.

Next was the bathroom I didn’t need, at the end of the hall.

On the way there, I stopped to whisper the back door open.

There was no body. No blood.

I swallowed a lump, stepped out to be sure. Then down the three wooden steps, the soles of my feet ready for the splinters I knew I deserved.

Maybe ten feet to my right, one section of the skirt was… it wasn’t flapping shut, exactly. This was slower. This was that piece of corrugated tin or aluminum or whatever being held, and guided back to its careful overlap.

I was breathing too deep now. I missed a step, my foot going through to the coffee can ashtray, the lip of the can scraping the back of my ankle, the sole of my foot whumping into the ash, sighing that smoky smell up into the air all around me.

But I could still see. I had to see.

There were drag marks in the dirt.

Not from just now, but from—I guessed from when I was getting punched into the carpet in the hall. When I was staring into Dino’s room.

Dad.

If a cat and bugs and drinks from Dino could bring him far enough back to drag a full-grown, shot-dead man under the house, then what could a full-grown, shot-dead corpse do for him?

I pulled back inside the house, shut the door, twisted the deadbolt, and hated that I had to call it that in my head.

After the weekend, which mostly involved me standing in Dino’s doorway all night, then falling asleep on the couch to cartoons, we were at the bus stop again. The sixth-graders and even the seventh-graders either gave us room, or they didn’t see what worse they could do to my face that wasn’t already done. Mom said that if the school tried to call Child Services on her, to tell them to call the sheriff’s department, too.

Walking past the neighbor’s chainlink, there’d been no dogs to harass us. And no neighbor to harass us, either.

How long until he was missed? Was he on probation now? Was he going to skip a check-in soon, and then the next check-in as well?

I hadn’t been under the house again.

There had to be a matted nest of hair and grass and saliva pulsating down there, though. Not pushed into the corner anymore but probably dug into the ground, in case I pulled all the skirts off at once, let the light in. I wasn’t sure whether what I was seeing in the secret parts of my head were my dad trying to crawl inside a corpse, wear it like more regalia, or if he was drinking it in somehow. All I did know was that if I uncovered him down there, then there would be a corpse riddled with bullet holes under our house, and that corpse would belong to a neighbor we already had bad history with.

Everything was screwed.

Soon Dad was going to be solid enough, he could just knock on the door. Except he wouldn’t knock, I knew.

I always thought—I think anybody would think this—that when you come back from the dead like he had, that you’re either out to get whoever made you dead, or you’re there because you miss your people, are there to help them somehow.

The way it was turning out, it was that you could maybe come back, be what you’d always meant to be, but to do that, you had to latch on to your people and drink them dry, leave them husks. After that, you could walk off into your new life, your second chance. With no family to hold you back.

It wasn’t fair.

He was going to be out there on the pow-wow circuit, taking every purse, walking out into the campers and lodges and back seats with whatever new girl, and nobody would ever know what he’d had to do to us in order to dance like that. After a few years, he’d probably even stay on one of those other reservations, have two more sons. Ones who weren’t broken. Ones he could teach things to, ones he could tell stories to.

It made me want to throw our tethered football so hard into the ground that the whole pole fell down.

Game over.

School was school, like always.

Teachers reading to us from lesson plans, hands going up, trays of food getting doled out. In the bathroom, with a dollar I’d stolen from my mom’s purse, I bought a tube of cinnamon toothpicks. They were the hot thing at this school—everybody trying to outburn the last batch. I threaded one between my teeth, but the liquid cinnamon the tube was swimming with found the cuts in my lip and gums, and made my eyes water.

“Perfect,” the guy who’d sold me it said, and patted me on the shoulder, left me there by the paper-towel dispenser.

After school, I made Dino watch cop shows with me. Which meant he did what he always did: melted off the couch like I wouldn’t notice, dug his toys out from under the coffee table, and walked and flew and drove them across the carpet between me and the television.