D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“No,” I said, reaching down. “He’s dead. I promise you. I saw him die. I was in here with him.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Andy kept repeating, shaking his head from side to side.

“Stop this,” I said firmly, but he ignored me. “I said stop it!”

I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face hard enough bring tears to his eyes and send ripples of shocking pain up my arm. He stopped shaking his head long enough to glare up at me, wounded.

“Now listen to me,” I said. “He’s dead. I don’t know if the rest of this is over or not, but his part is. He’s gone, and we have to do something about it.”

Andy’s mouth was half-open, and a thread of drool dripped out from his bottom lip like a nearly invisible fishing line. The perfect outline of my small hand was clear on his cheek, a sight that sent a pang of guilt through me.

“Do you understand?” I asked him. “I can’t do this alone. I need you. I need my brother.”

In that moment, I could see that he was more or less divided, split down the middle. Somewhere inside was Andy, the one I knew and trusted and loved. Sure, we fought, and between the two of us, we had enough issues to fill the bed of my dad’s truck, but he was whole. He was something I understood. The second Andy, the one who had dropped to his knees in a heap at my feet, was something that had been infected, used, and shredded into bits. A patch of his heart had been scorched and salted, and it felt likely that nothing would ever grow there again. Nothing good at least. In time, that dark patch of himself might give birth to something, but only if I did nothing.

His behavior ever since I had rescued him was nothing less than these two forced in a struggle to the death. As I stood there, the internal conflict inside him seemed to shift, and the better part of him emerged. He looked up at me, and I could see it all over him: his eyes focused and clear, his body at peace with the awful scene before us. He was scared. We both were. But he was, just maybe, equipped to deal with it.

“I think so,” he said.

“Good,” I said, pulling him back to his feet. “I think maybe it’s time to get Dad involved.”

“No,” he said, his voice suddenly panicked.

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, he wouldn’t have ever believed us before, but look. We got proof now.”

“No,” he said, even more forceful. “We can fix this. We will fix it.”

“But we don’t have to do it alone—”

“I said no!” He looked down and suddenly realized that he was holding onto my arm, squeezing it hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He pulled away, and a look of shame and fear rippled across his face. “I… I don’t want anyone to know…”

I couldn’t quite imagine what those lost hours must have been like, but I thought I understood.

“Okay. We’ll do it your way.”

Neither of us had any good ideas, at least none that we could pull off easily. The quarry was the safest bet, but even that was over a mile away, and neither of us had any great ideas as to how to move a seven-foot-long body in broad daylight. We immediately settled on waiting for nightfall, though we didn’t have any great way to move him. We didn’t know, not yet at least, how heavy he was, but we figured that just carrying him would be out of the question.

“We need something big. Something with wheels,” I said.

“The garbage can?” he said without much confidence. I brushed off the suggestion at first, but the longer we circled the idea, the better it became.

“It might be a little loud,” I said, picturing the noise it made on the driveway.

“Maybe not,” he said. “If we take it slow, through the grass maybe, it might work.”

“What if somebody drives by?” I asked.

“Simple. We stick to the main road pretty much the whole way. No cutting through yards or anything. Anybody shows up, we just park it next to the closest mailbox. As far as they know, we’re just getting it out a day early.”

It seemed risky, but what other choice did we really have? “Okay,” I said. “But what about him?”

“What about him?”

“What are we doing with him until then?”

“Well,” he said, surveying the body up close for the first time. “We need to get him out first. Any ideas?”

“Out where?”

He scratched his head for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “The basement.”

Our basement wasn’t really a basement at all in the traditional sense. It was completely unfinished, more of a high-roofed crawl space. The floors and walls were dirt, and there was a cinderblock wall in the center that divided the room in two. It was isolated and close at the same time, and best of all, the only door was on the outside of the house, tucked away on the far side of the back porch. If we got the body down there, it would be a cinch to sneak him out once night fell.

“Yeah,” I replied. “It would work. I really think it would work.”

Andy turned back to the body and stared at it. “Now,” he said. “Getting it down there…”

“Yeah…”

We both sat there, just staring.

Then Andy said, “Sleeping bag.”

Dad had bought him a real heavy-duty one a few years ago, and with some work, we could probably fit the Thief all the way inside. While Andy went and dug it out of his closet, I searched around in the utility room for some thick, yellow rubber gloves. I felt guilty for refusing to touch it, especially after the little bit of bonding we had done the night before. Even so, the thought of putting my skin against it filled me with a revulsion I couldn’t begin to explain.

“You ready for this?” I asked tentatively as I re-entered the bathroom.

“Not really,” he replied.

Together, we stared down at the thing in the tub.

“What about that?” he asked, pointing to the bear.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I want it. I really do. But I don’t even know if it’s mine anymore.”

“Leave it,” he said. “It won’t ever feel the same again.”

It was true. I knew it was, but it felt like losing the single thread that still attached me to Mom. The only thing that was ever truly from her. I imagined what she would want me to do, how she would feel about all this madness. In the end, I decided to let it go, and we went to work.

In minutes, we were both slick with sweat, and more than once, each of us had to step away and cover our mouths to keep from gagging. We threw the window open the rest of the way and turned on the overhead fan, neither of which seemed to help much. It wasn’t the smell of rot or decay that you might imagine. Instead, it was the scent of a slab of ribs left on the grill for too long, burned until the good smell of food turned pungent and sharp, twisting into something beyond foul. There were hints of other things too: dark, moldy smells that baked out of the old clothes, as if they had been buried in black dirt for years. We tried to feed the body into the sleeping bag headfirst, working it down an inch at a time. Once, when Andy tilted the head back, the mouth yawned open and an ancient, dry smell drifted out, like old grass clippings in the sun.

The Thief was lighter than we thought, his skin and body almost crisp to the touch. When he’d told me he never ate or drank, I hadn’t believed it, but now I understood. He really hadn’t been alive, not in the traditional sense, and I imagined that if I pressed hard enough, I could sink my hand into his chest. He reminded me of a mummy, something that had long ago lost whatever made him human, driven forward by some dark energy – hatred maybe.

By the time we had him halfway in, Andy stepped back and said, “I need some air.” He walked straight out of the bathroom and out the back door, standing in the clean, open air with his nose to the sky.