Seth Adams - Are You Afraid of the Dark?

‘Want to go see that movie?’ she asked.

Her arms were crossed and that meant that though she’d calmed down outwardly, internally her gears were still turning, her mind working.

Reggie knew there was no arguing when she was in such a mood.

‘And lunch?’ he asked.

‘And lunch,’ she said, smiling.

‘Pizza?’ he said, figuring he’d go whole hog if this was his sentence for the day.

‘Pizza it is,’ she said. Her arms fell away from her chest in a motion approaching relaxation, and she strode away to get her purse and keys.

***

The movie was a comedy, not the comic book movie he’d initially wanted to see. For some reason he wasn’t in the mood for violence and action, even stylized and cartoonish like in a Marvel Studios film.

The comedy was of the slapstick Leslie Nielsen variety, and made them both laugh in their high seats at the back of the theatre. In the dark of the theatre with the lighted screen in front of them and their laughter echoing it was almost as if that was all there was. The world relegated to four walls and their easy laughter, and for a time things didn’t seem so bad.

After the movie they ate their pizza on the patio of the restaurant and the soaring summer sun cast everything in bright hues. In the warmth and a light breeze with the food and cool drinks before them, they recalled some of the best gags in the movie and laughed again.

They walked back to the car side by side and to Reggie it seemed there was a lightness in their step and stride. As they drove he hung an arm out the window and the wind of their passing buffeted his hand like a sail and it felt good. Along the dirt shoulder of the highway, padding heavily in the opposite direction, a pregnant stray mutt made her way down the road, head down and sway-backed with the weight of her burden.

Reggie averted his gaze.

For a time, with the Dodge rolling along in the quiet of the day, the bleached hills sliding past, nothing mattered. Not the man in the tree house. Not the deputy offering up his rape pictures. Not the condom bandit with his hard fists and taunts. Certainly not a pitiful dog treading down the highway.

Then they were approaching a certain familiar turn-off and a large, bold bronze and stonework sign and something in him froze. At first thinking it accidental – that his mom was just taking a different route home – Reggie tried to calm himself. But then they were pulling into the parking lot of the place, and his anxiety kicked up a notch.

He thought of the conversation he’d only just had with Ivan. His ideas about places and memories.

His mom steered the car into a space and put it in park.

He felt sick in his stomach, like he might throw up.

He looked around at the rolling green hills and the stones about them stretching in all directions from the perimeter of the parking lot.

‘I know it’s hard, Reggie,’ his mom said, touching him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Mom,’ he mumbled.

‘But I think this is for the best,’ she said.

‘Let’s go, please,’ he said, shaking a little. He had a tight grip on the passenger door handle. His other hand gripped a fistful of his pants legs.

‘I think you should visit him,’ she said. ‘It’s been awhile.’

He surprised himself by laughing. It was a short, wicked noise.

‘There’s no “him” to visit,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Reggie,’ his mom said in a soft voice like a caress. ‘You can talk to him. Tell him how you feel. It might help.’

‘He can’t hear me,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘He’s worm food.’

‘Reggie,’ his mom said, her own voice changing from softness to warning. ‘Don’t be like that. That’s your dad you’re talking about.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. It’s a fucking corpse.’

‘Don’t use that kind of language, young man,’ she said, the softness gone now, leaving only a menacing tone he hadn’t quite heard before. There was an unspoken threat in it, but he didn’t care.

‘Its fucking eyeballs have fucking popped out and it’s fucking being eaten by fucking worms,’ he said, and then added for emphasis, ‘ Fuck .’

She slapped him.

He didn’t see it coming but he felt it, hard and loud against his face.

She gasped when it was done. He touched his flushed, stinging cheek.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tried to touch him again on the shoulder as she’d done before. He flinched away from the gesture as if from a hornet.

‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, flat and clear.

She slapped him again.

Reggie turned away; stared out the window.

But he could see her vague reflection behind him in the window.

She almost cried, a glimmering wetness at the corners of her eyes before she wiped it away. She gripped the steering wheel as a tremor passed through her. Then she started the car again and they pulled out of the place.

But in the rear-view Reggie could see the gentle hill and the tree atop it and the plot beneath where his father was, and though seen only fleetingly through a mirror, it felt as if he were being watched. A guilt and shame rose in him and he squashed it with indifference and old pain. Then he turned away from the mirror.

It kept showing him things he didn’t want to see.

‘What happened?’ Ivan asked when Reggie climbed back up into the tree house. It was early afternoon and hot and Reggie handed over the sandwich and lemonade to the man across from him.

‘What?’ Reggie asked, settling down again in what was becoming his spot against the wall immediately to the right of the ladder.

‘Your face,’ Ivan said, gesturing with one hand at Reggie’s cheek where his mom had hit him, taking a large bite of the sandwich with the other.

Reggie touched his face absently.

‘My mom hit me,’ he said.

‘Why’d she do that?’ Ivan asked.

‘I called her a bitch,’ he said.

‘You sure have a way with people,’ Ivan said, finishing the sandwich and washing it down with the glass of lemonade. ‘Hit twice by two people in one day. Do you see the common denominator?’

‘What do you mean?’ Reggie asked.

‘You know why you were hit, don’t you?’ Ivan said, brushing crumbs from his hands and off his lap.

‘Because I called one guy dickless and called my mom a bitch,’ he said.

‘It’s more than that,’ Ivan said.

‘How so?’ Reggie asked.

‘You let people hit you,’ Ivan said. ‘You let them get away with it.’

‘The kid from school was bigger than me,’ he said.

‘So?’ the killer said.

‘My mom’s an adult,’ he said.

‘And?’ the killer said.

Reggie said nothing. He wanted to argue, wanted to defend himself, but didn’t know how. Also, some part of him thought maybe he deserved it – the hard shove to the ground, the stinging slaps. Why and what for, he couldn’t say.

‘The common denominator is you,’ the killer said. ‘People know you’re weak, so they know they can hit you if they want, and you won’t fight back. You have to change the common denominator, and the equation changes.’

Reggie didn’t reply, but he considered what the man said.

‘Tell me about the man who killed your dad,’ the killer said.

At first he didn’t want to. Caught off guard, Reggie struggled to find the words. The words to refuse this man before him, but more than that, to refuse the memory. He thought again of the rear-view mirror casting back his father’s gravesite, and the shame that simple reflection had stirred in him.

Reggie’s thoughts and feelings whirled, collided, then solidified into something clearer. He focused and it came to him, and surprising himself, he told the killer in his tree house about another killer, the one who’d taken his dad from him with a single bullet.