Roadrunner Read online

  Roadrunner

  The Darkthorn Series

  Michael Lilly

  Copyright © Michael Lilly 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2018

  ISBN 978-1-910780-85-5

  Cover by Claire Wood

  www.vulpine-press.com

  For Grandma

  Also in The Darkthorn Series:

  Pond Scum

  Prologue

  My father flings the car door open. A swell of fear threatens to break on the shore of my consciousness, but the plentiful passersby ensure my safety—for now, at least. Daddy won’t hit us in public.

  “Get out of the car, hurry up,” he says.

  I do as I’m told; maybe if I’m good enough for the rest of the day, I can escape into the night without any new welts or bruises.

  My father pulls me—nearly drags me—into a clinical-looking building in a business park without anything interesting to look at. We cross to a glass door with a bunch of names I don’t recognize and initialisms I don’t understand.

  The lobby inside is inviting enough, on its own; a children’s movie plays on the mounted television set, but its intended audience—in attendance, only a three-year-old—is far more preoccupied with the careful and complete removal of the contents of his mother’s purse. His mother, a young, pretty brunette, looks deadened beyond the point of giving a damn. Her eyes are fixed solidly on nothing in particular, perhaps focusing on the inaccessible days of the past. Of waking up without any obligations but those to herself. To brush her own teeth, a quick, non-resistant task. To put on her shoes—again, non-resistant—after finding both of a pair in one place. The simpler days, as I understand it.

  Back in the days when no one relied on her. If she had wanted to kill herself, she could have done so worry-free. Scribble out a quick note and call it good. But no longer.

  My wading through these thoughts leaves me looking at her for longer than I realize, and now I’m the one staring off into nothingness. Her toddler busies himself with the numerous toys in the waiting room, showing each of them to his exhausted mother enthusiastically. By now, I cringe at the whole situation, as she is no longer making any effort whatsoever to match the excited wonder with which her child is attempting to engage her.

  The toys kept in here are the usual—those wire puzzles that invite you to push a small block on its track from one end to the other, a hexagonal prism with cutout holes of various shapes and the similarly shaped plastic blocks to match. Toys well below my age, really, and a stack of grownup magazines dedicated to topics from parenting to celebrity gossip to cooking. There’s even a hardware catalogue.

  Although some of these might be engaging, I feel uneasy here, and don’t want to disturb the carefully crafted atmosphere by moving to pick one up. It’s just as well, though; I’ve always been perfectly content to sit with my thoughts.

  A monstrous clock ticks on toward noon; my father pulled me out of school for this, which is possibly the most jarring factor of the situation. School is supposed to be my fortress, my solitude. Unbreakably and unshakably immune to my father. And though I behave at school, I get to revel in that no matter how badly or consistently I fuck up, I won’t be hit. At least, not by adults. Fights between students are rare, and usually involve the loud, belligerent students. I’m neither.

  The walls in the room are a cool gray, and floor lamps spread a warm hue on them. Fake plants cast angular shadows onto the same canvas. My father sits me on a couch that’s way too big for my ten-year-old body and which needs badly to be reupholstered. The fabric is worn and scratchy, and I suspect that if I were to flip the cushion over, tears and stains would be plentiful. One other person sits reading a magazine, an older man with a full head of thick, white hair. He hasn’t moved since I walked in, and his eyes remain fixed on one part of the page. Maybe he’s lost in thought or stuck on a difficult Sudoku puzzle. Maybe he’s just crazy.

  I want to ask what we’re doing here, why I was pulled out of school for it, and whether I’d be able to go back today. But Dad hates questions, and if something is likely to seal my fate of a beating, pestering him will do it. As of now, I’m still hopeful that I can escape that fate, as long as I perform correctly in whatever we’re doing here.

  The clock ticks on and my father remains still and silent. Many people might tap their feet, click a pen, or twiddle their thumbs. Not my dad. My dad, like me, is perfectly content to sit perfectly still with only his thoughts to entertain him. However, in him, this trait is one that likely fosters his more imaginative methods of inflicting pain on Mom, Trina, and me.

  On the other hand, this characteristic grew in me as a result of my efforts not to invoke that wrath. If I do my chores, stay out of his way, and keep quiet, I can usually avoid bruises.

  Usually.

  Lately, however, his punishments have been growing in aggression. He used to put on a show of it being for our own good, but as we got better at avoiding doing things ‘wrong,’ depriving him of things to punish us for, he was eventually forced into the truth: he just wants to hit us. We don’t know why. But from the time that truth emerged onward, Trina and I have done our best to disappear whenever Dad comes around.

  So while my father sits beside me on the uncomfortable couch, my mind wonders which of his favorite toys he has in his thoughts. The wrench, maybe. He’s been using that one more lately. Though he has to consider that it leaves much more substantial marks than the belt.

  The belt is my favorite (a word which seems grossly out of place in this context). It’s loud, which gives off the impression that it hurts far more than it actually does. It stings like a son of a bitch, of course, but it’s gone relatively fast, as opposed to when he uses his fists, the wrench, or the yard stick. Those pains aren’t quite as bad initially, but damn do they stick around. A bad encounter with a wrench and I have to find new positions to sit and sleep in for a week.

  Occasionally, Dad will venture into other tools—usually only if he’s really pissed—the worst of which being a crowbar once when Trina and I put a hole in the skylight in the upstairs bathroom while he was taking a bath. Our instinct was to run, but as any kid knows, that only makes it that much worse when it finally happens. Trying not to be noticed, I glance at my arm. The scar from the crowbar incident is fading steadily and will probably be gone in a matter of months.

  The smell in this room is that of Pine-Sol and, to my surprise, the undertone of mustiness I expect is not there. In addition, the odor does not suffocate, as it so often does elsewhere.

  Eventually, a small, business-looking woman pokes her head into the doorway from the hall beyond.

  “Jeremy Thorn?” she says. Her voice is as little as she is. She smiles as we get up to follow her. She leads us down a hall with thrift store wall art in abundance—photographs of flowery meadows, a rustic barn as seen from beyond its wooden fence, a handful of splotches and slashes of paint surely conceived and sold as abstract. The hall is narrow and makes me feel as though I’m under a great amount of scrutiny, like the shadows in the corners are equipped with peepholes and cameras.

  The woman walks in such a way that seems to be layered with intent and busy-ness, her hair bobbing enthusiastically in rhythm with the pff-pff-pff of her high h
eels landing on the short, hard carpet. She opens a door at the end of the hall and gestures for us to enter. We do so and she closes the door behind us.

  Inside, it looks like someone tore a page directly out of a home furnishing magazine and stuffed it full of psychology books. The lighting is low and warm, imbuing the room with an odd sort of busy tranquility, like making cookies. A squashy leather armchair sits opposite a matching couch, and its occupant, a middle-aged woman with a twinkly smile and dangly earrings, invites us to sit on the sofa. This one looks much more comfortable than the one we sat on in the waiting room.

  “So, you’re Jeremy?” she asks.

  I nod. She’s still smiling. Why is she smiling so much?

  She looks at my father. “Nice to see you, Don,” she says. My father smiles only for a moment before returning to his former expression, one of mild interest but mostly disconnect. Smiles from my father are rare, but even given their scarcity, they never feel all that significant. Probably because they’re mostly used to fool and appease others in public.

  I catch on fairly quickly that this is a therapist, and would have caught on even faster if I could figure out a reason for my being here. Sure, I have plenty of mental and emotional damage. Even someone with the emotional self-awareness of a ten-year-old such as myself can recognize that. But I feel like if my father were genuinely interested in sparking a recovery in me, an obvious first step would be to stop hitting me. A fresh hairline fracture in my ribs would seem to indicate that that isn’t the case.

  I wonder whether perhaps my school mandated the session, or maybe my father is under suspicion for the vile monster he is. But if the former were true, he wouldn’t have had to tell the school that it’s a dentist appointment. My curiosity mounts but I keep my mouth shut. Such is in my better interest, ultimately.

  The nice lady’s office is small, but cozy. I begin to notice things that escaped my attention on first impression: mostly little knickknacks that are visually interesting, akin to one of those birds that bobs its beak in a glass of water. My surveying of the room is cut short, however, as the therapist (Dr. Burrows, I learn) lays into a series of rapid-fire get-to-know-you questions. Surprisingly, my father doesn’t jump in to answer the questions on my behalf, but I guess such behavior would lend weight to any suspicion that may have cropped up and prodded this whole thing.

  The questions are somewhat routine for what I expected: Am I tired a lot? Do I ever feel hopeless? Have I ever felt alone? But then, the questions start becoming more specific. Aside from the appropriate ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ answers, I don’t know the ‘correct’ responses, so I keep them short, vague, and riddled with lies.

  Halfway through this lying session, I notice pain in my knuckle, followed by the weak but distinctly warm, sticky flow of blood. As the lies keep coming, so too do the cuts, self-inflicted, compulsive, as though my body is trying to reject the lies via driving my fingernails into my knuckle. If I get caught with these, though, that’ll be the end of it; my dad will beat my ass so hard it’ll glow in the dark. That’s not just fear or speculation, either; that’s a fact, sure as anything.

  After the questions are over (which feels like forever), we get up to leave and I shove my hands in my pocket. The shrink extends her hand to be shaken, and in a panic about revealing my bloodied finger, I feign childlike, paralytic shyness and hide behind my dad. I know I’m earning points with this one.

  I feel bad immediately for being rude, but if she only knew, she would understand. But she couldn’t. Can’t. Won’t. And it’s then that I realize what this was: insurance. If ever anyone questions what kind of father mine is, he has evidence of my mental well-being, in documented form, as medical records. Without my knowledge, I lengthened his leash quite a lot. Yes, he’ll be able to get away with much more than he used to, with such a powerful tool of defense in his arsenal.

  I keep my hands in my pockets the entire ride home. It’s all I can do not to cry. I don’t get a beating that night.

  [Present]

  From the north, looming black thunderclouds amass and advance. The previously gentle, warm breeze now punches through the curtains, a violent outburst to which I’m still becoming accustomed, like how the air here smells dusty and dead—a polar contrast to the vibrant air that had been pumped into my lungs in Oregon until two weeks ago.

  Fingers of hungry lightning thread through the colossal clouds, sewing them to the desert horizon, illuminating the clouds’ underbellies. Several seconds pass before the thunder reaches me, but without obstructions in the landscape to muffle and refract the noise, it hits the cottage with enough sonic force to rattle the dishes in the cupboards.

  When the noise settles, I hear Todd stir in the bedroom.

  It was a difficult decision to make, uprooting and skipping town, especially since things had just been settling down. But when one is alerted via death threat that things aren’t quite as settled as they seem, that the mess of a previous autumn has plunged its spindly, stubborn legs into one’s life, determined to cause any and all damage possible, well, one is not apt to stick around and find out what that amounts to.

  My mother seemed to think that this is some kind of exciting new adventure, like wanderlusty twenty-somethings who regularly pack their shit and hop on over to Wometzia, New Mexico.

  For whatever reason, my time away from my mother left me with an image of her that grew crazier with every passing day, like a solution of fermenting Ambien. I had pictured an eccentric mess of a woman, touched in less-than-subtle ways by the darkness of her past.

  But maybe I’m just projecting.

  I hear Todd get out of bed and flick on the attached bathroom’s light.

  As if to throw a Ha! I told you! in my face, my mother seems almost too okay. I suspect that the fireworks are still there, their fuses gathering dust but still ready to ignite with appropriate timing. With luck, hers wouldn’t detonate with the same extravagance that mine had. But, I suppose even that would be preferable to harboring the sinister explosives for any longer than necessary, and with Daddy dead, and the threat of adding new fireworks to the pile thus dissipated, now is a time that I certainly deem unnecessary.

  “You pissin’ off Thor again?” asks a sleepy voice, now approaching from the hallway.

  “Apparently,” I say. “Must be the shitty offerings I left. I guess conditioner and hair ties don’t really hit home with him.

  “Well shit,” he says. “That’s what I was going to leave for next week. What should we try next?”

  Another brilliant lightning strike, closer now, thrusts white light into our modest kitchen, briefly revealing the hands of the wall clock.

  It’s quarter to three.

  Sleep has been elusive to me, of late, like trying to trap a speck of floating cotton in your hands, only to watch it ride away on the disturbance in the air. We bought the cottage, however reluctantly, with the money that my dad left for my mom.

  There is still plenty left to her, and I suspect that she views her frivolous yet innocent shopping trips as an act of righteous retribution, the only way that she could elicit any form of penance from him now that he’s six feet under. I don’t blame her.

  Why Wometzia, New Mexico? Why, the hands of fate, of course! We needed to disappear. And more than that, we needed the place where we reappeared to be void of relatives, friends, contacts, sentiment, or history for either of us.

  My version of these criteria was simple, as the entirety of my life had taken place in Oregon. My mother had spent her hiatus in Washington, and my sister, Trina, ruled out New York. Easy.

  Todd’s family geography is not so simple. Todd has cousins in Idaho, Kansas, and up and down the East coast. He keeps in touch with childhood friends in California, Nevada, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Kentucky. Given our relationship, we had more or less ruled out the Bible Belt anyway.

  Todd has various siblings throughout much of the Midwest, and while Hawaii was tempting, we agreed to stay i
n the mainland states. Alaska is too cold for Todd and Arizona too hot for me. The Dakotas and Utah are both.

  So, into a ceramic bowl, we placed slips of paper. One each for New Mexico, Massachusetts, D.C., Maryland, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Wisconsin. Todd did the honors. Arguably, New Mexico is too hot for me, but I’d heard of the legendary thunderstorms and couldn’t resist; while rain is abundant in Oregon, the accompanying thunder is quite elusive. Thus far, it has not disappointed.

  The move itself was relatively simple, logistically. The hardest part was getting our combined book collection from Oregon to New Mexico. Nobody had been dumb enough to try to dissuade us from bringing those along.

  It didn’t help that we have many duplicate books, being that our taste in literature is so similar. But, as any sentimental reader knows, your copy is far superior to anyone else’s, and we thus agreed to keep the dupes as well.

  The other hard part was Beth. Not that she tried to convince us to stay—Beth recognizes a threat as much as anyone—it was simply saying goodbye. My career had always been augmented and fortified with her companionship, and she was, I realized then, my first real friend. She laid the foundation for the reconstruction of my ability to relate and to love. She promised to visit, though; after all, I still owe her ten bucks.

  Todd puts a kettle on the gas stove and lights it, a click-click-click-wumpf noise which I always enjoy. In the past, I’ve only had electric stovetops, but these gas ones are faster and more effective.

  “So what’s on the agenda for tonight?” Todd could go back to bed and fall asleep, but he doesn’t want to be alone, nor, I think, does he want me to be alone. So he joins me in my sleeplessness, in whatever lighthearted shenanigans might pull at me in the moment. Sometimes it’s tea followed by a movie. Sometimes it’s tea followed by sex. But there’s always tea.