A Guardian of Innocents Read online

  Doris’ shaking sputtered into gear again. From mild to intense. She brushed past me towards her old Nissan (that vehicle being in only slightly better condition than my own) with both hands clutching her keys to keep them from jingling so much.

  My stomach turned over again with the realization that Doris knew. I watched her slowly walk to her car with her head down, seeming to study the cement of the driveway.

  She was in the process of unlocking the driver’s door when she looked up at me. Our eyes met with a taut silence that was only interrupted by the shig shig shig sound of the idling Nova.

  “It looks like you bumped your head somewhere. . . You should put some hydrogen peroxide on it and...”

  She let the sentence, as well as the thought, just trail off into oblivion. I sensed in her an awful, hopeless desperation. She was giving me an excuse to dismiss what she knew to be true.

  But as she got in the car and backed out of the driveway, I felt something change. I felt the switch click on. Her mind was already in the process of turning that excuse, that lie, into something she would fully believe later. . . Probably by the time she arrived at the morgue.

  * * *

  Even as a child, I had trouble sleeping. Some insomniacs can’t go to sleep until they lay in bed for a few hours; others can fall asleep easily, but awake prematurely and can’t seem to find their way back to sleep. I kinda flip-flopped in between the two. Some nights (especially Sundays) I’d lie in bed thinking thoughts that a child should never even have to consider. Some kids think of turning to suicide when life’s problems seem too much for them, but I didn’t just think about it. I fantasized about it, on a regular basis.

  But that night was the worst. Doris was away until almost five o’clock in the morning. I kept thinking there’s a chance she’ll tell the police. She’s tired of making excuses. Oh dear God please don’t let her show up here with the police!

  * * *

  Two detectives from the Fort Worth P.D. were sitting in our living room late the next morning. There was a thick sediment of darkness around my bloodshot eyes, the end result of more than twenty-four hours without sleep. I wondered if that would make me look suspicious, but knew I had a good excuse if one of the cops brought it up. My father had been murdered after all.

  And about the hours that I was away from the house last night, the police had no clue. When they had called Doris, they woke her up and she, of course, assumed I was home and told them I was there asleep, only to find out a few minutes after she hung up that I wasn’t. The police hadn’t asked about it again, and so far she hadn’t mentioned it.

  While I was sensing no suspicion directed towards me, I was still greatly relieved when one of the detectives mentioned, “We think we may have already caught the kid that did it. He’s homeless, hooked on heroin. Think he was just probably looking to score some quick money to support his habit. Lives around that neighborhood. Matches the description one of our witnesses gave...”

  My heart skipped a beat, maybe that’s a cliché, but it really did. My heart just froze momentarily in my chest. Witnesses? I knew it couldn’t have been the fighting couple because they hadn’t really seen me.

  I tried probing their minds to extract more information, but it did no good. Their minds were occupied with other matters, such as what sounded good for lunch. Both of the cops’ main concerns were with getting out of this depressing place with its tacky furniture and heading to their favorite grease-pit diner.

  * * *

  The investigation was short. The case against the suspect, a Mr. David Silfer, was never brought to trial. There was simply nothing hard and substantial to convict him on, which meant the D.A. didn’t want to waste the county’s money trying a case he knew he would lose.

  The detectives kept telling Doris the investigation was still on-going, which I interpreted into: if something happens to pop up, we’ll look into it, but other than that, we’re not gonna do a damn thing.

  Time passes as always. As a teen, each year seems to flow by faster that the last. Even after Jack’s case was eventually closed as unsolved, I still felt paranoia to some degree every time I saw a cop car cruising behind me, or anytime one of the school cops walking down the hall made eye contact with me. But graduation came.

  And I started to get over it.

  Chapter 5

  College was the second best time of my life (the best and worst were still to come.) I felt a freedom there I had never known in all of my short life. I took up acting and joined the school’s theatre department. I still to this day believe there is not a more fun group of people to go out and have a few beers with than bunch of actors. True, I was only eighteen and couldn’t get into the more prestigious bars and clubs of the Dallas area, but we knew of a bar & grill kind of place that was pretty lax on the “We Card” issue.

  I performed in a few plays in my time there, made a few friends and even got laid. So I was pretty damn happy. I was living what seemed to be the normal life of a young community college student.

  Then Doris had to go fuck it all up.

  I was finished with my first semester at North Lake College and it was now Christmas Break. With the holidays approaching and my being eighteen, Doris thought it would be a great time to tell me about my biological parents and the immediate family connecting them.

  I already knew what she had to say. You don’t have to explain a whole lot to a mind reader, but she did reveal a few things I was surprised to hear. Like I have a cousin who lives only an hour away in a small town named Granbury. And my bio-mother’s legalistic parents had died a few years back when a tornado had plucked their tiny Hyundai Accent off the road and tossed it a few football fields away.

  She babbled on about a few other trivial things and then showed me the two plane tickets to Salt Lake City. We were leaving in a few days to go see my mother.

  * * *

  Doris, already a chatterbox by mature, becomes even more talkative when she gets nervous. And during the two-hour flight to Utah, I thought her tongue would fall out of her mouth by the time we landed.

  I wanted so desperately for her to shut up. Not only did her incessant ramblings annoy me, they annoyed everyone else on our charter flight. It was a compact plane with compact seating and every passenger could hear Doris, despite the fact that she spoke in an obnoxious, high-volume stage-whisper.

  Everyone’s thoughts were being drilled into my head:

  Could someone please shut that bitch up?

  God, she’s worse than listening to a screaming kid.

  Shut up you fat bitch.

  Glad I’m not her son.

  Shut up you FAT BITCH!!!

  This in turn just created more noise in my head. All I wanted to do was just sit by the window and read my fuckin’ Anne Rice novel!

  My real mother, Shannon, became very emotional when she saw me. I wasn’t so much emotional about the meeting as I was curious about her and the rest of my family. The three-day stay was an intensive lesson in my family history. There was also a small get-together with some of my extended family. I wasn’t really impressed with any of them. They were all typical LDS’s (Latter Day Saints, a.k.a. Mormons.) They were all full of handshakes and questions about whether or not I would become a missionary for the church and allow myself to get shipped off to Brazil or some other heathen country so I could enlighten the savages with the teachings of Joseph Smith, the Mormons’ beloved founder and alleged prophet.

  On the second night, Doris retired to bed early in the guest bedroom. I, having the luxury of the living room couch, was busy unfolding an old quilt to wrap myself up in when my mother approached me, armed with a dusty photo album.

  She whispered to me, “Finally, we can talk. Just you and me. I got some pictures I want to show you.”

  She was nervous and unsure of herself, trying to be motherly while at the same time wondering if she should be.

  There were probably a hundred or more family pictures inside the clear plastic pages of
that album, but Shannon noticeably went through those very quickly and briefly, skipping the majority of them, pausing significantly only at one picture of her own parents.

  She came to the end of the book and pulled out an envelope that was probably white twenty years ago, but was now yellowed with age. The envelope had been tucked into a pocket in the hard cover of the photo album.

  Shannon gently pulled from it what almost looked to be a picture of me with a 70’s shag haircut. I knew before she spoke this was my father from his high school days and it was the only picture of him she had. She shared with me some of her memories of him, but in a bittersweet tone of voice. She both loved and hated him; it was easy to tell. I could see the direction her story was taking: she got pregnant, he left town. But for conversation’s sake I asked anyways...

  “So where is he now?”

  Long deep sigh. “I don’t know—at least not exactly, for awhile I heard he was living down in Louisiana, then heard later he was in Georgia doing ministry crusades and big tent revivals.”

  “A Mormon?” I asked in disbelief. If there is one thing the Latter Day Saints are not, it’s holy-rollers. They speak quietly, believe in subdued reverence, and thus have the dullest Sunday services anywhere. They could put an insomniac wired on a caffeine/sugar rush to sleep.

  “No,” Shannon answered, “That was the whole problem between my father and Thomas. Thomas, your father, was born into an LDS family but he was never really one at heart. Your father was a non-conformist. He liked to argue a lot. And he was always questioning the validity of the Book of Mormon, saying this passage or other conflicted with the Bible. He would get into debates with others during Sunday school! Can you believe that? Well, anyways, my father was pretty rigid in his faith and just despised Thomas.” She then relayed the story to me that I shared in the beginning of this book.

  She had come back from Colorado only to find out he had vanished one day about two weeks after she’d left. His parents had told her he’d only left them a note saying he had to move “out of state.” He just had to get away from here.

  “My father told me later he had paid Thomas to get out of the area. I still don’t know for sure whether or not I believe that. It’s one of those things where my heart says Daddy’s lying and Thomas must have left for some other reason while my head says, ‘Yeah, right.’”

  I was silent for a moment, “Do you think he even knows I exist, that he has a son by you?”

  “Yes, he knows I had his child. Lord knows there were rumors enough of my pregnancy flitting around this town.”

  I felt something pass through her memories just then. It was something she didn’t want to remember, something about a phone call.

  (((she hung up)))

  I was about to ask her (in an indirect manner) about it when I felt her tense up as she prepared to ask a difficult question. I lifted my head and we made direct eye contact as she was opening her mouth to sound out the first syllable of her question. She paused.

  “You knew what I was going to ask you just then, didn’t you?”

  Carefully, I replied, “Only that it was something in the neighborhood of ‘Can you forgive me for giving you away?’”

  My mother smiled nervously, “You are definitely your father’s son alright. He could always do that too—tell what people were going to say before they said it.”

  Feigning a little more interest in my true family, I asked, “So where in Granbury did you say my cousin lived?”

  It gave me a quick chance to get off the subject because I did not want to answer her question. How in the hell was I supposed to forgive her when she had allowed my grandfather to send me off to live with Jack and Doris? But it was also because I felt sorry for her. The last thing I wanted to do was break her heart by telling her what kind of sick and emotionally disturbed people had been allowed to raise her child.

  And so the question was left to hang in the air unanswered, and Shannon never asked for my forgiveness again.

  Chapter 6

  My cousin, Pete, and I became friends in what was literally just a matter of minutes. It felt as though an instant bond was being forged as we spoke for the first time. His part of the family had severed ties with the LDS about two decades ago. After two hours on the phone, he invited me to have dinner with him and his fiancée out at their small ranch.

  It’s still difficult for me to believe that the one evening I spent at their place altered the course of my life so dramatically. I had survived Jack, but I still had yet to meet an even sicker bastard named Galen.

  The gate was wide open as I drove onto their property. A trio of black and white dogs jogged up to the truck I’d inherited from Jack, and escorted me to the brand new double-wide trailer sitting on top of a hill. The three were all friendly enough, a black and white Australian shepherd, a beautiful white lab and an old dalmation.

  Pete’s girlfriend, Kimber, came out and smiled at me, “I see you’ve been greeted by the welcoming committee!”

  As I closed the truck’s door, the lab stuck his nose in my crotch and took a big whiff. He started wagging his tail then. I guess I must have won his approval.

  “Roscoe!” Kimber yelled, squinting her eyes in embarrassment, “Sorry about that! He tends to get a bit personal with new company.”

  “S’alright,” I replied, grabbing hold of Roscoe’s collar as he attempted to take another sniff. With my other hand, I scratched him on the back to make it appear as though I wasn’t so much holding the dog back as I was just petting him.

  Pete walked out, approaching me with his hand held out ready for a firm shake, “I guess we must’ve both taken after our fathers, cuz we look nothing alike!”

  He was all smiles as I shook his hand. He pulled me to him and we gave each other a one-armed hug while our right hands were still clasped.

  “It’s good to finally meet you,” I said.

  “Likewise,” Pete responded, “C’mon, let’s go inside. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  * * *

  Kimber’s son, Isaac, reluctantly emerged from his room only long enough to say hi, eager to return to his Sega Genesis video game system. His eyes never left the floor during the brief introduction. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt such a pensive sadness radiating off a seven-year-old. The alarm signals in my head sounded off that something was very wrong with Isaac. I tried to push my mind to probe further, but to no avail. The child was so introverted and closed off, that he had subconsciously managed to build a psychic wall around himself of moderate strength.

  I might have broken through it if I’d had the time to sit there and seriously concentrate, but Pete was saying something.

  “Isaac’s a video game junkie just like you and me, Phil.”

  “Is that right?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” he mumbled under his breath, then whispered to his mother, “Can I go now?”

  Exasperated by her son’s lack of social skills, Kimber conceded, “Alright, but dinner’ll be ready soon, so when I call for you to wash up, I want you to get up and wash your hands immediately and not make me ask you four or five times. Understand?”

  “Okay,” he agreed, then fast-walked into his bedroom and closed the door.

  Dinner was served shortly after, baked chicken with stuffing, corn and peas. I learned through all the conversation that Kimber was the owner of the land, but Pete was the one responsible for putting the new trailer on it.

  “Did you see that old, faded blue and white house next to our property when you came in?” Kimber asked me.

  “Mmm—I think so,” I answered, not really remembering since all the houses in the neighborhood had looked not necessarily run-down, but definitely antiquated.

  Pete continued, “Well, when Kimber divorced Isaac’s dad...”

  His voice died out in my ears when he mentioned Kimber’s ex-husband. A flash of muddled, frightening images roared into my head. I looked over at Kimber and our eyes met.

  I felt myself transported into t
his kind of dreamworld where the horror of her marriage to a man named Galen was being relived. I felt a powerful hand slap me across the face. I felt a great weight on top of me as a pair of brick-like fists pummeled my kidneys. I felt myself being tossed around the kitchen as though caught in a whirlwind with my baby son crying in the background, seemingly far away.

  I heard smashing and breaking and stomping. I saw a big man with a broom handle. I felt shards of broken glass cut my face as I sat in a car desperately fidgeting through a set of keys with hands too adrenalized and shaky to find the right one.

  The distinct smell of alcohol upon hot breath was making my eyes water.

  But what finally broke the trance and sent me to their bathroom to vacate my stomach was the last vision. Despite all that Jack had done to me growing up, he had never done that.

  The words that I could hear were difficult to make out, but the ideas and the whole gist of what had happened two years ago was made all too clear.

  Galen was already well into his bottle of vodka only ten minutes after arriving home from work. Kimber had recently discovered her husband was not only an abusive alcoholic, but also had developed a taste for teenage male prostitutes, an interesting hobby for someone who so convincingly plays the role of a tough guy.

  She’d been taking his abuse for years by then, but this was somehow worse to her, far worse. AIDS was out there for God’s sake! What if he contracted it or some other fucked up disease and gave it to her? She’d heard it could lay dormant for years before any symptoms surfaced.

  So when Isaac had been in his room for awhile, absorbed into the fantasy world of Sega, Kimber confronted her husband and got righteously indignant on his ass. In a low, whispering but hate-drenched voice, she told Galen everything she thought of him as she stood over him in his chair. She advised him there was going to be a quick and painless divorce or everyone he knew would be told exactly what it was that her loving husband liked to do for fun.