Abandoned: A Thriller (3 page)

“That’s true.”

I bend at the waist and breathe into his ear. “Now shut up and do that thing I like so much.”

And he does, and the sun keeps rising and the ocean beats against the sand, and I cherish the minutiae of every moment. But even as we roam against each other, I know this peace is fleeting. We don’t belong here, in this place of too much light. I see other children in my mind, waiting for my return.

Tommy kisses me and I cry out, and the island says good-bye.

1974

“I’m going to be life.”

The man said these words to the Boy. The Boy took the timbre of his tone and got himself ready.

“Yes, Father.”

“You’ll be you, and I’ll be life.”

“I understand.”

It was a role play.

His father held out a hand, palm up. It was a big hand. It was a hard hand too. The Boy knew that from experience. It had fallen against him many times.

“Give me a dollar.”

His father regarded him and the Boy regarded his father, waiting for whatever was to come. It was the head of a brute, the Boy thought, not unlovingly. A head and face to match the hands, skull rough-cut from a block of concrete or a hunk of slag metal. His eyes were ice blue and ice cold, and they were the eyes of a philosopher and a murderer together.

The Boy was growing the same eyes, with his father as their gardener.

“I don’t have a dollar.”

“Well, now,” his father said. He looked down at the tabletop, tapped a single thick finger on it, as though lost in thought. “Well, now. I’ll ask
you one more time.” He returned his gaze to his son’s face. “Give me a dollar.” He held out his hand again, closing and opening it in a gesture of wanting and demand.

“I already told you, I don’t have a dollar. Asking me twice isn’t going to make it so.”

He was rewarded with a glint of approval. What he’d just done was dangerous, but it was also brave. Brave was good.

“I told you I was going to be life,” his father intoned, in a low, patient voice. “When life asks you for a dollar, you either provide it or life punishes you ’til you do.”

The table was small and his father’s arms were long. The hand came down against the left side of his face, thunderous. He saw blackness almost immediately. He woke up on his stomach, chair overturned, his palms against the floor where he’d caught himself. His ears were ringing, and he could taste his own blood in his mouth. Numb buzzing filled his head.

“Get up, Son.”

His head swam. He fought to find the words. “Yes, Father.”

He was grateful.

The Boy was only ten, but he’d already observed some of the workings of the world, and he had a pretty good idea that his father was onto something. Life was going to go on, with you or without you. Probably without if you were weak. His father wanted him to be strong. What other kind of love could a father show a son?

He struggled to his feet. He swayed briefly but caught himself. Weakness was the cardinal sin, cowardice the second.

“Never just take it, boy,” his father said. “Always fight back. If you’re going to lose a fight, then make them pay for every punch they throw.”

“Yes, sir,” he agreed. He brought his fists up, marveling at how small they were compared to the massive ones his father had now raised and clenched.

“Life wants a dollar, boy,” his father said.

The Boy didn’t land a single blow, but he kept his mouth shut as his father beat him into unconsciousness, and he didn’t cry.

The Boy came to in his own bed, shivering and hurting. He wanted to moan, but he bit it back. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed
next to him, a hulk in the dark, silvered by the moon bleeding through the curtains.

“I’m being life, and life wants a dollar, Son. I’m going to ask for a dollar every week until you give me one. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” he said through cracked lips, making sure his voice was strong and clear.

His father gazed out the window, watching the moon as though the two of them had something to commiserate on. Maybe they did. “Do you know what joy is, Son?”

“No, sir.”

“Joy is anything that comes after survival.”

The Boy filed that away, in the deep-down place where he held the great truths, and then he waited, because his father wasn’t done. He could tell.

“We only have one purpose in this life, Son, and that’s to draw our next breath. Everything else is just a dressed-up lie. You need food, you need shelter, you need a place to sleep and a hole to shit in.” The big man turned on the bed to look at him directly.

The Boy had never really been afraid of his father. In all the lessons in all the times, through the brutal and the painful, he’d never doubted that the man who’d given him life would preserve it. Until now. Now was different, and he held his breath and his tongue and he waited, watched by two eyes that were lit up like dying stars.

“Why’d I pick a dollar? Because money is at the base of it all. Life wants a dollar, Son, it wants it each and every day, from now ’til you go under the ground. If you can’t pay, you can’t eat. If you can’t eat, you can’t live. There’s nothing else to it. You follow me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not sure you do, boy, but we’ll find out. This is a test. I’ll give you some tries, but eventually, if you don’t come up with that dollar, I’m going to have to put you down and start over.”

His father turned away after a stretched minute and resumed his communion with the moon.

“There isn’t any God, boy. There’s no such thing as the soul. There’s just blood and flesh and bone. You weren’t put here by a higher power. You were put here because I stuck something in your mother and the meat of you grew into something else. That meat needs to be fed, and you need dollars to do that, and that’s the sum of all we are and ever will be.”

The big man stood up and left without a further word. The boy lay back on his bed and watched the moon and thought about what had been said to him. He didn’t question the lessons, and he didn’t resent the pain. That ship had sailed, then sunk, long, long ago. There was a time he remembered being angry and sad, but it seemed more like a dream than a memory now. His father’s fists had hammered that weakness from him, like a hammer smoothing the dimples from a sheet of metal. His father was his God, and his God was teaching him to survive.

He needed a dollar. If he didn’t come up with it, he’d die. That was all that mattered, so he put his mind to it. By the time he’d fallen asleep, he had a plan.

The Boy had just started fifth grade. School was something mandated by his father as a necessity.

“You need knowledge to feed the meat, Son, and school’s free. Only an idiot would turn that deal down.”

He sat in his class and waited for the closing bell to ring. He had no friends and wanted none. Other people were opponents. Best to keep to yourself, so he always did.

The Boy watched Martin O’Brian, the school bully, gauging him with a critical eye. Martin was big and brutal. He had flat brown eyes and thin brown hair that always looked like it had been cut at home, and badly. He wore sneakers a few years too old, and some of his blue jeans had holes in the knees. Sometimes, Martin would come to school with a black eye, or maybe wincing as he walked, and those were terrible days for the weak. On those days, Martin was a thunderstorm.

He was feared by everyone, even the sixth graders. Martin dispensed his bullying and misery with a wild light in his eyes, as though he were somewhere else entirely. You could never be sure just how far he’d go, and this, in many ways, was the secret to his power. Anyone can be huge. Not everyone can be terrifying.

Martin would pull your arm behind your back and tell you to call your mother a whore. If you refused, his eyebrows would come together and some part of him would go away. Once that happened, it was anything goes. He’d even cracked a kid’s arm once.

It was the kind of brutality that parents couldn’t believe in a ten-year-old (or chose to ignore, suspecting its origins), so Martin was scolded and
grounded or suspended but not much else. He was left free to rampage, an elephant set loose among the pygmies. Adults watched as the village burned but refused to smell the smoke.

The Boy smelled it. Surely. He’d seen the gleam rise in Martin’s eyes once, when the bully was deep in his work with another kid. They’d been madman’s eyes, set above a feverish smile that seemed more about tears than laughter.

Martin was what he was, and because of this, Martin was the solution to the Boy’s problem.

The bell rang and the Boy went to his locker. He put all of his books inside and left them there; he’d done his homework in class so he could keep his hands free. He grabbed the other item he’d put in the locker that morning and walked out of the school door without a second look back.

He walked off the school grounds and sat down on the curb of the residential street, waiting. It was a nice day. The sun warmed his shoulders. An impatient breeze hurried by, ruffling the leaves in nearby trees and giving his cheeks a distracted kiss before moving on to whatever would come to stop it.

Nearly ten minutes passed before the bully walked by. Martin was whistling to himself, smiling at some private thought, his fists clenching and unclenching in unconscious, continuous rage. The Boy watched him go, then stood up and followed from a distance.

Martin stayed on the road for about five minutes, then turned onto a side street. Just two more turns before Martin was home.

Now or never, and never was not an option.

The Boy ran forward, gripping the thing from the locker in his hands. His heartbeat was slow and steady. He reached Martin in ten steps and swung on him.

The Boy had cut the broom handle in half before school. It hit Martin in the left kidney with a hard
thump.
The bully froze for a moment and then he screamed in pain. He reached back a hand, and the Boy hit that too.

The bully turned to face his attacker and was rewarded with a jab in his solar plexus that sent him to his knees, gasping for breath. Another whack broke his nose. The Boy hit Martin with method and patience, taking no joy from the act. He wasn’t a sadist. This was a means to an
end, no more, no less. He needed Martin to break, and he’d stop when that point had been reached.

Martin fell and curled into himself on the sidewalk, covering his face and head with his hands, trying to present the smallest body area possible to his attacker. The broomstick kept falling. Again and again and again. Arms, legs, back, butt. Not hard enough to break any bones or rupture anything inside, but more than hard enough to bring agony and waves of red mixed with spots of bright and black.

The Boy stopped when Martin began to mewl like a kitten.

“Martin. Look at me.”

The bully didn’t reply, still curled into a fetal ball, wailing, shaking, farting in little bleats of sheer terror.

“Martin. If you don’t look at me and listen to what I’m telling you, I’ll start hitting you again.”

That got through. The bully uncurled in jerky motions, fits and starts of fear. His eyes were wide and roaming. Snot ran from his nose in a gooey river, mixed with blood and tears. A knot was already rising high on one cheek. His lips would need stitches. His breath hitched as he fought to get a grip on his runaway hysteria.

“Martin.” The Boy’s voice was as patient as his eyes were empty. He wasn’t breathing hard. “You’re going to start doing something for me. If you do what I say, you’re safe. If you don’t, there will be penalties. Do you understand?”

Martin stared up at his attacker, not saying anything. The Boy raised the broomstick.

“Yes! Yes!” Martin screamed. “I understand!”

The Boy lowered the stick. “Good. You’re going to get me three dollars a week. I don’t think that’ll be a problem, right? I’ve been watching you. I know you rob other kids. Lunch money, allowance, things like that?”

“Y-yeah …” Martin whispered. He’d begun to tremble uncontrollably.

“So you just have to keep doing what you’re already doing. The only difference is that you have to give me three dollars every week. Understand?”

Martin nodded. He couldn’t speak anymore. His teeth were chattering too hard.

“Now, this next part is really important, Martin, so I need you to pay attention. If you ever—ever—tell anyone about what I did to you here, or about the three dollars, or if you don’t get me the money, I’m going to show up in your house one night. I’ll kill your mom and your dad and then I’ll kill you too. And it’ll take a long, long time.”

Martin heard these words, and time stopped. Everything became both unreal and more distinct. He saw the present and the future and was filled with a vibration that rushed the fear from him.

The sun is out in a cloudless sky. The concrete on the sidewalk is warm but not hot, and he is only five minutes from his house. He’d get home and grab a Coke and one of Mom’s brownies and head to his room. He’d kick off his tennis shoes and read the latest Batman comic. Mom would call him to dinner (meat loaf, probably) and they’d enjoy it together because Dad was off on the road, doing his salesman thing. No Dad meant neither he nor Mom would feel THE FISTS (that’s how Martin thought of his father’s clenched hands—THE FISTS). Maybe later they’d watch
Happy Days
together. His mother might even laugh.