Everything You Need: Short Stories (5 page)

His hands stop moving. He has started to cry.

MAN 2: This shit changes nothing. You were right. Do everything just so. Do it
right
. If the rest of the world can’t be fucked, then fuck ’em. Do your thing.
Do it right
.

He stands, no longer trying to do anything, shoulders heaving. Then he sniffs, pulls his sleeve across his face.

MAN 2: Okay then. Glad we got that straight.

Then suddenly he looks off to his right. Stands absolutely still, and silent, for twenty seconds.

MAN 2 (quietly): You hear that?

He’s silent again, staring off into the darkness.

MAN 2: You hear your buddies? Off down along the shore. Seems like maybe there’s braindeads still in these woods after all. I knew there would be. Told you so. I never thought those things were as dumb as everybody makes out— and they’re getting smarter now, too.
Lots
smarter. And they gotta being loving that smell, right? Burgers cooking in the open air. Cooked by someone you know, in a place you’ve been to so many times it feels like home. There is no food in the fucking
world
tastes like a burger eaten with people you’ve known your whole life. That, my friends, is the word of God.

He grabs the bottle of alcohol and takes another big gulp, before shouting into the darkness.

MAN 2: You
like
that smell? ’Course you do. That’s
meat
cooking, and it’s meat done right. Old Man Stegnaro’s special sauce. Fucking shitheads just gnawing dead shit. That’s not how it’s
done
, don’t you fucking get it?

He’s quiet for a moment, looking off along the shore.

MAN 2: Fuck, dude. There’s a
lot
of them. Not sure we got enough to go ’round all these fuckers. ’Course you probably won’t be eating your burger and be honest with you I don’t really want mine, what with the ground round having come out of your actual fucking
leg
, but that’s the kind of joke you would have loved, bro – say it ain’t so. You make do with what you got, right? You were always telling me that.
And
you’d have made me bring all this other shit if you’d been alive to have a say-so, and so that’s what I done. Standards must be maintained. You can turn the Stegnaro brothers’ world to crap but we ain’t coming down to your level. Still here, still standing, still doing it right.

He looks off along the shore and cackles triumphantly – gesturing toward himself as if instigating a fight. He addresses people out of frame.

MAN 2: You want some? You fucking
want
some? If you’re going to eat, you dead fucking
assholes
, then do it
right
.

He holds the barbecue sauce bottle above his head and squirts it liberally over himself.

MAN 2: Fucking deadheads.

At the left and right extremities of the screen, we can make out shadows of human size, lurching toward Man 2. The fire is unsettling them, but they are neither retreating or halting their progress.

MAN 2: Yeah, yeah – ‘Oh, look at us, we just keep on coming.’ Assholes. And don’t forget the mustard.

The encroaching shapes are now within yards of him. He picks something else up from the ground. He holds it, flips the cap, looking over at the slumped other man.

MAN 2: Sorry I didn’t get there sooner, bro.

He holds the thing in his hand up and squeezes, squirting something else all over his clothes and head and body. Then pulls something else out of his pocket, as he squirts the fuel over the shapes now closing in on him.

MAN 2: I love you, man.

He lights a match and holds it to his chest. The flare of the flames whites out the screen. Dark shapes surround him, also burning, grunting.

MAN 2: Gonna be pretty fucking chargrilled, huh.

A shape reaches out toward the camera.

T
APE ENDS
.

I
first heard
the name on Monday night, when I was putting him to bed. Kathy was out for an early dinner and catch-up with a friend, and so it had been the Ethan-and-Daddy Show from late afternoon. The recurring plot of this regular series boils down to me preparing one of the pasta dishes which have gained my son’s tacit approval (and getting him to focus on eating it before it turns into a congealed mass), and the two of us then watching his allotted one-per-day ration of
Ben 10: Alien Force
. After its conclusion I coax him up to the bathroom and into the bath — against sustained and imaginative resistance — followed by the even more protracted process of getting him to
leave
the bat, Ethan having in the interim realized that the nice, warm tub is the best place in the world to be, and an environment he is not prepared to leave at any cost. Then there’s the putting-on-of-pajamas and the brushing-of-the-teeth and various other tasks which sound (and should be) simple and quick but always seem to end up taking
forever
— little tranches of time which add up to really
quite a lot of time
when taken together, time that I’ll never get back. We had Ethan relatively late in life (he’s six, making me exactly forty years his senior) but what the older parent may lack in energy and vim is hopefully tempered by what they bring in terms of perspective, and so I understand that it won’t be so very long before my presence in the bathroom (or anywhere else) will not be enjoyed or even tolerated by a child who’ll grow up faster than seems possible. Two more lots of six years, and he’ll be leaving home. I get that. I try, therefore, to take all these little tribulations in good spirit, and to enjoy their fleeting presence in my life. But still, at the end of a long day, you do kind of wish they’d just brush their bloody teeth, by themselves, without all the stalling and prevarication.

For
the love of god
.

Eventually we got clear of the bathroom and processed in state to Ethan’s bedroom — him leading the way, regal in pint-sized dressing gown, chattering about this and that. He resisted getting into bed for a while, but without any real purpose and in a pro forma manner, as if he knew this section of the evening was merely part of a ritual and he was doing it for my sake more than for himself. Eventually he yawned massively and headed toward the bed. He was tired. He always is on Mondays and Wednesdays because of after-school club. The trick with tired children is to resist in a passive, judo-style fashion, putting up no specific barriers for them to kick against, instead letting them use their own strength against themselves. This, at least, I have learned.

When he was finally tucked under the covers I asked him how his day had been. I’d meant to do this earlier, but forgot, which meant the enquiry was doomed to failure. Ethan appears to blank his working day within minutes of leaving the school gates, as if what happens there has no more reality than a dream, and melts like ice under the fierce sun of The Outside World. Or perhaps the opposite is true, and that theres’ a fundamental reality about the universe of the school that is impossible to convey to we shades who live in the unconvincing hinterland outside.

Either way, he appeared as usual to have zero recollection of what had occurred between nine a.m. and four p.m. that day. When pushed for a definitive account, however, he issued a brief statement saying that it had been ‘fine’.

‘And how was after-school club?’

Many of the kids who go to The Reynolds School have parents who both work. This means the school runs a slick and profitable range of activities to tide tots over from the end of actual school to the point where their stressed-out handlers can pick them up. Ethan’s after-school diversion on Mondays is swimming. This is a bit pointless, I can’t help thinking. Partly because Monday happens also to be when his class does swimming anyway — and so all his piscine endeavors are concentrated on the same day; mainly because said classes boil down to the children spending most of the half hour shivering on the edge of the pool, waiting for their brief turn to splash about. Ethan’s already pretty confident in the water — courtesy of a vacation in Florida last year — but untutored in terms of strokes, beyond a hectic doggy-paddle that is full of sound and fury but conveys little in the way of forward motion. We hoped the after-school club would help refine this. So far, he seems to be going backwards.

‘Terrible,’ Ethan said.

‘Terrible?’ This is strong for him. He usually confines pronouncements of quality to “fine” or “okay”, occasionally peaking in a devil-may-care “good”. I suspect the deployment of “great” would require the school suddenly deciding to hand out free chocolate. I’d never heard “terrible” before, either. ‘Why terrible?’

‘Arthur Milford was mean to me again.’

I snorted. ‘Arthur Milford? What the hell kind of name is that?’

Ethan turned his head in bed to look at me. ‘What?’

‘How
old
is this kid?’

‘Six,’ Ethan said, with gentle care, as if I was crazy. ‘He’s
six
. Like me.’

‘Sorry, yes,’ I said. I tend to talk to my son as if he’s a miniature adult for much of the time — too much of it, perhaps — but there was no way of explaining to him that the name “Arthur Milford”, while theoretically acceptable, seemed more appropriate to a music hall comedian of the 1930s than a six-year-old in 2011. ‘What do you mean, he was mean to you again?’

‘He’s always mean to me.’

‘Really? In what way?’

‘Telling me I’m stupid.’

‘You’re not stupid,’ I said, crossly. ‘
He’s
stupid, if he goes around calling people names. Just ignore him.’

‘I can’t ignore him.’ Ethan’s voice was quiet. ‘He’s always doing it. He pushes me in the corridor, too. Today he said he was going to throw me out of a window.’

‘
What
? He actually
said
that?’

Ethan looked up at me solemnly. After a moment he looked away. ‘He didn’t actually say it. But he meant it.’

‘I see,’ I said, suddenly unsure how much of this entire story was true. ‘Well, look. If he says mean things to you, just ignore him. Mean boys say mean things. That’s the way it is. But if he pushes you, tell a teacher about it. Immediately.’

‘I do. They don’t do anything about it.’

‘Well, if it happens again, then tell them again. And tell me, too, okay?’

‘Okay, Daddy.’

And then, as so often in such conversations, the matter was dismissed as if it had never been of import to him — and instead merely something that I’d been rather tediously insisting on discussing — and my son asked me a series of apparently random questions about the world, which I did my best to answer, and I read him a story and filled up his water cup and read more story, and eventually he went to sleep.

W
e tend
to alternate in picking Ethan up (as with most parenting duties), and so Tuesday was Kathy’s turn. I had a deadline to chase and so — bar him dashing into my study to say hello when they got back — I barely saw Ethan before I kissed him on the head and said goodnight when Kathy led him up toward bath and bedtime.

Fifty minutes later, by which time I’d made a start on cooking, my wife appeared in the kitchen with the cautiously relieved demeanor of someone who believes they’ve wrangled an unpredictable child into bed.

‘Is he down?’

‘I’m not enumerating any domesticated, egg-producing fowl,’ she said, reaching into the fridge for the open bottle of wine. ‘But he might be. God willing.’

She poured herself a glass and took a long sip before turning to me. ‘God I’m tired.’

‘Me too,’ I said, without a lot of sympathy.

‘I know. I’m just saying. By the way — has Ethan mentioned some kid called Arthur to you?’

‘Arthur Milford?’

‘So he has?’

‘Once. Last night. Why — did he come up again?’

‘Mmm. And it’s not the first time, either.’

‘Really?’

‘Ethan mentioned him last week, and I think the week before, too. They’re in after-school swimming together.’

‘I know. Last night he said this Arthur kid had been mean to him. In fact, he said he’d been mean “again”.’

‘Mean in what way?’

‘Pushed him in the corridor. Called him stupid.’ I thought about mentioning the threat to throw Ethan through a window, but decided not. I didn’t think Kathy needed to hear that part, especially as the telling had subsequently made it unclear whether it had taken place in what Ethan called ‘real life’.

‘Pushed him
in the corridor
? That means it’s not just happening during swimming class.’

‘I guess. If it’s happening at all.’

‘You don’t believe him?’

‘No, no, I do. But you know what he’s like, Kath. He’s all about the baddies and the goodies. It just sounds to me a bit like this Arthur Milford kid is in the script as Ethan’s dread Nemesis. And that maybe not all of his exploits are directly related to events in what we’d think of as reality.’

‘Doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there.’

‘I know,’ I said, a little irritated that Kathy seemed to be claiming ownership of the issue, or implying I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. ‘I told him to talk to the teachers if this kid is mean to him again. And to tell me about it, too.’

‘Okay.’

‘But ultimately, that’s the way children are. Boys especially. They give each other grief. They shove. Little girls form cliques and tell other girls they’re not their friends. Boys call each other names and thump each other. It has been thus since we lived in caves. It will be so until the sun explodes.’

‘I know. It’s just... Ethan’s such a cute kid. He can be a total pain, of course, but he’s... so sweet, really, underneath. He doesn’t know about all the crap in life yet. I want to protect him from it. I don’t want him being hit, just because that’s what happens. I don’t want him being hurt in any way. I just want... everything to be nice.’

‘I know,’ I said, relenting. ‘Me too.’

I rubbed her shoulder on the way over to supervise the closing stages of cooking, and privately raised my State of Awareness of the Arthur Milford situation to DefCon 4 to DefCon 3. Despite what everyone seems to think, the readiness-for-conflict index increases in severity from five to one, with
one
being the highest level (the highest level ever officially recorded is DefCon 2, which obtained for a while during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I knew all this from some half-hearted research for an article I was drafting on Homeland Security).

Be all which as it may, and despite my pompous such-is-life declaration, Kathy was right.

I didn’t want anyone hassling my kid. Much more of it, and words would need to be spoken.

I
picked
Ethan up the following afternoon, and remembered to ask him about his day as soon as we got into the car. He proved surprisingly well-informed on his own doings, and filled me in on a variety of Montessori-structured activities he’d undertaken (neither Kathy nor I truly understand what Montessori is about, but we believe/hope that it’s generally agreed to be A Good Thing, like lowering CO2 levels, and being kind to dogs). There was no mention of Arthur Milford. I thought about asking a direct question but decided that if Ethan hadn’t deemed him worth mentioning, there was probably nothing to say.

Ethan went to bed easily that night, in his unpredictable fashion. We had a laugh during bath-time, he brushed his own teeth without being asked, and then — after quite a short reading — he drifted off to sleep before I was even ready for it. I sat for five minutes afterwards, enjoying the peace of quietly being in the same space as someone you love very much. There’s usually a hidden edge to the observation that nothing’s as beautiful as a sleeping child (the point being it’s all too often nicer than them being awake), but the fact is... there really isn’t. To watch your son, asleep in his comfortable bed with a tummy full of food that you made him and a head full of story you’ve just told, arm gripping a furry polar bear you bought him on a whim but to which he’s taken as if they’d been separated at birth... that’s why we’re born. That’s why everything else is worth it.

Yet sometimes I get so angry with him that I don’t know what to do with myself. And he knows it. He must.

A
bout six hours
later I woke in my own bed, dimly aware I could hear a noise that shouldn’t exist in a house in the middle of the night. By the time I’d opened my eyes, it was quiet. But as I started to relax back into oblivion, I heard it again.

A quiet sob.

I quickly hauled myself upright and staggered out of bed. Kathy lay dead to the world, which was unusual. She generally sleeps on far more of a hair trigger than me. She evidently was really tired, and I blearily regretted my snipe before dinner the evening before.

I padded out into the hallway to stand outside Ethan’s room and listen. Nothing for a minute, but then I heard the sound again. I opened the door.

Before I even got to the side of his bed, I could tell how hot he was. Children beam their heat out in the night, like little suns. I squatted down and put my hand on his head.

‘Ethan, I said. ‘It’s okay. It’s just a dream.’

He sobbed once more, very quietly.

‘
Ethan
, it’s okay.’

He opened his eyes suddenly. He looked scared. Scared of me.

‘It’s Daddy,’ I said, disconcerted. ‘Just Daddy, okay?’

His eyes seemed to swim into focus. ‘Daddy?’

‘Yes. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.’

Ethan’s eyes swiveled. ‘Is he still here?’

‘Who?’

‘Arthur Milford.’

The back of my neck tickled. ‘No. Of course not.’

‘He was
here
. He came up the stairs and stood outside my room saying things. Then he came in. He stood by my bed and said he was going to...’

‘No, he didn’t,’ I said, firmly.

‘He
did
.’