New Jersey Noir (15 page)

“Bosh,” was Franklin’s response, not even bothering to look in her direction. He had her, by this time, utterly under his sway. She said nothing further.

When the question arose as to whom we might invite to this proposed party in the newly refurbished dining room, Franklin had a ready answer that floored me.

“Well, of course we’ll ask over some of the neighbors who’ve known you for years. The McDermott clan, the Riordans. I guess there’s nobody at school, but maybe the minister and his wife might like a nice slice of homemade cake and a glass of spiked punch,” he said, ticking these off on his finger tips. “Oh, and you’ll want to invite that girlfriend of yours, Mollie.”

Grandmother Iris jolted wide awake suddenly, and said, “Why, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, Wyatt.”

My arms crossed, astounded, fuming, I stared at Franklin who calmly returned my gaze with one of shameless triumph.

“That’s because I don’t,” I snapped.

“Well, however you want to label her,” Franklin said, waving off my denial as if it were a casement fly, “I’m sure she’d love to come. Bring her father Ralph along too, if you think he owns a bar of soap to clean himself up with first. He can make himself useful by helping me chaperone you two lovebirds.” These last bits about soap and lovebirds, meant for me alone, Franklin said under his breath.

Iris confirmed she’d missed it by adding something trite like, “By all means, let’s invite the lucky young lady and her father. Wyatt, shame on you for keeping this a secret from your poor grandmother.”

Looking back over the years, having had plenty of time to think about it, I’ve come to believe this was the moment when Franklin sealed both our fates. I couldn’t have known it for a fact just then, as I excused myself, rose from the dinner table, and fled the house to walk to the pond in growing twilight. But what I did know, with blinding clarity, was that I had not been hallucinating on several recent instances at the cemetery when I thought I’d seen somebody, or something, lurking in the grove of oak trees near the McKearin family plot, or prowling in the weeping branches of the huge willow that hunched over the Wylers near a brook whose waters emptied into Grover’s Mill Pond. And this somebody or something was clearly spying on me, hoping not to be seen.

I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, in part because a reasonable voice inside assured me it was a madness not unlike my mother’s, but in that moment I also knew for certain that on one particular occasion, when I saw Franklin’s shadow cast on the fresh-mowed graveyard lawn, it had not two legs but three. I might have dismissed this out of hand had not Mollie seen the shadow that afternoon too, and agreed that the person hiding behind the big Dutch elm did seem to have three legs.

“Optical delusion,” she later judged it, making a little pun to try to leaven things.

I wasn’t so sure.

Down by the pond that evening, after Franklin had revealed himself as a menace, a true nemesis of mine, I tramped slowly around the pond—my pond, on which I’d always been able to rely. Bile pumped through my heart as I tried to breathe in and out to calm myself, but the stagnant air only stung my throat. Franklin had done everything he could to usurp the roles of my father, my mother, my grandfather, and now had in essence declared himself my babysitter, my watchman, my warden. What was clear to me, clear as the shimmering full moon that floated on the face of the water, was that if I simply used Ralph’s wages as I’d intended—to run away, whether with Mollie beside me or not—Franklin would track me down. He seemed to know every inch of the world like the back of his bullying hand. Had me convinced there was nowhere I could hide but that he’d rout me out, like the woodpeckers in Van Nest Park rout out bugs secreted in tree trunks. No, I couldn’t afford to delude myself on that front. And if my hunch was right, that he was one of the invaders left behind after the Halloween eve attack half my lifetime ago—one who somehow escaped death, immune to the microbes that exterminated the others—then it would be all the easier for him to seek and find me. They have their extraterrestrial sensory powers, after all.

There are four ways a person can die. Natural causes, accidental, suicide, and murder. And while I don’t like to think of myself as someone drawn to death, by that time I had firsthand knowledge—and, in these waters, firsthand experience—of all of the ways to heaven or hell but one. It fell to me, I believed deep down, to complete the cycle. What did I have to lose? Mollie would still love me, I was sure. She would understand. So much for the aphorism about death coming in threes.

My father owned a service revolver which I inherited upon his death, along with his war medals, his fob watch, and other mementos. I stored these in his locked steel box, the key to which I kept hidden along with my stash of money in the back of my closet. There were half a dozen bullets in the safe box as well, and though they were pretty old, all I needed was for one of them to work.

Needless to say, I didn’t invite Mollie or her father to my birthday party. Why should I subject them to Franklin’s humiliations? Instead, I left the house, which smelled admittedly wonderful with a chocolate cake baking in the oven, and met Mollie as usual in the cemetery. Knowing it was my sixteenth birthday, Ralph had given me the day off, and since Franklin was caught up with his party preparations, I knew she and I could while away our hours in private. I had already hidden the revolver, loaded and ready, wrapped in a camouflaging green T-shirt of mine under a juniper bush by the pond’s edge. So my day was free and clear.

I had asked Mollie not to buy me a present. Better, I told her, to save her money. She did, however, produce a small rectangular box wrapped in shiny paper, which she presented to me with an excited smile.

“It’s not much,” she said.

“No, it’s beautiful.”

“You haven’t even opened it up yet, silly.”

“I mean just everything. The shiny paper, the ribbon, you.”

“Stop,” she said, with a blushing frown. “Open it.”

Inside was a pocket-sized field manual on the trees and wild shrubs of the Northeast. I was thrilled, but said, “Hey, you promised you wouldn’t spend any money.”

“Don’t worry, I got it cheap at the thrift shop. Besides, I know how much you love to be outdoors so I figured you might want to know what everything’s called. For your next birthday, I’m thinking about a bird book, or maybe one with all the insects.”

“It’s the best present anybody ever gave me,” I said, and we shared a long, yearning kiss.

Mollie and I spent the next hour lying side by side in a hidden clearing, marveling at the names we read together—
flowering dogwood, staghorn sumac, sourgum
—and the color illustrations beside each description. In my life I never felt so deliciously sheltered from the world, alone and yet so complete and contented, and when I set aside the book and began kissing Mollie again it was the most natural possible act for us to make love, and so we did, each of us losing our virginity that afternoon as the sun crawled down the sky.

The ache I felt when saying goodbye to her, moving just as naturally though nowhere near as blissfully into my next important inevitability of the day, was painful, to say the least.

I had no idea whether I’d ever see Mollie again. The chances were good that Franklin wouldn’t be fooled by my ruse, that he’d overpower and possibly do to me exactly what I planned to do to him.

The party was supposed to begin at six. Glancing at my father’s fob watch, which I’d decided to take along with me today, I saw that it was already five-thirty. As I walked to the place where I’d hidden the revolver, my afterglow of happiness and euphoria began to dim just like the cloudy sky itself, moving toward sunset and the end of the autumn day. Franklin and Iris, I imagined, were getting pretty anxious by now. “That kid will be late to his own funeral,” I could hear my grandmother rue with a cluck of her tongue. Franklin’s comments would not be as colloquial or forgiving. I pictured him pacing from room to room, steaming mad. I could almost hear him from here at the pond swearing I was the most ungrateful little bastard he’d ever met in the four decades and seven continents of his experience.

My guess that he’d angrily throw on his jacket—my father’s, that is—and march in a snit down to the pond to find me was dead accurate. Loitering in full view, pretending to be sulking, brooding on the shore, I waited for him to come, service revolver shoved into my coat pocket. There was a breeze over the pond, rippling it like a melted washboard. A flight of starlings, black tatters blown along, swarmed above. Soon enough, here came Franklin, a determined look on his vile face, his jaw set, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. I saw he was wearing a colorful cravat, one of my grandfather’s.

“What’s the big idea, birthday boy?”

I didn’t say a word. Just wanted to let my silence draw him closer, like he was a kite and I was reeling him in on an invisible string.

Predictably, he just kept talking, scolding me as he neared where I stood. “Don’t you have an ounce of respect for others? Your little harlot Mollie and the rest are probably already back at the house waiting for Mr. Sadsack. Well, this game of yours is going to end. I know places far away from here where delinquents like you can be sent for rewiring. Get you a brand-new personality. Tomorrow—” and I pulled out the revolver when he was two strides away and pulled the trigger, putting a slug right into his heart. He dropped before me without so much as a groan, eyes widening, on his knees in an attitude that looked for all the world like someone shocked into prayer, and I shot him once more, this time in his face.

Methodically following my plan, I removed my clothes and swam his limp body out toward the middle of pond, where I sank him as well as the revolver. Back on shore, I dried myself off quickly with the shirt I’d used to wrap the gun, dressed, and walked back home, numb and amazed.

“Oh, there he is,” Grandmother Iris cried out.

Franklin had been mostly right about the guests having already arrived, though of course he’d been mistaken about Mollie and her father. I accepted a glass of punch from the adult bowl, the one with champagne added to the cranberry juice, and did my best to engage in conversation with the neighbors.

When Iris asked, “Where’s Franklin?” I answered, “How should I know?” though I could hear my voice quaking. Not from guilt, but something more akin to excitement. I couldn’t believe I had summoned the courage to carry through with my idea. To say one is proud of taking a life is fundamentally unethical, morally wrong—I know, I know. But Franklin had become, for me, a saboteur, a guerrilla, an enemy combatant, and taking him out of the picture seemed more an act of domestic warfare than anything else. I held to the belief that my father would have approved.

“He went out looking for you, you know,” she went on, a raspy reproach underlying her words.

My charade didn’t last long. After several more trips to the punch bowl—I’d never had a drop of booze before in my life—I decided, woozily, to tell the minister what I’d done. My grandmother was by then beside herself worrying about Franklin and I thought there was no point in dragging out my little pantomime. From my perspective, I had rid myself and the world of a scourge. A scourge that threatened not just me, but everyone alive. I had, in the end, nothing to hide.

Problem was, when I confessed that Franklin wasn’t here because I’d killed him, and that he was dead in the pond along with the revolver I assassinated him with, the minister scoffed. “I’m well aware that you have your issues with Franklin, Wyatt, but I think the alcohol is speaking here, and not you.”

“No, ith’s true …” I slurred.

“I know things have been tough for you, my son. Losing your mother and father, your grandfather. All tragic indeed. But blaming bad things that happen to us on others is not the Christian way,” he said, putting a large, warm, consoling hand on my swaying shoulder.

Tongue foundering from the champagne, continuing to insist I was guilty of murder, I passed out and was carried upstairs to my bedroom.

By the next morning, Franklin still having not returned, my grandmother reported him missing to the police. At first she neglected to repeat my drunken claim that I’d killed him, assuming as the minister and others within earshot had that I was expressing an immature desire rather than an absolute fact. But after a few more days, having sobered up, of my continuing to insist, adding that I was quite certain Franklin wasn’t of this world, she finally broke down and reported me. In her shoes, I might well have done the same.

The officers, themselves doubtful, especially in light of the more unusual aspects of my theories about Franklin, allowed me to walk them down to the place where I had hidden my weapon and committed my crime. No one had heard gunshots the night he disappeared, fortunately or unfortunately. Nor had anyone reported seeing anything unusual on Grover’s Mill Pond that evening. Joined by a detective, the cops walked through the grass and down to the gently lapping water, seeing and saying nothing until one of them knelt and picked up a spent bullet shell.

“What kind of a gun was it you said you used on the victim?” he asked, standing.

“I’m not sure, exactly,” realizing I might better have kept the revolver if I wanted to convince anyone of what I’d done.

That they found no traces of blood in the grass strengthened my case about Franklin’s origins, I felt. Perhaps he didn’t bleed because his kind didn’t have actual blood running in their veins. And yet I could have sworn I saw his face erupt in a gushing geyser of red when my bullet hit its point-blank mark. On the other hand, I reasoned, maybe theirs is thinner and evaporates like so much mist under a hot sun.

What happened next confounds me to this day. They brought in divers, yet again, and this time even dragged the pond with a special boat they commissioned for the job, having taken me into custody for my own protection, as they put it. And what did they come up with? Nothing. No body, no revolver—just the usual jettisoned tires, an old boot, a porcelain dolly missing its head, fishing tackle, and part of a rusted nineteenth-century threshing machine. My court-assigned lawyer got me freed in no time, but not before the tabloid papers had a field day with me. I still have some of the newspaper clippings.
Murdered Martian Missing in Grover’s Mill
.
Boy, 16, Claims Revenge for Dad’s Death at Martian Hands
.
War of the Words in Jersey Missing Mars Man Case.