The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel

Terrier, I’m pregnant
.

I dreamed a desperate dream of Kimmy. It was a vivid memory fueled by my own unhinged fantasies. When I was on the ranch the other hands gave me a wide berth and made me sleep in a fruit cellar converted to a one-man bunk room. I had a habit of lashing out. I talk the only one I had leftirVHeed and shouted in my sleep. I heard myself speaking and tried to answer. I saw her sitting on the edge of my bed, crying, her face turned away from me. I’d reach for her and snap awake covered in sweat, my head ringing.

Terrier, I’m
—

I had the dream and the dream had me for the fourth night in a row.

We were in the Commack Motor Inn, one of the pay-by-the-hour motels we used to stop into for a little alone time. Intimacy and privacy weren’t among the benefits of living in a large house with a criminal family. My father had retired from the bent life by then but never went anywhere. My mother watched over my baby sister Dale, and Old Shep, my grandfather, who was starting to lose himself to Alzheimer’s, his personality seeping out an old gunshot wound in the back of his head. My uncles Mal and Grey stuck close to home with their schemes and grifts. My brother Collie was the only one with enough respect to work his bad deeds day and night elsewhere. And Kimmy’s parents hated my guts and kept watch for me like retirees guarding the So Cal coastline from the Japanese in ’42.

We were catching our breath, lying back in each other’s arms, holding tight. Her wet hair raked my cheek. I lit a cigarette and took
a long drag. I blew out a stream of smoke and offered the butt to her. She took it and ground it out against the side of the scarred nightstand. She pressed her lips to my ear.

“Terrier, I’m pregnant.”

The blinds had been drawn halfway against the parking lot lights. The air conditioner cranked away on high doing a shitty job. It was dark in our room and I couldn’t quite make out the expression on her face. A couple of sparks still clung to the nightstand, glowing red. Her voice was steady, but I couldn’t tell if she was happy or anxious or both. Neither of us had hit twenty yet.

I said, “We’re not naming her after a fucking dog.”

It made Kimmy laugh, a sound that eased the tension that was always inside me. I never knew it was there until she relieved me of it, and then I let out a breath and my muscles loosened and ached.

“Her?” she said. “So you want a girl?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Why?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “I like the idea of saying, ‘I’m going home to my girls.’ ”

My ghosts caught up to me again. I couldn’t move without inviting them along. They came and went and judged. My eyes opened in the pale dawn and they were with me. My dead brother, my dead uncles, they stood nearby, ready to resume their action. My best friend Chub was there too. He was going to die if I didn’t help him. A part of me wanted it to happen. The rest knew that he and I were bound by our shared history. If I couldn’t save him I wouldn’t be able to save myself. He watched me steadily. Blood bubbled from his lips as he said,

We were on death watch again. My brother Collie’s
had lasted more than five years before he’d been walked down that insanely white prison corridor. After a brief inevitable show of defiance, kicking and brawling with the screws, he’d forgone his last words, been strapped down to a table and given the needle.

I watched as his blood turned to poison, hoping he might try to connect with me in those final seconds and explain why he’d gone on his killing spree. But his hateful gaze said nothing and showed no remorse. He sneered right up to the moment that the second plunger depressed and his lungs grew paralyzed. His eyes were stone but I could forgive him that. He was taking his last breath in front of an audience of witnesses who all wanted him in hell.

When he went down he left the rest of the family reeling, and despite all our stoic resolve we were unable to take any more loss. My uncle Mal had been murdered a few days beforehand, knifed in the backyard. My uncle Grey, so far as my parents knew, had gone on the long grift and was living the sweet life somewhere full of sex and satin, maybe in A.C. or Reno.

My father had lost three of the most significant people in his life within a matter of a week, and now his best friend lay dying under the kitchen table.

It had been three days since JFK had eaten or sipped any water. He was ten and his muzzle was thick with gray fur. He was still massive and muscular, with a flat broad forehead and fierce features that hadn’t lost any of their intensity.

He didn’t seem to be in any serious pain as he continued to grow weaker. We huddled around him on the kitchen floor like our ancestors
squatting in front of a fire trying to keep the terrors of the night away.

JFK would occasionally look around the room, his glance landing on each of us in turn. Every time his eyes settled on my mother she whispered his name and stroked him between the ears. My father, a reticent man at best, tried to keep up a stream of buoyant chatter for JFK’s sake. I barely recognized his contrived, cheerful voice. My sister Airedale kept petting JFK’s haunches, saying, “That’s our boy, that’s our boy.” His dry tongue fell from his mouth as he struggled to lift his head in an effort to kiss each of us. He let out a sigh every now and again, his nubby tail wagging once or twice, before settling back to try to sleep.

“That’s our boy.”

It was time to put him down. We all knew it. Even my old man knew it. But my father, always a cool realist in all other matters, refused to discuss bringing JFK to the vet. My mother argued softly and begged him to change his mind. He wouldn’t. I sided with him at first because like him I was weak when it mattered most.

It was the cruelty of love. Dale, with a tight resolution marring her beauty, said, “Daddy, it’s time.” She gripped his stubbled cheek roughly, trying to snap him from his daze. He was short and wiry and Dale towered over him now, but his terrible staunchness made itself known. It was the thing inside him that couldn’t be moved or persuaded.

My father’s thousand-yard stare looked through all of us. Every muscle in his body stood out rigid and straining. His silence brought a barometric pressure to the room, like the hushed anxious period before a storm hit.

Old Shepherd sat in his wheelchair in the corner of the living room, in front of the televi this many times before to be Qsion watching cartoons. JFK’s slow dying had managed to reach through his cognitive fog where almost everything else had failed. He now had odd moments of lucidity where he
called to the dog, asking if he wanted to go for a walk in the park. Gramp sounded childlike, overly eager, and a little frightened.

By the fourth day JFK’s breathing had grown much rougher. He wheezed all morning long and about noon let out a little puddle of urine with blood in it. I went to the shed and got a shovel and dug a hole under the apple tree where JFK sometimes lay out in the sun. When I stepped back inside my mother was on her knees cleaning the floor with a towel. My old man was pretending he was somewhere else.

She said, “Pinscher, this has to stop.” She stood and put her hand to his powerful arm and I saw the tendons and veins in her wrist bulging as she squeezed and squeezed harder to try to gain his attention. “You can’t let it go on. He’s in pain. He’s in terrible pain.”

My father wouldn’t look at her. He stood in the front door with a chill autumn breeze blowing in through the screen. He seemed to be admiring the veranda. He’d spent a few thousand nights out there staring into the neighboring woods, looking over the arch of his life, with JFK curled at his feet.

I had to travel deep to discover what remained of my courage and mercy. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot left anymore. “We have to take him in.”

“Pinscher?”

“I’m not putting him down. We … we don’t have the right. I wouldn’t want anyone to steal my last remaining hours. Not even a minute. I won’t rob him of his.”

Anyone else might have found that ironic, my father being a career thief and an excellent second-story man before he retired to sit on his porch and drink beer, bored out of his fucking head.

But he wasn’t talking about himself or the dog. He was thinking of Collie’s victims, especially the kids.

“You think that’s wrong?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

He nodded once, his expression shifting from stonewall to slightly annoyed and back again. He sat at the table directly above JFK and looked everywhere except at the dog.

My mother tried one last time to make him see reason. Her anger was beginning to break through. “Pinscher, he’s in agony. Let’s give him a little peace and respect.”

“You think that’ll make any difference?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know you don’t, but you’re wrong.”

My old man shrugged at that. I noticed how his hair swung back and forth into his eyes as he lifted his shoulders. He’d always worn a crew cut but he’d been letting his hair grow out the last couple of months. It was a small sign that he was changing inside and it worried me.

He asked me to get him a beer. I pulled one from the fridge and sat the bottle in front of him. He emptied half of it in one pull.

My mother shot me a look. I knew what it meant. We were going to have to buck him. I was going to have to carry JFK to the backseat of my car and take him to the vet on my own. I knew my father wouldn’t try to stop me in a bikini and high heels. at the Q. His conscience was already in a frenzy and I wondered if he’d hold it against me forever. We Rands didn’t forgive easily. We Rands had long memories until Alzheimer’s turned our brains to tapioca.

JFK moaned groggily as I lifted him. I shouldered through the screen door and carried him down the walk to my car. My mother followed. She sat in back with him, using her thumbs to clear her tears away. After a few seconds my father climbed into the passenger seat. He stared ahead through the windshield, arms crossed over his chest, the black veins crawling across the backs of his powerful hands.

My mother said, “If you’re going with Terry then I’ll stay here with Gramp.”

“I’m going with Terry,” my father said.

“All right.”