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IV
In the middle of the night I wake up to Shadow barking wildly and running back and forth between my bedside and the door that opens directly onto our back yard.
The digital face of the Bose says that it is 1:52 a.m. I pull some sweat pants and follow Shadow’s yelping lead out into the lawn, which is cold and dewy under my bare feet. As soon as I open the door the dog breaks into a run, and seconds later I hear a man’s voice crying out. Shadow has turned the corner into the side yard where Sam keeps his yard toys and vehicles and has jumped the intruder, who was sitting on a bench next to Sam’s sandbox. The man is not fighting back or running away, but he has been knocked off the bench into the sandbox. Shadow’s paws are on the man’s chest as if he is claiming a trophy. Shadow is not ordinarily much of a watchdog, aside from barking for show whenever someone walks down the road in front of our house. His effectiveness surprises me.
The intruder is not a large man, about my size, and I decide he can’t be much of a threat if he is not even prepared for a watchdog.
“Shadow! Down!” I call out. Shadow ignores my command. “Down!” Shadow is still barking and menacing the man, but does not seem to be drawing any blood. My life has not been organized to any great extent around tests of physical courage, but I am not fearful now. Shadow’s fearless presence no doubt contributes to my own untested semblance of bravery.
The intruder rolls over onto his stomach in the sane, straightens his eyeglasses, and manages to scramble away from Shadow and begin to stand up.
“Stay right where you are,” I command. “The police are on the way.”
“It’s me, Stanley.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“It’s Bruce Gibbs. Are the police really on the way?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No. Are the police really on the way?”
I could easily have tripped a silent alarm to initiate an emergency visit from the police as I stepped outside with Brownie, but I didn’t. My first inclination now is not to think of the police as my friends.
“No,” I confess. “You aren’t dead.”
“No. I’m not dead.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I read your column in today’s paper. You called out my old man.”
“Yes.”
“For the first time, when I read that, I could see that maybe we were on the same side in this thing. And I could tell that it was going to keep haunting you until you found him.”
“So, what? You’re going to lead me to him?”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“No. I mean I can’t. He’s dead.”
“Shit. How long has he been dead?”
“It was him in the burning car, in Chelsea. I killed him.”
“You killed him? Why would you do that?”
“Are you kidding me? I killed him because he was a fucking maggot. He had it coming.”
“And that was your final frame-up of me. You set it up to look like me in the car.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s sort of what I do. I thought you would take the free pass I gave you, with the money and all.”
“You are one confused son of a bitch, Bruce.”
“Exactly. But I still thought you would take the pass.”
“Now I know why I didn’t. It would have made things too convenient for you.”
“I guess it seems that way to you.”
“Yes, it does.”
“But it isn’t like that.”
“Like what?”
“Convenient. It isn’t that I want to bother Rachel.”
“I’m not going to let you bother her, whether you want to or not.”
“She’s my daughter, Stanley.”
“So you say. Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t, but if it takes me killing you to keep you from ever getting near her again, that’s what I will do.”
“You’d kill me?” He laughs. “Stanley T. Branford, the conscience of the Boston Morning Transcript, is going to whack me? I don’t think so.”
“Fortunately, we don’t need to find out. I’m going to put you back in prison again.”
He sits down on the bench.
“I can’t go back in there, Stanley.”
“Should have thought of that before you started trying to fuck up my life. It’s out of your hands now.”
“If I go back in they’ll put me with the skinners.”
“Been there, done that. You saying you don’t belong there?”
“I’m not a skinner. I killed the skinner.”
“You’re not a skinner? What were you doing bothering Rachel?”
“I killed the skinner.”
“How did you do that?”
“Just basic stuff. Bought the car in your name. Hard-wired a fuse to a gas container in the trunk.”
“How did you get him to sit in a strange car all by himself?”
“He thought there was a blow job from a young girl in it for him.”
“Did he know it was you who did it?”
“I got right up next to the window so he could see me as he went up in flames. He was begging me as he was dying.”
“Begging for his life?”
“Maybe for forgiveness.”
“Did you forgive him?”
“Hell, no. I wouldn’t forgive that sick fuck if Mary Kate came back from the dead and begged me to forgive him.”
At the mention of Mary Kate’s name my accumulated rage sneaks up on me and overwhelms my civilized self-control: I swing my right hand out and backhand him with a hard slap against his right cheek. The blow sends a sharp pain up my right arm and shoulder, but is otherwise effective: Bruce Gibbs goes sprawling arse over tea-kettle and ends up, once again, in the sandbox. Shadow immediately becomes a bloodthirsty watchdog again, jumping into the sandbox and striking a noisy conqueror’s pose with his front paws on Bruce’s chest.
I stand over him, shaking with rage.
“Don’t ever say her name--”
“I won’t. I’m sorry.”
He sits up now in the sandbox. I sit down on the bench.
“Look,” I say. “Let’s get a few things straight.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know what delusions you may or may not have about whether or not you are a pedophile, or about what kind of behavior is appropriate with whom. But if you ever mention Mary Kate’s name to me again or come near my family again, you will wish you hadn’t with every breath you take for the rest of your life.”
It is dark, but he does not mistake the conviction in my voice.
“It won’t happen again.”
“That’s not all.”
“What else?”
“You are going back to prison.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You’re going. But I am going to give you a very generous choice.”
“I’m listening.”
“If I have to turn you in I guarantee you they will put you with the skinners. Regardless of the charges that you get sentenced on, the newspapers will be full of your sexual perversions. You know I can deliver on that, and you know as well as I do that it will get you skinner status at MCI Concord and everywhere else in the system.
“But you can avoid that if you want to, and I’ll help you. You turn yourself in for setting fire to your father and doing the identity scam and I will speak personally to the Attorney General and testify very convincingly, if it comes to that, about what happened to you as a kid. I already turned in all the money you put in my accounts. If most of the rest of the money gets back to its rightful owners you can get a good forensic psychiatrist and you’ll probably get away with very short time.”
“I’ll never get out.”
“Maybe. But think about it. Would it really be any worse than being on the outside, living your life as you have lived it so far?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s fucking prison.”
“I know. You deserve some prison time, whether you realize it or not. But I do give you credit for killing your old man. It doesn’t mean that we are on the same side, but it was the right thing to do, even if you weren’t really the right one to do it. It could give you a chance at redemption, if you could also somehow learn the things that you can’t do. Prison could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It will keep you away from little girls.”
“That would be hard.”
“Doesn’t it torment you?”
“I know it should. I wish it would.”
“You don’t feel any guilt?”
“Maybe. There is a line I have never crossed, in my own mind at least, except with—Except when I was a kid myself. I know there is a something there, but I don’t think guilt is the same as hating myself. I know I am never very far away from crossing that line, and it scares the hell out of me sometimes.”
“Can’t you let the guilt or even the fear keep you away from the line?”
“It’s just that there are so many layers of bullshit in between me and the guilt.”
“You’ve got to try to cut through that bullshit. To stop allowing yourself the luxury of it. You’re a smart guy. Smarter than me. You’ve got a story and you could tell it. It could make you into a human being again.”
“Again? What do you care about whether I become a human being again?”
“I care.”
“Because you are a fucking do-gooder liberal?”
“Hell, no. It has nothing to do with that, believe me. As far as you and your father are concerned I no longer have a liberal bone in my body.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s Rachel. I don’t know if you are her biological father or not. I don’t think you know either. I kind of think that I don’t want to find out, and I don’t want her to find out either, at least not any time soon. But I know it is a possibility, and if you are her father then it becomes important to me, the question of whether it is possible for you to have any kind of redemption, of whether you are a human being or a monster like your own father.”
“So you want me to redeem myself just so you can feel more optimistic about--”
He hesitates, and does not speak Rachel’s name, as if he thinks it will precipitate another eruption from me.
“Yes,” I answer.
“Do you think I could ever meet Rachel, if I totally redeemed myself?”
I don’t swing at him for saying her name.
“We’re a long way from that, Bruce.”
THE END
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