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TRAGEDY IN THE BLOOD by Steven H. Davis
Chapter 40
I stood there looking at the gun for a long time.
Of course it wasn't loaded. Rex wouldn't put away a loaded shotgun in the shed.
That would be crazy, I thought.
It didn't occur to me how crazy what I had just attempted to do was, of course, or what my next actions might be.
What I did next was this: I put the shotgun back in its red felt case and replaced it on the shelf. Then I turned off the lantern, left the shed, closed the door, and walked quietly back into the house.
Not knowing what else to do, I went to my bedroom, got in bed and went to sleep.
Monday was cold, wet, and windy. It didn't happen often in San Antonio, but when it rained, the dense Texas clay wouldn't absorb more than about half an inch of water. The rest would just sit there on top of the ground until it ran off into the muddy gutters and swept across the streets in sheets. Every dip in the road would flood, and any cars or school busses unfortunate enough to encounter such a dip would find themselves stranded until a tow-truck arrived.
The wind was intense, howling across the flatlands like a bitter wave of icy razors, cutting through jackets and coats and sweaters without a care, slicing into your skin until you were chilled to the bone.
That's why I was glad I didn't have to wait for the bus. I stayed nice and warm in the garage with my school books and my trophy until I saw Linda pulling up to the curb. She had already picked up Taine, who was in the passenger seat chatting to her animatedly, with many uncharacteristically broad gestures. I ran down the driveway and jumped in the back seat, teeth chattering a bit as the wind hit me like a hammer on the way down.
"Good morning," I said, hugging them both from the backs of their seats.
"Good morning, Rick," said Linda. "Taine was just telling me about your Maxwell family pow-wow yesterday. I'm glad things went smoothly."
I had to chuckle as she pulled the car back onto the street and headed for school.
"You told her it went smoothly?" I asked Taine.
"Could have been worse," Taine replied. "Could have been a lot worse. But listen, Ricky, Blaine wants to take us camping this weekend, over to Big Bend. He wants to leave right after school Friday. Can you come with us?"
Taine sounded excited and happier than I had heard him sound in a long time.
"I'll ask Rex and Tynah," I replied, "but I don't think they'd have a problem with it. That sounds fun!"
I was glad that I had tried to shoot myself last night rather than cutting my wrists. Bandages would be obvious, and would really sour his mood.
I didn't want anyone to know what I had done last night, and wasn't about to tell them. It certainly wouldn't have been the first time, nor would it be the last.
Since I was about eleven years old, there had been what I thought of as a "self-destruct mechanism" built into my head. Whenever emotions became too extreme -- and whether they were good emotions or bad ones didn't really seem to have much to do with it -- I immediately began thinking of suicide.
I could come down from an emotional high like it was a water-slide, instantaneously plunged into a black, suicidal pool of depression, and if the emotions were bad to start with, it would be even worse.
Some mornings I would wake up and, for no reason whatsoever, decide that I would rather kill myself than get out of bed.
Sometimes I would even go into the bathroom, take out a double-edged razor blade, and hold it over my wrist, making cutting motions in the air over the soft, thin skin of my inner arm.
Sometimes I would do more than make motions.
My arms were already criss-crossed with scars at the age of fifteen. There would be more. Once I even cut deeply enough that thick, red blood spurted from the wound, and I watched in horror as it pumped out in time with my heartbeat onto the gleaming white porcelain of the bathroom sink.
The sight of my life quickly pumping away snapped me out of it that time, and I immediately grabbed a first-aid kit and tended to myself before jumping on the bus to my middle school.
In retrospect, it was interesting that no one at that school had ever asked about the bandages, as it happened more than once.
I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised at that, since no one in my elementary school had ever asked about my numerous cuts and bruises, or at least asked in a way that couldn't easily be deflected by telling them I had fallen down or walked into a door.
Years later, when people did ask about the scars, I would blame them on my biological mother.
This would begin in my twenties, when I had just started to deal with the abuse I had suffered, and -- as young people often do when the true horror of their memories return -- I used my memories to bludgeon other people, to shock them enough to keep them away.
I also dealt with the abuse for a long time before actually dealing with why I thought about suicide almost constantly for most of my life.
I'm not sure anyone ever believed the story I told, that she had tied me down to a chair and cut me with a razor, but I would come to understand that the lie was actually also the truth, at least metaphorically.
Abuse can leave scars other than just physical ones, and the scar in my mind -- the "self-destruct mechanism" -- was actually the reason for the scars on my arms. I suppose that may have been the reason for my including in my stories the detail that this fictional incident had occurred when I was eleven, because that was the age that the mechanism was born.
But I was oblivious to all of these things that morning in October, 1981. All I knew was that I had gotten "carried away again," as I liked to think of it, during the night, and I didn't want anyone to know about it. I was just ready to move on with my day.
I was actually in a pretty good mood that morning. The prospect of going camping with my Babes and his brother sounded really fun, and tomorrow would be tryouts for the play, and rehearsals would start on the following Monday after we got back from our camping trip.
It was going to be a great week, I thought as Linda pulled into the Polk High School parking lot.
I didn't waste any time being grateful for being alive, or rueful about what I had tried to do. In fact, I didn't really think about last night's misadventures one way or the other. I kissed Taine and Linda with a smile before getting out of the car and heading for the schoolhouse doors.
What I did, at the bottom of it all, was just put it away, like I had put the shotgun back on the shelf inside Rex's shed. I knew that it would be there again when I wanted to revisit it, but I didn't know when or where that mechanism would kick in and make me want to go there again.
I just knew that it would.
I went to Mr. McRory's class and proudly set my Humorous Interp trophy in an empty space on the table, between Robert Steadman's Dramatic trophy and the team sweepstakes prize. Mr. McRory caught me standing there admiring it and came over to stand behind me.
"I expect a lot more of these from you this year," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder and giving it an encouraging squeeze. "You've got a lot of talent, Rick, and I hope you'll be at tryouts for the play tomorrow afternoon."
"Natch!" I said, and hurried off to Mrs. Colby's English class. Taine was already there, finishing up some homework on sentence diagramming which we'd been assigned to complete over the weekend.
I had done mine that morning over breakfast, and it had a bit of egg on the top corner, which caused my teacher to arch an eyebrow as I placed it on her desk.
"Including snacks with your homework will not get you extra points, Mr. Spivey," drawled Mrs. Colby in a pretend-stern tone.
I smiled, winking at Taine as I took my seat.
My schedule had shifted around a bit for the start of the second grading period, so I strolled down the hall and snuck around the side of the school for a cigarette before Mr. Salcedo's history class. When I got to a safe alcove, I found Nathan Schulman and Terry Garnett already there.
Nathan was a born troublemaker, the son of a local Episcopalian minister, and was every bit the hellion which one might expect from a Texas pastor's offspring. He was tall and lean, with longish, light brown hair which curled out at the neck, beady blue-grey eyes, and a puckish smile which he frequently used on teachers to charm his way out of detention.
He dressed like a cowboy, wearing checkered shirts with mother-of-pearl button snaps and tight faded jeans which flared out at the cuffs to accomodate his weathered brown boots. The boots came to a wicked point, being what we called "cockroach-killers", the idea being that the toes were so sharp that they could reach a roach in any corner.
Nathan's laconic manner was belied by those beady little eyes, which could go from lazy to dangerous with lightning speed. He was a badass, and enjoyed scaring people as much he enjoyed breaking rules.
Terry was just the opposite. He was thin but soft, and gave the appearance of someone whose body was just waiting for its hormones to settle down so that it could go about the business of achieving middle-aged obesity.
He had a round, moon-like baby face, with owlish round wire-frame glasses and unruly dark-brown hair which waved and curled on his head like a stormy ocean. He was a social nobody, and followed Nathan around like a puppydog, trying his best to please his cruel master so that maybe, just once in his high school career, he could feel a shred of accomplishment.
Nathan treated Terry like shit, and often loudly reminded him that "I only keep you around for laughs."
Nathan nodded at me warily, perhaps wondering what I was doing in his little smoking alcove, while Terry fidgeted with his too-large dungarees and looked away, too shy and awkward to speak to anyone but Nathan.
I pulled out a cigarette and lit one, causing Nathan's eyebrow to lift in curiosity and a bit of surprise. When he saw that I inhaled without coughing, he stuck out his bottom lip and nodded, the universal code for "not bad!"
"I didn't know you smoked," he said.
"I just started not long ago," I replied. "You're Nathan, right? And Terry?"
Nathan didn't say anything, leaning against the wall of the school with one knee bent and the heel of his boot resting against the bricks. He sure did expend a lot of energy trying to look cool, and it was working. On me, at least.
He tilted his head as he caught me staring at the seemingly enormous bulge in his crotch, and I decided to play it off by complimenting him on his belt buckle, a large silver skull and crossbones. Cowboy-types, or "Kickers," as we called them in a less judgmental contraction of "Shitkickers," always had great belt buckles at Polk High.
Nathan tossed his cigarette at Terry's feet and began fiddling with the buckle, sliding the skull off to reveal a three-inch knife blade attached to its side.
"Wow," I said. "That's really cool. Is it sharp?"
"Stick out your hand," he said.
Foolishly, I did so, extending my arm toward him with the palm of my hand toward the ground. He took my hand and flipped it over, exposing my wrist and drawing Terry's undivided attention, as well as my own.
And that was how, less than twelve hours after putting an unloaded shotgun in my mouth and pulling the trigger, I managed to get my wrist slashed anyway.
Chapter 41
"Oh, holy shit! What did you do?" I screamed, looking down at the blood dripping from my arm.
Nathan, in response to my query about the sharpness of his belt-buckle knife, had dragged it across the thin skin of my right wrist, slicing it open. I could see tendons beyond the blood, and was suddenly seized by hysteria and horror. What kind of a maniac was this, and what had he just done to me?
Nathan was laughing at first. Terry wasn't laughing, and quickly made himself scarce. I held up my arm in front of my face, grasping it with my left hand in an attempt to stop the bleeding. I ran inside and found Mr. Salcedo, whose eyes widened as he saw the blood dripping from my arm.
"Rick!" he exclaimed. "What the hell happened?"
"He cut me!" I sputtered, feeling dizzy and panicked. "The son of a bitch cut me!"
Mr. Salcedo hurried to his desk and found a cloth, one of several he kept in his drawer for cleaning the chalkboard, and then returned to tie it tightly around my wrist. By this time, Nathan had appeared in the hallway behind me, looking serious and concerned.
I didn't harbor any illusions that his concern was for my well-being. He was worried about getting in trouble.
"It was an accident," he told Mr. Salcedo. "We were just messing around, and..."
"Nathan, be quiet!"
Mr. Salcedo never yelled, so his angry tone surprised us both. He was trying to think of what to do, and I didn't harbor any illusions about his concern either. Like anytime when something happens to a student, he was seeing his career flashing before his eyes, school board panels, potential lawsuits, and was thinking quickly to avoid getting in trouble himself.
The bell rang signaling the beginning of 2nd period, and Mr. Salcedo looked frantically between his classroom, my bloody arm, and Nathan. Finally, he came to a decision.
"Nathan, take him to the nurse's office. Straight to the nurse's office."
"Yes, sir," Nathan replied with a smirk, taking me by the left elbow and leading me down the hall as Mr. Salcedo returned to his class.
What the fuck???
Had my teacher, my legal guardian during the 2nd period of every school day, entrusted the guy who had just slashed my fucking wrist to get me to the nurse's office safely?
Apparently, he had.
Nathan led me down the hall, through the breezeway, and into the main building. I half expected him to pull me into the boys' restroom and beat the shit out of me, but he didn't. In fact, he was now giggling.
"You were so funny," he laughed, then mocked me in a high-pitched voice. "'He cut me! The son of a bitch cut me!' Oh, shit, that was too good."
I stared at him in shock.
"This isn't funny!" I protested. "You slashed my fucking wrist, you asshole!"
Nathan glowered at me as we rounded the corner to the administrative wing.
"You wanna do something about it? Meet me at the arcade at seven tonight."
"Okay," I seethed. "I'll be there."
"I doubt it," he said, shoving me into the nurse's office. "But I will."
With that, he left me and returned to class. The nurse took good care of me, closed my wound with a butterfly bandage after determining that I wouldn't need stitches, and called Rex to inform him of my mishap.
I assured her that it had just been a careless accident, and I don't know why I did that.
Maybe I just wanted to settle this on my own terms, or maybe something inside me somewhere realized that Nathan would become an important part of my life very soon.
In any event, I didn't turn him in. And before the day was over, I would need him in my life more than I could have ever possibly imagined.
I went to lunch that day consumed with thoughts of my upcoming fight with Nathan, and I couldn't wait to tell Taine about it, but when I made my way to our usual table, Taine wasn't there.
*I see a bad moon rising/
I see trouble on the way.*
That's strange, I thought to myself. I wolfed down the day's lunch offering -- cheeseburger and fried okra with a peach cobbler -- anyway, because I was in training. Nathan would be a formidable opponent.
*I see earthquakes and lightnin'/
I see bad times today.*
I didn't see Taine for the rest of the day, and when I went into my Biology class, Nathan was already sitting in the back of the room, glaring at me with an ominous smirk on his face. He meant business, and for the first time, I started to get more than a little afraid.
Nathan had already shown that he had no compunction about using knives on human flesh, and I resolved -- if outmatched physically, which I clearly was -- to fight the hardest, and with the biggest knife. I would win this fight, I promised myself, even if it killed me.
*Don't go around tonight/
Well, it's bound to take your life/
There's a bad moon on the rise.*
After school, I went to meet Linda and Taine in the parking lot, but only Linda was there, leaning on her car hood and making out with Carter.
"Hey," I greeted them. "Have either of you seen Taine?"
Carter and Linda both shrugged, and we decided to wait for him. Eventually, Carter went off to party with Jim and Roger, and Linda and I had decided that Taine was not going to show up.
*I hear hurricanes a-blowing/
I know the end is coming soon.*
"Maybe Blaine picked him up in his black Charger o' Doom," Linda offered with a smile.
"Yeah, maybe," I agreed, but I was starting to worry.
Blaine himself had admitted, as had Sly, that they couldn't be around all the time in the event that Kevin or one of his friends decided to start meting out vengeance. I had to find out if my Babes was safe, if only for my own peace of mind.
"Let's swing by his house," I suggested. "I want to check with him and Blaine about the camping trip this weekend. I don't have any camping stuff, and I need to know what to buy."
*I fear rivers over flowing/
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.*
Linda agreed, and drove us down to the Maxwell home, approaching from the left side of the driveway.
It was a moment which I will never forget as long as I live.
"Doesn't look like anyone's home," said Linda.
Neither the Lambo nor the Charger were in the driveway, but I figured that maybe Taine was home alone, or that he had gone somewhere with Blaine or Sly and was still out.
"Let me go up to the door and see if he's here," I said, turning to Linda.
Suddenly, her face looked as if someone had just died. She looked very sad, and gave me the strangest look of pity and confusion, then looked at something in the front yard, weakly raising her hand to point her finger at it. My eyes followed her gesture, and I looked back over my shoulder to see what it was.
It was a Century 21 Realty sign. As I walked around to look at it, I could see the bay window at the front of the house. The curtains had been removed, and although the living room carpet was still down, there was no furniture. No pictures on the walls. Even the chandelier was gone.
The sign said, "For Sale. Call Anastasia Sarkissian, 210-817-2219."
"Oh..." I said, and then I was starting to fall, and Linda was there to hold me up, as always.
*Don't go around tonight/
Well, it's bound to take your life/
There's a bad moon on the rise.*
I went home in a shellshocked daze, after letting Linda go. First, I stood in front of what used to be the Maxwell home, just staring in the windows. There was nothing there. Just the carpet and memories of what could have been.
By the time I got home, it was just after 4:00. I fed the birds as if I was sleepwalking, then walked past Rex, who didn't say a word, didn't even question me about my "accident" in 2nd period that morning. He must have known, but I didn't even register that at the time.
I walked into my bedroom, closed the door, and laid down quietly on my bed, staring at the ceiling. The full impact of what had just happened finally hit me, and I cried for the next two hours and sixteen minutes.
When my sobs had finally died down, I uncurled from the fetal position I had assumed around one of my pillows, wiped my eyes, and looked at the clock-radio on my nightstand. It read 6:26.
As much as I really wanted to lay there and die at that moment, I realized that I still had a fight to get to. I walked into the kitchen. Tynah was at a Weight Watchers meeting, and Rex had retired to the master bedroom and was taking a shower.
Perfect.
I slowly slid the largest butcher knife from the kitchen drawer and tucked it inside my black leather jacket, zipping it and clutching my arms around my waist to keep the knife from falling out.
*Hope you got your things together/
Hope you are quite prepared to die/
Looks like we're in for nasty weather/
One eye is taken for an eye.*
I don't even know why I bothered to arm myself, as all I wanted at that moment was for Nathan to kill me and end my misery once and for all.
But I had a fight to get to, and no matter how hopeless, how despairing and how absolutely empty I felt, I would honor the challenge. Steeling myself, I slipped quietly out the garage door and began walking toward the arcade.
*Don't go around tonight/
Well, it's bound to take your life/
There's a bad moon on the rise/
Well, don't go around tonight/
Well, it's bound to take your life/
There's a bad moon on the rise.*
Thank you for reading Chapters 40 & 41. To be continued...
"Bad Moon Rising" written by John Fogerty. Performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival. c 1969 by Fantasy Records.
Once again, I'm always happy to hear from readers at DJAkeeba@aol.com. You have all been so supportive and encouraging, and I thank you all for your e-mails.
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