by Joel Durham Jr

All copyrights and trademarks referenced within the pages of this book are properties of their respective owners.

Preview

Prologue

My brother Rudy is sinking in Little Badger Lake. The water's clear, so I can see him as he plunges deeper and deeper. His arms are reaching toward me as if I'd dive in after him and haul him to the surface. Air bubbles, little trinkets of the last breath of his life, escape from his gaping mouth. His eyes, bloodshot with alcohol poisoning, are hazy at first. As the water swallows him, they rapidly flutter from shock to realization. The final expression I see, as I gaze downward during the last time I will ever see Rudy's face, is fear.

I have no reaction.

Decades of acid rain purged many of the Adirondack lakes of life, from the smallest plankton to the fat trout we used to catch when we were young and our parents were alive. It renders some of the lakes clear enough to see straight to the bottom in the shallower areas. Tourists think that's a good thing, that the sparkling clarity of the water means it's free of the pollution that goops up their own creeks and rivers.

Life, a molecule at a time, is creeping back into Little Badger Lake, but it's still eerily transparent.

The sun's high in the sky, piercing the depths of the water. I can see my brother until he finally vanishes into the deepest shadows of the lake where, despite the clarity, light can't penetrate.

Now I'm floating alone in our tiny fishing boat in the middle of Little Badger Lake. I have to look around to get my bearings. It's a tiny, but very deep lake--a water-filled dimple in the heart of the mountains. Its surface area is small enough that I can see the shore in detail in every direction. It only takes a second to spot our trailer. I guess it's my trailer now, and my boat, come to think of it. No one else is left in my family. My mom was an only child. My father, well, I don't know much about my father.

Then it occurs to me that I don't know what to do next.

I idly realize it's warmer out than I expected. So I take off my jacket, fold it neatly, and lay it on the seat that my brother swayed drunkenly upon only a few minutes before.

It slowly occurs to my disjointed mind that he's probably still alive.

I suppose I owe it to him to wait until he's drowned before I motor back to our--I mean my--patch of shoreline.

I light up one of my brother's Winstons and stare off at the pine covered mountains to pass the time.

I hear a motor fire up. I know without looking, from the sound of the little engine and the direction it's coming from, that it's Dick Hoof's boat. He's an ancient retiree who lives a few docks down from us--I mean, me. He always smells like compost. He's a blabbermouth. He talks for hours without taking a breath.

He's motoring right toward me.

I'm not nervous. I have very few feelings left, and nervousness isn't among them.

I mean, I feel nothing about my brother Rudy, who might be dead by now.

I mean, I don't care if anyone saw me toss him in.

I mean, I have no fear of accusation or prosecution.

The only thing I feel is mild, distant annoyance, because Dick's going to talk my damn ears off.

Dick always starts his conversations with an assumption about what you're doing. It's never, "Hey, whatcha up to?" It's always, "Hey, doin' some work on the yard?" or "Hey, gonna fire up the grill?"

I think of him saying, "Hey, did ya just drown your last living relative in the lake?"

It doesn't amuse me.

My cigarette's down to the filter. For the average smoker, a standard "king" length cigarette takes seven minutes to smoke.

The average human being begins to experience brain damage after about four to six minutes bereft of oxygen.

I lit up a minute or two after dumping him, and our--my --anchor, into the lake, so my brother has been airless for about ten minutes.

The water is fifty degrees. It's not cold enough to force his body into suspended animation. If someone were to haul his carcass to the surface and somehow get his heart beating, I doubt his brain functions would ever kick in again.

Dick cuts his motor as he approaches. He tips his floppy fishing hat, decorated generously with hand tied lures, and shouts, "Heya Rory! Doin' some fishin'?"

I doubt that there is a single fish in this lake.

I don't have a pole, a tackle box, anything.

I say back, "Nope."

As Dick's boat closes on mine, and he grabs the side of my hull and guides the little vessels side by side. "Good day for it, if the urge struck ya," he assures me. "Yeah, yessir, it's a good one. Weatherman said it wasn't gonna get higher'n sixty, but damn if my thermometer didn't say sixtythree. I got me one of them outside thermometers that ya hang outside the window so you can look out and see the temperature. It ain't just a thermometer, neither, it has a, has a, has a one of them things that reads out whether it's gonna rain, a, a,"

He sputters, sucking on his dentures in a vain attempt to find the word. I say, "A barometer."

"Yeah, that's the one! It's got a bar'meter so it says how the weather gonna be. Damn if it ain't better than the weatherman on WLLK. Don't know how that sombitch gets paid, ask me he's tellin the weather in Alaska or somewheres, not here." He guffaws, baring his oversized dentures, staring expectantly at me with his sunken, colorless eyes and waiting for me to appreciate his wit.

My mouth smiles. My eyes just stare. It's enough for him.

"Now I don't watch the news on the teevee on WOFR," he rambles, as fast as his ancient, withered lungs can push air through his vocal cords. "I think that's channel two. But I don't guess he's much better. Sixty degrees, you believe that? That sombitch on WLLK said sixty degrees. Damn, it feel sixty to you?"

I grunt. I imagine I could tell him that I took my jacket off, but that would only encourage him. A feeling of hopelessness is rolling over my consciousness like a wide thunderhead.

Dick drones on, but I don't really hear him.

My brother's heart has probably stopped beating. His stupid war is over.

I think of Nikki and wish she could hold me. All I want to do is feel her embrace, bury my face in the fuzzy warmth of her sweater and bawl like a baby. I used to cry a lot. I always did. But now, this moment, I can't. I don't think I'll cry ever again.

Dick says, "That motor workin' OK?"

My mind flushes itself of the tumble of thoughts that had just been going through it. I blank, I gradually process Dick's utterance, I glance at the little outboard motor and say, "Yep. Cleaned out the carb. Running smooth."

"Damn if this sombitch didn't take ten minutes t'start up this morning. Think it's the plug. I thought I bought a whole damn box of 'em, but I looked all through the damn shed, didn't find a damn one. Plenty of plugs for the Ford, not a damn one for the goddamn boat. Finally got the sombitch started, figured I'd head acrost to Werthman's for a new one. Need a couple other parts too. I'd of gone over earlier, but Gerty made me wait so she could make a banana bread for Johnny, seein' as his wife, what's her name, that, uh, Judy?"

"Jill." I don't even know what part of me is following the conversation. I'm staring at the pines on the far off hillsides. Imagining myself hanging from one. The Adirondack park is huge, and mostly wilderness. If I trekked deeply enough into the forest, it would be years or, or even decades, before anyone found my swinging body.

"Yeah, Jill, poor gal, never remember her name, how long they been married, eight, nine years? So anyways there Gerty made Johnny a blueberry bread or what have you seein' as Jill's still in Saint Anne's. Poor ol' Johnny gotta run the place by hisself, and tourist season startin'' up, he's gonna be run down by August! I offered to help out, but he says he can do it. Stubborn boy, been stubborn as a damn mule since he was a little kneebiter. So's anyway I figure I can give him the business, buy the plugs there even though I could drive down to Glens Falls and get 'em for cheaper than Werthman's got 'em, but he ain't got the volume of them big chains. 'Sides, it's a great day to be out on the lake. What brings you out?"

I say, "I threw my brother in the lake."

I take a long drag on my cigarette. Had I been in a healthier state of mind, I might have seen Dick's reaction as comical. He laughs heartily for a second at the idea of a prank, picturing me tossing Rudy in the drink as a scene from a slapstick film. The very concept of slapstick delighted his vaudevillian mind, regardless of the logistics of the prank itself.

Then he looks around. The water is serene except for the ambient ripples around our boats. He looked back at me with confusion, and then concern. His crusty old brain struggles to process puzzlingly conflicting data. I think his head might start to melt.

Finally, he says, "You mean just now?"

The words come out of my mouth, but I don't know where they come from before that. It's like I'm in someone else's body. "Yep."

Then I add, "I tied him to the anchor. He ain't coming up."

Dick's jaw drops. He looks down into the water in disbelief.

"Well he's, uh, you me--he's--"

I look at my watch. "Oh, he's gotta be dead by now." With my thumb and forefinger, I flick my cigarette butt into the lake. It hits the water with a little hiss.

Rudy has been down sixteen minutes, give or take.

Dick is speechless. He stares agape, maybe still hoping it's some kind of humor.

He glances down at the water. When his eyes climb back up to meet mine, they contain real alarm.

"You--you killed Rudy?"

I simply say, "Yup."

His gnarled old hand reaches for the pull starter on his outboard. He yanks it, still staring at me, as if I might plunge an ice pick into his back if he turns around. When his motor doesn't fire up, he finally gives in and looks away to fiddle with the choke. Monitoring me with nervous glances, he yanks the pull cord a dozen times, each more frantic than the last, before his motor finally starts up.

Then, without a word, he motors away, not toward Werthman's but back to his house.

I guess it's just a matter of time before the police show up. I have three Winstons left. My name is Rory Orrick, and I'm a fugitive.

Chapter One

When I was three years old, my father put a shotgun in his mouth and blew the majority of his head off, or so I've been told. It was a Remington double-barrel, but he only managed to fire off one side. It was sufficient to accomplish his apparently intended goal.

He did the deed in the woods across the street from our trailer. I was too little to understand that he was gone for good. I kept asking my poor mother when Dad would be coming back. I thought he was camping.

Mom spent the rest of her life cooking her brain with antidepressants, painkillers, and creative combinations of lowest-dollar alcohol. She built it up to an impressive peak: she swallowed more Librium and Vicodin in a week than most patients ingest in a month. I'm not sure what her physicians had to say about that.

Every night after she got home from working as a waitress at the Deer Mountain Inn, she'd haul out this huge jug of blood red wine, or a six pack of Pabst, or a bottle of cheap vodka, and pour and drink, pour and drink. She played kids games with me, like Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, and she read to me and kept me entertained as best she could, fading with each glass or can or swig, and then she'd curl up in Dad's old easy chair.

Mom and that chair. She hugged it and snuggled with it, taking in its scent and feel. When I was little, I figured she just thought it was a comfortable chair. Now I know she was desperately convincing herself that it was my father holding her and telling her that everything was going to be okay.

Our meals consisted mostly of leftovers from the kitchen of the Deer Mountain Inn. Rudy, who was eight when Dad blew his noggin off, used to tell me that the owner felt sorry for Mom and let her pick and choose from pots and trays of stuff that would otherwise have been thrown out.

That turned out to be the truth. My brother rarely told me the truth when I was young.

We ate pretty good for poor kids. Mom would bring home bags--and later Styrofoam – containers,full of honey baked chicken, or half pound burgers, or fatty cuts of prime rib, with sides of baked or mashed potatoes, bean salad, rice pilaf, steak fries, you name it. The Deer Mountain Inn was a pretty decent restaurant.

Dad didn't have life insurance. Mom made pretty good tips, though, and managed to keep me and Rudy fed, clothed and sheltered. And I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I keep saying we lived in a trailer, but it wasn't in a trailer park. It was a nice double-wide with a sidewalk and a dirt driveway and a pretty big yard, like a quarter acre, situated on lakefront property. It was a partially wooded lot, lined with old oaks and maples that seemed, in my childhood eyes, to stretch up high enough to tickle the passing clouds.

The showpiece, though, was a gigantic and almost perfectly symmetric weeping willow. It stood like a hunched old friend in the center of our yard, wide as it was tall. Dad, and later Rudy and I, kept it pruned so the drooping branches gave an average adult just enough headroom to walk beneath it without scraping--unless the wind was blowing, in which case the entire old tree billowed like a dandelion. In a strong storm, its branches seemed to be always on the verge of being whisked away, light as spider silk.

So we lived in a trailer, but we sure as hell didn't live in a crowded park full of country white trash.

White trash: poor white people who drink beer out of cans, drive rusty pickup trucks, listen to country or classic rock music, hunt, and shoot off illegal fireworks every holiday. It could be debated whether we were white trash. It depends on an individual's criteria for the title. If being poor was all it took, we were definitely white trash.

But if white trash meant being uneducated, selfish, smoking, tooth-missing, lottery-ticket-buying, boozing yokels who made stupid assumptions based on shock TV segments and didn't give a crap about their appearance, then Rudy was definitely white trash. I don't think I was--I never felt like it, anyway. Mom didn't start out white trash, but she slipped into it as gradually as life returned to the Adirondack lakes. When she was young, she was pretty and almost upscale. By the time she had me, she was raggedy and usually wasted.

Whether or not we bore the title of white trash, we grew up without a father, and eventually without a mother either. But whereas Dad was quick and decisive about his suicide, it took Mom a few attempts to get it right.

Once when I was five or six I found her in the tub with cuts in her wrists perpendicular to her arms. The water was all red. She looked mad. I asked her what was going on, and she said she spilled her wine. I believed her. She angrily got out of the tub, wobbling with intoxication, and gently asked me to leave the room.

Nothing more was ever said about it. She had little rows of Band-Aids on her wrists for a few weeks after that, and always wore shirts with long sleeves, tapered tight at the ends.

She didn't know that, if you want to kill yourself by cutting your wrists, you don't cut across the visible veins like they do in the movies. You cut deep, between the bones in your forearm, where you can pierce the big, juicy arteries. That'll do it. I know. I know a lot about suicide.

I don't remember having an unhappy childhood. Lakeside trailer life with an unstable but unquestionably loving mom was all I knew.

It was normal to me.

My fractured brain still has a whole, gigantic section dedicated to the storage of precious childhood memories. We had glorious Christmases in which Santa brought me bales of toys and candy. I had special moments with Mom, like when she let me stir the simmering chili or when she took me out in the boat, just the two of us, and we talked about our favorite things.

I remember when she'd humor me, letting me think I was helping her put the curlers in her hair. She let me smear the foundation on her cheeks when she "put on her face," as she called it. I remember giggling at that phrase, picturing faceless ladies rising from their beds in the morning and feeling their way to their makeup tables.

I remember so distinctly the scent of her imitation perfume that, to this day, when I smell it in a grocery store or a movie theater or some other public place, my head fills with images of my mother.

We had great relationships with our neighbors, too. We frequented the Werthman's boating, bait and general convenience store, which was reachable by boat or road, and John and Judy were always happy and chatty. Sometimes they gave Rudy and me free lollipops.

Dick and Gerty Hoof, who seemed old to me even back then, were constantly stopping by. They both came by boat in the summer, but in the winter Dick came alone in his snowmobile (Gerty refused to get on that fool contraption). She bombarded us with sweet, nutty bread creations. Rudy and I constantly nibbled on banana bread, blueberry bread, pumpkin bread, raisin bread--name a fruit or vegetable and Gerty made a bread out of it.

And Dick babbled. Holy fucking shit, did he babble. He'd stand on our back doorstep talking through the screen to Mom for an hour or more. Sometimes he'd keep on going even in the rain, and never seemed to notice or be insulted by not being invited in.

Rudy used to tell me that Mom was crazy. I knew he was full of shit, because he beat the crap out of anyone else who called our mother crazy, but it still got me riled when he said it. I'd try to kick his ass, but he was so much bigger I didn't really stand a chance.

Rudy knew damn well that I hated it when he insulted Mom. There was nothing worse anyone could say to me than a barb against my mother. I was a little boy. My mommy was all I had, besides Rudy (who was a shit- eating bastard his entire life). And she may have been in a prescription drug haze all day and a drunken stupor at night, but she was my mother. In my eyes she was a perfect, magical, infallible lady, a being of light and warmth and comfort that transcended humanity.

In my storage bin of childhood memories, there were only a few scraps that featured Dad. My memories of him were faint wisps and notions mostly, but I do have one specific image. I remember him as a burly man with a black beard and a blue flannel shirt, and he swung me up on his shoulders. Then he miscalculated our combined height as he walked me into my room, and whacked my head on the doorframe.

I screamed, cried and blacked out, and when I came to my mother was kneeling over me, holding a cold, wet cloth on my throbbing forehead and chastising my father, who stood nearby looking sheepishly concerned.

This tidbit I don't actually remember; it was told to me by Rudy (who thought until his death that the entire event was hilarious.) When Mom asked how my head felt, I said, "Round."

Then I blacked out again and woke up at the doctor's office, with Dr. Richards, the town's general care physician (there was a little sign in the waiting room that said "Cradle to Grave") waving a horrific-smelling white pellet under my nose. Mom and Dad were with me, and Rudy was in the corner too.

That ends my only specific memory of my father.

Somehow, nevertheless, my heart holds love for him. I don't think he would have killed himself if he got the care he needed--that white trash like us couldn't afford and that gruff, stubborn men wouldn't even consider.

Anyway, we never knew why Dad killed himself. He was a shift supervisor at the Foundry Co. paper mill. It wasn't exactly a glamorous line of work, but he had a great reputation as a hard, smart worker and was on solid track for a promotion to foreman.

Chapter Two

My mind, clouded as it is today, or maybe barren...

My mind contains another memory around the time of my father's death. It was a long bus ride; rides on several buses in fact.

Mom had to visit Dad's brother Ralph and tell him the news. We couldn't afford a train. We rode Greyhound to Rochester, New York.

Ralph was a weird, eccentric guy. He traveled seemingly randomly, working engineering jobs that I didn't understand when I was tiny. The thing I remembered was the bus ride. Once we got out of the Adirondacks, there were big, wide open fields, and occasionally flat land, and so few trees--I'd seen places like this in picture books, but never imagined that they were real. There were farms and fields of corn, cows and sheep, gigantic tractors.

Rochester seemed huge to me, a vast city with a pair of incredibly tall buildings and dozens of shorter ones. Uncle Ralph was currently contracting for Kodak. One of the tall buildings was the Kodak building, but he wasn't in it; we had to call a taxi (money that Mom really hated to spend) and ride way out to massive complex of industrial and office buildings.

I don't remember much about finding Uncle Ralph; we asked security guards and desk clerks where to find him, and nobody had a solid answer. Finally, we discovered the right building and somebody paged him.

I remember clearly his reaction. He held mom while she cried. She was barely able to choke out the words. She never got to "dead." She just said, "My husband, your brother, he's, he's," and she broke down.

Uncle Ralph held her. But he didn't seem too upset.

They talked a lot in the lobby of the building. I was a bored kid. I explored the plants, the seats, the reception desk, and played with my plastic dinosaur that Mom let be bring to amuse myself.

Ralph drove us back to the bus station (we couldn't afford to spend the night.).He and Mom hugged before we got on the bus, and he picked me up and told me to be the strong man of the house or some such thing. He was sweaty and smelled like machine oil.

We bussed back to Albany, where our car was waiting. But here's the memory that struck me harder than anything else that happened during the trip.

As we walked through the Albany bus station, I saw a man sitting alone in one of the generic, unpadded seats. He was pale, almost grey, and he was staring forward with the most empty look in his eyes that I'd ever seen. He could have been an empty shell of a human being.

His body and face made him appear to be in his early twenties (a grown-up to me at the time), but his expression added years and years. He was an old young man.

We had to walk right past him.

I had been babbling excitedly to Mom about the bus ride, but I could tell she wasn't in the mood for my banter. She was mad at Uncle Ralph. Apparently, she expected him to come to the Adirondacks for something to do with dad, but he refused, and she was really chapped.

As we passed the empty stranger, I stopped talking. I fixated on him, staring as only a three or four year old could stare, and suddenly our eyes met.

And for a second, I felt his emptiness. As if he beamed it to me right through our eye contact. I felt old, far older and wiser than three. I was a hundred years old, for a split second.

I slowed. Mom grabbed my hand and scolded me for staring at strangers. It's impolite, she said. The moment was broken. She tugged my hand and we moved on toward the exit to the parking lot, and once again I was babbling about cows and giant buildings and big farms without trees.

The man and his captivating stare etched itself into my mind forever. It became a part of me, and later in life I would think of it often.

My Uncle Ralph died a matter of months later. He was my father's only living relative. I heard sometime, somewhere, it was pills. I don't know for sure.

Chapter Three

Rudy said--and I think for once he wasn't lying--that Dad and Mom seemed to get along just fine. Plus we were good kids most of the time (me more consistently than Rudy). I was too little to get into much mischief, and Rudy didn't do very many abnormally evil things, at least for an eight year old. He had his obligatory stash of firecrackers, and once he painted the word BALLS in really big blue letters on the bright red firehouse in town, on the side facing the road. Stuff like that. He got scolded, he had to clean up his graffiti and vandalism, but he wasn't malicious or hurtful.

Of course, the firehouse BALLS accomplishment made him a legend among the local boys. The school wasn't too far down the road from the firehouse so most of the buses passed Rudy's artwork every day for the week it stayed on display, until someone narced on Rudy and he had to paint over it.

Funny thing was, Cliff, the volunteer fireman who was charged with the task of supervising Rudy's painting effort, didn't pay attention. Thus, Rudy refrained from repainting the entire wall; he only painted over the blue word he'd created. Since it had been a few years since the fire station had last seen a fresh coat of paint, the wall had faded enough that BALLS was still faintly visible.

It stayed that way for years. Some people even started calling it the Balls station.

Of course, Rudy was further punished. Dad and Warren, the fire chief, worked out an arrangement in which Rudy spent an hour a day for two weeks doing odd jobs around the firehouse, like washing dishes and emptying trash.

His legend, however, long outlived his penance.

But that's hardly a thing for a loving father to kill himself over. I was only three or four, but according to Rudy, Mom, and some other townsfolk, life was pretty good back then.

Dr. Richards and Nathan Clawson, one of the three New York State Troopers assigned to the nearest barracks and the one who took care of the rare police matters in Little Badger, concluded that something just went wrong in his head.

Who knows?

I spent a lot of time talking to Dr. Richards after Dad died. He was a general physician and a licensed psychological counselor to boot. He constantly assured me that Dad's death wasn't my fault. Dad had something wrong in his mind, Dr. Richards said. Sometimes people's brains don't work right and they do strange things. Some people go nutty and act funny and think people are out to get them. Other people just end their lives. Even though he seemed happy on the outside, Dr. Richards told me, Dad might have been very sad on the inside.

I remember one such conversation. I replied, "Like when the truck is all clean but it won't start up?"

Dr. Richards smiled and nodded, and said something about children and intuition.

In case you haven't picked this up already, Little Badger was a small town. We had three churches, one school, one hardware store, one gas station, one grocery store, a few motels and restaurants for tourists, a bar imaginatively named Thirsty's, and of course Werthman's for all your boating, snowmobiling, and general, random item needs. If you needed anything more than could be found in Little Badger, you had to drive thirty miles to Glens Falls.

Everyone in Little Badger knew each other. Everyone knew Dad killed himself. For years afterward, people looked at me with a weird mix of pity, sympathy and uncertainty. When people asked how I was doing, they didn't say it like they did to other folks. It wasn't a meaningless "How ya doin'?" It was more like a concerned-sounding, "How are you doing?"

Dr. Richards said that was normal and to expect it. So I did. I didn't milk Dad's death for sympathy, and I wasn't insulted by peoples' clumsy compassion. In fact, I liked it a tiny bit. As a child, it made me feel special, elevated from the rest of the kids in Little Badger.

For heaven's sake, my dad killed himself. I deserved a little special attention, didn't I?

Rudy didn't take Dad's suicide very well. I really think this is where everything started to go wrong for him.

Soon after the fact, he started getting in trouble at school. It started off slowly: He'd get detention once a month or so for things like starting food fights or tripping people.

Gradually, his rebellious behavior grew to a regular way of life. He started fights constantly, but he didn't shove and wrestle like most kids did in schoolyard brawls.

He went berserk.

Once, when I was in second grade, which would mean Rudy was in seventh grade and around twelve years old, he got into a recess altercation over something stupid, like the score of an NFL football game or something, with a fair faced blond- haired kid called A.J. Gardner.

When A.J. refused to give in regarding whatever the hell they were arguing about, Rudy suddenly got physical and smacked him in the face. A.J. was outraged.

"What was that for?" he demanded.

"Being such a numbnuts," replied Rudy dismissively. He was already walking away, but the playground denizens were expecting more. Touch football games halted, children descended from the jungle gym, the slide and the swings. A smallish crowd formed around the two boys.

"You're crazy!" insisted A.J.

The crowd gasped a little. As per the town's perception, that word had special significance with my family. It wasn't to be thrown around lightly.

Rudy spun to face A.J. "What are you saying?"

"You're crazy!" repeated A.J., more or less dooming himself to weeks of pain. "You just hit me for nothing!"

"I hit you because you're a numbnuts," said Rudy matter-of-factly. The crowd chuckled and looked to A.J. for a response.

"I am not a numbnuts! You're just crazy! Your family is crazy!" he stammered. At that point, he probably suddenly realized he shouldn't be using that word.

Rudy became bright red and his eyes squinted. He glanced around the circle of children robotically and quietly said, "Nice comeback." After a perfectly timed beat, he added, "Numbnuts."

His audience laughed. A.J. blushed and fumed. He shouted, "Shut up!" which caused Rudy to grin even wider. He owned the crowd. Rudy commanded an air of charisma that I could only dream about. The onlookers laughed harder. Rudy stepped up to him and again slapped his face.

A.J. bristled with embarrassment and hatred.

He exploded, "You're crazy and your whole family's crazy, and that's why your dad blew his brains out!"

A morbid silence fell over the entire playground. Rudy's face transformed into a perfect thousand-yard stare, and he braced his feet shoulder length apart. A.J.'s facial expression changed to fear, and then to uncertain resolve. He stuck out his chin and waited for the consequences.

Nobody even so much as breathed. Time stopped. The wind, the trees, the birds, nothing made a sound. At least, by all accounts I heard.

Then there was a gradual rhythm. Footsteps, coming from the school. A little girl dared to hiss, "Mrs. Leeds is coming."

It was like a trigger. Rudy exploded onto A.J. with the ferocity of a lioness taking down a gazelle. A.J. didn't even have time to raise his arms in defense when he was on the grass--Rudy upon him, pinning him down with a knee on his chest, pounding his face repeatedly.

The crowd went wild. Cheering, shouting, praise, panic, the classic fanfare of a schoolyard tussle. But it slowly died down.

Someone, an older girl, screamed. The other kids stepped back, rippling out ward like a shockwave. The approving roar was replaced by utterances of shock and revulsion, and the shouts of the rotund teacher, Mrs. Leeds, as she waddled into the fray.

She stooped to break up the interlocked combatants, but when she recognized the situation, she screamed like a startled toddler.

Rudy had his jaws locked on A.J.'s throat.

A.J. was flailing and clawing at Rudy's back, and growing weaker by the second.

Blood was flowing into the grass.

Chapter Four

When Dad popped his cranium, I didn't have the capacity to understand death, or the unsettling psychological paradoxes of suicide.

I don't mean to blame Rudy. He was old enough to be affected on an emotional level, with far greater fidelity than I was. But I really think that his destructive decline led to Mom's eventual breakdown.

She held together when Dad took himself out. From all accounts it was hell on her, but she was strong for her, us, Rudy and me, and kept her head and all that stuff. She didn't start to really get, well, unsettling is I guess as good as I can describe it, until Rudy almost killed A.J. at school.

Yes, A.J. survived. He was in a hospital at Albany for a long time. Rudy had managed to inflict several deep bites. He crushed A.J.'s larynx, ruptured his esophagus, and tore through a whole bunch of tissue. A.J. suffered some brain damage from blood loss and the fact that he couldn't get air into his lungs.

There were so many rumors. Later in life, it was hard for me to sift through them and determine the truth. My family, already in the throes of a stigma, was now an official oddity. The pity that I experienced after Dad bit the big one was gone. Now people stared at me with hints of disgust and revulsion, mistrust and suspicion, on their faces.

I know that after A.J. recovered physically, his mental well being was pretty weak. He knew some words, but had to re-learn the alphabet. He couldn't add or subtract or do basic math anymore. His mouth always hung slack, and he usually had a pretty blank look in his eyes. His neck was covered with patches of off-color skin, grafts from other parts of his body.

He didn't seem to grasp the concept of hygiene anymore. Some days, his breath stunk from clear across the room. Others, he strode in cloud of earthy body odor that made me think of old Dick across the lake.

I felt pretty bad for A.J. When I saw him around school, I tried to be extra nice to him, but other kids usually intervened and led him away from me. It was as if I was the one who tore his throat out.

It was my dad who killed himself. It was my brother who went psycho.

I, however, became an outcast by proxy.

Mom was an outcast because she acted bizarre. Diners in the Deer Mountain Inn started requesting not to be seated at her tables. Her tip income fell off sharply--even when her tables were filled, she was lucky to get a couple of bucks here and there.

People didn't chit chat with her like they used to. Cashiers at the Grand Union didn't ask how she was. Phyllis, the universal Little Badger hairdresser, spoke to other customers while doing Mom's hair. All she said to mom was, "How ya want it?"

And so on.

Rudy spent a year in a juvie center downstate. Mom and I visited him once a month.

I was expecting it to be like on TV court shows, where we sat on one side of a sheet of plate glass and spoke to him through a phone, but we got to meet him in a waiting room and even go for a walk in a courtyard outside.

On one visit, when Mom had scurried off to the ladies room, Rudy said, "Check this out, Roar!"

He proceeded to display angry red scabs on his knuckles.

"Are those from beating up A.J.?" I asked

"Naw. I beat the fuck out of my roommate almost every day."

I found that odd. I'd imagined living with someone would cause one to grow close, not violent. I was young and stupid, I guess. I said, "Why?"

"The first day I went in, he sucker punched me in front of all the other kids and called me his new bitch." I could see Rudy's eyes beginning to glare, his face reddening with anger. "So now I fucking headlock him, or break his face, or something, and make him tell everyone there that he's my bitch. Every day." The anger vanished from his face--replaced by shameless pride.

Rudy finished, quietly, almost to himself: "That motherfucker be my bitch."

From that moment on, I swore not to ever end up in juvie hall. I felt uncomfortable just hearing Rudy talk about it. I wished Mom would hurry back.

"How come? Can't you just be roommates? You know, I mean, get along?" I said.

Rudy replied, "That don't work here. There are control issues, Roar. You gotta get on top of the food chain, and that means you gotta show your might. Make sure everyone knows you won't take shit from anyone.

"Know what, Roar? I might get in trouble for beating Robert's ass--that's his name--and I might not get time off for good behavior. But there are some tough, mean fuckers in there, and none of them mess with me. Never did. Not once."

I wasn't sure how to feel. In fact, I felt like I was going to cry.

Before Mom came back from the bathroom, Rudy showed me what he called a tattoo on his bicep, but it was really a just scar. He'd scratched it into his skin with a paperclip. He said he had to do it every night to make sure it wouldn't heal up. He said it got infected and the people in the infirmary made him keep it bandaged up and take pills, but even when the bandages came off it was clearly visible.

It was a dollar sign.

Time heals all, and over the months after A.J.'s beating people gradually began to accept the Orrick family--meaning Mom and me, back into the Little Badger works. In fact, throughout Rudy's absence, I found myself bonding more closely with my school friends. That doesn't seem natural, does it? Me getting closer to my classmates--at least, a few of them--after my brother gets hauled off for brutalizing one of his.

Maybe they feared me and wanted to stay on my good side.

Who knows?

Every boy needs a best friend to share follies and foibles with, and mine was Len Humphrey. It was actually Len who started our long standing friendship.

I was sitting alone eating lunch. Then Len was standing there with another kid, a huge boy. I always thought Len was kind of weird, but I'd never spoken directly to him.

He was lanky and had the lightest blond hair possible without it being white. The other kid was a chest with meaty arms and legs and a chinless head that grew right out of his torso sans neck; the guy was a huge chunk of beef with eyes.

Len stood next to an empty seat and said, "Anyone sitting here?"

I said, "Doesn't look like it."

He grinned and sat down, plopping his tray in front of him. "I'm Len Humphrey. I've seen you around, well, everyone's seen you around, but I don't think I talked to you before." He held out his hand.

I shook it tentatively. I admit it. When I was young, I had a weak handshake.

Today it's like a rock.

The giant sat next to Len. Len said, "This is Meat. Well, his name is Ricky Timbre, but everyone calls him Meat."

In a surprisingly quiet voice, the large person replied to Len, "Everyone meaning you."

Len smirked at him. "The name fits. Wear it. Meat."

I was taken aback by the sudden, apparent offer of friendship. Silent at first, I finally decided to join in the banter by asking Len, "You actually taunt a guy who could crush you like a soda can?"

Meat smiled, but it was a gentle smile.

Len said, "I taunt everybody. So what if I get crushed like a soda can? Besides, Meat is on the shy side. Like you. I specialize in reforming shy people.

"Listen," said Len quietly. "Meat and I and a few other guys are gonna get together tonight and moon Mrs. Leeds."

"Moon her?" I said.

"Yeah!" whispered Len with quiet enthusiasm. "Her house has got, like, a million motion detector lights outside. We're just gonna go stand in front of her front window with our pants down until she notices us. Then we'll split."

"It's gonna be cool," added Meat.

Len continued, "Want to join us?"

"Geez," I said. "I don't know. Can't we get in trouble?"

"Not as much trouble as your brother's in," said Len frankly. For some reason, his comment didn't bother me. I was extremely sensitive about jabs at my family, but Len had this glow about him. He was okay.

He continued, "I don't mean anything nasty by this, but you don't seem to have a lot of friends here, and your brother's vampire act didn't help. Come on, moon Mrs. Leeds. You'll meet people and have fun."

Len and I became close friends fast. Before long, we were doing things together inside and outside of school. His devil-may-care attitude was much healthier than Rudy's: Len knew when to quit, at least most of the time, and when he taunted people it was usually just for laughs.

Len would never tear anyone's throat out.

Len and I and sometimes Meat engaged in pranks pretty often. We did stuff like plant trees in the middle of the football field and flush the toilets until they overflowed. Stupid shit like that. But at our age, it was fun.

Len and I also spent a lot of time in detention together, which is just as well because it gave Mom plenty of time to get sloshed on pills and booze before I got home.

We weren't bullies, and we weren't particularly destructive. We did the kinds of things that mischievous but benign kids in second grade do.

We pretended to accidentally slam our open-top desks on our fingers during tests, so the other kids would giggle at our feigned pain.

Once we stole a kidney that had belonged to a sheep or something from a high school biology room. We stashed it in the far recesses of a desk belonging to a loser named Kyle. Kyle always smelled bad, which was why we didn't like him, and as the kidney scent changed gradually over the weeks from formaldehyde to rotting flesh, other kids thought it was him. He found it eventually. He was so grossed out he vomited onto the floor. Len and I laughed until we couldn't breathe. Calls to our moms followed, but my mom was so hopped up on junk she forgot to punish me or even mention the incident.

One winter day during recess, the teachers had slides, extremely low balance beams, obstacle courses and stuff set up in the gym to entertain us. Len and I were sitting idly on some swings. He said in a surprisingly serious tone, "Is your brother crazy?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. What makes people go crazy?"

"Well, I know lead paint can cause weird things in your brain. Remember when Rick ate the paint off his windowsill?"

Please bear in mind, we were eight years old.

I thought about it for a few minutes. Then I replied, "No, I don't think Rudy eats paint. At least, I'm pretty sure he doesn't."

We drifted on our chain-suspended chairs, pondering paint and sanity.

Then Len said, "I know I joked about this, but is your brother a vampire?"

That wasn't the first time I'd encountered such speculation.

"I don't know," I said. "Wouldn't I be a vampire too, then?"

"Why?"

"'Cause we're brothers?"

"No, vampires turn each other into vampires by sucking blood. But wait, A.J. would be a vampire, too, then, but he's just a retard. Are there retarded vampires?"

I didn't know too much about vampires, but I knew this: "Wouldn't he have to rise up from a grave?"

"No," said Len, "Zombies do that, like in the Thriller video. Vampires sleep in coffins, but they're not buried in graveyards. At least, I don't think."

I said, "Wait, they can't be vampires! Rudy and A.J. They go out in the sun."

"Oh yeah," said Len. "Then why did your brother bite A.J.'s neck?"

"Maybe he's crazy."

I slept over Len's house that night. His mom was really sweet to me, considering that my brother was widely viewed as the town loony, and my mom was quickly becoming the town drunk.

Len's dad had left them years ago. I never asked for details, but his mom was great.

I rode the bus straight to his house. I had to bring a note from my mom giving the bus driver permission to drop me off there. When we arrived, Mrs. Humphrey was on a riding mower fixed with a little plow blade. It was scraping snow off their sidewalk. They had a real house, not a trailer. Our house didn't feature much of a sidewalk; it just had a few flat stones in dirt.

She stopped the tractor and got off. "Rory," she said sweetly through fat, sugar plum rosy cheeks. "It's so good to see you! Are you doing okay?"

"Doing fine, thanks, ma'am" I said. She grinned at my politeness.

Len hollered, "Hi Mom we'll be in my room!" as a single word and hauled me away by the coat sleeve.

"You've GOT to see this," he kept saying, hurling his winter outer clothes all over the house as we ran down the hallway. I was a bit neater, carrying my stuff along as I took it off. "Really, Rory, this is awesome!"

I couldn't wait. We got to his room, and he scrambled under the bed. He rummaged around for a few minutes, every so often thrusting a box or toy out behind him with the command, "Here, take this."

Eventually he emerged with a little black bag. He opened it up to reveal one of the most wonderful things I'd ever seen.

It looked like a big, fat purple firecracker. It was about the size and shape of a roll of 35mm film. Remember, this was the 1980's and digital wasn't around yet.

It had a long wick.

"It's an M-80," he said hushedly, in awe of the very presence of the item in his hand.

"Wow," I said respectfully. I didn't know what an M-80 was, but I knew it would blow up really loud. And big. My mind took that thought to the next logical step: "I'll bet that'll blow the door right off of a mailbox."

Len's eyes brightened. "Bet it would. Wanna try it?”

We didn't have to discuss whose mailbox we'd assault. As one, we thought immediately of Mrs. Leeds. She was such a great target. She overreacted to everything.

The night we mooned her, not only did she scream but she called the police. Len, Meat, Corey, Billy and I observed with glee from a thicket a few hundred feet away.

Once, we used a pin to wedge the nozzle of a can of fart spray so it would spray until it ran out, and we tossed it into her car. When she discovered it, he called the police again. Older kids egged and TP'd her house regularly, and she in turn called the cops on them.

The police, who were basically Nathan Clawson and another couple of New York State Troopers, hated her. Once, someone accidentally bumped into her car when it was parked in the street near the drug store. She called the police and made the kid wait until they showed up and filled out an accident report.

Len and I determined she was crazy, but in a different way than Rudy. There must have been a dozen or more ways people could go crazy.

At least.

But back to the important M-80. Len and I jittered excitedly until nightfall.

Mrs. Humphrey made us real, homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner, and rice crispy squares for dessert. It was cool to eat something that a restaurant hadn't made. It tasted more...sincere.

We watched TV. Len had cable, so I got to check out MTV and HBO and all that stuff. Mom, Rudy and I didn't have cable, and being in a low area near a lake meant that broadcast TV just couldn't reach us through the mountains, so we only got two channels. One of them came in snowy.

The cable picture was so clear! This was back when MTV showed videos, not crap, and we watched Prince sing about his little red Corvette,, and that dude who wore his sunglasses at night, and the awesome cartoony video by a one-hit band called A-Ha.

And later, we were going to detonate an M-80 in Mrs. Leeds' mailbox. Bliss, sheer bliss.

Night came. We said goodnight to Len's mom and retired to bed. Len's room was on the ground floor, and his mom's room was upstairs. Sneaking out at around eleven o'clock was a cinch. His mom snored so loud, we knew the second she fell asleep.

Like midget cat burglars, we tiptoed to Len's bike. I had to sit on the sissy bar. He peddled through the darkened streets sans brakes (due to the snow), and I remember several times when it seemed like we were going to slip straight into a gully or blast into a tree, which would have been the deaths of us. Finally, we made it to Mrs. Leeds' plastic mailbox. I looked at it closely and hissed, "Uh oh."

"What?" Len hissed back.

"The hinges are metal. Metal is strong, right? Stronger than plastic? The door might not come off."

"Well, it'll blow it open at any rate, and it'll be a cool loud boom."

I agreed. He produced a Zippo lighter that he'd lifted from a box of his father's stuff left behind, and paused.

"This is gonna be cool," he whispered excitedly. Then he lit the fuse, tossed the explosive into the mailbox and closed the door. Barely able to control our giggling excitement, we rode to the same thicket from which we watched the cops arrive at her door after the mooning incident.

We waited. And waited.

Len started to get impatient. "The fuse went out," he whispered.

"No, wait, I can kinda hear it," I hissed.

"That's crickets," declared Len.

"Dumbass, there's no crickets in the winter. It's going. I can hear it."

He said, in a quiet but real non-whispered voice, "I'll go relight it." He started to wriggle out of our cover of leaf-bare stalks.

"Wait," I hissed.

"What?" he said aloud, annoyed, and spun back to face me.

That moment, there was a blinding flash and a whopping sound much louder than anything we'd expected. It was as loud as when a bolt of lightning hits the lake. We both jumped about a foot off the ground. The amazing blast shook the ground, rustled the thicket, and rattled windows several houses away.

"Holy fuck," hissed Len.

Then the night was silent again--even more silent, because the explosion frightened the night creatures into hiding. After a moment or two of dead silence, we started to hear the sound of rain--but with more of a clattering tone to it than the familiar rain-like dribbling--more like hail. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped.

Lights started to come on in nearby houses about the tract. We huddled deeper into the woods. I glanced over at Mrs. Leeds' mailbox to survey the damage.

There was no sign of the mailbox.

But the street was littered with tiny dots, hard to make out from the distance in the dark, but we knew what they were.

The M-80, which is a quarter of a stick of dynamite, had blown the mailbox to dust.

I said, "We have to go now." Len disagreed.

"We have to hide."

"If we hide here the police will find us!" Len was more panicked than I'd ever seen him. He leapt to his feet and dragged his bike out of the snow. Without a choice, I followed and we hopped on the bike. He rode like a reckless cowboy on a wild horse and I scrambled keep my tenuous hold on the handlebar.

Somehow, without ending our lives in a colossal collision with a tree, Len got us back to his house. We burst back into his window and hit our respective beds (mine was a sleeping bag on Len's floor).

We heard footsteps coming down the stairs. "Sleepy!" reminded Len in a hiss. We emerged from the conventional door of his room, rubbing our eyes.

"What was that sound?" said Len.

"I don't know," said his mom, coming down the stairs. "Sounded like a shotgun, or something exploded off a ways."

We stage-yawned, shrugged our shoulders, bid her goodnight again, and retired back into his room, and with the bedroom door closed, we triumphantly got into Len's bed.

"That was cooler than..." he hissed excitedly, but finished with, "Uh oh."

Bright light invaded through the window, white light. It was so intense it lit up the white window dressing (which, admittedly, was wispy thin) and made the room look like it was bathed in unnaturally bleached daylight. Len looked out. "Fuck."

"What?" I demanded, and scrambled next to my friend to look through the cold glass.

A cop car was cruising slowly up the street toward Len's house.

Following the bicycle tire tracks.

"Oh god," said Len, when the cop's bright beam shot upward toward his mom's area room (did you mean to say “area room”?). We heard her make a whoop of alarm at the intensity of the beam.

"We are so fucked," said Len.

I said, "I hope my mom had plenty to drink tonight."

We lived it down. In fact, after the obligatory parental meeting, in which Len's mom and my mom got together with Trooper Nathan and he told us, sternly, that explosives were illegal in New York State, and they were illegal to minors in every state. He added more, noting that vandalism isn't something to laugh at, and that (this sucked) we were charged with the duty of shoveling Mrs. Leeds' driveway all winter long in addition to our parents buying her a new mailbox. Plus, worst of all, if we did anything like that again we'd end up in juvie with my brother.

That thought sent fear through me like a lightning bolt. Tears. Len, too. Apologies, from both of us as one.

After that meeting, life was actually pretty good. Word of our victory spread quickly around the school, and we were heroes. I enjoyed my brief popularity. Brief:

Rudy came home.

When he got back to Little Badger, the townsfolk weren't pleased at all. By this time, Rudy was thirteen. He had to repeat seventh grade; having been in kiddie jail interrupted his education.

A.J.'s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, filed some kind of official court document to try to prevent Rudy from being allowed to attend school in the Little Badger system, but the best they could get was a 50-foot restraining order.

Rudy violated it the first chance he got. It was recess, again, but this time it was in the middle of winter. Rudy purposely wore a different coat than his usual blue denim fur lined coat. He wore one of Dad's old hunting jackets, which made it easy for him to approach A.J. beneath the notice of Mrs. Leeds.

A.J. was still in a remedial program, but he was able to speak clearly and reason and stuff. Sort of.

As Rudy marched up to A.J., who was facing the other way and didn't notice his approach, I tried to talk him out of it. Rudy shoved me, and I landed on my butt in the snow.

He'd gotten stronger, developed a wiry, steely physique, in juvie. He was much sturdier than his size led folks to believe.

He reached A.J. and plopped a hand on his shoulder. The smaller boy spun around. His eyes met Rudy's, and he looked shocked, angry and then scared all in the space of a split second.

Rudy clenched his teeth and hissed one word to A.J.: "Sorry."

But he said it with a steely look that transformed the true meaning of the word. It was a threat. A threat not to use Rudy's actions against him. Not to sue our family, not to demean us, not to take advantage; to feel lucky that he was alive, and leave it at that. Rudy, my brother, somehow conveyed all that in one word which, by its strict definition, was supposed to be remorseful.

Then he walked away.

That's the first time I realized how dangerous Rudy really was. But he was my brother, and I loved him.

That's it for the freebie. Head to Lulu.com to see how to purchase the entire ebook for only $2.99! Available for Nook, Kindle, Apple iWhatever, and as an EPUB file.