New Jersey Noir Read online

  It was about this time, when Franklin announced his intention of painting and wallpapering the interior of the house, a project my grandmother embraced wholeheartedly, that I began to develop an idea of my own. My idea began small, like a baby worm inside an apple. But as the days rolled by, it slowly formed itself at the core of my raw existence. Here I’d been earning money for no reason, but now I needed money if I was going to run away and start a new life somewhere else. I didn’t know any other place besides Grover’s Mill, but my home wasn’t home anymore, it was being leached away from me. Now at least I had a plan, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And if I wavered, a particularly disturbing encounter with Franklin solidified my goal.

  This occurred when we were nearly finished with stripping off the old wallpaper in the dining room, a stately leaf-and-floral pattern with Greek vases that I used to get lost in staring at when I was a kid, which was to be replaced by a more up-to-date geometric design. To me it was just more of the same business of erasing the past, but I had no will to get all hot under the collar over it. The two of them had gone into New York to pick the new paper in a showroom there, so it was a moot point.

  Helping Franklin with this work during the mornings before heading off to my chores in the cemetery, where I could hang around with Mollie, left me little time for my loitering by the pond, and school was just a fading memory. I’d basically dropped out, without anybody making much of a fuss about it. I assured my grandmother I would finish high school later, after taking time off to regroup. Meantime, working both jobs—and let me say here, if I might, that I was a hard worker, despite any attitude issues I had regarding Franklin—left me a worn-out rag at the end of the day. It was everything I could do to get some supper into my belly, do the dishes, slip past Iris and Franklin as they listened to some variety program on the radio, and head upstairs to bed. A fast masturbation into one of my socks, and I was quickly in dreamland.

  One night, I’d gone down the hall to take a pee. After I lay down again, for whatever reason, I was having a hard time getting back to sleep. I tossed and turned, punched my pillow, adjusted my blanket, then had finally started to drift off when I heard someone turn the knob on my door and softly glide into the room. Far too startled, not to mention frightened, to speak or scream or even move, I lay there listening, and waited. Some long minutes passed, my heart up in my throat, and I did hear shuffling, very soft, across the rug, and the delicate, awful sound of breathing. I could swear I heard the intruder reach down and lift something up from the floor and—I can’t say for sure because my ears were so full of the shush of my pounding heart—inhale. The next sound was not as indistinct. A floorboard creaked, only somewhat muffled by the braided rug. The silence that followed was, as the cliché goes, deafening—and it went on for such an excruciatingly long stretch of time that I began to wonder if I hadn’t dreamed the intrusion. I continued my vigil with a corpselike stillness, and after a time I heard the faintest thud—not a thud, more like a poof of air—followed by another unnatural silence, and then the expertly turned handle again, though oddly no footfalls from my bedside back to the door. Mortified, I didn’t move a muscle, barely breathed, hoping against hope that there would be no further activity. As the room began to lighten, the sun not yet risen outside but the sky pinkening the sheers in my window, I recovered my wits and began trying to sort out what in the world I’d experienced.

  Franklin, who considered himself a bit of a chef, was making Irish oatmeal and Belgian waffles in the kitchen that morning, whistling, as I walked in and poured myself a glass of milk.

  “Where’s my grandmother?” I asked.

  “When I came down, she wasn’t up yet so I checked in on her and she’s a tad under the weather this morning. Would you mind taking that up to her?” pointing at a tray set out with a softboiled egg, unbuttered toast, orange juice. The unnecessary touch of flowers in a cream pitcher nauseated me, I must confess.

  “Breakfast in bed,” I said, and proceeded to do as he told me.

  Not that I suspected for a moment my grandmother had been the person who visited my bedroom during the night, but seeing her in bed, white as if she’d been soaked in bleach, feeble from flu, confirmed it hadn’t been her. I placed the tray on her bedside table, asked if there was anything else I could do.

  “No, Wyatt. I just need to sleep, is all. I’ll try to eat some of that later.”

  Back downstairs in the kitchen, I certainly wasn’t going to give Franklin the pleasure of hearing me ask if he happened to notice any burglars in the house last night. Best, I knew, just to leave him thinking I was dumb as a brick. One thing that continued to bother me as the day wore on was how my intruder, surely Franklin, managed to exit the room without making a single hint of sound. He’d deftly stolen into the room. Stood over me silent as death for a long time. But then it was as if he’d simply floated to the door when he made his escape. How did he do that? I took to leaning one of my schoolbooks—which I secretly read on evenings when I had enough energy—against the inside of my bedroom door before going to bed. This way, I figured I’d know if he had snuck in again in the middle of the night. I kept my father’s wooden leg beside me under my blanket too, with which I planned to bash in his skull if the chance arose. But every morning I saw that the book was still there, so I gathered he had lost interest or decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

  As work in the rooms continued, the wariness and hostility I felt toward Franklin only grew, despite his apparent decision not to trespass further on my privacy while I was sleeping. Grandmother’s health improved, in no small measure because of Franklin’s doting, but rather than making me glad this only irked me. One could reasonably argue I had no right to feel competitive with him, but any natural instinct—granted, piddling—I had about being a good grandson was crowded off the stage by Franklin. He was like a landgoing octopus with tentacles wrapped around nearly every part of my life. When she was sick, confined to her room, my grandmother had instructed me to do whatever Franklin said—that until she was back up and out of bed, he was head of the house. The only problem was, this edict remained in effect even now that she was back to her old, cold self. I found myself living with a strange new father now, one with whom I didn’t share a drop of blood in my veins and toward whom never a kind thought ran through my mind. Had my real father been alive to see what was happening here, or so I fantasized, he’d have beaten Franklin to within an inch of his life and then dragged him—one leg powering the way—down to the pond to finish the job. Sweet dream, but just a dream.

  The only time I felt free from the so-called freeman these days was when I was with Mollie. Much the same way the rich like hobnobbing with other rich people, loners are drawn to loners. Mollie and I were living proof of this. One might think that with his wife having run off on him, her father Ralph would have been extra strict about letting Mollie out of his sight. But from the first he seemed to trust and like me, so my wandering off from the cemetery to the pond with his daughter, our spending every spare hour we had in each other’s company, didn’t bother him. I felt like we had his silent blessing, and while he was rough-edged, unshaven, and stained by melancholy, I thought of him sometimes as a surrogate father, though I never told him such. Besides Ralph, nobody knew a thing about me and Mollie, because nobody cared. It was the only part of my life I inhabited with perfect independence, and as such it was my greatest joy.

  Once, lying in the tall grass with Mollie, secluded from everyone and everything but a red-tailed hawk circling high overhead, she asked me, “How come you hate that man living in your house so much?”

  “I never said I hated him,” and kissed her again, hoping that would be the end of it. Franklin was the last person I wanted to talk about here with Mollie.

  When she pulled her lips away to breathe, she said, gently, “But you don’t need to say it in words, Wyatt. Whenever he comes up, the look in your eyes says it all.”

  Mollie wasn’t someone I wanted to lie to, so
I told her, “Look, he just gives me the creeps, all right? He treats me like I’m his slave or something, and my grandmother goes along with it all. I just need to get out of there, the sooner the better.”

  “What’s he done to give you the creeps? You don’t seem to be afraid of anything, from what I know.”

  I told her about the night in my bedroom, and how every time Franklin was near me he got too close. I told her how even the way he smoked his cigarettes had a wickedness to it, how his endless stories seemed like a madman’s fictions, and that every favor he’d done for us seemed to have strings attached. “It’s like he’s a virus, taking over our lives and making us sick. I feel like I’m living in his house now, instead of the other way around.”

  The idea I’d been harboring, and the mounting hatred that fueled it, took a giant leap in a more dangerous direction when my sixteenth birthday rolled around. Franklin got it in his head that this was too important a milestone in my life not to celebrate in grand style. I’d have preferred to eat pizza out of a box, but he would have none of that.

  “We’re throwing you a party,” he announced a couple of weeks before the big day, knowing it was the last thing I wanted. “Oh, yes. Cake, candles, champagne, the works.”

  “I don’t care if he is turning sixteen, Wyatt’s still too young for champagne,” my grandmother objected, if meekly.

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s because I don’t,” I snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

  I wasn’t so sure.

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s not much,” she said.

  “No, it’s beautiful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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