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  WARPED:

  TALES OF HORROR AND RAGE

  RICK OCHRE

  Copyright © 2015 by Rick Ochre.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Warped / Rick Ochre. – 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-940501-14-7

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1.CYRIL

  2.MY SIN

  3.REPARATIONS

  4.TEMATANGI

  5.IT BUILDS SLOWLY

  6.FIVE WAYS YOUR MOM WAS WORSE THAN YOU’LL EVER BE

  7.HEAVY ENOUGH

  8.SUMMER GIRL

  9.DUTY

  10.SKOGSRA

  11.SIGN OF THE DEVIL

  12.YOU’LL BE A WOMAN SOON

  13.SOMEONE HAS TO PAY

  14.THE FUN ME

  ALSO BY RICK OCHRE

  An excerpt from THE STARVED: INCEPTION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CYRIL

  Frank and me, we meet for happy hour every month or so. Last time was in March, when the crocuses were coming up through the rime of dirty snow at the edge of the yard, crocuses Melanie planted the year we bought the house. I stomped the shoots into a pulpy green mass with my work boots, and still some of the stubborn fuckers came back, opening their purple throats to the sun.

  Now it’s May, and it’s irises rising up out of the ground to send me backward, only there’s been a new development and I don’t mess with Melanie’s flowers. Instead, I think of Frank. It’s time to call that old bastard, even if I didn’t have this other thing. But Frank owes me. After I think it through for a while, I see a way that Frank can fix my problem.

  #

  Frank shows up and right off I can see he’s doing fine. Looks to have taken off a few pounds, got a nice haircut and a new jacket, maybe pig suede, maybe the expensive stuff. Frank can afford it, ever since the Schapper boys put him in a half-million dollar house for free, contingent on him making it through that medically-induced coma with his head more or less glued back together after Josh Harrick took a bat to it.

  Since he’s got no mortgage payment, Frank’s pension from the Toyota plant leaves more than enough. Still, you got to hand it to him: he never throws it in your face. Lets me buy a round when it’s my turn, even on what I make as a cop. A little thing that means something to me.

  “Fuck me, you’re prettier every time I see you,” I say as Frank hugs me. It’s a full-on hug, with no back slapping. That’s all the therapy for you, the twelve-step shit. I know it well enough for what it is—I’ve lost two partners to extended AA sabbaticals, which is another way of saying they’re drinking themselves to death on the installment plan.

  But Frank’s no backslider. He’s one who found a way to make it work.

  I get my beer, he gets his club soda, we order one of those piles of fried onions, he looks at me long and hard and he gets down to it.

  “Something on your mind, Gil?”

  Shit yeah, I got something on my mind. If it was someone else sitting across the table, I might try all night and never get it out. But there’s Frank for you. I tell him the whole story. When I mention Melanie he winces like it’s him who can’t breathe the air as good ever since she left, even though it’s been two and a half years. When I tell him about that fucking Stroker she’s taken up with, about the “save the date” card—the long sleeves she wore the last time we had coffee, the bluish bruise on her wrist—anyway, Frank listens to the whole thing.

  Then we figure out how to fix it.

  I was counting on that. There’s been that offer on the table all these years. The quid pro quo. We’re friends. But our friendship kicked off with the balance on my side. I’m forty-six this spring, old enough to know you can pretend all day long that the past doesn’t matter—but owing is owing. And Frank’s owed me since that day twelve years ago when I walked into the Harrick house with my Sig in my hand and found him lying in his own blood, gasping like a trout on a June dock in the morning sun.

  #

  Neighbors saw Harrick’s truck drive up, saw him go in the house, and a little later they heard screaming from the open windows, then Harrick was running back out to the truck and he hit the road hell for leather.

  We find that out later. All we get on the radio is the 415, disturbance at an address over on Culpepper. I don’t know it’s Harrick’s place yet, but I’m already wondering if the Schapper brothers might have done something crazy.

  The Schappers aren’t any more crooked than any other builders. They had a little scale model of the future Twain Lakes Estates—Fourteen Executive Home Sites Build To Suit in a trailer where State Road 9 meets Culpepper Circle. I don’t blame them, nobody does. The five leaning shacks on Culpepper were eyesores, but they huddled around a pretty little pond fringed by willows and cattails. Their owners stood to make double what anyone else would ever pay them for their land, since the Schappers had money breeding money like a prize bitch with a broken fence—it was dot com times, Kansas City eighteen short miles down the road and the promise of quick technology cash.

  But Harrick wouldn’t sell. Money wouldn’t budge him. They kept to themselves, Josh Harrick and his wife Greta, their no-account kid with his stuck-out ears and his down-looking eyes and his flat, homely face: nothing to write home about there.

  Without Harrick, the deal was teetering on the edge of failure. Someone had put up a piece of land two miles closer to Kansas City—no ponds but a flat parcel with a stand of mature poplars along the back—and word was the Schappers were ready to bite if Harrick kept being a pain in the ass.

  Those were Frank’s drinking days. He lived a couple of doors down from the Harricks, and he took it as a personal affront when they got between him and serious money. One day he got tanked and decided to visit the Harrick house while Josh and his wife were both at work—had a pocket full of Sharpie pens and a vague plan to write “GET THE FUCK OUT OR ELSE” on the living room wall, maybe break a couple of mirrors.

  Frank broke in without any problems. We didn’t lock much around here, twelve years ago.

  Then he heard the sounds from the coat closet.

  #

  Frank says to me, the day he comes out of that hospital coma and the nurse calls the station and says come on over, Frank’s talking—Frank watches me walk into the room and says “They made him eat LARD.”

  Now, of all the fucked-up things Josh and Greta Harrick did to their eight-year-old boy Cyril, making him eat lard seemed to me the least of it. But there I am with my notebook open, not for the first time trying to figure out what the hell to say next. I’m no good in delicate situations—Melanie made that clear every time I came across her crying silently, shoulders shaking. I never could figure out how to make any of it right.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  Frank keeps talking. I don’t know, maybe you come out of a three-week coma, the first asshole you see is your new best friend. But Frank tells me about finding that boy Cyril tied with tractor chain, shit on his ankles, shit under his fingernails, crusty scabs making a meandering path on his back where Greta used cigarettes. Frank tells me about it with his eyes rolling like roulette wheels and then he grabs my arm like he wants me to drag him up from he
ll and he says I’m different now.

  Well God bless, sobriety’s a trick and all, I’m happy for the guy. I come around and see him a few times before they let him out, watch him learn to use a fork again, walk up and down the hallways. He’s the big story, crews coming from Saint Louis and Chicago to talk to him. He doesn’t say much but somehow he makes for good TV anyway.

  He’s a hero, even if the boy’s dead. Harrick came in and found Frank trying to get the chain off Cyril, went to get his bat—no happy endings there. Still, the Schapper brothers figure out how to spin the story. They hatch a plan to give Frank a house and a tricked-out Tundra. They finish Frank’s house first, it’s ready by the time he’s out of the rehab facility. The press love it, zoom in close on Frank using a cane to climb the steps to his new front door, and folks line up to buy the other thirteen Executive Homes in the new Twain Lakes Estates.

  #

  Melanie and I were still married then. She made cakes, casseroles, and we went out to see Frank every month or two. She offered to set him up with her sister. Frank was in his mid-forties then, a bachelor from way back, and he had plenty of women nosing around, women who’d seen him on TV. After a while, Melanie found a new project and I went to see Frank by myself.

  About six months after he’d moved into the new place, when we were supposedly celebrating his graduation from occupational therapy, he says, “Cyril’s taken up living in the house.”

  Well, I took my time thinking what to say about that, like you might imagine.

  Cyril was dead, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Once the paramedics got Frank out of the house, and Cyril on that too-small stretcher with the sheet over his face, we picked up Greta coming home from work. We figured Josh Harrick had hightailed it as far away as he could get, so it took us by surprise when he turned up drowned in two feet of brackish water an hour away in Sikeston where he was hiding out in an old fishing cabin. Then Greta hanged herself at an unlikely angle in a holding cell in Springfield.

  “Folks getting what they got coming”—that was the popular analysis.

  But I’d been around just long enough not to believe in justice delivering itself. So when Frank told me the boy was back, I paid attention.

  Cyril in death was more fetching than he had been in life, apparently. Frank said he cleaned up good, even if he was sort of shimmery and out of focus and made of nothing. In life, he’d been hard-road ugly—there’s a sad truth for you. Melanie, when we were married, would never let me speak that way of a child. Especially when we were working at making one of our own, a project that eventually failed and took our marriage down with it. To Melanie, every child was beautiful.

  When Frank, who had never married, who had no nephews or nieces or baby cousins, told me about the spirit who wisped around him as he did the crossword and checked on his investments, I knew he was smitten. I didn’t believe him at first. Would you? But then there came a series of incidents that made a believer of me.

  First was a guy at the end of the court. He’d been smacking his teenage daughter around. We had a couple of calls on record to prove it, short stays in the emergency room to set an arm or stitch up an eyebrow, though of course she never pressed charges.

  We get called out and the guy—some sort of financial consultant—he’s taken a fall out the second story window, head bounced off a stack of paving stones that just happened to be in exactly the wrong place. You figure the wife or the daughter, right?—only they were at the mall, and the wife swore those pavers were stacked in the third garage stall, left over from when they had the backyard done.

  I’m puzzling through that one when Frank, who ambled over with a few of the other neighbors, takes my arm and we go for a stroll to the edge of the pond. Cyril’s sorry, he says. They’re working it out, he says. Won’t happen again.

  Unless it’s another asshole. Then he can’t promise, he says.

  Right about then I’m getting chills. Think I’m a sucker? Well, first of all, you had to see those paving stones right under the window with a streak of brains and blood on them. And second, Frank’s that kind of guy. The kind that doesn’t lie.

  There have been seven incidents total. Not bad, for nearly ten years. Only two deaths. Frank managed to teach Cyril a measure of self-control. Or maybe it was some complicated barter system they had. I’m fuzzy on the details. Only, whenever some guy sliced himself up with an edger or broke a leg tripping over a hole in the turf, I was never surprised to see his kids with that hunted look in their eyes, that readiness to bolt because running’s all you got when you weigh fifty or ninety pounds and your dad likes to take out his frustrations on whatever doesn’t fight back.

  You might think we had some sort of child abuse epidemic going on in Twain Lakes Estates. Truth is—and this is cop truth, the kind that gets the old guys thinking about retiring long before their years are in—there’s a lot more of it going on than you think.

  When we were all kids, you’d do something, your old man would get his belt, tell you every which way you let him down and take a few whacks and you wouldn’t sit right for a few days. Now? Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s the media, hell, maybe it’s too much of something in the water, but a lot of parents don’t wait for a reason, they just let it fly as soon as they can get the windows shut and the drapes drawn. Some hit, some shove, some yell. Cyril wasn’t having any of it. He was the Dirty Harry of Twain Lakes Estates, and whenever Frank let me know the boy had been at it again, I believe I caught a bit of fatherly pride in Frank’s eyes even while he was apologizing for letting the boy out of his sights.

  I say “sights,” and I guess that’s accurate enough because Frank says he’s been able to see Cyril ever since he started showing up in the new house. I’ve never seen him, even though I used to ask often enough. Tell him come out, I said to Frank, tell him I’m no threat. I asked Frank what they do all day and Frank said Cyril just hangs around the place, like a cat, coming out on the odd occasion when he feels like a little attention, hovering nearby as Frank washes the dishes or works on his car.

  Retirement is a bitter pill for a lot of men, and I was worried it might be for Frank, but before long they started calling him “Uncle Frank” up and down the street. He threw the ball around with the boys, admired little girls’ dolls and helped ladies get their groceries in from the car. He’s a friend to the older folks, taking down screens in the fall and putting them up in the spring, fetching newspapers that land in bushes, pruning branches away from eaves. He barbecues with the young husbands, watches the game in half a dozen different family rooms, helps with the Pinewood Derby and buys magazines to support the schools.

  Cyril makes me a better man, he’s said.

  What am I going to do—argue?

  I’m sure there’s those that wouldn’t let a thing like a ghost-child rest, even one whose only activity—other than the very infrequent rages that drive people and objects together in calamitous ways—is lurking around the house built from the ashes of the hell-hole where he died. Maybe it’s my failure that I accepted Frank’s ghost, the only one I’d encountered in my life, with so little fuss. But I was distracted.

  Melanie left me in the fall.

  We used to go to the Calumet High home football games, back when we still hoped for a kid. We joked about watching a son on the field, a daughter cheering on the sidelines. Melanie used to slip her mittened hand through my arm and rest her head on my shoulder, and I bought her coffee and kettle corn at halftime. But the last couple of years we were together she refused to go. I’d put the little magnetized schedule on the fridge, and ask like it was no big deal, like it was just a notion that ran through my head when I went to get a can of iced tea. One day I said did she think the Panthers had a chance against Quincy, and next thing I know there’s a slam of a door and when she came back a couple of days later it was to get her stuff.

  Did I miss her? Tell me, would you miss breathing? Would you miss sun on your face? Would you miss cold water on a hot day?
I went to work, I went to church, I played on the department softball team, everything I did before, and I was never more than halfway there because most of me was still clamoring for her.

  So a ghost roaming around my sometimes-friend’s house wasn’t at the top of my list.

  But that fall turned into winter and then spring. A year passed, then two, and Frank and I got into our rhythm. My beard grew in silver if I let it go a few days, and Melanie dated a Nissan dealer from over in Jasper. They broke up and we had an awkward dinner or two and both times Melanie reminded me that she’d always care about me but that I needed to move on.

  Hell, she hit forty-five and yes I wondered, it doesn’t say anything good about me but I wondered if now, the dream of a baby finally over at last, if she’d come back to me.

  But that’s when she took up with Gray Stroker. No, really, that’s his name. Don’t think I didn’t have some fun with that one.

  At first.

  Hey, you know any cops? Maybe got one in the family, the guy your cousin’s kid married, something like that? And maybe you’ve wondered if he could do a favor for you. Fix a ticket, say.

  Let me set you straight: ninety-nine percent of the time we’ll turn you down. But that doesn’t mean we’re not doing it. Just not for you.

  When you get access to that kind of juice, it’s hard not to use it. Your kid’s coach doesn’t play him, the new pastor’s got an oily handshake, a neighbor moves in from a part of the world that ain’t friendly to your politics, hell yes you’re going to find out what you can.

  And it stops there. Most of the time it stops right there.

  Only here’s what I found out about Stroker:

  He had the kind of temper that leaves a trail. Went all the way back to school, he had to leave Mizzou late freshman year and start over at SMSU. He got smarter and more successful and learned to buy his way out of the scrapes he got into—or pick victims who weren’t likely to fight back.

  Melanie wasn’t the first woman he beat. She was just the first one he liked well enough to keep doing it. In fact, he liked her so well he figured he’d make it legal so he could move her in and do it eight days a week.