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“You mean your cousin? She comes maybe once a week. Is there a problem?” She looks confused.
“No,” I snap back. “No problem.”
“I’m glad, Evangeline has made a very positive impression on your mother.” She gets back to watching them with a fond smile on her face, and reaching inside my back pocket, I pull out a hundred dollar bill and tuck it inside the pocket of her tunic so I don’t have to make skin contact.
“I want to know when she visits, text me on the number you have for me whenever she arrives and then again when she leaves.”
“Sure,” she agrees. I don’t know the woman’s name but I’ve always found her cooperative.
I leave them to it when the warm feeling that seeing Rogue puts in my chest starts to spread to the rest of my body. Then jumping on my bike, I head back to the club.
AGED 16
His body weighs a lot more than I calculated. It’s dark and I can’t see where I’m stepping as I drag him through the yard.
This is not how I had this planned out.
The rain falls hard, and despite it being a nuisance I figure it’ll make clearing any blood trails easier. My arms ache already, despite me working out after school for months. I’ve lifted logs and sandbags. Repped paint tins and anything else I could get my hands on. But I’m nowhere near as strong as I need to be. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it all the way to the woods at the bottom of our field. And I wish I could just leave him out there to rot.
Mama is finally asleep, and I’m determined to have this taken care of before she wakes up. I’d sat and thought about how, and this is my only option. I have to bury him, somewhere where no one will ever find him.
I head to his shed to find a shovel, Father still hates me being in here, even though I know all his secrets now. And when he caught me in here the other week, he’d pounded me every night for a fortnight.
The fucker can’t pound me now,
I leave his blood-dripping body on the ground and head through the door. Inside is a lot messier than it was the first time I came in, there’s no order in here anymore. Different sized screws and bolts are tipped out on the workbench. Wood shavings litter the floor. It smells bad in here too, like stale cigarettes and paint stripper, and as soon as I locate the shovel I get the hell out of there.
I last remember him using it to turn over Mrs. Draper’s rose bed for her. Father always did a good job at playing the good Samaritan around town. But I wonder if Mrs. Draper would still think he was so wonderful if she knew that the ashes of the young woman, who went missing from Durango last month, were turned over with the very same shovel.
There’s poetic justice in the fact I’m going to use it to bury him in the ground, and that all the skills he taught me haven't gone to waste.
They’ll be used to make sure that no one ever finds him.
I get an idea when I see the wheelbarrow on my way back to him, and I tip out all the leaves I’d raked up before school this morning and wheel it to where his body is waiting, wearing the same empty expression I’d left him with.
I don’t know why I’d expected it to have changed while I’d been gone, perhaps it’s because I know how mad he’d be at me for entering his sacred shed.
His body feels cold against mine when I lift him up and throw him into the wheelbarrow, pushing him across the field, into the woods.
This land is owned by us. No one ever ventures out there, but still, I’ll have to dig deep. I can’t risk a wild animal turfing him up.
It’s hard pushing such a dead weight and the uneven ground doesn’t help. But eventually, I get to a spot where there are fewer trees, and the ground is soft enough for easy digging. Then taking the shovel, I force it into the earth and bring out the first heap.
It’s gonna take me all night to get deep enough but I don’t stop, even when my muscles beg me to. The rain comes down hard, making the mud slide around me, and it’s so much harder to keep going. But knowing that there’s so much more work to be done back at the house keeps me moving.
Now that he’s gone, I’m gonna take care of Mama the way she should be taken care of. She won’t have to worry anymore. She won’t live in fear.
When the hole is past my shoulders, I pull myself out and give myself some time to get my breath back. It seems fitting that I’m laying him to rest in such a filth-ridden hole. I can’t remember much of what the Bible says about life after death, but if the rumors are true, Father’s soul will be terrorized for all his sins.
Taking his ankles, I pull him from the barrow and tug his body until it rolls into the hole.
His body hits the earth with a hard thump, and I stare down at him. This is how I want to remember him. He doesn’t look quite so threatening with his body sliced to pieces, and the crisp white shirt Mama hung on his wardrobe door for him this morning drenched in blood.
I spit on his body before I kick some dirt over him. We’re free of him now, and while his body rots away out here, I’ll make Mama well again. We’ll visit the beach and swim in the ocean. Then we’ll stop for a burger at a roadside café. Mama will smile, and if I spill burger sauce on my shirt we’ll laugh about it.
When the hole’s completely filled, I pull some branches over the fresh grave, put the shovel back in the wheelbarrow, and make my way back home.
The first thing I do is scrub the pool of blood from the garage floor. It’s gonna stain but I already have an idea how to cover it up. Father passed a lot of his knowledge on to me and I’ve adapted some ideas of my own just lately.
