FORESAKEN: Chapter 2

2

There was screaming. Lots of screaming. Most of what I remember about this time, actually, was the incessant, core-rattling screaming that grew louder and louder as Jason and I would creep in to observe and rendered (echoing, echoing) my skull hollower and hollower as the nights passed on in sleepless fits.

Uncle Pete was demanding his money back, saying he would fly people - powerful people - down here to strangle Papa until he re-produced his initial investment. Papa retorted, saying that Uncle Pete had known what he was getting himself into and that the loss was shared to an equal extent by the both of them. This fighting continued for days on end, escalating each time until one day, Papa had had enough and knocked Uncle Pete to the floor with a punch to the face. Startled, Uncle Pete got back up and wiped the blood from his lips before striking Papa right back. Momma, watching from the corner of her eyes this whole time, ran over, screaming and screaming as the two men tore each other apart while I covered Jason’s eyes and spectated in the shadows of our stairwell. Momma threatened to call the cops, taking Papa’s side in the argument, and Uncle Pete cursed the night away until Papa drove him out with a handgun, saying “I swear to god Pete, if I ever see your face back here again I will shoot you!”

Uncle Pete never did show up again, but it wouldn’t be the last I’d see of him. For the next few days, Papa kept that handgun with him, keeping the doors locked and barricading the house like it was the coming of the apocalypse. Momma tried to calm him down, but he kept on walking around with a crazed look in his eyes, mumbling phrases like “deadly connections” and “takes grudges too far” while his nose twitched. I really did think he had gone insane. Jason’s crying didn’t help, but I didn’t have it in me to berate him this time. He was too young to understand what was going on but astute enough to know that our life wasn’t going to be returning to normal any time soon.

Even so, gradually, the days passed by, and soon it appeared as if the fight between Papa and Uncle Pete had stowed itself away into memory-oblivion like a cold wind that cooped itself up in a corner room and only stirred every once in a while to send a chill down our backs while we slept at night. Papa had begun talking to us again, looking behind his shoulders less often, and jumping with less agitation at every odd noise that permeated through the calmness of the day. Summer was almost at an end, and it was beginning to seem as though the events from that fateful day reflected nothing more than a bad fight between brothers, left behind for bygones to be bygones.

Finally, on the penultimate day before I’d begin the 8th grade, a miracle occurred. For the first time during that whole summer, temperatures fell. And not just by a little bit. It had gotten 30 degrees cooler overnight, and the heat was finally bearable enough to overcome.

That day, all the kids in our neighborhood rushed out to the streets in a crop-top and shorts and played ball until sunset. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. In fact, almost all 2,000 townsfolk in Seamsville were out and about, each person celebrating the turn of the weather by engaging in some sort of outdoor event. A cool wind blew by, rustling the fresh viridescent leaves of the Great Big Oak at the center of our cul-de-sac, and the sweet echoes of laughter could be heard at all times of day.

“Come on Todd, let’s go!” Jason’s eyes twinkled, and we rushed to the door at eight in the morning sharp to join our friends, as planned.

“Don’t move another inch.”

The voice came from the other side of us as Papa emerged, blocking the light and pushing his chest into our faces. We froze.

“It’s still not safe. I can’t tell you why, but you need to trust me.” His body juxtaposed our quivering frames, eyes steeled over and cold as ice as his lips flatlined.

My pupils darted to the floor. I heard a sniffle to my right and traced it to Jason. To my surprise, the next words that came out of Papa’s mouth were softer.

“It’s a scary world out there, and I can’t have you leaving the house until school starts and there are administrators monitoring you. I’m sorry.”

Jason grew lachrymose while I stayed in silence, my brain racing with possibilities. What could possibly have gone so wrong between them as to warrant this behaviour? I realized then that this was about more than just the waterpark. Something had happened between Papa and Uncle Pete, something atypical that had festered and brewed a kind of vehemence so intense that it couldn’t be undone. Whatever it was, it had set a permanent target on the backs of us and everyone else who Papa loved, which is why he still had that lump in his back pocket from the weapon he conceals in case of emergencies.

Apprehensively, I retreated, bringing Jason back to my room to play cards. Somewhere in the back of my mind though, I still wanted this whole situation to just be the result of that same striking paranoia that Papa had been characterized by ever since I was little. Maybe this would blow over - had blown over - long ago. Uncle Pete has known Jason and I since we were little; we loved him, and there was no reason for the fear of his presence to impede on our ability to enjoy our last few days of summer vacation.

So that night, I hatched a plan. Our house had a basement, and in that basement there was a door leading to our garden. Once there, we would have a clear sight to leave the house undetected, and would take our baseball and bat and scurry to the local field, playing until the coming of dawn. I told Jason that he would need to be quiet, and soon, the lights were off and we were sent to “sleep”.

After about an hour, I initiated the plan. Carefully, Jason and I tiptoed down the stairs, sneaking past the living room to our basement door. Out of the blue, a thunderous noise like the blast of a machine gun penetrated the void, and my heart flew to my lungs. I whipped around, but saw nothing but the blushed countenance of a guilty-looking Jason, staring up at me with large eyes that darted naughtily in a way that could only mean one thing: he had passed gas.

“Sorry broth-”

“SSHHHH” I struck my lips with my forefinger. Jason tilted his head downward, ashamed.

Aside from that small bump in the road, the rest of our plan went smoothly. We opened the basement door, groped our way down the stairs, and exited through the backdoor without raising even a trace of alarm from the residents of our home or neighborhood. Grabbing our gloves and other baseball equipment, which had been laying on the grass for months at this point, we snuck out of the garden and toward the baseball field.

“Hee hee, it’s like we’re ninjas”, Jason spoke gleefully, a bounce to his step as his little feet rushed to keep up with me. I rubbed his hair affectionately and smiled. “Sure, like ninjas”.

An odd pair of ninjas we would be. There I was, a skinny, dark-tanned kid with a cleft chin and scraggly, hairy legs running in zig-zags, and adjacent to me was Jason, a small, stubby boy who’d been clinging to me since the day he was born. The two of us were fleeing on an empty road in a half-empty town in an empty part of the country, baseball gear twice Jason’s size cradled in our arms and nothing but the moon to bear witness to our tomfoolery. All the while, we were giggling, telling jokes only the other would understand, talking in coded vernacular and play-fighting like two best friends. In a sense, even though he was three years younger than me and we had always had our differences, Jason was my best friend. Despite spending much of my free time hanging out with Mike and the other guys, it was nice sharing the burden of our parents’ half-broken marriage, our father’s fights with Uncle Pete, and now the pain of not being able to be let outside with someone who had gone through the same thing. In fact, there was no one else with whom I would rather have snuck out with than him. At least, that’s how I felt before I knew what would happen that night.

Soon, we were at the field and began playing. We did knockout hitting, derby-style, pitching-practice, batting-practice, and real games where we tried putting out as many home runs as we could. During one game, I hit the ball so hard it knocked the cap off Jason, and I damn-near thought I killed him. When I ran up to him, though, I just saw him lying down, giggling his brains out, making snow angels in the mud and drying the snot from his nose with his sleeves. “Again! Again!” he would say, and we went at it all night long. Finally, at four in the morning, Jason yawned and rubbed his eyes, the universal signal that we should probably head back and sleep. He let his body fall down on my left arm like a stuffed sloth, and I almost had to drag him as we stumbled over the cement path back to our house.

“Todd, proh-mise me we-uhll play ball toh-ghe-tha like this e-vuhn once we g-go back to schoo-wuhl?” Jason sputtered out in a groggy slur, and I smiled and nodded back.

Then, as we rounded the final turn on our block, a SCREECH of tires cut through the stillness of the night and a black Ford Bronco parked on the curb next to us. A man with a familiar shape opened the door, a cigar dangling from the crest between his forefinger and middle finger and a collared shirt and black trousers adorning him. He flinched his neck upward, his dark, combed-back hair glistening in the moonlight as he slammed the door shut behind him. He was a daunting figure, tall and muscular with a unique kind of presence that could only belong to one person I’d ever known. Uncle Pete.

A series of men in black suits and sunglasses who all looked identical followed behind him, their stumpy necks and shoulders giving them an awfully close resemblance to a gorilla. They moved into a line next to Uncle Pete, each step firm and over-dramatized as if they served as members of an army, their skins coarse and bruised with scabs.

Uncle Pete grinned, a single golden tooth commanding his dental array and his grisly black beard with flecks of white and silver jutting askew from the wind.

“Hello, boys. It’s good to see you after so long. How have you been?”

Instinctively, I clutched onto Jason’s arm and stepped in front of him, guarding him from the men in front of us. My heart was thumping so fast I was scared he could hear it, but I needed to be strong. Papa is paranoid. Papa is paranoid. Papa is paranoid. We’ll be fine.

As if hearing my thoughts, Uncle Pete responded, “Don’t worry, I’ve just come here to give you a gift. Look.”

He held out his palm, and in it lay a small mechanical wind-up toy. It was a Chick-ma-tron, a relatively new device that all city kids had. You would wind it up, and as soon as you released the switch, it would quack and shuffle its feet like a little chick. Jason used to have one of these, but it broke, and Papa never bought him another one.

Jason peaked his eyes out from between my legs, his pupils twinkling like a pair of pretty little angels dancing across the shrouded heaven gates in the clear night sky above. He gasped, a meek, tender noise escaping from his lips, and he clawed my legs apart. I didn’t even notice; it was as if a feather had brushed across my quads, and he ran from me before I could react.

“Chickyyyy!” Jason exclaimed, and jumped into the welcoming arms of Uncle Pete. I opened my mouth but my voice caught, and I stood there with my right arm outstretched and the other one limp by my side, paralyzed by fear.

“Nuh uh uh,” Uncle Pete cooed, holding Jason in one arm and the toy in the other, just out of reach above his head.

“To get this, you’ll need to earn it first.” Uncle Pete’s eyes narrowed into slits, like those of a serpent about to swallow its prey whole, and the men next to him were suddenly galvanized into action. As if completing a transaction, they snatched Jason from Uncle Pete and threw him into the car, shutting the door behind them as they jumped in after.

One guard remained. He looked at me, face cold and rigid like a frozen stalagmite, and inquired in a lower murmur: “and the other boy?”

“Leave him.” Uncle Pete never dropped his smile, and motioned to me with his finger.

“Tell you’re daddy I’ll be waiting for him, and that he knows where to find-”

As fast as I could, I lunged forward, plunging myself into Uncle Pete’s legs and taking him off balance before he could finish his sentence. We fell in unison, our figures collapsing upon one another like dominoes, wrestling and fighting as we danced around the space between our bodies and the ground. I kicked and punched and clawed and bit and did whatever I could to unleash the adrenaline that had built itself up inside of me. I don’t know what my plan was. I don’t know why I thought he wouldn’t fight back, and when he would, being twice my size, why I thought I could still defeat him. I don’t know why I didn’t think his guards would help, or what they would do to me if I tried to stop him. I don’t know why I did the things that I did. All I know is that I couldn’t let those men take Jason away from me.

I grabbed Uncle Pete’s hair, pulling at it like I’d seen Papa do hundreds of times to the weeds in our garden. He groaned, slapping at my hand, and I pushed my fragile little knee into his chest. For a 13-year old, I’d say I put up a hell of a fight. But that was where it ended. Because the next thing I knew, a sharp prick had been injected into my neck from behind, and I was lying face-down on the ground with eyes blurred over and saliva gently streaming out of my mouth like a leaky faucet. A gentle arm soothed over my head, caressing my face like Momma used to do to get Jason and I to sleep when we were younger.

But this was no Momma.

“You know, on second thought…” the rotten stench of dead souls burnt a hole through my ear. “I think I’ll take you too. You’ve always been his favorite.”

I felt my body rise from the ground. Then, I felt hard metal hit the side of my head, the taste of blood suddenly fresh in my mouth. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like throwing up. I heard a soft moan in my right ear, and then another, and another. Jason? I felt something scurry over my back, and then my legs, and then a nibble and a sharp pain in my thighs. Mice. I wanted to scream but my throat was barren, so I sat there and sobbed and sobbed until for the first time in my entire life, I felt Jason tap me on the shoulder and kiss me on the cheek and cough out “it’s going to be okay, brother”.

For what could have been hours or even days on end after that, Jason and I lay there in solidarity. Arm in arm, our faces were bloodied and adjacent while our bodies glistened with sweat and tears, packed into the back of this emptied car like sardines barrelling down god-knows-what-highway at what could have easily been a hundred miles per hour.

Soon, the sedatives fully kicked in, and Jason and I were in a state of stupor for the rest of the journey. It would be almost a full 24 hours, as we soon found out, that we had been trapped in that vehicle. The next day, the town would wake up to the hottest day of the entire summer, and for the members of every home except our own, it would be like yesterday was an illusion, forever passed on as just another snippet of history.

That morning, the wind howled so loud the trees bent over, and we were gone.