Bad Man_A Novel by Dathan Auerbach
His shoes squeaked against the tile as he limped past one of the cans he had sent rolling a few seconds before. He glanced down the aisle toward his mess and kept walking, wishing he could think of something other than how he should have let Eric have a goddamned cookie. More and more those had become the things that ate at Ben—the small things. They added up so quickly. Ben rubbed his eyes, glanced down an aisle, and froze.
He turned and looked behind him, back toward Receiving, and then ahead in the direction of the pharmacy. Ben was looking for Marty now, but when he moved his eyes back down the aisle, all he could see were the cans he’d loosed now stacked neatly in a pillar in the middle of the aisle.
“Marty?” But only the bland music of the PA answered him. With slow steps, Ben approached the small obelisk. “Sorry, man!”
Grunting, Ben squatted and began ferrying the cans to their spots on the shelves. He headed to the back room, expecting to find Marty there, and when he didn’t, he ran his fingers down the printed schedule to see if anyone else might be on for that night. But there were only two names, and they were both accounted for.
With a shudder, the air conditioner powered down, and Ben was left with only the tinny sputtering of old speakers. Ben listened to the garbled chutterings of the intercom, which now sounded less like singing and more like speaking. Ben suddenly became very uncomfortable, as if he had paddled too far out into a midnight lake. He stared straight ahead, waiting for the empty feeling to pass, waiting for his feet to touch the bottom. But the feeling did not pass.
The speaker crackled and then went silent. Ben’s skin turned to gooseflesh, and for just a moment the room seemed quiet enough that Ben thought he could hear his own breathing.
Thunder tore through that silence. Inorganic and harsh, the crash made Ben flinch as if he’d been struck. Ben spun, his arms near his chest in feeble defense, and looked to the upper level. He held his breath. The air conditioner whirred, coughing and thudding out of its slumber, until finally it roared back to life. Ben exhaled as if in relief, but he didn’t feel relieved.
* * *
—
The hours ticked by slowly until it was finally time to clock out. As Ben and Marty walked toward the exit, Ben saw a white-haired woman scurrying from table to table in the bakery department, undoing the damage that Ben’s attempt to help had caused.
“You want a ride or something?” Ben asked. “My dad should be here in just a minute.”
“Nah, that’s alright. Thanks, though,” Marty said.
Ben leaned his body against the propane cage. There was a sharp pain shooting up his left leg. He pressed the heel of his hand into his thigh and pushed down hard toward his knee. Ben groaned. The first time always hurt the worst, but eventually the pain would subside. Slowly and repeatedly, Ben overwhelmed his nerves until they were tired of talking.
“You all done then?”
Ben looked up to see Bill Palmer waddling toward the store, adjusting the waistband of his khakis; his tie was a little too short.
“Yessir,” Ben said. “Marty just left. Store looks real good.”
The man nodded, then seemed to glance behind Ben, his eyes lingering for a moment before he walked into the store. Ben turned and looked at the board. At Eric’s flyer.
When he heard the rumbling of his father’s truck, Ben stepped into the parking lot to meet him and climbed into the passenger seat.
The truck churned noisily down the street. On their right, Ben caught a glimpse of Marty on the side of the road. He wasn’t walking, though. He was just standing by the tree line gazing into the woods.
He didn’t ssstart out all the way buh-bad. It stuh-started in his head.
He thought bad things.
5
The loose rocks of their driveway popped under the weight of the truck’s tires. “She alright?” Ben asked, nodding toward the home. Clint only scratched his beard and shrugged.
When his father opened the front door, the powerful aroma of eggs and sausage wafted out, and Ben couldn’t help but smile.
The three of them sat at the oversized table. Two dinners and a breakfast made from the same food. No one mentioned the store. In fact, no one mentioned much of anything, but it wasn’t a bad silence. Wavy brown hair fell over his stepmother’s eyes, which were swollen from either bad or absent sleep, but her spirits seemed high, even if the corners of her lips seemed to tremble when she tried to smile. Ben stayed up a little longer than he had intended, just sitting at the table with his father and stepmother.
He thanked Deidra for the meal, cleared his plate, and walked sluggishly toward his room. And as he paused in his doorway, he listened to the clattering of dishes in the kitchen and tried to pretend that things were like they used to be.
How old had he been? Eleven? Maybe just ten, when his father remarried. He had known that his father had been seeing a woman; Ben had met Deidra a handful of times, and he liked her. But it never registered with Ben that anything serious was developing. The proposal had seemed to come out of nowhere in Ben’s mind.
Their new house had been a little too big, Ben thought. It was in worse shape than the house where Ben had grown up, and for a while the third bedroom was just a workspace for Deidra’s painting and other hobbies. It wasn’t until Deidra got pregnant that Ben understood why they’d really wanted a third bedroom.
Clint had moved Deidra’s easel and her desk, her typewriter and her fabrics, into the garage, where they would sit untouched and forgotten. A crib and later a bed furnished the room, resting on top of carpet that was still stained with paint. Ben remembered hearing new noises coming through the wall, coming from a room that was finally serving its intended purpose. Anytime Eric cried or laughed or crashed one of his toys into the partition, and anytime Eric’s mother sang him a song or read him a story, Ben could hear it. When walls are thin enough, it’s almost as if they aren’t really there.
Ben walked a few extra paces past his room and stood for a moment at the entrance to Eric’s. As quietly as he could, he turned the knob and gazed backward in time.
Eric’s room existed in a kind of stasis, frozen like a capsule that waited to be reopened. Unlike most of the other rooms in the house, there were no ceiling leaks in Eric’s room. Everything was clean. Strangely, everything felt new. And there were some new things. There were new toys, still tightly wrapped in colorful paper, placed on the shelves and dresser after each missed Christmas and birthday by Eric’s mother. From time to time, Ben thought about opening them. But he didn’t. He left them untouched, because they weren’t his. Whether they belonged to Eric was hard for Ben to decide. But he supposed they did in some way. The whole room was full of things Eric had loved and might have come to love. A mausoleum for a boy and who he might have been.
With quiet steps, Ben slunk back to his room and shut the door. The sound was what Ben noticed the most. There was so much less to hear now, but Ben still listened. And Ben still sometimes lay on his back in bed just staring at the ceiling before going to sleep. And sometimes when he did, he tapped the wall next to his headboard with his knuckles like he would when he was just a little younger and a little less lonely in his own home.
The mattress sank as he lowered himself onto it, a cordless phone gripped in his right hand. A few times a year, Ben called Officer James Duchaine, and a few times a year Ben was told that the police hadn’t found or heard anything.
There was a time when Ben could talk to any officer at the station, when they all knew the details of Eric’s case. But that time had long passed. Now there was only Duchaine. Ben could remember when that transition had begun, when his calls started being rerouted. But what he couldn’t remember was when the calls had become a kind of empty habit. He supposed it might have started around the first time he heard annoyance in Duchaine’s voice, when Ben was made to feel that he was wasting the man’s time with stupid questi
It didn’t matter, though. This time there was no answer at all.
The feeling that had come over him in the back room when the air conditioner rumbled to life wouldn’t leave him. And that almost would have been fine if Ben had been able to make some sense of what that feeling was exactly. It wasn’t fear. It might have been at the time, of course, but it couldn’t still be fear, not all these hours later. No, it was something else, something that made him blush even in the solitude of his room.
Because as silly as Ben knew it was, he didn’t trust that noise or its source. He didn’t trust it at all, and despite how hard he tried to shake it, he felt in some small and slippery way that he had caught the store not only doing something but also trying to pretend that it wasn’t.
Ben slid his hand from the receiver to a sketchbook that lay right next to it. He touched the cover as the cold pillow on the back of his neck made his eyelids feel weak. Plates and silverware clashed together under a running faucet in the kitchen as Ben’s breathing slowed. He lifted his hand off the embossed leather cover and brushed it against the wall by his headboard.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
6
Ben awoke suddenly in the middle of the day, the sun screaming violently through the blinds. His mouth was dry and tasted bad, and he unconsciously pressed his tongue against his palate, curling it toward his teeth in an attempt to wet his mouth. A loud heartbeat thudded in his ears as he lay there drawing in quick and shallow breaths. Uneasily, Ben let his eyes wander around the room, his heart accelerating as he turned his head to spy on the spots where the walls met. No faces, only furniture.
His head returned to the damp pillow with a heavy sigh escaping his nose. The dream itself was bad, but that it was back was somehow worse. It had to have been at least four years since he’d had it. As he lay there with the afternoon sun fighting its way into his room, he hoped that the dream was just an aberration of his brain, that it would pass and be forgotten by all parts of him just as it had before—that it was nothing more than a kind of mental indigestion bucking at him after a testing night.
As the pulsing in his ears receded, the muffled and monotone droning of his father’s snores trickled through his closed door. Under it, there was another noise. A song. Softly, almost timidly, it snuck into Ben’s bedroom through the wall behind his head.
It was Deidra’s voice, whispering a melody punctuated with words that Ben could not make out. Ben felt a sinking in his chest. Quietly, he stepped into the hallway, stopping just shy of Eric’s door, which he was surprised to find open. The song was sweet and unfamiliar—probably one she had come up with on her own after Eric disappeared.
Ben grimaced and mouthed obscenities. He looked down the hall. There might be a chance that his father didn’t know, and maybe some fleeting chance that this wouldn’t happen again, that it was a fluke.
“I love you, baby,” Deidra said softly. “I miss you more than you know.”
Ben could hear her breathing words into the air like a child entrusting her most closely guarded secret to a friend. Ben knew he should leave. But the longer he lingered, the more he fixated on the idea that while the secret might not be meant for him, it might indeed be about him. That in the wordless rustling of her quiet conversation, Deidra might be telling Eric about the bad and stupid thing that Ben had done. About how he’d gone to work at the store. About how it wasn’t just a store.
Ben leaned closer, the old wood creaked, and then there was no more whispering to hear. Suddenly, Eric’s door slammed shut so forcefully that a family photo jostled and fell from the wall. The glass cracked, and the pressed wood frame split almost completely in half.
Ben took a tentative step toward the closed door and then turned away from it. He squatted, inhaling sharply at the stabbing pain in his left leg, and began collecting the pieces of the frame. A door opened at the end of the dark hall.
“What was that? Everything alright?” Clint asked.
Ben ran his fingers over the ear that had been closest to the door, realizing only now that it was ringing. He told his father that everything was fine and silently tried to convince himself of the same.
7
Ben had been the one to choose the photograph that was used on Eric’s flyer. His hands had combed through dozens of smooth pictures from boxes that were hauled out of the garage and albums ferried from the living room. There were no pictures of Eric by himself, not since the time when he was an infant.
Deidra had hated every picture that Ben chose. She would look with damp eyes at each photograph, press her lips tightly together, and then dismiss it. Ben had asked her to explain her criteria only once. She’d sobbed, shaking her head. “He didn’t like that shirt…He said it itched him, but…but he looked so handsome in it.”
In the privacy of his room, Ben had held a family photo from the previous Christmas and cut into it with a pair of scissors. His hands trembled as he moved the blades around the curly locks of dark hair that fell onto his baby brother’s face. When it was done, the sight of the scraps twisted his stomach, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out, as if keeping them might change the fact that the scraps were all that was left.
For years afterward, Ben kept that photograph in a frame next to his bed. Some time ago, even Ben couldn’t recall exactly when, he had moved the photograph onto the dresser that sat across the room. The picture was roughly oval in shape, with swooping curves cut into the longer edges. Light creases arced across his brother’s face from a brief time when Ben hadn’t handled it with the necessary care.
Since his third night of work, Ben had carried the photograph in his back pocket inside an Ultra PRO baseball card sleeve like a secret talisman. It did nothing to ward off the uneasy feeling the store gave him. But it was nice to be able to look at Eric whenever he felt the urge, which was often.
Truth be told, almost every day since starting at the store, Ben had fantasized about showing customers too. He’d come close once or twice, approaching shoppers only to walk right past them, feeling short of breath as he pinched the picture in his back pocket.
He wasn’t sure why he felt that way. Ben had been afraid of losing his job since his very first night, when he’d told Marty about his history with the place. But near as Ben could figure, that particular danger seemed to have passed. If Marty was going to tell Bill Palmer, he likely would have done so in the past two weeks.
Whatever the nature of his apprehension was, Ben let it push him out of the store and into the great wide world beyond, onto a path he had walked before but not as often as he should have. Not nearly as often.
Outside, the lazy summer sun stalled just above the horizon. Ben tucked his sketchbook under his arm and started walking. By his watch, he had a little over two hours before work.
The contrast between the houses of the new neighborhoods and the ones that had first settled the town seemed stark—at first anyway. Most of the older homes flaunted their age without embarrassment; if they couldn’t be called ruins, it was only because they were still occupied. The homes that arrived with the interstate were young things, confident and sharp. Even their arrangement was well styled, lined up like rows of corn along the drive, then swaying with the winding asphalt of the cul-de-sac: guiding the road then following it, dancing.
From the street, the homes really did seem nice. Picturesque even. But distance could do that. In reality, the houses were nothing more than cheap gifts in vinyl wrapping. Some of them were already starting to show their wear in charmless cracks and creeping mold.
Opening his sketchbook from the back cover, Ben ran his fingers down rows of addresses and dates. Six months ago, there had been as many houses for sale in this neighborhood. The fact that there were now only two realtor signs meant that this trip wouldn’t be a total waste. Four new doors to knock on.
Right after Eric disappeared, the whole area, if not
Mostly, people just talked, guessing and speculating. From what Ben could tell they all seemed to be in independent agreement: that the same new road that brought in business might just have taken something with it in return, that Eric must have slipped right off the edge of the earth. And as that feeling spread, he began to slip from their minds as well. There was nothing to be done about that, really. The same process would probably play out inside the walls of the house that Ben now stood in front of, just as it had in the one before. And just as it would in all the ones to come.
Ben knew he couldn’t really blame them, even though he did. Gradually, even the buzzing flurry of voices in his own mind—Have I checked here? Did I look there? Could he have gone there?—was joined by just one more companion. It was quiet at first, barely a whisper, easily swept aside and overpowered. But it was tenacious, clawing and pulling itself against the muddy walls of Ben’s brain until it was all he could hear anymore.
He’s not coming home.
It was the only echo that seemed to get louder over time, and Ben couldn’t deny that it had changed him, worn him down. The fervor and intensity that came with every sunrise all those years ago had slowly burned out in the town, at his home, and eventually in his own heart. Hell, Ben had been out of flyers for almost a year. He’d let that happen. And now he couldn’t even make more since the only copy he still knew about was at the store.