e. b. graham

The newest update took me much longer than I’d thought, but on the bright side, it’s more than 5,000 words long.  Plus, I did an illustration for this one.  It’s a bit abstract, but I really don’t want to give any of the story away.

The Story So Far…

 

 

PART 14

 

 

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The night was cold and quiet and infinite and I was deep in it.  It was a place where you could start to lose physical form, drift away from the flesh until you rose up and looked down and saw your own mystified face staring up at you.

My thoughts wandered often now, slipping through my fingers, the burnt ashes of a long dead fire.  The mystery of what had happened to Hubert was now the lone landmark by which I navigated the wasteland.

Donald coughed beside me, making me jump six inches in a car where I had two inches of headroom.

It was amazing how deep the darkness of these roads were, winding through forest, occasionally dead-ending in a manner that probably resulted in five or six out-of-towners flying headlong into the ditch every year.  Maybe that was the purpose: “Welcome to Highdale County.  Now die. ”

Dmitri and Alan hadn’t told me much at the restaurant.  We’d mostly just stood in the bathroom and looked at each other, as though making sure we were all real.  But then, the words had tumbled from Dmitri.

“It’s… it’s… it’s nothing concrete.  There’s nothing that I can put my finger on.  Alan either, right Alan?  We went to the party the other week, the one that they hold out at Upshaw’s.  We didn’t see much, but there are, like, different levels for people in the group, and different parties for each of those.  We’re new, so we were in the room that looked like nothing much more than an awkward prom or something.  But there were other rooms, with lots of people.  Donnie, there had to be a couple hundred kids.  And Ricky… Ricky’s like the head of the whole thing.  He rules over it all like it’s his kingdom.  And lots of those kids… lots of them would do anything for him.  That’s what it seems like, anyways.  It’s scary, Donnie.”

“The worst part,” Alan began here, “is this sense–it’s strange–that you’re not quite you there.  Like someone’s got his fingers in the back of your skull, nudging you left or right in the subtlest way, especially if you start thinking about stepping out of line.  And those that do, the troublemakers…  There are rumors of people being roughed up, of reputations ruined by lies passed off as gossip, of threats against parents, even.  Hell, they started a campaign against Gary that got people calling him a fag and shoving him around in the hallways.  Finally Gary started going to the parties, and suddenly nobody thinks he’s queer anymore.  That’s when we knew we had to check it out.”

“We… we’ve talked about it,” Dmitri said.  “We don’t want to keep going.  We’ve seen the kids that have been there awhile.  It’s like they’re brainwashed.  Not like in the movies, where they talk like they’re sleepy and shuffle around.  It’s just that they agree with everything that Ricky says.  I don’t… I don’t want…” Dmitri broke down into sobs once more.  “There’s no way to not go.”

Alan and I tried to pull him together as quickly as possible, aware that Ricky and their parents were all still out there, waiting.

“Okay,” I said.  “Okay.  We’re going to stop this.  Whatever the hell it is, we’re going to fight it.  For Hubert.”

Both of them looked up as though they’d never heard the name.  Then, slowly, they seemed to find some new sliver of resolve to cling to, both straightening, preparing themselves to go back out.

“My Dad,” Dmitri said, his voice just barely wavering, “he doesn’t buy all their shit, either.  There might be help there, if you feel like risking it.”

“My parents,” Alan said, “are thinking about becoming members of the church.”

Dmitri and I both looked at Alan.

“I… they’ve always been the type, I suppose,” he said.  “They’re very social.”

“Alright,” I said finally.  “We’ll meet at my house, in a few days.  We’ll figure out what to do from there.”

*KA-CHUMP*

The pothole startled me back to the present.  Still, outside the windows was the perfect scenery for letting one’s mind expand into gray thought–there was nothing to be seen out there but the occasional skeletal branch that lingered in the periphery of the car’s inadequate headlights for a moment, then disappeared.

“I’ve been thinking about your two friends,” Donald said after fifteen straight minutes of silence.  “I think that they present something of an opportunity for us, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t rush to judgment on this… but are you familiar with the concept of the ‘inside man’?”

He said this as though he’d asked me about Nietzsche or particle physics.

“Yes,” I tried to inject a sufficient amount of eye-rolling into my tone, but failed.

“Well,” Donald went on, without, apparently, listening to me, “you see, the idea is that it can be very valuable to have a person inside an organization that you’re interested in countering or investigating.  Like a spy, really.  Only in this case, it would be two.  Imagine the useful things we could learn about Upshaw–there are so many possibilities as to how he might be controlling these people–outside his apparent natural ability to influence a person.”

“What?”

“For instance, it seems entirely possible that he may have discovered a way to use some mild psychoactive drug to greatly lower the inhibitions of those he seeks to influence.  Just enough to tip the balance, really, to augment his own considerable charm, distributed in an aerosol form, say, at his church and at his mansion, two places he has total control over the ventilation–it could be an incredibly effective method of controlling the masses.  That he’s had particular success with the elderly might be an indication that their older, more delicate constitutions are more susceptible to the drug.”

For all the questionable things Donald had said, this made me take pause.  It seemed possible.

“We need the information, Donnie.  That’s just one possibility, of course, and it’s almost certainly incorrect.  There’s no telling what the truth is, likely it’s something that we couldn’t even imagine.”

“They both want out,” I said.  “You didn’t see them.  Dmitri looked like he was ready to crack up at any moment, just… go to so many pieces that he’d never be put back together again.”

“Oh, I understand.  I fully understand, my boy.  But there are far greater issues here, far more important concerns.  We must root out this cancer fully, if we are to kill it.  We have to discover the very deepest depths of its depravity, lest we leave some small seed of it behind, only for it to grow back far greater, far more terrible.”

“I just don’t know that they can take it.  But…” I could feel myself being convinced.

“I can think of no other way.  We might break into the Upshaw estate and rifle around it for a few minutes.  But I guarantee you, Donnie, that the place is likely large enough that we would be caught before we discovered anything that might incriminate the good reverend.”

“I… I can’t make them go alone,” I said.  “I’ll go with them.”

Donald was stopped short by this.  His eyes moved back and forth as though he were calculating something truly important, like the fewest moves possible to unhook a woman’s bra.

Finally, he said, “That is very brave.  And I think it is an absolutely perfect idea.”

I knew at that moment that though Donald certainly seemed to have my welfare in mind, the mystery of Upshaw was of far greater importance in his mind than my own safety.

“A very brave idea,” he repeated.

And then we were struck by a meteorite.

At least that’s what it felt like as the car bucked, throwing me against my seatbelt hard enough that the edge cut a shallow line against my throat.  I looked back.

There was a van there, an old, battered, black GMC, the lights off.  It could have been there for miles, I realized.

“The hell?” Donald said just as we were hit again.  He was slowing, as though wanting to pull over to trade insurance information with the other driver.

“Go!” I shouted, feeling my body tremble with adrenaline and fear.  “Go! Go! Go!”

Donald was apparently susceptible to suggestion so long as it was screamed in triplet, as the end of the final ‘go!’ was punctuated by the engine of his vintage 1957 Mercedes-Benz 300SL screaming to life.

We rocketed out ahead of the van, our sports car more than a match for the lumbering behemoth that was now roaring to catch us but losing ground every second.  My feelings that Donald was an ass for owning a $100,000 car seemed suddenly misplaced.

“This thing sure can go,” I said, grinning ear to ear, as the van disappeared behind a hill, almost a quarter-mile back now.  Donald looked like a mad man, hunched over the wheel, squinting into the void before us, turning to give me a smile tinged with speed-induced insanity.  We both turned our attention back to the road, aware we weren’t quite out of the woods yet.

That’s when a blob of shadow separated itself from the surrounding gloom and slithered into the middle of the road.  When it stood, its shape resembling nothing so much as the silhouette of a person in the process of melting, with great dark lumps and loops of material hanging from its body and what could only be assumed to be arms, held open as though to catch the car.  The only feature I could make out from its face was an area of slightly deeper black that corresponded to an impossibly large maw, widening ever larger as we approached at 90 miles per hour.

Donald, a man who’d previously broken the speed limit a sum total of three times in his life, performed as expected.  He yanked the wheel hard, too hard, sending the car into a sideways skid with enough lateral gee’s to rip the front driver’s-side tire from its wheel.  There was a shower of sparks that ended just as soon as the wounded SL left the broken asphalt and flew into a four foot deep ditch.

The Mercedes had slowed to twenty mph or so from its long skid and its now-molten brakes when it hit the opposite side of the ditch, a wall of hard compacted earth with just slightly less give than a foot-thick solid plate of steel.

The next thing I remember is falling out of one of the SL’s gullwing doors, the smell of petroleum-fed fire hot in the air.  When my head finally cleared enough to make sense of everything, I saw that my side of the car was crushed in a foot, buried in the wall of earth, and that Donald had dragged me from the wreckage from his side.  The only light was that of the dangerous glow on the ground beneath the hood, orange and spreading.

Donald’s face was twisted in a panic, constantly looking back to the road.  I shook my head, trying to understand.

That thing is still up there.

The realization that it could be just a couple hundred feet up the road brought me back to my senses faster than a bucket of piranhas dumped down the front of my pants ever could have.  Already I was tearing my arm loose from Donald’s hands, where they were wrapped still after dragging me from the car.

In the darkness, it was hard to tell what was actually there and what was my rampant imagination’s fault, but in the middle of the road there seemed to be an ever-growing outline of the figure, now ten feet tall.  I froze in place as it crouched to pounce.

Then the old van barreled through the middle of the thing, and it evaporated into the night.  The van’s tires squealed on the pavement, coming to a stop just above the lip of the ditch.  The doors slid open before the vehicle came to a full stop. Still, the ditch was big and steep, so they weren’t on top of us yet.

I managed to shake Donald from his own trance.  We looked one another in the eyes.  We ran.

There was the sound of feet hitting the pavement behind us as we scrambled through the underbrush, heading into the forest as best we could.  I had no idea where I was, no idea where safety might lie, I only knew that what was behind was not good news, unless the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Prize Patrol had seriously retooled.

Donald couldn’t keep up. I drug him on as best I could the first time I saw him stumble.  The next time he slipped and fell to his knees, I cursed him.  I could hear the sound of our pursuers as they crashed through the dead limbs.  I looked back to see a single light searching, probing the trees, bobbing rapidly with the steps of its owner.  Apparently they hadn’t come much more prepared for the woods than we had.  Still, they were making up for their lack of equipment with zeal, crashing through the brush with abandon, cursing as they were jabbed at by the branches.  One must have been caught by a branch that had been held back and then released by one of his compatriots, for I heard a *thwack* soon followed by a thoroughly honest string of curses.

Then Donald fell a third time.  When he looked into my eyes, he saw instantly what I was thinking.

He was older… not old, but he was a man who had never known a serious game of tennis or football or even Frisbee.  He was puffing and sweating, and we’d traveled barely an eighth of mile.  The people chasing us, whoever they were, and however ridiculous their struggles might appear right now, they would be able to run Donald down.

I looked further down the twisted game trail that we’d stumbled upon, judging how fast I could get away without my uncle to slow me.

“No,” he mouthed.  Or maybe it was something else.  It was hard to see.  I steeled myself.

I took him by the arm and hauled him up, surprised that such a slight-looking man could be so heavy.  He must have been about 90% bone; he should be able to take a punch like a champ.  Given his personality, that seemed like a good trait for him to possess.  I put his arm around my neck and we stumbled through the brush as quietly as we could, but it was more difficult walking down the narrow trail two abreast.

Whoever was after us certainly didn’t seem nearly as supernatural as the creature that had caused the accident.  It sounded as if most were heading in the wrong direction, with only one or two nearby.  I was already doubting ever having seen the thing in the middle of the road, putting it down to a figment born of adrenaline and terror after the van had struck us.

But Donald saw it too.

I pushed the thought from my head as I drug Donald through the forest, doing my best to keep us going, and to keep from hating the man as he whimpered and gasped.

He was so fragile and close to the edge in that moment that he ceased to be Uncle Donald; he ceased being the man who had ruined his life, and lost his faith, who had reached higher than any other member in our family had ever dared, and had fallen a little, and in doing so, had given everyone he loved an excuse to despise him forever.  I’d never really shared in that, had always given Donald the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe it was the name.  Maybe it was pity.

But now he was just a human being.  He’d become divorced from everything else–his mistreatment by the family, his education, his awkward attempts to mend bridges, even his age, especially his age, that number of intervening years between us that should have determined that HE was the one keeping ME from going to pieces–it all evaporated.  He was human.  He was weak.  He was worth little, and had proved it here. Certainly he was not worth more than me.

So when Donald fell again, and I felt his fingers claw into my arm, saw the silent prayer working on his lips that he not be left behind, I knew just what to do.

I leveraged him back up, and slung him over my shoulder.

And though I was not in the greatest shape myself, I felt as though I could jog for miles like that.  The woods zipped past, the progress much faster now.  I knew that if my legs and heart would hold out, we’d make it.

Then my feet found open air with one heavy step, and I plummeted.

I’d begun to trust the little game trail, and thought that though it would twist and turn, there would be some kind of warning before it ended.  In the quiet light of the moon, I’d only been able to make out about a foot ahead of me at any time.

The cold water was as much a shock as the fall itself, making my breath freeze within my chest.  Donald went flying a couple feet, and landed on dry ground with a hollow thump.

This, of course, made an almighty racket.

I lifted myself up and saw that I was in a tiny creek, which might be called a stream in its wet season–its mostly-dry bed was about two feet across.

Even as I drew my first ragged breath I heard the excited voices, far behind but closing fast.  Donald was sitting up, looking around as though he’d just been plucked from his living room while in the middle of a MASH episode.

The stream I’d fallen into bordered a large field that was waist-high with winter wheat.  It went on as far as I could see, covering the rolling hills.  And out there, looking idyllic enough to be in a Rockwell painting, sat a little farming town, with two-story red brick buildings down the main street and ringed by old, well-kept houses with white-painted siding, and the whole thing lit by plenty of streetlights and the occasional passing car.

It was about a half-mile away.

“Run,” I said.  But instead of taking off, I made sure that Donald was up.  He shambled forward, clearly close to his limit.  I was alternately pushing and flogging the man’s back with my open hand to keep him going.

“We’re gonna make it,” I grunted.

But running across a wheat field was harder than it looked, with the ground uneven where it had once been furrowed, and the stalks themselves robust enough to slow our legs, like trudging through knee-high snow.

We’d gotten about thirty yards when our pursuers burst from the forest, one stumbling and falling into the same steam that had tripped me.

The two men were saying something to each other, but I couldn’t make out what was said over the sound of my own breath and pounding footfalls.

The light from the moon suddenly dimmed.  I looked up to see the clouds consuming it, the last of its delicate light drown in gloom.  We still had the lights of the little town to guide us, but it was now too dark to see even our own feet.  A broken ankle could be seconds away.

I looked back just in time to feel something fly past my ear.  The turbulence coming off it marked it as something huge, like one of those bats from India that have a six foot wingspan.  Or bigger.  It had to be bigger.

It passed, black upon the night, cracking and popping like a kite flying in a gale.  I never got a real look at it.

“Jesus Christ, what was that?” Donald said in a high-pitched, sob-choked voice.

“Go!” I screamed.

When the next thing passed by, just over my head, I couldn’t help myself.  It seemed so close, so dangerously within skull-smashing or eye-plucking distance that I ducked.  My knee came up into my chest, throwing me off-balance.  I stumbled through the field, then fell, getting a mouthful of dirt and blood as my lip burst open on impact.  I struggled to get up, could only manage to make it to my knees.

The air was now full with the popping and cracking of the things.  I had no idea what the hell they were, but it seemed to be a solid ceiling of them, just about head height now, if I stood.  The noise of them was overpowering, drowning out almost everything else.

I could just barely make out the sound of Donald’s steps as he kept going.

Son of a fucking bitch.  That’s gratitude for you.

And I swear, just over the hellacious sounds that were closing all about me, I heard the faintest “Sorry!” from Donald, said over his retreating shoulder.

I struggled to my knees, unable to force myself any higher.

They were flying shadows, creatures of wing and arm and leg and tooth.  Tooth especially, insane teeth that sprouted from impossible angles and places over the thing’s entire face–I could just make these out as dull silver against the blackness.  And there was the hint of the shape of a man within tangled folds of fabric and liquid darkness, tortured and deformed.  They were making high-speed strafing runs, heading straight for me, missing, then darting off into the blackness.  I assumed they were turning when they were out of sight and then coming back in, pass after pass.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, zipping past me, getting close without ever touching, the windstorm of their collective passes buffeting me to the ground when I would try to finally rise to my feet.

In desperation, I picked a handful of dirt clods from the ground and flung it out at several of the figures flying at me.

With an ear-piercing screech, three of them dissolved like mist before the morning sun.

“Ha! HA!” I screamed.

I struggled to my feet, the wraiths still swarming around me.  Their disassociated brethren had also recovered, quickly coming back together, to buzz me with a far greater wrath.

Then one of the creatures stopped directly in front of me.  It emitted a pale light, as though it wanted me to see it.  It wore tatters of black cloth, worn as though randomly draped about its body, which was amorphous beneath the folds.  I felt my heart gripped by a new, sudden terror as it drew near.  It was hooded; I could not see within.

It drew back its cowl, revealing a mass of naked finger bones, hundreds of them, all arranged horizontally to interlock with one another so that they formed the rough impression of a head.  The eyes were empty spaces.

I screamed, producing a sound that I’d never heard myself make before.  I screamed so hard that my head began to swim, or perhaps it was the fear that did that.  I felt myself begin to stagger in a feint.

The hundreds of finger bones opened up to reveal the interior of the creature’s head, pink and sucking concave flesh, and it moved in as if to begin devouring my entire face with one bite.

And then the moon broke through the clouds suddenly, and upon the wind I could hear a voice.  It spoke no English, but the words were warm and familiar, and had a power to them beyond mere meaning.

The creature in front of me froze suddenly in place, the ones already in flight took off for every direction of the compass, so long as it was not here.

The voice upon the wind grew stronger, and as it did, a gale raced along the hills, laying the wheat upon its side.  The wind blew every scrap of cloud away, and more, it blew the skies clean of every scrap of dust and pollution that had ever hung there.  The lights in the town went out one by one, but there was no terror there, for they were replaced by the stars in the sky, which shone brighter than I’d ever seen them.  I watched all of this, and then looked to the creature.  It had retreated back into its own shadow, now sucking in the light, and finally it shrank and disappeared as though it had only been a trick of the eye.

And then the voice was upon me.  I spun around to find Donald, leaning heavily upon what looked like seven feet of fence post.

“What?  Did you do that?” I asked.  “Did you just fucking do that!?”

And then the man collapsed.  I looked all around us in the new light, saw no sign that our attackers were still pursuing us, nor any indication that the wraiths were coming back.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“I’m alright.  Just give me a moment, please.”

“What in the hell was that?”

“It…”

“Was that Latin or something?  Holy shit!  The whole wannabe priest thing really paid off.”

“Um…” Donald said, looking awkward.  “Something like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I… I begin to understand, at least a little.  I tried my hand at it.  It’s perception, my boy.  It’s the mind.  We must tread very carefully.  It is us that we are truly battling, and those things were creatures of our own subconscious.”

“I… I don’t understand.”

“Those things never managed to actually harm you, did they?”

“No.  Not directly,” I said.

“As I thought.”

“Hey, I want an answer: what were you speaking, if it wasn’t Latin.”

Donald sat silent for a moment, looking out across the field, and to the stars, already dimming.

“Elvish.  I was always a Tolkien fan.”

* * *

“I think we should go along with the plan,” Donald said after a long silence, just as we were about to enter the little town.  We’d watched the lights come back on just a minute ago.

“Are you crazy?  They know.”

“Perhaps not–not exactly.  I’m afraid I haven’t been totally honest with you.  For the last several weeks, I’ve thought that people might be… monitoring me.  There have been odd clicks during telephone calls, the occasional times when I’m driving that I feel like I’ve seen the same brown Lincoln Towncar one too many times.

“I actually believed it might be survivors from the Peoples Temple.  Not all of them abandoned their beliefs after Jonestown, and my book certainly was neither kind to their movement, nor to Jones himself, who was a messiah to them.  For some years now, I’ve wondered if a lone nutcase with a revolver might not be the end of me.

“But… I think Upshaw sought me out for the very same reason–because I knew Jones, because I’m an expert on the cult of personality.  It must be something like that.  Now his followers have made an attack upon me.  They never tried to harm us–perhaps they were trying to abduct me.

“This all goes to the point, Donnie, that they likely do not know about you.  And… I must say, if they do, the safest thing possible for you would be to join them.  Convince them that you sincerely wish to become one of them, that you have no real connection to me, emotionally, of course.  They’ll be able to find out that we’re related–don’t lie about that,” Donald finished, slightly out of breath.

“God, I… This is different,” I sputtered.  “Before, it was going to be a secret.  Now, it might be all out in the open.”

“They may not know.  And, as I said, do you know any other way?  Are you going to run away, Donnie, to some safer place?  What about your mother?  The rest of your–of our–family?  If Upshaw wants to hurt you, he can do it very easily.  Make it so that he has no reason to.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Leave town, I suppose,” Donald said.  We were walking down the town’s main drag now, looking for a diner or a gas station.  “I can’t imagine being safe at home.  I’ll stay in contact, though.  I can call, or something.  The good thing about being the black sheep in the family is that, once Upshaw discovers how much they all hate me, he won’t be tempted to try to use them as a lever against me.”

“You’re leaving me?” I screeched.

“You’re safe, for now.  And being as far away from me as possible will make you safer still.”

“You fellas look like you might need a lift,” came from behind us.  For a split second, I was convinced that it was Upshaw who had spoken it, but when I turned, I found only an old man with deep wrinkles and a deeper tan, wearing a jeans jacket and a John Deere cap.

We rode back to Donald’s place in the bed of a beat-up, twenty-year-old F-150, the wind and the constant clatter of about a hundred empty beer cans making further conversation almost impossible.

My mind was occupied with what was to come, and how I was going to get through it.  The most important thing was survival.  Though discovering the truth about Hubert had begun this thing, I found that his importance diminished the more I considered how seriously fucked I might be, and how I might have brought down a wrath upon the ones I loved that I was incapable of shielding them from.  The thing Donald had said about Mom shook me up the most.

Already, in the back of my mind, I was toying with the idea of an honest conversion.  Upshaw’s people seemed happy, well, except for the two I’d really talked to.  Maybe it wasn’t really that bad, though.  Ricky had looked like a dweeb and was acting like the Pope of the Assholes, but I bet he didn’t go to bed worrying that someone was going to ‘accidently’ hit his mom as she was walking through the Safeway parking lot.

“Goddamn coward,” Donald said through the rattle of the cans.

“What?” I shouted, angry.

“I’m a coward, Donnie.  I ran.  I’m sorry.  You… you deserve someone better for…” but his voice grew quiet and the cans louder.  I had nothing to help him.

Finally we arrived at Donald’s house with a final crescendo of aluminum, accompanied by the piercing wail of the Ford’s ancient brakes.  Donald tried to give the man some money for the ride, but he shook it off and then waved goodbye.

“I think this should be the last time we see each other, until it well and truly all goes down,” Donald said.  “Do whatever you think is best Donnie, but I believe your greatest chance of getting through this safe is in going to Upshaw.  We can beat him, but we must know our enemy, first.”

I was silent, shaking my head.  I went over to my car, froze as I saw the scrap of paper beneath my windshield wiper.

I lifted the note away.  It was short, written in Sharpie, containing only two strangely scrawled words:

He knows.

The air in my lungs turned to sludge, I couldn’t get it up.  Over and over I told myself that this couldn’t mean what I thought it meant, that it was a mistake, or a prank.

“I’ll go to him,” I said, the words sticking in my throat.  There was a feeling in my heart as if the last tumbler of a lock had clicked into place.  Now that everything was lost, now that there was no choice, to act was easy.  The only logical thing to do was to submit, fully, unconditionally, and hope that in time I could leave town.  Maybe I’d even grow to like it.  I thought of my mother, my grandparents, and the danger I’d come close to exposing them to, that I could protect them from with one honest gesture of supplication to Upshaw.

In time, maybe someone else would come, someone who was stronger and smarter and better than I.  I could name a dozen such individuals without even trying, really.  One of them was John Wayne, of course.  Bruce Lee would be perfect.  Submission was the logical course, the best course.  The only course.

“I’ll go to him,” I said, my voice stronger than I’d heard it in months.  “I’ll go to Upshaw and I’ll make the son of a bitch wish he’d never set foot in my town.  I’ll make him pay for what he did to Hubert.  I’ll make him pay.”

 

For the August 27th update, click the link below.

LATEST UPDATE

 

It was a cold November day, and the boys were out playing football.  It was easy to forget the wind’s bite when someone had just shoved their thumb into your eye socket for the third time and you were looking for payback.  It was a madhouse game of anything-goes tackles and the occasional punch to the nose.  It was perfect.

I was seventeen and the leader of the group by virtue of all our older friends having grown up.  It was a hint of adulthood, that barren, make-believe land that promises wisdom while a sixty-year-old lounge comic belches his ABC’s.  I was already learning that my initial mistrust of my elders was strangely well-founded.

“Donny, watch the fuck out,” said Aaron.  ”Get your head in the game.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.

“Oh shit, here comes the Babe hisself,” said Dimitri, pointing.

Past his finger stood Hubert Upshaw.  He wore glasses and parted his hair as if he was on his way to Wall Street, all while his jeans strained around the planetoid that passed for his waist.  I was heavy-set myself, but this kid was a bowling ball with arms and legs.

“Hey, can I play?” he asked.  I groaned inside.

“Sure,” I tried to smile.  ”I need a breather anyways.  Take my spot.”

The boys had the sense to at least be silent, though Ricky rolled his eyes so hard I thought they might stick up there.  As Hubert waddled over, I rubbed my temples.  He seemed like a good kid, and he’d only been in the neighborhood a few weeks.  I’d heard people laughing behind his back, and occasionally in his face.  He needed friends, and I wanted to help.  Not directly, mind you–my own position in the social hierarchy was tenuous enough without taking on a charity case.

“Hike,” came from behind me.  They were in motion before Hubert could even make it to the line.  He broke into a run, looking for all the world like a puppy dog chasing after birds, with all the awkwardness and hopelessness that entails.  The smile was wiped from his face when Ricky Sidaris clotheslined him in midstride.

As my father would have said, he hit the ground like a big ‘ol sack ‘o shit.

“Boom goes the dynamite,” I said, ignoring the tears in Hubert’s eyes as he got up.  ”Way to take that hit, champ.”  I was trying to build him up in front of the others, but I could tell they weren’t buying it.

In fact, they smelled blood in the water.  Play after play Hubert got it.  He was on defense, too.  Not that we played by any particular rules, mind you, but it was generally only the guy with the ball that got that creamed.  It was getting impossible to ignore Hubert’s sniffles by the time he went over to offense, though ever time he looked up he had a wide, forced smile upon his face.

“This is fun,” Hubert said between gasps for air.  He repeated to anyone who would look in his direction.  ”Fun.”

If there was any athletic talent in Hubert’s family, he was proof that it wasn’t a heritable trait.  His run had all the fluidity of a walrus beaching itself.  Each leg appeared to be operated by a separate brain, requiring his eyes to coordinate them, for he spent a good seventy percent of his time staring down at them.

“Hubert, look up,” I said, just in time.  Alan Yossarian was a good kid, and the quarterback for their team; he’d been making an effort to throw to Hubert, but hadn’t had a chance until now.  The pass was short and soft, but the kid bobbled it, then lost it when Gary Sisko plastered him.  Hubert looked embarrassed as he struggled up, though he still had that damn smile on his face.

The goal was an area between two old oaks that were half-rotted.  Alan kept his team driving towards them, grinding away.  With every play, I prayed for Hubert to have his Rudy moment.  It was coming, I could feel it.  Already, the kid seemed to have improved slightly, as though this was the first football game he’d ever played.

They were about twenty yards out when it came.  Hubert was wide open, heading into the endzone like a boulder falling from a mountainside.  And his head was up.  Alan caught my eye, and at that moment, I saw that he and I were of one mind.  He hurled a perfect spiral.

Hubert knew.  This was it.  His tear-reddened eyes drew into sharp focus on the ball as it sailed, while strains of the Hallelujah Chorus played in my ears.

Then he stumbled.  He didn’t go down, but Hubert losing speed turned a perfect pass into an overthrown one.  Everyone was watching as Hubert launched himself through the air.  I was struck by how blimp-like he truly looked, so round, so un-aerodynamic, that he must have been lighter than air to be able to leave the Earth’s surface.

It sounded like a gunshot when he hit one of the old oaks.  He bounced from it, then bounced when he hit the ground a half-second later.  As he rolled over, the ball landed a good ten yards away.  It wasn’t even close.  He’d jumped in the wrong direction.

I was actually proud of the stunned silence from the boys.  It showed maturity, in a way, that we could all appreciate this disaster together.  Then the first laugh.

It was Ricky who started it.  He’d always been one of the great wits of our group.  His high, staccato  laugh pierced the silence painfully.  ”Fatty fall down.”

“Fatty fall down,” Gary chuckled.

Then the others took up the chant.  For a moment, I must confess, even I was tempted to.  Alan was the last to join in, though he did it with a look on his face that tore my heart.  God, they were even pointing now.

“Fatty fall down.  Fatty fall down.”  They repeated it as if trying to see how many distinct ways they could emphasize different parts.  ”FAT-ty fall do-WN.  Fatty FALL down.”

Hubert was finally up.  He struggled to pick up the ball.  He still had his fucking grin on, as though he was just taking a good-natured ribbing.  He stood there, holding the pigskin in both hands, apparently waiting for it to stop.

Then the goddamn tree fell down.  It was already half gone to a fungus, or a lightening strike, or hell if I know what.  Apparently Hubert’s head-on collision with it was enough to finish it off.  It gave a single, shuddering pop, then toppled over.

The boys thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.  They redoubled their chant.

Hubert’s face went blank.  For the briefest moment, I swear I could see what he was thinking.  He was going forward through the years of his coming life.  There was a college campus.  A cubicle-laden office.  A wedding gazebo.  Everywhere, people were chanting, “Fatty fall down.”

Hubert’s face screwed up into a rage, as if the group of boys before him represented every tormentor he’d ever had, and ever would have.  He tried to mash the football between his pudgy baby-hands, a totally useless gesture.

The boys laughed louder still, some going to their hands and knees.  Even Alan was wiping tears from his eyes.

Definite confirmation of my adulthood fears.  Age hadn’t given me a bit of wisdom, otherwise I would have sent Hubert on when he asked to play, and saved him this.  It was going to be a long life, with maturity being the biggest con-job in all history.  I’d thought I could force it, as if I…

The hollow pop shook me from my thoughts.  We all watched in silence as the deflated football dropped to Hubert’s feet.

Then, with a sound like all the abused nerds in the world joining into one enraged chorus, Hubert charged.  He bowled over several of the boys, fists flying, catching Alan square in the mouth.  The ensuing melee was brief but brutal.  I watched with my jaw hanging.  By the end, every one of them was sprawled upon the ground, gasping in the open air as though they had gills.  Hubert was the first to rise, and the first to help Alan up.  Then Ricky.  Then the rest.  They all stood around awkwardly, but there was a space in the circle for Hubert.

Maybe I’m smarter than I give myself credit for.

Nah.

***

Hubert was an odd duck.  Every day for three weeks he hung out with us, saying little, asking nothing, always willing to do whatever the boys wanted.  Despite his eagerness, he was still a person apart.  Everyone treated him like a lost puppy that was too ugly to take in.  But he was becoming part of us.  It was just a long process, for someone as odd as Hubert.  And the guys weren’t the friendliest bunch either.

Which is why I was so surprised by their reaction the day we learned that Hubert was dead.  It was a warm January day, a false Spring, with bright blue skies that made you feel itchy to be cooped up in a school desk.  Not at all the kind of day that people die on.  At lest not to me.

“Christ, I can’t believe he’s gone,” Ricky said for the hundredth time that evening.

Suddenly Hubert was one of us, fully and completely.  He had no one else.  He was our inheritance.  And now he was one of the boys in death, more completely than he might ever have been in life.  It was something I didn’t like thinking about, so instead, I occasionally chimed in.

“It’s crazy.  He was standing right over there just Thursday,” I muttered.

“Crazy.”

It went around like this for hours, or at least that’s what it felt like.  Alan had been silent the whole time, staring at the ground, never seeming to really hear us.  Not that we were saying anything.

“I… I been thinking,” he said.  ”A guy’s gotta have friends.  We know Hubert didn’t have anybody.  Not at school.  I just keep thinking about him, and his parents.  We gotta do something.  We gotta go give our condolences.  Nobody else is gonna.  We’re it.  We gotta go to the family.  We gotta show ‘em that Hubert had someone in this world that wasn’t his blood.  I… I just keep thinking that’s what I’d want.  Just keep thinking…”

Everyone was silent enough that I though this idea might die right there.  It’s easy to think good things, hard to do them.  And the idea of going to a family we didn’t know, that was in the midst of grieving their dead son, and trying to make some kind of meaningful gesture of our friendship… that sounding fucking awful.  I wasn’t going to chime in to support it.

“Yeah,” Gary said.  ”Let’s do it.  We gotta find his address, somehow.”

“Probably in the paper or something, in the obituary.”

“Damn.  And I just let my subscription lapse,” Dimitri tried.  There were a few dry laughs, but no more.  ”I, uh, think that my mom takes the Courier.  I’ll try and find it.”

“Thanks.  I’ll look for it too,” I said.  The others boys were silent, or at least they’ve gone silent in my memory.  There were almost twenty of us in the group in all, some coming and going, others always there.  But most are silent now.

Looking back on it, I’d like to think that somehow we knew what we were getting into.  The subconscious is a funny thing, after all; it picks up on the stuff that you don’t see, even when it’s right in front of your nose.  Especially when it’s right in front of your nose.  It’s easier if we knew.

But likely not.

* * *

The last piece of journalism I’d consumed had been the review for Wrath of Khan, trying to convince the guys to go and see it–instead we snuck in to Conan the Barbarian, for the boobs.  To be certain, I wasn’t much of a fan of the printed word.  But as I opened my crinkled copy of the Courier, I knew this wasn’t the norm.

Hubert Upshaw

B. April 9, 1967 D. January 12, 1983

Suicide

That was it.

“Suicide?” muttered Alan.

“Jesus Christ,” Ricky said.  “Christ.”

“What does this mean?” Dmitri asked, looking at me.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’  And where the fuck did you get that stupid coat?” I spat.  Dmitri was proud of his new parka, something his dad had brought home from a ‘business trip.’  Everyone knew Dmitri’s dad was a Soviet spy; it wasn’t possible to not be one with an accent like his.  But I mentioned the coat to try and silence the coming dissention.

“Are we still going to try and talk to his parents?”

“Yeah Donny.  Maybe we shouldn’t now.”

“Yeah,” was the chorus.

“Why would this change anything?” I asked, questioning myself as much as the others.  Hubert slipping in the bathtub and cracking his skull was one thing, or Hubert being hit by a pot-bleary driver as he walked home was another.  But suicide muddied the waters.  It added a layer of tragedy and complexity to the situation, a layer that meant it would be even more awkward for us to seek out Hubert’s family and interject ourselves into their misery.  Though a few of us understood the language of accidental tragedy–I’d lost a little sister, Alan his mother a year ago–none of us spoke suicide.   We’d be strangers in a fucked-up land.

Plus it meant that the asshole might not have liked us as much as he let on.  I mean… part of his appeal was that he’d seemed to want it so badly.  He’d been through that first horrible day with the football and the oak, and had still come back.  It made us feel  good.  We were the place to be.  We were worth putting up with.

He’d made it into the group.  Then he went and killed himself.   What the hell was wrong with him?

“Yeah, we’re still going to see his parents,” I finally said when no one else spoke up.

There were too few good things in my life.  My mother had always tried to be good, in the same way Hubert had tried to be one of us, but she was far less successful.  I’d lived my life fed a steady does of low expectation and questionable morality.  Being a part of Mom’s endless scams against Sears had started it–one of my earliest phrases: ‘It was broken when we opened the box,’ had begun my slide into ethical antipathy.

I wanted this now, though.  Alan had been right.  It was a thing worth doing, and we were going to fucking see it through.

“How are we going to find them, Donny?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“There ain’t even an address for a funeral home or a church.  No mention of a service.  What the hell?”

“Maybe,” Dmitri began quietly, “maybe whatever he did, it was the kind of thing where you don’t have a service.  Open casket, at least.  Maybe his family’s too poor for a funeral.”

“If there’s going to be a funeral, we have to be there.”

“Not a single Upshaw in the phonebook.  I looked.  Must be a private number.  Or that wasn’t his name.”

“So fucking weird,” Ricky muttered.

“Well, it fits him.”

Everyone looked at Aaron.

“What?  Jesus, I didn’t mean it in a bad way…”

“The school would know,” Gary said.

“They’d never give it to us,” I said.

“Why don’t we just take it, then?” Dmirti said.

“Okay, hotshot, you’re in charge of the break-in,” Alan laughed.

“It wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  Look, my big bro worked in the office his senior year.  He told me there’s a key always hidden under that big-ass planter, the one that has the tree in it.  It’s not hard to get into the building after hours.  Janitors are always there.  A couple of us could just bang on the windows until one comes.  Last time I left my history book there, the old, dirty-looking one just let me in and then headed off back to whacking it to old photography magazines,” Dmitri said.

“Man…”

“What?  You haven’t seen the stack he keeps in there?  Just him and the mags and that little stool in there.  If he had a radio in there, he’d at least have an excuse to be cooped up in…”

“Please stop,” Alan said, looking a little green.

“Or don’t,” Ricky grinned, miming the act whilst pretending to spin around and around on top of a stool.

“Sensitive, huh.  Anyways, it’d be no big deal to get in there.  Take five minutes to get the address and then get back out.”

“It would have to be you and me, Dmitri,” I said.  I was really feeling my leadership role at that point.  It must have been the new A-Team episode I’d watched the night before.

“Fuck yes,” grinned Ricky.

* * *

A little after seven o’clock and it was almost pitch black.  Dmitri and I watched the last car leave the staff parking lot of Pete Conrad High.  It was really fucking cold, too.

“I really think my balls have frozen,” Dmitri said.  His tone was serious enough to warrant response.

“Surely not.”

“Man, I swear.  I… I really think I heard them klink.”

“Stop playing.  This is serious.”

“It’s serious when your balls klink together.”  Again, I was stopped short by Dmitri’s forlorn tone.  I looked him over as he muttered, “My grandfather used to tell stories about Russia, Donny.  Shit like this really happens.  I’m klinking.”

I reached down.

“No! Don’t!  They’ll shatter!” he screamed.

“I don’t think so,” I said as I snatched the stupid-looking, huge wooden toggles on Dmitri’s authentic Eskimo parka.  I klinked them together a few times.

“Christ.  Guess I’m a little on edge.”

“A little,” I said.  Alan would have been a better choice to bring along.  Even Ricky.  “Let’s go.”

It took ten minutes of frozen-fisted pounding to get the janitor to slink from the shadows.  He considered us for another two before moving to open the door.  The man was a crusty amalgamation of hippie-length oily hair and long fingernails and jeans that were stained with his chronic self-abuse.  I’d never actually been this close, thank God, but now that I was, I could make out the pox-scarred skin and take in the aroma of bleach, dried urine, and failure that clung to him.  It was all enhanced by the low lighting–only every sixth bank of flourescents were on outside of school hours.  The effect of him was overpowering in every way, almost a kind of biological charisma– like he was the Winston Churchill of shit and hair clogs.

“Uhh,” I said.  “Uhh…” It must have been the sheer majesty of the man that did it.

“I left my book.  My book!” Dmitri said.  “For God’s sake, man.  Books!”

“Uhr-kay,” the man-troll grumbled, and then shambled back from whenst he’d come, in every possible way.

“Nice,” I said.

“Balls can’t klink when they’ve crawled up to my lungs,” Dmitri said.  “Nice and safe up there.   Hard to breathe.”

The planter was where we expected it, the key where promised.  Eyes darting back and forth down the dark hallway that fronted the school’s main office, we opened the door as quietly as possible.  Then it slammed shut behind us, rattling the glass panes and echoing off the banks of lockers.

“Fuck sorry,” Dmitri said.

The room was one of harvest green carpet and salmon-painted cinderblock walls.  Every counter top was plain Formica.  One long desk that divided the room was where the secretaries would normally sit, and behind this the floor-to-ceiling file cabinets that contained student records.  I went to the one marked U&V, shuffled through with trembling fingers.  My ears kept trying to make sounds from the silence as I strained to hear footsteps.  Dmitri watched out of the office’s windows.

“It’s not fucking here,” I said.

Dmitri looked back as though I’d said the Farrah Fawcett poster above my bed had come to life.  He shook himself.

“Then let’s get out of here.”

This was something good that we were doing, dammit.  We needed this address, we needed to finish this.  We were even safe right now, though with every minute I was in the office, my imagination ran away with guessing the trumped-up charges the school might throw at us if we were caught.

“Principal’s office.  Let’s check there.”

Dmitri followed me further into the office.  On the back wall, there was a room with two desks, one for the principal, the other for the vice.  Little light filtered in this far, but the manila folder sitting upon the big man’s desk shone like a beacon.  The name ‘Upshaw’ was clear as cleavage even halfway across the room.

“Holy fuck.  Hubert’s file is like three inches thick,” Dmitri said.

“Yeah,” I approached it slowly, confused.

I’d expected a slim little thing, a file that contained copies of Hubert’s perfect attendance awards and honor roll certificates, something that chronicled the uninteresting life I’d always imagined Hubert had led before finally starting to live once he’d met us.  This was another matter altogether.

Dmitri started opening drawers in the principal’s desk.  I was too interested in the file to tell him to stop

If there was one truth in life, it was that only bad things produced that much paperwork–doing them and having them done to you.  Being good never got you near three inches of recognition.  No teacher wrote up a report when you helped little Susie cross the street, but if you just acted like you were going to shove her in front of a bus, suddenly ink and paper need to get involved.  To make three inches thickness, Hubert must have murdered someone, or cured cancer, or…

On top of the file was a little note reading: ‘Family requested this.  Can I send? –Barb.’

I rifled through the file.  The first thing that caught my eye was the picture.  It was Hubert for sure, but he must have been 200lbs lighter.  There were all kinds of forms, from disciplinary actions to school transfer requests.

“Holy shit,” Dmitri said, too loud.  I looked over, about to tell him to shut his mouth, but was silenced.  Inside one of the principal’s drawers were dozens of photos of the girl’s locker room, very much occupied.  “Wow.  Susie Lasserman sure has grown up.  This is the whole fucking cheerleading squad. Aaaand the volleyball team.  Wow.  And more…”

“Leave it,” I said, going back to the file.  Dmitri nodded as he shoved a handful of pictures into his pocket.

“Got the address?” Dmitri asked.  He was staring at the principal’s trashcan.

“I… I can’t.  I’ve seen three or four addresses since I started going through it.”

“Okay, keep looking.  I gotta do something.  I just gotta.  We’ll be fucking legends.”

Before I could ask what, Dmitri had pulled down his pants and squatted on top of the trashcan.

“What the fuck, man?”

“Dude… urgh… this will be… uh… awesome.  Man, I really thought it would be easier.  The fucking janitor scared a little out earlier.”

That’s when we heard the door open.

Dmitri fell backwards, wedging himself onto the trashcan.  Both of our mouths were open in silent screams.  I could see in his eyes he was thinking the same thing–finding those locker room photos meant that the stakes were serious now.  They meant that the whole thing had moved from prank to potential legal matter.  I peeked through the window, fearing what I would see.  Sure enough, it was Principal Donner.

I grabbed the file, cramming it into my waistband.

Dmitri was stuck.  I propped him up, then, thinking faster than I ever have in my life, mounted one of the desks and pushed the ceiling tile to the side.  We were right next to a cinderblock wall.  Struggling with Dmitri, I first tried pushing him up.  When that didn’t work, I jumped up, balanced on the top of the wall that ended just above the ceiling, then pulled Dmitri up.  The raw blocks cut into my stomach, but I managed to get him onto the wall with me, just in time to slide the ceiling tile almost back into place.  Donner entered his office, and I left the tile alone, fearing it would make a sound.

Dmitri was lying on his side, facing away from the principal’s office.  I was perched like a bird, struggling to control my breathing.

“Damn file… ” Donner muttered.  Dmitri let out a single, incredibly high-pitched whine.  “Where in the good goddamn is my trashcan?”  Dmitri groaned quietly.  “This had better not…” Donner’s voice broke abruptly.  There were a few rapid steps, then the sound of a drawer being pulled out.  “Fucking Christ, I forgot to lock it,” Donner said.  It was the picture drawer.  I knew it.  Dmitri really knew it.

I knew that Dmitri knew, because just then, I heard a light *putt* *putt* *thump* *puuuuutttt* echoing in the can attached to his ass, accompanied by another near-silent whine.  The smell followed quickly.

“Fuck!” I mouthed to him.  Dmitri hid his face.

“Jesus, those pictures,” Donner said.  “Jesus.  Fucking kids.  Ruin me.  Could have been hours ago, could have…”again his voice stopped.  This time it was different.  This time, I was certain he had stopped talking just as he was looking directly at the ceiling tile I’d left ajar.

“Jesus, God,” Dmitri whined so quietly I felt I might be reading his thoughts.

There was the sound of loafer-clad feet mounting a desk.  Then, fingers probing across the surface of a ceiling tile.  And then, the shittiest miracle ever.

Just as Donner slide the tile back, Dmitri came unstuck from his metal parasite.  The can, perched directly over the tile, crashed down.  It did not settle directly over Donner’s head, but if certainly slung a couple pounds of shit on him.  He pinwheeled his arms for a second before crashing backwards to the ground.  I later learned that we had not, in fact, killed him, but at the time I did not care.

“Run, mother fucker!” I shouted to Dmitri.  This was illogical, as we were both perched atop a cinderblock wall.  What we did was fall to the other side.

Unsurprisingly, we found ourselves in the towel section of the girl’s locker room.

I looked up.  Eight feet above us were the broken ceiling tiles we’d fallen through.

“Do you think they’ll be able to tell us from those?” Dmitri asked as he looked at the holes.

Mine was nondescript, anyone or anything might have fallen through the ceiling.  Dmitri’s…

“That’s a perfect cutout of your parka.  It looks like someone wearing that exact fucking parka fell through.  It looks like fucking Bugs Bunny.  Even the hood is there.  Parka fingerprint.”

Dmitri mouthed a few words, struggling.  Then, he turned to me, and in all seriousness said, “Maybe we can pin it on an Eskimo.”

Escaping from the school was no problem; thank God for doors that open from the inside when they’re locked.  Donner had obviously had all the fight knocked out of him from his number two-ing; there was no mad dash, no near misses as he chased us through the dim corridors, sliding around every corner on the slick soles of his Florscheim loafers.  He resigned a week later.

As Dmitri was burning his beloved coat in an old barrel on our football lot, I was holding the file, so damn thick.  It was too dark to read, even with the fire, but having the file reinforced an idea that had been running over and over since I’d read Hubert’s obituary.  I let my hands play over the surface of some of the pages, as though I could read the Braile of crumpled carbon copies.  The whole thing was damn odd.  It didn’t feel right.  The idea was a thing I’d put down to childishness, a stubborn reluctance to face up to the realities of the adult world, where people could disappear unexpectedly, meaninglessly, forever.  Life was no longer like the movies, where Hubert would have gone down fighting, and taught us a lesson in the process.  I was right to feel that way before, and even now, with only the strange obituary and this unexpected file.  The idea was a fool’s hope.  A child’s dream.  But I finally voiced it and made it true to the world.

“I think Hubert’s still alive.”

♦  ♦  ♦

I was home alone a day later when I finally worked up the courage to look through the file.  I’m don’t know what stopped me the night we got it.  Every time I’d try to read, I’d get a weight on my chest, and the molecules of air around me swelled to grapefruit size.  I would stop and tell myself, ‘In an hour.’  All through that night and the next day adrenaline spurted like molten lead through my veins, bolting me upright in bed, or jerking my arm so that I ripped a near-completed Scantron in half as I was erasing an answer.

Finally I managed to work up the nerve to dip into the papered past of Hubert Upshaw.

The first revelation: that wasn’t even his real name.  It was McEnroe.  And Upshaw wasn’t his first assumed identity.  There were three other names: Thompson, Lorrie, and Lee.  Adoptions didn’t work like that.  Did they?  I wasn’t sure then.  And it couldn’t have been much of a secret if it was in his school records.  The state knew about it.   Probably.   The principal certainly.

Then there was the oldest photo.  Three years ago Hubert would have fit right in with our gang.  Hell, he probably could have run with the cooler kids.  His face was lean, his jaw making a hard line where now it hid beneath a balloon of fat.  His hair was longer then too, not the flat-top of a slide-rule user that he wore now.  It was only the eyes that gave him away as the same person; they were just as intelligent, just as open, just as hopeful as when I’d last seen them in person.

The face… it wasn’t the one I’d known.  It wasn’t the face of someone who could cause all the trouble in this folder, either.

God forbid I judge a book by its cover, but come the Christ on.  Tell me you’ve never spotted some punk from across the way and said to yourself, “That little fucker likes to start shit.”  Five minutes later he’s calling you a fag in front of all your buddies, and you can feel your ears going red and your fists are clenching and it’s going to go down any second.  Then he smiles and backs off, and acts like you’re the asshole for getting all bothered by it.  The last you see of him is a shit-eating grin, and you know you’ll remember his face for the rest of your life, and he’ll have forgotten yours by tomorrow.

Hubert didn’t have that look, then or now.

The earliest papers argued with me, though.  They were disciplinary reports, two dozen of them from a single school year.  In every one, Hubert’s side of the story boiled down to: ‘I was minding my own business, and then these guys came up…’  I’m betting the teachers even listened the first couple of times.  After five or six fights, though, you gotta figure something was going on.  After a dozen, that Hubert was starting them–the fights were never with the same people twice.

Maybe somehow he did have it coming.  It’s hard to believe the entire school was against him.  Maybe he’d done something that wasn’t in the file, something bad that only the other kids in the school knew about.  A rumor could have turned them all against him.  Anything, really.  Kids never needed much excuse to pick a weak one from the herd and run him down in a pool of his own guts.

It was hard to believe that it managed to follow him across a country, though.  The first reports had been from a Junior High in Philly, but the stationary abruptly changed to some place called Erving Middle High in Portland.

It looked like bullies there had flocked to Hubert like flies to shit.  He showed up in Portland with a new last name, a clean slate, and an extra fifty pounds if I had to guess from the picture of him.  He left there the next semester with no fewer thansixty-seven separate disciplinary reports.  There were barely that many school days.

I don’t know how you’d do it, honestly.  Have to work at it, that’s for sure.  Even assholes get tired of beating the piss outta people.  I guess it was kind of an accomplishment for Hubert, really.

I thumbed through the rest, finding more of the same from three other schools.  There were some fights serious enough that the reports included Poloroids of the damage–here was one of Hubert with the right side of his face so swollen it looked as though the weight of it was trying to pluck his eye out.  He must have fought a south-paw that day.

Years of torment distilled down into two-hundred-and-something pages.  The language was generally cold, though you could tell a few of Hubert’s teachers had begun asking questions and taking an interest in the kid.  Hubert always moved to a new school soon after, for a ‘new start’.

And then there were the DHS reports, stuck in at the end as though an afterthought.  They were brief, the communications between worried school counselors and overworked agents.  Hubert’s home life had been investigated several different times.  The report invariably said something about Hubert’s adopted parents being quite well-off and socially active.  They used phrases like ‘pillar of the community’, ‘dependable’, ‘affable’, and ‘attractive’, even, to describe them.  To describe Hubert, it was, ‘sullen’, ‘a lone wolf’, and ‘sloven’.

The parents were apparently mailed a copy of these communications, I guess as a way to let them know that DHS wasn’t really looking into them, that they were all on the same team.  Their names were always at the top.  Hubert’s latest address was right there in black and white.

I closed the file, shaking my head. The papers had shaken my belief that Hubert was alive.  His situation was strange, but I couldn’t find a thread that would unravel some fantastic conspiracy.  Already I was trying to think what I would say to comfort Hubert’s parents when me and the boys went to visit.  Still, every time I tried to string more than a sentence together, my mind went back to…

Realization hit me in the stomach like a club.  I flipped back to the DHS reports, my breath short.

Ven. Gerald McEnroe.

Msgr. Jeremy Thompson.

Ps. Garry Lorrie.

Br. Gray Lee

But it wasn’t till the last name that I was certain what the abbreviations were.

The Rev. Jerry Upshaw.

Venerable, monsignor, pastor, brother, were the best I could come up with.  But Reverand, that was for certain.  And the more I thought about it, the more I imagined that I recognized the name of Gerry Upshaw from public access madness and the backs of bus stop benches–a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher who had shaken up the town when he’d arrived six months ago.

At the time, I was still able to tell myself it could be coincidence.  After all, religious people were likely to adopt wayward kids.  I’d never heard of a monsignor doing it, though.  It sounded totally fucking crazy, really.  The first names, too… they…

It all stank.  So, while I should have been planning out what I was going to say to a grieving family, I was contemplating a lighting-strike assault on whatever shithole they lived in.  Whether Hubert was alive or dead, I was convinced there was more here than the story his file told.  I found Hubert’s oldest picture, looked at it without really seeing as I thought about the hell that the kid in the photo had no idea was just over the horizon.  Maybe it was abuse that had changed him.  Maybe it was something else.  But it wasn’t Hubert’s fault.  There was something here, though, that needed to be dug up and exposed to the light of day.  So many fucking questions, but I knew one thing for certain:

The boys and I were going to war.

♦   ♦   ♦

“Jesus Christ,” Dmitri whispered

“Shh,” Alan said, eyes darting around us.

We had expected something bad, but never this.  In our minds, Hubert must have come from something between a rusted-out trailer home and  Cracker-Jack-box track housing.  But this… much, much worse.

“It’s a fucking mansion,” Dmitri whispered louder.

“Shh,”Alan said frantically.  “Not in front of…” he gestured with his head.

The house was formidable, a gleaming white Southern Gothic structure with golden fixtures, placed in the middle of ten acres of immaculate lawn.  The grass was dotted with fountains and topiaries.  It would have blended in with the properties to either side if not for the statues that decorated the place.

There were hundreds of them, alabaster figures of cherubs and saints and so many depictions of crucifixion that I knew I’d never look at a lower case ‘t’ the same way again.  Where one image of Christ upon the cross could be an object of contemplation and reverence, this was pornographic.  The near-nude bodies seemed to be twisted in a wicked ecstasy, their faces contorted in… pleasure.

Religion had never been beaten into me as a kid; my family was negligent there.  But I’d always been respectful, and I’d always believed in something.  And though my faith had never been the type of thing to build cathedrals upon, it was mine, and strong in its own way.  It was deeper than I’d expected, too.  The display of grotesquery turned my stomach enough that, despite all my bravado and eagerness to face down Hubert’s abusers, I was ready to turn back.

Here was everything I’d ever suspected organized religion of being, distilled down into a slap right in the scruples.  I had no doubt that most people would interpret this display as an act of Godliness; I knew it for the mockery it was.  It was pride where humility was demanded, a tower of shit polished into the nativity scene.  It was bake sales and tithes and bingo nights and not an ounce of God.

“These fuckers must be loaded,” Dmitri said.  Alan elbowed him.

The gate was open, otherwise I’d have packed up my good intentions and gone on down the road a ways to throw rocks at some rich-people windows.  The driveway was long and gravel, looking like the last vehicle it had seen was a horse drawn carriage.  On either side we were surrounded by the infernal topiaries and statues, their blank white eyes rolled back in their sockets into insectoid impassivity.  The further we went, the more the marble faces were oddly contorted, their expressions corrupt, always wearing a small smile if they had lips.

The drive terminated in a large circle, and in the center of this stood the strangest of all the statues.  It was yet another crucifix, this one life-sized and rendered so realistically it looked as though it could start writhing in agony at any moment.  But the most disturbing thing about it was that it was also a fountain.

And it was fucking awful.

It looked as though fresh blood continually flowed from the wounds at the wrists and ankles of the crucified Christ, thin red tendrils coursing over the marble flesh until they fell in drops down to the crimson pool.  In the statue’s side there was a wound, and here the blood flowed in a small waterfall.  It was so unlike anything that I’d ever seen before that I had trouble imagining it coming from human hands.  It was alien.  It was wrong.

“Well hello boys.  What can I do you for?” came a voice from behind.

 

♦

♦            ♦

 

 

I spun around, heart in my throat and balls feeling like they’d just fallen off and bounced on down the road.  Most of the boys did the same, though Dmitri and Alan were frozen in contorted stances of terror.

The man I saw certainly didn’t match the mental image I’d been developing.  In my head, he’d been a decrepit old horror, bent and twisted by the perversions that he had no doubt helped to visit upon Hubert.  I’d practically gotten him down to an exact number of liver spots, the picture was so clear in my mind.

But this man, the one standing straight and tall before us in a bone-colored linen suit, couldn’t have been more than ten years older than we were.

“We’re looking for Reverand Jerry Upshaw?”  I tried to state, though it came out a question.

“You found him!” the man laughed.

Impossible.

“Um…”

“Who might you be, brother?” Upshaw asked, all smiles.  He looked like a model from a Sears catalogue–not good-looking enough to be an actor or something, but certainly someone who would stand out in a crowd.  He was six feet something, looked like he tanned and worked out, and his blonde hair didn’t betray a hint of thinning.

“We’re… friends.  Friends of Hubert’s,” I said.

“Oh.  Oh, I see,” Upshaw said, his smile immediately turning bittersweet.  “Please, won’t you come in?”

“I suppose we should.”

The Reverand led the way, me and the boys carefully skirting our way around the crazy Jesus fountain.  I didn’t take my eyes off of it until we were into the house.

It was quite a mansion, at least judged against my own experiences–which were none.  The interior was a stark contrast to the house outside; without, everything was white, but inside the floors were near-black stained wood and the walls mahogany panel.  The lighting was subdued for the most part, though little spotlights shone on the various pieces of art and artifact that occupied the walls and the little cases that looked like they belonged in a museum.

Upshaw strode straight through the huge foyer, passing the set of double, curving staircases opposite the entrance and making straight for the doors between them.  We followed without a word, though I had to wave furiously at Ricky to keep moving when he paused in front of a suit of armor that had a hole through the breastplate.

We emerged into an expansive hall, our footsteps echoing off of the vaulted ceilings.  Upshaw led us to a corner where several couches were arranged around a dead fireplace.  He sat first in a large leather armchair, we followed suit.

“Boys,” Upshaw began.  “Boys, I’m glad that you’ve come.  I did everything for Hubert I could, but I couldn’t provide the fellowship that a boy needs with his peers.  We… we’ve always worried about that, believed that that was a big part of Hubert’s problem.  He was just so quiet, kept to himself.  You can’t know how much it means to me that he had friends, and that they were close enough to come and seek us out.  You might not know this, but Hubert was adopted.  We love him, but we didn’t get much time together.”

“We didn’t know Hubert too long,” I said.

“We haven’t been here long,” Upshaw said quickly.  “Hubert’s had a troubled past, and he needed to get away from it.”

“How long have you been his guardian?”

“Since last summer.  I was just starting to feel like I was getting to know him when he… passed.”

“How did Hubert die?” Alan asked.

“Um… immolation.”

“What?”

“He burned himself,” Upshaw said quietly, and the look in his eyes as he said this made me question my screwball ideas about some kind of conspiracy of abuse.  There was some kind of pain there.

There was a silence that settled down amongst us, the least comfortable I’d ever had, including the one that happened at my Aunt’s funeral when the pastor went through half the service calling her by the wrong name.

“Hey!” Upshaw suddenly said, making us all jump.  He was wearing a sad little smile now.  “Let me take you on the tour.”

I followed as he sprang from his chair, too unsure of myself now to put up any fight.  The boys followed behind.

“This is our main hall, just kinda a place to hold get-togethers for the church and whatnot.  You know, honestly, it’s mostly for the people with all the money.  I hate having to operate that way, but if flattering a few dozen fat-cats means that I’ll get the dough I need to expand the youth center, then I’ll pander to ‘em just fine.  I’ll do it, yessir.”

We walked slowly through the room, the large windows on either side never seeming to let in enough light.  The place was absolutely filled with history–an original Monet there, a small cuneiform tablet there.  Weapons were all around, from Japanese swords to a Revolutionary War musket.  There were native dresses on display from places I’d never heard of, in varieties I could never have imagined.  It must be fun walking through here in the dead of night, surrounded by dummies wearing aboriginal demon-masks and full suits of armor.  We paused in front of one strange outfit long enough that Upshaw felt he should speak on it.

“It’s an Aztec Eagle Warrior,” Upshaw said almost reluctantly.  “Part of it was recovered from a dig site in Mexico,” he pointed to a tiny portion of feathers that looked dingier than the rest.  “Everything else is recreation.”  The outfit was strange, decorated with eagle feathers and leather thongs, the headpiece an eagle’s head posed with beak opened in a silent scream.  The mannequin wearing the outfit also wielded a strange kind of sword, a wooden paddle with shards of glass embedded in both edges.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Dmitri whispered.

“They were the elite, picked out from the main army.  You gained admission by capturing enemies, not killing them.”

“That seems…enlightened,” Ricky muttered.  “Guess it wasn’t so bad to be fighting the Aztecs.”

“They captured them to sacrifice to their gods,” Upshaw said.

“Holy shit. Ah, sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Upshaw said.  “The entirety of Aztec warfare was geared towards the taking of captives to be sacrificed to the gods… well, that, and all the usual political bullshit.”

“Why did they do it?” Ricky blurted, then looked like he wished he hadn’t asked.

But Upshaw seemed eager to answer.

“To save the world,” he said.  “They believed that the world’s continued existence rested squarely upon their gods’ shoulders, and that it was their responsibility to ensure their gods’ strength.  Their universe was one of struggle and debt.   They were indebted to the gods for making the world, for keeping the sun going.  Everything was in flux, and needed continual renewal.  You see, to them, sacrifice was something different than it was in the western world.  When the Greeks or the Romans sacrificed a bull, it was a symbolic act, an act of contrition and respect.  And something we don’t normally talk about is that the Romans conducted it more like a barbeque–the gods got all the junk parts, while all the animal’s good meat was fed to the people in attendance.  When the Aztecs sacrificed hundreds of prisoners, it wasn’t a show of faith.  Those sacrifices were nourishment.  Food for the gods.”

“Um…”

“Yeah, that’s a pretty big difference, once you think about it.  The Aztecs believed in real and personal devotion, went to go to the greatest lengths to express it.  Their entire civilization was centered upon it.  They sacrificed tons of food, millions of animals, buried entire temples as a dedication to their gods.  When they killed people, they didn’t just sacrifice their enemies to the gods, either.  They gave their own, their best, those who were most likely to quench their gods’ insatiable hunger.  Men and women.  Peasant and noble.  Adult and child.” Upshaw began licking his lips oddly, his tongue moving slowly around the “o” of his mouth.  “The gods grew stronger with every still-beating heart ripped from a chest cavity.  And so every fifty-two years, when all light in the empire was ritualistically extinguished in waiting for the coming–or extinguishing–of the sun,  the Aztecs would wait and see if their sacrifices had given enough strength to the gods.  The sun would rise and they would know that their dedication had been equal to the challenge.  It was proof of their faith, and proof of their gods’ love, and proof of their own power, all in a single sunrise.  They called themselves the people of the sun.  Their quest to ensure the continuance of the world was a noble one, no matter how many lives it cost.”

I stared for a long time, then worked up the courage to say: “How did you get all of this stuff?”

Upshaw looked slightly upset that the question wouldn’t allow him to keep blabbering.  “My father, actually.  He was a very wealthy man, and a collector.  Almost everything here is his.  Heck, even this house was bought with his money.”

“Not the churches money?”

“No!  Goodness… I’d never… My congregation is large, but far from wealthy.  I don’t even draw a salary.  Here, let’s move on.”

He pressed on, past displays that were interesting enough for us to glance at but no more.  I saw more masterpiece paintings in that day than I had in my entire life up until that point.  Just the paintings alone had to have been valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

“Ah, here’s my little addition to the collection,” Upshaw said as we turned a corner and found ourselves in a smaller room.  “I call it the ‘Saints and Sinners’ room.

Everyone froze in place.  Along one wall was a collection of medieval torture implements, most notably an iron maiden and a rack.  The door slammed shut behind us.  I glanced to Dmitri, trying to judge how close he might be to crapping his pants.  Maybe we could even turn it to our advantage, using it as a distraction or weapon.  I immediately got an image of myself as a poo-flinging Rambo, leading my men out of Hell with chocolate-brown hands.

“Welcome to my parlor, gentlemen,” Upshaw said, but I could tell by his tone and the high little giggle he gave off after that he didn’t think himself to be saying anything particularly threatening.  “Sorry about that door, draft keeps slamming it shut.”

A couple of the guys laughed nervously.

“Take a look at this thing!” Upshaw practically shouted.  He trotted over to the ancient rack–a table with a winch and manacles at the top and a bar at the bottom.  It looked like it could be the showpiece at any museum I’d ever been to, it was so well restored.  It looked new.  And very functional.

Upshaw vaulted right up on to it as everyone watched in shocked horror.

“Sometimes I just like to lie here and think,” he said.  “I… it’s like I can feel, just a tiny bit, what went on in this thing.  This particular one was used during the Inquisition.  Hundreds of people have been hooked up to it.  Great, huh?”

“Yeah,” Alan said.

“Can you believe that it used to be okay to use something like this on people?  Like, it was totally sanctioned by the government and the Church.  They’d put them in here and stretch them.  Supposedly the sound of the popping cartilage was really effective at getting people to confess–not really the person on the rack, but the people that they brought in to watch.  You could stretch people until their joints were totally separated and the muscle fibers were unable to contract back.  I really wonder what a person like that would have looked like once they dumped them out of the rack,” Upshaw said, sounding suddenly introspective.  “Probably like Gumby!” he laughed.

He popped up and positively skipped across the room to a series of displays I hadn’t noticed.  I felt my own bowels loosen as I noticed that most of them were skulls.

“And here we have the Saints portion of the room,” Upshaw said, picking up one of the skulls.  “This guy is Saint Vincent of Saragossa.  He was killed on the thing that I was just on.  Well, not that one, but one like it.”  Upshaw skipped over across the room once more, stopping at a little display table.  He picked up the device that was sitting there, a contraption fashioned of metal and bad news.

“These are thumbscrews,” Upshaw said, practically giddy.  “One of you come over here and try them.”

Apparently the look on our faces shook him out of his reverie.

“Kidding! Ha!” Upshaw sing-songed.  “Alright, let’s get out of here, still tons to see.”

We scuttled from the room like the pansies we were, me and Alan almost getting stuck in the doorframe in our haste.  Leaving felt like a last-minute death row pardon.

The tour went on and on, but it gave me time to work up my courage.  As we were coming back inside after seeing the helicopter pad, I finally managed to speak.  I was confused, knocked off balance by Upshaw and his mansion and the feeling that perhaps I had no idea what had happened with Hubert.  But the file we’d taken from the school suggested terrible things, and I wasn’t going to let my own cowardice keep me from doing what was right.  Not this time.

“Hubert’s moved around a lot the last few years.  Lot of different families, too,” I said.  “Lots of name changes.  Kinda strange.”

Upshaw stopped in mid-step, Ricky almost running into his back.

“He told you about that, did he?”

“Yeah.”

“Hubert was a very troubled boy,” Upshaw said, turning.  “Both of his parents were killed in an accident seven or eight years ago.  A few years after, there was another incident.”

We were quiet, hoping he would continue.  He did, but he changed track on us, the sneaky bastard.

“You boys came here for some answers, I think.  It’s natural.   Part of the way that we grieve is that we seek meaning in a loved one’s death.  But I’m here to tell you that, nine times out of ten, there is none.  Hubert was a very angry, very lonely boy.  We’ll never know what he was thinking when he killed himself.”

“If he killed himself,” Alan said.  We all turned to look at him, our eyes wide.

Upshaw’s eyes were hard as he stared the boy down.

“That’s natural too, of course.  Hubert’s story… I’m guessing you don’t actually know it.  Whatever information you have, you’ve strung it together in a manner that makes you feel better about your friend.  Maybe you’ve made him into a victim.  He was.  But that doesn’t mean he was justified in committing suicide.  He certainly wasn’t murdered.

“After his parents died, Hubert was almost immediately adopted by a man calling himself The Venerable  Gerald McEnroe.  We found out much later that McEnroe never had anything to do with the Church, he was just a very bad man who found shelter beneath the façade of godliness.

“Anyways, as best we can tell, McEnroe was the real deal as psychopaths go.  Total sadist.  And not only did he manage to adopt Hubert, he also covered his trail so thoroughly that we were never able to locate records on either him or Hubert past 1978.  None of us were ever able to even get Hubert’s original surname out of him.”

“Shit,” Alan whispered.

“It was terrible.  Hubert underwent years of abuse quietly, until, as best we can tell, the government took notice that he wasn’t enrolled in school.  Score one for the truant officers, I suppose.  That’s where Hubert’s record starts again.

“We originally thought that his discipline problems were a cry for help.  Perhaps he was too scared to directly speak up; there’s no telling what that monster threatened him with, did to him.  But he could draw attention to himself by getting into fights.  And he did.

“We have no idea how everything came to a head, but… eventually Hubert got our attention.  We vowed to help him.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.

“A group of friends as eclectic as they get, but who all shared faith.  We thought that we could help Hubert better than the ‘system’ could.  We tried everything.  But even after we’d gotten him away, the fights kept happening, and he became more and more distant.”

There was a silence here.  The boys looked at one another.

“I need to use the restroom,” I said.

“Sure.  It’s through that hallway, just past the doors down to the wine cellar,” Upshaw said.

I walked in the direction indicated, only stopping to look at a pair of flintlock pistols that appeared to have been carried by a Conquistador.  One still bore flecks of what looked like dried blood.

How in the hell is that still on there?

The wine cellar doors were heavy steel, set at the bottom of a half-flight of stairs.  Further down the hallway were two free-swinging doors that looked like they belonged in a restaurant–must be the kitchen.

I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure that Upshaw wasn’t snooping, but he was still around the corner, talking.  Jogging as quietly as I could on the wooden floor, I went to the swinging doors and pushed through lightly.

And then almost bolted right back out.

The kitchen was filthy.  Not just greasy-spoon, ‘let’s not eat there anymore cause I thought I saw a dead roach in the corner,’ filthy, either.  There was rust red something smeared on the walls, and the countertops held organic matter that had been rendered unidentifiable by weeks of decomposition.  Dirty cookware covered every counter and filled the two industrial sinks.  The smell was gut-twisting, so much so that I immediately panicked at the thought of throwing up right there–it would be sure evidence for Upshaw to discover.

What in the fuck is going on here?

I hurried out, examining the kitchen in my mind as I went to the bathroom.  Already I was trying to decide if anything in there might have been human, but in truth, it had all looked animal.  Even my fertile and willing imagination couldn’t turn a rotten side of beef into a teenager.

Still, bizarre fucking shit.

I flushed the toilet, went to the sink.  I was staring into my own eyes when it started.

*tump*tump*tump*

It seemed like it could have been the pipes–the sound was distant, and started up after flushing.  Old houses with old pipes…

*tump*tump*tump*

It was coming from below.  I left the bathroom, moving my head from side to side to try and locate the sound.

Standing in front of the doors to the wine cellar it was loudest.

I went down the stairs, knowing that at any moment Upshaw was likely to come looking for me.  The cellar doors seemed awfully stout to be just protecting bottles of grape juice.  I tried a handle but nothing happened.  I tapped on the door, but the sound barely registered–insulated.

Then I heard Upshaw’s voice just around the corner, approaching fast.

I bolted up the stairs headlong, almost stumbling at the top and crashing through one of the floor to ceiling windows in the hallway.  I had just enough time to collect myself before the group rounded the corner, Upshaw in the lead.

“Whew!” I said, smiling.  “Do NOT go in there.  Had to pinch one…”

“Ah,” Upshaw said.  “Well, I guess that’s pretty much the whole place.  Doubt you boys have much interest in wine or kitchens or pantries, which pretty much makes up this whole wing.  We…”

“I like wine,” I said, voice flat.  “Let’s take a look.”

“Well… unfortunately we’ve had some structural problems.  Not be safe down there.  Having a contractor come out next week.  Plus the pipes are bad.  And aren’t you a little young for wine?”

“My parents are very cosmopolitan,” I said, seeing my mom in my mind’s eye practically faint at the idea of giving her son an alcoholic beverage.  How little she knew…

“I’m afraid to say that I have some other obligations, boys,” Upshaw said, seeming genuinely disappointed.  “But you’re welcome to come back almost any time.  Just drop in whenever.  It’s going to be very lonely here without Hubert.  I’m always available to talk with.  I’m sure it would help us all.”

“Sure,” Ricky said, shockingly sincere.  I gave him a look that he didn’t seem to understand.

Upshaw walked us out.  I had been wracking my brain, trying to come up with some hole in his story that might finally convince me that I wasn’t crazy.

“Hey… so what happened to the McEnroe guy?  How is it they haven’t been able to find out about Hubert’s past?”

Upshaw was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “Because Hubert killed him, and we helped keep it quiet.”

Nobody remembered how it got its name, but Fishing the Goons was always one of our favorite activities when we went down to the big city.  It must have been one of the older boys who started it, one of the boys who grew up and probably moved  here for the work like everyone else did, all pretending after when people asked them that they had always been from the city, and they would wear their suits every day until they were buried in them.  However the game was invented, it was thoroughly enshrined in our collection of general assholery now.

We always played after seeing a movie.  On that Saturday, it was Return of the Jedi.  Despite rumors, Han Solo hadn’t been killed; guess Lucas wanted to make sure the merchandising kept going strong.  Anyways, a trip to the theater was the first ingredient.  The Fillbrook Movieplex was one of those old-fashioned numbers that had the box office jutting from the front of the building, connected by enough chrome molding to outfit a thousand juice-head Camaros.  You could get up on that little bit of roof if you knew where to go.  There was enough room for three people to lie on their stomachs and look down at the large, ever-present crowd of oblivious ticket buyers and post-movie chatters.

It was only a very particular class of person we were interested in.  Sometimes we’d sit up there for a couple of hours and not spot a single likely target, and have to retire for the night, defeated.  But apparently tonight was mating season for our mulleted quarry, as they were out in droves.

The game was simple–and though only three people got to play, everyone was involved.  The guys up on the roof had strings of fishing line with various bits and bobs attached to them, mostly wispy little things like cotton balls or particularly stout dust bunnies, though once Alan managed to lasso a bee onto the end of his.  Anyways, the guys on the ground found likely targets, calling them for the fishermen using an increasingly arcane and ridiculous system of gestures.  Then the guys on the roof would proceed to use their implements in a manner that would generally piss off the selected prey, and the target was always worth pissing off.  The guys calling the shots picked out only the most moussed mullets, the ones belonging to the varsity football and baseball players, the guys whose natural entitlement made them burn like beacons of jock stank and rocket fuel aftershave.

Good times.

Scoring was arbitrary, but loosely based around the criteria of how badly we’d get our asses whipped if we were found out.  Once a fisherman lost his gear, which was inevitable, they were out of the game, and would have to win it on their existing points.  Mostly, the victims thought they were just bugs or something buzzing around.  The look on some Cro-Magnon’s face as he yanked a goose feather attached to some fishing line out of thin air was always precious.

On the ground, we increased the difficulty by occasionally walking into the meat heads, nudging them just as a fisherman was making the delicate maneuver to just barely whisper their lure past a victim’s ear.  Once, such a bump-and-run had resulted in Albertdale’s star first baseman swallowing a Superball.  The string brought it right back up, of course, along with his dinner from Red Lobster.  I wasn’t able to eat popcorn shrimp for a year.

Ricky was working on some guy wearing a letterman jacket, a big fucker with crazy blonde hair.  His lure seemed to be actively struggling, which might have been possible, as it was a cricket.  But Dmitri was on the ground, had called the guy, and was now running interference.  He kept jerking spasmodically as though he was getting buzzed by a wasp the size of a blue jay running on hypergolic fuel.  The letterman was following suit, obviously the vulnerable-to-suggestion type.  Several of the boys were struggling not to crack up.

It was funny, but I couldn’t make myself enjoy it.  Hubert kept creeping up.  I’d tried to put him out of my mind, but it was difficult.  Hell, he’d been gone for months at this point.  I’d sat outside the preacher’s house, watching it for any sign of… something.  At first, most of the boys came with me.  Then just a few.  Last week, Alan had finally given up on me too.  I’d snooped around the place a few times, but there’d been nothing to find.  For one thing, it was hard to imagine Upshaw having some kind of horrible secret with all the people who were constantly over.  There were cocktail parties and dinners, champagne lunches and singles mixers.  The place was busier than the VFW on wet tee-shirt night.  Which wasn’t saying much.

Jerry Upshaw was a man who seemed to live totally out in the open.  I was going to give myself another week, then call it quits.  There was just nothing to do, especially after calling in that anonymous complaint to the police weeks ago; I’d watched the cruiser roll up to the house, saw that the policemen were in the house for more than two hours.  Apparently they found nothing.

In my less lucid moments I’d imagined breaking in, busting into that basement, finding a dungeon of unspeakable horrors, where rested new versions of the antique torture devices Upshaw let the company see.  Then Ricky had shown he had the biggest balls of everybody when he agreed to go to a youth fellowship meeting there.   I still remember the look on his face as he went in, like he was a dead man walking.  He came back fine, of course, talking fast and happy about the meeting.  The biggest surprise was that the whole damn thing had been held in that basement.  Ricky found religion amongst dusty bottles of grape juice while looking for a three-hundred-pound ghost.

After that, all the boys but Alan were convinced.  Even he was getting pretty agnostic.  They knew that I still wasn’t, and it bothered them.

So I watched as the others on the ground began to act like they were getting buzzed as well, flapping their arms and squealing.  I just stood there.  For a split second I felt like I was watching strangers being total assholes.  They were giggling a little, but I suppose that to the onlookers it might have sounded like little gasps of fear.  A girl standing several feet from Dmitri began to react, swatting at a nonexistent insect.  Then a kid let out a little scream and stuck his hand down his shirt, as though something had just crawled in there.

“Bees!” Dmitri suddenly screamed.  “I think it’s bees!”  Then he took off running down the street.

“Ow, ow, ow!” Gary shouted, flopping down on the sidewalk and writhing as though stung a hundred times.  “Run!”

The crowd took his advice, sprinting away from the theater.  To be sure, there were clumps of non-believers, heathens to our new church, but only a handful.  The mass of the mob followed Dmitri as he ran, flailing his arms the entire time.

I could only stand there, shaking my head.

Then Dmitri stopped in front of the fountain that was down the block in front of Midstate Bank.  I knew instantly what he was thinking.

“Quick!  In the water!” he screamed.

Had the mob bothered to observe their savior, they could have plainly seen that Dmitri, in fact, did not dive into the fountain.  Instead, he held up just before it and collapsed as though he’d finally succumbed to the insectoid assault.  However, the mob took the final advice of their stricken leader, throwing themselves into the foot-deep water, trying to submerge their bodies and protect themselves from the phantom stingers.

I was holding my head, covering my eyes, when Alan grabbed my arm.

“We gotta get the fuck out before they realize what happened.”

The boys got a good thirty seconds to appreciate the fruits of their labors, and then we were running back to the safety of Alan’s VW Bus with all the speed of a pack of junior-varsity rejects.  We spilled inside, smelling of hot breath and sweaty victory.  Everyone was busy congratulating themselves as I pulled out of the parking lot, keeping the headlights off for a few blocks just in case.

“My God…” Gary laughed.  “Did you see that blonde’s tits?  No bra.  My God.  They were spectacular.”

“Man, she almost fell right on top of me, too,” Dmitri said.  “I was planning how I’d cop a stealth feel when some dumb hick bowled right into her.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Alan said.  “Not the tits…”  He was sitting next to me, looking back at the rest.  Of all the others he seemed the most reserved, though he was still giggling right along.  “Really… what the fuck was that?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Dmitri finally breathed after a good thirty straight minutes of maniacal hyperventilation.  “I had no idea what I was doing.  I knew that the big blonde guy would bite.  And then, once he was in my pocket, I… I just felt like I had them.”

“Yeah, I watched the whole thing,” Gary said.  “I could see it.  I could see them going over.”

“It…”Dmitri began, stopped.  His smile faded.  “It was almost like they weren’t even reacting to what I was doing.  Know what I mean?  Like, I don’t think I’m the best bug-attack-in-progress actor in the world.  It was as if they were reacting to what I was thinking.  Like they were seeing the swarm I was imagining.  They were hearing them, feeling them.  And when I wanted them to go into the water, they went.”

“Like hypnotism,” I put in, more to hear my own voice.

“I don’t believe in that crap,” Alan said.

“I don’t know,” Gary said.  “One of those hypnotist guys once made my aunt act like a chicken.  Only it didn’t totally take, she just kept flapping her arms and shouting ‘Cunt, cunt, CUNT… cunt CUNT’.  Really.”  He sounded so serious I had to look back.  Sure enough, he seemed desperate to be believed.

“Dude, that crap is just an excuse for people to act out,” Alan said.  “It’s like… induced Tourette’s… you remove people’s inhibitions by  removing their filter… their sense of responsibility for their actions.  People can just do whatever they really want to do by pretending that someone is controlling them.  Which raises some questions about that aunt of yours.”

“She was an Anglican Deacon.”

“Very troubling questions.”

“I don’t know.  If one person can exert any control on another person… what is the limit?  If your parents tell you to take out the trash, you weigh the consequences,” I said.  “If it’s Alan’s dad, I’d just go back to my room and fire up the Atari.  He’s a total pussy.”

“Hey…”

“But if it was Dmitri’s dad… I’m running out to the garbage without stopping to put my shoes on.  That shit’s getting done.”

“Fucking A,” Dmitri said.

“But that’s different,” Ricky said.  “It’s… a calculation you’re making.  Whether or not you’re going to get your ass beat, mainly.”

“Fucking A,” Dmitri said.

“That’s kinda what I’m getting at.  What if hypnotism–maybe that’s a bad word cause of the connotations–what if that kinda stuff isn’t so mystical as we like to think it is.  What if it’s more about one person knowing how to unbalance that equation, that calculation?  Dmitri sure as hell looked like he’d managed to.”

“Fucking,” Dmitri let out a huge yawn.  “A.”

“That’s… interesting,” Alan said, looking troubled.  “So, ‘hypnotism’ not so much as a weird, mystical crock of shit, but as some kind of human… maybe animal would be better… ability to sway a person’s decisions.  Not really taking away their free will.  It would be more like convincing them that what you wanted them to do was what they really, really wanted to do.  Even if what you wanted them to do was something like… I don’t know… stick their hand in a pot of boiling water.”

“Yeah,” I said.  The bus was getting quiet, the boys back there closing their eyes as the adrenaline wore off.  Soon only Alan and I were awake.

The road was long, extended miles, but we could only see the few dozen feet of asphalt directly ahead, our world shrunk down to the range of a pair of busted-up headlights.  Just beyond their gauzy glow it seemed as if anything might be waiting.  Crooked figures ever lurked in the ditches, and the road was deserted save for us, and only I knew the way home.

My thoughts went back to Hubert.  Maybe I’d give him more than a week.

 

 

This fucking tie is going to kill me. 

I never learned the right way to tie the knot, never cared to, really.  It was a thing so far outside of my world, so much a beacon of excess and private schools and shitty, entitled assholes from the other side of the tracks that I’d actively resisted it.  The result was that my tie was now slowly constricting around my neck in a knot that couldn’t be loosened.  Every time I stuck my finger in there to try to get some breathing room, I swear it ended up just a little snugger… a little, I don’t know… noose-ier.

“GOOD to see you, brother,” a man shouted at me.  He captured my hand as though it was a live grenade to be thrown back, shook it vigorously.  Then he hugged me.  He was a total stranger.  A few years ago, I’d come home to discover my dad sitting in his La-Z-Boy as though he hadn’t disappeared for seven months one March night.  We’d just nodded at each other.

“Ah.  Okay.”

Then I was pinballed around the reception area, flying from one glad-hand to the next.  In the end I was more agitated than a fresh gallon of Glidden at Builder’s Square.  The worst thing was the absolute sincerity of it all–they seemed so genuinely happy to see me there that my deception burned me up and made me flush a bright red.  The tie probably helped with that too.  This must have lasted for fifteen minutes.

“Always good to have a potential new member.  Especially your age.  Never too early to worry about your soul.  I sure wish I’d gotten started on salvation that young.”

“Oh, me too Earl, me too.  You sure got a lot of tail, though.  Especially before you quit drinking.”

“Amen.  Wait, that’s probably not something to say that to.”

“Amen to that.”

“Uh.”

An older woman with a fire hazard bouffant took my arm and guided me in.  It was a modern church, built like a factory, and BIG.  There must have been enough pews to park three-thousand repentant asses, straining for heaven.  I’d never seen anything like it, but that just figured.  I was a fucking heathen, remember?

The old woman was nice, and smelled like rose-water perfume and dust.  She smiled more than she spoke, which was a relief after being lost in the fellowship black hole in the lobby.  She was also leading me right up to the front rows.

“I’d like you to meet someone.  We’re mostly an older congregation, it’s just that we’re in a part of town that time caught up with, I guess.  But there’s a young lady I really think you’d like to make the acquaintance of.  Really, I do.”

“Sure,” I said.  Every passing moment I was more and more certain that I would be seen for who I was, a usurper, a spy.  A lapsed Methodist in a Baptist church was bad enough…

Maybe I should just make a break for it.  I can outrun her.

“Donnie, dear, I’d like you to meet Jennifer.”

“Urgh,” I belched.  The girl sitting on the pew before me was a study of conservative perfection, a creature of flawless porcelain skin, carefully braided blonde hair, and a white dress so immaculate it belonged on a paper doll.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Jennifer said.  Her eyes were the shade of green you find in the shallows of Pacific atolls, the kind that drag men under in sudden riptides, never to be seen again.  You can just imagine being shot like a rocket down and down into the sea, the sun dimming green with the depth, and the warmth and pressure and release.

I went on a National Geographic kick when I was ten.

“My pleasure,” I managed.

“Why don’t we all sit together?” the old woman asked.  Up until this time, I’d known her name, but it was forever burned from my memory by the radiance of Jennifer.

“That would be a wonderful idea,” Jennifer smiled.  She spoke with an accent I couldn’t quite place, maybe it was Southern.

“Alright,” I said.  I tried to keep the old woman between myself and Jennifer, my brain still functioning well enough to realize that I was here on a mission and I’d need all of my already limited wits if I was to get anything out of this.  But the old lady must have been bent on a love connection, as she slid away with the grace and speed of a Bolshoi ballerina.

“So, where do you go to school?” Jennifer asked as I distinctly felt the old woman thrust her bony hip into me, trying to scoot me closer to the young lady.  I relented, but only a bit.

“Pete Conrad,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“Oh.”

It was a little tougher than average as high schools go.

“I’ve heard of it,” she said after a moment.  “ I actually just finished up my last year at St. Petunia’s.  It’s in Savannah.  What year are you?”

That explained the accent.

“I’m just about done.”

“Oh! How exciting!  What colleges have you applied to?”

Just as I was about to tell my first lie to her, the loudspeakers began booming out brassy trumpet music.  I gave a tiny smile and shrug, then very firmly directed my attention forward.  I’d never been gladder to see Jerry Upshaw in my life.

“Hallelujah brothers and sisters, we’re here for another service, allowed yet one more Sunday to sing His name!  We’re here to praise Him, praise Him, praise Him!” Upshaw shouted, practically dancing across the wide stage.  The Bible he held was an amazing oratorical instrument in his hands as he brandished it in various ways, thumping it from time to time as he shouted Hosannas.  “Here to praise him, here for salvation, salvation, salvation.”

The crowd was chanting right with him; apparently this was the standard performance.  They were loud for such a creaky, be-dentured lot.  Even the old woman beside me shouted loud enough that her voice occasionally broke into a screech.

I couldn’t help but notice that though Jennifer was participating, she seemed to be one of the most restrained.  When she caught me looking I felt as though I was falling and quickly went back to Upshaw.

The man strode back and forth, occasionally doing a very fast little mid-stride jump where he slightly kicked his legs.  Everything he said was echoed back by the blank, bare wall of the audience as they swayed where they stood, some holding their arms out as though dancing with an elephant.

“He has these poor bastards.  He has them,” I muttered accidently.

Jennifer glanced over at me.  I pretended to have been repeating Upshaw.

“Salvation! Salvation! Salvation,” Upshaw screamed.  And then as though some wire had suddenly crossed, he froze in place, face now stone, body tense.

“But never forget, not for one second, that Satan is here amongst us!”  Upshaw pointed directly at me.

I don’t think I was ever closer to crapping my pants than at that moment.  At least if you don’t count that Cub Scout trip when I actually did…

“He’s after you!  He’s always trying to get you!”

The audience stood frozen, some now numbly groping for their seats.

“He is the great deceiver, always ready to cast an unwary lamb down into the burning depths of ETERNAL damnation.  That’s right folks.  Forever.  That’s a long time to burn, indeed, twisting in agony in the fires of HELL.  A very long time.  Especially compared to the short time we have here on this earth.

“He was once called Lucifer, and that name should give you a real hint as to the things on this earth you should always be wary of.  Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer.  What does it mean?”  Upshaw looked straight at me at this point, I shit you not.  If I’d known the answer, I’d have shouted it out like I was in my third period U.S. History class.

“Lucifer,” Upshaw continued, “mean ‘light-bringer’.  Now can what does that remind me of?  What on EARTH could that be?  I’ll tell you, brothers and sisters.  It is the scourge of science.  The so-called ‘light’ of knowledge.”

There were mutters throughout the now mostly-sitting congregation.

“And like all things that exist in nature, science is not, in itself, evil.  It has to be wrought into a weapon of Satan by the hands of man first.  Scientists, attacking the church every day, are the ones responsible for fashioning the sword which every day attacks the very shield upon which the souls of men rely for their salvation.

“If the church falls, we all fall.”

This was echoed a bit too forcefully for my taste.

“But I’ll show you something right now, ladies and gentlemen, to prove the power of God, and the feebleness of science.  I’ve done this every Sunday, and will continue to, though it taxes me greatly.  I’ll willingly spend my own body if it causes His goodness to grow within your heart.

“Now, for a volunteer from the audience.”

I shook my head.  My jaw felt as though it was resting on the tops of my PayLess faux-leather loafers.

“Madam!” Upshaw called to a woman in a wheelchair who was within conspicuously easy range of the stage.  “Please, come up here.  Assist her, gentlemen.”

Two ushers pushed the woman up the ramp to the stage, spotlights quickly picking her out.  Her hair was a dark brown, but she looked spent and twisted, as though the spirit of a person could be slowly sucked from them by pain, the resulting void causing the body to collapse on itself.  But now she was animated, her eyes locked upon Upshaw.  Her body quaked with an excitement that didn’t look totally voluntary.

“My, my, what a fine dress,” Upshaw said, laying a hand upon her shoulder.

“Th… thank you.”

“Tell us your name, dear.”

“Dorothy.  Dorothy Natopoplis.”

“And what ails you, Sister Dorothy?”

“The doctors say I… I have Parkinson’s”

“And have they been able to help you, my dear girl?”

“No.  They say that there will be medicines soon though.”

“That’s science, isn’t it?  The answer will always come tomorrow.  The suffering will end tomorrow.  But we need help today, don’t we, Dorothy?”

“Yes.”  Her eyes were locked to Upshaw.

“Can you feel His spirit here, Dorothy?  Can you feel it, brothers and sisters?  Right here, right now, in the very hour of your need, when science has forsaken you?  I can feel it.  Can you feel it, Dorothy?  Brothers and sisters?”

A chorus of quiet ‘Amens’ bounced from the walls.  The congregation was matching Upshaw’s tone and volume perfectly.  For a moment I was struck by the idea that they were all mouthpieces through which he was having a conversation with himself.

He’s got them.  Fear was rising in my throat, choking me better than the tie.

“He is ALWAYS with you, sister.  He’s here now.  And He will heal you!”  Upshaw suddenly roared to action brandishing the Bible in one hand and…

What in the fuck is that!?!

In his hand there appeared to be the subtlest hint of a ball of light.  It was translucent enough that it could initially be dismissed as a trick of the eye, but when you looked directly at it, there was no doubting it.

“Be healed!”

Upshaw’s hand fell upon Dorothy’s forehead.  Her limbs spread out rigidly as though the Lord’s Grace ran at about 10,000 volts.  Then, just as suddenly, she went limp.  Her head lolled to the side for a moment as Upshaw stared down at her, unmoving.  Then she stirred.  When she looked back up, there was a small smile on her face.

“Now rise,” Upshaw said.

“But…”

“Rise!” he boomed as though parting the Red Sea.  Or raising it, I guess.

Dorothy sprang out of her wheelchair like it had bitten her.  She looked down at her own legs with amazement as she stood before Upshaw.

“Hallelujah!” Upshaw screamed, tears streaming from his eyes.

And the crowd. Goes. Wild.

Except for Jennifer.  Instead, she took my hand, stood up, and dragged me from the church.

 

 

When she finally stopped, Jennifer had us out of the building and around back.  There were two green dumpsters that smelled of an unsuccessful potluck, and the forest behind the church came almost right up to the pavement.  I opened my mouth to speak, and found a cigarette stuffed there before I could utter a single syllable.

Jennifer was lighting her own already, taking a slow drag before offering me the lighter.  I pretended as if it wasn’t the third time in my life I’d lit one.  I think I pulled it off.  It was the stuttering cough after my first puff gave me away.

“Not used to…” I looked at the cigarette between my fingers, “…filtered.”

“Yeah,” she said.  Jennifer was staring straight at me, and I felt like some kind of goddam bug beneath a glass, but there was nowhere to go.  There was a moment in which I began to imagine that she was attracted to me.  Then I realized it was probably because I was going green.

“I’m good,” I said as she took a step towards me.  “Really”

She was only a step away.  She reached up to me.  My heart experienced a moment of arrest, resulting in the logic centers of my brain short-circuiting.  She was going to kiss me.  I shut my eyes.

I felt a pair of thin fingers jab into my collar.  Okay.  This is strange.  Then there was a violent tug, throwing my head to the side and my eyes open.

My tie snaked down my front, puddling on the asphalt between my feet.

“You looked like you were about to die,” Jennifer said, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, moving dangerously with every word.  “We gotta teach you how to tie this damn thing.”  She bent down to collect the black strip of silk.

“Thanks.  I…”

“Here,” she interrupted, throwing the tie and her arms around my neck.  I watched as a clump of ash fell from the tip of her cigarette and tumbled down my front.  In the time it took for it to hit the ground, she’s twisted the tie into a beautiful knot, the kind that would have done a Fortune 500 CEO proud.

“Wow,” I said.  My mind was desperately scratching for something dashing to say.  “You might have to show me that one a few more times.”

Yes!  You are one smooth motherfucker!

“You know, they say it’s easier to learn to tie one of these with your shirt off,” Jennifer said, a little smile on her lips.

“Uh.  Erm.  I… uh.”

She giggled, the cigarette falling out of her mouth.

“Oops!” she said, bending to pick it up and then jamming it right back between her lips.  I guess the thirty second rule applied to everything.

“Here, I’ll show you once more today.”  She zipped the tie off with a flourish.  Her arms were once more around my neck, and I tried to watch her as she maneuvered the tie back and forth, but the nicotine and the smell of her perfume just behind the smoke, and the warmth of her wrists, and the little freckles on the bridge of her nose conspired to make me a moron.

“Okay,” I said.  “I think I’m learning.”  She let her arms linger on my shoulders after she’d finished the knot again.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I… wanted to see the church.  Was curious.  Thinking about joining.”

“No.  Really.”

“I…  wanted to know about that preacher.  Upshaw… there’s something not right about him.  I don’t know what it is, but he’s hiding something.”

“I know a thing or two about Reverend Upshaw,” Jennifer said.  “He’s not what he appears to be. ”

“What have you heard?”

“A few things.  He’s very wealthy–old money from his family.  He’s not nearly so young as he looks.  He adopted a boy named Hubert not too long ago.  But most of all, he has… charisma”

“What do you mean?”

“You were there.  He’s good at turning certain people to his will.  Were you paying attention to the congregation, hooting and hollering and acting as though Upshaw were Christ himself?  He doesn’t even have long hair.  I bet he couldn’t grow a beard if he wanted to.  It’s a piss-poor Jesus that doesn’t have facial hair and, at minimum, a mullet.  What the fuck is wrong with those people?

“Anyways, it doesn’t work on everyone, from what I’ve seen.  Most of the new people who are younger move on after a sermon or two.  But lots of the old ones… they stay.  No idea why.  They just eat him up.”

“But what is he doing?”

“I don’t know.  He’s just good.  Good at convincing people.  Good at getting them, and keeping them.  I’d like to know how he does it too, to be honest.”

She took another long drag from her cigarette, then blew the smoke up into the gray sky.  She looked like a model in the shadowless overcast.  I struggled with what to tell her, how much she could be trusted.  But she was beautiful and there, and none of my friends wanted to hear about Hubert now.  More and more I noticed them tuning out or rolling their eyes when I’d try to speak about him.  Could she be trusted, though?  Who was she?  Why was she here?  How was it possible that someone so beautiful had just taken my hand and run away with me to…

“I was friends with Hubert,” the words spilled out of me.

“I had no idea.  How did you meet him?”

“Just… randomly.  I didn’t know him very long, obviously.  But he was a good kid.  I’m convinced that he didn’t commit suicide.”

“Then what do you suppose happened?”

“I… I think that Upshaw might have had something to do with.  He’s just too strange.  And Hubert, he was finally starting to fit in.  It doesn’t seem like someone would kill themselves, just as they made a bunch of new friends.

“There’s no telling what’s actually happened, but I can’t believe Hubert committed suicide.  He might still be alive, trapped somewhere in Upshaw’s mansion.  Or passed along to the next person… I’ve heard that he’s been adopted several times now. ”

“Where did you hear that?” Jennifer asked.

“Places.”

“From Hubert?”

“Uh… yeah,” I lied.  Hubert’s file linked us with an actual crime.  Well, I guess that breaking into the principal’s office and stealing an official document was a crime.  Plus the waste can full of poo.  That’s gotta be a misdemeanor.

“I’ve heard things,” Jennifer said as she began pacing back and forth in front of the dumpsters.  “I don’t think they jive exactly with your suspicion against Upshaw, though.  Hubert had problems.  How much do you know, exactly?”

“That his parents died, and that he ended up with a priest, somehow.  And then a succession of other priests, of one kind or another.”

“There’s a story there–though I’m not sure how much of it’s true.  A lot of its speculation on my part.  Apparently Hubert’s parents both went and got themselves killed in a car accident.  Not long after, the priest of their church volunteers to take the boy in.  With no living relatives, ol’ Hubie would have gone right to the orphanage.  This priest is older, and he’s decided to leave the calling, anyhow.  So a deal is struck, and Hubert and his new dad set off.

“But this priest isn’t exactly the godly type.  I swear, I hear so many of these stories that I won’t be surprised when it turns into some major scandal for the Church someday.  Anyways, Hubert and this dude disappear off into the sunset.  They move away, ostensibly so that Hubert can put some distance between himself and all the places that might reopen his healing emotional wounds.

“Only life as a step-son turns out to be a living hell.  He was… abused in many ways.  The son of a bitch priest managed to keep the boy a secret, too–had him locked up in a basement, living like an animal, no human contact other than the man who torments him.  No one to ask about the bruises, no one to save him.

“But then one day the priest gets it in his head that Hubert isn’t looking quite so hot any longer, and lets him out to get some sun–the priest didn’t like his boys pasty.  He’s only let out for twenty minutes or so.  But in those twenty minutes, a goddam truant officer spots Hubert lounging in a backyard at noon on a Wednesday.

“Cat was out of the bag at that point.  The old priest decided to go with the flow–he could have hightailed it out of there, but that would have brought a lot of attention.  Instead, he terrorized Hubert into saying nothing, then sent the boy to school.

“Hubert kept his mouth shut, but his fists up.  He made people notice him, constantly fighting in school.  This went on for months, until everything came to a head.  Hubert finally found it in himself, and ended the priest one lonely night.  I’ve heard something about fire, but who knows how he did it.

“The full story never really came out.  The police wanted to protect Hubert’s identity, the media were willing to help.  Things were covered up to a degree–it was known that the man had died, but the papers all called it an accident.

“Then a conspiracy was cooked up.  To give the boy a chance at a new life, and maybe to repair some tiny part of his faith, a group of old friend came together to foster him.  Of course, the esteemed Reverend Upshaw is just the latest in the line; everyone else has failed.  For one reason or another, Hubert just couldn’t stop fighting.  Maybe… I don’t know.  Maybe it was the one thing that had helped him in his darkest hour, and he didn’t want to give it up.  Maybe he just liked it.

“Say whatever you will of Jerry Upshaw–I think he’s a creep that preys upon the old, taking their money from them while he puts them under his wierdo spell–but I can’t imagine him killing anyone. ”

My head was swimming.  I’d suspected some of what she’d said, but she seemed so adamant in her belief that Upshaw had had no part in Hubert’s death that I found my own resolve shaken and put me off balance.

“Where did you hear all this?” I asked.  “I thought you said you just moved here.”

“I’m Jerry Upshaw’s daughter.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

The rest of our conversation was brief.  She’d been adopted by Upshaw as well, though it had been longer ago, back when he’d lived in Georgia.  Jennifer had been allowed to stay back to finish her last year of high school, and now that it was over, had come to her new home.  With Hubert–the person for whom they had relocated–gone, the future was uncertain.  I was shocked and she could tell, probably even enjoyed it.

When she kissed me, it was with the attitude a person takes when they discard the wrapper of their just-eaten Filet-O-Fish sandwich.  It was almost European, with the feeling of formality or social duty, only I was pretty sure that they generally didn’t use tongue.  She tasted like ash and bubblegum lip gloss.

And then she was gone.  Jennifer walked off without saying another word, flicking the still burning remnant of her cigarette into one of the dumpsters.  Taking this as a dismissal, I went around the building in the other direction, not wanting to give her away as the degenerate nicotine urchin that she was, being seen with me and all.

We’d been back there long enough for the church to let out, and already the mumbling mass of Sunday-going elderly were flooding the lawn with loafers and sensible heels.  I wanted to get home as fast as possible, considered making a wide circle around the group so that I could get to my car on the other side, but knew that this would be far too obvious.  Imagining the hundred wrinkled, rejected frowns that might follow me if the group saw that I was denying their fellowship reinforced the idea of going straight through, shaking a few hands and leaving.

I’d made it about a third of the way through, going smile-for-smile with them like they were volleys at Wimbledon, mixing in a few handshakes and laughs at bad jokes for good measure.  Then Upshaw caught me.  There was no sense of foreboding, no glimpse of his back that allowed me to try and maneuver my way around.  One moment he wasn’t there, the next, he was.

“Don!” he practically squealed.

“Hi,” I said, my face frozen between the last smile I’d given and what I can only assume is the look on people when they’re bitten in the crotch by a Doberman.

“I am so glad to see you here, my boy!  It was just yesterday that I was wondering how you’d been doing.  Are you holding up?”

“I think so.”

“Good.  We’ll you’ve definitely come to the right place for support.  I don’t think that you’ll find a closer congregation in the state.  We’ve really managed to build something here, despite the short time we’ve been together… a real community.  We’d love for you to join.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“So, what did you think about the sermon today?  I saw you down there in the front row.  You were sitting right next to Jennifer, weren’t you?” Upshaw asked.  Though I couldn’t tell you how his tone changed, or even if it really did, they spilled cold water through my innards.

“Uh.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.  The whole thing with the lady…”

“Pretty awesome, isn’t it, the power of the Lord?” Upshaw interrupted.  “I can’t tell you how often I thank Him for allowing me to be His vessel, His tool.  Through Him… and I guess, heck, through me, all things are possible.  There’s no sickness that can’t be healed, no evil that can’t be rooted out.”  I felt his eyes  drill into me at the word evil.

“Um… alright.”

“Look!  Here’s Sister Dorothy now!” Upshaw exclaimed, then pulled her by the arm into the crowd that had assembled around us.  The frail, previously wheelchair-bound woman was still on her feet, so whatever Upshaw had done seemed to be sticking.

“Hi, everyone,” said Dorothy, keeping her eyes down as a shy smile crept across her face.  “I can’t thank you enough, Reverend.”

“Thank the Lord, Dorothy.  It was your faith that healed you; I’m only a conduit, I believe.  Maybe I just make it a little easier to get that prayer on through the great Call Center in the Sky.”

“Amen,” the group mumbled.  My urge to leave immediately went up about a thousand percent.

“Oh, dear, I feel tired though,” Dorothy said.  “If you don’t mind, I don’t think that I’m going to be able to stay for that lunch, Reverend.”

A shadow passed across Upshaw’s face.  “No, not at all, Dorothy.  May I help you to your car?”

“Oh, I’m fine.  All these people want to talk to you.”

“I’ll help you,” I said.  “I was just heading off too.”

“That would be very nice of you, young man,” Dorothy said.  As she took my arm, one of the ushers from earlier appeared from nowhere with her folded up wheelchair.  He stuck it over my other arm, nearly tipping me over.  Laden in this way I shuffled over to the parking lot, eager to escape the crowd.  I looked back once more to see that Jennifer had appeared next to Upshaw.  They spoke animatedly for a few moments before she stomped off, looking for all the world like a petulant four-year-old.

“So you’re not a member here, are you?” Dorothy asked, drawing me back.

“Uh, no.”

“Don’t.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, missing a step and almost breaking my ankle.

“I’m not a member, either.  I heard about this place through my knitting group.  Be very careful here, young man.”

My mouth went dry enough that it was hard to speak.  I finally managed to get out a, “Why?”

“I think that these are very good people.  But they’re the type that are so desperate to believe in something that they’ll ignore the train coming down the tunnel so long as there’s someone there to convince them that it’s just the light at the end.  That man Upshaw… stay away.”

“Um… alright.  Where’s your car?”

“Oh, I took the bus.  The bench is just right on the other side of the lot.”

We got there and she sat, and so did I.

“What do you know about him?  Upshaw?” I asked.

“Nothing.  I’ve never met him, and I’ve met him a hundred times.  He’s all about hope, young man.  I think that you’ve probably led a good enough life not to be too vulnerable to his type yet.  I… I’ve not had quite the same luck.  There are people out there who are willing to exploit some of the purest parts of us to get what they want.  One of those is the capability of the human heart to hope.  Eternally. Unredeemedly.  Awesomely.  Since I’ve gotten sick it seems like I can’t kick a rock without one or two of Upshaw’s type scurrying out from under.  If I could still kick a rock, I guess.”

I laughed, then was scared I’d hurt Dorothy’s feelings.  But when she glanced up, her face was creased with a wide smile.

“You can’t undersell hope,” she continued.  “If you really get down to the root of things, everything, it’s always there.  It’s why people work–the hope that they will make a better life for themselves and, more importantly, their children.  It makes nations out of slaves.  It makes people pull one lever instead of the other when they’re in that voting booth.  And the lack of it… hopelessness… that can be the most destructive force in the universe.

“So the people that are good at giving hope, young man, control a commodity that has infinite value.  They know it, too.  They bank on it.  Everyone needs hope.  The thing is, though, that if you look hard enough, you can pretty quickly figure out what they want for it.  Most people don’t want to look very hard.  They’re willing to go in with their eyes closed.  Some never figure out that all that was really wanted of them was their money, or their time, or sometimes, their love.

“Upshaw is the best I’ve ever met.  Hell, he’s better than them all put together, and then quite a bit more.  When I was sitting in that chair, and he was speaking… I just wanted to believe, and to do what he was telling me.  I don’t think I could have stopped myself if I’d wanted to.  But now it’s wearing off.  Maybe it was all adrenaline, maybe it was something else.  But I knew what I’d been sold when the tremor in my hand returned a few minutes after I’d walked off of the stage…”  Dorothy’s voice caught.

I looked over.  I could see how much she had wanted to believe, and how ashamed she was for allowing it.  It was the kind of embarrassment  you felt when you were twelve years old and at a sleepover and someone discovers that you still believe in Santa Clause.  And yet this woman had a right to it, and she was ashamed, and I wanted to say something, anything.

“My mom always says there’s no such thing as false hope,” I said.

“She’s wrong,” Dorothy said, but her voice was soft, and she patted the back of my hand with her trembling one.

The bus came rumbling around the corner as though determined to inject a dose of inner-city strife into the pastoral quite of the church.  I got up, getting the wheelchair in one hand and helping Dorothy with the other.  The bus stopped, the driver took the wheelchair and grumbled as he jammed it into a luggage compartment.  I helped Dorothy to the step.

“Bye,” I said.

“You’re a good young man,” Dorothy said, meeting my eyes for the first time.  Hers were a paler blue than I’d ever seen, one-in-a-million eyes.   “Stay away from Upshaw.  I’ve met so many like him, and he’s leagues apart.  That’s not what scares me about him.  I’ve had a lot of experience with these people, with seeing through them.  Once you figure out what they’re trying to gain it’s easy.  Usually it’s money.  Sometimes its fame.  Adoration.  Love. A legacy.”

“But what makes Upshaw worse than all the others?”

“He doesn’t want any of those things,” Dorothy said quietly, and then the driver helped her the rest of the way into the bus.  I watched through the dust and the exhaust as it moved on.  I never saw her again.

I was alone with my thoughts as I walked back to my car.  The parking lot was still quiet, the majority of the congregation choosing to linger after the service on the green lawn, smiling and laughing and looking to me like individuals who were quite happy with the taste of whatever Upshaw was spooning them.

I found my car and paused.  I looked for Upshaw, found him quickly as one of the few beacons of youth in the geriatric sea.  Jennifer was back, looking bored, swaying and looking at the sky.

Then my heart froze in my chest.  I blinked a few times, not trusting my eyes.  But there was no mistaking it.

My friend Ricky Sederis stood next to Jennifer, bedecked in a short-sleeve button-up and bowtie.


My hand was poised over the frosted glass slab for the ninth time.  Once more, it froze there as I peered into the opaque world beyond, the hint of a hallway and perhaps some Pollock knockoff hanging in the entry.  I let the arm drop back down to my side, licking my lips.  I took a step back, once more examining the house I was standing before.

It was modern.  Every time I tried to dredge up any further informed impression, that was it.  It was boxes and glass and plaster.  The landscaping was quite nice, though.  If only…

I took a step forward, raising my arm again, hoping that the sudden action would carry itself through, but instead, I stalled.  I rested my forehead lightly on the cool glass, staring at my scuffed Nikes.

* * *

It was a week after I’d seen Ricky that I finally tried talking to my mother about the whole thing.  There had been a bounty of Hungry Man dinners laid out on our TV trays, one for her and two for me, as usual.  Jessica Savitch was on NBC reading off news, and every time she said the word ‘Americans’ I wondered just where the hell she was from.

“Mom?” I said once it was at commercial.

“Uh?” she said around her meatloaf.

“I… I haven’t talked much about this, but I’d like to now.  There’s this kid named Hubert…” I began, and managed to stumble through the whole awkward story.  I have to admit, laying it all out for someone like I did, halting, going back occasionally… I felt like a fool.  The story made no sense.  But I kept on, talking over the TV even as the MASH repeat we’d been waiting on finally started.  Mom’s attention was carefully split, not wanting to ignore me, but also not wanting to miss any of Hawkeye’s scalpel-sharp witticisms.

“So, I’m really not sure of what to do,” I said.  “Hubert could still be alive.  And… and even if he isn’t, something is going on with Upshaw, and now Jennifer is stuck in that house with him.  If Upshaw hurt Hubert, why wouldn’t he do the same to her?”

“Ummm,” she said.  “You said that all of your friends believe that Hubert really did kill himself?”

“Yeah.  At first, they were with me.  Now, they think I’m crazy, and that everything’s alright.  Hell, I even saw Ricky Sideris at Upshaw’s church.”

“Then that’s your answer, Donnie.  I’m sorry, but whenever you’re not sure about something, it’s best to just go along.  Trust in your friends.  Maybe they see something you don’t.”

“Mom… that’s… thanks.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t Donald it up,” she said, a smile spreading over her face.  “Don’t pull a Donald,” she sang in the tune they all always used when the said that phrase, snorting at the end as though for punctuation.

That’s where the idea came from.

* * *

 

There I was, standing on a stranger’s porch, too scared or embarrassed or clueless or I don’t know fucking what.  It was that same feeling you get when you know that you’ve been on the winning side of a game from the word go, and it’s been easy and fun and then you look over at the other team and they’re bloody and their breath is hammering in their chest, and there’s shame in their eyes and as right as you’d felt the second before, now you were wrong, and worth a little less than you were before.  I don’t know.  It was the ‘Hubert Feeling’, the feeling I got when I recalled him in my mind’s eye.  The feeling that kept me going when I felt like a dumb shit, and crazy to boot.

But I couldn’t summon the courage even to make a fist.  It had been a foolish idea.  I took one more look at the place.  The windows were so damned big that I could see through most of the empty, sterile-walled rooms.

Probably not even home.

I turned to walk back to my car.  I was thinking of driving past Upshaw’s.  I still did that a lot, at least once a day, hoping, calculating.  Memorizing.  I knew every inch of the place now…

“Come on in,” I heard a half-familiar voice say.

I turned, my mouth hanging open.

“The door is glass, for Christ’s sake.  I’ve been watching you for the last half hour,” the man said.

* * *

It was strange watching him talk, and my leering must have made me seem like some kind of half-wit degenerate trying to poke the monkeys at the zoo.  Uncle Donald, my dad’s twin, looked identical to my old man but spoke in a voice that had obviously been exposed to education, one that would be totally impossible for dad to ever fake.  It was like seeing a movie with Robert De Niro in it, only he’d been dubbed over by Cary Grant.

“You’re Donnie, aren’t you?” he asked for the second time, and was greeted by the same slack-jawed befuddlement.  Finally, I shook myself out of it.

“Yeah, I am,” I smiled finally.

“Well, it’s nice that you’ve come to visit,” he said.  There was a tar pit silence, just waiting for something to fall into it.  I realized he was too polite to ask me what the hell it was I wanted.

“Uh, I need help, actually.  You were the only one in the family I could think of,” I heard the apology in my voice though I hadn’t intended it.

“Ah.  Well…” his face took on the kind of gentrified look that broadcast: suspicion confirmed.  It was a look that suggested it was so terribly hard living in a world that he was too smart for, that held no surprises for him because he was a master of human nature.  “I’m sure that, within limits, I can assist you.”

He thought I wanted money.  Prick.

“No,” I said a too strongly when Donald’s hand went to the front pocket of his cream-colored, pleated pants.  There was already a large money clip in his hand.  I couldn’t help but smile when he looked up as though he’d been slapped.

“This has nothing to do with money,” I said.  “Nothing.  I need advice.  Maybe not even that, really.  I… I just feel like I’m out wandering in the fog, and there’s nobody on the shore to call me back, and… nothing… nothing out beyond to set my course by.”

His face changed as he slid the clip back into his pocket.  I’d never really seen it, I guess, and I bet it had been years since anyone in the family had, either, but maybe Donald didn’t look as much like my father as I’d thought at first.  His mask looked a lot like him, but now the man across from me had eyes that looked softer, wider, still able to question, and his mouth wasn’t still set in a line that was ever poised to refute some new insult, real or imagined.

Donald looked like… family.  Family as I’d always imagined it.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

And so I told him.  There was a lot of emotion on his face as he listened, though it was all very subtle.  I’d say the most popular one was incredulity.

“This is…  I have to say that this is an awful lot to swallow,” he said after I’d finally stopped.  At least I’d gotten a little better at telling the story after running it past Mom.

“I know, I know, but…”

“I believe you.”

“Uh…”

“I believe that you genuinely think something’s going on…”

“I’m certain of it,” I said.

“And I believe you’re right there as well.  It’s the what that is going on that remains the real question. ”

“Well, I have some ideas there.”

“I’m sure.  It’s a matter of degree, though.  This is all very complex, very treacherous territory psychologically.  This could be anything, really.  But, honestly, I believe you, more than I’d be willing to admit to anyone else, I think.  And I trust your estimation of the potential magnitude of this man’s crimes.  This Upshaw sounds…  I actually did my doctoral thesis on the phenomenon known as ‘the cult of personality’. ”

“Uh…”

“Traditionally, that term only applies to dictators.  You need to have a propaganda machine behind you to create one–at least that’s what people used to think.  But the parallels are too perfect; Hitler has too much in common with Jim Jones.  It was my work, among others’, that started tying them together.

“These people have something in them, Donnie.  If you’re on their side, you’ll call it charisma.  If not, you’ll call it hypnotism, or animal magnetism.  Subliminal control.  Maybe they are dictators, ruling over a nation of a few thousand–a room, an organization, a congregation.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Donald had actually been at Jonestown, a year before the Massacre happened and ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ entered into the popular vernacular.  He always claimed that it was for research, but everyone in the family claimed that he’d been a member of the Peoples Temple.  That was only the latest in a long string of reasons for him being made a pariah by the family.  Whatever his cause for being there, the book that he’d written afterwards had helped make him rich, along with his psychiatric practice that was located right smack dab in the perfect spot to pull in every ignored trophy wife in town.

“Now, I don’t know what this man wants, but he’s definitely got the gift,” Donald said.  “I’ve seen the commercials and the ads.  Christ, his charisma seems to come through even the billboards.”

I watched, unsure of what to say.

“I… I’m sure that if I were to go and begin asking question, the jig would be up.  I’ve been too much in the media, I’d likely be recognized,” he said.  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, but by this point, Donald had a faraway look.  “But this could be big, Donnie.  And very, very dangerous.  This could be huge.  I will help you in every way I can, to unravel this mystery.”

“I just don’t know what to do,” I finally said.

“Be careful,” Donald said, suddenly coming back.  His face was sincere, frighteningly serious.  “This isn’t the kind of thing to be sticking your nose in, normally.  You believe this man may have even had something to do with a boy’s death.  I’m not sure I’d go that far with you, and still, I can tell you that any man that wields such power over a congregation is very, very dangerous.  As he begins to perceive his power over others, he will grow to believe in his own propaganda.  It could easily grow to the point that he constructs a divine identity for himself, and what are a few meager human lives to a god.  But…” he seemed to lose his train of thought.  We sat in silence as I watched the sky darken outside, a spring storm blowing up.

“I… I left out a lot of things from the book,” Donald said.  “There were… legal concerns.  Mostly, I guess I didn’t want to expose myself even more to accusations that I was somehow… complicit in it all.  But I think, in a very important way, I was.

“I saw through him, right from the beginning, Donnie.  Jim Jones was a kind of pointillist Messiah.  From far away, he painted a beautiful picture, but if you got close enough, you could see that it was all just this random noise.  I… How old are you?”

“Almost nineteen now,” I said.

“You… you have a younger look to you.  That you’ve come here to ask for my help tells me that you may be more of a man now than I was at forty years old.  I was afraid while I was around Jones, of course, but there was more.  There’s a natural tendency for people to believe that everything will turn out well, a belief that there’s someone else watching out for them… God if you’d like.”

And this was by far the greater part of Donald’s expulsion from the family.  They had mocked him as a screw-up, as clumsy, as am incomprehensible intellectual all his life.  But I’d seen that they hated for…

“I’ve heard,” I said.  “I’ve heard that you don’t believe in God.”

“That’s…”

I waited until Donald finally relented.

“When I was in undergraduate, through medical school, even part of residency, I always entertained this notion–and the whole family knew it–that I’d  go through the seminary once I’d finished my medical training.  A priest and a doctor… a psychiatrist at that… I planned on charting new territory, on trying to bridge some of the gaps between God and science…

“Residency wore on, until, in my third year, there was a woman in the ER who’d been brought in for self-inflicted wounds.  They were obviously an attempt at suicide–slashing her wrists–but they were so shallow that they’d barely even bled.  Some people just mutilate themselves with cutting, and though that’s serious in its own right, it’s not suicide by any stretch.

“It was the end of a long shift.  When I was consulted by the ER attending for her wounds… I was very tired, you see.  I went to her little bay in the ER, noisy, no walls, only curtains to keep prying eyes away.  And when I got there, I recognized her.

“Now, I did my residency in Los Angeles, a whole country away from here, but I knew this girl.  The odds must have been astronomical of me seeing her.  But, given the circumstances, we both pretended not to know one another.  Unethical, I know, but I was the only one on call, and it was such a minor thing.

“So I glossed over the interview, as she sat there, ashamed and in a paper gown, the bandages on her arms pristine because she’d barely managed to break the skin.  And in the end, I let her go back home.

“There’s an important thing every psychiatrist should remember, Donnie–after all, we’re not as useless as everyone thinks.  The lesson is that a person capable of suicide is equally capable of homicide.  I learned that the next day when I came to work.  She’d gone straight home, found the family shotgun, and murdered her husband and three daughters after locking them in the root cellar.  That was the day I knew I’d never be going into the priesthood.”

The silence stretched after this.  I couldn’t think of anything to say, other than the most obvious.

“So that’s when you stopped believing in God?”

“Oh,” the look in his eyes when he met mine sent a shiver down my spine.  “That’s not it at all.  I was meant to be there that day.  Don’t you see?  I still have faith in God.  I just have none in myself.”

 

 

 

The bird stared up at me, its eye sockets empty.  A once colorful body had been rendered a single caramel color.  Its beak was half parted, as though to whisper one final, accusatory question to me: “Whyyyyyyyyy?”

“It’s Peking duck.  It’s good,” my uncle said.

He’d insisted on taking me out to eat, using the kind of tone people generally saved for street urchins they’d chosen to throw a scrap of bread to.  Still, it was a free meal, and Mom wasn’t likely to be home for dinner, anyways.  I swallowed my pride along with my first taste of duck.

“Yeah,” I said.  I poked the duck on the platter, pivoting it around so that it was no longer gazing into my soul.

“We need to talk about what exactly we’re going to do.  We need to plan,” he said, his voice having taken on an annoying, theatrical tone of conspiracy since we’d left his house.

“I really don’t know what to do.  I went to the church, and I’ve watched his house.  It’s all just…”

“It’s the kind of problem that most people don’t have any experience with.  Don’t feel bad, Donnie.”

“You seem like you already have an idea, though.”

“I’ve had the experience.  When I happened upon the People’s Temple, it was during a very dark time in my life.  I needed something to believe in.  Jim Jones provided that… he was very good at providing things, Donnie.  Nothing material, obviously.  What do you know about the People’s Temple, and Jones?”

“Not much, really.  Mom never let me watch the news stories about it.”

“Jim Jones was around for a very long time before the tragedy at Jonestown.  He was a socialist, and wanted to create an egalitarian society, a place without rich or poor, without race, without fear.  And he believed that the first step towards this equality was to get people to stop believing in God.  At the time in my life when I discovered the People’s Temple, I was… vulnerable to this idea.

“They got along fine for decades, carving out a place for themselves in California after a time.  Hell, Jones managed to get a man elected mayor.  He rubbed elbows with the governor.  Even knew Mondale.  They all spoke highly of him.  They liked him.

“And that’s the most important thing to remember here, Donnie.  That’s what makes this so dangerous.  These people, Upshaw’s congregation, may seem to be under some kind of spell to you, but who’s to say that they don’t choose to be.  It’s easy to attack these people, claiming that they’re brainwashed, but what if they do still have their own free will.  They serve him because they believe in him, because they like him, and how he makes them feel, not because they’re some kind of zombies.

“That’s how it was with Jones.  People liked him.  He had a strong personality, but it always felt like he was persuading you, not forcing you.  At least it’s that way, until you try to leave…”

“Hubert,” I said.

“Exactly.  Maybe this Upshaw was really trying to help the kid, felt sorry for him.  But Hubert would have been inside the whole operation.  He would have seen exactly how Upshaw did things, might have had an idea of what made the guy tick.  Worst of all, Hubert knew those little secrets that made Upshaw human.  They can never allow that, Donnie.  A man that has built up a cult of personality around himself always has to be a little god-like.

“That’s how Jones was, but he was so damned good at hiding it.  But when people started defecting in California, he began to crack.  People who left the Temple wound up dead.  And there were rumors that some people were being held against their will.  Jones felt the noose tightening around his neck.

“This is the part you need to pay extra attention to,” Uncle Donald said, the look on his face sending a shiver down my spine.

“Alright,” I gulped.

“Jones fled to Guyana.  He’d set up a commune down there a few years before, calling it Jonestown to show the world how humble he was, a little experiment in his own personal socialist theory.  It wasn’t doing well already, but when Jones a bunch of his followers flooded it to escape scrutiny in the US, things got worse.

“Pretty soon, the families of the people down there started demanding that the government do something about it–they were all convinced that it was a prison camp, and that most of their loved ones were being held against their will.

“So Congressman Ryan got up a group to go down there to investigate, complete with a bunch of journalists.  He toured the camp, found out that people were working 12 hour days and spent their off time listening to Jones drone on and on about capitalist enemies and how great the Soviets were.

“Several people came forward, wanting the Congressman to help them get home.  He agreed to.  But the thing is, at this point, there were more than a thousand people living there.  Less than ten wanted to leave.  So the Congressman was convinced that Jonestown wasn’t a prison at all–just a terrible place to live, but a place that most of the people chose to be.

“But Jones is paranoid at this point.  One of his followers threatens the Congressman with a knife, as tempers were getting pretty high.  It’s really no big deal, but Jones believes that it means the end.  Totally irrational, I know.  The Congressman leaves, planning on reporting favorably back to the US government, not knowing that Jones, who’s gone totally off the deep end, is sending out guards to attack the Congressional delegation when it tries to leave the airport.  The attack goes down.  Congressman Ryan is killed, the only US Congressman ever assassinated in the line of duty.  Four others die with him, and the rest managed to survive.

“Jones goes further still.  Now he’s committed.  He thinks there will be US troops parachuting into Jonestown within the week.  So they hold a meeting, and they record it all on tape.  Jones tells them that there could be no worse fate than for their children to fall into the hands of the capitalists who will surely soon invade.  He convinces them that they will all be taken, reeducated, tortured.

“Now, here’s the dangerous part, the part that could have very serious consequences for us, if we’re not careful.”

I nodded.  In my mind’s eye, Upshaw had been playing the part of Jones, and some of those nice congregation members I’d just met the other week were now sweating under the Guyana sun, swatting at flies as they listened to their leader spew venom.

“Jones convinced almost every single one of them to kill themselves.  It… it was as if through his force of will alone, he murdered them.  Imagine a human being having that power, Donnie.  Imagine me being able to close my eyes, and concentrate, and cause you to fall down dead right here.  It’s the power that Jones had, though he used his voice as the vehicle for it.  The poison that they used wasn’t something that just caused people to peacefully die, either.  It caused pain, convulsions.  After the first ten or so, people were scared.  You can hear it on the tape.  But they kept going.  Mothers fed it to their babies after seeing people die horribly.  And it was Jones that did it.  It’s all on the tapes.

“And the hell of it is, Donnie, they were praising Jones the entire time.  Thanking him for freeing him from the shackles of a fascist, capitalist monster.  They thanked him for murdering their children.”

“I… I don’t know what to say… Upshaw…”

“If Upshaw has even a fraction of the power that Jones did, he is a very dangerous man.  And if we succeed in damaging him, I can’t imagine that he’d hold back.  He’ll come at us, not himself, but with his followers.

“Then what are we supposed to do?  What’s the plan to take him down?”

“We don’t have enough information, yet,” Donald said.  “We need more.  The answer is quite obvious, isn’t it?”

“No.  No it isn’t.”

“You have to go to him.  You have to join him.”

I felt my face fall, along with my guts.

“Hey,” Donald said.  “no one said this was going to be easy.  Or safe.  But we need information, first and foremost.  We need to determine if Upshaw is preaching something else behind the scenes, for one.  And don’t forget, Donnie: Upshaw could turn out to be harmless.”

“He’s not.”

“I don’t believe so either.  Just keep an open mind.”

“So how are you going to help me?  It sounds like I’m going to be doing everything myself.”

“I can’t go with you, Donnie.  But I can provide you with ample material support.  And guidance.  We’ll make tapes of everything, analyze them, look for ways to take Upshaw down…”

“Maybe write a book afterwards,” I managed to stop gritting my teeth long enough to spit those words out.

“Donnie… surely you can’t think that I’d send my own flesh and blood into harm’s way just to gather material for a new book?  Of course, I do bear a considerable academic interest in the subject, and I daresay, of all the possible people to be confronted with the opportunity to study Upshaw, I’m particularly well-suited to the task.  And of course, any proceeds would be split with you…  But this is all so gauche.

“I saw things when I was with the People’s Temple.  I watched horrors being committed, stood by and did nothing.  I was silent.  I was even at Jonestown, for a time.  I don’t think that I could have stopped it, but I could have tried.  If Upshaw is anything like Jones, we must set ourselves against him.

“But I can’t help you in person.  It would be too likely to put Upshaw’s guard up, too likely to tip him off to our purpose.  It would be best if you could get a group of friends to help you, Donnie.  But they would have to be people that you trust with your life, for that could very well be what is at stake.”

Friends.  My mind wandered back to that first football game with Hubert.  Things had changed so much since then.  The guys had all drifted apart, slowly but steadily, and I the most of all.  But there were a few who I felt I could still count upon.

The little bell that was attached to the restaurant’s door tinkled as it swung open to admit a chattering group.  I turned to see who they might be and felt my breath freeze in my throat.

Ricky Sideris was leading the way, still wearing the bowtie that I’d seen him in weeks before.  Behind him were his parents, I think… I’d never actually met them.  But what really shocked me were the two faces that peeked out from the back of the group.

Alan and Dmitri.