Saturday Night
Christopher knew they would be coming for him soon.
He sat on the wooden porch in front of the trailer, his head buzzing, with his back to the door. The television in the room behind him was left too loud as usual. It was tuned to a re-run of a five-year old Saturday Night Live. Two actors playing semi-retarded children are annoying a group of adults at a dinner party.
Christopher tapped the last Marlboro Lite out of a soft pack he had taken from Father’s jacket pocket and fished a purple Bic lighter out of the front pocket of his camouflage shorts. He held a flame to the tip of the cigarette and let his first draw linger, filling himself with the sweet smoke.
The exhale felt like a sigh and he let his head dropped with the weight of the past few moments. He wiped a three-dot spatter of blood from the inside of his right calf with his thumb then wiped the thumb on the back of his shorts.
He looked up again. The cool fall air cut through his faded tee shirt and chilled his knees and he realized he hadn't felt anything in the last few minutes. His eyes filled with this new awareness of his surroundings, awareness that this one great moment was over.
Christopher knew his life had just changed in an irreversible way. He knew it as certain as he knew that the cigarette in his hand was one of the many ways you could be killed. He knew that his fourteen years of living before this one moment of fatal violence had been one of his lives and everything from this moment forward would be his second life. But his life had needed to change, he was certain of it. What was done had to be done. It was inevitable. And it couldn't have been avoided from the moment he figured out who he really was and what had been done to him, the day he figured out the difference between the existence he was living and the existence he was supposed to live.
"Hon, are you okay?" He recognized the voice from the park, a hunched, overweight, chain-smoking old lady who always wore flowered housecoats and looked after most of the toddlers from the park that had parents who worked during the week. Her trailer sat cat-corner to his. She was in her doorway, silhouetted by her sharp porch light.
He took another pull on the cigarette. He couldn't bring himself to answer.
He heard her lumber across the road and hesitate at the bottom step of the porch, her eyes looking over him. He looked up. Her eyes were wide, nervous but wise. But they softened when she read the expression in his face and she looked past him to the partly open door of his trailer.
"Son," she said. "Is everything okay in there? I heard shouting. Do you need help?"
The old woman touched the top of his head as she walked past him in and stepped into the small living room of his trailer. He knew what she would see in there and he knew he should spare her from the sight of it but again, every part of his body felt weighted and sodden, too thick and heavy to follow his will to do anything but sit there and stare and his shoes, his cigarette burning to the nub in his pinched fingers.
He followed her footsteps across the front room. With a solid click, she turned off the television and the night fell more silent than he had ever remembered. The park was usually full of hubbub, even this late at night, even this time of year. But gone was the chatter of his drunken neighbors, the children, the annoying buzz of the mosquitoes that built up when the pond that collects runoff rain from horseshoe-shaped road that runs through the park stand stagnant. It's like every living thing in the park came to a standstill the moment he fired the shots that ended the man he called Father's life.
He heard the old woman pick up the phone in his kitchen then three short tones. Her voice shook as she spoke. "Hello. I'm at Desert Ridge mobile park. There's a dead body in one of the trailers here." Christopher flicked the long ash from the end of his cigarette while she paused. "I'm sorry, I don't know but yes, I am sure," she said. "I’m a nurse. He looks shot."
*****
He knew it was an odd thing to think even as it came into his mind but he was impressed with the old lady; she was keeping her voice low and even, had surprising cool for the fact that she was looking at a dead man not twenty feet from her own front door and had ruffled the hair of a murderer.
He heard her speak the address into the phone. "There's a young man sitting outside. I think the dead guy is his father. I mean, I've seen him in the trailer park but I don't know him. Jamie. I’m sure his father called him Jamie. He's not talking much. He looks scared. And I heard fighting. Just before."
She must have moved or turned away from the front door because her voice dimmed. Christopher lifted and turned his head. "There is a gun in the trailer. No, he doesn't. He's just sitting there. No, I didn't. I won't."
*****
The first siren broke the night's silence, distant. He could see a few more sets of eyes at the windows and doors of the aluminum neighborhood.
"He may not be," the woman said. "I hear them, yes. Do you want me to move the..." she was cutoff. "Okay. Listen, I think I need to see after the boy. Can I wait out there? I will. I will. Yes. Thank you."
Christopher heard her footsteps come out of his trailer and onto the porch with him. He could feel her standing at the threshold, watching him. “Shoo,” she said to a pair of twenty-something’s from the trailer directly across from Christopher who had come out onto the porch to stare at him. “Go on. Get back.” They stepped back into their home.
The buzzing in his body had turned into a tremor and he could no longer hold on to the cigarette so he wrestled a final drag out of it and dropped it onto the bottom step of the porch.
The woman sat beside him on the step. The touch of her hand on his arm was light. Maternal. Not that he really knew how maternal would feel thanks to Father.
“Honey. Did you do that? Inside?”
All he could manage was a nod.
The siren grew stronger. A second could be heard a bit further off, coming from a different direction. The woman’s voice softened. She slipped her arm around his shoulder. “The police will be here soon,” she said and pulled him to her. “Do you want to talk about it yet?”
Christopher did want to talk about it. And a thousand things to say rattled around in his head - stories of pain and punishment, stories of his numb existence, the story of how he woke up to the reality of the life that Father had fabricated around him, the story of how he figured out how to use the internet on Father’s phone and learned about school and family and real food and all the other things everyone else in the world his age had in their lives. But the images and impressions were like dollar bills in a tornado – enticing but impossible to catch.
“Maisy,” he said, his voice shaky. The woman’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
“Maisy?,” she said. “What’s Maisy dear.
“Maisy Stephenson.”
“What does that mean dear?” The old woman lifted his chin with her hand. “You aren’t making sense, son. The police are going to be here soon.” She pinched his chin a little and he lifted his eyes to hers. The first siren grew stronger still. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s been going on,” she said. “I’ve been living in this park a long time and I see everything that happens here. I know you’ve been living here a while even if I have never seen you play out in the street or wait at the school bus with the other kids. I know that man (she pointed a thumb over her shoulder to the trailer) ain’t one to get along with people. He’s barked at me once or twice. But I’ve kept my mouth shut.”
She let her hand fall from his chin and rest on Christopher’s shoulder. “I can see the bruises on your wrist.” She rubbed her thumb against his cheek. “I know what a black eye looks and feels like even if it is almost gone. You’ve got to get it straight in your head what happened in that house before the first policeman gets here. If what I saw is the only way things could have worked out for you, you’ve got to be ready to say it. Do you understand?”
He could see pleading in her eyes. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know anything about her. But he could see that there was something personal in her words. He wanted to tell her, to give her the satisfaction that he was a victim here, that he had to pull the trigger that put Father down in a puddle of his own stinking blood, that he shot his abusive Father our of fear and in self-defense, but her couldn’t lie to her, couldn’t tell her that he hadn’t done for himself at all.
“Maisy Stephenson. Please, Maisy Stephenson.”
“Oh poor dear,” she said and pulled Christopher into an hug as the first patrol car rolled to a stop about twenty yards down the road from Christopher’s trailer.
*****
A Deputy Sheriff popped out of the driver’s door, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol, and quickly scanned the trailer park. The old woman raised her hand and waved him over.
“Did you call Ma’am?”
“Aye. In there. A man’s been shot.”
The young cop unholstered his sidearm and lifted it toward the door. He looked back at the woman. “Up there.”
“Go on,” she reassured.
He hesitated but stepped past her, mumbling something into a radio microphone strapped to the collar of his uniform shirt. A second squad car pulled in behind the first. An older deputy fumbled with a baton, trying to slip it into a sleeve on his belt once he was free of the car but missing twice until he looked down to guide it properly instead of up to the trailer.
“Up here Charlie,” the first cop said. The second officer looked at Christopher and the old woman as well but she nodded and he went past and followed his younger colleague into the trailer. Christopher could hear panicked mumbling from inside the trailer. The cops were trying to put it together. He could almost feel head scratching. A new siren popped up in the night. And another. He needed to get across to them soon but the palsy was getting worse. His teeth chattered.
The two deputies came out onto the porch. There was caution in the older man’s voice. “Ma’am. Did you…”
Christopher looked at the old woman. She turned to the cops, her eyes furrowed. “No.”
The older cop looked at Christopher.
“Look,” the old woman said, “don’t go rushing to any conclusion. I have no more idea what went on here than you did.”
“All the same ma’am,” the younger cop said and reached for Christopher’s right wrist, lifting him from the step.
Christopher didn’t resist but it was hard for him to get up, like he had been poured of cement when he sat down after the shooting. “Relax,” he said. “I’m just going to sit you in the back of my car until we can get this all sorted out.” To the old woman, he said, “Stay right here ma’am. The detectives are on their way. We’ll need to get a statement from you as well.”
Christopher looked at the old woman as he was being led across the road to the first squad car. ‘Tell them you were forced to do it,’ she said with her eyes.
“Maisy Stephenson,” was all he could manage.
“Wait for the detectives,” the cop said and sat Christopher gently in the back of his car.
“Maisy Stephenson,” he croaked as the car door closed, his voice at half the power he could normally manage.
‘Who is Maisy Stephenson?,’ he could hear the cop asking the old woman and the world went silent and abstract for Christopher again.
*****
Christopher pressed himself as far into the stiff rear seat of the patrol car as he could, melting into the pre-formed plastic curves. The shaking had subsided and he felt nothing but tired now, as if the whole ordeal had taken place days ago and he had yet to sleep off the experience.
The entire car smelled of oranges. Not the natural, drink-yours-with-the-pulp-left-in kind. The slightly chemical orange of the gritty hand cleaners you find in the working bathroom at an off-the-main-street service station.
He let his head lie against the back of the seat and watched the trailer. Scores of uniformed cops had come out to the little park. Most of them seemed to have no real purpose there. They were around for the experience of looking at a body, it seemed. He took in their body language, tried to read their lips. It was a lark for some. They were excited. As keyed up as he was numb. All he could do was lay there and keep his mind working. He couldn’t risk falling asleep yet. Not until he talked to Maisy Stephenson.
Maisy Stephenson. The name sounded so foreign to him when he played it over in his mind. Maisy Stephenson. It washed over him with sadness that he didn’t have the connection he should have with the name. But even he, at such a young age, was wise enough to know that even the strongest connection could be polluted by the evil of the world. He was also wise enough to know that the bond he shared with Maisy Stephenson should mean something even if he couldn’t feel it. In fact, he had just gambled his whole life on the promise of that tenuous bond.
He could see the detectives the first young officer had spoken of. The lookey-lou crowd of uniforms tensed as a mid-fifties black woman with a boxer’s shoulders and demeanor stepped up the porch steps, a white man three inches shorter than her in a thick denim jacket, the kind a rancher would wear, trailing behind. The black detective spoke with authority to the young officers and several set off in the direction of other trailer, the intention of purpose in their eyes.
The detective’s eyes were sharp. She looked back at the car, at Christopher, leaving her stare on him while the first officer on the scene read to her from a small notepad. Christopher could feel his face heating up as she watched him. She was driving the numbness out of him from fifty yards and through a steel door and a solid glass window. He could see strong thoughts on her face. She suddenly turned back to the young man. He looked puzzled then flipped one page back in his notebook and spoke two words for what was obviously the second time. Christopher could read the words easily. “Maisy Stephenson,” he said. The detective motioned with her hands and the young officer repeated the name. The detective looked back at Christopher and he knew she was the one. She was the one person out of this whole night who the name meant something to. He could see it in the way her face had changed. The stern mechanics of working the puzzle of the dead man in the trailer and the emaciated and bruised young man in the back of the squad car was gone. Her mouth was the tiniest bit open. Her eyes had livened. She was deciding what to do about a connection she had just made. He saw her make a decision; she spun to her partner, grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the trailer, away from Christopher’s view.
*****
Christopher smiled and closed his eyes. He tried to bring a picture of Maisy to his mind but could only manage a silhouetted face looking down at him from above, framed in long curls that tickled his face. Frustration of not being able to fill in the details in her face nudged into his consciousness and before he could control it, the man who demanded to be called Father was in her place. This face he saw clearly; every ingrown follicle, every smudge of filth, every contour of the ridge of his eyelids.
A rasp on the window opened his eyes. The white detective looked in at him, contempt on his face. Christopher straightened himself as best as he could. The man looked over his shoulder and was shaking his head. Christopher followed his gaze. The black detective was standing back at the foot of the porch to his trailer and was speaking. She held a white plastic three-ring binder in one hand, her thumb marking a page, and urged the white detective to move as she instructed. The spine of the binder was as thick as a big-city telephone book.
The white detective turned back to Christopher and continued to stare until the first officer that had arrived on the scene ran over to the car and unlocked the rear door of the car.
“You. Come with me,” the white detective said and pulled Christopher off the back seat roughly and onto his feet.
Christopher was marched to the trailer. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the white detective said to his partner. She ignored him. She had opened the book to the page she had marked with her thumb and was lifting a cell phone to her ear with her other hand. Christopher could see the photograph of the face of a four-year old boy he no longer recognized on the page and the words ‘Missing since October 1997’ across the top.
The detective spoke softly into the phone, turning away from Christopher. Christopher stood tall when he was lurched to a stop, arms length from the black detective. The shaking was gone. The malaise was gone. His heart raced and he could feel rushes of blood warm his face and tingle through his arms.
The black detective said “okay, if you’re sure” into the phone.” Christopher heard the person on the other end of the phone speak. He couldn’t make out any of the words but the sound, the timbre of the voice, seemed to vibrate the air around him on a frequency that seemed synchronized with every cell in his body.
The white detective tightened his protective grip on Christopher’s arm. The partner closed the gap between them and lifted Christopher’s chin so she could see straight into his eyes. “There’s someone on the phone who wants to speak to you.” She held the phone to his ear.
“Maisy Stephenson?,” he said weakly. He heard breathing on the other end of the connection. A dog barked in the background.
“Yes,” she said gently, carefully; pained but hopeful.
Christopher’s legs weakened and he felt the weight of his body fall onto the white detective’s arm. “Mom?,” he said.
“Oh my god.”
“Mom.” He was crying now.
“Christopher?” She was crying.
“Can I come home now?”