Mercy

There was a dead tree in his front lawn.

Nothing else came remotely close to ensnaring my attention more than that the speckled, twisted mesh of rotting bark, shamelessly revealing its diseased existence with sporadic splashes of white. It was a leper among the botanical world, doomed to be forever cast aside by a vindictive boys’ club of the tree variety until its unstable core compelled it to collapse in upon itself. The tiny thing was pathetically disproportionate, as if it had been unable to sufficiently reach its prime, temporarily locking itself in a state of mortifying pre-pubescence. As if it wasn’t embarrassing enough to have died at the hands of an unsightly anomaly, the tree had been forced to stand in its demise for all the creatures of the forest to see and silently snicker behind its back before the rotted wood finally succumbed to defeat. Naturally, it was the only damn dead tree that I could spot in the entire wooded area surrounding the old bastard’s rustic little dwelling.

The final touch on a display only picturesque to the misunderstood lot of gloomy souls was a squirrel perched atop a claw of a branch. Unsettling foreshadow of death, thou art complete.

As for the victim?

I found myself rooting for the squirrel.

Beyond the decomposing tree was a bit more difficult to visualize due to a limited amount of light illuminating the night. If you looked to the sky, you could spot the intertwining branches of trees more fortunate than the one rooted to Billie Joe’s front lawn, and peeking out from behind a splash of nebulous, translucent clouds with an eerily admirable glow was the moon. A scattered assortment of lustrous lights were meant to fall down upon the general vicinity of the old bastard’s home, though many of them were extinguished by the vast amount of vegetation found nearly everywhere you turned. It was aggravating how very little you could actually perceive, yet I calmed when I realized I would have plenty of time to explore my surrounding in the daylight from then on. As for that moment, however, I could only distinguish a rotting tree, a spotted squirrel, and what appeared to be a fence. Whatever the fuck it was Billie Joe needed to protect himself against in this secluded area of the woods baffled me, for he had no neighbors for miles in nearly every direction. All he had between him and the woodlands were the creatures that inhabited it…and the spirits that haunted them, but I’d decided I couldn’t possibly accept that bullshit, right?

“The fuck’re you starin’ at a dead tree for?” Billie Joe grumbled, nudging himself into my side to convince my body to keep moving.

“Don’t you insult Gimp! And for your information, I was staring at Zombie up there, not the fucking tree,” I snapped, fully aware of the ludicrous nature in my statement, though I simply didn’t care to retract it.

The old man quit pushing into my side at once and gawked at me, mouth slightly agape and eyebrow cocked in utter disbelief. So many flaws in two simple sentences made it difficult for him to find just one insult to throw my way, rendering him momentarily speechless as he grasped at any means to rub my nose in my own absurdity.

“You…you named a tree, Fairy?” he inquired, incapable of swallowing the chuckle begging to escape his throat.

“And a squirrel,” I corrected. Giving the putrid tree one last appreciative glance, I pulled away from its intriguing aura to trudge the last fifteen feet of our journey to the house with Billie Joe clutching both a cane and my arm for support. His breath rattled in his chest, labored and nearly unbearable to listen to, and I relished knowing that we were minutes away from attaining the rest we both required.

The old man craned his neck to keep the dead tree and the peculiar squirrel in his line of vision as I led him away and declared, “Y’know, Zombie’s got them white spots goin’ for ‘im too. He’s like a fuckin’ chameleon sittin’ up there on that branch.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Poor bastard.”

“Mhmm,” Billie hummed before abruptly pausing. A hand darted out to slap mine away from the handle of his front door as his body went rigid. His face contorted in outright confusion, and his head tilted to one side while he strained to hear whatever it was that had plagued him so suddenly. Speaking slowly, he muttered, “Somethin’…ain’t right.”

“What do you mean by ain’t right, Old Man? Is someone going to hack my balls off the minute I open the door, or can we go inside now?” I questioned, wondering whether the hairs standing upright on the back of my neck were stirred by the grim tone to Billie Joe’s warning or by my own slight premonition of foreboding that emanated from every inch of the goddamn house.

“I…I dunno. Part o’ me don’t wanna go in,” he stammered, inching himself away from the door.

“Fine, wait here while I go explain to Jakob that his father was too pussy to enter his own fucking house,” I sighed. I hesitated momentarily as I grasped the handle, but I abandoned all apprehension in hopes of encouraging the frail man to follow me. With a wounded whimper, I felt his quivering fingers interlace with mine, and the pair of us stepped through the front door physically unscathed.

Audibly, however, was an entirely different story.

Somewhere deep within the house, an infant wailed with a chilling similarity to my daughter’s seemingly insatiable cries while two men bickered in close proximity. By their progressively escalating volume, it became alarmingly clear that, if left uninterrupted, their petty argument would mutate into something much more aggressive. Worse still, secreted beneath the shrieks and the bellows, I swore I could hear the persistent creaking of a rocking chair. The goose-bumps began crawling about my skin the moment I identified the last subtle disturbance, for combined with the infant’s howling, it sounded precisely as my apartment had before Darcy felt it entirely necessary to remove our child from the sanctuary of a prostitute.

Wide-eyed, Billie murmured, “Fuck.”

“What the hell’s going on? Whose baby is that?!” I demanded, heart thudding with panic. We were surrounded by absolute chaos, and it certainly did not help to quell my raging nerves to witness the old man shitting bricks beside me.

“You can hear it too?” he whispered, fingernails beginning to root anxiously into my skin.

I was in the midst of replying, dead-set upon spewing a spiteful comeback as my mouth contorted in preparation for an outburst, but a sudden increase in quarrelsome volumes enveloped us. The dispute had grown in disquieting vehemence, and a bone-chilling crunch of what could have been metal echoed throughout the hallways, emanating from wall to wall as the clamor was carried with alarming ferocity about the entire house. I could sense a violent tremor passing through Billie Joe’s body, one so consuming that I feared for his mental state and for his consciousness. A single glance at the ailing man and the blood that appeared to have vacated every damn vein in his face, slipping him into the pallid features parallel to those forcibly worn during his hospitalized captivity, would bring one to realize just how fragile he truly was when mere moments prior to entering his home his face glowed with a nearly buoyant magnificence that took decades from his weary complexion. The vast difference in character was terrifying beyond belief, though I felt compelled to multiply what little courage I had by the thousands. I sure as hell would need it if either of us wished to interfere with the war that had been waged on the home front. Fuck, I even withstood a terrible sensation of being at war myself with the furniture barricades Billie had to guide me through and the wooden land-mines hidden within the floorboards that exploded with creeeeeeaks! so loud I wondered how long it would be before the enemies grew conscious of our progressing invasion of their assumed victory. Little did they know that their triumph in that particular battle purely wasn’t meant to be, for the old bastard wasn’t keen on defeat despite any weaknesses in his state of mind.

We found them in a back bedroom, one hulking figure pinning a much smaller against a wall, while the ruins of a stickered mess of a guitar were strewn about inches from their feet. A young woman, twitching with withdrawal and displeasure upon being stuck with the screaming child in her arms, attempted to rock herself to a state of comfort in the chair that occupied a corner of the bedroom. Though it wasn’t quite the massive or stained mess of an armchair that I’d owned back in my apartment, the wooden rocker groaned with the floor beneath much like the broken springs of my lumpy nightmare once had. The woman looked about two seconds away from throwing the infant straight onto the floor in front of her, so I immediately removed him from her grasp without so much as a feeble protest from his junkie mother. In fact, the contemptible woman sighed in relief once her son was out of reach. The boy quieted his cries to a mere, pitiable sniffling within seconds of being cradled within my arms.

The head of the larger body turned slowly to see who possibly could have quelled the infant’s sobbing and nearly bolted when his eyes landed upon the old bastard and me. He did not, however, remove his hands from around the weaker man’s throat. Without taking his eyes off Billie Joe, he hissed, “Ain’t so tough now, are ya, faggot?”

It was impossible to tell which faggot in the room he was referring to, but no one dared to challenge his authority just yet.

The smaller man squirmed beneath him and spluttered, “P-p-please, Joey…l-lemme go.”

My eyes popped out of my skull at the scene playing out before me, for this was a side of Joseph Armstrong I never thought I’d live to see. He had appeared unnaturally protective of his brother in the company of Billie Joe weeks prior, ripping the crude old man to shreds the moment he began his vulgar derision of Jakob. It sickened me that a simple addiction had turned what seemed to be a genuinely close relationship between brothers into a dangerous rivalry.

“Not until you gimme the money, you little shit!” Joey roared, tightening his hold against his brother’s windpipe. The baby whimpered at the volume of the outburst but did not commence in bawling once again.

“What…money?” Jakob gasped. “I…don’t…have…”

“The money in your fuckin’ wallet, smartass!”

Jakob coughed, choking on the air he was being deprived of, as he struggled to say, “T-take…take it! J-j-just lemme…go!”

Joey released his grip on his brother’s throat and instantly began burrowing through pockets in search of said wallet. With trembling fingers, he ripped the leather object apart the moment he unearthed it only to cry out in frustration at the lack of anything but a driver’s license and a single credit card inside. Jakob took Joey’s momentary lapse into stunned irritation to slug him square in the temple, sending the taller man crashing to the ground among the desecrated ruins of a powder-blue guitar. Joey moaned, but made no efforts in standing again.

“Fuck you, Jake,” he snarled, clutching his head in agony.

“Fuck you for thinking I’d be dumb enough to give a junkie money. Especially after what you did to my car, and if you had any sense at all you would have considered selling Dad’s guitar before smashing it,” Jakob fumed, face crimson after the attack he’d endured and panting as he struggled to regain his breath.

“I don’t need money for drugs this time, I swear! I…we…we need food…and diapers…and shit, we’re so fucked.”

A peculiar sound escaped Billie Joe’s throat as he gawked at the tiny being sniveling into my shirt, unable to wrap his mind around what his elder son had relayed to him. As if to reiterate his thunderstruck state, he whispered, “That better not be my gran’baby.”

Joey rolled onto his back, giving himself the opportunity to smirk maliciously at his father before sneering, “Hey gramps, you think I could borrow a few hundred dollars?”