Mercy

I’ve done research on that place, y’know.

Well, of course he had. Nineteen years of excruciating silence forced by his elder brother’s violently persuasive hand would bring nothing but mounting curiosity down upon one young Jakob Armstrong, curiosity that could not be stemmed with a single slug in the gut or a slap in the face. Joey couldn’t feasibly flog that inquisitive desire to know why a grave was already marked and dated for their father’s supposed death when he clearly had yet to give up the ghost, but he sure as hell made it his personal vendetta in keeping his younger brother’s giant mouth shut. In fact, the discovery of that ominous tombstone is what initially sparked the growing rift between the brothers, though they were too young to understand what was happening to them. A pair that had at one point been utterly inseparable suddenly found themselves drifting apart in an area where it was virtually impossible to find another human replacement for the companion they had lost. The Armstrong boys had grown up alone with their father in that forest, their only contact with the outside world being a private tutor to educate the boys and three channels of television to display the news of a world outside of their secluded security. On a good day there were four, and on that glorious day the boys had a taste of the cartoons of the outside world. That fourth channel, however, was a rare commodity that hardly managed to grasp the attention of the boys when they were still a Dynamic Duo, but after the Day of the Grave, the walls of the Armstrong house were Joey’s preferred refuge while Jakob thrived on any further knowledge of his father to be gained through the wildlife outside of the Armstrong house. At eight-going-on-nine and twelve-years-old, the boys had already learned that they were each other’s downfall, Joey more so for Jakob than vice versa.

After the Day of the Grave, the Dynamic Duo ceased to exist, though a peculiar feigned relationship held together with the elasticity of a partially chewed wad of gum surfaced to keep their father content. He was, after all, the one they feared most, and that fear was left to fester and mutate into full blown terror after the Day of the Grave until Joey simply could not cope with it any longer. He left home at seventeen, leaving both the Dynamic Duo and the Dynamic Façade to crumble before the all-seeing eyes of their clairvoyant father…or the man who claimed to be their father. The uncertainty, the not knowing whether the old bastard was their father or merely a man masquerading as such, was what killed Joey the most according to Jakob…but I had a more plausible theory that revolved around the only fucking certainty I could pluck out of his frenetic recounts: Jakob wasn’t psychic.

They left it unnamed and unmarked for a reason.

The more he relayed to me, the more I mentally willed his lips to stop smacking together and his vocal chords to stop producing sound long enough for me to process every detail he was so forcefully shoveling into my lap. I feared he may have me as dead and buried as the corpses that littered the underground of that forest’s clearing with all the shit he piled upon me, but I was unable to deny how significant his seemingly futile hysterical ramblings were in unmasking the horrors within the real Jakob Armstrong. He may have prided himself in his impersonation of a mentally sound man, a man who could hold his own and didn’t give two shits about what anyone else had to say, yet he was nothing more than the eight-year-old boy who found his father’s grave during an intense two-person game of cops and robbers. He had been the bad guy all his life, cowering behind the menacing headstone while his big brother charged with BB guns blazing and a pair of purple plastic handcuffs to slap upon the dirty rotten scoundrel who had stolen his precious loot, but I could clearly see one of two things. Jakob was never the bad guy, and he certainly wasn’t the assertive asshole I initially pegged both him and his father to be. He was hiding a deadly truth, bullied into silence by the twelve-year-old Sheriff of the Woodlands himself whose irrational anger issues were about as maddening as the tiny metal BB’s that flew every which way from the barrel of his gun.

It was also clear to me that, even as an overprotective parental figure, Billie Joe always had a kinky little fetish regarding the color purple. I mean…why else would Joey have been able to get his eager mitts upon a pair of plastic purple handcuffs?

I mean…they couldn’t just let civilians waltz right into a convicts’ graveyard, could they?

No, they most certainly could not. That would be preposterous, leaving the graves of convicted felons on display for the general public to see, but that also made it impossible for the families or anyone that had been close to the criminals to ever find their loved ones. The more I thought about it, though, the more I began to wonder if that was the point. They were hidden away from society in jail, so being hidden from society in death was imperative, right? Perhaps it wasn’t the general public they were hiding these deceased degenerates from…perhaps they were concealed for the benefit of their victims.

At some point, I asked Jakob how Joey fit into all of it, how his particular piece jimmied into Billie Joe’s almighty puzzle of deception with his eventual arrest attributable to a simple check for one thousand dollars, and he merely gaped at me as if I’d asked him to claw out and suck the vitreous jelly from his own eyeballs. I honestly didn’t think it an absurd inquiry until I heard his answer, but at that point it was too late to retract my own stupidity.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Joe will get popped for identity theft if he uses a check that Billie Joe Armstrong signed because that man has been dead for nearly thirty years.

I was puzzled by his response regardless of how simple it was to accept. Sure, Billie Joe Armstrong was clearly one unfortunate, dead sonuvabitch who may or may not have been a raging lunatic of a felon, but if he’d attempted to buy anything at all in the past while using that name, wouldn’t the old bastard have been arrested as well?

You see, that’s the thing. Dad went by another name when other people were around. It was like a game to him, and I thought it was hilarious until…that day…

Right, right, the Day of the Grave. The entire fucking world shattered that day for every damn member of the Armstrong family whether they had the balls to admit it or not. It took nineteen years for Jakob to pluck up the courage to confide in someone other than his deplorable brother, compelling that scared child cowering behind a tombstone to step forward and realize that the BB gun and plastic purple handcuffs were in his hands now. Joey had become the dirty rotten scoundrel with the stolen loot, and Jakob was no longer eight-years-old and unable to confront anything without the blessing of his brother. He was a man of twenty-seven, and the grave had acquired a new trinket to add to its sinister presence: Zombie, crucified to the goddamn grave marker like the son of God.

He snorted when I told him of my first encounter with the rodent and nearly ran us off the road when I uttered its name. I then demanded to drive if he was going to be so careless, but my request was cut short as my eyes identified a car parked at the side of the road. For a fleeting instant, it resembled my car.

The car that had last been driven by the very man I was escaping from by agreeing to look after Billie Joe…or whatever his name was.

Jesus was a fucking Zombie…fuck, that’s rich. Did you know the damn thing was gonna get crucified?

Jakob’s question threw me off guard, as did the crumpled currency my bandaged fingers enclosed around after I’d thrust my fists deep within my pockets in exasperated irritation pertaining to the situation I found myself in. I didn’t need to count the bills to know exactly how much there would be. Five hundred dollars for a fuck and a suck whether I was asking for it or not. My head whipped back into the direction of the vehicle parked to the side of the gravel road, eyes bulging in an effort to catch a glimpse of whoever might have been behind the wheel. I half expected Elliot to be sitting there, mocking me with his inhuman, licentious stare and nearly pissing his pants in anticipation of getting his hands on me once more.

Only problem with my frightening conjecture was that on second glance, my car was gone.

I may have commenced in a frenzied panic, lungs refusing to expand and contract properly enough to acquire the adequate amount of oxygen for breathing as they succumbed to a merciless panic attack, but Jakob rambled on. He kept my mind off the car apparition and the crinkled bills soiled beneath my sweaty, bandaged palms. He made damn sure that the only notions drifting through my mind were those that would assist him in figuring out what to do about the old bastard even if his methods were wont to be unorthodox and malicious.

I don’t understand how you fit into all this. Until the hospital, Dad would only answer to a different name. There’s just…something about you that changed it all, and what’re you, like, twelve?

I loathed the accusation. I was well aware of my moderately boyish features, but to attack me for it out of random was unnecessary and cruel bearing in mind that I was more than capable when it came to my profession. Nervous and clumsy, sure, but nowhere near inadequate. I growled out my age, twenty-three thank you very fucking much, and returned to glaring out the window for a car I knew would never rematerialize because it hadn’t been there to begin with.

At least, I hoped it hadn’t been there.

So what does a twenty-three year old nurse have to not only bring my dad out of hiding, but out of the fucking closet? What makes you so fucking special?

I didn’t know. I wasn’t special, and I despised myself more than anything else in existence. Only the way the leaves giggled and roared with laughter when caressed by the wind’s frigid whisper, a psychologically abusive sadist, and a silly girl who could only properly raise a child on her own once hell froze over came close, but not one of the aforementioned articles which irked me to the point of madness could outrank the hatred I felt for myself.

I abstained to reply.

You think you could do me a favor, Fairy? Make Dad promise to tell you the truth if you suck him off. That’s how it works with the two of you, isn’t it?

I felt my lip quivering in spite of how desperately I wished to remain unabashed by Jakob’s spiteful allegation. He was fishing for reasons to be cross with me for bringing the old bastard out from behind whatever walls he’d constructed around himself to keep the outsiders from looking in, though I wasn’t quite sure how I’d managed such a seemingly impossible feat myself. Hell, I’d hardly even made progress in getting any information out of the old man…so why would trivial things, an alias and an implied confession, bring Jakob to envy me?

Before I was cognizant of my mind’s desire to speak, I heard myself asking the agitated man seated next to me what Billie Joe’s nom de plume had been.

“He called himself Frankie Wright.”