Mercy

It worked. The deceitful masquerade was done, and all it took was a simulated psychotic break to complete it. I stood there, a quivering jumble of feigned neuroses, while Jakob dug a tragically small grave in the old bastard’s backyard. Perspiration trickled from his mop of dark-brown curls, and each vehement thrust of the shovel into the unforgiving soil below brought grunt after exhausted grunt tumbling from his sweat-slicked lips. His face had adopted the scarlet hue of one overworked and in desperate need of a break, but each slice into the dirt proved more determined and agitated than the one before, turning the mere act of digging into a brutish, therapeutic release of unspoken frustrations. His mind was undoubtedly a spiraling torrent of questions identical to the storm raging within me, though his particular form of curiosity had been brewing years before mine. The sheer ferocity of his tormented state of mind made it all the more easier for him to buy my inability to allow anyone but myself carry the fallen child. In fact, he hardly acknowledged my existence during his plunge into the earth other than to antagonize me into assisting him. The guilt lurking within me urged my body to hand the baby off to his grandfather and claw my way through the soil alongside Jakob’s vicious shovel, but the microscopic manipulative portion of my psyche was far more compelling. Instead of giving in to Jakob’s exasperated orders, I took a few erratic steps backward and waited for the old bastard to explain to his son that I was far too unhinged to help with anything other than placing the body in its cardboard coffin. Billie’s son had issues believing I was even capable of that.

When it came down to it, however, I managed to make parting ways with the corpse much less dramatic than I had made the announcement of its demise without it seeming entirely falsified. I meticulously set the child inside the box and covered it with the blanket Billie Joe held out to me, making sure neither him nor his son caught a glimpse of the charred skin. Choking back a sob, I uncovered Phoenix’s face and ran a hand down his lifeless features before planting a second kiss on his forehead. My hand rested against the cooled flesh for a moment that I made sure felt like a lifetime, and once I believed I could handle putting my daughter into the ground once and for all, I put the cover on the box. For a while, all I did was kneel before the hole in the earth, clutching the cardboard coffin close to my chest until my knuckles had turned white and the corners of the box had begun to dig into my exposed skin. Then, once I was certain I was ready, I lowered the coffin into the ground.

“I’m sorry, angel,” I whispered, tears falling onto the box and forming darkened splotches on the cardboard as if to remind us all that life was just about as temporary as the tear drops. In time, they both fade to inexistence.

“What were you, uh…gonna name ‘im, Jake?” Billie Joe grunted, eyeing me as cautiously as one would eye a rabid dog. He made a motion to place a comforting hand on my shoulder, a hand which would fall almost directly on top of the marks Frankie had left on my skin, but once his palm was less than a centimeter from making contact, he swiftly recoiled, hissing. A similar reaction would have been made if he’d taken a stab at touching burning coals with his bare hands, and I began to wonder if the sheer act of touching me had grown physically painful for the psychic.

What the hell had Frankie done to me?

“Andrew,” Jakob whispered after a reflective pause. Tears had replaced the sweat which had been previously dripping down his face. “Maybe call him Andy for short.”

The old bastard made a peculiar sound, a cross between a sob and a gasp, at the mention of what the child’s name could have been. It meant nothing to me, so for the seconds before either of them spoke again, I was utterly confused.

“You were gonna name ‘im after…”

“Your dad, yes. It’s not like I could name him after you ‘cause I don’t even know if your real name is Billie Joe or Frankie,” Jakob spat, words harsh and jagged enough to cut the old man to shreds.

“The fact that you even considered namin’ ‘im after me is more’n ‘nuff,” Billie sniveled before quickly adding, “My real name’s Billie Joe, kid. Frankie was my…my alias.”

“Stop lying to him, Peach. Frankie Wright was more than just a goddamn alias. After all these years, don’t you at least owe your son the truth? Fuck, I’d even like to hear the whole story from you,” I hissed, stumbling to my feet and proceeding to grab the shovel out from Jakob’s grasp to refill the grave myself.

“So you were talking about someone besides your other name before. Tell me. Who was he?” Jakob pressed, inching closer to his father, wide-eyed and more than ready for the truth.

“Well, uh…I think you mighta figured out a’ready that I’m not straight-”

“No shit!” Jakob interrupted, sarcasm dripping from the two simple syllables.

“Shut up and let him finish!” I hissed, wielding the shovel menacingly enough to induce instant silence in the old bastard’s son. Once it was apparent that no other cheeky outbursts would come bubbling out of his throat, I lowered the tool and continued to pile dirt on top of the makeshift coffin.

“Frankie was my lover,” Billie Joe blurted, and it was immediately apparent that his confession made him feel more than uncomfortable around his son. Just one glance at the old man clearly shouted that he was itching to be out from under Jakob’s scrutinizing stare, but he wasn’t going to get away that easily. At once, he was hounded with another question.

“What happened to him? I mean, you’re using his name, and there’s somebody buried in your grave, so he’s obviously dead, right?” Jakob’s insensitivity brought a shudder coursing through my spine, yet somehow I managed to bite my tongue to keep from ruining the flow of information which was sure to come from his indiscretion.

“Yeah, Jake. Frankie’s the one buried in my grave. He was…” At that point, a choked sob impeded Billie Joe from speaking for a fair amount of time, but that was expected. Frankie was a repressed memory, a murder, from his past that wasn’t exactly a simple subject for conversation. After a while, he finished, “Frankie died exactly a week b’fore his fifteenth birthday.”

The shovel fell from my hands. Sure, Frankie had looked young, but fourteen? All at once, I found it nearly impossible to breathe. I should have been enraged in knowing that I’d been swindled by a goddamn pervert, that I’d practically fallen in love with him if I was even capable of such an emotion, but Jakob’s impending outburst contained enough fury for the both of us.

“How old were you?!” Jakob screamed, though given the amount of hysteria in his voice, he’d already done the math necessary for figuring the answer himself.

“You gotta understand, Jake! He was so mature for his age, ‘n’ he tol’ me he was seventeen!” Billie Joe cried out, but it did little to stem his son’s anger.

“How old were you?!” Jakob repeated, face flushed.

“Goin’ on twenty-three,” the old bastard mumbled, desperate in averting eye-contact with both of us.

“You’re disgusting. Is that why Joe hates you? Why he could never stand to be around you and why he has to stick a needle in his arm just to live with himself for a few hours?” Jakob interrogated, distancing himself from his degenerate father.

“No! I’d never hurt you boys, ‘n’ I never did! Not once!” Billie Joe sobbed, trying to lessen the space between himself and his son, but Jakob kept withdrawing.

“That’s what they all say, isn’t it? You pedophiles never think you’re hurting the kids you rape, not even when they’re screaming and crying for you to stop. Tell me, Dad, did Frankie cry when you popped his cherry?”

Billie Joe had fallen to his knees, gasping for air that his lungs were incapable of obtaining, yet he was somehow able to cry out, “He begged me to!” again and again until my stomach was in ropes. The old bastard never specified whether or not Frankie had cried during the initial rape, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to know. It was sickening either way.

“You gonna tell him the worst part, Peach?” I demanded. Billie stopped babbling at once to gawk at me, horrified.

“Fairy, please…don’t tell ‘im. He don’t understand!” he pleaded, but I would hear nothing of it. After piling the last of the dirt onto the grave so that it was merely a patch of disturbed soil amid the parched grass, I threw the shovel to the ground and advanced upon the disgusting old man to potentially intimidate him into owning up to his final atrocity. My tactics were unsuccessful, so I chose a more effective approach.

“Your father killed Frankie.”

Jakob shrieked, turned on his heel, and ran. Billie Joe called out to him, yet it did little else but persuade his son to run faster, refusing to stop until he reached the safe haven that was his car. Even as the vehicle violently whipped out of the driveway, spraying gravel an impressive distance as it did so, the old bastard howled after him.

“It ain’t my fault! You asked for the truth!” he wailed, but his son was already long gone.

I wondered if he would ever return, if he would bother to save me from his father. The more I speculated, the more it grew evident that my chance to flee from the dying pedophile had been squandered the second Frankie had appeared to me. My only escape from Billie Joe was to quicken the rate at which the life drained from his fragile body unless he gave me a damn good reason for sleeping with a fourteen year old boy.

Directly behind me, I could hear Frankie giggle and whisper, “You can’t rape the willing, Sug.”