Mercy

With an arm wrapped around his waist, I wished to lead Billie Joe to the area upon the shed’s wall where an antique gun case was supposedly hidden, but the moment we came within five feet of Jakob’s sole drawing, he froze. As if his feet had been nailed into the dirt-caked floorboards below, the old bastard would go no further. He stood, facing a child’s crude depiction of a game of cops and robbers, and impatiently waited for me to retrieve the case for him. A faint whine emanated from deep within his throat while his eyes rapidly darted from me to the yellowed picture, yet his mouth would not open to speak. He remained wordless in his pathetic plea like a neglected dog wanting desperately to be allowed outside. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of relief outside this shed.

I shoved him forward, roughly, and the old man yelped in protest. When his flailing arms made contact with the wall in front of us, he howled and fell backward. I watched in outright bewilderment as Billie scrambled to distance himself from where the gun was kept, hysterical as he used his arms and legs to push himself away. There was a ghastly ripping noise, signaling that the seat of his sweatpants had gotten caught on a nail during his frantic scoot across the floor. I cringed at the sound, but my discomfort was almost immediately replaced by amusement once the old bastard pulled himself up.

His ass was caked with dirt. I smiled inwardly until I lifted my gaze to meet his. He was absolutely horrified with what I’d done, and his ashen features screamed for an apology. I would verbalize no such remorse, yet the betrayal in those eyes haunted me. I was nearly moved to embrace him, to whisper sweet nothings until our palpitating heartbeats calmed to steady, mirrored murmurs within our chests, but I held my ground. When he finally realized I wasn’t chomping at the bit to apologize, he began to whine much louder than before. It was eerie, and I assumed the only means of silencing him was to rip the paper from the wall and search for that goddamn gun case.

I was dead wrong.

Jaw set and eyes cold, I solemnly advanced upon Jakob’s drawing and peeled it from the wooden paneling. Billie’s whine intensified. The frayed paper fell from my grasp and landed, face-down, in the dirt below. Gingerly, I used the pads of my fingers to search from some hidden latch embedded within the wood, and as they traced along a foreign piece of metal, the old bastard grew louder still. He was nearly screaming by the time I’d pried the box from its hidden compartment in the wall.

“What’s the matter with you?!” I shouted at him, lunging forward with the antique clutched tightly to my chest. He swiftly recoiled, sobbing along the way. I held the case out to him, and he covered his eyes.

“Nonononono,” he whimpered, waiting for me to lower the case. When he parted his fingers enough to peer out between the gaps and clearly saw I’d not only refused to lower it but had also drawn closer to him, he finally allowed his whine to explode into a full-fledged scream. Only once I’d complied with lowering the box did he cease in shrieking.

My ears would ring for hours after, but I didn’t mind. It was the sole aspect that made his abrupt lapses into silence seem bearable.

Billie clung to the wall behind him, trembling, and I grudgingly began to feel guilty for bullying him to the point of hysteria. I took a step or two away from him, scratched the back of my neck in thought, and mumbled, “You must have been real set on keeping this thing hidden. I almost didn’t find the latch.”

“It’s hid for a reason. Ain’t nobody’s s’posed to find it,” he panted, gradually relaxing his grip on the wall until he was able to stand on his own once more. I blushed and looked away. He was a wreck, and it was entirely my fault.

“Is that why you let your kids tack their drawings all along the walls? Did you hope it’d make the gun more difficult to find?” I asked timidly, poking at the dirt on the floor with my toe until I’d created a pitiful mound. I was so immersed in the process of building little mountains that I hadn’t noticed Billie was winding up to knock them down. He didn’t answer me until one of his tiny feet came crashing down upon my simple creation, prompting a cloud of dirt to billow up around our ankles.

He coughed, cleared his throat, and grunted, “Yeah, but Jake always knew the gun was there. I dunno how, but he did. He tacked one o’ them things on the wall to hide it from his brother, ‘n’ Joe…Joey…”

Billie was unable to continue. His vocal chords contracted and his tongue became a useless pink blob within his cotton-filled mouth the moment his deceased son’s name passed through his lips. I let it slide, for I presumed his end of the conversation had been obliterated by the mere mention of Joey. Minutes of silence passed, and I was convinced he would not speak again.

My body spastically jolted with shock when his voice unexpectedly pierced the air.

“Joey was always drawin’ pitchers after Jake tacked that first one up. He was damn near obsessed, coverin’ ev’ry inch o’ these walls wit’ ‘em. Jake was pleased wit’ ‘imself for that ‘cause he di’n’t have much influence over his brother, but I always thought the pitchers were morbid. I never understood why ‘til now. Just lookit ‘em, Fairy. Lookit ‘em real close,” the old man instructed, gazing from picture to picture as an unspoken revelation appeared to reverberate throughout his body. I wordlessly followed his gaze. I didn’t find a damn thing wrong with any of the drawings save for a backwards letter or two in Joey’s sloppy signatures.

“What am I supposed to find?” I demanded. Billie Joe’s face fell considerably, and my confidence faded as I was unable to present my lover with an adequate response.

“Ghosts. They’re all ghosts. Ev’ry single one,” he whispered. His eyes were dinner plates with an immeasurable amount of information to be gobbled upon each one, and his mind ravenously did so as it processed the answer to an unasked question that had been slowly driving him mad since the day Joey left home.

“They’re scribbles, Old Man. How can you possibly know that he meant to draw ghosts?” I spat with one incredulous eyebrow cocked.

“All these years he was tryin’ to tell me…”
“Tell you what-”
“…‘n’ the fuckin’ answer was right here…”
“You’re losing it, I swear to-”
“…plastered right under my fuckin’ nose. I’m an idiot.”
“No shit.”

Billie collapsed against the wall and slid downward until his knees buckled. He landed lightly with his legs folded pretzel-style beneath him and allowed for his head to fall heavily within his hands. It was distressingly obvious how furious he was with himself, and a maddening sense of helplessness began to swarm about inside me as I realized I couldn’t help him. Hell, I couldn’t even begin to speculate the reasons why his self-loathing had been exponentially increased within a nanosecond. All I knew was that it had something to do with Joey.

His junkie son had so many issues that the trigger for Billie’s insanity could have been anything.

“Joey’s like me,” he muttered, refusing to lift his head.

“How so?” I cooed, plopping down beside him. The antique case brushed against his thigh, and he hissed as if I’d struck him. He wriggled away from the touch of the box but allowed for his head to fall against my shoulder. I was subconsciously relieved that it was the case itself which forced him into hysterics, not me.

“He can see the dead,” Billie sniveled. He spoke of Joey in the present tense. His denial was almost too much to bear.

“He used drugs to make them go away like you did with booze,” I offered, satisfied with myself for drawing the conclusion before the old bastard could spell it out for me.

“Yeah. Just like me,” he sobbed. “He really is my boy.”

“You had doubts?”
“O’ course I did. In case you forgot, Adie’s a manipulative shrew. She woulda done anythin’ to make me stay wit’ ‘er.”
“Jakob’s not yours, is he?”
“No.”
“But you raised him like he was.”
“I had to.”
“Does he know?”
“No, ‘n’ I ain’t never gonna tell ‘im. He don’t need to know.”
“Kinda like how you don’t need to know Joey’s dead.”

Billie Joe’s body stiffened beside me, and at once he removed his head from my shoulder. His lips curled into a frightening scowl while he dragged himself up into a standing position. He groaned with the pain of his joints’ collective protests to movement, and he coughed as his damaged lungs demanded his attention. I reached out to grab his hand, to keep him from leaving me, but before my fingers could curl around his, he walked away.

“You can’t drown a fish, Mike,” he hissed over his shoulder as he exited the shed. “Joey ain’t dead.”