12
High-Functioning
Trevon Gaines walked from the bus stop to Mama’s place. It was three blocks up and two over — but really two and three-fifths blocks over if you counted by house. Westchester was a nice neighborhood, and you got to look at planes flying overhead from LAX even though right now you could mostly only see their blinky lights ’cuz it was dusk. Tonight was a family dinner, and all his aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters would be there except Kiara ’cuz she was in Guatemala and Leo ’cuz he was at home with a broke jaw and Gran’mama ’cuz she was in the home and Daddy ’cuz he was in heaven.
Trevon had a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, ’cuz you always showed up with something — that was a rule — but it was confusing because it wasn’t chuck, it was “Shiraz” which was almost like that girl’s name from PE back in high school, the one who wore the tight shirt and he’d watch run around the track but not stare because staring made people nervous.
The bottle was also confusing because it didn’t cost two bucks, it cost $1.99, which was one-sixth of what Trevon made an hour as the night watchman at the warehouse. Actually, it wasn’t one-sixth, it was 16.5833333 et cetera percent, because the penny made it not perfect. He didn’t like not perfect, but Mama always told him that not perfect was just fine, because things and people were made all different ways and they were all just as beautiful and you still loved them just as much.
It was a lot to spend for the Shiraz, because he wouldn’t drink any of it, but Mama never let him show up without bringing something no matter how small even though she was rich and had a nice house and gave him money every month to help him stand on his own two feet ’cuz he was a twenty-seven-year-old man now and how was he ever gonna meet someone if he didn’t stand on his own two feet. If you thought about it, he was just spending Mama’s money to ride the bus to Trader Joe’s and buy something to bring back to her, which didn’t make sense, because why couldn’t she just go to Trader Joe’s and buy it herself, but that was a rule about how people did things, and rules were important to follow even if they didn’t make sense.
He shoved his thick glasses up his nose and headed up the walkway and saw that the front door had been left open, and that was weird because Mama wasn’t raised in a barn.
It was a heavy wood door, and the hinges creaked when he pushed on it. It was quiet inside, and it was cold. The tiles on the floor were red Spanish tiles, and there were forty-eight of them in the front hall, and they were too small to walk on and not step on cracks, but that was one of his rules and not a real rule so he didn’t have to follow it, and sometimes it was even better not to.
He went down the hall to where it hit the big kitchen and living room and family room and the glass sliding doors that stacked back onto each other and opened wide to the yard.
He stopped.
He stood there for a minute blinking.
His first thought was of sangria, splashed on the walls, spilling off the accent table, staining the tile. He accidentally drank it once as a kid ’cuz it looked like juice, and he’d chewed the orange slices and then got all dizzy-headed. This looked like someone had dropped a pitcher. Or pitchers.
Then he looked at what he was trying not to look at like he used to try not to look at Shyrece’s chest when she ran laps in PE.
There were bodies, and they were sprawled on the couch and the floor and slouched against the walls, and they were the bodies of his aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.
He heard his mouth make a noise that sounded like a groan, and then he was saying, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”
He closed his eyes, and he hummed a little.
Then he opened them and looked at the twenty-seven drops of blood on the third tile from the back wall and the thirteen plastic spoons sticking out of the cup on the counter and the eighteen slats of the heating vent.
He blew a shaky breath and walked out through the slid-back glass doors into the backyard. His cousin Aisha was lying on a lawn chair and Uncle Joe-Joe was floating in the pool and Auntie Tisha was on the lawn with her dress all tangled and—
Mama was in her usual spot by the BBQ, except she was propped up in her chair now with her head nodded back so you could see all the rolls of her chin.
Trevon stared at her and felt hot beneath his face. And then he blinked hard, because we don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself, and he said, “That’s okay, Mama. Don’t be scared. You’re in heaven.”
It was getting harder to see everything, because dusk does that at the end, goes away fast. But Trevon heard footsteps crunching the gravel by the side of the house, and he turned around and the footsteps were getting closer, and he could feel his heart jerking in his chest.
Two shapes came out of the dark and turned into two men. One had the kind of outlined muscles you don’t find in nature but you see sometimes on TV. He had a tattoo of a half skull on each forearm, and Trevon could tell that if he held his arms together, they would make a full skull.
The other man reminded Trevon of how Uncle Joe-Joe always described that Johnson boy who lived around the block — raw and lean and all hungry-looking like.
They approached. They were wearing white gloves like the surgeons do on TV, and the gloves were stained red like they’d just performed surgery.
“Please,” Trevon said. “Don’t.”
The raw one smiled, and his pointy tooth glinted in the glow from the BBQ. “Don’t what?”
Trevon pointed at Mama and Auntie Tisha and Uncle Joe-Joe in the pool even though you couldn’t see him in the dark anymore.
“Oh. That.” The silver tooth gleamed again. “Nah, we got something better in store for you.”
“Damn,” the muscley one said. “Those are some Coke-bottle motherfuckers.”
It took a sec, but then Trevon figured out he was talking about Trevon’s eyeglasses, ’cuz that’s what Clyde Johnson called them.
The muscley one said, “You’re Trevon Gaines, right?”
Trevon said, “Uh-huh.”
“Night watchman at SoCal First Bonded Warehouse?”
Trevon said, “I was Employee of the Month in February and April.”
The men looked at each other.
“This should be easy,” the muscley one said. He walked over to the trash can by the BBQ, lifted out the liner, and dumped the trash on the lawn. “He’s a fucking retard.”
“No,” Trevon said. “I’m high-functioning.”
“Either way,” the raw one said, flicking open a folding knife, “you’re coming with us.”
The muscley one put the trash bag over Trevon’s head, and everything went dark, and he got panicky and sucked in, but the bag filled the whole inside of his mouth.
Then a hand palmed the back of his head and something punched through the trash liner into his mouth and nicked the side of his cheek, and then he could breathe through the slit in the bag, but only barely if he sucked in and blew out really hard.
The Scaredy Bugs were running crazy inside his body, but he breathed as hard as he could to get air and told the Scaredy Bugs they weren’t in charge, that he was the boss of them, and when the men shoved him to walk toward the gate, he didn’t complain, because we don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.
13
Good Little Lamb
From Terre Haute, Indiana, to the outskirts of D.C. was a straight shot on 1-70, ten hours and change without traffic.
But traffic had gotten worse in the past 1,779 days, and by the time Judd Holt steered the shitty Nissan Maxima into the motel parking lot, it was full dark.
He’d no sooner parked than the flip phone buzzed in his pocket. He thumbed open the clamshell and read the message: RM 7.