“He wasn’t my father,” Frank said, almost spitting the words out. “He had a hand in raising me, but he wasn’t my father.”
“I remember an older guy. An Uncle I think.” His searching mind unearthed the name. “Sammy, I think his name was? Uncle Sammy? That sounds weird, but—”
At the mention of Uncle Sammy, Frank turned away from Vince, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He appeared to be visibly affected, as if he’d just heard a set of fingernails being scratched against a chalkboard. “That’s Samuel Garrison,” he said, softly. “Yeah, you got that right. What else?”
Knowing that the mention of Samuel Garrison bothered Frank immensely and wondering why, he plunged on. “There were others, I don’t remember all their names. There was an older couple named Paul and Opal… that’s an old fashioned-sounding name, isn’t? Opal? I remember a black guy, real thin, friendly… a real cool dude. Sharp dresser. I think his name was Bobby. There were a couple of young guys that my dad used to hang out with. Maybe it was my mom’s boyfriend. I’m still not so sure who my dad was . They looked like hippies. A lot of the people that used to come around were kinda hippie like, but they were also respectable. You know, normal looking.”
Frank was nodding. “You remember more than I thought you would then. Much more.”
“I remember you and I used to play together,” Vince continued. “We used to play with Nellie and a couple other kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes there were kids whose parents our folks hung out with. I don’t remember their names.”
“I remember them, too,” Frank said. “I don’t remember names much myself. I had to dredge them up with the help of regression therapy.” He motioned to Vince. “What else?”
Vince shrugged. “Just… it all ended. We moved, and you weren’t around anymore for some reason. I don’t remember why. Or maybe it was you and your folks moved.” He concentrated, trying to remember. “Yeah, I think that’s right. My mother told me you and your folks moved.” He looked at Frank. “Is that right?”
“Pretty much,” Frank said, looking out the window idly, as if he didn’t want to answer Vince’s question. He turned to Vince. “Anything else?”
Vince tried to remember but he couldn’t. The images floated in his mind, intermingling with the dreams: the darkness dream, the dream in which the weird man tried to kill him. They all swirled in his head like a kaleidoscope. He felt weird telling Frank all of this, especially since he barely knew the man, but then it was Frank Black, his childhood friend. There’d been a bond between them twenty-five years ago, almost brotherly like, and despite the long gap of not seeing him he felt he could tell Frank everything. He told Frank a watered down version of his mother suddenly packing him up in the middle of the night and moving back east. He related what he remembered about the drive. “Now that I think back on it, I get the feeling that my mother was running from something out here,” he said. “What she was running from, I don’t know. But I remember how nervous she was during the drive. Her determination to put as many miles down every day, her insistence that we stay in out-of-the-way motels, our changing cars every few states.”
Frank nodded through the narrative as Vince continued. He summed up their arrival in New York, then their move to Toronto, and then the move to Pennsylvania. He left out the stuff about his mother becoming increasingly fanatical in her religious views. He didn’t want to taint Frank’s ears with his theory that he believed mother had skipped California so suddenly because she’d angered some cultish hippies. It was his own pet theory he’d developed in the last day or two and he wanted to see what Frank knew about his mother before he voiced this opinion.
“That’s it. What about you?”
Frank looked out at the park, noting the activity around them. He looked in the rear and side view mirrors, as if checking to see if they were being observed. It made Vince a little uneasy. Then he keyed the ignition to activate the battery and pressed the power window button; it slid down. He turned the ignition off and settled back in his seat, twiddling with the keys. “When you say that you thought I’d moved,” he began, “it isn’t really the whole truth. The truth was, I was taken out of my home and placed in foster care and my parents were jailed for abusing me.”
It didn’t surprise Vince. Maybe it was the air of dysfunction that seemed to permeate around the man. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Frank’s mother, Gladys, and his stepfather had been pretty strict. He remembered thinking to himself once that he would have hated to live with them. While he never actually saw them physically strike Frank, the implication was always there. Mom used to always say Frank was “a bad kid,” and he certainly remembered the older boy as being sullen and troubled. This new revelation explained it.
Frank took off his shades. His eyes were dark brown and piercing. They were haunted, liquid pools of pain. “What I have to tell you is pretty heavy stuff. It’s… going to sound pretty crazy to you.”
“Nothing sounds too crazy,” Vince said, thinking back on the past week of hell he went through regarding his mother’s death and the attempt on his life.
Frank looked at Vince, then cast his eyes out at the circle of women around the picnic table, as if contemplating how to begin. “Before I was sent to the foster home something really weird happened that… I guess sort of precipitated the beating I received that eventually led to the arrest of my parents. A classmate of mine, a guy I remember quite well named Larry, was with me one day after school. I was in the third grade. We were playing together outside and my dad came home. He was furious that Larry was at the house. I wasn’t supposed to have guests over unless they were what he termed ‘pre-approved’; you and Nellie, kids that were the progeny of our parent’s friends. Kids from the neighborhood or from school were a no-no. He blew his top and began wailing on me. Larry got scared and ran into the house—my house. That neighborhood we lived in, if you remember, consisted of older homes.”
Vince nodded.
Frank continued. “Some of those houses had little basements. Ours was one of them. Larry made his way to the basement where I later found out he stumbled upon a woman’s corpse.”
A sharp intake of breath from Vince. “Jesus,” he said.
“He scrambled back up the stairs and out the back door just as my step-dad was dragging me into the house. He beat me up real bad, and when it was over the police were there. Larry’s folks had called them.” He looked up at Vince. “Guess what they didn’t find?”
“The body,” Vince said.
“You got it,” Frank said, almost deadpan. “They didn’t find a body. I had no idea until later that that’s why they came to the house. How my stepfather managed to get rid of it before the cops showed up, I still don’t know, but—”
“Wait,” Vince broke in. “How could you even be certain there was a body in the basement. Maybe this Larry kid was just… scared and out of his mind with what he saw happen to you.”
“That’s what I always used to think,” Frank said. “Until just lately.”
A slight shiver coursed down Vince’s spine.
Frank continued his narrative. “They didn’t find a body, but they did find evidence of physical abuse against me. They took me out of the house and placed my folks under arrest. I was in and out of foster homes for three or four years. When my folks got out of jail, they sent me to El Paso, Texas, to live with my paternal aunt and uncle and their kids. I didn’t know them very well at the time, since I rarely saw my dad’s side of the family. In fact, I barely remember my real dad. It’s only been recently that I’ve learned more about him.”