The Revenant Road Read online

“There must be three-hundred people here I don’t recognize.”

  “Your father had a lot of… friends,” Lenore said.

  For some reason I got the feeling “friends” wasn’t the word she’d wanted to use. We’d only gotten the details of Marcus’s death a day before the funeral. He’d been traveling on business to Seattle with a client, a millionaire interested in developing a large tract of land using Marcus as the general contractor. According to my mother’s lawyer, Marcus Grudge owned and operated a successful construction firm somewhere in Northern California.

  I’d never been invited to visit Marcus’s place of business. I knew next to nothing about it. After leaving us in the seventies, he’d conducted most interactions through a parsimonious attorney named Oliver Quip. Child support, alimony payments, Christmas cards and a terse letter addressed to me on every birthday were the only regular contact we’d had with him.

  The prospective business partners had chartered a small plane in San Francisco intending to fly to Seattle to inspect the project. They never made it: Their plane went down somewhere in the Cascade Mountain range.

  It had taken the authorities nearly nine weeks to locate Marcus’s plane. By the time we were notified of the accident he had been dead for nearly two months.

  The mutilated couple standing on the far side of Riverside Drive snapped me out of my morbid musings. They were Asian, at least the man was. The woman looked bi-racial; an Asian-American mix.

  The man appeared to have been gutted, the bloody crater where his liver and lights should have been gaping and apparent even from across the street. Someone had ripped his right arm off at the elbow. The woman looked…stuck together somehow. Parts of her seemed to have been torn apart and knitted back together by a hyperactive, three–year-old speed freak. They were pale, those two…

  “Obadiah…”

  Their eyes hooded, slashes of darkness, twin abysses…

  “Obadiah, close your mouth. People are staring…”

  I was frozen, paralyzed by the sudden wash of cold terror that blossomed in the pit of my stomach.

  What the hell…?

  The gutted man raised his left hand and pointed at me.

  Pain exploded in my right arm.

  “Owww!”

  I looked down to see Lenore pinching the skin of my right triceps between her immaculate, diamond-hard nails. It was a trick she’d perfected back when I was a mouthy, unruly teenager. The slicing agony always served to bring my focus back to the here and now.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I snapped.

  “You were gaping,” Lenore said calmly. “You know I hate gaping.”

  I looked back across Riverside Drive, my eyes scanning the sidewalk, and the entrance to the park beyond: There was no sign of the mutilated couple. They had vanished. The sense of eerie dislocation that attended their appearance was fading, like a stubborn migraine after a stiff whiskey transfusion.

  I shook my head, hoping to clear the cloud of confusion that surrounded me. What had I just seen? Was I so upset by Marcus’s death that I was hallucinating?

  “Lenny, is that you?”

  I turned toward the speaker.

  Limping toward Lenore and me was an escapee from a Walter Brennan film. The man’s bedraggled appearance lent him the air of a mad prophet recently returned from the wilderness.

  The newcomer was as thin as the Nixon Administration’s record on public disclosure, and he moved with great care, like a soldier with a live grenade up his ass.

  “Neville,” Lenore whispered. “It’s been a long time.”

  “You’re as beautiful as ever, Lenny,” the crusty prophet said.

  “Lenny” smiled. Neither of them spoke for a moment, as mourners swirled around us. Then the crusty prophet turned to me.

  “Is this the kid?” he said.

  I was struck by the change in my mother. She seemed self-conscious in this man’s presence. Her eyes had lost their usual hawk-like focus. For the first time in recent memory she looked... uncertain.

  Her uncharacteristic behavior put me on the defensive.

  Even though we spent most of our time either screaming at or ignoring each other, the dormant protective impulse common to the sons of single mothers rose up in me. I stepped forward and extended my right hand.

  “Obadiah Grudge,” I said. “And you are?”

  The crusty prophet stared at me for a moment. Then he extended his right hand.

  “Forgive me,” Lenore said. “Neville Kowalski, this is... my son, Obadiah.”

  “How d’you do,” Kowalski said as he shook my hand.

  His grip was cool, surprisingly firm. An unexpected strength pulsed through his hand and up my arm.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

  Kowalski winced as if I’d leveled a charge.

  “I’m sure your mother’s...”

  “I’ve never told him about you and Marcus, Neville,” Lenore said, hastily.

  The crusty prophet’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of startled gray caterpillars.

  “Well, I s’pose that’s fer the best,” Kowalski said, winking at me. “Not everyone is as understanding as Lenny here.”

  A few yards away, the hearse rolled up to the curb. Two black-suited funeral attendants got out and ran around back to open the loading door.

  “What?” I said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Understanding about what?”

  The doors to the cathedral opened and my father’s coffin was carried out by six men. Three were employees of the funeral home. One of the men was a cousin of my father’s whom I’d last seen at a family reunion in Arkansas when I was ten years old.

  I didn’t recognize the other two pallbearers. One of them, a burly redhead who’d wept openly at the funeral, glanced over to where we stood on the steps of the cathedral. Kowalski stepped in closer.

  “Listen, son,” he said. “I know you and your dad weren’t close. But he wanted me to ask a favor of you when his time came.”

  “What kind of favor?” I said.

  “Marcus requested that you be one of his pallbearers.”

  At a signal from the burly redhead the men carrying the coffin stopped. The redheaded man nodded at Kowalski.

  “That I be what?” I said, unbelieving.

  Kowalski nodded. “We talked about it a lot,” he said. “Marcus told me if he went first he wanted you on hand to help cart the old bastard out.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  Kowalski shrugged. “So how ‘bout it, son?”

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

  Around us, people were beginning to stare. Since I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Sure.”

  I walked up the steps and replaced one of the employees. Kowalski took up a position behind me. As we descended, Kowalski laid his hand on my left bicep, increasing his creepy factor by about two million percent.

  “Your father and I were partners for thirty years, Obadiah,” Kowalski whispered. “We shared a life that few people would understand, or approve of. He was a great man.”

  I nodded, more to keep my skin from crawling over my head like a tight wool sweater than in agreement.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “He was a man of good and noble purpose,” Kowalski continued. “You’ve inherited a powerful legacy.”

  As I gripped the handle of my father’s coffin I felt a nagging certainty that I’d missed something.

  We carried the coffin to the hearse and slid it into the back. The driver slammed the door, climbed into the front seat, started the car and drove off toward the cemetery. I turned to see Kowalski and Lenore embracing on the steps like long-separated siblings.

  What the Hell’s going on? I thought.

  Kowalski lifted his head from my mother’s shoulder. Our eyes met.

  The crusty prophet burst into tears.

  7

  Attack of the

  Naked Vandal

&nbs
p; May 14th. Northwestern Seattle. Midnight.

  Sukhdeep Singh believed in the American Dream.

  He’d immigrated from New Delhi in the mid ‘nineties, worked his way up through a succession of low-paying jobs, saving, living like a pauper until he’d amassed enough to buy himself a piece of the largest convenience store franchise on Earth.

  He’d brought his wife and three children across the ocean two years ago and moved them into a four-bedroom house in a middle-class suburb.

  Sukhdeep Singh knew the Dream was real, had felt its transforming power reshape his life and the lives of his children.

  Tonight, however, the Dream was being a perfect pain in the cussi.

  The anarchists, teenagers who’d pierced, dyed and shaved themselves to within an inch of their skeletons, wanted cigarettes and beer. Sukhdeep just wanted to go home.

  “I don’t care what you got at Quickie-Mart,” Sukhdeep droned. “The good people at the All-Nite Mart chain of convenience stores are in full compliance with Washington State regulations regarding the sale of tobacco and alcohol products to people below the legal age of consent.”

  “Corporate stooge!” one Goth who might have been female cried.

  “You’re in chains, bra,” a second declared. “Just another latter-day slave.”

  Sukhdeep rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it.”

  The Goths left, grumbling about the W.T.O and the global servant class. Sukhdeep went back to his crossword puzzle.

  Two minutes later, the video monitor over Sukhdeep’s head flickered. Then the front doors hinged open and a naked man walked into the All-Nite Mart.

  “We’re closed,” Sukhdeep groaned without looking up from his crossword puzzle.

  Over behind the All-Nite 24 Hour Coffee House—which was really just a tall cardboard display festooned with life-sized photos of attractive Seattle stereotypes—something heavy crashed to the floor.

  Sukhdeep jumped to his feet. “Hey!”

  He threw down his crossword puzzle and looked up at the monitor that showed the area behind the Coffee House: It was empty.

  “Piece of crap,” he muttered to the monitor.

  This time, something exploded. Glass shards flew over the Coffee House. Sukhdeep ducked as glass tinkled to the floor around him.

  “What are you doing back there?” he screamed.

  Sukhdeep grabbed the crowbar he kept under the counter and stalked toward the display: Someone was tearing the Coffee House apart. Sukhdeep had been robbed seven times since buying the All-Nite Mart six months earlier and he’d had enough.

  He rounded the corner and slid to a halt.

  The nude Chinese man was crouching in the freezer compartment. Broken beer and soft drink bottles littered the area in front of the freezer. The floor was covered with bloody footprints.

  “Hey!” Sukhdeep shouted. “Where are your clothes?”

  The naked vandal grabbed a forty-ounce bag of ground coffee beans and ripped it open.

  “Stop that!” Sukhdeep screamed.

  The naked vandal upended the open bag and poured the ground coffee beans into his mouth.

  “I’m calling the police,” Sukhdeep said.

  The naked vandal opened another bag of coffee beans and upended it over his face. He swallowed the ground coffee in big, gasping gulps. When the bag was empty, he dropped it.

  Only then did he look at Sukhdeep.

  The naked vandal stepped out of the refrigerator. As he moved, the bones in his face snapped and shifted. His body lengthened and his jaw elongated. A black snarl of hair burst from the skin of his face.

  “I’m really calling the police,” Sukhdeep said.

  Sukhdeep turned, slipped on one of the vandal’s bloody footprints and fell face-first onto the All-Nite Hot Sandwich Wheel. He screamed as the heating element in the Wheel set his turban on fire, beating at the flames until he extinguished his burning head wrap.

  Then the thing from the refrigerator tackled him.

  Sukhdeep struck the thing across the snout with the crowbar. In response, the monster from the refrigerator ripped his right arm off and flung it across the store.

  The severed arm flew over the counter, and the crowbar, still clutched in Sukhdeep’s hand, smashed the television monitor.

  As he slipped into shock, Sukhdeep Singh’s life actually passed before his mind’s eye. And as the monster from the refrigerator tore out his throat, the last thing Sukhdeep remembered was his Uncle Iqbal’s terrible karaoke interpretation of She Blinded Me with Science.

  Then Sukhdeep Singh knew no more.

  8

  One Hell of a Stew

  Lenore sat across from me in the car staring out at the green hills of New Jersey across the Hudson River. She’d asked the driver to take the long way home, up the Henry Hudson Parkway, before heading east along the Cross County Parkway toward Bronxville.

  In a normal family we might have expected dozens of visitors bearing food and condolences. But Lenore had formed few lasting relationships in New York, preferring to pass her days with her books and her garden.

  I’d neglected to tell anyone from my set about Marcus’s death. Few of them were even aware that I’d had a father, and I’d never seen fit to disabuse them of the notion. As a result of our voluntary exile, we were heading toward Lenore’s immaculate and utterly empty house. During the internment more people had offered their condolences to Kowalski than to either of us. Afterward, he’d invited us back to “the House.” Lenore, thankfully, had refused.

  “Some friends are gathering there to pay last respects,” Kowalski had said. Pointing to one older woman who sat wailing ethnically at the graveside, Kowalski chuckled and added, “Old Sadie there made one hell of a stew for everybody. You sure you won’t change your mind?”

  It was as we were walking back to the car that the list of ingredients that were tossing themselves into my mental crockpot slammed together: The dish they presented was anything but tasty.

  Out of respect for Lenore’s unexpected display of human emotion I’d stifled myself at the cemetery. But as we passed beneath the George Washington Bridge, the stew of anger that had been bubbling in my gut since meeting Kowalski erupted over the lip of the cast-iron pot of forbearance.

  “When the Hell were you planning to tell me about them?” I said.

  Lenore shrugged.

  “When I felt you’d reached a certain degree of maturity.”

  “Mother, I’m thirty-eight years old.”

  “I’m still waiting.”

  “I’m serious, Lenore.”

  She hated when I called her Lenore.

  “There are just a few things you don’t understand, Mister,” she snapped.

  “Oh I understand alright,” I said. “I understand that the three of you were hiding a dark little secret.”

  “Obadiah…”

  “I understand that my dead father’s common-law ‘wife’ has more facial hair than I do and nobody ever saw fit to tell me.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” Lenore snarled.

  “Face it,” I said. “Marcus and Kowalski were lovers.”

  “Christ, give me strength.”

  “What?” I said. “I’m okay with it. I mean I have to be okay with it, don’t I? It’s the 21st century, for God’s sake.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m furious. I’m furious with you. I’m furious with Marcus and I’m furious with Kowalski, the other woman.”

  “Just shut up,” Lenore snapped.

  “Oh no,” I said. “You shutting me down as if I were eight years old is not an option, mother-dear.”

  “Right now, retroactive abortion is looking like an option for me,” Lenore grated. “You want to push your luck?”

  The silence in the limo was instructive.

  “You’re a vulgar person,” I said.

  We drove on.

  * * * *

  I picked at the food Lenore set before me. My mouth was
already too full of recriminations. I didn’t have room for pot roast.

  Lenore emerged from her bedroom and set a large black box down on the kitchen table. The box looked hand-carved from some dark wood, mahogany or painted oak. It had been secured with a heavy padlock.

  “Your father had secrets, Obadiah,” Lenore said. “In many ways he was different than other men.”

  “Really, mother, what’s the point?” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt,” she snapped. “After today you may never speak to me again, so I mean to have my say while I can.”

  Something in her tone shut me up. Whatever had been eating at her since the funeral was close to the surface. For no reason at all, a sense of foreboding draped itself about my shoulders like a uranium pashmina.

  “I know that I’ve never been an affectionate woman, Obadiah. But I do love you. I hope you know that.”

  Lenore smoothed the front of her dress and sat down. Even twenty years after her last modeling assignment she still moved like the Vice-Principal of a charm school.

  “Mother, what’s—”

  Obadiah, your father was a monster hunter.”

  Silence.

  “Did you hear me?”

  I said, “He was a what?”

  Lenore took a deep breath. “A monster hunter. He killed monsters.”

  Silence.

  “For a living.”

  Outside, a cat knocked over Lenore’s garbage pail.

  Inside: Silence.

  “Actually, for Marcus it was more of a calling.”

  Silence.

  “Obadiah, you’re staring.”

  “Mother, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Lenore stood and walked to the breadbox.

  “I need a drink,’ she said. “You want a drink?”

  “Since when do you drink?”

  Lenore reached into the breadbox and pulled out a pint-sized bottle of Crown Royal. Then she pulled out two glasses, cracked open the whiskey and sat down.

  “This is going to be difficult for you to hear, and even more difficult for me to say,” she said. “I’m asking you to trust me and wait ‘til I’m finished before you start shooting. Agreed?”

  “But—”

  “Agreed?”