The Walls of the Castle Read online

  Short guy, and untrained, but with some muscle to him, and a lot of heat. He lashed out and caught Kasteel’s bad ribs. Kasteel didn’t make a sound but his expression must’ve shown his pain because Bryce went to work on the area. It hurt. Bryce threw a lot of short jabs, worked his advantage and started in with tight hooks. More jabs to Kasteel’s face. Little prick threw about twenty unanswered shots. It hurt, but it was part of the plan.

  Kasteel knew about giving a beating and taking one. You could fight through the pain. Once you knew how it was easy. You could even learn to like it. The real beating went on inside. When despair set in, when you were cut off from your reserves. Kasteel let Bryce keep working away, and then backhanded the short fucker hard enough to split his smoochy lips. Kasteel liked the balance of it, how Bryce was now a mirror of his wife. Kasteel moved in and did it again. Bryce’s eyes flared. There was nothing quite as denigrating as being struck with a backhand. It’s the way your old man hit you when you were a kid. The humiliation was genetic, and it went back ten thousand generations.

  “That ugly voice of yours has to go, Bryce,” Kasteel said, his own voice still a little gritty. “Swallow red-hot embers. Suck giant black dick. But get rid of it.” Kasteel punched him almost gently in the Adam’s apple. Bryce thrashed and choked, fell back on the couch, and turned a nice shade of purple. The running water shut off. Kasteel waited until the guy had caught enough breath that he could hear what was about to be said.

  He crouched, got in close, let him check out what ugly, real scars looked like. “You’ve got stress in your life, Bryce, I understand that. Frustrations, disappointments, defeats. You’ve got issues. We all do. Maybe the worst of them has to do with your job. You haven’t made your quota lately. You’ve missed out on a couple of promotions you deserved. You’ve got a tall boss who smirks at anyone under 5'7. Something like that. Maybe your old man used to smack you around. Mom didn’t give you enough tit when you were a baby. You’ve got problems with intimacy. You’re impotent. A closet fag.”

  Count on that to get under his skin. Bryce grunted and made a jump. Kasteel slammed the flat of his palm under Bryce’s chin and enjoyed the hard crack of his jaws slamming together. Bryce let loose with a strangled yelp and fell onto the floor.

  Kasteel stared down at him.

  “Or your older brother died in front of your eyes, run over in the middle of the street during a stickball game. Maybe you got gang-raped by your high school basketball team. Hey, these things happen.”

  And they did. Kasteel reached down and took hold of the little prick’s shoulder and patted his back, the way a proud father does to his son, the way a friend lends support. Bryce’s eyes spun and hardened. His mouth leaked blood from both corners.

  “But listen to this, Bryce. I don’t care. Nobody cares. Not your co-workers, not your neighbors, not your wife or your kid. We don’t care. You haven’t been able to live with it, whatever it is. Okay, fair enough, some of us have too great a burden. Some of us can’t carry the load. We’re tired. We’re broken. We’re ruined, we’re wrecked.”

  Kasteel hefted Bryce to his feet, grabbed him by the scruff, and tossed him over the couch and almost through the front window. Bryce managed a short scream of fear and pain, a weird warble almost like a newborn’s gasping cry. A vase of flowers smashed and pink petals floated into his hair. Kasteel wanted to keep this quiet but the vitamin shots had made him edgy too. He hadn’t spoken this much to anyone besides Hedgwick in months.

  The bathroom door opened slowly, tentatively. The groaning sucking swirling glucking sounds of a bathtub draining made their way downstairs. Beth was probably up there with her ear turned to listen. Maybe she thought Bruce was going nuts, throwing things. Maybe she heard Kasteel’s voice and wondered if he was another enemy or a potential savior. He wanted to call to her, to tell her it was all right, but she wouldn’t trust him. She’d have to make the decision from there, in moderate safety.

  Kasteel stepped on Bryce’s chest and exerted a little pressure, just to keep his attention.

  “So this is what you do. You go find yourself a competent shrink. Or a priest or a rabbi or a fucking Buddhist monk who’ll listen to you. Or you can start self-medicating. You throw back a couple of six-packs a night. You pop percs, you steal scrips for vikes. You fall asleep in the gutter covered in your vomit. You pick up a hundred dollar a day coke habit. You kick back with a crack pipe. You let meth rot out your teeth while you pick your face apart. You pay whores who’ll let you smack them around. You become a barroom brawler. You go find yourself a twink boyfriend.”

  Kasteel stepped on him harder.

  “I don’t care what you do, so long as you resolve yourself. You never lift a hand against your wife or boy again.”

  His lips moved slightly. Kasteel could see exactly what the prick was saying. He knew Bryce was telling him to go fuck himself. Bryce was someone who had to learn all his lessons the hard way, and no one harder than him had come along for the last little while. Not until now. But Kasteel didn’t want to have to do any real damage. He didn’t want to sell what was left of his soul. But it looked like it might have to go that way.

  “I hate your voice, Bryce, but I need a response here. Do you think you can resolve yourself or not?”

  The little fucker’s tongue jutted and flapped. It seemed like he might jump up and have another go, no matter how stupid that might be. Bryce just wasn’t listening. He wasn’t hearing the message. Sometimes a man couldn’t learn. He took it to the wall and then right through the rock. Kasteel had known a lot of guys like him before. He might even be like Bryce himself in some ways. Incapable of change. Incapable of living with some trauma, great or small, that had come to define his life.

  Bryce’s gaze diverted. Kasteel glanced up and she was halfway down the stairs, watching expressionless, watching them. John stood beside her wearing fresh pajamas, his hair wet, wearing his sling. Eddie never could dry his hair either, it seemed impossible for any kid to do a good job. It used to drive Kathy berserk. She’d go and do it for him, rubbing his hair down with a towel, taking her time to comb through his shaggy tow-head. It would look perfect for about ten seconds and then it would be a mess again. The symbols of our lives find us wherever we are, wherever we go.

  Kasteel met Beth’s eyes. She continued to wait and watch. She wasn’t going to scream and come running at him with a frying pan. She wasn’t going to wrap her arms around her husband and declare her mad love for him. Everyone knew that it sometimes went down like that. No matter how badly they were treated, the devil they knew was almost always better than starting over again. You saw it happen every day. He was glad it wasn’t going to happen now.

  Bryce glared at her. He still thought maybe she was screwing around. He thought maybe she’d let Kasteel in to do some damage. He tried speaking. “Beth, what have you done?”

  His voice was hardly there but what was there was pure rage. Kasteel wondered where these kinds of guys found the energy. Being that pissed for that long was wearing. You had to be aware in the yard but always seething, always wanting to hurt somebody, it took a lot out of these guys. They burned up over the years until there was hardly anything left in the end.

  “I’m going to put you out now, Bryce, while we decide your fate. You’ll either wake up and have a limp for the rest of your life or you won’t wake up at all.”

  With that Kasteel stomped his forehead and put the little fucker down in the black.

  Kasteel hadn’t wanted the kid to see that, even though it might be good for him. It wasn’t Kasteel’s call to make. The woman didn’t pull her son’s face against her skirt. Kasteel waited for her to say something, ask a question, show some upset, but she didn’t bother. She braced herself for whatever might happen next. She was strong. She had to be strong.

  The boy looked at his father and then his mother and then at Kasteel. He put his free hand to his cast and scratched at it like he didn’t even realize it was there.

  Kasteel
still hadn’t heard the kid speak and suddenly it felt imperative to do exactly that. He had to hear the boy. He wondered if he’d sound anything like Eddie. He wondered if he’d ever see another kid in this world that wouldn’t remind him of Eddie. It was one of the things that had spooked the lady shrink. She had a couple kids herself, a boy and a girl, their photos framed on her desk, pointed outward. Why outward? Showing them off to the clients? Hoping to incite feelings, discover dysfunction? It had worked. Kasteel had looked at her boy and asked question after question, thinking of Eddie, until Kathy tugged at his wrist to get him to shut up and the shrink turned the pictures back and eventually put them in her drawer.

  “What’s your name?” Kasteel asked him.

  John didn’t respond. And he was a John, not a Johnny, not a JJ or a Jimmy John or a Jackie John. He was a John. Though maybe he wasn’t sure about that himself. He seemed to have forgotten his name, or perhaps to have never known it.

  “That’s okay,” Kasteel told him. “Names are overrated. I’ve had a lot of them. Now I don’t have any.”

  Beth didn’t seem to take that to heart, or understand what he meant. She asked, “Who are you?”

  Like everybody’s, his life had been full of shortcut answers to that question. You tried to compact your response. Nobody had patience for more than a few words. You said, I’m the best two-story man in the tri-state area, which was probably true, or almost true. You said, Prisoner #768259, sir. You choked out, when they asked, I’m a reformed felon. I’m a husband. I’m a father. You took a knee at your old man’s headstone and said, I’m a fuck-up, dad.

  He cut through it all and simply responded, “I lost my son. I won’t let you lose yours.”

  Her face began to crimp and fall in on itself as a moan broke from her. She stifled it almost instantly. She put an arm around John and he barely noticed.

  “He’s already lost.”

  “There’s a chance you can save him.”

  “Is there?”

  “Maybe.”

  She gestured at her husband. “Are you going to kill him?”

  He stared at her. “Do you think I should?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think carefully.”

  “Does he owe you money?”

  “No.”

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then–”

  “I told you already. I’m here for you and John.”

  At the sound of his name the kid seemed to snap from his trance. He blinked a few times, and yawned, and reached up and touched his wet hair. He looked down at his father and seemed to consider the question.

  Are you going to kill him?

  You’d think there might be finality to it, but there wasn’t. The question and the answer and the action, whatever that action turned out to be, would go on and on forever. The consequences would ripple out across the world and down through your life forever. Kasteel knew it. So did the mother. So did the boy.

  Bryce lay there unconscious, the fury gone from his face, handsome, snoring softly. Conscience only counts for so much. Fear of prison even less. She cocked her chin as she considered it. He watched her weighing the extent of her own moral imperative. She clenched and unclenched her hands.

  “He’s going to be worse after this,” she said. “A strange man in the house that beats him up? He’ll think we’re lovers.”

  “He already made that presumption.”

  “He’s never trusted me, not even when I loved him.”

  “Some guys are wired wrong.”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever hit your wife or boy?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not wired wrong.”

  “Yes, I am. Just not in that way.”

  “He’s going to be worse,” she repeated.

  “Maybe he won’t be. Maybe he’ll learn a lesson and come back to his senses. He might change.”

  “Is anyone capable of real change?”

  The easy answer was yes. People changed all the time, for the worse. They got weaker, they got crazier, they got more broken. Kasteel thought about a few guys in the joint who’d managed to turn their lives around. Animals who’d managed to educate themselves behind bars, learn a bit of compassion, find God and their own humanity. He could count them on one hand, but they existed. It seemed possible.

  “Would you really kill him if I asked you?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  She nodded, thought further on it, her hands squeezing tighter like she was struggling to hold on but was slipping. She glanced at her son. The kid glanced back. He looked at Kasteel, his eyes like you were staring into miles and miles of night.

  “I want to watch you hurt him,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Kasteel propped Bryce’s leg up on the coffee table and then dropped on top of it. The knee snapped and the leg bent back in the wrong direction. He’d limp forever. He’d be in the hospital for months. He’d be in rehab for at least a year. If he wasn’t going to change for the better anytime soon, then maybe at the end of the year he’d be a better man.

  The agony woke Bryce up and he shrieked like a spoiled girl, threw up on himself, and passed out again. The scream had reached into his son and shaken him up a little. The kid looked angrily at his father. Kasteel liked the fire in the kid’s eyes. It also reminded him of Eddie when Eddie used to get pissed.

  She said, “Is it enough?”

  “You tell me.”

  “He might kill us.”

  “Give me your cell,” he told her.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “I’ll take his.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need a phone.”

  Kasteel had snatched Bryce’s cell from his hand but where had he put it after that? He couldn’t remember. He looked around at the mess in the living room, the overturned coffee table, the broken vase, the shit that had fallen off of shelves. He spotted the phone on the carpet, grabbed and pocketed it.

  “If you need me,” he said, “for anything, just call his number.”

  “He’ll just cancel it.”

  “Tell him if he does that I’ll break his other knee.”

  Tears welled again and she let out one yawping sob that came from the center of her body and her soul. She bent and put her face to the boy’s hair and cried into it. The kid kept his eyes on Kasteel. They had an understanding now. They were partners in this thing. He wanted Kasteel to know he would honor it.

  In a few seconds she was done and her face cleared instantly. She was a woman used to keeping her emotions under wraps, tied firmly, cuffed.

  She asked, “How did you lose your son?”

  He still didn’t know the answer to that. He had listened to the doctors for months and hadn’t heard anything they said, none of it had made any sense. They changed the story every few days. First it was this, and then something else, and then they thought it had to do with an infection, and then a genetic illness, and then some kind of trouble with his heart, and it went on and on, surgery after surgery, machine after machine, signature after signature, the financial department calling the insurance company, the insurance company hassling him, until Eddie was alive but unable to speak, unable to see, and finally unresponsive, in a coma for weeks, and then in the ground the last ten days, so he was told.

  There was no answer but Kasteel still felt like it was somehow his fault. He knew in his heart that he had caused Eddie’s death in some unfathomable, unknowable way.

  He said, “I made a mistake.”

  “I’ve made a lot of them too. Is that why this is happening?”

  “Who knows? But it’s over now. Pack up and leave or stay and wait to see what happens. Either way, I’m on the other end of this phone if you need me. I’ll be close.” I turned to the kid. “You heard what I said, right?”

  John didn’t answer or respond with any kind of a gesture, bu
t Kasteel knew he’d heard and that he’d call if he ever needed help.

  “You need your sleep. You should hit the sack.”

  Beth led her son upstairs again. John looked back once as if to ensure himself that the scene was real. He’d be living with it in his head for a long time to come.

  Kasteel heard a door shut. He got the kitchen towel he’d been using, ran it under the tap again, got a half glass of water, and returned to the living room. He washed Bryce’s face down until the little prick began to stir and groan. Kasteel pulled out some bottles of meds, mixed several pills together, fed them to Bryce and then let him drink the water. He waited until the painkillers kicked in, helped Bryce Clarke to his one good leg, and then drew the guy’s arm around his shoulder.

  “Come on, Bryce. I’ll take you to the hospital. I’m headed there anyhow.”

  He first heard of Abaddon a couple of weeks later from an old woman with a bad brain.

  Her name was Merilee Himes, eighty-two years old, skin dark and wrinkled as a prune, with freckles like a spray of pepper shot burned across her cheeks. She was remarkably healthy for her age. Walked to church six miles from her home twice a week. Occasionally walked to the VFW to play Bingo. Had an active social life with many friends spread out across the city as well as a gentleman caller. They picnicked in the park, went dancing, visited museums, and sojourned to four separate cemeteries to visit their deceased spouses. They’d each buried two.

  Maybe it was inevitable that some piss-poor driver would come along, on their cell or distracted with the kids or just fumbling around the satellite radio for the perfect song.

  Turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl with a fresh license, texting with her boyfriend. She crossed over onto the shoulder while typing out 2 BLOX AWY, SEE U SOON and ran into Merilee Himes, launching her twenty feet into the air and knocking her into oncoming traffic.

  The girl proceeded to text HLY FUK, MY DADS GONNA KLL ME!!!!! even as three more cars proceeded to run over Merilee. All told she lost her left arm, both legs below the knee, her spleen, her right orbital socket, several large pieces of her skull, and about a quarter of her brain.