After The Flesh Read online

  And now we have the media changing the status quo far more often than in generations past. The media changes it much more quickly as well. Attitudes shift now with the passing of an administration rather than a generation or even a decade. Media is business more than information. It is a good bit religion as well. Ideas are given to us more and more by a media feeding off the rapture it gives its followers, the sighs and gasps of outrage and delight raised by the masses. But yet even this does change constantly. Everything changes. But then some things cannot be changed. The highs and lows of growing up never change – at least not by much.

  Growing up – what a joyously wonderful, horribly dreadful time of our lives.

  Few sounds inspire such joy in the hearts and minds of our youth quite the same way the school bell does on that one afternoon in June when it rings for the last time of the school year. You may wish to compare that shrill, tinny clatter to the harmonic pulse of the ice cream truck or to the cacophony of a stadium crowd cheering on the home team, but I would disagree. Sure, the feeling is there, the surge of something more than life, but the school bell is the one. It is the ultimate archetypical sound of freedom only a child can experience during the weeks and months of summer vacation.

  Even today when we walk past a school yard and hear that sound, or the paltry, electronic bleat that has often replaced it, we are drawn back to those days in our youth when Monday melted right through into Sunday next and we neither cared or noticed. Odd it is that so joyous a sound is juxtaposed brief months later as the shimmering greens of summer have begun their slow decline into the muted and dusty hews of autumnal red and yellow. On that morning the sound is the call of sorrow and obligation for the same young hearts who so recently sang the lyrics of Alice Cooper with backpacks as light as their step. Perhaps this is where the ice cream truck draws a close parallel. Its arrival never heralds the coming of autumn – only its departure does.

  Few ever care to contemplate such things as this, I know. Fewer still ever weigh their significance to our lives. But it is these small things that give us shape and form. These small things breathe life into our own little worlds. Such things, or the memories of them, define us. They pack the shelves of our minds. They give us our own personal filing system, a means of recollection. They tell us how to behave, how to live. In the end they tell us how to die. Our little worlds fill up. The filing system breaks down from time to time. Old memories, sad memories and bad memories are put in long-term storage or they are left in the corners to be recalled only when we happen by in our dreams. But then most people – particularly grown-ups – don’t see well into the corners of their little worlds even with the lights on. They block the cobwebs out as easily as a mess in the corner of the room can be overlooked and ignored in hopes that it will just simply go away. But the cobwebs in our corners – the dark places on the highest shelves, the old boxes stacked in an annex – these do not go away. The mess only piles higher and higher until it spills out into the aisles.

  Perhaps that is why Freddy was only different then and not yet what he would become. His system was quite different. Back then I think all he had were the corners. My little world was everything else.

  -

  In order to tell this properly I must start in the fall of 1986. We were ten. This is significant because it was the time when Freddy met Carrie Hicks and – more importantly some would say – Carrie’s mother, Nancy. During the years which followed, Carrie Hicks was Freddy’s closest friend. It could be said, up to that point Freddy did not have anyone you could call a friend – only a series of play dates. Until he met Carrie, he could not have cared either way. The family moved far too often in his early years for him to make any friends and consequently he did not have any friends to miss.

  They met at the start of the fourth grade after the Cartwright family moved into the tranquility that was – and is – Prince William Falls. This was to be the final move according to Freddy’s father. He managed to catch top seniority at the newly opened meat packing plant just south of town. It was here, he said openly, that white folks could still make a decent living without what he referred to as ‘the ape people’ ruining it for everyone.

  John Cartwright was, to the day he died, a bigot, a drunk and an antagonist to anyone less than his six feet and two hundred and forty pounds – an all-around nice guy in other words. He thought the Natives were bleeding the country dry with their welfare state living and the Chinese were stealing all the good jobs while the Japanese were just buying everything in sight. He would go on sometimes about how we were letting them do it, giving them the knife to slit our throats. But not in Prince William Falls. Good old PWF was safe for normal folks who just wanted to raise a family and work hard. He was damned if that was going to change.

  So, in the fall of 1986, with the future full of promise, the Impala pulled up in front of 113 Second Street – called Cornwall Road by the locals. John rose proudly from the driver’s seat to survey his new kingdom. He was pleased with what he saw. Freddy met Carrie a week later.

  I no longer question why that morning is my earliest memory. Ten years old. I don’t recall learning to ride my bike or to tie my shoes. I don’t know who taught me to read but I learned at some point. Ten years old, my earliest memory. It is my earliest memory of Freddy as well.

  I’d like to believe it was an accident but it wasn’t. I have to believe fate is a conscious being, weaving the skein of our lives with all the focus of a drunk at a card table. Fate becomes a blessing for some and a curse for everyone else. Draw your own conclusions, but one was blessed that morning and one was cursed as Freddy stepped off the curb in front of Nancy Hicks as she was preparing to turn off of Maple Avenue onto Cornwall.

  Freddy had his head down and Nancy was momentarily dazzled by sunbursts in the autumn leaves through the windshield of her new Chrysler. The impact was light – as light as a four-thousand-pound car can strike a child. Freddy was not even hurt – not badly anyway. He had scraped palms, a bruised shoulder and a sore hip that would be fine within a few days. It was mostly the shock of the impact that scared him, as if he had been slapped by a parent who never strikes. Freddy sat in the intersection in a daze, his legs sprawled out in front of him and his skinned palms face up in the lap of his faded and shining cords.

  “Holy gee!” Nancy Hicks gasped. Her hands fluttered over the steering wheel in a passable imitation of a hummingbird’s wings. Chrome glittered in the morning sun as she hauled open the Chrysler’s massive door, fully a third of its length. Her heels clacked on the asphalt as she hurried to him. “Holy gee!” She repeated.

  That stands out in my mind more than anything else that day: Nancy’s oath. It was the oath of the truly terrified and the genuinely sorry. If she had cursed, if she had let loose a Motherfucker or a sonofabitch, things might have been very different. Mind you, if she had come to a complete stop at the stop sign before proceeding into the intersection, things would have been different as well. But a comet killed the dinosaurs, the Romans used lead in their tableware and Michael Jordon retired – twice. Shit happens. Fate twines its way through these events along its seemingly capricious path and we are left holding the bag – for good or ill. We can say ‘what if?’ until the cows come home for all the good it does us. I have tried. I have cried out to whatever gods might hear and asked … why? It is useless. As much as we claim to have free will, our choices are decided for us, chosen by that little program running in the background of everything. This is what I believe because if I believed otherwise, I would have killed myself a long time ago.

  Because of Fate, Nancy Hicks did not curse as she rushed to Freddy’s aid in her high heels and her professional skirt cut a perfectly alluring inch or so above her knees. She was genuinely sorry and quite likely scared to death. Hence, she had no choice. Holy gee was the only thing suitable to say. It was also likely the only thing her brain was able to come up with at short notice.

  She squatted in front of him. One of her heels caugh
t on a loose stone or a pit in the pavement. Her ankle rolled and she lost her balance. Nancy fell back, caught herself and snapped one perfectly manicured nail in the process. That fashionably short skirt hiked up and her legs splayed wide as she released a short whimper of pain. It was an agonizingly brief glimpse, but as her legs snapped shut and the faint scent of baby powder and something entirely different wafted passed his nostrils, it would be a vision forever engrained in his brain. It was stored on an easy-access middle shelf coupled with the quiet whimper she could not keep silenced. It was long, deeply tanned thighs disappearing into the confines of her skirt, climbing into the curves of her hips and beyond. Where they met was hidden from him, concealed behind a triangle of pure, white lace – as pure and untainted as the cry of pain on her lips and the flame of agony kindling in her eyes. There was something there he had missed. He knew he missed it – something sweet and dark hidden under cover and just out of view.

  The moment ended, leaving only a memory as vivid as real life mingling with the scent of her perfume. He would come to associate the vision with the woman and her daughter even after one’s death and the other’s departure and both were gone from our lives. With it, he forged the underpinnings of all his relationships with the fairer sex. For him it became the promise of something more. Always something more. Something so much more.

  The car hit him, but Freddy did not cry. Most kids would have but not Freddy. He was not in shock. He was fully aware, fully alert and fully aroused. He blinked rapidly, his eyes locked on Nancy’s knees, as if by hope or will alone they would part again. He realized two things at once. He had been hit by a car. This woman who was now checking his cuts and bruises as one would a child who has fallen off their bike struck him with her car as he was walking across the street toward his first day of school. The second thing he realized was far more profound. Because of it he could feel no pain. Freddy had an erection. His small, juvenile penis had sprung to life and instantly he understood why. His arousal was a firebrand, a flame searing and burning away everything it touched.

  I believe that was the very moment he changed. He became what it was he was fated to be – if one could chart it. I could feel it in him then more than in anything he said or did from then on. It was the look in his eyes that told me. Not so much the look, but rather what was behind that look, what was veiled by his ordinary boy’s gaze on the world. In that instant Freddy Cartwright shrugged off all that was right about himself. He left it behind on the curbside where I watched in horror, unable to scream.

  -

  Some minds are like great, round rooms. They are brightly lit with few spots for shadow and dust to collect. They have few corners in them, very few dark places to race by in the deepest dreams. They are the bright spots in the wider world guiding the rest of us to salvation. Unlike most of us, these are the few who will be remembered. They leave a mark on us not easily forgotten or ignored. But most of us clutter our minds with useless things that become troubling whenever they are reawakened. Our guilt and our confusion distort the purity of our thoughts. The shelves of our minds are full of dust and cobwebs. The shadows are deep in our corners.

  Yet still there exists another. A third. We cannot forget the other end of the spectrum – as light is to dark, warm to cold, fire to ice and so forth. We dwell in the light and the bright places and only visit the shadowy corners in our darkest dreams and fantasies. But some do not have the light at all. Freddy was like that. His mind was in shadows. His was only the corners. But I think he preferred it that way. In the darkness it is always safer to have your back in a corner.

  Maybe there are a lot of people out there like that. Maybe they aren’t even aware of how truly evil they are. A religious man may call them seeds of the Apocalypse, but I am hardly a religious man. After all I have seen it is sometimes hard to believe in God. And yes, there are quite a few people like Freddy out there. But unlike Freddy, not all their switches have fallen yet. Or perhaps there is still a light burning in the darkness and they remain for now within its comforting glow. And each generation seems to breed greater numbers of these dark minds rather than fewer. Don’t blame television or pornography or video games. Don’t blame anything. I doubt very much we could isolate one single cause. Instead we should concentrate on spotting the seeds before they can sprout. All things fall apart. The center cannot hold. It’s the system that is breaking down. Maybe I should be happy I will be gone before it fails completely.

  -

  Either from guilt, pity or kindness, but not all three, Mrs. Hicks began driving Freddy to school each morning after that day. It was there, in the back seat of her Chrysler, Freddy met Carrie. Her hair was pale and soft, nearly the color of churned butter. It would darken in the years to come to a dirty blond. She wore it in a loose ponytail under a Red Sox cap with the brim bent to form a high, inverted ‘V’ on her forehead. She never wore dresses or pink or bows but rather favored T-shirts (a sweater in the winter) and jeans or cords. Carrie was a tomboy if ever there was one, but in that first moment she could have been an angel. She held Freddy’s hand, the hurt one, as though her touch alone would melt away his pain.

  I was certain Freddy was just as in love as I was but his love was different. Somehow it was wrong. Oddly enough it was not then directed at Carrie but at Nancy instead. He saw in Carrie a potential, the chance to reawaken his arousal in the years to come. Her mother was different. She showed him something secret about herself even though it caused her pain. By doing so it took away his pain. I am not sure how he knew these things, or how he drew such conclusions, but he did. One day he would be able to accept Nancy’s sacrifice. One day he knew she would offer it to him again. When she did, it would be offered fully and completely. Until then he would have Carrie.

  Mother and daughter – both hapless victims in a triangle that would too soon define Freddy’s whole world and, through him, mine as well. But Nancy was untouchable. She was the cookie jar on the highest shelf, a holy grail set just out of his reach. Carrie personified that image of white lace hiding … something. Freddy knew something was there – we both did. He knew it was different than what hung between his own thin, bony legs and he knew Carrie had one as well. Some things we both knew. We knew it was different and we knew they came together somehow. Our parents did it and actors in movies did it but as for the elusive ‘it’ – well, that was still a mystery. Freddy’s pursuit of knowledge would begin in earnest.

  -

  Carrie became Freddy’s best friend. She would become closer to him than anyone but me. They were always together. To me he told things I couldn’t believe or didn’t want to believe. He told me things I didn’t even want to hear. He forced me to listen nonetheless. To me, he could be cruel and vindictive, taunting me to the point of tears and beyond. With Carrie he was tolerant, patient and forgiving. I said Freddy may have been in love with Carrie. But when it came to Carrie it was more likely he was in love with the possibilities. He was more in love with what Carrie could offer than with the girl herself.

  She was the gateway to her mother. Freddy was certain of it. Nancy Hicks was his obsession, his heroin. Carrie would serve well until he grew older and could offer her mother his full potential.

  Doing ‘it’ was having sex. Before we turned eleven, we knew that much anyway. Freddy learned the mechanics of it, but ‘it’, itself, remained as alien as a Ferrari cruising down Main Street. As for the secret place hidden just out of sight, still unseen by either of us, it was more exotic still.

  He told me what he planned to do with Nancy Hicks once he was old enough to do ‘it’, when he was old enough to come (whenever Freddy used that expression back then I always felt my ears burn as I hastily searched for the grown-up I was certain had overheard him). Carrie’s mother had a full and well-stocked medicine cabinet. This was the age when Valium and other prescriptions might as well have been served as part of the value meal at McDonald’s. Nancy’s collection of little helpers was complete with every prescription upper and
downer that ever came in a little plastic bottle. Freddy knew what each one did and how much to give. If Carrie did not want to have sex (by the sixth grade they were ‘going together’ and had even kissed on several occasions) he would drug her. Freddy figured he needed practice before working on Nancy. He told me once he did not want to disappoint her. If he needed to, he would drug Nancy as well and finally be able to peel off the frilled, white triangle of lace that barred him from her.

  The vision of Nancy’s panties fogged his mind. Freddy convinced himself she let him see on purpose as a way of making up for hitting him with her car. More than that – she showed him as a promise of more to come. If that was true, he figured she might want to do ‘it’ with him anyway and he would not need to drug her. But then if she found out he had drugged her daughter, she might not. Freddy could not understand why someone would not want to do ‘it’ given the opportunity. According to everything we had heard it was supposed to feel very good. Freddy wanted to know how good and he was growing impatient. Because of this, I was afraid this was not him being delusional. I thought he would actually try to drug one of them. I didn’t know how I could stop him.

  Freddy never did end up drugging them – not then at least and later I don’t know what was real to him and what had been conjured up in that diseased mind of his. Even when Carrie turned twelve and got her first period and she did not want to do ‘it’, Freddy did not drug her. Part of him knew it was wrong – at least I thought so at the time. More likely he knew he would get caught. Instead he lay in his bed at night or went into the washroom when the need came over him and masturbated while the fantasies played out in his mind. Soon those fantasies became as real to him as the chipped, porcelain sink he gripped for balance. Fed by Nancy’s cry of pain and her exquisite triangle of lace, he truly became obsessed. He believed she owed him for that autumn morning in 1986 – her and her daughter. One day, in his own fashion, he would collect.