Kill Switch

I toss my new heavy Suffolk University sweatshirt on the ground behind me and pick up the chunky piece of wood. He smiles at me, almost, almost a laugh.

I crack him, tremendously, right at that temple spot where the zipper scar would go, swinging right through him, the way good, natural hitters do. He drops to the deck, stands like a bleeding, cowering dog on all fours. I need him to look up at me. None of this honorable death baloney for you, mister. He looks up, petrified, horrified, glorified.

He opens his sad little mouth to plead his soulless, meaningless case.

But he doesn’t get his chance.

I put down the chunky piece of wood, balancing it on one end between my knees. Then I conclude communications with a beautiful bouquet of wiggling fingers in front of my pursed lips.

“Octo-shush,” I tell Zeke. “It’s a funny joke. From the office. You remember. Or do you remember? Are you even supposed to remember? Are you allowed to remember?”

He doesn’t try to answer me this time. He knows we have our answer.

Then I reclaim my chunky piece of wood and I club him. It’s done.

He lies there at my feet in more blood than I thought a human body contained. I grab him, roll him, and shove him over the side, into the water. It actually goes plunk.

I straighten up, look around, expecting… something. I look and look. Even the ferry pulling in, right there, right there so close, gives away nothing.

I feel myself shaking. It only makes sense, though, doesn’t it? Big thing there. Nerves are dancing like spit on a skillet. I can feel myself shaking from my feet on up, like I am making the rotting wooden walkway beneath me crumble to bits with it, and then I will fall through and meet Zeke in the water. I feel it in my stomach and my head and even my vision-my eyes themselves are doing something they have never done before, actually physically trembling, juddering, side to side in the sockets, vibrating at the frequency of hummingbird wings. My brain and the backs of my eyeballs are leaning on each other and combining to make a buzz that’s a torture.

I extend my hands wide in front of me to look. I close my eyes then, to the juddering. “Stop,” I say, as calmly as I can. I open my eyes and watch my splayed hands again and they are shivering, quaking to make Parkinson’s seem like stillness. “Stop it,” I say, low, firmer. “Stop it now, Young Man,” I say, staring, staring, staring at my hands as the shaking slows, slows, calms, finally finishes.

I stare at my hands for minutes now, waiting. I listen to myself, check myself, wait for myself. Stillness. There is a fair amount of blood on my all-weather spook coat. Into the water it goes.

I did this. It was there to be done and I did it.

It has been some time. I look up and around again at the peculiar port town.

If Lundy Lee noticed anything amiss, or if it cared, it has already forgotten.

There’s a story for the grandkids, I think.

“Time, Young Man,” I say.

I promised Jarrod I would see him off, and I meant it. This outgoing ferry will be him gone now to whatever happens to a guy like him on a boat like that, and good luck to him.

“Maybe, when you get to college,” he says, “you can check out and see, maybe they need a caretaker. Then we can be a team again.”

The boy and his relentless unfathomable heart does make me smile.

“They might need a caretaker, but probably not as much as you surely do.”

“Then there’s that. Either way, I see the team reunited.”

The team. Unfathomable.

I do wonder if there is such a thing as juvenile dementia. Maybe that’s the team we’re on, really.

“Come here,” I say, and pull him close to me. I drape my new thick burgundy Suffolk sweatshirt around his shoulders. I feel they are death-bony shoulders. “Try and keep warm, at least,” I say.

He pulls the thing on, wrapping himself into it and grinning like I gave him mink.

“You defy all the laws of human nature,” I say.

“Well, then, you defy all the other ones,” he says, trapping me in a spindly, unexpected kind of creepy hug that feels like the best thing I can remember feeling.

Until it brings on the trembling in me again and I have to shove him away.

“Just go to work, will ya,” I shout, turning away as he goes up into the tub of a vessel.

The boat eventually pulls away, as it does a couple of times a day. It goes straight to the Big Island, which by all accounts is pretty small, and then another boat gig takes Jarrod away, farther, from here, from stuff, from me, from old difficulties and almost certainly to a whole bunch of new ones.

He is waving at me, waving madly from the rail of the boat like one of the doomed idiots launching on the Titanic. But in this case, he is the only idiot waving, the other passengers and crew showing no interest in the port they are leaving behind or the people they are leaving to it.

I wave at him a little less nuttily, but nuttily enough.

My waving only makes him wave with ever more gusto, and broadening grin.

An utter, unfathomable nut job.

This is why love is for chumps.

17

Independence, solitude, silence, are all great things.

But hitchhiking, ultimately, is for chumps. It is little wonder hitchhiking is so identified with mass murder. Ten minutes after you have been picked up by one of these jamokes, you want to kill them. Every one of them.

I make it just under halfway before I break down and call my sister to come and bring me home.

She is great for doing it. But I don’t feel chatty.

“Is that it?” Lucy says, finally exasperated with me after about a half hour of the clam show. “Nothing? You got nothing for me after all that?”

“Sorry,” I say, staring out at the trees I know individually by now. “Thanks for getting me.”

“Well, I don’t get you, but that’s another story. So, you just… left him? Just like that?”

“That’s what he wanted.”

“Hnnn,” she says. “What he wanted, huh? Fine, then. I’m cool with that. Nice work.”

“Thanks.”

We indulge in some more silence until we reach her limit again.

“Did you hear about Zeke?”

Now I turn away from the trees. I feel my face flush just like when I didn’t know an answer in school. But I hope she is not paying that close attention to my details. She looks over.

“Watch the road, jeez,” I snap.

She watches the road.

“No,” I say. “What about him?”

“Dead. Yeah, just like that. They just found him a few hours ago. A mess, apparently. They say he was hill walking, way up there in the jaggedy foothills up north. Fell, apparently, a long way down a cliff face and into a flooded quarry. Very pretty, they say.”

I look back to my trees.

“Huh,” I say. “Wow. How’s Mom and Dad anyway?”

I find out how they are when I meet them on the front porch. It feels like I have been away a year. I would love to get reacquainted with my cozy room and my lovely bed right now.

That won’t be happening.

“What’s this?” I ask, pointing at what is too obviously my suitcase on the top step. My mother is giving me a strange and tentative hug as I ask.

My father has never been big on answering stupid questions, so he lets that one lie there. I extend my hand to shake his but instead he hands me this plastic file box sort of a thing. I look at him and wait.