Palmquist chuckled low in his throat, dropped his face into his hands. “You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody would. I’ve told other people…they thought I was nuts.”
Romero pulled off his cigarette. “Shit, I’d believe anything by this point, kid. Really, I would.” He paused. “Okay. Let me tell you then. It’s this brother of yours, dammit. You called him Damon that first day. I remember. You said he wasn’t like other people, he was different. That if somebody fucked with you…he’d straighten them out. Except, well, I thought he was on the outside, but he’s on the inside, isn’t he? He’s inside you.”
“Yes, he is.” Palmquist clenched his teeth, scratched fingers over his scalp. “He’s always been in me. See, Romero, I was one of a set of twins. My brother, he died at birth. Well, he was already dead. Sometimes, when you have twins in the womb, one of them will assert its dominance and absorb the other one. I was the dominant one, though sometimes I don’t think that’s true at all…”
Palmquist said sometime in the first trimester of his mother’s pregnancy she had an ultrasound, and they discovered twin boys in her womb. She named the boys Danny and Damon. Whichever came out first was to be Danny, the other Damon.
Only Damon never came out at all.
By the second trimester, there was only Danny and some rudimentary tissue that had never taken. It was absorbed by the other fetus. Rare at that date, the doctor told her, but it did happen.
“She told me about it when I was like five or six. My old man died in a car accident and I guessnt ' a it was time for confessions,” Palmquist said. “Part of me already knew, because somehow, someway, I always knew I was never alone. I just sensed it, I guess, and as the years passed, that sense of another in me grew stronger and stronger. No, Damon never came out, never really formed, but what he was, it hid inside me.”
Palmquist said he never really talked to Damon, was never in direct contact with this other because Damon only had dominance when he was sleeping…then, only then, would he come out. Come out and play. Palmquist would wake up in the morning when he was a kid and his toys would be in disarray, things moved and sometimes things broken or lost entirely. It was Damon. He would come out at night and play like any other child. But he was not like any other child. Palmquist sensed this right away as a kid. Whatever Damon was, it was something that had taken the shape of all the awful, black and grotesque things that hide in the subcellar of children’s minds. Things from closets and ditches.
“When kids would pick on me, Damon would get them at night,” Palmquist admitted in a low, wounded voice. “Oh, he wouldn’t kill them or anything. Maybe pinch them or bite them or push them out of bed. By the time I was a teenager, he got more vicious, more aggressive, you know? All those hormones must have touched him, too, and when some kids picked on me, Damon would pay them back. A girl made fun of me endlessly in ninth grade bio. Called me a faggot and all that. Damon twisted the head off her dog. He pushed another kid down a set of stairs, clawed the shit out of a bully that was tormenting me. Candy Boggs. She was a popular chick, a real looker. I got up the balls and asked her out. She laughed in my face and she and her friends taunted me for days. Damon visited her one night. I don’t know what he did to her, but she ended up in a psycho ward for almost a year…”
Insane as it all was, Romero could see it happening, that hideous brother hiding inside, coming out to protect the only thing in the world he really loved. If such a thing could love. “That girl…the one he killed and got you here-”
“That was the first time he murdered anyone,” Palmquist said with complete honesty. “I swear to God, it was. Then came Brickhaven…and, well, I suppose you know the rest. He’s part of me just as I’m part of him. I’d wish him away if I could, you know? But it’s not that simple.”
The guard opened the slot in the door. “All right, Romero, you two can suck tongue another time.”
The slot closed.
As Romero made to rise, Palmquist put a hand on his arm. “Those guys who did this to me…Damon will hunt them down one by one. Do you understand, Romero? Keep away from them. Especially at night.” Palmquist released his arm. “He’s afraid of the light. Remember that, okay? And tell the hacks to leave the lights on in here or things are going to happen.”
Romero nodded. “Tell me something, kid. We’re okay, you and mee yoou -usright?”
Palmquist managed a smile. “Of course we are. You’re a good guy, Romero. I knew the moment I saw you that you wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Not if you could help it.”
“Maybe you know me better than I know myself.”
“And that thing with Gordo…man, that was really something.”
Romero just shrugged.
“You made us feel safe,” Palmquist told him. “I know you’ve been through the system and had it tough all the way…but you’re one of the good ones. You really made us feel safe, feel protected…”
And then the hack opened the door and dragged Romero out and Romero felt a lump of something in his throat, quickly swallowing it down as he remembered who he was and where he was and that this was no place for such things.
“Keep the light on in there,” he told the guard.
But the hack just laughed. “Your boyfriend afraid of the dark, Romero?”
“No, but after tonight, I bet you are.”
20
At Shaddock Valley, there weren’t many people Romero trusted.
Surely, not the hacks and precious few prisoners. But JoJo Aquintez was one of them. The state had dropped him for eight years on an armed robbery conviction. He was a tough boy and his little vacation at Shaddock was the second time the state had sent him away to college. But for all that and for all the swindling and menacing he’d done in his time, Aquintez was all right in Romero’s way of thinking. He was a good guy to have at your side. When you were his friend, you could trust him absolutely. He wouldn’t steal from you, snitch on you, or try to ram a homemade knife into your back.
And in a maximum security prison, man, that was saying something.
Romero was being up front about what he knew, exhuming all the demented little secrets from the black soil of his soul, rattling yellowing skeletons from closets he would just as soon have left bolted. “I know it’s fucking jiggy crazy stuff, JoJo, but I swear to it on my mother’s grave. Palmquist…Jesus…he ain’t like other people. That shit he was saying about his brother, well, it’s true.”
“I believe it. I think we all believe a lot of things we didn’t believe before, don’t we?” Aquintez said quietly as was his way. “Things have a way of adding up. Even things we’d rather not let ourselves believe.”
Aquintez was about 5’6 with shoes on, but stocky and powerful from working the iron pile in the gym. He wore glasses, slicked his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead, and was into Medieval history of all things. Had read every book in the prison library on the subject and had read about a hundred more through inter- library loans and purchases.
He wasn’t your average con.
But then, as Romero had learned in his many wasted years in lock-ups and hard-time state joints, there was no such thing as your average con. Some were jailhouse lawyers and some were artists, others were poets and still others were farmers at heart. And many others, of course, were just plain hoodlums and bullies and homicidal maniacs. One thing you could never put in a box were cons…figuratively, anyway.
“I gotta tell somebody this shit,” Romero said, “so it might as well be you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Palmquist…you see…he had this twin…”
Aquintez just smoked a cigarette and listened, patiently, absorbing every word and weighing them out carefully in his mind. And it was a good mind. One that easily picked out implications, subtle nuances, and unspoken possibilities. So he smoked and listened and watched the cons out in the yard playing their games, strutting around like randy males with no females to impress.
“He’s really a good kid, JoJo,” Romero finished by saying, his face sweaty and his eyes blinking rapidly as if he were trying to blink away some image he couldn’t bear to look upon. “We could have made him into a good con, one that knew the ropes but wasn’t like those guys out there. I really believe that. What happened to Weems and Gordo
