Fiction 3: Damned Nobody

DAMNED NOBODY

         I have always known I was no good.

         My parents told me so more than once, and I knew they never lied. They were good people. They went to church twice a week and always put money in the plate. They taught us right from wrong. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t disobey, don’t talk back, don’t be late to school or to home after school – I knew all the commandments by heart. Someone once told me there are Ten Commandments. Don’t you believe it. There are a lot more than Ten.

         I always knew I was no good because I could never keep any of them for very long. Except for talking back. I only did that once.

         I was nine. I had tried to skip out of Mrs. Marsh’s Sunday School class and got caught not six feet from the classroom door. My mother had left me at the door and gone off to her Bible Class. She turned the corner, and I took off in the other direction, and ran right smack headlong into Elder Cruickshank who marched me straight to my mother.

         The church had a playground for its day care center, and I thought it would be more fun to sit in the swings than listen to Mrs. Marsh drone on about King David and Uriah’s wife and how disgusting it was that David wanted to commit adultery with someone else’s wife and how God had punished him by letting two sons die, one by disease and one because he was a rotten no good son, like me I guess. Mrs. Marsh must have liked that story because she told it often. She told it every time one of us misbehaved. Someone would whisper or fiddle with a book or look out the window and not pay attention, and she would remind us that God punishes people who like to do what is wrong. God especially punishes children who do not honor and obey parents and teachers properly. I never listened anymore.

         Elder Cruickshank told my mother what had happened. She smacked my behind – hard – and demanded to know whatever had possessed me to be so disrespectful as to run into people and why was I running anyway, she had left me at my classroom and did Mrs. Marsh know where I was. I was crying and trying to hide the tears and I blurted out that Mrs. Marsh was boring and had a dirty mind and I was going to tell her about her always talking about David and Uriah’s wife, but before I could, her arm shot out like bottle rocket and I got the back of her hand across my mouth so hard I fell down and my mouth swole all up for a week and I had to tell my teachers I hadn’t been paying attention and slammed smack into a post running home. I made it sound real. People would believe me even when I made stuff up. Except for my parents. They knew I was a liar even when I was telling the truth.

         When we got home, Mother told Father and she said he would just have to beat goodness into me, and he tried, but it never took. Mother kept rubbing her hand unconsciously for a day or two. My teeth had taken some skin off her knuckles. I was glad. It took some of the sting out of my lips and I hardly noticed the other bruises when I thought of it. But I never talked back again except under my breath where no one could hear me or even read my lips.

         That’s when I learned I wanted to hurt people. After he had beaten me and gone to sit in his big chair and "rest up" from the unaccustomed exercise, I overheard him tell mother he had just done a godly deed that might save me from hellfire, and he was “Damned glad” he’d done it. Mother snapped, “Harold,” real sharp, like when she is warning me not to do something she thinks I’m going to do, but doesn’t want me to. I thought it was because he had said, “Damned,” so under my breath, as I was running cold water over my mouth, I whispered into the water, “Damned, Damned, Damned” over and over again, sharp-like, just like Mother had said “Harold.”

         It felt good.

**************

         The tricks I played had to be kept secret. Damned (Damned! Damned!) if I was going to give my parents another excuse for a beating, so I couldn’t afford to be caught. The bigger boys gave me a hard time because I was such a “Goody Two-Shoes.” They taunted me with that name, whatever that is, except it meant “bad” as far as they were concerned. Although how being “goody” is bad I never did figure out. They didn’t know I was really rotten. Maybe they would’ve liked me if they’d known - but then Mother and Father would have heard and I didn’t want them to know. I’m smart. I plan my tricks carefully. I never got caught again.

         It started simply enough. In school one day I sat at my desk hard, right before the bell, and yelled like a banshee. After a moment of silence, the whole class started to laugh. The teacher came to my desk with an angry expression and asked, “What is the meaning of this.” I was holding my backside. There was a thumbtack stuck in it, all the way through my thin slacks into my skinny rear. As soon as I felt it I knew what it was. I had seen a kid leave one on the fat kid’s desk across from me just the day before.

         I said, “I think I got stung by a wasp or something, Miss Treacher.”

         Her scowl didn’t change. “I don’t see any wasps around. Sit down and don’t let me hear another noise out of you today or I will call your mother.”

         I made no more noises that day, but she called my mother anyway and I got another whupping, only not so bad as sometimes and my “privileges” taken away. “Privileges” meant I could watch the news with my father on the television. He said television was evil for children and only adults could watch it safely, but that I should know how evil the world was, so I could watch the news. When it came to entertainment news, or sports, I had to leave the room again.

         But I hadn’t let on that there was that thumbtack, because she’d have taken it away. I sat back down with it still in my rump, and sneaked it out when I thought no one was looking. It was a bright green thumbtack. I stored it away. I knew sometime I’d get a chance to use it.

         It was fall, and apples were ripe and falling from trees all over the neighborhood. One particularly snotty girl had a Granny Smith apple tree in her yard. For maybe two weeks she had been bringing one in every day and putting it on the teacher’s desk, which Miss Treacher then ate at lunch time, carrying it with her and munching absently as she examined what all we had for lunch. It was the same color as my tack. I waited my chance.

         Some days, if it was nice out and she had no excuse to cancel it, we would get to go to the playground for an “exercise period.” The word always made me grit my teeth after my father used it to describe the beating he gave me. Some day I would have my chance really to "exercise." My idea wouldn't be quite so good, but it would make an impression, all right. So one day later that week we were allowed out. We were could stop in the lavatory before following outside if we needed to. I went into a booth and dropped my pants so anyone looking under the door could see I was doing my job and waited until everyone had left. From there, it was just a moment to slip back into the unlocked classroom and push my tack into the apple, down low where you didn’t look, but not so low it was in the core. I pushed it in flush with the skin. You almost had to know it was there to see it. I said, “Damned” under my breath, pleased with myself, and ran out to the playground. Funny, the word was always capitalized in my mind, and I never said it but in the past tense like that, “Damned! Done and Damned!”

         It was little more than half an hour later when we had come in from play and started on our bag lunches that Miss Treacher, wandering on the other side of the room crunching her apple cried “ouch!” She had gotten it into her mouth and had bitten on the tack. Lucky for her she had only gotten it sideways, so it didn’t really do any damage, but she was fit to be tied! She demanded to know if anyone had put that tack in her apple, but we all looked completely mystified. At first, no one else even knew what she was talking about. It was awfully hard to keep from smiling, but I managed it. After fretting for some little while, she decided it must have been on her desk and the apple accidentally put on top of it. She realized – or thought she did – that no one had had any possible chance to do it deliberately.

***************

         I experimented with all kinds of things. Pulling parts off ants or beetles palled pretty quickly, but for awhile it was fun watching them try to scurry along with one or two or three legs, to see them go in circles. Before long I just scrunched them good. I didn’t much like the buggy insides that came out when trying to take apart bigger bugs, so that was no fun, and I couldn’t catch birds or cats—at least not with nobody looking. Letting the air out of tires seemed cool for a little while, until I realized that was just an annoyance and no real fun. Then I learned how to give them a slow leak, inserting a thin nail that would almost plug it and make it last sometimes a whole day if it weren’t driven on.

         One Sunday afternoon I did it to Father’s car, and Monday morning on his way to work it blew out on the interstate. He fishtailed in front of a truck going eighty, I guess. That's what the paper said. A policeman came and got me from school and wouldn’t tell me anything. Mother was crying when I got home. She told me Father had gone to heaven. Under my breath, I said, “Damned!” I went to my room. I didn’t want her to see I wasn’t crying. I hadn’t planned that Father should die, just maybe be late to work; but I wasn’t one Damned bit sorry - except it annoyed me to think he might really have gone to heaven! I was glad I wasn't going to be there if he were.

         When no one was looking I got some RealLemon® out of the fridge and returned to my room. Later, when Mother called me out to have a sandwich I rubbed some into my eyes to make them red and teary and put on a long face. She sent me to her sister’s house – a sour old maid if ever you met one, looking just like the Wicked Witch in Wizard of Oz – because she had to go identify the body and make arrangements in the afternoon. I pretended to want to be left alone, which she was glad enough to do. I stayed in her bedroom all day, saying “Damned” to myself in as many different ways as I could think of, and trying not actually to laugh out loud. I was twelve.

***********

         I stopped playing tricks for a while. Father’s death had satisfied me, and Mother was too busy suddenly having to go to work to pay me much attention, and I obeyed the rules to the letter wherever I might be seen. Oh, little stuff, like adding just a tiny bit of salt to the sugar – not enough to make it taste salty, just enough to make it taste a little “off,” or letting a classmate’s homework “accidentally” get into my pack (from where it would be thrown out when I got home), or leaving graffiti on walls where no one would think I’d been; but nothing really big. To all appearances I was the model student. I got good grades, went to junior college, attended church faithfully, even sang in the choir (where occasionally, for some reason, there just wasn’t enough music to go around). And I got a job.

         Well, it wasn’t a very good job, really; I worked for the state investigating welfare fraud. It paid crap, but I didn’t have anyone to look after. Mother died without any help – an aneurysm in the brain – six weeks after my nineteenth birthday. I managed okay. The job mostly fit me, but was disappointing at first. Believe it or not, most people on welfare really would rather not be there and actually need the help. “Damned” if I didn’t nail the deadbeat cheaters good, of course, but there weren’t enough of them. So I started setting them up. I’d demand receipts I didn’t really need, I’d delay approvals, and most fun of all, I’d insert things into their files that looked fishy – and were, of course, since they didn’t come from the welfare dunces in the first place – but that they couldn’t prove weren’t theirs. I’d get them denied. Damned! That was fun for a while. And then it began to pall. I wasn’t happy. Someone needed to hurt. And I needed to do the hurting.

************


         So that’s how it happened. I started looking for a victim. It had to be someone who couldn’t fight back. In the first place, I wasn’t big enough to win a fight even with a moderately strong woman, and second, I couldn’t afford to sustain any damage, there couldn’t be any suspicion possibly laid to my door afterwards. Just making a life mildly miserable wasn’t enough. I felt rotten. I was rotten, and except for killing Father almost accidentally nine years before, I hadn’t really and truly hurt anyone, and the thought made my eyes narrow and my teeth clench. I knew it would have to be soon, or I was afraid I might get careless.

         Investigating welfare fraud takes me into some seamy neighborhoods. It can be dangerous, especially at night, but sometimes the only time you can get evidence of cheating is when a supposedly non-existent man in the house comes home at night. I was driving slowly down a block where one of my “clients” lived when I saw this kid walking along, hands in pockets, head down. There was no one else on the street. He was small, slight, looked only maybe six years old, give or take – I was never good at guessing. I pulled up alongside him and opened the passenger window. “Hey, kid,” I called. “Isn’t it a little late for you to be out?”

         “What’s it to ya?” the kid says. So maybe he’s not six, but he’s real short and thin. He’d be no trouble if I were careful.

         “Aw heck,” I said. “Just trying to help. Need a lift?”

         “Ain’t got nowhere to go.”

         “No lie? Everybody’s got someplace.”

         “I ain’t everybody.”

         “Maybe I can help.”

         He looked at me sharply now, and came closer. “How? You got some green?”

         “Green? Oh, money, well, a little. Why?”

         “Ain’t eaten today yet. Usually old lady over on Third gives me a sandwich, but she’s sick or something. Nobody answered the door.”

         “Tough break.” I paused for a moment, not to think – I knew exactly what I was going to do – but to look like I was thinking. “Hey, I haven’t eaten yet either. How ‘bout I treat us both to DQ or something?”

         “I ain’t queer or nothin’. I ain’t gonna blow you or nothin’ for it.”

         That actually threw me. It had never occurred to me that anyone might trade such favors for food. “Naw, I’m not into that stuff anyway. C’mon. Hop in.”

         The kid came up close and eyed me good through the window. Like I said, I wasn’t very big, and I guess I didn’t look very threatening. He got in.

         “I’m Harold. What’s your name?” I don’t know why I wanted to know; it didn’t really matter. But the hurt would count for more, I felt, if I knew the victim.

         “Nobody. I ain’t Nobody. Call me whatever ya want.”

         “Like music?” I turned on the radio.

         “Whatever turns you on.”

         Indeed.

         The only Dairy Queen actually in town was on the south side, so traffic patterns made it faster to drive north through an unpopulated area to the next town. I had suggested the DQ for just that reason. Dark, all along the way there - no lights, no houses. Traffic, but I wouldn’t be doing anything where I could be seen. Not long out of town, with no one close behind me, I suddenly put on my brakes and cried “Damned! What the heck is that?” I pulled way over into the swale, doused the headlights and made to look behind me into the woods a little behind us. Naturally the kid did, too. It just took a sec. I reached over, grabbed the kid’s head and gave it a quick twist. There was a sick snap and that was all there was to it. I checked for pulse and breathing, there was nothing. He had barely begun to make a startled cry when I touched him and it was all over.

         I let the kid slide down to the floor of the car while I went to the trunk to get an old blanket. I put it over him, just in case someone might be able to look in – not very likely, since it was dark and he was crumpled mostly onto the floor now, down low. I pulled back onto the road and put on the headlights again while no cars were coming. A few cars had passed while we were pulled over, but with us dark, they wouldn’t have noticed anything that far off on the shoulder. Then I drove out to the national forest forty miles east of us. Lots of old logging roads in there. I pulled onto spurs and at last on to one that had been driven on, but not often so I was out of sight of the more used ways, not where a new track would be surprising, but not where anyone would be at night, either. I stopped the car and doused the lights and waited for a little while. There was nothing but stars and a few insect sounds, once the call of some night bird.

         I went around to the passenger side, took the blanket and put it back in the trunk, taking out a new shovel I had bought for the purpose. No blood, no problem with the blanket. Made sure I had the shovel and all the kid’s stuff – he had nothing he wasn’t wearing – and carried him into the woods maybe a hundred yards. He was so light, I thought, it’s almost too bad I didn’t let him have a last meal. I got far enough into the woods that I was just a little nervous about finding my way back. Finally I stopped to rest by a tree that had been lightning struck, split partway down, but had somehow lived through it. A peculiar looking tree, looking as rotten and Damned as I. Good. Just right. I got pretty sweaty digging, even though it was cool, but Damned if I didn’t have energy! I didn't dig the hole very long, but deep enough I was over my waist standing in it and had a little trouble swinging my leg up and pulling myself out. I sort of folded up the kid into a ball and wrestled him in, wiped off my prints with my handkerchief, threw the shovel in with him, and covered him up by hand. No animal was likely to dig him up this deep. There was a little mound left even after stomping it down, so I scattered the extra dirt, and filled in with leaves to make it look as undisturbed as I could, knowing that in a day or two the wind would make it look completely natural. I was filthy, but no one would see me. I got a little lost trudging back to the car, coming out on the road almost a quarter mile away from it; but I had enjoyed the whole way, saying “Damned!” to myself over, and over.

**********

         I watched every news program I could for weeks. I even ordered a newspaper home delivery so I could follow the news more closely. Nothing. Damned! It had been fun doing the hurt, but even if they didn’t find the body – I had, after all, hidden it pretty well – where was the missing persons report? No child was reported missing of any age. I couldn’t understand it. Part of a good hurt is that, well, that people hurt! And nobody was hurting! Damned, the killing was good, but it hadn’t really even hurt the kid! Could this kid really have been Nobody?

         Day by day I became more agitated. Why was no one complaining? Why was no one looking for this kid? Damned! He had been murdered! Did nobody give a God-Damned? Who the hell was this kid nobody missed? I didn’t even know his name. He was just … Nobody! Damned Nobody! This was wrong! It wasn’t fair, not to me, and not even to the kid. No one should be Nobody! Damned if anyone should be Nobody!

         I started poking around the neighborhood where I picked him up. After a few days, I got up the nerve to ask some people if they knew of the kid. I described him.

         “Nine years old, maybe, looks six. Skinny. Old shirt and jeans. Grubby. Used to beg food around here I think.” Nobody knows Nobody. Damned!

         He had mentioned Third Street. Or was it Third Avenue? No, Third Avenue was shops. Third Street was seedy – old city gone to slums. An old lady had given him sandwiches. I started asking around there. There are a lot more old ladies living in seedy neighborhoods than you’d think; people who had just outlived their savings, who had little income, maybe once had been solidly middle class, now reduced to beggary. I’d seen it a lot. A couple I had accused of welfare fraud and took away their support. I’d thought it fun then. Damned! I was feeling sorry for them, now! Damned! Why?

         I came back there almost every afternoon after work for a week, and then a couple of days a week for two more before someone said “Yeah. Old lady useta live across the street there. Useta be a scrawny kid come by almost every afternoon. He’d mow her lawn or go grocery shopping for her or something, and she’d give him some food, a little money, sometimes even clothes. Dropped dead in her kitchen maybe three-four months ago. Haven’t seen the kid since.”

         Damned! He wasn’t Nobody! He wasn’t rotten like me. He was a nice kid helping old ladies and down on his luck! The Nobody was the nobody who had ever given a Damned about him! It wasn’t right! Damned!

         I had to do something. I went to the police department and reported him missing. They asked his name, I couldn’t tell them. I gave them his description. Maybe a litle suspicious, they asked how I knew him if I didn’t even know his name. I told them I had just seen him around as a street person, and since he’d disappeared, I was a little concerned is all. They thanked me and told me I was a nice guy to worry about a street punk who had probably found a drug haven or an old queer to look after him and was just gone. I wasn’t a nice guy! I was rotten, and I knew it, but I smiled graciously and told them thanks for their help and left.

         But I couldn’t let it lie. Night after night I saw myself talking with the kid, offering him something to eat, snapping his little chicken neck, digging his grave, covering him up, driving home and scrubbing up, and he was Nobody who nobody cared about enough to notice he was missing.

         Over the next year, I lost weight, then almost my job, not because my tricks had been found out – they hadn’t, but because I wasn’t finding as many frauds anymore. I even undid some of the tricks I had pulled and reinstated the welfare checks of those I’d cheated. Don’t ask me why – I’m still rotten, I did it on impulse. Damned, I hated myself when I did it, but I did it anyway. I started nailing only the real skunks – the most blatant of liars. My boss thought I’d gone neglectful. I’d just gone honest again. Damned Goody Two-Shoes.

         In the end, I knew I had to dig the kid up. But how to do it without getting nailed for the murder? I got a new shovel, drove out to where I had buried the kid, almost a year to the day from when I had done the deed. This time I took a flashlight, but it was still hard to find the site. Eventually I spotted the Damned split tree and started digging. After a year in the ground there were mostly just bones, but some hair and fabric remained. I scattered them about, filled in the hole, and went home to wait for their discovery.

         Three weeks went by, and nothing. I was half crazy with anxiety. I drove back out to the site, this time in daylight. Some of the bones were missing, the remaining flesh was mostly gone except for some that was dried and hardened. They were in plain sight, but no one was looking. Damned!

         I went back home. How could I get them found? They couldn’t just suddenly appear in a trafficked area. I couldn't just "find" them myself - that would put me in too much danger. Somehow, I had to get people into the area. I brainstormed who might go there. Loggers? Not anymore. Birders!

         I checked the local bird watching society. Eureka! They were having a bird count in the national forest in six weeks, would I like to help count? I went to the library and learned all I could from books about bird watching and joined the society. Now all I had to do was to get them to come near the bones.

         It wasn’t really very hard. They weren’t planning to go quite where I had left the bones, but close enough I thought I could steer them in that direction. I joined the little group I thought were planning to go closest to the bones, beginning before dawn and traipsing through woods and along streams for a couple of hours before we got within range.

          “Look there,” I called urgently, but craftily, in soft birdwatchers’ tones, and brought up my field glasses.

         “What did you see?”
         “I’m not sure, but it didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before!” Tricksters can lie very well. My group was excited.

         We trudged in the requisite direction, my calling attention to something or other now and then when enthusiasm seemed to flag, and soon stood under the stricken tree. I saw no bones! Stunned, I looked all around, before realizing birders don’t look down, but up! I said, “I think I dropped something here when I took out my handkerchief a few minutes ago.” I hadn’t taken it out, but I doubted anyone would realize it. “Help me look.” We had pushed round leaves with our feet for only a few seconds that seemed like forever, when someone cried “My God, look at this!” Nobody had turned up at last.

**********

         The police had a lot of questions, of course, but little evidence. They found some more bones a surprising distance away, but never did find the whole body. Poor Nobody, they didn’t really seem to care. They checked missing persons reports, and turned up the one I had sent in almost a year earlier. It was a risky connection for me, but I hadn't found the bones myself. There was no way to connect him with me otherwise.

“Nothing much to identify the remains with. No dental work on what few teeth were left. No way even to tell how he died. No marks on the bones, which is a little odd—if the body had been on the surface, there should have been tooth marks from scavenging animals, but there were very few, mostly recent. Probably murdered and dumped – no real reason we can think of for him to have been out in that wilderness, but no identity, no motive. Might be the kid you reported. Funny you should be in on his discovery. Kinda neat really; the nice guy who reports him missing gets to find him. Sure you don’t know his name?”

         “No, I really know nothing about him. Only spoke to him once, sort of in passing while I was investigating in the neighborhood. Just noticed he wasn’t there anymore. Seemed like a nice kid.”

         They never even called me again. Nobody cared. Damned! I couldn’t stand it.

************

         I’ve bought another shovel. I prowl around the neighborhood, but the only Damned Nobody I can find is me. I drive out to where I had broken the kid’s neck and stare into the woods. Then I drive out to the national forest. I pick my way out to the split tree, the poor, Damned, rotten misfit tree that somehow won’t die, and start to dig. After digging down pretty far, but as narrowly as I can manage, I burrow sideways, and pretty deep, so that there is plenty of dirt above me. In a moment, I will lie down in the hole with dirt above me, put this notebook in my pocket, and chop at the dirt above me until it falls on me and I can no longer move.

         I am already rotten, my bones won’t take long to be free of flesh. Damned, I will be buried as the Nobody I am and deserve to be; with luck, never to be found, for all I write my story. But even should you find me, I have never really told you anything – not my town, nor my church, nor any real names – no matter how hard you try, you will never really know who I am. I told everyone, the very few who knew me, boss, co-workers, landlord, church, that I am moving away – no one will suspect it is I, even should someone find my hiding place. And then perhaps they will call me Nobody officially, or Anybody; but not Somebody, never Somebody. Just rotten, and Damned!

************

Author's note: At the time I wrote this piece, I had had my fill of seeing nice kids permanently damaged by sick, abusive, uncaring, addicted, and flat weird parents, so I tried to write something that was two things:
a unique mystery [in 3 ways: a) It is told from the point of view of the killer; b) we know whodunit from the start; and c) other than the killer, there are no real characters other than cameos of the parents and murdered child]
and also a "message tale" about how tragic child abuse really is, and how not only the child, but generations of others can suffer from it. Truly, "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons even to the third and fourth generation!"

This was first prize winner in

Tales 1: A Birthday Feast for Hsiao-tse  (E) A fable. A Confucius-like elder teaches values to his grandson. #982631 by revdbob