The Warm Glow of Happy Homes Read online

“There. Satisfied?”

  “We don’t need it.”

  “If one of us or Ibbie gets hurt, I’m blaming you. Understand?”

  “I’ll take the heat, man. Everything’ll be fine. Or as fine as it could be with your idiot plan.”

  “No faith.”

  “Got that right.”

  13.

  Barton was pretty sure the cough had come from upstairs. He paused before ascending the staircase. What if the cough was like the paper sounds? What if he searched and searched for it but never found it? What then? Then Mexico Frat Funland would be a complete bust. He’d already decided there would be as many DJs as guests and that was completely humiliating. But if he were able to capture the beautiful young maid, then it seemed like that would be the very definition of Mexico Frat Funland. He could probably pay or force her to do just about anything. Strip. Wet t-shirt. Maybe they could all fuck her. He’d been to a couple of parties like that in college. Had never gotten to indulge though. Sometimes if he drank too much he couldn’t get hard and to try and participate in front of that many people only to fail would have been so embarrassing he’d had to have left school. Luckily, since then he’d discovered Viagra. It didn’t matter how much he drank or how fun his dose of other pills was, if he took enough Viagra, he’d remain rock hard.

  Mexico Frat Funland.

  Legendary.

  He wondered what time it was.

  He’d set his phone alarm under the new title, “Party Time,” and it hadn’t gone off yet. Of course, it was probably dead. He had the phone and the cord in his pocket. He sat the clock down on the first step. He turned his phone on and was surprised to see the screen come to life. There must have been a tiny amount of power left. He called William. Barton was surprised he answered. He must have sensed the urgency of ... everything. Barton told him about the piñata in his bathroom. Told him he wanted it suspended from one of the beams in the middle of the hut on the patio because, obviously, The Party People were not going to show up with their tent and chairs. Where he’d told the DJs to set up? Of course where he’d told the DJs to set up. Where else would they expect them to hang a piñata? From the sky? If you try and hang things from the sky, they’ll get all pecked at by space birds.

  “I feel alive, William. I feel so fucking alive!”

  And he did, momentarily anyway.

  He plugged his phone in in the kitchen and left it on the counter. He went back to the staircase and grabbed his clock. It was very dense and metal. He could grip it in his hand but it was almost too heavy. He began climbing the stairs. The farther he went up, the darker it got. He thought it was probably just clouds moving over the sun and he imagined the winding stairway as a tunnel and it made him think of when he would go down to the basement of their massive house in New York when he was a kid. It was the first house he could remember. He would go into the basement with an aluminum baseball bat in search of rats. They were all over in that house. They didn’t come out of the pipes and sleep with him like they did here. They knew their place. And he would pretend that his baseball bat was a sword and his name was the White Lord and if he could rid the village of rats, all those rats that didn’t belong there, he would be adored by the villagers and given his pick of the fairest virgin to take to bed. Eventually waiting for the rats in the basement wasn’t good enough. He wanted to catch them at their source. He found a spot in the woods where he could enter the sewers. He would go in and not come back out until all the rats had been killed. He’d gotten lost in the sewers and some city workers had to come and find him. They were the ones who’d told him he’d gotten lost. Probably sent to him by his parents. But Barton hadn’t gotten lost. He’d found some essential part of himself that his parents and most other people wouldn’t understand. He felt fine. He felt perfect. He felt almost invincible. It was his parents who were always taking him to the doctor and trying to convince him he was sick.

  Barton shifted the clock to his left hand and came out at the top of the tunnel.

  There was sunlight all around him.

  He looked for the maid but he could barely see anything.

  Maybe she was sunlight. Maybe she was all around him.

  His heart raced in his chest and he felt like crying again.

  He lay down on the bed and pulled the clock up to his chest. He tried to make it call his parents but it must have been dead. Either the clock or his parents. They didn’t make phones like they used to.

  14.

  “These shades are really nice,” Joe said.

  They were in the car on their way to the King estate. The day was violently sunny. Alex was grateful for the sunglasses too. The car didn’t have air conditioning so the wig was another story. Even with all the windows down he could still feel the sweat saturating his real hair.

  “Do you think we should maybe find out if Ibbie’s in trouble?” Joe asked.

  Alex tossed him the phone. “You do it. I don’t want to text and drive.”

  Joe picked the phone up from in between his legs and stared at it. “What should I say?”

  “How about ‘Are you okay?’”

  It felt like it took Joe half an hour to type this in. After hitting send he continued to stare at the phone.

  “You don’t have to stare at it,” Alex said. “It’ll vibrate if she sends one back.” Joe was maybe the last person on the planet who didn’t own a cell phone. He’d always told Alex that if he had a cell phone he’d have to pay for anxiety medication and a cell phone plan.

  They passed through downtown, careful not to roll through any stop signs or go even a mile per hour above the speed limit. King didn’t live in a gated community because, essentially, anything from the center of downtown east was an entire gated community. The cops who were on duty were there to protect the rich folks who lived up in the hills. And there were more cops than in your average small town. Everyone’s tax dollars going toward the visibility of cops so the rich had at least the illusion of safety. Besides, a gated community would have been redundant, since all the houses were gated and secure anyway. Doing the lawn and garden work in this area had given both Alex and Joe a good sense of how these people operated. Most of the estates, they wouldn’t even contemplate doing something like this. But the King place seemed to be designed to be taken advantage of. Well, maybe not the place, but that kid certainly was. Alex didn’t really know why he continually thought of him as a kid, since Barton was probably older than him. Actually, Alex tended to think of every male in this area as a kid. They were all like big overgrown children who were paying to be pampered. That’s why all the women were either frumpy, stereotypical soccer moms or catalogue attractive in that silicone and heavily artificial way. In short, the type of women twelve-year-old boys usually found attractive.

  But Alex guessed it wasn’t just the rich who were like that. Even his poor and working class brethren were a bit stunted in their emotional development with their guns and sports and motorcycles.

  The phone vibrated. “Oh,” Joe said.

  “What does it say?” Alex fought the urge to rip the phone out of Joe’s hands.

  “‘Not immediately.’”

  “Tell her we’re almost there.”

  Joe typed in “astolm thare” and hit send.

  It was hard for Alex not to speed. He didn’t really think Ibbie was in serious danger, but she wasn’t one to exaggerate. If anything, she downplayed things. This made him even a little more nervous.

  “Whoa.” Joe was looking at the phone again.

  “What?”

  “It says, ‘Think about calling the police.’”

  “Give me the phone.”

  Joe handed it over. Alex tapped Ibbie’s name and listened to the phone ring and ring and then go to voice mail. “Please call me back and tell me what’s going on.” He tapped end call and put it on the seat between his legs. It vibrated almost immediately and he picked it up. He held it with both hands so he could read and drive.

  He read out loud. “Ca
n’t talk. If I talk he’ll hear me. His parents are dead in the house. Pretty scared.”

  “I don’t like this,” Joe said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Call the fucking police.”

  They were now only a couple of miles from King’s, already out of town where the houses were spread acres apart, huge mature trees populating the lots. Most of the houses weren’t even visible from the road. Alex knew the serenity was only a facade. There were cameras and infrared laser beams all over the place. People watching from secret rooms and, the houses – the ones that could be seen – while projecting the warm glow of happiness and peace and tranquility, were undoubtedly ablaze with anxiety. He had yet to meet a rich person who got rich from doing something he or she felt good about. It seemed that in order to get rich, you had to take advantage of a lot of people in order to construct that solid gold house of cards.

  He wanted to pull over and think about calling the police, maybe talk this over with Joe, but if he pulled off to the side of the road or, even worse, into the end of one of their driveways in his little piece of shit car, they wouldn’t have to call the police because they’d be pulling up behind his car within a matter of seconds.

  And maybe that was what he was afraid of.

  Maybe if a cop showed up, he’d tell the cop he had a girlfriend who worked for the Kings and said there was some really weird shit going on right now. Or, no, maybe that wouldn’t sound serious enough. Maybe they wouldn’t even be able to investigate that. So maybe Alex would tell a cop that Ibbie was in trouble.

  And then he could kiss the money goodbye. Saved or spent he’d already planned on that money going toward a better life for him and Ibbie.

  And just as he thought he might be a complete and total idiot, Joe confirmed it by asking, “What are we going to do with the car?”

  Although, in his way, that was Joe confirming he was still on board with the original plan.

  “I’ll stop the car just before his house and we’ll have to switch. I’ll give you the phone and walk up to the house. If you don’t hear from me in ten or fifteen minutes, text Ibbie. If she doesn’t text back, feel free to call the police but text or leave a message letting us know. If we are in there and don’t need the police, I don’t want to be caught doing anything stupid when they do show up. Got all that?”

  “Sure.”

  And Alex knew he probably did.

  He pulled the car over.

  15.

  Maybe he was out for a couple of minutes because he hoped what he had seen was a dream.

  The sky was bright but he couldn’t see the sun because it was covered by the space birds. There must have been thousands of them up there. And he was being lifted toward them and looked down to see what was doing the lifting even though it made him so dizzy he felt like he might fall.

  Rats.

  As many rats below him as there were space birds above him and he wished he had his baseball bat.

  They lifted him higher and higher until he thought they were feeding him to the space birds. Then all the space birds dispersed and the sun exploded. They began flying toward him and he saw that the sun hadn’t exploded. They’d ripped it apart.

  And then the rats were gone and he was falling.

  Catching himself.

  Prying his eyes open. The evening sun blasted through the window and he realized his glasses must have fallen off while he was out, if he’d even been wearing them. He climbed out of the bed. The room stunk. He hadn’t been up here in a couple of weeks but it smelled worse than he remembered. Except there was another scent too.

  Was it the scent he had followed up here?

  No. He had followed the sound of a cough up here, but that scent had been here too. He must have had a hard time trying to distinguish it from the smell of rot.

  The sound of paper ripped down the hall. It was so loud Barton had to bring his hands up to his ears, almost knocking himself out with the clock he still clutched in his hand.

  He was sure whoever was ripping paper had been doing it from his house. Over there, he hadn’t seen how it could get any louder.

  But there it was again and it felt like someone jabbing a spike into his skull. A spike with an amplifier on the end of it.

  He got out of the bed, located his glasses, and adjusted his wig. He switched the clock to his left hand and followed the sounds of ripping paper – almost furious now – down the hall.

  Once in the hall, he had to orient himself. He’d stepped out of his parents’ bedroom. Why was he there? He had absolutely no idea. Maybe he was just tired. But he was waiting for the party to start. Now was not the right time to be tired. He shouldn’t be tired. He should be happy. He should be energized and ecstatic.

  Mexico Frat Funland!

  It was going to be great!

  Already he’d lost track of what he was doing. The deafening sound of ripping paper tore through his skull again and he was reminded. It was coming from in here. He was going to find whoever was doing that and fuck them up. He lifted the clock in his hand to make sure he could effectively use it as a weapon.

  The only rooms toward that end of the hall were a guest room and his father’s study. He didn’t know why anyone would be in his father’s study with his father away on vacation. It was possible someone was in the guest room. Maybe it was a relative that had come over and decided to crash there. Maybe they hadn’t told Barton or maybe they had and he’d since forgotten. Or maybe some of the help had decided to stay there since they knew Barton’s parents would be out of town. That seemed liked something they would do. Probably had a whole family living in there. He remembered seeing the maid down in the kitchen and following her cough. That was probably why she was here. There were probably a whole bunch of them living here. Living it up while his parents were gone.

  Part of Barton wished the maid was in there. He had a clock and, if he popped one or two of his Viagras, he could have a hard-on very shortly. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to be proactive. He stopped his march down the hall, reaching into his pocket, glad he’d remembered to put the bottle in there. It was the only drug he’d bothered bringing. It wasn’t a sure thing but Barton liked to think sex was somehow central to just about any party. He dry mouthed the pills and continued walking.

  He reached the heavy wooden door of his father’s study and almost knocked on the door. But that was stupid. He didn’t need to knock on the door. This was practically his house. And he was the only one with any right to be here. Well, maybe William could be in here but Barton would pretty much let William do anything he wanted.

  He opened the door slowly, brandishing the clock in front of him.

  The first things he noticed were the glossy black and white photos of dead rats pinned or taped to the bookcases lining the room. Maybe his father had turned his study into something like a dark room. But why would he choose to take pictures of dead rats? It seemed gruesome.

  Then he noticed his father sitting behind the desk. He didn’t look very good. He almost looked dead. Like a zombie. His head was bent down as if studying something on the desk. When Barton stepped farther into the room, his father lifted his head.

  “Barton,” he said, “we need to have a talk.”

  “I’d love to, Dad, but I’m kind of in the middle of something very important –”

  The sound of ripping paper almost took him to his knees.

  “I thought that might get your attention.” His father held a piece of paper in his hands. “Do you know what that sound is?”

  Barton’s eyes felt unfocused. “It’s ripping paper. I’ve been hearing it for weeks.”

  “That’s right. It’s also the sound of you going from being one of the wealthiest people in the state to being absolutely destitute.”

  Barton laughed and stared frantically around the room. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Poor, Barton. It means you’re going to be poor, without anything. Including a home. I want you out by the end of
the week.”

  His father tore another piece of paper. Barton remembered now. Kind of. It was the will he was tearing up. Along with a lot of Barton’s trust fund paperwork. His father had told him he couldn’t have a trust fund if he couldn’t be trusted and Barton had thought that was kind of corny but maybe kind of cool. And then his father had pulled out a folder and began showing him photo after photo of dead rats. Rats half buried in the ground. Rats hanging from trees. A dead rat in the trunk of a car. A charred rat.

  Barton was surprised by the clarity of that memory, especially when he couldn’t seem to remember just a few seconds ago. But that day stood out. It was essentially the day his parents told him they didn’t love him. Only his mother wasn’t there. His father had probably sent her away. But she’d come back later. Barton confronted her about the space birds. Asked them how else they’d gotten those pictures when his mom denied she even knew what a space bird was. And then she told Barton he had broken their hearts and the last thing he remembered was reaching for her and the sun exploding through the windows in the room and ...

  ... and then everything had been just great.

  He didn’t know why he had to work himself up over things like this. He looked around his father’s study. There weren’t any photos of dead rats hanging there. His father wasn’t behind the desk. He was on vacation. On vacation with Barton’s mother. Probably for a long time.

  Barton straightened himself up as best he could.

  His heart hammered and he might have been crying but he had a party to get to.

  Mexico Frat Funland.

  Rock on.

  16.

  Having done most of his work in the gardens and shrubbery surrounding the estate, Alex was able to get out of the driveway as soon as he walked onto the property. Everything was almost mathematically even spaced to give them room to work on everything, not that they really did much of anything on a regular basis except mow the grass. Most of the other time was just spent slacking. The only time the residents ever paid any attention to the trees and the gardens was in the spring when it wasn’t too hot to be outside and everything was fresh and new to look at. Then they would call the company and complain if something didn’t look perfect and a “technician” would come out and remove the offending weeds or dead leaves.