Hole: A Ghost Story Read online

  “That’s fine, Steve. Let it out. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just the adrenaline, from fighting. We don’t have to do anything about Dean. You go home after the funeral and don’t worry about your mother or Dean. Dean’s been warned off. He’s not going to come near me tomorrow. You did good. You did a real good job.”

  Hank said all these things, and he meant them too, but he couldn’t help but think that Steve was hiding something from him. Being a lawyer, he’d learned to read faces, and he knew there was more to the story than what his brother-in-law had shared.

  But what was it? And did it matter? His wife was dead, and after the next couple days, he’d never have to deal with her crazy family again.

  16.

  When Hank finally went to bed, Steve poured himself a glass of water and retired to the guest bedroom to get some sleep. He was exhausted and sore. He was actually hurting a lot more than he’d let on, but he didn’t want Hank to get into it with Dean, especially over his stupidity.

  Dean was dangerous. No one but Steve knew just how dangerous Dean could be now that Mary was gone, and he wasn’t about to let his brother-in-law join that club. It was like being on the endangered species list. Maybe that was being dramatic, but that was how it felt sometimes.

  Steve locked the door of the guest bedroom—he wasn’t making the same mistake again!—then stripped down to his underwear.

  The bruises weren’t confined to his torso. They ran down both thighs as well. He grimaced, then pulled open the front of his underwear. Yep, even his groin. There was a big bruise forming just above his pubic hair, and the front of his underwear had a little red stain, where he’d bled from the urethra following Dean’s assault.

  He was hurting all over, but he didn’t think anything was busted inside him. Not like the time he “accidentally” fell out of the tree house and ruptured his spleen.

  Steve didn’t want to think about that day. He was too tired. He just wanted to go to sleep and forget about everything for a little while. Mary, the fight, the past.

  Steve rummaged through his bags until he found his pills, checked the labels, then twisted the child proof caps off of two of the prescription bottles. He shook one large tablet from each into his trembling palm.

  There were several brown plastic bottles in his bag. He had all kinds of pills. He was a pill-head. He didn’t deny it, least of all to himself, but he needed them all the same. He couldn’t sleep without them, couldn’t live without them. The pain was too bad. The physical pain. The mental pain. If anyone took away his pills… well, he’d probably cut his wrists like Mary had. Within a month, most likely.

  He didn’t want to think about that.

  Steve tossed the pills in his mouth and washed them down with the tap water. He set the glass on the nightstand, killed the light and eased under the covers, gritting his teeth and groaning as he slid into the sheets.

  He shifted around, got as comfortable as he could. The cool sheets felt like heaven against his bruised flesh.

  He didn’t know why he’d confronted Dean like he had. He’d let his affection for his brother-in-law override his good sense, he supposed. He just didn’t want any trouble at Mary’s funeral. He wanted to bury the past when they buried his sister, and have no further dealings with his crazy religious mother and psychopathic older brother. It was time to cut the ties. Mary was really the only reason he’d even kept in touch with his demented family.

  His poor sister… She’d endured so much, and for what? She was never going to win her mother’s approval, or resolve the issues she had with her brother. Harriet and Dean Klegg were both selfish, evil, arrogant people. Mary’s value to them was strictly based upon the lengths she would go to appease them both. Steve didn’t know why she’d needed their love, only that she was just as sick in the head as his mother and brother were, just... in a different way.

  And look what it got her, Steve thought.

  Steve sighed, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. He didn’t want to think about Mary any more tonight. Not Mary, not his mother, and certainly not Dean fucking him in his tree house when he was ten years old, then throwing him out the door when he threatened to tell on him.

  That was the last time Dean raped him.

  The memories came, even though he didn’t want them to. He couldn’t help himself. It was like picking a scab.

  Steve was in the tree house, reading comics. It was summer and Dean was home from school.

  Steve tried to stay away from his older brother when he could help it. That’s why he was in the tree house. He thought it was safe. Dean had never followed him up there before. But he was just fooling himself. Nowhere was really safe when Dean was home.

  He was reading a back issue of the Hulk when he heard someone climbing the boards that had been nailed to the trunk of the big tree. Steve put his comic aside, looking toward the entrance of his treehouse, and that’s when Dean’s head rose into view.

  “Hey, little bro,” Dean said, smiling.

  Steve was wary of his brother when he first climbed into the tree house with him, but Dean acted very pleasant and brotherly that afternoon. After a while, Steve relaxed, and they read comic books together, leaning up against the walls on opposite sides of the clubhouse.

  Steve could still remember the sights and sounds and smells of that afternoon. The odor of the rotting wood planks the clubhouse was built out of. The echoing voices of the kids playing down the street, the thrum of the lawn sprinklers. He remembered the way the shadow speckled light had shifted on the floor.

  Dean cracked a couple jokes, and Steve laughed.

  Then the purring sound of Dean’s zipper.

  He’d looked up, his heart racing at the sound, to see his adult brother pulling his pud and scowling at him.

  Steve’s face flushed even now, remembering that afternoon. He laid in his brother-in-law’s guest bed, muscles tensed, as he relived the assault.

  “Dean... don’t...” he’d whispered, mouth dry. “Somebody might see!”

  “Nobody’s going to see us in here, retard,” Dean sneered. He gestured for Steve to come to him. “Come over here. I haven’t gotten laid since I got home from college. I need to get off before I bust.”

  He’d cajoled, tried bribery, then finally he ordered Steve to his side, threatening to beat his scrawny ass if he didn’t do what Dean told him to do. Steve surrendered, and tried not to cry out or accidentally bite as Dean grabbed his head by the hair and shoved his face up and down in his lap.

  “That’s right, you little faggot. Suck that cock,” he’d snarled. “You love it, don’t you! Say it!”

  But that wasn’t enough for him. He turned Steve around and tugged down his shorts and Spider-man Underoos. Steve couldn’t help but cry out, it hurt so bad, but Dean covered his mouth with his hands and kept thrusting into him, asking him how he liked having his little asshole raped, telling him he was a real faggot now, because Dean had popped his cherry, and now all he’d ever want was to be fucked in the ass. When he was done, he ground Steve’s face in the floor, shoving his head down by the nape, and then he wiped his penis on one of Steve’s comic books and pulled up his shorts.

  Steve rolled onto his back and pulled up his own pants, face wet with tears, and then he did something he never, ever would have dared to do if he wasn’t in so much pain. He threatened to tell.

  Dean’s black eyes had squeezed down to slits and he grabbed Steve by the collar of his shirt and lifted him off the floor. He swung him out the open door, holding him suspended in the air.

  “How about I just kill you instead?” he hissed, his lips peeling back from his teeth.

  Suddenly there was nothing below his kicking sneakers but empty air and a few thick tree limbs. Some of those tree branches had jagged looking broken branches. The ground was twenty feet below.

  Steve clutched Dean’s wrists. “Please, don’t let go! I won’t tell--!” he cried, and then Dean threw him down.

  He didn’t just let him go, h
e actually lifted him up and then heaved him downwards.

  Steve had bounced off those two tree limbs before hitting the ground twenty feet below, breaking his collar bone and rupturing his spleen on the way. When he hit the ground, his legs bent backwards, and both of them broke, the tibias and fibulas snapping in half like dry sticks.

  He almost died. The emergency room team had to remove his spleen and put metal pins in his legs. He spent two weeks in the hospital before he was discharged.

  He never threatened to tell after that, but it was also the one and only time Dean had fucked him in the ass, so it was worth the ruptured spleen and broken legs.

  After that, Dean left Steve pretty much alone. There were a few times, after Steve recovered, when he tried to make his little brother give him some head, but it only happened rarely, just when Dean was desperate for relief, and Steve managed each time to find an out. Steve didn’t know until several years later that Dean had turned his attention almost wholly toward Mary, but by then, things had gotten a whole lot weirder with Dean, if that was possible, and Steve was far too frightened of his brother to say a word to anyone about the abuse he and his sister had been forced to endure.

  Steve pushed his troubled thoughts out of his head. His pills were finally kicking in, making the pain in his body grow fuzzy and far away. His thoughts were becoming dreamy, pleasantly soft around the edges.

  He drifted, thinking about the house he was going to buy someday. The little beach house on the coast… far, far away from his brother’s madness and his mother’s religious mania. He’d only stayed because of Preston and his sister, but Preston had broken up with him months ago, and Mary was gone now, too. He only had his cat now, and she didn’t care where they lived so long as he provided the vittles and a warm lap to curl up on.

  He could practically see it in his mind. A little white house with green shutters. It was just a tiny place, his imaginary beach house, a one-bedroomer, but he was never going to have a family, was he? No wife or kids for the family queer. Maybe a lover. A sexy older man like Preston, an artist type, one of those tanned beach bums with sun-bleached hair and grizzled beards, who spent their days drinking by the ocean and their evenings making love. They would do it with the windows open so they could time their thrusts and blows with the rhythmic susurrations of the waves.

  Steve Klegg drifted to sleep, dreaming of his sugar daddy and a little white cottage by the beach.

  17.

  Hank was doing fine (he thought, with a modicum of pride) until he overheard his brother-in-law explaining to his kids why their aunt was going to hell. That’s when he lost it, and the feces, to paraphrase a well known expression, hit the atmospheric oscillator.

  Before that, the day was going pretty well, all things considered.

  Exhausted, he’d slept until Steve woke him. It was probably closer to a coma than sleep, but why split hairs? He lay sprawled in his bed with his covers kicked off and Mary’s pillow in his arms, snoring like a bear with bronchitis. He didn’t hear Steve greet his parents at the door or tromping up the stairs a few minutes later. He wasn’t aware of anything until his brother-in-law knocked and leaned through the doorway.

  “Hank, I’m sorry to bother you. Your mom’s here,” Steve said.

  Hank rolled over with a groan and checked the time. It was a little past noon. He’d slept almost ten hours.

  He sat up in bed and blinked at Steve blearily. “Mom?”

  “Yeah. Your mom and your, um… step-dad. They’re downstairs.” Steve must have been up a while already. He was fully dressed, shaved, his blond hair parted in the middle and combed neatly to the sides. The only visible sign of his confrontation with his brother was a faint bruise on his right cheekbone. “Are you awake?” he asked, seeing Hank’s confused expression. Hank was looking around like he didn’t know where he was.

  “Yeah, I’m up. Thanks, Steve,” Hank finally said.

  “All right.”

  Steve disappeared. A moment later, Hank heard him clomping back down the stairs. He heard his mother’s muffled voice from the first floor. Steve said Hank would be down in a few minutes.

  Hank sat in his bed for a minute, feeling oddly dislocated. He’d been dreaming of the vacation they took to Scotland almost a decade before. Hank and Mary were both of Scots-Irish descent, and they had vacationed in what they jokingly called the motherland for their tenth wedding anniversary. They’d spent a week at a big castle called Ackergill Tower, near Wick in the far north east of the country. In his dream, they were walking the grounds near the Loch one misty morning, and Mary said she felt like a fairy princess. The dream was so vivid, he felt like he woke in the wrong time, the wrong place.

  The wrong… life.

  She’d gotten pregnant there in Scotland, but she lost the baby a month later.

  What happened to our life? Hank wondered, despairing.

  He realized he was still clutching her pillow to his chest. He brought it to his face and smelled it, then placed it gently on the bed beside him.

  He heard laughter from the floor below, the murmur of conversation. It seemed wrong that families should only come together at deaths and funerals, he thought. Or maybe that was just unique to his marriage, his family. Being childless, he and Mary had been excluded from many of life’s common family events: baby showers, christenings, school functions, birthdays.

  If children were the glue that held most families together, maybe their childlessness was what caused their life to come flying apart so suddenly.

  He swung his feet to the floor, stumbled into the bathroom and pissed for what felt like five minutes straight. His kidneys were aching, his urine hot and acidic. He probably had a kidney infection from all the coffee he’d been drinking.

  At least the bathroom didn’t smell like blood anymore. He’d poured bleach down both drains a second time last night before lying back down to sleep.

  Hank shook off, flushed, walked to his closet to dress. He threw on an old pair of sweatpants and a tee-shirt. He looked like hell, he knew, but he wasn’t too worried about it. It was just his mother downstairs. She’d seen him in worse condition many, many times in his life.

  He didn’t need to get dressed for the funeral for several hours yet. Visitation for the immediate family didn’t start until 4:30 p.m..

  “There’s my baby!” his mother cried when he stumbled down the stairs.

  “Hey, buddy,” his stepfather greeted him sympathetically.

  Funny how your mother always made you feel twelve years old, no matter what age you were. Hank was forty, his mother six-three, but as soon as she pulled him into her arms (Hank towering over her by a good foot and a half) he pressed his face into the crook of her neck and sobbed like a baby. As his step-dad rubbed Hank’s shaking shoulder and his mother held him and kissed him on the temple, Steve excused himself and stepped out to smoke on the patio so that they could have some privacy.

  Hank had held himself together pretty well the last couple days, but as soon as his mother pulled him into her arms, his self-control split at the seams. His grief exploded out of him. He blubbered like a baby, bawling how much he loved her, how it was all his fault, how he should have known she was going to do something crazy.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” his mother said. “Shhh, now. I know. It’s not your fault. These things happen sometimes. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

  “It is!” he brayed. “It is my fault! You don’t know!”

  “Come over here and sit on the sofa,” his step-dad drawled. “You’re gonna knock your mama over.”

  Hank nodded, wiping the snot from his nose. “I’m sorry. Yeah, let’s sit down. Here Ma, come sit down.” He sniffed and tried to reign in his grief. He wiped his mother’s collar off. “I’m sorry. I got snot on your blouse,” he said, smiling.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” his mother laughed. “You’ve been snottin’ on me for forty years.”

  Hank laughed, snuffling and wiping his eyes as he accompanie
d her into the living room.

  “You look really nice, Ma,” Hank said, holding her hand as she eased down on the couch.

  “It’s all the clean living and fresh air,” she said. “The chemical peel didn’t hurt either.”

  She really did look good. At sixty-three, Elvina Goddard looked, at most, fifty years old. She was a short, slim woman with short cropped red hair and delicate features. She had a thin, wide mouth and large green eyes and high cheek bones. She was dressed in a dark gray pantsuit for the visitation, a white blouse with a frilly collar under a smart, tailored vest, minimal jewelry and makeup. Hank’s stepfather Trent was in a white dress shirt and black dress pants and was sporting a big black cowboy hat. Unlike Hank’s mother, Trent did look his age. Years of labor in the sun had turned his skin to crinkled brown leather, but he was still a handsome and hearty man, and he treated Hank’s mother like a queen, which made the loud redneck aces in Hank’s book. Hank had loved his father, but being an alcoholic, he knew the man had put his family through hell when he was alive, his wife most of all.

  Hank sat next to his mother. She took his hand and held it in her lap. Trent flopped down in the recliner across from them.

  “So tell me what happened, baby,” she said.

  So he told the whole story again. He thought he might cry, but he didn’t. Perhaps repetition inured one to the pain after so many tellings, or maybe his brief burst of grief had been enough for the time being. After a while, Steve returned and made them all some coffee. Hank drank a cup, even though his kidneys were throbbing.

  Hank’s sister Sue arrived a short time after that, and then Billy Joe and his brood pulled into the driveway.

  It was a relief to be surrounded by his family. They might be hillbillies and rednecks, but their simple goodness was a breath of fresh air. Mary’s family members were all just so… weird. Eat up with religion like a brain cancer. Steve excluded, of course.