Daddy Love (15 page)

Daddy Love had said, Son. Make yourself supper and take yourself to bed and Daddy Love will be home by the time you wake up.

Son said, yes Daddy.

Gideon said, under his breath
Go to hell Daddy. You are Devil Daddy and you don’t love me.

It was exciting to plan the explosion. Prepare the bomb.

Gideon knew, lots of kids blew off their hands, parts of their faces making such bombs. The Internet was filled with scare-stories. But also stories of bombs that had detonated as planned.

You won’t be prepared for the THRILL
—an anonymous commentator on the Internet observed.

Your ordinary little life will be shitty from now on. That is a promise.

The bottle was a twenty-four-ounce Coke bottle he’d found at a landfill. Following Daddy Love he knew to use gloves. They watched TV together—
Cops, CSI, Forensic Files.
You had to be pretty damned stupid to touch anything with your bare hands, even a bottle that would be shattered into small pieces.

Now that Gideon was older he saw things about Daddy Love that Son had never noticed before and one of these was that Daddy Love wore gloves almost everywhere.

And Daddy Love had a drawer of gloves. Including thin rubber gloves like you’d expect a surgeon to wear.

And Daddy Love had “medical supplies”—in a lockbox in his bedroom closet. But Gideon had observed him opening it once and removing packets of pills. And Gideon observed coils of rope, handcuffs, rolls of gauze … He’d searched for Daddy Love’s key for the box but hadn’t yet found it.

He’d planned
the hit
while riding his bicycle. Daydreaming in school. These past several weeks, since the Church of Abiding Hope in Trenton, and Reverend Cash’s sermon, and the vigil in the New Jersey Transit Bus Station, he’d been less interested in school and in getting good grades. He’d been less interested in being
good
.

Smirking and shrugging in class. His teacher Ms. Olson like Ms. Swale was surprised and
hurt
.

It was a weakness in people, especially in women, to be so easily
hurt
. Gideon knew now what Daddy Love meant speaking in contempt of
females
.

Daddy Love had had some sort of argument with Darlene. Maybe she’d been poking her nose into the wrong part of Daddy Love’s house. Maybe she’d been needling Daddy Love about taking her out. Their raised voices were surprising to Gideon, in the stillness of his life.

Now Gideon was older, Darlene wasn’t needed so much for housecleaning. Gideon prepared meals and washed dishes and mopped the kitchen floor; changed bedclothes, and did laundry in a rickety old washing machine; swept, and vacuumed; took out garbage to dump behind the old hay barn.
Good work, Son!
—Daddy Love was generous with praise.

Son beamed with pleasure. Basking in Daddy Love’s praise as you’d bask in sunshine sprawled on a chilly rock.

Gideon chafed at the praise. Resented Daddy Love so obviously manipulating him.

He thinks I’m some dumb little kid. Thinks I’m a moron like everybody else.

Lately Gideon came to realize that he hadn’t seen Darlene in a long time. Daddy Love never hired her to clean any longer nor did Daddy Love mention her.

He asked Daddy Love where Darlene was and Daddy Love said with a shrug, Go ask the cunt yourself, you’re interested.

Cunt.
This was a nasty word, uttered by the middle-school boys. The McIntyre brothers laughed at Gideon as a
skinny cunt
and Gideon had not known what this might mean until now.

Cunt
—
female.
Something whining and disgusting about them, though you needed them for some things, unavoidably.

The cunt let go of my fingers.

The cunt blew smoke in my face.

The cunt sold me to be “adopted.”

Vacuuming the house while Daddy Love was out—for Daddy Love hated the noise of a vacuum cleaner.

And there was the
safety-box
in Daddy Love’s closet, laid flat upon the floor.

It was a small casket with two lids that opened: the smaller one at the top, the larger below.

It was made of smooth wood and very deftly assembled. There was even room at the foot of the box for the occupant’s small feet.

Daddy Love had made it himself, he’d said. For Daddy Love was a skilled carpenter.

Inside, there was cushioning, but it had become badly stained.

The
safety-box
was too small for Gideon of course. It had never been used on
him
.

He could remember: a little boy forced into the wooden box, and locked in it. He could remember: the stupid little boy crying, crying and crying which only made things worse inside the box, when the top was shut and locked, and you couldn’t breathe.

He’d pissed himself. And worse.

That was the punishment: fouling yourself.

And being trapped inside the box for how long, you would never know.

What had happened to that stupid pathetic little boy, Gideon wondered.

He
had been kept at a distance from the snot-nosed boy.
He
had always been treated kindly by Daddy Love.

The little boy had screamed, when the gag was removed.

When Daddy Love cuddled hard, in Daddy Love’s bed.

Oh it hurt so
bad
. Between the little boy’s tender buttocks,
so bad.

And Daddy Love screamed too, a quick harsh cry like death. And a shudder ran through Daddy Love’s body that was naked, and sweaty, and smelled of the little boy’s blood dribbling out of his insides.

He
hadn’t seen.
He
hadn’t been anywhere near but in another part of the house.

Now, Gideon shut the closet door. The
safety-box
had nothing to do with him.

Gideon continued vacuuming. There was a pleasure in vacuuming. Inside the noise of the vacuum, there was laughter. Gideon was laughing. Gideon’s teeth were chattering, and laughing. Gideon was upset, and shivering. Gideon’s bladder ached with a sudden need to pee. Almost it was painful, like a knife-stab, this need to pee. In his haste to get to the bathroom Gideon tangled his feet in the God-damned vacuum cleaner hose and nearly fell down.

Carefully he’d prepared the bomb! In a swoon of expectation bicycling into town thinking it was risky as hell, the bottle-bomb in his backpack, but he liked that feeling of risk.

Daddy Love craved
risk
. It was how Daddy Love felt
most alive
he’d said.

It was a warm sunny May afternoon. There had been no school today—some state teachers’ meeting. Whether Gideon went to school or not didn’t seem to matter any longer for Daddy Love had ceased coming to PTA events and never inquired after his grades no matter how high they were, or how low; and if Gideon skipped school Daddy Love had taught him to write his own excuse for his teacher and even to sign
Chester Cash.

Gideon’s homeroom teacher said, You are missing school frequently, Gideon. Is your father taking you to a doctor?

Gideon mumbled
yea, sure.

There’s nothing wrong at home, is there, Gideon?

Nah
.

Maybe he should bomb the school? West Lenape Elementary?

Or—the middle school? Where the McIntyre boys went.

But his plan was the mill.
PRESTON FOOTWARE
on the river.

Too many people might see him prowling about the schools which were in a neighborhood of small residential homes.

In Kittatinny Falls Gideon avoided the main streets and bicycled to the edge of town, to the old
PRESTON FOOTWEAR
mill on the river.

The ghost-lady and ghost-gentleman! Especially the female with her cap of curly blond hair and vacuous eyes holding aloft a stupid shoe offended him.

But here was a surprise: teenaged boys were at the river, clambering over large boulders. They’d left their bicycles in the weedy graveled parking lot of the mill.

Gideon wasn’t sure how to proceed. He didn’t recognize the boys, and they hadn’t seen him yet. If he was careful, and kept to the farther side of the mill, no one would see him.

He thought
They will be killed, maybe.

He felt a thrill of anticipation. The brick mill would explode and bricks would rain down upon the boys below, at the river’s shore. They would be trapped and could not escape, the explosion would take place within seconds.

He was walking his bicycle now, in the graveled parking lot. It occurred to him that riding in so bumpy a terrain might activate the explosives in the bottle.

He had no choice but to continue to the farther side of the mill, which had been boarded up. The renovated part of the mill was at the front. This was a disappointment: he wanted to blow up the renovated part of the mill, more than the old, moldering part. But then, if the bomb was powerful enough, it would bring down the entire building.

He thought so. Maybe.

Really, he had no idea. Maybe the bomb wouldn’t even go off!

But here was an advantage: the rear of the mill was accessible, if you squeezed through a fissure in a wall. The front of the mill was locked tight so he’d have had to place the bomb outside rather than inside as he could do at the rear, crawling on hands
and knees with a quickened heartbeat and hearing, in the near distance, the boys at the river’s shore shouting and laughing.

His hands were trembling, removing the bottle from his backpack.

It weighed very little. It could not be much of a bomb, weighing so little.

Drano—(which stank, and made his eyes water)—and strips of tin foil—inserted in the bottle. The idea was, a “chemical reaction” would occur if the heat inside the bottle increased sufficiently, which it would do if Gideon placed it in the sun.

Stealthily Gideon made his way through the ruins of the old mill, to a window opening above the river. Here, there were only shards of glass remaining. On all sides, cobwebs, dust and grime. The boys were below, noisy and obnoxious. Gideon saw that they had fishing poles. They were not boys he knew, probably high-school boys. In bright sunshine Gideon positioned the bottle on the windowsill.

He’d forgotten to wear gloves! He had meant to wear gloves but had forgotten but maybe it wouldn’t matter for the bottle would shatter into bits. No one would suspect
him
.

In the local papers, it was stated that the “suspect” of the arson fires was believed to be an adult male, Caucasian, who’d been employed in Kittatinny Falls but had lost his job and moved away. An eyewitness claimed to have seen him in the vicinity of the third of the fires, on Pitcairn Street; he was driving a green pickup truck. However, this “suspect” had not yet been apprehended by the police.

Gideon’s teeth were still chattering. He was cold, and shivering.

He thought
It will go off now. My hands, my face.

He thought
Daddy Love will not love me again ever.

The bottle was upright, but maybe the bottle would better be positioned on its side, Gideon thought, for more sunshine could concentrate upon it that way.

He turned the bottle onto its side. But now, the danger was that the bottle might roll off the windowsill …

He found a brick-fragment, to secure the bottle on its side. He was breathing quickly, shallowly. It was mesmerizing, to see how sunshine seemed to focus, like a laser ray, onto the bottle-bomb.

He wondered how long it would require, before the temperature inside the bottle rose high enough to detonate the explosive.

Wished he’d had someone to plan this with! He needed a friend, like Daddy Love.

Son, you are always in my thoughts. As I am in yours.

Backing away from the bottle-bomb on the windowsill. It looked so
small
.

He was disappointed, the damned bomb was
so
small
.

Stumbled against some machinery, tripped and nearly fell.

But quickly righted himself, for he was an agile eleven-year-old. Not clumsy like Son.

The interior of the old mill was a ruin. There’d been a flood of the Delaware River not long ago, and the mill had been devastated. This was before the renovation had begun. Gideon
wondered if, if he died in this place, anyone would ever find him.

Daddy Love would find another son. Daddy Love would not miss him for long.

He squatted on his heels, waiting. About twenty feet away the bottle-bomb on the windowsill glinted, shimmered and shone with sunshine.

How hot was it in the mill? Maybe in the high eighties? And in the sun—in the nineties?

A “chemical reaction” would take place. Gideon wondered what this meant, exactly.

Outside, on the riverbank, the boys’ voices lifted.

Bicycling out to the Saw Mill Road. For he’d given up waiting.

It was late afternoon now. Soon, dusk.

He was anxious, edgy, disappointed, itchy inside his clothes, and
pissed
.

In the vicinity of the God-damned mill he’d waited—how long?—maybe an hour. He’d watched the boys fishing. He’d wished he was one of them. It seemed to him so easy, he might have been born one of
them
.

Then bicycled on nearby streets waiting for the explosion.

God-damn bomb! Fucking Internet, you couldn’t trust.

At last he’d given up. For he didn’t want to attract attention, a boy riding a bicycle aimlessly in a neighborhood in which he didn’t live.

All the way home waiting to hear an explosion in the distance and a sound of sirens as he’d been so thrilled to hear when he’d set the garage fires.

But there was nothing.

God-damn bomb was a
dud
.

And when he returned home, there was nothing: no Missy to rush at him, tail thumping and eyes alight with love, and no Daddy Love for Daddy Love had driven away in the minivan saying
Make yourself supper, Son, Daddy Love will be home by the time you wake up.