Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 5.
Thanks for sticking around. I’m grateful.
Chapter 5. Mars.
“Was,” Beaver whispers.
Marshall curses twice under his breath and then once over his breath for good measure. Just one glance at Jamie–they share a subtle nod–and the boy, still wearing his cowboy hat, takes Beaver by the hand and leads him away from the group of confused onlookers.
Marshall puts his face all up in the red-headed kid’s blotchy little freckles, makes his chest big and breathes hotly on his face. “That’s John. Don’t know who the fuck you are but you should probably kill yourself.”
His gut pinches the moment the words leave his mouth but he doesn’t regret it. It came from what he’s identifying as a very maternal instinct to protect this kid that he just met. He wants to be the metal pot on his head personified; post-brutalist, protective, capable of knocking someone unconscious if need be. Still, he doesn’t really think that red head kid should kill himself and he’s pretty ugly so it’s possible that he might have already been considering it and Marshall’s words will push him over the edge but Marshall is already jogging to catch up with Beaver and Jamie so there’s no taking it back. What’s another body at his hands?
Beaver is quiet, staring at his feet as they walk, drumming his hands on his hip bones with almost violent percussion. Marshall joins Jamie just a few steps behind the kid and they share a glance, so different from the one that passed between them by the fire. Had Marshall imagined that look? Was something happening between them? Would they have kissed had there been no interruption? The farther they get from the fire and the feeling, the more he doubts it. It was a nice thought but of course Jamie wasn’t really interested in a big brute like Marshall.
Jamie’s words are gone again but in a quick exchange of gestures and pursed lips, Marshall thanks him and Jamie says they should come back to his place to figure out what to do next. Marshall is grateful. And afraid.
The Quik-Mart is attached to a small brick and mortar apartment building. Jamie’s parents live directly behind the store. His sisters occupy the upper floor like a women’s prison. Jamie is tucked away in the basement like a box of seasonal decorations.
Marshall has never been in Jamie’s room. There are no windows and it gets cold really easily and smells kinda weird and he watches rats and roaches skitter in the dark corners. The upside is that Jamie gets the most space and he doesn’t have to share the room with anything human. Well, up until tonight.
Jamie sits on his bed–plain gray bedding, twin-sized, would not additionally fit Marshall, not that that has been presented as an option–and Marshall sits with Beaver on the couch–brown, leather, ripped up by myriad little scratch marks from the family’s several cats who have made themselves scarce. Jamie has only one lamp that emits a soft orange glow. Marshall figures it must be easy on his eyes after a day beneath the harsh and flickering fluorescents of the store. His face looks golden like it did by the fire but withdrawn. He fiddles with his own cold hands in his lap.
Beaver’s device is dead but he still holds it like it anchors him.
“Hey,” Marshall says, cutting through the settled silence of the past hour.
“Hey,” Beaver says quietly.
Marshall shifts and the fabric squeals beneath him. “I’m not upset with you. Well, maybe a little but I’m not mad. I need you to look at me.”
Beaver looks up. His eyes are shot through with his father’s blood.
“You didn’t tell me your pa was a cop, John.”
His tongue squirms in his mouth. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
“Yes, you did.”
Punches himself in the thigh. “I didn’t think you’d kill him if you knew he was a cop.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t have.”
Beaver shrugs. “I’m sorry.”
Marshall looks at Jamie but all he can offer is another shrug. Three very smart men and all they can do is shrug, hoping the weight will simply slide off their shoulders.
“Alright,” Marshall sighs, resigned to his fate. “Was he local? Town police?”
Beaver’s mouth is squirming like a bug under a magnifying glass. “State.”
“Well, fuck,” Marshall says.
Jamie takes out his phone and starts googling. It takes him only a few seconds to find him. Fred Jackson. The Missing Officer headlines came out this morning. The Body Found articles came out only an hour ago. Only, the articles read Bodies Found because Beaver’s mom evidently also turned into a body not long after they’d taken off. Might have been discovered exactly the way they’d left her, hands laid out on the table still warm from Beaver’s delicate kisses. Marshall reads all of this silently, stone-faced. He doesn’t know how to convey all of this information to the kid.
In the end, he just hands Beaver the phone and stares at the wall while the kid discovers that he is an orphan. It occurs to Marshall that he has ruined this kid’s life. And that he’s harboring the son of the dead cop he murdered. Some might even call it kidnapping. Many would call it fucked and confounding. Jamie seems to be following the same line of thought as his face tightens, realizing that he is harboring both the kidnapped child and the cop killer in the basement of his family’s home.
“We’ll be out of your hair by the morning,” Marshall says. “I’m not getting your family involved in this.”
Jamie nods but his face is hard beneath the brim of Marshall’s cowboy hat. Has he always known that Marshall kills people sometimes? Does he find Marshall scary? It seems as though all of it fell apart so quickly but Marshall wonders if maybe he was never put together in the first place. How can someone kill their own father and be anything but scattered shards of a tea cup?
Beaver puts the phone down. His eyes are watery but his face is solid.
“You can cry,” Marshall says, soft like a dull knife. “Or hit me or whatever. I reckon it’s all my fault so I’d hit me if I were you.”
One tear slips down his dark skin but he blinks away the rest. “What are we gonna do?”
Marshall doesn’t want to consider this, that a future is even possible, but he knows that he has to. There are very few options at his disposal. He never properly considered that something like this might happen, that he’d actually get caught, though in hindsight it seems inevitable now. Still, he doesn’t regret the dead cop or freeing Beaver from his fist, only that it had to happen.
“Get some sleep,” he says. “We’re gonna get up real early, get some shit from the trailer, get my bike and take off.”
“Where?”
He shrugs. “West? North? I guess it doesn’t matter. But we can’t be here. Unless…you don’t have to come with me, Johnny. I did the killing and the kidnapping. You’ll be alright if you stay.”
Beaver grabs the handle of his pot and uses it to hit Marshall across the head with a dull thud. Marshall’s got a thick skull so it just hurts a little is all. Jamie sucks in his breath at the sight of Beaver’s bared scalp but he keeps whatever he is feeling–surprise, disgust, terror, rage–to himself. And just as quickly, Beaver secures his helmet once more and says, “I will not be alright if I stay. My pa was a cop. I am a parentless black boy. Whatever they do with me will fuck me up forever, Marshall. I’m going with you.”
Marshall sighs, something like relief or self admonishment. “Alright. Good man.”
Marshall doesn’t sleep. When he closes his eyes, he sees Jamie’s face lit up by the fire and watches as it melts into the face of Beaver’s dad, a face he’s tried very hard to scrub from his mind like bleach on a tile floor. Blood pouring from his neck, jaw slack, police officer’s badge visible in the back of his throat. He needn’t have looked at the face too hard to draw it to life in his mind.
Marshall doesn’t think about the people he has killed. Not because he doesn’t feel remorse or the weight of ending someone’s life but precisely because feeling it can be too much. He can hardly remember the times he has recalled those nine faces and felt the breath explode from his lungs, the feeling of his knees hitting the floor. It’s why he’s never stayed in touch with any of the people whose loathed one he killed, never kept tabs on them, didn’t want to know if they turned out alright or if they immediately shot something in their veins and overdosed like Beaver’s ma. He can’t add that weight on top of all the rest of it.
What was he supposed to do? Those people asked him to do what he did and he’s good at it. Doesn’t that make a man better than the rest? To do what he’s made for?
Several times on the cold floor in the dark of the basement he considered just crawling into Jamie’s bed and wrapping his arms around the boy’s solid frame. But that would be stupid of course. So he stayed awake and uncomfortable on the floor with the rats and roaches until the digital clock blinked 5am and he woke Beaver up. He made sure not to disturb Jamie as they gathered their things and managed to slip out without waking his gentle body. In the soft light that spilled through the open door to the world above, Marshall turned back to watch Jamie’s chest rise and fall, cowboy hat pulled across his face like a ward.
They stalk through the woods in silence. The route they take through the dense stands of trees and scattered brush is longer than just walking on the side of the road but Marshall is keenly aware now that he is soon to be a fugitive from the law and probably called stuff like pedophile, kidnapper, addict, serial killer and other sensationalized stuff. He knows that he’s not a serial killer, not on purpose, but he is aware that he has serial-killed and it won’t be long before that becomes all that he is in the eyes of this small town, maybe the world.
In the dark blue of the burgeoning morning, they tiptoe through the trailer park with utmost caution. At Marshall’s trailer, he thinks he sees movement in the Willis home but those guys stay up until 2am and rise again at noon. They are long asleep in alcohol-induced slumber, dreaming of murder and manifest destiny and hurting women with simple weapons.
The TV is on in the trailer. Elaine is fast asleep on the couch even with George Lopez freaking the fuck out about something benign at full volume.
Marshall already has his backpack, everything he could possibly need, so while Beaver gathers his things, Marshall sits at the dinner table and writes a short note for his mother.
Heading out for a while. Take care of yourself.
-Mars
The first thing Marshall had ever painted with a real paintbrush and canvas was the solar system. There was some comfort to be found in the fact that ‘the world’ as he inhabited it was just one big ball of rock and water amongst even bigger balls of rock and gas and they all spun around each other on predictable paths and would continue to regardless of his existence. It’s good that there are these simple things that don’t need him. Some might see this as depressing, let it feed into their own particular brand of nihilism but Marshall found it plainly miraculous.
He painted the solar system in third grade art class with surprising specificity when it came to getting the colors right and the proportions of each planet in relation to one another. This didn’t make the painting at all good or technically deft but he liked it anyway and he got an A for being so thorough and he never got good grades so it meant a lot to him.
When he brought it home to show it off, his dad punched a hole in it and lit it on fire with the butt of his cigarette in the trash can. Marshall and his mother watched it burn and Elaine laughed at the hole he’d punched through the planet Mars.
“Mars, that’s you, baby,” she’d said to Marshall, all dreamy and distant like a drifting star. “You’re Mars.”
And so she started calling him Mars after that, not seeming to see how bleak it was and Marshall didn’t mind because he was just happy to be worth naming, to be a giant on a steady path through space.
He leaves the note beneath a sad stack of twenties. It won’t get her very far but it’s the most he can spare not knowing when he’ll get home next. It’s unclear and not worth considering how she’ll manage without him. There’s a pretty hefty possibility that she already does sex work anyway so she’ll either get by or get killed. No use in worrying about what gets left behind.
When Beaver is ready, Marshall adjusts his backpack and takes one last look around the trailer which doesn’t take very long. “Fuck this place,” he says.
He pulls aside the curtain before stepping out and is greeted by the sight of three state cop cars parked on the dirt road. Truck is out on the shitty fake lawn, talking to them with big gestures.
“Fucking cocksucker,” Marshall whispers. He looks to Beaver and then back outside. “Wait. No, that’s me. Fucking. Virgin. No sex haver. Fuck.”
There are at least six cops outside but given their relaxed postures and disgruntled looks as Truck goes on and on, they clearly don’t know why they’re here quite yet. Which means he still has time.
Marshall grabs a stool, climbs up on it and quietly pops the sunroof on the ceiling open. It’s only supposed to open about thirty degrees and have a screen protector but it’s been broken for years. Elaine leaves it open all the time so there are always bugs inside and the floor beneath is warped from rainwater.
Marshall beckons Beaver up and into his arms. “Stay low,” he whispers. “Crawl to the back and slide down. I’m right behind you.” He pushes Beaver up and watches him go. He peeks out again. The officers have gone slightly more rigid but haven’t turned to face him yet. Truck looks righteous. Lump the cat is scratching at one of the cop cars.
“Good kitty,” he says. And then he climbs through the roof, doesn’t risk looking back, flattens himself against the cold, dirty metal and shimmies to the back where he slides down to the ground to find Beaver is waiting for him. The bike is out front, inaccessible. They’ll have to walk.
Crouched low, they dart from trailer to trailer but it doesn’t take long to put some distance between them and what is no longer home. Marshall is trying to put together a plan. He won’t get far with this kid on foot. He doesn’t know where he’s going anyway. He really should have put more thought into this.
They reach the treeline without issue. It’s a five mile walk to the junkyard by the highway. He can hotwire a busted car, which is probably easy, or find another bike or a fucking scooter if it comes to that. And then they’ll head…South? West? Which is less predictable? Is any of it predictable? Marshall has no sense of agency in this situation, no personhood to lead him. Is this the end of the world? And if so, how is he so fucking unprepared?
At the main road, the cars roar by unawares of the two boys suddenly on the run from the law and they do have to run because all they got is legs and cops get an endless array of replaceable cars. Marshall takes Beaver’s hand. He looks both ways at the oncoming traffic. They’re about to take off in the growing yellow of the morning light when an old pickup truck slows to a stop where they’re crouched in the brush. Though Marshall has never seen him driving it, he recognizes the truck on account of it’s always parked outside of the Quik-Mart, complacent in its own disuse.
Jamie places an elbow on the rolled down window and peers at the two runaways with this look plastered across his face like he’s been wearing it since he woke up, a look made up of the words he won’t speak but doesn’t need to.
Now why the hell did you go and leave without me?
you’ve got a heart on fire / it’s bursting with desires
Previous chapter. Next chapter.
The plot thickens, as they say. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.