THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (2 page)

             
Which meant...I didn't know what it meant. It meant something bad was going on and I didn't like it.

             
When Johnny went back in to work, I sat a while longer but the more I tried to think through the problem, the more confused I became. Were things really disappearing and sometimes disappearing to be replaced by something similar, but different? What on earth could that mean? Or was I just more hungover than I originally thought? Something was either not right with the world or not right with me and I didn't know which one it was.

             
Back at work I kept my nose down and my mind blank. I had work to do and if I didn't do it right, I wouldn't get paid. Tonight was payday and I needed the money, no way around it. I deliberately drove down another street toward home so I wouldn't have to look at the two odd businesses on Main.

             
I worried the problem now I had free time, worried it like a bone, chewing hard, busting my molars on it, and still nothing was coming to me. At home, through the front door, and...

             
...and where the coat rack had been now stood a tall, skinny wooden cabinet with dull silver knobs.

             
I froze, holding my breath. I finally got the door closed behind me. I stood looking at the cabinet, a piece of furniture I had never seen before in my life. This was feeling serious. And bad. Worse than bad, like maybe a catastrophe. I brought my hands up and rubbed my cheeks hard. The cabinet still stood there, a silent reminder that it existed just as much as I did, as if to say,
Get over it, boy, I'm here, so accept it
.

             
I went slowly to it and took a silver knob in my fist. It turned easily. Inside the cabinet were shelves. On the shelves were things I recognized and some things I didn't. On the top shelf was my baseball cap printed with the legend, WOLVERINES, our high school baseball team. Next to it was my beat up catcher's mitt I hadn't seen in probably ten years and which I thought was in a box of things still packed in the attic. On the second shelf was a small collection of rocks I did not recognize. They weren't mine anymore than the cabinet was. Next to the pile of rocks, was a stack of photographs. I was afraid to touch them, but nothing could stop me from sliding them into my hands and flipping through them like a man in a hurry. Here was a picture of my mother and father when they were first married. Here was a picture of me sitting in a field with my legs around a giant pumpkin my mother had grown for the fair we had every fall. A photo of Davey on his first day of school. Davey and I swinging in the back yard swing set. The rest were like that, old photographs I hadn't seen in years, but that had originally been kept in an old suitcase in the closet of my bedroom. And now they were here, neatly stacked next to somebody's rocks.

             
I put them back and carefully inspected the third and last shelf. It held a pair of work boots that had seen better days, but they hadn't seen those days with me. I had never owned those boots. Next to them was a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson with a pistol grip.

             
I stepped back as if the gun were a venomous snake. I didn't own a gun. I hated guns. I had refused as a kid to go hunting with my dad, much to his displeasure, with him saying Davey was a hunter and he was a hunter, what was wrong with me? I didn't join any military service because unlike Davey, who went off and got himself blown up to a thousand million pieces, I wasn't going to have anything to do with guns and killing people. Just wasn't my thing and I can't explain it more than that. I just didn't like the damn things. Guns were destruction. Guns were weapons. I didn't need any weapons.

             
But there was a gun in a cabinet that didn't belong to me in my house that
did
belong to me now that Davey was gone.

             
"Are you here, you bastard?" I yelled it at the top of my lungs and the cabinet door fell shut. I stalked through the house, mad now, madder than I should have been because it was too crazy, too confusing, and I kept yelling in all the rooms, "Are you here? You bastard, do you hear me? Where are you hiding? What the hell is your game?"

             
I couldn't find anyone. When I finally sat down in a chair at the kitchen table, my head in my hands, I knew it was all connected someway, but I didn't know how. The buildings in town had changed. The beer and the coat rack had disappeared. And now I had a cabinet with a gun and other things in it that shouldn't be there.

             
#

             
She came through the front door calling, "Baby, you ready yet? I have got on one powerful thirst."

             
I still sat where I had collapsed in the kitchen chair, my head now on my arms on the table top. I blinked and lifted my head. What was Millie doing here?

             
"Millie?"

             
"Oh, there you are! You've still got on your grease monkey clothes. Why haven't you changed yet?"

             
"What are you doing here, Millie?"

             
She gave me a funny smile and leaned over and kissed me full on the lips. What...?

             
"I live here, or did you forget? Come on now, let's get you in the shower and changed. We're going to meet Davey at the Alibi for drinks before we go to eat. You're always making us late. Hurry!" She pulled me up, and pushed me toward the stairs.

             
I turned and stood my ground. "Millie, what's going on?"

             
She saw the confusion in my eyes and let her hands drop from my arms. "What's the matter, baby? Don't you feel well?" She didn't sound very sympathetic, but when had she ever?

             
"I don't feel well at all and I don't think this is funny. Why are you making a joke of Davey?"

             
She laughed and I had to admit when Millie wasn't angry, she was a pretty woman. "Davey's a joke all by his-own-self. But he's your brother, so we just won't mention it. And you know he's got that silly temper so he's not going to take kindly to us not showing up for his birthday. Now will you go shower?"

             
Davey's birthday was in May. This was October with Halloween just days away. The whole town had decorations littering yards with sheet ghosts hanging from tree limbs, carved pumpkins, and GO WOLVERINE signs next to the mail boxes to encourage the game they were playing on the holiday on their home field.

             
And besides, Davey was dead. We had buried a coffin covered with a US flag, but it was empty. Davey was spun into the wind like particles of sand in a storm.

             
"Millie, Davey's dead. He's your husband. You know that."

             
She slapped my face so hard it turned my head on my neck and stung like hell. "Davey's at the Alibi waiting for you to get there! Davey is not dead!
Have you lost your goddamn mind
?"

             
And so I had. I stood with my mouth hanging open and my mind jumbled not so much from the slap, but the words--the situation. I had just stepped, surely, into the Twilight Zone, because this was not my world and Millie was not my girlfriend and Davey was dead as yesterday's news.

             
I went up the stairs to the bathroom and took off my clothes very slowly, my mind in a flurry of contradicting thoughts. I heard Millie outside the door telling me
to get a grip and to stop drinking so much and to get my tail in gear because this was ridiculous.
I stepped into the tub and drew the curtain. The water was hot and I didn't bother to adjust it. The stream fell like a curtain down over my hanging head with me hoping, praying it would clear it.
Please God. Clear this up for me
, I thought. Is Millie right, I've lost my mind, my goddamn mind? Or has the world gone out of sync like a ferris wheel with popped gears that sends it tumbling across a fairgrounds?

             
Could Davey be alive, my God, could he? It might be worth it to have some forgetful events lost in a muddied brain if Davey was still alive.

             
Then I knew I did have to hurry, just as Millie said. I had to get out of the shower, dry, dress, and get down to the Alibi to see for myself. Because, you see, I loved my brother. I'm not ashamed to admit it. After our parents died, he was all I had. And though he had Millie, his by-god
wife
(what was she doing here?), they didn't really get along or suit one another and me and Davey were tight as boys and tighter as men. Brothers. We were brothers and we loved one another.

             
In the truck Millie said, patting down her short black skirt along her thighs, "This might be the last time we get to see Davey for a while. We need to have a good time tonight. You hear me?" She turned and glared at me as I drove. "No more of this nonsense. I told you drinking in the day would lead to this kind of thing. Make you act like you don't know what you're doing. I should have drove, in fact." She kept prattling on, but I tuned her out like dialing down a TV. I never had really liked Millie much, even if she was pretty, and even though she'd married my brother. She'd made him as miserable as she was now making me.

             
She was also wrong, as usual. I hadn't had a drop to drink. I knew that much. And this wasn't an alcoholic stupor or a hangover or anything else I could put a name to. It was a world gone mad for me, is what it was, but I had to see Davey again if I could...if only I could. I had told him, "Davey, don't join the Marines." I had pleaded, "Davey, think about it some more. You'd make a good mechanic like me, I could teach you." I had cried in my beer the night he left for boot camp and said, "Davey, you're gonna wind up dead over there, you know that, right? Don't go."

             
Yet he had gone, I know he did. I saw him off on the bus that day. I handed him his ditty bag. I saluted him as a joke and he cuffed me on the head and said, "You worry too much. I may be younger than you, but that doesn't mean you have to worry about me all the time like you're some old mama hen."

             
Then he was on the bus, swinging up like the big Marine he was going to be, and I never saw him again.

             
#

             
He was sitting at a back table with a draft beer in his hand. He saw me come in the door and smiled like the big, goofy fool he was. It was Davey. He was alive! My heart felt like busting open and tears came into my eyes as I walked over to him. He stood and hugged me and I couldn't let go. I couldn't let this moment go because what if it was a dream and I might wake up and he wouldn't be in my arms, alive and warm and real?

             
Millie slapped me on the shoulder and said to Davey, "Don't mind him, he's been, well, you know, tipping the bottle back a little too far lately."

             
I let him go then and wiped my eyes. "Davey."

             
"Lane. You're late for my birthday bash, as usual. I'd have never forgiven you if you'd missed it. I have to leave tomorrow, remember? This is my last hometown hurrah. Let's get drunk, buddy." My heart lurched in my chest. He couldn't be talking about leaving for boot camp.
Could he?
He laughed the way he did when my sentimentality embarrassed him and gestured for the waitress--who was some girl I didn't know and not Millie--to come take an order.

             
"Where you going?" I asked it in as normal a voice as I could manage, which sounded to me like a high whine of a bad engine.

             
"Going? You know where I'm going, it's all your damn idea, big brother! I am going in the Marines and I'm going to be the baddest badass Marine they've ever seen."

             
My idea? No, this wasn't happening. None of this was right, the world and reality had sidestepped and twirled everything around and upside down and this could not be happening.

             
In the real world, the one that began to change the night before with my missing beer in the Alibi, my brother was dead and buried for eight months and I had begged him, really begged him to not sign up.

             
In this world I evidently was hooked up, if not married, to his bitch of a wife Millie, Davey was alive--for now--and I had talked him into going into the military.

             
Wrong. So wrong that it made my head hurt. It made the room spin. Millie grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, "You snap out of it. Don't go ruining Davey's birthday. A man doesn't turn twenty-one every day."

             
But Davey wasn't just twenty-one; he'd been twenty-three and unemployable because he had no trade and few skills or education. That's why he felt joining the Marines was his only choice. And his birthday was in May, not October. Was this even the real Davey? Was this even the world? Was I asleep?