Is that them? George wondered. He didn’t think so. He doubted Edmund would risk leaving them out in the open for all to see.
From behind, Bobby said, “Do you hear that?”
George stopped, listened. All he could hear was the thump thump thump of his heart. He turned to his son. “What do you hear?”
“Someone crying. Sounds like it’s coming from over there.” Bobby raised an arm and pointed.
George followed the line of his son’s finger — straight to Edmund’s trailer over on the other side of the property.
George listened again.
He thought maybe he could hear something: a soft whimpering. Sounded like a female crying. But Edmund lived alone, and he had no family.
It’s just the wind howling (but there is no fucking wind). Or…
“A television,” George finished. “Probably just old Edmund watching a movie.”
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Bobby muttered. “Can we go over and see?”
George turned back to his son. His lop-sided smile and wide eyes were reminiscent of Christmas morning and how he looked upon first setting eyes on the presents sitting under the tree.
“No. We shouldn’t even be in here. We’re not gonna go spying into someone’s house and risk getting caught.”
“But…”
“But nothing. You’re not to go near that house, you got me? You’re to stick with me and do what I say, or else you’ll be sorry.”
Bobby’s face turned forlorn, dark. He cast his gaze downward.
“Come on, I wanna get this over with,” George said and started walking.
When he heard no bag scraping along the ground, he stopped and turned around. Bobby was standing with his head still bowed, the rubbish bag no longer clutched in his tiny hand but sitting on the ground.
“Pick up the bag and let’s go.”
Bobby didn’t move.
“Get your arse in gear!” George growled, his voice coming out shaky rather than the sternness he was aiming for. “You’ll get a good arse-whooping if you don’t pick up the bag and start movin’ those skinny legs of yours.”
With a sigh, Bobby bent down and snatched the rubbish bag from off the ground. He began shuffling forward.
George turned and continued walking.
Soon Edmund’s house was behind them and the crying merely a ghost in George’s fragile mind (had to be the TV, definitely had to be, couldn’t have been anything else…could it?).
As far as he knew, Edmund wasn’t like Tony, but knowing what he did about Edmund’s secret work, he had to wonder.
Jesus I hope I’m doing the right thing by Bobby here. I hope I don’t make things worse.
But what else could he do? He didn’t exactly have a myriad of options at his disposal for dealing with his son’s problem.
Bobby Fisher wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t soft in the head or anything like that. He was quiet, always had been. Even as a baby he hardly cried.
Concerned with the kid’s apparent lack of verbal skills, George had taken him to the doctors when he was five. Nothing wrong with him, the doctors had said. He wasn’t mentally handicapped — far from it. He was, according to them, bright for his age. He was just an inordinately quiet kid.
An inordinately quiet kid who likes to snap the necks of cats and then see what their insides look like.
As Bobby got older, things got progressively worse. He remained socially awkward, an outcast, without friends (not that he seemed to care). But the real concern started when he took to lighting fires in the backyard, and the startling number of dead birds and other small creatures he left lying about, usually with their heads pulled clean off.
George had wanted to believe these were just the actions of a normal pre-teen boy.
Is that another beheaded bird lying in the grass? Chalk up another casualty in Bobby Fisher’s war on all things avian. Another small, but potentially hazardous fire in the backyard? Oh well, boys will be boys.
But George knew the signs. If he wasn’t so heavily into reading true crime books, in particular the ones written by the FBI guys, he wouldn’t have picked up on them. He would’ve just smacked the kid, told him not to do those things again, and that would’ve been the extent of his involvement in the matter.
The cat was the final straw. After discovering his son playing with Mojo’s intestines in the backyard after dinner, he had to face up to the truth. And in doing so, he knew he had to do something to stop Bobby from going down the same murderous path as his uncle. The first thing that came to mind was the old smoke-till-they-choke routine.
George’s parents had forced him to smoke until he puked when they caught him sucking on a cigarette when he was around Bobby’s age, hoping against all hope that by doing so it would put him off the habit for life. And it worked — for about six months. He started up again (the first couple of times he lit up his stomach had revolted, but that soon went away) and had been smoking ever since.
Would a similar experiment result in a similar outcome for Bobby?
George hoped the more extreme situation would elicit a more extreme — and permanent — result, but Christ, he still couldn’t stop himself from wondering whether or not he was doing the right thing by his son.
They passed mound after mound of rubbish, the smell of things rotten and burnt thick and growing stronger. Finally, rounding a large pile of trash containing mostly rubbish bags and stacks of white-goods, George saw it.
He knew straight away he had found what he’d come for.
“Over there,” George said, pointing to ten or so holes in the ground. Most were wide enough to fit a large bull.
Bobby looked up. He frowned. “Are we throwing Mojo in one of them?”
George nodded.
“Is that why we came out here?” Bobby didn’t sound too impressed.
“That’s one reason.”
And though that was true, getting rid of Mojo was more of a happy convenience than the actual reason George had made his son hike for miles at night to reach Edmund’s rubbish tip.
Now he had seen how Edmund destroyed the evidence of his secret work, it was better than George had expected. Mojo would find a nice home in one of those pits.
“Why didn’t we just dig a hole in the backyard?” Bobby asked.
“I’ll show you,” George said. Palms sweaty, nerves twisting in his body, George walked over to one of the pits. The stench of death grew overpowering as he neared.
Standing at the edge of the pit, he gazed in. He first noticed the useless bits and pieces of cattle that Edmund collected from the slaughterhouse, some were stripped of flesh, others still retained scraggy bits of hair; all were unrecognisable as parts of an animal. Then his eyes focused on the rubbish bags underneath the sprinkling of animal off-cuts. It was these that interested George.
“It’s just more rubbish,” Bobby said, coming up beside his father.
George swallowed. His mouth was as dry as the soil they were standing on. “That’s not just any rubbish , son.”
In a small voice, Bobby said, “What do you mean?”
George turned to his son. “There are dead bodies in those bin bags.”
Bobby’s mouth popped open and his eyes widened. “For real?”
George nodded. “These pits are full of bodies, left here to rot among the animal carcasses.”
Although “left to rot” was just an expression in this case. George knew for a fact that Edmund burnt the contents of the pits. Working at the slaughterhouse, it was common to see thick, putrid black smoke drifting from the tip (“Looks like old Edmund is smoking his cigars again,” the men would often joke). The blackened ground around the pits was further proof of Edmund’s particular method of waste disposal.