Kernel of truth

Speculative fiction, maybe alternative history, about a boy with something special

Vern had never particularly wanted to kill anybody. Oh he'd gotten mad. Who hadn’t? But killing somebody? He just wasn't ready to do that. But the fact was somebody else was and they were willing to pay money for it. And Vern needed money right now. Gladys was going to need a doctor, and they'd had to borrow money to bury the baby. You wouldn't think it would cost so much to bury a newborn.

 So Vern had taken the money. It wouldn't be the first time he had broken the law for money. But before it had always been for smaller things, stealing something, or selling something that somebody else has stolen, or helping somebody steal something. There’d been a couple of times that he had helped people collect money. but nobody ever died from a few punches or kicks. This time somebody was going to die.

Just shoot him twice and throw the gun away. Easy enough. Well, simple enough anyway. Vern didn't know if it would be easy. He'd never done it before. And he told himself he was only going to do it once. He promised himself he was only going to do it once. Take this money, maybe get out of Mississippi. This could be a new start for him and Gladys.  But first he had to shoot a man in the chest. He didn't know why and he didn't really care. The kind of person that had hired him and the kind of person they’d have a deadly grudge against … they were all part of the life  where they all probably deserved to die now and then.

Vern looked down at his boots and he thought about what kind of evidence he would leave behind. Nothing that would mean anything. That mud was everywhere in town. Probably everywhere in Mississippi. He'd seen pictures and heard stories about streets in Memphis and other big cities that were not made of mud. He wondered what it would be like to walk on one. But not tonight.

Vern went through the steps like he'd been told. He pounded the door hard, made it sound urgent, and then waited with his arm at his side, the small pistol just waiting to do the deed that Vern would try to blame on the pistol.

 Everything went right. At first, The door opened and Vern kept the gun to his side until he looked at the man and made sure he had the right person. Then he brought the gun up and fired a shot into the man's chest. He saw surprise and fear and anger pass across the man's face like clouds going across the sun on a windy day. And then he fired the second shot to be sure. 

 Everything had gone so simply. Everything had gone according to plan. Until the woman walked in from the other room. She looked at Vern for a couple of seconds before she looked down at the body laying at his feet. Vern knew how long those two seconds had been. She has seen his face and he has seen hers. He didn't know her name and she probably didn't know his. But they had seen each other before. Vern knew he could lead the sheriff to this woman if he had to. That meant that she could do the same to him, and that was his thought as he raised the pistol.

He took a step closer, then a second one. What had happened and what was going to happen had not registered with the woman yet. The look on her face was curiosity. And then he raised the pistol again and fired the shot that brought the same surprise, fear, and anger to her face that he had seen on the man's face seconds before. He fired the second shot again and watched her fall.

It was simple. It was done. All he had to do was walk. Walk out, walk away, throw the gun away in some muddy field or rocky creek. Then he heard the baby crying.

Later he would tell himself that he couldn't just leave the baby there to starve to death if nobody came soon, or to smell his people starting to rot. But he knew he hadn't really thought about it that much. The baby was just there and he couldn't leave it. What kind of person could do that?

It was only a two-room shack. There was a piece of furniture there at the door of the second room and he laid the gun down on top of it while he picked up the baby. He thought about this baby with no mama, and about Gladys at home grieving over a dead baby. It wasn't a hard conclusion to come to. Vern didn't remember coming to it. He just knew what he was going to do.

The baby calmed down a little bit as Vern whispered to it. Don't you worry, he whispered, as if a baby knew how to worry. Vern forgot for a second how to worry himself. Little Jesse dead and buried, and no money in the bank. He didn't have to worry about either one of those now.

But he did have to worry about the man standing in the doorway. The man was wearing a dark suit. That was about all he could tell. He could see the man's face from the light that came from somewhere. Maybe through the window from the street outside, or maybe from the lamp still on in the front room. It didn’t matter. What mattered, Vern supposed, was that the man saw his face and the man was holding his gun.

Verne looked at him and waited. That was pretty much all he could do. He couldn't walk out the door. He couldn't do anything with the men standing there holding his gun.

What do you want? Vern said.

I want you to have whatever you want, the man said.

Said like that, it sounded pretty simple, Vern thought. But he knew it wasn't simple, and he knew it wasn't going to be easy.

What else do you want? Vern asked. Vern wondered just how he knew that the man wasn't law. But he wasn't. He was something else. Nothing new or original, just one more person who had more than Vern and Gladys did, and wanted to take away part of what little they had. Vern was so used to it he couldn't even be angry or surprised. It was like being mad at the weather.

I'll come back later for whatever it is I want, the man said. Right now I just need for you to agree that I can have it.

Have what?Vern asked.

I'll let you know when the time comes, the man said. 

Vern tried to place the expression that was on the man's face. It wasn't triumph because he had something on Vern, and it wasn't the face of somebody seeking retribution. Vern thought maybe he had seen that expression on the clerk down at the general store. Lining the cans up on the counter, totaling the cost up on the cash register. How much more? the eyes said. What can I get? they said. Whatever it was, Vern and the man  both knew that Verne couldn't say no.

And that's probably when Verne knew that's who he was facing was the one he had said he was going to say no to as soon as this job was finished. 

You're the devil, Vern said.

You just killed two people and you're fixing to steal a baby, the man said. I don't think you're in a position to be calling somebody names, now are you?

Vern could go one better. He wasn't in a position to do anything. He was helpless and some man he didn't know held all the power. It was the story of a poor man's life. Because that's all Vern was right now. Just another poor man helpless before somebody with all the power.

So I walk out that door, Vern said. And you come back later?

The man nodded and put the pistol in the pocket of his dark suit coat. He had Vern even without holding a gun on him and they both knew it.

How much later? Vern said.

Time will come, the man said.

And what will you want? Vern asked.

I can't tell you that, the man said. I can't even tell you who I might want it from. It might be you, it might be from that baby you're holding. That baby that's not yours. It might be something from Gladys. Does it matter? I got the only thing you need right now, the only thing you want right now. I can let you walk out that door.

If Vern hadn’t been sure before, he was when the man said Gladys’s name. The man might have known the name if he had lived somewhere close. But Vern knew he came from a long way off. He knew it because he just knew things he needed to.

Don't I have to sign something? Vern asked. Give you a drop of blood on down payment?

Don't believe all those old stories, the man said. You just take what I'm offering and the deal is done. Just walk out the door.

The baby had gone back to sleep in Vern’s arms. He wondered if the man in the door had done that, to make their negotiations easier. Vern smelled all the baby smells. He and Gladys had only had a day of them before they buried little Jesse, but smells stayed with you a long time. Like the smell that came off the man's suit when Vern walked past him. The smell was a little bit like rotten eggs. The smell that came off the swamp sometime at night. Vern didn't want to think of the word brimstone. He didn't want to think about the deal he just made.

You take good care of that baby, the man said when Vern was halfway across the main room, halfway between the baby's dead parents. That boy is going to be something special, the man said. People are going to know his name. He'll be able to buy you anything you want. He’ll be something that nobody has been before, but not everything he could be. He’ll give you things you didn’t dream about. But I'm the only one that can give you what you want right now. I'll see you later, Vern.

He had said it to the back of Vern's head. When Vern turned around to look at him, there was nothing to look at. The man had gone.

The baby whimpered a little bit as Vern walked home with him, but he didn't really say anything until they walked in the front door. That's when he started crying. And Gladys did what a new mother does when she hears a baby crying. She opened the front of her dress and pulled the baby to her without saying a word. She looked down at the greedily sucking baby and then back at Vern. The look on her face was just shining. Gratitude, happiness, satisfaction? Vern couldn’t put a name on it.

I'm not going to ask, Gladys said. I don't need to ask. The good Lord taketh away and the good Lord has brought us this baby.

Not exactly, Vern thought.

The boy started singing almost as soon as he could talk. He could sing pretty much anything too. He'd sing back songs that he heard on the radio and he sounded like the person that sang them. He could sound like one of those singers that you just knew was colored although they never said it. And he could sing like those hayseed boys with their twanging banjos. But he could always add a little something to it. He's sing a word a little differently, or he changed the rhythm a little bit. Verne didn't know enough about music himself to know exactly what it was. He just knew it was different. The boy was something special, and Vern always wished he had been the first one to say it.

Whether it was singing along to the radio or singing in the little church, it always seemed like he did his best singing when he looked at his Mama. His face and Gladys's face would both light up like they were reflecting off each other.

The boy was just out of grade school when they were finally able to move to Memphis. Vern and Gladys would talk sometime about whether the boy singing might be worth something. But it was just idle talk. Gladys thought about the boy’s singing as a gift, and Vern might talk about it but he didn't want to think about it too hard. The man in the dark suit had never shown up again, and on good days Vern would let himself think that it was never going to happen. The rest of the time he tried not to think about it at all.

They weren't the only ones to notice the boy could sing. But of course whenever anybody's child sang in church, everybody else said how good they sounded. Vern knew the things they were saying about the boy were the same things that he said about their children. Sometimes they would say that his boy had something special and he would wish they could use other words to describe it. People just wanted to look at him. They wanted to see his shoulder sway, or the way he leaned into the microphone up at the front of the church. They liked that look he got on his face when he sang, like he was feeling every word, and the way he would look at people in the audience or in the congregation, as if he was singing directly to each and every one of them separately and by themselves.

The boy had never sung for money yet, at least until he tried to sing as a birthday present for his Mama. He was almost grown then and the man that helped him record the song for his Mama told Vern and Gladys that he probably had quite the future. Nobody sings like him, the record man said. Vern and Gladys let him sing at a couple of little hillbilly shows. He made a few dollars, and they could always use it. Vern never got as bad off again as he was the night he found the boy. But that didn't mean they were rich. Far from it. They still lived in that life where every dollar counted, every penny counted, and every straw was worth grasping at. Nobody ever made the kind of offer to Vern again that had led him to the night in the two-room shack where he found the boy and where the man led him take the boy. Vern wondered what he would do. He didn't want to do something like that again, but he felt like the only thing he had to lose was something that the man was going to come back for one day anyway.

The boy still sang in church. People knew they weren't supposed to clap in church, but there was always that murmur of noise when he finished the song. They leaned to one another and said something about how good he was, and then they came up to him afterwards to tell him how good they thought he was. He acted shy about it. He would duck his head and thank them and call them ma'am and sir. But their praise was like something that he stored, something that he soaked up, and something that came back out in that glow that he had when he sang. And sometimes it was like that when he was singing at one of the hillbilly shows or in church. Like he was soaking up all the admiration and admiration that they had and giving it back to them. The way he sang with that golden voice was the gratitude that he gave back to them.

It was after one of those church shows one night, a Sunday night when they all came back to get a little more taste of what they had in the morning, when Vern noticed a peculiar smell in the room. It was not very strong, not a lot stronger than the flowers up around the altar, or the perfumes and colognes that people put on along with their Sunday best, but Vern noticed it anyway. It was a smell of eggs but when they were just starting to rot, or a swamp but from a little further away. It didn't necessarily get stronger, but once Vern noticed it he noticed it more and more, until he couldn't smell anything else.

Vern looked for him, and somehow knew to look in the back of the church and to look for that same dark suit. Vern wondered if that pistol was still in the pocket. He felt something he almost couldn't describe. It wasn't fear and it wasn't even despair. It was a sadness deeper than anything you'd ever felt. He felt it somewhere in the middle of his chest. He might have said that he felt it in his very soul, but right now he wasn't sure if it was his any more.

I didn't think you could come in here, Vern said to the man.

He doesn't keep me out of places like this, the man said. That's up to people who probably need to do a little better job at it. The man smiled when he said it. Bern thought he'd never seen the man smile before and that it wasn't a very pleasant expression.

Verne wanted to get Gladys and the boy out of there before the man saw them. But they had already made it to the back of the church, the boy shaking hands with people, ducking his head, while Gladys beamed behind him. The man shared his compliments too, but reached past the boy to shake hands with Gladys and to direct his praise at her.

Your boy is very talented, Gladys, he said. Is it all right if I call you Gladys?

Well, I suppose so, she said, smiling back at him.

I could help your boy make a lot of money, the man said. There was that way he said it, that certainty in it, that might make Gladys ask how, or even how much, but never whether he was telling the truth. That was his biggest trick, Vern thought. He might fool you, and he might swindle you, and he might take the first thing you ever had and the last thing you were going to, but he wasn't going to flat out lie to you. It was part of what made him so good at what he did.

Gladys turned to the boy. Vern looked past her at the man and noticed that his smile was a little sharper. The corners of his mouth were more pointed, the teeth were a little whiter, and the eyes glittered a little more brightly. For a moment he looked more the way Vern had expected him to.

This man wants to make you a lot of money, Gladys said to the boy. What do you think about that honey?

The boy ducked his head as he reached out to shake hands with the man.

I appreciate whatever you can do for me, the boy said. What should I call you, sir?

Vern had a moment to think that was what people had been asking since man ate his first apple.

My name's Tom Parker, the man said. We're going to do great things together, Elvis. You could just call me the Colonel.