Face of Evil

CHAPTER SIX

Twenty minutes later, Matt and Rachel sat across from each other in a booth at the Denny's on the edge of town. They each had a cup of lousy coffee in front of them and picked at a piece of banana cream pie that looked incredible but tasted synthetic.

"How could you not have known that Andy was guilty?" she asked.

"Maybe I want to see the best in people."

"Or you're blind, at least when it comes to him. What's he got on you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did he take a bullet for you? Give you his kidney? Or does he have pictures of you doing something terrible, like molesting little boys? Whatever it is, it must be huge."

"It's loyalty," Matt said.

"That's it?"

"It's huge to me. He's my oldest friend. I'll always have his back. That's all there is to it."

"But he's an asshole," she said.

"Not to me."

" Especially to you. How come everyone else can see it and you can't?"

Matt set down his fork. “You want to know what I see when I look at Andy?"

She nodded.

"Terror," he said.

They called the narrow, rectangular houses in Matt's neighborhood shotgun shacks. The four rooms were laid out in a row without any hallways. So, in theory, if all the doors were open, and you happened to be standing on the front porch with a loaded shotgun, you could fire it into the house and all the pellets could pass through to the backyard without hitting a wall.

That was how some people thought the shacks got their name. Another theory, the one Matt's parents subscribed to, was that it came from all the impoverished people who blew their heads off with shotguns rather than continue living in those miserable dumps.

Matt's father had remodeled their shotgun shack so extensively that it wasn't really one anymore. He'd built the place out, added a hallway, and erected a gable on their flat roof.

But the house next door, the one that the Goodis family moved into during the blistering-hot summer of Matt's eighth year, was still the original, cramped floor plan.

Sam Goodis, his wife, Marla, and their son, Andy, kept to themselves. Sam was a huge man, covered with tattoos, and worked as a mechanic in the railroad yard.

In the nights that followed, Matt often heard slapping, and crying, and yelling, and things breaking in the Goodis house. He could rarely make out what was actually being said, beyond the pleading in Marla's voice and the rage in Sam's. He never heard a sound from Andy.

Matt went to his parents about it and asked them to do something, but they told him that what happened under another family's roof was none of their business and that it was best not to mix in.

So Matt was left to wonder why Marla was always bruised and why their son, Andy, never wanted to play and always seemed as furtive as a feral cat.

But that changed one Sunday when Matt's parents were at church and he was home sick with a stomach flu. He was in bed, a towel laid out on the bedspread and a bucket on his nightstand, when he heard a scratching sound under the floor.

He got out of bed, went down on his knees, and pressed his ear to the wood. And when he did, he could swear that he heard breathing.

There was a dog in the neighborhood that liked to bring the small animals and birds that it killed under their house. The dog would gut the animals, leaving the carcasses behind, and the rotting smell would permeate the entire house for days. Matt was nauseous enough as it was without having to deal with the smell, too.

So he got up, grabbed a flashlight and a broom, and went outside to scare away whatever animal was under their house. They'd had everything down there. Dogs, cats, snakes, rabbits, squirrels, even a rabid raccoon that his dad had to shoot.

But he'd never heard anything breathing down there before.

He stepped off the porch, lay down on his stomach, and peered into the crawl space under their raised foundation, sweeping the beam of his flashlight into the cobwebby darkness.

What he saw surprised him.

It was Andy, curled up in the deepest, darkest part, one of his eyes nearly swollen shut, blood on his cheek. Andy looked at Matt imploringly and raised a finger to his lips, mouthing a silent Shhhh.

Matt was puzzling over it when he felt a presence looming over him. He scooted back and looked up to see Sam Goodis standing behind him, shirtless and sweaty, holding a beer can in one hand and a leather belt in the other. The belt was wrapped once around his hand, and the silver buckle dangled in front of Matt's face.

"What are you doing down there, boy?"

Matt stared at the buckle. There were specks of fresh blood on the hook. He swallowed hard.

"Looking for money."

Sam snorted and took a slug of his beer. “You think there's buried treasure under your house?"

"I broke my piggy bank and some of the coins fell through the cracks in the floor."

It wasn't entirely a lie. It had actually happened, only it was a year ago. He figured he had a better chance not getting caught in a fib if it was at least partially based on truth.

"What do you need a flashlight and a broom for?"

"I'm afraid of spiders," he said. “There are some big ones under there."

"Well, now that I know there's money under your house, maybe one night I'll crawl under there and take it all for myself." Sam grinned and finished his beer. “What would you say to that?"

"That it'd be nice if a black widow bit you while you were down there."

Sam squatted down on his haunches, close enough that Matt could smell the beer on his breath.

"You got balls. That comes as a surprise. Have you seen my boy?" Sam looked him in the eye.

"Boy?"

Matt couldn't help stealing a quick glance under the house. Andy was shivering with terror. He looked up at Sam Goodis again.

"No, sir," Matt said.

"You see him, you tell him he's the most worthless creature that ever crawled out of a woman's snatch."

Sam tossed his empty beer can under the house, got to his feet, and walked down the street.

When Matt looked back under the house, Andy was gone. For the next few weeks, every time he heard a sound under the house, he feared it was Sam Goodis, looking for his money.

Andy escaped that beating, but there were more, for him and for his mother. The beatings went on for years, until Sam walked out one day when Andy was a teenager and never came back.

"After that, Mrs. Goodis and Andy were on their own and my parents started looking after them," Matt said now, watching Rachel idly go after the last few crumbs of the pie with her fork. “Dad would fix things up around their house. Mom would bring them leftovers. I made sure Andy always had a friend."

"That was very sweet of you," she said.

"If we'd shown that concern a few years earlier, we could have spared them both a lot of pain. But we pretended we didn't see the evil that was right in front of us. We turned our backs and hoped it would go away."

"It did," Rachel said.

Matt shook his head. “Sam Goodis was gone, but we still felt him. He was there in the scars, the ones you see and the ones you don't. That's why Andy is the way he is."

And that was why late one winter night, a couple of years back, Marla Goodis walked naked out onto Spirit Lake and fell through the ice, but Matt didn't tell Rachel about that.

"You were a child, Matt. None of it was your fault. You shouldn't feel guilty about what happened."

"But I do," Matt said.

He was the most sensitive, caring man Rachel had ever met, and she had never wanted to make love to anyone more than she wanted to with him at that moment. She reached across the table and took his hand.

"You don't have to pick me up in the morning for the ski trip. You can come over tonight instead." She looked him in the eye. “And stay with me."

He smiled. “I appreciate that, but I'm real tired and I've still got to pack."

"Right, pack, I forgot about that. I've got to do that, too." She started to withdraw her hand, but he didn't let her go. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

"I'm looking forward to this trip."

"So am I." She kissed his hand, closing her eyes and pretending the wedding ring wasn't there.