The Mansion Page 23

  He took a deep breath, pulling the air in through his nose and holding it. Smoke and fire, but something else, too. Something dark and deeper. A dank rot that smelled old, ancient even, the way Eagle Mansion had smelled, too, before the renovations. His mother had always told him that Eagle Mansion was haunted, but he thought it was something worse, that smell. If he’d been pressed, he would have said it smelled like evil. Like the room was holding on to all its secrets despite the fire and the years gone by.

  Shawn closed his eyes, listening now.

  He didn’t know what he expected to hear. His mother crying?

  His father had been one hell of a son of a bitch.

  The first time he’d ever gone to church had been with his aunt Beverly when she took him in after the fire. St. Matthew’s Church. One of the oldest churches in Syracuse. He’d been twelve, and the church wasn’t the only new thing: he had on a suit and a collared shirt that was noose-tight on his neck. The service had been foreign and strange to him, a pageant that he couldn’t understand. At least, not until the priest started to speak about the devil. Now that was a thing he’d recognized right off. The devil. In that unfamiliar church with a woman he barely knew, the words of that priest were something he could understand: he knew the devil. But he also knew that the devil didn’t come with any of the trappings that the priest at St. Matthew’s Church was offering up. The devil was no serpent lying in wait, no slicked-up huckster worming his way into your heart. The devil didn’t knock politely at your door and wait for you to invite him in. No. The devil didn’t knock on the door; he knocked the door down. The devil didn’t worm his way into your heart; he cut your heart out with the glass from a broken bottle of beer.

  Shawn knew what the devil was like, because for the first twelve years of his life, until the fire, he’d lived with the devil. And the worst of it was that everybody around him knew that he and his mother were living with the devil, and they hadn’t done anything about it. Small towns. People minded their own business. It didn’t matter how many times old Doc Learner had to set his mother’s arm or give her stitches, he always nodded grimly when she told him that she’d stumbled in the dark or tripped on a root. And whenever he’d go with his mother to the market and she’d have to ask for a credit—“end of the month and all”—nobody ever said anything about how the money had disappeared into six-packs and the till behind Ruffle’s bar. But they knew. They all knew.

  He opened his eyes again. He hated this building. The groundskeeper’s cottage. Whose idea of a joke was it to call the building a cottage? He’d hated it when he lived here as a kid, and he hated it now. Why on earth had they stayed way out here, so far from Whiskey Run? Had his father really thought he’d be the one to return Eagle Mansion to its Prohibition-era glory? A crazy idea, befitting a drunk’s grandeur. As shitty as the groundskeeper’s cottage and other outbuildings had been when Shawn was a kid, the cottage had still been in better shape than the decrepit mansion. At least the roof on the cottage kept most of the water out. With newspaper stuffed into the worst chinks in the wall, some modicum of heat stayed in during the winter.

  The mansion itself, particularly the guest rooms on the higher floors, was a disgusting, diseased monstrosity before Shawn came back with his billions. Holes in the roof big enough to land a helicopter through. Only a single unbroken window in the entire mansion, all the other glass long since sacrificed to teenagers from Whiskey Run who came out to drink and fight and prove themselves brave enough to run through a house that was reputed to be haunted. And it looked haunted, inside and out. The stonework was crumbling. Inside the mansion, when it rained, the walls turned into waterfalls. Fungus grew from wallpaper. You had to watch where you stepped, the floors spongy with rot where they weren’t gaping altogether like chicks waiting to be fed.

  The third floor. The hole. It had saved his life.

  God. He hadn’t thought of that in years. Hadn’t thought of it since it happened, he realized. How much of that did he keep buried away? But he remembered it now. Remembered running as fast as he could, looking behind him in terror, hearing the footsteps closer and closer, the whip of the air behind him as he just missed being . . .

  He had been, what, ten? The very last few hours of the very last day of November? Yes. A little less than two years before the fire.

  He’d been reading in his bed. The light was bad, a flickering dance of shadows from the woodstove and the kerosene lanterns. Electric lines—the same ones they’d hooked up to the cabin after college—ran out to the property, but Shawn had never known a time when his parents had paid the bill. It was nearly ten o’clock. He was supposed to be sleeping, but he was careful to turn the pages quietly. If he heard his mother’s footsteps coming toward him, he would tuck the book under the blankets before she pulled back the makeshift curtain to check on him, though ten o’clock was late enough that he thought his mother might have already fallen asleep herself. It was a Tuesday night—yes! He remembered that, a Tuesday—which meant the next day was a school day and they both had to rise early. He for fifth grade, and she to go to the school, too, where she was the secretary. He was just beginning to drift off when he heard the wheels of the truck coming up the drive. His father’s truck. A shitbox Ford on tires that were held together with chewing gum. The truck skidded to a hard stop on the gravel. Always a bad sign. The screaming rust of the door opening and closing, and then the creak of the front door. Shawn shivered even before the gust of winter air blew through the curtain and drove him deeper under his blankets. He could have sworn that the wind carried snow to his bed.

  He listened. His father had an open-hipped walk when he was sober. A strut, really. Simon was a handsome man, despite all his attempts at self-destruction, and he walked like he knew it.

  When he was sober.

  In Whiskey Run, Shawn saw the way women looked at his father, and he saw how Simon saw it, how he could be charming when he wanted to be. When he thought there was something in it for him, he could talk low and sweet, and women would shift a little on their feet, leaning toward him. He kept his hair slicked, a can of pomade in the back pocket of his jeans where other men kept chewing tobacco, and he wore his T-shirts tight and tucked in. He was a trim man, coiled in a way that made women want to unwind him. He cut wood and did construction and hired himself out to lift and carry and heave and push and pull and dig and do whatever needed to be done for cash in hand. He was willing to work hard all day, every day, as long as it wasn’t for the benefit of his wife and kid. If he’d spent even a little bit of that energy on fixing up the groundskeeper’s cottage, it might have been a nice place. But he worked for himself only, and that work, despite the drinking, kept him a powerful man. That power meant he could have a simple life: Simon Eagle fought anybody who was dumb enough to stand in front of him. A simple life of working and fighting and drinking. A simple uniform, too, regardless of the season. In the winters, he’d throw a heavy wool sweater and a canvas jacket over a work shirt, and he’d loosen his belt a notch or two so that he could fit a pair of long johns under his jeans. That belt. A black, beaten leather belt with a big silver buckle stamped with his initials. That belt was a misery.

  But if Simon walked with a swagger when he was sober—or when he’d had only a dozen beers or so—once he passed on to the land of the well and truly drunk, the swagger turned into something else, something as twisted and mean as he was. It was the knee, Shawn knew. The knee that Simon blamed everything on. If it weren’t for the knee, Simon liked to say, he would have kept his scholarship at Syracuse University, would maybe have had a shot at the NFL. Not that he actually hurt the knee playing football, but he “wouldn’t have ended up back here, in Whiskey Run, trapped into marriage with your slut of a mom, if I hadn’t wrecked it.” To a lesser extent, on days when the temperature dropped precipitously or the rains came, the knee injury meant that Simon limped a bit, but on nights when he drank so much that the next morning brought blank spots and mumbled apologies, his foot dragge
d and pulled behind him. When he was drunk, the injury to his knee was no longer a piece of ancient history but a present concern.

  So when his father came in that night and Shawn heard his rough, shuffling step, he knew that it meant his father had gotten good paying work that day, earning enough money to drink the night away. And then Shawn realized it was a Tuesday: dollar pitchers of beer at Ruffle’s. His dad took him there with him sometimes, “Just for a quick one. Wet my whistle after a good day’s work, and don’t you be telling your mother about it.”

  Shawn could picture the bar. The mix of dirt and sawdust on the floor, men from the lumber mill playing cards, old Mr. Hickson, the English teacher, also a drunk, with his beard and his pipe, standing guard at the pool table. A few women he didn’t recognize sitting at a table in the back, winking and flirting with his father. And his father, swaggering, one thumb hooked in his leather belt, the other hand swinging down five dollars cash on the scarred black oak bar that Terry Fincher had built back in March of 1951 in exchange for a month of all he could drink. A poor deal for Terry Fincher: his liver had gone out by the end of April. Or maybe it was a good deal, Shawn thought. He would have welcomed it if his father had drunk himself to death with such speed.

  As he lay under the rough wool blankets, he realized he was shivering. Not from cold, though the room could get cold enough in winter that if the stove was out for any length of time, it would shriek with anger as a new fire came to life. No, he was shivering because he could see, in his mind, those five dollars turned to five pitchers of beer, and then maybe another pitcher for the road, and then his father’s stopping to buy a six-pack of screamers—Genesee Cream Ale—those familiar green-and-white cans riding shotgun all the way from Whiskey Run.

  Shawn, standing there now in the burned-out wreck of a building, realized he was shivering, too, as if in sympathy with the ten-year-old version of himself. It was enough to make him laugh, not at the memory, but at the absurdity. If he recognized the devil in his father the first time Aunt Beverly took him to church, had he recognized what kind of a sick miracle it was that his father hadn’t wrecked his car during one of those nights? The fifteen miles from Whiskey Run to Eagle Mansion—what was left of Eagle Mansion—running down twisting, crumbling roads that went from blacktop to gravel to dirt. The moon and the stars the only light aside from the cockeyed headlights on the old Ford, his father barreling along as fast as the truck could take him. How was it that on all those drives home he never left the road? Never tore the truck to pieces against the rocks and trees that stood sentry? How come a deer or a moose never startled him off the rutted track? No, Shawn thought, if his father had been the devil, then that meant there had to have been a God, and what kind of God would have guided that man safely down the miles from Ruffle’s bar or wherever it was he’d been drinking, let him put down a couple of cans of Genny during the drive, skid to a halt in front of the groundskeeper’s cottage, and then drag his busted-up knee through the door so that he could inflict himself upon Shawn’s mother?

  From where he was lying on his bed, Shawn was too afraid to move. He didn’t want to call attention to himself. The shift of his body on the mattress, the scratch of the blankets pulled higher to cover his face—either of those things might register, and then his father would pull back the curtain, hover over him, and decide that Shawn needed to be taught a lesson. And yet he was shivering. He could hear his teeth chattering like dice rolling in his mouth. His bed was just a mattress on the floor, stained and smelling faintly, always, of mildew. No box spring to creak, no bed frame to shift, but there was the wood floor underneath and the drag of fabric, and he could feel his body shaking uncontrollably. He did his best to keep his breathing even, exhaling softly through his mouth, trying to steady himself.

  Step. Drag. Step. Drag.

  Shawn closed his eyes. He wanted to be asleep.

  He would have given anything, traded anything at that moment, to be sure that his father’s attention wouldn’t fall upon him.

  Step. Drag. And then a sigh and the sound of his father sitting heavily on the edge of his own bed, clothes being shrugged off, the thump of the work boots dropping to the floor. Shawn had caught those work boots in the ribs a few times.

  Shawn, shivering and alone in his bed, would have said a prayer of thanks if he’d known how. As a teenager, living with his aunt Beverly and going to church regularly, he spent a few years offering up a prayer before sleep, but back then, in the groundskeeper’s derelict cottage so close to the falling-to-pieces Eagle Mansion, with his drunk father a few paces away, a blanket hung from the ceiling his only protection, Shawn didn’t know how to offer up his thanks, so he stayed still, knowing there was still the chance that a stray noise would bring the wrath of his father upon him.

  He heard the blankets and bedding moving, and then the voice of his mother.

  “I’m sleeping,” she said. “And you’re drunk again. I told you, no more when you’ve been drinking.”

  She was whispering, but there was only the makeshift curtain between Shawn and his parents’ bed.

  Harsher, a little louder this time: “No. Not when you’ve been drinking.”

  And then the sound that he’d known was coming, the sound he’d been dreading since the first sound of the truck coming down the drive, the sound that sometimes felt like the punch line to some horrible joke: fist on flesh. Always such a deep sound, one that spoke to the blood and bone that lay beneath the surface of our fragile bodies. It was accompanied by the sound of his mother’s grunting, and then her beginning to cry.

  “Ah, come on, please,” she cried. If a wail could be quiet, a breeze in winter, then this was a quiet wail, his mother, even then, still trying to let Shawn have what little peace was available to him.

  And then, again. Fist on flesh followed by tearing cloth. His mother gasping.

  “Simon, please,” she said, but now she was full-on sobbing.

  Shawn, lying in bed, as still as he could be, had one thought: I’m glad it’s not me.

  I’m glad it’s not me.

  Even now, standing in the burned-out groundskeeper’s cottage that had once been his home, he felt the heat flood into him. Twenty-six years later. A hundred billion dollars later. An entire lifetime later. He still felt the heat of it.

  Shame.

  He’d built a company—no, an empire—by himself, become the kind of man about whom books are written. He bedded supermodels and had a fleet of private jets, he had fifty thousand employees and countless more working for him down the length of the supply chain. He had the ear of the president of the United States and access to any pop star or actor he wanted to meet. He had everything, and what he didn’t have, he could buy. But still, that thought, I’m glad it’s not me, flooded him with shame. It didn’t matter that he’d been only ten years old, that he’d been scared and alone and shivering in his bed; he’d lain there and listened to his mother being punched and then, yes, to his father start raping her, and the thought that he’d had was I’m glad it’s not me.

  He took a deep breath in, and the faint, lingering smell of ashes was enough to remind him that he’d had other feelings back then as well. The thought I’m glad it’s not me had filled him with shame, had made him hate himself, but the next thing he had felt was anger.

  Rage.

  The ten-year-old Shawn Eagle slid as quietly as he could from his bed. He knew the floor of the room well enough to move sideways first, around those two boards that yelled with every step. He pushed aside the curtain and moved into the main part of the room. The kerosene lanterns and the woodstove were still sending dancing shadows over the walls and ceiling. He could hear his mother crying, gulping back her sobs and trying to stay quiet.

  Quiet for his sake.

  And his father was making noises now, the grunting that would eventually lead to Simon’s own sort of crying sound.

  “Whore,” his father hissed through his teeth, and for Shawn, it sounded like nothing other than th
e growl of a dog gone wild. He was afraid to look, afraid that if he did, he’d see his father turned beast. They didn’t have a television, but he’d spent the night at Mark Duran’s house with five other boys as part of a birthday party that previous spring, and they’d stayed up late to watch a werewolf movie. The other boys had taken it in stride, but it left an indelible stain on Shawn, and that night, listening to his father’s swearing, the seething breath, the growl of him, all he could think of was the monster from the movie. Skin split on knuckles and spine, the mouth distorted into a muzzle, teeth and claw.

  The tearing of flesh.

  The blood.

  Shawn couldn’t look.

  He couldn’t look, but he heard the sound of fist on flesh again, his mother gasping, the sobbing leaking harder out of her mouth, and he took another step forward. His foot bumped against something. His father’s work boot. He was at the side of the bed, nearly close enough to reach out and . . . And what? His father worked doing odd jobs, carpentry and construction, digging ditches and clearing fields, whatever paid in cash and helped him sweat out the alcohol every day. It meant that the man was all sinew and muscle, violence waiting to happen, and Shawn knew that even had he been a grown man, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against his father.

  He was in his bare feet, and he could feel the draft carrying over his toes, the worn-down plank floor cool, and there was nothing he could do. It didn’t matter that his mother was crying in full voice now, that she couldn’t even try to keep quiet for his benefit anymore, that the push and rock of the mattress had sped up, his father sounding more and more like an animal ready to kill with every breath. He might as well have just stayed in his bed, but as he had the thought, he took a step back and felt something hard against his foot.

  The belt buckle.

  He bent over and started pulling the leather belt from the loops of his father’s jeans. It snaked out smooth and easy; standing by the bed, listening to his mother crying, his father grunting, and there he was, swinging that heavy, shiny, stamped silver buckle at the end of a length of worn leather. Just holding the belt made him feel mean, the way it swayed back and forth. You could swing that belt as hard as you could and you knew it would hurt somebody. You could make somebody stop what they were doing with one good swing of that belt. You could teach your wife a lesson with that belt. You could teach her not to give you lip. You could teach her that when a man works all week, he’s entitled to blow off a little steam. You could teach her not to look at another man, you dumb slut. You could teach her not to burn the dinner, to dent the truck, to knock over your can of Genny, to show a little god (swing) damn (swing) respect (swing)!