A Guardian of Innocents by Jeff Orton Read Free Book Online Page B

emotions I’d ever felt, like some weird alcoholic concoction invented by some wacked-out bartender, full of various exotic liquors that tasted both sweet and bitter at the same time, harsh and smooth.
    I’d murdered the only man I’d known to be my father. I still can’t bring myself even now to call him my dad. I guess that’s a defense mechanism, to detach the role of FATHER from the man I’d killed.
    The twenty minutes it took to get home gave me too much time to think about it. I committed murder, worse yet I committed patricide. I felt sick inside. Acid ate away at my empty stomach while cold shivers gave way to full bodyquakes, the kind you get the morning after a night of binge drinking.
    Tears welled up in my eyes, but I didn’t want to cry, not for him. I tried to force myself not to, but I couldn’t stop it. My chin started to quiver and that was it. I lost the battle.
    The song Black by Pearl Jam was playing on the radio and that didn’t help. It was 1993, so it was still a fairly new song, slow and sad.
    I began singing along in a raspy whisper towards the end, “Doo-duh-doo-doo, doo-duh-doo. . .
    About a block away from my house a sudden jolt zapped my mind out of its sad reverie. Doris is wide awake. She’s crying—she’s crying because she knows. 
    As I rounded the corner, my house became visible and the premonition grew stronger. I could see as I approached that the living room light was on.
    Am I caught? I silently asked myself, Has she already talked to the police?
    A cold fountain of fear sprang up within me. I knew whatever had happened, the police were not there now and I didn’t sense anyone else inside.
    I pulled in the driveway and killed the headlights. I left the engine running just in case I had to get away fast and jogged to the front door. I reached in my pocket to find my keys and realized, like an idiot, they were still in the ignition of the idling Nova. I felt like such a scatterbrained jackass.
    Somewhere far away the gods were snickering at me.
    I was turning around to retrieve the keys from the car when Doris opened the door. There was a wide-eyed frantic look about her as she spoke to me in rapid hyperspeech, “What are you doing out here? Why aren’t choo in bed? What’ve you been out doing?”
    “Mom, I was jus—“
    “Oh God, Phillip, never mind! The police called—“
    My stomach dropped.
    “—They want me to come identify a body. Some man was mugged and shot outside a strip tease club and they think it’s your father. I know he’d never go to one those kinds of places but he still hasn’t come home from work and...”
    It was then that I committed fuck-up number one by asking, “Did you tell the police I wasn’t home?”
    I hate to admit it, but I asked that question with a very distinct level of paranoia, which all but confessed my guilt. She’d been shaking pretty badly when she opened the door, but then her trembling stopped for a few seconds as she gazed at the side of my head.
    And through her eyes I saw the blood in my hair. Instinctively, my arm reflexed and my hand touched the small mat of hair held together by Jack’s congealed blood. It felt like I’d hairsprayed just a small patch of my blonde locks.
    Doris’ shaking sputtered into gear again. From mild to intense. She brushed past me towards her old Nissan (that vehicle being in only slightly better condition than my own) with both hands clutching her keys to keep them from jingling so much.
    My stomach turned over again with the realization that Doris knew. I watched her slowly walk to her car with her head down, seeming to study the cement of the driveway.
    She was in the process of unlocking the driver’s door when she looked up at me. Our eyes met with a taut silence that was only interrupted by the shig shig shig sound of the idling Nova.
    “It looks like you bumped your head somewhere. . . You should put some hydrogen peroxide on it and...”
    She let the sentence, as well as the