I Don't Have a Good Feeling About Him
by Cristina Bryan
When we were kids my best friend Bennett and I were real jerks. When you’re twelve, if somebody is a whole year older, as Bennett was, it makes a big difference. Plus, he was tall and kind of on the heavy side. He was a bully to the puny and sissy and wrong-race boys, but he always seemed to get away with it. Along with a few other mean kids I learned to taunt his victims after he’d given them the business. So, you can see the fact that he chose me as his best friend, though I was younger and smaller, was pretty flattering.
We got up to a lot of things badly-behaved boys in the late ‘forties liked to do. Breaking windows in public buildings on Sundays. Spray-painting the bronze statue of some holy person in the church’s front yard. Shoplifting. Whacking all the heads off the hundreds of tulips in the town’s Memorial Tulip Garden. And once we put a turd in the mailbox of the school principal. Her mailbox was not a normal one but a yellow metal school bus, like a giant toy, on a pole. You can see she was practically asking for it.
A bad thing happened, though, when Bennett found out his father kept a revolver at home “for protection.” The dad was a cop so it wasn’t too far-fetched to think that a crook he’d busted might come to get revenge on him some night.
Bennett, of course, was dying to use it for target practice—something his father would never have allowed. So, Bennett took the gun out of his father’s underwear drawer one Sunday when his parents were at church, along with a bunch of ammo he’d already found in the sock drawer.
“This’ll be fun,” he said. “We’ll just do a little target practice.” I soon found out he considered targets to include songbirds and a woodpecker in the woods, and a big turtle. I didn’t care about the birds, but I hated it when he shot the turtle in the head and shell. Its blood was brown, not red, which made me kind of sick.
On the other side of this small, wooded area where we were fooling around was the town dump. Sometimes we’d see kids climbing around over the smelly trash, looking for cool thrown-away stuff, I guess. There were no kids today, just a weird man with messy hair lying down on a discarded mattress. He looked about my father’s age and was wearing chinos and a sports jacket and fancy shoes.
“Look at him, he’s dead drunk!” Bennett cried when we were just a few yards away.
The man opened his eyes. “Go away, you little shits!” he shouted. Then he added in a tired, afterthought kind of way, “Or I’ll kill you!”
I didn’t think the man could even sit up, and he certainly didn’t seem to have a weapon with him. Suddenly, though, Bennett got really excited. “He’s threatening us!” he cried with something like joy in his voice. “Did you hear him? He says he’s going to kill us!” And he raised the gun.
He hit the guy in the lower part of his stomach. There was a gush of blood.
“It’s self-defense!” Bennett shouted. He put the gun in my hands.
All of a sudden, I felt funny, kind of sick and kind of excited at the same time. The man started crying.
“Put him out of his misery!” Bennett, this son of a cop, said. “You know the law can’t touch us. It’s self-defense!”
Bennett got fifteen years, a lenient sentence on account of his age and our “self- defense” plea, though we could tell the judge wasn’t really buying it. I got sent to juvie till I turned eighteen.
When I got out, I enrolled in this HVAC training school where they taught us how to install and repair furnaces and air conditioners. It wasn’t bad work, and I was good at it. I actually got hired right away by W. W. Stearns Home Comfort, because I got a good recommendation from the training school and Mr. Stearns liked to help out young men who were trying to stick to the straight and narrow.
Bennett got out of prison after just six years, for good behavior. Bennett getting rewarded for good behavior, I had to laugh.
But he didn’t enjoy freedom for long. He was drafted into the army right away.
We got drunk together the night before he had to leave, and we promised each other that when he got out of the service we’d travel everywhere together and do cool stuff.
In a few weeks, I got a postcard from San Diego, where I guess they were shipping out from. The postcard showed a topless lady stretched out on a beach towel, with the message on the back in Bennett’s messy handwriting, “Wish you were here!”
After a few months in Korea, he got to go to Tokyo for a little R&R, which means “Rest and Recuperation.” But a while later we got word that he’d been killed by snipers almost as soon as he rejoined his platoon.
They shipped him back to Lumberton in an army-issued coffin and his parents talked about him like he was this big military hero. A few months later, though, this guy I knew who was just back from Korea on account of injuries told me Bennett had actually been killed in a drunken knife fight outside a bar in Tokyo. What a Bennett way to die, I thought.
In December of that year was my twenty-first birthday. I’d just relocated to Jacksonville, North Carolina. I hadn’t really made any friends yet, so when I asked a couple of guys at work if they wanted to help me celebrate with a few beers and they said no thanks it didn’t really hurt my feelings. I wanted to do something special, though, something I’d never done before.
There were all kinds of small businesses around Camp Lejeune, like stripper joints called “gentlemen’s clubs” and pawnshops and bail bondsmen. There was also a fortune-teller in a big pink doublewide next to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. I decided then and there I wanted to know my future, then get drunk.
Madame Estrella was the fortune teller’s name, and her tiny parking lot was empty. I wondered if she’d know it was my birthday, or that I’d ever helped kill a stranger for no reason, or if I was going to come into a lot of money sometime.
Madame Estrella let me in but said she was cooking supper for her son, so we’d have to make it quick. She was a tiny middle-aged woman with darkish skin, a local Lumbee Indian probably. We sat at a card table.
“Fifteen dollars please.”
“What? Before you even tell me anything?” I’d figured on five bucks at the most.
“Take it or leave it,” she said in a grumpy voice. “But happy birthday all the same.”
“Wow. It is my birthday.” So, I suddenly figured she might be the real thing. I handed her the cash, part of the birthday hundred my mom had sent.
She took a little twisted bit of copper-colored metal off this necklace she was wearing. It was shaped like a figure eight. She held it near her face. She was quiet for kind of a long time.
“What I want to know, first, is do you see money in my future,” I finally said, in a nervous loud voice. “Probably what everybody asks you.”
“No.”
“No they don’t, or no money in my future?”
“No answer yet, because there’s somebody trying to butt in.”
“Really? Somebody from the spirit world?”
She closed her eyes, still holding her wire. “Do you know somebody named . . . Binnit?”
My heart started pounding. “Bennett.”
“He’s very aggressive! Oh my, I don’t have a good feeling about him.”
“Well, that’s Bennett.”
“He says he has an important message for you.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Bennett, though dead, had remembered and wanted to wish me a happy twenty-first birthday.
Madame Estrella sighed. “He says where he’s at...is dark. Real dark.”
My mouth went dry, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t come.
“You can’t see nothing,” she went on. “It’s like being blind. And he knows he’s never going to see any light again. Never, never, never.”
I stood up. I couldn’t speak.
“Wait,” Madame Estrella said, “it’s dark but there’s more. This Binnit says it’s chilly and he can’t move a muscle or make a sound. And he knows it’s always going to be like that, it’s never going to get any better. Not ever. Not even in a million years, he says.”
“I think that’s enough,” I managed to say.
“Dark and chilly. And kind of paralyzed. That’s what he says it’s like.”
“No more, please.”
“Oh, one more thing. He says, ‘Wish you were here.’”
We got up to a lot of things badly-behaved boys in the late ‘forties liked to do. Breaking windows in public buildings on Sundays. Spray-painting the bronze statue of some holy person in the church’s front yard. Shoplifting. Whacking all the heads off the hundreds of tulips in the town’s Memorial Tulip Garden. And once we put a turd in the mailbox of the school principal. Her mailbox was not a normal one but a yellow metal school bus, like a giant toy, on a pole. You can see she was practically asking for it.
A bad thing happened, though, when Bennett found out his father kept a revolver at home “for protection.” The dad was a cop so it wasn’t too far-fetched to think that a crook he’d busted might come to get revenge on him some night.
Bennett, of course, was dying to use it for target practice—something his father would never have allowed. So, Bennett took the gun out of his father’s underwear drawer one Sunday when his parents were at church, along with a bunch of ammo he’d already found in the sock drawer.
“This’ll be fun,” he said. “We’ll just do a little target practice.” I soon found out he considered targets to include songbirds and a woodpecker in the woods, and a big turtle. I didn’t care about the birds, but I hated it when he shot the turtle in the head and shell. Its blood was brown, not red, which made me kind of sick.
On the other side of this small, wooded area where we were fooling around was the town dump. Sometimes we’d see kids climbing around over the smelly trash, looking for cool thrown-away stuff, I guess. There were no kids today, just a weird man with messy hair lying down on a discarded mattress. He looked about my father’s age and was wearing chinos and a sports jacket and fancy shoes.
“Look at him, he’s dead drunk!” Bennett cried when we were just a few yards away.
The man opened his eyes. “Go away, you little shits!” he shouted. Then he added in a tired, afterthought kind of way, “Or I’ll kill you!”
I didn’t think the man could even sit up, and he certainly didn’t seem to have a weapon with him. Suddenly, though, Bennett got really excited. “He’s threatening us!” he cried with something like joy in his voice. “Did you hear him? He says he’s going to kill us!” And he raised the gun.
He hit the guy in the lower part of his stomach. There was a gush of blood.
“It’s self-defense!” Bennett shouted. He put the gun in my hands.
All of a sudden, I felt funny, kind of sick and kind of excited at the same time. The man started crying.
“Put him out of his misery!” Bennett, this son of a cop, said. “You know the law can’t touch us. It’s self-defense!”
Bennett got fifteen years, a lenient sentence on account of his age and our “self- defense” plea, though we could tell the judge wasn’t really buying it. I got sent to juvie till I turned eighteen.
When I got out, I enrolled in this HVAC training school where they taught us how to install and repair furnaces and air conditioners. It wasn’t bad work, and I was good at it. I actually got hired right away by W. W. Stearns Home Comfort, because I got a good recommendation from the training school and Mr. Stearns liked to help out young men who were trying to stick to the straight and narrow.
Bennett got out of prison after just six years, for good behavior. Bennett getting rewarded for good behavior, I had to laugh.
But he didn’t enjoy freedom for long. He was drafted into the army right away.
We got drunk together the night before he had to leave, and we promised each other that when he got out of the service we’d travel everywhere together and do cool stuff.
In a few weeks, I got a postcard from San Diego, where I guess they were shipping out from. The postcard showed a topless lady stretched out on a beach towel, with the message on the back in Bennett’s messy handwriting, “Wish you were here!”
After a few months in Korea, he got to go to Tokyo for a little R&R, which means “Rest and Recuperation.” But a while later we got word that he’d been killed by snipers almost as soon as he rejoined his platoon.
They shipped him back to Lumberton in an army-issued coffin and his parents talked about him like he was this big military hero. A few months later, though, this guy I knew who was just back from Korea on account of injuries told me Bennett had actually been killed in a drunken knife fight outside a bar in Tokyo. What a Bennett way to die, I thought.
In December of that year was my twenty-first birthday. I’d just relocated to Jacksonville, North Carolina. I hadn’t really made any friends yet, so when I asked a couple of guys at work if they wanted to help me celebrate with a few beers and they said no thanks it didn’t really hurt my feelings. I wanted to do something special, though, something I’d never done before.
There were all kinds of small businesses around Camp Lejeune, like stripper joints called “gentlemen’s clubs” and pawnshops and bail bondsmen. There was also a fortune-teller in a big pink doublewide next to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. I decided then and there I wanted to know my future, then get drunk.
Madame Estrella was the fortune teller’s name, and her tiny parking lot was empty. I wondered if she’d know it was my birthday, or that I’d ever helped kill a stranger for no reason, or if I was going to come into a lot of money sometime.
Madame Estrella let me in but said she was cooking supper for her son, so we’d have to make it quick. She was a tiny middle-aged woman with darkish skin, a local Lumbee Indian probably. We sat at a card table.
“Fifteen dollars please.”
“What? Before you even tell me anything?” I’d figured on five bucks at the most.
“Take it or leave it,” she said in a grumpy voice. “But happy birthday all the same.”
“Wow. It is my birthday.” So, I suddenly figured she might be the real thing. I handed her the cash, part of the birthday hundred my mom had sent.
She took a little twisted bit of copper-colored metal off this necklace she was wearing. It was shaped like a figure eight. She held it near her face. She was quiet for kind of a long time.
“What I want to know, first, is do you see money in my future,” I finally said, in a nervous loud voice. “Probably what everybody asks you.”
“No.”
“No they don’t, or no money in my future?”
“No answer yet, because there’s somebody trying to butt in.”
“Really? Somebody from the spirit world?”
She closed her eyes, still holding her wire. “Do you know somebody named . . . Binnit?”
My heart started pounding. “Bennett.”
“He’s very aggressive! Oh my, I don’t have a good feeling about him.”
“Well, that’s Bennett.”
“He says he has an important message for you.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Bennett, though dead, had remembered and wanted to wish me a happy twenty-first birthday.
Madame Estrella sighed. “He says where he’s at...is dark. Real dark.”
My mouth went dry, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t come.
“You can’t see nothing,” she went on. “It’s like being blind. And he knows he’s never going to see any light again. Never, never, never.”
I stood up. I couldn’t speak.
“Wait,” Madame Estrella said, “it’s dark but there’s more. This Binnit says it’s chilly and he can’t move a muscle or make a sound. And he knows it’s always going to be like that, it’s never going to get any better. Not ever. Not even in a million years, he says.”
“I think that’s enough,” I managed to say.
“Dark and chilly. And kind of paralyzed. That’s what he says it’s like.”
“No more, please.”
“Oh, one more thing. He says, ‘Wish you were here.’”
Cristina Bryan has been a professional editor for many years (fiction, nonfiction of all kinds, and journalism) and in the 1990s, ran a small eclectic book publishing company. Her work has appeared in Ghost Story Magazine. She lives in Durham, NC.