Mama’s Boy

Mama’s Boy

by C.S. Fuqua
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 “Circle“

 

Our capacity for cruelty is beyond measure. When we witness an extraordinarily
cruel act we can’t prevent or stop, is it any wonder we wish for supernatural
intervention? Based on a true event, “Mama’s Boy” was a DAW Books’ Year’s
Best Horror Stories XXI selection and a Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 6
“honorable mention.”

Everyone saw where Carl Baker was headed. After spending two years on his belly
in Vietnam, Carl had come home with a habit most people called “a shame.” They’d
shake their heads, say, “It’s terrible, but I hear a lot of ‘em get hooked over there,” and
go on about their business, figuring that sooner or later he’d get his life together and
body clean. After all, he had his mother. In time, with her help, he’d be fine.
I was twelve then. We lived in a remote northern part of the county directly across a
pond from the Baker house. I saw Carl nearly every day, walking around the pond,
hands in pockets, glassy eyes staring into the ripples of the water. I’d stand beside him
sometime for upwards of half an hour before he’d acknowledge me. Then we’d toss a
football or take a walk through the woods. He’d tell me about the women he’d been with
in ‘Nam and the great drugs he got his hands on there. But when he was with me, he
never consumed anything other than water or an occasional beer. My presence, I
suppose, was good enough for a while. Maybe he saw something special in me, maybe
the childhood he’d lost in war—I don’t know. In those days, though, I was his only friend.
Out of politeness, I’d ask how his mother was getting on, and he’d shrug, his face

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going cold, unreadable, say, “Okay.” I don’t know if he really liked his mother or not. A
frail, brittle woman, she retired after forty years of nursing when Carl returned home,
hoping, I suppose, to devote her remaining years in service to Carl’s needs, but Carl
didn’t need much—a few bucks, a fix, and a patch of grass to lie on as he drifted into
oblivion. One day, he didn’t come back. Too much smack slammed into his brain and
left him a vegetable.
A month after Carl’s OD, Mrs. Baker took him home from the hospital. Mom stopped
by their place a couple of times, but Mrs. Baker never invited her inside, talking instead
from the front porch for a few minutes before returning to her son. Mom said she
admired Mrs. Baker’s determination, but she wondered if the old lady was physically
capable to care for Carl adequately.
Over the next few months, I rarely saw Mrs. Baker. She ordered all her groceries
and medicines delivered, each paid for at the door. I once saw a man with a black
satchel—a doctor, I assumed—get out of a blue Buick and go inside, but, as far as I
know, after the doctor’s single visit, no one but Mrs. Baker ever saw her son.
By Valentine’s Day, Carl crossed my mind only when I looked out my bedroom
window to see the reflection of lights from the Baker house shimmering on the pond. I’d
get images of him lying in bed and start to feel trapped. I’d turn away, slide into bed,
make a tent with the covers, and lose myself in my school books as Mom and Dad
watched The Late Show downstairs.
One warm night in early March, I had begun to nod off when something hit the outer
wall of my bedroom. Faint laughter drifted up from the TV. I sat up as another knock
sounded against my window. I slipped out of bed, over to the glass. Pale light glittered

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on the pond. Carl’s face, twisted in agony, flickered in my mind, the image abruptly
vanishing as footsteps started up the stairs. I slipped back into bed, settling as the door
opened and Mom looked in. A few minutes later, I drifted into sleep, figuring the knocks
against my wall were nothing more than pine cones falling from the tree outside my
window.
Two nights later, it happened again, a solid knock, like knuckles rapping. I searched
the darkness, saw nothing but the single light in the Baker house. I turned away from
the window—and froze. A bump against the outer wall. Then again, and again, a
gradual progression around the side wall, the inner wall, to my door.
“Mom?” I whispered.
Thump.
“Dad?”
I crossed the room to the door, jerked it open as Mom turned toward me at the head
of the stairs.
“What are you doing up, young man?”
“I—uh…” What could I tell her? My room was twenty feet off the ground. Who’d
believe me? “I need to pee,” I said.
Back in bed, I expected the knocking to start again, but what came were screams.
Faint, guttural groans, ending in suffocating shrieks. I twisted out of bed and hit the door
at a run.
“Mom! Dad!” I took the stairs in twos. They bolted from the den, their faces flushed
with concern. I raced back to my room with my parents following. Mom switched on the
light. They glanced around the room, their questioning gazes falling finally to me at the

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window.
“Listen,” I said in a hushed voice.
“To what?” Dad said irritably.
Frogs croaked. Night birds chirped.
“Somebody was screaming.”
A roll of the eyes.
“I swear!”
Dad shook his head and left the room. Mom paused in the doorway briefly before
flipping off the light. “Just a bad dream, honey. Back to bed. It’s late.”
A few minutes later, the TV downstairs silenced, and I heard my parents’ bedroom
door at the end of the hall softly close. Then came faint music from their radio, masking
the random sounds of night from their room. Sometime later, the screams started again,
faint, muffled. I wrapped the pillow around my head and hummed softly to drown them
out completely.
The following night, nothing banged against my walls, but the screams began as
random words drifted up from The Late Show. I called for my parents, but only Mom
came. She sat on my bedside, listened for a few moments, and then lay her palm
against my forehead.
“Is something bothering you, Kevin? You need to talk to somebody?”
Great. She thought I was a nut case. Next stop, the base psychiatrist, one of those
convenient military freebies. Dad, a Navy machinist, had three years left before
retirement, and Mom was determined to use any service she didn’t have to pay for. I
was glad I’d kept my mouth shut about the slaps against the wall.

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She tucked me in and left me lying in a pale, steel-gray shaft of moonlight. A quarter-
hour passed; another. Then screams. The television audience cackled. Every night
thereafter, faint and anguished shrieks echoed across the pond. Mom and Dad couldn’t
hear them, secure in their bedroom at the front of the house, the radio playing softly
within. I would sink deeper under the covers, wrapping my pillow around my head until
sleep finally overtook me.
The following week, Dad shipped out for a month’s sea duty. The night he left, a
rapid slapping circled the walls of my room, ending with a bang against my door. Mom
shouted from downstairs, “Kevin! Go to sleep!” Then came the screams, more
anguished than ever. Gooseflesh waltzed up my neck. I threw off the covers, stomped
downstairs, grabbed Mom’s hand, and pulled her toward my room, ignoring her
demands of “What’s going on?”
“Listen,” I said as we entered.
“Is this about…?”
“Mom, please, just listen.”
With a reluctant sigh, she leaned out the window beside me.
Nothing.
She pulled back in, shaking her head sadly. Poor boy, her eyes said. That’s when
her expression changed. She snapped around, her mouth unhinging in silence as
nightmarish shrills snaked through pines and oaks. She glared across the pond at the
Baker house. A moment later, she fled to her room to call the police.
She returned to my doorway a few moments later as she slipped on a windbreaker.
“I’m going over to the Bakers’, Kevin. You stay here.”

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As soon as I heard the car door slam shut, I yanked on my jeans and tennis shoes,
slipped out of the house, circled the pond, and skirted through Mrs. Baker’s backyard. A
police car pulled into the front yard, followed by Mom’s car. I crept up to the only lighted
window and peeked in, gasping as my eyes briefly met Carl Baker’s. Something stirred
behind those dilated, milky pools—a sense of relief, of gratefulness.
His room door swung open. A tall, uniformed policeman stepped in, his expression
sickening as he took in Carl and his surroundings. Mrs. Baker pushed by, placing
herself between him and her son. Beyond the officer, Mom waited in the hallway. The
policeman turned away, and I heard him mutter that he’d radio for an ambulance. Mom
backed away from the door as Mrs. Baker knelt beside the bed and began to stroke the
sweating brow of her son. His head rolled side to side, tongue waggling between his lips
as he emitted guttural grunts. Mrs. Baker began to cry, pressing her cheek to his
shoulder.
I crouched below the windowsill until the ambulance arrived, rising cautiously as two
attendants situated a stretcher beside the bed and positioned themselves at Carl’s head
and feet to transfer him over. They threw off the yellow spotted sheet, both pausing
momentarily, eyes widening at the cadaverous heaving chest, gray and crinkled, skin
sinking between ribs with every struggled breath. Cloth strips bound Carl’s thin and
brittle wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Scabbing flesh clung to the catheter running
from his penis into the urine bag at the foot of the bed.
One attendant, visibly grimacing disgust, transferred the urine bag to the gurney
while the other untied Carl’s bindings. The man at Carl’s head slipped his hands under
Carl’s shoulders as the other lifted Carl’s knees.

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Mrs. Baker cried, “He belongs here!”
The policeman held her gently back as the attendants lifted her son.
Carl shrieked mindlessly during the brief instant he floated from bed to gurney,
bottom sheet stuck to his backside.
My mother abruptly spun away and vomited.
The attendants dropped Carl, causing him to writhe and scream as thousands of tiny
roaches skittered from underneath him and raced down the gurney’s legs. Carl flailed
his arms and legs helplessly as the roaches emerged from folds of sheet and skin, his
back and buttocks a massive bed sore that had over such a long period fused with the
sheet. The policeman glared in disbelief and disgust at the bed where Carl had lain, a
thick mass of tiny roaches scurrying in fear of the light.
I spun away in a tripping, tumbling run home, scratching my hands, ripping my jeans.
I entered through the garage and made it to my bedroom window as the ambulance
pulled out of Mrs. Baker’s yard. Mom’s car was the next to leave, and, finally, the
policeman’s. I tried to shake Carl’s tormented image from my mind, but could only
soften it by thinking of Carl’s eyes, the way they had somehow thanked me.
I undressed quickly and was in bed by the time Mom came upstairs. She opened my
door, and I knew she was looking in at me, probably wondering how Carl’s mother could
subject her son to such horror, but love can be far more cruel than hatred. She closed
the door softly, and, a few moments later, I heard her retching in the bathroom.
She woke me as dawn slivered through the trees and bathed the pond in gray
iciness. She sat on my bedside, looking frail and drained. She took my hand.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you right off,” she said. “That poor, poor man…”

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***

The state placed Carl in a long-term convalescent home, his care VA funded. As for
Mrs. Baker, she stayed in her house. Authorities made no charges, but in the long run, it
didn’t matter. In June, the same policeman who’d answered Mom’s call about the
screams found Mrs. Baker dead.
Twelve years later, lung cancer killed my dad. And last summer, a drunk driver
murdered Mom in a head-on crash. I moved back to this house last October. The Baker
place across the pond is still standing, but kids have shattered all the windows, and
termites have weakened the structure so that it sags in the middle.
After that terrible night, I tried to forget Carl, but to no avail. Lately, though, he’s all I
think about. Maybe it’s because I see that old house every day. Or maybe because of
another reason.
I’m sure he’s still alive, although I have no idea where he’s living, something I must
discover—soon.
Last night, frenzied knocking rattled the outer wall of my old bedroom.