Bad Man Read online

  ALSO BY DATHAN AUERBACH

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Dathan Auerbach

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Front-of-cover photograph © Oli Kellett/Photonica/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Auerbach, Dathan Kahn, [date] author.

  Title: Bad man : a novel / by Dathan Auerbach.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Blumhouse Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017048799 (print) | LCCN 2017053610 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780385542937 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385542920 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Missing persons—Investigation—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction.

  | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.U347 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.U347 B33 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017048799

  Ebook ISBN 9780385542937

  v5.3.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Dathan Auerbach

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Body in the Woods

  PART ONE: Lost and Found

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART TWO: The Boy in the Moonlight

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART THREE: The Rut of All Things

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue: A Flyer on the Wall

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR BRIAN

  (1987–2017)

  We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet.

  —Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

  Man’s life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant.

  He is born without his own consent…

  —Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature (1770)

  Prologue: A Body in the Woods

  At the sweltering height of a north Florida summer, a body was discovered by two boys playing in woods they’d always promised to stay out of. Thick and looming trees made a forest that could swallow anyone who didn’t know the way. But they knew it, the same way all young boys who grow up near woods know it: by trampling through the trees until they give up their secrets. Even that day they emerged safely, though perhaps a little different. The story that they would tell their parents later that day was a lie. They hadn’t simply seen the body.

  The truth was that the older boy had been the one to find it, and he had found it not by accident but by violence. Directing his frustration with the world back on to itself, he would save his anger for the forgiving trees. The younger boy followed and watched, the sight as natural and turbulent to him as a thunderstorm; all you could do was stay back and hope not to be caught in its path. The older one would beat trees with their own limbs and toss saplings as far as his arms and gravity would allow—not in a mindless way or in a tantrum; it was somehow more methodical. Piles of dead leaves and anthills exploded on the toes of his swinging boots, while the two boys talked about calm things, happy things.

  That day in July, they were debating how big they thought the neighbor girl’s bra must be, when the words stopped as abruptly as the boot did. Boots pass right through anthills. The dry ones feel like they weren’t even really there to begin with. There’s a soft, quick thud, and then it’s nothing but leather chasing sand. Wet hills are a little different. Those kick back a bit, up the leg and into the knee. You have to drive harder into those or else your boot’s just scooping dirt. And then what’s the point? The older boy had kicked hard, hard enough to pass right through, but his leg hummed like a bat against concrete.

  It wasn’t until the younger one started yelling and pulling at the older boy’s shirt that he could begin to make sense of what had stopped his foot. He hadn’t kicked an anthill. The boy stood there dumbly for a while with his boot in the side of a collapsed face before his friend finally managed to wrestle him away.

  The older boy got the switch, but it was the younger boy’s parents who had been the most furious. Their anger was tempered only by a kind of unclean relief tumbling over them in a muddy wave, as they learned that their son had wandered in and out of danger before they even had a chance to know it was there. The boy never really understood their reactions. He was fine. Nothing had happened. But he was just a boy. He couldn’t know how scary having a child could be, knowing there’s a piece of yourself out in the world that you can protect only with warnings and rules that could be ignored and broken; knowing that the connecting nerves are so long, any message of distress would take an eternity to reach its wa
y back to you; feeling pain at the expectation of agony.

  The parents of the young boy said much to keep that summer in his mind, as if he would somehow forget or even want to. He had to be more careful with himself, they’d say. Next time, something might find you. Their town, small as it was, was no different from any other—the well of ghost stories no less deep, and so they drew from it and served him stories about other children who had also been fine right up until the moment they weren’t.

  What about that kid at the old paper mill? ’Bout the same age as you, more or less. Climbed in through a broke window twenty-five feet in the air, and then snapped both his legs when he fell from that platform. Lay there for damn near two days before someone found him.

  And that little girl, the one who didn’t get off the school bus that one day because she didn’t never make it on? Heard her momma stood at that bus stop all afternoon figuring there had to be some kind of mistake. But the world don’t make mistakes, you hear me? What it makes are fools who think bad luck won’t notice them. Don’t matter who you are, or how old neither.

  Just ask that one little boy, not that you could. Wasn’t nothin but a toddler. Just up and vanished into thin air. Poof.

  For the parents, perhaps more disconcerting than the boy’s story was the fact that he wasn’t bothered by theirs. But young boys are hard to bother. They’re immortal by their own measure. Only as the years wear on do they seem to see that there are fewer and fewer ahead. There’s no telling when this realization will hit, but given long enough, Time makes you aware of itself. Glancing backward, we can see we’ve done some traveling, but at some point we all learn that the horizon ahead won’t keep pace with us forever. We can only hope that there’s still a ways to go before the edge sneaks up under our shoes. How far is anyone’s guess, but we’re gaining on it all the time. The young boy’s parents decided to rush that lesson in their son, and it worked, more or less. He still went out, but he looked back more often.

  The two friends returned to the place a few months later, chattering the whole way through the woods about the things the young one’s parents had told him, adding their speculations and embellishments with each muddy footfall. They were talking about the missing toddler as they came to the clearing, but once they were in it the air turned as empty as the earth. They stood quietly for a moment, staring at the soil. There was only a smooth divot in the ground where the corpse had been, like the wet dirt underneath a pried-out stone. They knew the police had taken it; it had been on the news, after all. But neither boy said anything about that. Neither boy said anything at all, for that matter. They should have kept talking, though. There were few places on Earth where it would have been more appropriate to talk about that missing toddler.

  But really there wasn’t much else for them to say. The young boy’s parents had told him what they knew, and that hadn’t really been all that much. What the parents recalled was that the boy had simply vanished one day, like cigarette smoke in the wind. What they didn’t know was that the little boy’s name was Eric.

  They’d seen flyers for Eric here and there over the years. That is to say, their eyes had touched them from time to time, but that was as far as the image ever made it. They didn’t know because they never really looked. No one ever does.

  They also didn’t know that Eric had a big brother named Ben or that they’d actually seen all 220 pounds of him twice before. The first time was at a craft store when he was walking with his baby brother. The second time was years later when he was out looking for him.

  They might have known that’s what Ben was doing if they had slowed down to talk to him when he approached, but they hadn’t, so they didn’t. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Not because of what they didn’t know, but because of what Ben didn’t know. It wasn’t his fault, though.

  Ben had no way of knowing that he should have stopped looking.

  All told, there were only two people in the whole world who knew that.

  1

  “Ready or not, here I come!”

  The front and back yards were off-limits. Eric knew this, but Ben still locked the doors when they played. Even three-year-olds know that the only true rule in hide-and-seek is: don’t get caught. Eventually, the boundaries of the game would expand. Maybe in a few years. Ben could only imagine the hiding spots Eric would discover once he was officially liberated from walls and rooms.

  “I know all your spots, bud!” Ben taunted as he walked into the hallway that fed their bedrooms and bathroom.

  A muffled giggle floated from Eric’s room. Ben doubled back in order to add a little more time to the clock. This was the fifth time they’d played this game in the last hour, which was about five more times than Ben would have preferred, but this game at least afforded Ben some time to himself. The longer he could draw out the hunt, the less frequent the screaming and laughing fits would be. It was a hard game to play for both of them. Their house was fairly small, and Ben was more than fairly large for a fifteen-year-old. There was virtually nowhere for him to conceal himself. But Ben’s turns as the hider were really only ceremonial anyway. Just a formality.

  Eric’s giggles were the sound track of the game, growing louder and more uncontrolled the closer Ben got. Even without his brother’s snickering, Ben usually knew where he was hiding. Right now, Eric was in his bedroom. But Ben found Eric only some of the time. Most of the time, Ben let Eric sneak loudly back to the base.

  “Olly olly oxen free!” Eric would call.

  “Aw, dangit!” Ben would protest.

  It was a fun enough game, but Ben’s enthusiasm for it wasn’t quite as strong as his brother’s. It seemed like Eric might just go on playing it forever if he had his way. Ben walked into his own room and slipped his shoes on. He’d have to leave for the store soon enough. Ben tapped his knuckles against the wall behind his headboard.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  No response. Eric was getting cleverer all the time. The hall perpendicular to Ben and Eric’s led to their parents’ room and was lined with family photos in cheap frames. “You over here?”

  In the kitchen, Ben again ran his thumb down the itemized grocery list his stepmother had left for him. Deidra cooked well and often. Half the time it was tough for Ben to imagine how the ingredients could work together, but they always did. She was talented at just about everything she tried, and she tried a lot of things. The house was speckled with scraps of her hobbies, both old and new.

  An ovular table connected the dining room and kitchen by virtue of the fact that it was too big for the small space. It was the nicest piece of furniture in the house, though it was surely better suited for one with more square feet. Ben jostled the drawers and cabinets of the small buffet piece in the dining room’s corner. “I’m gonna find you!”

  “Olly olly oxen free!” Eric called as he barreled into Ben. Small as Eric was, Ben’s left leg was weak enough that he was pushed off-balance. Ben’s hip struck the edge of the buffet, and a small Hummel figurine tumbled down from the mantel. Ben lurched and whipped his arms out, fumbling with the porcelain doll until it rested safely against his chest.

  “Go easy,” Ben said, but Eric either didn’t hear or didn’t care; through chestnut curls, his bright hazel eyes smiled as he squealed and giggled around the table.

  “You hide now,” the small boy said.

  “Can’t and won’t.” Ben sighed, placing the figurine back on the shelf. “We gotta run up to the store, bud.”

  “What for?”

  “So you don’t starve to death.”

  “I don’t wanna go.”

  Ben rubbed his left thigh with the heel of his hand. “That wasn’t the deal, remember? We play for a while, and then we head on up to the store. Besides, I was gonna get you somethin, but I can’t remember what it is you like. Was it peas?”

  “No,” Eric said, and laughed.
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  “Nah, I didn’t think it was peas. It’s mustard, huh? Big jar of mustard is what you was wanting.”

  Eric shook his head. “Reesees Peesees.”

  “Wrinkled pigs’ feet? You want some pig feet, bud?”

  “No.” Eric laughed again and shoved his brother.

  “Well, go and get your shoes on then, and you can show me what you want, because I can’t understand what it is you’re talking about.” Ben smiled as he watched his brother run to his room.

  * * *

  —

  The air was stifling. Ben’s right hand returned repeatedly to the bottom hem of his shirt to adjust it away from his large stomach, but the attraction was undefeatable; the fabric pulled toward his body like a dollar-store shower liner. His other hand was full of Eric’s.

  “Look both ways,” Eric said as they approached the main road.

  “That’s right, buddy,” Ben replied.

  As Eric surveyed the asphalt, he turned his stuffed animal in sync with his own movements, its black dome eyes reflecting and warping the world around it. A car whizzed by and Eric tucked the small rhinoceros under his arm. “Watch out, Stampie,” he said as dust enveloped the trio. Ben felt his brother’s hand squeeze harder as they stepped into the street.