Читать книгу Watch Mommy Die - Michael Benson - Страница 9

MR. HYDE

South Carolina, July 2004. The South Carolina Lowcountry shore. Stephen Christopher Stanko was bespectacled, impeccably neat, thirty-six years old, mildmannered, white—and only just out of prison. Fresh to the outside—having just served eight years of a ten-year sentence for kidnapping, fraud, and breach of trust—he squinted in the strong summer sunshine.

Sure, his morning-fresh freedom gave him a fish-out-of-water feeling—but not as bad as most ex-cons, he figured. He’d shed his prison skin and emerged from his squalid surroundings into the crisp air of freedom with that ol’ Stanko sangfroid intact.

He had to pat himself on the back. He had chameleon skills, and could be just what anyone wanted him to be. Plus, he’d actually accomplished something in prison. That put him in—what?—the 99.9 percentile of ex-cons!

He entered prison a normal civilian and was released a published author.

With a pleasure that bordered on the autoerotic, he enjoyed stroking his own ego. Have to go away for a few years? Boom, start a career. He’d turned lemon into lemonade. Most guys got out and had nothing better to look forward to than manual labor. He had bigger plans. Much bigger. He’d used prison as a tool for upward mobility. It was proof of what a genius he was. Not only had he created a product that would generate income, he’d done some serious planning as well. He knew how to get over in modern society.

Still, even on geniuses such as himself, prison took its toll. It cut away at a man like a thousand small torturous cuts. His confidence was rendered porous by prison. Deep down, gnawing like a rat on the inside of a bedroom wall, was his insecurity. He worried that he’d lost his touch, that years behind bars had institutionalized him.

Ah, but it was all coming back to him—life without bars. Easy as pulling a nickel out of a child’s ear. All he had to do was conjure the cheery illusion of truthfulness and sincerity and he’d be sure to succeed. You had to know just how much of the truth to mix in, and he had the knack.

Great webs of deceit he could weave—and almost every dewy silver strand was based on a verifiable fact. Some people couldn’t lie for five minutes without betraying themselves. Stanko could go for weeks.

While serving the last days of his sentence, he’d arranged for his first few days of freedom. To help him, he’d recruited the goodwill of a woman he called “Hummer,” the mom of a guy in Stanko’s cell block. When he first got out, he called Hummer and she “loaned” him money for a motel so he’d have a roof over his head.

Hummer came in handy—for a little while, anyway. He knew that she was not a bottomless well, however. Pretty soon he was going to have to rely on his charm for food and shelter.

Existing as an ex-con can be a tricky business. Stanko coped by speaking about it, but only in positive terms. It was a neurolinguistic technique, a sleight of speech, like hiding something in plain sight. He hoped if he spoke openly and matter-of-factly about prison, others would think it matter-of-fact.

The story of his crimes, as he told it, was always framed as the prelude to revelation and epiphany. Prison gave him a chance to find himself, to discover his true value. And that was considerable. Just ask his publisher.

When he chose to talk about “going away,” Stanko liked to paint his criminal history as white-collar crapola. No big deal. A freakin’ railroad job. He’d admit, maybe, that he was a bit of a bs artist. But there was nothing un-American about that—it was all part of getting ahead.

But he never mentioned his kidnapping conviction, the details of which could seep right into a person’s nightmares. Anyone with a dollop of decency would deem them disturbing—and Stanko was hip enough to know he had to keep them secret.

And that part of his personality, the one that came out when he was angry and with a woman, must never emerge again. That was a rule. If he had a fatal flaw, that was it. Put that guy in the recesses of the mind and keep him there. When he did think about it, Stanko realized he was as a man stricken with lycanthropy, like the Wolfman, Lawrence Talbot, fearing the rise of the full moon would transform him into a bloodthirsty beast, like Dr. Jekyll, keeping Mr. Hyde on the down low. A monster that did very bad things—did them ecstatically—lived inside Stanko. Then it went away, leaving Stanko to endure the soul-crushing consequences.

Thinking about it made it worse for him. The idea was to sublimate the urge, push it deep, deep inside and hold it there. It was a constant struggle—like holding a balloon underwater.

An ex-con turned literati darling once described incarceration as living “in the belly of the beast.” And when you were released—Stanko thought, pushing the metaphor—you came out the beast’s ass. No bad men were cured in prison, Stanko knew. They just got worse, until they turned to complete shit.

Now, the Hummer ticket cashed in and spent—at least for the time being—Stanko headed for the Myrtle Beach area. Where better in the summer?

WELCOME TO THE GRAND STRAND the sign said.

During the first weeks of his freedom, he stayed in a number of rooms, all cheap—the landladies (there were never landlords) mostly unpaid. He looked for a job, but it was tough for a quality guy like himself to face the rejection. One look of suspicion or distaste from a prospective employer and his mood was shot the rest of the day. He got so mad.

He needed something to do with his days; so he began work on his research, maybe get an outline started for his latest literary creation. All he needed was a blank notebook, a cheap ballpoint, and a library with a pretty librarian.