The Interrogation
The house was yellow, and Isaiah hated the color. Even as he flew forward and slammed into the steering wheel as the car stopped, he thought of how much he hated the color. It was a tepid yellow, and it had grown even weaker from age. Now, it looked more like dirty white. It looked like countless oily hands had touched every surface of the house. The house had been in disrepair for a long time. His father was getting old. He and his brothers did not have as much time as they once did to come over and help with repairs. One of the stairs leading up to the house was loose. A porch window was boarded up. The ugly yellow paint was peeling in a few places, but since his father had been shot, the house looked even older, more tired, as if it knew one of its occupants was injured.
Isaiah ignored the pain in his nose as he climbed out of the car. He pushed it to the side, and as he looked to the back seat, the pain disappeared. In the back seat he saw the giant. His head brushed the car’s ceiling. His shoulders pushed Jeremiah and Hosea into the doors. A hand was up to his face. A deep groan left the man’s mouth. Isaiah saw a trickle of blood come from under the man’s hand, trickle past his mouth, and drip off his jawline.
“Get him out,” Hosea said. Isaiah glanced over to his oldest brother. Hosea’s face was furrowed with seriousness. His serious eyes were on Ezekiel. His hands were thrown up and gesturing toward the house again and again after he spoke.
Ezekiel was already muttering something back, but Isaiah did not listen. He turned toward the house. He looked at the yellow walls. He looked at the broken step and up to the dirty white gutters. “If Mom isn’t home…” His thought trailed off. He hoped she was not, though he knew she most likely was. Ezekiel had said that the emptiness of the house seemed to weigh on her, but he had also said that it was the only place she wanted to be.
“Through the front door,” Hosea said from behind him. Isaiah thought it sounded like an answer to something. When he looked back, he saw the giant was out of the car, and Ezekiel was behind the large man holding the gun with both hands and pointing it at the man’s back. Isaiah looked toward Hosea. Hosea’s door was open, and Isaiah’s oldest brother was just beginning to pull himself out.
“Front door?” Isaiah called to Hosea.
“Front door,” Hosea answered back. His voice was filled with certainty.
By the time Isaiah started to move up the front steps, he had forgotten that the first step was broken. When he pushed his foot down on it, it sank toward the mud beneath his weight and his foot slipped off. Isaiah swore to himself. He brought his foot up again and over the first step. When he had reached the top of the landing, he looked back to the car.
Jeremiah was first in line, and the man loomed over the youngest brother. Jeremiah glanced back at the man. “We’re going to that house,” Jeremiah pointed to the small, yellow house. If Jeremiah were afraid, Isaiah could not tell. The young man kept his jaw tight as he walked. He kept his back straight, and he only looked back to direct the man where they were going. As Isaiah looked back to Ezekiel, he wondered if the look on Ezekiel’s face was the reason for Jeremiah’s calm. Ezekiel’s face was dark. His brow was furrowed. The edges of his mouth turned down in anger or disapproval. Isaiah continued to watch Ezekiel, and he saw his lips curl back. A grimace made his feature barbed, and Isaiah knew the slightest false move from the man would set Ezekiel off. If Ezekiel saw that man try anything, Ezekiel might very well empty an entire magazine into the man’s body.
Isaiah looked back to Jeremiah. A quick smirk crossed Isaiah’s face when he saw the confidence on his youngest brother’s. Isaiah’s smirk faded as he turned back to the front door. When he pulled it open, the hinges of the door squealed. Isaiah grimaced at the sound, but another sound made him jump. Though he assumed his mother was home, when he heard her voice, worry jumped into his throat. Curses filled Isaiah’s mind when he heard footsteps, and those curses in his mind became harsher as those footsteps drew nearer.
“Hey, Mom,” Isaiah called. He tried to stifle the exasperation in his voice, but he knew he had failed. He hoped the wall between them would muffle his voice enough to hide his emotion.
“Jeremiah,” his mother called. Isaiah heard footsteps from the other room. They grew louder. They grew closer to him.
“Ah,” he swallowed. He did not know what to do. He did not know what to say. He put a hand up behind him to stop Hosea and Jeremiah from entering the house with the man, but he did not look back to see if they had listened to him. An idea jumped into his mind, and he moved as quickly as he could toward the sound of his mother.
Isaiah had to stop himself from falling forward when he turned the corner. “Hi, Mom,” the word came out in exasperation.
His mother’s face filled with surprise, and he found he was glad his appearance had put her off balance as well. “Isaiah,” she sputtered, “You sounded just like Jeremiah. What are you doing here?”
The question was not angry or annoyed. Isaiah actually thought the emotion he heard in his mother’s voice was justified. Isaiah did not ‘drop in.’ He rarely had a reason to stop by.
“Iya…” His voice was shaky. He glanced back toward the entrance, but the wall blocked it. His only consolation was that he did not hear anything from the doorway. “I’m looking for something,” Isaiah continued, “Honestly, I don’t know if it is even here. But I couldn’t find it in my apartment. I thought it might be in the basement.”
His mother nodded. She took a step back and started to turn to go back to the kitchen. “Well,” she shrugged, “are you hungry?” She paused at the doorway awaiting his response. Isaiah knew she was asking out of a motherly need to care, but Isaiah doubted she wanted his company.
Isaiah sighed. When he considered her question, he found he was, in fact, hungry. He had not eaten since breakfast. He had gone straight to class. He had studied through lunch instead of eating. The old German professor had asked him to come to his office, and this had all resulted in him not having a chance to eat. And he was tired, and he knew he would like nothing more than to follow his mother into the kitchen, sit down, and eat whatever she put before him.
“No, Mom,” he answered her. “Just ate, actually, and I am actually meeting someone at school soon, so, ah, I need to be quick.”
His mother nodded. “Well, good luck,” she said. “Good luck finding anything down there.”
Isaiah nodded back to his mother. When he turned away from his mother and back into the hallway, he did not see his brothers or the large man. He walked over to the door. He looked at the car. He did not see them by the car or outside anywhere.
As Isaiah turned back to the house and started toward the basement staircase, he wondered how they had slipped past him so silently. Part of him doubted they were in the house at all, but the voice of Ezekiel from down those steps told him otherwise. At first, he could not identify the voice. It was biting, dark, angry. As Isaiah walked down the steps, he heard a growl. “Do you want to take that risk?” Isaiah heard a bark. And with the last syllable of that sentence, he realized it was Ezekiel.
“Damn, Ezekiel,” he thought. Surprise moved through him with that thought. He did not know Ezekiel was capable of such emotion. All he thought Ezekiel was capable of was worry. Was not Ezekiel a scared little man? Was he not scared of what might happen in the next few moments, scared of acting because of what his action might result in? Now, Isaiah was hearing action in the voice of his brother.
Isaiah took his time descending into the basement. He heard a slap, a sharp palm hitting a face. The slap was followed by a moment of sharp silence and then a long grunt. When he had fully descended the stairs, he almost laughed. What he saw appeared to be an interrogation scene from a detective noir novel. But it was a noir interrogation in a police station that had its features blown out of proportion like a caricature.
His brothers had pulled on the light. The bulb hung bald at the center of the old, field-stone basement. It glowed an odd, pale yellow. They had placed an old milk crate under that light. The man, with hands tied behind his back and feet tied together, sat on the milk crate. Hosea was off to the side leaning against a wall looking on. Jeremiah stood next to him, looking lost, looking like he did not know what to do or what to do with his hands. Ezekiel, whose voice he had heard, stood at the center of the basement. He stood over the man. His lips were closed tight. His eyes were not filled with anger, and what Isaiah saw in his brother’s eyes made him feel disappointment, because it did not fit with what he had heard in his brother’s voice. Isaiah saw fear in Ezekiel’s eyes, but no, it was not fear, it was almost as if his eyes were filled with regret.
“Who do you work for?” Ezekiel’s voice was still a growl, but Isaiah still saw the pain in his brother’s eyes.
“Ezekiel, Zeke,” Hosea’s voice rasped from the side of the basement, “we don’t need to know who he works for. We already know who he works for. We need to know where they are taking Daniel.”
Ezekiel glanced at his oldest brother. The sharp look on his face slipped as he looked over to Hosea, but he realized that the serious look on his face had slipped, and he put it on, poorly, as quickly as he could.
Ezekiel turned back to the large man sitting on the milk crate. The hard face had completely returned, but it was too late. The large man was smiling, an ugly smile filled with snaggle teeth. Ezekiel had lost the battle. Any fear that was in that man before was gone. And Isaiah looked on in pity at his brother. Ezekiel turned back with that stern mask he had on before, but Ezekiel did not realize he had lost. He went on barking at the man for another ten minutes. And the man, though he did not smile, had a smirk on his face. Finally, Ezekiel turned from the man with a look of exasperation on his face. He looked to Hosea and Jeremiah, but he was quick to turn toward the steps and Isaiah.
Ezekiel sighed when he reached Isaiah. Their eyes met. Ezekiel pursed his lips. “Hell, Iz, I don’t know,” he muttered, but he said nothing else.
Isaiah pursed his lips. He wanted to sigh himself, for his brother. Or maybe it was not his brother he felt pity for. Maybe he felt pity for himself, that he had been right about Ezekiel. Maybe his brother was incapable of such a thing as this, a puzzle that seemed as if it had an easy solution.
“Well,” Isaiah pulled himself from the steps and to the center of the basement. He did not say anything else. He was sure everyone knew what he meant. His words and actions said, “Let me get a crack at this,” and a few swift steps brought him to the center of the room.
Isaiah looked down at the man. He did not have to look far. The man was so tall that even when he sat, the top of his head reached Isaiah’s chin. Isaiah swallowed down his nerves. He did not think any person was so large as to make Isaiah feel small even as he sat. “What is your name?” Isaiah asked. He tried to make his voice smooth through his nervousness. He tried to make his voice friendly. He knew he needed to be a friend of this man.
The man chuckled at the question. His face painted with a smirk, not a knowing smirk, but a smirk a stupid student would give to a teacher when he was acting up, knew he was wrong, but still wanted to assert his intellectual superiority.
“You don’t have a name?” Isaiah continued.
The man answered with the smirk still on his face: “My name is Allen.” The smirk began to slip as he answered.
“Allen, do you think I–any of us–want to keep you tied up in that chair?”
A quick, stupid chuckle filled the man’s throat. “Uh,” he answered. “I don’t believe you. I think you’re lying. No. No. I think you’re a liar.”
Isaiah pursed his lips. He felt anger tighten his chest, but he took a slow breath before that anger could make its way to his face. Isaiah opened his mouth. He made his lips curl back. He made his face smile as it had before, though he knew he was not smiling. He only hoped the man did not know the expression on his face was actually a sneer.
“Do you have any brothers, Allen, uh…” Isaiah wanted to sigh, but he knew it would be the wrong move. Even this idiot would know what that sigh meant. “Uh, um, Allen, what is your last name?” Isaiah continued the thought.
“Molotov,” the man grunted out the word, and as he said it, Isaiah swore the multiple syllables made the man sound intelligent.
“Allen Molotov,” Isaiah repeated. “Do you have any brothers?”
It was Allen Molotov who sighed. “Yeah,” he grunted. “I’ve got brothers. Who doesn’t have brothers?”
The question made Isaiah smile for real. “Well,” Isaiah continued. “Wouldn’t you do the same for your brother if you had to?”
The man’s laugh was a quick bark. “Oh, hell no!” the man answered. “I’d knock a railroad spike into that dumbass’ brain myself.”
Isaiah’s mouth returned to being pursed. He turned his back to the man to hide the look on his face. Isaiah had run into a wall. His strategy had not worked. He had made certain assumptions about this man, but his premises had been wrong. The solution would come to his mind. He just needed to search. As he studied this man, he would discover new information, and one of those bits of information would allow him to control this man in any way he wished.
Isaiah pasted the smile back on his face and turned back to the man. “Do you know my name, Allen?” Isaiah asked the man.
“How the hell am I supposed to know your name?” the man’s voice drawled out.
“My name is Isaiah,” Isaiah forced the smile to remain on his face again. “I was just wondering, because I am pretty sure we went to high school together.”
The man spit at Isaiah’s feet. He looked at Isaiah’s shoes and then his eyes ran from Isaiah shoes up to his face. “Isaiah, you said?” the man asked. The anger seemed to subside from his face, as if he had started to recognize Isaiah.
“Yeah,” Isaiah answered.
The man nodded. “Welles?” the man continued.
Isaiah wanted to laugh. He had expected to send the man into the murky depths of memory and confusion. He had not expected the man to remember a specific person. Though the chuckle tickled the back of his throat, he did not laugh. He only opened his mouth and replied. “Yeah,” Isaiah nodded back to the man. “Yeah, Isaiah Welles.” He let the smile slip from his face, but he maintained a look of soft openness.
“Isaiah Welles, really?” the man asked again.
Again, Isaiah nodded.
“Oh,” there was confusion in the man’s voice when the sound came out of his mouth. He stared up at Isaiah with that confusion on his face. “When did you come back from the dead, Isaiah.” As he said the words, the confusion left his face, and shrewd intelligence filled it instead. “Do you have a direct line to Jesus Christ himself?” The voice of the man was now a belligerent bark. “God, is it Easter Sunday? Do you have a tongue of flame over your head? Are you touched by the divine? Because I’ve never met a person come back from the dead.”
Isaiah took a step back. He wanted to swear. He wanted to spit, spit on the man’s face or even at his feet, but Isaiah knew he could not get angry. He had to maintain his composure. He knew he needed to find the value in this new revelation. And as he let this new information sink into his consciousness, he realized the man had revealed something very important. And that important thing was that the man had been stringing them along. He was not an idiot. He had put on a mask of idiocy. Why? Isaiah had no idea why someone would pretend to be an idiot, but he had a sense that if he dug into this fact, he would find a way to control this man.
“Oooh,” an airy voice came from behind him. It was not the voice of any of his brothers, but he was not surprised by that voice. After the little imp had appeared by the car and he had shot at it, he thought he had finally rid himself of it. But he had been wrong, and he had adjusted to being wrong quickly. As soon as he sat down in the car, the thing had appeared to him. The only difference between that thing now and before was that it was the size of a grasshopper then. And as it chattered away in the car like a nosy widow, all he could think of was how it reminded him of the human-faced grasshoppers of John’s Revelation.
That little, impish, tinny voice filled his ear through the whole car ride. He had a short reprieve when he entered the house and talked to his mother. He did not care that it was back now. He ignored it just as he had in the car (or he ignored it as much as he was able).
Isaiah turned his attention to the problem at hand. He had a giant of man in front of him tied to a chair. This man was not an idiot but had acted like an idiot. He probed into that fact again, but when his questioning led to nothing, he decided he needed more information.
“What do you want?” Isaiah asked the man. He bent down until his face was directly across from the man’s.
The man smiled back. From this angle, Isaiah could see the yellow streaks and crooked teeth of the man.
“Who says you can buy me?” the man boomed out.
“Do you think I was talking about money?” Isaiah asked.
“Too soft, soft, soft,” the imp’s tinny voice spoke from behind him. “Your tact, too soft,” it added.
Isaiah ignored the imp speaking. He kept his eyes on the man. He searched for some chink in that broad smile. He still found none.
“I don’t want anything,” the man spat back.
“Some people only understand force,” the imp chittered from behind him again.
Isaiah ignored the voice again. “Who do you think has more power and connections: a drug-dealing thug or Daniel, the owner of a multi-million dollar company?”
The man stopped smiling. His lips curled up and to the side. He glanced at the others around the room and then back at Isaiah.
“If he’s got so much power, why did we have to come get him? Hmmm?”
Isaiah shook his head. He was unsure what Daniel had done for this man to believe this, but he knew that he had hit another dead end.
Isaiah looked at the man and sighed. After this second dead end, Isaiah did not care what emotion the man saw on his face. Though the man laughed this time, Isaiah did not care. As he stared at the man, Isaiah wished he had some sort of drugs from his professor.
“It wouldn’t work,” the imp chittered from behind him, answering his thoughts.
“Then what would work?” Isaiah thought. “I can’t trick him. I can’t drug him—”
“Force!” the imp shouted from behind him. “Some people only understand pain.” The tinny voice of the imp came into Isaiah’s mind as cold, razor metal. But Isaiah ignored the imp again.
“There are other currencies than money,” Isaiah continued speaking to the man. “A man of moral standing has a different place in society than a drug dealer. He knows people, you know. It isn’t often about money. Do you have a friend in jail? A mortgage? Any favor you can imagine.”
The man continued to laugh, and Isaiah knew he had run into another wall and faster than he had imagined.
“Who says?” the man spat out. “Man of moral standing? I know your brother has dealt with Mr. Ansel. I don’t know of any prominent people your brother knows. Besides,” a laugh left the man’s mouth with a hiccough, “you assume you are correct when you say those in power are moral.” The man continued to laugh, a giggle, as if he had won a game through cunning and subterfuge.
“What do you want?” Isaiah could barely keep himself from yelling at the man. “What do you want?” he repeated, this second time even closer to a yell.
The man jerked his head up and looked directly in Isaiah’s eye before he answered. “I wouldn’t mind watching Mr. Ansel take your brother apart. I don’t think I would mind it if he took all five of you apart. I? Me? I wouldn’t mind watching you scream, myself.”
“Sometimes, sometimes,” the imp spoke before the man had finished speaking, and its voice had changed. Before, its voice was playful, but now its voice was stern. Its voice sounded as if it were from a disappointed parent. “Everybody, everybody responds to different things. This man,” the imp laughed, an angry laugh, the laugh of a person who had been twisted by bitterness so much that the anger wished for any pain it could wring from another. “Well, some men,” it continued with that same anger in its voice but in the cadence of song, “they need to be broken, broken, before they comply.” It chuckled, but that anger remained. “And you’ve got to be brutal.”
Isaiah laughed, but he did not laugh at what the man had said. He did not laugh at the imp’s words either. Isaiah laughed at himself. He laughed because he thought he could outsmart this man, but he had been wrong. He had failed. Nothing worked, and only one option remained to him. He laughed because the only option left was the one he had told himself he would not use. He was above using that final option.
Isaiah doubted the man knew what would happen next. Isaiah only cared about the anguish that filled the man’s face when his own foot slammed into the man’s groin. And he felt satisfaction when the pain that filled the man’s face lingered. Isaiah smiled as the man’s body arced forward in response to the pain, and he smiled more when he saw that the man could do nothing to assuage that pain. That pain even remained when Isaiah retrieved the two-by-four from a nearby pile and proceeded to smash his weapon across the man’s face.
Isaiah heard a yelp of disapproval from Ezekiel. He ignored it. He heard a happy chuckle from the imp behind him, but he ignored that voice as well. Isaiah was too focused on gripping the two-by-four tighter, too concerned with making the second swing hurt more than the first.
It was more than a minute before he stopped swinging. He chest heaved. His shoulders ached, but he was filled with satisfaction. He watched the blood pour from the man’s forehead. He saw the eyes pressed together in pain. The man’s body still arced trying to break free of his bonds, but he could not. As Isaiah stared at the man and the man’s new posture, the laughter of the imp filled his ears, and satisfaction swelled in his chest so much he thought he might burst into laughter himself.
“So”–when Isaiah spoke, he found his breathing was heavy–“do you want to help me now?
When the man opened his eyes and looked over, the eyes told Isaiah everything he needed to know.