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The Keeper of Secrets (a short story)

I am the Keeper of the Secrets in a town of a little over five thousand. Five thousand-two hundred and sixty-seven, to be exact. Secrets run deep in small towns and even deeper in the South beneath the suffocating summer heat when everything is as still as a corpse and the drone of mosquitos drill into your brain.  Secrets as deep and muddy as the Tallahatchie and Ocmulgee Rivers. Secrets as deep as December winter evenings when the sun sets at five o'clock and shrouds the world in a premature darkness. Secrets as deep and dark as the grave. I know the secrets. I keep the secrets.

          

         Tessie Burrell has a grown child that doesn’t know that her real father is the insurance man in town. Gretchen Crown has a slight problem with kleptomania that has led to her being banned from the Family Dollar, no small thing in a town with only four stores. We’ve been working together though, and she swears she hasn’t stolen anything in a year. At least she hasn’t been banned by one of the twenty-six churches. Now if she would just talk about her addiction to prescription drugs, most noticeably Xanax and Percocet. She skirts that one every time I try to bring it up. Wonder if she’s stealing them?

            Then there’s Robert Hollister who had a complete melt down in my office one day and confessed to once having had a love affair with a horse that Old Man Frank owned; Chester Richards and his proclivity for peeping into the windows of teen girls at night; Mavis Fordham and her fascination with WebMD.com- yesterday she swore she had leprosy; dear perpetually white attired Bertha Noles who brings me baked goods and proceeds to cry over Fred, dead these past fifty years. They weren’t married. Bertha just had a crush on him. When he married Carla Morris and then two days later was killed in a farming accident, Bertha swore that Fred had been planning on leaving Carla and taking Bertha away from her father’s oppressive house. Our own Miss Havisham.

            I’d rather not know all the darkest recesses of people’s souls, but it’s what I’m paid to do. I am the only therapist within a fifty miles radius. A Licensed Professional Counselor.  I was born and raised in  this town. I am the equivalent of the old small town doctor who used to make house calls, except I don’t make house calls unless my patients have been carted off to the E.R after trying to overdose or slice their wrist with a rusty razor, they’re being held for psych eval at the local jail, or Miss Howard has a fresh baked apple pie she wants me to pick up from her house.  Miss Howard won the State Fair pie competition five years running. I do love pie.

             I went to high school in this town, drank myself into drunken teen stupors by the river, went to the prom, played pool at Howie’s Pool Pub, and ran up and down the streets in my ‘68 Camaro. That Camaro was outfitted with a 427 cubic inch engine and a glove box full of weed. I’m still scratching my head over the fact that the same people who knew me as a hell raiser in my youth can see me in another light now that I’m more than a few years past middle age. I guess because I’m one of them.  They trust me with their lives. I mean, literally their lives. I could ruin 65% of this town either through direct knowledge or indirect knowledge of their secrets. Just think of all the blackmail material I possess. I could cash out those secrets and buy a place in sunny Spain.  Te gustaría otra cerveza? But, my patients pay me, or their insurance company does, a pretty legal penny to hear their confessions. Enough to live on. In this Southern Baptist town I guess I’m the closet thing they’ll ever have to a Catholic priest. So I am the Keeper of the Secrets.  All the secrets. Go forth my son and sin no more. Fifty Hail Mary's and ten Our Father's. I've heard it all.

            Russell Overstreet was sent to me because he killed all of his ex girlfriend’s Vietnamese pot bellied pigs- all twenty of them- when she broke up with him. He told me that he a was bit “miffed” when he found out she had screwed Lester Mitchell while Russell was away at a job training seminar in Atlanta. He said he had every right to kill those pigs since he had bought all of them. Judge didn’t see it that way, so now Russell has to come talk to me every two weeks for an hour.  He’s over his ex girlfriend, in fact he has a new girlfriend named Fran that he met in Macon at a bar two months ago, and he was best man at his ex girlfriend’s marriage to Lester in October, but he still has nine months on his court ordered counseling session, so we usually just play a few hands of poker.

            James Winsome is the mayor and he sneaks into my office through a back alley door so no one will see him. James is what I would call a special case. He thinks the Mafia is after him and that if they catch him they’ll make him a sex slave. His story on why they are after him changes every visit. One time it was because he had impregnated the Don's daughter with a two headed cat and another time it was because he stole a shipment of cocaine from them, stuffed it up his rectum, and it’s still there. He says he can inhale with his rectum, so he pretty much stays high all the time. And this is the man running our town.

            Poor Mrs. Tippley, who was my fifth grade science teacher, believes that very well endowed aliens kidnapped her one night and did sexual experiments on her. She suffers from PTSD. Seventeen- year-old Logan Kitchens is a pyromaniac who burnt down the American Legion, and I suspect the storage shed behind the First Baptist Church  He didn’t get any jail time because he is the son of the richest man in town; Buster Kitchens, the owner of the paving company. Ken Unger, the local undertaker, thinks he’s a donkey; Mrs. Marshall, the librarian, believes that there is a very tiny man living in her head; Bill Carswell, the president of the Farmer’s Bank, is a coke addict; Fanny White, a housewife, has nothing wrong with her. She just likes me because I actually talk to her- her husband is a deaf mute. June Reynolds, the secretary at the elementary school can’t stop herself from sleeping with every man in town who asks, me included. Don’t report me to the state licensing board. It was a very long time ago in high school and involved a pony kegger at the river after a football game. I have lines even I won’t cross. Anyway, when June sleeps with a man once she loses complete interests. It’s the chase that thrills her.  

            I can’t even look half the town in the eye if I see them in the grocery store. I have the drug store deliver my prescriptions and I hired a lady to do the food shopping for me because I truly dread running into my patients outside of work and having to make small talk. I mean what does one say?

             “Oh, hello, Mr. Browning! Smoke any meth today?”

             “You look perfectly lovely today, Janice. Remember, don’t binge and purge!”

             “Great to see you, Billy Bob!  I see you got another White Nationalist face tattoo.”

            My job has its dangers. J.C tried to choke me to death at the jail when I went to evaluate him. Damn near killed me. And I still have to see the bastard when I go pay my water bill. He’s the clerk at city hall. Two years ago Nathan started stalking me because he thought I had stolen his soul in one of our sessions. He stopped when I gave him a Ball canning jar filled with antifreeze. I told him that I had taken his soul in order to clean it for him and now that it was all shiny and clean I was returning it. He left me alone after that. Glenda Victors fell in love with me, and it might not have been so bad if she hadn’t been eighty-nine years old. When I gently refused her offer she took a .45 from her purse and held it up to my head.  Another patient knocked on the door and scared Glenda so badly she dropped the gun. I kicked it under the table and then bolted for the door. After Glenda bonded out of jail she felt so bad that she baked me a plate of chocolate chip cookies.  Ernestine Whitehead roofied me when I left the room for a minute and she stirred Rohypnil into my sweet ice tea. I came to about three hours later and she was gone. I staggered over to the E.R and when I told them what had happened, they tested me. Seems Ernestine had tried that shit before. No one warned me. I stopped seeing her as a patient and thank God I don’t remember one thing that happened after I took a few sips of that tea.  I don’t want to.

            I’m sitting here now waiting for my four o’clock to show up. Benjamin Garrison. I always schedule him last because he has dementia and half the time he forgets he has an appointment. I’ll wait for an hour, catch up on paperwork, and then go home if he doesn’t show. He’ll phone tomorrow and apologize profusely and I will tell him not to worry about it. If this were the city he’d be charged for the appointment anyway, but this is my town, my people so I forgive and forget. At least he hasn’t tried to kill me.

            I smile because I am the Keeper of the Secrets. I smile because no one told me when I received my LPC license that the people in my home town were so much like the text book cases I had read. It’s rather disturbing how people can hide behind masks. Maybe I am Keeper of the Masks. The masks get ripped off in my office and then carefully put back into place as my patients, my friends, my townsfolk end their sessions. They go home, they eat, they play with the dog, they take a bath, they watch T.V.  And all the while their mask is set firmly in place.

            Believe me once you’ve seen behind all the masks you can never forget. I wonder, when I die will the town bury me in a spot near the very back of the city cemetery under the old magnolia? That area is carpeted in soft bermuda grass and it's hidden halfway by a wall and great sloping branches. Hidden in the shadows.