by Jeff Gelb
DOCTOR: I’m glad I did it! He was a son of a bitch and a son of a whore and I knew I couldn’t let him be born!
ME: That means that you deserve to die.
DOCTOR: Yes. You have the right to kill me. I killed your wife and son. It is only fair.
I shot him in the groin, shot him in the mouth, shot him in the arms, shot him in the legs, left him there to die.
In the newspaper article, it said he had bled to death four hours after the bullets had entered his body.
He had been a stockbroker.
I have clipped my toenails and fingernails once each week since my wife died. I save the clippings to keep them in a plastic bag that I store underneath my bed.
On the tenth anniversary of her death, on what would have been our son’s tenth birthday, I will weigh the bag of nail clippings and then set the bag on fire.
I will swallow ten teaspoonfuls of the ashes.
The remainder I will bury with the body of my wife.
I will use the information gained from the weighing to determine the date and manner of my death.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the date of my birth.
My initials are J.F.K.
Cataloging:
My store has sixteen nonfiction books containing information about llamas. There are five fiction books in which a llama plays an important role. All of these are children’s books, and three of them are Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle stories.
I have killed sixteen adults since my wife’s death. And five children.
Three of the children were siblings.
The llama has changed my plans.
The llama and the retarded boy.
I stare out the window of my store at the dead animal, at the retarded boy next to it, at the occasional gawkers who pass by and stop and whisper. One of them, I know, one of them over whom I have no control, will eventually notify the authorities and they will take the carcass away.
I cannot let that happen.
Or maybe I can.
For the presence of the llama in my alley indicates that I have done wrong and that a sacrifice is demanded.
But who is to be the sacrifice, the retarded boy or myself?
Neither of us know, and we stare at each other. He outside, next to the dead animal, me inside, with my books. Through the dirty window he looks vague, faded, although the llama still seems clearly defined. Is this a sign?
I don’t know. But I know I must make the decision quickly. I must act today. Or tonight.
I have measured the body of the llama and it is four feet ten inches long.
Tomorrow is April 10.
Where the Heart Was
David J. Schow
Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thursday. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the previous Saturday.
“Stubborn sumbitch.” Renny reached under the bed for the ballbat. He was on his hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dustballs and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.
Renny’s life was one that Victor’s back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb’s was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingénue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbles, but for the baseball bat. This he refused to wield in the name of mere modesty.
Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulderblades, butt, and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig’s knuckle.
He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.
He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb’s bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.
Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, after sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.
Renny’s next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.
Enough.
At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invective. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor’s dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn’t have a chance.
Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting. , swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb’s, who was shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.
Renny’s eyes were pink with rage. Flecks of froth dotted the corners of his mouth. He kept bashing away with the bat, pausing only to sneeze and wipe. Victor put up as good a fight as a dead person could, which is to say, not much.
While the Renny on the outside was cussing and bludgeoning, the Renny on the inside was smirking about several things. Number one: zombie movies. In the movies, reanimated corpses boogied back from the dewad with all kinds of strength and powers. What a bagload. Cadavers had all the tensile strength of twice-cooked pasta. Even in the movies you could put them down with a headshot. What threat, where?
Deeper down, Renny was enjoying himself. He thought Barb watched too much cable. When he had first proposed murdering Victor—just as a hoot, mind you, nothing serious—she burdened him with probable cause and airtight alibis and where-were-you-on-the-night-of. Ridiculous, in a world where people simply dropped off the planet on a daily basis, never again a peep. You break his neck, you dump him in the first available manhole, the sewer is a disposal system, end of story.
Barb had wanted to play faithful and loving right up to the climax of the drama. Loving, hah. Faithful, not since she’d met Renny.
In the end it hadn’t come down to murder, but right now Barb sure was reaping some drama.
Things were so lively right now that Renny had busted a workout sweat and Barb’s vocal cords were rawing. He finally turned around and told her shut up while what was left of Victor Jacks twitched in a pile on the floor. The business end of the bat was a real mess.
“Is he dead?” said Barb, cowering.
“I don’t think he’s gonna move no more right now.” Renny would have wiped his begored hands on his pants; his pants had been off since just after dinnertime. He let his hands hang in the air as he looked around, uselessly. He said sheeeit, slow and weary. It didn’t help.
“How? How did he? He…we…I don’t…it just.”
Bar was still having a bit of trouble being coherent.
“Victor always was a stubborn sumbitch, you know that one, babe.”
Barn stood up and risked moving a little closer to what was left of Victor. “Maybe he, you know, didn’t really die. Went into a coma or something.”
“Barb, Victor was dead. He was dead last week and he was still dead when he walked in on us. He is the deadest thing I ever saw.”
“You knocked his head off,” she said dully.
“Stopped him, didn’t it?”
“What’re we gonna do, Renny? He’s all…ehh.”
“Shush. What we’re gonna do is call the morgue and tell them some pervert snatched the body and mutilated it, and dumped it here as a joke. Some old boyfriend of yours. You can make up a description. Nobody’ll bug us.”
“What makes you so smart?”
Renny had to stop a moment and ponder a good answer to that one.
“I mean, you think they’ll buy it?” There she wen
t again. Barb was one of those people who strolled through life obliviously, thinking a call to the police would sling her free of any sort of trouble. Now she was just as convinced that the Authorities—capital A—would swoop down at any moment to point j’accuse.
“Babe, just dream up a good description. Say he was a Mexican in a green windbreaker.”
“But Renny, I’d never go out with no Mexican, and how come I have to say he’s my old boyfriend? I mean—”
Renny sighed, held her by the shoulders, met her eyes. “We’ll deal. Trust me. Please.” He forced a smile for her. It was like jamming a finger down his throat to chuck up an emotion. He needed to divert her, to say something that would get her mind off police procedure, so he said, “Uh, got any towels?”
Renny mopped up. Barb brought a big Hefty bag. Renny stuck the bat back under the bed. Touching it again made him re-experience the sheer satisfaction of pounding ole Victor right back into death, and this gifted him with a healthy and urgent erection.
Barb glimpsed what was coming up and managed to finish him off before the police came knocking. Once again she told Renny that she’d never done that with Victor, and Renny smiled and stroked her head, keeping to himself the private notion that Barb could probably suck the stitches off a hardball through a flexistraw. Victor Jacks would never have hung with a china doll. Renny would never have been tempted by one, either.
Then the Authorities arrived, and Renny and Barn set about making up stories.
Funerals never were much of a hoot. Neither Barb nor Renny had RSVPed many in their combined forty-odd years, but this time they dutifully duded up in basic black, and held hands, and dabbed at crocodile tears as the rearranged remains of Victor Jacks were boxed up and delivered six feet closer to Hell.
Half an hour after the services, both of them were naked and neither of them was very depressed.
Most annoying of Barb’s bedplay habits was her wont of lighting off to the toile as soon as…well, right after. Renny had once joked about it: “I make all that effort to give you something, babe, and you just go piss it away.” Barb had made a face. Crude, her face told him. Not funny. Then, hi-de-ho, off to the can again.
Fine. Renny grunted manfully and rolled to his right side, his favored side for dozing. Swell.
In the bathroom, Barb watched herself in the mirror for a long time, not quite sure what her surveillance as in quest of. Victor had hit her in this bathroom. He’d also done it to her, same day, in the tub, which was too small for love. Victor’s tendency to boil over all at once was frightening, a pit bull on a very iffy leash, thought Barb. Whether it got hostile, life-threatening, might depend on a dozen factors. When it last ate. Whether it was pissed off. Whether it liked you. Whether it liked your smell. Victor Jacks had been like that.
But when Victor got to the part where he put his big hands all over her, large, powerful, warm hands, unbuttoning and unzipping her, making her naked and telling her she was wanted, touched her in places only she touched—curve of ass, inside of thigh, underside of breast, smooth-shaven armpit—oh, my. He made her moist, filled her up; she would practically hallucinate, and she had always slept gorgeously afterward. The sex was never violent between them; only the occasional backhand was.
Barb knew she would never get around to enjoying the way men apologized, every time, after they smacked her.
When she met Victor Jacks, she was a waitress-newly-turned-exotic dancer. Petite-chested, with good hips and sturdy, if not long, legs, she figured it was virtually the same aggravation for better tips and weirder hours; she fancied she needed more weird in her life. She got Victor. All he lacked was a puff of smoke to appear in.
When Victor met Barb, he was comfortably into pharmaceutical Dexedrine pops and on the cusp of crystal meth. He made do with the odd frame-weld for RUBs—Rich Urban Bikers—and bashed big-blocks for muscle-car meatheads with too much leisure cash. He paid Barb to table-dance and made her sit, just sit, while he looked at her. Management did not approve. Victor did not make a scene. He merely smiled and showed Barb’s bosses more money. To Barb, whose concept of foreplay was someone bigger than her saying shut up and lay down, this was romance with a big R indeed. After a week of this bizarre courtship, she went out with him…and he stayed in with her.
When Renny Boone met Barb, he was so chemical-free you could almost see his halo. To Barb, by this time shellshocked by two years of biker-speed tantrums and eight-ball insomnia, Renny’s well-cut bod and addictionless turn smelled like that myth come true, the Better Life.
“You look like you could use a rest,” Renny had told her, and, so telling her, he took her straight away to bed.
Five days later the two of them were still trying to dope out some rationalization that might convince, say, a jury, that she, Barb, and he, Renny, were Meant To Be. But Barb lacked the heart to dump someone as spontaneous and romantic as Victor Jacks.
Truth was, Renny preferred Barb as a rental. And that Victor wasn’t such a bad dude. He’d even nailed the chronic carburetor wheeze suffered by Butch, Renny’s black ’66 Impala.
Truth was, Barb preferred Victor’s flashfire spats to shaking her ass for the beery swine who bellied up to the runway at Nasty Tramps.
So Truth held say, and Victor stayed ignorant, dangerous, and sexy. Barb had Renny for the topics she could never broach to Victor. And Renny had Barb, the way cowboys have spittoons. And they all lived happily ever after for about two more weeks, until Victor came back to the house, unannounced, to fetch his set of Allen wrenches and…
…Well, you can imagine.
The tool excuse had been Victor’s cover story. That afternoon, unbeknownst to Renny and Barb, Victor had fallen in love again—this time with a smokable amphetamine called ice. He was pretty saturated, on the top of his morning handful of vitamins, when he walked through his front door and caught Renny and Barn doing the bone dance on the sofa bed. The speed made his anger instantaneous, his reaction time zero.
Victor snarled. Literally snarled, lips curling. He came for his betrayers, face bright crimson, the sclera of his eyes pinking. Two steps closer he stopped, stiffened, pawed as his left arm, and fell stone dead of the most concussive goddamn heart attack his mesomorphic build could contain. Victor’s fulsome, romantic-if-crazy heart shut down like a phone sex line with no callers, and all that was left was for the coroner to scribble death by chemical misadventure in the appropriate box.
Which brings us back to Barb, in the bathroom.
She flushed the toilet. Flushed, then blushed in a matchhead flare of anger as she remembered Renny’s idiotic joke about her having to urinate after sex. She would never forget it. Crude, Renny could be so crude. Maybe dumb, too, dumb enough never to have heard of Honeymooner’s Cystitis, an inflammation of the urinary tract that was easy to get when you had too much foreign juice rammed up your tubes. And perhaps uncaring as well: Maybe Renny didn’t care what havoc forty-five minutes of the missionary position could wreak on even a healthy girl’s poor need to pee.
In her mirror, by nightlight, she spotted a hickey on her neck. Crude.
But she loved the way Renny liked to chew on her, just nibble and bite and suck all the right places, as though he was desperately hungry for her, physically starving. She always orgasmed first, even when she tried to outlast him, and when she was coitally zoned, she wanted him to leave marks. Little ones she’d see in the morning, when she felt the delicious ache of their workout.
She liked to tease Renny about all the women he must have learned his bag of tricks from. If she had a headache or a rotten mood, Renny could bang it right out of her. Victor would never touch her at her time of the month; Renny didn’t have that problem. He made her feel more desirable on her doggiest days, and feeling desirable made Barb feel womanly indeed. Renny even understood about her having to go back to work at Nasty Tramps, now that Victor was no longer winning the bread. In fact, Renny had suggested it. What a guy.
Crude, dumb, uncaring, and boy-howdy
opportunistic. Yeah, Renny was a prize, for sure.
Except that today, somehow, Victor had found time in his schedule to come back from the dead. Maybe she’d seen too many of those damned monster movies, after all, and lacked the emotional capacity for astonishment…beyond the histrionics, that is. She looked her reflection eye-to-eye and reminded herself that Victor had done a lot of uppers in his thirty-two years on the planet. Hell, he was probably turning in his new grave right now—at 78 RPM.
The bathroom light was harsh and made her feel lonely. Fortunately, she knew it was a loneliness she could drive away. She wanted Renny on her, inside her, the fastest way she knew not to feel lonely anymore.
She found him semiconscious and semierect. Renny functioned best with a five-minute nap between rounds. Barb woke him up with her mouth; she didn’t say a word. They made a great deal of noise over the next forty-five minutes. Renny always lasted longer once he’d primed his pump; his words.
They were both on their backs, kcick away the sheet to let their own sweat cool them, when Barb said, “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Little scratchy noise. Like a mouse.”
“Probably that stupid cat of yours.”
“No, he doesn’t make noises like that.”
“Then it probably is a mouse. This house is—”
“No, listen.”
Renny listened. If the thing making the noise was a mouse, it was dragging off a dog for a bit of fun.
Barb pounded on his shoulder. “It’s under the bed!”
“Jesus Christ.” Renny stayed calm and leaned overboard for a look-see.
From beneath the dust ruffle, the baseball bat shot out like a piston, hitting Renny foursquare in the chin and making him see night sky. It still had clots of Victor drying on it. Then something whipsnaked tight coils around Renny’s throat and dragged him down to tussle.
Renny made a gargling noise in the dark as he was reeled in Discombobulated, he thought he as being engulfed by a giant wiggle-worm with a whole lot of little worms attached. He dug his heels into the rug and fought to breath. Barb was already making those screamy gasps that truly bugged him, deep down.
