Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  Upon converging into the dark maw of barrel not two inches above his face, his eyes popped wide open.

  “Holy what the fuck . . . ?” he whimpered.

  “Good morning, Eddie,” said the priest, then nothing for the next thirty seconds. A radio filtered sports talk from upstairs while a distant jack hammer fed hungrily into concrete. Then, “I was wondering how committed you truly are to games of chance.”

  A frown trickled through Eddie’s face before terror sucked it back down. His hands gripped and twisted the bedding at his sides.

  “Jesus Christ, man . . . a man’s home? What do you want?” His face switched madly between expressions before settling on belated regret. “Look, man. N-Nutter’s been sick. He’s . . . he’s been on last legs for a while, and I can’t . . . I mean, vet bills, they ain’t cheap, and so I figured, you know, I could put him out of his . . . ”

  And the source of the smell finally came to the priest, wafting from Eddie’s breath and the traces around his mouth: Alpo. Eddie had been eating Nutter’s food. Probably for weeks, based on the chronic emptiness of the trashcan.

  He tapped the gun’s sight between Eddie’s eyes and said, “Stand up, please.”

  In the next instant, Eddie’s bladder failed him. He complied nonetheless, his body reacting in segments, as if thought had been doled out only for moment-to-moment consumption, dragging himself across the sheets, as if to keep his rebellious urine from filtering down to the grimy bedding, before dropping his foal’s legs over the edge and quavering at last to his feet.

  When the priest placed the gun into his hand, it took Eddie a while before his fingers gripped the handle. Longer still before he raised it to his own temple.

  “No, no,” said the priest. He pulled the gun gently away from Eddie’s head and leveled it so the bore stared straight into his own eye. “First thing’s first, Edward. Let us test fortune’s opinion of me. Now pull the trigger, please.”

  VII

  When the policeman awoke, the first thing he saw was his patrol car slumped in a ditch several yards away, all its doors open, including the trunk. Then he noticed his hand-cuffed wrists, his nudity, the throb of his own badge pinned raw and crookedly through his skin.

  He sat up, and this brought him out of the shadows and into a sky too impossibly white to have ever held color. When his eyes readjusted again it was to the rope tied to his cuffs, and this he followed to the horse, charcoal grey and gnarled of limb, upon which was perched the spectral apparition of the priest in full vestments.

  The policeman rose on wobbly legs. The Fentanyl the priest had stuck him with still sat as a lump of lead in the middle of his skull, but gradually things were starting to come back to him—the priest following him out of the strip-bar, forcing him to his own squad car with a serious Dirty Harry, the handcuffing, the pinprick to his neck, and the subsequent blacking out from the world.

  The whole thing had felt clumsily improvised, but seeing the priest now on horseback, the gun jutting from his waistband, the bow and quiver which he kept in his cruiser now slung from the saddle’s pommel, he couldn’t stop his cheek-to-cheek grin from widening at how he’d managed to put himself so together in the space of a few hours.

  “Well now,” he said, glancing about to establish his bearings. “Where to, sheriff? West to Big Bear?”

  The priest shook his head. “A hunter would feel too at home in the woods, and comfort isn’t in our immediate future.”

  The policeman smirked. “Lead the way then, padre.”

  The priest nodded towards the shimmering, nothing expanse to the east.

  “Out there, if you must know. Just you, me, and eternity.”

  8

  The Magnum’s black eye jitterbugged before the priest’s left eye as Eddie struggled for some modicum of control. His urine had taken on the quality of ammonia in the dark stuffy room, and the priest couldn’t tell if Eddie’s tears brimmed as much from stench as terror. His fingers had gone from red to white in a matter of seconds. Sweat leaked from his palm, and as his shaking and squeezing increased, so did the low moan lumbering up from his thorax until at last, with the hammer bent as far back as possible, he broke with a violent twitch and exhale.

  The gun slipped from his grip and thudded on the carpet between his feet.

  He stumbled back until he slammed into the door jamb, the action prompting him to raise a hand and point back at the priest.

  “Fuckin’ lunatic . . . man!” Bone-meal sprayed from his lips and goatee. “Do your own . . . damn self in, why don’t you?”

  And he pivoted around the frame and plowed through the beaded curtain and continued headlong through the screen door and down the stairs on a single shod foot.

  A moment later the priest heard the engine of his second-hand Iroc-Z rev up before peeling out down the alley.

  He picked up the gun, suddenly aware of the beating of his heart with a profundity heretofore unknown to him. He considered popping the cylinder to see if Eddie’s successful trigger pull would’ve sent him to whatever awaited all man and beast alike, but felt that fortune may have already spoken her piece for the day, and he should spend his energies in burying Nutter.

  ***

  Hours fell away as they continued their zigzag along the rippled humps of dunes, careful not to stray too close to the slip-faces.

  Flashes of Nutter and Eddie from that morning prompted the priest to draw the gun from his belt, and without any further consideration, he pulled the trigger.

  The report, explosive and more powerful than he could’ve known, was immediately slurped by the hot air. He looked at the gun then, more with curiosity than shock, its blue-grey smoke splayed and likewise assimilated into the desert’s memory before he flung it into the sand.

  He then unhooked the policeman’s bow and quiver from the saddle, and cast them to the desert as well.

  The policeman never looked up, his eyes cabled to the ground, one teetering step after another.

  ***

  Just as the sun kissed the horizon at their backs, the priest at last halted the horse at the base of a blackened swell of slate and obsidian.

  He squinted up at the zenith, half blind from the miles of broiling sand they’d traversed, before yanking off his collar and peeling away his clerical shirt, chalked white on the inside from the salt loss. Like his cassock earlier, he let the wind have these as well.

  The iron crucifix was all that touched his bare flesh.

  He peered back at the policeman, doubled over now and dry-heaving, the blood from his flayed soles painting the shale behind him in black herringbone swaths. He waited for him to gather himself before finally speaking.

  “Somewhere on the other side of this mound lies a town. Nothing large. A service station, a general store, a chapel. A municipal building that doubles as a police station and clinic. A few small ranches and homes. Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. Beyond that, in all directions, lies a perpetuity of all we’ve just traversed.”

  The policeman panned slowly across the monolithic embankment and nodded at the priest. The pain was a part of him now, stitched to his body like a skin graft.

  “Maybe we’ll come across it,” said the priest. “Maybe we won’t. Are you prepared for either possibility?”

  The policeman’s ensuing smile verged on the euphoric.

  “I’m ready . . . for anything,” he said.

  The priest echoed the smile, realizing in the heat and drought of their shared eolian world that he’d at last found his ideological kindred spirit, and it had been delivered to him in the earthly guise of a serial killer.

  The policeman watched as the priest unbridled the crucifix from his neck. Watched as he dangled it over the sand as if to drop it, only to reel it back into himself. Against his heart he clutched it for a moment before taking it up by the hilt and pressing its sharpened end against his left eye.

  Before driving it into his socket, the policeman was certain he’d heard him say, “Good do
g . . . ”

  The policeman’s exuberant howl at the spectacle merged with the priest’s agonized scream, both growing in a mutual crescendo, whereupon the priest then plunged the cross into his second eye.

  With the impossible shriek still cutting through the desert’s own wail, the priest flung the cross into the sand, and in the same motion, heeled the nag into a gallop straight up the rocky embankment.

  The policeman wasted no time ripping the badge from his own flesh, then watched with mounting anticipation as the animal trundled up the uneven griddle of jagged stone, waiting for the rope to go taut, and the final sloughing of the hat from his crown.

  SEGMENT 3

  NINETIES

  INCARNATE

  MADDIE’S CREATING AGAIN. You can tell by her bloody fingers and the way she’s hunched over at the worktable, whistling.

  See the way her shoulder blades crest above the swale of spine? As if set that way by some ant-sized, chiropractic Moses? That’s Maddie engrossed.

  So what if the accident displaced a vertebra or two? She started to shrivel and twist long ago.

  At sixty-eight, she’s found her calling at long last, though it’s quite likely that taxidermy has crouched in her soul for her entire life, unleashed fully now with no one left to disapprove of it.

  Maddie, who had to plow through a lifetime of naysayers to reach full potential. And now she could finally whistle, never mind that her brain was close to matching her twisted body.

  She oops! upon pricking her thumb with one of the scythe-like spikes she uses for needles. Now watch as she joyfully sucks at the beading blood the way one would cake frosting.

  “Wait till you see Wolfie,” she yodels, plucking a thimble from a mason jar. “Minerva, you’re gonna flip!”

  If you were so inclined, you might nod back. Ditto calling her Mom, your wired jaw and feeding tube notwithstanding. But Maddie has likely forgotten that she’d forfeited that right back when she used to dole out unheeded advice and squint judgment as if deriding the sun’s very efficacy.

  Back when you were being your own woman and, according to her, paying for it with leukemia.

  Now she speaks in philosophical jingles between whistling and over-coddling.

  “All self-calamity,” she said just this morning, “metastasizes from audacity.”

  And, at the expense of sounding like a broken record, she’s way into her taxidermy.

  From the Greek, for “arrangement of skin.” You know this because she’s told you a dozen times at least—each one as if it was the first. How perfectly apropos, in the end, for someone who’s tried to mold her ne’er-do-well daughter since birth.

  Before the accident, Maddie had no hobbies to speak of. She didn’t bake, or press flowers, or knit, or do aerobics, or dance, or even shop. It got so that she even frowned on other people’s hobbies, yours included. Yours especially.

  Rock-climbing? That was your reckless substitute for deferred marriage.

  Poker? That was your inelegant, unsubtle metaphor for a lifetime of bad decision-making.

  Star-gazing? That was your excuse for never having made firm plans in general.

  Closest thing to a leisure pursuit Maddie enjoyed ***.A. (Before Accident) was conjuring new ways of pounding her circle of a daughter into the square of her ideal. That, and spoiling Wolfie blind. Monopolizing him. Turning your gambit into her personal, snarling lackey.

  Wolfie. The Chihuahua rescue you adopted as buffer after agreeing to move back in to help out after Dad died two years ago.

  To be honest, you’re surprised she’s remaking Wolfie as he once was. Rogue taxidermy’s been her latest obsession, crafting monstrosities by joining a cat’s head to an iguana’s body, or pinning a duck’s bill to a raccoon’s face.

  At first you thought her mind had fallen so far that she’d started confusing her mammals, reptiles, and fowl, but then one day she wheeled in the TV cart, and after subjecting the room to George H.W. Bush struggling to explain the range of Iraqi Scud missiles, she played a documentary on transgressive forms of taxidermy, and you learned that it was actually a thing.

  In fact, there are more things to taxidermy than you could’ve dared imagine.

  But Wolfie, he’s getting rebuilt to his original factory state, minus a trivial makeover in the coat-color department.

  “Good boy, Wolfie!” she squeals suddenly, even performing a decade late, quarter-speed Courtney Cox, Dancing in the Dark sway on the parlor tile. She bumps the worktable on a miscalculated spin, rattling the box of Mason jars she’d bought just that morning.

  “Such a good, sweet boy! Once a dog learns obedience, he stays obedient. People, not so much.”

  Wolfie. Within a year he went from a cock-headed, silent cutie-pie, to a snappy, surly, dirty-blonde misanthrope. The four-legged version of Maddie.

  But then the accident happened, and seemingly overnight, she changed. Like a one-eighty change. You hear about people undergoing radical personality shifts after trauma or a pregnancy, but when you actually experience it, you’re shocked that you ever doubted it to begin with.

  Well, the change wasn’t overnight, exactly. The drunk had t-boned into you, and being the driver, you took the brunt of it as Maddie quarreled with you over the evils of the pro-choice movement from the passenger seat while Wolfie snarled his peanut-gallery finest from her lap.

  Wolfie. The atom smashed between you and Maddie’s relentless inertias.

  So there was a piecing-together period before Maddie’s reformed outlook finally stretched its limbs, though seen through the span of your life under the woman’s heel, it was a geological blip.

  Comparatively speaking, the transformation should’ve required eons, and while ***.A. Maddie resented your nerve and sovereignty in every passive-aggressive way imaginable, A.A. Maddie (After Accident) now openly laments its absence, eyeing you with the same glint of possibility that grandma used on you.

  Maddie’s mom. How she doted on you during those holiday visits to Lake Champlain. Like a mother cat, grooming and purring. And you could tell that Maddie catalogued every one of those instances through lopsided glances over spreads of mostly brown and yellow food. It was a type of attention radically foreign to her. You were so sure that Maddie’s head was going to collapse into a singularity when Grandma invited you to summer at the lake that you actually groped under the table for something solid to hold onto lest you got pulled into the maw.

  It all ended up being moot though, as Grandma was killed during a botched diner hold up as she vacationed in the Adirondacks the following January. It had been a fluke—an ugly instance of bad timing—and yet Maddie still found ways to slant the blame her way for getting shot to death.

  You’d just turned twelve, and already you were aware that your tiny little arc-segment in the circle-of-life had started to constrict then: all the shit Maddie bitched to you that her mother said and did to her, she was now doing to you with even greater deniability than she accused her mother of having.

  And now, at grandmother age herself, Maddie’s gazing at you the way her mother gazed at you, only you figured out recently just why, but you try your hardest not to think about it, never mind that thinking is pretty much all you’re good for anymore.

  “Women used to be gods,” Maddie said, holding up a segment of pelt intended for Wolfie’s rump. “Before men co-opted religion, that is. But then if you don’t hold onto something bad enough, maybe you deserve to lose it.”

  You’ve watched her over the past week stitch every damn individual hair into that swath of deer skin. Re-creation taxidermy, it’s called. The substitution of similar parts to replace those missing or destroyed in the original animal. Turkey feathers to finish an eagle, or yak fur to fill in a bear, and so on.

  Wolfie. Stubborn even in death. His blood was too difficult to wash off his original straw-colored hide, so like Maddie’s own bland, stringy do. In that sense, she’s demonstrated some growth. Because while ***.A. Maddie squinted in disgust at yo
ur decision last Thanksgiving to donate the hair you’d been growing out since college to cancer patients, A.A. Maddie no longer seems to envy other women’s hair—specifically your lovely auburn tresses.

  See how beautiful they are in the afternoon light, perched on the wig stand by the bay window?

  Every time you look at it you think of baubles. Fake, egg-shaped rubies, emeralds, topazes, like the ones strung along Maddie’s bracelet, and which dangled gigantic before your eyes while she snipped away at your locks. Sometimes, one of those plastic ova would slam right into an eyeball. You’d see it coming fast, like some Technicolor avalanche, and the pain detonated in your head in mini-supernovas.

  To Maddie, you must’ve looked as peaceful as a sleeping manatee.

  Because within her waning mind, she’d surely forgotten what the doctors had told her about her precious daughter. That with total locked-in syndrome, she can’t show physical reactions. That because of the damage to the pons and basilar artery at the brain stem, she has no voluntary muscle movement whatsoever, and can’t twitch so much as a micron.

  But she can still see. And she can sure as fuck still feel pain.

  You were in the room when they told her all of this. You heard it all like she had, and she cried to frighten the piss out of the angels, and maybe she really meant it. Maybe the notion of her own girl buried inside herself for life was, at least for a moment, something worthy of empathy and self-blame.

  In the weeks that followed you learning of your fate, the most peculiar questions would cycle through your mind, a mind that felt suddenly larger because that’s all you’d become, much the way hearing for the blind becomes more acute.

  Can you will a heart attack? Or an aneurysm? Or even leukemia again?

  Can you bring about your own shutdown, just by thinking hard enough about it?

  You would’ve happily clicked ruby slippers to make it happen, if you had any motor control left to click them.

  But under these thoughts there always scampered one abiding anxiety: why hadn’t Maddie just pulled your plug when all those doctors implied it as the only decent move? Why, after being such the excruciation disappointment in her eyes, would she let you go on living in this state? Had she finally tapped into her atavistic, nurturing self? Did the sight of her only child tentacled to a half-dozen beeping, whirring machines prompt some type of toxicity molting?