Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  As much as my hands wanted to climb back up to take his face, I kept them clutched to the sheets.

  “I don’t need . . . ” he started to say, scrunching his face to redirect his train. “I gotta use the toilet. Something at lunch . . . didn’t agree with me. I’ll join you soon enough.”

  He adjusted to a single knee then, his grip on my hands tightening.

  “Let’s get married.”

  I sucked in a breath and tasted the sting of his scotch on my tongue. In my ideal imagining, this would’ve been a flawless moment—without my insides feeling as though they were being drawn-and-quartered by rats.

  “Ask me again after you sober up,” I said.

  He nodded most nonchalantly and planted a clumsy, slobbery kiss on my forehead before lumbering to the bathroom. Except for a giggle or two, no other sounds issued from within, and at some point I drifted off to sleep at the foot of the bed and dreamt of winter weddings and of giant sharks with stubby iguana legs making landfall in a coordinated phalanx.

  The blast startled me awake at 2:37 AM by the nightstand clock.

  Too close for a car back-fire, though that had been my initial guess. My next coherent thought was that Whit wasn’t in bed.

  The bathroom door was still closed, the sliver of light under it broken up in a haphazard pattern. All the dread and terror I ever felt in the whole of my life rushed through my veins then in a single arctic squall, and it took everything to haul my legs off the bed and get them moving toward the bathroom.

  When no reply came to my knock, I told myself that he’d simply fallen asleep on the toilet. That what I’d likely heard was his dreaming body slipping off and taking out the glass shelf with my Felix the Cat toothbrush holder to the left of the toilet.

  What I first saw upon easing open the door were his feet, canted to the side and staggered one over the other. A quarter-inch of water covered the white tiling, brackish and speckled like remnants in a coffee cup.

  The toilet running over again. That fucking toilet.

  Except that blood also crept into the grit in inky swirls to the right of Whit’s feet.

  I didn’t want to look up. I just wanted to grab the towel hanging from the shower door and dam up the slurry before it could crest the threshold into the bedroom.

  No sooner had I stepped in that my bare foot gave out on the soaked tiles and I was airborne. I landed on my ass with a splash, the back of my head slamming hard against the tiled wainscoting.

  For several minutes my eyes were lenses slowly racking in-and-out of focus. I could feel the water against my leg and wicking into my skirt, cold for the most part, though warm in pockets, like wading in a kiddie pool. Sitting dazed on the floor, my head lolled unwittingly to the side until I saw Whit, still half-perched on the bowl and leaning against the vanity, the top-front portion of his head basically scooped out and dispersed to the ceiling. Nothing remained above his eye-brows, and the section of his mouth that was more-or-less still intact was a black grimace that implied something between empathy and shock.

  When the weight of it dragged my eyes downward, it was to the shotgun on the floor. Bloody water was starting to draw into the twin maw of its stacked, engraved barrels.

  Bill’s final verdict, rendered via the walnut and steel antique Whit had spent a boatload on at a New Orleans auction.

  My head rolled away from the gore and towards the bedroom. None of my bodily functions were under my jurisdiction anymore. The whole world had turned to Novocaine, and I was willing to dwell there forever.

  From my seated position I stared at our still made bed, the only imperfection in the copper satin sheets being at the foot of the mattress where I’d dozed off. Then I looked towards the pillows, and only then did I start to weep. Slowly at first, but as the stone reality of it all hacked its way to the surface, my sobs turned to hitching blubbers, and finally to horrified shrieks that eventually pried our neighbor out of bed to investigate.

  When the EMTs were rolling me out of the room some time later, I wanted to tell them that I’d put an expensive, museum-quality Megalodon tooth under Whit’s pillow, but the tiny part of me that still refused to believe he was gone was reluctant to spoil the surprise.

  ***

  Should I let them take my nose?

  It’s what they want to do. Well, it’s what they’re suggesting anyway. Hard to argue it when, if you cross your eyes just right, you can see the skin unfurling at the tip in a carbonized chrysanthemum. But this is my face we’re talking here. Legs? Okay. Arms? Tough, but understandable. The skin from my right shoulder down to the elbow has the curled, blackened consistency of really good bacon. Would probably smell like it too if my nose didn’t burn as if someone were waving a lighter under it every time I tried to whiff.

  For the last eight hours I’ve been in-and-out of the world. They’ve ramped up my antibiotics and pain drip. They did let me control the amount of Fentanyl at first, but since the sores appeared on my hands last night, I can no longer bend my thumbs or index fingers without a jet of puss squirting from the webbing between them.

  No more phone privileges as a result, though they did let me call my older brother in New Mexico who can’t be separated from that lucrative dive-bar he runs outside a truck-stop. Then again, we’ve always been polar opposites. He followed a buck with the same single-minded zeal I followed love.

  I haven’t been able to use my laptop since yesterday either, so no more web surfing and no more odds. Numbers don’t matter anymore, except for the dwindling of time and limbs.

  Do breasts qualify as limbs? No? Well, they’re on the pile now, too. That was the toughest to let go—worse than my precarious nose and, as of thirty minutes ago, likely my jaw as well.

  How can I smile without a jaw? My Whit never could’ve won me over without his.

  Never could’ve killed me so sweetly.

  Soon I’ll be a prisoner of my own shell. I’m talking Johnny Got His Gun here, nineties edition. A brain without a body.

  Thankfully, it won’t last. Once it runs out of external flesh to feed on, the bug moves quickly to the giblets, and then the noodle.

  Forget your notions of infinite reduction, ladies and germs. It all starts and ends with the brain.

  So, twenty-four hours give-or-take is about when I’ll be topping off according to the doctors’ latest estimates. They’re amazed I’ve lasted as long as I have, and just as boggled by my indifference towards that. Except that I’m anything but indifferent. Distort the flesh enough, and eventually you transition from horror to a shocking tranquility and acceptance. All my fears and dreads of the whole of my life have been thoroughly supplanted by a myriad of tiny obsessions, one of which I’ve been trying to push away since I ended up in the ER sixteen days ago, a mere week after Whit pulled a Kurt Cobain on the can. I hadn’t even felt it when it happened. Bashing your head against the bathroom wall after finding you lover’s basically headless corpse tends to relegate miniscule puncture wounds to the end of the line. But that was the culprit if you must know: a tiny nick on my foot from slipping on that soiled bathroom floor. That’s what’s currently taking me out. The doctors surmised that it was likely a piece of glass or tile that scored the sole of my right foot, and this allowed the swarm of bacteria to enter my body, and that’s where it ended with them.

  But not with me.

  Oh, I agreed that it was likely the tile—the actual bit certainly matched the pearly-white tone of the bathroom porcelain—so I didn’t feel like I perjured myself too much in subscribing to their deduction. I didn’t even notice it till I was released from the hospital after being treated for shock over Whit’s death, but the pinch in my foot every time I took a step had eventually grown nagging enough to shake me from my daily broodings and stupors into prying out the offender with some tweezers.

  I sat on our bed from the first time since Whit died to do this, and only then did I finally draw the shark tooth from under his pillow. Figuring I’d strip the bed afterwards to wash t
he sheets, I grabbed my own pillow, and that’s when I found the engagement ring Whit had intended to surprise me with. Its sparkle was a birthing sun on my finger, and I admired it while I plucked out the sliver from my foot.

  The shard echoed the same tapered contour of the Megalodon tooth, though it was only a fluke shape carved from the buckshot. A shred of incisor. A piece of a smile that I’ll die craving.

  SAVIOR

  YOU’RE GONNA TALK about Liza now.

  Because you’re following her, and it’s easier expressing your thoughts to her ass than her face.

  There she goes now, a sprite loping across a parking lot with all the slack-jawed grace of a murmuration, sidestepping puddles of streetlights and bounding k-rails before plunging into shadows.

  To keep up with her takes all your muscle-memory from route clearance missions in Iraqi villages—proof that this part of you will never die no matter how hard you try to snuff it out.

  You catch up to her again as she waits for a car to drift past before tearing across the street on coltish legs towards the south wall of Leland’s Tavern. The wall farthest from its crazy-bright sign that keeps you up most nights with its irregular flicker and yawning buzz that gives the cicada a run for their money, even at the edge of a marsh.

  She tiptoes against the mottled tin siding to the back corner, and you decide to squat between parked Chevy long beds to catch your breath. In truth, there’s no need for you to match her pace. You’ve done this fruitless dance many times. You know she’s going to the barn. Its glow seeps from behind Leland’s, a frosty effulgence slithering around corners and peering through the mesh of Spanish beard with the warmth of coroner’s lights.

  Will you look this time?

  You’ll probably get as far as the back of the bar before retreating to your apartment, as usual. In the stifling heat of your narrow room, where the plumbing shudders and the floorboards groan lurid secrets with every contraction, it’ll be your old man’s oft-stated credo that’ll squire you to sleep: that the worst sin you can commit upon your heroes is to unmask them.

  In a blink she rounds the corner and melds into the light, and the same predictable breath scrambles up and grapples to the roof of your throat. Thus her namesake. Her invented self. Even removed from the glory of the trapeze, the moniker suits her just as well on the ground.

  Within the majesty of the big-top, under a patina of makeup, she’s known as The Golden Starling. But her real name is Liza. Mother of three. You might love her, and she might love you.

  It’s complicated.

  You cross the street.

  ***

  You remember the first time you saw Liza the way you remember the first time you fired an M16. Both shocked you to the core with their power. Even the simple act of her hanging a poster in the bar for the forthcoming three-week run of Coolidge and Sons Circus was enough for her to drive the same jolt into you.

  You’d just started living in the apartment above Leland’s where you worked four days a week. Because of your appearance, they relegated you to the back loading stock, filing inventory, book-keeping, and generally maintaining a wall between you and the patrons. Whenever the barkeep called for a new case of Wild Turkey or a refilled keg of Old Milwaukee, you shoved it through the canvas curtain between the bar and storeroom with your boot. Most times you would linger there and listen to all the random boasting and griping about women, work, and sports above the ubiquitous drone of docking and departing airboats. All the ticking that gives life around these parts a little pliability beyond the reek of diesel, fry grease, and marsh.

  As far removed from the pending dreads of Y2K as possible.

  You’d plant your back to the wall directly across from the small wood-framed mirror Beau Shambly hung beside the door frame as a way to deter you should you ever feel the urge to mingle out front. Beau was Leland’s son, a squat little toadstool with bratwurst arms and a smile that skewed left as if to balance the lazy eye drifting right. As a kind of subliminal backup, he’d hooked above the door a large walnut mallet he was fond of strutting around with as an affect—the high-striker type used at carnies to test strength and win Kewpie dolls for sweethearts by pinging a bell.

  When the beloved-by-all Leland died on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, Beau swooped in, mallet in hand, and sprayed the place with all his pent-up bile and umbrage, booting his doubters and raising prices. He only kept you around so he wouldn’t have to train anyone new on the workings of the place, though you were still banned from the bar proper on account of your facial scars, which he once told a new server could pinch off a squirting bronco on the spot. She of course had to look. She was young and it was late and the place was closing down, and you happened to meet her eye when hers crept through the rift in the curtains. Her sudden intake of breath varied little from the sound you once heard a man make when he was stabbed in the back during a bar fight in Terrebonne Parish, and she never returned to work.

  Sometimes, when the room was jumping and most alive, and the gator po’ boys dressed with Creole mustard were flying out of the kitchen like dealt cards, Beau would scrawl STAY! across the mirror with a red crayon, his crooked smirk reminding you how pleasure on certain faces can take on the glaze of disease.

  It didn’t bother you much by then. You weren’t all too fond of your mug before the fact, and sometimes you’d squint into Beau’s makeshift restraint just to see if you could spot the crooked nose or the pencil-thin lips through his letters and beneath all your knurled, medium-rare meat.

  Sometimes you’d even try to smile, never mind that those hinge-points have been rigid spot-welds for almost eight years.

  It’s what you were doing when Liza walked in that day to hang her poster.

  You only risked a peek through the curtains because you heard Freddy the barkeep—whose judgment towards the fairer sex was first-rate—blow one of his understated wolf-whistles from the other side.

  When you first glimpsed her she was tip-toeing to pin a flier on a high corner of the corkboard by the bathroom doors:

  3 WEEKS ONLY!

  THE GOLDEN STARLING

  &

  THE RED LION MASTER!

  Lord, was she a sight, with her peach sundress inching ever higher to expose taut calves. Even with an air that wagged between dour and blue, and which you only noted in profile scribbled behind stringy bands of yellow-white hair as she gazed at the poster, she was still a heart-stopper.

  But as pretty as she was, it was her walk that sucked the rest of the air from your lungs. That familiar little hitch that was almost a strut, but not quite. Some old hurt that never healed proper. You recognized it right away. Didn’t need Beau, his ‘possum’s grin loose and cold-blooded, to prance out of his office then to verify it. He brushed by you without acknowledgement and hopped up to slap the mallet’s handle—his preferred good-luck ritual—before bundling through the curtain with a kid’s enthusiasm on Christmas morning.

  Through the gap he left in the canvas you watched as he hooked an arm around her, then led her down the long hall and out the back door.

  She didn’t resist him, but neither was she gung-ho. Often you thought of asking him about her, but you needed your job and the freedom of seclusion it provided.

  They were headed to his barn. It’s where she would meet him once weekly during the four months the show was in town.

  ***

  You gumshoe it across the gravel road and lurk against the bar’s south wall, stepping in the spots Liza had ghosted moments earlier, hoping for a sense of her, yet grateful that you lack that thing animals have of picking up fear.

  Reaching the corner, you stop where she’d stopped and creep your head forward till you see Beau’s barn some ten yards down between a ticket of sumac. His makeshift studio. Whenever the icy blue light bleeds through the joints and knotholes of the pine-board siding, you know he’s at it, padding his income with a trunk full of secrets and a camcorder borrowed from a reporter cousin of his—because reall
y, everyone has to these days however they can.

  Except that Liza is in there with him, and the lights are humming and tape spools are whirring, and like every occasion before, you’re loath to venture closer, your old man’s dogmatic warnings about divulging heroes cantering around your skull in ever-reducing circles.

  ***

  For extra money, you took work with the circus whenever it rotated into town, mainly shoeing horses and cleaning animal pens, which was ideal for all concerned as it kept you segregated. Mostly though, you did it because you’d always been fond of carnies and travelling shows. The spike in attendance of late suggested the pull was mutual, though you suspected the looming Y2K scare has had people yearning for less technical entertainment. Yet despite the summer’s surge, the circus still wasn’t the draw it used to be when you were a kid.

  In those days, a featured act of some daring feat or talent would headline each show. What you most relished about them was their mystery. Beyond just their stage monikers, marquee performers often veiled themselves behind masks or under makeup. Rarely did anyone know who these people really were in the flesh. Sometimes, not even the circus regulars knew. They’d keep to themselves, having learned long ago the paradoxical lure of anonymity, often showing up only minutes before their acts, always incognito, ready to execute miracles for their audiences.

  To them, every day was Mardi Gras.

  In the small swamp towns where you grew up, especially amongst the kids, they were living, breathing superheroes with secret identities, and you caught them every chance you could, often hitchhiking for hours up and down Highway 90.

  In Raceland, you had The Electrifying Basilisk, who was a fire-eater and wore a dragon’s mask.

  Over in Charenton, you had Antoine the Transcendent, a magician who wore a different voodoo-inspired mask at every performance.

  In later days, you had The Stupendous Crane Sisters in New Iberia, who walked the high wire and wore matching feather costumes with wings for arms.

  Here in Bayou Vista, you had The Red Lion Master, a big-cat tamer who donned auguste clown paint with a Kabuki-styled, fiery-red underlayment.