by J M Lassen
Marti blinked, turned away, then turned back. “Get in,” she said.
“You don’t have to take me,” I said. “I’ll get there sooner or later. Doesn’t matter when.”
“Get in.”
I got back into her car.
For half an hour we drove in silence. She crossed Interstate 5, paused when we hit 99, the Strip. “Which way?”
I pointed right. The fire was so hot in me now I felt like my fingertips might start smoking any second.
She turned the car and we cruised north toward the Sea-Tac Airport, my old stomping grounds. We passed expensive hotels and cheap motels, convenience stores and fancy restaurants. Lighted buildings alternated with dark gaps. The roar of planes taking off and landing, lights rising and descending in the sky ahead of us, turned rapidly into background. We drove past the Goldilocks Motel, where Blake and I had a room we rented by the week, and I didn’t feel anything. But as we passed the intersection where the Red Lion sprawls on the corner of 188th Street and the Pacific Highway, fire flared under my skin. “Slowly,” I said to Marti. She stared at me and slowed the car. A mile further, past the airport, one of the little roads led down off the ridge to the left. I pointed.
Marti got in the left-turn lane and made the turn, then pulled into a gas station on the corner and parked by the rest rooms. “Now wait,” she said. “What are we doing, here?”
“Richie,” I whispered. I could feel his presence in the near distance; all my wounds were resonating with his nearness now, all the places he had pressed himself into me with his rope and his cigarette and his sock and his flaked stone knife and his penis, imprinting me as his possession. Surely as a knife slicing into a tree’s bark, he had branded me with his heart.
“Yes,” said Marti. “Richie. You have any plans for what you’re going to do once you find him?”
I held my hands out, open, palms up. The heat was so strong I felt like anything I touched would burst into flame.
“What are you going to do, strangle him? Have you got something to do it with?” She sounded sarcastic.
I was having a hard time listening to her. All my attention was focused down the road. I knew Richie’s car was there, and Richie in it. It was the place he had taken me to tie me up. He might be driving this way any second, and I didn’t want to wait any longer for our reunion, though I knew there was no place he could hide where I couldn’t find him. My love for him was what animated me now.
“Strangle,” I said, and shook my head. I climbed out of the car.
“Sheila!” said Marti.
I let the sound of my self-given name fill me with what power it could, and stood still for a moment, fighting the fire inside. Then I walked into the street, stood in the center so a car coming up out of the dark would have to stop. I strode down into darkness, away from the lights and noise of the Strip. My feet felt like match-heads, as if a scrape could strike fire from them.
Presently the asphalt gave way to potholes and gravel; I could tell by the sound of pebbles sliding under my feet. I walked past the first three dark houses to the right and left, looming shapes in a darkness pierced by the flight lights of airplanes, but without stars. I turned left at the fourth house, dark like the others, but with a glow behind it I couldn’t see with my eyes but could feel in my bones. Heat pulsed and danced inside me.
I pushed past an overgrown lilac bush at the side of the house and stepped into the broad drive in back. The car was there, as I had known it would be. Dark and quiet. Its doors were closed.
I heard a brief cry, and then the dome light went on in the car. Richie was sitting up in back, facing away from me.
Richie.
I walked across the crunching gravel, looking at his dark head. He wore a white shirt. He was staring down, focused, his arms moving. As I neared the car, I could see he was sitting on a woman. She still had her clothes on. (Richie hadn’t taken my clothes off until he got me in his apartment.) Tape was across her mouth, and her head thrashed from side to side, her upper arms jerking as Richie bound his thin nylon rope around her wrists, her legs kicking. I stood a moment looking in the window. She saw me and her eyes widened. She made a gurgling swallowed sound behind the sock, the tape.
I thought: he doesn’t need her. He has me.
I remembered the way my mind had struggled while my body struggled, screaming silently: no, oh no, Blake, where are you? No one will help me, the way no one has ever helped me, and I can’t help myself. That hurts, that hurts. Maybe he’ll play with me and let me go if I’m very, very good. Oh, God! What do you want? Just tell me, I can do it. You don’t have to hurt me! Okay, rip me off, it’s not like you’re the first, but you don’t have to hurt me.
Hurt me.
I love you. I love you so much.
I stared at him through the glass. The woman beneath him had stilled, and she was staring at me. Richie finally noticed, and whirled.
For a moment we stared at each other. Then I smiled, showing him the stumps of my teeth, and his blue eyes widened.
I reached for the door handle, opened it before he could lock it.
“Richie,” I said.
“Don’t!” he said. He shook his head, hard, as though he were a dog with wet fur. Slowly, he lifted one hand and rubbed his eye. He had a big bread knife in the other hand, had used it to cut the rope, then flicked it across the woman’s cheek, leaving a streak of darkness. He looked at me again. His jaw worked.
“Richie.”
“Don’t! Don’t. . . interrupt.”
I held out my arms, my fingertips scorched black as if dyed or tattooed, made special, the wrists dark beyond the ends of my sleeves. “Richie,” I said tenderly, the fire in me rising up like a firework, a burst of stars. “I’m yours.”
“No,” he said.
“You made me yours.” I looked at him. He had made Tawanda his, and then he had erased her. He had made Mary his, and then erased her. Even though he had erased Tawanda and Mary, these feelings inside me were Tawanda’s: whoever hurts me controls me; and Mary’s: I spoke up once and I got a curse on me I can’t get rid of. If I’m quiet maybe I’ll be okay.
But Sheila? Richie hadn’t erased Sheila; he had never even met her.
It was Tawanda who was talking. “You killed me and you made me yours,” she said. My fingers went to the jacket, unbuttoned it, dropped it behind me. “What I am I owe to you.”
“I—” he said, and coughed. “No,” he said.
I heard the purr of car engines in the near distance, not the constant traffic of the Strip, but something closer.
I reached into the car and gripped Richie’s arm. I pulled him out, even though he grabbed at the door handle with his free hand. I could feel the bone in his upper arm as my fingers pressed his muscles. “Richie,” I whispered, and put my arms around him and laid my head on his shoulder.
For a while he was stiff, tense in my embrace. Then a shudder went through him and he loosened up. His arms came around me. “You’re mine?” he said.
“Yours,” said Tawanda.
“Does that mean you’ll do what I say?” His voice sounded like a little boy’s.
“Whatever you say,” she said.
“Put your arms down,” he said.
I lowered my arms.
“Stand real still.” He backed away from me, then stood and studied me. He walked around, looking at me from all sides. “Wait a sec, I gotta get my flashlight.” He went around to the trunk and opened it, pulled out a flashlight as long as his forearm, turned it on. He trained the beam on my breasts, my neck. “I did you,” he said, nodding. “I did you. You were good. Almost as good as the first one. Show me your hands again.”
I held them out and he stared at my blackened fingers. Slowly he smiled, then looked up and met my eyes.
“I was going to visit you,” he said. “When I finished with this one. I was coming back to see you.
“I couldn’t wait,” said Tawanda.
“Don’t talk,” Richie said
gently.
Don’t talk! Tawanda and Mary accepted that without a problem, but I, Sheila, was tired of people telling me not to talk. What did I have to lose?
On the other hand, what did I have to say? I didn’t even know what I wanted. Tawanda’s love for Richie was hard to fight. It was the burning inside me, the sizzling under my skin, all I had left of life.
“Will you scream if I say so?” said Richie in his little boy’s voice.
“Yes,” said Tawanda; but suddenly lights went on around us, and bullhorn voices came out of the dark.
“Hold it right there, buddy! Put your hands up!”
Blinking in the sudden flood of light, Richie slowly lifted his hand, the knife glinting in the left one, the flashlight in the other.
“Step away from him, miss,” said someone else. I looked around too, not blinking; glare didn’t bother me. I couldn’t see through it, though. I didn’t know who was talking. “Miss, move away from him,” said another voice from outside the light.
“Come here,” Richie whispered, and I went to him. Releasing the flashlight, he dropped his arms around me, held the knife to my neck, and yelled, “Stay back!”
“Sheila!” It was Marti’s voice this time, not amplified.
I looked toward her.
“Sheila, get away from him!” Marti yelled. “Do you want him to escape?”
Tawanda did. Mary did. They, after all, had found the place where they belonged. In the circle of his arms, my body glowed, the fire banked but burning steady.
He put the blade closer to my twisted throat. I could almost feel it. I laid my head back on his shoulder, looking at his profile out of the corner of my eye. The light glare brought out the blue in his eye. His mouth was slightly open, the inside of his lower lip glistening. He turned to look down into my face, and a slight smile curved the corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he whispered, “we’re going to get into the car now.” He raised his voice. “Do what I say and don’t struggle.” Keeping me between him and the lights, he kicked the back door closed and edged us around the car to the driver’s side. Moving in tandem, with his arm still around my neck, we slid in behind the wheel, me going first. “Keep close,” he said to me. “Slide down a little so I can use my arm to shift with, but keep close.”
“Sheila!” screamed Marti. The driver’s side window was open.
Richie started the car.
“Sheila! There’s a live woman in the back of that car!”
Tawanda didn’t care, and Mary didn’t care, and I wasn’t even sure I cared. Richie shifted from park into drive and eased his foot off the brake and onto the gas pedal; I could feel his legs moving against my left shoulder. From the back seat I heard a muffled groan. I looked up at Richie’s face. He was smiling.
Just as he gunned the engine, I reached up and grappled the steering-wheel-mounted gear shift into park. Then I broke the shift handle off.
“You said you’d obey me,” he said, staring down into my face. He looked betrayed, his eyes wide, his brow furrowed, his mouth soft. The car’s engine continued to snarl without effect.
Fire blossomed inside me, hurting me this time because I’d hurt him. Pain came alive. I coughed, choking on my own tongue, my throat swollen and burning, my wrists and ankles burning, my breasts burning, between my legs a column of flame raging up inside me. I tried to apologize, but I no longer had a voice.
“You promised,” said Richie in his little boy’s voice, looking down at me.
I coughed. I could feel the power leaving me; my arms and legs were stiffening the way a body is supposed to do after death. I lifted my crippling hands as high as I could, palms up, pleading, but by that point only my elbows could bend. It was Tawanda’s last gesture.
“Don’t make a move,” said a voice. “Keep your hands on the wheel.”
We looked. A man stood just outside the car, aiming a gun at Richie through the open window.
Richie edged a hand down the wheel toward me.
“Make a move for her and I’ll shoot,” said the man. Someone else came up beside him, and he moved back, keeping his gun aimed at Richie’s head, while the other man leaned in and put handcuffs on Richie.
“That’s it,” said the first man, and he and the second man heaved huge sighs.
I lay curled on the seat, my arms bent at the elbows, my legs bent at the knees. When they pulled Richie out of the car I slipped off his lap and lay stiff, my neck bent at an angle so my head stuck up sideways. “This woman needs medical attention,” someone yelled. I listened to them freeing the woman in the back seat, and thought about the death of Tawanda and Mary.
Tawanda had lifted me out of my grave and carried me for miles. Mary had probably mostly died when Grannie cursed me and drove me out of the house. But Sheila? In a way, I had been pregnant with Sheila for years, and she was born in the grave. She was still looking out of my eyes and listening with my ears even though the rest of me was dead. Even as the pain of death faded, leaving me with clear memories of how Richie had treated me before he took that final twist around my neck, the Sheila in me was awake and feeling things.
“She’s in an advanced state of rigor,” someone said. I felt a dim pressure around one of my arms. My body slid along the seat toward the door.
“Wait,” said someone else. “I got to take pictures.”
“What are you talking about?” said another. “Ten minutes ago she was walking and talking.”
Lights flashed, but I didn’t blink.
“Are you crazy?” said the first person. “Even rapid-onset rigor doesn’t come on this fast.”
“Ask anybody, Tony. We all saw her.”
“Try feeling for a pulse. Are you sure he wasn’t just propping her up and moving her around like a puppet? But that wouldn’t explain….”
“You done with the pictures yet, Crane?” said one of the cops. Then, to me, in a light voice, “Honey, come on out of there. Don’t just lie there and let him photograph you like a corpse. You don’t know what he does with the pictures.”
“Wait till the civilians are out of here before you start making jokes,” said someone else. “Maybe she’s just in shock.”
“Sheila?” said Marti from the passenger side.
“Marti,” I whispered.
Gasps.
“Sheila, you did it. You did it.”
Did what? Let him kill me, then kill me again? Suddenly I was so angry I couldn’t rest. Anger was like the fire that had filled me before, only a lower, slower heat. I shuddered and sat up.
Another gasp from one of the men at the driver’s side door. “See?” said the one with the shock theory. One of them had a flashlight and shone it on me. I lifted my chin and stared at him, my microbraids brushing my shoulders.
“Kee-rist!”
“Oh, God!”
They fell back a step.
I sucked breath in past the swelling in my throat and said, “I need a ride. And feeling for a pulse? I think you’ll be happier if you don’t.”
Marti gave me back her jacket. I rode in her Rabbit; the cop cars and the van from the medical examiner’s office tailed us. Marti had a better idea of where she had found me than I did.
“What’s your full name?” she said when we were driving. “Is there anybody I can get in touch with for you?”
“No. I’ve been dead to them for a couple years already.”
“Are you sure? Did you ever call to check with them?”
I waited for a while, then said, “If your daughter was a hooker and dead, would you want to know?”
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Real information is much better than not knowing.”
I kept silent for another while, then told her my parents’ names and phone number. Ultimately, I didn’t care if the information upset them or not.
She handed me a little notebook and asked me to write it down, turning on the dome light so I could see what I was doing. The pain of scorching had left my fingers again. Holding the pen was awkward, but
I managed to write out what Marti wanted. When I finished, I slipped the notebook back into her purse and turned off the light.
“It was somewhere along here,” she said half an hour later. “You have any feeling for it?”
“No.” I didn’t have a sense of my grave the way I had had a feeling for Richie. Marti’s headlights flashed on three Coke cans lying together by the road, though, and I remembered seeing a cluster like that soon after I had climbed up the slope. “Here,” I said.
She pulled over, and so did the three cars following us. Someone gave me a flashlight and I went to the edge of the slope and walked along, looking for my own footprints or anything else familiar. A broken bramble, a crushed fern, a tree with a hooked branch—I remembered them all from the afternoon. “Here,” I said, pointing down the mountainside.
“Okay. Don’t disturb anything,” said the cop named Joe. One of the others started stringing up yellow tape along the road in both directions.
“But—” I was having a feeling now, a feeling that Sheila had lived as long as she wanted. All I needed was my blanket of goofer dust, and I could go back to sleep. When Joe went back to his car to get something, I slipped over the edge and headed home.
I pushed the branches off the other two women and lay down beside their bodies, thinking about my brief life. I had helped somebody and I had hurt somebody, which I figured was as much as I’d done in my first two lives.
I pulled dirt up over me, even over my face, not blinking when it fell into my eyes; but then I thought, Marti’s going to see me sooner or later, and she’d probably like it better if my eyes were closed. So I closed my eyes.
P/{-}
THE
SKULL-
FACED
BOY
DAVID BARR KIRTLEY
It was past midnight, and Jack and Dustin were driving along a twisted path through the woods. Jack was at the wheel. He was arguing with Dustin over Ashley.
