Journey From Heaven

by Joe Derkacht

  #

  Kit didn’t bother with the niceties of a note or a face to face explanation. She simply left on a day I was making one of my deliveries to Portland. When I came home that night, the front door was hanging open. I would have reported her as a missing person, except the clues were everywhere: the empty garage, the empty closets and shoe racks, the missing furniture.

  Zell walked in while I was wandering dazedly through the house. Her eyes were red and she kept dabbing at them with a lace hanky. If I expected to see her crying, I was wrong, though. I had never heard her swear before, but she would have made a commercial fisherman blush. Between her cussing and spluttering about Kit, I thought she might fall down with a stroke. It took me ten minutes to reassure her that I would be fine and to usher her out the door, before I could return to my wandering.

  If not for all the built-in cabinets, she wouldn’t have left me any place to keep either my socks and underwear or my thousands of books. She’d taken nearly everything except the bed, probably because the oak headboard and footboard were too massive to move without the help of several men. The bed linens were an altogether different story: the duvet, the sheets and pillows, the dust ruffle, all the things she picked out for our bedroom, were gone, ripped from the pillow top mattress without leaving a trace.

  I stumbled out to my workshop and turned the lights on. To my relief, the bigger machines were undisturbed, perhaps because they were permanently bolted to the floor and simply too much work to steal. I wasn’t as lucky with my air tools—all missing—and my compressor. The worst was discovering that someone had broken the intricately-worked leaded glass panes out of two different clock cabinets and smashed the clockworks sitting ready for installation on a workbench.

  Had Kit done all this by herself? I wondered. Or had she prevented someone from doing worse damage? Even in my state of shock, I couldn’t resist sweeping the place with a push broom and straightening up the mess. By the time I made it back to the house, it was nearly midnight. I dropped onto my bed from exhaustion. Around 2 o’clock in the morning, I woke up with the shakes.

  A few seconds passed before I remembered Kit’s betrayal. Dimly, it came to me that I still wore my clothes and shoes and was lying on a bare mattress. A search of the hallway closet revealed my new mummy bag was missing along with most of my other camping gear (something she had never shown any interest in). After a thorough search, I found my father’s old sleeping bag on the top shelf of the linen closet. Feeling greater and greater disgust, I rolled out the bag on my mattress, unzipped it, kicked off my shoes, and crawled inside. Another hour passed before the shakes subsided.

  Why? Why? Why?

  The questions weren’t so much about why she left me; that one was easy to figure out. Mostly, it was a matter of why I ever thought someone could love me. How could I fool myself like that? No one ever really wanted to love a freak like me. How could I be so stupid? Crazy moron! Why didn’t I just kill myself? Why not go to the shop, flip on the switch to the radial arm saw, and slide it over my neck?

  Nobody cared. Nobody ever had, nobody ever would. What was the use of living?

  Kill yourself! Kill yourself! Kill yourself!

  I curled up into a fetal ball. My chest felt ready to cave in from the pressure. I wanted to sob, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shriek, and only god awful groans shook from me.

  Daylight awakened me. Someone was knocking at the front door. I let them keep knocking, and prayed desperately for them to go away. Finally, the knocking ceased.

  Ten minutes later, I heard another knock at the door, a couple of sharp raps followed by the sound of the door opening. As usual, I hadn’t locked up for the night.

  “Jack?” A voice called out. It was Blackie. He came in without my answering. A couple of seconds later, he stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Zell thought you might want to talk.”

  I stared up at the ceiling, something I’d done a lot through the years, especially under the care of the State.

  I grunted noncommittally.

  “Couldn’t even leave you any chairs,” he muttered, swearing under his breath. “Guess I won’t be sitting down. Look, I was in Corvallis all day yesterday and didn’t find out about this until she was already gone.

  “Not that I really could’ve done much anyhow—she’s your wife and when a wife moves out with a bunch of stuff, that’s pretty much the way it goes. You know what I mean? You just have to cowboy up, buddy—be a man about it.”

  The ceiling and I were locked in silent communion. Mostly, I was aware of Blackie’s presence as a sort of shadow in the room.

  “Look,” he said, walking over to the bed and leaning directly over me. “I know about these things. It’s rough and it’ll be rough for a long time. Thing is, man, you got to check with the bank. Situations like this, one of the parties involved usually cleans out the joint-checking account before they leave town.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod or something, willya?”

  I nodded. It was Saturday and the local bank did not have Saturday hours. What I could do about it was beyond me.

  “Call on your charge cards, too. Those banks, they’re probably back East, so you better get on it. It’s already 11 o’clock, man.”

  I shook my head.

  “No charge cards?”

  “Never used ’em,” I managed to say. The words sounded like rain spatters on a tin roof to me. Was I stroking out?

  “All right, at least you did one thing smart.”

  Probably not, I thought to myself, remembering I had co-signed on one or two for her. For the moment my bigger worry was the more than $12,000 in our joint checking account, three-quarters of which should have been transferred into my business account last week. If she emptied it, I would be scrambling for months to make up my losses.

  Finally, alarm bells rang in my head, rang through the swaddling rags that were my emotions. I crawled out of bed and went to the room I used for my home office. My business checks were missing, and she was a signer on them.

  Scrambling was exactly what I would be doing the next few months, but I didn’t have to wait until Monday to start. Blackie called the bank manager at home for me and was told Kit had come in early Friday morning to make her withdrawals from our personal account.

  “So far, she hasn’t done anything illegal,” Blackie told me. “As a signer on both accounts, she can withdraw as much as she wants, as long as the cash is actually in the bank. If she’s really greedy, though—”

  He didn’t have to explain it to me. If she wrote checks against an empty or closed account, it would constitute fraud. At the same time, if I didn’t honor those fraudulent checks, both my business and reputation could be irreparably damaged.

  Three months went by, during which I worked both night and day to keep my head above water. A few bills came in from the department store charge accounts I knew about, plus others I hadn’t known anything about. Most were for clothing and jewelry bought before the split, items I never saw Kit wear but for which I was evidently responsible, according to the collection agencies. Those bills were minor in comparison to the checks she wrote against Raventhorst Originals.

  Financially, it was a struggle. Emotionally, I began recovering, perhaps because I was forced to keep my mind on my work so much, or simply because in reality I accepted that she wouldn’t be coming back and I was getting better at killing my emotions. Blackie helped, too: he floated the theory that I wasn’t her first victim, that she had done this very same thing before.

  Then one day a delivery man knocked on my open workshop door. I nodded a greeting and automatically signed on the dotted line before taking custody of a large manila envelope.

  “Sorry, pal,” he said, rushing off without an explanation, maybe because of the oversized hammer lying on my workbench. Explanations were really unnecessary; stamped on the upper left hand corner of the envelope were the wo
rds, PROCESS SERVERS. What now? I wondered.

  They were divorce papers. Driftwood Bay’s city attorney had drawn papers up for me shortly after Kit’s disappearance, but without knowing her whereabouts I was powerless to have the papers served. Now she was serving me. Irreconcilable differences, it seemed. That part was true; what did a scam artist have in common with a responsible, hardworking stiff? Correction—with a credulous sucker like myself?

  The papers had been drawn up by a Salem lawyer, but Kit’s mailing address was a box number in some no name town in Montana. I was just glad we didn’t have any kids. My blood ran cold, when I saw she wanted the house. I could keep everything else.

  How generous of her. She would get the house and I would get all the bills, including her attorney’s fees and mine. I wondered if she knew about the liens threatened against my property because of her liberal use of my business checking account?

  My hands shook, as I shoved the papers back into the envelope. Blackie would be interested in seeing them. With her address and her attorney’s name, we could realistically hope to discuss criminal charges with the D.A.’s office; she had written checks totaling over $18,000 on my business account in that first week after her disappearance. Blackie didn’t think he would have much trouble in proving his theories concerning a criminal past.

  Shirley Icenogle, the City Attorney, who was representing me as a personal favor, wasn’t as optimistic as Blackie. She grew even less optimistic when another manila envelope arrived in her offices a few days later. This one contained glossy photos of a bruised and battered Kit. Did I want an amicable divorce, or would I rather let it be known that I was a wife beater?

  “Never happened,” Blackie told Shirley. “These photos could’ve been taken anytime, before or since she lived in Driftwood Bay, and they might be stage makeup, as far as we know.”

  “They look pretty convincing,” Shirley said, glancing at me in a way that made me feel uneasy. Her reaction wasn’t all that bothered me. One of the photos was a frontal shot, with Kit barely concealing her breasts with her hands.

  “Never happened,” Blackie repeated emphatically. “My god, Shirley, you don’t see the smirk on her face? This is not a battered wife. This is pornography! And come on, look at the dates. They’re from last summer. She always showed off more skin than anybody else in town. People would’ve noticed bruises—I certainly would have noticed.

  “Sorry, Jack,” he said to me. “It’s not like she’s ugly, you know. She was always wearing those backless, those backless—thingies. You know, whatever they call ’em. I got more of an eyeful of her than of own my wife in the privacy of our bedroom.

  “And besides, Shirley, you know darn well I would’ve been notified by someone, by whatever ER she went to.”

  “Well,” Shirley began again. She adjusted her reading glasses. “ ‘He said, she said,’ you know. Maybe it so happens no one did notice her bruises, and maybe she didn’t actually go to any ER. Maybe she was trying to protect her husband, at the time.”

  Blackie swore.

  “You and I know he’s harmless,” Shirley said to Blackie. She paused, though not for effect, I figured. I knew where the conversation was headed or where it would eventually. I also noticed that for someone I’d known for over twenty years, it took her longer than it should to see things Blackie’s way.

  “I hate to have to say this, but no case is ever as open and shut as you would like it to be.”

  “Yeah?” Blackie asked, confronting the inevitable.

  She glanced apologetically at me and brushed back her bangs from her eyes. “There’s the tiny matter of his having been in and out of the State Hospital a time or two.”

  Finally! It was out in the open. As if it weren’t always out in the open. Who would believe the testimony of a nutcase over a battered wife’s?

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Make sure you document everything you can, start marshaling witnesses on your behalf, character references, that sort of thing.”

  She wasn’t finished. She glanced again at Kit’s attorney’s name and address.

  “You might start looking for a real divorce lawyer, too. The one she found for herself, I’ve heard of him. He has a reputation for winning his cases.”