by Muriel Gray
“My name is Josh Spiller.” He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. “Are you Amy’s father?”
Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted in the man that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger and, most perplexingly, fear.
“Yeah.”
There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.
“I was driving the truck.”
The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.
“What you want?”
Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.
“To say sorry.”
The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.
“You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.”
Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?
He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.
“It was her fault, for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.”
He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.
“She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.”
He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crablike over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.
He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.
What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.
Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.
9
She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.
A 10a scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.
The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.
Seven inches by seven-sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10a held its own.
A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.
At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying, of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.
The thud of a ball hitting the backyard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.
“Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.”
“Get the ball, you jerk.”
“Get it yourself.”
She waited. They were laughing, their young, high-pitched yelps growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.
Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.
She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.
As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken—they could never be corrected or retracted—a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.
Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry-cloth baby suit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.
It took only five minutes to walk back to the truck, during which time he worked hard to get that sad, mixed-up man’s face out of his mind.
She was still there, parked at a tortuous angle outside the store, and his heart leapt at the thought of the simple pleasure of climbing into his own private space, the place that smelt of him, that housed the detritus of his driving life, and starting her up. But as he came closer, Josh remembered the consistency of what had been under those wheels, and his pace slowed to a crawl. Would they have cleaned it up? Would anyone have been under there since they slid beneath the trailer and scooped out what was left of Amy Nevin? The
saliva dried in his mouth. He approached the trailer from the back and walked slowly along its flank towards the cab.
There was nothing to see. The wheels were just wheels.
A darker patch of asphalt under the whole cab was the only sinister suggestion that maybe someone had taken a hose to it, and it made him look towards the store. There were people in the window of Campbell’s Food Mart peering out at him.
He could see their heads and shoulders turned towards him, watching silently over a display of cans and giant bags of nachos as if waiting for something to happen, and for a moment he thought of going in, asking them what they saw. But the face of Amy Nevin’s father came back. That twisted, weeping, mad face. He wanted no more of this. Either everyone here was blind and insane or he was, and right now he didn’t care to work out which.
Driving would help him think. It always did. With eyes boring into him, he unlocked the cab, climbed in and sat down heavily in his seat, which bounced in happy response. There was a brief moment of paralysis as Josh started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He listened to the familiar throaty throbbing, feeling it vibrate up his spine, and for a fraction of a second he thought he might never drive again. There had been plenty of fur and feathers beneath those wheels, but never soft white skin and tiny bones. He’d never even clipped anyone, despite cretins stepping out of car doors into his path and kids playing chicken on city streets. He stared at the gas pedal as though it had grown teeth, then took a breath, dug deep into what was left of his tattered resolve and won.
Josh Spiller wanted out of Furnace.
The street was not sufficiently wide to turn in, so Josh drove ahead, looking for a side street that would take him back the way he’d come. The opportunity came at the end of the block, where a sign told him that the interstate was seventeen miles away down the route to his right. It was a different route from the one he’d come in by, and longer, but it was heading south so he would make up the mileage when he rejoined the interstate. And from here it looked like a better road.
There was little pleasure in driving, but as he increased his speed past the last of those heavenly suburban houses, and a small sign said LEAVING FURNACE, the vise around his heart loosened a notch.
The road was heading back down the mountains again, but this time it did so in a more generous and less winding fashion. Lacy budding forest still formed an impenetrable cloak on either side, but only a few miles out of the town normal Appalachian life started to appear. Here and there the odd run-down cabin poked a roof or porch from the trees, and an unpleasant-looking general store even boasted a roadside location with the comforting sight of abandoned rusty cars growing from the sumacs in the rough field behind.
Josh was numb now. He was back on automatic and he drove without thinking, letting the moving landscape roll in front of him. Five miles on and a huge clearing to his left revealed a long low restaurant called Mister Jim’s. It looked modern and clean, but more important the parking lot was big enough to take Jezebel. Josh started to brake and pull in.
He couldn’t be defeated by an answering machine. There was no question that he had to hear her voice, that just to hear Elizabeth’s mouth working its way around words, whether angry, hurt, loving or indifferent, would be his only salvation. The shop. He could call her there. He had to call her.
There were only two other vehicles in the parking lot, a crumbling Dodge Ram pickup and a blue and cream van that had the logo of the restaurant painted inexpertly on the back doors. Josh pulled the rig into the side, parallel to a regimented line of sapling trees tied to stakes that suggested Mister Jim wanted his restaurant to rival an urban fast food lot. He left the rig running to heat up, climbed out and locked the door behind him, casting an affectionate eye at the few bold birds that, undeterred by the growling of the engine, were flying at the radiator grill to feast on the insect life that was killed and stored there.
In Mister Jim’s, at least, the class system had restored itself. White trash wasn’t at home mowing a smooth, thousand-dollar lawn. It was watching TV behind the counter.
The girl was overweight and the hair that framed her pasty face had plainly been several colours before arriving at this dry thatch of yellow. She popped a membrane of gum and turned towards Josh as the swing door creaked slowly shut behind him.
“Seat yourself. Be right with you.”
She turned back to the television set, which was showing a children’s programme, suggesting that her last promise was unlikely to be honoured.
There was plenty of choice of seating. Only one other diner, undoubtedly the owner of the Dodge Ram, sat nursing a beer with his back leaning against the window and his legs up on the long, red, plastic-cushioned bench.
Josh didn’t need a seat.
“Where ‘bouts is the phone?”
She continued to watch the screen. “Gotta eat to use the phones. Otherwise there’s a booth at the store up the hill.”
“I’m planning on eating. Where is it?”
She turned to him and took a notepad and a portion of a pencil from her greasy pocket. “Yeah? What’ll you have?”
Josh looked up at the TV, clenched his fists and ran a tongue over his dry lips. When he looked back down, the waitress’s face was all but obscured by the expanding gum sphere. It popped.
“A coffee and a Danish.”
“No Danish. Got donuts.”
“Okay, a donut.”
She nodded and wrote it down as if it needed remembering, then looked lazily back up at him. “Phone’s out by the washroom.” She indicated with her head.
The other diner watched Josh without interest as he walked quickly in the direction of the indifferent nod, then got back to rubbing the neck of his beer bottle with a thumb.
10
She was perfectly still and he watched her from the corner of an eye, careful not to let her see him staring. He waited quietly, trying to be equally still until she spoke.
“Well, there it is.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She ran a hand thoughtfully over the dash of the police car and sighed. “Are you frightened of me. Deputy?”
The man felt his pulse quicken. “No, ma’am.”
She laughed, a crisp, brittle sound. “Really? That’s good.”
She turned to him, watching him squirm for a second, then her tone changed quickly into a businesslike chirp. “How long has he been in there?”
“ ‘Bout ten minutes.”
She nodded, then ran her hands over her legs. “Okay. Let’s get to it.”
The man returned the nod and was rewarded with the dazzle of her smile.
Deciding that anything would be preferable to remaining under the searing insincerity of that grin. Deputy Cameron shifted the gear stick clumsily and moved off.
“Come on… come on… for Christ’s sake.”
Josh gritted his teeth as the calling card voice went through her brain-dead speech before connecting him. Then, at last, the sound of a phone ringing.
“Hi. All Dressed Up.”
He closed his eyes and breathed out through clenched teeth, speaking his word in a hiss with the last of that breath.
“Nesta?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
His eyes flicked open.
“Casper the friendly ghost. Who the fuck do you think it is? Let me speak to Elizabeth.”
There was a silence, a muffled silence, as though a hand had been put over the receiver for a moment, then Nesta’s voice was back, but this time it had been dipped in acid.
“Cute, Josh. Real cute. And to think I said, naw, you’re wrong, the guy’s okay. Nice language.”
“Look, Nesta, just put her on.”
“She’s not here.”
“Sure she’s there. I can see you making dumb faces and flapping your hands at her from here.”
“Yeah? Can you see this?”
“What?”
“My middle finger, smartass. You can spin on it.”
Jos
h put a hand to his brow. He took a deep breath and tried to sound calm. “Okay, Nesta. I’m sorry. Okay?”
There was a huffy silence.
“Okay?” he repeated.
Nothing except the background noise of voices, dull thuds and clanking. Shop noises.
“I just need to talk to her. I know she’s there. Please. Look. Just tell her I love her. I’m sorry and I love her.”
“She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
“Tell her, for Christ’s sake.”
The hand went over the telephone again. Josh listened to that thick silence, his heart increasing its pace in anticipation of who might speak to him next. But the next voice was not the one he’d expected. It was a woman, okay, but it was that robot of a woman on the phone card.
“You have one minute left on Driveline.”
“Shit. Nesta! Can you hear me! Nesta. I only got a minute left on this card!” The silence continued. For a long time. Josh raked in his pocket for dimes. It was long distance from here. He’d need a lot of dimes. As it was, he had none.
And then the hand was lifted and her tearful voice suddenly caressed him.
“Josh? Where are you?”
He closed his eyes again, and exhaled like a man winded. “Oh, babe. Shit. It doesn’t matter. I’m coming home.”
“No. Don’t.”
Her voice had gone flat and dead again, the voice of someone who wanted him to know the bitterness was still there. This would take time. He didn’t have it. The line went dead. Josh screamed at the phone, slammed it down on the hook and ran back into the restaurant. The girl was still watching the TV show, where big furry green birds were now dancing frenetically.
“Give me some change for the phone. Quick. Please.”
Her eyes stayed on the TV.
“It don’t take coins. Slot’s broke.”
He gawped at her, considering how good it would feel to rabbit-punch the back of her thick, fleshy neck, then turned, ran back to the phone and instead punched in one zero zero.
