by Nancy Mauro
She takes it personally anyway.
Who can explain hidden aggression? The tickle of it can be kept down to a feather most days. Although, if she sometimes wants to kill Duncan, doesn’t it follow that he wants to kill her too?
The truth—when you really come down to it—is that she doesn’t need Duncan. Not in the traditional sense. Not for the mechanics of opening jars and carrying large boxes. Despite the heat, she shivers. Thinks of herself in the hated posture of the pigsticker; sprattle-legged over the wild boar with a tire iron in her raised fist. What sort of damage does a woman like this do to a man? If he has stopped loving her, isn’t it because she’s given her husband no soft spot to land? Not a single fissure to seep through? She was supposed to let him hold doors and reach high shelves.
She was supposed to let him kill the pig.
It was a wheelbarrow. Duncan remembers it only as he comes around the back of the house and finds Lily in a plastic windbreaker dragging the cracked tarp around the garden. While his wife’s been toiling against the rain like a pioneer woman, here he is, empty-handed, having failed his one simple task of the afternoon.
“There were no wheelbarrows,” he says.
Under the flimsy hood, Lily scrapes her hair back from her face, avoiding the swollen side of her brow. The rain has picked up enough to obscure her eyes behind her glasses.
“I swear I saw one outside the hardware store yesterday.”
“Yeah, well. Not today.” He picks up a side of the tarp and helps drag it over to the garden. “I did get the latest on the Sovereign of the Deep Wood, though.”
“More?”
“Not more, just worse,” he says. “A dumpster this time. Behind the Old Mill.”
“Does that preclude us?”
“Wishful thinking.”
The soil has turned viscous in places and tugs at his sandaled feet with a pleasant sucking action. Duncan considers standing in place, allowing the earth to take him if it so wishes. The mud doesn’t seem to stop Lily. She skims across the surface as though she’s been waist deep in the business her entire life. This familiarity with the land, her shine to the country and the elements quietly bothers him. Not once has she mentioned any need to return to the apartment, even for a day or two. Which leads him to wonder what she’ll do once the summer is over. Does she have any intention of returning home? Or will she simply wait here to be run out of town?
“How’s your face?”
She looks up from under the hood. “Slightly less disfigured. At least my cheek and hands are fine.”
“I’m surprised you left the house like that yesterday. To go to the library.”
“Why?”
“Your eye was nearly puffed shut. I thought you’d stay home.”
“Well, you were busy working. I didn’t want to disturb you.” Lily’s staring at the ground near the hedgerow, wiping her glasses on her wet skirt. She lifts a patch of grass that has been skinned from the soil in fine strips. “Come and look at this.”
He slowly pries his feet from the mud, circles the scarp and crag to squat beside her near the hedge. Lily flips back the shredded lawn. Underneath are a series of holes, each the depth of a mixing bowl and still relatively dry under the grass lids. Her peasant skirt, meanwhile, has grown damp and sticks to her legs and ass so that he can see the high cut of her underwear.
“We didn’t dig these,” Lily says. “That dog was here.”
“The poodle?” Some sort of lace underwear he’s never seen before. When has she started wearing lace underthings? “I don’t think poodles dig, Lily. They’re water retrievers.”
“Any dog will dig if there’s something to unbury.” She stands up quickly—could she tell he was looking at her ass? “Maybe that’s why we’re missing so many small bones.”
“And here I thought it was because you’ve been digging alone.”
She looks at him. “I dug alone. Once.”
“Are you sure?”
Lily’s moving back to her end of the tarp. “Why would you say that?”
He follows and takes up an opposite corner, stretching the heavy canvas over the south side of the plot. “There’s not much to do here all week.” Duncan tries to weed inflection and injury from his voice. “A cold case in your very own backyard. I’d be tempted.”
“Well, that’s you.” She’s avoiding his face. “I’ve been working.”
“Right. How’s the pointed arch going, by the way? The library, how are you finding it?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Say it like what?”
“The library. Like you can’t imagine anyone taking pleasure in a pursuit that doesn’t involve motion picture. You talk like it’s a personal affront to you.”
“Well, I’ve got to wonder why you haven’t made it over to Bard. They’ve got a real library. At the level you’re working at, I can’t imagine the Osterhagen Lending Library is meeting your research needs.” He works his way toward her, up along the side of the garden where the dog holes are. “I mean, wasn’t that part of the reason for staying here? Bard is close by?”
“I just haven’t made it over yet.” When she looks away he knows he’s caught her in some sort of lie. But the thought only fills him with the same sour happiness he felt while Anne was soaping his dirty dishes. It’s the triumph of his hairy, sweat-stained will.
The garden has produced a sizable rock reserve. Lily uses her foot to roll a five-pounder over an edge of the tarp. “Besides, I don’t need additional research at the moment. I’m structuring a bibliography and writing an outline.” She moves away from him again. “And you know, Duncan, if I was really honest about it, I would be in Europe now, doing on-site research.”
“If you were really honest?”
“Yeah. If I hadn’t decided to stay here this summer instead.”
A loose, horsey snort spurts from his sinus cavities. “What’s holding you back, Lily? And don’t say Tinker. Tinker didn’t exist when we got here.”
She’s silent for a moment. “Does it matter?”
He waits. Waits for the words to elucidate her meaning.
Then turning her face up to him: “It’s me doing all the heavy lifting here.”
Her simple delivery, the flat and firm belief in herself, nearly sends him across the grave at her. “What, are you crazy? I drive up here every weekend—you don’t think that’s making an effort?”
“You’re punching a clock.”
“What are we talking about here? Us, or this bloody house, or what?” He throws down the tarp. “Are you seeing someone?”
She looks up, surprised. “Where did that come from?”
“I have no idea what you’re doing up here, Lily.” He talks with a sawed-off tongue, half his words lost in anger. “Or who you’re doing it with.”
She remains silent.
“You want to accomplish something? Come home.”
“Accomplish something?” Her voice rises sharply in the rain. “You don’t give a shit about my accomplishments.”
He stops, tries to rein in his words. But he can feel the swift roll from his mouth, his shoulders rise and drop in defeat. “You’re right,” he says finally. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I do.”
Lily turns the same shade as newsprint. She bends over suddenly. He thinks she has lurched in pain but a moment or so later she straightens up, her hand cupped and loaded with mud. Before feeling the cool ooze of it on his face, the heavy drip between shirt and chest, he sees Lily’s swollen eye blossom as raw as purple onion. Duncan has to shut his own eyes to prevent the mud, which, against the cheek and nostril, carries the consistency and faint aroma of Turkish coffee dregs, from blinding him. He lifts the bottom of his shirt to his face and wipes. When he can open his eyes again, she is gone.
CHAPTER 24
Organs of Digestion
“Wake up,” he says.
She recognizes his voice, his face, even as he grows out of her amorphous dream shape. He is movin
g away from her, a swift and dark form against the morning light.
“You need to get up, Lily. They’re here.”
She opens her eyes, sees Duncan in his boxers, moving to her bedroom window. And beyond the window, the spark of orange sunrise. She pushes herself to her elbows—it’s strange to find him here, in her room. As if the waking Duncan is less probable than one conjured by her subconscious.
“Who’s here?” She casts her first glance at the alarm clock. It too provides incongruous evidence: 3 a.m.? A chime sounds somewhere in the house, the percussive appeal of a doorbell, and with this she finally wakens to the lucid overlap of her surroundings.
At the window, Duncan’s hair stands up from his head like a crown of palm fronds. Lily cringes; the details of last night are returning. That handful of mud. She slides out of bed, goes to his side, and looks down over the front yard. She was right on one account, it’s nowhere near sunrise. Instead, the deceit of morning. A dozen torches burning across the lawn.
Duncan immediately regrets his cavalier attitude of the previous weeks. If only he had kept his eyes open, his ear to the ground like a good Indian brave, he may have foreseen how vigil could easily turn to riot.
Now they’ve come for recompense, the entire village descending on their front lawn. Thankfully he’d been too tired after the muddy conflict last night to drive back to the city. That would have left Lily here alone with this. In the hallway she tries to push out from behind him but he stops her with a contraction of biceps. He’ll do the talking here. Duncan takes a deep breath, reminds himself that the defining feature of tragedy is always this insoluble conflict between hero and environment. And so when he throws open his front door, it’s done with a great salting of fear and a nod to the inevitable.
“Lucky you answered.” Skinner fingers the doorbell, which is hot and smoking, bells still pealing through the house. “We were gonna start shooting,” he says and flashes the ashy black length of what appears to be an M4 rifle. Behind him, at the foot of the porch, Emmett, with the same goose-egg skull as his father, heaves up a lit torch in greeting.
Duncan feels Lily’s breasts and hands pressed to his back, her stomach curving against the line he draws in the doorway. It’s sick that he’s happiest in these moments—when she’s small and clinging to him in fright.
“We got a little business to take care of.” Skinner rests the semiautomatic in the crook of his arm with the readiness of a folded umbrella. He looks Duncan up and down, the smeared white of his eye visible despite the darkness. “There’s a killer on the loose.”
Behind him, he hears Lily choke.
“What can we do for you?”
“Search party. Change out of your skivvies and let’s go.”
Duncan looks at the gun. “You planning on using that?”
“Sure I am.” Skinner lifts the rifle again, but this time squares it against his shoulder. He aims at one of the front windows. Duncan feels Lily grab at his waist. The old man pulls the trigger. Together they brace against the destruction of glass and wood frame but instead hear the high-speed collision of water and window. A fine vapor follows, a bit of laughter from the front lawn.
“Don’t know why, but the pig used to like it,” Skinner says in a fond voice as he lowers the water gun. “Stupid animal.”
Duncan knows his wife is going to lose it. Lily, who was raised in a house free of boys, has only conjectural knowledge of the formative role played by water pistols, firecrackers, shit talk. Instead of relief or amusement—which he finds himself overcome by—Lily is lit by anger. She shifts away from his body and draws up alongside him. Duncan spots Wakefield under the boxwoods, a couple others from the cannon firing. Most of the men are armed with flashlights. Contrary to his initial impression from the bedroom window, there are only three or four actual torches among the crowd, their wooden handles home-lathed and shifted uncomfortably from hand to hand. The smell of butane fills the air.
“Hey,” Lily says to the men at the bottom of the steps. She’s forgotten her glasses in her bedroom and squints furiously at the assembled. “This is not funny.”
Duncan is suddenly aware of her nightgown, some white cotton scrap woven together from a roll of gauze. He steps in front of her, shields her from the torchlight.
“It’s three a.m.,” she continues over his shoulder. “We were asleep.”
The men give her a long, unfriendly look, as if assessing the price she’d fetch in John Deere replacement parts.
Skinner clears his throat, makes a sound like bubbles blown in a glass of milk. “You two ever hear of a volunteer fire department?” He leans back against an unsteady porch rail. “I want you to guess: What is the key to a successful volunteer fire department, hey?”
The crowd is silent.
Skinner cups a hand to his ear.
“Volunteers?” Duncan says.
Lily punches him in the kidney.
“Correct!” The old man jumps up. “You think those firemen say, ‘Well, I don’t feel like volunteering’?” He turns to address his posse on the front lawn. “Let’s say, what happens one night when Oster Haus catches fire and—look at that—no one wants to volunteer? Everybody’s just standing around, watching the place burn to the ground?” Skinner looks back at them. “You two ever think like that, hey?”
“Christ,” Lily says quietly.
Duncan wonders if she’s as impressed as he is.
“You want to get a little in this life, folks, you got to give a little.”
In his ear Lily says, “You think any of them have gone in the back?”
In considering their current level of vulnerability, Duncan factors in this near-naked wife of his, the smashed Saab in the lean-to, the bones in the cellar, and the garden itself, which is looking more grave than garden. “Lock the door,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “And don’t come out.”
Her crinkled forehead means she’s not tracking his plan.
“I’m going with them. You stay put.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No discussion, Lily. Just do it.” Then he turns, steps onto the front porch.
“Okay,” he says to Skinner and in doing so is aware of offering himself as either decoy or sacrifice or both. “How can I help?”
The turbid eye watches him for a moment. “Some Arab bought out the lumber mill a few years back,” he says, “but I never yet paid my respects.”
Although Duncan’s objective is to move the men off the property, he’s surprised by his sudden desire to carry one of the torches through the woods. The clan, however, considers him a potential liability. Beyond providing brute manpower he’s a downstater unfamiliar with the dense ecosystem of a hardwood forest. This opinion becomes obvious when Emmett, the silent brigadier to his father’s major, hands him a flashlight.
Skinner has divided them into groups of three and employs the mobile tactics of guerrilla warfare in approaching an unsuspecting target. Duncan admits a certain anxiety when the old man refuses to reveal the nature of their mission. His only words as they assume linear formation in the narrow band of trees, You’ll find out soon enough.
The copse begins at the end of the driveway and meanders down to the back lots of Osterhagen. They keep to one side of it while Emmett is sent ahead as a scout to sweep south through the scrub. Duncan can follow the blaze of his torch for half a minute before the man’s swallowed by the bush.
“Emmett don’t talk a lot,” Skinner says, falling into place beside Duncan. “He’s retired now but worked maintenance on all the civil war cannons in Poughkeepsie.” In the forested darkness and torchlight, Duncan thinks the old man could be mistaken for some sort of woodland elf. A midsummer guide causing benign mischief among lovers.
They continue in silence, Skinner leaving him now and then to survey the formation of his renegade band. The only indication of his position is the occasional snap of twigs in the periphery. Duncan estimates they’re traveling about a mile east of the road where he and
Lily hit the boar. And while the moon is a thick magnet tonight, drawing the bay of dogs in the distance, it fails to illuminate their path through the dense canopy of branches. The forest here has been recolonized by pioneer species, trees that have risen to cover what was once destroyed by both Oster’s timber empire and the occasional eastern windthrow. The blindness keeps Duncan on edge. His eyes are impatient, slow to adjust and lacking the reflective properties of other beasts and men. He is grateful, however, for the forgiving spring of forest floor that muffles the sound of their advance.
Skinner again drops in alongside him. “What have you heard?”
Duncan stops, listens. “Nothing.”
The old man motions for him to keep walking. “I’m talking about the Arabs.” He pronounces the A and the rab as two hard and equally detestable entities. “You hear they killed my pig?” Despite the man’s ornamental stature among the towering growth, there’s something specious and terrifying about his conclusions.
“You know for sure?” Duncan asks slowly.
“I’m telling you, ain’t I? They brought him right to my doorstep.”
“How do you mean?”
“You heard. Ground up into pork sausage—one hundred pounds of pork sausage delivered to my door.” The old man’s breath comes in rosemary-scented puffs. “That pig alive was over two hundred pounds. This is what happens when you let those sorts into a town.”
Duncan is careful to keep his beam tracking through the understory He’s not surprised by this new and gruesome conjecturing on the old man’s part.
“Maybe it wasn’t the same pig.”
“What?”
“Maybe they sent you a different pig,” Duncan says carefully. “Like a gift. When they heard yours was gone.”
Skinner stops dead in his tracks. He turns to Duncan. “It’s people like you,” he says with a black look, “who turned this into a country of spineless chickenshits.”
There’s a ruffle of foliage and Emmett emerges from behind, his face dim and excited. Duncan recognizes the look, pure Heart of Darkness.
