The house was only four blocks from the subway stop and the streets were empty without the buzz of shops and restaurants. A lone man shoveled his driveway clean and glanced at Stewart for a short moment, wondering if school had been cancelled that day. The boy trudged through and lit another stolen cigarette, letting his nerves unwind. The wind pulled the smoke off of him and ashes were ripped from their flames like so many grains of sand in a storm.
The house stood before him. He flicked the cigarette aside, letting it die on its own. The embers glowed dimly in the light of morning until it sank down to the filter.
He read the note to himself again.
you dont no me but someone is looking for yor dauter.
He glanced up at the house. The curtains obscured his view of the living room, but when he closed his eyes and reached out, he could feel the girl’s mother sweeping the kitchen floor, unaware that someone was watching their house.
if you do not leav the city, they will tak her. if you
go to the polees, they will tak her and hurt you and
no one will stop them.
He felt himself sink deeper and deeper, going back further and further into the past until the present was just a shard of sunlight on the water’s surface.
yur girls name is Sandra. you had her when you
were 23. she is a danser and has frekels on her nose,
but not her face.
He folded up the note and tiptoed up the walkway to the house.
if you cannot leave today, die her hair brown.
this is not a game
After slipping the note through the mail slot, he stepped away and waited at the end of her driveway. Waited to feel what the woman would do when she found the note.
w.p. johnson
is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and noir. he graduated from temple university with a degree in english literature and has been published by one buck horror, kraken press, shroud, dark moon books, perpetual motion machine publishing, pulp modern, fox spirit books, and thunderdome press. you can follow him on social media through the moniker americantypo. he currently lives and works in philadelphia and is working on his first novel.
AND
ALL NIGHT
LONG WE
HAVE NOT STIRRED
BARBARA DUFFEY
It happened in harvest season. The sunflower fields painted the county yolk-yellow, petals serrating the sky—your mother had taken pinking shears to the horizon. That day, a gray pattern plumed in the southeast, quickly and quietly, so quietly that no one noticed it for several minutes.
“Are the Affenbachs burning their leaves already?” asked Mrs. Nichol. It seemed surreal that they couldn’t smell it yet, as if the fire was happening in a mural composed of the scene across the farm road.
“Hmmmm,” said Mr. Nichol, as the edges of the smoke turned blue-white, the color of skimmed milk. “Machinery,” he said, reaching for the phone.
Mariela was two blocks from school when she first heard about the body in the trunk. She walked through the cloud of smokers every morning, and every morning they said nothing, but this morning they said there was a body in the trunk. She was one block from school when someone stopped to ask if she knew whose car it was that had caught fire on the farm road in the next county over. She hadn’t heard. She hadn’t heard of any car. Whose car? Where? What?
It was that girl’s car with the body in the trunk. She could still see that girl’s shiny pink fingernails clutching her locker door, black as Mariela’s own locker down the hall, far enough away that he might have thought Mariela hadn’t seen his hand, its scrubbed-clean nails cut to the quick and interlaced with that girl’s nails, pink on the black background of that girl’s locker. He might have thought Mariela hadn’t seen.
Mariela had hated this town in this state with the farm roads every mile west to east, every mile north to south, like a checkerboard. She felt trapped, playing checkers with someone who didn’t believe in the king-me rule, someone who made you play back to the front with a single-decker checker. But her parents had brought her because there was work.
Then Mariela had met him at school, and he showed up sometimes at the gas station where she worked behind the counter after school, where she and her co-workers tried to gauge which patrons were too drunk to buy more beer, the stacks of it packed around her peripheral vision so her whole workday seemed framed in red and green diamonds. There he was, smiling, dimpled, framed in red and green diamonds. He seemed a kind of beauty. He got frequent haircuts and always cleaned up before he came back to town from his job at the lumberyard. He started talking to her at work and sometimes she let him buy a 40 when her co-worker was in the bathroom, she too young to sell, he too young to buy.
Then he started talking to her at school. He would meet her at her locker and walk her to pre-algebra. Sometimes she never made it to pre-algebra. She had a vision of those scrubbed-clean nails with their fingers that had been inside her body. She remembered them placed on top of that girl’s hand, the promise that they would go inside that girl’s body. That girl, who was now just a body, just a body in the trunk of her own burned-out car.
What a fucked-up piece of bullshit. Everyone had seen him fighting with Mariela about that girl. Everyone. He tried to think when the fire must have started for the call to go out to the firefighters at four. Couldn’t have been too much before four, but early enough that he could still have made it to his job after the fire started. Could have made it to the field from school and then gotten back to Claussen’s in time. Fuck. What had he done in his hour after school? What had he done? Why couldn’t it have been something better, something that he could at least remember? It had been two days ago. TWO DAYS. Who lost a whole hour just two days later? Maybe this was one of those repressed memory kind of deals. Could he have done it? He didn’t think he had done it. Maybe he should get hypnotized and try to remember his repressed memory of his lost hour. He wondered if the hypnotist, or hypnotherapist, or whatever they called themselves, would make him do things he didn’t want to do. He had an image of himself clucking like a rooster, as a rooster, as a rooster like his grandmother’s crowing around the school, pecking at the sunflowers painted on everything. He wanted to laugh, but something stopped him. The image seemed too right, somehow. He did like that rooster. Envied it, even.
He knew who hadn’t been in school that day, though. Mariela. Mariela had had all day to not have an alibi. Everyone had seen how that bitch had shoved him in the hall. Everyone had heard her scream that girl’s name and shove him and slap him across the back of his shoulder as if she were trying to slap herself, awkwardly, and his shoulder had gotten in the way. What a whacked-out bitch, and now that pretty girl was dead in the trunk of her own car. Mariela didn’t even have a car, but Mariela got to work and school and the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls without a car, so who knew? This was jacked.
The day it happened, the sirens were almost swallowed by your mother’s fabric of sky. The volunteer EMTs took the call. Everyone chewed sunflower seeds anxiously, and until the snow came, there lingered a ring of seed shells around the side of the ditch where the car had been parked. Once they put out the fire, the car was a whale skeleton displayed on stuck wheels. It still smelled like burning oil and melted rubber and singed hair. Of course, her skeleton was inside, and they took it to the morgue in a blue-black body bag. The day after, the one investigator in town went to the morgue in the hospital basement and looked at the body. I cannot tell any child what that body must have looked like. I cannot say how much muscle might have still attached itself to her bones, muscles singed as meat.
The investigator looked at the charred car skeleton parked in the impound lot. He drove out to the farm road and looked at the ring of sunflower shells. He looked up at the tarp of sky. He looked up and down the farm road. He drove to the Nichols’ farm, his truck tires crunching on the gravel of their driveway. Nothing needed paint. Their sunflowers were being harvested by hired help an
d Mr. Nichol. They cut the heads off and left them in the shed to dry, where they would drop their seeds. The seeds would be sold and bought and become seeds that stayed as seeds and seeds turned into cooking oil. The farm smelled vegetal like the inside of a stalk, like rotting lemon in impending rain.
Mrs. Nichol told the investigator that she and her husband were in the kitchen when they’d seen the smoke. She told him what time it was because she had been listening to public radio and the tones that marked the hour had just rung as her husband reached into his pocket for his phone. The investigator wrote this down on a notepad application on his own phone. He said that he would have to speak to Mr. Nichol.
Mr. Nichol came back from the sunflower field smelling of pollen. Pollen clung to his Carhartt jacket and the wrinkles of his palm. He confirmed Mrs. Nichol’s story.
The investigator drove back to town. Tomorrow, he’d have to investigate at the girl’s school. He called the principal. He had programmed the school’s number into his phone because it was also his daughter’s school.
He would have to ask his daughter if she knew the girl.
Mariela wondered what one did with the hatred one held for someone who had died. Mariela knew what the people of this town would do. They would turn the other cheek. They would say, let that girl hit you on your right cheek. Let her ghost do it. Let her ghost slap you on the cheek and wear the bloom of it like rouge. That just made her hate that girl more, hate her for turning him into a murderer. For wasn’t that what he was? She imagined the word “murder” in scrollwork ringed with red and green diamonds, like a Christmas card. She vomited in the one-stall bathroom, but that was nothing new. She took a Sprite from the shelf in the cooler, and her co-worker looked at her knowingly. The co-worker was 25 and lived in the USDA Rural Housing Service complex behind the grocery store. She had two children with two different men, so Mariela didn’t think she was in any position to judge. Mariela calculated the time it took to drive out to the next county. He could even have gone to sixth period, gone to meet that girl on the side of the farm road, and gotten back to the lumberyard for his shift. She straightened the coils of lottery tickets. She sent her mother a text telling her when she got off work. She wondered if her mom would tell the cop about the cans of gasoline in the garage. She wondered if Taylor would tell her dad about the hall that day.
Everyone knew Taylor’s dad was the cop. THE cop. The one who would come around. He did not plan on being around when the cop came around. Taylor knew him before he knew Mariela. Taylor knew him, and she knew Mariela, and she knew that girl. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Should he go to Mexico? How long would that take? Could you do the same thing, only with Canada? How far was Canada?
He went to the I-90 Travel Plaza. Roosters did not have this problem. Roosters did not have to decide if you would have Internet on the highway or if you would have to buy one of those actual maps. There was one rooster for all the women and all the mornings knew who the rooster was and every morning was the rooster’s morning and he told you. He bought a map and he did not tell Mariela he was going and he bought gas at the I-90 Travel Plaza even though it was a dime more a gallon than it was at Mariela’s. Tough shit. It was rooster money. It was rooster money and this rooster was gone to Canada and fuck this shit.
The next morning, the sky was milky gray-blue, the edges of your mother’s bleach spot. In another state, there would have been thunder. The investigator parked next to the cinder track and walked the half-block back to the entrance of the school, its four double-doors ringed with a mural of sunflowers. He asked the principal about the girl. He asked her six teachers. He asked the girl identified as her best friend. He had asked Taylor at dinner the night before. He knew he had to talk to Mariela and to the boyfriend. He knew neither of them would be in class that day.
He walked slowly down the halls, the linoleum corn-gold and shiny only in the corners around the black lockers. He touched a locker, as if he knew it was Taylor’s, softly, superstitiously, as he went by. The smell of overcooked chicken and tomatoes clung to the shiny corners of the halls. He cut through the field behind the school to get back to his truck, the cinders of the track crunching beneath his shoes. He drove to Claussen’s Lumberyard, south through downtown to the sunflower fields that lapped up against the back of the Wal-Mart and the Tractor Supply parking lots. He spoke to Mr. Claussen, and then to Claussen, Jr., before he found out that the boyfriend wasn’t expected until 4:30 anyway. He drove to Mariela’s house, really an apartment in a converted Victorian. It sat kitty-corner from a convenience store advertising walleye for a dollar less per pound than at the grocery store. The investigator bought a Gatorade and waited. He drank his Gatorade. No one came or left the Victorian for twenty minutes. He knocked on the door next to the number of Mariela’s family’s apartment. The door was an unfinished plank straight from the lumberyard, hung but ill-fitting in the frame. Mariela answered the door. His stomach sprung up his throat, sloshing the Gatorade. Her eyes widened when she saw him. He introduced himself. She led him to their Salvation Army couch, green and thinly padded, its springs outlined on the seat of his pants as soon as he sat down. He asked her where she had been that day. She said she’d been sick at home. He asked her if she had a doctor’s note or other documentation she might have used to excuse her absence at school. A decision shadowed her face. They could both see it, hanging there above them, as Mariela’s eyes searched the middle distance for the answer. She got up and brought him a note signed in the clichéd chicken scrawl of her big-city doctor, printed on Planned Parenthood letterhead. She had been sick with morning sickness that morning, an acute case. She reddened. The investigator reddened. The Gatorade threatened to make itself known. The investigator nodded, got something out about evidence, and took the note with him. I want to tell you, child, that you are not like that child. Your mother and I cross-stitched you on the selvage of her stomach-hem. Extra, and inside, but wanted.
Mariela didn’t know what she’d been thinking other than that she couldn’t go to school. When the cop showed up, the surprise dissolved immediately into a bath of relief. At least now it would start happening. She could watch it happen instead of imagining it in her dehydrated mind. Last night after work, she’d gone out to the garage and weighed the red containers of gasoline in her arms, held the cans like large dogs, one in the crook of one arm first, then the other in the other, to see if they were lighter than they should be. Her memory of that day was a square of bare wall six inches from the side of her bed. It smelled like Sprite vomit. It felt warm. It had no time other than the changing of the light. At some point, it got dark. She was pretty sure she hadn’t done it, but to say she hadn’t been delirious would be a denial of the warm light and the bare wall. She did not remember how full the gasoline cans had been.
She didn’t know why she should bother. Why was she worried? Didn’t she know that he had done it, that he had done it without her?
She didn’t, she didn’t know. She knew he didn’t love her, not enough to burn a thing, not enough to burn that girl.
Canada is farther away than you would think. So.
The rooster would let the hens peck each other to death and would probably fuck the corpses later. Maybe he was messed up for thinking that but you saw some pretty weird shit on the farm. Why should he run away because Mariela had pecked that girl to death? Maybe he shouldn’t be on the interstate. Would he be less likely to be found on smaller highways? But then you couldn’t get away, just two lanes with a farm on either side. If you wanted a bona-fide police chase, you needed a good four lanes and a few good-sized towns to drive through. A rooster needs his ROOM, know what I’m saying?
Man, if Mariela had killed that girl, she was one stone-cold bitch. He had not anticipated that. He had underestimated her. A begrudging respect for Mariela wafted through the truck cab. He got a little high off it. He thought maybe that baby would be one righteous little dude. One cute-ass motherfucker. Maybe he should turn himself in so at least Mariela wo
uld be outside taking care of their cute-ass motherfucker. He didn’t want to take care of it. He couldn’t even imagine it. It was impossible. He was going to have to take the heat for this. He was going to have to turn himself in for a murder he hadn’t committed. It seemed almost noble. If he couldn’t be the foreman on a construction crew, he could be a kind of foreman in a family in which he would be absent. He could brag about his kid and hot wife and not have to actually hang out with Mariela every day. At least in jail they fed you. No more of his mother’s slapped-together WIC-bread-and-generic-peanut-butter sandwiches. No more spending all his money at McDonald’s just to get a big enough hot sandwich to make you full when you closed up the lumberyard. He would live in the State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls and work on becoming the bad-ass motherfucker he should never not have been.
The APB went out for the boyfriend around the time he must have turned around. The dispatch desk expected a call from the Highway Patrol near Sioux Falls, or near Rapid City, or near Fargo, or near Sioux City, so when the boyfriend walked into the Public Safety Center and said his name, the volunteer manning the front desk asked him what he had to report. He said, simply, “Myself,” and two beats later, the volunteer understood. It was already the most exciting day of her volunteer career. So she should be forgiven. She should be forgiven for turning around and going herself to find an arresting officer, instead of calling to the back like she was trained to do. She should be forgiven for giving him even thirty extra seconds to think. He wasn’t a quick thinker, but that would have been enough. It would have been enough for a clearer picture of the penitentiary to condense inside his eyes. It would have been enough time for him to slip out to the railroad tracks that run behind the Public Safety Center, because the Dakota Southern came through right around then, and they never found the boyfriend again.
Exigencies Page 18
