by Adam Johnson
Mills made it to the door and closed it behind him. When he looked out the window the children were standing silently in his yard, waiting. When they saw him peeking they yelled Come back out and cut something.
His Army buddies came by later in the afternoon with a case of beer and some whisky. There were more of them now. The other Johnson had come back. He had a shotgun for a right arm, and Greggs had a wheel for a right foot. He could turn it on and go whizzing down the street on one leg.
We are through with running, they said, and have started drinking again. Mills looked at Johnson’s shotgun arm, double-barrel. He wondered how Johnson loaded it, how he took a shower. It was because of the car, Davids said. He was the tallest of them all but he looked short standing there, like he was shrinking. One of his fingers was a butter knife. Seeing you lying there like that reminded us of too many things we hoped were forgotten but really weren’t. The others stood in a circle nodding. Johnson was rubbing his shotgun arm with an oiled cloth. They gave Mills a beer. Now show us how those things work.
Mills spent the evening sawing off the tops of beer cans. He sawed pencils into smaller and smaller sections. He sawed his name into the front door and the neighborhood kids cheered. He sat in the front room with the summer light fading and fireflies hitting all up and down the street and the neighborhood kids standing on the sidewalk in front of his house trying to see his chainsaw fingers. Skeeter nicknamed him Cutty McCutter. They talked about Afghanistan, where it was not uncommon to see someone missing an arm or leg from an IED detonation or an errant bullet or bombs. They saw people missing eyes and ears and noses, people with burns all over them, women wailing over the body of a dead child in the streets, dogs slinking through alleyways, cowering at explosions in the distance.
I suppose, Mills said, waggling his fingers, that there are worse things than having chainsaw fingers.
Dead would be one of those things, Johnson said, but Mills was still inspecting his hand. He had not yet grown used to having chainsaw fingers. He still smelled like the apple nurse. They do not have this technology, Mills said, turning his chainsaws off and on. They do not have the ability to replace hands with chainsaws, or to bring people back from the edge of death, so they just die. His head felt like a balloon, floating slightly above him. How many people dead did you see? Mills said. Because I for one saw far too many and hope that I do not ever see another unless it is myself when I am rising upward toward wherever it is we go when the spirit leaves the flesh. When he crossed the room to get another beer his prosthetic legs were wobbly.
At some point they went out in the yard and Johnson fired his shotgun into the air and the children screamed. Greggs went roaring down the street and ran over a mailbox and the children clapped and shouted and hooked their fingers into the corners of their mouths and whistled. Mills tried to jump on top of the house but he sprung awry and ended up in a tree. Cut it down, cut it down, the children screamed. Mills turned on his chainsaw fingers and started sawing away until all the limbs but the one he was standing on were gone, and when he swung himself down the children yelled for him to cut that one too. When he had cut the last limb they wanted him to cut the tree down and when it fell the children scattered, screaming timber at the top of their lungs, all of them cheering and taking pictures with their phones. When he had cut it all up into small pieces they told him to cut the neighbor’s tree down as well but he was getting tired of them telling him what to do so he waved his chainsaw fingers at them crazily and went inside.
In the morning all the limbs from the tree he had cut were gone and the neighborhood kids were still outside his house. He pulled the blinds and went back to sleep.
He woke when the nurse knocked on the door. She said, You didn’t call me.
The sun stabbed into his forehead. He smelled like alcohol, he could feel it still swimming in his blood.
Some friends came over, he said.
It looks like it, she said. He turned and looked at the room. There were beer cans and whiskey bottles all over the living room. At some point he had sawed up the furniture and it lay in little piles. There was a hole in the floor. He held up his hand and little wood chips were stuck in the teeth of his chainsaws.
Outside, the children were standing in rows, waiting. Go away, he yelled, but they only stared at him until he pulled the nurse in and closed the door.
He took a hot shower and let the water run over his head. He held his chainsaw fingers out of the shower. When he turned them on the sound echoed off the tile walls like he was in the bottom of a well. Walking to the showers in Afghanistan you could hear distant explosions. Walking back the sand blew all over you and you were dirtier than before because the sand stuck to you when you were wet.
He got out of the shower and wiped off the mirror with his good hand. He fired up his index finger and cut his hair, occasionally scraping his scalp, bright bits of blood springing up. When he looked out the window he could see faces pressed against the glass.
When he came out of the bathroom she was cleaning up the living room, picking up the beer cans and whiskey bottles and trying to piece the furniture back together. She had raised the blinds and the light was too bright and on the sidewalk were more kids, dozens now, and a few adults too, sitting in lawn chairs like it was right field at a baseball game. He closed the blinds.
I can’t see, she said. It’s too dark in here.
It’s perfectly fine. Even through the blinds he could imagine the kids standing out there. It reminded him of the circus, the strong man, the bearded lady, the mermaid. Chainsaw Fingers! the sign would read. Watch Him Slice and Dice!
You could throw apples at me, he said, and I could cut them in half in mid-air.
She was scrubbing at the floor. What?
In the circus, he said. We’d make a hell of a team.
Are you still drunk?
I am not, he said, although I wish I was. Drunk, or dreaming.
She stood up. Let’s go dancing. Or get dinner. You need to get out of this house.
I am not going out there, he said.
She peered through a slit in the blinds. This has happened before, she said. The guy with shovel hands threw dirt at them. The one with guns used to walk outside and fire up into the air to make them run, but they only cheered. But they’re only kids, and they will go away. Probably.
I don’t think so, he said.
They made love in his bedroom but he could not finish because he could hear the crowd outside. Occasionally someone would yell for him to come out and cut something in half and that, combined with constantly having to remember not to turn on his chainsaw fingers and slice through her flesh kept him from it. He lay on his back while she went down on him, her tongue caressing him as she moved her head gently, but it did not work. When she left in the morning the children cheered as the door opened, but the cheer turned into a sigh of disappointment when they saw it wasn’t him. One of the children threw a rock that struck her on the forehead and Mills ran out and screamed at them, his fingers roaring to life in little palls of blue smoke. The children screamed. Cut something down they said. Cut a car in half. Cut the nurse in half. The nurse put a hand to her head and came away with blood. Mills led her to the car. He waved his chainsaws at the kids to keep them back but they were chanting Cut her up, cut her up.
The neighbors started charging for parking. People set up across the street with video cameras. Mills stayed in his bedroom. He put blankets over the windows. When the nurse called he did not answer the phone. The kids took turns running up to the house and ringing the doorbell. When the nurse came over and rang the doorbell he thought it was the children again, so he did not answer. The neighborhood kids, thinking the nurse might be let inside when they were not, threw rocks at her, and she ran screaming back to her car.
His army buddies tried to come by but the children would not let them through either. Johnson aimed his shotgun arm at them but they only smiled. When Greggs tried to roll through them they held him
down and took his wheel off and he hopped back to the car and Johnson drove away with his arm out the window. The army sent a chaplain from Bragg and the children let him through, but Mills did not answer the door. The children rang the bell all day and night now. It got into his teeth, the constant rattle, so he cut through the wall and ripped out the wires. The chaplain stood on the front porch pressing the button for a long time, but Mills did not hear because there was no sound.
When the chaplain quit ringing the bell and knocked, Mills peered through the peephole.
Let me in, Sergeant Mills.
I am not a sergeant anymore, Mills said through the door. My fighting days are done.
I would like to speak with you.
You are speaking with me.
The chaplain looked over his shoulder at the children. There were hundreds of them now, watching silently with long drawn faces like melted wax.
Are they always here? the chaplain asked.
Always, Mills said.
That must get tiresome, the chaplain said.
After the chaplain left the kids chanted for hours, keeping Mills awake. He finally drifted off but woke in the green glow of the alarm clock to hear them screaming Cut it down, cut it down and Do them all, do them all. Then they said, Cut her up, cut her up and after that it was Cut yourself, cut yourself. It sounded like the crowds at professional wrestling chanting USA, USA when a bad guy came into the ring.
Some mornings, if the kids weren’t chanting Cut it Down or Do them all or USA, he could hear his army buddies calling cadence a few streets over. It reminded him of army bases he’d been on, platoons running in formation before first light. From a distance they sounded like hound dogs crying out for quarry, or men pinned down in the rocks by sniper fire. He’d sit in the living room with the lights off and listen to them circling and circling, voices growing strained and weary, and sometimes he would think they were drawing nearer, they were coming to save him while the neighbors in lawn chairs slept with their chins on their chests and the kids sprawled out asleep in the dew-wet grass, but always the kids woke when the voices drew too near, and the kids swarmed out into the street to chase Johnson, yelling at him to fire his shotgun, for Greggs to ramp something with his wheel-leg. When his army buddies saw the children coming for them, they turned and ran back the other way, their red-hooded flashlights bobbing into the tops of trees, and the kids assembled themselves in formation in his front yard.
He caught the first intruder early in the morning. He had not slept. He was waiting to hear his army buddies running in the early hours before dawn, but had heard nothing, and he wondered if they were out boozing somewhere, pissing in the middle of the road and wrestling each other and firing their shotgun arms into the air and whizzing around on their one wheel and only occasionally slumping over with their arms around their insides as if something had come loose and saying Oh Dear Fucking God in Heaven why does it have to hurt so much? and Why can I not get these images of people with missing limbs out of my mind, the dead dogs in the streets, the streets themselves, long and silent and filled with rubble while glassless windows stare like silent eyes.
He was lying there in his bed trying to remember what the nurse smelled like when one of the neighborhood kids came crawling through the bedroom window. The kid pushed the blanket and blinds aside and fell onto the floor and lay there looking at Mills.
Mills sat up in bed. He raised his hand and turned on all the saws at once and the kid crawled quickly back out the window. Through the walls Mills could hear the children cheering.
Another one came just after dawn, and another in the afternoon. Mills spent the day nailing the windows shut. He called the nurse and asked her how long until they left the shovel guy and the gun guy alone and she said I’ll let you know when it happens.
You mean it hasn’t happened yet?
I was trying to make you feel better.
You didn’t.
I assumed they would. Leave them alone. Leave you alone. Eventually. But they are drawn to you. To all of you. You have gone some place they do not understand. They cannot help but look. You are something more.
More than what?
Than they are, she said.
In the night they broke out his windows with rocks and he woke with his bedroom full of people watching him sleep.
Turn on your fingers, one of them said. Cut something in half.
Jump on the house, another one told him. We want to see it.
Could you kill people with those? another one said.
Where’s the nurse, one of them said. Have you fucked her yet? Get out, he said. Get the fuck out of my house.
But there were too many of them. They picked him up. Turn them on, they said, and pulled his hair until he did. Then they worked through the night, holding him, a dozen of them at a time, all of them taking turns, their parents sitting in the yard in lawnchairs watching as the kids used his hand to cut away the walls of his house. They started in the corner, holding Mills like he was made of cardboard, his arm extended, chainsaw fingers roaring as they cut a vertical line at the corner and then a horizontal line across the top of the wall and then down the other corner and then the kids all together pushed and the wall tilted outward and landed with a loud cough like a landmine going off. Then they did the next wall and the next until all sides of the house were peeled away. They threw the TV in the front yard and cheered as the glass exploded. They cut up his favorite chair. They threw the pictures like frisbees. Mills struggled and kicked and tried to rake them with his chainsaws but there were far too many. Mills was screaming and crying, yelling for someone to help him but there was no one to help. When they finished and only the roof and a few supports were left standing, they gently deposited him in his bed and went back and stood in the front yard again. All the walls had been cut away. Everyone could see inside now.
ALEX MAR
Sky Burial
FROM Oxford American
IN FEBRUARY OF 2002, Patricia Robinson wrote to her daughter, the third of her five grown children, about a hospital appointment for her broken wrist.
Mary, I was wearing your hat—the purple & green & other colors one—to keep me warm & cover up my bad hair which was uncombed. Picture the old lady in gray sweatsuit, in jaunty hat with sprigs sticking out, shawl-wrapped wrist clutched to breast, shod in fat socks & men’s slippers—what a mess! And I had NO underwear, let alone clean. No pocket handkerchief. Dreadful! But they were nice to me anyway.
Patty was sixty-nine then—she would live seven more years—and she’d long ago developed a cavalier attitude toward her aging body, and her mortality, as one of many strategies for shrugging off disappointments. She told Mary that she’d turned down the doctor’s recommended surgery because “I’m betting on my body to repair itself as always.” She wrote, “I really do think my bones know who’s the boss, and I have spoken to them.”
Now it is May of 2014, and I am removing Patty’s bones from a long cardboard box. Here are the pieces that made up her arms: the humerus, the ulna, the radius that was fractured. Here are the halves of her pelvic bone, each ilium curved like a dish. Her vertebrae have been collected in a pile; her individual ribs are banded together with a Velcro tie. I remove her skull and cradle it, upside down, in the palm of my hand, where it fits perfectly. Without the jawbone, I can see her dental work clearly: two large gold molars, a bridge, and two porcelain crowns. When she’s turned upright to face me, I can also see the markings in her orbital bones, around her sockets.
I lay my fingertip there, just inside the socket, where some of the bone is chipped away: it was pecked out, by the beaks of vultures. These are the markings the huge black birds made when they consumed her eyes, with the permission of her family.
The few thousand acres of Freeman Ranch in San Marcos, Texas, include a working farm; fields studded with black-eyed Susans; and a population of white-tailed deer, Rio Grande turkeys, and brawny Gelbvieh bulls. But there’s more nested here: if, on your way f
rom town, you turn off at the sign onto dirt road, and if your vehicle can handle the jerky, winding drive five miles deeper into the property, you will come across two tiers of chain-link fence. Behind this double barrier, accessed by key card, sixteen acres of land have been secured for a special purpose: at this place, settled in the grasses or tucked under clusters of oak trees, about seventy recently dead humans have been laid out in cages, naked, to decompose.
Just beyond the gates is where I meet Kate Spradley, a youthful, petite, and unfailingly polite woman of forty. She has short, mousy hair that’s often clipped in place with a barrette, and dresses in yogastudio t-shirts that explain her slim, almost boyish figure. Kate is so utterly normal that it takes a moment to register the peculiarity of her life’s work: she spends her days handling and cataloguing human remains.
Kate, an associate professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, does most of her work at their Forensic Anthropology Center (FACTS)—the centerpiece of which is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF), the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Including Kate, FACTS has three full-time researchers, a rotating crew of anthropology graduate students and undergraduate volunteers, and a steady influx of cadaver donations from both individuals and their next of kin—brought in from Texas hospitals, hospices, medical examiners’ offices, and funeral homes. When I arrive, Kate is helping lead a weeklong forensics workshop for undergrads, spread out across five excavation sites where skeletal remains have been buried to simulate “crime scenes.” Under a camping shelter, out of the intense sun, she stands before a carefully delineated pit that contains one such skeleton: jaws agape, rib cage slightly collapsed, leg bones bent in a half-plie. In the time since it was hidden here, a small animal has built a nest in the hollow of its pelvis.
