Red-Blooded Heart

by V. J. Chambers

  Right.

  And Graham figures into this how?

  No, maybe it is something worse. Maybe Graham hurt Elsie in some way. I wouldn’t put it past him. He’d probably use his fists on a little girl.

  So, then Juniper brought him out here to torture him with the lack of cell service. No, that doesn’t make sense. Why would she risk it? He practically killed her.

  Maybe she wants to rehabilitate him. Maybe she thinks that the influence of the fresh air and nature will bring out his better nature.

  But if Graham is the man that hurt her sister, how can she bear to kiss him? To fuck him? Because I’m sure she was fucking him.

  And the thought of that makes me feel angry and sick to my stomach, even though Graham is gone.

  None of it makes any sense.

  Not at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  -deke-

  I go back the next day, hoping to get back into her house and read some more of the letters, but Juniper’s home that day. Judging from her shelves, she went out to stock up her kitchen. She’s bought canned goods, rice, and fruit preserves.

  She’s on the phone that day with Graham’s friends, asking if they’ve heard from him. No one has, of course, and this seems to depress her even worse.

  At one point, she throws the phone across the room and yells out, “Damn it, you’re making it worse by making everyone worry about him, Juniper!” Then she crumples onto her couch and buries her face in her hands.

  I think she’s crying.

  But after a while, she raises her face, and her eyes are dry.

  She leaves the house after that. She goes out and gets in her truck and drives off, but when she leaves, she doesn’t go down the road, in the direction of town, but up it, and there’s only one thing up the road.

  My place.

  Shit.

  I scramble out of the crawlspace and sprint back through the woods. When I get back to my place, I find her on her tip toes, peering in through my window.

  “Looking for something?” I call.

  She turns at the sound of my voice, chastened. Then she takes me in, and her brow furrows. “What happened to you?”

  Shit. I touch my face. “Uh… yeah, I fell. In the woods. It was dark. I hit a lot of things.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  I hurry to the door to my house and open it. “You want to come in?”

  She follows me in.

  I shut the door behind us. “Um, can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Tea?”

  “I’m fine.” She folds her arms over her chest. “Have you seen Graham?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Did you get into a fight with Graham?” Her nostrils flare.

  I chuckle, pretending that what she’s said is preposterous. “Aw, that’s adorable. You think I’d defend your honor, huh? You made it pretty clear it was, what did you say? None of my business. So, no, I did not get in a fight with him.”

  She’s a bit shaken by my response. She knows that if I’d beaten him up, I’d probably be proud of it. “Well, maybe he got the better of you and you’re embarrassed. If a city boy beat you up, that would fuck with your mountain-man cred, right?”

  “Look, is your dickwad boyfriend missing or something?”

  She sighs. Her whole body deflates. She seems exhausted and careworn. “He must have followed me out into the woods that night.”

  “What night?”

  “You know what night.”

  “The night you guys came over for dinner? You haven’t seen him since then?”

  She shakes her head. “No, when I went into the house after you left, he wasn’t there.”

  “Well, shit,” I say. “He should have come back by now.”

  “I know,” she says. She twists her hands together.

  I shrug. “Good riddance, I say. You dodged a bullet. You don’t need that asshole anyway.”

  “He’s probably dead,” she says. “I know you said that coywolves never attack people, but they were close that night, and Graham is stupid out in the woods, and…”

  I eye her. “Well, what are you going to do? If you report him missing, you’ll probably have a search party up here, combing every square foot of the woods. If he’s dead, they’ll find his body. But, you know, maybe he just decided he was sick of roughing it. He could have hiked into town, hitchhiked back to the city?” If she’s going to have a search party, I probably need to go and move the bodies.

  Hell. Bodies. How did I end up with bodies plural in my woods?

  “You think he could be alive out there?” she says.

  “Sure,” I say. “It’s only been a few days. But if he’s wandering in the woods out there, he’d surely have come to a house by now or something. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s not like there are thousands of acres of undeveloped land out there, either. There are people out there.”

  “I guess I have to report it then,” she says. “I mean, I couldn’t leave him on his own.”

  Damn it. “I guess you couldn’t.”

  “But you think maybe he hitchhiked somewhere?”

  “It’s a definite possibility.”

  She hugs herself. “So, then he’d just turn up at some point.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I doubt he died of exposure,” I say. “It’s the twenty-first century. And he had his cell phone, right?”

  She doesn’t answer. She just heads for the door. “Well, thank you, anyway.”

  “Any time,” I say.

  She opens the door. “How was the deer?”

  “What deer?”

  She turns to look at me. “The roadkill deer? The one you had in the back of your truck?”

  Shit. “Oh, that one,” I say. “Yeah, of course. Well, I, uh, cut it up and put it in my freezer. Haven’t had a chance to eat any of it yet.”

  “Hope it’s delicious,” she says.

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  She hesitates in the doorway.

  I go to her. I’m quiet. “Look, if you wanted to forget about him, I don’t think anyone would blame you, under the circumstances.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Did you come out here to get away from him?” I say. “Did he do something to you or someone you care about?” I’m fishing for info, but need to know.

  “No,” she says. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Uh… I don’t know. Most people who come out here are running from something, I guess.”

  She looks me over. “What are you running from?”

  * * *

  Alice thought it would be a good idea to break up with me over the phone. I almost didn’t answer it, because I was in the middle of writing a paper on Walt Whitman and the Civil War, and I remember that I looked at my phone, saw it was her, and almost didn’t pick up. But then I did, mostly because I figured I could use a break from quoting poetry written about Abraham Lincoln. I was pretty sure that Walt Whitman had a crush on Abraham Lincoln, because Walt Whitman was really fucking gay.

  Which, incidentally, is cool with me.

  Gay people, that is.

  I know some guys are weirded out about it, and the reason for that is fear.

  Guys are afraid of gay men, because gay men are men—which means that they have muscles and upper body strength and that there’s a possibility that a gay man could force himself on the straight, homophobic dude.

  People will deny this, but it’s subconscious. It’s the same reason that women are wary of men—all men. Like, not to get back to that whole thing about how men are evil and women are good, but that’s where all that wrong-headed business has its roots. Women fear men because men are stronger than them. And straight men fear gay men because of the possibility that gay men could be stronger than them. It’s all just fear of rape.

  Not that it’s likely to happen, you understand.

  See, here’s the problem. Men are demonized in our culture bec
ause women have subconscious fear, but the truth is that most men don’t have any desire to rape anyone or hurt anyone. Deep down, most people are good.

  People used to be afraid of gay men—not just homophobic straight guys, but also everyone. Mostly women were afraid that they were going to rape their little boys, I think.

  Also, people tend to be afraid of things that they don’t understand.

  Anyway, having come to grips with my subconscious fear of butt-rape, I’m totally over it. I can address the weird feeling that I have when I hear about gay guys, and think, “Oh, you’re just having a lizard-brain fear response, but there’s no basis in reality for it, and you’re not in danger.” So, therefore, I’m not afraid of gay guys.

  I think I’m going to stop talking about this, though, because I’m beginning to protest too much.

  It’s only that I want you to know that I have no problem with gayness at all. And lesbians? Why would I have a problem with lesbians? I have nothing to fear at all from lesbians.

  See, when Alice told me that she liked girls and she wanted to break up, I wasn’t angry with her for being gay.

  That wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help being gay.

  Really, I probably shouldn’t have been angry with her at all, because I do know that there’s a lot of pressure from society to conform to norms, and it must have been hard for Alice to admit to herself that she wasn’t like everyone else. And it wasn’t a crime for her to have tried having a boyfriend, just to see if maybe she did like men, even a little. Someone had to be the experimental boyfriend. I drew the short straw.

  I shouldn’t have been angry.

  No, looking back on it, I see that was the complete wrong response.

  But here’s the thing. I was angry. I was furious.

  And this fury didn’t have a lot to do with Alice, if I’m honest. It wasn’t about her rejection of me or about her preference for pussy. It was about something within me. My whole life, I have felt as though there is something really wrong with me. And the fact that I couldn’t even attract a real, heterosexual woman, that seemed to cement that feeling.

  You know, a lot of things over the years have cemented that feeling. And whenever I would feel that self-loathing bubble up inside me, it was like this fuse that was burning down, and there had to be somewhere for it to explode. So, what I always did as a kid was to burn things.

  It started out small. Twigs and branches and then dog houses and then… well, it got bigger.

  What I like about fire is that it’s destructive but it’s also beautiful. It’s mesmerizing. Show me a fire, and I’ll show you a bunch of people who want to stare into it. The way the flames move and the crackle of the burning wood, and the way that the things that burn change shapes and slowly turn black and then fall completely apart. God, I can’t even describe how amazing that is. And then from a metaphorical standpoint, once the fire is out, all the badness has been burned out, and everyone is free to start new.

  Fire wipes the slate clean.

  Starting those fires, it would burn out the bad part of me. It would make way for the better parts of me to emerge.

  And this thing with Alice, her confession, it was the worst kind of lit fuse I ever felt.

  She was supposed to be at her new girlfriend’s place when I lit her house on fire. I didn’t think anyone was in there.

  But when I heard her start screaming…

  Maybe I did know she was in there. Maybe I wanted her to suffer like I was suffering.

  Anyway, I’ve mentioned before that it’s really hard to make arson look like an accident. It’s pretty obvious that fire in Alice’s house was set by someone. It’s probably not hard to build a case against me. So, I just can’t have people knowing where I am.

  That’s what I’m running from.

  I’m running from those flames.

  Funny thing is, I haven’t set a fire since I got here, not one of those crazy fires, anyway. I think maybe needing to build a fire every day to cook or to heat my house, it satisfies some deep, ancient part of myself, and it keeps that wild piece of me in line.

  * * *

  Killers get caught for doing stupid things like going back to the crime scene or back to the burial site of their victims. Apparently, those kinds of killers go back because they want to relive the crime and all of that, and I am not one of those kinds of killers.

  I mean, really, I killed some people, but I don’t think that should make me a killer. I think I should be a regular guy who just happens to have killed a few people.

  Of the people I killed, the one I feel the worst about is Darius, though, because he didn’t do anything to deserve it.

  I go back to find his remains, because I’m pretty sure that Juniper’s going to have a whole team of people out here soon, looking for Graham, and I’ve got to hide things.

  But when it comes to Darius, there’s not actually a lot left at this point. His clothes are here, and most of his bones—not all—some predator has gotten pieces of him.

  I load what’s left up into a big plastic trash bag and then I take the bag to a cave I found when I was out here exploring. The cave has some trash in it already. I think some kids used to come out here and party or something, because there are beer cans and husks of fireworks and cigarette butts. I toss the bag amongst the rest of the junk in the back of the cave. No one will look at it twice.

  Sure, someday, someone might find it, but I don’t think it’s likely they’ll connect it to me.

  I feel like ass about it, though.

  I stand over the trash bag and talk to it, apologizing, telling Darius that I don’t think that he’s trash to be discarded, and I wish that I could offer his body more respect, because I know that he just got caught up in the wrong thing. I tell him that I wish that he hadn’t died. I tell him that I’m sorry that I did what I did.

  When I leave him there, I try as hard as I can to push my guilt away and not to dwell on it, but it’s harder than it usually is. It’s hard to move. My legs and arms are sluggish, as if they’ve been weighted down. I feel heavy and exhausted.

  But I’m not done, not by a long shot.

  I’ve got to go and do something with Graham’s body.

  Graham is in a very disgusting stage. His body is bloated. He’s still intact, but there are… liquids and gasses and other things that are escaping through his skin. He smells bad. I use a shovel to turn his body over and there are maggots and insects that are living underneath him.

  I know for sure that I cannot lift him and carry him. He is just too gross. And there’s no way he can go in my truck. I would never get the truck clean after he had been there.

  I also resolve to stop calling him ‘he’ and start calling him it, because Graham is gone, and his body is a thing. It is not Graham, not anymore.

  So, I need another plan.

  I wander around for a while, trying to think of something. I decide to bury it, which isn’t ideal, because it will preserve the body and it will take longer for it to decompose and someone might find it and figure out that he was killed by a gun shot and then suspect me, but damn it, I can’t have the body found right now.

  I do it.

  I bury the body close to where I left it, figuring that if they have dogs out here, they’ll find this spot anyway, and then they’ll know that the body was moved or something.

  I turn over all the soil and everything the body has lain on, into the ground, and it all gets buried. If it’s down under the ground far enough, the dogs won’t get the scent. When I’m done, I make sure not to leave a telltale hump in the ground, and I cover the grave up with leaves. I drag a fallen-down tree over the grave.

  Then, when I get home, I google it, and I discover that dogs can scent out buried bodies anyway, so I am totally fucking screwed.

  That night, I dream that I am locked up in jail, and my mother comes to visit me. She is shaking her head and wringing her hands and saying that it was all for nothing, everything she did for me, and I am sc
reaming at her to leave and to go away and that I don’t want to see her anymore.

  When I wake up the next morning, I call Felix and ask him if he still wants to bring his wife and kids up to my place to try out the hot tub. He’s all about it.

  Before we hang up, I casually say, “Oh, I was watching this show where they had these cadaver dogs that could sniff out dead bodies. Our police department doesn’t have anything like that, does it?”

  He snorts. “Hell, no. We can barely afford to keep two deputies. We don’t have any dogs at all.”

  Great news.

  But now I have to put up with a visit from Felix and his family, and all so I could ask that question. The things I do for peace of mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  -juniper-

  The nearby town of Daviston doesn’t actually have a police department. It’s too small. It’s not so much a town, anyway. It has a post office, a grocery store, a gas station, and a bunch of houses lining Main Street. It’s sort of an outpost, to be honest. So, I have to go to the next town over, Thomas Bridge, to actually report the fact that Graham is missing.

  I’m still not even sure that I want to do it.

  Basically, I just want to know what happened to Graham. I’ve had this crazy idea that I could still make my plan work if Graham is dead. If I know he’s out in the woods somewhere, killed by coywolves, then I feel like I can make a go of it.

  But if he’s alive, and he shows back up at some point, then my plan won’t work.

  It might be awful to wish that Graham is dead, but he’s an awful person, and he’s never going to change. I don’t know why he’s the way he is, but he’s broken or damaged or something and he’s going to damage everyone he comes in contact with. So, his being dead is better for the world.

  When I determined to use him in my plan in the first place, I already assuaged any guilt that I had by assuring myself that being part of my plan would be the best thing that Graham ever did for anyone. Other than this, all he’s ever done is cause pain and anguish.

  So, no, I’m not bothered by the idea of his being dead.