Already Jimmy understood—before she demanded the key code, before she emptied the safe, before she destroyed the security feed, before she dulled him with a blow to the temple and left him pinned to the counter and shoved the truck keys in his mouth—that she was in fact the blade and not the meat to be butchered.
The Dummy
She was pretty enough for a man, handsome enough for a woman. That’s what people said about her. She cut her hair short and feathered it up with gel. Her jaw was long and bunched with muscles. Her eyes seemed to squint even when there was no sun. She was thin but not slight, tightly roped with muscle, with wide shoulders set in a constant slouch, maybe because she had bad posture or maybe because she was hiding her breasts. For a laugh she sometimes called them her mosquito bites, because she knew making a joke at her own expense took away the power of those who might try to hurt her. She hated that she lived like this, always guarding against an ugly look, a cruel word, or worse. Her parents named her Johnette.
In high school she wrestled. No one encouraged her to do so, least of all her parents, but she liked the purity of it, a true sport, one body against another. Everyone always said the real wrestlers belonged to the lower weight classes. Anybody athletic over 160, 170 ended up poached by football, baseball, basketball. She wrestled at 120 and did all right in her first season, with a 31–15 record, though many of her wins came when an opponent abstained from a match, refusing to wrestle a girl.
She hated that word. Girl. Only four letters, but crammed into it was a whole lexicon of curses flavored with lavender, bubble gum, and baby powder. It wasn’t her word, but people kept trying to staple it to her. She hated the word she, too, but she hated more the annoyance and cross-eyed confusion that came when she test-drove the pronoun they for a few weeks. She didn’t fit her body, and her body didn’t fit language. The world sometimes felt like a clothing store where shirts were called pants and pants were called sweaters and everything was itchy and sized incorrectly and meant to cause discomfort.
The team practiced on dummies named Bill. The school owned five of them. At the beginning of practice the coach would swing open the supply closet and snap on the light and the Bills would be waiting in a shadowy huddle. They could stand upright. They were made of black nylon. They weighed the same as her, 120 pounds. They had squared heads and rounded fists. They looked like scarecrows dressed head to toe in S&M leather.
Strikes, submission, throws, takedowns. Again and again, she would hurl the Bills to the mat. An arm drag. A duck under. Those were her favorite moves, the moves that didn’t require as much strength, the moves that played off the balance and weight of the opponent.
Her coach was a short old man with enormous hands and a neck so wide he had to scissor a slit in the collar of the gray sweatshirts he always wore. He said you didn’t wrestle for the trophies, you didn’t wrestle for the matches—you wrestled for the drills—and if you didn’t take pleasure in the pain and drudgery of it all, you should go home. Some did, but not Johnette.
Why call the dummies Bill, she asked him, why not Frank, Steve, Joe? He said back in the day, that’s how the dummies came, as legless bodies with “BILL” printed across their chests. She liked the idea of the old Bills better. She imagined them as rice sacks with noodley arms stitched onto them. Something obviously lifeless. Not like these Bills, who stood at odd angles and made moaning, squelching noises against the mats and smelled like the sweat smeared across them daily and seemed sometimes to be gazing at her.
Of course there were those who thought it wrong for her to wrestle, the worst among them a boy named Breck. He wrestled at 190, too slow for football. He drank protein shakes and energy drinks. His breath smelled like the water in a vase full of rotting flowers. Sometimes they sparred together. He liked to bring an elbow to her throat, a knee to her groin and comment on what he didn’t find there. He kept his hair shaved down to the consistency of a wire brush he used to scrape her. Every now and then he tried to grow a failure of a mustache. When he was a boy, Breck overturned a fryer full of hot grease that cooked his left arm completely, the fingernails peeling away, the skin sloughing off like a snake’s, all the way to his shoulder, replaced by scar tissue the color of an angry sunburn. He claimed the arm could feel no pain and to prove his point would prod at it with the tip of a compass or hold a lit Zippo beneath his elbow until it blackened.
Sometimes she felt the same way about her mind. She was not capable of the same sort of injury as others. As if there was something already dead about her. Killing never bothered her. Maybe it even felt a little good to lash out at a world that seemed so intent on hurting her. She shot crows and robins from branches with a slingshot. She chased down grasshoppers and pinched them between her fingers and stared at the black spit that swelled from their mouths—and then she would toss them into spiderwebs and watch them struggle and tangle and eventually go still when a spider danced down and filled them with poison and stitched them into a white sack. A river ran through town, and she would gather frogs from its banks and hurl them high and watch their legs spread as if they might learn to fly. They never did. The cement smacked the purplish guts from them.
She asked her coach if she might take one of the Bills home—she knew she needed to work harder if she wanted to make it to state—and he said all right, so long as she brought the dummy back in one piece. She arranged the Bill in the passenger seat of the old Ford truck she drove and buckled him in so that he wouldn’t lean on the sharp curves. They drove together around town in this way, his black shape beside her like a shadow.
She lived in a neighborhood near the downtown, where bungalows crowded together and oak trees made shady tunnels with their branches and buckled the sidewalks with their old roots. Her house had a two-story detached garage, and from the second story she swept away the dirt and cleared away the old boxes and storm windows and laid down mats and made it into a wrestling room. There were a few dumbbells lying around, a pull-up bar she’d drilled between the exposed rafters. After dinner—after she cleared the dishes from the table and rushed through her homework—she dragged the Bill upstairs and practiced a Granby, a double arm bar, a gut wrench, a cradle. Only after committing these moves hundreds of times, her coach said, would she have the instinct, the muscle memory she needed.
One night, when she had brushed her teeth and pulled on her pajamas and went to drop the shades, she saw she had left the light on in the garage, its second-story window aglow, much of it filled with the black, slumped silhouette of the Bill. She could not help but feel he was watching her. She remembered a show about the occult she had seen on the History Channel. The narrator had said that anything in a human shape took on a human essence. That was the principle behind a golem, a voodoo doll, a wicker man. Johnette did not think much of this then, but wondered now.
When Breck discovered she was taking a Bill home on nights and weekends, he began calling the dummy her boyfriend. She was the only girl on the team—she wished there was another stupid word for her—but she did enjoy having a locker room all to herself. One time, after she padded across the tile and cranked the hot water on the shower and soaped and rinsed her body and wrapped herself in a towel, she saw her Bill propped against the lockers. He was dressed up in a smiley-face tie. A plastic flower was duct-taped to one hand. A purple dildo to the other.
She dressed, and with her hair still wet, marched from the locker room and found Breck and a few other boys sniggering in the parking lot. Without saying a word she shoved him, and he fell back onto the hood of his Camaro with the plastic testicles hanging from the rearview mirror. She said, “You come in that locker room again, I’ll make sure you’re expelled,” and he said, “What? You scared I saw your dick?” and she said, “Try sucking it ten minutes, maybe you could grow a proper mustache.”
The other boys laughed at this, but Breck did not.
The problem with Breck was the problem with all men, she decided. The way she looked confused them. She did not grow o
ut her hair. She did not wear lipstick or perfume or earrings. Her skin did not look like strawberry ice cream, nor her eyes like hard candy. Most days she wore a too-large T-shirt, but sometimes a collared shirt with a skinny tie. When people asked her why she dressed like that, she said, “Why does there have to be a reason besides I like it?” She hated how everyone wanted an explanation for why she was the way she was. Boys studied her uncertainly, as if peeping in a window only to find their reflection in it. They were goofy and bossy when they first met her—then cruel and aloof when they realized she would not fuck them. More than once she had been called a dyke, and maybe she wouldn’t mind kissing Samantha Dexter, who sat behind her in Spanish 4, but the word itself felt like some cousin to girl: a label meant to deride or pigeonhole her. She didn’t know what she was—and she didn’t know who she wanted—and she wished people weren’t so fixated on figuring her out.
The next day, when she was raking last year’s leaves from the yard, a chipmunk scurried from the woodpile. She remained perfectly still until it came near enough to bring the rake down on. It squeaked and struggled and eventually went still. She knew then the same poisoned pleasure Breck must feel when hurting her.
She looked around to see if anyone had seen her. The Bill sat in the passenger side of her truck, like a patch of midnight the sun hadn’t swept away. She swung the rake toward him, held out the chipmunk, punctured on a tine, like an offering.
She knew her business with Breck was not over—she knew he would want to punish her further—but she never expected him to come for her at home. Late one night, in the second story of her garage, she accidentally lost her grip on the Bill and gashed him against an exposed nail. She tracked down a roll of duct tape and whispered sorry when she lovingly applied it to the wound at his forehead.
A shoe scuffed the floor behind her.
She spun around, too late, his arm already around her neck, his weight dragging her down. She tore at him, the dead arm that stole her breath, though she knew it would do no good. She wondered if he could not distinguish pain because his skin felt always aflame. She wondered if that matched the feeling inside him now. His arm—when he flipped her over, her back to the mat—made a creaking, rubbery sound that reminded her of the wrestling dummies, the Bills, when she mangled them into submission.
She called out to her Bill then—called out to him as if he could hear her—but the Bill did not answer.
There was only Breck with his dead arm, hovering and gasping over her, and with the light behind him, he had taken on a dark, silhouetted appearance, so that he did not look like himself, but any boy, every boy. He groped at her body, pulled at her clothes. He wanted her to know she belonged to him.
She went silent, lest he mistake her cries for encouragement. She was never as strong as the boys she wrestled, but she could often outmaneuver them and only twice had she been pinned. She had a strong neck and would arc it back to keep her shoulders from lying flat. She did the same now, as if this were just another match, but then he pressed a forearm into her throat and she lay flat. He panted into her face. She could see his tongue. It was yellow, almost colorless.
When she was young, four or five or six, she had liked to linger in the bath until her fingers pruned. To hurry her, her mother would yank the plug and say that Johnette would swirl away with the rest of the water if she didn’t scramble out of the tub and into a towel and then bed, where she would dream of whirling downward, into darkness, which is a little what she felt like now.
She was swirling away, almost gone. Blackness pooled at the edges of her eyes, like a tide of unconsciousness about to overtake her, and then it solidified into the shape of a man. He stood over them, watching.
One moment Breck was biting her ear and the next moment he was not. One moment her throat felt crushed by a dull guillotine and the next moment she could breathe. She coughed and gulped for air, her lungs hitching, her body shuddering. Then she cleaned the tears from her eyes and wobbled to her feet. It took her a long minute to make sense of what she saw.
She did not recognize Breck at first. His back was bent in half the wrong way. His mouth was still moving but no sound came out. She guessed he would live, but she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. The sight of him did not scare but relieved her. He was like a robin pegged by a slingshot or a chipmunk pronged by a rake. He had lost. Maybe there would be repercussions, but right now the world outside of this room didn’t seem to exist.
Against the wall slumped her Bill. His color matched the feeling inside her. Bruise-black. Black as the deepest hole. The duct tape had peeled away to reveal the gash on his forehead. She used her thumb to seal it in place. Then she took the dummy in her arms and rocked him and whispered thank you and kissed the place where a mouth might have been.
Heart of a Bear
The bear did not know he was capable of love. This would come later. Now he knew only hunger from the bait oozing on his chops—and fear from his trap-ruined paw and the sound of dogs baying behind him in close pursuit.
Earlier, a five-gallon bucket of lard-and-honey mash had led him to a clearing. He had knocked it over and lapped at the thick discharge of it until a steel-fanged trap arced out of the grass to swallow his front left paw.
For an hour he yanked at the trap and chewed at the chain that bolted it to the ground. Whimpering, bleeding, he circled the trap’s anchor, trying to find some way out of its orbit, but of course there wasn’t one.
Then he heard the dogs.
Night was falling. The sky was gray-ceilinged with clouds. The bear could smell snow and the dogs could smell him and their hungry yowling carried through the woods and compelled the bear to lurch back against the chain. With all his strength he ripped and jerked and finally pulled free his paw but not without great injury, his fur and pads and muscles unpeeling like a glove to reveal something thin-fingered and glisteningly red, what could have been mistaken for a hand.
And now he was lumbering through the trees, knocking against them, unbalanced and half-mad with pain. The dogs were nearly upon him when he turned to face them. A swipe of his paw sent a hound spiraling into a tree, where it hit with an unholy yelp. Another he pulled into an embrace and crushed until it dropped limply between his bowed and shaggy legs. Another still he caught in his jaws and gnashed. And then he snarled and lumbered in a circle and raked his claws across the frozen ground once, as if to strike a flame, before discovering he was alone.
He huffed; a cloud of steam rose from his snout.
Snow—the flakes as large as moths—began to fall. It muffled the men’s voices, but the bear could still hear them shouting excitedly, moving toward him. He licked his injured paw and gave a low-throated moan, wanting nothing more than to collapse on a bed of pine needles, to rest deeply, but the men were coming and he had no choice but to once again hobble forward. The sun sank behind the mountains, and the clouds appeared as dark and ridged as the walls of a cave. The snow thickened and caused his vision, already bad, to worsen. He did not know where to go, and no matter which way he chose, he would not be able to last much longer.
The wind rose then. Skeins of snow twisted and swirled and made him feel dizzy, adrift. A great horned owl floated silently through the woods, and the bear followed its vanishing shape. Flakes clung to his fur and to the branches of the pine trees he shambled past. When a window—an ice-glittered rectangle of light—burned out of the storm he saw it almost as a doorway lit by the sun, the entrance to a better world.
The house was a one-story ranch and beneath its porch one of the latticed sections had fallen over and was tangled with browned weeds and frosted with snow. The bear spotted the opening and dragged his body through it and found there a burrow among the rotting mulch and mouse pellets and the bones and moldering feathers of cat-killed birds.
Through the night the snow continued to fall, covering his tracks, and the wind continued to blow, carrying away his scent, and the bear chose this place then to convalesce.
Weeks l
ater he woke to light streaming through a recessed window. He was still confused by sleep and felt as though he was deep in a lake and approaching the surface. He blinked several times, yawned widely, clacked his teeth, and licked his chops. He felt an ache in his paw and held it out before him. It was gummed up with scabs that were melting into scar tissue. His mind took some time to process what had happened and where he was, just as his eyes took some time to focus on what lay beyond the frosted glass.
When he saw the people moving inside the house—carrying loads of laundry, exercising with dumbbells—he felt at first nothing but fear. Humans, after all, carried rifles and chainsaws; they owned trucks and dogs that growled. When they came to the forest they left behind fires and candy wrappers and knife-scratched bones. But beneath the porch, surrounded by snowdrifts, the bear felt safe and exhausted and unhurried as he floated in and out of the slow time of hibernation and observed them.
The man was built like an immense slab of stone—with no neck to speak of, his broad shoulders rounding out of his ears and his shovel of a jaw resting directly on his collar. The woman had a willowy build, and her feathery hair fluttered and seemed ready to take wing whenever she moved. They looked wrong together, even to the bear, like a flower caught in the roots of a gnarled tree. Despite this, they somehow seemed to nourish each other, laughing often, hugging and even chasing each other, tangling together on the floor. They had a baby, a girl. She had a round face and a black thatch of hair. Her milk-white skin along her arms and legs creased over with fat. When she wasn’t eating or napping she was crawling about the house and shoving things into her mouth.
Over the next few months, the bear felt something magical take hold of him as he watched them, first in the basement, later through their living room and bedroom and bathroom windows. They never closed the blinds—woods surrounded the house, and they thought themselves unobserved. He watched them when they cooked dinner and exercised and made love and sat before the television. And as he watched, the bear could feel something inside him changing. For the first time, he was aware of more than simple, blind urges—hunger, shelter, sex—and began to turn inward. He really had no idea who he was, not yet, but hidden beneath the layers of fur and fat and muscle there was someone, all right. A self. A light flared in the darkness inside him; he was like a cave that had not yet been explored.
Suicide Woods Page 4
