Suicide Woods

by Benjamin Percy

  He wipes off his feet on the rug in the foyer and leaves some grassy deposit in its fibers. He moves toward Thomas with a noise like whispering. Without hesitation he grabs the dragon and the screwdriver and proceeds to pluck out the old batteries and replace them with new ones. And then he continues on to another room of the house to complete some other task and leaves Thomas staring after him.

  It is April, and Thomas is busier than ever with so many of his clients rushing to meet the deadline on the fifteenth. Three of them are small-business owners who tried TurboTax and got lost in the paper labyrinth of payroll. They all have ideas about deductions. “But what about …” is how most of their sentences begin. They seem to blame him for their mistakes. Secretly he hates them, even as he nods his head and smiles mildly at their jokes about Uncle Sam and says that he will get to work immediately so that they don’t have to file for an extension even as he wonders how he will ever find the time.

  His wife comes home with a new perfume. Something by Estée Lauder. She leans against Thomas and asks what he thinks. He sniffs at her tentatively. “You smell like flowers,” he says. “You smell nice.” And then his nose feels suddenly full of ants that needle and burrow and gather into a tremendous sneeze. He moves away from her, bothered by another sneeze, and then another. His eyes water. His upper lip is damp with mucus. His wife asks if he needs a tissue, and he holds out an arm to shoo her away.

  The mud man waits in the nearby hallway. He has stopped his sweeping. His hands grip the broom’s handle as if it were a sword. He is looking at Rebecca with his hollowed-out eyes. His nostrils appear to flare. Right then a worm slides its pink head from his forehead, probing the air, pulsing like a hungry vein.

  For Easter dinner, the mud man prepares mashed potatoes, a fruit salad, wheat rolls, and a lamb roast jeweled with garlic and rosemary from the garden. The table is set with the wedding china. Two pale green candles sputter against the breeze that purls through an open window. Everyone—even little Owen—makes an ooo sound when the mud man carries in the roast on a silver platter and sets it on the table. When he lifts the carving knife, Thomas stands up from his chair so suddenly that it nearly tips over. “I’ll take that,” he says, and snatches the knife and begins to carve thick, red slices onto plates. He’s not sure what’s overtaken him, but he suddenly feels annoyed by the mud man, even jealous and proprietary. “There you go,” he says, serving the lamb. “There you go.”

  The mud man watches all of this, as if waiting for an explanation.

  Thomas takes his seat at the head of the table. He tucks a napkin under his chin. He looks pointedly at the mud man—and then at his little family—and smiles and says, “Now, doesn’t this look delicious.”

  There is a streetlamp outside his bedroom window. Even on a moonless night, even with the blinds closed, the room glows with a pale blue light. The mud man is backlit by it, a dark silhouette that Thomas observes when he wakes from a nightmare about an audit shutting down his firm.

  “Is that you?” Thomas asks, his voice only a whisper. “What do you want?”

  The mud man does not say anything. He never says anything. The window is open to let in the cool spring air, and at that moment the wind shifts and sucks the blinds against it with a clatter. The room grows momentarily darker. “Leave me be,” Thomas says. “I don’t need you right now. Go. Go away.”

  Thomas comes home to find the stereo blasting. He claps his hands over his ears and says, “What on earth.” It’s one of his wife’s CDs. The Rolling Stones. She loves classic rock, but it gives him an immediate headache and makes his thoughts scatter and his posture stiffen.

  In the living room the mud man is dancing. He is bending his knees and pumping his arms. Next to him, Owen leaps about, clapping off-rhythm, and singing, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” And there is his wife, her hands above her head, twirling in a circle. Her eyes are closed and the corners of her mouth are turned up in a faint smile.

  Thomas goes to the stereo and snaps it off and they all go still and he fills the silence by saying, “That’s enough of that.”

  At work, he tells a farmer no, he cannot write off his dog and all of its food and chew toys, even though it chases down mice and nips at the heels of the heifers to hurry them into the barn. At work, he lays out differences between state taxes in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, and Wyoming, and makes clear to a musician why he has to file with all of them for the gigs he’s played. At work, he tries to explain itemized deductions to a college kid wearing mirrored sunglasses that reflect a warped and ghostly image of himself, his office.

  All of them stare at him openmouthed, still pale from winter, bored and confused and annoyed. It’s a familiar sensation. He believes he has the same effect on his family.

  He comes home to find the house empty. He calls out for his wife, but there is no response. He goes to the bedroom to pull off his tie and change from his suit. There he finds the bed tangled and muddy. He walks toward it slowly, his loafers scuffing the hardwood. He bunches the sheets in his hand and pulls them to his face and breathes deeply. They smell like grass, stone, rain, earthworms.

  He feels suddenly boneless, filleted. Dizziness comes over him and he holds out his arms like a man about to fall through rotten ice and catches his weight against the dresser. It is then that his glance falls to the window and he spies them, his wife and the mud man. They are kneeling in the garden, among his daffodils, yanking up weeds to set in piles they will later dispose of. He can hear music faintly through the glass, playing from a boom box they dragged outside. His wife is bobbing her head. Owen plays nearby, pushing a toy truck through his sandbox, his lips pursed, no doubt making little motor sounds. Above them the sky is a lush blue scattered with clouds. The window is latticed and Thomas feels suddenly jailed by it, so separate from them.

  All of this is difficult to process, completely outside the boundaries of mathematical principles. He cannot lick his thumb and leaf through a CCH publication or download a PDF from some .gov Web site for the answer. He cannot punch numbers into his calculator and thumb more lead into his mechanical pencil and correct his mistakes with an eraser’s grayish-pink nub.

  Because he doesn’t know what else to do, he slams down his bandaged hand on the dresser. A shock of pain forks up his arm and he relishes its distracting force. With a whimper he slams his hand down again and again until he can feel the heat of blood leaking from him. A perfume bottle rattles and tips and rolls off the dresser to fall to the floor, where it shatters. Its floral scent fogs and spoils the air.

  Outside, the mud man turns and raises his head, as though he hears—or maybe senses—Thomas at the window. Across the twenty yards of lawn a stare hardens between them. Thomas tries to hold it, but the perfume makes him sneeze, once, twice. His eyes are watering, tears spilling down his cheeks, so his vision is inexact, but he is almost certain he sees the mud man’s normally slack expression tighten into a frown, as if Thomas were a bothersome scrap of dream or maybe a weed that might be unrooted, disposed of, as if he never belonged here in the first place.

  Writs of Possession

  1.

  When Sammy knocks, when she says, “Sheriff’s office,” she stands to the side of the apartment door. No one has tried to shoot her, not yet. But you never know. The peephole darkens. She waits for the door to rattle open, and when it doesn’t, she knocks again. “I know you’re in there,” she says, and the apartment manager, a man with bony arms and shoe-polish-black hair, leans close to her and says, “He’s in there.”

  This is the Riverside Apartment Complex, and Sammy is a deputy with the Civil Division of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office. Every day people are falling behind—every day there is a taller stack of evictions, small-claims notices, repossessions of property, wage garnishments for unpaid debts—and every day there is another address to visit, a door to knock on, sometimes to kick down.

  The carpet is a burnt orange. The walls are pine paneled. The fluorescent light above th
em buzzes on and off. She hates her job, hates that she spends most of her day trudging through dumps like this to deliver subpoenas, hurrying people out their doors and down staircases with garbage bags full of clothes, cardboard boxes spilling over with frozen food. In the three years she has worked in the civil division, only once has someone been happy to see her—and she was serving him divorce papers. She seized her baton as he hugged her.

  She knocks again, this time using the side of her fist, booming on the door. “Okay,” a man’s voice says. “I’m opening.”

  She supposes she feels bad for people when they cry or beg or point to their grubby children and say, “You’re doing this to them.” Maybe she pities them—that’s a better way of putting it. But then a dog will come padding out of a back room or she’ll spot a video game console, a pool table, a cappuccino machine. And she’ll decide that they’re careless and stupid and getting what they deserve. She’ll want to say, How much you spend on dog food a month? or How much you think you could’ve sold that Xbox for? But she won’t. Instead, when people show their teeth or kick over chairs or get down on their knees and take her hand and beg, she simply says, “I’m no judge, no jury,” so that people contain their anger and sadness, bottle it up for someone else.

  Every one of these addresses is like a hole—the same hole, many chambered—and sometimes, when she thinks back on all the homes she’s visited, she feels as though she is falling through them, through their living rooms and kitchens, seeing hundreds, thousands of faces all creased and begging, “Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”

  At her hip she carries handcuffs, a telescoping baton, a .40 caliber Glock. Seven years ago, when she was working patrol, a drunk yanked her ponytail and grated her cheek against the asphalt, and ever since then she’s kept her hair cut short. She knows the combination of this and her square face and her wide stance makes her look a little like a man. People blink a few times when they first meet her, trying to make sense of her.

  That’s the case now, when the door clicks open and she moves into the dim light of the apartment and faces an old man, mid-seventies, wearing pale blue jeans and a ribbed white tank top. His head is bald except for a horseshoe of white hair. His feet are bare—their skin spotted and knotted with veins, the toenails a chalky yellow.

  “Milton Ridgeway?”

  “Yeah.” His square-framed glasses take up most of his face. He peers at her through them and they are thick enough that she can’t distinguish the color of his eyes.

  “I have a court order,” she says and holds out the paper, folded twice as if to better contain the secret. “Notice of eviction.”

  She steels herself, ready for him to plead his case—like all the others—to smack his fist into an open palm and shout so loudly spittle flies from his lips. To say that he has rights, that this is an illegal eviction. To say that he’s been cheated, that the landlord has been cashing his checks all along.

  But he doesn’t. “Okay,” he says and waves both hands as if to clear a bad smell from the air. “Okay. All right.”

  They are standing in his kitchen. The counter is bare except for a brown mug and a plate dirtied with crumbs. The smell of old coffee and cigarette smoke. Beyond the kitchen, the living room. Same pine-paneled walls and orange carpeting as the hallway. Dirty light seeping in through the tan curtains. A wooden box of a television playing Fox News with the sound off. She wonders if he has children, even grandchildren, who could help. She doesn’t see any photos magneted to the fridge, hanging on the walls. Everything is bare.

  Milton still hasn’t taken the paper. She shakes it at him and he snatches it from her and says, “Fine.” He unfolds it and folds it up again without reading, drops it on the counter. “I suppose you want me to leave?”

  “Now.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “Now.”

  “Fine.” He walks toward a blackened doorway that must lead to his bedroom, where he pauses. “While you wait, you might want a glass of water? Or some milk?”

  No one has ever asked her this before, so it takes her a moment to reply: “No. Thank you.”

  “I’ll only be a minute.” He coughs with a sound like pennies rattling at the bottom of a paper cup. “I got to warn you, though. I die sometimes. I been dying all day.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He taps his chest. “My heart stops beating. My lungs stop breathing. I die. Not officially but it’s death all the same. Then I wake up. I’m telling you this because I feel a spell coming on. Wouldn’t want to alarm you.” His smile is damp and pink—he hasn’t put in his teeth yet—but she doesn’t sense a joke.

  She looks to the manager for help, but he is in the hall, muttering into his cell phone. “What should I do?” she says to Milton. “If you die? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “Don’t do nothing. Give me a couple minutes—I’ll come back.” He picks at a splinter in the doorframe. “Doctor calls it a heart condition. I call it a Korean condition.” His chest hair is as white as dandelion fluff. He reaches into it, under his tank top, and withdraws his dog tags with a tinkle and chime.

  Normally she doesn’t talk to tenants during repos or evictions except to say, “Hurry,” or “I don’t care.” But Milton is old. And alone. Though she is used to dealing with people who have made the wrong choices, they are, almost all of them, young and furious and seemingly capable of rectifying whatever ruin has come to them. He is different. A lone cloud coming apart in gray filaments, a few drops of rain. She feels, no other word for it, sad.

  She calls to him, “Milton?” just as he clicks on the light in his room. His eyes are thin black slits behind his glasses. “You don’t mind me asking, what does it feel like? When you die?”

  He considers this a moment before answering. “You feel like you’re falling,” he says. “You feel like you’re falling into a very deep hole.” His hand makes a downward motion. “Every time I keep expecting to hit bottom. But so far, no bottom.”

  2.

  David peels up the duck-patterned linoleum in the bathroom and lays down tile. He rips away the aquamarine carpet in the guest room and pries out the hundreds of tacks and staples beneath it to reveal the hardwood beneath. He scores the floral wallpaper in the kitchen and sprays it with DIF and scrapes it off in damp shreds and gouges the drywall so that he must mud and texture before splashing the walls over with paint. He unscrews the light fixtures—all white orbs with brass collars—and replaces them with wrought iron. He hangs new gutters. He trades out the appliances for stainless steel. He installs new hardware on all the cabinets. He removes the cracked and yellowed switches and outlets and screws in white plates.

  Now the house looks like the house he imagined when, five years ago, he walked through it and laid his hands on its walls and said, “I can see the potential.” Five years and he hasn’t flipped open his toolbox until now—now that he has to move. His marriage is falling apart. His daughter is starting to bring home college brochures. His boss at the biodiesel company ordered a thirty-day furlough for all employees. So he spends his evenings and weekends alone; his wife has moved in with her parents and his daughter spends all her time in her room. All of his time is devoted to restoring a house he has come to hate, to think of as a kind of grave, for someone else to enjoy.

  The back porch overlooks a hillside crowded with big pines. For the decorative posts—staggered every ten feet along the railing, squared and beveled, as tall as a rifle and as thick as a thigh—the builder didn’t use the treated fir or cedar he should have, and dry rot set in. When David pulls off the old sheathing, tearing into it with a hammer and a short crowbar, he reveals their hollow core, and in it, the skeletons of four birds along with their rotten wig of a nest.

  David uses the crowbar to claw them from the post, their tomb. Bones and branches and broken bits of shell scatter at his feet. He toes at a skull and it crumbles into a white powder. He guesses the birds were nesting when the house was being framed, may
be up in the rafters, and the builder climbed a ladder and cradled the nest in his hands and cooed and whistled at the baby birds and then tossed them inside the post before hammering on its cap and whispering good-bye.

  3.

  For more than a month they have lived here. A month is the longest they have ever gone before getting caught—the owners walking in on them watching television, taking a shower, knifing mustard across bread. Then they run—they have learned to be fast—and eventually find another house.

  They look for a subdivision with brickwork driveways and three-car garages, with columns flanking the front doors and maple saplings struggling to grow in the front yards. They find a three- or four-story house with no dog toys or playground equipment in its backyard. They discover an unlocked window or a sliding glass door. In a guest room in the far corner of the walkout basement, they drop their backpacks. They wait.

  The first few days, they spend a lot of time listening to the footsteps thumping overhead, the muttered conversations overheard through the heating ducts and thinly insulated walls. They take note of the owners’ patterns. If there are no children and no pets, it usually means the couple spend their days, sometimes their nights, working, these doctors and lawyers and engineers. What little time they do spend at home, they spend in their room watching Netflix.

  After the shower creaks off, after the dishes clink in the sink, after the door slams and the Lexus growls to life and the garage door rumbles closed, the house is empty and will typically remain so until evening comes.