Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  TWENTY-ONE

  Stephen Phelps

  I smelled the sour odor of fear on Sheneel. On Laura. Among others. I smelled it on their bodies, the bed, the kitchen counter, the hood of a car. So thick I could lick it. I didn’t. Could.

  What would the midnight sex-and-hunger cries of forest animals have over me? Would Dad have slapped me? Would Kathryn have wiped her tender lips on her napkin and left for the club? Would Mom have smiled her crooked smile and said, My son is a wolf. He’s a panther. As all children are. You should have one of your own, even if he eats you – saliva streaming from her half-mouth?

  Lillian Turner’s eyes darted from Dad to Mom to Kathryn. Why not to me? She knew she was a caged animal. She knew iron bars are weaker than the ones this family raises around its dinner guests. Also anger in those darting eyes. Fear and anger. Anger has no smell. Stand downwind of it. Lay your tongue on it. Nothing. Antiseptic. But you can break anger. You can turn it into fear. You can even turn it into desire with its own sweet odor.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Johnny

  Lillian came in at seven thirty. Percy and I were sharing a frozen sausage-and-mushroom pizza, and she walked into the kitchen, watched Percy suck a piece of sausage into his mouth, and said, ‘That’ll make him sick.’

  ‘Where were you?’ I said.

  ‘At school. I told you I had a late meeting.’ Her eyes looked wild.

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘No, just really tired.’

  I pushed a kitchen chair from the table. ‘Sit and talk?’

  ‘I’m tired of sitting and talking.’ But she came to the table and sat.

  ‘Long meeting?’

  She nodded but didn’t look at me.

  I fed Percy another slice of pizza. ‘Where were you?’ I asked again.

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘Where were you really?’

  Her face broke. She didn’t cry. But the disintegration in her eyes and mouth was worse than tears.

  I took her hand and she gripped me as if she wanted to tear the skin from me. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  Anger and fear welled inside me. ‘What happened?’

  She told me. She’d gone to Little Marsh Island and found a Phelps Paper Company construction site. Edward Phelps and Peter Lisman had threatened her and made her follow them to Phelps’s house. They hadn’t touched her. They’d made her eat.

  ‘They what?’ I asked.

  They’d made her join the Phelps family for dinner.

  ‘Strange,’ I said. ‘How did they threaten you?’

  Her face broke again. ‘You’ll hate me,’ she said.

  ‘I could never hate you.’

  She told me she’d had an affair with Tom Corfield when I was on my first tour.

  ‘This happened ten years ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And nothing since then?’

  ‘Not really. No.’

  I looked up at the kitchen lamp. I looked down the floor. I took a deep breath. ‘OK, then.’

  Lillian looked hopeful, even grateful.

  The affair happened a long time ago, just after Lillian and I moved in together. It hurt, but if I could heal from all I’d seen on the Arabian Sea, I would figure out how to heal from this. I forced a smile.

  She said, ‘Except one night when you were in the hospital.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He came over. He spent the night.’

  ‘You mean last week?’

  ‘Last month. I was hurting. I was scared.’

  I was breathless. ‘Yeah, you and me both.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I wanted to strike out with my fists and legs, but my muscles felt weak. ‘I know.’ I could hardly move.

  ‘Do you hate me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I got up and stumbled away. As I went out the door from the sunroom to the backyard, Percy retched and vomited pizza on to the kitchen floor.

  Lillian didn’t come to me that night. I sat on the lawn chair, the moon almost full above me, and though the heat of the day had carried past sunset and the fiery light of the moon was so bright I needed to turn my eyes away, I shivered with cold.

  When I went inside in the morning, Lillian was gone. Had she run to Tom Corfield’s house and spent the night with him? No, our bedcovers lay at the bottom of the bed. She’d slept at home and had left to teach. She had written no note explaining, apologizing, or accusing.

  What was there to say?

  Although words were her life, she’d always been sparing with them, as if each one weighed so heavily that she feared overburdening the air with them. But she’d never been without words. She had carefully chosen ones for every occasion. But now she’d said nothing.

  I burned an egg in the frying pan, so I put it in Percy’s dish and set it outside in the yard, then poured a bowl of Cheerios because I seemed incapable of anything more.

  I needed to do something. But what was there to do? Nothing. I should take my meds, practice deep breathing, and learn to accept the imperfect world.

  I took my meds.

  I lay on my back on the sunroom floor and breathed deep.

  Percy stood outside the glass doors and whined to come in.

  He wanted to do something.

  ‘Sorry, boy,’ I said.

  I breathed deep.

  I considered emptying the rest of the meds into a coffee cup, stirring them with orange juice, and chugging.

  I breathed deep.

  Something.

  I went to the bedroom and found the box that I’d brought home from my last tour. It contained my tags, my service and discharge papers, my small-change ribbons and medals, a pair of dress shoes that I’d worn to a Navy dance with Lillian, a pair of combat boots that I’d worn only in training exercises, a set of binoculars that I’d bought years ago on a shore leave in Bodrum, and a pile of T-shirts each naming a ship that I’d served on.

  I laced the boots and hung the binoculars around my neck.

  A half-hour later, I parked next to the wooden porch at Papa Crowe’s house. The hawk that had perched in an oak tree when I first visited Papa Crowe nearly two months earlier sat again like a sentinel at the end of a branch, its head ticking in degrees as it scanned the sky and ground. The house was quiet but the door behind the screen door was open.

  Papa Crowe came from a back room when I knocked. ‘Can’t get enough of me now, can you, son?’

  I said, ‘Do you own a gun?’

  He opened the screen door and let me in. The room smelled of cut grass and an herb of some kind, sharp like basil. He shuffled toward the kitchen. ‘I don’t shoot. I don’t need no gun.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked. Do you own one?’

  ‘What happen to yours?’

  ‘Someone made me bat-ass crazy on jimson weed. Then the police took it away.’

  ‘Don’t know what kind of sonofabitch would do that to you,’ he said. He disappeared into the dark of the kitchen, went to a broom closet, and pulled out a rifle. It was a thin-stocked, narrow-barreled .22, little more than a pellet gun.

  ‘That’s not a gun. It’s a toy,’ I said.

  ‘It all I got.’

  ‘Shells?’

  ‘No.’

  I shrugged and took it. ‘Thanks.’

  He watched as I went out through the screen door on to the porch.

  I stopped and said, ‘You aren’t going to ask?’

  ‘It your business, not mine.’

  I drove two miles to a Walmart, bought a box of a hundred Remington long-rifle cartridges and a little bottle of Hoppe’s gun oil, and drove back toward the highway. A side road cut through a commercial grove of slash pines, and I turned on it and came to a defunct sand quarry. I parked by the quarry lake and waded through knee-high grass into the grove. No one had tended the grove for a long time, and ferns and palmettos grew between the r
ows of trees. A hundred yards or so from the quarry, I set three targets that I made from leaves and bark against the trunk of a tree. Then, twenty paces away, I sat on the pine needles, cleaned the bore of the .22, and oiled the bolt action until it slid and snapped. I loaded the gun, lay on my belly, sighted, and shot. In training exercises, I’d shot guns that bruised my shoulder with their kick and others that made hardly a sound as they sent a piece of metal ripping through the air. None shot with truer aim than Papa Crowe’s .22. One, two, three – I put holes in the leaves and splintered the bark. I made new targets and stepped away forty paces. One, two, three – I hit the first two targets and splintered the tree trunk next to the third. I pulled the trigger again – four – and the last piece of bark burst into pieces.

  An empty log truck, heading toward the highway, passed as I drove to the Phelps pulp mill. Convincing the security guard to let me in might be harder than when I first visited, and I tucked the rifle behind the front seat in case I needed it to get through the gate.

  But as I pulled close to the security station and breathed the sweet chemical stench of the mill, a red Audi sedan sped out, heading toward town. Stephen Phelps was driving it.

  I pulled on to the shoulder, turned around, and went after him.

  Edward Phelps had threatened Lillian and had exposed us to each other. Stephen Phelps had raped Laura Greene, might have killed Sheneel and Alex Greene, and had done God knows what else besides. The police were doing nothing about them. If I went down with them, I would count the cost as worthwhile.

  The Audi drove south toward town, then looped back and headed north on a county road. After ten minutes, we crossed into South Georgia and the Audi turned on to another rural road that took us past trailer homes with plastic children’s picnic tables and toys in the front yards and roof-top satellite dishes cocked to the sky. If Stephen Phelps knew a car was following him, he showed no sign of it. He turned on to a lumber road, and I realized that he’d come to the same area where Papa Crowe had brought me on the night he drugged me with jimson weed. We flew past the cinderblock Tobias Rib restaurant, the front door propped open, the gravel parking lot full of rusting pickups.

  Three miles farther, the Audi turned on to a winding road marked with a No Outlet warning. I dropped back, letting Phelps disappear around a bend, and followed slowly past a mix of little ranch houses and trailers set back in the trees. Branches shadowed and reflected on the windshield, and I drove past a green doublewide before I realized that Phelps had parked the Audi outside of it and stood on the aluminum front steps waiting for someone to answer the door. A quarter-mile up the road, I turned the car around, drove back past the doublewide, and pulled to the shoulder. With Papa Crowe’s .22 at my side, I slipped into the woods and worked through the trees.

  The doublewide stood on a plot of weedy sand, cleared of trees to about ten yards. A rusty swing set with a slide but no seats stood behind the house, and a stack of firewood stood between the swing set and the woods. I cut through the trees to the woodpile.

  The windows on the doublewide were open, as was a sliding glass door that led to an unpainted wooden deck. A ragged tabby cat lay in the sun on the deck and watched me. Inside the house, a woman laughed. Phelps spoke to her, but I couldn’t make out his words.

  I drew my binoculars from window to window. There was a cheaply furnished bedroom and a kitchen with a dirty refrigerator. Inside the open sliding door, there was a sofa and, on the wall behind it, a framed poster of a horse standing in a flowering meadow. The last window opened into another bedroom. Stephen Phelps stood in it, his back to me. A black woman in black shorts and a white cut-off T-shirt faced him. Her hair was dyed a color between pink and henna. ‘It can’t be,’ I muttered, and I thumbed the focus dial. A sound came from my throat – Stephen Phelps stood in the bedroom with the old prostitute, Felicity.

  As I watched, Phelps stripped off his clothes and stood naked in front of her. Then she stripped off her clothes too. Her breasts hung low with age, and her hips sagged with fat. In the half-light of the bedroom, her body looked gray.

  With all his money, Phelps could buy any hooker he wanted – a high-priced escort or a model with a drug habit – instead of a woman who, most nights, couldn’t find a customer even among the addicts and lowlifes who looked for pleasure on Philips Highway. But I knew that must be the point. He was seeking self-abasement. He had his pretty blond wife at home and together they’d made pretty blond children. And, on the side, he had this. I put down the binoculars and sighted the .22 on the cross where his shoulder blades met his spine.

  He sat with his back to me on the far side of the bed, and Felicity, naked in front of him, kneeled on the floor between his knees. He ran his fingers through her pink hair as she took him in her mouth.

  Did I want to think this through more fully?

  No. I tightened my finger on the trigger.

  But Felicity rose from the floor and mounted him, straddling him where he sat, her thighs wrapping around his thin white torso. His back rose and fell with the rhythm of their sex. If I shot him now, would the bullet pierce his body? Would it rip into the tender skin of the old prostitute and kill her too? No. The .22 shells carried only forty grains of gunpowder – enough to tear through one person but one only.

  But then Phelps stood from the bed, clutching the hooker’s body to his, turned, and lay her on her back.

  I lowered the rifle and brought up the binoculars again. If Phelps raised his eyes to the window, he would look across the space of thirty feet and see me watching him. But he didn’t raise his eyes. He looked down at the woman between whose legs he stood and there was fury in his face – hatred and fury.

  I jerked the gun to my eye and squared the sight on his forehead. I tightened my finger. But I released it again as Felicity bucked up from the bed and slapped Phelps. The sound of skin on skin came through the open window, and he cried out with pain.

  She laughed – loud and low – and he pulled back from her, standing, his hand feeling his jaw where she’d hit him. She got to her knees on the bed and crawled toward him, and he embraced her when she came. She wrapped herself around him, and again he turned and lowered himself until he sat on the bed, her legs clenching him.

  I sighted the rifle on his spine, my hands shaking – no longer sure what I was doing but unable to stop myself – and, as Felicity bucked backward, lifting her thighs toward Phelps’s shoulders, and Phelps plunged deep into her, I pulled the trigger.

  The rifle report stung my ears, and I jerked away, ducking behind the woodpile as if it could protect me from myself. When I rose again and peered over the logs with the binoculars, I saw what I had done. Phelps stood over the prostitute, holding a bloody bed sheet against her bleeding leg. He looked frantic, gazing around the bedroom and out the window, apparently unsure what had happened. Still, he stayed with the woman, though he must have known that his own life was in danger.

  I could have raised the rifle and shot him in the chest.

  I could have finished him and driven to the Phelps mill and shot his father.

  But I ducked behind the woodpile, found my shell casing, crawled back into the woods, and ran to my car. I knew I was a coward, but I’d shot the old prostitute in the thigh, and there’s just one thing to do when you make a mistake like that. And that’s run.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Stephen Phelps

  My hand on her wound. My hand in her wound.

  No, she said.

  Yes.

  I’m bleeding, baby.

  My hand in her wound, bloody, bright – bright as the sun because the yellow of the sun is a lie: if you stand close, the sun is as red as a bloody hand.

  Christ, baby, I’m bleeding.

  Tears. Mine. Why was I crying?

  My hand to my cheek. My bloody cheek. Would I ever look in a mirror again?

  I’m bleeding.

  The tears in my eyes put her in a bubble, in outer space. My fault.

  Not your fault, b
aby.

  But—

  The hospital, baby, the hospital.

  Then the roundabout in front of the ER, as if I was supposed to drive around and around until she bled through the front seat. The leather in my Audi as red as the day they stripped the skin from the lamb. As red as the sun.

  Leave me here, she said.

  I’ll carry—

  You can’t come in. You know that.

  You’ll—

  I won’t. Her bloody hand on my thigh. As if I was the one with the wound. I won’t die, she said. Never. Not till I’m ready.

  I’m coming—

  No. She closed the door behind her. She dragged that leg across the sidewalk like a dying animal.

  Me in the car. The smell of blood. The salt-and-metal smell of the burning sun. I’ll take care of it, I said, as if she still sat beside me – because I knew who did it. The idea bloomed like a bursting star. It burned away my nausea, and I felt myself grow hard with unfinished sex. I would take his wife, finish the unfinished.

  Felicity was right: not my fault. Johnny Bellefleur’s fault. His wife’s by extension. I could see his tears. I could taste his salt. He would touch her. He would lift her from the floor, the lawn, the bed, wherever I found her and finished her.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Lillian

  ‘Why now?’ Tom asked. We sat in my office, the door shut, two students waiting outside for appointments.

  ‘It came out, that’s all. I didn’t want it to, but it did.’ I wouldn’t tell him about my obsession with Sheneel Greene and my disastrous trip to Little Marsh Island.

  ‘But why now? He could hurt you. He could hurt us.’

  The skin on Tom’s face was perfect. I’d noticed it the first time we met. It looked as if he’d never bruised or cut it, never had a blemish, never nicked it when shaving. He wore brown loafers, blue cotton pants, a pressed white shirt, and a leather vest. The vest would have looked ridiculous on almost any other man. When I’d first introduced Johnny to him, Johnny had given him the smile he used for men he thought were soft and untried. It was his testosterone smile. I could almost smell it. But that was before he returned from his last tour soft and broken himself.