The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  Father woke from his sensory reverie. “Moll…,” he complained, mildly.

  “Better to have it the way you want it,” I told him.

  “So just a plain steak?” the waitress said.

  “My stomach’s shot,” Father lied. “Can’t take nothing really good—only the nourishment.”

  She told us again that there would be a wait, they were starting up the stove or something, I couldn’t follow her logic. I didn’t care. I hadn’t seen Father in five years, studying his face preoccupied me. There were spots on him: liver, skin cancer, dismal freckles—I didn’t know. Since the retirement that followed breaking his leg, he no longer spent hours out on the boat exposed to the sun. Though his hide was leathery, a paler color and variation had blotched the surface, like the spots on his worn boots.

  “Don’t shame me in front of her,” he said.

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “What are you doing here?” He ran his tongue over his teeth, retasting the bourbon. His blue eyes, whitening with age and cataracts, went gray with bliss, turning inward, blind to the world, seeing only interior pleasure. “Can’t pay for me no more? That it?”

  So the ugliness had begun after only one drink. “Nothing’s changed,” I said. “You can stay there. Do you still like it?”

  “No liquor there, you know. Don’t allow it.”

  “Not good for you.”

  “Why you giving it to me?” He leaned forward and brought a smell with him, not fishy or boozy as when I was a girl, and yet it was familiar.

  It was him, the smell of his sweat, of his body. The odor of a man—dangerous and strange. “A little fun won’t kill you,” I said, repeating his excuse to my mother from years ago. I could hear it shouted in our kitchen still.

  He chuckled, then sipped his drink, an ice cube bobbing against his thin lips, swallowed, and laughed. “True enough!” he said, loud. The waitress glanced our way and smiled. Father scratched his head. The once blond hairs were silver, not polished, but dulled and stiff. His frail skull was visible through the full head of hair, as if it were the cleared floor of a mature forest; all the thickening lower branches were gone.

  He was old. Not dangerous.

  “Don’t know when I’ll see you again,” I said. My childhood accent had completely reasserted itself: I was an instrument playing the song of my people, brash and bullying and telling stoic lies. “Let’s put it behind us, Mr. Gray. We’ve got nothing but death ahead.”

  For a moment he was shocked—his whitish pupils were blank. “True enough!” he shouted.

  “Shhh,” I said. Someone had peeked out from the kitchen.

  “By God!” He blew out air from between his numbed lips. The familiar stale smell of booze fogged my nose. “That’s true enough! What the fuck is there to worry about now!” The old bright blue lasers burned through his cataracts. Reckless, he looked younger.

  “Daddy,” I protested, “your language.” I hadn’t called him Daddy since I was a girl.

  “Sorry, dearie,” he said. “I’m enjoying myself. Having too good a time.”

  I allowed him another drink when the food came. He reacted to the steak passionately: “By God that’s a good cut of meat! Yessir, worth the wait. Thanks, dearie,” he told the waitress. She smiled indulgently—probably had one at home just like him.

  He ordered the fourth himself. The waitress glanced at me for an instant, checking. I considered stopping him, but I reasoned that he was as drunk as he could get. Between the second and one hundredth drinks he used to stay evenly sloppy, a cork bobbing, always in apparent danger of submersion, yet surviving crazily.

  Father complained of his neighbors at the retirement apartments. He was bothered by the communal intrusions into his privacy. “They keep away now,” he bragged, but sadly, as though secretly he missed the invasions. After the plates were cleared, he leaned forward and touched me on the back of my hand. “Dearie, time’s running out on you giving me a little devil.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Can’t have them?”

  “You want grandchildren?”

  “Why not?” He tapped my head with his index finger, mocking me. He used to do it when I was a child and had disobeyed him. “What’s in there? Wood? Didn’t know that. By God, that’s something I never thought of—course I want a grandkid. Old biddies get out their photos and I got nothing to show.” He winked. “Maybe I’d better get a fake one.”

  This made me ache and want to cry. I kept silent, afraid I would choke up. Why was I moved? Because I didn’t think of him as caring about me, except as his financial support. I had long ago given up on family feeling, even simple vanities, such as an old man wishing for a photograph of a grandchild to show off. I had thought Father and I were thoroughly burned out; that only the crusty charcoal of our old hate was left, no flame from its spark of love.

  “You got the stuff to give—can get a kid anything it wants,” he said, gruffly, no self-pity or appeal. “Kind of a waste not to. Know what I believe? Don’t think they ought to allow poor people to have any. Don’t know why everybody’s got the right to make life. Everybody don’t have the right to end it. Not even my own. Can’t kill myself. Against the law. Don’t have the right to shoot deer all year, can’t dig clams wherever I want, but I can make a hundred babies who won’t get enough food. They ought to make people get a license. Test them for mental stuff and then prove they have enough money.” He exhaled forcefully, vibrating his lips, neighing like a horse. His eyes rolled, unmoored. He swallowed hard. He hadn’t had any alcohol in a long time: his limitless capacity might be a thing of the past. I had been too indulgent. But I wanted him vulnerable. I wanted him honest. Booze accomplished that because the next morning he could deny he had meant what he said.

  I took his arm on our way out of the restaurant. Other people had come in by then and a pleasant man—obviously a retiree—held the door and steadied Father as we went past.

  “I’m all right,” Father breathed into the man’s face.

  “I know you are,” the stranger answered with a city smile, brilliant with promise and welcome and, of course, insincere.

  The surgical cold sliced through us and sobered Father. Or at least froze his legs into a steady position. “Can you make it?” I asked, referring to the ten paces we had to go to reach the car.

  “You feel warm and happy before you die in the cold,” he said. The words were blasted into clouds as they left his mouth—each one a silent white explosion.

  “Is that what you tell yourself about it?” I asked him. The air blew around my eyes and into my skull. They burned. But I held him with the look and accused him without another word.

  “You’re a cunt,” he said. The insult blew up and the remnants hung in the air. Father moved onto the sidewalk, his feet not raised, skidding a bit, like a novice ice skater. Puff went another blast: “Always been a cunt. And you still are.” He slid to my blue Volvo—a darker color than the one Naomi had used to drive me away from him—and finished his theme in a cheerful tone: “Guess you always will be a cunt.”

  When we began the drive back to his apartment, a twenty-minute journey, it was already dark. Father’s head nodded back and forth with the motion of the car. I slowed so that we wouldn’t arrive quickly—besides, the road was treacherous—and soon his head pitched forward and stayed there, chin propped up by the puffy collar of his down jacket.

  I called to him a few times. Not Daddy. I used his real name, Sherman. Saying it softened me toward him again. He didn’t respond. He stayed asleep.

  At the crossroad I turned off 176 and got onto the back route, the inland road that would take me past the dump, and eventually to the town cemetery. I had never been to my mother’s grave. I had refused to go to the funeral because my father was attending. Now I wanted his company.

  He stirred when I stopped. The cemetery was small, only fifty graves. Mother was entitled to burial there because her family, along with five othe
rs, was listed in the town charter as one of the founders, and their descendants were given that right in perpetuity. Most did not avail themselves of the privilege since it meant separation from their mates. Besides, the town’s fee was high. I paid. Father had no money for anywhere else. Thus I barred him from eternity with her.

  “Sherman…?” I whispered. His eyes opened slowly. Covered by the filmy blur of sleep and impaired by the cataracts anyway, they didn’t recognize the darkness outside. For a moment, the white circles held me in their sight. But the look was blind. He said nothing. He shifted away from me, shut his eyes, and leaned his head against the window. He wanted the comfort of rest.

  Nightfall was complete. What headstones I could make out were visible due to the car’s headlights. There was no moon. The woods disappeared in the blackness. I got out and stepped among the generations carefully.

  I had lived in the city too long. I was afraid of the outside: of the dark, of the animals, of the beds of the dead. I picked my way with fearful glances, checking behind me, and looking over at the car. Father appeared dead also, slumped against the window, mouth open. Only the Volvo was animate, like a dragon, breathing smoke, eyes burning bright.

  Some of the soldiers had miniature flags on their headstones. Besides sorting trash, the dump man was also responsible for maintaining the graves. He had done his duty—none of the flags was tipped over. Two were from World War I, but the others, five in all, were from the Civil War. A lot of Maine boys died in the Great Conflict. While in college I had researched the area’s history. Mainers were to the nineteenth century what the blacks were to Vietnam: a supply of bodies. It’s a commonplace of history—the poor die to preserve the principles and the property of the rich.

  I admit I had wanted my mother buried alongside the few heroes of my people to steal a little of the honor done them. For her, life had been nasty, brutish, and short. Perhaps it had been no better for the young soldiers, but they had been rewarded with headstones that told of their bravery and reproductions of the Union’s flag flying proudly all year.

  And, you know, I was right. For once I had done well. I calmed when I found her place. The headstone, by rule, was done in the style of the ancient ones, low to the ground, modest in size, letters carved in a fancy script. Not the minimalism of today, but the illusions of the past:

  HERE LIES KATHERINE EATON GRAY

  1932-1980

  DIRECT DESCENDANT OF TOWN FOUNDER JACOB EATON

  BELOVED MOTHER & LOVING WIFE

  SHE KNEW NO HOME BUT HERE

  I couldn’t cry. My eyes ached, but it was too cold to weep. Besides, I was glad to see her there, safe from him, with a place all to herself, pompous and sad, honored and irrelevant.

  I found a black stone, weighty and smooth. Of course there were no Jews in that cemetery and so the dump man would knock it off tomorrow, but I put the rock on her headstone.

  At last I had done my duty to her memory. That left my duty to her death.

  I opened his door and Father fell halfway out, stopped by the angle of his torso. “Wake up,” I said.

  His white, ghostly eyes stared at me. “What…?” He tried to right himself back into his seat, but couldn’t. He peered, un-comprehendingly, at the black world behind me.

  “You killed her, didn’t you?” I had brass in my voice, cocksure and mischievous, as if I didn’t care one way or the other. “You left her outside, passed out—”

  “What?”

  “Like this.” I pulled on his arm, and though he tried to grab hold of the dash and then the door, he tipped out onto the hillock of soiled snow by the edge of the dirt road.

  He moaned, “Jesus! I’m hurt—”

  I dragged him—to my surprise, it was easy—away from the warmth and safety of the car, down the snowbank by the edge of the road into the beginnings of the wood. We made noise on the crusty snow, crunching it like a breakfast cereal.

  “She didn’t get drunk!” I had shouted this in my head, on Dr. Reynolds’s couch, but never in real life: “You’re telling me she was too drunk to walk ten feet into the house! She couldn’t call to you! You couldn’t hear her!” I kicked him. I don’t mean this as an excuse, I know it isn’t valid, but I didn’t think of him as a seventy-five-year-old man. He was the great blond terror, hands thick and heavy, body impervious to winter wind, eyes blind to my pain. How could I hurt such a creature?

  He wheezed at the blow. I swear I heard a bone crack. He wasn’t my terrible nemesis anymore: merely a poorly stuffed doll, hollow or soft depending where you touched. “Jesus…,” he groaned into the snow, feet pulled up to his belly, hurting.

  “Tell me the truth, goddamn you!” I was insane—weepy, in a rage, worried I’d killed him, terrified that he could get up and kill me. What did you do? Force her to drink until she passed out, and then dump her in the snow?”

  “Fuck…” I think he meant to curse me, but his voice gave out. He coughed once, groaned, and coughed harder. “Going to be sick,” he said.

  “I’m leaving you here,” I said, and walked away. I had to set my foot in the imprint of my last step down from the road, put my hand in the next to last, gather momentum, and jump to surmount the snowbank. Once up, I still had to fight to keep my balance. He’d never make the road, much less get to the nearest house, more than a quarter mile back.

  I’d be caught. They knew at the retirement apartments that I had him with me.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted the truth.

  He was vomiting. The sound of his retching boomed in the tamped-down snow-covered world: a very loud, solitary noise amplified in an empty auditorium.

  “Blood,” he growled. “Blood!” he roared.

  Mine? He wants my blood? I was scared of him. Now that he knew what I believed, he might kill me if I went to rescue him. Those hands were still powerful. Once around my neck, he could squeeze life out of me.

  I watched my breath flow, a white flame, in the air. It must be very cold, but there were no more hollows in my bones for it to freeze. I was burning.

  “You fucking cunt! I’m bleeding. Get me up, you fucking cunt!”

  From what I could see he was on his knees, arched forward, face in the snow. The goose-down jacket came down only to his waist. He wouldn’t last long.

  You die happy in the cold. The car was near. I could be in it and driving south, the Phantom of Route 80, a woman with a tragic past, doing what she can to make up for it. I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t mocking. I thought it might be the real answer. To go back to New York meant dealing with Ben, with another one.

  “Tell me the truth you bastard!” I hurled the words down at him, stoning him with my hate, so old and still so new.

  “She was…” He raised up, although on his knees; he thrust his chest out and reached toward the black sky. In the half-glare, positioned away from the headlights, he resembled a wounded soldier, dying on the battlefield. There was blood on the neck of his jacket and his face was contorted in pale horror, a ghastly death mask. “She was…,” he repeated, talking not to me, but to the woods, blacker lines of trees against a black mass, cracking from the ice, branches shivering in the cold wind. “She was pissed! Thought she was inside, in the fucking house!” he yelled in a rush, and fell forward, fists out to punch the ground. They sank into the snow. “She drank. Once you left us, she drank! Took my stuff! I threw her out. She used to come back in the kitchen door. She couldn’t get to it. I was sick in bed. But she drank!” he wept into the crusty snow. “Don’t tell me nothing else,” he blubbered. “She was a fucking drunk.”

  No she wasn’t. She wanted to be close to him, to be intimate, even if that meant living in a stupor, too far gone to get up, open a door, and enter. Even if that meant you died five feet from home and rescue.

  What was I going to do? Kill him for a crime he didn’t understand? There was no truth to get out of him: he had converted lies into truth. I climbed down the snow to get him.

  He hadn’t vomited. The bl
ood was from a cut on his chin. I pulled him out of the snow. He’d stopped weeping; his breathing was labored and rapid.

  “Come on, Daddy,” I urged him, his arm around my shoulder. I pushed to move his body toward the road. Could I get him up the snowbank?

  “Let go of me,” he mumbled. “Don’t want to go back there,” he whined like a child. He kicked me in the shin with the hard rubber of his boot and leaned his weight on me.

  We toppled. I screamed as we went down. Stuck under him we could both freeze.

  He put his bloody chin on my cheek and whispered in my ear: “You hate me?”

  “No, Daddy. Get up.”

  “What do you hate me for?”

  The snow burned on my calves and wrists. It crawled, alive, into my sleeves and shoes.

  “Don’t care anyway,” he mumbled.

  I pulled hard to get myself out from under him. Abruptly yanked free, I rolled over and over, falling down the snowbank toward the woods. He flipped up, arms spread, crucified, sinking until he was level, imbedded in the white crust.

  When I stood over him, his eyes were shut. “Help me, Daddy. I can’t get you up myself.”

  Silence. The trees cracked and moaned. Father began to hum a song.

  “Going to leave you here,” I warned him.

  “‘Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,’” he sang, softly, “‘cryin’ all the time.’”

  I had to go to the Volvo and get the towing line Stefan stored with the jumper cables. While Father sang Elvis Presley, I tied it around his chest, attached the other end to the trunk lock, and slowly drove on the road, pulling him up the snowbank. He cursed and dragged his heels, digging deep furrows and uncovering a patch of brown frozen earth. Eventually I got him into the car, and finally to the local hospital, where we were both regarded as too drunk and too crazy to be allowed to do anything more for ourselves. They admitted him for observation and a doctor drove me to the nearest motel.

  I stopped by the next morning and found Father pale and bandaged in a bed. I told him I was going back to New York. What else could I do? There were no answers in my past.