The Cellar

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Maybe I could hide here. Or deeper in the woods.

  But he had hounds. He would find me.

  I stared down the road. The cabin. The others.

  I needed to find the others. Jay. Lipsky. Together we could figure something out.

  42

  When I burst through the front door of the cabin, Lipsky crouched on the other side. He had his kitchen knives drawn and his lips were pulled back in a snarl. He was backpedaling fast.

  He screamed. "Wait, Jay, it's Skip."

  I sensed the motion before I fully saw it and dropped to my belly. A dark shadow whizzed over my head and the wall by the door exploded in a cloud of plaster.

  I rolled away.

  Jay cocked the baseball bat back at his shoulder and for a second I thought that he did not recognize me and was going to strike at me again. Instead the bat floated by his ear, his hands squeezing so hard that his knuckles had whitened.

  "You almost killed me."

  "You should have knocked."

  "Knocked?"

  "Where's Tug? And the girls?"

  I walked past Jay and Lipsky to the counter, lifted one of the whiskey bottles, and choked down a mouthful.

  "Where's Tug?" echoed Lipsky.

  The booze burned right into my stomach and my whole body warmed with the fire. "We got away. The Sandman came into the house, and we escaped. Where the hell were you guys? We got stuck in a ravine. Then he tracked us down with his dogs. He got Tug."

  Jay lowered the bat to the ground. "What do you mean he got Tug?"

  I was not sure I would be able to find the words. "He shot him. And then dragged him off into the woods."

  "Oh, god," said Lipsky, "we're all going to die."

  "The car's destroyed," I said. "He destroyed the car."

  "What kind of nightmare is this?" asked Lipsky.

  "Where's Amanda?" I asked.

  "In the bathroom again," said Jay.

  "What do we do?" asked Lipsky. "How could he get Tug? He's a soldier. If anyone could fight off some freak, it would be him. Oh, god..."

  "You're not helping, Lipshit," said Jay.

  "Well, what are we going to do? What?"

  "We need to get the hell out of here. We go back to the bridge and we cross it. We get help."

  I stared out the window at the sheets of rain. "We're not going to be able to cross the river."

  "We get some ropes, tie ourselves together, slowly work our way across. Maybe tie onto a tree on this end, and allow the current to carry us across."

  Lipsky laughed. "That wouldn't work. That'd just pull us back to this side of the river again."

  "We could rig the ropes like rock climbers," I said, "tying in along the way, on the parts of the bridge that are not submerged. That way if we slip we won't be swept away."

  The bathroom door squeaked open. Amanda's eyes were rimmed red. "You're going to leave him?" she asked. "You're going to just leave your friend to him? That's it. You're not going to try to help him?"

  I wanted to turn away from her, and pretend that I had not heard a word that she had said. But I had to face her. "It's not like that. We would do anything for Tug. But this Sandman, he's got a gun and dogs. Look at us. What do we have? Video game weapons to fight off the zombie apocalypse. And they're not enough."

  "My friends? Tug?" She yelled.

  "He's the brave one. The soldier. The fighter. We just followed along. Always have. We need to get help."

  "You don't get it, do you?"

  "We're going to get help."

  "He's going to kill them," she said. "The Sandman doesn't just kidnap people. He kills them. And your friend, if you don't save him now, it will be too late. He'll be dead."

  43

  I felt as if I had just been slugged in the stomach. I could barely breathe. The Sandman was going to kill Tug. How did I not see that?

  I should have gone after Tug when I had the chance. I should not have run. My cowardice controlled me and now Tug was going to pay the ultimate price.

  "Get back into the bathroom!" Jay barked at Amanda.

  "I'm just telling you who he is and what he's capable of. Your friend's going to die unless you rescue him. And then the Sandman will come for you."

  Jay would not have any of it and with threatening punches he backed her into the bathroom and then slammed the door.

  He smashed the baseball bat through the wall, caving in a large hole.

  "Jay, relax, man!" said Lipsky. "You're not helping at all."

  "I'm going to do what I want."

  "How's that going too help?"

  "Oh, shut up already, Lipshit, you stupid nerd. God, you haven't changed one bit in thirty years. You're so pathetic."

  Lipsky bit his lower lip and shook his head slowly. He retreated to the dining room table and buried his head in his hands. "This is not good."

  "We gotta get Tug," I said. "It's what he would do for us, and we need to do it for him."

  "You have to be kidding me," snapped Jay. "Us and what army? That freak has a gun and dogs. What do we have? Garden tools and sports equipment. We need to get back across the river. Anything else is just stupid."

  "Jay, it's Tug we're talking about here. He's in trouble. You heard what she said. He's going to kill Tug."

  "And you want us to walk into his den? You're the lawyer, supposedly the one with the brain. Be smart. If we try to rescue him, we're going to fail. You think you can outrun his dogs or a bullet. We don't know the first thing about anything like this, and plus think about it, he's seen us. He knows we've come to his house. You don't think he's going to be expecting us, laying traps, getting his dogs riled up to tear us to shreds? You are being stupid. You're letting emotion control you. We need to make the right choice, and the right choice is to get away and find help."

  "She said that he's going to kill Tug."

  "What if she's lying?" asked Lipsky.

  Jay and I stopped arguing and stared at him.

  He turned a shot glass over in his hand. "Isn't it strange that she just shows up on our doorstep? And doesn't tell us that this Sandman's a killer until now? She could have said something before we went to his house the first time. Wouldn't that have been a good thing to tell us? There's a big difference between a killer and a kidnapper. What do we know about her?"

  "You think she's working with him?" I asked. I could not imagine anything further from the truth. She showed up at our doorstep in the middle of the night, in a horrible storm, covered in blood, her body cut up and bruised.

  Lipsky turned his hands up.

  The rain drummed against the roof. The distances were lost in the haze of the storm as if the whole world had drawn back its borders, concentrating all its fury and confusion in the area around our cabin.

  "He'll come for you," a voice said from the hall.

  I wheeled about. Amanda stood in the doorway of the bathroom.

  "You can sit here and argue. Pretend you are safe. You can even try to run. But he will come after you. He will find you. He'll peel the skin from your bodies and chop off your fingers and toes. Cut off your cock and shove it down your throat. Won't kill you for a long time. If you don't get him, he will get you."

  "Back in the bathroom!" screamed Jay. He smacked the bat in his hands.

  "If you aren't going to go after him, let me go," she said. "Give me a chance to run, to escape him."

  "Back!"

  "Please."

  He charged her and she retreated quickly into the bathroom slamming the door shut a moment before the bat crashed against the wood.

  "She's lying," said Lipsky. "I can feel it."

  "Why would she lie?" I asked. "She just begged us to let her go. What's she gain by us going after Tug?"

  "We gotta get help," said Jay. "Let someone else figure this out."

  "We'll never make it across the river. You know this as well as I do. We try and we're going to die."

  He shook his head.

  "And it doesn't matter if she's lying
," I continued. "There's only one thing that matters. He's got Tug and our friend needs our help. We all let Dave down. We sat on our hands and turned the other way while he slowly drank himself to death. We did nothing. But now with Tug, we've got the chance to do something. We got the chance to save him. And I don't think we could live with ourselves if we did nothing. Not again. We're past that now. We need to step up. He's in trouble. We need to shove aside our fear and doubt, and do what he would do for us. We need to do the right thing. We need to rescue him."

  44

  Once I was called a hero.

  But it was by a child so it did not count.

  Bridget was in the fourth grade, pony tailed, all smiles. The sweet child she once was. I remember coming home from work and her charging the door like a wild animal to leap into my arms, unable to contain the stories of her day: the milk spilled at the table, the hamster babies, the mispronounced words in Spanish. Back then she was unformed.

  It was one of those days after work that she came running up to me the second that I walked in through the door. It had been a hard day and honestly the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to have put that fake smile on my face as she told me about her day.

  All I wanted to do was to kick off my shoes, drink a strong gin and tonic, and lie down. I was so tired I could die.

  I was in the middle of the Rayburn trial at the time. He was a son of a bitch. No other way to describe it. But a rich one. So he had sought me out. I was the go-to-man.

  Rayburn, mop of red hair and ham-fisted, was a developer. That's what he called himself. But what he did was flip houses, turned shoddy, drafty, paint peeling houses until they shimmered and glowed. All in about two months' time. Sold them for twice the price he bought them for. It all worked well until a year after the sale the walls buckled, the pipes burst, and the roof sagged. A crime really though that's not what he was on trial for.

  No. Old Rayburn, glad handing, was always a bit too free with his fists. A few times police had been called to bars or even job sites where by the time they arrived Rayburn was sitting on the hood a car, cigarette dangling from his bright lips, and the other person nursing a black eye. But the police always went away without Rayburn in cuffs. Always an accident or a misunderstanding despite the frantic call on the 911 recording. No charges ever filed.

  If the cops had been a little more observant, they would have noticed the fat wads of cash in back pockets or bulging jackets.

  He was as free with his money as with his fists.

  That worked out for him.

  Until he punched one of the roofers on a job site, Smitty, an old guy who really shouldn't have been working in the first place, one of those tough old mothers who was going to work until the day he died.

  Well, that day he did. Not from his heart giving out. But because they had messed up the job, actually did what any honest contractor would have done and rebuilt the roof frame, and it was going to cut deeply into the profit on this flip.

  This was not a big deal and honestly it was the constant battle that Rayburn had with his contractors. He tried to cut corners and they tried to fix them. Almost a cat and mouse game.

  This day was no different. Rayburn came onto the site, saw that they had done a good job, and he started laying into them, cursing, insulting them, shoving the men in the chest. Usually this charade went on for a while, the laborers accepting the abuse, and ten minutes later after Rayburn let off steam, they were back to work, hammering, whistling, and wishing death on their employer.

  Only thing this was Smitty's first day on the job, and he had been horribly abused as a child, so when Rayburn shoved Smitty, the old man shoved back, shoved so hard that Rayburn fell hard into a pile of sheet metal, badly cutting his hand. Normally, Rayburn would have stood up and clocked the man, but Rayburn on the way back to his feet, grabbed a roofing hammer and came up swinging. One blow was all that it took. Orbital bone crushed. Blood sprayed in the air. Smitty dropped like a rock. Dead from a single strike.

  My job was simple. Argue it was self-defense. So I painted a picture of Smitty as a psychopath, a boy who once hung dead lizards by the neck (the lizards were dead anyway), who shoved little girls off their bikes (they were trying to run him down), whose notes dreaming of the death of his father were seized by teachers (these notes helped get him away from his abusive dad), to the apparent joy he took in killing people in Vietnam (he did receive a medal for his bravery).

  That was what I had spent my day doing when I walked back in that door to a child leaping into my arms. Her skin was soft against mine and my beard stubble felt like it would scrape her cheek bare. She smelled of milk. She held me tight around the neck with her bony arms and then jumped off of me and taking me by the hand, led me into the house.

  Looking back, I realized that I should have taken more joy in those moments. I should have let her love sweep me up, transform me, turn me into the man that I should have been.

  Instead, after we were in the house, I guided her to the living room and television, telling her that I needed a drink and a nap to relax and then I could play with her. But inevitably, one drink led to three, and the short nap ended in the darkness of my study, waking when the street lamps lit the empty streets and the stars struggled against the dark sky.

  That night I wandered back into the kitchen. Liz was at the counter. She barely looked up from her magazine.

  "Dinner in the fridge."

  I finished half the plate of pasta before going to the sink and pouring myself a glass of water. "Long day today," I said. "This case. This guy's a bum."

  "Aren't they all," she muttered turning a page. "What do you think of white marble countertops?"

  "I shouldn't be defending this guy. Or maybe I should not be doing such a good job."

  "You are good at your job, aren't you?"

  I returned to my food, my appetite gone. "Bridget still watching TV?"

  "Asleep long ago."

  I glanced at the clock above the stove. Hard to believe that I had been asleep for so long.

  "She wanted to show you something." Liz tore out a page from the magazine. "On the fridge."

  It was a drawing, crayon and markers. She had scrawled "MY HERO" in yellow outlined with black. Below it she had drawn me, or a gross distortion of me, in my suit, a sword in hand, fighting a snake or a dragon. At my side, she had drawn herself, small, smiling, our hands holding.

  I was a hero to her. To no one else. And maybe I could have been that to her. But I defended scum, drank my cocktails, and retreated to dreamless sleep. All the while the years passed, every day I slipped further away from my daughter.

  No longer a hero. No longer her father.

  45

  "Do you really think this is the right thing to do?" Lipsky asked me.

  We stood at the front door waiting for Amanda to come out of the bathroom, waiting for Jay to get up from the couch.

  I tried to swallow but my throat was dry and I felt like gagging.

  "It's Tug. He's one of us. We can't let him die. If what she is saying about this guy is true, we need to get there quickly."

  "You don't have any doubt."

  "Maybe. But mostly I'm just scared."

  "This is like a DnD game gone bad."

  "It's not bad yet. We just have a tough Dungeon Master. He's separated one of us and now the rest of us have to rescue him."

  Lipsky laughed. "When all this is over, will you come up and visit me?"

  "You won't make me play DnD, will you?"

  "Of course, I will. I'm not ever changing."

  Jay got off the couch and joined us by the door. "Why are we even bringing her with us?" he asked. "She's only going to get in the way."

  "Four's gotta be better than three," I said.

  "We can still change our minds."

  "We can't get across the river."

  "We could just head south. Keep moving. There's got to be another way across. Put distance between us and him. That'd be best."

/>   "I'm not leaving Tug. We're not leaving Tug."

  The bathroom door opened and Amanda stood there, eyes rimmed red, sniffling. "Do I get a weapon?" she asked.

  46

  "I don't see his truck," I said staring through the rain. The four of us hid on the hillside, crouching behind the burnt out stump and the bushes. The sun hung somewhere overhead, buried beneath clouds. The forest was lit with an eerie glow, a diffused light that made the greens more vibrant, and the reds and browns darken to near black.

  "Could be in that barn," said Jay squinting. He wiped water from his cheeks. "Under that blue tarp. I don't remember seeing that blue tarp before."

  "This isn't safe," said Lipsky. "Maybe Jay's idea is not such a bad one."

  "Tug's down there." I shifted the axe in my hands. The shaft had become slippery with the rain and I felt as if I couldn't get a secure grip on it. "I'm tired of talking in circles. Let's just do this."

  "The dogs," said Lipsky. "I don't like dogs."

  "That's what this bat is for," said Jay.

  I turned to Amanda. I caught her looking behind us.

  "What is it?"

  "Nothing," she said.

  "Did you see him?"

  "No. I'm just scared."

  "This will all be over soon."

  She nodded without saying anything.

  We did have a plan for the dogs. Jay carried hamburger meat in plastic bags in his pockets. We had mixed them up with rat poison we had found in the cabin's carport. There was not a lot and I had no idea how quickly it would work. I really hoped we just did not run into the dogs in the first place.

  But who was I fooling? Did I think we were going to be able to walk in and out of there without a hitch?

  Something would go wrong. It always did.

  I nodded to the others and then without a word descended the hillside. Each step I slid and I felt as if I were bringing the whole hill with me, as if the world drained towards the house before me.