Then, they’d string him up on a low-hanging cross, arms spread wide. Then she’d lean in close and ask him, “Got any…suggestions?” They’d use a gutting knife from the boats to cut him open like a pig—cock to throat—and watch to see what spills out. Rumours of wild dogs on the island were rampant. A pack might catch the scent of him and that would be one nasty way to take his end.
Unbelievably, there was no malice in Teeny’s voice when she came to the end of this daydream. She came back to the bright, hot kitchen. She raised her chin and looked right at Mama.
“I know the first thing I’m gonna do.” Let those dogs have their way with his entrails, her tired mind thought, just like they did with Jezebel.
It was quarter past ten.
4.
It was a hot shower that soon ran cold, and Teeny sat at the back of the tub with her knees pulled up to her chin. She let the water hit her face and stream down her shivering body. She put the plug loosely into the drain so the tub would fill up some. The tepid water soon turned pink but she stayed sitting in it for over an hour because she thought the sound of the shower would muffle her sobs.
Mama wasn’t asleep anyhow when Teeny got home. And now that there was this…other thing…to contend with, the shower was a saving grace. She had to do something after the Chief and his deputy left and she knew sleep wouldn’t be coming. She tried to calculate how much money she had in her savings. She wondered if Mama had truly given everything over to the Smythes or if there might be some mad money in the house somewhere or even another bank account. Her memory briefly fluttered on the secretarial scholarship that never came in the mail. It seemed like only a few days ago that this money was going to change her life. And then, a few days later, another, much bigger chunk of money was going to solve all her problems for good.
But now she had nothing. Even less than nothing.
She shut off the shower, got out and towelled off. Her bum hurt so much now. Her goose bumps and taut flesh were cold. She tried not to think of the memory of that open hand clutching at her right breast, fingers trying to pierce her fresh, creamy skin. She looked at herself in the mirror and expected to find a hand print of bright pink on the skin of her tit, the palm where her cold, hard nipple was. But there was nothing, no visible remnant. She shivered and turned away from the mirror, again without looking into her own eyes.
She was careful not to get any blood on the bath mat or the towels but quickly wadded up some more of those pink tissues and tried to ease some into her raw, engorged anus. She took two handfuls of tissues for the night and then cracked the bathroom door to peek into the hallway. She couldn’t hear Mama and no lights were visible – just dim moonlight from the window over the stairs. It was past midnight now and Mama, despite her own horrible evening, had probably found sleep, either in her main floor bed or on the long couch downstairs in front of the TV. With her new wheelchair that had collapsible arms and an overhead bar suspended from the ceiling, Mama could get in and out of bed on her own. She could even get onto the couch without calling for her daughter’s help as she had done for the last several years until church donations had afforded the new chair.
Teeny tip-toed to her room, trying not to let the second-storey floorboards squeak. She lay down under warming coverlet and, to her surprise, felt the tug of sleep. As she drifted, she saw a grey-white blade going back and forth on a brown leather strap, long and dark and oiled. She didn’t hear the sound of the blade though, no, instead it was the slap-slap-slap of Frank Moort doing something behind her, his fingers jammed up against her private parts, getting this set. Then the sound dissolved into the swish-swish of his suit coat, then mutated into the blades of the overhead ventilation fan. Her mind veered from one fevered image to the next, from one remembered sound to another. She was still awake, but dazed, fatigued. She was running forward, with some kind of unknown animal or insect trying to bite into her from an unseen spot.
In her ears was the memory of those buzzing lights and the Tin-ting-tin-TING of the fan.
Ahead, the men’s room door was a stark, canted opening to whiteness, and—same as the Highliner’s kitchen door—it swung on hinges in both directions. First it swung open outward. Then it blew open inward toward Teeny. She perpetually ran toward it on a long road of green floor tile as the panel of the door changed colour: robin’s egg blue, in, then sickly green, out, robin’s egg blue, in, then sickly green, out, back and forth, but she was never able to reach it. Mental fabrications of her arms were outstretched to it as she ran and she realizes they were covered in rivulets of deep red out to bony, aged fingers that looked like tree branches. She looked down to bare feet on the green tile that were becoming spotted with coin-sized dabs of red.
And then Teeny, now mentally exhausted, fell away to sleep.
It was twenty past twelve.
5.
Teeny had a deep sleep and woke to light through the lace curtains of her second-storey bedroom, the same room she’d had since moving out of a cotton-lined bassinet in her parents’ room at eight months of age.
She had two fleeting mental images retained from her dream. In one, she was sticking her two reddened fingers into a beehive only to realize it wasn’t bees swarming up her fingers, hand and arm all the way to her shoulder. Nor was it a beehive. It was a large, commercial tin of Tahitian cut pineapple. The bees were sections of pineapple moving up her arms with trails of sickly sweet syrup. Her fingers were protruding into a soft bit of metal in the skin of the can where white foam had created a hole. Her fingers were hot and burning. Mixed with the syrup, foam and black bits that looked like mould were small trails of red: her own blood.
The other image had come later in dreamy sleep. She’s not sure how or if it was connected to the beehive version of the pineapple can. It was the long, noisy strokes of a knife on the leather pelt of a sharpening strop. Up and down that blade went, this side of the steel, down, and then that side, up. Long loud stroke down, long loud stroke up.
Then she realized she was six years old, out back in the hot garage, at knee-height. Her eyes trailed up the long brown leather strap and saw the muscular tanned arms of her daddy. He was smiling at her.
Back and forth, back and forth, his blade pitched.
And this was when she woke.
6.
Mama said little at breakfast beyond a thicker-than-usual version of grace. Begging forgiveness, no. Begging for strength and for wisdom, yes. Begging to be shown the way, o Lord, most definitely.
Teeny had the lunch shift at the café which meant she could dawdle a little but, today, she intended to be out of the house by nine at the latest. She didn’t know where she would go for the hour before shift started at ten, but she didn’t want to be here with Mama. She didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to talk about anything with Mama. She didn’t even want to look at her.
Finally, when she was finished eating, Teeny put all the dishes in the sink and wiped the table as she usually did, saving the washing for after lunch when there would be more to do. Mama sat in the smaller of her two wheel chairs looking small herself and facing the lacy curtains at the dining room window. She couldn’t see the garden from this angle. Just bits of tree branches, some sky and the odd bird. But she was looking intently out that window. Out there at something.
Mama didn’t say anything.
But finally Teeny spoke. Standing at the sink, and clenching her behind inside her jean shorts, she said, “Mama, what did Daddy do for a living?”
Snapped out of her trance, Mama looked up at her, blinked, and said, “He worked for Union Rail, dear. He was a train engineer. You knew that.”
7.
The walk downtown to the café was unpleasant. She had stood to eat her cereal at home because there had still been raw, red blood in her underwear and sitting was not an option yet. Not even close. Mama didn’t ask about it, probably didn’t even notice. She was consumed with thoughts of stolen money while looking out at the snippet of sky over the bac
k garden.
When she had gotten out of bed, the toilet paper compress Teeny had used last night was soaked through with red, rusty brown by sun-up. So this morning, feeling less pain but still seeing more blood than she’d hoped, she’d switched to a heap of three sanitary napkins piled on top of each other and pushed more to the back of her panties than to the bottom or front. She had also taken a clean bundle of them and stuffed them into her purse before she struck out for work. When she got there, well before the ten o’clock shift, she went directly to the ladies room to take care of her underside again, fearing the walk had loosened things enough to produce more blood. She didn’t know how she would make it through a rush today without breaking down in tears.
There, inside the green-panelled stall, she sat with her legs open and feet arched on tip-toes, peeling brown napkins from her ass and trying to replace them before anyone came in. She knew no one would be the wiser. Any other gal would just think she was on her regular cycle if she happened in here and heard Teeny rummaging with underwear and dipping toilet paper into the toilet tank to wet it. More likely, that other woman would pee in the second stall and not give her neighbour a second thought. The world did not revolve around Teeny McLeod, she reminded herself.
Her two fingers, those that had come into contact with white foam on the Tahitian cut pineapple can in the back room, now looked like two big bulbous blood blisters. They were red and swollen and rounded. Her fingerprints on those two fingers were stretched taut and nearly gone. But the pain and itch deep inside them was distant now, distant in comparison to the over-filled feeling down below. The fingers almost looked like two giant, shiny insect eggs, ones that would burst open and spill out thousands of tiny, gooey larvae. She pushed the pads of those red fingers with her other index finger and they throbbed white, sending a sharp sliver of pain up to her knuckles and beyond her wrist. She should probably go see a doctor. They looked infected, but, truthfully to Teeny, not like any infection she’d ever seen before. She took a whiff of those two red fingers, as if she could smell it, like a dog might sniff out a tumour, but there was no unusual odour. Her mind returned to the hurt and swelling of last night’s...encounter.
She chewed three aspirin while tugging wads of hair matted with caked blood out of her tender flesh—with her good hand, this was. The dried blood and goo down there had chaffed like gravel as she walked to work this morning, but it was only part of the reason for her discomfort. The sour, powdery taste in her mouth made her grimace as she went to work, reaching down between her legs and feeling the cool aura of toilet water as she periodically flushed some of these leavings. She pulled on her own pubic hairs to get as much of that matted mess out as she could. The yanking made her wince, and the burned surface of her private parts was not a fresh agony, but more like a small insult. Like table salt on a paper cut. She breathed through gritted teeth.
She looked down at the wad of used napkins and the red-brown fingerfuls of her personal dark hairs laying across her narrow knees. She could smell the blood, a pungent mix of her own smells, plus a deep, dark odour that reminded her of being six years old and looking up from the bottom of the stairway to her second floor in the big off-white Georgian at the end of Lannen Lane.
Daddy was up there at the top. Daddy and Mama both.
8.
Mama said that Daddy was just tired. But Teeny knew, even at six, that it was more than that. You didn’t lay in bed, day in and out for more than three weeks and eat as little as he did if you were just tired. And you didn’t haul off and shout at Mama like that either.
You didn’t wind up and throw things at the wall. And you certainly didn’t use those nasty words on Mama either. Words that started with ’c’ and ended in something that rhymed with ’punt’. You didn’t call your little girl ’brat’ and you didn’t say you wished your boys would be men and stop their snivelling like little girls. You definitely didn’t do any of those things. Not if you were just tired.
But Teeny still held hope that one day Daddy would get back out of the bedroom and Ol’ Doc Sawbones would stop his visits. Of course, Teeny knew that wasn’t his real name. Everyone did, even though that’s exactly what they called him. Good Ol’ Doc Sawbones.
He was a nice old man, pleasant and round with a bit of white fur around his ears and the back of his head above a sunburned neck and a pink, spotted head. He wore little round glasses, too, and carried a dark grey bag. He would take different instruments out and use them on Daddy: pumps and shafts and things with little dials and windows.
One time, near the end, Sawbones brought another man and while Mama looked worried outside in the hall, Teeny crept in and sat quietly on the floor while this man—who Mama said worked with Daddy—used another machine that made a crackling-buzzing sound while they pointed it at Daddy’s joints, his throat and behind his ears. Sawbones said they were measuring for something. Rads, she thought she heard him say, but she couldn’t be sure because she didn’t know what a rad was. She thought it was the thing the hot steam came out under the window sill in the wintertime, but she didn’t dare ask. Not now.
Daddy swung in both directions those days. Sleeping steadily or shouting. Then talking low with Mama in the dark with only one small lamp on, saying that she couldn’t possibly know what he’d seen, what he knew was going on here in Dovetail. She said she was there for him. They cried together a lot.
It scared Teeny and, for years, she wouldn’t think about how badly it did scare her.
It was lunch time and Mama had brought a steak to Daddy after he’d told her he was ravenous, something rare for him. She’d told him, “You can have anything you want, dear, I’ll make you anything.”
He had said, “I can’t help but taste red meat. Every swallow, it’s just the taste of it, y’know? I want a steak—so bad—but you don’t know how to start the barbecue.”
He was too weak to do the stairs, to come down and out to the back yard to start it for her. And the boys were off at summer camp, but she assured him. “I can do it, hon. I’ve seen you do it a hundred times. Steak it is. No problem. Anything for my man—my man who’s starting to get his appetite back.”
When she brought it Teeny stood in the corner, her back cagily cuddling the side threshold of the bedroom doorway, eyes big but not saying anything. Mama backed out of the room with, for once, no look of hesitation on her face. She wore a wide grin: pride at not only starting the barbecue without blowing her head off but at cooking the steak and presenting it to him. And, more importantly, that this might be the beginning of going back to normal. If he was awake before noon and he was ready to eat a big meal now, that might mean an easing out of this…limbo.
Daddy sat up in bed, shaky but looking more vibrant now, with a pallor in his cheeks and anticipation on his red lips that had been white for weeks now.
He cut into the meat on his plate that sat perched on a small piece of plywood—their makeshift solution for a bed tray. That is, he tried to cut the meat.
“Damn kitchen knife. Dull as a spoon.” He was muttering, more to himself than anyone else. “Get in here with a new knife, wouldja?” he finally called, this time with much more volume, “’fore the meat’s as cold as cornflakes.” Then he looked over at Teeny, frozen at the room’s doorway. “What you lookin’ at Teensie-girl?”
Teeny said nothing, only turned and went downstairs to see if Howdy Doody was on yet. In the kitchen, Mama’s transistor radio was playing “Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash. And mingled with that, it was the first ad on Howdy Doody, blasting out of the living room set: “March right in to the table right now, it’s Snap! Crackle! Pop!”
After a few minutes of watching Buffalo Bob while Johnny sang about being a fool, about the tie that binds, that’s when the shouting really started.
9.
She was saying in a hushed tone that she could cook another one. He was shouting back that he didn’t want another one, what, were they made of money? And, why couldn’t you leave it bloody in the mid
dle? She was saying it was no problem to do another one. He was shouting back that it was so a goddamn problem. Get him a better knife, he was shouting and shouting. This one is dull. Bring him his knife, his hunting knife, that’s the only thing that would cut through this piece of black leather.
Holding the tears in, she hurried down the stairs to get it while Teeny, momentarily forgetting Bert and Ernie, climbed the stairs back up to the doorway of the master bedroom. She looked in and saw him there, shirtless and wiry, long gaunt torso of white skin, stubble on his face grown to nearly a full beard. His eyes were heavy as he looked down at the plate in his lap, holding the fork and dull knife in each hand, both of them pointed at the ceiling. His teeth were bared and his lips snarled to a sour face. Cords stood out on his neck. Behind Teeny, Mama returned with Daddy’s large hunting knife, brushed past her in the hall and swept into the room to give it to him.
Teeny could hear his breathing, heavy, deep, like an animal in the woods. Even from over here, she could hear it. She wondered what kind of animal made that sound? An angry horse? A wild boar—?
And that’s when he lunged at Mama.
10.
It was a crazed look in his eyes, as he tumbled with Mama. They bashed into the doorway, sending wood splinters into the air and scraped through the opening made marginally bigger. They landed in the hall, not meaning to have Mama careen into Teeny. This sent Teeny reeling backwards against the far wall of the stairway. She lost her footing entirely, and all fifty-one pounds of her went down the stairs, a-tumbling.
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