Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  It stayed that way until last year.

  It was July and hot and we were both in the city for a change.

  Laura was going to make dinner, a light salad, some bread and cheese. She’d gone into the liquor store to pick out a bottle of wine. I was across the street at the Pathmark buying cigarettes. Trying to quit hadn’t taken again.

  Despite its reputation Manhattan isn’t all that dangerous, especially not around Lincoln Center. I’m told we have the safest precinct in the City. But safety’s a relative matter. Tell the one doomed goose in thirty who flies off the lake with the rest and gets blown out of the sky by some hunter that basically, he’s been safe.

  The gunman must have thought the store was empty. Laura was squatting in the aisle reading wine labels when he walked in and demanded money from the kid at the counter. Then she must have stood and startled him. The weapon was a thirty-eight and the range was close, no more than a dozen feet and he shot her three times, in the face, hip and chest and then ran away in panic. She would have survived the first two bullets. But the third found her heart exactly.

  I heard nothing. No shots. I saw no one running away. What I did see was a group of five or six people peering in through the doorway to the liquor store. No police yet, no sirens. But it didn’t look right. And Laura was inside. I crossed the street feeling like I was slogging through mud, my head suddenly pounding. For the first time in years I could feel my heartbeat. I elbowed through the crowd and into the store.

  I won’t describe this in any detail. I refuse to. There are some things not worth telling. My wife, my lover, my twenty-eight-year companion, the woman I slept with and woke with and laughed with and held in my arms was dead on the floor in a pool of blood and wine studded with bright stained shards of glass and that’s all you need to know.

  But at times like these you notice, you see the craziest things and they loom with their own unaccustomed weight. I saw not the racks and rows of bottles but the fluorescent lights overhead, columns bright as suns. I saw the spinning fan above me, like a propeller displaced from its ship and planted in the ceiling. I saw cracks in the walls like the veins in some huge wrist. I turned to look for help from whoever was at the counter but the boy had long since gone looking for a policeman, before I even arrived.

  In front of me the cash register was a small grey mountain. It looked impregnable. There was a wicker basket of corkscrews and bottle openers beside it like somebody’s jagged metal picnic.

  And beside that a small box of pennies.

  It was the box that did it, that finally made my legs go, that made the world tilt and fall.

  Three’s the charm they say.

  In my Webster’s II Dictionary definition number six for charm is incantation of a magic word or verse.

  I have never believed in magic. Unless magic was the captured image. Life lived over and over again in patterns on a screen.

  Or unless magic was Laura.

  But the ring had already introduced me to mystery.

  Remember my thesis? It’s from the mysterious that we make the leap to godly grace or evil.

  And only from there.

  You see these penny boxes all around in New York City. In Love Cosmetics. At Tower Video. You see them everywhere. Usually all they say is take a penny, leave a penny but with this one someone had gotten more elaborate.

  It said take one if you need one.

  And do the same for someone else someday.

  They never caught the man who killed her. The kid behind the counter’s description was impressionistic. Male, mid-to-late twenties, caucasian or light Hispanic, Jets teeshirt and jeans. Medium height, medium weight, medium build.

  All those mediums. All those greys.

  A thief in shadow. A killer under fluorescent light.

  A dangerous complexity of light and dark, brightness and shadow. Promise and promiscuity. That was what killed her. And I ask to what end? To perpetuate exactly what?

  I sold some stocks. I gave notice at ABC. I was no longer interested in that kind of seeing. I started looking elsewhere.

  The world pushes pins on a bulletin board we pass daily and on that board are scraps of paper, messages which have no order or design but of which we must make order and design for better or worse.

  If not we go mad.

  I did my homework and found the right location for the store, a place down on the Lower East Side in Alphabet City. I closed the sale within a month. The gun permit took longer and I waited for that to come along before the opening. In the meantime I made arrangements with the liquor distributors and did some remodeling. When the permit came through I bought a thirty-eight Smith & Wesson and put it on a shelf behind the register. It’s there now.

  The store’s been robbed four times over the past fourteen months so I got it for a song. I figure it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries again. I’m not looking for the guy who shot Laura. I know the odds on that. But somebody. Please god.

  Someone else someday.

  I’ve got to give it back.

  The wallet. The ring.

  The penny.

  Rabid Squirrels in Love

  From the Journal of Kathleen McGill

  Augusta, Maine

  June 8th, 10:30 p.m.

  He’s the cutest man I ever laid eyes on unless you count the movies. That’s the first thing.

  The second thing is he scares me.

  And I want to write this down now because I don’t know which I like better to tell the truth, the good looks or the scary part. (Isn’t that weird?) Mama gave me this big brown leather notebook about four years ago right after they pulled my skinny butt out of college (and thank God they did!) in hopes that I’d write down my thoughts and feelings about the drugs and Kenneth and of course, about Daddy, for Father Sylvestery or Doctor Todd. But I never did use it then. Now I feel confused, and I want to.

  He’s got a violent side for starters.

  I saw that today.

  I’m working as an aide at Augusta Mental Health. I’m a recreational therapist and he’s an attendant, usually on the locked ward. I know getting a job in a mental health facility is a little strange for somebody who’s had problems of her own. But I suspect he’s had them too. I bet a lot us who work here have.

  I guess maybe it takes one to know one, right?

  It’s pretty good though. I work both the locked and unlocked wards, with both men and women, all ages. I take them to the pool for swim therapy, take them out for walks or volleyball, play ping pong or bumper pool with them in the game room. When the weather’s nice we go out for picnics or over to the park to feed the ducks. I’m supposed to loosen them up, basically, and encourage them to talk. Which is hard because a lot of them are mostly nonverbal to begin with and all that Haldol, Stelazine and Thorazine doesn’t help any. Some of the older ones have even had lobotomies or shock therapy before the courts made them illegal. Talking to them is like talking to to a spruce tree.

  I get to wear street clothes, which is nice. It’s been hot this summer so most of the time I’m either in short-shorts or bikinis, even around the men, the theory being that if some of them are going to go back into society one day, back on the streets, they’re for sure going to see women wearing this stuff, some with bodies a whole lot better than mine, so they might as well see them in here too, in a more controlled environment. Even though a lot of these guys were committed for something involving sex, everything from exposing themselves to little kids to rape.

  I’m the youngest person in the facility, male or female.

  I’ve never worried about that until today. Though I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff, believe me.

  There’s one man, Mr. Schap, he’s about forty, and I guess he was taught that masturbation’s bad or something, so he’ll go into these sexual seizures that are almost like epileptic seizures and bite out big chunks of his hands so he won’t start playing with his penis. You’ve got to restrain him or it’s gruesome.

  T
hen there’s Gideon, who’s old enough to be my grandfather. He mostly walks around all day in his grey suit singing “Jesse James was a man who roamed through the West” or “let’s turn off the lights and go to bed” over and over again in this gravelly sing-song voice, lying down on the floor for a while, mooching a cigarette from somebody now and then, singing and walking some more. But then one day we found him standing naked in the middle of the hall, staring at a ventilator duct. He had this enormous hard-on. All it was was a ventilator duct! You got to wonder.

  So strange shit happens. But today Baby Huey stuck his hand up my bikini bottom and I guess that definitely started something.

  We call him Baby Huey because he looks like this big giant chicken. He’s fat and pointy-faced and sort of lumbers through the halls like that character in the old cartoons. He almost never speaks. And usually he’s harmless. But we were down at the pool today, sitting at the edge and just kicking at the water, splashing, Billy Osserman on one side of me and Baby Huey on the other. Billy was talking about old cars (he used to restore them before his breakdown) and it was a little hard to follow because I know nothing at all about cars, so I was paying attention to him, not Huey, until I felt Huey’s fingers groping for my pubic hair.

  I slapped his hand away and laughed and gave him a look like, what do you think you’re doing? And he said, I want to fuck you. So I said, well, you can’t, keep your hands to yourself. He looked at me real hard and said, then I want to kill you, bitch.

  Well you can’t do that either I said, and got up and walked away. I kind of made a joke of it. But I have to admit, he shook me a little.

  Then this evening we were in the dayroom with a bunch of the patients, Baby Huey included, watching Gilligan’s Island on television. I was talking to Gloria in the nurse’s station, which is this big enclosed cubicle with non-breakable floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides facing a wall in back and two doors you can lock if you need to. You always lock them when you leave because that’s where we keep the medications. But other than that, in six whole months we’d never bothered.

  Stephen (that’s this guy, the attendant I was talking about, the cute one) was out there sweeping the floor when Baby Huey stood up and heaved his metal folding chair directly at my head. Threw it hard. It bounced off the window but I damn near had a heart attack anyhow. And then all of a sudden he’s running for the door. With me and Gloria inside still too freaked to get our asses in gear to go over and lock it.

  Hey! Stephen shouts but Huey doesn’t stop, so Stephen reaches out with the broom and whacks him on the side of the head. Huey falls down all right but sort of slides on his big fat belly with the momentum and by the time I get to the door to lock it he’s slid halfway through, so now I can’t lock it, and he’s reaching for my legs, spitting and growling like he really does want to kill me. And the next thing I know Stephen’s on top of him, with one hand on his forehead pulling his head up and the other on his windpipe, choking him.

  Huey goes all red in the face, gasping for air but not getting any and we see him sort of start to go blue so Gloria and I are both shouting at Stephen to stop! stop it! you’re killing him!

  And then the weirdest thing happened. Scary and sexy, both at the same time.

  Stephen looked up at me and grinned and winked and said, “present for you, Kath,” gave Huey’s throat one more little squeeze like you’d squeeze a lemon and dropped him passed out cold to the floor.

  I didn’t even know he knew my name.

  We talked over coffee after that (I made Gloria promise not to say anything, because you could get fired for using that kind of force on a patient!) and I told Stephen about what happened by the pool. He said a guy like that ought to be castrated, not incarcerated, and I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not even though when he said it he was smiling.

  I asked him where he learned to do that thing with the windpipe and he said from his father. I sure didn’t want to talk about fathers because I never could do anything right by mine God knows, so I let that matter drop. Then our break was over and we had to go back to work. But just before we did he asked if he could see me sometime.

  I said yes. He said when, and we settled on Saturday night.

  And now I’m honestly not sure that was smart. He’s too damned attractive, you know? Just like Kenneth was, though in fact in the looks department, Stephen has Kenneth beat by a mile. Which probably only makes it worse. Because look what I got living that year with Kenneth. A crystal meth habit that nearly killed me, rotten grades in school and three long years in therapy.

  But besides that, there’s this violent thing. Kenneth was hardly ever real violent despite the biker stuff, mostly just screwed up. But I watched Stephen with Huey and I know he enjoyed it, what he was doing, choking him. I’m sure he did. I could see it in his eyes, in that big wide sexy grin.

  I’m not real religious or anything God knows but I wonder if enjoying himself that way isn’t some sort of sin.

  I just hope I know what I’m getting myself into.

  I should probably call it off.

  But probably I won’t.

  Kathleen read the entry thinking, well, I wanted to remember how I got involved in this. And now I do.

  It doesn’t help. It was seventeen years ago and it doesn’t stop the moaning sounds, the muffled screams. It doesn’t mean a thing.

  She remembered how he used to let his long hair down out of the ponytail after work hours back then, shaking it free. Weekends he would never shave. He wore sandals and bellbottoms and lovebeads and an ankh around his neck, the Egyptian symbol for life. They read Siddartha and Kahlil Gilbran.

  Now he was clean-cut. He said that people didn’t want some shaggy carpenter in their homes unless it was maybe Jesus Christ, and probably not even him.

  But he was so handsome in those days that she sometimes wondered what he saw in her. He could have had anybody. She had never been anything but just short of pretty. Though her figure was good especially her breasts and she had nice soft curly red-brown hair.

  She closed the journal and left it lying on the bed and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She poured it and put the mug in the microwave and turned it on. The sounds were louder here. She could hear them over the microwave’s hum. He’s got to soundproof the place a whole lot better if he’s going to keep this up, she thought.

  It’s driving me crazy.

  God. What am I doing here?

  She took the coffee out of the microwave and opened the kitchen door that led down to the basement.

  The sounds were louder still.

  Well, better the kid than me, she thought. At least we got past that part. You want to keep that in mind when you think about complaining, about the noise or about anything having to do with him. Take a look at the drawerful of polaroids if you need to be reminded. It could be you down there again. Doing whatever he wanted you to do, just because you loved him.

  Why do you love him, anyway?

  She had no answer that immediately came to mind though he could be very attentive and kind sometimes, come home with little gifts for her, a pair of earrings, flowers. But it was more that they were just fated to be together, and that was that. She couldn’t imagine life without him. She loved him because she did.

  Despite his little habits.

  She wondered what was going on. The boy was hardly ever this loud. Not any more. Usually the boy was passive, almost one step up from catatonic, and she knew one when she saw one. She still saw her share of catatonics these days even if he was free of all that now. It had turned out he was handy, could build things. Like Jesus. A carpenter.

  He wouldn’t mind if she went downstairs for a look. He never did.

  With him nothing was private.

  She stepped out onto the landing, sipped carefully at the steaming coffee and let it warm her hands as she started down.

  It was cool these days for September and even colder in the basement by at least about ten degrees. She felt goose-fle
sh on her arms and legs and felt her nipples stiffen beneath the loose white extra-large Superbowl teeshirt as she hit the concrete floor. Stephen always seemed to think that her nipples stiffening down here in the basement was some form of erotic anticipation on her part but in reality it was just the cold. Though she would never tell him that. Let him think what he wanted to think.

  She saw dust-bunnies amid the paint cans and empty flowerpots beneath the wooden stairwell. She’d have to clean up a bit down here. She smelled bleach and laundry detergent in the humid musty air along with some other smell she couldn’t quite place. None were smells she liked. Maybe at some point she’d get the boy to start doing the laundry for her so she wouldn’t have to bother. She’d mention it to Stephen.