Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  What was the point of having a slave, for chrissake, if he never did any work?

  She opened the door to what Stephen called his Den of Impunity and despite what she’d seen over the past two weeks and despite what she’d been through herself for years and years before that she damn near dropped her coffee.

  He had the boy manacled to the X-frame he’d made for him again—naked, gagged and blindfolded. Nothing new there. But Stephen was playing with electricity this time. That was new. There was a patch of black electrician’s tape over each of the boy’s nipples and at each of his inner thighs. The patch on his left thigh seemed to have come undone. She could see wet burst-open blisters there. Wires ran from beneath the tape to the circuit breaker which in turn plugged into the wall socket. She smelled burnt flesh and burnt hair. That was the other stinky stuff along with the bleach and detergent.

  He’d been sitting in a director’s chair by the wall switch so he could turn it on and off at will but now the chair was pushed back to one side and he stood in front of the boy, pounding at his heart, tearing at the gag, breathing into his parted lips.

  “Fuck,” he kept saying. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. You’re a fucking kid for godsakes, you’re supposed to be strong. Strong, you get it? You fucking better not die on me!”

  She saw he was scared and something inside her was glad he was scared, some voice inside her said it was damn well time. But she was freaking too.

  Accessory to murder.

  Oh, God, she thought. Don’t let him die. Please God please. Don’t let us get caught doing this thing. I didn’t do it. I didn’t kidnap him. It’s not my fault. I didn’t do any thing except just go along with it. I don’t want to go to jail, I couldn’t stand to go to jail. Living this way has been a lot like jail sometimes but I couldn’t handle the real thing god, no way.

  He was working at the ropes now, had the left arm untied so that the boy’s body lolled to the right and he was working to free his left leg. He seemed only now to notice Kath was even in the room.

  “Help me get him down! Get your ass over here goddammit!” His voice like a smack across the face. She moved.

  Her fingers tore at the rope around the boy’s wrists but struggle and sweat had tightened them so that she wondered how long he’d been at this, the knots wouldn’t give beneath her fingers and she heard herself saying oh, oh, oh, as she breathed like she was listening to another person separate from herself while a nail on her index finger cracked and broke and the cool slimy texture of the boy’s cheek brushed her own and then she had his wrist free, the chill wet naked flesh and soaked matted shoulder-length hair brushing across her own bare arms, across her face and neck as she slid her arms under and through the boy’s armpits first to support him and then to lay him down across the concrete, face turned toward her and bruised mouth open and so young, she suddenly thought, not knowing if she meant the boy or herself or what.

  She felt for a pulse. Listened for a heartbeat.

  Oh god, she thought. Whatever you want me to do, I swear I’ll do it. Yours forever I swear.

  Just get us out of this.

  Please. Just this once.

  Just this once please please please let me please get lucky.

  They walked and walked, eight of them, silent, watching.

  The pair of uniformed policemen seemed largely oblivious, talking quietly, now and then making a joke and smiling.

  It was cold. Her nose was running. Across from her she could see that Stephen’s was too. Her mittens stuck to the wood. She stamped her feet to get the circulation going. Inside the boots her toes felt raw and brittle and achy.

  Enough of this, she thought. Enough of this bullshit.

  She was betting Stephen felt the same. She hoped so. She watched him move roughly in step with the others. Runny nose or not she thought he was still the most handsome man she’d ever met.

  And they all of them must have seen her nearly at once right then because the circle slowed and the signs all went out in her direction, Kath’s too, fulfilling her promise, pointed toward this thin small teenage black girl in the ratty Augusta High School jacket walking toward them with her head down and shoulders hunched, walking purposefully toward the door where the two policemen waited, her dark eyes cast down so as not to read the signs which said PRO CHOICE IS NO CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and HE’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE—that is if she could fucking well read at all, Kath thought, any better than the dumb cracker in the cellar—and she smiled as Stephen held out the tiny pink plastic twelve-week fetus cupped tenderly in his hand.

  Sundays

  Someone once said to me that if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. Just tell him who you are.

  I lie beside her watching her sleep in the light from the street, watching her face and her breasts rise and fall and think how she and I are not one person but so many, both of us and all of us for that matter each uncertainly housed in a single wrap of flesh, and memory intrudes like thick smoke from a woodfire and surrounds us in our bed.

  My father Bradford Collier was a squirrel hunter and a good one. I remember him sitting rocking in the shade of our porch his Sunday afternoons off with his old .22 cradled in his lap and watching the stand of four grouped tall black oak trees far across the field which the squirrels would naturally favor for their rich crop of acorns and we inside would hear the short flat bark of the rifle maybe half a dozen times over an hour and then his boots moving slowly down the wooden steps. There’d be silence and then we’d hear the boots again and Anne and Mary Jo and I would rush out from the kitchen to find him working on the five or six he’d shot, pinching the loose skin of the back to slit with his knife and inserting his fingers to tear and peel it away like a too-tight glove, cutting off head and tail and feet and slicing the belly open to flip out the tiny entrails.

  Should he decide a hike was the order of the day there was another stand of six hundred-year-old oaks down by the brook about half a mile away. He’d disappear down there for a while.

  They were clean kills nearly every time though like any other hunter he’d had to slit a throat or two. But what my father shot normally didn’t suffer much. And my mother’s stews were fine.

  My father considered squirrels vermin, though. Pests. Even if they did make for good eating. So that it was a surprise to all of us when in the summer of 1957 when I was just turned eleven and my sisters Anne and Mary Jo were twelve and ten my father returned from the stand of oaks with five dead eastern greys in one hand and in the other, one that was very much alive, held by the scruff of the neck and trying hard against all hope to bite him.

  “Must’ve fallen out of a tree,” he said. “And fallen long and hard. See? Front paw’s broken. Danny, you get on into the kitchen and ask your mother for some string and good thick twine. Girls, get a couple of those popsicles you been suckin’ on all summer long out of the freezer. Eat ’em fast or run ’em under the water, I don’t care which.”

  He lay the five dead greys out on the porch and we did as we were told. My mother came out to join us and take hold of the squirrel by the scruff of the neck and the base of the tail while we watched my father cut and loop the twine around his jaws and snout in an expert bowline knot so he could bite no longer and once that was done had her turn him over on his side. He used his hunting knife on the popsicle sticks stained pink and orange and cut a length of string. The squirrel chattered and scrabbled at the wood but could gain no purchase.

  “Hold him tight now, Marge. This will hurt.”

  But seeing those two big gloved hands coming toward him much have frightened the squirrel to such degree that he stopped resisting entirely and simply rolled his eyes. Even when my father took his delicate paw and forearm and gave them a sharp jerk apart he just jumped once and then lay still and panting. My father splinted the leg with the popsicle sticks and wrapped it tight with string.

  “Take that twine and make me another bowline, Danny. We’ll collar him and tie him off
to this post here and see what happens. If he doesn’t go into shock on us he might be fine in a week or so.”

  “Shock?”

  “From pain. Or what we just did to him. Either one could kill him.”

  And once we had him sitting up dazed and baffled and leashed to the support stud with his makeshift muzzle removed my father did an astonishing thing. He took a glove off and ran his hand across the squirrel’s back. Just once. Bradford Collier did that. A man who never had use for animals in his life unless they were working animals, a cat who was a good mouser or a guard-dog maybe, and who considered the greys nothing more than fat rats with furry tails. Who happened to taste good and were cheap at twice the price.

  “Husk some walnuts, kids. Put ’em nearby and then leave him alone awhile. That’s one scared animal.”

  In time my father actually allowed us to name him. It took some spirited wrangling between the three of us but we did. We named him Charlie after Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie. My older sister Anne’s idea. I thought it was dumb to name a squirrel after a dog but Mary Jo sided with her and that was that.

  Charlie took to the easy life right away. A bowl of water on the porch in front of him and all the acorns and walnuts he could eat. He never again tried to bite. In a couple of weeks my father determined he’d healed and removed the splint and though he ever after favored the leg he got around well enough and was quick enough so that once we let him off his leash you had to be careful opening the screen door or the next thing you knew he’d be inside, barking and chattering at the furniture and climbing it too.

  There was nothing he couldn’t get into. No cabinet or drawer was safe. But he never made much mess except somehow to displace things. A fork in my father’s socks-drawer, my old cat’s-eye marbles mixed in with the spoons. So after awhile we tolerated him inside and got used to his invasions. My mother bought mason jars to protect the beans, rice and macaroni. My father, who was as good with woodworking as he was with the wrench down at his garage, even went so far as to cut him a small hinged trap at the base of the door to the porch so Charlie could come and go as he pleased.

  He never once went back to the stand of oaks across the field. Not that we knew of. In fact we observed that he wasn’t much for trees in general anymore. He seemed to prefer to stay in or around the house, under the porch or in the tall fieldgrass and the low scrub beyond. Maybe it was remembering that fall, that height, that sudden break. He’d climb the bookshelves or the bedposts or the banister up to our rooms handily enough—my mother was forever polishing the tiny scratch-marks he left behind with wood-stain. She didn’t seem to mind. She said Charlie was just antiquing her furniture. But the trees he mostly left alone.

  He climbed us too.

  He seemed to know not to go for a bare leg or arm but if you were wearing pants or jeans or especially a jacket—he liked to rummage through deep open pockets—he’d be up and over you and riding your shoulder in a matter of seconds. You could walk around with him that way and he’d just hold on perfectly balanced like some strange furry added appendage.

  Only my father wouldn’t tolerate it. Like the rest of us he’d feed Charlie a walnut now and then but that far he refused to go. He was almost as fast with his hands as Charlie was on his feet and would pluck him off like an annoying bug and drop him soundly to the floor. Charlie was persistant, though. It was almost as though my father were the one he really wanted to climb and the rest of us were just amusement. Walking monkey-bars. Finally it got through to him that he just wasn’t wanted but I’d still catch him watching my father sometimes, that nervous sidelong glance, chittering, nose twitching, and was never quite sure that someday, sometime, damned if he wasn’t going to try again.

  My father still continued to hunt. Twice a month, maybe. Across the field or down by the shady brook.

  And I sometimes wondered what Charlie thought if he thought anything at all of the scent of squirrel-meat steaming in our stewpot. I look back on it now and how we could actually eat the stuff with him running around underfoot is something I’ll never understand. But we did.

  As I say, we’re not one thing, we’re many. We’re capable of all kinds of balancing acts in our heads. Until something or someone tips the balance.

  The way my wife beside me’s tipping it now.

  That winter was a cold one in northern Jersey and the snow fell thick into five-and-six-foot drifts against the house and mostly Charlie stayed indoors. He liked the mantle over the fireplace which I always thought unnatural since wild animals are supposed to be afraid of fire or even the scent of fire but for Charlie the hotter the fire in the grate the better. He’d fall asleep up there basking in the updrafts.

  Come spring and he was using the trapdoor again and using it a lot, his comings and goings according to some design unknowable to us but clearly urgent to him. He’d either be flying through the trap constantly back and forth or else he’d disappear for hours at a time. We suspected sex of course, though only Anne and Mary Jo and I would talk about it and only in private. Parents weren’t comfortable talking with kids about sex back then.

  “I wonder how squirrels do it,” said Mary Jo.

  “With their penises, silly,” said Anne. “Just like everybody else.”

  “Charlie’s gettin’ some!” I laughed. They ignored me.

  “Anybody ever see Charlie’s penis?” asked Mary Jo.

  “Not me.”

  “Ugh,” said Anne. “Spare me!”

  I rarely went along with my father on his Sunday excursions down to the brook and never once in memory shot from the porch at all. At an age when most boys would shoot at most anything that moved with rifle, bow or slingshot I had no taste for bloodsports.

  One afternoon in May he asked as he often did though and this time I accepted. I think I was angry with Anne for some reason and felt the need to get out of the house that day. Anne could be bossy or else she and Mary Jo would side together against me in an argument and that could make me furious. Whatever the reason, I went.

  My father and I never talked much and didn’t that day either. I followed him through the tall fieldgrass into the woods and found his well-beaten trail down to the brook, both our .22s held at port arms. I had no intention of using mine. It was there because my father wanted it to be. I was a miserable shot and my father knew it but it was a formal thing with him. You didn’t go hunting unarmed. It simply wasn’t done.

  His habit was to walk first to the brook and then approach the stand of oaks from there, the fast-running water masking whatever sounds we might make along the dirt embankment. It had rained the day before, the brook swollen with water the color of coffee with a dash of cream. I could never have found the exact spot to cut up to the trees from there amid the tangled foliage had I been alone but my father had no problem and I saw that he’d worn a path of sorts there too barely noticable amid the scrub. I could see the six tall trees about forty yards away up a gentle slope.

  We walked twenty of those yards and stopped at the edge of the clearing and knelt each of us on one knee and my father started firing, small sharp cracks in that wide open space that could have been branches breaking and the first squirrel slammed against the tree-trunk twenty feet up as though a hand had pushed it and then fell and my father worked the bolt and chambered another round and fired as another raced across the high branches of the same tree and tumbled bouncing from limb to limb. By then squirrels were racing barking across the ground and pouring down off the trees but my father took his time and squeezed off two more rounds. I saw one big grey somersault across the ground and another skitter and roll just as it reached the bushes. He missed with the fifth round but the sixth caught another where the bole met the root system of a second tree and flipped it on its back, the .22 round going through the squirrel entirely and chipping at the green wood behind him.

  “Five’s enough,” my father said.

  It had taken just moments.

  We stood and he took the canvas sack off his be
lt and we went to harvest them.

  “Good shooting.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Five out of six and they were really moving!”

  “They were, weren’t they.”

  I wasn’t nearly as excited as I was trying to sound but something told me my father expected it. The greys were still barking angrily at us yards away in the safety of heavy scrub. My father moved slowly and methodically, prodding them with a stick to make sure they were fully dead and wouldn’t bite and then picking them up by the scruff of the neck with one gloved hand and shoving them into the sack.

  “Uh-oh. Damn.”

  “What?”

  We had four of them in the sack and were walking toward the scrub. My father suddenly picked up his pace considerably, the closest I ever saw him come to running.

  “The one I shot at the edge here. I think he’s gone.”