Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  Another wall displaying masks, belts, whips, some of them tipped with metal balls.

  In the center of the room stood two huge eight foot black beams intersecting to form the letter X.

  The wall in front of it was a mirror.

  She saw what looked like an outdoor grille made of old rusted iron.

  A wooden barrel lying on its side, studded with nails.

  She saw a scarred butcher-block table arrayed with weights and clamps and knives.

  To this the woman added Dora’s carving knife, setting it down gently, almost lovingly.

  “He comes here, you know? He feels guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Of course he does. Look at what he did to you.”

  “Me? How do you know . . . ?”

  “Oh, I know you all right. I knew you right away. See, Howard always pays cash. You’d think a guy like him, with the kind of job he’s got, you’d think he’d go with a credit card just to get the float. Not Howard. Always cash. Did you know he still carries a picture of you in his wallet?”

  “I . . . he does?”

  “I told you. He feels guilty. I bet you didn’t think he had it in him, did you?”

  The woman was serious. Her picture was in his wallet. Amazing.

  “Of course it’s not just you. There’s the broker and the secretary. He feels guilty about them, too. Though I never could figure out why. Hell, I think he even feels guilty about his mother dying. Howard’s got a lot of guilt. A lot to answer for. At least he thinks so.” She laughed again. “Don’t look so shocked. In this business you hear a lot of stories. People confess. I make them confess.”

  She stepped closer.

  “Stand up, Dora.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Take off your jacket. Let me look at you.”

  She hesitated.

  “I’m a whole lot stronger than you. Without your little toy there. You know that, don’t you?”

  Dora looked up into her wide green eyes and nodded. She slipped the jacket off her shoulders. And suddenly felt naked there.

  The woman reached out and lightly touched her hair. Her touch was electric.

  “So what about you?” she said. “What have you got to answer for?”

  You’ve got to get out of here, she thought. Now.

  The woman turned away, walked to the klieg light and switched it off.

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this correct,” she said. “Once you had him, you didn’t want to fuck him anymore, am I right?” She shrugged. “It happens. For some people, the capture’s everything. Once you’ve proven you can do it, once he’s yours, it’s not so much, is it? Kind of turns to ashes. Especially if you don’t really like yourself much. And you don’t, do you?”

  Dora felt her eyes on her again, probing.

  “Of course it took him awhile to catch on to that—to catch up with you, to become the incredible shrinking dick you really preferred him to be in the first place. And then once he did, he sort of retaliated, he started to belittle you, tried to make you feel like somebody small and stupid and powerless. Which part of you really thinks you are. He knew exactly which buttons to push, didn’t he.”

  She walked to the table and picked up Dora’s knife again, fingering the edge she’d honed this morning.

  “I do, too,” she said.

  And Dora believed her.

  “Did it occur to you that he was only whittling you down to size in a way? So he could finally leave you, get free of you without feeling like something was wrong with him, prove to himself that it was really you all along? And it was you, wasn’t it. Part of you really is small. You didn’t want to fuck him. You’d already got what you wanted. Simple as that.

  The woman walked back to where Dora stood in front of the huge black X and pointed the knife at her, at the top button of her blouse. Dora stood frozen. The woman turned her wrist and the button was gone.

  “So,” she said. “I’ll say it again. What’ve you got to answer for?”

  She felt the coolness of the knife as it parted her blouse, its flat edge moving down. Another flick.

  Another button falling to the bare hardwood floor.

  “I . . . I didn’t . . .”

  “Mean to? Of course you did, Dora!”

  She trembled. The knife moved down over her cream silk bra, over her sternum. To the next button.

  Flick.

  The woman shook her head and smiled ruefully.

  “And he still keeps your picture in his wallet. You’re standing on the rocks by the shore. You’re wearing a halter and jeans and the waves are crashing white foam and you’re smiling.”

  The flat of the blade moved down across her belly. The blade felt warmer now. She could feel the woman’s breath on her cheek. It smelled of rain and fresh open air. The woman was beautiful.

  They had all, in their ways, been beautiful.

  “Dora. Don’t you feel guilty?”

  She couldn’t help it. She began to cry.

  “Oh. No need for that,” said the woman. “Just step back.”

  She felt the point of the knife in her belly now, pressing her gently toward the wooden structure behind her. But the woman was wrong—there was plenty of need to cry. Whether the tears came out of guilt or fear seemed almost irrelevant now, they were practically one and the same.

  The woman knelt and fitted her ankles into the soft black leather manacles at the base of the structure and strapped them tight. When she parted Dora’s legs to set second strap she felt all volition leave her, expelled in one long breath. “Raise your arms.”

  She felt the manacles tighten over her wrists, smelled leather and rich scented oil. The woman stepped back.

  “And the others, Dora. Have you thought about the others?”

  She hadn’t.

  She had.

  Of course she had.

  She gazed at herself in the mirrored wall, and then at the woman’s long sleek back. I’ll see everything, she thought. Everything.

  Both of us. All the while.

  It was terrifying. Also thrilling. As though she and the woman were part of a single entity and both were Dora—essentially Dora—the punisher and the punished.

  “You killed them. You were going to kill me.”

  Her heart pounded. In the mirror she saw the rise and fall of her breasts, nipples hard and aching beneath the thin filmy surface of the bra.

  The woman sighed. “You’ve been a very bad girl,” she said. “They didn’t deserve it. Certainly not because of you and Howard. I think you’ve got a lot to answer for. Don’t you?”

  In the mirror she watched herself respond. She nodded.

  And thought, I was only looking for some redemption.

  She watched as the knife slit through her skirt from waist to hem, the sweat of the day cooling suddenly on her as the skirt fell away, then moved up to the final two buttons of her blouse and trailed up along her arms to slit the sleeves, so that blouse and skirt formed a pool on the floor in front of her like a snake shedding its skin.

  The woman paused and stepped away and allowed her a moment to see herself in the mirror.

  That was good. She found that she needed to see.

  She walked to the linen cabinet, took out two black sheets, and spread them around Dora’s feet both front and back. She unbuttoned the jumpsuit and shrugged it off her shoulders. Beneath it she was naked. She placed the jumpsuit neatly on the back of the chair, then took a long pearl-handled straight-edge razor from the table and opened it. The razor gleamed in the track lighting. She thought that it was very much like her father’s.

  “This is going to take awhile,” she said. “And it’s going to get somewhat messy. But we’ll get to the bottom of you, you and I. I promise you that. Your own true inner self.”

  When the razor plucked through the straps and center of her bra and the sides of her panties, she felt a sudden rush of freedom bound tight to a sudden sense of dread. It was perfectly right that this should
be so.

  “We’ll set you free,” said the woman.

  For the first but not the last time, the razor descended.

  The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard

  The boys in the pickup were traveling north along the dark empty stretch of I-75 near Nokomis, three of them cramped side-by-side in the cab and sweating in the mid-July heat despite the open windows. They could smell each other’s sweat wafted in and out by the breeze. They didn’t mind. It was Monday night. There weren’t any girls around anyhow.

  Jimmie who had just turned eighteen the week before and was losing yet another battle in his ongoing war with zits popped a Bud and handed it to Doug who handed it to Bobby. The truck was in the fast lane doing seventy in a sixty zone. Bobby was driving. Having his fourth beer open in his hand was dangerous. Less out here on the highway at nearly midnight than it would have been back home on the streets of Tampa—you were much more likely to get stopped in towns—but dangerous enough.

  He didn’t mind that either. Hell, the risk was part of it.

  He’d been lucky so far.

  He tilted back the can. The beer was warmer than he liked but the first pull always tasted good, warm or not.

  “Hey. Turn that up,” he said to Doug. “Quick.”

  The song on the radio was Johnny Cash doing The Tennessee Stud and it reminded him simultaneously of his uncle’s hardscrabble farm in Georgia and of Mary Ann Abbot and Dee Dee Whitaker—and what he, Bobby, knew about life that these other two, Doug and Jimmie, didn’t.

  He loved this guy. The Man in Black.

  And for once Doug didn’t complain about Johnny’s singing. Truth was, Doug was past complaining. Five cold brews at the Cave Rock Inn in Murdock and one on the road and old Douggie could barely find the volume control. He managed though, leaning forward and studying the panel and then Jimmie started singing along beside him. Jimmie had a pretty good singing voice but he couldn’t get the growly low notes that Johnny got. What could you expect? Hell, Bobby still remembered when little Jimmie’s voice changed. Wasn’t that long ago, either. Jimmie was still a kid.

  He thought about Mary Ann again, an image of cool white thighs spread naked in the woods.

  He was thinking of that and listening to the wind and the song up loud over the wind and he had the beer can to his lips again when he saw something glint ahead of him and then something loom suddenly in the headlights and way over against the passenger side door Jimmie stopped singing and shrieked and he guessed he did too something like whathafuuuuck? and he swerved the pickup and braked and tried to steer and the next thing he knew they were cruising the bumpy dirt shoulder at fifteen miles per hour, amazed to be alive. He was shaking like a cold wet dog and his lap and legs and teeshirt were foul and wet where Doug had thrown up all the hell over him.

  Earlier that afternoon George Hubbard stared out the double glass doors leading from his kitchen to the lanai and thought about the dog and how the dog had in some ways been the beginning of the end of it.

  The dog had been a gift to her, something to make her stay, a hope against hope that a few furry pounds of warm retriever puppy would be the glue for them that sex no longer was, nor love, nor anything else was able to be.

  It hadn’t worked. She was gone, the dog with her.

  Just like all the rest of them.

  His father was gone—dead of a heart attack—and that was all to the good, actually. At least one of them wouldn’t be around to play victim to his mother’s fucking viciousness any more. His sister, now in her thirties, had somehow without his noticing turned into the lesbian bitch from Sodom, working as a mail carrier for God’s sake in Shreveport, Lousiana. They hadn’t talked in two years, not since his father died and even then that was mostly to shout at one another. His friends had drifted away into one Sarasota warren or another since he started telling them the truth about what was really going on with him. They’d all stepped back into their own little lives, their own private blind alleys of pseudo-awareness. Good riddance. Sister, friends. Even his sadass father.

  The only one he couldn’t get rid of was his mother.

  Ever since he was a kid she’d been trying to kill him and lately she’d been stepping up the pace. In a way, she’d already succeeded.

  He stared out into the dimming sunlight on the lanai and pulled at the joint. The joint was one of the few ways he had of escaping her.

  They said he was crazy. Paranoid. The doctors at the hospital after his meth OD had the balls to go even further. Paranoid schizophrenic they said.

  Even Cal and Linda thought he was paranoid and said so to his face. Told him he needed to get help—his best friends since high school. Said his mother couldn’t do all that. When he knew damn well she was mob connected, knew damn well she’d been harassing him constantly, anyone could see that, getting her friends in the IRS after him, getting her friends in the police force after him for back child-support payments to his first wife and his daughter, trying to put his ass in jail.

  He’d had to leave the state. Come here to Florida.

  He’d disappeared.

  His mother wasn’t the only one who knew a trick or two.

  Though he knew she was looking for him even now. He could feel it. In his blood he could feel it. His mother had tentacles everywhere. She was psychic as hell and she was looking.

  Get help. Shit. Once, years ago, he’d fucked Linda. It had been a good fuck too. Friendly.

  And now she denied him.

  They all did.

  Even Sandy, after three years of loving him or at least saying she loved him, making him think that, making him feel he knew that, staying with him even through the relocation because she understood first-hand what a bitch his mother was, she’d had enough run-ins with her herself by then, though even she wouldn’t believe how connected she was with police and mob and government, his mother was too smart for that, too smart to let on to her. Some things she reserved strictly for him.

  He stubbed out the joint and walked absently through the condo, looking at what she’d left behind. It wasn’t a whole lot. In the living room, his desk, a shelf full of paperbacks and audio tapes. In the kitchen, some old pots and pans, some silverware and glassware, the toaster and the microwave they’d bought together.

  Upstairs in the bathroom she’d even taken the shower curtain.

  The worst, for him, was the bedroom. The bed was still there, but stripped of its quilt and the lace hand-made bedspread. Dirty sheets lay in a corner. She’d left him three out of seven pillows. The television was gone and the night stand by the bed. The dresser was there, but empty of her jewelry boxes and perfumes and toiletries it looked uninhabited, the entire life of it fled. The empty hangers in the big walk-in closet seemed ridiculous, poverty awaiting an abundance that would never occur again.

  He crossed the room and sat down on the bed.

  His footsteps sounded much too loud to him.

  The bed had seen them through three apartments together, one for every year they’d been together. It seemed almost wrong that she hadn’t taken it with her—like leaving a child behind or a kitten. A kind of betrayal. He thought of what had happened on the bed, the talking, the laughing, the fighting, Jesus, all the joys and sorrows between them that had lasted long into the night sometimes, he thought of making love to her, her intense, amazing passion that was easily the equal to his own and the like of which he’d not only never seen before but never even knew existed in a woman and which hadn’t dimmed at all until just recently, until just this last year when he’d begun telling her the truth about what was happening to him, sharing with her really, what his mother was doing and the whole damn conspiracy. And finally, a week ago, about what was wrong with him.

  He thought of how intimate a bed was. In the night, before sleep, the soul pours forth its strength.

  He put his hands to his face and cried.

  His listened to his sobs echo in the empty room.

  When he was exhausted he stood and went downstair
s again. One of the dog’s chew-bones lay half-eaten on the landing. He picked it up and walked to the kitchen and dumped it in the garbage.