Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  He stood a moment looking out at the lanai, into the fading light. The screens leading out to the small enclosed yard were becoming overgrown with creepers. Normally he’d have wanted to take care of that right away. He made his living as a gardener and it was a matter of his pride as a professional. A few creepers were one thing, even attractive. He liked them there, their graceful abstract patterns. But the way they were going, eventually they’d ruin the screen.

  He decided it was time to break his rule. He’d quit because Sandy hated the smell of the stuff on his breath and he wanted to smell good for her for when they went to bed, for the times they made love or even just kissed good night, so that sleeping beside her on the bed, he wouldn’t offend. But now that she was gone there was no one to offend anymore and given this fucking little problem of his, there never would be.

  He went to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a drink.

  A half hour after Bobby’s pickup went off the road and thirty miles south along I-75, Pete and Jan Hoffsteader’s white Ford Thunderbird crept along the on-ramp at Peace River, waited for a set of headlights to pass in the slow lane and then pulled out onto the highway.

  They were both a little nervous to be out this late. It was after twelve.

  That almost never happened.

  Normally they’d have been in bed over half an hour now, right after the news and weather.

  Pete was weary.

  It had been a pretty good evening, though. They’d had dinner with Jan’s brother and sister-in-law, ate good German food at the Karl Ehmer Restaurant in Punta Gorda, too much of it really, so much food that they couldn’t finish it all. Which at their age seemed to be happening a lot lately. About half his sauerbraten, red cabbage and potato dumplings were in the usual styrofoam container resting in Jan’s lap. They’d gone back to her brother Ed’s mobile home for a nightcap which then became two nightcaps and he’d lost track of time a little talking with Ed about their respective outfits stationed in France during the War and then Pete thought he’d best have some coffee before heading back.

  They were on their way home to the Silver Lakes retirement community in Sarasota.

  Forty-five minutes’ driving time.

  The highway was nearly deserted at this hour.

  What if they had car trouble? Jesus. What if they had a flat?

  At sixty-seven, with a heart that was not exactly in the best shape possible, not to mention with three drinks in him, he didn’t feel up to changing a goddamn flat.

  What the hell, he thought, you hope for the best.

  Jan was nervous, though. He could tell by the way she kept fidgeting with her hands, playing with the tongue of the styrofoam container.

  Part of it was that he wasn’t really supposed to be driving at night at all and she knew it. The glaucoma. It narrowed his field of vision and the oncoming headlights could be hell. But out here on the highway the headlights were few and far between. And if he stayed over here in the slow lane they weren’t that big a problem. It was worse in town actually, where the streets were narrower.

  He felt a momentary annoyance with her. She’d been the one who made the dinner date with her brother. What did she expect them to do afterwards? Fly home? Whether it was eight o’clock or midnight darkness was darkness, headlights were headlights. He used to drive a bus for a living. He’d manage.

  He couldn’t stay mad at her, though.

  He reached over and patted her pale cool hand.

  He was lucky. His second wife was a damn good woman. He’d known that when he married her. But if he’d had any doubts, the way she stood by him during the angioplasty, him scared shitless, scared to tears, she a goddamn pillar, well, he would have lost them then and there.

  Whoever said that men were tougher than woman didn’t have any idea.

  Now though, she was really pretty nervous for some reason.

  Get her talking, he thought. Relax her.

  The usual subject was the first that came to mind.

  “So. What do you think about the Stockyard for dinner tomorrow? We haven’t been there in a while.”

  She thought about it.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It’ll be crowded.”

  “Not so bad this time of year. With all the snowbirds gone.”

  “It’s always crowded. Dorothy went there last week and it was crowded. What about the Olive Garden?”

  He shrugged. He’d rather have a steak from the Stockyard but so what. “Olive Garden’s fine.”

  “It’s just that the Stockyard’s going to be so crowded.”

  “I don’t mind the Olive Garden.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He glanced at her. “You all right?”

  She was frowning, her mouth turned down, tight brows squinting her eyes. He heard her fingernails pluck at the styrofoam container.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m driving okay, aren’t I?”

  He was doing fifty in a sixty zone, riding the straightaway in the slow lane, the Thunderbird on cruise control, not another car in sight in front of him or behind.

  “Yes, dear. You’re doing fine.”

  He knew that.

  “So? What, then?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Something’s wrong. Something’s not right.”

  “You worried about your brother?”

  Ed had prostate cancer. It was still too early to tell if the treatments were going to take.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

  He glanced at her again. The dashboard lights gave off a pale greenish glow. Her face was set, immobile.

  He thought for a moment that this was what she would look like dead and then dismissed the thought.

  Hell, she’d outlive him by ten years, if not more.

  She’s just tired, he thought. Tired and nervous being out this late, with me driving.

  We’ll be home soon.

  He concentrated on the road ahead and did not look at her again.

  Five and a quarter miles behind them Annie Buxton held to a steady sixty in the rented red Nissan and thought about how amazingly clear her head was.

  Three weeks ago by about this time at night she’d have been sipping her sixth or seventh vodka and tonic. Or she’d have switched to Stoli straight up. Either that or she’d have passed out altogether.

  She glanced down at the gas gauge and saw she was down to a quarter of a tank. She’d make it home to Bradenton. Barely. Who cared?

  The point was she was going home.

  She considered turning on the radio but it was entirely possible that anything the slightest bit sentimental—hell, any song with the word love in it—would get her crying again. She was weepy these days.

  Her sister said that was to be expected. Annie was picking up the pieces of her life and putting them together again and there were so many pieces and so much putting together it would make anybody weepy now and then.

  Anyhow, Madge said, you always cry when you realized that against the odds, you’ve survived.

  Still she decided against the radio.

  It was better to have just the silence and the wind and the highway’s bleak flat sweep in front of her.

  She took a Marlboro from the pack on the dashboard and lit it in the orange coil glow of the lighter. Cigarettes were something she would continue to allow herself, she thought, at least for the time being. She’d quit them too one of these days, maybe get the patch. But first things first. Or as all the literature read, one damn step at a time.

  My God, the air felt good pouring in through the window.

  For a week and a half she’d seen nothing but the inside of her sister’s stuffy bedroom. The first two days of that, she’d spent strapped to the fourposter bed.

  Tough love, Madge called it.

  You won’t go into a goddamn hospital, okay, fine, we’ll do it this way.

  She saw rabbits on the bed with her and snakes who swallowed the rabbits whole. She floated out to sea on t
hat bed, sunk and drowned and rose again. She howled and sweated and hurt and stained the sheets.

  Tough love. That it was.

  Three weeks, total, at her sister’s house. Most of that time a virtual prisoner, held hostage against her own vices, trapped inside her own feverish sweaty body while she waited for her system and then her mind to clear themselves of the poisons that were killing both her and her six-year marriage to Tim.

  Two weeks before Madge would even allow her to light up a smoke.

  By then she’d called her sister every name in the book. Early on, even swung at her a couple of times. Even while she knew in her heart that big sister was busy as hell with the nasty job of saving her silly life.

  It was only later, when she was sane enough to talk about things, talk until they were both exhausted, endless exhausting exhilerating nights, that she realized she actually wanted to save her life, and that some of the facts about her life, like Tim’s being a respected English teacher while she’d barely finished high school, like the fact that so far they were childless and she was pushing thirty-five, like the fact that at the moment he was busy with his life and she was not, that these kinds of things didn’t matter half as much as she was simply letting them matter. It was wilfull destructiveness. She was obsessing on the trivial and ignoring one great big beautiful fact—that Tim loved her, hell, he adored her. Even adored her when she was drinking.

  Though the drinking was poisoning him too.

  So many times she’d sent this gentle quiet man into a towering rage.

  So many times she’d pushed and pushed at him.

  You’re just like Mom! Madge said. You damn fool. You love him to death and he loves you and all you care about is that you’re jealous, that at the moment you’re fucking bored and unemployed and you feel stupid and useless because he’s not. You know how crazy that is? You’re exactly like her! You’re not just missing the forest for the trees, you’re burning the goddamn forest!

  She brushed her cheek with her fingertips and, in the oncoming glare of headlights moving south toward her, saw that her fingers came away glistening and black with mascara.

  You really are a fool, she thought. You might as well turn the radio on after all. You’re going to be crying anyway. Why not just wallow in it?

  She smiled at herself and stubbed out the cigarette and took a deep breath of the warm night air.

  It was over. She’d get into a program if she had to—though she’d never been much of a joiner. Anything. There was no chance in hell she’d ever touch a drink again. She suspected there was going to be a lot of coffee around for a while. His voice on the telephone when she called to say she was coming home to him, the break in his voice, the sob when he said thank God, told her as clearly as her own finally steady voice did that nothing was ever going to be the same from here on in.

  Lives were to be made as best you could and then remade if necessary.

  Not broken.

  Never broken.

  When he climbed into the car that night George Hubbard didn’t really know what he was going to do.

  He was going out for a drive. Going out to shake the blues. Forget about Sandy. Forget about his mother. Get out of the lonely bare condo and drive before he drank too much to impair his judgement or get his ass arrested.

  Meandering through the streets of town he was fine. It was only when he turned out onto I-75 that the darkness began to envelop him.

  The darkness began in his mind, in some corner of his mind where his mother lived and Sandy lived and mostly, where anger lived and had for a very long time. It reached out from that place to embrace his future, a growing black clot of pain which dimmed his senses and fed itself on ghostly images of future prosecutions by his demon mother, by the authorities, by doctors, images of the long lonely loveless sexless months ahead of him while the AIDS virus ate away at his immunity, of wasting away alone, of bedsores and coma and that single crystal meth spike in his arm so long ago that was also his mother’s demon spike, his mother’s revenge, his mother’s hydra venom, the reality and consequences of which for both Hubbard and for Sandy he had finally admitted to her and which had driven her away from him in horror and in fury.

  The darkness inside spread as the AIDS spread, inking his conscience black.

  On I-75 it reached out from his fingertips and turned off the headlights.

  And then turned him south into the northbound lane.

  He was only half aware of the pickup truck going off the shoulder. Only that he was still alive and whoever was inside was still alive and that so was everybody else on this miserable planet and that none of these things would do.

  He drove.

  Within and without he was only darkness.

  It was probably the glaucoma. Pete never would have seen it were it not for Jan, never did see the car really or not much of it, her eyes good and fixed on the road ahead, his wife worried, nervous about being out so late, Jan startling him so much when she screamed his name that he stomped on the brakes and wrenched at the wheel away from the black hurtling mass ahead of him skimmed by light and the Lincoln rolled, skidded on its side and rolled again and for a moment they were weightless and then they were crashing down, air bags suddenly inflated, his door caving in and the front fender throwing sparks across the highway, the shoulder-strap harness biting deep into his chest and thighs and pulling his shoulder out of its socket with a sickening thud of pain, the air bags enveloping them both as the car slid and righted itself and rolled to a stop at an angle across the highway.

  He pushed his way free of the air bag and looked for Jan beside him but only the passenger-side bag was there, the brown and red remains of his dinner from the styrofoam container dripping over it. Her harness was empty. Had she been wearing it? God! had she had it on her? Her door was wide open, its window shattered. He tasted metal and smoke.

  Only then did he panic.

  “Jan! Jesus Jan!”

  He shoved at his door but it wouldn’t move and pain raced hot through his shoulder. He tried again but he was weak and hurt and then he heard her pulling at it from the outside, calling his name.

  “Other side!” he said. “Your side. I’m coming! I’m okay.”

  Thank God, he thought. Not for himself. For her.

  He got out of the harness and edged himself across the seat past the air bag to the door. By the time he got one foot out on the tarmac she was already there in front of him, leaning toward him, crying and smiling both, her pale thin arms reaching out to him to ease him gently home.

  Maybe this is a mistake, he thought.

  People just kept going by me.

  Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. It was possible.

  Near the exit to Toledo Blade Boulevard he pushed it up to eighty, sightless of the speedometer in the roaring dark.

  There were lights out there in the distance.

  I’ll get flowers, she thought. I’ll make dinner.

  Candlelight.

  No wine.

  Everything new, she thought. People could start over. People could forgive and if not forget exactly they could take up life sadder and wiser than they were and make something good of it, they could make love again and find a halfway decent job and maybe even someday make a baby, she wasn’t too old, she had her health now that the poison was gone and the dark cloud over her life was gone, she had strength.

  I’m coming, Tim, she thought. I’m coming home.

  I’m alive. I’m fine.

  Chain Letter

  I’m waiting for the postman again. I promised myself I’d stop that but here I am.

  Most days nothing comes. Not even junk. Nothing.

  Which is all to the good, I suppose.

  I dreamed last night that I’d broken my leg, so I had to take a cab back to my hotel. Which is silly because there are no cabs here and I live in a little house at the end of a long dirt road and there are no hotels here either. Anyhow I took a cab and got distracted, I was looking out the window and I m
ust have let the driver take a wrong turn somewhere because the next thing I knew I was lost. I cursed the driver. I hated that stupid sonovabitch. By the time we found my hotel we were in deadly emnity. I had whined and bullied. For his part he wouldn’t say a word to me.

  I got out without paying and went directly into the bathroom and found two old sticks to which I’d attached some rusty nails and I whipped myself over the back and shoulders until I’d done myself real harm.