I said, "I thought we were going to talk about this first."
"We did."
"Not with me."
She indicated the bills. She meant she'd arrived at some kind of a budget that fit a cleaning lady. She could always fix a budget.
"They cut my salary today."
"Is that why you're drunk?"
"Buddy was paying."
She was going to say Buddy's divorced, which meant Buddy had no one to clean his shirts or make him dinner. Buddy didn't have a piece of ass waiting for him at home is what that was all about. She said, "We can still afford it, Martin. For a while. I can't clean anymore."
If you want to annoy a man in peril for his livelihood, call him by his first name like a school child. It will work every time. "I don't mind if you do it every other week," I said.
"The toilets make me sick."
"I'll do the toilets."
"You'll put it off."
"I'll do them."
"You never even fixed the shelf in the laundry room."
Or remind him of all the things he hadn't gotten around to doing in the house while he was out busting his ass against three billion Chinese coolies on a losing bet.
"How much?"
"She's affordable."
That was a Tuesday. I didn't so much as look at Linda the next week. It wasn't easy. I had that deep longing, that sick hurting animal lust from which I could see otherwise good men getting put away a long, long time for acting on. I say I didn't look at Linda, but when she was in the house I could feel her, and when she left—it was a physical weight that lifted. But that relief left me feeling deflated and useless. I didn't think I could wait seven more days.
I popped a Plavix and poured myself a double whisky and sat watching the front window like a dog in case she came back. It grew dark. Maryland suburbia at dusk. You could forgive yourself for drinking with a heart condition. I poured myself another shot.
Carla cooked that night. Leg of lamb in tarragon cream sauce. A meal you weren't supposed to eat after a double bypass at thirty-two. I'd noticed that lately Carla had been loosening up on my regimen, implying that as long as the tests were good I had nothing to worry about. I wondered how many tests there would be after I lost my job and the medical insurance bottomed out.
"I've got news," she said.
Wine breath. We were at the little table in the kitchen, the breakfast table. I scraped the chair back across the white pine floor, digging in, so that it would leave those little marks Carla couldn't stand.
As long as the tests were good? Technically, I'd died eight years ago. I'd gone up to heaven and come back. Heaven didn't want me. Hadn't seen anything up there, but I'd taken the round trip. With my genetics, there was nothing to say I wouldn't take it again—the next time, one way. I poured myself another glass of wine, my second.
"They've made me an offer," Carla said, leaving me to drink.
"You're going back to work?"
She said it was a full-time gig with a year's renewable contract. Six figures before taxes.
"That's good news," I said.
So why did good news sometimes make you feel like wrapping it around their throats and pulling? We killed the bottle, and upstairs I had Carla put on her lace-top knee highs and drop her head and I did my best to imagine it was Linda I was making love to from behind. Except I must have gotten lost somewhere in the middle.
"Jesus," Carla said. She rolled over onto her back, feeling her neck like a doctor feels for swollen lymph glands. I guess I'd just let myself get a little too pent up. I lit a cigarette. I had a taste and passed it to Carla and she passed it back.
"Let's go to a nice restaurant to celebrate," I said.
She moved closer.
"I don't like it that you don't look at me anymore," she said. "You think I don't notice, but I do."
Funny, because I was looking at her now. Noticing her. The cigarette began to taste bad.
"Do you like her?" she said.
"Who?"
"You know who."
"Why did you bring her here if you didn't want me to look?"
"It's difficult to find them legal these days," Carla said. "She's supposed to be good."
Good at what?
Carla turned over and I finished what we'd started without making any new choke marks. But I wasn't done thinking. I was going to lose my job and Carla had just been offered one…but that term insurance policy I'd taken out four years before I met Carla wouldn't hurt either. The policy Carla knew all about. The one that would set her up with a $500,000 payout. Now, if it was a heart attack she wanted to give me, the lamb and the drinking would eventually do it. But she wasn't the type to put things off. She'd be looking for something faster. A roll in the hay with the girl next door. The kind of girl you could get worked up about—a nice, quiet girl with a snatch on her that could pop a sick, overstressed heart working against a stream of liquor, wine and fat.
You see, the way small minds think is nothing but small. A year here and a year there, change in the drawer. It's the way crabs think in a tin pot when the water temperature's rising, where if you've got just one more crustacean below you, that's the difference between life and a relatively drawn-out, agonizing death. You think it's like that, but you're dead just the same. The only thing you're doing is drawing out the pain. I knew I'd have to keep my eyes open while I slept from then on. Look both ways before I crossed the street, check my glass before I drank. I'd just have to send Linda home.
You try. I couldn't. I counted down the days instead. It was a bad deal those two were breaking on me, but I had to have Linda if it was the last thing my poor heart did.
The week passed one bad sales run at a time. My last trip was out to Hing's Envelope at the tip of Chevy Chase.
Goddamn Hing. It was Hing—the only bona fide Chinaman on my selling route—who'd been holding out against his own people and their iron Chinese stranglehold on cheap, poisonous merchandise. But that day, Hing was giving me a pain in my ass. He wasn't going to order from China, but he was thinking of canceling his account with Mr. Baxter just the same.
We went through the numbers, which weren't bad. In fact, Hing was moving more fair trade product than most. But, you see, there's a certain look all Chinaman get when you know they aren't going to budge, and Hing had that look. It was a rainy and chilly late spring afternoon, a regression to winter, to stagnation, and Hing was taking us back one step further. I told Hing if he made this order, if he just put his greasy old John Hancock down on the order form, I would personally give up my cut. In other words, he would get his balloons and party hats and all his compostable confetti at cost. Obviously, not an offer you make too often. Never, actually. You can't make an offer like that, except if you're drunk. Or desperate enough.
I guess it was what Hing did with his hands that made me do it. Probably just a Chinese gesture of disinterest. To me, it felt like I was a cockroach he was shooing off a birthday cake. Funny, too, seeing that they ate cockroaches in China.
It was the compass I reached for. Hing had it lying around on his desk. God knows what for. A granddaughter with trigonometry homework. Hing had a metal pedestal desk, so the point, after it had gone through Hing's soft pink hand, had nowhere to lodge. Hing lifted them both—his hand along with the compass in it—and just held them up in the air a moment before he began to scream like a sow.
I tried hard to know what to do. To comfort Hing, to ring the right number. But every mewl out of Hing was just making me sicker. Not sick about what I'd done, but sick for Hing and his whole species. Sick about sucking up to men like Hing who treated me like an insect. Taking away my cut. You just didn't do that, one working man to another. This was the goddamn retail business. I found my catalogue and samples and threw them in the briefcase. I was in such a state I'd forgotten it was Tuesday.
Linda.
I'll tell you, it was a funny feeling. I was in no mood to listen to that vacuum cleaner being dragged over the carpet when I got
home. Not that day. But that's just what I did. I sat in the living room with a fifth of Teacher's and the ice bucket watching Linda vacuum. When she left to vacuum the stairs and the upstairs rooms, I stayed, and then she came back. She hadn't said anything about my watching or my drinking in the middle of the day and, frankly, it was just the kind of aloofness you'd expect from a bitch like that. She was wearing a cotton-viscose skirt with her hair up—and God help all St. Augustine's little fighting men—it lodged in my head, like that spindle in Hing's hand, that she'd done it on purpose.
I'd finished half the bottle when her phone rang. She took the call in front of me. A boyfriend. Evening plans. Blushing.
No, not blushing. Faking.
Leading this poor fool on with her sweet fake words. Her lips pulled back over bright white teeth. Uppers only. Wide. A Hollywood tart's smile. And that skirt. It shook like a duster over a porcelain poodle. If the plan was to work me up, she'd succeeded.
She hadn't even hung up on her boyfriend when I grabbed her by the waist and hurried her into the hall closet and shut the door. Tennis racquets and winter coats I knew to be there and that eerie silence I was still getting used to.
Her breathing was steadier than mine. I couldn't see a thing. I reached out and undid her bungee and her hair spilled out. It smelled like hair used to smell when I was younger. The kind of smell that could make you fall in love, or remind you why you already had. I held that hair up to my face, imagining its color.
Carla was due back from work at six-thirty. It was only five. Our quiet, blushing Linda fucked like a Chinese fire alarm. I think it was better that we couldn't see each other's faces. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have been able to break her neck.
I sat with Linda in the dark for a while. I apologized for what I had done and for what would be done. But you didn't come into a man's house and try to kill him with your pussy. You just didn't. I told her this. It was good, what we'd had, and it might have gotten better. If we could have drawn the line there, fine. Before we'd made the kind of decisions that weren't really profitable for either party. Obligations. Like sticking that compass into Hing. I shouldn't have done that. I hoped she understood me. Wherever she was. Heaven or wherever. One place I knew she wasn't coming back to was my house to pop my heart with her cunt. She just wasn't taking that trip back down.
After I'd explained all that, I took my Plavix and checked my blood pressure. A steady 115 over 75. I dragged her down to the basement and tried to figure out what to do next.
I didn't get fired after all, but instead of relieving the anxiety I'd been carrying around with me, keeping my job made it worse. Maybe Hing hadn't mentioned anything yet because he was afraid of some Italian-type revenge scenario. But it would come out sooner or later. A doctor would suggest a lawyer. The lawyer would do what lawyers do. I thought I'd better tell the boss first then. Before I left the office, I went to the bathroom. I checked under the stall doors, then soaped up and washed off.
Something about my face was wrong and I couldn't tell if it was one thing completely missing or a little bit missing from everything that was there. It was an odd disconnect, like a knee that didn't jump when pinged with a reflex hammer. When I looked at my face, I didn't see a place where real happiness belonged. What I saw was a man buried in wet sand from the neck down waiting for the high tide to roll in. Again and again.
So, you see, Mr. Baxter, I didn't so much put that compass through Mr. Hing's hand as through your heart in proxy, and for that reason I would like to suggest that I'm no longer fit to continue in this line of work. However, I would like to tell you, Mr. Baxter, that I'm grateful to Baxter Office Supply Ltd. for chaperoning my life into this hole I'm currently in where I'm fucking the dead house cleaner in the closet while my wife's out making double what you paid me in a good year. In light of all this, and to avoid any future complications, i.e. a compass through your cheap fucking hollow heart, I kindly request that Baxter Office Supply Ltd. consider a two-year severance package, put into effect as of yesterday. P.S. Don't think about canceling my health coverage and throwing me to the wild dogs of COBRA, you sonofabitch, or I will come and feed you your hempen self-closing envelopes by the gross until they could turn you inside out and use you as a shit-covered shopping bag.
I kept Linda in the Whirlpool chest freezer in the basement. Folded up. Fourteen cubic feet of deep freeze couldn't hold her any other way but spread-eagled. Her pocket book, shoes, skirt, her phone with the battery out—all of that was buried under the frozen vegetable medleys and Chef Buddy Stone ice molds. Like Linda was some kind of space-age mummy frozen in a zero gravity freefall. I'd taped off her mouth and nose and ears and anus to minimize seepage. I just didn't know how long a body could be kept that way. Accounts varied.
I avoided looking directly at Linda's face because she'd died smiling—and that smile, frozen and a little blue—that smile was a taunt even in death. I could still see that smile underneath all of the tape.
I didn't have to worry about Carla digging around in the basement. Now that Carla was bringing home the lion's share of our income, I'd taken over cooking duties. I figured I had another week left, two at the outside.
I waited for the office to call, but that call never came. Monday morning I was starting to worry Hing might have taken things into his own hands. It was seven o'clock and I could hear breakfast noises in the kitchen.
I took my Plavix, checked my blood pressure, and went downstairs. Carla was checking herself in the mirror by the door. She looked good. Professional. Well-maintained. She gave me a peck on the cheek. The choke marks were gone.
"You owe me a dinner, Mr. Cobin."
She'd wanted me dead but she couldn't do it herself and now our cleaning lady was in the chest freezer, folded in half, and she wanted to celebrate.
"I'm busy this week. Got to drum up my quota."
But I had the feeling she knew. About Hing and his hand. I couldn't say for sure she hadn't checked the freezer either. She couldn't get me with the food and the tail, now she was waiting for the guilt to kill me.
The phone rang.
I let it ring seeing Carla to the door. I hadn't shaved in three days and she gave me that look. That 'get your act together, mister' look. That 'I'm still your piece of ass look.' She was silently encouraging me to fill my quota for balloons and party hats the way you'd trick a five-year-old into cleaning up his toy cars. I watched the Subaru stop at the corner and then head off for the Beltway. The phone was still ringing. I answered.
A perfunctory voice, almost a tenor. A friendly voice waiting for you to trip on it. Montgomery County Police. We went through the basics. My blood pressure was hovering at 124 over 82. My story wouldn't change that.
My story: the missing girl, Linda was her name, had cleaned our house once a week, Tuesday afternoon. Usually from three o'clock to six, but the time varied. When she didn't show up last week, we tried calling. No answer.
But weren't we concerned enough to notify anybody?
It was just a week. Notify who?
There was a long pause. I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman I was talking to. Detective Bull Dyke.
"Who was it that tried calling, Mr. Cobin?"
"My wife."
"You said had. Did Ms. Schaal stop working for you?"
Until that point it sounded like we were working down a list of questions they asked everyone, even the grieving parents.
"I meant until her disappearance obviously. She's still working for us. We didn't fire her."
"Mr. Cobin, would you mind if I passed by this morning to have a talk? You don't have to agree. I want you to know that. But it would be easier for both of us."
I said I couldn't today. Work. My quota. Tuesday was out too, obviously. Wednesday was the earliest I could make it then. Two days.
There was another pause.
"I'll see you on Wednesday morning at ten o'clock then, Mr. Cobin."
Putting it all into a timeframe clarified a few t
hings for me that wouldn't have otherwise come into focus when they did. I felt like a man with a plane to catch. I went downstairs and unplugged the deep freezer. It crossed my mind standing there over Linda that the police might call the office to double check my story and—my heart turned over, a murmur you might get from heavy lifting. I popped another Plavix. 135 over 85.
Arranging the surprise dinner for Carla was the easy part. Getting her drunk on Valpolicella was a close second. I paid for this meal with the company credit card. That was the only catch. Baxter hadn't canceled it yet.
Driving back home, the Subaru rolled through the oily darkness. I'd shaved and Carla rode with her head on my shoulder. We were coming up to a traffic light near our turn when we both saw the dog.
It was a common problem at this intersection we'd seen several times before. Asshole dog owner with an unleashed dog sees the light changing to yellow, lets the dog skitter ahead. This dog was bigger, no lap terrier. The light was still yellow, and I could still make it.
I felt Carla's head lifting off my shoulder even before I sent that mutt sky high. I'm telling you, I could feel Carla's mouth drop along with everything else of Carla's that was intact and in the right place—drop into a new place that was as frightening for her as an endless dark closet filled with dead bodies. I never even saw the dog hit the ground. I never heard it. I kept driving.
"We need to go back," Carla said. "You…did you hit that dog?"
I had definitely done that. Dogs didn't have wings. They certainly didn't do jackknifing, somersaulting triple pikes by themselves either.
I said, "They shouldn't have crossed before the light changed. It's dangerous for them and for us. That dog wasn't wearing a leash either."
"Look at me."
"I'm driving."
"Martin?"
I was sorry for Carla then because she'd begun to see the contours of that dark closet she and I were both stuck in.
THUGLIT Issue Eleven Page 11
