Borderlands

by Unknown

Eyes on the .38 now.

  I’m not going to let him have them. He wants them to suffer. Even Donny will suffer. I see that clearly now.

  But I won’t let them suffer.

  “Dad, what’s wrong?” Christopher says.

  I wish he’d stayed asleep. Sleeping, it would have been easier for me.

  “I’m sorry, Chris,” I say. “I love you, honey. I love you.”

  I get him near the temple. Death, a red blooming flower against his blond hair, is quick and final.

  I kill Donny right after.

  I’ve scarcely started to leave the room when I hear them coming up the stairs so heavily, heavily in the narrow echoing staircase.

  Police.

  I turn, the gun still in my hand and…

  “You scared us, Mr. Washburn.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “Several of our guests were sure they heard a gunshot in your room.”

  Washburn laughed. “Gunshot? Afraid not.”

  “It’s a terrible morning, anyway,” the desk clerk said, taking the key from Washburn and shaking his head. “Real nice fellow named Tom Brice went crazy this morning and killed his wife and his son and a friend of his son’s. Shot them dead.” You could hear the numbed disbelief still in the clerk’s voice. “Just don’t know what to make of a thing like that, do you?”

  Washburn frowned. “Nope, guess I don’t, my friend. Guess I don’t.”

  Then he pushed out into the sunlight and got in his long black sedan and drove away.

  HIS FROZEN HEART

  Jack Hunter Daves, Jr.

  Most of the stories in Borderlands are here because of their innovation, unique vision, weirdness, etc. But there were a few stories that made the final cut for a more special reason: they were so well written, I couldn't keep them out. "His Frozen Heart" by Jack Hunter Daves is, as Rod Sterling would have said, a case in point. The whole time I was reading this story, I kept thinking: this guy can, write. There is a sense of atmosphere, of place, that permeates the language of Daves, and he makes it move with a persistent undercurrent of emotional power.

  Daves was born and raised in the green hills of Tennessee. He reports being a "normal" kid till the age of nine when he discovered a stack of movie-monster magazines. Thereafter, hooked on the stuff of the bizarre, he became a heavy-duty reader. "I'd rather be shot in the kneecaps than watch a whole night's worth of American prime time TV, "he writes, adding: "I want to be a writer because I'm quite mad." Okay, Jack.

  The highway between Fayetteville and Belfast slid in a black tide beneath a dusty Dodge Dart with chipped paint and bald tires. Hewlett Peirce fought against the feeling that the road disappeared into him rather than behind him, slipping up inside his body like a cold metal rod. It would be lost in the big freezing hollow between his breath and his soul. His heart was sleeping, preserved in ice. His eyes saw, but were connected to nothing.

  He once killed a boy on this road. A boy who wore white sneakers. The Tennessee Valley weather forecast called for temperatures in the teens and snow flurries before midnight.

  The radio warned to watch those bridges and overpasses just before he flicked it off.

  On either side of the highway, unseen in the dark, lived sad people. Warm spots in the night betrayed by pinpoints of yellow windows on the hillsides. Those unseen people often held private misery, things no one else would ever know, within the confines of their skins. They say in the farm reports that the major cash crop in Lincoln County is Burley tobacco. Not true. Hopelessness is rolling out by the truckload with plenty left over to stock local cupboards for the winter. Hewlett wished he had been drunk the night he ran over the boy. That was a decade ago. He had been a newly ordained minister and the Lord had filled his cup. No room left over for alcohol. Things were very different now.

  At the moment he worked as a dishwasher at a catfish house in Fayetteville. The people he worked with were intimidated by his melancholy face, an expression obviously as deeply set and immobile as the one on the Easter Island statues. Even though they obviously considered him an emotionally disturbed, thirty-six-year-old dishwasher bum, he still would have loved to have gone with them after work and gotten hammered. They were likely going to a beer joint called the Wagon Wheel or over the state line to the Plush Horse in Huntsville. No one had asked him to come along.

  He was approaching a small town called Belfast, with one blinking caution light flanked by an ancient grain warehouse and an even older general store. Six miles on the other side lay the trailer park where he lived. This was the town the boy had lived in for fourteen years. He was buried here in two pieces.

  People he had grown up with lived in the blackness on either side. A young farmer to the left was about a month away from losing his farm to the People's Bank of Lincoln County. His father had killed himself with work trying to keep that from happening. To the left and right lay lonely pain and dreams gone numb.

  Hewlett couldn't remember the actual sound of the boy's scream, just the surprised look on his face as the headlights struck him. The young man had been to a softball game and had forgotten his glove. He twisted his bike back onto Highway 231 intending to go back to the ball field. Hewlett had been visiting old shut-ins at the nursing home. He was sleepy. It was dark. The people at the softball game heard it happen. They all came running.

  Everything had changed in the space of three breaths. Hope and happiness were wedged under his car and dragged across asphalt and gravel. Hewlett wobbled out of his car, yelling for help, looking at the dead boy on the shoulder of the road, blurred by the tears in his eyes. Blurred by his car.

  The boy's mother ran from a dark street and onto the highway. She must have been waiting on the porch, hearing or possibly seeing the accident. Her face was stretched in an unmoving expression of despair. It was designed to hold a certain kind of pain the way a holster is made to cradle a particular firearm. All of her wrinkles and worry lines were carved out over the years so that this mask, for this occasion, could be worn. She fell down, screaming and trying to breathe, on the roadside next to a boy covered with blood and gravel dust. He had been the only good thing in her world. He had been her only hope for meaning and love in her painful animal life span.

  She took the boy's severed leg into the backseat of the police car and sat there, rocking. Hewlett recalled her screams when the ambulance drivers tried to take it away. She was positive that they would lose it. Her dry fingers neatly tied the laces of the white sneaker.

  The caps and faces of the ball players and their families floated around him in the dark. He remembered their cleats scraping the asphalt. No one had touched his shoulder or held his hand or tried to help him stop shaking. The ambulance lights slipped over a hill with the police car close behind. A deputy came over to take down his account of the thing. His face was impact proof.

  Hewlett looked at his face in the rearview mirror. He tried to see himself as a preacher again. The image came, but it was unpleasant, like suddenly seeing in a crowd the girl you wanted to marry years ago. He had left the ministry less than two weeks after the accident.

  A decade later, on this barren December night, he was traveling, toward Belfast, his own private gauntlet. Closed stores, dark barns, and ratty houses. A grain silo. Belfast Elementary waited for morning and digested the souls of children in its rooms full of creaking desks and worn-out books.

  The world was ice. Precious and delicate, but without a hint of love.

  Hewlett knew the child's name but hadn't spoken it aloud in ten years. He was afraid to hear the sound of it in his own tired voice, as if it would let out his suffering like air from a balloon. And he wanted to keep that pain. It was the only thing that held him together. His diamond. His frozen heart.

  The Dart swept over the death zone about two miles out of Belfast. A few years ago Hewlett could've recalled exactly how it felt to drag a bicycle thirty-seven feet and then crunch it with his rear wheels. But that form of torture had given way to something else. A
lways at this spot. Lately he felt that he wasn't alone in his own persecution. The boy was touching him. Always after he hit this spot in the road.

  The car heater was turned off. The accident occurred on an unbearably hot summer night and he hoped that the cold would hold his mind, everything, to this night and not that one.

  Houses drifted by. Dull glow of TV sets in windows. Cattle clumped together in pastures and barn lots. Old people stayed awake watching Johnny Carson because they were afraid they'd die in their sleep in the long hours before dawn.

  The Dart hugged a sharp curve and Hewlett heard something slide across the backseat. It hit the door on the right side with a soft sound. He knew what it was as surely as some people know they'll never truly be loved.

  He began to smell wet canvas. Newly mown grass. Decay. This had happened before, and each time he had pressed down hard on the accelerator and shot for home, never turning to look back because he was afraid the shadows weren't deep enough and he would see it.

  He wanted to stop the car and run into the pitch-black fields.

  The leg lay in the shadows of the backseat, whispering across the vinyl upholstery as the car swerved and made ascents and descents through the countryside.

  Hewlett reached up to the overhead light switch. He was going to look at it. Maybe then it would go away. There was resentment in him for anyone, especially the boy, joining in on his self-torture. He didn't need any help. Not this kind. His scalp tickled as the object behind him moved again with the motion of the car.

  Tree climbing. First base sliding. Football kicking. Bicycle pedaling. Scabby kneed.

  The light flickered for less than a heartbeat. With his cold fist he pounded the light fixture, but it refused to come back on. Between watching the road and flipping the switch, he'd missed it.

  But it was still there. Dew and blood and grass and summer dust.

  The car was doing eighty when he saw something on the road ahead. He slowed down, thinking someone's cow had wandered onto the highway. The closer he got, the less it looked like a cow. He didn't have time to even feel surprise as he jerked at the steering wheel.

  The Dart embraced the telephone pole like a long-lost friend. Metal and glass rippled in waves. Hewlett fell out on the passenger side, landing on his knees. He couldn't stand up. The top of his head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He looked down at the gravel between his hands and noticed with great interest that the pebbles were turning black, one by one. Reaching to his face, he understood. His fingers encountered the delicate shreds of his mouth. Since he couldn't make his teeth touch, he knew his jawbone must be broken. It was all right. He never used it to smile anymore. Only to eat.

  Getting up was impossible, so he crawled on bloody knees into the cold, deep, brown grass of the embankment and pressed his sticky face to the ground. From down on the midnight road came the sound of bike tires going round and round and round.

  Hewlett's voice sobbed out of his mouth, mixing with the blood. "Go away! Please…Please leave me alone, Warren."

  EVELYN GRACE

  Thomas Tessier

  Tom Tessier is one of those writers who've been quietly creating a list of works that are head and shoulders above most of what's being done each year…and who receive little, if any, recognition. To say this guy is underrated is almost criminal. He grew up in Connecticut, then went on to attend University College in Dublin. He's authored three books of poetry, had three plays professionally staged, and has published eight novels of horror and psychological suspense, including Finishing Touches and Rapture. His latest novel is Secret Strangers.

  Of his short fiction, there is, sadly, not much. Tessier simply doesn't write many short stories, and that's why I'm so pleased to have an example of his work included here. The story that follows is one of those pieces that escalates from perfectly ordinary beginnings up through the levels of the quietly disturbing until it finally unloads a double-barreled last line that gives new meaning to the old axiom that the only things that matter in life are sex and death.

  So Evelyn Grace was dead from a drug overdose at the age of thirty-eight. Her body was found on the floor of the studio flat in east Los Angeles where she had been living for the last seven months. She had been a model, an actress, a singer, and she was unemployed at the time of her death.

  Evelyn Grace. Dead. An accident, or so the coroner had ruled. But it was not impossible to imagine that Evvy had known exactly what she was doing with her last needle. Or that she had been murdered for some bizarre California-type reason. In fact, it was easy to imagine all sorts of things about Evvy. She had always been the kind of girl who made a guy's blood run away with his mind.

  Tim LeClerc refolded his newspaper and set it aside. He lit a cigarette. He knew her, but they had never met. He and Evelyn Grace had been in the same graduating class at high school, back in the late sixties. They had been in different groups, however, and they didn't live in the same neighborhood, so for four years they passed each other in the corridors at school, but their paths never really crossed. Tim had been aware of her, it was hard not to be, but she had probably never even known that he existed. In a class of nearly two hundred there were bound to be quite a few strangers, even after all that time.

  Bitter early March, the land still frozen, locked up beneath steel clouds and day-old snow that was already tarnished with the grime of Utica. The wind hit Tim's face like cold fire as he ran from the diner to his car. It was then, while he sat huddled and shivering, waiting for the engine to idle down and the heater to generate some feeble warmth, that the idea came to him. He would go to Evvy's wake.

  Why not? He was curious to see her again, even if she was dead or maybe because she was dead, and that was morbid. But on the other hand, her parents would appreciate the gesture. You can never have too many visitors at a wake. It was only about twenty miles away, in Rome. Besides, he had no one to rush home to, nor anything better to do with his evening.

  That was how far he'd gotten, Tim thought. Twenty-odd miles in twenty-odd years. Never mind. He'd seen enough of the world when he was in the army to realize that upstate New York was the place for him. He came back alive and whole, and settled into a modest but clean apartment on the eastern edge of Utica. After a few false starts he had landed a decent job at the bottling plant and had been there ever since. Nothing to crow about, but it was a life and it did have its occasional moments, although Tim would be hard-pressed to enumerate many of them. When he wanted female company he could always find it. Somebody's neglected wife, or a divorcee on the wrong side of thirty, or any of the women at work who were still single because they were overweight or ugly or too crushingly dull to snag a mate. Nothing romantic, but the years had given Tim a rather functional attitude to sex.

  His was just an ordinary life, but he never regretted it or felt sorry for himself. He liked it the way it was, uncluttered and straightforward, low-key but comfortable. At least he would never be shipped home in a steel box in the cargo hold of a jet plane while strangers drank cocktails overhead. Funny, how he'd been to Vietnam and escaped that fate, while Evelyn went to L.A. and hadn't. Poor Evvy.

  Tim polished his dress shoes. He put on his best shirt and tie, and his only suit. He had second thoughts while driving to the wake, but promptly dismissed them. If he felt awkward when he got there he would just take a quick look at her, mumble some words to the parents, and then leave. That's what he'd probably do anyway; no sense in sitting around once his juvenile curiosity had been satisfied.

  But what actually happened was shockingly pathetic. Mr. and Mrs. Grace were the only people there when Tim arrived. He felt very odd indeed as he crossed the room and knelt down at the open casket. For a few moments he was occupied with Evvy. She looked lovely still, her face virtually unmarked by the years and events of her life. The mortician had done a good job, applying no more makeup than was absolutely necessary. Even now she retained her girlish good looks, the ghostly afterimage of a beauty you never forget once you'd e
ncountered it.

  Tim was touched by her haunting appearance, saddened by the fact that her life had plummeted to this abrupt end, and he found himself wishing that he had met her when they were in high school together. How different everything might be now—for the both of them—if they had. It was an idle fantasy, of course, but Tim believed there was a kernel of truth in it. Don't all lives have at least one turning point that's flukey or accidental or capricious? Too bad, too bad.

  At last he stood up and turned to Evvy's parents. Leonard Grace was small and wiry, with a scattering of white fuzz about his largely bare scalp. His manner was bright and alert, though he nodded his head too often, as if to emphasize his agreeable and understanding nature. Charlotte Grace was plump, with a moon face and a distracted air. It took Tim a few minutes to notice that now and then she would fade right out of the conversation, like a distant radio signal drifting in the ether. She had run the family for as long as it had existed, was Tim's guess, but now she was probably an Alzheimer's case.

  Tim explained that he had been to high school with Evelyn, and her parents were very grateful to him for taking the time to come to the wake. He didn't actually say that he'd been a friend of their daughter, but they somehow got that idea and he saw no need to clarify the matter. It was such a sad situation, two old people, one of them not quite all there, alone with the dead body of their only child.

  And hardly anyone came. The calling hours were from seven to nine, and in that time perhaps half a dozen people appeared to pay their respects. They were older folks, acquaintances of the parents, and none of them stayed more than ten minutes.

  It was amazing, shocking, to Tim, who had expected a rather large turnout. A lot of people would have moved away over the years, but there still had to be plenty of former friends and classmates of Evelyn's left in Rome, so where were they? It was as if nobody wanted to admit knowing her. But why? Just because she'd been something of a bad girl, running off to California, living a wild, silly, rotten life? Because she'd met her squalid death at an age when she should have been organizing bake sales and ferrying kids to Little League games? I see Evelyn Grace is dead. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Well, it was to be expected. Smug, self-satisfied bastards. I didn't even know her, Tim thought, but I'm a better friend to her now than all those people ever were.