Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  “I think it’s cuz she didn’t get stung.”

  “Stung?”

  “Yuh-huh,” Zeke said. “Stung by dat there dragonfly. The yellow-jacket one.”

  Tom reached out to Zeke on the walkway in front of him and took Zeke’s shoulder. He didn’t shrink back, but he stopped. Tom circled him. “Lemme see,” he said. “Your neck.” Again, Zeke cocked his head back and looked at the sky while Tom looked at the underside of Zeke’s chin. He’d made the man wash it at the basement sink before they came up for dinner time. The bleeding hadn’t started again.

  Yeah, Tom thought. The yellow-jacket dragonfly with the two-inch stinger.

  It was a sarcastic thought, but then he pictured that thick stinger, sliding out of Zeke’s neck with a squelching sploosh—and then all that dark blood. It was a stupid idea—a yellow-jacket dragonfly—but Tom didn’t know of any critter with a stinger like that.

  “Come on,” he said to Zeke. “Let’s go and see what we can see.”

  15

  Zeke knew the way and they were up over the bridge and across the creek eight or ten minutes after Tom had examined Zeke’s neck for the second time on the walk out in front of Ocean View.

  They hadn’t talked until they got to the grit lane up there where the cookie cutter houses stood in silence. Only a few had people living in them. Save for his trip to the old ferry terminal when he returned the leased shuttle van, Tom hadn’t been up this way on the island at all. The trees were overgrown and it looked nothing like new subdivisions he’d seen back home. This was one that had failed. He wondered if the Banatyne Corporation had sunk much of their dough into it... or if they were involved in it at all, beyond owning one of the model homes.

  And maybe Zeke had gotten that wrong. Maybe it wasn’t this house at all. Maybe it never happened at all and maybe it was just a dream of Zeke’s, brought on by those subs from the dealer on the mainland.

  They turned into the long, slender driveway, overgrown with honeysuckle on both sides up to the dark figure of the house.

  “You bring flashlights, Zee? Zed. I mean, Zed.”

  “Yuh,” Zeke said, illuminated only by the dim dash lights. He leaned over the wheel and squinted. Tom thought himself stupid in that moment, driving with him after he’d left his glasses somewhere in the woods, claiming he didn’t need them anymore.

  The truck halted. Zeke got out, and left it running with the headlights also lit and shining on the bungalow. The front window was simple black glass. No lights were on in the house. It looked abandoned but nothing was broken. Just worn.

  Zeke rummaged in the bed of the truck. He got out two flashlights from a tool box, slammed it, tested them and then walked back to the driver’s side of the truck. He reached in through the open window and flicked off the engine. But he left the headlamps on.

  “You gonna get those?” Tom asked.

  Zeke stomped off through the tall grass toward the house. “Nuh,” he said as he went. “Might need all the light we can git.”

  Tom got out. He stood a minute. He was tender all over. He hauled the heavy door shut. Silence now, except for a distant car. It faded. And then it was crickets in the distant blackness. The tree line was darker against an already dark sky. The stars were out and the heat of the day had escaped like helium from a balloon. Gone, baby gone, just like Tom would be from DC, from Ocean View, and from the Banatyne Corporation. He couldn’t wait, particularly in this moment.

  With the clock ticking down to his last day, why should he give a rat’s ass about this goose chase of Zeke’s?

  Probably because of that two inch black stinger sitting in the ashtray back at the house with his photo tweezers. He’d never seen anything like that in his nineteen years.

  He followed Zeke through the twin beams of dirty light. Moths had found it. The season was winding down and the night was chilly already, even an hour past sunset. Tom was wearing his shorts and Birk sandals. He’d have to get into the habit of long pants, socks and close-toed shoes the next week—if the evenings were this chilly.

  Wait. Hold the phone. From the side of the house came a sizeable bang. Not a loud one, but a hard and clear one, a short burst of sound in the nothingness of the night. Then, in the large plate glass of the living room window, a third shaft of light appeared. It speared the black of the living room—without curtains, of course. And then it moved about, searching.

  It was, of course, Zeke’s flashlight. His torch, he called it.

  “Ah, Christ,” Tom muttered. “What the hell ya doin, Zeke?”

  He reached for his camera, which he hung around his neck when it wasn’t in its case. He had always wanted to get in the habit of having it with him at all times, having it when either the mood or the fates struck. But of course it wasn’t there. It was snug in the black case Zeke had snatched from oblivion on the forest floor at the hot spring.

  And it was on the floor of Zeke’s truck.

  “I’m gonna kill him,” he said, again under his breath. Karen would have both their sets of balls in her particularly toothy vice if she even caught a whiff that they were snooping around her property—particularly on a hunch that she was doing something sideways with her husband. Or, God forbid, to her husband.

  He doubled back, the headlights nearly blinding him. Moths fluttered in the harsh yellow light. A mosquito buzzed his right ear and he swatted it, losing his balance. The canted headlights were disorienting and there was a ridge and a dip in the crushed-gravel drive. He went sideways and bent his knee. It nailed a big stone in the ground and he went down on the heels of his hands. He let out a yip, more of surprise than anything. He got up, straining against not only the pain in his hip and his kidney where Mikey had betrayed him with his shove and his foot, but now the bloody heels of his hands—shredded by the gravel and his right knee.

  “Gonna-kill-him,” he said again, of Zeke. Of Mikey. What the goddamn was his problem?

  He hobbled his way to the truck again and retrieved his camera from the bag. He hung it from his neck. Strange to feel such comfort for something so new. He felt like a reporter on the hunt for a big story. But that was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. He had to remind himself of that again. Do not, he said to himself. Do not get caught up in the moment. Especially when that moment is trite and silly and non-productive, like this one.

  As best he could in a body that felt three or four times his natural age, he hurried back to the house, did a hard left at the front window where Zeke’s light still searched and went around the side of the house. Sure enough, the wooden door was open. Moths fluttered in. He put his own flashlight—his own torch—on the door handle. It was broken and hanging. He went into the porch and looked at the other side. One screw held the handle in place. “Kill him,” he said again and let out a heaving breath of exasperation.

  He moved into the house, catching a mix of the cool night air and the stale, hot stuff inside. In the porch, one set of stairs led down and were swallowed by the black basement and he took the other set of four bringing him up into a kitchen-dining split.

  Zeke was right. No decor. Nothing on the walls. No area rug. No appliance or coffee pot on the counter. No dining table. “Zeke,” he called. Reticent at first. “Zeke!” he shouted. He tried the light switch. Flick, flick. And then flick-flick-flick. No action. He sprayed his light at the ceiling. No bulbs in the light fixture. Same deal in the kitchen half. Figures. This probably was Karen’s house. Anything to save a buck.

  “Back room,” Zeke called from somewhere in the depths, somewhere that could have been the seventh level of hell. “Down the hall.” Then in a moment, Zeke added. “It’s dark.”

  “No shit,” Tom said in a mutter as he left the kitchen and headed into the hallway. The hardwood floor creaked as he went. He heard other creaks and ticks. Either Zeke was moving around up ahead, or someone else was.

  He realized his heart was a staccato, like the light air rhythm of timpani percussion in high school orchestra. His head didn’t want
him to move down this dark, narrow hallway in a stranger’s house. His heart didn’t either. It beat louder as he trod.

  But his feet didn’t stop. They carried him along, not gliding, but trudging as if forcing their way against a mix of thick mud and glue. A big part of his psyche needed some closure. To open up the back bedroom door and see it empty—to know that ol’ Zeke had had himself a wondrous dream hopped up on those benzies the good nurse had been doping him on.

  But Zeke.

  Zeke was different. Somehow, the last couple of days. He was different. Wasn’t he?

  His thoughts on what had transpired, this sideways story about the hot spring. And that damn two-inch spike in his neck. There was something here, lurking in these details, lurking in this mentally-disabled man who didn’t call him ‘Mr. Tom’ anymore.

  At the end of the hall, a slash of light appeared simultaneous with the distant click of a light-switch. Another creak in the floor, a long one this time, a squeak that felt like someone would be leaning in on Tom’s face, a big hulk of a man towering on him and leaning down to let his spit fly—just like Mikey Dean had when he called Tom a sniveling college-boy faggot.

  “Ah jeezus, Zeke. Are you back there?”

  A fat pause. Nothing from Zeke.

  Then: “In here.”

  Tom put fingertips on the cracked bedroom door. His flashlight lit up his fingernails and then mingled with the light from the bedroom.

  The door eased open, soundless. Inside, Zeke’s back to Tom. Zeke crouched, ready to pounce on something unseen. Again with these feet, oh God, Tom. What is the matter with your feet? Why are they still moving? Why are you still treading into this crazy retard’s crazy nightmare of men under pink blankets and beds with leather restraints?

  But there they were. As Tom rounded into the room, giving Zeke an arc, the old metal bed with rails and light cream sheets was there. Shockingly there.

  And in it, the frail figure with balding head and whiskers. He lay in the sallow light of the one bulb. Beyond him, something not described by Zeke in the basement furnace room of Ocean View late this afternoon by a mentally-challenged man who seemed to have gotten this one thing—this very big one thing—completely right.

  Bars. But bars on the inside. Beyond it, the place where a lion lay in the treetops. Tom nearly expected to see it out there, whipping its tail in silhouette at the night bugs as they bothered his rump.

  The man in the bed groaned. One eye eased open. It was wet. The other eye was swollen shut and crowded by—oh my God—by something that was not the pink blanket Zeke had described. Tom gave a gulp as realization hit. He looked sideways at Zeke as he reached even keel with the older man. Zeke wore a grimace. This was as disgusting a thing as Tom had ever seen. Maybe even as bad as Zeke had in his years.

  The bunched up bit of blanket wasn’t blanket. It was more of Chris—or whoever this man was, tied to the bed in leather restraints at his ankles. Over his eye and conjoined with his forehead and cheek was a swollen, bulbous sack of veiny skin. It was the size of a paper grocery sack. Purple and blue veins traced their way in throbbing line work on the skin as it faded to yellow and white patches. It wore sores, like bed sores, but facing up instead of the part down on the sheet. It looked like a painful, cancerous tumour grown in a lab for study—except it was attached to a human head.

  The man lifted his head from his shallow, wet pillow. “Karen, luv,” he said in a croaking voice that made Tom thirsty. “Karen, be a doll,” he said. “Close the window, I’m catching a chill. Summer’s over. You can tell when the sun goes down so soon after suppertime.”

  He reached out at Zeke and Tom near the doorway. Neither man moved. They only stood. They only gaped.

  On the floor at the bedside was a half bowl of what looked like vegetable broth. A spoon poked from its surface and rested on the lip of the bowl. A used napkin lay crumpled on the tray. A fly buzzed and then landed on one dot of the broth near the edge of the tray.

  Zeke looked over at Tom who reached down and picked the camera up off his chest with a trembling set of hands. He popped the lens cap off and brought it to his face. The fates had struck. The mood definitely had not—Tom wanted to turn and run back down that skinny, bleak hallway his glue- and mud-ridden feet had forced him to follow. But the fates had called and here he was, his camera in hand and loaded with colour film.

  Zeke only said two words.

  “Mr. Chris.”

  16

  He forced a calm hand. He knew the first two shots would be blurry so he purposefully stopped and looked away from the troubling sight of the man lying in his own sweat and blood on that bed. He was tied to it, goddammit. Tied to a bed like a beast.

  Tom took a breath and looked out the window. Lightless trees against a nearly lightless sky. No lion up there. He wasn’t high, that much was sure.

  For the next twenty minutes, they ignored the smell of the man who might be rotting. If it was Chris Banatyne, he was hopped up on some pretty glorious pills himself. He didn’t complain or ask them for help. He was just as comfy as peach pie and ice cream on a Sunday after church.

  He talked to Tom and Zeke about how his lovebird Karen and he had plans to retire to the Dominican. They had a place there on the beach and would fix it up new with their nest egg. They just had to sell a few properties here on the island and get a few deals finalized. He had a bad stutter and nearly every third word was caught in a consonant loop until he could spit it out. He called them p-p-properties. And he kept complaining to a Karen-luv he couldn’t s-s-see and that it was c-c-cold.

  Snap-snap went the K1000 in Tom’s capable hands. Since seeing the shots of Mary in her nude glam shots, his confidence with this equipment had increased ten-fold. And he needed it now. He knew he and Zeke wouldn’t be traipsing out of this house with Chris Banatyne in tow. They needed proof to take to the police, or to some higher authority.

  Zeke moved into the room and pulled off the sheet which lay across Chris’ waist and covered him down to his feet. He only wore a pair of underwear and a white t-shirt, now sickly yellow with sweat stains. How long had he been here?

  Tom didn’t voice the question. He found himself voiceless at this new gross thing growing out of his hip and reaching both down to the skin of his scrotum and up to the soft belly flab at his middle. Blech! Blech to this man laying before them. He just had to get the shots snapped out. Get them snapped and then show them to the right people.

  Finally, the smell got to him. After two rolls of film, he thought Fidela’s supper was going to repeat on him in a big way. He’d spray Chris and Zeke and the dinner tray and the soup bowl with his chunky vomit of dinner and Coca-Cola.

  The dinner tray. The soup spoon. She was taking care of him.

  MY GOD, SHE’S TAKING CARE OF HIM.

  He had to get out of here, he had to leave this house and gulp desperately at the cool night air. If he didn’t, he’d pass the contents of his guts onto the room and then he’d pass out right in it. Opportunity had presented itself as fate and he’d taken advantage. But now, after some forty-eight shots of this conversational monstrosity, Tom was done.

  He turned. He blew through the bedroom door and tore down the hallway to the safe distance of the kitchen. Memories of what he’d just captured screamed at him. Snap-snap. The bulbous sack filled with God knew what behind throbbing, coloured veins. Snap-snap. The one eye perilously open but seeing nothing, the other swollen shut, both looking like they’d been swabbed with Vaseline. Snap-snap. Bleeding wrists and ankles where Chris had tried to twist free of the thick, treated leather binding him to that rusted old sanatorium bed. Snap-snap. A second bulb, even bigger than the one on his face, this one protruding from his opposite hip, up across his distended belly where a turkey thermometer of a belly button looked ready to pop—

  Snap-snap-snap.

  And all that inane chatter! Holy hell. Planning a winter holiday to the beautiful Dominican coast with his beloved wife. He had no idea what was happening. T
HE MAN HAD NO IDEA!

  Zeke found Tom in the driveway, bathing in the cool yellow headlamps. He paced with ferocity, back and forth, breaking the fading cast, then repairing it, then breaking it all over again.

  “Forgot your torch,” Zeke said. He had both of them, now switched off. “’S okay,” he said. “I got it fer you.”

  Tom widened his eyes, looking like a student before his exam after an all-nighter, trying his best to keep awake for the performance he’d studied all night to conclude.

  “He’s sick. The man is dying. He has cancer or tumours and Karen has this all under control. Maybe he’s waiting for a surgeon. Yeah, from the mainland. One from Seattle or Vancouver who can do some kind of—I don’t know—procedure. There’s got to be an explanation for this.” Then he looked at the sky of still, silent stars punching tiny holes in their sheet of mottled blue. “THERE’S GOT TO BE,” he shouted.

  “Take me away,” he said to Zeke in a huff. “Come on, come on.” He got into the passenger side and slapped the lens cover on his camera. He slammed the door and reached out the window to slap his palm on it. “Come ON! Let’s go!”

  Bewildered and looking his usual, slow-on-the-uptake self, Zeke got in, started the truck and drove them away from the house north of the creek.

  17

  “I have to see Mary.”

  “What?” Tom asked as they sped through the night, spewing road dust like spent ash in a furious wake.

  “Mary,” Zeke repeated. “I’m not remembering. It’s going away. I need another treatment.”

  Still confused, still downright scared about what he’d seen north of the creek, Tom rubbed his temples and looked into his lap at his jittering camera case. “Treatment?” he said, only half present.

  “Yeah,” Zeke said, sounding tired and exasperated that Tom was not getting this. “I go back to the hot pool. Then I can see Mary. I can take her. And then I won’t go in and I can make sure she gets a good treatment this time.”