And that’s okay. I don’t want to remember. And I don’t like to see the pieces I bin given.
It was later in the day. Sun was going down. I remember the acre was creeping up on dark. The shadows were long and they mish-mashed on each other. Trees on top of trees. Shadows on top of shadows.
We have this spot out in the acre with a wood shed and a clearing. We have space enough to bring the big wagon in and unload the logs for chopping. The floor is bare dirt. The odd weed. Lots of wood chips and leaves. When it’s wet, it’s clean black mud.
It is a place meant for simple things: chop the wood for a long winter. Nothing more.
But my daddy, he was a smart man. He could re-purpose anything. An engine, an animal.
Even a person.
He sit with me and talk with me. He didn’t make a lot of sense. But we sat and we drank in that clearing and he gave me what I always asked for. His vodka. He let me try lots while he stoked a fire. That place was for making the wood for fires. Never for fires.
But when all that vodka was in my belly making its own fire, I didn’t ask im about the fire on the mud floor. It didn’t seem wrong. I just drank as much as he gave me.
The vodka and the time with the fire—poking it and feeding it with more logs, that was just about him getting ready, I think. Back then, on that day, I didn’t know nothing. But now, with my thinker fixed, I can see it right. He was crying. I see that now. In my membering.
He didn’t want to do what he was going to do. But them angry men and them sad, scared mamas, they needed him to.
And so he would.
I could barely stand. So much vodka. It was a good feel for me. It was not the same as when I touched Princess Margrett where she tole me to touch when we was in her daddy’s upstairs of that barn. That was so different. But it was a good feeling too. I don’t lie. It was good and I liked it.
Twenty years later, I would be friends with all those fishers and we would play cards and I would drink their drink and buy them their drink and I would sort of member the late afternoon time when I drank vodka with my dad out in that wood chop place, where the ground was made of dirt and leaves and chips.
But now I was listening to Daddy.
He said, put on this shirt. Tie it like this round your face.
And I did.
He said, come stand with me by the fire. Here. Next to me.
And I did.
He said, lay down on this set of logs.
And I did.
I didn’t do so good a job with tying up the shirt on my face. I saw everything.
I lay on a stack of wood next to the chopping block.
And, like I was sleeping, I watched my poor daddy. He waited and he waited. I think he waited for me to get up and run away. To maybe run and find my way onto a boat that would sail me away from this island. And maybe that would have been better. Maybe it would have.
But I didn’t. I trusted my daddy. I waited for him to get ready. And after another vodka, and then another, he was. Ready, I mean.
And down’t came the axe. Right down on my prick.
Well, the underside of my prick.
He had coaxed it, you see. In the minute before, he had done to me what Princess Margrett had done. He had rubbed it with hands made hot by the fire. He’d brought it to life just like her purty round taw-taws had done.
And when it was long and thick, the axe had come in tight to it.
I lay on a wood pile in the shallow, end-of-day light and the axe took off the hanging parts right underneath my how-do-you-do.
Then, quick as he could, under the shirt I’d tied up over my eyes so badly, I saw Daddy scramble. He scrambled and scrambled. And in a moment, a long steel poker went from the stoked fire into a pail of water. It screamed and blew smoke.
I screamed but no smoke came from me. At least I don’t think it did.
And then that hot poker went right up under my prick. To keep it clean and make sure of no infection, that’s m’ guess.
It felt ice cold. And it hurt. I don’t lie. It hurt the most.
And I screamed some more.
But I didn’t run.
Not even when Daddy wished I had.
31
Zeke had finished the last of his story in the driveway of Karen and Chris Banatyne’s cookie-cutter house north of the creek. It was late afternoon and the light was fading. This late in August, the sun fell early. Tom’s dimension of time had been unravelled, done so by his unconscious stretch after Fidela’s bad food poisoning. He had thought it early morning when he woke to Mary in his room telling him to waky, waky. But it must have been supper time at least when Ingy had fallen in her balancing act on the backyard stump. Must have been about time that Fidela’s awful cooking usually hit the table cloth with all those hungry mouths trying so hard to get forks lined up with open lips when Nurse Karen had matter-of-factly asked him to kill her dying husband.
And here, in the quiet of only crickets chirping and fading light from a sun hidden by clouds, not only could Tom picture Zeke’s dad truncating his manhood with a sweaty axe and a hot fire poker, he could actually see it.
In the driver’s seat, Zeke had inched his pants down to his boots.
And there in his bushy grey furrow of pubic hair, was an averaged-sized flaccid penis. He delicately lifted it to show the melted scar tissue of his harsh burn. Where testicles hung on most other men of every age, size and heritage, Zeke only had hairless, pink scar tissue.
The hot poker. To keep it clean and make sure of no infection, he’d said.
“I can’t make no babies,” Zeke said. There was shame in his voice. He started to pull his underwear and pants back up, having set his daddy’s pipe on the dirty dashboard, still spewing smoke.
“It wasn’t me who put Mary’s baby in her belly. I mighta done it to Princess Margrett all dem years gone by. But not Mary. Not Mary.” He looked at the house as he fastened his button and pulled his zipper. He reached for the tobacco pipe. “It was the hot pool, Tom. It fixed my thinker but it couldn’t fix hers. So it gave her a baby instead.”
32
Now Tom felt like the dumb one. This man had lived a thousand lives for every one of Tom Mason’s. He knew pain. Turmoil. He knew life. At nineteen, Tom had only seen glimpses. Here and there, a scattershot portrait blown to bits and Tom only caught the whiff of those bits on the wind. But Zeke, the town retard of Dovetail Cove, he had lived, lost and been burned by the rite of fire.
“I’m so sorry, Zeke,” Tom said. “I mean, really.” After a man bares his mish-mash of torn up and pieced-back-together spare parts, what can you say to that?
Zeke said nothing.
Only sucked in some snot and wiped a quick hand at tears Tom didn’t even realize were on his face. Zeke unlatched the door of his pride and joy, his old municipal truck, and got out as its hinges squawked. The interior light came on and he saw Zeke reach back in for that axe handle.
Tom got out of his own side in a flurry. “Oh no,” he said, his voice rising. “Oh no you don’t, Zeke. Zed. Come on now, buddy, let’s leave that here. What are you doing?”
He met Zeke around the front of the car. The sun was down and the light was slipping away from the earth. A cool breeze scented with ocean hit Tom. Crickets chirruped as if they knew nothing of what was going on here.
“I know,” Zeke said, anger rising in him.
“You know what? Come on, you know what?”
“I know what she did to her husband. I know. I know it all now. My thinker’s polished up, Tommy. I can see everything now. And I know what she done ast you to do.”
“Zeke,” Tom said, tilting his head as if to say, Show some reason, old man. “How could you possibly know?”
“Because I know her. I know her, I know what she’s capable of. And I know what a woman like her does. She makes deals. And she done made a deal with you.”
Tom stepped back. This son of a bitch was two balls shy of a bull, but his thinker-bottle was indeed none t
oo shabby. He thought again of the nonsense about that yellow and black striped dragonfly, the one with the giant stinger. He’d seen that stinger, held it in tweezers and examined it. And yet, somehow, he’d still dismissed it. Come now, a story like that? Old man gets stung and falls into some mineral bath. He comes out with all this knowledge? A brand new ability to reason that’s even surpassing Tom’s own? This after Tom had a normal upbringing, not one like Zeke’s. Not one with an aging nag of a quarter horse, not one with an axe after the neighbour girl decides to sow some wild oats at the town retard’s expense.
Tom’s was downright picturesque.
“I didn’t come here for that, Zed,” Tom said, authority in his tone. “Not to do that. You’re right. Karen did ask me to. But I’m not gonna. And you’re not either. We’re not her toys, are we?”
Zeke didn’t answer. He said, “Then what didja come here for?”
Tom stalked around to the side of the truck where his door still stood open. He reached in for his camera. It glinted in his hand, a relationship of light and dark built in the interior illumination of the truck cab—and then transferred into the broadcast of the headlamps which fluttered with untamed moths.
“Pictures. Karen either got a hold of my negatives and doesn’t realize it—or I lost em at the dark room when I got sick. Either way, I came to take more pictures of Chris Banatyne in that house. We’re gonna get more proof of what she’s been up to. I’m tired of her walking all over people. You. Me. Everyone at Ocean View. We’re gonna make sure she goes away for this.
“Now,” he continued as he walked up to the house, hoping Zeke would follow him. “You gonna help or stand there?”
33
Of course Zeke helped him. He brought both torches. That’s what he called flashlights with batteries. It was kind of amusing. But Tom lost all amusement when he saw that Zeke had brought the old wet axe with him too.
They went in the side door, up those few steps into the hot, humid house that couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old.
It was full-on dark in there now and the flashlights illuminated their path down the creaking hallway of new hardwood. Tom thought no one had ever lived in this show home. He wondered why the Banatynes had ever bought it in the first place. And he wondered if Mr. Banatyne had ever felt an inkling that it might be a place his wife would one day bring him to suffer and die strapped to an old restraint bed, maybe bought at an auction from some old sanitarium on the mainland.
The wind had picked up. At least that’s what it sounded like. Outside, maybe up on the roof, a loose group of shingles lifted and settled. Or maybe the wind moved through the eaves and made that noise. Whatever made it, Tom didn’t like it.
With Zeke moving ahead slightly, Tom paused at the big arched entry to the living room. He threw the beam of his flashlight in there and rested on the two big filing cabinets. All the drawers were emptied. They didn’t just stand open like mouths in the blackness. The actual drawers and any files they may have held were gone. Now both towers were only three equal-sized rectangles of black. Tom waved his flashlight beam at them to convince himself they really were missing and that it wasn’t just an illusion of the dark night and his tired mind.
After hearing what he’d heard in the last while, he wasn’t convinced that any of this was completely real.
Moaning. That was moaning they heard. Not wind on a lazy shingle or on an unlatched back door, squealing with uneven movement. It hadn’t come up all of a sudden and bristled through the eaves. No. It wasn’t the wind at all. It was human moaning.
They went to the back of the house, Zeke first. He pushed open the last door with his flashlight and the room brightened from blackness to show its expanse, empty except for that sizeable bed and a new meal tray, this one showing flies hovering on a mottled banana peel, and the leavings of a bran muffin, plus some muck in a bowl with a spoon. It could have been apple sauce or pudding.
The moaning continued. It was louder in here. It sounded like a man on too much pain medication after a bout with the kind of dentist who relies on knees to the chest rather than good anesthetic.
Who’s that knocking? Knocking on my chamber door? Again, Tom thought of that snatch of Poe and took a shiver, even though it was boiling hot in here.
Their beams flew around the room, looking in corners and up at the ceiling. As if there would be a family of bats up there ready to swoop down on them. The room felt immense and tiny in its blackness, all at the same time.
Then there was a head. Tilted up from the bed with one pothole of an eye, shining its white at them and blinking. The moaning stopped. Tom’s light trained on the half face. Zeke’s held steady on the heavy sack of skin, now the size of a basketball that had lost a third of its air.
“Help me—” the man pleaded. Chris Banatyne, or what used to be Chris Banatyne, was begging them. Or he was just begging the night, so deep in whatever illness this was that he had no idea if there was even anyone in the room. “Help me—” he said again. His lips moved only a little.
“Help me—die,” he finished.
Tom felt a pang in his chest. Greater or about the same as when he learned what Zeke’s daddy had done to him with the axe and the hot fire poker. He couldn’t tell which pang hit him harder. And just now, he didn’t care.
He had business to take care of and he couldn’t lay down and be a whiny college faggot just now. No feelings. Just this business deal.
The truth was, he told himself, Chris Banatyne’s fate was already sealed up. And there wasn’t much Tom Mason could do about it. But he could do something about the man’s wife. Her fate, it seemed, was entirely in his hands. And he aimed to fix it. The guests at Ocean View couldn’t do much worse for a caregiver, even if they were scattered to the wind once this particular truth had come out of all the lies.
“Lights,” Tom said. “Can you find the switch?”
“Here it is,” Zeke said beside him in the empty blackness.
Then the tell-tale click-click-click of the switch as Zeke tried it, tried it again and then tried it a third time, but to no avail. The light was dead.
“Shit,” Tom said under his breath. “Can you try another room?”
He heard the sound of Zeke’s shuffling steps moving out and then down the hall. In a few seconds, more clicking sounds. The switch in another bedroom. Then Zeke’s distant voice competing with Mr. Banatyne’s as he begged. Zeke: “Dead in here, Tommy. Whole house maybe.”
“I can’t take pictures without light,” Tom said. His skin crawled at the sound of Mr. Banatyne.
Mr. Banatyne just kept repeating, “Help me—die.”
Tom set his flashlight down on the floor next to his Birks. He put it on its butt-end, facing the ceiling and it lit the whole room, much better than it did pointing straight ahead like a thick arrow. It wasn’t much light, but all the dimensions of the room—the bed, the patient, for lack of a better term, the walls, corners and black glass of the window.
Its expanse felt so small all of a sudden.
Zeke gave him a start when he burst back into the room. “Tried a bunch more. I could check the breaker box. Prolly in the basement.”
“I don’t think we’re gonna have luck. She’s either stopped paying the power bill or there’s a bigger problem here. You saw all those empty filing cabinets—?”
Zeke nodded, then looked nervously over at Mr. Banatyne, still craning his neck up at them and pleading, getting quieter and quieter.
“I think she might be... done here. I don’t think she means to come back.”
A moment while that notion sank its teeth into the both of them. What do you say to that?
Then, only more of that single phrase. Help me—die. Help me—die.
“I can’t stand dat,” Zeke said. “I can’t stand to see im so... suffering like that.”
“It’s okay, Zed,” Tom said, reaching out hands to comfort the man. “It’s okay. We don’t need pictures. We’ll just go and we’ll come ba
ck with the sheriff, the chief, whatever-in-the-hell you have for law enforcement on this god-forsaken island—”
“Dunno, Tommy,” Zeke said. “Chief Birkhead, he’d understand. He really would.” Zeke made to raise the axe. He took a step forward, toward the foot of the bed.
“Whoa there, horsie,” Tom said, stopping him, stepping in front and putting both hands on the axe handle. He realized the foot-in-mouth of referring to Zeke as a horse and had an internal cringe at his own bad taste. For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t they both just head out of here, go back to that nasty-smelling, cramped furnace room. After a sleep, this would all seem much less insane.
“Don’t do that,” Tom said. “Don’t even think that way. We’ll head out and knock on the Chief’s door. He’ll come and he’ll see. Problem solved. It’s awful, I know it is, I know, bud. But you and me, we can’t fix it. There are people for that. And I think the police chief is a great place to start with getting Mr. Banatyne any help there might be for him.”
They were interrupted by a deep, guttural gurgle. They both threw their heads around at it. It sounded like a hunger pang from the man in the bed. The man wiggled his head up and down and closed his one good eye. Then he belched. It was a putrid, heavy sound, from way down deep in him. With it came black goo leaking from the corners of his mouth and trailing down to his neck in an oily set of matching rivulets. And in a second, it stank. The whole room was overwhelmed with it: the sour, bad fruit smell of deep, late-season rot.
“Oh gawd,” Tom said in a grimace. “Let’s go, Zed.”
A beat and then from Zeke, “No, I’m gonna help im. I can’t stand it—”
That white eye of Chris Banatyne’s lit up. He leaned his head even further off the wet, yellowed pillow beneath him. Tom pushed against Zeke as Zeke threatened forward. Tom, younger and healthier, especially since he’d been working here all summer and heaving Dar Salem in and out of the bathtub, he was still no match for Zeke. Zeke was a real powerhouse and he pushed right through and sidestepped the younger man with the axe readied just above his waist as if heading toward the doorway of a building on fire to chop through it.
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