by Robert White
“It ain’t right, bro,” the other one muttered. “I’m takin’ the same chances as you.”
“Shut the fuck up and let me think,” Calderone snapped.
This man wasn’t Calderone’s size and his two-hundred-eighty or ninety pounds were mostly flab. His arms and belly stretched the fabric of his black tee-shirt and his wrists were as thick as barge poles.
“Come on, man. Let’s drill this bitch and go get us the money,” he said.
I couldn’t talk yet, the sounds were hoarse coming as they did from a damaged larynx, but I managed the word No all right.
“No, what, you fuckface cunt?”
Calderone peered down at me between the single line of his black eyebrow and put a boot on my forehead. He looked about to launch a fist at me so I squeezed my head into my neck and hoped he shattered every metacarpal bone in his hand.
“Wait, Randy!” The fat one grabbed Calderone by his wrist. “Let’s hear this shitsucker out, bro,” he said.
“No-money-hurt-her,” I managed to wheeze out.
Calderone was torn between beating me to death and getting his hands on the money – a boon he must have thought would never come his way after the discovery of Marija’s body in the field and the money missing. Revenge was on hold for greed, for the moment.
He leaned over me. “Your faggot brother died screaming. That will seem like dyin’ in a four-poster bed compared to what I will do to you. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” I half-coughed it.
“Where is the money?”
“Fuck’s sweet sake, let the motherfucker answer,” Fat Boy said.
I spoke one word and waited.
“‘Break’ – what the fucking hell is a breakwall?” Fat Boy shouted to Calderone.
“See that, out the window there, you dumb Kentucky hillbilly?”
Calderone pointed just beyond Sarah’s still body. She could have been posing for a nude portrait with her blonde pubis shaved into a wedge, no doubt for the benefit of the latest carcass occupying my garage; she hadn’t moved anything but her eyes the whole time.
Fat Boy asked Calderone to cut my hands free. They gave me a paper and pencil and I wrote down the location with simple directions. I added a crude sketch that included the house, the breakwall, and an X-marks-the spot just like a kid’s pirate treasure map.
I looked at Sarah and saw the tears coursing down her cheeks. How could I ask forgiveness for the bomb crater of my life?
Calderone and Fat Boy bickered like an old married couple; neither one wanted to be left here while the other one went for the money. In the end, Calderone yielded to Fat Boy, who was going to lead me down there to fetch the bag. Calderone would remain with Sarah.
The fact that Calderone yielded to his partner and was going to let him touch all that cash told me as surely as anything else Calderone had said or done that he was setting him up. Fat Boy didn’t know it, but he was going to join Sarah’s man in the garage.
#39
I wasn’t taking a chance with Sarah’s life. I located the bag easily enough. Fat Boy made me carry it back to the car. When I tried to tell him what Calderone intended for him, he backhanded me across the face.
Two hours later, at the height of his glee, while he was counting out the bills on my living room floor, Calderone put a bullet in his head without so much as a harsh word or a whisper.
I saw Fat Boy’s boots wobble in front of me – a couple inches forward and then a stutter-step backward a couple more inches like someone anticipating a dance move. He fell hard and slammed all his weight into the floor; it shook the room and rattled the tiny crystals hanging from Sarah’s lamps.
Fat Boy’s eyes stayed wide open. His face was mere inches from mine as I lay trussed near the sofa. The tiny red hole in the center of his forehead wasn’t big enough for my pinkie to fit into.
Calderone, standing above me, said quietly, “You can run punks in the joint, but you don’t keep them. Brotherhood rules, man. I told him that a dozen times.”
I heard the sound of the silencer being unscrewed from the barrel. He dropped it on the floor where smoke curled out of drilled holes. He patted Fat Boy down and removed the Taurus from the back of Fat Boy’s pants. He circled his left boot with his hands and went up it to his calf. He found a little Phoenix Arms .25 in his right boot. He worked the slide and ejected a shell. He held it out in front of my face.
“Now what you suppose my bro intended to do with this?” He rolled me over so I could see him.
“Ho-hum,” Calderone said with a big yawn and a stretch. “I think I’ll go upstairs and fuck the wife.”
He put his boot on my neck and rocked all his body weight in to it. After the third time, I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out of my head.
“No point in squirming, Jack-off. You keep my man company down here because I ain’t lugging your ass up those stairs. Your wife’s name, remind me.”
“Sarah,” I said. “Her name is Sarah. Please don’t hurt her.”
“Sarah. A Jew, huh? Don’t matter. She reminds me of this strung-out little girl in Albuquerque. Used to squirt her pussy juice all over me when she came. She liked it in the ass. Bet you there’s a lot she’s gonna learn from me you never showed her, flower boy.”
He tossed the rest of the spilled packets of money into the backpack. He went over each of Fat Boy’s knots on my hands and feet. When he was satisfied with the tension on the cords, he picked up the backpack by a strap.
“All them books with big words upstairs ain’t gonna help you or her. I didn’t need books down in Mexico. You learn by doing down there.”
“Calderone, listen to me-”
“I learned how to give histamine injections so a man’ll feel more pain. I learned about all kinds of drugs down there. I learned a human body’s got a big nerve called the vagus that runs from your ass into your brain. That’s important when you’re making a man slide down a greased pole into his asshole by his own body weight. It takes fuckin’ days that way. You should see their faces go through the changes.”
“Calderone, you can have your revenge on me right now.”
“I can do whatever I want,” he said quietly. “I learned that in Mexico, too. No limits, man. No limits.”
Suddenly, without even disturbing the air, he was next to me down on his haunches. He put the butterfly knife to my throat and lightly grazed the skin in a gentle sawing motion. “I got a long list of grievances to take up with you later. You thought I didn’t know Marija was going to try to screw me out of the money.”
“Let my wife go, Calderone,” I begged.
“I took a hammer and found some German shepherd tied up behind his house and I beat that dog’s skull in. I called your name every time I brought that hammer down on its fuckin’ head.”
“You can tear me up, anything.”
“I got everything lined up in the basement and it’s all for you, boy. Got me a nice set of shiny knives and some pliers. Got your garden hose down there, too. Even found me a jar of your wife’s KY jelly. Most of all, I’ve got you, you piece of dog shit, and I’ve got time.”
“You’ve got no time, Calderone. You need to take the money and run now!”
He stood up and touched my chin with his boot and raised my head to see him.
I lay my head down on the floor, exhausted from wheezing that out. My chest heaved with panic. I felt ice-cold fingers on my spine – my thoughts, my helplessness roosting in my cells. When you were drifting alone in the open sea, when you saw the first shark fins cut the surface, did it feel like this?
I heard his boots come off. One thud, two. A belt buckle jangled and made a different swooshing sound as it too hit the floor. Then I heard the zipper. He was at the first landing when he called down to me from the banister.
“Listen up real good, motherfucker, because I want you to hear every time she comes.”
As he headed higher up the stairs, I heard him call her name; dread crawled like a tape
worm under my skin until my whole body shook on the floor. He said in a soft croon like children playing peek-a-boo: “Yoo-hoo, Sarah, up there, here I come...
“...and come... and come...”
Saturday, September 11
12:01 a.m.
#40
In the bible, Judith cuts off the head of Holofernes after she wears him out in sex. The bloody-minded bible omits that part and lingers on the triumphal bloody head. I glimpsed Sarah’s terrified face and I saw the courage she had in her, but I needed to see the guile of a woman who knew she had hours to live unless she found the courage to do what she never dreamed she’d have to do in a lifetime, let alone in the house where she felt safest.
While I lay on the floor with the dead eyes of Fat Boy staring into mine, I had nothing else to do but think. It wasn’t lost on me that the gods were ladling out irony: what had Alicia’s terror been, after all? I let rage percolate like oil under sand and waited for my mind to clear. It was still ricocheting like a ping pong ball in a room full of furniture – Montreal and the old terrors, Carlos, my escapades in the city, the face of my mother, all the chaos of the last two weeks.
Over the hours I lost all feeling in my hands, feet, and wrists; the numbness went all the way up my arms and only the shoulders felt the white-hot pain of my stretched-out tendons. My abdomen hurt and the tops of my thighs. Little by little, the pain censors were tripping or blinking out all over me. I tried to put my mind somewhere else by working variations of the Pythagorean formula and imagined myself sitting in a boat on Moose Lake with the sun casting shadows over different sides of my ball cap. I plotted the sun’s azimuth by finding magnetic north to match the imagined landscape where Carlos and I had fished. I put an imaginary protractor on the angle between the shadow on my cap and the sun’s position along the horizon to tell the time of day. You never know where your mind will take you in the moments before you’re going to be killed.
The irony was that I heard nothing from upstairs. Not a sound. It wasn’t possible for me not to in that quiet house beside a dead man. I heard cars start up in the distance as my neighbors awoke to begin a new work day. All was quiet above the stairs. I heard the creaks and tiny snaps a house makes on its own; her new ormolu clock on the fireplace mantle was making a deafening tock. Dogs woofed. I heard a squirrel in the red maple outside, but I couldn’t hear Sarah being raped by a mad bull right over my head.
Fat Boy’s boot knife...
I tried rocking. The pain was intense and I made no forward or backward progress from what I could see. I worked up a sweat and brought some deadened nerves back to flaming life; his middle-aged baby’s face was right where it was when he fell, mocking me with slitted eyes that said: This ain’t nothin’. Wait’ll you see what he’s gonna do to you. I resumed the rocking motion but all I was doing was creating intense pain and wearing myself out. With all my body weight centered, it wasn’t possible. I was a turtle on its back. I had no other option but the faint hope Pippins would come knocking.
If you’re ever thinking of being rescued, you’ve already lost. My father had a dozen sayings for this. I kept rocking, and after an hour, I made all of three inches’ progress toward the corpse of Fat Boy. I was afraid of going into spasms at one point and the searing pain in every joint in my arms was unbearable. It felt like having my arms pulled behind me and being suspended in the air.
It seemed impossible but I was close enough to Fat Boy now to smell him. Not the rancid smell of his body but the overhanging smell of death. He was already showing dark patches of lividity on his face and arms. I changed the rhythm of my rocking to put as much torque as I could into the third swing. I gained a miniscule extra amount of ground that way even though the few feet separating us now seemed like the Alaskan tundra. I had sweated through my clothes and in one long exhausted spate where I couldn’t move my body at all, I generated enough body heat to dry them.
Counting from the time I was brought in hog-tied and dumped on the floor, I had spent hours working myself to exhaustion at this hopeless task. I was close enough to touch Fat Boy’s cheek with my own. Once I had his body weight for leverage, however, I was going to be able to work more efficiently. It took me another forty-eight minutes to work down his body and angle myself so that my face was resting on his left leg. I had the sickening feeling that Calderone had removed the knife without my seeing it, and this was all for nothing.
His pant leg had to be pushed out of the way, and this was harder than I thought. I tried a hundred times to pull it back from his boot with my teeth. I failed every time.
I decided to eat my way through it. I began chewing at the edge where it was thickest. I tore at it like an animal in a leghold trap until my jaw ached. I had to stop and wait until my mouth could produce more spit. I did this for a long time with little to show for it but an abraded face and a dead man’s slobbered boot. My lips were raw and bled. But it finally happened – a tiny rip.
I worked my way into the material with my face to get to the part where the material was like a tasteless pulp. I steadied myself and threw my head back with all my neck strength. I tore open a sore on the inside of my cheek but left no damage to the fabric. I worked my way back to it after worming and twisting over Fat Boy and prepared for the thrust. This time it was not going to fail, I said to myself. I thought of the basement. I thought of Sarah. Then I thought of Carlos. I snapped my head back and heard the satisfying rip of cloth.
I rested for ten minutes and then I began working toward the boot. Calderone had missed it because the sheath was made of very thin, supple leather. I used my teeth to loosen it inside the boot, and with my nose like a hog snout rooting for truffles, I managed to push it up his leg. It was like everything else so far: an upheaval of strain and agony for a millimeter of progress. I stopped checking the time but I knew hours were passing. The sun bloomed white through the backs of the heavy drapes Sarah installed.
I kept at it – a brainless, wriggling, six-foot worm of throbbing nerves and tortured muscles.
Then I had the knife in my teeth and I was able to extract it by the blade. The next part was worked out in my mind with angles. I couldn’t get the blade near my hands, which were useless, so it was going to have to be feet first. I had to work the blade with my mouth so that I could stick it through the jelly of Fat Boy’s eyeball and then drive it home into the brain’s meat as far as I could manage. It took me awhile to get my legs in position so that I could create enough friction to cut into the cords at my feet. The knots weren’t the problem. I had one cord to cut. I left about four inches of haft to work my leg against, abrading and sawing against thirteen pounds of head weight. Once I had worked my body up past his head and found the right angle where the tension on the nylon rope was greatest, it was a sawing action that required less strain on my upper body and my aching shoulders. Calderone and Fat Boy had figured on the knots as the important thing to hold me fast, but it was here that I had my only chance. I worked through the rest of the morning until it was the middle of the day.
Fear of Calderone tromping down the stairs in his biker boots rarefied my hearing so much that I thought I heard the threads part. The weight of Fat Boy’s head provided me all the ballast necessary to thrust and saw, thrust and saw...
I felt a last surge of adrenalin that gave me some release from the burning pain. I worked frantically until I felt the blade bite skin as well as cord. I didn’t stop, I let the blood flow. It took my mind off the pain.
At last the rope parted and my legs swung loose. A loud sob escaped my throat. The realization I was unbound seemed like too much happiness. The sound of the bed bumping against the wall in the familiar rhythm of sex did something to my mind then. It wasn’t the sound of rape I heard. It was the sound of a woman building up to climax.
I couldn’t stand just yet even when I used the couch to help me get to a sitting position. The circulation in my legs was so bad that my thigh muscles fluttered uncontrollably. I sat there and breathed deeply, th
inking of the exertions to come, and trying to hear and simultaneously block out the sounds from upstairs. The knife was almost corkscrewed into Fat Boy’s socket and jutted out at a forty-five degree angle. I was going to have to sit on his head and work myself up and down from behind.
It would be easier than what I had just done, but I was too exhausted from the labor past to begin another task. I let precious seconds escape. I knew I could get out the door. My luck wasn’t going to go on, and Calderone’s lust would be sated eventually. I might make it to the street, but I’d be killed right there, and Sarah right afterward.
I went to work on my bindings and rode Fat Boy’s head as if I were a buck scratching his behind against a tree. I worked and cut a few strands and rested. I heard Calderone in my mind telling her to do things and I heard her laugh and I wanted to ram my head into a wall to stop the sounds and the pictures in my brain.
It took another fifteen minutes to cut through and I didn’t stop until I felt the warm blood pour down. I could not feel anything in my hands, but when my arms sagged free from their own weight, I thought this was like womb bliss. I had spent almost eight hours in and I was delirious and sick from the effort.
When I could stand up without falling over, I chafed my hands against anything I could to bring life back into them. When I had enough feeling in them to turn the door latch, I almost caved in to fear and bolted.
I breathed deeply and thought about what I was going to have to do. I put the filleting knife in my hands and squeezed them shut. It was the best I could manage. I started for the stairs.
I made it to the first landing on shaky legs and listened for sounds. Murmurs, low talk, post-coital noises of lovers – or so my mind let me think. I crept up the stairs and waited for the tell-tale creaks to bring a thundering reaction. Sarah laughed. It sobered me like stepping into a freezing mountain stream. I made my way down the darkened hallway to the bedroom; the door was opened and a puddle of yellow light spilled out.
