by Ed Park
“You know,” Lou said slowly, “I usually do Helen’s lawn. You want to get started on your big night, I can take over.”
Pete dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “Take a break, Lou. I got it. Besides, you might want to make dinner for your wife. Helen said you once owned a Greek restaurant.”
“Yeah, Demeter’s.”
“Nice food. Used to have lunch there with some of my colleagues.”
“That’s where I seen you before,” Lou said. “Been there lately?”
Pete shook his head. “It’s different now, not as good.”
Lou half smiled. “So what’re you gonna make your wife? If you want some ideas . . .”
“I’m good, but whatever I decide, I’ll make a little extra and take it over to Helen so she won’t have to eat one of those crappy TV dinners. She’s been so nice to us.”
Lou nodded and bit his lip and began to drift toward his own front porch.
“By the way,” Pete called after him, “have you seen that car?”
And just like that, the game was on.
* * *
Several times that fall Lou stepped next door to tackle a chore on his Helen List only to find Pete Washington had already completed the task. Pete’s class schedule was such that he had a free morning here and a free afternoon there when he could sweep her porches or patch her blacktop drive. He took her shopping every now and then. Sometimes he even got to the yard work before Lou. He wasn’t as thorough, but Helen didn’t seem to mind. He never washed her front windows and didn’t spend as much time inside her house as Lou and Athena, though he was definitely charming his way into her heart. Twice, when Ebere worked extra late in the hospital, Lou watched him carry a box from Just Pizza straight onto Helen’s porch and take a seat so they could share it. One night Helen was ill, as she later told Athena over the back fence, and Mrs. Washington came over to examine her, giving her medicine that made her feel so much better. When her power failed in October, Pete not only replaced the blown fuse but also arranged for an electrician friend to install a breaker box the following Saturday, at a considerable discount. Lou still managed to roll out her garbage tote before each collection day but only because the professor had classes that afternoon. Once he put the tote on the curb so early a passing police officer stopped her cruiser and threatened to fine him if he didn’t keep it in the yard till six.
“Dr. Washington says with all the burglaries around here I should have an alarm put in,” Helen said at their now semiregular Thursday dinner the first week in November. “But I have nothing that would interest thieves or dope addicts. What do you think?”
Athena, who still did her laundry but had grown more distant from the old woman since the Washingtons’ arrival, had no opinion. Lou was slow to respond, unnerved by the look in Helen’s eye when she spoke of Pete—not exactly a schoolgirl crush but something else that made him wary. Finally, he said, “Those things got panic buttons—you know, for police or fire or medical. Good thing to have.”
Later, Lou sat bolt upright in bed when he realized what it was he’d seen in Helen’s eyes every time she spoke of the Washingtons. It was an almost maternal pride, as if they were her children and she was living through their accomplishments. Though the newcomers gave no indication they knew they were in a competition, he decided he must do something to safeguard his inheritance. And he must do it before winter, before the younger man outshoveled him and lavished Helen with Christmas cookies and his doctor wife cured her of something and got her to change her will. However much you loved other people, it was the ones you loved as your children who got your estate.
At last he was desperate.
Lou might not have resorted to murder if Helen hadn’t declined his Thanksgiving invitation in order to spend the holiday with Pete and Ebere. “Their son will be home,” she had told Lou over the phone while Pete lay on his back to tighten the new trap he’d installed beneath her kitchen sink, “and they’d like me to meet him.” Lou still might not have resorted to murder if Athena hadn’t screamed at him so much when he gave her the news. “I cook for old bitch, clean for old bitch, be nice to old bitch ’cause you say so! You! Now look! We get nothing! Might as well go eat with Spiro and Horse-Face!” And he might not have resorted to murder if there hadn’t been so many recent break-ins. But it was the rash of burglaries that made him stare up at the guest room ceiling in Spiro’s house in Fort Benning. For three nights over the Thanksgiving weekend, he worked out the details. Sunday, his final night, he slept better than his two-year-old granddaughter in the next room.
* * *
Pete Washington had a late class every Monday night and got home sometime after nine. The Monday after Thanksgiving was warm enough that the threatened light snow came down as misty rain by the time Pete wheeled his Camry into his driveway. Tired from the morning flight home but still determined to see his plan through, Lou was waiting for him and rushed outside to meet him before he could enter his house through the side door. Right hand in the pocket of his slicker and left hand pointing up Helen’s driveway, Lou said, “Pete, it’s Helen! Come quick!”
If he had any doubt that Pete Washington wanted Helen’s things as much as he did, it disappeared when he saw how quickly the man moved. Within three steps Pete was ahead of Lou, moving toward the rear of the house and calling Helen’s name. He never saw Lou slip on the latex gloves and pull on the shower cap. When they were deep enough in the driveway that they couldn’t be seen from the street, Lou pulled the fisherman’s knife from his slicker pocket and jammed it into his rival’s right kidney.
Pete gasped and clutched his back and stumbled forward, muttering something that showed his confusion. Then Lou was on him, forcing him into the dark yard, even though he tried to plant his feet and turn around. Left arm across the back of Pete’s neck and right hand moving like a piston, Lou drove the knife into him again and again. With each blow another page of the plan unfolded in Lou’s mind. The slicker would keep blood from staining his clothes. The cheap oversized shoes from Big K, the slicker, the gloves, the shower cap, and the knife would all be in a bundle wedged behind the washtub in his basement until later. The police would have no reason, no probable cause, to search Lou’s house. No one could say he had ever exchanged an angry word with Pete Washington, likely another victim of random violence. The body would stay in the dark yard till morning. Helen herself would see it from her kitchen window and call the police. She would tell them that Dr. Washington often checked on her when he came home, just like Mr. and Mrs. Demopoulos on the other side. And they all had warned her to be careful with the recent break-ins. Maybe poor Pete had confronted a would-be burglar and died trying to stop him. Wasn’t she fortunate to have such good neighbors?
Pete’s knees were buckling when Lou gave him a hard shove around the back corner of the house. He collapsed five feet past the rear door as Lou moved toward him to deliver the final blow. At that instant, however, Lou found himself caught in the brilliant crossfire of motion-sensor lights that lit up the backyard like combat flares. The lights were part of the home security system that Helen, at Pete’s insistence, had allowed his electrician friend to install over the Thanksgiving weekend. Lou wheeled toward the kitchen window and saw the equally startled Helen looking out at him. Taking her hand away from her mouth, she reached toward something he couldn’t see, but he knew what it was even before the piercing alarm deafened him, roused the neighborhood, and connected directly to the nearest police station.
The panic button.
* * *
Eight months later, in early summer, Helen Schildkraut had new neighbors on either side of her, a young couple with three children in the Demopoulos house and two young men who told her they were partners, whatever that meant, in the Washington house. After the mess Lou had made of the neighborhood—for no good reason she could discern—she was glad the new people were all so nice. They helped her in the yard and took her shopping. They brought her food and adjusted the cable setting
s and the microwave again and again without complaint. Moving amid the timeworn relics that filled her house and still missing Heinrich after all these years, she never heard the husband tell his wife or the first partner tell the second about the car in her garage. If she had, she would have laughed it off. After all, who’d give a fig about that old thing?
Hand
BY KIM CHINQUEE
Historic District
Passing a girl on the sidewalk, Kyle notices her hand, so small with its plain fingers, unlike the hand he found in the dumpster. At first it didn’t seem real. At first he only poked at it.
He hears a dog bark and he looks down into his cart at the cans. The hand felt kind of spongelike. It smelled of wine. He found it under soggy papers and some empty beer cans; he picked it up. He figures it’s his now.
Across the street, he sees some cops sitting in their cars talking to each other. Kyle feels electric. His cart sounds like a train. The air feels thick, its smell reminding him of bacon.
As his stomach growls, he remembers he skipped breakfast. He usually has grits, something he’s been eating since he was a kid. He’d be in his grandfather’s old white shack, where he used to go every morning before school, his grandfather saying, “You must always tell the truth. No matter how anybody treats you.” Kyle thought about that at school each day, trying to sit upright in his desk and listen to the teacher. One day his grandpa slipped his shack key into Kyle’s pocket and said, “It’s time.” And the next morning when Kyle went there, he unlocked the door to find his grandpa hanging from the ceiling. Kyle was only ten. He still has the key; it sits there in his pocket.
Cars are beeping. His cart isn’t full. Still. This other thing is something.
Kyle knows the right thing to do. But cops can be rude and nasty. He was a cop for two months in the air force—the other cops used to sit around and tell dirty jokes and swear, and since Kyle didn’t do that, they kept calling him a faggot.
At home, he wheels his cart up to the building where he lives. He grabs the hand and puts it in his backpack. “Hand,” he says, “we’re going to my place.”
He runs up, unlocks his door, pets his old Chihuahua, and when he sees the fridge he opens the door and sets the hand on a shelf.
When he gets down to the cart again, he watches a couple pass: a girl with dark-lined eyes, a white-haired man in golf shorts.
He pushes the cart to Tops, and with his giant hands he puts his cans and bottles into the machine.
Later Kyle puts on his newest jeans to get his blood drawn. He dons a crisp white shirt he used to wear when working in collections. He’s had plenty of jobs: scrubbing toilets, his short gig as a cop, then that year as a med tech. He picked berries but wasn’t fast enough. At thirty-six he tried to get a bachelor’s in history. He thinks of his own history: flashbacks of his father in the bathroom, the barn and straw, and his mother’s ruby glasses. Once a week his therapist tells him to watch the dots on a screen as she asks him to relive things.
She says, “How do you feel?”
He doesn’t know what to say. “I’m not sure I’ve ever felt much.”
Today he’s getting his blood drawn, which he does every year on his doctor’s orders. Kyle parks the car his father used to drive before ending up in prison for killing a woman while drunk driving. Sometimes Kyle visits the prison, busing the hour to get there. His father wears orange and keeps his head shaved. Each time as Kyle leaves, his father says, “You must be guilty of something.”
Kyle walks to the lab, thinking of the hand with its fuchsia polish. He says hi to a lady on the sidewalk. But mostly to her shaggy dog, its tail wagging incessantly.
At the lab, Kyle skims through the stack of magazines, only seeing ones with skinny, fair-skinned ladies on the covers. On the chair next the table, he sees a thin man wearing tinted glasses and an obese lady with curly auburn hair. Kyle notices an odor. On the TV in the corner, a sportscaster talks about the Sabres’ recent win. A weather lady says it’s cloudy. Then there’s breaking news; a pregnant, suited woman interviews a man who holds a slim cigar. He says, “A woman washed up in the river. She’s been missing. Her name is Ruby Smith and she appears to have no hand.”
Kyle moves closer to the screen, seeing a shot of the dead woman: dark-haired with a barrette, her face a little chubby. She’s wearing glasses and maroon lipstick. She’s maybe about thirty. When he found the hand, he didn’t picture whom it might belong to. It was manicured and purple; the wrist was wrapped in foil. He looked at the palm and fingers. They seemed so soft and tender, like he remembers his mother’s being. She left when he was twelve, and he wonders where she is now. The hand was wet, like it wasn’t dead yet. He pictures it, now maybe next to the peanut butter in his fridge, how he left it there in haste, thinking he’d tend to it later.
The sportscaster comes back on the screen and talks about the upcoming Bills game. Kyle sits. He feels like a kid again, his father telling him he’s sinful.
Then when the phlebotomist calls out, “Kyle Krupp,” he follows her. He sits in the chair and sees a sign that reads, Biohazard. He remembers being on her end of the needle, the routine of gloving, uncapping, sticking, watching the blood rush into the tubing.
He studies the lab order, his last name spelled with one p instead of two. He says, “My last name is spelled wrong.”
She says, “I’ll have to fix it,” then slams her hand down on the printer. Her lipstick looks black, and her nails are long and polished.
He remembers patient-sensitivity sessions he used to have to attend. They were required by law.
He says to her, “Have you been to the training?”
She turns to him. “What?”
He says, “Patient sensitivity. Have you not been trained?” He smells an odor and sees the obese woman going down the hallway.
The phlebotomist says, “I’ll be back.” She gets up and leaves, so Kyle sits and waits. He remembers chairs like this, back when he was a med tech, sitting down and discussing things like breaking up with his one and only girlfriend. She was a med tech too until she said she was moving on, maybe to save lost dogs or plant marigolds, maybe to hang out with bikers.
He thinks of the woman in the news, the hand. He thinks about the dead girl.
Now he hears the phlebotomist from across the hall. “Girl,” she says, “that fat lady smells like sausage!”
“Girl,” says someone else, “you always get the stinky ones.”
Then another woman appears in the hallway sprinting backward. She stops, looking at Kyle. “Hey!” she yells down the hall to the other workers. “You guys,” she yells again, “we have a patient!”
Kyle hears somebody say, “He was a pain right when he got here.”
The woman from the hall looks at him again and says, “I’m really sorry.”
On the way home, Kyle notices the Check Engine light on the dashboard of his Toyota, and hopes it doesn’t need anything expensive. He can get by with his savings and from what he makes on bottles. He likes to compare prices.
He stops at a red light, seeing a driver in the next car who looks like the phlebotomist. His windows are open. He wonders if he took his medication. He tries to see her hands on the wheel—they look a little plain. He glances at his own hands. Big and bony. Wrinkled.
He thinks about the hand belonging to the dead girl. He feels his stomach churn. He remembers finding the hand, so manicured and soft. It didn’t seem real.
He recalls that girlfriend from long ago, how she went to get her nails done. He thinks of his mother’s hands, the last time he saw them.
* * *
At the apartment, Kyle remembers the barrette he saw in the picture of the dead girl. Blue and gold, a butterfly, like one he saw holding back his mother’s bangs the night she left. There’s another shot he remembers of his mother looking happy, by the way she holds her head back, her teeth and lips aglow. At the beach, the wind sweeping.
He sits on his sofa, listening to his dog
whine.
The woman was last seen at the Pancake House on Hertel. Kyle pictures a woman with big rings, high heels, and good clothes in a mansion.
He wants wine. He goes to the fridge, where he sees her right hand where he left it. He picks it up and smells it. It reminds him of merlot; the skin is rubbery. He touches the foil on the end, and he imagines a big tree. He remembers a branch from his grandfather’s oak that smashed onto his father’s windshield in the middle of a snowstorm. “It’s okay,” he says out loud. He decides to make some eggs. He turns on the stove and pours himself some wine. He picks up the hand; he cradles it and rocks.
* * *
He wakes to the smell of smoke. He sees firemen and police who have sticks and cuffs and handguns. He sees the hand on his lap, and the empty wineglass by the rocker. A black man stands in front of him and says, “Busted.”
The man takes the hand. Kyle’s dog looks up at him. He got a dog bite as a kid, something he hasn’t thought of in a while, as if it’s all a dream or maybe never happened. He remembers the dog’s sharp teeth, its black eyes, then being in the hospital with a wrist full of stitches.
“You almost burned the place down,” says another cop with a uniform too small for his gigantic muscles.
Kyle remembers the night before, turning on the burner to make eggs, swallowing the Xanax his doctor said to take when he feels anxious. He reaches in his pocket, running his thumb over the edges of his grandpa’s key.
The hand, it felt so cold, the skin almost like his mother’s. He wanted to do right. He says, “But it’s my hand.”
He rides away in the backseat of the cop car. His own hands are in cuffs. He looks up at the rearview and sees the cop’s white eyes.
Kyle says, “I didn’t kill her.”
He thinks he hears a laugh.
“I’m innocent,” he says. “I’m sure of it. I know.”
