The metal yardstick pinched her neck and she saw glistening particles around the stranger’s face, which had darkened, the room flattening up against his head like a cutout. Joan didn’t exactly fake her own death; she simply left the scene of the crime—stopped resisting and faded backward into herself, like a fish swimming to the bottom of a pond.
Roy wasn’t even around anymore. He had died of cancer. Joan looked for him in the murk. At the lake where she first lived when she came to New York, fat, tattered goldfish had risen from the depths whenever it rained to nibble at the drops, as though a big child were shaking food into their bowl. She used to watch them from her porch, slender glimpses of orange beneath the blue, varnished surface of the lake.
She should have been a painter; she always knew that.
* * *
—
Joan had seen a physics demonstration once where a bullet was fired into a slab of gel, its trajectory made visible by a jagged tunnel in the pale amber block. Just in that moment, gazing up at the matte brown of the stranger’s hair, she heard it again, the sound of the report like a cap gun right next to the ear.
Joan had known someone who was shot, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight; none of the people she might have expected to see were at the bottom of her pond. Mother? Father? Her eyes were wide, searching, but the only thing visible was her own hair, drifting in front of her like seaweed.
The stranger was startled from the task at hand; he clambered to his feet, tripping over Joan’s body, and lurched against the wall. Pilgrim had hooked one of his muddy toenails through the screen and prized the flimsy door open a foot or so against its latch. When he let go, the bottom of the door snapped shut against the wood frame, creating a sharp report that reverberated through the house. He did it again, then gave up, threw all his energy into a baying, hysterical howl.
STRANGER…STRANGER…STRANGER.
Spock found himself in front of the house before he even knew he was awake. He bolted around in a joyous, dirt-churning circle, barking into the evening air.
On the roof of the shed, the possum opened one eye.
* * *
—
Too much commotion at once: the cacophony of dog yelps; the sharp noise, like two blocks of wood clapped together; the blurred sound of toenails being raked across a screen. The stranger glanced down at the body, boneless and vacated, mouth slack, eyes fixed and staring. More in common now with the carpet or the chair than with him. He looked out the window to the yard below. The black dog was trembling and baying, staring at the door.
In the woods behind the house, a silver coyote glanced up from what used to be a deer. The nearest neighbor, just getting home from work, stood next to his car for a moment, listening to Pilgrim and Spock, and then went on inside, where his wife was cooking dinner and his sons were watching the Three Stooges. Good old-fashioned black-and-white mayhem, and the after-work sound of meat frying.
The stranger stepped on Joan’s outflung hand as he strode from the room.
* * *
—
Way back in the Iowa farmhouse days, Joan and her first husband had woken one morning to find they had survived a tornado. There was a wide swath cut across the cornfield next to their shed. The tornado had gone through a fence neatly, lifting it like a row of stitching from a hem, and then turned and run alongside the house, uprooting the soft-faced pansies and leaving in its wake a farmer’s feed bucket, a muddy wind sock, and what looked like a waterlogged stuffed toy that turned out to be a kitten. Joan hadn’t wanted to go to the cellar during the night because she had seen an obese toad down there, a horrible depressing creature who seemed to have eaten himself into a corner—he had grown so fat that his arms and legs didn’t reach the ground; he was like a soft gray stone about the size of her foot, resting in a puddle of ancient exploded preserves. So they had remained upstairs on their mattress on the floor with the collie between them, getting up on their elbows every once in a while to peer out at the wild, whipping storm. At some point they had watched a ball of blue lightning travel back and forth between the house and the barn on an electrical wire, and had thought they might be going to die, but still they had lain in bed, unwilling to face the giant toad.
Joan hadn’t let her husband bury the kitten that was flung onto their sidewalk in the tornado. At the last minute, while placing it in the hole, she decided maybe it wasn’t really dead, and carried it out to the tall grass and left it there, just in case.
She came slowly back to herself, there on the floor of her study, lungs inflating and deflating until she could feel everything at once: crushed nose, thread of blood running across her cheek, the blue stem of windpipe.
The kitten had been gone the next morning, carried off in the jaws of whatever carries things off in the night. The sounds they would hear sometimes in that farmhouse, in the darkness, insane snarling fights, agonized cries deep inside the corn. From outside came the sound of Pilgrim’s growling attack, a sickening thump. Joan pulled herself up to the window and looked out. The stranger was kicking her dog. Once, twice, off the flagstone stoop and into the shrubbery, yelping.
Then only Spock was visible in the early evening light, a white dog with a stick in his mouth, keeping just out of reach.
* * *
—
The stranger swept his boot sideways, knocking her geraniums off the stoop, homely Martha Washingtons, with neat scalloped leaves and lavender fringed petals. It was like kicking someone’s grandmother.
Her neck, her dog, her flowers.
When she was a little girl, her grandma Bess had hung bed linens on the line down at Joan’s height, letting them rest wetly on the clean grass as she set the pins, then lifting the line high with a notched pole until the sheets were off the ground, snapping feebly around in the breeze. Joan would walk in a kid trance through the damp white rows, a clothespin pinching each of her fingers, feeling the thin cloth against her face.
In the gloomy confines of that grandmother’s living room was a mirrored coffee table made of cobalt glass that reflected Joan’s face in a mesmerizing way, blue and desolate. She had loved that grandma, a silent, opinion-less woman from the unpopular side of the family. At Grandma Bess’s house, there were no frightened farm animals, no knife-wielding butchers; she had her own gentle version of hens and chicks, cunning little succulent plants that spread in a low green flock across the cracked dirt by her back door, kept alive with periodic drenchings of dishwater. She used a rusted enamel dishpan with a rock in the center for a birdbath, and did her business out back in a shed. Once, eating dinner at someone’s house with her parents and sister, Joan had piped up, remarking that her grandma Bess had the same kind of soup pot underneath her bed. That was one of Joan’s famous childhood jokes, although she herself didn’t get it at the time.
She peered down at her spilled geraniums, the curtain like a shroud against her face. The clay pots were broken into large pieces. She had spectral visions of herself on the front lawn—there was young Joan at her grandma’s house, whirling through the laundered sheets as the sparrows landed on the rock and sipped at their bathwater; there was Joan crouching to look at the hens and chicks; there was Joan kneeling, gazing down through the blue coffee table atmosphere at her image floating below, disembodied and deprived. She had to touch her own mashed nose just to see if she was still alive.
The pain was dazzling, invigorating, like poking her brain with an ice-cold wire; she did it again, this time imagining a pair of shining tongs pushing alcohol-soaked cotton balls into her head. She’d read that in a story somewhere, a woman staring helplessly at a doctor as he packed her mangled nose with what felt like burning snow. Joan closed her eyes and pressed firmly against the shattered bridge, until she was rewarded with a surge of endorphins.
She opened her eyes.
* * *
—
He had been looking for
something to lure the white dog, that’s why he got in the refrigerator in the first place; he had decided to make a clean sweep of it, because he hated dogs anyway and the fact that the thick white one thought this was all a game—well. The stranger liked to play games himself, and this was one. Have a slice of cheese, dog, if you call this cheese.
In another Magritte metaphor, a man stares into a mirror and instead of seeing his face, sees the back of his own head. The dead woman behind him was noiseless, but he felt a shift, the still air giving way as the shovel was cocked back, and then he somehow was behind himself, seeing what she saw right up to the moment that the black bowl of the shovel hit the side of his head, at which point he heard not the sound of a gravedigger hitting rock but a sudden loud silence.
* * *
—
Joan had already killed something once, with her car, on a bitter night when snow was blowing into her headlights. A flash of antler, a shoulder thudding into the front bumper on the passenger side, and suddenly the animal was up on the hood of her car, sliding across it, into the windshield, and then off onto the ground, taking the side-view mirror and leaving a trail of fur. It was late on a black night, and Joan had been so startled that she screamed as she pulled the car over and looked behind her. There was nothing. Then something, a glimpse of turmoil, over on the gravel, the deer struggling to right itself, chin on the ground, trying to gather its legs beneath it. She began to tremble and cry, when suddenly the cracked windshield sagged inward and fell all around her, into her lap, down the front of her coat, like chunks of ice, and she drove on, into the windy stinging darkness, her face frozen.
Driving away from the dying deer was the worst thing she had ever done; it was how she had come to know herself as a coward, and for a long time afterward she had tried to atone by helping things off the road, either before they were killed or after, which is how she ended up with the little titanium shovel in her trunk. She used it now to reach across the man and push the refrigerator door closed.
* * *
—
His grandmother had been worn out from being married to a drunken gravedigger and raising six children and various grandchildren next to a sprawling cemetery. Just a backyard, a runoff ditch, and then acres of tombstones—some old, mossy ones with rounded shoulders and stricken, ornate messages and some modern, ranch-style ones in bright, rectangular granite inscribed with more circumspect messages. The old gravedigger himself ended up cremated, reduced to a pile of grit that seemed more like him than the previous version.
So, the gravedigger’s grandson knew his way around a shovel, because they all did, or the boys anyway. They had to sit in the equipment shed during the service, an agonizingly slow and silent play that couldn’t be hurried no matter what—there was always somebody who needed two people to help them walk; there was always a kid who lay down on the ground in his good clothes; there was always a pair of startling legs tottering in high heels; there were always old people who had to walk around saying hello to other tombstones before hobbling back to their car, getting in, starting it, and then fucking sitting there while it warmed up or cooled off. Only when the last car had finally crunched along the gravel road to the gate could they pick up their shovels and head across to cut up and throw dirt on each other while the old man cussed at them.
It was actually a nice thing to think about, the mysterious stately behavior of the black-clad people, the smell of rich dirt, the worms who didn’t know they were cut in half. He let it keep him company now, wherever this was he was.
* * *
—
Joan had seen a number of dead things in her life, and although the man on her kitchen floor looked strangely flat and ruined, he didn’t look dead. On his side, one arm lodged behind him, the palm facing up, the other arm slumped forward at the shoulder, elbow bent, the hand resting somewhere under the edge of the cereal and wineglass cupboard. She needed to get that hand, somehow put it with the other hand, and tie them together behind his back.
Rope, rope, rope.
All around her, things had come loose from their meanings and were washing in and out with her breath like tidewater: the planks of afternoon sunlight laid across the kitchen floor, the plaid dog leash looped over a chair, the garish paste jewels shimmering next to her lunch, cast by the prism hanging in the window over the sink. A giant rose, a single knotty carrot, a man in a bowler hat, his face obliterated by an apple.
Ceci n’est pas toi.
In fact, she had been a good-natured child, cartwheeling around the lawn, throwing the ball for the family’s terrier, grinning gap-toothed into cameras, whistling, constantly with her arm hooked around the neck of one skinny cousin or another.
Her neck, her dog, her flowers.
Out the kitchen window, a heron stalked the edge of the pond, searching for grubs, jabbing its long beak into the mud and then tipping it up toward the sky, like a frail child playing with a sword. Beyond the pond, inside the woods, the coyote lay stretched out on the ground with a bone between his paws, like a dog. The bone had strings of flesh attached to it and fur, some of which he peeled off and some of which he went ahead and ate. He hadn’t killed the deer, a truck had hit it, and it had crawled off into the woods and tried to bury itself.
There were crows trying to bother him but unless they came down he refused to be bothered. They were above him, squawking.
* * *
—
It sounded like the comedian he used to watch on TV, the big man who wore an overcoat and a pirate’s scarf, and who traipsed up and down the stage, bent over his microphone, squawking in helpless rage at the stupidity of women. Oh! Oh! Oh!
You cuuuuunt!
Now his cemetery was dark, the tombstones like bones poking up out of the ground. The ones he had liked were the ones who died before their time—men in their thirties, women in their twenties, three-year-olds. Hurried along by farm accidents, childbirth, whooping cough. You could feel the unfairness hanging over the tombstones.
Once, he helped bury a coffin two feet long, ivory colored with chrome handles, which had housed a waterhead baby that died at birth. That’s what people called it then, and that’s how he had pictured it, a baby with a head made out of rainwater. The features, the ears, everything, a baby’s head that looked like a clear glass jar, only it was water.
He felt like finding that baby’s grave and stretching out, resting his head, which it seemed like he was carrying in his hands; he couldn’t tell. It might be where it was supposed to be, but it felt like a balloon. Only solid. And with a bad spot, like a melon that had sat in the melon patch too long. This bad spot didn’t feel like mush, though, it felt like rain. Or not like rain, like pain.
* * *
—
She had visited a morgue once, and seen someone with a bullet wound. In a hospice room, she had seen her mother, and later, in a room down the hall, her father; in a hospital chapel, she had seen a stillborn baby in its mother’s arms. The bullet had created a precise, catastrophic hole that was deeply startling, even though she was prepared for it; her mother had been awake until the end, struggling and translucent, like a baby bird forced out of the nest; her father, picked clean by the vulture of cancer, had grown quieter and quieter, until even his heart devolved into silence. The baby had been lavender, and perfect.
* * *
—
Spock circled the house, checking all his posts, stopping to fan his leg at the corner of the shed, the stand of daylilies, both Adirondack chairs. Usually when the crows sounded like that it meant something was out there to eat, and he and Pilgrim would pace along their invisible border and try to see what it was and who was eating it.
He had mostly run out of urine but he still had his stick, one with a twig coming off it that if he turned his head would poke him in the neck. When he found the right spot, Spock was going to settle down and chew the twig of
f. For now, he just kept turning his head, letting the twig dig its own grave.
* * *
—
The kitchen was strangely beautiful. Joan looked down and saw flowers foaming at her feet last week as she took a shortcut through the Queen Anne’s lace. Something weird was happening to time—it was swirling instead of linear, like pouring strands of purple and green paint into a bucket of white and giving it one stir. Now was also then was also another then. She saw Spock nosing through summer brambles with a stick in his mouth and her husband in the snow cutting a Christmas tree, making the Jack Nicholson face he always made when he had occasion to use the ax.
Honey, I’m home!
The hand that was under the edge of the cupboard, she needed to get that out of there so she could see it.
* * *
—
The stranger was somewhere else now. The tombstones were gone and he was in his chair, in the dark. It was late at night and the comedian was on TV, ranting and sweating through his overcoat. Oh! Oh! Oh!
He pointed the remote but he couldn’t turn it up. His fingers weren’t working.
You biiiiitch!
The comedian had been hurried along by a drunk driver, T-boned on his way from a gig. Gigged on his way to a T-bone. They used to catch frogs, he and his cousin Kyle, and do the most inventive things to them. Sometimes though, they just fished, and that was almost as fun, simply because of Kyle. Nobody didn’t have fun when they were with Kyle, who ended up hurried along by mysterious circumstances involving diving off a bridge drunk.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 5
