The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Can you get away?”

  “Jamie’s out of town again. So, yes, I’ll be here,” Becky Odel said. “I don’t think I can wait, though. Can I see you sooner? A little while after Wednesday night service? I can say I’m practicing.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I need you. I can barely get through the day as it is.”

  “Patience, my beautiful angel. We are humbling ourselves before the Lord by being faithful servants. And I know it’s hard, really I do, but this relationship is a test of our faith. He’s testing us—our character. He’s told me we’ll be together the same way He said you needed my help. That’s why I came to you. You have to ready your heart for Him,” Warren said with practiced faith, but I knew the truth. He was manipulating her the way he did everyone else.

  You can’t believe that. He’s lying to you.

  “Warren, God has to understand. I can’t do this by myself. He has to understand it now. I love you,” she cried behind the doors and it was hard to stomach. “And I can’t go home anymore to that man. It kills me inside not to be with you.”

  “Listen…listen to me, shhh shhhhh now. Be still, Becky. Come here. Give the Lord time. He’ll find away for us to be together like I said. God promised me and I believe in Him.”

  I backed down the stairs, realizing if I had been a little faster I might have walked out that door right as they did. Then I would’ve been trouble. They must have parked in the back to hide their cars. More importantly, Warren had been having his way with Jamie Odel’s wife for a while. How long could it have been? Had it been going on when Mom was alive? Probably. And Becky Odel was ready for something more out of their relationship. Who else is he fucking? I backed down the hall and cut into one of the nursery rooms.

  I grabbed a chair and pushed it up to the low window that shown outside, careful not to touch the glass. Flecks of wet sand and water blanketed the window from the rain shower. It was hard to see out.

  I propped my knees against the wall and stood on my tiptoes near the top of the panes. Just to the right, above the green hedge, I saw them hugging. Becky pulling him over to the car and unzipping his pants, her kneeling down in the wet gravel on her bare knees and swallowing his cock in her mouth and him forcing her head back and forth, fingers buried in her hair, a terrible knowing smile on his face.

  I dropped away from the window, unable to watch anymore. Warren’s eyes had looked hungry, as if he could have eaten her soul out of the top of her head, and he probably had, I thought, sitting down in the chair. Sucked the marrow of humanity out of her bones. It needed to end. Someone had to stop him from doing anymore harm to people. But how did you do that? And after several minutes, a plan came to me. Like a puzzle some of the details were still missing, but it would work. I saw the distinct borders framed together then. My mind went back to the chainman again. Your days are numbered by 17. If I got what I needed next Saturday, then the following Sunday I’d have everything ready. It would be 17 days on Monday. The beginning of the end. A smile crossed my lips. It felt dirty, like Warren having his cock swallowed by Becky Odel’s mouth, over and over again.

  I’d never had a secret before. And now I had two. I leaned back in my folding chair and felt the power of destroying someone and knew it was an intoxicating anger. First he had to be punished. And I knew just how to do it. How to destroy the man I hated with every measured bone in my body. Then I’d kill him.

  20

  Amy tapped out her cigarette in the ashtray beside her. “How did you know it would work?”

  I held my face in my hands, elbows on my knees. “I don’t know, to be honest.”

  “That thing you saw. Your chainman. He wasn’t real. You know that, right?” It was as if Nicole were trying to convince herself rather than me.

  “Two things you need to know about playing football, Nicole.” I held up a couple fingers. “First off, protective gear was a damn joke when I was playing ball and secondly, you’d be right back out on the field the next down. Rule was, if you could stand, you could play. Nobody ever said no. So look, I won’t sit here and tell you I thought something was coming to visit me from beyond the grave. That’d be crazy and I know it. But back then, what you’ve gotta remember is that nobody thought about concussions and taking shots to the head like that, either. That thing as you so eloquently put it—he didn’t have to be real for me to believe in him. I’ll be the first to tell you, I was so out of it, I was seeing the damn boogeyman or something that ran a close second to one. But in my frame of mind, he was as real as it gets.”

  “It’s no wonder you have migraines as often as you do,” Charlie said.

  “Does kind of explain a few things. What’s funny is I never had any headaches until that year,” I said.

  “Am I remembering this right?” Amy looked over at me. “It came out later he was sleeping with five women in the church?”

  I nodded. “He was one camel short of a harem and the names got passed around. Everybody knew who they were. Becky Odel you know about. But there was Maria Tomlinson, Kathy Suggs…I don’t remember the other two.”

  “Betsy White and Lori Stoner.” Amy finished the list, breaking off the ash of her cigarette.

  “Stoners moved away right after it happened,” Amy said. “I was friends with their daughter. They just packed up and left.”

  The outcome of what I’d done had been monumental. The church split and the ones who tried to stay were the old folks, the founders. All the younger families left and went to new fellowships, taking the money with them. And a few families vanished from town in the middle of night. Folks knew why. Nothing stays a secret.

  “Not everybody was willing to deal with that kind of humiliation.”

  “What’s sad is they were looking for help.” Amy took a swallow of water. “And they were all coming to him.”

  “He had Becky Odel roped into thinking he was gonna run off with her somehow.” I recalled their conversation again. “Her husband would have killed him and her, and he knew it. I think that’s why Becky drove to that hotel and cut her wrists open. Like she said, there wasn’t any going back.”

  “That explains why the sheriff picked up Jamie Odel that week. I heard how they found him with a shotgun laid across his lap, waiting for her to come home. I don’t think he knew she was dead, yet,” Amy said.

  “They didn’t find her body until Wednesday morning, right? She’d been gone since Sunday.” I found the details numbing. And like a shade I opened it wider. “Just packed a bag and took off. Maybe she thought he’d meet her. I don’t know.”

  “Did you think that’d happen?”

  “Not like that. I didn’t know about the other women, except for Kathy Suggs. And I only found out about her later that week.”

  “What happened?” Charlie asked.

  The chainman told me. But I kept that to myself. “I heard them in his office that Wednesday night and they weren’t praying, if you know what I mean. That’s when I figured out how to get the picture.”

  Nicole pushed off the edge of her seat. “Why didn’t you go to elders?”

  I thought about it a second. “You know, I think it was because nobody would have believed me. Then, on top of that, if I’d told somebody and it’d gotten out, somehow made its way back to him…” I shook my head. “I couldn’t take that chance either. You’ve got to realize something—there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind he would have killed me. Taken me out in the woods someplace. Drug me off in a field maybe and used a bat on my head and beaten me to death.”

  “Daddy, you didn’t have anybody you could tell?”

  “I didn’t know who to trust and who not to.” I caught Amy’s eyes widening, a look of regret mounting behind them. I studied my hands. “But more than anything, I wanted to watch his face come undone. I wanted to see what he looked like when he was broken. Because I needed a way to get past the fear. As much as I was scared of him, hurting the man wasn’t enough. In the end it wasn’t about that. I
had to know it was possible for me to kill him.”

  21

  1973 - The morning I took the picture I couldn’t hold anything down. I woke up in the dark, staring at the clock. My legs slipped out of the covers and I sat on the side of the bed, stretching my arms. It was still early. The house laid still on the edge of daylight. The sun had yet to rise and the heat of the previous day scratched at the seal of the raised window. Dressing myself, I threw on my shoes and grabbed the Leica camera hidden in my dresser drawer.

  Downstairs, I found a handful of old biscuits in a tin and some ham and forced it into my mouth. But on the way up the road, I threw it up in the ditch. You can do this. Calm down. I felt my nerves melting into a soup. Just go through it again. It’s the easy part. Each step was laid out to perfection, and I walked everything through my head one final time, until I was sure of it.

  In my pocket I carried a twenty-foot length of rope I’d stolen from the school. Every few minutes, I reached back to touch it and make sure it was still there. Without it, I’d be in trouble—there wouldn’t be enough time to get away. Tucked in a loop of belt was a burlap sack I’d grabbed out of the barn. It swelled against my leg as I walked.

  At a bend in the road sat a single lane bridge converging over the top of a dry riverbed. Rocks jutted up from below. Like the endless brown scales of a snake, its humps twisted and surged deeper into the woods where it was swallowed whole.

  Looking behind me, I saw nothing in either direction. I cut across the side of the bank, my free hand reaching out to grab at stalks of high grass and vines as I made my way down. A tangle of dense foliage hung over the riverbed and provided shade in the growing heat of the morning.

  Between two brown boulders, I rested on an old fallen oak. Loose brush and broken limbs washed into a tangle at its base and spanned nearly a third of the width of the river. Sweat clouded my shirt in stippled ribbons and clung to my chest. From where I sat I needed four or five more minutes and I would be there. I pushed off the face of the rock, knowing why I’d come that way. I’d have to see it before I went to the church.

  Climbing over the dead oak tree, I dropped to the other side, thinking of the visit I’d had the night before. Back to when the thing from the church had come to call on me in the dark of my room.

  Out of the edge of the dressing room mirror, I finally saw him. His chains lay in a puddle of metal on the upper bed, dragging against the sideboard. He sat there among the crumbling shadows. Resting in the corner where the mattress carried back over my head.

  For the longest time, I watched him sitting there in the darkness. Occasionally, his chains would rattle beside my face, followed by the sharp sound of a single link striking the floor. He kept hidden from view along the far recess of wall. His pale yellowing skin stretched over the splits that marked his feet. They were the only things I could see clearly out of the mirror.

  “Have you been sleeping, Lee? Thinking of Daddy, I bet. You miss him, don’t you?”

  A thin prickly feeling came over my midsection. The skin tightened there, moving between my legs and bringing with it a surge of electricity that shot up through my back and lifted the hair on my neck when he called out my name.

  “Pay attention to me. Or would you prefer I come down and climb in your bed?” the chainman said with a hiss, and I could see its teeth for a moment, crazy zigzagging things. He brought one knee up and the toes on his foot flexed in the mirror, causing his skin to ripple and blister. I saw the death-stains spreading up over his ankle. Darker than before.

  I imagined him crawling into my bed with those hands pulling back the covers and the feel of death in its touch. By then, the smell of it alone made me ill, its faint, sickly sweet odor of decaying gums and fossilized teeth. He would eat me if he were close enough, I had the feeling, or something far worse than I cared to imagine.

  “I don’t wanna see you,” I whispered to the ceiling of the bed. Wood straps stretched across the frame and sagged down with the weight of him.

  “We can be together forever. Don’t you want to be together? You can feed me, Lee. I’m so hungry.” The chainman choked on his words and it came like a gargle of bones and sand and something like liquid, where nothing would go down or come up. It was a sound that was thick and pasty and flush with desire. There would be no running away—he would swallow me whole with his petrified face, chains wrapped around my neck until I was dead and gone.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to save you from yourself,” it teased. “You would be wise to listen to me, Lee. Find the largest pair of boots you can wear, at least two sizes bigger than you need. Then this is what you must do. Along the river’s edge, where it feeds into the pool far out under the trees—you know the place already, down in the dark of the woods.”

  “I’m not sure where you mean.”

  “Yes you are, it’s right above the sand bar. The dirt is softest there. Always has been, I think. That’s where you must go. When it’s over you’ll dig a hole by the light of the moon, deep enough for his body. Dig it deeper than you think. Until your arms hurt and your shoulders ache. Then go to the door and stand outside, behind the steps, and wait for him. He will come, I promise you. Hit him hard as you can and cover his head with a sack and bind his hands tight. You’ll use the wheelbarrow to move his weight. It’s in the shed at the back of the church. Roll him out to the riverbed and drag him to the opening. Only when you have him there can you kill him. Let the blood fall to the grave. Split his head wide until you expose the bone and the feel of cold has set in.” Its words almost seemed to drag themselves out of its throat. “When he’s in the ground, he’ll rot in your memory.”

  I lay there shaking my head. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I did. “I can’t kill him like that. They’ll catch me. Somebody’ll know.” But on the inside, I didn’t care. I thought about the plan. And the timing was all that mattered. “It can be done, can’t it?” He can be destroyed right? Made to rot in my memory.

  The chainman never answered.

  “Does he have to die?” Part of me doubted everything for a minute. “Taking away the church would be enough. That would be like killing him alone—”

  It rattled its chains and the boards came alive underneath it. “No, your father said he must die!”

  I pushed my eyes into the reflection of the mirror. “No, he wouldn’t.” He’d never say that. “My father—you can’t know my father.”

  “Yesssss, I do. He’s in hell, Lee. I see him every day, stretching his legs and scratching the itch. And its one hell of an itch, boy. He said to tell you he misses you, tell you he likes it down there and he wants you to come pay him a visit. Of course, he struggles with corners. Who wouldn’t though, a pike through the chest will do that to you. He said to tell you he wants you to pull the pike out of his chest. That it might stop the itch.”

  And at that, I knew whose voice it was. Why it had been so familiar. The chains screamed, as it leaned over the bed peddling Warren’s face. Only it stretched far tighter than anything human. Teeth brimmed wide out of its mouth and a dangerous froth pooled at its chin, formed a smile that said he’d eaten a boy or two in his day, given the chance.

  “One more thing before I go.” The Warren-chainman thing licked his lips. “You simply can’t have just one picture. That’ll never do. When you bring a bag of candy to class, they always make you share. And, trust me, they’re all dying for a taste.”

  And I would give it to them.

  Above the large sandbar sat a clearing of dirt hidden back in a grove of cane. Around the outside, I found the opening and stepped through into the middle of a barren patch of soil. The ground swelled and seemed to seep under foot. It was a natural blind, protected by stalks and river brush, my feet sinking when I walked out. As I turned to leave, I remarked on what a good spot it would be.

  I climbed the bank of dead leaves and loose dirt to the church. Below me, spread out in two directions, was the dried up riverbed. I smile
d back through the trees, at the spot off in the distance from where I’d come. The plan would work. That much I felt good about. And reaching back, again, I felt for the rope and found it still in my pocket. It reminded me of what I had to do, of what would happen if I failed.

  Of all the windows on the basement side, I settled on the third from the end, the one most guarded by a hedge of bushes. I looked up the side of the church. It was clear and I kicked my way through the glass. Using a crooked stick on the ground, about the length of my arm, I cleared away the dead shards that hung in the pane. I brushed the larger pieces back into the rain ditch flowing along the side of the wall. Next, I crawled onto my belly and shimmied over the edge, dropping down into the darkness of a classroom. Glass crunched under my feet. I didn’t bother with the light, but exited out the hall door and made my way down to the steps leading up into the vestibule.