Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  It wasn’t as though we loved her. June and I loved only each other.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “Somebody ought to.”

  “You don’t want to go.”

  “Neither do you. I’ll go.”

  “Are we going to keep the shop?”

  “Hell no. She should have sold it years ago. I bet Pete’ll buy it. He hasn’t spent his first dime yet.”

  So this morning I picked up a rental car at Hertz a few blocks away and headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. Traffic was light. At the entrance to the Tunnel a grim-faced balding man with a .38 police special on his hip handed me a pass which I’d have to present on the way back along with the usual toll.

  Three hours later I was at the lake.

  The turnout this afternoon was small. A handful of fellow-traveller Baptists toting rifles and shotguns. Aunt Joan, unarmed but for the fierce set to her jaw. Me, the pastor and old Pete all wearing sidearms under our jackets. I pled June out to ill-health to those few who bothered asking. The day was mild and the cemetery was old and there was so much recently turned earth it looked like we were holding services in the midst of an ant colony. June had wired flowers and so had the church and so had my Aunt and Pete.

  Pete seemed to be taking it the worst.

  Hanna had been a difficult woman but probably it was difficult too for Pete to shoot her.

  I didn’t get to ask him about the store.

  I didn’t get through the service.

  Halfway into the Lord’s Prayer I felt a buzzing in my head like a television tuned to nothing but loud static and knew that June was gone.

  It was good that as family I was seated on a folding chair because in those first few moments I couldn’t have trusted my legs to do anything but buckle. I must have said something because my Aunt gave me a look and a deeper frown than usual but then I saw reflected in her eyes a grave concern and tentatively at first she touched my shoulder and then pulled me over and wrapped her arms around me while I sobbed and stopped the service howling my grief for what reason neither she nor any other could begin to understand.

  I drove back knowing exactly where to find her.

  Under what circumstance or where it had happened to her I would never discover but once it was over she’d gone home to our apartment, the same sort of instinct that took some of the dead to Times Square or their favorite bar or restaurant or back to their office buildings or shopping malls or homeless haunts beneath the stairs.

  So that I found her where I expected her to be, at home in our bed, June naked and waiting for me, her little brother by seven minutes only, the world a hostile place once again for both of us in which there is need and very good reason to scream, the bright eyes empty and the gash in her neck ugly as badly butchered meat but waiting there in our bed for all that, waiting for the flower to rise one final time maybe or waiting for nothing at all but that other part of her which lived.

  There’s another Scots belief that when one twin dies the other will not as a rule live long, but that if he does somehow survive the vitality and strength of the dead twin passes on to him, even sometimes to the point of giving him strange new healing powers like the power to cure thrush by breathing down the throat of the sufferer. I have no use for healing powers even if that were true. And I don’t particularly care to breathe down anyone’s throat but June’s.

  I’ve closed our bedroom door and propped a chair against the doorknob in order to sit in the living room and write this down. I’ve half expected pounding, growling, sounds of that raging hunger they all seem to have turned toward me now but there have been no sounds, nothing at all.

  She’s waiting in our bed. When I last saw her, her hand rested gently between her legs.

  I’ve given a lot of thought to it and there’s only one thing I can really think to do. Lie down beside her and let her create in me a wound which is in some way twin to her own and then before I pass into wherever it is they go, turn the Colt on her and then on me. I won’t let the two of us be damned even today, when half the world is.

  We were born on Mischief Night, June and I. The first windy moments of Halloween.

  We’ve done nothing wrong.

  Amid the Walking

  Wounded

  It was four in the morning, the Hour of the Wolf he later thought, the hour when statistically most people died who were going to die on any given night and he awakened in the condo guestroom thinking that something had shaken him awake, an earthquake, a tremor—though this was Sarasota not California and besides, he’d been awakened by an earthquake many years ago one night in San Diego and this was somehow not quite the same. The glow outside the bedroom window faded even as he woke so that he couldn’t be sure it was not in some way related to his sleep. He was aware of a trickling inside his nose, a thin nasal discharge, unusual because he was a smoker and used to denser emissions. He sniffed it up into his throat and thought it tasted wrong.

  The guestroom had its own bathroom just around the corner so he put on his glasses and got up and turned on the light and spit the stuff into the sink and saw that it was blood and as he leaned over the sink it began leaking out his nose in a thin unsteady stream like a faucet badly in need of new washers. He pinched his nose and stood straight, tilted back his head and felt it run down the back of his throat, suddenly heavier now so that it almost choked him, the gag reponse kicking in and he thought, now what the hell is this? so he leaned forward again and took his hand away from his nose and watched it pouring out of him.

  He grabbed a handtowel, pressed it under and over his nose and pinched again. One seriously major fucking bloody nose, he thought, unaware as yet that he was not alone, that others in town had awakened bleeding from the nose that night though none of them had been taking aspirin, eight pills a day for over a month’s time trying to fight off some stupid tennis elbow without resorting to a painful shot of cortisone directly into the swollen tendon—unaware too that aspirin was not just an anti-inflammatory but a blood-thinner, which was why he was not going to be doing any clotting at the moment.

  The towel, pink, was turning red. The pressure wasn’t working.

  If he put his head up it poured down his throat—he could taste it now, salty, rich and coppery. If he put his head down it poured out his nose. Straight-up, he was an equal-opportunity bleeder, it came out both places.

  He couldn’t do this alone. He had to wake her. He crossed the hall.

  “Ann? Annie?”

  There was a streetlight outside her window. Her pale bare back and shoulders told him that she still slept nude.

  “Annie. I’m bleeding.”

  She had always departed sleep like a drunk with one last shot left inside the bottle.

  “Whaaaa?”

  “Bleeding. Help.” It was hard to talk with the stuff gliding down his throat and the towel pressed over his face. She rolled over squinting at him, the sheet pulled up to cover her breasts.

  “What’d you do to yourself?”

  “Nosebleed. Bad.” He spoke softly. He didn’t want to wake her son David in the next room. There was no point in disturbing the sleep of a fourteen-year-old.

  She sat up. “Pinch it.”

  “I’m pinching it. Won’t stop.”

  He turned and went back to the bathroom so she could get out of bed and put on a robe. He was not allowed to see her naked anymore. He leaned over the sink and took away the towel and watched it slide out of him bright red against the porcelain and swirl down the drain.

  “Ice,” she said behind him and then saw the extent of what was happening to him and said Jesus while he pinched his nose and tilted back his head and swallowed and then she said ice again. “I’ll get some.”

  He tried blowing out into his closed nostrils the way you did to pop the pressure in your ears in a descending plane and all he succeeded in doing was to fog up his glasses. Huh? He took them off and looked at them. The lenses were clear. He looked in the mirror. There were beads of red at each of his tear-ducts.r />
  He was bleeding from the eyes.

  It was the eyes that were fogged, not his goddamn glasses. She came back with ice wrapped in a dishtowel.

  “I’m bleeding from the eyes,” he told her. “If it’s the ebola virus, just shoot me.”

  “Eyes and nose are connected.” She hadn’t grown up a nurse’s daughter for nothing. “Here.”

  He took the icepack and arranged it over his nose, tucked the corners of the dishtowel beneath. Within moments the towel was red. The ice felt good but it wasn’t helping either.

  “Here.”

  She’d taken some tissues and wrapped them thick around a pair of Q-tips.

  “Put these up inside. Then pinch again.”

  He did as he was told. He liked the way she was rushing to his aid. It was the closest he’d felt to her for quite some time. He managed a goofy smile into her wide dark eyes and worried face. Ain’t this something? He pinched his nose till it hurt.

  The makeshift packs soaked through. He was dripping all over his teeshirt. She handed him some tissues.

  “Jesus, Alan. Should I call 911?”

  He nodded. “You better.”

  The ambulance attendants were both half his age, somewhere in their twenties and the one with the short curly hair suggested placing a penny in the center of his mouth between his teeth and upper lip and then pressing down hard on the lip, a remedy that apparently had worked for his grandmother but which did not do a thing for him and left him with the taste of filthy copper in his mouth, a darker version of the taste of blood. Annie asked if she should go with him and he said no, stay with David, get some sleep, I’ll call if I need you. She had to write down their number because at the moment he couldn’t for the life of him remember.

  Inside the ambulance he began to bleed heavily and the attendant sitting inside across from him couldn’t seem to find any tissues nor anything for him to bleed into. Eventually he came up with a long plastic bag that looked like a heavier grade of Zip-loc which he had to hold open with one hand while dealing with his leaking nose with the other. A small box of tissues was located and placed in his lap. When one wad of tissues filled with blood he would hurriedly shove it into the bag and pull more from the box, his nose held low into the bag to prevent him from bleeding all over his khaki shorts. The attendant did nothing further to help him after finding him the bag and tissues. This was not the way it happened on ER or Chicago Hope.

  The emergency room was reassuringly clean and, at five in the morning, nearly deserted but for him and a skeleton staff. They did not insist he sign in. Instead a chubby nurse’s aide stood in front of him with a clipboard taking down the pertinent information, leaving him to deal with his nose, replacing the half-full Zip-loc bag with a succession of pink plastic kidney-shaped vomit bowls but otherwise treating him as though it were ninety-nine percent certain he had AIDS.

  He didn’t mind. As long as the pink plastic bowls kept coming and the tissues were handy.

  He was beginning to feel light-headed. He supposed it was loss of blood. He couldn’t remember Annie’s address though he’d written her from his New York apartment countless times in the past four years since she’d moved away and knew her address—quite literally—by heart. He couldn’t remember his social security number either. The nurse’s aide had to dig into his back pocket to get his wallet. The card was in there along with his insurance card. He couldn’t do it for her because his hands, now covered with brown dried blood, were occupied trying to stop fresh red blood from flowing.

  The ER doctor was also half his age, oriental, handsome and built like a swimmer with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, like the rest of the staff quite friendly and cheerful at this ungodly hour but unlike them seemingly unafraid to touch him even after, having swallowed so much of his own blood, he vomited much of it back into one of the pink plastic bowls. He asked Alan if he was taking any drugs. And that was when he learned about the blood-thinning properties of aspirin. He thought that at least he was probably not going to have a heart attack. He supposed it was something.

  The doctor used a kind of suction device to suck blood from each of his nostrils into a tube trying to clear them but that didn’t work which Alan could have told him, there was far too much to replace it with, so he packed him with what he called pledgets, which looked like a pair of tampons mounted on sticks, shoved them high and deep into the nasal cavities and told him to wait and see if they managed to stop the bleeding.

  Miraculously, they did.

  Half an hour later they released him. He phoned Annie and she drove him back to the condo and he washed his hands and face and changed his clothes and they each went back to bed.

  He woke needing to use the toilet and found that both his shit and piss had turned black. A tiny black droplet clung to his penis. He shook it off. He supposed he’d learned something—a vampire’s shit and urine would always be black. He wondered if Anne Rice could find a way to make this glamourous.

  The second time he woke he was bleeding again. He squeezed at the pledgets as he’d been told to do should this occur but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. He roused Ann and this time she insisted on driving him to the hospital herself, handing him her own newly opened box of Puffs to place in his lap. Upstairs David continued to sleep his heavy adolescent sleep. It was just as well. The boy was only fond of blood in horror movies.

  The chubby nurse’s aide was gone when he arrived but the pink plastic bowls were there and he used them, sat in the same room he’d left only hours before while his doctor, the swimmer, summoned an Ear Nose and Throat man who arrived shortly after he’d sent Annie back home.

  By now he felt weak as a newborn colt, rubber-legged and woozy. It seemed he needed to grow a new pair of hands to juggle his kidney-shaped pan, eyeglasses, tissues and tissue boxes, all the while holding his nose and spitting, vomiting, dripping and swallowing blood at intervals.

  He felt vaguely ridiculous, amused. A bloody nose for chrissake.

  What he felt next was pain that lasted quite a while as the ENT man—another healthy Florida specimen, a young Irishman who arrived in pleated shorts and polo shirt—withdrew the pledgets and peered into his nose with a long thin tubular lighted microsope, determined that it was only from the right nostril that he was actually bleeding, and then repacked it with so much stuff that by the time it was finished he felt like a small dog had crawled up and died in there.

  A half-inch square accordion-type gauze ribbon coated in Vaseline, four feet of it folded back-to-back compacted tight into itself and pushed in deep. In front of that another tampon-like pledget, this one removable by means of a string. In front of that something called a Foley catheter which inflated like a balloon. Another four feet of folded ribbon. Another pledget.

  He had no idea there was so much room inside his face.

  The man was hearty but not gentle.

  He was given drugs against the pain and possible infection and put into a wheelchair and wheeled into an elevator and settled into a hospital bed for forty-eight hours’ observation. Once again a nurse had to find and read his insurance and social security cards. The drugs had kicked in by then and so had the loss of blood. He didn’t even know where his wallet was though he suspected it was in its usual place, his back pocket.

  The bed next to him was empty. The ward, quiet.

  He slept.

  He awoke sneezing, coughing blood, a bright stunning spray across the sheets—it could not get out his nose so instead it was sliding down his throat again, his very heartbeat betraying him, pulsing thin curtains, washes of blood over his pharynx, larynx, down into his trachea. He gagged and reached for bowl at the table by the bed and vomited violently, blood and bile, something thick in the back of his throat remaining gagging him, something thick and solid like a heavy ball of mucus making him want to puke again so he reached into his mouth to clear it, reached in with thumb and forefinger and grasped it, slippery and sodden, and pulled.

  And at first he couldn’t
understand what it was but it was long, taut, and would not part company with his throat so he pulled again until it was out of his mouth and he could see the thing, and then he couldn’t believe what he’d done, that it was even possible to do this thing but he had it between his fingers, he was staring at it covered with slime and blood, nearly a foot and a half of the accordion ribbon packed inside his nose. He’d sneezed it out or caughed it out through his pharynx and now he was holding it like a tiny extra-long tongue and it continued to gag him so he reached for the call-button and pushed and fought the urge to vomit, waiting.

  “What in the world have you done?”

  It was the pretty nurse, a strong young blonde with a wedding ring, the one who’d admitted him and got him into bed. She looked as though she didn’t know whether to be shocked or angry or amused with him.

  “Damned if I know,” he said around the ribbon. Aaand ithh eye-o.

  He vomited again. There was a lot of it this time.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “I’m going to call your doctor. He may have to cauterize whatever’s bleeding up in there. I’ll get some scissors meantime, snip that back for you, okay?”

  He nodded and then sat there holding the thing. He shook his head. A goddamn bloody nose.

  It occured to him much later that an operation followed by a hospital stay under heavy medication combined with heavy loss of blood was a lot like drifting through a thick fetal sea from which you occasionally surfaced to glimpse fuzzy snatches of sky. In his younger days he’d dropped acid while floating in the warm Aegean and there were similarities. He awoke to orderlies serving food and nurses taking his blood pressure and handing him paper cups of medication. None of it grounded him for long. Mostly he slept and dreamed.

  He remembered the dreams vividly, huge segments of them crowded spinning inside his head with unaccustomed clarity of detail and feeling—and then he’d seem to blink and they’d be gone, just like that, his mind occupied solely by the business of healing his ruptured body. Adjusting the new packing to relieve the pressure, swallowing the pill, nibbling the food. Then hurrying back to dream.