Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

  There are other women. World’s full of them. I just got rid of one permanently, and then I go and let another one in the goddam door. Bad move. Maybe all this is working out to my own advantage.

  The lawyer says we have a shot at probate, about getting the bitch declared dead. But he adds that it’s highly unlikely in just a few months and that I’ll have to wait a reasonable amount of time.Then I’ll have enough money to leave the country, maybe head for Mexico, lie on the beach. There must be hundreds of brown ladies down there who’ll meet my every need. Bring me cervezas on the sand. Make sure I leave all this shit behind.

  Ghosts. The goofy bitch thinks there’s something wrong in my house.

  But I know I’ll go over to Carrie’s place again, and soon. I’m not done with that piece of ass quite yet. And who knows? She’s pliable enough that after some time she’ll overcome her nutty fears of something out of whack in here.

  What I saw was a delusion. A nightmare with my eyes open. A suggestion from that goofy broad who was probably sleep walking through a nightmare. It wasn’t real.

  When I go outside that afternoon, I notice there’s something strange about my little patch of lawn.

  Every goddam blade of it is dead, in the front. I look at the neighbors’ lawns on either side of me, and they’re still verdant, still dark green. It’s only October, and the grass doesn’t turn brown like this until the winter, and winter is more than two months away. This is the way it looks in late February, in the heart of the final season of the year.

  Someone’s poisoning my grass?

  I go around back, and it’s the same thing. Dead as below-zero January or February.

  Maybe the goofy old Kraut next door has a hard-on against me. Maybe he sprayed weed killer or some shit all over it.

  But I don’t smell the odor of weed killer or anything unusual, and my nose works just fine.

  Perhaps I haven’t watered it enough. I have been lax about yard work, lately. I do remember putting the sprinkler out about a week ago. And it’s rained a few times in the last two weeks.

  Screw it. I have to go to work. I should go on vacation, like I told Carrie, but I’d rather save the days in case I can get the lawyer to do his magic. His name is Gustafson, and he has a rep for spreading bread upon the waters to win his cases. I can’t offer to throw him any cash, but he’s got all the right connections in the courts.

  *

  When I get home that night, I find a message from Carrie on the phone recorder. She says she wants to see me soon—maybe tomorrow night? But I’m too worn out to call her back. I had to make three arrests last shift, and I’m dead.

  I eat something leftover that I don’t even recognize, but it tastes all right. And then I head for bed.

  Carrie ought to be here. Something is jacking with me, whether it’s in her head or whatever it is. But I know I have to have that flesh at my fingers, again.

  I lie down and immediately fall off into a light sleep.

  It feels like only minutes when I hear it in the bathroom.

  Running water from the shower. The sound is unmistakable.

  Then I see the white cloud billowing out from the bathroom door. And I can’t wake up from this suffocating illusion.

  Chapter 11

  The noise kept irritating Leonard until he could no longer lie awake in bed. He’d looked out the hole that was his front window, but when he pointed his big-assed flashlight outside, he couldn’t see a damn thing that didn’t belong out there. Everything was more or less where it was at sundown when the orange bulb settled out over the bayou, to the west.

  “This shit is getting annoying,” he said to no one.

  So he finally rose, got dressed hurriedly, and scooped up his sawed off shotgun that he used for up close and personal encounters with the local reptiles. When he’d let loose with both barrels, the gators stayed away from his dock until their short memories told them it was all right to come slithering onto Leonard’s property again.

  He slammed open the rickety front door and plodded toward the wooden dock where his dinghy was secured. There was no moon tonight, so he had to light his way with the club-sized flashlight that he fished with at night, sometimes. When he strode onto the jutting slab of wood, he pointed the light upward.

  Still, he saw nothing that was out of place.

  “If there’s some goddamned punk-assed teenagers hanging around here,” he said loudly and clearly, “I’m not going to save your stupid behinds when one of them prehistoric fucks starts tearing into you like a cheap cheeseburger.”

  But there was no response, once more. He walked out to the edge of the rectangular projection, and he stood at its farthest point near the swamp. There was a mist hovering over the black liquid before him. It was moving slowly in at him, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about a fog over the bayou.

  Except that it moved in a curious way. It came directly at Leonard, and it was still too early in the dark hours of the morning for it to come landward.

  The approaching white veil made him step back. Something cold was coming his way, he thought, and even in October there was never a chill like this. This was more like a creeping mist in January.

  It hovered strangely out over the water of the lagoon, and Tare thought his heart had stopped and that his lungs had ceased to operate.

  Then it gradually diminished, whatever it was, and floated back into the swamp.

  The head had to go. Leonard knew as much, by now, but he wasn’t certain exactly what to do with it. The police were still a distant option, but maybe the thing on the dock had appeared to force his hand, on this one. Could be a ghost, some gris-gris Cajun shit, after all. Some goddam spirit crying out for justice after some miserable son of a bitch had fed her, or it, to the gators. No way of telling.

  He was beginning to miss too much sleep over that goddam thing. In his business he couldn’t afford to let his reflexes go slow, or one of those gators would have Leonard for lunch, instead of the other way around. He couldn’t have that. Business was business, and something was getting him all irregular, like constipation, and it was time to get it out of his system.

  *

  Mama Bea lived down the road from his shanty. She was part of a dying breed. Old Cajun-gypsy-whatever-the-hell women like Mama Bea were mastodons, prehistoric, like the crawling critters that ruled the bayou. Their talk of loup garou and silly shit was simply something that scared kids around the campfire, but Leonard had no plausible explanation for that goddam thing that had lit on his dock last night. He didn’t think anyone could come up with a logical reason for its temporary existence.

  He knocked on Mama’s front door. She lived in a real house with windows and screens and such, and she even had an air conditioner. She’d told Leonard it was because of her allergies, mostly. She kept the thing set at 80, and it was sometimes cooler outside than it was inside. She let him in after the third knock, and Leonard bolted upright with the speed of her response.

  “I scare you, boy?”

  “Yeah, you scare the hell out of me.”

  She motioned for Leonard to sit on the faux leather couch. It was warm in here, as usual, he thought.

  Bea might have been seventy or eighty. There was no way of reading her age. She was probably born old, Tare reckoned. Never young a day in her spook-assed life.

  She might have been black or brown or a mutt’s mixture of both, but she mostly looked like someone who’d been lifetime roasted by the Louisiana sun. There was no husband or children. She lived alone. He imagined there might have been a family for her, eons ago. But Bea never talked much about herself. She ran a small-time operation of herbs and health bullshit and cure-alls, and mostly it was the locals who kept her financially afloat. She worked as a midwife for the Cajuns who lived in the territory near Plank, and she was able to afford a new Chevy pickup that sat in her driveway next to Leonard’s beat-to-hell Ford 150 truck.

  “I think there’s something on the property that needs to go and
I can’t kill it or skin it, myself.”

  “The hell you talking about, son?” she laughed.

  “You’ll think I’m nuts.”

  “I already think you crazy, boy!”

  She laughed, and Leonard had to laugh, too.

  “You look a mite peaked, soldier boy.”

  She knew all about his background in the Seals. He’d come to her on several occasions to give him something for his gout. When that left toe flared, Leonard was all but crippled. But she gave him something that made it stay away for a couple years, now.

  “I can’t sleep, Bea. I think I did something I shouldn’t have.”

  He told her about the gator with the surprise inside and about the mist on the dock.

  “Goddamit, youngblood! You need to take that nasty thing to the po-lice…What mist?”

  “I know, I know. But I’ve had bad dealings with cops.”

  “You rather live with this whatever-it-is that’s troubling you so?”

  Her eyes were a strange green. Like a jungle green, Leonard figured. Quadruple canopied green, like the baddest rainforest you ever beheld. It was no wonder the kids never fucked with Mama Bea at Halloween or any other time. No pranks pulled on her, no.

  “I need you to come out to my house tonight and see can’t you deal with whatever it is that landed on my dock last night.”

  “You think I’m some damn exorcist, boy?”

  Her green eyes seemed to turn a bit lighter in hue. It was almost like looking into a kaleidoscope. They were constantly brightening and darkening, and yet they were always the color of thick, ripe, untouched greenery.

  “I need your help, and you know I’m no goddam Catholic or anything else that bows down to a god I know ain’t listening. Please, you have to help me, Bea. I’ll get rid of that damned head, like you said, but I got to get rid of that other thing because I don’t expect it’s going to go away on its own.”

  Bea had never seen Leonard appear as vulnerable as he was right now. She knew the stories he told her about that dumb-assed war weren’t tall tales. He always prefaced everything by saying he wasn’t allowed to talk about operations, as he called them, and he left out the specifics about where and when, and then Bea couldn’t rat him out to the military. She was like his mother confessor, because, as he said, he had no religion, and the evil he’d seen and done himself had to have some way to escape his blood—like a poison in his veins.

  “I don’t know what you think I can do, Leonard. I ain’t a witch or no voodoo priestess. I just sell cure-alls and such. You know it’s all show business, don’t you, honey? Anybody else, I’d tell them it was voodoo, but with you I gotta tell the truth, Leonard.”

  “I know you can heal. I know you don’t talk about it, but I’ve seen what you can do.”

  “You mean your gout? I gave you allopurinol. I had some left over from my miseries I used to have, a long time ago. Ain’t anything magical about it, soldier boy.”

  “I’m not talking about any goddam drug you sell. You know things other folks don’t, and don’t try to fluff it off on me.”

  “Nonsense. It’s just nonsense. Part of the sideshow—but I’ll never admit it to nobody else but you, and that’s because I like you, Leonard. You’re a different sort of soul from all the other coonasses and crackers around here.”

  She looks at Leonard with those ever-changing green eyes, and then her face softens.

  “Goddammit, soldier boy, what am I gonna do with you?”

  She goes into her kitchen and then returns with two giant-sized glasses of sweet tea, Leonard’s favorite. She hands the moist, dripping, loaded-with-ice glass to him.

  “I don’t know what you think I can do, but I’ll come out tonight. What time’d you see it?”

  “Must have been shortly after midnight.”

  “It would be around then, of course.”

  “No bullshit, Bea. It was some kind of fog, but it wasn’t nothing like anything I ever seen before. It just wasn’t natural.”

  “Now you’re putting the frights into me, fool.”

  “I don’t think it meant to harm me, but I can’t be living with that…thing hovering outside my shack. I can’t , Bea. I can’t. I didn’t do her any harm. Haven’t hurt another human since the war. But I can’t sleep. Not with that floating…whatever it is, outside. I can’t.”

  *

  At midnight on the button, the wind began to stir by the swamp at the end of the shaky wooden pier that Leonard had put together when he returned from half way around the world. They could both hear it rustle and sough. And there was a chill breeze that wafted in from the aperture that Leonard called a window. They both felt it at the same moment.

  “I got me the goose spots. You sure this ain’t a werewolf, son?”

  Leonard shook his head.

  “Will you come out there with me?” he asked.

  It was more like a plea.

  Bea looked at this tangle of muscle and human grit and couldn’t imagine that anything could frighten such a predator. The fear began to flow freely in her own veins, and she wanted to tell him there was no way in hell she was going out there to look at the entity or thing or other-worldly critter that had struck terror in his leathery, intrepid heart.

  “Let’s go or we’ll have wasted the whole goddam evening waiting around for it to show up. Let’s go, Leonard. It ain’t going to go away until we do something for it. That’s how these honts work, don’t they?”

  She got up, and then he rose. Again, he snatched up the double-barreled shotgun.

  “You don’t think that cannon’s really going to help anything, do you, Leonard?”

  He dropped the gator-killer on the floor and they walked out to the dock.

  There was a full moon, and the water was lit by its glow. The same small whirlwind rotated on the end of the pier.

  “Should I ask what it wants?” Leonard said as he turned to Bea.

  “How the hell should I know? It just looks like a got-damn mist to me, boy.”

  Leonard grabbed her by the arm. The figure in front of them was almost a solid human form, now.

  “What does it want?” Leonard pleaded again.

  “All I see is a cloud, Leonard. It ain’t nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Tare repeated.

  “You see what your head tells you to see, son.”

  Then the wind picked up, and it drifted off onto the blackened waters of the bayou.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bea whispered. “It ain’t nothin’, I tell you.”

  “You don’t believe in him, either,” he told her.

  “Jesus Christ,” she repeated. “It’s got-damn cold out here, is all.”

  *

  He called the State Police the next morning. When they arrived, he pointed out the freezer in his back room, and then he opened it for them.

  “I know you, don’t I, Tare?” the taller trooper demanded as they looked down at the plastic-covered head.

  “Yessir, I believe you do.”

  The other, shorter State-y, said nothing. He stood slightly behind them as if he were afraid to get any closer.

  Then the bigger officer lifted the bag out of the chest.

  “Goddammit, get the forensics people out here right away,” he told the reluctant policeman.

  The bigger man peered over at Leonard.

  “Didn’t the game warden have a beef with you, last year?”

  “Yessir, he did. And I paid my fine.”

  “Yeah, after we had to drive all the fuck out here and threaten to jail your sorry ass. And if you hadn’t been a vet of that fucked war, I wouldn’t have let you off so easy. And now you have someone’s fucking head in your fucking freezer, and you explain to me why I shouldn’t arrest your sorry ass.”

  Leonard told him that it came slip-sliding out of the gator’s guts.

  “That sounds like a really lame lie, son.”

  The shorter cop returned.

  “They’re on their way.”

  “And
now I have to waste another few hours of my precious life sitting here with you, Tare. And you know what? For the life of me I don’t know why the hell I believe your little fable about the head in the gator, which now resides in this here plastic bag. But I guess I do. I think you’re too dumb to make up such an entertaining bullshit story.”

  The big man looked over at his partner.

  “Might as well sit down and relax. They’ll be here directly, I suppose.”

  Chapter 12

  Malloy gets a hold of us on a Monday morning just as Doc and I arrive at Headquarters. Doc hasn’t even had time for the first of his legion of coffees, and I haven’t popped the top of my first can of Coke, either. We head downstairs to Missing Persons, and we find Donny Malloy waiting for us.

  “Just got off the phone with the Louisiana State Police. They’ve found the remains of a woman, a head, to wit. It supposedly came out of an alligator that some local reptile hunter found when he slit the gator open. They were able to make ID with dental.

  “It’s Skotadi’s wife, Jennifer, gentlemen.”

  I look over at my partner, standing with his Styrofoam cup.

  “Fuck me,” Doc says.

  “No thanks,” Malloy smiles up at him.

  We sit down in the two straight-backed chairs opposite Malloy’s desk. His cubicle is as small and dinky-assed as mine.

  “They’re sure?” I ask.

  “The creature didn’t mess up her head, apparently. Other than missing flesh, most of the jaws and skull remained intact, and the dental records confirm it was Jennifer Skotadi. They sent the head to the FBI in Quantico, just to make certain, since it was the wife of a Chicago policeman.”

  “Does our boy Skotadi know, yet?” Doc queries.

  “He’ll get the bad news presently. At least there’s a body, or some of it, anyway,” Malloy tells us.

  “No torso, hands, feet, I don’t suppose,” Doc asks him.

  “Just the top knot,” Malloy says evenly.

  “So there won’t be anything under her fingernails. No fingernails. Probably no blood, no body fluids to help us out, naturally.”