by Ronald Malfi
The shoe box was full of dead birds, their eyes the color of marble and twisted, skeletal claws frozen in the air. Catching my breath, I leaned forward and studied the birds that had rolled out of the box. They were frozen stiff, their brown-gray feathers glistening with pixels of frost. Some of their beaks were partially opened.
I reached for a wad of packing paper and scooped the dead birds up with it, setting them back in the box among the others. Each one was as weightless as a Christmas ball. The shoe box was like a mass grave. There were about nine birds squeezed in there. What kind of child—
Of course, I was accosted by a vision from my own youth, hiding out behind the shed with a frog trapped in my hands and the nest of baby birds I’d swatted out of the shrub behind the garage. How I squeezed each one until sticky yellow fluid bubbled out of their rectums and their tiny beaks opened wide. I felt sick to my stomach.
“Fuck this.” I replaced the lid on the shoe box, closed the cubbyhole door, and took the shoe box to the kitchen where I slid it into a garbage bag. Then I took the bag out to the yard and dumped it in one of the trash cans.
The basement was a schizophrenic jumble of chairs, boxes, and randomly discarded objects that no longer fulfilled their purpose. It appeared that the previous owners, the Dentmans, had hastily erected Sheetrock walls to section the basement off into various rooms, transforming what had once been a wide, yawning expanse of low-ceilinged open space into a honeycomb of secret pockets, mazelike walls, and right angles.
I located a flashlight in my toolbox and took it around with me, casting the beam into each little room—one of which was no bigger than a tiny closet—as I went around. My original notion was that the Dentmans, or whoever had put up these walls, had intended to finish the basement. But on closer inspection it became obvious that the layout was atypical. There were six of the makeshift rooms in all, the Sheetrock old and gouged in places, nailed directly against the studding of the house. None of the rooms had their own electrical outlets, which suggested very poor planning, and two of them had a panel of Sheetrock as the ceiling instead of the open beams and tufts of pink insulation like the rest of the basement. In one of these rooms I bent down and focused the flashlight on a wall where chunks of the drywall had fallen away. The cement floor was coated in a powdery white film. I felt the gouges in the wall.
“Bizarre,” I mumbled, moving back into the open area to address the boxes stacked in the center of the room. Yet I paused just outside the doorway to the tiny makeshift room, my flashlight beam reflecting off a series of small puddles on the concrete floor. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they were quite evident now. I flicked the flashlight’s beam toward the ceiling where a network of copper pipes ran in every direction. It occurred to me that if there was a leaky pipe somewhere, I didn’t even know where to find the goddamn water shutoff.
But the pipes looked dry. To make sure, I ran one hand along them, my palm coming away caked in bluish-gray dust but dry as bone. I dipped my fingers into one of the puddles. Ice-cold water. Casting the beam farther along the concrete floor, the puddles seemed to suggest a vague alternating pattern.
Footprints. Wet footprints.
The puddles negotiated the length of the basement, then ended directly in front of one of the slabs of Sheetrock nailed to the wall. Vanished into nothingness.
I was tweaked temporarily as the world around slipped a notch. Too easily I could recall my childhood fear of Kyle slinking back from the grave to claim my soul, dripping foul black water in the hallway of the little duplex we had all happily lived in together. In my head, the sounds of his feet on the hardwood floor were the empty soulless beats of a vampire’s heart.
I shocked myself by uttering, “Kyle?” The instant the word left my mouth, I felt my blood run cold and my body begin to quake. Surely I was scaring myself for no good reason. Surely I was creating something out of nothing.
Just water . . . just puddles of water . . .
I grabbed a towel from the laundry room and mopped up the wet footprints, all the while trying to convince myself they weren’t footprints at all. One was even crescent shaped and bore the suggestion of five splayed toes . . . yet I still managed to talk myself out of it.
I spent the better part of the afternoon unpacking countless boxes and transporting the items to various locales throughout the house, as well as dumping a good number of things by the curb for bulk pickup, until sometime later I heard the front door slam upstairs. Jodie entered the house and tramped across the floorboards above my head. Aiming the flashlight at my wristwatch, I saw it was ten after two. I was suddenly hungry for lunch and wondered if Jodie might be interested in accompanying me into town to check out the local scenery and grab a bite. Anyway, I was exhausted and didn’t want to spend any more time in this lousy dungeon mausoleum.
I clumped up the narrow staircase and crossed the kitchen where a pot of coffee was overpercolating on the stove, coughing steam into the air and spitting gouts of black sludge onto the stove top.
“Goddamn it.”
Grabbing a dish towel from the kitchen counter and wrapping it around my hand, I yanked the coffeepot from the stove and shut off the burner. The pot still burped and bucked in my grasp. I set the pot in the sink and wiped the stove top with the dish towel.
Upstairs, Jodie thumped her foot down twice to get my attention.
“I know. I know. The coffee’s burning. I got it.” I cleaned up the remaining residue with the dish towel, then wrung it out over the sink.
Two minutes later, searching the second-floor landing, I could not find Jodie. I checked the bedrooms, the bathroom. They were empty. Yet I knew I had heard her. Back downstairs I went to the front door and found it locked. I called her name but she didn’t answer. Momentarily, I stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up into the well of risers climbing to the second floor, until I realized I was alone.
Later, in the lazily falling snow, I wandered outside and trekked down the snowy slope of the backyard to retrace my steps from last night’s bizarre little escapade. Despite the evidence of the wet pajama bottoms and a pair of frozen Nikes left by the front door, I could almost convince myself all that had happened by the lake had been a dream. Yet the footprints in the snow leading around the side of the house, down the sloping embankment, and through the trees toward the water was proof beyond refute. Hugging myself in my parka, I hiked to the foot of the lake where the frozen surface was accumulating a dusting of fresh snow.
I paused here and fished a pack of Marlboros from my jacket pocket while looking out at the floating staircase protruding through the ice. Though still enormous, the daylight betrayed its mystery, exposing it for the joined bits of rotting wood, nails, and splintered planks that it was. More careful of my footing than I had been last night, I got as close to it as I could—close enough to examine the graying skin of the staircase, the weathered and warped planks, the bone-like suggestion of the thing. I didn’t realize it right away, but the preliminary stirrings of a story were yawning and stretching in the far recesses of my brain as I stood there, my hands stuffed into my pockets, a Marlboro smoldering between my lips.
I turned north along the lake and followed its perimeter until the slope of the land became too treacherous. I stared down at the lake from a plateau perhaps fifteen yards above the frozen water, the ground below covered with twiggy undergrowth and sharp, biting rocks that rose out of the snow. The trees were all barren, their branches providing sturdy handholds that I held on to before I lost my footing and spilled over the edge. Those sharp rocks below would tear me to pieces like crocodiles awaiting a careless gazelle.
From this vantage I could make out the entire circumference of the lake. It was larger than I’d originally thought, the view from my house impeded peripherally by tall pines bookending the perimeter of my property. From here, the view opened up and was even more spectacular; I could only imagine what it looked like in the summer, with all the trees in full bloom, the sun burning a brownis
h-red smear on the horizon, the sky crowded with scudding cumuli and heavy with birds. The odd wooden staircase looked like the tower of a submarine breaking up through the ice.
There was only one other house here along the lake, directly at my back and seen through the spindly, interwoven arms of the naked tree branches. It was a cabin-style home with a stone chimney, like something you’d see on the bottle of maple syrup. It had an elaborate wraparound porch, which overlooked the lake: a view, I was certain, that was probably better than ours. A flag of smoke twisted lazily up from the stone chimney, stark against the faded gray of the afternoon sky. A fence of pines ran from one side of the house to the highest point of the incline, the trees resembling people standing shoulder to shoulder, their limbs twitching in the wind.
When Jodie came home later that evening, she found me on the living room sofa writing in a string-bound notebook.
“How’d it go at the college?”
“Compared to the professorate in North London, these guys are like extras from The Andy Griffith Show.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“I’m exaggerating but not much. The head of the department wore a goddamn bolo tie.”
“What about the credits?”
She leaned over the arm of the sofa and pressed her cold nose against my temple. “I’m happy to report that they all transferred over. I’m a happy girl tonight, Mr. Glasgow. You better take advantage of me while you can.”
I closed the notebook and kissed her. “Sounds like a plan.”
“You working on something?”
“Just jotting down some notes.”
“Finally beat the writer’s block?”
I shrugged, noncommittal. “Don’t jinx me.”
She straightened up and tugged off her coat. “Did you get to those boxes in the basement?”
“Of course.” I thought of the watery footprints again. A chill raced down my spine.
Jodie leaned her head on my shoulder and ran one hand up the length of my neck and into my hair. “You smell good.”
I turned and kissed her. She eased onto the sofa and pulled me down on top of her. Out of nowhere I was overcome by an animal lust I hadn’t felt since the days before our wedding. I was certain Jodie felt it, too, and a moment later, we were making love on the couch, my jeans dangling from one ankle as I wrestled Jodie’s blouse, which was only partially unbuttoned, over her head. The whole thing lasted only three or four minutes, but the ferocity and passion made up for the duration.
When we were done, I rolled onto my side as Jodie sat up. She put her blouse on, then leaned down and rested her head against my chest. Our labored respiration was in perfect syncopation.
“That was something,” I said after a few moments of silence.
“Hmmm.” She sounded far away and close to sleep.
“Hey,” I said, squeezing one of her shoulders, “falling asleep afterwards is my job.”
“Sorry. I’m just exhausted. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
I thought about my midnight jaunt to the lake and grinned. “Oh yeah?”
“I kept having a strange dream.”
“What dream was that?”
“There was someone in our room. Someone just standing there at the foot of the bed watching us sleep. It was so real I kept waking up. I must have dreamt it four or five times.”
I felt a cold sweat break out along my body. While I remembered going to the lake last night, I’d forgotten—until now—the reason I’d woken up in the first place: the sensation that someone else was in the bedroom with us. I’d even gotten out of bed and stood in the upstairs hallway looking down over the landing, momentarily certain I could see a crouching visitor lurking in one darkened corner of the foyer.
“Hey.” Jodie rubbed my chest. She craned her neck so she could look at me. “You’re sweating like a champ.”
I squeezed her shoulder again and kissed the top of her head. “You wore me out, lady.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The party at Adam and Beth’s came as a much-needed reprieve from all the work Jodie and I had been doing on the new house throughout the first week. Most of the fixes had been cosmetic—painting walls, repairing broken tiling, fixing the electrical outlets that dangled like loose teeth from the walls—and we ended our first week at 111 Waterview Court dappled in dried paint and with blisters on our fingers.
Jodie fell back into the swing of her graduate program and picked up a teaching internship at the college during winter semester three days a week. Ideally, her absence should have afforded me the perfect opportunity to get some writing done . . . yet truth be told, the writing had stopped coming to me months ago. Admittedly, my writing notebooks were currently overflowing with drawings of cartoon animals humping each other in a vast assortment of acrobatic positions.
Holly Dreher, my editor at Rooms of Glass Books, had started leaving exasperated messages on my cell phone asking about the rest of the chapters I’d promised her. Though I hadn’t checked my e-mail in several days, I was pretty sure my in-box would be filled with her pushy, overanxious messages as well. I still had two months before the official deadline, but at the rate I was going, I was beginning to consider photocopying pages from the latest Stephen King novel and FedExing them to her.
People started to filter into Adam’s house around a quarter to six. The Goldings were the first to arrive. A furtive little couple, they came bundled in woolen earth tones and proffering a small Crock-Pot covered with a tinfoil tent, then spent an unusual amount of time hovering over the small Vinotemp carriage that, this early in the evening, was equipped only with a stack of leftover Christmas napkins and a small plastic vial of toothpicks.
Ten minutes later, a few more couples filed in. Adam selected an Elvis Presley Christmas CD for the stereo, and with the addition of each newcomer, something akin to a party took shape.
“For the most part, everyone here in the neighborhood is tolerable,” Adam said, preparing drinks for his guests. We were alone for the time being in the kitchen. “Of course, as with any town, there are a few individuals that’ll make your skin crawl.” He cut a lime into half-moon wedges and added, “Gary Sanduski, for example. He gets talking about his car dealership, you’ll want to drive a cocktail fork through your brain.”
“Okay. So I’ll need a cocktail fork handy. Check.”
“And the Sandersons. They’re an odd duo. I’d bet a hundred bucks the husband’s gay. He runs an interior decorating company from the house, and his wife’s a mortgage broker or something. Point is, we’re not really friends with everyone here, but Beth wanted to invite the whole goddamn neighborhood. She said it makes for good karma, and, anyway, you should know all your immediate neighbors.” Adam clucked his tongue. “Ever the strategist, my wife.”
The Escobars; the Sturgills; the Copelands; the Denaults; Poans; Lundgards; de Mortases; Father Gregory, the cherubic Catholic priest from Beth’s congregation; barrel-chested Douglas Cordova, my brother’s partner on the police force; Tooey Jones, the owner of Tequila Mockingbird, the tavern Jodie and I had passed while driving through town—my brother’s house magically unfolded into a veritable cornucopia of chambray work shirts and foresters’ boots, of Allegheny colloquialisms packaged in alpine-scented skin.
Many of my new neighbors insisted on having a drink with me. Not wanting to be rude, I was half in the tank by the time most of the men cornered me in Adam’s kitchen. They were all good-natured, overly friendly in a small-town way, and the excessive alcohol made it so I didn’t mind the bombardment. Jodie was occupied in the den with the women, their voices loud and screechy as they filtered down the hallway and into the kitchen nook.
Tooey poured shots into half-pint glasses from a dark-colored, label-less bottle. At first I thought it was liquor—bourbon, maybe—but as it poured I could see a foamy head forming at the surface. A few of the men laughed in unison at something Tooey said, and one even clapped him on the back. Someone tried to pinch one of the g
lasses, but Tooey playfully slapped him away.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Tooey said, shoving a half-pint glass in my free hand. “Make sure everyone’s got a glass first.”
“How come you didn’t play bartender at my Christmas party, Jones?” one of the men wanted to know.
“Maybe I should have. It certainly would have livened things up.”
Some bullish laughter.
“Come on. Come on,” said another man.
I turned to Adam, who had also been burdened with a glass of the dark, foamy liquid, and whispered, “What is this stuff?”
“Tooey’s Tonic,” he said.
“But what is it?”
“Beer.”
“For real?” I held it up to the light. It was greenish in color, and I could see pebbly particles swimming around near the bottom of the glass. I thought of witches cackling about toil and trouble while stirring a cauldron.
“He changes the recipe almost weekly,” Adam said close to my ear. “Been trying to get a distributor for the stuff for years. His bar’s the only place you can actually buy it.”
“It looks like it should be outlawed,” I said and perhaps a bit too loud, as a few of the men chuckled.
“Green,” Tooey responded, “is the cure for cancer. Green is what makes the world go round-round-round. Green is gold.”
“It’s not easy being green,” I added.
Tooey’s mouth burst open, and a fireball of laughter burst out. It looked forced but wasn’t. He had a wide mouth, with narrow, sunken cheeks, and I could see the landmarks of his fillings from across the kitchen. His clothes—a flannel shirt, suede vest, faded blue jeans—hung off him like clothes draped over a fence post. The only remotely handsome feature was his eyes—small, faded blue, genuine, somber, humane.
“Good one, Shakespeare,” Tooey said. Anyone else calling me Shakespeare would have irritated the hell out of me, but there was an easiness to Tooey Jones—in his eyes, perhaps—that made it sound comfortable and almost endearing, the way old army buddies had nicknames for one another. “But—but— but taste it. Taste it.”
