Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

“Not legally. And don’t get your fucking hopes up. It’s just fucking temporary—he’ll come to his fucking senses one of these days, move down to Santa Fe to be with her. No fucking doubt about it.”

  Officer Cahill sips his own vodka as if it were castor oil or some other foul-tasting medicine. It’s his third glass, though, and that as much as anything tells Maledicta that he’s buying her story. Officer Cahill is still on duty, and meant to limit himself to one drink—he said as much earlier—but when Maledicta told him that Sam had kids (twins!), that limit went out the fucking window.

  “So if all this is going on with her husband,” he wants to know next, “what’s Sam doing back in Seven Lakes? And what the heck was that about this morning, with Sam saying she thought she might have killed Horace?”

  “Oh that.” Maledicta waves a hand and sways a little on her barstool. “Well, you know, a lot of Sam’s problems, like with her fucking husband and all, that all goes back to, to what her fucking stepfather did to her. You know.”

  “No, I don’t. What—”

  “Oh give me a fucking break. You’re the fucking ex, the guy she was going to fucking run away with. Don’t tell me you didn’t fucking know about it.”

  “I know Sam and Horace didn’t get on well—”

  With a snort: “‘Didn’t get on well.’”

  “All right, Sam hated him. But—”

  “She hated him because he was fucking her, asshole!” At the other end of the bar, one of the geezer-clones twitches, and Maledicta feels a flash of embarrassment. She’d meant to tell only lies here, and now she’s gone and blurted out the truth.

  Well, fuck it.

  “He was what?” Officer Cahill says. “Excuse me?”

  “You fucking heard me.” Maledicta raps her shot glass on the bar to signal for another refill, but Officer Cahill grabs her arm. “Hey!” Maledicta objects. “What the fuck?”

  “Is this a joke?” Officer Cahill demands. “Are you making this up to, to I don’t know what…”

  “No, it’s not a fucking joke! Fuck you! You don’t believe me, go ask your fucking boss.”

  “Chief Bradley knows about this?”

  “Yeah, he fucking knows about it. A day late, but…” She jerks her arm free and draws back, pissed off but curious. “You really didn’t know? Sam never told you?”

  “No! No, Sam never said any—” He stops suddenly, and Maledicta can almost hear the memory falling into place, like a dropped brick. “No, that couldn’t have been what she meant…”

  “Right,” says Maledicta. “So she did fucking tell you—you just didn’t fucking get it. Par for the fucking course.”

  “Oh God. Oh Sam…”

  “Oh please. Fucking spare me.” Maledicta knocks a cigarette loose from the pack in front of her and lights it.

  “So Chief Bradley knew about it?” Officer Cahill says. “He found out?”

  “Not in time to do any fucking good, but yeah.”

  “God. That must have nearly killed him.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Maledicta. “He was really fucking dying when we talked to him.”

  The officer looks at her coldly. “I’m sure Chief Bradley was mortified when he found out about that. God, and not just for Sam’s sake—for himself, too.”

  “For himself? Why? Because he fucked up?”

  “For not stopping it, sure. And also…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit, nothing. Why else would he feel bad for himself?”

  Now it’s Officer Cahill who looks embarrassed, like he’s the one about to reveal a confidence. But Maledicta stares at him until he tells her.

  “It’s just,” he says, “that it must be bad enough to lose out to a good man, let alone one who’s…like that.”

  “What do you mean, lose out? Lose out at what?” A light goes on: “Oh, fuck.”

  “Sam’s mother,” Officer Cahill says. “The chief and Sam’s father—her real father, Silas—both courted the same woman. Silas won: he married her. But then not long afterwards he died, and Chief Bradley—”

  “Oh fucking nice,” says Maledicta. “What’d he do, propose to her at the fucking funeral?”

  Officer Cahill gives her another frosty look. “I’m sure it wasn’t like that. But Althea was fond of him, and she had a new baby to think of, and I guess she gave indications that she might be interested—but then before anything really happened, she turned around and took up with Horace.”

  “And how the fuck do you know about this? You must have been a fucking baby yourself at the time, right?”

  “Chief Bradley told me.” Officer Cahill taps a finger against the rim of his shot glass. “We were drinking up at the cottage one time about a year ago—”

  “What, is that your private fucking clubhouse now?”

  “No, but—the chief, you know, he’s been trying to keep the place in shape since Althea died. One evening I found him up there, not doing any work, just sitting in the kitchen with a bottle. So I sat down with him, and he started talking about how he’d been in love all those years…

  “So that would have been hard enough,” the officer concludes, “feeling that way and being rejected, not just once but twice. But to find out on top of that that you’d lost out to a, a child molester…I can’t imagine.” He adds hastily: “Not that that compares to what Sam went through, of course…”

  Maledicta would like to hit Officer Cahill now, but instead she looks at the bartender—who’s hovering right on top of them, pretending not to listen—and holds up her empty glass. “One more for the road.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Officer Cahill says.

  “Don’t you think you should mind your own fucking business?” Maledicta retorts.

  Officer Cahill sighs. “All right,” he says, “it’s your liver—it’s my tab, but it’s your liver.” He pulls out his wallet and checks to make sure he actually has the money to pay for all these drinks. “Just tell me one last thing. When you said Sam was on her way home to Santa Fe already, that wasn’t true, was it? She’s still here in town.”

  “Only for as long as it takes me to crawl back to the fucking car,” Maledicta says. “But…”—her glass is full again; she tosses it back—“A-a-aah!…you’re not going to fucking bother her anymore. And you’re definitely not going to tell her what I fucking told you about her stepfather.”

  “No, of course not, I wouldn’t…at least not unless she…but I would like to talk to her one more time before you go. Not to bother her, just…hey, are you all right?”

  “Fucking fine,” Maledicta says, but she’s not. The last shot of vodka hits her brainstem hard—she drops the glass, and has to grab the edge of the bar to steady herself.

  “You don’t look fine,” Officer Cahill observes. “You look green.”

  Maledicta doesn’t answer; her stomach’s rolling over.

  “…ten thousand dollars,” Chief Bradley was saying, his voice slightly muffled by the closed door between us. “I know that may not sound like much, but you understand, the cottage is almost surely a loss. I would love to save it if I could, if there were some way to fix the foundation, but my sense is I’m going to have to tear the whole place down and build new. And there’s also the matter of the maintenance work I’ve done over the past two years—I know you didn’t ask for that, but I did pay for it out of my own pocket and I believe it deserves some consideration…So what are your thoughts, Andrea?”

  “I think it sounds…fair.” I kept my head raised as I spoke, so he’d be able to hear me. “It’s just, I’m still not really ready to make a decision about this.”

  “Well, and I don’t want to rush you,” Chief Bradley said, “but from what you’ve told me it sounds like you’re pretty set against staying on in Seven Lakes yourself.”

  “That’s true. But—”

  “Right, and I don’t imagine you’d be visiting much either…”

  “That’s true, too.” />
  “Right! So there you go—it seems like a waste to leave a perfectly good property abandoned, if you have no intention of using it yourself. And you know…”

  But the rest of his words were lost as another wave of nausea gripped me, and I bent my head once more to the bowl.

  I was tempted to blame my current distress on Chief Bradley’s chili: a mostly bland hamburger stew spiked here and there with chunks of incredibly hot pepper. But I’d eaten very little of it—I could see, gazing into the toilet, that I’d eaten very little of it—maybe five or six spoonfuls in all.

  The beer was a more likely culprit. I wasn’t sure how much I’d drunk. I’d only become aware that I was drinking at all when we were about to sit down at the table, and Chief Bradley, pointing to the bottle in my hand, asked if I wanted another. Startled, I told him no, and yet only moments later, as I hurried to wash down a bite of chili, I found myself tipping up a fresh Budweiser, still cold from the fridge. And then a little while after that, when a sliver of jalapeño got stuck on the way down and started spot-welding the back of my throat, I reached coughing for what I thought was a water glass, only to taste still more beer as I swallowed.

  That was when I’d started to feel ill. The jalapeño, though safely extinguished, left an after-impression that was like a finger pressing down on my gag reflex. As the feeling rapidly grew worse, I stood up and asked where the bathroom was. I barely made it in time.

  At least Chief Bradley didn’t seem offended that I’d lost his lunch. Indeed, he hardly seemed to have noticed at all.

  “…and if you’d like to get a better sense of the local property values before you make up your mind, of course I understand. I want you to be comfortable about this, Andrea. But what I think you’ll find…”

  My nausea seemed to have run its course. I waited another minute just to be sure, then got up to use the sink. I was dizzy from being hunched over so long, so after rinsing my mouth out, I plugged the drain and let the basin fill with water. As I splashed my cheeks and forehead, I heard a creak of hinges and felt someone come up behind me. “I’m OK, Chief Bradley,” I said, but when I looked up into the mirror the bathroom door was still closed, and the face peering over my shoulder wasn’t the chief’s.

  “Hello again, figment,” Gideon said.

  A plastic cup on the back corner of the sink held a toothbrush and a steel-pointed dental pick. I made a grab for the pick, but my left hand got there first and knocked the cup away. Then the hand was at my throat, and the bathroom walls faded into open sky as I was dragged from the body. I looked down and saw the lake far below me, its dark waters swirling around the gray dot of Coventry.

  “Andrea?” Chief Bradley called, his voice echoing with distance. “What just fell?…Andrea, are you all right in there?”

  “I’m fine,” Gideon replied. “I’ll be right out.”

  There’s a soda machine outside the grocery store on Main Street. Mouse is hoping it’s the kind of soda machine that offers bottled spring water as a selection—that’s what she really needs right now, fresh water—but this is Seven Lakes, not Seattle, and the machine is stocked only with pop. She could go into the store to buy water, but the idea of waiting in a long checkout line, trying not to pass out or faint from shame as the cashier and the other customers catch a whiff of her, is more than she thinks she can stand.

  Soda pop it is. She puts coins in the machine and punches the button for ginger ale. The can comes out of the machine warm, and the ginger ale tastes like something you’d clean dentures with, but Mouse forces herself to drink it anyway. She needs the fluid.

  She looks across the street to where the Centurion is parked. Andrew has still not reappeared. Mouse tells herself that she can’t blame him for wandering off, but the truth is she does blame him. He should have waited. He should have come after her. All right, no, he shouldn’t have come after her—Maledicta was being abusive, and if he’d followed her to the bar it would have just made a bad situation worse—but he should have waited.

  Mouse leans back against the soda machine and slides down until she is sitting on the sidewalk with her knees up under her chin. She drinks warm ginger ale and feels wretched. People coming in and out of the grocery store give her funny looks, as if she were a homeless person.

  She feels homeless. She’s got no motel room, no safe place in this town where she can go to sleep for a few hours. And she can’t go somewhere else, because even if she were willing to abandon Andrew—the way he abandoned her, she thinks petulantly—she can’t drive. A lot of the vodka that Maledicta drank got left behind in the bar, but enough of it is still in Mouse’s system that she doesn’t dare get behind the wheel.

  The only remotely good thing about her current circumstance is that she’s pretty sure Officer Cahill won’t be bothering her again. When Mouse ran out of the bar he was still in the men’s room, cleaning himself up, but that was just a temporary measure—he’s going to have to go home and change, and probably take a long hot shower. Mouse knows she shouldn’t be happy about this—she should be disgusted with herself, and furious with Maledicta—and she is—but at this point anything that cuts down the number of obstacles between her and a clean getaway from this town is a welcome occurrence.

  “Come on Andrew,” she says. “Come back. Let’s get out of here.”

  But it’s a while yet before Andrew comes back. The sound of his voice rouses Mouse from a drunken doze; she wakes confused, needing a swallow of warm ginger ale—it’s gone flat now too, yuck—to remind her where she is.

  Andrew is across the street, shaking hands with Chief Bradley through the window of the chief’s police car. “Seven-thirty tonight,” Mouse hears Andrew say; then he steps back, and the chief drives off.

  Mouse gets up from the sidewalk. “Andrew!” she calls.

  He turns towards her, caught off guard, in his surprise looking almost hostile…but then he smiles. “Hey there, Penny!” he greets her. “How’s it going?”

  Mouse waits for another car to pass and crosses the street. “Andrew,” she says, drawing near him. “Where were you?”

  “Chief Bradley’s house.” Belatedly picking up on her mood: “Gosh, Penny, I hope you weren’t worried.”

  “I was,” says Mouse. “But never mind that now. Are you ready to go?”

  “Well, actually,” he says, “that’s kind of what I came back to tell you: I can’t leave yet.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve decided to sell the cottage to Chief Bradley,” Andrew explains. “It won’t be official until I can establish clear title to it myself, of course, but we’ve agreed to do the deal, and he’s even going to give me a down payment. I’m going back to his house tonight to pick up the money.”

  “Tonight? So we have to stay here?” Please, no.

  “We don’t have to stay,” Andrew says. “I have to, but there’s no reason for you to hang around. In fact, if you wanted to head back to Seattle on your own…”

  “No,” says Mouse. “I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. Don’t worry about me, I—”

  “No, I mean I can’t do that. Maledicta got us drunk, got me drunk. I can’t drive.”

  “Oh.” He leans forward, sniffs. “Wow! Gee, Penny…”

  “So I need you to do it.” Mouse shoves her car keys into his hands before he can refuse. “Please…just take me somewhere, anywhere I can rest. And then if you want to borrow the car and come back and see Chief Bradley tonight, I guess that’s OK, I’ll just wait for you wherever.”

  Andrew bounces the keys in his palm and looks thoughtful. “Hmm, OK, I suppose that could work…”

  “Only let’s go,” Mouse stresses. “I can’t stand up much longer.”

  “Sure.” He’s smiling again. “You just lie down in back, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Before stretching out on the Centurion’s back seat, Mouse rolls down the windows, hoping that fresh air will counteract any lingering urge to vomit. It works: her stomach lur
ches a little while Andrew is pulling out of the parking space, but once they are on the move the cool breeze is very soothing. “Just one other thing…” she says, her eyes drifting closed.

  “Hmm? What’s that?”

  “I could really use a drink of water. Could you run in somewhere, and get me…”

  “Sure thing, Mouse,” he says. “You relax, I’ll get right on that.”

  “Thanks…” She settles down, lulled by the smooth forward motion of the car, and—

  —something is tickling her eyelid. A breeze is still blowing through the windows, but less steadily now; the Centurion is stopped somewhere. Mouse lifts a hand to her face, bats sleepily at the thing tickling her. A leaf.

  She sits up, blinking away sleep. She tries to call Andrew’s name, but her mouth and throat are totally dry. She glances at the driver’s seat and sees that it’s empty.

  Mouse assumes they are at a rest stop off the highway somewhere. Andrew must have gone to get her water. She yawns deeply, and is surprised by how much better she feels: she’s parched and she has a headache, but she’s sobered up quite a bit, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d almost think she’d been asleep all afternoon.

  Huh. That’s funny. According to the dashboard clock, Mouse has been asleep all afternoon. And—taking a good look outside, now—this is a very unusual rest stop: the parking lot is covered in grass, and there are no gas pumps or fast-food restaurants, just a single white cottage-like structure, tilted to one side…

  Oh God.

  Mouse twists around to look out the back window, hoping that this will turn out to be some sort of mirage. But there’s no rest stop behind the car, either, just a dirt road that is becoming all too familiar.

  Why would Andrew have come back here?

  On second thought, never mind—Mouse doesn’t care why. She just wants to get out of here. She leans over the seat back and honks the Buick’s horn. Short honks, first, and then a sustained blast that causes birds to take flight from the surrounding trees. But Andrew does not come running.

  Damn it. If the keys were in the ignition, Mouse would be tempted to drive away—she’s sober enough, now—but they aren’t, and anyway she knows it would be wrong to just leave. Whatever is going on here, it’s atleast partly her own fault. If she hadn’t been too drunk to drive in the first place…