Women Drinking Benedictine

by Sharon Dilworth

  “It’s not nonsense. Yannick Murphy saw them.” Janeene was surprised by Phil’s tone. She knew he was uncomfortable with these men in the house, but there was no reason to take his anger out on her.

  “Yannick Murphy says he saw fifty people getting off a boat and you believe him?”

  Phil made a small cut in the material and began to pull. The pants were thick and difficult to tear.

  “People don’t make up things like that.” Janeene leaned across the table to help, but Phil shoved the pant legs off the table, where she couldn’t reach them.

  “You ever stop to ask yourself what Yannick Murphy was doing in the lower harbor at two o’clock in the morning?”

  Now she was irritated. She had already told Phil the story of Yannick walking home from Doc’s Saloon. Drunk, tired, and cold, he was more surprised than anyone to see the boat skimming the dark water as it slowed to dock in the quiet night. The breakwater was icy and he set out to warn them to move the boat to the marina. That’s when he saw all the people getting off the boat. That’s when he heard them talking and knew that something was up—something strange was about to happen.

  “He spent the night in a bar and you’re going to believe what he says?” Phil said. “People see all kinds of things when they’re drunk. Flying saucers. Seven-footed animals. Mystery ships.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s afraid,” Janeene said. “That’s why you don’t want to believe it could happen. Because you’re afraid of them.”

  “I’m not afraid of something that doesn’t exist.” Phil pulled at the material with both hands, and this time it gave way. It caught the side seam and ripped all the way up to the crotch. They were no better than the pair Henry was wearing.

  “I don’t have anything that’s going to fit this guy.” Phil threw the trousers to the floor.

  “What about something else of your grandfather’s?” Janeene would not fight with Phil. Not with these men in the house. “All that stuff we found when we moved in?”

  Phil nodded but did not get up from the table.

  “Do you want me to look?” Janeene asked.

  “No,” Phil said. “It’s not insulated up there. I’ll go.”

  “A little cold’s not going to kill me,” she said.

  “What?” Phil turned to her.

  “Nothing,” she shook her head. “Nothing.”

  When he left, she picked up the trousers and turned them over her arm until she had rolled them into a ball. She was angry that Phil was so upset. It wasn’t as if the men had interrupted them. It wasn’t as if they were doing anything important when the men came knocking at the door.

  She knew they would talk about the men after the tow truck came and jump-started their car. Phil would be relieved that they were gone. He would sit on the edge of the bed and talk to her even after she told him she was tired. He would keep talking even when she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. All talked out, he would crawl under the covers and want to make love. Janeene, not finding a reason to say no, would go through the motions.

  The thought of the empty house and the days ahead with nothing to do, no one to talk to except Phil, got her so frustrated that she shoved the wool pants into the dirty dishwater just as Wade walked in the room. He did not ask her what she was doing.

  The dinner plates had been soaking since six o’clock. Janeene buried her hands up to her elbows and turned the heavy wool in the dead soapsuds while leftover bits of pork chop and mashed potato floated to the top of the still, gray water. She tried to act like nothing was wrong, but she felt foolish taking her frustrations out on a pair of pants.

  “You and your husband don’t look like you’re from around here,” Wade said quietly. She fished the pants out of the water and hung them over the side of the sink. The excess water dripped onto the floor.

  “We just moved here in September from Detroit,” she said.

  “You must be going nuts.”

  “I’ve never been around this much snow,” Janeene said. “It gets cold in Detroit, but nothing like this. Some nights I can almost hear the temperature falling. It just keeps getting colder. I think the wind’s going to pull the house down with it.” She was out of breath from speaking so quickly.

  “I didn’t mean the weather,” Wade said, and Janeene asked if he was talking about the people.

  Instead of answering, he picked up the bottle of aspirin, but his fingers were too thick to open it. He stuck it in his mouth and tried with his teeth.

  “Do you have a headache?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Wade handed her the bottle. The cap was wet from his spit. She turned it until the two arrows pointed at each other, then popped it open with her fingernail.

  “Feel my forehead,” he said, “and you can tell me if I’m sick.”

  His skin was soft and warm, but she could not tell if it was feverish. She started to pull her hand away, but Wade held her wrist with a firm grip. He was not hurting her, but his touch made her nervous. Her fingertips brushed the corners of his eyes and he closed them. His lashes were darker than they should have been with his hair so blond.

  “What are you doing there?” Henry yelled and Janeene dropped her hand and shoved it back into the dishwater.

  “I’m not doing anything,” Wade said and turned to face his father.

  “She wouldn’t touch someone like you unless you bribed her,” Henry yelled at Wade.

  “He’s got a headache,” Janeene interrupted. “He doesn’t feel good.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, old man,” Wade said. “Stay out of what you don’t know.”

  Their heavy bodies were not used to the heat in the house, and the smell of their perspiration was everywhere. The strong, stale odor was strange in the winter world, which kept everything so sterile, and Janeene found it unnerving.

  “He didn’t make me do anything,” Janeene said. The pants had dripped onto the floor and she tripped on the wet tile when she started to leave the room.

  Wade held her hip and asked if she was all right. She could feel the skin bruising beneath his touch.

  Henry smiled at them. “Well. This is cozy,” he said. “And you with your husband just up the stairs.”

  Janeene was still holding Wade’s aspirin. She put them on her tongue and then turned to the sink and cupped water into her hand. The aspirin dissolved in her throat, the chalky substance creeping back up into her mouth. She turned and spat them into the dishwater.

  “Excuse me,” she apologized and went upstairs to see why Phil was taking so long. He was not in their bedroom. The spare bedrooms were cold and dark, and she opened the attic door and called up the steps.

  “Phil?” There was no sound. She called his name again, but her voice echoed back to her. She slammed the door and hurried downstairs, wanting to get away from all the emptiness.

  Henry was sitting on the couch watching television. He was wearing a pair of dark green pants she didn’t recognize but knew they must have been among Phil’s grandfather’s things. She turned down the sound on the TV and asked Henry where Phil was.

  “Like that’s something that you’re concerned about?” Henry smiled.

  “Of course I’m concerned,” she said. She wanted Phil there with her.

  “Don’t give her a hard time,” Wade said. “Tell her where her husband is.”

  Henry kept staring at the television, but pointed to the front door.

  “He left?” Janeene asked. “Why? Where would he go?”

  “He’s getting his car started to give us a jump.”

  “What about the gas station?” Janeene said. “Couldn’t they tow you?”

  “The truck’s out in Big Bay,” Henry said. “They’re not sure when it’ll be back.”

  “It’s a bad night to be out,” Janeene said, and Henry laughed.

  “They’re all bad nights to be out.” Henry zipped up his coat and pulled on his cap until it covered his ears.

  “No se
nse in all of us getting cold,” he said. “You two might as well stay here where it’s warm.”

  Wade stood in the middle of the room looking out the window. She knew he was standing too far from the glass to see anything but his own reflection. Yet he was concentrating as if he could see into the night.

  He was silent for some time and then slowly, as if coming out of a trance, turned and asked if she was afraid of living in Marquette.

  “What would I be afraid of?” she asked.

  “Things. All kinds of things go on in these parts,” Wade told her. “There’s lots to be afraid of.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like ghosts,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “Like something haunting my attic?”

  “I’m talking about people coming back from the dead,” he said.

  “People don’t come back from the dead,” she told him.

  “They don’t?” Wade looked at her, his eyebrows raised. “You know that for a fact?”

  “Why would they come back?” she asked.

  “To settle the score,” he told her. “They might want to get even.”

  He was trying to tell her something. He had been trying to tell her something all night. The taste of copper filled her mouth, and she swallowed hard to get rid of it. “Did you kill that man in the park?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  The wind was cold by the open door, but she didn’t move. The icy blasts ran up her spine. Her skin spotted with goose-bumps.

  “We’re hunters up here,” he said. “Gutting a deer is something we all know how to do. Those are the kinds of things we learn when we’re twelve.”

  “This is a strange place,” she told him. Her voice sounded distant, as if it belonged to someone else.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Wade said. “After a while you’ll get used to it.” He had been scratching his skin under his shirt, and suddenly, as if he’d had enough of the discomfort, he unbuttoned the top buttons, exposing a large red shape on his chest. It looked like a tattoo—an undefined drawing she didn’t recognize right away—but when she stepped closer, she saw that it was a scar. The skin was unmarred, with no hair, like a baby’s.

  “What about the people from the boat?” she asked.

  “They could have killed him, too,” he told her. He turned to face her head on as if proud of this mark.

  “No. I want to know what they’re doing here,” she said. “I meant what are they doing in Marquette?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I want to know what happened to them,” she said.

  “Will you tell me? Will you tell me what happened to those people?”

  “No,” Wade pulled away.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Wayne rubbed the scar as if her touch had made him sore. He buttoned his shirt and turned toward the front door, where they saw Phil making his way up the front walk. Her heart raced as he stepped inside. She grabbed the edge of the table and held tight to stop the dizziness taking over. The room seemed to be losing light, as if Phil had carried the night in with him.

  Phil’s glasses fogged, and he set them on the table. Janeene reached for them so that she could wipe the condensation off, but her hands were clumsy and she pushed them onto the floor. Phil bent to pick them up.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Did you figure out what was wrong with the car?” Wade asked.

  “Nothing,” Phil said. He put his hands to his mouth and blew on them and then got the flashlight out of the drawer.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the car? Nothing at all?”

  “Not that I can tell,” Phil said. He tested the flashlight. The strong light hit the opposite wall and filled the room with long shadows.

  “I think your father ran over something,” Phil told Wade. “The car started up right away. It didn’t need the jump. There’s no other reason you would have stalled out.”

  “Did you see anything?” Wade continued rubbing his chest through the thick layers of winter coat he was not wearing.

  “It was probably a deer,” Phil said. “A deer’s got the strength to stop a car like that.”

  “Did you check the grate?”

  “There was nothing,” Phil said.

  “Then it wasn’t a deer,” Wade told him. “Deers leave their fur.”

  “There was nothing except a dent near the driver’s-side headlight,” Phil said.

  “There’d be blood if it was a deer,” Wade said. “Those animals bleed more than any animal on this earth.” They stood, ready to leave the house.

  “Wait,” Janeene called as they went out the front door.

  They turned back and looked at her. “What?” Phil asked.

  “I want to see it. I want to see the car,” she said. She put on her coat and wrapped a wool scarf around the bottom part of her face.

  “It’s thirty below out there,” Phil said. “Stay in here where it’s warm.”

  “There’s no reason for you to be out on a night like this,” Wade said. “This kind of cold can kill you.”

  They were gone before she could protest further and right away the silence of the house was overwhelming. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to let go of whatever it was that was scaring her. The panic increased, and she stepped outside and stood on the front porch, letting the wind run through her body.

  Phil and the men huddled around the two cars, but she could not hear their voices. She did not know if they were talking to each another. Phil had pulled his car around so that it faced Henry’s, and the front ends touched like animals confronting each other.

  She turned toward the lake and saw a flash of light shoot up from the ground. She stared into the darkness, and a few minutes later there was another flash. Certain that it was not her imagination or something in the sky, she stepped off the porch. Staying close to the houses, away from the street lamps, she walked as fast as she could through the snowdrifts. When she was far enough away so that the men would not hear or see her, she took off.

  She ran stiffly in her heavy winter clothes. The cold air filled her lungs, and her sides ached with cramps. The fear stayed with her, but she refused to stop. She had to know what was out there.

  The breakwater was somewhere off to her left. She could hear the rustling noise in the tall evergreen branches. It was too dark to know exactly where she was until she reached the beach. The winter wind had caught and trapped the sand like waves in motion. She turned to look where she had come from. Marquette was covered in a shadowlike net cast from the lake. It was near midnight. The streets should have been deserted, yet she thought she saw shadows moving in the distance. If there were only a bit more light, Janeene was certain she would at least see hints of all the figures hiding on Superior’s shoreline. But understand them, she could not.

  Women Drinking Benedictine

  THE WAY MY SISTER EXPLAINED IT WAS THAT she wanted to get rid of her husband. I never believed she’d really kill him, but she was definitely up to something. She claimed she was going about it slowly, not because she was afraid of being caught, but because she loved Randy too much to use rat poison or to blow him away with the 30-caliber rifle he’s got hidden between the washer and the dryer in the basement. Instead Siobhan was relying on a series of small accidents—accidents that in time would make him leave her. Last fall she loosened the lug nuts on his car tire. She pictured the tire flying off as he was driving down the highway into Munising. Luck just had it that the next time he drove the car, the Holsum Bakery truck in front of him ran over a squirrel. Randy had to slow down to keep from smashing into the rear end of the truck, and that’s when the tire fell off. He was only going about ten miles an hour, so it wasn’t anywhere near the accident it should have been. He plowed into a tree and broke his collarbone and two of his ribs. The hospital kept him overnight to get all the windshield glass out of his face, but
it wasn’t anything worse. As Siobhan said, that one should have been the one.

  Siobhan said being married was not for her. She was tired of the way things were, and she wanted a change. I know what it is to be trapped in a dead-end situation, and I wanted to help her get out of it. Getting rid of Randy wasn’t going to solve anything, but you can’t argue with Siobhan. She gets angry and she’ll snap like a dry twig in the woods. That’s why it was up to me to interfere with her plans. Whenever the attempts on Randy’s life didn’t foul up of their own accord, I had to step in and rescue him.

  Yesterday Siobhan stayed up until four in the morning putting together a booby trap in the bathroom. She hadn’t warned me about this attempt. When Randy closed the door, the garden tools wrapped in the bedsheet were supposed to fall on his head and kill him. But he was standing over the toilet taking a leak when he kicked the door shut. The rake knocked a gash in his forehead, but it didn’t come close to killing him. It got him acting dizzy, and he wandered out onto the highway without realizing who he was or where he was going. Siobhan was asleep, planning to wake up a widow, when the hospital in Marquette called to let her know they had sewn fourteen stitches into Randy’s forehead. A road construction crew had found him wandering on I-41 just south of Munising. He was resting comfortably and Siobhan could pick him up after his observation period—anytime after 12:00.

  “You were going to do it in the house?” I should have guessed Siobhan was up to something; she’d been unusually quiet the last couple of days. “What were you going to do with the body? Drag it outside?” We haven’t had the snow we usually get, but I still couldn’t see Siobhan acting like that in an emergency.

  “Of course not,” she said. “As soon as I got up I was going to call the state police. They would have gotten rid of it.”

  “How were you going to explain the rake and the snow shovel on the bathroom floor?” It was hard for me to imagine why Siobhan wanted to be single, especially in Munising. Everyone we know is married with kids.

  “I was going to put those back in the garage,” Siobhan said. “Right back where they belong.”