Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  He buried the ax blade in a stump and stretched his aching back, mulling over how sulky and silent his brother had been these last few days. It frustrated the older boy to no end, but more than that it worried him. Ezra was not even practicing his penmanship or copying the scriptures as he was expected to do. If he failed to finish his Bible in time, Papa would be cross. Terribly cross.

  Jonah snatched up his shirt from a low hanging branch and used it to wipe himself down as he made his way to the house.

  In Ezra’s bedroom, he found his brother staring dubiously at his Sunday clothes laid out on the bed.

  “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be helping me chop firewood.”

  Ezra snapped his head up and gawped at his big brother.

  “And what’re you doing with them clothes? It’s still Saturday, you know.”

  “I’m just—I’m just getting ready for worship,” Ezra stammered. “That’s all.”

  “Baloney. It ain’t like you have to make up your mind about it. Never have before.”

  Ezra frowned, started gathering up the clothes to put back in the closet.

  Jonah planted his hands on his bony hips. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on,” Ezra barked. “Mind your own business.”

  “That’s rich,” Jonah said. “You’d better mind yours. There’s wood to chop, and Papa’ll be back before sundown. If you wanna get whupped, then get whupped. I’m gonna chop wood.”

  With that the older boy stalked out of the room. By the time he reached the front door, his anger melted, giving way back to the concern he had before. Something was going on, and it bewildered him deeply. If it was at all indicative that Ezra might be straying, Jonah decided he was going to have to keep an eye on his brother.

  There was a dwindling legacy to think about, after all.

  * * *

  As instructed, Annabelle waited in the clearing beyond the Durfee place. She stood atop a mound of brown pine needles, shielding her eyes from the setting sun with the flat of her hand, wishing she had a wristwatch. Even without it, she was fairly sure Ezra was late.

  She wore a pink-and-white striped circle skirt dress, with three large Lucite buttons running down the front that had ribbons tied into them. Her mother said she looked dee-vine. Annabelle worried that she was sweating too much in it, standing out in the warm late afternoon like she was. She hoped Ezra would show up soon.

  Finally, she heard the crunch of feet smashing forest detritus, coming from the general direction of Ezra’s house. The girl perked up, checked herself over for anything that might have gotten stuck to her dress on the way into the woods. She wanted desperately to look nice for Ezra. She’d never been to a dance with a boy before.

  And he was such a nice boy.

  Presently, a figure appeared amongst the trees, silhouetted by the sun at its back. Annabelle managed a nervous smile, clasped her hands together at her breast, and stepped forward.

  “You,” the figure seethed.

  “Ezra?” Annabelle called back. “Is that you?”

  “You have the brazen look of a prostitute, and yet you refuse to blush with shame.”

  “What?” she asked, her skin prickling with anxiety and confusion. “Ezra?”

  The shape emerged into the light of the clearing. He looked an awful lot like Ezra—he sported the same brown flattop and his nose was similarly thin and crooked—but this boy was taller, skinnier. At his side, the rusty ploughshare hung from his hand.

  “The Lord is filled with fury against you when you do all these things,” the boy growled at her, “acting like a brazen whore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She stepped back, her pink shoes rustling the pine needles.

  The boy closed the distance. He tightened his grip on the worn handle, obscuring the branded legend with his bloodless hand.

  He felt the blood of his great-grandfather throb in his veins.

  “I reckon you’re no priest of Baal, but a sinner’s a sinner, and you’ll just have to do.”

  Annabelle stumbled backward, raising her hands over her sweat-drenched face when her heel snagged a root and her body jerked with a single violent spasm. In an instant she collapsed to the ground in a heap. She twisted her upper body to right herself, tearing the top button from her dress. It disappeared among the dead pine needles. A wet sob bubbled up from her throat.

  “No,” she rasped.

  Jonah raised the ploughshare high above his head. The receding evening sun glinted rust-red off the metal of the blade. He then brought it down hard and squeezed his eyes shut before the blade crunched through shoulder and neck.

  Blood sprayed across the front of the cupcake dress.

  * * *

  As the afternoon wore on, Ezra eventually gave up on the bedroom door. Usually it was Papa who locked him in, but this time it was Jonah, exercising his authority as the eldest son. There was no getting it open, not even by slamming his shoulder against it. He regretted giving in so easily, telling Jonah what he’d planned to do. But by then it was much too late to do anything about it, so he relented and spent the time copying the venerable words in to his Bible. He’d made it through Second Kings at last, and he now worked on First Chronicles. His wrist and knuckles ached, but he had to be careful to keep the letters looking nice and even. He had gotten sloppy halfway through Deuteronomy back in the spring, around the time Mama passed on, and Papa was like to make him eat the pages he’d ruined. Now the youngest son was considerably more vigilant in his work.

  As the sky outside his bedroom window went from purple to black, Ezra felt his heart sink. It was foolish to have agreed to take Annabelle to the dance in the first place, but he hated himself for standing her up. He wondered how long she would wait in the clearing before realizing he was never going to come. He wondered how much she hated him and if she was going to feel that way forever.

  A warm tear dropped from the edge of his eyelid and splashed the page, leaving a dark spot in which the ink smeared. He grimaced and crumpled the page into a ball.

  He was never going to finish. Everything felt so hopeless.

  A key crunched into the lock and the bedroom door creaked open. Ezra bolted up from the floor where he was working to see Jonah emerge from the shadows. He was wearing his undershirt and blue jeans, both spattered with blood.

  He was breathing hard and his face dripped with sweat.

  “You’d better tell Papa you done it,” he wheezed.

  “Done what, Jonah?”

  “He’ll be back any minute. I better get cleaned up for supper.”

  “Done what?”

  Ezra heaved himself up to his feet and stared, open-mouthed.

  “And I’m not doing none of the peeling or the stitching for you, neither.”

  A lump formed in Ezra’s throat as he watched his brother vanish around the corner. He just stood there, gaping at the darkness beyond the room, knowing what Jonah meant but still trying to make sense of it.

  Ezra reckoned he would be the youngest Durfee to ever finish his family Bible. Papa was bound to be prouder than an old peacock.

  But it didn’t help the heartache much.

  Ed Kurtz is the author of Nausea, A Wind of Knives, The Forty-Two and Angel of the Abyss, among other novels and novellas. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Thuglit, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shotgun Honey, and Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane. He work has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014.

  During the early ‘70s, just before the two spans of the old Sunshine Skyway Bridge shook hands two hundred and fifty feet above Tampa Bay, the unopened southern approach became an informal layover point for the rough characters migrating down to Miami and the Keys. Myself, I’d gone AWOL from the Air Force—a conscientious objector, if the girl asking was pretty enough—and had journeyed there via those interconnected fingers of land near St. Pete: Treasure Island, Madeiras Beach,
Pass-A-Grille. Names to make a restless man think of toucan birds, jaunty pirates and the freebooter’s lifestyle.

  Of course, no toucans greeted me on the Skyway’s southern approach. The freshly concreted two-lane had all the charm of a bail jumpers’ convention: rusted out camper vans, vagrants dossed down in sleeping bags and the smells of beer and marijuana mixed in with the aromas of raw bait and the salt breeze. No one blinked an eyelid at my ruin of a ’56 Chevy and my bullet-holed Airstream.

  That first night I had a fugitive’s wanderlust, so I scrounged a bottle of watered-down Jack Daniels off an enterprising fisherman, and then had the crazy idea of checking out the view from the bare bones of the south span. I wasn’t the first man to blame Vietnam for his loss of faith in God and country, but, nonetheless, I felt a coward for running, and there are few cures for cowardice as good as booze and an act of grand stupidity.

  By the time I reached the spot where the jumbled girders thinned out to a lone tight-walker’s strut, the bottle’s contents were in my gullet and the bottle itself had taken a long dive into the bay below. I walked out onto the steel ribbon, each foot going toe-to-heel like a Russian gymnast.

  That was where I met Sharkbait Sutter.

  He was perched on the end of the beam, solemn and still, at peace with the night, the long drop beneath his heels and the slow rumble of the ocean. An unlit cigar twitched between his teeth, and he leaned forward. I thought he meant to jump, probably because suicide and death were never far from my thoughts in those days, but then I caught the silhouette of a rifle.

  He was sighting down an old bolt-action military piece.

  Having discarded my best manners, along with my sobriety, I sidled closer and asked him what he was shooting at.

  “Not communists,” he said, which made me think about the fading tan lines under my shirt where my dog tags had been.

  “What are you shooting at?” I repeated, a meaner edge in my voice.

  “Thin air,” he said without turning around.

  “Try not to miss.”

  Sutter laid his head closer to the rifle’s scope and fired off a round so thunderous that I lost my balance. I teetered on the beam’s edge, glimpsed the dark and cracked shell of the ocean far, far below. My stomach butterflied into my throat, and I did a passable impression of a doomed cartoon character teetering on a cliff. Sutter grabbed my shirtfront and yanked me straight again. I doubled over laughing after I’d caught my breath.

  Sutter adjusted the scope and hefted the stock back onto his shoulder. He was wearing a snow parka, a bulky nylon get-up that had to be ridiculously hot. If I’d been less drunk I’d probably have thought harder about his choice of clothing, but right then I was fixated on the fact the lunatic was taking pot-shots at empty water. The rifle stock seemed a hunk of worn and dark-grained obsidian, the barrel a spear of starlit bronze. I followed the barrel’s line out across the ocean, tracking the curve of the earth and the tide that swept out into the Gulf. To my surprise, an orange light swooped and bobbed out there, its afterimage uncoiling like a Chinese dragon dancing with the wind.

  The Gulf of Mexico has always had a reputation for the unexplained. In further testament to my drunkenness, I took a tipple from the local reservoir of superstition and wondered if I were indeed witness to a glowing visitor. Then the sharp crack of Sutter’s rifle broke the mystic moment, and a split-second later the light winked out.

  “What the hell did you do?” I asked belligerently, as if Sutter had just tossed a puppy onto a campfire.

  “Hopefully caught me a shark,” Sutter said. Then he turned around, teeth clenched hard on his cigar, and the look he gave me was sobering. I took the hint and left him to his fishing.

  * * *

  Next morning, dried out and nursing the hangover to prove it, I ran into Sutter on the Skyway’s approach. He was sitting astride a chunk of broken concrete, a protruding length of rebar sticking up between his thighs like a satyr’s glory. Between his hands he held a car inner tube, one end tied to a length of small-gauge chain. The chain trailed four feet to a hook that looked about the right size to hang a pig carcass.

  He wore a heavy wool sweater, shapeless and baggy. It reminded me of his fashion choice the previous night, and it made me wonder if some mental health issue wasn’t behind his overdressing. I didn’t mention him saving my life, figured I wouldn’t have lost my balance if he hadn’t spooked me with that rifle shot in the first place. Still, I found myself shuffling up to where he was working. I guess when a man saves your life, even if you don’t want to thank him, some sort of acknowledgement should occur. Maybe a person’s life feels more worthwhile, less pointless, if the saving of it isn’t just disregarded.

  Off to one side were a couple of deflated sacks. “What are those?” I asked, ice-breaking and small talk not being great strengths of mine.

  “Weather balloons,” Sutter said.

  I looked at the blue sky. Looked back at Sutter. Looked up again. He ignored me. I asked him why he had a weather balloon.

  “Hitch the balloon to the hook and let the tide carry her out into the deep waters. When you shoot out the balloon, the hook and bait will fall, fall, fall.” He angled his fingers downwards and wriggled them to make his point.

  “Couldn’t you take the shot from down here?” I asked.

  Sutter scratched his chin, silver with stubble. “Probably could.” He went back to checking the tension of the inner tube, his big hands torturing the squealing rubber, stretching it out and out.

  “What’s with the tube?” I asked.

  “Why you so keen to know?”

  “Just making conversation is all.”

  “Can’t you go do that by yourself somewhere?”

  I used a hand to shade my eyes from the sun’s glare. “Probably could,” I said, echoing his earlier response.

  Sutter’s jaw tightened and his skin took on a curious grey tinge, but then the door of his trailer opened, interrupting the usual chain of consequences that comes from two recalcitrant men getting edgy with their words. A fox-faced girl stepped out. She wore an expression that indicated she found the sunlight bouncing off the bay even less therapeutic than I did. Either that or she’d taken offense to the pervasive stink of fish guts. Given her alabaster skin, and the stains on the oversize singlet that was pulling double-duty as a miniskirt, it wasn’t hard to figure out which was the more likely option.

  “Darlene, the kid wants to know what the tires are for. He can’t figure it out,” Sutter said.

  “Stop teasing him,” she said, throwing a dismissive look my way. “They’re shock absorbers. For when he hooks the big fish. He wants you to ask, you know. So he can hold court and be the keeper of the knowledge.”

  Sutter’s expression darkened for a moment, but then he chuckled and threw back a private insult of some kind. The two of them traded them casually, to and fro, while I stood on the sidelines. I mused on how the sultry Tampa breeze was playing havoc with the singlet's hemline. The tenor of Darlene’s banter with Sutter made me sincerely hope that the two of them weren’t father and daughter.

  “Baby, now you’ve finally gotten your sweet tail out of bed,” he said, “why don’t you fetch me some soup off the stove.”

  Darlene gave him a hard look that made me wonder if maybe she’d once turned tricks—or still did—before skulking off to the camper with one last flick of her behind that answered any remaining questions about whether she was wearing underwear.

  “She’s a peach, ain’t she?” Sutter asked, watching me with eyes that glittered like wet stones.

  “You’d know better than me,” I replied.

  “Ain’t that the truth of it,” he said in a weary voice as he tightened the chain around the inner tube. “You think this’ll hold?” He held up the tube; it looked like a conger eel that he’d strangled to death.

  “Sure,” I replied, still thinking of Darlene’s ass.

  Sutter laid the tube down across his lap, freeing his hands. He reached do
wn to a bucket next to him. His fist came out gripping a wicked filleting knife. The bucket was filled with bloodied water, but when the water sloshed back and forth, I heard hard objects bumping the tin sides.

  “Turn around,” Sutter said.

  “I heard that one before,” I said, eyeing the knife.

  “C’mon now, aren’t you forgetting you owe me your life after last night? It’s a bit early for me to go collecting that debt. I got to fillet some bait for the hook, is all. Bait bucket’s just behind you. You going to help me out and throw me a chunk of chum or are you just going to give me bullshit all day?”

  My pride finally overcame my fear—not exactly shattering news to anyone who’d known me back then—and I spun about, saw a halved grouper in a bucket, and spun back about with the fish dangling from my fist.

  “Suspicious critter, ain’t you,” he said, eyeing me carefully. “So, which branch of the military you cut and run from?” He gestured for the fish I held.

  “I never said I was in the military.”

  “No, you never did.” Sutter feigned puzzlement. “Here now, I thought you wanted to make conversation.”

  I leaned over, inches away from the filleting knife, making my point, and dropped all twenty pounds of wet fish onto his lap. “Air Force,” I said. “Not telling you which wing, though. That’s my business.”

  “See much action?”

  “If you’re asking that, then you weren’t over there. But yeah.”

  “Kill many gooks?”

  There was a pause, a lull during which the Tampa Bay itself seemed to tighten itself around the pylons like its surface was a skin of heated shrink-wrap. I got whammied with a second of vertigo, and I could smell the blood of the halved fish mixing with the remembered stench of burning flesh. The black inner tube sat in Sutter’s lap under the bleeding fish, looking for all the world like the scorched dead husk of a baby.

  “So?” Sutter said.

  Darlene broke the silence by pushing out the camper door with a pot of steaming soup balanced in one hand and a cigarette dangling from the other. She paused to blow equal parts smoke and cool breath over the top of the soup and then set it down next to Sutter.