Grendel looks at the complete resurrection spell before him. He knows he could do it. He knows he could make it work. Clyde was a fool to try it with only a fragment. But here it is complete. Grendel looks at his dead wife’s picture and smiles sadly. He raises the glass and throws the bourbon back. He addresses the picture.
“Be seeing you.”
He slams the book shut. For now, at least.
One Small, Valuable Thing
Chad Fifer
I.
The first time the old man looked at me, he was taking a piss in the snow.
I’d stepped out of the house for a smoke. It must’ve been ten or eleven degrees out there. The world was frozen over. Nobody was out. I was drunk. It was probably seven in the morning.
The old man appeared on the corner down the street, walking his dog, I don’t know, maybe six or seven houses away? Bald guy, tall, black suit. The dog looked just like him: skinny, bony, all in black. Some kind of Doberman, I guess.
I watched him cross from one corner to the next, slow but deliberate. The dog didn’t seem to mind the pace. They stopped and the dog sniffed around the bottom of a street sign while the man stared down at him. It looked peaceful. These two thin figures against the dead silent snow, like some kind of charcoal drawing.
Then the dog lifted his leg and did his business. There you go, I thought. Sweet relief in the morning. Better than anything.
As if he’d read my mind, the old man turned away from the dog, unzipped his pants and started pissing in the snow himself, right out in the open, still holding the leash in one hand. I couldn’t believe it. He and the dog were facing away from each other like they were trying to be polite, this leash dangling in a smile between them. The scene had gone from serene to ridiculous and I kind of chuckled as I put out my smoke.
That was when the old man snapped his head to the side and looked at me. Impossible for him to have heard me laugh or anything, but that’s when he looked, his hands tucking and zipping at his pants, independent of his gaze. I couldn’t tell you what his expression was because of the distance, but I didn’t like the feel of it.
The dog pawed at the snow around the sign. The old man continued to look my way, his body now just as frozen as the street.
I was back in the house before I could decide whether to wave or flick him off, slamming the door against the cold. Something had disturbed me about the situation, but I didn’t know why. I felt light-headed.
There was a last gulp of Jack waiting in a measuring cup on the kitchen counter. I stepped over, knocked it back and pulled the sheet away from the window. It was too frosty to see much outside, but I felt like the old man had moved on. I looked a while longer for some kind of glimpse, but the frost just stayed where it was.
I wandered into the bedroom to tell Grace about the old man. She was asleep on our mattress, surrounded on three sides by electric space heaters. The bedroom was the only place with any warmth at all, and she was in the center. One of her legs was poking out from under the blankets, just a little brown calf tapering into a fluffy polka-dotted sock. I leaned over and pinched her big toe, swaying a bit.
“Hey,” I said.
She kicked at me and rolled up from under the layers. I could see her face now, squinting.
“Shut up,” she said. “What are you doing? What time is it?”
She burrowed back into the bed.
I took off the coat and the flannel, threw them against the chair and made my way into a sitting position on the floor, scooting over to the mattress.
“Hey,” I whispered, leaning over her. “You won’t believe what just happened.”
She didn’t respond but I told her about it all anyway. After I was done she waited a moment, then pulled the covers around herself and sat up a bit to look at me.
“He was bald? Like, he wasn’t wearing a hat?”
“No.”
“Who goes out in this shit with no hat? Who walks their dog in this?”
“Who pees outside in this?”
“You could pee all day in the middle of the street. Nobody’s out there to see. I’m saying who goes out without a hat?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he lives right there.”
“Please,” she said. “You’re the only white guy living in this neighborhood. And the only bald guy.”
She dove back down under the covers, making one last muffled comment:
“And the only old guy.”
Grace is 19, I’m 23. That’s all the difference there is but I guess it makes me the old one. She’s black and Vietnamese, so she can get away with calling me white. But she’s wrong about the bald thing. I have hair; I just choose to shave my head. Back in high school, I wore it long and dyed it black. All I cared about was drawing, talking shit, taking roadtrips. Drinking by the river with the guys. No consequences.
That was before the Army.
I was in my second tour when things got cut short. We’d only been in Kunar Province for five weeks. I was driving a truck with my buddy Gustavo riding shot. Our patrol had taken some small arms fire in the morning, but it was over for the time being and we were feeling relaxed, just bullshitting each other. I was actually goofing on the Pope when it happened. Gustavo grew up Catholic, so he was loving it. Then I hit the IED and we just fucking went boom. I honestly don’t remember it. When I woke up, the doctor told me I was in Italy. I said no shit—I was just talking about the Pope. He got a big kick out of that. I’d been unconscious for a week. Gustavo didn’t make it.
Coming back to Iowa after that, nothing was the same. I’d managed to keep all of my limbs, but I was spooky in the head and everybody knew it. Couldn’t concentrate. My ears would ring. Sometimes I didn’t know where I was at night, and I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing. The pupil in my right eye had been blown when my head got knocked in, and it had never come back to looking right. I could see out of the eye okay, but the whole thing was practically black and it bothered my little sister, who didn’t want much to do with me anymore. That was harder than anything, I suppose. The way she looked at me.
So I drank. I drank all the time. My parents had been keeping me in my old room but just couldn’t handle it after a while, so they found me a bachelor apartment near Davenport West, my old school, and ponied up rent for a few months. It was on the condition that I worked this shitty security job in a parking garage next to a shopping center. I tried to do it their way but after a few shifts I said fuck it and never went back. I’m not lazy, I wasn’t mad at my folks and I wasn’t trying to get back at anybody. Maybe I was just humiliated. I don’t know.
I met Grace right around that time, in the late summer, both of us trying to catch a ride home from a bar at two in the morning. Nobody would take us anywhere, so we ended up walking together and then sitting on some swings in the park, just like we were kids. It was one of those golden moments I didn’t think could ever happen again. Four in the morning with the smell of grass in the air, staring at a girl’s smile. Laughing. Bumping shoulders as we swung sideways and talked and swung sideways and talked. I mean, the girl was a drunk like me—it was obvious—but there was a light inside of her that warmed me right up. Something that made me feel like I should take a shot at life again. Like I could climb back into the driver’s seat.
Grace moved into the bachelor with me a few weeks later. She’d been living in her ex-stepmother’s condo but had to get out; the woman kept taking on cats and the whole place smelled like ammonia. On top of that, she had overheard the ex-step on the phone, telling a man that if he brought over fifty dollars and a bottle of something, she might have a girl for him. That was all it took. Grace punched the bitch in the stomach and hit the road.
Once my parents finally gave up on me and the rent stopped coming, we moved from the apartment into a nearby squat—this little house that had been foreclosed on in a neighborhood that’s been rotting from the inside since I was a kid. It was supposed to be temporary while we cleaned up and found jobs, but we were stil
l drinking with every last cent I had in savings. We just couldn’t get to bed at night, walking around the house, talking it all out, everything either of us had ever thought or experienced. When we could wake up in time we’d get down to the library to use the computers and look for jobs, but we both knew we were dragging our asses.
Then the winter came. We were lucky that the power still worked in the house—for some reason it had never been shut down. I’d taken the space heaters from my folks and we were getting by with them but it was desperate, man. The cold was brutal. We knew we could lose the electric at any minute and freeze. Or we could get thrown out by the cops and freeze. Either way, we had to do something, and soon.
All of this was on my mind the morning I saw the old man, and when I saw him again the next day, a real bad idea started forming in my head.
I’m no thief. Even when I’ve been the most down and out, I’ve never stolen to pay my way. It’s just not fair, I don’t think, taking other people’s shit. Like, when I was a kid, I used to wear my Uncle Kip’s dog tags. He’d given them to me after noticing all the tanks I was drawing on my grade school notebooks, all the guns I used to design in sloppy detail. I loved those dog tags—the way the small metal orbs on the chain felt, almost like a rosary—the way the metal was cold against my bare chest. One day in high school, I took them off and hung them in my locker during gym class. When I came back, the locker was kicked in and they were gone. I don’t know who took them or why they would even want them, but I tried to beat the shit out of a Mexican kid in the next period, just because he’d shrugged when I told him about it. He put me in a headlock and nearly choked me to death. That’s what thieving does, man. It’s bad business for everybody.
But after I saw the old man a second time, I started thinking, what if we stole something just once, and not to support the drinking, but to get us out of the cold? Something that somebody didn’t really need. Something that was probably insured. I knew that with a little dough I could get us back into my bachelor, and my old friend Jim Tingle told me he was always on the lookout for stolen shit if it was small and had what he called “demonstrable value,” meaning you didn’t need an outside expert to say it was worth a lot of money. He sold weed out of his van like a delivery service, but doing the fence thing was a good second income. Once a month, he would drive boxes of whatever shit he’d acquired up to Chicago and turn a profit through his connections with the Black Disciples. It was like the path out of misery had paved itself in front of me: grab some scratch, get my place back, find a job, and marry my girl. Easy.
So I started keeping watch at the window for my mark. And sure enough, every day, the old man walked his dog past the bottom of our street, always at different times, but along the same route. He never did the pissing thing again but he repeated that same slow, deliberate pace, always dressed in some spiffy black suit, no hat on his shiny bald head. Grace joined me by the window on the fifth day, both of us taking pulls from a nasty bottle of crème de menthe we’d found in the back of a cupboard.
“Tomorrow I’m gonna follow him,” I said.
“Your new boyfriend,” she said, and laughed.
The next day, I pulled on my coat and skullcap the minute I saw the man hit the corner. But before I could get through the door, Grace grabbed me, throwing her thick blue scarf around my neck and wrapping it across my nose and mouth. It smelled just like her, my beautiful girl. Her cocoa butter skin.
“To keep you warm,” she said. But I think she already knew what I was up to.
I gave her a squeeze and hit the street, my face masked by the scarf. The man had a predictable stride and he never looked back—I mean never looked back—so the slo-mo pursuit was a cinch. I’d walk about a street’s length behind him, careful not to make much noise even at a distance, pause to light a smoke when he’d turn a corner, then hustle a bit to catch up. The dog loped along right at his side, keeping just as steady a pace and ignoring the cars, fire hydrants, and snowballing kids along the way. It was hypnotic how they moved together, all smooth, like they were on one of those conveyer belts that people ride at the airport, those flat escalator things.
But the weirdness wasn’t just in the style of the walk; it was in the goddamn length of the walk. That was the real surprise. I swear, we were trudging through the freezing cold for almost two hours. Two hours, this crazy old man walked! We weaved through the ghetto neighborhoods around my squat, down through Fejervary Park, and then sliced back and forth through neighborhood after neighborhood until we were miles away on the hills of McClellan Heights, where mansions look down on the icy Mississippi. I was beat by the time we got there, but the old man pivoted into his driveway without a single sign of fatigue, even though he must’ve walked at least twice as far as me if he was all the damn way out in my neck of the woods. All I could think was: how much exercise does this fucking Doberman need?
The house was a wide, two-story joint with about nine or ten trees on the sprawling front lawn, all reaching up to the sky with arthritic, clutching branches. It was well-kept but gray and a little bland for such a ritzy place. No lights were on inside, no smoke was coming out of the chimney, and nobody seemed to be waiting for the codger in a window. As I continued to stroll by, head down, nonchalant, I imagined a family could make a great home there. But with the man slowly creeping up to the door, unlocking it and leading the dog inside without saying hello to anybody, it only seemed like some kind of sad museum.
And museums are full of things with demonstrable value.
During our many drunken conversations in the squat, Grace had owned up to a whole load of shit she’d done before we met, from stealing earrings at the mall to siphoning gas in a church parking lot. I tried to play it cool when I came back from my long walk with the man, but she could tell I had crime on my mind.
When I borrowed my buddy Randall’s car a few days later, she was the one who zipped up my coat, put a ball cap on my head and shoved a cardboard box under my arm. After seeing the old man float past our street with his dog in the morning, she handed me the keys and I drove right up to his house, parking on the street. I grabbed the box, walked up the drive to the front door, and rang the bell just like a delivery man. Grace had told me to be obvious when scoping a joint out. People don’t notice obvious.
After a few minutes had passed and nobody came to the door, I wandered around the side of the house as if I were looking for a place to safely leave the package, scanning the surroundings for signs of nosey eyes. I probably looked guilty as hell, but the neighbors weren’t watching as far as I could see.
Around the back, where the yard plunged down into a ravine and the river revealed itself in the distance, I found a point of entry after a quick search along the icy path that ran the house’s perimeter. A small doggie door was built into the wall, almost hidden behind a large, chunky air conditioning unit. Its aluminum hatch only lifted outward, but after a few minutes of fiddling with my pocket knife, I was able to pull it up and peer through the opening at a darkened kitchen. I got to my feet and searched the yard quickly for a branch, being careful not to leave boot prints in the snow. Returning to the doggie door, I lifted the hatch again and pushed the branch through the opening into the kitchen, waved it around, then removed it and threw it back into the yard.
After ten minutes of waiting in the car, no alarms had sounded and nobody had come to arrest me. Okay. It seemed like the house could be entered through the doggie door without tripping alarms. But I could never fit through the door myself.
I passed the old man and his dog as I drove home to tell Grace.
Our plan was pretty basic. Grace would squeeze through the doggie door, find one valuable thing for us to sell and then slip out with it and drive home. On foot, I would follow the old man as he walked the dog so that we knew how much time she had. I spent some of our last money getting two disposable cell phones from Jim Tingle and told him I’d be back soon with something to sell him, if I was lucky. Randall lent me his car again
, this time for a fictional doctor’s appointment (the last time had been for “groceries”).
Early the next morning, Grace drove off to park near the old man’s neighborhood, and about two hours later, I gave her the call.
“I see ’em. He just crossed the bottom of our street. You’re good to go.”
“About time,” Grace’s voice whispered over the phone. “We’d better celebrate after this is all done.”
“I promise,” I said. She didn’t sound nervous at all as she hung up. My girl.
The man and dog walked the route for the next twenty minutes. I followed them at a distance, doing my usual stealth routine. The phone vibrated.
“You think anybody saw you?” I asked.
“How do you get this fucking thing open?” I could hear my knife clacking against the doggie door.
“I told you. You have to be real gentle.”
Clack. Clackety clack clack.
“Shit!”
“Grace, come on,” I whispered. “Just take it easy. Poke the point into the right side and lift. You can’t use a lot of force.”
“Shut up. You’re making it harder.”
She hung up. An SUV blasting music rolled past the old man and the dog but neither reacted, gliding along at their slow, steady pace. Another fifteen minutes and the phone vibrated again.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 14
