It was very early evening. Sunlight faded from the ground above me. The earth was decomposed wood mingled with sand. The vegetable matter fermented, a warm musk, like maturing tobacco.
And then I remembered what a special night this was, with a child’s joy at remembering that this is no ordinary morning—presents are waiting.
My skin was seething with life. My eyeballs, my tongue. Tiny legs searched me, an army under my clothes, up my nostrils.
I shrugged out of the earth, climbing through the shell of a decayed log. I strode, a living map, lips and fingertips busy with the city of ants, all the way to the creek. With a sigh like an apology I knelt in the current, and lay down flat on my belly on the rocky bed.
The water was flowing more quietly than the night before. The current did not entirely cover me. I had to roll on my back and look up at the trees while the stream washed me clean.
It didn’t work. Hundreds still clung to me. Button by button I labored to remove my clothing. Undershirt, Jockey shorts, shoes, black stretch socks. Until I was naked.
The gunshot wounds had healed, the scar tissue gray. One of the bullets had entered between my ribs. A gunshot rips the body. I have always been conservative about certain personal articles. I would wear a favorite undershirt until it was thin as gauze. I used to keep Levis until holes appeared at the knees.
This was my body. My bones, my skin. I felt a worried compassion for all that was left of me. My penis was shriveled, my skin blue in the poor light. Until then I had tolerated the ants, finding their attentions drily amusing. Now I shuddered. I rinsed my clothes carefully in the stream.
I tied my shoes with fingers that slipped, bent clumsily. There was a struggling ant on my sleeve. A sense of fellowship made me hesitate. I blew on him gently until he vanished.
A trail broke the shrubbery beside the stream, the lights of houses in all directions, muted by branches. Someone was dribbling a basketball, steadily, followed by the silence and the metallic chonk of the hoop. Meat was frying, blood and fire.
On wings, I ascended the hill. A deer lurched out of the underbrush. She was riveted, staring downslope, looking at the place where I had been an instant before.
My wings embraced her. She shied, kicking. My fangs broke the fine, dry grassland of her hide. A tick scurried away, a trickle of mercury. I supped as she ran, and when she faltered, crashing heavily through a crown of ferns, I clung harder. Her blood tasted of new leaves, of the young green of the oak trees, the early irises, fiber and membrane. I had an emotional rush of images—smells, sounds, sunlight through tender grass.
Her hooves clattered. She dashed across a street, catching the attention of a woman gathering groceries from the trunk of a car. The deer sprang and stumbled, forelegs crashing into a compost heap. I loosened the trap of my fangs and let her go. She tossed her head, cantering sideways, until she found the ancient trail again and kept to it, hard, all the way up the hill.
I studied the rambling house from outside. Smoke drifted feebly from the chimney. A swing had fallen from a tree, a tire under a long tangle of rope. A tiny green figure stood attention on a stepping stone, a plastic soldier.
The killer’s smell was all over the ax, the chain saw, the battered steel wedge. I crouched under the kitchen window, pine needles crisp underfoot, envisioning what was happening inside.
They had eaten tuna and macaroni. The empty tuna cans were secured in this metal garbage can, the lid weighed down with two large rocks. A discarded microwave oven leaned against a stump, its glass window shattered. I heard laughter from inside, two children playing with a squeaky toy.
Rebecca would plead again: leave him alone.
I made my way up the back steps. The back door was unlocked. Perhaps some of the powers of the doe were present in my caution, alert to the sound of a newspaper page turning, children giggling in a distant room, water squirting. A new microwave oven sat on the sink, next to a cookbook open to a photograph of a casserole. I was able to make out a word: French.
Tuna and French Onion. I could read! At the same time my resolve began to shrink. A can opener, a jar of instant coffee—perhaps I had made a mistake.
I spoke where I was, staring at a kitchen cupboard. “Tell me about Rebecca.”
But I spoke before I was prepared to, startling myself. A red kettle on the stove vibrated with the sound. A wooden salad bowl crammed with seed packets, recipes, letters spilled over onto the table. An oven glove, red plaid, hung on the wall.
You heard me, don’t sit there reading the newspaper pretending, praying.
There was no answer. I had the sickening feeling that my voice no longer reached human ears. I could hear myself, but no one else would ever understand me.
Gentle, civil. “I need to talk to you.”
In response there was a long silence. I trembled. I had no voice. Joy, doubt, hope. As a living man my emotions had never surged through me with such strength.
“Who’s there?” he demanded.
Perhaps doubt exists as a whetstone, to give a sharp edge to the will. It was like a chance to meet a long-lost brother, a meeting dreamed for years. The voice was not welcoming. It was taut, comically suspicious. I entered the living room.
He didn’t know how to build a fire. A few flames shivered around a largely uncharred log. I found myself in a spacious, wood-paneled room with a shaggy carpet, various shades of brown, the sort of carpet design to not show wear. The easy chair was still warm. It moved, barely rocking.
A woman put her hands on her hips in the doorway. She was looking back, away from me, into the bathroom. “I’m not happy about what I’m seeing,” she said. “This room is a complete disaster.”
A can of beer was open on the sidetable, yeast and malt sugars. A newspaper was spread across the floor, a trail of printed pages marking his retreat.
I picked up a metal bowl, puzzled by what I saw, dessicated crumbs. It took me a heartbeat to realize that she had spoken. “What do you want?” The woman held the front of her blouse, squeezing the cloth, one hand on the doorframe.
I lifted a hand, reassuringly, but not giving her my full attention. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had followed the wrong man, and, what was worse, I couldn’t make sense out of anything. It had taken me half a minute to identify a few crumbs of potato chips.
Get out of here! She could not say this, the words choking.
Her eyes were blue. I admired her blowzy, blond attractiveness, her show of courage falling apart now that she had a better look at me. I gestured apologetically with the bowl.
One of the children was calling her, that urgent syllable, Mom. In my mind I could see it all—the warm bath, the talcum powder, the clean towels. I had lived like this! I could not quite believe it, but I knew it to be true. I had lived a childhood of comfort, an adulthood of ease.
If only I could set eyes on the children’s faces, see them, pink and wet from bathing. If only I could approach them, lay a hand on their heads, feel their hair, their wet arms, help dry them off, kiss them where the skin was so suffused with rose the pressure of my lips would force a white shadow.
I put the bowl down carefully, on the coffee table next to a nutcracker. The bathtub drain opened, and water begain to ebb into the plumbing, gurgling, the flow down and under my feet.
She wanted to scream. Her words were there on her lips, but I silenced her, touching her hair, combing my fingers through it, unfastening the clasp that held it into a bun, letting the long blond hair fall free.
I had failed Rebecca.
It was something this woman would understand. I could tell her my story, the long search, my instincts faltering. What woman could listen to a story like this unmoved? The children could listen to my tale, too. I thought I had run my quarry to the ground, but instead I found a man at peace, at home, reading.
Red splashed her, covered her.
Something hit me. I did not understand, but more importantly I could not lift either arm. I could not take a st
ep. I could not turn my body, or cry out.
Scarlet gushed, her hair dark with it. I couldn’t speak. I could not breathe. Something had my throat. One knee buckled. I could not stand upright. There was a dark, iron taste at the base of my throat. I staggered.
My head rolled, forced to one side by a heavy, unyielding wedge. I gripped something, a span of wood. It was slippery. I could not lift my head, and I could not turn it. I could not move my tongue and my windpipe sucked air.
The head of a weapon was buried in my neck. The woman screamed as I slammed into a wall, a shelf of porcelain animals crashing. I got a grip on the shaft of the tool. I sawed it back and forth, levering it, my blood spattering the carpet. I pried the ax free, and turned to find the man who had done this.
The force of the turn flung my head from my shoulders. My vision yawed, my head connected by a slim sinew. The ceiling swung upward. My severed neck tendons spasmed, writhing far into the stub of my neck. Until this moment there had been no pain.
The ax fell to the sodden carpet. I put my hands to my head and put it back where it belonged. The pressure of spouting blood nearly forced my head off again, and my legs were unsteady as I tried to turn from one direction to another without unseating my skull.
A new pair of earphones lay beneath a lamp. A magazine was folded open to a photograph of a concert hall, a conductor, a grand piano. When I saw my assailant at last he was picking the ax out of the widening flood in the carpet.
All I had to do was fit the carotid arteries back together. My heart pumped the hot fluid into my arms through the great brachial highways, down my legs through the femoral aqueduct. Only in the one crucial point of severance was there serious injury, but it was grievous. I tried to grip the rubbery worm of a neck artery in my fingers.
I saw how this woman had been taken in, how little she knew about him, how much he had lied to her. I could taste his envy of Rebecca, his failure, his refusal to play the paino because he could never equal Rebecca. And because he could never court her successfully, never seduce, never win, he had killed her. I perceived all this as he lost his footing, stumbling into the easy chair, the newspapers splashed with red.
“Don’t!” he cried. A tall man, stout, blond hair, big, square hands.
The woman had grabbed the telephone off a pile of magazines. She was hyperventilating, and when she had someone on the line she couldn’t say anything. Her breath was loud, each exhalation a scream.
“Don’t,” he said, more calmly, taking the phone away from her, hanging it up. The hair on his arms was blistered with my blood. She clutched at him, at the phone.
I felt tipsily peaceful. I was struck by a memory so vivid I wanted to share it with both of them, interrupting their frenzied argument. Once, in my childhood home, the fish pond had to be drained. It had never been a success, back beyond the arbor, a concrete pond of black moss and two albino carp. Mosquitos festered in late summer, and frogs discovered them, and at last my parents decided to drain the pond and start over.
The gardeners used a small, one-cylinder pump, the water saturating the lawn, and I helped rake the black grass, scrubbing the pond with bleach. When it was all done, I was disappointed. Standing beside a plastic bucket of slow, stubbornly twisting fish, I looked down into the bare cement bowl and realized that I had expected a surprise, a treasure, a golden secret.
And all I had was this. This emptiness, this numb, pleasant sensation in my arms and legs.
35
He slapped her. Then he hit her, not as hard as he could, but enough to make her hair fly out from her head. “Stop making all that noise,” he said. She had her fists up, covering her ears. The children were in the bathroom, bawling.
At first I was sure I would be able to climb to my feet at any moment. I lay on my side, my ear on a heating grille in the floor. A strange inner pain awoke in me, a desert spreading, dehydration, hard drought. The children were crying so hard their noise echoed in the heating ducts.
He put his arms around her, neither of them able to speak, rocking, dappled with blood. I could not move. I was certain I did not have a heartbeat. Then it pumped, once. Blood squirted briefly from my neck.
“You don’t know anything about me,” he said, his voice broken. “All you know is—why don’t we call the police.”
“You killed him!”
“I hope so.”
“Tell me—” She had to stop to take a breath. “Tell me why.”
He sounded almost patient when he said, “Please shut up.”
“He wasn’t doing anything, Eric” She wanted to stop talking, but she couldn’t, now that she had her breath. “We get people like this in the woods. Mental hospitals let them go.”
Eric. I had always admired the name—it smacked of Norsemen, exploration of the high seas.
He said, “Go shut the children up.”
She didn’t argue but stood where she was. Her hair was stringy, clotted.
My heart kept squeezing, at about the same rate as a crocodile’s on a winter day. I felt systole, and blood gushed a little more feebly than before. My heart seemed permanently contracted. At last the muscle relaxed, and the valves in my chest fell silent for another age. So it was a sort of pulse, I consoled myself. There was so little fluid in my body that my eyelids dragged over my eyeballs, and stuck.
I managed to open one eye, barely. Eric wiped his hands and forearms on sheets of paper towel. The crumpled, sodden paper littered the floor. His voice was almost kind as he insisted, “Would you go tell the kids to shut up?”
The kids had fallen quiet. It was a shaky quiet, though, and what he meant was: go find out what they’re doing.
When she was back in the room, he continued, “I’m going to cut this carpet out, the whole thing. It’s cheap stuff, tell the landlord Randy puked on it. Go get me all the knives you have.” He was keeping his voice steady, but it was a pitch higher than it should have been.
She hurried from the room. A drawer opened, shut. Soon, I promised myself, I would move one of my hands. She pulled a new-looking Bowie knife from its sheath, the light from the steel reflecting on the ceiling.
“They don’t make this kind of knife to cut up carpet. I told you to go get every kitchen knife in the house, all those fancy knives, every one of them.”
“They don’t make those to cut up carpet, either.”
His voice was very quiet. “Go get the kitchen knives, Helen.”
He stood over me. He began to bend over to take my pulse but couldn’t bring himself to touch me. He looked at me, then looked at the mess on the carpet. There was a dimple in his chin. He massaged one of his arms, kneading the muscle. I could read the look in his eyes: maybe he should get the ax again.
She came back with a handful of blades, dropping one on the floor. I could contract my right hand, make a fist, release it. He selected a long butcher knife with a wooden handle. It was the wrong knife for the job, and his hands kept slipping off the hilt. He made a grunt of effort, stabbing the carpet. He worked on his knees, cutting, sawing. “Move that chair out of the way.”
“Let me do it,” she said.
“I have to use your car. Go out to mine and get the gas can from the trunk. Put it in the backseat of the Chevy.”
She was gone a long time, and twice he rose to his knees and listened. There was the sound of a trunk opening, the slosh of fuel in a can. By now I could wiggle all my fingers. My severed tendons shuddered. Soon, I promise myself, I would try to shift my head.
She entered the room again, flushed, panting. He knelt to his work, slicing the carpet, tearing it. “What are the kids doing?” he asked.
“I told them to dry off and get into their jammies.”
There was silence from the bathroom, the tub empty. It seemed his attack had never happened, except as a forgotten, faded prologue to the sound of carpet tearing. “You better use this knife,” she said.
He accepted it from her. The work went more quickly. There was a thought-out non-logic to
everything they did; as long as they had some sort of plan he wouldn’t hit her again. “You told me I could stay here, and you promised you wouldn’t ask a zillion questions. You liked it, didn’t you. A man with secrets.”
Her voice hard, she said, “He’s still alive.”
“He can’t be.”
She said, “Look at his eyes.”
He glanced at me, made himself give me a long look. She was on her hands and knees, gathering fragments of a porcelain dog.
“You can clean that up later. Tell the kids to hurry up and get into bed. I’m going to take a shower, change my clothes. I’m going for a drive. I want you to promise me something.”
She didn’t respond.
He held the knife, pressing the ball of his thumb against the blade. The flesh of his thumb was indented in a fine line where the steel pressed it. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “I need you to promise me something.”
She said, “I think his foot moved.”
“Can you promise me, Helen?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to tell the kids happened out here.” She sounded firm, but not as sure of herself as she wanted to be, an elementary school teacher refusing to panic. “Randy already asked and I told him to mind his own business. I believe in being frank with children.”
He fell into the easy chair. He shook his head, meaning: let me rest a minute. He grunted and, without getting up, drew the handle of the ax toward the chair.
Once during a tour of the Natural History Museum in San Diego, my father and I were shown into a library by a smiling, white-haired woman. The woman made me feel terribly shy. At the time I had no idea why, in that lack of self-knowledge peculiar to children. I realized later when I saw her photograph in a magazine that she was beautiful, refined. She and my father made what I ignored as medical chit-chat. So when a certain drawer was pulled out I was unprepared. I should have been warned, but both adults had ignored me, joking about money and politics, the dead language of adulthood.
The Judas Glass Page 18
