Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  What happens at the Gold Digger Saloon. I cannot speak of it. The ecstasy is the sun going nova in my brain. Nova, then collapsing inward, a snow crystal flaking, disintegrating, and then nothing left except a point of darkness, the wormy head of a black strand that bores its way to the core of everything.

  * * *

  We aren’t rich. The pool house is our compromise — as long as Ferris didn’t push for a mother-in-law cottage, I’d see she had herself a full length heated pool to do laps. Ferris was on the swim team in high school and college and she’s tried valiantly to maintain her form. The YMCA is a no go. Too many sluggish old people in the lane, too many screaming kids, too many creepy dudes in the bleachers. Thus, the pool house. A gesture of defiance in the face of brutal Alaska winters.

  I enter through the skylight. A long dead star field turns and burns over my shoulder.

  Ferris lies naked and icy pale against the dappled green water. Her eyes are closed. Occasionally her arms and legs scissor languidly. Beneath her is her seal shadow and the white tile that slopes away into haziness. Vapors shift across her body and carry its scent to me, sharp and clean amid the faint tang of chlorine. She daydreams on the cusp of sleep and I taste the procession of phantoms that illuminate her inner landscape. Mine is not among them.

  I descend like a great spider on its wire, then stop and hang in place. This thing that has hijacked and reconstituted my body, reduced my consciousness and placed it in a bell jar, is drawn to her. More specifically, that which I have become is drawn to something within her. I don’t comprehend the intricacies. I can only bear mute witness to the spectacle as it unfolds.

  A black spot stains the bottom of the pool. The spot spreads across the white bed, a ring of darkness widening as pieces of tile crumble into the depths. It is a pit, slackening directly below my lovely, frigid wife. My betrayer wife, my arm extending, my claw, hollow as a siphon, its shadow upon her betrayer’s face, and the abyssal trench an iris beneath. Wife, come along to Kingdom Come, come to the underworld.

  Her eyes snap open.

  “I didn’t fuck him,” she says. “I fantasized about it, plenty.”

  Monroe is absent from the scene, and that’s a shame. Every pore in me longs to drink his blood, to liquefy him, fry him, to have his heart in my fist. To ram his heart down her throat.

  “I didn’t fuck him. Elmer, I didn’t. I should’ve.”

  Her blood. His blood. Their atoms.

  I open my mouth (maw) to accuse, to excoriate, and the dead song of the dead stars worms out. She doesn’t blink, she repeats that she hasn’t fucked him, hasn’t fucked him. She projects her innocence in an electromagnetic cone meant to kill. She is entirely too composed, this fragile sack of skin and water.

  She says, “Are you here to hurt me, Elmer?” Her smile is pitiless, it cuts. “The time you came home drunk and forced me? There’s a word for you, hon. Don’t you remember what you’ve done?”

  I don’t remember. I seethe.

  Difficult to concentrate through the interference of her thoughts that explain via pointillism how Monroe opportunistically slaughtered me and then so much like the narrator of the “Tell-Tale Heart” had succumbed to guilt and paranoia and eventually fled the country. The FBI hunts him in connection with my disappearance. He could be anywhere. She suspects Mexico. Monroe always had a romanticized notion about Mexico and what he could do there, a super gringo lover man.

  The little shit swallowed her teary stories of my cruelty and violence. He’d done me in as an act of vengeance. An act that only earned Ferris’s contempt. She is utterly my creature and let no man cast asunder what all the powers above and below had seen fit to forge.

  I convulse with a complicated longing and snatch for her. She’s too quick. She rolls, sleek and white, and flashes downward amid a cloud of bubbles into the pit. Fool that I am, I follow.

  * * *

  We meet in darkness, each illuminated by a weak spotlight that dims and brightens with our breathing. I sense immense coldness and space pressing against the bubble where we reside. I am whole. My cloven skull and rotting flesh are restored. My mind is papered over with gold star stickers and crepe.

  She points an automatic pistol at me. I understand that it’s a present from her would-be lover. The barrel aligns with my eye. I have traveled through the barrel and been deposited in this limbo.

  “I warned him. Told him he’d never succeed. If I couldn’t kill you, then there was no hope for him.” She laughs and shakes the wet hair from her eyes. “Arsenic in your coffee every day for three months. Nothing. For God’s sake, I frosted your birthday cake with rat poison.”

  Now that she mentions it, now that her thoughts bleed into mine, I recall the bitter coffee, the odd aftertaste of the icing on my last cake. A skull and crossbones has hung over our marriage for years. Yet, I remain. What does it mean?

  “I hurt you, but I couldn’t kill you. Monroe couldn’t. Nobody can. You died in childhood. Maybe you were never born. Maybe the parasite that fruits your corpse is the only true part of you that existed.”

  Am I merely a figment? If so, I am the most rapacious, carnivorous, and vengeful figment she will have the misfortune to encounter. I strike aside the gun and reach for her. A black halo of light manifests around Ferris. Her arms spread wide and she becomes the very figure of a dread and terrible insect queen. The enormity of her eclipses my own.

  She clutches me and the sting slides in. “It was always here, love. In all of us, always.”

  It’s apparent that I’ve miscalculated again.

  * * *

  Reality has bent and bent. I look past the nimbus of black flame into her cold eyes. Reality goes right ahead and comes apart.

  Darkness rolls back to daylight. It’s spring and balmy. The breeze is redolent with sweet green sap and the bloom of roses. Guests and children of the guests clutter a lawn that’s too bright and too green to be real. “Death to Everyone” by good old Will Oldham crackles over the speakers. I’m stuffed into a poorly fitted tux. At my side, Ferris shines as radiantly white as the Queen of Winter.

  I have seen this, relived this, in a thousand-thousand nightmares.

  My hand overlaps hers as we saw the blade into that multi-tiered cake. She opens her mouth and bites through the icing, the bunting, and my brittle soul. I shudder and kiss her. It feels no different than kissing ice bobbed up from the bottom of an arctic lake. She inhales my heat and my vitality before I can inhale hers. She’s always been stronger, in the only way that counts. She always will be stronger.

  Oldham’s voice fades and the guests stare at us in hushed expectation.

  Nearby, a little girl in a black funeral dress begins to sing the “Hearse Song” to the boy she’s tormenting with malice or affection, take your pick:

  They put you in a big black box

  And cover you up with dirt and rocks.

  All goes well for about a week,

  Then your coffin begins to leak.

  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

  The worms play pinochle in your snout,

  They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,

  They eat the jelly between your toes.

  This time around, I do what I should’ve in the first place all those lost years ago. Instead of cutting a piece for the first guest in line, I grip the knife and slice my throat. Blood fans the cake and Ferris’s white dress. She throws back her head and laughs. I sink to my knees in the thirsty grass. The sun pales and contracts to a black ring. Red shadows pour through the trees, drench the lawn, and reduce the paralyzed spectators to negatives. I try to speak. Worms crawl out.

  * * *

  Ferris’s parents loved me. I first met them during Thanksgiving when she and I stayed over at the family casa — Ferris slept in her old room with the Prince poster and a mountain of heart-shaped pillows and teddy bears while I bunked in the basement on a leather sofa between her old man’s pool table and a gun safe.

  There was a tense mom
ent when she removed her shades and revealed the Lichtenburg flower of a purple knot under her eye. Ferris was so very smooth. She spun a story about getting kicked in the face during swim practice, and her family bought it. She wasn’t speaking to me except as required, probably hadn’t even decided whether to stay with me or toss her engagement ring into the trash.

  Hell of it was, at that early stage in our romance I didn’t care much either way.

  Turkey, gravy, pumpkin pie, and afterward, a quart of Jim Beam passed around a circle of a half-dozen of Ferris’s menfolk. Salt of the earth bumpkins who raised coon dogs and revved the engines on four-wheelers at the gravel pit and picked through piles at the dump for fun.

  You like John Wayne? one truck-driving uncle wanted to know. Shore as hail, I love the Duke! And with that, I was in like Flynn. My lumberjack beard, plaid coat, and knowledge of professional football didn’t go amiss, either.

  Her dad welcomed me to the family with teary eyes and a bear hug. I wasn’t “nothin’ like them pussies she usually brings home from college.” How right my future in-law hillbillies were! Not three days before that Clampett-style feast I’d beaten a UAA fraternity brother within an inch of his life for giving me the stink eye as I staggered home from the Gold Digger Saloon. I made the letter-sweater-wearing jock try to eat a parking meter. The whole time Ferris’s family exchanged jocular crudities at the supper table, my hand was in my pocket, caressing the frat boy’s braces, with a few teeth still stuck in them, like a God-fearing Catholic fondling his rosary. It was the only thing that kept me from stabbing one of those bozos with a steak knife.

  I gave the lot of those silly, inbred bastards my best aw-shucks grin, and daydreamed about how lovely and charred their slack-jawed skulls would shine from the cinders of a three A.M. house fire.

  Aided by booze and a vivid imagination, I survived dinner and into the following day. Driving home, the stars were blacked. Snow fell like a sonofabitch. Every now and again the tires slipped against ice and the truck shook. Dad’s ghost muttered in my ear. My heart knocked and I forgot to blink for at least forty miles. The high-beams carved a tunnel into the blizzard. Patsy Cline came on the radio out of Anchorage. Patsy sang “Crazy” and that was our song, all right.

  Ferris reached across the gulf from the passenger side and held my hand. Her fingers pressed cold and tight over mine. In the rearview there was nothing but darkness, snowflakes endlessly collapsing in our wake, and a black slick of road painted red in the taillights’ glow.

  (Little Miss) Queen of Darkness

  I: Initiation

  I write this: The cops don’t know what really happened in Eagle Talon. Lies, all lies. Ask Jessica, if I ever see her again. This isn’t about Eagle Talon, however. I’ve never even been. No sir, Bob, if it’s about anything, it’s about that debutant ball Zane throws in his basement at the tail end of high school, 1998. The unfinished basement with the raw earth and a tunnel that smells of mildew and dankness. The tunnel is maybe three by three and is actually a cleft in the rock of the hill upon which this house rests.

  I can’t forget that tunnel. It drills through my mind.

  Yeah, Shit Creek describes an imperfect circle right back to the bad old days. Oh, the party is rad, though: heavy metal, booze, drugs, psychedelic lights. The kids slam-dancing. Me with my hand on Stu Whitlock’s hip the whole time and nobody the wiser. Then that damned hick brat Dave Teague racing overhead, naked and covered in blood (so the legend goes), screaming his head off. Ruins everything…

  I also write: People call it this or that, but our club doesn’t have a name. It didn’t originate in Alaska. It was around before Alaska. We don’t suckle at the breast of a god, it suckles at ours. Unfortunately, devoid of context, that stuff reads like the Unabomber’s doodles.

  Next, I make a list. Were I to title it, the title would be “People Who Died,” like the song. Such an everyman tune because everybody can relate, right? The partial list is scribbled in a black moleskin notebook. I’ve left bloody fingerprints on the pages. Many of the names are illegible from the smears, or redaction with a magic marker. Names changed to protect the guilty. Four remain intact in truth and form. Hell if I know whether that’s significant or not.

  Zane Tooms & Julie Vellum: They could’ve been the power couple from the lowest circle of Hell. Alas, Zane already had a loyalist and Julie’s not the kind to need any. These are your villains. Nuff said.

  Steely J: Tall enough to play pro basketball. He’s Zane’s major domo. The Renfield to Zane’s Dracula. Loyal through thick and thin — and I’m not kidding, I literally mean that. We called Zane “Fat Boy Tooms” until his folks croaked and he started in with the horse de-wormer and got slenderized. Steely J stuck with him down the line. Steely is what you might call inscrutable. Looks nice, dresses nice, and plays nice, if a teensy bit of a cold fish. His features lag behind whatever message his brain is sending. Somebody behind the curtain throws a switch and he smiles. Or, he smiles and picks up a claw hammer and comes for you. The Sandburg poem about fog creeping on little cat feet? That’s Steely J. Except six-six with a hammer.

  Vadim: My buddy Vadim often brags that he’s an expert in Savate. He paid two hundred dollars for a six-week course at a strip mall. I let him drag me in once to meet the instructor (mainly I wanted to ogle some studly hotties kicking and stretching, but whatev) and the dude had a bunch of diplomas, certificates, and autographed photos of macho celebrities I didn’t care to recognize. The French version of hi-ya for an hour. Bo-oring.

  The strip mall closed shop when the economy cratered in ’09. Not before Vadim got what he needed, however. He asserts that Savate is the elite of the elite fighting arts, natch. I don’t know my foot from my elbow when it comes to violence. I’m a lover, always have been. That’s why I keep the numbers of a few bigger, tougher friends in my mental rolodex.

  Vadim talks lots of shit every time we go clubbing and the fraternity bros start hitting on me, which they totally do. I clutch his sleeve and say, “Whoa, there stud. They’re just being friendly. Get mama another margarita, kay?” Vadim shoots the bros a venomous parting glare and then toddles off to fetch my drink. His thighs bulge his cargo pants so that he really does toddle. I think of it as having my own Siberian tiger on a leash, except with pouty, pouty lips, and six-pack abs! Nice while it lasted. He’s dead too.

  End of list.

  * * *

  Go back, not the whole way, not to high school. Three and a half years is far enough. We have gathered, dearly beloved. Gathered to sign on the dotted line and change the course of our stars forever. What a load of crap. I’m motivated by fascination, boredom, skepticism. Some of the others are buggy-eyed true believers. Have at it, morons.

  The sun is bleeding out all over the Chugach Mountains. An inlet, ice-toothed and serpentine, lies below us somewhere, wrapped by mist that’s freezing into black pearl. I’m not captivated by the austere beauty of the far north as seen through frosty picture windows. My feet are cold and I’m bored. I’m an L.A. girl trapped inside an L.A. boy. This arctic weather is for the birds.

  Julie Five says to me, “Oh, Ed, quit sulking. You detest it so much, why’d you come? Nut up or shut up.” She finishes me off with a sweet as pie smile. I beam one right back. Anybody more than arms-length away might get the impression we’re peaches and cream. Big sister, little brother at worst. Then again, it’s an intimate gathering of former classmates. Most of the others know how it is with us because it’s been this way with us since junior high. Her nickname is JV, but I call her Julie Five. Our mutual acquaintance, the lamentably absent Jessica M, coined that bit of mockery. Sure, we’re supposed to pity Julie Five for cowering in a closet while her lover got noisily disemboweled by the Eagle Talon Ripper in the winter of 2012, but her sob story doesn’t move me — “victim-of-unspeakable-tragedy” is scraping the bottom of the barrel on a white trash reality show. Her sneaky path to fifteen minutes of fame and she didn’t even try to stop the murdering bastard. Oh, dear
heavens, no — she left that chore to her archrival, Jessica M, the girl who got the cover of Black Belt Magazine and interviews with every cable news show in existence. Good for Jess. Screw Julie Five. She’s cowardly, treacherous, and mean. She like totally vacillates between vocal fry and ending every sentence on a rising note. Basically the darkest valley girl in the history of valley girls. I’d feed her a cup of lye if I had some.

  Our host, Zane Tooms, stares at the sunset the way a man with an appointment compulsively checks his watch. He’s dressed in a white shirt and black pants. No shoes. He never wears shoes at home. His shirt is unbuttoned two notches. A metallic chain gleams from the opening. I’ve seen the pendant when Zane had his shirt off — a smallish lump of vaguely horrid metal, or bone. Its color shifts, the film of a lizard’s eye rolling aside. He folds his napkin, rises from his seat (throne) at the head of the table, and walks further into the decrepit mansion.

  The house juts from a knoll with an impressive view of tidal flats and occasionally the water. The knoll was a bear den until hunters exterminated the bears and poured concrete back in when-the-hell-ever. Exactly the kind of place natives would say, “Don’t build here! Bad medicine!” White Man doesn’t give a shit about any of that and here we are. Even so, the Tooms residence lacks the sinister gravitas of a classic, gothic haunted castle. Made over once too often, the latest reconstructive surgery has rendered it a queasy amalgam of art deco and ‘60s kitsch. His home might have been cozy in its heyday. He let it go to seed after the senior Toomses shuffled into the next life. He travels and can’t be bothered with upkeep. I’ve told him he needs a decorator because the ambiance sucks. Frontier chic it is not. Swear to God he doesn’t even live here, it’s so borderline derelict. If Zane confessed he only showed up to unlock the joint and turn on the lights half an hour before his guests arrived, I wouldn’t be shocked.