by Jan Strnad
She stood at the door and thought about running now. Why wait for the hand to grab her arm and twist it until she fell to her knees? Why wait for fists to knock her to the floor and hard-toed work shoes to bury themselves in her ribs? Why wait until she lay on the floor crying and begging his forgiveness and trying painfully to drag herself out of range of his anger? Maybe he'd break her leg again and she wouldn't be able to run at all. Why wait? Why not go right now? Why not run?
Because there was nowhere to run to. Hadn't her sister warned her, after the last time, that she was tired of seeing Madge all bruised and broken, and that if she didn't leave John after this she could just run to someone else?
Leave. They made it sound so easy. As if a forty-year-old woman with no skills could just rent an apartment with no money, no security deposit, no first and last month's rent. As if John wouldn't find her and kick the door down and drag her back home wherever she ran.
She peered into the darkness. She turned on the switch but the light was off at the lamp. She called his name again and there was still no answer.
For a moment she dared to hope that he'd left her. Just packed his things and left. How could you live with a woman who had split your neck while you slept?
"John?" she called.
"Upstairs," he replied, and Madge's hopes died.
Well, what did she expect? She was a murderess, after all. If John did beat her, even if he killed her, it was no less than she deserved.
She flicked the switch that would illuminate the stairs. The stairway remained dark. Had he removed the bulb, or did he break it in a fit of anger?
She set her foot onto the first step and began to climb. She didn't have to see the wallpaper along the stairs to know it was faded or see the carpeting beneath her feet to know it was worn thin. The details of the house were as familiar to her as the lines in her own face. The shabbiness of it depressed her. This was her house, this was her self, shabby and worn to bare threads. If John did kill her, maybe he would have the courtesy to put a match to it all, destroying the evidence of his crime and sending her ashes into the sky, soaring at last.
Her mother must have felt this despair all those years ago, when she took her life to escape Madge's father. Madge had grown up with the fights and the beatings. Her sister had run away when she was fourteen, but Madge stayed behind. Someone had to stay with their mother. If now and again she could divert her father's anger away from her mother and onto herself, maybe her mother would find the strength to put an end to the abuse. Maybe she'd see Madge being beaten and something inside her would rise up and break the spell of fear her father had woven over them all. Maybe she'd grab something...a poker or a chair or anything...and bring it down hard over his head....
Instead, her mother had swallowed poison and died a horrible death that left her husband's rage focused with unrelenting precision on Madge. When John Duffy started "sniffing around" (as Madge's father called it), he brought hope for Madge's own escape. He was strong and forceful. He would protect her from her father. And so they were married when Madge was nineteen and she passed from one hell to another.
She endured John's abuses but made one promise to herself. She would not die for him. She would not kill herself over a man the way her mother had done. She would find any other escape if it became too much to bear. Murder, if need be.
She continued her march. The railing wobbled under her hand, the stairs creaked in all the familiar spots.
As she neared the top of the stairs she could hear him up there, pacing. She looked up. The bulb in the overhead socket was gone, but there was a flickering light from down the hall. Not an electric light but something warmer and less steady, like a candle, but too bright for a candle. She reached the landing and saw that the light came from the bedroom.
"John?" she said.
"In the bedroom."
His voice was pinched, expectant. He was waiting for her, lying in wait like some great, hairy beast crouched in the corner of its cave, eyes afire, waiting for its prey to come stumbling in. Waiting to pounce.
She stepped hesitantly toward the open bedroom door. She could smell the burning wax. So it was a candle, or rather, many candles. Why did he remove the bulb? What was he planning that required candles? Some churches used candles. Some rituals....
A sacrifice.
Her heart pounded in her chest. Her throat constricted so she could barely speak. Her voice, when again she spoke his name, was thin and wavering.
"John?"
"In the bedroom," he repeated. "I'm waiting for you."
She wanted to turn and run, to lose herself in senseless flight. But what was the point? She couldn't run forever. If it was going to end, let it be now. Let it be here. Let him beat her to death if that's what he wanted, but let it be over once and for all. She deserved it. She was a murderess in her heart. She didn't deserve to live.
Her only prayer was that he do it quickly. Maybe he would be so angry that couldn't hold himself back. He would hit her once and knock her out and she wouldn't even feel the killing blow.
She walked across the landing to a yellow trapezoid of light on the floorboards that issued from the open door. It beckoned her with its warmth. She reached the very edge of the light and paused. This was her last chance to run. If she entered the light, if she so much as let it touch the tips of her shoes, the decision would be made.
She took one more step and turned her head to peer into the bedroom.
He must have dug out every candle in the house, she thought.
The room was ablaze with candlelight. John stood in the middle of it. His hair was washed and neatly combed, slicked back the way he used to wear it, and smelled of Wildroot. He wore his only suit. The vest was tight across his middle and a button was missing from the jacket. His shoes were brightly buffed and shining in the candlelight. The pants, judging from the way the zipper opened ever so slightly in a V, must have been fastened with a safety pin around the waist. He hadn't worn the suit in years. Ages.
"Do you remember?" he asked. He stepped forward. "Our first night in our first house, the power wasn't on yet but you insisted that we spend the night there."
My God, she thought, that was a hundred years ago.
"I...bought candles," she said. And John had griped about what a waste of money it was.
"It was the beginning of a new life." He walked toward her slowly, as if afraid of frightening her off. "Tonight was another beginning. I was born again, Madge. I'm a new man. Maybe I almost deserved what you did to me, I don't know. But I don't hold anything against you. We're starting over again. Starting fresh."
He was close enough to touch her now. She tensed as he lifted his arms, afraid of what he would do, but he only rested his hands on her shoulders.
"We have work to do," he said. "We'll do it together, you and me. I can't explain it yet, but you'll understand soon enough. You'll see. Everything's going to be different."
Madge couldn't believe her ears. Was he reborn, really? His eyes were so bright, like they were twenty years ago before they'd grown cold and mean. In any event, what could she do about it? She was trapped there the same as ever. If things were better or worse, it didn't matter. There was nothing she could do about it.
His hands on her shoulders began to weigh her down.
"It's been a rough trip," John said. "It was quite a shock, waking up in the morgue. Then Doc told me I'd died, and the Sheriff came around and told me how. They showed me pictures, Madge. They weren't pretty. I'm not blaming you and I'm not mad. But I'm tensed up. Very tensed up."
The hands were pushing her down. She knew now what he wanted. It was one thing she'd never given him, not so much because she was against it, but because it seemed to be what he wanted almost more than anything else. It was the one thing he'd never been able to force her to do, despite the threats and the beatings.
She lowered herself to her knees. As she lowered his zipper, she told herself that she was not giving in. Maybe it was a new
beginning. He wasn't threatening her. He'd forgiven her for a thing she'd done to him that was much worse than what he wanted now. It wasn't giving up to do this. It was an act of good faith. It showed she was willing to do her part.
The pressure on her shoulders remained as she drew him out of his pants, all hard and expectant. She looked up to see him standing like a saint in all that candlelight, the glow flickering over his face and glistening on his Wildroot-slickened hair, his mouth set tight but curling slightly at the corners, and she wondered if she knew what she was letting herself in for. She decided that she did not.
Oh, well, she told herself, you never did.
Seven
Deputy Haws stood in the dark back yard of the Culler house and looked up at the bedroom window. Tom's Honda was parked beside the house, his muddy shoes were on the back porch. So the boy was home.
Haws forced open the back door with the strength of the undead and shuffled his way inside. One foot had stopped working somewhere between the grave and the house. His good foot, thick with mud, sucked at the vinyl flooring of the kitchen. The other, dragging behind, left a brown smear. Bits of decaying flesh dropped from his body, landing ker-splop ker-splop in his wake.
Somehow, without passing through the living room, Haws was on the stairs that led to Tom's bedroom. His dead foot knocked against each step as he painfully heaved himself up the long flight of stairs. He gripped the banister with a deteriorating, lichen-covered hand.
Haws gazed up with his one good eye. It was glazed over and yellow with pus. The other eye had fallen out in the woods. Earthworms oozed from the socket like meat through a grinder. Haws' teeth were decayed, some were missing, and his rancid breath issued through torn lips in a visible yellow-green vapor.
His head twitched. It seemed too heavy for him to lift. Sometimes it sagged until his chin collided with his chest, and then he'd raise it again, looking up, his Cyclops eye fastened on Tom's bedroom door.
Then suddenly he was standing over the bed where Tom slept fitfully, embroiled in a bad dream. Tom tossed his head from side to side muttering, "No, don't, Haws, don't, stay away, you're dead, dead, Haws, don't...."
The room was starkly lit by the full moon shining in the window. Haws leaned his slack-jawed head over the sleeping boy. Drool hung from Haws' mouth and dangled over Tom's face. Longer and longer grew the thread until it broke free and deposited itself on Tom's lips.
Tom opened his eyes. He beheld the grinning face of Deputy Haws hovering over him, staring at him with one yellowed orb, haloed by the full moon in the bedroom window, breath hissing from his throat like gas through a cracked pipe, maggots overflowing his mouth and the stench of death exuding from his putrescent flesh.
Tom screamed.
He sat bolt upright to find himself in a bedroom bright with morning sun. A mockingbird outside the window chirped another bird's song. Tom shook his head to clear the cobwebs.
"Shit," was all he could think to say.
His mother called to him from downstairs.
"Coming!" he said.
He hauled himself out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom. His foot slipped on something wet and gooey and he fell to the floor.
"What the hell...?" he said, and then he saw the muddy footprints leading from the hallway to the bathroom. They weren't his. They couldn't be his. He'd left his shoes outside on the porch.
The bathroom door was closed. Carefully he climbed to his feet and followed the muddy prints to the bathroom. He threw open the door.
And stared into the grinning face of Deputy Haws peering at him with one yellowed eye, maggots overflowing his mouth and the stench of death issuing....
Tom cried out as his eyes popped open and he found himself flat on his back in bed in a bedroom bright with morning sun and a mockingbird outside the window chirping another bird's song and his mother calling to him from downstairs.
"Jesus," he muttered, awake or dreaming, not certain which, "how long is this going to go on?"
***
Tom stared at the sunny side up eggs on his plate and wondered if he had ever seen anything more repulsive in his life. The bad dreams had left him with a queasy stomach that had been sour enough when he went to bed.
The events of the previous night were beginning to feel like a nightmare. He'd have given everything to make it a bad dream or make it right or just make it all go away. It was so weird to think of Deputy Haws lying out there in the woods, under the ground, and that it was Tom and his friends who'd put him there.
It was all Galen's doing, of course, but the law wasn't as lenient on accessories to crime as it used to be. Just being there when somebody shot somebody else was enough to get you a mandatory sentence if the circumstances were right. Didn't you have to be committing a crime or something for that law to apply? But shooting a cop...man, that was serious shit no matter what. And he knew that covering it up was a mistake that would come back to haunt them.
Was that what his dreams were about?
The swinging door to the kitchen banged open and Tom jumped a mile, expecting to see Deputy Haws' rotting face and moldy-green body come shambling through. He was only slightly relieved to see his mother, especially since Peg wore the tight-lipped, scowly look that said she was about to jump on his case about something.
"You look like crap," she said.
"Thanks."
"Late night."
"That's what Fridays are for," he said.
"Fridays are for going on dates with girls, going to football games, going out for dinner and a movie. For renting a tape and making out on the sofa after your mother goes to bed. Whatever happened between you and Cindy, anyway?"
Tom shrugged.
"Didn't work out," he said. He glared at her through his eyebrows to show her that any good humor she tried to spend on him would go unappreciated. He'd rather she just ragged him out. She got the message.
"I don't want you going out with that gang tonight," she said.
"It's not a gang."
"Then what is it, Tom? Please, characterize it for me. Is it a charitable organization...you're out doing good deeds for the underprivileged?"
He glared at her in silence.
Peg propped her arms on the table and leaned toward him.
"Look," she said. "You're old enough to be out after midnight. I don't care about any sort of curfew. You could stay out until six in the morning and I wouldn't care, not if I knew you were all right and weren't getting into trouble. But I don't like the boys you're hanging out with, and I especially don't like that Ganger boy."
"Why is he always 'that Ganger boy' to everybody? Why doesn't anybody just call him 'Galen?'"
"Because that's what he's made himself. And I don't want people calling my son 'that Culler boy.' You used to be a good student, once upon a time. Until you started hanging out with those...with Galen and Kent and the others."
"They have nothing to do with it."
"They have everything to do with it. They're ignorant. They don't value education. They don't value anything but those souped up cars of theirs and getting drunk and--"
"You don't know that! You don't anything about them!"
"I know enough." She was thinking that they were just like Tom's father, but a comment to that effect would spin them off to a place she didn't want to go.
Peg sat there looking at Tom stonily. Tom stared at his eggs and they stared back. Big yellow eyes. The yolks looked like pus.
"Your eggs are getting cold."
"I'm not hungry."
Peg sighed. "They're a bad influence on you."
"Who? The eggs?"
"Don't be a wiseass. You know who I mean. They won't be happy until they drag you down to their level. You were a good student before. Now I never see you crack a book."
"You'd have to be home for that, wouldn't you?"
Peg's jaw set and Tom could tell from the way she started breathing heavily through her nose that he'd hit a nerve.
"What do you
think waitressing pays in this town?" she asked after an ominous pause. "You think I'm rolling in twenty dollar tips out here? You think I want to work double shifts? I do what I have to to put food on the table...food you don't even care enough eat!"
The guilt was starting to roll in like a fog that settled over Tom's mind, obscuring everything. Where did it come from, this fog? He didn't have anything to feel guilty about...well, except the dead cop he'd helped bury in the woods. But what he was feeling now was old guilt. Old, familiar guilt.
He knew how hard his mom worked. He knew how hard it'd been on her since the divorce, and since she and Tom's dad weren't married when he died, there wasn't even any insurance money. He should've been working, but at what? Busboy in Ma's Diner? God, but Anderson sucked.
"I'll eat the eggs," he said.
Peg pounded the table. The dishes jumped and so did Tom.
"I don't care about the goddamn eggs!" she screamed. "I just want you to straighten the hell up! Quit hanging out with losers! Take school seriously! For Chris'sakes, Tom, I just want you to use your head!"
The implication that he was stupid cut Tom to the quick.
"Well maybe you've got two brain-dead kids in the family!" he snapped, with instant regret. That was low, bringing Annie into it. He wished he could call the words back and stuff them back down his throat where they belonged.
Peg's hand, moving with the speed of reflex, whipped out and slapped him hard across the face.
Tom sat back, stunned. He shoved his chair away from the table. It made a groaning noise and toppled onto its back, and he left it that way as he strode out of the room.
"Be here when I get home!" Peg yelled after him. She heard him tromp upstairs, heard his bedroom door slam shut.
Tom flopped down on his bed and somehow the motion made him think about Deputy Haws' body flopping into the hole they'd dug. He wished he could trade places with the dead deputy right now. He wished he was dead and buried and didn't have to hassle with all this bullshit.
