The Dispatcher

by Jahn, Ryan David

  Ian sets the hatchet down on an end table and gets to work.

  He’s sitting in an easy chair watching TV when, thirty minutes later, the first groans escape Donald’s throat. He picks up the remote from the arm of the chair and hits the power button. The sound of a sitcom laugh track is cut off and the screen goes blank as tomorrow. He looks over at Donald. He is naked, hands and feet taped to a wooden chair. His head hangs down, chin resting on his chest. A bit of drool hangs from his mouth and drips upon his hairy belly. His greasy hair hangs down from his head. Blood has dripped from his hairline, run down the side of his face, and begun to dry to brown. He groans a second time, lifts a head he momentarily can’t seem to hold steady, finally does manage to hold it upright, and looks around. His face is twisted with pain and confusion. After a moment, his eyes meet Ian’s.

  ‘Donald.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing h—’

  But the last word catches in his throat, the question apparently no longer of concern now that he realizes he can move neither his arms nor his legs. He looks down at his wrists. They are held in place by duct tape. As are his legs. He is still a moment. Then he shakes violently in the chair, trying to pull himself loose. His face purples in concentration and exertion, his hands form fists, his toes curl. He cannot get loose. His body relaxes again and his chest heaves. He swallows and looks at Ian.

  ‘So what do you want?’ After that display of violence his voice is surprisingly calm.

  ‘A man after my own heart,’ Ian says. ‘Skip the chit-chat. How about that weather, did you hear what Cora did to an eggplant at Albertsons, John Roberts has been arrested again. I want information.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Information. You know what that means?’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘If there is one, I suspect you’ll get there first.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Where’s your brother headed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your brother. Henry Dean.’

  Ian pushes himself up to his feet, feeling lightheaded but trying not to show it. The pain is tremendous, the pain-killers pumped into him at the hospital finally wearing off. He stands motionless a moment, thinking he may be sick. He isn’t.

  Once he’s sure of himself he picks up the hatchet from the end table on which he set it and walks toward Donald. He simply lets it hang from his fist.

  Donald looks from the hatchet to Ian.

  ‘You can’t do anything with that.’

  ‘No?’

  Donald smiles, shaking his head.

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘You’re the police.’

  ‘I’m just a dispatcher these days.’

  ‘You still can’t—’

  ‘There may be consequences, but I can do whatever I want, Donald, because those come later, and right here, right now, tonight, it’s just you and me alone with an axe.’

  Donald swallows, the smile gone. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘But I don’t know—’

  Ian sets the hatchet blade down on Donald’s bare leg. Donald flinches. It must be cold. Ian drags it gently across the pale skin from the inside of his thigh to his knee. It’s not quite sharp enough to draw blood from pressure of its own weight, but it draws a thin pink line across the flesh.

  ‘Thing is,’ Ian says, ‘what you know and what you don’t know—that’s less important than what I think you know. Less important for you, I mean. You may be telling the truth right now, Donald. It’s possible. But I don’t believe it. And what I believe is what matters. Again, it’s what matters for you. Because I’m going to take you apart one piece at a time until I get the information I want. The information I believe you’re hiding from me in that thick fucking noggin of yours. Do we understand each other?’

  Donald licks his lips. They’re dry and chapped. He looks from the hatchet to Ian’s eyes. Ian looks back. He can tell Donald is sizing up the situation, deciding what he will say, and Ian hopes, for Donald’s sake and his own, that the man says the right thing.

  Instead what he says is, ‘Maybe I don’t believe you either. Maybe I think all you got is talk, and maybe talk don’t intimidate me.’

  ‘Questioning my sincerity right now would be a mistake, Donald.’

  ‘You’re lying. You don’t have the sack to—’

  Ian slams the hatchet down into the floor, and lets go of it. It stays there at an angle, held by the wood into which it’s been imbedded.

  Ian watches Donald’s face. For a moment he does not seem to realize what’s happened. Then he looks down at the floor. The hatchet’s blade is stuck between Donald’s right foot and his two small toes. The small toes lie on the green carpet looking like grapes that have been hiding under the couch for the last six months, shriveled and ancient, practically yellow raisins. Then the blood begins to flow.

  Donald’s breathing gets strange and heavy. He does not scream, but his breathing gets labored and a series of groans escapes him, and he looks at his foot unbelievingly.

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You just cut off my fucking toes!’

  ‘I was just trying for the pinky toe. Hatchet isn’t exactly a precision tool.’

  ‘Put them back. You can’t fucking do that. You’re the police.’

  ‘That’s the kind of thinking that’s going to get you into trouble tonight, Donald. You need to understand that I can do whatever I want, and you need to understand that I will.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  He closes his eyes. He breathes in and out.

  Ian watches him, feeling strangely detached from everything that is happening. There have been times when merely seeing an old man struggle down the sidewalk while pushing a walker in front of him has broken his heart: thoughts of the man sitting alone at some cockroach-infested diner eating a three-dollar bowl of soup, the only dinner he can afford on his pension; the pictures of his dead wife that surely litter the small house in which he lives; the house itself in disrepair; the lonesome bed; the going to sleep without knowing if tomorrow will come; the hope that it does not. Nothing more than a liver-spotted hand gripping a walker has broken his heart, but here he is staring down at fear welling in a man’s eyes and he feels nothing but contempt. Contempt and hatred. This man knows where his daughter is and he’s not talking.

  Soon he will be.

  He leans down, picks up the toes, wraps them individually in torn pieces of paper towel, and sets them in a glass bowl into which he’s broken several ice cube trays. Then he pulls the hatchet from the floor. Blood drips from the blade.

  Very soon he will be.

  ‘Sooner you talk,’ Ian says, ‘sooner you help me get back what I lost, sooner I stop chopping—and you get to the hospital and have a chance of getting back what you lost.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Donald says.

  ‘Have it your way,’ Ian says.

  He swings the hatchet.

  Ian stands in the bathroom staring at his own reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror above the sink. He looks very tired. He looks very sick. He’s having a hard time breathing. He turns around and looks over his shoulder at his back in the mirror. There is a red spot about the size of a dime on his orange button-up shirt. The place where the bullet came out. He tore the stitches while swinging the hatchet. It hurts like hell, especially since whatever they gave him for pain at the hospital is wearing off, but mostly he’s glad he did not tear the catheter from his chest.

  He sits on the toilet lid and puts his elbows on his legs and his face in his hands.

  He has taken all of Donald’s toes and the man has still not talked. He has to start on the fingers next. But first a moment of peace.

  He sits silently and thinks about nothing.

  Somewhere a tumbleweed rolls through desert sands.

  ‘Okay,’ he says after a few minutes, and gets to his feet. He opens the me
dicine cabinet and looks through the bottles there, knocking several into the sink below before finding some 50-milligram tramadol tablets in an orange prescription bottle. ‘Take one tablet by mouth every four hours, as needed, for pain.’ He thumbs the cap off and pours three or four pills into his mouth. Then turns on the water, brings a palmful to his lips, and swallows. He pockets the bottle and wipes at his chin before heading back out to the living room where Donald waits and bleeds.

  ‘For all I know he went down to Florida to try to catch a fishing boat to Cuba.’

  That’s the sentence that loses Donald the pinky finger on his right hand—the hatchet also cutting halfway through his ring finger. He swings the hatchet down into the arm of the chair, taking off a small chunk of wood along with the finger. The finger drops to the carpet like a dead bird.

  Donald groans and clenches his teeth and grimaces with cracked, bloody lips. The groan stretches out, becoming a sob. Tears stream down his face.

  Ian picks up the finger, rolls it in paper towel, and sets it among the other digits. The ice is beginning to melt, making a bloody soup in which pieces of Donald float. Ian thinks of going to the fair when he was a kid, of bobbing for apples. His stomach clenches.

  Turning back around to Donald he says, ‘Did you try that one on the police, too?’

  Donald doesn’t respond. He simply glares at Ian through bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Do you want to try again?’ Ian says.

  ‘You’re no better than he is,’ Donald says between labored breaths as tears stream down his face from bloodshot eyes. ‘You’re no better than he is.’

  ‘Then you know what he is.’

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘He’s a piece of shit.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘I’m a man trying to get his daughter back.’

  Donald actually laughs. Taped to a chair, toes hacked off, fingers on his right hand now gone too, naked in a pool of his own blood—he laughs. ‘You think Henry doesn’t have justifications for what he’s done? You’re everything he is.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve done nothing. I’m just a man protecting his brother.’

  ‘Then you made your choice too.’

  Ian brings the hatchet down on the left arm of the chair, taking off the two middle fingers on Donald’s left hand. Donald clenches his teeth. Blood merely oozes from the wounds. When Ian began this thing there was much more bleeding, but now most of the blood is already on the outside, and what little Donald has left is hesitant to leave him. Each new wound bleeds less than the one before. Donald is pale. Weak and pale. He’s already momentarily lost consciousness once. Ian doesn’t know how much longer the man can hold up. But he’ll find out.

  Donald glares up at him, defiant.

  ‘Tell me where he is and I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘Don’t try to lay what you are on me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You motherfucker,’ Donald says. ‘You relentless, heartless motherfucker. Don’t you try to lay on me what you are. Saying I made my choice. I didn’t choose for you to come in here with a hatchet. I didn’t choose to be bound to a chair. I didn’t even choose to have Henry for a brother. At least admit what you are. You’re . . .’ he stops talking, breathing hard, and his chin drops briefly to his chest before snapping up again, ‘you’re no better than he is. You’re just as willing to . . . just as willing to hurt . . . I hate . . . Fuck you both.’

  Donald’s chin drops to his chest again, but just as it drops his head snaps up once more. For a moment his eyes are lost. Then they find focus, and Ian, and Donald glares at him.

  ‘I’m not the same as your brother,’ Ian says.

  ‘You’re no different.’

  ‘My daughter is an innocent. All those little girls were innocents. You’re no innocent. You might try to tell yourself you are, that you never did anything, but we both know different. You know what he is. You probably have always known. But you never stopped him. You could’ve stopped him but you never did. That makes you an accomplice. He stole my daughter, my life, and you knew. You knew and you did nothing. Every day I saw you and you said nothing—for years.’

  ‘That doesn’t make you right.’

  ‘I don’t care if I’m right,’ Ian says. ‘I want my daughter back.’

  Donald’s eyes flutter and start to roll back in his head, but he manages to hold on to consciousness. Just barely, by all appearances.

  ‘I gave her books. I even gave her lessons when I could. History, math. I checked on her. To make sure she was okay.’

  ‘But you didn’t do what you should have.’

  ‘I did what I could without betraying my brother.’

  ‘I want her back.’

  Silence for a long time, then: ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine what?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. He doesn’t . . . he doesn’t deserve to be protected from the consequences of what he . . . I’ll tell you where he’s headed, but you have to tell me some—’ He stops here a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing. ‘You have to tell me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?’

  Ian is silent for a long time, in part because he is not certain of the answer. He knows he told himself he would only go this far if he absolutely had to, but he doesn’t know whether or not he was lying.

  You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?

  He licks his lips, and after a while he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  FOUR

  Ian is on the road before first light. He lay down last night after he was finished with Donald, after he had gotten what he needed from the man; he was exhausted and in pain and did not have any choice in the matter, it was lie down or fall down, but he set the alarm for four o’clock and is after Henry before the morning sun breaches the horizon.

  After the first five minutes on the interstate, during which Bulls Mouth lies to his left like a pile of tangled Christmas lights, most of which are broken, the town is history and he sees little more than the gray strip of asphalt that is the road rolling out before him. The lights of the small town are replaced by a vast flat nowhere decorated occasionally by scatterings of trees that can barely be seen in the darkness. Fireflies dot the air here and there, and Ian drives through them. They splatter on his windshield, and his wipers leave glowing streaks smeared across the glass. He cannot see much of anything beyond the road. It is pleasant to drive that way. It shrinks your world to nothing but the road in front of you: everything there is is what your headlights splash across. Everything before you is comprehensible. The drone of the tires is pleasant: a song to send you to sleep. There are no other cars on the road.

  He drives this way for some time, time itself nonexistent. Time means nothing when every moment is like the one that just passed. He stops for gas at a Citgo in Schulenburg at some point, but as soon as he’s back on the road, it’s as if it didn’t happen, like a dream after waking. Then, around six thirty, with the sunrise on the flat line of the horizon behind him splashing into his rearview mirror, something to signify that minutes and hours have gone by, he arrives in San Antonio, passing the Shady Acre Tavern, Lone Star Truck Equipment, Southern Tire Mart, and a couple dozen other businesses that skirt the city. He finds a Denny’s on Frederickburg and eats a Grand Slam Breakfast and drinks five cups of coffee. When he is done he tips his waitress, Doris, twenty percent.

  By just past seven he is back on the road.

  Maggie sits on the ground behind the house, Beatrice beside her. They silently watch Henry cover Flint and Naomi with dirt. It took him a long time to dig the hole into which he dumped them, grunting and levering out hard chunks of earth, but the filling of it goes quickly. His shirt is off and tucked into the back pocket of his Levis, and he’s covered with an oily layer of sweat and dripping with it. His face is red. He digs the shovel into his pile of dirt and dumps it over the bodies, one load of dirt
after another.

  Maggie feels sad. She could not bear to watch Henry dragging Flint and Naomi to the hole; to see how Flint’s arm flopped lifelessly as Henry rolled him into it; to see Naomi stare blankly with one eye, the other covered in blood from a knife wound in her forehead; to hear the potato-sack thud-thud of the bodies hitting the bottom of the hole. She has seen so much death lately. She never wants to see it again. And she liked Flint and Naomi. They helped when they didn’t have to. You don’t repay someone who helped you by killing them.

  Henry told her if she kept her mouth shut they would not be killed, but she did keep her mouth shut and they were killed anyway. Henry lied.

  He finishes covering the hole and pounds the dirt down with the flat of the shovel, and then throws his shovel into the bed of his Ford Ranger, which he drove around back of the house earlier this morning.

  After that, but before digging the hole that would become Flint and Naomi’s grave, he removed the license plates from the Ford and threw them out into the field. Now he pulls open the door and takes out a pair of guns, and puts them into Flint’s Dodge Ram. He puts the long rifle behind the seats and tucks another smaller gun under the driver’s seat. Then he takes the boxes from the bed of his truck and puts them into the bed of the other.

  When he’s done he takes his T-shirt from the back pocket of his Levis and wipes his sweaty face on it, and then slips back into it. It is covered with moisture and smeared with dirt.

  Maggie wants to run—if she could just get away everything would be okay—but she feels certain Henry would catch her.

  He caught Naomi. He caught Naomi and she was a grown up. He caught her and he stabbed her in the face and the neck and the chest, and he dragged her to the back of the house by her hair and dropped her and kicked her even though she was dead, and covered her with a blue tarp that he pulled from a stack of cordwood and dropped pieces of that wood onto the corners of the tarp to keep the wind from blowing it off the body. She watched him through a window, working in the circle of the back-porch light. There was blood on his hands when he was finished and he reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt and rolled his hands around in it before dusting himself off and coming inside. He pulled the steak knife from his back pocket and dropped it into the sink as if nothing had happened. As if the blood on it did not belong to a man and a woman who had never done anything but help them. As if nothing terrible had just happened at all.