by Jamie Mason
• • •
Jason remembered his sanctuary in the woods by the sinkhole. At first he went on sunny days, sweating in the low-hanging summer shade, sometimes reading, but always whittling time from the hours in each day that Harris could use against him. A forecast of rain would make him nearly despondent, stealing his options, until he realized that umbrellas were as fully functional in the woods as they were on the sidewalk. It turned out, rain on the skin wasn’t so bad either. He learned to clear his mind and feel nothing but the drops tickling through the maze of his hair, turning to little rivers that slipped over his cheeks, rushing to merge and cascade off his chin. He felt the fabric of his clothes swell and grow heavy, chilling his skin at first, but losing the battle to his own radiant heat, ending up all musty and warm. The rain meditation took the place of untroubled sleep and left him restored, and slightly distanced from his problems.
Harris met him on the stoop, waiting for him one stormy afternoon. He looked Jason over with a sneer. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“It’s raining,” answered Jason, still dripping, but relaxed in every muscle and able to meet Harris’s eyes in a singular moment of unbothered confidence.
“Never heard of an umbrella?”
Jason only smiled and, in it, took a slice from Harris’s satisfaction. He looked, for once, distinctly ill at ease in his needling. He didn’t stay long that day.
He showed up the next night with four sealed boxes for “storage.” He’d also brought Bella. Bella, it seemed, had forgotten to bring her laugh. She kept her eyes downcast and bloomed crimson while Harris made a show of nuzzling her neck and tonguing her earlobe in front of Jason.
“Okay, Har—, Harris.” Jason rued the day each time he faltered at the name. “I get the point.” He whispered to Gary in the hallway to safeguard Bella’s embarrassment, looking back over his shoulder to test the distance to her, hunched over a drink at the kitchen table. “You’re making her cry.”
“Oh, what?” Harris hissed back. “You think she’s something you need to act like a big hero over? That she’s your girlfriend?”
“No. It’s just you don’t need to do this. She didn’t do anything.”
“She’ll sleep with anybody. You know that, right? For some blow, some weed, a few drinks . . . It doesn’t matter to her. What, did you think you were special? Pffffft. I got you laid.”
“I know that.”
Harris studied Jason from an aggressive few inches away and shook his head. “So ungrateful.”
• • •
Harris had stayed away the full four nights’ length of his tether, and Jason had settled into a nearly peaceful sleep when the irksome triple ring of the bell announced his return. Jason slapped his hands against the bedspread and ground his teeth. But he also didn’t get up. It chimed again and Jason threw himself over and pulled the pillow down to block his ears. The bell rang on at intervals throughout the night, and Jason’s startled heart scorched his blood every time, but he would not get up. In the lulls of up to an hour, Jason dozed, but only once did Harris beat a barrage of blows on the door with his fists and his feet. Jason’s breath congealed in his throat, locked solidly out of his lungs by the memory of Harris at his angriest and then magnifying that picture to imagine what shape his temper might take to match this random act of defiance. Jason’s stomach boiled his dinner into something caustic, and his guts sizzled in it all night.
And still he would not answer the door.
In the morning, before his shower, Jason tiptoed to the windows and surveyed the street for a man or a motorcycle out of place. He checked again after he’d dressed, and then once more before breakfast. Behind the wheel of his car, Jason dared enjoy a touch of satisfaction, if not buoyancy, until just as he pulled the lever into reverse, the flat of Harris’s hand whacked down on the windshield, his body suddenly blocking the gold and green light that had been filtering in through the trees.
A clatter of thrown keys grated on the hood of Jason’s car.
Harris nodded at them and crouched to get his face close enough to the driver’s-side window to be heard through the glass without shouting.
“Your boss’s keys. I left everything else, but I scratched the shit out of his ride. You pull a stunt like that again and somebody’s going to get hurt.” Harris slapped the glass over Jason’s face again and was gone.
• • •
All of these things Jason endured. He fled to the rim of the crater in the woods whenever he could. He stole time away from work for it if he had to. He minced words and strides everywhere else, trying to be small and ignored. He calculated that he could outlast him, that Harris would get bored and drift off to a new diversion. Jason certainly didn’t count himself as interesting enough to earn lifelong harassment for using a last name, one time, in a moment of heat.
In hindsight, it was funny that he expected Harris to change while never sparing a thought for his own limitations. It never occurred to him what sort of man might split out of his own brittle composure if it ever lost its glue.
• • •
Harris brought a monkey. Of all the things Jason never expected, a monkey would have been right up there with a volcano and the ashes of Albert Einstein.
“It’s a chimpanzee, not a monkey,” Harris offered. “Help me carry the cage in. The little bastard’s heavy. Watch your fingers. He bites.”
“You can’t leave it here,” Jason said, huffing big breaths to wrestle the heavy cage inside.
“Yeah, I can. I have to.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Feed it. And keep it hidden. You can’t tell anybody it’s here.”
“Feed it what?” Jason pleaded. “And who am I going to tell?”
Harris smiled. “Exactly.”
He promised to come back for it within three days. By the fifth day, Jason was as frantic as the boxed monkey. The creature screamed and shook the wire mesh of its pen with terrifying strength. Jason locked his bedroom door, listening for the chimp’s coop to finally give way under its frustration. It hissed at him when he shoved food through the slot, baring its teeth and tensing for an attack if Jason wasn’t quick enough at banging the food dish into the sliding tray with his trembling hands. Other times, it waved its fingers through the gaps and whimpered like a human child until Jason felt moans of sympathy aching in his own throat.
Jason sealed up all the windows in the house and pulled the drapes and still worried that the sound would carry. He bought some hours of ease by lugging his small television from the bedroom into the kitchen. The monkey seemed to like cartoons and commercials, but some random images would set it to screeching, frantically rocking until Jason was sure the entire cage would tip over and the poor thing would be trapped on its side until Harris came back.
If Harris came back. Jason had often fantasized about Harris’s motorcycle launching him over the handlebars, headfirst into something hard. Preferably brick. Before Patty died, Jason had never thought of someone else’s death as an escape hatch. He’d never seen the possibility of an upside to a tragedy before, and he considered it the darkest thing his mind had ever drummed up. He had shamed himself with his relief that no one knew she was going to leave him; doubted that he could be a decent human being if he could see anything about her untimely death as fortunate for him. But now, with the practice for it laid, he couldn’t help imagining the freedom he’d feel if Harris met with an accident.
Until then, he’d never thought it through very well. He’d fantasized about liberty and the private celebration he’d stage. He’d find a bar and buy a drink for every sad sack sitting there, then leave with an enigmatic smile. He’d plant a tree in the clearing by the sinkhole and record its progress in pictures. He’d buy himself that dog.
But he forgot to calculate into the scenario the fact that he’d never know. If Harris tripped down a well or got eaten by a bear, Jason would be none the wiser. His first problem would be that he’d find himself stuck with a miserable, a
nd likely illegal, primate. But beyond that, he’d sit in angst for God knew how long before he’d dare breathe easy again. He’d look over his shoulder, flinching for that wicked grin, for years. Maybe forever. He didn’t know a thing about Gary Harris—where he lived or what he did with the time he wasn’t tormenting or burgling. He didn’t know Bella’s last name, or if she knew any more about Harris than he did himself. He didn’t even know the make of the motorcycle that he’d been wishing a malevolent malfunction on.
But Harris did return—after nine of the longest days that Jason had ever suffered through. He was exhausted. He’d missed a week of work. The house reeked like a zoo; the floor and walls were grim with the dried and drying muck the chimp would splash and fling to amuse itself or when it lapsed into one of its frequent rages.
“Jesus.” Harris looked Jason over as part of the trashed landscape. “You need to open a window in here.”
Jason’s face was numb with fatigue, eyes expressionless, and his voice a dazed monotone. “I would, except there’s a screeching monkey in the kitchen.”
Harris wiped his clean hands down the legs of his jeans. “Look, I appreciate it. I’m sorry it took me so long. This one was complicated.” He sounded, for a change, infused with sincerity.
“Get out.”
“I said I appreciated it. What the fuck’s your problem?”
“Get the cage and get out of here.”
“Fuck you, man. You pick the goddamnedest times to get ballsy. I’d punch your lights out if you smelled any better than that fuckin’ monkey.”
Jason ignored him, only reached down to grip his fists around the carrying bar of the cage. The chimp’s wet eyes locked onto Jason’s; they burned with accusation and welled deep with hatred and desperation and a heartbreaking understanding of its plight. Jason clamped his lips over the sob that pressed hard against the roof of his mouth. He kept his head down, face averted, while they huffed over the strain of loading the blanket-covered box into the van that Harris had borrowed for the errand. Jason stomped back into the house, banging the door shut and slamming the lock into place without another word.
• • •
The doorbell rang over the next days, but never so insistently as it had that one night. The phone racked up scores of calls from blocked or unknown IDs, but Jason wasn’t answering any of them. Through the office window across the hall from his desk, he thought, on several occasions, that he saw Harris’s bike on the far side of the filmy floor-to-ceiling glass, but it barely raised his pulse. Harris wouldn’t risk being seen. Jason knew that.
Since meeting Harris, the weather had lingered over summer, drawing it out through a golden September and into a brass October. The mornings and evenings bookended warm days with a bracing chill. Jason left a jacket in his car for his treks into the woods. He felt nothing. He would have called it calm, except that in its anticipation of a storm, it would have been too clichéd. He was a blank. He bought a new television just for something to do, but he wouldn’t have minded sitting in his chair staring at the plain white wall.
Inevitably, a night came when a few rings of the doorbell wasn’t the last of it. Jason heard a key scrape in the lock. Harris pushed open the door and they faced each other over the threshold.
“What? You think I couldn’t get a key?” Harris stepped past him, making sure it was far enough into Jason’s space to cuff his shoulder. “Little brother, I don’t care how pissed off you get at me, this bullshit isn’t an option. Shut the door.”
Jason did.
Harris laughed. “God, you’re easier to play than my grandmother.”
But Jason wasn’t listening well enough to take any offense. Seeing Harris in the doorway had pulled his mind back into a dream he’d had just that day. He wasn’t sure he would ever have remembered the details until he’d been reminded of them with that exceptional sneer that only Harris could pull.
Jason had fallen asleep outside after tidying the glen by the sinkhole. He’d taken to keeping a box of trash bags in his car, now the self-appointed caretaker of the wooded chapel. The other parishioners had obviously held a service with cheap cigarettes, cheaper beer, and campfires. The frequent visits from the cops had discouraged their irreverence, but not eliminated it.
Jason had shivered with disgust after forking a used condom into the bag with a stick, and he worked out the lingering picture of it by kicking a thick bed of fresh leaves over the clearing. Contented and out of breath, he slid down against the trunk of his favorite tree, maybe three yards from the edge of the drop-off. It was the last large oak to have dug in its toes and remained. Everything else close by was small, scrubby pines or spindly new elms. Jason had leaned over once and seen a basket of his oak’s roots jutting out from the wall of the abyss. It was anyone’s guess if it would last in its precarious disobedience. The hole wanted it. That much was clear.
But for now its notched side was the perfect place for Jason to wedge his back against and snooze. In the dream, he’d been cradled in a strangling cage of boughs and vines. He wasn’t comfortable, indeed it was crushingly claustrophobic, but at least it held him out of Harris’s reach. Harris harangued him from the base of the tree. The wind rocked Jason’s twiggy hammock, and although he knew he was safe, fear sizzled through him whenever he’d tip far enough to see Harris still down there, waiting, smirking.
Suddenly, as dreams do, the scene turned and Jason wasn’t in the tree, although he could still see a version of himself, his back reclining in the webbing of laced branches. He was on the ground, face-to-face with Harris, who grinned and snapped his teeth at him. Jason looked up, longing to be reunited with the part of himself swaying above, safe and imprisoned in the stranglehold of the tree, but each time he’d bent his head back to his present view, Harris was closer to him and the tree was nearer to his back, pressing him forward.
Harris, Jason, and the oak were inched to the lip of the sinkhole until they were essentially all taking up the same space. The bole of the tree was cold against Jason’s back, Harris’s breath hot in his face. In a roar and gray-brown blur, the oak opened to pull them in. They were wailing inside the tree, mauled, ground together. High above, the roil and rumble shuddered up through the cradle of branches holding the rest of Jason as the tree chewed its Harris-Jason meal.
Jason had woken with a start, a cool, misty rain sweetening the sweat on his skin. A jet plane roared overhead, a pale echo of the racket in the dream. Jason had already forgotten the details before the contrail faded from the sky. He took the garbage with him and tut-tutted over the thoughtlessness of others, hating just a bit that there were others at all.
Now backing through the hallway, Jason was sweating again, tripping over his own feet, shuffling away from Harris, and cringing at his fury. Lost in the memory of his dream, he’d not heard a single thing Harris was saying.
“Are you even listening to me, you faggot? I’m talking to you. No, you know what? I own you. I’d kick your ass, but I don’t know if I can stop myself from killing you.” Harris shoved Jason hard in the sternum, knocking him against the sharp molding that framed the living-room doorway.
“Don’t push me,” Jason said, a plea with an edge to it.
“Why not, Jason? Huh?” Harris hit him in the chest again, harder this time. The door frame bit into his back. “Why not? You’re pushing me—not answering the door, not taking my calls, moping around every time I ask you to do one little goddamned thing.” Harris sidled up too close, his nose beaking down into Jason’s. “I’ve been easy on you. You have no idea. But you’re so ungrateful.”
Jason felt the waves of rising temper thumping from Harris until it seemed the room itself had a heartbeat booming into the air. But with a tingling, cold surge, he felt a countering strength climbing the rungs of his own spine. His back muscles cramped around the wood poking into it. “Back off me, Harris.”
“Well, look at that. It finally suits you.” Harris pinned him against the wall, his shoulder and hip pressing, grindin
g Jason into submission. “Say it again,” he purred through gritted teeth. “Call me Harris like you mean it.”
The pressure of Harris’s body revolted Jason. The dominance that wanted him to shrivel, to invert and receive, lit the last length of Jason’s fuse. He bent his knees and Harris relaxed a fraction, thinking he’d buckled Jason’s will. But it was only for purchase. Jason drove all his strength down through his legs and locked his arms against Harris’s chest.
The two men stumbled together, grappling and swinging at each other through the small living room, cracking their shins against the coffee table and toppling the lamp from its stand. Jason latched onto Harris, scrabbling for every hold and lock he could keep, his hands slipping against sweating skin and shifting clothing. Harris was stronger, faster, and more experienced, but he couldn’t draw any distance from Jason for leverage or for swinging room.
Near the fireplace, Harris had twisted around, so that Jason was left clinging to his back, one arm crooked in a choke hold on his neck.
“ . . . fucking kill you . . . fucking kill you . . . ,” gagged Harris, over and over, thrashing to dislodge his passenger. He spun and lost his feet to the raised hearth. Harris spilled out onto the floor. What little air he had left was forced from him as Jason crashed down onto his back.
In the fall, Jason had thrown out a saving arm and, in the motion, snagged the drooping cord of one of the antique phones that lined the mantel. It thumped and clattered onto the carpet beside them, rapping Jason’s knuckles hard as it settled over their sprawl.
Everything seemed too soft for a good grip: Harris’s smooth back, flexing and bucking under him, the short nap of the rug, sliding away wherever his fist searched for a handhold. And then there was the solid, angled density of the phone. Jason’s right hand closed around its sturdy weight. He raised it over his head in the time it took Harris to crane around to see it come hurtling down.
11
How long would it take to dig him up?
