Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala

by Rick Hautala

  I gave the cops my alibi, and it was solid. When the shots rang out, I was in class on the Portland campus, lecturing on Shakespeare's use of horse imagery in Richard II, more than twenty miles from my house. You can't go against the testimony of a roomful of graduate students.

  About then, one of the policemen came around behind the desk and noticed the Colt in the desk drawer. Eyeing me suspiciously, he asked if he could take a look at the gun.

  Sure, I said.

  There was no denying now that I owned a gun like the one used to kill my wife. After he inspected it for a moment, he put it back on my desk.

  "Look," I said, a bit nervously as I hefted the gun. "This sucker doesn't even work. It's a model or something." I opened the chamber, showed them that the gun was loaded, clicked it shut, and then with a flourish, pressed the barrel to my temple.

  "See?" I said, and before either of them could react, I pulled the trigger three times in quick succession.

  "Nothing happens. It's a fake."

  They were unnerved by this display, but it seemed to satisfy them. After thanking me for my cooperation, they left, saying that they'd wait in the hallway until I felt ready to come with them to the morgue to make a positive identification of my wife.

  But they had no more than swung the office door shut behind them when shots rang out in my office. I had put the gun back on my desk and was turning to pick up my coat when the center of the Dartmouth Christmas Revels poster blew away. I turned and stared, horrified, as the top row of books on my bookcase suddenly jumped. I saw a large, black, smoking hole in the spine of my dissertation. Then the pencil sharpener by the door exploded into a twisted mess of metal. Three more shots removed pieces of wallboard and wood from my office wall.

  With the sound of the six shots still ringing in my ears, the two policemen and detective burst back into the room, their revolvers drawn and ready.

  "You said that gun didn't work," one of them shouted as he stood braced in the doorway, his revolver aimed straight at me. His expression shifted to one of confusion when he saw that the Colt wasn't in my hand. It was lying on the desk, exactly where I had put it before they left.

  " I have no idea what the hell's going on here," the detective said, "but you'd better come down to the station until we can check out the ballistics to make sure."

  I was in a state of near shock I'm positive my face had turned chalk-white. An icy numbness rushed across my cheeks and down the back of my neck as a terrible realization began to sink in.

  It had been almost—no. It had been exactly twenty-four hours ago that I had aimed and shot the Colt in my office.

  Six times.

  And nothing had happened … until now.

  And this bit about the ballistics test had cracked my nerve. I mean, at this point I was already convinced that it hadn't been coincidence. The shots I had banged off twenty-four hours earlier must have been what did in Sally. If the cops checked it out, the ballistics would be a match.

  And what about good ole' Walter Altschuler?

  Was he dead, too?

  With a sickening rush, I remembered what the Devil had said the night he gave me this gun … It was a Colt .24. A specially modified Colt .45.

  I tried to force myself to remain calm, but damn my soul to hell. I had pointed the gun to my head as a beau geste and pulled the trigger three times. I remembered— now—that when I had done that, I had smelled a trace of spent gunpowder and sulfur … as I had yesterday morning at my house when I had targeted Sally and Walter, and then again in my office.

  Just then Joan Oliver, the department secretary, poked her head into my office—cautiously, I might add—to inform the policemen that they had a phone call. I started to lose it, knowing exactly what it would be. I fell apart completely when, seconds later, one of them came back and informed me that my wife's attorney, Walter Altschuler, had been found shot to death in his car in the Casco Bank parking lot in downtown Portland. He had three .45 caliber bullet wounds in his head.

  I finally knew that I'd been had.

  I'd signed the damned contract—in blood. I had the damned gun. It had worked. And the Devil had cheated me but good in the bargain.

  So while I've been sitting here in the jail cell, after coming to my senses this morning, I asked for some paper and a pen. If I'm wrong, I don't want to tell my story and be committed to the psycho ward. I still might be able to get away with this.

  But if I'm right … if I'm right, it's been just about twenty-four hours, and I want to have all of this written down to leave a permanent record before those bullets from Hell blow my hea—

  The Compost Heap

  Merit Parker finished the job about an hour after sunset, and now that it was done, he was sitting on his back porch steps, beer in hand, congratulating himself for getting it done so quickly and with only a small amount of real mess to clean up. His face and hands were smeared with mucky black earth, but he didn’t mind … not at all. He actually reveled in it. Just as soon as he finished his beer and took another five or ten minutes to enjoy the peace and quiet of the evening, he’d go upstairs and take a shower.

  “Yes-sir-ee bobcat,” he said, taking a long sip and letting it slide slowly down his throat in several gulps. “Peace and fucking quiet.”

  Merit had been surprised by how much blood there had been in the old girl, but then again, he thought with a chuckle, he shouldn’t have been too surprised. What with all those rolls of blubber and pulpy muscle, there probably should have been gallons more. It was a good thing he had caught her outside; otherwise, there would have been a helluva mess in the house to clean up. These days, with all that modern detective stuff cops have, even in a small town like Hilton, Maine, he figured they would have eventually found some minute trace of blood or saliva he would have missed cleaning up. No, catching her off guard outside by the garden where he could easily turn in the topsoil to bury the spilled blood had been a pure stroke of fortune.

  And now? … Peace and quiet … Sweet Lord Jesus in Heaven, the peace and quiet.

  This farm hadn’t known quiet like this since—hell, since before he married the bitch back in ’67.

  As he listened to the soft strains of a whippoorwill up on Watcher’s Mountain, Merit wondered why the Christ he had waited so damned long to do it. Certainly over the thirty-five-plus years of their marriage she had provoked him plenty, but there had never been any one thing that triggered it, that put him over the edge. Living with Lydia had simply become a constant, irritating strain on his nerves. When he finally did snap and did something about it, he hadn’t acted out of rage or impulsiveness. He had planned it all quite carefully, biding his time, and then he had dispatched Lydia with all the cool calculation of a killer from one of those slick spy novels. He didn’t act at all like a man who had been pushed far beyond his limits. What it all boiled down to was this—he had simply become numbed to the constant, daily irritation of living with her, and he had finally done something about it. His remaining years were going to be peaceful, no matter what.

  The stroke of inspiration, the one part of the whole thing he hadn’t counted on, was cutting her up into little pieces and burying her beneath the compost heap out behind the barn. That sucker generated so much heat it actually steamed in the winter. Why, back in the seventies, some of those hippies who lived in one of those communes over on the other side of Watcher’s Mountain had actually run their water pipes under their compost heap to get hot water. Merit suspected that would have gotten it to about piss warm, but now he laughed with glee when he considered how in the coming months, the worms and grubs and heat of rotting vegetation would reduce Lydia’s body, big as she was—the girl dressed out over three hundred pounds—into a mound of rich, black, spongy mulch. It would take—what? He wasn’t sure. Maybe a couple of weeks; certainly no more than a month or two.

  “Finally found a good use for yah,” he muttered as he raised his bottle of beer to his mouth and gulped some more. “I’ll spread yah around th
e tomatoes ‘cause I known you liked ‘em. Prob’bly get me a bumper crop this year.” When he took another slug of beer, he snorted so hard it stung the back of his nose and made him sneeze.

  Coming out of the gathering darkness, a squadron of buzzing mosquitoes strafed him. Waving one hand over his head to drive them away, Merit heaved himself up off the porch step to go inside. He was planning on having at least a couple more beers before retiring for the night. He wondered when he should call the police and report her as missing. He definitely should take a shower first, clean himself up, then sit by the open window in the living room, watch a bit of TV—whatever he wanted to watch, not friggin’ Jeopardy—and then go to bed in a peaceful, quiet bedroom with no beached whale sagging down the other side of the bed, keeping him awake half the night with her infernal snoring.

  That was his intention, but when he glanced over at the barn, his intentions suddenly changed.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered when he saw a small edge of the compost heap poking out from behind the back of the barn. He tilted his head back, guzzled the last of his beer, and just stood there for a moment, staring at the compost heap. He was positive he had shoveled everything around back just so he wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded of Lydia every damned time he saw it. But damned if there wasn’t just a bit of it he could see from the porch, even in the darkness.

  “Well, I guess I gotta finish ‘er off for good,” he muttered to himself as he walked back to the barn and grabbed the shovel he had used earlier to do the deed. Working by the faint light of the crescent moon, he quickly scooped the last remnants of the compost heap well back behind the barn and out of sight. When he was finally done, he wiped his hands clean on his coveralls, returned the shovel to inside the barn door, and went up to the house. He was satisfied, now, that Lydia was—finally...permanently—out of his life.

  * * *

  He awoke in his recliner to the sound of the TV blaring high-pitched static and a flickering, snowy pattern. Bleary-eyed, he rubbed his face with the heels of his hands and shifted up into a sitting position. For an instant, he looked in panic over at the couch, half expecting to see Lydia sitting there, glaring at him over the top of her knitting.

  “You comin’ up to be soon, Honeybun? … You’re drunk on your fanny, you are, ain’t yah?”

  But then he remembered what he had accomplished earlier that evening, and he smiled to himself as he slowly stood up. His shoulders and the small of his back ached like hell from the work, and something in his lower back cracked when he stretched his arms over his head and took a deep breath. After reaching over to turn off the TV, he closed his eyes and stood there in the middle of the living room floor, listening to the absolute silence.

  Damn, it was quiet. Even the whippoorwill in the distance had fallen silent. The only sound disturbing the summer night was the low buzzing of insects bumping against the window screen. Merit tried to bend down to pick up his empties, but a twinge of pain from all that shoveling caught him like a knife blade in the small of the back, so he waved his hand at the bottles, telling himself they’ll be there in the morning, and turned to head upstairs to bed. He was about halfway down the hallway to their—no, his bedroom when a soft sound barely at the edge of hearing caught his attention.

  “What the—” he whispered, He turned around slowly, straining to get a direction on the sound. He hurried back downstairs to the living room, thinking maybe he left the TV on. The screen was dead. His eyes flicked back and forth, and then widened when the sound came again, and he realized it was coming from outside.

  Raccoons raiding the garbage was his first thought, but as he leaned on the windowsill and put his good ear close to the screen, he knew it was no raccoon.

  Not unless it was one great big mother-fucking king of the raccoons because he could see … something smack-dab in the middle of the driveway.

  The moon was already down, so all he could make out was a huge slouched, black shape. It looked to be about the size of a cow or maybe a fat deer lying down in the yard, but damned it he could see a head of a tail on the blasted thing. It sure as shit didn’t look like anything living. As far as Merit could see, it was just a big, old … thing.

  “Jesus H. Baldy-eyed Christ,” Merit whispered when his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, and he realized it was the compost heap, right there in the middle of his driveway.

  “How in the name of Christ ...?”

  His hands started shaking as he leaned on the windowsill, staring out into the night. Tiny prickles of cold danced up and down his back, and intensified with a sudden jolt when the sound that had first drawn his attention came again.

  It was a low, wet, sucking sound that made him think of someone’s boot, mired in deep mud and sucking back when they tried to lift it up.

  But that wasn’t the only thing that gave him a jolt.

  Even as the sickening sounds were vibrating in his ears, he saw—or thought he saw—the compost heap move. Like a wounded animal down on its belly, it heaved and lunged forward … toward the house.

  “Just a trick o’ the eye,” Merit mumbled to himself, unable to tear his gaze away from the window. He was vaguely aware that his fingernails were digging into the soft wood of the sill. The tendons on the backs of his hands stood out like pencils under his skin, and the stitch in his back came again, sharper.

  He held his breath until it burned in his lungs as he waited for the sound to come again. All the while, he was wondering how in the hell the compost could have gotten out into the driveway.

  Had some neighbor, passing by in the fields at just the wrong moment, seen him when he brought the shovel blade down on the back of Lydia’s neck?

  Maybe they had, and they had also seen how he had disposed of her, so they had moved the compost heap out into the driveway now as a way to torment him.

  Or maybe, by some wild fluke, a wild dog or other animal—maybe raccoons—had smelled Lydia’s remains moldering away in the compost and had dug down for the bones, spreading the compost all around. If that’s what happened, though, how had it all collected into such a neat pile in the middle of the driveway?

  “Damn’it’tall!”

  There had to be some reasonable, rational explanation, Merit knew, but he also knew what he had to do right now. He had to get that frigging compost pile back out behind the barn and make goddamned sure no part of Lydia was peeking out in case the cops or a nosey neighbor came poking around. He dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a flashlight, and then went out into the night, heading straight for the shovel and wheelbarrow in the barn.

  The wheelbarrow rattled in the ruts of the dirt driveway as he pushed it over to the compost heap. For just a moment, he paused and played the flashlight beam over the pile, looking for some sign, some indication how that damned thing had gotten out there. He didn’t see any footprints in the dirt, and it didn’t look as though any animals had been snuffing around. The compost heap itself was as smooth and pat as he had left it, only it was here in the driveway, not out behind the barn. Cursing softly under his breath, Merit doused the light so a neighbor wouldn’t see it, and began shoveling the compost into the wheelbarrow.

  As he worked, Merit kept expecting to turn up some part or another of Lydia’s body. Certainly parts of her—especially the bones—must be here in the heap somewhere. There was no way he could tell if any of her body pieces were still out behind the barn, but he braced himself, telling himself to be ready for that first glimpse of a hand or a foot or something.

  But shovelful after shovelful turned up nothing but rich-smelling, composted soil that was literally crawling with worms and grubs. Even though that couldn’t account for how the compost pile had gotten here from behind the barn, it certainly explained the seething motion he had seen from the living room window that created the illusion that the compost heap was moving.

  He wheeled the first load back out behind the barn, dumped it, and then went back for more. He was curious why he didn’t see even the t
iniest trace of his dead wife in the black soil, and he guessed that either her skin had already turned black from rot and was lost to his sight in the night or else—maybe, thank God—she had already decomposed in the heat generated by the compost. She was rotten enough in life, that’s for sure. Any way he looked at it, though, the only problem was getting the damned thing back out behind the barn so he could forget about it.

  It took him more than an hour, and five more barrow’s full, but—finally—exhausted and sweating, he was finished with the job. The compost was piled up and rounded off nice and neat, back where it should be. Merit put his tools back into the barn and then dragged himself upstairs to his bed. He had to be to work at the paper mill in the morning, and he was already wondering how in the hell he was going to make it through the workday with so little sleep.

  * * *

  Morning light filled the bedroom and woke Merit up earlier than usual. He chuckled when he realized that—as always—he had slept on “his” side of the bed, which was approximately one-quarter of the whole queen-sized mattress. As he sat up and looked at his dirt-blackened sheets, the events of last night came back to him, and his chuckle turned into a full-bellied laugh.

  No more sleeping on the edge of the bed. No more listening to Lydia’s bitching and moaning. No more cringing at the irritating way she always called him “Honeybun” … like she really meant it. No more putting up and shutting up. A few dirty sheets were a small price to pay for the peace and quiet. He danced a little jig as he started down the hallway to the bathroom for a quick shave and shower before work.

  In the kitchen, he fried up half a pound of bacon—real bacon, not that vegetarian non-meat shit Lydia’d been buying—and he did three eggs, sunny-side up, the way he liked ‘em, Lydia’s constant nagging about his cholesterol level be dammed. Along with orange juice, coffee, and toast, he had a rip-snorting breakfast. He even picked up his plate and licked it clean just because he knew how much it used to irritate her when he did that. He couldn’t help but smirk when he didn’t hear the sharp reprimand to “mind his table manners.” As if manners mattered anymore.