Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

  As he completed the triple play of Grand Slams, he realized he was ultimately grieving the loss of his honesty, his purity, his privacy, his virility, his family, and his sanity. He staggered out of Denny’s into the horrible heat of the day and, despite the caffeine, fell asleep in his car.

  He arrived home in the early afternoon, put his wallet and cell phone and car keys on the kitchen table, grabbed a glass from the cabinet, and filled it at the kitchen sink while looking out at the backyard, where Linda sat on the edge of the pool, her feet in the water. She still wore the navy blue business suit Mike had chosen for her funeral—the same suit she’d been wearing in her casket only yesterday. There was no way to reason her being alive. She simply was.

  Acceptance, Mike thought, the fifth stage of grief. I’ve come through to the other side and discovered that over here I’m as insane as I am back there.

  And then his cell phone rang. He took a last look at his mother, sat at the kitchen table, and hit the speaker button because he was too weary to hold the thing to his ear.

  “Mike Miller.”

  “Mike, hi. Bob Cutting. El Cab Country Club.”

  Oh great, Mike thought, the general manager calling to bust my balls about bailing on him.

  It was only yesterday that Mike had been sitting in Bob’s office, waiting to fill out the application for Linda’s job—since it was only yesterday that Linda was still dead. Judd Martin had slipped into the office, kidnapped Mike at gunpoint, taken him to the end of the Earth somewhere, and branded him like a steer. Now Cutting was calling to find out what kind of asshole leaves a meeting without an explanation.

  “What can I do for you, Bob?”

  “Well, for one thing, Mike, we got word that Linda’s funeral was postponed, and I wanted to make sure everything was okay, see if there was anything we could do on our end.”

  “Nothing you can do. We’re working it out over here.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure. We’ll let you know about the funeral.”

  “All right then. Just so long as you know we’re here for you.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  “Listen, Mike, you left my office yesterday before I got you the application.”

  Here it comes, Mike thought. “I’m sorry about that, Bob. Couldn’t be helped.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m the one who’s sorry. You shouldn’t have to fill out an application. You are, or were, a senior accountant at a successful firm, which means you’re more than qualified. And you’re family. That counts for a lot at El Cab. I’ve spoken with the board. We’d like to offer you Linda’s job. Same salary and benefits as Linda. Assuming you’re still interested, the only question I have is: When can you start?”

  Mike was blown away. Somehow, he had forgotten he’d even asked for that job. So many thoughts flooded his mind, but the first thought was: I’m saved. He opened his mouth to say, Monday morning, but another voice, a voice behind him, came out instead.

  “Why is Bob Cutting offering you my job?” Linda said.

  Mike turned to his mother, who was standing at the stove, and clicked off the call. How could she be in his kitchen? Five seconds ago she was sitting poolside, soaking her feet. There’s no way a woman her age can move that fast and be so silent, Mike thought, especially a deceased woman.

  “Because they think you’re dead,” Mike said.

  Linda lifted a cast iron frying pan off the stove and walked slowly toward the table in a way that woke Mike up. He pushed his chair back and stood.

  “Why do they think I’m dead?” Linda said, making her way around the table.

  Mike backed away from her. It looked like his mother, and it sounded like his mother, and it walked like his mother, but there was something about her that wasn’t his mother at all, something askew in her general vibe, something cockeyed about her karma. “Because you died, Mom.”

  She tilted her head to the side as if Mike were speaking Swahili. “What do you mean I died?” She held the iron pan against her chest, one hand on the handle, the other holding the top edge. She was slow and deliberate as she crossed the kitchen. He realized she was boxing him into a corner, and he couldn’t stop her from doing it.

  “You had a heart attack, and you were dying, and then it seemed like you died.”

  “Seemed like I died?”

  “You woke up, and now you’re alive, but people thought you were dead, so we’re working it out.”

  “By stealing my job?”

  Mike was trapped between the fridge and sink. His only escape was straight through Linda. But she was holding the frying pan like a sledgehammer and drilling him with eyes he didn’t recognize. Christ almighty, she was looking right through him.

  “I didn’t want El Cab’s numbers to fall out of line while you were dead, uh, gone, so I’m a placeholder until you get back.”

  “You’re lying to me, Michael.”

  Her voice was soft and sharp and cut him like a knife. He couldn’t ever remember her sounding like this. He thought he might be afraid of her.

  “What? No, I’m not lying to you.”

  “What about your job?”

  “I took an unlimited leave of absence after you died…after I thought you died.”

  “Marcy had no problem with that, you quitting your job because you thought your mommy died, you little pussy?”

  His eyes shot open. She had never called him a name like that in his entire life. “Marcy’s in New Jersey with the girls for the summer.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but it also wasn’t a lie. “I’m not a little pussy, Mom. Don’t call me that.”

  “You’re a fairy, and you’ve been one since the day you were born. Now take me home. I hate this house.”

  “You can’t go home yet. You have to stay here a little while longer. And stop calling me names. I don’t—”

  She swung the iron pan at him, not actually trying to hit him, but definitely trying to scare him, and he flinched like a second-grader.

  “How long do I have to stay here?”

  “Until people understand that you’re alive and not dead.”

  She swung the pan again, and he flinched again, and she laughed, a disturbing sound he had never heard her make when she was alive before she was dead.

  “Then get the word out. Tell everyone I’m making the comeback of the year.”

  She put the pan on the stove, opened the fridge, found a bottle of beer, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig. He couldn’t recall her ever drinking beer before.

  “Mom,” he said, “when you were dying you made me swear an oath.”

  She drank again, maybe half the bottle, and then belched. Michael was in shock.

  “What kind of oath?” she said.

  “You made me swear to watch over and take care of Danny, whatever that means, whatever is necessary, no matter what very bad thing happened to him or to me or to us.”

  “So what?”

  “So Danny doesn’t want me to take care of him, and I don’t want to take care of Danny, and so I want you release me from The Oath.”

  She walked across the kitchen to where he was still trapped in the corner and patted his face, though not before he flinched.

  “Take me home, and I’ll consider it,” she said. “Make me stay here one more day, and you and Daniel will have many, many years of living hell together.”

  Then she shot the rest of her beer, put the empty bottle in his hand, and left the room.

  I DON’T HAVE ANOTHER LEASH

  Donald Greenburg had sex three times with Ramona Clifton—twice in the dental chair and once on the maple desk in his office. In order to screw her on his desk, he had to move his computer, his lamp, his phone, and his fish bowl.

  While he was moving the fish bowl to the credenza behind the desk, he’d noticed that one of the goldfish was dead—the pale gold one—though not floating upside-down dead on the surface, more like torn-to-shreds dead all over the bowl. The killer was the reddish gold one that Jenny
Stone had murdered on this very same desk—upon which he was about to fuck Ramona for the third time since filling her cavities. Come to think of it, the dentist had said to himself at the time, I’m just filling a different cavity. Anyway, then Jenny had breathed on the reddish gold one, and it had come back to life, and she had dropped it in the bowl.

  But the thing about the reddish gold one was that it had kept banging its head against the glass while it stared at the dentist—while Greenburg fucked Ramona—as if trying to get at him somehow. She was lying on the desk, and he was standing so that he was facing the credenza, and he could see the damn fish bang-bang-banging its head against the glass. Or maybe he had imagined the whole goldfish thing since his blood at the time had been in his dick and not in his brain.

  After the sex, he had taken Ramona for lunch at Marmalade Café on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, and then they had gone to the Galleria shopping mall, a short drive down Ventura, and he had bought her two blouses, a pair of shoes, fancy sunglasses, and a new watch.

  Then he’d gone home, slipped into his office, poured himself three fingers of Tanqueray, cut himself three lines of cocaine, and considered Carol, who was doing yoga by the pool when he’d arrived.

  His wife had been wearing a fantastical green leotard with a matching green headband. In the headband, Carol had placed a single plume of a tall green feather to make her look—and so to make her feel—like Gertrude McFuzz, one of her favorite Dr. Seuss characters. She had plugged her iPod into the Apple player and turned it up loud so that the soundtrack to her yoga session was Seussical the Musical.

  Upon seeing his wife, Greenburg had expected—was even secretly hoping—to feel guilt or shame or regret or sadness but instead had felt…manly. Yes, for the first time in years, Greenburg felt like a man, granted, a skinny white man, but still a man—Ramona’s man. And then, as the gin and coke relaxed him, he felt guilty for not feeling guilty, which made him feel relieved that at least he had guilt-once-removed if not guilt-in-the-first-degree.

  Greenburg had seen Chachi too, when he’d stood in the living room and looked out through the French doors. The dog was still leashed to a pipe at the far end of the pool and was chewing something, maybe a bone, to death, its eyes glued on Carol. The dentist and his wife did not say hello, and Greenburg had gone to his office and sucked down two of the three lines and finished two of the three fingers of Tanqueray when his cell phone rang.

  It was Carol calling from the pool.

  “Yes,” Greenburg said.

  “He’s biting through the leash,” Carol said.

  “I thought it was a bone.”

  “Come out here, Donald. He’s almost through it.”

  She clicked off the call. Greenburg snorted the last line, swallowed the rest of the gin, licked his gums, and went out to the pool.

  He stood beside his wife, and together they watched Chachi rip and tear at the leash, growling like a demon, foaming at the mouth, staring at them the entire time. The upbeat “Biggest Blame Fool,” a full-cast, Seussical the Musical production number, blasted across the backyard through the sound system.

  “Jesus, he’s almost through it,” Greenburg said.

  “That’s what I told you,” Carol said.

  “How long has he been doing this?”

  “All night, all day, how should I know? Get another leash. He’ll bite that one in half any minute.”

  “I don’t have another leash.”

  “Then do something else. Pick him up. Put him in the garage. He’s just a poodle. Be a man for once in your life.”

  I was a man this morning, he said to himself. Not once, not twice, but three times.

  “I am doing something else,” he said to her.

  “What?”

  “I’m having his attitude adjusted for free.”

  “There’s no such thing as free.”

  “That’s what Ramona said.”

  “Who’s Ramona?”

  He opened his mouth to explain, but Chachi chomped completely through the leash and, free of the pipe, ran across the yard at incredible speed and jumped through the air like a heat-seeking missile and hit Carol’s chest, knocking her to the ground. In a violent frenzy fueled by hyper-strength and hellish power, the little white poodle bit and clawed at her face.

  “Get him off me, get him off…” Carol said, shouting and shocked and cut and bleeding.

  Greenburg froze and blinked and froze and blinked for what was only a few seconds but seemed longer and then moved to his wife, reached down, grabbed Chachi, and pulled him off, holding the dog at arm’s length with both hands.

  The dog growled and barked and roared and shook like a madman, snapping at the dentist with rage and fury.

  “Stop it, Chachi, stop it,” Greenburg said.

  He remembered that Carol had told him to put the poodle in the garage, and so he started to backpedal his way across the patio, never taking his eyes off the dog, which was three feet from his face, but his foot caught the leg of a lawn chair, and he went down hard, the poodle on top of him.

  Chachi scratched and bit Greenburg’s face and hands and arms and chest as the dentist struggled to hold him at bay. Jesus Christ, Greenburg thought as he fought for his life, how could a poodle be so strong, so fast, so vicious?

  Each bite, each scratch was impossibly painful, and the bleeding dentist had a moment where he thought that Chachi was trying to kill him—not just trying to bite him but trying, intentionally, to kill him.

  Fifteen feet away, Carol was on her hands and knees, looking down at her blood dripping onto the flagstone, the top of her head facing her husband, who was fighting the dog—and losing the fight. The pool was right behind her. “Here on Who” blasted from the speakers. Her single green plume was broken at a cockeyed angle.

  Beneath the animalistic survival instinct that had kicked in to keep him alive, beneath the bark and growl of his bloodthirsty dog, beneath the Seussical the Musical soundtrack to the savage attack, beneath the peripheral glimpses of his wife bleeding by the pool, beneath all of that was the thought in the back of Greenburg’s mind that there was something wrong with his heart.

  It was pounding, of course, Greenburg’s heart, but more than that, his entire chest cavity was screaming with pressure, and his left arm was going numb even as he struggled to hold Chachi away from his face, and he couldn’t catch his breath, he couldn’t breathe. Oh my God, I’m having a heart attack, Greenburg thought.

  The dentist knew he had to get the dog off his chest or he’d die right here on the patio. He rolled hard to his left and in the same movement threw the poodle with his right hand with all the power he could muster.

  The dog flew through the air and smashed into a table, shook its head for two seconds, and then shot like a bullet toward Carol, who at that exact moment was lifting herself up off her arms so that she was upright on her knees.

  The poodle hit Carol in the neck and bit down hard, opening her carotid artery and sending a pumping pulse of blood into the air. Carol’s eyes went wide with shock. She opened her mouth but couldn’t make a sound. She fell on her back, head and neck hanging over the edge of the pool, her blood turning the water red.

  Greenburg saw it happen, saw his wife ferociously murdered by his dog, and felt the adrenaline surge through him. Twenty-five years of empty, painful coexistence went out the window. All he could think of was their college romance, their dental school love affair, their early years in the Valley when he was building his practice, before the vodka and Percocet and cocaine and gin took hold of them.

  He got to his feet, ran across the patio, grabbed the dog, and crashed them both into the shallow end of the pool.

  He held the dog under the water, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Die, you fuck, die.”

  But the poodle would not die. It fought like the devil, and then Greenburg lost his footing and slipped underwater as well, the two of them face-to-face, eye-to-eye, the dog snapping and scratching and trying to shake free, n
ot to save his own life but to kill the dentist.

  And then Greenburg was up again, sucking in oxygen, holding Chachi beneath the surface. The dentist couldn’t believe how long it took the dog to die, minutes and minutes of thrashing and splashing, but finally the fight was over, and the poodle was drowned.

  Greenburg let go of Chachi and the poodle floated to the surface—lungs filled with water, eyes open, mouth frozen in a fiendish snarl.

  And then Greenburg saw his dead wife, and his chest cavity exploded as if he’d swallowed a grenade. Every muscle in his body burned with agony. His vision blurred. The world began to spin and go dark. He pulled himself to the edge of the pool, collapsed on the stairs, half in the water and half out, and stopped breathing.

  SUNDAY

  SOMEBODY CROSS A LINE CAN’T BE CROSSED

  Greenburg wasn’t dead. His heart didn’t explode. It was true he had stopped breathing, but only for a minute, and then his breath was dangerously shallow and weak, though enough oxygen had reached his brain so that he didn’t stroke out or hemorrhage or expire while he was lying unconscious on the pool steps.

  When he’d opened his eyes and came to, it was ten o’clock and quiet on the patio. Pool lights below the surface gave the water a dreamy red-amber glow. He was weak and in shock and entirely disoriented. He had a nightmarish memory of what had happened and knew he needed help. He’d crawled across the flagstone on his hands and knees, trying not to look at his wife, who had bled out and was whiter than white, eyes open but seeing nothing—the Seussical corpse of Carol Greenburg. He reached the outdoor furniture and called Ramona on the poolside extension.