American Dead

by PW Cooper

  Kevin shrugged, finishing his beer with a noisy swallow.

  “She was a black lab. I named her Sally. She was a rescue dog, been abused by her old owners somehow. I never found out exactly what they did, but she was the sweetest thing you've ever seen, not a hateful bone in her body. She never barked or growled at anybody, certainly didn't bite anyone. You could tell just by watching her that she wanting nothing more than to be loved. And everybody did, how could you not?”

  Kevin listened nervously. He didn't like it when Robert talked like this, but he'd learned not to interrupt.

  “I had this cousin. Hal. He came to live with us one winter back when I was, I don't know, twelve years old maybe. He was older than me, parents just got divorced, yadda yadda. Anyway, I never liked him much. He was just one of those sorts. After he came the dog started to act sort of odd. She was different, more withdrawn, like she was afraid of me. He was there alone with her all day long. I knew something was wrong; it was one of those things, you just know it.

  “It turned out that Sally was pregnant. We'd just assumed that she was neutered. Turned out not. Anyway, when Hal found out, he looked like he'd been slugged in the gut. His face actually turned white. An absolutely lifeless color. He threw up right there at the dinner table, just leaned to the side and puked on the floor.

  “The next day he tried to kill himself. Hung himself in the basement with Sally's leather leash. We didn't find this why until a few weeks later.”

  “Yeah?” Kevin's face had gone a sort of green shade, though it wasn't clear whether that was a result of Robert's story or the slurry of intoxicants mixing in his bloodstream.

  “That asshole sent us a letter, he explained the whole thing, even drew little pictures, like cartoons. It turned out that he'd been fucking Sally. Tied her up and wrestled her down and fucked her. When he found out she was pregnant he assumed that they were, you know, his somehow. Like I said, this kid was messed up. There were these little half-human half-dog things he drew all over it. I don't know, they say the oxygen was cut off from his brain for too long. Not long enough, if you ask me. We all read the card, first me, then Dad then Mom. And poor Sally just sat in the corner, getting bigger every day.

  “She started to get nasty after what happened. She'd growl if you tried to pet her, show her teeth. I don't know if it was the pregnancy or the Hal thing, but she didn't even seem like the same dog anymore. My parents were totally unable to process any of it. They'd just stare at her sometimes with these absolutely incredible expressions on their faces. Made you wish you had a camera or a mirror so they could see how absurd they looked.

  “They were both real quiet about it. Mom cried sometimes, but she never said anything.

  “Every morning my father would split wood for the stove; I'd bring in the pieces while he worked. One day Sally followed us out, went trotting right up to my dad and started smelling his palms. He just stared at her. He had the ax in his hands, holding it real tight. I was waiting by the door, just watching, this horrible feeling in my stomach. I don't know, maybe I'd had some kind of a premonition of what was going to happen. I hadn't been sleeping.

  “He grabbed Sally's collar and dragged her over, and he told her to put her head down on the block, the big stumpy hunk of wood that he put the smaller pieces on when he was splitting them. And she did it. Did right what he told her, just put her chin down on the block and stared up at him and for a while they were both just looking at each other. Then he killed her and he buried her and forbid me from ever talking about any of it.

  “That night, I had a dream that all those little puppies inside of her clawed their way out of her belly and suffocated in the dirt, trying to dig their way back up. I avoided the spot we buried her for years, I just couldn't stand knowing.”

  Robert stroked the retriever's nose. It yawned sleepily, its rough pink tongue curling and it eyes drifting closed.

  “...Shit, man,” Kevin offered, “that's messed up, man.”

  Robert sighed. “Eloquent as usual, Kevin.”

  Kevin rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “Was there, like, some kind of point to that?”

  Robert picked the money back up, starting once again to count. “The point, Kevin, is that it's people that are strange. You don't need to worry about dogs. Animals are simple. It's people that you have to watch out for.”

  September Ninth

  Patricia Conner stood in the hallway, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She stared at the framed picture on the wall, eyes narrowed, focused intently on the glass-covered aerial photograph.

  The blue tendrils of the Finger Lakes cut through the green earth, not like the soft imprint of the vast divine, but more like the claw marks of some great scrabbling monster. She stared at the picture, perplexed by it for reasons she couldn't explain. It seemed somehow false to her now, the wisps of cloud looked like pulled cotton over the manufactured diorama of the world.

  “Charlie?” she called down the hallway to where her husband sat, hiding behind a newspaper at the dining room table, digesting the meal she'd cooked.

  “Hm?” he mumbled.

  “I'm thinking of taking the pictures down. These ones here in the hallway, I want to get rid of them.”

  “Whatever you want, dear.” The pages of his newspaper rustled.

  “Well for God's sake, Charles! Don't be like that. Have an opinion why don't you? Didn't you buy these in the first place? Don't you care what happens do them?” She stood at the end of the hall, looking in.

  He bent the edge of the paper down and looked at her over his reading glasses. “You bought them.”

  “Well, that's beside the point.”

  “Is it? Hm.” He went back to the paper.

  Patricia seethed. Like talking to a brick wall... It had been so quiet in the house since Micheal had left. They'd never even bothered to find out where he was living. She wondered if there was there something wrong with her. She had tried to talk with Charles about it, but he didn't seem to hear her voice anymore. And anyway, she didn't really want to relive all of the things that they'd done wrong. All that she'd done wrong. Parenting was such a terribly painful thing, she couldn't remember anymore why she had ever wanted it so much.

  She went back down the hall and took the pictures down, one by one, piling them in her arms. The sturdy glass and metal frames were heavy and awkward, all of them different sizes.

  Charles' voice floated eerily through the house. “Gonna snow tomorrow. Paper says.”

  Patricia went back to the dining room. “Are you sure? In the middle of September? That can't be right. I don't believe it!”

  Charles shrugged. “What it says.”

  “How horrible.” She shivered, and set the piles of framed pictures down on the far end of the table.

  She went to the wide bay window and looked down at the trailer park below. The boxy little houses looked like model train cars after a collision. They reminded her of the toys her brother had played with as a boy. Wrecking them had always been his favorite part, watching the physics of the crash play themselves out, the twisting buckling crunching pinball-machine chaos of the little electric cars running up against each other, dragged inexorably by that misguided locomotive, blind and anyway incapable of altering their course.

  The sun set over High Gorge Park.

  September Tenth

  Jeffrey Burke went into the gathering darkness. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and turned up his collar. It was frigid cold; he could see his breath before him like a pale and formless ghost leading ever onward. The automatic doors of the bus hissed as they folded shut, and the great machine lurched away. He stood and watched until the red tail-lights had gone over the slope of the far hill and left him, at long last, far behind. Only then did he turn away and begin down the long and dreadful road.

  It was half a mile further to Robert's house. He wrapped his arms tight around himself. The cold seemed to breed in the darkness. The sycamore trees turned black and limp and wept.
It had been raining all day and the world seemed now too quiet, poised in a state of unnatural stillness as though the earth were holding its breath while it watched Jeffrey shiver. His fingers wrapped around the grip of the pistol down in his pocket. The metal had been cold at first, but it had warmed against his body, had drawn the heat right out of him. He checked the bullets again, for the tenth time at least, and he set his teeth.

  The road curved gently, and when he came around the bend and looked up the hill he saw all the lights of the house flickering beyond the tree-line. He bit down on his tongue to stop his teeth chattering. The electric lights danced beyond the web of black trees, urging him upwards. Jeffrey took out the pistol and opened the chamber; he ran his thumb across the backs of the cartridges. When he snapped it shut he did not return it to his pocket but held it tight in his fist, naked to the eerie dark.

  The cold was like a weight inside him. It stripped through his clothes and pressed its weightless touch against his skin, cutting with wet metal fingers into his prickling flesh. His thin jacket did nothing. He stuck the gun under his arm and rubbed his hands together; he slapped his cheeks and tucked his nose into his elbow. He did not think he had ever been so cold. He went on.

  There were cars spilling out along both sides of the road, enough cars for forty or fifty people. So many more than he'd expected. Jeffrey looked into the tinted windows of a darkened Subaru, almost pressing his face against the glass before he remembered that there might an alarm. There was a child's car seat in the back seat, a pipe-wrench on the floor.

  He hopped across the ditch and worked his way back around to the rear of the property, fighting through the brush every step of the way. There was a high embankment behind the house. He went further back into the woods until he'd found a place were the grade wasn't so steep and he scrambled up. The dead leaves plastered to the ground were still wet and slippery; he put the gun back in his pocket and went up the slope on all fours, fingers reaching into the rocky crevices.

  There was a narrow stream there that emptied into a little pool below, a waterfall in miniature. He stepped carefully over the water and went on until he was behind the house, so close he thought he might almost be able to jump onto the roof. The light from the house lit the ground like spilled oil shining gold and glossy on the wet grass. He scrambled down and approached the house, bent so low that he was almost on all fours. There was movement in the windows. The back door was just a few feet away. Alice had told him that it would be unlocked. He crept closer, kneeling below a wide bay window. He stopped when he'd reached the far side, and he peeked over the frame in through the glass.

  There was a tangle pale white flesh laying on a sofa, wrapped tight together and rocking angrily against itself. A woman's hair thrashing, and through it curled a man's thick fingers, meaty and dark-furred on the knuckles. Her chin was tilted back and her mouth open, lips pulled back to bare her teeth. A slim man in a dark suit sat in the corner of the room with his penis pulled through the zipper of his neatly pressed slacks. He watched the coupling on the sofa, keen interest shining in his damp eyes.

  Jeffrey crept on, his teeth down so hard on his tongue that his mouth filled with blood. The hinges of the door groaned in protest. He winced at the sound and shut it softly behind him.

  The house was in an organic stupor. Low music played in a distant room, carrying with it the shallow moans and cries which echoed through the building like an erotic mimicry of the tormented. He was in the kitchen. There were wineglasses standing on the counter, empty but for the multi-hued dregs that made colored shadows like stained glass on the counter-top.

  Jeffrey took out the pistol and he held it tight in his hand and he went out into the chaos of the intestinal halls. He passed through the crowds of stripped revelers like a puritan ghost, unseen and untouched. The men were all older than he, most of the women too. They worked as a vast machine, cogs locked together in purulent congress, each turning into the next piece of the whole.

  There was an energy here that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It had an unholy taste about it, as though the communal breeding were the genesis of a forgotten pagan ritual by which something timeless and unknowable would awaken, rise from deep within the earth to somewhere in the apathetic woods out beyond the light.

  He looked for his sister, but she was nowhere to be found. He wondered if she was taking part, or cowering in some put-away corner of the house like a child tucking its head between its knees when the train roared by. No one yet had taken notice of the naked gun in his hand.

  A bearded man tried to kiss him in the hall, and a woman with thick red hair between her thighs sized him up and arched one eyebrow and spread her knees but he stopped for nothing, forcing his way through the twisting halls while all the way the music grew louder and louder. Finally, he came to the epicenter of the gathering. There were about two dozen people there, all in varying states of undress.

  The closest was a firm woman with streaks of gray in her black hair. She lay back on the leather couch with a wine glass delicately cupped in her sculpted fingers, her short silk dress pushed up over her hips and her thighs spread. A pair younger people, children almost, where kneeling before her, timid supplicants to her exposed femininity. A girl and a boy, their hair short and curly and androgynous. Their faces were pushed together between the woman's pale thighs, their pink tongues lapping at the slick opening. Like twins before a primordial mother, begging to be let back inside. The old woman's head lolled back, eyes half-lidded; she met Jeffrey's gaze and held it unabashedly and he felt as though he were revolving weightless around the sun.

  He saw Alice at the extreme edge of the room. She was dressed in a long red nightgown upon which were traced inscrutable black lace figures, runic designs of an older world. She wore long black gloves that went all the way up her forearms and a feathery black mask which covered all her features but for that familiar mouth, turned bitterly downward.

  Nathan Riley not far from her, stripped to the waist and staring blankly at the far wall. He saw Jeffrey, and he flinched and averted his eyes. Jeffrey held the gun behind his back. Nathan seemed lost, wholly unsure of himself and deeply uncomfortable. Utterly alone.

  At the center of the fray, caught waist-deep in twisting bodies like a war god at the slaughter, was Robert Summers. Red wine slipped from the black bottle in his hand like blood across the naked backs of the fornicators about him and he laughed with his head back and his jaws open to the high ceiling. His penis hung heavy between his legs, his pubic hair as thick and dense as a tangle of black wire. He brushed aside the hands of men and women alike as they reached up toward it, as though it were handhold up from the general malaise and he the arbitrator of their ascendance. He lifted his bottle and he emptied the last of it on the people writhing at his feet. He kicked a girl who had licked his foot; she whimpered and was drawn back under the crawling mound of limbs. Robert laughed, sneering as he drank back the dregs.

  It was in his eyes, shining there like polished stones set in flesh, the truth: all men were his and all women were his, and summer would last forever.

  Jeffrey sunk back into the shadows of the far wall, and he watched what proceeded with his thoughts swimming blindly through his skull. He couldn't do this. He couldn't kill a man. He couldn't do it.

  Finally Robert was staggering drunkenly from the chaos, his empty bottle clutched about the neck. Jeffrey waited until his brother-in-law had left the room, then he separated himself from the shadows and followed. He had to at least try. He owed Alice that much at least. He had to try.

  Robert went to the kitchen first; he tossed the empty bottle into the sink and immediately took a new bottle from the cabinet above the stove and tucked it under his bare arm. He went on, passing his way jovially through the crowd, pausing now and again to bite at a pouting lip or thread his fingers through the available nethers of his guests, until he at last came to a tall white door with an ornate black handle. He went inside and shut it firmly behind
him.

  Jeffrey moved through the crowd. Their fingers caught urgently on him, clinging to his chest and groin as though desperate, as though they thought he could save them. His hand lighted on the knob and he found it cool. He lifted the gun and followed his brother-in-law inside.

  “Sorry, this room's not...” The words died in Robert's throat when he saw first the gun, then the person who bore it.

  Jeffrey wanted to speak, but he couldn't think of anything to say. They were in Alice's bedroom. He saw things which he recognized as belonging to his sister. There was no evidence of a man's cohabitation. The bed was too narrow for two. There was a puppy on the mattress, dashing excitedly from one end to the other.

  “What are you doing here?” Robert asked.

  Jeffrey just shook the weapon in his hand.

  “You've come to shot me? Why would you want to do that?” Robert held the bottle in both hands.

  “You killed Michael Conner,” Jeffrey said, and his voice trembled.

  Robert's familiar expression of disdain crept back, lips twisting and eyes tightening. “You don't know what you're talking about."”

  “You killed my friend.” Jeffrey shook the gun again.

  “Your friend,” Robert's voice dripped contempt, “You were never his friend. Jeff. You barely knew him, not really, not what he was. I was more a friend to Mike than you ever were.”

  “You?” Jeffrey wanted to laugh, but his throat was too dry.

  “Where do you think he was living after his parents threw him out? I paid his rent for a year.”

  “You used him,” Jeffrey spat, “you sold him like a piece of meat.”

  Robert laughed. “He wasn't some desperate junkie. Mike was just bored. He was bored, and that's why he did it. He didn't care what happened to himself. That's why he killed himself.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “You're a liar.”

  “That's beside the point, I'm not lying now. Put the gun down. Is that my gun? Put it down.”

  “I'm not going.”