Love You to a Pulp

by CS DeWildt

  Heidi smiled. “Why you? Why Neil Chambers?”

  “You needed a hot head to do the job.”

  “Hoon would have done the job. That boy would do anything, and there wouldn’t be all this tangled mess.”

  “So why didn’t he? Why’d you have him killed?”

  “To get to you. But I promise, Neil, though you performed perfectly, you weren’t a part of the deal to begin with. Not for us. You were an added piece, a pretty scenic detour that got us where we were going, just not the quickest way.”

  “Davey,” Neil said.

  “Smart boy.”

  Heidi was still smiling when her face exploded over Neil in a hot stinging mass of skull and gray matter and assorted mystery pieces of flesh and support tissue. Neil stared into the empty shell that was Heidi Skaggs’ head, the shock enough to sit him up. Only her lower jaw remained intact, quivering as if still laughing. He body fell limp upon his blanket covered legs and he felt the radiating warmth, the entropic loss of life, he felt it soak through the blankets, burning him before leaving him cold almost instantly. Behind her slumped body, Lotta stood with the nickel plated .45, barrel smoking. Helen picked stray pieces of Heidi’s face from her bare, tanned shoulders. She stood and Neil watched her leave the room, watched Lotta point the piece at him, his own piece, and waited for the shot. Helen returned with Heidi’s Coach bag, pulled out a roll of bills and tossed it on Neil’s lap. The blood crept through the fabric like night over the hills and Neil used his good arm to take the cash.

  “That should cover your services,” Helen said. “And then some.” The girl looked at him with a kind of gratefulness Neil knew from various jobs. She was happy with his work. But the work was done and just because someone is grateful to you doesn’t mean they wouldn’t kill you if they had too, if they thought you might talk. Neil forced himself from the bed and dressed before uninterested eyes. He fumbled with the buttons of his shirt until Helen stepped in to help him. She didn’t wait for him to struggle with the belt, left it a notch too loose. She kissed him on the mouth. “Goodbye Neil,” she said and took the gun from Lotta. Helen raised the piece and touched the barrel to his heart tattoo, grazed it, hesitated, and then holstered the gun for him.

  “Now go,” she said. And he did, left Helen and Lotta to whatever end was there in the room with Heidi and the pieces. He walked down the long hallway, smelled none of the privilege he’d smelled of the house on previous visits. He was a boy again, pants falling, arm dangling loose and worthless at his side, the butt of his piece thumping his chest with each step, keeping with the beat of his heart.

  ***

  Thoughts of Rinthy kept pace with him as he walked the long strip of country road back from the old Skaggs place toward Brownsville. It was Sunday and he was as tired as the mess he was responsible for. He slapped his pockets with his good hand and found the tube of glue, punctured and bled dry, affixed to the fabric of his jacket. He dropped the worthless tube into the dry fescue, and found a cigarette, lit it, and watched red quarter horse colts bounce in the fields, much like human children. A speck appeared on the horizon and Neil knew what it was, knew it couldn’t be anything else. The speck became a dot escorted with the generic V8 rumble of authority. Sheriff’s cruiser slowed next to him and he stopped walking. Davey’s burned up face was glossy in the rising sunlight. The face lost its menace as it took in Neil’s form, tried to piece the events together.

  “Hate to see the other guy.”

  “Yeah. They don’t look so good.”

  “They?”

  “Jenkins. Heidi Skaggs. They’re done.”

  “Done with what?”

  “Done with livin’.”

  Davey turned away from the sun, spit a mouthful of tobacco juice into his coffee mug. “We need to take a ride then.” Neil didn’t hesitate, reached for the rear handle of the door. “You can ride up front. We need to go through town. Spare you the embarrassment.”

  Neil stepped in front of the cruiser and half expected the car to run him down on the empty street, half heard the creak in Davey’s old joints as the man considered it. Neil moved on to the opposite side of the car, got in and closed his eyes.

  “Where to?” Neil asked.

  “I think you know the answer,” Davey said. They pulled away, made a wide turn on the empty road and headed back the way the car had come. Neil stole glances at Davey, at the good side of his face and wondered if the good went any deeper than the skin. He suspected not, the man was a burned out shell without Neil’s help, always was. Neil thought about revenge, wondered if it could ever have just a single vector or if it was always a two grave type of deal. It was an energy that defied entropy and natural law. That he knew. But what fed it? Neil almost had an answer before it floated away in favor of a long due rest.

  “Get out,” Davey said. Neil prepared to roll from the car, but he opened his eyes and found the vehicle stationary. It was dark under the forest canopy, but what little light broke through the leaves gave off the warm yellow promise of morning. Neil stepped out and got his bearings, knew where he was exactly. He walked ahead of Davey without being told there was a gun in his back. His own piece remained holstered and its weight told him how competent Davey was as a peace officer, removed any doubt.

  Neil walked down the rocky wash with a kind of tentative muscle memory, feeling the thousands of identical steps manifested in a foreign body, an aged machine full of rust. His joints popped like his daddy’s used to, clicked with the rocks. Behind him, Davey’s did the same. And it would have been comical if Neil didn’t know Davey planned to shoot him when they got to the harbor. Maybe it still was.

  Neil felt for the old fear but it was hard to come by, even with the gun in his back. The old haunt had become something else entirely, a disappointment, a truth that couldn’t hold up to time and scrutiny, as if Neil’s eyes had been replaced with another set, and the new view made him realize just how insignificant a single point of view could be. It was the same birds, the same wind, but the effect was lost. All Neil felt was his dangling arm slapping against his thigh, the sharp bite coming again and again, the only sign it hadn’t fallen off farther back on the trail.

  The men stepped from the deer trail and the site of the Harbor pulled the same memories from both, two sets of eyes viewing the same events from different angles. Neil slowed and Davey put the gun in his back.

  “Keep moving,” he said. Neil didn’t react but to put one foot in front of the other. He saw the different scenarios that could take place, saw himself make an offensive turn, pull out the .45 and bed Davey down forever. Neil saw himself run to the water’s edge, take a non-lethal shot in the back maybe, dive into the river and let the current take him away as the rounds created ripples all around him like hot lead rain. He saw the graves behind the clapboards open, the rotten bodies crawling from the dirt to save him, or maybe just take him back with them.

  Davey pushed him to the water’s edge; across the river he saw the old sycamore Rinthy had used to prove she could shoot. The patch of bark had scabbed over, a wrinkled graft carrying the tree’s story into new generations. He listened to the water. Davey was waiting for him to speak and Neil wondered how long that would last. It didn’t matter what he said, just that he spoke, any breath of life would be reason enough for Davey to finish the job he’d started when they were still young.

  “Arm looks like shit, Neil.”

  “Feels worse, Davey.”

  “Ha. Do that in your wreck?”

  “Your wreck, you mean?”

  “Words. You say mine, I say yours. Does it matter? Last story is the only thing gets remembered.”

  “And what story is that?”

  “One about you, Neil. One about you taking out the Hoon boy on behalf of Jenkins, then taking Jenkins on behalf of the debt he owed. Sloppy, Neil. You were too sloppy.”

  Neil fought against his eyes as his vision blurred with pain, exhaustion. He tried to make sense of the motives, who was with who, who wan
ted him dead.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Davey continued, “the girls asked that you live. I told them I’d see what I could do.” The hammer on Davey’s revolver clicked. Neil fought for clarity.

  “Was you that killed her,” Neil said. He waited for the shot, or for death, he didn’t know if a man heard the bullet that got them or not. Neil watched a water bug walk atop the green meniscus, hunting larvae and eggs before it was swallowed up by the mouth of a fish, like some sink opening up beneath it and dragging it down to some unknown place.

  “Don’t matter,” Davey said. “I can blame you.”

  “And I saw the baby.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “I did. And I know where it’s at. The body anyhow.”

  “You’re lyin’.”

  “OK then,” Neil said. But the shot didn’t come and with each second he remained standing he’d know he’d hit on the only thing that could buy him time. His life wasn’t assured, he didn’t even know if he wanted it anymore, but a little more time might make up his mind. “I can show you.”

  “You’re gonna die today, Neil.”

  Neil said nothing, just moved through time like he was on some kind of conveyor, standing still, moving toward the end of the line.

  “Show me.”

  “All right, then.”

  Neil dropped down into the mouth of the cave, maneuvering his dangling, dying limb at the shoulder, holding rock and root with the other as he lowered himself, hanging in the blackness, stretching himself as low as he could before dropping to the cold rock floor below. A patch of cave crickets moved slightly as the warmth of Davey’s body disturbed their cool patch of stone near the hole on the ceiling. Curious, ornery, long-eared bats had taken to swooping in on the men, shrieking at them, creating an auditory picture of the strange invaders advancing into their world. Davey let himself drop and pulled his flashlight from his belt, raised the gun and the light to Neil’s face.

  “It’s this way,” Neil said.

  Davey handed over the light and Neil led him through a series of tunnels, bent and squatting, crawling forward, standing up in the successive chambers before tunneling again, deeper and deeper into the earth. Dripping stalactites grew with their mates while the runoff fed small pools where black and red salamanders sat stone still on the walls, hunting the tiniest of the cave dwellers, the crickets, the archaic, bristle-tailed lithocampa, the eyeless red beetles with their stochastic amble, confident and oblivious to their state.

  Finally the light found the spot; the cotton dress lay barely exposed under seasons of silt and detritus brought in by the heavy spring rain. Davey saw the dress and knew it immediately. He took the light from Neil’s good hand and shone it over the floor, shifting the shadows, making them dance, spirits of the McGrath clan.

  “Where is she?” Davey said. Neil scanned the floor, forced to follow the lead of Davey’s beam. The bodies were gone, a fact, but the question was a good one. Neil pondered it and the answer came with a flash of light on white bone. Neil moved forward and Davey trailed him with the light. Neil took a knee and began digging around a white stone embedded in the clay floor, pried it free, the female rib. He held the piece of Rinthy and it was as if her very presence gave him eyes in the dim light. Scattered about the floor were the remains, torn apart by some scavenger led into the depths by the scent. Neil watched Davey and saw that he saw the bones as well. And Davey’s reaction was like his own, eyes locked on the last thing they expected to see again. And once they’d found one bone, the rest of the skeleton became visible, spread out upon the floor of the cave, the sad makings of a false temple blown apart by malevolent winds. Neil looked over the bones, saw the paw prints among them and played the scene, saw the coyote in the darkness as it ate the flesh, tore it apart with its scissor molars, unconsciously grateful for everything that had led to that moment, as if all had happened with only the wild dog’s survival in mind. Neil watched it rip the baby from Rinthy’s stiff arms, watched the head loll until the neck was completely severed and the dead eyes that never knew light stared out black as the cave until they were plucked out by worn incisors at the end of the narrow snout. And there was surely more than one, the rich gift in the cave would draw many others from the wood, the canines leaping blind into the hole at the harbor, or perhaps following some other untouched entrance, led in by the musky reek of blood and afterbirth. Neil saw all of these things as they happened, then he saw Davey standing over the tiny child’s half skull, the jawbone either buried or carried away.

  “You took my sister away,” Davey said. “You took my child. I put my baby in her so she wouldn’t leave.” He stared at the collection of bones, some obviously adult, others of a child, and the rest mingled somewhere between, unknown. “She was all I had.”

  And for Neil to hear Davey romanticize like that, as if his past was something more than a monstrous abomination to Rinthy’s memory, if that version lived on as truth, whether in Davey’s mind alone or another’s, that brought up the fear that Neil had been missing, and it rippled under his skin like some beast of the flesh, devouring him from the inside. Neil raised his good hand and found the .45, pulled it from the holster. He stepped to Davey, entered the dim ring of the flashlight’s back scatter. Neil raised the piece to the back of the hairless skull and pulled the trigger. Nothing but the jamming click as the piece locked up tight. Before Neil could wield it like a clubbed extension of his fist Davey was on him with the flashlight. Knocking him to the cave floor with a crack behind the ear and then dropping skull splitting blows, grunting, no words, the steady heartbeat thump of the blows. Neil struggled under Davey, watching the wave of light roll in again and again, illuminating the stone ceiling before crashing against his skull and lighting up his interior with a white flash of consciousness desperate for an out. He lay still, content to die next to Rinthy. Another blow came down across his brow ridge, the skin splitting open with the sound of breaking glass, the flashlight killed. True darkness arrived, and with it, the will to see Davey dead.

  Neil reached through the blackness, grabbed Davey’s testicles and squeezed, flipping the switch that unbalanced his attacker and allowed Neil to slip out from the straddle and roll, crawl over the cave floor. He stretched his hand into the darkness, looking for some sort of bearing, some safe port. His hand hit the cold wet wall of the cave and Neil collapsed, wedged himself against the stone, tried to become part of it. Over his own breath, Neil heard the panicked motions of Davey, lost in the darkness.

  “Neil! Where’d you go?” His voice carried the breaking menace of one on the cusp of a final truth. “Neil? Neil! Neil!” Neil lay silent and listened as Davey’s brain worked through the situation, angry, then fearful, and finally desperate. And then they were friends. “We got to find our way out of here!” Neil said nothing. He closed his eyes and listened to the man stumble around the cave, felt his heat when he got close, felt the cold move back in as Davey stumbled away, tripped over rock and bone. He listened to Davey rise and fall. He listened to him become an animal as he resorted to ancestral crawling, his knees scraping on the floor in search of an exit, his remaining underdeveloped senses useless in this world of infinite darkness. And finally there was silence and Neil settled into his ache, tired, wondering if he’d ever be tired again. The voice roused him. “Neil! Neil! Don’t leave me here! Don’t you leave me!” Neil pulled himself to his feet slowly, felt the rock wall as he had years before, smelled the same afterbirth and death. He stepped carefully, quietly, disturbing a pebble that in Davey’s desperate ears was akin to moving a mountain. “Is that you? Is it you, Neil? Help me!”

  Neil continued through the open chamber, feeling the stone in his hand, skirting the tomb with the slow creep of the water that had cut it from the earth. Then a draft, the cave breathed on him as he entered the small passage and began to crawl. Behind him, waning in both volume and heart, were the calls of Davey. Davey who did not know the world below the surface.

  ***
r />   Neil emerged from his tunnel and the light once again set fire to his already burning eyes. He pulled himself to his feet with the aid of a young black oak. He looked up the hill, knew the road was up there somewhere. He looked back through the tree line to the clearing at Rogue’s Harbor and moved toward it. He stopped in the center, surrounded by the stilt homes of the McGrath clan, behind him the woods, ahead, the river. He stepped heavy between the houses, used them to steady himself and launched himself toward the family plot. He dragged his useless green and yellow arm over the markers, knuckles finding the limestone and delivering a message of screaming agony no one was at home to receive. He dug up the child’s grave and found the thick bundled tarp, used it for support as he took to his feet again and side stepped through the clearing and back to the edge of the river. He sat with his feet in the water, boots on, the cold wetness soaking into his socks and soul. He unwrapped the bundle and looked over the .22. It was so clean, so unnatural in its place, yet shining and reflecting the sunlight with what Neil registered as pride, a thing that never learned shame. Neil looked across the river to the healed sycamore. The wind carried his name across the clearing. Again and again it escaped from the stone depths. Until it didn’t. Neil fumbled with the rifle, wondered if he could make the shot.

  About the Author

  CS DeWildt’s books include Candy & Cigarettes, Dead Animals, and The Louisville Problem and are available at www.amazon.com/author/csdewildt

  He lives with his wife and kids in the American Southwest.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the people I know and the places I’ve seen in the Bluegrass State. You are beautiful and I miss you dearly. You are the heart of this book.

  Thank you, beta reader Abbie Rodgers. Your unyielding support and encouragement was integral to the completion of this project. And belated thanks for all the chemistry help as well; I never would have been able to balance those fucking equations without you.