Murders Among Dead Trees

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  “So you are stressed,” I said. “We are all under stress but you never learned how to handle it. Instead of handling it correctly, you smoke and drink too much. You wanted to feel you were in control so you tried to mellow out before you came up here with a cigarette. Your nerves are jangling right now and you would love a cigarette. I can smell the nicotine coming out of your pores with the sweat. You eat a lot of sugar to make yourself feel good and it works for a few minutes and then you feel like crap so you have more sugar and feeling like crap all the time feels normal now. You sleep badly and you are underemployed. You are a hamster who can’t get off a wheel. You came here to scare me, maybe even hurt me. You will not.”

  He laughed. “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you are not an animal. You are a person who needs help and compassion and understanding. You will not hurt me because you know I am right about all these things. If you were going to hurt me, you would have done it by now. You have lost momentum. You had to get your nerve up and now all the steam is gone and you are cooling off.”

  “I could hurt you, make you tell me — ”

  “And have more charges against you? I think you are smarter than that. You are here because you want to stay out of jail. If I am assaulted or dead, how long will it be before the police knock on your door?”

  There was a long silence. I waited for it. And waited.

  “So…what are you selling me?”

  “A way out of this. Free.”

  “How?”

  “It starts with slowing your breath. We have to convince your nervous system you are not running from a bear all the time.”

  We had twenty minutes before my next session. It was just enough time. I showed him the finger cue and as he brought his thumb and forefinger together I knew for certain I had him. In another three minutes his neck muscles relaxed and his head came forward to his chest. I watched the pulse in his neck slow to seventy, then sixty. I talked him down, his nervous system slowed and his mind opened up. Any stage hypnotist can make susceptible people jump around and pretend they are chickens. The post-hypnotic suggestion I had in mind was much easier than that.

  The police showed up at my door eventually, of course. Once they figured out who the guy in the elevator shaft was, someone made the connection to me. The detective was a tall, handsome man who accepted my offer of tea and wriggled his bulk into my office chair to get comfortable before he took out his notebook.

  I told him what Paul had done to Susan. I told him I thought Paul was going to hurt me and kill his ex-wife. I told him I didn’t feel bad at all when I heard the scream fade all the way down the 12-storey shaft. I smiled then. I couldn’t help myself.

  His brow furrowed and he studied my face. “Didja push him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I told him to sit and I gave him a suggestion.”

  “Doctor, my understanding of hypnosis is you can’t get someone to do something they wouldn’t do anyway.”

  “It’s a simple trick of the mind, Detective,” I said. “I just told him to take the elevator to his new life and that’s what he thought he was doing, at least until he started falling. I suppose he had a moment to think about it. The maintenance people left that yellow warning tape up to tell people to take the stairs while they went for parts.”

  “I find your tone disturbing, doctor.”

  “I don’t know why. It was self-defense. Under similar circumstances, you’d have shot him.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You wouldn’t say maybe if you saw Susan. Despite our medical advances, prosthetic noses look awfully fake. A clown nose would be more aesthetically pleasing.”

  The detective stood and gave me a hard look. “I read the report on his ex-wife before I came over here. The guy was an animal who needed to be put down. However, the time you saved the court and the money you saved the taxpayers will have to go to your court case now.” He fished out handcuffs. “I’m sorry. I really don’t want to do this but — ”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “What?”

  “Do you mean you really want to let me go?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Of course, but — ”

  “Then please do sit down, Detective. I want to show you a neat trick.”

  THE CLAWED BATHTUB

  Several people refuse to speak to me because of this story. I don’t mean to make anyone nervous. It’s fiction and I’m a sweet guy.

  Cross my heart and hope they die. ~ Chazz

  His wet clothes plaster his body, dark against his cold, pale skin. His red plaid shirt and soaked jeans give you a better grip when you pull him out of the big bathtub. He seems heavier than he really is, as if he’s a baby who, even in sleep, resists you. Though the water washes it away, the man’s mouth still tastes of peanut butter.

  When your cheeks blow out but no air goes in, you realize you are rushing and sloppy. The smell makes you nauseous but you pinch his nose and wrench his head back to open his airway.

  You take a breath and put your mouth on his and blow. Even as you force oxygen into his lungs, you strain your peripheral vision to see if his chest rises with your effort. It does, but slower than seems right. Seven breaths later, maybe ten, you’re cursing yourself because you thought you were in better shape than this. You thought it would be like blowing up a balloon but instead you’re inflating a water bottle like the strongman in an old-time circus sideshow.

  You blow twice more and you know by the pulse in your ear you’re going to have to slow down. Panic kills. Work instead. They taught you no battle plan survives engagement with the enemy. You give him five more steady breaths. How much of your air is worming its way up into his brain? How much is enough?

  You pause for a moment to check for a pulse at his wrist. They taught you not to use your thumb so you don’t mistake your pulse for that of the drowning victim. That sounded silly then, but now, with your own heart cranking hard, you understand.

  Sweat and salt run into your eyes and you’ve lost track of how long you’ve been trying to save him. Your legs tingle a warning so you shift your weight for relief, praying your legs do not fall asleep. Your heels are jammed against the bathroom wall. As you bend to give him another few breaths, you feel the bristles of your brush cut against the tub.

  The hard tile makes your kneecaps ache. There’s no bathmat to put under your knees. Who doesn’t own a bathmat? Oh, yeah. Mr. Peanut Butter Sandwiches. The knee pain is your own fault. You should have thrown down a towel first. It’s a small detail, but you need endurance to make him live again.

  Tick! Tick! Tick!

  Time is life, a small thing that slips and scurries out of your grasp. You can’t keep flogging him back to life much longer. Sweat runs down your spine like ants. It is so hot in this small room. You could get up and open the bathroom door or smash the small frosted window to let in fresh air, but you do not dare break your rhythm.

  His lips are blue. The rest of him looks washed out, as if the water has diluted him. You almost raise your head to check the bottom of the tub. Are bright Crayola colors even now draining away to some far off place? Is whatever makes up his essence circling the drain?

  You pass another few breaths into his lungs and rest your head on his chest to listen. Time stretches out. Have you finally lost him?

  You can’t accept that. You soldier on.

  You’re surprised by a sickening couple of snaps and a sinking, boggy feeling as something gives way in his chest. Just as they taught, you ignore the broken ribs and keep the steady compressions, reminding his heart it should wake up and get on with it. Beating. At least with the ribs broken at the sternum, you don’t have to work so hard to compress his heart.

  Please...oh...please.

  Your movements are smooth and unhurried as you rock forward and back, the weight of your torso pushing down through straight arms. You are a steel clock. This is easier than trying to pu
sh air into his dying lungs — especially since the ribs snapped — but the respite is too brief.

  Your breaths are gasps.

  You don’t have the wind to do the count aloud so you run the numbers silently. For a moment, the weakness is waved away and all you hear, feel, see and do is the count.

  You keep alternating between pushing his chest to the count and squeezing air from your lungs to his.

  How long is too long to bother anymore? You can’t feel your legs and that lightheaded feeling says you better just breathe for yourself. The exhaustion comes back in full and you’re losing count again.

  Is this it? Heavy disappointment and failure begin to replace that full, stopped-up feeling of frustration. You rest your head on his chest again.

  And wait.

  Please.

  Oh.

  Please.

  Wait.

  And give up.

  Almost.

  There it is. Yes! His heart is starting up again, though there is a long pause between the lub and the dub. That stillness must be the sound of reluctance. That’s the fourth time his heart has stopped in the last fifty minutes. It took much longer to get it started again this time. It came back easier the first couple times. Next time will be the last. That’s almost okay. You’re so tired from the grinding effort of keeping him alive.

  You put your ear by his mouth to listen for him moving air on his own. You watch for the rise and fall of his chest and, seeing none, give him another quick breath. This time the water in his stomach does rise up and somehow you feel the lurch shuddering up through his body in a wave. You get out of the way as he spews bathwater.

  You carefully turn him on his side so he doesn’t choke and the water keeps coming in a gush. The spasms bend his body back and forth in a rigid, grotesque dance. Interesting.

  Your shoulders relax and a smile slowly crawls across your mouth. “Finally,” you say aloud. The sound of your voice in the small room startles you. It’s the first word you’ve said since entering the bathroom. He’s still sputtering and disoriented. You spit into the bathtub and hope you can find some mouthwash in the medicine cabinet.

  Still on your knees, you press into his back, rolling him farther on his side to give him time to swim back up from wherever he was. His lungs must be burning. You give him a little recovery time. He gasps and sputters. Through your kneecaps and hands you feel his tortured struggle to push out water and bring in air.

  He’s a fish yanked out of the murk, flopping on a dock.

  Triumph pulls and stretches you out, making you feel physically, spiritually bigger. Elation bubbles up through your cells. You want to laugh and sing. There’s a soaring feeling in your chest, like your heart is expanding and wants to pull you up and off your feet.

  He comes back to life.

  You could fly.

  You look around the bathroom. A couple of ragged-edged towels hang on the back of the bathroom door. They were probably once pure white, but with repeated washings they have faded and pilled. Though the tile is yellow old, the bathroom is very clean, even in the corners. On a rack along the wall behind you hang blue towels embroidered with the word “Guests.” They look like they have never touched wet skin.

  Behind sickly sweet peanut butter, sweat and the sour stomach acids in his long greasy hair, another smell is lurking. You can’t quite identify its component parts, though you guess there might be lavender, bleach and some kind of lemon cleaner in the mix. That unquantifiable, other smell tells you the man must live with his elderly mother. That’s old lady aroma in your nostrils.

  A long-unused brain cell awakens. A dormant synapse triggers. You’re surprised by something you thought was lost. You see your grandmother in her house on the Big Island. You’re looking up at her. She smiles as she washes your hands in a grey tin washtub. And there’s that same smell. Funny to think that you would have anything remotely in common with the man on the bathroom floor.

  Your pulse begins pounding again in your left ear. There are little bones in the inner ear called the hammer and anvil, but to you it really does sound like iron striking iron. Though your heart slows, this throb is steady and grows louder. It’s a form of tinnitus. Most people with the disorder get a ringing, whining or whistling sound. Some people hear loud sirens day and night until it drives them to suicide.

  You’ve heard this pounding in your ear since that bright morning when a bomb knocked you off your feet. First there was a flash of white followed immediately by blackness that enveloped the world. When you opened your eyes, the sun shone through a cloud of dust that hung still like a photograph of a windstorm in the desert. The dark figure of a medic leaned over you. His face was stretched long and urgent, shouting. You searched his face for meaning. He was not screaming in pain. He was trying to tell you that you’d be okay, you decided.

  As if anyone knows anything about anyone by looking.

  The ringing went away and your hearing came back, but the pulse in your left ear, iron pounding iron, remained. It’s like a time bomb ticking down. Each strike of that inner clock is almost painful. Each tick gets you closer to that blackness that swallowed the world when the bomb went off. When you start thinking like this, it is time to move and get out of your head.

  The man’s gasping and sputtering subsides. He turns his head away to place his forehead on the cool, wet tile — as if he’s trying to gather strength. They taught you that if you find yourself in a fair fight, you have not planned properly. You drive your left knee hard between his shoulder blades. He gasps in pain, but he’s past surprise.

  This is the last chance. “Remember anything?”

  The man is quiet, afraid he will be punished for his silence but stalling for time, nonetheless.

  “I asked you a question,” you say. You keep your tone flat, like this isn’t urgent. Like you’re a machine. You could do this forever.

  “I remember...” He gasps and begins to cry again.

  “Yes?”

  “I couldn’t get away,” he says weakly. His hands are free and they flutter to the shower curtain. He pulls it toward him like a blanket.

  Back in the second round of resuscitation, he pulled the curtain down into the tub with him as he flailed. He hit his head on the side of the tub as he went down. With his heart working again, the raw swelling on his forehead is powering up, leaking blood into his left eye. He blinks the blood away as priorities rearrange themselves in slow motion behind near-dead eyes.

  “Did you see the tunnel? Something?” Your tone is casual and curious, not angry.

  Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

  “I thought so.”

  You yank him upright. He’s not up to fighting. You used thick plastic zip ties on his ankles. There’s no running away. He asked what you planned, but you could tell he didn’t want to know. In the first round, you knelt on his head as the old claw-foot tub slowly filled with hot water. The tub’s deep and it took some time to fill. The water heater is empty now so the tap only runs cold now.

  He lasted much longer than you thought he might. This sort of thing isn’t covered in the regular army manual. This is from another army manual.

  He asks you in a rasp to kill him and be done with it, once and forever. The heavier his body gets, the lighter you feel. Some unnamed energy is passing from him to you. Is this life energy you feel, or just adrenaline? Is what was his now yours or is that just the chemical echo of physical domination pulsing through your veins?

  He fades away this time. You can’t revive him anymore.

  When you’re done, you leave him face down in the bathtub. He never once asked you why. That’s good. He knew what he did. Maybe you saved him after all. Maybe baptism works.

  It’s pretty slick in here now, what with all the playful splashing. You wipe yourself dry with the blue guest towels and leave them on the floor so the old lady won’t slip on the wet tile when she comes in and discovers Junior.

  This is the war at home. They say it’s all
for a flag and only by necessity. You know better. Soldiers kill and die for each other and for the tribe. It is as it always was.

  But when the tribe is done with you, what then?

  With each baptism, you are born again. You are lost and, through death and resurrection, you find yourself strong — a warrior hero once more. The difference between here and there, hero and villain, is a hundred imaginary lines dividing the earth. Maps are for smug men defining nature by creating kingdoms. You know it is nature that defines Man.

  For the next one, you should try baptism by fire. Where are you going to find a couple of fire extinguishers at this time of night?

  You look up. The stars look as bright and cold as ever. The sky is oblivious to your night travels, but your head is clear. There is a light feeling over your heart that could pull you up into the night. You can barely hear the pulse in your ear. You begin to sing Amazing Grace and the song’s haunting beauty is unsoiled by the strike of iron on iron.

  POETRY BREAK

  I mostly only write poetry when my mother dies. ~ Chazz

  Last One Out

  120 pounds...

  The lymphoma took over her body,

  110...

  replacing her with each tendril of metastasis.

  102...

  She slipped in and out

  98...

  through drugs and exhaustion.

  95...

  She knew it was coming.

  90...

  Two days before dying she recited

  "Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands..."

  87...

  She saw the bullet coming at her in slow motion.

  85...

  And three seconds before her light went out,

  she waved goodbye

  and was gone.

  At age 82 she weighed 82 pounds.

  Did she really wave goodbye

  or flick a switch

  to welcome the darkness?

  Been Away Burying Mom

  It took awhile.