Murders Among Dead Trees

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  “Shut the fuck up,” Crystal says.

  “Look at us! We’re scarred for fucking life here! You’re going to jail, bitch!”

  Jerry pushes forward and tips his baseball cap back. The light catches his face. Jesse and the girl gasp. Without a word, he steps close, bends, grabs Jess’s head with both hands and kisses him on the lips before he can recoil.

  “I’m the Boogie Man,” Jerry says, his sharp white teeth illuminating his horrific lopsided grin. “You like my boogie?” With that he twanged the bulb of limp flesh hanging from the end of his nose. “I’m going to tell Daddy you like my boogie!”

  Jesse leans against the car, scrubbing his lips with the back of his hand and smearing more blood across his face. “You think your daddy will like my boogie, too?” Jerry looks down at the girl. “Hey what? You want to kiss it, too? You badasses sure are getting freaky with the Boogie Man!”

  The girl finds her feet and runs for the woods at the edge of the lot. She says nothing, though we hear retching noises a moment later.

  “Kiss me again, Jesse! You’re so passionate when you kiss the Boogie Man! You been kissin’ me every night we come here. You been kissin’ the ball on my face for months. We been kissin’ each other’s balls, hey what? Then your friends found out and they were going to beat me up. They were going to beat us up for our love. Good thing for us, my friends came along to stop all the hurtin’.”

  Jesse makes a guttural sound.

  “It’s okay now, Jesse. Now you and me can be together forever. Forever and always, whenever your friends think of you, they’ll think of us and our eternal, unquenchable flame of love.”

  Jesse’s jaw drops open and his eyes stream. He wipes his face with his t-shirt, looks down at the still form of his friend in the dirt, and backs away staring into Jerry’s face. At the edge of the parking lot he turns and the darkness soon swallows the ebbing sound of his running feet.

  “Hey, what?” Jerry says. We all high-five Jerry, even though I could see that the slap on her hand hurts Crystal. She winces and holds her fist like a broken bird.

  I look at it, touching her gently. The knuckles are bloody but she’s sure the blood isn’t hers.

  “It’ll be alright, but I need some ice,” she says. “I’ve seen guys punched out on TV all my life but nobody ever mentioned that it comes close to breaking your goddamn hand!”

  Jack looks at her hand, pulling at it roughly. “Don’t worry. You aren’t shattered Crystal. You’re surprisingly strong.” He gives me a nod and a wink, his unspoken blessing.

  Jerry giggles. “Shattered Crystal and the Boogie Man! Riding for justice!”

  I look at the thug in the dirt. “That’s two defeated villains. What should we do about him? He needs an ambulance.”

  “I have another idea,” Crystal says. “How about you drive me home and get the ice cubes out of the fridge for me?”

  She looks into my eyes and I don’t look away. I flush red, thinking what else I could do with ice cubes before the end of the evening. I nod. “But what are we going to do for him?” The thug stirs and makes a low, throaty sound.

  “What we’ll do for him,” Crystal says, as she pulls me toward the car, “is not run him over as we get out of here.” I climb behind the wheel. She looks to Jack and Jerry. “You guys need a ride somewhere?”

  “Nah,” Jack says. “The Boogieman and me are going to find us a peeler bar. Hey what, Jerry?”

  “You’re damn right!” Jerry says.

  As we pull out of the parking lot, the street lights pass over us, bathing Crystal in a bright, yellow glow which gives her color. She says nothing but she never takes her gaze off me. Whenever I glance her way, she is smiling.

  When was the last time I felt so thrilled? I can’t remember. I only feel my heart beating in my chest. I pay no attention to the pulse in my ear.

  ANOTHER NARROW ESCAPE

  I wrote this story in a rush in one evening: the night before Halloween, 2012. Sometimes, stories (and answers) come in a rush. I love the brain tickle and dopamine kick that writing yields. It’s the juice of creativity, making connections from one step to the next until you discover where the story takes you. The first step was a woman passed out on a couch. After that? I had no idea where it would carry us.

  Lt. Mathers makes an appearance in Higher Than Jesus and the dead lumber mill worker referenced below is the dead dad in The Dangerous Kind. I’m slowly populating (and depopulating) the town of Poeticule Bay, Maine. ~ Chazz

  The warm whisper reached down to her, pulling her from sleep’s cocoon. “Every woman has a secret. I know your secret, Celeste. I want to know more.”

  She stirred but did not yet wake. Was that warm, oddly familiar, voice real? Celeste Mathers had been curled on her living room couch where she had collapsed, exhausted, at sunset. Darkness had gathered, but the heat pressed in unabated under the heavy white moon. The power outage had gone on for two days so far, a result of a summer storm that had battered the eastern seaboard. Tiny Poeticule Bay seemed to be Central Maine Power’s last priority for repairs.

  Celeste longed for her little electric fan to come to life, even if only to beat weakly at the sultry night. She was still woozy, her mouth dry from gin and tonic. She’d run out of ice to ease her drink’s potency. Was that yesterday, or the day before? The gin first made her feel braver, then sleepy. This dark, old house, slouching and shambling on its foundations from generations of the Mathers family living here? Each summer night was a fever in a sweatbox.

  Instead of a sweet goodbye and a frantic kiss, Chuck’s final words before he left for Afghanistan for another tour were, “Get yourself to AA. Leastways, maybe you’ll make some friends that way.” Her husband packed such cruelty and punch into his soft, gentlemanly Georgian accent.

  Contemplating the cold moon, Celeste had begun to think again of killing herself, more seriously this time. She knew she’d have to work her way up to it, but drinking harder was helping her get there.

  It had been so long since that first attempt, she’d lost the business card for the therapist up in Orono the doctors made her visit. She guessed the card was in the kitchen drawer that held unfamiliar keys, outdated cell phones, loose screws, batteries and twine. She’d looked, but, when she couldn’t find the therapist’s card, she couldn’t be bothered to find the therapist’s number again. She just wanted to drink and sleep and wait for the courage to end things painlessly in one quick move.

  The therapist in Orono had been a nice woman, but the truth was that Celeste was cured of her urge to kill herself, at least for a while, by her husband. She’d taken too many sleeping pills once, back in the bad early going of her marriage that preceded the progression through despair.

  She’d awoken in the hospital, her mouth foul with bile and stomach acids, her shirt stained with a long black drool of charcoal from the stomach pump. She didn’t know it when she took the pills, but she’d hoped for life and sympathy. She wanted to show she was fragile so her husband would treat her delicately. All she really wanted was gentleness.

  Instead, when she woke, bleary and disoriented, all Chuck had for her was more venom. “Men kill themselves with firearms. Women play around with pills or stick their head in a stove or cut themselves and wait in a bloody bathtub for someone to find them. Women cry for help. Crying for help is weak, Cel. You want out? Then get out. You want to kill yourself? Do it. You’re looking for me to go soft and cry all over you and treat you like a baby? Fuck that,” he whispered in her ear. “And fuck you. Shit or get off the pot because I am not interested in being married to a mental midget. When you really decide to step up and kill yourself, just do it. I don’t want to know anything about it until it’s done. When you’ve done that, you’ll have really done something. I’ll want to know right away so I can start celebrating.”

  He walked out, smiling and tipping his hat at the nurses. They gazed after him, talking among themselves about the man in uniform who was so handsome, he was almost
pretty. Chuck didn’t want to know her anymore and Celeste had given up hope she could make her marriage better. He was away for long periods at a time and no one was hiring teachers. If not for that, they might have divorced long ago.

  She wanted to sleep and not wake from inertia’s rut. Depression, she was sure, sapped any energy she had to change, but a trigger didn’t require a lot of energy. Second amendment remedies were, she reasoned, the easy way, if she could just suck enough courage out of another bottle of gin.

  But wait. There was a man who wanted to know more...that wasn’t a dream, was it? She began to swim back from sleep, slowly but with a destination in mind.

  Her bleary vision was drawn to the yard sale reject, the too-soft seat of the low chair across the room. She felt the man’s eyes on her before she spotted his silhouette. He was hunkered down, knees high amid pale moon shadows.

  Sleep evaporated in adrenaline’s heat. Celeste bolted up. Waking up like this was like falling on hot concrete. Her spine stiffened and her nerves jangled, readying her to run. The knife block sat by her kitchen sink. Beyond that, the back door. Twenty-five yards of a dead run after that, past the gray, clapboard woodshed and the well, the woods waited. There were no neighbors to flee to or to hear her screams for help, but she knew every tree and gopher hole on her property. Any man who came after her beyond the dark tree line would be easy to stick with the long bread knife.

  Despite her nervousness, she summoned her teacher voice and it came out cool and strong. “Who’s there?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Mathers. I called and you didn’t answer. The windows were open. I saw you through the window and...I was worried.”

  She knew that voice. “I’ve got every window open to try to catch a hint of a cross breeze, but the door wasn’t open.”

  “It wasn’t locked.”

  “I’m unimpressed with that answer.” That voice. It had to be one of her students. Who else called her Mrs. Mathers? The tension in her shoulders loosened, though if the lights worked, she would have reached for the lamp.

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Mathers.”

  Ah. She’d heard those exact words before. “William Kendle.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Mathers.”

  The boy — well, a man now — had just graduated from Grade 12. Celeste had last seen him picking his way down Rocky Beach with that overdeveloped bottle blonde Bennett girl, hand in hand. They were headed into the sunset, beyond the sea wall at the lighthouse. Sandy dunes rose beyond the break that had proved popular among young lovers for generations.

  Watching them walk away together, Celeste had felt a pang of recognition and regret. Her days of frantic hands in parked cars and urgent, dangerous moments amid the dunes were behind her. Time flows in one direction.

  “Mrs. Mathers?”

  She reached for her glass and refilled it, half gin, half warm 7Up. “The polite thing to do, would be for me to offer you a drink, William. But walking into a stranger’s house is not friendly, so suppose you tell me what brings you all the way up the hill in this heat?”

  “You.”

  “Oh? Do tell, though I should warn you that I’ve already told you everything I know about William Styron. I don’t hold back in the last semester.”

  “I saw you through the window.”

  “You didn’t expect to see me passed out drunk. I get it. Back when I taught elementary school, the little kids were always shocked to see me down at the General Store, as if they didn’t expect me to eat. It took them a couple of years to get past the idea that I didn’t actually live at the school.”

  “Passed out drunk surprises me, but it doesn’t bother me.”

  “Nor should it. I fell asleep in my own house, William. It’s not just a little bit creepy to wake up with you sitting there in the dark.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mathers.”

  “You said that. Tell me why you’re here.”

  “I saw you through the window and I couldn’t stop watching.”

  “Ah. Me all tousled and drooling and whatnot. Mm...no. Still creepy.”

  William Kendle leaned forward and the moonlight made his face a white lamp. “It’s not creepy,” he said. His face was earnest and, even in the dim light, she caught the pleading look in his eyes.

  “You said you were worried about me?”

  “The power’s been out a while. I remembered you talking about the electric pump on your well. I got a big water bottle in the back of my pickup down at the bottom of your driveway.”

  The bottom of her driveway was blocked by her creaky iron gate. She’d gotten into the habit of locking it each night after Chuck went to war. “When the pump’s out, a pail on a long rope will do. And most people take a locked gate as a sign nobody’s home.”

  “I knew you were home. You complained you never leave the Bay.”

  Had she? Not in so many words, but yes, she supposed she had complained. In the closing week of the school year, she had delivered a barn burner of a lecture to her graduating students. She’d implored the boys to look for other options besides joining up. She’d told the girls to keep their options open and see more of the world before they settled down. At the time, Celeste kidded herself that she had couched her talk with enough of a flair for a valedictorian’s generalities that they wouldn’t hear her own frustrations seething through. She’d been drinking more lately, and maybe it had started with that speech. It was drink or boil over every day.

  William stared at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Should have knocked.”

  “Yes. I have no excuses. I have reasons, but no excuses. I saw you through the window and...I couldn’t look away.”

  Celeste sighed. “I’m a little old for crushes from my students, William.”

  “I’m not your student anymore...Celeste.” He broke into a smile as he tested out the use of her first name on his tongue (and the equality that implied.)

  “You,” she said, “are a presumptuous young man.”

  “Really? I don’t think I am. I saw how you looked at me when you thought no one was looking.”

  And there it was. All her frustrations hadn’t been expressed in one speech about her concerns for her students’ collective futures. She had other frustrations — “bedroom needs” her mother used to call them. William Kendle, a young man full of a young man’s needs, had felt her lingering gaze. She hadn’t looked away quickly enough as she watched him shoot hoops over the lunch hour, his muscular arms shining in the noon sun. There was something about his dark, deep set eyes and strong jawline that reminded her of another young man: her first boyfriend. Those roots grow deep and they stay in the marrow. No one forgets their first.

  “You want a drink, William?”

  “I was hoping, sure.”

  Celeste poured him the drink and held it out to him. When he stood, he towered over her and he took the glass slowly, his hand lingering over hers in the transfer.

  “If I’m to start drinking again after passing out,” she said, “we better toast something or you’re going to suspect I have a problem.”

  “Let’s toast goodbye,” he said. “This is my last night in the Bay. I decided to take your advice and get out while the getting’s good. I thought I had a job waiting for me at the mill. I was told there was an opening for me after that old guy, Mr. Kind, died. Turns out the foreman promised the job to his own son.”

  The mention of “that old guy, Mr. Kind” made Celeste feel...what was the word? Bleak. She was closer in age to the dead mill worker than this young man. She pushed the thought away. “The thing about small towns and family businesses is nepotism is expected and never publicly condemned.”

  “Guess so,” William replied. “You give your stupid son a job, that’s not called unfair around here. That’s a legacy.” He knocked back his glass and drank the gin in one go. “I’m taking it as a sign and heading west.”

  Celeste watched him, still towering over her and looking awkward now that
his glass was empty. She picked up the bottle and waggled her eyebrows. He held out the tumbler for more.

  “That’s no way to drink gin. It’s my gin, so take it slower this time and make it last. Plus, too much too fast and it’ll do more than poison your brain. It’ll make your stomach bleed.”

  “That’s what it’s for.”

  “If you’re going to go out into the world and make your way, I should teach you about drinking. Most boys your age rush to get drunk. You’ll stand out more if you don’t hurry. Girls like a man who doesn’t hurry.”

  “But if I hurry,” his gaze lingered on her breasts now, “I can do it more often.”

  “I was talking about drinking.”

  “I wasn’t,” he said. He smiled and stepped closer, bolder by the minute. She didn’t feel threatened. She felt annoyed with him that he thought bagging her would be so easy. She was annoyed with herself, too. He wasn’t wrong.

  Celeste stood. She barely came up to his shoulder, but she spoke with the same authority she wielded in her English class. “So what was the plan, William? Swing by with some water for your old teacher and give ’er a good one for the road?”

  “Like I said, I was planning on hurrying, so I could give you more than one good one. And you’re not old, Celeste.” He stepped closer, so close that she could feel the heat of his body. Their bodies acted as a capacitor, the electricity building in the small space between them, all the hotter for not touching and completing the sexual circuit.

  “I’ve already said goodbye to everyone else, Celeste. My folks think I’m already out of town and headed to California. I got a full tank of gas, chips and crackers and pop for days of driving and the road is calling my name, just like Kerouac in that book you suggested.”

  “On the Road’s too racy for the required curriculum in Maine. I’m surprised you read it. As I recall, your paper on To Kill a Mockingbird made me think you watched the movie but didn’t bother with the book.”