“Pastor Rob . . . ” Mark says, squinting to remember. “He’s the one hanging by the extension cord from the—”
“That’s not what killed him,” Chrissy says, batting the sudden mistiness from her eyes in a way that makes Mark want to cast around for a camera.
“Yeah . . . ” Mark says, trying to figure how to phrase this. “Celibate or not, you need the lower half of your body, I figure.”
“He wasn’t that celibate,” Chrissy says, and for an instant Mark looks over to her, like she’s a code he can crack. Like she might actually be a code worth cracking. But he lets it go.
“Either way,” he says. “I’m dead, I figure. You’re talking to a dead man. If anything I’m the quirky sidekick here. Non-threatening to you sexually, always good for a laugh and a wise word, and, once I’m dead, I can even be an object lesson, right? An instant regret? A final reminder? You can pick up a candelabra or something, avenge my skinny ass.”
“Any last words?” Chrissy says, still watching the dark doorway across from them as if she remembers Kissyface from elementary, knows something about how he might make an entrance.
Mark looks around, says, “Last words, last words . . . Yeah. What the hell are we sitting on?”
The inflatable log.
Chrissy smiles about this.
“It’s part of a play we were supposed to do next week,” she says. “It’s not really meant to be a—a tree trunk. It’s a, I don’t know what they’re called, one of those runners or pontoons that go on a boat. Except kind of . . . it’s for a pool, I think? I painted it myself.”
She strikes another cigarette up.
“What’s the play?” Mark asks.
“You said ‘ass,’” she says, smiling around her first drag.
“Probably something about a mote and a log,” Mark says.
“Or a phallic object.”
Mark bites his lower lip, stares at his shadowy outline in the shiny plastic of the piano poster.
“We could make out,” he says.
Chrissy has to cough her smoke out, then fan the air in front of her mouth for breathing room.
“This how you tell him exactly where we are?” Mark says. “Some secret signal the two of you worked out after school?”
“Make out?” she says.
“Desperate times,” Mark says. “I mean, the way Kissyface sees it—would it look like I was cured, you think? We are in a church, right? ‘Cured’ is the right word, isn’t it? Or would it be more like an exorcism? Does your denomination think I have demons, or just a temporary cold?”
Chrissy passes him the cigarette like they’ve known each other their whole lives, not just these last few minutes.
“So you’d be less . . . quirky if it looked like you were into girls?”
“Guess it would also compromise you, though,” Mark adds, thinking it through from all the angles. “You wouldn’t be as pure anymore, just making out with some random guy, and in a church, of all places. With dead quarterbacks watching.”
She looks over to him again.
“I think you know my answer, then,” she says.
Mark lowers the cigarette in a way he’s practiced in the mirror ten thousand times.
“Probably for the best,” he says, exhaling through his nose again, staring into that romantic middle distance.
For maybe thirty seconds they sit. Contemplating, it feels like.
“My real life,” Mark finally says. “It was going to start at graduation. No more of these high school games.”
“High school never ends,” Chrissy says back, like reciting a lecture. “You just start wearing ties in the halls.”
“Still,” Mark says. “It wouldn’t have been these halls.”
“You’ve never been here before.”
“This town, I mean.”
“That bad?”“Could have been better, yeah.”
“You were after Leo, weren’t you?” Chrissy says.
Mark looks over to see the cast of her face.
“It’s all right,” she says. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“Then he wouldn’t have been . . . into me? That what you’re saying with your past tense?”
“He might have been,” Chrissy says, shrugging, taking the cigarette. “But he might have been both, too. I mean, maybe he was a . . . what’s the word?”“Switch hitter?”
“That, yeah.”
It figures, Mark says inside.
Now when Kissyface is standing over him, digging the gaff around for some prime liver meat, Mark won’t even be able to tell himself it was all for love, that it had all almost been worth it.
“But I—” Chrissy starts, picking her words carefully: “I have it on good authority he spends some quality time in our dugout as well.”
“‘Dugout,’” Mark says, not able to keep his smile down this time.
Chrissy smiles too. She really is beautiful, in a classical, wispy kind of way.
“That gaff he’s got,” Mark says. “It’s from your uncle’s garage, isn’t it?”
“Why?” Chrissy says.
“Just—I bet the ritual of all this, it’s important for him. Getting a weapon from the same set of tackle that originally hurt him, it would have to feel righteous, wouldn’t it? Like a circle, closing.”
Chrissy doesn’t answer.
“Do you know what ever happened to that fish hook?” Mark says. “From the playground that day? The real one, I mean.”
“You’re sick,” Chrissy says.
“I’m telling you to be careful,” Mark says. “If this is a ritual for him, then the re-enactment part’s probably pretty important.”
Chrissy sucks her cheeks in to her teeth with realization of what’s Mark’s saying.
“He wouldn’t,” she says.
“I think he has to try,” Mark says. “It’s not quite the sins of the father. But I bet a big brother counts.”
“I won’t let him. I won’t open my mouth.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Still, she hands the cigarette back, says, “You’re pretty grim, you know that, right?”
“Do you know what the boy’s locker room is like for me?” Mark asks back.
She narrows her eyes at him.
“Not a peep show,” he says, before she can suggest it.
“You’re saying it’s—”
“I’m saying it’s grim.”
She nods, can accept this. Just as a fact of life, not anything she feels compelled to address, or apologize for in the general sense.
“Were you serious, about making out?” she says.
“No atheists in a fox hole . . . ” Mark says.
“‘Fox hole,’” Chrissy says, liking it.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Mark says, breathing the smoke in deep enough that his eyes water. “More like cavern of mysteries. Tunnel of horror. The shiny mollusk nightmares are made of. Passage to—”
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to be gross about it.”
She reaches for the cigarette but Mark takes another long drag instead, like trying to cash it.
“You shouldn’t even be smoking these,” he says, holding the cigarette out sideways to study it. To showcase it. “If you want to live, you’ve got to be pure. Keep those lungs pink.”
“Think it’s a little late for that,” Chrissy says, snatching for the cigarette.
Mark palms it, smiles at her slowness.
“Cigarettes don’t count,” she says.
“Like the . . . other things that don’t count? I should talk to Pastor Rob, shouldn’t I? Think he’s got office hours next week? I bet he does. He can be in two places at once, now.”
Mark can’t help chuckling.
Chrissy doesn’t even come close.
“It’s no surprise you had to go gay,” she says. “You’re not exactly . . . unabrasive.”
Mark breathes in, breathes out, his exhale synching up with Kissyface’s breath coming through the speakers.
&nbs
p; “That’s not really how it works,” Mark says. “You don’t go one way or the other. You’re just on the same road the whole time, no forks, no branches, no choice—no regrets. But thanks for giving it some real thought.”
Chrissy watches him for maybe five seconds, here. Mark can feel it. It makes him pay attention to the doorway she’s supposed to be watching.
It’s empty. For now.
“We shouldn’t fight,” she says.
“You’re right,” Mark says, in his best fake voice. “It’s not like we’re going to be a couple, right? Bickering’s hardly worth the investment.”
“You’re just mad because Leo didn’t swing your way. Or did you think you could, what? Flip him?”
“Common misperception number . . . what are we on by now? It’s a choice to be who you are out loud, yes. In the halls. But it’s not a choice to be who you are.”
“More like ‘what,’ right?”
“I’m seriously losing count here. But no, Leo’s not what I’m pissed off about. If I’m pissed off, it’s because there’s a killer out there who wants to push a fish pike into the back of my head, so that it comes out my mouth.”
“Gross.”
“Like that isn’t?”
He flings his hand casually over to the quarterback. Because a fast death would be too kind for his kind, Kissyface had shaved off the quarterback’s nose and lips and eyebrows and eyelids and ears, then sawed the crown off the scalp as well. On his—Kissyface’s—way out the door, Kissyface had evidently slapped the scalp into the wall, leading with the sticky side.
It wasn’t sliding down, either. The adhesive properties of bodily fluids. Who knew.
Chrissy squeaks out a little chirp of sympathy pain about the quarterback. Or something. It’s not exactly a sound Mark’s ever heard before.
Guys are so much easier. Because this is, after all, a church, he says a silent little prayer of thanks that he’s only ever had to navigate guys.
On cue, Chrissy scoots over on the log. A few inches closer to him.
“Mind?” she says.
“At your service,” Mark says.
Instead of reaching for the stub of a cigarette Mark’s considering pulling one more black lungful from, she gets another new one going.
It keeps the smell of all-star guts at bay, some. If not the sight.
“Think they’ll build a new church, after this?” she says, gesturing around with her cigarette so that the cherry drags sparks across the whole place.
“Not fast enough for the funerals, anyway,” Mark says. “You never told me what that play was going to be. Something about a giant penis, I take it?”
Chrissy laughs, leans into him, says, “I wish.”
Mark casually places his hand on the smooth plastic of the log left between them. It’s right where one of the internal ridges comes up—some sort of bulkhead or safety thing, so that if the log or pontoon or floatie or whatever pops a hole, then just one chamber empties, not all of them.
His hand isn’t there for support, though. It’s to keep Chrissy Carlton from coming any closer.
If he’s going to die, then it’s going to be on his terms. As himself.
At least give me that, he says inside, and checks the doorway again, the one he’s been counting on Chrissy to be watching.
When it’s empty again—how many times can it be empty?—he drags his eyes back to his silhouette of a reflection on the poster. It’s like looking into the mystery of himself: why are you not hiding? why are you not running? why are you not gathering hymnals to use as grenades, candles to use as torches? couldn’t you survive by stepping under the now-red water of the baptismal, and breathing through a straw? or what if you dressed in the preacher’s robes? would Kissyface back away from a figure like that? can’t you use the strength of the breathing through the speakers as a measure of distance from the base unit, and then hide in the most opposite direction?
Answer: none of that has any hope. All it does is delay.
Mark figures he’s had something like two hours to plan his resistance, his survival. An intense two hours, no doubt, a desperate hundred and twenty minutes lubricated with blood and lubricated well, but Kissyface, he’s been working on this since elementary school.
Case closed.
“What are you thinking?” Chrissy says up to him, and Mark flicks his eyes away from his own shadowed outline in the piano poster. He flicks his eyes to the space maybe three inches above his head, over in Chrissy’s direction.
There’s a tiny green light. It’s floating between them like a firefly.
And then it blinks once, weakly. Not like a firefly.
Mark stops breathing, and Kissyface’s steady breathing continues, all around the room.
“What am I thinking . . . ” he says, trying to figure that out himself.
That green light in the reflection, that green light behind them, it’s an indicator, isn’t it? That the power, some power, it’s on. And ever since the breaker box went down in a shower of sparks from the fire axe, the only power left anymore in the church, it’s battery power. And the only thing Mark knows for sure is running right now on battery power, it’s the little black box that hooks to your belt or the change pocket of your jeans, the little black box that a late mic plugs into, to transmit.
Kissyface has been in here all along, hidden back in the choir robes.
His breath through the speakers was to throw them off. To make them think he was far away.
He’s been here the whole time. Listening.
“Keep it to yourself if what you’re thinking's gross again,” Chrissy says, still watching ahead of them, the glare and angle of the plastic probably hiding the green light in the poster’s reflection from her.
“Do you remember him?” Mark says, leading her into this. “This . . . Derek, was it?”
“Derek,” Chrissy says, holding onto Mark’s upper arm with both her hands now, like she’s about to lay her head on his shoulder. Like this is a postcard they’re in, not a horror movie. “You know that’s like three of the four letters of ‘dork,’ right? In the hall we used to always call out to him, to buy a vowel already. That we all knew. That he wasn’t fooling anybody.”
She laughs from the guilty-sweet terribleness of this secret.
Mark only has eyes for that green light behind them.
It’s closer in the reflection now. Brighter.
He pulls the cigarette butt to his lips again and drags deep, around the lump in his throat. He’s not reaching for the smoke this time, though. He’s heating that cherry up as hot as it’ll go, and then one breath hotter.
Then, moving slow and deliberate, trying to keep his right hand from trembling, he guides that butt down to the span of stretched-tight plastic between him and Chrissy Carlton.
“What?” she says, tracking his hand down like he might burn her, or smudge her pants.
“I think this is for you,” Mark says, and flips the cigarette over expertly to grind the cherry down all at once, his chamber of the log or whatever it is popping all at once, dropping his seat a foot and a half all at once.
It’s just in time.
In the space his head was, a gaff whistles through, swinging for the bleachers. Because Kissyface, he was playing by the rules. The best killers always do, right till the end. Chrissy was still going to be the last to die, but only by half a second. The gaff was going to slice through Mark’s head, then t-ball it over into hers like a croquet ball, knocking her over hard but not hard enough that she wouldn’t be able to get up, run, keep things interesting for a few more minutes.
Only, now, that swing, Chrissy gets every last bit of it.
The gaff catches her left eye socket and her head pulls around as far it will, and then, with the force of Kissyface’s swing, farther, the vertebrae in her neck cracking over to accommodate. She doesn’t even have time to chirp or squeak or whatever her signature sound is.
Pastor Rob would probably know.
Mark smi
les, thinking this, and, operating purely on instinct, reaches across to two-finger the new cigarette from her hand before she can slough down to the floor.
He stands then, his heart in his throat, his throat in his mouth, his life balanced on the sharpened edge of a pilfered gaff.
He’s the same height as Kissyface.
It’s not something he expected. Killers like this, they’re giant, they’re epic, they’re monumental.
But they’re also human, aren’t they?
They were once, anyway.
Chrissy Carlton slumps over into Mark and he raises the cigarette just in time to keep from losing it, pushes her away with his knee as politely as possible.
“And then there were really two,” he says, completely surprised to find that his voice actually works. “The killer and the . . . the final—me.”
Kissyface can’t smile appreciation for this.
One of his contacts—this is from the fight the quarterback put up, drilling offering plate after offering plate across the sanctuary—it’s slipped, has to be leaving him blind in one eye, messing with his depth perception. Meaning that gaff, swinging, it had been swinging with more than a little bit of luck.
But Kissyface, he was due some luck, Mark figures.
He wants to fix that contact for him, but doesn’t know where to start.
“I’m sorry,” he says instead.
Kissyface doesn’t limber the gaff up from Chrissy’s head in response. But he doesn’t let the handle go, either.
“I’m sorry for what they did to you, I mean,” Mark says.
Kissyface breathes in through his hourglassed lips. The lipstick’s smeared all over his mouth. Mark cold trace it with his fingertip, clean those edges up.
But then he registers what it is Kissyface is doing, here: he’s breathing in, yes. But not just the air. It’s the exact same gasping mannerism Mark’s seen in his dad’s koi fish, when the pump fouls, stops oxygenating their pond. The koi belly up onto the bank, try to breath that air, their lips opening and closing.
What Kissyface is trying to breathe in, it’s the smoke curling up along Mark’s leg, scrimming up between them.
All those months in rehab, and then all the years locked up for psych eval after psych eval. You pick up a few things. You pick up bad habits.
Abominations of Desire Page 26
