He lay awake that night, stewing in the certainty he could never tell the woman he loved anything about what he'd seen behind the restaurant, despite the promise they'd made after the miscarriage to share everything. Most men know a promise like that is conditional; no woman wants to know every dirty little secret about her husband, just like no man wanted to know how many men his darling wife had taken behind the bleachers before he had met her. Just the same, I think Jim was the rare type of man who wanted to know, not out of jealousy but because he was genuinely interested, and the promise they'd made was something he had aimed to follow to the letter. Until that very night, I believe he had honestly thought he could keep it.
While Leanne slept, Jim replayed the scene on the darkened stucco of the bedroom ceiling: Cordelia's glowing eyes, the grime on her face and in her straggly hair, the way she'd mollified the cat by mimicking its own sounds, before tearing out its raw guts with her teeth. Her nudity, bizarre and somewhat grotesque at the time, aroused something primal within him as his wife snored softly beside him. Cordelia was old enough to be his mother (she may even have taught him how to bake clay pots in a kiln when he was a boy, when they had taken classes to her studio), but he found his mind now returning to the dark, mud-slicked place where her muscled legs came together, and felt himself stiffening under the sheet. This was the sort of dark detail a man's wife should be spared, as I've said. I only relate it to you because it illustrates Jim's chaotic state of mind—and certainly body—as he contemplated what he'd do, if anything, the next time he saw Cordelia Moone.
She's killed him, too, you know, he thought, and the erection immediately began to subside. It hadn't just been Cordelia. Whoever had left the cat chained to the bike rack behind the restaurant, like a treat left for a larger, far more dangerous pet, was equally, if not more, responsible. You've given Rosco his last Snausage. He's pissing on the carpets in doggy heaven now, the little rascal.
He thought of Rosco—shivering and yelping in the dark, chewing obsessively at his paws as he sometimes did, his cries met with nothing but anger from apartment dwellers trying to sleep—and was reminded of the Golden Retriever he'd had as a child, a dog named Rufus. Jim swallowed a hard lump and held back his tears. They weren't Jim the adult's tears, anyhow; they belonged to the boy he'd been. The rat terrier had been Leanne's idea, and Rosco had loved her most, perhaps sensing Jim hadn't liked him much. Rosco was too wimpy, too yappy, too disobedient—Jim and I had the same complaints, it seemed. Mostly, he had reminded Jim of Rufus, despite their obvious differences, and looking at Rosco had called up happy childhood memories poisoned by Rufus's miserable demise.
He would not cry for Rosco, whom he liked but could not love.
Somebody, somewhere, cried for their fat orange tabby. A young girl, maybe, who'd smiled each time she'd heard the jingle of its little blue bell as it scampered through the tall grass in their yard, who'd watched it toy with a ball of yarn for hours at a time, squealing with delight as it did. (I was thinking of my youngest, Jessa, as I wrote that. Her Maine Coon, whom she'd named Mr. Muggins for reasons neither Gin nor I could gather, had played a mean string ball.) Somebody somewhere wept for their black Lab named Chico, their ferret, or their pair of long-haired Peruvian guinea pigs.
And if Cordelia Moone had eaten these defenseless animals, was it much of a leap to think she might eat a child? If you scraped away the morality, if you slathered it over with animal feces (judging by the smell), and transformed yourself into the savage she-beast he'd seen in the back lot, if you crossed the rather rational line between keeping household pets and eating them alive, would enough humanity remain to think in terms of morality and mortality?
Of course, nobody would believe him if he told them. If he'd said Cordelia Moone rubs shit on herself at night and hunts pets for dinner. If he'd said, The Frugaltarians cannot be trusted. He'd tried it out on me, and I'd looked at him—rightly—as if he'd gone mad. Leanne herself wouldn't believe him, even if he'd wanted to keep up his end of the promise they'd made in the fall of '98. Oh, she might want to believe him, if only so she didn't have to think her husband was insane. But sooner or later she'd suggest, as passive-aggressively as she could manage (and Leanne Taymor was anything but passive), that he visit that quack shrink at the Medical Center who walked to work each day with a metal lunchbox and still clung to the few scraps of hair he had left on his scalp, suffering from the delusional belief that nobody had noticed he was bald.
If he hadn't seen Cordelia with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it himself.
What's to stop her from eating a child?
What is she, anyway? Is she even human at all anymore?
These were the thoughts that plagued him, while Leanne rode out her NyQuil coma beside him.
If he'd been planning murder from the get-go, he could easily have visited her at her home and strangled her or stabbed her, then messed up the place a bit to look like a hot burglary. They say this type of robbery has been on the rise since the recession hit. With businesses taking more extreme preventative measures, private residences have become easier targets, despite the higher likelihood of casualties. Nobody would have blinked an eye over it, I suspect, and perhaps Jim and Leanne and all of those others they put to death would have been spared the fates they got.
But Jim didn't go to her home, nor did he follow behind her in his car on her morning run. What he did was drive to the empty lot on Mulligan Avenue, where there had once been a profitable Chrysler dealership. It's all gravel and weeds, the remains of the showroom foundation crumbled and sprouting dandelions, strewn with cigarette butts and broken beer bottles. Among the weeds each year grows a particularly ample crop of rhubarb. Jim clipped them at the stem, using a pair of Leanne's gardening gloves to stuff them in a trash bag so as not to touch the leaves directly.
He was counting on the idea that, whatever she may be at night, Cordelia still believed in the Frugaltarian movement. Short of house pets chained mysteriously to bike racks, perhaps she'd resort to scavenging.
As a restaurateur, he knew all about the sorts of foods you could and couldn't eat. He must have known the amount of rhubarb a woman of her weight would have to consume to reach a lethal dose of oxalic acid was approximately seven to eight pounds. No one, even a morbidly obese vegan, could possibly eat that amount of leafy greens. He would have known, as I now do, that cooking the leaves with soda bicarbonate dramatically increased the plant's toxicity. These are facts you can easily divine on the internet, as I've come to learn, ever since Gin persuaded me to chip away at our retirement fund for its low-low monthly fee so she could keep in touch with out-of-town friends and relatives, in particular Jessa and Tim.
Jim knew the leaves were poisonous, but for fear that it wouldn't be enough, he added a healthy dose of rat poison. I believe they call that "overkill."
He closed shop early, much to the discontent of his wealthier customers, and cleared the staff. Leanne still felt ill, and Jim had pulled double duty for Javier, whose own wife was still in the hospital (Lord knows how they afforded the medical bills on their meager salaries; perhaps my neighbors had footed the bill there, too). Sweating in front of the stove in the darkened kitchen, he prepared a few special dishes for his nighttime visitor. The extra ingredient was not love but poison. He cooled them in the walk-in, scraped them into the trash. A small part of him mourned the loss of so much good food as he hauled the bag to the Dumpsters.
No animals chained out back tonight. Good for him. Not so good for the creature calling itself Cordelia Moone.
Jim sat at the mouth of the alley behind the wheel of his Suburban, waiting. One of those maddening talk shows on public radio played low in the background, but he wasn't paying attention. If he had been, he might have heard that the man responsible for the attacks on September 11 had been killed. A bit of good news like that might have changed his mind, but Jim wouldn't hear about it until the next morning, and by then the deed was already done.
In actual
fact, I don't believe he expected anyone to show. A part of him, he told me, had come to think he'd imagined the whole experience. It has always been difficult for me to believe that. The details he'd given were so vivid, names and faces withal, that if he had imagined it all he surely would have seen the signs much earlier. A man doesn't acquire schizophrenia overnight, not without benefit of drug or alcohol dependency, a tumor or lesions in the brain. Court-appointed neurologists and psychologists had him checked for these and found nothing. In any case, the trap was set. If things ended up with a family of dead raccoons in the bins, they'd go out with the trash on Wednesday. No harm, no foul.
He was about to give up when he heard rattling somewhere near the far end of the alley, a hubcap's clatter and scrape as it rolled to the ground. Then the lid of the furthest Dumpster swung open so violently it slammed against the back. Jim leaped up in the driver's seat, jerking his collarbone against the seatbelt. In his agitated state, he must have buckled himself in, though he didn't remember having done so.
Cordelia Moone crawled onto the lip of the Dumpster and perched there. She remained motionless for some time, perhaps sensing for predators. Finally, she began plucking out a single piece of trash at a time. She brought each item close to her face to sniff at it, and tossed what was spoiled over her shoulder. What hadn't begun to rot she nibbled at with both hands held to her mouth like a rodent, and Jim watched with cold captivation for her to reach the bait bag. He didn't think she would suspect poison, especially when you factored in the treat that had been left without it the night before. She would see its contents, virtually devoid of the plastics and scraps which constituted real garbage, as the motherlode.
As Jim sat there, with news of bin Laden's assassination going unheard in the background, he could think of only two things. One was that she would see him. Nocturnal animals can see in the dark, and it appeared to Jim that whatever Cordelia was during the day, she was surely a creature of the night now. Something had changed her. He held a vague idea that the Frugaltarian movement (these things were always "movements"; one couldn't simply do anything these days without belonging to one group or another, so eager we human animals are to be placed into our little labeled boxes) was some kind of cult. But the notion they could have somehow altered her into the subhuman creature he saw before him... It wasn't just difficult to believe, it was outright preposterous.
The other thought was that if she did happen to see him, he'd have to be quick about it: start the Suburban, drop it into Forward and step on the accelerator, before Cordelia Moone had a chance to react. If she was still on the Dumpster, so be it. He'd ram the bin and Cordelia so hard into the back wall of the building that even if it didn't kill her, she'd be too broken to get up. And if she came at him, if she was running full steam by the time he got the car going, he'd plow her down like roadkill. Then he'd simply back out into the street, leave the door open and the keys in the ignition, and walk home.
He'd tell the police the car had been stolen—with any luck, it would be—and they'd assume it had been a joyride gone bad. Cars were stolen all the time, particularly in the current economic climate. Besides, what motive would Jim Taymor have to kill her, aside from her rooting through his trash? If she really was no longer human, as Jim truly believed, the unidentified carjackers would be hailed as accidental heroes.
Fortunately, Cordelia did not see him, and Jim never had to lie about it. That was one thing he never did: lie. Everything he said to the police, to Leanne, and to Gin and me was the truth, at least as far as he saw it. The polygraph they'd administered proved it. I suppose that's a pretty decent reason why they aren't admissible evidence in court.
What Cordelia did do was find the goodie bag Jim had left for her. Her eyes lighted, quite literally, as she tore it open to poke through its contents: spinach lasagna, sautéed spinach with garlic butter, spinach and salmon mousse. She must have thought she'd died and gone to Frugaltarian heaven. Except what looked like spinach to her was actually leaf rhubarb, and in addition to the nutrients you'd expect to find in your leafy greens, your vitamins A and C, your potassium and dietary fiber, these were loaded with oxalates, cooked in soda bicarbonate, and sauced with the rat poison kept under the sinks as a just-in-case, which he'd never had occasion to use until just then.
She sniffed at the handful she'd scooped out, like a kid with a handful of pumpkin guts. In the moonlight, Jim was close enough to see her nostrils flare.
A creeping certainty grew in him then: she'd smell the poison. Or taste it. She nibbled a bit, and waited, like a rat would. Waiting for the onset of stomach cramps that would tell her to avoid the brown acid.
A minute passed on the dashboard clock.
Two.
Cordelia sniffed the cloudless night air. In the distance came terrible squawks and screeches: raccoons fighting over a tasty morsel in some poor bugger's yard. Her head twitched to the left, the gold eyeshine vanishing momentarily, leaving only black. It seemed to Jim that black had spread from eyelid to eyelid, as if she were no longer human at all. It took all of his strength not to run her down right then and there.
Then he thought of Leanne, sitting on the living room sofa surrounded by crumpled tissues, something mindless on the boob tube, and the thought of her discovering what he'd been doing out here, when he should have been serving steak in mushroom béchamel sauce and lobster ravioli to a house full of salivating customers, gave him the strength to hold out. He chuckled softly to himself as a dark thought occurred to him: I'm still serving food... at least technically. It made him feel like a homicidal chef in some dime-store detective novel, and he stopped cold, looking at the dashboard clock. Four whole minutes had passed. Finally, Cordelia returned her attentions, and her snout, to her supper.
People may tell you warfarin poisoning is a painless, more humane death, but I tell you this: Cordelia's death was far from painless. She'd eaten roughly an entire helping of rhubarb lasagna laced with rat poison, when her fingers clutched suddenly at her belly. The expression on her face, which Jim neither relished nor entirely abhorred, was that of pure agony. She toppled from her perch to the cold concrete, crying out like a wounded animal. Had she loosed a human cry from her conspicuously human lips instead of that monstrous howl, she might have caused alarm. Someone might have called the cops, and the paramedics might have arrived just in time to save her life. As it happened, the sounds of her death were lost in the din of the raccoon skirmish maybe a block away. No one had ever considered that a woman lay dying in the back alley of Jim and Leanne Taymor's Italian family eatery. Good for Jim. Not quite so good for the thing calling itself Cordelia Moone.
Jim sat in the comfortable cab of his Suburban and watched her die. Rufus, the dog Jim had when he was a boy, had gotten sick, suffering multiple seizures near the end that had terrified eleven-year-old Jimmy's father as much as they had Jimmy. In the waiting room, while the vet put down old Rufus, Jimmy had wept the whole time. Adult Jim remembered this while Cordelia Moone twisted and moaned at the foot of the bins. Rain pattered in through the sunroof, falling on Jim's cheeks and tracking warmth down to his chin. But it wasn't rain—the sky was clear, full of stars, and the sunroof was closed, anyhow. These were tears streaming down his face, just like the little boy who'd lost his dog.
He looked up from wiping his face, in time to see shadows skulking into the back lot, perched on the fence and on the rooftop. Terror rattled through his bones; curiosity held him there, the same sort of reckless curiosity that would cause a man to stick his head into a darkened hole to see what lay beyond. He peered up through the tinted portion of the windshield, then the sunroof, counting heads: six of them in all, mere silhouettes against the moonlit sky. Cordelia's caterwauling had summoned them. They whimpered and howled and lay down on their stomachs, their chins resting on their hands like a pack of wolves grieving its Alpha. Jim couldn't see their faces throughout this performance, just the eyes, and the same glow fading from Cordelia's life-lamps burned brightly in theirs
.
Jim waited for them to leave, but as time ticked away, he grew ever more nervous. There was, after all, a dead woman in the alley, or some manner of thing with the look of a woman, which would amount to the same thing when the police showed up. He needed to be gone when they did. He had a successful restaurant to worry about. A reputation. A wife—
The moment he thought of Leanne, his cell phone began to ring. As I recall, it was some classical piece or another and high-pitched as all get-out, the sort of thing they use to deter teenagers from loitering at some shopping centers. Naturally, it was Leanne. Speak of the Devil and he (or she, in this case) doth ring. This was especially true when you had your phone surgically attached at the hip (or ear) like most everyone seemed to these days.
It was after midnight, and she'd be worried. Jim scanned the fence, the rooftops, certain they'd heard. Night animals had heightened senses, he knew; whether that extended to hearing for these creatures, only human in appearance... Well, he was about to find out firsthand.
One head turned toward the sound, atop a smallish body that might have belonged to a child. Another, large and distinctly male, crouched at the edge of the roof of the surplus store directly across from where Jim was a sitting duck, and turned toward the Suburban.
He scrambled to get the phone out of its holster. In that moment—a moment that seemed to draw out longer than the time it had taken for Cordelia to die—the smallest of the pack leaped down from the fence, landing on all fours, its knees drawn up higher than its shoulders. It was no human posture, and even from the relatively low height of the ten-foot fence any normal human child would have been injured in the drop. Like Cordelia, the boy was naked, encrusted with dried muck and animal scat. Judging by his little winky (that's Virginia's word, not mine, and it pains me some to see that I've written it, but for this to be an authentic account, I feel I should censor myself as little as possible), a hairless knot below his abdomen, he had yet to reach puberty. Maybe eleven or twelve at the most, just about the age when Jimmy Taymor had wept for his dead dog.
Gristle & Bone Page 24
