Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  On the third ring, Jim fumbled the worthless thing out and thumbed it off. It was already too late. The others had heard, shining their mutant eyes in his direction. The big male climbed a pipe down the side of the building, nimble as a monkey and big as a gorilla. A female bounded from rooftop to awning to the ground below, with the speed and grace of a house cat, though she was heavy-breasted and thick in the waist and bottom.

  The boy-thing crawled foot over hand toward Jim, like some jittering specter from one of those Japanese horror movies Jessa liked to watch on her visits. Jim saw its face as it crept into the light from the kitchen, and he realized—with genuine despair—it was the son of an old friend from junior school. Do his parents know he's been drawn into this? Jim wondered. Are they there with him, lurking somewhere in the dark beyond the rooftops?

  He turned the key in the ignition, forgetting it was already half-turned, even with the radio "personalities" buzzing like know-it-all bees in the background. The engine whinnied. The largest of the creatures closed the distance, prowling toward him; there was no doubting the murder in his—I should say its, if I'm to fairly represent Jim's state of mind—eyes. He eased back on the key, and the engine roared to life. The gas gauge flittered and the tachometer shot straight up to 1000 RPM.

  The brights came on in that same moment, blasting cold white halogen over the entire scene. The effect was like flicking on the kitchen lights at a cockroach party. Before he could see any of their faces, they threw their arms up over their eyes—he had a sudden foreboding feeling the others would be disfigured somehow, twisted into shapes too horrible for the human mind to comprehend—and drew back a step at a time, their shadows thrown long and black against the far wall.

  Emboldened, Jim laid on the horn: one long blast. Two. On the third, the pack began to scatter, crawling back the way they'd come. The big one threw one last baleful look over its shoulder. It was a bear of a man, muscular as well as fat in the gut, and prematurely bald (most of the hair had migrated to the torso, including the back, and poked through the cracks in the layer of filth, like grass sprouting from dry ground). It was the type of guy with an overabundance of testosterone, probably working some hands-on, outdoors job, like road work or forestry, maybe farming, with a healthy thirst for the wobbly pop. Jim didn't recognize him, but it didn't mean he was a stranger. In a town of a little over 2000 souls, it wasn't possible to know everyone, despite what television might have you believe.

  Then the creature scaled the wall, getting fingers and footholds in the small chinks between bricks.

  Alone now, Jim allowed himself a chance to breathe. He gave his phone a contemptuous look (or so I imagine; were I in his position, it would have ended up in the trash alongside Cordelia's leftovers). Simple concern had almost cost Leanne a husband: death by cell phone. Had she been widowed that night instead of being greeted by Jim's cold, distracted look at the door, she would never have known the horrors her husband was soon to show her. She would never have known how it felt to have human blood on her hands. Child blood.

  But she would have known heartache. In this case, I believe, such grief would have been a kindness.

  Not that I believe my friend should have been set upon by those things, torn apart limb from limb, or whatever they might have done to him for murdering one of their own. I do not wish that at all, except the Jim I knew is long gone. If he'd died on that warm, clear night in May, instead of the other six innocent folks he put to death (and the dog, lest we forget him), would the world have been better off?

  I have to think it would.

  Jim had lived, though, and because he'd lived, Leanne got to hear the whole unspeakable story, straight from the horse's mouth. How Cordelia had had a kind of foam clotted on her lips and chin, pink with her own blood. How putrid she'd smelled when he'd folded her body into the gazebo tent they kept for charity events, like pungent, musky animal feces. Like rot. How he'd carried her inside and through the kitchen, where La Costina's staff had worked and laughed and danced along with silly songs on the radio, and how her head had thumped against every stair on their way to the basement cold-storage. How she'd looked when the tent had slipped away, frost growing on her pitch-black eyes, as mist from the deep freeze rose around her, like it had off Stevens Lake in the early morning sun, back when they were still in school.

  Jim spared Leanne no detail, no matter how gruesome. ("It was the only way," he later told us, as the two of them sat at our kitchen table, holding hands through it all. Leanne gave his hand, which was trembling, a little squeeze. "It was the only way I could live with myself after what I'd done.")

  He told her everything that very night, and when he had finished, he closed her hand over something cold and flat.

  It was a key, the key to the basement freezer, only to Jim, it was more than that. She held his life in her hand, small and metallic though it was. "Keep it," he told her, still holding her hand in both of his. He gave her an unsmiling look. "Or hand it over to the police. You do whatever feels right, sweetheart."

  What felt right to Leanne was to sleep on it.

  5

  I CANNOT IMAGINE how Leanne must have felt, lying awake beside her husband of over twenty years, a man she thought she'd known, while Jim slept like the dead.

  I lay awake myself that night, wondering what had gotten into my friend and neighbor, yes, but also worrying about our youngest, Jessa. I finally fell asleep in the wee hours, and woke some time later from a nightmare I cannot fully recall, in which I'd become lost in grass the height of a man as it was cut down by the blades of some God-sized lawnmower. I woke with a gasp, my hand held out before me as if to stop God's thunderous John Deere from mowing me down. Gin, my sweet Virginia, took me by the wrist and kissed the back of my hand. I took hers in both of mine and kissed back, still cold from my dream.

  At the Taymor house, Jim woke to find Leanne's side of the bed empty. Her half of the comforter lay flat, meaning she'd made her side of the bed when she got up. In those few moments between sleep and fully awake, he thought for sure she had left him. The worst of it was that he couldn't fault her for it. She'd stuck with him through tragedy and triumph, but nowhere in their vows had murder been among them. She would have been well within her rights to pack a bag and slip out during the night, with or without leaving a Dear John (as well as the John Deere sitting in their garage).

  Hell, she would have been smart to.

  So it was with mingled regret and relief that he found her in the kitchen, looking like the illness she'd had was gone, scrubbing the stove in a frenzy. The room was already gleaming—it was always gleaming–-yet still she spritzed cleaner and scoured away like a madwoman. I suppose in that moment she might have been a bit mad, and with good reason. To discover the man whose bed she shared was capable of such a horrendous undertaking... I think we'd all go a little crazy burdened with such knowledge.

  Jim stepped around Rosco's bowls, as he did every morning before he realized they were missing from their mat on the floor—the mat itself was gone, too. A good sign for his case, or so he thought. It meant Leanne had believed at least a portion of his story.

  I do not know how Jim talked her down from her manic state, I only know neither of them had much interest in the coffee she'd scalded. Knowing Leanne as I do, I don't believe she would have acted as if nothing had happened, nor would she have given him the silent treatment. She would have been moody, almost surely, and who could blame her? She might even have given him the cold shoulder for a while. But at the restaurant, it would be business as usual. She would put on her game face, and no one outside of the two of them would be the wiser.

  Spinach, however, would be off the menu for quite some time.

  I'm not sure Jim could have said anything to sway her in his direction, frankly. Had the large man not come into La Costina that night, she might be paying her husband conjugal visits now, instead of wearing a matching orange jumper. She might even have kept his secret, sparing him his fate, but the weigh
t of it would have driven a wedge between them that the miscarriage hadn't. Spinach might not have been on the menu, but divorce surely would have been.

  The large man stood just inside the doors, looking through the pass-through at the busy kitchen and gnawing on his fingernails, as if they might provide him the sustenance he'd been denied in La Costina's back lot. Jenny Meyer, the hostess on duty, scurried away from her station to approach Jim, who was offering a young couple on their honeymoon a complimentary dessert.

  He took Jenny aside. "What's the trouble?"

  Jenny looked off in trepidation, and Jim followed her gaze. If he hadn't recognized the face straight away (and of course, he did—I've already mentioned his recollection of faces), the man's build would have been a dead giveaway.

  "He's giving me the charlies," Jenny said with a cold shiver. (For the record, "charlies" was the word Jim told us Jenny had used. I am not overlaying my own unhip old-timer version of teenaged slang over her words, though I suppose Jim could have done so himself.) Jim agreed, not taking his eyes off the man. He was used to making quick decisions on the job, yet none of them had been life-and-death until now. "I'll take care of him," he said, laying a hand briefly on Jenny's shoulder. "Why don't you go have your break?"

  Jenny eyed the large man suspiciously before wandering back to the kitchen, beyond which the break room, and her cell phone (with probably more than a dozen text messages; Jenny was a pretty girl, and popular), awaited.

  Jim spared a look into the kitchen, where Leanne was plating food with the same frenzied expression she'd worn in their home kitchen that morning. She glanced up from her work, caught the frightened look in Jim's eyes, and knew, the way a spouse instinctually understands the geography of his or her marriage, her husband's fear had been caused by the large man at the door, chewing the ends of his fingers. There was nothing very menacing about the man, aside from his monstrous size. He was a behemoth: six-eight if he was an inch, possibly taller, broad in the shoulders and heavy in the gut.

  Jim gave her a troubled nod, but she didn't need it to know this was the one he'd told her about: the man-thing who'd scrabbled down and then scaled back up the brick wall, as sprightly as a child climbing the playground monkey bars.

  Jim pasted on a smile and headed for the front of the house.

  The large man had to duck under the hanging lamp at the host station as the two men approached each other. They met in front of the bar. Jim stuck out a hand. The large man left it suspended, and Jim lowered it to his side unshook. He had a prominent brow, the sort of forehead that folds down over the eyes like a hood, giving the appearance of brooding—or idiocy—when the face is slack. The eyes themselves, though... intelligence shone in them, as brightly as they had shined in the dark.

  "Can I offer you a drink?" Jim said, aware he was stalling. Business such as this was best handled in the back office, behind a closed door, but Jim's desire for a stiff drink came on sudden and strong, a sentiment I understand fully but don't currently endorse.

  "I don't drink," the large man said. His acrid sweat filled Jim's nostrils: a musky, nostril-stinging sort of smell, barely concealed by a liberal application of Brut aftershave. His voice was as deep as Jim had expected. Not Jolly Green Giant deep, but the sort of baritone that commanded attention, if not respect.

  "No," Jim said, visibly shaken, "I don't suppose you do." He threw a glance back at Leanne, wondering just how much this man knew about them. Did he know they were married? Where they lived? "Step into my office," he said, thinking, Said the spider to the fly. Only he was the fly now, wasn't he? Never in his life had he wanted to be elsewhere—anywhere—so badly.

  The large man, who did not introduce himself then and never would, followed Jim through the kitchen. I happen to know his name was Richard Holland, with the benefit of Jim and Leanne's confession, not to mention the endless news coverage. He answered to the nickname "Dutch." I'm sure you can guess why.

  A man his size does not pass through a crowd without being gawked at and, though this was their busiest time, tonight was no exception. Every single eye in the back of the house looked up as he lumbered through, ducking his head to miss the pots hanging on the rack. Even Arnie Jacobs, sweat dripping out from under the bandana on his bald, coffee-colored scalp, turned to gape, and Arnie stands at least six-four himself.

  "Let's keep focused, guys!" Leanne said, clapping her hands to get their attention.

  Work resumed. Jim opened the office door. Dutch had to duck again to step inside. Leanne shot her husband another look—one that said, Shout if you need me in there—and Jim closed the door between them.

  Sitting behind his desk, Jim said, "Have a seat." He gestured toward the chair he used for interviews and one-on-ones with the staff, the same one I sometimes sat in when the two of us were going over the annuals. The chair was clearly too small for Dutch. He didn't even regard it.

  "I'll stand."

  "Of course you will," Jim said, the large man towering over him. "Well, I suppose I should just come out and say it—"

  "Cordelia and I weren't close," Dutch said. "Simple fact is, I hated the bitch."

  Jim made to say something, but Dutch held out a hand large enough to crush his head like an egg, palm first, to silence him.

  "But she was one of us," he continued. And whatever the "us" was, be they Frugaltarians or members of some peculiar, cat-eating religious sect, whatever Jim had thought he'd seen in the alley the night before, this was certainly a man standing before him now. No nictitating eyes, no scales or unusual birthmarks. Not a monster—a man. A decidedly large man, make no mistake. But nothing more.

  "She was family, and that's gotta stand for something."

  "Uh-huh." Jim didn't know how to respond.

  "So here's what I think we should do." He'd begun to chew his fingernails again, already inflamed from biting. Jim couldn't get a good enough look at those teeth to see if they were as sharp as Cordelia's had been: the teeth of a carnivore. "You forget what you saw," he suggested, "and we got no truck with you. You go on with your life, we go on with ours."

  "You killed my dog," Jim said, surprising himself with the outburst. "All those lost pets, you killed them and ate them."

  "That's one of the things the bitch and I disagreed about." Dutch took his paw out of his mouth long enough to make a swishing gesture with it, then planted it right back between his eager jaws. "Certain principles and tenets of the organization, you might say, including but not limited to the consumption of living meat."

  "You're against it, I suppose," Jim said, feeling rather sickened by the man's flippant use of the word, meat. As if anything with flesh was by definition edible, and anything a man could eat should not be excluded from the menu without consensus.

  "We're against it."

  "We?"

  Dutch ignored the question, began looking at the framed photo of Jim and Leanne on the desk, from their Missouri University days. Jim had no gut and sideburns and Leanne's hair was still a shock of platinum-blonde curls with dark roots, hanging loose over her stonewashed jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up. They had made quite a pair: Jim the shy geology student, eager to bust out of his shell, and Leanne the English Lit. major, hoping to shut down the party and settle into life as an adult.

  Jim flipped the photograph face down. "You can't expect me to believe you won't turn me in. I poisoned a woman. A woman is dead because of me, and you people are gonna let me walk away scot-free?"

  Jim had never been the type to disregard the dental hygiene of the horse he'd been presented with. I know this from my many years preparing his taxes. All the little tricks where I could save him some cash, he'd say, This can't be legal, knowing full well the kind of man I am, and of course that it was not only legal but required.

  "Not exactly," Dutch said, with a sly tilt of his big round head and a nibble on the red-raw index finger of his right hand. "There's still the matter of Cordelia's remains."

  This was the twist of the blade Jim
had been waiting for, though he'd never imagined he would be bargaining over her corpse like a couple of fellas haggling over the price of cukes at a roadside stand. "I see," he said.

  "If it was up to me," the large man said, "you could grind her up and feed her to those wasters out front. Unfortunately, it's not up to me."

  He spit a bit of nail out. Jim saw where it landed, on the L-key of his computer, and made a note to wipe it up the moment the man left his office.

  "The others feel we should give her a proper send-off. It's tradition. Me? I say, fuck tradition. Cordelia Moone didn't give a squirt of piss for tradition, pigging out on all those kitties and pups. Worse than that, she was stupid, too stupid to smell a trap when it's already clamped down on her leg. If it'd been up to her, we'd all have eaten that shit out of your Dumpster, and you'd have had one hell of a mess to explain to the cops."

  Jim considered the idea for a moment. Already his mind was working, you see. If he handed over the Moone woman's remains, what was to stop Dutch and "the others" from turning him in to the police? One body or seven bodies—murder was murder in the eyes of the law. And whether he'd serve one life sentence or multiple consecutives, they'd amount to the same: the rest of his life spent behind bars, without his wife. Probably he'd be filling the role of wife himself in the Big House.

  "What would happen if I didn't hand her over?" Jim said. "Hypothetically. Say her body was no longer intact? What would you do to me?"

  The large man squeezed his hands into fists, the knuckles cracking, and relaxed them. His dull expression never changed. "It's not me you'd have to worry about," he said finally.

  "The others?"

  Dutch nodded ominously. "They would split you apart at the joints."