* * *
Gil just sat wishing he could have left town yesterday. He barely even noticed as Rick and Marisol pulled up. He hardly breathed a word of thank you to her condolences or in acceptance of the bridge models she laid gently next to him. He didn’t think on the fact that Rick never even left the Winnebago and before it occurred to him to say something more, Marisol was gone and he had no idea how long it had been since she had come and gone. It didn’t matter really and it only crossed his mind because he thought to worry for a moment that they were able to make it out of the town alive. They had come close to him and that wasn’t working out very well for people. He was pretty sure he had 6 deaths on his head right now. Not that it was really his fault, but it was his curse and if he just kept his mind focused on driving then he could have made it out of town and even though Kurtz failed at least he and Tod wouldn’t have died and he wouldn’t have hit the tower and killed Denise and the Hirsons and it wasn’t his fault really. The shit that happened to him and around him wasn’t his fault and he knew that and his parents and friends always told him that and yet it always felt like it was his fault because he knew that his simple presence made things worse and he knew that if he had somehow managed to get out of town, if he had never come back to the town, things might have happened but they wouldn’t have been so messy. But there was always that thing that kept him here or sucked him back. The last time he came home it was because of his arm and he thought once he figured out how to use the prosthetic he could find his way back out into the world. But that never happened like it should have.
He looked down at the piece of plastic strapped to what was left of his arm. His dad said it served him right for being fool enough to lose it and Gil should be grateful that it was him and not someone next to him like it had been up in Alaska. Gil’s dad understood that he was a walking time bomb waiting to go off on himself, but more often on someone else. He never said it, but Gil knew his dad blamed him for his mom’s death. No more so than Gil, though. That was a pain that never went away. Not like his arm. He hardly thought about the pain of that anymore. He didn’t even feel it when his arm was ripped off at the elbow. That’s what he always told people when they asked him if it hurt. They always assumed that it was this incredibly painful experience and they wanted to hear about the pain. Sometimes he would appease them and tell them
“Yeah, it hurt. The worst pain ever. I don’t like to think about it and I still wake up screaming, it hurt so bad.”
They would nod, awed, like he was some kind of hero for having suffered. They always asked if he lost his arm in The War. They wanted his loss to have meaning and losing a limb in The War seemed to be the most meaningful way to suffer such a thing. While he thought it might be easier to just say, “Yeah, I was in The War.” He believed that would be a dishonor to real vets who suffered for more than a side of beef.
What they didn’t want to hear. What he told them anyway, because they asked - and, really, most people didn’t ask… most people tried real hard to ignore his prosthetic or just pretend it was a real arm - was the truth. He was another victim, along with millions of cows, of the slaughterhouse machine.
Gil drifted into Milwaukee. Something weird about Milwaukee – if you stand in the middle of it, you can smell the breweries and the chocolate factory and the slaughterhouses. Gil didn’t know why he followed the scent of blood. At the time, he believed he would find some kind of answer in all the blood. It was a gut feeling more than anything. Plus, he heard the jobs there were easy to come by and he needed to make enough money to move to New Zealand. He believed that there was no place on the planet he would rather be than New Zealand except Stansbury – but at the time he couldn’t think of going back there… as much as he loved it, loved Vermont, there was too much pain in knowing. It just seemed…peaceful. He needed peace and green grass and mountains and New Zealand had those to spare. Sure enough, he had no problem securing a job. It didn’t pay well, but he was used to that. He would stick with it until he made enough to save enough for airfare. Feed Kill Chain. That was his title. Feed Kill Chain. He tried not to think about the fact that he never had a job with a more horrifying title. The job, however, was more horrifying. After the cow was knocked out by a hydraulic bolt to the head, he would quickly chain its hind legs up so a conveyor could take it to the next phase of its death where its throat would be cut. He never really had time to think about his job while he was doing it. The cows came fast. The chain came fast. He had to keep the whole thing moving and it kept moving 14 hours a day. He stopped seeing the cows as living things. He called them widgets and it was his job to keep the widgets moving. It was a factory that made meat from widgets. When he was done for the day he found a bed and slept and woke up the next day and went back to his place in the machine making meat from widgets.
On the day he lost his arm, he figured he had probably been working for 10 hours or so before it happened, before his arm became a widget for the machine to grind up and spit back out as meat. One second he was chaining the cow’s hind legs for the sticker and then… nothing. No pain. He floated up over his body. Actually, floated is not really correct. He climbed a ladder and sat on a rafter over his body. He sat down and looked down on the commotion beneath him. There was so much blood it was hard to separate what was his with what was cows’. There was a small group of people gathered around him. They automatically moved him out of the way so a replacement could keep the machine running… keep processing the widgets.
A woman’s voice spoke next to him. “Think they’ll try to get you your arm back?”
He looked away from the crowd around his body and was somewhat unsurprised to see an angel sitting on the rafter. She was somewhat cherubic…had a halo, wings, white robe. The whole deal. Her blue eyes glowed a little, but that might have just been a reflection from her golden halo.
“Not really,” he replied. “I’m sure it’s been processed by now. They move pretty fast around here and no one really thinks about what it is they are butchering.”
“Hell isn’t this bad.” She glared at Gil. “Hell is not this bad. It’s a good thing you have to stop.”
“Why do I have to stop?”
“You’ve only got one arm now.”
Gil looked down and made sure this was true. He thought he should be in some kind of pain. “I should be in some kind of pain.”
“I’m keeping you from it. You have enough suffering in your life. You will have more. You don’t need this.”
“What do I need?”
“You need to go home.” She glared at him again. There was something about her eyes. “You have to go home.”
Gil did not know why she was making this demand. He would accept all the pain in the world before going back to Stansbury.
“You don’t have a choice. Go.” Something about her eyes.
“Mr. Hamilton?” Gil woke up and looked up at the doctor.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid we couldn’t find your arm.”
“I know.”
And so he went home and it seemed the whole reason he had to come home was to be there so people could suffer around him and die around him and he could be there to witness it all and record it all. And to what end? To what end? So that when people came to town he could be the friendly ghoul and they would get a good scary story about some bastard warlock who had made this terrible thing and ever since the people of the town had been trapped in this cycle of death and uneasy amnesia? Was he there to warn off folks who upon seeing this seemingly ideal small Vermont town might think that it is a good place to call home and be sucked into the grip of this horrible cursed place?
He looked down at Kurtz’s little busted up models and a laugh came out of him. Ivy looked up at him weakly and chuffed. Chiding him for his inappropriate mirth? She whined a little and went back to sleep. Despite her close proximity to Gil, she survived. Perhaps she was immune to his plague of misfortune. He hoped so because she was his charge now. They wanted
to take her from him but he would have none of it and, strangely, neither would the dog. They said she would probably have a little lasting damage from the smoke and so she would never be whole either. For better or worse, she bound herself to him and they would suffer together.
“What do you think, Ivy? Should we go and see?”
She looked up at him as if to say, “You go and see. I’ll just stay here if it’s okay with you.” Collie girl was smarter than him.
As he got up, he grabbed one of the models Marisol had left behind. For some reason he thought he’d bring it down to the lake and then he held it for a moment before a wave of nausea washed over him. It was all he could do not to vomit on the dog as bile and what little liquid was in his stomach poured out of him. He wasn’t sure how long he dry heaved the nothing in his belly because when he was done and there was nothing left of the nothing, a second wave hit him. This was the sadness and the fear and the anger and the all of the negative everything and it came all at once as a scream. He had no words but just this sound that contained the whole of his pain and he could not stop even as what was left of his voice was stripped from his throat. Every bit of it and he kept on almost silently, hoarse air worked to fill the silence as it emptied from his lungs and he kept on until his eyes were swollen and no more tears could flow and then he collapsed and found himself standing over himself.
A woman’s voice chuckled next to him and then spoke. “Did that help?”
He turned and there was his angel. “Why did I have to come back? For this?”
She smiled and her chuckle became a laugh that chilled him. “Yes, my darling Cloud. Without you, the love in this place would vanish and it would all come undone. The town needed you, Gil, and you were perfect.” And the laugh again, only this time it was so very wrong and he tried to really look at her but there were her eyes again and they were wrong and he didn’t understand.
And Ivy was licking his face and whining and chuffing. He tried to say something to her but nothing came. He just pulled the dog to him and hugged her and she didn’t try to escape from him because she needed to be held and to know that he was okay and not leaving her.
For some reason, he still felt like he needed to go down to the lake and see. He had been told what happened there, but he needed to go and see. He weakly pulled himself up to his feet and looked down at Ivy.
“I’m going down there, okay?” It was more croak than words, but she seemed to understand and resumed her place on his porch. “Stay.” She stayed. “Good dog.” He made his way across the road to the path.
For no good reason, the forest was beautiful and serene in a way it had no right to be and as he spotted the bridge, it somehow seemed brighter and redder than before, as if it had been built all over again. He saw Shelley sitting by the bank and staring at this insane thing that spanned a lake for no good reason and he suddenly believed in it all, every last bit of it.
“I’m so stupid.”
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 58