by Nancy Mauro
The massacred lawn bears a strong resemblance to the topography of eastern seaboard sand dunes. The terrain is still tarped from their Sunday downpour. Lily has neglected to roll away the rock weights and fold up the canvas, which would allow the soil to dry. Here and there the tarp sags where rainwater has pooled. Duncan’s shovel is still staked where he planted it in a mound of grass. He sits on the sweep of porch. The only differences he sees in the dig site are the changes brought about by precipitation. The small mountains of soil remain, their peaks chewed down by rainfall. Beyond the yard the barley heads dip and toss vigorously, but hold. They have another month to fight gravity.
What will he do when Lily gets home? If she gets home? Drag her into the woods and give her such a seeing-to? It’s something he’s never considered before. But maybe he should now. After all, the written, spoken word has failed. The structured sentence, vocalized intelligibly, restructured with plosives, both barked at her and sung, this has failed. All he’s left with is articulate muscle.
Duncan sees the thing coming out of the barley before he hears it. He slides down the porch to the bottom step. Why isn’t it a surprise? Out back, the grain whisks apart and he knows that all along he’s been waiting for Lily’s avatars to emerge. The obstinate governess, leading a man’s pride off by the hand. The Viet Cong, setting miles of underground punji-staked labyrinths. The flare-legged Grunt Girl, waiting for the Zulu on the small-boned Latinos she’d sent down to spring those tunnel traps. Down on her hands and knees, her face pressed close to the forest floor, listening to the whisper of steam vents, the expiration of grass, the sighs of the frontline dead conducted up through roots. Those tunnel rat souls, all of them, small puffs of smoke.
He crawls from the porch, lowering himself in the soil as though the paleontological era of upright vertebrates is over. He spreads himself on the ground, drags nipples and nuts across the last few feet of earth until he’s reached the two mounds of dirt nearest the staked shovel. Duncan jockeys between these two lookouts, following as the dog moves from the hedge to the garden, its white fur luminous among the foliage. The smell is familiar here, something he has eaten or watched burn. He eases forward a bit, the animal unaware of his presence. It’s squatting at the edge of the tarp, urinating, the sound a sharp spray against canvas. Duncan gets to his knees, watching as the dog edges under a corner flap and starts to dig.
Too many of us want what’s in the soil, he thinks, rising to his feet. He has to tell Lily this. He moves across the boneyard. Warn Lily that taking Tinker from her grave is just the beginning of an unexpected responsibility. Hereafter, they have no choice but to spend the rest of their lives together, fending off disruption, chaos, personal ambition, the charge of those who would bite them at the neck and leave them dry.
Let’s start now, Lily. Duncan lifts his shovel, steps directly behind the dog, and clobbers it over the head.
CHAPTER 27
Of the Teeth
She can hardly bear to watch as the man slides out of the armless dental chair and strikes the checker-box linoleum.
“His mask snapped off.” She sees the rubber tubing of his gas mask caught in the headrest. She begins pounding her fist against the glass. “Wake up!”
Lloyd’s hand is on her, not exactly twisting, but bending her fist backward and then pushing her down the strip of grass between the fence and the office building.
“He could die.”
“We’re all going to die, Lily.”
“Fuck your Jesuitry.”
He smiles but doesn’t let go until they reach the alley. He stands with his back to the fence as though ready to tackle if she tries anything. Lily holds both her arms against her chest.
“Sorry to manhandle you. But you did swear.”
She feels short of breath. “I don’t even know what to think here.” Her voice is girlish and insulted.
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” He starts walking away from her into the shadows.
She has to hustle to catch up. “Why did you show me that?”
“Crossed the line, hey?” Lloyd smiles evasively. “You like to think you’re tough. Really you’re just a chump.”
She stops. “You’re calling me a chump?”
“As long as you can spin those wheels.”
“Hold on,” she says. “The pervert is calling me a chump?”
“Certain girls deserve what they’ve got coming, right?”
“Watching a man,” she flares her hand in the direction of the office, “maybe take his life. That’s crossing the line.”
Lloyd begins to laugh. “You’re the sophist, Lily. You probably think what? That you’re a great liberal?” He shakes his head as if she is pitiful. “But you’ve never done anything wrong. That’s why the little things bother you so much—smirches on your sterling record of close calls.”
She can’t believe this articulate ugliness, or more precisely, she can’t believe how he’s turned his ugliness on her. They move through the buildings now, and as much as she had it in her to help the dentist, she finds herself marching quickly away from the scene, if only to part ways with Lloyd.
Once they’re out on the sidewalk he relaxes back down to his pear-shaped stroll. “Listen,” he says, turning to her, congenial again under the streetlight. “I told you there’d be a quiz. In my books you pass on so many other levels. How can I hold one night against you?”
He stops walking and holds out his hand.
She looks at his fat palm but doesn’t take it.
“Let’s just agree to disagree, Lily.”
She allows her mouth to gather into a rich smile. “I’m just here to provide you with an objective view of yourself.”
“That is more kindness than I deserve.” Each word saccharine-coated.
“It’s clear to see how comfortable you are—how much you like it—on this side of the glass.”
He nods. “Where the average folk are.”
“See, I don’t believe you’re ever going to become the great frotteurist you want to be. You are a Peeping Tom and nothing else.”
“From one failure to another?” He looks at her. “Is that the idea?”
In the morning, Duncan finds himself in the front seat of the car, roasting in a sweater that’s skewered here and there with twigs and stems. His forehead is slick, the trail of moisture less viscous than perspiration. When he rubs his face, his hands come away patterned with mud created by his own body fluids and the dirt of a hasty burial.
Never one for early morning, Duncan sits and looks out the window, trying to slow his recollection of the previous night into manageable increments. But outside, his shovel is leaning up against a tree and provides undeniable evidence. Also, he’s sitting on a dog collar. He pulls the tongue of blue leather out from underneath him. A killer’s memento, he thinks, buckling the strap at its loosest notch, twirling it around his finger.
He waits for the incriminating thought to come, but it seems that remorse and conscience are pretty concepts grown too short in the leg, too tight across the chest. Duncan had believed it was the double shot of codeine that had made him giddy, but this morning the feeling lingers. Had it been a dingo or some trailer trash rottie that he’d draped over his shoulders last night as though he were the Good Shepherd, he couldn’t be more satisfied with himself. No, the fact that it was a rangy poodle does nothing to discourage his self-righteousness.
The only wrench in the whole business had been trying to find his way back to the house last night. How could he have gotten lost in a patch of forest the size of a handkerchief? Only explanation was that he’d been describing circles around base camp. Maybe the codeine did have some effect on his internal coordinates. It had taken an hour or so to make it out to the dirt road. Then he walked about a quarter mile, trailing the shovel, until realizing he was beyond the house and nearly at the river. Duncan spun around, undiscouraged, thinking he might walk up to the front porch, stretch out on those questionable floorboards,
and wait for Lily to trip over him. She’d either be coming or going. And in the direction of her landing, he’d have his answer. But he came across the car in the clearing first. With the pills making it impossible to continue in an upright position he reclined the passenger seat and slept.
Despite the parcel of land between them this morning, he can hear the slam of the back door, followed by the rasp of the screen latching into place, then the leaves of the softwoods rushing to fill the space around the morning sounds of Lily’s bicycle gears. Duncan turns the key partway in the ignition and checks the time.
He gives Lily a head start and then follows her, easing the crippled Saab out of the clearing and onto the gravel shoulder. The chestnut trees bordering the road have dropped early fruit and he drives over them, pleased with the crunch of the spiny husks under the wheel. In the sunlight Duncan can see the lip of crushed bonnet through the windshield. Instead of replaying the humiliation of the wild boar, he reminds himself of the silent and bloodless slump of the poodle.
In the second layer of his consciousness—that pink spongy layer resembling insulation fiber—he is aware of a huge lack of discretion here, taking the car into Osterhagen in daylight. However, this morning he’s operating strictly at the first layer of consciousness, the one lined with billboards and FM radio waves, and it’s telling him he doesn’t care. Something is changing just beyond his sightline. He’s got a wife to tail.
He catches up with Lily at the highway junction, trails her bicycle at an eighty-yard lag, keeping one eye on the surprising volume of Osterhagen morning traffic, and the other on the locomotion of her ass on the bicycle seat. It takes her ten minutes to reach the downtown district and another five until she stops at the library.
She actually does stop. Pulls up in front, locks her bike to a post with the ease and familiarity of daily routine.
He idles in front of some shops, slouched beneath the shady mercy of an alder branch, while she unclips her helmet and shakes out her hair. He is surprised to feel his heart beating in his mouth, as if relief volleyed the organ up there. She is still true. Despite the rift between them, she is still his wife.
She crosses the lawn and goes right into the library.
Duncan is alarmed by the pleasure he feels, tries to control it by starting angry fires. Circles back to the beginning when he was unable to kill a pig. Such a small failure and yet she insisted on pinning it to his chest.
He pulls up the hand brake and feels under his seat for a pen. This thing with the pig, Lily—enough is enough, he writes on an unpaid parking ticket. Rewind to that night and believe me—not only would I finish the thing off, I’d fritter it on the spot. I’m obviously a simple guy and can’t keep up with these mental Olympics you’ve got going on. It’s like I’m up in the nosebleeds and you’re down in the box, sipping gimlets. If you plan on remaining my wife, Lily, get your ass up here.
Startled by a tap on his window. A thick finger, a cracked yellow nail whittled to the stub. He somehow recognizes it. Yes, Duncan knows the hand but takes a breath or two to move up to the face. It’s Wakefield hunched toward the window. Of course. Duncan realizes he’s parked directly in front of the shop.
“Hey,” the old guy says, eyes not on Duncan but scouring the car interior. “What happened to your front end?” The voice is muffled through the sealed window as though it were traveling a great distance to reach him. For a second Duncan believes he’s referring to his face, the streaks of sweat and dirt. Then he realizes the man’s talking about the car.
There’s a pause here where Duncan has an opportunity to act neighborly. In the moment or so it’d take to lower the window, he could concoct an explanation. A fence, a cyclist, a drunken bender in the city. But none of these things come. Panic takes him instead, stem to stern. He throws off the hand brake, knocks the car into first, and rips a streak down the road.
This morning she found the dentist’s name in the slender phone book, called and asked whether the doctor was taking any new patients. Then she held her breath. The receptionist, she told herself in the pause between question and response, seemed too blissfully pleasant to have found her employer dead in the operatory this morning.
He certainly is taking new patients. When would you like to come in?
Check your nitrous oxide levels, Lily said and hung up the phone.
So what if it was a cheat? The result is she’s feeling much more disposed to seeing Lloyd after their argument last night. She can’t wait to present him with news of the dentist’s survival. She will wave it in his face like a flag captured from the tower of his pervy little kingdom. Lloyd is just a mental pugilist lacking a sparring partner. She sees it now.
She folds her coil notebook open to a call number in the American Fiction stacks and scans the cutter numbers on some spines. There’s a book she has in mind for Duncan, the Graham Greene novel, but she has turned in three aisles short at the D’s. Even though it’s late in the game, the book might spark some thoughts for his campaign. Or at least create a square of familiar ground between them, beyond the terror of the townsfolk, give her footing from which to ask questions. She continues toward the back of the building, glad to know that for once she’s not in any way responsible for a major Osterhagen tragedy. For once she and Duncan are not the hairpins in the socket, the ones conducting skunk energy through the little town.
She’d told her husband that her grandfather’s abduction was likely a “rape and revenge” story. She admired Tinker’s ingenuity in this version. Instead of sticking old man Oster with a pair of sewing shears, she got him where it would really hurt—by carting off the boy. But after last night, Lily suspects that even this account is a bit clean-cut, somewhat naive and small-minded.
She has to review her theory based on her new knowledge. Hold it up against the mottled light of this new dimension the pervert’s opened up for her. The Secret Life of People. Isn’t this the rubric of her new education, what Lloyd has been trying to tell her in his own magniloquent way? That she’s not meant to have a definitive answer, but rather to understand that there are infinite answers?
Lily steps between the corridor of shelves, into the heart of the G’s, having given up on the call numbers and now just skimming for Greene. She turns into the next set of shelves and glances down to the end of the aisle. At first she doesn’t understand the arrangement of bodies slumped up against the wall. Because the positions of the figures are distorted, the picture strikes her as incomplete. There’s the rigid truss of arms and legs, a hip’s line of force—the mathematics of push and pull. Lily blinks. Repeats. The physics are impossible to register in one eyeful.
He has the girl raised up on her toes and pressed against a shelf. Parts of his body—arms and legs—are thrust toward her, as though he’s leaning into the weight of a looping punch. From behind, Lily thinks his shoulders are strong enough to be yoked and made to pull a wagon through town. His knee is raised and cleaves the girl’s thighs apart; one of his hands is lost there in the bunches of her skirt. The other is on her small face, on Audiophile’s small face, his fingers like a muzzle on a beak. Lily can see that he’s holding her head still with the simple threat of his pinky finger over her eye. The girl’s lid is creased shut, fluttering below this finger. Her hands are clenched and pecking at his shoulder but the disproportionate scale of their bodies suggests her fight is without progress. There is some sound that carries over to Lily, some music from her small, songbird throat, but it’s screened by the palm of Lloyd’s hand. He has planned for this, that’s for certain. He has set his trap too deep in the stacks for the girl’s music to reach anyone that can save her.
Somewhere in Lily’s belly the idea registers that she should do something. She is watching as his hand comes down out of the skirt, the girl’s underwear coming with it. They’re covered with orange flowers—daisies. She sees daisies. Try to think now; she could unlace the tangle of girl and man. Although this sort of knotwork requires skill. Where are her own hands? Somewher
e at her sides, cramped and broken.
Lloyd has drawn the panties down the girl’s calves and scuffles to get the stretchy fabric over each foot. Then he presses his elbow into her belly, bracing her against the wall with one arm while he raises the underwear to his face. Against his mouth and nose and sniffs deep. Audiophile’s free eye follows him. Tracks his hand as he lowers the scrap of material and stuffs it in his pocket. Lily feels her mouth as a pouch of unwieldy stones, the weight of it drawing her empty head forward. She wants to help this creature. She wants to free her. But how? There’s no one here to show her the technique, how to release a snared bird.
Lloyd’s hand returns to the skirt, struggles with it as one might with a stubborn valance. Lily thinks, How long will this last? Hovering is the most expensive form of flight. How long until the muscles slump from fatigue? Lloyd’s knee is between her small thighs. If only the girl could fly away, Lily thinks. She’s aware that these long moments are illusory, that everything is happening at an alarming speed. That when the girl finally pries her leg loose, she’s actually taking advantage of the sliver of a second required for Lloyd to shift his weight from one foot to the other. And though it seems a month of Sundays before Audiophile jams her knee between Lloyd’s legs, the incoming thrust is so rapid that he actually looks at his crotch in surprise before curdling inward like a salted leech.
Lily looks up to the ceiling, considers all possible points of exit. A hummingbird would lift and dart. She, however, turns and runs.
CHAPTER 28
Metacarpal Bone of the Ring Finger
Duncan stands in the leaking chill of the open refrigerator, lips crimped around the orange juice spout, dazed about the dog and now also wincing at his bad judgment with Wakefield and the car this morning. Nothing you can do now, he thinks, lowering the juice carton, but put it out of your head.