Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  He was still floating, but his back was against the ceiling now, and he was hovering face down above Bridgette’s bed. Two female figures lay on top of the tangled sheets—each with their backs to each other, facing away from one another, each loosely curled on their sides in fetal positions. It was as if a mirror had been placed in the center of the bed, reflecting one of the frail, dark-haired women lying there. A Rorschach test, Wayne thought distantly. Or the top-view of the brain’s corpus callosum. Yet as identical as the figures appeared, he began to discern that one was older, the splayed hair wired with streaks of gray. Everything in this scene, this half-dream aberration, had been absolutely still, but now, with arresting slowness, one of the figures began to twist her head, rotating her face away from the pillow to stare at Wayne’s form floating above the bed. Of course it was the familiar visage of Nancy; but as Wayne recognized this, his body began descending, Nancy’s portentous expression contained something like devastation mingled with expectation. Her face was painted not by shadow but smudged and smeared with what looked like jaggedly applied war paint. Wayne had seen this sort of mask on the faces of Cherokee shamans. A thin layer of smoke, or perhaps tendrils of incense, appeared, creating a phantom cloud to permeate this slow-motion spectacle. And now Nancy’s body was no longer wrapped in crumpled cotton sheets, but was enveloped in a black bear pelt, the animal’s palate and upper skull capped over Nancy’s head; and as Wayne fell toward her, it was no longer his wife, her face streaked by mystic designs, but simply the open maw of a black bear. The curve-clawed arms sprang toward Wayne as he fell inexorably toward the black cavern of sharp, gleaming teeth.

  Dreams, he had told his students each semester. Never dramatize dreams. But this really hadn’t been a dream, had it? Come now. No. Some type of hybrid between hallucination and image-muddled musing.

  The affair continued into the first few weeks of December, and Wayne had achieved a confident disposition in concealing his liaisons—always meeting Bridgette somewhere far from the familiar thoroughfare of faces, and only on nights after class. Nancy, typically, would already be in bed when Wayne got home, not budging as Wayne slipped into the bedroom, and appearing not to have stirred even after Wayne had showered, washing away the scents of sex.

  On the night of his last lecture with Bridgette’s class Wayne, having deemed this a providential coincidence, seized the opportunity of Nancy being out of town—visiting that reclusive, incense-burning sister who lived out by that backward town Colfax—and decided he’d spend the entire night with his kinkily agreeable young lover.

  So: the morning after that last class, Wayne woke in Bridgette’s bed, his head throbbing and his tongue residue-soured from some questionable brand of Bordeaux. The phone was ringing. Bridgette twitched awake and clambered for her cell phone. She picked up and made a few monosyllabic responses before clasping the mouthpiece with her hand and saying one last thing and hanging up. “Listen,” she hissed, “you have to get out of here. My friend Doug’s out front.” Wayne hadn’t risked asking too many questions when it came to the possibility of her sleeping with someone else—someone her own age. Even this Doug character. Bridgette’s expression was soberingly unapologetic. “I forgot I told him I’d go to the opening of the Pawnee exhibit up at the museum,” she said. “He’s waiting outside for me to buzz him in.”

  Translation: You are not to be seen; but still he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  Bridgette slid from the bed, partially wrapping herself with the sheet in which she’d been twisted moments before. She crouched and clutched the bundle of Wayne’s clothes. “Just go through the courtyard.” Bridgette flitted her fingers toward the window. “It’ll be easier that way,” she said and flung Wayne’s slacks to him. Still distantly assuming this might be some sort of joke—escaping through a first-floor window . . . this has to be a—Wayne had time to slip into his pants and fasten his belt as Bridgette ushered him over to the window.

  It had snowed lightly overnight, leaving a feeble layer of dusty accumulation on the trees and sidewalk in the courtyard. Clouds of various gray smudges stretched out above the apartments like a smoke-tattered shroud.

  Bridgette yanked up the window and appraised “professor” Webber. Wayne was tempted to lean in for a kiss, but thought better of it; he swung a leg over the sill. He was gathering his faculties to make a joke about how ridiculous he must look, but he lost his balance and tumbled into the shrubs below the window, the wiry cluster of branches raking his bare shoulders and face. As he rolled into the snow-peppered grass Wayne thought he heard Bridgette stifle a giggle. Or maybe it was just a gasp. He got to his feet, cradling his remaining clothes to his chest. He quickly brushed snow and dead leaves from his slacks. Wayne looked up to say goodbye, maybe even taking the risk of investing the sentiment, I love you.

  Bridgette had already shut the window and dropped the blinds behind it.

  In the following days Wayne continued his business at the university—conducting end-of-the-semester meetings, arranging appointments, generally preparing for break. Initially, Wayne dismissed the less flattering aspects of his first-floor retreat and instead envisioned the scene at Bridgette’s apartment with a fair amount of levity—fleeing, he mused, from the ravaged bed of some clandestine lover like a modern-day Casanova.

  Wayne spoke with Bridgette on the phone, briefly, after turning in his final grades. She had apologized for the awkward scene at her apartment. Wayne—succumbing to some pathetic possibility that she might instigate another chapter in their relationship—had all but guaranteed a perfect grade for the class.

  That had been four months ago.

  Bridgette never called again.

  Nancy is still massaging Wayne’s head, her slender fingers gently coiling and loosening, flexing sensually. With his eyes still shut and the mercury hue of the TV playing on his face, Wayne allows himself a faint smile. He hopes the tepid spell between him and Nancy is over, and that he can share and return his wife’s attempts at affection (catalyzed by medication or otherwise) as he had so many years ago. He begins to rotate his upper body toward her. Wayne opens his mouth to verbally reciprocate—I love you too—but again, Nancy cuts him off and whispers, “I know, darling. You don’t have to say anything—I know.” Wayne’s smile widens. He thinks about new things, about an uncertain but ultimately companionable path together. This could be our second act.

  Nancy’s fingers, still threaded through Wayne’s hair, suddenly contract and coil—her grip tightening on the crown of his skull. In the periphery of his now bulging, searching eyes, Wayne sees a silver flash as Nancy’s free hand moves over his shoulder, under his jaw, between his ear and the pillow. And gracefully handling the pearl-handled straight razor that Wayne instantly recognizes from its place on the narrow shelf of their mirrored medicine cabinet, Nancy places the chilled, obscenely sharp steel against the strained cords of his throat, and with a single, elegant stroke, slowly slides the blade to the other side.

  What About the Little One?

  The nimbostratus moth wings out west

  has become the undulating Rorschach test

  I’ve expected for months. It’s hard to tell where it all

  begins—where that exam ends. I know Fall

  like dreamers know the ocean floor

  peace and the aquamarine torpor

  of the Kraken’s embrace—like the stray dog

  seeks the burlap solace in a hollow log

  after a morning of fruitless looting. The hound knows:

  ear cocked with the hope of a far our howl; nose

  to the ground as he crosses the dead-bladed plain

  of this frost-peppered property. He returns to the remains

  of his hermetic campsite hidden in a wooded nook,

  and to the comfort of that aforementioned oak.

  Our pup props his jaw upon his paws and joins the dreamers

  —drifting off against the green-glow fire made of femurs.

  Things beg
an deteriorating after the dog got knocked up. Of course, Lewis only made this association after it was too late. Doing the gestational math—one of the only reliably rational methods that proved useful to Lewis in this particular predicament—the dog had certainly been impregnated on the night he and Maggie had gone sledding on Hatcher Hill.

  That had been a Friday night, and on Fridays Lewis Brewster had a routine: finish recording his students’ grades for the week, hustle out of the high school as early as his contract stipulated, take a well-worn shortcut to a nondescript liquor store, and drink a generous portion of the purchase along the narrow backroads on his way home. It was a routine he’d established shortly before his separation from his ex-wife and which was later ratified in the midst of a tidy divorce. But then Maggie came along, and Maggie presented an entirely different sort of routine.

  On this frigid Friday in February, Lewis had made it home and was sitting in his recliner, easing into inebriation, reading a book about the Johnstown flood, waiting for Maggie to call.

  His cell phone rang just as the sun was declining behind the leafless tangle of tree limbs and the steep-pitched roofs of the nearby houses.

  “Put on some warm clothes,” Maggie said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Maggie. Full of surprises. It had been about six months earlier that they’d initiated their difficult-to-define relationship. Following the divorce, Lewis—having gained the judgment that spending too much time alone would only exacerbate his growing talent for slow-paced psychological self-destruction—had acquired the compulsion of remaining in public places, surrounded by the white noise of the vox populi. He had even taken to writing poetry at a coffee shop on the other side of town, solemnly scribbling bitter, disjointed material, the caliber of which he would have frankly criticized had it been composed by one of his own high school students.

  He was a stranger in this part of town, though, and found solace in assuming the role of mysterious poet, a sort of poseur Byron—mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Yes, Lewis was mad, but he wasn’t bad, and the only person he was a danger to was himself.

  It had been a genuine surprise during one of these self-obsessed writing sessions when someone had casually bopped a fist against his shoulder. Lewis turned to discover one of his former students.

  “Well, well, Mr. Brewster,” Maggie Boyd had said (it would only be a few more days before Lewis insisted she begin addressing him by his first name). Her voice was distinctively hoarse and seductively husky. “Hell of a surprise to see you here.”

  Two years earlier as a senior, Maggie Boyd had been precocious and, more often than not, difficult to discipline and unceasingly argumentative, but had a trenchant independence that Lewis found compelling. He’d vaguely suspected that there existed some difficulty in her home life outside of school that fostered her peculiar maturity. In that unexpected moment in the coffee shop, as Lewis extended his hand to shake hers, the thirty-year-old divorcée found himself quickly calculating their age difference—ten years, give or take—and registered a sense of unease about being seen in public with a former student. His unease wouldn’t last long.

  She hadn’t changed much. The tongue ring was new. Her eyeliner and makeup were what Lewis would have described as “Goth lite.” She had darkened her hair and fashioned it into a punky, pixy thing. Maggie was wearing a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt and her Bettie-Page bangs tickled the top of her eyebrows as she spoke and gesticulated. Maggie Boyd had a stout body and chest—a mix between farmer’s daughter and roller-derby chick.

  It was a surprise—during the second week of these coordinated encounters, which increased with frequency, eventually culminating at Lewis’s house—to discover Maggie’s nipple rings and a slender tattoo of intricate script on her pale stretch of torso. The single line of song lyrics was apparently from a band called Dashboard Confessional. (As with most of Maggie’s day-to-day playlists, Lewis was unfamiliar with this particular band.) A few nights after glimpsing the tattoo, Maggie had used her new tongue ring on him with a fascinating, dark-gaze proficiency. They quickly achieved a sophisticatedly tacit variety of sexual stasis (Lewis’s students would have slangily classified the arrangement as “friends with benefits”).

  “A surprise, huh?” Lewis leaned back in the recliner and fingered the slats of the blinds. Though the ember-orange sunset was visually comforting, a swollen expanse of pigeon-colored clouds were gathering in the southwest. “Can you give me a hint?”

  “I just did,” she said. “God, don’t be dull as dishwater. Put on some warm clothes and I’ll pick you up.”

  Lewis thought about it for a second. “I’m wiped out, kiddo.” Then he thought about her pale torso in contrast with his dark bed sheets. “But you could stop by in a little while if you want.”

  Maggie made a dismissive noise. “Have you been drinking?” Though she rarely discussed it at length, Lewis had gathered—among other anecdotes about her immediate family—that Maggie’s father was not only bound to a wheelchair but was also a ferocious alcoholic.

  “Not really.”

  “Whatever. Come on, be spontaneous.” Notwithstanding her lusty and limber contortions in the bedroom, Lewis had grown weary of Maggie’s spontaneity. “Put on a sweater and some boots.”

  Lewis slowly stretched his neck. “Are you bringing Zooey?”

  “Yep.”

  Of course. Maggie brought her dog, a hyperactive black lab, everywhere it was allowed on a leash. She even began leaving one of the worn, leather leashes at Lewis’s house. “What time are you picking me up?”

  “Like an hour or something. Just be ready.” Maggie claimed to be an only child. Her old man had clearly spoiled her.

  That was a Friday night. And how had Nabokov put it?—that Friday everything went wrong.

  Maggie drove a 1987 Jeep Wagoneer with faux wood-grain paneling. It had been passed down by her father and she’d freely received the vehicle four years earlier when she turned sixteen. Maggie had no job but was a full-time student at a neighboring university. The only thing he could figure was that Maggie’s “daddy” (never dad on the rare occasions when she mentioned him) paid for everything.

  Night now. Maggie was behind the wheel and they were slowly coursing along snow-coated country roads. Delicate flakes of snow had just started drifting through the yellow shafts of the old Jeep’s headlights. Sitting in the passenger seat, Lewis twisted around to glance past the panting, tail-wagging dog to study the two snow sleds stacked in the back—antique-looking, wooden slats with red, metal runners. Lewis cocked his head toward Maggie and in low whisper rasped, “Rosebud.”

  Maggie’s face screwed up with smile. “Huh?”

  Lewis shook his head. “Citizen Kane,” he said at last. Maggie merely raised her eyebrows, clearly anticipating an explanation. Lewis waved a hand. “Never mind.”

  Despite the frequent disparity in pop-culture references, Maggie was sharp; she’d even caught Lewis off-guard once or twice. For instance: her dog’s name, Zooey. Shortly after purchasing the animal last autumn from a classified ad (which we’ll come back to shortly), Maggie explained the name choice—a Salinger novella. The title had been lost on Lewis, but he feigned recollection, nodding his head as if retrieving the tale from some great distance.

  Lewis found the dog to be mind-numbingly irritating: hyper, obnoxiously eager to please, and desperate for attention. Once, when Lewis and Maggie had been preoccupied in the shower, Zooey discovered Lewis’s watch on the dresser and used the leather strap as a gnawing novelty. But Lewis tolerated the animal, certain that as long as he did so, his bucolic concubine would remain as biddable to him as servant to master.

  Maggie had chosen a leisurely route through the back roads, and Lewis surmised that she was taking him to Southeastway Park. Of course—Hatcher Hill, thought Lewis. “Where’d you get the sleds?”

  Maggie was quiet for a several seconds. “They were my parents’.” So like the Jeep, the sleds were a hand-me-down from her father.


  Maggie rarely talked about her father and divulged even less information about her mother. Drugs, other sorts of substance abuse had been vaguely hinted at.

  One Sunday evening months before, Lewis and Maggie had just finished and were lying naked on the living room floor. “I don’t even like thinking about that fucking bitch,” said Maggie, her cheek resting on Lewis’s chest.

  Lewis—relaxed, eyes narrowed to slits—shrugged. “You’re not on trial here, kiddo.” But he was curious now. “What about the rest of your family?”

  When it came to discussing her family Maggie’s responses unpredictably pendulumed anywhere between the cryptically Delphic to the downright defensive. Maggie had lain quietly, breathing softly. Finally she propped her chin on Lewis’s chest and waited for him to look at her. “Let’s put it this way,” she murmured. “My cousins are sort of like my half-siblings, okay?”

  Lewis twitched a frown. “You mean like—” He made a quick calculation—So your mom has kids from your dad and his brother?—“Okay.” He tried to conceal his dismay and failed. Maggie stared at Lewis for a stretch, her expression registering shame, disappointment, and something else—confirmation perhaps—before nimbly sliding away and slipping back into her jeans.

  Now, with the question of the sleds, Lewis was aware that he should give the subject of her parents a wide berth. “So,” Lewis placed his hand on Maggie’s leg, clawing at it playfully. “Southeastway Park, huh?”

  Maggie smiled but kept her eyes on the road. “It was probably never a shocker, was it?”

  Southeastway was a two-hundred-acre park managed under the state of Indiana, and as such was closed after dusk. Lewis could not suppress his didacticism, nor could he avoid sounding like an overcautious candyass. “You know we’ll be trespassing after dark, right?”