There was a condom close by, dried out from the sun and looking brittle, a dead thing in the surf. Sadie sniffed it but Board jerked her along…past glinting shards of broken beer bottles, and an intact whiskey bottle further back in the underbrush.
At the corner of the lot, a street lamp rose up. Its own trunk was streaked with rust like splatters of dried, flaking blood. Board tilted his head back to squint up at it.
At its summit, a camera was mounted. Its single, milky eye gazed down at him in turn with seeming blankness. Its kind could survive for nearly a year without nourishment until a maintenance worker from the town would climb up on a ladder to feed it some bone grit. At night, when the post’s lamp automatically came on, its beam would draw clouds of moths and beetles, as if they had come to pay homage to this proud sentinel. This solemn, remote witness.
Board was almost jolted forward off his feet, as Sadie abruptly surged into the grass. He caught his balance and snarled, “You stupid damn dog…I’ll send you back where I got you, I swear to God!” He’d probably been a fool taking on such a boisterous young animal at his age. He had thought she’d be good company after Judy—his live-in girlfriend of eight years—had succumbed to smallpox (which had been released from an Italian bomb in the most recent war). That had been two years ago now. Well…the dog was good company. The dog worshipped him, even tried to park her seventy-five pounds in his lap when he sat before his TV. He supposed the problem wasn’t so much with her, as it was with himself…
Reining in his temper, fighting to rein her in, he pulled back on her leash once more. “Come on…you’re going to get another tick, you moron.”
But it wasn’t a choice spot to stack a mound of turds that she was sniffing for. Not the territorial markings of an earlier dog she was investigating. Board finally saw the bare feet poking out from behind a particularly thick and tall clump of grass. Riding on that visual, a scent made itself known to his conscious mind at last. And a sound that had been subliminal, as if only imagined. The low humming of flies.
Board wrapped Sadie’s leash around and around his hand to bring her in close. Then, trying his best to keep her beside him as he advanced, he gingerly moved nearer to those jutting naked feet. He found himself holding his breath.
The woman’s legs were spread out but bent inward at the knees in a frog-like posture. Board felt she might have been posed that way. She was nude, and her skin was a light brown. Smooth, tight, youthful. There were no stab wounds peppered across her vulnerable breasts, yawning open in her elastic skin, as he might have thought. Instead, she was more or less pristine except that her head had been run over by an automobile’s tire (or two). Board could see the markings of its tread a little further along, where red-streaked weeds had been crushed into a patch of dirt. The young woman’s head had been flattened into something like a discarded rubber mask, its gaping expression almost comically unreal. Its contents had been squeezed out in a paste. It couldn’t be her tongue alone that protruded from her wide, dismayed mouth—it looked like she’d vomited out a raw steak.
She couldn’t have been killed this way; she must have been strangled first. Or beaten over the head with a chunk of cinder block; there were a few of those in the grass here and there. Then, then she had been disfigured so contemptuously. It couldn’t have been an accident. Intentional, Board was sure, like her splayed legs.
Because of her skin tone, and her apparently slanted eyes (it was hard to be certain about that), Board figured her to be Asian. For a vertiginous moment, he took the woman to be his neighbor Kei, from whom he had obtained Sadie when the woman decided the dog was too wild for her home, played too rough with her small children. But Board concluded that was not the case; this woman was too young.
A drop of liquid splattered against his forehead. Board touched it, looked at his fingers, then at the sky, as if he expected to see blood dripping down from a second body in the crotch of a bone-white birch. But no, the sky had gone a darker shade of silver, and a light rain had begun to patter down.
With his eyes still turned upward, Board again took in the camera mounted at the top of the lamp post. He shifted his gaze to the right, swiveling until he spotted another camera atop a distant telephone pole.
Board returned his attention to the woman, whose head and thus identity had been obliterated. He saw no clothing, no purse in the vicinity. Debased before and then even after her death—ground into the dirt like a cigarette under a heel. Stripped down to nothing but this mass of cells. The ruined head making the smooth prettiness of the rest of her grotesque in its contrast. Like his mother’s pretty dark hair, hanging down around her discolored face…her bare feet, pointed downward like a ballerina’s, fine in form but black as overripe bananas.
Board felt oddly more embarrassed for this anonymous woman than mournful. He wanted to throw something over her legs, her gaping crotch, but had nothing to cover her with but his own jacket. And what good would that do, anyway, except get him wet from the rain on his walk back home?
“Stop it,” he hissed to Sadie, who had been snuffling at the girl’s pretty feet and even gave one sole a lick before he wrenched her away. “Let’s go,” he told her. “Come on, idiot, let’s get back home.”
He threw another look at the dead woman before he left her there. He saw flies crawling across what had once been her mind. Another fly picked its way across the wires of her pubic hair as if playing a game, trying not to fall into the crevice of her vagina. No other region of the human body—not even the brain, it seemed—had inspired so much killing as the one that gave birth.
When he got home, Board immediately called the police. He told the detective he’d been transferred to that he had stumbled upon a murdered woman on the property of the old abrasives factory.
“Right there at the corner of the warehouse parking lot?” the detective asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it.” Someone else had already reported it, then?
“We know about it. There’s a camera right there. We just haven’t had a chance to pick up the body yet.”
“Well…so…did you see who did it, then? On the camera?”
“It was a legal kill, sir, don’t worry about it. The man’s already been checked out. We’ll try to get down there tomorrow.”
“But…” Board began to stammer now “…kids play down there…”
“I said we’d get to it. Kids shouldn’t be playing around there, anyway…it’s private property. And you shouldn’t be walking your dog there, either.”
“Sorry,” Board mumbled, hanging up.
Later he fed Sadie her supper, and then tried to find something he could watch on TV. When he saw that the popular “reality show” Rape Island was on, he quickly changed to another channel before his bile began to rise. Even the newspapers reported on each weekly episode with the same fervor that workers gushed about it around the water cooler. As much as he tried not to hear anything about the program, even Board knew that it looked like Elizabeth would be the last woman to be raped on Rape Island, and thus would win the ten thousand dollars. The first woman who’d been raped, he’d heard people cynically joke, had been caught after only an hour on the island—proving that she’d wanted to be raped.
Turning off the TV after coasting through its several hundred channels in two full, restless loops, Board looked toward the window he had stood before when it had still been light. Out there in the dark, in the now drumming rain—just at the end of his little suburban street—that young Asian woman lay in the street lamp’s glow. Only that camera watching over her. The lonely rushing vibration of a passing train might have been the moan of her spirit, struggling to free itself from the chaos of her head. Emptied, flattened, like that discarded condom. Just like a tossed condom, to the man who’d killed her; something he’d briefly put his dick inside.
Am I insane? Board wondered. Is it me?
Was he too old, too traumatized maybe from events of his boyhood, to just loosen up and sit back and watch Ra
pe Island? To go outside tomorrow at six o’clock, after coffee and bug eggs, and shoot his neighbor in the head for playing his radio so loud when Board was still trying to rest his aging bones? He could shoot the man’s entire family and still have five or six kills saved up.
Was there something wrong with him? Was he simply unable to blend in with society like the majority? He the mutant? He the misfit, the outcast, like a murderer who couldn’t ask a woman for a date and thus stabbed her, who couldn’t interact with his coworkers and shot them instead?
Judy had been the longest relationship of his life. She hadn’t wanted to marry him; she was a divorcee who after twenty-plus years with an alcoholic harbored a dark view of marriage. A rather dark temper, too. She’d slapped him across the face on several occasions. But she’d died with eight kills accumulated, unused. Gone to waste, some would say, because she hadn’t willed them to Board or anyone else.
He’d waited all his life for Judy. He was grateful he’d had her for the eight years he had.
Young men would often make a kill in front of girls they wanted to date, to impress them. So many young men had it easy…had no problem meeting women, dating, marrying, (cheating).
Yes, he was thankful for the eight years. But that didn’t erase the bitterness that his girlfriend had been murdered. By tiny organisms too many, too distant from him, to count. By humans too many, too distant from him, to count. Before her death, her face had become discolored and disfigured by the virulence. He was lucky, he supposed, that he hadn’t caught it from her. Hadn’t died, too. Lucky, he supposed.
In war, you could kill as many people as you wished. No limits. And there was never a shortage of volunteers.
Judy had liked his mustache and goatee, silvered these days. He stroked his bristled chin now, but instead of Judy he briefly thought of Louise. He hadn’t heard from her since she’d sent him a Christmas card in 1938, the same year that her last movie, Overland Stage Riders, had come out. He’d listened to her in radio plays several times, but he’d never seen her on any of the countless TV police dramas and sitcoms. Just movie late shows. Not young enough to appeal to casting directors, he supposed. He had even heard a rumor that she’d taken a sales position at Saks Fifth Avenue.
The rain increased to a pounding downpour. Biblical torrents that threatened to drown the world. Board went to the window but could barely see through the glass, which seemed made of some unstable, rippling black matter. He wanted to go out there, nonetheless, into the drowning world. To bring a blanket or a tarp with him, and cover that woman lying there alone in the night. Her smooth belly, that once a mother might have nuzzled and kissed as his own mother had kissed his, was being hammered mercilessly.
But again, as with his jacket, the urge was a pointless gesture, and he turned it away. He pulled the shade, shut off the living room light, and went to his bed. Sadie followed him, to sleep at its foot. Before climbing in, he stroked her head and said, “Good girl, good girl,” to her in baby talk. He always felt badly, later, when he’d lost his temper with her. But she always forgave him. Her loyalty didn’t swerve. He admired her for that. Despite her savage fangs, her simplicity, she was—to him—as fine a creature as nature could ever conceive. “Esteemed hunter,” he cooed to her as he slipped under his blanket.
-3-
When Board walked Sadie down to the parking lot again in the morning, the rain had stopped and even dried up for the most part, and the sky over Coccyx was as bright as it got, and those two brothers/friends had laid their bicycles down and were throwing chunks of cinder block against the body of the dead Asian woman. A birch branch poked up out of her vagina.
“Get away from her!” Board shouted at them. “Go!”
“Calm down…jeesh,” said the boy who’d complimented him on Sadie. He gave the corpse a kick in the side. “She’s dead, seeee?” The other boy spluttered into laughter.
“I said leave her alone!” Board rasped, his heart beating so maniacally that he was feeling light-headed.
“Fuck you,” said the other boy, and he jabbed another branch into the curdled pudding of the woman’s brain.
Board was restraining Sadie with one hand—she was rising up on her hind legs, trying to get to the rank body to sniff it, or the boys to play—when he reached under his jacket and pulled out the .45 with the other. There was already a round in the chamber. He thumbed off the safety, raised the gun into the air, and fired it.
“Christ sakes!” the first boy yelped, scrambling to his bike and jumping aboard. He skidded on the dirt-filmed lot and almost lost his balance as he pedaled away.
“Fucking old homo!” the other fleeing boy yelled over his shoulder.
“Faggot!” the first boy called back.
Sadie had practically gone down on her belly at the explosion of sound, disoriented and terrified. Board didn’t feel much better than she as he slid the pistol back into its holster. It was a heavy, powerful thing—the sidearm of American servicemen through all four World Wars—and his slender wrist had been jolted by the recoil.
He looked up at the camera atop the lamp post. For a moment, he had wondered if his shot into the air might have hit it by mistake. Lucky it hadn’t. Lucky, he supposed.
Board approached the woman, having to drag Sadie back to her feet, soothing her impatiently, his heart still jack hammering. Now with his free hand, he took hold of the protruding birch branch and pulled it out of the woman, then tossing it into the grass. He kicked away a hunk of stone that lay across the woman’s ankle.
Her long black hair, clotted with macerated brain tissue, was still wet from last night’s rain, here in the gently rippling lattice of birch shadows. Flies had been joined by tiny ants. Her slack mask was swarming with thousands of them. In and out of nostrils, across the slab of meat that passed for her tongue. Like smallpox organisms—or soldiers—busy at work.
He hated to leave her this way, but what was he to do? Drag her home, store her in his house until the police could come for her? Bury her nearby in a shallow, temporary grave? He was too old to be digging graves. Too horrified to have her in his house. He didn’t want to touch her at all.
After Sadie had calmed down and concluded her business, he called the local police precinct again and asked for that same officer, Detective Chisel. He told Chisel what he had seen some local kids doing to the body near the old abrasives plant.
“Look, Mr. Board, I told you…we’ll get her, okay? We’re busy down here, ya know? She isn’t the only stiff in this city, in case you couldn’t guess.”
“But children are playing with her!”
“Tell their parents about it, then. It’s not a crime scene; we don’t have to preserve evidence. If she didn’t die of smallpox then there’s no threat of contagion. If it bothers you so much, Mr. Board, don’t go down there. I told you—you shouldn’t be on that property anyway. I could cite you for trespassing, ya know?”
“Sorry,” Board snapped, and hung up the phone.
-4-
Shortly after his return from Europe in the late 20's, Board had begun to drink again. Heavily, at some points. But because of Judy’s painful relationship with her alcoholic husband, for a good many years Board hadn’t had more than an occasional, single glass of wine with dinner, or a handful of beers spread over the whole of a summer. But this evening, he poured himself a glass of merlot even though he hadn’t yet eaten, even though he knew it would go straight to his head.
He had bought the bottle of wine at the supermarket today after seeing a man murdered there, not even ten feet from him.
Someone had told him afterwards, that one man had cut the other man off for a parking space in the lot. Apparently, the man who had been cheated of what he felt was his rightful spot had followed the other man into the market after fetching a shotgun out of his trunk. The man who’d won the parking place was standing with his son, who Board gauged to be about ten, looking over canned vegetables when the man with the shotgun appeared in the aisle.
&n
bsp; Board didn’t know about the man with the gun, though, until he heard its booming report.
Remembering the incident, though he didn’t welcome the images, Board stood before a framed movie poster on the wall of his living room, seeing his ghostly reflection in its glass. The movie was William Wellman’s 1931 film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney as Tom Powers. Though his credit wasn’t on the poster, Board had been the cinematographer on that film. It had taken almost a year for him to get work in Boneland after his return from Europe, but by 1931 he had been getting work with regularity.
Though Cagney’s leering face tried to dominate his mind’s eye, instead Board saw again the bared teeth of the man with the shotgun when the deafening blast caused him to whirl around.
Board tried to think of Mae Clarke’s face as Cagney smashed a grapefruit into it. Instead, he saw the man who’d been hit with the shotgun discharge, as the man was still slithering down the shelves of canned vegetables, some of these cans tumbling to the floor, some of them trickling salty water from where they had been punctured with buckshot. It looked as though someone had dug out most of the man’s face and the top of his skull with a trowel. You could put your arm in the front of his head and out the other side.
Glass in hand, Board drifted to another poster, this one for Howard Hawk’s 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby, with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. The poster showed a cartoon of the stars feeding the film’s three-year-old leopard, “Baby”, in a high chair. Board’s favorite scene had been in a museum, when Grant—a small dinosaur bone in his hand—sat before a huge, cage-like brontosaurus skeleton trying to determine where the bone should fit. With unconscious sexual suggestiveness, Grant’s character said, “I think this one must belong in the tail.” His character’s fiancée, Alice Swallow, retorted, “Nonsense, you tried it in the tail yesterday and it didn't fit.” Board hadn’t been able to keep a straight face while shooting the scene.
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