Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Lillian?’ I said.

  I stepped into the sunroom.

  The plate glass on one of the doors to the outside was shattered. A man sat on the sofa. He was enormous and pale, with blue veins visible in his hands and forehead.

  He had stretched a white T-shirt over his big body and blue jeans around his big legs. He wore brown cowboy boots on his enormous feet. He’d taken our butcher knife from the kitchen and held it in his big hands. Percy lay at his feet, calm.

  As I entered the room, Lisman stood up. His eyes were dull and flat. If he had any opinion about me, he kept it to himself. He moved toward me with the knife.

  I wanted to run, but my muscles failed me.

  I wanted to speak, but words failed me.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lillian

  Tom poured me a vodka tonic, heavy on the vodka, and I stood in the kitchen, watching him cook. He knew I was watching. I could feel him feeling it. He wore green cargo shorts, sandals, and a bleach-white T-shirt. He was tall and tightly muscled. He talked about a kayak trip he was planning with a guy I didn’t know in the Chemistry Department – easy, gentle conversation that filled the silence and meant I could avoid speaking or even thinking. I was grateful to him. But I didn’t want him. Not tonight.

  He opened a bottle of wine with dinner, but I asked for another vodka tonic. As I ate, he got up and put on music – the Gene Harris Quartet, soft jazz, but not pathetic. Then he sat across from me and asked, ‘How are you doing now?’

  I said, ‘No sex.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No sex tonight. I can’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to suggest it.’

  I put my hand on his.

  He did everything right. After dinner, he poured me a third drink. When Gene Harris ended, he let the house fall quiet. He looked at me as if he wanted to kiss me but he didn’t do it. He gave me his bed and took the couch.

  I lay in bed, looking at his ceiling, the room turning with a gentle alcohol spin, his sheets smelling of his body, but his body lying a room away. I didn’t telephone Johnny. But I put my cell on the bed beside me as if it could keep me close to him. I closed my eyes, and the alcohol spin got faster, so I opened my eyes and gripped the bed sheets and tried to slow the world before it broke into pieces.

  Eventually, I slept.

  When I woke again, Tom was in bed with me, close against my body.

  Vodka and sleep fogged my mind. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t sleep. I want to. But with you here …’ He sounded sorry, pained and sorry. He stayed with me, pressed against me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He put a hand on my belly.

  I pulled away.

  For several minutes, we were quiet and still, and then he put his hand on me again.

  I untangled myself from the covers.

  ‘Come back,’ he said.

  My pants and shirt were on the floor. I pulled them on in the dark.

  He turned on the light. ‘Don’t go,’ he said.

  I put on my shoes.

  ‘You belong here.’ His chest was hairless, filmed with perspiration.

  I found my car keys on the dresser. The clock on the bedside table said the time was twelve thirty-one. Was I too drunk to drive? Definitely. Was I too drunk to stay? Definitely.

  I left the room, and Tom scrambled out of bed and followed me. ‘Where will you go?’

  I said nothing.

  When I reached the front door, he said, ‘We’re right, Lillian. We are. This is. You shouldn’t walk away from it.’ I let myself out and closed the door. As I climbed into my car, he opened the door again and shouted, ‘Where will you go?’

  I drove home. I wanted to see Johnny, to be with him. What would I say? What would I do? Nothing, nothing. I would just be with him. If he hurt me – if he hurt himself – I would stay with him anyway.

  I opened the car windows. The air smelled of the sweet chemical fumes from the paper mills. The moon hung in a thin haze. Cars passed and a truck played loud hip hop on its sound system. I gripped the steering wheel, slowed and stopped for a stoplight, counted to three when the light turned green, and accelerated.

  Ten minutes later, I rounded the corner to our house and my headlights shined on the front yard. The driveway was empty, the house dark.

  I unlocked the front door, flipped on the hall light, and called Johnny’s name, though I knew he was gone. In the bedroom, the bed looked as it had when I left in the morning. Johnny’s vial of Xanax was on the bathroom counter – a good sign that he was staying on the right side of sanity. I shook the vial and pills rattled – a good sign that he had kept himself from pouring them all down his throat. I went into the kitchen and switched on the light. There was dirt on the counter. I heard a growling from the sunroom – Percy growling a warning.

  I felt suddenly as if I’d been lured into the house and into a danger I hadn’t anticipated, my senses and logic softened by vodka and fatigue.

  I called Percy. He growled, and from the darkened sunroom a breeze blew into the kitchen. I backed toward the kitchen door. Percy’s growl became a soft whine.

  ‘Percy.’

  Nothing.

  I wanted to run.

  In one of the kitchen drawers, we kept a small tool kit, a ball of twine, an extension cord, and a flashlight. I got the flashlight, inched close to the sunroom without going in, and shined the light.

  Percy lay on the floor on his belly, his eyes gleaming yellow in the dark. The black fur under his jaws looked wet. A small, white, fleshy object, streaked with blood, lay between his front paws. As I stepped closer, he growled and took the object in his mouth. The breeze, with its sickening chemical smell, breathed into the kitchen. I raised the beam of the flashlight. Broken glass lay on the sunroom floor. The window on one of the doors to the backyard was shattered.

  What had Johnny done?

  As Percy growled, I switched on another lamp. The sunroom floor was a mess of glass, blood, and dog fur. The object in Percy’s mouth was flesh – but from where? Johnny’s leg? His arm?

  A tooth – long, bloody, one of Percy’s – lay near the broken door. A shred of bloody denim lay next to it. The sofa had been pulled away from the wall.

  What had Johnny done?

  I sat on the floor in the doorway from the kitchen and spoke to Percy, ‘C’mere, baby.’

  He looked uncertain who I was.

  I reached my hand toward him.

  He growled.

  ‘It’s OK. C’mon …’

  He stopped growling.

  I slid a couple of inches across the floor toward him.

  He rose on his haunches.

  Would he come after me as he had gone after Johnny? What had Johnny done to make him tear into him?

  I slid closer.

  Percy sprang to his feet and disappeared through the broken door into the dark backyard, the bloody flesh in his mouth.

  The energy went out of me, but I got to my feet, went to the kitchen, found the phone, and dialed Daniel’s home number. It rang four times, and Daniel answered.

  I said, ‘Johnny’s gone off.’

  ‘Gone off?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s done—’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  I told him what I’d found when I came in.

  ‘Slow down,’ he said.

  I told him again.

  He said, ‘Get out of the house.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now. Get out. If Johnny comes back, you don’t want to be there. Do you understand?’

  I felt exhausted. ‘I do.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Get out now. You can come here.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Now,’ he said again.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  I hung up and stared at the kitchen walls. The ceiling lamp cast an icy green light. I stared into the sunroom at the broken glass door. Pe
rcy was racing through the dark with a chunk of skin and muscle. ‘Percy!’ I called, but he also had gone off, crazed by the taste of human blood. I wandered into the front hall. The hallway light was icy too, illuminating a world without human or animal warmth. The night outside the front door would take me back to the living. A twenty-minute drive to Daniel’s house would restore me to his voice and his wife’s.

  But I went into the bedroom. I stripped off my clothes and climbed into our bed. I pulled the covers around my body. I was neither hot nor cold. I felt half-dead. I pulled Johnny’s pillow to my face and breathed in, sucking his smell deep into my lungs. If life remained possible, this was where I must find it: in the dense layerings, the nearly suffocating air that had passed through our bodies and bones. The upper atmosphere might sustain people who are light and able to float on the thin currents. But I knew that, like a deep-sea creature that would disintegrate in a fisherman’s net when brought to a higher depth, I depended on the heavy weight of submersion.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Johnny

  I drove across the St Johns River on the Hart Bridge, the headlights gleaming on the skeletal steel. Peter Lisman sat in the passenger seat, the knife on his lap, blood soaking the remains of his jeans around his right calf and running down his leg into a cowboy boot. His pale, heavy face was blank. He kept his pain to himself.

  When I had stepped into the sunroom, he had stood and raised the knife.

  Percy, who had lain at his feet a moment earlier, lunged at him. With the knife in the air, Percy seemed to anticipate the harm the big man meant to do me. He sank his teeth into Lisman’s leg and held.

  Lisman could have killed Percy with the knife. He could have planted the blade between his raging eyes or reached under Percy’s head and sliced his neck. Instead, he grabbed Percy by the collar and pulled him away. Percy tore skin and something more from the big man’s leg, yelping as his teeth caught in the muscle or ligament. Lisman could have flung him into the backyard through the broken plate-glass door. Instead, he set him on the floor and stood over him with a look as old as the glowering that must have tamed the first wolves. He splayed his fingers in front of Percy’s face and said, ‘Stay.’ Percy lay at his feet and stayed.

  Lisman spoke to me in the same tone, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’

  He led me through the house and out to the driveway, staying close enough to reach me with the knife if I disobeyed. Now, I steered on to the S curve that dropped from the Hart Bridge into the city, passed empty office buildings and churches, and cut south on to the streets that hugged the river down to Ortega.

  ‘I met your mother,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I get the sense she doesn’t know what you do for the Phelpses.’

  ‘You took my laptop.’ His voice was pinched.

  ‘I did.’

  He shook his head as if I’d disappointed him.

  ‘What’s wrong with your voice?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Sounds like you’re castrated.’

  ‘When I was little, my dad was beating my mom. I tried to stop him. He hit me in the throat. This is what I sound like.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He shrugged. ‘He’s dead now.’

  ‘It happens,’ I said.

  ‘It happens,’ he repeated, pinched.

  ‘How long have you been doing dirty work for the Phelpses?’

  ‘Turn left up there,’ he said.

  I turned on to a dark winding drive, the sides planted with trees and flowerbeds.

  ‘I know you killed Alex Greene,’ I said. ‘How about Sheneel? Was that you too?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘You look like Sheneel,’ I said. ‘Same pale skin. But bigger, of course. Any relation?’

  ‘Pull to the side by the garage.’

  The driveway ended in a cul-de-sac with a large carriage-house garage on one side and a long brick house on the other. Flood lamps, set in a front garden, cast a golden light up the walls and into the branches of nearby oaks. From the hazy sky, the moon shined through the trees.

  I pulled on to an apron of black pavement and turned off the car. ‘You can’t be her brother or father,’ I said. ‘What’s the relation?’

  ‘Mr Phelps is waiting,’ he said, and got out. But when I got out too, he said, ‘I want my laptop back.’

  I was hoping he would say that. ‘No problem.’ I went to the trunk and opened it. I gave him his laptop.

  As he was looking it over, I reached into the trunk again, brought out Papa Crowe’s .22, and shoved the barrel against his belly. ‘Give me the knife,’ I said. He considered me awhile before giving it to me. I dropped it into the trunk and nodded toward the front door of the house. ‘Move.’

  He lumbered up the steps. When he’d hit me on the head at Alex Greene’s house, he’d moved fast, but if he wanted to go slow now, I was happy to go slow. He let us into the house without knocking. I kept the gun barrel on his back as he led me through a high-ceilinged front hall into a formal living room, through a room full of family portraits, and into a room with a wide-screen TV. Edward Phelps, wearing khakis, loafers, and a pink polo shirt, stood when we came in.

  He looked at Lisman, at me, at the gun, and said, ‘You can put that away. It won’t do you any good.’

  I pressed the barrel into Lisman’s back.

  Phelps said, ‘Peter, will you pour me a drink? I have the feeling this gentleman is going to try my patience.’

  Lisman tried to step around me, but I said, ‘No.’

  He stepped past me anyway.

  I aimed at his back. ‘Stop.’

  He kept going.

  I shifted the gun a couple of degrees and pulled the trigger. The slug splintered the wooden molding on the doorframe.

  Lisman didn’t flinch.

  I chambered another bullet, but he disappeared into the next room.

  ‘Make that a double,’ Edward Phelps called after him. I was merely a joke. He said to me, ‘Do you realize how much woodwork costs? Carpenters see this neighborhood and this house and they triple the price before walking in the door.’

  I pointed the rifle at him. ‘You’ve got that man well trained.’

  ‘He’s spectacular, isn’t he? But you’re mistaken. No one is capable of training Peter. He makes his own choices. Do you know where I found him? He was working at one of our timber sites. He’d been incarcerated for twenty years, since he was twelve years old – first on a work farm for juvenile offenders and then in jail. On the work farm, they taught him forestry and some animal husbandry. We hire a lot of felons to cut timber. They’re used to a hard life, and, contrary to popular belief, they’re mostly an honest group of men.

  ‘I saw Peter on one of our work crews, and he stood out. At the time, my family was doing some heavy work on our Cumberland Island vacation house, so I brought him over to help lifting beams and coquina. One afternoon, I was watching the progress when a wild horse, a pregnant mare, stumbled on to the property acting crazy, crashing through the low branches on the trees. She was having trouble birthing a foal.

  ‘No one would go near her. She looked like she meant to kick a man or two in the head. Well, Peter put down his load and walked over, talking steady and soft if you can imagine that. The mare didn’t respond. She went crashing through more branches. But Peter went after her, calm and steady. And when the mare ran out of energy and collapsed, Peter reached up inside her – right into the birth canal – and pulled out the foal. Still birth. I thought that was remarkable. I thought, this is a man who can handle difficult situations.’

  Lisman came back with a cocktail glass.

  ‘I’ve been singing your praises, Peter,’ Phelps said as he took the glass. Then he turned again to me. ‘I see you as a difficult situation.’

  I gestured at Lisman. ‘Why was he in jail?’

  Phelps said, ‘He killed his father. Isn’t that right, Peter?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

&nb
sp; Phelps said to me, ‘As I see it, you’ve been working against us. Is there nothing I can do to change that? You understand, I was never in the armed services myself, but I have great respect for those who have served. I would like to be able to demonstrate that respect, if you will let me.’

  ‘I think you already own enough people in this city.’

  He smiled. ‘What’s enough?’ He sipped from his drink and looked pleased with himself. ‘Is there nothing you want? Nothing you need? I have a lot to offer.’

  ‘What did Sheneel Greene want? Or her brother?’

  ‘That’s beyond your understanding.’

  ‘Try me.’

  He sipped again from his glass. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I want from you. I want to know what happened to them.’

  ‘That’s a stupid wish.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘I’m offering you a way out.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ I said, ‘at least not from you.’

  Phelps sighed and spoke to Lisman. ‘Take his gun, Peter.’

  Lisman stepped toward me, and I aimed the rifle at his chest and said, ‘Don’t.’

  Phelps said, ‘You’d better knock him down with your first shot, because if he’s still standing, he’ll turn you inside out.’

  I pointed the gun at Phelps. ‘I’ll shoot you first.’

  His face colored. ‘Take it, Peter.’

  But a woman’s voice spoke from the doorway behind me. ‘What in God’s name is going on?’

  Lisman stopped and Phelps frowned. The monstrous woman I last had glimpsed in the backseat of a black town car outside of Papa Crowe’s house stepped into the room. Last time, Papa Crowe had drawn a muddy cross on her forehead with an unction he stored in a mustard pot. Now, Cecilia Phelps wore a long white cotton bathrobe, and the glassy skin on her face was bare.

  She stared at me with one moving eye, the other eye fixed under an overgrown eyelid. She asked, ‘Did you shoot that gun in here?’

  Her husband said, ‘Cecilia, go upstairs.’

  She didn’t seem to hear him, but the glaring eye softened, and she came to me and placed a knotted hand on my cheek. ‘You poor man,’ she said. ‘You poor, poor man. You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?’