Dinah shrugged. “Good thing I want him, then. See you around, Em. Be careful.”
Dinah slipped through the stalks, Socks at her heel, feathery tail swaying in an almost-wag. She was heading east, back toward him. For the first time, Emily wondered where Dinah lived. Perhaps he was her neighbor and Dinah hadn’t said a word about it, which would be her typical sleight of hand, wouldn’t it?
After she’d hefted the Mauser back on the pegs and returned the chair to the dining set, Emily grabbed a fistful of the rabbit food her father had bought. She ran to the pen behind the garage. The bunny was lying on its side. A slow shudder rippled through its slack belly as if it had been popped. Emily had mistaken for fat these empty rolls of fur. How could she have missed this wasting, the dull varnish on the eyes? She bit off a piece from a pellet, held the chip close to the mouth. The rabbit nudged her hand gratefully before nibbling the food.
Had the warding charm turned out to be her superstition about the rabbit’s health or her damn fool’s stunt with the Mauser? Maybe it was fattening that bunny right back up or maybe it was her clumsy potshots after all, but when her father called later that summer as promised, he refused to come to dinner.
The way Dinah stuck to her from that summer on, admiring her and teasing her and forever pulling her into clearings made her believe that Dinah could tell her what the charm was, if only Emily would ask.
Reasonable Fear
Maybe for other couples there was something to the idea that confession made a marriage stronger. But it wasn’t working out that way for Dan Rilke and his wife.
To start with, she accused him of inflicting the bite.
When Julia hollered from the bathroom, Rilke was just settling down to sleep for the day. He’d come off a grueling shift, and exhaustion was messing with him. A tussle with a wife-beating thug kicked off the long night. The man had a history of run-ins with the county sheriff’s office, should have been put away a long time ago and save everyone a lot of hassle, the poor wife most of all. The woman involved was tough and true, which Rilke admired. Typical township type; someone he remembered vaguely from high school as one of the fringe gals who hung out in the shop wing with the automotive tech guys. She was giving it back so good that when Rilke first arrived on the scene he was confused as to who was beating on whom until he saw the kink in her nose and a bloody smear above her lip. Even so, Rilke had to threaten to cuff her to the oven range to make the arrest on her husband.
Just after Rilke processed that individual, he was called to a gruesome pileup on I-94. Wrapped in a thick veil of fog, the bodies of a young woman and her two little kids clung together in a minivan’s mangled remains as if the mother had managed to hold her daughters close in their last moments. The semitruck driver walked away unhurt. Rilke spent the rest of his shift cleaning up this horrifying proof of fate’s lopsided rules. Hours later, the bodies still haunted him, and the cut on his arm, courtesy of some whacked-out kid he’d arrested a couple of weeks back, was oozing again. So maybe he wasn’t as prepared to be patient with Julia as he might be if he had been scheduled for a night off.
He grabbed the badminton racket he kept handy to deal with the bats and hustled to her. Julia, hair streaming, nude skin soft and puckered like loose silk, was peering at her mouth in the fogged mirror. Steam swirled thick and foamy around her lovely body. She never used the fan when she showered, which was why the ceiling above the shower head was dimpled with mold. Rilke threw the switch, startled her with the motor’s sudden static. Her lip was swelling fast. The stark bathroom light paled her, or else fear had drained her color.
“Look,” she demanded. This while covering her mouth with her hand so he couldn’t see any damn thing.
He tried to grab her hand away to inspect, but she shook him off angrily. “Well, let me see it, then.” He should have minded his tone, but he was pissed that she was mad. They’d been married long enough that Julia acted like every little setback was his fault somehow, even the things that happened when he was nowhere near the problem.
Julia eyed the racket and punched his arm near the cut. Not lightly, either. “There’s no bat in here. Did you do this to me?”
Rilke almost laughed, but in fact they’d made love before he left for his shift and he’d been passionate. It had been months since she’d made overtures. Last night when she’d downed a beer and joked with him a bit, he’d been attentive to possibilities. Until the bat problem, their physical connection had always been sustained and intense, her body the reliable wonder of his life. But when Rilke adopted an arm’s length response to the bat situation, the lovemaking stopped.
Julia was waiting for his reply as if the question were a serious inquiry regarding harm he might actually inflict. He choked back the laugh impulse to consider carefully whether he’d kissed her too hard last night and accidentally clamped down on her lip. From the bedroom, the fan he used to drown out wakeful daytime noises hummed steadily under the bathroom vent’s static. He was still holding the racket. If she believed he’d hurt her, she should be screaming at him, fuck you Dan. Instead she surveyed his clumsy, confused stance blankly. Her arms lay slack at her hips. Her lips were parted, coddling their tenderness. Her breasts swayed, the dark nipples hard in the stir of cooling air. He propped the racket behind the bathroom door, crafted deliberate movements, kept the timing slow.
She took his silent maneuvering as assent. “You did do this. You bit me, Dan.” She moved on him then. Got in his face, her breath bitter with sleep and coffee. Another of her habits. She brushed her teeth after she showered. Complained that toothpaste soured the day’s first coffee.
He couldn’t have done it, he decided. He’d barely touched her mouth. “Let me see.”
“See?” She thrust her mouth at his. Her teeth snagged his lower lip as she gave him a hard shove.
He staggered back. “Jesus, Jules.”
“Like it?”
He swiped at the pinprick of pain, surged hot at the dot of blood on his thumb. “You want me to like it?” He struggled to keep the volume down.
“Sure, Dan. Sure I do.”
“Come on, Jules.”
“Because I love it so fucking much. Especially the part where I go to work looking like this.”
“Don’t you think if I had done it you’d have felt me?” he asked mildly. Her color was back. The flush in her cheeks splashed down her neck. Her breasts brushed his T-shirt, her hip grazed his bare leg. It hadn’t been so long ago that he would have felt moved, entitled by her anger to pull her into him, make love on the tile. Their dustup would be a coda to the previous night’s passions. Maybe other couples possessed a more equitable rhythm to their marriage, but they’d always played lopsided. This inequity was what Rilke loved most. Julia’s fuck you Dan blazed the same joy as her body opening to him. But touching her now felt like a violation, and then there was the sudden confounding problem of his desire leeching from him the closer she drew.
She reached behind him. Switched off the bathroom fan. “Don’t you think if you hadn’t you would say so?”
Which unnerved him a bit. Did he want her to think he’d hurt her? “Will you let me see?”
He pulled her to the vanity light, a bit too rough. She didn’t protest the manhandling like she should. He tilted her mouth, spotted an inky red streak leeching from two tiny puncture holes. Knowing how she’d react he didn’t want to tell her. But she’d need the shots and antivenom, too, and soon with those streaks, so it wasn’t a fact he could conceal.
“A bat bit you.”
Her eyes widened. Wonder on the first wave, not dismay. “But how could it? I never saw it happen.”
“I don’t know, Jules. Maybe the one we chased out yesterday got you and we’re just now seeing it.”
She made a low, harsh sound and drew away from him. He fetched clothes for both of them, and her coat. Bundled her up although the autumn air was not yet very cold. She let him maneuver her arms into her coat sleeves like a little girl. Her u
nsettling wariness kept her manageable.
They were almost to the car when she stopped in the middle of the drive and clamped a hand on his arm. “It must have bit me in my sleep.”
The yawning horror in her eyes was so steeped in repulsion that for a moment he thought she’d finally guessed his dreams, seen what he was doing to her in his unspoken heart. The fear that seized him bubbled a laugh, which at first he could have passed off as a hiccup. But then the fit had him. Once it started, he knew he’d never get it under control. She stood there exasperated, frightened, poisoned for Chrissakes, while Rilke laughed it out in hoarse, honking gulps. The noise drew that loony drunk Gary Handelman from next door onto his front porch to stare at the couple with his usual greedy nosiness.
After Rilke was released and had wiped away the tears, Handelman offered a three-fingered wave. To this day Julia’s sympathy for that busybody’s wounded hand irritated Rilke. She smiled gratefully, waved back as the old man shuffled inside his house to mind his own business. Julia settled a bleak gaze on Rilke which suggested an outlook that from now on anything he did was bound to be unacceptable, unforgiven.
Julia’d been on Rilke for months to deal with the bat infestation. She even blamed his work on the siding as the instigation of the problem. Rilke had assured her many times during many arguments that the bats must have nested in the attic for years, well, months anyway, before he’d ripped off the rotted board and batten and installed the HardiePlank this past summer. It was true he’d rushed the job. Rilke had chosen the last week of August to tackle the project and couldn’t hold the heavy boards in the blazing heat. So after his shift he nailed like crazy all morning to beat the sun’s arc past the maple canopy that sheltered Rilke until just about noon. The work cut into his sleep, made him cranky and uptight. Late in the week, Julia served him sandwiches and silent resentful looks and not much else. But he’d finished quick, done a decent job. Painted in record time, too, the jay blue that made the house pop out from all the others on their street.
Julia had admired his work for all of two days, until the first bat wheeled out of the bedroom closet straight to her golden hair, dug its hairpin talons into her scalp, beat at her with leathery wings. Rilke had walked in on her running in tight circles between the bed and the dresser, cuffing the bat. The wings’ dry swish flapped in time with the click of Rilke’s old flip alarm clock. The bat’s weak squeak and the watery slap of Julia’s sweaty hands had raised Rilke’s hackles. He’d grabbed her arm, a bit too rough because she was a bit crazy and wouldn’t stop running around the damn room. Working the bat’s fisted claws out of her hair was like coaxing tangled thread from a needle. He trapped the creature with the badminton racket and let it loose outside.
The very next day, another bat wheeled to her golden head, guided by the sonar of her lovely scent. More bats followed, and more trouble for the marriage. Each encounter left her drained and fearful and ready to heap the blame on him. Julia remained convinced his disturbance of the siding had summoned the bats. She came to view the siding job as some plot of stiflement on his part. That’s what she’d called it, stiflement, as if replacing worn siding that had been low quality in the first place with something durable and fireproof wasn’t basic responsible maintenance on a house. Anyway, stiflement wasn’t even a word. He’d pissed her off when he pointed that out. You’re dodging the issue with semantics, she complained. If she could get a word like semantics right, why couldn’t she get stifle right, was his response.
A response he would change now if he could.
Instead of cracking wise he should have hugged her and stroked her and soothed the trouble away like he’d always done. Instead, her fear made him want to fuck her. Which he would never do in real life, take advantage of her weakest moments, so as retribution for his terrible desires Rilke endured disturbing half-formed dreams where he forced himself on her. He would watch with clinical detachment her mouth gape open, stuffed with soundless cries, silver beaded tears sliding down her flushed lovely cheeks. He would bury his hands in her golden hair, seize a flapping bat, choke the life from the creature as he came. In some dreams he withdrew and came on parts of her body he would never violate that way, not ever, during their waking love.
It never occurred to him to wonder why, in their years together, he hadn’t known she was so afraid of bats. In a loving marriage such as theirs, such an ordinary fear should never have been a secret.
The bite brought on a fever, three days of chills and hallucinations that changed some assumption between them that the bat problem was a temporary irritant, one of many a happy marriage would endure. After the fever abated, Julia made it clear she would no longer suffer Rilke’s soft stance on the infestation.
“If you won’t kill them, I can’t go on living in this house. With you. Do you understand me, Dan?”
They were standing in the hallway below the attic access as if she expected him to climb up right then, just off a shift. Had she been up all night waiting to confront him? He understood her, he said, and proceeded to tell her some of the truth, that there was no way to eradicate the bats for good.
“Fuck you, Dan. You never even try. Set traps. Poison them. You don’t do fucking anything. Why are you ignoring this?”
“I’m not ignoring this, Jules.” He didn’t point out that any and all options for temporary shelter—like his mother’s farmhouse on Scipio Township’s outskirts—also had bats. Like every other southeast Michigan house, because weren’t bats as routine a pest as rats and roaches?
“You’ve shot two people as part of your fucking job, and you can’t deal with some bats?”
Those shootings were in the line of duty, he pointed out. Plus, he hadn’t killed anyone. What Julia didn’t know was that the second incident had pulled Rilke probation. Two weeks ago, some punk farm kid had tried to set a light pole in the Costco lot on fire. Never mind that the metal pole was noncombustible and the kid was using a butane lighter. Rilke spied him crouched at the lamp’s base flicking his Bic intently like he’d just discovered fire, not tried to start one. A simple warning situation, but when Rilke approached, the kid freaked out, pulled a knife, sliced Rilke’s arm. Lunged again after Rilke sidestepped, so he’d had no choice but to disable him. The boy was out of his mind by the time the ambulance arrived, writhing and hollering despite Rilke’s efforts to calm him down, kicking around ineffectual and outdated insults like pig and fuzz. The EMT had to strap him to the stretcher while the kid thrashed and cursed like Rilke was his whole problem. Obviously high on some stupidity-enhancing substance. The bullet only grazed the kid’s knee; Rilke never fired unless he was certain of his aim.
Later the physical evidence, not to mention the EMT’s statement on the boy’s condition at the scene, supported Rilke’s response as reasonable and necessary. Plus, he’d needed stitches on the arm wound, which turned out to be deeper than it looked and still wasn’t healing up right. But the kid was only fourteen, and an Adler, one of the township’s old farm families. Some grumbling ensued. Some complaints were lodged about the use of excessive force against a harmless prank and a mere boy. If anything was excessive, it was these baseless accusations, offered up like they were damn evidence by folks who weren’t even there. But to be on the safe side of community sensitivity, Rilke spent a couple of nights on desk until the inquiry ruled him justified. The national mood toward cops these days made such caution necessary, he had to admit. Recent unhelpful and chaotic protests in Chicago over routine policing errors, committed by overextended cops doing their best despite deep cuts in resources and personnel, were igniting distrust between the law and the public. No use crying over the deal. Managing, hell, protecting the world as is, not as one wished it could be, was the greater part of effective policing. He was just glad the Adler kid was well-known as a dismal punk. Since the incident occurred in the middle of his night shift, not one member of the whining public saw Rilke ignore the damn blood pouring down his own arm while staunching the undeserving kid’
s bleeding leg.
Seeing as the marriage had passed the point of routine loving sympathy, Julia hadn’t shown much concern over the arm either, so he’d left out much of the incident’s detail.
“I’m not asking you to kill anyone. I’m asking you to exterminate vermin. And speaking of line of duty.” Julia was shouting now, more like her old self. Drawing too close, tapping his chest, the hot curdled breath steaming him up. He waited to feel the old normal hunger for her anger, or perhaps it was normalcy he craved. “Here’s the line I’m drawing over being bitten in my fucking sleep, when I don’t even know it. OK?”
He gave her a push with his shoulder, just enough to get her to back off. “Why don’t you take care of it, then?” Really an unfair attitude on his part. The deal between them had always been that Rilke took care of her in the million ways men took care of women like Julia.
Seeing as Rilke had never once suggested she take care of anything except him, Julia hesitated. She pressed her back to the wall opposite, the rosebuds on her loose blouse blending with the girlish floral wallpaper she’d chosen for the hallway. Her wariness sparked. Maybe she’d suddenly become aware that he was still in uniform, still wearing his gun. Her angry summons to the hall the moment he opened the door had disrupted his after-work routine of shedding his gear before seeing her. Weapons didn’t usually bother Julia one bit, so her attitude confused him. Maybe his hand had dropped to his hip when she began shouting at him, some stupid cop instinct in response to amped-up drama.
She rocked on the balls of her bare feet. Surveyed him as if he were a distant occurrence she couldn’t quite make out. Her voice softened. Her lovely certainty dissolved. “You know I’m really phobic of bats. You know we had them growing up, and they scared the shit out of me, and my dad was too much of a drunk fuck to get rid of them. He used to laugh at me, Dan. Don’t you remember?”
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