Blood Will Out

by Jo Treggiari

  “There was no body,” Captain Rourke said. “There was no sign of Stroud Bellows in the cabin.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Ari said. “I touched him.”

  Captain Rourke just looked at her steadily.

  “His water polo team jacket,” Ari stammered. “It was hanging on a chair. That’s why I went into the cabin. I have his phone.” She reached into her pocket and then remembered that they’d taken her clothes. “You took it with my clothes. I used his phone to call my parents.”

  “It was a pre-paid phone. A burner phone, they call it on the streets.”

  “Like what drug dealers use?” her father said. He was a big fan of The Wire.

  “Yes. No way to trace any calls in or out. No way to tell if it belonged to Stroud Bellows.”

  “It was in his jacket. The jacket with the C for ‘captain,’ ” Ari wailed.

  “No jacket, no prints other than yours that we’ve found yet, no evidence of his being anywhere in the vicinity,” Captain Rourke said with finality. His voice echoed weirdly in her head, words jumbling together until they made no sense at all.

  She heard her father ask, “Will you talk to the boy?” and the heart went out of her. Her father didn’t believe her.

  “We haven’t been able to locate him yet but his grandmother isn’t worried,” said Captain Rourke. “He’s often out and about on the weekends, she said.”

  “He was there. I saw him,” Ari said, waving her mother’s arm away and sitting forward. The blanket slipped to the floor. She closed her eyes for a moment, little lights sparking in her periphery like struck matches. “He was in the cabin.” She could hear the hysteria in her voice but she couldn’t help it. “I saw him!”

  “Baby, hush, hush,” her mother said.

  “Can you let us know if there are any further developments?” her father said, slipping his arm around Ari and enfolding her against his shoulder.

  Ari heard some more paper shuffling and then Captain Rourke sighed heavily. “Sure. Why don’t you take her home now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Here begins my education.

  Albany is a cesspool.

  I found some things out pretty fast.

  There are evil monsters in the world.

  Kids are powerless. Nothing but prey. Fodder. I lost everything in the first few days. My meager belongings, my coat, my precious jars and sketchbook, and when those things were gone, the predators went deeper and possessed the parts of my body that were unprotected by armor. I suffered it, went to my quiet place until they were done with me. It didn’t take long and sometimes they bought me a bowl of hot soup or a coffee following the act, as if we had actually conducted a social transaction. And once, the man threw a crumpled twenty-dollar bill onto the ground near me before he walked away zipping up his pants. After that I made sure I got paid something for my services.

  I sold drugs and I sold other stuff that looked like drugs to stupid college students. I stole what I could and flogged it in the back streets and the alleys behind the restaurants, and I made sure to hide my money in my boots and sleep with one eye open. The shelters were the worst for beatings and muggings and so I avoided them and found places under bridges and in abandoned warehouses.

  No one will hire you. But if you volunteer or work for free you can get in the door. No one asks too many questions if you practice invisibility and learn how to forge signatures.

  And eventually getting the necessary ID papers is not impossible. If you can pay. People see what you want them to see. I became adept at becoming what was needed or expected, and no one seemed to care overmuch. Such is the nature of this busy, bustling world we live in.

  Once I’d scraped up enough money I took a room in an old lady’s house, Mrs. Randolph. She had no husband or family but she did have various properties, lung cancer and cats. Nine of them, mostly inbred tabbies with extra toes, so that they walked splayed on fat cushions. They slept on her bed with her and about a hundred throw pillows. She was submerged, as if the bed were swallowing her up, as if all those cats were suffocating her. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t come along?

  It was serendipity. I was walking by; she was out on the porch trying to coax a tiny black-and-white kitten down from the roof. I climbed up on the railing and grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, ignoring the sharp pinch of its claws.

  Much later, I trussed it up by the legs like a turkey and left it under my bed for twelve hours. It never scratched me again after that, though it would hiss and spit at me from the safety of the mantel.

  Mrs. Randolph was glad for the company, and the little bit of money I was able to pay her augmented her disability checks. No family of her own, or at least no one who gave a crap that she was drinking milk well past the expiry date and eating canned okra every day. The cats ate better than she did: beef chunks with carrots and peas, or chicken in cream sauce.

  I told people she was my grandmother, and maybe she even came to believe it herself. She certainly didn’t make trouble or try to kick me out. I picked up her mail, learned to forge her signature and cashed her support checks for her (skimming a little off the top), and ate her groceries. Sometimes we shared a can of cat food, if things were tight that week. I warmed it on the stove and told her it was stew. Her eyes were too bad to read the labels by that point and she trusted me.

  I sought out the jobs that no one else wanted, where references were not needed, where I didn’t need to prove my age and, most importantly, where I could work alone. Collected bottles and cans for the deposit money; worked for the city park spiking up garbage with a pointy stick; helped out at a soup kitchen feeding the lost souls, where I learned how to become as ignored as they are. Some janitorial work if I could get it. Drug dealing. And, one particularly low summer, handing out flyers and standing around in a giant dog costume shilling for a hot dog chain. That at least allowed me plenty of time to observe people without their knowing. Perfect anonymity. I thought a lot about killing them one by one and the exact way I would let out their blood and I captured those fantasies in my new sketchbook.

  I had many jobs, but it wasn’t until I started working in a Polish meat shop that I felt any interest in my work.

  They were hard, tough men, who’d been working since they themselves were kids, and they saw nothing wrong with employing someone who was just a few months past sixteen as long as my social security number appeared to be in order. I could pass for seventeen in any case: old enough to have dropped out of high school.

  Every movement they made conserved energy, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think they were graceless. You’d be wrong.

  When my boss, Jarek, butchered a cow, it was like watching a dance between two perfectly matched partners.

  You think of the word butcher and you think of someone in a bloodstained white coat with big, brawny arms and a ruddy face. Someone who looks like a marbled side of beef himself, who wields a big knife and hacks away at a carcass. But Jarek was a whip-thin, hairy man about forty years old, and he was a poet with a knife. Butchery requires an economy of motion, grace and strength in perfect balance. The blade becomes an extension of your arm and then of your will. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so beautiful. All of it. The loops of intestine like shiny rubber tubing, the soapy fat, the great balloon stomachs, the lungs like angel wings.

  And nothing shone brighter than the knives.

  The sharpening becomes second nature, with foreknowledge that meat and hard bone have dulled the edge and it needs to be honed again. The knife hisses against the steel and is pulled in the direction of the body, toward your own hand and your own guts, as if the danger of accidental injury is all part of the ritual. The old, silvery scars on my thumb bear witness to its proximity.

  The knife is small, maybe six inches, with a fine, thin blade. You only use the tip of the boning knife, and then, later, a larger blade for slicing. There’s no hacking, no sawing. Just clean, deliberate sweeps. You k
now the internal structure of the animal; you know exactly where the different parts are and how they fit together, as if they were your own organs. The point glides along, following the natural contours of the muscle and the ligaments, and then it’s just a flick of the wrist to sever the tendons, the meat falling away beautifully. I felt like a conductor. I heard music—heard music too beautiful for most people to decipher.

  By the end of a year I could portion out a cow by touch alone, my eyes closed.

  But first I swept the floors. Then I cleaned intestines for sausage, sluicing them out with cold water, hanging them from lines to dry like transparent holiday streamers. And lastly, as my final test, I disemboweled one hundred and fifty turkeys, one after the other, in preparation for the Thanksgiving weekend rush.

  Jarek called me over in the morning and told me, “You gut these.”

  I put down my broom and trotted over to the pile. It was barely 6:00 a.m. but I loved my work and I came in early.

  “All of them?” I couldn’t help it. They were everywhere—great, pale, floppy carcasses with that tart smell that all dead fowl have.

  “You want to be a butcher?” This was a rhetorical question. He was a man of few words.

  He was grinding raw pork for sausages, adding spices, tasting all the while. They did that, the Polish men, not caring about trichinosis, trusting always in the quality of their meat or the iron of their stomachs.

  He showed me how to use my knife—a secondhand boning knife that had still cost me a month’s pay and which I kept always in a sheath on my hip—to slit the abdomen. He grabbed my hand in his, easily enveloping it. “You shove your hands in, scoop up along the ribcage to separate the lung tissue from the bones, and then pull,” he told me in heavily accented English.

  He guided me, clenching my fingers around the slippery innards, and then he drew his arm back and my hand came out too, fisted around a whole mess of guts.

  We used our hands so we wouldn’t pierce the bowel with anything sharp.

  I still remember the smell. Warm, ripe, the slight tang of iron though these birds had been bled dry already, and something else, slick and biologic, slurpy like a thickness in my throat. And I remember thinking: this is not something I should smell. That’s the inside of something’s smell.

  It was more difficult with the mammals. With them I had to carefully cut around the anus before I could remove the lower intestine. One nick of the blade and a spurt of excrement would spoil the meat. But done properly, with care, the entire digestive tract including the stomach, all bloated and glistening, and all those feet of silken gut could be lifted out, cradled in my arms and deposited into a bin, leaving the rib cavity empty and perfectly open before me like the framework of a boat.

  It gave me such a feeling of achievement to strip everything unnecessary away and be left with only the bones and meat.

  It took me eight hours to gut those birds. They were cold. The room was frigid. By the end of the day my fingers were numb and my hands were chapped and raw. When I flexed my hands I bled from a dozen small wounds like stigmata.

  But the next week, as if I had done penance, Jarek let me slice sirloin steaks, cutting in long strokes against the grain of the meat. I could imagine the rich tint, like polished cherrywood gleaming in the sun. There was care and precision and honor in how the meat was handled.

  And soon after, he gave me the pigs—the meat, the cuts the butcher shop was famous for. The reason people lined up on Friday morning to get the best we had to offer. And I took infinite care with them, making no unnecessary slices, wasting nothing, remembering the mess I’d made of Ferdinand and the rest of them and feeling ashamed at the fledgling I had been and how little I had known of artistry.

  Sometimes I saw Jarek watching me with a slight frown, and in those moments I would press my lips together and hold the intense pleasure inside where he could no longer read it on my face. Sometimes, in my dreams, I killed everything in the world, making beautiful pictures out of the vivid flesh and hides and dead eyes. My sketchbook was full of such drawings.

  I brought thick chops home; cooked them rare for my dinner and Mrs. Randolph’s, though her appetite was miniscule and she’d lost most of her five senses. Feeding her was a waste of good meat.

  She had no more secrets now. Not even her shame was private. I wondered if life was worth living once things got that bad. I wondered if she could even smell her own urine anymore or if it was just something she had learned to abide. In the wild, the young and healthy would have turned on her, old and toothless as she was, and ripped her belly out. It would be a mercy but I would hate the feel of her skin on my hands, so I let her live.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was nightmarish. The town, the familiar shops, the quiet street that Ari had grown up on looked completely different. In eighteen hours it had become ominous, even though it was the middle of the day, as if she were seeing it through filmy black gauze. The distance between her house and Lynn’s seemed insurmountable; the bushes and thickets of trees, places where evil and evil-doers could hide.

  Something was wrong with her eyes. It was as if she were looking down a long dark tunnel, and sometimes there was a disorientating shimmer, like a heat haze. She stroked her bracelet. Maybe she could send a telepathic message. And Lynn would somehow know that Ari needed her.

  Lynn, she whispered in her mind, wanting to see her friend so badly but knowing she wouldn’t be able to make her legs walk all that way, unsure if she could even find the words to make a phone call because the telling would unbottle the tears inside and she was scared they might split her open. Shock. Traumatic injury. Concussion. Her body was betraying her.

  If things weren’t so completely fucked up with Tallulah’s death and the aftermath, Lynn would have been waiting for her on the front steps, her arms opened wide, ready to give and receive a hug. But she wasn’t.

  “Ari,” her mother said gently. Ari refocused her eyes—she’d been staring at the beige back of the car seat—and realized that her mom was just standing there holding the door open and had maybe been standing there for a long time, saying her name over and over, if her stricken expression was any clue.

  On feet that seemed miles from the ground, Ari left the warm safety of the car and went into the house.

  She felt frayed, as if the fiber of her being were unweaving itself. Twice on the way home she thought she’d seen Sourmash, his bearlike bulk leaning against a tree and then standing on the corner of an intersection, hot eyes blazing, a rifle in his hand. And a few times she’d caught a glimpse of Stroud’s bright-red jacket hurrying down a side street, only to blink and look again and see nothing. Could she trust her eyes?

  “I’ll just get you a glass of water, honey,” her mother said. She caught the murmur of her parents’ voices as they walked toward the kitchen.

  She heard the words side effects, PTSD, darkroom but the rest all sounded like feedback to her. She curled up on the sitting room couch, piled the pillows around her body like a fort. Stroud, she thought. The last time she’d seen him alive had been in the grove. She was positive she had seen him in the cabin, no matter what the police said. Round and round flew her thoughts, making her feel as if she were trapped on a carousel, with the speed and music cranked up to ten. Stay on and ride, or jump off and risk breaking something irreparable? Was her brain completely and truly fucked? What was real and what was not real?

  “Mom, Dad,” she called.

  Her parents appeared in the kitchen doorway. They looked guilty, and she knew they’d been discussing her.

  “Can you try to find out about Stroud? See if he’s come home? If I just knew—for certain…” Her voice cracked.

  “Of course. We’ll make some calls,” her father said.

  “You should get cleaned up. Change out of those clothes. You’ll feel better,” her mother said brightly, handing over a glass of water. “Let me run a soothing bath for you.”

  “A bath sounds good.” Ari took a sip an
d put the glass down. Her tongue felt like a slab of something dead in her mouth. Just forming words seemed impossible.

  She got up, her wobbling legs like jelly. Her stomach was rolling and she was worried she might spew jerky again. Her dad hurried forward to give her his arm. “I’m fine,” Ari said.

  She dragged herself upstairs, her mother one step behind as if she was afraid that Ari might fall backwards. They parted in the hallway and Ari went to her room and shut the door. Her parents’ hovering was totally freaking her out.

  She wished she could hear their familiar brusque voices, the fond but abrupt things they shouted over their shoulders as they passed each other in the scant minutes between rushing to their jobs, on quick visits to the refrigerator, the last thing at night; small snatches of conversation, blunt words of love that rang true.

  She realized she’d been walking around her bedroom in overlapping circles. Just like back in the well. “Get a grip, Ari,” she said with force. She was too anxious to sleep, too wired to read or listen to music. She needed an anchor, something to root her into her life. That was Lynn. Reflexively she reached for her cell phone before letting her hand drop, empty. The cops hadn’t found it in the cistern or the surrounding area.

  Maybe if she screamed loudly enough, gave voice to the fear festering in her belly, Lynn would hear her and come running. But no, she was sick of screaming. Instead she went to the window, threw open the sash and leaned out, perched on the sill. From here she couldn’t tell who was home at Lynn’s. The driveway was empty, the yard silent, the windows like empty sockets. The world seemed too big. It scared her. It didn’t seem to matter how many times she told herself that it was over. Sourmash was dead. They’d arrested Rocky. But Stroud? Dead? Alive? She remembered the clammy feel of his cool cheek. Could it have been a hallucination? Could hallucinations be sensory or were they always just visual?

  Post-traumatic stress disorder. My mind is playing tricks on me and I can’t trust it. What I think I know, what I think I see might not even exist outside my mind.