by Ryan Sayles
She never sang out loud because she said her voice was nasal in tone. When the world has songbirds like Karen Carpenter and Donna Summers, they don’t need crows like me. But she would hum under her breath and stir the heartstrings of angels whose ears were delicate enough to listen. Tuned to her songs fit for God’s reception. Both humble and captivating. Her smile was gummy yet exactly right. Her laugh sounded like it came straight from Rhode Island even though she’d never set foot on the East Coast. Yet it came with a warmth that dulled the percussive edges.
She was perfect and the fact that she would never know it made her more so.
At sixteen her leviathan surfaced. It went into remission when she was seventeen. It came back when she was barely twenty-one. She was called home at twenty-one years, ten months, twelve days and almost one hour.
But no matter how hard her disease tried to hollow out her flesh and leave her empty, her beauty persisted. Yes, her collarbones were more prominent than sins on a murderer; every bone and joint seemed to be lightly painted with skin instead of covered by it. Yes, her shoulder blades became ungainly and withered wings of crudely hewn stone under her flesh. Yes, the cords in her neck constricted and cut deep lines through her throat every time she coughed. Hurt like hell.
She cried so much out of agony. She couldn’t sleep most nights because of her suffering. But her beauty persisted. Her artistry.
Human beings wear their atrocities on their sleeves. One only needs the proper set of eyes to read the fabric, to decipher the horrors committed and woven in. I thank God those same eyes could also see her enchantment, floating like candles on a storm surge, never winking out, never getting so wet as to extinguish, only persisting. Persevering. Her beauty. Her artistry.
It all came from the inside. From a well of calme beauté and understated brilliance that arrived with her from the heavens. Meeting her proved that somewhere there is a God. There must be. It is the only explanation of her. Her beauty. Her artistry.
No ravenous affliction can rot that out. Even though near death, even through actual death, a gorgeous soul will radiate. Through the bitter thorns, through the melancholy, through the wasting.
Hers did.
And those four days, we were married a lifetime.
With her I buried any reason to live. Any compassion. Any withholdings. And that’s okay.
I don’t need them anymore.
16
1030 hours, Wednesday
My business line rings.
I let the machine answer it. I killed that booze in a half hour. Mostly passed out on the couch, empty bottle fallen from my hand and long ago rolled across the wooden floor with a hollow note, I fight to keep my bleary eyes shut as a man whose voice I do not recognize speaks into my machine.
“Hello. This message is for Dick Buckner. I got your email.”
I sit up.
“Mr. Petticoat doesn’t have the balls to try and adjust our arrangement. Nor is he very thorough at hiding his tracks or even checking his rearview mirror to see if he’s being followed while he goes to meet a washed-up cop. Anyways, short and sweet. I—”
I stand up to get the phone as the first runner of color zings down my vision. Big Fry smear. I shake my head violently to stop this but it only sends more runners down in a waterfall. Brown at first, the color of the wood beneath me, whiskey brown next as my stomach revolts. I taste the bile and booze as my vision constricts and I know I’ve vomited everywhere but it’s no good. My knees come alive with pain. I must’ve fallen to them. My face next. The browns sink deep into black waters and my ears ring numb. I can barely breathe and the panic turns the black into a jiggling white. Pinks stream through it and I can hear the rapist from a million miles away talk in a cartoon voice as my brain seizes and melts, drains down my spine and spills out the bottoms of my feet. Then it crawls back up as the pinks turn to reds turn to oranges turn to yellows turn to greens turn to blues and hatred. So much hatred.
Then it all washes away, taking me with it.
I come to on the floor.
I hear the traffic outside. Spring birds. The cold wooden floor beneath me has warmed up considerably. I dread to think how long I’ve been lying here.
One eye cracks open and all it sees is mush. Ambient light is harsh, muddling. It’s also taken on a bronze hue and I hope that is from blood and not dusk. I try and open the other eye but it feels huge. Swollen. Leave it alone then.
I slowly drag one hand up from my waist. Then the other. I exhale into the pool of sick mess around my mouth. I push up off the floor and peel my face from the drying vomit. My neck can’t support my head’s weight. I go up anyways. My chest hurts. My left side especially. The only times it feels like this is when I get drilled in the ribs. One hot, stabbing spot.
I crash back onto my ass, legs bent beneath me. Feel my face. Shiner over the eye. I manage a look at the clock nearby. Almost six p.m. Fuck. I work my way to my feet. Aches and pains, stiffness and atrophy burn and come alive with screeching alarm.
I walk to the machine. It flashes zero. I hit the PLAY button and get nothing.
You have no new messages. I hit it again. You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages
I rub my face and go to the bathroom. Wash the stink off of me. I don’t have hallucinations preceding a Big Fry smear. That shit happened. I got a phone call from the rapist.
Water running down my face, etching lines through my stubble, my eyes sore and dry and bulging from the whiskey, even my teeth feel gritty and ache. My stomach sour and vile, my shoulders twisted because I slept on them wrong, stuffed onto the couch. I get weary just cataloging my body’s condition.
I remember flashes of the morning. Funeral. Then holding her picture. Holding her ring. Stumbling like I do when I drink to forget her as opposed to just drinking. Somehow I got on the couch. I remember trying the TV for a while. I remember lying with my head at one end and then later, with my head at the other end.
A wave of nausea percolates up from my twisted gut and I close the toilet lid. Sit down. The phone ringing climbs up from my memory like a rat clawing to the top of a sewer drain as it backs up. The ringing echoes. His voice comes across. He knows my name, although he commits the cardinal sin of calling me Dick.
No one calls me Dick. No one.
He got the email, he said. He tailed Petticoat. Then the smear. I sit. Wait for my stomach to back off. In the meantime, the sounds of the living world continue to sneak around corners and play out next to my ears. People down on the street, yapping as they live their lives and pass into and out of my own by walking on my sidewalk. Birds busy building nests on signs and ledges where there are no pigeon spikes to interrupt them. Taxis zooming around, surely speeding and nearly hitting pedestrians.
I hear my neighbor unlock his door. Slam it shut. Something different about it. Louder. More crisp. Jerry is an asshole and prone to being obnoxious and loud, but this is different.
I open my eyes, stare into the lightless bathroom. Tune an ear. Jerry’s door opens again. His footfalls like explosions into the hallway. The wood floors and bare walls outside my doorstep magnify the sounds of his existence. He shuts his door, jangles keys into a lock. The deadbolt falls home and Jerry trots off. All too blaringly loud.
I uncover my face. Stand. Open the bathroom door. Walk into the front room and look. My door is open. Wide fucking open.
Someone came inside my place while I was there on the floor, unconscious, defenseless, destroyed and in a pool of my own vomit.
17
The front door lock has been picked, not kicked in, drilled out, blown up or anything else.
If the rapist was involved in a burglary and the late Detective Gillispie didn’t find anything resembling forced entry, I figure he has more skills than just having sex with unwilling women. He came here.
I shut the door quietly and my mind begins to race on what I need to do. Search the house for
missing items, bugs and bombs for sure. Send him another email and try to meet. Find out why he would call me, leave a message, then just come over here and erase it. What was in that message? Why come here and risk it? Better yet, why come here and leave me alive?
I walk to my wife’s closet. Unmolested. My gun, still loaded and in the holster. For an hour I search the house. No bugs, no bombs. I feel the hot spot on my ribs and think he did kick me. I brew some coffee, take a shot of whiskey and go over to the answering machine. It’s a long shot but I try and lift a fingerprint from the ERASE button.
I get one and doubts immediately come to the surface. Might be my own. I fingerprint the outside door handle. Look for anything else disturbed. Nothing. He could very well have called, got the machine, left a message he immediately regretted, figured since he got the machine I wasn’t home, raced over, picked the lock, came inside and saw me on the floor, erased the message and gloated while he kicked me on his way out. Left the door standing open as a taunt.
I brace the front door with a two by four. I walk into the bedroom and strip down. As I pull my shirt up over my head it leaves a wet trail up my neck onto my scalp. I examine it. Spit. I see red.
Did this fucking guy really loom over me, kick me and spit on me? Please, God, say he did. He already called me Dick. I have to breathe in and out in a slow, methodical manner to keep my steam from blowing like a nuke. I collect my wits, get a sample of the spit and keep it with the fingerprints.
I have to do something to vent. I punch a hole in the wall.
I shower. Smoke half a pack while I tear a sheet of paper into thin strips. Concentrate. Ruin something. Exercise my anger.
Finally I crush out a Rum Coast and open up the laptop. View Petticoat’s email. Nothing new. Just like me, the rapist is trying to keep Petticoat in the dark about this. And why not? If Petticoat is still paying him his blackmail cash, why upset the apple cart with anything?
I email the rapist and write, “We should meet.” Hit SEND.
Willibald and I sit on his front porch, the music of beer bottle caps popping off filling the night.
Graham is inside; stirring some horrible concoction he refers to as his “famous buffalo tuna dip.” The red pepper sauce dances along the air through the living room, waving acrid tendrils along our nostrils. Mix that with the oil-canned tuna and I’m ready for another beer.
“Guess what I’m not eating,” Willibald says.
“Graham will guilt me into one or two bites.”
Willibald raises an eyebrow. “Oh, well then, guess what you’ll be vomiting.”
I laugh as Graham comes outside and waves around a bowl of red-tinted slop. “Get some, get some. I got the crackers, I got the pretzels, I got the cold beers, I got what you need.”
“You got dysentery,” Willibald says, pushing away the arm Graham is using to hold the dip. “Smells like you learned to cook in Southeast Asia.”
Graham plops down into a chair, feigns being hurt. “I’ll have you know this has won awards.”
“I’ll bet it has.” Willibald looks at me and takes a bite out of a cracker. “Award for fastest shit storm ever.”
“No, that’s Richard here,” Graham says.
“Don’t involve me in your squabble. I came here for the booze.”
“Hurry up and drink it then, Richard. We ain’t got all night.” Willibald hands me a second one and stares until I polish off my first. I crack open the new bottle and he looks away, satisfied that his houseguests are doing the master’s bidding. “Hell, Richard. You take two. Ice that shiner.”
I take a second one, and just like in those fancy commercials from the ’90 s where one dude hands another dude a bottle of beer and the bottle is wet and the ice slides down the side and you can’t think of anywhere you’d rather be, I get that beer. Lay it upside my swollen face. Heaven. Pure Heaven.
I look to Graham. He leans back to meet my eye line, his head appearing behind his grandfather’s. He winks. Gives me a cheers salute. I return it and enjoy the silence.
“Nights like these came and went in the war, you know,” Willibald says, his voice filling with that ashen tone that any grizzled veteran has when he remembers the times where killing was the only business at hand besides dying. “Little skirmishes, getting jumped I guess you boys would call it. They’d send a few guys here, a few guys there. They’d wait until the night had settled in just enough to have shadows for cover but not enough to where their muzzle flash would be a dead giveaway.”
Willibald rubs his bottle across his forehead just as I imagine he did back in the war, taking his cap off and using the back of his hand to clear his brow. “So you had to balance the beautiful evening with the threat of bullets around every corner.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “It was warfare. Demoralize your enemy.”
“It solidified us,” Willibald says. “When God gives you an evening like this, you can’t help but see His hand in it. How the insect song slowly crescendos for hours in synch with the failing light, tuning up just a bit as it tunes out. How the breeze pushes through the tree branches and flutters them in a lullaby. And those sonsabitches would sneak in and shatter it like a jaw in a street fight.”
Graham snickers. “I hear that wasn’t the only bad thing about the Nazis.”
Willibald laughs. “Yeah, but it might have been the worst thing, though.”
“Yeah,” Graham says.
“Did your grandmother ever eat this fish mush?” Willibald holds the dip in one hand, slowly using a cracker to tease out a hunk of the award-winning buffalo tuna dip. Graham smiles and snorts, shakes his head as his grandfather mocks his centerpiece for the evening.
“I like to think Grandma would have loved it.”
“Your grandmother loved fresh salmon and little else. Cajun tuna on a cracker would probably—”
I see Willibald holding the cracker, suspended in air as the first staccato blast cleaves the stillness. The cracker, in slow motion like everything truly agonizing, it explodes into tuna splatters and grain dust as bullets cut through everything.
The dish explodes into millions of cheap white ceramic shards. A glob of Frank’s Red Hot and a can of tuna spray outward like a bad prank. I can’t see Willibald’s hand and I can’t see his smile as he toys with the food and all I can hear are the pop pop pop of projectiles punching through the windows and siding behind us.
Graham turns red and falls or dives I can’t tell and I feel the hellish sting of a round zip an inch or less off of my forehead. I drop, grabbing Willibald’s pants and yanking. Get him down, shield him. I can’t even look up I’m covered in that tuna dip and all I hear are screeching tires.
Adrenaline. Every sound pinches down to a mosquito squeal and I feel my heartbeat thudding. Pieces of the wood deck splintering and flying about. I dive to the old man and his grandson. Just like in the war. Hot lead speaks a language all its own, but still somehow everyone who hears it understands it plainly.
I get a split second where the whites of the shooter’s eyes meet my own. I see his face just enough to feel secure in the fact that the next time I see it I’ll be beating to death the right coward. The facial hair, the baby cheeks and high eyebrows. Ugly.
“Willibald! Stay down!” I’m on my feet, .44 Magnum out and rushing into the yard. A car screams down the road and takes a corner on two wheels.
I charge with everything I have. Across the street. Through the neighbor’s yard. Up and over the fence, rattling like ten thousand scales on a knight’s chainmail as I vault it. Hit the ground in a flowerbed. Trample. Rush forward; dodge a pooch that comes yapping at me after bolting from its doghouse. Over the other fence. Around the house and into the street.
Empty roads greet me. I spin around, hunting. Looking. Listening. Demanding the world to offer me a sound. A target. But as I turn, gun out, and that fresh adrenaline dump turns into burning gasoline in my veins and all of a sudden my lungs are only getting half the air they were a second ago an
d the sweat itches like steel wool down my scalp and my shoes are wet from God knows what and my suspenders are too loose and my shirt is untucked and fuck it, fuck all of this. I stop spinning. Gone.
Gone. I think the car was brown. Looked old and long. Town car. Sedan. Four doors, maybe. Probably.
Deep breath while I stare down the street, and I don’t feel the torch holes of bullet wounds. I holster and wipe off tuna dip from my shirt, my pants. My face. That fish slop burns worse than the sizzle of getting grazed by a round.
I walk up the street, turn the corner. Take my jacket off and snap it, trying to work out the wrinkles. I get a few houses down and jog over to Willibald’s. Off in the distance I hear sirens playing our music.
Up the steps onto the porch. Graham. Crying. On his knees, back and forth, rocking. Holding Willibald. And all that red everywhere.
I kneel down, put an arm around Graham. I watch the street for more of the gangbanger turds, and I feel Graham’s hand climb up and grab my arm. Squeeze so tight he might think if he lets go he’s going to float off.
“I’m feeling petty,” Graham says in a voice I’ve never heard him use before.
“I do too, and this is war,” I say, and I hold my friend while his grandfather goes off to join his wife now that his circle is complete.
18
Seven a.m., Thursday
My stomach is sour from lack of sleep.
SAPD processed that scene well into the night, Graham and I being fed cups of burnt, black coffee as we gave our statements over and over. They wouldn’t let Molly through the police tape. Made her wait, sobbing and alone on the other side until Graham walked off mid-sentence, took his wife in his arms and came back with her.