The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  “Congratulate us.”

  “Oh. Congratulations.” I turned to Kellee. “Thanks for the shirt. It’s really a sweet gesture. When are you due?”

  “July 27.” She began prattling about the intricacies of calculating ovulation and due dates. I tuned her out and did the math. July 27. This was January. I had seven months to wrench my attitude into place and get ready to be an aunt. I mean, a sister.

  “Well,” I said at last, raising my water glass. “Congratulations.” What else was there to do?

  They raised their glasses and we clinked. I asked some obligatory baby questions—Do you want a girl or a boy? Have you thought about names?—until the waiter brought our drinks and stood over us, refusing to leave the table until we’d ordered. The two of them returned to their menus, oblivious to my distress.

  My father’s self-absorption can be a blessing sometimes.

  My dad finally ordered a steak, which seemed to meet with Kellee’s approval. She spent five minutes ordering a broiled chicken breast, specifying in intricate detail the cooking instructions and side dishes she wanted, apparently subjecting every item and procedure to the smell test she’d applied to my father’s order.

  We ate our meal and, as usual, I made it through the entire affair without anyone at the table asking me anything about myself. Which was just as well.

  What was there to say? Someone left a bloody ax on my porch last night? Some poor girl named Drew was found dead in the trunk of a car? The guy could be coming after me? I’m being chased by a demonic lumberjack? I’ll be a sister, not an aunt?

  Sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.

  7

  God is in the details, someone once said. An architect, I think it was. Le Corbusier? Or Van der Rohe, maybe. I get them mixed up. It’s an apt observation coming from one who creates secure, carefully structured space. I spent the rest of my birthday trying to restore structure and security to my space. Paying attention to the details that might summon peace to my house and my mind.

  First order of business was to clean the blood off the walls and floor of my entryway. I believe in the sanctifying power of Pine Sol. Just the smell of it gives me a wonderful (if false) sense of security, a comforting sense of denial. I smiled serenely as the familiar fragrance wafted off my mop. By the time I was done scrubbing, I could almost pretend the blood had never been there in the first place.

  I swept up the pantry-bomb debris in my kitchen, reorganizing cans and boxes on my shelves with meticulous, Dewey-decimal exactitude. And after a few more attempts to light the water heater and a couple of fits of wildly creative cussing, I repented, conceded defeat, and called a plumber.

  When I heard his Sunday rates, we agreed he’d come first thing Monday and take a look at it. If I had any shot whatsoever of regaining my sanctification, I was going to need hot water. I was not capable of maintaining even a passable attitude without it.

  I put off supper with David. Celebration seemed inappropriate to me that night. Instead, I ate alone in my newly disinfected and de-moused kitchen, and lit a single birthday candle for myself, poking it into a toasted, chocolate fudge Pop-Tart, cracking the icing just enough to perch the candle upright. It was a nice evening, actually. I spent the solitude trying to come to terms with the last twenty-four hours of my life.

  Strangely, my father’s news had trumped everything else, at least for the moment. It was selfish and immature of me, I know, to focus on what was truly a trivial personal issue. Selfish and immature—both adjectives I routinely applied to my father and to Kellee. The irony didn’t escape me. If anything, it amplified my distress.

  But when I teased away my petty little resentments and tuned out my own whining, it boiled down to this for me. It seemed almost sacrilegious, a puerile affront to my mother’s memory and to that of our ragged little family, such as it was, that my father would so blithely create a second family. It was almost as if he’d simply opened up a new kit, complete with steps and procedures and shiny, new interchangeable parts.

  Kellee was Other-Woman Scrub Nurse Barbie, my dad was Handsome-but-Unfaithful Doctor Ken, and now they were going to produce a little duplicate of themselves. Beautiful Midlife-Crisis Baby. As though my mother, my brother, and I were replaceable. Or maybe even disposable. We were just the old dolls, tossed under the bed and forgotten, hair uncombed and legs askew.

  Not that I got the feeling, through the entire excruciating lunch, that my father cared two hoots about having more children. It was clearly Kellee’s agenda, not his. My father went along to get along, shoveling out to Kellee whatever little bauble or indulgence she wanted.

  Kellee, with her manufactured beauty, her petulant bossiness, and her enormous wedding ring—a ring that would choke a farm horse, the jeweler had said to me—raked it all in. Any of my father’s scant available affection, any microscopic drop of otherness he possessed, he doled out to her. And she snatched it up and gobbled it with a sense of entitlement that sent me reeling.

  Why did he care more about Kellee than he had my mother? Or—and this was the muddy bottom of it for me—why did he care more about Kellee than he did about me? This was a man whose chief interactions with me had always seemed to be afterthoughts. My father’s leviathan ego—at once immense and primitive and insatiable—had consumed our relationship for most of my life.

  Why did I care so much? Why, at thirty-five years old—a speed-limit birthday, my mother would have said, always a milestone—why at thirty-five did I still chafe in the face of my father’s apathy?

  The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. Ashamed of being a reject and ashamed of caring. Both.

  As I contemplated my father’s defection, I was flattened by an old, unappeasable deficiency, a nagging urge I’ve spent my life trying to overcome—not for my dad, for I was determined to finally outgrow my girlish need for him. But for Father, for God. For someone to sign up to care about me and to promise not to leave me alone in the world.

  God as Father—now there’s a concept that continues to baffle me. I’ve wondered often why God chose to introduce Himself as Father. It’s a uniquely New Testament idea. The idea shows up only a few times in the Old Testament, faint traces of foreshadowing. Which must have been why Jesus’ contemporaries were shocked at such an ambitious claim. Son of God indeed. Yahweh had sure ratcheted up the intimacy level with that one.

  In spite of my better knowledge, I tend to conduct myself in my relationship with God as I do in my relationship with my own dad. Independently.

  I am secretly convinced that God thinks, as I know my father does, that I am fine on my own. Or had better learn to be. I am certain, in that lonely place in some dusty corner of my soul, that help is indeed NOT on the way, and that, generally speaking, I am not on God’s to-do list. That He, like my father the heart surgeon, has other people to attend to, people who need Him more than I ever should.

  People whose hearts are far more important to Him than mine.

  This is absurd theology, of course. I went to seminary. I studied the Bible. In the original languages. I majored in systematic theology I graduated with a 4.0.1 should be a spiritual genius.

  After all that study, I know the drill. All about how God sees me as His child. All about how I am, though not divine like Jesus, nevertheless a fellow-heir, a sister of the King. Yep, that’s me and Jesus, sitting in the way back of the station wagon while God points out the historical markers on the highway.

  Unfortunately for me, there’s a primal tie, psychologically speaking, between one’s experience of God and one’s experience of an earthly father. And I just cannot seem to pick that knot out of my stubborn, twisted brain. The God I know, often, is not a product of theology, but one of biology. I look at heaven and I see my dad.

  Indifferent.

  Powerfully, thoroughly, immutably indifferent.

  The Peter Terry incident the year before had forced me out of this posture for a while. I’d had no choice but to ask for help.
Desperation does that. Flattens me out and sends me begging. And now again, spiritual forces more malicious than I could contemplate were invading my life. So, how about it, God? Father, Abba, Eloi…Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? Or more appropriately, in my case, my God, my God, don’t bail out on me.

  God was driving me to my knees. And he was using my narcissistic father, his vapid wife, a bloody ax, and a demon dressed as a lumberjack to do it.

  Whoever said the Lord Almighty didn’t have a sense of humor?

  I cracked my Bible again that night, poking around in Isaiah. Isaiah must have had a crummy father too. He seems to spend a lot of time reminding himself that God gives a hoot.

  It was ten o’clock before I finally washed my supper dishes. My house was meat-locker cold, my water practically coming out in cubes.

  Rarely in my life have I gone to bed at night without a hot bath first. I’ve been doing the bubble bath thing since I was three. Bath, jammies, bed, read, sleep. That’s the ritual. Leaving out the bath part threw me off completely. Instead of getting to sink into a warm tub of bubbly water, I sank quickly back into cranky self-pity. I switched on my electric blanket, brushed my teeth, warming my flannel jammies and socks over the flame in the bathroom before I put them on. I read with mittens on to keep my hands from turning blue.

  Tired as I was, I was edgy and couldn’t concentrate on my book. My mind wandered, flitting first to Peter Terry, then to my father, then to Drew Sturdivant and the ax. But exhaustion won out, eventually, and I turned out the light and slept hard.

  Until 3:30 a.m.

  At three thirty, right on schedule, I was jolted out of my dreams and sat bolt upright in bed.

  By my stereo. Which came on full blast. By itself.

  I threw back the covers and stomped into the living room, more furious than afraid. I checked the locks and looked in all the closets to make sure no one was in the house. But I knew the whole time I wouldn’t find anyone. No one had broken in.

  I popped the CD out just to double-check my theory, but it wasn’t really necessary. I knew what was in there. I’d recognized the song immediately, even at stentorian volume.

  Peter Terry had selected a CD I hadn’t listened to in maybe ten years—a leftover from a reject boyfriend who was into metal music. The CD was an old one, released in 1991. Use Your Illusion by Guns N’ Roses. The first cut on the record, the one Peter Terry chose to wake me with, is called “Right Next Door to Hell.”

  Guns N’ Roses’ lead singer is a man named William Bailey, a choir-boy turned criminal turned rock-star with an astonishing vocal range, passable guitar technique, and a powerful ability to claim an audience.

  His stage name is Axl Rose.

  I turned off the stereo and unplugged it.

  “Very funny,” I said out loud.

  I snapped off the light and went back to bed.

  8

  Monday morning came early, on the heels of two nights of demon-visitation insomnia. But this is not the sort of thing you complain about out loud. Normal civilian people do not have problems like that. And they think you’re batty if you do. So I painted a smile on my face and greeted the plumber as though I were fresh-as-a-daisy rested and happy to see him.

  His name was Paulie. Of Paulie’s Pretty-Quick Plumbing Repair. When I opened the water heater closet, he let out a whisde of admiration.

  “I never seen one so clean before.” He reached out and touched it gingerly, as though it were a rare work of art. “You just buy this or something?” He squinted at the Whirlpool emblem. “But it looks pretty old.”

  I pictured myself at Twelve-Step group. Hi. My name is Dylan. I spent an hour and a half cleaning my water heater yesterday.

  “It came with the house,” I said. “I don’t know how old it is.”

  He hiked his pants up and squatted down. “Let’s take a look,” he said, “see what the problem is.”

  He shined his flashlight into the hole and reached up in there while I busied myself making tea.

  “Can you tell what’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  He was fully prone now, in the water-heater worship position, his hand way up inside its belly.

  “The line’s pinched off,” he said at last. “It can’t get no gas.”

  “That would explain why the pilot won’t light,” I said, nodding.

  He looked up at me, puzzled. “You try to move it or something?”

  “The water heater? No. Why?”

  “The line’s pinched off,” he said again.

  I pictured a length of rubber tubing with a kink in it. “Can’t you just straighten it out?”

  “Line’s copper. It don’t pinch by itself. Looks like it got pinched off moving it. Or something.”

  “It’s a metal line?” I asked.

  “Copper. And it’s pinched off. Like someone took pliers to it.”

  “I doubt pliers were necessary.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Can you fix it?”

  “Have to replace it.”

  “The whole thing?” I tried not to panic as I calculated the cost of a new water heater.

  “Naw, just the line. Take ten minutes.” He scooted himself upright and went out to his truck, returning with tubing and a blowtorch and a box of tools.

  A blowtorch and a gas line didn’t seem like a safe combination to me, so I went into the bedroom to pack for my day. I had office hours in the morning and a senior seminar to teach from two to five. A brutal day in the salt mines for an academic. We try not to work more than an hour or two a day if we can possibly help it.

  I got my books together and twisted my hair into an emergency up-do. There was no way I was taking another goose-bumping, toe-bluing shower. I grabbed my swim bag and returned to the kitchen just as Paulie was dusting himself off.

  He handed me a business card. “Might want to give my brother a call.”

  I looked at the card. Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal.

  “I think I got rid of them,” I said.

  “Take a look.” He shined the flashlight under the water heater and, sure enough, there were the little brown pellets again. I peered behind the water heater. The monsters had chewed through my Cool Whip top.

  “They love plastic,” Paulie said. “Best favor you could’ve done ’em. They use it in their nests.” He picked up his clipboard and began writing my invoice.

  He tore the sheet off and handed it to me. Eighty-five dollars. For twenty minutes of work. I was in the wrong business.

  “Rats are like roaches. You see one, he’s got a whole bunch of buddies,” he said.

  “You think it’s rats? Or mice?”

  “What difference does it make? You got ’em living in your kitchen.”

  I took the card.

  “Good point.”

  The campus was buzzing when I arrived. Students crisscrossed in front of me as I lugged my stuff up the stairs to my office. I dumped it all in a heap in the hallway while I jammed my key in the lock. Someone had taped a note to my door. I grabbed it and stuck it in my mouth, gathering my stuff again to lug it across the threshold.

  I threw it all down and reached for my tea mug, then headed out to the kitchen area. First things first. On the way, I opened the note.

  My boss wanted to see me. Immediately.

  I stuck my head in her office as I passed by.

  Helene Levine glared at me over black, half-moon glasses. “Come in and shut the door.”

  “I was on my way for tea.”

  “Coffee for me,” she said. “Black.”

  Helene is very bossy. Everyone is terrified of her. I adore her.

  I fetched our refreshments and settled myself into an ancient armchair, crossing my feet on her desk.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “The police were here this morning.”

  I tried not to look too alarmed.

  “And?”

  “And they were asking about you.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “Is there any
thing you’d like to tell me?”

  “Was it Detective Jackson?”

  She checked her notes. “And someone named McKnight. Charming, delightful conversationalists, both of them.”

  “I haven’t met McKnight. But Jackson,” I gestured with my tea mug. “That dude has all the warmth and charisma of a box of rocks.”

  “You’re avoiding my question.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What do I need to know?”

  “What did they ask you?”

  “They wanted to know how long you’ve been here, how well I knew you. What I thought of you. Whether you were well liked on campus. Things of that nature.”

  I took a sip of my tea. “What did you tell them?”

  “I answered everything in your favor, if that’s what you’re wondering. I painted you the saint.”

  “Doesn’t sainthood usually involve flaying? Or being burned alive? It’s always some dreadful, medieval way to die. Slowly.”

  “Stop stalling. Are you in trouble again?”

  My problems last year had involved a patient of mine, Eric Zocci, a student who’d come for therapy at the school’s clinic, and who had later flown off a twelfth-floor balcony to his death. The entire mess had landed squarely in Helene’s lap. Though I’d been cleared of any wrongdoing, I still don’t think Helene has forgiven me. She runs the place like a general. She does not like surprises. Especially surprises that involve lawsuits and police departments and indictments. Things of that nature.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. In danger, maybe.”

  She waited.

  I braced myself and told her about the ax. I left out the lumberjack part and the swimming and the wet footsteps. And the water heater line with the kink in it. And Axl Rose. I didn’t see any reason to make myself out to be completely unbalanced. The ax was bad enough.

  “Is it your ax?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Why is everyone obsessed with this point? Do you own an ax, Helene?”