God Laughs When You Die

by Michael Boatman

  Leona carried Lester’s TV tray over to the sink. Her attention wandered to the picture on the television screen. A moment later, the tray clattered to the floor.

  The woman in the photograph looked only a few years younger than Leona, no older than twentyfive. She was beautiful, with long black hair and wide, laughing black eyes. In the photograph she stood next to a smiling older couple, whom she resembled.

  “…the most recent to go missing, Ivy Horse, a South side resident who vanished last month. Horse, who is twenty-three years old, is expecting a child later this month. Tonight, Mayor Dee, along with Ivy’s family is asking for your help. If you know anything about these disappearances…”

  Lester leaned forward in his chair, his eyes shining, and turned up the volume. Moving automatically, Leona cleaned the remnants of his dinner off the floor and scraped them into the disposal unit. Her daddy, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, had trained her up right, long before Lester came along.

  Girl, you’re too funny-lookin’ to make a proper wife. Better learn your way ‘round the kitchen if you wanna catch a half-way decent husband.

  She loaded the dishwasher without paying attention, unable to look away. Pictures showing five of the missing women flashed on the screen. Leona didn’t know any of them.

  But she recognized all of them.

  The pain in the back of her neck made her cry out.

  “I told you to get me a beer.”

  Lester had her by her ponytail. He jerked her head back and snarled into her ear. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I...I...” she stammered, unable to think. “I...”

  “You what?”

  Leona glanced down at the dishwasher. She’d left the door open, the machine half-filled.

  The big butcher knife lay on the top shelf. It would be so easy, she thought.

  But aloud she said, “I’m sorry, Lester.” He slapped her, once, sharply across the face.

  Then he dragged her into the bedroom and raped her.

  ***

  Ivy Horse limped along dark streets she could never have afforded to traverse when she was alive. Her killer had been particularly cruel. Her left arm had been pulled nearly out of its socket. In his rage, he’d shattered her right cheekbone. Her head hung at the wrong angle from where he’d wrung her neck. But the Pain distracted her from these minor hurts. The Pain giggled. Then it told her to stop.

  Ivy stopped. The thing she sought was inside the immaculate yellow house. The Pain told her so.

  Ivy dragged herself up the walkway.

  ***

  Leona couldn’t sleep. She sat at the kitchen table staring at the pictures from Lester’s closet. Lester was upstairs, snoring with his legs on her side of the bed. He’d choked her nearly unconscious before forcing himself on her. Now her body felt like one big bruise.

  She’d inherited the immaculate yellow house. Her mother had died giving birth to her and her father had spent the rest of his life making sure Leona never forgot. Lester’s childhood home was on the other side of Garvey, near the abandoned steel mill. It had burned to the ground five years ago.

  Lester’s parents had made him the executor of their estates after they went into the senior complex over in Riverglen, but Lester had never seen fit to repair the old place. It sat like the ruined wrack of Leona’s marriage, a blackened husk, empty of light.

  A noise from outside made Leona look up from the pictures. Lately, an old raccoon had been raiding the trash bins next to the back door. Leona got up and went to the window above the sink. It looked out over the trash bins in the backyard. A tap on the window usually scared the raccoon away.

  The back yard was empty. Bright moonlight, sharp as a scalpel’s edge illuminated the patio and the pool. Only the interior of the garage remained thick with shadows. Lester had left the door up again.

  Too drunk, Leona thought.

  She drew her robe tight and unlocked the back door. Lester would expect to find the garage closed and locked when he left for work in the morning. If she didn’t do it now, she’d regret it later.

  Fool, her mind warned. There won’t be a later for you.

  Leona crossed the driveway. She walked to the touchpad on the outer wall of the garage. Lester had installed it so he could open the door manually using a numeric code.

  Last chance. Drive away and never look back.

  “Where would I go?” she asked the cold night wind.

  All of her people were dead. She had no one to run to, no real education, no money of her own. Everything was in a joint account that Lester controlled.

  Leona entered the code, 2-24-61, Lester’s birthday, and stepped back as the garage door rolled down and clicked against the driveway. She pulled her robe tightly around her shoulders, shivering at the chill that trickled down the back of her neck.

  Then she went back inside.

  ***

  “Dalton Police department. How can I help you?”

  Leona almost hung up the phone. Her fingers flickered along the flat contours of the brown girl’s picture, the wide brow; the cheekbones high and sharp as a mother’s curse. The girl’s smile had been corrupted by agony, reforged into a grimace.

  “Dalton Police Department. How can I help you?”

  “I know...” Leona stammered. “I know what happened...to those girls.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I need help,” Leona whispered, then with greater force, “Help me.”

  The sound of footsteps froze the words on her lips. Leona turned, her mind whirling.

  Lester was leaning over the kitchen table. Leona’s mouth went dry and the phone dropped from her fingers.

  “Hello?” the telephone said. Then the line went dead.

  Half shrouded in the moonlight, Lester seemed intent upon the items she’d stolen from his closet. He studied them closely, his nose pressed to the table.

  Alright then, she thought. Alright then. She reached out and grabbed the butcher knife.

  The figure at the table stood and Leona saw that it was not Lester. The woman - yes it was a woman - her face was lost behind the veil of black hair that hung almost to the table.

  “Who are you?” Leona hissed. “What do you…”

  The woman stepped into the beam of moonlight shining through the kitchen window and Leona fell silent. Even with all that Lester had done to her Ivy Horse’s smile remained. She held up the thing she’d taken from the kitchen table.

  “Kat…chi…na,” she moaned.

  The dead woman caressed the bulge that protruded from her exposed midsection, caressed it as a mother caresses the cheek of a sleeping infant.

  The bulge moved. The woman’s belly rippled, her flesh roiling like the surge on a sluggish sea. Leona’s mouth stretched wide, a scream beating its way up from deep inside her gut. Her hand gripped the handle of the butcher knife.

  The shadow/woman turned and walked out the back door.

  “Wait,” Leona hissed. “Stop!”

  Heedless, Leona followed the dead woman from the house and down the back stairs. The woman walked swiftly, her legs ticking like a windup doll. She marched toward the woods.

  Lena followed. The curve of the woman’s spine brooked no denials. Her will accepted no delusions. She had defied Death itself to gain her desire: That strength drew Leona on. She ran through the woods until the dead woman walked into the clearing that faced Lester’s childhood home. Leona stepped into the clearing and Ivy vanished, swallowed by the old house.

  Something rustled in the woods behind her.

  The flame that had fueled her flight shuddered and grew dim. Fear pushed her across the clearing and over the threshold. Leona stumbled over the landing in the darkness, lost her footing and fell headlong down the stairs. She hit the dirt floor and felt something tear in her right shoulder. She bit back her scream, sensing that she’d blundered into a sacred place.

  She caught a glimpse of the dead woman climbing down a hole in the floor. Leona stood - the movement
slicing jagged ripples across the muscles of her back and shoulder - and picked her way through the dark until she reached the hole. She looked into that abyss but could see only darkness.

  “Maybe you aren’t as stupid as you look.”

  He was on her before she could turn. Lester punched her in the kidneys and Leona felt something with blades unfold itself in her lower back.

  “You woke me up, monkey,” he growled. “You know better than that.”

  Leona lifted her left hand. In the darkness Lester didn’t see his danger. She drove the butcher knife into the big muscle of his left thigh.

  Lester uttered a surprised yelp of pain. Leona raised her left hand again and slammed the knife into his left buttock. Howling, Lester punched her, knocked her to the dirt floor. The knife spun away in the darkness. Lester straddled her chest, grabbing for her throat.

  Leona clawed stripes of flesh from his face, hooked her fingernails into the soft tissue of one eye. His pain had ignited something in her blood, something black of heart and red of claw, and she screamed: “Killyou! I’llkiiillyooouu!”

  Lester’s hands found her throat and began to squeeze. Leona’s heartbeat thundered in her ears, filled the world with its pounding rush. Her vision flashed white, flickered and darkened.

  Then Lester screamed, and the air turned cold. Gasping, Leona looked up. Twelve corpses surrounded them in the half-light.

  Ivy Horse had buried Leona’s butcher knife between Lester’s shoulder blades. Moving as one, the women bent and picked up jagged two-by-fours, lead pipes, hunks of masonry and concrete. Lester screamed again. The women fell upon him and dragged him down. A woman whose head was a fractured ruin lifted a piece of concrete and smashed Lester’s right leg like rotten kindling. Another corpse broke his fingers with a lead pipe.

  “Leona,” he screamed. “Pleeeease.”

  Ivy Horse turned her remaining eye toward Leona. The two women faced each other there in the darkness as Lester begged for mercy. One of the dead women jammed a sharpened iron rod into Lester’s open mouth and pinned his head to the dirt floor.

  Ivy lifted Leona’s knife and took a step toward her.

  Leona turned and ran up the stairs, through the hall and out into the night. Behind her in the dark, Lester’s screams became a babbling shriek.

  Leona ran on, toward home, toward freedom. In her left hand she gripped a tiny red and white doll no bigger than her palm.

  It sang to her and told her who she was.

  BLOODBATH AT LANDSDALE TOWERS

  Danny Wahlberg, twenty one, white, and dumb as a box of chicken turds, cleared his throat, blinked three times and said: "You want me to do what?"

  Lennox Ravanaugh, thirty-nine, black and mean as a Republican with a rattlesnake up his dickhole, held up one of a dozen little plastic packets that sat on the table in front of him.

  "I said I want you to fuck your sister in the ass."

  White Bitch - who had once answered to the name Carrie-Ellen Wahlberg - shook her blond head and pulled a knife.

  "You stay the fuck away from me, Danny."

  Ravanaugh looked back and forth between the twins. They were good for a few more weeks at least. He chuckled and sniffed the little packet.

  “Bubble bubble toil and trouble,” he said.

  The packet held five chunks of rock cocaine. When smoked, they would produce the kind of chemical satisfaction that squirmed its way down into your DNA, checked out the accommodations and said "Make Room For Daddy."

  "Weeeelll?" Ravanaugh sang.

  Danny glanced over at his sister, who had certainly seen better days.

  "Don't even think about it, Danny," White Bitch said. “I'll cut your fucking nuts off."

  Danny shook his head and turned back to Ravanaugh.

  "I don't think she's gonna go for it, ‘Naugh"

  Ravanaugh smirked.

  "Well that's a shame," he said. "Ain't it, fellas?"

  Ravanaugh's Crew, a ragtag motley made up of some of the stupidest humans on Earth, made cattle sounds. Goat, Ravanaugh’s best runner, cackled and spat out two of his teeth. The teeth hit the cheap linoleum and bounced under the sofa like a pair of rotten dice. Rook, Lil’ Knot and Pabo, Ravanaugh’s lieutenants, laughed and threw used condoms at each other.

  "Yo Goat," Ravanaugh said.

  He flicked the packet over his shoulder.

  Goat was nineteen years old and looked sixty, but he scampered across the room with the dexterity that only lifelong junkies can muster and caught the packet before it hit the floor.

  "Hell yeah, boss," he panted. "Hell yeah."

  Goat produced a pipe and lit up. A sound like a fresh sucking chest wound filled apartment 1654. Then Goat leaned back and closed his eyes.

  Danny Wahlberg drooled on his sneakers.

  "Sis," he whined.

  "No, Danny," White Bitch said. "The hand job was bad enough."

  But White Bitch was weakening. She backed up onto the mattress that served as Goat’s palette. The mattress smelled like the septic field of a Mexican abortion clinic at high tide. White Bitch’s blade dipped. Her attention fluttered between Danny and the Goat.

  Ravanaugh heaved a contented sigh.

  “Ah, nothing stokes my juices quite like snappin’ the moral backbone of upper middle class privilege.”

  Ravanaugh lived for grinding down the ones from Chicago’s Northern suburbs, the ones whose parents sucked ass for Haliburton or Exxon or any of the mega-corps that were corn-holing the planetary working class.

  By 2010 raging unemployment, abetted by four successive Bush administrations, had forged a Darwinian nightmare for the residents of the Landsdale Towers Residential Estates. The gauntlet of drug dealers, crack whores and child molesters that stalked the seven mile stretch of State Street that contained the LTRE made life in the projects as pleasant as crawling through the anal tract of a rabid she-moose at the height of mating season.

  The college basketball scouts made it worse.

  But any guilt Ravanaugh might have felt - since he ran the criminal operations that centered around the Towers - paled beside his outrage at the depredations of Corporate America.

  “See, fellas?” Ravanaugh said. “A middle class white kid’ll shank his grandmama if you fuck with his sense of entitlement. Observe.”

  Ravanaugh swept the packets off the tabletop and into the open briefcase on his lap. He snapped the briefcase shut. Danny jumped as if Ravanaugh had fired a shotgun.

  "Gimme that briefcase, you cunt,” White Bitch snarled. “Or I'll stick this knife up your fat ass."

  Lil’ Knot and Pabo snickered. Over in the corner, the Goat nodded and fell off of his chair.

  "Last chance, Dan," Ravanaugh said. "How ‘bout it?"

  Danny turned and lurched, zombie-like, toward White Bitch. White Bitch whirled and slashed a long red gash from his inner elbow to his palm. Danny howled.

  “Owww!”

  He smacked White Bitch across the jaw, knocking the knife across the room. White Bitch swung a booted foot up and caught Danny square in the balls. Danny let out a whoooof, clutched himself and dropped face-first onto the mattress.

  “Bravo,” Ravanaugh said. Then he picked up a packet and held it out to White Bitch. She reached for it.

  “Ah ah ahhh,” Ravanaugh whispered.

  White Bitch hesitated. Ravanaugh lifted the packet and sniffed it.

  “Mmmmmhhh goooood,” he said.

  White Bitch unzipped her jeans and went over to the mattress. Ravanaugh laughed, his barrel chest filling the room with bad humor.

  “We should have brought hay,” he said.

  "White folks are so fucking depraved."

  ***

  Ravanaugh was just about to make White Bitch blow the whole Crew when someone knocked on the door.

  Danny was lying on the mattress with his underpants around his ankles. White Bitch was trying to crawl out from under Mosquito. Mosquito, who was diabetic, had passed out on top of White Bitch while pounding
her into a thin paste on the cheap industrial strength carpet. Mosquito weighed nearly four hundred pounds. White Bitch lay spreadeagled beneath a fifth of a ton of insulin resistant mocha man mountain.

  Ravanaugh said, “See who it is.”

  Rook, Ravanaugh's second-in-command, strode over to the door, a Glock nine mm gripped in his fist.

  "Who the fuck is it?" Rook shouted.

  "A better question might be: Who the heck are you?"

  Ravanaugh and Crew spun around.

  A black man wearing a long, camel-brown duster and a white ten gallon hat was standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

  "Who the fuck are you?” Ravanaugh said. “How the fuck did you get in here?"

  Duster shook his head.

  “Mister, you sure got a dirty mouth."

  Ravanaugh stared at the stranger. He appeared middle aged and stood about six-two, maybe six-three. His chest and shoulders were broad, his middle free of anything resembling fat. Duster looked like the sort of man who got his exercise ripping boulders out of the earth with his bare hands.

  The Crew drew down. Duster didn’t seem to notice.

  "What’s with that fucked up outfit?" Ravanaugh said.

  Duster made a tsking sound.

  "Anybody ever tell you fellas it ain't polite to say the F-word s'much?" he said. "'Specially in the presence of a lady?"

  "What lady…?" Ravanaugh said.

  Duster nodded toward the front door. The woman standing in the doorway might not have been Eartha Kitt's younger, hotter sister but she surely could have passed for her.

  "Hello boys."

  She was wearing a red leather catsuit.

  Red stiletto heels put the woman at about six feet two inches tall. She was the color of milk chocolate; her short black hair combed backward and slicked down. She had the blackest eyes Ravanaugh had ever seen.

  Ravanaugh's eyes darted back and forth between the invaders like a man watching someone play tennis with his balls.

  "Who are you people?" he said.

  Duster stepped forward and took his hat off.