by Joe McKinney
“Daddy?”
He opened his eyes. Madison was standing in the doorway, looking at him, her expression one of worry underscored by a note of fear.
“I hit my thumb with the hammer,” he said.
She stepped out onto the porch. “Oh no.” She reached for his hand. “Are you okay?”
What does it fucking look like? he nearly said, but caught the words before they had a chance to come out. That wouldn’t do. Hurt as he was, it was hardly an excuse to lash out at her. God knows they’d done plenty of that over the last eleven days as it was.
With a great deal of effort he said, “No, sweetheart, I hit it pretty good. Do Daddy a favor, would you? Go get me a rag or something from inside.”
She looked at his hurt thumb. A thin trickle of blood was seeping out between his fingers and running down the inside of his wrist. She nodded.
“Okay, Daddy.”
Madison ran inside the house, and when she was gone, Jim took his right hand away and looked at the thumb. It was a mess. A small crescent-shaped cut had formed right below the web where the thumb met the hand, and within the curve of the crescent he could see the negative impression of the hammer’s nicked head. The left side of the cut was deeper, and bright red blood was flowing freely from it.
Tentatively, he tried to move the thumb, and right away felt like somebody had jammed a live electrical cord into his wrist.
“Okay,” he said. “Not gonna do that again.”
Fuck, he thought, probably broken. That’s just great. We got a big-ass storm on the way and I go and break my fucking hand. Lot of fucking good I’m gonna be.
He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, and when he looked up again, Madison was running out the door with the tackle box they were using for their first-aid kit in her hands.
She put it on the porch next to his feet, then took his huge hand in her small ones.
“Easy,” he said, wincing. “I think it’s broken.”
He tried to pull it back, but Madison held on firmly. She made a clucking noise and kept on examining his hand, turning it this way and that.
Jim Norton chewed his fingernails, always had and probably always would, no matter how much Eleanor complained about it. As a result, his fingernails always had a ragged, unkempt look. He wasn’t especially self-conscious about it, no more than a smoker is about smoking, but it did make it difficult to pry open the tabs on Coke cans or pick coins off a counter. Eleanor would sometimes see him struggling and she’d make the same clucking noise Madison was making now. It was an impatient, Here, let me do it gesture, and as he stood, watching his daughter examine his injury, he realized how very much she was beginning to look like her mother.
“It’s not broken.” She said it flatly, like a pronouncement.
“Feels broken.”
“It’s not. Just cut real bad. If it was broken I wouldn’t be able to move it like this.”
“Huh,” he said.
He looked at his injured thumb and frowned. Jim wasn’t sure which surprised him more, the easy confidence in his daughter’s voice or the fact that he was accepting as almost certainly accurate the medical diagnosis of a twelve-year-old.
“It is bleeding pretty bad, though. We’ll need to clean it and bandage it.”
She knelt down and examined the contents of the tackle box before finally settling on a roll of gauze and some hydrogen peroxide.
“This is gonna sting some,” she said, and he had just enough time to muse how that too made her sound like her mother, before the liquid bit into his wound.
Jim closed his eyes and tried not to think of how the hydrogen peroxide would be foaming up upon contacting his blood and turning to little pink bubbles that ran greasily down his arm. He could, he knew, be an awfully big baby sometimes, and the thought brought on a wave of bitterness that was as palpable as half-chewed aspirin clinging to the back of his tongue.
Eleanor had once told him how thankful she was to have found him. They had been in the car at the time, coming home from an Astros game. Jim was driving and Eleanor was in the passenger seat, her legs curled up beneath her.
He glanced at her, a small, curious smile at the corner of his mouth, and said, “What brought that on?”
He knew she had dated some before they met. They never really talked about past loves. They both knew the other had had them, but there was never any reason to bring them up. Those were all in the past, and they hardly mattered, certainly no more than a batter’s practice swings before stepping up to the plate for real, and what they had together was real. It was for keepsies, as she sometimes said.
So he was a little surprised when she started telling him about some of the guys she had dated before she met him.
“This was after I became a cop,” she said. “Before that, you know, it was no big deal. Back in college, guys were just boys. No big deal. But after I became a cop, things just got weird. I learned to avoid telling guys what I did for a living, because once I did, they got all crazy on me.”
“Crazy?” he said. “Like how?”
“Not anything mean. Nothing like that. They just sort of drifted off, you know? Sometimes they’d become defensive. Sometimes they’d just stop calling. I used to think it was me, like maybe I was doing something wrong. I don’t know. I wondered if I had a nasty case of halitosis or something.”
She laughed, then put her hand on his arm.
“But then I was at the doctor’s office one day, and I met this woman there. She was about fifty, I guess. Pretty, you know, but obviously older than me. She was a chemistry professor at Rice. Anyway, we got to talking, and I was kind of surprised at how much we had in common. We were both single, both struggling, both completely clueless about what we were doing wrong in the dating department. And then she told me something really strange. She said she never told guys what she did for a living. When they asked, she’d just say she worked at a college, let them think she was a secretary or something.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Well, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You see, when guys found out she was a PhD, they ran the other way. They got intimidated, I guess. It was the same with me. Guys would find out I was a cop, and they would joke about it, but underneath it all, I could tell they were uncomfortable around me. I made them nervous. You can’t build a relationship that way.”
She paused then, and when he looked over at her, the smile gradually thinned from her face and became a look of utter gratitude.
“That’s why you were different, Jim. That’s why I fell for you. You weren’t like all those other guys. I love whatever it is you see in me. It feels special, like only you can see it.”
He hadn’t really known what to say to that—he never did, in situations like that—and perhaps she hadn’t expected him to say anything, for at that moment she put her cheek down on his shoulder and sighed, as if it was the best place in the world to be.
But looking back on that memory now, with his head swimming in pain, Jim Norton wondered if maybe she had misjudged him. Or maybe he was being unfair to her. He didn’t know, but he suspected it amounted to the same thing, for he found that after all these years of marriage he was, after all, a little intimidated by his wife.
No, he thought, maybe intimidated isn’t the right word. Maybe you’re resentful. Maybe that’s a better word for it. You’re resentful because here you are, the man of the house, the one who’s supposed to be the rock, the provider, and instead you’re standing here getting doctored by a twelve-year-old girl while your wife is putting on a uniform and saving the city. She’s the one with the balls. Maybe you should just go ahead and hand her your dick, too. You’re not gonna need it.
He frowned bitterly at the thought. He didn’t want to believe he was that shallow, but . . . was he? Did he really resent his wife for going out into that flooded mess of a world and doing her duty?
He was uncertain what he really felt, and that bothered him.
M
adison was still busy wrapping gauze around his thumb. He gazed at the work she was doing and it occurred to him that she had actually done a really good job of it. The fit was snug, but not painful. He had experienced a moment of numbness in the thumb, but that was gone now, replaced by a dull, insistent throb of pain that he suspected would be with him for a couple of days at least.
“You did a good job on that,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Daddy.”
Her voice was bubbly, as effervescent as always, and it brought a smile to his face. She had really done a wonderful job since all this began. His little girl was growing up.
The reason for that of course was Ms. Hester upstairs. The poor thing was doing badly. After Eleanor had saved her (and he mentally hesitated over the memory, for yes, it had been Eleanor who did the saving), they brought her to their house, where she had slipped into a state of shock from which she couldn’t seem to recover. They weren’t equipped to care for her, at least not properly, not with the power out, and soon her shock took the form of a fevered sickness.
While Eleanor was at work, saving the city, and Jim was moving around the house, fixing this and that and occupying himself with any little task in a desperate attempt to ward off the restless boredom of cabin fever, Madison had calmly invested herself in the ceaseless effort to ease Ms. Hester’s suffering. She was her nurse. She read to her. She held her hand and wiped her brow and fed her with a spoon and kept her hydrated and cleaned her when she went to the bathroom. Yes, he realized, she had played nurse, but she wasn’t just playing at it. She was actually doing real work. She was recognizing a problem and confronting it head-on, like an adult.
Jim turned from his daughter’s ministrations and glanced across the street, toward Ms. Hester’s house. A light breeze carried the stench of mud and sewage across the patio. It made his nose wrinkle and his Adam’s apple pump up and down in his throat. Ms. Hester’s house was a shambles. Mud from Hurricane Kyle’s storm surge had pushed through that side of the street and poured into the gaping hole on the kitchen side of her house. Water now filled the house up to a height of about two feet, not quite covering the top of the mud flow, and in the stillness the house, the tree that jutted through it had a skeletal eeriness that he didn’t like. Not one little bit.
A figure was walking around the back corner of the house.
Jim watched the man carry something from the house and put it into a small green boat and thought: Is that really him? It can’t be. That slime ball Bobby Hester is looting his own grandmother’s house. Is that really what I’m seeing?
But he was. Bobby Hester was carting a TV right out of his grandmother’s house and putting it into the back of a boat that was almost certainly stolen as well.
What was next? he wondered. Her jewelry? Her collection of Spode china?
“Sweetheart,” Jim said, pulling his hand away, “do Daddy a favor and go inside the house.”
She followed his gaze across the flooded street to Ms. Hester’s house.
“But, Daddy . . .”
“Don’t argue with me, Madison. Go upstairs. Right now. Go on, move.”
He gave her a gentle push toward the door. She resisted momentarily, then turned and ran inside. He followed her to the door and watched her run up the stairs.
“Stay put up there, you hear?” he said to her back.
She reached the landing and turned. “Daddy?”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Just stay up there, okay? Daddy’s gonna go check something across the street.”
“Daddy, no . . .”
“It’s okay, Madison. Just hang tight up there. I’ll be right back.”
But part of him wondered if that would happen. It hadn’t come across in his voice, at least he hoped it hadn’t, but the truth of the matter was that he was very scared just now. He was pissed off at the idea that anyone would steal from an old woman, that much was true, but he was also out of his depth.
He watched Madison disappear into the game room upstairs, then turned back to Ms. Hester’s house. What would he do if he actually got his hands on Bobby Hester anyway? Jim had picked up more than a few cop stories over the years of his marriage with Eleanor, and he thought he had a pretty good idea of what meth addicts were capable of doing. They tended to be violent and unpredictable, not the kind of people who listened to reason. If he were actually to catch Bobby in the act, what would he do?
He had a momentary vision of belting Bobby across the jaw with a hammer, his meth-addled body flying backwards, landing with a splash in the water and then going still as a small, thin groan escaped his lips. Jim would stand there, victorious, a suburban Conan the Barbarian, defender of all that was right and good.
As far as fantasies went, it felt like a good one. It appealed to his sense of justice.
But a nagging, insistent little voice in the back of his head kept repeating: It’ll never happen that way. He’ll get the hammer from you and hit you with it again and again and before you know it it’ll be you flying backwards, landing in the water, a pink cloud spreading out around your head. Only you won’t go still, and he won’t stop to gloat. You’ll keep sliding under the surface of the water, unconscious, little silvery bubbles escaping from your nostrils as he drops the hammer and grabs your neck and holds you under until you’re dead.
He shook his head as though to shake off the voice and walked out the door. The hammer was where he had left it on the porch. He scooped it up, flexed his fingers over the handle, and stepped into his flooded yard.
Jim was halfway across the street, up to his chin in water, before he realized he hadn’t planned his approach. For a moment he entertained using the downed pecan tree as a cover, but then he remembered all the water moccasins he’d seen gliding through the water over the past few days. They took shelter in the trees, he knew, and the idea of suddenly finding himself entwined in a bolus of writhing snakes was more than he wanted to deal with.
He sank a little lower in the water and dog-paddled around the bedroom side of the house and into the backyard, where he hoped to get the drop on Bobby Hester.
And, as he peered through the open back door and saw Bobby in the kitchen, struggling to remove a microwave oven from its alcove in the wall, it appeared his plan might actually work.
Staying low in the water, the hammer gripped tightly in his right hand, Jim glided through the living room.
He stopped at the edge of the couch and slowly rose from the water.
Bobby Hester was busy pulling at the microwave, grunting and cursing under his breath, but as Jim closed the distance between them, the situation abruptly changed for the worse.
Bobby took his hands down from the microwave. His back was still to Jim, but his head was turned just enough for Jim to see dark light in Bobby’s left eye.
“You’re in my house,” Bobby said.
Jim froze. The distance between them was maybe eight feet. Even in hip-deep water Jim figured he could probably close that distance in the wink of an eye. But it wasn’t going to happen. His fear had rooted him to the floor as surely as if hands had come up from the dark water and grabbed his ankles. A flood of adrenaline twisted his stomach into knots. He could feel his face and his scalp tingling with a heated electric flush.
Come on, Jim, he thought. Do something. Don’t just stand here. He’ll know how scared you really are.
“This isn’t your house, Bobby.”
At the mention of his name, a wicked smile lit the corner of Bobby Hester’s mouth. One hand went into the dark recesses of the shelf in front of him and came out with an imposing ten-inch chef’s knife. Jim saw a flash of light dapple across the blade as Bobby turned to face him.
“This is my grandmother’s house,” Bobby said. “Might as well be mine.”
There was a maniacal light dancing in Bobby’s eyes, not sane. Dark pockets, like bruises, filled the hollows of his cheeks, and when his burned and bloodless lips spread open, they revealed a mouth of broken and blackened
teeth.
Jim thought: That’s a tweaker’s face. The man is amped up as high as a body can go. Oh shit, what have I done?
“You don’t have her permission to be here,” Jim said. He was trying as hard as he could to sound confident and strong, but no amount of trying could keep the tremors from his voice. He heard it, and he was pretty sure Bobby Hester heard it, too. “You need to get the hell out of here, Bobby. Just walk out that door over there.”
Bobby glanced down at the knife in his hand. It was a deliberate gesture, full of implication. Then he looked at Jim, his eyebrows raised.
“I’ll tell you what I need to do,” Bobby said. “I need to get the rats out of my grandmother’s house.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he lunged forward, slashing the knife in the air between them. The thrust wasn’t meant to cut Jim, only scare him, and that it did. Jim stumbled backwards, falling over something under the water (he wasn’t sure what). He managed to keep from going all the way under, but the damage was done. Bobby threw his head back and let out a savage sound that was part laugh, part battle cry, and he charged again, jabbing the knife in front of him like a bayonet.
Jim scrambled away from the knife until his buttocks hit the submerged top of Ms. Hester’s kitchen table. The next instant he was on top of the table and sliding backwards across it like a piece of wet ice over a tile floor. He caught himself at the back edge of the table and jumped to his feet, his jeans pulled halfway down his ass, full of water.
But he was on his feet. He looked down at the table, and then down at Bobby Hester, who was still closing on him, and it seemed impossible to Jim that only a moment before he had been down there in the water with that deranged, knife-wielding lunatic. He saw Bobby, his mouth a diseased O, staring up at him in surprise. I did it, Jim thought with a clear resounding sense of exaltation so intense that for a moment he wanted to laugh.
The laughter died inside him a split second later, though, for Bobby charged the table and grabbed it by the corners and started to shake it.
“Whoa-o-o,” Jim said, as the table trembled below him. He could feel it tilting to one side, and as it reached the tipping point Jim’s feet slid out from under him and the hammer went flying. For a horrible moment he tracked its flight, watched it tumble end over end until it plunked into the water and slipped into darkness.