Disintegration

by Nicholson, Scott

  Mother had made that same sound walking down the hall after her stroke, tapping with her cane. Jacob could picture her hunched inside a peach flannel nightgown and wearing frayed slippers, ankles streaked with thick blue veins. Her body trembled as she slid a foot forward, balanced herself, swung the cane and planted its tip against the floor, adjusted her weight on the handle, and slid the second foot beside the first. Repeated over and over, slowly, until she reached the stairs. Then the tap of the cane would be broken by the clatter of her spidery hand against the railing.

  "We had some good times in the old barn, didn't we?" Joshua said, without turning.

  "The chickens didn't."

  "Heh. So you remember that, huh?"

  Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua's torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens' eggs came out...

  He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. "Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying."

  "The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don't it, brother?"

  "You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn't have had to come back."

  "It's more fun this way." Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn't changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.

  "Wish me, Jake," Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.

  From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the "Scooby Doo" cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob's.

  "Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes," Joshua would whisper in the darkness.

  Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. "I'm not afraid of you."

  "It's not me you're afraid of. It's the Sock Monster." And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua's hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua's voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed's gap to snap and claw at his flesh.

  All the while, as he pinched and poked, Joshua laughed and made cruel comments in his creepy fake voice. He would keep up the Sock Monster game until he was bored or tired, then he would say, "Do you give, you big sissy?"

  By that time, Jacob would be curled into a shuddering and whimpering ball.

  "Suck that snot back up your nose and tell me you give."

  "I give," he said when he could part his clenched teeth.

  Each morning, Jacob never failed to find a sock under the bed, pocked with small round spots of dried blood. His blood. As if the Sock Monster had really dug teeth into him, pulled his hair out by the roots, gnawed his fingers and toes.

  Eventually, Joshua stopped sliding under the bed and began hiding in the closet instead. That's when things really started getting nasty. And Jacob was eleven again.

  "Wish me, Jake," Joshua repeated, and Jacob opened his eyes to find himself in the present, in the room he never thought he'd see again except in occasional nightmares.

  "I don't want to play."

  "You better. Or I'll tell."

  "I'm not twelve anymore."

  "No, but the statute of limitations don't run out on murder."

  "It wasn't murder."

  "Well, I guess in a court of law they'd call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment or something to make sure you got off with a slap on the wrist. Since you're so upstanding and all. But we both know it's a killing no matter what name you give it."

  Jacob felt as if his ribs were splintered and digging deep into the meat of his lungs and heart. "I was just a kid."

  "That cane was her life, Jakie Boy. She hardly ever took a step without it. Even when she sat and read the newspaper, or dusted her little knickknacks, that cane was right there with her. She probably could have beat off a rabid mountain lion with that thing. She sure enough knew how to whoop us with it."

  "She shouldn't have hit me. Not right there on the elbow, where it made my arm go numb."

  "You always was the type to carry a grudge. Look what you done to me. Let me live like scum while you rode that golden ticket to the top. And I reckon you figured Momma was in the way, too."

  "She shouldn't have hit me."

  "The stroke crippled her up a little, but it didn't hurt her mind a bit. Helped her focus. Just made her hate us that much more. You remember why she hit you?"

  "Because I was in striking distance."

  "No. That was the other times. This time, it was because you broke her little ceramic rooster."

  "I didn't break her ceramic rooster."

  Joshua laughed, lit another cigarette, sucked in the burning tobacco as if it were a hit of eternal life. "Hey, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me. So I reckon it was either you or somebody who looked a lot like you."

  "You bastard."

  "When the eagle head of that cane knocked against your bone, I heard it clear across the house. Figured it served you right. Still, that wasn't no excuse to mess with her cane like that."

  "You're the one who snuck into their room and stole it."

  "As a favor. You're my brother."

  Jacob had a little pocket knife, a Case with two blades that their father had given him for a Christmas present. When Joshua brought him the cane that night, Jacob slid it under his blankets and kept it there until he heard Joshua snoring across the room. Jacob had intended to mar the cane in some way, maybe carve his initials or try to raise a few splinters to catch his mother's skin. But he'd found a soft vein in the wood near the bottom and he worked the knife deep into it, gouging until the cane had a little flexibility. Jacob thought maybe the cane would crack as Momma swung it at him and missed. He never dreamed it would give way while she was descending from the top of the stairs.

  An accident, they had said. Warren Wells was the one who found her, sprawled and twisted at the bottom of the stairs, one shattered leg poking through a broken baluster. Dad didn't scream or moan or even shed a tear. He didn't bother calling 9-1-1. With the calmness of an undertaker, he had called the sheriff's department and then the ambulance service, telling them not to hurry. He seemed more upset over the broken baluster than over his wife's death.

  She was insured for two million, after all.

  "I didn't mean for her to get hurt," Jacob said.

  "That's a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?"

  "Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you're the only one I ever wanted to kill."

  Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn's tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.

  "When's the last time you visited her grave?" Joshua said.

  Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, wher
e a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn't damage real estate values.

  "Why would I visit Mom's grave?"

  "Ain't her I was talking about."

  "Mattie doesn't have a grave."

  "The other one. Christine."

  "That burial was for Renee. She was still Catholic then."

  "So you think the dead sleep better in tiny pieces, scattered on the wind?"

  "Except for those like you who go to hell."

  "Mattie could have been buried here," Joshua said, nodding toward the family plot that held three generations of the Wells dead. "You know kin is always welcome under home ground."

  Something thumped outside the room, a sound eerily similar to the one Mother had made while tumbling to her death down the stairs. Jacob tried to stand, then gave up.

  "We have a guest," Joshua said, showing teeth that were brown from tobacco.

  "Renee?"

  "No, she's Thursday, remember."

  "Not..."

  "Heh. I'm sure you two will have a lot to talk about. It ain't been that long, has it?" Joshua called out of the room. "Honey, we're in here."

  Jacob lay back on the bed again, his head swimming, his pulse sluicing through the veins of his temples like liquid barbed wire. He wondered how quickly a physical addiction to alcohol could cause a case of delirium tremens. Footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway. He closed his eyes against the dawn.

  "Hello, stranger," she said.

  He didn't have to look to picture her. Her face was dark, the tan color of a worn football, eyes as black as midnight crows. She was several inches shorter than Joshua but she'd be standing straight, her breasts small and firm beneath the men's shirt she always wore. Her hands would have their first wrinkles now, the fingernails chipped. Her hair was thick and dark and flowed down her back to her waist. Drinking would have been hard on the skin around her eyes, and he wondered if she had let her hygiene deteriorate to match the environment in which she lived. But she had made her bed, tangled its blankets, stained its sheets, and now she could lie in it and rot for all Jacob cared.

  "He's in a mood," Joshua said.

  "Poor chiquito," she said. "He always was the sensitive type."

  Her voice hadn't changed over the years. It was still that same husky silk that even a telephone line couldn't diminish, the clipped accent not much influenced by her exposure to eastern Tennessee. He could even smell her now, a woodsy, animal odor, a wisp of sweat, a perfume that blended patchouli and cinnamon. Beneath that lay the faintest scent of her vagina, as if she and Jacob had made love in the bed across the room from him as he slept.

  Or maybe that was just his imagination. She would never do such a thing. Nothing to tease him or hurt him. Or remind him that he would never be Joshua, no matter how much he tried.

  "Come on, look at me," she said, and all that old bravado was back, her cruel and tantalizing indifference. He wished he could run to her, throw his arms around her, clamp his hands around her throat, kiss her and slap her and bite her lip.

  But in the end, all he could do was obey her. Just like always.

  "Carlita," he said.

  Her eyes were hard and flat, dry obsidian marbles. That was all he allowed himself to absorb at first glance. It was drink to a drunk, heroin to a junkie, d-Con to a starving rat.

  "Your face is red," she said. "Are you blushing?"

  "Jake got a little too close to the campfire while he was roasting his weenie," Joshua said.

  "Oh, that thing. I didn't know you still had one," she said to Jacob.

  Life had marked her, the plows of time and hardship dragging furrows into her face. But her lips were as robust as October persimmons, though the corner of her mouth twisted in disdain. She had probably been born with that mannerism, hatched in the dirty hut of an illegal immigrant's shack in Piney Flats, where the Christmas tree farms leached their insecticides into the slow-moving creeks. On land that Warren Wells had owned and lorded over.

  He couldn't look away from her eyes. They were as deep and dark as that grotto into which he had descended while hospitalized. They held the promise of cool suffocation, a slow and pitiless drowning. Though her skin had changed, losing some of that caramel luster, her eyes were untouched by the years that had passed since he had last seen her. Those eyes were as ancient as Mayan idols.

  "How is the wife and kids?" she asked.

  Jacob looked at Joshua, who smiled as if he had swallowed a greasy lizard. "You told her, didn't you?" Jacob managed.

  Joshua shrugged and snuffed his cigarette against the wall. "Family secrets."

  Jacob's head throbbed, the sun now high and bright and piercing him as if its needles were sewing his skin to his flesh. "I need a drink."

  "Drinking is a want, not a need," Joshua said.

  Carlita lifted her bottle of beer and drank. The bottle was beaded with moist drops of water, further arousing Jacob's thirst. She twisted her mouth again and pressed the Corona Light to her forehead, the motion causing her unbridled breasts to sway beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her denim jeans were tight around the curves of her thighs. She hadn't borne any children. She had moved too fast to be pinned down, had evaded all sperm that swam upstream against her unwelcoming currents.

  Jacob closed his eyes again and turned his face against the pillow. His back was sore.

  "Sorry to hear about your kids," she said. "That's mal mucho."

  "Joshua," Jacob said, eyes clenched shut. He actually whimpered. "Make her stop."

  Carlita came closer. Her beer breath wafted on his face. She whispered, "Told you it would never work. You cannot run away from who you are."

  "Joshua," Jacob repeated, his voice cracking like a teenager's. "I'll give you anything. Just let me go."

  Carlita's lips brushed against his cheek. He fought a slithering snake of vomit that wended up his esophagus. Despite his revulsion, a rush of warm blood surged through his groin.

  "You didn't need them, Cacatua," she whispered. "Just me. Just me."

  Jacob screamed, or maybe something inside him tore open and the sound that filled his ears was the wrenching of flesh from bone.

  When he opened his eyes, he couldn't tell if seconds or minutes had passed. Drops of cool sweat clung to him like tiny leeches. Carlita and Joshua were sitting on the bed across the room, holding hands. They shared a kiss, no tongue, like kids with braces who were trying something new.

  "I'll give you anything," Jacob said. "Just make it go away."

  "Anything?" Joshua said.

  "Yes."

  "Sounds like what we wanted, don't it, babe?" Joshua said to Carlita.

  "He filthy rich, a gringo pig," Carlita said. "Right now he just plain filthy."

  "She's right, brother, you're really starting to stink up the joint. If dear old Momma was here, she'd rap a cane across your knuckles and give you a bath."

  "Renee will bring the money," Jacob said.

  "I know."

  "Can I go now?"

  "Sure, big brother. You're a guest here. You're free to leave any time you want."

  Jacob lifted his hands and rubbed his wrists together where the ropes had chafed and cut through his skin. "Untie me, then."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Renee knelt on the cool grass. The morning clouds overhead were irregular, a jagged wash of gray rubbing against the lard-like lumps of white cumulus. She couldn't arrange the clouds, nor tidy the twisted trees that lined the edge of Heavenly Meadows. The shrubs along the low stone fence hadn't been trimmed since autumn and bristled with ungainly new growth. A chipped mausoleum stood at the top of the rise, its columns and facade done in a Roman style as if polytheism were acceptable as long as the tenants paid the
ir rent. The world was irregular and obscene, the cracks in the mausoleum much too large for her to repair. Even the grave markers were arrayed in uneven rows, the older ones on the top of the hill worn and leaning, some bearing small, tattered American flags. She picked the stray bits of uneven grass from Christine's grave.

  "She loves me, she loves me not," Renee heard herself saying, and the smell of plucked grass sent her to a fantasy playground where Mattie and Christine ran together, hand in hand. But the image made no sense, even for a daydream, because Christine had never even crawled, let alone walked.

  "She loves me," Renee said, then changed to "Hail Mary, full of grace." Instead of rosary beads, she clutched the dirty pink rattle she'd found in the forest behind their burned-down house. Several priests had warned her in sermons that all the great and wondrous gifts of God could be stripped away in the blink of an eye, but that even the deepest sorrow could be tempered through abiding faith. She'd always thought those sermons had been addressed to other people, those whose sinful and cluttered lives invited disaster. Bad things didn't happen to good people in a just world guided by a merciful God.

  She was praying over Christine's body because Mattie had no fixed location, no single point at which to hurl grief. Jacob's belief in a unifying, universal energy seemed terribly large and empty to her. Such an afterlife was the spiritual equivalent of ashes tossed onto the cosmic winds. She didn't want Mattie spending eternity in such a place. That's why she'd pressed Jacob to allow the children to be christened and baptized as Catholics. For all the good it did.

  Renee finished her run through the cycle of sorrowful mysteries and stood. The grass had stained the knees of her pants. She would have to throw them away. Her apartment didn't have a washer and dryer, and she hated the dank, dim laundry room beside the property management office. She wasn't sure when she'd be returning to the apartment, anyway.

  The money was in her jacket pocket in a crumpled paper sack, like something out of a crime movie. Twenty-seven one hundred dollar bills. All that was left. The profit of Christine's death.