And I heard Jack give a sharp groan. I was shocked to see him climb off the bottom of the banister railing, coughing. It did not take long to realize what he’d done. Theodore Everton had ridden that banister tail-first a hundred times in his rambunctious days.
Jack was within five feet of the front door. I reached out automatically to lock it, but was reminded in my burgeoning horror that the replica was not mine to control. It was Jack’s. The man hobbled forward with unwavering resolve. He was going to escape. I fired more nails from the floorboards, none of their erratic numbers landing a hit.
I wanted to cry out as he arrived at the door. I reached for everything I could sense: trim, loose plaster, even ancient wallpaper buried beneath layers and layers of crusted paint. But confusion overtook me just then. Before I attempted to collapse another wall—an action that would have likely killed me—I was shocked into giving pause. Because Jack did not touch the front door. He didn’t even look at it. The concussed fellow just kept on running, like an aimless madman, right past his own certain salvation.
“You’re gone, fucker. You’re so fucking gone.”
And then, just before he was about to enter the den, Jack opened the door to the hall closet and disappeared inside.
Did he think me some ghoulish apparition, a spiritual remnant from the beyond which occupied this house, rather than the house itself? It did not matter. He could not hide from me. Not inside my own walls. I sensed his weight shifting there in the closet. But I could not see him. Even the darkness of the cubby should not have prevented such a thing. Something was blocking me. I realized that among his other minor renovations during my recovery, the fool had done something to block my presence from this closet.
It was an idiotic thought. Why would he have gone to the trouble to blind me from such a tiny room? And no matter its size, how dare he perform such an amputation upon me. As said before, I could feel his 200-pound frame rocking across the newly carpeted subfloor of the room. The carpet was like a wig to me, but the subfloor, that was something to collapse.
I gathered my furious strength and leveled it at the floor beneath Jack’s feet, imagining him as he fell to his death in the cellar. The square area of plywood started to splinter, cracking audibly as I split the floor joists beneath into toothpicks.
And just as the room and a two foot radius beyond it began to sag downward, Jack burst from the depths of the shielded closet with grated teeth. He was wincing, no doubt, from the pain in his battered body. The sight of him in such disrepair did my spirits a great deal of good. But pain was not the only element in that rictus. With my attention diverted, the floor ceased its immediate collapse and so did the sounds of cracking wood. And that was when I heard Jack.
It was something hoarse, but rooted deep in his belly. He was laughing. The sound of it perplexed me, but I was distracted by the shining metal object in his hands.
“I thought things might go down like this. I had hope for you. I really did. But now you’re fucked.”
The next thing I saw was searing white pain, accompanied by the chorus of explosion. Jack stepped away from the doorway leading to the den, holding a metallic, ebony-colored cane at his side. Dust hung in the air behind him, as well as a six inch hole in my plaster. But it wasn’t just surface damage. The wood lathe behind it, and even the plaster on the other side in the adjoining room, had been punched clear through.
It was a gun. He jammed it into the wall next to him and again my mind was seared agonizingly as two more holes were torn through me.
“Had this beauty overnighted to me from a friend in Florida,” Jack said, grinning. “Apparently, they use them to kill alligators down there. Not really my kind of thing, but I think this is more or less the same basic application.”
I found my bearings again, ripped a piece of ornate door trim free. I prepared to hurl it like a javelin but Jack was quicker and pounded his stick against the main post of the banister. With a flash of gunpowder and a lightning crack, wood exploded across the room. It was as if my hand had been blown off by a cannonball. I dropped my weapon—another piece of my body—and retreated to collect myself amid the terrible burn.
“It’s basically a shotgun,” Jack said proudly as the spent shell was ejected to the floor. “Except it’s pressure activated and holds about ten times the ammunition. Cool, right?”
When he blasted another hole through the floor, I could do nothing to retaliate. I was too shocked, too rocked off kilter to even think of it. The foyer floor moaned in protest, sagging further downward as Jack stepped away from it. He turned and approached the den. His fancy black dress shoes, taken from the closet in haste, contrasted absurdly with his boxer shorts and bloodied tee shirt.
“Leave it alone, Jack, my agent says. It’s got too much bad juju. That whitebread motherfucker wouldn’t know juju if it kicked him in the ass, but god damn me if he wasn’t right. Right? I should have listened to him. But nooo, I said. It’s got character. And it’s just far enough outside the city I might actually get some work done. Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? You’re just a wormy apple. Beautiful, but rotten to the core.”
Jack emphasized his point by planting the end of his pole gun into yet another wall, one which had formerly housed Mr. Everton’s favorite painting of dogs on the hunt. That shot hit wiring and sparks flew from the wound like blood from a clipped ventricle.
“I looked at dozens of places like this. But you, you were perfect. Your layout was too goddamn perfect for a gallery. And now look at me. Look at my house. My place of business. It’s starting to look like Swiss cheese. Shit, so am I, for that matter. So much for the importance of aesthetics, eh?”
With that, Jack limped across the room and stared up at my fireplace. He planted another round in the floor. It took my breath away; a great gust of air was involuntarily expelled from my open windows.
“I did my research on this place. You have to know that by now. And where the other morons failed to put the pieces together, it doesn’t exactly take Sigmund fucking Freud to figure out what the problem is here. The first owners lived in this place peacefully for, what, fifty years? You and me, we would have been perfect for each other. Who better than an open-minded guy like myself to cohabitate with? We could have helped each other. I would have cared for you. But now, you try to kill me in my sleep? Jesus… I thought my ex-girlfriend was bad.”
The next shotgun blast was aimed at the wall next to the fireplace. My body was now in so much agony from my previous, more grievous wounds, that I hardly even noticed it. It is well known that when exposed to extreme distress, humans will go into shock. I believe whatever was currently happening to me at that moment was similar. My newfound well of wrathful power seemed to have dried up completely. Soaring as high as I had only minutes before, I never would have imagined such a thing was possible again. That went to show how little I knew.
It seemed that I had learned quite a lot about myself during these last few weeks. In fact, as my mind drifted away, ushered by that deep black fold of darkness, I thought it quite funny just how much I had learned about myself after my life with the Evertons. For the first time ever, it seemed as though I had lived a longer and more varied life with their memory in mind than I actually had spent living with them. As Jack prattled on furiously, I felt their memory slipping further and further away, like whispers in the wind.
“I tried and tried to be reasonable, to show you that I wasn’t a threat. But now, I see that you and I, we weren’t meant to be stardust. What’s that you say? I can’t hear you.” Jack leaned forward, rapping on the mantle with the tip of his weapon. “Did you say you’re sorry? That you’ve had enough? That you’ve finally realized that there is no way you can win this fight?”
Jack stood there resolutely, staring at the empty stone fireplace. I watched him with blurring vision, felt his weight shift from heel to heel as he constantly redistributed his balance.
“Well, fuck you,” Jack said. Spit fired from his lips as he seethed th
e phrase and it misted down to the dusty floor. “This just became a personal matter, you goddamn coward.”
Jack reached his free hand behind him and tugged at the waistband of his boxer shorts. Something had been stowed there, likely taken from the closet. When he held it up to the moonlight piercing the window, I saw what it was. I had not seen the thing in many years, but I recognized it immediately. Its appearance grounded my straying, battered senses, and brought my vision back to crystal clarity.
“Answer me this, asshole. Who the hell just leaves a family photo album behind? I mean, furniture is one thing, I can see that. But a photo album? Jesus Christ. Those Everton kids must have really hated you to have sold this place so quick that they just up and left family heirlooms behind.”
I shuddered, watching Jack stand there with my entire lifetime hefted in his hands. How had he found the photo book? It had certainly not been within my walls; I would have sensed that.
“In case you’re wondering, this was among a box of goodies removed by the bank before good old Theodore and June sold this place fifty years ago. The thing is, despite the bank’s attempts to contact them, neither of them ever responded. So the box just sat there in a safety deposit box for the last fifty years. And since you’re such a curmudgeonly old prick, nobody ever lived here long enough to lay claim to it. Which is too bad. There’s some seriously cool antique junk in there that’s going to look great in my new office.”
I watched that book gripped in his hand, longing for it to be open upon my floor, pages turning to reveal long forgotten flipbook scenes of happiness past. And there was some part of me in there, I knew. I could feel it. In fact, the album tugged slightly forward and almost fell out of Jack’s fingertips.
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Jack said. And he dropped the photo album to the floor. For a moment I could have kissed him, could have thanked him endlessly for his gesture of peace. But what happened next was done before I had a chance to contemplate stopping it.
Jack buried the tip of his shotgun into the leather face of the photo album. And the book exploded.
“Starting first thing tomorrow morning, I’m scheduling demolition of this shit-heap. And I’ll take it by your utter lack of a response that there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop me.”
It started as a numbness. As I watched the six inch hole in the album, still smoldering at the edges, I could not believe what he had done. I would have acquiesced to his every request, would have done any manner of vile, degrading haunt he had asked of me for the rest of eternity, had he only allowed me to keep that album. I would have done anything. And to see him so callously obliterate the only physical remains of my memory, without even letting me see them once, that was pure evil. This man, this so called successful artist, had just played executioner to my family. And his axe was pointed at me next.
Jack turned on his heel, began whistling, and did the best he could to strut out of the den. My family lay dead behind him in a heap and he did nothing more to acknowledge them than whistle Dixie.
I shuddered. I literally shuddered. The admixture of emotions within me was too much to contain, let alone describe accurately. The anger, the resentment, the fear of loneliness, and the pent up grief of familial loss: it all coalesced, boiling inside of me until it bubbled up and burst out of my veins like volcanic lava.
My walls shuddered, without my conscious will. I was beyond thinking, beyond even the petty need for vengeance. My body had become an outlet of pure, unchecked damnation. In the front foyer, the weakened floor was the first to go. It fell like a sinkhole into the belly of hell, swallowing most of the room with it.
Jack stumbled onto his backside, groped for an ottoman to regain his footing. He was screaming something unintelligible. He rammed his gun into my floor a half dozen times, but I no longer felt the sting of his blows.
My very bones snapped inside of me, as if under the weight of a mountainous wood press. The upstairs hall was the next to go. The rafters and roof joists snapped dirtward into toothpicks, bringing a blanket of shingles down across the whole eastern half of the collapsing house. Windows shattered. Chandeliers and rail spindles were crushed like tinfoil.
Plaster dust hung in the air, thick as a forest fire. Above it all I could hear Jack coughing, even felt him try to harm me once again with his little stick. He was a dead man. He just didn’t know it yet. And even though I knew it, there was no stopping the inevitable. I had gone too far to turn back, and I would not have wanted to even if I could. Porches and peaks tumbled, my very foundation crumbled like concrete sandwich crackers in the way of the earthquake. And through it all, for the first time ever, I felt nothing. As my body turned to rubble, shaken to death by my own hand, the pain left me. I no longer felt the sting of my torn body, of my maladies both physical and mental.
That was how I knew the end was near. When I saw Jack lying dead, his skull dashed in by a chunk of my decrepit mantle, I felt nothing. Neither remorse nor regret, and not a hint of fulfillment either. But still I was untroubled, because the darkness had come for me. Hazy pitch surrounded my every sense, and I welcomed it openly. My family was waiting for me on the other side. Of this I was certain.
Interlude: They Call Me Mr. Lucky
There’s no great secret to living the good life.
You always hear about how hard it is to find happiness, how much trouble it is to make it in the world. I’m talking about that upward struggle to break free of all your shortcomings, make the most of opportunities, and achieve all the dreams you’ve ever dreamed. People make it sound so hard, so damn difficult. But it just isn’t so. At least it doesn’t have to be. That capitalist struggle, that daily grind, it’s all a hoax. The greater the amount of fight a man exerts does not equate to a greater amount of happiness in the long run.
You see, happiness comes from inside you. It’s a fact that I learned almost a decade ago, shortly after high school graduation. While all of my buddies were busy planning flights and moving trucks for college, I realized that not only did I not fit into the mold of the upward struggle, but that I had no real interest in joining it in the first place.
And here I sit, nearly a decade later, happy as a clam in my living room. Today is not unlike yesterday and tomorrow will hold no great surprises. But contrary to what a struggler might think, that is a good thing. Because, you see, there is no stress in my world. Especially at this moment. I am at want of nothing. There is only bliss.
For example, I am currently watching the beauty of nature as it sits on my windowsill. There is a chocolate colored sparrow hunched into the corner on the opposite side of the glass, huddled against the wind. I admire his resilience, study the beautiful structure of his little bird body. He and his evolutionary brothers and sisters have been braving the winter winds for what, millions of years? And they too live simple lives. Never has a sparrow struggled to meet a mortgage. Nor has one ever gone to court to settle the custody dispute of its babies. The sparrow squats low in the corner, so low that its legs are no longer visible beneath its feathers, which seem to be molting. Its head is tucked into its shivering body. The wind gusts so hard I can hear it against the apartment building.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
“I saw on TV that they do that when they’re dying,” replies Lindy.
Lindy sits across the room facing me from her perch on a flattened bean bag, in a moth-bitten tank top and pajama bottoms. Lindy isn’t a struggler, either. Not anymore.
“We don’t have a TV,” I counter.
At this she giggles and pulls herself up. “TV’s overrated, anyway.” She’s heading toward the kitchen, but before she does, she makes a beeline toward me. “I’m gonna go cook us another snack.” She leans in, gives me a quick kiss, and turns toward the door. It brings a smile to my face.
As I said, I am not a man of envy. I have all that I want, all the things that make me happy. Sometimes I wish my parents could see how happy I am, but they’re unwilling
to see it. They worry about me because I don’t have a college education or a steady job. They think I’m unhappy. They’re strugglers.
Beside me, on a foldup TV tray, sits the only photograph I have of my parents. In truth, it’s the only material possession I care about. My folks smile out at me from their brass frame, a reminder of their own youthful happiness. Dad still has some of his hair and it’s combed sideways over his scalp. His mustache is still thick as it was the last time I saw it, if slightly darker. His shirt is pressed and clean, just like it always was when he left for the office every morning, patting me on the head as I crunched a mouthful of cereal at the kitchen table. His pats were heavy. Always heavy. He has a hand on each of our shoulders in the picture. I briefly wonder if Mom remembers his hand being as heavy on hers as it was on mine.
Mom looks so pretty. Her face is thinner in the picture than it ever would be again. And her smile is thin and hopeful. Her hair is long and thick, a sleek cascade of auburn falling down over her shoulders. She has a thin neck, even longer and thinner than mine, and the kind of cheekbones that one would expect to find on the face of a Disney princess. Her eyes look beautiful, wide and dark. I’ve always thought that when I look at the picture, because I remember how much trouble she took to make them look right. She took almost an hour to put her makeup on that morning. She fussed and fussed. And when you look at the sun-faded photo, now over twenty years old, you can’t see a trace of any bruise.
I’m in the photo too, at about age eight, but I don’t notice much exceptional about myself. I see gapped front teeth and a Mickey Mouse tee shirt on a kid that doesn’t really look anything like me now. But that’s okay, because I don’t keep the photo around to look at myself. I keep it to remind me of the happy couple that watch over me now as I sit in my armchair. The people in the picture look happy. That’s how I like to remember them. The glass that holds this snapshot memory in place has a crack spider-webbing its way across one corner, but none of us inside seem to mind.
The Graveyard Shift Page 11