Man Down

by Roger Smith

  “Tanya’s car’s in the driveway.”

  “She went with friends.”

  “I shouldn’t have come here, John. Just fetch my phone.”

  “Please Grace.”

  She hesitated.

  “Okay, just for a minute,” Grace said as she stepped toward him.

  And Turner, seeing her wide blue eyes, was back in all those motel rooms, feeling for a vivid moment the wash of her warm breath on his face as she’d lean in to kiss him, hearing the throttled moans when she’d climax and whisper forbidden words of love, reached out and shoved her away, shouting, “Run, Grace. For fuck’s sake, run!” slamming the door on her.

  He took a blow to the head and fell, dazed, as Bone wrenched the door open and flew into the night, chasing Grace down like a predator taking its kill, slamming her to the ground and punching her in the gut.

  Bone grabbed her by her feet, her rubber flip flops left lying in the gravel, and dragged her into the house, Grace moaning as the step by the door struck her head, knocking her out cold.

  Part Five

  Every guilty person is his own hangman.

  ― Seneca

  1

  “Grace? Grace, can you hear me?”

  A man’s voice coming in soft and muffled, like an old-time radio show reaching her from a faraway childhood room.

  “Grace?”

  A pinprick of light pierced the blackness, a flickering beacon on a distant shore and she saw the blurred outline of John Turner looming over her, clicking his fingers in front of her face like a carny hypnotist, blinking as wildly if he were experiencing an epileptic episode.

  Alert now, Grace opened her eyes wide on a sight so hellish that she convinced herself that she’d never left her apartment and was asleep in her lonely bed, caught up in about the worst goddam nightmare she’d ever known.

  Now, Grace was no dreamer—at least not while sleeping.

  No, she seemed way better at cluttering her dumb bottle blonde head with fantasies during her waking hours, daydreams about love and happiness and all that sad bullshit.

  The best she could do when it came to the nocturnal variety was to snatch at a blurred fragment while surfacing in the morning, a fragment that always seemed to evaporate like breath on a mirror.

  So this, for her, was a nightmare of astonishing vividness.

  She dreamed she lay flung up against the lifeless form of a thickset, bald man whose throat had been cut so deep and wide she could see bone in the gaping wound. She smelled the coppery odor of his blood (blood that was thrown out from his body like a cape, dried to a shellac tackiness, sticky to her hands, arms and the side of her face resting on the wooden floor) and the stench of his loosened bowel was thick in her nostrils.

  Grace closed her eyes again and decided she was having one of those flying dreams she’d read about but never experienced, for her body was lifted and spun and propelled at speed.

  When she hit the floor again (a tiled floor now) her eyes were jolted open and she knew this was no dream.

  A massive man kneeled over her, his rancid breath seething in her ear, the choking stench of his unclean flesh rising through a cattle-dip deodorant. His eyes, darting little shadowy fish swimming in an ocean of wrinkles, flickered over her face and body, leaving her feeling violated and unclean.

  A jolt of terror took her low in her innards and her bladder released a few drops of piss into her panties—lacy little sin-black underthings purpose-bought for her trysts with John. Raw panic seized her and she tried to lift herself but the terrifying man pinned her to the floor with a hand as wide as a soup plate.

  Grace tried to frame a question but her tongue lay heavy and inert in her mouth.

  She moved her head and saw John standing in the kitchen with his hands dangling at his sides, watching her.

  Tanya, her sinewy arms crossed, her mouth a thin gash, leaned against the kitchen island, looking on. Despite her bloody shirt, the Band-Aid on her cheek and the makeshift splint binding her left hand, her demeanor was that of a housewife about to watch an appliance demonstration.

  Another man, blond, smaller than the creature who straddled her like a reeking elephant seal (though still big and in his own way more intimidating because something akin to malevolent intelligence animated his watery blue eyes) entered Grace’s field of vision.

  “Tard, I’ll mind the whore. Why don’t you bring the child to join our party?”

  Wheezing, grunting, clearing his throat with a phlegmy rattle, the monster gained his feet in a series of hoists and jerks and lurched off toward the closed door of the pantry, dragging behind him a leg that was shorter and skinnier than its mate.

  Seizing the pantry door—a solid slab of fissured, distressed ironwood—he hoisted it from its track as easily as if it were papier-mâché. Tossing the door aside, allowing it to shatter the row of cobalt blue glass bottles that decorated the counter before it thudded to the floor, the man reached down into the darkness of the pantry and emerged with Lucy Turner, the child kicking and crying, looking as small as a tot in his grip.

  He helicoptered the girl over to where Grace lay and set her down, the child squinting at the bright light, her cheeks patterned with tears.

  The sight of the terrified girl spurred Grace to her feet, filled with the desperate, mindless urge to grab Lucy and flee.

  With blinding speed the blond man swung a leg as solid as a steel girder, catching Grace in her midriff, sending her smashing against the drawers, a block of kitchen knives clattering to the floor around her.

  Grace, winded, grabbed for one of the knives, her fingers touching the bone handle when the man’s work boot caught her in the mouth, whiplashing her head backward.

  For a moment she was on the merry-go-round in the park her mother used to take her and Nancy to when they were kids, her twin’s head thrown back, hair fanning out, mouth wide open, face infused with rapture, and the awful symmetry of their fates had Grace panting and blinking, spitting blood and something solid onto the floor of the Turner’s kitchen.

  When she looked down she saw her left incisor lying in the red pool that patterned the white Formica tile.

  The blond man squatted in front of her and grabbed her face in his thick hand.

  “Aw, whyn’t you put that under your pillow for the tooth fairy you adulterous little harlot?” he said, slapping her hard enough to get her sprawled on her back.

  Looking up through a pain-filled vortex as he stood, Grace wormed into the fetal position, bracing herself for another kick.

  2

  When Turner took a faltering step toward Lukas Bone, who applied his steel capped workboots to Grace’s head and torso with precision, purpose and undisguised glee, punctuating each kick with a “whore” or a “slut”, the giggling Tard, without moving his eyes from his husband’s brutal industry, sent out a hand and shoved Turner backward.

  Turner’s hip struck the granite top of the kitchen island and he slid to the floor near his bloody, stinking wife who stood watching the assault with the avid attention of a cockfight addict.

  Turner closed his eyes and thought about Tanya’s parents and he thought about Grace’s sister. And, thinking about what he’d done back in South Africa, he looked for the lines of intersection and had tried to make some sense of it all but he couldn’t.

  Just couldn’t.

  Turner opened his eyes and looked away from Bone and Grace toward Bekker’s body, his eyes seeking out the invisible gun.

  A scream, very close to his ear, snapped him from his trance as Lucy yelled and flailed at Lukas Bone, shouting, “Stop! Leave Grace! Leave her!”

  Turner grabbed his daughter and clamped a hand over her mouth.

  “Lucy,” he said into her hair, his whisper lost in Grace’s cries, Tard’s cackles and Bone’s glottal curses.

  Still the child fought him.

  “Kiddo, I need you to listen.”

  She stopped struggling and looked at him with wide eyes.

  He put
his mouth right up against her ear.

  “Do you see that man lying by the table?”

  He turned her face toward Bekker’s body.

  “Do you see him?”

  She nodded and he relaxed the grip on her mouth.

  “He has a gun in the waist of his jeans. When nobody is watching you I want you to get it. Do you understand?”

  The child nodded again.

  “I want you get that gun and bring it to me.”

  3

  Turner, riding the helter-skelter rush of the second meth pipe (vacuumed up after he’d called the bent cop) backed against the bullet-scarred wall as Bekker delved beneath his shirt like a gunfighter and produced an automatic pistol, leveled it and fired in one fluid motion, Turner raising his hands in a pathetic attempt at defense as he watched—his drug-mediated terror slowing time to treacle—the blue-black instrument of his death escape the rifling of the barrel in a small, sour puff of propellant and spin toward his head, intent on adding his blood and brain matter to the soiled carpet of the death house.

  “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”

  Bekker, compact frame taut as a quivering wire, the hurricane lamp on the floor flinging his giant shadow across the walls and ceiling as he advanced on Turner with his hands spread in a gesture of interrogation.

  Empty hands.

  The pistol still holstered.

  Turner, certain that the meth had blessed him with the unsought gift of precognition, relaxed only slightly as he lowered his arms.

  The cop, breathing bile and brandy and Coke, shook his head.

  “Jesus, you’re a useless fuckin cunt. You know that?” Bekker said, for the first time the guttural rasp of his roots infecting his voice.

  Turner nodded, his slime gummed lips unable to release a sound.

  The Afrikaner ran a hand through his sweaty hair, his normally stylish coif dangling in inky tendrils over his forehead.

  “I’ve got the fuckin money in the car,” Bekker said. “It went a smooth as silk, Englishman. The Lawn Jockey came through. All we had to do was blindfold the girl, release her somewhere in Sandton and drive off into our rosy fuckin futures, free and clear as little tweety birds.”

  Turner said nothing, the air around the cop boiling with his agitation.

  Bekker pointed to where the girl was hidden by the splintered bedroom door.

  “She’ll identify you. And you’ll sing, you cunt.”

  “I won’t. I won’t say a thing about you,” Turner said, the words torn from his throat.

  “You will. You’ll sing about me to save your own ass.”

  “I won’t, I swear,”

  “That’s too much of a risk, Englishman. That’s playing Russian roulette with three fuckin bullets.”

  Bekker’s hand moved, lifted the hem of the shirt that he wore untucked from his pants, and there it was, the gun, the cop cocking it with a glottal, tubercular sound.

  Turner was trying to frame a plea, his raging brain fizzing and spitting like a downed power line as Bekker walked toward him.

  Then the cop passed Turner by, crossing to the bedroom, pulling his mask over his face.

  He stood a moment at the door before he toed it open and stepped inside, the dusty light from the lamp dribbling into the room, finding the girl who sat on the mattress staring up at Bekker.

  4

  Grace, her face hidden beneath a curtain of hair dark with sweat and blood, lay so still on the floor of the kitchen that Turner wondered if she were dead, and decided that it would be a blessing if she were.

  But she moved, sobbing, and sat, staring up at him through eyes already swelling from the kicks Bone had landed.

  Her nose was broken and her mouth leaked blood.

  Her torn, bloody shirt gaped to the waist, revealing a breast sagging free of her black lace brassiere.

  Turner, wanting to take her in his arms and tell her some soothing lie, was arrested in his steps when Lukas Bone lifted the power saw from the kitchen counter and spun it for a short, terrible burst.

  “I think it’s time for a little more home improvement,” he said, looking down at Grace as he revved the DeWalt again.

  “Let me do the fat cow,” Tanya said, stepping forward.

  Bone shook his head.

  “No. I have a better idea.” He grinned at Turner like a jack-o’-lantern. “We’ll let him do it.”

  Turner held up his hands and shook his head and said, “No. No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain of that?” Bone said.

  “Yes.”

  Bone turned to Tard, adopting the clubby tone of a late night TV host addressing his straight man.

  “You hear that, Tard?”

  “I hear it, Lukas.”

  “Daddy is refusing my offer.”

  “Right ungrateful.”

  “That’s the word. Ungrateful. But, Tard, I will not be refused.”

  “Nor should you be, Lukas. Nor should you be.”

  “Tard, walk the darlin child this way.”

  “We’re walkin, Lukas. We are walkin.”

  The brute seized Lucy and lumbered toward where Bone stood spinning the saw again.

  “Wait,” Turner said, his voice lost in the howl of the tool. “Wait!”

  Bone ignored him and took hold of Lucy’s arm and forced it down on the counter, her shirt riding up revealing her skinny limb.

  When Turner leaped forward he met the stinking wall of flesh that was Tard.

  “You done had your chance,” Tard said.

  Turner tried to fight himself free but Tard tittered and lifted him from the floor, smothering him to his body.

  Bone cranked the saw and Turner watched the blade spin and screech, its jagged shadow falling across Lucy’s arm, his child staring up at him with eyes that leaked terror.

  “Wait!” he shouted again, his breath squeezed from his lungs by the rancid giant.

  Again Bone ignored him and the blade tugged at the flesh of Lucy’s forearm, opening the skin, blood flowing down toward her wrist.

  The child’s scream pierced the whine of the blade.

  Turner sucked air into his bursting lungs and yelled, “Stop! I’ll do it!”

  Bone laughed and stilled the saw.

  He freed Lucy and the child stood holding her bleeding arm, sobbing, blood from the gash dripping to the floor.

  Tard released Turner and lowered himself to the floor, grunting and wheezing, until he squatted beside Grace who stared up at Turner through eyes seeing something beyond terror.

  “You done changed your mind?” Bone asked.

  “Yes,” Turner said. He couldn’t look at Grace.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Then kindly bring me the whore’s head,” Bone said, holding the saw out to Turner.

  Turner took the saw.

  Grace closed her eyes.

  As Tanya focused on the screen of her iPhone (the idea to shoot this had come from her pathetic husband during their touching little goodbye session, and Lukas Bone had indulged her when she’d asked for the return of her phone and explained why she wanted it) framing the fat bitch’s face and the gray spinning blade that got ever closer to her neck, she remembered an interview she’d seen on TV with a war cameramen who’d said that as long as he viewed the carnage through his viewfinder he was distanced enough to be able to record it.

  But Tanya had no interest in distance or distraction.

  Fuck that.

  She wanted to both record this event—her moment of sweet, bloody revenge (thank you Chris Bekker, you dead little cocksucker, for gifting me with these fabulous lunatics, like evil genies escaped a rubbing lamp to do my darkest bidding)—and participate in it on a visceral level.

  Tanya framed up the shot of the whore’s head then panned across to Johnny, his face pale and haunted as he wielded the saw, moving in toward the milk cow.

  Turner had learned
a dangerous trick that long-ago dawn when he’d stood beside the hole that ate his family: he’d watched himself from afar, locating himself as a character in the drama he was observing.

  It was this facility that had led him to believe he was a writer, to believe that applying this gift of detachment would allow him to create memorable fiction.

  But he’d been a bad writer and a worse man and he hadn’t written a word of prose in more than a decade because his life had proved to be more interesting than his work and, of course, his life was the one thing he could never write about.

  After he’d gone clean and sober he’d found himself incapable of reading his unfinished novel, an ugly misshapen thing, a funhouse mirror reflecting the Turner he’d once been and—or so he’d managed to convince himself after reconstructing his life, mosaic-like, moment by moment—no longer was.

  Before he’d left South Africa he’d taken his laptop to the bottom of the garden of his house in Johannesburg, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight, watching it burn, the screen cracking and exploding, the case buckling and melting, exposing its inner workings and then becoming just a small pile of clotted plastic and a few charred wires.

  But it was this writer’s trick that a desperate Turner reached for now in his Arizona kitchen, standing over the only woman he had ever loved, her eyes filled with terror as he took the power saw from Lukas Bone.

  He made himself a character.

  He wrapped himself in the gauze of fiction.

  Turner watched himself hovering above Grace, her pallid neck exposed by Tard, the freak’s one hand seizing knots of her hair, the other clamping her chest, his immensity crushing all the strength from her legs and arms.

  Turner squeezed the trigger gently and felt the strength of the saw, grabbing it tightly before it flew from his grip.

  He released the trigger.