“It so happened that one night, the boys arranged to meet some young women at the lake. You’ll notice I did not say ‘ladies.’ This would have been your grandfather Abe, my Frank, Shadroe, and Don.”
“Not Patrick?” asked Anne.
“This was before Achnacarry, dear, so the boys hadn’t yet met Patrick or Henry. No, it was just the four of them. That night, they snuck out of camp and went down to the lake. It was about three or four miles away, and they didn’t have a car, but being strong young soldiers, a four-mile run wasn’t going to get in the way of the evening that they had planned.
“So, they went to the lake, and sure enough, the girls were there waiting for them. They walked around the lake a bit, away from the road for more privacy. The girls had brought blankets and wine, you can imagine what for, and pretty soon each couple was moving off into the trees.
“Well, the way Frank tells it, he and his girl had decided to have their wine and watch the moon, unlike everyone else, and while they were engaged in this innocent pastime, they heard a commotion from the trees. He didn’t think much of it, until he heard Abe start screaming and yelling in terror.
“Just then, Abe’s date ran past them with her clothes clutched to her chest, making straight for the girls’ car. Frank ran back into the trees and found Abe, stark naked, up in a tree. Down below were two black bears, angry as can be.” Georgia laughed and fanned herself with one hand.
Anne laughed out loud with her. “That must have been some sight.”
“Oh, that’s not the half of it. The boys started yelling about bears, and the girls all jumped in their car and took off. Abe couldn’t get down because the bears wouldn’t leave, and the others were too scared to get close to them. So Frank, Shadroe, and Don had to run all the way back to camp to get help. Shadroe and Don were immediately confined to the barracks, but the MP’s took Frank with them back to the lake to show them where to find Abe.
“When they got back, they found Abe, still up in the tree, still naked. They scared the bears off with their guns and got him down. On the way back to the base, Abe tried to explain how he came to be treed by bears while naked, and the senior MP stopped him. He said, ‘Son, I don’t know what you had planned for tonight, but maybe next time you should bring the bears flowers first.’“
Laughter rang out in the kitchen, mine included. God, I missed those boys. “You know that Frank sent … my grandfather a birthday card every year, and every year it had a bear on it.”
She smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes, I used to help him pick them out.”
“He kept them all, every one.” I realized as I said it that those cards were all gone now, lost in the fire. It hurt. “He didn’t hang on to much else, just letters from his friends, and some souvenirs from the war. Did Frank keep any of that stuff?”
“I gave most of it away, after he died. I kept a few little things to remember him by. Are you looking for something in particular? I have his old medals, and the letters he sent to me from overseas, but that’s all. I’m going to get some more coffee, would you like some?” She got up from her seat and went to the counter with her cup.
“No thank you, I’m fine. We’re looking for something he brought back from Europe, a piece of metal.”
She put her cup down on the counter with a sharp click, but she didn’t turn around to face us. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall anything like that. I wish I could help you. I’m afraid I’m not as young as I used to be, so I’m feeling a little tired. I think I’m going to lie down for a while. Thank you for stopping by.”
Anne and I looked at each other across the table. “Are you sure, Georgia? It’s a very distinctive piece of metal. It’s like a long curve with two points on the back.”
She spun around and glared at us. Her eyes were wild in her face and her lips were drawn back. “I said I was sure, now get out!” The woman that let us into her home and offered us coffee was gone. I didn’t know what had replaced her.
I stood up and showed her my palms. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. But it’s very important that I get that piece. You could be in danger.”
She snatched a butcher knife out of the sink and screamed, “No! It’s mine! You’re not taking it away from me!”
She slashed at me wildly with the knife. Knives scare me. We don’t really have instincts for guns, but we know knives down to our bones. It’s a fear that never needs to circulate through the logical mind to make us cringe. The butcher knife’s blade was heavy and gray and sharp as hell.
I jumped back, knocking the little table over. The coffee cups smashed on the floor, sending pieces of white china and black coffee everywhere.
“Frank wanted to take it away from me. To give it to you. I didn’t let that happen, did I? It tells me things when I sleep. Things you could never understand.” She lunged again, much faster than I had expected, and opened up my left palm.
“Georgia, stop! Let’s talk about this, okay?”
She wasn’t listening. “It’s all I have, and it just wants you! I know who you are! It shows me your face every night. Every night! Your secret face. You won’t take it! You won’t!”
She began slashing and screaming, spittle flying from her thin lips. I caught her knife hand in my right, and she sank her teeth into my forearm. She shook her head savagely, but I didn’t dare let go. If I let go of her knife hand at this distance, she’d gut me. I stumbled back from the sheer ferocity of her attack.
She let go of my arm and lunged at my face, mouth open and screaming, her teeth painted red with my blood. Then there was a meaty thud, and her head jerked away from me, and she went limp. Anne was standing behind her with a heavy wooden cutting board in one hand. There was blood on one corner.
I lowered her to the floor and took the knife away. I was breathing hard, and my hand and arm hurt like a son of a bitch.
Anne dropped the board on the counter and knelt down by the tiny form sprawled out on the kitchen floor. When she looked up at me, she didn’t have to say anything. Georgia Eaton was dead.
16
“I killed her.” Anne’s hands flew to her mouth.
“She was trying to let my guts out with that knife. You were defending me.”
“I just wanted to stop her. I just wanted to hit her on the head and knock her out, I didn’t want to kill her.”
I pulled her close, but she was rigid in my arms. Her eyes were wide over the tops of her fingers covering her mouth and nose. I blame TV and movies for this kind of shit. According to them, everyone has a nice ‘off’ button in the back of their heads, safe as pie. Konk ‘em on the noggin, and they wake up a little while later with nothing worse than a headache.
The reality is that people are damn hard to render unconscious, and even if you manage it, it’s going to be for seconds unless you do some major damage. The jaw, the temple, sudden blows to the side of the neck, those things can work if you know what you’re doing, or if you get lucky.
But hitting people in the back of the skull with a blunt object? That’s a different story. That kind of thing is in the same class as a stabbing or a shooting. I would imagine that an elderly woman, even one as spry as Mrs. Eaton, would have a skull like an eggshell.
“Anne. Look at me.” I looked into her eyes and watched them focus on me. “She was insane. There was no way to stop her from killing the both of us outside of using a hell of a lot of force. If you hadn’t done it, I would have. She wasn’t going to stop until someone was dead.”
She pulled away from me and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “That sounds like an excuse. I just killed someone. The reason why doesn’t change the fact that I did it. I’m a murderer now. I can never go back to who I was two minutes ago.”
Guilt and regret turned to acid in my stomach. I had known that sooner or later, this journey would diminish and stain her, hurting her in every way that matters. And I knew it was just going to get worse from here.
She needed a minute to pull herself together, so I l
ooked around the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty. The pantry was empty. There was no trash can, and the dishes in the cabinets were dusty from disuse. If it wasn’t for the candles and the smell of baking cookies, I’d swear no one had lived here for years.
I walked over to the oven. It was set to a hundred and fifty degrees, pretty low for baking. I pulled the door open and found a pan with several candle jars on it. The labels on the candle jars said Sugar Cookie. I guess that’s easier than baking cookies all day.
My hand was hurting like a son of a bitch, so I forced myself to open my fist. The congealed blood cracked as my fingers uncurled, revealed a long, deep slice across my palm. It was bad. I could see white tendons glistening down inside the meat. I tore a strip off of the bottom of my shirt, wrapped it a couple of times around my hand and tied it off. I tore off another piece to use as a rag.
By the time I had started wiping our prints off of everything I could think of, Anne had stopped staring into space and started helping me. When we were done, she followed me to the closed door to the rest of the house.
“Why don’t you stay here. I’ll look for the piece.”
“I don’t want to stay in here with … with the body. I’ll help you look.”
The kitchen had two doors, one leading to the living room where we had entered the house, and another one that was closed, situated on the opposite wall from the kitchen sink. I walked over to it, being careful not to leave footprints in the spilled coffee, and put my hand on the knob and listened.
A faint odor came through the door, cutting through the thick, cloying scent of cinnamon and cookies in the kitchen. It smelled like rotting garbage. I didn’t hear anything on the other side, so I turned the knob and pushed the door open. I had to fight not to gag when the smell washed over me. I heard Anne encounter the smell a second later. I hoped she wouldn’t throw up on my back.
The hallway was dark, so I flipped the switch next to the door. To my surprise, it came on. The hallway ran about thirty feet, and then made a left turn out of sight. There were two open doorways, one on either side of the hallway, and on the far wall at the end where the hallway turned, there was a closed door.
The floor was covered with what must have been several years worth of pizza boxes, Chinese food cartons, empty bottles of all kinds, and other unrecognizable garbage. A path through the foot-high mounds meandered down the corridor of filth. Roaches crawled brazenly across fetid hills of old food and rotting cardboard despite the light.
I looked behind me, into the kitchen. Except for the mess we made, it was neat as a pin. Anne followed my gaze. “How could she live like this? She obviously knew it was wrong, or she wouldn’t have hidden it from visitors.”
“I doubt she cared. I think the front of the house was just part of her disguise, like the pink sweater and the cookies.”
We moved into the hallway.
Just because there was a path with less garbage in it didn’t mean it was clean. Slowly congealing fluids from the rotting food on either side had soaked the carpet, leaving it sticky, black, and occasionally crunchy when stepping on an unfortunate cockroach that hadn’t had the strength to pull free.
There were entrances to two bedrooms in the middle of the hallway, one to either side. The doors were open, and the rooms were empty of furniture. In the center of each was another pile of garbage, but the floor near the walls was mostly clear. I would imagine that was because Georgia had needed the room to walk, as she circled the room drawing endlessly on the walls.
The room on the right was full of faces. Two faces to be exact, mine and Piotr’s. The right wall had a five-foot-high drawing of my face, sketched out with a green marker in crude strokes. I wore an expression of furious ecstasy with my mouth stretched wide, as though to I was about to swallow the viewer. The eyes bulged with gleeful anger. It was the face of ravening, devouring insanity.
That portrait reached me. I understood it. Over the years I’ve come close to losing control, just hovering over the abyss and choosing not to let go. Not because it was wrong to cave in the skull of some mouth breather, but because of the consequences. My father used to tell me that a righteous man follows the Lord because he fears his wrath. I never thought that made a good man. It was understanding that driving a screwdriver into somebody’s eye was the wrong thing to do in the first place that made you a good person. I’m not a good person.
I could feel the emotion contorting the face on the wall, and I could understand it, and even be tempted by it a little. Just a little. The release and the freedom of it. I wasn’t looking at a twisted mockery of myself, I was looking at a secret temptation, drawn by someone who knew me better than I want to know myself. I may not be a good man, but I’ll die before I give in, and that’s close enough for me.
The other wall was a portrait on the same scale, drawn with a black marker. The face was turned upward, lips parted slightly and eyes closed, eyebrows arched skyward. It was the face of a supplicant and a martyr. It was the beatific calm of the willing victim.
That expression on that particular face was disorienting. Piotr was a butcher. He was violent, aggressive, and crafty. He bled out hundreds of living people for his charnel pit, suspended shrieking from chains in rows with no regard for age or sex or race. The expression bothered me more when both portraits were taken together. They faced each other across the room on opposite walls. I was ravening madness, lunging at Piotr, who was waiting, ecstatic, to be devoured. It made the hair stand up all over my body.
The wall between them, the one opposite the door, was made up of dozens of smaller portraits, each one a mixture of features from the larger ones. Here, my lunatic eyes over Piotr’s slack mouth. There my gaping maw snaring out of his beatific face. In one my face shared an eye from each of us in the center, with smaller mouths covering the rest of the head. This wall made me the most uncomfortable, implying some kind of interchangeable intimacy between us that was obscene.
Anne stared up at my portrait, meeting its eyes with her own. “Is this a picture of your past, or your future?”
“Neither, I hope.”
“Me, too.” She turned and gestured at the other giant face. “Who’s your victim, here?”
“That’s Piotr, the guy that we were chasing in Warsaw. I’ve only spent maybe ten minutes with the man, but I’ll never forget his face. It was his pit full of blood that Henry pulled me out of.”
“Georgia seems to think he’s the good guy here.”
“She also thought I’d look better with my insides on her kitchen floor. Fuck Georgia.” I stood next to Anne, looking up at Piotr’s face. “You know, I’m the only person in our squad to have ever actually laid eyes on Piotr. We were alone when I spoke to him up in that control room. Everyone else was down on the ground. Even Henry doesn’t know what he looks like, and Frank sure as hell didn’t.”
“Maybe he visited her?”
“And left her alive with the altar piece? I doubt it.”
I stepped back out into the hallway, finding the moldering garbage almost comforting in its forthright existence. Anne followed me to the next room.
It also featured walls covered with drawings, but this time they were crowded so close together that frequently the edges overlapped, creating an impenetrable crosshatch on two of the four walls. The other two walls were more sparsely filled, as if the artist has simply picked a blank spot at random to start drawing every time.
Each picture was fairly small, maybe a foot across, and without borders. The subjects seemed random, and more often than not, innocuous, drawn as though looking through the eyes of the observer. There was a coffee cup on a counter with a hand extending into the picture about to grasp the handle. Next to it was an empty parking lot in front of a boarded-up storefront. A sign in the window proclaimed “OPEN.”
My eyes wandered from wall to wall, skipping from image to image. Most of them were bland and pointless. A hand pulling open a door. A bird. A view out of a car window, looking at field. Some o
f them were weren’t. There was a body, facedown in a bedroom with a dark stain spreading around the head, a dismembered dog on a kitchen table, and horribly, a knife pointed directly back into the center of the picture, two hands wrapped around the handle.
“Abe.” I turned away from the jumble of mesmerizing images and went to Anne, who was kneeling down and staring hard at a picture near the floor. “Look at this.”
It was a picture of a bathroom, looking into a mirror. A woman was leaning forward and putting on makeup. Her face was indistinct, being a small part of a small picture, but the shape of the features were there, if not the details.
“That’s from my dream. I dreamed I was that girl, putting on my makeup, in that bathroom. This is it exactly.” She stood up and turned her back on the sketch. “Is this what I have to look forward to? Being driven more and more insane by my dreams until I’m wallowing in garbage and trying to chop people up in my kitchen?”
“Well, at least you’ll bake a good candle.”
“That’s not helping.”
I hunkered down next to her and took her hand. “I think you and Georgia probably shared a certain sensitivity, but that’s all. Just because you can hear the music doesn’t mean you have to dance.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I helped her to her feet. “Me, too. Nobody likes a stabby roommate.”
The door at the end of the hallway turned out to be a bathroom. At some point the toilet had gotten plugged up, but that hadn’t stopped Georgia from using it. Looking at the sink, it appeared that she had resorted to mashing stuff down the drain towards the end. We pulled the door closed and prayed that we didn’t have to return to search.
Moving around the left bend brought us to the final door in the house, also closed. I put one hand on the knob. “Has to be her bedroom. Ready?” Anne nodded, and I pushed it open. The door swung open without resistance, indicating a lack of garbage on the floor, or at least along the door’s path. Beyond the entrance was only blackness. The odor coming from the room was that of stale, sour sweat.
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