by Cutter Wood
Now she is lying there with her eyes open, but she isn’t moving. He is sitting on the floor a few feet away, though he can’t say how he got there. His chest feels like it’s bound tight with a belt, and he keeps trying to swallow but can’t. He doesn’t need to see if she is breathing. She looks peaceful, and if it weren’t for the droplets of red across her cheek, he could almost believe she was just lost in thought.
He gets up and walks straight to the bedroom, and strips the sheet from the bed. After laying the sheet out beside her body, he puts her feet together and her arms to her sides, and rolls her up just like a burrito. Only when she is wrapped does he look around to see where he can put her. He settles on the laundry room and drags her down the unlit hall. Now he can think, and he goes to the refrigerator and gets another beer.
He has to think of a plan now. He walks back and forth across the apartment, stopping as he passes the window to look out at the courtyard and the street. He needs to stop looking out the window and think of a plan, but he doesn’t. Instead, he stands with the curtain pushed aside and remembers how easy it was, how she didn’t resist at all. He looks over to where she was lying with her feet sticking out in the middle of the floor, and he looks down the hall at the closed door to the laundry room, and out the window. Someone walks by, and he whips the curtain closed. He can still see her face like it had been, not even looking at him, and can still feel the way her whole body just went slack, and he just can’t believe how easy it was. He puts down the beer beside the couch and studies his hands.
There are a dozen beers in the fridge. He’s got to figure a way to paint a picture like he didn’t do what he did, but he has to calm down first. So he opens another beer. He didn’t really do it anyway. He did, but that’s not how it feels. He doesn’t feel like he could have killed her. He walks down the hall and peeks in the laundry room, just to make sure. She’s still lying there in the dark, so he closes the door again, softly, and locks it.
When he pokes his head out into the courtyard, he expects the neighbor to be out walking her little dog, but the street is empty, and only Sabine’s car is in the lot. The apartment door closes, and a moment later, it opens again. Bent over, he steps backward through the doorway, and with a yank to get it over the threshold, the rolled-up sheet emerges after him. He drags her with little steps across the courtyard and out to the car. The trunk is full of her things, so he runs around to the driver’s-side door and moves the seat all the way forward. As he tries to push her into the back seat, he is overcome by a feeling of remove, like somebody else is doing everything, and he is merely watching. He sees his hands shoving at the fabric and hears himself cursing under his breath, but he has no power to stop himself from doing these things. He pushes her into the car up to her waist, but then her shoulder gets jammed against something, so he goes around to the other side and pulls on her from there until he has her half folded on the seat with her face down in one corner and her rear end up in the air. It doesn’t seem right to have her facedown like that, but he thinks that, considering the circumstances, she would understand.
Once she’s in, he stands up and looks around. No one is there. The night looks smudged with darkness. The air is still. A few vacation homes sit across the street half-built, and in the patch of dirt beside them, a group of wood storks raise their heads in unison when the headlights sweep across them. He comes to an abrupt stop at the intersection, then swings slowly onto the main road and heads south. No one is out. The chairs have been stacked up at the café, and the beer signs are all dark at the sports bar. In the homes he passes, there isn’t even the blue flickering glow of a television on the bedroom ceiling, and the lot is empty at the church. Only the streetlamps are on, dropping little pools of dim orange light in a line along the shoulder of the road. When Bill reaches the motel, he turns right. It’s only a few hundred feet until the asphalt dead-ends at the beach, and he pulls off in the shadow of a pine and cuts the lights.
Most of the Halloween decorations have been taken down at the motel, but some polyester cobwebs remain on the azaleas, a plastic skeleton is still leaning up against one wall in the office, and there’s a cleaver with red corn syrup on it by the pool. Only a handful of the rooms are occupied. An anthropologist from Des Moines is dreaming of the 1800s; a husband and wife, both orthodontists, lie in the room next door; and their three children, all in headgear, are in the room after that. There’s a breeder of spaniels in one room, and in another, a married man from Sarasota with a graduate student in gender studies from Tampa. All are asleep when Bill opens the gate and walks across the patio to the storage room. No one wakes when the hinges creak, except the youngest child of the orthodontists. Her pillow is cool with saliva, and her headgear is stuck in the fabric of the pillowcase, and she holds her breath while someone shuffles and mutters in the dark outside her window. But she isn’t little anymore, she reminds herself, monsters aren’t real, and she squeezes her eyes shut.
There are no windows in the storeroom, and Bill can’t see a thing. He runs his hands over the objects on one wall—a push broom, a mirror—until his hand finally settles on a shovel. Feeling his way back to the gate, he heads out to where he parked the car along the beach. He keeps to the shadows, with the shovel held neatly by his side, but he doesn’t run into anyone. He knows exactly where he is going. He follows the path through the bushes toward the beach, and when it branches, he takes the path to the right. The moon is covered by clouds, and a pavilion comes into view, looking pale and blue in the muted moonlight.
He sits on the bench first, listening. He thinks he hears women gossiping, car doors closing, sirens, rodents stirring in their burrows.
He begins digging discreetly at first, stopping every so often and holding his breath. Soon, though, he is scooping sand out of the hole with hurried, spastic movements. He works his way around the edges, widening and deepening it little by little, as a pile of sand grows beside him. His shirt is soaked through from the effort. It clings to him, and as he digs, he licks the sweat from his upper lip. The muddy sand at the bottom sends up a rich mineral smell. When he’s waist-deep, he climbs out and crouches beside it for a moment, looking in, even though there’s nothing to see down there.
He drags her out along the path, her body still limp and warm in the sheet, and when they get to the hole, he jumps in first and then pulls her in after him. He wants to position her looking up at the sky, but she won’t quite fit that way, so he turns her on her side with her knees tucked up against her chest. He spends some time trying to get his foot out from beneath her until at last, with a violent squirming, he pulls free and scrambles out of the grave. There isn’t time to say a prayer. He covers her as quick as he can, kneeling and pushing the pile of sand into the hole with his arms. Then he follows the drag marks on the way to the street, moving his feet back and forth across the sand to erase them.
When he gets home to the apartment, he sits on the couch and stares out into the middle of the room, and the entire night slides rapidly through his mind again: walking down the street in the direction of the apartment, opening the door, the bottle of wine on the counter, the shoes on the floor. He recalls her foot resting against his leg, the rustle of the sheets as they tumbled into bed; flicking the cigarette butt into the bushes; her nose sniffing at his shirt; and her back as she walked away. He arrives at the moment when he makes a fist, then he immediately starts again at the beginning.
He can’t find a way to undo it, but neither can he stop himself from trying. He talks to the place where she was lying on the floor and explains that if she had just done this or that differently, things never would have come to this. Then he goes to the fridge for another beer and tries to think of something else.
Sabine’s car sits parked two blocks from their apartment beneath a large pine. On one side of the street is a row of vacant houses; on the other is the Gulf. A raccoon crosses the road to hunt for turtle eggs on the beach, but otherwise no creatures stir. A little before dawn, a pair
of headlights appear at the end of the street and swing across the convertible. A deputy is at the end of his shift, making one last sweep of Anna Maria before returning to the office in Bradenton. He parks behind the car and writes out the license plate number on the ticket. Then he pulls himself out of his cruiser and slips the notice under the windshield wiper. He shakes his head. He will never understand if people can’t read the no parking sign or if they just don’t care.
All mornings somehow are the same. Cats lick their paws. People roll over in bed. Birds fly silently to the sea. The island gets up slowly, and the sun brightens the horizon without heat. A man with a fanny pack and a metal detector heads out past the pavilion to the beach. At the motel, the guests are wrested fitfully from their sleep. The smell of coffee rises and drifts, and down the street, at the café across from the apartment, a truck loads the newspaper machines with the day’s edition, and the cinnamon buns go in the oven.
Bill leaves sleep slowly, coming to himself little by little. His back is sore. His hands are raw. Even before he opens his eyes or thinks of last night, a sense of horror descends on him. He knows there is something he doesn’t want to think about, and he tries to delay the process of waking. But this only serves to catapult him out of sleep. He finds himself slumped to one side on the couch. The TV is on, and someone is talking about the weather. There’s a full beer in his hand, and on the coffee table is the towel he’d been using to clean the blood off the couch. He finishes the beer and closes his eyes, but that only makes it worse.
He can hardly believe the change that’s come over the apartment in the few hours he’s been asleep. In the closet, her clothes still hang in disorder. Her shampoo is in the shower. The empty wine bottle is on the counter, right where it was before. Everything looks the same, but it no longer feels like somewhere he lives.
There’s a bar on the mainland, a few blocks from a place Bill used to live. He knows the kind of people who drink there, and he backs the car into a spot at the corner of the lot. Before he gets out, he wipes down the steering wheel, the shifter, and the seat belt, and looks around to make sure he hasn’t left anything. In the back seat, there’s a place where blood has soaked into the cloth, and he pulls a small paring knife out of his backpack and hacks at the spot until he’s removed the fabric and the foam beneath it. He puts the chunk of cushion in the first trash can he comes to. As he waits for the bus to take him back to Anna Maria, he thinks about how angry she’d be if she knew he got blood in her car.
Wednesday is Sabine’s day off at the motel. It’s a bright, cool, and lovely day, a day like an empty bowl. In such sunshine, all the objects appear to have been placed precisely in their places, even the parrot, dozing on his perch. There isn’t much to do so Tom sits out by the pool and pretends to be a guest. Eyes closed, sun warming his face, he imagines this is the last day of his vacation. The wife and kids are still asleep in the room. The van is packed, and by noon they’ll be on their way back to Wisconsin or Ontario. There are only a few pages left in his book. If he finishes it before the kids wake up, he can just leave it behind, travel that much lighter. He dozes lightly, following this line of thought, and when the few guests do begin to stir, he almost does call out to them as though he knows them.
The image of Sabine settles on him, but in this watery half-asleep mood, it doesn’t trouble him. He considers her as if she’s part of an exhibit in a museum. He sees their whole life together this way, far away, at last safely behind glass. Now that the moments have crystallized, with their emotions embedded and intact, it seems to him a lucky, even a beautiful life. They stand beside a sandcastle, its turrets crenellated with shells. The warmth of her hand in his at the courthouse; the hurricane that blew along the coast the day they were married; the rain that beat down on just the two of them, holed up in a hotel room, eating lo mein; even the ways in which she hurt him: all are preserved here, and he doesn’t mind them. He is done worrying about her.
The first sign of Bill is a rustling outside the office. Tom finds the man cursing as he tries to extricate himself from the bushes. Bill’s eyes move loosely in their sockets, and his shoelaces are untied, but the morning’s calm remains with Tom. He waits until Bill has gotten back to his feet unsteadily.
“Have you seen Sabine? We got in a fight last night about my smoking, and she left, and she’s not picking up when I call.”
“You know how she gets.”
“I just—” Bill hitches up his backpack and moves toward him, and the stench of beer and sweat overtakes Tom. “Just tell her I need to talk to her.”
Tom stands and watches as the man trips off down the street with his backpack slung over his shoulder. He’s done wondering what is going through Bill’s head.
The scar on Robert Corona’s temple is from a drunk ex-lineman who robbed him for a handful of quarters. He missed the eye, but he managed to cut some sort of nerve, and now Robert sees only light and dark shapes on the right side. It’s like the world’s been divided in two, and sometimes he prefers the clear one, and sometimes he prefers the one where dim shapes pull apart and come together without sense or reason. The left eye is the one that works, but when he’s trying to tell if someone’s lying, it’s the other one he turns on them.
Wednesday night, he goes to every dealer he knows, and nobody’s selling, so he takes his seventeen dollars down to the Gator Lounge and starts to drink. Two men are talking in low voices outside the bathroom. The bartender is stubbing out her cigarette in a Styrofoam cup. There’s golf on the television and a rock song on the jukebox. After a few hours, he covers his face with his hands, and when he takes them away, the bar is empty except for the bartender and an old man at the corner table with a cigarette in a long ivory holder.
“One more,” Robert says.
“You’re broke.”
He lifts his arms off the counter and begins counting out the nickels stuck to his skin, but he gives up just as quickly. The bartender stops stacking glasses.
“Where you staying tonight, Bobby?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me.” And with a nod at the old man in the corner, he steps out into the parking lot.
It’s a few hours before dawn, and the outside world is as still and quiet as an empty theater. The lights from the city cast a dull orange glow into the cloudy sky. From the Dumpster by the back fence comes the smell of curdled milk and wet cigarettes. The blacktop is still hot under his flip-flops, but there’s a cool wind blowing a cup in circles just outside the door. He gives it a kick and watches as the wind carries it tumbling away, underneath a white convertible, and as he stares at the car, he realizes the window is down.
In a second, he’s inside it. He runs a finger around the cup holders, looking for change, and opens the glove box. As he leans across the seat, he glances up to check if anyone is watching, and that’s when his eye catches the keys glinting in the ignition. He straightens slowly and reaches out to twist the key. The engine turns over and grumbles to life, the dials jump and glow on the dash, and he adjusts the seat until it’s comfortable and puts on his belt. He turns on the radio, and by the time he pulls out onto Fourteenth, he’s already singing along to the music.
Through the window, a cool breeze seems to carry with it the promise of a different sort of destiny. Robert sees himself cruising down the coast, a cooler in the back full of beer, a girl in the front jiggling amply at every bump, and some slow soul music on the stereo. He sees the car parked outside of motel rooms where women in cowboy outfits tickle him without mercy. There are tables full of barbecued shrimp, hush puppies, ice buckets full of Coke, and there he is in a Panama hat, a girl on each arm, placing fifty-dollar bets at nine to one, slipping twenties into the sweaty palms of valets, smoking his cigarettes out of a long ivory holder, with the car keys in his breast pocket like a talisman. In this mood, he reaches up to adjust the rearview mirror just as the flashers go on behind him.
Two deputies stop by to see Bill around four in the morning on Thursday, but he�
��s so drunk that when they drive away, he can’t remember what he just told them. All that day, he hears cruisers pulling into the drive. He is making scrambled eggs when suddenly he is sure the police have surrounded the apartment. He ducks to the ground and crawls to the window. No one is there, and he stands up and brushes off his knees.
When they do come back, just before sunset on Friday, he doesn’t expect it at all. He thinks it’s the neighbors talking in the courtyard, and when he opens the door, it takes him a few heartbeats to realize it’s a sheriff’s deputy, dressed in tan and gold, and behind her, three detectives. The deputy is very young, with the slouch of the intelligent and disinterested.
“You here to arrest me?” Bill says.
One of the detectives asks if they can talk to him for a few minutes and have a look around the apartment, and when Bill nods, the deputy puts on blue plastic gloves and brushes past him.
Bill and the detectives sit out in the courtyard. There’s a breeze that makes his cigarette burn faster than he’d like.
“Just walk me through Tuesday night,” one of the detectives says.
“We had dinner—vegetarian spaghetti. We watched TV. I went out for a cigarette. We got in a fight.” There’s not much to tell, but Bill feels like he talks for a long time. All three men nod along with what he says, but only the one detective speaks, saying “um-huh” every so often, and taking notes in a small black notebook.
“I tried to get with Tom and say we need to put our heads together.”
“Um-huh.”
“And find out what’s going on, you know?”
“Going on as far as what?”
“Just . . .”
“OK.”
“He thinks I hurt her,” Bill says. None of the detectives flinch, but Bill senses that some communication passes between them. “Why would I hurt Sabine?”