Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  “No,” I said.

  “You . . . can’t keep me here. You’re not. Strong. Strong enough.”

  Then her mouth changed and she couldn’t talk anymore.

  She banged the wall and went into a fit.

  Saliva poured from her mouth. She shook her head and her snout got longer. She shook it again and her ears grew. She turned her eyes up to the keyhole again and they were like lamps, both greenish, one more grey than the other. She bared those wicked teeth and snarled, utterly without recognition. I backed away from the door.

  I went to my car and got the .45.

  I peeked through the keyhole again just in time to see her rear up and swat the overhead bulb. It exploded. It was dark in there now.

  The front door knocked.

  “Y’alright in there?”

  “Yes! Thank you!” I yelled.

  “I heard screamin, so I thought I’d ask.”

  I hid the gun behind my leg and opened the door a crack.

  A man in red and black flannel. The neighbor from five.

  I don’t know how I said this so calmly, hoping another god-awful sound wouldn’t come from the bathroom, but I did.

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said, my voice cracking, my heart racing, “but we need to be alone right now. I’m afraid my wife’s about to lose another baby.”

  “Lordy, Mister, I’m sorry. I got a car if you want a lift to the hospital in Somerset,” he offered.

  “They can’t do anything. She’s just going to have to get through this. I’m sorry about the noise.”

  “No, I’m sorry. Y’all take care. God bless.”

  “God bless,” I said.

  Nearly as soon as I shut the front door, the bathroom door banged again, so hard that a little bit of plaster fell from the ceiling. I turned the radio on and mostly got fuzz. One preacher talking about rum. Then jazz. I couldn’t believe it. Good jazz in Nowhere, Kentucky.

  I latched what was left of my sanity onto that.

  I turned it up.

  I sat on the bed.

  The noises from the bathroom seemed to get more infrequent, and eventually stopped. My vigil began to relax. I probably lasted until ten o’clock before pure exhaustion overtook me and I fell asleep.

  Night.

  Cold.

  I was lying on my side on a strange bed in clothes that weren’t mine.

  My crooked, spare glasses were on my head.

  My gun was in my hand.

  A radio was on, just playing static.

  I reached beside me but Dora wasn’t next to me.

  Everything started coming back to me, and I sat up with a start.

  Jesus.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly three a.m.

  Dora.

  Was she sleeping?

  I got up quietly and peeked through the keyhole.

  There was a breeze coming from it.

  I realized then that the bathroom was empty.

  “Goddamnit,” I said, really frightened, and grabbed the key. I opened the door. Moonlight and cold air were coming through the window, which had been knocked completely out of its frame. The curtain rod was still hanging by one support and the flimsy curtain blew in the night wind. Glass and plaster were everywhere. One piece of glass reflected the full moon at me like a trapezoid eye.

  “Goddamnit,” I said again, watching my breath curl potently out of my mouth.

  I went and sat down on the bed again, running my hands through my hair, feeling insane, feeling worse, if possible, than I felt in the cage. There, at least, there was nothing to be done except to endure. Now I had to do something, but I couldn’t imagine what, and lives hung in the balance. I briefly considered shooting myself. I decided not to, but gave myself permission to reconsider the question later.

  At last I gathered my reserves, wrapped the blanket around me, and set off into the night to find my Eudora. My adulteress. My leper.

  This was coal mining country. Small shotgun shacks sat well removed from one another. I saw tire swings and fences and cows and I got lost. Good and lost. I kept the gun under the folds of the blanket. I wandered by the highway, looking, no doubt, like just another vagrant on his way from one hard-luck situation to another. I laughed, because I supposed that was in fact what I was.

  “Get out of the road, ya idjit!” someone yelled at me.

  I was pretty sure this was US 27, but I didn’t know. I was pretty sure I was going in the right direction. But the sun came up on me and I still had not found the Sycamore Village Tourist cabins. My feet were bare and I couldn’t feel them anymore. I might lose toes! That struck me funny. Frost glittered on the grass by the side of the highway, achingly beautiful in the peach-colored dawn.

  A sheriff’s car pulled up to me. The officer inside was young, maybe twenty-five.

  “Mornin to ya,” he said.

  “Good morning,” I said, grinning.

  “You doin alright, mister?” he asked, pushing back his hat in a gesture of effortless dash and goodwill.

  “I’ll be doing better if I can find my hotel. This US 27?”

  “Yessir. Have you been drinkin, sir?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m an opium fiend.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “I have never seen an opium fiend in this county, but I do allow that you look like what I might imagine one to look like. Do you need a lift somewhere?”

  “Sure,” I said, “that’s very kind of you.”

  I have a gun in this blanket!

  I told him where I was staying and showed him the key.

  He took me there without saying anything. I didn’t blame him; I wouldn’t want to say anything to me either. I’m sure I looked like a lunatic. I kept a shit-eating grin on my face and a white-knuckled grip on the gun so it wouldn’t bounce out during the drive.

  We pulled over at Sycamore Village and he reached across me to open my door.

  “One other thing,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “My pa’s a eye doctor in Somerset. Name’s Dr. Murray. I’m Clint. Tell him you know me and I reckon he’ll tighten those spectacles up for nothing.”

  I WALKED SLOWLY into the cabin.

  The radio was playing jazz again.

  Something was in the bed.

  Eudora.

  My Eudora was in the bed, with the sheet clutched all around her.

  My first reaction was overwhelming relief, but my heart caught in my throat when I got a better look at her. She had blood matted in her hair. There was no small amount of it on the sheet, but I hadn’t noticed at first because the sheet was a flowered print with lots of purple.

  Dirt on the floor.

  O sweet God let that be her blood please please please

  I walked around and put the back of my hand to her cheek, as if I were checking her for fever. Her cheek was warm, but not like when she was ill.

  I felt my heart fill up with love for her.

  Yes, even this. I can even live with this.

  That’s what I thought.

  But then I stepped in it.

  Her vomit.

  Just in front of the nightstand.

  There was a lot of it, a heap of undigested meat.

  So much her human stomach couldn’t hold it.

  It stank.

  There were objects in the mess, too.

  A button. Hair. A piece of cloth.

  And something else.

  I reached down for it.

  Chewed up and bloody.

  It used to be white.

  It took a moment for me to realize it was a baby shoe.

  It was heavy.

  I put it on the nightstand.

  She kept sleeping.

  She had crawled into some coal miner’s house and yanked an infant out of its crib in the night, like some fairy-tale horror. Like the angel of Passover. Some faceless child I didn’t care about. My beloved Dora. She knew what she was.

  And she came to be with her own.<
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  Frankie, if I get out you have to shoot me.

  So I shot her.

  At least that’s what I meant to do.

  I crawled on top of her and straddled her chest, wrapped the blanket around the end of my gun and pointed it at her head.

  Her gorgeous eyes opened and met mine, without emotion.

  She knew what was in the blanket, and it seemed she neither wanted me to do it nor minded if I did.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The report was very loud in that small room.

  The end of the blanket caught fire a little, then went out.

  But here’s the thing.

  I missed.

  As God is my witness, I meant to blow her brain out the back of her lovely head and then go find a river to pitch myself into. I didn’t miss on purpose. Not in my mind. It’s possible that the blanket and my exhaustion somehow caused me to angle the gun wrong, but I don’t think so. It really wasn’t such a complicated thing to try to do.

  I believe now that my wrist jerked.

  Something in me refused the command.

  A small mutiny.

  I don’t know what else to believe.

  The end result was that the gun went off, she flinched and yelped and I blew a big hole in the pillow next to her head. A few goose feathers blew out and settled slowly, ridiculously, to the floor.

  I got off of her and stood by the bed.

  I popped the slide release and closed the gun.

  I put it on the nightstand, but then remembered I might like to shoot myself later, so I put it in my pants.

  She lay there shaking, but kept her eyes on me.

  The jazz song came to an end and the announcer wished his listeners a happy Armistice Day.

  I backed out of the room, taking the keys.

  I walked to the car, breathing hard, my breath like locomotive steam in the cold.

  The man in cabin five peeked white-faced out of his window, white as a fish-belly, then shut his curtain when he saw me look at him.

  I started the car and left.

  The clerk tried to wave me down, saying, “Mr. Taylor, Mr. Taylor!” but I kept going.

  I expected Clint Murray, the optometrist’s son, to pull me over and take me to jail for destruction of property and attempted murder.

  But it never happened.

  I kept going all the way to Chicago.

  But not for good.

  I did go back to Georgia.

  Just one more time.

  And not alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DECEMBER.

  I was standing in John “Granny” Giangrande’s apartment with my shirt off, facing his pretty window that gave on Lake Michigan. He was behind me, inspecting my back over his tiny glasses. He whistled.

  “Goddamn, Nichols. I thought your back was fouled up before.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you plan to tell me how you got these?”

  “Later.”

  “And where’s Dora?”

  “Later. Let’s drink.”

  LATER, WHEN MY shirt was on and the night was black and bitter cold outside, and a little snow had started sticking on the window, we sat on his couch and drank his good wine. It was the kind of wine a guy who works on State Street and has no kids drinks.

  About midnight, our dead friend Dan Metzger came up, like he always did when we were alone and had a bottle, which was part of the reason we rarely saw each other alone with a bottle. Funny thing was that I’m the one who saw it, but Giangrande’s the one who always cried first. It’s important to understand that about Granny to know why he did what I asked. It also makes more sense when you know how badly he was picked on at St. Ignatius and how many fat lips and busted heads I got standing up for him. It makes more sense yet when you remember that he sat stateside with a research job while Dan and I waded in the mud and got whizbangs and 75s chucked at us. That wasn’t his doing, of course, and it’s nothing I would Lord over him, but I knew it worked at him and I was quietly glad for anything that might sway him.

  Men who want revenge have no dignity.

  They have already died and sold everything.

  I told Granny what happened only after I had sat with him long enough for him to remember how much he loved me and to hear that I wasn’t nuts. I’m not saying I was sane. But I was demonstrably not nuts. So I told him what happened. But there was still the matter of what I wanted. I only told him what that was when we were both good and pie-eyed, and when, if not belief, something other than disbelief sat on his face.

  “I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that stuff is, do I?”

  “No.”

  “Or how much time I’d do for making it?”

  “No.”

  He was swaying on the couch.

  “I will say yes, but provisionally. I reserve the right to say no tomorrow.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And I will say yes not because I believe you, but because you believe yourself. Which is good enough for me.”

  “Thanks, Granny. Thanks so much.”

  “And because you’ve never asked me for anything.”

  “This is big.”

  “Yeah. But maybe lots of little things every time I needed them sat in the bank and gained interest.”

  “You’re talking like my father.”

  “I know. And the fact that you and I are becoming old men and still know how each other’s father talked, that’s a reason. I’ll do it, Frankie. If this is some big joke you’re pulling, then I’ll be your patsy. And if you’re dragging me to hell, like Father Patterson always said, then fuck the Jesuits.”

  I hugged him to me.

  “Have you told your brother any of this stuff?”

  “Not much.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You know who else?” he said, struggling to light a cigarette.

  “What?”

  He swayed and closed his eyes.

  “Might go. Eicher.”

  KARL EICHER WAS another vet.

  He was also our friend from high school years, but not grade school. During grade school he had run with the neighborhood kids who bullied us for being Catholics. His parents were harsh Lutherans and he hated them and hated how poor his father was and always had something to prove, but he was a guy who always needed to be part of the dominant tribe. His allegiances against the neighborhood Catholics began to shift as more Poles, Italians and Slovenians moved in, and shifted completely by the time the war broke out in 1914 and everything German was suspect. Karl Eicher became an unfortunate name to have. Now he was a minority. Now he needed the three awkward guys with glasses who went to the hoity-toity Catholic school.

  He was a good guy to know, though.

  He could get dirty pictures.

  And he loved to fight.

  When I went to find him, he was in Gary, Indiana, standing with the other day laborers by the docks. Right where Granny said he would be. He looked rough. He looked like the last guy you’d pick for anything but a cheap killing. I guess that’s what I was after.

  His face lit up when he saw me, not from affection, but because I was dressed decently and he knew he’d get a beer and a sandwich.

  He was right.

  Karl Eicher.

  I hadn’t kept up with him the way Granny had.

  I lost touch with him in 1917.

  In the war, he went with the Marines and, because he was little and mean, they used him to go into dugouts and tunnels. He ended up with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Belleau Wood. I think it was a high point for him.

  Granny told me how rough things had been for Eicher; that he had twice hit Granny up for money and that he had sent it. The war had sat on him hard and he couldn’t keep work long. He sailed for a while, then went to D.C. with the bonus army in ’32 and got teargassed with the other vets looking for the money the government owed them.

  I had nothing to lose telling him what happened.<
br />
  He had nothing to lose hearing me out, nothing but the rumble in his stomach.

  He chewed his pastrami and nodded noncommittally, washing it down with the last of his beer.

  I got up and got him another one.

  Then I did what Granny suggested.

  “You don’t have to believe me, Karl. But if you come along and do what I ask, no matter how crazy it sounds, when we come back, I’ll give you my car.”

  THE TRIP SOUTH seemed short. We were all glad to see the snowy farms of Indiana and Ohio behind us and to be able to crack the windows to smoke. We didn’t talk very much at first, but by the time we hit Kentucky, Karl Eicher and I had become drinking buddies; we drank Old Crow out of a bag until we started swerving and Granny made us stop for coffee. He drove us into Georgia, but I took over when we got close.

  Then the mood changed.

  We all felt it.

  WHITBROW WAS DEAD.

  Those across the river had killed it.

  The toe of the corpse was the Nobles’ filling station, overgrown with brown weeds and stripped of anything valuable. White, painted letters on the busted window advertised:FREE PECANS WITH FILL-Up

  The last p had been made smaller to fit because the painter had not measured it. Ursie Noble had not measured it.

  The Canary House had been vandalized.

  It had not been burned, as I expected, but all the windows had been busted out and the doors taken away. All the furniture was gone, even the porch swing, and someone had been using the living area as a dump.

  A family of raccoons were nesting in the pantry, the doors and hinges of which had been stripped.

  Upstairs was worse.

  Upstairs was personal.

  Someone had written WHORE on the wall of our bedroom and left the bones of a pig on the remains of the mattress. The mattress had been cut to shreds. Some prudent scavenger had made off with the headboard.

  The office wasn’t as raw, but it was still hurtful. My rolltop desk was gone, of course, and the bottle of Drambuie I had stashed in it had been drained and left upside down on the sill. Someone large had taken a shit in the corner. I hope the SOB really mashed his thumb moving that desk.