by Tony Burgess
Thomas thinks one of the men has seen him so he rolls under the water and pulls himself up onto the shore. He emerges in a chamber made by an arrangement of tall rocks. He can hear the conversation.
Stranger: “I see you two have caught a little fish.”
Deputy: “Oh, yeah, he’s mine, that little bastard.”
Fisherman: “I just don’t want him to scare all the fish away.”
Stranger: “Well, why don’t we pull him up and see what we’ve got, hmmm?”
Deputy: “Oh I know what we got, we got a little prick, is what we’ve got.”
Stranger: “Oh my God, I can’t even catch my breath. This is so exciting, you guys; I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Fisherman: “Like what?”
Stranger: “Are we gonna go one after another, or do we share him all at once?”
Deputy: “Huh?”
Stranger: “What I really want is to come while he’s dying, that’s what I really want. Is that OK? Do you guys mind?”
Kyle emerges from the shower with a beige towel wrapped around his waist. The Doctor is in the sunroom, flipping through oil paintings stacked in a corner. He stops at one painting, holding it with the tip of his finger while he dips his head to look. He lifts the painting and calls out to Kyle.
Marion steps onto her front porch and feels her husband’s hand slip off her arm. He is looking for his keys. He finds them in his pocket and reaches in front of his wife to open the door. When it opens, and Marion can smell lemon coming from within, he gives her a sharp push from the bottom of her back. It is not meant to help her through the door — it’s meant to scare her.
The Mayor has turned onto his street. A large willow tree spills out over the sidewalk and blocks the view of his house. As he nears the giant tree he has to struggle with the desire to slip behind its wall of white whips, to stop off here before going home. He sees a woman’s bare legs and hiking boots stretching out off his porch.
Jack jumps back. He feels the stranger’s words like a physical blow. He knows for certain what he has just said, and he can tell, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he has meant it.
The stranger has come here to rape and kill little Thomas. And he’s telling us this as if we wanted to know. As if we knew already. Jack leaps to the side as Brian swings wildly at the man. He hasn’t been given time to think. Brian misses and falls forward at the stranger’s feet.
The painting depicts a woman, seen from above, standing in the moonlight. She is on a path of glowing stones that wends beside a shallow pool. Large yellow fish are visible at the surface. She is wearing a tight, elegant black dress, and black gloves that draw snugly up to her elbows. Her hands are bent through the palms and her fingers pluck at the night air. She has a tiny, tiny waist and large broad hips. Mendez leans the painting in a kitchen chair and waits for Kyle to emerge from the shower.
As he steps onto his lawn the Mayor is struck by the strong odour of his failed septic tank. It rises up out of the ditch at the end of the driveway. He feels his stomach pitch and he has to stop and drop his head. Breathe. Breathe. You’re going home. He thinks of his wallet and touches the back of his pants. They hang slack. Lost it. He hears the woman’s heavy boots dragging across stones.
Ron flips the heavy pipe out from the back of his pants and drives it across the back of Brian’s head, scoring a blow deeply, opening the scalp. The younger one steps backward. Ron leans over the fallen Deputy and has a clear shot at Jack. The pipe bounces off his cheek, splitting the skin. He falls onto a bush. Ron stands over the two men and swings the pipe, first off the Deputy, then off Jack. Then back and forth and back, again and again and again.
Marion’s husband still hasn’t spoken and now she wishes he would. She’s sitting in a kitchen chair, and he’s opening the refrigerator. It wouldn’t be so bad to say something. It would be nice if he just acknowledged that they were home, that she was there. He knows I can’t. He opens the bread box beside the microwave and lifts out a complete loaf. He breaks the plastic tie in half to remove four slices.
Thomas hears the terrible thumps and he can tell by the alternating tone of banging that two heads are being crushed. One sounds hollow and resonant, it must be hanging from the shoulders, the other is dead and flat, it must be against the ground. Thomas submerges himself, but he does not feel safe. Anything could come down on him from above and he wouldn’t see it. He opens his eyes. The water is black and gold, alive with flicking fingers, and it pushes him upward.
Kyle’s head feels completely clear as he stands in front of the painting. He is struck by how beautiful it looks.
“She’s my Wasp Woman.”
Though the moon is not visible, the light it casts is so clearly its own. Every colour rings towards gold — a single light source from below.
“I wondered what the Wasp Woman did when she wasn’t buzzing around apartments. So this is what? I think that she is here alone, in a pretty garden, at night. But she’s walking perfectly. And she knows that she is entirely made up. A character in a movie — a very good movie, but still a picture. So she can never stop being herself, not even for a second, not even while she is alone. She’s always in danger of disappearing altogether.”
Ron rolls the body of the Deputy into the trunk of his car. He pauses and looks at the two men. Jack’s eyelids twitch. They are still alive. Ron slams the trunk closed and looks up the road, then back through the forest he has just come from. Someone has tricked me. He has the terrible sensation that he has just done exactly what he was supposed to do. He starts the car and decides to return to Bewdley. To escape this. That’s my decision. My decision? Ron sees a large tin mailbox about fifty metres down the road. It slips itself out of the ground and moves slowly back into the bushes.
Marion is staring at the fridge magnets. Her husband is making sandwiches with his back to her. He isn’t going to ask her what she wants. Butter or margarine. Lettuce or tomato. She notices a new magnet, one that has been put up while she was gone. It is a large hamburger made of clay and glazed with life-like colours. A piece of paper hangs out from under it. An invoice. Her husband puts a plate down on the table. In the middle of the table. She has to reach across if she wants her sandwich.
Thomas has curled the top of his feet over a large piece of sunken driftwood and he holds himself below the surface. His lungs are yanking at the top of his throat, causing him to push down on his chest with his chin. He has to decide when to emerge for a breath. When is it safe? He forces his head up and looks toward the surface. The shadow of a tree creates a dark bar in the water. Thomas is sure he can see huge hands parting the waves over his head, coming in to pick him up.
“Now, there is a fellow in the movie as well, an adulterous fellow, living with his poor wife in a small apartment. She doesn’t know anything about the scoundrel. Oblivious, hmmm? He has a thing for Wasp Woman, and of course, there’s nothing we can do about these people. The way they behave — it’s an old movie, you see. What they used to call cliché. But I wanted to paint the fellow at a moment when he’s by himself, when he’s not tricking his wife, or falling down the hallway to get his hands on those magnificent Waspy hips. And now, here he is.” Mendez slides another painting in front of the Wasp Woman.
Ron stops the car, suddenly, at the top of a hill. He does this deliberately, so he can hear how the bodies move, to see if he can tell whether they are conscious. He hears nothing. That could mean they are holding onto the interior of the trunk, but it might also mean that they are just rocking silently. They could be alive or dead. Ron pours some Kool-Aid into the red plastic cup. He lifts a paper bag from the seat, opens it, and takes a sniff at the contents. He withdraws a wrapped sandwich, rolls down the window, and tosses it into the trees. He turns the bag upside down and dumps a pudding cup, a paper plate, and a heavy spoon onto the seat. He crumples the bag before pitching it into the back. He acceler
ates quickly, spinning the tires. This time he hears the bonk of what is clearly a head against the interior of the trunk.
Kathy looks at the Mayor. He’s frightful, and sways with his eyes closed. Robert clutches his stomach. His hair, once flammable and stiff, is now flat and spare across the top of his head. An orange stain runs down the left side of his face. The piping on his shirt is swollen with dampness and his cuffs hang, flapping beyond his wrists like busted wings. She pushes herself off his stoop, suddenly embarrassed that she has been hunting a man who clearly has some very serious problems. She waves her hand into a corner of the sky. Later, later, it can all wait.
Thomas scoops a long heavy stone from the lake bottom, unhooks his feet and springs up. He breaks the surface shouting and drawing the stone up as quickly as he can through the drag of water. The stone soars over Kyle’s little rock village and crashes into a birch tree. No one is there. They have all gone somewhere. Thomas feels his chest break open with air and before he can stop drawing in his breath something charnel in his stomach explodes. He falls forward, vomiting.
Marion lifts the quartered sandwich from the plate. She cannot bring herself to take a bite. The bread is so white it is not bread, the tomato a bleeding disc of wax. The meat, slices adhered together by an animal’s sweat, is speckled with dirt. The lettuce is cloth. The salt’s poison. She holds it six inches from her mouth and looks at her husband. He squints at her. An intense face, an exerting face. He might be defecating. He bunches his lips in a tight wrinkled aperture and slowly pokes out his tongue. His tongue is cracked and shiny, held together by dozens of fecal strings.
The painting depicts an elderly man in a blue turban with a thick white beard. He is sitting at a bench and turned toward the painter. The man guides a precision carpentry tool into a plank of wood. The ends of bright red sleeves are visible coming out from under the coarse dull robe he wears.
“Well this may or may not be him, I suppose. I had trouble picturing him, so I copied a painting. It has a good biblical theme I imagine. You see the town through the window there, I’m very proud of the detail.”
Ron is driving along Highway 7 toward Bewdley. He is trying frantically to think of what to do next. If these fuckers aren’t dead, I’m gonna have to kill them. Holy Christ!
There are lots of forests in and around Bewdley. He can dump the bodies in a number of places. Not around cottages, kids are always exploring. Kids. He remembers the handcuffs he brought, just in case. And the rope. He pulls the car over and stops.
Suddenly again: this time to inflict pain.
A breeze washes the smell out of the air around the Mayor and he steps forward, trying to follow it. He feels a hand touch the back of his arm and he opens his eyes. A woman in cut-off jeans and heavy tan hiking boots stands beside him. He can tell that she knows. It’s probably pretty obvious: he is completely lost. In his condition he has only come here automatically. She helps him forward, and he also knows that she has decided, without having any knowledge of the facts, that the Mayor should be helped up onto his porch and, finally, through the front door — into a house that he has lived in all his life.
Ron lifts the trunk lid. The two men are laying entwined in each other, either dead or unconscious. Ron leans forward to grab a wrist and is instantly hit with a fresh, powerful odour. One of the men, or both, has fouled himself. Ron drops the lid down, not quite closed, but shut enough to trap the smell. He hurries in case anyone should drive by. First, he opens the handcuffs and hangs them off the last two fingers on his left hand. Then he twirls the rope loosely around his right arm. No time. Hurry. When the trunk lifts, the raw smell flares again. It ripples up, pulls into Ron’s throat. He grabs a wrist and cuffs it, then reaches blindly, spitting and blinking, fishing for another arm. Maybe from the same body. He pulls it hard and the cuffed hand doesn’t move. Different body. He clicks over the cuff. This activity causes the air to turn a livid green and Ron gives up, tossing the rope in loose across the bodies before slamming the trunk. He blows a thick cap of foam from his lips and falls to his knees. He throws up between the rear tire and the ditch.
Mendez can see that the young man is quite stoned now. He’s lost in the glazed surface of the picture, marvelling more at the paint than the painting.
“Well, let us say then that you and I had better not concern ourselves so much with the oddness of inconsequential things, hmmm? It’s enough that your old friend has wasted a few hours on them, pictures that nobody could ever imagine, that nobody was ever meant to question. Let’s have ourselves a little lunch.”
Mendez puts the paintings on the floor, revealing a pile of sandwiches on the table. Kyle feels the opiate in his system trigger a reflex in his brain.
Far from his empty stomach flashes the sensation of nausea. He smiles, but he can’t eat. Not now.
EIGHTEEN
There is a great distance to be covered. Thousands of hours and millions of miles. Some of these hours, caught up in the strange species of their construction, bear down jealously on a few chosen miles. They style themselves back up through the sieve of the road, extruding minutes upward and stroking the bottoms of cars with their elegant hands.
Nothing to draw a map from, or set a watch to, these hours.
In fact, it’s probably only one hour that experiments with its sixty slippery fingers — splashing them, little clean darts, down to the base of an abdomen. It is from under here that magnificent erect cocks sway up, girded and plumed with blood, into the tanned ribbon and sizzle of hot vaginas. And behind them, the muscle of the anus, hard and perfectly set.
Well, well.
If this hour has wheeled so cleanly downward, and it has, because we saw it, and if its behaviour has been less than edifying, then at least it has shown that some hours are prodigies. A great hunt can begin, therefore, for its relatives.
One such relative is close by. Its internal leaps are invisible so far, because, in fact, it must resolve itself on the same surface as the millions of other miles and thousands of other hours. It could easily pass by in shadow, in disguise, and never distinguish itself.
The Mayor’s will to return home has grown frail and he stands with one hand held to his side, staying the woman who would stride along with him. He has stopped at the bottom of the stairs, at the last point where he can see the entire front of the house. Its image, as a face, still has integrity. The tall wide eyes are at either side; the teeth are at the front door, pressing down on the stepped tongue — the tip of which Robert pushes against with a sopping shoe. In the left eye the Mayor sees the reflection of a yacht parked in the driveway across the street. He wishes that this picture, sharp and white, could fall out onto the lawn. The schooner crashes through tall vines, and his hand grasps gleaming metal as he swings through a vapor of salt, safe on the deck as it pitches high over a wave. He sees volcanic islands. Distant, brown cities. Even death. He’s aging in the sun, dying. He’s hallucinating. Dying.
“Uh, Mr. Mayor?”
The Mayor pats the back of his pants again. “I’ve lost my wallet.”
“Oh dear. Do you know where it might be?”
“No. I think it might have fallen out somewhere.”
“Well, where could it have fallen out?”
“I don’t know. I had a shower over at, over at the telemarketing place. Up behind Powel’s up there …”
“Oh. Well, maybe it’s there.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we could call them and see.”
“Yeah, sure. They’re pretty good people.”
“They’d hold it for you, I bet.”
“Yeah. It had all my identification in it. Driver’s license and credit cards. I better get it back.”
“Let’s go inside and call them right now.”
“Oh, we don’t have to call right now.”
“Why not?”
“Oh dear, because I’m
scared.”
“Scared? Scared of what?”
The Mayor nods to the front door.
“You’re scared of the house?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly.”
“Well, then, what is it? You can tell me.”
“OK, go look through the front window.”
Kathy steps forward, nervous now, feeling that something very odd is happening. She puts her hand to the pane and leans her brow into its cover. The boy is still there, sitting in a chair facing away from the door.
“What do you see?”
“It looks like a boy. Who is that?”
“That’s not a boy.”
The child suddenly gets out of the chair. He walks over to the television and slams a fist down on its top. Kathy feels the hair on her scalp tingle. It isn’t a boy. It’s a man. A perfectly proportioned man — about four feet tall. Not a child, not a dwarf — a miniature man. Kathy feels like she might scream. The little man turns to face her.
“What is it?”
“You tell me.”
Kathy can now see a tiny version of the Mayor’s face looking directly at her from the back of the house.
“It’s me,” Robert says.
Kathy steps away so that she can see both Mayors, the tiny one inside and the one she knows — the one who is now opening the front door. The two Mayors hit Kathy as the consequence of some negligence, a mathematical flaw: the result of someone forgetting to erase something.
One plus nine is nineteen.
Frightened by this, Kathy reaches out to stop Robert from entering his house. She’s too late.
The door closes and the blinds are drawn. The Mayor has just added something that should have been subtracted.