The Beast of Barcroft

by Bill Schweigart

  “I am sorry you lost your dog.”

  “There are children in this neighborhood. Does that bump up your number any?”

  “Get some sleep, Prince Charming. But clean yourself up first. You smell like piss.”

  After a long shower, he lay in bed, alternating between being furious at the cop and thinking about his dog. He could not imagine his father rolling up on someone in distress and giving them shit. Would he? He’d been a tough cop, but a kind man first and foremost. More than that, a strange feeling scratched at the back of his mind, making him restless. Like a word on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. Finally, he got out of bed. He marched to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and removed his antidepressants. Part of it was that he wanted to honor the loss of the one thing left in his world that had loved him unconditionally, and he it. But mostly he knew he had to think clearly. He poured the pills into the toilet and flushed.

  Chapter 3

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10

  Ben slept poorly that night. Actually, he was not sure if he had slept at all. It was hard to tell where his groggy wakefulness ended and the nightmares began. The attack replayed over and over in his mind and he rose early Monday morning before the alarm, irritable and with a headache.

  The dog was not there to greet him. It was happening all over again, he thought. It had taken months for Ben to adjust to life without Rachel and now not even Bucky was there to distract him. His mind, lethargic and aching, raced back to the last time he saw her, right here in this room.

  It was morning on an early summer day and already sweltering, the air so still and humid it draped over the neighborhood like a shroud. She stood by the open door, silhouetted by the bright light streaming into the room. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a quick and practical ponytail, ready for the business at hand. She was athletic and tall, tall enough that whenever she had worn heels, she had him by two inches. Compared to her lithe figure, his looked compact, bullish. And his expression was always stern—even when he did not intend it to be—while her features were open and welcoming. With the sunlight, he had to squint to discern them now. As if she were already fading.

  Bucky sniffed her hand and she patted his head absently. He must have thought they were all going for a walk.

  “You didn’t have to take off of work, Ben. I could have loaded all of that.”

  He shrugged. It was a task, albeit one he despised and disagreed with entirely. That was his way: He always put his head down and plowed through anything unpleasant. This was no different. However, there was nothing left to do now. Her little Honda was overflowing with bags and lamps and pillows and picture frames. It could take no more. When he finally met her gaze, he saw tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, you’re crying now?” he spat, suddenly angry. He fought to keep his face from contorting in contempt. “Don’t forget, this was your idea. All of it.”

  If he drew her into an argument, maybe she would step away from that bright door. Maybe she would stay longer.

  “I’m so sorry, Ben. I tried. I tried so hard.”

  She wasn’t taking the bait. It was maddening.

  “You’re bailing, Rachel. When I need you the most. Call it whatever you want to call it,” he said, pointing at the door, “but this is fucking desertion.”

  “I’ve begged you for months to snap out of it.” She wiped the tears from her eyes and cleared her throat. “Don’t act like this is unexpected.”

  There, he thought, that’s better. You can’t win an argument unless you argue. He might still win.

  “I thought it was a rough patch. I never thought you were serious.”

  “Ben, last week I heard you yell ‘Fuck!’ from the kitchen and when I ran in, I saw you picking a fork off the floor. A fork! No mess, nothing broken, no big deal, but you bellowed like your foot had been caught in a bear trap.”

  “I told you, I had seven things going on at once—”

  “You’re always pissed, yet you’re never present. And you always have an excuse. That’s just the latest example.” She shook her head. “I actually thought you were hurt.”

  He flung his arms wide. “I am hurt!”

  Rachel breathed a heavy sigh. Bucky, realizing a walk was no longer in the offing, trotted to the empty spot in front of the fireplace, circled once, and flopped down with a sigh of his own.

  “I loved your father too, Ben,” she said. “I miss him too.”

  “Don’t invoke my father when you’re walking out the fucking door.”

  She slung her overnight bag over her shoulder.

  “I’ll be back this weekend with my girlfriends to pick up my furniture. Please make it easy on everyone and don’t be here.”

  She turned. This is really happening, he thought. There are no arguments left to win. He swallowed hard.

  “Don’t go.”

  She turned around.

  He gritted his teeth. “Please.”

  She stepped away from the threshold into the shady end of the room and touched his cheek. “Maybe if you could’ve said that without looking at me with such bitterness. Or if the words sounded like they weren’t fighting through venom.” He looked away and she withdrew her hand. “I’m truly sorry about all of this, Ben, but you’re not the man I fell in love with anymore. And I can’t build a life with whoever you are now.”

  On her way back to the door, she stopped beside the dog. He lifted his head toward her, ears up. She cupped his long muzzle in her hand and kissed it. “Take good care of him, Bucky,” she said through fresh tears. “Be a good boy.”

  Ben felt tears of his own coming but would not give her the satisfaction. “If you’re going, then go,” he said. “We don’t need you.”

  She rose from Bucky’s side and walked through the door without breaking stride or looking back.

  “I don’t need you!” he yelled after her.

  The echo of his voice snapped him back to the present. He realized he had just yelled at the empty doorway. He ran his hand through his rumpled hair—brown flecked with a few remaining strands of red from boyhood—and sighed.

  “That can’t be good,” he muttered to himself.

  Ben had respected Rachel’s wishes and left the house the day she came to collect her remaining things. When he returned that night, emptiness suddenly filled the spaces once occupied by her furniture. It was jarring enough to see, but even the acoustics were affected. Sounds traveled farther with nothing to interrupt them, then rattled back into the gaps and bounced off the naked hardwood floors. In the first few days after she left, it seemed overwhelming to fill those holes, to start over, but after a week he went online to order cheap, modular furniture just to stop the strange echoes. By the time he had assembled everything and filled the largest gaps, even her scent had faded.

  But he still had Bucky.

  When he did not want to get out of bed, when the idea of simple grocery shopping seemed like a herculean task, there was his dog. Nudging Ben out of bed with a cold, wet nose, ever ready for a walk. Jumping in place, thrilled to see him at the end of the workday, ready for still more walks. And sitting beside him, taking up too much room, while Ben ensconced himself on his couch, watching his extreme nature shows. The dog provided him not just companionship but also the necessary structure when Ben felt like he did not have the backbone to take another step.

  Ben understood that Bucky was more than a friend. The dog was his last bulwark against something more terrifying to him than any mountain lion creeping in the darkness at the edge of his property: total depression. The strange, new echoes of Bucky’s nails clacking on the hardwood floors in the aftermath of Rachel’s departure were bad enough. But their absence would be even worse.

  Ben fled the house without bothering with coffee.

  It was still dark when he stepped outside. He took a few steps, then stopped in his tracks. He looked in every direction and, satisfied that there was nothing ready to leap out at him, walked quickly to his car. Half an hour later, h
e settled into his cubicle five miles away with an extra-large coffee he had bought on the road. He worked for a defense contractor in the Crystal City section of Arlington, and thankfully, his tasks on Monday did not require much concentration or interaction. He put in earbuds and lost himself in an Excel spreadsheet until the early afternoon, when he began to feel flulike symptoms. Lightheadedness. Nausea. He thought about going home, but under the circumstances, he decided that feeling sick at work was preferable to feeling sick at home. He stuck it out until the end of the day.

  It was twilight when he left for home and was greeted with a familiar sight: Jim, at the top of their block, trying to get his boxers to play fetch. It usually ended up as a wrestling match between the two dogs, but any exercise was good exercise, Jim had told him. The big man waved and Ben stopped the car in the road. He rolled down the window.

  Jim’s ever-present grin faded when he leaned in and saw Ben’s face.

  “You look like shit, brother.”

  “I didn’t sleep much last night.” Ben furrowed his brows as a buttress against tears. When he knew his voice would be steady, he added, “Bucky was killed last night.”

  “What the fuck? Come on, pull over.”

  Ben obeyed. He explained what had happened and Jim coaxed him out of the car and into the house for dinner.

  He went through the whole ordeal again, this time for Lisa, as she made them a huge southern meal of chicken and potatoes. Ben picked at his. When Jim went to let the dogs out again, she told him that he needed to eat.

  “It’s not the food, I just—”

  “No, I get it,” she said, and patted his hand. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not that. I…may have flushed my antidepressants down the toilet last night.”

  “You what?”

  “Is that dumb? That’s dumb, right?”

  “That was pretty damn stupid, Ben, yes.”

  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. On a scale of one to ten, how bad are we talking?”

  “It’s a ten, and ten equals calling your doctor and getting more.”

  “Seriously? Can’t I just ride it out?”

  “It’s called antidepressant discontinuation syndrome and you can feel like shit.”

  “I already feel like shit.”

  “Like the flu?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Congratulations, moron.”

  Ben looked at his uneaten food. “Here’s the thing. Rachel wasn’t ‘for better or worse’ material. I know that now. But Bucky was. I don’t want to tune out for this. Does that make sense?”

  “So wean then.”

  “Look, I already did it and I’m in the middle of it, so why not keep going?”

  “Jesus, you men are so fucking stubborn.”

  “Look, can you not tell Jim I was on happy pills?”

  “You’re so cute, thinking he doesn’t know already.”

  “How does he know?”

  “Because I told him.”

  “But you’re a nurse.”

  “I’m a nurse, not your nurse. And I’m your neighbor.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Eat your food.”

  —

  The next day at work, Ben bolted upright from his chair. He felt a sudden, dull pain radiating from his chest to his back. His heart raced and he found it difficult to breathe. He cursed himself. Lisa was right and now he was having a heart attack. But instead of calling for help, he felt an overpowering desire to move. He raced to the stairwell and pounded down five flights of stairs to the lobby and did not stop until the chill November air cooled his head, which throbbed with heat. It was midafternoon and the lunch crowds had already moved on, so he had the sidewalk mostly to himself. He loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and took great, gulping breaths of cold November air. It felt sharp in his lungs, as if his body were resisting it. The wind chilled his face and neck. He touched his fingers to his brow. They came back wet.

  He leaned against a tree and concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths. As he did, he watched a few passersby out for coffee or heading to the Metro. The wind whipped leaves down the street and the sun was low in the sky, too low for the hour. He dreaded this time of year. Eventually, his heart rate slowed and his fear abated. When he calmed down, he realized two things. First, it was incredibly stupid to leave a building, populated with coworkers and telephones, for the street if he was having a heart attack. Second, he figured the more likely culprit was not a heart attack but a panic attack.

  It felt so real, he thought. He had believed he was going to die, that his heart was about to pop like a balloon. He walked back to his building and took the elevator back to his floor. Once seated in his cubicle again, and confident that no one had seen him make a spectacle of himself, he did a search for the symptoms of a panic attack.

  Racing heart. Chest pains. Breathing difficulties. Sense of terror, or impending doom or death.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  He looked over his shoulder, then did another search on the properties of his antidepressant. After scouring through several websites, though, he could not find panic attacks as a sudden withdrawal symptom.

  He reclined in his chair. This was new. Never in his life had he had a panic attack. Not in the navy. Not during his father’s long illness. Not when it became apparent that Rachel was serious about leaving, and not when she left. Was it a withdrawal symptom, or could it really be because of the attack, of losing Bucky? Or was it both? Or could it all be cumulative? It had been the worst year of his life, and if he was being honest with himself, he had not handled it particularly well. At least your heart is fine, he thought.

  You’re just crazy.

  He sat up and went back to the website on panic attack symptoms. He read the list again. One in particular caught his eye.

  Sense of terror, or impending doom or death.

  “Terrific,” he said.

  —

  He spent the next day cleaning the house. Junk thrown away. Paperwork filed or shredded. Dusting, disinfecting, organizing. Spring cleaning in the fall, everything ninety-degree angles and dust-free. Order, it felt good again. Rachel had always said he was tough to live with after his father died, too demanding, too angry at the little things. But he handled the big things well, he had always replied. I’m getting up every day, functioning just as before. Not missing a beat at work. Still, she wanted him to talk to someone. He could handle his own shit, he told her. Between the stress of living next to Madeleine and the stress of living with him, she threatened to leave. They had just moved in together, had just bought a house together, so why would he take it seriously? When he finally realized she meant it, it was too late. He agreed to talk to someone, take medication, anything. The irony was, with her gone and no one to clean up after him, the house became a fucking mess, and thanks to meds he never wanted to be on in the first place, he had no longer cared.

  Now, with the house back in shape, he moved outside. He was full of energy. He tingled. The more he accomplished, the more energy he had. He raked. He called a lawn service and arranged to have all the brush rimming the fence line cleared from his property over the next weekend. All of the trees would need to be trimmed back too. It looked unkempt. Plus, he wanted a clear line of sight. Standing in sunlight again, looking at the corner of the yard where Bucky had been killed, he realized the feeling scratching at the back of his mind. An old friend who hadn’t come around in a while: anger.

  Chapter 4

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  Lindsay Clark’s thighs burned from the ready stance. The white smock she wore was thick and heavy and perspiration pooled around her mesh helmet, and she felt it begin to slide around her face, like a scuba mask that did not have a proper seal. It made her think of the beach. No, concentrate, she thought, as she parried another attack. Stop wishing this to be over and do what you came here to do.

  She lunged with her foil, but her opponent parried, and just as quickly launche
d a riposte over the top of her blade. She lifted her elbow and the tip of his blade glanced off the bell guard and past her mask. That was a close one. She retreated to gather herself. They say fencing is the chess of sports. As she shuffled back, she thought perhaps she should have taken a chess class first.

  This fencing match had been three minutes, maybe four, but it felt like an hour. Her thighs burned. Her shoulder carrying the foil ached. The opponent she had been paired up with in class, a man probably ten years younger than her thirty, had fifty pounds on her and a swimmer’s build. Was he even sweating?, she wondered. It was hard to tell beneath all the gear. All she could see was his lean, muscular torso, draped in a smock like hers and topped with a wire-mesh mask.

  He was a very athletic, aggressive fencer. He smacked the tip of her blade over and over, trying to rattle her. Intimidate her. He feinted twice to throw her off her rhythm, but she did not take the bait.

  On the first night of class, the instructor addressed the students: “In fencing, you are hardwired to be one of two things: an attacker or a defender. It’s natural, it’s inevitable, and whichever you are reveals itself quickly. So play to your strengths.” But playing defense was not why she took the class. Every clash, every unmistakable metallic shing that split the air, reminded her of the hours and hours spent mesmerized by the black-and-white movies. Flynn and Fairbanks, the swashbucklers. They were beautiful, they were graceful, but most important, they each got their point across.

  Something buzzed on her hip, beneath the smock. She had forgotten to remove her cellphone from the pocket of her sweatpants. She hesitated. Even through her inscrutable wire mesh mask, her opponent must have sensed her distraction. He lunged forward. She panicked and thrust her foil forward without thinking. In a last-ditch effort, she turned her wrist outward to try to twirl his blade away in a counter-six motion, but he mirrored her movement, and the tip of his blade went under hers. For a split second, their blade tips twirled around each other in a graceful orbit, then he plowed forward into her.