Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

  The story about his sick kid was a lie; Eddie was sure of it now. He no longer believed Bill Peters had a kid at all. He was a con man, and Eddie was his patsy. He’d scattered the threads and taken the jug and hidden it somewhere.

  The water would be back soon, and when things were normal, Eddie would walk the neighborhood streets and find him. He wouldn’t threaten his life or punch him—he’d simply walk to his house in the shadows and put a brick through the windshield of his car. Or spray-paint THIEF on his front door. Something to let him know that Eddie knew. Something to keep him looking over his shoulder. Eddie would let a few weeks pass after that and then go back and do it again.

  He stood up and crossed the streambed and found the trail.

  He walked a long time in one direction. He was waiting for the place where the path widened and there were many small rocks and roots, where the runoff from the streets had cut a gully. That would lead to the aluminum railing along the entrance. But he walked so long that he knew he must have been walking in the wrong direction, and so he turned until he’d redoubled his steps and then some but still found nothing. He thought he might just sit down and rest until the sun came up. His legs had lost their strength and he imagined he could see the pulsing cloud of energy as it left him. He walked farther still, and then the trail opened up and he saw the gully. He passed the aluminum rail and stumbled up the hill into the neighborhood streets, and made it home.

  Laura was asleep in the bedroom, but she was only sleeping lightly, and when Eddie came in, she stirred.

  “Where were you?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  And then she was asleep again.

  In the middle of the night, he woke. He’d been dreaming he was walking in the cold. He’d had a sled full of tools, and when the grade steepened, he’d stepped awkwardly, and the sled tipped over.

  There was a clatter in the kitchen, but he couldn’t tell if it was real, or simply an echo from his dream. He walked through the house with the bat raised to his shoulder. The plywood he’d screwed into the window panel was knocked out, but the door was closed and locked.

  In the basement, the drill was out of power. He found some nails, but they were short, and when he hammered the piece back in, they only just bit through. Anyone who tapped on it would knock it out again.

  “You’re making too much noise,” Laura said. She’d come up behind him with a flashlight.

  “I’m not happy with this door. Someone could get in.”

  “You can get into any door if you kick hard enough.”

  “Yeah, but this one’s easier than that. The panel’s no good.” He touched the piece of wood. “Help me move the sofa.”

  They got one of the sofas on its side to fit it through the opening to the kitchen. It slid easier on the linoleum and the armrest met just below the knob.

  “Let me test it,” Eddie said. He unlocked the door.

  “Why did you unlock it?”

  “In case they unlock it.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Whoever. There is no they. This is just in case.”

  He went out the front door and around to the side of the house. The grass was crisp beneath his feet. He’d forgotten to bring the bat, and he stayed close to the brick wall, ducking low when he walked up the driveway. Though it was dark, the sky was filled with starlight. At the back porch he turned the knob and pushed on the door. Even without leaning his shoulder into it, it opened far enough for him to squeeze through. The sofa wasn’t enough weight. “Shit,” he said, coming all the way in.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Laura said.

  He rummaged in the utensil drawer to find the can opener. The cans of beans were in the cupboard, and he opened one and poured its contents into a Tupperware container. Then he placed the empty can on the knob and tried to balance it where it was. With a little piece of tape, he kept it up, but it wouldn’t stay if the knob was turned. If the knob was turned, the can would fall and clatter.

  “Alarm system,” he said, pleased with his bit of engineering.

  “I don’t like this,” Laura told him. “I don’t like the way you’re thinking.”

  Setting up the can had steeled him, though. “Only a coward breaks into a house,” he said. “That’s why alarms work in the first place. The noise scares them off. If they think we’re here, they’ll run.”

  “So why put the couch there?”

  “Why not be overcautious?”

  She smiled at that, but not in the kindest way.

  There was a roll of duct tape in the basement, and he found it and brought it up.

  “You need to sleep,” he said to Laura.

  “For what?”

  “The more you move around, the more you dehydrate.”

  “So, I go to sleep while you set the booby traps?”

  “It’s just a roll of tape.”

  When she was gone, he took the chef’s knife out of the block and held the handle flush with the barrel of the bat. He wound the tape around and around—maybe twenty times—until the blade no longer wobbled when he pressed it with his thumb.

  To avoid the couch and the can alarm, he went out the front door, holding the bat under his arm, with the knife tip pointing forward like a bayonet.

  He wanted to stand out there for a while, to stare into the darkness. There might be men out there, yes, but he was a man, too. If they were dangerous, so was he.

  The starlight made his vision two-dimensional. His head still ached, but it was a dull ache, and he could forget about it. The shadows weren’t as crisp as they should have been; it was possible that the noises he’d heard had been imagined. For instance, right then he thought he heard Mike Sr. and Patty sitting on their porch furniture, and he walked up their steps and put a hand on each patio chair to confirm that it was empty. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was late, and the Davises were probably sleeping.

  He crouched beside his own porch, laying the bat on the ground beside him. He put his fingers into the latticework to keep his balance.

  Then he forced himself to become very still. He even held his breath.

  He could feel someone in the yard. It was similar to the sensation of being watched, but not the same. Though he saw nothing, it was as if they were staring at each other. Going up on the Davises’ deck had exposed him. That had been a blunder, but there was no undoing it now. Staying low, he took the bat and crept to the back of the house. The air around him was as taut as the skin of a balloon, and it made his breathing shallow.

  At once, the feeling changed. The ground beat from the corner of the yard—footfalls coming quickly. Eddie turned and thrust the tip of the bat in front of him, and a great weight met it there and knocked him down and backward. A man stood above him. It was Bill Peters. The bat shook from where it stuck into his chest. The tape around the knife had loosened enough to let it wobble back and forth.

  “Yaah,” Bill Peters yelled like a victory whoop. He pulled at the handle of the bat, but couldn’t get it out. The knife had gone through two of his ribs like a key. He struggled and loosened the tape, and the bat flopped like a fish.

  Eddie pressed himself against the back of the house.

  Bill Peters sat down on his knees, his feet behind him. His head was still bandaged.

  “Whuff,” he said. It was a wheeze, and Eddie thought for a moment he was joking, that his friend Paul would step out from behind the shrubbery and laugh at him about the citizen’s arrest.

  “Wuh wuh,” Bill Peters said. Thick blood obscured his mouth and chin.

  Eddie stood and tried to find his voice. “Where is it?” he said, finally. “Where’d you hide it?”

  Bill Peters stared somewhere past him. His eyes weren’t working.

  “You idiot,” Eddie said. “You bastard. It didn’t belong to me. It belonged to that old woman. You couldn’t get it from her, so you stole it from me. Tell me where it is, you bastard.” He had to stop talking because a sob was clogging his throat.
r />   When his voice came back, it was desperate.

  “Tell me,” he said. He pushed Bill Peters’s shoulder back, and it stayed where it was, askew. “I’ll find your kid,” Eddie pleaded. “If you tell me, I’ll help him.”

  The top half of Bill Peters fell backward and stilled, though his legs continued twitching.

  Eddie was talking, but only softly, as if to himself. “It was hers,” he said. “You stole it.”

  He sat in the grass and swallowed hard, but whatever was lodged in his throat wouldn’t go away. It was a dry, painful swallow.

  The whole great universe of night screamed around him. He could hear it.

  What had he done? What had happened here?

  He loosened the tape around the knife handle and jiggled until the bat came free. Bill Peters’s eyes shone dimly, but his face was a mess of shadow. Eddie flopped his arms above his head and tugged on them to pivot the body. Then he dragged him to the corner of the property where he’d made a pile of yard waste earlier in the summer. The pile was thick with clippings that had begun to rot. Beneath dried daylily stalks were branches from a dogwood he’d pruned, and when he pulled at one, it was connected to everything else. He left Bill Peters and found a shovel, and used the tip of it to try to hollow it out. It was hard work, and he was sweating. He got under Bill Peters’s arms and staggered to get him up and on top of the pile, but the hole he’d made wasn’t deep enough. Eddie covered him with the dirt from around the edges and pulled out a tarp from the side of the house to drape over him. He put stones on the tarp to keep it in place.

  Inside, he used the disinfectant wipes to clean the dirt and blood from his arms and neck and face. His mouth was thick and rough, and his head was rhythmic with pain. He was still sweating. There was a panic in his lungs.

  “Eddie?”

  Laura was in the bedroom. The door was closed.

  He tried to clear his throat. He tried to ignore the jolt that he still felt in his arms—the jolt of Bill Peters’s body slamming into the tip of the bat.

  “I’ll be there in a sec,” he said.

  In the kitchen, he opened a jar of pickled peppers and brought the lip of the glass to his own. The vinegar made the sides of his tongue curl, and he tried not to gag, tipping the jar until the peppers bumped against his nose. When he’d drunk it all, he poured half the peppers into his hand and chewed them.

  He got into bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin. “Why do you smell like that?” Laura asked.

  “I ate some peppers.”

  “What were you doing outside?”

  “Just checking.”

  He lay there and tried to concentrate on keeping his head from throbbing. Before a race in college, he would sit and envision the blood in his body swirling to his arms and legs. It would calm him. He couldn’t get his blood to move down from his temples, though.

  “You’re holding your head,” Laura said.

  “It hurts a little.”

  He tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Laura was still watching him.

  “There’s another jar of peppers,” he said. “You can drink the juice. It’s not that bad.”

  “That’s what you did? Yuck.”

  “It’ll help your head.”

  “Mine’s not bad. It doesn’t hurt when I’m asleep.”

  “You were asleep?”

  “Yeah. Until you came back inside.”

  He could close his eyes and see the night. He could feel the jolt in his arms. “Yeah,” he said. “I was outside.”

  He slept, and in his dream it was deeply cold—the type of fiercely bright cold that brought an unwavering knowledge of his body, that he wouldn’t last there long, dressed as thinly as he was in his dream. The beauty of the landscape was a solitude that enveloped him. He began to run, and as he did, the sweat started coming. He could feel it beneath his arms and on his upper lip. He could feel it at his temples. But he couldn’t stop—couldn’t even slow himself down. If he stopped, the sweat would freeze, and he would die. The only thing to do was run faster. He was pulling a sled. On the sled was Bill Peters’s body. There were sirens in the woods.

  Laura shook him awake.

  “Eddie,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re tossing.”

  “Am I sweating?” he asked.

  She put her hand on his forehead. “You’re dry.”

  Eddie ran a hand through his hair. She was right. He touched the collar of his shirt. His neck was dry, too.

  “I feel it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m out of breath.”

  “Stay still,” she told him.

  “The water’s got to come back soon,” he said. He got up and stood beside the bed. “Don’t they plan for this? Isn’t this why we pay taxes? Why we elect people?”

  “There’s a cop right up the road,” she said.

  “No,” he said, the word escaping him before he had a chance to pen it back.

  “The cop we passed with Mike.”

  “So what?”

  “So, we’re safe. There are people around, is all I’m saying.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  When she was asleep, he went very quietly out the front door again. Around back, he took the tarp off Bill Peters’s body, tugging on his arms until his legs dropped from the pile.

  With small backward steps, he pulled him across the grass. The body was heavy, and it strained his back and knee. On the sidewalk, he stopped, even though it was open and clear for anyone to see. His eyes burned, and maybe he was crying. He checked with his fingers, but his fingers were numb. If he left the body right there on the sidewalk, it would be found by the time the sun was up. He would be questioned, but there was nothing he couldn’t deny. Why would he leave a body in front of his own house? He’d been in bed with his wife. Laura would say that that was true.

  The knife handle stuck out from Bill Peters’s chest, and Eddie used the corner of his shirt to wipe it down.

  What else had he touched? Bill Peters’s skin? He didn’t know if fingerprints could be left on skin.

  A couple of houses down, there was an abandoned house. It looked just like Eddie’s, except there were county papers taped to the door and the lawn was in poor repair. It had been empty since they’d moved there, five years ago.

  He dragged the body down the sidewalk and around the back of the abandoned house. There was a hedge that divided the yard from the neighbor’s. It was six feet tall and full of long waxy leaves. Eddie pushed Bill Peters’s body beneath it, and then he lifted each leg, rolling it over so that the body flipped onto its stomach and then onto its back again deeper into the hedge. He was in there pretty good. No one ever came around this side of the house.

  On his way back, there was motion on the sidewalk. It was two people, a man and a woman. They had backpacks on and a little girl between them. She had a pack on of her own.

  As they approached, Eddie stopped. They hadn’t noticed him yet and he looked down at his body to see if he was visible.

  “Where are you going?” he said, as calmly as if had he been saying hello.

  As they passed, the father pulled his daughter close in against his hip. They didn’t look at Eddie. They used each step to put themselves between the world and the little girl.

  “Stay with us,” Eddie heard the father say sharply.

  Eddie awoke when the sun was high and hot in the bedroom window. Laura was already up. She was in the kitchen, squinting into the light, but it wasn’t from being groggy.

  “My head hurts more now,” she said. “Maybe we can find that guy with the wheelbarrow. Maybe he has extra.”

  “Drink the juice from the peppers first.”

  “That’s not for drinking.”

  “Here.” He took the second pepper jar and held his fingers over the opening so that only the juice drained into a glass. It made about half a cup.

  “Pinch your nose,” he said.

  “We can go down to the stream an
d get water. We can boil it first.”

  “Forget about the stream.”

  “Why?”

  Eddie hesitated. Laura knowing about the dry streambed seemed worse than the dry streambed itself. “There’s barely any water in it,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? Some is enough.”

  “Listen to me. I don’t want to do it. There’s nothing down there for us.”

  “Then I’m going this time,” she said.

  He caught her wrist and squeezed.

  “Ow,” she said. “Okay.”

  “It’s dangerous,” Eddie said. “Even when there’s not an outage. There are homeless people down there. They’ll be desperate.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Eddie. People walk their dogs there.”

  “You’re not an idiot.”

  “If you say so.” She rubbed her wrist as if it were cold. “I’m going to have a mark here. So thanks for that.”

  She went around by the stove where he couldn’t see her.

  “My parents are going to wonder why we didn’t try to come,” she said.

  “No they won’t,” he said. “That’s absurd.”

  He heard her clinking dishes.

  “You’re putting those away?” he called, not moving.

  “Well, they’re dry.”

  She began to sing. She had a low, somber voice, and when she used it with any seriousness, it could make Eddie weak. Her previous life apart from him was still so mysterious—a childhood he could never really know, textures he could only touch the surface of. The singing brought it out of her somehow.

  It took him a moment to recognize the song, she was singing. “Idiot Wind.” It was a dig at him, he knew, but he loved that song. And she knew he loved it. He’d played it for her—had introduced her to the album, in fact—that first year that they’d met. It was the deepness of her voice, though, not the words, that touched him. The words were nothing. He knew this about the way he loved her—that there were times when it was the vessel, not what shifting matter it contained, he needed most.