A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  He could see the ad copy now.

  It was an A4 page design that depicted a sledgehammer sealed under glass. The words I KICK ASS FOR THE LORD were burned along the length of the tool’s wooden handle. Above the image, in a distinctive font that really made the lettering jump off the page—

  (“Come on, Robert, you really got to make this one pop,” was how the marketing team always put it)

  —was written:

  BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.*

  The asterisk, of course, related to a thin line of disclaimer text at the bottom of the page.

  *Assurance is not guaranteed. Guess you’ll just have to have a little faith, huh?

  Had this advertisement been real and the sledgehammer within reach, Robert would have thrown his fist through the glass and yanked it into his hands by now. He longed to feel its weight in his arms, to grip the inscribed handle so tight his knuckles turned white.

  And he’d swing it, he’d swing it hard, and he’d do it for the both of them. Him and the girl.

  We need saving.

  He had been taking a photo of an infant monkey with a banana in its mouth when the Swedish couple had been bombarded; their screams changed something in the animal. It assessed him with new eyes. Moments before, as he gave it the fruit to chew on, he’d been its best friend. Now he was the enemy. A threat. Something that could, yes, provide it the food and drink as it demanded, but which could also threaten and hurt. Robert had felt a ping of guilt as the infant glared at him, seeming betrayed. He had, after all, witnessed similar expressions on his daughter’s face.

  That primal urge to seek safety sent his legs into a sprint. His aim was to disappear beyond the tree line and into the cover on the opposite side, but he tripped on an exposed root just before reaching his goal. His hat fell from his head, exposing the tufts of his graying hair. The shadow from the encroaching jungle made the sand here much cooler than that back in the war zone. It was almost soothing. Whatever relief he felt was short-lived, as a splish-splash of scat sprinkled over him. Robert didn’t allow himself to react. His body stiffened and he buried his face in crook of his forearm. Monkeys leaped from the trees above, as fluid and graceful as flowing water, and passed over his unmoving form.

  Robert kept his prayers to himself.

  And then there had been the blood.

  The part of his brain that dictated his logic condemned him for not seeking refuge on the boat, for not trying to save those who were under attack. It confirmed in him what he’d perhaps always known but never admitted to: that he was yellow.

  It was an expression his father, when he was alive, had often used in reference to his drinking buddies—those of them who hadn’t enlisted in the army. “They’re yellah,” he’d say in his clipped Kansas accent, which Robert had made a concerted effort to shake off. “We live in the Air Capital of the World, and some of these guys haven’t ever stepped inside a hanger. Sedgwick County’s a breedin’ ground for cowards.” He would fix his glare on his son, lean forward and caress his cheek in a manner that spoke of both comfort and threat. “You ain’t yellah, are you, Robert?”

  It was then, as he lay there playing possum, that his skin had begun to itch.

  Yeah, I think I am.

  His ex-wife also shared this sentiment. And she’d been right, even then. He hadn’t had the balls to tell her that he was drifting. When she asked if he still loved her, he’d said yes. Robert’s guilt was deep and bloodied. That didn’t stop him from putting his hands on the legs of the women who slipped in through his car door and sat on the leather seat next to him. He was constantly shocked to find how sad they were. Yet this was why he could trust them: they were his mirrors. Robert was always trying to tell himself that nah-hhh, cheating’s just an elaborate form of masturbation—love’s where it counts. Another lie. He was sure it would end the way he wanted, amicably and without notice, though it didn’t. He got caught and it ended the way it should have, with his wife busting open his face.

  “Coward,” was what she called him.

  When he was running from the beach—forcing himself through the jungle like a slow-moving blade through flesh—and saw the girl near the tree, the part of himself that he hated the most reared its head.

  Redeem yourself, you fat fuck.

  This was why his sweaty arms were pinning her against the bark, shielding her vulnerable body from the eyes of the monkeys in the canopy.

  Take me! Take me!

  There’s little in me that’s worth saving anyway.

  The girl writhed under his grip. “Sh-shhhh, sweetheart. Don’t move. They’ll see you.”

  Her beat of stillness was a distraction that worked. She crouched to the side and drove her elbow into his crotch. Roberts swooned, breathless, as liquid pain seared through his lower half. By the time he landed on his knees with an almighty guffaw, almost all of the color had drained from the burst capillaries on his cheeks. The girl stumbled away.

  “No.” Gasp. “Stay still! I’m here to—”

  Help you, Robert wanted to say, but the nausea from the blow snatched him up again and wouldn’t let go. The sudden urge to vomit was consuming. He grabbed one of the tree roots and began to drag himself back onto his feet.

  Robert saw the girl. She had plucked a fallen tree branch from the among the deadfall to defend herself with, only to have it crumble into mulch in her hands, spilling white caterpillars down the front of her blood-speckled singlet top. Her fingernails began to scratch at the insects, popping and smearing them, yet tearing up her skin in the attempt.

  Robert began to feel the phantom sensations again, those bedbugs that lurked deep down in his flesh. The hairs on his arms stood on end, revealing the threadwork of white scars they had left behind. He knew they were still there, somewhere inside him, even though he couldn’t see them. They were building tunnels through his bones, waiting until it was dark again, and only then, once he’d finally caved in to his fatigue and fallen asleep, would they rise. It was horrible the way they burrowed up through the pores in his skin and danced. Robert had no idea how they managed to survive, but they had. The evidence was right there, in the echo of their bites. They were as immune to the pesticides he’d doused them in as they were to his limitless begging.

  They had flared just enough to remind him that they were still there—

  (Ha. As if I could ever forget!)

  —and then vanished. Their electricity fled him and he almost collapsed in an anemic faint. Hands of darkness massaged his head, threatening to knead him into sleep. However, they disappeared just as quickly as they had come when he saw the monkey drop out of the canopy and land on the ground behind the girl.

  Robert searched inside him, through the burning flares of pain, and found speech.

  “Watch out!”

  Amity sensed the presence behind her as the last of the repulsive caterpillars peeled off her skin. Those that had survived her assault writhed against the leaves between her feet, baking in the sunlight they had tried so hard to avoid.

  She spun around.

  The monkey’s fur was the same hue as the ashes that coated Evans Head during sugarcane burning season—and it stank just as strongly. Saccharine and soil. It was hunched over with its forearms scratching at the ground and its head arched in her direction. Were it to stand, Amity was sure it would stretch over a yard in height.

  Its mouth was as wide as its face. Teeth protruded. She could tell that it was roaring at her, and the sound she couldn’t hear was RED. And yet, in a way, she could hear it…

  Amity’s body tensed.

  The sound was the growl of wild dogs—echoing, echoing—within a cave.

  She could still see the head bitch now, as threads of rubbery saliva dripped from its jowls. Fleas swarmed through its coat. Even after all these years, the bitch was squared off to leap at her, to bite and tear and covet her bones again, if indeed it had ever stopped.

  The monkey shot at her, sending up a spray of dead leaves behind it. It sl
it through the air, through floating dust mites, twirling bugs, and the day’s first rain that had just started to trickle through the canopy. Amity could see every one of its rippling hairs; the sight seized her chest in preparation for pain. Those beads of water exploded against the monkey’s face as it soared nearer and nearer.

  The lead bitch pounced.

  Amity knew that nothing would soften the blow, but she turned her shoulder to it on instinct. Needle claws rooted in her skin and dragged slashes through her flesh as gravity bore the monkey to the ground.

  Until that moment, she’d never known what real pain was like. Not really.

  It had been so many years since the day her eardrums exploded that the memory of the agony had dimmed. Then, of course, there had been the time she’d lost her footing in a school-run yoga class and landed on her tailbone. How she had cried—the ache was incredible. Her friends, all of whom had speech impediments of varying degrees, had huddled around her in their leotards and tried to help her. When one girl tried to haul Amity to her feat, a scream had filled the hall, stopping all in their tracks. At the time she’d thought, It can’t get worse than this, except maybe childbirth.

  But she was wrong. Real pain hit you hard, and it didn’t act alone.

  It had conspirators. Spiteful memories that smashed at her from every angle.

  The lead bitch biting her leg.

  Bright blood on her fingers as she pulled her hands from her ears.

  Her father’s coffin being lowered into the ground.

  The faces of the leotard-wearing students huddled around her, their large foreheads bulbous moons threatening to tumble to the earth and crush her alive.

  There was the man in the old gas mask; his unheard words fogged the eye glass.

  Yes, there was all of this pain too.

  The monkey hit the ground and revolved around to attack again. She kicked it in the throat with her foot. There was heat in the impact, in its soft gullet. It revolted her.

  Got you, you fucker.

  But the monster was quick. Its eyes darted with frightening intelligence.

  Christ, what do I have that it wants so bad? I’ve got nothing, she wanted to tell it. Instead, she roared back at it, hoping to scare it away. No luck.

  It leaped again but didn’t get far. A slab of brown rock thumped down on the back of its neck, forcing it against the jungle floor in a spray of red. It twitched under the weight, kicking at the air in frantic jabs. It spasmed one final time and then settled. Dead.

  Panting and oblivious to her own bleeding, Amity slumped against the roots of the old man tree and watched the stranger in the Hawaiian shirt, who had appeared from nowhere to save her life, reach his soiled hand out in her direction.

  I’m so sorry for hurting you, she wished she could say. The humiliation was instantaneous. I’m sorry I doubted you. Only then did the tears begin to flow.

  The stranger from the boat wrapped his arms around her. Safe. Amity pressed her face against his sweat-soaked floral print. She longed to speak the words she wanted to say, yet wouldn’t.

  Thank you. Thank you.

  Amity felt the man tense against her. Through a stunned blur of tree, earth and rain, she saw the shapes dropping from the canopy and landing around her. They plopped to the ground—one, two, three. Exploding bombs of hair and teeth scuttling toward them.

  The man’s mouth wrote a single word for her reading.

  Run.

  The shock of the attack stripped Amity and the man of their sense of direction. They were sprinting now, hoping against hope that the path they were carving through the jungle would lead them back to the beach.

  Amity called out to her brother in her head, and the name ricocheted off the interior of her skull. Her pulse hammered through every limb. Sharp leaves whipped against her face. A bright orange bird shot up from behind a bush and crashed into a thicket of flowers, exploding dusty pollen in their faces.

  We’re going the wrong way, cautioned a voice in Amity’s head. I just fucking know it.

  It was getting darker. The canopy was so thick that even the rain struggled to touch the ground. She glanced over her shoulder and watched the monkeys hurtle from tree to tree in a sloppy choreography of luck and dexterity. They were dark with blood.

  The man’s hand gripped around her wrist.

  You’ve got to slow down, please-please-please.

  Amity’s feet were beginning to drag, despite the adrenaline forcing her onward. It came without warning…

  There was a sudden dazzle of sunshine and clouds. Weightlessness. One of the monkeys dove through open space beside her head, waving its arms, clutching at nothing. She watched the man fall ahead of her, his Hawaiian shirt billowing. The raindrops were caught in conflicting currents of wind and glimmered—shooting stars. Amity’s stomach lifted into her throat.

  The ground had vanished from beneath their feet and now they were plummeting off a cliff face with the peaks of trees rushing up to greet them. White birds flashed by, a shimmer of hope before the impact.

  10

  Koh Mai Phaaw’s beach was a red-and-white checkerboard. The monkeys dragged themselves back into the trees, exhausted by the game. Coke bottles were wrapped up in their tails, tinkling against the branches as they went. They left their dead behind in puddles of rippling rainwater and bone shards.

  Nobody was mourned.

  Wind blew hard. Air full of kinetic energy. Leaves twirled, fell.

  There was movement in the red water. Susan Sycamore’s bald head, crowned in a halo of pelting rain, hovered above its surface. She blinked, squinting against the sting of bloodied saltwater splashing in her blue eyes. Lightning gashed the sky in a silvery bolt. She was ready.

  Sycamore would miss the ocean. It was home to her now. She stepped from waves that churned with gristle, with meat. The water ran down the curves of her body, beaded off her skin. She could feel it all. Her senses were alive, alive in a way that they had never been before. It all had changed, and she was not who she had once been. Her lurches through the water grew heavier and heavier until she was on the beach, her feet sinking into the sand. Deep breaths, so very calm. Sycamore had waited her life for this moment.

  Her clothes clung to her limbs, weighing her down. She couldn’t believe that there had ever been a time in her life when she had stood in front of mirrors, unsure of what to wear, judging herself so that people she didn’t care about wouldn’t judge her. Changing outfits before leaving the house; asking her husband how she looked, knowing that he would only lie anyway. It made her giggle. The noise sounded foreign in her throat.

  She leaned her head back, exposing the long line of her throat. Her mouth was open. She could feel every drop of rain bursting against her face, drumming against her like the fingers of curious children who knew that she was changed, and that she was to be admired. They touched her almost with a sense of reverence. A stone to be kissed. A face to fear.

  I’m here, she thought. It’s happened.

  The air smelled of ozone and shit. She pulled her head out of the sky with the aid of muscles that had never been used before, muscles that had been loitering near her bones, waiting for the day when all the bullshit would be stripped away. And bullshit was what it was. That other life, all the fools she’d filled her time with. Like the animals that had fled into the trees, Sycamore didn’t mourn those who were dead to her.

  She was hunger. It consumed her.

  The beach was still there. She wasn’t sure when things had gone to hell; it was hard to remember anything anymore. But when the blood had started to spill, turning toward the ocean had come naturally to her, as it always had. It was the right thing to do. There she had been baptized.

  In some distant part of her brain, where there were still a few fraying binds tying her to the other life, an image of the Normandy beaches during the Second World War stirred—black-and-white footage from some late-night television program. Or had it been a film? Something with lots of shaky camera work.
Sycamore didn’t know. All she knew was that the shore looked just like it: intestines and body parts disguising the postcard-perfect stretch of land beneath. She walked among it now. Stopped.

  Her clothes constricted her every move. They repulsed her. It was as though the fabric were woven with poison ivy that stood to make her skin blister and itch. A shiver ran down her spine, igniting nerve endings that had never burned before. She began to weep; it was glorious. Her fingers twitched to life, the knuckles cracking. There was such strength there. The power lifted her hands without the provocation of her brain, made those fingers that had once marked students’ school papers, ruffled her children’s hair, rip at her shirt. It tore with ease. She dropped it between her feet.

  “Get off me! Now. Now. Off—”

  The clasp of her bra eluded her; it was so fickle. Vile. Another little trapping that she’d forced herself to be ruled by. No more. All of that was gone to her now. Swallowed up by the ocean. Given to the storm. She was the shark, and she had no use for it. So she ripped it off her chest, that little clasp flung through the air. Her nipples hardened under the kisses of the rain. A moan began to build inside her.

  “I want. The light.”

  Another bleat of laughter. Snot ran from her nose. Sycamore hooked her thumbs over the waistline of her cutoff jeans and forced them down her legs. “Let me go. Christ, now.” They joined her torn shirt on the sand. She had soiled her underwear at some point, but didn’t care. That was the other woman’s problem, the other woman’s defeat. Sycamore slipped off the panties, those nerves ringing like a series of bells—