by Unknown
The gun seemed to grow heavier in his hand. The old metal had warmed in his fingers and he raised it, putting it to his temple in a gesture he was not even aware of as he watched the neighbor piss on a patch of dirt that had once been home to lilies and gladioli.
The gun made a hard chink as it tapped against the glass of the window. The sound made Lou blink but he found himself fascinated by the very fact of the gun: the way the sun gave the metal a hard twinkle that sparked up into his eyes; the heat of it in his hand.
“Bang, you’re dead you little sonofabitch.”
The man out on his lawn jerked around as if he had heard the words. Lou could almost imagine that the bullet had puffed right past the bastard’s head, scaring him senseless. A grin creased his sagging cheeks and a jagged laugh spilled from his mouth.
“Got ya! Take that you dirty rat!”
The man lit a cigarette, eyed the length of the street for a few more seconds, hitched up his greasy and too-long denim shorts (why they wore them that way Lou would never know), and ambled back toward his front door. Lou tapped the gun against the glass and wondered if there were any bullets in it; if he could hit the man from where he stood, if he dared … and then it was too late. The front door of the house opened and closed and Lou could almost smell the ghost of homemade fudge and hear old forties torch songs playing sweet and low. Then he was alone once more with the seedy street and the unyielding sunlight.
Lou let the gun fall back to his side. It hit his hip as it did so and a yelp of pain sprang from his mouth. Then guilt over the direction of his thoughts - killing a man while he stood in his own yard, what had he been thinking? - set in. He stepped back from the window, allowing the curtain to fall shut. A puff of gray dust drifted upwards and he sneezed.
The curtains had once been plush red velvet. Now they were mostly rags. The little color that remained in the material had long since faded to a sickly pink, streaked with the occasional suggestion of coral. The outline of the window could be seen even when the room was pitch black; the curtains were lighter in that area and seemed to glow with an inner light. Dust lay in the creases; the shreds still clinging to the rod were festooned with cobwebs.
The whole house had an air of abandonment. It could have been left behind years before for all the care it showed. The rugs were threadbare and dirty. Dust lay thick on the floor, undisturbed except for the tracks of Lou’s heavy boots.
Out on the street there was a slight noise and once more Lou’s liver-spotted hands twitched at the curtains. It was Bessie Reynolds, walking home from her job as a cashier at the Wham Bam Burger down on Main and Thirteenth. Lou watched her walk for a moment, watched the heavy thighs rubbing together under brown polyester and the ass lifting and falling like two oversized pistons, and he raised the gun again.
“I would be doing you a favor.”
Bessie plodded on, sweat running down her face. Lou could almost taste it. On the heels of that thought was another: that when Sally had lain beneath him she had always laughed when drops of his sweat had plopped onto her face or breasts. Or she had until that Mama’s boy had come along, anyway. The memory of Sally’s face, upturned and filled with wanting, made his fingers tighten on the trigger.
The boom was very loud. For one second it filled the entire world. Then it died, replaced by an odd, high ringing. Lou’s mouth sagged open. Out on the street, Bessie Reynolds took two more steps, teetered, and crashed to a halt on the broken sidewalk.
“Oh damn,” Lou muttered. Hysterical laughter welled up, ran over. He rocked himself back and forth, tears streaming from his eyes as the man in Lisa Nelson’s old house came running out, along with a few of his equally useless friends.
The men surrounded Bessie. There were yells and one stood, sticking his hand up to his ear. Lou knew he was calling the cops. The fact that a person could use the phone without having to go through all the motions that had once made the invention so special - the dialing of the big dial, the sound of it whirring as it slid back into place, the sitting down in a chair with the cord dangling from one end of the receiver, the wire running into its snug little nest in the wall, infuriated Lou.
One man screamed and the rest scattered, running like chickens before a storm. Lou was laughing again without being aware of it. The hot lead had shattered the glass of his window and tiny, sharp shards had slammed into his face, hands and chest. Blood traced the furrows of his forehead and trickled from the corner of his mouth where he had bitten his lip, but he did not notice.
Bessie twitched and heaved, got to her feet and then fell again. That time she landed half on the sidewalk and half on the street. She had lost one of her safety-approved nonskid shoes, and her stocking-clad foot looked terribly pale and small on the concrete.
The gun clicked and then clicked again. Lou shook it, stared down the barrel in puzzlement and then realized it was empty.
“Bullets in the attic,” he spoke aloud, and walked across the pellets and bits of glass, crunching them beneath his boot heels as he made for the spot in the hallway where the door swung down to reveal a ladder that gave access to the attic.
Dimly, he was aware that there were yells coming from outside, that there was some major commotion going on, but he was too focused on getting the hook that held the attic ladder in place to notice. When the latch finally gave, rust flakes pattered down and the smell of something both old and sweet filled the house.
Lou stood there looking up, wondering how many years it had been since he had visited that room at the top of the stairs. When he put his foot on the first step it gave way beneath him and he almost fell on his face in the middle of the hallway. He stood looking at the spongy, rotted wood, forgetting what it was he had been after in the attic.
There was a loud banging on his front door and Lou flinched.
“Crazy old bastard shot Bessie!” came a yell, and Lou put his foot on the second step up, feeling the material of his dirty green slacks stretch taut. Then came a long, tearing sound. For a moment, he felt his heart almost explode from his chest. He had thought that the ripping was the stair letting go and found himself terrified of falling. He could break a hip or an arm. He was not a young man anymore. He could feel the frailty in his bones at the prospect of hitting the floor. Another flurry of loud bangs from the direction of the living room made him move.
The attic was not as dark as he had thought it might be. His head popped up through the door and he sneezed. The dust was even thicker here than in the downstairs rooms. And the smell … it was an odd smell: the mingled odors of dried flowers and mothballs lying over something else, something once ripe and warm but now faded to a brief memory.
Sounds in the lower floor of the house made Lou stop and stare down at the floor in bewilderment. His eyes flickered across the sheeted bulk of a couch that they had bought at a yard sale, their first purchase for the new house. He closed his eyes, remembering the way the sunlight had picked out the drops of sweat on the thin brown hair that lay on Sally’s arms and the freckles that dusted her upturned nose.
He had come home once unexpectedly from work to find her lazing in the sun on the backyard. Little Lou had been a bare bump in her belly then and he had stood there watching her for long minutes, watching the tick of the pulse in her throat, the shape of her fingers on the ice-choked glass that she held against her wrist (an old cooling trick that had never seemed to work for him), and the blue veins traced across her lids.
He had never been able to imagine what it was women did all day. He had always had some vague notion that the housework and cooking and shopping occupied all their time. Then he had come home to find her in hair rollers and a robe, picking over the destroyed remains of the breakfast table, sipping Bloody Marys and eating salmon on tiny points of toast with the other wives of the street. After that, any time the factory called a half day he stayed away until it was his normal time to return home; standing there watching her during those moments had frightened him. She had not looked like his wif
e in those moments; she had looked like someone else entirely.
The attic was explosively hot and bird droppings smeared many of the sheets that Sally had always put over the things he’d hauled up there. The sheets were yellowed and gray with dust. The sunlight that came in from the one tiny, open space where there had once been a window seemed too strong, too brilliant, and he wished he had thought to nail a board over it years ago.
The gun fell from his nerveless fingers as he walked past the silent, blinded objects under the sheets. Once upon a time he had known where everything in the room was, what lay under every single sheet. Sally had wanted to throw everything out but he would not hear of it, one more thing that always set them to arguing. He ran his hands along the covers as he walked through the eddies of dust that rose around his feet.
The wardrobe was made of solid oak. He pulled the sheet away from it and ran one finger down the once gleaming surface, feeling the dried out quality of the wood. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, the good kind that stood six feet high and was made to hold an entire family’s clothes if need be. The doors were solidly hinged and padlocked closed; he knew that the wood was so heavy it would absorb the hardest blows. Or the loudest screams.
He felt tears crackle at the corners of his eyes. He could feel himself being transported back in time, back to the day he had come home to find that note on the table.
The sun had poured like honey through the kitchen windows that day. The whole house had still hummed with Sally’s womanly energy and he had looked up at the sound of a footstep overhead.
Lou wiped his eyes and reached onto the top of the wardrobe for the key to the lock. He had picked the lock up just that afternoon at the hardware store, he recalled as he worked the orange-mottled key into the bottom of the lock. Some kids had been stealing gas from the lawnmowers and he had been determined not to be a victim again.
Sally had been in front of the wardrobe, bent over, busy stuffing her winter clothes into the suitcase at her feet. When she had seen him, her face had gone from fearful to angry.
“You do not know what it is like to always be a prisoner of this damn house! To never be allowed out!” Sally had yelled. “I am more than your wife dammit, I am a human being and I want… I want… ”
He had known what she wanted. She wanted what all the wives suddenly seemed to want. She wanted to run around without a bra and sleep with any and every man who came down the pike. She wanted to go back to college and neglect her responsibilities to her family.
Sally was curled up in a fetal position around Little Lou. The dress she had worn that day had been a bright, happy blue; now it fluttered from her bones in strips, and Little Lou’s baby teeth poked out from his jawbone like those tiny squares of gum he had been so fond of chewing on.
“Holy shit,” someone said from behind Lou.
Lou could not turn around to see who was speaking. He was looking at Sally. He wanted to tell her he finally understood what she’d meant when she said she had been a prisoner of that house. He himself had been one. He wanted to ask if she remembered the day they had gone for ice cream, driving along the old highway out by Sander’s Creek until dusk had hung heavy across the late evening and how, when they had stopped, she had slow-danced to a sad little ballad coming from the car’s radio right there in the high grass while frogs and crickets sang. He wanted to tell her he remembered exactly how her skirt had swung out around her tiny waist like a pink bell. How the thought of her dancing out there under the shadowed sky, in the soft amber of his low-beamed headlights, always made him want to cry.
Hands grabbed at him. He could feel the arthritis in his elbows and knees gearing up; soon it would be a dull flare that would roar into pain, but at that moment the hurt in his heart was too high to give way to the physical.
Voices rolled over Lou. He heard them but ignored them. He was drifting away, moving away like the sea from the shore, in soft, undulating waves. He was twenty-two and freshly married, wide-eyed and ready to start a family with pretty little Sally Johnson, now Williams, and they were looking at the neat house that sat on a tiny and well-clipped yard. Her pink, polished fingers were trembling on the sleeve of his second-best jacket and he knew the realtor was looking at them; they should not appear to want it too badly or they would never get a good deal but just then Sally spoke, her voice thrumming with passion:
“Oh Lou, I could stay right here forever!”
THE BOOK OF LOVE
BY NICK SCORZA
Imust write this quickly. There is not much time before she overtakes me. I say ‘she’ because part of my crumbling mind still clings to the memory of my dear Catherine, but what pursues me is not of the fair sex, or any sex – it is old, and immeasurably foul.
It is all because of the book, that accursed book I came across in my employ as a dealer in antiquities. I did not choose the profession, but rather awoke to find myself immersed in it – being something of an antiquity myself, even as a young man. I loved all old things, whether from the past century or the past millennium. I was mad for them, but books I prized above all else. Is there anything more wonderful than a book? It is a treasure trove – the wealth and wisdom of the dead preserved for the living as no hoary pharaoh could have hoped for. In books I sought the same commune with things greater than myself that others sought from the church. To me, any book was a bible.
Alas, this love was not enough to sustain me.
My family being of comfortable means, I pursued my education to the fullest extent, but sought the classics themselves, not the busy disciplines of law or medicine. I pursued books and objects first as a private collector. When I tired of something, I sold it, and found I could supplement an already sufficient income in this way, so as to afford even greater and rarer delights. For years this was my life, and my only social circle was a small cadre of like-minded men.
My friend Mr. Charles Denton was to furnish the seed of my destruction, in a form fairer than any my imagination could supply. How strange that I, who had found joy only in the tomes of my ancestors, could be so bewitched by sweet Catherine Denton, the young sister of my dear friend. She was the opposite of all I had loved previously, a bright bundle of life, with joy radiating from her rosy pink face and intricate curls of auburn hair. This was the youth I had spurned in a life chasing treasures of the past, given form to tantalize me. When I met her, introduced in an offhand manner while Denton and I discussed matters relevant to our acute bibliomania, I suddenly realized the wasted weight of my years.
I had read much of love in Petrarch and Ovid, Shakespeare and Donne. I had thought that storied ‘marriage of true minds’ was something I would never experience directly, save for the union of my mind with the texts of the past masters. Now it was before me and so full of life. I longed to join my soul to Catherine’s, and to share all that it is possible to share with another living thing!
I called more frequently on Mr. Denton. It did not take my friend long to guess my intention, and he was not pleased. I could not understand where the man’s objections came from – I was his trusted friend, and in a position to provide his sister with an excellent life. My family name was not so distinguished as his, perhaps, but my income was a good deal larger. As for the disparity in age – I was older than Denton, and much older still than his sister – it was really not such an unusual thing, and an established husband could offer many things to a young woman that a mere youth could not.
But Denton was fixed against the match, for reasons that were bewildering to me. Miss Catherine herself, in those few moments I could arrange to be alone with her, laughed coyly at my remarks and seemed mildly pleased by my attention, with a touch of the shyness with which nature has endowed her sex. Still, the very act of speaking to her threw my age, my faltering manner, my general unloveliness of form into sharp relief. Next to her, I felt like a withered scarecrow, my gnarled claws grasping toward a light and life I did not deserve. Still, I resolved that I would make my dream come true. I sought
her father’s permission.
The old man, who smelled faintly of brandy and the horse track, was all too happy to marry his daughter off to a gentleman of means. Catherine’s mother had died when Catherine was young, so there was one less person to convince. I made my case and her father accepted, resolving to inform Catherine forthwith. The very next day, I received young Denton, unexpected, at my apartments.
“Whatley, I’ve come to ask you to abandon this foolish pursuit. My sister will bring you no happiness. She is delicate and unused to company…”
I let Denton continue his little speech, though my blood boiled and I longed to throw him out on his ear. When he finished, I rose and mustered all of my dignity.
“I assure you that my intentions toward Catherine are nothing but honorable. Who better to be with her than I, who am also unused to company and do not seek it out? She will not be required to be some society hostess – you know I have no taste for that. For God’s sake, Denton, why aren’t you happy for us?”
“My father gave her the news yesterday evening, and she wept. She wept, Whatley, at the thought of marriage! I love my sister, but in some ways she is a pitiable creature. I think sometimes she is not meant for any man.”
“I will hear no more of this! I love her, and the matter is decided. You have no say in it. I must thank you not to call again.”
I immediately formed the worst sort of depraved suspicions about Denton’s feelings for his sister, and I resolved to watch them both closely for evidence of any wrongdoing. I was troubled by the idea of Catherine weeping at our engagement, but I felt it was most likely the usual youthful anxieties, and tried to put it out of my mind.