A bolt of pure white-hot pain slammed through Ernie’s skull, and he screamed.
By the time his co-workers returned from lunch, Ernie was back at his desk, working. He’d cleaned himself up, flushed the remains of the bee-thing and the brain-thing down the toilet and used an entire roll of paper towel to wipe up the blood and gore all over the bathroom. He’d found a bandage in the bathroom’s first aid kit and applied it to the wound at his temple.
His face was still pale, and dark splotches underlined his eyes. But the trembling had stopped and the headache was receding. “Hi, Rose,” he said, as she passed his cubicle. “How was lunch?”
“Fine,” she said, barely looking at him.
She kept walking, and he called after her. “Hey, Rose. Maybe tomorrow, if you want to, we can go to that Chinese place you were talking about.”
She paused, cocked her head at him. He smiled at her, and the smile looked strangely fragile, too fragile for her to say the harsh words she was prepared to say.
Instead, she said, “Okay. If you want. Sure.”
And the rest of the day passed normally for Ernie, and his co-workers would talk during the following days and weeks about how strangely emotional he had become, and how his desk didn’t seem quite as neat and how he’d thrown away the little alarm clock, and how he would laugh or burst into tears at the least little thing.
From Here to Oblivion
Henry Black was bringing the first beer of the day to his lips when it all came clear to him. Everything had reached a head, all the misery and doubt and heartache, and he suddenly knew. There was nothing for it but to kill himself.
“That’s it,” he said. “Damnit, that’s it. It’s so simple.”
Larry looked up from the other end of the empty bar. “How’s that, Henry? You need another one already?”
Henry shook his head, raised the glass to the bartender. “Just talking to myself, Larry.” He downed his beer and dropped a five on the bar. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Leaving kinda early, ain’t you?”
“Things to do.”
“Okay then. See ya tomorrow.”
“I reckon not. I’m gonna go kill myself now.”
Larry grinned. “Okay, bud. Good luck with that.”
Henry left feeling better than he’d felt in months. Outside the bar, with the day fading into cool gray and a light breeze ruffling his hair, he felt the thrilling prospect of freedom, only a few short steps away.
“Why didn’t I think of it before?” he asked himself. “It’s so simple. Just kill myself, and it’s all over.”
The day before, he’d celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday, all alone. Even if he hadn’t decided to kill himself, he knew that he wouldn’t be there a month from now—rent was overdue, and he couldn’t raise even the three hundred bucks it would cost him. He’d hocked his car two months ago for five-fifty and that carried him for a while, but even that money was gone now.
The Dew Drop Inn was at the corner of a major intersection, and the tail-end of rush hour traffic roared by, horns honking and music thumping. Pedestrians strolled to and from the downtown shopping area. Banging and clanging echoed from the muffler shop at the far corner of the intersection. Everything smelled like gasoline.
Henry had no connection to any of it. His life was done. He was a corpse still walking around, he realized that now. He had been for some time.
He glanced down the street, thick with speeding traffic, and saw a semi-truck barreling down in his direction. One of those flat-front kinds, hauling a twenty-foot trailer, going about 40 miles per hour.
The traffic light was green. No reason for the truck to slow down.
Henry took a deep breath and stepped out into the street.
The roar of the semi’s horn rattled his skull. He felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes as the driver of the semi slammed on his brakes with an impossibly loud hissing sound, and rubber squealed.
The truck was so close Henry could see the driver’s panicked face, twisted with effort, wrenching his steering wheel hard to the right.
The trailer behind it snapped like the tail of a fish. The front bumper of the truck missed Henry by inches.
The truck careened onto the sidewalk and smashed into the brick front of the Dew Drop Inn and Henry saw with perfect, horrifying clarity the driver of the truck, tossed like a bundle of wet laundry, smashing through the windscreen in an explosion of glass.
The driver’s head bashed open against the brick and his broken body dropped, twitching, to the sidewalk.
Henry stared, mouth open.
hind He heard screams, screeching tires, steam hissing out of the truck’s smashed radiator. Metal groaned against concrete as the trailer teetered and finally fell over on its side with a tremendous crash.
People were running in the direction of the smashed truck. Traffic had come to a complete stop. Someone screamed, “Oh my God, call an ambulance, someone call an ambulance!” and another voice screeched, “He’s dead! He’s dead, Christ!” and Henry heard sirens in the distance.
He stood there in the middle of the street and finally a few faces began turning questioningly, accusingly, in his direction.
Damn, Henry thought. Oh, damn.
He ran.
Henry Black wasn’t sure exactly when his life took the left turn into Shitsville, but recently he’d begun to suspect that there had been no turn, that it had been the road he’d always been on, since the day he was born. If God handed out roadmaps to every soul about to become incarnated on Earth, He’d probably given Henry the one that traversed all the rocky paths, all the unpaved back roads and quagmires and potholes. The one that led, finally, to a huge drop into the crapper.
No one would understand any of that. Especially his ex-wife, Rachel.
She never understood anything. “You can’t get blood from a turnip,” he’d said to her once, when she demanded even more alimony. And she’d said, in her nasally Southern drawl, “I don’t want blood or turnips, you blockhead, I want what’s mine. I want my money.”
It still boggled his mind that she’d invited him to her wedding, just a week or so from now. What the hell kind of stunt was that, inviting your ex-husband to your wedding? Crazy bitch.
But Rachel was only one piece, one component, in the tapestry of crap—the crapestry—his life had become.
He made it back home and slammed the door behind him. He was shaking. Dusk was darkening the shabby little room. There was a single lamp on an end table next to his easy chair and he stepped toward it automatically before stopping short.
Whoops. Can’t do that. The wiring in the place was screwed up and if he turned on the lamp it would cause a short. The landlord had told him that three weeks ago. Hadn’t offered to fix it, either, the bastard.
So Henry flipped on the overhead light and the place lit up like an airport. He winced against the glare, but it was either that or total darkness.
His bed—just a beat-up mattress with no frame or box spring—rested in the corner of the room and he plopped down on it.
The suicide mishap had thrown him. It had seemed like such a sure thing. Step out in front of a speeding truck, get smashed to a smear, end of story. But no, the stupid driver had to be all… alert. And now the driver was dead and Henry didn’t have a scratch on him.
He lay there for a long time, arm thrown over his eyes, thinking. One little set-back… okay, one big set-back… didn’t mean he would abandon the idea.
He fell half-asleep, even with the light glaring in his face. But fifteen minutes later his eyes snapped open and he grinned up at the cracked ceiling.
“Got it,” he said.
He jumped up and hurried into the bathroom. He stuck the little rubber plug into the drain of the tub and turned on the faucet. As usual, there was no hot water, but it didn’t matter. Cold water would do just fine. While the tub filled up, Henry went to the closet and found the box containing the old-fashioned straight razor his pop had given
him twenty years ago.
He pulled out the razor and dropped the box on his easy chair. Pop had taken good care of the thing—the ivory handle was white as a baby’s belly and the blade, unfolded, gleamed beautifully. Henry admired it for a moment before closing it up and getting undressed.
He threw all his clothes on the bed and, carrying only the straight razor, went naked toward the bathroom. “Okay,” he said. “Climb in the tub, settle in, and then, real quick-like, slash the right wrist and then the left. And down, slash down the wrists, not across.” He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that before, but he knew it had something to do with severing the arteries properly.
He didn’t feel afraid at all, but a little nervous. His hands were trembling when he entered the bathroom.
The bathtub was overflowing. Water cascaded out of it and had already soaked the bathroom floor and Henry stepped into water that nearly covered his naked feet. He cursed and stepped carefully toward the tub to turn off the faucet.
From underneath the tub, wood creaked and moaned.
Henry stopped, water now up to his ankles.
The creak turned into a screech and something gave under the floorboards with an ear-rending snap.
Then the floor under the tub gave way. With a roar of rotten lumber and rusty metal, the tub dropped through the floor and plummeted into the downstairs flat.
Henry head an explosion of shattering porcelain, an avalanche of water, louder than he would ever have thought possible, like a bomb had went off, and one sharp, high-pitched scream from downstairs.
The sudden silence was more horrifying than the crash. Water still poured out of the jagged exposed pipes, but flowed now like a waterfall directly over the huge hole in the floor.
He stepped carefully toward the hole and peered downstairs. The bathtub had smashed into a hundred pieces. Shattered porcelain was everywhere. One edge of it had broken the downstairs toilet in two.
And blood was splashed along the walls. The water that covered the floor was tinged red with it. Henry said, “No. No, no, no.”
But there was no mistaking the frail and broken body of Mrs. Child, the old lady who lived downstairs, half-hidden under the largest part of Henry’s bathtub.
And her always-napping husband. One skinny leg, matted with fuzzy gray hair, stuck out of the rubble at a crazy angle, not too far from his wife. The sonofabitch was always napping, but he’d picked a helluva time to get up.
The judge awarded Henry Black three thousand dollars for emotional distress, and the landlord went to trial for manslaughter. The charge would be reduced, almost certainly, but there was no question that he was the one being held responsible for the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Child. Negligent landlord, structural instability, etcetera.
Henry spent the next three days at a mid-priced motel, at the expense of his landlord, and by the time he returned to his flat he still felt vaguely disconnected.
Someone had been at work in the place while he was gone. The mess in the bathroom was cleaned up, the pipes sealed off, and heavy plywood boards had been nailed over the gaping hole in the floor.
He ambled back into the living room, reached for the lamp next to his easy chair before catching himself. Whoops, he thought. Don’t wanna cause a short, on top of everything else. He almost flipped on the overhead light but decided gloom was better than glare at the moment.
He dropped into the easy chair and stared at the wall.
A big, fat depression had settled over him. It should be easy, he thought, easiest thing in the world, to kill yourself. But twice now, twice, he’d tried it and came out completely unharmed. And three—three!—people were dead in the meantime.
He drummed his fingers on the ratty plush of his armchair and thought. Why would this happen to me? Maybe, just maybe… I’m not meant to die?
No. That was horseshit. He was meant to die, and damnit, he would.
Well, there were ways, many, many ways, to do it, and just because God felt like throwing a monkey wrench into the proceedings didn’t mean Henry was going to give up. God had messed with him all his life, why should now be any different? Henry had some money now, and that would make it easier.
He jumped up, left the flat, and caught the bus to the gun shop on Third Street.
He bought a Colt .45 pistol. He paid the man a deposit, signed the papers, and was annoyed when the owner told him he now had to wait forty-eight hours for a background check.
He hardly slept or ate at all over the next two days. When he showed up at the appointed time to pick up his new gun, he was weak and disoriented.
The gun came in a plastic box with a cleaning kit and several rounds of ammunition. On the bus, Henry stared at the box lovingly, and missed his stop.
He wouldn’t wait, he decided. He’d waited long enough. Best to get on with it.
The bus stopped on the outskirts of downtown, right where all the industrial parks butted up against low-income apartment buildings. It was noisy with the whiny din of rooftop heating units and truck engines and power generators. The air smelled like cordite. It was hot, and a fine sheen of sweat formed on his face.
Henry walked past a block of nondescript tooling companies, lawn services and temp agencies toward a narrow alley that ran between two apartment buildings. He stopped at the mouth of the alley, set the box on the lid of a garbage can, and opened it up.
The gun glimmered in the mid-day sun, and Henry felt that thing that men for generations have felt upon seeing a gun, that tightening in the stomach, that almost sexual explosion of possibilities. He pulled it out of the box and loaded it, just the way the man at the gun shop had shown him.
He left the box on the garbage can lid and made his way down the alley.
About halfway down, with the noise of the industrial park faint in his ears, he stopped. The alley was only marginally filthy, not too bad at all. The brick of the two apartment buildings closed in on him, and the closest windows were on the second level of the building on his right. They were all closed.
Henry nodded. Alrighty, then. Time to do it.
He wiped sweat away from his forehead with the back of his free hand, and then placed the barrel of the gun at his temple.
He lowered the gun.
No, not the temple. Too easy to slip, to miss entirely, or even worse, live through it and cause himself permanent brain damage.
He put the barrel in his mouth before thinking better of that, as well. What if he blew out the back of his throat somehow and missed his brain completely? No good.
He settled on placing the barrel under his chin, in the soft flesh under his jaw line. That would work, for sure. With the barrel firmly in place, all he’d have to do is squeeze the trigger, and the bullet would smash through his head, into his brain, and out the top of his skull. The odds of living through that would have to be infinitesimally small.
So, steeling himself, he put the gun under his sweat-slick jaw, and closed his eyes tightly. His finger caressed the trigger, a mere fraction of pressure away from squeezing. He clenched his teeth. He pushed the barrel hard into the soft flesh, hard enough to force his head up, and he forced his head back down, hard against the barrel.
He squeezed the trigger.
The rest happened in the space of half a second.
As his finger tightened on the trigger, a window went up on the second floor.
The barrel slipped against Henry’s sweaty skin and skidded along his jaw.
A heavy-set woman leaned out the window with a small throw rug in her plump hands.
The bullet exploded out of the gun, less than an inch from Henry’s ear. He cried out, his ear drum nearly ruptured, and the bullet went wild.
The woman had been about to shake the rug out when the bullet tore through the cheap weave. The hot, twisted steel tore a small hole in her cheek, a bigger, messier hole in the other side of her head when it came out, and a cloud of dust formed like a halo above her head as the bullet lodged firmly into the brick and mortar above
her window.
Henry looked up just in time to see the woman stiffen, dropping the throw rug into the alley, and slowly, inevitably, tumble out of the window.
Her body thudded firmly against the concrete, mere feet away from him, and she lay unmoving, blood and gray matter leaking around her head.
Henry’s ear rang, and he was half-deaf, but he didn’t need to hear anything. He stared at the body as blood snaked away from her in every direction, purple-red tendrils that found the throw rug and seeped into it eagerly.
“Sonofabitch!” he said, without hearing himself. “Sonofabitch!”
He ran.
It took a couple of days for him to put things back in perspective. The gun now rested at the bottom of a river, along with the decorative box and cleaning kit, so trying that method again was a no-go, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to.
There was no time to be sorry about the woman’s death. There was only time to think about what went wrong, and what he could do to fix it. His commitment to his mission was firmer than ever.
The next day, he bought a car for three hundred dollars. It was an old, beat-to-hell Chevy Malibu, circa 1973, shit brown and rusted to the core, with about 240,000 miles on it. The brakes were bad, the steering stiff, and the transmission probably hours away from failing entirely. The driver’s side door wobbled on rusty hinges, threatening to come off entirely.
Henry didn’t care. The Malibu suited his needs at present.
He put twenty bucks in the tank, and the needle wavered a little bit toward the right. He slammed the driver’s side door shut, managed to get it to stay shut, and drove.
North of the city, the countryside was hilly, almost mountainous, with weaving and winding two-lane roads that wiggled past exposed cliff faces and stomach-churning drop-offs. Every winter, you’d hear about another car skidding off the road and smashing into the rocks near the lake there.
Henry drove fast, squealing around the hairpin turns, delighting in the heavy power of the Malibu’s engine, the assurance the car had, even though it was nearly as old as he was, and nearly as decrepit too.
Dig Ten Graves Page 4