AHMM, October 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Belleek china,” she answered. “A small piece."

  "Then I'll treat this baby like a thin-shelled egg.” Tenderly, he stamped the brown paper, printing the word FRAGILE in red letters. To Audrey's delight, he repeated the action on each side. “Just a tip,” he said. “Bubble wrap—like shipping it in a cloud."

  Audrey smiled serenely, a vision of her own clouds filling her head.

  The box arrived the next day, Saturday, at ten thirty A.M. Audrey was alerted when she heard the familiar squeak of her own mailbox out front. She ran to the side window and peeked through the blinds just in time to see the postman set the brown package to the right of Kirk's door.

  She considered dialing his number, waking him to get his day going. Best not hurry Providence. She gave the box a last glance through the blinds. A delicious feeling filled her. Something was going to happen. She'd worried that the box would be smushed, or that his girlfriend would open it. But now a certainty came to her that Kirk would open it himself, the way he was meant to. What the box held, intended only for him, would make him sweat.

  At two, Audrey left to run an errand. Driving past Kirk's, she saw that the package was still there. The red Jeep parked over the mimosa stump confirmed that he was home. She was pleased that Star's pointy yellow sports car was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she'd left him, left for good.

  When Audrey returned half an hour later, the box was gone. Otherwise, things out front looked the same. Red Jeep on lawn, totaled brown truck run aground in driveway, boat and two vans lining the street out front, and a leaning tower of trash between the Cadillac and Olds.

  Audrey pulled into her driveway. Killing the motor, she experienced a moment's ecstasy. He was opening the box right now—opening it alone, as he should. She imagined the eye's searing gaze burning a hole through his rotten soul.

  That night she slept soundly. No good old boys hooting, no yells of “Brown Dog,” no hysterical girlfriends. She slept late and lay in bed after waking, listening to the birds. When she rose to get the paper, though, she found a familiar van sitting in her gutter, touching bumpers with the blue truck Kirk's minions picked up each weekday, leaving their orange bomb of a Buick in its place. In the past, Audrey sometimes debated which she detested most: the Best Air van or the blue truck with its trellis structure that supported lengths of lumber, rebar, and PVC piping.

  Today, Audrey didn't debate. She hadn't expected drastic changes overnight. Still, she sensed change in the air, even though when she stuck her head outside, she saw Brown Dog roaming. He peed on the van, then loped back to a plastic trash bag on Kirk's lawn that he'd already ripped open. Hunkering down, Brown Dog pulled out its contents like a child emptying a Christmas stocking. Wads of paper soon surrounded him and began wafting onto Audrey's property.

  She shrugged and shut the door. Maybe the wind would pick up and tumbleweed the trash on down the block. She dressed in shorts and a tank top, poured a cup of coffee, and sat at the kitchen table reading the paper. Brown Dog and the trash and the dented van and rusty blue truck aside, something was due to happen soon. She knew.

  A horn tooted. Audrey investigated. Star's yellow sports car hummed in the street.

  A bitter reflux of coffee invaded Audrey's throat; her arms, shoulders, and face glistened with clammy apprehension. Her breaths condensed on the white miniblinds, fogged back on her mouth and nose.

  Kirk appeared. In tan jeans and a soft suede shirt, he sauntered down the front walkway, stepping over mounds of trash as though they were so many garlands laid at his feet. Brown Dog sat on his haunches, tongue curling up—a cheerful sentinel, wishing his master good day. Kirk slapped the car's hood and hopped in on the passenger side.

  Early for him to be up, Audrey thought, as the car peeled off. Maybe they were off to a kiss-and-make-up hamburger. She squeezed a smile onto her face. An infinitesimal trembling rippled through her body as if some weird tachycardia had commenced firing at the cellular level. She wished she could have seen Kirk's face to gauge whether his expression had changed at all. His macho, swaggering walk certainly seemed no different.

  More paper was accumulating on her lawn. She hadn't the heart to go out there and pick it up.

  Star was back with Kirk. Brown Dog would continue to shred garbage bags and bark all night. Cars and trucks and rude, freaked-out druggies would come and go. As before, complaints to the police would be unheeded.

  She'd sworn that the Eye of God box would be her last. She had no new ideas. Without a creative outlet to vent her anger, depression flooded in. She crawled into bed, pulled the sheets up to her chin, and lay there, eyes blinking in a kind of non-rhythm with the void. Thinking about nothing was intensely painful. If eternity were like this, full of thinking about nothing, she'd rather be snuffed out.

  The phone rang: Doris, the crabby lady who lived on the other side of Kirk. Audrey listened to her meandering message on the answering machine. “Can you believe all that trash?” Doris's voice was a smokey rasp. “I have half a mind to call the ASPCA on that dog, only I feel sorry for the poor animal. Just thought I'd tell you, I picked up the trash on my side. I'd help with yours, but have to visit my sister in the hospital. She's got gall bladder. Oh, and I talked to that girl he's dating—that Star. Awful, the way he treats her. Awful, what she told me, but she won't take advice. Thinks she can change him. Silly girl. I'm rattling on as usual, my strong suit. Good-bye, Audrey dear. Talk to you later. We need to fix this guy. He's detrimental to the neighborhood. Maybe we can do something."

  "Do something.” Audrey groaned under the covers. Doris was nuts, thinking anything they might do could get rid of Kirk. Sometimes Doris deposited Brown Dog's feces in front of Kirk's door to let him know she didn't like the dog pooping on her lawn, but even that obvious message didn't make a dent in Kirk. Nothing did. And his cheerful minions would clean up the mess.

  Audrey gave up the ghost. Kirk had won. Monday—no need to tell Doris—she would call a real estate agent. She would sell the little house she loved so much, the house that would have been perfect for her if not for Kirk.

  Once she finally pried herself out of bed again, Audrey left the house, driving with no destination in mind. She ended up at the mall, wandered past racks of clothes she had no interest in buying. Then she strolled into the movie theater and sat through a movie she had no interest in seeing. Car chases, monster truck pulls, endless jokes about bodily functions. Kirk would have loved it.

  Around dusk, she returned to her trash-strewn front yard. She drank a glass of wine with leftovers, went to bed early. If she were lucky, she might win a few hours of sleep before Kirk and Star returned from the bar where he worked. Doris had found out its name: Inca Hoots Bar.

  Perfect, she thought blearily, propped up in bed after downing a fourth glass of wine. She nodded off. In her dreams, she was sitting at the bar of Inca Hoots. Kirk served up his good-old-boy smile. “I'd like a gin and tonic,” she told him. He puffed out his chest and said, “My specialty.” He poured straight whiskey into a tall glass with no ice, elbow cocked out at an affected angle. “On the house.” He shoved the glass at her.

  She jolted awake. A loud thud woke her, as if a tall bureau had toppled over. Then came a voice—Star's. In the dark, Audrey squinted at her window. Through it, she could just make out Kirk's bedroom window—a fuzzy yellow light gleaming through a curtain. The voice was muffled; the girl was wheedling, pleading. “Give me my keys, Kirk. I didn't do anything wrong!” The same thing she'd said the last time, when she'd stood on Kirk's front porch that night it rained.

  Audrey lay back, blinking at the dark. She recognized Kirk's nasal whine but couldn't decipher his words.

  "My keys!” Star's voice was high pitched, frantic. “Give me my keys!"

  Kirk's answer was an unintelligible bleat. Star cried, “Stop it! I just want to go home, want to see my mom."

  Audrey blinked at the black ceiling, her jaw sunk into her neck. Would this tale of human folly never end? Should she call the
police? How many times before had they argued and made up again?

  Next came an unexpected sound. A shot. Audrey immediately knew what it was.

  All arguing stopped. The total quiet Audrey longed for descended. Eerie—that's what this quiet was. A scary void she wished would fill up with sound again. She crossed her arms on her chest, willing to act the part of a mummy who knows nothing, hears nothing, hopes the shot was a dream.

  A minute later, Kirk's front door banged. A soul-wrenching howl axed through the walls of Audrey's modest clapboard house. It was Kirk, now in the role of mourning wolf. Then came the pounding. Fists against metal. “Damn! Dammit! Dammit to God!"

  Groggy from the wine she'd drunk earlier, Audrey angled her legs out of bed, stood, nestled into her robe, tugging its loose flaps around her and tying the sash. From the living room windows, she spied Kirk's nude, rubbery body, his radical movements tricked out by the yellow porch light. He was standing in the gutter in front of his house, beating his fists against the derelict Cadillac.

  "Nuts!” Kirk yelled. “Stupid bitch. Nuts!"

  Audrey let go of the blinds. She clasped her hands and held them up to her chin in a devout, if merely secular, prayer on Star's behalf. Kirk was the one who'd emerged from the house, not Star. Did that mean she was still in the bedroom? Audrey pictured her sprawled on a grimy carpet, her blood leaking into cheap dirty fibers.

  She should contact the police, but even as the thought occurred, a siren blared. Doris, on the other side of Kirk's house, must have called them, her finger always so quick on the trigger, ready to summon a higher authority.

  Audrey opened the front door. It seemed that the last act of the play she'd witnessed days earlier was unfolding. Two policemen approached Kirk. He gave the Caddy one last pop with his bloody fists, then ran back to his porch with an odd, penguinlike stride. There, like Stanley Kowalski, only without a T-shirt to rip, he dropped to his knees in front of the policemen and bellowed, “Star! Star!"

  Audrey hoped an ambulance would pull up next. Instead, a more sedate vehicle, the color of putty, with tall, narrow double doors in back, crawled up the street. It hugged the curb and, like a molting crab, nestled into the only empty spot in front of Audrey's house.

  The phone rang. Audrey wasn't up to it. The answering machine did its job. “She's dead!” Doris sang, a soprano vibrato. “Star is dead, poor dear. That's the coroner's van out there. Oh, but Kirk's goose is cooked now. He's history. They slapped the handcuffs on. Kirk is history!"

  So is Star, Audrey thought, as she crawled back into bed. She lay there thinking of the girl who couldn't be much more than twenty, the one with the doomed, hopeful expression so much like the one she, herself, had bestowed on Bret many years ago. Cocooned in blankets, Audrey fell asleep.

  Next morning, Monday—Labor Day holiday—she glanced out the kitchen window and saw the same colorful bits of trash that Brown Dog had unbagged the day before. The balled-up paper seemed to perch on her lawn like happy Easter eggs. The day looked too bright for any of last night's drama to have been real. Had she dreamt it all? The gunshot, police cars, coroner's van, Doris's ecstatic call?

  Audrey popped two waffles into the toaster.

  But no. She hadn't downed so many glasses of wine last night that she'd invented this stuff. It was real. Poor Star. On the other hand, Kirk truly was history, as Doris had joyfully proclaimed.

  Audrey had won. Fate had finally smiled upon her. She tried to smile in return. The smile stretched her facial muscles painfully. Undaunted, she said aloud, “No more Kirk,” and danced a giddy jig in front of the toaster.

  The waffles popped up. She couldn't eat them.

  Star. Dead. A girl that age. Star's father died early, Doris had said. Floozy mother. No guidance. The choices had been Star's to make, and now she owned the consequences. Kirk was bad news, sure, but Audrey never imagined he'd kill anyone, least of all pretty, young Star.

  The debris from two days ago still fluttered in Audrey's front yard. The sooner she cleaned up all the paper Brown Dog had ripped out of Kirk's garbage bags, the sooner she would lay this nightmare to rest. She would not think about Star. Not today. Instead, she would clean up her little bit of the world. That was all anyone could hope to do. Audrey returned to the kitchen and, ignoring her shaking hands, hunted up a bag and work gloves. Out front, she cruised the lawn, stashing trash in the sack.

  When she finished on her side, she continued onto Kirk's property. Brown Dog growled. Had no one made provision for him? “Dumb dog,” Audrey said. He bounded up and slobbered on her gloved hand. “That's a good, dumb dog.” She patted his broad, boney head. Whatever happened next, bad dreams aside, she felt happy that Kirk's empire of weeds and pirogues, junk cars, boats, and beer bottles had now fallen.

  She shoved a last wad of paper into the sack and crinkled its top edges together. She would discard Kirk's trash in her own tough garbage can, the lid of which snapped on so tight not even Brown Dog could knock it off.

  She glared at Kirk's porch. Three air conditioners were stacked on the side nearest her house, next to an ice chest. Newspapers littered the area in front of the door, along with a single flip-flop and a chewed, leather dog collar. Chained to the column at the other end stood a spanking new orange-topped gas barbecue on a cart. It had been there for at least a month, not even used once.

  Everything Kirk owned, except for his clothes, the red Jeep, and gas barbecue, was a mess; and the Jeep and barbecue would quickly dilapidate also. Every new thing he acquired soon looked as if it had been left out in the weather for decades. The same was true of his girlfriends. Yet he always walked out his front door as if he'd just stepped out of a bandbox.

  Did I really hope to battle such a mentality with crayons and paints? Audrey asked. He'd thought nothing of plowing up her lawn, trashing her peace and quiet, erecting walls of pure junk. Now he'd shot Star, a girl who had her whole life ahead of her.

  An embolism of hatred fired in Audrey's brain. Next thing she knew, she was standing on Kirk's porch.

  The red and white ice chest went first. Like Moses with his tablets, she heaved it over her head onto the lawn. The lid went flying, and Brown Dog chased it down, loving the sport. The air conditioners were next. She pushed with all her strength and sent the top two crashing into the azaleas.

  She kicked the newspapers and rusted gardening tools, the dog collar, and lone flip-flop before her as she made her way to the barbecue. With one mighty shove, it keeled over into the azaleas on the other side of the steps. As it crashed, the chain that secured it to the porch's rotting wooden column yanked the support off its pedestal. The overhang slumped, creaked. Old nails whined against wood, threatened collapse.

  Audrey jumped down the three steps to the walkway, exhilarated by a desire to be caught. Brown Dog, tired of the ice chest lid, watched with faint surprise as she picked up the sack of trash and headed toward the sidewalk where a candy wrapper fluttered. Audrey stopped.

  Doris approached. “I don't blame you for that one bit,” she said, taking in Audrey's destruction. “But did you hear? Kirk's now claiming she committed suicide."

  "Suicide?"

  "He says Star pulled the trigger on herself, the rat. I don't believe it. Do you?"

  "No,” Audrey said. “Star asked for her keys. She wanted to go to her mother's."

  "I hope you tell the police. If you don't, Kirk will get off. And they said—they interviewed me already because I'm the one called soon as it happened—they said Kirk blamed Star for sending some kind of boxes. Don't know what that's about. He kept accusing her of sending these boxes, something she'd made, and she wouldn't admit it. He was furious. Star was into arts and crafts, you know."

  "Boxes.” Audrey repeated the word as if reading it out of a dictionary, but her free hand flew to her neck just beneath the jaw, and the fluttery tips of her fingers registered the wild throbbing of her pulse there.

  "Don't know what they were. Just some awful boxes.” Doris hiked her
shoulders, waved her hands willy-nilly. “The police say Star must have made these boxes that set him off.” Doris eyed Kirk's porch with disdain. “That boy was downright mean when he drank. But we're rid of him. His landlady will want him out, even if he gets off. How Jackie could rent to the likes of him I do not know. She grew up in that house! The police say he had forty automatic guns on a table in his living room! Laid out like sardines, one next to the other, to intimidate the guys who came to buy drugs. They've got him on arms violations. They found heroin. We're rid of him. Can't believe it, can you?"

  Doris tilted her head. “Don't take it too hard, dear. The police will probably want to talk to you today, but rest easy now. A few weeks, this mess will be a dim memory. Bless the Lord.” Doris gave a bright wave and retreated to her own property. She shook her head one last time, as if in memory of Star, and disappeared inside her house.

  Audrey stared at Kirk's cleared front porch, then turned, heading toward the sidewalk. The sack in her hand, full of Kirk's trash, felt heavy. Just ahead, on the muddy ruts between the Cadillac and boat trailer in Kirk's gutter, sat a large cardboard box stacked high with old magazines. Perched on top of the stack was the white Belleek china box—her last creation. Kirk must have put it out for trash yesterday, hours before his fight with Star. An orange peel sprawled across its lid. “My aesthetic solution,” Audrey muttered, ready to salvage her masterpiece.

  She dropped the sack and stood a moment, contemplating the orange peel. It had been pared in one perfect spiral. That didn't seem like something Kirk would do.

  Flushed, chest heaving, her mouth dropped open as she held one end of the corkscrew peel between the thumb and index finger of her gloved hand. She watched it boing up and down in the air. Coming back to herself, she flung it aside and lifted the white box from atop an Outdoor magazine. She held it at waist level, ready to mangle the thing with her bare hands as viciously as Kirk crumpled his beer cans.