by Joel Arnold
He’d never before imagined a day when the shine in his wife’s eyes would be gone, her contented smile unable to surface, her shoulders sagging with such dismal resignation. It was as if death was the one breathing behind the video camera while Elaine waited patiently for its arrival.
He shifted into second gear. Traffic barely moved. Office buildings rose too close on either side of him. He felt like getting out and walking. It would be faster. Just leave the goddamn car in the middle of traffic, get out and walk. But he had too far to go.
He made sure all the vents were open, aimed them all at his face and hands. It felt so goddamn hot, so hard to breath. Beyond was a gauntlet of traffic lights. He honked the horn twice out of frustration. A middle-aged woman in a power suit gave him the finger.
Keep it together.
He stepped on the clutch. Shifted into third gear.
He loved his wife.
He knew that now.
3rd Gear
After the camera had zoomed in on Elaine’s face, the videotape went blank. Just a snowy void. He pressed rewind, and as the tape spun backward, he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone in his office. He spun around. A large man dressed in black trousers, a black sweater, a black ski mask stood behind him. He held a small black gun.
Steve scrambled away from the television set. He wondered for a moment where the man had come from, then saw that the file cabinets in the back corner of the room had been pushed slightly to the side. Had he been there the whole time?
The man spoke softly. Carefully. “Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh.”
“What do you want?” Steve asked, not comprehending.
“Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh,” the man repeated, emphasizing each letter and number.
“I don’t understand.”
“Memorize it,” the man said.
“What are you — “
“Shut the fuck up! I’ll say it one more time. It’s simple. Bee-tee-ex, three-three-oh. Got it?”
Steve nodded, although he was not sure if he got it at all.
“Now open your safe and give me the sixty thousand dollars you have stashed in there.”
Steve tried not to show his disbelief. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
The man came at him fast and stuck the gun in Steve’s chest. He put his other hand around Steve’s neck and slammed him against the wall. “Don’t fuck with me. You’re wife’s time is slipping quickly away and we’ve got no time for games.” His face was inches from Steve’s. The black moist wool covering his mouth moved in and out as he breathed. “Beneath the marble planter. Open it.” He loosened his grip around Steve’s neck.
How could he have known about the safe? No one knew about it except the man who installed it, and no one, absolutely no one, knew about the sixty thousand dollars except—
Of course. Elaine knew. And this man, this big fucking ape of a man, had Elaine.
Steve sucked in a mouthful of air that shot painfully down his throat. He stepped cautiously over to the marble planter, the man close behind. He pushed the heavy planter aside and lifted up a square of blue carpet. A small metal door winked back at him. Steve’s hands shook, but he managed to get the combination right on the first try. He opened up the safe and pulled out two thick bundles of hundred dollar bills. The man in the black ski mask hovered over him, a massive breathing obelisk radiating power. He grabbed the bundles of cash from Steve and stuffed them in his pockets.
“Find the car with the license plate that corresponds to the number I gave you.” He dropped a set of two keys at Steve’s feet. Steve stared at them, spread apart and shiny like two poisonous fangs.
“Number?”
What number? Bee? Tee? Ex? That sounded right. But the rest?
The man ignored him. “Inside the car will be directions to your wife.” The man backed up to the office door and placed his hand on the knob. He stood there a moment, his eyes hard on Steve. “Have I made myself clear?”
“What were the numbers?” Steve asked.
The man backed out of the office and slammed the door shut.
This was too much. This was not happening. Steve stood up, his legs almost giving out. He lurched at the door and flung it open.
“What are the goddamn numbers?” he yelled.
The man was already gone.
4th Gear
Finally a little movement. He merged onto the freeway, cramming himself between a blue Jeep Cherokee and an orange Gremlin. The traffic moved steadily, but still only forty miles an hour in a fifty-five mile per hour zone. The skyscrapers gradually disappeared, replaced by smaller office buildings, shopping malls, residential neighborhoods. Yet he was still too hot, still unable to get the vision of his wife sitting there in the chair out of his head. It was all his fault. He knew it. The end of his perfect little world. He had needed the domesticity to keep him grounded, to keep him from flying off the edge of the world, and if he had to choose, if it came down to his family or endless flings of passion, he would choose his family. Hands down.
But wasn’t it too late for that now? Why couldn’t he have seen this coming? Why was it that the truth came only in the final seconds? The truth was a climax with no denouement. There would be no time to enjoy it.
He knew that now.
Only thirty minutes earlier, Steve tried to remember the number the man in the black wool ski mask had told him. Funny how he could keep facts and figures in his head, how he could visualize spreadsheets and balance sheets and totals for three months worth of assets and liabilities, of revenue and net income. Yet he couldn’t remember a simple goddamn license plate number.
The man in the mask hadn’t even told him which level the car was parked on, but as he frantically searched the parking ramp for those first three letters — B-T-X — it suddenly struck him.
“BTX 330,” he said out loud. That wasn’t just any license plate number. That was Elaine’s car. An old, rusting brown Toyota Corolla. Why had it taken him so long to make that connection? Jesus.
He found her car within ten minutes.
When he opened the driver’s door with one of the keys the intruder had tossed him, he saw a piece of paper taped to the steering wheel. He slid into the driver’s seat and read it.
Highway 35N to County Road 60. Turn left. Six miles up will be an abandoned farm house. She’s in the cellar.
Names flashed through Steve’s head, names of people he’d pissed off, names of people he may have said the wrong thing to. Who could do something like this? But the more he thought about it, the more he realized the names racing through his mind were just camouflage.
The last time he had seen Linda was a week ago. They had taken the afternoon off, rented a motel room, a cheap Mom and Pop joint outside of the city with no perks, no extras, no amenities to interfere with their fucking.
While Steve lay naked and spent on top of the bed, Linda came out of the bathroom, rubbing at her nose, the residue of cocaine still visible on her left nostril.
“Let’s go away,” she said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here and change our names, our identities.”
Steve laughed. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not? What’s stopping you?”
“My wife, for one thing. My son.”
“He’s old enough to handle it.” Linda sat down on the bed, staring wild-eyed at Steve. “Come on. Right now. We’ve got credit cards.”
It sounded tempting. Exciting. How many times had he imagined that exact same thing? But as Linda hovered over him, her wild-eyed, flared nostril excitement scared him.
Steve shook his head. He patted her bare thigh. “Sorry. Can’t.”
Then she was at the phone, violently poking at the numbers. “I’m calling her,” she said. “I’m calling Elaine and telling her what we’ve been doing.”
“Hey!” Steve leapt off the bed and tried to grab the phone from her, but she twisted around. “This is not funny.”
Linda said into the mouthpiec
e, “Hello? Is this Elaine?”
The world seemed to stop. Steve’s heartbeat became a live thing, a beast that pounded at his ears with giant metal fists. He wanted to fall to the floor, curl up in a ball and plug his ears so he could not hear. He watched the smile on Linda’s face grow into something predatory, something manic. The cord to the phone seemed to glisten in the lamplight with venom. It was a snake plugged into the wall, and on the other side, miles away at his home, his goddamn home, its fanged mouth was opening wide for the strike, ready to plunge into Elaine’s throat and destroy her forever.
Steve yanked the cord from the wall. He pulled again, this time jerking the phone from Linda’s hands. He stood there holding the cord, watching Linda, her eyes still wide, only now with surprise.
“Jesus,” she said. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“Don’t ever — “
“Get real. I didn’t even dial her number.”
Steve’s whole body shook and he couldn’t get any more words to come out. When Linda reached out to touch him, he collapsed on the bed, as if her touch was the pail of water thrown on the wicked witch.
5th Gear
Traffic moved steadily now, the Corolla’s speedometer creeping up to sixty miles an hour. He’d thought a lot on the ride over here. A lot about Elaine. A lot about Linda. For all he knew, Elaine could be dead right now. For all he knew, Linda had hired some thug to have her kidnapped and killed.
But that’s not how it works, Linda, Steve thought.
If somehow he got through this, even if she wasn’t involved, he would tell her it was over. That he could never see her again. He loved his son too much, his wife—
Please, God…
He turned onto County Road Sixty. The city had disappeared, and there was farmland all around him full of dried up cornstalks resting in long black furrows. He checked his odometer, watched the miles tick by one at a time. When six miles had passed, he saw the abandoned farmhouse.
It had been painted white once, but the cancer of neglect and erosion had eaten at it, inside and out. There was a portion of wall missing and the profile of a stairway could be seen. It reminded him of a flap of skin pulled back from a jawbone, the teeth exposed in a fixed, grotesque grin.
He turned onto the overgrown driveway, gravel popping beneath his tires in a dissonant percussion. He got out of the car, taking a small flashlight from the glove compartment, and listened. The ticking of the Corolla’s engine could barely be heard over his own heart. There was the sound of wind blowing over the splintered wood of the house, the sound of dried leaves colliding with one another in a constant Sssshhhhhh. A light dusting of snow began to fall. He stepped toward the house.
There was something about this house. Something familiar. A strong sense of déjà vu, perhaps. He carefully stepped through the missing section of wall. There were rusty nails, shards of glass, the sharp teeth of broken boards. Holes were poked in the ceiling and floor. He bent down on all fours, getting as close to one of the holes in the floor as he dared. He shined the small flashlight beam in the hole, but the light was swallowed up by the darkness.
“Elaine,” he called. “Elaine?”
He suddenly couldn’t move, didn’t think he’d be ever able to move again as the certainty of her death overwhelmed him. He was too late. He knew it. Maybe she wasn’t even here, maybe she was already discarded like garbage in a lake somewhere, or buried in a gravel pit. He knew it. Felt it in the fresh numbness that spread from his head down his spine and out to all of his limbs.
He heard movement behind him.
“Hello, Steve.”
He froze. It was her voice. Elaine’s voice. Coming from behind him. But that couldn’t be. That wasn’t possible, was it?
He scrambled to get up.
“Elaine?”
It was her. Standing outside in the falling snow. Staring at him, her face unreadable, unfathomable.
“I’m glad you found your way out here,” she said. “Do you recognize the place?”
“Are you okay?” Relief rushed over him, yet he still felt something was not quite right.
“Surely you’ve seen pictures of it in our photo albums. I grew up here.” Flakes of snow landed on her and melted. Steve stepped outside of the house.
“You’re okay?” he asked again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That depends.”
“On what?” He stepped forward and reached out for her, but she backed away. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought—”
She turned toward the Toyota. “I’m glad you recognized the license number,” she said. “I wasn’t so sure you’d figure that out.”
“What’s going on?” Steve asked.
“Do you have the keys?”
Steve pulled them from his pocket, stared at them for a moment as if they were some evil thing, and gently tossed them to his wife. “I thought you were—”
“I’m fine.” Elaine opened the driver’s side door, bent over and popped the trunk release. She went around to the back of the car where Steve couldn’t see her behind the open trunk.
It was an elaborate prank. A joke. What was the occasion? His birthday was still a month away.
“Who was the guy in the ski mask?” he asked. Then it hit him. “Your brother.”
Elaine didn’t seem to hear him. In fact, the next words from her mouth made no sense at all.
“She’s still alive,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer.
“Elaine?” The whirlwind of emotions going through Steve made it impossible to know how to feel. Relief? Surely relief, because his worst fear had been dispelled. Anger? Certainly anger for frightening him like this. But there was something else, something stemming from the tone of Elaine’s voice, of the way she stood hidden behind the open trunk of her car, of the words she had just uttered.
She’s still alive.
They began to sink in, the words like low voltage electricity crawling through his bones.
“Elaine?” He stepped slowly around the car and came to his wife’s side. He looked in the trunk. “My God.”
There was a woman bound and gagged inside. A woman he knew, a woman only minutes ago he was ready to curse for the death of his wife. His mouth fell open as if his jaw had become unhinged.
Elaine squeezed his arm. “I can’t live like this,” she said. “I can’t live with her in your life, so you have to choose. You have to choose between me and Tommy, or her.”
Had she been in the trunk this whole time?
Linda’s eyes slowly opened, and when she saw the two of them hovering over her, she began to squirm. But there was not much room for movement in the trunk. The gag was too tight to allow anything but the slightest of sounds to issue from her mouth.
“It’s you, of course,” Steve said, struggling to get enough air behind his words. “It’s always been you.”
Elaine backed away. She shook her head, dislodging a light dusting of snow, and pulled something from her pocket.
“I found this out back while I was waiting for you to arrive.” She held it up. It was an old steak knife, its wooden handle chipped and stained, the serrated edge dull and bleeding rust. “I don’t know how long it’s been there, but when I saw it, I knew it had been waiting for us. Waiting for just this moment.”
“What are you saying?”
“I need more than your word. I need to know for sure.”
Inside the trunk, Linda Janson had grown still. When Elaine handed Steve the old steak knife, her eyes bulged and she struggled against the ropes with a renewed vigor.
“I can’t,” Steve said, looking from the knife to Linda.
“It’s her or me.”
“You want me to—”
“Her or me.”
Elaine’s eyes locked on Steve’s. He saw forgiveness in them. Hopefulness.
He lifted the knife in the air. Snowflakes kissed his knuckles and melted on his skin. The sky lo
oked full of swirling white ash. The farmhouse became a grinning skull. Steve took one last look at Linda as she lay bound in the trunk. The wildness, the danger, was gone.
He turned to Elaine and whispered, “I love you.”
A tear spilled down her cheek.
As he plunged the rusty knife into Linda’s throat, he could not take his eyes from his wife. Elaine placed her fingers over his, and together they cut into her, sawing and twisting the knife, the fresh blood an emulsion that bonded their hands. Steve kept his eyes on Elaine, watching the ferocity grow in her as they cut.
After they were finished, after they disposed of Linda’s body beneath the cold, loose soil of the nearby cornfield, the snow swirling about them like fevered ghosts, they made love on the hood of the old Corolla. All the while, it felt to Steve like they were blissfully falling, shards of glass winking all around them, twenty-five floors straight down to an eternity of hard pavement, of vows no longer broken.
He realized he did not have to choose between safety and danger, domesticity and passion. He knew that now.
He knew it.
Telephone
Jill Johnson inserted herself into the oval of six and seven-year olds standing at the front of her class. “You know how Telephone is played, don’t you?” she asked. She was met by nods of affirmation and a few dumbfounded stares. “I whisper something into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it into the next person’s ear, and so on until it gets to the end. Then we’ll see how much the words have changed. Okay?”
She leaned over and whispered into Benjamin Cale’s ruddy, wax-rich ear, “I like plums and apples.”
Benjamin knit his brows, then leaned over to Lydia Rathberger, cupping his hands over her strawberry blond hair. It went like that from person to person, around the entire class, until Bobby Blaisdell whispered into Gail Dupree’s ear, and Gail, directly to Mrs. Johnson’s left, nodded. Mrs. Johnson smiled at Gail, “Tell the class what you heard.”