I was getting used to how dark it still was in the room and I could see him bite his lip a little and seem to think of something. Then I went clean back to sleep, awful sudden.
When I woke up, there was sunlight, shining in through the eyeholes of my suit and I was not in a comfortable position.
You know what had happened?
Bob had taken Taylor Whitman and me out of the house, knocked unconscious, and he had put us down in the hole that was waiting to be Taylor Whitman’s snake pit. I found that impolite, to say the least, and I didn’t waste any time in telling that old boy, Robert McConnerey Coons just what I thought of him when he happened by with his spade.
‘Robert McConnerey Coons, just what exactly do you think you’re doing?’
‘Well, Irma Jean, I was going to bury you. Why? You worried about your daughter? She’s just fine. I’ll see she gets taken care of, don’t you worry a bit.’
That was a weight off of my mind, but Bob still had me disappointed. Don’t you think otherwise.
‘Don’t worry? What sort of fool thing is that to say to someone in a snake pit?’ Which was a slight exaggeration, as you know, what with the pit being hardly finished, but I was mad and felt my remark was justified at the time. ‘Why shouldn’t we worry? Did we ask to be buried alive?’
‘Not exactly, no. But I really can’t have people knowing what I do. Taylor Whitman there, he knows about the tools I bought and you know I ain’t got no Mama up in Alaska. I stayed around, hoping you’d both keep quiet, but then I just got awful nervous. I like my freedom, Irma Jean, and I love life. They kill people who kill people in this state and I would not enjoy that.’
‘Bob, what you do in your own time is nobody’s business but your own and people round here believe in letting what’s private stay that way. You should know that. Your behaviour this morning is plain uncivilised.’
‘I’m sorry, Ma’am. But it don’t look to me like I have any choice.’
‘I know and we all make mistakes when we’re being hasty. I can appreciate your predicament. Now how about you pull me up out of this hole and I’ll fix us some breakfast? Then we can talk, work something out, don’t involve so much death and unpleasantness.’
Bob didn’t seem too sure about that, but I gave him my biggest Sunday morning smile and he reached down his hand, lifted me up, real easy. He was a very strong person, I’d guessed that.
I was hoping that some home cooking and coffee would calm Bob down – even if coffee is a stimulant. He did seem to settle some and even let me go change out of my sleeper suit, because I was walking that pit dirt all through the house, the mess it had got into.
Through the bedroom window as I fixed myself up, I could see Taylor Whitman’s hands, scrabbling at the dirt round the edge of the hole. He was OK and on his way out to see what in hell was going on. I could tell he was mad, just from looking at his fingertips.
Back in the kitchen, Bob was almost through with his ham and eggs, dabbing at his mouth very particularly with a napkin. I like a neat man.
‘Bob, how you feel now? You want some biscuits?’
‘I’m just fine, Irma Jean, thank you. I knew you’d be an excellent cook. You’d better come along with me now, I have to get on. Where’d I put that spade, you remember?’
‘Down by the pit, Bob, but things don’t have to be this way. You can change.’
‘I don’t want to change. I like the way I am.’
‘Do you really, Bob?’
‘Yes ma’am, I surely do.’
I stared him in the eye for that answer and he stared back, real steady and sincere and I got to thinking that I liked him the way he was, too. No argument about it. So I took a step closer and leaned in to say, ‘Then how about you and me go down to the pit, Bob. Taylor Whitman ain’t dead yet and he’s trying real hard to get out.’
Bob gave me a smile then, shone up the room. I can recall thinking how it seemed to sparkle with the sun off of the cream jug in just the sweetest way.
‘Thank you for letting me know that, Irma Jean. You know why it is, he’s still alive? You took away my concentration so much I did not hit him the way I should, you goshdarn delicate thing, you. You want to come outside?’
‘If you’ll hold my hand, Bob.’
‘Why certainly I’ll hold your hand. That, ma’am, would be a pleasure.’
It was very still out, but I could smell something a little like rain on the air, definitely a softness that hadn’t been there in such a long while.
Down in the yard, Taylor Whitman was still scratching at the rim of the pit like a big old dog, cussing too. Bob squeezed my hand and whispered.
‘What you think we should do, honey? He’s kind of hard to get at down there and I won’t use a gun, they’re too noisy and no dang fun at all. Ain’t got one.’
Well, Bob calling me ‘honey’ like that, just started the day off all over again, nice and fresh.
‘Why don’t we bury him, Bob?’
Bob turned and winked at me, ‘That’s what I was aiming for, Irma Jean, but he ain’t dead yet.’
‘But I think that’s for the best, don’t you?’
‘Oh, honey, where you been hiding all of my life?’
Bob didn’t say that too softly which set Taylor Whitman hollering like he was on fire or something so we had to bury him kind of quick and I didn’t have any time to say good-bye. Still, after it was over, Bob told me to go set my ear down to the ground, see if I could hear something. Sure enough, Taylor Whitman was still belly-aching just a bit and stirring around so I shouted down into the earth that I would always remember him and thank you for our lovely daughter and I hoped it was appropriate for him to die kind of short of breath on a hot morning in his sleeper suit, because I had often dreamed of going out that way myself. If he said anything back I couldn’t hear it.
After that, Bob and I washed up and drank some more coffee. We’d both had a kind of disturbed night so Bob took off his shoes and slept on the couch while I went back to bed. It must have been two or three hours later that the rains come.
The thunder was bowling and rushing itself all over the sky and over each of the little wood houses in our town and the drought aching fields and the snapping dry woods and our memorial silent garden and our sand-bellied yard where Taylor Whitman was buried and dead. All that disturbance just drifted sweet and easy over you, but it woke me and I lay under my sheet and nothing else, while the entire house let out one big, contented breath and then began to loosen up under whole loops and clatters and spouts of rain. I walked through to watch it fall against the windows, not even noticing Bob was there until he rose up from the couch and walked straight to me, put his arm round my waist while the lightning shone in his hair. His hand fluttered against me, near my hip and it seemed a mighty fine thing that his skin could be close up to mine. I considered that might happen quite often from then on.
Bob and I lived on at Taylor Whitman’s house for almost a year and nobody seemed to bother too much that Taylor Whitman was gone. The town was glad that Bob was home and that was all. The only regret I hold about that time is how we had to have that dumb dog, Buddy, put to sleep. He was the only one seemed to miss Taylor Whitman and he would keep on digging up the dirt to get him back. Nearly made it, too.
We lived a good life and business at the store continued well, even if Bob did keep the stock kind of depleted on the sharp object side of things. Which brings me to the only difficulty Bob and I ever had with each other.
‘Couldn’t you stop it for a little while, darling?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the killing people thing. Don’t you get tired of it, ever?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Lord knows, I wouldn’t stand in the way of your interests, but won’t you get in trouble one day? I’d hate to lose you.’
‘Well, I’d hate that, too. As it happens, folks are getting awful cautious, round here. Suspicious, too. There ain’t the visitors passing through li
ke there used to be. I’m running out of strangers I can kill and I’d just hate to have to start up and kill folks we knew.’
‘Well, I should hope so. That would be just like murder, wouldn’t it? But what do we do about this, Bob? It’s getting to be a problem. You’re practically emptying the state.’
‘I know and I’ve thought about it. The only thing to do is just to up and move away to someplace else. I know you like it here and I do too, but it could be we have to sell up and get on the road.’
Now I didn’t want to leave the town where I’d been born one little bit and the idea of it made me very blue. I even got mad about it, which I never did with Bob as a rule.
‘Robert McConnerey Coons, I don’t see why you and your precious serial killing should mean I have to be uprooted from every darn thing I know. That doesn’t seem fair to me.’
‘We’d go someplace nice, I promise.’
‘And then what? We’d just have to move out again when you’d cleaned up all the drifters and loafers and welfare types. I am not a travelling salesman, I need to be settled in my life. I have a daughter and attractive breakables to think of.’
‘But I don’t know what to do, honey.’
‘What if I cut your arms off with an electric saw, break your legs and leave you in the woods all night before I kill you? Would that set you thinking?’
‘How’d you know about that?’
‘I read the papers. And all I see there is you having fun and not thinking of your family one bit. We are your family now, you know.’
The thought of having a family all of his own seemed to knock the air clean out of Bob and, before I knew it, he was holding on to my hand and crying worse than Taylor Whitman had during his interment.
‘I’m sorry you had to read that. If there’s one thing I hate it’s the morbid interest in violent crime, as evidenced by certain elements in the media. But I don’t know what to do, honey. I can’t stop. I can take a week out, even two, but then I need to get back to killing. I need to hear those noises they make. I need them fresh.’
‘Well, consarnit, why can’t you buy a tape-recorder like any normal person would?’
I was in a tough mood that day, I’d about had enough, washing all that blood and bone out of his things – it was worse than the frogs.
‘I tried it, Irma Jean. But I need the variety of sound. It’s not the killing I like, not really, it’s just that every one of them says different things, you know? They all beg and plead and whimper and shout in individual little ways – that’s a precious thing to me, it gives me a kind of faith in each person’s unique humanity, even in this cruel old world of mass production and drive-in funeral homes.’
‘Robert McConnerey Coons, I’ll move with you once and it’s got to be a nice, clean-living town we go to. But I only move once, mind, you don’t sort this out, we’re in for stormy weather, you and me.’
I found I was a much more forthright woman since I’d stomped down the earth over Taylor Whitman. I’d realised, you can do that to a husband, or anybody else, any time you like.
So we lifted up Taylor Whitman, buried him again in the woods, to save any inconvenience for the next owners of his house and we made the move to the home that you were raised in, the home where I’m writing this.
I’m sitting in the kitchen while your father is out in the woodshed, if you want to know. You will have guessed by now that Bob is your real father. We changed his name to Buddy when we got here, after Taylor Whitman’s dog. The name Elwood we took from another couple that your father met up with one night on the journey north – I never saw them, but they sounded real nice.
How come we’ve stayed here so long and happy and kept your life so undisturbed by your Papa’s homicidal tendencies?
Technology – that was the answer. Technology.
I don’t mind admitting, things were getting about as out of hand as they could get with your Papa. He got the house fixed up and had a job over at the garage, but as soon as he got the garden in shape, he was off serial killing again. I was happy because it made him happy and he come home with money from people he had dealt with now and then which helped to keep us comfortable and put you through school, but our happiness was founded on sand, as my Mama would have said. It was only a matter of time before something unpleasant occurred.
Then I was sitting home, watching TV, and a genuine miracle came to pass. I couldn’t wait to tell your father when he come in. It was another late night for him and I was so full up with the news that I sat on the edge of the tub while he scrubbed the blood out of his ears, didn’t wait for him to come downstairs.
‘Buddy, it’s happened. I’ve found a way out.’
‘What’s that, hon? You found what? Could you burn that, by the way, I don’t think it’ll wash.’
‘Oh, hush up and listen some, boy. You don’t have to do this any more. I found a way you can stop.’
‘Irma Jean, we’ve been through all this a hundred times.’
‘But it’s different now, listen.’
And I told him how they’d come up with machines, could take any noise at all and make it higher or lower or changed altogether, just mix it around any way you liked. What he had to do was record the sounds he got off of maybe eight or ten more people and he’d never have to kill a fresh one again. We had plenty of money saved by then, we could go right out and buy what we needed, put it in the woodshed, where he kept all those sharp objects of his.
Your Papa weren’t too sure about it at first, but he come round to my way of thinking in the end and was very conscientious about collecting up every little noise and whisper those final few people let out. It happened he couldn’t really let it go at ten and kind of eased the numbers up to fifteen but then I said that enough was enough.
He wound up with hours and hours of tape and what with Buddy being so practical-minded, it wasn’t long before he was out in the woodshed almost every night with his itty-bitty earphones on, mixing it up to beat the band. We could be happy again.
Now I won’t say your Papa has never caught another live one, but I’m too soft-hearted to say he shouldn’t ever go out and have some fun. Once in a while for old time’s sake ain’t so bad and he always tapes every detail, so there’s no waste involved.
Which pretty much wraps it up, sweetheart. I’ll sign off now before your Father gets back. We both sincerely hope you’re doing fine and will come see us whenever you can. We both of us miss you every day and think of you often as we know you think of us. Like your Papa says, ‘Our kind of folks stay close, it doesn’t matter what.’ So our best wishes and prayers go along with this letter, as always. Pleasant dreams and good night.
NOW THAT YOU’RE BACK
AND BECAUSE SOMETIMES he no longer knew what to do, or how to be, he went up to the emptied church on the hill and simply looked out of the window for a while.
He supposed he might spend a good deal of time here, staring down at the grass barrelling and sinking over the old graves, the blue-green slopes beyond it turning suddenly into rocks and sea. His memory wasn’t the best thing about him, but he was sure he had never seen a place like this. There was something impatient here about the sky, something with no space in it for men and an anger to swallow their works. The church had survived by becoming another stone among stones and setting its congregation safe underground. There were seven hundred years of them here, it said so on the plate fixed by the door.
Which he wished he’d never read because now he couldn’t walk here without thinking of stamping down on to yards and yards of spent bone and compressed personality. There was no particular sense in his thinking that way because everywhere here must run just as deep and peculiar as everywhere else. He could tell that just by looking. Through the window there was nothing but dust in water, water in peat-turf, peat-turf on rock and bare rock dipped in naked air and hard against raw water and millions of atoms of millions of years of dust. A frightening peacefulness. No argument, it was old – dusts and rocks
and waters were the oldest things possible, they were part of the planet and nothing he knew could be older than that, not really.
A thin breeze wavered between the stones of the wall and the little sheet of glass conserving the space where a window would once have been. He let the pressure of air wash against his face, skim over his hair and his eyelids and into his brain. Open his mouth and he could taste something slightly ocean and damp, just pushing fresh along his gums. Nice.
Rather than go straight inside when he came to the caravan; he turned down the track for the pool and began to skim stones. His first few efforts flew off numbly, crushing the surface into plumes and spidery disturbances that scampered up to the banks. A fluke attempt skipped twice over what seemed more and more like a thick dish of sky as he squinted at it, concentrating, trying to find a comfortable way to move his arms. He hadn’t tried skimming anything in years – seemed like hundreds of years. He could not picture himself as the boy who did this once without thinking, good at throwing things.
He knew he should relax more with his swing, try to feel unobserved and not ridiculous. It wasn’t as if he was doing harm, only playing to himself, by himself, that shouldn’t make him feel so uneasy.
‘Just like a human being, eh, Tom? See anything too lovely and you just have to start chucking stones. We’ve all got to make our mark.’
Phil. That was Phil’s voice saying his name and speaking to him and it would be Phil’s shape when he turned and looked, probably his flickering type of smile with the one eyebrow winced down above it – as if his smiling always hurt. There was no reason to be scared of Phil, no edge in the way that he’d spoken, but Tom found himself curling over slightly under his words, a cold space swinging open in his chest. He listened to the spatter of his pebbles dropping down beside him and wondered why his hands had let go of them. When he breathed, his ribs jumped and he wanted to cough.
‘Sorry. Tom? Sorry, man, I thought you knew I was here.’
Now That You're Back Page 14