Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  She was about to call out when she heard one of the farmhands shouting her name—her favorite mare was foaling. Abigail wiped her hands and ran toward the stables, forgetting all about the birds and the preacher.

  The search party drove down every dirt trail and poked into bushes; they peered into the shimmering dam and contemplated dredging it. They combed through the waving fields of wheat and ransacked barns…until the sheriff called off the search. The rainmaker was missing, but not before he’d done his job, and, besides, it wasn’t as if he was a local, Jeremiah rationalized. One week was a respectable time to spend looking for a stranger, especially one who had gone out of his way to seduce all the womenfolk in town.

  The sheriff had his deputy pin up notices declaring that Jacob Kidderminister had left voluntarily due to family circumstances and in the rush had left behind his trailer and his possessions. No one questioned the law enforcer’s assessment.

  The water receded; Rebecca adopted the coyote; the Kaufmann brothers towed away the silver trailer to sell for recycled aluminum; and life went on.

  The preacher resumed his sermons and gradually his congregation trickled back. But Bill Williams appeared a destroyed man. The stoop was more pronounced, the thin lips were curled in a permanent sneer of disapproval. But what was most noticeable was that the old fire and passion had completely disappeared from his preaching. During one sermon, delivered in a barely audible whisper, he fell into loud sobbing. Embarrassed, the organist petered into discordance and the congregation began to snigger.

  The subject was raised at the knitting circle. The postmistress (who had flown into Dallas for a face-lift since the incident of the rainmaker) put down her needles. “I say he is losing his wind,” she declared defiantly.

  The other women rattled their knitting needles in agreement.

  The mayor’s mother spoke up. “Why don’t we swap him for a young sexy one? You know, one of them that talks in tongues. You never know, he could turn out to be a useful contributor to the mental health of the women of this town, just like the rainmaker!”

  The room dissolved into giggles.

  The rivers became streams again, frogs returned to the wetlands, and the wheat rippled fatly under the hot sun. Life was bursting with fecundity. Bill Williams recovered and slowly the fervor began to creep back into the Sunday sessions at the small church—with one difference: he never mentioned race again.

  All returned to normalcy. Except the townsfolk seemed to take more joy in their everyday tasks, as if the drought and the floods had given them a greater understanding of the vulnerability of life.

  And so it was that the mayor and his mistress again found themselves in Abigail’s back paddock, with Abigail’s face buried between Chad’s legs. The mayor, having just reached orgasm, pulled her up and gazed into her eyes. He had never felt more emotional. Divorce proceedings were under way and Cheri had already begun her campaign trail to run against him in the next council elections. All of which Chad was treating with supreme equanimity. He was in love and had reached a momentous decision. He was going to ask Abigail to marry him.

  He’d barely got the words out when she emitted a loud scream.

  “Hey, I didn’t expect that kind of reaction,” he muttered, crestfallen, but then noticed that Abigail was pointing to something in the field. He turned and gagged on a wave of nausea.

  Beneath a tree in which a flock of starlings were roosting, sticking up out of the mud, were two human hands entwined. One, fragile and dark, was obviously female. The other was large and white. Twinkling on its index finger was a large sapphire ring, which Chad instantly recognized.

  They lay tied to a rusting brass bed, his muscular body curled around her darkly luminous flesh. It was a posture of infinite tenderness, a petrification of the moment when two people collapse into each other in love. The dead couple, miraculously preserved, were raised out of the earth like a glorious classical statue suspended in its own time bubble. The stunned onlookers removed their hats in respect, lowered their eyes in hushed shame. The silence was broken by a lone nightingale that perched itself on the bed frame and burst into song.

  Jeremiah, in an attempt to hide his clenching heart, adopted an air of professional detachment. He pointed to a single bullet wound visible in Jacob’s back. “I would say that one bullet was responsible for both the deaths, having passed through the male’s body and into the female.”

  He paused, visibly shaken by the clouded gaze of the dead girl who, despite her black skin, looked vaguely familiar.

  “Who is she, by the way? Anyone here know?” He turned to the small group of farmhands and officials who had helped drag the bed from beneath the mud.

  The youngest Kaufmann brother, the shyest, spoke up. “I don’t know who she is, but she’s got the very same birthmark as the preacher on her hand. Why, I’ve seen that mark a thousand times!”

  The men all leaned forward to look. There it was, as clear as day, a star-shaped wine-colored mark.

  By the time the sheriff and the mayor reached the church, word of the double murder had spread across town like a virus. The officials pushed open the iron gate with some dread. Jeremiah hated homicide cases. Luckily he hadn’t had to deal with many, but they were enough to scar a man’s soul for life.

  By the time they reached the door of the church the two men sensed something was amiss. The door was wide open, the altar smashed, the plaster hands of the Lord Jesus had been hacked off.

  As Jeremiah bent down to pick up one of the miniature hands, a creak came from the belfry above them.

  The preacher’s body hung from a rafter beside the huge brass bell, suspended by a metal chain. The body slowly swung around and the darkened, swollen face came into view. It was ravaged, pecked to pieces. On the floor below lay a single owl’s feather.

  Echo

  The tramp stank of piss and some unmentionable human filth Gavin couldn’t even bear to imagine. His leathery face loomed out at the property developer from under the canopy of snaking vines that still clung to the decaying wooden verandah.

  “Forest come un twisty up your soul, you have nothing, boyo, seep into yer DNA then zap! Dead meat scum.”

  He spat what looked like the last of his teeth at the property developer’s feet. Gavin, a big-boned man, who moved with the lolling grace of an individual who knew his own strength, was not a sentimentalist. He was also convinced that everyone was responsible for their own destiny and that poverty was quite likely contagious. He stepped back and regarded the squat, ragged figure with open disgust.

  “Get the fuck off my site before I arrange for the Salvos to come and pick up a corpse, comprende, you psycho schizo? I’ll give you the grace of ten minutes to fuck off, starting from…” Gavin pulled up the sleeve of his Zegnitti suit, chosen especially because it was woven entirely out of synthetic fibers, and studied his Gucci watch, “now.”

  The old man clutched a battered leather medicine bag to his chest. His matted locks crawled with lice; his eyes, kaleidoscopes of crazed delirium, fixed unerringly on Gavin. He lunged forward and tugged at his suit, his stench washing over the developer in a nauseating miasma.

  “I know. Forest talk through concrete. Forest crack roots into your skull. Believe. You must.”

  Gavin’s patience snapped. Pulling his sleeve away, he grabbed the collar of the tramp’s filthy coat and hauled him to the edge of the vacant lot. The vagrant’s legs, blue-veined sticks, knocked against the broken bricks that were scattered over the thick undergrowth, but he still clutched the medicine bag to his chest.

  The property developer reached the gate, kicked it open, and dropped the itinerant. He fell heavily, rolling to rest in the gutter.

  “You cursed. You no longer living. Flitter, flitter,” the old man muttered, blood mixed in with the spittle flying from his mouth, his skinny arms held above him as though he was expecting to be kicked.

  His leather bag had split open to reveal ten green cuttings inside. Incongruously their roo
ts were all neatly bagged like scientific specimens. Thinking they might be marijuana, Gavin leaned down. At closer inspection the plants looked odd, like primitive facsimiles of plants he would normally recognize. Great—a fucking environmentalist, he thought, some old hippie who’s lost his marbles.

  “Catch you here again,” he said, jabbing his finger in the tramp’s face, “and my boys will have your balls.”

  With that he slammed the gate. By the time he reached the wooden shed he’d had erected that very morning—a sentry box for his site manager—Gavin had managed to forget the encounter. At least, he thought he had.

  At forty-three Gavin Tetherhook was an impressive individual, both materially and physically. A staunch atheist, he prided himself on being self-made. He had grown up with his younger brother, Robert, on a sugarcane farm in northern Queensland and defiantly called himself a country boy. The Tetherhooks had been sugarcane farmers for five generations, until the 1970s when the sudden influx of cheap American sugar sent his father broke in less than two seasons. Devastated, his father had gone out into the cane field, strung his clothes over the unfurling tender-green leaves to make a tent, then sat, stark naked beneath it, weeping into the furrowed dirt. His two sons had found him six hours later, his exposed feet burned raw from the midday sun. The farmer had never recovered mentally, leaving Gavin’s mother to sell and rescue what she could after the bank had been through.

  The family was forced to move to a cheap boardinghouse on the outskirts of Tully, a frontier town famous for being one of the world’s top locations for UFO spottings and for its marijuana crops—two facts not entirely unrelated.

  After months of complete silence Gavin’s father eventually secured a job as a bus driver while his mother turned to religion for solace. The stoic fifteen-year-old, determined to haul himself out of the never-ending cycle of poverty and resignation, apprenticed himself to a builder of dubious reputation involved in the first local real-estate boom. Meanwhile his thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, began increasingly to depend on Gavin for the guidance his father was now utterly incapable of. It was a role Gavin relished and soon the two boys were inseparable.

  Gavin’s first job was to assist in the harassment of long-term residents who were reluctant to move, harassment that involved dog turds through letter boxes, mysterious fires, and the odd knee-capping. It was terrorism that got results. By the age of twenty, the last vestiges of morality erased from his personality, the entrepreneurial youth had purchased his first house. He bought his second at twenty-two—a shack that he demolished to create a parking lot. A year later he broke with the builder and set up his own property development company; six months after that he bought out his employer.

  Yep, Mr. G. P. Tetherhook Esquire was an impressive man. So Gavin reminded himself as he adjusted his balls then zipped up in the men’s toilets at the Brisbane RSL Club after lunch, the day he had evicted the tramp. If it wasn’t for the divorce, he thought, tucking a thick gray lock behind one ear, if it hadn’t been for that fucking little bitch upsetting his wife, he’d have a perfect record financially and emotionally.

  Cathy. He still couldn’t say her name without a ripple in his stomach walls, which he vaguely understood to be grief. Cathy, his wife, mother of his three children: Aden, twelve; Irene, nine; and Jonathan, four. Their names were imprinted on him like an epitaph.

  After checking behind him for witnesses, Gavin leaned against the wall of the urinal, momentarily overwhelmed by the sense of failure his divorce evoked. The marriage had been part of the plan, part of the vision he had of himself at fifty: wealthy and retired, with his groomed blond wife glistening beside him forever. Gold Coast mansion, private yacht, sons he could take fishing. Now that fantasy had evaporated overnight. Bugger them. Bugger them all.

  Gavin steadied himself then stood up straight: six foot four inches of fairly well-maintained male flesh. He hadn’t gone to pieces; he hadn’t suddenly developed cancer like his mate Wayne did after his separation. No, he was okay, he still looked good. So maybe he was drinking a little too much, and fuck knows he was over the promiscuity, however exciting it’d been at the beginning. Now it was just the money, the golden scaffolding, that kept him upright, that kept him hard.

  Whistling defiantly he rinsed his hands and stepped out of the bathroom, leaving the door swinging.

  The structure was going to be a ten-story block of service flats—chic units to maximize the constant stream of businessmen and tourists that passed through Brisbane. Gavin had waited until the dip in the housing market then bought the heritage bungalow in Fortitude Valley before auction after checking he could cash in a few favors with the local member to fast-track a planning permit.

  It was a formula that had worked over and over, and, as Gavin leaned against the iron scaffolding and gazed across the Brisbane River from the fifth floor, he felt a familiar roar of adrenaline, almost akin to a sexual rush, sweep through his body.

  Maybe it was a reaction to the devastation the natural world had inflicted upon his father, combined with a hatred of the oppression and tyranny of a farmer’s life as he battled the unmanageable—the weather, the seasons, the lack of rainfall. Whatever the cause, the idea that he had conquered nature in a way his father had never even imagined thrilled Gavin profoundly.

  This obsession against nature manifested in a variety of ways. First there was his choice to wear only synthetic fibers. Gavin went to extraordinary lengths to purchase the latest fashions in fabrics that incorporated nylon, polyester, or artificial silks. The property developer loved the scratchy sensation of polyester against his skin, the way his nylon sheets caught at his toenails, the unnatural way his body heated up under them. Then there was his tenacity in annihilating all vegetation on his construction sites before they began building. He was notorious for it, and fiercely proud of the fact that he was the prime target of the local environmental movement. Finally, his abhorrence of nature and his desire to control it translated to his sexual aesthetic. In the early days of their marriage he had demanded that Cathy remove most of her body hair. He loved combing the neat pubic triangle of fine blond hair once his wife’s long-suffering beautician had imposed some order onto Cathy’s otherwise unruly bush.

  Lately, since the divorce, he’d found himself going further, demanding that his young mistress rid herself entirely of body hair. The imposition of hegemony upon her body gave him the illusion of order—something he craved increasingly since his departure from the family home and routine.

  Not that Gavin Tetherhook was going to admit that to himself, let alone anyone else. He pulled his mind back to the present: prime real estate at prime prices. The slogan was pounding out a rhythm in his mind—Prime real…—when suddenly the scaffolding collapsed and the ground rushed up to meet his falling body.

  “You were lucky, mate,” his site manager told him as he hauled him to his feet. “Thirty-foot drop and you land on a pile of sand. Broke yer fall real nice, eh?”

  Dazed, Gavin blinked into the sun, then brushed the sand from his trousers. “I think I might have blacked out for a second or two,” he replied slowly, squinting as the blurred landscape pulled into focus.

  The property developer ran his hands across his body feeling for pain. The knees seemed all right, his back ached slightly around the shoulders where he must have landed, and there were two large bruises already beginning to form on his forearms, but apart from that everything seemed normal.

  “Want a lift to the hospital? They could run a few checks.”

  Remembering that he’d failed to insure the site for work-related accidents, Gavin shook his head. “Nah, I’ll be all right. Now what were those alterations you wanted me to look at?”

  Later that night, in the sterile comfort of the brand-new apartment—part of an investment block called Bridgeport he was about to launch onto the market—a refuge since Cathy had thrown him out two months ago after discovering he was having an affair—Gavin stripped off his clothes and stood heavily naked
in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. Raising his arms above his head he rotated slowly looking for further injuries. Nothing; just the familiar triangle of chest hair that curled thickly up from his belly, fanning into two gray wings that encircled his nipples, and the comforting weight of his cock resting against his thigh. He sucked in his stomach and glanced critically in the mirror. There was no doubt he was a good-looking man, a man who could still turn heads, a masculine man.

  In acknowledgment of his approving eye his penis began to harden. Life force—nothing to be ashamed of, Gavin thought. But he couldn’t help remembering Cathy’s face in the throes of orgasm, an image from the golden days of their marriage—his hands tracing the line of fine blond hair that ran from belly button to pubis; the sound of her laughter—girlish, not yet tainted with cynicism.

  Recently he’d suffered a deluge of such memories, as if time had decided to play a cruel trick on him, bending back on itself like a lewd female contortionist. In reality he and Cathy had slipped into an antagonistic celibacy after the birth of their third child.

  Gavin had loved his wife, still loved her, but the insidious loneliness had stifled him as she turned away from him night after night. She made him feel fallible. Human. Male. A sperm bag. In his darkest moments he hated himself for his weaknesses.

  “You never know what you’ve got until you’ve lost it,” he reminded himself. Then, determined not to free-fall into depression—something that seemed to happen increasingly lately—he grabbed a dressing gown and headed into the bathroom.

  It was a magnificent triangular room set into the corner of the apartment. Gavin had hired one of Queensland’s top interior designers to do the fittings and it was resplendent with spa, bidet, and sunken bath. Sinking into the steamy bathwater the property developer tried to remember what the theme was meant to be. The curved golden taps reminded him of exotic belly dancers. Then there were the Arabic tiles whose mosaic patterns covered the bathroom floor. Harem, that’s right—a bathroom fit for a sultan. A strange choice he had thought at the time, recalling the immaculately groomed homosexual interior designer who had proposed it. But Gavin had approved it anyway and the outcome stank of luxury, a perfect foil to the rest of the apartment, which echoed the pristine transitory world executives liked.