Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  The doorbell man smoothed his suit and stepped down from the table. He took a seat, crossed his legs, adjusted his fedora. “What do you suppose would happen then?”

  §

  This was what they wanted. What they always wanted. Just this slow thick leak, these fat droplets spattering against the floor and sinking into the woodgrain, staining the teeth of her house key. She squeezed the meat of her thumb with her opposite hand, milking the blood from the wound and speeding the drip. The monsters (No, she thought, not quite monsters, are they? Or not just any kind of monster. I know what they are. I know their name. They have been understood and catalogued and thrown behind a partition marked with their species and phylum) shuddered and salivated and gnashed their rotten broken saber–teeth to match the new tempo.

  “I know what you want,” she said. “I know what you are.”

  One of them hissed, “Paaaaaglia. Sssssteinemmmmm.”

  Another growled, “Behhhhind the hhhhhedges.”

  Another, its face fused into profile, its mouth almost filled with the metastasized flesh of its fellows, said, “Ennnnjoying the view?”

  “I could give you what you want,” she said, and wondered what would happen if she did. Wondered if it could somehow erase the bad decisions and the worse luck, the tense and unpleasant marriage, the dead baby that never lived the ghost of which floated between her and Jim. She wondered if she’d finally feel like she’d done something worthwhile. Each of the faces in the wall salivated in expectation, wet from lips to chin with thick foamy spit. Could she refuse them? Could she disappoint them like that?

  She would tell one more secret. And then she would see.

  “When we were in college,” she said, squeezing the gash, “Jim asked me what I wanted to do. With my life, I mean. We were spent, exhausted. We had just finished, you know… fucking, I guess. Making love. I don’t know. We were satisfied with ourselves. We felt philosophical. So he asked me… ‘in the cosmic sense,’ he said, whatever that means, what I wanted to do. And I took a deep breath, and I imagined that I was inhaling the whole universe, the stars and the planets and the dark matter, and I told him what I wanted to do. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted the world to bend a little under my weight. To never be the same after me.”

  She lifted her thumb upward, offering it to the chomping mouths in the wall of the Sudden Room. They strained and gurgled and roared, and the house shook.

  §

  Jim could hear them gurgling and roaring upstairs, louder than they’d ever been. And here he was, downstairs, listening to the doorbell man, whatever he was, stumble through his best estimation of what human conversation might sound like. He wasn’t sure how much more of this his brain could take.

  “Now imagine,” whispered the doorbell man, “that some homeowner just… stumbled onto the secret corridor where that Rattenkönig had become stuck. It would have to have been a sleepwalking homeowner, a homeowner catatonic with despair and disappointment. Sound familiar, homeowner? Sound like anyone you know?”

  “Okay, enough!” He was standing. “Enough, man, alright? Now what?” He was leaning over the doorbell man, shaking his fists, gesturing, shouting. “Why are you here? Are you here to help? Can you help us? Can you, what, kill those fucking things?” He grabbed the doorbell man by the lapels, shook him. “Can you do fucking anything? Huh?” He crumpled, came down onto his knees before the doorbell man, buried his head in the doorbell man’s chest, wept.

  The doorbell man caressed the hair at the nape of Jim’s neck and shushed him, rocked him back and forth. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not here to kill them. I just wanted to… see. I wanted to see, homeowner. I’ve never seen a Rattenkönig before.”

  Upstairs, someone screamed.

  §

  Abigail Quatro screamed. She tried to pull herself away, but she was trapped, held by dozens of scrambling arms and legs against the pulsing wall of skin. She felt their razor fangs at her wrists, her thighs, her shoulders, felt their dry, sore–covered lips wrap around the wounds and suck, drinking desperately from her, and it hurt, it hurt, God, it hurt. She struggled, kicked, squirmed, but even piled into a single gigantic body, they were stronger than anything she’d ever known. They weren’t letting her go. Her vision was getting hazy, and the part of her with the will to fight back was shrinking, fading. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

  She heard the door to the Sudden Room slam against the wall, felt the hall light burst through onto her skin, saw two silhouettes through the haze. One of them was shouting her name, rushing toward her. Jim. It was Jim. It had to be Jim. She was so very tired. And this wasn’t fair.

  The other silhouette clapped his hands, bounced on the balls of his feet. It said, “Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.”

  Jim was at her side now, pulling on her, trying to remove her from the wall of mean mouths and blind eyes. He was screaming. He was struggling.

  When they finally let her go, she knew that Jim hadn’t saved her. Her monsters just… weren’t hungry anymore.

  Her vision was coming back to her now. The pain was receding. She felt numb and betrayed. She kept trying to speak, but her throat wouldn’t let the words pass.

  “God, Abby. Oh Jesus, Abby, it’s okay,” Jim, above her, faking his way through normal again, “it’s okay, baby, I’m here. I’m here. Goddamn it, goddamn it. Okay, it’s okay. I’m going to call the hospital, baby, okay? Everything is going to be…”

  She hated to be called Abby. Always had.

  The other man… the bald man with the sunglasses and the fedora and the umbrella hanging from his arm… put his hand on the back of Jim’s head. She watched all of this from the floor. She didn’t like the floor. It was so dirty. So uncomfortable. The bald man said, “Well, that was fun, homeowner. Bye, now.”

  Jim’s head jerked up to stare at the bald man, watched him strolling through the door, down the hallway. Out. She stared at the slope where his jaw became his throat. She watched his pulse announce itself in the throbbing vein there. It seemed to be beating so much faster than hers.

  “What?” he screamed. “What?” Loud, raw, unhinged. “What?” A real question. A question to which he desperately expected an answer.

  For many moments, they listened to the bald man’s footsteps. They listened to the door slamming on his way out. And then all there was to listen to was the gurgle and slurp of the wall of monsters.

  When her voice returned, Abigail Quatro said, “Nothing changes. Nothing is different. Everything is always the same.”

  Old Roses

  MY FATHER BUILT OUR BASEMENT like a theatrical set. He made partitions and propped them up against the cold stone walls, the real walls, the rough walls that smelled like mold and wet age. He painted the partitions (the paint he used was called “Old Roses”). He added Styrofoam crown molding where the partitions met the ceiling, which he covered in mirrored black glass, and he bought a series of musty faux–Persian rugs to toss over the cracked concrete floors. He built shelves into the fake walls, and a dresser, and place for a television, and he brought in a bed and a recliner. He built a bathroom down there and stocked it with a series of aftershaves and toothpastes. The shower was too small. With bent knees and craned spine, you’d try to position yourself beneath the showerhead, washing the foam from your hair in thirty–second shifts because if you stood like that too long, you’d cramp up and spend the rest of the day with your neck jerked to the side. Or maybe you wouldn’t. But I did.

  There was a wall in the fake basement that opened on secret hinges, and behind it, down a lightless hallway untouched by my father’s obsessive façade–building, was his office. His secret office, where things were what they were, and not what they pretended to be. This is where he kept his tchotchkes, the apparently endless collection of shit he had picked up over the years, much of it useless, or broken, or so stripped of whatever had once made it beautiful to look at that it seemed to function only as a reminder that all things, in their essential una
dorned form, are basically ugly. The skulls inherited from his oral hygienist father, their teeth capped or replaced with gaudy silver or overlaid with sparkling braces. The grinning cigar–store Indian with the word NIGGER scratched into its forehead a dozen decades past. The whistle from Moscow, shaped like a horse and colored like a children’s story book, glued back together after I dropped it on the floor (I inherited this at some point, as I did with so many of my father’s tchotchkes, but I have no idea where it has gone now; it creeps up on me, when I am vulnerable to regret and longing, when I am alone, and its ghost whistles in my ear and asks me why I didn’t love it enough to keep track of where it went). He would sit at his desk (itself a glass–fronted relic rescued from the alley behind a head shop, a former display counter, its case filled with a cavalcade of other tinier orphans) and smoke his cigars and drink non–alcoholic beer and play with his prizes.

  My father was an intellectual.

  He bought me a cell phone when I was sixteen so that he could call me from the basement and say, “Hey Lieutenant.” (This is how he began every conversation I ever had with him; it’s how he began his toasts at the wedding ceremonies marking both of my failed marriages, and it is how he told me my mother had died when he called from his new place in California, to my new place in Boston). “Hey Lieutenant. I just finished another chapter. Care to give it a listen?”

  So I would. I would pass by the stairs to the attic (this is where my mother stayed in those days, with her Kurzweil keyboard and her fantasy novels about opera singers) and I would hear Mom shout down, “Dean, whatcha doing?”

  And I would ignore her and go downstairs, past the set and backstage, to visit my father’s greenroom, where he would read to me, in the sonorous baritone he reserved for pronouncements of the gravest profundity, selections from the autobiography of the life he wished he had led. Here’s the first chapter:

  The War I Fought

  I was drafted into a secret war when I was six years old. I was given a machete, and I went out at dusk to find the threat and destroy it. The threat, in this case, lifted itself up out of the drainage culvert that ran behind my house in Tarzana, California, an army of human hands with foot–long fingers and twenty–eight knuckles and mouths superimposed over their wrist–stumps. The hands would collect on the concrete banks of the culvert in the summers of my childhood, each night when the sun started to go down, and they would click their fingernails against the concrete. The men who drafted me into this war told me that, if the hands were ever to make it past the culvert and into the world, their mouths would open and they would sing a song of such profound joy that humanity would be plunged into universal, suicidal depression through the inevitable comparison of the sum of their own life’s joy to that depicted in the song. This was not allowed to happen, obviously, so… I was in charge of stopping it. I would hack the hands to bits with my machete and throw them back into the shallow water. One day, the men who drafted me came to my school and called me to the principal’s office, where they told me that the job was done, and the world was safe.

  The house of my teenagehood always seemed to breathe. It was a labored breath, rattling and uneven, but I could feel it, sitting in my bedroom across the hall from my older sister’s room, or sitting on the couch watching television, or sitting on the toilet, or sitting anywhere. The whole place seemed to take in air and spend it, the walls seemed to move so slowly that you couldn’t be sure they were moving at all, and the whole operation seemed to take so much effort and energy that, falling asleep at night, staring at the television in my room, I was routinely afraid that the works would collapse around me.

  I tried speaking to my sister about it on those few occasions when I was allowed into her room. My sister’s room changed every time I went in. She was fickle with her fandom, her interests shifting from moment to moment. I remember when she painted the walls black and put candles on all the flat surfaces, and teased her hair and wore bold make–up that made her look like something excised from a silent movie and dropped into the real world. She was lying on her bed when I came in, staring at the ceiling fan with her headphones on. I opened the door, and then I knocked on it, which I immediately recognized as the wrong order of doing things, and I almost closed the door and ran back to my room out of shame and fear. She didn’t seem to notice. I said, “Hey Marcy?”

  She glanced at me, sighed deeply, and shifted her attention back to the ceiling fan.

  “Can I come in?” I said.

  “I don’t care what you do, Dean.”

  So I came. I sat on her black bedspread and stared at her black walls and tried to think of something to say. I said, “Hey, can I ask you something?” Even then, I didn’t know what I wanted to ask.

  She sat up without using her arms to support her and fiddled with her portable CD player. Then she sighed dramatically (again) and pulled the headphones down around her neck. She said, “Fine. Free country.”

  “Is Norton… you know, is he Mom’s, like… boyfriend, or something?”

  Norton. That name, which more than any other I associate with a particular person, a specific face. That name, which to me feels like something slick and sticky and rotten on my tongue and in whatever portion of my brain it occupies. Norton. Who, when I learned the word “obsequious” several years later, sprang to mind as its paragon (and who, despite his omnipresence in those days, was not around when my mom lost her footing and became my dead mom). Norton. My mother’s boyfriend. Or something.

  Marcy said, “Mom says he’s her student. He’s taking piano lessons.”

  “I know what Mom says. What’s true, though?”

  “Dean, what do you think?”

  “I think they’re fucking each other,” I said, and I started to cry. I’m not sure why anymore. Maybe I was sure then. Maybe there was some vital imperative that compelled me to cry, and maybe it made sense at the time. But I can’t remember it now.

  Marcy put her headphones back on and said, “Yeah, well…” and fell backward onto the bed. The next time I saw her room, it was painted burnt–orange and she had joined the volleyball team at school. There was more than a little of my father in her, the set–builder, the changer of backdrops.

  Here is what my father’s autobiography says about when he was sixteen:

  The Great Spanish Orgy

  I went to Spain when I was sixteen to escape my father, who had no idea that I had spent the majority of my childhood among magic and war but seemed to sense that there was something strange about me in any case and desired nothing less than my humiliation and the destruction of my spirit. He was a dentist. I was a poet. I have always been a poet. My son is also a poet, because I have made him into one. My daughter is a poet of a different sort. My wife is fucking a poem written for her by our house, so at least there is some tenuous theme to attach our family to one another. I had saved some money from the summer previous, when I sold psychic tongues on the black–market, and I used it to buy a plane ticket and a counterfeit passport. These were the days in which you could still smoke cigarettes on airplanes, and I did. Then I got to Barcelona, and I watched the bullfights, which the locals call La Corrida. They shouted “Viva La Muerta!” from the bleachers. In the streets that night, a group of men with long wooden poles maneuvered a gigantic wooden marionette through the avenues and boulevards, and I met a girl named Giselle from France, and she took me to an orgy. She had an extra arm that grew from her side, which she kept wrapped around her belly beneath her shirt. She couldn’t allow it near pen or paper for fear that it would tell her secrets. She claimed to have many secrets, but she would not share them with me. That night, lying on a mattress made of other people sprawled across the floor, with the light from the windows turning everyone bluer than Krishna, and with the shadow of the leering marionette peeking through at us from outside, I gave her extra arm a pen and I let it write some secrets on my back. When I returned home, I had a tattoo artist attach these secrets to me permanently. I have never asked anyone to
read them for me, and so I still do not know what they are.

  My only real friend in those days was Fir, the Iranian girl with the nose ring. Fir had enormous eyes. She was quiet, and she smiled a lot, and she was thrifty with her attention, and so when she said something nice, she meant it with such sincerity that it wrecked you inside, made you feel somehow simultaneously that you really met her criteria for goodness and worth, and also that you couldn’t possibly deserve it. Around her, you were reminded of all the awful things about yourself that she didn’t know. Or maybe you wouldn’t have been. But I was.

  Behind my father’s childhood home (or whatever he imagined to be his childhood home in the wild nonsense of his autobiography) may have been the legendary culvert, but all that was behind mine was an empty lot, overgrown with weeds and freckled with trash and rimmed at the far end by a row of unhealthy looking trees, and beyond that, the freeway. This is where Fir and I spent our afternoons, once we had escaped from high school and the various tortures therein. There was an old wooden observation tower at the edge of the lot, although what you were supposed to observe from on top, neither of us could ever figure out. Its planks were old and dark and soft, and the stairs to the top deck were rotten, and some of them were missing. We spent our afternoons erecting fresh planks stolen from behind the hardware store. We added a room to the bottom by walling off the empty space beneath the top deck, and we decorated the walls with posters of my favorite movies and her favorite bands. We repaired the stairs. We mounted a flag to the guard rail on the top deck, a piece of red fabric that had once been a Halloween Dracula cape, and we wrote in sharpie on the face of it: THIS TOWN BELONGS TO US. Which, thinking back, we had backward.