Deadweight

by Robert Devereaux

  Daddy came around to her nightstand. Reaching for a Kleenex, he knocked the rose over, swore at it, left it there, its furled pink bloom pressed to the laminate like her face had been pressed to the pillow. Turned away, he daubed at his belly, tugged on something, then balled the Kleenex up and thrust it in his robe pocket. Cinching up his robe, he leaned over her. He pressed his face close to hers, put a hand on the back of her neck, pulling her hair so tight she had to bend her head back. His other hand lay on her pillow, a thumb pressed to her forehead like a spot of dark sunlight. “If you tell anyone about this,” he said, “I will kill you.”

  There was a calm in his voice that terrified her.

  “Nod if you understand.”

  She gave the barest of nods, unable to tear her eyes away from the hurt she saw in him. It was a wounded look, a haunted look, as if the part of her he had stolen was now trapped in his eyes.

  “You bled some. It’s all right. It’s normal. When the bleeding stops, take the towel, ball it up, and put it in the garbage under the sink. Make sure it gets covered over with other things. Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “That’s my girl.” He leaned toward her as if to kiss her cheek, then checked himself. He threw a blanket over her. Karin wished him away, he went away. The hall light snapped off, deepened the darkness in her room.

  ***

  After a while, she did as her father had said.

  Lying there on her belly, feeling her body ache and throb where her daddy had hurt her, she thought she’d bled more than she had. Still, the shock of seeing the bright red blotch of blood on the white towel set her softly to crying again. She put on her flannel nightgown, disposed of the towel, and climbed back into bed.

  The little rose lay overturned upon her nightstand, a spill of potting soil at its base. She closed two fingers about the stem, shook most of the soil off into the paper bag in her wastebasket—stray rain beating at windows—and brought the bloom to her nose. The soft pink aroma of the dying flower was a breath of heaven.

  Her whole body ached from her daddy’s abuse, but the pain throbbed worse between her thighs than anywhere else. She turned on her night lamp, bending its neck so the light was inches from the wall, casting an intense yellow circle there but bathing the rest of the room in the glow of one small candle. Then she propped her pillows up and slowly tugged at her nightgown until it was bunched at her waist. She ran a fingertip over the hurt area but it felt too raw and tender even for that amount of touch. Taking the stem of the rose carefully in one hand, she lowered its bloom to her hurt, feeling the soothe of its velvet-soft petals. She moved it gently along her sore wrinkled lips like the twin kiss of flower to skin. Looking about her room, she saw the other roses—in bottles, in jars, in Maxwell House cans—all seeming to comfort her, to add their soothing to the rose in her right hand.

  She lifted the rose to her face, frowning at a trick of the light. The top third now appeared bright red, like a strawberry indeed, like Alice’s white roses painted red in the Disney cartoon. And just like those cartoon roses, it dripped now, one red drop on her creamy nightgown. She felt the wetness even as she looked down, saw the scarlet flow seeping out of her, trickling down onto her bed like the first water spilling from a cracked dam.

  “Mommy,” she screamed, “Mommy, I’m bleeding.” Over and over she screamed it, staring down helplessly at the spreading red on her sheets, the liquid coming out of her where she still throbbed from her punishment.

  Then the door came open and the light flooded in and Mommy came with it, holding her, and Daddy stood there at the door, blocking the light. “I didn’t know there’d be more,” she said. “I didn’t know it would start up again.” Then realizing what she’d said: “Don’t let me die, Mommy. Please don’t let me die.”

  “There, there, my baby,” her mother said, squeezing her tightly. New yellow bruises stood out on her mother’s high cheekbones. “Don’t talk nonsense. You’re not going to die. You’re just becoming a woman is all. William, go back to bed. This is for me and Karin to deal with.”

  Daddy didn’t move.

  Mommy looked back at him. “Go on,” she said, “go to bed,” but Karin heard the last word die and saw her daddy stare something into her mommy without meaning to and felt her mommy’s hands stiffen on her back. Then the doorway was empty, the glare harsher from the hallway. When her mommy turned back, shock had pulled her face tight.

  She knew. She knew it all. For a moment, Karin saw rage flare distantly in her mother’s eyes, rage not at her but at her father; then it extinguished like a spent match and a sheen fell over her face. Karin saw it fall, saw it stay fallen and become fixed, and she cried and cried, but her mother did not hug her her mother did not hug her but helped clean her up and tucked her in and did not kiss her good night.

  When she left the room, she took her love with her.

  ***

  The next day Karin threw out all her roses, replacing them gradually with other flowers. Asters, orange tiger lilies, marigolds. None of them lasted long, not in her room, not in her garden. She’d lost her touch with them, stopped caring whether they lived or died.

  She cried when Granny Eva died the following October, late when the leaves fell. She and her mother went to the funeral, sat beside the impassive Grandpa Borchert. But neither of them could summon any tears then, and barely a word passed between them that day.

  On Christmas Eve, Daddy brought his punishment—which had kept on unabated and would continue so for eight more years—to her face, filling her mouth with wet white ashes and her heart with wormwood.

  ONE

  BROKEN BLOSSOMS

  Sal had one heck of a sharp ear, that much could be said for him. Only missed one in ten. Other nine times, he identified her pickup with ease, the soft purr of its motor mingling with the sounds of air being scooped and scoured off the road in the waning light.

  He sat, not rocking, on the porch of the modest house the cemetery provided. Tabby had settled herself as usual into the fleshy nest—an arched V like bird wings—his fat thighs made. She was heavy and warm with sleep. Years as a graveyard cat, she knew enough to stay close to Sal, not to bother the mourners, though it being Easter Sunday, the traffic in mourners had been light. Easter was a time of joy, of chicks and colored eggs; for the faithful, it was the celebration of the Lord’s triumph over death. People tended, even the most zealously bereaved, to steer clear of the cemetery on Easter.

  But not, it seems, Mrs. Karin Tanner.

  Sal looked out beyond the easy plateaus and slopes of grave after grave, black ribbons of road winding here and there to separate one era of cemetery from the next, ash trees providing shade for white stone benches from which the living could contemplate the dead. He looked out, no strain in his eyes, toward the west, off where Taylor Road funneled over the rise to Loomis and Rocklin and Roseville beyond.

  Was her, all right. Any doubt, however faint, erased itself when her truck hove into view. The pick-up curved obediently along the road, slowed as it neared the gates with their CLOSED AT NIGHTFALL sign, blinked its intended left, stopped to let two cars—a leadfooted bubblepopping teenybopper and some gray-haired grouch of a tailgater in a business suit—sail by, then eased across the road into the cemetery and lazed its way, predictable as any rut can be, through the grounds. This time of day, she could have parked in one of the spaces painted in faded white on the blacktop in front of Sal’s house. Instead she invariably chose, as now, to pull over on the shoulder of one of the access roads and walk—the slight uphill struggle seeming to earn her some right she otherwise lacked—between the earliest Penryn plots and the stretch of graves belonging to the Barker clan (from Benjamin Barker 1931, through the logjam of deaths in the ’50s and ’60s, on past the trickle that ended, one final drop, with Eunice Barker 1974, when Calvin her son, the last of a long line, pulled up stakes and fled north to Oregon). From there, she’d pick her way through in a predictable meander—leaving always
one sprig of baby’s breath on stillborn Betsy Trillin’s plot—until she reached her bastard of a husband’s grave.

  She reminded Sal, as she came on, of someone from his past. Pretty, more than pretty, but beat down inside her bird bones; beat down yes, but not out; no, she had a good measure of feist in her. He couldn’t place the memory but that was okay—was it the braid-haired girl from his third grade class, Terry something, whose wet-lashed eyes seemed always to be crying? Nope, not quite, but that was close. No matter. It tied this Karin Tanner to Sal’s past in an intriguing way, and that pleased him, made him appreciate the hint of mystery she brought into his quiet life. Not enough to disturb, just enough to tantalize.

  Now she had slowed on the approach to her tormentor’s grave, stopped where she always stopped, raised her eyes to Sal’s, lifted her carefully wrapped bouquet in greeting to him, silent, reverential as if he were the god of death watching over her wife-beating husband and she needed his permission to kneel by the tombstone. Dear God, what was the draw, he wondered. Why did she come back, day after day, to Danny Daniels’ grave? And what must the good man she had hooked up with since be thinking? But Sal held all of that in. He just eased into a smile, waved his short slow wave, gathered fat startled Tabby to his chest, and, stroking the scruff of her neck, went inside, careful to catch the screen door before it banged shut.

  It wasn’t a large place. Just the front room for the idle sit in bad weather and the rare TV show; the little kitchen alcove with its munchkin appliances, save for a fridge that stuck out some; a john complete with crapper, sink, and shower stall; and one cramped bedroom whose sag of a window looked out on the tall back-building where the digging equipment awaited its next corpse.

  Sal dropped Tabby on the couch, where she curled up and went to sleep again. He tugged on the silver handle of the fridge, let the light and the stale cheesy smells assault him as he foraged for drink. No, not Pabst Blue Ribbon, not on Easter. Passing over V-8, Apricot Nectar, and Jolt, he settled on the bitter juice of the cranberry over ice. Tinged with red, tasting of evil, making the tongue say yes and no at the same time, Sal didn’t always love it. But now, with Karin Tanner kneeling beside the rotting slime who had roughed her up and whom she had finally had the sense to do in with a carving knife, kneeling by that grave on an Easter Sunday no less, talking to him as she always did—this was an evening for bitter cranberry.

  He sat beside Tabby, lights off, and watched Karin Tanner through the front window. Today’s bouquet lay to one side. Her fingers were lovingly stroking offerings from days past, lifting away dead blossoms, leaving behind those that still held a semblance of life. As her hands worked over the grassy plot, she leaned in to talk to the dead man.

  Sal shook his head, swirled cranberry juice over his tongue, felt it go down cold and wrong, like burped barf. What a waste of a beautiful woman’s time, mooning over a dead wife-beater. But then life was funny, indeed it was, and every one of God’s souls found its own way through the thicket. She’d gotten worse. Put him under nearly a year past, maybe one or two visits during the summer, then once a week in the fall, double that through the winter, and so on increasing, until, for the last month at least, it had been every goddamn day, the Lord pardon him his blasphemy. But it wasn’t his blasphemy, but hers for showing such guilt or devotion or whatever it was, to mourn a man who’d abused her the way the reporters covering her trial hinted at. Daniels was one sorry lowlife Sal had been pleased to bury—though for months after, he had felt obliged to extend silent apologies to those good souls buried nearby.

  He gazed at her. She was leaning now over the grave like the White Rock girl, her breasts straining the fabric of her dress just like the White Rock girl’s did her tunic or whatever the heck she wore. Staring down into the lake at her reflection, was that what was going on? First time he’d seen her, he hadn’t seen her. That’d been two years ago when Walter Pyne, who owned not only this cemetery but a funeral home in Penryn as well, had talked Daniels into buying a plot, or rather a pair of plots—no, not for his spouse, who hung back like a faint wraith from the men as they walked among the graves and whom Sal could not recall with any clarity. Not for her but for the dog, the steel-gray German shepherd who’d made Tabby’s eyes go wide, whom the husband had hugged and pointed at the twin plots, whom Sal had interred an hour past midnight, full-sized coffin, grave liner, the works, but no headstone of course, for it was only right, Mr. Pyne had told him, to honor the wishes (not to mention the signed contracts) of the dead but what would folks think if word got around that animals as well as people were buried in the Pyne Memorial Cemetery? The wife hadn’t known, Sal thought. Probably didn’t know now that just beyond the grave grass she caressed, the family dog, willed to Pyne at Daniels’ death, now lay buried.

  He sat on that couch for another hour, watching the day die around her. She rose, indistinct now in the dark, and stood looking down at her husband’s grave. Next thing Sal knew, she was moving away, a creamy blur in the night. Her engine scattered the quiet. Her headlights lanced the darkness, scooped over headstones, drew the car around the curves of the access road, onto the highway, and off into the west. Sal thought of Mildred for a while, buried in a special place up on the hill, how much he missed her after twenty years and more, how fine it would have been to have had children with her, how bitter even now it was to think of her barren womb, and they both from large families.

  He sat maybe ten minutes longer. Then he got up, hit the switch to turn on the floodlights Pyne had put in four years back to discourage vandals, and retired early.

  ***

  In the beginning, there was pain, and pain was with him, and pain was him. A knifepoint pried at his center, cold place come suddenly back into being. It twisted and poked like a merciless dental probe, found the agony that lay deep in him and made it grow and billow and swell.

  One with the pain was the stench, sharp and dark, a blade-twist of putrefaction. It savaged the organs that sensed it, demeaned them by ravage and rape, ten thousand scalpels tinier than wasp stings pressing their way into them, forcing wave on wave of redefinition upon them.

  He groped—not knowing who “he” might be—for some place, any place, to stand. He was a coal brought forth from cold ash, red glow pulsing in his dead belly, in an airless lightless terrain. It pulsed, this frosted flame of pain and stench, and its pulse, ugly, irregular, washed waves of terror over him.

  From nothing, there was suddenly everything. Floods of mentation, but not whole, not healing. Vile tatters of thought, more color than word, garroted, syllable-warped, whip stings darting in, at once denying and affirming all origin: to him, to them, to anything.

  But out of the unbearable chaos—not to be borne yet impossible to flinch from—the very struggle to coalesce gathered the scatterings of coherence around the faintest of images: A woman. Her face a thin suggestion, carved by pain out of pain, tiny steel leaves of agony flurrying by, blood and flesh, sculpting an image in vitriol. But even as it formed, it began to disperse. The pain blurred and spanged back into focus, multiplied. No air, none, to sustain the impossible glow of undead embers.

  He tried to seize the image, reached for it with his mind, even though it was loathsome, even though the effort to reach howled new cries of pain through him. Two truths banshee’d around the image as it crumbled: This wasn’t the first awakening, although it was the first time reflection had come back; and the woman’s name—the sound shivved his heart—was Karin.

  Then the agony collapsed in upon itself. His lungs pulled for oxygen, found none, foundered, and he was no more.

  ***

  Monday afternoon, Karin knelt beside the windflowers. Flanked by beds of dwarf blue stars and the pinks and reds of sweet-scented monkeyroot, the white of the windflowers with their bright yellow centers bloomed forth like God’s pure thought. Leaning in, she caressed the cool petals, nosed the overlapping white folds, breathed the delicate scent of buttercup there beside the redwood fence that enclosed he
r backyard.

  Idling a finger up and down the thin but sturdy stem of the tallest of them, she decided that it and its three closest neighbors would make a fine bright centerpiece for Danny’s bouquet this evening. She took up her clippers—Smith & Hawken specials that fit just so in her hand—and snipped them off near the base, placing them beside others gathered so far in the long flat wicker basket.

  She sat back on her haunches and took in the perfume of colors all about her. The deep bordering gentian of forget-me-nots, as blue and troubled as her thoughts of Danny sometimes. Clusters of yard-high scarlet lightning darting up here and there. A wide range of yellows from the sunrays and moonbeams of coreopsis, near the central meeting place where the curved cobbled paths she’d laid down years ago came together. Large clematis in velvety blues and reds climbing the trellis she’d put up near the back porch. Her garden was the best place in the world, an escape from both the ruins of her past and the bland homogeneity of her new marriage, a place where her hands and indeed her whole being could work the magic Granny Eva had told her about so often.

  The sun felt grand on her skin. Moments like these, she wished she felt comfortable not stopping at halter and shorts but stripping all the way to the buff, standing out here in the full glory of the sun, feeling the cool brush of gladiolus at her thighs. Once or twice when Danny had gone drinking and left her alone, humid summer evenings in the house, she had slipped out the sliding door, laid her robe over a lawn chair on the back patio, felt fingertips of air move against her unrestricted front as she walked easy and open along the cobbled paths, kneeling to love the flowers without reserve and to feel the return of that affection. Those times had been precious in the extreme, daring and lovely.

  Frank never went drinking. Never went out at night. Just holed up in his study, poring over torts and wills and briefs, or whatever it was trial lawyers pored over. She didn’t know. He never shared his work with her and she never asked. All she knew was that, as much as she liked him and whatever residue of gratitude remained from what Frank had done to win her acquittal, she no longer felt she loved him, not the way a woman ought to love her husband. It had been the turmoil of the trial and the media play that surrounded it, his undeniable good looks and his many kindnesses toward her during that time and in the months following, the whole built-in melodrama—these things, she supposed, had turned her head, had made her cling to the belief that he was her beloved white knight and that agreeing to marry him would lead inevitably to the happy ending she deserved.