Deadweight

by Robert Devereaux

  “Yes, I did.” Why did she say it that way, making him feel guilty for his gift, as if she suspected some ulterior motive.

  “Thank you,” she said, setting it on the fridge next to the box of Kleenex. No kiss, no smile. A heavy sigh. What in Christ’s name was going on? “I need to change out of these clothes and be on my way.”

  “Karin, it’s only three-fifteen.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were moist but otherwise unreadable. “Sorry, I have to be alone.”

  “I came home early so we could talk.”

  “What about?”

  “About us.”

  “Not now, Frank. Later, maybe tonight.” She walked off, through the TV room and down the hall.

  He was afraid he knew what was going on. He’d become too dull for her. She’d grown stronger in the last year, too strong to be held under by any man. She was going to walk out, quiet and strong and no longer needing him.

  He wanted to rush into the bedroom right now, rush in there and grab her, pull her close and tell her how much he loved her. But he couldn’t do that. The mood was all wrong. It was too late. He was going to lose her and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  He tried to drink some apple juice but his attempt at swallowing hurt something fierce. Pouring it in the sink, he watched the rich brown juice coat the white porcelain and heard Karin’s shower start up in the distance.

  FIVE

  SOILED HANDS

  “Mrs. Tanner, you’re early again. I was planning to meet you at your truck and explain what happened.”

  Karin had heard Mister Romano’s screen door slam, and part of her mind registered his approach, but for the most part her attention fixed on the fresh earth—no grass, no blooms—that mounded over Danny’s grave. Deep tire tracks gouged the earth where she was used to kneeling, and here and there tamped-down spills of dirt clumped the crushed grass.

  “It’s really a baffler. In the old days, before we had grave liners, a coffin would collapse after a year or two from the weight of the earth and you’d have to fill in the depression just like this. But grave liners changed all that—big blocky concrete boxes form-fitted together and banded on the sides with metal strips—I’ve never seen them fail before, except for one time with Joel Beddoe, a fellow we hired who claimed more knowledge than he had. I trusted him to do a decent job, thing collapsed soon’s he started filling the grave, major embarrassment. But I did all the work on this burial and I know this liner got put together right, got set in the ground right, lid lowered into place just as nice as you please, and I just wanted to say I’m real sorry and as baffled as a man can be.”

  Karin had never heard so much out of Mister Romano before, not even during the funeral preparations nor the burial ceremony when Frank, bless him, had taken over the bulk of the planning, what with her hospitalization, her arrest and arraignment, the swirl of media that left her helpless with trauma and distress. Mister Romano stood before her, his hands folded over his belly, fingers in uneasy twitch, a subtle rocking where his gray cuffs met his workboots. Karin suddenly realized that the poor man was waiting for some sign of forgiveness, anything that would let him return, shriven, to his house.

  “I . . . I understand,” she offered, and he accepted it with relief. “We ceded it,” he said absurdly before he turned and left, and she spent a confused moment wondering to whom Mister Romano had surrendered her husband’s grave before she saw the tan-white splinters of seed generously scattered on the plot and realized what he’d said.

  Kneeling, she set her basket down in one of the tire tracks. She’d been so upset at Jimmy Gallagher’s assault on her that she could hardly remember showering, changing, driving here. Yes, there was her Chevy-10 in its usual spot, there yesterday’s primrose on Betsy Trillin’s grave, and now she remembered—but as in a dream—lifting the flower to her face only minutes ago, renewing it to a brilliant yellow, and replacing it with new apologies for again forgetting Betsy’s sprig of baby’s breath.

  Now she was here, her moment with Mister Romano had come and gone, and she was here in the protective folds of the cemetery’s rolling greenery, sitting beside Danny once more. “Danny,” she said, “my life’s a mess. Feels weird talking to this newly turned earth, I’m so used to the cut and swirl of the grass, the dents and bumps in the ground the way they were.” Karin touched the mound tentatively, its smoothed-over spade marks still apparent from morning before they’d sprinkled the grass seed. It was warm from hours of sunlight, warmer than the grass plot she’d grown used to. She closed her eyes, caressed it, tried to find Danny’s spirit newly infused in it.

  “Danny, I don’t want to be a victim, not yours or anybody’s. I thought I was stronger than I am, no, I know I’m stronger, but Danny, I don’t seem to be strong enough. Jimmy came on to me. The guy next door? He nearly raped me, and dammit I just stood there and let him do it. I’m frightened, Danny, I’m really scared I’ve been a victim so long that that’s what I am at the core, this weak mewling woman who’s only comfortable when she’s being misused. I know I’m not like that inside, there’s this rage in me I let out when I . . . when I hurt you, and it’s stayed with me and it’s a good rage, I know it is, but it stayed deep and buried inside me just when I needed it most.” Karin’s hands roved over Danny’s plot, touching thin stubble. “If only I had your strength, Danny, your passion, not the bad parts but the good, alive, all-out exuberant parts of you, if I could only depend on that passion for self-defense at least, I could maybe sort everything out, decide what me and Frank need to do, decide what I should do with my life besides stay at home and talk to my plants.” Her fingers glided over the ground, feeling yielding lashes of grass everywhere.

  Grass.

  She opened her eyes. A moment of discontinuity, as if a week or two had elapsed as she spoke. Young shoots of grass sprang up through the brown bald head of Danny’s grave. The power, like a tingle of electricity, coursed in her arms, down into her fingers, which brushed through the new spare growth like a harpist barely touching her strings. She let them rove wider, to the all-brown edges of the mound, caressing the air not a quarter of an inch above the ground and watching, as if it were a time-lapse film, crumbles of dirt part to let through the unfurling silent sproing of new growth. Where her hands brushed back through the sparse patches directly above her buried husband, what was already there shot forth and widened by barely perceptible millimeters, joined by microscopic new needles that gradually unbrowned the bare soil with sheer profusion. It made her forget her trauma for a time, made her want to laugh, and she did that, briefly, not loud, an escaped giggle, enough to sense the depths from which her power came. For it wasn’t simply her arms and hands that tingled; that same core of goodness, of excitation, glowed throughout her body. Its roots sank deep into her, almost as though it began inside the relaxed fist of her womb and emanated outward from there, up through her belly and her lungs and heart, up into her brain and coursing through every limb. She let it splash invisibly onto the plot of earth, amazed at what her eyes witnessed and yet feeling as if she’d never participated in anything so natural; it was what giving birth must be like, she thought, if you could strip away the pain and feel only the ecstasy of helping new life, life you’d created, push out into the air and take its first breath.

  “Danny, if you could only see this,” she said, then wished she hadn’t. Jimmy Gallagher’s attack had, for all its horror, brought body memory jarringly back, had forced Karin to recall the worst times with Danny. Until now, as Danny’s final outrages and her assault on him had receded into a haze of memory, she had conveniently let their good moments come to the fore, represent—with more force than their frequency should have allowed—the totality of their life together. Danny’d been loving, ardent, boyish in his initial devotion. But then his love had curdled, grown in directions that disturbed and then hurt, emotionally and at last physically. It had seemed inevitable, like a foot slipping into a forgotten shoe. She’d gone with it, felt
perversely closer to him, knew it was Daddy come again but didn’t know how to strike back at what her body recognized as home. She veered off that thought.

  “Mister Romano’s eyes are going to bug right out when he sees this.” Karin’s hands filled in the spare patches as she spoke, made the grass over the plot blend in with the surrounding blades. She peered closer. “They don’t quite blend, do they, Danny? A little like the glaze of yesterday’s flowers, but not so much.” These were new seeds sped up, but those had been dead blooms brought back to life. “Hmmm. Maybe I need to experiment further, I—”

  The sound came to her, under her voice and over it. It was distant and muffled and high-pitched, and it took her by the spine and shook her something fierce. There it came again, rasped and terrifying, a razor on the wind and then gone. Realizing she was holding her breath, she let it out. The shadows fell long over the graveyard; the sun hung low, close to the horizon, not yet down. No matter. It was time to go. Yet again the sound, and her neck came up sharply, her head whipping about to catch direction, a scent on the air. Nothing. It had been like a door hinge protesting, a screen door on a deserted house waiting for enough wind to bang shut; but this hinge had been no mere whine of rust on rust, but something alive, something out of a hellish throat.

  “I’m sorry, Danny. Suddenly I’m spooked like I’ve never been before.” She laid the flowers she’d intended for Frank on the fresh new grass, gladiolus and crocus, wisteria and lavender, her hands shaking. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, blowing her kiss, but she wasn’t too sure about that any more.

  On the way back to her truck, empty basket dangling on her arm, Karin felt as if dark clouds were closing on her: storm premonitions, though the sun on this clear day threw her shadow long and black and thin before her on the ground like a sacrificial knife cut from stone. She found them impossible to shake. She fumbled the ignition. The keys fell with a jangle to the mat, and after she clutched them in her hand, she had to grip the steering wheel and force herself to calm down.

  Maybe, she thought, it was the full trauma of the afternoon finally catching up with her. God damn that Jimmy Gallagher, the nerve of that son-of-a-bitch. She’d show him. She slammed the wheel with her palm, gripped it tight in both hands. “Fucker!” she said, and then Oh fine, now you let it out, now when he’s miles away instead of then, right then, when you could have kneed him in the balls and taken the edge clean off him. She would keep a weapon by her at all times, a knife, no not a knife, by God she’d tell Frank, he’d know what to do. Yes, she’d let him know what had happened, bring the law down on that bastard.

  Karin fired up the truck. In her rear-view mirror, the sun sat squat on the horizon. Already the hills up ahead—where white tombstones decorated with ribbons and floral bouquets climbed the slopes like proud teeth—were darkening. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, swore at the world, and eased along the weave of access road to the cemetery gates, turning right, heading home.

  ***

  The darkness roiled with hope and fear.

  His hope came from the sound of machinery above—that old fart Romano would dig him out, him and Wolf, offer his apologies but Danny would beat the crap out of him anyway, assuming he had the strength and no bones had been crushed by the grave liner. His fear started as a fringe feeling, tangled with rage at Karin. But when no weight was lifted at all, no spade shoofed into the earth, but instead it felt if anything like more had been added, and the machine rumbled away, then Danny’s fear rose up and panicked him: What if they left him here, absurdly alive, mouth jammed shut, forced to hear Wolf’s soft squeal for all eternity, forced to endure the slither of worm and insect over him, inside him, world without end.

  When such thoughts came, he deflected their torment onto his wife. Sure he’d bruised her, slapped her about some out of anger over the barrenness of their lives that beer couldn’t wash away. And sure he’d even gotten a bit carried away at the sight of his naked lady trembling into the fear of pain, full animal trembling that he knew, even at the flailing height of his rage, he’d be able—come the time to cry for her forgiveness—to turn into all-out, no-holds-barred loving.

  But he’d never intentionally drawn blood.

  She had.

  She’d plunged that knife into his heart and twisted the sucker—he remembered that in this airless lightless void under a God-crush of concrete—twisted it like she was prying a pearl from the bleeding oyster of his heart. Meek and mild Karin, his bruised and battered wimp of a wife, had in one stroke raised the stakes and forced him to fold. Well now, by some miracle, he was unfolding, and by God when he got free, he was going to deal her a hand she wasn’t going to live long enough to regret.

  Dreams came. Hard to separate from waking delirium, which he knew slipped over him whenever a face formed in the black blindness or a voice tickled at his ear, words maddeningly off any language he knew. But they came, as much as he feared sleep and the lapse into nothingness it threatened. In them he ran, his skin choked in layers of cloth, his feet pounding against mirrored feet, his voice raised in one continuous deafening shout that went on and on and up and up through the brilliant air, at once grown deeper and higher, a full spectrum of sound, until with a deafening crack the swirling silver surface shattered under his feet, shot shards of razor-jag into him, closed a fist of knives about him, sucked him down into a vortex of slashing impaling angles of pain. He woke to nothing, this nothing, cold and dead and filled with a downward press that rendered him immobile but for one index finger brushing against satin. He would have waked screaming if there’d been any space to draw breath, any air to suck in and expel, if his mouth were not broken under stone.

  Wolf, poor suffering bastard, had kept up his high-pitched squeal forever, as dependable and unpredictable as a tormented pendulum. At last the whining began to fray, one thin strand snapping at a time, until it was so faint, a mere ghostly exhalation, that Danny could no longer tell if he was imagining it or not. And that was in some ways the greater torment.

  The simpering rhythms of Karin’s voice lured him out of his dreams—aural memories, he thought at first, which made more real the knifed icon of her he’d carved from his hatred. But then he grew more certain that she was indeed there, three or four or however-many-the-fuck feet above him, talking to him, maybe taunting him. Anger boiled in him. Against the press of concrete he struggled. Yeah, right, you’ve got some imagination, Danny, old boy. He was pinned tight, ribs staved in, face smashed so flat he could probably smell memories if he gave his nose half a chance; he suspected his pain was so universal, the damage so massive, that the overload had shut down his ability to feel anything at all.

  But now the energy began to well up in him, that same radiance as yesterday streaming down from above. Strength formed a core inside his heart and rippled outward. Danny felt flesh shift in him, try to push up and out. It felt like an alien writhing there, until he accepted it as part of himself and joined the agony of its struggle. Crushed organs were doing their best to uncrush, compacted lumps of raging force confined between the curved shaking hands of a bodybuilder. Danny was tearing up inside. He wanted to holler, but his lungs had no room for air, even if air had been in ready supply, and were in any case struggling to repel rib ends and fill in the punctures with new pink lung tissue. The energy rippled through him, head to toe to head to toe, slamming back and forth like a caged wind-demon. His body verged on explosion.

  Yet still the non-stop changes twisted his insides. Organs clamoring for room pressed one another and fought back to defend and enlarge their space. His crushed rib cage tried to unclench like a fist caught in a vise, went bone against stone, the immense poundage of the concrete slab bearing down, refusing room. And his face—dear God his flattened shatter of a face—throbbed with skinshift, fractures straining to unfracture, bone planes shredding flesh as they tried to reclaim curve, to turn concave to convex. The radiance turned malevolent, no longer a warm wash of life but pinpoints of agony, unco
untable hosts of them jagging in and twisting with pert viciousness, from below now as well as above. His body was a pin cushion. Thin shafts of steel invaded him, sank deep, turned the hurtful stuff inside harder. Whenever the agony seemed at its height, a new attack drove it higher; invading steel, invaded by sharper, harsher steel, thrashed in throes that threw forth pain new-invented by a goddess who reveled in its delivery.

  Her doing, all of it. She was the dentist probing without Novocain his every nerve end, making him want to die even as she drilled life into him—life crowded into too compact a body, life in too much abundance for a man impacted inside the earth. His brain raged, caught up in conflict between the desire simply to live and the need to tear his tormentor apart; and although the second easily brought the first to its knees, all was not right in his head, and she’d pay for that too.

  In his mouth he could taste coffin wood and the dust of concrete. His tongue moved. His tongue moved. Until now, it had been caught between palate and floor. But in his agony, any new motion, even the slightest movement of his tongue, registered.

  His jaw had shifted.

  Impossible.

  And then, as if that one movement were the crack in the dam, a flood of twitches overran his pinned body like an army of fire ants, mandibles open and biting, savaging every inch of skin. It was as if the boiling pain of his organs bubbled over with generation, lancing back out and playing his body with a billion fingers of fire. Thought was drowned out for a time in a symphony of suffering, no relief in blackout, not for him. Then a smooth coherence made itself manifest in his gut, a cool absence of agony. His mind sought refuge there, huddled there away from the firestorm of his body’s transformation and protest against earth and concrete. It spread. He felt it move out, full of confidence, pushing the pain up against the envelope of his outer skin. It streaked out, beautiful blue shoots of soothing and strength. With amazing suddenness, the hurt dispersed, flaming barbs of torment bursting and flaring and whickering every which way out of bone and pore.