Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” he screamed. “I’m going to fucking snap your neck you fucking whore . . .”

  And as he carried on in that manner she hit him on the head with the tire iron. The blow was too light, though, and he just grunted in pain and then screamed louder. She knelt on the ground and hit him again. He moaned, a high-pitched peal like a pig led to slaughter. His struggling slowed. So she hit him again, and the Walmart bag tore and collected a mist of blood on the inside. She’d found the side of his skull, the ear and temple. She hammered at it three more times, huffing with each blow. Finally, she heard a crack and felt the hardness of the bone go soft with a sound like a plate dropped on the kitchen floor. Then 56 was still. Motionless, pants now around his ankles, the semen on his belly glowed in the starlight.

  She sat back in the grass, gasping, trying to think about how this changed her plan.

  She examined the tire iron. Because he’d still had the bag on his head, there was no blood on it that she could see. She took it to the car and put it back in the trunk. What did she have to worry about? Blood. She had to move him before he bled too much.

  She positioned the heavy-duty rope diagonally across her chest like she’d seen her father do when he dragged game. She’d chosen a precise spot where a natural slope allowed gravity to make an otherwise backbreaking task easier. Still, the rope bit into her clavicle as she began hauling him toward the woods. Near the end of the clearing she saw the branch she’d leaned against the tree to mark her way. From there it was only about five minutes to the depths of the woods, though several times she thought she lost the path. She followed the soft sounds of the Cattawa River. All this planning, and it hadn’t occurred to her to bring a flashlight.

  A gray tarp near a pile of dirt stretched over the earth, weighted down with six large rocks. Two cans of gasoline sat nearby, a twenty-dollar bill and a note (Just paying you back for the gas and food. Thnx) poked out from between them. Her plan, when she’d dug the hole four days ago on her day off, was that if anyone wandered by, they’d think her little setup had something to do with camping. That person would take the twenty and she’d know her site had been compromised. As it stood now, no one had stumbled upon the scene, and the hole that took her an hour to dig, until her back and arms throbbed and she’d had to take one of her dad’s old Vicodins to dispatch the pain, was still her secret. She dropped 56 by the tarp, tossed the rocks off, and pulled it back. The cavity in the ground, maybe four feet deep, was noticeably darker than the woods around it. She peered in and could see some water had collected at the bottom but just a puddle. It had been a dry summer. She dragged 56 to the edge, and when she went to push him in, she heard his breath. It came in a ragged hiss that whistled against the bag tucked over his face. She peeled back the slippery blue hood to peek. One eye was blacked out, the nose ruined, and the hissing sound was his breath going through a gap where she’d knocked out several teeth.

  She lowered her shoulder into him, and shoved him over the edge. He landed with a wet thud and an oomph. Another slow moan. Then he began to say her name.

  “Tina.” It sounded surprisingly coherent despite the G and the work of the tire iron. “Tina, stop this. Go get help.”

  She could hear the place where his teeth were missing.

  She did not feel like climbing down into the hole with the tire iron. The plan had gone mostly right so far. No point in deviating now.

  “Please get help . . . Tina.”

  As he called her name again, she pocketed the twenty and tossed the note on top of him. She unscrewed the first gas can.

  When the cold fuel splashed against him and the air filled with that pungent gasoline scent, as distinct as coffee or barbecue only dangerous, he started crying. She hadn’t planned on him being alive for this. He was supposed to pass quietly with the bag over his head. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “This will only hurt for a second.”

  He was crying and apologizing and begging and finally, she knew, lying. Pleading, “I’m gonna be a dad a dad a dad . . .” over and over. She’d been watching him on her days off for nearly a year. It seemed like his only haunts were bars and his trailer. His only companions Ostrowski and the gray-haired mutt that lived with him.

  She spilled half the contents of one can, and he finally managed to kick a leg free. Naked from the waist down, he was trying to get his legs under him. To stand up. So tenacious. She felt for the matches in her jeans pocket, tore one free, and said a prayer. She’d wondered endlessly if when this moment came she would flinch, but she felt no wobble in her heart. She’d already made this right with God, but she would keep making it right for the rest of her days on this earth. He was screaming for help and had finally shimmied to a sitting position when she lit the book and tossed it at him. It landed in his lap and the flames wrapped around him like armor, encased him, a blue-orange knight. He screamed and fell onto his back. The night went bright and the tops of the trees glowed yellow from the power of the blaze. His cries made her understand she’d never actually heard a person scream before. Not like that. Not even close to the scream that had brought her mom running when she cut too deep. Not with madness and pleading and desperate hope that you’re about to wake up from a nightmare. His screams grew louder for a moment and then faded to a choking sound as his esophagus or voice box melted. The last thing she saw was his skin blistering, huge boils forming on his arms and thighs, fat bubbling from the tissue like bacon grease sizzling in a pan, the fabric of his shirt and the duct tape melting quickly away. He pulled his skin off in slithering, sizzling strips. The blue Walmart bag fried to his face. She kicked the sled in after him. Then she turned, walked a ways to the edge of the woods where the air was cool and clean. Though she could no longer see him, the glow beamed out of the pit. The river murmured, and the flames threw mischievous, dancing shadows across the surrounding woods. Like a gash in the earth had opened to reveal a bit of hell.

  She went back with the gas can and emptied it onto him. He didn’t protest. It was strange looking at him now, once a human being she’d known and cared for and now just a log of char. The flames once again went white-hot, the sled burned purple as it melted to him; the heat steamed her face, and sweat beaded across her brow and in her armpits. She couldn’t smell him cooking, only the gasoline. She stepped back into the cool of the woods again. She waited until the flames had died down some, and then began emptying the second gas can into the pit, stepping back each time the flames grew too hot. Like she’d hoped, there wasn’t much left of 56 by the time she’d emptied both cans. The love of her life was nothing but blackened, smoking shards of bone. She took the heavy rocks she’d used to weigh down the tarp and spent a few minutes hurling them at the skull. Squatting in front of the pit with that acrid scent now more barbecue, she turned the last recognizable feature of his skeleton to smoking scraps. They looked like broken bits of ancient pottery. She saw the chain necklace, filthy and blackened, but there were no longer dog tags looped to the chain. It was a locket, like a grandmother would wear. She fished it out with a stick and pocketed it. Then she covered what remained with the tarp, took the shovel from its perch in the dirt, and began filling in the hole.

  * * *

  “Why’re you always reading that gruesome stuff?” Cole had asked her once. She was at lunch in the break room, riveted by a book about JonBenét Ramsey. She’d spent all morning stocking in the grocery section, pulling around cases of apple juice and baby food and frozen dinners on the pallet jack, and she wanted to be left alone for just a minute. She kept her answer short.

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Doesn’t seem interesting. Seems weird.”

  “You like horror movies. This stuff’s like real-life horror.”

  Maybe she was thinking about her plan even back then when Cole first began to pursue her, before she’d even had an inkling about what she would do. The example of poor JonBenét served her well, though, when her mind got wandering about how she might do this.
Misdirection. Disappearance. Time.

  Buried beneath four feet of earth, covered in branches and a young fallen tree toppled prematurely by a storm that she dragged across the disturbed soil, 56 would almost certainly not be discovered. At least not for a good long while. If he were found in a few years, forensic experts—the CSI guys—would have only bone fragments to go on. Dental records would be tough with the skull and jaw in pieces. Wallet and clothes and identifying marks would all be burned up. Perhaps they’d use DNA to identify the victim, but then they’d have to ask what happened to him. Who was he last with? Who did he know? Who’d have reason to hurt him? So few of those questions would have even a remote chance of directing attention to her. His car would be sitting in the parking space across from the Lincoln Lounge with a flat tire. In a few days it would be towed. After three or four days of not showing up for work and not answering his phone, his employer (or maybe Ryan Ostrowski) would call his mother. A missing persons report would be filed. Yet there were plenty of reasons a guy like 56 might want to flee town. Everyone was fleeing everywhere these days. At Walmart, temp associates up and left because a child payment came due or a warrant went out for violating a parole offense or someone had a court date they didn’t want to show up to or just plain old debt they could never pay. Without a body, that would be the first assumption. Later, they would first and foremost suspect men. As long as Cole was fast asleep back home, no one would have reason to suspect she’d been anywhere but her own bed on this particular night (and there was no reason he wouldn’t be: for four months she’d practiced finding the dosage that would put him under for the night, tapping it into his dinner Mountain Dew). She’d show up for work a bit tired tomorrow but would power through with a Red Bull just fine.

  Even if a pair of eyes had spotted 56 climbing into the blue Cobalt, that was okay. She and Cole had already spoken about getting a new used car. She’d suggest they finally pull the trigger this week. There was certainly video footage of her pulling into the gas station on Route 30, but by the time they found him (if anyone found him) this footage and the Cobalt would be ancient history.

  She’d shower before Cole woke. She’d get rid of the tire iron, the Buckeyes hat, the gas cans, the little whiskey bottles, the duct tape, and the shovel in the next few weeks. Find them new homes, toss them in dumpsters, or abandon them in places no one would ever look. What was left? Without investigators stumbling upon a huge stroke of luck that tied her to 56 on this night, would she even make the top twenty in a list of suspects? The top fifty?

  She suspected not. She also suspected that when 56 turned up missing, New Canaan’s police department would assume that he’d either run somewhere or—if he was the victim of a violent crime—it was somehow related to the distribution of methamphetamines, prescription pills, and heroin in the county. He’d said so himself how he was still friends with characters like the Flood brothers. She wasn’t worried. She’d have many secrets to keep, but she was an expert at living with secrets. She planned on returning home, living her life with Cole, riding her new bike to work, adopting two children, a boy and a girl, and never hearing about 56 again. She’d sleep happily in her bed, and he in his. Because what she’d finally decided was that Love sometimes called upon people to do drastic things in order to secure it. God would take 56 into His arms and allow him all the happiness that had eluded him, that had made him cruel in life.

  And yet, her face grew wet with tears as she remembered him in his backyard cutting burrs out of Symphony’s hair.

  * * *

  She turned onto the dirt road that led back to Stillwater. As she approached the pavement that would take her back to Route 30, which would take her home, a lightness bloomed from within. She’d done it. Not perfectly, but as her mother said, Nothing in life goes perfectly. That’s why it’s life and not heaven.

  Crawling back up the dirt road, past the fields of summer grass, she kept the headlights off and drove by the light of the moon. She saw movement ahead as a critter, a small blob of dark on dark, jetted across the road on its way to survive somewhere. She imagined the stress of that creature. Constantly in danger of a savage death by beak, talon, or jaw, its enemies were everywhere. Being ripped apart and devoured was nothing but a constant background terror. A possibility every single day of its short existence. Its life would likely end, and it would be nothing more than a carcass to be picked over by lesser predators.

  She brought the car to the gate, which she’d closed after going through—just in case anyone drove by at this late hour and wondered why it was open. She knew from experience that if you drove the same country road enough you got to know it intimately: the curves of the asphalt, the seasonal decorations of the houses, the trees with branches that groped too far into your path, the fences, the signposts, all markers of distance from home. All it would take was one late-night driver to recall that this gate, normally closed, had been open.

  She flicked on her lights, left the car running, hopped out, and pushed the gate wide.

  This was about disappearing. People, she’d come to understand, disappeared all the time. The world simply opened its jaws and swallowed them whole. They vanished, and unless they were rich or famous or particularly beautiful, they did so almost without comment. There was bitterness at murder, grief at accidents, and fury at suicide. But to disappear—well, there was only mystery. And mystery was all three of those things bundled together and made more frightening by the impossibility of it. There were Facebook and iPhones now. People weren’t supposed to disappear anymore, and that made it all the more unnerving. At least to those who would wonder about a former football star, who went out for a drink, got a flat tire, and never made it home.

  She climbed back into the Cobalt and drove to the other side of the fence. She parked it at the side of the road while she closed the gate. This time, mindless habit led her to shut off the engine, not giving it a second thought. She took the bolt, dangling from its chain, and fixed it back into the hasp. She glanced briefly at the sky, at a flash of very distant lightning. When she slid back into the car, her hand automatically turned the key. In the same moment that the starter did its little choked wheeze, she wondered why on earth she hadn’t just left the car idling.

  Her stomach turned liquid. Sweat broke out as if once again she faced the heat of her fire pit. She tried it again. She tried it a third time. The engine had started just fine in the clearing. She’d thought of everything except for Cole’s failing car. She tried it a fifth time. A tenth. The wheeze was down to a rattle.

  She couldn’t panic. If she panicked she might do something stupid. She was so close. She got out of the car, though she was not sure why. She popped the hood, but even after all this time with Cole, she knew nothing about cars other than how to drive one.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Please.”

  The car probably just needed a jump. But she’d left her phone plugged in on her nightstand in Van Wert. She could walk to a nearby house, claim she was on her way back from a party and the engine had quit. But then there would be a record to follow. Witnesses. Proof she’d been in New Canaan tonight. She’d have to pay with a credit card, and Cole would see the charge.

  So instead she just stood there, staring at the shadows of the engine, indecisive, panic swelling. She ripped hair from the spot on the back of her head and felt how wide the bald patch had grown.

  She lost track of how long she stood there screaming inside her skull.

  When the sound of a car and the glow of headlights both crept into the distance, she wanted to weep. Because this was both what she needed and what scared her the most. The car came from the east, from the direction of town, heading toward the country. The tears came out of her unbidden, but she moved to the road anyway, waited for the headlights to find her, and waved both arms above her head.

  The car, an old boxy Jeep, slowed, hesitated, and then pulled to the side, nose to nose with the Cobalt. A figure emerged, a young woman, her face hidden by the gla
re of the headlights.

  “Howdy,” said the woman.

  She didn’t respond. Tina didn’t want the first word she spoke to be a sob. Now she was shaking.

  “Hey,” the woman said, coming around the side. “Holy shit. Tina?”

  Of course it was someone who knew her.

  “Tina? Hey— What? Are you all right?”

  It was the woman in the summer dress she’d seen outside the Lincoln. Tina knew her. The face was eminently familiar in the way a face can be when you can still not summon the person’s name. She’d been Tina’s best childhood friend. Such was her disbelief, her terror, that this simple, memorable name would not come to her. She ripped at the hairs with two fingers. She had to pee. She had to scream.

  She thought of Cole to center her. Finally, she was able to push words out.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hey. Wow. What are the odds.”

  Such a stupid way to begin, and she practically wept each word. She wiped her eyes.

  “Jesus, are you all right?” She came over and put a hand on Tina’s arm. Tina couldn’t look her in the eyes.

  “Yeah, no, I’m fine. I’m sorry.” She waved a hand in the air spastically to clear it. “I just. My car died out here, and my phone’s—” Forgotten, your phone’s forgotten. “I forgot my phone. And I just. This is so far out, I was afraid I’d be out here all night.”

  The woman stared down at her. The familiar pixie face, cute, eerily similar to both her brothers’. She’d cut her hair into an odd, ugly, spiky mess. Memories of sneaking downstairs to the family snack drawer in search of Fruit Roll-Ups. Her name was right there in every sense but the sounds of the letters.

  “It’s okay, girl. We’ll get this fixed.”

  “Yeah—no, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was just— Before you came I was panicking. I don’t know anything about cars.”