Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  All those mediums. All those greys.

  A thief in shadow. A killer under fluorescent light.

  A dangerous complexity of light and dark, brightness and shadow. Promise and promiscuity. That was what killed her. And I ask to what end? To perpetuate exactly what?

  I sold some stocks. I gave notice at ABC. I was no longer interested in that kind of seeing. I started looking elsewhere.

  The world pushes pins on a bulletin board we pass daily and on that board are scraps of paper, messages which have no order or design but of which we must make order and design for better or worse.

  If not we go mad.

  I did my homework and found the right location for the store, a place down on the Lower East Side in Alphabet City. I closed the sale within a month. The gun permit took longer and I waited for that to come along before the opening. In the meantime I made arrangements with the liquor distributors and did some remodeling. When the permit came through I bought a thirty-eight Smith & Wesson and put it on a shelf behind the register. It’s there now.

  The store’s been robbed four times over the past fourteen months so I got it for a song. I figure it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries again. I’m not looking for the guy who shot Laura. I know the odds on that. But somebody. Please god.

  Someone else someday.

  I’ve got to give it back.

  The wallet. The ring.

  The penny.

  Rabid Squirrels in Love

  From the Journal of Kathleen McGill

  Augusta, Maine

  June 8th, 10:30 p.m.

  He’s the cutest man I ever laid eyes on unless you count the movies. That’s the first thing.

  The second thing is he scares me.

  And I want to write this down now because I don’t know which I like better to tell the truth, the good looks or the scary part. (Isn’t that weird?) Mama gave me this big brown leather notebook about four years ago right after they pulled my skinny butt out of college (and thank God they did!) in hopes that I’d write down my thoughts and feelings about the drugs and Kenneth and of course, about Daddy, for Father Sylvestery or Doctor Todd. But I never did use it then. Now I feel confused, and I want to.

  He’s got a violent side for starters.

  I saw that today.

  I’m working as an aide at Augusta Mental Health. I’m a recreational therapist and he’s an attendant, usually on the locked ward. I know getting a job in a mental health facility is a little strange for somebody who’s had problems of her own. But I suspect he’s had them too. I bet a lot us who work here have.

  I guess maybe it takes one to know one, right?

  It’s pretty good though. I work both the locked and unlocked wards, with both men and women, all ages. I take them to the pool for swim therapy, take them out for walks or volleyball, play ping pong or bumper pool with them in the game room. When the weather’s nice we go out for picnics or over to the park to feed the ducks. I’m supposed to loosen them up, basically, and encourage them to talk. Which is hard because a lot of them are mostly nonverbal to begin with and all that Haldol, Stelazine and Thorazine doesn’t help any. Some of the older ones have even had lobotomies or shock therapy before the courts made them illegal. Talking to them is like talking to to a spruce tree.

  I get to wear street clothes, which is nice. It’s been hot this summer so most of the time I’m either in short-shorts or bikinis, even around the men, the theory being that if some of them are going to go back into society one day, back on the streets, they’re for sure going to see women wearing this stuff, some with bodies a whole lot better than mine, so they might as well see them in here too, in a more controlled environment. Even though a lot of these guys were committed for something involving sex, everything from exposing themselves to little kids to rape.

  I’m the youngest person in the facility, male or female.

  I’ve never worried about that until today. Though I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff, believe me.

  There’s one man, Mr. Schap, he’s about forty, and I guess he was taught that masturbation’s bad or something, so he’ll go into these sexual seizures that are almost like epileptic seizures and bite out big chunks of his hands so he won’t start playing with his penis. You’ve got to restrain him or it’s gruesome.

  Then there’s Gideon, who’s old enough to be my grandfather. He mostly walks around all day in his grey suit singing “Jesse James was a man who roamed through the West” or “let’s turn off the lights and go to bed” over and over again in this gravelly sing-song voice, lying down on the floor for a while, mooching a cigarette from somebody now and then, singing and walking some more. But then one day we found him standing naked in the middle of the hall, staring at a ventilator duct. He had this enormous hard-on. All it was was a ventilator duct! You got to wonder.

  So strange shit happens. But today Baby Huey stuck his hand up my bikini bottom and I guess that definitely started something.

  We call him Baby Huey because he looks like this big giant chicken. He’s fat and pointy-faced and sort of lumbers through the halls like that character in the old cartoons. He almost never speaks. And usually he’s harmless. But we were down at the pool today, sitting at the edge and just kicking at the water, splashing, Billy Osserman on one side of me and Baby Huey on the other. Billy was talking about old cars (he used to restore them before his breakdown) and it was a little hard to follow because I know nothing at all about cars, so I was paying attention to him, not Huey, until I felt Huey’s fingers groping for my pubic hair.

  I slapped his hand away and laughed and gave him a look like, what do you think you’re doing? And he said, I want to fuck you. So I said, well, you can’t, keep your hands to yourself. He looked at me real hard and said, then I want to kill you, bitch.

  Well you can’t do that either I said, and got up and walked away. I kind of made a joke of it. But I have to admit, he shook me a little.

  Then this evening we were in the dayroom with a bunch of the patients, Baby Huey included, watching Gilligan’s Island on television. I was talking to Gloria in the nurse’s station, which is this big enclosed cubicle with non-breakable floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides facing a wall in back and two doors you can lock if you need to. You always lock them when you leave because that’s where we keep the medications. But other than that, in six whole months we’d never bothered.

  Stephen (that’s this guy, the attendant I was talking about, the cute one) was out there sweeping the floor when Baby Huey stood up and heaved his metal folding chair directly at my head. Threw it hard. It bounced off the window but I damn near had a heart attack anyhow. And then all of a sudden he’s running for the door. With me and Gloria inside still too freaked to get our asses in gear to go over and lock it.

  Hey! Stephen shouts but Huey doesn’t stop, so Stephen reaches out with the broom and whacks him on the side of the head. Huey falls down all right but sort of slides on his big fat belly with the momentum and by the time I get to the door to lock it he’s slid halfway through, so now I can’t lock it, and he’s reaching for my legs, spitting and growling like he really does want to kill me. And the next thing I know Stephen’s on top of him, with one hand on his forehead pulling his head up and the other on his windpipe, choking him.

  Huey goes all red in the face, gasping for air but not getting any and we see him sort of start to go blue so Gloria and I are both shouting at Stephen to stop! stop it! you’re killing him!

  And then the weirdest thing happened. Scary and sexy, both at the same time.

  Stephen looked up at me and grinned and winked and said, “present for you, Kath,” gave Huey’s throat one more little squeeze like you’d squeeze a lemon and dropped him passed out cold to the floor.

  I didn’t even know he knew my name.

  We talked over coffee after that (I made Gloria promise not to say anything, because you could get fired for using that kind of force on a patient!) and I told Stephen about what happened
by the pool. He said a guy like that ought to be castrated, not incarcerated, and I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not even though when he said it he was smiling.

  I asked him where he learned to do that thing with the windpipe and he said from his father. I sure didn’t want to talk about fathers because I never could do anything right by mine God knows, so I let that matter drop. Then our break was over and we had to go back to work. But just before we did he asked if he could see me sometime.

  I said yes. He said when, and we settled on Saturday night.

  And now I’m honestly not sure that was smart. He’s too damned attractive, you know? Just like Kenneth was, though in fact in the looks department, Stephen has Kenneth beat by a mile. Which probably only makes it worse. Because look what I got living that year with Kenneth. A crystal meth habit that nearly killed me, rotten grades in school and three long years in therapy.

  But besides that, there’s this violent thing. Kenneth was hardly ever real violent despite the biker stuff, mostly just screwed up. But I watched Stephen with Huey and I know he enjoyed it, what he was doing, choking him. I’m sure he did. I could see it in his eyes, in that big wide sexy grin.

  I’m not real religious or anything God knows but I wonder if enjoying himself that way isn’t some sort of sin.

  I just hope I know what I’m getting myself into.

  I should probably call it off.

  But probably I won’t.

  Kathleen read the entry thinking, well, I wanted to remember how I got involved in this. And now I do.

  It doesn’t help. It was seventeen years ago and it doesn’t stop the moaning sounds, the muffled screams. It doesn’t mean a thing.

  She remembered how he used to let his long hair down out of the ponytail after work hours back then, shaking it free. Weekends he would never shave. He wore sandals and bellbottoms and lovebeads and an ankh around his neck, the Egyptian symbol for life. They read Siddartha and Kahlil Gilbran.

  Now he was clean-cut. He said that people didn’t want some shaggy carpenter in their homes unless it was maybe Jesus Christ, and probably not even him.

  But he was so handsome in those days that she sometimes wondered what he saw in her. He could have had anybody. She had never been anything but just short of pretty. Though her figure was good especially her breasts and she had nice soft curly red-brown hair.

  She closed the journal and left it lying on the bed and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She poured it and put the mug in the microwave and turned it on. The sounds were louder here. She could hear them over the microwave’s hum. He’s got to soundproof the place a whole lot better if he’s going to keep this up, she thought.

  It’s driving me crazy.

  God. What am I doing here?

  She took the coffee out of the microwave and opened the kitchen door that led down to the basement.

  The sounds were louder still.

  Well, better the kid than me, she thought. At least we got past that part. You want to keep that in mind when you think about complaining, about the noise or about anything having to do with him. Take a look at the drawerful of polaroids if you need to be reminded. It could be you down there again. Doing whatever he wanted you to do, just because you loved him.

  Why do you love him, anyway?

  She had no answer that immediately came to mind though he could be very attentive and kind sometimes, come home with little gifts for her, a pair of earrings, flowers. But it was more that they were just fated to be together, and that was that. She couldn’t imagine life without him. She loved him because she did.

  Despite his little habits.

  She wondered what was going on. The boy was hardly ever this loud. Not any more. Usually the boy was passive, almost one step up from catatonic, and she knew one when she saw one. She still saw her share of catatonics these days even if he was free of all that now. It had turned out he was handy, could build things. Like Jesus. A carpenter.

  He wouldn’t mind if she went downstairs for a look. He never did.

  With him nothing was private.

  She stepped out onto the landing, sipped carefully at the steaming coffee and let it warm her hands as she started down.

  It was cool these days for September and even colder in the basement by at least about ten degrees. She felt goose-flesh on her arms and legs and felt her nipples stiffen beneath the loose white extra-large Superbowl teeshirt as she hit the concrete floor. Stephen always seemed to think that her nipples stiffening down here in the basement was some form of erotic anticipation on her part but in reality it was just the cold. Though she would never tell him that. Let him think what he wanted to think.

  She saw dust-bunnies amid the paint cans and empty flowerpots beneath the wooden stairwell. She’d have to clean up a bit down here. She smelled bleach and laundry detergent in the humid musty air along with some other smell she couldn’t quite place. None were smells she liked. Maybe at some point she’d get the boy to start doing the laundry for her so she wouldn’t have to bother. She’d mention it to Stephen.

  What was the point of having a slave, for chrissake, if he never did any work?

  She opened the door to what Stephen called his Den of Impunity and despite what she’d seen over the past two weeks and despite what she’d been through herself for years and years before that she damn near dropped her coffee.

  He had the boy manacled to the X-frame he’d made for him again—naked, gagged and blindfolded. Nothing new there. But Stephen was playing with electricity this time. That was new. There was a patch of black electrician’s tape over each of the boy’s nipples and at each of his inner thighs. The patch on his left thigh seemed to have come undone. She could see wet burst-open blisters there. Wires ran from beneath the tape to the circuit breaker which in turn plugged into the wall socket. She smelled burnt flesh and burnt hair. That was the other stinky stuff along with the bleach and detergent.

  He’d been sitting in a director’s chair by the wall switch so he could turn it on and off at will but now the chair was pushed back to one side and he stood in front of the boy, pounding at his heart, tearing at the gag, breathing into his parted lips.

  “Fuck,” he kept saying. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. You’re a fucking kid for godsakes, you’re supposed to be strong. Strong, you get it? You fucking better not die on me!”

  She saw he was scared and something inside her was glad he was scared, some voice inside her said it was damn well time. But she was freaking too.

  Accessory to murder.

  Oh, God, she thought. Don’t let him die. Please God please. Don’t let us get caught doing this thing. I didn’t do it. I didn’t kidnap him. It’s not my fault. I didn’t do any thing except just go along with it. I don’t want to go to jail, I couldn’t stand to go to jail. Living this way has been a lot like jail sometimes but I couldn’t handle the real thing god, no way.

  He was working at the ropes now, had the left arm untied so that the boy’s body lolled to the right and he was working to free his left leg. He seemed only now to notice Kath was even in the room.

  “Help me get him down! Get your ass over here goddammit!” His voice like a smack across the face. She moved.

  Her fingers tore at the rope around the boy’s wrists but struggle and sweat had tightened them so that she wondered how long he’d been at this, the knots wouldn’t give beneath her fingers and she heard herself saying oh, oh, oh, as she breathed like she was listening to another person separate from herself while a nail on her index finger cracked and broke and the cool slimy texture of the boy’s cheek brushed her own and then she had his wrist free, the chill wet naked flesh and soaked matted shoulder-length hair brushing across her own bare arms, across her face and neck as she slid her arms under and through the boy’s armpits first to support him and then to lay him down across the concrete, face turned toward her and bruised mouth open and so young, she suddenly thought, not knowing if she meant the boy or herself or what.

  She felt for a
pulse. Listened for a heartbeat.

  Oh god, she thought. Whatever you want me to do, I swear I’ll do it. Yours forever I swear.

  Just get us out of this.

  Please. Just this once.

  Just this once please please please let me please get lucky.

  They walked and walked, eight of them, silent, watching.

  The pair of uniformed policemen seemed largely oblivious, talking quietly, now and then making a joke and smiling.

  It was cold. Her nose was running. Across from her she could see that Stephen’s was too. Her mittens stuck to the wood. She stamped her feet to get the circulation going. Inside the boots her toes felt raw and brittle and achy.

  Enough of this, she thought. Enough of this bullshit.

  She was betting Stephen felt the same. She hoped so. She watched him move roughly in step with the others. Runny nose or not she thought he was still the most handsome man she’d ever met.

  And they all of them must have seen her nearly at once right then because the circle slowed and the signs all went out in her direction, Kath’s too, fulfilling her promise, pointed toward this thin small teenage black girl in the ratty Augusta High School jacket walking toward them with her head down and shoulders hunched, walking purposefully toward the door where the two policemen waited, her dark eyes cast down so as not to read the signs which said PRO CHOICE IS NO CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and HE’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE—that is if she could fucking well read at all, Kath thought, any better than the dumb cracker in the cellar—and she smiled as Stephen held out the tiny pink plastic twelve-week fetus cupped tenderly in his hand.

  Sundays

  Someone once said to me that if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. Just tell him who you are.

  I lie beside her watching her sleep in the light from the street, watching her face and her breasts rise and fall and think how she and I are not one person but so many, both of us and all of us for that matter each uncertainly housed in a single wrap of flesh, and memory intrudes like thick smoke from a woodfire and surrounds us in our bed.