Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  She lacked confidence.

  The worker ant climbed over labia arid and joyless as the desert.

  The tuna was nearly gone.

  “I can’t do it by myself,” she said. “You got to help me.”

  “Ramona, I can’t help you. What if they caught me? What excuse have I got?”

  “We could say I forced you. I was so crazy I threatened your life and Albert’s life and you had to go along. You were afraid of me. I’d back you all the way. I’d be as crazy as a fucking loon.”

  Bernice made a face. “I just don’t know, Ramona.”

  ’Mona was on a roll now.

  “Listen, Howard’s got an insurance policy for thirty thousand. If we make it look like an accident that’s double indemnity, that’s sixty. Help me do it and I’ll give you thirty. That’s half. How’s that sound?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars?”

  “Right.”

  “Gee.”

  She considered it.

  “You only offered me a thousand at first.”

  Ramona didn’t comment.

  She could see Bernice’s nipples stiffen under the terry housedress. Let her think about it. It took two years for Albert to make that kind of cash. Ramona felt pretty good about things for the first real time that day.

  Though Bernice ought to lose some weight in her opinion. Those nipples could stand to ride a little higher.

  “Okay,” said Bernice. “I’ll do it. Only I’m not doing this alone, either. No riding over him in the driveway or anything. Whatever we do, we do together. Is that agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Now what the fuck was that?

  She stood up and brushed hard at her belly. The itching, crawling feeling stopped abruptly.

  It took three more hours for the body to be discovered curled in the hollow of her navel.

  “Want more Sanka?” she said.

  “Fuck Sanka,” said Bernice. “Haven’t you got any gin?”

  Ramona sighed and pulled out the bottle.

  Two more weeks had elapsed and Howard was still alive.

  They sat alone together in a bar. The bar was all pink and red. The lighting was dim. It was like sitting in something’s stomach.

  Ramona was on her third banana daiquiri. Bernice ordered another pink gin from the barman. She was one ahead, but the liquor made her happy.

  “Make it a double,” she said.

  “Bernice, don’t get drunk, for chrissake, will ya?”

  “My head is perfectly clear, ’Mona,” she said pointedly. “It’s not me who keeps coming up with these ideas.”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “I’m not. I’m not the smartass here.”

  It was loud enough and testy enough so that the topless dancer behind the bar, an Irish girl with a face as broad and squat as a piano and breasts the color of old tin cans, missed a bump.

  The barman put the double pink gin in front of the fat one, wishing these two would stop arguing. It was giving him a headache. Besides, the thinner one wasn’t so bad looking. He crossed a pair of treetrunk arms and smiled at her.

  Ramona caught the glance. Right here was a side of beef.

  “So what happened?” asked Bernice.

  “He didn’t eat it. The fucker.”

  The two of them were the only customers. The barman and dancer each found them interesting—for different reasons. The barman was trying to discern the elusive outline of Ramona’s pale nipples beneath her open cardigan and sheer mauve blouse. The dancer waxed more introspective: he didn’t eat what? She moved her legs listlessly forward and back and tried to remember not to knit her brow.

  “Jeez,” said Bernice, “and here I am spending the whole day cutting the sacs off the goddamn bugs and baking the pie. Doesn’t he like apple pie?”

  “Of course he does. He ate the crust. He said it was good, by the way. I guess it’s the tarantula he doesn’t like.”

  She gulped the drink.

  “It was pretty disgusting to look at, tell you the truth. Poison turned it kind of greenish brown. I wouldn’t have eaten it. I told him the apples must have gone bad or something.”

  “He bought that?”

  “Of course he bought it. He bought the wax on the front steps, didn’t he?”

  “He has a wonderful sense of balance, ’Mona.”

  “And he bought it when I dropped the toaster into the bathtub, didn’t he?”

  “We should of scraped the insulation better. We’d of had him.”

  “I know that. The point is Howard’s the dumbest jerk walking. That’s what got me into this mess, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  Melancholy set in.

  Bernice downed her double and motioned to the barman for another.

  They watched him move down the bar. Enormous shoulders on the guy. From the rear you couldn’t see his big pot belly and his ass and hips were nice.

  “Not bad, huh,” said Bernice.

  “Jesus, no. Big sonovabitch. You might need a shoehorn to get him in, though.”

  “Yeah. A guy like that could be awful big.”

  “You never know. I’ve seen his type with peckers no bigger than a car key.” She smiled conspiratorially. “I bet we can find out, though.”

  She slipped off her sweater and draped it over the bar-stool. Then took each of her nipples between thumb and forefinger and twisted gently. They gorged and grew.

  The barman returned with Bernice’s pink gin and noted the improvements. He met her eyes and saw the promise there. Ramona ordered another daiquiri. He swallowed and turned away. And Ramona saw what she wanted to see.

  “That’s a cattle prod he’s got in there,” she said—betraying her West Chicago background. “One more drink and I’m gonna want to suck that.”

  Bernice giggled. “Want company?”

  “Hell, no.”

  The barman returned with her drink. There was an easy familiarity in his manner now. It spoke of long exposure to cheap and beautiful women in every dark corner of the damp, pungent continent of sex. He leaned close over the bar.

  “Anything else I can do for you ladies?”

  “We gotta talk,” said Bernice.

  “Later,” said Ramona.

  The barman felt certain he could afford to be expansive. “Sure,” he said and moved away.

  “I say we disconnect the brakes on the Mercury,” said Bernice.

  “I don’t know how. Do you?”

  “No. But we could climb in under there and disconnect everything we saw and probably something would be the brakes.”

  “Shit, Bernice. We’d probably make it so the car won’t start. How are you gonna kill him that way?”

  “Yeah. You’re right. Too risky.”

  “I still like the pancakes, though. You still like the pancakes?”

  “The pancakes is good,” said Bernice.

  She nodded sagely, tapping her fingernails against the bar. The fingernails were maroon because her dress was burgundy and her pumps were cherry. She looked perfectly at home in the gastric decor of the bar.

  “You still got the LSD?” she asked.

  “All ground up and waiting to go in the batter. Problem is he keeps saying he gets breakfast at the plant so all he wants is coffee. Maybe Saturday, though.”

  “’Mona, I have to go to my sister-in-law’s for dinner on Saturday! I told you that. Look, let’s run over everything again and just pick something. I want to get this over with. Right now.”

  Ramona nodded. Waiting for Saturday was an inconvenience for her as well. Take that barman there. She would have liked to bring him home and give it to him the proper way. With Howard in the picture she’d probably have to settle for a quick one up against the urinals in the men’s room. Time was a-wasting.

  She caught his eye. She ran her tongue slowly, wetly, over her lips. The barman smiled and winked.

  The topless dancer glanced down at her breasts and compared them to Ramona’s. Unhappily they came up
short. She decided to wear them more defiantly.

  “Okay,” said Ramona. “There’s downers in the Budweiser and the lye in the bean soup. I still think we could put the .45 slugs in the carburator. They’d explode and blow his brains out. We could say it was kids.”

  “We’d still have to find the carburator.”

  “Yeah. Now, our best bet would be to figure out some way to get the hypodermic needle fixed and shoot an air bubble into him. But you had to go and drop the goddamn thing.”

  “I’m sorry, ’Mona. It was just such a good idea it made me nervous.”

  “That’s all right, Bernice. You have to allow for these things. But we have to count that out for now. And I still think it would be hard to make a stabbing death look like he had an accident.”

  “I think bullets in the carburator is chancy.”

  “Maybe. But to be honest, handling lye fucking worries me.”

  “Me too.”

  “So given the time factor, I’d say death by beer.”

  The barman leaned over the bar. “Why don’t you just bludgeon the sonovabitch to death?” he asked.

  “Oh christ,” said Ramona. “Shows how much you know. You realize the guy we’re talking about is as big as you are? You figure I could bludgeon you to death?”

  The barman shrugged. “There’s two of you. He sleeps, don’t he?”

  “Yeah, smarty, he sleeps.”

  “So, you get him some night when he’s had a few, you kill him and then toss him over the rocks somewhere and it looks like he got drunk and took a walk where he shouldn’t of been walking. What’s the big deal?”

  Bernice had had about enough of this. It wasn’t her tits he had his eye on after all.

  “Hey,” she said. “Who asked you? You want to hire on to do the work or what?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Then suppose you just pour me and my friend another and if we want your advice, we’ll ask for it. Okay?”

  “Easy, Bernice,” said Ramona. “The nice man was just about to buy us a round. Weren’t you?”

  She smiled. He decided he didn’t mind the peach lipstick smear along the bottom of her front teeth.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “Now that you mention it.”

  “You’re a doll.”

  She glanced at Bernice. It was obvious her doubles were finally catching up to her. She slumped on the barstool. The mole on her neck had not made an appearance in over twenty minutes now. Her upper lip tended to tuck itself into her lower lip, and then vice versa, like a pair of worms wrestling across her pale rouged face.

  “You better lay off the sauce a little,” said Ramona.

  She hated to see her friend like this. It certainly wasn’t doing her figure any good. Now, Ramona could drink all night without even gaining a pound. She was proud of that. Proud of her figure, of her good legs and her dark thick hair. Mother had called these “attributes”—meaning they would help her get a man. Well she had got one all right. And now this pudgy dimpled barfly would help her get rid of him. If she could dry her out sufficiently.

  “I’ll lay off,” said Bernice. She was beginning to slur her words. “You lay off too. So. We gonna beer him to death or what?”

  “Huh? Oh. Sure,” said Ramona. She’d been eyeing the barman. She was getting a little drinky-drunk herself she suspected.

  Above them the dancer frowned and checked her Timex.

  “Quarter to three,” she said. “Time for me to break.”

  She started to climb off the bar. The silver high-heel pumps made her awkward. She looked for some help from the barman. But the barman was over with the girls, grinning wolfishly at Ramona. “Fuck it,” she muttered. She eased herself down gingerly. As though slipping into Arctic seas.

  On her way to the john she skidded to a stop behind them. The fat one seemed to be dozing. The other was staring at the barman through smoky, half closed lids, mumbling rut and endearment.

  The dancer leaned in close to her tiny festooned ear.

  “Honey, why don’t you just climb on over that bar and have some,” she said. “Then maybe you won’t have to kill the other guy, y’know? Just leave a little left for me.”

  “Hell of an idea,” said Ramona.

  Bernice jerked violently upright.

  “Gotta piss,” she said. “Where’s the toilet?”

  But Ramona was already gone, and if the barman heard her he didn’t bother to respond. Instead he responded to Ramona, who had his pants and jockey shorts down around his ankles and a slurping mouthful of barkeep.

  “Whereza fucking toilet?” said Bernice.

  She clambered off the barstool, tripped and fell, and suddenly was sitting again. Only lower. In the peasoup haze of her disorientation she did the only thing left open to her.

  She used the floor.

  The Budweiser murder did not come off.

  Bernice and Ramona dropped ten downers each into his beercan. Ramona delivered it. And Howard drank it while watching Hollywood’s Greatest Boners that night. But the drug dropped out of solution and sat uselessly at the bottom of the can, thick white sludge.

  On Saturday Ramona tried to feed him her LSD pancakes. But Howard wasn’t hungry and said that her pancakes were always leadburgers anyway.

  On Sunday they dropped two dozen bullets into the carburator of the Mercury. When Howard tried to start it up for his beer-run over the the 7-Eleven the car just burped and died.

  By Monday they were frantic.

  “It’s impossible to kill the sonovabitch,” said Ramona. “I’ve decided that a woman simply can not kill a man. Anything we’ve heard to the contrary is filthy lies.”

  “Let’s think,” said Bernice.

  They did.

  “There’s the lye,” said Ramona.

  “What good is the lye if the guy won’t eat your cooking?”

  Ramona sighed. “I guess he’s never really liked it much.”

  “Know what I’m beginning to think, ’Mona? I’m beginning to think that that bartender...”

  “Stanley.”

  “. . . that Stanley had the right idea. Let’s just get something heavy and bash the sonovabitch.”

  Ramona sighed again. It was more like a wheeze. Cigarettes, drinks, and countless sleepless nights all chuckling inside her lungs.

  “So we just find something to whack him with, right?”

  “It’d have to be disposable. You couldn’t just leave it afterwards.”

  “That leaves out the tire iron. And the golf clubs. I’m damned if I’m buying new golf clubs.”

  “Has he got a baseball bat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like baseball?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Make it the baseball bat then. Then we just got to find a convenient cliff to dump him over.”

  Ramona thought a moment. “Okay. But who does the bashing?”

  “We both do. We’ll flip a coin to see who goes first.”

  Ramona thought that was fair.

  “Want to do it tonight?”

  Bernice hesitated.

  “Come on, Bernice. I got a date with Stanley tomorrow. I thought this would all be long over by now. Let’s do it. What do you say?”

  Bernice considered, then giggled.

  “Gee. When do you think they’ll pay on the policy, ’Mona?”

  “Let’s flip,” said Ramona.

  They found a quarter. Bernice won.

  Heads.

  In the upstairs bedroom the warm wet San Diego darkness clung to the room like used sweatsocks to a filthy pair of feet. On the bed, beneath the totally unnecessary—and now, ironical—comforter, Howard lay asleep, his high bulbous forehead awash with dreams.

  In his dream, fueled by Kentucky bourbon, it was already morning. Howard was in the bathroom, breaking into a brand new bottle of Listerine.

  The cap wouldn’t give. Howard turned the bottle upside down and tapped it twice on the green porcelain sink. That did the trick. He threw back his hea
d and tasted some.

  It tasted like Old Grandad.

  He gargled, swallowed, and slugged again. Delighted, he finished the bottle. Looked in the cabinet and underneath the sink for another. There was still the problem of his breath.

  He unscrewed the cap from a shampoo bottle and tasted it.

  Eighty proof.

  Amazed and laughing he drained it. Then a bottle of hair tonic. A bottle of aftershave. Ramona’s roll-on deodorant.

  What a morning.

  Ramona and Bernice tiptoed shoeless up the stairs and opened the bedroom door. A shaft of light and a tired current of thick warm air preceeded them into the room. Bernice carried Howard’s Louisville Slugger in her right hand, laving its neck with an unaccustomed slick of feminine perspiration.

  They waited till their eyes adjusted to the dark and could see something of the green and silver wallpaper.

  “I don’t know about this,” whispered Bernice.

  “You better know.” Said Ramona.

  “I don’t feel so good about this, ’Mona. Look how peaceful he looks lying there. Oh! He looks just like a baby.”

  Howard did look childlike. The illusion was enhanced by the pillow clutched in his hands, one corner of which tilted toward his open mouth—in the murk of his dream, the hydrogen peroxide that was actually whiskey, guzzled in early morning greed.

  “Yeah, he’s cute all right,” said Ramona. “Whack the fucker right now or I swear you’ll hear about it later.”

  She did not exactly know what she meant by that. But Bernice seemed to know. And suddenly they were in accord, and Howard’s doom was writ.

  “Sorry, How’,” said Bernice.

  She stepped toward the bed and raised the Slugger.

  “I am too,” whispered Ramona. Though a good half of that was drama.

  The bat arced down. Bernice’s aim was true.

  Wood on wood. The second piece, slightly wet.

  As for Howard, all he heard was a single slap. All he saw was the red-out of his dream. All he felt was the onset of a killer hangover.

  It figured.

  The girls came down all bloody and excited.

  “We did it,” said Bernice.

  “We sure did,” Ramona said. “Look at my pants. They’re sopping.”

  It was not just blood she was talking about, though there was plenty of that.

  It was difficult for her to remember exactly when it had happened.