Stay with Me

by Paul Griffin

  THE FORTIETH DAY . . .

  (Tuesday, July 21, morning)

  MACK:

  Tonight. Her house. In a real bed.

  I can’t think of anything else all morning, and my dogs know it. They’re goofing off and nipping at each other and crossing leashes. Boo’s out with me for my morning rounds. After three hours in the heat, she’s done. I bring her up to the roof and water her and pen her, and she’s asleep by the time I turn to lock the hutch door to head out for my afternoon rounds.

  I’m off tonight, but Céce’s working. Me and Boo are going to pick her up at the Too at nine. Tuesday nights are usually pretty slow, so Céce should be done with her tables by then. If she’s not, Mrs. V. will cover the last table or two, and then she’s heading down to the shore after all. I can’t figure out if I’m more excited or nervous. I have this weird feeling. I don’t know.

  Sky’s crazy, blue then brown, breezy then still, threatening conflagration, like that preacher used to say back when I was a child and my mother took me to church with her all the time to pray for money. Or maybe I heard Vic mumble it over a crossword. Or maybe I overheard Céce saying it, studying for the test between shifts. But somehow I know that word. I wish I didn’t.

  I drop off my dogs and collect my pay. I stop at the bodega and grab a six of Sprite for Céce and me, for tonight.

  “You want a double bag?” the bodega lady says.

  “Triple, if you can spare it,” I say.

  “Triple?”

  “For my dogs. You know.”

  “Of course,” she says, but she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, and why should she?

  “To pick up after them,” I say.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’ll give you four bags if you want.”

  “That’d be fine.”

  “Here, take five.”

  “I’ll rip ’em in half and make ’em ten.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Man, she’s cool. Everybody’s cool. This is going to be the greatest day of my life, even better than last night. Tonight I will be in a real nice house with my girl. A home. I grab some flowers, daisies. Tell you what, I’m so excited about being alive, I can’t stop smiling, and doesn’t the bodega lady just smile too? She’s whistling, and I carry her tune with me, out the door, the cowbell jangling like a laugh. I’m lit up just like the sky. Lightning falls all across it like God brushed a wirehaired jackal and pulled the dross from the comb and just tossed it down on us. The elevator’s out again, and I haul the fire stairs for the roof to chill with Boo for a couple of hours before we go pick up Céce. I can’t barely wait till eleven o’clock or so, when I’ll be kissing her long and slow, and we won’t have to worry about anybody happening upon us, like that one time in the park when I was on top of her, and we heard owls hoot, except it was these kids watching from the thickets. But now we’ll have a place to be alone together, for one night anyway. Her lips will be so warm and salty and sweet all at once, and her long hair will be black and shiny against the cool white sheets. It’ll be so quiet, except for the whoosh of cars down on the highway, but even that’ll sound nice because they’re so far away.

  My roof’s quiet. Too. With the lightning, you’d think Boo would whimper at least. I unlock the door to the elevator housing. “Heya, girl, wake up.”

  The dog is on the floor, on her side.

  “Boo, come.”

  Man, she’s really out after that all walking.

  “Boo?”

  Wait, is she . . . She isn’t breathing. I roll her head to me. Her tongue hangs slack and gray. Her eyes are sunk in. Oh, God. Oh, no.

  What did I do? Was it too hot in here today? No, the air conditioner is on full blast. Too cold? She’s no pup, but she’s too young to have a heart attack. Was too young. Did I walk her too hard this morning? She walked farther and faster and on hotter days. I can’t figure it out, how I killed her.

  I ruined it. This is going to mess her up so bad, Céce.

  I draw my Boo close to me and cradle her, and aren’t I just lame, whispering to this dead body, petting it. Her limp like this in my arms, I feel it, that she’s not here anymore, and I can’t imagine where she’s gone. It’s all through her, the coming stiffness. The cold.

  Then I look over at her water pot, full of bright green liquid. I sniff it. Antifreeze. Dogs go crazy for it. Like a milkshake to them because of the sweet smell. A tablespoon will kill a dog. Boo lapped up a lot more than that. It’s all over the floor. In the window screen is a fresh rip. The glass is chipped out at a low corner. The holes are big enough to funnel through a length of garden hose.

  I know what happened. I do. But I just don’t want to let it be real, that a person could do such evil. If that’s part of being human, I don’t want to be a man. Right about now, I’d rather not be.

  I can’t help but see it, him, Larry: He waits till I’m gone. He takes out his knife and cuts the screen. He cracks the window with a punch of his blade and bends out the broken bit of pane. He funnels it through, the hose. As he snakes it into Boo’s water pot, he’s gleeful. Maybe he even calls her over with a gentle “Heya, pretty girl” as he lets the antifreeze run. Boo trots over, tail whirling, grateful for the sweet words and the sweeter drink.

  He used kindness to cut her down.

  I don’t understand killing. How can it be, that killing is natural? That it has to happen? And it does have to happen. It really does now.

  This time the static doesn’t pounce. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t strong. It’s the strongest yet, just taking its time to build itself pure. It creeps in, a growing itch to the back of my eyes, until the fingernails dig in hard, and I’m sure my eyes will leak their jelly. I don’t know how long this goes on, me holding Boo, the inside of my head lighting up, the fever taking me from mourning to mad. No, this isn’t mad, what I’m feeling now. This is moving into madness, sure enough. I can’t hear anymore. Just the static, a tornado with ambitions, the kind that’s bitter it wasn’t born a hurricane. Outside the hutch window, the sheets are blowing horizontal. A dark gray one takes leave of the dry line and flies off like the Reaper starved for a fresh soul.

  Boo’s body slides out of my lap. After a second, she stills, her legs all wrong, her head like she’d never let it be in life, twisted so strange, like she’s looking back over her shoulder too far, too hard. Her eyes. I think I know the last thing that came to them, the one thing that’s stronger than love, app arently.

  The rage swells like a heat blister in my throat, heart, balls. Behind my eyes, just clawed clean now.

  I don’t know if I’m being pushed out of the hutch or dragged, but I’m staggering across the roof, down the fire stairs to Larry’s door. I see my fist pounding on it. Like I’m possessed, and I don’t have the will to stop the demon. This isn’t me now.

  Larry’s cursing at me from the other side of the door. He’s fading in and out of the hissing noise, but I can just make out that he’s saying, “I warned you I would get that filthy dog. Stinking up my sheets. Jumping around and barking up there. I warned you, dirtbag.” He says it over and over, and he’s laughing.

  The worst of it is, she was so forgiving, my Boo. Men had wrung her out again and again, forced her to live a life of battle and fear so constant she couldn’t have thought anything but that terror was the natural way of things. And she still had so much goodness spilling from her that she trusted her heart to a man again. To me. She believed in me. And I let it snatch her, the evil. She was sweetness and light, and this Larry is that darkness they say is between the galaxies, nothing out there. He was just made wrong. He can’t be a man. We can’t be the same. But we are. Oh, how we are.

  I hammer Larry’s dead bolt lock with a high kick, once, twice, I’m in.

  Larry reaches for his baseball bat, mouth wide as his eyes.

  The Sprite cans. I spin the bags tight to keep the cans in there real good. And then I walk fast at Larry and swing the six-pack at his face.

&nb
sp; He bleeds bad. Spits broken teeth. He’s still holding his bat, but limp, at his side. I slap it from his hand and hit him again with the cans. Bust his nose open.

  On his knees, Larry. Looking up at me. I can’t hear anything except the hissing now, but I read his lips: “Please. I’m sorry.”

  He sure is, boy, tell you what.

  I peel off into my mind’s darker streets and lose myself. I keep hitting him, and hitting him, and hitting him, until the cans explode.

  Pink froth everywhere. Then it’s a fast fade to shadows.

  I’m sitting on the floor, must be a while later. My teeth click in the prickly hundred-degree heat. I scratch at a bedbug bite on my neck. One of Larry’s cats stares at me from the kitchen counter. She flicks her tail. Another cat licks at the dishes piling the sink. Out the window the clouds are burnt rags.

  The sound comes back with the cop’s voice. “Son?”

  I hear the echo of little kids laughing, playing chase down in the courtyard.

  Blood slicks on the floor. A slug trail from when Larry tried to drag himself to the door. He made it halfway before I finished him.

  “Yessir?” I say.

  “Put down the bat, son.”

  Condo I-beam rising in the distance, ka-kong, ka-kong.

  I see the bat in my hand. Slick. I start to remember it. Chopping at Larry after he was dead.

  “Son, do you hear me?”

  Church bells.

  “Yessir,” I say to that nice cop who three times called me son.

  Céce would have stopped me. Just her touch would have been enough.

  I’ll never get to be with her again? That can’t be right. She believed in me. She had faith that I was good. How could I let it come between us, the need for the stink of blood in my shirt? How could I let something so cheap one-up my love for her? It’s awful and true: No demon made me do this. I did it. Wanted to do it. And I still think I was right to do it. That it had to be. I’m the demon?

  I was a man, hers, and now I’m nothing.

  My hand goes weak, and the bat bangs the sunburnt linoleum and rolls hollow and crooked across the sloped floor. With blood on my hand I touch my forehead, then my heart, left shoulder, right, in the sign of the cross. Then I fold my hands and I pray that Céce will forgive me.

  Except maybe it’s better she doesn’t.

  I look out the kitchen window, up to the sky. Across the street, a pair of sneakers strung over a power line turns in a hot wind that smells of ozone. The rain comes.

  (Tu esday, July 21, night)

  CÉCE:

  He’s late.

  I’m waiting out in front of the restaurant. I keep replaying it: tomorrow, sunrise. Waking up with him in that double bed down in the basement. The light is good down there then. Clean. Boo will worm her way into our cuddling. She’ll wake up with me every morning from now on, and I’ll walk her around the reservoir. I’ll lose weight and be able to eat more cheesecake.

  He’s never late. ESP. Push comes to shove, it isn’t real, right? C’mon. Probably had to do something for his father. Haul trash, mop the halls, sweep the stairs.

  Half an hour late. Why didn’t he let me get him a phone? I was going to add another line to mine for ten bucks a month, and the phone comes free, but he said no. I head into the kitchen to tell Ma I’m going over to Mack’s. Everybody’s bunched around Vic’s laptop. Vic downloads tomorrow’s crossword every day at about this time.

  They’re not looking at the crossword. They’re looking at me. They’re pale.

  I step closer, and I see they’re on the breaking news link, local edition.

  “Oh Céce,” Ma says.

  Vic almost catches me as I pass out.

  (The next morning, Wednesday, July 22, the forty-first day . . .)

  He was inside me. Moved in me. I felt him so clearly. His pulse. The sting of his desperate heart. Marcy told me it would hurt, but it didn’t. It was perfect from the first stroke. It was blindingly clear to me: We were born for no other reason than to be together. He made me shake. I was a mess, but he didn’t mind. He was shaking too. He draped me, his torso overtaking mine, gently, softly, our lower bellies brushing where the hair lightens. The throbbing was so sweet I saw colors I didn’t know existed, and they shimmered to our rhythm, all kinds of gold, like sunlight through leaves. After: He held me, and I could cry in front of him and feel stronger for it. I was a seagull driving for the full moon. But now wires lasso my joints and pull me to the floor. A puppet flattened, chained to the dustiest ground.

  They’re calling him the Soda Can Killer. In the print edition, he comes up just before page six, where the gossip columns start. His mug shot looks nothing like him. He’s not so much looking into the camera as looking through it, at something far, far away. He doesn’t seem at all surprised. He looks tired and, oddly, relieved.

  Oh my god. It’s really hitting me now.

  Mack Morse killed a man.

  He hasn’t called me. He’s just gone. I’m dragging the pictures across my phone screen. Scrolling through smiles and touching and hugging Boo.

  My Boo.

  That man. Larry. How could he? How dare he? If he wasn’t already dead, I’d claw him blind.

  I need Mack with me so bad now. To keep me from wanting to break everything I see, windows, the TV, the bones in my hands, creaking.

  I have to salvage what’s left of us. I have to hold her one last time. Hugging the pillow doesn’t work. Hugging myself hurts worse. I need her. I need Boo.

  Vic drives me over there, to the roof. Yellow tape everywhere. A cop sits on a folding chair out front. “You can’t go up there,” he says.

  “I have to,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Boo.”

  “Boo?” he says.

  “My dog. Her body. I have to bury her. In the park.”

  “Bury her?” the cop says. “You can’t bury a dog in a park.”

  “The graveyard.”

  “Miss—”

  “You don’t understand, Officer. That’s my dog up there. I have to take her to her final resting site. My boyfriend’s secret place.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  Vic hushes me and steps in. “Listen,” he says to the cop. “You know Detective Escobar, right? He’s one of my longtime customers—”

  “Look,” the cops says. “I can’t let you through the tape. And anyway, the dog’s not up there.”

  “Then where is she?” I say.

  “They took the bodies. That’s all I know.”

  I’m ripping the tape, heading up there. I have to see. To be sure they didn’t just leave her there. I have to take her to his hideaway, our hideaway, where he buried the others, the ones he tried to save, the ones that didn’t make it. That time he showed me. Beneath the pines. He marked their graves with smooth stones. I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I pushed my mouth down on him right there, I wanted to taste him so bad. He kept saying “Not here,” but we did. Right there.

  The cop is yelling, but I don’t hear him. When he grabs my arm, I spin into him and shove him off and scream, “Don’t touch me. Don’t. You. Fucking. Touch me.”

  He and Vic drag me out and put me into the Vic-mobile. They hold my arms down, because if they don’t I’ll start smashing them on the dashboard again. The cop calls an ambulance, but by the time they get there, I’m spent, too tired to cry. They ask my name, where I am, and the day of the week, and I give them the right answers. The one guy says, “She’s okay.” I laugh myself into a coughing fit, because that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in the longest time.

  A few hours later, we’re in an old courtroom with a high ceiling. Marble floors, dark oak, ornate moldings everywhere. But the windows are dirty. The lights are dark with bug cake. A thick filthy cobweb rope swings from the ceiling. The fans don’t do any cooling, but they make a lot of noise.

  Vic’s detective friend knows a guy at the Department of Juvenile Justice. Mack is supposed to
plead today sometime, could be anytime, depending on how full the blotter is.

  It’s full.

  The place is packed. Me, Ma, and Vic are shoved into standing room only, way in the back. We bob and weave and go tiptoe to look over the crowd, but I can’t see any sign of Mack. Every three minutes or so, the judge says, “How do you plead?” And some lawyer says for his client, “Not guilty, Your Honor.”

  Everybody’s so mad in here. The heat. I have to step out for air. Ma comes with me, out to the courthouse steps. I try calling down to Anthony again, to tell him about Mack, but he’s still in a communications blackout.

  I still haven’t heard from him. Mack, I mean.

  “When’s he gonna call me, Ma?”

  “He’ll call you, sweetie. Just give him a chance. He’s probably . . . We better get back inside.”

  “But what if he doesn’t, Ma? What if he doesn’t call?”

  And what if he does? What can he tell me, and what can I say? I keep seeing them, the words in the newspaper. What he did. The same person who clubbed somebody to death told me he loved me?

  An hour later, the judge says, “Macario Morse, how do you plead?”

  “Not guilty, Your Honor,” Mack’s lawyer says. He’s the same court-appointed attorney a lot of the others have. I can barely see Mack from back here. They gave him a clean T-shirt, but his jeans are spattered with dried blood.

  He said I muted the hissing, but I’m really starting to wonder now: If I was with him, could I have saved him from himself? How do you do that, take a baseball bat to somebody’s skull? His hands, once so gentle on my body, are fists now.

  The judge is saying, “Bail recommendation?” when Mack cuts her off.