by CS DeWildt
Chief went up to the counter and peaked into the world behind. Al lay bloody and finally dead. He had no far-off gaze as his eyelids were closed. The face told a tale of sleep that was contradicted by the contorted body and blood-smeared floors. Chief grabbed the fifth of Hennessy from the display behind him. He raised the bottle toward Al.
“Cheers, you lecherous fuck.” Chief left the store, still unnoticed.
Chief closed in on his destination, killed the headlights and slowed to a stop at the curb. He stepped out of the cruiser, and the bitter night nipped at him above the collar. He walked up the cracked sidewalk path, entered a foreign land littered with beer cans and windblown trash. Broken furniture sprouted up from the soil among the tall weeds that blanketed the whole of the property. A broken lawnmower was among the debris, and Chief felt the rusty handle slip in his grasp as he walked by. The metal oxide flakes left a stripe of orange/brown pigment across his palm.
Chief climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the porch. More beer cans. The Bizbang’s porch bulb was smashed, the jagged remains still twisted into the socket. Searching for a hidden key, over the doorframe, under a stained burlap welcome mat worn and stretched to nearly nothing, Chief found nothing. He thought for a moment and then grabbed the door handle, twisted it, pushed the door wide without entering. He listened to the silence inside, mostly silence; the low buzz of television came from somewhere within. It sounded like flies. The smell enveloped him, stale and warm, inviting him in as it mixed with the night air.
Chief followed the noise through the dark house, through the rot and mold, through the lingering ammonia aroma of rodent waste, his thick rubber soles thumping on the floors, amplified by the darkness. He reached the source of the buzz and pushed open the door. Infomercials had taken over the airwaves. Chief watched the old man sleep and thought of Al Ryder. Perhaps it was just too dark to see the old man’s blood. Chief hadn’t seen the man in many years, since the time of the wife’s death. He watched the old chest rise and fall for a long time before he closed him in the room again.
Chief walked the hall further, checking rooms as he passed them. A dirty bathroom, sink full of beard trimmings and bloodstains. The pantry smelled heavily of onions and organic rot. Entering the kitchen, Chief saw the flies over the sink in a wash of some outside light diffusing through the filthy window. The strip of flypaper lay next to the faucet, full and dead. Tiny aerialists zipped in wide lines back and forth, around and under and over the light. They tapped the window with their bodies, trying to escape their limbo, trying to find the confusing glow. They lighted to rest on the falling, failing cabinetry, their weight pulling the cupboards further from the wall an immeasurable distance with each landing. Chief watched the flies. The damage they were doing did not escape his attentions. He knew the collective pressures of time.
In the sink, a bowl full of what first appeared to be rice grains squirmed and feasted on the putrid remains of some forgotten meal. Chief watched the flies alight in the filth, land and drop their eggs. He put a slow hand to two copulating flies and ground them into the glass. He smeared the innards over the glass in a long streak of brown and red.
Chief turned and ascended the steep, narrow staircase on the wall opposite the maggots. The upstairs held a new darkness that Chief’s flashlight could not cut as easily. He entered the room at the top of the stairs and flipped the switch. The light was such a sudden violation that he turned it off again, favoring the dimness and flashlight. The roaches ran like shadows across all surfaces. Chief shone the light over the cracked and postered walls, over forgotten bands, a red Ferrari overlaid on a blue and black checkerboard background. He looked over the space. The room was an amalgam of brain vomit, Lloyd, himself, projected all over the walls and floor. Chief’s light found something on the floor among the dirty clothes and books and pornography that littered the room. He grabbed the T-shirt and examined his painted find, noted the blood.
Chief heard the old man coughing and quickly moved from the room and down the stairs, backtracking, T-shirt in hand. He slowly opened the old man’s bedroom door. The man laid the same, asleep, chest rising and falling in the glow of an advertisement for the best food processor known to man. Chief followed the plastic tubing from the man’s nose and over a winding, tangled mess to the oxygen tank next to the bed. Chief kneeled between the bed and the tank, watched the old man. He pulled a small blade from his utility belt and applied pressure to the tube. The soft plastic gave easily as the knife blade rolled over the tube, creating an unbridgeable gap between parasite and host. Chief twisted the knob on the kerosene heater, extinguishing the flame. He twisted the knob opposite and listened to the light hiss of the fumes. He remained still for a moment and took in the sweet gas. He crouched and sucked in the kerosene. He drifted, loved, forgave, hated. He became a tooth in rotten, black gums. His legs were frozen roots. He tried to wiggle free, but the need to remain paralyzed spoke to him and kept him so. The sound and echo of steel traps snapping shut popped in his brain, from everywhere at once, shutting him into his black field of vision as neurons fried and withered and cannibalized themselves for oxygen. Chief’s fingertips felt cotton. He looked at the shirt in his hand through the tunnel of his glistening peepers.
He stood and left the room with the agility of a cement cat, left the house and locked the old man inside. He stumbled into the driver’s seat of his cruiser and was gone.
Chapter 23
It was dark and no one was left at the barn. She stepped inside, completely forgetting what she’d come in for.
“Damn it,” she said.
Zeke tackled her to the hay and held her firm. He and Terry took turns like good boys, ripped her clothes away from the warm, supple core. Its newness and smooth perfection could be lost on no one.
The girl writhed in the itchy hay. She fought until a hardened fist smashed her nose. Then another smashed her cheek. Then another somewhere else. She stopped fighting; the strikes continued, part of the deal. The cement floor was cool on the small of her back. The hot blood seemed to hiss as it dripped, but it was only the sound of hay rubbing concrete.
It’s so cold for August, she thought. Through blood and tears, she saw the brown leather hat hanging from a rusted nail on the stall door, above and beyond the stone-carved, greasy boys who rode her. There it is, she remembered.
Chapter 24
Lloyd found the Bohls drinking a portion of their winnings in the dirt overflow lot across the street from the fairgrounds.
“Next year, man,” Jason said to John.
“Next year what?” Lloyd asked from the foliage behind the lot, watering plants in the dark.
“Next year, I’m going to take first place.”
“Like hell!” John said through a snort of Hennessey, brown spittle misting the air. They bickered and passed the bottle. Lloyd zipped up.
“You guys ever see Terry and Zeke?”
“You still looking for them?”
“You want them to mess up that beauty of a face? Oh wait.” The brothers laughed. One held up the bottle. Lloyd took it and drank long and deep, savoring the sweet brown.
“Easy,” Jason said with a mustelid paw begging for the bottle’s return.
“You going to invest in us now?” John said.
“An investment is supposed to mature. You guys are spending more than you’re making. See that?”
“Yeah. But we get to drive in the derby.”
“And party with the winnings.”
“But you could party more without the derby is what I’m saying.”
“We do party.”
“This is more fun anyway.”
“Something to look forward to,” Jason added.
Lloyd thought about that and took another long swig from the bottle. The Bohls protested, but all Lloyd heard was the wash of liquid down his throat.
Occasional headlights washed over Lloyd and the Bohls. Lloyd kept alert, watching the silhouettes and shadows of those who approached. Paired
men were common, and Lloyd remained tense throughout his core. The figures became fewer and fewer, and soon all they were gone, leaving only three young men getting drunk and high in a parking lot.
Chapter 25
Chief felt the pain in his abdominal cavity, the same as always since he’d been drinking again always. The shotgun next to him was unlocked in its vertical ready position between Chief and the empty passenger seat. The rack was always unlocked, but the gun hadn’t been out of the car in months, shot in weeks. Chief looked at it and thought he should grab it, turn it on his liver and pull the trigger. If he could, he’d then pull the trigger again. He imagined going out this way and laughing at the pulsating, blackened mush inside him. He’d kill it before it got him.
Chief’s spotlight flowed over the dark August night, clouded and calm, draped in biting cold that drew smoky breath. Chief’s own father had died of lung cancer, and for that reason, Chief never smoked a cigarette. He wondered if he should start as he watched the tiny clouds puff from him. His eyes were connected to the light burst of the spotlight as if they were one entity, or at least connected by wires. Figures limped and stumbled through the night and were lit afire, examined and left for dead as they continued home.
Chief clutched at Lloyd’s blood-and-paint-stained shirt. The county boys would like to see this, he bet, but he couldn’t turn it over yet. It was his. It would pull him from his pit. It was his.
Chief remembered little Lloyd, white-haired and crying. Hair still damp, he was wrapped in a bath towel. He shivered in the front yard, scared and sad and blinded by the police lights.
“What really happened, Lloyd?” Chief had asked. Lloyd said naught, and under Chief’s face, something rippled, like carrion eaters devouring muscle tissue beneath sun-hardened skin and fur. Chief tried to catch it, the way a man would, catch it and lock it away forever, but tears welled, and he knew the boy saw his sadness.
The dead girl was blue and did not look like Lloyd. She looked like no man in her life. Chief saw past the boy and watched the woman sob alone; Lloyd’s father gone away to do the same. Chief wanted to be the comfort the woman sought, wanted the woman to be his comfort, wanted the woman to be his own again. The boy in front of him would not allow it. Chief saw what the boy knew. He put his hand upon the blue girl as she past. Her skin felt like nothing under numb fingertips. Chief watched little Lloyd’s teeth chatter. He spoke slowly with frosty breath, at the boy, not to him: “I will see this fixed. You hear me?”
The cruiser slowed to the curb, and Chief turned off the spot and flashers. The dash of dials flooded the interior of the cruiser a holiday red and green, muted, like a field of flower bulbs just ready to pop and reveal their truth. Chief took the shotgun and pointed it out the window. He took aim at nothing, closed his eyes, fired off a shot into the sky and stomped the gas pedal. The discharge was a short-lived firework display, just enough to grab the attentions of anyone within earshot, just enough to illicit something beyond the lazy indifference he was privy to, the indifference that lurked in their souls.
The cruiser bounced wildly, and Chief forced his eyes open, swerving in time to avoid a house, smashing through a handcrafted, decorative windmill. The treads tore into the lawn, and by the time the old man got up to see about the commotion, there was nothing but a mess of dirt and destroyed grass among jagged pieces of fencing, landscape and windmill. The old man phoned into the police station to make a report. No one answered. Chief’s recorded voice gave him the number of the county sheriff.
The old man sat on the cement steps admiring the ruin of his yard. He smoked and drank two light beers as he waited for the county boys.
“God damn animals,” he said. He looked upon his yard, and the Christian in him tried to empathize with the culprit, if only to get into the mind of whoever was capable of this much disrespect, disrespect for the work, for another person’s labors, time, money. The old man was going to cry, but he stopped himself. He knew what was what. He finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the cement, in the center of the black burn where thousands of hot ash cherries had been snuffed.
“God damn animals.”
Chapter 26
Lloyd and the Bohls walked the dark streets, the brown, tropical twins flanking the ghost like a pair of Voodoo zombies. They walked the blacktop, away from the empty sidewalk, away from the staggered, conical light shafts of the streetlamps. Lloyd rolled another cigarette, looking up and down from his busy hands to the road ahead. The alcohol was leaving him.
They cut through the playground of Park Street Elementary. Lloyd saw the night he’d been on mushrooms and visited the playground. He wasn’t alone. It was probably the Bohls with him, but he favored to pay the actuality little mind as he remembered the evening spent with a girl, a private scene laden with sentiment; he saw it clearly. Together they spun on the merry-go-round, watching the tracers of street lamps and porch lights in the distance, beyond the ball diamonds. Lloyd had climbed to the top of the slide found it to be as high as when he was a boy. A breeze blew away his fear, and Lloyd leapt from the metal grating of the platform and skated the dewy metal slope, squawking from both mouth and foot. His footing escaped him as the incline leveled. He went airborne, horizontal. His head split open as the back occipital region of his skull connected with the end of the slide. The hit took his sight. He lay in the dirt, bleeding and blind, and she came to him. He saw nothing, and everything was illuminated, the indifferent nothingness of existence, of all life.
She told him she was not Death.
“Are you life?” Lloyd asked.
“You think I’m here for you. I’m not.” She did not smile. Her face was calm water in the eye of a storm. She kissed him between the eyes. “Am I here?”
“I see you,” Lloyd said.
“You’re blind.”
“But I see you.”
At those words, she did smile. And Lloyd rode the wave of that smile up and out of the darkness, higher and faster until his sight returned and again he was alone.
He saw the Bohls squabbling over the final eighth-ounce of red-topped shrooms. Lloyd ate a final two caps and woke up in the hospital. His head ached due to twenty-seven stitches and a skull fracture. The back of his head was shaved and blood-stained under a tight wrap of a gauze cloud.
Crossing this stage again, Lloyd felt for the nothingness he’d encountered. A benevolent coldness welled up within whiskey-like warmth, but unlike the alcohol, it sustained, it grew, discovered more and more room within him to spread. The men stepped out of the schoolyard and back to the pavement, now a full block west of the fairgrounds in addition to their 4 or 5 North. Lloyd felt that if he flapped his arms, he could fly away. He looked for the girl. Until she was with him again, he would not fly away.
Headlights rose in the distance, and the light embraced them as the car approached. At thirty yards, it downshifted and slowed, surveyed the road, then groaned and sped and swerved for Lloyd and the Bohls. They moved out of the way easily, immediate preservation defeating the knowledge that being struck by the car might seem the better option at the end of the night. Drizzle had started again, cold and constant and threatening to freeze. The car slid to a fishtailed stop, ass end hanging in the road, headlights on the three.
“We got you, Lloyd,” Jason or John said from behind.
“Fuck that,” the other said. He ran.
The car doors swung open. The black figures stepped into the headlight, haloed like demons in fire.
“Chief says you’re looking for us,” Terry said.
“What you want with us, Lloyd?”
The idling Olds drowned out any other noise except for that within the light. Lloyd watched the men come closer. Zeke rubbed his scar absently, scratching at patchy beard growth.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Terry told the remaining Bohl.
“Stay if you wanna get fucked up,” Zeke added.
“Go,” Lloyd said and watched him leave. Lloyd heard the twins squabble over the d
ecision to turn pussy and then over the bottle as they moved through protective shadow, truly leaving Lloyd to the Cutters.
“Three on two isn’t really fair anyway,” Lloyd said.
“We just don’t need a bunch of eyes lookin’ in on us tonight,” Zeke said.
“Chief told us to leave you be. Said he had somethin’ for you his self. But that was just for yesterday and now it’s goin’ on one in the AM.”
Lloyd put up his palms and set himself with one foot grinding into the wet, slickening pavement. “I don’t want to fight.”
“So get beat,” Terry smiled. The triangle froze for just a moment. The three examined the moment independently, simultaneously. A single moment with three different realities, all true.
Lloyd waited for the gap to close, and as it did, his open hands became hard-fleshed spear tips atop coiled springs. He released them into an Adam’s apple each. Terry and Zeke stumbled back, both gasping. Lloyd watched both men’s eyes and chose Terry. Lloyd stepped up and thrust a stiff boot to the shinbone, striking hard just below the knee, separating ligaments, before grinding the square boot tread down the length of the bone. As Terry stumbled forward, Lloyd threw a close elbow across his jaw, shattering it and knocking the man back into the open car door. The door slammed, and Terry lay still in the cold rain.
Lloyd turned to Zeke, who was still choking, but poised enough to pull his knife. The silver devil snapped from its folded slumber, alert and ready. The shining blade was about four inches, sharp and saw-toothed. Lloyd did not hesitate and stepped to Zeke with his hands ready. The knife shook as Zeke rewatched the easy dismantling of his older brother, the backbone of the pair, over and over. It was all he could see other than Lloyd’s eyes shooting through him. Zeke felt trapped in a tableau of Lloyd’s making, nothing but a frozen frame for the white-haired man to scrutinize and then dispatch justice as he saw fit.