Doppelganger

by David Stahler Jr.

  “How much farther?” she asked. Even though Amber was right behind me, holding on to my jacket, her voice sounded far away as we walked along the tracks.

  “Not much,” I said.

  There wasn’t any moon out, not yet at least, but between the stars and the lights from town, I could see well enough. Amber’s human eyes had a tougher time. Still, I didn’t want to use the flashlight. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t want anyone to see us. Not only that, I had no idea how long the batteries would hold out. The last thing I wanted was for the flashlight to die in the middle of digging.

  A couple minutes later, the trees on our right fell back. We were coming to the clearing. It looked different in the dark without the campfire. It seemed bigger.

  I smelled Chris twenty yards from the culvert, that odor of decay that’s sweet but not sweet. It wasn’t strong, but it was enough to make me pull up.

  “Sorry,” I whispered as Amber bumped into me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  She was nervous. I could hear it in her voice. I wanted to tell her it was okay, that I was nervous too, but I held back. I figured it would only make her feel worse if I told her the truth. Besides, it actually made me feel better to pretend not to be afraid. Like pretending made it real.

  “We’re close,” I said.

  We went a little farther, and then I spotted the culvert. By then we were close enough that Amber could smell him too. I heard her take a sharp breath and groan a little, but she didn’t say anything.

  We scrambled down the bank and paused by the edge of the culvert.

  “Hold these,” I said, handing her the pack and shovel.

  I reached way into the culvert as far as I could. For a second I couldn’t feel the plastic, and I got scared. I had this sudden fear—what if they’d found him? What if they’d taken him away and only the smell had stayed? But then my fingers brushed along the edge of the rolled sheet. It was a weird feeling—both relief and revulsion at the same time.

  Planting my feet, I reached in with my other hand, got a good hold, and pulled.

  To my surprise, the body slid out pretty easily. In fact, I almost fell over and would have pulled him right on top of me if I hadn’t caught myself at the last second. It seemed as if Chris had lost a little weight.

  “Ugh,” Amber gasped as the smell suddenly grew stronger. I could hear her breaths starting to come quick.

  “If it weren’t for the cold and the plastic, it would probably be worse,” I offered.

  “You think?” she murmured.

  “Breathe in through your mouth.”

  “I’m trying,” she said.

  I leaned over to her, opened the pack, and pulled out the flashlight.

  “Wait,” she said, grabbing my arm in the dark.

  “Amber, we need to see. I have to find a spot. Somewhere to dig.”

  “Don’t shine it on him,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  I flicked the light on. It was bright. Painfully bright, even with it pointing straight at the ground, and I felt like every cop in the area suddenly knew we were here. Then my eyes adjusted, and it wasn’t so bad. I left Chris and headed toward the edge of the clearing. Amber was right beside me. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to be left back there alone.

  After a little bit of poking around, we found a good spot behind some trees in a little opening where the ground was soft. I planted the spade and turned to go back for Chris, when Amber stopped me.

  “Leave him there,” she said. “Dig the hole first.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  And so I did. For the next hour, I dug while Amber stood by holding the flashlight on me, lighting up the dark shower of earth that flew from my shovel with every scoop. It takes a lot longer to dig a grave than you might think, especially when you’re trying to make it deep. And I was going for the six-foot standard. It wasn’t just about keeping the dogs or whatever else away, not anymore. I wanted him to stay buried for good. So I tried to be careful, to do it right. In fact, I spent almost as much time cutting up the sod into squares and setting them aside to put back later as I did digging the hole.

  We didn’t say much, though at one point Amber asked if she could help dig for a while, to give me a break. I told her no, that it was my job.

  “After all,” I said, “I’m the one who killed him.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, gazing down at the hole, “but I’m the one who wanted to.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then I went back to digging.

  Not long after that I finished. We went and got Chris, pulled him across the grass and up beside the grave. I was about to roll him in when Amber spoke up.

  “I want to see him,” she said.

  “You do?” I said, stepping back from the body.

  She glanced up at me and nodded.

  I took the jackknife I’d swiped off Barry’s workbench from my pocket and opened it up.

  “You’re sure?” I said, holding the knife over the plastic. She nodded again, holding the flashlight close to herself so that her breath sent little puffs of steam into the light’s beam.

  I cut through the layers of plastic, one at a time, until I made it all the way through, then pulled the layers apart so that everything was open from the shoulders up.

  Then I stood back. She slowly moved the light until it was shining on his face. Needless to say, he didn’t look too good. In fact, he almost didn’t even look like Chris, but enough so that there was no mistaking him.

  Amber turned the light on my face for a second. I squinted and covered my eyes. When she pulled the flashlight away, I could see she was shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m still trying to get my head around all this. I think a part of me was holding out, believing that you—or him, I guess—had just gone insane. Some bizarre schizophrenic crack-up, you know? And this story of the doppelganger. This crazy, elaborate fable…”

  “It’s no fable,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “No, I’m glad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now I don’t have to feel guilty,” she replied.

  “For what?”

  “For playing along. For letting him be crazy because I liked him better that way.”

  We were quiet for a minute, staring down at the body, a decayed echo of my own form.

  “We’d better get going,” I said, pulling the plastic back together to cover him as best I could. “We’ve got more work to do.”

  I was going to just roll him in, but at the last second, it didn’t feel right. Like it was the wrong thing to do. So I had Amber grab the legs and I took the top, and we dropped him down in as gently as we could.

  We started piling dirt on. Even Amber helped, kicking dirt down in, sometimes scooping it with one hand while she held the flashlight with the other. I shoveled like crazy. It’s like we both wanted to get it over with as fast as we could, especially at first when the dirt hit the plastic, making a weird sort of crackling sound. Then it was dirt on dirt and real quiet and not quite so bad. We finished by laying the sod, with its long grass, back in place. It wasn’t perfect, but it looked okay.

  We stood back, side by side, me holding the shovel, her shining the flashlight on the slightly mounded ground. Our breath, heavy from the exertion, clouded in the cold. We were both dirty, but it was done.

  Amber reached over and took my hand. All of a sudden she started to cry, a little bit at first, but pretty soon she was choking back sobs. It was over pretty quick.

  “Sorry,” she said, sniffing.

  “Don’t be.”

  “It’s just that I grew to hate him so much, especially these last couple months,” she said, wiping her eyes. She kept looking at the ground.

  “He used to hit me, you know,” she said. “Not much at first. More toward the end.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d already figured as much
, but to hear her say it was still strange. Maybe it was the way she said it, like it was a confession, an admission of sorts, even though she’d been on the receiving end. Maybe she was saying it for him, because he couldn’t.

  “I thought at first that it would stop, that it was just a temporary thing, like when you come down with a cold for a few weeks and then it sort of disappears.” She shook her head. “I was so stupid, to let him treat me that way, to just sort of block it out like it was happening to somebody else. In the end it only made me feel worse. I felt like I was nothing.”

  She hesitated. “That’s why I hated him so much,” she said at last. “Because he made me hate myself.”

  “But it’s over now,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, Chris hated himself too. For the same reason. I know,” I said. “I saw it in his eyes that night, right here in this clearing.”

  We lingered for another minute. I didn’t want to leave yet. Not now, not after what she’d said, no matter how true it was. Chris was a messed-up kid, no doubt about it. But there was more. There’s always more.

  “I didn’t know Chris when I killed him,” I said. “But I still felt bad. And now after being him, even for just a little while, I feel worse. He didn’t deserve it, Amber.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “But who’s to say why things happen the way they do?”

  She leaned her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. I felt so good all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

  “We’d better say good-bye,” I said. She nodded.

  “Tell me something about him,” I said. “Something good. Let’s say good-bye that way. There must be something.”

  “There’s lots of things,” she said. “He was an asshole most of the time, but every once in a while, he’d let his guard down. There was this side to him, like a little kid.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “He had these sheets,” she said suddenly.

  “Race cars,” I said.

  She laughed. “I thought they were cute. I even picked on him once about them. He got pretty mad, but he never took them off,” she said. “What about you?”

  I thought for a second. “He was good to his sister,” I said. “I think he really loved her.”

  I turned to look down at Amber. Her eyes closed all of a sudden, but the tears came out anyway. She wiped them with her sleeve, and we turned away.

  We kept the flashlight going until we got up on the tracks. Then we switched it off and walked the rest of the way back in the dark. With every step, I felt new relief. I’d finally buried Chris and didn’t have to worry anymore about either of us being found out. Everything would be okay. That’s what I thought, anyway, as Amber and I headed down the tracks side by side, still holding hands, close under the stars.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was around ten o’clock when we got back to Amber’s car. She opened the trunk, and I laid the shovel down in it. Clumps of dirt still clung to its blade.

  For a minute we just stood there gazing down at the shovel, the trunk’s light illuminating our faces from below. Then we looked at each other.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Me neither.”

  There was another long pause.

  “I don’t know. We could get some coffee, I guess,” she said at last.

  “That’s probably not a good idea,” I said. “I mean, look at us.”

  Even in the dim light of the trunk I could see both of us were filthy, with dirt on our hands and on our pants and shoes.

  “Hey,” I said, “why don’t you teach me how to drive? I mean, Chris knew how. So I should too, right?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s not that hard.”

  She was right. Once I got used to knowing how hard to hit the gas and the brakes, it was actually pretty fun. We spent the next two hours driving the roads around Bakersville, laughing and having a good time. I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t have. I mean, I suppose it wasn’t too respectful, considering what we’d been doing earlier. But it felt good to laugh and fool around a bit and forget about Chris for a while.

  By the time she dropped me off, it was midnight. Barry’s car was parked in the driveway. He must have come home and passed out—I couldn’t see any lights on in the house.

  “We have to go visit my grandmother this weekend,” she said. “I won’t be back until Sunday night.”

  “I’ll see you Monday, then,” I said. She leaned toward me, and I kissed her. “Thanks,” I said, “for everything.”

  She nodded, and I got out and watched her drive away.

  I tried to let myself in as quietly as I could, but as soon as I opened the door, Poppy tore past me with a yelp and disappeared around the corner of the house into the backyard. Standing in the doorway, I knew something was wrong. By now it was a familiar feeling, only this time it was worse than all the other times combined. I mean, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight as I went in and closed the door behind me. The only light came from over the sink in the kitchen, and the odor of fresh cigarette smoke lay heavy in the house, mingled with the smell of booze.

  I was about to call out when I heard a sort of choking noise coming from the kitchen, followed by the sound of a glass being smacked onto the table. I’d heard that sound before—Barry was drinking.

  I started to head for my room, when all of a sudden I froze.

  I still don’t know why I stopped or why I turned around and went into the kitchen. Maybe it was anger. I was in kind of a weird mood after having buried Chris. And all of a sudden, I realized I was fed up with Barry doing nothing but sitting around getting a load on. Even if he never touched Echo again, I suddenly felt like it wasn’t good enough. I mean, Chris was dead. And now it was like Barry was dying too. Slowly, bit by bit, he was killing himself, and even though I didn’t have to stick around and watch, Echo did. It wasn’t fair to her.

  Maybe I just wanted to see him sitting there at the table, wallowing in his misery, drunk and pathetic.

  If that’s what I’d wanted, then that’s what I got. And then some.

  He was at the table, all right, in his usual spot, sitting there in the darkened room with his favorite bottle, his favorite glass, his favorite ashtray with a burning cigarette resting on its edge—all the accessories of his screwed-up life gathered around him. And there was one other thing there besides.

  I didn’t notice the gun until I’d moved farther into the kitchen, over to the counter. It was the pistol I’d seen in his drawer that first morning. He was resting it in his left hand up against his head, the barrel pointing at the ceiling, like he was holding himself up with it or something. So much for him killing himself slowly.

  He didn’t notice me at first, but when he did, he started, and for a second I was afraid he might shoot me. But the gun hardly moved.

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked away, reached down to pick up his cigarette, and took a drag. I could tell he was pretty drunk, more than usual. His arm moved in that herky-jerky sort of way, as if it were some robot arm operated by remote control.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Go to bed,” he growled.

  I didn’t move. For a minute I just watched him, trying to figure out how to get us all out of this and get him safely to bed, which was kind of twisted, considering I’d tried to kill him a week earlier.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He shook his head and started laughing.

  “What am I doing? That’s a good question,” he said. He was slurring his words pretty badly. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I thought I was doing the right things—job, wife, kids.” He paused. “But what do I have? That’s the real question, after all. And you know what the answer is? I’ll tell you what the goddam answer is, Chris. Nothing. I’ve got nothing, Chris. No wife—she left me. No kids—they hate me. No job—”

  “You got fired?” I blurted out.

  “That bastard, Mitch,”
he said.

  He splashed some more whiskey into his glass and downed it, smacking the glass back on the table even harder this time. I wondered why it didn’t break.

  “So you’re going to kill yourself—” I started to say.

  “Go to bed.”

  “—is that what you’re going to do?”

  “I said go to bed!” he hollered.

  “Is everything okay?”

  I whirled around to see Echo standing in the kitchen doorway all sleepy eyed and husky voiced. I went over to her. I didn’t want her to come in and see Barry at the table with the gun. Heck, I didn’t want her to be around Barry with the gun.

  “Go back to sleep,” I whispered, crouching down in front of her.

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?” she asked. It was funny—I’d never heard her call him that before.

  “He’s just a little drunk, that’s all,” I said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. Just go back to sleep.”

  “You’re all dirty,” she said, looking me over.

  “A little bit,” I said. “Just go back to bed, okay? Please, Echo.”

  She nodded slowly, then went back into her bedroom and shut the door.

  I headed into the kitchen and sat down across from Barry at the table. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I wasn’t scared anymore. He glanced up, squinting his eyes at me like I was far away. I could tell he didn’t want me there. He started tapping the gun against his head.

  “So you’re really going to do this?” I said. “Blow your brains out with her in the next room? You really hate her that much?”

  “She won’t care,” he said. “And neither will you, so fuck off.” He waved the gun vaguely in my direction for a second. Then he took one last drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out. “You want to talk about hate, talk about yourself,” he said.

  “I think you should give me the gun.”

  “I want to hear you say it,” he muttered, this time pointing the gun straight at me. “I want you to tell me you hate me.”