by Robert White
As I passed the car, I thought I should check to see if my pipe wrench was left under the seat where I had placed it beside the gun. There it was.
“C’mon, Henry Lee,” I said, “time to go home.”
I managed the walk but not without a few blasts of passing car horns to keep me on my side of the road. I slipped once and hit the pavement, the wrench ringing on the road. As I got up, I could see that I had torn up the skin on the palms of my hands. I had those maudlin, stupid thoughts of a drunkard trying to console himself for too many failures.
I made it home and did a little jig on the front porch just to make noise and urinated into the tall grass of my front lawn. Maybe I was trying to scare away hobgoblins, but the walk had sobered me enough to make me understand they were all inside.
I tossed Henry aside on the porch, found the key under the welcome mat, and let myself in. I stripped off my shirt and headed right for the velour sofa where I collapsed in a heap. I scraped my shoes off with minimal effort and in getting comfortable, dug the hammer of the gun into my back.
Somehow I knew I was on my way to a bad dream. Too much inside for the booze to handle or maybe drinking only lubricated the wound channels. I just knew that I started to drift into familiar scenes and patterns of horror. I was traveling a road, much as ever, seeing multitudes of walking cadavers. Men with guns and men on horseback shouted and fired random shots at us. Some were hit and dropped in their tracks. I saw limbs and heads explode in red mist. People kept walking despite their wounds. I wept as I traveled among children holding their guts in their hands. Mothers and babies lying beside the road. The babies dead or crying for their mother’s warm flesh. Sometimes the mothers’ dresses were hiked up to their thighs. I passed alongside a skinny boy in a black uniform raping a woman. His white horse flashed its teeth at me, and I could see a machine pistol tied to the saddle’s pommel, but I was afraid to reach for it. Meanwhile, the boy continued thrusting into the woman as if he knew I did not dare to interfere. The woman looked up at me as I attempted to walk past. She seemed embarrassed. Her exposed backside and pelvis quivered from the rocking action; her heavy breasts swayed from side to side. The boy’s trousers were bunched around his knees. A lock of white-blonde hair fell across her eyes: Ingrid. I passed on, unable to stop it or too afraid to interfere. The horses pranced among the crowd; the men would club the heads of anyone within reach—old men, children—it made no difference.
At one point the dream returned to its pattern: the walkers, mostly those who survived the savagery were walking uphill. It was the dreaded revelation at the top of the hill, a place of horror I knew was coming, but I could not stop myself from going on nor could I turn back. There was no escape.
As usually happened as I approached the top of the hill, I felt as if I were surrendering my will, in some crucial way. This time, however, the dream did not take me to the crest of the hill. Something was different. I turned back and ran through the crowds of people, oblivious of the uniformed men shouting at me, and with an agility I had never known in life, I ducked under their rifle butts. I even pulled several off their horses and stopped long enough to kick one in the head until he lay there, dead or unconscious. I had a mission. In my dream I had to get back to the woman being raped, and as I made my way back to the spot where they had been, I found them. He had finished with her and was drawing out a sidearm, a .45, to finish her off.
I charged him and knocked him backwards to the earth. I drove my fist time and time again into his face. Rights, lefts, roundhouses, hooks—everything. I cracked bones in his jaw. Felt the cartilage of his nose splinter. My assault was so frenzied that I heard the bone of his skull crack and split open like a melon. Finally, I was sated. My fists two bloody, raw stumps. I grabbed him by the collar and began dragging him backward toward the river. I saw the water of the river was-n’t deep enough to get him into the current, so I walked him out into the water’s edge until he began to float. The water was up to my chest, and the current’s tug was beginning to pull at my legs. I turned around stiffly the way you do in deep water and as the corpse drifted past me, I could see he was alive. He winked at me going past. Lindell. He’s alive.
Then, without anything in the house being different, without a sound to alert me to any change. I knew as I lay sprawled on my face inside my dream that he was inside the house. I could feel him there in the dark. My good eye snapped open, but I dared not make a sudden move unless he too could feel the infinitesimal difference in the way that one senses another’s body. The very air in the room was different, as if in having to flow around another body changed the current. I awoke from my dream, and reached my hand—slowly, slowly—from my side to the floor and felt the gun with my fingers. I flicked the safety. Adrenalin was pumping through me in waves. Every muscle in my body stirred to act, and I could feel the neck hairs standing up.
Seconds passed . . .
I was not alone.
He must have gone upstairs to wait for me in the bedroom. Ever since hearing me flop on the couch, he had been working his way down the stairs. Knowing the house to be old, he must have moved with the patience he alone possessed, careful not to give away by the merest groan of old floorboards the terrible surprise of himself. He would want me to see him, to know that he was going to kill me. I waited for him to move again, not sure how far that first sound had been. I fought my quickening body and by an act of will stilled it to silence. In every move, I had been the novice; he the teacher. He had played with me the way a cat plays with a mouse, tortures it before killing it. He watched me squirm in prison while he tormented me with his voice and knowledge. And when I failed to react interestingly enough to his sadistic game, a little swat from one of his paws would send me into some response that, like a maggot, he could feast upon and savor.
The next noise was about ten feet off and directly behind me. I waited. Another twenty minutes passed before I heard the next sound: a floorboard his step miscalculated, but it was barely a sound indistinguishable from the house settling at night. My eyelid itched and I was afraid I was going to give it away too soon. I remembered how he withstood the brutal beating in the Ritz-Carlton. Fearless like those berserk Norse warriors in battle.
Be like him, I commanded myself. Be dead.
My blood pulsed in my veins, and I had a terrible microsecond of panic. Maybe he was not where I thought. Maybe I would miss him.
I stilled myself for the next sound. My life depended on it. If it were no more than the rush of air impelled by his body moving forward, I knew I would pick it up. This time, he had underestimated me. Heard me come rolling in drunk, pissing off the porch, a hopeless stumblebum ripe for the slaughter. He must be savoring every moment as he listened in the dark to my boozy yawps and snores. His mind so vastly unlike the ordinary human being’s that he could content himself with those images of terror and violence he created. I was not even a challenge. My own death would change nothing, I knew. Booth could not care less that he added one more victim to the heap as long as he got what he wanted.
The next sound took fifteen minutes. It was just above my head. I expelled my breath in a long sigh as if my drunken sleep were taken down a notch deeper. I released the tension of my gun hand just enough to keep my hand from cramping. I had the move calculated in my head. I knew the arc of the swing. I wanted one more sound, a last bearing.
It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Something in the dark had moved by my feet.
Oh Jesus Shit Fuck. Where was he? I had two targets in my head and not more than seconds to decide, if he were inching toward me at the rate I had calculated between sounds. Now! I heard myself think, He’s going to make his move—Now! Do it!
Tensed, still prone on my face, I whipped the gun off the floor and fired behind my head where I expected him to be. Three shots in a straight line: head, heart, stomach.
The muzzle explosions told him right where my hands should be. I heard a whispery movement from the other end of the couch and then felt
a displacement of air next to my head. The numbing shock that went through me began at my arms and tore through me so fast that I thought, irrationally, that I had been hit with a live transmission wire. By the time I recovered my senses, another lightning bolt hit me—this time, I thought my spine had been severed.
A baseball bat.
He had my aluminum softball bat from a closet upstairs. I nearly passed out from the pain. I tried pulling the trigger on the gun but there was no longer a gun in my hands; it had been knocked loose from my hands with the first blow and I never felt it.
Got to move or die . . .
I was beyond thought after that. It was just animal instinct. Instead of scrambling away from the pain, however, I threw myself in the direction the blows had come from. That probably saved my life. The next swing put the meat end of the bat at an angle where my head had been a second before. Lindell wasn’t going for a KO with plans to revive me for a night of torture. He was going to kill me and be done with it. By now, I was in a crouch position too close for leverage for a killing swing.
He must have figured that and taken a measure because I heard his feet shuffle. I had my feet under me well enough to spring toward the noise, and using my fist like a bowsprit, I connected with a solid form. He grunted with surprise. That gave me all the incentive I needed. I swung my left arm at him and clutched his clothing. The bat came down again—on my shoulder—but not hard enough to break my grip on his clothing. I had him measured now and I sent an overhand right into what I hoped was his face. I missed, grazed his head, and he wrenched free. My arms and hands were still too numb to be effective.
I heard him panting some yards away. It was black in the room, not enough light for either of us to see.
“Haftmann,” he whispered from somewhere by the wall, “I’m going to beat your brains to pulp.”
I thought of trying to find the gun on the floor behind me, but I gave that up as useless. I heard him laughing. “Your luck is ended.”
Then somewhere else, a corner by the wall. Moving around, speaking softly in that hypnotic voice, calmly. “Over here, Haftmann. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to dismember you into a dozen pieces.”
Over there now.
“ . . . tiny little chunks. I may even serve you up. A rotisserie of Haftmann morsels. Invite your neighbors.
Reversing his direction, trying to get behind me now.
The only sound in the room was my labored breathing.
Something stabbed me in the ribs. I swing my fists and connected with nothing but air. I could hear the sound of my own drops of sweat hitting the floor. Slick as an eel, soaked in nightsweats.
“I’m going to kill you, make you pay for Annaliese.”
“A man once said that it ain’t bragging if you back it up. Can you back it up, Haftmann? I think not.”
“You’re going to die for what you do to her, her mother, all those people,” I said into the dark, turning every which way to catch a sound. He kept moving on silent feet. I couldn’t place him.
Then, he whispered, “That poke you felt? You’ll be in twilight sleep very soon. Know what that is, Haftmann? A caudal block. To ease the pain of childbirth. A little morphine and scopolamine. I nearly drowned in that river. Fortunately, I didn’t lose my trusty syringe kit in my pocket. You’re in pain now. That should speed things up nicely. Soon you’ll find it hard to concentrate—”
“I’ll kill you first,” I said.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” His voice . . . so lulling.
I lunged toward his voice but slammed into a table and went down hard.
I heard Lindell laughing from a corner of the room. “Missed me.”
I was dizzy and panic was surging inside with every breath. The blackness was the worst. I started to shake—first my hands and then my legs.
“Did you enjoy Gallatine, Haftmann? Too bad I didn’t get a video of it.”
He seemed far away. Near the staircase. “You’ll be dead on your feet in a moment. Maybe I’ll take my time with you . . . ”
The drug was a rivulet inside me taking away all my senses.
He took me from behind. The bat struck me over my right ear and slammed into my shoulder. My knees buckled and I went down.
Fuck this, too much pain. I heard the bat thunk into the floor all around my head as he tried to measure me lying there. Instead of crippling me with body blows, he made the only mistake he ever made. The third blow landed a hair’s width from my forehead and cracked the floorboard.
I stuck my hand out and held the bat in place with a deathgrip.
He put all his might into dislodging it. His foot flailed and caught me in the neck and stomach, but he didn’t have enough force for fear of surrendering the bat to the enemy. I counted the moment between blows and then jerked myself from the floor with the bat as a pivot and swung my body directly into him. We both went down, and he scrambled out of my grasp once more. This time I didn’t let him slip away; our momentum sent us reeling into the next room and into the wall. He clawed and grunted and spittle flecked my face. But I had him firmly—both fists clutched into the fabric of his clothing under his neck. This time I knew from the feel of the wall and the banging rattle of the front door in the door frame. Nothing was square or plumb. He dug frantically, wildly for my eyes.
Locked together like furious lovers, Lindell and I waltzed and smashed our way from the living room into the front room.
I smashed his hard, wiry body into the wall, gaining a little momentum but slipping each instant into the drug-induced torpor of twilight sleep. Once more: we hit door, wall, and—hoping I had the distance—I flung him with the last of my fading strength right where the window should be.
The force carried us both through it. Wood and glass splintered, exploded. I had thrust him into it back first, and I found myself still gripping him hard. He writhed and churned beneath me on the porch. There was enough light for me to see the outline of his shape. I took my hands from his shirt front and pushed them over his face and let my thumbs find his eyes. I felt the hollows and then the eyeballs and dug my thumbs in as hard as I could. My body had him pinned, so all he could do was postpone the inevitable. I used my fingers to squeeze the sides of his head still and dug harder into him. I felt him slip a little, but his squirming and flopping was now useless; his mouth opened for air, and I could see that his bridgework had come loose in the struggle. He was losing strength fast in the effort to throw me off.
I took a deep breath and then I gouged out both of his eyes at the same time. The scream was worse than anything I had ever heard, but I kept digging until there was jelly, and then there was not even that. After some minutes, he stopped twitching and then I got off him.
The next part’s a little fuzzy, and I have had to reconstruct what happened by talking to some people, so I’m not one-hundred percent certain of things at this point. I do remember coming to, struggling to walk back inside, and seeming to take an hour to do it. I remembered thinking I ought to call the police. Then I remember not being able to find the phone.
I sat on the sofa and nodded off, as the drug ceased roller-coastering through my body and just surged with enough force to make me aware of what had happened before I succumbed to the next surge. It was like being hit on the head at intervals by someone with a rubber mallet. I couldn’t think or focus. The ripsawing pain in my arms distracted me from any coherent thought longer than three seconds. I vomited between my knees.
I must have sat there like that until daylight illuminated everything and finally broke through the nausea and pain. I was suddenly aware of a cacophony of starlings and grackles outside. I have never greeted a dawn like that before or since.
I stumbled and groped around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors at random, but I don’t remember doing it. The next thing I know, there are sirens and flashing lights all over the yard. A truck with Mexicans en route to pick grapes at the wineries drove past my house and saw a body lying on my porch. Our local cops aren’
t much, but that was sufficient cause and effect to send Code 11 or a DBF (Dead Body Found).
I heard crunching of broken glass, and then I turned to confront a deputy sighting on my midsection with a Magnum. The deputy was staring at me. I didn’t realize how badly I must have looked. Both forearms were fractured, my collarbone broken, and my right ear was pulped to a mass of swelling at the side of my head like a crusted cauliflower ear. I was trailing blood everywhere from a slice along my left leg that would take forty-six stitches to close.
As I said, I don’t recall much of any of this, but I met the deputy who held the gun on me at my hearing some weeks afterward, and he said that I told him I was looking around for bird seed.
“The sparrows need to be fed,” he claims I said.
Frankly, I don’t know what I said. I know that for the first time since Micah left me I stopped dreaming.
Epilogue
I don’t live in Ohio now. It’s been a couple years since I left. I used the money from selling my house to take me out of there. I followed the lakeshore and wound up in a flophouse off Woodward in Detroit. Then I stayed a few months in Eastpointe, better digs, but not doing much of anything, nor finding substantial work.
One afternoon in the middle of winter, I was sitting in a Greek restaurant on Gratiot Avenue. There was a giant decorative torch in front of the place. I drank coffee and read the paper’s classifieds; something drew my eye to the horoscope column, so I read these and found the one for my birth month. It said that the wolf moon augured well for me. I should break with the past and start over.