Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  The noise had been a crunching sound.

  Kyle was holding my crucifix and chewing on the head of Jesus.

  "It's hot down here in hell, Jimmy," he said. "Wanna see?"

  His voice echoed off and he melted. His skin rippled, swam, dripped off, and gave way to a taller form, dark, a silhouette that gained shape and texture as if being brought into focus by some unseen artist of the grave.

  It was the woman from the Honda.

  Knees apart, she sat on the chair and rubbed searching hands up and along her bare thighs. She squeezed at her breasts. She ran a sneaky finger against the triangle shape her shorts made between her legs, and worked her face to a coy, questioning pout.

  "Wanna go for a ride, Jimmy?" she said. "In my car?"

  Her face broiled and changed. Wounds ripped open on her forehead and burst with wriggling worms. Bugs jumped out of her ears. Her teeth broke off and she spit them to the floor. Both of her eyes exploded and smoked.

  "Give me back my blood," she rasped.

  I snapped awake with a holler caught up in my throat. I clenched my teeth and mashed my lips with my hand to lasso the scream. I darted anxious eyes across the darkened room to relearn the old familiar shapes which now seemed menacing and strange.

  Everything was ringing.

  I breathed heavily and let the dream's aftermath settle into the reality of my heartbeat, the soft sounds of night outside of the window, the ticking of my clock. Gradually the surrounding gloom loosened, worked itself off, and waned to the pale intrusion of a low moon.

  I swallowed dryly. I tried to cry and could not. I breathed through my nose, stared ahead, and wondered how long these ghosts would own the shadows in my darkened corner of the world.

  Possibly a lifetime, depending on whether or not the construction men found something in the dirt tomorrow.

  I closed my eyes and fell asleep wondering which of the scenarios was ultimately worse.

  11.

  I heard the sounds of chainsaws the minute I hit the bottom of the gully and shuffled across the rusted sewer pipe.

  The alarm had blasted into a cheap, tinny rendition of Rod Stewart bitching to Maggie that he couldn't have tried any more, and I jumped up to dial down the volume. Mom's room was a door down past the den. I crept over to my chair and put on the same clothes I had worn to the police station the night before.

  Mom's door was closed and there was nothing stirring around in there that I could hear. I padded past to the kitchen and out to the patio. I half expected Lucy to be waiting for me out there, cold in the crisp morning air, wet with dew, tail shaking so violently it moved her whole back end. Nothing but the yellow bowl still pushed to the side almost off the edge of the concrete. She was gone, so I put my hands in my pockets, pushed forward, and let the high grass of the woods take me in.

  Going at my leisure made me realize how difficult the trip really was, and I had to be careful going down the first incline. At one point I misjudged the angle of the drop and slid about five feet, but I recovered without going ass over tea kettle. Once at bottom, I paused a moment to search for Kyle's blood in the general area that I'd head-butted him, and then I heard the machines.

  It sounded like chainsaws, but there were other sounds too, like big engines. Come to think of it, I could feel the ground rumbling as well, and I tried to discern exactly how it made me feel. I had gotten the start time wrong and woken up too late. On the one hand, I had missed their initial progress, and this was bad. They could have found the woman already and called in the boys in blue for an assessment. On the other hand, those sounds on top of the rumbling engines were definitely chainsaws, and if they were cutting down trees they were not worrying about what was lurking down in the rabbit holes, so to speak. On the other, other hand, I wondered if they had gotten to the oak yet and if anyone had noticed the fresh gash. I started up the other side of the gorge with almost the same urgency that I felt one short day before.

  I almost stumbled right into them because they had already changed the configuration of the woods. The glen that had contained the footer and the rooted path had been cleared of all machinery and foliage both in front going up to the original site and about forty feet back. I took a position behind a cluster of trees on that far side, and peeked from underneath the hood of a long, low-hanging branch of a maple endowed with a wealth of fluttering leaves.

  Everything looked bald, and I was relatively high up. When I had raced after Kyle into the woods to protect Lucy, I had not realized how steep the initial climb out of the clearing had been. Now with so many of the trees gone from the original rear end of the grove, I was even with the top of the rooted path across the way. It was now merely a short hill that looked almost no different from the rise naturally cut into the ground to the left of it. The trees in that patch of earth had already been removed, and you could see the jobsite clear to the overpass. The oak was gone. So were the construction trailer, the fencing, the dozers, the dumpsters, and the scatter of old tools for the most part. What stood up there now was a highly organized line of flatbeds seemingly putting the finishing touches on removing all traces left by the failed workers of the past. Men with hard hats moved and snaked all around in pockets of activity, and the loudest sounds came from the three dull-yellow, pitted tree-shredding machines parked in a line at Reed Road's dirt road entrance that we had originally come through on our bikes yesterday.

  And the footer? I briefly had to search for its location with the surroundings altered so, but after a couple of seconds I saw it. It sat smack in the middle of the larger, tilled crater, rooted path and rise on the far side, little green flags all around the perimeter (I was close enough to one of the flag-stakes to reach down and steal it if I wanted to). What was so recently a hole now had a slightly darker face than the rest of the soil around it. Otherwise, it was uniform with the broader surface, and looked like a huge empty dish. They had filled in the dead woman's grave the rest of the way.

  I was just starting to wonder what purpose the crater would serve, and what part the hole within the hole might play, when I saw the dump trucks, big ones, sounding their beepers that warned they were coming in reverse and backing up to the ledge of dirt between the upper site and the lower one. The gargantuan steel tubs started rising on their front hydraulics, and the new dirt started cascading out from under the heavy back tailgates pushed out and squeaking on their mammoth hinges.

  They were filling in the crater, evening the ground from the rise, probably all the way to the green flags at my feet. The overpass ramp would now have a huge landing pad. There would be no more drilling or digging into the dead one's resting place.

  I walked home with mixed feelings.

  My pain was to be of the longer, slower, more internal type. Option number two.

  When I came back through the kitchen door Mother was slicing up fruit for breakfast on a cutting board by the sink. We looked at each other expressionlessly and I went back to my room to change into fresher clothes.

  12.

  Feared. Shunned. Wall-shadow. Forgotten. What else is there to say about my social existence through the balance of my career in Westville's fine institutions of learning? It was a rough ride from the day I entered eighth grade to the moment I dropped out of high school in the middle of my junior year, but I do not think it is appropriate in this kind of communication to dredge up those details. First, it is all pretty obvious (with the small exception of whether or not some girl with a wild side actually got close enough for me to sniff during those difficult years, and the answer would be, not unless they had to) and second there is really no point. Does one really, finally care if a boy-murderer got a passing grade on his critical analysis of the structural issues in The Catcher in the Rye, or whether or not it was fair, or funny, or sad that he couldn't get laid?

  I also do not wish to take up too much valuable time retelling all the little facts about the trial that one could look up in the back issues of newspapers. It would be more than easy to
discover that Mom asked for and got a speedy trial for me in front of a judge, "Only the guilty ask for juries, Jimmy." It would be just as simple to find documentation proving that Mr. Skinner tried to file a civil suit to protest my verdict of innocent, and ran out of money before it really got going.

  What is not in the papers or online is a measure of how difficult it was to live in the same town with such a hateful enemy. I never quite shed the fear that I would run into Skinner or his small, plump wife on the express line at the Acme, or while sitting in the waiting room at Dr. Bransen's. That fear turned out to be a valid one, and this little thread of the tale has two halves, the first an incident that unfolded in May of 1975 just after the civil suit was dropped, and the second in the dead of winter, 1984. Here, however, I must split those two events and reveal but one now with the hope that you will patiently wait for me to unveil the other just a bit later. I know. Timelines are a bitch.

  The first Skinner sighting occurred right after one of my key visits to the dead one.

  Right around the time the man was dropping his civil suit and I was thanking God school was almost done for the year, the construction specialists had shored up the east edge of the landing area from the Route 79 overpass, done the primary and secondary pours, and gated it off with Dura Flex safety rails. By Christmas of 1976, they would finalize the new construction of Reed Road, complete with overhanging streetlight poles every two hundred feet through Scutters Woods with a merge onto West Main Street five miles down. At the end of May 1975, however, right about the time when they were putting in the white shoulder lines on that wide landing, I had a horrifying experience.

  I found her "spot."

  I had wanted to do this for months. I had recurring dreams of her exploding eyeballs, and on some level I thought showing the courage to stand right over her again might help. I also had a constant fear that they would find some reason to dig and check out what was really down in that hole within the hole after all, and I had taken regular afternoon visits to the site all that year, hanging off in the cover of the trees to make sure they did not bust out the pneumatic jackhammers and put a whooping party on the cement and dirt fortress she was lurking under. Up until May, however, I hadn't had a chance to actually walk onto the cement platform because the space was always crawling with workers. And I hadn't dared make a night-time attempt. The darkness was her playground, and the dreams were bad enough in the safety of my bedroom.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon. I walked my famous path over the sewer pipe, and when I pushed aside the leaves of my hiding tree I saw something that filled me with a sick kind of excitement. The landing was empty. There were surveyors marking off what would be the road paved through the thick part of the woods about a hundred yards away, but their backs were to me.

  I approached the guardrail, climbed over, and had a moment of déjà vu when I crossed the threshold. It was hot and windy on the platform and I gave a quick study to the ground. I walked a few paces and then I saw it. About twenty feet from the guardrail, and fifteen feet south of the front end capped off with a three-quarter round cylinder painted in black and yellow stripes like a barber pole, was a small pair of grooves cut into the concrete. I looked up to get my bearings, and though it was difficult without the old landmarks, I was pretty sure someone had marked off where they had filled in that strange hole the rest of the way, now better than twenty-five feet below surface.

  An arrow of fear went between my shoulder blades. If someone marked it, someone had a question about it. I would never be safe, not with these hidden ghosts always floating just out of the reach of my experience and authority, in boardrooms, with complicated plans spread across their drafting boards like tablets of fate.

  "Hey!" I heard. One of the workers had seen me, and he was pointing a rolled-up piece of paper in my direction.

  My face went suddenly red hot and my heart started palpitating. My hands felt like stones and I almost dropped right there on the hot top. This was not the fear of getting caught by the surveyor, now jogging toward me with his partner just behind, struggling to stick his sunglasses behind his pocket protector while on the move. This was different. The breeze came up around me in what felt like a whirlwind. At first it sounded like huge, beating wings, and then it moaned. It raced by my ears and made what could have been just an undeterminable gust like the one you would hear if you let down the back seat window of a car moving at a high rate of speed, or it could have been perceived as a couple of words.

  "My blood," I heard.

  My nose was bleeding.

  I felt the liquid run out and drip down the top of my lip, but it did not quite feel like a drip. It felt like a pull. A dot of it splatted on the concrete, right into one of the little grooves, and I crumpled.

  The voices of the men came to my ears. Then the temperature felt different, and I knew there were shadows over me blocking the sun.

  "Hey, Doug," one of the shadows said. "Here's another one."

  "C'mon, son," the other said. He helped me to my feet. I opened my eyes. They walked me over a few feet and then I ran for it.

  "Hey! You!" they were calling. I scrambled for the guardrail, crawled over it, and sprinted for home. Ghosts didn't just hide in boardrooms. I suppose I could have interpreted "Hey, Doug, here's another one" as an acknowledgment that I was just one more kid who was dared by another to sneak onto the site, but that version didn't feel right to me. "Hey, Doug, here's another one that passed out" seemed more the fit. I knew it in my bones.

  It was the first time she had spoken to me in the waking world, and she had been speaking to others before me.

  I came through the weeds, trudged up the back lawn, and looked up at the face that came into the kitchen window. I didn't really feel the pull of those shock-blue eyes anymore, and it was easy to break the glance first. I turned and sat on the edge of the concrete patio, drawing up my knees to my chin. I stared out into the woods. What was going to become of me? What would I do if it became public knowledge that you passed out if you stood directly above the burial place of the neglected dead? I bumped my lips gently against my forearm. Maybe growing up was all about the ability to handle loneliness while living with the fact that there were possible outcomes, some horrific, that you could not control.

  The doorbell rang inside.

  I jerked my head up. It was a strange sound. Since the incident I had not been afforded the opportunity to invite over many "friends," and it was rare we had a caller. I pushed up and moved to the kitchen window. There was a wash of glare on it so I went up on my toes and made a hood with my hands for my eyes to peer through. I moved over to the left a couple of inches. I could not see the whole exchange because of the corner of the hall archway, but I had most of the front doorway in view. It was Mr. Skinner. He was wearing his Sunday best, reddish-orange plaid flood pants, a collared shirt, and a tan leather jacket that went down a bit past the waist. He removed his hat and held it before him. His hands were sort of wringing it. I could not really hear what he said even with the kitchen door standing open, but I could hear that his tone was soft.

  I wondered what he could possibly want. An apology? A heart-to-heart? The civil suit had caved weeks before.

  Suddenly I saw Mom's elbow pop into view. Her hands were obviously on her hips. Her voice was also unintelligible for all but the tone, but the pitch was of a sharper nature than that to which she had responded. She closed the door, came around the corner of the living room, and went down the far hall toward the garage.

  I walked into the house and followed her steps. I walked past the refrigerator, into the utility hallway, and down the two wooden stairs. I stood outside of the screen door and peered into the garage.

  It was a woman's space, filled with gardening tools thoughtfully placed on nails in the walls, lawn furniture, a couple of mulch bags neatly piled on top of each other, and a spiffy workbench. There were soldering tools, shears, strips of lead arranged across the surface, and colored glass pieces stacked at the ri
ght front corner. Dead soldiers. The stale remains of Mommy's little stained-glass hobby that got ditched when I started having my "problems."

  She was by the utility sink. Her long fingers were making the prayer shape, her thumbs tucked under her jaw and her nose pressed between her index fingers. Her shoulders were gently shaking up and down.

  "Mom?" I said. I pushed the screen door half open and it squawked.

  She ripped her hands from her face and jerked her eyes to the wall in front of her. She was wearing faded jeans and a white cotton shirt that had blue stripes across it. It made her look both cold and fragile. There were tears on her face, but she had cut that particular faucet off to the quick. Rain on marble.

  "What is it, Jimmy?" Her face was still looking off at the wall in profile.

  "Ma?" I said. I came forward an inch or two, then stayed in the doorway. "Mom, do you love me?"

  She looked over slowly.

  "I'll always love what you could have been, Jimmy. We'll always have that, I suppose."

  I went back to my room and turned up my radio as loud as it could go.

  13.

  Before I give the violent details of my second and final run-in with Mr. Skinner nine years later, I think it is necessary to talk for a moment about Maryanne. The woman buried in her car, twenty-five feet under the concrete apron at the base of the Route 79 overpass. Maryanne McKusker.