Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  With that he closed his eyes and his face took on a tortured expression. I thought that perhaps he was having a seizure or ‘episode,’ as I heard the doctors call the post-traumatic stress reactions of returned soldiers, but too late I understood that what I saw was bliss.

  His pricks twitched, and his ejaculate spurted the full ten feet up onto the roadway. Great dollops of it landed near my boots, but more of it sloshed into a tin bucket by the fishing rod. It was his bait bucket, the same one he’d taken his knife from that first day I’d met him by the camper. A hollow scrabbling came from inside the bucket.

  I backed away, stopping only to snatch up the gaffing hook. The bucket was shaking and jumping now. Water foamed over the sides. It toppled and three fish heads came out, mouths gasping. Behind them they dragged their flensed spines, white ribs scratching against the concrete. Half a crab followed, cut cleanly along its center, one stalked eye bobbing and weaving as it dragged itself sideways towards the road center.

  I smashed them all apart with the gaffing hook. When I was done, Sutter was still down there, waiting. “You believe me now? Or do you think I just offed some whore down here, her legs knotted tight at the ankles and her mouth shut with electrical tape? Say, like that bitch Darlene.”

  I said I hadn’t much considered that.

  He told me I should, and he laughed some more. I figured I’d leave him there and go have a harder look for that Colt of mine when something he said stopped me cold.

  “Don’t you want to live forever?”

  There he was, hunched over and streaming with saltwater, motioning to the twin bulbs of his pricks as they yearned upwards toward the empty space in the sky where in a few months the two jagged halves of the old Skyway Bridge were destined to intertwine their cable, concrete and steel. “Don’t you want to fucking live forever, boy?”

  “You’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “Am I? Even if you think your own future isn’t worth pissing on, you telling me you’ve never wanted to bring someone back from the dead? You telling me you’ve never had that wish? You’ve never watched someone die and wished, really wished, that you could bring them back?”

  Near my boot one of the fish heads was still alive, its mouth opening and closing, gill slits clenching and unclenching. I kicked it off the edge of the roadway and into the sea.

  * * *

  A place can sneak up on you. One day it’s not a pit-stop any longer, it’s a home. One day you realize you’ve got a job, a mailing address, and keep your whiskey in a glass cabinet rather than on the bedside table.

  Yeah, things sneak up on you, time most of all.

  In 1980, I was living in a shack on Sunset Beach when the freighter Summit Venture plowed into the old Skyway Bridge during a storm, sending six cars, a truck and a Greyhound bus plummeting into Tampa Bay.

  In ’86, I moved into a rental out the back of a Crabby Bill’s in St. Pete. That year I stood on the new Skyway Bridge and watched Challenger climb heavenward on rocket fuel and the cheers of us proud Floridians. And I stood there on the bridge as those cheers turned to tears and the traffic stalled and people climbed from their cars to watch our champions return to earth as ash.

  In 1993, I called in sick at my job and drove twenty minutes to watch the old Skyway be demolished. Explosive charges pulverized the concrete pylons into dust so fine I could taste it through my open car window. I remember it being a beautiful, sunny day.

  At times I stare out at the Gulf and think about Sutter. For all his bluster he didn’t live past that night, let alone forever. I left him hard up—to pen a crude pun—in the humid Florida night. Come morning two beachcombers found his corpse washed to shore near Fort De Soto. No one’s sure how he died. His body was torn up pretty bad. There are a lot of hungry critters in Tampa Bay and the inter-coastal waterways.

  As for Darlene, sweet Darlene, what of her? You ask me, Darlene’s still out there. See, lately someone’s been following me. I don’t know for certain who it is, but I have a reasonable suspicion, as the lawyers say.

  So, I’ve taken to watching my street from the living room easy chair, the Colt Python laid in my lap. That’s what a scared man does. Sits and waits and watches. Supposedly, those talents also come naturally to an old man, probably because being old and being scared are generously thought of as being a sad fucker’s two-for-one deal. Supposedly. At least my hands don’t shake much for an old codger’s. I’m a keener shot than I was at twenty-one—just ask many a floating beer can in the swamplands—and I’ve learned better than to stash my gun under a pillow.

  My residence backs onto a marshy culvert thick with cattails, and I’ve got an eye cocked out that way too. At night you can hear the cattails whispering and the water burbling over the mortared joints of the culvert. In Tampa Bay it never gets cold enough that you need to shut your windows to the breeze and the salt air.

  Straying too far from water makes my back ache and my skin crack, so Tampa’s hooked me good for now. Toss a coin in my hat and bleed me some sympathy, sure, sure.

  Point is, I’m never far from the blue Floridian ocean. Darlene, the lovely lass, she won’t have to travel far to find me. Sharks, gators—anything with teeth, a tail and a hunger for meat finds its way to Florida in the end.

  I can guess at, too, what’s finally drawn her to me. No one wants to suffer, but it is even truer to say that no one wants to suffer alone. You take what you can get. Whatever passes for love, whatever substitute is on offer. That’s what Darlene had said, the young girl with the old, old eyes.

  I dare say, though, that it won’t be that skinny girl—won’t be a girl at all—who comes a-knocking on my window pane in the dead of night. Thirty years of Sutter’s gift percolating through her will have put paid to that. Nothing in this life comes without a price.

  Strange to say, but what I’m most scared of is that she’ll want to talk. She knows how Sutter died, I reckon. She knows what he offered me, too, I reckon.

  Maybe she thinks her and I are bound by some unholy pact, by a commingling of circumstance and blood. Whatever she accuses me of, though, I intend on denying. There’ll be no dark confessions in my living room tonight, or any other night. Nothing to be done now but wait, and I’m better than most men at that.

  Durand Sheng Welsh has worked as a police officer in Sydney, Australia, for the past 14 years. He is currently based at the Coroner’s Court, just above the morgue. Down the hall from his office is a long flight of stairs that bottoms out at a doorway that reads: CAUTION NECROPSY AREA. One day he’s going to open it.

  Welsh is a graduate of Clarion 2008 San Diego, and the winner of the Apex 2007 Halloween competition. He has published stories in several venues, including Phantom Drift 4, Crossed Genres and the anthology Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. He is currently working on a grimdark SciFi/Crime novel.

  Thom Campbell stood at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee in his hand, watching his twelve-year-old daughter, Megan, slip into the shed in the backyard.

  From the backward glance she gave over her shoulder, it almost looked like she was trying to get away with something.

  Or, maybe, she’d just heard a noise.

  Christ, who knew anymore?

  He sure didn’t.

  For the last two years, the girl had been a complete mystery to him. Some days he was so fed up he was ready to give up. Let her live in the house until she was eighteen, then they’d toss her ass out and forget about her. Other days, when he hated himself for thinking some of the mean things he thought about his oldest child, he just wanted to crawl into a bottle and pickle himself.

  It had gotten that bad.

  But most days he was able to tough it out. Yeah, she was a mess, but she was his mess, and he would love her, and he would deal with her shit because he loved her. No matter what, he loved her.

  Still, loving the girl was hard.

  It was a Saturday morning in early April and he was doing the taxes. Thom worked as a par
amedic for the Austin Fire Department, twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off. He’d worked the day before, and after what his Fitbit claimed was a meager three hours and forty-two minutes of sleep, he’d dragged himself to the dining room table, fired up the computer and started plugging away at the old Turbo Tax, grumbling at paying taxes for a government that he felt was increasingly full of shit.

  He’d been at it for an hour.

  Sometime during that hour Megan had come downstairs, surprisingly dressed in something other than her pajamas, and asked him what he’d done with her phone.

  “It’s your phone,” he’d said. He and his wife Sarah were always walking on eggshells around Megan, bracing themselves for the next screaming fit, but some days his patience was too thin for that and he’d let the passive-aggressive part of his personality take over. “Why would I know where your phone is?”

  “I’m just asking. You don’t have to be so mean.”

  “Baby, I’m not being mean. It’s your phone. That means it’s your responsibility. I don’t know what you did with it.”

  “You hid it, didn’t you?”

  “What? No.”

  “You did! Why are you so mean to me?”

  “Mean? How am I mean? Baby, I’m just sitting here trying to do the taxes.”

  “Great. Nice. You don’t care.”

  “About your phone? No, I don’t care. It’s your phone. It’s wherever you left it last. Now come on, I’m trying to do the taxes.”

  “You don’t care!”

  “Please, baby. I’m really—”

  “Stop!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop it! Just stop it. You don’t care.”

  Just like that. Zero to fucking freak-out in no time flat.

  “You don’t care!” Megan said. She clapped her hands over her ears and ran to the living room couch where she crawled up into a ball and screamed, over and over again, “You don’t care! You don’t care!”

  If he tried to say something, he’d be met with shrieking. “Stop it! Stop!”

  It was like that almost every day now.

  The freak-outs.

  Sarah was no better at it than he was. She and Megan would spend hours yelling at each other, Sarah pleading with her to make sense. He couldn’t even count the times he’d watched Sarah, sitting on the floor, leaning against Megan’s door, begging her to say something. Just talk to me, baby.

  Sarah tried. She really did.

  When Thom would get into it with Megan, Sarah would intervene. She’d scream at Thom, actually bark herself hoarse. “What are you doing? You can’t yell at her like that.”

  “She’s fucking insane, Sarah. What do you want me to do?”

  “She’s just twelve, Thom. Can’t you see that? She’s our little girl.”

  But the long and short of it was that Megan was out of control.

  He and Sarah were both at the end of their rope, and they knew it. Neither one of them had any idea how to move forward. He felt helpless and angry and hopeless and bitter beyond belief. The whole family was hurting. They were in real danger of tearing themselves apart, and there was no relief in sight.

  They’d been to therapy. They’d been to shrinks. They’d had her tested again and again. The first doctor, the only one they’d even thought might be credible, told them it was Oppositional Defiance Disorder coupled with severe depression.

  She wouldn’t prescribe medication though, and she didn’t take their insurance.

  So they found someone closer and in network.

  No help there. ADHD this time. New medication, but all it did was make Megan so constipated she’d taken to spending hours in the bathroom behind a locked door, crying her eyes out.

  And it had been that way through eight different shrinks. A different opinion every time but no answers. The latest jackass wanted her tested for freaking autism, for God’s sake.

  Thom put his coffee cup down on the table. A little harder than he’d meant to.

  He wanted to punch something.

  He wanted to grab the back of a chair and twist until it broke apart in his hands.

  Instead, he took a couple of deep breaths and refocused on the shed in the backyard. Megan had left the door open, just a little. What in the hell was she doing out there?

  The shed was one of his projects, something he’d been meaning to work on since they bought the house three years earlier. The thing was starting to look a little ratty, but it was still in okay shape. They kept the Halloween and Christmas decorations out there in large plastic tubs. He had plans, though, to turn it into a woodworking shop. He had plans to fix the back patio awning too, and he thought the shed would be the perfect place to put a band saw and a hobbyhorse.

  Then Megan came out of the shed and closed the door behind her.

  Her tears were gone.

  She wasn’t screaming, for once.

  She was actually smiling.

  She crossed the yard and came in through the backdoor. She saw him standing there in his jeans and t-shirt and gave a little wave. “Hey, Dad,” she said. She didn’t stop to talk, though. “Love you,” she said and walked up the stairs to her room.

  All Thom could do was watch her go.

  * * *

  She’d looked so pleased with herself.

  These days, he’d come to distrust anything she did or said that wasn’t done while screaming, and so he waited for her to close her bedroom door and then went out to the shed to take a look.

  Nothing too terribly out of place.

  She’d taken the Halloween decorations and pushed them into neat stacks on the right side of the shed. On the left she’d arranged the Christmas decorations. Her bedroom always looked like a trailer park after a tornado, but the rest of the things in Megan’s life always had to have a home. Everything had to be in its place, so it didn’t surprise him that she’d come out here and put some order to the mess.

  It didn’t even surprise him that she’d taken some pains to wipe down and clean up the workbench he’d made.

  She’d actually done a really good job.

  She couldn’t pick up laundry to save her life, but if it was something she set her mind to, she made damn sure it got done.

  And done well.

  Laser focus, Sarah called it.

  Like the workbench.

  Spotless.

  So too were the insides of the cabinets above the bench. He closed the cabinet door and frowned.

  What was she up to?

  * * *

  As the distance between he and Megan had grown over the last two years, Thom had become more and more attached to their Jack Russell terrier, Bartleby. He never thought he’d like a little dog this much, but Bartleby stayed by his side constantly. He couldn’t turn around without nearly tripping over the thing. He couldn’t nap on the couch without the dog climbing up beside him to snuggle, whining whenever he stopped with the belly rubs.

  He’d fallen in love with Bartleby.

  In the back of his mind he knew what he was doing.

  It had been like this with Megan, back when she was little. She’d snuggle with him, laugh with him, fill the house with giggles.

  But as her attitude had turned poisonous, he had transferred some of that affection for Megan to the dog. It was pathetic and wrong and horrible on all kinds of levels, and he knew that.

  He couldn’t help it, though.

  * * *

  That Monday, while Megan was at school and their youngest, Jacob, was inside watching cartoons—he was four—Thom took Bartleby out back to throw a tennis ball around. One wild throw ended up with the ball under the shed. Bartleby tried to get it, but too many treats had made him fat and he couldn’t get all the way under. Thom pushed the dog out of the way and glanced beneath the shed.

  “What the hell is that?” he said aloud.

  It looked like…bed sheets.

  Megan’s bed sheets.

  He pulled them out. They were cream colored, with princesses all over
them.

  Definitely Megan’s.

  And they were wet.

  He sniffed the sheets. It was pee.

  What the hell? She’d wet her bed. She’d done that a lot when she was little, but she was twelve now.

  And why in the hell would she bury them under the shed?

  * * *

  That afternoon after Sarah got home from work, the two of them confronted Megan with his discovery.

  They sort of pussyfooted around the accusation, but once it was out, he could feel Sarah stiffen beside him.

  They waited for the screaming.

  To his surprise, she just shrugged. “Bartleby peed on my sheets,” she said.

  “What?” Thom asked.

  “I don’t know. I went to shower, and when I came back there was dog pee on my bed.”

  “But he was in his crate when I went downstairs,” Thom said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Jacob let him out.”

  “And then put him back in?”

  “I guess.”

  Thom and Sarah both heard the pitch of Megan’s voice change.

  They’d been trained, after two years of this, to know when to back off.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Sarah said. “Do you want me to wash your sheets for you?”

  “No way. They’ve got dog pee on them. Just throw them away.”

  “Sheets are expensive,” Thom said. “That’s money we don’t need to be throwing away.”

  “It’s not my problem,” Megan said. She made a move to push her way past them. Thom, for a moment, thought of holding her back, but they’d been down that road before. Megan was too big now to control physically without a fight. The last time he’d tried it had gotten so ugly a neighbor had called the cops. The cops had taken one look at Megan’s ranting and raving and they’d responded by simply giving Thom a pat on the back and wishing him luck.

  But the point was made: he could no longer physically control his daughter without putting himself in serious legal trouble.