“Goddamned chair,” he laughed, shouting, kicking it against the wall, making us all laugh again. “It always falls over when we’re drunk.”
My heart was pounding and I felt the resurgence of blood and strength through my body. My head reeled but I was also suddenly conscious of the tiny kitchen and the smoke-stained ceiling and the sputtering fan, Billie and Retha talking, leaning across the table with their faces less than a foot away, the floor hidden beneath the boot tracks and the occasional spike of a high heel and Van cracking another beer at the fridge. I grabbed mine off the table after sitting firmly back in the chair next to it.
“I got to take a piss,” I announced.
“Well I’ll show you the house, then,” Retha said, “since Van can’t get around to it. Pisser’s on the way.”
I followed Retha out of the kitchen via a narrow, dark hallway with a matted carpet quieting my footsteps. Brown paneling cruised past me as I stumbled down the hallway, resembling wood, and the rhythmic regularity somehow reminded me of the permeating patterns that had surrounded Pounder in his camouflage shorts at Digger’s house that day, at the end of a dark hallway. The paneling suddenly opened on my left into a living room. It was dark except for the glow of a TV at the other end, a solid fifteen steps away. Two girls were lying on the floor on their stomachs, holding their chins with their hands, propped on their elbows, staring at the TV. Some generic TV horror flick flickered across the screen in front of them. A young couple was having PG-13 sex, while another man stalked outside the window with a huge carving knife. The movie bounced back and forth between images of some skinny boy’s ribs rising and falling above a heaving set of breasts and through-the-eyes shots from outside the window, with the knife sometimes superimposed over the shot of the couple, like the killer kept holding the blade in front of his own face. If only evil was so obvious as it was in horror movies, not just the result of mischance and injury, or a series of disturbingly indifferent coincidences.
“Girls,” Retha said from the front of the living room. “I thought I told you not to watch this shit.”
“It’s almost over, Mom,” one of them said, turning to look back at Retha and wave.
“That’s Gettie,” she said, pointing to the one that waved. “She’s sixteen, and that’s the little one, Stephie. She’s fifteen.”
Behind them a knife flashed repeatedly on the TV screen, puncturing the skinny kid’s ribs and splashing blood repeatedly across the girls’ tits, still heaving, still in a bra.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked, feeling dirty from my fall.
“This way,” she said, pulling me further down the hallway and into the darkness until she landed against the paneling on the wall and I found myself pressed against her, unable to hold myself up. I wrapped my arms around her and leaned down to kiss her. I have no idea why. I thought she wanted me to.
“Keep moving, Hollywood,” she said, shoving me off of her toward the bathroom door next to us.
I stumbled through the doorway, closed the door immediately behind me and leaned against it as soon as I was in the bathroom. Only then did I even turn the light on. The mirror was on my left. My eyes were violently red, my hair was shoved away from my face in perpendicular directions, my skin glowed with a white sheen beneath a layer of cold sweat. I turned the water on and lifted handfuls of cold water into my face. I left the water running as I opened the medicine cabinet, looking for any pharmaceutical that might help me get my shit together. I clawed and picked through tubes of Preparation H and wart remover and multiple little packets of tiny birth control pills, one labeled Retha, one Gettie and one Stephie. All sitting there, all next to each other, all as normal as the one next to it, the perfect alchemy to make sure these girls could escape this hellhole some day.
Make sure they didn’t get knocked up as children here, molested by ignorance and mauled in the backseat of a Buick on a dirt road by first one friend, and then another, and by everyone they knew eventually.
I lurched away from the sink and the medicine cabinet, kicking the toilet seat up with my foot. Several hairs were stuck to the rim and the bottom of the seat held to the porcelain by dirty stains of dried fluids. My sense of balance drained out of me along with my urine and by the time I finished pissing I couldn’t hardly stand straight and I dropped to my knees without even zipping my pants up. My stomach tightened and my body buckled and I spewed vomit so fast that I didn’t even hit the bowl, my chunks instead spilling over the side and splashing up onto the bottom of the lifted seat. Falling the rest of the way to the floor, I rolled back against the short porcelain wall of the tub and felt a chilly breeze move up my entire body. My eyes re-focused on splatters of vomit on the under arc of the toilet bowl, echoed visually in tiny rivulets on my pants which, though buttoned, allowed the cool breeze I was feeling in through the open zipper. That breeze was the only sensation I knew that didn’t feel like it was killing me.
I didn’t mind the chill. Hell, I wanted to take off my shirt too. Flushed with heat, I couldn’t get enough of the breeze as it slowly stabilized me. After a super long moment, I turned and opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a plastic jug of Vapor All Cleaner. I had to clean up my mess. I couldn’t stand yet, though, and pulled myself up to lean back against the side of the tub on the floor, with the jug of cleaner between my legs. I slowly unscrewed the cap and leaned down close to it. My nostrils and lungs, and eventually my whole insides and my brain, suddenly burnt with a searing brilliance that was both painful and transcendent at the same time, and I felt my whole spine shake, like a fish dangling from a hook, once, but with violence, and I contorted against the tub and the floor and the puke-soaked toilet too.
I think I cried out.
The bathroom door opened and Gettie and Stephie both stuck their heads in. I tried to stand quickly, pulling myself up with the toilet and the sink, but I knocked over the Vapor All Cleaner and I reached for it. I fell without the sink and toilet to hold me up, crashing backwards between the tub and the toilet.
“Gross,” Stephie said, pushing the door wide open.
“Dad!” Gettie shouted.
But Van was already there. “Get back in the living room!” he shouted at the girls, pushing past them toward me. He stared at the vomit and the Vapor All and me crumpled on the floor. I tried to sit up but Van grabbed me by the front of my shirt and yanked me out into the hallway, slamming me against the wall.
“What do think you’re doing?” he shouted.
I gargled, but couldn’t speak.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.
He slapped me hard. My head jerked around and smacked right into the wall Van had me pinned against. I tasted blood. Billie and Retha rushed into the hallway, grabbing at Van to pull him off of me.
“Daddy, don’t hurt him!” Stephie shouted from the living room entrance.
“Van, stop!” Retha screamed. “What’s going on here?”
“My God, zip his pants up!” Billie cried.
“I think I saw his dick, Mom!” Gettie wailed.
“I’m going to kill this motherfucker!” Van snarled.
“Oh Jesus!” Retha gasped.
I dug my hand into the waist of my jeans where Besse’s pistol was miraculously still jammed and grabbed it by the handle. I shoved the barrel into Van’s face. I didn’t say a word, though. My hand shook and the barrel of the pistol bobbed up and down but never wavered out of Van’s face. My lack of control only made me more dangerous and I think Van recognized that. He stepped back. One step. Two steps. He should’ve just hit me, but I stabilized, and kept the gun pointed at his face.
“Jesus,” Retha whispered, a deadly silence falling over everybody there. She glanced nervously at the girls, waving them toward the living room. “Van, just let him go,” she whimpered. “Please.”
I pushed away from the wall, starting down the hallway backwards, extending my arm to keep the gun pointed at Van’s face. “Everybody stand back,” I shou
ted and both Retha and Billie moved to allow me past. “Get in the living room,” I told Van’s daughters. They hadn’t moved, paralyzed.
“Don’t let your knuckles drag on the ground, boy,” Van said, staring me down as I backed out the door in the kitchen, stepping toward me to make sure he was between me and his daughters. I don’t think he was scared at all anymore. I think he was itching to pound the fuck right out of me.
I was sure it was me who was scared.
I had just really messed up again.
49.
I rushed with the same frantic energy that had exploded at Van’s house all the way back home, limping drunkenly and licking my psychological wounds, shoving the pistol back into my pants with one hand and zipping them up with the other. There was likely to be trouble for me still. With the car accident, Besse, Elle, Duke, Van, Logan, I sensed that the bubble of my lies was about to implode - or, more likely - explode. I worried about Van coming after me. If the police found me for the accident, could I keep the burglary secret? Could I keep the murder hidden? What if Besse had already told the police I killed Logan? What if the troopers were waiting at my apartment for me now?
I arrived cautiously at the house and saw all the lights were off. No vehicles that looked like a police stakeout glowed on the street. I shouldn’t have even come back here, but I had one more thing to do, or maybe I didn’t know what else to do. I had to get the Buick at least.
There was a lot of evidence tied to that car.
I slipped up the driveway and opened the door to the garage – not the garage door itself, but the regular door that opened into the garage. A cloud of exhaust bellowed out at me in a violent puff and I had to back away. I could hear my car running but the smoke overwhelmed me and I had to back up more and more quickly. I coughed, lightly at first, but I was gagging before I knew it, gasping for air, heaving and trying desperately to inhale clean air. I held my hand over my face and started for the big garage door to throw it open. I stumbled over a bucket in the driveway and pawed at the wall with my arms. I scrambled toward the handle, and eventually lifted the heavy manual door, barely able to keep my eyes open between the stinging burn of the smoke and the violent spasms of coughing. I staggered backward down the driveway but so much more exhaust spilled out that I still couldn’t get fresh air. It thinned quickly, though, even as I retreated across the lawn and hid in the darkness around the corner of the house in case I began to attract any attention. I breathed deep to catch my breath again, but not for long. As soon as I determined police cars weren’t unloading onto the street, I ran back in. I had to turn the car off. I buried my face in the crook of my elbow and leapt in the front of the Buick, killing its engine, turning the ignition with the broken key still in it. Fumes still permeated the air but it was getting easier to breathe every second, with the big garage door wide open now. I could see much better now too, and I scanned the backseat of the car and then the corners of the garage, looking for Besse’s body crumpled somewhere, perhaps dead from the carbon monoxide, but didn’t see her anywhere.
Images of her, burdened under the guilt of contributing to Logan’s death through her cheating and betrayal, consumed me. I pictured her turning on the car – the same car that killed Logan – and crying herself gently to death, weeping in remorse at the knowledge of her cheating complicity. In fact, I considered restarting the car and closing the garage door myself and taking the long slow sleep to death on those fumes for not much different reasons. I was only likely to spend a lot of time in prison at this point anyway, I feared. But Besse wasn’t in the garage or the front seat or the back seat of the car.
I got out of the car and bounded up the steps into the apartment. The thick burn of fumes hung in the air there too, and I imagined Besse changing her mind about dying as she choked on the fumes and crawling inside. I might still find her unconscious somewhere – anything but dead, I prayed. I ran into the living room and then down the hall to the bedroom but she wasn’t there either. There was no sign of her. Maybe she had left halfway through the suicide attempt. Her clothes were gone from the closet. I went back in the kitchen. There was a note.
I’m leaving. No shit. I’m at the hospital with my father. Where else? Don’t follow me. Don’t count on it. I ran your car out of gas so you can’t come after me.
Stupid. So fucking stupid.
I grabbed the kitchen table in rage – I didn’t even feel it coming – and heaved it into the refrigerator and sink, chairs flying all around me. I walked back out to the garage, stepped cautiously to the car and popped the trunk before creeping around to the back of the car.
I groaned out loud, looking nauseously into the open truck where Elle lay bound and gagged and dead, asphyxiated from smoke.
I lifted her out. I had wanted to let her go. She knew about Logan; I didn’t know what to do, so I had tied her up to buy me some time. I had more Old Crow in me than common sense, all I could think of at the time was that fat little elephant Pounder in camouflage shorts and no shirt duct-taping his teacher up so she wouldn’t take him away from his depraved, ignorant, abusive, depriving parents.
I fucked up. Again. Two deaths on my hands. This was going to catch up to me before I could cover it up, before I could escape. Besse could have turned me in any time, could still do it any second if she hadn’t.
Wait till she finds out about this, I trembled with dread to think, looking at Elle’s cooling, stiffening corpse
I felt like some curse, some inclination toward evil, pulsed in my veins, some explosive, innate impulse toward violence, and nothing else, spurred all of my actions; I felt helpless and weak, enraged and imprisoned otherwise. But what was left to destroy now? And how could destroying anything save me? Had Besse talked yet? Was that my only hope?
I carried Elle inside. Though she was heavy with death, it wasn’t too hard to maneuver her since her arms and legs were still duct-taped and she was approaching rigor mortis in an embryonic huddle. I cradled her in my arms as I entered the living room and laid her down on the floor. I went back outside and closed the doors of the garage. Back in the living room I opened windows to help the lingering exhaust clear. I sank to the floor, next to Elle. A cool breeze, like from earlier, in Van’s bathroom, made it inside my body and my brain and I froze. Ice cold gravity pinned me to the floor, as empty and lifeless as the corpse next to me. I wanted that freedom from my own body but I couldn’t just make it happen. My body would not move.
I couldn’t trust anything that I wanted so badly. My every natural inclination was toward either only sex or violence – upon others, upon myself, both directly and indirectly. No intellect, no reason. Wisdom, morality, had nothing to do with that from, and for, which, I was created. I wondered if I was meant to think at all, or if it was just a coincidence that this body even had a brain.
The cordless phone was on the coffee table next to me. It rang and rang and rang until some Pavlovian compulsion made me answer it.
“Hello,” I said, my voice hoarse from my fume-burnt throat.
“Who is this?” Duke asked gruffly.
“It’s me – Buzz,” I said, focusing.
It was weird to hear my own name, as though no one had dared utter it for so long, as though it was me that had died, not Logan, as though I had no identity of my own, as though I was only what someone else needed of me at any given time.
“Buzzard?” he asked, surprised. “I can never tell which one of you boys is ever answering the phone over there, which damned one of you she’s with.”
My mind snapped alert at his words.
What other men were over here?
I mean, after all, I had already killed Logan.
“I thought you were in the hospital?” I asked, sitting up and moving again.
He never can tell? Which one she’s with?
“Nah, they let me out earlier this afternoon,” he said.
Earlier this afternoon? Why did Besse say she was going back to the hospital?
What else was
she hiding?
“You okay?” I asked, pulling the phone book out from underneath the coffee table.
“I got pneumonia, boy,” he said, without much emotion. “In the summer, no less. My lungs. But I’ll get over it.”
“Jesus. Shit,” I said, flipping to the yellow pages.
“Is Besse there?” he asked. “She left a message earlier. Didn’t sound too good. She real upset or something?”
Besse wasn’t with him? He hadn’t been in the hospital since this afternoon? I marveled at the depth of Besse’s dishonesty. She hadn’t just left the hospital when I saw her with Cole, when I crashed into that other car. She didn’t leave here to go visit her father after leaving my car running.
My eyes glazed with sadness and my vision blurred with rage as I stared at Elle’s body, her pointless death, and I thought of Logan, too, killed on the road that day. That I had been driven to do the things I did, that I hadn’t planned any of this to happen. And that there was really only one person who had betrayed me, and continued to betray me, and was responsible for all of this. And who was also the only one who knew the truth about Logan’s murder, besides me. And no one knew about Elle’s – or that there was any connection between me and her. Except Van – but Van was also guilty of a lot of crimes himself.
Besse, whether she wanted to live up to it or not, was the lynchpin in everything that had gone wrong; she had betrayed me, and driven me to the violence that was even now threatening to consume me. I would betray myself too if I did not do what I was now driven to do. It was only one more, after all, and it would wipe the slate clean for me. If she hadn’t gone to the police yet, I could still get out of this. Hide Elle’s body and find Besse and put her down before she ran her lying goddamned mouth to anybody about any of this.
And I knew just how to do it.
Seeing Crows Page 18