Little Deaths

by John F. D. Taff

  They set out for the huge field that bordered an entire side of the subdivision. In the summer and early fall, this field was dense with corn. Now, after the harvest, the field was a series of deep furrows that stretched far into the distance.

  Across the bare field lay a narrow, two-lane country feeder that was used mainly by farmers moving their equipment from field to field. It also, however, served as a shortcut for locals seeking a quick way to get to the main highway.

  They paused at the base of a gentle, three-foot rise that sloped up from the edge of the field to the road. Its entire length ran above fields on both sides, and local tow trucks made a killing pulling all sorts of vehicles out of these fields.

  Mike uncoiled the rope he carried and made a long loop around the scarecrow’s midsection. He knotted this several times and gave it a strong tug.

  “There, now all we have to do is wait.”

  * * *

  The car banked and swerved as the road humped, like a bronco attempting to unseat its rider.

  “Throw it now!”

  Scott and Eddie heaved the scarecrow out in a high arc. The white rope reflected the oncoming lights like a phantom umbilical cord.

  Silken guts crumpled without a sound against the car’s front fender. It rolled forward on the hood, its milk-jug head thumping on the windshield—loudly enough to be heard over the car’s squealing brakes.

  As the dummy rolled over the car’s top, bounced off the trunk and onto the pavement, Mike pulled the rope he held and reeled it back. It slithered over the road as the car fishtailed to a stop. Illuminated in red by the car’s brake lights, it tumbled down the small incline and out of sight.

  “You goddamned kids!” yelled the driver. He ran to the other side of the car, peering into the darkness.

  “If I find out who you kids are, I’m callin’ your parents. Hell, I’m callin’ the police!” He made one last sweep of the darkness, but could see nothing.

  “And I mean it!”

  He climbed into the car, slammed the door and squealed the tires.

  As the door closed, barely suppressed laughter exploded from the side of the road.

  “I told you guys that it’d be the best,” said Mike. He coiled up the rope, and Scott and Eddie went to where the dummy lay.

  Scott bent to grasp the limp legs, and Eddie did the same with the arms.

  “Yuck,” said Eddie. “This tux is wet and slimy. I wonder what Mrs. Becker did to it.”

  “Jeez, it feels like this thing’s gettin’ heavier,” said Mike. “Another car’s comin’.”

  * * *

  The second car, whose driver was obviously a veteran of this joke, screamed to a stop, and then honked her horn and peeled out.

  Mike grunted this time as he tried to pull the rope in. “It must be hooked on something. Scott, hop up and untangle it.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a pause as he hunted for the black shape of the dummy against the night and the asphalt road.

  “It’s not connected to nothing.”

  Mike hauled on the rope again. The dummy slid down to the field.

  “Just bring it over here so I can wind the rope.” Scott and Eddie bent to their task with some difficulty.

  It was much heavier. And it felt warm and mushy, like a bag full of oatmeal.

  They walked it bent-kneed over to Mike, busily coiling the rope for the next launch. “Take it up the hill,” Mike said. “I’m ready.”

  Scott moaned, but Eddie let his end slide to the ground, disturbed at how real it suddenly felt. “Uhh… maybe we should stop. It’s gettin’ late,” he said.

  “What’s with you tonight?”

  “I’m just gettin’ a bad feeling about this. Like…”

  “Like what? Like Mr. Becker’s gonna come back for his clothes? He’s dead! He’s not coming back for anything, not even on Halloween! So, what’s the difference whether we’re using the clothes for this or whether they’re rotting in some garbage dump?”

  “Like,” Eddie continued as if he had not heard Mike, “this might be the night when someone calls the police.”

  “Fine,” said Mike. “Just one more, and we go home. That okay with you?”

  Eddie didn’t answer. He picked up his end of the dummy, waited for Scott to do the same, then trudged up the hill.

  They waited in silence for several minutes until another car came into view. As it rounded the last turn, they began to swing the dummy. It was so heavy, though, that they released it a moment too late.

  The car blurred past in a rush of wind, and the dummy rolled across the road behind it. As it tumbled into the bushes on the other side, the rope snapped and a portion of it recoiled back to Mike.

  “Missed!” spat Scott.

  “Missed?” Mike asked. He put his face up to Eddie’s. “You missed on purpose!”

  “No,” answered Eddie. “It’s just heavy.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to go get it since you two are such weenies.”

  Mike walked across the road, kicking a crushed soda can in anger. “Did you two see where it landed? Or were you too busy playing with…”

  A dark shape rose from the brush on the other side of the road, blotting out the sky, the moonlight and the stars. It made no sound, and no features could be seen on its dark face, but Eddie knew what it was.

  Who it was.

  Mike looked up in time to see it standing on the road directly before him. He was close enough to see the tatters of the tuxedo’s tails fluttering in the evening breeze, the rips in the white cotton gloves that showed nothing underneath, the crushed top hat that sat atop something that no longer resembled a milk jug.

  One of the gloved hands lashed out, caught Mike across his jaw, rocking his head violently to the right. Across the road, the other two boys heard what sounded like celery snapping.

  Mike’s body spun in a tight circle, as if captured in a ballet move, careened down the hill on the other side of the road.

  Eddie took two steps backwards, forgetting that he, too, was very near the edge of the slope. His right foot flailed for purchase, found none. As he fell, he saw the shape stride purposefully toward Scott.

  The stars pin wheeled over his head. The air exploded from him painfully. He lay there for a moment, staring at the night sky in a daze.

  He leapt to his feet and looked around. At the top of the rise, the dark shape huddled over Scott’s body. He could hear Scott repeating over and over, “No, no, no…”

  Then he saw a sinuous flash of white in the moonlight, and he turned and ran through the field, stumbling again and again in the deep, hard ruts.

  He had seen the thing coiling a length of rope around Scott’s midsection.

  And he was horribly sure what it meant to do.

  An overturned glass of gin on the nightstand near Vivian’s head sparkled in the moonlight that spilled through the open window. A fat wedge of lime teetered on the lip of the glass. Diamond drops of gin trickled to the floor, the remains of her Halloween treat.

  But no trick… not yet…

  A faint breeze entered the room, and the smell of autumn leaves, rich with damp earth and wood and rot, floated on it. It stirred the curtains, caressed Vivian’s naked legs. She surfaced from her gin-induced sleep long enough to shiver and pull the blanket over them.

  As she reburied her head in the pillows and sank beneath the gin, a sound like wet sneakers, heavy and squishy, floated down to her.

  A hand clutched her bare shoulder. Where it touched her skin, its cold flesh was soft and disturbingly yielding. A strong odor of mildew and decay, mingled with the sharp smell of cedar, flooded her senses.

  Still drunk with sleep and gin, she jerked her head shakily from the pillow, saw the blurred shape of a top hat silhouetted against the window.

  A voice, soft and horribly wet, whispered from underneath the hat, spilled past a bloated, rotting tongue.

  Vivian, darling, wake up, said the voice, its lips smacking moistly.


  I have a new trick for you…

  I want to show you how it’s done…

  For Randy Kalin

  HERE

  The first time I saw him, he was all motion and energy, pushing over his littermates, straining to get to me, to be taken with me.

  To be with me…

  Here…

  The last time I saw him, he was lying motionless, a pool of dark water in the middle of the country road that runs in front of my house.

  Only it wasn’t the last time… not really.

  I’d gone in for a second, just a second, to pee while I let him out to do the same. I was late getting home from work, and I knew he’d be anxious to get outside. It was dark, no moon, and he was a small, black pug. But I wasn’t worried, never gave it a thought. The road, a narrow, gravel thing, heavily cratered and barely graded, was little used. I live on, if you’ll excuse the pun, a dead end. The few people who actually use it are those few who actually live on it, and there aren’t many of us. Traffic wasn’t a concern.

  I remember zipping up, my mind wandering over that day at work, what to fix for dinner, what was on TV that night. Nothing more. He’d come in, I’d cook something from my bachelor repertoire, share it with him, and we’d curl up on the couch together, pretend to watch a program or two before hitting the sack.

  Not that night…

  … not ever again.

  I left the bathroom, walked through the house to the back door. The night was cool, and I could hear the river, a dark ribbon twisting through the greater darkness, gurgle just beyond the trees and down the bank at the rear of the property, its waters faintly limned by distant houselights.

  Standing there on the little deck leading to the back door, I whistled for him, whistled the short, two-note trill I always gave when it was time for him to come in. Sometimes he’d respond; often he’d ignore it the first half-dozen times until he was ready to come on his own.

  Unconcerned, I whistled again… and again… and again. Then, in mounting annoyance—generally I was annoyed with him about something. He was that kind of dog—I called his name, then called it again, louder, sharper.

  “Hector! Here! Here!”

  Then the whistle.

  But there was no response.

  No pounding of his pads on the driveway, no jingle of the dog tag on his collar.

  And my attention, scattered across annoyance and dinner and television, suddenly focused, sharp enough to cut.

  I felt something in my gut uncoil, like a length of cold rope.

  My mouth went dry, even as something in my brain told me not to make too much of it; he was just sniffing around the neighbor’s house or nibbling a treat disgorged from the septic tank or following the scent of a passing possum or any of a thousand things that could have drawn his attention away.

  But I grabbed the flashlight and flew out the back door, down the driveway.

  Deep into spring, and the trees still wore something between buds and leaves. Otherwise, their naked limbs raked the sky. Clouds mounted in the distance, roiled darkly, ready to spill over the hills on the horizon and into the little river valley where we lived.

  It would rain tonight, heavy and hard.

  At the end of the driveway, I stopped, took a breath, and raked the cornfield across the road with my meager light. Blunted furrows piled up like waves on a black sea were all that greeted me.

  Turning left, I walked onto the gravel road, the beam of light illuminating my way.

  That’s when I saw it.

  Just a pool of water.

  Dark water…

  Sighing audibly, I continued toward it, sweeping the flashlight before me, certain that what I saw was a puddle left from the recent rain.

  Then, the glint of an eye…

  I felt a rush of emotion push out from the center of me as I saw that it wasn’t water… it was him.

  “Hector!”

  As pugs go, he was taller than most, with long, muscular limbs and a lithe, almost athletic build that, perhaps, one day, would fill out and give him the usual pug look of an ottoman with feet. But now he was only a little more than a year old… just a pup… just a pup… and his spare legs and lean body gave him the look of a gangly teenager… which, I suppose, in a way, he was. Dog years and all…

  I bent to him, put my shaking hand onto his chest.

  Solid, warm… still.

  His legs appeared whole, unbroken. They were arranged in a kind of repose, as if he had simply lain down in the road to take a nap.

  “Hector… baby… no… come here… back to daddy… come on good boy, come on… here… here!”

  His eyes were open, unblinking. They stared at me, sad and pitiful, asking me to pick him up, to hold him.

  I touched his muzzle. A trickle of blood came from his nose, oozed from the ear nearest the ground.

  A car, I guessed…

  Not knowing what else to do, I gathered him in my arms, lifted him from the road, as his eyes had asked. I had lifted him in my arms dozens, hundreds of times, and he’d been all flailing paws, squirming muscle. Now, though, he was a rag doll, limp and heavy, and it was then I knew, knew it in my practical brain if not my protesting heart.

  He was gone… dead.

  I lurched across the front yard, the flashlight still clamped in the hand that cradled his neck, throwing a beam that swept back and forth, up and down crazily over the front of the house, as if still searching for him.

  My legs gave way at the back door, and I slumped onto the steps. I cradled him in my arms, kissed his cooling black head, his muzzle, pressed the smell of him into me as if trying to capture it. I whispered my love for him, my anguish into his soft ears. I wanted him to hear the sound of my heart breaking, to know that he was loved enough to break it.

  How long I held him like that I don’t recall, but the cold stickiness of his blood soaking my shirt brought me back. Moving him, my tight embrace of his broken body had made the bleeding worse, and I wore it on my shirt, my pants, dribbled onto my shoes and socks like an accusation.

  Hours later, after he’d been buried by my friend Chris, whom I called that night, I looked at myself in the mirror, saw his dark, dried blood across my cheek, my neck, on my hands and arms.

  I looked at myself in the mirror for a long while, knowing I should take a shower before trying to go to bed, as Chris suggested before he left—after he’d buried my dog, my friend, my companion. But I didn’t want to wash the last of him down my shower drain… didn’t want to lose the little part of him I had left, when the rest of him was already cold, already underground, already being rained on.

  In the end, I took the shower, but threw the bloodied clothing into my hamper… and haven’t removed it since.

  When sleep finally did come that night, it came late and more from emotional exhaustion than physical fatigue. I listened to the rain pound on the roof and worried about him getting wet.

  And though I missed his back pressed against mine as it usually was when we slept, I kept his collar wound through my fingers throughout the night.

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep much at all, maybe just a little as dawn crept closer to the horizon. But when I did, the only solace I received were images of his sweet face, but not calm and peaceful as he’d been when I’d held him. No, now his face was distorted, his muzzle drawn back from his teeth. His eyes were wide and fixed, grey and cataractous.

  And the blood… it had been only a thin trickle. But now, in my dreams, it gushed from his nostrils, his ears, wept from his wide, accusing eyes.

  I awoke shaking, nauseous, and rose to sit vacantly in front of the television, watching images of other people’s woes, other people’s losses.

  * * *

  “Go ahead and take the day off,” my boss told me the next morning. I was sensitive, still am, to that tone in people’s voices… you know, the ‘it’s only a dog’ tone that some people give you when you show the slightest inclination to grieve the loss of a pet.
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br />   I’d gotten Hector when he was eight weeks, and had raised him since then. It was he and I against the world. I knew it, and I think he did, too. No one was going to tell me that he was just a dog.

  Another friend I spoke with that morning mentioned that tone, those people. He told me to take their names down and pass them on to him; he’d personally kick their asses for me.

  I spent the rest of the morning in bed, lying in sheets that smelled of him, bore his dark hairs. I cried some, more than I ever thought I could—more than I ever thought I should.

  I hadn’t really slept the night before, so I tried to pull the covers over my head, tried to find some piece of sleep that wouldn’t confront me with his battered, bloodied body.

  And succeeded.

  * * *

  The next time I saw him was the first time he tried to kill me…

  When I awoke, it was strangely dark, and I shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  I glanced at the microwave clock. 7:43 p.m.

  I’d slept all day, but felt no better for it.

  He wasn’t there at my feet, watching me, his eyes darting unsubtly from me to the pantry where I kept his treats. I looked at the space on the floor where he should have been and sighed.

  Taking a glass down from the cabinet, I bent to the sink, turned on the water and ran it for a second, waited for it to get cold.

  I absently looked out the window as I filled the glass.

  Dropped the glass just as absently into the sink…

  There, across the river, a blotch on the far bank, etched in dark relief against the bruised, twilight sky…

  The glass shattered, but I was already out the back door, not breathing.

  I scrambled to a stop where the backyard sloped down to the river, glared into the setting sun.

  It simply could not be.

  He was there, just across the winding river, no more than 30 feet away on the edge of the opposite bank. I could just make him out, like a dark ghost backlit against the sun. He seemed to be sitting, directly facing me, unmoving.