by Neil Gaiman
“Yessir.” “Stay put, Ed. We’re going to draw blood.” My dad’s excited. I can hear it in his voice. “You okay to take samples back to town?”
Ed nods. “I brought the cooler.” “Blink, go get Ed some coffee and anything else he wants.”
I take Ed to the kitchen and put the pot on the stove. From the kitchen window I can see my dad and the kid in the field tent. My dad’s got latex gloves on. He’s making the kid make a fist, feeling where his veins pop out in the soft crook of his elbow. I see now the kid’s got tons of stick and poke tattoos up and down his big arms. Swastikas, SSs, eagles. I smile a little.
“Black’s fine for me,” says Ed.
The pot burbles. I take it off the stove and pour Ed a cup. My dad’s got the needle in the kid’s vein now. He’s drawing off vials. He pricks the kid’s other finger and drops a dot in the well of a rapid response test on the table in front of him.
My dad’s doing what Doc had done to him, somewhere in Montana, make sure he’s free of syphilis and HIV and whatnot. Doc’s probably fucking girls by now.
I get out another cup and fill it to the brim. I take it to them. “This is my daughter Treblinka,” my dad says, not looking up. “Thanks,” the kid says shyly and takes the cup from me. I see now he’s got ice-blue eyes, not a speck of green. I’ve never seen eyes that blue on something that wasn’t an animal. I can’t stop looking at them.
Ed follows me into the tent. Dad hands Ed a bag of blood vials. “You got lots of stick and pokes. I’m phoning out for Hep C plus the regular. Tonight you’re not touching my daughter. Understand?” He looks at me. “Understand?”
“I understand.” “Can you bear great burdens, soldier?” “I can.”
He throws a sleeping bag at him. “Tonight you sleep on the ground.” He points a finger at me. “You don’t touch him.”
I lay down on my bed. I hear the crickets and the tree frogs and Ed’s truck peeling out on the gravel. I can’t sleep. I think about touching myself but decide I want to save it. All wet is just about the hardest way to fall asleep.
The next morning the boy’s still sleeping. I go outside to him. I kick him with my foot a little. He wakes up.
“Show me your tattoos,” I say.
He rolls up his sleeve and I see them all now. They’re not bad for stick and pokes. I roll up my sleeve. I’ve got a Celtic cross. He smiles. He shows me where on his arms he’s got an American Front cross. We almost match.
“Come on,” I say. “I want to see you chop wood.”
We walk to the stump. “What’s your name?” I say. “Eric.”
Dad’s already in the tent. He’s talking to Ed on the CB. “All clear,” I hear Ed’s crackle say.
Dad got me an axe for Christmas last year because the maul was too big for my hands. “You can use the maul if you want,” I say to the guy. I stand a dry log of pine on the block and back up. I straddle my legs and raise the axe over my head. Thok. It sticks in the wood.
The kid steps forward. “I’ll get it for you,” he says. I shake my head. I know to smack it on the block until it splits. “Your turn.” I say. He looks at the axe and picks up the maul. Thwack. He can do it in one stroke. Blood rushes through me.
“I’m sixteen,” I say, and I don’t know why. “I’m sixteen, too” he says.
Dad gets off the CB. He walks over to us. He’s got a smile on his face. He’s got the Bible in his hands.
“Guess what I did.” He pulls out the Bible. “I married you.”
Then he turns and walks away.
The kid and me go back to my room in the cabin. “Lemme see all your tattoos,” I say.
He peels off his shirt. They’re all over him, across his chest. I can see all of them clear because he doesn’t have any chest hair.
I reach up and unbutton his pants. I stick my hand in. I’ve never touched it before. It doesn’t scare me like I thought it would. It just feels very warm. He swallows hard.
I let go and wriggle out of my pants. I can already feel where the wet spot sticks to my underwear. In an instant he’s on top of me and I only panic for a second when I wonder how he’s going to fit it in me and then it’s so easy. It’s better than easy. It’s good. Holy shit, it’s good. I dunno if it’s rude or not to do it to yourself when a guy does it to you but I read somewhere it’s good for conception. He doesn’t mind. “Holy shit,” he says, eyes agog. And then he feels it. And then I feel it.
We do it again. “I forgot one,” he says afterwards, laying beside me. He takes his two hands and rolls his lower lip open so I can see the soft inside. ARYAN, it says in blue letters.
“How’d you end up at Metzger’s?” I say. “Same as everyone. Run away. You’re lucky, you got a dad that loves you.” “I’m glad you’re here,” I say.
He sleeps in my bed.
It only takes two weeks to skip a period. Two weeks of chopping wood and him dragging things around the compound for Dad and then I look at him hot and sweaty and my dad sees me looking and says “Go ahead.” And we go back to the cabin. We do it all kinds of ways. We do it with him on top and with me on top and with me bent over on my knees and him behind me, driving into the heart of me until I want to scream. We do it in my mouth, even though that doesn’t help the cause any.
It only takes two weeks.
“Good work,” my dad says, when I tell him, when I’m sure. I pretty much knew when I spotted during the middle of my cycle. I never do that. But I counted the days so Dad would be sure too.
“Go kill a deer for your wife,” says Dad, and Eric goes off into the woods. I could have got a deer myself, I’m not far along yet. But he goes and then just before dusk he comes back, crossbow slung low, carcass over his shoulder, white t-shirt brown with blood. I think I love him more that moment than I’ve ever felt for anything on earth.
We eat steaks that night and I’m so happy.
That night I hear Doc’s voice on the CB. “They had me work on two of them, Tanya and Crystal. They’re gonna give birth within a week of each other.”
“Good boy,” says Dad. “You coming home in the week?” Eric’s listening but he doesn’t say anything. I try to get him going that night but he’s out of it. “I love you,” I say. “I love you too,” he says, and even though it’s the first time I hear it from him it doesn’t thrill me like it should.
I wake up before him because I’m sick. I eat crackers and it goes away but I can’t go back to bed. I wash dishes until my hands go numb in the cold water. There’s a little blank spot inside me where that joy used to be.
Through the window I see my dad chopping wood. I see Eric come up behind him. The next day he corners my dad when my dad’s chopping wood. “When do I go back?” he asks him.
My dad narrows his eyes at him, maul in hand. “You’re a married man,” he says. I watch him shrink a size but he keeps talking. “That wasn’t the deal,” he says. Kind of whining now. “Your son’s coming back.”
“My son is not the same as my daughter,” my dad says. “She’s my wife,” he says, and just as I feel that joy jump into place inside me again my dad raises the maul and drives in one long swinging arc that ends stopping hard in the top of the boy’s head. And he pulls it out and swings it again and as the boy’s body falls, I see now he got him right over the ear, there’s a split that’s like a tree wound and all I can think is an axe blade makes the same shape in a person as in a tree and I drop the dish in my hand and I watch as my dad swings the maul into my husband again and again and again and he just turns into meat. That’s when I run on rubbery legs to the closet in my dad’s room. I can look at meat but I can’t look at meat that’s still wearing clothes, meat with tattoos, meat with hands that touched me. I slam the closet door. Like how you see lightning before you hear thunder all the sounds come piercing me like arrows while I’m shuddering in that small dark space. The THOK of the maul and then that second crack that must have been his skull, the way splintering bone chops different than wood.
I
realize I didn’t even hear him scream.
Then it’s just quiet. I hear my dad walk in the door. “Blinky?” I hear him yell. I stay quiet. He curses. I hear the rack of a shotgun and hear him walk back out.
I think I hear but I might be imagining Ed’s truck pulling up on the gravel. “I heard on the CB,” Ed says, “You needed me?—” and boom, the shotgun and then Ed has nothing else to say.
I know there’s a knife in the footlocker under my dad’s bed. There’s guns there too but I can’t even think about that. Dad always told us not to use bullets on deer because we needed the ammo for the race war. I’m not even sure he shot Ed. It doesn’t make any sense if he did. I’ve got to peek my head out to see if I can make it to the locker. I’m working up my courage to do it when the door swings wide open.
It’s my dad, and the shotgun. “Are you really pregnant?” he says to me. “Yes,” I say, my voice tiny and quavery. “Yes. I am, I told you that I am.” “Okay then.” He throws the shotgun on the bed. “Come on out and quit playing.” Out in the yard he’s already put the boy’s head on a stick. It’s sort of hanging half open like a carved ham but it sits on the stick straight, right in the windpipe. I see Ed’s truck. I guess I did hear right.
Dad’s got a shovel and he hands me one. “Go get the quicklime,” he says. I take the shovel and my fingers can’t grasp it enough to hold it up. There’s just a big pile of red fat and bone on the dark bloody ground. “Stop it,” says Dad. “I already did the hard part.” I can’t stop it, I’m shuddering and crying and I guess I’m drooling because my dad wipes the corner of my mouth on his sleeve.
“I need to make you tough,” he says. “Doc and Birk are disposable. All men are.” I remember my dad telling us about practicing for the race war when you kill a deer: do it right and then do something extra. Gouge out its eyes with your thumbs. Break its ribs. Wrap your hands around the throat and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, until you feel what it’s like to make a windpipe crumble in your grip. Do it because when the war comes you’re going to have to do it to niggers and spics and all the mud people coming after all we have here. Do it for our future.
“Come on,” he says. “If you can do this you can do anything.”
He’s right. If I can dig a shovelful of dirt, one little shovel, and throw it on my husband’s body, that will be the hardest. Every shovel after that will just make the mess go away, will put that meat back into the ground with his smile and his touch and the way he killed a deer for me that night. It will get further and further underground and nothing, absolutely nothing, will be hard after this.
I put the tip of the shovel against the dirt. I push my weight against it and I see how the hard iron cuts a little gash in the clay, not enough to dig even a tablespoon but enough to know I’ve started.
My dad nods and turns away.
I didn’t know I was strong enough to raise a shovel over my head. I didn’t know until I feel its weight swinging through the air over my own. I hit my dad in the back of the head. It’s not enough to kill. “Goddammit,” he roars, and reaches for his own shovel. I raise it again before I can think and this time I get him in the forehead. Blood comes out. He staggers back. I hit him again. He falls down. I hit him again. He’s on the ground now. I hit him and hit him and hit him. I feel the moment shift when something living becomes something quiet and dead, just like a deer. When it happens I go back to being me. I throw the shovel down on my dad’s beaten-in face and when I see it bounce I howl, running into the woods.
If I had sense I would run back and get Ed’s truck and Dad’s weapons but all I can do is run like an animal, the fastest animal that ever lived. I know the world is full of monsters and Jews but I’m not afraid. I will do anything for the baby in my belly. I can make it to Eugene in seven days if I lay low and follow the stars. I can go into Gomorrah if I have to. I run and I run, the last of our kind inside me. I’m ready to live among niggers and spics, they’ll put us in a zoo when the race war comes and all the mud people will come and gawk at our skin every day. But I will stare into my baby’s blue eyes and hold my head high and know nothing is hard, anymore. We will be okay.
All Through the House
BY CHRISTOPHER COAKE
Old friends. There’s nothing like them. They’re the people you’ve grown up with, and loved all your life.
So what do you do when one of them snaps and does something so heinous that you’re forced to call your whole life into question just to answer the deeper, even uglier question, “How did I not see this coming?”
Returning to the scene of the crime—both physically and emotionally, with all your memories and puzzle-solving brain waves engaged—is one of the hardest things a survivor of atrocity can be asked to do.
And it is here that Christopher Coake’s “All through the House” so brilliantly succeeds: as an impeccably honest dissection of survivor guilt by association.
And of the love that survives, even after all the promises have been broken.
Now
Here is an empty meadow, circled by bare autumn woods.
The trees of the woods—oak, maple, locust—grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly—but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow, too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow’s edge, is a dirt track, twin ruts with a grassy center, winding through the woods and away.
The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling—save for at the meadow’s center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath a thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.
Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox lives in the nearby trees, rusty and quick. His den, twisting between tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.
Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out, and walk into the grass. They take photographs, or draw pictures, or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.
Whenever these people come, a policeman, fat and gray-haired, arrives soon after. Sometimes the people speak with him—and sometimes they shout—but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they are gone he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When this happens in the nighttime, the spinning of his red-and-blue lights makes the trees seem to jump and dance.
Sometimes the policeman comes when there is no one to chase away.
He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.
When he makes noise, the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man’s barks and howls.
He does not stay long.
After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air, and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground, and into the burrows of mice. Things eat, and are eaten.
Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman, and the house, and all the people who have come and gone here, are not forgotten.
They are, simply, never remembered.
1987
Sheriff Larry Thompkins tucked his chin against the cold and, his back to his idling cruiser, unlocked the cattle gate that blocked access to the Sullivan woods. The gate swung inward, squealing, and the cruiser’s headlights shone a little ways down the tra
ck, before it veered off into the trees. Larry straightened, then glanced right and left, down the paved country road behind him. He saw no other cars, not even on the distant interstate. The sky was clouded over—snow was a possibility—and the fields behind him were almost invisible in the moonless dark.
Larry sank back behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth, for the static spitting from his radio. He nosed the cruiser through the gate and onto the track, then switched to his parking lights. The trunks of trees ahead dimmed, turned orange. The nearest soul, old Ned Baker, lived a half mile off, but Ned was an insomniac, and often sat in front of his bedroom window watching the Sullivan woods. If Larry used his headlights, Ned would see. Ever since Patricia Pike’s book had come out—three months ago now—Ned had watched over the gated entrance to the woods as if it was a military duty.
Larry had been chasing off trespassers from the Sullivan place ever since the murders, twelve years ago in December. He hated coming here, but he couldn’t very well refuse to do his job—no one else was going to see to it. Almost always the trespassers were kids from the high school, out at the murder house getting drunk or high—and though Larry was always firm with them, and made trouble for the bad ones, he knew most kids did stupid things; he couldn’t blame them that much. Larry had fallen off the roof of a barn, drunk, when he was sixteen—he’d broken his arm in two places, all because he was trying to impress a girl who, in the end, never went out with him.
But activity in the woods had picked up since the Pike woman’s book appeared. Larry had been out here three times in the last week alone. There were kids, still, more of them than ever—but also people from out of town, some of whom he suspected were mentally ill. Just last weekend Larry had chased off a couple in their twenties, lying on a blanket with horrible screaming music playing on their boom box. They’d told him—calmly, as though he might understand—that they practiced magic and wanted to conceive a child there. The house, they said, was a place of energy. When they were gone Larry looked up at its empty windows, its stupid dead house-face, and couldn’t imagine anything further from the truth.