Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  The bike sped away, pulled into an empty parking lot at the 5 and Diner just off the access road, taunting Dennis to come “get some.” He strongly considered that the man would be an easy target, and that he could run him down, smashing his motorcycle, but he continued to drive past the turnoff. He then reached into the glove compartment, which sometimes held gloves, but always had his Smith & Wesson tactical knife.

  He maneuvered a quick U-turn and pulled into the empty 5 and Diner parking lot as well, but the biker was long gone. There was no sign of the man. Dennis gripped his knife furiously anyway; heart pounding, face still moist from the stinging spit. Ego irreparably bruised from the way the man treated him, as if he were less than nothing.

  As if he were not even a man.

  Later, at work, Dennis had told the story differently. In Dennis’s version, the spit only hit the door. In his version, the man had refused to pull over and meet Dennis in the parking lot. In Dennis’s version, he had not been the coward. By the time he’d left work that day, Dennis had almost convinced himself that his version of reality was true. But when he saw the reflected image in the driver door window of his own face and the remnants of the biker’s filthy saliva staring back at him, even he couldn’t believe the lie any longer.

  “Who, the fuck, does this little teenage cunt think she is?” he asks himself.

  Though he had been terrified to confront the biker, he won’t hesitate to give this little girl a piece of his mind, and something more if he gets the chance. His racing heart establishes a pulse in his groin and he begins to drift into carnal fantasies about exacting revenge upon the girl, and spitting into her mouth as the biker had spat into his.

  All the while Dennis is constructing elaborate fantasies of decimating the girl in the car ahead; his mind is nagging at him to continue the job he has started, and drive to the burial site.

  He has planned to see the funeral. Especially after seeing the dead man’s face, haunting him, he needs to see the final resting place of the man he put to death.

  Dennis makes eye contact with the young woman one final time as she stares into her rearview mirror, and then he slows and turns.

  He isn’t consciously aware that he’s taken note of the girl’s plate.

  T8RTOT.

  “I’ll catch you later, Tater,” he says and then laughs to no one as he pulls onto a side street to turn around.

  The graveyard never scared Dennis as a child. He remembers spending many afternoons playing in the boneyard. He was one of the few kids who didn’t walk around, but instead chose to be in the cemetery gates and stop behind the mausoleum to find a break in the wind, so he could light up a cigarette. He never feared the supernatural or superstitious; he just enjoyed being somewhere that most kids wouldn’t follow. The cemetery offered a peaceful resting place for him as well as the dead.

  There were only a couple of times he would avoid the graveyard after school. The first was any time he had seen the milky white smoke discharging from the roof of the crematorium. The smell sickened him. The odor of burnt hair, with something sweeter on top of it, like an additional layer of horrible. He would step quickly to avoid that smell. The next was if he saw the boy in the camouflage jacket. Dennis didn’t know if he worked for the cemetery, or if he was a student who was ahead of him and went to the school’s other annex for grades eleven and twelve.

  All Dennis knew for sure was that the boy hit hard.

  Dennis often walked around unaware of his surroundings. He never ran into trees or parked cars, but nonetheless was in his own thoughts more than in the real world. He liked to dream up stories and imagine alternate realities where he was the ruler, or the champion. Or where his parents were alive and happy.

  He also liked to throw rocks. It was this latter hobby that would introduce him to the boy in the camouflage jacket.

  There was a speed limit sign, fifteen miles per hour, posted along the paved path into the deepest parts of the graveyard, towards the nicer plots, the more secluded plots and the large marble aboveground burial sites. Just before the sign, and all the way to the main entrance, the road was gravel. Dennis supposed they had only paved the road for the wealthy stiffs.

  Every day, Dennis would throw a handful of stones from the gravel road, one at a time, trying to hit the fifteen-miles-per-hour sign. His aim was seldom true from that distance, which is probably why he hadn’t made the team in little league, but once in a while he would hear the delayed clang of stone striking metal and his pride would swell.

  He didn’t even see the boy walking ahead of him until the rock left his hand.

  Dennis could have yelled “heads up,” or “look out,” or anything at all, but he didn’t. Instead, he watched the small piece of sparkling grey flint rock crash down at the boy’s feet, just shy of hitting him.

  Why didn’t he say something, anything, to warn the boy?

  Before he knew what hit him, Dennis was on his ass. The boy had turned on his heels in complete silence, not yelling or making any threats, but had marched up to Dennis calmly and confidently and railed him in the face with a meaty fist. The boy had been much larger than he was, and Dennis crumpled like a shoelace that had been stood on end and released.

  The camouflage jacket had then landed in the grass next to Dennis, as one steel-toed boot or another rained down on his back, shoulders and head.

  Dennis barely remembers pleading and apologizing, screaming while the boy stomped up to him and then stomped through him, because the boy in the camouflage jacket never said a word.

  When the attack stopped and the boy was still standing over him, Dennis looked up, scared and confused as to what the boy was going to do next.

  Their eyes met, Dennis’s full of tears, the other boy’s full of hate. He then reached down next to Dennis and picked up his camouflage coat and Dennis’s baseball cap, bent down and put the cap on Dennis’s head gently, like a caring brother, while Dennis cringed and held his breath in anticipation of another knuckle sandwich.

  And then the larger boy walked away with his coat slung over one arm.

  Dennis never saw his face again. He made sure of that. Anytime he saw a hint of camouflage, he took the long way home.

  Today Dennis feels that fear all over again, like a helpless boy, and Hector Jiménez is the new host for this fear. He’s afraid to see the proverbial boy in the camouflage jacket, even though that man is now dead. Even in death, the man in the Jacket holds power over him. Even in death, the man proves Dennis is a coward.

  Dennis parks away from the rest of the procession and walks around slowly, creating a perimeter of the gravesite. He orbits the funeral like a decaying satellite, gently tightening his perimeter, creeping through the cemetery as just another ghost among the dead. He doesn’t want to be seen.

  He cannot understand why he is so frightened of being here. He has done nothing wrong. He has to be here to prove to himself that he is not a coward and that he deserves to be the man who lived through the conflict between him and Jiménez.

  Dennis passes by a freshly visited grave where the leaves have been swept away recently to reveal new grass sprouting from the sunken pock of the burial site. He sees a loose bouquet in one of those permanent canisters that are sometimes attached to the headstone. He wonders what those things are called as he snatches the flora from the metal bucket.

  The flowers are held together by a small ribbon, which has loosened from the elements, and time. Dennis tightens the bow subconsciously. Unaware.

  He settles in behind a knotty old mesquite tree, with its tar-black sap marking every wound that was inflicted by the groundskeeper when trimming branches, and its scaly and brittle bark, which comes off in chunks like a molting diamondback. He observes the small number of people gathered around on the fake green turf blanket that surrounds the casket, many of whom sit with dry eyes.

  “Looks like you weren’t a very popular guy,” Dennis says under his breath, still concerned with being found out.

  A w
hispering in his ear—“Didn’t your mother never teach you not to speak ill of the dead?”—causes Dennis to yelp out a cry and stumble onto his ass as he spins to identify the voice. There is no one.

  A man with the funeral group is staring over at Dennis, who feigns as if he is weeping at the grave under the tree. He hides his embarrassment under his gloved hands and slowly rises back to his full stature. As he looks up from his own unsteady feet, his eyes land upon a pair of boots, just a few inches away.

  Standing at full attention, as if someone had fired a starter pistol, he meets the gaze of Hector Jiménez, who is still smiling.

  “You’re one jumpy-ass gringo, you know that?” he says to Dennis.

  Dennis quickly shows him his heels and elbows as he frantically dashes back to the car, not caring who will notice him any longer. He stumbles over sunken grave markers and steadies himself on his hands, the thorns from the bundled roses piercing through his gloved hand as he grips them tighter. Pausing to look over his shoulders, he isn’t surprised to see the Mexican is still there under the tree; in no rush to catch up with him. Nonetheless, Dennis still doesn’t slow his pace.

  He arrives at his car, throat burning, out of breath and hand shakily reaching into his jacket pocket for the keys. The other hand is still tightly gripping the slightly withered flowers. He snags the metal ring on his index finger and pulls hard to free the jingly set of keys. The large remote entry box catches on the way out and tears the ring from his unsure grip. The keys fall onto gravel, indicating to Dennis that this is the cheap part of the cemetery.

  Before reaching to pick up the keys from the sparsely graveled road, he cocks his head back again to fix Jiménez’s location.

  But he is gone.

  Where the fuck did he go? Oh fuck, what the fuck is going on? Am I going crazy? Am I fucking going crazy?

  With the keys firmly back in his mitt, he presses the little open padlock hieroglyph to unlock the door and slams it behind him. The tip of the key circles the ignition for a second, refusing to go in the hole. Just as Dennis starts to feel a bout of uncontrollable and high-pitched screaming coming on, the metal slides into the shaft and he starts the Acura, squalling tires and flinging rocks from the road as he gains momentum and peels away from the cemetery.

  Running from the man in the camouflage jacket.

  Libby

  The room is still spinny from the night before, when Elizabeth Langston opens her eyes. Most likely the entire city is still spinny, but she is too nauseated to care. She heads for the bathroom, after having finally declared a winner in the battle between her overfilled bladder and her churning stomach. Her voice echoes off the tile and drives an iron spike into her brain when she shouts to an empty house.

  “Hey babe, do you have any Xanax I can take? I feel like hammered dog shit from last night,” she says. After a pause, she calls Dennis’s name, but when he doesn’t answer, she acquiesces to the pain of a thousand ice-cream headaches and calls off the verbal search party. He’s probably gone to go get some Vodka, she thinks, and hopes he won’t be long.

  It takes only seconds for her to find the pill bottle he has stashed in his nightstand. Taking a Xanax and a Vicodin from the stash, she pitches them into her moist gullet and chases the bitter pills down with what’s left in a Corona bottle from the night before. It isn’t until she pulls the bottle away from her lips and gives a ragged swallow that she notices the cigarette butt clinging to glass walls of the vessel. She spews the gritty remnants of beer and ash into the air and coughs, and then tosses the bottle across the room in anger while her free hand reaches for the sheet to wipe her tar-caked tongue.

  The tiny, presumably aboriginal man in her head begins to pound the drums louder.

  I am never drinking red wine again, she thinks.

  There is a beep from the kitchen. The coffee maker, which is programmed to shut off one hour after brewing is complete, is doing so now, announcing quite loudly that its task for the day is v; seemingly begging for attention—last chance to get coffee, ever!—that beeping seems to say. Although she is familiar with the sound, from the nights when she would crash and Dennis would leave for work in the morning, she is no less annoyed.

  This coffee pot will self-fucking-destruct in five, four, three . . . Christ it was annoying, but her mouth was coated in talc and tasted of old ashtrays and her tongue felt rougher than a dead cat’s.

  Opting for coffee instead of nursing the taste of the rank beer laced with ashen particulate, she meanders through the bedroom and into the open area preceding the island countertop, holding her outstretched hand to her eyebrows to shield her aboriginal drummer from the sun. The house is immaculate, other than the mess, which she has brought and created herself. Dennis’s place was never this clean.

  I wonder if he hired a cleaning lady, she thinks, and picks her panties off the floor, giving them a quick pitch to her purse, which is lying open on the arm of the microfiber sofa. The thin, sheer undergarment clings to the arm of the couch, having missed the leather bag.

  She is wearing one of his oversized grey sweatshirts and nothing more. The hemline ends just below the crease in her chiseled posterior. She absently tugs at the tail of the shirt to conceal her ass from no one in particular, and moves further into the realm of dishes and fruit. She pours herself a coffee in hopes that her headache will dissipate, or at least the rhythmic thudding will slow down to a more manageable pace, before Dennis arrives home with more booze.

  She wants to be in good spirits for him today. He deserves that, at least, after last night. Her drunken ramblings, her spilled beers.

  Often she will lead him on or make him beg before finally caving into him and responding to his urges for coitus. He was stronger than she had ever seen him last night. He was forceful and controlling. It was something she had seen in him a few times before. Sometimes it scared her, but it was what she thought it was supposed to feel like when you were balling an older man. It was what she expected.

  To be treated as if he was in control and she were just a little fun for him on the weekends. Like he owned her, and he could have what he wanted because he knew how to please a woman better than some punk kid she would be dating in college.

  When he became needy and clingy, as he so often was, it was a big turn off. She felt like she was dating a woman.

  The coffee is warm and pleasing to her twisted tummy. She tugs again at her shirt, steadying it from the swaying movement as she saunters to the computer desk, and tucks it between her rear and her left foot. She then installs herself in this position into the high-backed leather chair.

  A delicately manicured acrylic nail flicks the power button, resurrecting the machine from its hibernation. The screen comes to life and reveals the last page visited: a news article about a shooting. The page is listed as a favorite.

  She is a moment away from leaving the page, when she catches his name in the article as she subconsciously scans. Uncharacteristically interested in something that isn’t about celebrities or herself, she continues to read. Dennis had not told her about the events written in the article, nor could she remember the presently mentioned bullet wound on his forehead. Last night was little more than a blur, with violent sex and white powder peeking through the haze. And little more.

  Christ, I must’ve been more wasted than I thought. This can’t be real, she thinks, and then checks the URL again, confirming the site to be a reputable news source.

  “I’m never drinking red wine again,” Libby says aloud this time, adding a symbol crash to the incessant drummer.

  Did he tell me any of this? she wonders.

  She is sitting with both hands clenched around the steaming mug like a batter choking up on the pine for a better swing. She remains in this pose, hands embracing cup, arms embracing her right knee and her ass embracing her left foot, for what seems like an eternity while she considers all the possibilities that could have arisen from the horrifying story she has just read.

  No wonder he
just took what he wanted from me last night, she thinks and then smiles with Cheshire magnitude, remembering his hand firmly around her throat, too tight to shake free; it felt as if he were using it to control her like bit and bridle on an ornery horse. That much she did remember from the fog.

  She also knew that he didn’t ask her permission last night, and she had gotten the distinct feeling that she had given up her right to choose the second she had walked in his door, plastered drunk, at 2:00 am.

  Her headache is starting to fade now and with the cocktail of pills and caffeine in her body, she is beginning to feel blood rushing through and invigorating her. Piecing together the memories: the rough and powerful, dominating way Dennis had overtaken her last night makes her ragged breath grow deeper.

  Curiosity piqued, and with little else to do while awaiting his return, she begins to skim through Dennis’s browser history, further investigating the man she knows less about now than she felt she had a week ago.

  The name of another man, Hector Jiménez, comes up in search after search. Aside from the article about the shooting, there’s: his Facebook page, his employer’s website, which lists him as an “integral part of the team,” a second news story about a freeway accident over the holidays (with a reminder to always wear your safety belt). A few links in the list lead to paid sites that give you background screenings and phone numbers. They all prompt an error telling her that she needs to log in to access this page, or that this page has expired. She doesn’t try to use his password—she knows the one he uses for nearly everything—to see the specific information he’s extracted. She feels as though, somehow, that would be crossing the line. A line that was muddy enough to justify her continuing the passive investigation into his internet habits, nonetheless.

  The internal conflict is moot anyhow, because the most recently visited page is Google Maps and has directions to an address in South Phoenix, near Dennis’s office, in a shitty part of town that he has no business going to on a Saturday.