MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  Instead, he was at least half-responsible for Glass Jar’s murder, and Glass Jar was at least half a person, and he knew, even lying on his back despair-laughing into the hot, wide open sky, that it was a thing he’d never live with, or more that he would always live with it, but never happily, or even neutrally. But he also knew what he had to do now, and there was a calmness, a coldness, that came with that knowledge. Mike stopped laughing, stood, and looked one more time at the top of the tree, then one more time back to Glass Jar’s house, imagining the body behind the wall, and then he weaved back towards the shack, closed the door, and shoulder-checked carefully as he slowly pulled his car into the empty street.

  45

  According to Mousey, the beach property he was setting Tommy up on belonged to Joanne Withrow, a lovely sixty-two-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis who spent all day making unique but similar paintings of young women’s faces melting into long, gentle streams. Mousey either took care of — or pretended to take care of and actually paid some local kid to work — the thirty-year-strong garden on the edge of her property, which had recently become inaccessible to Joanne. Mousey had decided to set up Tommy’s tent in the garden for the night.

  They’d placed the tent in the shade of a tall wooden gazebo covered with the kind of ivy that looks pretty but, once you’ve had someone explain it to you, is the garden equivalent of a fascist state. The ivy will just grow outwards and choke any plant nearby, and anything it can’t choke it’ll just surround, hug hard and without permission. Obviously it was a pretty well-planned garden, so that gazebo was separate from the perennial garden, which overflowed and bloomed in a huge, billowing corner of the yard with a view of the gap between two mountains.

  About once a month, Mousey ate dinner at Joanne’s house, and he was babbling his way through a lavish des­cription of her dinnerware when Tommy just couldn’t take it anymore.

  Tommy had no idea which direction the house was even in. “Wait. So is she going to come up here?”

  Mousey, who’d been in some kind of amphetamine speech trance, shook his head from the side and bobbed it from front to back before gathering himself and responding. “No, well, shit. I mean she can get up here, if, uh, if her caretaker, I think his name’s George. If George takes her, she can get up here. But, yeah, the garden here, it’s sensitive to her as a symbol of the, umm, the shocking and practical and rolling-terrifyingly-downhill nature of her aging and disease, or something like that, y’know what I’m saying? Probably. I’d feel that way, I was her, I’d feel that way. I shouldn’t speak for her, but I can guess. I’m a guesser, by nature.”

  Tommy continued to debate telling Mousey about the bloody piece of skull suspended from his hair. “Mousey, why are you talking about her if she ain’t coming up here?”

  “I’m saying she won’t. But I’m saying, now, if she does, you need to treat her with respect and care. She’s a sweet woman, and just . . . She deserves a certain generous and unselfconscious tenderness paid to her.”

  As Mousey rattled on, the gore wiggled loosely and almost pleasantly, the way a tiny toy giraffe on a mobile does.

  Tommy tried to hide a deep shiver and nodded, curling back into silence as Mousey swiftly switched the topic to how he was going to get Tommy off the island. And Tommy tried to follow along, even though his head felt three-quarters full of cotton that had been pulled off cotton balls and bunched back together.

  Tommy had never been particularly resilient in the face of colds or fevers. Usually, if he felt slightly off, he would stay in bed all day — probably making himself sicker by not standing to get himself water or food as much as he should have. But now, right now, was a time to grow. To really improve. So Tommy kept a firm, steadying grip on his elbows, keeping his shivers in check and trying to look attentive as Mousey explained what would happen with the boatman.

  Mousey spent a weird and unnecessary amount of time trying to convince him of how cool and smart his accountant, Mr. Wu, was. Mr. Wu didn’t even really matter, as far as Tommy could tell, he’d just referred the boatman. Plus it’s always pointless to try to make someone know how cool a person who’s just a name to them is. You have to meet people to know if they’re cool. Tommy thought that was pretty basic, and Mousey probably knew it, but he was zooming: dry-mouthed, twitchy, sweating profusely as he talked. Dude needed to chill out on the pill-popping.

  So, combined with the fever, the accountant ramble had completely exhausted Tommy’s ability to pay real attention by the time Mousey got around to actual logistics. Tommy looked out at the water and let the fever drift over him for a second, and an image came into his mind of Joey, the girl from the beach, bobbing in the water behind a canoe. She was bobbing in the water, her hair wet against her head, holding a rope in her mouth and smiling around it. And even imagining it, Tommy could tell that if someone saw a picture, a still picture of it, they might think she was in trouble, or that it was disturbing somehow, but he knew, being there and breathing the air and seeing it, that she was happy, that it was fun.

  The whole daydream probably took a second or two total, Tommy couldn’t be sure, but however long it lasted was just long enough for Mousey to notice and slap Tommy across the face again, the pain radiating feverishly across all of Tommy’s nerves this time. Tommy curled in on himself.

  “Ah, shitshit. Okay, I’m going to stop doing that, Tommy. It’s not fair, and when you do stuff that isn’t fair, you’ve got to . . . Sorry, I’m off. Are you sick? Are you all right? What’s going on? Are you sick, man?”

  Tommy exhaled a jagged, shivering breath, and reached his hand out to stop Mousey’s babbling. “Hey. Stop. Sorry, I’ve been trying to be cool, but yeah I’m sick, and you’re talking really fast.” Tommy looked dreamily over Mousey’s shoulder at the skyline and the slightly separated mountains. He thought of the phrase “sky cleavage” and laughed a bit to himself.

  Mousey took a deep breath and tented his hands over his nose. “Yes. Good, this is . . . this is communication, Tommy. Right? Not like radios or Oprah and therapists and whateverwhatever, but communication between people in a tough spot. The thing. The real thing. This is what we need. So here’s what’s what: tonight, you cover yourself up, just go right to sleep, sleep until I get here. Chill. All right?”

  Tommy was done with the sky cleavage, so he looked back to Mousey and gave a small, sincere nod.

  “Then, tomorrow, I show up and I take you to the boat. I take you to the boatman, you give him one envelope; I’ll mark it so you know. You give him one envelope after you get to Campbell River, and he puts you in the car. You drive the car as far as you can, all right? Then you pull into the cheapest hotel in whatever town you’re in, and you pay the clerk $500 to let you take a room without registering a name. Follow me?”

  “I follow you. I’m with it.”

  “You sleep, you take some Aspirin, you watch some TV, whatever. As soon as you can, you get back in the car and drive until you hit the prairies. Then you do what we talked about before. Under-the-table job, all that. But that’s later. Right now it’s about envelopes, cars, and riding out this fever, yeah?”

  Tommy smiled the weak, brave smile of a sick adult who feels really, really sorry for himself. “Yeah.”

  Mousey went back to his dry-mouthed pace. “Tonight, you wrap yourself in every fucking blanket and sleeping bag I gave you. You drink all the water I brought you. And I go home and pack you your bag. I’ll put everything in it. Tylenol, some food, plenty of water. What you’re going to need. I’ll get that ready for you, then I’ll come pick you up in the morning, drive you to the boatman. That’s the whole plan.”

  This time Mousey didn’t bother demanding any active listening cues from Tommy but rather took him around the shoulders and helped him stand and walk over to the supplies. Tommy tried hard to remember the plan before he fell asleep. Tommy felt Mousey pulling the sleeping bag around his shoulders. Then he saw the water being put beside him on the rock and he knew he should say thank y
ou, so he did. Mousey snugged up the sleeping bag and rubbed Tommy’s head, which was a thing Tommy really wished he’d stop doing.

  Mousey was almost off the property by the time Tommy remembered. “Hey. Mousey, wait.” Mousey turned around and held his hands out inquisitively. The piece of skull had fallen. Probably during the slap. Tommy might have asked or said something about his mother or explained about the piece of skull and what it had looked like and how distracting it had been, he might have told Mousey that he’d never seen someone die before, but he chose instead to breathe quietly and lift his arm to wave and hope that some of it was clear just from the angle of his arm against the giant sky, or the way he held his body, not quite upright on the rocks.

  46

  A thing Greta really liked about her entire professional life being totally separate from the rest of her life was that her good friends would seek out counsel at scary or sad times, without even an inkling that she might be, say, planning a murder or three. Or feeling herself botching those murders. Or fearing her own murder at the hands of a crazed motorcycle-gang father. Or some combination of all those things.

  She told Charlotte to wait a couple minutes, and she hustled up to her room, genuinely excited to FaceTime with her friend for a bit and talk about something that seemed, and therefore was, important to someone else.

  Charlotte’s pretty, clean, in-for-the-night-face popped up and took over the whole phone. Greta slid to her back and held the phone above her head.

  “Hey!”

  Charlotte waved several times. “I got your out-of-town message. But, do you happen to have a minute —”

  “To talk about the minivan commercial? Of course I do.”

  “Okay, great, so I have the mom-in-minivan-commercial crisis. That’s one thing we have to cover. Where are you, by the way?”

  “Work. They made me run out last minute to assess a piece in the Temple University archive.”

  “You’re somehow always away for work and usually available to hang out at like one p.m. on weekdays. It’s very weird. You’re an odd duck. Hey, where’s Temple?”

  “Philly.”

  “I thought so. Why are you in a log cabin hotel in Phila­delphia?”

  Greta laughed and glanced around her room. “Airbnb, son. So what’s your beef?” Greta asked to get the conver­sation rolling, but she knew the beef. Charlotte Li had been offered a great paycheque to be the mom in a series of car commercials about how it’s possible for moms to successfully disassociate from their awful children while driving if what they’re driving is a Kia. The problem with this being that just two years prior, when she had been thirty-one with great skin, Charlotte had done another commercial, this one for a piss-water beer, in which she had played the ambiguously young adulty party girl at the most racially diverse frat party in history. The sudden transition was leaving Charlotte with a lot of questions and rage and urges to die/disappear.

  “Okay, this isn’t a beef. You know my beefs. I’ma take the cheque, try to get my one-woman show on, do more writing, and so on and so on. But I might have to take the paycheque and move towards actually quitting acting entirely, totally entirely. That’s the new thing.”

  “That’s not a new thing.”

  “But with a new vigour behind it.” Charlotte waved her hands into the picture, as if they were very fast-growing vines. “And I have to confess one thing that happened that helps to explain why, before I actually do that vigour.”

  “I love confessions. Priest me, Char. Priest me.”

  Charlotte giggled and kicked her desk, knocking her phone askance in its stand. “Okay, so, oh this is bad, this is bad. I went out, this is the week before they wanted to mom me, I went to an audition for an oily-skin-cleanser commercial. And I get there, and it’s me and seven hundred pounds of white girl in eight very similar shapes, and I was just . . . I felt like I was looking down a well. Straight down the top of a well. That was the feeling. So — oh, Greta — so it turns out that it’s a group audition, which I fuckin’ told my agent I wasn’t . . . Whatever, whatever, me and these girls all line up, we all have perfect skin, and they tell us about how to wash our faces. And, just, rage. So when the time came for us to wash our faces for the imaginary future camera, I started scrubbing super-viciously between my eyebrows and shouting, for real shouting, ‘T-ZONE! TEEEE ZONE . . .’ over and over until they asked me to leave.”

  The two women laughed hard into each other’s digitized faces and gradually settled into the comfortable and separate silences of their rooms. Greta stroked the screen where Charlotte’s cheek was. “It’s time to quit acting. Or, like, shitmoneyacting. That’s as clear a sign as you’re going to get. Or give yourself, as the case may be.”

  Charlotte nodded then turned to look out a window that Greta couldn’t see. “Yes. It is. I feel a lot better now that I told someone that. That was eating at me.”

  Greta nodded and smiled and thought about con­sciences.

  Charlotte took a long exhale and set her shoulders. “I might become a model for hairdresser pictures. Like, on the walls there.”

  “That could really work for you. You looked great with that undercut.”

  “I did. I so did. That haircut might have cost me a part in Speed-the-Plow and definitely got me a non-speaking in a Future video. God. Acting is the worst. I’m so done.”

  “And you were the worst of the worst! Wait, that’s not what I meant.”

  They laughed again, and Charlotte waved dismissively at the screen. “At least you didn’t call me a moon-face again.”

  “HEY! I totally meant that nicely, and you know that. I just didn’t know what ‘moon face’ actually meant. I thought it was, like, nicely round in the face in a beautiful way like you are.”

  “You thought it was a generic compliment you could give to Asians. It’s okay. We’re past it.”

  Greta brought the screen of her phone closer to her face. “Hey. I’m getting crazy pings on my phone here. I’ll take you out when I get back — say, next Thursday? You are great, and you will be fine. You don’t need this acting shit.”

  Charlotte winked. “I’ll pick you up in my minivan . . . hon.” She said it like “hung,” and the two women chuckled, reached towards their phones, and made each other’s faces disappear.

  Greta had a series of texts from Darillo waiting for her.

  U R on FaceTime!?!?!!!?

  Why are you FaceTiming? Should n’t you be working. I am waiting here. Gun, Gun, Storm Cloud, Waves.

  Sergei has not been in touch

  I need details

  hey accept my facetime

  Hey, I am facetiming you I am not your boss but answer or I might Kill you one day for fun haha

  Lols

  You are a stupid bitch and i am a angry experienced man

  tick tock

  Cutn

  Stupid spoiled cutn

  Autocorrect my phone remembers

  accept my facetime its important about your job

  Do you say accept for Facetime? ISt wrong?

  Take my facetime its important for your job

  Stupid lazy bitch its important about your job

  Greta was just too profoundly tired to even think a murderous thought. She tapped her screen and a disturbingly clear image of Darillo sitting straight up on a couch masturbating through his fly, his gross old dick, that kind of hard gross old dicks only ever seem to get when and where they’re not wanted. Beside him on the couch was a partially open butterfly knife; on the other side was the most overfull keychain she’d ever seen. She could see one corner of that Easy Rider poster that everyone who has ever died on a motorcycle has owned.

  Mostly it was just the gross old dick, and Darillo’s sudden, sad transition from slow maintenance strokes to that desperate, is he angry at it? pounding motion. Often, a gross old dick is all there is to it, at the end of a bad day.

  Because things exactly like that were not the kind of things she could afford to lose sleep or words or thought
over any longer, Greta just turned her phone off and went to sit at the desk. She poured a moderate amount of GHB into a glass of water and drank it and stared at a Gustave Caillebotte painting on her computer that she could remember having cared about a very huge and very naive and very beautiful amount a very long time ago.

  47

  Had Mousey’s hands not been quaking so hard on their own, they just might have started when he saw Richmond’s truck, dented-in windshield and all, parked in front of his house, Richmond pushing himself off his perch on the bumper.

  Mike Richmond was getting to be a real nuisance. Some­one Mousey would still have minded in the best of moods and someone he hated a whole lot right now.

  If he’d had the time and the patience, he could have dealt with the kid properly and easily, plant some of Glass Jar’s stash in his car and dime him out to Reubens, something like that. Mousey made that plan, and a couple others, as he sloppily parked the car then backed it out and re-parked it. He swung out onto the gravel and pushed the door closed with his foot.

  Mousey started out by talking significantly louder than he needed to or thought was reasonable. “Next time let’s do this somewhere else. How about that? Shit’s getting re-re-re-repetitive. Y’know what I’m saying?” Mousey moved to walk past Richmond without looking at him, but the big, dumb sweetie-pie found it within himself to stop him with a firm hand across the chest.

  “The last thing I want from you is more advice, Mousey. I know you have Marlo. And you’re going to tell me where he is.”

  Mousey gently pushed Richmond’s arm off him and walked to the front of the police truck. As he went to rest his weight on the hood, Mousey lost his balance, misjudging the distance and landing harder and with his legs further out than he’d intended. He adjusted himself a little, got comfortable. “I’m not going to bullshit and bore you here, Mike. Cut to the chase: I just don’t want to give you this Marlo collar. I don’t feel like it. And you don’t have any way to make me do anything I don’t feel like doing.”