by Andrew Post
“Anyway, that’s all. I’ll let you get back to it. Bye.”
* * *
“Hi, Felix. It’s Merritt. This is some game of telephone tag we’ve got going, huh? So, I’ll admit I’m starting to get a little worried here. It’s almost nine now and you haven’t called me back. I’m sure you’re probably just busy. This whole thing we’re doing closing everybody out has got to be like keeping plates spinning, so I won’t let myself get truly worried until you say it’s time to be worried. If you call and I miss it, I’m probably just using the bathroom but just leave me a message and I’ll call you right back. Okay, talk to you later. Bye.”
* * *
“Felix. Merritt. You’re just being fucking rude now. I tried calling about fifteen minutes ago and it said your voicemail thing was full and couldn’t take any more messages but then I call this time and it lets me make one? So that tells me you have been receiving these messages but just being selective about who gets a call back.
“I didn’t want to say it, because I get putting me on the back burner while you’re handling other things might’ve been necessary before, but it’s ten thirty and I still haven’t heard back from you. There’s no way you can be that busy.
“No contact from Brenda. I have no idea whether she’s still in the Cities, this state, your state, or even this fucking planet still for all I fucking know. A little guidance. For you to touch base with me and tell me what you want me to do. That’s all I asked for. Pretty easy, I’d think. But no, you’ve got a man who could’ve been on her tail in no time but do you take advantage of that? No. You choose to gab up your rich fat cat friends instead, talking about your yachts or whatever and leave me out here in Minne-goddamn-sota with my dick in my hand no idea what the fuck you’d want me to even be doing.
“I mean, I’m sorry for flying off the handle like this but I’m also kind of not sorry at the same time. This is fucked up what you’re doing to me, plain and simple. We have no idea where she is or where she could be or where she might be going but all of that could’ve been easily avoided if you would’ve realized I could’ve still caught up to her if you would’ve just shat, gotten off the pot, and fucking helped me. But now? We’ll probably never find her.
“Of course, she wasn’t bluffing when she said she’s going to kill us both. So maybe she’s going to start with you. Maybe that’s where she is. Maybe she’s on her way to your place as we speak. Fuck, who knows, maybe it’s Brenda listening to this message right now while she warms her feet standing in your chest cavity.
“If so, hello, Brenda. Mrs. Stockton. Mrs. Brenda Stockton. You’d better send that husband of yours and your kids somewhere safe. Because getting to Boston will be no problem for me. I got the time, I got the money, and I got the ambition. That last one, you can take that shit to the bank, and how. Ambition for days, years, an eternity.
“Sorry, Brenda, but the rest of this message is for Felix’s ears only. You know, in the event that it isn’t you listening to this.
“Personally, I wouldn’t be too sad about it if she does do you, Felix. Treating people like this. Casting them aside like they mean nothing. Fuck you, Felix. This could’ve been something great but you just couldn’t see what good things I had to offer you. Goodbye forever.”
* * *
“Hey, Felix. You know all that coffee I was talking about drinking before in my other messages? It wasn’t coffee. Surprise. And it’s not booze either. I’ve jumped clear over booze.
“I forget what you called it. Mumbo Red. Mamba Scarlett. Something weird like that. Let’s just say I get the appeal now.
“Oh, Winston and my dad wanted me to pass along a hello. So, hello from them.
“Anyway, I don’t know how far the story has gone, if any other news outlets have picked it up outside Minnesota, but you may’ve seen on TV that thing about two guys being discovered who had all their blood drained out of them. Well, one of them was Chaz Knudsen, who I know we had a work order out on, but the other, Michael Olson? Before you start thinking it was your little favorite going off the rails draining people who you didn’t ask to be drained, I’ll tell you right now, it was me, I did that one.
“Whoop, looks like nutty old Merritt’s gone off script again! What do you think that zany fuck will get up to now? Nobody knows! He’s a wild card!
“So, the coffee I kept going on and on about? Yeah, it was Michael Olson’s blood I was drinking the whole time. You probably put that together already. You’re smart like that.
“You know, when you first told me about how you’d gotten into doing that, at first I was kind of like, ‘whoa, that’s messed up’, but now, here I am, having nearly drank everything I got out of Michael, sitting here in this motel room with my feet up, watching the Discovery Channel, feeling fucking fine. Didn’t even water it down. I said fuck drinking it out of a cup too. I’m going straight from the bag.
“I say fine but I’d be feeling great if you’d just fucking call me back, you asshole.
“Speaking of assholes. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear what you’d say, everybody’s got one just like everybody’s got an excuse but that wasn’t what I was going to say. What I was going to say was that there’d been this asshole staying in the room next door who came over and said I was making too much noise. Probably just spoiled the ending, referring to him in the past tense, but anyway, I get why he was pissed. I probably was stirring up quite a racket. This has a way of sneaking up on you and I’ve messed this room up pretty good. Gave it the old rock star treatment. Scratched Merritt was here into the wall over the bed with my knife.
“Anyway, yeah, so this arrogant asshole comes over and is banging on my door telling me to shut the fuck up because he’s trying to sleep. Way he said it, that he was trying to sleep not we were trying to sleep, it made me think he’s probably staying here by himself. So I take that same knife I marked my territory on the wall with and I just stick it in his neck. Yep, just like that. Just stuck it right in his neck. And he’s looking all surprised about it, like he’s gone his whole life running off at the mouth and nobody’s ever done nothing in return. Anyway, I turned the knife like a key in a lock to keep it in him and I dragged him by it into the bathroom – my bathroom, not his – and dumped him in the tub. Been treating him like a beer keg, going in for refills when I need them, straight from the tap. With all of Michael Olson gone, I’ve been squeezing what I can out of this jerk. Been using the room’s ice bucket like it’s one of those big cups you see Vikings drink out of in the movies.
“Still sticking with the Discovery Channel for the time being. I had no idea there were so many shows about Hitler and people who live in Alaska.
“Anyway, I know I talked about the odds of just running into Brenda were fairly slim, but I’m going to approach this a new way. If I find her – this is how I told myself to look at things – if I find her, that will mean it was my destiny to find her. Yeah. My destiny, her fate. My guess is she’s going after you and I know physically speaking, as the crow flies, the quickest path between two destinations may be a straight line, but in this case – her getting to you and me catching up to her – would be to get on I-94 east.
“So, that’s what I’m going to do. I should probably get to it. Head out under the cover of night before housekeeping comes knocking. As I’ve said, I’ve made quite a mess in here.
“What’d be even better is if I beat her to you. Because I’d like a word with you, Felix. About how you treat people you claim you wish were your son. If you’re still alive, I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.”
Chapter Eight
In the dream, Mel was six years old and because it was a snow day she’d gone with her uncle to a job on the other side of Erie. If she behaved and minded him and didn’t complain about being bored, he said they’d go get hot dogs and go down and park out at the waterfront afterward, watch the big freight ships move across Lake Erie for a while like g
iant metal slugs.
Before they got out of the truck to go ring the doorbell, her uncle said to look for the empty spots in the dust when they got inside. She didn’t really know what he meant by that but said she’d look for them anyway. A nice white lady answered the door and Uncle Craig introduced Mel to her and told her, “This is my niece, she’s my assistant for the day.” The nice white lady let them in and as she led them upstairs to where the bathroom she wanted remodeled would be found, Mel did as her uncle said and looked for the empty spots in the dust. And she saw them, on every bureau and end table, circles and rectangles showing where something had been placed but was now gone.
She wondered if this nice white lady wasn’t experiencing some money trouble like her parents were and was selling things or pawning them, but she noticed high on bookshelves or locked behind glass-front china cabinets there’d be all these gold clocks and cute little vases that looked like it would’ve taken a hundred years to paint such intricate pictures on them.
And that’s when Mel realized that the nice white lady hadn’t sold any of her things but just moved them so they wouldn’t be so easy to steal. Mel did not yet understand the full breadth of racism and how common it was and how somebody could smile at you and welcome you into their house and offer you money to do a job for them and still, deep down inside, hate you just because of the way you looked. She would in time come to know that, and encounter examples of it on pretty much a daily basis, but right now, at six, it was only a small bad feeling that seemed to roll away from her, too small to fully grasp or define with words quite yet but which already hurt to try to pick up, to try and know better, to understand it, even though twenty years later she still wouldn’t understand why some people decide to hate others, though trying to figure out why was something she’d give up on fairly quickly.
Mel and her uncle were left alone by the nice white lady to inspect the bathroom that she wanted remodeled because that’s what Uncle Craig did for a living. He used his tape measure, said hmm a lot, and took notes in this notebook he kept in the front pocket of his jacket, a pen always tucked behind his right ear. He looked at the bathtub and said hmm and took notes about that, then the toilet as well. Hmm. Scratch, scratch, taking notes about the medicine cabinet. He opened it and carefully moved aside the toothbrushes and toothpaste and sticks of deodorant and cough syrup and told Mel he wanted to show her something. She was too short to see so he lifted her up. She liked being picked up and carried, even though she was hearing a lot lately that she was getting too big for it. She could smell her uncle’s cologne and the cigarettes he liked to smoke but never in the truck when she was with him, not after that one time her mom got on him about it.
In the back of the medicine cabinet there was this slot that looked like a smaller version of the slot on the front of their house where the mail came in through. Her uncle asked her if she knew what that slot was for and she said no because she didn’t know what it could be for.
Her uncle set her back on the floor and got down on his hands and knees and reached under the sink with a chisel he plucked from his toolbelt on the first try without even needing to look. He popped free one of the tiles and used his flashlight to show her that behind the wood slats there was this pile of brown things inside the wall. Using the pencil from over his ear, he teased one out and let it clink to the floor and warned her not to touch it because it might be sharp.
“Men use those to shave,” he said. “They’re called razor blades. In older houses like this one, we’ll run into this sometimes. A long time ago, instead of putting the razor blades in the trash after they’d gone dull, they’d put them through that slot up there in the medicine cabinet and let them drop down inside the wall.”
“Why would they do something like that, Uncle Craig?”
“You know, I have no idea. I suppose people were just lazybones back in the day.”
“But why down inside the wall, Uncle Craig?”
When he didn’t respond, she looked at her uncle but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking past her. Mel turned around and expected the nice white lady to be standing there, mad because he’d pried a tile off her wall even though he would probably have to anyway if she wanted him to remodel her bathroom, but there was no nice white lady there.
It was a boy a few years older than her and his neck was purple and his eyes were entirely white like there were two miniature moons stuck inside his head. And behind him, Mel saw, craning her neck to look up at his face, a man was standing there with most of his head missing.
She was scared of them and realized she was dreaming. It still terrified her but she was still trapped inside herself at six years old. She tried screaming but couldn’t make any sound. She turned to look at her uncle, hoping he’d do something to make the moon-eyed boy and the man with no head go away, but her uncle was now very old and skinny and lying on the floor with all these red holes across his chest and even though they were only inches apart, as much as she tried reaching for him as he reached for her, they could not get any closer.
* * *
Much like Amber, her car was in rough shape. A bruise-colored Honda Civic with a crunchy transmission and one dead headlight. But, more important than how it looked or ran, it was unknown.
Once they were on 94 moving eastbound, Brenda kept them in the slow lane and heeded the speed limit, distrustful of every other car. She kept her gun wedged down next to her seat, within easy reach.
It felt like months had passed since she’d left Chaz Knudsen’s apartment and met Mel, but it’d only been less than eleven hours ago. Come midnight, Christmas would be only three days away.
She looked over at Mel in the passenger seat, still unconscious, mouth agape, her head against the window. Seeing her like that made Brenda think of the long road trips she, Steve, and the girls would take going out to his parents’ place and how on the way back, after playing with their cousins all day, the girls would all be lined up in the back seat, eyes closed, heads bobbing with the motion of the car. How Brenda would turn around in her seat to look back at them and hold that position of wearing that fond smile until Steve saw because, really, she was doing that for him, showing him she actually cared about the girls.
She had yet to call Steve. He was probably getting worried. Not enough to call the police or come out here and round up a search party, but he was probably glancing over at the clock a fair amount, maybe sending texts to a phone his wife had already broken hours ago, things like, Everything okay? or, Just checking in. Miss you, or The girls say hi. Little pokes, keeping his mounting worry well hidden.
She thought about Steve and girls and what they might be doing right now. Maybe they were at the house, Elf going on repeat, wrapping presents, hanging stockings. Brenda smiled at the thought of the girls dragging their father out of the house to go see real-life reindeer at the park or ice-skate out on the pond near their place. And, intruding on the happy imaginary sights of her family doing things without her, Brenda thought about how there might be a man there watching from a distance, occasionally talking into his sleeve. The cops, one of Felix’s people, it wouldn’t much matter. The result would be essentially identical.
The thought arrived in her head fully formed and it was something she knew she would have to take to the grave with her because there was no possible understanding outlet in existence. Maybe it’d be better if Felix did to them what he’d done to Mel’s uncle. Make it look like some lone wolf psycho with an automatic weapon decided to kill a bunch of people and Steve, Rebecca, Maureen, and Judy just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like she’d momentarily considered doing herself before leaving for this clusterfuck, it would be a preemptive act of mercy. Death preferable to knowing that Mama was not Mama, but for whom? For them, or for Brenda?
Her imagination gave her an image of four bodies lying in the blood-spattered powder as if they’d exhausted themselves making sn
ow angels. A snowflake falling and turning and coming to rest on the surface of a dead little girl’s open eye.
With a long straightaway now ahead of them, Brenda brought out the burner and dialed Steve. Seeing how he didn’t work, he watched a lot of news and like someone thirty years his senior he’d become privy to every worry an upstanding citizen should be aware of, chief among them scammers calling trying to dupe your credit card information out of you. So, naturally, he didn’t pick up. She left a message, a short one. Less than a minute later he called her back.
She glanced over at Mel to make sure she was still unconscious and put on the voice she used when talking with Steve, that Brenda.
As soon as he’d picked up, she said, “Hey, babe, I’m so sorry but I dropped my phone so I had to get this pay-as-you-go thing for now until I can get it fixed.”
“You had me worried,” he said, his voice sounding bland and faraway, reminding her of when he was in the hospital after his accident at work and they had him on a morphine drip.
She waited for him to say more, to ask her if everything was all right, but he didn’t, simply expressed that she’d had him worried, end of statement. She wondered if Felix had someone break in and was now standing there with a gun to her husband’s head. Brenda caught herself speeding, brought it back down to the legal seventy.
“How’re the girls?” Brenda said, calm, casual.
“They’re good. They miss you.”
“And what about you? Do you miss me?” she said. “Because I miss you.”
“What time do you think you’ll be home?” he said.
Brenda sat up straighter in the seat. Something was off.
“Steve, I know they’re probably listening to how you respond very closely right now, so I’ll keep this to simple yes or no questions. Are you and the girls okay? Have they hurt them?”
“What are you talking about?” He sounded angry, almost disgusted with her. “Brenda, I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I’m not really in the mood to play games. I asked you what time you think you’ll be getting in because I need to talk to you about something. And before you start asking me what about, I’d really prefer to not do this over the phone. You deserve better than that.”