by Adam Howe
“Oh … fuck you,” Tilly croaked. “Fuck you!”
There was no more fight left in her; she wasn’t sure what was left.
She turned and started limping through the house to the kitchen. Maybe the dog’s chain wouldn’t extend to the back yard? Surely she was due a small break?
She was crossing the kitchen to the rear porch—her vision was tunneled, and the room so cluttered with trash that she didn’t even see the phone—when she heard a familiar voice calling weakly from behind the closed cellar door.
Tilly paused, listening to Hingle’s cries. The bastard could shout himself hoarse for all she cared. Then she pictured the dead woman’s accusing eye and sighed. She dragged the cellar door open, sunlight spilling down the stairs like luminous paint.
When she saw him—stripped to his underwear, hanging by chains from the rafters, with what looked like a birdcage fitted over his head—the sight was so surreal that she couldn’t suppress a mad cackle of laughter.
His face was crosshatched with scratches. Ragged flaps of skin that had once been eyelids hung from his brow. His lips were gnawed away to the gums, his mouth carved into a permanent Harlequin grin; he appeared strangely delighted about his predicament. Disembodied rat heads were strewn about the bottom of the birdcage like cigar stubs, their bodies littering the floor about his feet.
His mangled features made it hard for Tilly to read his expression. But she thought he looked relieved to see her. She continued to laugh.
“What the fuck are you laughing at, cunt? Get me out of here!” His words hit her like a blow. She stopped laughing. Started closing the door. “Wait, no! I’m sorry! Please!” She closed the door on his cries— Revealing Dwight stood behind it.
28
“Fugging bish!” Dwight’s face was a flattened red pulp, his mouth a sunken crater of bloody teeth, his eyes swelling shut like a prizefighter’s. A mad dog foam sprayed from his lips. “Fugging bish, I keeeee ooooo!” Dwight hurled himself at Tilly, snatching her throat in a two-handed grip and lifting her up off her feet. He slammed her back against the door. The rotten wood splintered. The door crashed off its hinges and they stumbled onto the landing; tumbled down the stairs, end over end; landing hard on the cellar’s earthen floor.
They scrabbled in the dirt at Hingle’s feet.
Hingle rattled his chains and roared at Tilly, “Kill him! Kill that sonofabitch!”
Slumped on top of Dwight—much as his brother had been slumped over her only hours before—Tilly kneed him in the groin and staggered to her feet. Dwight grunted in pain and clutched at her ankle, unable to get a grip on her blood-slick legs. She kicked his hand away and lurched towards the stairs.
Dwight heaved himself up and bull-rushed her. The top of his skull crunched into her gut, punching the breath from her lungs. He tackled her back against the pegboard wall. Tilly slumped to the floor, sucking for air. Tools dropped from their pegs in a rain of rusted steel, crashing to the ground all around her.
Dwight stooped to pick up a hatchet, gripping it like a favorite toy as he backed up a step, and measured Tilly for the killing blow. He hefted the hatchet high above his head, backhanding the ceiling light. The bulb rocked wildly about its fixture, casting nightmare shadows through the cellar.
That backwards step was the death of Dwight—
Hingle swung himself forwards on his chains like a trapeze artist. Launching his legs from the waist, he coiled them around Dwight’s neck in a chokehold. Hacking for breath, Dwight flailed pathetically at Hingle’s legs. Hingle tightened his grip. Dwight sank to his knees before Tilly in grudging supplication.
Blindly snatching up tools, she skewered his chest like a matador spearing a bull. Knives, screwdrivers, scissors, the bladed edge of a garden trowel, the tines of a barbecue fork; whatever her hands could find. The hilts of a dozen tools jutted from Dwight like quills. Blood jetted from the wounds in a high-pressure spray. The hatchet slid from Dwight’s grip and thudded to the floor. In a flash of crystal-clear clarity, Tilly saw Dwight or Dwayne’s initials (D.R.) carved into the hatchet’s wooden handle. She snatched it from the dirt and returned it to its owner, burying the blade in Dwight’s skull, cleaving his face to the bone, blood and brain matter erupting from the wound and burbling down his front like lava.
Dwight’s body slumped lifelessly from the scissors of Hingle’s thighs.
Hingle relaxed his grip and let him crumple to the floor.
He lowered his legs and let the chains take his weight, hissing in agony as his shoulders bulged grotesquely, the bones threatening to rend the flesh and wrench his arms from the sockets.
Panting for breath, pale-faced with pain, he looked down at Tilly.
“Now …” he said, “how about you get me the fuck down from here, sis?”
The sound of Hingle’s voice snapped Tilly back to her senses.
She tore her eyes from Dwight’s butchered carcass and gazed up towards the nightmare Christ suspended above her.
“How about I go fetch the law instead?” she said.
“I just saved your ass.”
She staggered to her feet and stood in front of him.
“It’s because of you I’m even here,” she said.
He glanced about the cellar. “This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
She stared at him coldly. “I know what you had in mind.”
“Just get me down from here and we’ll call it quits.”
“Quits?” She shook her head and gave a hollow laugh.
“You have no idea,” she said, thinking of the woman upstairs.
“And if I let you go … ?” she asked him.
Sensing a glimmer of hope, he said: “You won’t see me leave, I’ll be gone so fast.”
“You promise you won’t hurt me?”
“All I want is a doctor.”
Not to mention a good plastic surgeon.
Tilly stared at him.
“Damn it—” he whined, “You got my word!”
“And a man’s only as good as his word, right?”
He chuckled weakly. Like he couldn’t believe she’d hold that against him.
Tilly thought for a moment.
She reversed the pulley suspending him from the rafters.
He crashed to the floor in a tangle of chains.
“Keys,” he wheezed. “Gimme the keys.”
Tilly hesitated, and then tossed him Dwight’s keys. Hingle unlocked his handcuffs, moaning with relief as the steel bracelets slid away from his wrists. He massaged some life back into his hands, his shoulders. His head remained imprisoned within the birdcage, drooping under its weight. He wrenched it from his head like he was removing a helmet, shrieking in pain as the cage bottom raked across the raw wound of his face. In fury, he hurled the cage away from him. The cage clattered across the cellar, headless rats rolling about inside it like furry lotto balls. He reached gingerly towards his face as if to probe his wounds. Then he seemed to think better of it, asked Tilly instead: “How … how bad is it?”
Hingle took her grim silence as an answer in itself.
He wrenched the hatchet from Dwight’s skull, wiped the blood off it, and then examined his reflection in the blade, sobbing when he saw what the rats had left of his face … his pretty face. He let the hatchet fall limply from his hands.
Tilly backed away and slumped down at the foot of the stairs to the kitchen.
She watched as Hingle crawled on hands and knees to the pile of his clothes that Dwight had tossed in the corner of the cellar. Hauling himself to his feet, he dressed with trembling hands, his movements stiff and uncoordinated, as if he were drugged or suffering concussion. He considered the smiley face tee shirt he’d looted from the LOST & FOUND box in Big Bob’s office. Unable to see a way of putting on the tee shirt without aggravating his facial wounds, Hingle tossed it aside, and just dragged on the jean jacket and buttoned it up to the throat. He noticed Tilly watching him. Grinning his lipless grin, he gave her a woozy twirl. “
How’d I look?” he croaked through his monstrous bared teeth.
Good enough to eat, Tilly hoped.
He glanced towards the bulkhead doors.
“How about giving me a head start before you call Johnny Law?”
She’d expected nothing less.
He nodded at her.
“Adios, sister.”
She watched as Hingle limped across the cellar to the bulkhead doors.
He trudged up the steps and threw the doors open, shielding his eyes and recoiling from the sun as he staggered up into the brightness of the yard—
And then Roscoe pounced and yanked him out of sight and Hingle’s scream of surprise was abruptly cut short.
Well … Tilly thought. That takes care of the dog.
29.
Tilly emerged from the house, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the sun’s blinding glare. She stepped down from the porch and began limping across the yard like a wind-up toy at the end of its spring. Crickets chirred loudly in the tall grass and weeds.
Roscoe was busily feasting on Hingle and paid her no mind. Hingle’s throat was a ragged raw wound. The dog had a paw pressed down on his chest, pinning him to the ground as it gnawed away his face. Bloody strings of flesh dangled like pizza cheese between the dog’s glistening chops and the gleaming white bone of Hingle’s exposed skull. Hingle’s arms were outstretched, and before Tilly looked away and left Roscoe to his meal, she noticed his fingers twitching, as if he was counting off the seconds before God showed mercy and allowed him to die.
She continued limping across the yard towards the battered truck with RITTER GAS & TOW on the side, Dwight’s keys in her hand, jangling at her side.
She paused to give Betsy Bug a final lingering look, and saw her haggard reflection in the splintered driver’s-side window. So long, old girl …
Tilly climbed in Dwight’s truck and slammed the door shut and was deafened by sudden silence. The truck was a junkyard-on-wheels. It smelled about as bad as she’d expected, like something had died in it, and it probably had, badly. She wiped away the grime caking the dashboard console. The dashboard clock said it was after seven. Uh-oh. Late for work. Big Bob would be pissed. He’d probably found the empty safe by now. Maybe he thought she’d split with the night’s takings and had called the cops? The thought struck Tilly as funny. Glancing down at the nametag still pinned to the breast of her blood-spattered uniform, she started rocking with what she thought was hysterical laughter, until she felt the tears streaming down her face, and she crumpled over the steering wheel and wept.
When she had no more tears left to cry, Tilly raised her head, glanced once again at the dashboard clock, and saw that close to an hour had passed. She unpinned the nametag from her breast and tossed it amongst the trash littering the footwell. Then she turned the key in the ignition and gunned the engine.
Before pulling away, she looked back towards the house, glancing up at the bedroom window above the porch. For a moment, she glimpsed the young woman gazing down at her. Then the sun glinted off the window and the apparition was gone. Tilly eased her foot down on the gas pedal, not knowing where she was going as the truck pulled away, and not looking back again.
GATOR
BAIT
1.
I fled the city: Two fingers short and sworn off dames for life.
The money I stole from the cuckold bought me a bus ticket out of town. When the ticket ran out, I kept running south, riding the rails and the thumb of my intact hand when I could, tramping by foot when I couldn’t, which is what I was doing when I came to that lonely swamp crossroads down Louisiana way.
The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.
Dense woods choked the crossroads; crickets chirred, frogs croaked and somewhere in the distance a bull gator growled for a mate. The cataract-eye of the moon glowered down through the clouds like a Cyclops swaddled in gauze. Mosquitoes swarmed around the bloody handkerchief bandaging what remained of my left hand. I might’ve swatted them, but the pain was sleeping and I was afraid to wake it.
I stopped in the middle of the crossroads, looking around at the whole lot of nothing, trying to decide which way I should walk. I fished the cuck’s hipflask from my pocket. His wife had inscribed it in ornate script:
To my darling husband Forever yours Laura
I could almost hear the irony choking her voice.
As I uncapped the flask, the stumps of my fingers throbbed, and it crossed my mind to wonder what the cuck had done to his wife. I shoved the thought away. Worrying about Laura wasn’t going to help. Booze might. I drained the dregs from the flask and then shook it above my upturned mouth trying to magic out a few more drops. I screwed the cap back on, crouched down stiffly in the middle of the crossroads, set the empty flask on its side on the blacktop, and then gave it a spin, leaving my fate to chance. When the flask stopped spinning, fate was pointing me south, and so that’s where I walked,
without any idea just how far south I was heading.
The heat should’ve been a dead giveaway.
An hour later, maybe two, about dead on my feet, my cheap cotton suit was soaked through with sweat and clinging to my body like a cheaper suit. I heard an engine approaching. Headlights speared me. I raised my good hand to shield my eyes and saw a rattletrap pickup truck rumbling my way. Hiding my bloody paw inside my jacket, I plastered a grin on my mug and stuck out my thumb.
The truck driver slowed down to take a good look at me before stopping. He had a thatch of carroty hair, prominent yellow teeth like a prairie dog, a shit-eating grin I wasn’t crazy about, and no chin. He narrowed his eyes and sized me up, struggling to decide if I was a vagrant. Glancing down at my suit, I could see his dilemma.
“You lost, mister?” Rusty said.
“Damn car crapped out,” I said, scuffing the road with my foot like I was still hopping mad about it. “You probably passed the hunk of junk a few miles back?”
Rusty shook his head slowly.
I gave a grunt of surprise he hadn’t seen my non-existent car.
“Well,” I said, “I’d be grateful for a ride someplace to arrange for a tow.”
Rusty jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Climb in back with the niggers.”
I glanced at the crew of Negro workers slumped in the truck bed. Only the whites of their eyes were visible in the darkness. I glanced back at the empty passenger seat next to Rusty. He was smirking. But I wasn’t about to complain my way out of a ride, so I said “Obliged to you,” and then climbed on the back of the truck.
The coloreds shuffled down the truck bed to make room. As the truck pulled away, I heard Rusty laughing at my expense, and decided I preferred to be riding with the help. I’d never had no beef with coloreds, had even played with one or two in the speaks that allowed that kind of thing, and those boys could play. I noticed the man slumped beside me admiring my bandaged hand. “Cut myself shaving,” I told him, with a wry smile, and he just shook his head like I was crazy.
The truck pulled away and I slumped against the slatted sides of the bed and breathed a long sigh. Since leaving the city—less than a week ago, it just felt like forever—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d stopped moving, and a wave of exhaustion washed over me. As the truck rattled along the swampy backwoods roads, the rocking motion lulled me down into sleep like a babe in the cradle.
But even in dreams there was no peace for me.
I’d answered the knock at the door of my apartment, wearing a silk robe and a cocky grin, freshly showered and shaved, and stinking of the fancy French cologne Laura had bought me. Get-‘em-in-the-mood music was playing on the gramophone in the bedroom. The satin sheets and pillowslips on the bed were scattered with pink rose petals. An ice bucket of champagne sat chilling on the nightstand. Safe to say the last person I expected to see when I opened the door was Laura’s husband.
He was a little gray sadsack with bloodhound eyes, a drooping mustache and worry lines corrugating his forehead. He wore a funeral-blac
k suit. Cobwebs of hair were pasted across his sweat-beaded baldpate. He daubed at the sweat with a handkerchief before returning it to the breast pocket of his tailored suit jacket.
He was the kind of guy you don’t give a second glance—especially when looming beside him was a rent-a-thug with a mug like a Universal monster.
The cuck sized me up with his sad puppy eyes and then nodded to the bruiser.
The ape popped me with a stiff right to the kisser. I staggered back inside the apartment, blinded by tears and snorting blood. They entered my digs and the cuck closed the door quietly and chained the lock behind them.
I started babbling, “It’s not what it looks like, I was gonna end it—”
The cuck waved away my words like a bad smell.
The ape slugged me in the guts.
I hit my knees like a penitent, retching.
The cuck said, “I do apologize for intruding on the romantic evening you had planned with my wife, Mr. Hammond. Unfortunately Laura will not be joining you tonight.” A bugsy smile teased his lips. “Or any other night.”
I lay crumpled at his feet, gasping for breath.
“Well?” the cuck said. “Aren’t you going to ask me how she is? How I’ve punished her?”
Her, who? Even if I could speak, I’ll admit it, all I was thinking about was my own ass. Hell, Laura and me, it wasn’t even serious. She was just another floozy. Practically threw herself on me. You play piano as good as me, the dames can’t wait to find out if your magic fingers can tickle the ovaries like they tinkle the ivories.
The cuck shook his head in disappointment. “As I suspected …”
He glanced around my love nest. Through the open bedroom door he saw the freshly made bed, the rose petals scattered across the sheets and pillows, the bottle of champagne on the nightstand. “Well, Mr. Hammond. You certainly know how to treat a lady.” He glanced at his ape. “Charlie—bring Mr. Hammond through to the …” His upper lip curled in a sneer, “Boudoir.”
Dragging me to my feet, the bruiser wrenched my arms behind my back and then shoved me towards the bedroom, with a kick in the keister to hurry me along. The cuck turned up the music on the gramophone. I braced myself as he reached inside his jacket. But instead of a rod, he produced a cigar and a gold plated cigar cutter. He wafted the cigar under his nose, inhaling deeply to relish the aroma, before feeding the end through the cutter’s guillotine and looking me dead in the eye. “My wife was always a music lover,” he said, “like so many other silly little girls.” He decapitated the cigar. The severed end dropped to the floor and bounced off the toes of his shiny polished shoes. I shuddered.