Strange but True

by John Searles

  “How about this one?” he says, then clears his throat and reads: “A Russian man claims to be in possession of Hitler’s penis. Victor Vupodroz says his father was among the first troops to storm the evil dictator’s Nazi command bunker. Vupodroz said his dad snatched up the penis as a souvenir after they stripped the body of clothing, then punched and kicked it before cutting it up. He said the penis is just over two inches long. Vupodroz plans to put it on the block for twenty-two thousand dollars.”

  “Gruesome,” Gail says in a flat, emotionless voice.

  Thankfully, Bill does not read any more to her tonight. As soon as she finishes drying the last dish and returns it to the cabinet, Bill closes the newspaper and they retire to the living room to watch television. This has been their ritual for years, though for obvious reasons, Gail cannot focus tonight on the evening news, or The Odd Couple rerun, or the TV movie about a mother sent to prison in a case of mistaken identity. As she sits in her rocking chair and Bill stretches out on the lumpy plaid sofa, she looks away from the TV and stares vacantly at those wicker baskets filled with magazines on the shelf.

  After a long while of puzzling and contemplating the mess of her life, Gail finds herself thinking of a quiz she took years ago in one those magazines, How Well Do You Know Your Husband? She remembers answering every single question about Bill’s favorite meals, his favorite television shows, his favorite books, as well as the way he might act in various hypothetical situations. When she checked her answers against his, it turned out she had scored in the top category. According to the magazine, she was a woman who knew her husband inside and out. At the time, Gail actually felt proud. All these years later, she feels stupid for allowing herself to be comforted by something so positively inane. After all, she thinks, you could know what a person likes to eat, to read, to watch on TV, you could accurately predict the way he might act at a formal party or a casual get-together, and still you could never really know the true him. Life had taught her that much at least. Though the lesson came at the expense of so many tears and regrets.

  When the door to a prison cell clangs shut on the television and the movie cuts to a commercial, Gail glances over at Bill, who is sound asleep on the sofa. His lips are parted, his eyebrows raised, as though he is in the middle of a conversation. Normally, she’d wake him and they’d go off to bed. But the thought of lying next to him makes her hold back. She considers standing up, fetching her purse and car keys, walking out the door into the cold night, and driving away from all of this. She has done it before, and she can do it again. But this time someone else is involved. As much as Gail wants to simply flee, she cannot leave before figuring out Melissa Moody’s place in all of this and without making sure she will be okay. So rather than making any sudden moves, or any moves at all for that matter, Gail sits motionless in the blue light of the living room as the prison movie comes back on. She watches a grim-faced guard lead a skinny actress down a hall to a visiting room, where an equally grim-faced lawyer awaits.

  “I’ve got some bad news, Gina,” he says, his voice muffled through the glass. “Your appeal has been denied.”

  Dramatic music rises up, and Gail looks away from those pretend people and their pretend problems to the bookshelf again. Though she cannot say why, she begins thinking of those odd deaths in the pages of The Darwin Awards that Bill has read to her over the years. His fascination with those sorts of strange stories used to seem peculiar to her in the early stages of their relationship, but like everything else, she had gotten used to it over time. She recalls one story he read to her about a sailor named Dudley something or other, who survived thirty-seven days lost at sea before being rescued, only to fall asleep in his bathtub at home a week later and drown. She recalls another about an elephant trainer in India who survived being trampled by a herd, only to get hit by a Vespa outside an open-air market and die instantly.

  When she is done thinking about all those deaths, Gail rises from her chair and turns off the TV. The only light comes from the slow-burning log in the fireplace, which casts shifting shadows on the walls. The sudden absence of the TV, along with the squeak of her slippered feet on the floor, rouses Bill out of his sleep. He lifts his head from the crocheted throw pillow and squints at her. “Time for bed?”

  Because there seems to be no other choice at the moment, Gail looks down at him and says, “Afraid so.”

  He takes his time sitting up, yawning, stretching, scratching his belly. Meanwhile, Gail lifts the laundry basket from the floor and carries it to the bedroom. Before he can catch up with her, she turns on the lamp beside their bed, pulls out her nightgown, then goes to the bathroom. Beneath the vanity, there is an old TWA overnight kit that Gail got years ago when she missed a flight and was forced to sleep in an airport motel in Lexington, Kentucky. She pulls the foil pack from the pocket of her sweater and tucks it inside, where she plans to leave it until she can decide what to do. Once the pills are safely hidden away, she stands before the mirror and sees that old lady’s face staring back at her.

  How did it happen? Gail wonders. How did that girl from Lake Falls, Ohio, end up here?

  “Did you drown in there?” Bill asks, rapping his fist against the thin door.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” Gail says as she quickly sets about brushing her teeth, washing and moisturizing her face.

  When she opens the door, she finds him standing right outside in the flannel pajama bottoms and the pit-stained Fruit of the Loom T-shirt she washed for him today. If this were any other time, she might step up on her toes and give him a kiss or a playful squeeze on his butt. But Gail can’t bring herself to do any such thing. And neither does he. Instead, the two walk silently past each other in the narrow hallway—Gail on the way to the bedroom, Bill on the way to the bathroom—as a chill crawls over her body, where it will remain for hours to come.

  Back in the bedroom, Gail begins turning down the sheets but stops when she hears a car pull up out front. She goes to the window and peeks through the curtains to see Melissa Moody sitting outside in her Toyota. The snow that had been on her hood, roof, and trunk when she left this afternoon to visit that psychic in Philadelphia is gone. The longer Melissa sits there, the more questions come to Gail’s mind. She has the urge to run outside and ask her if she really thinks this baby belongs to that boy she claimed to have been dating early last summer. She has the urge to run outside and ask her if she remembers anything about those nights Bill lingered at her cottage. She has the urge to run outside and tell her to drive away from this place and never come back.

  But she does none of those things.

  When Bill’s footsteps come padding down the hall, Gail leaves the window and returns to the task of turning down the bed. As she folds the top sheet over the comforter, then fluffs the pillows, that pharmacist’s voice rings in her head, If you’d taken that pill by mistake, you wouldn’t have known what happened to you, especially if you were drinking. Once the sheets and comforter are in place and the pillows are fluffed against the oak headboard, Gail hears Melissa’s car door creak open and close outside. Her footsteps move across the yard toward her house. If Bill hears her too, he doesn’t mention it. They simply climb into bed together.

  Before turning out the light, he leans over and kisses her. The touch of his thick, chapped lips against hers breaks her heart, because she senses—no, it is more than that, she knows somehow—that this will be the last time they kiss. And the tinge of sadness Gail feels makes her hate herself all the more for mourning someone capable of doing something so despicable.

  “Sweet dreams, my dear,” Bill says.

  Gail stares at the deep lines in his forehead to avoid looking in his eyes. “Good night.”

  After he switches off the bedside lamp and the room falls into darkness, Gail listens to his breath slowing down and the sound of that plastic over the windows on the vacant house snap-snap-snapping in the wind. Soon, he falls into a fitful sleep beside her. She lies there with her hair fanned out o
n the pillow, thinking of the way she spent her day, doing laundry, then cleaning Bill’s cluttered work area, only to turn up such an unexpected mess. Her mind moves over and under and around the details once more, touching on each and every one of them—the sock, the flashlight, the pills, the call from the pharmacy. She becomes something like a blind woman making her way around an unfamiliar room, trying to get an exact picture of it all.

  The whole while she works toward this more clear understanding, the world moves quietly around Gail. Bill begins to snore. The refrigerator hums on and off in the kitchen, releasing the same pings and ticks as the engine of Melissa’s car cooling in the makeshift driveway beside the road. Next door, Melissa stretches her body out on the ratty sofa and rests a picture of Ronnie facedown on her swollen stomach. As her eyes flutter shut, she talks to him the way she often does late at night to help herself fall asleep.

  “Remember that day at the library? We went for diesel money. There was that woman at the front desk with the funny accent. I thought she was your mother, Ronnie, but then she pointed to the stacks…”

  As her words wind down to an incomprehensible mumbling, outside the wind dies off, leaving the woods around the three small houses in a perfect hush.

  Across town, five miles away in an apartment on Grant’s Passing, Janet Pornack takes her last pill of the day and gulps it down with a glass of ginger ale. As it slides slowly, painfully, down her throat, Janet glances at the telephone by the bed and wonders why Gail Erwin did not call back today. No one ever calls her anymore, and the sight of the silent phone fills her with loneliness. Finally, she gives up thinking about it or waiting for it to ring, and she lies back on the mattress, closing her eyes for sleep.

  Still farther across town, at the Chases’ large gray-stone colonial at 12 Turnber Lane, Philip is tossing and turning on the foldout sofa in the family room while his mother sleeps soundly upstairs with the help of the pills she swallowed before bed. Philip replays the recent turn of events concerning Melissa Moody and her baby, over and over in his mind. You already know that, eventually, he sits up and turns on the light. And you already know that he opens his musty Anne Sexton biography to a random page and looks down to see the lines of a poem scratched in black pen, like a message in the margin:

  The woman wonders why he murdered their love

  But the killer in him has gotten loose

  She knows she should run while there is still time

  But she pauses here

  Soon to be dragged into darkness

  Since the words have no particular resonance to him, Philip turns to another section and begins reading a chapter he’s read before about the death of Anne’s parents. After twenty minutes, he finds himself lingering over a single passage of a poem:

  I refuse to remember the dead.

  And the dead are bored with the whole thing.

  But you—you go ahead,

  go on, go on back down

  into the graveyard,

  lie down where you think their faces are;

  talk back to your old bad dreams.

  His thoughts go back to his brother and then to Missy. Again he mulls over all that happened tonight until finally, he is just too tired to think or read anymore. His arms droop like the branches of the trees outside, and the book comes to rest on his chest. His eyes shut.

  As the night passes, the starless winter sky over the small Main Line township of Radnor turns to an inky, fathomless black. The roads become empty, drained of all life. Even the highway on the outskirts of town is soundless, except for the occasional whoosh of a tractor trailer barreling past the exit ramp that leads to Radnor. And when it seems that it can’t get any darker or quieter, the first bits of sunlight break on the horizon. The light comes slowly at first, then more quickly.

  You know what’s coming next, but you don’t know all of it.

  Inside the Erwins’ small house, Gail lies awake in bed. Not once through the entire night did she come close to sleep. But with her insomnia brought the clarity she had been after, as well as this decision: she is not going to call the police and get herself or the girl tangled in an endless legal mess. No. Instead, Gail is going to see to it that Melissa moves away as soon as possible, then she will leave too.

  With that thought paramount in her mind, she rises from bed. As Bill goes on sleeping, Gail walks to the living room, where she finds a piece of plain white paper and a pen. She has had hours to draft and redraft this letter in her mind, so it comes out in one fluid rush from the second she puts the pen to the page. She tells Melissa that she is sorry, but as of the first of the month she is seven months behind on her rent. She tells her that they have been very patient and understanding due to her condition, however they cannot allow her to occupy the cottage any longer if she is not going to pay the amount agreed upon. Finally, she tells her that they have no choice but to ask her to kindly vacate the premises as soon as possible. And in closing, she tells her that they—or the truth is, Gail—regrets this more than Melissa knows.

  When she is done, Gail does not bother to read over the letter. She simply slips it in an envelope, then puts on her quilted down coat and boots before stepping outside. Her breath mists in front of her face in the early morning air as she walks toward Melissa’s cottage. Those dreadful birds, which look as large as pheasants to Gail, are perched on the dented gutters, pecking at their oily wings. The sound of her approaching footsteps sends them into the trees in a rush of flapping and squawking. When Gail reaches Melissa’s door, she bends and slides the envelope in the gap beneath before quickly turning toward home.

  Back inside, Gail tugs off her coat and boots. She walks down the hallway and is about to return to the bedroom when she catches sight of the lump of her husband’s body under the covers. She cannot bring herself to climb in there and lie beside him another second. Not one more second. Instead, Gail goes to the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee. As the machine brews and the aroma fills the air, she stands by the paned window in the kitchen door and stares out at that vacant house, then over at Melissa’s cottage, wondering how the girl will react when she finds the letter. Gail has yet to figure out exactly what she will tell Bill when Melissa inquires about it, but she trusts that the right words will come to her when the moment arises. Perhaps she will simply tell him that she decided to take charge of the matter once and for all in order to get their finances sorted out. And most important, as soon as Melissa is gone, Gail will leave too.

  When the coffee is ready, she lifts a mug from the mug tree and fills it. Gail is stirring in milk when a dull, scraping sound comes from another part of the house. She carries the coffee with her to the living room and stops short when she sees the basement door open and that yellow glow shining up at her. With one hand on her chest, Gail walks quietly to the bedroom and peers inside. The covers are pulled back. Bill is no longer there.

  That clogged feeling returns to her throat as she calls out, “Bill? Bill, where are you?”

  From the basement comes his low, crackling voice, “Down here.”

  Slowly, Gail walks to the top of the stairs, one hand still holding the steaming coffee, the other pressed to her fluttering chest. Down below, she sees his shadow, stretched and distorted on the cement floor. In a wobbly, uneven voice, she asks, “What are you doing up so early?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, I made some coffee. Why don’t you come up and have some?”

  “No thanks.” Gail sees his shadow shift and reshape before he says, “It looks like you’ve been busy down here.”

  “I cleaned a little,” Gail tells him. She takes one step into the basement to try and see him better. “What are you doing?”

  “I am waiting for you to come down here.”

  “Why?”

  He does not answer. His shadow vanishes, and Gail hears the rumble of the storm doors opening. “Bill?” She takes another step lower, but a moment later a noise comes from behind her. Gail turns to see the front door
opening. Bill steps into the house, holding the bottom of that grass green flashlight in one hand, the top in the other. “How did you—” Before she finishes the question, Gail realizes that he went outside and came around. That’s when she blurts, “Did you rape that girl? Did you get her pregnant?”

  And this is her only answer: Bill drops the flashlight and lifts his hands to push her backward into the basement. But Gail is too fast for him. She splashes her hot coffee in his face. As his arms shoot up to shield his eyes, she cracks the mug against his skull, then turns and runs down the steps. Behind her, Bill lets out a groan. When she reaches the bottom, Gail’s chest is heaving, her breath coming in shallow rasps. As fast as she can, Gail weaves between those makeshift support columns, slamming into two of them as she moves toward the open storm doors that lead out into the daylight. Two at a time, she lunges up the cracked cement stairs, but the moment she reaches the top, Bill is standing there. He is holding the garden shovel he bought yesterday and he raises it up and swings, sending Gail toppling backward down the stairs.

  Her head whacks against the cold concrete floor.

  Her limbs come to rest in twisted, unnatural positions.

  Blood pools around her small body.

  Bill stands at the top of the cellar stairs, gripping the handle of the shovel and looking at his wife below. Before going down, he turns to be sure no one has seen what just happened. The only witnesses are those beady-eyed crows and the blank face of that vacant hunting cottage with the plastic over the windows. He turns back toward the basement and lowers himself down the stairs, dragging that shovel and stopping to close the storm doors behind him. In the dull yellow light of his workbench, he sees Gail’s eyes flickering open and closed, her chest rising and falling in fast, uneven motions. She is still alive, he thinks as he wipes the sweat and coffee from his brow. Sweet Jesus, she is still alive.