Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  have you ever:

  walked into a roomful of people and immediately sensed that something important, maybe ugly, possibly profound, has just occurred, and have you then forced a smile onto your face as you make the rounds, trying to discern what has happened by the way the others behave, the tones of their voices, the manner in which they carry themselves, avoiding too much eye contact, but there you are, digging for clues like some second-rate detective just so you can discover what occurred while you were out of the room;

  have you ever:

  found yourself weeping for no reason, be it at the office or at home or when you find yourself stuck in traffic with nothing to do but sit there and wait for everything to start moving again, and while you wait your mind—without your knowledge or assistance—scrounges through the place where you’ve stored memories of pain, regret, sadness, despair, guilt, and digs deep until it finds a particularly terrible memory; but instead of throwing that memory into your mind, it sends only the feelings that you experienced at that moment, the ones you hoped you would never experience again; and have you ever

  wondered about the purpose of pain; and have you ever

  in dreams never spoken of, drank the sky from a silver chalice, reigning over a kingdom where there is no more sorrow, or hunger, or broken spirits; and have you ever

  felt your heart skip a beat at the sound of a child’s scream because, for just a moment, you can’t tell if it’s a scream of joy, meant to travel the world, or if it’s the scream of absolute terror because someone is doing something terrible the child, only you can’t see where it came from;

  and have you ever

  railed against the existence of God;

  or why it is that movies with happy endings always leave you cold and resentful and wishing you could reach into the film and strangle all the actors;

  have you ever

  wondered why it is that those who, for some reason, love you, are always forgiving of your mistakes, no matter how cruel; and, in the end;

  have you ever asked anyone, say, a little girl drawing chalk outlines on the street, if anything you do or say or hope for or strive toward or dream or regret ultimately matters, or is it all just some protracted, contemptuous, obscene delusion?

  Shhh; there-there; it’s not necessary for you to have an answer. But we did have to ask; after all, if there is enough pain, if there is enough grief, if there is sufficient desperation and hopelessness, and if they are focused intensely enough, with an adequate amount of belief, on a single point and at a single subject (much as the unseen observer watches from his/her/their place of safety), how could you not accept the idea that something that was not, suddenly is?

  We leave Eugene Benson for just a few moments, rising on the breeze toward an upstairs window. Looking in, we see that there is no furniture in the room. Dust covers the badly-scuffed hardwood floor. But as we continue watching, the dust is being disturbed by something unseen; it swirls in the air like snowflakes until it all twists and turns toward the same spot in the middle of the empty room; here, it becomes a small funnel-cloud that, from its behavior, is trying to drill through the floor. Instead—and it takes us a few seconds to realize this—it is trying to pull something up through the floorboards, and, soon enough, we see the semi-gelatinous substance that is leaking upward from the cracks between the boards; at first it looks like mud left on the hillside after rain, but as the funnel continues to churn and more of the mud leaks upward, it takes on the color and consistency of raw liver, all of it combining to form something like a cocoon made of spoiled pork. There is a soft snapping noise from inside the cocoon, and it begins to split apart on one side, a mouth disgorging something unpleasant, and with a series of wet, tearing sounds, a small, slick knot pushes outward. After a few more moments the knot begins to split apart, fingers uncoiling, flexing, and then clawing at the side of the cocoon, ripping away chunks of meat that fall to the floor with heavy splattering sounds.

  We turn away from the window and drift back down to Gene, who is now looking across the street where a middle-aged woman has been is watching him for who-knows-how-long, her narrowed eyes filled with suspicion.

  Gene suddenly feels embarrassed, foolish, insufficient, and inept, so he glances once more at the flowers and the picture of Leigh and whispers a farewell before walking on, eventually going back to his house where he will order a pizza for dinner, watch the DVD of his favorite movie, The Shootist, the one where John Wayne plays an ex-gunfighter dying of cancer, and when it’s over, Gene will smile at the television, reach over to the small table beside his chair, pick up the gun, shove it in his mouth, and squeeze the trigger. It will be ten days before any of the neighbors notice the stench in the air; twelve days before any of his friends become worried enough to check on him.

  Interlude: Still-Life(s) in White and Red

  With nearly all of the figures completed (there will be twenty-seven once she has finished with them) and the little girl stops with the red chalk, now worn down nearly to a nub, held tightly in her grip. Her brow furrows, creating wrinkles in her face and on her forehead that look as deep as scars, momentarily ageing her by decades. She stands and turns in the direction of the first figure (now several yards down the street), her glance tracking from left to right, examining all of the chalk outlines until she is looking down at this final form at her feet. She considers something—what, we cannot tell—nods her head, and skips a few feet away from this final figure. Looking down the gallery of her chalk ghosts, the little girl raises one arm, pointing straight out, reshaping her hand into an imaginary gun that consists of thumb and index finger. “Bang. Bang. Bang,” she whispers. Her brow relaxes, her flesh becomes smooth once again, no longer marked by ageing scars; she is only a little girl, holding nubs of chalk in each hand. She kneels down and begins drawing a new figure, different from the rest; this one—a man in his late thirties, yes, that’s it, that’s exactly right—is given much more detail than any of the others; he has a recognizable face, a knowing expression; he has clothes—work boots, khaki pants, a tee-shirt, a denim jacket, a work cap, all of them stained by machine grease from a factory floor. He is standing, full of purpose. He begins to move with confidant steps, not too fast, not too slow, just enough that one can take a look at him and know that he will not be deterred from his destination or his task. The little girl smiles at him. He smiles back at her. “Shouldn’t I be carrying something?” he asks. The little girl nods her head. A few moments later, he is holding something sleek.

  “Hold on,” says the little girl. “I gotta finish something on the last person.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Huh? Oh, geez, I don’t know.”

  “Make it a mother holding her newborn baby.”

  The little girl considers this for a moment. “I’ll have to draw it over again. You’ll have to wait.”

  “That will not be a problem.”

  “Good.”

  “That’s an impressive fire, by the way.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It would certainly make me want to come outside to watch.”

  “Well … they started it.”

  “Yes. That they did. Hey, Leigh?”

  “What?”

  “Who am I?”

  “Huh?”

  “Give me a name. Tell me the story of my life. I don’t care how much of it is left or what I never had of it to begin with, just … tell me. Tell me about me.”

  “Like they told me about me?”

  “Something like that, yes. Please?”

  “That’s fair. Okay … let me … let me think …”

  “Will it be a happy story, or a sad one?”

  “I don’t know yet. Just wait a second.”

  “I can wait. Take your time. Make it a good story, this story of my life ….”

  4. A Terrible Thing

  We turn our attention to the middle-aged woman across the street. She wears a shabby housecoat and even shabbier slippers, but this does
not stop her from coming down off her front porch and crossing over to see what that strange man was up to.

  She sees the carefully-placed flowers; she sees the photo of the little girl whose face is no longer smudged and worn down, but clear and bright. For a moment the middle-aged woman—Virginia Thompson, “Jinny” to her friends, recently laid-off from the hospital where she worked as a cafeteria cook—stares at the flowers and the photo. The little girl looks oddly familiar, yet Virginia can’t quite place her. It takes her a moment longer to realize what this means, and when the realization hits, she shakes her head, turns around, and heads back to her house where she immediately calls her best friend, Arlene, and tells her all about it.

  —I knew it must have been a terrible thing that made them move out in the middle of the night like they did.

  —But that was so long ago, wasn’t it? Are you sure it’s the same house, Jinny? Why would any of them come back? That don’t seem like such a smart thing to me.

  —Maybe he was feeling guilty and that’s why he left the flowers and the picture. Oh, Arlene, you ought to see what this little girl looked like. Poor little thing.

  —Did you call the police? I would call the police, Jinny. If he’s still nearby, he might hurt some other little girl. You never know.

  —And what am I supposed to tell the police? That I seen some strange man leave flowers and a picture on the steps of a house ain’t no one lived in for a good two years?

  —Well, you know the names of the folks who used to live there, right?

  —Hell, no! Nobody knows anybody else around here. Everyone minds their own business.

  —Don’t sound like it’s much of a neighborhood.

  —It ain’t, but the house was the right price. If Herb gets laid off from the plant, I don’t know how we’re gonna keep up with the mortgage payments, I really don’t.

  —Hey, Jinny?

  —Yeah?

  —I just had an idea about that little girl ….

  * * *

  By seven-thirty that evening, having phoned most of the people either of them could call a genuine friend, Virginia and Arlene stand on the sidewalk, facing the house where the flowers and photograph have now been joined by dozens of small lighted candles, sympathy cards, children’s toys, hand-drawn pictures, figurines of Christ and the Holy Mother, several rosaries, photographs of other dead or missing children brought there by family members. Word has spread quickly about the vigil (we smile to ourselves as we observe this night watch, somewhat dumbfounded that two or three phone calls have set into action this chain of events), and there are easily two dozen people milling around the front of the house, many of whom have never met before. A man we have never seen before (and will never see again) turns to the woman beside him.

  —I heard that Channel 10 might be sending a news van here tonight.

  —Really? God, if I’d’ve known that, I would have fixed my hair. I can’t have people seeing me on television looking like this.

  Arlene has come prepared, and walks around handing everyone a sacramental candle (they had been on sale at the religious bookstore downtown, three dozen for ten dollars, and Arlene was not one to pass up a bargain); after everyone has set flame to the wick of their candle, the crowd becomes more orderly, forming a lengthy half-circle in front of the house.

  —What was her name? someone asks.

  —Leigh, replies Virginia. I think I heard the man call her Leigh when he left the picture.

  —It must have been a terrible thing, to weigh on a man’s conscience like that.

  —Do you suppose she suffered much? asks someone else.

  And like a curved row of falling dominoes or a grade-school game of Telephone, the speculations begin running down the line and then back again:

  I hope he didn’t beat her to death, that would have been an awful way to die; think I heard something about a shooting here a couple of years ago, but I don’t remember the little girl’s name; heard she was strangled with one of her own belts; he tied her hands behind her back and hung her up by her neck in the closet and just left her to choke to death no it was the flu bet you anything it was the flu it’s just been terrible this year just a terrible thing the mother poisoned her a little bit each day y’know like in that movie with the little boy who says he can see dead people got pushed down the basement stairs and it broke her neck they both held her under the water in the tub until she drowned a divorce thing the mother had custody and the father got drunk as hell and decided that if he can’t have his kids no one can have to wonder why didn’t she scream or cry out for help bet she was terrified the whole time her last minutes on this earth were horrible being beaten like that poisoned like that hanged like that strangled like that raped and stabbed like that starved like that pushed down the stairs like that burned like that starved like that hacked up into pieces like that tortured like that what makes a person do such horrible things to a child or anyone for that matter kind of sick person has thoughts like that anyway ….

  On and on it goes, until, at last, they compare notes and decide they have their answers.

  Second Interlude: The Story, in Mosaic, of the Purposeful Man, Who is Standing

  His name was Frank Thomas and for as long as he was alive he acted like a man who was always looking back in hopes that something joyful from his past would come running forward, jump up, and piggyback him into the future, happier life. But that’s not quite how it went.

  It happened like this:

  He finished high school, did his stint in the military, and then went home to help run the farm. He found a good Christian woman to marry and started a family. His parents retired to Arizona on Social Security and passed the farm and its debts to Frank. Everything seemed to be working out just that way it was supposed to.

  One night shortly after his parents moved away, Frank remembered telling his wife as she sat at her piano, “I feel powerful, Betty. I’m a man, living in the strongest nation in the world, and I got all that goes along with that; a good home, a good wife and family, plenty of good food. If I work for it, I can have just about anything I want.”

  But that’s not quite how it went.

  As his children, Nadine and Rachael, grew up, he found them to be a burden. “It’s your fault they grow up so lazy and disrespectful,” he told Betty. He did his best to swallow his anger, but when it got the best of him, he told them all just exactly what he thought of them. Betty was a “fat cow” who “...didn’t have the backbone to stand up to her brood and teach them what was right and proper.” Nadine was a “slovenly ne’er-do-well” who, if she didn’t get better grades, would “...grow up to be trailer trash on welfare surrounded by ten screaming children.” Rachael was “sickly,” and Frank let it be known he resented the special care and expense necessary to support her. As far as he was concerned, none of them had any gratitude for the life he provided for them.

  As a young teenager, Nadine got into drugs and sex. She beat up her mother a couple of times and became useless around the farm. One day she was gone and didn’t return.

  “I’m glad she’s run off,” Frank told Betty. “I couldn’t love nobody who’d do the things that young girl did.”

  “She grew up like that because you are a heartless bastard,” Betty told him. It was the only time she’d ever stood up to him.

  The next day, as punishment, Frank sold Betty’s precious piano. He enjoyed watching her cry as it was hauled away.

  She never gave him any lip again. But she did take up with another man. Frank knew that he should have felt hurt, but he didn’t. On some level that he was never really willing to admit to himself, he didn’t blame her, but he never visited that level too often and so it was easy to ignore.

  He took to forcing himself on Betty some nights, just to see if she’d refuse him.

  She never did. Never much enjoyed having him on top of her, either, for that matter, but Frank got to shoot his wad and that was all he cared about—that, and teaching her that there was
a price for spreading your legs for another man when you were Frank Thomas’ wife.

  Eventually Betty died in a car accident on her way to one of her disgraceful, adulterous meetings. There was some question as to whether or not it was an accident; it seemed that there were no skid marks on the road near the tree she’d hit. “Have you noticed if your wife had seemed depressed lately?” one of the investigators had asked him.

  Frank stuffed his resentment down deep inside.

  So he found himself middle-aged, not as strong as he once was, and without help running the farm. Money was tight. Frank couldn’t afford to hire help. Although he’d worked hard all his life and chipped away at his father’s debts, he’d never made much of a dent. Rachael, with her mysterious seizures and the drugs she took for them, couldn’t be expected to help out much.

  The debts piled up.

  The farm started to shown signs of neglect and ruin.

  Younger debts came along to keep the older ones company.