by Wenke, John;
Contents
The Critical List
Copyright © 2019 John Wenke. All rights reserved.
Dedication
Choke Hold
Closets
House Arrest
Mulekick
Z-Man and the Christmas Tree
A Good Samaritan Will Stop
The Jolly Season
The Decomposing Log
Young Mr. Moyen
Baby
Anchorite
The Critical List
Acknowledgements
The Critical List
John Wenke
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2019 John Wenke. All rights reserved.
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27612
All rights reserved
ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548985
ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030255
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941547
All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.
Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene
lafayetteandgreene.com
Cover images © by Mr Doomits / Shutterstock
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
To Sheila and our children—
Jacqueline, Joseph, Benjamin and Gabrie
Choke Hold
Marsha Flinders gnaws the slivered nail jutting from the jagged crescent of her left index finger. Though biting hard, she merely snips some skin. Blood seeps into the flayed cuticle.
“Ouch!”
Shoving her finger into her mouth, she stretches her neck to see around a gaggle of squawking hens—her crowd—stationed in the cluttered aisle between the small food court and Space Mania’s big attraction—a play-maze caged in netting that resembles the wire mesh restraining the leaping, hooting spider monkeys in the downtown zoo. Marsha’s eyes scour their capering cousins, these primates predisposed toward credit card bankruptcies, hate crimes, competitive eating, and bingo. They caterwaul through twisted tubes, somersault down padded inclines, and thrash in pits of multi-colored plastic balls. Like a pivoting surveillance camera, Marsha’s head rotates, but she can’t find Kenny. Her throat muscles tighten; he’s either crawling through a tube, disappearing into space dust, or being raped by a pedophilic slayer.
“Hey, Sally!” Marsha’s voice makes no dent in Space Mania’s pay-for-play din of squealing kids, screaming parents and ringing arcade bells. With her throbbing leg propped, she sits at the edge of the five-table eatery. Behind her, burgers spit on the griddle. A blender churns ice cream. A girl bickers with her friend.
“I got here first.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“I did.”
Marsha takes her finger out of her mouth and bellows, “Sally! Sally Cooble!”
One of the hens turns, smiles and bends an ear. “What is it, Marsh?”
In this gang—the mothers assembled for Sarah Hart’s sixth birthday party—all you get is one syllable: Sally is Sal; Cynthia is Cyn; Bernadette is Bern; Marsha is Marsh.
“I can’t see Kenny. Is he still there? Can you see him?”
“You just relax. We’ve all been keeping an eye on him. He’s right over there. On the flight deck. Waiting in line.”
“Really? Thanks.”
Marsha fakes a smile, plants a crutch on the sticky orange tile floor, and hoists herself on her right leg. With her left leg still propped, she peers around three laughing men. Two overweight boys are jostling Kenny out of the way. Jungle Law. In the bush, the bullies would be hyenas and Kenny a lame gazelle. Her raven eyes rend flesh, but Marsha resists the urge to swoop in like a henish harpy—a bedraggled avenger with slashing crutches in lieu of cutting claws. Now safely behind the bullies, Kenny bumps in and out of view. Marsha squints. He’s bobbing his head, but she can’t tell if he’s moving his lips.
In the mobbed command center, the kids are strafed by flashing lights. They shove one another to get a crack at the reclining seats fronting the control panel. Here a Space Ranger might steer the ship, fire laser bolts at alien spacecraft, or radio crisis reports to Earth Central. Or a tired ranger might just lie in one of five glass-encased deep-sleep space couches. The bullies scatter into two open seats, leaving Kenny next in line. He turns and gestures behind a little red-haired boy, who is pointing a remote-control device at a robot covered with blinking lights. The robot flaps his arms, takes two steps forward, two steps back, and then bows from the waist. To the left of the control window, a little girl, her hair flared with wild ringlets, snuggles to the keyboard, punches prefabricated questions into the Super Cryptillion Computer and receives prefabricated answers. His turn comes; Kenny settles into one of the captain’s chairs. He pushes some buttons, making asteroids and planets explode. Sitting next to him is Sarah Hart, a skinny blond with cropped hair and a pouting face. She has both hands on a Nuclear Kill Laser Bazooka.
With neck aching, Marsha plops back, exhausted, her temples pulsing. The back of her neck burns like heated coils. Her throat growls. Squirming in the wobbly pink molded seat, her ears tortured by the sonic percussion—that howitzer whiffing—blasting from the Death-to-Aliens videogame, she wiggles her behind and steadies the fiberglass cast squeezing her swollen left ankle. It rests on a blue chair with uneven legs. Her right arm straddles a rickety table. No sooner does she settle into place than the blue chair clacks and sends her heel skating. A razor-sharp pain slices her leg. A few seconds pass before the rippling pain settles into the usual throb. With feathery fingers, she rattles the plastic tube in her shirt pocket. Not forty minutes ago, two hours too soon, she doubled her dose and now she wants more.
Behind her the Death-to-Aliens box whoops. Frenzied wonking booms like sixteen spastic tubas. A human voice barges in.
“YAHYAHYAHYAHYAH!”
Marsha jolts upright. Her ankle skitters, jazzed with a thousand volts. Her breath sucks in. She needs to kill that kid, or maybe just chop off his hands and tongue.
“YAHYAHYAHYAH!”
As Marsha cranks her head around, little needles prick the nerves running from ankle to brain. A string bean boy of about thirteen jumps up and down—“YAHYAHYAHYAH!” On his forehead, a boil flares. Pimples dot his throat.
Marsha reins in her rage and tries the civil approach. She sounds like her mother.
“Young man! Excuse me, please. I’d like a word with you.”
The boy still jumps and screams. From the red seat beside her, Marsha picks up a napkin dripping with mustard, crumples it, and pops the boy in the head. “Yo, punk!”
A dab of mustard clashes with splayed purple dye.
Boil Boy
turns and stops screaming. He scrunches his nose like a spider monkey lost in spider monkey thought, puzzled by the startling sight of a woman near thirty scowling—and now shouting—at him from the other side of the mesh.
“Keep the racket down, punk! You’re giving me a headache. You know what a headache is? I’ll come over and give you one.”
Marsha shakes her crutch.
The twitching vein in Boil Boy’s neck reminds Marsha of what happens to Bill when he’s about to lose it—the same vein, the same jiggle. But Boil Boy doesn’t let go. His mouth sags into an oval, all shocked to hell that some bitch is calling him down, his mind on seven-second delay, all gummed up, a churning jumble of junk, like what the fuck? Did that bitch just give me some shit?
“You talkin’ to me?”
Marsha laughs. The punk filched a movie line. Where’s it from? Some tough guy talking tough to make himself sound tougher. Taxi Driver. Mohawk gunner man mowing down the scum.
“I sure am, punk. Look at me!” She’s channeling Chili Palmer, even puffs her cheeks, blowfish style, to affect Travolta’s chubbed-out face. “I’m tellin’ you to keep your voice down. And if I have to tell you again, I’ll wipe the floor with you.”
“Fuck you!” Boil Boy points a finger at her face and pulls the trigger. “Know what I mean? I mean, fuuuuuck you!”
Marsha can’t believe it when this big hand grabs Boil Boy by the throat, lifts him straight off the floor, and throws him an easy four feet. Throws him right through the air. It’s like something you’d see in a cartoon. Boil Boy hits the wall. The popcorn maker wobbles. White puffy mounds tumble into little heaps. But Boil Boy doesn’t bounce. He slides to his haunches and screams.
“Hey, Da-ad! What ya doin’? Tryin’ to kill me?”
“Shut up!”
The punk’s old man is laughing, stroking his chin, waving his left hand, inviting the kid to fight. The guy stands all of six-five with slicked-back graying hair, a former pumper turning to suet. His round face is red and beery with flabby Fred Flintstone cheeks and take-me-to-your-leader brows. A new moon scar runs from his left ear to the edge of his mouth. He gives Marsha a mouth-breathing smile and turns to the boy, now sliding up the wall, cowering, his head bent sideways and eyes bulging.
“Have a little couth when somebody asks you to shut up! Don’t you see this pretty lady’s got a problem? Now get the hell away before I slap you one.”
“But Da-ad! I won two games. Two games!”
The old man boxes the air and steps toward his son. “Get your ass out of here!”
Boil Boy squirms to full height and bolts.
Seconds later, the guy sits on the red chair. When his knee grazes hers, she moves it. His knee follows and knocks it. He’s the hunter. She’s his meat.
Yesterday, Marsha left her wedding ring on the deck in a stinking tuna fish can she set atop Bill’s clothes and his pathetic pile of movables—an Indian River High School yearbook, seven Elmore Leonard paperbacks, a five-string electric guitar and a box of heavy metal CDs. With Marsha directing, an ebullient Kenny had dumped Bill’s things out of the upstairs window. As of this morning, he hadn’t come back to get more of the message. Thursday night, after she had told Kenny to call 911, Bill banged out of the house. While she talked to the dispatcher, he revved his heap car—all boom, grumbles and explosive farts—and roared away. Marsha didn’t want Bill to die, exactly, just disappear, end the story, not leave it like it is now—everything suspended, her throat tight, almost strangled, with no wedding ring and a large hunter to fend off, worried that Bill might have read the kitchen calendar and come slinking into the play place, all hangdog and sorry and wondering what she said to the cops. Then she’d have the problem of getting rid of him all over again.
But there weren’t any cops that night, only the paramedics. In less than seven minutes they had made the run east on Route 50 from Peninsula Regional Medical Center.
At the bottom of the steps, naked beneath her clutch of blankets, Marsha watched Meg, a butch-looking woman who turned out to be a grandmother, use gentle hands and slide a board beneath her crooked ankle.
“How’d ya fall?”
“My husband and I had an argument. When I was stomping down the steps to sleep on the couch, I tripped over something.” She looked at Kenny. He was in his Power Rangers pajamas, crying, holding Rufus, his Teddy Bear.
“She fell over Rufus. I left him on the stairs. It was an accident.” Kenny looked squarely at Meg. “It wasn’t Daddy’s fault. He tried to catch her, but she fell through his arms.”
Meg rolled her eyes at Fulton, a young black guy with a shaved head and thin mustache. He was crouching near the stretcher, ready to slide a big polished board under her body as soon as the ankle was stabilized.
“Your husband?” he said, clearing his throat, his nose snuffling like he smelled something bad. “Did he, like, give you a little push and then try to catch you?”
Marsha’s ankle tilted. Her body spasmed.
“No, Bill stayed upstairs. I came down. I tripped. He’s basically a coward and doesn’t have the guts to push me.” She smiled and shivered. “He hates me and Kenny.”
“Marsha,” Meg said. “We have shelters, if you think you’re suffering abuse. Good places, too. Safe. I can put you through to my friend Nell. She’s with the Life Crisis Center up in Seaford. It’ll be discrete.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s other stuff.”
“Well,” Fulton huffed,” if he didn’t do this, then where is the man? He picked a bad time to take a fade.”
“I told him to leave forever, and he left.”
Bill had thought it was funny—Marsha naked at the bottom of the steps with a busted ankle. He’d said, “Well, I guess there’s a God after all.”
She’d screamed, “If you don’t go away, I’ll tell Daddy to kill you. I’ll tell him what you’ve been doing to me and he’ll either kill you himself or have one of his friends kill you. He knows how to do it, so he won’t get caught.”
Bill had blanched, his weasel eyes flashing panic. He was afraid of her father. Before going to Vietnam, her father had ridden with the Pack Rats, a cycle gang from Newark, Delaware. In the war he was a grunt, all snout and claws, weed and skag. After two tours, he came home strung out. He hit bottom and did a month in jail for aggravated assault, but then he got straight and split with the Pack. After Marsha was born, he married her mother and worked as an auto mechanic for his father-in-law. Bart Mason now owned Walker Exxon on Route 13 in Harrington, Delaware, and made big bucks towing cars for AAA, but he’ll occasionally dusted off his chopper and ran down to Dewey Beach with a few old guys from the Pack, the lifers.
Meg had her ankle and leg taped to the board.
“Fulton, time to lend a hand. Gentle does it.”
Fulton slipped both hands under her thighs and Meg lifted under her arms, blanket and all. They slid her on to the big board. Within seconds, the paramedics set it on the stretcher.
“Why am I so cold? I’m all shaky.”
“Shock, dear,” Meg said. “It’s normal.”
Fulton cleared his throat.
“Is there anybody we can call? To meet us at the ER I mean, they might need to put you under to set the bones. Is there somebody who can take care of the boy? He can ride with us all right, but he shouldn’t just hang there. We can leave a note here for his daddy. He might come back.”
“He’s not my daddy,” Kenny squeaked. “He’s only my stepfather. Daddy’s over there.” Kenny pointed to the foyer. “He says he wants to help push Mommy to the ambulance.”
Marsha was sweating and shivering, She was about to scream.
“Six months ago, my Sam was eating lunch while driving between open houses. He always ate too fast. Somehow, a cheeseburger got caught in his throat and he choked to death. The car crashed into a pole over near St. Francis de Sa
les church. Last month, I went crazy and married Bill. I dated him back at Indian River. Since then, Kenny talks to his father.” Marsha shrugged and shivered. “Maybe he does.”
Fulton studied the ceiling and cracked his knuckles. Meg licked her lips and nodded. She reached over, grabbed Kenny by the arm and squashed him to her side.
“You’re a lucky little boy. My daddy’s been gone five years, and I’d give anything to talk to him.”
Fulton cleared his throat. “Hey, we need to split. That ankle needs work. If you don’t want Bill involved, can we leave the boy at a neighbor’s?”
“No! I’m going,” Kenny screamed. “I’m going. I’m going.” He leaped and clamped his arms around Marsha’s neck. He stared at the foyer and screamed. “Tell them to let me go!” He paused. “Daddy says you have to let me go.”
Marsha pushed him away.
“All right already, just get the phone. I’ll call grandma and grandpop.” She looked at the paramedics. “They’re forty miles from here, but they’ll come right away. He’ll be good.”
Boil Boy’s dad knocks her knee and pats it over and over.
With a disgusted grunt, Marsha lifts her right leg and tries to swing it over her cast, but on the slippery seat she tilts in the guy’s direction. To stop herself, she plants her right foot, scrunches up, and jerks the entire chair six inches to the left. A canyon of air opens. He scoots his knee across the great divide and pats her knee again and again.
“Just relax,” he says. “I can see you’re stressed. That kid of mine’ll do it to anybody. He acts like he was raised in a hog pen. No effing manners. By the way, my name is Jim, but my friends call me Duff, short for Duffy.”
He stops patting her knee and wants to shake. Marsha ignores his paw, inhales deeply, and blows out slowly. Of late, the pressing presence of men in heat has been making her sick. She wonders if she’s turning into one of those New Virgin icicles her mother told her she saw on Oprah. Sex aversion. And why not? Every time she shuts her eyes, Bill’s hairy ass looms like a mutant face on a painted fun-house balloon.