She was wearing denim shorts and a white tank top, her hair swept up in a single clip; wisps falling on her cheek as she folded clothes. She was a pretty girl, prettier than any cat. The basket on the floor, she bent over and stood and folded, bent over and stood again. Her shorts hung loosely and they rode up her thighs each time, revealing a little more skin. Hidden, watching, seeing the soft parts of her body; he took the hunting knife from its case. His reflection in the cold steel, he held the smooth flat side to his face. No one was around but her. No one would ever know. Treading quietly as not to alarm her he went inside the garage and up to the door which opened easily. In this room there was a sliding glass door to the deck on one side, and a café door to the house on the other side. He heard a car come up the driveway. He flattened himself against the wall as if that alone would hide him. He heard a car door slam. He heard someone say, “Debra,” and he went back to his own car the same way he had come.
Chapter 11
Debra leafed through a variety pack of legal forms, quarterly statements to the State of Ohio and the IRS, unemployment, worker’s comp, city and school. All this to keep a business going. They couldn’t afford to hire a hand, much less a crew. So Greg worked on his own from the first thing in the morning to just before dark. And that was fine because they were trying to get ahead. At least he was home at night.
Debra had the radio on, not that she could hear it. The water pump kicked on loud, straining to bleed water from the shallow well. Greg had diverted all the gutters to it, but it hadn’t rained for such a long time. A forty-dollar check in hand, she was waiting for a truckload of city water, something she’d taken for granted before she’d come here. The pump straining loud in the background, would burn up if it didn’t stop soon and it was getting on her nerves. Debra fed an unemployment form into the typewriter and lined it up just right, trying to ignore the noise. Aggravated, Debra stood straight up. “Fine!” she said to no one. She would shut down the straining pump by pulling the fuse, which would be a trial because she didn’t know which one it was.
On her way to the basement, the pump kicked off. She unclenched her hands, loosened her shoulders, and stretched her back. There was water for now, at least enough to wet her flowerpot garden. Then the truck would come and she could wash clothes and give all her plants a proper drink.
When she stepped outside she saw two groundhogs on the deck who were chewing up the yellow beans and lettuce. She’d given up on a sprawling garden for this very reason. All those weeks of digging the dirt on her hands and knees, pulling weeds, fertilizing, hoeing, plucking slugs and inch worms, and spraying for white flies—just to feed wild rabbits and groundhogs.
“Get out of there!” she yelled. The small one took off. The big one stayed. It was surprising how it seemed to be sizing her up. Prompted to look for something, a broom, a stick, she took hold of an old shovel just within reach which was odd because she didn’t know where it had come from. Its aged varnish sloughed off in her hands in a déjà vu moment of when the swing set flaked yellows and reds. “Go on, get out!” She poked it with the rusty shovel, its teeth clanking the metal blade. It stood up on its hind legs completely out of character in some declaration of dominance. She took a step back thinking to just leave it alone; and she would have, if it hadn’t dropped on all fours, bared its teeth, arched its back, and growled.
“No you’re not,” she said, fed up. “You’re not going to chase me inside. I won’t have it.” She jabbed at it with the shovel. “Get out of here . . .”
The groundhog went wild in a violent fit, biting the shovel between her and itself. The shovel smacking it—the groundhog biting, snarling, foaming. The shovel fended it off as though her hands were a conduit for some other force. Blocking. Hitting. Blocking. Hitting. The groundhog bit her shoe, her waiting to feel the pain. She smacked it full force. The animal backed off. He stood up just like he had. She could see blood. Was it her blood or its? Was her foot numbing the pain where it had bitten her? It dropped on all fours and arched its back in what she saw as round two. Then it came at her. She hit him and hit him and hit him, blood splattering all the while until he didn’t move anymore. Her insides shaking she flipped her tennis shoe off to see where he had bitten her. Rabies, she thought, what if he has rabies? Feeling like she would be sick, she saw where he had bitten the tip of her toenail, no blood, no broken skin. That’s why it didn’t hurt.
The groundhog gurgled amid its pooling blood. Time rewound to her stepfather’s own pool of blood. When would murder be justified? Surely if a creature was suffering. She would get the rifle and would do what had to be done. The groundhog lifted his head and dragged its broken body down a deck stair. Now that she knew it could move, she knew it would be gone by the time she got back with the rifle. It would hide and suffer terribly before it would die. Debra raised the shovel, getting strength behind it; feeling justified somehow, and sliced its head half-off with the sharp edge. This was too much.
She gagged over the edge of the porch. Already a turkey buzzard was circling overhead. A hot gamey scent would be an unbearable stench by noon. She had to bury it. She brushed her hair away from her face, her hands shaking, and dragged him to the field in the bloodstained shovel. Here she looked for a spot to dig a grave.
Two dragonflies spun overhead. Turkey buzzards dipped uncomfortably close as they circled. In the distance that dumb cow was grazing this whole time, swishing flies with his tail.
That night, Greg came home just before dark like he’d done all summer. Debra had been waiting for him to come home and as soon as he did, she told him, “You won’t believe what happened. One of those groundhogs threw a fit today and went after me. Right on the deck.” She told him about it biting her shoe, about her killing it. “I just hope it didn’t have rabies.”
“It didn’t hurt you. Did it?”
“I don’t think so. It didn’t draw any blood.” She stopped herself from saying too much. His face and arms were dirt crusted in dried sweat. He’d worn a hole in his jeans at his knee in the course of the day. She’d taken care of the problem. Now it was time to take care of him. That’s what a good wife would do.
“What did you kill it with? The rifle?” He started walking to the house, her next to him.
“I didn’t get the chance. All I could find was that old shovel. Where did you get that?”
“Do you mean the hoe? We don’t have a shovel.”
“Yes we do. It’s on the deck.” She guided him through the garage, through the utility room, to the deck where groundhogs had chomped lettuce and yellow beans.
No shovel. No blood stains. Only the tennis shoes she’d washed and left to dry.
“It’s here somewhere,” she said. “I left it right there. I hosed it off when I cleaned the deck, and put it back where I found it. Right there.”
She’d seen that look before. It was the look she’d seen on a mental-ward-aid where her mother was. Debra concentrated on the empty space. “Maybe I . . . .” She walked slowly toward the field, “It’s here somewhere. I’ll find it.”
Greg walked with her. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine.” Her words floated out in a hush. She was the right age for Schizophrenia to manifest, early twenties, the same age her mother was. That’s what the doctor had said. Greg knew it. She knew it. What would life be like if she couldn’t find that shovel, if she couldn’t find that grave? She walked deeper into the field, trying to retrace her steps, thinking about which direction she’d gone earlier. It seemed so long ago, and now there wasn’t any trace of it in the overgrown weeds. The neon glow of lightning bugs dotted the darkness. They tromped in circles, slapping mosquitoes, looking for anything to prove it happened. “I believe you. Let’s go back,” Greg said.
“Wait. I know where it is.”
He followed her to the broken mound of soil, proof of the burial. Yet there was no trace of a usable shovel, just an antiqued bug-riddled shovel handle, unfit to wield the weight of the ru
sty metal tool lying next to it—milkweed and thistle sprouting through its holes. The same aged varnish had sloughed off in her hands.
A cold chill mocked the humid summer night.
“. . . I made some brownies today.”
Chapter 12
Julie was here to end what had started with a jog by his house, without even knowing who he was or where to look. Kyle asked to come, asked her nice, the day that ‘Smitten’ told Julie to jog here. They watched from inside their car, Julie and Kyle, cruising through Brentwood Pines. She wondered what Smitten would do, and thought probably nothing, not right there in public. She knew what she would do, absolutely nothing, not with the temper Kyle had.
Brentwood Pines used to be a soybean field, these boxy houses jammed together in river-stone landscaping, lined in starter bushes and maple trees, a Victorian lamppost at the end of every driveway. People around here didn’t like it; they called it a plague on the rolling farmland. But Kyle was in favor of it. He picked up the contract to lay the cement. And Julie, too. She jogged on the new cement instead of gravel roads. No one would stop her from jogging here, not if she knew which road to avoid.
“Anyone look familiar?” Kyle asked, a soft tone in his voice, a side of him she mistrusted right now. He would start off this way, irritated but suppressing it. He would be nice, smiling and all. But the veins in his neck would give him away.
“I can’t believe how the men here seem to look alike,” Julie said.
Each of them quiet for the time being, his composure came and went from one minute to the next, his jaw line taunt then soft, his lips pressed then not. Tension mounting, they rode past white-washed houses, brick front houses, stained houses, a blue house, past compact cars, sedans, a white cargo van, a minivan.
“Look at you,” Kyle said flatly. “You must really think you’re something. Men tripping all over themselves.”
There was no way to respond, not with his moods changing like this.
“You had to give this guy a reason to send a letter like that.” He staggered his words as to let them sink in one at a time. Then picked up the volume, “For crying out loud. Don’t tell me you don’t know who he is.”
She chose her words carefully as not to start a screaming match. “Why would I be here if I knew who he was?” Her chest tightening, she measured her breaths just to get them all in.
“How do I know what you do all day,” He turned another corner. “How do I know you’re not whoring behind my back?” he said it like he meant it. She suddenly went back to her teenage self in that Medina cornfield so long ago when she hadn’t met his ‘sexpectations.’ She glared at him, stunned, hurt. This was all backward. He was supposed to be on her side.
“You know me better than that. You know that half those men were trying to impress other businessmen where I worked. And the other half were trying to get their secretaries drunk. Why would I want any part of that?” She stared straight ahead, out the window, reliving the gut-wrenching first date in his father’s car. Each posed at far windows, where they were now. “You know why I jog?” She grabbed hold of herself. She would out-mean him. “I like to imagine the further I run, the further I’m running away from you,” which was partly true. When Kyle came home in a manic mood, jogging was like duct tape to keep her sanity from oozing out. “I have to say though, sometimes I think you and I are friends. I won’t make that mistake again.” She could tell she upset him by the redness of his ears, and worried that she’d gone too far. His breaths in and out were heavy.
“You tell your secret admirer, if I catch him I’ll kill him.”
Julie shut up. She would be back. Not tonight but tomorrow. Not by herself. Tomorrow she would ask Debra to come.
Debra heard the farming tractor before she saw it, the ping-ping-ping of the motor. A diesel smell rose above the freshly-tarred gravel. She stopped pumping water for Otto and came to the front of the house, motioning for Julie to bring the straw in back to the lean-to. It was time to coral Otto, time to limit the greens in his diet and treat him to nothing but corn-mash. It seemed strange, Debra thought, tenderizing meat while it was still alive. The tractor was loaded down with more than enough straw to bed him down.
Julie jumped off the tractor. “How’s Otto behaving?”
“I honestly don’t see how he can poop so much.” Debra climbed in the tractor bed and rolled a bale of straw off the edge. The calico cat unexpectedly scrambled up to her and purred against her ankle. “Kitty Callie,” Debra said sweetly, rubbing its head. “Julie. Look. I can’t believe she came to me. She’s always been so skittish.” Debra sat down on the edge of the trailer, petting the mother cat for as long as it would let her. Julie hopped up on the trailer and sat next to her. Dangling her legs over the edge, her hands inside her knees, Julie shrugged innocently.
“I’ve got something to ask you. It never came up before because I wasn’t sure if you would be interested. How would you feel about jogging with me?”
“I’d like that, if you don’t mind me starting out small.” Debra stopped right there. How could she tell Julie that her lungs had been compromised in a fire? How could she tell her that her legs had been broken and ached something awful sometimes. Julie would want to know how and why and where. Debra wasn’t ready to say that much.
“You’d be surprised how fast your body adapts.”
“You think so?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Garnering a wait-and-see attitude Debra agreed. If she could be company in any sense of the word, Julie wouldn’t be dragged off and murdered, not without a witness anyway. Waist-high in bales of straw, Debra told Julie what she’d been waiting to tell her, about the groundhog. She told her about the blood and the killing, how she got sick to her stomach. Julie nodded in all the right places, shook her head just the same, yelling out once, “Holy cheese Louise.”
Debra flipped a straw bale off the trailer, chaff clinging to her clothes. “That shovel really got to me. I probably left it in the field and just forgot. I was so upset. I guess I didn’t realize how bad a shape it was in.” Now that she had said it out loud it seemed to make sense. “I probably dropped it at just the right angle, so it appeared to have weeds growing through it, like it had been there a long time.”
“It’s amazing how our minds can play tricks on us. Did you find the missing shoes?”
“It’s the strangest thing. I can’t find either one. But you know . . . I’ve been so forgetful lately. I lost a jar of mayonnaise a week ago and I still can’t find it. It’s so weird. One minute I was spreading it on a sandwich and the next minute it was completely gone. And I can’t understand how my flip-flops ended up in the freezer. Julie hadn’t nodded this time nor had she shook her head. She was splitting bales with a pitch fork, spreading straw in the lean-to; she hadn’t even looked up. Debra had taken a chance in saying all this, maybe saying things she should have kept to herself. “Here I’ve been going on. You never got to tell me what happened when you and Kyle went looking for that man last night. Was he there?”
“I’ll never know. Kyle got all pissy with me. He thinks he can make me feel bad. I let him have it.” Now it was Julie’s turn. She told Debra about her and Kyle, about their fight, how she was afraid of him sometimes because of his temper. “He’ll just start screaming and yelling and breaking things. He was so mad once he broke everything in the kitchen, the blender, the toaster, smashed a whole dish-drainer-full of dishes at the wall behind me. I left him for three days over that.”
“What made you go back?”
“He said things would change. And they did for a while.”
“Please tell me he doesn’t hit you.”
“He wouldn’t dare. He knows I’d leave him for good. The things he says, though, sometimes he won’t stop till he sees me cry . . . . I’ve never told that to anyone.”
Debra was here to run interference, going with Julie. It was before sunset. Julie had said it was the best time to jog because it was cooler then.
But it was still hot, eighty degrees or so.
Debra jogged a slow to moderate clip as far as the first stop sign, a quarter-mile-run. Julie beside her, she made herself push on, breathing heavily. This was hard. But nothing hurt so far, not her legs, not her chest, which meant her childhood injuries must have healed like doctors hoped they would. Julie did all the talking; telling a story about her car, her voice wavering in time to her steps.
“. . . I took Marie to lunch on our way to the hearing aid center, and I couldn’t figure out why my key wouldn’t unlock my car . . .” Julie was talking with such energy, breathing with such ease.
Debra said, “uh huh . . .” barely able to speak, trying to regulate her breaths. Keep going, she told herself, breathe in, breathe out, one foot in front of the other, she’d been asked to come and was glad of it, glad to be here with Julie. Keep going, she told herself.
“. . . so I went back inside the restaurant and called triple-A. It took a whole hour for them to get there. You should have seen Marie. She set herself down in one of the rocking chairs in the shade, and greeted everyone coming in and out of the restaurant. It’s funny how people take to her. She has a way . . .”
Debra focused on the next stop sign way up ahead, a stitch in her side getting worse. What was hard at first was brutal now. Where was that second wind she’d heard about? Where was that runner’s high?
And here Julie was, talking like she was serving tea, “. . . by the time the mechanic got there, Marie seemed to have gathered a crowd. The mechanic wedged a coat-hanger-thing in the door hinge. He messed up the rubber piping around the car door, but I was so relieved when he finally got it open, I didn’t care. You’re not going to believe what happened when I got inside.”
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