by Joe Hill
I descended the stairs and had a peek in the master bedroom. Dr. Rusted’s gold spectacles were still on the end table, and the counterpane bore the rumpled imprint of a big man’s body. His tasseled shoes stuck out slightly from under the bed. A framed photo of all of us—Dr. Rusted, Mrs. Rusted, Yolanda, and myself, on a trip we made to Estes Park—was faceup in the center of the bed. Maybe he’d had a sleepless night, worrying about his wife and daughter, and had dozed off with that picture of us all together cradled to his chest.
He could’ve been hugging any of the thousands of photographs he owned of Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted, but it made me almost feel like bawling that he’d picked one that included me. I never wanted to be liked by anyone so much as I wanted to be liked by Yolanda’s parents. Understand: I wasn’t just in love with her. I was in love with her family, too. It threw me at first, how often they held each other, and kissed, and laughed, and enjoyed one another, and never seemed to find fault. I’d never cared a damn about crosswords until I learned that Dr. Rusted liked them, and then I began doing them every day on my iPad. I helped Mrs. Rusted make ginger cookies just because it made me feel good to be near her and hear her muttering to herself in her lyrical island accent.
I left the throw blanket with the picture and made my way back outside. I stood just in front of the rainbow-colored banner extending from an angled flagpole bolted to one of the brick columns flanking the front steps. Gumby had retreated to the entrance of his garage, and a daughter had appeared. The daughter was maybe fourteen, willowy and bulimia thin, with sunken cheeks and circles under her eyes. She wore a tracksuit, too, black with purple piping, and the word JUICY across her butt. I wondered what kind of father let his fourteen-year-old wear that.
“You know there’s a man dead over here?” I asked.
“There’s dead folks everywhere,” he said.
“This one was murdered,” I said.
The fourteen-year-old girl twitched, tugged nervously at a silver bangle around her wrist.
“What do you mean, he was murdered? Course he was. Probably ten thousand people were murdered yesterday. Everyone who was caught outside, including a quarter of the people on this road.” He spoke calmly, without distress or much apparent interest.
“He wasn’t killed by the rain. Someone surprised him and shoved him down the stairs, and he got his neck broken. You hear anything?”
“Sure I have. People have been screaming and crying and carrying on all day. Jill and John Porter walked up the street this morning, each one of them carrying one of their shredded ten-year-old twins. The Porters were out looking for their girls all night. I prayed they’d find them, but maybe I should’ve prayed they didn’t, considering the condition the children were in. The two little girls had hidden together under an overturned wheelbarrow, but it was too rusted out to stop the nails. Their mother, Jill, was sobbing and shouting that her babies were dead until John gave her the back of his hand and shut her up. After that I decided I’d heard all the awfulness I wanted to hear, and I haven’t paid attention to any shouting or screaming ever since.” He took a lazy, disinterested look at the back of his wrist, then shifted his gaze to me once again. “It was a judgment, of course. I’m lucky my own daughter was spared. Everyone on this street let your girlfriend look after our children.”
I felt a clammy, cool feeling spread out from the nape of my neck, down my spine. “You want to elaborate on that?”
“What happened yesterday has happened before—to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he informed me. “We let your sort mingle with our sort, as if we didn’t know there would be a price to be paid. As if we hadn’t been warned. He claimed to be a man of God, that one.” Nodding to the house. “He should’ve known.”
“Dad,” said the teenage girl in a quavering, frightened voice. She’d seen the look on my face.
“Keep talking, buddy,” I said. “And you won’t have to worry about celestial retribution. You’ll get some right here on earth.”
He turned and took his daughter by the elbow and steered her away into the garage, past a gray Mercedes with a sticker saying that somewhere in Kenya a village was missing its idiot. He was walking his daughter up the step, toward the door into the house, when I called out to him again.
“Hey, sport, you got the time?”
He took another look at his naked wrist, then caught himself and shoved the hand into his pocket. He swatted his girl on the bum and urged her ahead of him into the house. Then he hesitated, glaring back at me, searching for one last insult to put me away. Nothing came to him. Quivering now, he took two last brisk steps up into his house and slammed the door behind him.
I WENT BACK INTO THE Rusteds’ house. The stillness could be felt almost like a shift in barometric pressure, as if the interior of the brick Tudor existed at a different altitude, had a unique climate of its own. Maybe Teasdale was right and henceforth emotions would register as weather, as atmospheric change. The light was silver and gray, and so was the mood. The temperature hovered a little below lonesome.
I curled up on the big king in the master bedroom, under Yolanda’s throw, holding the photo of us all together in Estes Park. I would’ve cried if I could’ve—but as I’ve said before, I’ve never been what you would call a crying woman. When my mother wept, it was a manipulation. When my father cried, it was because he was drunk and feeling sorry for himself. I never felt anything except contempt when confronted with someone in tears, until the first time I saw Yolanda weeping, and it twisted my heart. Maybe if we’d had more time, she would’ve taught me to cry. Maybe if we’d had more time together, I would’ve learned how to wash my infected parts clean in a good, healthy flow of tears.
As it was, I only curled up and dozed for a bit, and when I woke, it was raining again.
It was a soft tick-tick against the roof, not like drops of water but crisper, sharper, a kind of crackling. I left the bedroom and wandered to the open front door and peered out into it. The rain came down in a steady drizzle of shining needles, no bigger than what a tailor might use to pin up a sleeve. They bounced where they struck the flagstones and made a pretty tinkling. It was such a sweet sound that I stuck my hand out, palm up, as if to sample a warm summer shower. Youch! In an instant my palm was a flesh cactus. I admit the rain didn’t sound so pretty after that.
I plucked the quills out one at a time, over a burrito of eggs, cheese, and black beans. The Rusteds had natural gas, and the stove could be lit. It was a comfort to have a belly full of hot food. I ate in the master bedroom, right out of the cast-iron pan.
After I was done, I got some packing blankets from the garage. I carried Dr. Rusted into the bedroom and stretched him out and covered him up. I set the picture of all of us together in his arms. I thanked him then for sharing his daughter and his home with me and kissed him good night and went to sleep myself.
THE RAIN STOPPED AT ABOUT two in the morning, and when Gumby from across the street slipped into the master bedroom, I was already awake and listening for him. I didn’t move while he stepped around the body on the floor, under the packing blankets, and crept to the side of the bed. He reached for a pillow and put a knee on the edge of the mattress. He was wired, quivering with tension, legs shaking, when he drew down the blanket and pressed the pillow over the face of the sleeper.
His back was to me when I pushed aside the packing blankets and got up off the floor. But by the time I reached for the cast-iron frying pan, Gumby had realized that the person under the pillow wasn’t struggling. He yanked the pillow back and gazed raptly and blankly into Dr. Rusted’s calm, still face. Gumby had time to issue a little shriek and turn halfway around when I swung.
I was jittery and amped up myself and hit him harder than I meant to. The pan connected with a resounding bong. He went boneless, limbs flying in four different directions, head whopped to the side. It felt like I’d struck a tree trunk. I smashed his glasses, his nose, and several teeth. He went down as if he were standing on the gallows and the hangman h
ad opened the trap.
I grabbed him by one foot and dragged him into the hall. I pulled him through the door at the end of the corridor, into the two-car garage. It was three steps down, and his head struck every one. I didn’t even wince for him. Dr. Rusted’s big black Crown Vic sat in the nearest bay. I popped the trunk, scooped Gumby up, and dumped him in. I slammed the trunk on him.
It took me about ten minutes, hunting around by candlelight, to find Dr. Rusted’s battery-powered hand drill. I squeezed the trigger and punched a dozen breathing holes in the trunk. If it didn’t get too hot tomorrow, Gumby’d be all right till at least noon.
You just can’t sleep the same after belting an intruder with a frying pan, and by the time the sun came up, I was ready to go. I left through the garage, my backpack slung over one shoulder, loaded up with fresh bottles of water and a light picnic lunch. It would be dramatically satisfying to tell you I heard Gumby kicking and wailing to get out when I left, but there wasn’t a sound coming from the trunk. He might’ve been dead. I can’t swear he wasn’t.
The evening rain had scrubbed the sky bright and blue, and the day twinkled. So did the fresh downpour of nails in the road.
Gumby’s daughter was at the bottom of her driveway, staring at me with wide, frightened eyes. She was wearing the same black tracksuit with purple piping and the same silver bangle that had been around her wrist the day before. I wasn’t going to speak to her—it seemed important to avoid acknowledging her, for her safety as much as mine—but then she took a nervous step toward me and called out.
“Have you seen my father?” she asked.
I stopped in the road, nails crunching under my feet. “I did,” I told her. “But he didn’t see me. Bad luck for him.”
She withdrew a step, the fingers of one hand curling to her chest. I stalked a few more yards down the road, then couldn’t help myself and went back. The girl stiffened. I could tell she wanted to run but was stuck in place with fright. An artery beat in her slender throat.
I grabbed the bangle around her wrist and yanked it off: a silver bracelet with crescent moons stamped on it. I hung it on my own arm.
“That’s not yours,” I said. “I don’t know how you can wear it.”
“He . . . he said . . .” she gasped. Her voice was small, and her breath was rapid and shallow. “He said he paid Yolanda a thousand dollars to b-babysit over the years, and her p-parents should’ve g-given it back. That they never should’ve let s-someone l-like Yolanda—like you—watch children!” Her face twisted in an ugly sort of way when she said that last bit. “He said they owed us.”
“Your father was owed something. And I gave it to him,” I said, and I left her there.
I WENT AROUND THE PARK this time. I didn’t want to see a pile of dead penguins or smell them either.
Seventeenth Avenue borders the southern edge of City Park, and a squad from the National Guard had been deployed there to do some cleanup. A couple guys used a Humvee to drag wrecks out of the road. A few others plied push brooms across the blacktop to sweep aside the latest shimmering carpet of nails. But all of them worked in a despondent, desultory way, the way folks will when they know they’ve been assigned a pointless chore. It was like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teacup. Denver was sunk, and they knew it.
The road crew were the lucky ones, though. Some of the other soldiers had been assigned the job of bagging corpses and lining them along the curb, same as Parks & Rec used to leave bagged trash for garbage collection.
Just past where Seventeenth crosses Fillmore, there’s a handsome entrance to the park: a wall of glossy pink stone in a welcoming crescent that opens on an expanse of green as smooth as the surface of a billiard table. A couple of park benches, fashioned from steel wire, had been placed artfully to either side of the park entrance. An elderly couple had tried to squeeze in underneath one of those benches together for shelter from last night’s drizzle, but it hadn’t done them any good. The nails had gone right through the wire.
A crow had found them and was in under the bench plucking at the old lady’s face. A soldier in camo approached and bent down and yelled at the bird and clapped his hands. The crow jumped in fright and hopped out from under the bench with something in his mouth. From a few yards away, it looked like a quivering, soft-boiled egg, but as I approached, I could see it was an eyeball. The bird walked up the sidewalk with its fat, pearly prize, leaving bloody footprints behind. The soldier took three brisk steps to the curb and vomited in front of me, a hard cough followed by a wet spatter, a mess that smelled of bile and eggs.
I came up short to keep from getting any of the spray on me. The soldier, a black guy, average height, downy little mustache, heaved again, and coughed and spit. I offered him a bottle of water. He took it and swigged and spit once more. Drank again, long, slow swallows.
“Thanks,” he said. “Did you see where that bird went?”
“Why?”
“Because I think I’m going to shoot him for being a pig instead of a crow. His eyes are bigger than his stomach.”
“You mean her eyes are bigger than his stomach.”
“Ha,” he said, and shivered weakly. “I’d like to shoot something. You can’t imagine how badly I want to put a bullet somewhere it would do some good. I wish I was in with the real soldiers. There’s a fifty-fifty chance we’ll have boots on the ground in Georgia by sunup tomorrow. Shit about to go down.”
“Georgia?” I asked. “They think Charlie Daniels might’ve had something to do with all this?”
He gave me a sad smile and said, “I thought something similar when I heard. Not that Georgia. This one is in that puddle of crap between Iraq and Russia, where everything is Al-frig-i-stan and El-douche-i-stan.”
“Next to Russia, you said?”
He nodded. “I think Georgia used to be part of it. The chemists who dreamed this shit up—clouds raining nails—work for a company out there. A former U.S. company, if you can believe it. The Joint Chiefs want to strike with a dozen battalions. Biggest ground operation since D-Day.”
“You said it’s only a fifty-fifty chance?”
“The president has been on the phone with Russia to see if they’d be okay with him dropping a couple tactical warheads on the Caucasus. His stubby little fingers are itching to stab the button.”
After all I’d seen in the last forty-eight hours, the idea of thumping our enemies with a few hundred megatons of hurt should’ve given me a rush of satisfaction—but it only made me antsy. I had the nervous, fidgety sensation that there was somewhere I needed to be, something I needed to be doing; it was the way a person feels when she’s away from home and suddenly begins to worry she left a burner running on the stove. But I couldn’t for the life of me identify what it was I needed to do to ease my anxiety.
“You want a bad guy to whup, you don’t have to fly halfway around the world. I can point you to one right here in Denver.”
He gave me a weary look and said, “I can’t help you with looters. Maybe the Denver PD can take a complaint.”
“How about a murderer?” I asked. “You got time to deal with one of them?”
Some of the exhaustion left his face, and his posture improved just slightly. “What murderer?”
“I walked down from Boulder yesterday to check in on my girlfriend’s father, Dr. James Rusted. I found him dead in his front hallway. He took a tumble down the stairs and broke his neck.”
My soldier softened up a bit then, shoulders slumping. “And you know it was murder . . . how?”
“Dr. Rusted was caught out in the rain, like so many others, but he was able to get inside before he suffered anything worse than light injuries. He bandaged himself up and stretched out to rest and recover in his bedroom. I believe he was awakened by the sound of someone moving around in his daughter’s bedroom upstairs. He was so surprised he didn’t even bother to put on his glasses but went straight up to see who was there. Perhaps he thought his daughter had returned home. But when he
got up there, he found a looter. There was a confrontation. Only God and Dr. Rusted’s assailant could tell you what happened next, but I believe that in the course of the struggle Dr. Rusted toppled down the stairs and suffered the fatal injury.”
The soldier scratched the back of his head. “You don’t want to bring the National Guard into a crime scene. You want someone who knows about the art of detection.”
“There’s nothing to detect. The man who killed him is locked in the trunk of Dr. Rusted’s Crown Victoria. He visited the house last night to kill me as well, but I was ready for him and slugged him with a frying pan. He won’t suffocate—I drilled some holes in the lid of the trunk—but he might get awfully hot, so I recommend going right over there.”
When I said that, the soldier’s eyes about came out of his head. “Why’d he try to kill you, too?”
“He knew I had identified him as Dr. Rusted’s murderer. The guy in the trunk has a grudge against the entire Rusted family. Yolanda Rusted, the doctor’s daughter and my girlfriend, used to babysit this guy’s daughter. After he found out Yolanda is gay, he was horrified and demanded that the doctor refund every cent of the babysitting money he’d paid over the year. The doctor rightly refused. Well, after the rain fell, this neighbor noticed that a car was missing from the garage, assumed the house was empty, and decided it would be a good time to do some stealing and settle the bill. I’m sure he thought he was justified in looting Yolanda’s jewelry box, but the doctor had a different point of view. While they were grappling, the intruder lost his watch. Later, when I asked this neighbor if he’d heard any ruckus in the doctor’s house, I saw him looking at his bare wrist, as if to check the time.”