Living Things

by Landon Houle

Wait, Marty said. Stop.

  Candy stopped. She’d eaten too much for breakfast. Sue’s strange curried eggs had turned to a hard knot in her belly. This was what she told herself. This was what she tried to believe as Marty motioned for her to come back, and as she did, after only a few seconds, exactly what she was told.

  Marty was writing something down on a sticky pad. His handwriting was terrible, partly because, Candy saw, he held his pen all wrong. She was about to tell him so when he tore off the sheet and handed it to her.

  Candy held the paper far away. Then she brought it up to her face until she could make out that it said, Twilight.

  Maybe tomorrow, Marty said.

  There was real regret in his voice, like he was sorry to say it, like he was saying he was sorry.

  Candy looked at him, the wobbly neck, the twitching face, the lips he licked to obsession. If asked, she would have said that Officer Marty was a pathetic, repulsive little man.

  Corina’s, she said. Tomorrow.

  All that afternoon, they’d worked on proofing an issue, which had taken hours longer than it should have on the sole account, according to Candy, of The Airhead’s willful ineptitude. Apparently, the reporter, who was actually just an unpaid intern from the technical college and for whom the job was intended by the school to be an exciting and beneficial learning experience, had not taken full advantage of the grammar handbooks Candy had so graciously lent, and when Candy asked why she hadn’t completed the night’s homework, the intern said, of all things, that she’d had a date, that her boyfriend had (Can you believe it?!) asked her to marry him.

  The copy teemed with splices as well as fragments and capitalization errors. Sentences bled together down the page.

  The Airhead had forgotten herself. That is, she’d forgotten who she was speaking to, and while Candy marked and slashed with the red pencil, The Airhead went on about how the boyfriend (now—imagine!—she could call him a fiancé) had ordered their favorite type of pizza and how he’d wiped cheese off her chin just before he’d gotten down on one knee and thank goodness because the waiter took their picture, and the whole restaurant clapped . . .

  And it wasn’t that Candy was ignoring her. In fact, Candy found it hard to ignore anything, and so could not typically and efficiently do more than one task at a time, and just now, after five, she was losing ground on the proofing and giving in to the scene The Airhead was bent on creating, except for the man on one knee in Candy’s mind had a triple chin and a twitching eye, and when The Airhead took a breath, Candy said, Get out!

  And while The Airhead stood gaping with just that stupid expression, Candy said, Go! Out of here! Now!

  She said some other things then, things that only The Airhead would remember later. It was a vile, vitriolic little stream that sent The Airhead scrambling around her desk, gathering up her tote bag and her water bottle, and the poor girl actually let out a little yelp when she finally closed the door behind her.

  When she was gone, Candy stood in the middle of the empty office. Her feet were planted flat on the floor. Her hands were fists at her sides, and if she felt any regret, if she had the slightest sense of misplaced aggression, she pushed it out of mind, or, rather, she pushed it far down inside herself beside the knot Candy blamed on Sue. With a military flair, she spun on her heel and marched back to her desk where she continued to proof and correct in the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil way she preferred.

  Candy took her temper from her father. This according to Sue. Candy’s own memory of her father was specific but maddeningly minimal and consisted primarily of a sawdust smell and the soft knees of slacks worn thin.

  Sue, though, remembered everything and liked most of all to regale Candy with stories about her father’s own “mood storms.”

  He’d get mad at the least little thing, and he’d stomp around, and you could nearly see the smoke coming out of his nose, Sue said. It was best just to let him go out there to the shed and hide from life for a while. He’d be better the next day. You could just see all the bad stuff running out of him.

  So Sue was right and she was wrong too because while Candy was prone to real and abiding anger, it seemed there was nothing she could do to release it. She wasn’t better the next day. It seemed that all she did was get worse. Explosions such as what befell the unsuspecting, stupidly happy Airhead that afternoon were only illusions. Any eruption only fed a deeper well of malice that had been building practically since Candy was born.

  She could feel the weight of it within her, this place where she pushed everything, and more so, she could feel the levity in others—in Sue worst of all but also in The Airhead and Marty and, Candy guessed, in Roger and Deborah, too. My boy, my boy! All of them acted and behaved with a kind of shallow irresponsibility to themselves and the world.

  Under her desk, Candy struck at her stomach with a closed fist. The pancreas was right, so the gall bladder left. A comma here. No comma there.

  Corina’s Mexican restaurant was in an older building downtown and all the buildings downtown, including the police station and the newspaper office, suffered from significant and occasionally terrifying bat infestations. Perhaps in an effort to cover the stink of guano and bats more generally, the owners and operators of Corina’s mopped the floor a dozen or more times a day with quadruple the appropriate amount of Pine Sol. Still, the place smelled like a cave and the food carried interesting flavors of dirt and chemicals of the lemon-scented ammonia variety. Sue swore the food would kill people if the hole in the atmosphere didn’t take care of everybody first.

  Candy sat in a booth working on her second basket of tortilla chips. The chips made little cuts along her gums and under her tongue, and the salsa on these cuts was so painful as to be almost medicinal. Candy ate more. She ate faster.

  She’d spent all of the previous day and, after the blowup at The Airhead, half the night working at the proofs. Now the issue was at the printer, and so they were at work on the next edition, which would feature Candy’s yet-to-be-written article about Makeisha Powell.

  Candy had a start. That is, she had some facts. When they—the coroner with help from paramedics and Marty—pulled the body from the creek, they’d found, in the girl’s pocket, a school ID with the Quinby Place address, and there, at 127, they’d found Makeisha’s grandmother, bedridden, soiled, and nearly starved to death. At some point, maybe years ago, Mrs. Powell had suffered a stroke, and the best they could tell, Makeisha had been the one taking care of Mrs. Powell ever since. The parents, like a lot of parents in Black Creek, were nowhere anybody knew.

  At Twilight Nursing Home, Mrs. Powell laid on her side and curled in on herself. Her hands were tucked to her chest, like a baby’s, and she seemed not to notice that Candy was in the room.

  Candy sat down in the chair and, after a minute, she pulled the chair closer. She stared at Mrs. Powell, and Mrs. Powell stared at a spot on the waxed tiled floor.

  Candy took in air and let it out again. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of the photograph she’d found that morning in a school yearbook. There wasn’t much to be told from it—just a girl with braids and a wide smile, and if you stared too long, as Candy had, the girl’s face disintegrated into pixels, a kind of black and white confetti.

  Still, Candy showed it to the woman, hoping it might have some effect.

  She waited, but there was no response except the slow blink that Mrs. Powell kept up like a clock, like a part of herself that worked by mechanics and nothing else.

  Your granddaughter, Candy said. Makeisha?

  Another blink. Then nothing.

  In the other room, some patients were watching Young and the Restless. Candy had seen the TV while she waited for the nurse at the front desk. Sue liked those shows, and it drove Candy crazy—the plotlines that went on for years, forever even, and just when you had it figured out, they threw in something else like a convict or a ghost that sent everything spinning in a new direction.

  On the television,
there was a sound like a gunshot, and as if it was fear that caused her to move, Candy reached out, grabbed Mrs. Powell’s hand. The fingers were cool and hard as sticks, and Candy tried to make them hold onto the photograph.

  Remember, she said, your granddaughter, Makeisha.

  She studied the old woman’s face, which was dull and void of expression, and still for a minute, a few seconds, Candy had a feeling that was equal parts plausible and unreasonable, that the woman was seeing her, that she was seeing the inside of her, and in the woman’s yellow eyes, Candy saw Sue with a handful of fire and Office Marty on one knee and before him, she saw herself, and her belly was cut, and she was pointing to the way things were. She was saying, The gall bladder left! And, as clearly as if the old woman had a dissecting needle, Candy felt a sharp prick.

  Without thought and without measure, Candy said, Please!

  It was not a word she used often, and so, from her tongue, it carried a kind of trill, and in Mrs. Powell, there was a flicker, an undeniable shade of recognition, and Mrs. Powell did not take her eyes off Candy even when the nurse came in and said, Somebody should have told you. She’s non-verbal.

  The voice startled Candy.

  She can’t talk, the nurse said.

  Because she’s non-verbal, Candy said. She glared at the nurse, but the nurse didn’t seem to notice.

  I think she’s still in there though, she said. I’ve worked here long enough to know it’s possible. Anything is.

  Candy turned back to Mrs. Powell. A line of spit ran down the woman’s chin into a bubble that very prettily popped.

  Now, at Corina’s, Candy was waiting on Marty even if she was pretending otherwise. A part of her wanted to tell him about Mrs. Powell, but she wouldn’t. Mrs. Powell she would add to the heap of things she did her best not to acknowledge, a regular stinking dump that would, too, house the vision with which Candy was just then confronted.

  See it to know it. That’s how Candy used to be and maybe in some ways, maybe in more ways than she thought, Candy hadn’t changed all that much. To see Deborah was to know her, to see her hand in Marty’s and Marty and The Boy, My Boy wearing their matching Fighting Falcon T-shirts. To see the family was to know the family and so much more, it was all Candy could do to shove her mouth full of enchiladas that tasted like dirt, like Earth, like the very world that caused Candy so much trouble and, if she were honest, pain, and she might have killed herself. She’d thought about it more than once. More than a lot of times. But if Marty was scared of his own shadow which was a shade composed not only of himself but of Deborah and My Boy and his pension and, of course, Candy, then Candy herself was terrified. It wasn't the doing—the slitting of the wrists or the tying of the noose—the procedure, that is, of suicide that scared her, but of that moment when she could do nothing else but accept what came as it came whether or not it conformed to her idea of structure. It was this very moment that, for Mrs. Powell, had expanded in such a way that it had become more than time, so that it was also a place, a dark pit without beginning or end or center from which a person could only languish and, if she was so lucky, scream.

  So what Candy might have done was never what she did. What she did was stab at the greasy pool of rice and beans at the edge of the platter, and that night, when she came home growling and hitting at her stomach, Sue said, What did I tell you? It’s all nothing but poison.

  Candy told Marty she was going to kill him. She told Marty, during the phone call she received late that night, that she planned to cut him up into little pieces and carry those pieces down to the alligators. She knew where there were some, a whole family, less than an hour away. And then, she would wrestle and kill the specific alligator, as Marty knew she was very capable of doing, and she would slice that alligator from Adam to anus and remove Marty’s dismembered and now partially digested body to see which parts of him—the brain, she was betting—disappeared first.

  This was what she told Marty. This was what she said.

  On the other end of the line, Marty let loose a great hiccupping heave of a sob, and he said he was sorry, and he said Candy had every right to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to the family of alligators or whatever she wanted, and that in some ways, he felt like somebody had done the job already. It was the girl in the creek. Seeing her there in the water, pulling her out and holding her hand. That’d been his part, to hold her hand and pull, and it was almost like she would come alive, like in the fairy stories he read to his boy and that his own mother had read to him. Like the girl would open her eyes and ask for a prince or a father, for an answer of how long she’d been sleeping.

  This stuff doesn’t happen here, Marty said in between gulps for air. This isn’t the kind of place where kids die.

  Marty blew his nose, and when he was finished and another minute had passed, he said, Hello? Candy? Are you there?

  Candy could hear him breathing through his mouth like he did when he was fast asleep, and in that space between them, in that relative silence, there was everything anyone wanted. There was in the calling out and the waiting a need so basic as to be shared by humans and animals alike, and as if in answer to some much larger question, Candy said, Yes. I’m still here.

  Good, Marty said, and then he made a sound like a laugh but one in which there was no joy, only relief. That’s good.

  Because he was going to make some changes. He’d leave Deborah. He’d make sergeant. He’d take a couple of classes at Tech. I’ll do, he said, whatever you want.

  Candy was at her vanity. She’d had to throw the frog away. The smell had gotten too bad even for her, but the book was still there. The book was still open to the diagram, and now, as Marty rattled on about all his hopes and dreams, Candy traced with her finger the workings of the frog—the strange flag of the brain and the heart which seemed, in its central location, superior to a human’s at least in terms of symmetry.

  In the mirror, above the book, Candy saw herself. She knew what it was the old woman had seen, and she knew, too, what Mrs. Powell had asked of her as if the woman had opened her mouth and spoken more clearly than Marty was now.

  Candy studied her reflection, her hair, her face, her neck. She loosened her robe, let it slip down over her broad shoulders. She put a hand over the place where her frog’s heart would be, and she told Officer Marty exactly what she wanted.

  The house at 127 Quinby Place was empty. That isn’t to say there wasn’t furniture, but somehow, even with the coffee table and the sofa lounger and the chair with the doilies on the arms, the living room and every room thereafter gave the impression of things missing.

  Hurry up, Marty said. He’d agreed to what she’d asked of him, but he didn’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.

  The kitchen was alarmingly bright, clean dishes on the drying rack. A single cup in the sink. Candy picked up this glass and held it to the light. The tap leaked regularly as a clock.

  Move it, Marty said.

  Candy looked back over her shoulder, but from this part of the house, she couldn’t see the front door where Marty stood guard.

  That morning, he’d picked Candy up from the newspaper office like they’d agreed, and he said how sorry he was and that nothing like that would happen again and that it was over between him and Deborah and that he did certain things on account of his boy and then he asked Candy what was different about her. Something, he said, is different.

  And Candy told him he was imagining things, that guilt could make a person see what wasn’t there, and this part was true and nothing like what Candy said next about being the same, about being just how she always was.

  Candy moved from the kitchen and down the hall, which was darker than any other part of the house. There were framed pictures there, mostly women from what Candy could tell, but in the shadows, all the portraits might have been the same person at different stages of her life. The same high forehead. The same sharp chin.

  The first room Candy came to had been the old woman’s. The bed wa
s unmade and still a mess from the days the old woman had spent unattended. Marty said the paramedics said it was a miracle the lady didn’t die.

  There on the grandmother’s dresser was a bud vase with the withered remains of what looked like small tree branches. The leaves had fallen around the bottom of the vase, a passing season in miniature.

  Candy went on, further down the hall. The door at the end was closed, and Candy reached out, took hold of the cold knob, and pushed.

  She’d had expectations, a collection of details she’d gleaned primarily from television shows. There would be a stereo. Posters. Dirty clothes under the bed. A drawer of stolen makeup.

  But what Candy found was as neat as every other part of the house. The bed was covered in a yellow chenille spread that was straight and folded so as to cover the pillows. The closet door was shut, and when Candy opened it, she saw that all the clothes were hung or else folded and stacked on the top shelf. At the end of the rod were several formal dresses wrapped carefully in clear plastic.

  Candy looked back down the hall to make sure this was the only other bedroom besides the grandmother’s, which it was. But the room seemed like it didn’t belong to any girl, like somebody had just stayed there.

  There was no TV, no radio, no collection of tapes or CDs. There was, though, a little desk by the window. A silver soup can of pens and pencils and a stack of school books—Algebra I, Health Today, English in the Modern World.

  Candy picked up the English book, flipped through the pages. She saw some familiar titles, but she hadn’t read those stories in what seemed like a hundred years. Things were circled and underlined. There were notes in the margins. Bub sees what Robert sees, Makeisha had written at the end of the Carver story.

  Marty was calling out to Candy.

  Just a minute, Candy said.

  With the other books was a library copy of The Hidden Lives of Wolves. It wasn’t anything for biology class. That is, there weren’t diagrams of skeletons and organs as in the book Candy had been studying. This book was more about wolf culture, community—clear color photographs of wolves running, wolves howling, wolves baring rows of sharp teeth.