by Ray Garton
"Leooo!"
Roger dashed back through the Munch Room and spotted Leo's legs sticking out of the bathroom door, jerking.
He was curled on the floor, clutching his chest, pain shattering his red, sweating face with countless lines and wrinkles. He was groaning, writhing miserably, wheezing for air, and as Roger knelt beside him, Leo vomited onto the concrete floor.
Sondra pressed herself into the corner, hugging her books, her face ashen.
"Call an ambulance," Roger said in a thick voice.
She didn't move.
"Go now!"
Betty passed her on the way in, crying, "Leo! God, oh, Leo, oh—"
"Betty, see if there's a doctor out front, somebody who knows what to do. I think it's his heart."
Her hoarse cry faded as she hurried out.
Leo's face was darkening as he struggled for air. He vomited again with a long, agonized groan.
Roger had never felt so helpless, so useless. Tears burned his eyes as he watched Leo's body writhe. "Leo, oh, Leo, just...if you could just..." He did not know what to say.
Leo suddenly clutched Roger's shirt with a meaty hand and pulled him closer, sucking air to speak. His words were wet and garbled.
"What...is...she?"
"I don't...who?"
"Son...dra."
Roger saw more than pain in Leo's face, in the way his mouth stayed open and his tongue darted around, in the way his eyebrows rose high above his bulging eyes. He saw fear. "What...what about Son—" Leo wouldn't let him finish.
"I saw...her. I-I-I came in and...and...she was...she was—"
Leo's big body stiffened and he cried out in pain, tearing Roger's shirt with his fingers.
"What...is she?" he gasped.
Leo released a long sigh that seemed to come from the deepest part of his body. His hand relaxed against Roger's chest.
The room filled with the smell of bodily waste as Leo's hand slapped to the floor.
11.
Roger got no sleep for the next twenty-four hours.
Betty crumbled when she returned to the restroom and found Leo dead. She was taken to the hospital at the request of her family doctor, who rushed to the deli when he heard.
Roger stayed behind to take care of things at the deli. Fortunately, the girls knew what they were doing and needed little help because he was not up to supervising. He knew Leo kept a bottle of scotch in a box under the back room sink. After things had calmed down a bit, he had a couple of drinks to warm the cold trembling in his limbs.
When he went out front, he found Sondra sitting at the table by the front window, staring out at Main Street. Roger quietly seated himself across from her.
"Would you like to go home, Sondra?"
"My cousin is coming to get me during her next break." She was silently crying.
"Are you okay? Can I get you something?"
"No, I'm okay."
He chewed his lip a moment, debating his next question.
"Tell me, Sondra...what happened in there?"
She took a deep breath and said, "He...he came in and...he grabbed his chest and...fell over and...and..."
"Did something startle him? Were you talking when it happened?"
She stared out the window a long time, then shook her head, wiping away a tear.
What...is she?
Leo was in a lot of pain, he thought. He was probably hallucinating.
Another tear tumbled down her cheek as she whispered, "I didn't do anything."
"There was nothing any of us could do, Sondra. It was a bad one. It took him—"
Roger stopped when he noticed she was wringing her hands on the table, squeezing until her knuckles paled. Pearls of sweat clung to her forehead and her lips were a tense, straight line.
She had not meant that she was sorry she didn't do anything to save Leo from his heart attack—she was denying that she had done anything to cause it. And she was making the denial for no good reason that Roger could see.
What...is she?
"Well," he said, looking at her differently now, curious about the guilt she was failing to hide, "remember what I said about bad things happening to good people? This is one of them. But Leo wouldn't want us to spend too much time crying over him." Roger stood. "He'd want us to keep the boxes stacked and the slicer clean."
And he'd want us to get good and drunk, he thought.
The bell over the door sounded and a small, weary-looking woman came in wearing a white rectangular name tag on her pink-and-white striped smock. She smelled slightly of medicine and disinfectant, like a doctor's office. Her brown hair was pulled back snugly into a ponytail. Large brown eyes were set deep beneath a worried brow. Her cheekbones were like blades beneath her pale skin. She clutched her purse before her in both hands.
"Ready to go, Sondra?" she asked in a small voice, ignoring Roger.
He saw in Annie the same fear he saw in Sondra and found it fascinating.
Sondra left the table and went to the door. Roger was not sure if he'd heard her whisper "Goodbye" or if it was just a soft exhalation.
"Sorry about your loss," Annie muttered, leaving with Sondra.
Roger watched them through the window for a moment. Sondra's shoulders were tense and a bit hunched, as if she were about to close in on herself.
Roger thought, What could she have done in that bathroom?
* * * *
In the following days, Roger helped Betty arrange for Leo's cremation. She refused to hold any kind of ceremony, claiming that Leo would hate to be the reason for any man to have to put on a suit and tie. Instead, she held an informal gathering at her house the following Tuesday.
DiMarco's Deli had been opened in St. Helena by Leo's grandfather seventy-five years ago. The DiMarcos were a prominent family in the area and Betty received visitors from all over the Valley.
Roger spent that day at the deli. Debi, the cashier, showed him how to clean the new slicer and change the filter on the new coffee maker. They were new to him, anyway.
Sondra came in late that day and said little. Whenever Roger spoke to her, she acted as if she did not hear him and hurried away.
Betty had given him the key to lock up at the end of the day, but after everyone had gone, Roger sat in the Munch Room listening to the radio, sipping scotch and smoking while he stared at his blank-paged notebook.
An hour later, Betty came in the back door and walked unsteadily to his table, smiling.
"Jesus, I've never had so many people in that house at one time," she said, slurring her words.
"Did it go well?"
She lit a cigarette and nodded. "Everybody seemed...comfortable. You know? Leo would have liked it. Everybody was...well, drunk is what everybody was. Me, too, I guess." Her smile turned downward and tears began to fall. "Roger, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I think I...want to stay this way for a while. Drunk. You know? I was wondering if you'd mind...well, kinda taking care of things here for a few days? Or...weeks. I don't know how long. Just for a while, Roger, I promise."
"Sure, Betty. I don't know if I'll be any good at it, but I'll do my best."
"Oh, you'll be fine. I don't know about me." She laughed as she cried, putting out her cigarette and standing.
"Can I drive you home?"
"No, I'd like to walk. Or stagger, as the case may be."
Roger imagined Benny Kent's torn and bloody body lying in a cold, muddy ditch—
I don't think he ever really jogged.
—and became uncomfortable with the idea of Betty walking alone after dark.
He drove her home.
12.
Roger had met Denise in Los Angeles.
When he arrived there, he moved into an apartment with Tony Gavin, an ex-Adventist he had known for years. Tony constructed sets for movies and television shows and shared Roger's feelings about the Seventh-day Adventist church.
The week Roger moved in, Denis
e Long moved in two doors down. She was a speech therapist from Colorado. And a Seventh-day Adventist. Roger didn't discover that until their third date. By then, it was too late. They got serious fast and on that night, when Denise made a joke about her Adventist upbringing while they were lying tangled half-naked on the sofa, it did not seem very important. She knew about his writing. He decided if it disturbed her, she would have mentioned it already. She was probably a lax, back-slidden Adventist.
He was right. She rarely went to church, was extremely liberal in her observation of the sabbath, and she ate pork, seafood, wore jewelry, danced, and went to movies. And she had nothing against living together before marriage, a topic she brought up very early.
Three months after they moved in together, Roger announced their engagement to his parents and sister, as well as to Betty and Leo. Shortly after that, Denise read his book in progress in bed one night. She did not talk about it until a week later.
During that week, something changed between them. Denise seemed preoccupied and frowned a lot. Sometimes Roger would find her staring at him as if he were a total stranger. He thought little of it. He was happy for the first time in a long while. He was in love and his writing was going beautifully. The pain that had made him so miserable for a while had not reared its ugly head in months. He decided Denise was just buried in her work, maybe not getting enough sleep. The possibility of it all going sour seemed so remote that it did not cross his mind.
Until he came into the bedroom one night to find Denise reading a volume of Testimonies by Ellen White.
"Roger, why do you write what you write?" she asked.
He took his time replying, trying to give her a clear explanation for his interests in crime and the macabre. When he was done answering her question, he said, "Why?"
She hesitantly told him that his novel had disturbed her deeply, that she had shared her feelings about it with a friend.
"A...pastor," she said. "From Glendale. He's heard of you. Lots of people have heard of you, it seems. And none of what they've heard is good."
As Roger tried to decide where to begin his explanation of his reputation, she asked, "Are you always going to write this kind of stuff?"
His stomach sank as he looked at her. He saw no point in responding.
"Because if you are," she said, "I can't stay with you."
They did not go to bed that night. They stayed up talking, even though he knew, deep down inside, that it was pointless. Their conversation went in circles as they moved from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room and back to the bedroom, Denise saying that, even in her disinterested, back-slidden spiritual state, she could not justify his work, could not understand how a person with is upbringing could use a God-given gift toward such dark and unpleasant ends.
It was the same thing he'd heard from Marjie and Bill, and finally, he reached a point in the conversation when he knew he couldn't fight it. He was Sisyphus and the boulder was...everyone he knew. He stopped arguing and started packing. His things were back in Tony's apartment the next day.
But it wasn't that easy. She only lived two doors down. He knew when she walked by the door because he recognized her footsteps in the tile corridor. He saw her car in the parking lot. Sometimes he thought he could smell a faint whiff of her perfume.
Roger began to look for another place to live. He couldn't really afford it, but he had a royalty check coming. He found an apartment in North Hollywood. On the evening he was moving his last few boxes of things out of Tony's apartment, he got a phone call.
"We wanted to wish you luck in your new apartment," a man said.
"Who is this?"
"Because you're gonna need it...devil worshiper."
Although his new number was unlisted, Roger began receiving the calls at his apartment after he moved in.
His tires were slashed again, all four this time. The following week, someone painted a red cross on the hood of his car.
He decided not to get a pet.
* * * *
Roger drove nightly to Tiny Naylor's in Studio city where he spent hours writing over coffee, sometimes with an omelette or a grilled cheese sandwich. He couldn't spend much time in his apartment; the clamber from Tiny's kitchen and the chatter of the patrons and waitresses were comforting and preferable to the confinement of his apartment.
He got to know several other writers who frequented the coffee shop for the same reasons. One was a screenwriter who interested Roger in writing for the movies and even arranged a couple of meetings so Roger could pitch some ideas. Neither meeting was successful, but it was good experience and gave Roger the feeling that he was doing something.
The pain returned with a vengeance and brought with it horrifying nightmares. Roger remembered little of what happened in them except for two things: Looking at his hands and seeing, instead, hideous blood-soaked claws, and the burning sensation of his skin changing its texture as it moved over his muscles and bones.
He began to renew his relationship with alcohol, which he had neglected during his months with Denise.
When the calls increased in spite of the fact that he had changed his number, he spent more and more time at Tiny's, never looking forward to going home.
One morning, Roger awoke to find his apartment door open a crack. The lock had been broken during the night and the contents of his open closet were scattered on the floor. With his head pounding from a hangover, Roger went to the closet and fell against the wall suddenly, afraid he would be sick.
His clothes were splattered with blood—clots of it clung to shirt sleeves and had dribbled into small puddles on the floor.
But it was not blood. It was red paint.
All but the dirty clothes in the hamper were ruined.
As he stared in disbelief at the mess, the phone rang.
"Most people have skeletons in their closet," a man said. "You've got blood in yours. And we want you to know...that we know."
Roger hung up.
Later that day, he bought new locks and an answering machine.
From then on, he went out only to buy groceries or go to the post office. Even then, he tried to make his errands as brief as possible. Sometimes he got the unshakable feeling that people were staring at him, maybe even whispering about him as he passed. The pain in his gut became a companion that clawed his insides at the most unexpected moments, doubling him over, sometimes sending him retching to the nearest bathroom. Sometimes he lay in bed waiting for the pain, afraid of it.
Tony came over one afternoon and pounded relentlessly on the door until Roger let him in. Tony looked around the messy apartment and stared at Roger like a stranger, muttering, "Shit, man, what's wrong?"
Roger tried to smile. "Caught me on a bad day, I guess."
"Bad day my ass. You need help."
Tony insisted that Roger see a therapist and, reluctantly, Roger agreed.
Her name was Dr. Yee—"But please call me Laurie."—a soft-spoken Asian woman in her thirties whose interest turned to confused shock as Roger told her of the harassment and threats he'd been receiving.
Shortly before the end of their first session, she frowned and said, "Tell me more about the pain in your abdomen."
"Well, it has no pattern that I can see, it's not brought on by any food or—"
"Stress? Anxiety?"
"Maybe, but I'm not sure."
"Tell me again what it feels like."
"Like...like a claw scraping me inside."
"Picture the claw in your mind and describe it to me."
"It...it has long, bony fingers...knobby joints...coarse, leathery skin and...and..." He stopped, afraid that talking about it would stir it up, bring it to life. "Razor-sharp talons are growing out of the ends of its fingers."
"Is it always there?"
"Well, it's like it...curls up in a ball and just...waits."
"For what?"
"I don't know."
"What is
it trying to do, Roger?"
"Well, it...Jesus, this sounds crazy."
"Go on. Don't worry about how it sounds."
"Sometimes it feels like it's...trying to get out. Like it wants to tear right through my belly and...get out."
He saw Laurie again that week and she continued asking him about the pain. After searching his face for a long, thoughtful moment, she said, "What is it about yourself that you're afraid of, Roger?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Look at the way you're sitting. Arms folded in your lap, hunched forward, like you're covering something up. Or...holding something in."
"I don't understand."
"What do your Adventist friends think of you now, Roger?"
"They think I'm...evil. That I'm some kind of monster."
"Do you agree?"
"Of course not."
"But Roger, you were raised to believe that all of the things you enjoyed and were interested in were bad. That you were bad. You said that whenever visitors came to your house, the first thing your mother did—before she even knew who was at the door—was run to your bedroom and close the door so no one could see the posters on your walls or the books on your shelves. You've been taught that the work you're doing now is wrong. Very wrong. All of this was pounded in your head from the time you were a baby. Aren't you just a little afraid that maybe the Adventists are right?"
He did not respond.
"I'm not saying they are. But you can't just throw away almost two decades of indoctrination, of being taught what they say is right and wrong. Especially when you've still got people telling you how evil you are. You know what I want to do here, Roger? I want to help convince you that what's inside of you—the real Roger Carlton—is not an evil, clawed monster. Because I don't think you know that yet."
She assured him he would not see instant results, that it would take some time, and that he should be patient and realistic. But patience did not come easily for Roger. He wanted whatever was wrong with him to go away immediately so he could be the person he had always wanted to be right away. That person continued to remain out of reach. Roger was not even sure who knew who that person was.