Dysphoria

by Sheldon Lee Compton

  Dave took the two good-sized steps back the shed would allow for and hit a spot on the wall. When he did, his knee popped through the hole he pulled loose from the bottom half of the wall. He had forgotten about the hole he pulled loose from the rotted boards earlier that morning. Without returning to the knob hole to check on Clara, he started pulling again at the boards just to the right and left of the palm-sized hole. Small but inspiring splinters of dark wood had just started to peel away between his sore fingertips when he heard the back door open and slam shut.

  Through his two inch by two inch view of the outside world, Dave saw Clara drop heavily down the steps leading off the back porch. She stopped at the base of the steps and squatted slowly to pluck at two or three dust-powdered flowers sprouting from sheer will out of the dreary, grassless earth forming a radius along the edge of the house. She pushed them with the tops of her fingernails very gently and then pulled at them, attempting, it seemed, to straighten the weak and failing stems. She did this for nearly a full minute and then walked the short distance across to the dog house.

  She bent awkwardly to the ground, glared into the opening of the tiny dog house, and rested her hand across the top of the tin roof. Instantly she pulled her hand away. The tin was already scorched to a stove-top sear. When she did turn her attention to where Dave struggled to keep sight of her through the knob hole, she grew excited and moved swiftly to the door of the shack. She made no sound as she approached the door and Dave heard the rattle of the cooking pan bouncing against rocks and dirt as she picked it from the ground. She stalked off to the edge of the house and suddenly stopped. It was then Dave noticed the small well. She pulled the rope and a bucket slithered into her hands. She pulled the pan from where she tucked it under her arm and dipped it into the water. The sunlight reflected off the water and Dave could make out the way it moved and lifted inside the pan. Cold and wet. It reminded him of his thirst and how he should probably be dead, according to his great-grandmother and her one day rule.

  Remembering this, Dave felt the energy he had discovered and harnessed earlier pour from him in defeated waves. The simple act of keeping his head held upright long enough to look through the hole became more than he could manage.

  It seemed that several minutes passed in the half-dark when the door tore open and a sunburst of light blinded him. It took a moment, but when his eyes adjusted he saw Clara looming above him holding the dull baking pan with water sloshing back and forth and spilling from the edges. The water landed in large swelled drops and then scattered across the dust, splashing onto the ground and then forming small mud pellets at her feet.

  "Com' on.” She grabbed the top of his arm hard, digging her fingers into the muscles there. "Take a drink of this, now. Drink this."

  She pushed the lip of the pan to his mouth and tilted it. Water ran over his face and he cracked open his mouth. The feeling was better than anything he had ever experienced. The skin along his back broke out in goosebumps shivered as the water dumped down his throat. Before long he was gulping and then, in one instant motion, he vomited it back up, over his teeth and onto the ground. It cascaded from his mouth in a fierce spray. Some of it coated the tops of Clara's feet.

  She returned to the well and brought another pan full of water and he drank. This time was able to keep it down. It was cold in his stomach and for the first time since it had started last night, there was no dry click when he breathed. The sound had been something he had gotten used to and now it was gone.

  He was rubbing his lips and eyeing the pan when she grabbed his arm again, pulling him to his feet. He swayed against the wall and bumped his knee. He was reminded of the hole he had been trying to tear loose and instinctively moved to cover it with his hands.

  She saw him try to hide evidence of his progress and shook her head, clearly disappointed. "Honey, that don't matter right now. Don’t you know that? Right now we’re goin' in the house. Me and you are about to have some big fun."

  23

  "I didn't stay gone for too long, though," John Harper said.

  They had moved onto the front porch after Harper's quiet wife moved with her beans to the kitchen.

  "I went back home. I was running down the road like crazy. Call the cops, call the police. That was all that was going through my mind.” He stuck an oak splinter into his teeth and leaned back in his chair. "But I was scared. Plain and simple. I was scared. Larry had got hurt on my property, and I guess I don't have to tell you that having a dozen or so cops out on my property was something I wasn't real keen on seeing happen.” He stopped and dropped his head, unable to return his gaze to Paul.

  "Why'd you go back?"

  "I had to do something."

  "What'd you do?"

  Things went silent for awhile with just the rocking of the chairs the only sound along the ridge. Harper only looked out into his yard. There was nothing out there but a couple of birds jumping around in a puddle of water, but he looked anyway. He studied them, the two birds, for a long time.

  "I just went back,” he said finally. “I got there real late at night. It might have been real early in the morning. I know that because I figured it would be safer to walk back that way with nobody around. When I got there everything was quiet, so I went up to the window and looked in. It was the living room, must have been, and nobody was in there. So I went to the other window and saw Larry lying on the bed in there. He was covered up and I could see him shivering in the bed. He had his eyes open just laying there and shivering. It was terrible."

  "Where was my dad?"

  "I didn't know right away, so I just went up on the hillside there behind the house and watched for some time. Then when it started getting that real dull light like right before sunrise, I saw Joe Fenner come out on the porch."

  Harper continued to talk and as he did, Paul began to feel sick. It was the story, the words. It was the way his face looked, the tone of his voice. It felt like guilt to Paul, and it felt like hell, he was sure.

  "I watched through a window after Joe and Larry left for as long as I could stand it, but it wasn't something I wanted to keep watching. It was as wrong as anything I'd ever seen before or since."

  Paul asked anyway, wanted to know. Had to know.

  "It was your daddy and Joe’s wife. Jesus, Paul. They were in there together in Larry's room on that bed with the covers in the floor. There was blood all over the covers and in the floor and they were on that bed, Paul. Do I have to keep talking about this? Can't you figure it out? Can't you mostly figure it out without having to hear it?"

  But Paul needed to hear it. He pushed and pushed until Harper was sitting bolt upright in his chair, clenching his hands together, talking with a heaviness Paul had never heard before in another's man's voice. He spat the words out at Paul. At once he seemed disgusted to be articulating the words and then happy to be purging them from his body, one syllable at a time. When he was finished, he dropped back into his chair, drained and empty.

  Paul thought for awhile before saying, "And then you went back home and he stayed there for two more days?” He was trying to sound quizzical and leave it at that, but the anger was coming through and there was little he could do to control himself. "That's good Mr. Harper. That's real good."

  "Paul, you have to understand--"

  "Do I? Why's that, exactly? I get that part about you being scared of your own shadow. I get the part about being afraid to deal with people, but you could have just called the cops, told them where Dad was and not gave a name."

  Harper tore his gaze from the floor, where he had kept it fixed and rigid for several minutes, and looked directly at Paul.

  "You think I haven't had that on my mind for all these years?” Harper said. "You think I don't know the things I could've done? What I'm telling you, the only thing I can tell you, is what I did. You see? It don't matter what could have been. If a bullfrog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass all the time. All I can tell you is what I did."

  Paul didn't
speak, didn't nod, didn't move an inch in his chair. If a bullfrog had wings. If a bullfrog had wings. The words crawled over Paul's body like fire.

  "I told you before about things settling," Harper said. "How I told you about some places just not fit for settling when I first saw you. You remember that? Well, that's what I've been trying to do ever since that summer. Just workin' to settle, and it can't be done, not really. I found some peace here, but what happened to your daddy is

  something I ain't never told another living soul. Not even him. He never named it, and so I left it right there too. My Augustine ain't heard all of it. You're the only one."

  Paul stood and let the chair tilt back and bang against the side of the house. The sudden movement startled Harper and he grabbed the sides of his own chair and looked up into the doorway. His wife was standing there with her arms hanging lifelessly to her sides, her face entirely blank.

  Paul turned to look at her and then put his hand through his hair and pushed air between his lips, letting it whistle through and escape in a rush, bottled up but now released. Without a handshake for Harper or a word to his wife, Paul started off the porch but the woman asked him to stop, to wait. Turning, he was still surprised to be face to face with Harper's wife. She was much taller than he realized, and her features brought to mind old family photographs full of grim and serious people that fill attics and basements. She spoke again, and, when she spoke, the words were dry, as if they had been lodged in her throat for years and years.

  "There's gonna be a day,” she said, “and it'll feel like tomorrow, when you'll be over this and done with it.” She stopped, looked back at Harper, and turned back to Paul. “But it's not going to be today."

  24

  Dave didn't so much sit on the couch as try to melt into it. If he could sink far enough, down into the dust and mold, he could get away, he thought. His stomach ached again from drinking the water too fast and to counter the feeling he tried to sit as still as possible. He kept himself bent slightly to the left, the same position she left him in after pulling him through the kitchen and past a small hallway. He had gotten a look at himself in a stand-up mirror in the middle of the hallway as she dragged him to the living room. He tried to forget how he had looked in the mirror. Instead he waited and listened to her moving around in what must have been her bedroom. But he couldn’t forget. He knew now that his eyes looked like sunken black pits, knotholes like the ones he dug sap from the pines up at White Mountain. While passing the mirror, he had seen a crow's nest of black, matted hair jumping in a series of feathered tornados off the top and sides of his head.

  "Little Shannon ain't so little these days, huh.” Clara stood in the doorway. When Dave saw her he immediately began holding his breath and sat bolt upright on the couch. For the first time in hours he wasn't thinking about water.

  Clara had changed clothes. She now wore what looked to Dave like a thin white dress, much shorter than the dress she had been wearing. It moved like silk across the humps of her stomach and hips, slid easily across the expanse of her upper thighs. She smiled, revealing teeth that were split and gashed and ragged, and pushed fallen strands of hair from her forehead.

  He wasn't thinking about water, exactly, but food was there. Hot food, warm and rich in flavor, biscuits and gravy, pork chops and buttered mashed potatoes. Water could wash it down, but even with Clara standing in the doorway, one arm stretched to the ceiling to hold to the top of the paint-chipped door, the other on her wide hip, it was food that Dave hoped for.

  "Can I have something to eat?"

  This seemed to please Clara instantly and the smile grew wide. More teeth, less teeth, bashed, crooked. Her arm came down and landed firmly on her other hip. She tilted her head sideways and her face became serious. She started walking across to him, slowly at first, and then faster across the hardwood floor in her bare feet.

  "Can I have something to eat?” He asked again after she sat down beside him on the small couch. She rubbed her leg against his. "Can I go home?”he whispered. He felt tears building in the corners of his eyes.

  "No, you can't go home. But you can have something to eat."

  Dave's instincts were to look away as Clara raised her slip up across her kneecaps. He turned his head and she grabbed it in both her hands and snapped it back around, pulling his head downward, closer to her thighs. She tugged again at the slip and it popped above her hips. Beneath were two wide thighs, white and flabby, hairs sprouting here and there from moles and various spots. And in the middle of his field of vision was something he had seen many times in magazines, but never in real life. A large patch of coarse brown hair about the size of an adult's fist stood out like a brown boat amid the white caps of her thighs.

  "You know what to do with something like that?” She said, tossing her hair down from its fixings so that it spilled across her back. She leaned back on the couch now, her legs splayed outward. Her left foot was tucked into the cushions along the back of the couch, taking hold, causing the muscles in her legs to jump while she balanced. Dave was afraid to move his eyes. When he offered no movement or comment, Clara pulled the slip over her head in one fluid motion and, in an instant, was completely naked, stretching her back across the couch arm so that David could see the slightest hint of ribs poking out from beneath the huge double mass that was her breasts. He had never seen breasts that large in magazines before. And, despite his hunger and the pain still stinging through his body, and regardless of how appalling she was to look at flopped across the couch the way she was, he felt himself stir. He had explored with a couple of girls, but never this close. He felt himself stir again and it made him sick. He leaned forward and vomited into the floor.

  "Jesus!” She thrashed on the couch, flesh moving, bare feet beating against the floor as she leaned over. "Look what you did, you little shit!"

  Nothing was real. Things were filtered through a haze of vomit and pain and confusion. He only felt a rough tug when she took a handful of his hair and jerked his head back. Something snapped when she did, just below the nape of his neck and everything was stiff. Her foot slid through the vomit on the floor.

  "We'll take care of that later," she said. Her voice was a hiss, a furnace ready to blow. She still had Dave's hair pinched through a fist of tight fingers. "Now eat!"

  Suffocating. Gagging. Everything in his body revolted and went clam, revolted again and went calm. He concentrated on other things, any other things he could get himself to think of while trying not to listen to her instructions. Left, right, up, down. He could hardly hear, his face and neck buried into the patch of brown, his hands clasped firmly against the white ocean thighs pumping his shoulders up and down with movement he could not have managed on his own.

  It was almost dark when she finally finished with him. They had moved to the bedroom by that time and she had left him scattered across the bed and disappeared into the hallway. She returned some minutes later wearing a different dress than she had on before. Her hair was placed back into a bun on the back of her head. She looked exactly the same as when she had came to the shed some hours ago, only now her face was flushed red, her lips chapped and cracked from breathing heavily for so long.

  "Come on. Let's get you back out there.”

  Her steps were light and she moved swiftly across the bedroom. Giddy, that's what Dave would think later, when he understood some of the things that could get a person's spirits up that quickly. At the side of the bed, she took his arm firmly in her hand and pulled him up. His clothes were dirty and smelled bad, crumpled in a blood stained wad at the side of the bed. She picked them up with her other hand and tossed them in his lap.

  "You can put them back on when we get out there. Ain't nobody gonna see you trotting across the yard.” She paused, smiled, ran a hand across her hair, touched her flushed red cheek. "Ain't nobody but me gonna see that pretty little backside.”

  She waited for him to stand and then smacked him once across the ass. Dave dropped his head and tried to c
over himself with his free hand. His clothes — socks, underwear, shirt and pants — were tucked beneath his arm.

  On the way back to the shed, she watched the hills closely and ran her fingers down his spine, a light touch, all the way to the top of his ass, where she brushed gently with two fingers. When they made it to the door of the shed, she turned him around, pushed herself close to him and grabbed him in her hand. He kept his head lowered and didn't look up. He closed his eyes hard while she moved her hand, slowly at first, and then faster until he started getting hard, growing in her fist.

  "See there, you little shit. You liked it all along.” Then, still stroking him, she leaned in close and put a finger under his chin. He looked up into her eyes, which were soft and seemed to be someplace else. "You breathe a word and you know he'll kill you, don't you? You know better to say anything, cause he'll kill you and make it hurt. See, I know that's what you're thinking, he'll kill me anyway, but not like that he wouldn't. You see, this'll be me and your little secret, huh. Little secret. You tell him, he'll skin you like one of 'em old hogs out there. We'll eat you up just like one of 'em so nobody ever finds anything. We'll grind the bones up and dust 'em across that piss poor field out there."

  Dave was getting sick again. He was so hard inside her fast moving fist it was starting to hurt too. And then he went, he wasn't sure if it would happen. He had done it several times himself, but he was always thinking about good things. This time, he just went, the same way he might have coughed if he'd had a cold. A physical reaction to something that was happening to his body.

  She was smiling now, and laughing. She raised her hand to her face and looked at it in the fading light. It glistened and sparkled as she moved her hand closer to her face. Dave vomited again when she sniffed it and then touched her tongue gently to the palm of her hand.