Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  8

  I FEEL I should backtrack a tad here. Remember me? Why would you? I am the nameless narrator whose voice you have likely been imagining all wrong: a folksy yet slightly prissy tone, due to my profession, my age bracket, my background. I have never offered my name, just my wife's—though I suppose the sharper among you could deduce, given what you already know about the Taymor Murders, who I am: Retired accountant, mid-to-late 50s, fiscal Republican (during the Bush Jr. administration, this was often difficult to admit), husband of Virginia, father of Jessa and Timothy, next-door neighbor to Jim and Leanne Taymor. The sharper among you might also have deduced I could easily have "changed the names to protect the innocent," as the true crime shows claim. It might be of interest to the ghoulish types who need to know every morbid, minuscule detail surrounding a murder case that I enjoy puzzle books and have a mole on my right ass-cheek that looks somewhat like the state of Florida. The journalists have left these last two details out, but I'm sure, had they known, it would be household news. Neighbor of convicted Frugaltarian Killers has a mole on his buttock! More at eleven. That sort of thing.

  I've said I was there during the time of the murders, but the truth is, I both was and wasn't. Gin and I had troubles of our own to deal with: Jessa, our youngest, was in and out of the hospital, for symptoms which seemed at the time to be related to multiple sclerosis. It wasn't, thank God, but it was quite a scare, and Jessa had almost lost her entire first year of college over it (we had her in our early-40s, if you're wondering about the age-discrepancy, an accident but a blessing). She managed to make up some credits here and there, but I was less troubled by her missing classes, or even by those bewildering symptoms: chronic headaches, oversensitivity to light, confusion, and spastic muscle movements which felt to her as if she no longer owned her own body—all of which seemed to dissipate in a little over two to three weeks. What worried me most was the thought of my little angel passing away before me. This was the thought which caused most of those sleepless nights the week of the murders, as I'm sure you can imagine.

  By June, when she came back home for the summer, the scare had mostly passed. When Gin and I picked her up from the bus depot, she wore a black t-shirt, cut off above her navel, MEAT IS MURDER printed in blood-streaked letters over her chest. She fairly reeked of marijuana. Gin, who had never smoked it in her life (had perhaps never even seen it being smoked), had commented on Jessa's "nice perfume," and I caught a glimmer of a smirk in our daughter's eyes in the rearview.

  If it is difficult for any man to truly know what lurks inside the mind of a teenaged girl, it is even more true when the girl is the man's daughter—and that goes double if said father is edging toward sixty, I suspect. I did my best to cut her slack, in light of her recent health scare, but I found it hard not to lose my patience in those few months between semesters. She was moody that summer, all too often snarky with her mother. She wouldn't eat much of what we put in front of her, preferring instead to get food with her high school friends. I kept my suspicions, that one or more of her professors had been filling her head full of liberal propaganda, to myself. A child's mind is easy prey, even a child of college age. Give them a free beer cooler, promise them no payments, tell them what they want to hear, and they'll be yours to mold.

  Jessa was far from the perfect little girl I remembered, but she was alive. I was grateful for that much, at least.

  And like they say after those oh-so important news breaks, which Jim and Leanne have starred in many a time: We now return to our regularly scheduled program...

  9

  PARKED OUT FRONT of Richard Holland's house, Leanne slipped out of her heels and left them on the driver's seat. She stepped out, eyeballing the man's large shadow as it turned the corner onto Flint Street, where it disappeared behind a hedge.

  Those first few steps were the worst. Barefoot, it felt like she stepped on every single stone and twig and upturned bottle cap between her sedan and the corner, struggling not to cry out as they bit into her heels, the calloused pads, cursing herself silently every step of the way.

  From Flint Street, the large man turned onto Genoa. Where the two streets come together, the Elementary School stands behind a chain-link fence. Both Jessa and Tim went to that school, ten years apart. That night Leanne paid no mind to the SLOW CHILDREN sign, which had always caused her distress; what she wouldn't have given to have been blessed with any child, even a slow one. Her thoughts were on the chase; the pain in each step reminded her of the potential cost if she lost sight of Richard Holland. And by the time she had hobbled and limped past the schoolyard, she'd gotten used to the pain anyway. The soles of her feet would be bloody and raw when she finally got back to the car, worse even than the skin surrounding Dutch's fingernails. But the gains—the gains of this venture could prove to be very fruitful indeed.

  From Genoa Avenue to Devlin, past her friend Paulette Chamblee's four-star B&B overlooking a woody ravine. From Devlin to Sammon. On Sammon, which dead-ended at the edge of those same woods (Lord help me if he goes in there), the large man strode heavily down the center of the potholed road to the foot of the Schultz house, where he stood on its sagging porch for a long moment, until the crooked front door swung inward onto darkness, and he ducked inside.

  Anyone born or at least raised in Knee High should be quite familiar with the Schultz house and its sinister aura. To call it an eyesore would be too kind. It was a blight, and had been, for much longer than the Taymors were my neighbors. With wallboards as gray as ash, the crumbled slate-shingle roof sagging in the middle, its porch nothing but a broken heap of old lumber, its staircase sunken, its cobblestone walk and front yard (to call it a yard was flattery) a wilderness of jimson and hogweed and wild ficus, the Schultz house had been known by children to be haunted, long before Tim and Jessa had attended Knee High Elementary.

  Old Lady Schultz had been rumored by kids to be a witch. If you'd ever seen her out there on her porch, you might have been hard-pressed to contest it. In her youth, she'd been a librarian—Lord knows why; it was obvious she loathed children. Perhaps she'd found sadistic pleasure in shushing them, in squeezing every last nickel of their allowances out of them for their overdue books throughout the years.

  I knew Old Lady Schultz, though when I was in school she'd been called Dotty, and Dotty Schultz had been just as mean in her twenties as she'd been in her decrepitude. When she finally kicked the bucket in the early aughts, you can bet there were cries of Ding-dong, the witch is dead from many a mouth.

  It was thought that when she died her house would be demolished by the bank, but when news of her death arose, lo and behold, the rats crawled out from the woodwork! The rats in this case were long-lost relatives—"long-lost" meaning those relations who could not tolerate her when she was alive, and were only too happy to snatch her property (including about fifty acres of the woods behind and to the left of it) from her cold, dead hands.

  Her great-nephew, as chance would have it, was a land developer. I have no clue if he'd held this job before laying claim to his great-aunt's property, but just three weeks after Dotty Schultz keeled over, a sign went up out front, in the same surreptitious manner as those MISSING posters had:

  LAND RESERVED FOR

  FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

  I suppose Great-Nephew Schultz suspected Knee High might be soon to expand, what with the new addition to the highway, perhaps incorporating with nearby towns across the Platte and finally, to the great city of Omaha. Commuters and retirees would need condos and townhouses, and what better place to put them than a quaint little valley town with low property taxes and little to no pretensions?

  These days they call that sort of market speculation "hope value." Whatever young Mr. Schultz's hopes had been, the house (and sign) remained until the recession hit, and by then any hope of future value had sunk, along with the rest of the housing market. That the same sign stood for Leanne to hide behind some ten years later—albeit with the thoughtful addition of BARACK SUCKS
COCK Sharpied across it on a diagonal by some semi-literate artiste—was a testament to the failures of economic recovery, debt ceiling be damned. One of Jim's LOST DOG posters was stapled haphazardly to the utility pole nearby, dampened by the other night's rain. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Leanne made her numbed, barefoot approach and peered inside a darkened window.

  They were cross-legged on the floor, amid stacks of yellowed—a slightly darker shade of gray in the gloaming—newspapers, all six of them just as naked as Jim had told her, though they lacked the crust of filth he'd mentioned. The night sky was just bright enough through the dead trees outside the Schultz house for her to make out their faces, and the horror of recognition widened her eyes.

  There was Pete Wallin, who drove the resurfacer at the public ice-skating rink in the winter and, come spring, a big lawn tractor (though not as big as his Zamboni) at the fairgrounds on the other side of the woods. He was as skinny as a rake with his long, Ichabod Crane face, and every single rib visible in his hairless—save for a few stragglers around the nipples—chest. His spine stood out like alligator spikes.

  She remembered the heavyset woman from the checkout counter at the Food 4 Less in Lincoln, mouthing numbers as she counted the food stamps of a customer ahead of Leanne. Tara or Tina, she thought, trying to conjure up a mental image of the woman's nametag, before realizing it would be worse if she knew her name. Bad enough she knew their faces, let alone their names.

  The kid Jim had recognized belonged to George and Helena Lannegan. She thought his name was Kyle, and knew he was enrolled in the same school up the road that Tim and Jessa had attended. Neither parent was among the adults seated around him. He was a stray, it seemed, like the others—but how? If they truly were no longer human, as it appeared from everything she'd seen herself and all that Jim had told her, how could Kyle Lannegan be one of them if his parents weren't? She supposed it could have been a recessive gene or a mutation, like dwarf parents siring a child of normal height. Or—and the thought of this caused her to shudder uncontrollably—he could have been changed.

  Richard Holland's head twitched suddenly on its tree trunk neck, his nostrils flaring in her direction. She ducked, certain he'd caught her scent. Like a dog, she thought. Like my Rosco. Fear and anger pumped volcanic adrenaline into her veins, her breath quickening. Surely they'd hear her, she thought, if they hadn't smelled her already. She waited for Dutch's thick fingers to snatch her up by her hair, or the scruff of her neck, and for a moment it felt as though they'd actually slipped along her spine. But it was only a moth.

  Typically, the very sight of them gave her the charlies, as Jenny Meyer might have said. ("It's the dust," she explained to Gin and me during that long night spent around our kitchen table. "Why do they have to be so dusty?"). But crouched outside the decrepit Schultz house she merely watched the moth flutter awkwardly away, counting out Mississippis as she slowed her breath, waiting for the hand to fall on her neck.

  At thirty-Mississippi, she steeled herself to chance a peek over the window ledge.

  They remained sitting in their ragged circle, all heads turned toward the heavyset woman, who plunged her hands into what looked at first to be a hole in the floor. The woman's gut folded over her crotch, yet pubic hair was still evident in the folds at her hips. Her hands came up streaked with black, and the smell—earthy and musky and sour, the smell of death and rotting cheese—was strong enough to make Leanne's eyes sting. She swallowed an involuntary gag, but the hot innards stench had already imprinted itself on her olfactory bulbs. It was a smell she would likely compare to every other stench, from that day forward: Sure, it stinks, but it's not as bad as the time...

  This filth was black as tar, and Tina/Tara smeared it onto the naked torsos and necks of the others. They scraped it from their skin with their palms, not to fling it away in disgust but to rub it on their faces and in their hair, the way someone might attempt to conserve the suds of a single dried-out sliver of soap in the shower.

  The delight Leanne saw in their glimmering eyes spoke of sacrament. Whatever they were, human or animal or something in between, Cordelia's Frugaltarianism had merely been a cover for this undreamed of private-interest group or secret society, who met not in the library basement or the Legion Hall, but at an abandoned house on the edge of the woods in the dead of night, providing neither coffee nor donuts, but a liberal application of animal shit on their naked bodies.

  Once they'd entirely covered themselves, they raised their arms to the rotted ceiling and bent at the hips, slapping their open palms into the excrement with a wet sound and raising their blackened palms again to the sky. They did this perhaps a dozen times, uttering soft, animal grunts with each elevation.

  Finally, each of them shook out their limbs like some post-meditation ritual, and lay down to dry out on the bare boards. Their chests rose and fell rapidly, the panting of desert wolves. Leanne stayed at the window, and while she watched them sleep she began to formulate the first inklings of a plan.

  If the body-paint and bowing were parts of a ritual, surely the sleeping was a part of it, too.

  A lot of things could happen while a person slept—that much had already been proven by the men and women (and child) sleeping fitfully in the Schultz house, who had gone skulking unnoticed through the streets and alleys of Knee High for God knew how long, while the rest of us slept.

  Well, Leanne was awake now. She thought she might never sleep again until this business was done, but she was wide awake.

  Her blood froze. The boy, who'd been asleep only moments ago, had gotten up while she was thinking and had begun sniffing at the air, staring directly at the window where she was crouched. She was frozen in place, caught by that innocent, terrible stare, the eyes shimmering out from his shit-streaked face like stars in the void of space.

  He sniffed.

  Did he smell her?

  The short woman beside the Lannegan boy stirred in her sleep.

  How could he not see her?

  Sniff-sniff-sniff. Sniff-sniff-snifffff.

  Kyle Lannegan squinted out at the dim night, the light in his eyes closing to slits. Then he turned away from the window and sank back to the floor, curling up beside the short woman and planting a grimy thumb in his mouth.

  10

  LEANNE REMAINED MOTIONLESS at the window a while longer, wondering why the boy hadn't seen her when he'd been looking her right in the eyes, or if he had seen her, why he hadn't awakened the others.

  They were still sleeping when she walked back to Davis Street, where the car was parked. Once there she gave the agony in her feet a rest, lying across both front seats with her poor tootsies hanging out the driver door, cooling them in the night breeze. She would bathe them in ice water once she got home, but for now they had work to do on the pedals. It had been just over an hour since Richard Holland had left his house. Ten more minutes of strain couldn't possibly hurt them worse than they'd already been.

  When Jim got home from the restaurant, she was asleep, sitting up on their plush recliner, her feet soaking in a basin of lukewarm water, pink with her blood.

  He woke her gently. Still, she was startled. She wrapped her arms around his neck as if she were clinging to a life-preserver, and he carried her to bed. He dressed her feet in gauze and bandages and ointment. She tried once, in a sleep-muttering sort of way, to tell him her plan, but he shushed her. When he slipped into bed himself a few minutes later, she was breathing soft and slow and steady.

  Jim flicked off the light.

  11

  "JEWISH LIGHTNING," HE said, skeptical.

  They sat in the kitchen, sipping their morning coffees—fair trade coffee, I suspect. Leanne normally liked hers black, but she took a little cream and sugar today, the color just too similar to the grime she'd seen at the Schultz house. Even dumping out the wet grinds she'd gagged a little, thinking back.

  "Jim," she said with a disapproving squint.

  He let out an exasperated sigh. "We're talking a
bout roasting people alive here, Leanne, and you're concerned about an ethnic slur?"

  "Those things aren't people," she quickly reminded him. "Just tell me what you think."

  What Jim thought was that it wouldn't work. The outcome was too uncertain, and the possibility it could blow up in their faces—both literally and figuratively—was far too high.

  "First of all," he said, "we don't know if it's a daily event, this..." He shook his head, not knowing just what to call the thing she'd witnessed. "And even if it is, how can we be sure we'll get all of them in one shot?"

  Leanne let her shoulders sag. He was right, and she knew it. Her idea had been to throw a Molotov cocktail through one of the windows (though what she'd called it was "one of those bottles filled with gas and a wick thingy on the end"—Jim had provided her with its name), hoping there was enough methane in the feces to act as an accelerant and engulf the whole group of them in flames.

  Even if it were a surefire plan, the idea of burning people alive felt not just morally but physically repugnant, a whole lot worse than letting an old, oft-used ethnic slur slip (a forgivable sin, perhaps, given the circumstances, though the B'nai B'rith might disagree). Jim didn't voice the opinion. Having poisoned a woman just two nights prior, he was hardly in a position to judge.

  Leanne was right about one thing, though: they had to take out the whole group at once, and before the "Dutch" wolf came knocking at their door. If not arson, though, then what? Chances were pretty slim the lot of them would return to La Costina's Dumpsters, which meant another good dose of rat poison was out of the question. Besides, there was hardly enough free space in the old downstairs freezer for Cordelia and Dutch, let alone the rest of their clan. And the likelihood that on a few days' notice, either he or Leanne could get their hands on a legitimate assault weapon—a bazooka, Jim thought with childlike excitement—was slim to none.