by Jon Scieszka
I saw someone in the produce section. I was at the store to buy cheese for Mr. Mildew, but I am always drawn to the fruits and vegetables. To the heaped-up colors and shapes. The way everything resembles a still life painting, hovering somewhere on the spectrum of hard or ripe or speckled with liver spots. Does that mango dimple under your thumb? Will that green bean snap, so crisp? Is there one berry in the pint that oozes, laced with mold? Examine it all, Mr. Investigator, under the magic spray of those automatic produce misters, and you will see why I did not immediately do as ordered by Mr. Mildew, and head straight to the cheesemonger for the latest shipment of Époisses.
There was a thin man standing by the tomatoes. Mr. Mildew would have sneered at him, called him a pickle of a person, so slender he was, shoulders curved, spine stooped. I did not care. I saw him reach for six perfect tomatoes still on the vine. I could see, I could tell, that there were no better tomatoes in the store, and that this man knew the peak and prime of things. What more could you ask of a lover? Nothing, I thought, as he threaded his fingers through the vine, tomatoes dangling like blown glass baubles.
Of course I will tell you his name. As soon as I remember it.
You know, even your doubt has a smell. It is the decay of trust.
Decay is the resin at the bottom of a wine glass, blended with spit. A used toothbrush. The yellow smear of nicotine in a glass ashtray where someone’s left a filterless cigarette burning. It is black paper from an old photograph album, crumbling onto the table, as black and blank as all the forgotten names that no one can place to the album’s blurry sepia faces.
Decay smells like worry. Desperation. Futility.
And I can smell it, sir, on you.
Steven and I definitely did not kill the world’s worst editor. I mean, our editor. Sure we might have had a few reasons we would have liked to. (Finger painting set for Steven’s Christmas gift because his illustrations are “childish and amateur”? Not cool, Mildew. Sack of tears for me because “this is the extent to which I was bored reading your latest manuscript?” Totally not cool, Mildew!) But that doesn’t mean we’d kill the good-for-nothing, imagination-less troll.
And besides, we’ve totally got the alibi to prove it: we were out of town when the deed went down.
See, we travel all the time. Mostly it’s to research whatever new book we’re working on. And so, at the time of Monstrous Mildew’s death we were…let’s see here…oh yes! We were in Germany taking an amateur alchemy class.
Yes, we were planning on writing a historical thriller about a serial killer who poisons all her victims with handmade brews, but then Mildew pulled the plug on it. Hm.
Oh wait! No, no, sorry about that. We weren’t in Germany when Mildew bit the dust. We were in Brazil learning how to street fight from the fiercest of all favela slum lords.
This book was going to be a tormented love story between a rough and tumble street fighter who falls for his mentor’s daughter only to—oh wait. Mildew vetoed that one too.
Sorry, I must be getting my dates confused. When did you say this all went down again? Oh! OK, now I remember. It wasn’t poison camp in Germany or hand-to-hand combat training in Brazil. We were in Kenya doing research for a murder mystery we were working on, set during a hunting safari. We hooked up with this company called Death Safari. They loaded us up with weapons and ammo after a brief training and just let us loose. Their company promise is that the five-day trip will provide you with the ability “to track and hunt down anything or anyone in the world or your money back guaranteed!”
Our guide was really impressed by Steven’s and my natural ability to wield a weapon. He said people with revenge on the mind often make—
Oh no wait a second. I’m so sorry. Mildew canned that one as well. “Too touchy-feely. Not enough vampires,” he said.
Let me get out my calendar. See? We travel so much it’s easy to get our schedule confused.
Right! I’m sorry. Steven and I were on vacation when Mildew ate it. We had treated ourselves to an artist’s retreat and spa in Tahiti. We spent the whole time writing, painting, meditating, eating healthily—it was just wonderful. Totally rejuvenating and inspiring. I think Mildew really could have benefited from a trip like that. It’s a good thing he’s dead. Oops! I mean, it’s too bad he’s dead.
I know I didn’t kill him. I mean, I couldn’t. It’s not in my nature. You don’t even understand. I’m a total goody-goody. Ask anyone. Ask my mother. Ask my sister. She’ll gladly give you an earful about how perfect little Kieran has never made a mistake in her whole entire life. Ask my high school boyfriend, even. He got so frustrated by my absolute purity that after we broke up he went on a three-year-long bad-boy bender that was like True Blood meets Jersey Shore only with less physical restraint and more booze. I couldn’t hurt a cockroach, let alone a human being. Although Mr. Mildew did have some cockroach-y qualities, didn’t he? Like saving his boogers in plastic wrap? I mean, ew! I could imagine someone offing him over that lovely little habit, but it wasn’t me.
Of course that doesn’t mean it wasn’t her.
You know who I mean by “her,” don’t you? I’m talking about my other half. Not better, mind you, just other. That girl is definitely capable of murder. Just look at the stuff she writes. Kidnappings, stalkings, faked suicides? A teenage serial killer with a bigger body count than Tom Ripley? She definitely has a dark side, that one. Sometimes? When I wake up from a prolonged blackout? I find the most disturbing things in my room. Like a box full of carefully detached squirrel heads and a series of close-up photos of pussy goiters and hairy brown moles.
And you should see the pages she bookmarks on my browser. Things like “Deadly Drug Interactions” and “One Hundred Ways to Kill Your Roommate” and “World’s Grizzliest Animal Attacks.” I mean, what does she do with this knowledge? I hate to imagine that my hands, these hands, the hands that have typed up so many stories about happy-go-lucky cheerleaders and first loves and best friendships, may have closed their skinny fingers around that awful man’s sinewy, papery, age-spotted throat and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until that bulbous purple tongue lolled out the corner of his frog-like mouth and he feebly sucked in his last raspy, rancid, garlicky breath.…
Really. I hate to even imagine it.
But it’s possible. Because she? She is obviously disturbed. So maybe you should be talking to her. Yeah. Ask her where she was the night of the murder. Because I was in blackout. I know because I still have that night’s episode of Cupcake Wars saved on my DVR, and if I hadn’t been in blackout, you know I would’ve watched that puppy live. So that means she was out there somewhere doing God knows what to heaven knows who. She’s the one you should be interviewing here. Trust me.
If you want to talk to her all you have to do is show me something really disturbing and she’ll come out. Like some juicy road kill or one of those Star magazine pictures of real celebrity cellulite. I don’t usually let her out by choice, but if it’ll clear my name, sure. Anything to put this behind us so I can get on with my life. I’m sick of that rhymes-with-witch and all her bestselling books anyway. Good riddance. So go ahead. Bring her out. Do it! I’m just dying to know what she has to say for herself.
Wait. If she goes to jail does that mean I have to go, too?
For the record, this is not a confession. I have nothing to confess. And it’s not a denial either, because the word “denial” implies that I have something to deny, and I don’t. I had nothing to do with the death of Herman Mildew. In fact, I have an alibi. I was with my sister.
And just so you know, she’s the one who knew Herman Mildew. I never met the guy. Well, not in the traditional sense. But no one met him in the traditional sense. I may have shaken a hand I presumed to be his, once. Maybe twice. Maybe we’d reached the level of a kiss-on-the-cheek hello, but I never let his lips actually touch my cheek, because, well, ew.
But she’s the one who introduced us. She was much friendlier to him than I was. She’s the f
riendlier sister. Ask anyone. She’ll even be friendly to someone like Herman Mildew.
But like I said, I barely knew the guy. Okay, yes, fine, I did sort of meet him, once, twice, maybe three times. But it was only sort of meeting him. My sister is the one who said it was him. She may have been lying, but that doesn’t mean she had anything to do with his death. People lie all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got something to hide. I mean, often it does. But it doesn’t always.
I’m not a fan of mildew. The mold, I mean, not the man. It’s always disgusted me. The stench of it. The way it thrives in the cold and the damp, the way it clings to wet laundry left to dry in a pile on the floor. The only thing that smells worse was Mildew himself—the man, that is, not the mold.
The first time I met him—or the man that my sister said was him—and shook his hand (a slimy and weak handshake, of course), I thought he smelled like pickles gone bad—no mean feat, since I’d always been under the impression that pickles didn’t really go bad, being, inherently, you know, pickled. But he smelled like rancid pickles, old pickles, mildewed pickles, if such a thing is possible. And the worst part? His smell leaked onto me when he shook my hand. For days afterwards, I washed my hands with anti-bacterial soap, hot water, even detergent like the kind you use to rid your towels of mildew, but the smell lasted for two solid weeks.
The second time I saw him, I managed to turn our handshake into something shorter—more of a hand slap, really. Still, I ran to the bathroom immediately afterwards to wash my hands before the stench of him could settle into my skin. But the third time was when he tried to kiss my cheek, and if I’d thought the smell of him an arm’s length away was bad, it was nothing compared with the stench of that face hovering next to mine. I ran to the bathroom again; this time because I thought I was going to vomit.
But did I want to kill the man? Of course not. Sure, I may have remarked to my sister that if he got that stench on me one more time, I would murder him myself—but that was just some sisterly hyperbole. And yes, I may have told her that I thought he smelled half-dead already, but come on—that doesn’t mean I wanted him completely dead. Half-dead was just fine with me.
I mean, that is, fully alive, but smelling half-dead, of course. I would never actually want anyone dead. Or even half-dead. I’m a very peaceful person.
If you don’t believe me, just ask my sister. She’ll tell you.
Okay. I’ll admit it. We hooked up once. Though it could have been one of his doppelgangers. You know he has doppelgangers, right? He says they’re his henchmen. They spread bad tidings when he’s busy. They dress in grey and do a lot of grunting.
I met him at a knitting class. I had decided to take it because my parents had been bugging me to get out of the house more and write less, and I thought a knitting class would piss them off. They probably hoped I’d join a cult or hang out with the miscreants by the river who set fire to things. They thought it was weird that I wasn’t into people my own age, that I’d applied for an AARP card despite the fact that I wasn’t eligible. “Stop hanging out with your seventy-year-old Chinese dentist!” they said. “Go volunteer! Go to a cocktail party!”
He had been the only man there. He was very good at knitting socks. His fingers could fly. He made me a pair in the first hour. They were more like Chinese finger cuffs than socks, per se, but I was still touched. When our instructor, Gladys—who’d brought her three Bedlington terriers to the class and whose said Bedlingtons menacingly positioned themselves around her chair—announced a ten-minute break, he and I made eyes at each other over the coffee tureen and the Krispy Kremes. I told him I was planning on making a fisherman’s sweater. He told me he was going to knit a giant spider web that could capture human prey. I asked him about his intriguing cologne. He told me it was pickle juice. He also said he liked my peg.
We made out in the back alley. The lamb-like Bedlingtons watched us through the window.
I’d wondered if he’d ever kissed a girl before, because he devoured me like he was slurping up a pot of Greek yogurt. But when we pulled away from each other, I was in love.
“Can I call you sometime?” I asked him.
“I don’t really do the phone,” he said.
I gave him my number. I floated through my front door when the class was over. I tasted that kiss again and again, the pickles and the donut glaze and a slight tinge of shoe polish, which he’d told me he sometimes used to blacken his teeth. In the course of four days, I knitted him seven pairs of argyle knee socks. I opened jars of pickles just to sniff the vinegar. I made the stupid mistake of sitting by the phone and waiting for him to call. Which, of course, he didn’t.
I don’t really do the phone, he’d told me. I’d thought it was some kind of line.
I saw him once more after that, at the abandoned pickle factory. He pretended not to know me. He said that it was one of his doppelgangers who’d gone to the knitting class, not him. But I knew. I saw an errant strand of yarn sticking to his wool pant leg. I saw the double-pointed needles sticking out of his pocket. Funny how getting your heart broken feels rotten no matter who does the breaking, whether it’s a camp counselor who only danced with you because he was temporarily blinded, or a convenience store clerk who kissed you because he thought you were that other one-legged girl, or a grouchy old editor named Herman Mildew who should’ve known a good thing when he saw it.
Admittedly, I did think about killing him for a while. Hanging him by looped-together threads of Suri alpaca. Strangling him with a skein of cashmere. Suffocating him with one of the socks I’d made for him. My parents got in touch, worried again because I was locking myself away again. “You’ve got to get over this,” they urged. “You can still live a productive life.” But they were talking about something different. They didn’t think I had the capacity for love.
I would never kill him, though. I loved him too much to hurt him. I wasn’t the one who did this. I was in my bedroom that night. Every night. I can guarantee you I was sitting on my bed when it happened, thinking that if I just smiled more, it would make everyone’s lives so much easier. Or I was lying on my floor, thinking about pickle juice and what the drivers through the alley must have thought when they noticed a peg-legged girl and rotund man kissing.
I was hysterical and broken and never sure I’d be whole again, but I wasn’t and am not a murderer. Ask my parents. Ask anyone. It’s true.
The first thing you should know is this: I’ve known Herman Mildew since I was a kid. He was my cousin’s best friend’s sister’s uncle. So, in some ways, it feels like he’s been around forever.
I’m not saying that’s how I got this gig or anything.
I’m only saying that we go way back.
When I was six, I sent him my very first short story. It was about a rabbit who learns his mother is a duck, and after being an outcast for a while, is eventually accepted by both the ducks and the rabbits. At our family’s annual Christmas gathering—which Herman attended as a guest of his niece’s brother’s best friend’s cousin—he handed me back the pages, which were so covered in red ink, it looked like someone had been murdered quite nearby.
At the very bottom, he’d written five simple words: “Ducks don’t have bunnies, dummy.”
Of course, I thought. I have to write what’s real.
So the next time I saw him, at my cousin’s best friend’s sister’s uncle’s annual Easter brunch, I tapped him on the shoulder. He was, as usual, hovering near the food table, munching on pickles smothered with stinky cheese. He tipped his warty nose at me and narrowed his eyes.
“Here,” I said, turning over my pages with the hopeful heart of a newly minted writer. This time, the story was real. No silly tales of ducks and rabbits. Instead, I’d written about the time I got lost in a grocery store and managed to knock over an entire display of baked beans.
A few weeks later, I found an envelope in the mail. Inside were the pages, once again covered in red ink. At the very bottom, Herman had written
only this: “Avoid baked beans, idiot.”
I took his words to heart, and by the next year, when I was eight-years-old, I was finally prepared to present him with my best story yet. This one was about a young writer who meets a famous editor at a Christmas party, and I’d painted Herman in the best possible light you could ever paint someone like Herman, leaving out the parts about how his sweaters were always too small and his feet smelled like moldy bananas. I didn’t even mention how he always spit pickle seeds at me across the buffet table whenever I tried to talk to him at these events.
Usually, it took a few tries to get him to actually take my stories. First, he would make little paper airplanes out of each page and send them sailing all over the room. Then, when I’d run around collecting them—pulling them out of people’s eggnog glasses or the bowl of cranberry sauce—I would tuck them in his coat, and he would proceed to roll them up and pelt them at other kids as if they were snowballs. It would always go on like this for quite a while, until, eventually, he’d get bored and stuff them in his pocket. When they finally came back to me in the mail, they’d always be covered in food stains and torn at the edges, but smoothed out just enough to appease the U.S. Postal Service.
But this one Christmas, as I wandered around the party looking for Herman—stopping politely to say hello to people like his niece’s brother’s best friend—I couldn’t find him anywhere. It wasn’t until I rounded the corner near the front hallway that I saw something that still haunts me to this day.
There, in our living room, was Herman Mildew. He was sitting cross-legged on the blue carpet beside our Christmas tree. And where before there had been piles and piles of beautifully packaged gifts, now there was nothing but a sea of wrapping paper.
Herman looked up when I walked in, but there wasn’t an ounce of guilt in his beady eyes. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was wearing a tie meant for my dad, and the pair of mittens I’d saved up to buy for my mom. His coat pockets were bulging with other things: a small radio and a model car, golf balls and tubes of lipstick, and even a row of chocolate snowmen, who peeked out over the top with their wide, unblinking gazes.