by Chris Dennis
In the motel room in Chicago, Martin hung his suit and washed his hands at the sink while I put on my nightgown. He closed the bathroom door and asked that he might be allowed to go up to the mountain. He asked the Lord to please show him. I lay down in the bed and switched off the lamp. He said, I know you know about the threats and either allow them to stop or else make me unafraid. The vent kicked on and I heard a door open. There was the creaking of a hinge, but with words buried beneath it, like someone talking in a small, crackling voice. Someone was whispering from inside the bathroom, not Martin but a double voice. I wanted to call out, but instead I kept my eyes shut. Martin said, I am hungry, and so are they. What do we do, what do we say to the God of History? I waited for a long time but the sound of the opening doors went on and on until Martin said, Can I see the Promised Land?
When he came out and lay down beside me, he kissed me on the shoulder. I did not open my eyes to look at him. I lay there and thought, You are just a man, Martin, beside me on a bed. You’re safe and tired, and what is fear but another, abnormal gift from the Lord Jesus Christ? I thought of the white women waiting on either side of us like security guards and how it felt to be in a room with my husband and know we were being recorded even as we drifted to sleep. I wanted all of the tapes the FBI had made, so I could put them together in order and hear what went on in the rooms when I wasn’t there and so Martin could hear what went on in our house. He and I could listen to the whole thing together. I thought of the sounds, and the strange films I imagined in the twilights of sleep. I wondered why I was so inclined to combine the two, and why I also wished to look back years later and know that in most ways our efforts had matched, that they lined up, like two mirrors facing each other in a very long but narrow room.
Nettles
Of course the husband was mean. Back then all the husbands were. They moved out of the city on a whim, mostly his, to live on a seedy triangle of acreage in the country. Some important considerations regarding their marriage:
1. He’d built their little house in the city himself, supposedly for her, back in the earliest days when even those central-most municipalities were still developing. It was a metropolis on the verge: sporadic clutches of tall, redbrick factories and rows of shotgun houses. Theirs was one of the city’s first modest bungalows. The husband and wife were from a time before the crime and fast-food chains. The bungalow was beautifully serviceable, with three small bedrooms and rich pine cabinetry all the way to the ceiling, complete with peculiar hinges and special compartments. She would go back into the city with a lady friend, twenty years later, on a doctor’s visit, searching out a diagnosis for a rare blood disorder that would nearly end her life at forty-one. She’d never seen the ocean, but returning to that city again after living so long among gaping fields and farms, she felt lost at sea. An electric sea. She felt mangled by the chaos of the freeways and its inexplicable, spiraling constructions. The place was made flashy and metallic and of questionable, compound materials so oddly arranged she could not make sense of it. She found her little house with an emaciated, brown-skinned lady in a denim miniskirt leaning against the porch post, sucking on an orange popsicle. The deep sucking of the popsicle riveted her. The porch lady gave them the finger as she and the friend waved from the passenger seat of their air-conditioned sedan. What had become of those smooth, naturally stained cabinets, she wondered? Her hand-crafted lazy Susan? Her lady friend, a retired prison guard, responded by saying, “You think every house without clean shutters is a crack house.” Which was true.
2. The husband was great with the children, at first. Very attentive, slapstick in his comedy, always patiently instructing, right up until the children reached puberty, after which he ignored them like mangy strays. Was it their transformed genitals? the wife often wondered.
3. The husband’s first wife was a lesbian, who he was still in love with and likely always would be.
He’d responded to an ad in the newspaper. Rural home with finished attic on eight acres. 5000 sq feet animal processing facility on premises. Prior to becoming a carpenter, he’d been a meat man. He’d loved being a meat man. Hacking into things soothed him. He could slice a steak thin as paper in seconds. Unless you ran the place, though, and slaughtered the animals yourself, there was no real money in it. He belonged to a middle-class generation of men who felt duped by capitalism, tossing at night on their too-soft mattresses, dumbfounded by the constant expansion between their labor and the fey furnishings slowly filling their homes. No amount of wrinkle-proof slacks or electric razors or frozen dinners could wipe the deep memory of bailing hay from his muscles. Once he saw the ad, that was it, he was a goner. She was fine with it, really. She was born to be a business owner, she decided, having thought it over for a day. Being a mother wasn’t so easy. She could cook (bacon grease, Worcestershire), organize coupons, keep immaculate record books, darn, polish silver. Domesticity was a contest she was always winning. Except for the part about the children. She expected them to behave like miniature adults and was too desperate for their affection. It was difficult, having a husband who was in love with a dead lesbian. She’d kiss the children for too long, and requested many topless back rubs. She encouraged long, intertwined naps on the sofa from which the children awoke to find their mother’s housedress hiked around her plump waist. Also she beat them too often. Mostly for being loud or complaining or playing in the drainage ditch. Of course he beat them too, but that was expected. A woman beating her children implied a hysterical lack of control. With a man it implied the opposite.
He put their city house on the market, emptied the savings account, and took out a sizable business loan from a locally owned bank in the new county. He went on ahead of them to ready the estate. During that time they spoke only once, when he called for instructions on how to poach an egg. His absence delighted and terrified her. Two weeks later he sent for them and the furnishings. Oh, weren’t they an excited bunch, crossing the bridge out of the city, waving goodbye to the neon telephone company sign beside the river, finding themselves quickly in farm country, a few hours and there it was, the little town with a dusty candy store and one restaurant and an old abandoned movie theater with a dead marquee that read for sale, and their new house, of course, out on the edge of everything, with a water well and a dozen birch trees and an actual broken-down combine rusting away in their very own pasture.
The slaughterhouse was a lengthy cinder-block building with tangled, flowering weeds growing around it. While the movers and the children unloaded all the furniture, she began pulling the plants with a sweaty, ravenous intensity. In her good shoes. And her black slacks and silk blouse and red fedora. “This building will have to be painted! Most likely multiple coats!” she informed her husband from across the new yard, as he lumbered grumpily up the porch steps with his fireproof lockbox. Turned out the weeds were poisonous nettles—tall and leafy with a tuft of white petals on top and invisible hairs down the stalk, like microscopic hypodermic needles. Her husband got a good laugh out of this, while she lay about wrapped in wet rags, squawking in agony on the sofa.
The next night they had sex on the attic floor while the children slept on a pile of linens downstairs. He’d not wanted to do it, but she insisted it was customary, so he lowered his pants to his ankles and pulled his briefs to the side. She lay there panting hungrily beneath him with a broad, closed-lipped smile on her face that reminded him of a pink balloon stretched tight, ready for inflation.
Some things they found that were curious about the country:
1. Strangers asked a lot of questions, questions that strangers in the city would never ask and couldn’t care less to know the answer to. Rural folks would ask something and then start talking even before you’d finished responding. This was something she did herself. Though how in the hell had no one returned that simple disrespect before now? “Oh, that’s just like me and my . . .”
“What a self-centered world we’ve found
ourselves in,” she said to her husband after those first few days around town.
He almost choked on his soup. “You’ve met your match,” he said.
And she had.
2. The wife made so many friends she had a list of customers to fill an address book before they’d even opened for business. Just hearing about her friendly industriousness gave him a nosebleed and excruciating gas. He’d assumed he would smoke his own bacon and everyone would smell it and come driving over, that he’d open the building doors and people would file in to sample his cracklins. Maybe the men would want to chat about wildlife or war and he’d quickly demonstrate his breadth of knowledge on the subjects. Maybe a lady would smile at him, as he suggestively carved away at the luminous red flesh of a healthy beef.
3. The previous owners seemed gravely invested in the continued success of the business. They were an older couple who dressed with a painful and thrifty formality, in gray and brown synthetics. It wasn’t that the couple didn’t smile, it was that a serene pride rested beneath their stuffy manners, and also that the moment their antique pen was lifted from the document they’d procured from their ratty briefcase, the lady said, “You’ll come to our service, then, on Thursday?”
“We will?” the wife said, too loudly, she realized.
“Sure!” the lady said. “Were you considering another church?”
“I guess we hadn’t thought about that, had we?” the husband said.
“There’s nowhere else you’ll want to go,” the lady assured them, her face wrung up like a rag. The lady sat at the kitchen table, compulsively sliding her palms down the dress, flattening the polyester over her expansive thighs.
“We’ll think about it,” the wife said to her husband. “Won’t we?” And then, turning to the couple: “We’ll let you know.”
“Now, I want to warn you, because you seem like good people,” the man said. “You’ve got some perverse elements living across the way, sexual deviants, men who lie with men, women who make congress with women! A bad lot.”
“Is that the case?” the husband said, pulling a Lucky Strike from the pack on the table. He slid it between his yellowed fingers and put it up to his mouth where his upper lip had begun to twitch. When chewing tobacco wasn’t nearby, he smoked, and as he lit the cigarette he sent an accusing glare at his wife, reprimanding her for any thoughts she might be having regarding the kinky neighbors. “We appreciate the heads-up,” he said, nodding at the three of them before disappearing into the bathroom. “Pardon me,” he said.
“It’s a lovely church house,” the man said. “Nicest one around here, ain’t it, Louise?”
“Yes, sir,” the lady said. Her hair was gray and dry as dirt, the ample mass piled on her head like a bristly cloud stabbed through with a dozen copper pins.
“Do you all want coffee or tea?” the wife asked.
“No thank you,” the couple said, in a chilly, throbbing tandem. Their voices fit neatly inside each other’s, making a single, fluttering sound that stunned the wife.
“We better be going, hadn’t we?” the man said, standing up.
The lady agreed, following him out of the kitchen and onto the side porch, where they disappeared from sight, closing the door softly behind them.
“This was a mistake! The whole thing. You mark my words!” she yelled to the husband, who, in response, released into the toilet bowl a rattling, moist roar of flatulence that he’d been holding in since he’d first gone in and sat down.
He’d saved her. Her mother was certifiably deranged and her father was a known rapist. She remembers thinking on their first date, At least I’ll get my own house now. It was years before she’d admit that to anyone, but there it was—she wanted her own place, with her own dishes and hand towels and family photos on the walls. He needed a new wife, and she was clean enough, polite enough, back then. He’d just gone up to her father in the yard one day and pointed, saying, “Could I take her on a date?” and her father said, “Sure you can. If you buy me a soda.” So he came back the next evening in his truck with a six-pack of Pepsi. He took her out for milkshakes and a biscuit. The place they went to had giant biscuits. It was known for them.
The thing was, the blow dealt to him by the lesbian ex-wife was more than his stunted brain could endure, she decided, a year into the marriage. He was reasonably handsome and hardworking, but despite his noble posture and militant haircut, he turned out to be a broken-down stable horse with a burning-hot ego that would eventually incinerate him. It could only ever have been snuffed by the love of the lesbian who’d died a decade ago. How was the wife supposed to know this? It’s not something you understand until it’s too late. He’d caught the lesbian in bed with his own sister, more than once, engaged in a raunchy, possibly criminal position he’d not even known was possible. From what she could piece together of his cranky explanation, he’d beat his sister until her ears bled and begged the wife to denounce her same-sex attraction or else end up in a state hospital. Later he’d finally given up and said the ex-wife could do whatever she wanted so long as he occasionally watched from the broom closet, and if she promised never to divorce him. This contract was the tipping point, though, because the ex-wife left him shortly after and months later died in a car wreck. He insisted the crash was caused by one of her mentally unstable lovers. How could the ex-wife stand to be around him though, really, after he’d engaged in such groveling? It was doomed from the start, like so many things. The first wife was a beauty. The husband still kept a tooled leather album of their wedding photos in the lockbox. She never wore makeup and had the creamiest complexion, boyish, like potter’s clay. She wore her black hair slicked back in a flip. Her breasts were magnificent, even under the high-necked oxfords she wore. He was a huge fan of magnificent breasts. The new wife kept hers on prominent display as well. Like she had a choice. It was a more liberal time and partially unbuttoned blouses were the thing the year they moved out of the city. He hated this constant presentation of her tits, unless they were alone. He was nothing if not possessive.
What was it that made denial turn into desire? the husband wondered to himself in private moments, smoking his cheap cigars on the wheel of the rusted-out combine, watching a gentle doe sneak behind the encircling birches.
When the children discovered they enjoyed the offal truck, the husband called them to be placed on the hydraulic lift at the rear, allowing them to ride up among the rancid waste barrels to watch the driver dump gallons of blood and sloppy innards into a maggot-infested trough. They held their noses and stared deeply into the thick pool of organs. The wife took great delight in explaining how the offal would be transformed into ladies’ cosmetics at a nearby factory.
Once things took off, which didn’t take long on account of the wife’s ingratiating social skills, the previous owners appeared again, creeping slowly up the long drive in their flesh-colored Town Car. It was newly washed, the trim and wheels flashing in the sun. They lingered inexplicably within the vehicle, as if organizing something, before emerging from the hot car to stand with their hands in their pockets. Were they shy, or just old? The wife was incensed over not being allowed to make their acquaintance prior to the purchase. One look at those two, and she’d have advised him not to buy. She knew he knew this. She was a quick study in deceit. But what did they want? Nothing was certain about the two—every mannerly gesture seemed to conceal a filthier, feral motive. They meandered up to the office, waving as they walked through the door, as if the wife was expecting them and a graciousness ought to be extended for their having arrived on time for the appointment they never made.
They offered endless advice, in their eerie, matching voices. They delivered too-detailed histories of the facilities and the adjacent properties. “And of course this area was home to slaves. The help was necessary, and always humane. Now the neighboring estate is owned by a group of dykes and sodomites. So be cautious! Protect your childre
n!”
“You mentioned that already,” the wife said. But she could feel her husband burning behind her. She wouldn’t turn around to see his face, but she could feel the heat melting the flesh off his hard bones.
“It was a booming business for us, and we paid all of our employees a fair wage,” the lady said.
“When is this church service?” the husband asked, his demeanor suddenly turning bright enough to blind them. “We have no taste for lewd behavior,” he said. “None!”
“Absolutely not,” she said to him later. “It’s a damn cult. And why wouldn’t they pay their employees fairly? Like they deserve a prize for being good to people.” The whole conversation seemed beyond reason to her.
“We need to keep the peace!” he yelled, scolding her in the way he did when he’d reached his mysterious brink. His eruptions came without warning. Rarely did she see one coming.
“You should hire me,” she said sweetly, trying to change the subject. “As a paid employee. I keep saying this. I want to pay taxes, honey! Pay into Social Security.”
“There’s no need for that! We’re the fucking owners!” he said, still inflamed.