Mystery Tribune

Fiction-1

Fiction

by Laird Barron

by Laird BarronA miniature coffin of chipped, lacquered wood, maybe 17th century, hung in Cray’s bathroom. Within the open coffin, a skeleton awaited the first spadeful. The unknown artist jaggedly carved LERN TO DYE beneath the figure. The L hooked like a sickle. He couldn’t remember where his daddy stole the plaque. He hadn’t raised his head to look at it in a long time. Sensed it looming, however. The darkened moon, an approaching meteor. Existence was to descend the rungs of Hell. Suffering, emotional and physical, brought the quote and its message into focus.

The pain in his back intensified to that tipping point between exquisite pain and pleasure. He gave in and called the doctor. A nurse led him to a surprisingly shabby room. The room stank as hospitals must, perhaps worse. He breathed through his mouth and removed his clothes, noting with mild embarrassment how soiled they were and the grease welding his socks to his ankles. On the second visit, the doctor showed him several X-rays and intoned a litany of woe: stage-4, metastasized, inoperable. The doctor repeated inoperable. Awfully chipper for a man pronouncing a death sentence. Doc wrote a prescription for painkillers. Cray paid in cash; a greasy wad of fifties and hundreds dredged from the strongbox hidden in the garage—the nest egg he’d grimly amassed over the course of his adult life. Wages of sweat, toil and the ascetism of a monk; sacrifices measured in self-imposed privation, missed vacations and the decision to not sire children.

His younger wife stoically endured their apparent lack of means, although he sensed her bitterness. Perhaps she would understand in due course when her life opened fully, and him gone at last. Staring into the bathroom mirror at home, he decided to keep the diagnosis to himself for the moment; nurture it in secret as he did his griefs and complaints. He added his prescription medicine to the stockpile of bootleg pills previously acquired from a local connection. Kept everything safe in a drawer under his junked electric razors and mostly dry bottles of aftershave. Torment would be alleviated only upon extreme need. Otherwise, the pangs of consumption were akin to a penitent’s lash. Punishment well-deserved.

What do you wish, mortal flea? his reflection said. The image resembled him, wizened and irradiated, in a future decade after the bombs dropped, or his father somehow risen from the dead in the horrible gloaming.

After she retired for bed… he slouched off to the garage and sharpened his weapons.

He tried to speak his desire, an end to suffering. Infrasonic squeals emanated. He couldn’t discern the sounds, but it enraged the dog next door. This was what happened when he lied to himself, to the paternal god figure looming at the threshold.

Learn to die, his reflection said. The mirror became opaque as a bronze shield.

Before work, he crossed the street to where the neighbor mutt watched him through a fence. A chained black dog with brown eyes and a hopeful grin. He handed the dog a piece of leftover breakfast and let him lick his fingers. Then he got into his car and drove to the shop. The guys at the shop ran an afterhours poker game every Friday. He declined to join them in their jocular boozing and squandering of paychecks. Instead, he ate TV dinners with his wife Bianca and watched a true crime show she enjoyed. Melodramatic murder reenactments were her reward for enduring another tour at the grocery store—a rustic anticathedral plopped in a cow field; badly lit, badly heated, lumpen wood floors slanting leeward to wreck a woman’s arches and spine.

After she retired for bed (not from the store, she’d be at the store an eon unless Hell froze over), he slouched off to the garage and sharpened his weapons. Knives and axes first. Machetes and tomahawks second. The Green River knife was taken off the body of a scalped settler along the Oregon Trail. A felling axe had seen action against mammoth Douglas firs on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle. The machete with the loose wooden grip chopped a path through a 1930s South American jungle. Then came the Bohemian earspoon, the winged spear; the b***h, the bastard, smelling of oil and the Black Forest. His great-great granddaddy stuck the spear in the last wild boar he’d ever hunted.

Cray used a whetstone for the small blades and a wheel stone for the heavy work. The wheel was a treadle model requiring brawn. Built by Puritan engineers and shipped to the New World at the bottom of a caravel. He performed this ritual as Bianca slept by the blue radiation of The Late, Late Show. He labored in pajama bottoms near a sooty forty-watt bulb, sweat dripping from his nose and his n***d shoulders, where tufts of hair were white. Potbellied and slump-chested, yet powerful and sinewy in his arms. Arms made for brachiating.

The Late, Late ShowThe streetlight at the corner of Tanner and Wayne was busted. The glow from the garage window shone into the neglected yard like the running light of a boat on a dark sea. His silhouette flickered, wreathed in sparks. He’d inherited the house and the garage from his old man. The place needed repairs. Mold-gray cobwebs gathered in the corners. A rat crept forth to watch him. Big liquid eyes, twitchy whiskers. Cray poisoned many of its brothers, sisters and children. Natives believed ravens carried the messages of the dead; he suspected that rats were little underworld messengers too. Rat wanted to tell him something. Or it crouched atop his workbench in judgment.

We’re coming for everything, one day soon. Twitch, twitch.

Some in town believed he possessed the evil eye, although they framed it otherwise. w*********h, hillbilly, hick. He moved soft-footed and dirty, but not good farming dirt; engine grease and knuckles skinned b****y. A skulker; vicious if cornered, and he always felt cornered, deprived, cheated. These sentiments ran in the blood of his people. Daddy had smiled too much around those he feared or hated. Cray did too. His family lurked in the Midwest before they burned the farmhouse and migrated east to this woodsy neighborhood near Accord. Reinvented themselves as gentled. His kin were collectors, scavengers. Hoarders of treasure. Nibelungen gold. Ever thus, all the way down the line to folkloric times of woodcut illustrations and thatch roofs and Satan trying barred doors come sunset; whyfor the arcane knick-knacks, the rustic tools and weapons. And the heartaches, misfortune and grudges.

The ritual was done. He stepped off the treadle.

Cutting, hacking, stabbing, clubbing implements of death hung on the rack. Vibrating with potential; an infinite roulette wheel. He returned to the house. His steps scraped faintly on the gravel path. He crawled into bed in the dark. Bianca pressed her cheek to his sweaty chest, muttering a consolation or a curse. Her shiny blonde wig glimmered on its own rack, like the death implements.

“Baby. Baby. Baby. Baby,” she said to someone, surely not him—the forest goblin, the troll in its cave. Grendel, Fenrir.

The neighbor dog barked at the trees. Cray slept, shivering and cooling. The constant gnawing in his spine fell behind. As he slept, he swam backward into the womb of his mother and deeper into the womb of the world, the root and blood scent of a snug subatomic burrow, and into the heart of the galaxy where possibilities concentrated to a pinprick nothingness.

◆

A year and change past high school graduation, Gage lived at the dead end of Caltrops Road in a doublewide trailer with his uncle and his uncle’s pissed-off Manx. He chomped a bowl of Wheaties every a.m. before pedaling his ten-speed three miles to the auto shop. No shoulder on the sideroads made for a treacherous commute. Three junk cars sat on blocks in the yard; something about the cobbler’s kids and their lack of shoes. He favored T-shirts and jeans in the summer, plaids in winter. Dad ministered, Mom kept house, little sis attended school. He hugged his sister, second grade, she’d joined the family almost too late. Pop said she’d arrived just in time to complete the family circle, praise Gawd. The right rev would be mortally ashamed to know his son coveted another man’s wife, and more. Most unholy.

Gage shared supper with them in their very nice house on Saturdays (they’d converted his bedroom to extra storage), rode with them to church on Sunday. The congregation kids loved him like a gangling, cheerful uncle. Whenever the boys got bored and rowdy, he stripped off his jacket and wrestled them on the lawn until somebody started crying. He was a regular attendee of the Friday night poker game. The seasoned mechanics appreciated an easy mark. Duck season rolled around, he borrowed a twenty gauge and joined a hunting posse of former schoolmates to prowl byways and waterways. He drank whatever beer was on sale and hammered back JD at parties if he was spoiling for a fight. Someday, he wanted to rent an apartment in LA and model. Uncle Finneas said he was pretty enough. That’s why the kid tucked his luxurious locks under a do-rag at the shop. Took him five long years to grow them proper—had to protect his investment.

He slaved shoulder to shoulder with Cray. Grease monkey extraordinaire, and Bianca’s husband for some damned reason. Gage, wet-behind-the-ears new hire, couldn’t understand how a hunchback goober pushing sixty managed to land a stone-cold fox. Rumor was B’s family owed Cray’s family a debt and they’d arranged the union as such matters were done in a less enlightened era. Another, slightly plausible explanation came directly from B: once upon a time her man had been slightly less ugly, and he’d socked away a chunk of every check he’d ever cashed, which amounted to a tidy sum. Her own paltry education and dire prospects influenced her to stand pat.

In fairness, the older dude treated him okay, didn’t tease or bully him as was the custom of such professions. Weird, though. No matter what you said, Cray smiled wincingly and shrugged. Kept a steady pace with his duties, nothing spectacular. Gorilla-strong. Popped bottle caps with his thumb and loosened lug nuts with his grimy bare hands. Didn’t say spit over the course of a shift barring a solitary occasion: he coughed a veiny, b****y gob and declared he’d belonged to a tribe of hominids that hurled infants into a volcano to pacify their fire god. It hadn’t saved them in the end. He didn’t mention it again and might’ve been high. Everybody at the shop operated drunk or stoned. Bianca first came by to bring Cray his lunch. Ham on rye and a Pabst, every damned time. Hell of a looker ripe in the sway of her hips, the heat of her gaze. Platinum blonde, blue eyes, pink lips, she surely filled out her sundress and stockings. Gage had thought on those lips and the sly smile she flashed only for him gawking beside the water cooler. Thought on those eyes glancing to the crotch of his overalls, appreciating his virility.

Rough, reckless and randy, he figured that married or not, a woman as fine as B deserved a young stud, and that’s why he didn’t feel a speck of remorse about f*****g her whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. Said opportunity had only presented itself five times so far, alas. Twice in the bed she and her husband shared; twice in her rusty Caravan parked in a vacant lot near the Rondout; and once on the couch in the trailer while Uncle Finneas was down to the American Legion post in Ellenville to get his drunk on.

The other day Gage and B lay upon the folded down rear seat of the Caravan. Spent and enervated, the stink of their passionate s*x roiled his gorge. He focused on her voice, reliving within another partition of his consciousness what they’d just done to each other, and that helped quiet his guts.