It's Loose, page 1
IT’S LOOSE
By B. W. Battin
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / B. W. Battin
*Note: Originally published under the pen name Warner Lee
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Meet the Author
B. W. Battin grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After serving four years in the U.S. Coast Guard, he graduated from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He became a reporter at KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, then moved on to TV stations in Shreveport, Louisiana; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Duluth, Minnesota, where he wrote his first published novel, Angel of the Night. After it was published, he became a full-time writer. One of his novels, Smithereens, was made into a TV movie for NBC. His novels and short stories have been translated into various languages, and he has ghost-written novels for other authors. He lives in Belen, New Mexico, with his wife Sandy, whom he describes as the love of his life. They met in Albuquerque while they were both in the news business.
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To Jim Wofford, who’s been a friend for more than thirty years
IT’S LOOSE
Prologue
1
Opening the oven, Charles Capwell stared at the TV dinner, wondering whether it was done. With the thing covered with foil the way it was, you couldn’t tell whether the food was bubbling or still frozen in the center. Although he knew how long the package said you were supposed to cook a sliced-turkey-with-stuffing-and-carrots frozen dinner, he hadn’t noted the time when he put it in the oven. He almost always forgot to do that, which meant he had this problem often, since frozen dinners were the mainstay of his diet.
Capwell eyed the foil-covered rectangle, trying to make up his mind. The small oven was in dire need of cleaning. Black crud God knew how thick coated its interior walls. Not surprising, he supposed, since he’d lived here for eight years and had never cleaned it. But then cleaning ovens was woman’s work, simply not the sort of thing a guy did. You made the oven all shiny, and it looked better, but it didn’t work any better. What difference did it make how it looked—especially inside where nobody could see it?
Finally Capwell did what he always did: he got a fork and poked a hole in the foil. Steam came out. His meal was ready.
Seated at the scarred wooden table, he peeled back the foil and stared at compartments containing steaming portions of turkey and stuffing and carrots and a square of some sort of dessert. You were supposed to tear off the foil covering the dessert, but Capwell never bothered with that. You did, you didn’t, the stuff tasted the same.
Like the house itself, the kitchen was small. Worn linoleum with a faded flower pattern, a few cabinets whose white paint had turned a yellowish brown, the result of years of fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. The sink had a permanent brown stain where the faucet dripped. It was nearly as bad as the toilet, whose bowl had turned grungier and grungier over the years Capwell had lived here. He cleaned it occasionally—grudgingly—but the rust-colored crud just kept getting thicker.
Although he wasn’t much for the inside stuff, the woman’s work, he kept the outside of the place immaculate. Failure to do woman’s work didn’t affect his self-esteem, but letting the lawn go or watching the weeds take over the flower beds would make him look bad in the eyes of his neighbors. They’d think he was lazy, slovenly. So Capwell worked hard in his yard, keeping it among the best maintained in his working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood.
Capwell figured most of the people living on the block thought of him as a good neighbor! He was quiet, never bothered anyone, always wished people a good day if they walked past while he was outside working in the yard. Except for his job, that was the extent of Capwell’s social contact. He was what people called a loner. He had no friends. Not one.
Capwell had been married once, back when he lived in Kentucky. He was eighteen, just out of high school, and Lori Ann was sixteen and pregnant. The marriage lasted two years. Lori Ann divorced him so she could marry an evangelist she met at a revival. Got religion, she said, wanted to spend her life in the service of the Lord. That was twenty years ago, and Capwell had seen neither Lori Ann nor his son since. Sometimes he wondered what Jimmy looked like now that he was all grown up. And sometimes he wondered whether Lori Ann was still married to the preacher, whether she still had religion.
Sometimes. But not very often.
Lori Ann was just one of the things he’d lost during his life. He’d had a new Cadillac convertible, a business, a chance to be a major league baseball player. They were all gone now, as if they’d never been, as if they’d happened in someone else’s life. He bought the Cadillac when he was a young guy, just starting out. His uncle had gotten him into the electricians’ union, and he was making good money. Not good enough to afford the Cadillac, but he wanted it, and he could make the payments if he skimped on other things, and Lori Ann thought it was the sexiest car she’d ever seen. (The preacher she ran off with had one, now that Capwell thought about it.) He lost the car when he lost his job. Four hundred dollars’ worth of tools and copper wire had been stolen from the company, and somehow he got fingered for it. Wrongly. He’d never taken even so much as a three-cent wire nut. But his boss didn’t believe him. Capwell lost his job. Then, unable to make the payments, he lost the Cadillac.
He lost the business years later. He and a guy named Herschel Sniezek had opened a meat market. Capwell did most of the butcher work, cutting up meat for freezer orders and things like that, while Herschel did the paperwork. The business was barely better than marginal, but it was a living. At least it was until Herschel died in his sleep of a heart attack one night. Under their partnership agreement, Capwell got Herschel’s share of the business, but he wasn’t good at doing Herschel’s part of the work. He didn’t know how to keep records, which got him into trouble with the IRS. He forgot to order ahead, then overreacted and overordered. The business struggled along for six months before Capwell declared bankruptcy.
Perhaps the loss he regretted most was his chance to be a major leaguer. He’d always been good at baseball. Just sandlot stuff with other kids, but he could pitch so well that his team nearly always won. No matter who else played on it. Could have been all girls, wouldn’t have mattered, almost no one ever got on base. So one day, after Lori Ann had left him, he decided to go to Florida and try out for the Dodgers. He had another car, a used one, and he was working as a forklift operator, which he hated. He had a few hundred bucks. And he’d never been to Florida.
There were closer places to go, of course, but he’d always liked the Dodgers, and if he was going to play baseball, that was who he wanted to be with. He tried out in Vero Beach. And was selected. His record was seven and one when he was advanced to the Double-A San Antonio team. He pitched only one game for San Antonio. During it he was struck by a hard-hit ball. It broke his arm, which mended, but not well enough for him to pitch again.
He went back to Kentucky. Back to being a forklift operator.
And as time went on, he discovered that he’d lost something else. The ability to have a relationship with a woman. Maybe Lori Ann had taken it from him; he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he’d tried to get along with women, tried lots of times, but it never worked, for they were all alike. They’d smile and laugh and come on to you. They’d make love to you. They’d tell you that you were the one, the only, the best. And then they’d hurt you. Always. Without exception.
He’d relearned that the hard way just last week. There was this girl named Janey at the grocery store where he worked. Kind of thin, with curly blonde hair and the biggest, brightest smile he’d ever seen. She was a checker, and whenever Capwell saw her, she flashed that smile at him, said hi, asked how he was doing. At first he thought it was just friendliness, and then he decided that she was coming on to him, that she liked him. Before long, Capwell was so infatuated with her that sh e was all he could think of. He’d lie in bed at night, thinking of Janey. He’d fry his bacon in the morning, thinking of Janey. A part of him knew better, kept warning him to leave her alone because she was poison just like all the rest of them. But Capwell hadn’t wanted to hear that. He wanted Janey. She was all he wanted.
It had taken him a month to work up the courage to ask her out.
On the surface, she was nice about it. If you just looked at her words, at what they meant if you looked them up in the dictionary, she wasn’t being mean about it. “I like you and enjoy working with you,” she’d said, “but I’m pretty much going steady with this guy, and I just don’t see us having a relationship beyond what we have here at work.”
Nothing you could point your finger at. No derogatory words. No obvious attempt to hurt. But that’s what it had all been about. Hurting. Making you crawl. Making you feel all twisted up and ashamed inside. Sometimes he thought women practiced it, took lessons in it, maybe even went to college and got a Ph.D. in it.
Doctor Janey, expert in giving pain.
Capwell angrily stabbed a piece of turkey with his fork, puncturing the bottom of the foil tray. He studied the spot a moment, but it didn’t look as though any gravy was leaking out.
He’d started getting even with Janey after that. Once, when she’d stepped away from her cash register, he rang up a fifty-dollar sale just so she’d come up short. If she called over to the meat department to get a price on something, he’d always give her the wrong one, hoping the boss would notice and think she was screwing up. When she said good morning to him, he just scowled at her. He became sullen and grouchy, not just around Janey but all the time he was at work.
The store manager, Fred Jamison, had called him in for a talk, told him he had an attitude problem, he wasn’t getting along with his fellow employees. Capwell said he was just in a bad mood, it would pass, nothing to worry about. Jamison said he hoped that was right, because if there was one thing he didn’t like it was people with attitude problems.
Capwell stabbed another piece of turkey, and this time he embedded the fork’s tines in the table. He stared at it, his mind churning with emotions he was unable to sort out. And then he found he was picturing the fork sticking out of Jamison, sticking out of his back.
You can make it happen, something said to him. It was a voice, and yet it wasn’t, as if human speech was the closest he could get to describing it and thus the term he was forced to use. It came from behind him, from inside his head—from everywhere and from nowhere. And yet it was real. He had not imagined it.
Capwell looked around the room. He knew there was no one else there, but it was the instinctive thing to do. The voice hadn’t frightened him. There was something comforting about it, seductive, and he wished he could hear it again.
When he shifted his gaze back to the table, Janey lay on it, naked, the fork protruding from her belly, blood seeping out around the tines. She looked at him, her eyes pleading. For just a second, his heart went out to her, and he wanted to pull the fork from her stomach, get help, beg her to forgive him. But it was too late for that. Looking into her pleading eyes, he thought, Bitch!
Yes, the voice said soothingly, yes, yes, yes.
And then they were both there on his scarred kitchen table, Janey and Jamison, lying beside each other, looking as though they were about to make love, right in front of him, mocking him. Getting up so fast he knocked the chair over, Capwell dashed to the drawer in which the knives were kept, grabbed a butcher knife he’d stolen from the store.
Yes, yes, yes. Do it. Do it!
With a roar, Capwell rushed to the table, raising the knife. They were still there, Jamison caressing her now, one hand on her breast, the other on her pussy, neither of them paying any attention to the fork sticking out of her. Capwell swung the knife downward with all his strength, its blade passing right through Jamison’s chest and sinking into the wood of the table top.
Yes, yes. Wonderful. Oh, how wonderful! Feel it, how good it feels. Feel it. Feel it.
And Capwell did feel it, a hot surge of power and vitality and elation. It was as if he’d just won a million bucks in a contest, had a triple orgasm, received a shot of a potent narcotic, drunk deeply from the Fountain of Youth. Simultaneously. All the gloriously good feelings chasing each other around inside of him.
And then the image vanished. There was a fork sticking out of a TV dinner tray and a butcher knife protruding from the table’s wood surface about a foot and a half from the fork. The good feelings vanished. Capwell stood there, confused, trembling, afraid.
You can get them back, the good feelings.
“How?” Capwell asked the empty room.
You know.
And he did, too. If he accepted the voice, just sort of drew it in like a breath of air, the good feelings would be back. Power instead of helplessness. The ability to hurt those who had hurt him.
Something icy slipped down his spine, like the time Eddie Mertz had stuffed a Sno-Cone down his shirt at the county fair when they were ten. Except that chill had just been on the outside. A quick squeal of surprise, and then the sun was warming him, and he and Eddie were scuffling in the dirt, laughing and throwing half-hearted punches at each other.
The cold he felt now was different. It was inside. Inside his marrow, inside that core part of him that made him what he was, inside his essence, his very being. And a part of him was screaming for him to say no, to reject this thing that wanted to… to what?
“What do you want?” he asked.
You know.
And at least on some level he did. Although it was July and hot and muggy and the air conditioner was broken, Charles Capwell shivered, his summer tan turning a whitish blue, his skin crawling into gooseflesh. No, he thought, no, no, no. But the refusal was weak, for he wanted the good feeling back, needed it the way a heroin addict needs his next fix. Now that he’d experienced it, without it he was cold and hollow and afraid.
“Who are you?”
I am you.
“No.”
I am everyone.
Capwell just stood there, shivering, not knowing what to do.
I’m leaving now.
“No!” The trembling was worse now, as if he were having a seizure or in the grip of St. Vitus’s dance.
You want the good feeling back?
Capwell didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “Oh, please, yes.”
2
Janey Donovan was at her cash register when Charles Capwell came in and headed for the meat department. He walked past Janey, deliberately not looking at her, making it clear he was still pissed. Jesus. She hadn’t done anything to encourage the guy. She’d been friendly to him, the way she was to everybody. Her daddy always called her his little chatterbox. Talking and being nice was simply her way.
Capwell had always seemed to be a decent enough guy, a quiet man who was usually sort of withdrawn, in there with himself, needing his own company more than anybody else’s. A tall, thin guy with dark hair, he was neither good-looking nor bad-looking. He reminded her a little of Ernest, the guy in the TV commercials who was always getting windows slammed on his fingers and things like that. Except Capwell was a lot less talkative.
Janey had been taken completely by surprise when he asked her out. Capwell just didn’t seem the type. For one thing, he was around forty, which made him twice her age. Although that in itself might not have been enough to make her say no, Janey was all but engaged to a guy named Brad Houghton. When she’d tried explaining this to Capwell, he looked something like a hurt puppy, and then his eyes glazed over. Ever since then he’d been acting freaky.
Janey was ringing up the purchases of a woman with two obnoxious boys who’d been shoving each other and knocking batteries and disposable lighters from their display by the checkout counter. One of the boys picked up a candy bar, peeled off the wrapper, and began eating it. Janey made a point of looking at the kid, then at the mother, and then ringing up the price of the candy bar.
