Flesh Wounds, page 28
“Suck swamp water, you son of a bitch!”
Shelley’s motto had always been “Do unto others before they do unto you.” Looking at Higginbotham bobbing in the swamp water, Dylan admitted that there were times when she had the right idea. A wise woman, his wife Shelley. Too bad she’d never understood the difference between intelligence and arrogance. How many times and in how many ways had she told him what a dumb shit he was?
God, he’d lost count years ago.
You should have drowned the bastard the first time you had him down, she’d be saying if she were with him now.
Loretta’s ankle was tied to a tree. It was the nylon rope that had so rudely snatched her from his arms. Dylan untied her and gathered her in his arms. Blood ran sticky hot down his side and leg. The slightest movement shifted the blade buried in his ribs. He stood for several minutes, breathing in ragged gasps, willing his head to stop reeling and his leg to stay locked.
“It’s okay, Loretta. I’m going to get you to a doctor now.”
Using the mushroom-shaped stump to get his bearings, Dylan started out in what he hoped was the direction of the Toyota pickup. Stumbling, wincing in agony with every stride, he wondered if he’d have enough strength to empty the camaro’s trunk.
Somehow he’d missed the truck.
Twice he’d stumbled upon quicksand, the second time going in up to his knees before he flung himself back on solid ground. He’d come close to losing Loretta, just barely managing to drag her out by the hair.
He’d held her and rocked her for a minute, cooing to her the way a mother does a baby, whispering that it was going to be alright, that he was going to get them out of this, going to get her to a doctor. “It’s alright,” he told her again and again.
But it wasn’t He was lost.
And worse, he was certain that something was following them.
There it was again. Something big. Sliding on its belly through the muck and water. Following them.
He was tired. Weak. Faint. His twice-stabbed leg was beginning to experience muscle spasms. One minute he’d be shuffling through the swamp, the next it would seize up and pitch him to the ground. Every stride shifted the steel embedded in his side. It seemed he could hear it grating against bone.
Was he even heading in the right direction?
Whatever was following him made a splash. And then, a hissing grunt. Dylan considered leaving Loretta behind. Whatever it was would probably be satisfied with her and let him go on.
“But what kind of a man am I?” he asked aloud. The sound of his voice prompted a frenzied wet scrambling from behind him. It was getting close.
You’re a selfish bastard, Shelley answered. The voice in his lurching mind seemed as real as the weight in his arms.
“I’m a good man, Shelley.”
You think of no one but yourself, Dylan.
“I do all sorts of things for you.”
Name one.
“I’ll name you a hundred!” An owl scolded him for the outburst.
Just one.
“Sure. I’ll name—” His leg seized up. He caught himself on a dead tree, managed to stay up, but Loretta tumbled to the ground. He hung there, listening to the approaching sound of what was probably the biggest goddamn gator in Louisiana—bigger than anything at that fucking alligator farm!—and he couldn’t think of anything to tell Shelley. A verse from an old Paul Williams tune ran through his head.
Love yourself as you love no other,
Be no man’s fool and be no man’s brother,
We’re all gonna’ die anyway,
And that’s the hell of it.
“But I’m not going to leave you out here to die, Loretta.” He reached for her.
Something heavy struck him from behind. He sprawled into the mud, tried to rise, but it came whistling through the air again and struck him in the back of the head. He was reminded of situation comedies and the sound a frying pan makes on someone’s head.
“Stupid asshole! She’s dead already!” Bong! went the frying pan over his head. “Been dead for two whole fucking months!” Bong! “You gouged out my eye to save a goddamn dead woman!” Bong!
Dylan managed one look over his shoulder. There stood Higginbotham, blood and optic nerves streaming down his face, madly swinging a metal bucket. The bucket came screaming down again. Bong!
“Experiment,” Higginbotham panted. Bong! “You fucked up—” A great wheezing breath. “—my preservation experiment!” Bong!
Fireworks exploding in his head, Dylan tried to scramble away, slipping past where Loretta lay cold and lifeless in the mud. The bucket had opened his scalp and he was blinded by blood flowing down over his forehead. As he crawled, Higginbotham pursued, flailing away with the bucket.
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” he screamed, punctuating each word with a blow from the bucket.
There was suddenly a clearing. A warm hard surface beneath his hands. The bucket glanced off his shoulder and made a new tone as it bounced off the blacktop.
“You like her so goddamn much,” screamed Higginbotham, “I’m gonna put you in there with her, you son of a bitch!”
Something struck at Dylan’s face. Through the blood and random spots of light, he saw ivory fangs fall inches short of his eyes. Recoil. Strike. Again, just short of making contact with his face. Recoil. Strike.
Higginbotham paused to catch his breath.
Recoil. Strike. Red eyes gleaming. Forked tongue.
Dylan caught the water moccasin behind the head and tore the snake’s functioning half free of the road. He rolled over and, with the last of his strength, surged to his feet and lunged at the mad professor. He was squeezing the snake behind the head, forcing its mouth to gap wide. The glistening fangs were protruding white crescents, tiny slivers of moon hooked in the night.
He raked the moccasin’s mouth across Higginbotham’s face. The serpent’s fangs left twin razor-furrows from forehead to chin. Higginbotham screamed. Dylan struck him again. And again. Higginbotham dropped the bucket and raised his arms to protect himself. The water moccasin’s fangs left deep cuts across both forearms before the professor turned to run. Dylan sank the snake’s fangs into the back of Higginbotham’s meaty neck. He dug deep and the fangs tore free of the snake.
Higginbotham stumbled away, clawing at the poisonous needles embedded in the back of his neck.
Dylan legs started to buckle, so he sat down in the road. He slung the dying reptile aside. Wiping blood from his eyes, he watched as Higginbotham fell to the ground and went into convulsions.
It took twenty minutes for Higginbotham to die. Good eye rolled back in his head, the professor spasmed and thrashed about in the mud, making noises like a strangled guinea. His hands became talons that tore at the mud and swamp grass. He snapped and hissed like the snake that had imparted its last ambition to him.
When Higginbotham was still, Dylan crawled down in the mud with him. He packed Higginbotham’s mouth and nostrils with mud. Unsatisfied, he scooped out a small hole, pushed the professor’s head in, and buried it. Finally, he crawled back to admire his work, amused by Higginbotham’s ostrich repose.
He wiped the face of his watch free, tried to concentrate on the tiny hands. Every time his chin hit his chest, he’d snap to and check the time. Thirty minutes went by. Higginbotham hadn’t moved.
Loretta lay where he had dropped her. He leaned close and for the first time noticed the slackness in her face, the sunken eye sockets, the sepia-tinted flesh, the hollow places and prominent bones. There was still swamp in her mouth and ears. Her hair was coming out. Remembering how cold she’d felt, he shuddered.
“Sorry, Loretta.”
The road was empty save for the camaro sitting where he’d left it. He could just make out the head of the fire trail in the gloom. If he stayed on the trail, he shouldn’t have any trouble finding the truck. The keys were still in his pocket. He’d drive into Chacahoula like he’d planned, tell them that he’d followed Higginbotham out here.
But first he had to get Shelley’s body out of the camaro’s trunk.
The Endless Masquerade
When Amy was eight, old Farmer Brandt sold his southern cornfield—the one that would flood every four or five years—to some big city carnival people.
Amy’s mother said carnival people were trash and if Amy’s father were alive he’d have talked Brandt out of selling them that field. Amy was told to stay away from the carnival, but like most of her mother’s orders, this one was ignored. As long as Amy showed up for lunch, her mother was too busy cleaning at the bed and breakfast all day to notice where Amy spent most of her time.
The carnival people came in trailers and buses, erected tents and plywood booths, shaping a midway there in the soggy bottoms along the Illinois River. The tents were dark canvas, round and bulbous. When they went up that first summer, Amy thought they looked like ticks on the back of some vast, foul-smelling hog. Ticks on the back of the Earth. Earth as an odious pig rooting through the cosmos—she liked that image. The shaven stalks of corn were its bristling, porcine hide. The mud and muck of the field were the effluvia in which the beast had rolled for so long that they had become the predominant components of its constitution. When the tents shuddered in the wind, the canvas billowing in and out like the heaving sides of some ravenous beast, it was as if they were sucking the lifeblood from the Earth.
The image was perhaps a bit excessive, but Amy was obsessed with parasites that summer. She had just become the victim of one.
The rides came next: great metal octopi, skeletal wheels, abrasive music, and lights—more lights than in all of Tahlequah. Kiddy-car tracks were laid. Dunk tanks were filled. Gantries and gears were assembled to form apocalyptic leviathans from whose pinnacles could be seen the city people in their canoes and rafts on the river.
On a good weekend there were thousands of people on the river. Men with gymnasium muscles and blow-dryer hair. Women with French-cut bikinis and tans that could have only come from a booth or a bottle. The city regurgitated them every weekend, and they swarmed on the little river community like maggots in roadkill. By the thousands, the river brought them in. The carnival only made it worse.
One, or both, brought Kevin. He worked the river by day, hauling canoes and tourists up to the drop-off point, and by night he worked the carnival. Oh yeah, he worked the goddamn carnival.
She was attracted to him at first. No way for her not to be. She, an impressionable Okie who’d never been any further than the great metropolis of Muskogee. He, a suave college sophomore whose military parents had taken him around the world and back, settling finally near the Air Force base in OKC. They were the proverbial moth and flame. And by the time Amy was burned, Kevin had already convinced her that everything he said was true.
“I’ll slit your throat if you tell anyone, Amy.” He showed her the skinning knife he’d use to do it.
She was eight. She was as terrified as she was humiliated and hurt, more so perhaps. And she believed him. So she never told. It was, after all, only a summer. Come fall semester he’d be gone and she could put it behind her. Now, almost thirty years later, she knows that problems are never resolved that easily. She knows that those who prey upon others never just go away. But the child she was that summer had never met the likes of Kevin.
When Amy was nine, the Illinois swelled in the spring rain and the carnival was forced to delay its opening by two weeks because of water standing in Brandt’s field. Three tourists drowned on the river that spring... and Kevin came back. College had disagreed with him. What had been a summer job was to become permanent.
That summer the carnival opened a makeup booth. For a dollar they’d paint your face. You could be a cat or a dog or a mouse, a mime or a superhero, even a hideous monster if that’s the sort of thing you were into. Amy discovered that if she had her face painted, she could step outside herself while Kevin panted and shoved and tore at the tender parts of her body. With her face painted, it was someone else suffering the pain and indignation. She could watch: repulsed, but not really implicated in the events; disgusted—sick to her stomach even—but not filthy, not soiled with Kevin’s semen and sweat like that caricature of a little girl with her painted face pressed against the vinyl seat of his car.
She stole the money from him. It took very little secrecy to slip a buck from his jeans while he lay gasping afterward, wiping at his flaccid penis with tissues from the box he kept in his car. She took his money and she used it to buy a mask so that pitiful girl who he used so savagely could hide her face. She took the risk because she felt sorry for the little girl; though perhaps it was not so great a risk after all. Kevin may have known where the money was going. Kevin seemed to enjoy the painted faces.
When Amy was ten, the makeup booth expanded, adding colorful carnival masks with sequins and feathers and beads. They were handmade and exquisite, with died hair and painted smiles. For three bucks you could own one. There wasn’t a masquerade or mardi gras to be found in the backwoods of Oklahoma, but Amy accumulated quite a collection of the bright disguises.
That August the Illinois flooded again and, as a river will sometimes do, it changed course. North of Brandt’s field was a bend known as Slippery Shoals. For a hundred years, Slippery Shoals had kept the Illinois River from taking the easiest route south, the route through old Farmer Brandt’s cornfield. That year the shoals collapsed, sinking under the weight of raging river, washing downstream to join the billions of other pebbles that had once been part of some greater whole.
There was very little warning. The carnival people had time to strike their tents and load their trailers. Within an hour, the field was under three foot of water. The Ranger’s Station said the river would rise another six feet before it crested late that evening. The Ferris wheel, the rollercoaster, the Tilt-a-whirl and others were a total loss. Abandoned and deserted, they sat in the pouring rain like the half-submerged skeletons of some mythical sea-serpents.
Amy arrived that afternoon. She was a strong swimmer; she had, afterall, lived on the river all her life. Though the swift current and pelting rain may have turned back someone from the city, Amy wasn’t scared. She knew the field was clear of stumps and submerged branches that could pull her under. She knew to enter the water upriver so the current would do most of the work. When she reached the Ferris wheel, she scaled the slippery metal frame like a monkey. Just moments after she’d first plunged into the water, she sat in the wheel’s topmost seat where she could see everything. This was the top of her world and, for that moment, she was its ruler.
Despite the rain and the treacherous current, there were actually a few canoes on the river. She guessed that they were locals looking for lost tourists or canoes that had been swept from the river’s bank. The original course of the river was still open—probably would be until the water level dropped and the river settled into its new path. The canoeists stuck to the original route, bypassing the flooded carnival grounds. Except for one.
When she saw Kevin coming, she realized too late that she didn’t have a mask for the poor girl he was so fond of abusing. While Kevin tied off his canoe below, she slid down the spokes and collected black soot and grease from the hub of the wheel. By the time Kevin caught up with her, she had scrambled back to her seat. She huddled there, awaiting the inevitable, hidden behind her black war paint.
When it was over, they lay naked in the warm rain in an oddly tender moment, his arms around her, stroking her hair and back. “I think,” he said after several long minutes, “that I have fallen in love with you, Amy.” He tilted her head so that she was looking up at him. “Can you believe that? You’re a kid, not even in high school yet, and I think I’m in love with you.”
She realized at that moment that he was about to steal the very last thing she owned. He was about to take away her hatred of him. Lying there in the downpour, she could only pity him, this poor sick pedophile who’d not only failed at college, but at life. She was only ten, but she saw clearly her future from that point on. She saw how her pity would in time become compassion. How compassion would in turn lead to affection, how the rest of her life would be spent in service to him. Worse, she saw how the rest of her life might be spent wanting to serve him. She saw the masks eventually coming off. And she saw her face beneath the masks.
What she didn’t see was the need which had already formed within her. The need to be possessed. The need to wear the masks. When she slammed the lap bar down over Kevin’s head, both stunning and pinning him in one fell swoop, she didn’t know she’d miss his touch, his ownership. When she slipped home the bar’s locking pin and jumped, she didn’t know he had already shaped her life as surely as if she’d let him live.
Because the Ferris wheel was one of the many rides she’d watched Kevin operate over the years, she knew about the hand crank used to turn the wheel when power was lost. It was hard to turn, especially with Kevin screaming like that the whole time, but she kept telling herself that it wasn’t her murdering him, it was the girl in the mask. As Kevin’s hands strained in vain to reach the bar’s locking pin, she kept remembering the thing’s he had done to that poor little girl in the mask. And she thought of the things he would do yet if she let him live.
Kevin’s screams stopped when the seat that had been at the top became the seat at the bottom. He thrashed about for a few minutes because the water wasn’t quite deep enough to cover more than his head. But, in time, he was still.
She unhooked the bar and let him float free. She capsized his canoe. He was a city boy, they’d say. He shouldn’t have been out on the water in that kind of weather.
Amy still has her masks, quite a collection of them actually. They fill the walls of one whole room in the house she inherited when her mother died. She’s found that most of the men she picks up don’t really mind her wearing them. It adds a sense of mystery to the evening, an extra element of spice to the sex.
They’re not so sure about the old cornfield and the rusted carnival rides though.
