Flesh Wounds, page 33
“Don’t go in the house,” I told her.
“I don’t believe this,” she muttered, meaning the moths. I’m not even sure she heard my warning.
“There is a man in the house who will kill you if you go in.” I left out the things he would do before he killed her, but I’d tell her if I had to. Anything to keep her from going in.
“How do you know this?” Understandably, she didn’t trust me. I doubted she’d trust anything that night. There was magic in the air and the only magic she knew was what she’d created herself with sweat and blood.
“Go home, Connie Hayes.” The moths rose at a point closest to her home, forming an insane, dented hula-hoop that spun off-kilter like the wheel on a battered bicycle. “Go home to your husband and children. Live a long life.”
“I don’t... Who are you?”
“Nobody. Just go home.”
Midnight. Most of the moths had chased off after the moon. A score or so remained, silent company perched on my shoulders and in my hair, waiting with me, knowing the Timekeepers would come.
My job was to record, but I’d tampered. Connie would wake beside her husband, find one of her three children in bed with them, rise and fix breakfast before her husband went to work.
I thought about the excuse I’d give the Timekeepers when they showed up. All that came to mind were George Lott’s words. The cynicism of those words, applied here, amused the dark places in my heart.
It is a horrible, horrible thing I did today.
I saved a woman’s life, aborted a murder, stopped another senseless sacrifice... sent ripples through the lake of time that might have dire repercussions.
But you have to do a horrible, horrible thing to catch people’s attention.
Even the attention of gods.
Today, July 10, 1992.
From this distance, out beyond massive Saturn and Jupiter, beyond even Pegasus, the world spins quietly, effortlessly. I can no longer see the violence, the daily oblation, the endless drama of lives traded for whimsy.
Beyond me, others wink into existence with irrational regularity, an eternity blossoming against the heavens. We wait. We watch over the shoulders of Draco and Hercules, Perseus and Cassiopeia. We can’t see a lot from here.
But the Timekeepers have their watchers below. Perhaps one day mankind will be ready.
And we can all move on together.
* * *
The events described in the first eight days of this ten day extraction from Cecrops’ journal can be verified with any national newspaper. The atrocities themselves are not fiction. George Lott was put to death by lethal injection in Houston on the 19th of September 1994. The Garrison sisters and friend all received life sentences. Everyone in Biloxi, MS said Betty Garrison was a wonderful person, the last to have deserved to die this way.
Well known naturalist Roger Payne has said, “The only security in this life is the willingness to risk everything.” Until we, as a people, are willing to step forward and risk everything, we’re playing against impossible odds. The prize is out there. We’ve just got to want it bad enough.
* * *
Lost Things
The left wheel was squeaking, a cold mist was falling, and Arthur could swear that someone had grabbed the uphill end of Cemetery Ridge Road and raised it a good ten feet, the combination of the three leaving the old man particularly miserable this morning. To top it all off, he’d lost his pipe. Bad enough he was confined to the wheelchair (with its wheel whining like a ball bearing in heat) and his arthritis left him damn near incapable of so much as tying his own shoes, but to deprive a man of his pipe...
It was just too much.
Still, Arthur Patton wheeled from his lonely apartment on Fifth Street, across to Windsor Avenue, and up the steep ascent of Cemetery Ridge to visit Laurie. Same as he’d done almost every morning for the past twelve years.
Like most mornings, he paused to catch his breath at the halfway point in front of McGruder’s Market, to rest his cramped hands and weary arms, to let his atrophied lungs replace depleted oxygen. Lately, what with his arthritis worsening each day and the road magically getting steeper, he’d been considering one of those fancy electric wheelchairs, but harbored little hope that he would live long enough to enjoy one. Besides which, his bank account could hardly support what one would cost.
Arthur locked the chair’s wheels against the steep incline while he rested. He laughed morbidly as he thought of the horror that would spring to the faces of the drivers on Windsor if they were to suddenly find a white-haired old man in a wheelchair flying through the busy intersection. Looking down the hill at the cars accelerating through yellow lights, squealing to a halt at red ones, and burning rubber when they saw green, at all the people in such a hurry to get somewhere, not realizing their ultimate destination was the quiet summit of this hill, he knew the cars would be quick—mercilessly brutal, but mercifully quick. He doubted that he’d feel anything going out beneath those hurtling megaliths of modern technology.
“Morning, Art.”
The suicidal reverie dissolved. It was all idle speculation anyway, the daydreams of a dying old man. If he was going to kill himself he’d have done it twelve years ago when Laurie died, or two years ago when the wheelchair became a necessity, or six months ago when he’d suffered his first heart attack.
“Good morning, Mac. How’s the store?”
McGruder set down the tray of onions he’d been about to move inside in anticipation of heavier rain. Not that the rain would harm the onions, but it was a pain to drain the water from the tray. He kept reminding himself to fix the problem by simply drilling a few holes in the bottom of the tray, but it was one of those things he only remembered when it was raining.
“Store’s fine. I got in that tobacco you were asking about.”
Arthur frowned. “Lost my damn pipe.”
“Got pipes in the store too, Art.”
“Wouldn’t be the same.” He wrung his aching hands together and looked up towards the cemetery, thinking how he needed to get moving. Black clouds were sweeping in from the west and the mist had become as thick as damp cotton. “Laurie gave me that pipe.”
“Oh.” No further comment was necessary.
Both men were silent for a moment, then Arthur cleared his throat. “Time I quit smoking anyway.” But there was no conviction in his voice.
“You’ll find your pipe, Art.”
Still looking up at the top of the hill and the myopia of grey markers hazy in the heavy mist, Arthur nodded his head. “Yeah. You’re probably right. Lost things usually work their way back to a fellah. Leastwise, the really important ones do.” He unlocked the wheels on the chair. “Better get them onions in. Starting to rain harder and you still got the taters and apples to go.” He started up the hill, leaving McGruder to his work.
The cemetery was a rolling expanse of green stretched across the ridge line, cleared of all but a few of the great oaks that had once covered the entire area and still lined Cemetery Ridge Road. It was surrounded by a stone wall, pale grey in color, always cold to the touch. The wall was low enough that it didn’t hide the solemn landscape within, high enough that it kept out stray dogs and the dry oak leaves that blew up and down the road. It was broken by several wrought-iron gates, each cleanly painted and well-oiled by the grounds keeper. Something about the silent operation of those black gates always bothered Arthur. He thought they should open reluctantly, shrieking like some rusty gate to Hell in a B-grade horror movie. Instead they opened smoothly, effortlessly, testimony to just how easy it was to join those poor souls bedded within.
Today, the graveyard was quiet and wet, empty of mourners on a day that, on the surface, seemed made for mourning. The drizzle had left the tombstones glistening on their windward sides as if the caretaker had tried to wash them of the permeating aura of death.
Arthur rolled down a path the wheelchair knew. There were tiny ruts permanently writ on the ground, admissible evidence of his daily sojourns to this place of the dead. The rain was falling now in genuine drops. It fell slowly, but the drops were big, hitting his bare and balding head like the droppings of seagulls. His clothes were rapidly soaking through, making him more uncomfortable than usual. He ignored the discomfort same as he ignored the glass slivers wedged deep in his deteriorating spinal column, same as he ignored the doctors’ warnings about being out in weather like this.
The rain had found the face of Laurie’s stone, leaving it as wet as the day he had first cried over it. The stone was simple. It bore her name, dates of birth and death, and the simple legend Most Beloved Wife. The flowers he’d left yesterday were still there (often they weren’t), looking fresh in the rain and the dim light.
Arthur kissed the tips of his fingers and laid them tenderly against the cold stone. “Won’t be long now, Laurie.”
The wind sighed in the nearby trees, a drawn, tired keening, a wailing of the world.
Late evening. Still raining, though now it was a steady deluge that had beaten down the grass in the cemetery, washed the oak leaves from Cemetery Ridge Road, and left puddles standing like sentinels about the somber stones. The cemetery was a quiet place in the storm, the only sounds being the steady patter of rain, the wind in the trees and, occasionally, the distant rumble of thunder. The cemetery was devoid of living customers, save one.
Crouched beneath a parka cut from black plastic he’d stolen from a construction sight, Toby Simmons spoke to his mother.
“I know it ain’t what you’d a wanted, Mama. But it’s what I wanted. Justice, that’s what it was. Exactly what he deserved.” The fifteen-year old pulled a hunting knife from under his parka and laid it beside the simple marker set in the ground above his dead mother’s head.
“You give him everythin’ you had—I understand why—but he give you nothin’ but pain and...” A sob made the boy’s shoulders shake beneath the slick plastic. “I done took care of him, Mama. I done him right.”
The boy settled forward, his head resting on the cold marker, and cried softly. There was no one to hear him. No one to care.
There was a flower shop on Fifth Street, just two blocks out of his way. Laurie deserved fresh flowers as often as he could afford them. Yesterday’s mail had included his social security check. McGruder had cashed it for him yesterday afternoon.
At the florist’s, Arthur picked out some inexpensive daisies. They were canary-yellow, dazzling in the sunlight. With them across his lap, he wheeled back up Fifth Street. Despite his lack of energy, Arthur was beginning to feel better than he had in several days. He attributed it to the change in weather; sunshine and Indian-summer breezes had replaced the darkness and rain that had followed him to the graveyard for four days running.
McGruder was out front sorting vegetables when Arthur paused to work some of the stiffness out of his hands. There was a newspaper tucked under McGruder’s arm.
“Damn kids,” the store owner muttered. “Guess I shoulda known to take this stuff in. But hell, I was only going around the corner for a paper.”
Arthur tried to look sympathetic.
“What they didn’t steal, they mixed all up. I’d like to take a board to the backside of each and every one of them.”
Arthur was determined not to let McGruder ruin his morning. “Just boys doing what boys have always been good at, Mac. You think on it a minute or two and I bet you’ll remember worse things you done when you were that age.”
“Humph.”
Arthur leaned back in his chair, letting the warm sun and light breeze waft the smells of the market to him: the sweet tang of apples and oranges, the duller aroma of vegetables, the nasal bite of the onion bin, the tropical pleasure of bananas... He and Laurie had taken a cruise in the Bahamas, one of the few summers they’d had the money for a real vacation. It’d been the best summer ever.
Damn. Why’d he have to go and remember that?
“You watch, Art. In a few years those same boys’ll be coming in here with thirty-eight specials to empty my cash register.”
“It’s not as bad as all that.”
“Oh yeah? I swear I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” He opened the newspaper and swatted at the front page. “Every day: burglary, rape, murder, one after another. And the goddamn drugs! Every time I turn around they’re talking about a new one. The biggie these days is crack—whatever the hell that is.”
McGruder flashed the paper at Arthur. “See right here? Somebody cut this pimp up so bad they never even found all the pieces. Tell me that wasn’t some crackhead.”
“We’ve always known the world is not a kind and gentle place, Mac. If it were, I’d be sitting at home with Laurie, and your Martha’d be sorting out them vegetables.”
A moment of silence passed between the old men, a moment of mutual understanding for what they’d lost, then McGruder pointed at the daisies. “Damn waste of money, Art. You ought to find one that’s still kicking and give her them daisies.”
Arthur just frowned at him. McGruder had cremated his Martha—something to do with not wanting the worms after her in the Earth, but Arthur suspected it left McGruder free of any obligations for visiting a graveyard or otherwise preserving her memory. Since Martha’s death, Joseph McGruder had chased every skirt he’d come across, albeit with little or no success.
“Find your pipe yet?”
“Not yet.” Arthur didn’t tell him that he’d also misplaced his electric razor and a paperback western he was halfway through reading.
“Ah, no matter. You will. I saved back some of that tobacco.”
“Thanks. See ya, Mac.” Arthur unlocked the wheels and started up the street. McGruder watched his old friend’s back for a few minutes, long enough to make sure he was going to be alright, then he went back to sorting his produce.
McGruder’s thieves had taken up target practice in the cemetery. There were three of them, tall and thin, in faded jeans with ragged white holes at knees, crotch, and seat. The rock bands advertised on their t-shirts conjured images of satanic worship and human sacrifice. One of them wore a Japanese hachimaki about his wild black hair. Their high-tops were untied, with rabid hound tongues that flapped as they ran away. They left behind sticky splotches of tomato-red and avocado-green splattered like abstract art over the dignified grey of many headstones, Laurie’s included.
Arthur dug out his handkerchief. He winced at the pain in his back as he bent over to wipe tomato blood from his wife’s stone. “I’m sorry, Laurie. Hoodlums, that’s all they are. No respect for anyone, not even the dead.”
He got the last of the juice wiped off and straightened up, head reeling with the effort. For a moment, the grey stones spun about him like a drunkard’s Stonehenge, then he got it under control. He was leaning back in the chair with the sun hot on his face, taking long, deep breaths, when he heard them coming back.
“You’re such a pussy, Mike. Look, it’s just one old fart in a wheelchair.”
“Yeah, one old geezer’s all I see too. Wait’ll I tell everyone at school what a wuss Mike Ford really is.”
Two voices, coming up the row of graves behind him. Young voices. Angry. Bored. And then the third voice, the one they’d called Mike: “Didn’t see either of you assholes sticking around. Let’s see what Gramps is up to, eh?”
Arthur swallowed the first faint taste of fear. He’d always felt safe in the cemetery. It was as if all the violence intended for those within had long since been dealt and, so long as he was within the stone wall, on this side of that dividing line between the living and the dead, he was safe.
Not so today.
One of them caught the handles on his chair and spun him around. “Leave me alone!” Arthur cried. He was surprised to hear his voice come out high-pitched, frightened. Embarrassment and fear spread crimson across his face.
“Leave me alone!” one of them mocked.
“Shut up, Pete,” said the boy holding the chair. “Can’t you see Gramps is in mourning?”
“Sure, Mike. Give him a tomato and I bet he’ll feel a lot better.”
Mike had two tomatoes remaining, loaded in the pockets of a Metallica sweat shirt. He pulled one out and tossed it a few times in the air, catching it deftly in his strong, young hand. With his other hand, he took the daisies.
Arthur clawed at the flowers, but his attempt to keep them merely stripped free several bright blooms which fell desolate in his lap, poor substitute for the entire bouquet.
Mike dropped the tomato into Arthur’s lap. The boy and the old man stared as if it were about to give some kind of performance where it lay fat and red atop Arthur’s withered legs.
“Don’t seem to be working,” observed the as-yet-unnamed third boy, he with the BANZAI! bandanna.
“That’s just cause he don’t know what to do with it.” Pete theorized. Pete proceeded to demonstrate what the tomato was for by hurling one full force at Laurie’s headstone. It exploded across the marble, obliterating her name.
Arthur found his voice. “Please stop. My wife is buried there.”
Mike smudged at the running juice with the sole of his shoe. “Laurie. That was your old lady?”
“Didn’t she like tomatoes?” he with the bandanna guffawed.
Mike retrieved his tomato from Arthur’s lap. “You like tomatoes, don’t ya Gramps?” He crushed it in his hand so that the thick red meat and juice gushed out between his fingers to spill into Arthur’s lap. Then he wiped his hand off on Arthur’s shirt.
“Please,” Arthur tried again.
Mike leaned close, breath reeking of burgers, fries, and shakes, chin coated with thin, scraggly whiskers, nose bent as if it’d been broken at least once, eyes awash in unwarranted hatred. “What are you gonna do about it, old man?” He pulled the other tomato from his pocket, made to crush it over Arthur’s head.
