The Collected Short Fiction, page 141
Ferris lies naked and icy pale against the dappled green water. Her eyes are closed. Occasionally her arms and legs scissor languidly. Beneath her, is her seal shadow and the white tile that slopes away into haziness. Vapors shift across her body and carry its scent to me, sharp and clean amid the faint tang of chlorine. She daydreams on the cusp of sleep and I taste the procession of phantoms that illuminate her inner landscape. Mine is not among them.
I descend as if a great spider on its wire, then stop and hang in place. This thing that has hijacked and reconstituted my body, reduced my consciousness and placed it in a bell jar, is drawn to her. More specifically, that which I have become is drawn to something within her. I don’t comprehend the intricacies. I can only bear mute witness to the spectacle as it unfolds.
A black spot stains at the bottom of the pool. The spot spreads across the white bed, a ring of darkness widening as pieces of tile crumble into the depths. It is a pit, slackening directly below my lovely, frigid wife. My betrayer wife, my arm extending, my claw, hollow as a siphon, its shadow upon her betrayer’s face, and the abyssal trench an iris beneath. Wife, come along to Kingdom Come, come to the underworld.
Her eyes snap open.
“I didn’t fuck him,” she says. “I fantasized about it, plenty.”
Monroe is absent from the scene, and that’s a shame. Every pore in me longs to drink his blood, to liquefy him, fry him, to have his heart in my fist. To ram his heart down her throat.
“I didn’t fuck him. Elmer, I didn’t. I should’ve.”
Her blood. His blood. Their atoms.
I open my mouth (maw) to accuse, to excoriate, and the dead song of the dead stars worms out. But she doesn’t blink, she repeats that she hasn’t fucked him, hasn’t fucked him. She projects her innocence in an electromagnetic cone meant to kill. She is entirely too composed, this fragile sack of skin and water.
She says, “Are you here to hurt me, Elmer?” Her smile is pitiless, it cuts. “The time you came home drunk and forced me? There’s a word for you, hon. Don’t you remember what you’ve done?”
I don’t remember. I seethe.
Difficult to concentrate through the interference of her thoughts that explain via pointillism how Monroe opportunistically slaughtered me and then so much like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” had succumbed to guilt and paranoia and eventually fled the country. The FBI hunts him in connection with my disappearance. He could be anywhere. She suspects Mexico. Monroe always had a romanticized notion about Mexico and what he could do there, a super gringo lover man.
The little shit swallowed her teary stories of my cruelty and violence. He’d done me in as an act of vengeance. An act that only earned Ferris’s contempt. She is utterly my creature and let no man cast asunder what all the powers above and below had seen fit to forge.
I convulse with a complicated longing and snatch for her. She’s too quick. She rolls, sleek and white, and flashes downward amid a cloud of bubbles into the pit. Fool that I am, I follow.
We meet in darkness, each illuminated by a weak spotlight that dims and brightens with our breathing. I sense immense coldness and space pressing against the bubble where we reside. I am whole. My cloven skull and rotting flesh are restored. My mind is papered over with gold star stickers and crepe.
She points an automatic pistol at me. I understand that it’s a present from her would-be lover. The barrel aligns with my eye. I have traveled through the barrel and been deposited in this limbo.
“I warned him. Told him he’d never succeed. If I couldn’t kill you, then there was no hope for him.” She laughs and shakes the wet hair from her eyes. “Arsenic in your coffee every day for three months. Nothing. For God’s sake, I frosted your birthday cake with rat poison.”
Now that she mentions it, now that her thoughts bleed into mine, I recall the bitter coffee, the odd aftertaste of the icing on my last cake. A skull and crossbones has hung over our marriage for years. Yet, I remain. What does it mean?
“I hurt you, but I couldn’t kill you. Monroe couldn’t. Nobody can. You died in childhood. Maybe you were never born. Maybe the parasite that fruits your corpse is the only true part of you that existed.”
Am I merely a figment? If so, I am the most rapacious, carnivorous, and vengeful figment she will have the misfortune to encounter. I strike aside the gun and reach for her. A black halo of light manifests around Ferris. Her arms spread wide and she becomes the very figure of a dread and terrible insect queen. The enormity of her eclipses my own.
She clutches me and the sting slides in. “It was always here, love. In all of us, always.”
It’s apparent that I’ve miscalculated again.
Reality has bent and bent. I look past the nimbus of black flame into her cold eyes. Reality just goes right ahead and comes apart.
Darkness rolls back to daylight. It’s spring and balmy. The breeze is redolent with sweet green sap and the bloom of roses. Guests and children of the guests clutter a lawn that’s too bright and too green to be real. “Death to Everyone” by good old Will Oldham crackles over the speakers. I’m stuffed into a poorly fitted tux. At my side, Ferris shines as radiantly white as the Queen of Winter.
I have seen this, relived this, in a thousand-thousand nightmares.
My hand overlaps hers as we saw the blade into that multi-tiered cake. She opens her mouth and bites through the icing, the bunting, and my brittle soul. I shudder and kiss her. It feels no different than kissing ice bobbed up from the bottom of an arctic lake. She inhales my heat and my vitality before I can inhale hers. She’s always been stronger, in the only way that counts. She always will be stronger.
Oldham’s voice fades and the guests stare at us in hushed expectation.
Nearby, a little girl in a black funeral dress begins to sing the “Hearse Song” to the boy she’s tormenting with malice or affection, take your pick:
“They put you in a big black box
And cover you up with dirt and rocks.
All goes well for about a week,
Then your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle in your snout,
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.”
This time around, I do what I should’ve in the first place all those lost years ago. Instead of cutting a piece for the first guest in line, I grip the knife and slice my throat. Blood fans the cake and Ferris’s white dress. She throws back her head and laughs. I sink to my knees in the thirsty grass. The sun pales and contracts to a black-limned ring. Red shadows pour through the trees, drench the lawn, and reduce the paralyzed spectators to negatives. I try to speak. Worms crawl out.
Ferris’s parents loved me. I first met them during Thanksgiving when she and I stayed over at the family casa—Ferris slept in her old room with the Prince poster and a mountain of heart-shaped pillows and teddy bears while I bunked in the basement on a leather sofa between her old man’s pool table and a gun safe.
There was a tense moment when she removed her shades and revealed the Lichtenburg flower of a purple knot under her eye. Ferris was so very smooth. She spun a story about getting kicked in the face during swim practice, and her family bought it. She wasn’t speaking to me except as required, probably hadn’t even decided whether to stay with me or toss her engagement ring into the trash.
Hell of it was, at that early stage in our romance I didn’t care much either way.
Turkey, gravy, pumpkin pie, and afterward, a quart of Jim Beam passed around a circle of a half-dozen of Ferris’s menfolk. Salt of the earth bumpkins who raised coon dogs and revved the engines on four-wheelers at the gravel pit and picked through piles at the dump for fun.
You like John Wayne? one truck-driving uncle wanted to know. Shore as hail, I love the Duke! And with that, I was in like Flynn. My lumberjack beard, plaid coat, and knowledge of professional football didn’t go amiss, either.
Her dad welcomed me to the family with teary eyes and a bear hug. I wasn’t “nothin’ like them pussies she usually brings home from college.” How right my future in-law hillbillies were! Not three days before that Clampett-style feast I’d beaten a UAA fraternity brother within an inch of his life for giving me the stink eye as I staggered home from the Gold Digger Saloon. I made the letter-sweater-wearing jock try to eat a parking meter. The whole time Ferris’s family exchanged jocular crudities at the supper table, my hand was in my pocket, caressing the frat boy’s braces, with a few teeth still stuck in them, like a God-fearing Catholic fondling his rosary. It was the only thing that kept me from stabbing one of those bozos with a steak knife.
I gave the lot of those silly, inbred bastards my best aw-shucks grin, and daydreamed about how lovely and charred their slack-jawed skulls would shine from the cinders of a three A.M. house fire.
Aided by booze and a vivid imagination, I survived dinner and into the following day. Driving home, the stars were blacked. Snow fell like a sonofabitch. Every now and again the tires slipped against ice and the truck shook. Dad’s ghost muttered in my ear. My heart knocked and I forgot to blink for at least forty miles. The high beams carved a tunnel into the blizzard. Patsy Cline came on the radio out of Anchorage. Patsy sang “Crazy” and that was our song, all right.
Ferris reached across the gulf from the passenger side and held my hand. Her fingers clamped cold and tight over mine. In the rearview there was nothing but darkness, snowflakes endlessly collapsing in our wake, and a black slick of road painted red in the taillights’ glow.
Screaming Elk, MT
First published in Nightmare Carnival, September 2014
One night, a trucker dropped me at a tavern in Screaming Elk, MT, population 333. A bunch of locals had gathered to shoot pool and drown their sorrows in tap beer. CNN aired an hour-long feature on survivors of violent crime. The Jessica Mace segment popped around halfway through and I told the bartender to switch it pronto. A sodbuster on the next stool took exception, started to bark his offense, then he did a double take at the file photo of me larger than life onscreen and things went from bad to ugly.
“You’re that broad! Yeah, yeah, you’re her!” Shitkicker had crossed over to the dark side of drunk. “Nice rack,” he went on in a confidential tone. “I wouldn’t pay a nickel for anything above the tits, though.”
I threw a glass of whiskey in his face, as a lady does when her appearance is insulted by an oaf. No biggie—I’d been nursing the cheap stuff. A couple of his comrades at the bar laughed. He recovered fast—animals are like that—made a fist, and cocked it behind his left ear. I puckered my lips. Don’t suppose that I enjoy getting punched in the face. It’s simply that I can make it work for me if it comes to that.
Despite my gravelly voice and rough edges, I know how to play the femme fatale. I can also hold my booze. It’s a devastating combo. My brothers Elwood and Bronson were the brawlers, the steamrollers. Elwood has gone to his reward and Bronson crashes cars for a living. Me? Let’s just say I prefer to rely upon a combination of native cunning and feminine wiles to accomplish my goals. Flames and explosions are strictly measures of last resort.
I’ll put my life in mortal danger for a pile of cash. No shock there, anybody would. Goes deeper, though. I’ll also venture into hazard to satisfy my curiosity, and that’s more problematic. The compulsion seems to be growing stronger. Violence, at least the threat of violence, is a rush. I’m addicted to the ramifications and the complications.
As the CNN story so luridly explained, I did for that serial killer up in Alaska, the Eagle Talon Ripper, and nothing has been the same. It’s as if the stars and the sky don’t align correctly, as if the universe is off its axis by a degree or two. Since pulling that trigger I haven’t figured out exactly what to do with myself. I wander the earth. It would be romantic to say I’m righting wrongs or seeking my destiny. Feels more like I’m putting my shoe into one fresh pile after another.
A good friend who worked in the people-removing business for the Mafia once told me there aren’t coincidences or accidents, reality doesn’t work that way. Since the first inert, superdense particle detonated and spewed forth all that gas and dust and radiation, everything has been on an unerring collision vector with its ultimate mate, and every bit of the flotsam and jetsam is cascading toward the galactic Niagara Falls into oblivion.
The dude possessed a more inquisitive nature than one might expect from an enforcer by trade. He said, Jessica, you’re a dancing star being dragged toward the black hole at the ragged edges of all we know. Drawn with irresistible force, you’ll level anything in your path, or drag it to hell in your wake.
Load of horseshit, am I right? Sloppy, I-love-you-man drivel. Yet his words come back to me as I travel east, ever east. I’m starting to believe him. I’m a dancing star and my self-determination is a façade.
Cut to the drunken asshole in the bar rearing back to knock me into next Tuesday. Not so fast, Tex, said the universe.
A rugged, burly fellow in a safari shirt and work pants stepped in and introduced himself with a left hook to the sodbuster’s jaw. Put the cowboy to sleep with one blow. I hadn’t needed a white knight. I’d palmed a steak knife and knew exactly where to stick it if necessary. But, I must admit, the crunch of the cowpoke’s jawbone and the fast-spreading blood on the scuffed floorboards thrilled me a little. A lot.
Mr. White Knight rubbed his hand. All those nicks and notches on his knuckles, like rocks that had been smacked together a thousand times.
“I’m Beasley. What are you drinking?”
“Ah, the beginning of another beautiful friendship.”
Mist flooded across the marsh and erased the country road. Rounding a bend, we were transported from present-day Montana to Scottish moors circa 1840s, or a Universal Studios sound lot with Bela Lugosi poised to sweep aside his cape along with our feeble protestations.
“Can’t-find-your-own-ass-with-both-hands-and-a-flashlight weather,” I said to cut the tension.
Beasley stepped on the pedal. His face by dashboard light put me in mind of Race Bannon and Doc Savage. The unbuttoned safari shirt contributed nicely. Ten, maybe fifteen years my senior, but some juice left in him; I loved that too. A crucifix dangled from the rearview mirror, also sprigs of dried flowers. More dried flowers peeked from the ashtray. I wondered if these details meant anything; made a note.
We were rocking and rolling like a motherfucker now. That rickety farm truck’s tires cried mercy. But when the moon hove nine-tenths full and full of blood over the black rim of night and screamed white-hot silver through the boiling clouds, everything stood still.
“The Gallows Brothers Carnival, huh?” I said after I caught my breath. I would have said anything to break the spell. “I heard that name somewhere. Want to say a news story. Which means somebody got maimed or murdered. Wouldn’t be news otherwise.”
He grunted and hit me with a sidelong glance.
“So, uh, you know how to shoot a gun?” Maybe he meant the rifle rattling in the window rack behind our heads. A light-gauge shotgun, nothing fabulous. “And would you say you’re fast on your feet? On a scale from a chick in high heels to Carl Lewis sprinting from a lion.”
“I hate it when dudes ask me that. The line of inquiry seldom leads anywhere pleasant.”
“You dames have all had bad experiences.”
I laughed, low and nasty.
“Yeah, it’s weird. Can’t figure what the common denominator might be.”
He shut his mouth for a while, smarting. Guy like him, pain didn’t last long. A whack upside the head with a two-by-four was positive attention.
My thoughts went to a previous fling with another brutish loner type: a coyote hunter in eastern Washington. I hoped my luck was better this go-around. I hoped Beasley’s luck was better too.
“You’re not really a carnival roadie,” I said a few miles later. “You lack that particular something or other.”
“Well, I wouldn’t get on any of the rides.”
The Gallows Brothers Carnival had set up shop in a pasture a few miles outside of town. Unfortunately, I had missed the last show. The great machinery lay cold and silent and would soon be dismantled. Beasley lived in a modular at the end of a concourse of shuttered stalls, Tilt-a-Whirls, and tents. All very Beaver Cleaver 1950s. The night breeze swirled sawdust and the burned powder of exploded firecrackers.
A wolf howled from the north where the forest began.
Then we were inside Beasley’s shack, barring the door behind us. Down, down into the darkness we dove, to the bottom of a blue hole at the bottom of the earth. The wolf howled again. Its pack answered and the ponderosa pines closed ranks, as Beasley’s Herculean arms closed me in.
A hazy nightlight fumed at the foot of the bunk. Beasley, with a physique straight from a picture book of Norse gods, could’ve wrestled bears, looked as if he’d done so on occasion. Once Beasley and I got going he held back for fear of breaking me, the fool. I wanted to tell him it was only really good once it started to hurt, but I’d gone past the vanishing point and dissolved into another, primal self, the one that doesn’t speak English.
He performed as his swagger advertised, or close enough. Afterward, he lay slick and aglow, perfectly scarred. I asked him if he did any acting, because he radiated mucho charisma. He only smiled boyishly and took a swig from the bottle, took it in like water. I suspected his fate would be to die horribly of cirrhosis, or under the claws of a beast, and young, or to turn fifty and appear as if he’d gone face first into a wall, haggard as a kerosene-swilling bum. Probably the dying-young deal: I kept seeing a bleached skull when I caught him in my peripheral vision.
“Gimme some sweet, sweet nothings,” I said to keep him from nodding off and leaving me alone with my two a.m. thoughts, and alone with the howls in the wood.
“Look, doll, I’m a man of action. Sweet talk ain’t my bailiwick.”
