She munched cornflakes one flake at a time, taking two or three bites from each flake. He brought over a bedspread made from American flags and draped it over her shoulders. “Red white and blue / Just for you,” he crooned. “I won’t be long, maybe an hour. Get some sleep.”
He was gone two, maybe three hours. He usually didn’t drink, but he had a few. He had a good time in a joint full of tourists and local people with accents so thick he could barely figure out what they said. The music was fantastic. It took him away from himself. The wailing guitar, the deep throbbing bass, the throaty syllables more like a growl than a voice. Some of the locals carried guns in holsters on their hips, but it felt right to him, like atmosphere, authenticity. He could tell that everybody in the place understood how much he loved the blues.
How could something so good be a blasphemy? He would have to do some debting the next day, he reminded himself, pray without cease as he drove to Florida to pay back the Good Lord for tonight’s good times. Fair enough.
Outside the juke joint, the rain had moved on and the night was clear, the sky full of stars.
A God-given sky.
When Tom pulled into the gravel drive next to the shack, he was still humming songs and didn’t see his wife until he was upon her. She sat, almost invisible, on the crooked front steps, moving her fingers together as if sewing with needle and thread.
Tom tumbled from the car, stood stock still under the stars. He set his mouth and walked to her. “Can’t sleep?” His happiness felt too good to waste. I married the homecoming queen, he thought, and this is what it comes to. He wanted to crawl under the red-white-and-blue bedspread and dream bluesy dreams.
“My babies are gone,” she said.
“What?”
She repeated the words.
He felt the chill like the sound of a train whistle down the tracks, like the week of riots in Fargo that had burned down a dozen houses (one of them just down the block from his own), the wail of a blues guitar howling in the wind (like a voice hoarse from singing the blues). The crackle of the blues could take you down and down to the bottom of things. Which was where he sometimes felt he belonged.
In the shack, the first thing he saw was Sharon’s hair, cut from her head and lying like golden weeds on the bed’s white pillow. Beautiful hair, he thought, rotating his neck absentmindedly to clear his head.
She was in the bathtub, dead in water the color of blood.
His other children, also dead, lay naked on the double beds. They were propped like mannequins into grotesque positions, arms and legs splayed. His son, apparently still alive, had crawled to the floor before dying, leaving a trail like bloody snail slime.
He could hear the thrum of the guitar and made a smacking, hungry sound, though he wasn’t aware that he was doing so. In his head, in the dark, he could hear blues from the juke joint miles down the road but couldn’t tell if it was a song coming to a glorious end or just beginning to assert itself among the ruins.
He, Like, Died
I wanted Heimlich to help me when it happened, when I found out I was in deep shit, but he had lit out for Tulsa, I heard, or someplace like that, and I tried to explain it the right way, the way he might have done, but it came out all wrong, didn’t it?
***
Look, officer, it was raining. A heavy rain, for Chrissakes. That’s the first thing. You ever drive in that part of town at that time of night in a storm? Yeah, lightning, thunder, the whole ball of wax. And yeah, the stories you hear are true. I was high, why deny it, sweetcakes? Dee Dee was high as a kite. I’m a lady most of the day, work as a nurse’s aide in the senior center full of Q-tips, I’m damn good too, and that’s not just me talking, counselor. You can look at performance reports any damn time you want. I wear the mask, take the pills, follow every regulation. Even when the riots came after Frankenstein was killed, I drove to the center every day for my shift, even got carjacked once but trudged through the snow to punch the clock, that’s me to a T.
That night, though, that night I’d gone to a powwow rave, and what’s one of them without a tab? Of what? Of Ecstasy, counselor, pure love. You’re a counselor, right? You’ve read me my rights?
And during the party, I didn’t count the drinks. What? Oh, mostly vodka, I think, though I drank a lot of H2O too. I’m not a nurse’s aide for nothing. I’m no novice, so don’t get that look. Fact is, I felt all right in the car, but like I said, it was a bad part of town. You know what it’s like out there these days; you can’t stop for hell or high water. I was drunk, and high, and this godawful rain like golden crystals was on the windshield. Snow with sleet, both at the same time.
I forgot to turn the wipers on. And there he was, swear to God, in the street, stumbling, drunk. I didn’t know what the fuck it was, thought he might be a Marauder armed to the teeth. A living nightmare. And I hit him. Or he walked into the bumper, actually, and I must have been going fast, because he got stuck in the windshield.
Stuck, I say. Can you believe that shit?
What? Headfirst. Part of his head was like in the car with me. Maybe the windshield was already cracked; yeah it actually was, because how else could most of his head end up inside my personal space? He moaned, was like really stuck. I like freaked when I came to myself—did I tell you the crash knocked me out?—with this flea-bitten head in my personal space. He was breathing on me; I wasn’t wearing no mask, and he was bleeding. I veered from side to side to get him out of my car. That’s when I sideswiped that Buick.
Hey, see it from my perspective. I had no idea what to do, so I drove him to my house and parked in my garage. I wouldn’t be sitting here now in this stupid jailhouse if Serena, that bitch I thought was my pal, hadn’t called the goddamn cops and snitched. What made her do that? Snitch the Bitch. I’ll have her killed, counselor. If anything happens to me. You know I will.
Can I have a smoke, counselor? You don’t? Well, fuck; what the fuck are you good for then? Well, what the hell; this is one of them new places anyway, and I’m not supposed to smoke. Got to go to the exercise yard. So you’re saving us both a lecture. Thank you, counselor.
Right. Okay. Well, this tramp, maybe I read in the news he was forty or something ancient like that, looked one hundred, was stuck in my windshield, bleeding all over the dashboard. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t happy; I didn’t ask the guy to step into my car to hitch a free ride, but that day it wasn’t the biggest thing on my mind. I apologized and told him he could just walk out of my life and save us both a ton of trouble, but he had one eye pierced by the glass he went through. Damn glass is supposed to be shatterproof. Shatterproof, my ass. And he was like, well, I don’t know, stuck.
I mean, I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Help me,” he said, or I think that’s what he gurgled, but I couldn’t handle it. I mean, what was I supposed to do, counselor? He had long funky hair matted with something that stunk like shit. Puke, maybe? Matted blood? Yukky shit. Or maybe that cotton candy shit that comes out of your head? And you want to know the goose that’s good for the baba ghanoush? I thought I recognized him under all the shit. He used to do talk shows on TV before it hit the fan. You know who I mean, right? God, I wish I had Heimlich here. Remember him? He remembers everything. Like a raven. Ravens never forget, counselor. You know that, right? He would translate what I’m saying for you so you could understand my dilemma.
I went in the house and meant to help, but I was so goddamned anxious that I had a few pops and smokes and listened to a few tunes to calm my nerves; then I crashed in the crib and slept like a baby. I crashed, man, and the next day, or maybe it was even the one after that, I went out to the car to go get my smokes and freaked out when I saw he was still in my garage, still stuck in the windshield. Not moving. I tell you true, counselor; I had forgot all about the dude, like a nightmare. Maybe I thought I was hallucinating. I was freaked like a bump on a lump of log. Post trauma, maybe that’s my plea. I mean, all right, I’ll say it straight: I was flat-out fucked up. I fucked up, all right? PTSD.
Am I in trouble? What, murder? Manslaughter? No, no way it’s that. I mean, he, like, died, yeah, but I didn’t do nothing to him. He just, like, jumped in my car headfirst , and after a while he died. I went out there the third or fourth day to see if he had crawled off when his head lost some weight and he could get loose. The passenger seat was soaked, counselor. If I was about killing the dude, don’t you think I would have washed it off to hide the evidence?
Anyway, the dude was cold and stiff. It freaked me. And he stunk. Like a skunk.
So I left him like that but, I mean, don’t they rot after a while? I started worrying there might be a smell or something or that the dude’s spirit might be in pain or stuck. I called my friends, the good ones, I mean, not Snitch the Bitch that got me in this mess, and they came over and said, “My God, Dee Dee, what have you done?”
They bitched at me, but after I explained how fucked up I was and made a big pot of red-hot chili with cheese and bought a case of beer, they came around. We put the guy—or his body, I guess I should say, right?—in the trunk of another car—no, not the Buick—and dumped him in that park by the Red River. You know the one I mean? Gooseberry, right?
And that would be that. What’s done is done, right? You can’t bring back the dead; but I tell you, if I was Jesus, I would help the guy. Like Lazarus. Remember him? He came back from the dead. Good as new. This guy? No way, counselor. Dead. For good.
They found the body, I guess. I don’t read papers or watch news, so I take your word, but nobody connected me to it, and it never, never would happen again. I ain’t no murderer, nothing like that, but I got drunk with Snitch the Bitch and told her the story for no real reason, just because, and you got to admit this, it is a good story to tell—a brush with death, that kind of thing; a man tries to carjack your ride and gets himself trapped like a wolf that can only get back into the brush if it gnaws off its leg.
But I guess you can’t gnaw off your head that way, because how can you take out your teeth to get at your neck? I even told her that when we dumped the body, we said a prayer for it, me and my friends, and that was truth; I didn’t make that shit up. Doesn’t that show I’m not bad? We even laid him to rest, but Snitch the Bitch took it with her and told it to the cops, and so now I’m busted.
If that’s what this is.
Hard to believe, the way things go these days, that you’re busting me over some little thing. Don’t we all have bigger problems? Like climate change and flooding and tornadoes and all those Marauders who do as they please? Why me? WHY ME?
So, yeah, I fucked up. Call me guilty, but it was a freak accident. They really gonna make a crime of it? Can I just apologize, pay for the dude’s coffin? I mean, if they want me to show I’m sorry.
How much would that be, do you think? I mean, am I in trouble? Am I really in trouble, counselor? Or is that just you kidding around to make me feel bad?
Getting Even
There was a smell of ozone after a rain in Fargo that August afternoon, Cinderella told Heimlich, where distemper came to rule, in the days before he relocated to Tulsa, a work in progress, but more peaceful than not most days, where he now had what he called a home—a place to stay where he could be of use to others, but he remembered that he wasn’t of much use, if any, to Cinderella.
Cinderella—”Call me Cindy” was her perpetual mantra—in the story she told him, wore headphones, riffing to private music as she walked two small dogs along the river. She didn’t hear the man on the racing bike until too late. The big man biked fast, followed sharp turns on the rain-slick walk as though a contestant racing against himself. The glisten of sweat on his calves was a detail she described in her hospital haze to doctor and cop, both in hazmat suits, which surprised her. She was concussed, fuzzy, but thought the virus had run its course once the vaccine was administered.
New virus, one said.
The biker had on a T-shirt, rust-colored sweats, she said, or maybe the sweats were indigo blue. The bicycle was rust too. A bully, a boor, a jerk, she thought but didn’t say, perhaps conflating the biker with a former lover who had treated her like shit. No prince, anyway.
Beatific, she thought the doctor said, but that wasn’t right. She thought she saw him give the cop a sardonic stare, maybe roll his eyes. She squinched her own eyes against the glare.
The memory played in slow motion, she told Heimlich.
A raking bike, she said to the cop. “You mean racing?” he said, leaning close. His eyes glinted inside the face shield.
“Yes, raked me over. Head-butted, crushed ribs, flipped me. Like a pancake. Just like a pancake. Or waffle. Then went at my crotch. He was Hemingway. I have the tapes,” she said to the cop, praying he would move away from her—too close, too damned close—so she could stop holding her breath, but the doctor listened too, and later a lawyer from the DA’s office, also in hazmat attire. She repeated everything.
