A midget in an Elmer Fudd cap stepped from the shadows near the body and shifted a brick from hand to hand. “Terrible, ain’t it?” he said. “They kicked him in the ribs. Put a rifle butt in his face. Then the knife, zooie.” He spit and paused to breathe heavy. “Watcha doing on the streets dis time a night, by the way?”
“Walking to my karate class. Black belt. Hands that can kill.”
He slapped one of his own hands onto my shoulder. “Why don’t cha stop for a sec? Look, here’s my problem,” he said. He wasn’t wearing a mask. “I got cancer. It hurts, you know? I need some comfort.” He rubbed his hand on my upper thigh and winked. “I like Marines, and Marines sure as hell like me. You ever been a Marine?”
An old battered Buick screeched around a corner, nearly lost control on the slick, wet asphalt, and braked at the curb. A crew of thugs in ducktails, leather jackets, and pointed boots whooped out like vampires. They swung tire chains and machetes and baseball bats. Each had on a beret or an armband. “There’s the dwarf!” one screamed.
He took off. A greaser blew the horn twice. They all piled back in the car and somebody who looked like Faust stuck his head out the window. “You can run, you fucking dwarf, but you can’t hide!” He saw me, winked, and gave the thumbs-up.
That was about it.
Back home I turned on the tube. So what if the world figures America is a wreck that needs a tow? More room for you and more room for me. Some sort of accident, the newscaster claimed. Something big blew up and the Pacific Northwest territory is entirely radioactive. It wasn’t deliberate, the president said, but hey, shit happens. He clicked his bottle of Coca-Cola against the camera, a close-up, and wrapped a shoulder around a stuffed grizzly bear standing tall on its hind legs in his nuclear-safe hideaway inside a mountain.
So what if illegals were dying by the thousands on account of the new law? Women being flailed with whips for disobedience? If the Cold War had turned hot? Frankenstein and Faust, coming out of retirement, that was the real news, but Frankenstein’s obituary would be tomorrow’s sidebar, wouldn’t it? The late Mr. Frankenstein, part of that great comedy club in the sky, all his body parts returning to the source, giving it all up, like Jesus, sacrificing his own life to redeem us all.
And global warming? An afterthought. Fake news.
What global warming? When I stare from my window, everything is white and clean. It’s damned cold up here this time of year.
There’s got to be something better than this. Tulsa, here I come.
PART TWO
Sharp Objects
Dark Times
The family of six reached the shotgun shack at dusk. “Oh, my God,” said Sharon, who was six. Tina, her mother, once a homecoming queen, now having one of her typical bad days, didn’t react. Her breathing sounded shallow.
“Yuck!” the two older kids screamed in unison. The infant started to bawl.
Tom, their father, laughed the sort of laugh designed to irritate his family to the edge of derangement. Once, he had played high school football with Chuck and played cornet in the school band, a double whammy that gave him a reputation as a Renaissance kid; those glory days were long gone. “Now, now, brown cow,” he said. “What’s good for the goose is good for the baba ghanoush.” It was sadistic, he knew, to tease them like that, repeating nonsense stuck in his head, but he could see paint peeling from the cypress walls and needed to do something to break the spell of marital ennui. “That’s good wood,” he said.
Inside, the bed liner was worn. The place smelled like mothballs. An air-conditioning unit rattled in one window. A stream of water dripped from it, but the machine cooled the room, or at least kept the Mississippi Delta heat at bay.
“Oh, Daddy,” Sharon said. “This is yucky. Why they call it a shotgun shack?”
“All the rooms and doors are one behind the next. If somebody shot a shotgun through the door, the shot would go all the way out back.” Tom was manic. He unloaded suitcases from the car. His wife sat like a zombie on one of three double beds. What the hell. Each had bedspreads quilted together with squares that looked like fabric from an American flag. The shacks were not cheap, but Tom insisted on staying two nights for the atmosphere on the way to Orlando and Disneyworld. It was his treat to himself. Afterward, he would reunite with his role as a good family man and again become the religious zealot his wife now expected.
Lately, she was in a very dark place. That was one reason for the vacation, to get her out of the house and away from nosy Fargo neighbors, especially one who called Tom at work. “She needs help now. Now, Tom. Why aren’t you doing anything?” Tom would excuse himself and ask his secretary to screen calls from the woman. He would telephone his wife at home and sweet-talk her for a few minutes. “I’m doing what I can for her,” he explained to the doctor he consulted, one who put her on strong medication that she didn’t always take. “We have the Bible. Scripture. The best medicine available.”
The doc stared, his hands steepled and chin resting on his thumbs. “Make her take the pills, Tom. God helps those who help themselves.”
The shack had a tin roof. Later that evening, they sat at a wooden table in the kitchen eating barbecue Tom had brought back from a take-out place and juke joint up the road. A rainstorm passed. They heard clatter on the tin roof. It was the strangest sound. “Like a new kind of music,” Tom said. He was delirious with happiness, despite the bawling of the infant and his wife’s catatonia. Sharon was the only one interested in his stories about great bluesmen like Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil just down the road.
With a finger, Sharon traced the numbers on the license plate that covered a hole in the wall. Though the place was quaint—a nice word for it—and reservations had been difficult to get, only his six-year-old daughter appreciated it. “You’re Daddy’s girl,” Tom said. She lay her head in his lap and he stroked her long golden hair. After a time, she slept. He carried her to a bed and lay her down next to her sister, who had crawled under the covers on her own. He wiped Sharon’s fingers, still greasy from barbecue, and eased off her underpants, did his best to Velcro a plastic diaper into place.
The baby had cried herself to sleep. The oldest, Ben, had claimed the bed in the back room and closed the door. Tom knocked, reminded him to read his Scripture, and said goodnight. There was nothing left now except the patter of rain and his wife’s guttural yelps.
“What’s that?” Tom asked. She had refused to eat ribs, stared at them as if they were crawling with maggots.
“They’re unclean,” she said. She ate cereal instead. Cornflakes were scattered on the cypress floor around her.
He swept them up with a piece of cardboard. “You all right?”
She said nothing. He went to the suitcase and foraged for her medicine. He fingered out a dose and offered the pills with a glass of water. She stared up at him. Once, he might have reached over, touched her, but that time had passed. The growing dystopia in the world around them paled in comparison to his marriage and its gloom. Any contact made her flinch. She had become depressed when the infant came with God’s glory into the world and couldn’t—or wouldn’t, Tom suspected, out of sheer obstinacy—snap out of it.
“Look, honey,” Tom said, too manic to sit for long, “there’s a juke joint down the road. Mind if I take in a set?” Blues music was his vice. He admitted as much, but had promised himself a taste on the way to Orlando. He would put it behind him soon enough.
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.
