Like Death: Chapter One

by Tim Waggoner

Huddled beneath the kitchen table, knees drawn to his chest, hands balled into fists, jammed against his ears, kneading them, as if he might cut off the screams by grinding cartilage and flesh to a pulp. It doesn't work; the screams come through just fine.

He keeps his eyes open, doesn't seem to be able to close them, even to blink. Which is too bad, because he'd give anything to shut out what he's seeing. At nine, he's too young to make useless bargains with God - If you take away the cancer I swear I'll be faithful to my wife, I really mean it this time - and he's too old to think he can make it never-was merely by wishing hard, hard, hard! All he's got are those fists of his grinding, grinding. . .

A woman falls to the kitchen floor with a wet smack. Her face is turned toward him, and like his, her eyes are wide open. The difference is she's never going to close hers again, not on her own. An image flashes through his mind, a composite drawn from hundreds of movies and TV shows: a hand (sometimes belonging to a cop, sometimes a coroner) passing over the open-eyed face of an actor pretending to be dead. The fingers are straight, and there is no obvious contact between the hand and the mock-corpse's face. Yet when the hand has finished its pass, the eyes are closed, almost as if it were some sort of magic trick. The boy wonders if he were to reach out and pass his hand an inch or so over the woman's face, if her eyes - those terrible, empty eyes - would close. He doubts it. Life is never as good as TV.

The front of the woman's flower-print sundress is covered with blood, so much and so thick that it's almost black. The dress itself is shredded, and he realizes that what he first took to be blood on the fabric is really gore smeared on her flesh. He stares at something round with a little nub in the middle, and he understands that he's looking at his first naked breast. At least, the first he's ever seen outside the pages of a purloined Playboy. It looks so much different than the pictures he's seen; it sags a bit, for one thing. And of course, it's slick with blood. Miss June after she's been through a meat grinder.

Someone else is screaming now. Or maybe the screaming has taken up residence inside his skull despite his efforts to keep it out, and it's echoing in there, bouncing around, becoming louder and shriller with each pass, and soon it'll get so loud that his head can't possibly contain it anymore and it'll explode, splattering the underside of the table with blood, bone, and brain.

He wants to look to see who else is screaming, but he can't move (besides his fists, of course, those he can move just fine, still grinding, grinding), not even to turn his head, so he keeps staring at the dead woman's face name, name, name, he knows her name, knows who she is, but he can't and he watches as a pool of dark blood spreads out from beneath her, the leading edge of it sliding toward him slowly, as if he were sitting on a beach watching a crimson tide come in.

Gotta move. If he doesn't, the blood will reach his sneakers within seconds, stain them, and his mother that isn't his mother on the floor, staring, mouth gaping open like a dead fish, it isn't! will get mad at him for getting them dirty. She just bought them last week. But if he moves, he'll draw attention to himself, and that would be a Very Bad Thing, because . . . because . . . He's not sure why, really. Just because.

So when the blood touches his sneakers, his legs tense, but he doesn't move, and when it rolls on, touching the bottom of his shorts, starting to soak through at once, warm as fire against his skin, he grits his teeth and a soft keening sound starts deep in his throat, but he doesn't move, doesn't dare. Only now he's punching his ears with fast jabs, left-right, left-right, left-right, and his head starts to ring, but it's not loud enough to cover the screams, not nearly.

A shuffle of feet, and the table gives a jump. The sound startles him, breaks his paralysis, at least for a second, and he's able to turn his head, sees a pair of hairy legs, men's legs, feet in brown leather sandals. There's blood on those legs, streaks and splatters, though they seem to be undamaged. Dripped from above, the boy thinks, the observation as cool and rational as any made by the cops in the TV shows he likes, Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, The Streets of San Francisco, and the coolest of all, Hawaii Five-Oh. Drums, that wave, Jack Lord's hair.

There's another pair of legs beyond the hairy ones; these are covered by blood-dotted khaki slacks, feet encased in crimson-speckled black shoes. Under those shoes are red smears, and the boy wonders how either of these men have managed to maintain their footing with so much blood all over.

He hears the sound of what he guesses is a knife plunging into flesh - chuk, chuk, chuk - but it's a terribly ordinary sound, like when his mother slices a cantaloupe (though he can't see it from here, he knows there's one on the counter, mother bought it before they left home, they were going to have it for supper, but he knows they aren't going to have it now, no one's going to have an appetite after this).

Chuk-chuk-chuk.

Those hairy legs buckle, the sandaled feet slip out from under them, and the man crashes to the floor, causing the table to slide back a couple inches. He falls next to the wide-eyed woman, a hairy arm draped across her leg, almost as if he were purposefully posing for the crime-scene photos to come. His blood pools, runs, mingles with the woman's. The boy experiences an urge to reach out and try to separate the blood, smear it apart, because if it gets all mixed up there's no way anyone'll be able to tell whose is whose, and then how will the doctors be able to put it back? But he doesn't move, keeps pounding his ears until he realizes something.

The screaming has ended.

He stops hitting himself, draws his fists away from red, raw ears. Listens through the ringing, hears harsh breathing, tired but excited. Looks at the khaki legs still upright, standing patiently. A hand hangs next to the right leg; it's holding a wicked-looking hunting knife, metal coated with wet red.

"Come on out, Scotty." This is breathed more than said, the words drifting forth when the speaker exhales. The boy tries to place the voice, almost can, but fails.

A pause, and he senses a smile accompanying these next words.

"It's your turn."

The boy sighs, closes his eyes (since he still can) and waits for the hands to reach for him.

Scott Raymond took a draw on his cigarette and let the smoke drift out of his mouth of its own accord. He cracked the car window so the smoke wouldn't obscure his view of the apartment building, and more specifically, the entrance. The radio was on - the cassette player didn't work and he couldn't afford a car with a CD player - tuned to an oldies station, though the songs they played didn't seem all that old to him. Mostly seventies and eighties stuff, with a bit of early nineties thrown in for the hell of it. A song by Soft Cell was playing, "Tainted Love," the one that had a series of tones that sounded like the beeping of a medical monitor. It felt almost as if the radio were keeping track of his pulse, making sure he stayed calm.

Oh, he was calm, all right. Re-laxed. Just fucking great. Least he would be if Gayle would deign to make an appearance sometime this century, the goddamned bitch.

Easy, boy. Don't want to get the radio all worked up, do we? He took another drag on his cigarette and pretended not to notice his hand was trembling. It had been three weeks since he'd seen her last, almost twice that since she'd let him see their son. He'd talked to David on the phone a couple times - How you doing, are you eating enough, we'll go to a Reds game this summer, how's that sound? -- but it wasn't the same as being able to see him, stand close enough to touch him, to smell the lingering odor of Doritos and Ho-Ho's on his breath, a scent finer than any rose.

He looked at the door to building 203. He knew he had the right place; her Taurus was parked just a few spaces down from him. He scowled, focusing all his willpower on the door, as if he hoped to force it open through sheer mental effort. And then, sonofabitch, it did open, and out walked Gayle carrying a plastic laundry basket full of clothes, and David behind, lugging a blue laundry bag. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of them, and he felt his sinuses go hot and moist, his eyes begin to tear up.

Keep it together, man. You might not get a second chance at this.

He opened the car door, stepped out of his Subaru and into the slight chill of an early April afternoon. He closed the door and let his cigarette drop to the ground. Gayle hated the things, and he didn't want her to see him with one in his hand. He crushed the cig out with a quick step and twist of his foot, then hurried toward his wife and child, only barely managing to keep himself from running.

David saw him first. T-shirt, jeans, running shoes. Thin and tall like his father, unkempt brown hair that refused to stay combed, like his mother's. Blue eyes from somewhere back in his genetic ancestry. Sky blue, ocean blue, break-your-goddamned heart blue. Those eyes widened in what Scott hoped was surprise, and then David grinned. "Dad!" But he didn't drop the laundry bag, didn't come running over to give his old man a hug. No biggie, Scott told himself. The boy was ten, too big for hugs. He understood, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt like. . . like a hunting knife in the heart.

Gayle turned her head, saw him, but aside from a flicker of something in her eyes, a flicker that was gone before he could name it, her expression remained neutral. Not the best of signs, but at least she wasn't yelling at him. Not yet, anyway.

That ratty brown hair: he knew its scent, texture, taste. Mud-brown eyes she insisted were really hazel. Full lips, and oh jesus what he could remember about them. She wore an oversize gray Ohio State sweatshirt to conceal the fact she was ten pounds overweight, but she wasn't fooling anybody; you could tell by her round cheeks. He didn't care. She looked damned good to him, always had.

"Hi." He continued toward them, smiling, hands in the pockets of his jeans. He wanted to look as non-threatening as possible. He stopped, making sure to keep six feet between them. Out of arm's reach.

"What do you want?" Gayle said. No hello, it's good to see you, we've missed you, David especially. Not that he really expected any of that. Still, it would've been nice.

He shrugged, still making sure to keep his hands in his pockets. "Just to say hi." For the last several days he had mentally rehearsed what he would say once he saw them, but now that he was here, he couldn't think of anything. All he could think to do was look at them and hope they sensed the love he was broadcasting.

"You already said that."

Scott smiled. "I guess I did." He turned to David. "How do you like your new place?"

Now it was the boy's turn to shrug, and from the corner of his eye, Scott saw his wife scowl. The gesture must've looked a little too much like his father's for her comfort.

"It's all right. My room's smaller than back home, and I don't have a good view out my window, just the parking lot."

Scott glanced at the building, saw four windows, two lower, two upper. David's was one of those.

"I've told you before, hon, this is our home now." A hint of irritation on is but otherwise Gayle managed to keep her tone even. Scott knew she had seen him look at the building, knew she probably didn't like the idea of his knowing too much about where they lived.

David let the duffel bag touch to the ground and studied his Nikes. "I liked the house better." Almost too soft to hear.

Gayle gave Scott a look that said, See what you started? "I liked the house too, sweetie, but we don't live there anymore. We sold it. You and I live here, and Daddy lives in an apartment in Cedar Hill."

"Actually, I don't. Not anymore." This wasn't the way he wanted to tell them, it would've been so much better to make some small talk first. But now that he'd started, he couldn't turn back. "I just moved into a place on the other side of town. Not as nice as this," he took a hand out of his pocket and gestured at their building, "but it's not bad."

David looked up from his shoes and grinned. "Really? That's great!"

From the way Gayle's eyes narrowed, it was obvious what she thought about it. "We had an understanding."

He took a deep breath, stalling for time to think of a way to phrase his explanation that would mollify her. It was so much easier when he was writing; there was time to think, time to reword, rework. Never in real life. The air smelled of cut grass, and chlorine from the pool over by the rental office. Birds sang, calling to potential mates. He wished he could remember whatever song he had sung that had attracted Gayle to him in the first place. He'd sing it at the top of his lungs, if he could.

"We did. But I just . . . wanted to be closer to you both. In case you needed anything. I know we've had some troubles -" Yelling obscenities, fingers pressing the soft flesh of upper arms, leaning forward, thinking how easy it would be to fasten his teeth onto her nose and just riiiiip - "but that doesn't mean I don't still have a responsibility toward my wife and son. Besides, you said you were willing to try to work things out."

"I said I'd think about it." Her voice was cold now, and he knew that if David weren't here, she'd tell him to fuck off.

"Okay, but how can we do anything if we live an hour and a half apart? Besides, a dad should at least live in the same town as his son." He looked at David. "Right?"

David nodded, smiled, but in his eyes Scott saw he was remembering the yelling and the grabbing. Scott looked away, ashamed. If he didn't love them both so much, need them so, he wouldn't have been able to face them.

There was another reason he had moved to Ash Creek, one that had nothing to do with either of them, but he wasn't about to mention it, not now, not with how Gayle felt about his work, how she blamed it for . . . the bad days.

"Look, Scott, we really need to get going. We've got clothes to wash, and the laundry room is always busy, so we're heading off to a laundromat." David looked up at her. "And we don't need any help," she hastened to add.

Scott nodded. "Sure. Maybe we can get together for dinner sometime? My treat? You know, just so we can . . . be together for a while?"

Gayle looked at him for a moment, then set her basket down on the sidewalk. She fished her keys out of her jeans and handed them to David. "Go get in the car, honey. I'll be there in a minute."

"But, Mom. . ."

"Go on." Gentle, but firm.

David made a face, but he did as his mother said. On the way to the Taurus, he turned, waved once at Scott, then kept going.

He turned to Gayle. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't call, but -"

She took a step toward him, then stopped as if she were afraid to get too close. "I told you I needed to be alone for a while so I could have some time to think, and I meant it. Alone. Without you. Get it?" She glanced at David, who had climbed in the Taurus and was sitting on the passenger side, watching them. "And he needs time, too. He doesn't talk about it much, but I know it's eating at him. I need him to talk to me, I need find out just how badly he's hurt inside."

Scott could barely hold back the tears now, but he had to. Gayle hated it when he cried, accused him of using tears as manipulation "I'm so sorry. If I could take back -"

"But you can't, so don't even bother to say it." She paused, took a breath. "If I have to get a lawyer and take out a restraining order on you, I will. If that's what it'll take to keep you the hell away from us, I'll do it, and don't think I won't."

She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself as much as him, but he knew better than to say it. "I understand. But can I at least call soon, just to see how you're doing?"

"You saw us today; we're doing fine. There's no need to call." She picked up her laundry basket and walked to her car without giving him a backward glance. Scott watched as she got in, started the Taurus and drove out of the lot. David watched him without expression, and when Scott waved, he started to hold up his hand, but then he stopped, as if thinking better of it, and turned and looked forward. Scott was still standing on the sidewalk when they pulled onto the street and drove off.

"Well," he said softly to himself, "that didn't go so well." He started back to his car. He needed a cigarette, and more, he needed something to take his mind off Gayle and David and the complete cock-up he'd made of his marriage. And he knew just the thing: her name was Miranda Tanner. She was the other reason Scott had moved to Ash Creek, Ohio. Maybe, in the end, the real reason.

He got in his car, lit a cigarette, started the engine, and backed out of his parking space. It was time to make Ms. Tanner's acquaintance.