Freddie sat slumped in his Barcalounger in front of the TV set. The last
few minutes of a football game were playing out. The sound was turned down,
almost off, and had no more meaning than a gust of wind in the eaves.
A long-necked beer bottle was in his right hand. It was empty. He had
been sitting there so long dusk had crept over the world outside and had
sneaked into the room. Light from the TV flickered across the chair, his
body, his hands, causing an illusion of changing expressions on his blank
face. The bottle slipped from his fingers, hit the polished pine floor
with a thump, and rolled a few inches. Freddie sat up straight and shut
the television off with the remote. He stood up and looked around the
room as if seeing it after a long absence. Everything was as it should
be, had been for ten years, except for his wife’s body on the rag
rug in the middle of the floor.
The door leading to the kitchen was on the other side of the room. Freddie
walked along the wall, not looking at the center of the room. He glanced
at the pictures and knickknacks on the bookshelf. One framed picture of
Freddy and Janet at their wedding caught and held his attention, creating
a tunnel vision sharply focused on her face.
He pulled away with a shrug that became a shudder, and moved toward the
kitchen, never letting his gaze wander to the bundle on the rug. As he
passed through the doorway, a knot at the back of his skull loosened,
and the tingling and numbness in his hands faded to a faint pulse.
When he touched the light switch the kitchen exploded in startling brilliance,
limning the counter, cabinets, and hanging pots. The darkness outside
made a mirror of the window in front of him. Freddie could see his own
familiar, uninteresting face clearly. Partly dried blood was smeared from
his hairline down his cheek and onto his shirt. He looked at his shaking
hands and the blood there. Clinching his fists stopped the trembling,
but he could feel the slickness of the blood, his blood.
With long strides, almost running, he rushed down the hall and into the
bathroom, where he stripped and ducked into the shower. The first cold
water shocked, the warm soothed, and the hot burned away the muzziness
in his head. Soapy lather cleansed his body.
Calmer afterward, Freddie dried himself, paying attention to the cut on
his temple. It was deep, with swelling and discoloration around it. Finding
a butterfly bandage in the cabinet, he patted the wound with the towel
until the bleeding almost stopped, then pulled the skin together as he
applied the bandage. His image in the mirror showed three scars, but little
evidence that sometime in the past his nose had been broken.
In the bedroom he rummaged in the back of the closet until he found a
pair of camouflage pants and his hiking boots. The pants held a faint
odor of mildew overlaid with the scent of crushed pine needles. The boots,
with soil clinging, smelled like newly plowed earth.
Dressed, leaving the camouflage jacket unbuttoned over his T-shirt, he
was prepared for the chore ahead of him. But as he started for the back
door, his legs were shaky, and he had a strong desire to sit. He went
to the kitchen instead. In the refrigerator he found a plate of fried
chicken, and green beans and okra in separate plastic containers. He could
fix a lettuce and tomato salad and have a complete meal.
He had a cold beer with it. Before he finished, he opened another, defying
one of Janet’s rules.
Janet always took good care of him, as long as he abided by her rules.
She could be very loving. The trouble was, he wasn’t always sure
what the rules were, and any transgression brought retribution. He ran
his finger along the faintly raised scar on his left cheek.
He cleaned up, rinsing the plates before putting them in the dishwasher,
and making sure to put the chicken bones in the garbage disposal to knock
loose sticky debris, as the directions with the disposal encouraged, and
Janet had demanded.
He turned on the floodlight outside the back door and went to the tool
shed where he collected leather work gloves, a mattock, and a spade. At
a spot close to the house partly shielded from the floodlight by hanging
tree branches, he started to dig.
The Georgia red clay resisted. He thought the soil there must not have
been disturbed since the Incan Empire flourished. The mattock was pick
ended, and he had to use the pick to loosen the clay before the broad
blade of the mattock could penetrate deeply enough to be effective. Then
the spade could remove the dirt. The routine of pick, mattock, spade was
wearing. He found himself using brute force on the downward swing of the
mattock, contrary to the common technique of allowing the weight of the
mattock to do the work. The rectangle he was excavating began to be deep
enough to stand in as he worked, and he could visualize the end of his
labors, but from time to time he had to pause and rest.
As he sat on the growing pile of dirt, he could see a half-moon through
the pines. An owl swooped across the clearing that was his yard. Two crows
followed. But that couldn’t be. Crows are not night birds. Crows
hate owls and will harry them, cawing and making a fuss until the owls
leave the crows’ territory, but not at night.
He stood and looked around. The floodlight limited his vision, and beyond
its reach was an unknown realm. No lights from other houses were visible.
Janet had chosen this place because it was isolated, at the end of a long
drive, at the end of a county road. It was also at the end of the water
line, and the water pressure went up and down unpredictably.
He never knew why she didn’t want neighbors near. Her will of iron
added almost an hour to his driving time as he went on his route selling
industrial solvents and detergents. The clients were dispersed, and he
could be away from home for a week at a time on occasion. That didn’t
bother Janet, and the income enabled them to live comfortably. Their wants
were modest.
He went back to work. Two and a half feet down he struck granite. Even,
flat, and impenetrable, a root of the mountains. A shallow burial it would
be, but a shallow grave would do.
At the back door he stomped his feet to shake off any of the dry, crumbly
clay from his shoes. Entering, he went to the kitchen. There he picked
up a paring knife and a ball of heavy twine. He turned toward the living
room. At the door he paused. Immediately, he smelled the effluent of death.
Shaking his head and turning away, he slowly sat down at the kitchen table.
His head fell forward onto his arms. The quiet sound of his ragged breathing
seemed loud in the silence.
He stayed that way for long minutes. When he got up, he walked purposefully
to the body. He wrapped the rug around it and stitched the folds together,
pushing the cord through the separations between the twisted scraps of
cloth.
Her body was heavy for its size. She was more bone and sinew than soft
flesh. He carried the package out to the neat, rectangular excavation.
Without pausing, he simply dropped his burden into the hole and immediately,
almost frantically, shoveled dirt on top of it.
He spread the excess dirt around so there would be no mound over the grave.
The fresh dirt could appear to be a new flowerbed if he shaped the edges
and covered it all with pine straw. Janet had planted a camellia in the
pine island at the side of the house two years before. That would make
the bed look authentic.
Digging up the camellia was easy. He planted it precisely over the center
of the grave, in the loosened dry dirt. He would have to water it, or
the leaves would droop in a day. Rainfall had been scarce during the summer.
The builders of the house had given them only one outside faucet, and
that was at the front. Freddie patiently untangled the hose and ran it
around to the back, making sure the end of it was positioned to water
the camellia.
At the back door he reached inside and turned off the floodlight. The
gibbous moon was in the western sky, a clockwork symbol of the hours of
darkness past. He walked to the edge of the clearing, where the loblolly
struggled for dominance with oak, red maple, sweet gum, and all the assertive
deciduous growth. The woods in moonlight had always given him a sense
of the rightness of the earth, but as he looked into the darkness, other
forms, less benign, seemed to be shadows of the corporeal.
He turned back toward the house. As he returned the tools to the shed,
he took out a large plastic bag. At the back door, he removed his shoes
and put them in the bag. He went to the bedroom where he stripped again
and put his camouflage jacket and pants and sweaty underwear, along with
the bloody clothes, into the bag.
He showered again, shaved, and dressed for work.
In the bedroom closet he pulled out two suitcases. The large one was Janet’s
and almost new, the other, scuffed and worn, was the one he took on his
trips. Quickly and efficiently, from long practice, he packed his.
Packing the other with the clothes Janet would have taken if she had left
him was not as easy. It required remembering her habits and guessing what
would be important to her. Scrapbooks and letters would have been reasonable,
but there were none. Impatiently, he stripped all the clothes from hangers,
roughly folded them, and tossed them into the suitcase. He didn’t
forget her shoes and bits of costume jewelry.
The darkness outside the windows had changed from black to gray. He wanted
to be past the cluster of shops and the filling station at the intersection
of the state highway and the county road before anyone was about.
He carried the suitcases to the front door, put them down, and looked
around the room. It all seemed unfamiliar, as if he had only seen it as
a picture in a magazine. He turned out all the lights.
With the suitcases in the trunk, he started driving down the long gravel
driveway. He stopped. The water. He hadn’t turned it on. Backing
up, he slewed to his left and hit a sapling crowding the drive, bending
it almost to the ground. He got out and saw there was no damage to the
car and trotted to the faucet and turned the handle until he could barely
hear water running. Satisfied, he returned to the car and drove away.
Freddie hadn’t planned to be gone a full week or go as far as Mississippi
to dump Janet’s suitcase off a bridge along with the bag containing
his dirty clothes, but once he was in motion away from his house, checking
the odometer from time to time became a comfort.
He knew he had to go back, but the first two hours of the return made
him shiver and sweat at the same time. Gradually, as time passed, he regained
self-confidence and restructured the image of himself as a pleasant, easygoing,
and yet skilled salesman. He stopped to see some clients and picked up
a large order from one.
Early Friday afternoon he turned onto the county road. He always came
home by Friday. As he drove the familiar route, he admired the rolling
countryside and the term Elysian peace came to him, but he wasn’t
sure if his thoughts were of Janet or his own newfound serenity.
Ahead, he could see buzzards circling, spiraling downward and sailing
back up to rejoin the flock. Not too unusual in this rural county. But
the closer he got to his house, the closer he got to the buzzards.
He caught glimpses of flashing blue and red lights through the trees soon
after he turned onto his driveway. He wanted to back out and return to
Mississippi, but he found himself calmly continuing, a song by Vince Gill
repeating in his head.
The sheriff seemed to have been waiting for him. Freddie pulled up beside
him and got out of his car. The yard was filled with ambulances and police
cars. Most of the activity was centered at the back of the house. Two
men with muddy shoes appeared with a gurney. On the gurney was a black
zipper bag.
A few buzzards perched in a dead tree, watching silently, as others sailed
in disarray above the scene. Occasionally one would swoop in as if checking
to make sure it was all over.
The sheriff looked up at the birds, then at Freddie. “It was the
water pressure,” he said. “What we had was an overflowing
bathtub.” |
