A Natural History of Hell: Stories (10 page)

Right around that time, I met Constance at the town library one night. I had nothing to do, but she had to write a paper. When I arrived, she’d put the paper away and was reading. I asked her what the book was. She told me, “Plato.”

“Good story?” I asked.

She explained it wasn’t a novel, but a book about ideas. “You see,” she said, “there’s a cave and this guy gets chained up inside so that he can’t turn around or move but only stare at the back wall. There’s a fire in the cave behind him and it casts his shadow on the wall he faces. That play of light and shadow is the sum total of his reality.”

I nodded and listened as long as I could. Constance was so wrapped up in explaining, she looked beautiful, but I didn’t want to listen anymore. I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was around. When I saw we were alone, I quickly leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. She smiled and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

On a warm day in mid-May, we had the blood drive. I got there early and gave blood. The nurses, who were really nice, told me to sit for a while, and they gave me orange juice and cookies. I thought about becoming a nurse for maybe like five whole minutes. Other kids showed up and gave blood, and I stuck around to help sign them up. Cody came and watched but wouldn’t give. “Fuck the dying,” I heard him say. “Nobody gets my blood but me.” After that a few other boys decided not to give either. Whatever. Then at lunch, the King of Vermont was drinking his Red Bulls and vodka, and I think because he’d given blood, he was really blasted. He went around threatening to stun people in their private parts.

After lunch, in Mrs. Cloder’s class, where we sat at long tables in a rectangle that formed in front of her desk, Wisner took the seat straight across from her. I was two seats down from him toward the windows. Class started, and the first thing Mrs. Cloder said, before she even got out of her seat, was to the King. “Get that foolish jar off the table.” We all looked over. Wisner stared, the mist swirled inside the glass. He pushed his seat back and stood up, cradling the jar in one arm and drawing his stun gun. “Sit down, Scotty,” she said, and leveled her riot gun at him. I could see her finger tightening on the trigger. A few seconds passed, and then one by one all the kids drew their weapons, but nobody was sure whether to aim at Mrs. Cloder or the King, so about half did one and half the other. I never even opened my lunch box, afraid to make a sudden move.

“Put down your gun and back slowly away from the table,” said Mrs. Cloder.

“When you meet the Devil, give him my regards,” said Wisner, but as he pulled the trigger, Mrs. Cloder fired. The breeching slug blew a hole in the King of Vermont’s chest, slamming him against the back wall in a cloud of blood. The jar shattered, and glass flew. McKenzie, who had been sitting next to Wisner, screamed as the shards dug into her face. I don’t know if she shot or if the gun just went off, but her bullet hit Mrs. Cloder in the shoulder and spun her out of her chair onto the ground. She groaned and rolled back and forth. Meanwhile, Wisner’s stun-gun darts had gone wild, struck Chucky Durr in the forehead, one in each eyebrow, and in his electrified shaking, his gun went off and put a round right into Melanie Storte’s Adam’s apple. Blood poured out as she dropped her own gun and brought her hands to her gurgling neck. Melanie was Cody St. John’s “current ho,” as he called her, and he didn’t think twice but fanned the hammer of his pistol, putting three shots into Chucky, who went over onto the floor like a bag of potatoes. Chucky’s cousin, Meleeba, shot Cody in the side of the head, and he fell, screaming, as smoke poured from the hole above his left ear. One of Cody’s crew shot Meleeba, and then I couldn’t keep track anymore. Bullets whizzed by my head, blood was spurting everywhere. Kids were dropping like pins at the bowling alley. Mrs. Cloder clawed her way back into her seat, lifted the gun and aimed it. Whoever was left fired on her and then she fired, another shotgun blast, like an explosion. When the ringing in my ears went away, the room was perfectly quiet but for the drip of blood and the ticking of the wall clock. Smoke hung in the air, and I thought of the King of Vermont’s escaped souls. During the entire thing, I’d not moved a single finger.

The cops were there before I could get myself out of the chair. They wrapped a blanket around me and led me down to the principal’s office. I was in a daze for a while, but could feel them moving around me and could hear them talking. Then my mother was there, and the cop was handing me a cup of orange juice. They asked if they could talk to me, and my mother left it up to me. I told them everything, exactly how it went down. I started with the blood drive. They tested me for gunpowder to see if there was any on my hands. I told them my gun was back in the classroom in the lunch box under the table, and it hadn’t been fired since the summer, the last time I went to the range with my dad. It was all over the news. I was all over the news. A full one-third of Bascombe High’s senior class was killed in the shootout.

Senator Meets showed up at the school three days later and got his picture taken handing me an award. I never really knew what it was for. Constance said of it, “They give you a fucking award if you live through it,” and laughed. In Meets’s speech that day to the assembled community, he blamed the blood drive for the incident. He proclaimed Mrs. Cloder a hero, and ended reminding everyone, “If these kids were working, they’d have no time for this.”

The class trip was called off out of respect for the dead. Two weeks later, I went to the prom. It was to be held in the high school gymnasium. My dad drove me. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was empty.

“You must be early,” he said, and handed me the corsage I’d asked him to get—a white orchid.

“Thanks,” I said and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As I opened the door to get out, he put his hand on my elbow. I turned, and he was holding the gun.

“You’ll need this,” he said.

I shook my head, and told him, “It’s OK.” He was momentarily taken aback. Then he tried to smile. I shut the door and he drove away.

Constance was already there. In fact, she was the only one there. The gym was done up with glittery stars on the ceiling, a painted moon, and clouds. There were streamers. Our voices echoed as we exchanged corsages, which had been our plan. The white orchid looked good on her black plunging neckline. She’d gotten me a corsage made of red roses, and they really stood out against the turquoise. In her purse, instead of the Beretta, she had a half pint of Captain Morgan. We sat on one of the bleachers and passed the bottle, talking about the incidents of the past two weeks.

“I guess no one’s coming,” she said. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the outside door creaked open and in walked Bryce carrying a case in one hand and dressed in a jacket and tie. We got up and went to see him. Constance passed him the Captain Morgan. He took a swig.

“I was afraid of this,” he said.

“No one’s coming?” I said.

“I guess some of the parents were scared there’d be another shootout. Probably the teachers too. Mrs. Cloder’s family insisted on an open casket. A third of them are dead, let’s not forget, and the rest, after hearing Meets talk, are working the late shift at Wal-Mart for minimum wage.”

“Jeez,” said Constance.

“Just us,” said Bryce. He went up on the stage, set his case down, and got behind the podium at the back. “Watch this,” he said, and a second later the lights went out. We all laughed. A dozen blue searchlights appeared, their beams moving randomly around the gym, washing over us and then rushing away to some dark corner. A small white spotlight came on above the mic that stood at the front of the stage. Bryce stepped up into the glow. He opened the case at his feet and took out a saxophone.

“I was looking forward to playing tonight,” he said. We walked up to the edge of the stage, and I handed him the bottle. He took a swig, the sax now on a chain around his neck. Putting the bottle down at his feet,” he said, “Would you ladies care to dance?”

“Play us something,” we told him.

He thought for a second and said, “Strangers in the Night.”

He played, we danced, and the blue lights in the dark were the sum total of our reality.

A Terror

Emily woke suddenly in the middle of the night, sitting straight and gasping as if finally breaching the surface of Puffer’s Pond. The last thing she could remember was the shrill cry of the 6:00 a.m. whistle from the factory down Main Street in The Crossing. Then a sudden shuddering explosion behind her eyes; a shower of sparks.

She pulled back the counterpane and moved to the edge of the bed. There, she rested; her bare feet on the cold floor, letting the night’s hush, like between the heaves of storm, settle her. Only when a fly buzzed against the windowpane did she remember everything.

Her health had been bad, her spirit low. She’d felt so weak for days on end that she could barely make it out into the garden to cull wilted blossoms. Her pen, which usually glided over a page, sowing words to correspondents or conjuring a poem, had become a weight nearly too burdensome to bear. At her father’s insistence, the doctor had come the previous week and demanded to examine her. She’d reluctantly allowed it, in her way. He stood in the upstairs hallway, peering through the partially open door of her room as she shuffled past the entrance, back and forth, three times, fully clothed. He’d called out to her, “Emily, how can I diagnose anything other than a case of mumps in this manner?” but she was loathe to see him, to have him or any other stranger to the Homestead near her.

All that had somehow passed, though, and she no longer felt a slave to gravity. Gone was the perpetual headache like the beating of a drum, gone the labored rasping for breath. That frantic confusion of thought that had plagued her seemed only a fading nightmare, as if now, at the start of autumn, there’d been a spring cleaning in her mind. Before standing, she took stock to make sure she wasn’t deluding herself, but no, she felt calm and rested. She stood and stretched, noticing a dim reflection of her loose white nightgown in the window glass, a floating specter that made her smile.

Moonlight sifted in through the two windows and showed her the way to her writing table. There, she lit the taper in the pewter candlestick and took it up to lead her through the darkened house. She wanted to let them know that she’d recovered from her spell. Turning right, down the hallway, she stopped first at Lavinia’s room. A tapping at the door brought no response. She rapped louder, but still couldn’t raise Vinnie from sleep. Quietly, she opened the door and crossed the dark expanse. Bringing the candlestick down in order to light her sister’s form, she was surprised to find the bed still made, empty. She left that room and hurried farther down the hall to her parents’. Her mother had been in the poorest health, and Emily was reluctant to wake her, but concern for Vinnie overcame her caution and she knocked heavily three times. Silence followed.

The raised lantern revealed her parents’ bed to also be empty, still made from the day. She hurried back up the hall to the top of the stairs and called out for her father. The glow of the candle only reached halfway down the steps. Beyond was a quiet darkness from which no answer came. She felt the nettle sting of fear in her blood and called again, this time for Carlo, her dog. At any other time the Newfoundland would have been right by her side. Slowly, she backed away and returned to her room. She set down the candlestick on her writing table and stepped toward the bed. After a quick look over each shoulder, and a moment of just listening, she pulled the nightgown off and tossed it on her pillow. She was paler than the garment she discarded, glowing within the glow of the candlelight. From the closet, she removed her white cotton day dress from its hanger and slipped it on with nothing beneath. She found her walking boots in the shadow at the end of the bed and guided her bare feet into them while standing. Not bothering to tie the laces, she picked up the candlestick and left the room.

The untied boots made a racket on the steps—better, she thought, than having to utter a warning to whatever revelation lurked in the dark. She discovered that the clock on the mantel in the downstairs parlor had stopped at 2:15. Stillness reigned in every room, from her father’s library to the kitchen. She fled to the conservatory, to her gardens, for comfort. As soon as she crossed the threshold from the house into the growing room, the aroma of the soil soothed her. An Aeolian harp in the one open window made music, and she turned to the plants, desperate for a moment’s distraction.

It seemed to her like it had been weeks since the last time she’d inspected the exotics. September had definitely come and was drawing the summer out of blossoms. The peonies, gardenias, jasmine drooped dejectedly, their closed petals half wilted. The summer gentian were long shriveled, and she knew she must pick them before they fell in order to make the purple tea she’d dreamed of. Resting the candle in a patch of thyme, she leaned over pots of oregano to reach the plants and pinch the desiccated flowers from their stems. Only when she had a handful did she recall that her family had vanished in the night. She shook her head, muttering recriminations at herself, put the petals in the pocket of her dress, and blew out the candle. Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlit night.

Before leaving through the door at the end of the conservatory, she grabbed from a peg the tippet of tulle she often wrapped around her shoulders when walking or working in the outdoor gardens. It was a flimsy wrap, and did little to warm her against the wind that shook the trees in the orchard. She thought of it more as a familiar arm around her shoulders. She kept to the path and called out in a whisper for her father and then Vinnie.

Upon reaching the heart of the gardens, she rested upon the log bench her brother, Austin, had built when just a boy. She resolved to go next door to The Evergreens, Austin’s house, and get help. She had a choice to either reach it by traversing a lonely thicket or going round to the street. For the first time ever, she chose the street.

She hadn’t been in front of the Homestead in over a year, and the thought of being seen drained her will. She found it ever preferable to be in her room, sitting at her writing table, watching, through the wavy window glass, the traffic of Main Street. For long stretches in the afternoon, before she’d put pen to paper again, she’d watch her neighbors come and go. Her imagination gave her their names and their secrets, but she felt in her bones that only at a distance could she know them.

It was different when the children came into the yard and stood beneath her window. They could smell that she’d been baking. When the cookies cooled, she’d slip them in a crude envelope she made from butcher wrap and then attach a parachute of green tissue paper her mother had been saving and forbade anyone to use. There’d be three or four children on the lawn, looking up at the white form behind the glass, a mere smudge of a phantom. Opening the window, she’d say nothing, but launch the cookies, the green paper cupping the air. The parcel would float gracefully down into their grasping hands. They’d hear her breathy laughter, the window would slam shut, and they’d scurry in fear.

She opened the wrought-iron gate of the fence that ran between the property and the sidewalk, cringing with the squeal of its hinges. Looking around, she waited for someone or something to come at her out of the dark. She left the gate open so as not to make it cry again and headed right, toward The Evergreens. The wind pushed against her, and dry leaves scraped the street. She shifted the tippet on her shoulders but it could do no better. It was only early September, yet she smelled a hint of snow and felt winter in her brain. A line from a poem she’d written surfaced, and she spoke it under her breath: “Great streets of silence led away . . . .”

She’d taken no more than fifty steps, head down, anticipating the comfort she’d find in the presence of Austin and the arms of his wife, Susan, when from the street behind her rose the sound of horses’ hooves, the clickety-whir of carriage wheels. The noise slowed and then stopped her; zero at the bone. She dared not turn to look, and hoped the late-night travelers would pass her without notice. From the corner of her left eye she saw the contrivance pull just ahead of her and stop. It was an elegant black brougham with a driver’s seat, a cab, and two white horses dappled with dark spots like a leopard’s markings.

Emily turned and lifted her head but couldn’t make out the driver beyond his silhouette. He was dressed in a heavy coat, collar up, a wide-brimmed hat, and gloves. He turned and lit the two lanterns that were attached to the front of the cab and then resumed his slumped posture. The door swung open and a male voice called out of the dark compartment, “Miss Emily Dickinson?” She blushed as she always did when confronted by a stranger. A man stepped out of the brougham. She took two steps back.

In that instant, she hoped and then thought for certain it was Sam Bowles, editor of
The Springfield Republican
and her clandestine correspondent. His stream of letters had dried up since his wife had discovered that he and Emily referred to her as “the hedgehog.” Emily missed him so dearly since his departure for the sanitorium to treat his nervous condition. It would be like him to surprise her with his return in this way. But just as quickly she saw the features weren’t Bowles’, and her joy curdled.

It was a gentleman, finely dressed in a black tailcoat and trousers, a spotless white shirt. There was a lovely white rose in his lapel. He wore leather gloves and carried a walking stick. The last she dared to take in was his face, which was adorned by a thin mustache but otherwise smoothly shaven. His eyes were dark yet glimmered with the light of the lanterns. His smile was, considering her anxiety, enormously appealing. He took a gold watch from his vest pocket and held it on its chain up close to his eyes. “We’re running late,” he muttered, as if to himself, but loud enough for her to hear. This fact didn’t seem to distress him in the least. In fact, he smiled more broadly.

Her manners obliterated, she called out louder than she’d intended, “Who are you?”

The gentleman stepped up out of the street and onto the sidewalk. “I’m nobody, who are you?” he said and laughed. “You know me,” he added.

He wore some subtle cologne that reminded her exactly of the scent of the garden at the height of summer. The chill left her immediately and her breathing eased. “What do you want?” she asked, now more relaxed but still with a fading memory that she’d meant to be defensive.

“I’m here to bring you where you need to go,” he said. “I know you’re busy so I’ve taken it upon myself to come for you.”

“I’m only going up the street to my brother’s house.”

“Oh, no, Miss Dickinson, you’ll be going much farther than that.”

“Please. I’m in a hurry. An emergency.”

He took the glove off his left hand and held it in his right. She was incredulous at the effrontery when he reached down and lightly clasped her fingers. At his touch a blast of cold, like a January wind, ran through her body, lodging in her mind and causing a sudden confusion. He had no right to touch her. She meant to protest, to pull her hand away, but every time forgot what she’d intended and then remembered and forgot again.

“If I might call you Emily?” he said in a soothing voice.

“How civil,” she thought while still searching within herself for the panic she expected. The cold that had invaded her slowly diffused into a sense of utter calm more comforting than an afternoon with Susan and the new baby. He gave a half-bow and led her toward the brougham as if her fears about him had never existed. She stepped off the curb convinced that a journey was precisely what was needed.

Emily woke to the movement of the carriage. The shades were up and the sunlight shone through the window to her left. She pushed against the hard bench to straighten her posture and yawned.

“You’ll want to see this,” said the gentleman, sitting opposite her.

He smiled cordially and her spine stiffened; a scream rendered numb fell to the bottom of her throat. He pointed out the sunlit window and his gaze insisted she look. The view was dizzying as the rig sped madly through town. She thought they were caught up in a twister, but then she was able to identify a section of street, and the whizzing scenery slowed to a crawl, as if it and not the carriage were moving. The sidewalks were empty in the late afternoon light, and the aroma of the oyster bar downstairs in the Gunn Hotel pervaded the cab. The very next thing she noticed was the spire of the First Congregational Church, and that was all wrong, for it should have been in the opposite direction.

They went a few more yards down the road and, impossibly, were passing the grounds of Amherst Academy. Whereas the church and hotel were steeped in the summer heat, the three-story school was surrounded by trees whose leaves had gone golden. There were children sitting on the steps of the building and some playing Ring A Rosie in the field out front. Emily remembered that the school had closed just that year, as a new public school had been built. She wondered what had brought the old place back to life. As the carriage rolled by, the children turned in the ring and she glimpsed the laughing face of her second cousin, Sophia.

She gasped and closed her eyes, averting her gaze from the window. “It can’t be,” she said.

“What’s that?” asked her traveling companion.

“My cousin, Sophia. She died of typhus when we were children.”

“You don’t understand yet, do you?”

“You’re taking me to my family, I thought.”

“In a sense,” he said.

“But then what is all this, this journey through the town all crossways and confusing?”

“You’re taking the tour, Emily. Everybody gets the tour.”

“The tour of what?” she begged, her voice raised.

“Why, your life, of course. A little summing up before nestling down into your alabaster chamber.”

“How do you come to use my private words?”

“I can see you’re beginning to see now,” he said.

She turned quickly and caught a glimpse of Mount Holyoke Academy, miles away from Amherst, in the early evening, and right after it Amherst Town Hall, with its giant clock lit by morning light.

She looked back at him and asked, “What happened?”

“It comes to all, my dear. You were weak and had one of your seizures and . . . well . . . I have my job to do.”

“But Vinnie and Mother and Father?”

“Oh, they’re all as well as when you last saw them. It’ll be a while more before they get the tour.”

“I want to say good-bye to them.” Tears formed in her eyes.

He shrugged and opened his gloved hands as if to indicate there was nothing that could be done.

“Where are we going?”

The gentleman banged on the ceiling of the cab with his cane, and the horses instantly set into a gallop. “Toward eternity,” he said.