Blameless in Abaddon (7 page)

“It's not a
corpse.
It's the Godform. I stood over His left eye, directly on top.”

“I think we might go—the kids've been asking about it, Mrs. Blumenberg too. They let Jews in, right?”

“No problem.”

“And you really believe the trip put you in remission?”

“I'm sure of it.”

“I want to draw some blood today, so we can check your acid phosphatase.”

At four o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Blumenberg phoned the Abaddon Municipal Building, reaching Martin shortly after he'd gotten a Glendale teenager named Todd Weatherwax to promise that his rock band, the Elementals, would stop rehearsing after ten
P.M.
If no cancer is present in a person's body, the urologist explained, his acid-phosphatase level will be somewhere between 2.5 and 4.0.

Martin's level, he was sorry to report, stood at 11.6.

 

Of all the pests and parasites the Almighty has commissioned over the years, the termite continues to do me proud. As you will see, termites figure as objects of philosophical discourse throughout this tale. At the moment, however, it is termite teeth, not termite teleology, that concern us.

An unutterable despair racked Corinne Rosewood as she drove home from work that evening. Right before she'd left, her husband had phoned with his blood-test results. Tears spilled down her face. Mucus dribbled from her nose. Eleven point six. She hadn't felt so wretched since the death of her girlhood Welsh corgi, Gwyneth.

Carefully she guided her Ford Ranger onto the Henry Avenue Bridge, an aging span of oak and iron that crossed the Algonquin River three miles above the point where it met Abaddon Township's beloved Waupelani Creek to form the muddy Schuylkill. The mammoth wooden guardrails were riddled with 27,489 holes, each wrought by one of my termites.

Eleven point six, she brooded. Eleven point six. And yet they'd been so sure their trip to the City had helped him, so sure, so sure—

A nervous and confused Irish setter dashed into the path of Rosewood's truck. She did exactly what one would expect of the Kennel of Joy's founder and president—she stomped on the brake pedal and swerved the wheel. The Ranger skidded, careening wildly, its right fender fracturing the setter's skull. Rosewood heard the emphatic smack of metal meeting bone. Her truck kept sliding, the dog's corpse sprawled across the bumper. The guardrail splintered like Styrofoam.

She screamed, overcome by the same chaotic falling sensation she'd recently experienced on the Chariots of Ezekiel ferris wheel. Her truck hit the Algonquin and sank. Darkness suffused the cab, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the sun. The dead setter floated up past the windshield like a wraith rising from a grave. Water squirted in around the door frames, spraying Rosewood's chest and face. Frantically she felt her way through the gloom, seized the window crank, and gave it a turn. The mechanism froze, befouled with silt. The water reached her knees. She wrapped her fingers around the door handle. Yanked. Pushed. Jerked. Shoved. The door wouldn't budge, not one inch. The water caressed her stomach.

Holding her breath, she lurched toward the passenger door. She grabbed the window crank. Stuck. The water encircled her neck. She clawed at the handle and threw herself against the door. Nothing. The Algonquin rushed up her nose, down her throat, into her lungs.

A splendid golden carp was the last thing Corinne Rosewood saw in her life—a lost and forsaken creature who, seeking to rejoin its school, had fought its way a half mile up the Algonquin, getting farther from home with each twist and turn of its shining body.

P
RIOR TO HIS DIAGNOSIS
of prostate cancer, the worst thing that had ever happened to Martin was the loss, at age fourteen, of his cherished childhood home. He'd actually stood and watched as two bulldozers knocked it down, their fearsome steel scoops toppling the walls and leveling the foundation. By this time Martin's family no longer owned the place, his father having sold it to a wealthy chiropractor named Harold Clevinger for twelve thousand dollars, a sum with which Walter Candle had immediately acquired a more conventional domicile across the street. The chiropractor's first move was to obliterate the Candle dwelling—the property per se was what enchanted him, Waupelani Creek and its palisade of weeping willows—and erect in its stead a serpentine, one-floor monstrosity suggesting nothing so much as a spine that Clevinger had failed to straighten.

Martin's family couldn't fault the chiropractor's decision to call in the bulldozers, for the edifice in question had been constructed in 1935 to accommodate Abaddon Fire Company Number One and its modest two-engine fleet. When the building was abandoned a decade later, Martin's father had purchased it for a mere forty-five hundred dollars, deploying studs and plasterboard to convert the firefighters' upper-level dormitory into a maze of domestic spaces: bedrooms, bathrooms, dining area, kitchen. As a Sunday school teacher, Walter Candle was delighted with the idea of living in a firehouse. He saw himself as a kind of spiritual firefighter, forever dousing the burning desires and blazing temptations that flared in his pupils' hearts.

Martin loved the firehouse no less than his father. He was particularly enamored of the main siren, its domed carapace straddling the peaked roof like a helmet protecting the head of an infantryman. The siren was broken beyond repair, and no one in the family pretended otherwise, and yet he fantasized that one day, somehow, the device would spring to life, releasing a banshee cry so loud his sister would wet her pants.

And so it was that when Martin, ear pressed to his telephone receiver, first heard the terrible news from Constable Steadman—“Judge, your wife's been killed in a freak accident”—he heard something else as well: the long-dead siren on his lost firehouse, howling with bereavement and dismay.

He howled, he screamed, he wailed, he moaned. He damned the moment he was conceived, cursed the hour he quickened, and rued the day he left his mother's womb. Mourning transmuted him. He became a kind of monster, a violent force of nature rampaging through the farmhouse, breaking plates and ripping down curtains. The sinking sensation returned, the horrible feeling of suffocation he'd first experienced in Dr. Hummel's office, only instead of falling through Abaddon Marsh he was trapped in a slough even colder and crueler—a swamp the size of the Godform's bowels. Were it not for the vigilance of Vaughn Poffley, he might have availed himself of the Algonquin River that week, following Corinne into oblivion.

“Casket, cemetery plot, obituary in the
Sentinel
—I took care of everything,” Vaughn informed him in the same steady voice he employed when assuring Martin they could beat the Democrats' current candidate for JP. “The stone is going to read, ‘She loved all creatures great and small.' That sound okay?”

Seated at his kitchen table, Martin did not respond. He uncapped the salt cellar and dumped its contents in a shapeless pile before him. He stared at the white grains—so suggestive, he decided, of the useless I-125 seeds filling his prostate. For the first time ever he began to regard his imminent death as a blessing, his best hope for escaping this world with its rapacious bulldozers and elevated acid phosphatase, its dangerous bridges and drowned wives.

“Did you know Samuel Johnson missed his wife's funeral?” he said at last. “Too much for him.”

“You ought to come, Martin. You'll regret it if you don't.”

“Queen Victoria couldn't bring herself to attend the services for Prince Albert.” With his index finger he traced a spiral in the salt.

“All you have to do is show up. I know Corinne wasn't religious, but I've arranged for my pastor to say a few words at the graveside, nice Lutheran words—that's okay, right?—and then we'll have a reception at my place. Marge'll make coffee, plus shortbread and little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.”

“Goddamn Irish setter,” he said, mashing the salt with his fist.

“Just show up, that's all. Hillcrest Cemetery, Saturday, ten o'clock. Your sister'll bring you. The grave's near the lawnmower shed. It's where they keep, you know, the lawnmowers. Day after tomorrow. Lawnmower shed. Just show up.”

When evening came, Martin wandered into the
Nepeta cataria
patch, sat down amid the crop, and waited. At midnight the hedonists appeared—tabbies, calicoes, Manxes—but instead of rolling around on the leaves and getting stoned they simply stared at him, their pupils dilated by the darkness, their gazes a mixture of the inquisitive and the accusatory.

Where's Corinne?
the cats seemed to be asking.

“She's dead,” he said out loud. “You'll never see her again.”

Who will grow the crop?

“I don't know.”

Will you grow it?

“I don't know.”

You must.

“Think of someone besides yourselves. Think of Corinne.”

We are cats.

They spent the rest of the night together: a grieving judge and thirteen apprehensive felines.

Waking at dawn, his Perkinsville College jersey damp with dew, he rose and made his way through the heart-shaped leaves and the sleeping cats. Back in the farmhouse, he opened a box of Wheaties and shook several dozen scablike flakes into a soup bowl. He looked in the refrigerator. No milk. He sprinkled four teaspoons of Cremora onto the cereal, adding cold water from the faucet. The concoction tasted astoundingly foul.

Later that morning his big-boned sister appeared, each arm wrapped around a paper bag stuffed with groceries.

“I inventoried your kitchen yesterday,” said Jenny, setting the groceries on the counter. “You were out of everything, so I went to Super Fresh. How're you feeling?”

“It hurts to pee—the prostatitis must be back. My right hip aches. Do me a favor?”

“You bet.”

“Those animals of Corinne's, armadillo, tarantula, there's also an iguana—think you could find homes for 'em?”

“I'll take out an ad in the
Sentinel.
”

“I don't want any money, but their new owners must be responsible people. No sadistic schoolboys. No flighty teenagers.”

“Right.”

“Good homes, Jenny.”

“You got it.” She unbagged a half gallon of skim milk, two grapefruits, and a cantaloupe. “I'm sorry about your pains. I'm sorry about . . . everything.”

“Do me another favor? I'd like a ride to Perkinsville Station. I've got a three o'clock with Blumenberg at Sloan-Kettering. There's a new drug he wants me to try.”

“Oh, Marty, this is all so
unfair
.”

“Unfair,” he echoed.

“Did you know Mom's coming to the funeral?”

“She can't. It's too far away.”

“I'm giving her a lift.”

“She can't drive that far.”

“
I'm
driving her. Aren't you listening? I'll pick
you
up too. Nine-thirty, okay?”

“I want to go alone.”

“I don't understand.”

“It feels right.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

He caught the 11:45 out of Perkinsville.

Just as he feared, the new drug Dr. Blumenberg wanted him to try wasn't new at all. It was Feminone, the synthetic hormone that threatened to turn him into a woman.

“I'm not going to take it,” he informed the urologist.

“It's our best hope for a remission,” said Blumenberg, fingering Martin's inflamed gland.

“I don't want a remission.”

“Nonsense.”

“It still hurts to pee. The discharges have started again.”

“Bactrim ought to clear that up. Any pelvic pain?”

“Quite a bit.”

“Where exactly?”

“Right hip.”

“Let's put you on a maintenance dose of Roxanol: first cousin to morphine—it'll give you substantial relief. Today we'll draw blood for another acid-phosphatase check.”

Dusk found Martin standing outside Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, raindrops bouncing off his cheeks and beading the lenses of his bifocals. As the Manhattan traffic rumbled down First Avenue, spouting black exhaust and invisible toxins, he drew the Feminone prescription from his pocket and methodically crumpled it up. He stared at the wad of paper, watching it grow soggy in his hand, then tossed it into a wire mesh receptacle. If I must die, he told himself, I shall do so in the gender to which I am accustomed.

 

On the morning of Corinne's funeral, the skies over Abaddon Township bloomed sunny and clear, heralding a day more suited to tending roses or playing badminton than to burying one's wife. “Just show up,” Vaughn had said. And so, at 9:45
A.M.
, Martin got into his car and, like a man transporting himself to his own hanging, set off for Hillcrest Cemetery.

He hadn't seen the place in years—not since he'd gone gravestone rubbing with a dozen other kids in his father's Sunday school class. Driving along the maze of narrow roads, he half expected to glimpse Walter Candle's ghost moving among the markers, paper and charcoal in hand, preserving names and epitaphs.

Although Vaughn had implied the lawnmower shed was conspicuous, Martin couldn't find it. Three times he circumnavigated the cemetery. His hip throbbed: hardly a surprise, his current acid-phosphatase level being a whopping 12.0, according to Blumenberg. He lobbed a 20-mg Roxanol tablet into his mouth and chewed. It tasted chalky and sour. A minute later he spotted a ramshackle brick building covered with Virginia creepers, and—sure enough—a few yards away a funeral was in progress. Two dozen mourners in dark clothing stood around an open grave, its head marked by a granite tombstone, its perimeter decorated with lilies and gardenias.

The pelvic pain faded, supplanted by a mild opium high. He parked, got out, and limped toward the crowd. The grass around the grave was weed infested and unevenly clipped, a disgrace by the standards of Celestial City USA. No one greeted him. Every face looked unfamiliar. When had Corinne acquired these mysterious friends? Where had she been keeping these auxiliary relatives?