Keepers (9 page)

The front of the house.

He was telling me I should go look at something in front of the house.

Up yours
,
Derby-Boy
, I thought.
I’ll go take a look when I’m damned good and ready
.

I stumbled into the bathroom and threw open the door on the upright cabinet where I keep all breed of crap—extension cords, old lighters, duct tape, loose tools, lighter fluid, a little of this and a lot more of that...and medical supplies. I removed everything I would need: bandages—both the elastic and gauze variety—as well as gauze pads, medical tape, hydrogen peroxide, and a couple of old finger-splints I’d hung on to after getting my left hand caught in a car door about a year ago. I laid out everything on the sink’s counter and took a deep breath.

Do it now
,
before you turn chickenshit
.

I gripped the broken fingers with my left hand, released the breath I’d been holding, clenched my teeth, then simultaneously pressed down and pulled out.

The
snap
!
of the bones as they popped into place seemed louder than the shotgun blast; the pain shot up my arm and hammered directly between my eyes; I dropped to one knee, grabbing the edge of the sink with my left hand to keep from hitting the floor, and tried to hold in the scream.

From under the house, the dog howled as if she’d felt it, as well.

“I’m st-still here, g-girl,” I whispered, trying to pull myself up.

I bent my right thumb and index finger several times to make sure they were still working. Satisfied they weren’t going to lock up, I sat on the closed toilet lid and balanced the Mossberg on my lap. I slipped my right index finger over the trigger and situated my thumb in the proper position on the handle-grip; my other three fingers I arranged as best I could, making sure that the right side of my middle finger was parallel to the underside of the trigger-guard, then I used half the roll of duct tape to bind my hand to the shotgun. No way was this going to come out of my hand or be taken away from me.

That done, I tore one of the remaining gauze pads in two and wadded the halves to use as ear plugs—if I had to fire again, I wanted some protection against the noise.

After that, I opened the cabinet over the sink where my storage habits are a little more traditional; cough syrup, aspirin, throat lozenges, and...where was it?

There
.

The same accident that had necessitated the finger splints last year had also brought with it a prescription for painkillers, most of which I still had. God bless codeine.

I popped the lid off the plastic bottle and tossed two tablets in my mouth, then twisted down so I could drink some water from the tap. All better now (or telling myself I was, anyway), I put the bottle in my pants pocket, ran my good hand through my hair, and looked at my reflection in the mirror. If I saw this fellow on the street, I’d cross to the other side and run like hell.

I turned and started toward the front of the house.

The mist was pressing against the windows. I wondered how much longer it would be content to do that before deciding to smash through the glass—and if I doubted it had the ability to change into something solid, I had only to look at the wreckage of my right hand.

I opened the front door and leveled the shotgun.

About nine of them stood scattered around the front yard, arms folded across their chests, derbies perfectly straight, goggles shooting thin red beams that formed Xs when they crossed those from another Pedestrian’s. Something about their stances suggested they were waiting for something important to happen.

On the periphery of the thrumming in my ears I began to hear...music. Muffled at first, until someone turned up the volume and the bass began to register in my bones, then a harsh, nasal voice began singing words, something about soldiers, tin soldiers, yes: tin soldiers and Nixon—

Ohio
.

Someone was playing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio.”

Three Pedestrians who’d been standing beyond my field of vision emerged from the mist and started toward the porch. Their movements were deliberate and exact: dancers executing a carefully-choreographed ballet routine. One of them wore an absurd wig of long, straight blonde hair beneath his derby. Another carried a boom-box from which the song was blaring. I leveled the Mossberg and took a step forward, taking care to make sure the screen door didn’t close behind me.

The first Pedestrian held up a white placard like those used in old vaudeville acts; written on it were the words:
It Was Already Broke When I Got Here
. He backed away, bowing his head and parting his arms, taking the boom-box from the second one’s hand.

The second one, using overblown, melodramatic gestures, clutched at his chest and dropped to his knees, then fell face-first against the ground. The third Pedestrian went down on one knee, arms parted at his sides like a Celebrant blessing the Hosts at Mass; the long straight hair of his wig caught on a breeze I couldn’t feel and blew slightly to the right.

The others began to applaud, but Magritte-Man came stomping forward like a petulant child, wildly waving his hands in the air, silencing them. He grabbed the two performers and wordlessly moved them into different positions.

That’s not exactly correct. He moved them back into the
same
positions, only this time facing away from me, frozen in tableau except for the hair of the wig, which now blew to my left.

I couldn’t move.

They’d recreated the Kent State scene almost perfectly. After all, this
was
the angle from which I’d seen it.

The song reached its final chorus as Magritte-Man stepped back, examined his players, threw his arms in the air, and bobbed his head with great enthusiasm. The Pedestrians scattered through the yard broke into loud applause, a few even placing fingers in their mouths to whistle.

As “Ohio” ended, Magritte-Man tapped his players on their shoulders and the three of them joined hands to take a bow: first to the overjoyed audience in the yard, then, turning around and clasping hands again, to me.

Behind them, the mist skirled and churned, forming the faces of countless animals; dogs, cats, horses, pigs, cows, swans, bears, and more, some species so foreign or exotic they could be seen only in zoos or the pages of
National Geographic
.

Each of these mist-animals cried out in its primal language, as if to echo the sentiments of the audience and express pleasure with this evening’s entertainment. The players turned and bowed to the spectators. The applause swelled, heads nodded in admiration, red beams danced and bounced through the glowing silver gloom.

As the applause began to die down, Magritte-Man faced me, holding another white placard. He smiled, and then pulled the placard away to reveal another underneath, only where the previous one had been blank, this one had a word written in large black letters:

Ring

He tossed it aside to reveal the next:

Any

Then the next:

Bells?

“How did you know?” I shouted, my voice creating heavy ripples of gummy pain inside my skull. “How the fuck could you know? It’s been over forty goddamn years since—”

He tossed aside the
Bells?
placard to unveil a new one, then another, then another and another, until he’d said what he wanted to say:

You Know Damn

Well Who

Told Us

About It

I was shaking so violently I thought my internal organs were going to drop out through the legs of my pants. “No riddles—
who told you
?”

Another card:

Guess.

But I didn’t have to. I’d known the answer since
Well
.

I moved forward another step. The Mossberg felt like it had fused to my hand, flesh and steel becoming the organic tissue of a new limb.

“Tell me,” I said to him. “I want you to say it. I want to hear your voice, if you’ve got one. If it’s going to be like this, I want for us to have spoken once as civilized men.” I aimed directly at his chest. “So you tell me what—”

He pointed at the Mossberg, then waved his other hand to draw the Pedestrians’ attention as well; as he did this, he moved up to the second step, less than two feet from the business end of the shotgun.

The Pedestrians clustered nearer the porch, some leaning their heads to the left, others to the right, all evidently fascinated by what they saw.

Magritte-Man pointed to his right hand, then to mine, and that’s when I figured out he was drawing their attention to what I’d done with the duct tape.

Again, the Pedestrians began to applaud, except for a trio who moved to the side, conferred among themselves for a few moments, then held up more placards:
9.5
,
10
,
9.7
.

Magritte-Man gestured toward the judges’ scores and applauded soundlessly.

I didn’t know whether to laugh, scream, or just sit down on my ass and cry, so I did the next best thing: I stepped forward and shoved the barrel of the Mossberg under Magritte-Man’s chin.

“Speak to me, right now.”

He shrugged and stepped back onto the walk, lifting his hands into the air. He bent his fingers down against his palms and began to strike at nothing—no, not strike; paw. He was imitating an animal
pawing
at something.

At the same time, two Pedestrians took up places on either side of him and held up a small barred door taken from a cage. Magritte-Man pushed his arms through the bars and continued pawing while a third Pedestrian—the one who’d worn the wig before—held another placard over his head:
Sanctioned Personnel Only
. All of them began opening and closing their mouths as if trying to form words—

—
lips squirming in a mockery of communication, sounds that were a burlesque of language
—

—I shook the image of the old man out of my head and moved back into the front doorway, the Mossberg still at the ready.

They crowded around the bottom step, their hands pawing, their mouths working soundlessly, the thin bright red beams of their goggles creating laser-show patterns before my eyes. The mist became thicker, the faces of the countless animals within pressing outward like
bas-relief
masks. I couldn’t lift my left hand to shield my eyes because that would mean letting go of the shotgun and I wasn’t about to give them an opening to rush me—and
what
the fuck had I been thinking, coming out here like this?

In perfect synchronization, all of them—Magritte-Man included—reached up to loosen their ties and unbutton the tops of their collars.

Every last one had a curved scar that ran from one side of the neck to the other. They turned their “paws” toward themselves and began to claw at the scars, all the while still moving their mouths and—

—
Why are they so quiet
?
I asked Beth
.
Because when there’s this many, they cut out their vocal cords
—

—Magritte-Man flexed his fingers, and with an overly- theatrical flourish reached up to remove the derby from his head.

Another placard:
You Get Used To The Smell
.

He was bald. Not a stunning revelation, I know, but for a moment that was the only thing I would allow to register. He was bald. He wore the derby because he was bald underneath. I suspected that all of them were bald underneath. But the old man on the highway, he hadn’t been bald—hair thin and sparse, sure, but not bald. I remembered that. I remembered that clearly. I remembered the way he’d grabbed my shirt, pulled me toward him; I remembered his blood seeping into the cotton of my shirt as I lifted the derby and showed him that it was undamaged; I remembered the way he looked into my eyes, lips squirming in a mockery of communication because his vocal cords had been cut out long ago—

—no, no, that didn’t belong there, that wasn’t right, it couldn’t be, there hadn’t been any scar running across his neck and throat, right? Right—I was getting confused; the Pedestrians’ little vaudeville had thrown me a curve, that was all. The old man on the highway
had
had some hair—not much, not shining, gleaming, glowing, flowing, waxen, flaxen, wear-it-down-to-
there
hair—but he’d had some. Magritte-Man was
bald
, shiny. Shiny skin covered his head, except for the spots where matchbox-sized rectangles with electrical wires were implanted in his skull. The shiny, shiny skin of his bare scalp was crusty and red where it joined the metal.

Another Pedestrian began flipping through another series of placards:

Care Enough About

Someone And You’ll

Find A Way To

Help Them

No

Matter

What.

He waited a moment, and then flipped through three more in rapid succession.

NO

MATTER

WHAT!

He wasn’t repeating anything with this—he was issuing a threat.

He tossed away the third placard to reveal one more:

THERE OUGHT TO BE A PLACE

I felt my stomach tighten. I knew those words, had heard them spoken to me. But by whom? And when? What
place
?

Magritte-Man turned his head to offer his profile, then used his index finger to bend forward his ear and give me a good look at the blue plastic tag attached back there. I didn’t have to be close enough to read what was printed on it to know what it said, because at that moment all the tumblers fell into place and the door of the safe swung open and out came everything from all those years ago that I’d been forcing myself to forget every second of every day of every week, month, and year of my stale existence...until now.