Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“You don’t believe I
saw
anything. It’s all just part of my addictive, delusional personality, remember?”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore what I believe,” she says, wanting to sound sincere, wanting to get past this to some place she can help him, and the pint of Jack Daniel’s won’t be an ax hanging over them. Deacon shakes his head and comes back to his place on the sofa, his bare feet making hardly any sound on the hardwood floor.
“Did you see what they
wanted
you to see?” Chance asks, and he shrugs and props his feet on the coffee table.
“I saw something. I wouldn’t have this splitting fucking headache right now if I hadn’t seen something. But I’m not sure what it was. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything they wanted me to see.”
“But you told them, whatever it was.”
“Nope,” Deacon says. “I lied. I told them I didn’t see anything at all.”
“What’d you do that for?” Chance asks, surprised, and she leans as far forward in the chair as her belly will allow, straining to close the distance between them, and the baby moves again.
“You don’t tell the man what the man don’t want to hear.”
“But you think you saw the killer?”
“I already told you, I don’t know what I saw.”
Chance leans back in the armchair again. The lamplight through the whiskey bottle is casting a tea-stained reflection on the wall. She looks up at the high ceilings, the crossbeams lost in shadow, and “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I can’t believe you about these things, and I’m sorry I got upset. It doesn’t help either of us if I get upset.”
“How’d the exhibit look?”
“It’s beautiful,” Chance says, too tired to tell him that they changed the name without asking her and the new name doesn’t even make sense. Too tired to tell him about the dinosaurs and the Coal Age diorama. Too scared to tell him about the blood.
“I think they’ll leave me alone now,” Deacon says. “If they don’t think I can help them, they won’t be back. I called Hammond from the library and told him to leave me the hell alone.”
“Do you think he will?”
“I told him I was married now and you were pregnant. I told him I was staying clean and I don’t have time for this psychic shit. He doesn’t try to be an asshole. It just seems to come naturally.”
“Deke, honey, will you please help me get these shoes off?” and Chance kicks at the corner of the coffee table with the toe of one sneaker. “I swear, I think my feet have died and gone to hell.”
“I’m sorry I bought the bottle,” Deacon says. “It was stupid.”
“Let’s just forget about it, okay? How’s your head?”
“Either it’ll kill me or it’ll get better in a couple of days,” and Deacon slips off the sofa cushions, squats on the floor in front of Chance and begins unlacing her shoes. “I’ve got the Fioricet there, and I’ve got the Imitrex if it gets unbearable.”
Chance runs both her strong hands though his short, uncombed hair; her fingertips pause at the sides of his head and, gently, she begins to massage his temples as he slips her right sneaker off.
“Your feet are swollen,” he says.
“I think I’m holding enough water to float the goddamn
Titanic.
”
Deacon pulls off her other shoe and rubs her ankles while she continues massaging his temples. He closes his eyes and sits down on the floor at her feet.
“I’m sober, Chance, and this time I’m going to stay sober.”
“I know,” she whispers, but then glances nervously back at the whiskey bottle on the TV, as if it might have moved, as if it might have slithered away when she wasn’t paying attention.
“I know,” she says again, and outside another truck rumbles past and the windows rattle.
After Chance has fallen asleep, Deacon sits at the foot of the bed and stares out the window at the street, the whitewashed brick office building on the other side of Twenty-third, the limbs of the tall and spindly trees planted between the sidewalk and the asphalt tossed by the wind and all their dry leaves rattling together in the cryptic tongue of autumn. There’s a storm coming, and already he can smell the rain. The drapes billow in the breeze, and Deacon thinks maybe he should go ahead and shut the window now, before he dozes off and everything gets soaked. But the air pushed along before the thunderstorm feels clean and healthy, untouched and uncontaminated by the world; he doesn’t want to close the window, and he doesn’t want to go to sleep.
His head feels like a bucket of broken glass and raw meat, and he wishes he had a cigarette. But Chance would raise hell if she caught him smoking in the apartment, especially the bedroom, and he doesn’t feel like getting dressed and standing alone in the stairwell. So he ignores the craving, so much of his life these days spent ignoring cravings that there are times when he thinks he could best be defined entirely in negatives, the collection of things he doesn’t do. The man who doesn’t drink. Or work. Or have visions of the secret things that murderers do when there’s no one around to stop them. The man so thirsty he would sell the last hour of his life for one sip of alcohol, something wet and warm to soothe the pain behind his eyes.
He glances over his shoulder at Chance, lying on her back beneath the cornflower-blue comforter, the big goose-down comforter that she bought to match the walls. Her pregnant belly is a great blue dome and her mouth is open slightly, her hands clasped together beneath her chin so she almost looks like she’s praying. But Deacon doubts that Chance has ever prayed in her life, both her grandparents the sort of evangelical rationalists who subscribe to
The Skeptical Inquirer
and feel sorry for anyone still shackled by the chains of religion or any other stultifying superstition. Deacon suspects that Joe and Esther Matthews would have packed Chance off to a shrink at the first sign of an irrational thought.
He turns back to the window and the night, annoyed at himself that he feels guilty for thinking such sour thoughts about her dead grandparents. Esther died years before he met Chance, and Joe was never anything but kind to him, even on the occasion or two he showed up drunk. But there are times when he wishes their influence on their granddaughter had been a little less profound.
“You’re just jealous, asshole,” he says, not loud enough to wake her, and the drapes flap and flutter their agreement. The clean air washes over him like a balm, like clemency, something to scrub away the sights and smells of Soda’s gore-spattered hovel.
They ordered a pizza for dinner, because that’s what Chance wanted, a huge pizza with extra olives, and then he watched CNN while she took a shower. Afterwards, despite his headache, he read to her from Dr. Seuss’
McElligot’s Pool,
because Chance was convinced it was good for the baby to be read to, that Deacon’s voice could somehow help to gift their unborn child with its parents’ love of books. A hopeful, harmless Lamarckian trick to bias the roll of Darwinian dice, insurance against a stupid kid, but mostly he suspects Chance just wanted to hear the stories herself. Tonight, he only made it as far as the furry Eskimo Fish bound for warmer waters before she was asleep and snoring softly; Deacon closed the book and laid it aside, wondering if he would sleep, too, if he would make it to dawn without dipping into the Imitrex. The injections almost always work, but can leave him nauseous and vomiting, and he usually prefers taking the Fioricet tablets and riding out the migraines.
He closes his eyes, and there’s Soda’s corpse waiting for him, lying beneath the red wheel and words painted on the wall in a dead man’s blood, the hard black line drawn underneath. The naked thing gnawing at Soda’s flesh is there too, the naked
woman,
but a woman from some freak-show nightmare. She stops and looks towards him, her irises flashing iridescent red, and Deacon opens his eyes.
The dry October leaves rattle in the wind, and the drapes make a sound like pterodactyl wings.
She’s out there, somewhere,
Deacon thinks, not wanting the thought in his head.
Whoever she is, whyever she does it, she’s out there somewhere.
He sits on the bed until the first heavy raindrops begin to fall, coming in and splashing themselves against the floor. Then he gets up and closes the window, pulls the drapes shut, and lies down next to Chance, and begins waiting for morning.
The next day, and Chance sits in a chair near the lectern, sipping a can of Sprite, as the last students drift indifferently into the small, windowless auditorium. Her final day at work before maternity leave begins, and then Alice will be taking over her sophomore-level Evolution and the History of Life survey course. Biology-lite for non-majors, a magnet for business and humanities students looking for required science credits without getting in over their heads, and most of them are in way too deep anyway. She glances at the clock above the blackboard, 10:30, so it’s time to get things started, five minutes past time, but her back hurts too much for her to care.
Students shuffle loose-leaf paper, cough, hastily flip textbook pages, talk among themselves in loud and hurried whispers, the muffled clamor caught between the lime-sherbet walls, beneath the too-bright fluorescent glare. Chance sets down her drink and slips on her reading glasses, picks up a stubby piece of chalk and turns to the blackboard. She writes
NATURAL SELECTION
=
MECHANISM
in tall, blocky letters, and then
DARWIN
and
WALLACE
underneath that, before turning back to the lectern and her notes.
“Well,” she says and licks her dry lips. “Here we go again,” and a few of the students laugh, though most of them are too busy scribbling down the four words she’s written on the blackboard to notice that she’s said anything.
“If you read the assignment, there shouldn’t be anything mysterious about any of this,” and Chance waves one hand in the general direction of the blackboard. “In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism that would account for how new species arise from preexisting species, explaining Earth’s present biodiversity and the fossil record. Or, as he so eloquently wrote, ‘As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.’”
The sound of seventy or so pencils and ballpoint pens scritching down her every word, and Chance braces her elbows on the corners of the lectern, sighs, and gazes out at the class over the tops of her spectacles.
“You don’t have to write all that down. It’s in the book,” she says, but most of them keep scribbling anyway. “I want you to grasp the concept here, the elegance of Darwin’s argument, not memorize the precise words he used to express it. I want you to see how his observations, of artificial selection by pigeon breeders, for instance, led him to the theory of
natural
selection.”
And near the very back of the room, high up, near the doors, a thick-necked boy with auburn hair cut close to his scalp raises his hand. He’s leaning back in his chair, tapping arrhythmically, deliberately, on his unopened textbook with the eraser end of an unsharpened pencil. Chance takes a deep breath. So much for an easy last day, so much for hoping she could get through this one lecture without a duel. She takes another swallow of her Sprite, and “Yes, Larry,” she says. “Do you have a question?”
“You really think people and pigeons are the same thing, Dr. Silvey?” he asks and taps a little harder at the cover of his textbook. There’s a nervous smattering of laughter, and Chance smiles and nods her head.
“In that human beings and pigeons are both animals subject to the process of natural selection,” she replies and stares resolutely back at the auburn-haired boy, hoping that she’s said enough to shut him up and knowing that she hasn’t.
“Animals don’t have souls,” the boy says, staring stubbornly back at her. He leans forward, letting the front legs on his chair rock back down to the floor. “My creator gave me an immortal soul. That’s what separates me from animals like pigeons.”
The rest of the class is waiting quietly, expectantly, for whatever Chance is going to do or say next; all eyes on her or Larry, grateful for any diversion that might possibly shorten the lecture. She glances down at her carefully typed notes, but there are no answers there, and she tries to recall all the things that Alice has told her about dealing with creationist students, the value of a witty comeback to break the tension, humor to turn the tables.
Never let them see you sweat, kiddo.
“Larry, are you familiar with
Inherit the Wind
? It’s a play.”
“Yeah. We had to watch that movie in high school,” the redheaded boy says and watches her suspiciously.
“So, do you remember when Matthew Brady’s on the stand, and in response to one of Drummond’s questions about the age of a fossil, he says, ‘I am more interested in the Rock of Ages, than I am in the age of rocks’?”
“Yeah,” Larry says and taps his pencil against the cover of his textbook. “I remember that. That was right before Brady explains how Archbishop James Usher calculated the true age of the earth by—”