The Judas Glass (23 page)

No time. I had no time—all day I would be helpless. I splashed across the stream, and climbed carefully over a fence, to find myself on a large pile of chopped cordwood. The splinters were white, the sap glittered.

This was where he lived, that chain saw, that ax. This was all his. He was waking. He was lying in that room beneath a wool blanket. I knew how languor kept him there, a drowsy erection, sleep in his eyes.

His part of the house was on stilts, a wing added on to the main body of the house. I could hear movement, floorboards, clothing. Urine plunged into the water of the toilet, a loud, animal gush. I couldn't stop myself from giving a low laugh.

I crept beneath the porch, pinecones, dog turds aged white. The floor creaked. A child's voice rose, bickering, whining.
No
. A woman's voice. A child cried. Something didn't make sense. This wasn't right, not the right people, not the right place.

A pinecone gleamed, casting a squat shadow. Pine needles caught the light, a thousand pinpricks, dazzling. Too late. The sunlight had arrived, and I was in pain.

He was waiting for the tap water to run hot. A silhouette rippled in the pebbled window, a profile. He was studying his face in the mirror.

34

The chalk of the bones begins to ache, the salts of the blood solidifying, silt in a river. The stone of the body wakes first, the minerals and fats that, in a living man, are the least alive.

It was very early evening. Sunlight faded from the ground above me. The earth was decomposed wood mingled with sand. The vegetable matter fermented, a warm musk, like maturing tobacco.

And then I remembered what a special night this was, with a child's joy at remembering that this is no ordinary morning—presents are waiting.

My skin was seething with life. My eyeballs, my tongue. Tiny legs searched me, an army under my clothes, up my nostrils.

I shrugged out of the earth, climbing through the shell of a decayed log. I strode, a living map, lips and fingertips busy with the city of ants, all the way to the creek. With a sigh like an apology I knelt in the current, and lay down flat on my belly on the rocky bed.

The water was flowing more quietly than the night before. The current did not entirely cover me. I had to roll on my back and look up at the trees while the stream washed me clean.

It didn't work. Hundreds still clung to me. Button by button I labored to remove my clothing. Undershirt, Jockey shorts, shoes, black stretch socks. Until I was naked.

The gunshot wounds had healed, the scar tissue gray. One of the bullets had entered between my ribs. A gunshot rips the body. I have always been conservative about certain personal articles. I would wear a favorite undershirt until it was thin as gauze. I used to keep Levis until holes appeared at the knees.

This was my body. My bones, my skin. I felt a worried compassion for all that was left of me. My penis was shriveled, my skin blue in the poor light. Until then I had tolerated the ants, finding their attentions drily amusing. Now I shuddered. I rinsed my clothes carefully in the stream.

I tied my shoes with fingers that slipped, bent clumsily. There was a struggling ant on my sleeve. A sense of fellowship made me hesitate. I blew on him gently until he vanished.

A trail broke the shrubbery beside the stream, the lights of houses in all directions, muted by branches. Someone was dribbling a basketball, steadily, followed by the silence and the metallic
chonk
of the hoop. Meat was frying, blood and fire.

On wings, I ascended the hill. A deer lurched out of the underbrush. She was riveted, staring downslope, looking at the place where I had been an instant before.

My wings embraced her. She shied, kicking. My fangs broke the fine, dry grassland of her hide. A tick scurried away, a trickle of mercury. I supped as she ran, and when she faltered, crashing heavily through a crown of ferns, I clung harder. Her blood tasted of new leaves, of the young green of the oak trees, the early irises, fiber and membrane. I had an emotional rush of images—smells, sounds, sunlight through tender grass.

Her hooves clattered. She dashed across a street, catching the attention of a woman gathering groceries from the trunk of a car. The deer sprang and stumbled, forelegs crashing into a compost heap. I loosened the trap of my fangs and let her go. She tossed her head, cantering sideways, until she found the ancient trail again and kept to it, hard, all the way up the hill.

I studied the rambling house from outside. Smoke drifted feebly from the chimney. A swing had fallen from a tree, a tire under a long tangle of rope. A tiny green figure stood attention on a stepping stone, a plastic soldier.

The killer's smell was all over the ax, the chain saw, the battered steel wedge. I crouched under the kitchen window, pine needles crisp underfoot, envisioning what was happening inside.

They had eaten tuna and macaroni. The empty tuna cans were secured in this metal garbage can, the lid weighed down with two large rocks. A discarded microwave oven leaned against a stump, its glass window shattered. I heard laughter from inside, two children playing with a squeaky toy.

Rebecca would plead again: leave him alone.

I made my way up the back steps. The back door was unlocked. Perhaps some of the powers of the doe were present in my caution, alert to the sound of a newspaper page turning, children giggling in a distant room, water squirting. A new microwave oven sat on the sink, next to a cookbook open to a photograph of a casserole. I was able to make out a word:
French.

Tuna and French Onion
. I could read! At the same time my resolve began to shrink. A can opener, a jar of instant coffee—perhaps I had made a mistake.

I spoke where I was, staring at a kitchen cupboard. “Tell me about Rebecca.”

But I spoke before I was prepared to, startling myself. A red kettle on the stove vibrated with the sound. A wooden salad bowl crammed with seed packets, recipes, letters spilled over onto the table. An oven glove, red plaid, hung on the wall.

You heard me, don't sit there reading the newspaper pretending, praying
.

There was no answer. I had the sickening feeling that my voice no longer reached human ears. I could hear myself, but no one else would ever understand me.

Gentle, civil. “I need to talk to you.”

In response there was a long silence. I trembled.
I had no voice
. Joy, doubt, hope. As a living man my emotions had never surged through me with such strength.

“Who's there?” he demanded.

Perhaps doubt exists as a whetstone, to give a sharp edge to the will. It was like a chance to meet a long-lost brother, a meeting dreamed for years. The voice was not welcoming. It was taut, comically suspicious. I entered the living room.

He didn't know how to build a fire. A few flames shivered around a largely uncharred log. I found myself in a spacious, wood-paneled room with a shaggy carpet, various shades of brown, the sort of carpet design to not show wear. The easy chair was still warm. It moved, barely rocking.

A woman put her hands on her hips in the doorway. She was looking back, away from me, into the bathroom. “I'm not happy about what I'm seeing,” she said. “This room is a complete disaster.”

A can of beer was open on the sidetable, yeast and malt sugars. A newspaper was spread across the floor, a trail of printed pages marking his retreat.

I picked up a metal bowl, puzzled by what I saw, dessicated crumbs. It took me a heartbeat to realize that she had spoken. “What do you want?” The woman held the front of her blouse, squeezing the cloth, one hand on the doorframe.

I lifted a hand, reassuringly, but not giving her my full attention. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had followed the wrong man, and, what was worse, I couldn't make sense out of anything. It had taken me half a minute to identify a few crumbs of potato chips.

Get out of here!
She could not say this, the words choking.

Her eyes were blue. I admired her blowzy, blond attractiveness, her show of courage falling apart now that she had a better look at me. I gestured apologetically with the bowl.

One of the children was calling her, that urgent syllable,
Mom
. In my mind I could see it all—the warm bath, the talcum powder, the clean towels. I had lived like this! I could not quite believe it, but I knew it to be true. I had lived a childhood of comfort, an adulthood of ease.

If only I could set eyes on the children's faces, see them, pink and wet from bathing. If only I could approach them, lay a hand on their heads, feel their hair, their wet arms, help dry them off, kiss them where the skin was so suffused with rose the pressure of my lips would force a white shadow.

I put the bowl down carefully, on the coffee table next to a nutcracker. The bathtub drain opened, and water begain to ebb into the plumbing, gurgling, the flow down and under my feet.

She wanted to scream. Her words were there on her lips, but I silenced her, touching her hair, combing my fingers through it, unfastening the clasp that held it into a bun, letting the long blond hair fall free.

I had failed Rebecca.

It was something this woman would understand. I could tell her my story, the long search, my instincts faltering. What woman could listen to a story like this unmoved? The children could listen to my tale, too. I thought I had run my quarry to the ground, but instead I found a man at peace, at home, reading.

Red splashed her, covered her.

Something hit me. I did not understand, but more importantly I could not lift either arm. I could not take a step. I could not turn my body, or cry out.

Scarlet gushed, her hair dark with it. I couldn't speak. I could not breathe. Something had my throat. One knee buckled. I could not stand upright. There was a dark, iron taste at the base of my throat. I staggered.

My head rolled, forced to one side by a heavy, unyielding wedge. I gripped something, a span of wood. It was slippery. I could not lift my head, and I could not turn it. I could not move my tongue and my windpipe sucked air.

The head of a weapon was buried in my neck. The woman screamed as I slammed into a wall, a shelf of porcelain animals crashing. I got a grip on the shaft of the tool. I sawed it back and forth, levering it, my blood spattering the carpet. I pried the ax free, and turned to find the man who had done this.

The force of the turn flung my head from my shoulders. My vision yawed, my head connected by a slim sinew. The ceiling swung upward. My severed neck tendons spasmed, writhing far into the stub of my neck. Until this moment there had been no pain.

The ax fell to the sodden carpet. I put my hands to my head and put it back where it belonged. The pressure of spouting blood nearly forced my head off again, and my legs were unsteady as I tried to turn from one direction to another without unseating my skull.

A new pair of earphones lay beneath a lamp. A magazine was folded open to a photograph of a concert hall, a conductor, a grand piano. When I saw my assailant at last he was picking the ax out of the widening flood in the carpet.

All I had to do was fit the carotid arteries back together. My heart pumped the hot fluid into my arms through the great brachial highways, down my legs through the femoral aqueduct. Only in the one crucial point of severance was there serious injury, but it was grievous. I tried to grip the rubbery worm of a neck artery in my fingers.

I saw how this woman had been taken in, how little she knew about him, how much he had lied to her. I could taste his envy of Rebecca, his failure, his refusal to play the paino because he could never equal Rebecca. And because he could never court her successfully, never seduce, never win, he had killed her. I perceived all this as he lost his footing, stumbling into the easy chair, the newspapers splashed with red.

“Don't!” he cried. A tall man, stout, blond hair, big, square hands.

The woman had grabbed the telephone off a pile of magazines. She was hyperventilating, and when she had someone on the line she couldn't say anything. Her breath was loud, each exhalation a scream.

“Don't,” he said, more calmly, taking the phone away from her, hanging it up. The hair on his arms was blistered with my blood. She clutched at him, at the phone.

I felt tipsily peaceful. I was struck by a memory so vivid I wanted to share it with both of them, interrupting their frenzied argument. Once, in my childhood home, the fish pond had to be drained. It had never been a success, back beyond the arbor, a concrete pond of black moss and two albino carp. Mosquitos festered in late summer, and frogs discovered them, and at last my parents decided to drain the pond and start over.

The gardeners used a small, one-cylinder pump, the water saturating the lawn, and I helped rake the black grass, scrubbing the pond with bleach. When it was all done, I was disappointed. Standing beside a plastic bucket of slow, stubbornly twisting fish, I looked down into the bare cement bowl and realized that I had expected a surprise, a treasure, a golden secret.

And all I had was this. This emptiness, this numb, pleasant sensation in my arms and legs.

35

He slapped her. Then he hit her, not as hard as he could, but enough to make her hair fly out from her head. “Stop making all that noise,” he said. She had her fists up, covering her ears. The children were in the bathroom, bawling.

At first I was sure I would be able to climb to my feet at any moment. I lay on my side, my ear on a heating grille in the floor. A strange inner pain awoke in me, a desert spreading, dehydration, hard drought. The children were crying so hard their noise echoed in the heating ducts.

He put his arms around her, neither of them able to speak, rocking, dappled with blood. I could not move. I was certain I did not have a heartbeat. Then it pumped, once. Blood squirted briefly from my neck.

“You don't know anything about me,” he said, his voice broken. “All you know is—why don't we call the police.”

“You killed him!”