Rossoff poked his fleshy head out of the entrance to his apartment. Paul felt an instant unease. Rossoff’s door was open only a crack, but beyond, Paul could smell the man’s house. It smelled of secrets. People who count their money every night and do not say personal things over the phone because they think someone might be listening. People who change their clothing in the dark. People who hoard food in their refrigerators until it rots. People who do not take out their garbage. People who wait until their babies are sick before they change their diapers. It had that kind of smell. Nothing specific. Just a mold.
“Don’t come around here,” Rossoff said. He was so fat that he could hardly fit through the door, and in his beard were little pieces of white cotton.
“I won’t,” Paul said.
Rossoff smiled. As he opened the door just a little wider so that they spoke face to face, the cotton things squirmed. A speck fell out of his gray beard and onto the collar of his black shirt. It continued to squirm. The blood drained from Paul’s face, and bile rose in his throat. Crabs. Pubic crabs.
“’Cause I wouldn’t want to have to call the police,” Rossoff told him.
It dawned on Paul just then. Maybe he had known it before, just never believed it. She never locked her door. She never paid her rent. This man, Susan.
“Because none of us needs that,” Rossoff said. “None of us needs the police. Like to hear about all your pissing around here Thursday night. Pissing in dirty pots.” And then, he winked. A quick, skilled wink.
This man, Susan. At first Paul walked, but after a few steps he was running. Rossoff yelled after him but, thankfully, he did not hear.
Around eight that Wednesday night, when he normally would have been eating pot roast with his wife and son while doing his best impression of a guy having his first drink of the evening, his feet were bloody. The muscles in his stomach clenched again and again in dry, painful heaves. Don’s Liquor Bonanza was closed. He’d been tempted to break in, but he wasn’t in such great shape. He probably wouldn’t have escaped before Danny pulled up in a squad car, lights flashing, ready to arrest him. Not a tempting prospect. He could have knocked on someone’s door and asked for something. It wasn’t like his reputation was something that needed to be upheld. He could have asked some friendly Bedford neighbor, maybe the parent of some student at his place of former employ:
Sorry to disturb you, after I leave, please go on about your business and forget that I was ever here, pay no attention to my appearance, but could you spare a drop? Anything will do.
Or he could have gone back to Montie’s and done some groveling. But he did none of these things. He took a stroll, thoughts of white insects and runaway wives not even entering his head. He took a walk and let things empty out, and he kept walking until his mind was an absence of memory, his physical body in such agony that all else was wiped clean.
That was his state as he sat on the bench next to Susan Marley. She looked like hell. Worse than him, even. She was wearing a blue dress with white trim. Her head had been shaved bald, and she struggled to hold it erect. Black autopsy sutures weaved their way down her throat and beneath her dress. It might have been a tasteless joke: Devil in a Blue Dress. In might have been a DT hallucination. This might even have been happening. Sadly, he didn’t care.
He first saw her at Don’s Liquor Bonanza. He had taken a seat on the edge of a gutter. Kicked out some leaves with his wilted wing tips so that it drained a little better and then just sat there, recognizing this point as the lowest of his life. He knew what Cathy might do right now, were she in his place. Only he had kept her from doing it. But he did not think those very dark thoughts. They were not in him, not just yet.
He saw her shadow. It moved in jerks like someone carrying something very heavy. She walked on the outer soles of her feet. He lowered his head and let himself believe that what he saw was just a dream. And then, on the ground, he saw her feet. They were bare and bloody. Her fatty pads hung loose like flaps, and underneath them he was sure he could see the ivory of her bones.
He could not help but follow. She waved to him and he got up from the gutter. They did not walk together. He kept a distance, yards behind. She limped farther south. In the dark and wet, he only saw her silhouette. She had a tiny body, like a child’s. And this is how he kept from thinking about what was actually happening: It was not simply the pain of withdrawal that made his mind a blank. He never saw her face.
She led him to the river. The tide had risen above the two-foot railing. She waded to the center of the bridge and stood between Bedford and the outside world. There was lightning, and he kept his eyes squinted so that he would not see her clearly when it came. But he did see.
She pointed at the water. There were whirlpools, crests of white. A bucket floated. He followed its path with his eyes. It rushed under the bridge, heading toward the lake thirty miles south. He imagined that it would wash up on a bank there, covered in rust. Really, this was what he wanted. This was what he had been looking for since he moved to Bedford. A way out.
His life flashed before him. Grandmother and her cigarettes. Chess. Meeting Cathy. Telling her the night before the wedding that he loved her, he really did love her, so no matter what happened everything would work out. Seeing, smelling, the Clott Paper Mill before they even got off I–95’s Bedford exit. Its shadow had blanketed Main Street like something out of a nineteenth-century novel, and he’d thought: People still live like this? And then he’d thought: Yes, of course they do.
He remembered Susan Marley. Even in high school, her eyes had been wild. And Georgia, who’d first cut his hair ten years ago. She’d shown him pictures of her son, “Smart as a whip!” she’d told him. And then she’d spun him on her swivel chair once, twice, three times, laughing: “Everybody likes a ride, right?” Was it so surprising that he got his hair cut every other week that summer?
He thought of his children most. What would they think of him if he died in this river? Andrew, he could not say. It had been so long since the boy had been his boy. And James, well, James. He might make it through. Paul pictured him all grown up. Years from now he might be sitting in a bar, offhandedly telling a second or third date about his dad.
Yeah,
he would say,
you might know my dad. He’s not the guy who writes books and appears on
Journal Report.
He’s not the guy who helped my mom through a hard time. My dad was a drunk. Every town has a few. He killed himself.
Paul turned from Susan and the river then. Left without fear or in haste. Knowing this would not be the end just as he knew he was not ready to do what she wanted. Not yet.
She followed him. Things in the town seemed to change, maybe just his perception of them. Maybe just his sickness. But there was an echo as she walked behind him. He could hear it above the rain. An echo of water splashing, one foot a quick splatter of water, the second a slow gulp, and on and on.
Had he not been so sick, had the shaking in his body, even his hands, subsided for just a second and allowed him a shred of mental coherence, he would have seen the people who looked out their windows when he passed. He would have noticed how some of them stood on their porches, not bothering with coats, some in flannel pajamas and robes, some in yellowed undershirts and boxers. They watched, not him, but something behind him. He would have understood that they saw Susan Marley.
When he reached the park and took a seat on the bench, he was not surprised when Susan joined him. The bones in her spine made popping sounds as she bent to sit. Rigor mortis, he thought, without being able to connect this thought to the present action. Like her relationship with Rossoff, too awful a thought to place.
He did not look at her. He watched the way the seesaws bounced up and down with no ostensible cause of momentum. Watched the swings rock. They pumped themselves. He could hear this as well, the rusty creakings. As if inside an enormous haunted house that had no limits, he could hear it above the rain.
When it was time, when he was ready, when he knew he could handle it, he saw her face. It was a massacre of skin; premature wrinkles caused by decay, funeral parlor makeup in red and brown splotches, and stitches. He believed then what he had not allowed himself to believe before. “Oh, God,” he said. In a moment of clarity that chilled him so deeply he could feel it in his bones, he wondered: Where had she gone, and what had she brought back with her?
Before he had the chance to run, she placed her hand on the back of his head and squeezed. At first he felt only the dampness of her fingers. It was the coldest touch of his life. And then she squeezed harder and there was pain. She squeezed harder still, and a flood of emotions filled his consciousness. The sound was like a loud fluorescent light, a discordant buzzing. He heard the stories of the town. He heard April Willow praying for her dog. He pictured Liz Marley climbing a fence in a cemetery and landing in another world. He saw Susan prowling the woods. He heard Bobby Fullbright trying to make a fist. He saw inside Louise Andrias, and the color was black. Cruelty so pervading that everything she’d ever touched was marked by it. He heard Georgia O’Brian fantasizing about a merchant marine who looked a good deal like himself. He saw Cathy’s uncertainty like a thick suspension cable that over the years had gotten thinner and thinner until this week it became a piece of twine that broke. He felt himself going insane. “Stop,” he shouted. “Please stop.”
Susan squeezed harder, and the voices stopped. He looked in her eyes, and he saw his own reflection. He saw himself through Susan’s eyes. In her left eye was a man to whom she was grateful. In her right eye was a man who had betrayed her. These men stood side by side. One man was bigger, but then a drinking man’s devils are always stronger than the angels of his nature.
He waited, quite sure now that he was going to die. She squeezed harder, and the three bones of his inner ears (he really could feel them) rattled. He waited. He was so tired. He was so sick of upholding the fiction that there was a better man inside him that was trapped beneath a bottle when really there was nothing. Really, he was a loser. A coward who, let’s be honest, sometimes exaggerated his own drunkenness so that to himself, his wife, the people who believed in him, he would in some way be less accountable. He was so tired of fighting when never once had he witnessed grace.
Susan kept squeezing, and he saw that she meant to crush his skull.
T
he three of them stood at the edge of the river. Louise Andrias, Owen Read, and Steve McCormack. Voices prodded them, like scalpels carving new gullies in their minds. They listened. They watched the water. They were not conflicted. They had known all along what they would do.
Louise Andrias wasn’t a nice girl, not at all. There was something inside her that didn’t feel, like poking needles through nerveless skin. She smiled the right way, and she dressed the right way, but she sometimes forgot that the people around her were people at all. She forget that they breathed, or that when they were alone they had their own thoughts that she would never know. Once, she squeezed a calico kitten too tightly and it stopped moving. So she squeezed the second kitten, just to see if it would happen again. She wasn’t sorry that they died, but in order to keep her allowance, she made very sure to cry about it to her mother.
Nobody had ever hurt her growing up. Nobody had lifted an angry hand, or locked her in a closet. She was just born without a conscience, the way some people are born with extra toes.
Louise liked Owen and Steven pretty well. They were nice to her, which was important. Owen didn’t like girls, not
that
way. He’d never said so, but he’d never needed to say it. He didn’t look at girls’ asses, didn’t get hard-ons when they watched porn on late-night HBO. Didn’t ever have crushes or ask girls out. He flirted with them all the time, told them they were pretty, teased them, pretended to be hot for them, but mostly Louise could tell he was just mad at them. Mad because he knew he was supposed to like them, but he didn’t.
Once, she led Owen by the hand into the basement of the mill. Cajoled him into a dry-lipped kiss. Unbuttoned his jeans and rolled them down his legs so that he looked all vulnerable and frightened, like a kitten. She’d smiled at him, thinking: He can’t run very far, not with his pants down around his ankles. Then she took him in her hands. This wasn’t her first time, and she knew what she was doing. He tried for her. She saw him try. Saw him close his eyes, furrow his brow. Try. Try. Try. After a while, he came. Then he held her and started to cry, and she knew he’d convinced himself that he loved her.
After that she and Steven McCormack shared a sleeping bag in the mill a couple of times. When they made the sounds of sex, Owen would wander the dark basement, all moony and depressed. The boys never fought with each other; she made sure to play the one off the other in just the right way. That’s how she managed to keep them by her side. Three points that would never form a triangle.
At the river now, Louise Andrias pulled the hood of her jacket over her head. To her left was Owen, to her right, Steven. The water rushed the banks, and rain fell. The buzzing spoke to them. They heard it like a song they knew by heart. Like intelligent déjà vu. It had always existed, would always exist. Louise bent down and touched the water. It rushed so fast it slapped her hand, and its coldness cramped her fingers into a claw.
Once, she’d imagined her future. Glimpsed it from far away. A nurse in a pretty white uniform, living in a small apartment she’d furnished with her own money. A wicker table just because she liked wicker. The boys nearby, so she could see them every day. But she was no fool. With a job after graduation waiting tables at the Weathervane in Corpus Christi that she’d been lucky to get, she knew what was to come. Sure, she knew the world didn’t owe her anything. And yet, sometimes, she was sure it did.
She’d always liked Susan Marley. Her eyes like corpses stacked in a pile. A few months ago she’d sent Owen over to knock on her back door and pay the man who lived on the ground floor fifty bucks. Sit with her. Watch her. Fuck her. Just a test, really. She hadn’t expected Owen to do it. But he did.
Like death,
he’d explained after he left the apartment and found Louise smoking a cigarette on Susan Marley’s front lawn. His khakis hadn’t even been zipped yet, which had made Louise laugh, and he’d told her,
Like waking the dead.
Things changed after that for all of them. They changed after that, in a bad way. Louise liked it. She slept with Owen one more time, and Steve, too. When they looked at each other after that, sometimes they saw Susan Marley. She populated their dreams. Her smell was on their skin. She infected them. When they went to the mill to drink their beer and light fires after that, they started to hear voices. Murmurs of men long dead. They pressed their ears to the wet floors until they became haunted, too.
They’d talked about their plan last night, and then again this afternoon outside the school. They’d decided to meet here at the river. Give themselves one last chance to turn back. A last chance to say no. But no one backed out. The water rushed fast, and they knew they’d never make it out of Bedford. The current was too strong, and the bridge was out. No place to go. They came to a decision then. The three of them. They did not need to speak aloud; they did not need to.
They would go to the mill tonight. They would do what the voices asked. What they’d planned, for months, to do. A final prank on this shithole town. A mill of fire, just like in their dreams.