The Natural Order of Things (28 page)

The waitress leans over the table. “Sure smells like it,” she notes drolly.

“Well, since the menu doesn’t specify what
kind
of fish it is, perhaps
you
can tell me.”

The waitress shrugs. “Catfish? Naw, catfish don’t have scales. Sheephead maybe. Never had the courage to try it myself. Never asked the chef about it neither.”

“The
chef
.” Elsie laughs. “Yes, well, I certainly won’t eat catfish. They’re bottom feeders.”

“That’s your prerogative, ma’am.”

“Prerogative? My, my, someone’s been taking night classes at the community college. I’ll tell you what, sweetie. Just take ‘The Fish’ off our bill.”

“No refunds, ma’am. Says so right there on the door. Sorry about that.”

Elsie smiles. “Oh, I’m sure you are. Well, then, could you please box these rancid bones so when I leave your charming little establishment, I can toss them into the trashcan? I want all of your customers to see just what I think of your ‘home cooking.’ ”

“You want them bones in a Styrofoam box?”

“Styrofoam, yes, that would be lovely. It releases toxins into rivers and streams. And we want to make sure your little town is stocked with plenty of Frankenstein fish, don’t we?”

“Sure, lady. Sounds great.”

“It sounds
delectable
!”

During this exchange, Claude tries to keep his eyes focused on his plate, but the need to inspect, to study, to supply his dwindling libido with some kind of fuel, however meager, proves far too tempting. Though not particularly pretty, the waitress is young, much younger than Elsie, no more than nineteen or twenty years old, and she is also slender, with a disproportionately ample bust. Normally other women do not catch his eye, but for three days now he has been forced to endure the sight of morbidly obese women who trundle their hefty rolls along the cramped aisles of antique shops and force their wobbling thighs into the tiny booths of ice-cream parlors; he has listened to their raucous laughter and has smelled the stale cigarette smoke on their clothes.

He bears witness to other things, too: a middle-aged woman and teenage boy walking arm-in-arm through a flea market. A teacher and her apt pupil, he initially thought, until they began kissing near a bin of pumpkins and gourds, their tongues wet and heavy and eager. It was disturbing to watch, but several customers stopped to stare anyway, an old man whose left ear had been sliced off, a little boy whose skull was crisscrossed with angry sutures, a big black barn cat that hopped on top of an oak barrel and sat still as a witch’s familiar, licking the bright festering sores on its hind legs.

The waitress is different, she looks almost normal, and Claude admires how her thin cotton blouse, which is just a little too short for her sturdy farm girl frame, creeps up
her back and reveals a pale blue butterfly tattooed only a few breathless centimeters from the glorious crack of her ass.

Elsie, who has a sixth sense about these things, grabs her purse and shouts, “Let’s go, Claude!”

“But … the young lady hasn’t brought us our check.”

“She’s lucky I don’t speak to the manager.”

Claude considers tossing a few singles on the table, the spare change in his pockets, but the risk is too great. Insubordination of that sort will cost him dearly, and so he scurries behind Elsie, once again trying to avoid the glares of the other customers, who sigh with relief that this godless and dissolute couple is finally leaving, carried off by a howling gale of neuroses and pretension.

Though she never stops carping about her hunger, Elsie insists they keep driving until they find a motel where the aging proprietors might regale them with a vending machine filled with bags of pretzels and cans of warm soda, maybe even a mini fridge stocked with small bottles of booze, but the longer she speaks, the more her voice fades in and out like a weak radio signal crackling with the sermons of bombastic preachers who describe the agonies of hellfire until they are so hoarse that all that remains is a single, unwavering note—a buzz, a hiss, an alien humming that allows Claude to indulge in his fantasies of the waitress, a skinny country girl with nothing to do on a Saturday night but drink cheap beer and get high and screw her good-for-nothing boyfriend. The bruises on her arms tell the story of rough fingers pressed into tender flesh, lots of dirty talk, vivid instruction, a motel room reeking of marijuana, a thin bedspread sullied with sweat and semen.

Claude sees a barn with a faded octagonal hex sign painted on its warped planks and, a bit further down the road, a redbrick schoolhouse abandoned to the elements.

Elsie crosses her arms. “Didn’t we pass that barn a couple hours ago? We’re going in circles, aren’t we?”

“I gotta piss,” he announces.

“Oh, goddammit …”

He pulls over to the shoulder and puts the car in park. He hops the wire-fence and stomps through the mud and hissing grass. Behind the great decomposing barn door, he stands with his prick dangling limply in his hand, closes his eyes, and envisions the waitress, naked, bent over a table, the blue butterfly swiveling along the base of her spine as she swings her hips. Something tells him that she probably has ugly tits, large areolas like slices of baloney, asymmetrical and pink as the drooping belly of a prize-winning sow. Razor burns on the inside of her thighs, fingernails chewed and jagged. These details do not turn him off. With ferocious self-loathing he strokes his penis until it begins to stiffen.

He listens to the stridulating weevils in the wood and the gnomic response of an owl in the rafters, but then he hears, in the distance, the cough and rumble of an old engine and the angry grind of gears. The noise makes it difficult for him to concentrate. Through the gaps in the rimed planks of wood, he glimpses a pickup truck barreling down the road, its rusty tailpipe drooping like his own defeated member. Desperate for
some kind of catharsis, he varies the rhythm and pumps away, faster, faster, but it’s no use, and with a grunt of resignation, he stuffs his disobedient prick back into his pants.

The truck slows to a crawl and pulls to the shoulder in front of his car. The man who emerges from the cab doesn’t look particularly menacing—he is elderly, rail-thin, trembling with what might be the onset of Parkinson’s, and when he removes his felt hat, he reveals a head free of hair and covered with liver spots. A gentleman farmer, perhaps, on his way home from church, a song of praise on his lips, a Bible opened beside him on the seat, the pages turned to a damning passage from Leviticus. The Jesus fish on his back bumper gives him away. So does his sober black suit. But Claude is reluctant to leave the barn, maybe because the man, despite his outward appearance of infirmity and meekness, cradles a shotgun in his arms.

Claude looks for an escape route. Hiding in here won’t be easy, but Claude can always bury himself under a pile of straw and remain quiet as a mouse until the old man, should he be hell-bent on senseless slaughter, finishes his business with Elsie and then drives away into the gloaming. But Claude also understands that the longer he lingers in the barn, the longer he will have to endure Elsie’s taunts. “You were
hoping
he would kill me, weren’t you? That would make you so happy, wouldn’t it?”

After a few moments of serious reflection, he emerges from the barn and goes forth to accept his fate.

At first the old man says nothing at all, only nods with grim severity. He regards Claude with clear eyes that belie his wind-ravaged face, and when he speaks, his voice is slow and deliberate, the voice of a village elder prepared to pass judgment on the wicked.

“I believe you’re the folks that ran over my dog.” He points to the bed of the truck and lowers the tailgate. The hinges shriek in the cold and the wet. “You wanna take a look, see if you know him?”

Claude scrambles up the slippery embankment and peers inside. “God almighty …”

The thing is still alive, a big, brindled, nub-eared mutt, its head crushed like a rotten apple, its snout crusted over with blood, its reeking organs and entrails bubbling and foaming from the angry wound on its enormous, heaving belly. Claude stares, can’t help but stare, and when the thing lifts an accusatory paw toward him, he stumbles backward and begins to cough on the fumes spewing from the tailpipe.

“Ain’t right, you know,” says the man, “to leave a animal in that condition. Maybe you folks never had no family pet?”

“I don’t think that makes any difference …” Claude begins.

Elsie cranes her head from the passenger side window of the sedan. “Oh, sir. Sir!”

“Please, Elsie, let me handle this.”

“The gentleman asked us a question, Claude, and I think he’s entitled to an honest answer. He wants to know about Gonzago.”

Claude laughs nervously. “I really don’t think he’s interested, Elsie. You’re not interested, are you?”

“Gonzago was a demonic creature,” she says. “A hellhound. He kept digging up my garden, eating the hostas and daises. And I’ll tell you this, sir. He enjoyed watching us, yes, watching us while we were
in flagrante delicto
.”

“Elsie!”

“That dog would pant and moan and lick itself feverishly. Things got so bad that Claude took him out to the backyard one night and, well, go on, tell him, Claude. Tell him how you took care of business. Tell him how instead of digging up my daisies, Gonzago is now pushing them up.”

“Damn you, Elsie.”

“Right now, Gonzago is probably playing fetch with Saint Peter.”

“It was
your
idea, remember!” he shouts at her. “You told me …”

“Oh, I say all sorts of things, you know that, Claude. But, sir, let me ask you a question. Are you listening, sir? What kind of person is capable of actually carrying out such a monstrous deed?”

The old man’s forehead creases with perplexity, and he seems to regret his decision to stop these odd people. “Well, I don’t know about none of that. What I come here to say is that since it was you who run down my dog, I figured you should put him out of his misery. It’d be the decent thing to do. The Christian thing.”

Claude gestures to the rifle. “I’ve never handled one of those before, but if you show me how …”

“Ain’t nothin’ to it. Just point and squeeze the trigger. It’s already loaded. Here.”

Claude accepts the rifle. It feels heavy in his hands and smells of oil. The black barrel glimmers faintly under a sun buried under clouds, inflexible and motionless. The old man positions the dog’s head so it hangs over the tailgate, giving Claude a clear shot. Claude steps forward, pauses a moment, waits for a message imparted fleetingly on the wind, some kind of secret wisdom, an acknowledgement that what he is about to do is important, transformative, crucial to his understanding of the cosmos, but the silence is utterly vapid, banal, indifferent. He hears no message, no secret wisdom. The rusted weathervane spins on the peak of the barn, and on the bed of the truck the rain taps out a gentle song of suffering played in a minor key,
largo, morendo
. Claude looks to the sky, wondering when the snow will come and when the hand of God will stamp them all out like irritating bugs.

He looks back at the car. Elsie has shut her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears. Claude lifts the rifle and points. When he finally musters the courage to squeeze the trigger, he recoils from the powerful blast and counts the plangent echoes ricocheting off the ugly hillocks of shale and clay on the far horizon, a sound gradually hammered down and flattened by the dumb immensity of the land.

The old man bows his head.

Claude feels compelled to say something. “I don’t believe in God, haven’t seen the inside of a church since I was a schoolboy, but I’ll be sure to say a prayer for your dog anyway.”

After checking the safety on the rifle, the man plods over to the cab and tosses it through the open window. He leans against the door, his hands spread across the rough surface, fingers picking absently at the loose flakes of crimson paint. Then with a small groan of discomfort he climbs inside the truck, where he sits behind the wheel and stares at the road. He wipes the rain from his forehead, the tears from his cheeks, and with a
frown as intractable and harsh as the desolation all around, turns slowly to Claude and says, “Don’t believe in God? Then, my friend, you will burn, you will
burn
.”

Had it been a dry day, the kind of day when the sun scorches the fields and blisters the backs of the migrant workers who come to gather the corn and rye and wheat, Claude would have felt the sharp sting of gravel against his face as the man stomped on the accelerator and sped away, but it is autumn now, the road is pliant, and the tires of the truck do not spin with the speed and force the old man would have liked, and so Claude feels only the soft splatter of mud against his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.

He watches the truck rise and fall on the ribbons of road like a tiny boat carried high and low by the swells of a tumultuous sea, and he keeps watching for what must be miles and miles because there are no other roads out here in the center of this mindless wasteland, and even though Elsie urges him to get back into the car—she is in a hurry, the antique shops close early today—Claude stands very still and waits to see if the old man will pull over to bury his dog in the graveyard on top of that distant, corpse-bloated knoll.

After he makes bail and collects his personal effects from the crooked-nosed corrections officer working behind the bulletproof glass, Edward de Vere limps from the county jail and takes a seat outside on one of the benches that faces the broken fountain in the center of the sprawling, concrete plaza. It’s morning now. A cold wind lashes his face. Black exhaust from a passing bus stings his eyes. When the smoke finally clears, he sees the woman from last night gliding gracefully across the slick pavement. In her purple dress she looks like a phantom freed from cumbersome flesh, the agony of existence. He wonders if she has been waiting for him the entire time, keeping vigil out here in the cold. With a furtive glance over his shoulder to make sure the cops aren’t observing him, he stands up and approaches the woman. If they catch him speaking to her, they will almost certainly charge him again with solicitation.