The Summer I Died: A Thriller (19 page)

“
Who’s hungry?
”
he asked. Butch barked.

Skinny Man lunged, grabbed Tooth’s dick, and sliced it off.

Tooth screamed, the razors opening his cheeks back to his ears. His bowels let loose and evacuated all over the floor, piss spraying out like it was coming from a showerhead.

From the back room Jamie screamed and I followed her lead.

Skinny Man took the wormish body part and tossed it into Butch’s dog dish. The dog walked over and sniffed it and sank his teeth into it, bit it in half and swallowed the pieces. Once again, this was followed by a quick repair
job from the blazing shovel, which Skinny Man pressed against Tooth’s stumped, bloody groin. Smoke rose as the hair and flesh fused shut.

Tooth passed out.

Skinny Man put the shovel back in the stove and shot me a smile.
“
Back in a bit,
”
he said.

CHAPTER 16

The collar around Tooth’s neck caught him as he fainted and swung him side to side, slowly
.
I thought for sure his neck would break, but his chin was taking most of his weight. He was alive, though I wasn’t sure how long that would last. His naked lower half was bubbled with third degree burns, and fluids were leaking out like lava from a cracked volcano wall.

Upstairs, Skinny Man was stomping around and talking loudly to someone, no doubt Butch. It sounded like they were arguing about something: a day of the week, laundry, other nonsense that meant nothing
—
or everything
—
depending on how you looked at it. This went on for several minutes and then I heard the door to the driveway open and Skinny Man go out, slamming it behind him. Faintly, I heard a car motor start and fade into the distance.

We were alone.

If we didn’t get out now we might not ever.
“
Help! Anyone! Help us!
”
I yelled. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone for and I had to try the obvious.
“
Please, somebody, help me!
”
I waited and tried again, but still got no response.

“
Tooth,
”
I said,
“
You’ve got to stand up. The chain is going to choke you.
”

He didn’t respond, just hung there with his eyes closed, his feet dragging through his own feces. He
looked like a monster, an unrecognizable mass of contusions. The razor wire had done its job and I imagined you could flip his head open and use his skull as a bowl.

I pulled on the chains again, hoping they might have loosened in the past few hours, but my wishful thinking was squashed like a bug; the chains were fortified links of imprisonment. Tooth was onto something before, about figuring out how to get Skinny Man while still in our binds, and right before he came downstairs,
Tooth had that proverbial light
bulb over his head. Unfortunately, I hadn’t the faintest idea what he had thought of.

I had to think, and I had to do it outside the box. Tooth had tried to yank his wrist through the cuffs, ripped a chunk of skin off, and beamed. But I knew he’d never get his hand through in one piece. What was his plan?

I was wracking my brain when I heard the car return, tires crunching on the gravel driveway. Shit, that was fast. Or was it?
Time didn’t measure the same to me anymore; the seconds lasted hours and the hours blurred into a single frozen moment.
The driveway door opened and keys jingled down the stairs, stopped behind the sunset
photo. For a brief moment Skinny Man just stood there, listening. There was nothing to hear though
—
Tooth was out, Jamie was crying softly and incoherently, and I was quietly listening. What was he hoping to hear? Us making plans? Then it dawned on me: he was just playing around. Coming down the stairs as loud as he did, he knew I must have heard him. Like the incident with the gun, he was just messing with my head.

Sure enough, t
he door unlocked and Skinny Man came back into the room carrying a
brand new
roll of duct tape in his
hands. Butch followed him in and went and sat by his dishes.

“
Should have done this first I guess,
”
he said.
“
Some people just love to say ‘I told you so.’
”

He tore off a piece and slammed it
over
Tooth’s mouth,
covering
the razor wire. The blood, saliva and pus made the tape slick and he had to put a few pieces on, wrapping it around the entire head before it would stick. He did me next, pressing it against my face so tight I thought my head would cave in. Having to breathe solely through my nose accentuated the stench of the room
,
which was beyond anything I’d ever dreamt possible. Dead fish in a hot trunk would have smelled better. Next, he disappeared into the back room and muffled Jamie’s cries. When he came out he put his hands on his hips and stared at Butch.

“
Are you satisfied now?
”

The dog sat like a bump on a log, obviously aware that his master’s brains were made of diarrhea. But Skinny Man gave a little chuckle, and for the first time I thought maybe he was just messing with us. Maybe the whole talking-to-the-dog thing was a ruse in case we escaped. I tried to remember if Son of Sam had pleaded insanity, but I couldn’t recall.

He came over and picked Tooth’s Red Sox cap off the floor, brushed it off and put it back on Tooth’s head.
“
Should’ve known you was a Red Sox fan. Never met an asshole that wasn’t. Hear tell that Red Sox fans are the most loyal fans around, but if you ask me, anyone who roots for the
se
loser
s
year after year after year, that ain’t loyalty, that’s just plain ignorance.
”

Tooth made a little snuffle and blinked his eyes. I prayed for him to wake up, at least so he wouldn’t choke
.
But then I thought better he choke than get butchered any more. God, was I really giving in?

Blood was seeping out around the tape on Tooth’s face and running down his chin. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen,
Force Ten From Navarone
, where Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw were trying to blow up a dam. When they blew the dynamite, little cracks zig-zagged along the dam wall. The water trickled out slowly at first and they thought they’d failed the mission, but slowly the cracks widened until the whole dam broke apart and fell into the river. I almost expected Tooth’s head to do that now, just crumble apart and spill his brains down his shoulders. But Skinny Man must have seen the same movie, because he took out a pocket knife and poked a hole through the tape into Tooth’s mouth, letting the blood run out and pool on the floor.

Butch was on it like a fly on shit, licking it up as it fell.
“
Leave it.
”
Skinny Man kicked at him and reluctantly the dog went back and lay near his dishes.

“
Okay then,
”
he said.
“
I think it’s time to play another game. How about that, Butch, you wanna play some more?
”

The dog looked up, tilted his head, gave a little wag of his stubby tail. He looked unsure whether he’d get a treat or a kick in the ribs.

“
Who’s feeling lucky? Will it be asshole number one, wearing the hat of a loser team made of midgets and niggers? Or will it be asshole number two, who rubs his nub to pictures of Wonder Woman because he’s too much of a nerd to get laid? Or perhaps,
”
he smiled, licked his forefinger and stuck it in the air,
“
asshole number three. A sweet young hole if there ever was one.
”

I hated him talking about Jamie, but I forced myself to remain calm, to figure out what Tooth had hit on. It
was difficult to ignore Skinny Man as he rolled the dice about and tossed them on the floor. I didn’t look at the numbers, didn’t look to see the expression on his face. I had to think. What had Tooth been doing when he
’d
tried to pull his hand through the cuffs? I tried to pull my hand through but my wrist wouldn’t fit, and I ended up opening the cut that was there already a little more.

“
Eleven. Boy, I am one lucky motherfucker, ain’t I, Butch? Got to hand it to fate, I tell ya.
”

I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding when I heard it wasn’t my number.

Then the ritual began, the dancing, the fondling, the dog barking. I fought to control my mind, to focus on the chains, on escaping. But as he undulated in front of me, taking off his clothes, I found it harder and harder to concentrate until, inevitably, I started crying again. He danced right up to me, all the tattoos following his lead, his own little tribe of headhunters. When he was completely naked he went into the room with Jamie.

She started screaming when he opened the door, though her voice was muffled from the tape. It wasn’t long before I heard a clink of metal and Skinny Man’s heaving grunt as he lifted something heavy. Whatever it was smashed against the ground and reverberated off the walls, sent chills down my spine and stood my hairs on end. Jamie pierced my ears with an unholy wail that lasted until her breath gave out.

I started shaking like I was freezing, but it wasn’t from any cold. I think I might have been going into shock, but I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to tell Jamie to shut up. I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I wanted to be in California, by the waves and smoking fresh dope.

She filled her lungs again and let loose with the same excruciating cry, and I couldn’t take it. This wasn’t happening. I was asleep, and any moment now I would wake up.

He came out of the room,
blood smeared like war paint on his face and chest
, carrying a large ax that looked like it had just been used to serve several pieces of cherry pie. Chunks of red flesh slid down the blade and plopped on the ground. Butch ran over, snorting like a wild boar, and sucked in the meat. Skinny Man rolled the largest piece of flesh up and down his stomach, then down to his erect prick where he rolled it up under his balls. I turned away, nauseated. I didn’t want to know what it was, it didn’t matter anymore. The daydream was safer, so I went back to the West Coast. But even then he wouldn’t leave me alone, came out of nowhere and stood next to me on the beach.

So I took a walk toward a
public
park to watch the children playing. I saw Jamie and myself running away from our father who was busy chasing us
, making
his
silly face
s
. My mother was sitting on a checkered blanket, laughing and taking pictures. Jamie tried to dodge my father and twisted her ankle, crashing to the grass with tears in her eyes. I stopped running and stood next to her, just looking at her puffy face as she cried. My father scooped her up and carried her to the blanket and kissed her on the forehead. My mother rubbed her ankle and made
more
funny faces until she laughed.
Nobody seemed to know I existed at that moment so I sat in the dirt and played with some ants, wondering why this little girl had stolen my parents from me.

Why that particular memory resurfaced is beyond me, but it calmed me down.
I think I was trying to tell myself something, find reason for being where I was. It was a peculiar memory to dwell on, watching myself
give in to jealousy.
But perhaps it was not the resentment that was the focus, but something else. The picture from that day hung on the wall in our family room, though it was taken in the field behind the elementary school near our home and not in California. And though I had never paid much attention to it growing up, it always reminded me of the blandness of my upbringing. We weren’t a family of stature, or adventure, we were just your typical normal, no-flair unit. But we were a caring family, always there for each other when it mattered most, even if we couldn’t stand to be in the same room with one another half the time.

No matter what happened now, we would never be a normal family again.

I dared a look at the hell about me, and found Skinny Man on the ground petting Butch, who was in turn licking the stump of flesh that had just been placed in his bowl next to the mystery woman’s arm bones. It played sort of like a movie, like I was in another dimension, trying to figure out how they lit the shot without drawing attention to the crew. If I wanted to, I could change channels by blinking my eyes and watch the California station instead.

Seemingly, the two worlds melted together like paint mixing, and soon I was watching Butch eat pieces of my sister on a beach in Malibu. Tooth stood next to me on the beach, his flat
,
sizzl
ed crotch attracting seagulls.

Skinny Man walked up to the ice cream truck on the boardwalk and bought a molten red shovel, threw it over his shoulder and carried it back to a door that
opened against physics
in the breaking tide. He
disappeared inside
, fading into darkness and into a woman’s screams. Out in the cloudy red sea, the dorsal fin of a dolphin broke the surface and then sank back into the depths.