Love You to a Pulp Read online

  “When did you help yourself to this?” Neil said, sliding the piece into the shoulder holster.

  “When you were ‘preoccupied’. How do you think I got you out of there? Get me some clothes? We left in a hurry.” Neil stood up slowly, back against the wall, sliding across the surface. From the closet he tossed Lotta a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt. She lay on the bed, holding the clothes but making no move to dress, daring him to resist her. Neil wondered why every girl who lay in his bed was thoroughly broken. Then he saw the heart tattoo on her inner thigh: H+L inked black inside the blood red valentine. She winked.

  “You know it?” Lotta asked, smile growing.

  “You and Hoon?” Neil said.

  And with that she really started laughing, so hard he finally had to yank her off the bed.

  “Get dressed.”

  Neil drove her small hatchback through the rain. It was cold, nearly freezing, and Lotta alternated stuffing her hand between her thighs and holding them up to the lukewarm air coming out of the vents. She didn’t stop talking.

  “I was a lawyer in Bosnia. I was wealthy. Then the war and now this. Mr. Skaggs was going to help me through law school, here in the States. If I worked for him.”

  Neil listened to her tale of woe, squinting through the rain—not cleared away but smeared by the dull wiper blades, trying to see beyond the white drops barely lit by the dim headlights. She reminded him of a prostitute he’d had once, the way she told her story, as if trying to convince him of her humanity, as if she was terrified of him and was trying to save herself with talk, believing if she fed him some personal information he’d be less likely to turn on her, less apt to beat her senseless and take her money. Who’d done that to her? Did she bring it on herself? Was she doing it again?

  “And let me guess. You’re still waiting for that first tuition check?”

  “Now you are thinking like detective.”

  Neil began to suspect they were headed to Jenkins’ place as soon as they got off the Cave City exit. Among the Jenkins’ holdings were a variety of tourist traps heavily advertised on the highway, a dinosaur world with its “over 200” painted concrete beasts and the dry concrete toboggan run that ran all the way down from the simulated ghost town that could be seen atop the tall limestone bluff a quarter mile back from the off ramp. Set back in a stand of trees, behind the ghost town was where Jenkins and his wife had built their home, hidden away from the world, yet perched to oversee everything below.

  Jenkins’ driveway was a long series of switchbacks up the face of the steep hill. The rear tires alternated between whining spins over the icy rain and screeches of found traction on the slick blacktop. The windshield was smoky with a skin of ice, the wiper blades had completely given up. Neil rolled down the driver’s window, watched the edge of the drive with the frozen rain pelting his face like needle pricks. Neil hugged the hillside of the drive, using his one good hand to keep the vehicle away from the black void below that pulled on the hatchback. Lotta was silent, eyes closed, her fingers curled around the door handle, again looking like a woman fearing she’s put her life in the hands of an unknown stranger, a stranger capable of unknown horrors, faith rested upon a devil.

  On foot, Neil circled the perimeter of the Jenkins house looking for an open window. The place was secured so he settled for kicking in the front door.

  “What am I looking for? What am I looking for?” he asked the darkness. He felt Lotta breath behind him, felt her breath warm the air around him, reached back and took her hand, two children wandering a haunted home. Outside, the wind picked up and the frozen rain hit the windows with renewed life. Thunder cracked the silence but no flash lit their way. Lotta pulled Neil to a stop, guided him left.

  “Upstairs,” she whispered. Neil followed blind up the stairs, heard only the click of Lotta’s heels and his own heavy thumps on the hardwood steps. At the landing, Neil’s dead eyes found a sliver of blue light leaking from underneath a door at the end of the hall.

  “There,” Lotta said, giving Neil the lead. He took it and his hand went to the butt of his piece, ready to draw, hoping that behind the door was something other than another question or blow to the head. His hand rested on the faux crystal knob. The hot sweat and musk of sex hung in the air. The sound of passions.

  “Who’s in here?”

  “Go in and see for yourself.”

  He did. And he saw.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Rogues’ Harbor is the name given to it by the law way back, probably in the eighties, that’s the eighteen-eighties understand. Henry McGrath was his name, the man that settled that little patch of land on the bank.”

  Young Neil sat on the bank of the Green alone, remembering the last story his daddy had told him, and as they always did, the elder’s words crept inside him and replaced all visual distraction—no crackling fire, no rush of white waters over the rocks just upstream. Neil saw clearly the ghosts he and Helen had stirred. He saw Henry McGrath in all his stained lank, all his meanness. Neil saw the young bride who’d aged twenty years in one. She wasn’t meant to be his wife, but after he’d taken her she swelled with child and her daddy had given her to McGrath cheap. In addition to marriage, McGrath had promised the girl’s father a gift of goats, the herd itself a promise that never found its way from Brownsville and probably had never existed anyway. But the preacher’s words bound the souls and false goats were not enough to break the vow in God’s eyes.

  McGrath took to building the first of the clapboards, his wife and unborn sleeping on the dirt and smelling of smoke from the constant fire they burned to fool the elements. He put her to work on the saw and her arms hardened with her resolve for anything better than this life on the river. He drank nights and had her do the same when she got to crying. When she kept on with the crying, he took to her with hand and strap. He was said to have the biggest hands anyone had ever seen, hands that had bested many men since he was a boy, and he put the hands on her as he liked, whether it was in twisted tenderness or a display of his power.

  The house was finished come spring and almost became a home but the winter had been a rare white one and come spring the snow melt flooded the valley and the clapboard was washed away as McGrath and his wife and his dim child watched perched up in the hills. She hoped it was the end of the place and when McGrath took off to find money for new materials she hoped he’d never return. She spent night after night alone with the dull baby that never cried and looked into the fire with the fear of his return in every branch that cracked in the darkness. She squeezed that baby, tried to elicit a cry or a laugh, but the glass-eyed boy remained as silent as the stone she sat upon. The only noise it made was the greedy slurping at her breast. And she wept.

  When he returned, McGrath had a collection of dirty men in tow, men like him but not as brightly lit. Together McGrath and the men built the new clapboards, four of them, all elevated upon the stilts, the legs sunk deep and raised high to keep the domiciles safe from wicked waters. Upon completion the bride found herself descending the high stairs every morning, the child on her hip, and tending the fire, cooking a breakfast of beans and whatever game the group was able to hunt, or fish they’d pulled from the river. Periodically the men would leave and return drunk with plenty of store bought whiskey and a little cash money.

  It was upon return from one of these journeys that the men in the group began taking their way with the bride. The first night she pleaded for McGrath to aid her and it wasn’t until the fourth man mounted her that she realized her man was letting it happen to her and that she was payment in lieu of some secret service performed. She whined as the filthy men ravaged her and she watched the boy, stumbling on newly found legs over the bottle-littered stead, looking at the scene periodically only when a severe thrust brought a shriek from his mother’s lips. She looked away and saw McGrath in the doorway of their shared clapboard, a still silhouette like a graven idol backlit and flickering in the light of a single oil lantern.


  Neil rolled the images in his young mind, Daddy still alive but not for long. He had so many questions he knew were not for asking. The pictures faded and Neil watched the fire flicker and lick the sky, shooting sparks like crackling beads of red lightning.

  His daddy rolled another cigarette with the continuance of the story somewhere between his memory and lips. Neil waited, hardly wanting to breathe for some remnant of the history to find him and take him away to its dark places.

  “Now I don’t know,” Daddy said, “what caused McGrath to be the way he was, the kind of man he was. But it ain’t worth debating the natural versus unnatural. What is in nature is of nature. But like I was saying, the things we don’t see are there. Our eyes are only good in the light. And to say that they aren’t is the ultimate affront to God, and if you need it spoke in terms of earthly values, such a thought is plain old ignorance. The elements are there for evil and it’s just a matter of them coming together. Some things are a volatile mix. Even a man of science would not deny it.”

  Neil rolled it over. He remembered clear glass tubes in a laboratory from his school days. He saw smoke and color changes, the glass becoming hot as fire. Benign ingredients becoming toxic under a sucking fume hood.

  “What happened to the boy?” Neil said.

  Lester crushed the cigarette between thumb and finger with a callused hiss. He dropped the remainder in to his shirt pocket.

  “Died,” the man said. “Swept away down the river. His mama too.”

  “And the men?”

  “Dead. Shot by the law. For thieving.”

  “That’s where the money came from? They stole it?”

  “It’s all stolen from somewhere. Every dollar you ever hold has blood in its very printing. Just not everybody gets a posse for their trouble.”

  And Neil thought on that truth while Lester took the last piece of squirrel flesh from the black skillet, chewed it, made it part of his own body. Neil thought on that story, staring into the fire and wondering if he was evil. Wondering how much evil he’d see before he was swept down that river like the rest, and how it might set in stone what he would be when that unknown day came.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The door swung open silently and initially the image on the wall mounted, flat screen TV was nothing more than a piece of amateur pornography, a couple in missionary, grunts and moans. The man was hairy backed and balding, resembling a dominant ape, thrusting hips without rhythm into his rightful piece.

  “What is this?” Neil said and as if by coincidence the man on the screen turned his head, spun off the girl and broke the fourth wall, met Neil’s eyes with his own. It was Jenkins, and as he scrambled he exposed the partner beneath him, his child, his daughter, his Helen. Neil pushed the door open further, hit something and watched the image upon the screen arc as the video camera fell to the floor. Neil watched as Jenkins made simultaneous moves to dress, to hide, to will himself invisible or to wake from this dream turned nightmare. Helen pulled the blankets over herself and began to sob. Neil felt Lotta behind him, her hand on his shoulder.

  “He loves her, no?”

  Jenkins stood wearing just his pajama pants. “What the hell? What are you doing in my house?” Neil just watched the man, listened to Helen cry. He wasn’t comfortable with the moral high ground and only felt a tinge of repulsion, as if the scene was a joke he’d only caught the punch line to, the setup needing to be teased apart before he could react. Jenkins’ mask of anger began to peel away and the panic underneath was truth exposed and his eyes moved about in their sockets as he thought faster than he had in his life, as he weighed scenarios so heavy they crushed him. He fell back on what he knew.

  “How much do you want? I’ve got money. You want drugs?” He didn’t seem to hear Helen crying, or if he did, he couldn’t acknowledge his daughter’s tears, the truth they told, the destructive force they had upon the lies he’d forged in his fiery soul. Neil didn’t respond, couldn’t respond. He listened to Helen, a ball of madness under the blanket and all he saw was Rinthy, withered away to a thin shell over bone, cold and holding the child, too young to shiver itself warm, but old enough for cold death. Neil’s anger had no time to rise as Jenkins reconsidered the situation, the players in the scene, calculated their social worth and worked out desperate odds. He reached his inevitable mental destination and sprung from his crouch. The force of his flying body took Neil out of the room. The man had the desperate strength of a scared animal and Neil remembered Helen’s words the first time they spoke. He could handle himself. And he did a fair job of it, dropping wild fists over Neil, blind blows in the dark. Neil covered himself while trying to get his gun but each fist seemed to reset his thinking, make him question his location, his mind. Jenkins’ hard hands found Neil’s throat and squeezed. Neil fought against the arms and they were solid like stone pillars. He pulled at the fingers digging into his neck and it was as if they were fused to his flesh in a scorching weld. Neil reached for his gun and found the holster empty, he felt with one hand about the floor, and then the other, seeking out his invisible piece lost in the dark. Jenkins changed his grip, made one hand a claw that gripped Neil’s trachea with a crushing force. Neil gagged and choked for air, not knowing if his eyes were open or closed, if the blackness he saw was the lack of light or his own end. Then the sun shone above, a seventy-five-watt sun in a globe fixture, resting and partly hidden behind Jenkins’ shoulder, setting beyond the horizon. With no air and little hope, Neil caught the flash of silver in his periphery. He stretched his aching, broken arm for the gun, swollen purple fingertips grazing it, pushing it away. Neil’s lungs screamed for air that would not come and through sheer will he lifted the plaster cast and brought it hard against Jenkins’ face, stunning the man, loosening the grip slightly. Neil struck again, took in a swallow of cold air, struck again, and again. He rolled the stunned Jenkins, but did not go for the gun. He continued to rain down blows, the cast crumbling, soaking up blood, caving in the man’s head. The women were silent and Neil was only vaguely aware of their presence, like a stage actor fully absorbed in his part. He beat Jenkins to the point of exhaustion, until lifting his arm took an effort akin to moving the hill the house sat on. Neil gasped, choked, vomited and fell to the floor, next to dead Jenkins, covered in the man’s red spray. He glanced at his arm, a bare and mangled mess with the cast all but completely removed, the bone sticking out of the skin again. Jenkins looked at him, sort of, the man’s eyes bugged out of their sockets, not by surprise but by anatomy, his skull crushed and the orbs hanging by their wiring like hanged convicts. Then the girls were standing over him, Helen and Lotta looking down on him and Neil knew they were trying to figure out how many dead men were on the floor. He tried to speak, tried to move, but his body had given up, leaving only a shell of drying blood, unable to give them even a whisper.

  ***

  Neil’s sleep lasted a full day and night. He woke up in a room unfamiliar but for the smell. Outside the window a whippoorwill called to him, announcing its identity proudly. Neil hurt all over and felt for his pockets, for his glue, but he was naked and he looked down over himself, touched his heart tattoo, settled into the pain and the healing. His arm lay useless at his side, clean of the blood and plaster but swelled and purple and greening with infection where the bone had broken through the skin again. It felt not like a pained part of him, but some parasite latched on, causing the pain, but also giving him life for the ache and throb was all he could feel, the intensity of the pain had raised the bar of sensation. It gave him life while taking it, keeping him alive long enough to see him die.

  He didn’t know how long he lay there in the bed in the Skaggs’ house. He drifted in and out of fever dreams, dreams that swirled everything together in a potpourri of dark confusion. He saw Rinthy on the stage at Eddie’s, dancing for the men in her cotton dress. Instead of bills they through mussels onto the stage. He saw Heidi in the front row, watching with intense sorrow, looking from Rinthy to Neil in the s
eat behind her, his arm in his lap, purple and green, swollen and oozing yellow pus. And then he realized it was not his arm, but his limp dying member.

  “You like it? You like this?” She laughed.

  Helen and Lotta sat beside Heidi, raked her face with claws, drawing blood and watching the strips of flesh dangle from their nails like flatworms.

  “Does he know?” they asked the parasites. “Can he know?”

  ***

  Neil woke again with the three women at the foot of the bed. They smiled. Helen came to him and sat softly next to him. She stroked his wet hair and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.” And she stroked his hair, teased apart the blood coated strands with the gentle touch, like the tongue of a maternal beast. Neil felt he could cry were his eyes not swollen, were his tear ducts not caked with dried blood and infection.

  “It had to be done,” Heidi said. “All of it and I’m sorry you were hurt. But you’re a strong man. You’ll recover. Are you thirsty? Gin and tonic, yes?” She turned to Lotta who hovered in the doorway. “Get Neil a drink.” Heidi watched Lotta exit and came to the bed, sat next to Helen. She stroked Helen’s neck and let the hand travel down the shoulder, stopping at the breast, finger stopping to swirl upon the supple nipple and continuing down to the hem of the dress, drawing it back like a curtain and touching softly the heart tattoo on her thigh. H + H.

  “H isn’t for Hoon,” Neil said. And the women laughed lightly.

  “It would appear not,” Helen said. And it began to fall into place as Neil looked up at the two most prominent women, people, in all of Brownsville. A small pond perhaps, but their pond. It made sense. Until it didn’t again.

  “Why is what you’re wondering. Isn’t it, Neil?”

  “Pretty obvious. You and Helen got the pharmacy. Got your husband out of the pill game. Got everything you wanted.”