Annie of the Undead (3 page)

I found Chris’s Zippo lighter lying on the
coffee table next to a bunch of candles. I used it to light the
second-to-last cigarette in my pack, and I began my search. A
couple of sticks of buffalo jerky on a side table made it into my
possession –one into my mouth and the other into my pocket. I found
Chris’s clothes easily, hanging in the closet. I pulled out a khaki
military shirt and smelled it. Then I got out another one –a
dappled marine utility shirt. They didn’t smell like him. In fact,
they didn’t smell like her or this house –they smelled of the
deodorant and BO of another man. Roger. I clenched my teeth.

I found one of his T-shirts in the middle drawer
of the armoire. I got out of the charity clothes and into the tee
and a pair of his desert camo utility pants as fast as I could. He
had been a few inches taller than me, so I had to roll up the legs.
His ex had a pair of running shoes that weren’t half bad on my
feet. I shrugged on one of Chris’s long-sleeved shirts and his
Carhartt and packed the rest of the clothes into an empty duffel
bag that had been on the floor of the closet. I walked out into the
little living room and looked around. Maybe she still had one of
Chris’s knives? I could sure use one. I hated to go unarmed. Not in
Detroit.

I tapped my ash into the potted plant by the
front door and started knife hunting. I was rummaging through the
trunk in the corner of the living room when I heard them pull into
the driveway.

Their car was a shiny new yellow Mustang. They
got out of it and came up the walk, laughing and nudging each other
like one of them had just told a good joke. Or maybe they just
always laughed like that. Some people do. She had
two-hundred-dollar hair extensions and he a Movado watch. The
bitter cold didn’t seem to bother them at all. How could it, when
you’re so damn happy?

The new guy was taller than Chris, but not as
muscular. He had a soft face, and he wore a button-front shirt and
a tie under his Red Wings jacket. Great, he’d like the T-shirt I
had left for him. He looked like a cubicle guy, or maybe a bank
teller –nothing I couldn’t handle.

I let them open the door and find me at the
trunk, digging for some remnant of my brother. Seeing me did not
tickle the ex’s funny bone, not like finding your wiener dog
wrapped in toilet paper like a wiener mummy might. It took her
about two seconds to express the fact.

“Annie? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Good to see you too, Anjelah. Would you mind
telling me where Chris’s Ka-Bar is?”

“Is this the Annie you told me about?” asked the
new boyfriend with sudden concern

“Are you the guy that’s been wearing my
brother’s military uniforms?”

“I…uh…”

“Is that Bubbles crying?”

Hearing the whining coming from the bathroom,
Anjelah went to it and opened the door. The wiener erupted forth,
rolled up in TP like a burrito and dragging a length of it behind
it as it charged three-legged into the living room. Anjelah stared
for a moment in confused displeasure. Nope, that didn’t tickle her
funny bone either.

“What’d you do-?” said the boyfriend, looking
down at the partially mummified dachshund.

“Oh my God!” said Anjelah, walking across the
room to the back door. “You broke in? Are you nuts?”

“She broke in?”

“Did you see my cat? Did she get out? She’s not
supposed to go outside. Annie, where the hell is my cat?”

I stood up, having no luck with the trunk.

“You tell me where to find Chris’s Ka-Bar, and
I’ll tell you where your cat is.”

She glanced out into the backyard, then closed
the door.

“What is that, some kind of threat?”

I ignored her, heading to the kitchen, rummaging
through drawers, starting with the bottom drawer and going up so I
wouldn’t have to close one to search the next, like a good
ransacker.

Anjelah’s voice was escalating.

“Hey! Where the hell is my cat? Huh?”

“Angie,” said the boyfriend in a small voice.
“Should I call the police?”

“You’d better answer me! Where’s my cat? Don’t
turn your back on me, bitch–”

I spun. My muscles tensed, my fist weapon-ready,
so eager to strike her, but I held it. I stared down the sudden
fear in her eyes.

“Hey!” said the boyfriend, stepping up behind
Anjelah, putting his arm between us –that soft arm, as if that
would have been enough to stop me from doing anything, “Leave my
girlfriend alone! Who do you think you are?”

“No, Rog! Stop,” said Anjelah.

“What, babe? I can take care of this…”

I exhaled a nice cloud of secondhand smoke into
Anjelah’s face. She pretended to swallow her fear in order to avoid
doing so to her pride.

“Fine,” she said, her eyes growing wet from
adrenaline and emotion –or maybe from smoke.

She pushed past her boyfriend into the living
room, then took a shoebox down from the shelf in the coat closet.
She thrust it toward me.

“Here. Take all of it. I don’t want it anymore
anyway. Take it and go.”

I opened the box. The knife was inside, along
with some photos and other things that had been Chris’s. I closed
it, looked at her.

“That’s all he means to you, huh? Just a bribe
to get the Devil out the door?”

“Just take it and go,” the new boyfriend echoed
Anjelah.

He was trying to intimidate me with nearness and
height. I looked up at him blandly.

“You got the stones to back up your demands, or
are you only good for boning other peoples’ girls, Roger?”

His face got as hard as a face like his could,
which wasn’t very, but Anjelah grabbed his arm, trying to pull him
away from me.

“Don’t! She’s a boxer, Rog, and she hangs out
with some very bad people. Just let her go. Go on!” she said to me
like I was a rat with the rabies, to be shooed out of the garage
but not approached, “Get out of here, and don’t ever come
back.”

Roger, reluctant to back down from a girl and in
front of his girl, but equally reluctant to find out if whatever
Anjelah had told him about me was true, settled on a different
solution.

“I’m going to call the police,” he said,
pointing a finger at me resolutely, “Right now.”

Just then, a car honked its horn out in the
street. There was the sound of squealing brakes and then a cry,
high and strangled, like a small thing dying in agony.

I walked to the front door, opened it, and stood
in the threshold. I figured I ought to hold up my end of the deal
I’d made with Anjelah. Or maybe I just did because it was fun to
say.

“Better go scrape up your cat.”

Okay, so right about now, you’re thinking,
Anjelah was right. Annie, you
are
a bitch. And I say in
answer: Ya think? But let me just correct a small but integral
detail of that statement: I
was
a bitch. But things have
since happened to me –supernatural things that sort of changed my
view of humanity and the world. When you are confronted with
terrifying and unnatural things, like, say, politicians or
vampires, you gain a little perspective –perspective that, as in my
case, can help you become a better human being.

But becoming a better human still had a ways to
go that night. The debacle resulting from going to get Chris’s
stuff wasn’t quite over yet, because the person I would have least
wanted to see in all the world –less than my drug-dealing ex, less
than the rich patron who had put me in the boxing ring and then
tried to put me (at gunpoint if necessary) into his bed, less even
than those tools of Satan who call themselves Nickelback –the one
person who had the ability to make me lose even my appetite for
fried chicken (and God knows how I always loved me my fried
chicken) at the mere thought of her, happened to be driving the
Acura that had squashed the cat.

“What in fresh hell are you doing here,
Mother?”

The witch herself got out of the car, careful to
avoid the blood smear the cat had left on the pavement with her
prissy little peg-heel shoes.

The very first thing she said to me was: “You
look like you’ve gained thirty pounds.”

“You look like you’ve aged thirty years.”

She pretended my comment was beneath her
notice.

“I went to meet you outside the jail,” she said,
oblivious to Anjelah, who ran past her down the drive, screaming
hysterically at the little orange corpse partly tucked beneath the
rear tire. “But they must have released you early. I’ve been
driving all over town looking for you. I almost didn’t try here. I
didn’t think you would come, but then you’ve never quite gotten it
through your head that Chris isn’t here anymore.”

She looked around at the little cul-de-sac like
it was some third-world outhouse. Amazing, how quickly people from
meager backgrounds can become snobbish after marrying into a little
money.

I said, “I know where he is. Chris is in the
ground. Been to see your son lately?”

“I have a service put flowers on his grave every
month.”

“Why are you here, Mother?”

“To take you home,” she said peevishly. “To
extract you from this dangerous life you’ve chosen. To give you a
fresh start.”

“Isn’t that interesting?”

I didn’t buy that load of sow shit for a second.
It wasn’t natural for me to be near the top of my mom’s priority
list. I took a draft of my smoke and glanced around, checking for
cops. They couldn’t be here this quick if Roger was calling them,
but they could be if my mother had something up her cashmere
sleeve. She wasn’t remarkably devious –in fact, she wasn’t
remarkably anything except a bitch, but life had taught me never to
underestimate anyone’s capacity for treachery, especially the
person who gives you life.

My mother took out the compact that she carried
always in her purse and began compulsively dabbing the sticky
orange substance it contained onto her face.

“Of all the things you could have done with your
life, the vices you could have cultivated, you had to choose,” she
almost couldn’t bring herself to say the dirty word,
“
boxing.
”

“Right. You would have liked it better if I’d
been pregnant at thirteen, then two kids, married, and divorced by
twenty.”

“Now you’re just one of the animals. Why
couldn’t you have just been a mooching high school dropout like so
many other kids? I never thought I’d say this, but –that little
freak who used to stay in her room all the time and watch all those
ridiculous science-whatever-you-call-it movies and draw monsters
all over her notebooks –I miss her. She was so much less of an
aggravation than you are.”

“Sure, as long as you didn’t know she was one
dark fantasy away from going Columbine on all your asses,” I said
and took a drag.

“Oh, Annie, put out that damned cigarette.
That’s a terrible, ugly habit.”

“You should have thought of that when your
boyfriend Tim was smoking me out and liquoring me up to keep me
from screaming while he had his fun. Oh, but that’s right, you were
too busy the snorting lines you bought with his paper.”

“Shut up!” she hissed. “Things are different
now. I found the Lord. He lifted me up out of darkness and filled
me with the spirit of the Holy Ghost.”

“How nice for you. I take it the Lord came with
a lot of money.”

She dabbed on more sludge.

“Six point two million. Plus a house in Grosse
Pointe and a condo in the Turks and Caicos. You know what I have to
offer doesn’t come cheap.”

The bitch had been a high-priced call girl once,
before the pregnancies and birth of her kids had made her ugly and
ruined her career. At least, that was what she had always told
Chris and I. She’d come from the country an unblemished little
redneck beauty and made big bucks with her body for a while before
we took it all away from her. It wasn’t the all the drugs she did
that used up her money and appeal. It was us.

“That why you’re driving a mid-range sedan?”

“I’m smart with his money. Think about it as
saving for your education. We were both hoping you would get your
GED, then maybe go to college. He knows a dean at Bryn Mawr. Maybe
we could get you in there. You could make something less
embarrassing of yourself than a
boxer.
Perhaps your colorful
past could be spun into sounding a little more…romantic.”

“Don’t minimize, mythologize.”

“Jeffrey’s planning on running for office next
year. You being in college would help our campaign.”

A politician. So good I would never meet
him.

“So tell me, does this one rape little
girls?”

My mother closed the compact with a hard
snap.

“Don’t bring your baggage into this. Jeffrey is
a man of God. He’s the one who lifted me up. He showed me the
light, like I’m trying to do for you right now.”

“For my own good, of course.”

She tilted her head dismissively.

“God loves you, Annie, whatever I may think.
Just think of it that way if you hate me so much. But come back to
us. Come into the light.”

A few flurries began to drift down from the sky.
The storm was coming. Anjelah’s wails still filled the little
street. My ears pricked at a more distant sound –that of police and
fire truck sirens a little more than a mile off. One was headed
away, the other steadily approaching. I knew which was which.

“The light is not for me, Mother. Don’t come
looking for me again.”

I cut out of there, at first at a walk, my
mother’s voice chasing me with its banal arguments, but as soon as
I turned the corner out of the cul-de-sac, I broke into a dead run.
I had maybe a minute and a half to get the hell on before the
cavalry showed, and while I didn’t think they’d waste a helicopter
on me, they sure might come looking for me in their patrol
cars.

I really didn’t want to go back inside, not
really. I wanted out, out of everything –maybe even out of the
world. As far out as possible, at least.