Black House (5 page)

We want to invoke our capacity for flight and get the hell out of here. We want to float through the unresisting roof, to regain the harmless air, but we cannot, we must bear witness. An ugly dog is chewing on a child’s severed foot while making every effort to extract the foot from the white New Balance sneaker. The mongrel’s scrawny back arches down and extends, the quilled shoulders and narrow head drop, the bony front legs rigidly clamp the prize, tug tug tug, but the sneaker’s laces are tied—too bad for the mutt.

As for the something that is not an old army-surplus blanket, beyond a swirl of dusty tracks and furrows, at the floor’s far edge, its pale form lies flattened and face-up on the floor, its top half extending out of the dark pool. One arm stretches limply out into the grit; the other props upright against the wall. The fingers of both hands curl palmward. Blunt, strawberry-blond hair flops back from the small face. If the eyes and mouth display any recognizable expression, it is that of mild surprise. This is an accident of structure; it means nothing, for the configuration of this child’s face caused her to look faintly surprised even while she was asleep. Bruises like ink stains and eraser smudges lie upon her cheekbones, her temple, her neck. A white T-shirt bearing the logo of the Milwaukee Brewers and smeared with dirt and dried blood covers her torso from neck to navel. The lower half of her body, pale as smoke except where drizzled with blood, lengthens into the dark pool, where the ecstatic flies hover and settle. Her bare, slender left leg incorporates a scabby knee and concludes with the uptick of a bloodstained New Balance sneaker, size 5, laces double-knotted, toe pointed to the ceiling. Where the partner to this leg should be is a vacancy, for her right hip ends, abruptly, at a ragged stump.

We are in the presence of the Fisherman’s third victim, ten-year-old Irma Freneau. The shock waves aroused by her disappearance yesterday afternoon from the sidewalk outside the video store will increase in force and number after Dale Gilbertson comes upon her body, a little over a day from now.

The Fisherman gathered her up on Chase Street and transported her—we cannot say how—up the length of Chase Street and Lyall Road, past the 7-Eleven and the VFW hall, past the house where Wanda Kinderling seethes and drinks, past the shiny glass spaceship of Goltz’s, and across the border between town and farmland.

She was alive when the Fisherman moved her through the doorway next to the pockmarked Coca-Cola sign. She must have struggled, she must have screamed. The Fisherman brought her to the rear wall and silenced her with blows to the face. Very likely, he strangled her. He lowered her body to the floor and arranged her limbs. Except for the white New Balance sneakers, he removed all the clothing from her waist down, underwear, jeans, shorts, whatever Irma had been wearing when he abducted her. After that, the Fisherman amputated her right leg. Using some sort of long, heavy-bladed knife, and without the assistance of cleaver or saw, he parted flesh and bone until he had managed to detach the leg from the rest of the body. Then, perhaps with no more than two or three downward chops to the ankle, he severed the foot. He tossed it, still contained within the white sneaker, aside. Irma’s foot was not important to the Fisherman—all he wanted was her leg.

Here, my friends, we have true
slippage.

Irma Freneau’s small, inert body seems to flatten out as if it intends to melt through the rotting floorboards. The drunken flies sing on. The dog keeps trying to yank the whole of its juicy prize out of the sneaker. Were we to bring simpleminded Ed Gilbertson back to life and stand him beside us, he would sink to his knees and weep. We, on the other hand . . .

We are not here to weep. Not like Ed, anyhow, in horrified shame and disbelief. A tremendous mystery has inhabited this hovel, and its effects and traces hover everywhere about us. We have come to observe, register, and record the impressions, the afterimages, left in the comet trail of the mystery. It speaks from their details, therefore it lingers in its own wake, therefore it surrounds us. A deep, deep gravity flows outward from the scene, and this gravity humbles us. Humility is our best, most accurate first response. Without it, we would miss the point; the great mystery would escape us, and we would go on deaf and blind, ignorant as pigs. Let us not go on like pigs. We must honor this scene—the flies, the dog worrying the severed foot, the poor, pale body of Irma Freneau, the magnitude of what befell Irma Freneau—by acknowledging our littleness. In comparison, we are no more than vapors.

A fat bee wanders in through the empty window frame in the side wall six feet from Irma’s body and makes a slow, exploratory circuit around the rear of the shack. Suspended beneath its blurred wings, the bee looks nearly too heavy for flight, but it proceeds with easy, unhurried deliberation, moving well above the bloody floor in a wide curve. The flies, the mongrel, and Irma pay it no attention.

For us, though, the bee, which continues to drift contentedly about the rear of the horror chamber, has ceased to be a welcome distraction and has been absorbed into the surrounding mystery. It is a detail within the scene, and it, too, commands our humility and speaks. The weighty, burrowing rumble of its wings seems to define the exact center of the undulating sound waves, higher in pitch, produced by the greedy flies: Like a singer at a microphone in front of a chorus, the bee controls the aural background. The sound gathers and comes to a serious point. When the bee ambles into a shaft of yellow light streaming through the eastern wall, its stripes glow black and gold, the wings coalesce into a fan, and the insect becomes an intricate, airborne wonder. The slaughtered girl flattens into the bloody floorboards. Our humility, our sense of littleness, our appreciation of the gravity deeply embedded in this scene grant us the sense of forces and powers beyond our understanding, of a kind of grandeur always present and at work but perceptible only during moments like this.

We have been honored, but the honor is unbearable. The speaking bee circles back to the window and passes into another world, and, following his lead, we move on, out the window, into the sun, and into the upper air.

Smells of shit and urine at Maxton Elder Care; the fragile, slick feel of
slippage
at the off-kilter house north of Highway 35; the sound of the flies and the sight of the blood at the former Ed’s Eats. Ag! Yuck! Is there no place here in French Landing, we may ask, where there is something nice under the skin? Where what we see is what we get, so to speak?

The short answer: no. French Landing should be marked with big road signs at every point of ingress:
WARNING
!
SLIPPAGE IN PROGRESS
!
PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK
!

The magic at work here is Fishermagic. It has rendered “nice” at least temporarily obsolete. But we can go someplace nice
-er,
and if we can we probably should, because we need a break. We may not be able to escape
slippage,
but we can at least visit where no one shits the bed or bleeds on the floor (at least not yet).

So the bee goes its way and we go ours; ours takes us southwest, over more woods exhaling their fragrance of life and oxygen—there is no air like this air, at least not in this world—and then back to the works of man again.

This section of town is called Libertyville, so named by the French Landing Town Council in 1976. You won’t believe this, but big-bellied Ed Gilbertson, the Hot Dog King himself, was a member of that bicentennial band of town fathers; those were strange days, pretty mama, strange days indeed. Not as strange as these, however; in French Landing, these are the Fisherdays, the slippery slippage days.

The streets of Libertyville have names that adults find colorful and children find painful. Some of the latter have been known to call this area of town Faggotyville. Let us descend now, down through the sweet morning air (it’s warming up already; this will be a Strawberry Fest kind of day for sure). We cruise silently over Camelot Street, past the intersection of Camelot and Avalon, and travel on down Avalon to Maid Marian Way. From Maid Marian we progress to—is it any surprise?—Robin Hood Lane.

Here, at No. 16, a sweet little Cape Cod honey of a home that looks just right for The Decent Hardworking Family On Its Way Up, we find a kitchen window open. There is the smell of coffee and toast, a wonderful combined odor that denies slippage (if only we did not know better; if only we had not seen the dog at work, eating a foot out of a sneaker as a child might eat the hot dog right out of its bun), and we follow the aroma in. It’s nice to be invisible, isn’t it? To watch in our godlike silence. If only what our godlike eyes saw was just a little less goddamn upsetting! But that is by the way. We’re in it now, for better or for worse, and we had better get on about our business. Daylight’s a-wasting, as they say in this part of the world.

Here in the kitchen of No. 16 is Fred Marshall, whose picture currently graces the Salesman of the Month easel in the showroom of French County Farm Equipment. Fred has also been named Employee of the Year three years out of the last four (two years ago Ted Goltz gave the award to Otto Eisman, just to break the monotony), and when he is on the job no one radiates more charm, personality, or all around
niceness.
You wanted nice? Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Fred Marshall!

Only now his confident smile is not in evidence, and his hair, always carefully combed on the job, hasn’t yet seen the brush. He’s wearing Nike shorts and a tee with cutoff sleeves instead of his usual pressed khakis and sport shirt. On the counter is the Marshall copy of the
La Riviere Herald,
open to an inside page.

Fred has his share of problems just lately—or, rather, his wife, Judy, has problems, and what’s hers is his, so said the minister when he joined them in holy wedlock—and what he’s reading isn’t making him feel any better. Far from it. It’s a sidebar to the lead story on the front page, and of course the author is everyone’s favorite muckraker, Wendell “
FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE
” Green.

The sidebar is your basic recap of the first two murders (
Gruesome and Gruesomer
is how Fred thinks of them), and as he reads, Fred bends first his left leg up behind him and then his right, stretching those all-important thigh muscles and preparing for his morning run. What could be more antislippage than a morning run? What could be
nicer
? What could possibly spoil such a lovely start to such a beautiful Wisconsin day?

Well, how about this:

Johnny Irkenham’s dreams were simple enough, according to his grief-stricken father.
[
Grief-stricken father,
Fred thinks, stretching and imagining his son asleep upstairs.
Dear God, save me from ever being a grief-stricken father.
Not knowing, of course, how soon he must assume this role.]
“Johnny wanted to be an astronaut,” George Irkenham said, a smile briefly lighting his exhausted face.
“When he wasn’t putting out fires for the French Landing F.D. or fighting crime with the Justice League of America, that is.”

These innocent dreams ended in a nightmare we cannot imagine.
[
But I’m sure you’ll try,
Fred thinks, now beginning his toe raises.]
Earlier this week, his dismembered body was discovered by Spencer Hovdahl of Centralia. Hovdahl, a First Farmer State Bank loan officer, was inspecting an abandoned French Landing farm owned by John Ellison, who lives in a neighboring county, with an eye to initiating repossession proceedings. “I didn’t want to be there in the first place,” Hovdahl told this reporter. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the repo stuff.
[Knowing Spence Hovdahl as he does, Fred very much doubts if “stuff” was the word he used.]
I wanted to be there even less after I went into the henhouse. It’s all rickety and falling down, and I would have stayed out except for the sound of the bees. I thought there might be a hive in there. Bees are an interest of mine, and I was curious. God help me, I was curious. I hope I’ll never be curious again.
”

What he found in the henhouse was the body of seven-year-old John Wesley Irkenham. The corpse had been dismembered, the pieces hung from the henhouse’s decaying rafters by chains. Although Police Chief Dale Gilbertson would neither confirm nor deny it, reliable police sources in La Riviere say that the thighs, torso, and buttocks had been bitten—

Okay, that’s enough for Fred, everybody out of the pool. He sweeps the newspaper closed and shoves it all the way down the counter to the Mr. Coffee. By God, they never put stuff like that in the paper when
he
was a kid. And why the Fisherman, for heaven’s sake? Why did they have to tag every monster with a catchy nickname, turn a guy like whoever did this into the Celebrity Sicko of the Month?

Of course, nothing like this had ever happened when he was Tyler’s age, but the principle . . . the goddamned
principle
of the matter . . .

Fred finishes his toe raises, reminding himself to have a talk with Tyler. It will be harder than their little talk about why his thing sometimes gets hard, but it absolutely must be done.
Buddy system,
Fred will say.
You’ve got to stick with your buddies now, Ty. No more rambling around on your own for a while, okay?

Yet the idea of Ty actually being murdered seems remote to Fred; it is the stuff of TV docudramas or maybe a Wes Craven movie. Call it
Scream 4: The Fisherman.
In fact, wasn’t there a movie sort of like that? A guy in a fisherman’s slicker wandering around and killing teenagers with a hook? Maybe, but not little kids, not
babies
like Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham. Jesus, the world was disintegrating right in front of him.

Body parts hanging from chains in a crumbling henhouse, that is the part which haunts him. Can that really be? Can it be
here,
right here and now in Tom Sawyer–Becky Thatcher country?

Well, let it go. It’s time to run.