Callisto (5 page)

“I wouldn't sue anybody for a snakebite. Maybe I'd sue the snake seeing as he's the one that did it.”

Dean laughed. It was an evil laugh, not humorous. He was playing with me now, very confident he could murder me and get away with it, leaving his victim under the chicken coop for all time.

I sat down in the armchair again and tried to get things settled in my mind about how not to get murdered. First off, he must be planning to do it while I'm asleep seeing as he must know he can't attack someone my size while I'm awake. That meant I had to stay awake to keep it from happening. Once he saw I wasn't asleep he'd just forget about it, what else could he do? Unless he had a gun. With a gun it makes no difference if the shootist is big or small, the shootee winds up dead anyway.

“Why don't you go shoot it?”

“Huh?”

“Shoot the snake, then everyone's okay.”

“Oh sure, like it's gonna be out there all coiled up in a neat pile waiting for me to come out and blast it.”

“Have you got a gun to do it?”

“Got a shotgun, ten-gauge. Don't have no shells for it, though.”

The liar! Nobody keeps a shotgun with no shells, that's just bullshit, but he said it real casual to make me believe it's true. He was a cool killer all right, sat there watching the weather report like he isn't planning to blow my brains out and bury me deep and put the chicken coop over me instead of a tomb-stone. There is no dignity in finishing that way.

“Hey, Dean?”

“What?”

“Those eggs yesterday, were those supermarket eggs?”

“They come in a supermarket egg package, didn't they?”

“Well, yeah, but people that run their own chickens, they use those egg cartons for the convenience, so they don't break. I noticed you got chickens here.”

“Aunt Bree, she's got some running around. Stupid fuckers lay their eggs where you never can find them because she lets 'em run wild. It's those goddamn chickens brung the snake. There's nothing a snake likes more than eggs.”

“So she doesn't collect the eggs?”

“Listen, Bree's a crazy old lady that doesn't even live in the same world as regular people. She acts like those chickens are pets. I mean . . . she
talks
to them.”

“That's pretty crazy.”

“You bet it is. If I didn't know she'd throw a shitfit about it
I'd chop their goddamn heads off and be done with it. I can't stand that racket they make, you know?”

“You could tell her when she comes back the snake ate them.”

“Good plan, Odell. How big of a snake you figure can eat a dozen chickens, huh? Maybe one of those jungle pythons fifteen foot long, but you know what? We don't have that kind around here.”

“Okay.”

He looks over at me, still smiling that evil smile. “Anyone ever tell you you're weird, Odell?”

“No, they never did.”

Which is a big lie. Back at Kit Carson High School in Yoder there was this girl, Feenie Myers, the only person I know that graduated with honors and went on down to college in Durango, Colorado, she told me I'm weird. See, in Kit Carson High there's three kinds of kid. There's the Jocks that play football, there's the Skaters that wear baseball caps backwards and baggy clothes and ride around on their boards, and then there's the Ropers, which means guys that wear jeans and boots and cowboy hats. I never had a cowboy hat but got called a Roper anyway. You have got to be one of these three. Anyway, this Feenie Myers, she says I'm a Roper with Geek characteristics. That's another thing you can be, a Geek, but it's almost as rare as being a Nerd. There has never been a Nerd at Kit Carson High except maybe for Feenie Myers. They are very rare in Wyoming, I believe. They are in Yoder anyway.

We watched more TV. There is only four kinds of shows they make. Cop shows, Lawyer shows, Doctor shows and Teen
shows. We watched a Teen show that has got these smart-talking teens like nobody ever met outside of Hollywood. These guys, they only ever say stuff that's smart and cutting and they never have acne or do stupid stuff that's embarrassing. Back at Kit Carson High these characters would have ruled the school if they were real, which everyone knows they are not. This is the reason I am not a fan of TV, the falsity of it. I am no genius but I can figure out that much. This is what made me discover
The Yearling
, which has got real people in it and no glamorousness to make it false and not believable. I was glad to get away from the TV after awhile and put the clothes in the dryer like Dean said.

After the Teen show we watched a Lawyer show and then a Doctor show, then along about ten o'clock Dean gets up and switches off the tube without asking if maybe I'd like to keep watching, which I didn't so that's okay, and he says, “Gotta get up early tomorrow if we're gonna drop off your car at the junkyard.”

“Yeah.”

He went clomping off upstairs without even saying Goodnight or Pleasant dreams or anything polite like that. You might think that even an axe murderer could be a little bit polite, but not Dean, he just couldn't be bothered it seemed like. I snuck along the hall to the front door where Dean's baseball bat was still propped against the wall and brung it back to the sofa and laid it alongside where I can reach for it in a hurry. Then I turned out the lights and lay down on the sofa same as last night without even a blanket, which Dean never did make the offer of, and stared at the ceiling far away, wondering when he'd come sneaking down to do what he had the intention of – murdering.

The grandpa clock bonged soft and mellow on the quarter and half and three quarter hours while I kept on waiting. I guess it sounds crazy, me waiting around to get killed, but there's a part of me still didn't believe it'll actually happen in reality, one side of my brain saying to the other side, You have got it All Wrong and the hole in the yard is for locating a leaky septic system pipe that needs replacing. Why the hell would Dean be wanting to murder a complete stranger that never did him harm? And I could leave anytime, so why lay there waiting for the blow to fall, a shotgun blast to come blazing from the darkness?

But that is exactly what I did, telling myself if he come tiptoeing downstairs with the shotgun I'd hear him coming. And he never would've blasted me right there on the sofa, tearing it up and splattering blood everywhere in his own living room. Dean was not houseproud but he wouldn't have wanted a mess like that. He would do what they do in wartime, which is take the victim at gunpoint to his grave and make him stand over it, then blast him from behind so he goes toppling down into the hole without making a big mess to clean up later. I would have to get the better of him between the time he rousted me by poking the shotgun barrel in the side of my neck to wake me and the time he stood me alongside the grave hole.

Bong bong bong
etcetera. Eleven o'clock and he still didn't show. Because he wasn't going to, I finally told myself, it's all just bullshit in my brain, which was a big relief. What a big idiot I was to think all that about Dean, which even if he wasn't the greatest guy in the world was definitely not some cold-blooded psycho killer. I got that settled in my mind by
the quarter hour and felt myself drifting off into dreamland. That sofa was not the cleanest I ever lay on, but it was plenty soft and the cushion under my head fit just right. I felt myself sliding into darkness the way you do when sleep is coming, like sliding down a velvet chute into a deep pool filled with stillness and calm . . .

“Odell?”

Dean was drifting alongside me in the pool. How did he get there?

“Odell?”

I woke up. Dean was squatting right by my head, whispering in my ear!

My arm had fallen down from the sofa and lay with my fingertips just barely touching the baseball bat. They wrapped theirselves around it by pure instinct for survival and begun lifting it, and at the same time I'm rearing up in slow motion with alarm bells and sirens screaming in my head and this voice saying over and over
Get him get him get him
. . .and Dean is looking at me strange in the darkness, just this little bit of light from the windows coming through . . .
And why the fuck is he right beside the sofa on his haunches that way, practically whispering in my ear?
. . .that was the scariest part, not the shotgun, which was beside him on the floor, not in his hand, which gave me the advantage while I'm rearing up and he's saying, “I thought I heard something . . .” The bat was raised high to shut out that little-boy voice he's using, pretending to be all helpless because he heard the boogeyman prowling around downstairs, which is the lamest kind of deceiving . . .

The bat come down like a lightning bolt from above and made this awful
thonk
sound as it bashed the top of his head.
His face was upraised to look at me – I'm on my feet now– and there's this expression of total surprise on it because he wasn't expecting me to be prearmed with the bat like I am, and now he recognizes it's too late for a surprise attack because he made the mistake of whispering my name when what he should've done is poke me awake with the gun barrel like I predicted. Well, it was too late now for him to succeed in his criminal intent because he's falling backwards away from me with his eyes wide open still . . .and hits the floor with a thud.

I stood over him with the bat raised again. There's blood hammering through my head and my heart going
budumbudumbudum
so fast I thought it might bust out of my chest. Dean didn't move, so I must have whanged him good. He looked dead, he's so still. He only had pajama pants on without the jacket, so I could see his scrawny chest heaving the breath in and out of him so he's okay, only unconscious, which made sense because I only hit him the one time and not all that hard neither because I was rising up from the sofa at the same time I whanged him, not the best position to swing a baseball bat. The shotgun was next to him. I picked it up and opened it up. No shell inside. Now why the fuck would he come downstairs to kill me with no shell in the gun? He said, just before I hit him, he thought he heard something, meaning a prowler, I guess, but again, how would an empty gun be useful as a threat against intruders, unless he was only going to bluff them with it? Or bluff me into going out to the hole to await execution. With what, though? None of it was making any sense.

I listened to him breathing kind of ragged for awhile,
waiting for him to come around so I can ask him what's going on here. After a time my heart slowed and I started thinking I must have hit him too hard even if I didn't have a good swing for maximum impact. I was even starting to feel a little sorry for having hit him at all, but I mean, what else did he expect, whispering in my ear like that and a shotgun beside him? It was the dumbest way to wake someone up you can think of, so it's all his own fault, that's how I saw it. There was no way I could go back to sleep, not with Dean lying next to the sofa that way with air whistling through his nose, so I went and had a glass of water and come back. Here's a strange thing – I almost felt like crying, I really did. I had never before hit anyone with nothing but my fist and only when they asked for it by needling me about this or that. I had hit someone now with a baseball bat, which is a truly awful thing to do when you think about it, not so bad as hacking at them with a machete or shooting a bullet into them, but plenty bad enough.

Listening to him was more than I could take, so I lifted him and carried him upstairs to his room and put him on the bed in a nice comfortable position, then I turned out the light and left. All kinds of thoughts kept galloping through my head and I knew sleep was not going to come back again to comfort me. I tried a few pages of
The Yearling
but the words kept switching around and making no sense so I quit and went outside to sit on the porch rocker and listen to the night.

I
t was a chicken that woke me. I was on the rocker fast asleep and the stupid bird flapped up onto my chest and pretty near gave me a heart attack. I jumped up so fast it squawked and went running away down the porch steps. I waited a minute to calm down then went inside just as the clock is striking five.

Up the stairs and into Dean's room, where I found him still unconscious or maybe just asleep, it's hard to tell. He had gone and urinated in the crotch of his pajamas but I wasn't about to peel them off and put on another pair in case he woke up while I'm doing it and figures I'm doing weird homo stuff with him while he's helpless. So I left him like he was and looked at his head, then felt it. There's a good-sized lump there on top where the bat connected but no bleeding, a good sign I didn't hit him all that hard. I felt better knowing that and went to fix breakfast for myself. I was fully prepared to
forgive Dean for his dumbass stunt in the middle of the night and fix breakfast for him too, just as soon as he's ready.