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Authors: Kevin Hardcastle

Debris (18 page)

BOOK: Debris
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Emily got up and brushed her teeth and combed through her hair for a little while. She stepped outside onto the sun-warmed pavestones behind the house. An early spring had brought the snows down to sopmush over the fields beyond. She wore her bathrobe and walked the cement in her slippers. Bob had drawn the poolcovers back and the waters were hung through with grit and grass and twigs. Emily took hold of the fencerail and studied the pool. She was about to go but stopped. There in the far shallows spun a tiny, brown body, held under by a tangle of mossy branchlets, the tail trailing wide and drawing in the water gently. After a long time watching it she went for the net.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOST OF THE HOUSES

HAD LOST THEIR LIGHT
S

 

 

K
ayla got to the tavern
near midnight and her husband was already shirtless and inconsolable. He'd put one man through a table and the other into the wall plaster. Matthew had gotten to highground and held it by standing atop a wooden riser with chairparts in either hand. Kayla pushed through a crowd to the emptied sitting room. There were still full plates and pint glasses on the tabletops. Nobody would go near him anymore.

He had a steak knife buried to the hilt in the meat of his shoulder and it bled a crimson streak down his front.

“Who stuck him with that knife?” Kayla said to the bartender.

“He did.”

“What?”

“That fella in the wall raised a knife at him and he picked up another and stuck himself first.”

“Good God,” she said.

They had called the police as well but they'd called Kayla first, so many years had Matthew come to that watering hole. Kayla figured she had but minutes. She went over to him and waited there. He looked around like he might find an escape route. He stood about six-foot-two when he was on the ground proper and he had big shoulders and was well-muscled all the way through. With his build and his beard and the blood it looked like he could eat her alive. Kayla just reached up for him. Stared into his eyes.

“You gotta come back home,” he said.

“How 'bout you get down off the table first.”

She had him by the wrist when the cops came in through the saloon door. Kayla pulled him down and took the chair pieces out of his hands. She got him sitting on a bench with his back to the wall and stood where the cops couldn't get to him without rounding her.

“He's sick,” she said. “And he's hurt. Don't make it worse.”

There were three cops and they were all big or bigger. They studied the ruins of the place with their thumbs hung in their belts. The least huge cop had a hand by his pistol. He was told to go and see to the man in the wall. The other two looked blankly at each other and at Kayla and at the man bleeding all over the upholstery behind her. The ranking cop took off his hat and rubbed at his scalp with his palmheel.

 

 

A psychiatric nurse stationed
with the near police precinct met Kayla outside the emergency room. Kayla had to commit him to the mental health centre involuntarily and could barely sign the forms for all that her hand shook. The cops had told her plain that he would go to prison if she didn't put him in.

“How long you all been married?” the nurse said.

“Two years,” Kayla said.

“How long has he been sick?”

“He was sick when I married him.”

 

 

The ER doctors had sedated him
and drawn the knife out and tended to the wound. Matthew's forearms and ankles were tethered to the bed where he lay post-operation. Cops guarded him there and they guarded his transport across the city to the asylum. Kayla rode to the compound in the back of a police cruiser, her knees banging against the fore seats. She tried to talk to the nurse and the cop in the front but they could none of them hear each other very well.

At intake Kayla had more forms to fill out and a harried-looking shrink to talk to. The doctor seemed to have woke up minutes before, her blonde hair barely tied and her eyes crowfooted at the corners. She was otherwise quite pretty, perhaps ten years older than Kayla. They went down to the cafeteria and sat lonely with the thrum of vending machines and overhead vents cycling the air.

“Did you notice any change in him lately, leading up to this?” said the doctor.

“Yes,” Kayla said.

“He stop taking his meds?”

“I believe he was rationing them when I left.”

“You left him?”

“Probably I shouldn't have.”

The doctor sipped at her coffee and made a face at it. She sipped again. She'd not brought anything to write with. Kayla thought that strange.

“He lost his job and went off the rails. I went to a motel for the night and just kind of stayed on.”

“He didn't hurt you? Anything like that?”

Kayla just stared at the woman until she asked another question.

 

 

Near four in the morning s
he got to see him through the glass of his room door and he slept shallow and his legs danced a little against the mattress. That was the last thing she saw before she left. The cops gave her a ride home and when Kayla got out they were studying the house and the numbers pinned to the brick. She followed the flagstone walk and went down a set of busted stairs to their little basement apartment. At first she couldn't find her keys. No matter. She turned the knob and shoved. The door hadn't been locked and she didn't know for how long it had been like that.

 

 

Three days back at the house
and she had cleaned the place top to bottom. Picked up all of his clothes and laundered them, folded them neat and laid them neat in the drawers. She went to the store for groceries and came back with a pizza and a case of beer. On the walk home black clouds carried in the southern skies and the afternoon turned to night in a hurry.

By six in the evening the rains had overrun the city lowlands and babbled out through the sewer grates. The river swelled and lit out from its banks and sunk highway feeder roads. People swam on the parkway where a train had left the rails and turned over, floated on and on. Most of the houses had lost their lights and candles lined high windowsills where people watched the rains. There were no birds anywhere. Near midnight the moon shone massive behind lessening cloud.

The apartment was on the west end of the city under a tall and narrow Victorian house, built near a crest on a street that didn't go under. Through the storm Kayla stood in the basement stairwell drinking at her beer, kept going around the place to make sure there were no leaks or wet patches in the drywall. The house did not lose power. She watched movies until the small hours of morning and slept on a mattress and box spring set right on the flooring of their windowless bedroom.

 

 

When Kayla got up the next day
she found a shallow pool of cold water in the back room of the apartment, leakage already dried to silt along the outer wall of their living room. She started to clean at it with a mop and some ragged old towels. After that she planted fans around the room and pointed them to where the water had come in.

“It don't look that bad,” she said.

She was about to call him out of the room and she stopped partway and felt strange. Hollows inside her. She went through to the kitchen entry. Saw where Matthew always had to duck low under the covered underhang where the vents ran. Tiny spots of red in the spackling where he'd often caught his forehead travelling past. The landing steps outside were bone dry when she went there to lay out the rugs, the concrete near-white in the sun.

 

 

Days to come and she noticed
the smell. Like damp soil. Fieldrot or the mulch of a forest floor. She pulled the furniture away from the walls and saw the creeping-vine paintings of mold on the wood and along the floorboards. Kayla bleached it all to where she had to leave the house and sit out front for a while with the doors and windows open. The fans blew at the baseboards and drywall for days at a time. The lower half of the back-room wall started to sag and buckle.

Their landlord came through with his friend. Both of them small and black-haired. They broke into the wall and studied the rot and the foundation where it was run through with cracks and fissures. They spoke at each other in Mandarin and the friend, who was supposed to be the contractor, raised his voice and held bits of the wall in a gloved hand. He chucked the ruined stuff and left the place in a hurry, wouldn't come back into the room. The landlord said he would be back and then he left too. A few minutes later Kayla went out and stood at the front walk, looked around the neighbourhood. Across the road was a small crew of labourers. Two men who'd taken too much sun and their crew boss with the crest for a local plumber's union on his shirt. Kayla went across the road to them.

“You all thirsty? I got some cold beer.”

They just looked at each other.

“You gotta come down to get 'em,” she said, and left out across the street again. Their crew boss locked the work van by remote and followed but ten feet behind her.

Kayla gave them each a bottle and had them come through to the back. They stood there filthy and studied the room, sipped at their beers.

“They're gonna have to seal this up,” said one labourer.

“Shit,” the crew boss said. “They're gonna have to gut the whole fuckin' place. Dig down around the outer walls and fix the foundation.”

“Can we still live here?” Kayla said.

“Not for long.”

 

 

An old man with navy tattoos
ran the front counter of the rooming house and he studied Kayla's forms behind Plexiglas. Weird folk travelled the lobby. Two women howling drunk in the middle of the day. A young man missing his right arm at the elbow. The rates were not as low as they should have been. The clerk was supposed to call for references but he just scribbled something and gave her a key.

“That your truck out front?” he said, nodding out through the greased and cobwebbed glass doors.

“It is,” Kayla said. “You think it's okay out there?”

“You got belongings inside?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, no, it ain't.”

He leaned down under the counter and came back with a pass card in a cellophane sleeve. He slid it to her by the shallow gulley under the glass.

“There's a little lot they reserve for the bossman and contractors that come through. You can park there for now. It's covered over.”

“Thank you,” Kayla said. She took the pass and stood there with the old man a minute. He tried to smile at her.

“How long you plannin' on stayin'?” he said, and he said it funny.

 

 

Matthew wouldn't see her
through his first month at the hospital. She went anyway and spoke to the shrink and to orderlies that knew him. They'd switched many of his old medications and taken him off some of them outright. In some cases he'd been getting doped so heavy with them that his blood and organs were full with toxins and the shrink figured he'd just about crossed into territory where he might have spent his liver.

“They likely weren't working properly for him when he was taking them like he was supposed to,” the shrink said. “Even before he started his tinkering.”

“That why he hit the bottle harder all of a sudden?” said Kayla.

“Could well be.”

They'd sat down in the cafeteria again, the place half-full this time with staff and patients and their visitors. Sunlight through the ten-foot glass and in the pale floor tiles. The shrink had a plate of fries and she'd near cleaned it. Kayla did not eat.

“Can we make sure he don't have to see his old doctor again?”

“Yes. I'll just have to get you to sign something. He'll send his records. Are you planning on speaking to him?”

“More likely I'll go over there and shoot him,” Kayla said.

The shrink laughed a little. Kayla didn't. The doctor ate her last three fries. She got up with the tray and Kayla followed her back to the offices to fill out the forms.

 

 

Kayla dropped some books
and clean clothes at the hospital. She waited long to learn the same thing. Learn it by the orderly shaking his head as he came back to his station. Kayla thanked him for nothing and then she went back to the rooming house. She walked into the lobby through one huge, swinging door and then went right back out through the other.

 

 

The bartender gave her two
drinks for every one she ordered. She felt like hugging him. By and by she got drunk and sat there watching the
TV
above the backbar. She played pinball in the pool-room and the board was fucked and she beat it to tilt more than once. Leaning at the bar top for another round she heard two men talking and lingered on.

“I'm tellin' ya he was a crazy sumbitch. Some sorta nervous breakdown or somethin'. There was nobody could talk reason to him.”

“I thought you were buddies.”

The first man blew hard over his lips. Drank deep.

“Only in that we spent too many hours in this same row a' barstools.”

“Well…”

“Well nothin'. I always did find that fella fuckin' spun and he's probably best to be locked up. He weren't never right.”

BOOK: Debris
11.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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