Ghouljaw and Other Stories (22 page)

Sprinting through the lobby, Corbin took the steps two at a time as he ran up the stairwell, jogging along the jaundice-tinted hallway and fumbling for the right key on his key ring. Corbin carried a backpack with him to work, which contained a few handy pieces of equipment for his gig as a mover: pair of gloves, lifting belt, couple sets of ratchet tie-downs, a few other things. He already had the heavy-duty box cutter out and had thumbed open the razor blade as he burst into apartment 505.

Somehow (maybe it was all the brainless horror films he’d watched alone late at night) he knew that no one—a ghoulish, fanged hag . . . a psychopath cross-dresser in a gown wearing garish makeup to resemble a frail old female—would be in the apartment when he ambled in, breathing heavy, box cutter raised and ready at shoulder level. And of course no one was. No
thing
was. The drapes in his bedroom were pulled to either side, but Corbin was unsure whether or not he’d done that before he’d left that morning.

And as sure as Corbin was that there would be no living soul when he bounded into the apartment, he was just as certain that it had not been a ghost or a phantom or some other ridiculous, insidiously spiritual entity. Catching his breath, Corbin walked over to the window and looked down toward the street. He felt no disturbing sensation here—no phantom pocket of apparition-iced air, no half-flashes of grim visions. His breath was beginning to fog the glass now, and he took a few steps back and watched the cloudy patch draw in on itself and fade away.

He’d made a mistake, that was all. He’d made a mistake.

Corbin walks into Cassidy’s immaculate apartment—what he has slowly gained the confidence to call their apartment. He hears Cassidy’s voice somewhere in here, in the kitchen. He finds her talking on her cell phone, her tear-streaked face rosy and puffy. “I got to go,” she says to whoever she’s been talking to and disconnects. Corbin blurts out, “What’s wrong?” Cassidy sniffles, takes a wadded tissue, and runs it under her nose. She makes an attempt to smile, but it just makes her face more pained. When she speaks, her voice is composed and seductively saccharine. “Sit down, Corbin, please.” At first, he assumes it’s one of her grandparents—sick, taken from the nursing home, and sent to the hospital or something. But as he slides into the chair at the table he notices the pamphlet. He hears Cassidy speaking. Hears the words
pregnancy test.
After an excessive explanation, Cassidy breaks out into a fresh series of sobs. Numb but alert, Corbin stands and rounds the side of the table, sinking down to one knee and pulling Cassidy toward him. He wants to tell her it’s going to be okay, that they have nothing to worry about. Most of his mind believes that, but it sounds flimsy even as he silently recites it to himself. It’s going to be okay.

Corbin twitched awake to the sound of a crying baby.

Irritated, he squinted at the clock—three in the morning. Corbin rubbed his eyes fitfully and twisted in his sheets, taking a deep breath and staring at the ceiling. The arc lights lining the street below filled the room with a feeble-diffuse furnace-orange glow. First it was the bawling baby but now, adding to his agitation, his ear picked up on a blaring car alarm echoing somewhere in the neighborhood. Then came the domino effect of contemplation—his mind moving from the whimpering infant to the car alarm to this shitty apartment complex with its attendant shitty residents, which made him think of Cassidy’s place. Then his dwelling inexorably tumbled toward the tragedy of him and Cassidy in general.

But it had been his choice, right?
I mean, it’s not like she kicked me out and told me never to come back
. No. Most of Corbin’s undoing was Corbin’s doing. It had been a choice to walk out, rejecting the possibility of returning to that plush apartment and reconciling with Cassidy. It had been his choice to fork over most of his savings as a down payment to live alone in this decaying box in this ancient building and living down the hall from a demented version of an elderly Joni Mitchell. Throughout all that upheaval, Corbin had somehow maintained his job at the moving company. It was predictable, rewarding work—it was how he’d met Cassidy.

Just by glancing at the stuff he’d been toting he knew they were doing a job for some moneyed maiden. Sure enough, as he and a few of the guys had wheeled in those belongings into the impressive Evanston apartment, the girl hung around, supervising every movement and maneuver, frequently correcting the movers, unable to make up her mind as to where to place furniture. When he was in high school, he had despised this sort of spoiled, upper-class piece of ass. But something had occurred in the intervening years—a degradation in self-value, perhaps—that gave Corbin pause when considering girls like this, as if they might possess the potential to make him better. Corbin had had sense enough to understand that there was one variety of life waiting for him down in Colfax, and possibly another life somewhere else. But his lack of commitment resulted in his current state of stagnant, in-between existence. Besides, who the hell was he to judge this girl?

She had kept her eye on Corbin. And it was she who had ambitiously instigated a hasty conversation at the end of the day, following Corbin into the stairwell and, after some antagonizing small talk, offering him her phone number.

It took some time, but Corbin eventually figured out that Cassidy Davenport’s attraction to him was twofold: 1) Corbin was compellingly deviant—not quite dangerous, but just roguish enough so that by partnering with a guy like him worked as a sophisticated mechanism of revenge toward her strict and overbearing parents; and 2) Corbin Hollis, in her mind, was a worthwhile project—rough around the edges but potentially malleable enough to mold into an in-law minion for her parents and to groom into an upper-class lapdog for herself.

Taking another deep breath, Corbin shoved the covers aside and slipped from bed, shuffling into the darkness of the hallway. He walked by the sliding door of the hall closet, absently noting some of the things stored in there from Cassidy’s apartment—a few unpacked boxes, an old vacuum. Cassidy had been really good at that—buying
stuff
. After reaching the kitchen, Corbin poured himself a glass of water. The water smelled strong and strange in this apartment—a mineral mix of age and earth, infused with a whiff of ozone. The sound of the baby was beginning to fade. He drank deeply, placed the glass on the counter.

He was in the corridor next to the hall closet when the crying baby suddenly let loose a wild wail that caused Corbin to stop and go rigid just outside his bedroom. The crying was so intense—a series of
wah-wah
gulping sobs—and so desperate that Corbin imagined its pinched face, its extended arms, and tiny fingers helplessly flexing at the air, desperate to clutch something secure. He couldn’t detect whether or not the crying was coming from above or below, next door or down the hall by the stairwell. It sounded as if it was coming from everywhere.

Corbin had to go to work in a few hours and hoped the kid’s parents would just rock the damn thing to sleep already. He slipped back into bed and began to doze. And as he drifted away he tried and failed to recall which of his neighbors actually had a baby.

Corbin thinks, but doesn’t ask,
Will your parents die because a) their precious, promiscuous princess got herself pregnant, or b) their daughter’s deadbeat boyfriend is the father?
He wants to convince himself that it might be more likely that it’s a timing issue, that their well-to-do daughter is midway through grad school and unengaged to a guy they’d never met. But Corbin, in that deadbeat heart of his, knows better.

Cassidy’s posture is pert and alert. She has the business-set composure of a woman in a critical business deal—a hostile takeover, maybe.
Just like her old man.
“And what are we going to do, Corbin?” The sophisticated subtext of her tone serves to criticize Corbin’s intelligence—or lack of intelligence as the case may be:
This is partly your fault. So what’s your brilliant plan, genius?

Corbin thinks he can see through her precocious posturing and knows he loves the girl underneath. He’s no angel either. This was the first relationship he’s ever been in where he has so much to lose, and lately he lets Cassidy do all the fit-throwing.
She’s the one with the business degree,
he frequently reminds himself
—she’s the one paying for the apartment. She’s the one paying for everything.
To illustrate this he unconsciously adjusts the hood on the Chicago Bears sweatshirt she’d bought for him recently.

Her question
—what are we going to do?—
flutters through his mind, darting, swooping in and out of shadows like a trapped bat.

She looks at Corbin—looks
through
Corbin—as if catching a glimpse at some celestial event blossoming in the sky over the city. A demure smile appears, making the bloodless implications of her statement all the more unsettling. “You work for a
moving
company, Corbin.”

The name of the old gypsy-witch at the end of the hall was Barb.

Corbin stepped off the elevator and turned left toward his apartment; but as he walked along the narrow, shadow-paneled corridor, he was seized by the sensation of being watched. He twisted and looked over his shoulder.

Down at the other end of the hall, standing in the open-door threshold of her apartment as she sometimes did, was the odd-looking old woman. Though momentarily caught off-guard, he had become used to her presence by now. She was not a tiny creature but rather tall, just about eye-level with the twenty-four-year-old who’d now slowed to a stop to reciprocate her stare. Her long hair was silver-white, parted in the middle, and sheaved over her shoulders in wiry cables of cronish neglect. She stood with her hands resting in the pockets of a maroon, lint-pebbled cardigan that was too large for her. And even from this distance Corbin spotted several pieces of ostentatious jewelry—the dangling earrings, a few beads braided into her scraggly hair, a couple of necklaces looped around her loose-fleshed neck—that held all the hallmarks of a time-displaced bohemian.

Corbin found that he could not pry his attention away from her. Feeling as though he’d lost this installment of the staring contest, he said, “Do you need something?” It came out a little harsher than he’d intended.

The unusual smile on the woman’s weathered face became more pronounced. “I saw you walking on the sidewalk,” she said. “About thirty minutes ago or so.”

Corbin bowed his lower lip and shook his head. “Not me.” He’d just come from the first-floor lobby not three minutes before. “I just got home.”

He was preparing to turn and leave when the old woman’s expression changed. She smiled casually, and to Corbin it was something unusually warm and inviting. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re here now.” Corbin waited. “This building is full of old people and crawling with selfish young shits with wires stuffed in their ears who aren’t aware of anything larger than the damn screens on those damn phones.” Corbin instantly thought the comment funny but revealed nothing. The witch said, “Are you one of them?”

Corbin shrugged. “Am I an old person?”

Her smile turned into a wry smirk. “An old soul, perhaps. But no—are you too preoccupied with your gadgets to assist your strange neighbor?”

With his fisted hands shoved into the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt Corbin quickly pondered the long-range implications of rejecting the request. “What sort of assistance do you need?”

“Lifting sort of assistance. I thought living down the hall from a competent mover might have its benefits.”

Corbin frowned. “How’d you know I was a mover?”

The hippie-witch slipped a hand from the pocket of her cardigan and used a knuckle-knobbed finger to gesture at Corbin’s head. “That cap of yours. You do work for that company, don’t you?”

Corbin’s hand involuntarily came up and pinched the brim of the dark green ball cap, which was embroidered with the logo of two back-to-back dollies, forming a pair of mirror-imaged Ls. “Oh. Yeah.” He adjusted his cap, already approaching the open door.