Gutshot (6 page)

When he kisses someone else, flay his abdominal skin.

When he says he’s sorry, snatch his nose.

When he tells you that you don’t love him, rip a fistful of hair from his head and put it on your cereal.

When he wants to know if he’s made himself clear, press your thumb against his eye socket and slurp the goop.

When he says he’s sorry you feel that way, peel off his toenails and sprinkle them on a salad.

When he says he needs some time off, jam his hand into a toaster.

When he shows up with flowers, nibble the hair from his arms.

When he invites you on a walk, crush his elbow in a vise.

When he asks if you’ll take him back, tuck your fingers under his lowest rib and pull.

When he draws you a bath, sever his smallest toe.

When he offers you his arm, squash his neckflesh in your fist.

When he asks you to wear the dress he likes, slice off a slab of his buttock and serve it to yourself on a plate.

When he wants to know if you think he’d be a good father, broil his viscera.

When he marvels at how much time has passed, gnaw the skin between his fingers.

When he asks you to take it down a notch at the Christmas party, pour wine into his ear and drink what drains out.

When he teaches your kids to drive, masticate his chin.

When he takes you out for your anniversary, squeeze his forearm until it bursts.

When he says you’ve looked a little pale this year, open his throat with a rough wedge.

When he drives you to the doctor, cut a knot of muscle from his upper thigh with a handsaw.

When he sits with you for months, chew off the tip of his thumb.

When he tells the hospice nurse to leave you both alone, work a tube into his larynx.

When he says you’ve had a good life together, force your finger into his mouth and scrape out his soft palate.

When he says he’ll miss you, dig a spoon into his belly button.

When he says goodbye, eat his heart out.

The Moment of Conception

We wanted a child so badly! Even then, when she suggested the procedure, I wasn’t sure about it at first. It didn’t seem natural.

She pointed out that the fact we hadn’t made a child, when we both wanted it so much that we each dreamed about it every night, was not very natural, either.

It was true. My nightly dream featured a wide, dark field lined with bowing branches, a line of dogs running ahead of me in a single-file line. Their feet would pound the earth and I would feel an earnest and magnetic connection to them, my body being pulled along behind.

Meanwhile, she often dreamed that she was walking through a hallway of carriages filled with sand. She would wake crying if she had a chance to touch the sand, which she described as being very cold.

We were sitting up in bed together, sharing a bowl of chocolate pudding in the nude when she spoke of her plan. Neither of us much wanted sleep. We had made a life together, a quiet house. In the center of our home was our bedroom, and in the center of our bedroom was an extravagant bed, which we had specially made. The mattress was out of reach from the floor and getting in required scaling one of two ladders mounted to either side. We would take our meals there.

She dipped her spoon into the pudding and licked it off. She said, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

It would be nice if you would alert me when you were thinking of things like this, I said.

I have the supplies ready, she said. She told me she had read about certain creatures in the ocean who experience this phenomenon naturally.

You might as well show me the supplies, I said.

Getting down onto her naked belly, she scooted toward the stepladder. She was always a handsome woman and had only grown more so with the sprouting of wiry gray hairs, each reminding me of a sensitive antenna tuned to the stars. I recently discovered a gray, almost white hair jutting proudly out of her mons pubis. The other hairs seemed to show it some deference, curling below.

She padded to her closet and returned with a shoebox. She placed it at the foot of the bed, out of reach, before mounting the stepladder. At the top, she got on her belly again and scrambled up, rolling toward the center of the bed and patting the mussed sheets around her. She pushed the box over to me. Inside were sewing needles curved like half-moons, thick coiled thread, a hunting knife, and a vial of white powder atop a folded plastic sheet.

You found my knife, I said.

This would mean something to me, she said. And what’s more, she said, I think this really might work. She was coaxing me into tumescence through the sheet. I held her hand still with both of my own.

It involves some sacrifice for the both of us, she said. She removed her hand from my grasp and took the plastic sheet from the box, unfolding and spreading it over the comforter. She lay down on the plastic and gestured toward me.

A few items made an appearance in my head in quick succession, dominated by the thought that it was difficult to find a person with whom I shared so many of my hobbies and habits and that if I left her, our dual presence would be missed on the court by our badminton league for months to come. But it was more than that; this was a woman who gave up a job in the city to be with me. She made a pastry for us to enjoy each Sunday, featuring food items of individual or mutual significance to us. There was the lemon cake for my years in the seminary, the chocolate ganache for one of her long illnesses. I knew from her kindness and her spinach torte that she was my spiritual equal.

Thinking of her value, I entered her easily and we held there for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes while she readied her hand. She touched my hip, kissed my neck. When I was positioned properly inside her, she grasped the base of my member with a firm hand and sliced it off, the knife’s clean cut blinding me as if it had severed my optical nerve as well. I collapsed to the side and felt pressure from her hands holding something to my body, a cloth, and upon regaining my vision, saw her injecting herself with a compound, and upon waking some time later, saw her sewing her bloody sex closed, my own still inside, with a hooked suture needle, a look on her face of such steady concentration that she seemed to express a controlled rage, and I saw that my body was already closed and cleaned and healing under a fresh linen bandage.

We woke much later, pale and thirsty, the plastic sheet sticking wetly to our bodies. Her breathing stuttered as she moved her head in the crook of my arm and then she was quiet. There were things that we would do for each other, sacrifices we would make, and the proof of that fact was before us as plain as an hour in the day. It was a beautiful morning or afternoon.

Journey’s End

Once you counted eleven hundred days, you lost the desire to count. You threw out your notebooks, which freed up some space for fuel. Those days we were looking either for fuel or for places to store it. We opened every closed space, every fridge and trunk, every clotted gallon jug, finding mostly rot and the occasional mummified corpse of something small like a squirrel, which either had tried to hide itself or had found its end at the hands of others. I began to fantasize what might happen if we discovered glowing cubes and cracked them open to find blistering stuff of the universe within. I didn’t miss you counting the days like you needed a record. Like any authorities picking us up would want to know the details of our survival. I figured things would be better when you gave all that up and I was right.

We found fuel in plastic bottles and tins, some mixed in with orange juice. I would have almost rather had the juice. There was one double-zip bag of fuel and one of vinegar that used to be wine at the base of a pile. I found a cooler of urine buoying rotten cans, their metal bowed out, contents sunk in a haze at the bottom. Some industrious individuals filled every light fixture in an empty house with gasoline. We marveled; they had freed delicate glass from metal and filled each bulb, soldered to reattach, and affixed in place. If the power ever came back on the whole thing would go up. It wasn’t clear why anyone did the things they did. You remembered your father obtaining a wood-boring drill-bit set; after he died, you found that every book in his house had been ventilated and the trees out back as well.

Behind the bulb house we found our third video-game cartridge, maybe the first that might actually work in a console. You saw it first, its black half-moon tucked under a pile of makeup tins, their pressed powder turned out beside like a fleshy pyramid. Our goal after some walking was to settle down, and such a cartridge was on our short list of essential items. We would find what we needed and once we got everything we would stop.

We settled that week in a nice place. There was a bed for us, the cellar was clean. Someone had semiprofessionally engraved his family crest into the door. There was an old set and console. I hooked up the generator and didn’t immediately die. You blew on the cartridge and snapped it in. We held each other when the old familiar sound emerged. I wanted to break the screen and employ the services of its glass on my face but you warned me to be careful after all we had been through. You were thoughtful like that.

Three

These Are the Fables

We were in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaumont when I told Kyle. I figured I’d rather be out under God as I announced the reason for all my illness and misery.

I said Well shit. Guess we’re having a baby.

“Lemme see,” Kyle said, frowning at the test for a second before tossing it into a planter. He flipped the double deuce to a stranger who had set his coffee down to applaud. “People these days,” Kyle said.

I said my folks would be happy.

“Here’s the thing though,” he said. “Your folks are dead. And I have a warrant out for my arrest. And you’re forty years old. And I am addicted to getting tattoos. And our air conditioner’s broke. And you are drunk every day. And all I ever want to do is fight and go swimming. And I am addicted to keno. And you are just covered in hair. And I’ve never done a load of laundry in my life. And you are still technically married to my dealer. And I refuse to eat vegetables. And you can’t sleep unless you’re sleeping on the floor. And I am addicted to heroin. And honest to God, you got big tits but you make a shitty muse. And we are in Beaumont.”

I said these were minor setbacks on the road to glory.

“And,” he added, “the Dunkin’ Donuts is on fire.”

Indeed it was. Customers streamed from the doors, carrying wire baskets of bear claws, trucker hatfuls of sprinkled Munchkins. “Get out of here,” one of the patrons said. “The damn thing is going up.”

Listen, I said. We’re going to have to make it work, we’ll forge a life on our own and the child will lead us.

The wall of donuts had fueled a mighty grease fire. The cream-filled variety sizzled and popped. Each ignited those within proximity. Their baskets glowed and charred. The coffee machine melted. The smoke was blue and smelled like a dead bird. I popped the lid off Kyle’s coffee cup and puked into it. All I had wanted that morning was an old-fashioned and the absence of puke. I said that everything would be all right, that we were living in the best of all possible Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots.

He pushed some dirt over the test with the toe of his boot. “Poor thing,” he said. Between his sensitive nose and sour stomach, we both knew the next nine months plus the eighteen to twenty-two years after that would wreak some manner of havoc. I put the coffee cup on the ground because the trash bin inside was consumed by flames.

He took my hand and we got out of there before the cops showed up to the fire and started checking IDs. He stopped at the Kroger and came out with half a dozen roses, which he laid between us on the dash.

“Let’s get back to the Rio Grande,” he said. I tipped my seat back and dug in to sleep while he took the tollway. The coast was speckled with cities with names that would suit the spines on a grandma’s bookshelf. Sugar Land. Blessing. Point Comfort. Victoria.

We ended up at the Days Inn in Corpus. Kyle examined a road map in his underpants while I took the bucket to the ice machine. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.

A young woman touched my ice bucket. “We are looking for where Selena was murdered,” she said.

I said I didn’t know what she meant.

“Fifteen years ago at this very Days Inn,” the woman said. “I am disappointed in you.” An older woman was leaned up against the ice machine. She had her face pressed into her hands and her hands were pressed into the ice machine.

“They won’t tell us where,” the younger one said. “They changed the numbers on the doors so we won’t find out.” She pulled me close. “There are secrets at this Days Inn,” she said.

I said that there were secrets at every Days Inn. The ice machine was broken and the women wailed for unrelated reasons.

“Our angel,” one of them said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did resemble an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry-room floor.

In the room, Kyle was eating a waffle the shape of Texas and reading the syrup packet. I stood in the open doorway.

“The first ingredient is corn syrup,” he said. He was a shadow in the back of the long room in his buttoned shirt and a clean pair of pants. He had his shaving kit out on the table. The blade was drying and his face was shorn and cold. He said, “The second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup.”

I told him he looked like he was preparing for a funeral.

They say that hotel-room floors have
E. coli
but I lay down anyway. Kyle came and settled near me. When he pressed his cheek against my belly I could feel the machine motion of his jaw grinding tooth on tooth. I said These are the fables we will tell our child.