Helmet Head (10 page)

CHAPTER 22
The Boogerman

What was I thinking?
Macy castigated herself as she opened the door to the storeroom. Hormones! Young, good looking cop standing up against Bill. And let’s face it. Bill was no longer the dashing young rake he once appeared to be. He’d put on forty pounds of beer belly and turned into a sour, abusive troglodyte who treated Macy as chattel.

She’d been thinking of getting out for a year but how to do it? You didn’t just walk away from a control freak like Bill. You had to have an exit strategy. Find a replacement. Pray for Bill to jam himself up and go to prison, but even then she wouldn’t be safe. Bill bragged about his extensive connections behind bars.

She’d thought about faking her own death and moving far away, but where would she go? How would she do it? She was no Jason Bourne. She had no savings. She couldn’t very well appeal to her parents, not after she dropped out of nursing school to be with Bill. They had financial difficulties of their own. If she went back there Bill would know where to find her. And why would they protect her now? They never had.

A tiny part of her brain prayed that Bill would splatter himself all over the highway but her good Christian upbringing jumped on that like a hawk on a June bug.

Shame!

She’d imagined a thousand scenarios: Wild Bill dead in a shoot-out with the police, with rival gangs, with Doc and Curtis. Wild Bill dead of an overdose, heart a mushy softball from years of abuse. Kidney failure. Bad bad
bad,
but she couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming.

She’d had a bellyful of Wild Bill. And how she had a belly full of Wild Bill. Well, not yet. It had not begun to show and wouldn’t for a month or two. Time enough to grapple with that decision. As a little girl, she’d never pictured herself as a mother. She was always the heroine of heroic fantasies, the equal of her romantic partner as they rode into battle laughing, on their valiant steeds. Substitute a Harley for a horse and what have you got?

She’d tried praying, drowning out her thoughts with scripture. But the thoughts wouldn’t stay away. How many times had she dreamed of a white knight to save her from the ogre? Stop it, Macy, she told herself. She was thinking like a schoolgirl, like one of those simpering idiots that devoured
Us
magazine and ended up in a beef with her ex on
Judge Judy
.

As if!

The cop was not a knight and Bill was not an ogre.

The baby changed everything. She had yet to see a doctor but she’d tested herself. Now it was no longer just her. It was the baby, too. Macy had no illusions that becoming a father would change Wild Bill—he already had two whelps with some woman in Biloxi who had filed for child support. Now Bill had to stay out of Mississippi. Big whoop.

He used to joke about his baby mama’s futile efforts to get some relief from him. Not to Macy. To the boys when he thought she wasn’t listening. Doc had a daughter in Seattle and Curtis’ boy was in Afghanistan.

Bill would want her to get an abortion.

She paused inside the cavernous storeroom and shut the door behind her. It was such a relief to be alone! She lived with Bill in a trailer park across the river from Paducah. Bill’s ego left little room for her and her meager possessions. She frequently spent the night on the sofa in the bar after cleaning up when Bill wasn’t around. She preferred it to the chaos of the trailer.

“Ice,” she said. Ice for the cop.

And here was another problem. Before things turned really bad Shane had taken particular delight in scaring the bejeezus out of her with an original creation he called the Boogerman. Despite the light-hearted title Boogerman was nothing to sneeze at.

Shane would creep outside her window at night and drone in a weird old crone voice, “The Boogerman is coming … the Boogerman is coming.…”

Macy: “DADDDIEEEE!”

Dad: “SHANE STOP SCARING YOUR SISTER!”

Shane would wait in the basement for hours giggling, knowing that their mother would sooner or later ask Macy to fetch something from the freezer. Macy was afraid of basements and dark places. She would tentatively enter the unfinished basement staring at the freezer against the far wall working up her nerve.

For Shane, timing was everything. He waited until she heaved a little sigh of courage and started across the floor before leaping out from behind the furnace wearing a sheet with eyeholes screaming, “BUGGA BUGGA BUGGA!” And then chase her, trying to rub his boogers in her hair.

The memory of her shock and fear caused Macy shame and bile in her stomach. Shane lacked the gene which made families love one another. Maybe her parents failed to pass it on. She didn’t know. Maybe her mom’s drinking and dad’s obliviousness was an infection that killed love. She remembered being loved as a child. She felt secure pretty much up ’til five. Things began to change in grade school. That’s when her parents’ unhappiness with each other began to manifest itself.

Mom’s drinking.

Dad’s affairs.

Mom’s retaliatory affair.

Macy started turning her Barbie dolls into zombies. She blackened their eyes, worked gaping wounds into their fresh skin, dressed them in rags, fabricated bones, stripped their hair and replaced it with purple Mohawks. She found solace in the goth lifestyle. She was cursed with sunny good looks. She dyed her hair black to her parents’ horror.

Shane was always there to take the heat off.

Until Macy dropped out of nursing school Shane was the black sheep. Now they were both black sheep although she, at least, was still in touch with her parents, however tenuously.

Younger bro Bruce was a CPA with a firm in Sioux City. She had always thought of him as a cipher, staying in his room playing with computers. He always sent her a card on her birthday. He was married now with a two-month-old baby.

Shane was a bad kid. She knew it, her parents knew it, and his teachers knew it. Their childhood had been punctuated by encounters with angry parents whose children Shane had bullied, teachers he’d humiliated, motorists he’d egged or stoned.

He did a little dealing, a little stealing. There was always a football or basketball coach to plead his case—until he flunked out his senior year. When he was nineteen a judge gave him a choice: Son, you can serve your country or you can serve your time. The family breathed a sigh of relief when Shane chose the Army. Be all that you can be. Shane would have despised Doc and Calvin as weak old losers but they’d come out of the Army with something resembling character.

Last year Macy learned that Shane had gone AWOL while rotating stateside. No one had heard a word from him since.

She hoped never to hear from him again. She didn’t care if he were dead. In fact she wished he was dead. Did that make her a bad person?

“Ice,” she said again. The sound disappeared like a pebble in a well. She went to the refrigerator on the left, an old Frigidaire with a top freezer. She opened it up. Inside were Fred’s venison steaks and chopped venison meat from last fall. The whole thing. She opened the refrigerator to its right, an Amana with a side freezer. The automatic ice dispenser had died long ago and the ice tray contained only white powder.

That left the horizontal freezer in which they’d put Fred’s body. Macy was not particularly squeamish nor was she superstitious, but the sight of her friend’s headless corpse was upsetting. Even before she looked at it. She knew there were several ice packs in the horizontal, the kind you bought at Walgreen’s and put on swollen ankles, because she’d put them there herself to deal with boys’ ongoing bumps, trips and whoopsie-dos. The ice packs were down at the bottom beneath the pizzas taking up very little space.

She stared at the freezer noticing for the first time how much it resembled a coffin. Only white. But they had white coffins, didn’t they? For children.

Well come on girl let’s get it over with. “Ice, ice, baby,” she muttered reaching for the handle. She heaved it upward and looked down. Thank God. Thank God the ice packs were beneath Fred’s feet and not beneath his headless neck. Reaching far in she grabbed both ice packs, straightened up and slammed the lid down.

***