Naked, on the Edge (7 page)

Justice can be swift. Justice should be swift.

Fisherman Joe struggled violently, back and forth against the nylon rope. At last he spoke. "Please don't! What you doin' this for?"

"Katie said that, I bet!" laughed Bill, ignoring Melinda. "No, Katie yelled it, I bet. She screamed it, begging for her very life, I bet! 'No, don't! What you doin' this for?' Did it make you hard, you flicking redneck bastard?" Bill stepped up to Fisherman Joe and almost pressed his lips against those of the bound man. "Did you get hard when you cut my wife into ribbons?"

"I didn't do nothin'!"

"Shut your fuckin' mouth!" Bill cried. He picked up a stick and slashed it across Fisherman Joe's mouth. The skin split apart on contact, leaving the man with a wide, bloody grin-like wound. Joe sobbed.

"Now," said Bill. He began to pace back and forth before the tree, rubbing his chin.

"Let me see if I can recreate this little scene for you. Stop me if I leave out any important details. You found Katie building a campfire, and she looked like a good piece of ass. Yes?"

Joe, blubbering, shook his head. Tears, blood, and spit ran down his face to his shirt:

I thought so," said Bill. "Good-looking piece of ass that would have nothing to do with an uncivilized thug from the backwoods. So you throw down your fishing pole and go for her. Hey, pussy tastes better than trout any day, doesn't it!"

"I never even seen her!" screamed Joe. "I killed . . ."

Bill hurled his fist into the man's face. Fisherman Joe coughed and sputtered.

Bill strode to the campfire. He felt around inside the utensil bag until he found long
handled barbecue tongs. From the fire he fished a glowing, bright red piece of wood. He went back to the sycamore tree. "Open his mouth," he said to Josh.

Josh said, "Bill, good Lord, would you let the law—!"

"Open his mouth, Josh! Let's have it done!"

"No!" cried the man on the tree. "Stop it! I killed–"

"I fucking know you did!" screamed Bill. He slapped Joe's bloody, drooling mouth.

Josh went to the tree and pried Fisherman Joe's jaws apart. The man gasped and gurgled, tossing his head back and forth. Bill shoved the burning coal into the mouth. The cries covered the sounds of sizzling, although Melinda could see steam rising from between the lips and out both sides of the bloody gash.

Bill dropped the tongs. "Man was perjuring himself," he said. "Can't have that in a court of law. Now, the evidence will continue."

Melinda felt her gorge rise, but she couldn't look away. Kill him if you're going to, she thought. Get it over with!

"She struggled, not wanting you to put your filthy claws on her," said Bill. "And so you picked up your ax and gave her a few chops. That old, trusty, rusty ax."

Fisherman Joe cried, coughed, and shook his head. Melinda glanced at the man's ax on the ground, at the dried blood and the black hairs stuck in it.

Katie's hair is red
, she thought.

"Sliced her good and left her to die on the creek bank," said Bill. "You know, I'm trained to heal people, but I bet I can't heal Katie. You think I can, Joe?"

Fisherman Joe's head wavered, his eyes rolled in the sockets.

"I'll give you what Katie got. A little pain before you must be going." Bill took the pistol from his jacket pocket, and aimed at the man's foot. He pulled the trigger. Joe's shoe exploded with red. The man howled around
his ruined tongue. Then Bill shot the man's other foot. Joe slumped, no longer able to keep his weight up.

“Get it over," said Melinda.

I love you guys," said Bill, looking over his shoulder. His face softened for a moment. "Kill him," said Melinda.

Bill shot Joe's knees out, then put bullets through both of the man's palms.

"He looks too much like Christ that way," Bill said. He shook his head. "Can't have that.
This man is no Christ." He picked up the ax, lifted it, testing the weight. "Nice tool. Sharp and heavy." He walked to the tree and with a grunt, swung the ax at Joe's heaving chest. It smacked deep into the flesh and bone. Josh groaned and turned away.

"No more Christ,” said Bill.

"No more Fisherman Joe," said Melinda. Bill looked up at the man's face. He was indeed, dead. His mouth hung open. His eyes were glazed globes.

"Hmmm," said Bill. "And I had some other ideas." Beside Melinda, it was Josh's turn to lose control. He doubled up and barfed bile into the leaves.

Bill took the ax to the campfire and dropped it in the center of the flame. He collected the three pistols, wiped them off, and put them back into the van. "We were never here," he said to Melinda and Josh. "Get the tents, put them away. Douse the fire, stir it up. I'll take the Toyota, you two the van. We found Katie's body in the ghetto. You understand me? Then the justice system can begin its tailspin."

The tents went into the van, all traces of camping packed and swept away. Fisherman Joe remained tied to the tree.

"If he can feed the buzzards," said Bill, "then his life wasn't a total waste."

"Now," said Bill as he closed the hatch of the van. "Let's get Katie."

As the three walked through the dogwoods and down the knoll to the stream, Bill caught both Melinda and Josh's hands and gave them a squeeze. "Thank you. Greater love has no man than he who will help take a life for a friend." He was nearly giddy in his torment.

Josh and Bill gently lifted the butchered body from beside the jam of logs and leaves. One shoe fell from the dead woman's foot into the water. As Bill and Josh carried Katie up the bank toward the van, Melinda followed alongside the creek to catch the shoe and take it back with them. No evidence could be left. Melinda grabbed a stick from the bank and tried to reach the shoe but it floated on, just out of reach.

The creek made a sharp turn around the rock shelf on the other side. Melinda, holding branches so not to fall in, went around the turn, watching the shoe.

She stopped.

She dropped the stick she was holding.

From somewhere behind, up at the campsite, she heard Josh call, "Melinda! We have to get out of here! Hurry up!”

Katie's shoe was snagged on a small creek rock within reach. Several yards beyond the shoe, lying on the creek's bank with its head split open was a black bear. Melinda took several steps closer. Her lungs were caught on the spikes of her ribs.

The bear's paws were splayed out, one on the ground, one across its chest. The ax-sharp claws were clotted with blood. A hank of red hair was tangled in one set of claws.

Katie's hair.

Melinda stepped into the stream and picked up the shoe. She hurried back to the campsite, where the van and car were turned around, engines revving.

As she climbed into front seat she was careful not to glance into the back where Katie lay wrapped in a tarp. But she did look at Fisherman Joe on the tree, mouth open and still, his expression one of terror and righteousness.

I never seen her!

"Let's go," Melinda said to Bill.

I never killed her, I killed….

She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. The van hit the road and sped toward the city.

M
ail was in.

Elliott Mitchell stepped out onto the front stoop, pleased and shocked, as he usually was, at the cool roughness of the concrete beneath his bare feet. From the mailbox he pulled assorted flyers and bills, several final notices, and two copies of the new phone book, wrapped in brown paper. Elliott flipped through the collection, taking mental notes of the exciting variety of places from where the mail had come and filing this information away in the hungry places of his mind.

Washington, D.C. Chicago, Illinois. Pueblo, Colorado.

If there had been an atlas in his home like there had been in school, he would have looked them up. But the names themselves were intriguing enough.

He moved back into the house. His feet found the familiar, sticky warmth of the worn living room carpet. The cats peed here, and food from Elliott's mother's tray were spilled here. Elliott couldn't keep up with it all anymore, and so the cats continued to pee and his mother's trembling hands continued to knock portions of her dinners onto her lap and onto the floor.

Elliott dropped the stack of mail onto the top of the console television. He moved into the small kitchen. The windows were closed and locked in defiance of the cool May air. Orange flowered curtains hung, dead weights against grease-iced window glass.

There was a two-liter Dr. Pepper in the refrigerator.

Elliott took a long swing from the bottle. "Ellie?"

Elliott's stomach fluttered. He turned toward the call. A drip of cola caught in the corner of his mouth then slid to his chin. "What, Mom?"

"Can't hear my set. Come turn it up, honey."

Elliott put the drink back and closed the refrigerator door. On the door, held by an eclectic collection of magnets, were some of Elliott's best school papers from seventh grade. A spelling test, "A+!” A letter written in social studies to George Washington, "96, Good job Elliott!" Numerous charcoal, pastel, and watercolor artworks, each praised in red ink on a Post-It Note by Mrs. Pugh, the middle school art teacher. He would have had Mrs. Pugh in eighth grade this year for advanced art if he had not been so sick.

But he was homebound now.

He was sick. He knew it, Mom knew it. So very, very sick.

“Just like me, Ellie,” his mother had said. “If you go to school today I might just be dead when you get home.”

And so homebound was the only answer.

"Ellie? The set, I can't hear it and I can't get up. My back's doing it again."

Elliott went down the short dark hall to his mother's room. The door was open. Smells of stale cigarettes, medicated vaporizer, and illness hung around the doorway, a heavy, eye-stinging, invisible fog.

"Set, baby, fix it for me."

He stepped into the bedroom. The floor here was bare linoleum. It was not the pleasant coolness of the front stoop; it was clammy on the skin of his soles. But it was familiar. It was never a shock.

Mom was on her back in her bed, three pillows against the wobbly headboard, one set of white fingers curled around the bedspread at her chest, one set around a cigarette. In the blue light of the television set the skin on her thin face seemed to jump and crawl. When she smiled, Elliott could see her bad teeth. There were three of the cats on the bed with her. Next to the bed was the wheelchair the health department had given her.

"Can't hear it," Mom said. She drew on the cigarette. The smoke blew back out in the wind of a violent cough. She found her voice and said, "Just a little volume, honey."

Elliott stepped to the tiny black and white set on Mom's dresser, and poked at the volume button until the chattering voices were uncomfortably loud. Mom said, "That's just fine, Ellie."

"Anything else?" There was a cat turd on the bottom of Elliott's foot. He looked at the bottom of it but couldn't see except that it looked dark and it felt soft and warm. "You need anything else?"

"Teacher come yet?"

"No. Mrs. Anderson won't be here until two."

Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the tube on an oxygen mask. She let the smoke out then said, "I just can't rest good today. I'm hurting. My back, my heart is just hammering like it wants to come out. Lay with me 'til I'm asleep."

I thought you wanted to watch T.V., Elliott thought, but didn't say. He went to the bed and lay down beside his mother. The mattress was lumpy. When his mother turned to him, her breath was familiar and strong.

"I feel a little better, honey." One side of her mouth went up in what might have been a resigned smile. It looked as if even her face hurt her.

Mom always called Elliott honey. Never "Wee-wee Boy", or "Poop-Man" like the kids at J.E.B. Stewart Middle School did. Elliott's mother loved him, even as she was dying. And she had been dying since Elliott had been in third grade. Her heart was bad, she told him. She couldn't breathe very well because she was born with bad lungs. Her stomach made juices that were poison. Her muscles were giving up inside her skin and her nerves had so many short-circuits the doctors couldn't even find them all. Month after month she begged him to stay with her and not go to school. Daddy had insisted, getting Elliott onto the school bus when he could. But most of the time Daddy left for work before the school bus came, and three days out of five, Elliott would stay with his mother because if she died when he was at school, what would he do then?

Elliott awoke to the tune of
All My Children
. He had slept next to his mother for almost two hours. It was time to find something for them to eat for lunch. At two o'clock, the teacher, Mrs. Anderson, would come.

Mom didn't eat much of the bean with bacon soup Elliott fixed. She let Elliott wheel her to the bathroom but she would not eat with him in the living room. She insisted on a tray in bed, and then only sipped a couple of spoonfuls and ate the chips Elliott had put in a bowl for her. She didn't want the Dr. Pepper he'd poured for her. She wanted Sprite. There wasn't any Sprite, so Elliott told her he would make a list for Daddy when he came home. He could go into town and get Sprite for tomorrow. Mom settled down with another daytime show, and Elliott took the tray to the kitchen, ate his own soup and Dr. Pepper in the living room, and looked through the mail again.