The Keeper (9 page)

S
usan’s apartment was on the south side of town near the trailer park. She lived on the second floor of an old wooden house. Graffiti was spray-painted on her sidewalk and front stoop. It said things like:
Susan Marley sucks cock. A witch lives here. Best lay in town. She is always hungry; she is never satisfied.

Such abuse of the local loon bolstered Paul’s theory that the majority of Bedford’s population was the product of inbreeding. He stepped over the graffiti and helped Susan through the screen door and up the stairs to her apartment. The door was unlocked, so he pushed it open and searched for a light while she stood behind him, swaying like at the bar to music that came from her head.

He had not been here for over a year. Even then, it had been only to drop by, to make sure that all was well and to play that game that all people who once knew each other play. No hard feelings? You don’t bear any grudges that might entail stalking my wife or mailing dead rats through the U.S. Postal Service? Nod your head if you mean “yes” and shake it if you mean “no.” Fantastic! See you next year. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, have a good Easter, and don’t blow anything up on the Fourth of July.

When he flicked the switch to the single bulb hanging from the ceiling, he saw that the room was very different from when he’d last visited. The first thing he noticed was the soup.

There were fifty or so cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup on the green shag carpet, atop the kitchen table, and on the side of her bed. Some were inverted. Inside a few were spoons that had congealed to whatever black residue was left inside the can.

With one look, Paul created the scene. Overwhelmed by too many options at the Shaws Supermarket and with fifty dollars or so in hand, Susan had gone the staple food option. Tomato soup, she must have decided, would cover all her nutritional requirements. She had probably been good at first. She had probably heated it up on the stove. But after a while she’d said, what the hell, it’s only heat, and spooned it right out of the can. After all the spoons had been used up—this might have taken as long as a week since she probably ate only a can a day—she had decided, why do dishes? Why not just guzzle that slop up like a V8? And then, at some point, maybe over the last couple of days, she had run out of soup. She had decided to go to the bar and see if she could find someone willing to pay for a meal. But perhaps he was giving her too much credit. Perhaps there had been no forethought at all.

Along the walls were six large mirrors, each hanging at different levels, none straight. They were the cheap, Kmart, faux-cherrywood variety, and they were fixed to their places by thick layers of duct tape. Inside them, he saw an infinite number of drunk Paul Martins with their left hands rubbing their foreheads. As he entered the room, they came at him all at once.

“Shit weeps,” he pronounced.

Susan had stopped swaying, and was now eyeing him. The blue in her irises got big, and then small, and a shiver ran down his spine. Was it possible for eyes to do that?

He noticed that her hands and feet were dotted with pinprick-sized red spots: frostbite. “Come on,” he said. He pushed the dirty clothes and soup cans from the bed. Like a somnambulist, she let him arrange her body so that her arms were at her sides and her head on top of the pile of clothes he had made for her as a pillow.

“Get some sleep,” he whispered. He thought about it for a second, then gave in to the impulse and kissed her on the forehead. Soon her breath rose and fell as steadily as a metronome.

In the quiet of the apartment, he went about looking for a kettle to warm some water for when she woke. But there was no kettle, only stacks of dirty dishes in the sink and little roaches that scampered near the drain. It was a mess too big to bother with. Better to throw everything away. Better to nuke it with some of those flammable chemicals stored at the mill. The room was so filthy that his skin literally itched.

He picked up her phone. Surprisingly, along with the crumbs lodged in the receiver, there was a dial tone. He ordered a pizza for her and a six-pack for himself. Then he left to see her landlord, in search of a kettle.

When he opened her door, he saw Rossoff standing at the bottom of the stairs. Rossoff lived on the ground floor, and their apartments were connected by this back entrance though he was never supposed to use it. He was a vet with a bum knee who smoked his days away, giving himself emphysema. From the top of the stairs, Paul could hear the whistle of his wet lungs.

“What are you doing here?” Paul asked.

Rossoff grinned. At six feet tall and about half as wide, he was the living proof of what happened to sumo wrestlers when they got too fat. “Just checking. Never know who’s coming and going with her. Like to keep safe.” He wore a full beard, much of which was tangled, all the way down to the open collar of his frayed polo shirt.

“You keep safe from inside your own door from now on,” Paul told him.

Rossoff nodded and smiled. Paul had seen this smile before. It was the smile some of his students used:
Sure, I’ll do my homework, just as soon as you explain to all of us why you got soused for your own protest.
A good deal can be conveyed within a shit-eating grin.

“I think she’s sick up there, got a case of hypothermia. You got a kettle I can use? I want to make some tea or something.”

Rossoff took a deep breath and that breath fought against him, churning. “She likes you, I can tell. Maybe she’s in love,” he coughed out.

“What?”

“Feel like something’s on its way. Can’t stop thinking about her. Bitch gets inside your head. Knows what you don’t want to see. Does the mill burn in your dreams, too?”

Paul stopped for a second, and wondered if he was hearing this right. Hadn’t Brutton and his wife dreamed the same thing? Surely this was only a coincidence. She was just a girl. A girl with wide eyes. A girl who knew things. But still, just a girl. “A kettle,” Paul said. “They have handles. You boil water in them.”

Rossoff shrugged. “She owes me four hundred, last two months.”

“That’s nice. You got a kettle?”

“I don’t got nothing.”

“I see your education did not place its emphasis on grammar.”

Rossoff’s mouth turned down in a look of contempt. “I need my money.”

They looked at each other for a while. “Fine,” Paul gave in. “You got a pen?” Rossoff produced a greasy Bic from his jean pocket and Paul took it while avoiding touching the man’s hand. He opened his wallet, where he kept a few extra checks, and wrote one out for two hundred. Rossoff grabbed it and the pen as soon as Paul scrawled his signature.

“Can I get that kettle now?” Paul asked.

“I told you, I don’t got one,” Rossoff said. He then winked at Paul, opened the door to his adjoining apartment, and left. A smell wafted through the hall as Rossoff shut his door. A smell of staleness, squalor, and human sweat. It was worse than the smell in Susan’s apartment and it made Paul think that there was something rotten at the core of this house. It rose and filled every room.

“Thanks, you’ve been a big help,” Paul called out while lightly kicking the door. “That’s what society’s all about, helping crazy people not die from hypothermia.”

With two hundred less dollars in his checking account and no kettle for his troubles, Paul started back up the stairs. He was winded when he reached the second floor, and he realized that, in addition to being miserably out of shape, he was also nearing sobriety. His head was beginning to pound. The unwelcome Jiminy Cricket in his head asked one question before he silenced it.
What rational person drinks this much and still calls himself rational?

As he neared her door, he heard a buzzing sound. He stopped, leaned against the wall in the hallway, and listened. All he heard was buzzing, like a thousand voices speaking all at once. He waited, but the voices did not go away. His heart was beating fast, and he realized that for the first time in a long time, he was frightened. He snorted to himself; a grown man frightened of an eighty-pound anorexic who played her television too loud. The booze was making him soft in the head.

He opened her door, and the buzzing stopped. There was actually a shushing sound and it quieted. Out of the corner of his eye, he was sure that he saw movement coming from the mirrors. He was sure he saw a crowd of people. Angry people.

For a moment he understood, and he was too frightened to move. The rain. The dreams all the people in this town seemed to share. The corpse of the paper mill whose sulfuric air, on certain days, he could still smell. The way Susan Marley’s irises danced. These things added up. This place was haunted. Susan was haunted. This entire town was haunted, and the only person in this room that wanted saving was himself. If he had been sober, he would have run. But he stood for a few seconds too long, and his moment of clarity passed. In its place returned numbness, the cloudy filter of booze through which he viewed and lived his life.

Paul blinked, and the faces in the mirror were gone. His normal reflection replied to him. He winked at it. Waved at it. It waved right back. He decided he was just too damn drunk.

Just then the bell rang, and he remembered the pizza. Better yet, the beer.

He opened the door a crack. The drenched kid holding the box turned out to be a student in his class. “Hi, Mr. Martin.” The kid smiled from pimpled ear to ear.

“Hello, Craig. Long night with this rain, huh?”

The kid tried to peek behind the door, and Paul moved so that he was leaning against its opening.

“How’s everything,” he asked the boy, handing him a seven-dollar tip on a thirteen-dollar order.

“Good.” Craig bobbed his head, trying to get a glimpse past Paul’s shoulder.

“Okay. Good night, then.” Paul shut the door in the kid’s face.

When he turned around, Susan was standing right behind him. He jumped. “Jesus. Don’t creep up on people like that,” he said.

She grinned, looking less tragic than when he’d seen her in the bar, and more menacing. He remembered the buzzing sound, and the shelf in his stomach dropped a few inches.

“Come on,” he said, guiding her to the table. He pressed down on her shoulders so that she sat. Then he placed a slice of pizza in her hand, holding it up for her so that she would not plop it down into the cigarette ashes.

“Eat your pizza,” he told her.

She lifted the slice up to eye level and inspected it. He took it from her and fed her a bite. Red sauce slathered the corners of her mouth and cheeks like she’d just earned her wings. She took the slice and began to feed herself.

He looked for a napkin. None present. No paper towels. Toilet paper though, about five sheets left. He thought it might be rude to finish it all and left a square hanging off the brown roll until he remembered that social etiquette was not a pressing factor. He ripped off the last sheet, crinkled it together with the rest, returned to the main room, and handed them to her. “Use this,” he said.

She straightened the ball and laid it across her lap. “On your face, Susan.”

She held the paper in her hand, considered it, then patted it daintily over her lips.

“Crap,” he said. He opened a beer and looked out the window at the long pipe of the mill. Susan stood and brushed her lips against his neck. She smelled of cigarettes and, oddly, paper mill smoke. It came from deep within her lungs. The skin on her upper arms was drawn taut over her bones. She smiled at him because she thought he liked what he saw.

He touched her stomach, her ribs. Unlike his wife, she moved with his touch. He wanted to kiss her. Feel a warm, responsive body, next to his own. Instead, he literally shook himself, stepped back, and kicked over an empty can of soup in the process. The spoon inside it rattled as it hit the green shag carpet. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked. He knew this was a stupid question. He could have asked her this yesterday. He could have asked her this a year ago. But he’d never seen her this deranged until now.

“What’s with the mirrors? You really lost it now? You gone over the edge here?”

She grinned and lit a cigarette. It occurred to him that she was having a grand old time. Whooping it up. Watching him squirm was fun for her.

He wished he’d let the hick deal with her problems. Let the hick pay the mute’s rent, see how much he liked it. “How long you gonna go without talking? Mimes don’t make much money, you know. Or do you only talk when you’re alone? I’m a little lost here on the artistic statement.”

She blew a smoke ring.

“What should I do here, Susan? Should I call your mom? Should I call the men with the butterfly nets? I can’t let you starve to death.” She didn’t answer. Just like Cathy. A massive brick wall. Maybe a beer would add some levity, lighten the mood. Yes, a beer was in order.

After his third, he started to feel better. But not enough. “You got anything else to drink?” he asked.

She pointed at a cabinet in the kitchen. Inside was the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he had left there a year before. He opened it and took a slug, knowing that tomorrow he would be too hung over for work, knowing that he would lose his job, knowing that he didn’t even want a drink. He was drunk enough. But it would calm him down. Yes, another drink, and he’d feel much better.

After he sipped what amounted to about two highballs, the room didn’t look so bad. Just messy. And the mirrors, they were an artistic statement. She was commenting on the degradation of working-class life. She wanted to be a ballerina. Whatever. Who the hell cared.

He was no longer imagining what her life was like, waking up here every morning. How she probably got up and then realized that she had no plans for the day. But she’d get dressed, just like everyone else. She might forget the little things, like shoes and a coat, but she’d get dressed and go on with the rituals of living. She’d go to the store and buy a few packs of cigarettes, maybe wander around town. And then she’d get tired and go back to bed unless she brought some hick back with her because there was nothing left. Nothing to do. Nothing but four walls, six mirrors, and a can opener. Nothing. Back to this cell.