Day One (8 page)

Until then, the long hours kept Stuart busy and tired—a blessing for Ellie. He’d come in late at night, eat, and fall right to sleep. Every so often he awoke in the night. “I want some of the sweet stuff.” A compliant wife, she’d spread her legs. Sometimes she bled, but her mother told her bleeding was common for new brides. Ellie wasn’t so sure—Lady Latex had never mentioned it—but she kept her mouth shut. Stuart gave her money for expenses and she worked around their little farm. There were some chickens and rabbits, the garden to keep up. Housework. She stayed busy. Stuart was tired often enough that when he wasn’t she could deal with the worm.

But now it was the end of the season. Field corn laid up, barley sold. Stuart was around more, wanted sex more often. The worm remained long and thin and always stretched out tight like a steel spring.

“I’d leave him.” Luellen was home from college for a visit. “That, or make him do some reading on the concept of foreplay. They have books with pictures and everything.”

“You’re from another world.”

Luellen had no response.

As autumn settled onto the valley, Stuart came to a decision. “Let’s make us a son.” He’d barged into the house full of energy after a slow day doing equipment maintenance with his father.
Just last night,
Ellie thought, the waters of the brook trailing ripples from her dipped fingers. For herself, Ellie hoped for a daughter. Someone who could grow up in the house with her while Stuart was working, someone she could talk to and teach to be a woman. But when she said as much to Stuart, he scoffed.

“Someone you can lezzie with, Lizzie?” He laughed as though he’d made a joke and pressed her into the wall, kissed her hard.
Then he picked her up with one arm around her waist. He carried her into their bedroom and dropped her on the bed. “Remember when everyone thought you were a witch?”

She sighed. “I’d rather forget.”

“Aw, come on. It’s kinda funny when you think about it.” He laughed again and dropped his pants. The worm looked up at her. “If you were, you could make sure it was a boy. Cast a little spell.” He giggled, amused with himself. She hiked up her skirt and pulled off her underwear. He spit on his fingers and rubbed her, cursory circles against her pelvic bone, then without warning thrust into her. She held her breath, but almost immediately she felt him shudder and ejaculate, hardly enough time for her to wonder would it be like to have the kind of lover—attentive, even playful—Luellen sometimes described. Stuart collapsed, lay panting into the depression where her shoulder met her neck. She turned her head, but couldn’t escape the smell of sweat and machine oil. “You like this?” She couldn’t tell if he was murmuring to her, or to himself. “It’sthe sweet stuff, isn’t it?” After a while he rolled to the side. She tried to creep from the bed but he grabbed her. “Stay here.” He pawed her breasts through the fabric of her blouse. “Give your witchy spell a chance to work.” After a while, he entered her again. She’d loosened up from the first time, was still moist from his semen, so she barely felt it. He fell asleep with his thumb inside her, a cork in a bottle.

When early morning came she eluded his grasp. Maybe he’d remember his joke and tell himself she cast a spell to escape, but she knew she’d simply slipped away as he slept. She had no influence over Stuart or his hand, even less over the fluid processes deep within herself. Still, Stuart might be right—his seed might take. With that thought arose a fear long quiet. “Witches,” someone had once said, “can only bear more witches.” She left the house and escaped into the countryside.

The cool stream lapped her sore vulva. Behind her, Jack began to make a fuss, eager for another run after his drink. She could
sense his brisk energy, his desire to gallop again. “Witches like to do it with animals,” was one of Myra’s favorite pronouncements to the younger girls at church. Ellie eyed Jack’s hanging penis with a clinical eye. She thought it looked more wholesome than Stuart’s straining member. She shook out her shoulders, remembering the days when her hair had been long enough to hide them.

“Jack!” She clapped her hands over her head. “Go! Go home!” She wanted to be alone. The horse rolled one great eye and shook his head. “Go!” After a moment’s further hesitation, Jack stepped across the brook and trotted back toward the house. She watched him with a satisfied gaze. A tickle ran through her stomach and she wondered if she’d tapped into some primal power. The notion was ridiculous, yet strangely pleasing. She smiled into the breeze, alone and content. The last warm day, perhaps, before winter.

Jack left a muddy trail in the water as he crossed. The murk made its way down the stream bed and roiled around her. She lost sight of her legs under the floating silt. The water was cool and soothing. Thin strands of mist rose from the stream. She sat, eyes half closed, sun warm on her face and breasts. After a while, she heard the crackle of brush and looked up the gully toward the house, gasped when she saw it wasn’t the horse returning.

“Stuart—”

“What the hell are you doing?” He hurtled toward her down the slope. “You’re washing me out of you, aren’t you?” He looked terrified.

She recoiled at his approach. “I was just resting—”

“You’re lying!” She tried to scramble away, but her bare feet slipped on the slick rocks in the stream bed. “Trying to kill my son! I know it!” He caught her by the hair with one hand, wrenched her neck around. She fell onto her hands and knees in the water. Stunned. He slammed his balled fist into her cheek, then into back of her head, and she dropped onto her elbows, breasts contracting against the touch of frigid water. As she hung there, gasping, he
took her from behind. “You never,” he grunted, “wanted me ... never
wanted
... my
son
... only care about ...
that Jew bitch!
” When he finished, he stood and buckled his pants. “That’ll take.” His voice quavered in the heavy air. “That’ll take no matter what you try to do.” He ducked his head, wiped one trembling hand across his mouth. The fear was still there, a shadow in his wet eyes. “Now find your clothes and get your ass back up to the house.”

Time passed. The next day and the next month. Winter came, creeping up and settling on her hard shoulders like a shroud. The breeding sows on her dad’s farm got sick and a quarter of them died. She gazed out of the shroud at her husband. “You been witching, Lizzie?” Stuart was jolly with a baby on the way. He laughed, because everyone was so pleased. His folks were pleased and her mother was pleased and her brothers were pleased. Even her father seemed a little bit pleased. And Stuart, he especially was pleased, convinced he’d fathered a boy. When he didn’t know she was nearby he’d mutter under his breath. “A son, a son. My son.” But with the sows sick and dying so artlessly in her father’s barns, Ellie visited the obstetrician. UltraSound revealed the girl growing in her womb. Ellie told Stuart there was nothing she could do. There was no magic. The caul had given her no power over her fate, or good fortune.

He didn’t believe her. He screamed, accused her of casting a spell and making it a girl. He pushed her to the floor and kicked her. She vomited. Within the hour, a pint of blood flushed the dead fetus into the toilet.

Winter stayed on hard that year. Ellie wrapped herself in a blanket and moved through the house like a ghost. She shivered as Stuart worked. He fed the surviving pigs and trucked in oil for the furnace, even collected the eggs. On her best days, her torpor made supper hours late. More often there was no supper at all. And though there wasn’t much heat in the house, even with the furnace
firing around the clock, Ellie refused to share what little warmth remained in her.
There will be no more fucking,
she told Stuart. As her snowy shroud trickled out of the dark sky he looked into her eyes, and he believed her. He knew what she said was true.

November 19 — 10:02 am

I
can’t blame Susan. At best, Eager is just another complication in a day already fucked beyond reason. Another charge to hang on Mitch when there’s no dearth of charges. Maybe a witness at trial, assuming the case ever comes to trial. Assuming Eager survives the bullet behind his eyeball.

But Mitch isn’t going to trial. Assuming
he
survives. A couple dozen cops saw him draw down, and at least one eye in the sky above recorded it. He’ll plead out. As far as Susan is concerned, Eager represents little more than another stack of paper. She has her own problems; Eager is all mine. Unease plays across my belly like a charged wire.

I don’t know what to do with myself, so I start walking. I need to get away from all the boiling motion, the staring onlookers, the earnest cops. I don’t bother to go back to the house for my keys. The cops in my living room could very well still be there tomorrow. But before I move a dozen paces, I knock up against someone. He turns, face sour until he recognizes me. Michael Masliah. He’d been on district patrol when I was still in Homicide, but he’s moved over to the Neighborhood Response Team. I haven’t seen him since I started working on my tan full time.

“Michael.”

“Hey, Skin. What’s going on?”

“Wondering if I’ll ever get my house back.”

“That’s right, they moved in. I heard even the chief was up there.” He shakes his head. “Crazy morning, huh?”

“You said a mouthful.” I laugh, though I’m not sure where the joke is. Sometimes I feel like I hung up my ability to trade banter with other cops with my dress blues.

“What are you up to these days?”

It’s the kind of question I don’t like answering, but I figure Michael isn’t interested in an actual response. “As little as possible.”

“I heard you were working at that coffee shop where you used to hang out.”

I feel my cheeks ignite and I look away. Outside of Susan, I didn’t realize anyone was keeping track of me. “I do a little insurance investigating, but otherwise ...” He’s looking at me sideways. I shrug, realizing it’s a stupid thing to lie about. I’m hardly the first ex-cop to pick up honest work after retirement. “The coffee thing, it’s ... well, yeah, different shop, but the same owner.”

“She’s a cutie, if I remember right.”

Tell me about it.
But I keep my mouth shut and lift my shoulders like it’s something I never think about. But the comment shifts my thoughts to my part-time job at Uncommon Cup. From cop to barista had never been the plan. Some cops are in it to do some good for others, some to do good for themselves. For me, it was about making a living off my one half-assed aptitude: teasing a plausible, admissible narrative out of available evidence. It was a job I did pretty well, and we all need a job. Until the job doesn’t need us anymore. Now it’s hard to look a working cop in the eye and talk about pulling espresso shots for tips and a gnat’s hair more than minimum wage. Or, if I’m lucky, spend a day or two a month snapping long lens photos of some nitwit bricking retail shop windows and so he can file a phony insurance claim.

Michael doesn’t help by being decent about the whole thing. “Hell, Skin, I don’t blame you. If there’s one thing citizen hate more than paying our salaries, it’s paying our pensions after we’ve busted our humps for twenty-five years. You gotta make ends meet.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Thanks for stopping by to cheer me up, man.”

I smile, in spite of myself. “Ah, you know me. Far as I’m concerned, the whole world’s a shit hole and we’re all looking up from the bottom with our mouths hanging open.”

“Then shut your fucking mouth, Skin. Jesus.” He slaps me on the shoulder. “So what happened here, man? Guy was your neighbor, right?”

“I’m as shocked as everyone else.” If I’d have picked anyone in that house to go off the rails, it would have been Jase, but even he would have been a long shot. Just a pissed-at-the-universe teenager, like there aren’t a million of those. I don’t want to get into another post-mortem of Mitch on the porch, but it occurs to me that while Susan might be dodging my bullets, Masliah may be able to help with my real concern. “You remember that kid, Eager Gillespie?”

“From Mount Tabor, sure. What about him?”

“He was here this morning. He got hit by the round our friend on the porch got off.”

“Jesus, you’re kidding. Is he all right?”

“You didn’t see it?”

“I’ve been tied up since I got here. Talking to the neighborhood association folks and trying to get people back in their houses. Dealing with all this.” Beyond him, citizen press against the barricades as uniforms work to maintain some semblance of order.

“Sure. So you don’t know where he went.”

“Where he went? Are you saying he swallowed a pill and then just walked away?”

“I don’t know. The paramedics tried to check him out, but then they got busy with Mitch and no one’s seen him since.”

“Well, I don’t know what I can do, but if I see him—I mean, Jesus, where’d he get hit?”

“Eye, looked like to me.”

Masliah whistles under his breath.

“That was my thought.”

“What did the lieutenant say?”

To mind my own business. “She’s got enough on her plate, Michael.”

His lips tighten, and I can tell what he’s thinking. In his spot, I’d be thinking the same thing. He answers to a chain of command, and I ain’t a part of it. “You know if he took a bullet in the head, we’ll probably find his body somewhere, an hour or a day from now.”