My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (31 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“It’s not for sale,” Axel said, leaning forward, allowing the casino boss’s fingers to follow the lines of the mermaid’s hips, and down to where the points of her fins ended just above his ass. The casino boss playfully snapped at the elastic of Axel’s briefs, which stuck up from his baggy dungarees.
“
Nothing’s
not for sale,” the casino boss said cheerfully. He took the lid from a vase on the credenza, and reached in for a thick roll of bills held together with a rubber band. “Think of all the intoxication you could buy your little sweetie. And a boy so young as yourself would heal in a matter of weeks. Our good doctor has all the latest medical gadgets. And strawberry-scented anesthesia to boot! You won’t feel a thing.”
Not only did Axel then agree to be skinned, but he signed a far more sinister contract with the casino boss. He promised he would give him a child. “You young people,” the casino boss said, “have unwanted infants all the time. It’s no loss.” He then offered Axel a much-consulted pornographic pamphlet disguised as a medical guide:
Properly Defiling the Mermaid
, by Dr. H. W. Easterman, with illustrations by the author, its pages taped together and falling loose from the staples.
In the flophouse bathroom that night, Axel thumbed through the pamphlet with horror—the text and illustrations were graphic, but the photographs were more so: full-on mermaid snuff, the girls vivisected, their flesh peeled back and their innards laid open atop a clinical bench. He slapped the book shut and examined his back in the mirror, staring at the tattoo, divorcing himself from it, gritting his teeth and furrowing his brow, as if willing himself to slough off the skin painlessly.
He took Rapunzel to the roof then and, within the fence of wrought-iron spikes of the widow’s walk, made love to her sweetly and passionately, in a variation on diagram #142 from the pamphlet. After, as he watched the stars flicker in and out within a netting of smoke-colored clouds, and considered the chilling magnitude of his own smallness, he knew he would be defaulting on all contracts with the casino boss. But the refusal of their first-born would most certainly be the end of them; the casino boss’s spiny network of thugs infected every district of the world. Where could they go but into the air?
Just before dawn broke, Axel took Rapunzel to the convent of the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, its massive doors crafted from the hulls of retired ships, barnacles still crusting the wood. The door knocker was an anchor dangling from a chain. At the noise of it, a tall nun with a paralyzed hand swung out her claw and captured Rapunzel by the hair. “We have no place for boys who violate helpless creatures,” the nun said in a voice gravelly with sleep and the whiskey she nursed every midnight, as she snatched away Axel’s lover. Rapunzel, so long voiceless, howled with the keening of a rabbit in a trap, and she didn’t stop, and Axel didn’t leave the front garden, not for two days and two nights, until the nuns, unable to worship peacefully even with cotton in their ears, evicted Rapunzel, a twenty-dollar bill safety-pinned to her smock. Back in her wheelchair, Axel kneeling next to her, she wrote in her sketch pad, in a shivery, old-lady cursive:
I am an animal
.
Axel lifted his fingers to her lips. He parted her lips with his thumb and slipped his pinkie in to touch at the powerful stump of her near-soundless tongue. “Thank God for your terrible noise,” he told her. He made love to her again, right there, in that garden overrun with a trumpet vine that attracted only flightless birds, and he knew they watched, the nuns, he knew they gathered in the crow’s nest because he could see the stem of it warping with their weight, could see the nest of it leaning forward like the head of a sunflower. The nuns watched, their neutered flesh tucked away in mortifying panties of thorns, growing slick, throbbing with afterlife.
Never to be yours
, he said in his mind to the nuns, about his love,
never to be anybody’s but ours,
and he knew this was true, because he and Rapunzel were impossible, everyone said so. And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.
“Maybe our baby would be happier with them,” Rapunzel wrote on her sketch pad as they escaped Mudpuddle after dark, Axel pushing her wheelchair through the forest. Though the chair bounced and bumped along the pinecone-strewn path, Rapunzel drew a portrait of the child they’d have and give away, a baby with legs and wrapped in fox-fur bunting, resting in a pram so elegant it resembled a hearse with its silk curtains and its curlicues of chrome on a waxed black cab. “We’d have a rich child,” she wrote.
What Axel didn’t tell her was that the silver duct tape he’d wrapped around his knuckles concealed a missing finger. He’d left the nun’s garden only once during Rapunzel’s captivity, to go to the boardwalk for some pralines to sustain him in his vigilance, and was there nabbed by a goon who’d taken him to the lower guts of the Waterloo Casino. Luckily for Axel, the goon had been too giddy with sadism, determined to luxuriate in Axel’s slow torture. As the goon had delighted in Axel’s lost finger, using it to scratch his nose and chewing on its hangnail, Axel had escaped through a vent.
And it was the goon who’d revealed to Axel the casino boss’s true intentions—the organs of the first-born would be harvested. The casino boss’s wife was failing fast and needed fresh parts that were as like new as possible.
“When he finally told me about his finger,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree, “I felt so sad for our first-born. I cried and cried as if our baby existed, as if I’d seen him and lost him. So I don’t know whose idea it was, when we came up to the hanging tree, that we should put our necks through those nooses. Have you ever seen
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare?” Desiree hadn’t, but she’d had a part in Rothgutt’s all-girl production of
Titus Andronicus
last year. “Axel and I saw it at the Mudpuddle Beach amphitheater. Romeo had been played by a forty-year-old actor in a wig and with circles of rouge on his cheeks, but he was quite good, and you could very much forget that he was too old.”
“Like
Romeo and Juliet
,” Axel told Rapunzel as he lifted her from her chair and helped her to the noose that had lynched many men. In Axel’s arms, she felt euphoric, her soul given over entirely to this notion of absence, and she slipped her neck through the noose and reached up to tighten the knots. Axel stepped back, but couldn’t bear to have her die before he did, so he leaped up onto the seat of the wheelchair to reach for the next noose on the tree. The wheelchair rolled from beneath him and he fell to the ground, hitting his head on the skull of a long-dead convict, knocking himself unconscious. When he woke, Rapunzel swayed lifeless above him.
“It wasn’t that he changed his mind, Desiree,” the mermaid ghost insisted, “but that he thought he could somehow keep
my
soul alive if
he
lived.”
Upon hearing this, Desiree, her wrists too weak to hold on any longer, let go of the branch and fell to the ground. The mermaid’s ghost went instantly vaporous. When Desiree landed hard on both feet, she felt her Achilles tendon tear in her ankle, and, like a stretched rubber band snipped with scissors, the tendon snapped up inside her leg and balled behind her knee. She passed out from the pain but woke only minutes later, Miranda lifting her into Rapunzel’s wheelchair, which had sat wrecked beneath the tree ever since the half-orchestrated suicide pact. Miranda, with the screwdriver she kept tucked in her sock for protection against the pervy mashers who crept among the forest paths, repaired the chair’s wobbly wheels and pushed Desiree toward the wintry gray haze of the sky above the ocean, far in the distance.
“It’s past midnight already,” Miranda said, “but if he truly loves you, he’ll still be waiting.”
“I need a doctor,” Desiree said. Her leg felt like her elbow felt whenever she banged her funny bone, but one hundred times worse.
“Shhhh, there’s no time to talk,” Miranda said, though it was at least a half hour’s walk to the beach. Desiree closed her eyes and longed for sleep so she could dream dreams of Axel, so handsome in those days before he saved the mermaid from drowning.
It must have been only a week or two after Rapunzel’s death that Desiree had found a note from Axel in their crack in the wall, which she had still visited every morning before going to the hives to collect the honey. She would run her fingertips through the break in the brick, hoping to scratch her skin on the edge of paper.
Dear Desiree, Are you still on the other side of this wall? Love, Axel.
Dear Axel, Yes. Love, Desiree.
Axel had returned to Starkwhip Academy, but not as a student. He now worked for the boys he had so adored, and for the professors and the deans. No one recognized him, and certainly no one believed him when he told them he was Axel. He became known only as Nine Fingers due to his missing pinkie, and whenever anything was stolen, he was blamed.
You’ve been nine-fingered
, the boys would say to one another when even so much as a single tooth of an old plastic comb turned up gone.
Every day he crawled through their crawlspaces and pipes with a hard-wire bristle-brush, dusting their chimneys and ducts—polishing every ventricle of the black lungs of the ancient halls in which the boys studied listlessly. In the basement, he stirred their laundry around with an oar in a kettle of boiling water and lye, and sometimes, when he folded their clothes, he’d put on a boy’s uniform, skivvies and all, and fantasize about the life he’d once led. He’d lie back in a pile of quilts, rubbing his genitals through this other boy’s britches, smoking a damp cigarette that frequently fizzled out from the humidity of the laundry room. He’d press his fingers hard against his tender throat, and he’d swallow, approximating the strangled breaths Rapunzel must have struggled for in her final minutes of life.
I’m worse than that pirate
, he thought, thinking of her knifed-out tongue.
How can I live with myself?
He pressed harder on his throat and imagined it being hard enough to choke all life from him, and he pictured Axel dead, and Nine Fingers alive, Nine Fingers the criminal, the villain, and he proposed to Desiree among the clouds of angered bees, her face hidden by a heavy net draping down to her shoes from the broad brim of her hat of black velveteen. The ring was a ruby one he’d stolen the night before from the headmaster’s wife as she’d bathed; she’d safely tucked it away in an antique jewelry box with a pop-up ballerina that didn’t pop up anymore. He’d tried to fix the ballerina by monkeying with a cog, but then he’d heard the sexy rush of water as the headmaster’s wife had stood from her tub squeaky clean. “Don’t let the ring fall from your finger this time,” he told Desiree, either remembering the circumstances wrong, or hoping Desiree had forgotten how he’d fumbled his proposal on the Ferris wheel. She forgave him the little lie, the first of thousands of forgivenesses she could feel waiting to be granted, stuck in her teeth like an ache.
Though Desiree and Miranda arrived at the chapel long past midnight, Axel waited. He sat on the bumper of a rusted Volvo parked in front, beneath the pink of neon lovebirds, his legs crossed, the flood-level trousers of his tux revealing mismatched socks. He’d rented the tux, a dandelion yellow, from the chapel, fake shirt-ruffle and all.
“He mustn’t see me in this chair,” Desiree said, and Miranda rushed ahead, waving her arms, shooing.
“Bad luck!” Miranda yelled. “You can’t see the bride in her wedding dress! Go inside!”
And he did as he was told. He went to the pastor’s office to keep from seeing, and the pastor’s wife helped Desiree into the chapel as Miranda hid the chair in the peony bushes of the parking lot. The pastor’s wife seated Desiree in the front pew. “We usually charge a nickel to rent a bouquet,” the pastor’s wife said, pausing to allow for Desiree to offer a nickel, then she continued with, “but that’ll be my present to you.” She brought Desiree lilacs made of felt, their stems wrapped in an embroidered hankie.
Desiree took a deep breath and closed her eyes when she heard the pastor’s wife begin to play an almost-melodic song on the pump organ. She thought of all the weddings she’d ever devised growing up—she thought of her play-marriage to Ophelia Littlenought in the third grade, her nightgown knotted atop her head and training behind her like an antique veil, her bouquet nothing but morning glories. She and Ophelia had mock-kissed—their hands over their mouths—in a corner of the yard where the gardener had just drowned a toad in a bucket. She remembered how, when a little older, she had talked herself to sleep reciting the vows she would write for the pretty-faced prince who’d been in the news when his mother fell to her death from a balcony—
If I ever stopped loving you for even a second, may the devil himself knock me over with a feather.
She remembered all the flowers she’d ever considered holding at the altar—all the tall violet glads, the plain-faced daisies, the tiger lilies with their vulgar spots. She’d decided on yellow roses until reading in an old book of manners that yellow roses were symbolic of jealousy.
My groom will not ruin my wedding
, she vowed as she sat in the pew of that dollar-a-service chapel, and indeed he didn’t. He was so beautiful in his suit that didn’t fit. His Adam’s apple up-and-downed with his sweet, nervous gulping, wiggling his bow tie that was knotted all wrong to begin with. She thanked God that he let Rapunzel die alone, and then she felt sick with guilt for thinking of Rapunzel at all.

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