The Dispatcher (21 page)

With a mouthful of mashed potatoes Henry says, ‘I gotta tell you guys, we sure do appreciate your hospitality, don’t we, Bee?’

Beatrice nods, but keeps her head down and her eyes on her plate.

‘Not a problem,’ Flint says.

‘Well, it’s damn neighborly of you.’

Flint nods.

‘And this is a real fine meal. Fine meal, ma’am.’

‘Thank you,’ Naomi says, smiling slightly before picking up a glass of Coke with cubes of ice floating in it and taking a drink. The ice clinks against the glass.

‘No,’ Henry says, ‘thank
you
.’ He picks up a chicken leg and sucks the skin off it. It flaps against his chin, smearing grease on it, before it vanishes into his mouth. Then he takes off a piece of meat and chews.

‘Flint made the rub for the chicken.’

‘Damn fine, Flint,’ Henry says through a mouthful.

‘I saw your tire swing,’ Maggie says.

‘Hush up, Sarah.’

‘Kids are allowed to talk at my dinner table, Henry,’ Flint says.

The two men stare at one another for a long moment, but when Henry says nothing, Flint turns to her and smiles. ‘What was that, Sarah?’

‘I saw your tire swing.’

‘Yeah?’

She nods. ‘Did you . . .’ she licks her lips, ‘did it come with the house?’

‘No, we have a six-year-old.’

‘Is he in bed?’

‘Spending the week at his grandparents’.’

‘Oh.’ She goes back to poking at her peas for a moment, and then looks up again. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Samuel.’

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘Thanks,’ Flint says. ‘It’s Naomi’s dad’s name.’

‘Six years old?’ Henry says.

‘Yeah,’ Flint says coldly.

‘Naomi’s a little young to have a six-year-old, ain’t she?’

‘Naomi’s twenty-eight, Henry, not that it’s any of your business.’ He sets his fork down beside his plate. ‘You reckon you guys’ll be leaving right after dinner?’

Henry takes another bite from his chicken leg, chews slowly, swallows. Then he sets it down on his plate and picks up a napkin from his lap and wipes his face off with it and then his hands. He sets the napkin down on his plate.

‘Well, no,’ he says finally. ‘I don’t guess we will be leaving right after dinner.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Why, you fart or something?’

Maggie looks from Henry to Flint, and though neither man has said anything precisely confrontational, and though neither of them has used a tone that suggests anything but pleasantness, she can feel that something is happening: the temperature in the room has changed: the weather’s gone bad. It makes her stomach feel tight and her appetite has vanished. She looks at the two men to see what will happen next while simultaneously dreading it.

Flint sucks at an eye tooth. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I been awful generous with you and your family, Henry.’

‘I know it.’

‘Let me finish.’

Henry extends an arm and bows his head slightly. ‘You may.’

‘I know I may. It’s my goddamn house.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting your panties in a bunch about, Flint. I know it’s your house. Go ahead and say what you gotta say.’

Flints hits the table with the flat of his hand and while Maggie, Beatrice, and Naomi all jump at the sound Henry does not. Flint exhales heavily through his nostrils, closes his eyes for the length of a breath, and then opens them again. He looks at Henry.

‘I been generous with you and your family, Henry,’ he says, ‘but truth is, I just ain’t comfortable with you guys staying the night. You get on the interstate and drive west another fifteen, twenty miles you’ll come across a perfectly nice motel where I’m sure they’ll be happy to put you up. If you leave after dinner you can get there before bedtime, no problem.’

‘Well, if it was just a matter of sleeping quarters that might be okay, but it ain’t just a matter of sleeping quarters. There’s more to it than that.’

‘We’ve been plenty hospitable. Whatever more there is to it ain’t my problem.’

‘Unfortunately, Flint, it is your problem.’ Henry reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a roll, thumbs a round tablet into his mouth, and chews. ‘I’m making it your problem.’ He tongues at a molar.

‘You’re making it my problem?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘You know what,’ Flint says, taking his napkin from his lap and throwing it to the table, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna wait for y’all to finish up. I’m asking you to leave right now.’

‘Now, honey,’ Naomi says.

Flint doesn’t even glance toward Naomi. His eyes stay locked on Henry. ‘I’m asking you to leave,’ he says again.

‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

When for a moment Henry does nothing Maggie hopes, despite what she knows of him and his temper like a loaded gun, that he will remain calm. He won’t do anything crazy. He’ll stand and walk to the door and call for Maggie and Beatrice. He’ll open the door and they’ll walk through it. They’ll all head out and Flint will slam and lock the door behind them. They’ll get in Henry’s truck and drive away. That could happen. There’s no reason for it to go any other direction.

But as Henry gets to his feet it does go another direction. He grabs a steak knife from the tablecloth where a moment before it lay beside his plate and lunges at Flint.

Maggie slides down her chair and hides beneath the table. She puts her hands over her ears, but that does not block the sound of Naomi’s scream. She closes her eyes, but not before she sees blood splatter to the floor.

‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

His stomach is a tight knot of hatred, and despite the antacid he just ate he can feel bile burning the back of his throat. He tried to play the smiling fool for this son of a bitch, but the man saw through him, same as the cops did earlier. The cops had already seen past the facade—some doors can’t be closed—but Flint, well, maybe he didn’t try very hard with Flint. There was no reason to, really, not when he knew he’d have to kill him. He thought he’d kill Flint and Naomi while they was sleeping, but it’s come to it a little sooner than that. He needs their vehicle and he’s not leaving without it, and if they’re dead they can’t report it missing.

He grabs the steak knife from the tablecloth and lunges at Flint. The man’s eyes go wide and his mouth becomes a black zero—and that is what comes out of it: nothing and nothing and nothing—but he still manages to get an arm out in front of him to block the attack. Arms and flattened palms, however, aren’t much protection against a stainless steel blade. Henry sticks the knife into the palm once, the serrated blade sawing at the bone of the ring finger’s knuckle, twice, into the meat of the thumb, and a third time, severing a pinky finger that just dangles from a single piece of flesh like a macabre keychain fob. Then he pushes in close and stabs the man in the arm and the shoulder.

But Flint grabs him by the wrist with one hand—Henry can feel the loose pinky brushing against his skin like a ghost—and punches him in the neck with the other, and suddenly Henry can’t breathe.

He staggers backwards, gasping for air, and Flint rushes him. This is a mistake. He overestimates the damage his blow has caused Henry. As Flint rushes him Henry simply turns the knife out and ducks his head to the left as a fist swings past it. Flint rushes onto the blade. Henry jams it into his belly further, till his fist is buried in stomach and the tip of the blade grinds against spine at the back of him, and then yanks upwards as if trying to lift the man by the blade’s handle, and in fact he does momentarily lift him off the ground, until his weight causes him to slide back down it, splitting him open.

When Henry was ten or eleven his family had a cow. One of his chores was to feed her every morning, and it was a chore he took very seriously. Over the course of a year he began to feel that she was his friend. He named her Moo and sometimes after school, if he’d had a particularly bad day, he’d sit on the fence and tell her about it. She would sometimes lick his hand with her fat, coarse tongue. Then one day, as Henry walked up his long and winding dirt driveway, books under his arm, he saw his dad cutting off Moo’s head with a meat saw while Uncle Fred cut slits in the Achilles tendons and slid in a gambrel. They used a winch to hoist Moo into the air. Blood thick and dark and full of bubbles drained from her neck and into the dirt. It ran down the driveway in a stream. As Henry walked up the driveway his dad stuck a blade into the cow’s stomach and dragged it down toward the neck. He had never seen so much blood before in his life. It was frothy and rich as crude oil.

As Flint falls to the floor and blood pours out of him Henry is reminded of that day.

He reaches down and pulls the knife out of the man.

He looks toward Beatrice. She is staring down at her lap and rocking herself gently and saying, ‘This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.’

But it is happening, of course, and it’s happening for Bee.

He looks toward Naomi.

Her face is white and her eyes are wide. She is very pretty, especially when frightened. Dishwater-blond hair, lips full, fine wide hips. It’s a shame, really, what he has to do. But he does have to do it.

She is, apparently, frozen with shock. She has not made a sound since that first scream, nor has she moved. Her mouth is open slightly, and there is a strange twitch at the side of her left eye, but otherwise she is motionless.

‘I guess you know what’s next,’ Henry says. ‘I don’t suppose it’s no consolation, but we’re Christians and we’ll bury you with a prayer.’

A small groan escapes Naomi’s throat.

Then he rushes her.

But something strange happens: halfway there his feet lose contact with the floor. His feet stop while the top half of his body continues forward. He flies through the air, turning midair from a vertical position to a horizontal one. And then he hits, chin first. His teeth clack and he bites the side of his tongue. The steak knife is knocked from his hand.

He glances back over his shoulder with watery eyes and sees Sarah hunched beneath the table, one of her legs still extended.

‘Run,’ she shouts at Naomi. ‘Run and get help! Run before he gets you!’

The words seem to snap the woman out of her paralysis.

‘Oh,’ she says.

And then she turns and runs toward the back door, grabs the knob and pulls. The door doesn’t budge. She looks over her shoulder, eyes alive with fear, unlocks the door, pulls it open, and rushes through it, disappearing into the night.

Henry pushes himself up and backhands Sarah.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

The slap opens a split in her lip, and blood trickles down her chin, but she does not make a sound, nor does she look away. She simply stares at him and bleeds.

He gets to his feet and drags her out from under the table. He raises a booted foot, fully intent on stomping her fucking face into mush. Stomping till she’s unrecognizable. That’ll teach her to pull shit like this. It’ll teach her to fuck with—

‘Henry!’

Beatrice limps around the table and wraps her arms around Sarah and strokes her hair and says, ‘He didn’t mean it, Sarah.’ She looks up at him. ‘Tell her you didn’t mean it, Henry. Tell her you didn’t mean it.’

‘Don’t let her leave the house.’

He turns around, grabs the bloody knife from the floor, and runs out the door after Naomi. If she makes it to a neighbor’s house they won’t be able to use Flint’s pickup truck, and he really doesn’t want to have to go through this shit again with someone else.

He scans the horizon. In the distance a yellow light in a window. And running toward it, Naomi. She falls as she runs, then pulls herself to her feet, and continues on.

Henry runs after her.

Ian sits in darkness. A hatchet rests on his knees. His car is parked behind Donald’s trailer so that, when the man finally arrives in his El Camino, he will not be alerted to Ian’s presence. Ian now simply sits and waits. There was a time, and not long ago, when he would not have been capable of doing what he plans on doing here tonight, if he has to, but that time has gone, a small moment in his past that gets smaller as he moves further from it and into the future.

He thinks of Andy Paulson, of realizing that he was capable of following through on his threat. Capable, yes, but he did not do it. This, he may follow through on. But even knowing what it will make him, he believes the price will be worth paying. He can’t be certain until he has actually paid the price, and held what he purchased in his hand, but he believes it will be.

Car tires crunch on gravel outside. An engine goes silent. A door swings open and then slams shut. Footsteps come nearer, first on gravel and then on the steps outside the door. The doorknob rattles. The front door of the mobile home swings open and a shadow enters.

Ian grabs the hatchet by the handle and gets to his feet. He turns the blunt edge of the hatchet forward and swings it down. It hits the shadow on the side of the head. A soft thunk, like someone tapping a melon to check ripeness.

The shadow collapses to the floor with a dumb grunt.

Ian reaches out to the wall and finds the light switch and flips it. An overhead light comes on. The light is in a ceiling fan. The fan’s blades spin lazily. Ian looks down at Donald. He’s lying unconscious on dirty green carpet, bleeding from a split in the skin just inside the hairline behind the left temple. He smells of cheap beer. Several flattened cardboard boxes he carried in are lying beneath him. Apparently he was planning on packing when he got home, packing and leaving town, most likely. That won’t be happening now.

Ian sets the hatchet down on an end table and gets to work.

 

 

 

He’s sitting in an easy chair watching TV when, thirty minutes later, the first groans escape Donald’s throat. He picks up the remote from the arm of the chair and hits the power button. The sound of a sitcom laugh track is cut off and the screen goes blank as tomorrow. He looks over at Donald. He is naked, hands and feet taped to a wooden chair. His head hangs down, chin resting on his chest. A bit of drool hangs from his mouth and drips upon his hairy belly. His greasy hair hangs down from his head. Blood has dripped from his hairline, run down the side of his face, and begun to dry to brown. He groans a second time, lifts a head he momentarily can’t seem to hold steady, finally does manage to hold it upright, and looks around. His face is twisted with pain and confusion. After a moment, his eyes meet Ian’s.