Decatur (22 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Downstairs

The sticker bushes ran all the way around Marilyn’s shabby duplex as they did on almost every house on her block. They were robbery deterrents, they would scratch any potential casual thief up pretty good, so thieves being what they were stayed away. The only place they didn’t grow in a thick shrub was in the back of the house where the old root cellar led to the basement, and that was locked with a sturdy metal latch from the inside, so neither Harry the Pill or Marilyn ever really worried about intruders, besides there wasn’t much to steal.

Gar slinked around the outside of the duplex, keeping very close to the sticker bushes, not minding their scratches. Pain was always increased by the anxiety about pain, he knew. People got panicky and hurt even more because they were terrified about what it might signal, but he wasn’t, he knew it was just temporary, an intense feeling that could be pleasurable in its intensity. The scratches were nothing. He saw the root cellar doors, flat wooden leaves that opened out. Harry the Pill’s kitchen window was to the left; and the light was still on but the window shade was shut tight. Good, Gar thought. He dropped down and slithered on the grass to the root cellar. Still on his stomach he put his fingers on both sides of the doors and pulled up; they lifted slightly. He smiled, they were locked from the inside, but they gave pretty good with the first tug. It was getting dark and the kids on the block were playing hard trying to drown out their mothers’ calls to come home. The bouncing on the neighbors’ makeshift driveway basketball court along with the kick the can game would be enough of a mask for the noise, he decided. Gar pulled again harder and the root cellar doors shuddered, creaked, and groaned as he ripped the latch from its hinges and pulled up and opened the doors. Moving quickly he clambered down the steps into the basement of Marilyn’s duplex, shutting the doors behind him. In the dark he moved cautiously, running his hands along the cold and clammy wall, feeling for a light switch. The basement smelled of mildew, oily rags, and turpentine. He stumbled on something and had a little crash into a metal shelf. He stopped, listening. Nothing. After a moment he ran his hand along a wooden bench. Work bench, he thought, there had to be a light. He waved his hand over his head then, feeling for a light fixture above, looking for a string to pull on. He found it, pulled and the basement lit up, full of stacks of old magazines, paint and project debris, and the work bench. There was a long screwdriver on the bench with a yellow-and-black plastic handle; he picked it up in a considering way and then put it his back pocket. It was time to go upstairs and see how Harry liked being interrupted.

Forgoing silence for speed he ran up the basement steps and threw open the door which led into the yellow and green linoleum-floored kitchen.

Harry the Pill was waiting. Retirement hadn’t suited Harry; his days were spent listening and watching for things that bothered him and then squashing those things or making them miserable. The kids on the block all knew to stay out of the yard and steer clear. If Marilyn hadn’t been so pretty he would have made her life living hell but he compromised his standards out of a gut instinct that told him he didn’t want to drive her completely away. Harry wasn’t big but the only other thing he did besides fiddle in the basement workshop was keep himself fit. He had his own self-made regime of lifting old bowling pins he had found when an alley had gone out of business, and running up and down the basement stairs with jugs of water he had kept from the Bay of Pigs nuclear scare. So even at sixty-seven, he was tough as leather and mean as a snake. Harry had heard the something in the basement and wasn’t frightened. He had his broom handle, with the broom unscrewed, he would whip the intruder with it until whoever it was begged for mercy.

The old man in a soiled undershirt and baggy pants was wiry with a snaggle-toothed grin. Harry the Pill was standing in the center of the tiny kitchen with a broom handle, swinging it at Gar as he came through the door. He wasn’t the least bit caught by surprise. The first blow landed with a crack right on Gar’s side, and the broom handle split, making it a jagged spear. “Now that’s not nice,” said Gar softly. He was going to have to move quick.

Harry saw the man keep coming through the door even after he landed a blow so solid that the broom handle split. He was big, bigger than he had reckoned on; he’d thought it was probably one of the kids from three doors down that he had yelled at earlier in the week for running his bike over his lawn. Still it didn’t matter. Harry was not going to let this son of a bitch off easy. He would stab him with the broom handle and see how he liked that. He jabbed at the intruder and danced back.
God, this was better than TV
, the adrenalin rushing through his veins.

Harry was hopping around like he was dancing on hot coals as he dodged Gar’s first punch. The jagged spear scraped Gar, not enough to hurt, just enough to double down his determination to exterminate the old man. Gar’s arm shot out and grabbed the broken handle hard enough to yank it right out of Harry’s hands.

Harry felt his arms nearly pull out as Gar jerked the broken broom handle away from him and he fell back against the counter. Behind him in a metal drawer were the kitchen knives. His hands scrambled behind him and he managed to get the drawer open, pulling a knife from inside as Gar broke the broom handle over his knee with a satisfying crack. It was the second Harry needed. He held the butcher knife by its tip and he threw it like the bowie knives he used to play with as a boy in Kentucky. He nearly laughed as it landed in the muscle mass of the intruder’s shoulder. The big man winked like it was all in good fun and pulled the knife out, throwing it right back at Harry. It sliced his ear and he felt scared for the first time as the blood spurted out of the side of his head onto his undershirt. Where was the knife? Somewhere behind him but if he turned to look, he was dead. Harry saw in the golden eyes of the intruder that he was playing for keeps. The big man was bleeding too but he didn’t look at all fazed; instead he looked up and put his finger to his lips. “Keep quiet and it won’t go so bad on you,” Gar said in a husky whisper.

The thought exploded in Harry’s brain: Marilyn was upstairs, she had that damn dog. Upstairs, he thought, this was the man who must have been upstairs. He opened his mouth to call for help but the man had a screwdriver in his hand and just as he started to scream the screw-driver plunged down his throat, choking and gagging him as blood exploded.

Gar plunged the screwdriver deeper with one hand as he grabbed Harry’s throat with the other, throttling him. He was making the rattling sound Gar knew so well, so, because he couldn’t help himself, because this bastard had ruined his time with the source with his thumping and yelling, Gar bent down over the terrified old man’s face and, letting go of his throat, he felt for it, the man’s essence, as the blood rushed out of his mouth. His tongue flicked out, searching for it as the man’s green-grey eyes began to spin in his head, there, a little thread, tiny, but it was what he had. Gar sucked it down like one might a noodle; it was gone.

Harry knew he was dying but something worse than dying was happening to him, the intruder was over him like a some horrible visitor from a place he never wanted to go and he took something, something Harry hardly even knew he had until the man had it in his mouth and then it was gone. An emptiness opened up like a chasm inside Harry then, the world had no meaning, death was claiming him, his wasted life one long missed dream, and he was now pulled into the blackness of existence with an emptiness as vast as eternity.

Gar sucked down the sliver of Harry’s soul, feeling it enter him like a little flame. It fell into the huge crater that he held in his center but even a tiny flame falling into a bottomless pit can create a lovely light on its walls, and for a split second he had a glimpse of all that had been denied him. In a flash there was the Presence. The Presence was confirmed in all of its magnificence, in its goodness and its evil. Gar knew his fate had put him on the dark side long ago, but even as puny as the thread of Harry’s essence was, it was enough to remind Gar of why he was seeking the source and how, once he had it, he would be reborn, strengthened and transformed - an unstoppable dark angel of revenge for all the emptiness he had endured.

Gar looked down at the man dead on the floor without any pity. He had deserved it as far as Gar was concerned. The apartment didn’t stink and, while cluttered, it wasn’t disgusting, so it would do. He shut the swinging wooden door of the kitchen on the blood and the mess and began looking around. He rummaged through the apartment until he found the linen closet. The sheets were old and thin like the towels but they were clean. He pulled a set from the closet and went to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Harry’s front room was the original parlor on the house and the bedroom was made from the original dining room so, while narrow, it had high ceilings and two good sized windows covered with yellowed pull shades. Gar began stripping the single bed; he wasn’t going back to the parish house, not tonight. Staying here and keeping an eye on Marilyn seemed like a much better idea. He rolled Harry’s old sheets up in a ball and tossed them in a corner. There, he was moved in.

An apartment buzzer sounded then. Not to Harry’s but to Marilyn’s. Gar cocked his head and moved down the hall in Harry’s apartment so he could hear better. Rowley started barking on cue, sounding a little hysterical. He heard Marilyn come out of her apartment and then down the steps treading softly in her ballerina flats. There was the sound of the duplex front door being unlocked.

Marilyn opened the door a crack with the chain on, turning on the porch light. There on the front porch was Father Troy with moths already beginning to circle above his head.

“Father Troy? What’s the matter, what are you doing here?” she asked as a dark worry came over her. This wasn’t right; he didn’t really even know her and to come to her house?

“Can I come in?” Father Troy said in a strained way that did nothing to relieve her anxiety.

“Of course you can, come in,” she said taking the chain off and letting him in the hallway. “Rowley! Be quiet. It’s okay,” she called upstairs as quietly as she could. Harry the Pill didn’t thump for once, maybe because he had been thrashing around in his kitchen doing God knew what.

Father Troy, feeling really daring and completely out of his water, followed Marilyn up the stairs. She was still in her waitress uniform and that was unsettling because it seemed like his dream. A tawny dog with a white diamond on his chest was waiting for her right inside the door; she knelt down and rubbed his ears saying, “I know, lots of visitors tonight. It’s okay.”

Rowley sniffed the black-suited man, he seemed alright but he was still on edge from Gar in the apartment before. “This is Rowley, Father Troy,” Marilyn said.

Father Troy heard the words ‘lots of visitors’ with a mixture of hope and jealousy. He was right, Gar had been here. “Where’s Gar?” he blurted out, he couldn’t help himself, being in her apartment was unnerving like looking at the ladies in the dressing room of Dayton’s department store in Duluth, which he had done just once on a dare from some friends in high school. It had been mortifying, seeing their fleshy curves with girdles and slips. Marilyn looked up at him with her big dark eyes. He hated her then. What had Gar been doing in her apartment?

Rowley stayed close to Marilyn. The man called Father Troy was nervous and giving off the faint whiff of sweat and vomit.

“Gar?” Marilyn repeated surprised. How did Father Troy know the mysterious man she had met? She thought back, hadn’t Gar said he was staying with some friends who needed his help? Then she flashed on Father Weston sitting in the plastic booth at the Steak and Shake with an onion ring in his hand saying they had a parish guest now who was a project of Father Troy’s, a vet. Gar, she realized, he was the same person as Father Troy’s project. Why hadn’t he told her he was a vet staying at the parish? Not very sexy sounding, she guessed She exhaled deeply, catching out of the corner of her eye the place where the shattered mirror had been. There was a lot she didn’t know about Gar and it made her feel deeply uneasy suddenly. Better slow down, she thought. “He was here earlier but he left. Is he staying at the parish these days, Father Troy?”

Father Troy could hardly stand it; Gar was sneaking around seeing women. “You know,” he said in shaking voice, “Gar has a lot of emotional problems, he’s not very stable. I don’t think you should see him anymore, Marilyn.” He couldn’t help himself, standing there in the hallway, with the door to her apartment open, looking in on what might be their love nest, he raised his voice and said more forcefully to drive the point home, “As a priest at St. Patrick’s I’m telling you Marilyn, don’t see Gar. He’s not ready for any kind of relationship. Do you understand?”

Marilyn nodded looking at Father Troy, who just didn’t seem himself. His grey blue eyes were blinking rapidly behind his glasses and she had never heard him raise his voice once, not even to a gaggle of rowdy kids in the back of the church. “Okay,” she said, just to calm him down while she rubbed Rowley’s head.

“And if he comes back here, you send him to the rectory, understand?” Father Troy said.

“I’ll do that. Give my best Father Weston, would you?” Marilyn said, wanting to close the conversation and shut the door.

Father Troy nodded in what he hoped was a firm way and with a little half-wave started back down the wooden steps. Marilyn followed after him to relock the door. “I’m sure he’ll turn up, Father. He’s free spirit, I wouldn’t worry too much,” she said.

Her voice was kind and it tore at Father Troy’s heart. She couldn’t help herself, Father Troy thought, Gar to people was like catnip to cats. She hadn’t meant to try to steal him and she wasn’t going to. The priest put a hand out to her then and she shook it like they were at the receiving line at church.

Gar leaned against Harry the Pill’s door. No wonder he thumped on the walls; you could hear everything clear as day in the duplex hallway.