Good Neighbors (22 page)

Kees thumbs back the hammer.

‘Don’t you fucking move, you son of a—’

He swings the revolver around on Frank and Frank cringes as he walks, waiting for the bullet, but it doesn’t come. He glances at Kees over his shoulder as he heads toward Kat, and he sees that the cop now sees the carnage as well, and Frank sees the fire leave the man’s eyes, and he knows he’s safe. For now anyway. He’s not gonna shoot him in the back.

Frank walks to Kat – poor tiny, fragile, broken bird – and he kneels beside her on her front porch. She simply lies there motionless in a dress that looks like it might once have been light blue but which now is just brown with drying blood.

A knife sticks from her chest. The blade is buried all the way inside her; the only part visible, the cracked wooden handle.

Her eyes are open, but she seems to be simply staring blankly.

He reaches out to feel her pulse, but then she blinks.

‘Help,’ she whispers. ‘Please, help . . . Frank.’

‘I’m gonna call an ambulance,’ he says. ‘Help’s on the way.’

He looks up at Kees. The man is still standing in the street, gun hanging from his arm. He is simply standing and looking at him, at him and Kat and the blood, and not with disgust or shock but with something much worse – mild interest.

‘She’s still alive,’ Frank says. ‘Call for a fucking ambulance.’

Kees nods at this, as if it’s the first time he’s heard the request, then holsters his weapon.

Frank looks down at poor Kat.

The knife handle throbs in her chest. It’s barely visible, but it is visible.

Frank doesn’t want to count – he feels sick just thinking about it – but he thinks she’s been stabbed at least a dozen times.

‘An ambulance is on the way,’ he says.

Although it’s hard to tell Frank thinks he actually sees a faint smile touch her lips.

‘I’m not going to die,’ she says, and it’s barely a whisper. ‘An ambulance is on the way. I just have to lie here and wait.’

Frank nods.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Just lie there and wait. An ambulance is on the way.’

‘Easy-peasy,’ she says.

44

One of the things that surprised David when he first started the night shift was how often things happen at four, five, six o’clock in the morning. Before he started, he’d thought the first hours would be the busiest – from midnight till four, maybe, when many were still up and drinking – but no: everything happens between four and six. The night is alive with mischief between four and six. The world goes to sleep and evil steps out into the moonlight. Cops he’s talked to have told him the same – most burglaries happen between those hours, for instance.

He is shoving his last french fry into his mouth as John pulls the ambulance away from the curb.

They’ve got a stabbing to attend to.

45

William pulls his station wagon into the parking lot behind the Carlson Canning Company. He puts the car in park and turns off the engine.

He still doesn’t understand why no one stopped him.

He steps from the car, slamming the door behind him.

The gray clouds light up briefly, as if someone in the sky turned on a light and the filament broke – the bulb exploded – and a clap of thunder fills the air. The air feels full of electricity.

Someone should have stopped him. He knows people saw him. He saw their faces in the windows. He saw their faces looking at him. He saw their wide white eyes filled with shining interest. He saw them with their hands pressed against the glass, with their noses pressed against the glass, with their mouths hanging open.

But no one stopped him.

It makes no sense.

Maybe no one stopped him because it’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Maybe it’s his real purpose in life. Maybe he’s doing something that’s supposed to be done for a reason beyond his understanding.

Multiple concussions rumble in the distance.

Don’t be stupid, William, he tells himself.

You’re sick, that’s all. You’re just sick.

He walks across the asphalt to the back stairs and walks up their concrete steps. He feels shaky with lack of sleep. He feels as if he’s walking through a dream. He pulls open the heavy back door and walks inside.

He can see other employees milling about.

He grabs his timecard from its slot on the wall and stands at the back of the line leading up to the punch clock. A guy he sometimes talks to during cigarette breaks gets in line just behind him. His name is Bob.

‘How’s it going, William?’

William shrugs.

‘You look tired.’

The line shuffles forward.

‘I am,’ William says, ‘I am tired.’

‘Long night?’

William looks back at Bob, standing there in his blue denim shirt, timecard in one hand, lunch bucket in the other. Bob, who goes home to his wife and son every day, and plays catch with his son every weekend; Bob, who probably never has urges – terrible urges in his guts like a rash inside you that won’t go away unless you do what they want – and who’s certainly never acted on them; Bob, who he shares cigarette breaks with. Lately they’ve killed the time during smoke breaks discussing the upcoming World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park and how pathetic the Mets are.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he says. Then he reaches the punch clock and punches in. He puts his card back in its slot on the wall where it belongs.

William stands in front of the conveyor belt, watching the tin cans roll by. As each one passes, he quickly scans the lid for leaks, flips it, scans the other end, and sets it back down so the conveyor belt can carry it away.

He does this silently, one can after the other.

He wonders if anyone is ever going to stop him.

46

Patrick stands in the open doorway looking at his mom.

He had hoped when he told her he’d help her she’d say no, honey, that was just talk, that was just your mother being tired and talking, but she didn’t say that. She said thank you and yes. She said she was finished. Then he went to get the pills, which he’d left on the coffee table – as he had hoped he wouldn’t be needing them – and he found them where he left them, sitting next to his Order to Report.

He picked up the Order to Report and read it (again); he sat down on the couch and thought about it (some more). He thought his mother was right: he’d been using her as an excuse – but soon she wouldn’t be there anymore and he’d have to actually face the world.

He thinks that now, standing in the doorway, looking at mom: soon she’ll be gone and he’ll be alone in the world with no excuses.

He’s supposed to report for his physical three hours from now, and with his momma gone, he’ll have to go. It’s that or jail. And while the idea of war is frightening – guns and mud and blood and grenades and shrapnel and thwacking helicopters overhead and jungle stench and gangrene and burning villages – it also seems slightly unreal, like something from a movie. Jail is very real. It’s a small concrete box, and he’s tired of small boxes, concrete or otherwise. The world is a big place, a frightening place, but maybe once he’s seen Vietnam, maybe once he’s faced his fears, it won’t be quite so scary anymore. Maybe once you’ve had a gook shooting at you from some unseen location while you trudge through the jungle and gangrene sets in on that foot wound you got last week – maybe when you come back home from that, the streets of the city seem a little more bearable, a little less frightening. An investment banker can’t possibly be as intimidating as a Viet Cong guerrilla with blood in his eyes.

Mom finally turns her head away from the window she’d been staring out of and looks at him and blinks.

‘I’m ready when you are, I guess,’ he says.

Mom nods.

‘I’m ready too,’ she says. ‘How long do you think it will take after I finish the pills?’

‘I don’t know, momma.’

‘Do you think it will hurt?’

‘I don’t know. I think you’ll just go to sleep.’

‘I wonder if I’ll get nightmares before it’s done. I hope not. I hope I don’t get nightmares.’

‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’

Mom nods, but it looks to Patrick like she’s nodding to herself, not to him.

‘Yes, I do,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

Patrick walks across the room to his mother’s bed and sits on the edge of it. He forces open the orange pill bottle. He dumps the pills into his hand to see how many there are. He wants to make sure there are enough.

Twenty-eight.

He doesn’t know how many it will take really but twenty-eight seems like a good number. He thinks he’d have been uncomfortable with anything under fifteen or twenty. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t even really know that twenty-eight will be enough; nor does he know that ten wouldn’t be. But it seems like it’ll be enough. It’s a lot of pills.

Twenty-eight.

He cups the hand holding the pills and scoops them back into the bottle, save three. Three at a time. Gone in nine swallows save for one.

He hands the three pills to mom and she puts them into her mouth.

He picks up the glass of water. He wonders if one glass will be enough. Then he hands it to his mother. She smiles, puts it to her lips, sips, tilts her head back.

Over ten percent of the way through it already.

Patrick pours another three pills into the palm of his hand.

‘Good night, Patrick,’ mom says, closing her eyes.

Patrick takes the empty water glass out of her hand and sets it on the nightstand and looks down at her.

‘Sweet dreams,’ he says.

47

There is only darkness and the sound of sirens at first, and when she opens her eyes and lets the light in and sees the off-white ceiling pushing down on her, Diane realizes she must have fallen asleep. Fragments of dream-images still float in her head:

Picture Diane sitting on a couch. A face looking at her, white and doughy and sitting on a coffee table next to a gold watch. Just a face like a mask on a coffee table next to a gold watch. The watch hands move counterclockwise. A knock on the door and the door melts away. The face’s body come to collect. The head is there too but it has no face; it’s just featureless flesh. And it’s come to collect.

Means nothing, Diane. Just a dream. Forget about it. She’d like to but it makes her feel crummy. She has a sense of dread sitting heavy in her guts.

She looks at the clock – nine minutes past six.

The suitcase she packed is on the floor next to the bed. She must have kicked it off the bed in her sleep.

Dreams of running.

When she was a little girl living in a small town called Elgin, in Texas, she had a pet dog named Dinosaur. For some reason she thought it was hilarious at the time to name pets after other animals. She also had a pet cat named Horse. But it’s the dog, Dinosaur, she’s thinking of right now. He used to run in his sleep. He would lie on his side on the carpet in the middle of the floor when he slept and everyone would have to step over him to get from one place to another in the house and every once in a while while he slept his little feet would really start kicking and he’d bark once or twice or three times and run and run and then it would be over.

‘Chasing rabbits,’ dad would say.

Dreams of running.

She picks the suitcase up off the floor and sets it on the bed. Then she picks up the clothes that fell out and puts them back in and closes the suitcase.

She clicks the metal latches, locking it, puts her hand around the handle, hefts it, and walks to the bedroom door. She unlocks the bedroom door and pulls it open, hardly believing she is actually doing this.

Is she crazy?

There are worse things a person can do than what Larry did.

But, she thinks now, this isn’t really about what Larry did. Maybe if that was all she could find a way to forgive him eventually. Maybe. But there’s more: there’s the way watching him eat used to amuse her and charm her but now it makes her stomach sick; the way he never wants to talk about anything; the way he goes through her purse and takes her tip money so that he can go out drinking – if he asked, she’d give him some, but he doesn’t even ask. Dozens of little things. That’s what it’s about.

She walks out of the bedroom and into the living room.

Larry is asleep on the couch, lying on his side.

He is wearing his pants and socks but that is all. His white belly, lumpy with fat, is spread out on the couch like unrolled bread dough. Gray hairs sprout in a trail from his waistline, up past his belly button, and then thin out and disappear.

The sound of sirens grows louder, but it’s still faint.

She sets down the suitcase, walks over to Larry, and quietly kisses him on the cheek.

‘Goodbye,’ she says.

As she walks back to the suitcase and wraps her fingers around its handle she hears a sound from the kitchen. A cock crowing.

When she lived in Elgin, Texas as a little girl she used to hear the real thing every morning. They had chickens for eggs and to eat. Once when she was about seven or eight her dad took his axe into the chicken coop, a plywood structure he’d spent a couple afternoons building, and there was the familiar sound of chickens squawking, feathers flying, and then a
thunk!
as the axe thudded into the tree stump in there. Dad’d had to pull many trees out of the ground after they bought their acreage so that there’d be room to set down their little house and after building the chicken coop one of the tree stumps went in there to act as a chopping block. It was soon covered in hatchet scars and a slick layer of curdled blood.

Usually after the
thunk!
there was silence, as if the other chickens understood what they had witnessed and were mourning, but this day there was none of that. The feather flapping and the squawking continued. Then Diane heard curse words – shitfuckgoddamnitall – escape her father’s mouth. A moment later a headless chicken came running out of the chicken coop proper and into the fenced-off area surrounding it. Diane had spent the next nine days stuffing grain down its headless gullet. On the tenth day, though, she found it dead. The rest of it had finally caught up with the head, which had been put in the pig’s slop the day it was axed.