Mr. Splitfoot (4 page)

“Sure.”

“Well, it was dark out there one night. It’s always dark out there, right? Raining. You know. A dark road. Wet road. No one around.” I put plenty of space between each small description. Slowly, slowly. “A man, fella around your age, was driving home on that road, squinting through the raindrops on his windshield when all the sudden there’s a pretty girl standing in the street, eight years old, wearing a summer dress, wrong for the weather. Think she was in my cousin’s class at school, but I don’t remember her name. Maybe you knew her. Anyway, guy slams on the brakes. Right?”

“Right.”

I look into the woods. I look at my hands in the firelight. “He tells her to get in. It’s freezing, wet, cold. ‘Climb in,’ he says. ‘I’ll take you home.’ Right?”

Lord nods. “Right,” like I’m wasting his time.

“‘Thank you,’ she says, and I know,” I tell Lord, “if you’re like me, you think that’s the scary part, right? Young girl, bad dude? That’s not the scary part. Just hold on. Girl says, ‘My mother will be worried.’”

I’m doing my best with the voices, girl’s voice high, man’s voice low. And both voices slowly, slowly. Scary.

“Then he asks her, ‘What are you doing out here alone at night?’ The girl was so young and brave, acting like she had no reason in the world to be scared, like she’d never even imagined the bad things men do to girls every moment of every day.” I am required to apply guilt to Lord, remind him how much he and, really, all men suck. “‘There was a party,’ the girl tells the man, or a recital, something like that. I can’t remember where she was coming from. But she climbs in his car. ‘What address?’ he asks. ‘Just up over the ridge. You know Horseshoe Hill? Half a mile past that.’

“The two drive on, and it’s quiet in the car. He notices she’s shivering. ‘Take my coat.’ He wraps it over her shoulders, a tan windbreaker, a real gentleman or maybe not. Maybe that’s what a total creep would do, hard to say because, you know, it could have been a bad situation.

“The rain picked up, lashing the windshield, and he had to concentrate again just to keep the car on the road. It’s dark out that way. Finally the girl stops him. ‘Here it is. Just there.’ And you’re like, phew. The little girl made it home safely. A small white cape. Very tidy. You know it? I’ve looked for it, but I’m not totally sure which one it is. You know it?”

“No.”

I watch the fire for a bit, saying nothing. I rub my thighs, pushing them open just the slightest bit to remind Lord what’s between them. I look off again into the dark woods beyond our fire. I know Lord’s horny because he’s always horny, old guy, young girl. But I can’t tell if he’s scared. I want him to be scared. I watch the woods. I let the story percolate.

“So. The guy pulls over, and the little girl dashes out of the car, darting across the road into the darkness and rain. He can’t see where she went or if she made it safely inside because of the rain. For a minute he thinks, ‘Forget it. I did my job.’ Turns out the guy’s not a creep, turns out he’s OK. He had parents who loved him. But he’s
so
OK that he can’t help it. He’s worried about the girl. Plus, she has his coat, so he gets out. It’s late but the lights are on downstairs in the little house. He rings the bell, and almost immediately an older woman answers the door like she’d been waiting for him. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she tells him, which seems pretty weird. ‘Come in.’ Still he tries, ‘Ma’am,’ he says. ‘Ma’am, did a young—’ She doesn’t let him finish. ‘My daughter. Yes. Thank you. Please.’ She hurries him in. ‘Follow me.’ The guy is starting to freak out. Everyone’s acting weird and all that rain. Still, he follows her. The old woman leads the man upstairs and into a bedroom, a girl’s bedroom. He stumbles in and there’s a photo of his hitchhiker there on the bureau. ‘My daughter,’ the old woman says again, but it’s impossible that such an old woman could be the mother to such a young girl. He starts to question, ‘But—’ Again she interrupts. ‘Twenty years ago, on a night like this one,’ she says, and the hairs on his neck rise. The storm blows. He doesn’t want her to go on. Fear’s making, you know, static in his head. ‘My daughter was killed,’ she says. ‘Struck down by a car as she walked home. The driver never even stopped to see if she was all right. Now, when it rains, she returns. She comes back, finding a ride with some kind driver. She’s home,’ the woman said. ‘She’s home. She’s come back again.’

“‘No,’ he says. ‘No. No!’ The guy, he runs down the stairs, out the back door. The rain’s blinding him and he’s lost his bearings. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ the guy keeps telling himself—just like you—clenching his fists. He’s terrified, stumbling, trying not to see that right there in front of him, what he thought was a garden is a small graveyard, and in the graveyard is a tombstone and a low rusted wrought-iron fence. ‘No. No.’ He shakes his head, crazy because there, on top of the grave, is a tan windbreaker, his tan windbreaker, half buried in the muddy churned-up dirt.”

Then I get real quiet, watching the fire, nodding my head. Finally, I add the clincher. “Ghosts don’t care if we believe in them or—”

“Cora.”

“Yeah?” I smile. I scared Lord.

“That’s the oldest story in the world.”

“What?”

“It’s been told a million times. We used to tell it when we were kids. Different location and all, different item of clothing hanging out of the grave, but same story. It’s not real.”

I straighten my spine. Fucking jerk. “Doesn’t mean it’s not scary.”

“Yup.” Lord gives me a wink. “Pretty scary. Pretty, scar—BOO!” He pounces on me and bites into my cheek. Lord smells like boiled pasta. He digs his face into my chest, toggling between my boobs.

“You weren’t scared?”

Lord walks away from our campsite as if he’s going to take a pee. I shout into the woods. “It’s not real?” But Lord doesn’t answer and then Lord doesn’t come back, so I think it’s something a little more involved than pee, but he still doesn’t come back. A really, really long time passes, so I know what he’s trying to do. He wants me to think the bogeyman got him, think I’m all alone in the woods with a psycho on the loose.

I’m not going to let him do that to me. I put away the dinner dishes, strum his guitar, and later when I can’t think of anything else, I just sit there by the fire perfectly still with a fucked-up-looking clown smile on my face. I’m good at that. Lord’s too big a jerk to scare me. Orange light flickers on the underside of the tree branches. I think about the little girl who can’t stop coming back. I wonder what would make her come back. Love for her mother? Anger at the driver who killed her? Why keep coming back? Why not just stay dead?

Lord doesn’t explain anything when he returns. We do it like wild beasts for an hour right there in the dirt, like I’m the innocent little girl and he’s the big bad man with the car come to run me down.

Afterward he asks, “Do you want to shoot the gun?”

“Sure.” I’m still naked except for my hiking boots. The kick of his gun throws me three feet back. He thinks that’s the funniest thing ever. Lord opens more beers. I rub my arm. My shoulder will be bruised yellow for days.

“Janine was nineteen when I met her.”

His wife. Every freaking time the man comes, he starts feeling guilty. Every freaking orgasm.

“She was giving haircuts at a house party. Had no idea what she was doing, but the men lined up. Hatchet jobs. Including mine. Janine’s so beautiful, like a model almost. I’d let her do anything. She’s just so beautiful.”

He means: She is; you’re not. I want to tell him that she’s just normal-looking, nothing too special, but I’ve never met her and I don’t want him to know I stalk her on the Internet. He already thinks he’s better than me because he doesn’t use the Internet.

“We fell in love in a bloody way, thorns and hooks.”

Lord’s wiry and strong. “You must have been something at nineteen.” I hope that hurts. Lord’s old now. Forty-five, at least.

“Yeah. We got hitched and tangled together.”

This never stops him from sleeping with me.

“Well,” I say. “I can’t wait to meet her!”

He keeps a hand on his mustache. “We’d been married a year when she started screaming about men from the K.C.G. controlling people with solar panels and jet trails.”

“What’s the K.C.G.?”

“Kancer Containment Guard. Usually they’re harmless old men, bumbling and sweet, but sometimes they’re evil. They fill juice boxes with strychnine.”

Lord looks at me, disappointed again. I put my clothes on. He makes me miss my faithful computer.

“I believed every word she said. I’d even make stuff up myself to confirm it for her. Wall vents, I’d tell her. Suspicious-looking cars. I created bullshit evidence. But then Janine told me my sister Emilia was the head of the K.C.G. and that we needed to kill her.” Lord looks at me sideways. “You know my sister?”

I’ve never met his family.

“Emilia has spina bifida. She was twelve when Janine said that.” Lord reaches for another branch for the fire. He pauses for drama. He does that a lot. “I kept Janine home until she brought scissors to bed and tried to use them on my neck. ‘I’m cutting your hair!’ That’s what she was screaming.” Lord wraps both hands around his neck, choking himself. “She’s in the mental ward of the VA. Take your pill, watch TV, and sometime this afternoon an orderly will change your diaper.”

No wonder the Internet doesn’t have much to say about her. She’s in the loony bin. Lord’s wife is locked up like all the wives in a public television British miniseries. No wonder he’s so in love with her.

Lord looks up into the dark trees. He’s learned a lot from the movies. “Love of my life.”

“Well,” I say. “That’s real nice you love someone, even if it’s not me.”

And he nods. Like I mean it. Like I actually mean it.

The next day Lord drops me off at the end of my driveway. “I’ve got to get to the hospital before visiting hours are over.” I head up the drive. Purple loosestrife is beginning to bloom.

Eleanor and I live in the caretaker’s house on a larger property. The cottage belonged to El’s mother. She’s dead now. I still live with El. I pay rent. I buy food. I went to college. I cook and clean. I have a job. El and I get along fine.

She’s always working, and work has made her large, strong. She gets mistaken for a dyke or a biker or a dyke biker. She never tells me that I am alive because of her, but I know I am and I’m grateful, since it turns out that getting born is the best thing that can happen for your life.

Sometimes my mom and I go to a bar together, and the man she has her eye on has his eye on me. Though this opens up an unnatural seam between us, El has never turned against me. She’s had a couple boyfriends. She lets men visit, but they don’t stay. She says, “I like men.” But then she’ll say, “I like dogs” or “I like toast.” The truth is El likes me and not much else.

When I was a girl, there was so little to do around here. We lived with my grandma, a nasty woman. I avoided her, so before I was old enough for school, I was alone much of the time. I’d walk to the end of our driveway, a place of great opportunity where you could go one way or the other. Our street was quiet. Nothing much happened that I remember. No accidents or incidents of road rage. With the noise of other people gone, the sky could open up. The air, the grass, the asters, the stones on the road would take what they wanted, a little blood or breath, some nightmare or earwax. I didn’t mind. Nature would nibble, thinning my body out like a piece of burnt film, light streaming through the holes of me. I was as much a part of the natural world as a shredded brown leaf gnawed on by a grub. I’d wait for El to get home from work. She’d join me out on the driveway. She didn’t like my grandma either. I’d sit on her lap, and she’d sit on the gravel. She’d pat the skin of my hands, my arms. I’d tell her what I was thinking about holes and nature, and she’d say, “I know just what you mean.”

On Monday I head back to Erie Indemnity. “Hello, computer.” It never answers me. A girl I know from high school has posted new photos of her husband, her kid. Pictures of her drinking from the lip of a champagne bottle. Headlines say:
STOCKS ARE DOWN. GOLD NAIL POLISH IS BEING WORN BY WOMEN IN THE KNOW
. A war is being fought. Another girl I know posted footage of her C-section. I watch the doctor slicing her abdomen open. Her fat looks like last month’s ricotta. A guy I knew in college posts a photo of his kid bent over the toilet, vomiting. #puke #sickkid #dayoffwork. Another guy I know posts: “Not much to report here.”

I call Lord from the stairwell. There’s an elevator in my office building so only total freaks use the stairwell. I leave a message on his cell. “I’m pregnant.”

I’ve known for three weeks, though I have no idea how far along I am. I wasn’t paying attention, and I’ve never had regular periods anyway. Two months? Three months? Maybe even four. I was stuck with some stupid idea that Lord being married to someone else would stop me from getting pregnant. “I’m going to keep it,” I tell his voicemail, and after I hang up, I sit alone in the stairwell. I put my hands on my stomach. Somewhere inside there is my baby. I don’t care about Lord at all. I don’t think I even like him, but this baby, even though it’s barely here—some half-dead, half-alive thing—I feel it, and it’s something big. To me at least, in all my smallness, this baby is really something very big.

A few days later, Lord calls me back at home. I can hear cars rushing by on his end of the line as if he’s standing beside a highway. “You know anything about Safe Haven laws?” he asks.

“Homeland Security?”

“No. You drop a baby off at a hospital or police station. No questions.”

“Oh,” I tell him. “I’ll be fine. I won’t need that.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying. Anyone can drop the kid off. It doesn’t have to be you. You don’t need ID. The baby just gets lost, becomes a ward of the state. Say someone were to take your baby. There’d be no way for you to find it again. It disappears into the system because it doesn’t have a name. See what I’m saying?”

“You can’t stop me from having it.”

“And you can’t stop me from getting rid of it.”