Anything but a cherry red, mint-condition, 1949 pickup truck.
Charles Whitman. Texas Clock Tower. I can see myself doing that. Not right now (no gun, ha ha). Charlie is this marine, right? So, he likes guns and has them. Maybe he’s got this wife that needs stuff and maybe she’s even nice and all but she NEEDS stuff and she’s always at him. And maybe at school he’s got these teachers yammering at him to get stuff. Maybe old Charlie got to thinking everybody was eating him, biting chunks of his flesh out, and he was running out of flesh. Pretty soon he gets to feeling the whole world is made of biters, so he gets his rifle out and decides to take a few biters with him when he goes. Yeah, I could see doing that.
31
Marshall had not cried in so long his body did not know how. Sobs sawed out in anguished groans. Hot and niggardly tears crept from the corners of his eyes. His shoulders and arms jerked as if he fought to free himself from the clutches of sharp-nailed fingers.
The fit lasted only minutes. Tears were not cleansing; there was no relief, only an ache in his gut where muscles had clenched in a vain attempt to vomit out the unvomitable.
Breathe, you psycho fuck, he ordered himself and drew in warm air, thick as night, exhaled noisily, and again took a lungful of the static air. A semblance of sanity returned with the oxygen. He looked up at the basement’s center beam.
The axe hung where he’d put it not five minutes before. It had not migrated up the three flights of stairs to secrete itself under the bed like an ogre in a children’s story. It had not flown out of the darkness like a sentient thing, a bat spiraling upward in the night to prey on the innocent. That was a comfort of sorts.
The cellar was dark enough the newly cleaned metal gleamed only in Marshall ’s mind’s eye. Still he reached up and flicked off the overhead lights. True or not, TV crime shows had him convinced that scrubbing with turpentine would not be enough. A crime scene investigator would spray the axe with a magic substance and it would glow blue where blood had seeped into the wood, clotted in the crevices between handle and head.
There is no crime scene, he told himself.
A key grated in the outside door. Polly had come home.
“No!” he cried as the door swung inward.
Danny screamed, high, wild.
“Sorry, man. It’s just me, Marshall.”
“Damn it!” Danny yelled.
“Sorry,” Marshall said.
“The door’s unlocked in the middle of the night. What the hell… What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Had Marshall not known his brother never took any drug but aspirin, and that sparingly, he would have thought he was high on something with an edge. “I live here,” Marshall said. “Take it easy. Sorry I startled you.”
Danny closed the door, shutting out most of the light. For a second, Marshall felt threatened. Instinctively, he stood up.
Threat vanished-that or he had imagined it.
“Sorry myself, brother,” Danny said. “I shouldn’t have gone off like that. Scared me is all. Door’s not locked, you yelling from the dark. I jumped so high, I’m surprised I didn’t bash my brains out on the ceiling.” Danny turned the lights back on and looked at Marshall.
“What are you doing in the basement in the dark anyway? Where’s Polly? The kids? You don’t look so good, Marsh.”
“Polly and the girls are staying at Martha’s,” Marshall said wearily and, the effort of standing suddenly too great, sat on the step again.
Danny sat next to him. The closeness was comforting. His brother glanced toward the center beam that bisected the cellar.
“It’s there. I just put it there.”
“I wasn’t looking for the axe,” Danny said. The lie was kind but transparent.
“It wasn’t there last night,” Marshall said. “It was upstairs. Under the bed for Christ’s sake. Like before.”
“And you don’t… ”
“No. I don’t remember a thing. I’m a fucking werewolf. At night I turn into a predator and wander the streets thirsting for blood. Goddamn.” He rubbed his face, as if he could scrub the image from his mind.
“You’re too hard on yourself, Marsh. Nobody’s been hurt.”
“There was blood on the axe, Danny.”
Danny said nothing. Marshall didn’t appreciate it. He needed the reassurance of excuses made up by somebody other than himself.
“You’re sure it was blood?” Danny said finally.
“Pretty sure. There was a lot of it, smeared over the blade, the butt, down the handle.”
“Like before.”
“Yeah. I brought it back down, cleaned it with paint thinner, then burned the rag. A criminal mind, no doubt.”
“Maybe it wasn’t human blood,” Danny offered.
“That makes it better? Sneaking around the neighborhood hacking dogs to death? There’s no way out, Danny. Psychotherapy is crap, and the psycho pharmaceutical companies haven’t come up with a drug for the likes of me. I can’t keep screwing around with half-assed theories. It’s too dangerous. Polly, Gracie, Emma… ”
After a minute, Danny asked, “What does that leave?”
“Suicide.” Marshall laughed.
“Don’t say that!” The fear in Danny’s voice was sharp. “Ever. You’re with me for the long haul brother. You and me. You don’t get to cut out early.” He put his arm around Marshall ’s shoulders. “We’ll get through this. I will see to it that we get through this. Have you been taking the Valium before bed? One of the worst things you can do is let yourself get overtired.”
“Pretty much. They knock me for a loop.”
“They’re fairly mild. You’re just so keyed up, it feels like they knock you out. Your body needs to rest. Wait here.”
Danny stood and looked down. “Will you promise… ”
“I’m not going to off myself with the table saw while you run upstairs,” Marshall said. Danny smiled crookedly.
The sound of his brother’s footsteps climbed into the air behind his head where the stairs corkscrewed up. Marshall loved this building. The rooms were full of light. There’d been so many windows and doors-front, back, balcony, and cellar doors-they’d made them all open with a single key so they wouldn’t be carrying key rings the size of janitors’.
Danny’s steps descended again, the thip, thip, thip of soft-soled shoes spiraling back down. For some reason it made Marshall think of Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.
“Here.” Danny poured half a dozen small white pills into Marshall ’s palm.
“What is it?”
“Valium. The same old thing in a new bottle. The drug reps give me so many samples, I could relax half the Third World. I can run back up and get the literature if you want.”
“Never mind. Thanks.”
“Take two-three won’t hurt you. Get some sleep.”
“Sure,” Marshall said. Danny squeezed his shoulder.
“Go to bed. That’s what I’m going to do. Good night, brother.” Danny’s footsteps corkscrewed upward. Marshall heard his kitchen door click shut.
He stared at the tablets.
You get, you share.
The thought made him smile.
Even in the bad times, there were good times. By virtue of their rarity, they were experienced more keenly, remembered more fondly. Maybe that was why men remembered their wars with such relish. Maybe that’s why he’d never had the tattoo removed.
He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and looked at the old marks. Crude green slashes, once sharp but now blurred and faded with age, formed the numbers one and three and the fraction one-half. A classic prison tat. He’d been anesthetized with cheap bourbon one of the “girls” had gotten from a guard in trade for a blow job. The tattoo artist had been as drunk as the rest of them. Marshall remembered the sting, and the blood, and the laughter.