What was it? he wondered. Some sort of sacrifice?
No.
A trade.
His sack of oranges was gone.
He looked quickly up the alley, then down, half-expecting to see a lurching misshapen form carrying a sack of oranges pass through one of the pools of dim light thrown by the motion-activated security bulbs of various garages. But there was nothing. Only darkness, stillness.
He shivered, chilled by the irrationality of the entire situation.
But he pushed that feeling aside. He didn’t have time for it this morning. Any other day, he would have called his father, called his friends, called the police, gone through the step-by-step processes such an incident demanded. But he was on a schedule, he had things to do.
He went into the garage, found a pair of old work gloves and slipped them on. He was glad he’d awakened early, given himself some extra time. Grimacing, he reached into the car and picked up the dog’s body. It felt heavy in his hands, and this close he could smell a sweetly sick scent coming from the fur. He carried the animal’s corpse around the side of the garage and threw it in one of the garbage cans. After quickly spraying the car’s interior with Lysol and loading the ice chest, he headed off, driving with the windows open and the air conditioner on full blast in order to get rid of the lingering remnants of the smell.
He found her street easily enough, and although he counted down the addresses on the block he needn’t have bothered. While porch lights were lit at nearly every house, hers was the only one with interior lights on.
He pulled into the driveway behind a small Honda and got out of the car feeling oddly nervous—and not just because of what had happened. If before he had worried whether she would be up to his standards, now he was worried that he would not measure up to hers.
The front door of the house was opened before he was halfway up the walk, and a young slim blonde walked out. “You must be Ron,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’m Joanne.”
She was indeed very attractive. Out of his league, he would have said, but he sensed no disappointment in her eyes as she saw him for the first time, heard no falsity in her enthusiastic greeting.
“I just have a few things to pack into the car,” she told him. “An overnight bag and a few groceries. Did you bring an ice chest?”
“Yes,” he said, and she immediately frowned as his voice gave him away.
“What is it? What’s the matter? Oh God, you’re not coming.”
“No,” he reassured her. “Nothing like that.”
And he told her.
He described how he’d been carrying out the ice chest when he’d seen someone rooting around in the back seat of the car. The man disappeared into the shadows and Ron discovered that a dead dog had been substituted for the bag of oranges he’d intended to bring along as a gift for their hosts.
“Oranges?” Joanne looked at him, her eyes wide. “Was it a hunchback?” she whispered.
He felt an involuntary shiver of fear. Why was she asking this? Why would she know anything about it?
“Yes,” he told her.
She started shaking, crying. “Oh God. Oh God.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Oh, God!”
He felt helpless, confused. “What do you want me to do?”
“Yes!” She wiped her eyes, face brightening. “We’ll cut off the dog’s leg,” she said. “And boil it. Then we’ll feed it to my father.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Unless you want your father to eat it.”
“N-n-no!” he said, and his voice sounded to himself like a bad Jimmy Stewart impression.
“Come on, then.” She was assertive and in control, her voice and manner imbued with businesslike precision, her tears gone.
He didn’t know what was going on. He felt stunned, as though he were sleepwalking through water, and when she moved over to the passenger side of the car, he opened the driver’s door and got in.
“Hurry up. We don’t have any time to lose.”
They drove back to his place, and he got his gloves and a hacksaw out of the garage and walked out to the garbage cans, where he sawed off one of the stiff fetally-crossed dog legs.
He tossed the severed limb into the trunk along with the saw and gloves, and in silence the two of them retraced the route back to Joanne’s.
They boiled the leg in a Vision Ware pot, and sat in the kitchen talking about Woody Allen. Ron was struck by the morbid absurdity of it all, but Woody’s films were one of the interests they had in common, and perhaps it was best at this time to build on the things they shared. God knows, he didn’t want to talk or think about what was boiling on the stove, and their trivial conversation served to, if not take his mind off the grotesquerie, at least temporarily divert his thoughts to other, healthier, more normal avenues.
Joanne had turned on a timer, and when the bell rang, startling them both, she got out of her chair and walked over to the stove. He accompanied her. There was fur floating in the water, what looked like hair soup in the pot, and from this disgusting mess she fished out a bare, muscled dog leg.
“All right.” She grimaced. “Let’s take it to Daddy.”
She led the way out of the kitchen and down a short hall to what appeared to be the closed door of the master bedroom.
She knocked. “Daddy?”
Ron heard no response.
Joanne smiled. “He said it’s okay. Come on in.” She pushed open the door, but the room contained no bed, no dresser, no furniture at all save for a single white table. On top of the table was an oversized urn.
Joanne walked across the room holding the boiled leg and opened the urn’s lid. She looked inside. “Daddy? I have something for you.”
She dropped the leg in, and damn if Ron didn’t hear the sound of chewing coming from within the ceramic vessel.
She looked down and nodded, as though listening to a voice. “Oranges,” she said, and for the first time since he had initially told her his story, there was a tremor in her voice. “A hunchback.”
The chewing sound stopped. There was a faint high-pitched whistle, and then an almost imperceptible puff of ash blew up from the urn and settled on the white table top.
Joanne licked her index finger again, swallowing the collected ash.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said.
Ron looked at her dumbly. “What?”
“Walk with me. Just around the block.”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning, a hunchback traded a dead dog for my bag of oranges, we cooked the dog’s leg and fed it to your father’s ashes and now you want to go for a walk?”
“Please?”
Common sense was telling him to run like hell. Jo might not have been fat or ugly or a guy, but this sure as Christ wasn’t a normal situation, and the smartest thing he could do was to get out of here and not look back, write off this whole wretched affair as a loss. And yet...
And yet he didn’t want to. Despite the weirdness, despite the craziness, he liked Joanne, and for the first time in a very long while he’d actually met someone with whom he could see himself having a future.
Yeah. As she fed dead pet parts to her father’s ashes.
Everything was happening too fast. His brain had no time to sort out a proper course of action or even to sift through these recent events to determine what was tolerable and what was completely unacceptable.
“Please?” she repeated, and there was a lost sort of plaintiveness to the request that made him nod his head.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly.
Joanne looked at her watch. “We’d better get going. It’ll be light soon.”
She put the lid back on the urn, said goodbye to her father and closed the bedroom door behind them as they headed down the hall toward the front of the house.
It’ll be light soon? What did that mean?