Don't Kiss Me: Stories (5 page)

When they found her, two severed ears were gripped in her bloodslick hands. She declined the offer to hand them over. She was naked except for the underwear. A lady cop was called in to cuff her.

The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties into his mouth just short of gagging.

THE WIFE:

I was born with an extra spine in a lump on my shoulder. My parents had it removed but I can still feel it. Like a ghost limb. Like a ghost twin. She grew up and lived and she weighs me down and we share everything. My parents called her Imaginary Friend. Sometimes it’s just too hard to relate to the real thing. None of this is true, of course. It’s just the easiest way to explain.

Of course none of this is true. I’ll try another way. There was a girl that died mysteriously down the street when I was growing up. After her funeral I saw her white face in her bedroom window, watching me, mouthing, Wait for me, wait for me, and I waited and I’m still waiting. Every once in a while I hear her name being called, but there’s never an answer.

No. No. No. No.

Here: her room was across the hall. At night I stood outside her door and listened for her breathing but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of silence. I watched her chest not move. She was dead and then the morning would come and she was alive. There was no way she could die. There was no way she could be revived. We wrote notes to each other and slid them under our doors. Mine said, I wish I was alone. Hers said, I miss you.

THE SISTER:

Oh, and the way he’d kiss me. Like I was you. Like I was the you he always dreamed I was. If you are discourteous with a rose its petals will bruise. That’s how he kissed me, so gorgeously discourteously. I could feel my heart beating in my lips. I could feel the throb of blood.

THE DETECTIVE:

The detective stopped at a do-it-yourself car wash. Got out and leaned against the car, did a few toots of Afrin. The lights hummed and a hot moist wind came in and made his neck sweat. He’d punched in three hours and forty-seven minutes ago. He had four hours and thirteen minutes to go. He had to be looking for something.

Pretty soon he heard the squeaking, like a mouse caught in a trap. The lights blinded him and all he saw was a vivid darkness. He listened to her getting closer.

Then she was there, squinting up at him from the edge between light and dark. A child’s head, the cherubic face, the purple empty gums, the wisps of hair. The body of a trucker, its puffed, sexless chest, its clumpy limbs. The wheelchair and the mangled hands forcing its wheels along. The drool bright on her chin. The smell of urine and cinnamon chewing gum. The MacGuffin.

She motioned to the Afrin and he gave it to her. He was glad for the other one he had in the glove compartment.

Pretty soon he couldn’t smell the urine anymore. He got used to it. She wheeled away and he figured that meant follow. He figured he had to start somewhere.

A JOKE, PUNCH LINE FORTHCOMING:

Once there was a man who wanted to build his wife the house of her dreams. He began working for a contractor, building other people’s houses, and each day he’d steal a brick, hiding it under his shirt or in his lunch pail and bringing it home. On his final day the contractor caught him. Please, the man said. This is the last brick I need to complete my house. I’ll do anything for that brick. Well, the contractor said, I’m going to throw it up as high as it’ll go, and if you can catch that brick it’s yours and I won’t come after you for the others. The man agreed that it was a fair proposition. The contractor took a few steps back, breathed deeply, and flung the brick high. The sun flashed behind it. The man’s heart pounded desperately.

THE DETECTIVE:

The detective began to feel the effects of the whiskey and Afrin. He put a few gobs of Vicks under his nostrils and talked to himself in the rearview. A man is dead, we can all agree on that. Count to ten. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Oh hell. Ten. Remember that God and murder are in the details. He noticed that the area around his mouth was a bit pink from the bloody underwear. He got stern. You’re makin me sick. Stop talkin to yourself and get out there and do it. The Vicks made his eyes water.

The MacGuffin squeaked along in front of him. The tears in his eyes and the headlights smeared everything and he lost her. He circled back to the office so he could start again, retrace his steps.

THE WIFE:

In my opinion she couldn’t tell she existed. That’s why she does it (did it) to us.

He had a tattoo of a heart over his heart because he said that’s how he knew where he ended and we began.

I still have those notes. I wonder if she kept mine. Oh God, all that blood? Is he a ghost now? Is he a white face in a window? Were we married?

THE SISTER:

We love(d) you more than all the bricks in Brooklyn.

THE DETECTIVE:

If this is tedious to you, Tin Ears, there’s a desk job with your name on it.

Murder’s tedious.

That’s just a label. We got a ransom letter. Prints all over it. Pubic hair taped in a circular clump—looks like it might be the point of the exclamation point.

Cripes. What’s it say. (come on come on)

Search me. I don’t read shouting. Bad for the eyes. Jameson, read it to me.

And.

It says if you want the body you’ll have to kill for it.

That doesn’t make any sense.

It makes perfect sense, Tin Ears. Perfect sense.

What’s it askin.

It’s asking you to produce the body. No body no death.

THE SISTER:

Dearest love, let me count the ways. Dismemberment, garroted, poisoned, drowned, named. I read that as soon as a species is named it begins its travels up the endangered list. Discovery meaning death.

He
asked
me to cut him. I did. The blood, disappointingly, did not drip. It seeped. We gathered it with a tiny blue washcloth.

THE CORPSE:

Ahem. I believe I’ve earned the right to step in here. At least as some kind of oxymoronic metaphor for this plus this equals that. The dimple in my tie filled with blood. I was wived and I made my wife a widow. And is this really me speaking? Am I being imagined?

Somebody tarred Daddy to the floor.
My ears splitting, off they went.

THE DETECTIVE:

The detective took the letter down to run its prints, find out if the pubic hair was of the male or female persuasion. He held its corner with red tweezers and it flapped along beside him. Smith cut out the whole exclamation point with an X-Acto knife and his eyes got round at all that possible DNA. He said, Hopefully there’s a root or two. His breath smelled like onions. The detective’s stomach turned. Jenny took the letter minus the exclamation point and promised to dust for prints before her shift ended. The detective noted her waves of red hair and the mole just under her nose and decided one didn’t cancel out the other.

On his way out to the car his nostrils started closing in on him. He opened the glove compartment so fast the Afrin bounced under the seat and he cursed. The body, the Afrin, he’d have to reach for both. He didn’t know why he had to look for something that wasn’t even hiding.

THE SISTER:

If there’s anything we’ve learned it’s that roses are red. I planted our man, told him the eyes are the last to go, and he believed me. Our man bloomed and died and a year later bloomed again. That’s the hope anyway. And did you know that a human head weighs more than the shovel.

Dearest, you say you understand, but if you did you’d stop crying.

We had a child. Our man named him Junior. Our man thought it was all a dream until it actually became a dream, and then he knew how real it was. And did you know blood tastes sweet like summer grass.

THE DETECTIVE:

Knuckles rapped on the window. The detective rolled it down and smoke poured in from the chief’s pipe.

She’s confessed again, he said, squinting. You better beat it.

The detective nodded, began rolling up the window, and the chief stepped back.

I’m on it, the detective said through the glass. The car started too smoothly. He had three hours and seven minutes left on his shift. He drove due south, fast. There was a truck stop he knew of where he could be alone and eat. There had to be.

THE CORPSE:

This is how I imagined being dead:

Hard to know where you are if everyone who knows you doesn’t know where you are and if the one who loves you most will never come looking for you. I’m here. I’m pointing at myself. My heart is sort of beating.

THE WIFE:

When we got married I told myself when he’s dead I’ll know it immediately. But I still can’t convince myself he was ever alive in the first place. Absence makes the heart grow fonder of absence. I shave my legs with his razor. Blood shimmies. It was always my razor.

A JOKE, PART TWO:

So this lady is in first class, real snooty-looking broad, and she’s got this poodle in her lap that yaps with practically every breath. Next to her is this real salt-of-the-earth-type guy, like the kind of guy who starts from nothing and ends up richer than anything. So the guy says to the lady, Look, you gotta shut that dog up and the lady takes offense and says, My dog is no worse than your disgusting cigar smoke. And they go back and forth like that and it starts to get ugly. So the guy says, Fine, lady, you asked for it, and he takes the poodle and throws it out the emergency-exit window. The lady is downright astonished, and she yanks the cigar out of the guy’s mouth and throws it out the window too. Well this makes them both laugh and they become great friends, and when they land, the guy says he’ll help the lady find her poodle, he’s real sorry, and the lady says no, she’s sorry, and they set out together. So they find the poodle wandering around this field in a daze, and guess what it’s got in its mouth?

THE PUNCH LINE:

The brick.

THE DETECTIVE:

The truck stop said
OPEN
in green letters. The detective wiped his neck with the underwear and put it back in his pocket. Inside, he ordered coffee and creamed wheat and watched the cook scratch his armpit. The waitress had a peanut shell in her hair. The jukebox played something country-sounding, of course it did, and it seemed to be on repeat.

The detective’s head pulsed. When the waitress turned he tooted some Afrin and nearly cried. When she came back with his coffee he plucked the peanut shell from her hair and handed it to her. Thank you, she said, and she looked touched.

The detective stuck his finger in the coffee and stirred. A woman came out of the ladies’ and sat at the other end of the counter. She watched him from the corner of her eye and then she said, Sir, you are unpleasant.

The detective was startled. He threw a ten on the counter and walked out and the night was cool. He purposely mistook the city lights for stars.

He went to his car and grabbed the cuffs. Back inside the cook had his chin on his forearms and seemed to be lost in thought. Okay, the detective said, let’s go. Get up.

The woman at the end of the counter didn’t move so the detective got rough with her. He mostly yelled. The waitress wiped the counter in slow circles. The woman’s shoes were loud on the floor and louder on the gravel outside. The detective threw her in the backseat. You’re gonna talk, he hissed, and you’re gonna say what I want you to say. The woman’s eyes glittered meanly.

The detective slammed the car door and went back in for his creamed wheat. Only then did he hear the bell over the door, violent with jingling.

THE SISTER CONFESSES:

I said, This is going to hurt. I said, If you insist on being so quiet I’ll be forced to make you scream. I said, You can’t love we but we can love you.