Fuckness (28 page)

“
Hey, you stupid bitch!” Sir Boo called. “Come in here and get the roast outta the oven!”

Maria came back in the kitchen and turned off the oven. “This is nowhere
near
finished,” she hissed.

“
Hey, you fuckin whore, you fuck ol freak boy over there? You let him slip his horns in you?”

I almost laughed. I was sure Sir Boo thought he was being ridiculously absurd when he said that but it was the exact truth.

“
You’re an ass,” Maria said. She pulled the roast out of the oven and threw it into the sink, cracking the thick glass dish. “I’m leaving.”

“
Like hell you are.” Boo grabbed one of the multitude of beer bottles in front of him and threw it at Maria. It shattered on the cabinets behind her, the acrid smell of beer filling the kitchen.

“
Fuck you,” she said, practically running out of the kitchen. This time Boo followed her.

That’s it, I thought. Now’s the chance. I could have easily run for the door, out into the night. I could have left the Thiklet house behind me as only a grim memento of why I should probably not get married. I could be home by tomorrow. I could. I could. I could. But I didn’t.

It wouldn’t let me. Whatever had guided me here. That rope. That force. It wouldn’t let me leave. Not before getting the lighter that Drifter Ken had given me. The lighter had become like a talisman. It was presented to me at the beginning of my journey, my stumbling, whatever the great white fuckness it was, and it now seemed vital that it remain with me all the way through to the bitter end. I stood up to go get the lighter.

Hearing their yelling, I wondered where they were. A thumping or shattering immediately followed a shout. I wondered how many times this happened. They seemed to strive for a perfect house, keeping everything in order. I imagined Sir Boo coming home every night, slowly undoing what Maria did through the day. I pictured him walking down the halls, crooking straight pictures, tilting lampshades, wiping his feet on the floor, his ass on the shower curtain.

I stood on the landing, knowing all I had to do was dart into the guest bedroom, pocket the lighter and dart out of the house. Slowly, I took the few steps to the bedroom, trying to glean some sense out of what they were saying. They were in their bedroom, the door shut, probably locked. I went into the guest bedroom, crossing over to the dresser where the lighter lay on its side. I reached down, took it into my hand and stood there, numbly frozen, staring out the window at the illuminated side of the church. Somewhere unseen, a tree wavered in the soft breeze, producing a dancing shadow on the side of the church. An exceptionally loud crashing, like the ceiling falling down or some fuckness like that, raised me from my stupor.

The fuckness. Yeah, the fuckness was going to pour.

My body’s rigidity turned into near palsy, my nerves jumping around inside me, that jittery motion carrying me to the Thiklets’ bedroom door. In a way, I thought, as inevitable as their conflict may have been, I contributed to this. I got to the door.

“
Please, please, please,” I heard Maria say.

“
Joo fuckem!” Boo savagely grunted.

“
Just let me leave. I swear I’ll never come back. I don’t want
anything
.”

I opened the bedroom door and almost vomited. It was like all that shaking, all that jittering, zoomed straight into the pit of my stomach. The whumming started up good and strong.

A burning smell singed my nostrils. I quickly scanned the room for the source of it and took in the devastation. All the pictures were gone from the wall. They lay in a shattered heap in the far right corner. One half of the curtains and blinds had been ripped down so they hung there with a psychotic cant. The bed was disheveled and, in the center of it, lay a rifle, the barrel pointed sinisterly at me. The room seemed brighter and harsher than it had earlier and in this was the source of the smell. A lamp lay on its side in the corner to my left, the bulb melting into the plastic lining of the shade that directed all of its light upwards. Then I saw the sickening thing.

Their room also had a dresser, pushed up against the wall to my left. Boo had Maria bent over the far side of the dresser, his right hand tangled in the hair on the back of her head, his left hand clasped around her left arm, cinching it up tight to the middle of her shoulder blades. Her skirt was gone, her underwear tangled and stained. She saw me first but her eyes seemed unable to really focus. Bloody strands of hair clung to her cheek. Her nose was fat and swollen, blood running out, combining with the blood and spit from her mouth and waterfalling lugubriously down the front of the dresser. Sir Boo lifted up the back of her head and slammed it back down into the dresser’s unforgiving wood with each word as he said, “Did. You. Fuck. Him.”

Then I said, “Yes,” mainly to get his attention. The word sounded muffled among the whumming in my head.

Sir Boo snapped his head back at me. Maria had managed to claw deep red streaks into his face. His eyes were huge and all pupil. He was so mad they jumped around. I closed my hand around the lighter, drew it back and threw it at Sir Boo. Amazingly, it smacked him right in the middle of the forehead. However weakly, it made him let go of Maria. He looked at me and thumbed his mustache. Maria slid off the dresser and hit the floor with a thump. Boo moved toward the bed. I took off running, hearing his footsteps behind me.

I got to the top of the stairs and heard the gun go off. The bullet hit me in the back, to the right of my spine, the impact catapulting me down the stairs. Immediately, with the slightest exertion, both of my lungs started burning. There wasn’t a lot of pain, but the pressure made it hard to breathe. I scrambled through the living room, managing to stand by the time I got to the kitchen. My breathing raggedly mixed with the whirring iron whumming and I slammed into the front door, fitfully trying to grab onto the handle. My body shook violently. I felt like I had to run to make that shaking go away. If I were to just stand, I’d have the overwhelming desire to rip my skin off.

I got the door open and ran out into the night.

The church was the only thing really lit up so I ran for that, some hopeless feeling telling me the doors would be locked. Where was he? Was he behind me? I couldn’t hear anything over the breathing and the whumming. The church seemed a mile away. My body had shook itself into exhaustion. I felt like a gelatinous slab but, nevertheless, my legs carried me. Everything spun around me. One of my shoes flew off. I was dimly aware of the blood trickling down the crack of my ass.

I reached the door, the iron handle feeling like a rare treasure in my hand. I put all my weight against the door and pushed the handle. It collapsed inward. I collapsed with it into the dimly lit interior.

At the far end, the baptismal pool cast a rippling white reflection against the wall. I lay in the deep red carpet of the aisle. I couldn’t stand up. For a panicked minute I thought it was blood all around me, extending up to the pulpit area. I crawled up the middle of the aisle, those big heavy pews on either side of me. Then I had a thought.

I’m dying
.

The fuckness had caught up with me, striking a final deadly blow. I rolled over, collapsing onto my back and staring up at the rafters of the church. Fuck it, I thought. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.

Everything melted away. The whumming, the ragged breathing, all of it melted away. If I was still breathing, and I couldn’t tell if I was, it had to be through my skin. My chest wasn’t moving.

Everything was quiet. I stared up at the rafters. The soft light. A flash of blue. Blue. White. A jagged razor of death. Boo Thiklet positioned over me. He lowered the barrel of the rifle down to my forehead. Still there was silence. It felt like everything happened through a thick plate of glass. I looked at his hand as he pulled the trigger, awaiting the explosion, the inevitable end.

Nothing.

Again he depressed his finger.

Nothing.

Again and again and again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. For a second, I thought it had happened and I just didn’t hear it. I thought maybe I was watching everything from someplace above.

My body was numb. He grabbed me up, wrapped his arms around me and tossed me onto the edge of a pew. I landed on the floor and flung myself back into the aisle. Finish me off, I thought. Now Boo held the gun by the barrel and swung the stock at my head. It connected with a hollow- sounding impact. Every sound I heard came from inside my head. I lay on my side, my back resting against the row of pews. He grabbed my feet and pulled me up to the pulpit. I noticed my other shoe had come off in the meantime. I didn’t see how anyone could brutalize someone whose shoes had fallen off.

A long wooden altar sat squatly in front of the pulpit. The scripture, “For he so loved the world...” was stenciled in blood red letters on the front of the altar. What was the rest of the scripture, I wondered? Why didn’t they put it on there too? Boo turned me around, grabbed both of my horns and thrust my face into the floor. He rolled me over onto my back. Figuring out what he meant to do released some feeling into my body. Like I was cast suddenly and coldly back into life and reality. A wave of sickness burned in my stomach, turning my bowels and throat to acid.

He placed one of his brown construction boots on my left horn. Holding the rifle by the barrel and aiming it downward like a jackhammer, he brought the stock down at the base of my right horn. I didn’t know how they were connected so I had no real idea of how he was going to go about the excision. Each impact of the rifle butt sent a sickening bone impact through my body. I figured Maria had confessed our indiscretions to Boo. I wandered if she had confessed the small details of the fling also. He came down on it with increasing ferocity. I heard the horn first separate from my head with a sick wet peeling sound. My skin ripped as Boo bent down and yanked the horn to fully remove it. My head felt wet. More and more of my senses were coming back. It was like the more he tortured me, the more alive I became. He had the horn in his right hand, a giant hideous thing. The anger was still there, hopping around behind his eyes but it was a focused anger like he had some sort of renewed purpose, fulfilling a job he desperately wanted done. He slid the horn under the base of the still attached left horn, creating a fulcrum. This caused my head to turn to the right and I stared at his boot and the tip of the gun.

A violent force yanked my head to the left. I felt the horn give. He had brought his boot down on the tip of it. The whole thing made me think about trying to remove a tooth. Sir Boo brought his foot down again and this one went with a pop. I rolled to my right and vomited. The horn was still attached to my head by a thin string of skin, hanging with a sickening weight. In a smooth, continuous motion, I reached back, grabbed the tip of the horn, yanked it free from the skin, and swung it into Boo’s knee. I didn’t feel any pain with this one. Just the tearing tug. I got up on all fours, feeling the blood running down both of my cheeks. Boo raised a foot to stomp on me and I launched myself at his supporting knee. It went from being very rigid to oddly jointed. I spun off to the side. He tried to follow but his knee no longer pivoted that way. He went down, smacking his head on the pew and lying kind of dormant in the middle of the aisle. The gun was right beside me. I grabbed it by the barrel, the metal cold in my hot hand. I wrapped the other hand around it and used it like a cane to stand up.

Something surged over me, totally overwhelming and empowering. I stood over Boo, wielding the gun like an ax. I brought the stock down onto Sir Boo’s head, the connection rattling through the gun and twinging my hands. A hungry rage swirled through me. I brought the gun down for Racecar, for the mother, for Mary Lou Dover and Bucky Swarth and Pearlbottom. I did it again and again, watching as Sir Boo’s skin reddened, thinned, and then split. His eyes rolled around in his head. Exhausted and sickened, I couldn’t do it anymore.

I turned the gun around and aimed the barrel at his head. I looked around the church. Most of the blood, mine and Boo’s, had sunk into the carpet and it didn’t really look like anything out of place had happened here. The baptismal pool continued making its slow magical ripples on the wall. I suddenly thought of Uncle Skad, standing in a bed filled with his parents’ blood, unaware of what he’d just done. I thought of myself back at Toady’s, surveying the carnage I’d created. This time, I’d been conscious all the while and felt as alive as I ever had at that moment, the barrel of the gun resting against the rubbery weight of Boo’s face. I had hit him for all those other people and now I saw myself. I saw myself after I did this. Who would I be? If I pulled the trigger, would I even get the chance to try and define myself? Or would I be put into a system where society defined me?

I wasn’t the boy with horns anymore. And I was tired as hell of being Wallace Black.

I turned the gun toward the carpet beside his head and pulled the trigger. It went off with a thunderous explosion, tearing up the red carpet to expose the raw wood underneath. I dropped the gun on Sir Boo’s bloody face.

Every bit of aliveness I felt drained out of me. Raced out of me. My body felt like a used condom. I had to get out of the church. I was suddenly overcome by the smells around me—the musty wooden odor of the church, the sour age of the hymnals, the smell of steel, cheap cologne, and beer clinging to Boo, and everywhere, everywhere hung the iron stench of blood. And beneath that. Yes, somewhere just below the scent of coagulating blood, was the scent of death. It wasn’t Boo’s death that I smelled. His chest heaved as he lay there on the floor, merely passed out.