Seven Deadly Pleasures (24 page)

"C'mon, Jimmy!"

Right in my ear. I jumped and brought my hands to my throat. Kyle grabbed my elbow and pulled me around to the open door.

"I can't throw the clutch and bang it to neutral because my arm can't reach," he was saying. "And the bimbo is stuck right in the middle. The passenger side is crushed and I can't move her, ya dig?"

I did not "dig." We were right in front of the open door and I could feel the cab's sticky heat. Throw the clutch? Bang it to neutral? I knew he was talking about the gear shift, but wasn't sure whether the clutch was on the floor or by the steering wheel. My mom drove a Toyota and it was automatic.

"Neutral?" I said. I avoided the car's interior by focusing on the top rim of the door. Kyle sat down Indian style before me and pushed his hand in toward the floor mat.

"Yeah, neutral so we can move the car. When I push down the clutch pedal I need you to switch that gear shift to neutral. Pull it to the middle and just waggle it a second to make sure you're back to home base, all right?"

Easy for him to say. He had to fumble around with a pair of shoes down there, but I had to go in right over her lap.

I held my breath and bent into the car. The heat was an assault. By instinct I turned away from the close form beneath me and I felt something ever so slightly brush the hair on the back of my head. I jerked a bit and banged into what must have been her face. A bit of warm liquid oozed onto my neck and I lifted my frantic eyes from the wheel to the windshield. It was spiderwebbed with a series of cracks that roadmapped from the wipers clear to the roof side. At the center there was a marbled dent pushed into the glass where her forehead initially made contact. It was like the eye of a fly, with multiple cross-sections dripping tears of blood to the dash.

I let out my breath in a burst and gagged.

Caught between two scissored shards was a piece of her skin, dangling. It was big enough that I thought I could see a freckle on it.

My head swam. I could taste the aroma of her perfume on my tongue mixed with the heavier scent of shock, violence, and what might have been shit.

I bent in farther to accomplish my task in swift combination. From what seemed another planet I heard Kyle ask what was taking so long, and I fell a bit forward. I put my left hand down to the seat for support and it pressed the woman's bare thigh.

A scream whistled up in my nose and I groped to find the space between her legs. I stretched in with my right and made for the gear knob. In doing so I caught a glimpse of her right arm somehow outstretched and propped against the smashed-in right side of the instrument panel. I saw three thin gold bracelets down by her elbow, and one of her soft blue-painted nails that had broken off to a bloody smear.

I pulled at the gear shift and watched my fingers go white with the struggle as if from miles away. I yanked it as hard as I could downward instead of across and got nowhere. I jiggled, then threw a shoulder into it. I almost toppled in. I tried using some finesse and just wristing it. The bar went into its groove. It snapped in to rest at center, and I nearly tripped over Kyle in my peeling scramble away from the vehicle.

The hot wind actually felt cool for a second. I crossed the dirt road and went hand to knee before a square stack of bricks. I breathed deeply, then advanced to standing fairly straight with my hands on my hips. The brick pile was waist high and covered with a ratty blue tarp that flapped its edges and corners into the summer wind. The taut, roped-down surface was water-stained and covered with sticks, mud curls, bird shit, and a few acorns. Ordinarily, I would have liked to have chucked those hard little nuts at a sign or something just to hear the "ping." Ordinarily, I could have been distracted at any moment to jump up and see if I could touch a high archway, or tap a ball against a wall four hundred times for a record, or race someone through a field, past the last phone pole with the tar marks on it, and all the way to the little walking bridge over the creek that sat between Pennwood Park and the back side of the shopping center. Ordinarily. The word didn't exist anymore.

I wiped the back of my neck, looked at my hand, and almost threw up. Her blood and my sweat combined in a red slime. I rubbed my palm on the leg of my jeans until it burned. I thought of Kyle reaching in for the pedals between those hard, impersonal shoes while I had the open wounds in my ear and the bare thighs of a corpse surrounding my prop hand. I thought of his telling me to hurry up from the safety of the open air outside of the cab while I was stifled in the hot box, and I suddenly wondered if I could take him.

Kyle was bigger. I floated between one-o-eight and a hundred and fifteen pounds or so, and I would estimate he was about a buck forty-five. The problem was that I had never seen Kyle fight. Some guys were built for fighting and they dressed for it. There were the guys with the silk shirts and gold chains, the guys with motorcycle jackets and boots, and the guys with crewcuts who looked like they already pumped iron. Kyle was the closest to that last category in appearance, but didn't need nor bother with the actions that usually went with it. Where tough guys seemed to look for the weaker breed to build a footing on, Kyle made a living gathering troops of all shapes, sizes, and colors against the older generation. He was never challenged because he had everyone on his side.

There was, however, the thinly smiling (but not at all smiling) aggression everyone could sense beneath the broad grin of the ever-present wise ass, and I believe Kyle sometimes gave a demonstration or two, of course masked as a joke, just to make those with an ugly side think twice about crossing him. At the end of seventh grade, he brought a tape measurer with him into the hallway and bet Ronnie Shoemaker that he could put a two-inch dent in a locker with one punch. A crowd gathered in the traditional semicircle at the end of a line of thin lockers we called "The Gray Mile," and watched Kyle wind up, bash the steel, crimp it in about an inch and a half, and fall to the ground in gales of laughter.

At the end of the same year, Kyle became the hero of metal shop by cutting off the tip of his pinkie. I heard that they listed it as an accident on the school report, but I was there. This was not incidental. Kyle had been at the station with the portable band saw turned upside-down and propped to an angle in a set of huge bench vices, filled in their creases with metal shavings, dirt, and WD-40. His project was a four-post lantern shell and he was supposed to trim the scrolls down from twenty-four inches to a foot. Before doing so he walked the room with a whisper in a given ear at the soldering and welding bench, a hand to a shoulder at the drill press, face to face in front of the bench grinder. Protective glasses were propped up on foreheads and safety shields were put in open positions. I set down my file. Kyle approached the Portaband, flicked it on, and turned a sly smile to us. He then ceremoniously raised his hands above his head, the triumphant prize fighter. He held the tip of his left pinkie in between the pads of his right thumb and index finger. He lowered it all slowly and then leaned into the whine of the machine. We craned our necks and went up on our toes. No one had a good angle for a visual past his shoulder, except, that is, for Junior Macenhaney over by the dual industrial wash basins who suddenly put a dirty work glove up to his mouth and pointed.

Kyle turned around. He was still smiling. A thin, spotty line of blood had splashed up his cheek and over the left lens of his goggles. He walked up to Mr. Ruthersford, who was bent over the tool drawer, and shouted,

"Hey dude! Want a Chiclet?"

After being rushed to the nurse and then the Children's Hospital out past Rutherford Heights, they sewed the tip back on for him. You didn't even notice the tiny scars nowadays unless you got right up close and personal with it, but he still got mileage from it. He claimed he couldn't feel it anymore, and on a dare right before last Christmas break he put it over a flame in science lab long enough to burn the nail black.

You would have to assume a guy like that was a vicious competitor if forced to fight. Some guys boxed real well, and others even laid down rules like no eye gouging or crotch shots, but Kyle gave the impression that he would do anything to beat your butt if he had to. I pictured kicking, bites, scratches, and worst of all, props if they were handy. What would stop a guy who cut off his own fingertip for a thrill from grabbing a rock and bashing your cheek with it, or snapping off a car antenna and jabbing your eye, or breaking a bottle and swiping it at your jugular?

I was no weakling myself, but my skills didn't apply here. I could wrestle pretty well, and had earned a spot on the B team last year. Though there was an ace at a hundred and ten pounds named Barry Cutlerson who knew all kinds of fancy ways to stack you up, put your head where your ass should have been, and twist you into a pretzel, I had my own reputation for being "a worm," rarely pinned, often winning my matches by a couple of points. But even if I could rush Kyle, get a single leg, and take him down, what happened next? What could I really do except hold him there? I needed to knock him out and run home, not tire myself out submitting him.

The cold fact was that I had to have the cold will to pick up a rock when he wasn't looking and sucker him. I had always wondered if those who bragged about keeping weapons handy actually had the gumption to use them. What did it feel like to murder someone if you thought you had the right? I looked down at my hands and pushed out a shaky breath. I just helped murder someone for absolutely no reason at all, and I deserved a bash on the head as much as did Kyle. A sneak attack just muddied and worsened the complicated equation.

"Hey Jimmy," Kyle called. "I want to show you something. C'mon, man, you're really going to like it."

I turned and spit into the dirt. There was blood in the saliva because I had bitten the inside of my lip without realizing it. Kyle stepped across the lane, took a position before me, and rubbed the sole of his sneaker over the place I had moistened. The thin streak of red mud blended, darkened, and vanished.

"What, did you cut yourself shaving?" he said. I sucked in at my lip to nurse the wound that was no more than a trickle. He licked his teeth, smacked his lips, gulped air a few times, and let out a tremendous belch.

"Whiplash!" he said. He then took a fistful of my shirt and dragged me across the road past the back side of the car. "Look."

We were on the far side of the road now, near the edge of the woods, and I saw nothing but a patch of wildflowers in front of a thick march of trees.

"What am I looking for?" I said.

"The doorway, man, the doorway!"

Now I knew. There was a space about nine standing men wide between two elms at the lip of the forest. A rough path pushed a short way in, quickly hooded and darkened by overhanging branches. The far side of the glade was a wall of ferns, vines, and brambles.

"Go in, Jimmy," Kyle said. "Walk through the doorway, make a sharp right, and find the surprise down at the end of the path."

I advanced into the shadows. I did not want to take the time to second-guess it. Dead vegetation crinkled under my sneakers and passed through my mind vague images of snake skins and insects. I shook it off. I had been in dark forests hundreds of times, hunting out salamanders, fossils, and arrowheads, and whatever was down here had to be better than what was waiting in the Honda.

The woods took me in like a cold womb. Stabs of sunlight slipped through at odd angles, and a spiderweb that had once spanned a two-foot nook between a trunk and crooked branch now fluttered with one side unfastened, a frail shroud pointing in stuttering rhythm the way of the breeze.

I followed the light wind and shifted right. I edged down the rooted path about twenty-five feet down as Kyle had advised and then it was there, waiting in silence.

It was a place where the ground fell off in a twenty-foot arc. A deep, black hole.

It was going to be the woman's grave.

Closest to the dark, empty shape cut into the ground were huge banks of dirt piled at the far side covered with what looked like low cut open air circus canopies. There was a digging machine to the left, and a score of rusted shovels scattered along the perimeter. I dragged my feet to the rim of the pit and peered over the edge. The drop was so deep I could not see the bottom. Edges of roots pushed out of the near inner wall like the knobby fingers of jailed witches. I reached into my right front pocket and fumbled out a bent nail. I tossed it into the hole. Once the nail winked out of sight I did not hear it land.

The other nails followed, all of them, mate joining mate down the black well of silence. No one had told me to unload the evidence here; I just sensed it was right.

All on my own I was beginning to think like a criminal.

I forced myself to pull my glance out of the blackness of the abyss and walk the border. The scene around the hole past the dirt hills and shovels was busy with "stuff" that made a haphazard background of things I passed on the roadway a thousand times and took utterly for granted.

Just beyond the biggest pile of light brown dirt was a smaller heap of crushed stone. At the far side of the clearing there were two machines with massive inner coils and big, flat bottom-pads. They were turned on their sides like discarded bicycles near an apparatus that looked like a standing ride mower with a nine-foot chain saw at the end. Five rolls of orange construction fencing were lying in some overgrowth between two trash cans filled with wooden stakes, and the mini-bulldozer now directly to my left sat opposite the position I had just abandoned at the front side of the hole.

The machine had "BOBCAT" stenciled in block letters beneath some dried mud caked to the back panel. Around front, the wide bucket was full of the whitish crushed stone in a pyramid shape and the whole thing was raised out about ninety percent flush over the lip of the hole. I stepped in closer. It seemed as if the driver of the machine had stopped cold just before getting fully squared in position to spill the rocks, and there was a thick length of old chain now holding up the bucket. It was padlocked through a hole between the digging teeth and figure-eighted into the high steel mesh of the cab.