Stories (2011) (38 page)

I assured her I understood.

The old couple went home then, and another lady came up, and
sure enough, I hadn't seen her before either, and she said, "Did that
crazy ole girl come over here and ask to use the phone, then fall down on you
and flop?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Does that all the time."

Then this woman went around the corner of the house and was
gone, and I never saw her again. In fact, with the exception of the elderly
neighbors and the Phone Woman, I never saw any of those people again and never
knew where they came from. Next day there was a soft knock on the door. It was
the Phone Woman again. She asked to use the phone.

I told her we'd had it taken out.

She went away and I saw her several times that day. She'd
come up our street about once every half hour, wearing that same coat and hat
and those sad shoes, and I guess it must have been a hundred and ten out there.
I watched her from the window. In fact, I couldn't get any writing done because
I was watching for her. Thinking about her lying there on the floor, pulling
her dress up, flopping. I thought too of her hanging herself now and then, like
she was some kind of suit on a hanger.

Anyway, the day passed and I tried to forget about her, then
the other night, Monday probably, I went out on the porch to smoke one of my
rare cigars (about four to six a year), and I saw someone coming down the dark
street, and from the way that someone walked, I knew it was her, the Phone
Woman.

She went on by the house and stopped down the road a piece
and looked up and I looked where she was looking, and "through the trees I
could see what she saw. The moon.

We both looked at it a while, and she finally walked on,
slow, with her head down, and I put my cigar out well before it was finished
and went inside and brushed my teeth and took off my clothes, and tried to go
to sleep. Instead, I lay there for a long time and thought about her, walking
those dark streets, maybe thinking about her mom, or a lost love, or a phone,
or sex in the form of rape because it was some kind of human connection, about
hanging herself because it was attention and it gave her a sexual high . . .
and then again, maybe I'm full of shit and she wasn't thinking about any of
those things.

Then it struck me suddenly, as I lay there in bed beside my
wife, in my quiet house, my son sleeping with his teddy bear in the room across
the way, that maybe she was the one in touch with the world, with life, and
that I was the one gone stale from civilization. Perhaps life had been
civilized right out of me.

The times I had truly felt alive, in touch with my nerve
centers, were in times of violence or extreme stress.

Where I had grown up, in Mud Creek, violence simmered
underneath everyday life like lava cooking beneath a thin crust of earth, ready
at any time to explode and spew. I had been in fights, been cut by knives. I
once had a job bouncing drunks. I had been a bodyguard in my earlier years, had
illegally carried a .38. On one occasion, due to a dispute the day before while
protecting my employer, who sometimes dealt with a bad crowd, a man I had insulted
and hit with my fists pulled a gun on me, and I had been forced to pull mine.
The both of us ended up with guns in our faces, looking into each other's eyes,
knowing full well our lives hung by a thread and the snap of a trigger.

I had killed no one, and had avoided being shot. The Mexican
stand-off ended with us both backing away and running off, but there had been
that moment when I knew it could all be over in a flash. Out of the picture in
a blaze of glory. No old folks home for me. No drool running down my chin and
some young nurse wiping my ass, thinking how repulsive and old I was, wishing
for quitting time so she could roll up with some young stud some place sweet
and cozy, open her legs to him with a smile and a sigh, and later a passionate
scream, while in the meantime, back at the old folks ranch, I lay in the bed
with a dead dick and an oxygen mask strapped to my face.

Something about the Phone Woman had clicked with me. I
understood her suddenly. I understood then that the lava that had boiled
beneath the civilized facade of my brain was no longer boiling. It might be
bubbling way down low, but it wasn't boiling, and the realization of that went
all over me and I felt sad, very, very sad. I had dug a grave and crawled into
it and was slowly pulling the dirt in after me. I had a home. I had a wife. I
had a son. Dirt clods all. Dirt clods filling in my grave while life simmered
somewhere down deep and useless within me.

I lay there for a long time with tears on my cheeks before
exhaustion took over and I slept in a dark world of dormant passion.

* * *

Couple days went by, and one night after Fruit of My Loins
and Janet were in bed, I went out on the front porch to sit and look at the
stars and think about what I'm working on -- a novella that isn't going well --
and what do I see but the Phone Woman, coming down the road again, walking past
the house, stopping once more to look at the moon.

I didn't go in this time, but sat there waiting, and she
went on up the street and turned right and went out of sight. I walked across
the yard and went out to the center of the street and watched her back going
away from me, mixing into the shadows of the trees and houses along the street,
and I followed.

I don't know what I wanted to see, but I wanted to see
something, and I found for some reason that I was thinking of her lying there
on the floor in my hallway, her dress up, the mound of her sex, as they say in
porno novels, pushing up at me. The thought gave me an erection, and I was conscious
of how silly this was, how unattractive this woman was to me, how odd she
looked, and then another thought came to me: I was a snob. I didn't want to
feel sexual towards anyone ugly or smelly in a winter coat in the dead of
summer.

But the night was cool and the shadows were thick, and they
made me feel all right, romantic maybe, or so I told myself.

I moved through a neighbor's backyard where a dog barked at
me a couple of times and shut up. I reached the street across the way and
looked for the Phone Woman, but didn't see her.

I took a flyer, and walked on down the street toward the
trailer park where those poor illegal aliens were stuffed in like sardines by
their unscrupulous employers, and I saw a shadow move among shadows, and then
there was a split in the trees that provided the shadows, and I saw her, the
Phone Woman. She was standing in a yard under a great oak, and not far from her
was a trailer. A pathetic air conditioner hummed in one of its windows.

She stopped and looked up through that split in the trees
above, and I knew she was trying to find the moon again, that she had staked
out spots that she traveled to at night; spots where she stood and looked at
the moon or the stars or the pure and sweet black eternity between them.

Like the time before, I looked up too, took in the moon, and
it was beautiful, as gold as if it were a great glob of honey. The wind moved
my hair, and it seemed solid and purposeful, like a lover's soft touch, like
the beginning of foreplay. I breathed deep and tasted the fragrance of the
night, and my lungs felt full and strong and young.

I looked back at the woman and saw she was reaching out her
hands to the moon. No, a low limb. She touched it with her fingertips. She
raised her other hand, and in it was a short, thick rope. She tossed the rope
over the limb and made a loop and pulled it taut to the limb. Then she tied a
loop to the other end, quickly expertly, and put that around her neck.

Of course, I knew what she was going to do. But I didn't
move. I could have stopped her, I knew, but what was the point? Death was the
siren she had called on many a time, and finally, she had heard it sing.

She jumped and pulled her legs under her and the limb took
her jump and held her. Her head twisted to the left and she spun about on the
rope and the moonlight caught the silver pin on her ski cap and it threw out a
cool beacon of silver light, and as she spun, it hit me once, twice, three
times.

On the third spin her mouth went wide and her tongue went
out and her legs dropped down and hit the ground and she dangled there,
unconscious.

I unrooted my feet and walked over there, looking about as I
went.

I didn't see anyone. No lights went on in the trailer.

I moved up close to her. Her eyes were open. Her tongue was
out. She was swinging a little, her knees were bent and the toes and tops of
her silly shoes dragged the ground. I walked around and around her, an erection
pushing at my pants. I observed her closely, trying to see what death looked
like.

She coughed. A little choking cough. Her eyes shifted toward
me. Her chest heaved. She was beginning to breathe. She made a feeble effort to
get her feet under her, to raise her hands to the rope around her neck.

She was back from the dead.

I went to her. I took her hands, gently pulled them from her
throat, let them go. I looked into her eyes. I saw the moon there. She shifted
so that her legs held her weight better. Her hands went to her dress. She
pulled it up to her waist. She wore no panties. Her bush was like a nest built
between the boughs of a snow-white elm.

I remembered the day she came into the house. Everything
since then, leading up to this moment, seemed like a kind of perverse mating
ritual. I put my hand to her throat. I took hold of the rope with my other hand
and jerked it so that her knees straightened, then I eased behind her, put my
forearm against the rope around her throat, and I began to tighten my hold
until she made a soft noise, like a virgin taking a man for the first time. She
didn't lift her hands. She continued to tug her dress up. She was trembling
from lack of oxygen. I pressed myself against her buttocks, moved my hips
rhythmically, my hard-on bound by my underwear and pants. I tightened the
pressure on her throat.

And choked her.

And choked her.

She gave up what was left of her life with a shiver and a
thrusting of her pelvis, and finally she jammed her buttocks back into me and I
felt myself ejaculate, thick and hot and rich as shaving foam.

Her hands fell to her side. I loosened the pressure on her throat
but clung to her for a while, getting my breath and my strength back. When I
felt strong enough, I let her go. She swung out and around on the rope and her
knees bent and her head cocked up to stare blindly at the gap in the trees
above, at the honey-golden moon.

I left her there and went back to the house and slipped into
the bedroom and took off my clothes. I removed my wet underwear carefully and
wiped them out with toilet paper and flushed the paper down the toilet. I put
the underwear in the clothes hamper. I put on fresh and climbed into bed and
rubbed my hands over my wife's buttocks until she moaned and woke up. I rolled
her on her stomach and mounted her and made love to her. Hard, violent love, my
forearm around her throat, not squeezing, but thinking about the Phone Woman,
the sound she had made when I choked her from behind, the way her buttocks had
thrust back .into me at the end. I closed my eyes until the sound that Janet
made was the sound the Phone Woman made and I could visualize her there in the
moonlight, swinging by the rope.

When it was over, I held Janet and she kissed me and joked
about my arm around her throat, about how it seemed I had wanted to choke her.
We laughed a little. She went to sleep. I let go of her and moved to my side of
the bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the Phone Woman. I tried to
feel guilt. I could not. She had wanted it. She had tried for it many times. I
had helped her do what she had never been able to manage. And I had felt alive
again. Doing something on the edge. Taking a risk.

Well, journal, here's the question: Am I a sociopath?

No. I love my wife. I love my child. I even love my Suburban
Husky. I have never hunted and fished, because I thought I didn't like to kill.
But there are those who want to die. It is their one moment of life; to totter
on the brink between light and darkness, to take the final, dark rush down a
corridor of black, hot pain.

So, Oh Great White Pages, should I feel guilt, some inner
torment, a fear that I am at heart a cold-blooded murderer?

I think not.

I gave the sweet gift of truly being alive to a woman who
wanted someone to participate in her moment of joy. Death ended that, but
without the threat of it, her moment would have been nothing. A stage rehearsal
for a high-school play in street clothes.

Nor do I feel fear. The law will never suspect me. There's
no reason to. The Phone Woman had a record of near suicides. It would never
occur to anyone to think she had died by anyone's hand other than her own.

I felt content, in touch again with the lava beneath the
primal crust. I have allowed it to boil up and burst through and flow, and now
it has gone down once more. But it's no longer a distant memory. It throbs and
rolls and laps just below ready to jump and give me life. Are there others out
there like me? Or better yet, others for me, like the Phone Woman?

Most certainly.

And now I will recognize them. The Phone Woman has taught me
that. She came into my life on a silly morning and brought me adventure, took
me away from the grind, and then she brought me more, much, much more. She
helped me recognize the fine but perfect line between desire and murder; let me
know that there are happy victims and loving executioners.

I will know the happy victims now when I see them, know who
needs to be satisfied. I will give them their desire, while they give me mine.

This last part with the Phone Woman happened last night and
I am recording it now, while it is fresh, as Janet sleeps. I think of Janet in
there and I have a hard time imagining her face. I want her, but I want her to
be the Phone Woman, or someone like her.