A Stark And Wormy Knight

Ants

It feels good to swing hard, to feel his muscles flex and the blade of the ax bite deep into the wood. It feels even better that it’s the old apple tree, the one whose apples have never been any damn good, puny and sour. But the blossoms, she always says, it blossoms so nice — it makes the whole yard look pretty! Yeah, and who gives a crap about that?

Well, today he’s made his mind up. If there’s one upside of having lost his job down at the salvage yard, it’s that he doesn’t have to pretend to care about anything around here that isn’t pulling its weight. The apple tree is a perfect example: a few useless blossoms versus the need to bring down the heating bills next winter equals the tree is history.

As he finishes setting the cut wood onto the pile, which is getting impressively high, he sees her watching from the window. Oh, God, that face. Like he was killing a family dog instead of just taking down an old eyesore of an apple tree. He gives her a mocking smile and wave, a little twiddle of the fingers. She turns away.

He married her. He must have — everybody tells him so. But he doesn’t really remember it happening and certainly doesn’t remember why. Sometimes, listening to her complain about all the things that (according to her) he should have done and hasn’t, or shouldn’t have done but did anyway, he has a sudden fantasy of just taking a big old swing at her with his fist, like something out of a Popeye cartoon, hitting her so hard she just flies away and he never has to hear that voice again.

He even sees it with a caption, like one of those rumpled, Xeroxed cartoons they used to pass around at the yard in the days before the internet: Bitch In Space.

“That’s just great, Karl,” she tells him as he comes in and sets the ax in the corner of the kitchen. It needs to go out to the garage to be oiled and re-sharpened and put away properly, but he’s going to have a beer first because he goddamn well deserves it. He wipes sweat from his face and the back of his neck. Maybe two beers. He’s only had a couple today so far and it is Saturday. Is there some law that says you have to have a job to enjoy a few beers on Saturday?

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just great. Spend an hour chopping down a harmless tree for firewood in the middle of July instead of doing something useful. It’s ninety goddamn degrees outside — what do we need firewood for?”

He ignores her, feels the beer sliding down his throat, icy and perfect. If only there was a way to pour cold beer over his whole life. Yeah, drown the bitch with it…or at least drown her out.

“Have you done any of the other things I asked you to do? Did you call the exterminator?”

“We don’t need any goddamn exterminator. Do you know what those cheating bastards charge? It’s just a few ants.”

“Just a few?” She stares at him like he’s crazy. “If you were ever in here for any longer than than it takes to open another beer, you might have noticed that we’re being overrun by the creepy little things. Look. Look!” She’s waving her arm like her turn indicator’s broken. He rolls his eyes, which just makes her more pissed off. “Look in that sink, damn you!”

He takes a long swallow of his beer, hitches his pants up, rubs some sweat from the small of his back and ambles over to the sink. It really would be nice just to plant her one, a shot in the nose to straighten her right up. Yeah, he’d probably go to jail, that’s the way things are nowadays, but oh my God it would be like a dream come true… “So what?”

“Do you happen to notice about a thousand ants in there?” She points at them like he’s stupid — like he really doesn’t see them. “And in the cabinets, and on the table, and all over the floor. It’s gross, Karl, it’s goddamned gross and disgusting! I can’t walk across the kitchen without stepping on hundreds of the things!”

“So why do you want to pay an exterminator if you’re doing it yourself?” A good one. He laughs.

She slaps him stingingly on the arm. “You’re not funny, you mean bastard!”

For an instant — just an instant, but it rushes through him like a wildfire — he almost does hit her. Things go a little bit upside-down, like when he sometimes gets up too quick, gets dizzy, and almost falls. “Don’t…don’t you ever do that again,” he tells her, with enough of his true feelings in his voice that she backs away a few steps, like a dog trying to decide whether to bolt.

“I want those things out of here, Karl,” she says, but whining now like a stuck-up kid. “They’re disgusting.”

“Oh, they’re in the sink, isn’t that too bad,” he says, mocking her. “Did it ever occur to you, you lazy bitch, that all you have to do is turn on the water and wash ‘em down the drain?” He does, using the rinsing hose to send all the little leggy black creatures sliding and swooshing away to watery death. “Bye-bye, you little fuckers.” He turns to her. “See? Problem solved.”

She’s gone pale now, her face cold and hard. She hates it when he calls her “bitch” — as if it wasn’t the best possible name for someone like her, someone who was pretty damn cute in high school but has long since gone fat and mouthy, just like her chain-smoking, vodka-gargling mother, but who also puts on airs like she’s too good for him because she watches Oprah and reads an occasional book.

“Why are you so hateful, Karl? It’s not just ants in the sink.” Her voice starts to rise. “What about the ones on the floor? What about the ones on the counter, and in the damn cabinets, and in the goddamned sugar bowl, Karl? Huh? What about that?”

Why don’t they think, he wonders. Why can’t they think? Because all this Oprah, Dr. Phil, everything’s-about-feelings bullshit clouds their minds, that’s why. Not a one of them can think about things logically, make a plan, solve a problem… “Oh, Jesus, shut your mouth for just a minute, Norah — I know it’s hard for you, but try — and I’ll show you what to do with the goddamn sugar bowl.”

The ants trek across the table in a wavering line. You have to admire their focus, if nothing else, he thinks. They’re like him, in a way — small, maybe, but tough and strong and well-organized. They’re carrying little grains of sugar from the bowl across the table and down onto the floor, then off to their nest or hive or whatever they have. It’s kind of funny, really. If you’re an ant, finding that sugar bowl must be like winning the lottery.

He put his hand under the sugar bowl to lift it. The plastic table cover is sticky and it grabs at the hairs on the back of his hand. Something hot and red flares in him again. “No wonder we got ants everywhere. This place is filthy. Now, pay attention, stupid, and I’ll show you something. Ants in the sugar bowl, big problem? I don’t think so.” He goes to the sink and dumps out the sugar, stands for a moment, sweat on his face and his heart beating strangely as he watches the little black shapes dig out of the pile of white crystals on the floor of the basin. Then he sluices them away with the rinsing-hose.

“Empty the sugar bowl,” she said. “Real clever, Karl. God, it’s just like you always say, men are just smarter. I wonder why I never thought of it? And when I want to put sugar in my coffee, or on my cereal, why, I’ll just go scrape it out of the drain. Brilliant.”

He isn’t going to look at her because if he does he’s probably going to smack the shit out of her. He only ever did it once before, when they were first together. She came back from her mother’s after two weeks and they didn’t talk about it again. She hadn’t seen Oprah in those days.

“Just because you don’t use sugar doesn’t mean I don’t want to use it, Karl.” She was still using that voice, the one that made his hairs stand on end. “They’re into the sugar bag in the cabinet, too, but I’m sure you thought of that already with your superior male logical intelligence. So tell me, Mr. Spock, am I just supposed to give up sugar entirely?”

Wouldn’t do you any harm, you fat bitch, he thinks. His head hurts and he doesn’t really want to talk any more. He wants another beer, maybe two — shit, maybe four — and then he wants to go sit in the living room and watch the baseball game, or wrestling, or anything that means he won’t have to think about any of this.

“Shut up and look,” he tells her. “Just…shut up. I’m warning you.” Mr. Spock, huh? Compared to the crap that fills her head, he is an alien genius. His teeth are clenched so hard now that it’s making the headache worse. He rinses the sugar bowl, dries it off with a paper towel, then refills it from the sugar bag after flicking off a few six-legged explorers. It’s the hot weather. The ground gets dry and the little bastards come in looking for water, but then find out where all the good stuff is. Little shits. His moment of identification with the ants is long gone. Just somebody else who wants to rip him off.

When the clean, dry sugar bowl is full of clean, dry sugar, he takes it to the dishes cabinet and rummages around until he finds a bowl large enough for it to sit in comfortably. Then, with it nesting there like a small boat in a bigger boat, he fills the outer bowl with water and holds the whole arrangement out for Norah to see.

“Get it?” He points to the inch-wide span of water now ringing the sugar bowl. Karl is pleased to get the last word for once — he couldn’t have proved his case against her lazy thinking more completely if he’d had a chance to prepare in advance. There’s absolutely no way for her to refute this evidence. “It’s like a moat around a castle, see? The ants can’t get to the sugar bowl. They try to cross the water, they drown. No ants in the sugar. Get it, Norah? Get it?”

He’s about to set the sugar bowl back on the table when he remembers the stickiness that had sucked at his arm. He wipes the sweat from his forehead. Bad enough the heat, but the whole goddamn house is sticky, too. Ants? The way she cleans, they probably have roaches… Karl puts the sugar bowl up on top of the refrigerator, then pulls the plaid cover off the kitchen table and holds it out toward her. “Go on, make yourself useful. Clean this shit up, the ants won’t even want to get on the table. It’s only because you keep this place like a pigsty…”

He picks up his ax and starts toward the garage. The headache is beginning to ease.

“You…you bastard!” she shrieks. “You stupid, ignorant bastard! Those damn ants are everywhere! What am I supposed to do, bring in the hose and just fill the house with water? Is that what you’re saying?”

He’s not going to argue any more. He showed her — he shut her up — so why won’t she stay that way?

“Don’t walk out on me!” She’s screaming louder now, that voice like a dentist’s drill — he swears he can feel it buzzing in his fillings. “Don’t you dare!”

“Shut your damn mouth or I’ll slap you silly.” He tries to get the garage door open but she’s blocking his path. He grabs her arm and yanks her out of the way. The garage beckons like a cave, dark and cool, quiet and safe. Then he feels her fingernails in the skin of his neck, burning, sharp, and her other hand in a rude little fist, smacking away at the back of his head.

“Don’t you dare turn your back on me, Karl Eggar, you ignorant pig! Don’t you dare! Don’t you…!”

And suddenly something just expands inside him, a great, hot plume like the blast that leveled Hiroshima. He can feel it blaze up through the whole length of his upper body, out of his guts and up his spine and out the top of his head, rising like a mushroom cloud. He has the ax in his hand and suddenly everything has turned hot, the very air is blazing like an oven. Everything is flow, and noise, and movement, and all of it is glowing red — a single hot, moving, expanding thing with him helpless in its midst, helpless but laughing as the ax rises and falls, over and over again. Each time it strikes it makes a sound — skutch, skutch, skutch — as satisfying as sinking a steak knife into a thick porterhouse. He can’t stop laughing. Heat and the glorious pounding — the pounding! He feels like he is hammering the world in half.

For a long time after he has finished swinging Karl only stands, the ax now hanging in his hands, heavy as an iron girder. His limbs tingle, even his scalp prickles. He is drained, as bonelessly weary as if he has just had a ten-minute orgasm. But there is a…thing…on the floor. No, many things, one big and the rest in all kinds of sizes and shapes. It’s hard to make out details because the kitchen is very messy. The walls are spattered and dripping red. Red everywhere.

The exhilaration is beginning to wear off. He sinks into a crouch in the middle of one of the larger scarlet puddles. The strangest, thickest, saltiest smell is in his nose. He’s trying to think, staring at what’s left of his wife. Call an ambulance? No point. No ambulance in the world is going to do any good. All the kings horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put…that…

He wretches up what is in his stomach, a slurry of beer and less identifiable components. The smell combines with the blood and suddenly he is on his side in the warm red goo, unable to do anything further until he has emptied his stomach to its lining, until he is gagging out air and streams of mucus. Then, numb and unable to think about much of anything, he staggers to his feet, drops his shoes and clothes where he stands, then steps carefully over the abstract red splatters as he leaves the kitchen.

He stands under the shower for what seems like hours, hoping in a hopeless kind of way, like a superstitious child, that if he waits long enough and lets enough water run over him, when he goes back to the kitchen things will be…different.

But, of course, they are not. He stands shivering, looking down at the bloody meat and bone, the scatter of pieces that had seemed so inevitably connected once, but now seem as random as an emptied bowl of stew. His stomach lurches again but there is no longer anything in it to throw up.

Think, he tells himself. Think. Don’t panic. That’s when people make mistakes. Don’t think with your emotions. Be a man. Be…logical.

First things first. The shower was a mistake. He shouldn’t have left the room. The police, they have all this equipment now, special lights and chemicals to detect blood stains, even stains that are so small or so old you can hardly see them. He’ll put his shoes back on and stay in the kitchen, and if he has to go anywhere else, he’ll leave the shoes here so he doesn’t track any blood.

But he has to leave the room almost at once because the blood is pooled everywhere across the floor, right to the baseboards. He doesn’t think it will soak through the vinyl flooring, but at the edge of the floor it will definitely get into the gaps between the flooring and the walls and that will be that. So he goes to the garage and gets a big plastic tarp left over from camping and then, back in the kitchen, gingerly lifts the largest piece up onto it — it is surprisingly heavy for only part of a person — then begins piling the other decent-sized chunks onto the plastic as well. He has to stop several times to gag again, but after a while he gets used to the smell and a sort of gray haze covers his thoughts and he can work without thinking too much about what he’s doing. Still, the discovery of a finger with a wedding ring still on it makes him pause for a moment. It’s not that he loved her, or even gave a damn about her, but this…this is so…final. Not to mention the fact that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail if he gets caught, and that’s if he’s lucky. And now he’s cleaning up. He’s trying to hide what he did. That could get him the death penalty.

Karl pauses for a moment, then gives a sort of shrug. Too late now. The bitch drove him to it. Admitting that he did it, calling the police, going to jail — that would be giving her the last word. That would be Norah having the last laugh as he spends the rest of his life, maybe fifty years or more, suffering for what she did to him.

But how will he get it all clean? He’s seen it all on television cop shows. Eventually, they’ll come, and he’ll be the first suspect.

Karl surprises even himself by laughing. Of course he should be the first suspect. Because he did it! He’s sitting naked in his kitchen in a pool of his wife’s blood!

No, think, he tells himself. Look. There are red splatters everywhere, and dozens of pieces flung all over the room still to find. And on top of everything else, ants, hundreds of the little bastards still crawling everywhere, oblivious, and if they aren’t already doing it, they’ll soon be tracking thousands of little bloody ant footprints everywhere. The ants are searching for food — they’ll head right for the blood and bone chips and bits of meat. And even if he keeps them off the body, how will he find all the pieces of Norah and get this kitchen clean?

The idea, when it finally comes, is so good that he begins to laugh again.

You dumb bitch, he thinks. You could have watched Oprah for a hundred years and you’d still never have an idea as good as this!

He gets to work.

Once he has every visible piece collected on the plastic tarp, some of them already crawling with tiny black insect bodies, Karl begins to scrub. He concentrates on soaking up blood first, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, using paper towels and rags from the garage. It takes a couple of hours, and after a while he realizes he is dizzy with exhaustion and hunger, so he stops to stand naked in the middle of the kitchen and eat corn chips from the cuPRETTY BOYoard. While he is getting them out he notices a few random droplets of red on the pretty board door, six feet above the ground. There must be hundreds like that, he knows. Still, he has a plan.

When he has finally mopped up all the blood he can see and mopped the whole floor with rubbing alcohol to kill the traces, he takes the red rags and the ruined torso and the forlorn, bloody pieces, even the ants climbing on them, and wraps them all together in the plastic tarp and tapes it shut. Then he sits down on the floor to wait. He has blotted up every ant he could find, mashing them into the bloody rags now wrapped inside the tarp, and for the first time today the kitchen is antless. Norah would be pleased, if she wasn’t dead.

The sky is darkening outside and the sounds of the empty house give him the strangest feeling that he should finish up soon because his wife will be coming home from work soon — but, of course, she won’t. Besides, it’s Saturday. The weekend. Tomorrow’s Sunday. He stares at the huge tarp swathed in duct tape. Day of rest.

His laugh, this time, is raspy and hoarse.

He opens a beer, but doesn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes the first scouts of the ant army return to the kitchen. Karl sits, sipping on his beer, and lets them walk past him — hell, they can walk over him for all he cares. He’s smeared in blood again, so why wouldn’t they? But he’s waiting for something else. At last he sees a trail beginning, leading from the entry point in the sink cabinet, out to the wall beside the trash can, then looping back again. The trail becomes an orderly line. The ants are at work in earnest now. After a few more minutes, Karl moves the trash can. There, stuck to the wall down by the baseboard, is a sliver of something pale — bone, fat, it doesn’t really matter. He wipes it up with a piece of alcohol-soaked tissue and throws the tissue into a trash bag, then goes back to watch some more.

It becomes a weird sort of sport, following the busy ants as they do his work for him, locating with their ant-senses all the body pieces and bloodspots too small or too well-hidden for him to have found on his own. They find what looks like a tiny slice of eyelid and eyelash stuck to the refrigerator door handle — how did he miss that? More shockingly, they locate an entire toe that has bounced out of the kitchen into the hallway. That would have been a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t it? Karl laughs again. He’s beginning to enjoy this, despite the mute presence of the bundled tarp.

It goes on throughout the night. The blood gets sticky, dries, and when he finds hidden spots he has to scrub harder and harder to get them clean. He brings his spotlight out of the garage to help him see better. The ants themselves are repaid for their searching by being wiped up along with whatever they have found. It doesn’t quite seem fair, but hell, they’re only ants.

At last, sometime around ten the next morning, his eyes red and his head ringing with exhaustion, he sees that the ants are all walking aimlessly. There is nothing left to find. No pieces, no spatters, nothing. The tiny, mindless creatures have done their work. They have saved his life.

Logic, he thinks as he drags the tarp to the garage. He’ll deal with the rest tonight, when it’s dark. Cold, hard, logic, that’s how to do things. Mr. Spock? Damn right.

Sunday has its share of struggles, too. He empties her car trunk and glove compartment, files the vehicle identification number off the engine, removes the plates, then puts what’s left of its former owner in the trunk and, when night-time comes, drives it down to the salvage yard where he used to work. He certainly hadn’t imagined anything like this when he copied the old man’s keys before they got rid of him, but it just goes to show the quality of ideas Karl Eggar has.

As he closes the gate the dogs come at him, growling, hackles raised, but he knows them both, calls them by name, gives them the remains of his lunchtime cold pizza. They wag their tales happily as he drives the car into the crusher. The salvage yard is out by the bay, and the landfill next door is closed. Nobody to hear when he fires up the crusher except for maybe a few migrant fishermen out in their boats. No car lights coming down the bay road, either, so with rising confidence he gets into the crane and pulls out Norah’s car, which looks like a wad of metal gum, then after swinging it over onto one of the piles of wrecks, drops a few of the other smashed cars on top of it so as much of her car as possible is buried. It’ll all be gone to the smelters on Monday night. If not…well, since they’re right beside the landfill, it’s not like the place doesn’t already smell like wet garbage.

He walks home, careful to keep to the shadows and enter the house through the back door. No, he thinks, we don’t want surprise witnesses telling how he went out with Norah’s car and came back on foot.

You the man, Mr. Spock, he thinks as takes a well-deserved beer out of the refrigerator. He’s suddenly single, the house is quiet, and with all this cleaning he’s managed to drive the ants out of the kitchen, too.

Oh, yeah, you the man.

He calls them himself, of course — it doesn’t make any sense to wait. Waiting is like a little kid covering his eyes and hoping he’s turned invisible. Karl calls them Tuesday morning, tells them his wife hasn’t come back since she drove away on Sunday night.

When he opens the door he’s immediately reassured to see two young officers, the kind of square-jawed, just-out-of-the-academy types that always say “Sir,” and “Ma’am,” even to half-naked lunatics they’re arresting for drunk and disorderly. Probably neither of these fellows has even seen a dead body.

“Come in, please.” He tries to sound both pleased to see them and properly worried. “Thanks for coming so soon.”

“No problem, Mr. Eggar,” says the shorter of the two. He’s freckled and has the wide-eyed look of one of those born-again Christian kids in Karl’s old high school, the ones who always studied and never cheated. “Please tell us when you realized your wife was missing.”

“Well,” he says with a humble sort of laugh, “I’m not sure she is missing. To tell the truth, she was pretty pissed off at me when she left. Argument, ya know. I called her sister in Trent to see if she was there, but she hasn’t heard from her.” Of course she hasn’t, unless she can hear all the way to the scrap heap at the salvage yard, but he called her late the previous night to make the timeline look good. Thinking, always thinking. “Hey, come on into the kitchen. I’m just making some coffee.”

He leads them in, holding his breath as he does, although he knows there’s nothing to see. Even a county forensics team wouldn’t find anything, he’s been that thorough, so what are these two bowling-leaguers from the sherrif’s department going to see except a clean kitchen? And not even too clean: he’s given it a bit of a temporary-batchelor look, cereal out, bowls unwashed. He gestures them to two of the chairs at the small table, then lifts the pitcher out of the coffee maker and pours himself a hot, black cup full. “Can I get you some?” he asks. They shake their heads.

“Tell us more about what happened Sunday,” the one who hasn’t spoken before says. He’s tall, mustached, slightly familiar. Maybe he worked in the Safeway or something when he was a kid. That’s one of the funny thing about small towns, the way you keep seeing faces and features. Karl has never liked the idea of other people knowing his business, but Norah, well, you’d have thought it was her own soap opera to hear her go on all the time about everybody else’s private lives.

He works his way slowly into his story about the argument, although now it’s a story about a guy who just wants to drink a beer and his wife who keeps nagging him to chop some firewood.

“I told her, Jeez, it’s the middle of summer, Norah, but she’s all, ‘It’s going to be a cold winter, Karl. You always put things off to the last minute.’ All I wanted to do was watch the ballgame. Anyway, I guess I sorta called her a name. — the “b” word, if you know what I mean — and went off to do it. Better than having her riding my back all day, I figured. But when I came back in the house she was gone. Figured she was just letting off some steam, but then she didn’t come back. When I got up the next morning and saw she’d never been home, well, I called you guys. Do you think she’s all right? I hope she’s all right. It was just a stupid argument.”

He can tell from their expressions, which are already glazing over, that they think this is a waste of their time. A fight, they’re thinking, maybe a bit worse than he’s telling. She’s got a boyfriend — that’s what they’re also thinking — and now she’s shacked up with him, deciding whether to come back to ol’ Karl or not.

Oh yeah, he thinks, and almost laughs. She’s shacked up, all right. But it’s kind of a small apartment…

“Look,” he says to Officer Born-Again while the tall one is writing the report, “you sure you won’t have some coffee? I just made it.”

The small, freckled one shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Been a long morning already.”

“There you go.” He pours it out, hands the officer a steaming cup. “How about you?” he asks the other. “Change your mind?”

The one writing the report shakes his head. “No, thanks, I’m off caffeine. Doctor’s orders.”

Karl nods sagely. “Yeah, it’s probably not good for any of us, but I figure, hey, what’s life without a few risks?” He’s ready to have a good long chat, actually. He’s all but in the clear and it feels good. His new life starts now. Maybe there’s even a way he can collect Norah’s insurance…

The smaller cop looks around absently. “Uh, sorry to bother you, but you got cream and sugar?”

“Milk, hope that’s okay. It’s not expired or anything.” He takes it from the fridge. The sugar he can’t immediately find. “Never use it myself,” he explains, but just then he spots the edge of the sugar bowl. It’s sitting, for some reason, up on top of the refrigerator.

It is only as he grabs it and something wet slops onto his wrist that he realizes it is still sitting in the dish of water he placed it in to keep the ants out of the sugar. The bowl has been sitting up there all this time, ever since…since…

That day. The day he was right about everything — even the sugar.

Because the moat around the sugar bowl has definitely worked. The ants never got near it. Karl can see that clearly as he sets it down on the table in front of the freckled cop, because there in full view, perched on a mound that is snowy white except for the crusted bit of sugar at the top that has gone brown with dried blood, lies the severed tip of one of Norah’s fingers, nail and all.