Leather Maiden

6

Each morning I awoke with the fresh point of view that things were going to change and that Gabby and I would get back together. I could sit down and think this over and realize just how stupid it was, but the thought wouldn’t go away, and I clung to it like a fading movie star thinking just one more film would bring it all back.

I took off my clothes and went to bed just wearing my underwear. The bedroom was the one Jimmy and I had shared growing up. All the things we had loved as kids were still there. It was like stepping back through time, entering the past. The only major difference in the room between now and then was that the bunk beds were gone and there was just the one bed for guests.

After lying in the dark for some time, eyes wide open, I began to see the room more clearly, the outlines of things. I looked up at Jimmy’s model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on wires, looked over at his desk where the frogs and mice he had practiced taxidermy on had started to lean against one another. The stands on which they rested, some kind of glued wood, had begun to come apart and the creatures had fallen together into a gruesome pyramid of arrested decay. I could see the outline of his Eagle Scout sash hanging on the wall. There was a long couple shelves of books, and I could make out a lot of the titles more from memory than from sight.

I got up, turned on the light and sat at my old desk. It was smaller than I remembered, the chair was uncomfortable. I opened one of the desk drawers. All my comic books were still there; at least my favorites were. I took out one and read it. I got up and walked around the room, turned out the light and went to the window and peeled back the curtain and looked out at the street. It was starting to rain, a slow, sweet summer rain. The pavement glistened in the streetlights, and then Jazzy appeared, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, walking down the street in bare feet, the rain washing over her.

I watched her for a while. She walked until she came to the end of the street, where it met the highway, then she turned around and started back. I pulled my chair over and sat at the window and watched her through the crack in the curtain. I thought about calling Child Protective Services, and then remembered Dad had done that.

I thought I might call anyway. I watched her walk back up the street, lifting her head to the heavens, spreading her arms, enjoying the rain like some kind of nature nymph. She stepped onto our lawn and crossed to hers.

I couldn’t see her after that, but I had an idea she might be climbing the elm, making her way to her platform in the boughs while her mother and her new daddy did whatever it was they were doing in the bedroom. Being uncharitable, my guess was they were passed out drunk. I started to go out and talk to Jazzy, to tell her to go to bed, that trees draw lightning. Or perhaps I just wanted to have her keep me company. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything but watch the rain until it wasn’t raining anymore.

Finally I stood up and went over and looked at the shadow shapes of the taxidermy frogs and rats my brother had fixed up, and remembered how it had all smelled out in the garage when he was preserving them. Even then, as a kid, I thought it was a shitty hobby. I reached out with a finger and gently pushed at the heaped-together dead things. They tumbled over and one of the rats fell and went behind the desk. I didn’t bother to pick it up. Way it had been pumped full of chemicals, way the skin had been treated, it could lie there without odor for a century.

I looked up at his sash again. I had made Life Scout, not Eagle. I had gotten in a fight with the scoutmaster’s son and kicked him in the teeth, knocking a couple out, making myself persona non grata at the Scout hut. My swift kick didn’t affect Jimmy’s scouting at all. He was the kind of guy who could have shit in the middle of the Scout hut, set the crap on fire and burned the place down, and before anyone would say anything bad about him, it would have been blamed on arsonist rodents. He had the knack, Jimmy did.

I went to bed and thought about some of the things Dad and I had talked about, closed my eyes and went to sleep and dreamed immediately, saw all the dead I had seen in the war. Americans and Iraqis were lying in the middle of a blood-soaked street. There were so goddamn many.

As I watched, all of them crawled together into a bloody and mangled heap, made themselves into a zombie-style pyramid of writhing bodies, many of them missing limbs, dripping blood the color of oil. They wrapped their arms and legs around one another to hook up and form a moving mass, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, with a headless baby at the peak; a pyramid of bloody, rotting flesh, acting as one, stalking toward me.

I awoke, sat up in bed, sweating. I got up, turned off the alarm, went into the bathroom with my suitcase, showered and shaved and brushed my teeth taking my sweet time.

I put on a loose blue shirt and some new blue jeans that I had to pull the tags off of. I went back to my room and put on my socks and shoes and sat at my desk and looked at my watch frequently and watched it grow lighter through the curtained window.

It had rained some more in the night and because of it the morning broke off cool. I went outside and enjoyed the cool as the sun came up and began to pour color into everything. Then the sun climbed up higher and it got hot and the wetness on the road in front of the house began to evaporate and rise up in a warm damp mist. There was a balmy, lethargic wind that came with it, and in a short time it blew the mist away. Then there was nothing but the heat, a kind of slow broil that turned everything sticky as the crack of a fat man’s ass.

I drove to work, made it there at a quarter to nine.