Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

THE BOX IS NOT TOO HEAVY. Ruth carries it into the woods. Each branch of every tree is coated with snow. The sky is the same color white as the fathomless mountain below her. She stops halfway between Earth and the edge of the solar system, cold and warm, her mother and the end. Voyager 1? Check. Voyager 2? Voyager 2? Who is Voyager 2?

Ruth hides the money in a place no living soul would ever find it, and when she returns to the house, her toes have frozen to a pale larvae color. No one’s in the living room. She drops the needle on Percy Sledge so that Mr. Bell, warming up a cup of tea, hears “Out of Left Field.” He finds her. Her husband, legally, illegally.

“Mr. Bell,” Ruth says, forgetting to leave off the Mr. And the formality of that name mixed with the informality of what she’s imagining slows her breath.

“That didn’t take you long,” he says.

“No.”

“Where’s Nat?”

“He went out to start shoveling.”

“But it’s still snowing.”

“I tried to tell him that.” Mr. Bell takes her hand. “Are you busy, dear?” She follows him upstairs. The hallway’s tall windows look down to the lake. Up here, far from the furnace, the rooms are chilly. Mr. Bell opens the door on another bedroom.

“It’s freezing.”

“All part of my plan.”

There is a twin bed, a bureau, a window with a pink silk curtain.

What makes a home?

Take your hands in his. This plus this.

What makes the unsaid audible?

The distance between us.

Mr. Bell has power in his arms. Angles and tattoos she’s never seen. He touches her face, the mess of it. He lifts her up. He lays her down, adoring her. Mr. Bell smells like the edge of a stream, and there, alone in a storm on a mountaintop, Ruth and Mr. Bell commit astonishing, if tiny, acts of gravity and attraction. They rest. They return to their fever. They rest and are troughed together in the sinkhole of the bed, swarmed by blankets, warmed by skin and how many long years it was before they knew each other, before it didn’t have to hurt.

Ruth studies the bristles of his face and grows old with him, old as wood. Quiet and happy. On the ceiling above the bed, a leak has left behind a ripple of brown circles moving out from the center. His halo or the universe saying, I give this man just to you. I give you him wondrously, imperfectly made. Thunder and a night or a life by a fire with him in a warm home. The skin of his wrist. The leak’s discoloration throbs and grows above them. Ruth considers her scar, her heart. He’ll be inside her now forever. She counts the rings of the leak. Does each signify a year? A storm? And she’s inside him. How long before love splits into two, cells dividing? Voyager 1. Voyager 2. Under the stain, Ruth holds tight to his back. The blob could beam them up to a waiting meteor. Her neck dips, infrared, ultraviolet, and when she rights her head, lifts this fog of love, The Book of Ether is sitting on top of the bureau no more than two feet away.

Ruth reaches for it. Her bare skin bristles outside the blankets.

Mr. Bell tucks his hair behind his ears. She brings the book back to the warm bed, legs in a diamond. The book opens in a bloom.

348

Dark unto you.

Dark over them.

Dark, dark, dark house where no one dares to go.

He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead.

Ruth and Mr. Bell plow through bowls of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They speak in a hush. Nat still has not returned. “It has a strange way of making sense,” Ruth whispers.

Mr. Bell nods. “The mis-arrangement of words suggests reincarnation. It suggests multiple, endless readings.” He takes a bite, noodles dangling down his chin. “Not that I believe in that.” He points to the last entry on the last page.

599

Shall

Shall I

Shall I come

Shall I come back

Shall I come back again?

“Elvis,” he says. “We danced to it. Mardellion’s forty-five had a skip that he interpreted as proof of his immortality.”

“What do you think?”

“No way. Dirt to dirt. One Life to Live.”

Ruth winces.

“Why? What’s wrong with that?” he asks. “Microbes. Bacteria. Worms underground that mingle our parts with everything. It’s generous.” He locks his fingers in hers. “And infinite.” Mr. Bell squares his face to hers. “If you can get over the dreaded finite.”

“Where’s Nat?” she asks for the fifth time in one half-hour. “Is he clearing the whole road?” She pushes the remains of her meal across the table. “Maybe we’ll be able to leave tonight. That would be good. Maybe we should go help him.”

Mr. Bell checks the window again. Snow. Nothing else. “Yes, let’s go help. Let’s get out of here tonight if we can.” Ruth carries her dish to the sink, and finally they hear footsteps in the living room. Ruth’s so relieved. She lets out a long breath. “There he is.” The kitchen door opens with certainty, pushed by a hand that knows it. “Nat,” Ruth says, but she’s wrong.

“No, dear. It’s me.” Holes far darker than a mountain lake. Ruth falls in. He opens his arms to her. “Welcome to my home,” Zeke says. So Ruth knows for sure that there’s nothing scary about dead people. It is the living who terrify.

Mr. Bell crumbles. “Mardellion.” He names Zeke “Mardellion,” which really somewhere some part of her brain already knew. “How did you get here?”

Zeke rubs his hands together. “That’s a good story. A really good story. Care to hear it?”

They don’t answer.

Zeke grabs the back of a chair but doesn’t sit. He squeezes its top rung so tightly. He tells them anyway. “I met a friend of Ruth’s down in Minerva. Ceph? He’d followed me all that way because he had it in his head, some crossed wire, that I was Ruth’s husband and wouldn’t believe me when I told him he had the wrong man.” Zeke takes a seat, feeling very much at home. “Said he was coming to rescue Ruth. Take her away, take care of her. Poor guy.”

Ruth’s fingers jerk by her sides. “Ceph’s here too?”

Zeke twitches his cheek as a horse’s flank disturbs a fly. “No. Not anymore.” An answer so vague, it’s sinister. Darkness opens in the house.

Mr. Bell stands to shield Ruth, placing his body between theirs. “Ruth,” Mr. Bell says as Zeke also stands, his awful head, Mardellion’s terrible noseless face rises up, ripe, over Mr. Bell’s. Moon leaves umbra.

“Run,” Mr. Bell tells her. “Run. Run. Run.”

Out the kitchen door into twilight. Ruth runs through the wet snow barefoot. She breathes air in leaden chunks. The snow has stopped. Ruth sees the Father’s truck parked in the drive. There’s no mistaking its huge, stupid tires, its flaming paint job. She takes off in the other direction, feeling her mind about to split. Things set in motion so many years ago. Ruth tramps though drifts so deep, her escape is in a dream, running without movement, making her slow-motion way down to the lake. The wind has swept its icy surface clear of snow, tracing paths across a surface that is solid in places, slurry in others. Ruth runs across the lake. Her bare feet flush with frozen pain.

132 Out of whose womb came the ice?

Ruth’s flesh burns. The woods take little notice of her panic. Mr. Bell runs after her into the dusk light, out onto the lake, and Zeke follows behind both of them. He doesn’t run but takes his righteous time in comfortable winter boots, rubber and fleece. The chase happens in silence as if one of them is imagining it.

Mr. Bell cuts off from Ruth’s path, a decoy trail across the lake leading away from her. “Mardellion,” he yells. “I’m over here.”

A number of crows fly away and Ruth stops running. She’s scared for Mr. Bell. The evening’s quiet. Zeke’s rolling gait looks like trouble, smiling in a proper snowsuit. The rough edge of his sinus cavity has caved in as though the hole will swallow his entire head. His face is collapsing.

“What happened to your nose?” Mr. Bell asks.

Zeke inserts a thumb into the crusted cavity, clearing dried sinus debris. Slowly as a television preacher, he smiles. “I let some light in.” This makes Zeke laugh.

Pines click hoarfrosted branches. Ruth turns and flees again across the lake’s slush and ice sharp as volcanic rock. Her bare feet are numb, the flesh raw. She swoops like an injured Sasquatch. As she nears the center of the lake, the surface jolts. The sound of the crack lashes deep into the woods and back again. A fault line lifts on the surface. Mr. Bell and Zeke brace themselves after the crack, arms out, knees bent low as surfers. Ruth runs for the other side.

“Whoa. Whoa,” Zeke speaks like a cowboy, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. “You don’t have to run from me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She sloshes on. “Nat,” she calls. “Nat?”

Zeke dislodges sputum from his bronchial tubes.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“Why? The End’s always coming. Right? You feel it?”

Ruth does feel something coming but can’t say what. “No.”

“Sure you do. Always have. Turning the last page, closing the book after a huge explosion destroys everything ever built. What do you think?”

“I think you’re mentally ill,” she manages.

“Some call it illness; I call it faith.” He smiles broadly, strangely. “So after Carl here pointed out that your scar was a map of what’s coming — comets, collisions — I thought you’d understand.”

“No,” Mr. Bell says. “No.”

“Son, you’re feeling bad about serving your wife up to me like a tasty piece of pie, but that doesn’t mean you can just give her my money.”

Sound travels so easily over the ice.

Ruth drops her chin. That’s the weight. Once there were two spacecraft built and raised together. “What?”

“It hurts. I know.” Zeke sounds pleased. “But Carl thought your scar could freshen up my followers. Rejuvenate the cause.”

Mr. Bell takes his head in his hand. “I thought it might stop you from killing them all. Yes. I thought it might prevent mass murder.”

“What?” she asks again.

“Your scar oddly resembles a map of all the meteorites we’ve got. Including Tahawus, mine, the great one to come. Kind of cosmic. Right?”

“My mother burned me with bleach,” Ruth says.

Zeke snorts. He closes some of the distance between Ruth and himself. “Yeah. See, I know that now. Turns out there’s nothing special about you.”

“She’s my wife.” Mr. Bell looks up at her. “You are my wife, and I made a huge mistake when I told him about you. I didn’t even know you yet. I’d seen you once, peeking through the curtain at the Father’s house. I was desperate.”

Zeke claps his hands. “He traded you for information about his mom. But he knew you weren’t worth much, so he trumped up your value. Made up some BS about a map on your face, blah, blah. ‘Gilding the granite’ we call it.”

Ruth watches Mr. Bell.

“A junk rock from a motel parking lot. Right, son?” Zeke laughs, nods. “I can’t believe I fell for it, Carl. A moment of weakness. I forgot you’re an expert con man.”

Mr. Bell is squatting in the ice, ruined. “I didn’t know you, Ruth, and I was desperate to find my mom. I didn’t know he’d come for you the way he did. I should have never seen him again, but I’m trying to undo this mess. I’m trying to fix it.”

“By bringing me to his house?”

Mr. Bell looks at her.

“You gave us the money to undo your betrayal?”

“Steady on,” Zeke interrupts. “That’s my money and I’ve come to get it.”

“It’s as much mine as it is yours,” Mr. Bell says.

“’Cause your mother stole it from me?”

“You stole it from the Etherists. It’s been in your house for years, and you were too thick to find it. All that time I was gone, it was sitting in the pantry with the toilet paper. I never came for it because I figured you’d found it years ago. I didn’t even know it was still ‘lost’ until Ruth told me.”

She walks away from both men. “Nat!” Her call bounces across the lake’s surface.

“It’s Ruth’s money now,” Mr. Bell adds.

“Afraid not, son.” Zeke notices her flight. “I need you to come back, Ruth, and show me where you put it.”

But she doesn’t come back. She keeps heading to the far side.

Zeke snickers through a thin, diseased beard. “I really need you to stop now,” and from the hollow of his back, as if scratching an itch, Zeke produces the tool of a coward and a cheat.

“What?” Mr. Bell greets the gun.

“Belonged to Ceph.” Zeke holds it loosely, like it’s a harmless tract he wants them to read, something to guide their steps in a brotherly gesture of friendship. “He”—Zeke coughs—“umm, gave it to me. In so many words.” Zeke cracks a creepy smile.

“Don’t,” Mr. Bell says. “Don’t—” But Zeke fires the gun into the trees past Ruth, forcing an unfair end to a slow race. Ruth stops, focused as a magnet now, rattling in the waves of that much sound. The three of them make an irregular triangle around a hot center. She bounces from bare foot to bare foot.

Zeke brushes hair from his cheek using the gun’s barrel to do it, clipping his ear with the steel sight. He lifts his chin, trying to strike a less horrifying profile. “Hi.” Zeke snickers, having captured her attention, gun still pointed in her general direction. “What’d you do with my money?”

“Why do you want the money?” Mr. Bell asks. “You can’t take it with you wherever you’re going.” Mr. Bell waves his fingers up into the sky.

Zeke looks up, stroking his thin chin hairs, as if the stars are his cohorts. “I’m not going anywhere.” His chin still lifted.

Ruth and Mr. Bell follow his gaze. Lots of frozen stars.

“You’re just going to dispose of the others?” Mr. Bell asks. “Blow ’em up?”

“You chose an unfortunate time to return. They’ll be here soon as this storm ends. And they’re ready to go. Trust me. They don’t even care that I’m not going with them. They want any excuse to get out of their miserable lives as soon as they can.”

Ruth lifts her hands to her eyes, presses hard. “You killed Ceph?” she asks.

“About that,” Zeke says. The gun barrel does a loop-de-loop, rolling, unraveling. “What can it mean? The whole thing based on a mistake? A mishearing or misunderstanding, right? He was trying to kill me. Really, he was trying to kill you, Carl. He just didn’t know it.” Zeke smiles. “You should be thanking me. I saved your life.”

So Ruth turns and starts across the ice again, away from both of them. “OK. Stop now,” Zeke says.

But she doesn’t stop.

“Ruth. Stop.” Zeke’s voice is sharp, as if she’s pulling blood from his body, tiny red threads dragged out of him across the white ice. The frozen lake crunches under her numb feet. She can’t feel them anymore. Zeke’s face goes blank. He points the gun and fires for the third time today, and even before the noise washes through Ruth’s ears, she’s turned back. Mr. Bell’s blood strikes a pattern on the ice behind him, that of an exploding firework. His body canters, falling centered on the spectacle of red, redder still for the purity of the snow.

Zeke holds the gun at the end of his extended arm, a weak branch, a heavy rotted fruit.

The lake is silent. Pluto continues to exist, and Mr. Bell absorbs all that quiet through his open wound.