Those Across the River

CHAPTER THIRTY

WE DROVE NORTH.

I hugged the steering wheel to keep my back off the seat.

She seemed nearly well.

We didn’t speak much.

We had plenty not to talk about.

I had no plan beyond getting as far north as I could before the moon rose full that night. I thought, quite reasonably, I believe, that more conventional issues like how to deal with infidelity that may or may not have been voluntary could wait until after I knew if the full moon would, in fact, change my wife into a murderous beast.

Are you still my wife?

If you can stand it.

Northern Tennessee was vivid and cool. The abundant trees on the hills had mostly gone red or brown or butterscotch, or that rare warm yellow that looked gold when the light came through it. Sometimes the wind would knock loose a shower of leaves that would cascade over the road like a premonition of snow and Dora would smile and squeeze my leg. If only our days in Whitbrow could be shaken off and scattered like that.

I stopped at a filling station just over the Kentucky border on US 27 so Dora could use a telephone. She wanted to call her father and tell him we were coming for a visit before we cut west to Chicago. Her family’s hatred for me was as unreasonable and unassailable as their illusion that Eudora had been the picture of wifely devotion before I came along and bewildered her. Small potatoes, now. I would gladly suffer their bald references to her legitimate husband and I would grinningly eat the beef stew her mother made on Sundays, knowing she had dipped less meat for me than for anyone else at the table, if only she and I could leave this gruesome summer behind us. Perhaps the father could hold the daughter down with his disapproving gaze and dare the curse out of her. Perhaps the father and son-in-law would mount a ladder to the moon and carve just enough out of it so no one could call it full again.

Anything.

The wind blew up, showering the car with leaves as I paid the attendant for pumping his gas. He was a man my age with a deep scar that changed the shape of his chin. Everything and everyone was damaged. I gave him an extra nickel as a tip.

“Thanks, young man. God bless.”

The attendant did not recognize me as a peer because Dora had made me shave my grizzled beard last night. My face felt naked in the cold wind.

I went around the corner of the building, past a table where a slightly cross-eyed girl was selling Indian artifacts I suspect she made herself, to find Dora.

She sat against the wall next to the pay phone with coins spread next to her as if they were seed for birds to come and feed on.

“I love that awful coat on you,” she said, looking at me with moist eyes.

“Did you call? Are you alright?”

She shook her head.

“Are you cold?”

“That nice young girl changed a dollar for me, but I hurt myself. Frankie, I can’t touch the coins. Just the pennies.”

“Eudora.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“Do you want me to dial?”

She was crying now, shaking her head.

“It’s all real.”

“It was for them. Maybe not for you. Maybe not away from there.”

“My jaw hurts. My joints.”

“You were shot.”

The Indian artifacts girl had good ears. She turned around at that and I glared at her until she faced the road again.

“They said it would hurt. That it would take a long time the first time and that it would hurt.”

I helped her up.

“They said the longer I lived the easier it would get, until I could do it whenever I wanted. That I could even choose not to when the moon was full. Like Martin. Poor Martin. He never changed anymore, never wanted to. Just got sick when the moon came. But that took years and years.”

“Just give me a minute to think. Please. Do you want me to help you dial your father?”

“We can’t go there. I can’t.”

“Let’s at least get to Lexington.”

“I won’t make it that far. It’s soon. I’m so scared.”

I held her against me while sobs shook her frame, her hands small and white against my lapel. A man in a fishing cap came around the corner to use the telephone but thought better of it and went away.

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t think I would be able to open a strong door. A strong, locked door. We never saw them do that.”

She looked up at me with heartbreaking love in her eyes. She always said it was unfair that I was so tall; that I was framed by sky when she looked up at me but that she always had the ground as a backdrop.

“What are you saying, then? Lock you up?”

I felt her nod against my sharecropper’s coat.

“Where?”

“I don’t know, Frankie. Find us a place. Lock me up tight and don’t look in no matter what you hear.”

“This won’t happen. Not to you.”

“Then we’ll have a good laugh in the morning, won’t we?”

THE SYCAMORE TOURIST Village was the one that fit the bill. The property was just south of Somerset, Kentucky, offering SOLITARY CABINS, NEW FLUSH TOILETS!!! and DAILY BUSSES TO BEAUTIFUL CUMBERLAND FALLS. I checked in under the name Zachary Taylor, at which the clerk did not raise either of his caterpillarish eyebrows. I asked to be away from neighbors.

“Why’s that?” he said.

I didn’t say anything so now he looked up at me.

“Well… we’re newlyweds,” I finally offered.

He chuckled and nodded his head at that.

“You kids want a radio? Five-dollar deposit.”

I paid him. He filled out a slip and handed it to me, along with the door key on a carved wooden sycamore leaf that bore a number. I handed it to Dora.

He went in the back room and came back with a badly scratched and cigarette-burned tombstone RCA radio.

“Is that a six or a nine?” Dora said, examining the key.

“Nine. Stem goes down. I keep meanin to underline em. Yer next neighbor’s in five, but sometimes they come late, so no promises.”

WE COULD SEE our breath as we walked from the car to cabin nine. The smell of autumn was heavy here with its undertones of smoke and rot. I set the radio down just outside the cabin and Dora handed me the key. We looked at each other as I fit the key in the door, but then I let the key hang and took both of her hands in mine. I looked down at the stump of my little finger, the badly healing ring finger. The ring was still on. Hers was, too. She took a deep breath in and out. Everything was going to be different soon, and we both knew it. I looked up again and let myself swim for a moment in her gorgeous, mismatched eyes, letting where we had just been and what we were now headed towards fall away. For just that moment she was my true wife and I was in love with her and the door was not yet open.

THE CABIN ITSELF was almost perfect; the separate bathroom had a sturdy door with a real lock on it. The only drawback was a window in the bathroom, above the clawfoot tub. It didn’t look big enough for one of them to get through, but it was hard to be sure. On closer examination, it proved to be painted shut. Yes, this just might do.

She shuddered.

“Oh, that’s bad. That feels really bad. The light’s getting weak,” she said.

“I can’t believe I’m about to lock my wife in the toilet.”

She hugged herself cross-armed and paced the floor.

“God it hurts. Would you draw a bath for me, Frankie?”

“Hot or cold?”

“Hot for the joints, cold for the skin. I don’t know. You pick. Hot. Please. No, cold. The skin’s getting worse than the bones.”

“Dora, I should get you a doctor.”

“You know better. Hurry, Frank. God it itches.”

She took Samma’s dress off so roughly that one button popped off and rolled across the wooden floor.

I started the bath.

“Where’s your gun?” she said.

“In the car.”

“Make sure you get it.”

“No,” I said, turning the spigots on.

“Frankie, if I get out you have to shoot me. You have to.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“You’ve seen what they do.”

“I know.”

“I want to do those things, too. Somewhere deep in me, but it’s rising. I want to hurt. I want to eat something that’s still alive. And if I do, I can’t go back. I’ll like it too much.”

She went into the bathroom then and I locked the door behind her.

“Don’t open it, no matter what you hear. Promise me!”

Not completely her voice. A hint too low.

I pulled the key out and looked through the hole. Her eye met mine.

“You can’t look at me like this. You can’t let me out. Even if I tell you to. It won’t be me. Promise!”

“I won’t open it.”

“Swear it!”

“I swear.”

“Go away.”

I left.

I went into the bedroom.

I thought I heard groaning.

I heard water splashing in the tub, or maybe the memory of that sound from before my ears were hurt. I felt insane.

I paced the room, jamming my hands in my pockets, thinking how like some grotesque of an expectant father I was. I went to the east window of the cabin and parted the curtain to survey the horizon. No sign of the moon yet, although the sky had gone pink and lavender where the sun’s last gasp lit the clouds from below. I could barely make out the individual shapes of trees. How the last yellow leaves clung here and there as if an artist had used a fine brush to hang them. A hint of Naples yellow against all that grey and umber.

I opened the window and let the cold air jolt me. I watched the tree line where I thought the moon would rise and I waited for it. As a child I had loved to go to the docks and watch it rise as if born from the waters of Lake Michigan. My brother had always claimed he could see it move, but I would correct him, explaining that one could almost see it move. Before I lost my religion, I thought of God that way. A presence one could nearly but not quite verify.

“Eudora?”

No answer.

I turned my gaze back to the window. A rosy glow appeared through a stand of sycamores and I knew I would see it soon. It would crest through the trees red and lovely, older than love, neither cruel nor kind.

“Eudora?”

My fingers tightened on the sill and my breath came faster, pluming out into the cold air. There would be frost on the ground in the morning.

It came.

Just the lip of it, glowing through the branches.

She screamed.

“Dora!”

She screamed again.

The scream broke the word in me, my given word not to look. The part in me that responded to that sound was older and stronger than the part that made promises, even stronger than the fear of injury and death. I ran to the bathroom door and fumbled for the key. Dropped it three times before I got the key in, but I didn’t turn it.

I heard another noise then, so deep and threatening it stopped my hand. I felt the sound as much as heard it, felt it in the fingertips that rested against the doorjamb and in the ones that held the key.

I pulled the key out.

I looked through the keyhole.

I never should have done that.

She was in the tub.

She was halfway through it.

Her body had become long and canine. Her breasts were still hers, and they had multiplied. Her skin kept splitting and re-forming itself, so blood and tissue dropped from her. The worst part was her face. Because it was still her face, only her mouth was full of horrid, sharp, outsized teeth.

How like a Sphinx.

Then she spoke, only it wasn’t her voice at all.

She could barely speak through those teeth.

She panted between the words.

“You let me out… You let me out NOW.”

I mouthed the word “no” but no voice came out of me.

She looked into the keyhole.

Blood was welling in her eyes.

Still a woman’s face on a monstrous body.

“I hate you. Everything. You’re afraid I liked… I liked. Let me out and I’ll tell you… about it. You let me out… you sorry fuck. You sorry, sad FUCK.”

“No,” I said.

“You… can’t keep me here. You’re not. Strong. Strong enough.”

Then her mouth changed and she couldn’t talk anymore.

She banged the wall and went into a fit.

Saliva poured from her mouth. She shook her head and her snout got longer. She shook it again and her ears grew. She turned her eyes up to the keyhole again and they were like lamps, both greenish, one more grey than the other. She bared those wicked teeth and snarled, utterly without recognition. I backed away from the door.

I went to my car and got the .45.

I peeked through the keyhole again just in time to see her rear up and swat the overhead bulb. It exploded. It was dark in there now.

The front door knocked.

“Y’alright in there?”

“Yes! Thank you!” I yelled.

“I heard screamin, so I thought I’d ask.”

I hid the gun behind my leg and opened the door a crack.

A man in red and black flannel. The neighbor from five.

I don’t know how I said this so calmly, hoping another god-awful sound wouldn’t come from the bathroom, but I did.

“I appreciate your concern,” I said, my voice cracking, my heart racing, “but we need to be alone right now. I’m afraid my wife’s about to lose another baby.”

“Lordy, Mister, I’m sorry. I got a car if you want a lift to the hospital in Somerset,” he offered.

“They can’t do anything. She’s just going to have to get through this. I’m sorry about the noise.”

“No, I’m sorry. Y’all take care. God bless.”

“God bless,” I said.

Nearly as soon as I shut the front door, the bathroom door banged again, so hard that a little bit of plaster fell from the ceiling. I turned the radio on and mostly got fuzz. One preacher talking about rum. Then jazz. I couldn’t believe it. Good jazz in Nowhere, Kentucky.

I latched what was left of my sanity onto that.

I turned it up.

I sat on the bed.

The noises from the bathroom seemed to get more infrequent, and eventually stopped. My vigil began to relax. I probably lasted until ten o’clock before pure exhaustion overtook me and I fell asleep.

Night.

Cold.

I was lying on my side on a strange bed in clothes that weren’t mine.

My crooked, spare glasses were on my head.

My gun was in my hand.

A radio was on, just playing static.

I reached beside me but Dora wasn’t next to me.

Everything started coming back to me, and I sat up with a start.

Jesus.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly three a.m.

Dora.

Was she sleeping?

I got up quietly and peeked through the keyhole.

There was a breeze coming from it.

I realized then that the bathroom was empty.

“Goddamnit,” I said, really frightened, and grabbed the key. I opened the door. Moonlight and cold air were coming through the window, which had been knocked completely out of its frame. The curtain rod was still hanging by one support and the flimsy curtain blew in the night wind. Glass and plaster were everywhere. One piece of glass reflected the full moon at me like a trapezoid eye.

“Goddamnit,” I said again, watching my breath curl potently out of my mouth.

I went and sat down on the bed again, running my hands through my hair, feeling insane, feeling worse, if possible, than I felt in the cage. There, at least, there was nothing to be done except to endure. Now I had to do something, but I couldn’t imagine what, and lives hung in the balance. I briefly considered shooting myself. I decided not to, but gave myself permission to reconsider the question later.

At last I gathered my reserves, wrapped the blanket around me, and set off into the night to find my Eudora. My adulteress. My leper.

This was coal mining country. Small shotgun shacks sat well removed from one another. I saw tire swings and fences and cows and I got lost. Good and lost. I kept the gun under the folds of the blanket. I wandered by the highway, looking, no doubt, like just another vagrant on his way from one hard-luck situation to another. I laughed, because I supposed that was in fact what I was.

“Get out of the road, ya idjit!” someone yelled at me.

I was pretty sure this was US 27, but I didn’t know. I was pretty sure I was going in the right direction. But the sun came up on me and I still had not found the Sycamore Village Tourist cabins. My feet were bare and I couldn’t feel them anymore. I might lose toes! That struck me funny. Frost glittered on the grass by the side of the highway, achingly beautiful in the peach-colored dawn.

A sheriff’s car pulled up to me. The officer inside was young, maybe twenty-five.

“Mornin to ya,” he said.

“Good morning,” I said, grinning.

“You doin alright, mister?” he asked, pushing back his hat in a gesture of effortless dash and goodwill.

“I’ll be doing better if I can find my hotel. This US 27?”

“Yessir. Have you been drinkin, sir?”

“No,” I said, “I’m an opium fiend.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“I have never seen an opium fiend in this county, but I do allow that you look like what I might imagine one to look like. Do you need a lift somewhere?”

“Sure,” I said, “that’s very kind of you.”

I have a gun in this blanket!

I told him where I was staying and showed him the key.

He took me there without saying anything. I didn’t blame him; I wouldn’t want to say anything to me either. I’m sure I looked like a lunatic. I kept a shit-eating grin on my face and a white-knuckled grip on the gun so it wouldn’t bounce out during the drive.

We pulled over at Sycamore Village and he reached across me to open my door.

“One other thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“My pa’s a eye doctor in Somerset. Name’s Dr. Murray. I’m Clint. Tell him you know me and I reckon he’ll tighten those spectacles up for nothing.”

I WALKED SLOWLY into the cabin.

The radio was playing jazz again.

Something was in the bed.

Eudora.

My Eudora was in the bed, with the sheet clutched all around her.

My first reaction was overwhelming relief, but my heart caught in my throat when I got a better look at her. She had blood matted in her hair. There was no small amount of it on the sheet, but I hadn’t noticed at first because the sheet was a flowered print with lots of purple.

Dirt on the floor.

O sweet God let that be her blood please please please

I walked around and put the back of my hand to her cheek, as if I were checking her for fever. Her cheek was warm, but not like when she was ill.

I felt my heart fill up with love for her.

Yes, even this. I can even live with this.

That’s what I thought.

But then I stepped in it.

Her vomit.

Just in front of the nightstand.

There was a lot of it, a heap of undigested meat.

So much her human stomach couldn’t hold it.

It stank.

There were objects in the mess, too.

A button. Hair. A piece of cloth.

And something else.

I reached down for it.

Chewed up and bloody.

It used to be white.

It took a moment for me to realize it was a baby shoe.

It was heavy.

I put it on the nightstand.

She kept sleeping.

She had crawled into some coal miner’s house and yanked an infant out of its crib in the night, like some fairy-tale horror. Like the angel of Passover. Some faceless child I didn’t care about. My beloved Dora. She knew what she was.

And she came to be with her own.

Frankie, if I get out you have to shoot me.

So I shot her.

At least that’s what I meant to do.

I crawled on top of her and straddled her chest, wrapped the blanket around the end of my gun and pointed it at her head.

Her gorgeous eyes opened and met mine, without emotion.

She knew what was in the blanket, and it seemed she neither wanted me to do it nor minded if I did.

I pulled the trigger.

The report was very loud in that small room.

The end of the blanket caught fire a little, then went out.

But here’s the thing.

I missed.

As God is my witness, I meant to blow her brain out the back of her lovely head and then go find a river to pitch myself into. I didn’t miss on purpose. Not in my mind. It’s possible that the blanket and my exhaustion somehow caused me to angle the gun wrong, but I don’t think so. It really wasn’t such a complicated thing to try to do.

I believe now that my wrist jerked.

Something in me refused the command.

A small mutiny.

I don’t know what else to believe.

The end result was that the gun went off, she flinched and yelped and I blew a big hole in the pillow next to her head. A few goose feathers blew out and settled slowly, ridiculously, to the floor.

I got off of her and stood by the bed.

I popped the slide release and closed the gun.

I put it on the nightstand, but then remembered I might like to shoot myself later, so I put it in my pants.

She lay there shaking, but kept her eyes on me.

The jazz song came to an end and the announcer wished his listeners a happy Armistice Day.

I backed out of the room, taking the keys.

I walked to the car, breathing hard, my breath like locomotive steam in the cold.

The man in cabin five peeked white-faced out of his window, white as a fish-belly, then shut his curtain when he saw me look at him.

I started the car and left.

The clerk tried to wave me down, saying, “Mr. Taylor, Mr. Taylor!” but I kept going.

I expected Clint Murray, the optometrist’s son, to pull me over and take me to jail for destruction of property and attempted murder.

But it never happened.

I kept going all the way to Chicago.

But not for good.

I did go back to Georgia.

Just one more time.

And not alone.