Читать книгу Never Leave Your Dead - Diane Cameron - Страница 12
ОглавлениеHe came into the basement through the cellar door and headed directly to the gun case over his woodworking bench. He was still wearing his gray jacket and the blue tie with maroon swirls that his wife had given him last year for his new job as the English teacher at Washington Valley High School.
He removed the gun from the case and weighed it for a moment with both hands before he began to load it. He hadn’t fired a gun since hunting last fall and, before that, since he was a Marine in China.
He closed the case quietly and walked up the stairs. He could hear his mother-in-law in the kitchen; she was starting dinner. She removed dishes from the cupboard, the oven door banged, and a utensil clattered to the floor.
He had left school early that day and gone to walk in the woods again. Recently, he’d been doing this more and more. Sometimes he told the principal he was sick. But lately, he’d leave the classroom and walk straight out of the school. Something would come over him when he looked at the boys and girls in his class, and he’d get a sour taste in his mouth. And then the foggy feeling would come.
When he walked in the woods, it helped. He’d think about China or try not to think about it. But when that foggy feeling came, the pictures would just slip into his vision. He’d see the bodies, and sometimes only severed arms and legs. The worst were the babies, limp and dead. Some were cut in half. It took so much energy to push these pictures out of his head. They seemed always to be on the edge of his vision. If he closed his eyes, they just stayed. He was exhausted from trying not to see the images that tortured him.
In the past week or so, a new thought had come to him with the pictures. It was confusing. He had this idea—it was like a fact, very certain—that his wife was in danger, right here in Pennsylvania, not China. What made it more confusing was that he knew his mother-in-law was the danger. That was very clear.
His mother-in-law would always yell at him when he came home early from school.
“You’ll get fired,” she’d scream at him.
And she told his wife that he was crazy.
“You know he thinks you’re unfaithful. Only a crazy person would believe that,” she’d say, raising her voice.
When she yelled, he got mad, and that made the pictures in his head more confusing: China, the kids in his class, his wife, the dead bodies, and his mother-in-law yelling. They all rolled together.
He could no longer think about all these pressures. He had the gun in his hands; he was at the top of the stairs now. It was past three o’clock in the afternoon. His wife would be home in half an hour. Best to do this fast, make this pain stop. He stepped into the kitchen; his mother-in-law looked up. She was wearing a yellow apron, holding a mixing bowl. She looked surprised. The stove was on; the oven was warming up. She started to look at the clock as he raised the gun and aimed directly at her face. Blood splattered everywhere.
The sound of the gun surprised him, but when he looked at her lying on the floor—her apron not so yellow anymore—he felt an odd comfort. This scene was familiar. He saw his mother-in-law, but he also saw the women’s bodies on the streets in Shanghai, layered images moving in and out of here and there.
He always saw more women’s bodies than men’s. The Japanese stacked the men in groups so their bodies were tangled in enormous piles, but the women’s bodies could be seen in doorways, fields, and alleys—everywhere. The worst was finding arms or legs but no body. Sometimes there would be a woman on the side of the road who had been dissected or had a stick or bottle shoved inside one of her orifices.
He glanced at the clock. His wife would be home soon. He loved her so much. All he wanted was to be with her, be happy, and feel better. He knew that today was trouble. He understood what he had just done, but what else could he do? He knew he’d have to go to jail. That was another problem: He loved his wife; he couldn’t be separated from her. And she needed him; she depended on him. A wave of fear and sadness went through him. She was young and pretty. Other men would want her. She might even want another man. Anger flowed on top of the fear. He bent over and picked up the dish towel that had fallen near his mother-in-law’s body. Then he wiped the gun.
He took the extra cartridges from his pocket and finished reloading just as he heard his wife come through the front door. She always came in that way, after stopping to get the mail from out front. She was now in the living room. He met her halfway; he didn’t want her to see her mother on the floor and be frightened. He dropped his head and started to cry.
There was no alternative; he knew that. She looked at him, and her mouth started to open, no words. He could barely meet her eyes as he raised the gun. He fired at her chest, and she crossed her arms, almost a gesture of modesty, as she fell backward. He shot again, aiming down at her heart. He was crying openly now as he fired more shots at her chest and neck. He could never shoot her head; she was so pretty.
When her body was still, he knelt and straightened her bloodstained dress. He gently laid the gun away from her body. Then he rose and walked calmly to the kitchen, avoiding the sight of his faceless mother-in-law. He continued on his path and turned off the stove.
He pulled a kitchen chair over to the corner of the room and removed the telephone receiver from its cradle on the wall. He calmly asked the operator to connect him to the Washington County Sheriff. He needed to sit down. Suddenly he was so tired.
