Beneath Cruel Waters Page 2

  “Margaret!” he hollered through smoke-induced hacks. He managed to burst through the fiery doorframe outside into a snowdrift, where he rolled around for a few seconds and used his hands to mash snow against his face and neck. He turned around and watched as the house transformed into a hellish inferno, the black smoke sucked toward the sky.

  Windows turned red. The door collapsed forward. The roof caught fire. The old man struggled to his feet and staggered down the dirt road, past the towering cottonwood, and then he was gone.

  By the time the firefighters arrived, there was nothing much they could do. They managed to wash the fire away, but all that was left was a charred skeleton of a structure collapsing onto scalded earth.

  So what do you do with a burned house that nobody owns? You let it sit there, an eyesore to anybody who ventures off the two-lane highway and decides to drive past the old grange.

  Another decade passed and then most of the next one. The earth healed, regenerated, but not the house. At some point, a group of men wearing hardhats walked around the skeletal house, taking photographs and writing notes. They talked about razing the structure, discussed cost analysis.

  They came back two more times.

  The structure remained.

  It was late fall, 2018, and most of the leaves had fallen from the cottonwoods, a sad breeze dragging them across the dirt. An old Ford moved deliberately down the dirt road, barely visible because of all the dead leaves and broken branches. The car slowed and then stopped, fifty yards from the charred house. For several minutes the car remained idle, the engine still running. Eventually, the engine shut off, but nobody got out.

  Ten minutes. More. The door finally opened and a leg appeared, a black dress falling nearly to the ankle. Moments later, the other leg, and then a woman. She was stooped at the shoulders, either from age or sorrow. Her white hair was thin and disheveled. But behind creased lids her eyes were lovely and lively, and cornflower blue. It was the same woman who had entered this house years ago, the same woman who had pulled a pistol from her purse and shot and killed a man while he smoked in his kitchen.

  The woman walked slowly toward the burned and rotted house, her lower lip trembling, her dress swaying in the breeze. In her right hand she held a Bible, its cover battered. She shuffled through the structure and took in the blackened boards, the remains of the floor. She stood where the kitchen had once been. There was ash, shattered glass, and twisted scraps of metal, perhaps remnants of the oven or refrigerator.

  The woman got down on her knees, her dress spreading beneath her, and placed the Bible on the ground. She opened the cover, and a breeze through the missing windows fluttered the pages. She licked her finger and flipped through the book until she arrived at the page she was searching for. She read silently, her lips moving almost imperceptibly. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and began rocking back and forth. Eventually, she closed the Bible, rose to her feet, and trudged through the house toward the front.

  The Bible was left behind.

  Outside, the sky had begun to darken, and the air was getting cooler. The sound of a train’s ghostly whistle echoed through the autumn air. The woman edged around the perimeter of the burned-out structure, leaves floating past her, toward a water well, long since abandoned. It was made of crumbling brick and covered by a few wooden planks bolted lazily into the brickwork. Crossing herself, the woman bent at the knees, grabbed ahold of one of those planks, and yanked. The wood was rotted and came away easily. She got down on her knees, placed her hands on the brick opening, and peered down the darkened tunnel.

  There was no bucket, no water. Only blackness. And yet, as the minutes passed, she continued to gaze into that blackness, and then she began to sob, her wails echoing against the brick walls. When she finally rose to her feet, tears wetted her wrinkled cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.

  Eventually, she left the abandoned well and returned to her car, dead leaves collecting on the windshield. From the trunk, she removed a rope and a step ladder. Then she walked toward a bare cottonwood, gnarled branches jutting from the trunk.

  She placed the ladder a foot or so from the tree and climbed it slowly. She found a thick branch and yanked on it with her free hand. Despite her frailty, she managed to tie and tighten the loose end of the rope around the branch. She then placed the other end—already secured in a noose—around her neck and tightened it. A soft breeze blew. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Five seconds, ten. Then she kicked the ladder away. It wobbled slightly before crashing to the ground.

  For a few moments—as her body convulsed, eyes bulging from a distorted face—the woman’s arms became perpendicular to her torso, and she resembled a grotesque mockery of Christ. But then her hands fell to her sides, and she twisted and kicked and jerked in silence.

  And so the woman died, her body still swaying gently from the crooked tree as the sky darkened, and lightened, and darkened again.

  PART I

  2018

  CHAPTER 1

  The motel was nothing special. Bed, nightstand, dresser. One photograph of a horse in a meadow. Another photograph of a red barn. The girl was nothing special either. She had bleach-blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a plain, white face. Holt had met her the night before and had liked the way she poured his coffee, had liked the way she hummed that nameless tune, had liked the way she laughed. Happiness sometimes begins that way. She had told him her name, but he hadn’t listened. They shared some drinks and a few laughs. Later, he got a little rough with her, but she didn’t seem to mind. Some girls are just like that. Now they were lying inside this cheap motel, and he felt like he was dead.

  “I don’t usually do this kind of thing,” she said, stroking his chest, but he figured she was lying. He figured she did it all the time.

  In the room next to theirs, a baby started crying, shrieking really, and Holt worried that it’d never stop. He felt panicked and wanted to leave, but he couldn’t seem to move. That happened to him from time to time. A paralysis of will.

  The girl wanted to make conversation. “Do you live here in Deerfield?”

  Holt shook his head no. He had no intention of providing his life story. He had no intention of providing anything at all.

  “Where do you live then?”

  “Around. Topeka area.”

  The girl smiled. She had a gap between her front teeth, and Holt figured that she hadn’t been blessed with very much. Not looks or intelligence or even a decent car. A girl like her could only get what she could get. And he guessed that was him.

  She said, “So why were you in the café last night?”

  He placed his hands behind his head, shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I go driving to clear my mind. That’s what I did last night. And then I got hungry. Spotted the café. The pie was good.”

  “Yeah, well. Best in Deerfield, anyway. I’m glad you found me. But why you got to clear your mind? You got worries or something?”

  He glanced at her quickly and then glanced away. “Don’t we all?”

  She laughed. “Yeah. I guess we do. My husband’s a worry, for one thing. Fat bastard.” And now she winked. “Jealous too.”

  Holt didn’t care that she was married. They didn’t arrest you for adultery anymore. He stared at the ceiling. It was cracked in several places, and the white enamel was peeling. They were letting this place die. Just like everything.

  “You got a job?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Well, what kind?”

  “I fight fires. Rescue cats from trees. That sort of thing.”

  “No shit? You’re a firefighter? That’s so exciting. I thought that’s what you looked like when I first saw you. Honest, I did.” She pointed to his wrist, which was scarred, the skin pink, fibrous, and raised. “That’s how you burned yourself ?”

  He didn’t answer, not right away. Instead
, he touched the wound and closed his eyes. And just like that he remembered the flames and smoke and sirens and screams. The mother and the child, huddled in the closet. The mother was dead, face frozen in agony, but somehow the baby was alive—

  Holt opened his eyes and nodded his head. “Yeah. That’s how I burned myself.”

  For a few weeks, Holt had been a hero. There had been an article in the local newspaper, with a picture of him lowering the baby down the ladder. fireman saves baby. He’d thrown it away.

  She asked more questions, and they floated in and out of his consciousness: You ever been married? Do you think I’m pretty? You got a girl? Holt answered with nods and grunts, all the while calculating how many more minutes he had to stay.

  His phone vibrated on the nightstand, and he reached across the girl’s flattened breasts to grab it. He didn’t recognize the number, but he did recognize the area code: his hometown, Thompsonville, Colorado. His stomach tightened.

  He brought the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

  It was Joyce Brandt, his mother’s best friend, the one who had been married to the police lieutenant. Holt hadn’t heard Joyce’s voice in a decade at least. She asked how he was doing, and he answered vaguely. Then she started speaking quickly, as if someone else were waiting to use the phone. Down by Liberty Grange . . . a couple of kids found her . . . been there a week or more . . . can’t imagine why . . . nobody knows what to do . . . a hell of a thing . . . Holt only caught phrases instead of the whole monologue—his brain couldn’t quite catch up to the words—but her meaning was clear.

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said, and hung up.

  After that he just lay there, staring at the ceiling, the cell phone resting on his bare chest. But the girl wouldn’t let him be.

  “Who was that?” She touched his stomach.

  “Just some woman,” he said. “A friend of my mother’s.”

  “And what did she need to tell you?”

  Holt rolled over to his side, his back to the girl.

  “She needed to tell me about my mother. She needed to tell me how she killed herself.”

  The girl tried comforting him, and he appreciated the effort, but it was really no use. Eventually, he got out of bed and got dressed. The girl asked if he’d call her soon, and he told her maybe, and he figured she knew what that meant.

  Ten minutes later, he stood in the hotel parking lot, hands buried in his pockets, as the sun rose over the nearby refinery plant. He gazed at a destitute man, just across the lot, leaning against his truck, crushing out a cigarette with his boot. The air smelled like hog shit.

  Holt got into his car and drove, feeling even more lonely than usual. He hadn’t been close to his mother in a long time, but somehow knowing she was gone made him hurt. He thought about the words he’d never said, and the ones he wished he hadn’t. He pressed hard on the gas down Highway 42, getting the old Ford up to seventy, eighty, before letting up again, but he decided it was no good, you can’t escape from yourself, no matter how fast you drive. No matter how far you go.

  And then, as the radio crackled, he felt that familiar urge, the one that had been plaguing him ever since he’d saved that baby from the flames. Ten or fifteen miles outside of Deerfield, just south of Topeka, there was a nameless lake, all brown with mud. He’d been there on a few occasions, the last time a month or so ago after struggling through another bout of insomnia. Nobody was ever there, nobody but him.

  Now he pulled off the highway and drove down a dirt path toward the water, his car lurching over unseen holes and bumps, and parked near a shallow gully. He killed the engine and stepped out of the car.

  That urge, that urge.

  Soon he was standing on the shore and staring at the murky water, surrounded by cottonwoods and yesterday’s sins. Nobody was there, so he stripped his clothes and stepped in. He closed his eyes. “Just as Christ was raised from the dead, by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life,” he whispered. The water was icy cold, and despite the mildness of the day, he couldn’t stop shivering.

  He wandered farther in, until the water reached his knees, then his thighs, then his chest. From somewhere he could hear the screeching of an animal, and then he took a deep breath and dropped beneath the surface. He kept his eyes open, and as he kicked deeper into the water, he wondered if it was possible to drown yourself by pure will, or if the human drive to survive, to live, was too strong.

  Pretty soon his chest was aching, and bubbles trickled from his mouth. He thought of his mother, he thought of the baby, and soon he came floating upward until his face was out of the water and he was gasping for air.

  CHAPTER 2

  It had been more than twenty years since Holt had filled a couple of duffel bags with clothes and toiletries and some worthless souvenirs and stuck out his thumb, looking to get as far away from Thompsonville, Colorado—as far away from his mother—as possible. In all those years he’d never been back to his hometown, not once, although his mother had visited him in Topeka five or six times, and each time he had immediately longed for her to leave.

  As a young child, however, things had been different. As a young child, he had relied on her presence and became panicked when she wasn’t within earshot, cried when she didn’t get home before dark. His father had skipped town months before he was born, and so she had been Holt’s only protector. He used to sleep with his door open a crack, so that whenever he opened his eyes he could see the corner of her bedroom and would know that she was nearby. Mornings, after the sunlight woke him from forgotten dreams, he would tiptoe through the hallway and climb into his mother’s bed, where she would hold him tight, listening to every breath he took. Evenings, they would eat dinner together at the kitchen table, telling stories and laughing. After putting the dishes away, they danced to Elvis and the Beatles with his older sister, Ophelia, clapping and stomping her feet all the while.

  If only he could ever feel that safe again.

  After Ophelia was taken away by those men in white, his mother had changed. Or maybe it had been before that, his memory of that time was unclear, foggy. Now when he came into her bed on those early mornings, she didn’t pull him close, she didn’t listen to him breathing. Instead she would roll over, her back toward him, and pull her knees toward her chest and softly sob. At dinner there was no laughter, no stories. She would sit upright, stare straight ahead, and chew her food slowly, methodically, barely able to say a word.

  Soon after there were the bouts of rage, when she would lash out at Holt for no reason, screaming and cursing, sometimes grabbing him by the wrist and shoving him against the wall. And there were the nights, the long and lonely nights, when his mother would spend hour after hour staring out that blackened window, waiting. For what? It was as if she blamed Holt for Ophelia’s madness, blamed him for the darkness that hovered over their lives now that his sister was gone.

  As Holt grew, turning seven and then eight and then nine, his mother spent more and more time in church, more time reading the words of the Bible, more time on her knees in prayer. She tried passing this religiosity on to him, and before Holt went to bed she would stand over him, watching closely as he prayed, making sure the words he mumbled were reverent and holy.

  And on each Sunday, she would take him to Mineral Lake, near their house, and baptize him anew. “No sins,” she would whisper. “None.”

  Despite her zealous religiosity, despite her bouts of depression, despite her frequent cruelties, for much of his childhood Holt wanted nothing more than to please his mother. He studied for hours on end to get perfect grades. He became a Boy Scout and then an Eagle Scout. He volunteered at the homeless shelter. And he made her cards, so many cards, filled with hearts and words of adoration.

  But none of it worked. After Ophelia was taken away, he could never please his mother, could never gain her love, not completely. So, as Holt got older and entere
d high school, he pulled away from her. He got mixed up with some unruly people and took to staying out all night. He drank and fought and fucked. His grades began to suffer, but that didn’t bother him. What was he going to do with an education, anyway? He got suspended twice and in trouble a lot more often than that.

  But his mother didn’t seem to care, not about him, not about anything. She was too far gone, in her own little world of melancholy and imaginary spirits. As soon as Holt turned seventeen, old enough to drop out of high school, he left that house, left Thompsonville. His mother had commanded him to stay, shouted that it was a mean old world filled with demons of the worst kind, but Holt ignored her. He wanted to hurt her, so he told her that he didn’t believe in God, never had, and told her that he couldn’t stand her voice, her smell, her touch. She cried, and that made him feel good. He knew he needed to find his own way, even if the demons joined him.

  Over the next several years he bounced from town to town (Salida, Fort Worth, Tulsa, Fayetteville) and from job to job (welder, oil field worker, short order cook, mechanic, custodian). He made some friends, but none of the friendships lasted. When he was twenty-three he met a girl named Michelle, and she had the darkest brown eyes and the prettiest lilting laugh. They began spending time together. For some reason she loved him, and he tried to love her too. Her family was from Topeka, and she convinced him to move there. Her brother, Hal, worked as a paramedic for the fire department, and Holt liked the idea of fighting fires. He took some classes to become an EMT, and then Hal pulled some strings and got him hired. He liked the job. Good hours, good people, a sense of purpose. A way to provide salvation, if not to himself then at least to a stranger in need.

  But things with Michelle didn’t last. She wanted to get married, wanted to have a baby. Holt thought that maybe he would be a decent husband. But not a father. Never a father. And so he refused. “Is it because your own daddy left you?” Michelle asked. “Is that why?”