Corrosion Read online

  I rose to my feet. Yes, sir.

  Come with me.

  He grabbed me by the arm and we walked through the corridor. Where are we going? I said.

  You’ve been bailed out, he said.

  Bailed out?

  Yes, sir.

  Who bailed me out?

  He didn’t answer.

  We reached the front desk. The cop behind the desk asked me to sign a paper before pulling out a bag with my clothes and belongings. He gave me another paper, which had the date of my next court appearance. And that was it. I was free to go. I reached into the bag and pulled out my snuff, stuck a pinch in my mouth. Then I nodded at the officer. Be seeing you around, I said. And I left.

  * * *

  I didn’t know what to make of all this. I didn’t have a friend in the world. Outside the air was cold and the wind was howling.

  I walked down the highway, sticking out my thumb. Every now and then a car would slow down, but when they caught a look at my face, they sped right on up. I buried my hands in my pocket, mumbled a prayer to God.

  When I finally arrived back at the Hotel Paisano, the moon was being smothered by a blanket of clouds. I snuck in the back door and walked up the stairs. Somewhere a phone was ringing, never picked up, lonely, lonely, lonely. I finally got to my door, shoved it open. It had been days. My suitcase was gone. And that’s not all. A skinny old man with a concave chest and Einstein hair was sitting on the bed, his eyes rolled straight back in his head. The town whore was sitting on her knees, humming an American tune. Her wig was pink and her back was bare. I watched for a moment. Then I shut the door.

  I sat in the hallway and played mumblety peg with my knife. And I got to thinking about how it sure was lucky that I’d gotten out of the war alive, and it sure was lucky that I’d been bailed out of jail, and it sure was sure that one of these days I’d pay Lilith McClellan a visit…

  I went down to the lobby. The blue-haired woman was behind the desk, head resting on the counter. I pounded on the counter a few times and she jerked awake. When she saw my face, she released a muffled scream. It took her a moment to compose herself.

  I’m sorry, she said. You startled me.

  My room, I said. I wasn’t done with it.

  I assumed you would be gone for some time…

  Where’s my suitcase?

  She nodded toward a closet. I’ll get it for you, she said. Miscommunication is all. I hope you return to the Hotel Paisano next time you’re passing through…

  * * *

  I stayed in my car that night. I snorted snuff, drank brandy, listened to The Handsome Family. At some point it started to rain and it was a lullaby and I drifted to sleep.

  I dreamed of Lilith and we were dancing in that old miner’s cabin and calliope music was playing and the floor was covered with rats, several layers deep, crawling over each other, gnawing on rodent corpses and I pulled Lilith close and her skin was missing, there was just a bleach-white skull, and I was walking down a darkened stairway…

  * * *

  I awoke to the sound of tapping on the window. My heart ruptured and my eyes flew open. With trepidation, I rolled down the window. A flashlight shone into my face. I squinted and shielded my eyes with my arm. The wind was howling and the rain was falling slantways. Winter trudging forward. The flashlight lowered and I saw cruel eyes under a gray wool hat. The stranger. I opened my mouth, ready to say something.

  He raised a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and aimed it at my forehead.

  CHAPTER 13

  Unlock the door, he said, motioning toward the passenger’s side. I pulled up the lock. The stranger walked around the back of the car, his shotgun still pointed at my poor head. He yanked open the door and sat inside. His eyes were all bloodshot and he smelled like Petron.

  Start the car, he said. We’re going for a drive.

  And so we drove. He guided my driving, told me how fast to go, when to turn, all the while keeping the weapon straight and steady.

  Eventually we made our way onto Highway 52. It was a good deal past midnight; there were no other cars on the road. I could hear him breathing, wheezing. I wondered if he was going to shoot me. I wondered if I’d see my body from above. Another couple of miles, he said.

  I didn’t ask him any questions. I didn’t ask who he was. I didn’t ask what he wanted. He’d tell me soon. Or he wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter. None of it really mattered…

  There was a sign for a town called Dacono. He told me to exit. The snow was falling harder now and it was hard to see. I turned on my brights, but it only made it worse. We drove down a county line road, surrounded by whitened wheat fields, before passing through a little town with nothing but a farmer bar and a post office. We turned onto a little dirt road and drove for a while. Then he told me to stop.

  We were at the end of the world and this man here was the devil and he was waiting for payment…

  Turn off the engine, he said.

  I did as I was told.

  Did you kill that man, Nick McClellan?

  I didn’t answer.

  You can tell me. It won’t make a difference now. Besides. Don’t you think I deserve to know? After emptying my savings to bail you out?

  I turned and faced him. My mouth was dry. My head was spinning. It wasn’t going to be long now.

  What do you want from me? I whispered.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he took the shotgun and slammed the barrel against my temple. My head smashed into the window. I covered my face with my hands. He aimed the pump-action gun at my face. You know what’s gonna happen, Private? he shouted. Your skull’s gonna crack like a coconut!

  After that he didn’t say anything for a long while. Eventually his hands tired, and he lowered the weapon, placed it on his lap. I eyed it cautiously, thought about making a move. Thought better of it.

  Through the brooding gloom, his cheeks appeared sunken, his skin yellow. When he did speak again, his voice was filled with tempests, disease, and death. He said: Let me tell you about my son. There’s some things you should know.

  And suddenly, I knew where this was headed and I didn’t want to hear.

  A soldier. Like you. Same battalion. Same regiment. Same division.

  Truth, truth, truth. Who decides?

  He enlisted in March. Three months later he was in the desert. 130 degrees. Covered with gear. Knocking down doors, firing at insurgents. My son. My beautiful son.

  But he didn’t last long, did he? Killed in action. A soldier knocked on our door. My wife fell to her knees. He told us the story. How my son’s convoy hit a tripwire. How there was an explosion. How his body was burnt beyond recognition. How the only way they knew it was him was because another soldier grabbed one of his tags. And he gave me that tag. Placed it right in my hand. A souvenir of his death.

  The stranger stopped speaking and stared at me. The anger in his eyes had been replaced by sadness, by resignation. Finally I spoke because I couldn’t take the oppressive silence. I still don’t understand. What does all this have to do with me?

  His eyes narrowed and his upper lip twitched. He started nodding his head over and over again; I wasn’t sure he would ever stop. He said: You showed me a dog tag back at the landfill.

  Yeah? So?

  What happened to your other tag?

  What are you talking about?

  Come on, Joseph, or whatever the fuck your name is. You know that every soldier is issued a pair of tags.

  I shook my head, said, I lost the other one.

  The hell you did!

  The stranger grabbed a hold of my hand and shoved something inside of it. I sat there for a long moment, gripping the piece of metal tightly. Then, slowly, I loosened my fingers and stared into the palm of my hand.

  A dog tag. Downs. Joseph. My past corroding, my hands trembling, I removed the tag from my neck and compared it to the one in my hand.

  They were identical.

  There’s been a mistake, I said.

/>   He shoved the shotgun in the center of my forehead. No mistake. It took me a while, took some investigating, but now I know what happened. I know—

  You don’t know shit, I said.

  Adrenaline took over. Next thing I knew, I was struggling for the gun and then there was an explosion that deafened my ears. For a moment I thought I was dead. I was wrong. My hands were gripping either end of the shotgun. We fought, and his face was panicked and the veins were popping in his neck. I was younger and stronger than him and eventually I managed to shove the weapon against his throat. He pushed back, but his muscles and will began to weaken. He wasn’t able to breathe and his eyes were bulging, his face turning purple. Eventually, his hands loosened from the shotgun. I managed to get some space. I pulled the shotgun back, aimed it at his face and squeezed the trigger. Blood and brain splattered on the windows and on my shirt. The devil was dead, and I was a few steps closer to home.

  * * *

  I sat there for a long time, listening to the blood roaring in my ears. I knew who I was.

  There was a shovel in the bed of my truck. I turned my headlights on and stepped outside. The snow was whipping all around me. I walked away from the road and started digging. The ground was cold and hard and the digging was difficult. It must have taken me thirty minutes or more before I’d dug a shallow grave. I was sweating despite the cold. I limped back to the car and pulled open the truck door. Death and destruction. Placing my hands beneath his arms, I managed to pull the stranger out of the pickup. He wasn’t heavy, and I dragged him across the snow and toward the grave, rolling him the final few yards into his resting place. Breathing heavily, wiping snow from my brow, I covered him with mud and snow and then got down on my knees and prayed to Jesus Christ with all of my might.

  * * *

  I got into the truck and drove. Tammy Wynette was singing about standing by her man. The wheat fields around me were engulfed in blackness. As the headlights plowed through the darkness, I kept worrying that I might disappear. Off in the distance, the unblinking headlights of a semi appeared, pulling toward me so deliberately that I wondered if I’d ever reach them. Then suddenly they were upon me, and I shielded my eyes with my hand. My Chevy trembled as the big rig rushed past. I watched in my rearview mirror as the red taillights got smaller and smaller, fading into nothingness. Then I was alone again. That ancient coldness rose up inside of me, quickly, unexpectedly. I could barely breathe. I jammed on the brakes, and the car screeched to a halt. I turned off the headlights and the world disappeared. Suddenly, I got the strange sensation that I was staring at the back of my own head.

  Panicked, I got out of the pickup, leaving the driver’s-side door open and the engine running. I was standing on County Road 13 staring into endless miles of nothingness. I began running down the highway like a fool, just running as hard as I could, not knowing if I could be with myself anymore.

  * * *

  Back in Stratton. All the streets were silent and still, save the dead leaves marching toward their graves. Off to the south the factory smokestacks shot columns of soot into the filthy sky, a human sacrifice to God. I drove down Main Street, stopped at a liquor store. My clothes were covered with blood. I walked inside, zombielike. The windows were barred, and the man behind the register watched me suspiciously as I found the cheapest pint of gin. I paid for the booze, twisting off the top as I staggered outside. Then I sat in my truck and drank. I drank a lot. My head was bobbing around, my tongue lolling outside of my mouth. The devil’s shotgun rested on my lap.

  I weaved through town. I knew where I was going, but I didn’t know what I was going to do. My name was Joseph Downs and I came from a small town in Ohio. I was wounded in Mosul when our Humvee exploded. I knew who I was.

  * * *

  I parked at the edge of her property and turned off the engine. My truck was hidden in the shadow of an old juniper tree. The windows of the little ranch house were glowing orange, the curtains pulled closed. Every so often I could see the silhouette of a woman, then the silhouette of a man, walking through the empty hallway.

  I turned on the radio and listened to a Southern preacher, and he got me good and scared. The moon was an evil grin in a basalt sky.

  Nobody left the house that night. I watched as the lights began shutting off. First the kitchen. Then the living room. Finally, the bedroom. The whole house was dark. I choked down one last drink, squeezed my eyes shut, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  Early the next morning I saw him. Tall, thick, ruggedly handsome. The vaquero from the bar. He was wearing blue jeans tucked into roper boots, along with a brown Carhartt jacket. He stood outside a while, just gazing across the desolation toward a lonely windmill, the metal blades and tail vane shining all purple and pink and orange in the hazy winter sun. He started walking slowly toward his car, whistling a tune I’d never heard. Then he got inside and hit the engine. I could hear the muffled sounds of Los Ponchos playing from his radio. He put the car into gear and drove, passing right in front of me, kicking up dirt and dust.

  Some time passed. I stepped outside of the truck, the snow crunching beneath my bloodstained boots. A bedroom light flashed on, and I saw Lilith in the window. She was wearing a long white gown and her face was otherworldly. I stood in front of my hearse, the shotgun dangling from my hand, a steel appendage. Somewhere in the distance a lonesome train whistle blew. I pulled back my hair with my hand and started walking slowly toward her door. And now I knew what I was going to do, what I had to do. Choices aren’t made. There is no free will.

  PART TWO: BENTON FAULK (2003)

  “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it’s gone now and I’m sick…”

  —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

  CHAPTER 14

  The old man kept the rats in the cellar, hundreds of them in metal cages on cinder block shelves. It was some sight to see, boy, all those rabid rats watching you from beneath those beady black eyes, longing to stick their disease-infested teeth into your flesh. And in the middle of the cellar, a large rectangular table with beakers and Bunsen burners and medicine droppers and notebooks filled with equations and whatnot and all the mountain folk talked and said what’s he up to down there, he can’t be up to no good, but it didn’t bother me even a single bit because Dad knew some things and I trusted him more than all the doctors with their sighs and shaking heads.

  And now, as Mother lay in bed in her moth-bitten white nightgown, muscles withering, voice shrieking, Father showed me the Christ Rat, in a cage by itself, body calm, eyes alert, and said, three days, my boy, and no symptoms. Just a little mixture of Tetrabenazine and Peroxetine. An antidote from God himself! Don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner! And then I realized how much Father’s eyes resembled those of the rats, but still I didn’t want to believe all the things the men at the store were saying, didn’t want to believe that the Castle was waiting for him.

  And me upstairs, pacing like one of those caged rats, feeling more than a little melancholy, hoping nobody would come check up on me because the living area was a mess with clothes and blankets and pillows and cans and plates, and they might say enough of this, time to call social services on you! They might say time to put you in a foster family or worse! I walked across the living room, floorboards creaking beneath my graveyard boots, and pulled open the curtains, stared outside. The snow was all over the mountain and it made me realize how cold the house was, colder than a penguin’s left nut as they say, so I began gathering wood from the corner of the room and placing it in the fireplace, and by the time the flames were dancing I felt tired and I rested on the couch and snorted some snuff and then fell asleep. Then I was awake again and my head was aching and I could hear my father singing mournful songs and sobbing and I knew he’d sneaked some of that homemade bourbon again, that will be the death of you, I told him once and he just smiled and said better to die
from a bad liver than a broken heart and I laughed and said so true, Dad, so true.

  Feeling restless and maybe a little anxious, I went to the closet and grabbed my flannel jacket, thinking maybe I’ll just get outside, maybe I’ll go explore in the mountains and the caves, but I’d just gotten my right arm in the sleeve when I heard my mother’s voice, weakened but still shrill, calling out my name, Benton…Benton…Benton. For a moment I thought about ignoring her, but then the guilt stifled me, and I walked slowly toward the bedroom, where the stink of disease seeped from beneath the wooden door.

  I stood outside the bedroom for a while hoping she’d stop calling for me, but she was tenacious, so I pushed open the door and stood there, hands useless at my side, eyes aimed downward. I could hear her breathing noisily and I felt sick to my stomach and feared that I’d vomit.

  I’m not well, she said, though I’d heard it a million times before, for years and years. I don’t have long to live, Benton. Soon I’ll be gone and nobody will care. They’ll put me in a cheap casket and bury me beneath the dirt, and those worms will have quite a feast, don’t you think? And what about you? When I’m dead and buried, will you care?

  And when I said that I would, that I loved her because she was my mother and spent sixteen hours giving birth to me, she just laughed and laughed and called me a liar and said she didn’t really blame me, that she’d been a terrible mother, unfaithful to me and my father, and once she was dead I should just forget about her, shouldn’t bother wasting love on her because there’s only so much love in the world, and it’s much better to spend it on somebody who can be redeemed.