CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

He’s shouting for forgiveness. He’s shouting that he’s just a man. He’s shouting that hatred and war made him nuts. I start running down the hill agreeing with him. The Mrs. gives me a look and puts her hands over Maribeth’s ears. We’re all running. The Mrs. starts screaming about the feel of the scythe as it opened her up. The girls bemoan their unborn kids. We make quite a group. Since I’m still alive I keep clipping trees with my shoulders and falling down.
    At the bottom of the hill they pass through the retaining wall and I run into it. I wake up on my back in the culvert. Blood’s running out of my ears and a transparent boy’s kneeling over me. I can tell he’s no McKinnon because he’s wearing sweatpants.
    “Get up now,” he says in a gentle voice. “Fire’s coming.”
    “No,” I say. “I’m through. I’m done living.”
    “I don’t think so,” he says. “You’ve got amends to make.”
    “I screwed up,” I say. “I did bad things.”
    “No joke,” he says, and holds up his stump.
    I roll over into the culvert muck and he grabs me by the collar and sits me up.
    “I steal four jawbreakers and a Slim Jim and your friend kills and mutilates me?” he says.
    “He wasn’t my friend,” I say.
    “He wasn’t your enemy,” the kid says.
    Then he cocks his head. Through his clear skull I seeSam coming out of the woods. The kid cowers behind me. Even dead he’s scared of Sam. He’s so scared he blasts straight up in the air shrieking and vanishes over the retaining wall.
    Sam comes for me with a hunting knife.
    “Don’t take this too personal,” he says, “but you’ve got to go. You know a few things I don’t want broadcast.”
    I’m madly framing calming words in my head as he drives the knife in. I can’t believe it. Never again to see my kids? Never again to sleep and wake to their liquid high voices and sweet breaths?
    Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.
    Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.

I SABELLE
    T he first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter. We were young, ignorant of mercy, and called her Boneless or Balled-Up Gumby for the way her limbs were twisted and useless. She looked like a newborn colt, appendages folded in as she lay on the velour couch protected by guardrails. Leo and I stood outside the window on cinder blocks, watching. She was scared of the tub, so to bathe her Split Lip covered the couch with a tarp and caught the runoff in a bucket. Mrs. Split Lip was long gone, unable to bear the work Boneless required. She found another man and together they made a little blond beauty they dressed in red velvet and paraded up and down the aisle at St. Caspian’s while Split Lip held Boneless against him in the last pew, shushing her whenever the music overcame her and she started making horrible moaning noises trying to sing along.
    Maintaining Boneless cost plenty. Split Lip’s main job was cop but on the side he sold water purifiers. When the neighborhood changed, the purifier business went belly-up. Split Lip said the niggers didn’t care what kind of poison they put in their bodies. Truth was, the purifiers were a scam. Inside was a sponge and an electric motor connected to nothing. But without the purifier money he couldn’t afford the masseuse who eased Boneless’s bad pain