When she speaks, she makes the most peculiar sound, something akin to a knife blade sliding across a sharpening stone: “Schick. Aren’t you two just the most precious little things I ever saw!”
Orson and I look up from the ground into her heavily powdered face. Her curly platinum hair is rigid, and she smells like a concoction of cheap perfumes.
“Darlings!” she exclaims, grinning, and we see her false teeth, where broccoli florets still cling. Here it comes — that question everyone feels compelled to ask, though Orson and I are mirror images of each other. “Are y’all twins?”
God, we hate that. I open my mouth to explain how we’re just fraternal twins, but Orson stops me with a look. He peers up into her eyes and makes his bottom lip quiver.
“We are now,” he says.
“What do you mean, young man?”
“Our triplet brother Timmy — he got burned up in the fire three days ago.”
Through the powder, her face colors, and she covers her mouth with her hand. “Schick. Oh, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to…” She squats down, and I’m pinching the back sides of my calves, trying not to laugh. “Well, he’s with Jesus now,” she says softly, “so —”
“No, he wasn’t saved,” Orson says. “He was gonna do it this Sunday. You think he’s in hell with Satan? I mean, if you aren’t saved, that’s where you go, right? That’s what Preacher Rob said.”
She stands back up. “You’d better talk with your parents about that. Schick.” Her feigned giddiness vaporized, she looks off into the bordering wood. With all her makeup, she reminds me of a sad clown. “Schick. Well, I’m terribly sorry,” she says, and we watch her walk back into the crowd. Then we run behind the walnut tree and laugh until tears glisten on our cheeks.
I woke and found myself sitting up in Orson’s bed, pressing the Glock against my temple. Nothing surprised me anymore. Sliding out from under the fleece blanket, I walked into the living room, the gun at my side. Without the warmth of the kerosene heater, the cabin had cooled again, and I bent down to punch the electric starter, when something curdled my blood: I recalled the dream and the woman’s queer nervous tic: schick, schick, schick. Instead of lighting the heater as I’d intended, I unlocked the dead bolt and cracked the front door. Subzero night air deluged the cabin.
I hadn’t ventured outside again since arriving at the cabin in the late afternoon, and my tracks ran south toward the car. A surge of adrenaline straightened each hair on my neck — another set of tracks, which I had not made, came directly from the shed, up the steps, to the front door, where I now stood. He’s in the cabin. Closing the door, I turned around and chambered a bullet, regretting I’d not left the votive candles burning in every room. I stepped forward into the red darkness, squinting at the corners in the kitchen and the living room, straining to detect the slightest pin drop of sound — a noisy breath or a clamorous heart that pounded like mine.
Are you watching me now? I thought, creeping from the living room back through the hallway. The door to the spare bedroom was cracked, and I couldn’t remember leaving it that way. Approaching the door, I kicked it open and rushed inside, spinning around in the darkness, my finger on the trigger, waiting for him to spring at me. But the room was empty, just as I’d left it.
I returned to the hallway. Your room. You were watching me sleep. Disregarding my fear, I stepped over the threshold. The only place in the room obstructed from view was the other side of his dresser. The Glock raised, ready to fire, I lunged across the room, beginning to squeeze the trigger as the blind spot between the dresser and the freezer came into view. He wasn’t there.
The four closets were the only places I’d yet to comb, but I couldn’t imagine he’d squeezed himself into one. They were filled with supplies — one a pantry, another a storage space for gas, bottled water, and a substantial coil of rope. Besides, I’d have heard him banging around in the dark.
I walked out of his bedroom. There were two closets on each side of the twelve-foot hallway connecting the bedrooms to the living room. You’re waiting for me to walk by again, so you can swing a door into my face. I bolted through the hall back into the living room.
Standing by the cold heater, I’d begun to devise a plan to flush him out, when a bead of water slapped the crown of my bald head. Snowmelt. Wood creaked above me, and I looked up into the rafters. A shadow swung down from a beam, and something blunt and hard smote the back of my head.
I came to on the floor, and the Glock was gone. I struggled to my feet. The red darkness twirled, pierced by bursts of light. Am I dreaming?
The point of a knife slipped between my right arm and my torso and touched my solar plexus. I saw the ivory handle, and when I felt his breath against the back of my ear, piss flowed down the side of my leg and pooled under my bare feet. When I tried to pull away, the blade pressed against my throat.
“This knife’ll cut through your windpipe like it was Jell-O.”
“Don’t kill me.”
“What’s that jangle?” Reaching down, he felt the pockets of my sweatpants. “Oh goodie.” He removed the handcuffs, with the key still in the lock, and cuffed my left hand. “Give me the other one.” I put my right hand behind my back, and he cuffed that one, too. “Now lead the way,” he whispered, the blade still at my throat. “There’s a surprise for you in the shed.”
36
THOUGH barefoot, I couldn’t feel the ice between my toes. I imagined that the sliver of moon lit our faces blue and baleful. The night was surreal, and I thought, I am not here. I am not walking with him to that shed. Orson kept close, grunting with each breath, as though it were a struggle for him to stay with me. Withdrawal or frostbite, or both. I reached the back door of the shed, stopped, and turned. He shuffled toward me, pointing the Glock waveringly at my head. In the moonlight, I saw his face — the tips of his ears blackened, his cheeks, lips, and forehead corpse-white from the cold.
“You’ve been guzzling your buttermilk,” he said, grinning. “Go on in. It’s unlocked.”
I pushed my shoulder into the door and it opened. Terror weakened me when I saw what he’d done. The interior of the shed was filled with candles — dozens of them placed on the floor and the shelves. Innumerable shadows jitterbugged along the concrete, up the walls, into the rafters. I saw the pole, the leather collar, the sheet of plastic spread out on the floor to catch my blood.
“All for you,” he whispered. “A candlelight death.”
“Orson, please….” The tip of the knife pricked my back, urging me through the doorway. As I walked across the concrete, I stared at the hole in the far corner of the wall, presuming he’d crawled in out of the snow sometime after dark. The missing panel of pine lay on the floor.
“On the plastic,” he said. When I hesitated, he took three steps in my direction and pointed the Glock at my left knee. Immediately, I moved to the plastic and knelt down. “On your stomach,” he said, and I prostrated myself as instructed. I smelled the leather collar as he slipped it over my head and cinched it around my neck — the scent of misfortunate strangers’ sweat and blood and tears and spit. I felt a terrible, intimate kinship with those doomed souls who’d worn this putrid collar before me. We were blood now — Orson’s hideous children. Papa dragged the stool out from the corner and perched on it, just out of reach.
Shoving the Glock into the waistband of Walter’s jeans, he took the sharpening stone from his pocket and began drawing the blade across it: schick, schick, schick. Watching him work in the dim, jaundiced light, candles surrounding the plastic, I grew sensitive to the cuffs that dug into my wrists.
They were mine. I’d owned them since a Halloween party in 1987, when a friend presented them as a gag gift to me and this woman I was seeing, Sophie. It embarrassed us at first, but I cuffed her to my bedpost that night. I’d tied up other women with these cuffs and allowed them to shackle me. I’d bound Orson. Now he bound me. Fucking durable metal.