Dead Reckoning and Other Stories Read online

  Copyright 2018 Crystal Lake Publishing

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design:

  Matt Andrew—www.verboten-valley-art.com

  Interior Layout:

  Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com

  Proofread by:

  Ethan Harris

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Welcome to Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

  WELCOME TO THE LAKE . . .

  OTHER SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS BY CRYSTAL LAKE PUBLISHING:

  Things You Need by Kevin Lucia

  Frozen Shadows and Other Chilling Storiesby Gene O’Neill

  Varying Distances by Darren Speegle

  The Ghost Club: Newly Found Tales of Victorian Terror by William Meikle

  Ugly Little Things: Collected Horrors by Todd Keisling

  Whispered Echoes by Paul F. Olson

  Embers: A Collection of Dark Fiction by Kenneth W. Cain

  Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest by Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier

  Tribulations by Richard Thomas

  Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast by Jonathan Winn

  Flowers in a Dumpster by Mark Allan Gunnells

  The Dark at the End of the Tunnel by Taylor Grant

  Through a Mirror, Darkly by Kevin Lucia

  Things Slip Through by Kevin Lucia

  Where You Live by Gary McMahon

  Tricks, Mischief and Mayhem by Daniel I. Russell

  Samurai and Other Stories by William Meikle

  Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts by Jasper Bark

  Or check out other Crystal Lake Publishing books for more Tales from the Darkest Depths.

  “Each being is a broken hymn.”

  —E.M. Cioran

  A man said to the universe:

  “Sir, I exist!”

  “However,” replied the universe,

  “The fact has not created in me

  A sense of obligation.”

  —Stephen Crane, A Man Said to the Universe

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SEGMENT 1: SEVENTIES

  ENTROPY

  VISITATION RIGHTS

  TWO BOYS IN A DINER

  SEGMENT 2: EIGHTIES

  MUIR WOODS

  PUFFER FISH

  DEAD RECKONING

  SEGMENT 3: NINETIES

  INCARNATE

  TOOTH

  SAVIOR

  SEGMENT 4: TRIPLE-ZEROES

  SURGE

  PETRICHOR

  MOJITO

  SEGMENT 5: AFTER

  ON THE FICKLE NATURE OF GERMINATION

  UMBILICUS

  STRATUM

  THE MOTHER-OF-PEARL WAY

  SEGMENT 1

  SEVENTIES

  ENTROPY

  LOOKING UP AT an endless stipple of stars in my sky, and a single question tears at me: how do you light a Marlboro with hands like crushed pomegranates?

  After twenty-nine years of getting hit and hitting back, it all boils down to the execution of simple tasks.

  Case in point: just getting to the cig means nudging it up from my chest pocket with shaky, shredded knuckles so my teeth can fish it out, and even then I have to attack it from the side with molars. When you run your tongue along the cherries jubilee of jagged roots that were once your top and bottom incisors, you have to think outside the box, a side-effect of which is the rekindling of dormant memories. Six years back and three weeks into my first stint in McCreary, the very same broken-glass sensation lingered long after the crowns had been put in. Phantoms, they’re called. Nerves screaming their accounts of renounced body parts in pitch-black rooms. A reminder that the human body is little more than a roving, spongy container for ghosts.

  Read about that in an AMA journal. About the phantoms, I mean. Not much to do on the inside but read your fill and fall in step with time’s heartless pulse. That first stretch, conjured out of some overblown vehicular misunderstanding involving the police while the boy was still in his mother’s belly, I busied myself dissecting the dictionary front-to-back between soaking up my weight in prose. Misters Chandler and Azimov were eagerly devoured between bench-presses, brawls, and the occasional muled reefer.

  By my last stint, I could parse Hamlet and Macbeth to give the average Oxford don a run for his money. Turned out that words and I were a more natural fit than man ever was. It’s one of the few contradictions I ever got comfortable with.

  As to the reasons I wound up penned on all those subsequent occasions, there were only bureaucratic ones. Nothing moral. Wasn’t a person who got thrashed that didn’t deserve it in the biblical sense. Missed the boy’s birth as a consequence though, along with the C-section that nearly killed Jenna. Over the next two years, she would bring the chubby little bundle along for visits, and she’d mail the occasional picture, but I don’t know him. Not how a father should. Only been on the outside for four of his ten years. The other six subsisted on daydreams and the scribblings of dead men, gazing out a tiny meshed porthole at a slow fan of constellations, hesitant of rejoining the world as an understudy.

  Three teeth were vacated from my mouth on that first brawl. Far as I can recall, it was over a curl bar disagreement, of which there would be quite a few more. Had I occasion to do it over, I would’ve left them broken at the gum line as reminders to pick and choose my battles more wisely.

  My sitting on this curbside at the moment doesn’t quite qualify as an example of such indiscretion, what with my blood and memories dribbling into a coursing gutter while the bar’s sign winks nasty in the corner of my eye. But neither are there intentions on fixing these freshly smashed teeth—four on this night—which should nullify any further excursions to the prison orthodontist on my next stretch, which is now a certainty.

  Lee’s, the sign says in large, yellow block letters. As much a declaration of status as proprietorship. A simple marker garnished with stars shooting from the loops in the letters, forming a pattern surrounding the name. Even the apostrophe’s a star, the biggest one of the bunch. Jenna once told me the scientific term for the patterns stars make in the night sky, but damn if it’s not coming to me at the moment. For what it’s worth, I remember her saying once after lovin’—in what I assumed at the time to have been the very session that yielded the boy—that space is an endless, expanding womb where galaxies and stars, planets and comets, gametes and lust smash into each other to either create or extinguish life.

  To which we can now add: Hands colliding into faces to alter gravities.

  Spent years
trying to remedy that, and now it’s all moot. My hands are fountainheads of agony—pulverized, misshapen lumps incapable of any further betrayal. The inside of my head burns and clangs like an off-plumb radiator. Brain cells, much like friends and opportunities, are a finite allotment, and I’ve officially burned through my quota and then some.

  No way Jenna’s taking me back. Not after this. No one stays after this. Not with the boy to consider.

  ***

  Jenna and I met in the middle of a balmy August meadow when she was part of a college astronomy club on a field-trip to watch the Perseid meteor showers.

  Wasn’t there for the meteors myself. Was too bottom-heavy with blood and booze for that, lugging around eyes too disinclined to climb higher than whatever fetching chest they found purchase on, to say nothing of the sky.

  She stood on a tiny mound of crabgrass when I first saw her, eyes poring over the sky as if it were a Dear-John letter penned by some philandering god. Drawn in by her serious air—as much for how she filled out a pair of jeans—I was ill-prepared for how tough a score she would prove to be.

  “Any more room on that bump?” had been my primed opener upon sidling over.

  Like I said, bottom-heavy.

  She about-faced fully to take in her meddler, chewing on the end of a pen as if to stifle the draw of a bone saw, laying on me her driest appraisal before resuming her previous peacocked stance.

  Had no counter for this audacity, nor for her abrupt shifts in attitude, as when I started to walk away, convinced that I’d struck out, only to have her hop down, snag my hand, and jot her name and number on it. She had hard, kinetic fingers, as if from a lifetime of wringing and fist-making, and when I delved into her deep blues, I lost myself in the eclipse that pulled across her face, and I wondered if she was either high or possessed, neither of which, admittedly, was much of a deterrent.

  Nor were the hints of ink peeking out from the base of her shoulder blades. I’d known my share of ladies with tattoos, but she didn’t give off any of their highfalutin, beatnik vibes. If anything, I got a hit of Victorian prim-and-proper from the tight bun spilling their Medusa curls, along with the antique moon pendant around her neck, big as a silver dollar that something extinct had taken a bite out of.

  “Call me within twenty-four hours, or forget about me,” she said, before turning on a heel to retake her mound.

  And I should’ve forgotten about her right then and there, as she suggested, but it was never my way to leave something unexplored on account of rough terrain.

  ***

  My hands got me doubled-over by the minute, as if being squeezed under steam rollers driven by the widows of preachers and gamblers.

  If the gutter’s runoff didn’t flow directly from the carwash down the street, I’d dip them into the cold sluice to numb them. But these gashes run deep. The nicotine wash of bone blinks through the petaled ticking of fat and muscle in far too many places. A truly sobering thing to see your naked inner workings displayed in such pulsing color. Human eyes aren’t meant to see their own bones, any more than they’re meant to see the face of God, or the graves of their babies.

  ***

  Damn near waited till the eleventh hour the next night to call Jenna, and the first words out of her mouth were, “What’s your biggest dream? Even if it may never come true?”

  Going right for the jugular. But I gotta admit, I liked it. Spared me the anguish of ice-breaking, at least.

  “You’ll laugh,” I said.

  “I’m not an easy laugh. But feel free to try.”

  “Alright. Guess at some point I was wanting to be a chef.”

  Took her a while to respond. The whole time her finger tapped a Johnny Cash tempo on the side of the phone.

  “I don’t see anything funny there. That’s sweet actually.”

  “You’d be in the minority then. Ask my father who worked cement his whole life. Ask my brother who’s a banker in San Francisco. Okay, your turn.”

  “I’m scared to tell you.”

  “Why? ‘Cause you’re worried I’ll laugh?”

  “‘Cause I worry you won’t.”

  “Try me.”

  Could’ve listened to the slow-drawn cello of her breathing all night.

  “If you ask me out, I’ll tell you then.”

  As a caveat to all further discussion, she insisted on divulging one important fact: she was the daughter of Lee Allister Malone. Lee ran the biker bar out on Highway 64. Korean War vet and all-around top alpha dog, Lee was the town’s official, off-the-record trustee. Even the cops would retain his services now and again when discretion and a little extra muscle was required.

  Jenna left out all the dirty business with the police, but there wasn’t a soul in town who wasn’t already privy to it.

  ***

  I’ve read reports of wolves and coyotes chewing off their own paws to escape a trap rather than starve to death. Even read a case of a raccoon doing it. Looking at the roaring mess that are my meat-hooks, it’s all that comes to mind at the moment. Except how could I ever do that? I don’t wonder this out of fear or pain, or because I’ve lost the requisite teeth to do it, but because I experience the world through my hands. They’re my bug’s antenna. My snake’s tongue. My expression. As much as they’ve let me down, they’ve provided me the few joys I have. My heart, for better or worse, lives through my hands.

  ***

  For our first date, I set up a picnic at the edge of a velvet-black pond that went by about eight different names—a spot where, in the spring of ’69, Trisha Eccleston welcomed me into manhood with deep, throaty guffaws and a cheap citrus perfume that burned in my eyes and nose like horseradish.

  “What draws you to damaged goods?” Jenna asked. Another pointblank inquiry as I spread the blanket over sodden earth. “Are you striving for some Christian ideal, or just a garden-variety masochist like all the others?”

  Wasn’t sure how to reply, so I reddened and shrugged before claiming my corner of the quilt. To my surprise, she plopped down right next to me, and that was fine. Took her a while to squeeze my hand back, though it was she who’d taken mine first. We spoke little while gobbling gas station hotdogs and pink Snoballs amidst a pollen-drift of fireflies. Occasionally we’d snicker over sandpipers jousting against the pink down of the horizon, but mostly we just ate.

  At one point I noticed several stray coconut flecks on the corner of her mouth, though when I reached up to dab off the pink with a napkin, she shoved away my hand.

  “I wipe my own dribbles and spills,” she said.

  There was no censure in it. Only a matter-of-fact statement. Still, my hands suffered the sting of shame, and it took a heron screeching its hungry roo-roo into the night to umpire me back into the sweet stasis of just before.

  Eventually my eyes crept over to the peculiar scrawlings on her left shoulder blade I’d first caught sight of when we met, and which I’d noticed again earlier whenever she’d turn to the basket. Definitely a tattoo, though a botched one. Someone had tried to redress a flower from something of a misshapen star.

  When she caught me looking, she stiffened, yet kept her eyes hooked to mine. I could tell it took every ounce of courage to prevent their flight from her skull.

  “Blunder from my youth,” she said, and the bashful smile that ensued was something I knew I would never tire of. She went on to say how much she admired starfish for their ability to self-replicate—that she used to think herself resilient like that, but as she got to understanding the order of things, she found she better related to flowers.

  “It’s okay to die in the fall,” she said, “if it means returning again stronger in the spring.”

  My confusion must’ve flared white-hot, for she smiled more assuredly and dabbed a finger on my nose.

  “Wanted to be an astronomer,” she said. “My dream. Mama bought me a telescope when I was eight and set it up in our attic. Father . . . he wasn’t too keen on me wasting my time daydreaming about outer space. Rag
ged me about it every chance he could, pissing off Mama something awful each time. Then one day, not a month after Mama passed . . . I suppose to make up for things . . . he painted the attic black before gluing a bunch of green and blue phosphorescent stars to the walls and ceiling. Only they looked more like starfish than anything up in the sky.”

  Her mouth pressed into a hard straight line, and I felt compelled to say something lest her entire face siphoned into her throat.

  “You can still do it though, you know?” I offered.

  She managed to shrug, nod, and shake her head all at once, her moon pendant an extension of her apprehensions as it blasted and swallowed light.

  “It’s fine as the occasional outdoor hobby, but it’s too much focus in confined, solitary spaces for this girl. I am staying in the sciences though. Studying nursing at the college. Trying to anyway.”

  She shivered hard and sudden. Couldn’t say if it was just the cooling air that did it, but I shimmied towards her anyway, and she eventually listed her head against my shoulder and sighed quietly. Huddled in this sweet melancholy, red tendrils snaking down my chest and back, I tried to rest my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

  Sensing my confusion, she took both my hands into hers, cupping them as if to keep a kitten warm. “You should know: I come with my share of complications, and I think that maybe you’ve got complications, and maybe it’d be better if we left well enough alone.”

  And that bashful smile again, coy and knowing, aware that I knew she’d pinched that line almost verbatim from The Hustler.

  “Sometimes,” she added, “I can’t help wondering if self-interning might help straighten out the complications.”

  She laughed it off after a pause, and I followed suit because it was ill-mannered to leave her hanging during such a naked outpouring, and it was a game we’d continue to play on each subsequent date whenever she’d bring up the casual threat. But the day she actually, finally left, the reality was still a roundhouse to my throat. This was Jenna’s power. Her unique and unnerving inexorability.