The cops call. He’s skipped a work detail. The man said he wasn’t coming here but just to be on the safe side. Karen cried, little muffled gasps from the bedroom down the hall. She cries into her pillow. She doesn‘t want to worry me. I thanked the cop and hung up. I pad down the hall and say quietly out loud ‘He’s coming here.’
I hold Karen. She wipes her nose on my bathrobe. I sing mockingbird to her softly, she feels the vibrations against her cheek ‘… and if that mockingbird don’t sing, papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring …’ She grows heavy and damp in my arms and I set her back on her pillow.
He gave me a diamond ring, the day he proposed, down on one knee at the Sizzler. It was just a chip in a 14k gold plated band. I cried anyhow. The people at Sizzlers cried. I remember the cheeks of a pudgy little boy, chewing, clapping, his fat mother’s arms around him clapping in front of him, catching crumbs from the roll that spilled from his lips. All this useless beauty, I thought, for me.
I loved him. I loved him in the back seat of his Chevelle, I loved him at the Sinclair Station, I loved him in my uncle’s barn, I loved him in our marital bed the night Karen decided she might as well start getting born.
I loved him right up until I found the dead things. No. I loved him a bit longer. There was a sub-basement in the fourplex, a leftover from the Eisenhower years, the low rent version of a bomb shelter. I don’t even remember what I was looking for, it seemed important at the time. The box had our address on it. Dead things. Not the freshly dead, gods design for purification, the blood and flesh returning to dirt.
No.
Grotesque dead things. Pieces of dead things, cut to fit, dried, made grotesque by preservation, thwarting the process of death. Dead thing Jerky. I loved him through the cat paws, the vole hindquarters, dog muzzles. I loved him right up until the first human hand, brown and stiff like a leather mitt. The cops said there were at least ten people. The FBI said twelve and gave them names.
By the time Karen first kicked I no longer loved him. By the time Karen first kicked he’d been tried and moved from county to Federal. By the Time Karen first kicked I had left Kentucky, changed my name and moved to Huntington. She is sleeping now, I listen at the door; she is sleeping now. I take off my slippers to hide the muffled padding. I kneel at my bed as if to pray careful not to drag the lock box but to lift it to the throw rug. The top layer is bonds for Karen’s college, the next photographs, the third are certificates and passports. At the bottom is the colt my Daddy gave me before I left Kentucky.
He said it was heavy for a girl, but I wasn’t just a girl, I was his girl, and it fired true for his grandpaw, his daddy and for him. He told me better a dead thing in the open than in a box.
He’s coming. He’s coming now. Karen wakes with night terrors and doesn’t even know why. I don’t want her too ever have cause. Me, I don’t sleep at all. I check the revolving chamber. Six rounds. That’s how I love him now; with six live rounds, the memory of a box of dead things, and a little girl who sometimes sleeps and sometimes wakes crying into her pillow.
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