Haunted

  God bless him.

  All of this, the Matchmaker's secret plan to give his girlfriend

  a premature, accelerated broken heart. Then catch her on the rebound.

  His last meeting with Steed, he paid an extra fifty bucks for a blow job.

  Steed kneeling there, at work between his knees.

  This way, when his future wife had her well-researched, multiple orgasms,

  the man in her head would not be a total stranger to her husband,

  the Matchmaker.

  Ritual

  A Story by the Matchmaker

  There's a joke the uncles only tell when they're drunk.

  Half the joke is the noise they make. It's the sound of someone hawking up spit from the back of his throat. A long, rasping sound. After every family event, when there's nothing left to do except drink, the uncles will take their chairs out under the trees. Out where we can't see them in the dark.

  While the aunts wash dishes, and the cousins run wild, the uncles are out back in the orchard, tipping bottles back, leaning back on the two rear legs of their chairs. In the dark, you can hear one uncle make the sound: Shooo-rook. Even in the dark, you know he's pulled one hand sideways through the air in front of him. Shooo-rook, and the rest of the uncles laugh.

  The aunts hear the sound and it makes them smile and shake their heads: Men. The aunts don't know the joke, but they know anything that makes men laugh so hard must be stupid.

  The cousins don't know the joke, but they make the sound. Shooo-rook. They pull a hand through the air, sideways, and fall down laughing. Their whole childhood, all the kids did it. Said: Shooo-rook. Screamed it. The family's magic formula to make each other laugh.

  The uncles would lean down to teach them. Even as little kids, barely on two legs, they'd mimic the sound. Shooo-rook. And the uncles would show how to pull one hand sideways, always from left to right, in front of your neck.

  They'd ask—the cousins, hanging off the arm of an uncle, kicking their feet in the air—they'd ask, what did the sound mean? And the hand motion?

  It was an old, old story an uncle might tell them. The sound was from when the uncles were all young men in the army. During the war. The cousins would climb the pockets of an uncle's coat, a foot hooked in one pocket, a hand reaching for the next pocket higher up. The way you'd climb trees.

  And they'd beg: Tell us. Tell us the story.

  But all an uncle would do is promise: Later. When they were grown up. The uncle would catch you under the arms and throw you over his shoulder. He'd carry a cousin that way, running, racing the other uncles into the house, to kiss the aunts and eat another slice of pie. You'd pop popcorn and listen to the radio.

  It was the family password. A secret most of them didn't understand. A ritual to keep them safe. All the cousins knew was, it made them laugh together. This was something only they knew.

  The uncles said the sound was proof that your worst fears might just disappear. No matter how terrible something looked, it might not be around tomorrow. If a cow died, and the other cattle looked sick, swelling with bloat and about to die, if nothing could be done, the uncles made the sound. Shooo-rook. If the peaches were setting in the orchard and a frost was predicted that night, the uncles said it. Shooo-rook. It meant the terror you were helpless to stop, it might just stop itself.

  Every time the family got together, it was their greeting: Shooo-rook. It made the aunts cross-eyed, all these cousins making that silly sound. Shooo-rook. All the cousins waving one hand through the air. Shooo-rook. The uncles laughing so hard they stood leaning forward with one hand braced on each knee. Shooo-rook.

  An aunt, someone married into the family, she might ask: What did it mean? What was the story behind it? But the uncles would shake their heads. The one uncle, her own husband, would slip his arm around her waist and kiss her cheek and tell her, honey bunch, she didn't want to know.

  The summer I turned eighteen, an uncle said it to me, alone. And that time, he didn't laugh.

  I'd been drafted to serve in the army, and no one could know if I'd ever come back.

  There wasn't a war, but there was cholera in the army. There was always disease and accidents. They were packing a bag for me to take, just me and the uncle, and my uncle said it: Shooo-rook. Just remember, he said, no matter how black the future looks, all your troubles could be disappeared tomorrow.

  Packing that bag, I asked him. What did it mean?

  It was from the last big war, he said. When the uncles were all in the same regiment. They were captured and forced to work in a camp. There, an officer from the other army would force them to work at gunpoint. Every day, they expected this man to kill them, and there was nothing they could do. Every week, trains would arrive filled with prisoners from occupied countries: soldiers and Gypsies. Most of them went from the train, two hundred steps to die. The uncles hauled away their bodies. The officer they hated, he led the firing squad.

  The uncle telling this story, he said every day the uncles stepped forward to drag the dead people way—the holes in their clothes still leaking warm blood—the firing squad would be waiting for the next batch of prisoners to execute. Every time the uncles stepped in front of those guns, they expected the officer to open fire.

  Then, one day, the uncle says: Shooo-rook.

  It happened, the way Fate happens.

  The officer, if he saw a Gypsy woman he liked, he'd take her out of line. After that batch was dead, while the uncles hauled away the bodies, the officer would make this woman undress. Standing there in his uniform, crawling with gold braid in the bright sun, surrounded by guns, the officer made the Gypsy woman kneel in the dirt and open his zipper. He made her open her mouth.

  The uncles, they'd seen this happen too many times to remember. The Gypsy would bury her lips in the front of the officer's pants. Her eyes closed, she'd suck and suck and not see him take a knife from the back of his belt.

  The moment the officer came to orgasm he'd grab the Gypsy by her hair, holding her head tight with one hand. His other hand would cut her throat.

  It was always the same sound: Shooo-rook. His seed still erupting, he'd push her naked body away before the blood could explode from her neck.

  It was a sound that would always mean the end. Fate. A sound they'd never be able to escape. To forget.

  Until, one day, the officer took a Gypsy and had her kneel naked in the dirt. With the firing squad watching, the uncles watching with their feet buried in the layer of dead bodies, the officer made the Gypsy open his zipper. The woman closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

  This was something the uncles had witnessed so often they could watch without seeing it.

  The officer gripped the Gypsy's long hair, wrapped it in his fist. The knife flashed, and there was the sound. That sound. Now the family's secret code for laughter. Their greeting to each other. The Gypsy fell back, blood exploding from under her chin. She coughed once, and something landed in the dirt next to where she died.

  They all looked, the firing squad and the uncles and the officer, and there in the dirt was half a cock. Shooo-rook, and the officer had cut off his own erection stuck down the throat of this dead woman. The zipper in the officer's pants was still erupting with his seed, exploding with blood. The officer reached one hand to where his cock lay coated with dirt. His knees buckled.

  Then the uncles were dragging away his body to bury it. The next officer in charge of the camp, he wasn't so bad. Then the war was over, and the uncles came home. Without what happened, their family might not be. If that officer had lived, I might not exist.

  That sound, their secret family code, the uncle told me. The sound means: Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things—they save you.

  Outside the window, in the peach trees back of their house, the other cousins run. The aunts sit on the front porch, shelling peas. The uncles stand, their arms folded, arguing about the best way to paint a fence.

  You might go to war, the u
ncle says. Or you might get cholera and die. Or, he says, and moves one hand sideways, left to right, in the air below his belt buckle: Shooo-rook . . .

  12

  It's Sister Vigilante who finds the body. She's coming down the lobby stairs, from the first-balcony foyer, from turning on the lights in the projection booth, when she stumbles over Miss America's pink exercise wheel gripped between two dead-white hands.

  There, in the video camera's little viewing screen, the Duke of Vandals's stretched out at the foot of the lobby stairs, his fringed buckskin shirttails hanging out, his blond hair fanned out, facedown on the blue carpet. The pink plastic wheel is between his hands. One side of his face is stomped flat, the hair pasted down in every direction with blood.

  The royalties to our story split one less way.

  Sister Vigilante, she had the video camera. Getting around in the dark, Mr. Whittier had used a flashlight, but now the old batteries were as dead as him and Lady Baglady. Now Sister Vigilante used the camera spotlight, with its rechargeable batteries, to find her way up and down the stairs before dawn, and after dark.

  “Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” Sister Vigilante says, her words recorded as she pans the camera over the body. “With partial avulsion of the left cerebellar hemisphere.” Saying, It's the most common sequela of massive head trauma. She zooms in for a close-up of the compound skull fracture, the bleeding inside the outer layers of the brain.

  “As you press the skull in one spot,” she says, “the contents swell around that location and burst the skull in a rough circle.”

  The camera roving over the sharp edges and dried red on the skull, Sister Vigilante's voice says, “The outbending is extensive . . .”

  The camera comes up to show the rest of us, staggering into the lobby, yawning and squinting into the spotlight.

  Mrs. Clark looks down at the sprawled buckskin body of the Duke, his cud of nicotine gum—plus all his teeth—knocked halfway across the lobby floor. And her inflated lips squeak out a little scream.

  Miss America says, “The bastard.” She steps over to the body and kneels to pry the stiff, dead fingers off the black rubber grips of the exercise wheel. “He was trying to lose more weight than the rest of us,” she says. “The evil shit was doing aerobics to look . . . worse.”

  As Miss America wrestles and kicks at the stiff fingers, Mrs. Clark says, “Rigor mortis.”

  As Miss America pulls the body to one side, twisting the wheel to free it from the hands, as she pulls, the body turns faceup. The Duke of Vandals, his face is dark as a sunburn, but purple except for the tip of his nose. The tips of his chin and nose and the flat of his forehead are all blue-white.

  “Livor mortis,” Mrs. Clark says. The blood settles to the lowest points of the body. Except where the face pressed into the carpet: at those points the weight of the body kept the capillaries collapsed, so no blood could pool inside.

  From behind the video camera, Sister Vigilante says, “You sure seem to know a lot about dead bodies . . .”

  And Mrs. Clark says, “Just what did you mean by partial avulsion of the left cerebellar hemisphere?”

  The video camera still panning the body, taping over the death of Mr. Whittier, the voice of Sister Vigilante says, “That means the brains are leaking out.”

  The pink wheel slips free from the Duke's hands, and the fingers seem to relax. Rigor mortis only goes away, Mrs. Clark says, as the body starts to decompose.

  By now, Agent Tattletale has arrived, looking strange with both his eyes showing. Reverend Godless stands over the body. Mother Nature with her patchouli smell. The Matchmaker, his back teeth chewing around and round on a cheekful of spit and tobacco, he leans over for a better look.

  The Matchmaker says, “Decomposition?”

  And Mrs. Clark nods, frowning her silicone lips. After death, she says, the actin and myosin filaments of the muscles become complexed from the lack of adenosine-triphosphate production . . . She says, “You wouldn't understand.”

  “Too bad,” Chef Assassin says. “If he wasn't so far gone, we might've had a big breakfast.”

  Mother Nature says, “You're kidding.”

  And the chef says, “No. Actually, I'm not.”

  The Matchmaker is pop-eyed, squatting next to the body, digging in the back pants pocket.

  Rubbing her hennaed hands together and yawning, Mother Nature says, “How can you be so awake?”

  And, opening his mouth, wide, pointing a finger at the brown mess inside, the Matchmaker says, “Chaw . . .” He pulls out the wallet, slips out the paper money, and tucks the wallet back into the pocket, saying, “Kiss me, and you'll perk up, too.”

  And, shaking her head, Mother Nature says, “No. Thanks.”

  “Little girl,” the Matchmaker says. He spits a brown stream on the blue carpet, and he says, “you need to be a little sexier character, or no bankable actress is going to want to play you . . .”

  And Saint Gut-Free pulls her away.

  Sister Vigilante shuts off the camera and hands it back to Agent Tattletale.

  To nobody. Or to everybody, Mrs. Clark says, “Who do you suspect?”

  And Agent Tattletale says, “You.”

  Mrs. Clark. She got up late last night. She found the Duke of Vandals alone, doing this stomach exercise. She crushed his skull. End of official story.

  “You ever wonder,” Mrs. Clark says, “what you'll do after you sell your old life?”

  And the Matchmaker licks the spit off his lips, saying, “What do you mean?” He hooks both thumbs behind the straps of his bib overalls.

  “After you've sold this story,” Mrs. Clark says, “will you just look for a new villain?” She says, “For the rest of your life, will you be looking for someone new to blame everything on?”

  And Agent Tattletale smiles, saying, “Relax. There's no point blaming one of us for this. There are victims,” he says, pointing a finger at his chest. “And there are villains,” he says, pointing a finger at her. “Don't create shades of gray that a mass audience can't follow.”

  And Mrs. Clark says, “I did not kill this young man.”

  And the Agent shrugs. He shoulders his camera, saying, “You want audience sympathy at this point, you're going to have to campaign for it.” His spotlight flickers bright, spotlighting her, and Agent Tattletale says, “Tell us one thing. Give us one good flashback to make the folks at home feel just a teeny bit sorry for you . . .”

  The Nightmare Box

  A Story by Mrs. Clark

  The night before she disappeared, Cassandra cut off her eyelashes.

  Easy as homework, Cassandra Clark takes a little pair of scissors out of her purse, little chrome fingernail-scissors, she leans into the big mirror above the bathroom sink and looks at herself. Her eyes half closed, and her mouth hanging open the way she puts on mascara, Cassandra braces one hand against the bathroom counter and uses the scissors to snip. Each long black lash falling, settling, fluttering down the sink drain, she doesn't even look at her mother reflected there, standing behind her in the mirror.

  That night, Mrs. Clark hears her slip out of bed while it's still dark. In the one hour when there's no traffic in the street, she goes naked to the living room with all the lights off. There's the rumble of springs inside the old sofa. There's the rasp and—click—of a cigarette lighter. Then a sigh. A whiff of cigarette smoke.

  After the sun's up, Cassandra's still there, sitting naked on the sofa with the curtains open and cars going past. All her arms and legs bunched tight around her in the cold air. In one hand, she's got the cigarette, burned down to the filter. Ashes on the sofa cushion beside her. She's awake and looking at the blank television screen. Maybe looking at herself reflected there, naked in the black glass. Her hair looks lumpy with tangles from not combing. Her lipstick from two days ago, it's still smeared across her cheek. Her eye shadow outlines the wrinkles around each eye. Her eyelashes gone, her green eyes looking dull and fake because you never see her blink.

&nbsp
; Her mother says, “Did you dream about it?”

  Mrs. Clark asks: does she want French toast? Mrs. Clark turns on the wall heater and gets Cassandra's robe off the back of the bathroom door.

  Cassandra hugging herself in the cold sunshine, sitting knees-together, her breasts are pushed up by her arms. Flakes of gray cigarette ash are scattered on the top of each thigh. Flakes of gray ash settle into her pubic hair. Her feet twitch with tendons under the skin. Her feet flat and side by side on the polished wood floor, they're the only part of her not statue-still.

  Mrs. Clark says, “Did you remember something?” Her mother says, “You had on your new black dress . . .” She says, “The short-short one.”

  Mrs. Clark goes to put the bathrobe around her daughter, tucking it up tight around her neck. She says, “It happened in that gallery. Across from the antique store.”

  Cassandra doesn't look away from her own dark reflection in the off television. She doesn't blink, and the bathrobe slips down, putting both her breasts back out in the cold.

  And her mother says, what did she see?

  “I don't know,” Cassandra says. She says, “I can't say.”

  “Let me get my notes,” Mrs. Clark tells her. She says, “I think I have this figured out.”

  It's when she comes back from the bedroom, her thick brown folder of notes in one hand, the folder open so she can pick through it with her other hand, when she looks around the living room, Cassandra's gone.

  At that moment, Mrs. Clark's saying, “The way the Nightmare Box works is, the front . . .”

  But Cassandra's not in the kitchen or the bathroom. Cassandra's not in the basement. That's their whole house. She's not out in the backyard or on the stairs. Her bathrobe is still on the sofa. Her purse and shoes and coat, none of them are gone. Her suitcase is still on her bed, half packed. Only Cassandra's gone.

  At first, Cassandra said it was nothing. According to the notes, it was an art-gallery opening.

  There in Mrs. Clark's notes, it says, “Random Interval Timer . . .”