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| Sweat Equity by S.P. Miskowski (Issue 9) |
Beverly Dempsey told a lie. Now she was paying for it in a form her late husband Rex would have called "sweat equity." She had pulled every piece of furniture in the house away from its usual spot, to run a vacuum cleaner over the linoleum and carpet. She had dusted the drapes, valances and blinds. She had wiped down the counters and walls, dozens of knick-knacks, even the poker and shovel hanging by the fireplace--ordinarily her least favorite task; she disliked the metallic click and grate of the tools when they struck one another.
She washed all of the windows in the house, even the glass and aluminum screen door. That was another nasty job. In fact, she couldn't recall the last time she'd wiped down the screen door. It was a chore that she avoided with a wide range of excuses. But the cold, gritty water she squeezed from the sponge into the sink after the awful task was done--that gave her a click of satisfaction. Here was real, visible scum removed from her house and washed down the drain.
Late in the afternoon, she paused to admire how much she was accomplishing. The moment she sat down, she felt a wave of irritation as distinct as nausea. She had to keep moving. She plumped the sofa cushions, forcing her imagination back to the goal: A sparkling house. That was the best she could do. Everything else was beyond her control, now.
Did the living room need a bright color scheme, instead of alternating Beige and Olive Drab? Now that she thought about it, she also questioned Turquoise in a bedroom with one window near the ceiling, over a mahogany headboard. The house was too small and confining for the color combinations Beverly had fallen in love with at the paint store, last year.
The bungalow was L-shaped, cradled on two sides by the woods. A kitchen window faced the yard and a curving, single-lane road known to its residents as Connie Sara Vue. The living room window faced only the yard with its tulip beds, Japanese maple and wooden geese. A half-mile on, the road snaked, straightened and then split in two directions. But this wasn't visible from Beverly's house, where cedar and hemlock grew in abundance and the road was dark as midnight on winter afternoons. At least seven months out of the year a gray dome of clouds mimicked the sky. Even now, in the spring, drizzle fell on the valley more than half the week.
Several times since Rex died Beverly had considered a move south to Oregon, or even California. She had never been to California. Rex had disapproved of the state on principle, and since he'd been gone Beverly had never traveled alone. Her sense of California came from TV and magazines, but she realized the place couldn't be as glamorous as it seemed.
The house that had once felt snug now threatened to smother its only occupant. The place needed more work, to open it out, maybe a bay window or a skylight. She wanted to take the advice of a sales clerk who recommended a combination of Canary, Bright White, and Bamboo. That would be a real project, though. It would take time. She would have to hire some of her husband's illiterate cousins to come over and help.
On second thought, it wasn't worth it. It really wasn't. It would cost too much. And the memory of Rodney and Darrell Dempsey traipsing around all day in their scratched-up work boots and overalls gave her a chill.
Beverly lied about her reason for skipping the memorial; she wasn't sick. Now, instead of relaxing in front of the TV as she had planned, she was cleaning her house top-to-bottom on a Saturday. Sweat equity.
Rex would have laughed:
"I swear, Bev! The twenty-five things you'll do, just to get out of the five things you don't want to do!"
Deep-voiced, a broad-shouldered man with backbone, not like the shiftless Dempsey cousins, Rex had been dead nearly three years. Would he have laughed at her, for avoiding a simple memorial service? Or would he have told her to go, for the sake of her old friends Ethel and Marietta? What would he say if he knew the real reason she didn't want to face Ethel today?
It didn't matter. Beverly couldn't risk it. In the sickly-sweet damp of Henry Colquitt's homemade chapel--which was nothing but a white trailer with Astroturf all around it--and the scaled-down white coffin festooned with silver crucifixes and pink silk ribbons--one of her friends might have detected a smile teasing the corners of her lips. Anything might set her off--the rose-scented candles, the white shag carpet, or the blond wood benches from IKEA--and then she wouldn't be able to stop. She might laugh out loud. And everyone would know she felt more than relief. She was giddy with a pure, awful kind of joy.
Her face flushed at the idea. Despicable. Terrible. Laughing at the demise of a child. She made up her mind to shut it out, but there it was, again. She stood in the living room and laughed for a minute, to clear her head. When she looked out the window she caught herself expecting to see Connie Sara on the lawn, dancing around, up to no good. She was so used to it, she had to remind herself the girl would never do that again.
Beverly slapped a stubborn cushion into place on the Olive Drab recliner.
No one else would say so, but surely most of her friends and neighbors on Connie Sara Vue felt the same way. The people who lived along this road were quiet cowards. They had never dared to cross the girl, no matter what she did, or what they suspected she had done. They called it minding their own business. Well, the girl hadn't torn up their yard or left dead things on their doorstep. Or maybe she had, and they were just afraid to say so.
Beverly had crossed the girl. Beverly and Marietta, of all the people who knew Connie Sara, understood what had to be done. That was all. They had done what was necessary.
Anyway, really, Marietta was the one who came up with the idea of sabotaging the girl, rigging one of her tricks, to "let it come back on her." Marietta didn't hate the girl, the way Beverly did, but she was the first to say the girl was bad. Something was wrong with her. She wasn't sick. She didn't deserve pity. Someone had to stop her. Marietta swore there was something inside Connie Sara that was evil. That was how it started.
So it was Marietta's idea, if it came down to that and anyone needed to know: Marietta had set things in motion. Beverly was happy to help, but it all came about because of Marietta, who somehow had the nerve to go to the memorial, straight-faced, nothing but an old friend to the dumbstruck parents, Burt and Ethel. It seemed heartless, although if both women had deserted Ethel in her moment of grief, suspicions would have been aroused.
All the sheriff would have to do is take a careful look at the accident: the oak tree where Connie Sara liked to challenge her little playmates to hang upside down by a rope tied to one ankle, and try to right themselves. Of course, the way the girl set it up, no one could accomplish this. They ended up stuck there, push and prodded like a piñata until Connie Sara got tired of the game and let them down. Crying hysterically and ashamed to say they had broken their parents' rules and let the Sanders girl talk them into something stupid.
Rigging the rope Connie Sara kept on a hook on the tree trunk was easy, and luckily the girl was a creature of habit. She always gave a little demonstration first, allowing herself less rope slack than her victim would have. Seeing her right herself and pull the rope from her ankle on the first try gave the victim courage. That was the key. Distressing the rope with a penknife made all the difference. When Marietta had described this to Beverly, it seemed like a clean way to go. But it wasn't clean. The girl was mangled and disfigured, and she lingered for days in a coma.
The whole business was a mess. It shouldn't have happened in the first place.
More than anything, Beverly wished Rex were here. He would have stopped all the nonsense before it got going. If he'd caught the girl pulling up the tulip bed, he wouldn't have gone to see Ethel about it. He wouldn't put up with all the other stuff the girl did, and he wouldn't rig a trap and then lie about it. No sir. Right on the spot, that first time, he would've taken off his belt and done what the girl's father ought to have done. Then maybe all of it would have turned out better. One good hiding might have knocked out of her whatever was bad, before it got worse. Then there wouldn't be anyone to blame for anything.
Ethel and Burt were under a spell ever since their only child was born and they took her home. Ethel knew there was something wrong, but she wouldn't talk about it. She and Burt tried to pretend the girl was special and smart, but they spent less time with friends and neighbors as the years passed. At home, just the three of them, Beverly reasoned, they might be able to act like a family. But everyone who ever visited the Sanders house knew the place was strange.
By now Rex would have pulled down all those tacky, hand-painted signs--Burt's drunken handiwork claiming the road, naming it for Connie Sara like a birthright. But Rex was long gone and now Ethel's only child, Connie Sara, was dead.
Beverly had heard the gossip and jokes: people wanted to get a look, to make sure the girl was really gone. Wouldn't they be surprised when they found out the casket was closed? Well, they were mostly superstitious hicks living up in the woods, pitiful kids and their beat-up young wives, out of work and living off their families. They wouldn't know what to expect at a formal gathering. But the casket would be closed. She was sure of that.
She finished wiping down the living room lamps. For a minute she stood still, breathing hard. Beads of perspiration trickled between her breasts. The white cotton blouse and black knit pants clung to her skin. She itched all over.
Outside the living room window the first drops of a downpour plopped onto a row of premature tulips, forcing their stems flat in the cool air. It had rained hard that afternoon then let up completely. Now a second storm was rolling in.
Beverly arched her back and listened to the plunk-plunk on the roof. She thought she heard raindrops hitting the back door, too. But there wasn't enough of a breeze yet, for that. She fanned herself by flapping the front of her blouse.
At the end of the short hallway, past the Turquoise bedroom on her left and a shapeless laundry nook full of odds and ends on her right, she studied the back door. No need to clean that. The wood paneling was in decent shape. A spyglass at eye-level afforded a narrow view of the back yard, with its dogwood and cherry trees, straight on into the woods.
Beverly was gazing through the spyglass, when she heard tapping at the front door. She smoothed her blouse and went to the living room, expecting to find the rain-soaked Pastor Colquitt on her doorstep with a morbid replay of the day's memorial and a plea to attend his regular Sunday service. Such impromptu visits made Marietta's son Henry unpopular around town, especially among his neighbors on Connie Sara Vue.
Beverly looked out the glass and aluminum screen door. No one was there.
Now she heard someone tapping at the back of the house. Tapping--louder than the plunk-plunk of raindrops. Knocking. Someone was clearly knocking on the back door. That damn girl, she thought, and remembered that the damn girl was dead and gone.
Beverly returned to the spyglass. With her fingers splayed against the door, she leaned carefully forward. No sooner had her eye focused on the yard than she heard knocking at the front door again! It was ridiculous!
The rain was starting to come down like mad. In this torrent, anyone dashing from one end of the house to the other, outside, would fall down; but there was no sign of anyone, no matter how fast Beverly charged from door to door. They had to be kids, playing pranks--probably more of the Dempsey boys, some of the pathetic cousins from those little trailers up in the woods. They drank whiskey, all of them, and they played cards late into the night sometimes. She would look up into the woods and see the amber lights of kerosene lamps, because most of them didn't have electricity. There were five or six trailers and vans parked on one piece of land. The grownups kept pretty quiet except during hunting season, but the kids were bored. The kids got into trouble. Not like Connie Sara, just the usual kind of trouble--caught stealing cigarettes at Misty Mart. Dumb stuff.
Beverly took a detour into the kitchen. She opened the cabinet under the sink and grabbed the first thing handy--a can of foaming cleanser. That would give them a surprise! She shook the can hard and strode toward the front door, where she froze. The stimulated contents of the can crept out the nozzle like drool, and ran down onto the carpet. She dropped the can.
On the opposite side of the screen door someone was watching her intently, facing the door, so close to the glass that Beverly couldn't make out any features, only the outline of a head, shoulders, and arms.
"Hello?" She said.
The person didn't answer or move.
Beverly thought: Halloween pranks in the spring! Stupid kids!
But she didn't laugh.
"Is that Darrell Dempsey?" She asked.
"Rodney?" She said. "You better answer me."
Not a sound.
She tried to move, to shut the front door. But she couldn't make herself go forward. She wanted to, but she couldn't force herself.
Whoever it was grabbed the screen handle, and shook it hard. The door made a tin, shuddering noise. She thought it was coming off the hinges.
Beverly stayed frozen. As suddenly as the shaking had begun, it stopped. The figure outside let go of the handle, drew back and spat a wad of phlegm at the glass. The mess stuck and dripped down leaving a slug trail.
Startled by the smacking, fluid sound, Beverly slammed the front door over the aluminum screen and slid the deadbolt into place. Immediately she heard knocking at the back of the house again.
She crept to the back door. The breath felt sharp in her chest. She flicked through a mental inventory of latches, bolts and locks. She knew that all the window shutters were open but there was no way to secure them without going outside--and she was not going outside, not for anything. All her nerve had buckled when she heard that metallic rattle of the screen door. She finally noticed the telephone on the kitchen wall, and dialed a number before she realized there was no tone. The line was dead.
The knocking was gone. The rain was gone, too. Not like the storm had subsided, but like the sound of the world outside had been muffled or quilted over. As if the clouds overhead had hunkered down until they covered only the house. Nothing spoke or moved.
Beverly's heart beat hard, and she swallowed dryly. She was listening with her whole body, stiff, aching.
Faintly, she heard another sound: Scratching or scraping. Tree limbs, or maybe twigs, across the side of the house.
She pushed open the bedroom door and looked in. Outside the narrow window near the ceiling, the only thing visible was a cluster of dark clouds. Rivulets of water coursed the glass.
Maybe it was over. Hope flickered inside her ribs and it hurt, like something broken trying to fly.
She heard the scraping again. This time it seemed softer, more muffled. She crept to the living room and looked at the door--the ceiling--the window. Not quite.
She turned toward the fireplace. And while she stared at the dry, cold center of brickwork, a thin stream of soot fell gently down, followed by another. With a scratching and grunting noise, something heaved its way down through the chimney, forcing out another quick stream of soot.
Beverly couldn't close the flue without reaching her arm up inside the chimney. She upended the coffee table and pushed it against the fireplace. She grabbed cushions and heaved them against the coffee table. Whatever was climbing down into her house through the chimney was making progress, and grunting with a kind of gleeful lunacy. She pushed as hard as she could and slid the recliner over, then onto its side, behind the coffee table.
She tossed every framed photo and lamp and cushion she could get her hands on into a pile on top of the recliner. If only she could block the fireplace long enough to get out the front door, and run for the car in the driveway…
She shoved the sofa hard against the armchair, and a disk in her lower back twisted. The pain shot through her left leg and kidneys. She heard herself whimper, and felt warm liquid soaking her black knit pants. The smell was sharp like bleach. She slipped and felt a crack at her wrist as she hit the floor. Searing pain cut across her arm.
She looked up and watched helplessly as a foot, then a leg--thin as bone and coated in soot--thrust out of the chimney and braced on the edge of the upended coffee table. The foot was bare, with toes that tapered into square, blackened nails as thick as talons.
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