Of Stone and Brass

You've never resented him more than you do now, as you gradually brake onto the shoulder. Lefty hums the same note circuitously like a mantra. After throwing the van in park and a moment’s indecision, you leave the engine run. Lefty is loath to hold a postceremonious debate about right or wrong, dumb or smart, so he hops out briskly, propping the Bean upright on his seat where it swirls like an inch or two of distilled copper. You have to really push on your door to contest with the virulent winds. He waits for you to come around and unlock the trunk, lighting up another one of Max's cigarettes even though the chances of it staying lit out here are slim to none. He's behaving like an artist who just exacted his masterpiece but is yet too tired to congratulate himself.
When you get all three doors flayed open, the body is easy to spot. Troy Doogan’s high-grade thermal sleeping bag is slumped like a lethargic boa constrictor against the backseats, swollen by the unmediated digestion of a 5’10", 150 lb entree. Lefty hurdles inside, kicking books and clutter out of his way, then seizes the bag’s opening like a farmboy wrestling sacks of grain and drags it up to the bumper.
Hopping down, he slides it halfway out. "There. You can have the feet."
They are light in your hands.
"Towards the water," he orders. These are the last words spoken during the long haul. Nature is too garrulous with its whipping gales and crashing breakers, its encroaching thunder and whispering sands. Swirling blue and gray condensation veils the road after thirty yards in either direction, just as it veils the twinkling grid of cosmic light above. If it were up to you, you'd be lugging in the other direction, into an acreage of stale grass and maybe a few intrepid breeds of wildflower, too sandy for farmland. Doubtless every inch of it will be searched anyway once Max is declared missing and Lefty's boasts are reported to the police. Sometime in the next hour, these mists will be strobing with lawmen. They'll find the body regardless where you drop it, so you may as well drop it now and work on distancing yourselves another eighty miles.
All this dissent you keep unwisely to yourself. It's enough of a struggle trudging down the incontinent embankment, you going backwards. Each of you stumble twice in the first phase alone, leaving a messy collage of tracks in your wake at the mercy of the wind to conceal. Lefty kicks off his long-sought Birkenstocks. Once the ground levels out, there are weeds to contend with. Weeds and desultory dunes and potholes. These blemishes make it impossible to walk in a straight line. You notice over Lefty's shoulder than you've started slanting westward, away from the van's dim aura.
Long, arid blades keep snaking up your pantsleg, itching a hundred times more awful than they'd itch if you enjoyed the option to scratch. Lefty gets distracted en route by a crown of black hair that comes exposed when his end of the sleeping back starts to slip, otherwise he might forewarn you about a shallow trench approaching and you wouldn't topple in backwards, dragging the body along with. Lefty has enough sense to let go last second. The fall is soft of course, but you land awkwardly and so does Max. One of his feet actually kicks you in the face through the material, and it strikes you as ironic how the dead find a way to fight back. You roll the body off and spit out some grit.
Standing on the trench's cusp, Lefty runs a hand through his hair. He is laughing a light sophisticated laugh that would seem to be aimed at you except he's staring out at sea, watching the Port Angeles lighthouse wink on and off. "This'll do, don't you think?" he consults like a prospective rancher scouting the prairie.
As you climb out--thinking sourly you'd refuse Lefty's hand even if he offered it--you raise a few points about how it's too far away and too grassy to be a public-friendly beach . . . no houses around, at least that you've seen . . . sure, it'll suffice. Something crunches underfoot. You both look down and spot a splintered sunglass lens. Inspecting the pair hooked in your collar, it would seem Max's collapse busted one out, so you crouch to pick up the shards one at a time, and when Lefty asks why you tell him, "Evidence. Now go find your f*****g sandals."
To your surprise, he plods off obediently.
Once all the big pieces are packed away in your pocket, you kick sand over the rest and become engrossed by the wicked look of the clouds stacked piecemeal from the horizon like corrugated metal, rendered three shades brighter than the Strait's meniscus by a backdrop moon. Snakeskin waves lap and spiral on the porcelain beach, bubbling and frothing with omens of a regular tsunami. Maybe if the tide's coming in, you think, he'll get washed out. And then the squids can finish him off. With a wry shake of the head, you follow Lefty's tracks, not casting another glance at the cocoon in Max's burial trench.
If the crashing sea reminds you of one thing, it's that despite all you had to drink tonight you haven't pissed several hours. That said, you find a dune piled about waist-high and sort of prop your a*s against it, dropping your pants around your ankles. Now, on top of the preliminary stresses of travel, toss in this added bonus of sand up your crack. Lefty is about fifteen yards away, climbing the embankment back onto the road. Liquid flows out of you tirelessly as the wind, ceaselessly as your thoughts. Mostly, these thoughts pertain to Maddie ("Stubs, promise me something?"), from the echo of her piss hitting the gutter to the echo of her screams in the stairwell. But she's back there now, where she'll fade out with the last flash of the lighthouse. Her and her lighthouse are one and the same after all. Distant totems. Another blank chapter of the past that erases itself even as it writes. Now that Lefty has dumped Max's corpse and guaranteed credit from Max's family, he can pull out too. He's proven whatever the f**k he set out to prove. This is, in a sense, Lefty's first exposure to total, unabated freedom, so it makes sense the result should be so, well, explosive. When his junk dealer made the shrewd move out to Cali, it gave Lefty just the excuse he needed to ditch Ohio and that neurotic, tightknit, Jewish Brady Bunch atmosphere. Henceforth, instead of his family possessing him, his dealer did, but Lefty was a lot quicker to come to terms with that than most sententious rockstars ever were. He got the address of a rural methadone clinic from some inept resource and skipped town yet again, only this time where he wound up was someplace completely unintentional; nevertheless, as the psychiatric evaluation determined, equally necessary.
That was how you met Lefty.
You remember for the first week he was admitted you never saw him. He refused to take his meals or his medication outside the confines of his room (the "temper tank" is what RWs called it, but it's where they let Lefty come down off his white horse). During the day, you'd think it was a broom closet he caused so little fuss, but come nightfall, they had to tie him to his bed. He'd howl until dawn for liberation; it's unbelievable he can even speak today. The sounds he made were like live elk being fed through a snow blower. In the morning, an orderly would go in and sometimes come out carrying an armload of s**t-soaked pajamas. Intrigued, you hung around as close to Lefty's suite as you could, eavesdropping on the nurses deliberate about his status; how he'd chipped off his nails on the limestone wall; how he'd screamed himself so raw last night he was coughing up blood. You didn't know the new guy yet but you felt connected to him, in that weird way people feel connected to their state's football team. Hardly anyone knows any of the actual players, but they've followed their trials and biopics so intimately that a sort of pseudo-bond is forged. That's not to say when Lefty finally kicked you imposed yourself right away and went up to shake his hand. No, you let the other loonies test the waters. And you remember he was so natural, so cool and prosaic, that you swore he must morph into a werewolf at night to produce those agonized howls. He was hailed by the patients as something of a commodore. The erratic, messianic Squid King. And he played this up to the fullest degree, convincing many unfit minds those tattoos of his were congenital, prophetic stigmata.
The doctors, needless to say, didn't approve of this idolatry. It went against their Fascist temperaments. Anyone who rose above the flock got a knitted brow and disgruntled clipboard jottings. Up until Lefty, you were probably their least favorite, thanks to your time-killing aptness to absorb every psychology text that the sexlessly alabaster, yet encouraging, nurses were eager to bring you upon request. Not only were you genuinely interested in the vagaries of the human mind, but it also felt nice to have a weapon to fight back with against the 'specialists' and their clammy stares. Maybe they could reserve your freedom, but soon you could toy with their pride by deflecting all shallow terminology, all theory, all prognoses back on their graduated little selves: "What do you say, doc? Maybe there’s a neural discrepancy in the ventral region of my medial prefontal cortex. . ." or "Hey, good theory! That could be the root of my unempathic proclivities. I’d hate to pass it all off on something like alexithymia just because I’m ashamed of my own underdeveloped orbito-frontal cortex. Strange though, because I always thought that deficiency was more common in males, isn’t it?"
Ah yes, the good old days.
You brush most of the sand off your a*s and zip up.
A western wind converges where you stand with the static thrashings from the north, easily distinguishable by essence, particularly temperature. Canada's gales are sultry, stormy things that make your clothes stick to your flesh and the small hairs down your nape stand on end. The other feels more akin to early spring, several degrees cooler. It stumps your nerves. Another odd foible of this rebel wind is that your body seems to be a checkpoint, if not an endpoint for its energy. As you move towards the ditch, no weeds or granules to your left are displaced by it. The full brunt grows heavy inside your limbs, stomach, and torso, like after a feast, until you won't take another step further for fear of plunging into the bowels of mud and bedrock.
Just then, Lefty's trumpet beckons with an impatient solo. So he does still have it after all. The west wind diminishes while the main gale grows in force. You proceed with practical ease and are about to start climbing Lefty's footholes up the dune when you notice how far off his trumpet actually sounds--the result of your crooked procession. You take one last look back at the beach. It's like some dead-end planet, a purgatorial quagmire. The lighthouse, if you're not mistaken, throbs a little brighter, a little plumper, and its lantern casts a violet sheen that wasn't there before. Your lips feel cold and you start to sweat a cold strange sweat. Just drunk, no doubt, drunk and maybe a little vertiginous after so many complications during what was supposed to be a banal pit stop in a banal town.
You launch yourself headlong into the steep embankment, remembering with shame how easily Lefty had cleared it. From a distance it hadn't looked nearly so damn steep! There's no way to work up enough centrifugal force, you may as well be scaling a rock wall. You grab onto a hump of snaggly brown roots for support and claw forward with each of your limbs like a crab. Head down, you're watching the sand dribble past underneath when a hand enters your field of vision. A stable hand offering support.
Lefty blows his blues yards down the road.

* * * *
"Stubs, promise me something?"
"What."
"If you ever have a little girl . . ."
"Lie down. Shut your mouth, you're rambling."
"Far far down the road of course. If you do, promise me, I mean, at least consider, naming her Ecaterina?"
"Relax your muscles. Why are you so stiff?"
She smiles. "Look how you take care of me. Like my own mother."
"I give up," you sneer and walk away.
Her bed sits along the bay window with an angled view of the driveway, so your eyes dart every few seconds to the van, waiting to see a fed-up Lefty come pounding at the door with a bottle of rum in hand. An old maple's curling bough tap-taps at the glass with every gentle breeze. For you, it would get downright aggravating, especially during a storm. External light from the streetlamps and the sky and even your own lowbeams paint the room's powderblue walls with myriad shadows. It looks like a teenage girl's room. Strangely juvenile in some parts, with mementos from babyhood framed or flaunted, such as a stuffed koala bear holding a red heart that's come unstitched and now hangs by a thread from one paw. Then there's a poster of four individualists, all of whom resemble Max, posing under the headline: Spear of Travesty. Pictures of the actual Max are everywhere. One on her nightstand rests beside a vase of emaciated roses thats symbolic irony you can't get over. In fact, as soon as you could get her to lie down, she saw the picture frame and slammed it on its face, grumbling, "Get those dumb roses out of here."
"Forget about the roses," you said. "Where's the medicine cabinet?"
"In the bathroom, silly."
"Where's the bathroom?"
She pointed to a convenient niche adjoining her own bedroom, but before you could walk over, she sprang partway up, grabbed your hand--"Wait!"--and began babbling thusly. You make every promise in the book so she'll let you go. Then you cross into the bathroom and find the switch on the wall. It's surprisingly messy, especially around the sink where all her cosmetics are left out like a Maybelline commercial. Stray rogue and powders and lipstick smudge the sink, even the mirror. A lump of towels sit on the floor beside the shower stall. You click open the mirror and start rooting around for isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs. They're easy to find. When you shut the cabinet again, a small purple vial amongst the sink clutter catches your eye. Maddie is out of sight around the door jamb, so you pick up the vial and give a confirming whiff. Lilacs.
You admit debating whether or not to steal it, but swiftly rule out that faux pas as a symptom of the night's mayhem. Instead, you take the alcohol and cotton over to Maddie (she is still talking) and get one of the swabs damp for her. Her skirt is hiked carelessly high. She peels off her coat and you see she's wearing a snug black tunic and a gold pendant. Her white skin looks whiter in this bluish half-light, and the wound on her throat is little more than a caked blotch of dry blood with no puncture marks you can perceive. She wants to apply the swab herself, interrupting her absentminded monologue about Venice--the overfed family cat who likes her best and who's now ruling the pillows--to ask if you have any brothers or sisters. You tell her no, then persist while you still have the podium to ask if she needs anything, a glass of water maybe.
"That sounds nice actually." She puts her fingers to her adam's apple as if having just detected a thirst. "I don't have any glasses in here, so you'll have to go in the kitchen--Oh, second thought don't worry about it. I should see you out anyway. I can get it."
"You don't have to see me anywhere. Just lie down." And you guide her by the shoulders onto her side, using one hand to smack Venice off his plushy perch.
"Don't hit my cat," Maddie laughs.
"Try to relax your mind. I'll be right back with your water and then I'm leaving."
You're aware of the formality in your voice when you say this. It's hard to describe, but at this stage you deem it wise to treat Maddie rather cold--if not outright brusquely--so that when the time comes for you to join Lefty, she's not tragically disillusioned over the memory of a kiss that didn't really mean anything, or tender words thats only genuine motive was coercing said kiss. Of course, these quandaries may be mere the imaginative dregs of your ego, which is why you haven't confronted her straight out. Things like kisses, after all, should be farthest from her mind given what judicious actions she vowed to take once you and Lefty are gone. But far from judicious, she's been acting, well, flighty, that's a good word for it. Touching your hand too much, or your shoulder; going out of her way to retain eye contact; nodding whenever you mention departure with a sort of sly disregard that makes you feel she's convinced 'both of you know' you're not going anywhere. That you've saved her from one danger and you'll be there to save her from the rest, even down to the petty hurt of Max's desertion.
"You're sweet Stubs," she says as you step out into the hall.
What an emotional mutant this town hath wrought! The lilac aroma fades behind you, but not entirely--Never entirely until you're free from this attraction and onto the next. What you need is to get laid. Sure, it's an easy blame, but people think too much when they haven't got good and fucked in ages. That's a fact. More to the point, they feel too much. Your own thoughts of late have gotten too airy, too romantic, prohibited for too long from a firm and fleshy reminder of what's what.
The hallway is short and adorned with family portraits dating back to the early 1900s, yellow and frayed, taken in communist Romania for all you know. To your right appears a foyer, through which you and Maddie entered via the big oak door. Directly opposite that is the living room and the source of the once-startling glow. Even though you know better now, you can't help but slow your pace and peer furtively around the corner.
Either Maddie's mother or her stepdad or both clearly came into some money. The house is only one story, but it's deep. All the rooms are spacious and lavishly decorated, the living room being a prime example. One of the walls is an elegant stone insert. A few flat slabs stick out far enough to act as shelves for picture frames, statues, plants, and what looks like an urn. A giant plasma screen centers this wall, hung above the fireplace. Fake ivy is the decorator's weapon of choice. It swoops off everything. The carpet is a clean, manicured white. Most of the furniture is cream suede, except for a brown leather La-Z-Boy, and all of it crowded sociably around a glass coffee table facing the television. Hereabout sits uncle Hugh, confined to his wheelchair, gaunt face glazed in glaring blue, pointed ahead with precisely the same drugged countenance as when you first laid eyes on him. You continue on briskly to the next open doorway, the kitchen.
The kitchen is equally ornate and well-furnished. Granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, a breakfast bar rowed with mahogany stools built under a voluminous abstract light fixture. The sink is by a window overlooking the backyard. Rifling all the cupboards for a glass, you find one and run just a thin trickle of water to curb the noise. An urge to sweep through and commit a cursory plunder of the place is enticing, to say the least. Plus, it would ensure some atonement in Lefty’s eyes for making him wait so long. Once the glass is full, you cut off the flow and start back, telling yourself you don't give a s**t what Lefty thinks and you'll make him wait all night if Maddie, in her illegible state, demands a proper goodbye. Hugh mutters something in the next room.
You wait to hear if anyone responds but it seems just to have been a contraction of the poor old man's tongue--the shame actually being that he's not so old. 37, Maddie said, when he suffered his stroke just two months ago. She had never been close with her uncle, hence her impression of him moving in as "spooky" rather than traumatic. He was a successful stock broker, or something, you weren't really listening, but single and childless, so all the duty fell on Maddie's mother lest he be neglected in some $3000-a-month clinic. There's no telling how old he'll get. Old as anyone, you guess, so probably not a short-term addition to the living room's feng shui. As you pass by on your way back, your intrigue gets the better of you and elects a brief detour from the hardwood corridor onto crisp carpeting. The room is quite long, stretching back into another shadowy parlor area with lots of space in-between, tangibly divided by a shaft of moonlight flooding through a large glass sliding door which steps onto a wooden deck, ideal for summer barbecues and baseball parties. No shortage of area rugs 'tie s**t together'.
Uncle Hugh shares a striking facial similarity with his niece, however he's blonde (though, for all you know, so is she). He bears her proud cheekbones and impotent chin, though on Maddie it doesn't seem quite so impotent. Everything about Hugh does and is.
A bib worn over his Oxford shirt is smattered with droolstains and new pools are congealed in the corners of his mouth, fizzing and popping like tiny glue bubbles, about the only thing letting you know he draws breath. He is still dressed like a stock broker--ennobled, but probably not comfortable--with his hair is combed and tapered like a schoolboy's. You can just see Maddie's mother doting on him with a finetooth comb, humming the same songs their mother would sing. The groin of his gray pleated slacks bulge around a diaper. The closer you come, the more animate he looks, and less like a handsome wax structure but something with veins and musculature and eyelids so fibrously encrusted you could swear his scarce blinks resound with raspy, sucking pops. His face is shiny with grease, blackheads forming to the size of freckles, some emitting oily stalactites of gunk and sweat. His earlobes are bright red and hang low as if encumbered by 5-lb. earrings, plus his eyebrows have begun to connect.
The TV's slideshow of paradoxes and ironies, from bouncing cheerleaders to Cialis, from criminal-defense attorneys to Congress, shackle Hugh's attention span so doggedly that if you were to grab that remote off the chair and switch it off, you feel halfway convinced you might switch him off too. Entirely. You know it's silly, but there's also the impression that he is willfully averting your gaze out of distaste or shame.
"Look at me," you hiss. Toothpaste ads flash within his pupils, but you know his mind is not a toothpaste ad. "Look at me," you say again, harsher. There are inches of withered brain-callous to permeate before his radar pinpoints you, or whatever technology pumps that generative dye keeping his eyes so blue. Not the cold blue of a corpse, but the blue of sentient, gushing water. Staring so puerile and helpless he reminds you of someone 1/37 his age. You step back. Some water from the glass rocks overboard and soaks Hugh's sock. Though his skull and throat stay soldered in place, his pupils plummet like two heavy sapphires and bob there, evaluating this latest indignity.

Maddie is upright when you return, the garden smells of her room oddly reassuring. Her coiled glare leads into the bathroom, totally unmindful of your presence until you brush purposely past her face and set the dripping glass down on her nightstand, beside the roses. "Thank you, Stubs." Her voice sounds natural enough, and her bloody cotton swabs have been discarded upon a pillow, staining it.
"Why don't you lay down?" You chuck them at Venice, who's perched on the windowsill shooting more accusatory looks, and watch him dart down onto the mattress, past Maddie, and disappear somewhere on the floor.
She doesn't even notice. "I'm not tired."
"Come on." When you try to physically assist her, you find you're nudging at a Greek column. A cold marble column not unlike the man down the hall. "Maddie--" You touch her cheek. "You're f****n freezing."
She takes your hand by way of response and turns it around in her own. All her movements seem uncanny in a way you can't describe other than they're too rigid and at odds with her litheliness, her agility, like a disturbing, preternatural rigor mortis has set in. Her fingers, the ones entwined in yours, are crimped into a sort of lame claw. She mutters something--"Save her," you think, but it's not important. You keep enjoining her to lay down and finally apply more stubborn force. She grows frantic and precocious, latching onto your clothes, uttering pathetic sob sounds while her eyes remain dry.
"The sooner I leave the better," you insist through gritted teeth.
"Stay! Please stay with me a while longer. There's something I need to tell you." She winds herself tightly around your neck. Under different circumstances you would have given in now, but the collective risk is too great. There's cops on the prowl for Lefty and the van. Sooner or later they'll pass through this neighborhood. You manage to pry off her wrists and force them down on the mattress. If a relative were to peek in now, they'd have one hell of a start. "There's something I need to tell you," she says again, quiet but pleadingly.
"Don't."
"If I don't tell it all right now, I swear I'll go mad. I mean it, Stubs. I'll f*****g kill myself!"
"Oh, knock it off! When are you going to quit? Life is s**t, you think that's some edgy revelation? No one's going to listen to your problems, nobody can do anything. You're alone, Maddie, and you shouldn't let that scare you. Once the tit pops out you have to fend for yourself, take what you can, and don't let people walk all over you or else you may as well f*****g kill yourself, because what's the difference? If it's the world's sympathy you're after, then I say do it. Slit your wrists. Because no one feels sorry for a doormat. Other doormats might pretend to so you'll feel sorry back, but that's it."
She doesn't hear a word, still struggling imperiously, thrusting her chest into your face until all these complex emissaries from out of nowhere say you should desecrate the princess here and now. Outside, the neighborhood gawks, and you reach out with one hand to snap the vertical blinds closed.
The room falls pitch black. Maddie is breathing hard. Her free hand wrenches your shirt. You yank it off. She swipes her bare feet across the sheets and pitches her head so close to yours you nearly lose a few front teeth but don't even know to deflect until she's come and gone. None of her, especially her hair, exudes the same vernal warmth anymore.
"Whatever you did in the past," you try again with a weary exhale, "it's all going to be paid for when you save this kid, understand?" She subdues her tantrum slightly, beginning to shiver all over. Still, though, she doesn't really cry. "No one else can do it, you need to . . . But first I have to go. You have to let me go first."
These seem to be the only other words she'll deign to hear besides "alright, I'll stay". You feel the tendons in her wrists relax and she has completely stopped convulsing. Gradually, your eyes adjust and you can see her lying there, hands pinned to the sides of her pillow even after you've withdrawn your own. Venice's hiss cuts the silence when you step backward and he darts out from between your legs, but Maddie doesn't comment, though you find yourself wishing now, of all things, that she would say something. The maple bough ticks off seconds on the glasspane and you pace your retreat accordingly; the room feels a mile wide . . . As you squeeze the warm brass doorknob to swing it shut behind you, Maddie imparts in a voice quenched of emotion, one just extrinsically her own, "Thank you, Camille. Goodbye."