Deathbed

Part Ten

I woke to the sound of a Harley some distance off and approaching. For a moment or two I didn’t know where I was. A dark room filled with an unfamiliar smell; a bed with musty sheets in which I lay naked. The side of my face was sore and my hip joints ached.

The burn in my groin brought it all back to me in the next moment, and I sat upright, pulling the quilt around me. The kerosene lamp had been turned down or had gone out. The dogs began to bark in a howling chorus.

Outside, the Harley pulled up and stopped and a voice began over the dogs. It continued in a low and complaining tone as the barks gradually subsided, though I couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t seem to be a conversation, since no one answered in the silences, and though it was somehow familiar, it didn’t sound like the rider’s voice.

Where was he? He’d covered me and gone, though he’d said he would take me all night. If that had been his bike, he’d apparently left and come back. It was still night; the blackness was defined only by the slightly lighter rectangle of the window and a faint beam of light coming up the stairs through the half-open bedroom door.

Between my legs seeped the sticky moisture of sex, now cooled, but still redolent of what had happened in this bed. I could smell my own sweat and the scent of a man: sharp muskiness and the crushed-herb tang of semen. Now I realized why his aura of suspended decay had such an effect on me. I recalled Deadman’s powerful naked body, his hands, the look in his eyes as he took me, and my insides went hot and soft.

I’d confessed a crime to him--he’d forced me into my most vulnerable state and made me admit what I’d done, and for some reason I felt relieved. As I had been raised Catholic, confessions of sin and guilt resonated deeply with me, but only in the throes of sexual passion could I ever open my confidence to anyone.

I recalled the previous confession I had made while in bed with a man, and its result, and the relief began to flee. What if Deadman had gone to fetch the police and returned to betray me? What if they were just behind him?

Searching by touch, I found my clothes and put them on. The voice had fallen quiet. I crept down the stairs past the bloodstains on the wall and floor and through the front room, navigating by the light from the kitchen.

Someone was moving around in there, clanging utensils. My purse and gun were still where they had fallen, so I picked them up, closed the purse and peered into the kitchen. Stephanie was chopping potatoes again, her back to me. Her long, inexpertly crimped ash-brown hair hung over her shoulders.

“Excuse me--” I began, and she jumped, her knife slipping.

“Ow! Shit, you scared me!” she said angrily, waving a cut and bleeding forefinger. “What are you sneaking around for?” She put the finger in her mouth and took it out; I couldn’t see the cut any more.

“I wasn’t sneaking around. I was wondering if--”

“Whatever,” she snarled, turning back to her task. “’Taker just got back and he’ll be hungry, so I have to get the food ready.”

“Got back from where?”

“How the hell should I know? He had to go on one of his rides and fetch someone. He’s right out there with the passenger.” Stephanie bobbed her head at the door that led to the veranda. “He doesn’t tell me where he goes. Just orders me around!”

“A passenger? Not…the police?”

She laughed in a high shrill tone. “Cops? Him? You’ve got to be kidding! He HATES cops! There isn’t a police station in fifty miles, anyway. Only state troopers come all the way out here, and you wouldn’t catch them *dead* near *this* house. Ha!” It apparently hadn’t occurred to her to ask why I was concerned about the police. “No, he’ll eat and then he’ll leave with the passenger, but he won’t be gone long, damn him! I wish he’d ride off on that noisy, stinking bike and never come back!”

“What is he to you?” I moved into the kitchen and took my jacket from the chair where I had left it; the house had grown chilly. “Does this house belong to your family?” Shouldering into the jacket, I crossed the room to peer out the window. Nothing was visible but a portion of the driveway beyond the rise of the veranda. The Firebird was gone.

“Of course it does!” she snapped, dumping several handsful of potatoes into a skillet along with a chunk of dubious fat from a tin can. “It belongs to Daddy! ‘Taker just comes here and commandeers the place whenever he likes and sleeps in our beds and eats our food and sends us on errands and makes us wait on him! We all hate his guts!”

Turning for a moment, she glared at me. “And we feel exactly the same about *you*, understand? I don’t know why he decided to keep you here--I don’t know what you’re doing here at all, whoever you are! You’re not even *dead!*”

“Um…no. Is he really what he says he is? Uh…undead?”

“Du-uuh! Of course he is!” She stood with arms akimbo as the potatoes sizzled, looking me up and down with chilly blue eyes. Since she had on far too much makeup, her glare lost a large part of its malicious effect. “I guess he must think you’re cute or something--you don’t look like anything special to me--but he’s never kept anyone here before.” If her expression had been more pleasant, I thought, she might have looked much prettier than she did. Her eyebrows went up. “Oh! Did he do it to you?”

“What?” I knew I was blushing bright red.

“Oooh! Now I get it--he said you were his woman! ‘Taker brought you here to *screw* you! He screwed you in mine and Aitch’s bed up there!” Stephanie’s nose wrinkled, but her eyes gained an avid, prurient inquisitiveness. “That is SO gross! I didn’t think he *ever* got laid! What’s he like in the sack--I bet his dick’s just monster, right? Did he do it to you up the--?”

“None of your business!” I was appalled; my few women friends had never asked me such questions, knowing that my somewhat askew sexuality wasn’t a matter for light conversation, but she seemed to lack any feminine insight into my nature.

“Oh, la-di-da!” she replied sarcastically, rolling her eyes at what she apparently considered my over-delicacy, then asked a question that took the breath out of my lungs. “So you’re in love with him? You’re going to stay with him?”

“WHAT?!” In love with the rider? A man I’d met only a few hours before? A huge, uncouth biker? A man who’d virtually kidnapped me and forced himself on me--though with my tacit consent? A man whose very humanity was in question?

But I was the sort of woman whose desires ran in dark directions, as he seemed to have known from the beginning, and although I’d never loved any of the men I had slept with, he wasn’t like any man I had ever met. I hadn’t sorted out how I felt about him, and I had no idea how he felt about me, other than the obvious fact that he lusted after me. Or he had lusted after me--he’d left me alone after finishing, so perhaps he’d taken all he wanted.

“That’s…that’s the craziest thing I’ve heard all day, which is saying something! I’m leaving here as soon as I can!”

To my utter surprise, she looked crestfallen. “You’re not the woman of his dreams, I guess. Too bad--we would have gotten rid of him if you had been!” The Firebird pulled up and parked outside, and Shane got out: her brother. “But that wouldn’t have happened in a *thousand* years, let alone fifty, no matter what the contract says! He’s so big and nasty and smells like a--”

The scent of scorching approached my nostrils. “Your potatoes are burning,” I said. Her eyes opened wide and she turned to stir them. “What contract are you talking about?” I recalled that he had said the Devil’s promises were worth nothing. “You mean…his contract with Hell? Is that really--?”

“It’s not like he doesn’t deserve his job, no matter how much he hates it!” she hissed, scraping stuck potatoes off the bottom of the pan and adding another chunk of fat. “I hope he steps out of bounds and gets taken away himself! He’s never going to find a woman who will be faithful to him anyway--he might as well give up and break the terms and get it over with!”

Snorting, she broke a few eggs into the pan and clapped on a lid. “Then we’ll have our own damn house to ourselves! Just family, the way it used to be!” Shane opened the kitchen door and came in with a sack of groceries. “You stupid prick!” Stephanie screamed at him. “’Taker’s gonna kick your ass for coming in the house!”

“No, he isn’t, you dumb slut!” he shouted back. “He told me to put the stuff in the kitchen!” They stuck their tongues out at each other and she threw some potato peelings at him. “Bite me, you bitch!” He flipped her off and left, making a face at me.

I rolled my eyes and tried to piece together what she was telling me. “’Taker needs to find a faithful woman to be redeemed from service to Hell? That’s the Devil’s stipulation?” It sounded fairytale, medieval. What did a dead man walking sound like?

“Uh-huh. A woman who’s always loved *him* and never will love anyone else! Fat chance, right? Who would fall in love with a bastard like that? Who in their right mind would even want to *fuck* him?” Her face sharpened into prurience again. “Did he, like, *make* you do it? Did he tie you up or something? That’s really gross!”

I ignored all but one question. “Love…?” Who *would* have always loved him and been faithful? I wasn’t a faithful woman; quite the opposite, in fact. I had slept with several dozen men for varying reasons, and I had betrayed every one of them. Other than my father and my daughter, I didn’t believe I had ever loved anyone. My mother had died from complications of pregnancy just before I had been born.

In a sense I had killed her. I had been taken from her dead body by Caesarian section, so I had never known her, either to love or to despise. Perhaps that was why I didn’t have much to say to other women.

Certainly I hadn’t loved my husband. It hadn’t cost me much emotion to shoot him, and less to shoot my lover, who had been his best friend. Both relationships had been matters of convenience alone. “Love defined how? Sex? Devotion? Sacrifice?”

“How should I know? The whole thing’s gross and weird and so is he! He doesn’t have any more time anyway, which is such a pisser! Another forty hours, and the limit of the contract is up and he’s permanently bound to Hell. We’re stuck with him forever!” She banged a bottle of hot sauce on the table and scrubbed a plate with a grubby towel. “I’ll have to cook his damn food until hell freezes over!”

“Forever? How are you going to last that long?”

She smirked at me. “We’re the same as he is. Undead. Isn’t that a crock?” She grinned at my wide eyes. “Me and Daddy and my husband Aitch and my stupid brother. We all died in a car accident years ago. Boo!” I jumped and she laughed. “Ha, ha! Scared you! You’re in the house of the living dead! Bwaah!”

I realized she was telling the truth, but her juvenile glee made fear ridiculous. She wasn’t truly dangerous, the way the rider was; she was only a spiteful girl who didn’t like having another woman around, no matter how she had tried to attach me to the rider. Was she concerned for the virtue of her big blond husband?

I wondered if he had recovered from his injuries as quickly as Deadman had. Her face fell when she saw that I retained my equilibrium--she’d apparently hoped I’d run out screaming. But the sight of the rider’s fury after I had shot him had inured me now to almost any kind of lesser fright, supernatural or otherwise. Nothing could be worse than his unholy wrath.

“Your family is cursed, the way he is?” I thought of another cursed family I knew.

“No,” she said as if it were obvious. “We’re good people! Decent people! ‘Taker saw us standing along the road next to the car and he stopped and looked at us, and told us he wouldn’t take us with him because that wasn’t where we were supposed to go. So we asked him to help us get the car out of the ditch and he did, and we just came home and we’ve stayed here ever since.”

“For years? No one else came to get you?”

“Like who? What, God or something? We don’t believe in shit like that.”

My jaw dropped slightly. “Oh.”

“So here we are. He takes advantage of us because he can. Everyone around here knows who he is and won’t let him in their houses, so he uses our place for a crash pad when he’s around. The rest of the time we mind our own business. We’re not looking for an impossible redeemer the way he is! We’re just fine the way we are!” For a moment her face changed; a hint of human sorrow crept into it. “I can’t ever have children. Dead people don’t have children…”

I couldn’t get my mind off the idea of Deadman’s redemption. It did sound impossible. A woman had to have always loved him and have been faithful? How long did she have to remain true to him--eternity? Where would he find a woman like that?

She had to be someone he already knew, I supposed, and if he hadn’t found her in fifty years he wouldn’t ever find her. Maybe the whole stipulation was a fraud. Surely a contract imposed by the Devil had myriad loopholes in Hell’s favor, though perhaps the condition had to be possible of fulfillment in order for the contract to be valid. What were the legalities of damnation, and who was the final judge? I could hardly believe that I was taking this seriously, but obviously there was more substance to my childhood theology than I had realized.

Mind spinning a bit from all the peculiar revelations I had heard, I opened the kitchen door and went outside. There next to the veranda stood the big pale Harley, leaning slightly over on its kickstand like a tired horse. Surrounded by his spread-out black leather coat, the rider knelt with his back to me tinkering with something on the engine. He had braided his hair and tied a bandanna over his head.

I walked to the railing meaning to speak to him, but a short distance to the left of him stood another person--a man. He was tall, somewhat overweight, and dark-haired, his white dress shirt splotched with blood, and all around him sat and lay the dogs as if guarding him. Obviously it was the passenger Deadman had gone to fetch. The man turned, and I looked into my husband’s eyes.

Part Eleven

“Hello, Roy,” I said, feeling only a little faint. Nothing of this kind was going to surprise me ever again, I knew. Deadman didn’t turn around.

“Bitch,” my husband replied dazedly. “I’m dead. You shot me dead.”

“Yes, I did. Did he bring you here?”

“I was wandering around. I didn’t know what to do. Where to go. Tony kept saying the rosary and he left with someone else. She had a shining face, but I couldn’t go with her. Didn’t want to go with her…angels are too fucking New Age-y.” He looked around and up at the house. “This dump is where you ran off to?”

“Yes.”

“This enormous guy came up alongside me. He told me to get on the bike, and I told him to fuck off. He touched me and I couldn’t move. He put me on the bike. We came a long way, I think. Or just a short way--I don’t know. A strange road. Like glass.”

“I saw the strange road. It must be his route between places.”

“You’re not dead, you murdering bitch,” said Roy. “Why not? You ought to be dead, not me.”

“I don’t know, actually. I almost was killed. I almost ran your BMW off the road.”

“You stole my fucking car, you bitch. First you shoot me dead, then you steal my ninety-thousand-dollar custom Beemer. You better not have wrecked my car. I’m still paying on it.”

I sighed. “You’re dead, Roy. You don’t owe any more on your car.”

“I should have killed you. No, I shouldn’t have married you. You’re damn sexy in a slightly twisted way, but you’re a deeply conflicted, passive-aggressive, necrophilac bitch. You murder your own family and friends, and you spend too much of my dough. My psychiatrist says you’re symbolically emasculating me by spending my money.”

“Which would mean that you equate your money with your prick? Par for the course, Roy.”

“Where did you get that gun? Did you buy it with my money?”

“Papa gave it to me before I ever met you. Papa has a modicum of foresight.”

“Oh, fuck your Papa! Fuck you! You killed me! It hurt.” He sniffled.

“So I hear.”

“Your eggs are ready, ‘Taker!” Stephanie yelled in the kitchen. “Don’t blame me if they’re overdone! Daddy hasn’t adjusted the damn propane tank yet and the stove’s still running hot!”

Deadman got up and brushed off his hands, looking at me for the first time. When our eyes locked, I felt a great wave of emotion pass through me. Heat, desire, memory only a few hours old. I had never before felt the way I had felt in bed with him, and all of it washed over me in an instant and left me shivering.

I saw his pale face flush at the sight of me; he ran his tongue along the line of his lips as if his mouth had suddenly gone dry, but he said nothing and came up the steps toward me, gaze riveted to my face. It felt as if we were the only two people in the universe, but I couldn’t help wondering if he actually meant to kiss me in front of my dead husband.

When the rider stood before me, he paused for a moment. I knew my eyes were speaking plainly to him again, and his focus dropped to my lips, but he stepped to one side.

As he passed me wordless on the way to the kitchen door, Roy spoke again. “I loved you, you pretty bitch. I really loved you. Tony told me what you’d done. I went through hell. I didn’t want to kill you. I love you.” Deadman stopped where he was, just abreast of me, and slightly turned his head as he listened.

“Why didn’t you and Tony just call the police if you thought I should be punished, you idiot? None of this would have happened.”

“Call the police? You crazy? That’s not the way we do things in the family. You know that. We take care of our own. I love you. You’re mine. My wife. It’s my right to kill you.”

“I’m not your wife any more. I’m alive and you’re dead. No one can be married to a dead man.”

“I love you, baby,” he blubbered. “You vowed to be faithful to me and then you cheated on me with everyone under the sun, but I love--”

“I don’t love you, and I never did.” I met Deadman’s eyes, which were intent on me. “I married you because I wanted to have children and you had money. You never told me how your family had made that money. Death. You sold death disguised as pleasure, poison to bring on oblivion. Heroin, crack, methamphetamine. You sold poison to people who only wanted to relieve their pain, and you killed them.

“All of you were criminals and racketeers and drug-addled perverts. You never told me that your grandfather raped your mother until her husband stabbed him to death, that all of her children including you were her own father’s offspring, and that your damned family was so inbred from generations of incest that it was a miracle you didn’t walk on all fours. I wanted children because I wanted to give life for once instead of taking it. You never told me that your sisters died as babies because they were too deformed to live. All of you were cursed, including my daughter. You were dealers in death and you profited from death. You might have made a bad choice in marriage, but so did I. Maybe I knew what you were even though you hadn’t told me. Maybe I thought I deserved you.”

“That doesn’t give you the right. You don’t have the right to take matters into your own hands.”

“I loved Irene. I loved her even though I knew she wouldn’t live the moment she was born, and I didn’t want to see her in any more pain. It wasn’t her fault she was born to such a family and that your curse passed on to her through me. I let the doctors torture her for three years, and then I gave her the only gift that would relieve her pain. I know it was a sin, and I’ve suffered for it ever since. Why do you think I finally confessed to Tony? It was eating me up inside, because I felt my child’s last breaths through my own hands. I blurted it out while he was fucking me in your bed because I lost my mind with grief on her birthday. I gave Irene life and I gave her death. What did it matter if her death was a little sooner rather than later? What difference did it make?”