They settled upon a methodology. Or Doug settled on one, and Liv agreed, because she could not think clearly, not when she looked at the thing that had, one way or the other, been party to her father’s eradication from earth. Their stated goal was to get the skinner, through pain, to express tangible information about what had happened to Lee. If he was still alive, if he was definitely dead. Unstated was the catharsis of simply doing something about Lee, no matter what shape it took, after years of just taking the hurt like punches.
At Doug’s direction, they gathered what objects existed that might still smell of Lee Fleming. Aggie had gotten rid of a lot, but she’d done it as she did everything—in fickle, fitful impulses. Lee’s gardening gear still hung from a garage hook. His winter hats, gloves, and scarves remained in the hall closet. A box in the bathroom was a veritable time capsule: his last-used bar of deodorant, his razor, his toothbrush. What could smell more like him than those?
They also gathered pictures. Most family photographs, Liv came to realize, focused on her. She had to dig out albums curated from before she was born, filled with photos shot on actual film. There was Lee Fleming at grad school graduation, pretending to weep in joy. Further back: Lee on the beach, looking up from a book at the photographer, his wife—or maybe, back then, only his girlfriend. Further back: Lee, impossibly sharp-boned, his hair full and whipped by wind, wearing a jean jacket, atop a picnic table, happy. The blessing of ignorance, Liv thought, remembering when she had it.
They entered the Armory with a shopping bag of these items. The skinner had had days to improve. Raised welts had lowered. Scratches had sealed over with crystalline crust. Wounds on exposed organs had faded from furious, red blemishes to dimmer blots. None of these improvements would last.
Doug spread Lee’s personal items around the skinner in a half circle. While the skinner goggled in instinctive fright, Doug donned a pair of work gloves and Liv her mother’s studded gardening gloves. Doug picked up a hollow metal leg he’d broken off one of the worktables. It was as hard and lightweight as a police baton. He tested several grips, then looked at Liv.
“Ready?”
No, she’d never be ready, not for this. She nodded.
He nodded back, blasted out a breath, inhaled quick, and whacked the skinner’s left hip with the baton. It made a loud clucking noise, metal on bone. The skinner’s strangely jointed legs scrabbled away to move its hips as far from Doug as possible, which, because of the zip ties, wasn’t far.
Liv knew what to do. They’d discussed it. She picked up the razor, a dull thing spotted with rust but still clinging to Lee’s hair and particles of his skin. Hunched by the skinner’s opposite hip, Liv held the safety razor in front of its face.
“Closer, Liv,” Doug said.
She blew out a nervous breath and scooted forward until she could feel the skinner’s warm flesh through her jeans. She positioned the razor inches from its face.
“Closer,” Doug pressed. “Get that thing in its nose.”
Liv didn’t want to hear a third critique. She shoved the razor into the alien’s face. Her reward was a queasy thrill, watching the skinner whip its rubbery neck to evade contact. A pointless struggle: Liv pressed the razor’s handle over the thing’s mouth, while the blade rested against its nostrils. The skinner flopped and, sure enough, the blade nicked the small, delicate flap of its nose.
Liv recoiled on instinct, but tried to push aside the nausea. A little blood was nothing at all. It might focus the skinner, help it get a big whiff of her father’s smell.
“Talk to it,” Doug said. “Like we said.”
Liv nodded and cleared her throat. This was nothing like speech class, and yet she found herself strangled with nerves.
“Lee Fleming,” she said. “Where is Lee Fleming?”
Skinners had mastered interplanetary travel. Doug’s rationale was that they therefore must be highly intelligent and capable of recognizing sounds if not words, though he did leave room for an alternate theory that, to Liv, felt plucked from science fiction: that individual skinners were indeed dumb and that their collective intellect rested in overlord figures like the Whistler or the Green Man.
Doug’s baton connected with the skinner’s hip a second time, and the alien’s body jiggled as if electrocuted. Liv jerked, too, and couldn’t help but notice where blobby tumors on its hip had been squashed flat, where whitish skin there had gone hot pink. She tried to focus; she’d missed her cue. She swiped for one of the photos of Lee and held it so close to the skinner’s eyes that, when it contorted, the stiff photo paper dug red scratches across the eyeballs’ plump white surfaces.
Keep going, don’t stop, don’t think, she told herself. She pushed the safety razor harder against the thing’s mouth. The plastic handle clattered off crooked teeth.
“His name was Lee Fleming,” she said.
Doug let loose, harder this time. The skinner thrashed about. The flesh of its left hip was rising like bread.
“Lee Fleming,” Liv repeated. “Lee Fleming, Lee Fleming.”
The violence drove everything from Liv but the anxiety that these three syllables were losing meaning, degenerating from words that symbolized her beloved father into nonsense prattle that meant nothing but oncoming agony. Doug hit the skinner a few more times, and Liv watched the thing learn to bear down in anticipation, muscles thickening before each strike.
Chirp, she wanted to tell it, and the surprise notion screwed up her chant: Flee Lemming, Leaf Femming. If the skinner would only make one of its small, sympathetic sounds, it might give her and Doug the excuse they needed to pull back and reassess the possibly flawed plan under which they labored.
To her utter shock, the skinner did what she hoped.
“Car.”
Liv’s head snapped back so fast a neck muscle cramped. This wasn’t just an alien chirp. It was recognizable, an English word that might have been said by her mother, home early, needing the station wagon. Liv looked to the door and listened, but heard nothing from the direction of the house. She looked up at Doug, but he didn’t appear to have heard. He had the raw, busted end of the table leg pressed against the skinner’s hip and was grinding it in a circular pattern, shaving off a curlicue of skin.
“Bow.”
This time Liv hissed. She didn’t mean to. Doug quit twisting the table-leg baton and frowned in uncertainty. Liv’s mind spun into the rafters, among the dangling weapons. Bow—her dad had brought an Inuit bow to the climactic hunt through Black Glade. Could it be that the animal that had rushed through the underbrush that day hadn’t been a rabbit or squirrel, but rather this ghastly thing?
“Hole.”
Doug scrambled back, taking the baton with him. His motion startled Liv and she stood; their shoulders collided. Hole, Liv thought, could refer to so many things. Could the skinner be alluding to Abyss? Had the trap caught a second skinner? Or did this skinner wish to be tossed into Abyss so that it might impale itself upon the spikes and die?
“It’s talking,” Liv said.
Doug shook his head. “Just noises.”
“Those are words.”
“They just sound like words,” Doug insisted.
They were words, Liv was certain of it. Simple, single-syllable, preschool words, and for an instant Liv entertained a fantasy of Doug sneaking into the shed every night to read picture books to the skinner. What might the alien parrot next? Boy? Dog? Tree?
“Car,” the skinner repeated.
Liv pointed a finger and shook it.
“You can’t tell me that’s not a word!”
Doug broke away with a snort of disgust, wiped sweat from his forehead, and looked at the trail of Lee’s belongings scattered across the concrete floor. He checked his watch and then bent over, gathering the toothbrush, deodorant, and winter hat. Liv could tell by the set of his lips that he wanted to say something, and after snatching up Lee’s old scarf, he couldn’t resist it.
“You’re losing it,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Doug gave her an impatient look.
“You think it said car? You really think, Liv, that this thing knows the word car? Car is probably its word for ‘fuck you.’ Car is probably some god it’s praying will get it out of this mess. Well, it can say car all damn day. Nothing’s going to change what it’s got coming.”
Liv felt fireworks going off inside her. She turned and grabbed their first aid kit off a table. She nudged past Doug and squatted next to the skinner. Its writhing had gone slow-motion, a pained rotation of its injured hip. Carefully Liv held the area in place with her gloved hand and removed from the box antiseptic wipe, gauze, compress, and tape.
“Bow,” the skinner said.
Liv ground her jaw and opened the antiseptic wipe.
“Hole,” the skinner said.
Liv glared up at Doug’s stubborn chin.
Doug threw up exasperated hands. “You think when a dog goes ruff, ruff, it’s saying rough, like a rough texture? No! These are coincidences.”
Suddenly the shed felt like an oven. Liv began unspooling gauze, but her face, then body, was sluicing sweat. Doug paced around her and the skinner, gauging Liv’s ministrations. When he reached the skinner’s opposite side, Doug halted.
“So, what? You’re not mad at it anymore?”
“I’m not not mad,” Liv said. “I just know when I’ve heard words.”
“I guess mad can burn itself out,” Doug said. “Even if something does the worst thing in the world. Like kills your dad.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. I’m tired, okay?”
“I’m jumping to conclusions? I got news for you, Liv. We’re both tired. This is tiring work.”
“We don’t have to do this all ourselves. We could still call someone. Maybe not the police, if you don’t want to. But, I don’t know—a teacher?”
“An adult, is what you’re saying. Because adults have been so fair to me in the past. So kind and understanding.” He held up the baton. “Oh, they’ll definitely understand this. Liv, think about what you’re saying.”
“No, you think. We could clear Dad’s name. We could finally do it. The proof is lying right here. We show this thing to the world, and no one would call Lee Fleming crazy again.”
“One person sees this thing, five minutes later it’s gone. The FBI, CIA, whatever. Then we’re the ones who seem crazy.” Doug looked exasperated. “You’re looking for a way forward that doesn’t hurt, Liv. That doesn’t hurt you. But it’s going to hurt. We have to live with that. This is about Lee, not us. ‘If anything ever happens to me, you two know what to do.’ He said that, Liv. Lee said that.”
“Why not take a few weeks off? Get our heads straight?”
“A few weeks? You want to waste that kind of time? This isn’t a pet.”
“I know that. I know that better than anyone. It’s at my house. It’s in my backyard.”
“Then your responsibility is double.”
She yanked a length of medical tape. The gauze was already soaked with blood.
“Then why don’t I even have a padlock key?” she asked.
Doug crossed his arms. “Maybe I’m waiting to see if you’re serious.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Fine. Great. Be mad at me, if that’s what it takes. Do what you have to do. As long as you’re mad. Because if you’re not mad, that’s a problem. A big problem. A problem with you.”
Liv stared at the skinner. The spindly limbs, bent like triggers in expectation of pain. The huge, round, bulging eyes. The spumous mess of its mouth, reverted back to silence. It was inscrutable, obstinate, unsympathetic. Doug was right. She had to hate this thing, for her dad. She pictured him and searched herself for anger. Nothing, so she tried again, pushing herself toward specific recall, precise details that might bring Lee Fleming screaming back to life.
Up leaped a memory she’d long forgotten. Watching her dad put on a tie for a community theater matinee of Annie, jabbering about poetry again. Liv, in middle school back then, had scoffed, and Lee tsked at her as if she was missing the time of her life. Writing, he’d said, is the most dangerous thing there is. Because when you write, you’re only creating half the ideas. The reader brings the other half. And when you have two people involved in a plot, what’s that called?
Her answer: boring.
His response: a conspiracy.
Then she’d asked what the conspiracy of Annie was, and he’d replied that it must have something to do with how lousy kids are at keeping orphanages clean. Liv had laughed and said that if Miss Hannigan really wanted to punish Annie, she should have made her read poetry, and that made her dad laugh. There was no clutching bellies and rolling on the carpet; it was a small moment, one of a million, and that’s why, Liv figured, it hurt so hard. There would never be another moment like it. Because of this thing. This ugly, awful thing. And Doug was right—no adult, no matter who they were, would ever understand that.
In that way, she was trapped. She knew a lot about traps. The only way to get out of one was to fight and accept the wounds that came with it.
She had the first aid kit’s scissors in her hand. It was there to cut the medical tape. But in that moment, she could see herself plunging its blades into the center of the gauze, maybe the pulsing brown sack of the skinner’s heart, perhaps the softness of its neck. Hate returned. It had been waiting behind three small, unimportant sounds that bore a vague resemblance to English. Liv slapped the tape on the skinner’s bandage, but did it unkindly, and when she next glanced at Doug, he looked proud of her.
He went outside to fetch the hose. This was a responsibility, he’d said, and he didn’t shirk it. He came back and started to spray, creating a pink tide that sent clots of flesh like bitsy rafts into Liv’s shoes. Doug’s loathing of the skinner was all over him, and Liv was jealous. They ought to bear equal loads. There were, after all, two of them involved here. In Lee Fleming’s words: a conspiracy.