Erika screwed her face up and said, "That's disgusting, Jack. Did you look at it?"
"Sure I did," I told her. "Why not?"
"What did it look like?" she asked. "Was it a skeleton? Was it just bones?"
"Mostly," I said. "There was some skin attached to it. It looked like a rolled-up grocery bag, Erika. There was nothing upsetting about it."
"And was there anything else?" Now, her look of disgust was mixed with curiosity.
"Anything else?"
"Sure. You find an arm and you'll probably find other things."
"Nothing yet, Erika."
She rolled her eyes. "That's comforting."
"This bothers you, doesn't it?" I said.
"Huh?" she said, clearly incredulous.
"I asked if this bothered you." I paused very briefly. "I guess it probably does."
She reached up and patted the top of my head. "Yes, Jack," she said. "It bothers me."
I felt very foolish.
She had an accident once that scared the hell out of me. She was cleaning the cellar floor of our townhouse in Syracuse. It was particularly dirty because we'd been gone for a week and a half, and our cats' litter box had grown too filthy for them, so they'd started using the floor. The smell was awful.
I was upstairs, making dinner, when the accident happened. She'd been moving some aluminum screens and windows that had been leaning against the wall—the cats had utilized the area behind these screens and windows—when one of the windows shattered. A shard of glass put a nasty gash in her arm, just above the wrist, and when I got down there, after hearing her scream, I found her holding the arm tightly, eyes wide, mouth open. I realized she was going into shock.
The gash was bleeding badly; my first thought was that an artery had been severed, so I led her to the cellar steps, sat her down, ran upstairs and grabbed a dishtowel, ran back, and made a tourniquet.
"I'm taking you to the emergency room, Erika."
She shook her head.
"Erika, this is a very bad wound; you might have severed an artery."
She shook her head again. "No," she whispered.
"You're being stubborn."
"I'm not," she managed. "The bleeding will stop, Jack." She sounded very sure of herself. "It's not bad."
I believed her. I told myself that I was being foolish. "Yeah, and where'd you get your medical degree?"
And she said, with that same stiff self-confidence, "I know my body, Jack."
I sat beside her. I saw that much of the towel, which was white, had turned a deep shade of red. "What were you doing, Erika?" I asked, merely for something to say.
"I was moving one of those windows, Jack. The cats crapped behind it."
"This is foolish," I began, and she interrupted, "I know my body, Jack."
I was nervous, of course; I nearly said something suggestive, something to lighten the tension between us. Instead I asked, "Am I being overly protective?"
"Yes. But it's okay. The bleeding has stopped."
I shook my head. She took the towel off her arm. The bleeding had indeed stopped. I shook my head again. "Keep it wrapped up, Erika, please—"
"No," she said. "It's okay."
And it was. A narrow, almost invisible scar is all that remains.
Several days after Jim Sandy's discovery I told her, "Jim Sandy said that other . . . body parts have been found in the area."
We were in bed. I felt her stiffen up beside me; she said nothing for a few moments. Then: "On our property, you mean?"
"I think so. I'd have to check."
"Check what?"
"The survey map. I'd have to pace the boundary out, I think. What does it matter?"
"It matters," she said, her tone very earnest. "I don't care if they find 'body parts' somewhere else, Jack. It's no concern of mine. But when they start finding them on my property—" She paused. When she continued, her tone was softer. "It's spooky, Jack."
"It gives the place atmosphere," I said.
She said nothing.
"Don't you think it gives the place atmosphere, Erika?"
"No," she whispered.
"Do you think we should move?"
"Not yet," she said.
"When, then?"
"When they start finding heads and torsos and thighs and eyeballs and . . ." She paused. "Then we move!"
"It's a deal," I said.
But we never moved from the house. In retrospect, maybe we should have. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, after all, but the effort might have given me some brief comfort.
I'm a commercial artist. In college I studied fine arts—it's what I got my master's in, in fact—and I had grand ideas of making some kind of living as a painter. I didn't care if it was a good living, or even a poor one. I was willing to suffer. I did suffer. For ten years, I went from one lousy job to another—I laid sewer pipe; I washed dishes; I was a gardener's helper, a carpenter's helper, a plumber's assistant. And all the while I told myself, and believed it, that I was doing it "for the sake of art." I did hundreds of paintings. Landscapes, mostly, and a few dozen portraits (when friends or relatives pleaded with me to do something with my painting that would get me some money). I sold five of the landscapes in ten years (earning a total of $825.00 from them), and all of the portraits, because they were, in a sense, commissioned. And one morning, seven years ago, I sliced my face up while shaving with a razor blade that should have been replaced weeks earlier, but I literally did not have the money to replace it. I looked at myself in the mirror and whispered, "Enough! This has gone far enough!" A week later I had a position as an apprentice commercial artist with an ad agency in Elmira, New York.
I was still working for that agency when Erika and I bought the farmhouse. The agency had moved to Syracuse, a good 125 miles from the house, but they trusted me to do much of my work at home, so it wasn't a matter of commuting that distance every day. Once or twice a week would do it.
My work is fairly well known. I've done jobs for Coca-Cola, for Pampers, for IBM, and NIKON, and Burpee Seeds, plus several dozen others. No one knows that the work they're looking at is mine, although I've managed to slip my initials into a few ads (check the rectangular reflection of white light on the Coca-Cola ads that feature a koala bear). I've resigned myself to anonymity.
Jim Sandy never finished his trench. He came back to the house the day after he'd begun work and told me, "Sorry, Mr. Harris, but you gotta get yourself someone else to do this work."
"Who, for instance?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Beats me." Then he loaded up his backhoe and left. I think the cellar leaks to this day.
Life at the farmhouse was going to be rustic, I realized. We had no trash pickup, for instance. We got a permit from the town clerk that allowed us to use a sanitary landfill three miles east of the village. This weekly job started shortly after we moved to the house. We put a half-dozen plastic bags filled with trash and garbage into my Toyota and carted the whole stinking mess to the landfill, which, we found, was down a half-dozen narrow dirt roads. It gave us a chance to scout out the area, anyway, which Erika enjoyed. There were a lot of mobile homes, most of them with makeshift the roofs—I guessed that it was a town zoning ordinance—a trailer looked less like a trailer and was indeed more stationary and therefore a more permanent part of the tax base if it had an extra roof on it. There were also several small, crudely built houses, some with tarpaper roofs and windows covered with plastic—most apparently had fallen into years of disuse. A few were inhabited. We saw several scruffy children standing around, looking bored, their equally bored-looking mothers behind them; this bothered Erika a lot. She said that children who had to be so close to the earth should learn to enjoy it. I accused her of naïveté, and the subject was dropped.
We saw a couple of joggers, too, which I didn't expect. I had assumed that jogging was an urban pastime and that rural people did enough hard work that jogging was unnecessary. "You're a snob," Erika said, and I agreed.
"These people do seem to put more into it, though," I said. And it was true. One of the joggers, a man apparently in his late thirties, legs and arms and chest well-muscled, head bobbing, dark hair flying this way and that, looked wonderfully involved in what he was doing.
"Now that man's serious about it, Erika," I said. "He's not just fooling around."
"Of course he's not fooling around," she said. He obviously knows the value of what he's got."
"The value of what he's got?" I asked.
She nodded. "Yes. His body. He knows how precious it is." She gave me a quick once over, reached and patted my stomach. "You could use a little self-appreciation yourself, Jack."
I glanced at her, grinned. "Oh? I thought you liked that . . . "—I looked down briefly at the slight protrusion of my belly—"that small proof of my imperfection."
She laughed quickly. "Jack, I love what makes you human. I wouldn't change any of it." She patted my stomach again. "Even that."
"Thanks." I said, grinning. I glanced in the rearview mirror; the jogger had fallen. I stopped, looked back; Erika looked, too.
"He'll be okay," she said, an edge to her tone that surprised me.
I started backing up; the jogger was lying motionless face down in the road, his arms wide and his legs straight.
"Jack." Erika said sharply, "he doesn't need your help. He'll be all right."
I looked at her, surprised: "What are you saying, Erika?—'Don't get involved'?"
"Oh, of course not!" She was angry, now; I had rarely seen her so quick-tempered.
The jogger pushed his upper body off the road, then, as if he were doing pushups. I stopped the car, watched him bring his knees forward so he was on his haunches, take a long, deep breath, and stand.
Erika said, "These people can take care of them—selves, Jack, you'll see."
"Thanks," I said testily, "for you old-time country wisdom."
She sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry with you." She reached, patted my belly yet again in an effort to lighten things up. "C'mon, let's go home and make love, paunch and all."
The area around the house is starkly rural. The road in front of it is paved but badly rutted, and our nearest neighbors, when we moved in, were an old German couple named Alnor who lived in a huge and immaculate white Victorian house a good mile and a half north of our house. The Alnors ran an antique shop in their small white barn, and we soon found that they were friendly enough if we looked to be on the verge of buying something, but became stiff and cool if we just wanted to talk. We never got to know them well. When the trouble started, they didn't come to us for help; they toughed it out for a while, all by themselves (I give them credit for that). Then one day I saw that their house had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck on it and a distinct air of abandonment about it.
The nearest town is called Cohocton. Once a year the locals stage what they call the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival, which involves neither trees nor sitting. Local men stand for twenty-four hours at a time on small platforms at the top of fifty-foot tall wooden poles. Lots of beer and handicrafts are sold at these festivals, and everyone involved seems to realize the kind of gritty charm they hold for city people, which Erika and I were. We've attended the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival only once, shortly after moving into the farmhouse. It was a sublimely simple diversion from the confusion, of moving in and getting things straightened around. The men on the poles wore broad, clownlike smiles, as if they realized the idiocy of the whole event. There was no real purpose to it. No one won anything for the longest time standing on a pole. It was merely something pointless to do, and even more pointless to watch, and everyone enjoyed the hell out of it.
It wasn't until several days after Jim Sandy left with his backhoe that Erika asked me, "What kind of body parts, Jack?"
She was feeding our two cats their once-a-day can of Goff Pure Horsemeat Catfood (I'd once done some very good work for Goff, and as a kind of spiff they'd given me several years' worth of their cat food), and the kitchen smelled bad. "It's a hell of a time to ask something like that," I said.
She shrugged. "What's a good time?"
I shrugged, said, "None, I guess," paused, went on, "An arm. Some fingers. A few ribs."
"Where?"
"Where what?—Where'd they find the ribs?"
"No. Everything, Jack." Our cats—a wiry tom we called Orphan, because that's the way he came to us, and a big, orange longhair named Ginger—were rubbing against her ankles, now, telling her thank you, could they please have some more. "Where'd they find the other arm, and the fingers, and the ribs?" She leaned over, stroked Ginger, said to her, "No, that's enough."
"Various places," I said. "Here and there. They found part of a head, too. Did I tell you that?"
That was a bombshell. Her mouth dropped open, though very briefly; she closed it at once, leaned over again, patted Ginger, said "No!" to her again.
"Did you hear what I said, Erika?"
She looked up at me. "I heard."
"And?"
She looked down at 'Ginger again. She said nothing. "And?" I said again.
She shrugged, her head still lowered. "I don't know." She was clearly upset; her voice was trembling. "Fingers and toes I can deal with, Jack." A nervous smile flickered across her lips. "'Part of a head' —that's a different story, isn't it?" She straightened, looked very seriously at me. "Isn't it?" she repeated.
"It was a very small part, I'm told," I said. "Part of a forehead, and part of a nose—they were attached—"
She cut in, "Oh, give me a break, Jack! I really don't want to hear this!" And she stalked from the room.
The boy who swept toward me from behind that dying oak twenty years ago was a boy I recognized. His name was Harry Simms. He was my age; we went to school together, we even shared some of the same classes. Earlier in the day, we'd been on opposite teams in a game of battle ball. Battle ball was a game we all liked because it allowed us to vent whatever pubescent anger and tension had built up—I think it gave us nearly the same kind of relief as masturbation.
He screamed this as he swept toward me from behind that oak: "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Then he was gone.
In school three days later, Harry's seat was empty and rumor had it that he'd run away from home. On my way back from school that night, through the park, I went looking for him.