Ryan Jahn - Low Life

He used a coffee mug to bang a nail into the wall outside his apartment and to the left of his front door. Then he tied one end of a shoelace to the doorknob and the other end to the nail. He’d found the shoelace in a drawer in the kitchen, but had no idea where it had come from. Once it was tied in place he nodded. That, he thought, would keep the door from swinging open when he was out. When he was in, he could prop a chair in front of the door to hold it closed. Tomorrow he would buy a padlock to keep the door shut. He didn’t want Leonard or any of the handymen he hired to come into the apartment, which meant he’d have to fix the door himself.

He looked around to see if he’d drawn anyone’s attention with his late-night noise-making, but the corridor was empty save for him.

He grabbed the trash bag and headed for the stairs.

He parked his car in front of a 7-Eleven, the fluorescent light from inside spilling out through the dirty windows, splashing across the sun-faded asphalt of the parking lot. He stepped out of the car, carrying the trash bag, and with it he walked around to the back of the convenience store where a dumpster sat smelling of rot. He threw the bag into it.

He stood squinting just inside the door for almost a full minute before his eyes adjusted to the bright lights of the convenience store and he could make out the rows of chips and pork rinds and candy bars and magazines, all foiled in bright blue and green and yellow packaging.

Once his eyes adjusted he made his way to the back of the store, where a white freezer with steel doors sat, a picture of a polar bear holding up a bag of ice on its front. He opened one of the two steel doors and looked inside. He counted eighteen seven-pound bags of ice. He thought his bathtub held sixty gallons, which meant there were about a third as many bags as he needed – give or take. The bags were shy of a gallon, and he wasn’t sure exactly how the cubes would pack. About a third of what he needed, minus however many gallons a body took up.

If you rounded down and said a gallon weighed about eight pounds – a gallon of water actually weighed eight-point-three-five pounds – and if you assumed a person weighed about the same – eight pounds per gallon of meat – then Shackleford, if he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and that seemed about right to Simon, would take up another twenty-two and a half gallons of space himself. So to fill the tub Simon needed another twenty or so bags of ice in addition to what was in this freezer.

‘Is this all the ice you got?’ he asked the man behind the counter.

‘You think I’m holding out on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, that’s where we keep the ice.’

‘It’s where you keep all the ice?’

‘We tried to store extra on the roof, but it kept turning into water.’

After paying for the eighteen bags of ice, Simon loaded the back seat of his car up and headed to another 7-Eleven. There he got another fourteen bags of ice. And at a liquor store near his apartment he got another six bags just to be sure he had enough. Also a bottle of whiskey, since he was out. Then he headed back home.

There was a hole in the grocery bag that he hadn’t seen, and as he was carrying the body to the bathroom – struggling: a hundred and eighty pounds was a lot of weight, and this happened to be a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight – the head rolled right, as if the corpse wanted to see where they were going – watch out you don’t bang my head on the wall, buddy – and the blood which had pooled inside drizzled out and onto the hallway floor.

Simon put the body into the tub and cleaned up the trail of blood. He put the bloody paper towels into his trash can. He thought he should probably get rid of them as he had the others – by dropping them off in some random city dumpster – but it was late, he was tired, and the chances of anyone finding anything were slim. Still, just to be safe, he made sure there was nothing in the trash can with his name on it, a bill or a letter addressed to him. It was clean.

That done, he made several trips up and down the stairs, carrying as much ice as he could in each trip, his arms getting damp and cold, and then numb. He broke open the bags once he got them upstairs, and poured them over the body.

By the time he was done, the ice formed a mound at the top of the tub – like the black dirt on a fresh grave – and only the corpse’s head was visible above it. Or rather, the bloody bag which was taped over the corpse’s head.

He gathered up the empty plastic bags the ice had come in and threw them on top of the bloody paper towels in his trash can.

He changed back into pajamas, poured himself a whiskey, propped a chair in front of his front door to keep it closed for the night, and walked to the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the tub and sipped his drink.

The ice shifted and settled as it melted. Simon jumped at the sound, then laughed at himself for being so skittish. He took another sip of whiskey.

He felt cold inside. He had killed a man, a man who was now lying in his bathtub, and he felt almost nothing. He did not feel a loss. He wondered idly if Shackleford’s mother was still alive, and if she was whether she’d notice his absence – would phone calls go unanswered? He wondered if Shackleford’d had a wife – and if they’d been on good terms. He reached into the ice and grabbed the left hand and pulled it up to look at it. There was a gold band on the third finger. He wondered if Shackleford and his wife had any children. Would Shackleford’s wife look into her son’s green eyes and see her missing husband? Did they sit up in bed at night reading novels by Mickey Spillane or biographies of Audrey Hepburn, their feet touching beneath the blankets and sheets, sharing choice bits of text with one another? He wondered how long they had been married. He wondered if Shackleford ever had cause to remove his wedding band. He wondered what his wife tasted like when they kissed. Was her breath sweet? Did her lipstick taste waxy? He wondered what it felt like to have a wife, what it felt like to lie next to someone every night, to feel that warmth.

But mostly he wondered why this man had broken into his apartment, why this man had wanted him dead. For that was why he had come here. This hadn’t been a burglary. This had been an attempted murder – a premeditated murder: this man lying dead in Simon’s tub had driven here, parked his car, walked up the steps, and broken in through Simon’s front door with it in his mind to kill a man.

Why?

Simon couldn’t understand it. He lived a quiet life. He had never hurt a soul – until now, and this was self-defense. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want him dead. How anyone could be filled with so much rage, and all of it directed at him.

He sipped his whiskey and felt cold inside.

The ice shifted again. A sound came from the grocery bag. Simon reached over and put his drink on the small bathroom counter. He leaned closer to the grocery bag and thought he sensed movement – very slight movement – perhaps caused by shallow breathing. Was Shackleford still alive – unconscious but breathing low? The thought made Simon’s stomach feel sour.

Would he be able to dash out this man’s brains while he lay unconscious in his tub? Would he be able to simply dash out this man’s brains in cold blood, for no other purpose than to have it done? And if he couldn’t, what was he going to do with him? Let him go?

Simon leaned closer, hoping he was mistaken – maybe it was just the sound of the ice shifting again – but he wasn’t. He wasn’t mistaken.

Shackleford’s cold left hand shot up and grabbed a handful of Simon’s gray hair and yanked it hard, slamming Simon’s head against the blue art deco tiles that lined the wall around the tub. The pain was immediate and a star burst exploded in front of his eyes. He slipped off the edge of the tub and thudded to the floor with a clacking of teeth. He heard the ice shifting, felt cubes of it falling out of the tub around him and on him, and then something heavy – something which weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds – was on top of him. It was cold as a corpse, wet, and slippery as a fish.