Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

Strange how the longer you wait to do something the harder it is to do it. You push a task forward rather than pick it up, knowing you can take care of it later, always later, but as it rolls it gathers mass, like a snowball, and what you could once have picked up with one hand and put into your pocket now has to it the weight of planets.

Ian burps and salts his second egg.

He steps onto the elevator.

His apartment building was constructed as a hotel in 1924 by Carl Dodd. For some reason known only to him he thought Bulls Mouth was going to grow into the major metropolis between Houston and San Antonio. But it never happened. He died and left the place, as well as Dodd Dairy, to his children Carney and Vicki, who turned around and sold the hotel to a Houston realtor in 1996. The realtor converted the hotel into apartments for college kids who wanted out from under daddy’s thumb, but the conversion consisted of little more than knocking down the old sign and putting up a new one. Certainly a repairman hasn’t so much as glanced at the elevator in twenty years or more. Every day Ian steps into it he’s certain that today will be the day the cables finally snap.

The doors creak shut and Ian presses a button. The elevator shakes violently, as if the mere thought of movement frightens it, and then begins its descent.

The doors open on the ground floor.

Ian glances at his watch. He has twenty minutes to get to work.

Maggie hardly slept all night. Her thoughts kept turning to escape. Even counting did not help. She kept losing track and having to start over. She tossed and turned and found herself tangled in her sheets. She could not get comfortable and her brain could not find peace.

Now morning is here and she is standing beneath the basement’s sole window, on tippy-toe so that she can put her face into a bright beam of morning sunlight. The heat feels good on her skin. She wants to be out there again. She wants once more to feel fallen leaves and soil beneath her feet. To hear birds sing. To hear the still air come to life as a gust of hot summer wind forces itself through the leaves of the trees.

‘He might kill you if you try to escape again.’

She glances to the left.

A horse’s head poking from the dark shadows, flaring nostrils, a single black eye glistening in the small gray light reaching him from the window while the other is hidden in darkness, the toes of a pair of Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. That is all she can see of Borden. The rest of him in darkness.

‘I think he’s killed others.’

His mouth does not move when he speaks. The words seem to simply float from his mind, scatter on the air, and reform in hers.

‘I think so too,’ she says. ‘But I can’t stay.’

‘Don’t you remember what he did yesterday?’

‘I remember.’ She touches the scab bracelets on her wrists.

‘Then how can you think what you’re thinking?’

She does not respond. She looks back toward the window and lets the light fall upon her face once more.

‘It will be worse next time.’

‘I know.’

‘Even if he doesn’t kill you it will be worse.’

She nods silently. And now he has made her picture it in her mind. Hanging from the punishment hook, her hands purple and numb, her wrists bleeding, the rest of her body helpless, defenseless as she swings. She has been there before, at least two dozen times, and it is always terrible.

She can kick. Kicking keeps Henry away, but only temporarily, and when she stops kicking, as she has to eventually, Henry’s punishment is even worse than it would have been. The mere thought of the punishment hook has kept her obedient on many occasions when every part of her down to the last cell cried out for rebellion against the horrors of the Nightmare World.

‘I know,’ she says again.

But with the morning light falling upon her face she does not care. She does care, she is terrified, but even caring and being terrified she believes it will be worth the risk. She cannot stay here any longer. Not after yesterday. It’s worth the risk.

‘Even if he kills you?’

‘Even then.’

‘But what about me?’

‘You can come.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can never leave. This is my home.’

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

‘This is where I was born. I can’t live out there.’

‘You can try.’

‘I know better. I can never leave.’

‘Why?’

Only silence in response.

‘Borden?’

More silence. Then: ‘If you try to leave, I’ll tell.’

‘You can’t.’

‘If you leave. .’

‘If I leave, what?’

‘You can’t leave.’

‘You can’t tell.’

‘I can never leave and you can never leave.’

‘You can’t tell!’

He steps back into the shadows.

‘Borden?’

He does not respond. She closes her eyes imagining herself swinging from the punishment hook, imagining blood running down her arms from her bloody wrists, imagining the terrible pain in her shoulders and hands, imagining the blows she will receive.

She opens her eyes and looks to the shadows. They are dense as cloth and she cannot see through them. Anything could be in that darkness.

You can never leave.

Diego Peña hates the sun: it’s mocking him up there above the trees, shining its white light into his eyes and cooking his throbbing brain as he drives east along Flatland Avenue. If he could draw his service weapon and shoot the thing down he thinks he might actually do it. Watch it drop like a dead bird and go out like a candle.

He burps, almost vomits, and swallows it back.

He doesn’t know how many drinks he had last night at Roberta’s but it was at least half a dozen too many. He should just stop going there and make O’Connell’s his regular place. He’s incapable of regulating himself at Roberta’s.

Ever since he answered a domestic disturbance call and took a roll of barbed wire to the face from her ex-husband Jimmy Block, Roberta has given him free drinks. Ever since she got the bar in the divorce settlement six months later and changed the name from Jimmy’s to Roberta’s, anyway, though some few partisans refused to go along with the name change and even now call it Jimmy’s. Diego burps again and swallows back what comes up. He shouldn’t have eaten the leftover rabo de toro for breakfast. But he’d thought his time kneeling before the toilet was finished. He thought a little food might soak up what alcohol was left in him.

If the look on Cordelia’s face this morning was any indication, his wife thinks over four years of free drinks has been enough. Of course he was hunched over the toilet at the time, and when he looked up with spittle on his chin she turned and walked away, so maybe he misread her expression in that brief moment before her back was to him and she was saying, ‘. . hace lo que le sale de los cojones .’

What he needs is a red rooster: light beer, tomato juice, hot sauce, a splash of clam juice, and one raw egg. That would do him well. He glances at his watch. Seven thirty. Roberta’s morning bartender won’t even be in for another two and a half hours. He’ll have to suffer this.

He guesses he’s on duty then.

Kind of.

Pastor Warden came into Roberta’s last night around eight thirty, just as the place was coming to life, and announced he’d pay ten dollars a head for each dachshund returned.

‘Dead or alive?’ Andy Paulson said from his stool at the bar, glancing over his shoulder, grinning through his broken china teeth, beer foam hanging from his ridiculous waxed mustaches.

‘Alive,’ Warden said. ‘Dead’ll get you a six-hour sermon on the sins of intoxication come Sunday morning.’