Charlie Huston - The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

I rested my head on the carpet and watched as he shook out the bag and fitted it over Talbot's crushed head.

He came over to me.

– And it looks like that training's going to come in handy for you.

He grabbed one end of the knot that tied my hands and gave it a tug and it came apart.

– You best get cleaning.

He took the rope to the corpse and used it to tie the bag around its neck.

– And then go get our can, and call.

He tossed Talbot's cellphone onto the carpet.

– Just call the last number he called on there.

He took the corpse under its arms, pushed up with his legs, let it flop over his shoulder and stood.

– I'll take care of this bit here.

He walked to the door, easy under the weight of the dead.

He opened the door.

– Go get my can. I want them damn almonds. Alright?

I stared at Talbot's blood in my kitchen.

The cowboy tapped a heel on the floor.

– Said alright}

I looked away from the mess.

– Yeah. Alright.

He touched the brim of his hat.

– Good then. And, oh yeah, I got your boss's van. You can have that back too, when you bring the can. Case you need any other motivation.

And he went out the door, corpse on his shoulder, apparently prepared for any questions such a thing might raise.

That or just quick on the draw.

Almonds.

As I cleaned yet another crime scene, I thought about almonds.

Stripped to my underwear, a pair of sneakers, and rubber gloves I took down the white pillowcases I had hung over the kitchen windows to keep the morning sunlight from pouring in when I used to get up early and have my coffee before going off to teach kids how to read and write and add and subtract. And I thought about fucking nuts.

In all their guises.

Starting with myself.

Dropping the pillowcases into the bathtub after rinsing them out and dousing them in about a half gallon of bleach, I considered just how crazy I actually was. Not a question I'd been apt to embrace for the last year, but one that seemed appropriate to the moment.

I brought my desk lamp and a clip light from Chev's bedroom into the kitchen and plugged them in. The improved lighting gave me a better idea of what I was dealing with. Studying the remains of a man's face spattered about the area where I prepared my meals, or opened my to-go containers anyway, and finding that I didn't really have any emotional reaction to speak of, gave me a better idea of just how out of normal mental alignment I'd gotten.

I looked down at my nearly naked, blood-scrubbing self.

– Skewed.

I pulled a strip of paper towels off the roll I'd gotten from under the sink and started wiping the little card table under the window.

– Your mentality, Webster Fillmore Goodhue, has become seriously fucking skewed.

I cleaned, wondering if the fact that it had taken witnessing a man deliberately murdered in front of me to shake this realization loose was a bad thing, or a really really really bad thing. There seeming to be no other options available.

The table clean, I carried it to the edge of the linoleum kitchen and set it safely across the carpet border of the livingroom. Along that edge, I spotted a rim of dark wet spots on the dirty carpet. I soaked a hand towel in cold water and blotted the spots before they could set. I worked some dish soap into the carpet fibers and left it to be finished later.

The worst of the mess was puddled below the window. Talbot had, quite fortunately it seemed, looked down after the first blow, sending most of the blood that had poured from his ruptured nose to the floor, rather than hosing the walls with it. Of course the cowboy had swung the phone in an uppercut on the second blow. Not so good. That meant the ceiling had a nice spray pattern on it. But the last three blows were all placed squarely once Talbot was on the floor on his back.

I looked up.

– Ceiling first.

I got the stepladder from the hall closet and started spraying and wiping, moving from side to side as my body crossed the beams of the lights and cast shadows over the blood, trying to see clearly.

When the worst was done, when I'd scooped the partially congealed blood from the floor and scrubbed the walls and mopped and wiped and wiped some more, and taken four ruined sponges and the shredded remains of two paper towel rolls and three old Ts I'd had to use as rags, and the mop head, and stuffed it all in the cleaning bucket and carried it downstairs and locked it in the trunk of my crapped-out 510 in the driveway, I poured the remains of a bottle of hydrogen peroxide into the empty window-cleaner spray bottle and misted the carpet and floor and walls. The carpet foamed in a couple spots, but it wasn't anything visible to the naked eye, so I let it go. Back up on the ladder, I sprayed the ceiling, searching for any last remains, and caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the dark window.

All but naked, on a stepladder, cleaning dead man's blood from my kitchen ceiling, I stopped and addressed the young man I saw there.

– Is it possible, my friend, that your coping mechanisms have been over-compensating for the shit that happened on that bus?

The young man in the window responded.

– What shit are you speaking of?

I continued the dialogue.

– That shit where a little girl from your class was hit by a stray bullet and died in your arms and you were covered in her blood.

He shrugged.

– Oh. That.

I put my hands on my hips.

– See, that's what I'm talking about, that nonchalance about the whole thing, and also just kind of being a dick to everyone, that's not the way people react to traumatic situations.

He was unimpressed.

– It's not? You know of another reaction? You've experienced another reaction? Man, as far as you know, this is totally normal. This may be the most normal thing you've ever done in your life.

I jabbed my finger at him.

– Fuck you! That's fucked up. I'm trying to really talk about this for a change and you're being all.

– What? I'm being all what?

I froze, looked at my reflection for a long and deeply disturbing minute.

I shook my head.

– Man, I am not even having this conversation with you right now.

And I climbed off the ladder and laid myself spread eagle on the floor and stared at the flawlessly clean ceiling, and I think I may have cried for the first time in a year, but I'm not entirely sure because a huge mass of sleep loomed and got its arms round my middle and dragged down and I was gone.

Mumbling as my eye slammed shut.

– Fucking almonds.

– I appreciate you cleaning up, you know.

I opened my eyes and found the daylight the pillowcases were meant to keep at bay was shooting me in the face.

– But it's not really going to change anything.

I looked at Chev, sitting on the edge of his lounger, rubbing his eyes.

I pushed myself up on my elbows.

– I'm sorry about the money, man.

He flopped back in the chair and let out all the air in his lungs.

– See, that's the point right there.

I shaded my eyes from the sun.

– I didn't even know he gave it to me, Chev.

He shook his head.

– Fuck the money. That is not the point. You missing the point is the point. I get the money thing, I get you going to see him. He's your dad. I understand that more than you do. Jesus, man, I saw him like six months ago.

I sat up.

– What?

– When you didn't stop acting all fucked up after a few months, I went and saw L.L.

– Chev.

– I didn't know what to do, you know? Thea was like, He'll heal in time. People I talked to, the grief counselor at the hospital, they all said you needed to confront what had happened, talk about it in a supportive environment. Well, I knew sure as fuck that wasn't gonna happen. I read these books on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they described you pretty smack-on. I mean.