Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

The people watch him, anticipating a sermon or speech. He does a back bend, some dance move. Finally he delivers what they’re waiting for. “In a town upstate — long time ago — there were three sisters, Kate, Margaret, and Leah. There are always three sisters, right? These three heard voices. Or at least Kate and Maggie did. Leah was older, wiser. Still, she went along for the ride. The sisters claimed the voices belonged to dead people. Much like yourselves, they could speak to the dead.” Zeke twists, cognizant of his entire audience. “And thousands of people believed them. It’s incredible how many people believe this, right? Incredible how much people will pay, right? If they’re desperate enough, yeah? Say a mom who lost her kid. I bet you get a lot of those. I bet that’s a real moneymaker for you.”

Ruth stiffens.

“Or people don’t even have to believe it. Doesn’t affect your business. Everybody’s got dead people. You probably even have non-believers lining up to pay you. Right? Genius! Wish I’d thought it.” The more excited Zeke gets, the damper his nasal cavity becomes. “But these sisters heard rappings at night. How they knew it was dead people instead of, say, a tree branch or a squirrel or their own ankles cracking, I don’t know. Same way you know, I guess.”

Nat stays low to his lap.

“So the sisters decide that there’d been a murder.” Zeke brushes the knuckles of one hand lightly. “They say the voices told them.”

Ruth’s back becomes brittle. “A murder.”

“The rappings told the girls, and the girls told their parents. Said that there’d been a murder right in their house. And the parents believe the children, so the family digs out the whole basement looking for the bones. And they found them. Tibia, humerus, et cetera. Could have belonged to anything, cow, coyote. Or maybe there was a murder.” Zeke bends low.

Ruth worries that he will bring his noseless wet hole of a face closer to her. His hair is shoulder length and greasy. He stretches back again, hands on his butt. His tunic lifts to show his hip girdle. He straightens, takes one step closer.

“The girls fingered a guy, a stranger, a traveling merchant. Three young girls accused a grown man on account of some late-night rappings and a cow bone. And still, the whole town believes them, whole town shunned this man, drove him away. Why?”

Zeke looks around to the group gathered. They smile and nod as if they already know the answer but will let him deliver the punch line. “Because belief is easier. Belief is fun, right? An entire religion was born from these girls, hundreds of people to this day, unshakable in their belief, even after the girls admitted making it all up.” Zeke wraps his arms together like some sort of snake yogi, this way, then that. “Because it’s not untrue to the people who believe it. That’s what I think I hear you saying, Brother Nat? Yes. This bit about the pool?”

Zeke isn’t really talking to Nat. He isn’t talking to anyone besides Ruth. Zeke laughs. First just a heaving of the shoulders, then a hack. He cackles. He reaches up to the sky before wiping his eyes. “I love that story.” Knee slapping. “I love that G.D. story!”

The people begin to twitter, colorful birds who forgot how to fly. They also love that story. Zeke claps his hands for silence.

“Faith is beautiful.” Zeke smiles gently. “For example, what if I told you, Ruth, that you were meant for me? That you and I, together, were supposed to alter life as we know it on Earth? What would you think if I told you that?”

“I think you need help.”

“I needed your help, but you went and married somebody else.”

The twittering of the peanut gallery starts up again. “Who are these people?” Ruth asks.

Zeke turns to gather them. He smiles. “These,” he says, “are the faithful. The believers. At least some of them. Am I right, Sister Sylvia?”

The woman in white nods.

The cowboy returns just then bearing a tray of steaming ceramic cups, the sort with no handles. And on the tray beside the tea set is a paper cylinder of Comet, the cleaning powder.

“Thank you, Confucius.” Zeke again takes his seat. Confucius is not a cowboy nor is he Chinese. He looks Bronx Italian, stuffed into his clothes. He serves Zeke tea.

Zeke lifts his mug to his chin. He breathes like a horse, inhaling the fragrance from the brew. The caked darkness of his sinuses turns his entire face into a respiratory apparatus, fleshy nodules flare with each exhalation.

Confucius sprinkles a pile of the pale aquamarine powder on the low table. He claims a seat, rocks onto one hip in order to pull a small slim box from his coat pocket, a cigarette case. He pops the clasp and, using the hard edge of a credit card, cuts and divides the cleaning powder into rows and rows of fine lines. Zeke selects a small section of straw from the case and, inserting its plastic into one open flap of his sinus cavity, he uses his hand to close off any other opening. Zeke inhales deeply, snorting Comet, loud as a slurp.

Ruth has to, finally, look away.

He lifts his head, cracks into a broad smile. “Light of the world. Want to try it?” He extends the damp straw to Ruth. His nostrils are splattered-speckled blue now that the pale powder has dampened.

The Saint Bernard quite suddenly has a desperate itch, windmilling his leg to scratch the spot.

Ruth voices an obvious truth. “You are not supposed to snort that. It’s toilet bowl cleaner.”

“It”—Zeke lifts the canister up to his cheek—“has been a heavenly deliverance from the betrayal you dealt me.”

“Me?”

He lifts his mug to his chin, breathes like a horse, inhaling the fragrance of the tea. He wipes his sinus cavities clean with a sleeve. “You were the catalyst, Ruth. You were going to lead these people where they are supposed to go. Now they’ve got no mother.”

Cowboy has his chin in his palm.

“Why me?”

“It’s printed clear as day across your face. You’re a map. You were my wife, and I was your husband, your true husband!” He screams it loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

Nat and Ruth stare openly at each other. “What? No.”

“You don’t have to be scared of me,” Zeke tells Ruth.

“I’m not scared. I’m leaving.”

A faint trickle of creamy blue oozes from his non-nose. Again he wipes. “Hold on. Just hold on. I didn’t mean to scare you. What about the box? That’s why we’re here, right? Sylvia, Confucius? That’s our purpose tonight, right? Money?”

“Yes,” the woman says. “Tonight that is our purpose.”

“Sylvia wants proof I’m no thief. Right?”

The woman doesn’t answer. Her chin ticks back and forth.

“See, years back, we lost a whole lot of money, and we really need that money just now. Sister Sylvia needs it so much she’s starting to suspect that maybe I was the one who stole the money. Right?” he asks Sylvia.

“Right.”

“So if we find the money, then all’s well, right?”

“Right,” Sylvia whispers again.

“But if we don’t find the money, if bad things happen to good people, then why bother believing anything at all? Right again?” Zeke chuckles.

Sylvia takes her face into her hands. “Right.”

He turns to Ruth. “I think we can kill two birds with one stone. Find the money and finish my story, the three sisters, OK? Because what I’m wondering, what I really want to ask you”—he puts both index fingers up to his temples like two guns—“is where’s your third sister? You’re missing one. Where is he, Ruth?”

“What?”

“Where’s that guy you married? I’ve got a hunch he can solve this whole mystery.”

“No. He’s not like us.”