James Hall - Body Language

‘You’ll never stand outside my window again. Say it.’

‘Okay, okay, never in a million years will I stand outside your window.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now when your parents get home, you’re going to tell them what you did to Pugsy.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that. My dad’ll kill me.’

She raised the pistol, supported it with her left hand, cocked the hammer with her thumb, and aimed at the wall a couple of feet beside him.

She heard her father’s lawn mower sputter and die out. She heard him trying to start it. Pulling the cord, pulling it again.

She was very calm, floating high, watching herself, that little girl.

‘All right, all right, goddamn it.’ He put his hands up beside his shoulders. ‘I’ll tell my dad about your stupid dog. Okay? Now get the hell out of my room.’

Alexandra took a deep breath and let it go. She was lowering the pistol when behind her she heard the surge and flutter of water – a toilet flushing.

She swung around and peered down the hall toward the Flints’ single bathroom. As she waited for the bathroom door to open, she heard Darnel fling his civics book aside, then heard the screech of the bedsprings.

She spun back and glimpsed his snarling face, his hands clawing the air as he leapt at her. Jerking away, she slammed against the door, stumbled, and fell to the floor. On her way down, the pistol fired.

Darnel was flung backward against the edge of the bed. After hanging there a moment, he spilled to the floor and came to rest in a sitting position, his legs stretched across the rattan rug, his back propped against the side of the mattress. He was motionless except for his right arm, which twitched.

The bullet had struck him in the jaw and had torn away his right cheek. His bedspread was covered with blood and the spatter of his skull. She watched Darnel’s arm quiver for a few moments. It was as if he was trying to shake loose something stuck to his fingers. Gradually, the arm went dead. And at the same time, the buzzing beneath her skin eased.

She got back on her feet. She felt nauseated and empty and even farther away from her body than she’d been before – up above the ceiling, beyond the roof, way up in the air and the high, streaming clouds. But she couldn’t stop staring at Darnel, at the open place where his jaw had been. In her hand, the pistol hung heavy, tilting her sideways. She saw the blood running down his hairless chest, the angle of his neck as it hung to the side. Her eyes burned from staring, but she could not pull away.

Then she was crying, dragging in gulps of air between sobs, but at the same time she floated high up in the air like a peaceful mist, looking down at the girl who sobbed and was frozen in place, a gun in her hand.

In the Flints’ hallway, there were heavy steps. She stopped crying, but Alexandra didn’t move, didn’t turn from the faceless thing before her. Her eyes ached, but she continued to stare at the dead boy.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Her father, Lawton, was behind her, breathing hard. He smelled of cut grass and sweat. ‘Christ Almighty.’

He stood unmoving for a few moments; then his hands were gentle but commanding as he drew Alexandra into the hallway and pried the pistol from her hand and ordered her to stay put, not to move. He sprinted down the hallway and out the back door of the Flints’ house.

Alexandra wiped her nose and stared at a rectangle of copper that sat on the hallway bookshelf. Etched into it was a quote from Ecclesiastes: ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.’

She looked at the words from the Bible, read them over and over to herself for whatever comfort they might provide, but she had no idea what they meant. She was cold and vacant and the buzzing had completely ceased.

When her father returned, he was carrying a plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. He held it inside a blue bandanna.

‘You stay here,’ he said.

He went into Darnel’s room, and Alexandra moved to the doorway to see.

She watched him step around the widening circle of blood and stoop over Darnel and dump the powdery dust across his shirt. He stood up and dropped the empty bag near his lifeless hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘A drug,’ he said. ‘An illegal substance.’

‘Why do you have it?’

‘For emergencies,’ he said, ‘occasions like this.’

He stared down at the body, the sweat sheening his face.

‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

‘I don’t need to hear it, sweetheart. I can see.’

‘I just wanted to scare him. That’s all.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all right. We’ll fix this. We will.’

‘He killed Pugsy, Dad. He murdered the dog.’

Her father stepped over to Darnel’s dresser and, using the blue bandanna, opened each of the drawers and dumped them onto the floor.

‘But it wasn’t just about Pugsy,’ she said. ‘It was about me.’

Her father drew a long breath and stared at the dead boy.

‘Did he touch you, Alexandra?’ he asked quietly, his eyes hidden from her. ‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Yes.’

Her father tried to say something, but the words failed in his throat and he swallowed hard.

‘Am I going to the electric chair?’

He shook his head and stepped over to her and squatted down to look squarely into her eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not if I have anything to say about it.’

She hugged him and he patted her back as she wept. Finally, he rose and took her by the arm, then drew her away and guided her out of the room, down the hallway and toward the back door.

At the door, she halted.

‘There’s somebody else in the house.’

Her father turned and knelt down to peer into her eyes. His eyes were bruised and misty. She had never seen him look so naked before.

‘I heard a toilet flush,’ she said. ‘There’s someone else here.’

Her father gazed past her, down the hallway, and swallowed hard. Then he rose, walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and went inside. He came back out a few moments later. Next, he went into the Flints’ bedroom, then the girls’ room. When he came back down the hall, he was shaking his head.

‘There’s no one here.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Alexandra, listen to me. Nothing happened here. It’s all going to go away and we’ll forget it and things will be the way they were before. I promise you that. Exactly the way they were. This didn’t happen, Alex. This simply didn’t occur.’

They walked back to their yard and Alexandra sat in the shade of a mango tree, and through the blur of her tears she watched her father finish mowing the grass. Her body felt heavy and old, as if the part of her that had been floating above had stolen all the buoyancy from her flesh.

She watched him, shirtless in the sun, a scattering of gray hairs showing among the dense forest on his chest. He pushed the mower through the tall grass by the canal. And she thought about men, how they could do such terrible things, then go right back to eating ice cream, mowing the grass. She watched her father and tried to picture herself as a grown woman married to a man like him, someone strong and sheltering.

The flesh of her face felt heavy. She couldn’t imagine laughing again, or even smiling. It was the first time in her life she had noticed the dreadful pull of gravity.

A half hour later when the Flints returned home, the twins ran over to Alexandra and began to chatter while they ate their raspberry Popsicles. Alex tried to act natural, listening and nodding. Molly asked her about her reddened eyes, and Alexandra said her allergies were acting up. A few minutes later, Mrs Flint screamed and screamed again, and the girls went flying into their house.