George Saunders: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

I roll over into the culvert muck and he grabs me by the collar and sits me up.

“I steal four jawbreakers and a Slim Jim and your friend kills and mutilates me?” he says.

“He wasn’t my friend,” I say.

“He wasn’t your enemy,” the kid says.

Then he cocks his head. Through his clear skull I see Sam coming out of the woods. The kid cowers behind me. Even dead he’s scared of Sam. He’s so scared he blasts straight up in the air shrieking and vanishes over the retaining wall.

Sam comes for me with a hunting knife.

“Don’t take this too personal,” he says, “but you’ve got to go. You know a few things I don’t want broadcast.”

I’m madly framing calming words in my head as he drives the knife in. I can’t believe it. Never again to see my kids? Never again to sleep and wake to their liquid high voices and sweet breaths?

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.

Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.

The first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter. We were young, ignorant of mercy, and called her Boneless or Balled-Up Gumby for the way her limbs were twisted and useless. She looked like a newborn colt, appendages folded in as she lay on the velour couch protected by guardrails. Leo and I stood outside the window on cinder blocks, watching. She was scared of the tub, so to bathe her Split Lip covered the couch with a tarp and caught the runoff in a bucket. Mrs. Split Lip was long gone, unable to bear the work Boneless required. She found another man and together they made a little blond beauty they dressed in red velvet and paraded up and down the aisle at St. Caspian’s while Split Lip held Boneless against him in the last pew, shushing her whenever the music overcame her and she started making horrible moaning noises trying to sing along.

Maintaining Boneless cost plenty. Split Lip’s main job was cop but on the side he sold water purifiers. When the neighborhood changed, the purifier business went belly-up. Split Lip said the niggers didn’t care what kind of poison they put in their bodies. Truth was, the purifiers were a scam. Inside was a sponge and an electric motor connected to nothing. But without the purifier money he couldn’t afford the masseuse who eased Boneless’s bad pain and couldn’t afford to have Mrs. Cavendish in. So before leaving for work he’d put Boneless on the floor with a water bottle and her lunch and a picture book. Halfway through his shift he’d call home and she’d jerk the phone to the floor by the cord and make a certain sound that meant she was fine. In her simple way she understood poverty and never asked him to leave work, and time and again he came home to find her shivering on the floor in soiled pants.

By this time the panic-sell was in full bloom. Old Poles and Czechs were losing their asses and leaving treasured flower gardens behind in a frenzy. Local industries failed left and right. The stockyard downscaled and Dad was reduced to pushing a gutcart for minimum. Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy. Dad resolved to sell. But it was too late. The moment was past. A big loss was in the cards. The realtor came over and said ten thou. Dad sat looking at him.

“I pour my life’s blood into this place,” he said, “and you offer me half what I paid?”

“Market forces at work,” the realtor said. “But all right, all right. Call me a saint walking the face of the earth: ten thousand five.”

“Get out,” Dad said.

“Fine,” the realtor said. “Live among the savages forever if you want.”

“What’s happening to me is a goddamned shame,” Dad said, and threw a scratch pad at him.

“Agreed,” the realtor said. “But don’t blame me. Blame the spades.”

Then it was spring, and flowers bloomed in the park.

Then it was summer and the lagoon scummed over and race riots broke out and tear gas blew over the trees as Leo and I fished for carp.

One day in June, Split Lip came into the clearing leading a black teen by the ear. We squatted in the reeds. Officer Doyle nudged the teen’s little brother with his billy club. We knew the little brother. He was Norris Crane. He played cornet with me in school, in Amazing Marching Falcons. He was an altar boy whose skin tore like paper. The nuns said that because of his affliction he didn’t have to kneel through Stations but he did anyway and offered it up to the Lord whenever he bled through his pants.

Officer Doyle said let’s interrogate. Split Lip said I’ll show you interrogation. He pushed the teen into the lagoon and held him under. With his club Doyle made Norris watch. The teen’s hands slapped and slapped. Then Split Lip stood up and the dead teen floated.

Now that’s interrogation, Doyle said.

Split Lip said to Norris: Tell a soul and I’ll take it out on your fat-butt mom in a heartbeat.

We ran home crying. Dad said shut our mouths about it forever. Ma said pray continually and try to forget. But who could forget? Every day on the way to school we saw Norris outside Spritzer’s, becoming the world’s youngest wino. Old lady Spritzer sold to anybody. She was a bitter crone with a thick mustache and big arm veins who’d lost two sons to the Koreans and one to an aging Rush Street queen who brought him back by the neighborhood on weekends in a tremendous purple Lincoln. We’d see Norris puking into the sewer while talking nonsense about the blood of the Lamb and vowing in his high-pitched voice to waste Split Lip. Who would have believed him? He was twelve. He was a sweetheart who in biology had hired Earl Dimps to carve up his fetal pig. Every Halloween he came to school an Apostle and proudly placed his papier-mâché staff in the aisle. Dead brother or no dead brother, his was a kind heart that would never allow him to do anyone harm.

Or so we thought. Then he came up with a gun. He showed it to us behind the Dumpster where Hal Flutie had lost his arm to the crushing blade.

“I can’t live with it anymore,” he said. “I’ll sneak in there this morning and wait all day for him to come home.”

“You won’t,” Leo said.

“I will,” said Norris. “Nine o’clock tonight he dies.”

At ten to nine Leo and I walked in the odd autumnal dark to Split Lip’s sagging home. From the stockyard we could hear the Czechs inducing cows into the deathhouse with tongue clicks. When the tongue clicks didn’t work they ran out extension cords and used the prods. We mounted the cinder blocks. Inside, Split Lip was doing I’m a Little Teapot, making a handle of his left arm and a spout of his right. Boneless applauded by pounding her wrists together. Overcome with love, Split Lip gathered her up in his arms.

“My darling girl,” he said. “We’ll stay together forever and every day will be fun like this. Would you like that?”

“Yunh,” Boneless said.

“Would you like that my honeylamb?” Split Lip said.

“Yunh,” Boneless said.

Norris stepped out of the closet, a frail kid in sneakers. He raised his gun and Boneless began to wail.