Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

IT AIN’T RIGHT

BY MICHELLE GAGNON

It ain’t right, is all I’m saying.”

Joe just kept walking the way he always did, shovel over his shoulder, cigarette clinging to his bottom lip.

“You hear me?”

He stopped and turned, lifting his head inch by inch until his eyes found my hips then my breasts then my eyes. A dust devil whirled away behind him, making the bottom branches of the tree dance like girls on May Day, up and down. He stared at me long and hard, and I felt the last heat of the day seeping into my skin and down through my bones, reaching inside to meet the cold that burrowed into my stomach early that morning.

“She’s dead, ain’t she?” With his free hand, Joe scratched his belly where the bottom of his T-shirt had pulled away.

“Just ’cause she’s dead don’t mean she should be put down like this.”

He looked past me toward where the road met the hill and dove behind it, wheat tips glowing pink in the twilight. “What else we gonna do with her?”

We stared each other down while the shadows crept in and heat eased into darkness like air escaping a balloon. Night surrounded Joe’s head, digging under his cheekbones and into his eye sockets, carving out the face that had been so handsome years earlier that I swore he could’ve been in pictures.

I turned and shuffled back to the house, kicking up pebbles and dust with my sandals, crossing my arms against the cold that radiated out like there was a snowball growing inside me.

He was gone a long time. The six o’clock news came and went, then Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and me checking the clock every five minutes, getting up from time to time to peer through our fading curtains. It was always so quiet at night, I swear the TV was the only thing keeping my head screwed on my shoulders.

Law & Order was on when he finally came in, bolted both locks, and went to the sink without so much as a word. Joe washed his hands for a long time. I stared at the screen, trying to figure out why some girl was crying over someone who from the look of things she hadn’t much liked anyway. He plunked down beside me and made the same sigh as his beer when he popped it open.

“So it’s done, then,” I said.

“Yep.”

And that was the last we spoke of it. But once that cold burrowed inside me, it seemed dead set on staying. It got so I couldn’t watch Joe standing in a towel with the mirror steamed up, shaving in that slow, careful way he did everything without wanting to sock him over the head with something. I kept washing his clothes and making his dinner, but when he entered me I stared up at the ceiling and endured his gasps and cries without a word, both of us pretending there wasn’t another person lying there with us, when both of us knew there was.

Winter made it better somehow, made it so I couldn’t imagine her trying to claw through the roots and soil to the air. I knew she was done then, that she wouldn’t be able to come after us, at least not till spring. I figured maybe we’d move, head to the city like we always said we would when we were young and such things still might just happen one day. I had almost put it out of my mind, even managed a smile for Joe when he showed up with a new scarf and mittens in my favorite periwinkle, when lights pulled into our driveway. The police didn’t say much, just probed our eyes while they asked, Ever hear what went on over there? Any word on who she was seeing? Joe did most of the talking, smiling a little too large, taking so long to answer you could practically hear him sounding it out in his mind before the words left his lips. I thought, Always so handsome in those uniforms, so shiny. Then I caught myself twisting the dish towel around and around my hand.

“She’s the type,” I heard myself saying.

“What type, ma’am?” One of them was eyeing me now, the older one with the small mustache.

“Loose — you know. She’d head off with any Tom passing by — since the day she was born, dead set on getting outta here. I heard her say once she wanted to go to Vegas, see the lights.”

“Vegas, huh.” The two of them looked at each other and nodded, slapped shut their notebooks, and waved their way out the door. Joe leaned back on the couch again and started flipping through channel after channel: knives slicing meat, kids swinging on ropes, women cleaning their kitchens. He went through all five hundred twice and I saw he wasn’t stopping anytime soon, so I got my new mittens on and went outside for more of that quiet I was always complaining about.

It was cold and crisp and the moon shone flat on the field with a strange dead light, all gray and unnatural. I started down the road without really thinking, ’cause if I had been I would’ve said to myself, Sadie, the cops just been here and this ain’t no way to behave, but something about the moon and the quiet erased those thoughts and suddenly I was there. It looked the same as all the other fields. This is why they put up markers, I thought, tapping my feet to keep out the cold. Otherwise no one knows where you last set foot on earth. I tasted the salt before I knew I was crying and was suddenly on my knees tearing at the snow, periwinkle blue pounding at the crust then throwing handfuls of cold past my legs. It should be red, I thought, I’ll dig down until I see some red …

And then Joe’s hands were on my shoulders, and he was carrying me in those arms that looked too thin to hold anything heavier than a shovel, and I woke up in my bed, sun warming the curtains and the smell of coffee sneaking under the door.

After a knock-knock, Joe came in holding my favorite mug, steam licking his face, and he kind of smiled at me. He put the mug on the table and smoothed my hair back and said, “I know you didn’t mean to do it. I made you, and I’m sorry.”

We were fifteen again, and he was the only boy in the world for me, movie-star handsome standing on the side of the quarry, beads of water glowing on his skin before he dove in and came up laughing.

We were twenty, and married, and I was pregnant and he had a decent job, and we were moving to the city soon as we saved enough money.

We were thirty, still happy even though none of the babies had worked out, and his job was the same, and I had trouble breathing in summertime.

We were forty, and even though we had each done a terrible thing, he still bought me mittens and lied to the police and brought me coffee in the morning. And I thought to myself, This is a good man. And I said, “Let’s move to the city.” And we never spoke of it again.