Jamey Gallagher, author of “Idiotic American Boys” lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2024. His noir story, “Savor Life,” was published in Bang! an anthology from Head Shot Press.
*****
His beard grew longer. His hands roughened from working in the cold. He split wood for hours in back of the house, where his grandfather had left chunks waiting to be split. He sharpened the axhead on the whetstone his grandfather had taught him how to use. His blood thickened. Sometimes he still shivered in the cold but less often now. It snowed. It was January, if not February. He lost track of hours, days. He stood on the dock while the sun set, feeling the air gather around him and disperse.
He walked to the eastern end of the island often, somehow comforted by the broken land, then he walked back. He saw deer. Sometimes they scattered at the sound of his footsteps, but more often now they just lifted their heads to watch him. The herd, apparently permanent to the island, seemed to be growing. Maybe they had always wintered here and he just never knew. He imagined shooting one, slicing open its soft belly and hanging it, waiting for the meat to turn from red to peach pink, slicing into the carcass. Flank steaks, saddle steaks, ground beef. He imagined gorging on meat. But he had not hunted since he was a teenager, and he refused to shoot a deer with a handgun.
He walked to the eastern end of the island often, somehow comforted by the broken land, then he walked back.
He put off returning to the mainland for supplies as long as he could. He could survive on canned goods until April, but he could not survive without coffee. He went one day without and his body protested, his head aching. If he had to, he could pass through the need, but in the early morning he bundled up in his heavy jacket, his thermal shirt and pants and jeans, his gloves and fur-lined hat, and he set off across the frozen lake. The sky was still dark, darker because overcast, everything solid gray. He felt like he was setting off on a long, dangerous trek, when all he was doing was crossing the lake for supplies.
The lake was so large it was hard to believe the whole thing could freeze, but the ice was solid underfoot, and when the sun rose high enough and broke through the cloud-cover he could see colors in it, mostly pale pinks, purples, and blues. Air bubbles. The surface was rough, embedded with tiny sticks. Fishing sheds, tiny plywood houses on runners, had been dragged onto the ice near the other shore.
A few of them were occupied. He felt like a man coming out of deep wilderness, even though he’d only been on the island alone for a couple months. Some of the men in the fishing sheds raised their hands. They held mugs of coffee or rum. There were children sitting on little folding chairs or sliding around. The men sat over holes carved in the ice, filled with deep black water like nothingness.
The Chevy Sonic was still where he’d left it. He wondered if anyone had spotted it yet, reported it as abandoned, checked its provenance. One of its tires was flat. He walked past it. It was midday but still very cold by the time he got to the library. When he entered the warm lobby, he swooned and took off his gloves and hat, blinking and breathing slowly. The proximity of other people had become strange to him. It was possible for a tame animal to re-wild. He was slowly shifting away from the need for human connection. If it were possible to stay on the island, and if it were always winter, he could leave them behind forever.
He signed up for an hour on the computer. At first he sat before the monitor unsure what to do. The whole network felt doomed. If he wrote one word it could suck him back in. He opened his gmail account and found an email from her, Priya. It asked him where he was and whether he was safe, claimed she was worried about him. He suspected a trap, imagined police monitoring her email account, waiting for his reply, ready to track him. He typed his three-word reply—I’m fine, thanks—and sent it anyway, then sat regretting sending anything. He had been so careful until now.
He remembered their first kiss in the parking lot of the high school, her body close to his, before they’d fallen completely into it. How mixed his emotions had been, the struggle to maintain order giving way to desire. How fraught it had felt— but delicious and inevitable. Love. He had never believed in it until he met her. She was different from anyone he’d ever met before, but she felt familiar. That was the least of his problems now. His fingers looked too large, clumsy on the keyboard.
He refused to think about the things he’d done, had successfully blocked them from his conscious mind until now. Was not going to allow them in, though shards of memories pressed like glass against other memories. Hannah with her sleep-puffed face that morning. The heavy emptiness of Priya’s apartment when he left it. He desperately wanted to go back to before, but there was no before.
He typed in the name—”Brian Sanderson”—and found an article about a man who’d been arrested for several murders in the area. In the accompanying photo, the man looked indigent, his hair wild, his hard jaw dusted with stubble.
He bought a large bag of coffee and a half-gallon of milk, a bag of Doritos because he missed the rich fake flavor of junk food, a package of individually wrapped cupcakes. He bought a large bag of white rice, pasta and sauce and a baguette for his dinner that evening.
Everything fit, barely, inside one paper bag he carried cradled under his arm. He felt happy to leave it all behind, the town, the people, and return to isolation. He would not return again until spring arrived and people started using the lake more often. He had no idea what he would do then. Maybe head west. Maybe return to civilization, if that were possible. All he knew was that he was happy to head back to the island. He would worry about the future when the future came.
Everything fit, barely, inside one paper bag he carried cradled under his arm.
He walked past the men and their children in their fishing sheds, almost certainly drinking rum from their thermoses now. He heard laughter, and then he was away from them, alone on the lake. The silence and isolation and space. The edge of the lake went to the horizon. He had to walk slowly on the ice. Winter birds flew in the distance, too far away for him to identify.
He did not hear the young men following him until they were upon him. When he turned, alerted by the sound of ice crunching, a thick piece of wood, a chair leg or a baseball bat, caught him across the side of the head. He saw faces covered in ski masks, bodies in dark clothes. He went down, blacking out even before he had time to wonder who they were and why he had not brought his gun. Not that it would have done him any good.
*****
In dreams he had plotted to have his wife killed. He hired two men in suits without faces to do away with her. He thought they would do it discretely, but they arrived in the middle of the night, while he was still sleeping, stumbling up the stairs, banging against the walls, making no attempt to be quiet.
They pressed a pillow against Hannah’s sleep-puffed face, raised fingers to the space where their lips should have been, then, their no-faces turned toward him, shot her, the silencer and the pillow swallowing almost all sound. Rivers of blood seeped from the edge of the bed. He would jolt awake, soaked in guilt, turning over to look at the humped shape of his sleeping wife. He had not intended any of this. He didn’t want to hurt her, nevermind kill her, though apparently part of him wanted to do just that.
He knew he was going to have to leave her but wasn’t sure he would be able to. Hannah was the first woman who’d ever loved him. When he met her he’d been coming out of his drug days, crawling out of darkness, twenty two years old, unlovable. She’d helped him come back to himself, had encouraged him to go back to school, had supported him while he got his Master’s, had believed in him when no one else had. She’d talked him through the difficult decision to leave the Army Corps of Engineers and take up teaching. In his own way, he loved Hannah more than he had ever or could ever love anyone else. An abiding but tempered love.
He was sure that, at this point, she needed him more than he needed her. Leaving her might kill her, would definitely destroy her. She didn’t suspect a thing, thought their lives were, if not perfect, set. He wasn’t sure she could recuperate from that kind of trauma, wasn’t sure he could put her through it. She had given him Casey, their daughter, in her final year at college. They had raised her together, true partners, and he was proud of her. She was an incredible young woman. How could he throw all that away?
*****
Stephen came to slowly, climbing out of thick darkness, the knot on his head throbbing. It was not like waking from sleep, was more like resurrection, coming back to life, gasping for breath. He tried to move, but his torso had been tied, tightly but inexpertly, to a straight-backed chair. He tried to determine how injured he was, to take stock of the situation. Blood coated the left side of his body. Then he realized it was not blood but tomato sauce, the thick red liquid glinting with slivers of glass from the broken jar. Aside from his throbbing head, he couldn’t detect any other injuries. He was in the family house on the island, where he’d run away from what he’d done, tied to a chair, in the shadows under the loft, so far from the fire he couldn’t feel it, his breath pluming in front of him.
There were people in the house with him— the young men who’d knocked him out, he assumed— along with the smell of something cooking, garlic. He could see their bodies but not their faces in the kitchen. They were shifting shadows. Always in motion. His father’s bottle of single-malt scotch stood on the counter, almost empty, surrounded by brown beer bottles. Dead soldiers. Someone grabbed the scotch and drank from it. He heard the rough, hurried laughter of young men, always in competition with one another. He had been like that once, too— wild. He had pushed against expectations. Had smashed shit. He could not parse their sentences as they talked over each other. There were at least three of them. No more than five.
One of the young men crouched before him, a ski mask covering his face, so close Stephen could smell the alcohol on his breath and feel strands of wool from the mask against his face. Neither of them spoke. The young man’s bloodshot eyes had dark centers. His smile showed jagged eyeteeth. He was frightening because he was so normal. Like someone Stephen might pass on the street without noticing.
The young man pressed his index finger against Stephen’s temple with a slow, steady, incrementally increasing pressure. Then he stopped, the force of the pressure remaining as he turned and walked away. He wore tan work boots and thick black jeans.
*****
After it was over, apparently, their run of motel rooms, where they fucked with abandon, they saw each other in faculty meetings and sometimes in the hallways between classes. Priya smiled and nodded as if he were any other colleague, a fellow adult in a swarm of teenagers.
They ran into each other on Friday afternoons drinking with other science, math, and social studies teachers, but they kept their distance. or he did, sitting on a stool as far from her as possible. She had stopped texting him. Was, as his students would say, “ghosting” him. Would not return his increasingly desperate texts. He tried, hopelessly, to stop thinking about her, to let her go. He felt like something had been ripped out of him. Some future happiness denied him. How could she not feel the same way he did? It had always been mutual, hadn’t it been? Of course it hadn’t. How could it have been? He was not up to her level. She had been playing with him the whole time.
Since Hannah had been the first real relationship in his life, he had never experienced this before. It seemed absurd, beyond sad, to be experiencing this kind of pain, “heartbreak,” at his age. He was almost fifty years old, for God’s sake. At the beginning of the affair, he couldn’t think about anything but Priya, imagined talking to her all the time, and now he still couldn’t stop thinking about her, but there was nowhere for his thoughts to go. There was a scientific term for this kind of problem. What happened to energy that couldn’t spend itself?
One night at the bar of the “American Bar and Grille” where they met for drinks, he overheard that she was seeing someone, that that was why she no longer met them for drinks. Now he caught sight of her only in the hallways or in the teacher’s lounge, where she said hello, as if he were any other fellow teacher. Apparently she’d forgotten she told him that she was in love with him, too.
*****
He heard them eating in the kitchen, heard them slurping up pasta, heard the clatter of forks against plates. The smell of the food induced both hunger and nausea. His head ached and he felt like a man in an underwater cage, figures just beyond his sight range. Sharks, whales, submarines, creatures that were not named and had never been seen before. Out the window the sun set red over the lake. The sunset, often brilliant, was even more brilliant tonight. It looked like the world was ending, but of course it was only the day.
In almost total darkness, they took up baseball bats they’d brought with them. At first he thought they were going to hit him with the bats, were going to beat him to death, but they ignored him, took the bats to the interior of the house instead.
They yelled and laughed as they wrecked destruction. One of the young men grabbed his guitar from its case and smashed it against the floor, wielding it above his head for a second before bringing it down. The strings held the neck and body together momentarily, wood shattering. When he threw the pieces of the guitar into the fire, the veneer blistered.
They threw cans of soup against the wall as hard as they could, making a game of it, denting the wood, some of the cans cracking open and oozing. They laughed, held bottles of beer, lifting the masks from their mouths to drink, though that didn’t help Stephen identify them. They were indistinguishable young white men, resembling frat boys, baby fat and stubble on their cheeks. Idiotic American boys. They smashed against each other, smeared each other with beef stew, yelled, chanted, cheered each other on. They were out of control, and yet part of it was just a show.
They laughed and talked and yelled, and one of them played music out of a small speaker, the music rough-edged, from another world, a world of dark streets and hard days.
They all pissed inside the house, two of them in the corners and one of them directly in front of Stephen. The young man had lowered the mask over his face again, and he took his dick out and sprayed urine six inches from Stephen’s feet, a steady stream pattering on the floor, his eyes on Stephen the whole time.
“Hey,” he said, to the boy who was slumped over in the hallway not far from him. The boy was wrapped inside a sleeping bag. It was like looking at himself from when he was a child, though he knew the boy was a teenager, maybe twenty. He looked younger, wrapped in the sleeping bag. When his head emerged, Stephen couldn’t see his face in the darkness.
“What?”
“Do you have a family?”
“Shut up,” the kid said.
“I get it,” he said. “I get what you’re doing. I might have done the same thing back when I was your age. Tearing shit down. Right? Sometimes that’s all you want to do.”
“Shut up,” the kid said again.
And so he did. He heard the kid’s breathing get regular and even, and then he was asleep and Stephen was alone. He wasn’t any different than the vandals.
*****
He sat outside on the front steps of their townhouse in a t-shirt and jeans, staring blankly at the small lawn, a rake leaning on the steps beside him. Small piles of brown leaves dotted the lawn. He could barely move, every year of his life suddenly taking on weight. He checked his cell phone again.
Priya had not answered his last text, or the dozens before that, but he sent her another one anyway. I miss you. It was so sad, so bald, so true, that after he sent it he deleted all the texts they’d ever sent each other, a running log of their love affair— flirtation, wordplay, dirty talk. Two or three times they’d gotten into “fights,” but it had never felt serious. It had always felt like they were playfighting. Now he realized that the whole thing had been play.
He put the phone in his pocket and sat feeling empty.
Hannah emerged from the house, also wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and helped him bag the leaves. They worked well together. Inside, they made love, in a perfunctory way, for the first time since he had confessed. Hannah closed her eyes, the two lines between her eyebrows deepening. He wasn’t sure that he could do it at first, but the mechanics of the act took over. Afterwards they lay together like they hadn’t for years.
There was no question about it: despite everything, he still loved Hannah, at least in a way. And apparently she still loved him. Was willing to allow him back into their life. Maybe there was a way to come back from this, to reassert control over his life, to piece things back together again. To be forgiven.
Maybe.
*****
Sometimes the young men ignored him and sometimes they remembered he was there and one of them would come over and poke him, shove his head, or laugh at him.
“Hey, you stupid motherfucker.”
“You stupid rich motherfucker.”
“You think you’re special?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“You’re nothing.”
“You are nothing, motherfucker.”
“You got this big fucking house, but you ain’t nothing.”
His lack of reaction disappointed them. He had retreated inside himself, was holding up. Remembering pieces of his life without trying to make sense of them. His own youth. He might have but had never done anything quite like this. There had been drugs, danger, music— punk, hardcore— sex. After his brothers were away at college he had brought friends to the island. In the morning, they would be laid out on the lawn like casualties of war.
He knew that, in one way or another, after a while this would have to end, knew that in so many ways he deserved this.
“What are we going to do with him?” one of them said. They shrugged. No one was the leader. No one wanted to take charge. They had no plan.
*****
He watched Priya get into her car and drive off. She was dressed in black boots and a polkadot dress, ready for another day in the classroom. He sat for a moment or two longer. He could follow her to school, forget all about this. Let this flirtation with danger, or whatever it was, die out. Instead he got out of the car and walked across the street toward the converted factory building. He was not, he was going to do this. He was doing this. He was hyper-aware of everyone in the area. An old woman wearing a red wool jacket walking a small white dog. An old man wearing a cap. A younger couple with tattooed forearms. He felt the Sig Sauer secured against the small of his back. Shooting the gun had become automatic for him—double action pull followed by single action, or double action pull followed by a de-cock.
The lobby was empty. He waited for the elevator. Inside the elevator, he put on the blue gloves he’d taken from a science lab at school. He already knew there were no cameras in the elevator or hallways. It was all easy.
The apartment door was not locked. A sign. He’d been prepared to force the door open with his credit card— he’d tried it one day when they were still together— but now he didn’t have to. Clearly a sign. He turned the handle slowly, entered the apartment, closed the door behind him, the click of the latch nearly silent. Every breath deep and even. A new odor was now layered atop the old odors—him, the new man.
There was still the mélange of Priya’s body wash and cardamom and curry, but added to that mélange was the faint metallic scent of another man’s sweat. Stephen remembered the times he’d spend here. Hours. Entire afternoons. They’d talked about everything. They had climbed inside each other and looked around, as if he’d finally found the person who understood him.
The blinds in the living room were half open, light falling in a slant onto the golden hardwood floors. Everything was still, real but not real. Too real. Unreal.
He removed the gun from the small of his back and held it the way TV cops held their guns, arms extended, feeling removed. This was not him. He was not doing this. Behind or beneath his face things churned; he would not allow those things to surface. Wouldn’t feel what he was feeling. It was all about action now.
The man was sprawled in bed on his stomach, half the covers kicked off. His back was muscled and his hair was mussed and he grunted and turned over.
It felt as if he’d done this already. He gave himself no time to think, just shoved the pillow over the man’s face, pressed the barrel of the gun into the pillow, let all of his energy concentrate in his finger, which crooked, pulling the trigger. A sudden pop. Under the pillow, after a few seconds, red seeped up. He de-cocked the Sig Sauer, the reverberation of the gun’s pop loud in his ear— and final. The man’s body had gone still, lifeless, emptied.
He had done it.
It had been easy.
There was a stillness to the apartment now, a new, almost beautiful sense of loss. An ending. The clawing things behind his face threatened to break through, but still he wouldn’t let them. Priya would feel the stillness the second she entered the apartment. She would freak out, then she would mourn for the man, but then… then, maybe she would come back to Stephen. Did he really believe that?
Something tried to coalesce behind his eyes. He considered hiding in the closet and waiting for Priya to return, though he knew that would be many hours from now. He was not confused because he was not really thinking. He imagined shooting her, too. Pressing the gun to her temple, looking at her beautiful face as it got ripped apart. Imagined shooting himself, too. If he shot her, he would have to shoot himself. A triple murder-suicide that would be reported on the news, their faces in snapshots, then forgotten. Their colleagues and students would talk about them for a long time.
Realizing he hadn’t breathed in minutes, Stephen took in as much air as he could. He felt scatterbrained. Like he had to remember something.
He found the man’s wallet in the jeans left on the floor like a discarded skin. His driver’s license. Brian Sanderson. A normal, boring name for a normal, boring man. He shoved the wallet in his back pocket. In the kitchen he took a glass, filled it with water, drank it as he walked out of the apartment.
No one was in the hallway, so he assumed no one had heard the shot. If they had, they must have thought it was something else, or from somewhere else. It could not be coming from inside the luxury apartment building. Gunshots did not happen here. Everything was safe here. They were delusional. He rode down the elevator with the glass still in his gloved hand. Then he walked through the lobby.
*****
Sodden with drink, they grew morose. They’d dragged two Adirondack chairs inside the house and sat around the fire with the lights off, flames reflecting off their faces. Stephen couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but he heard the names of women, the blunt edge of curse words. Fuck and cocksucker and motherfucker and cunt and fuck again. They were not much older than his students were— or had been.
He was no longer a teacher; he had left that world behind. He resisted connections between then and now. These men were in their early twenties, if he had to guess. Despite what they had done and were doing to him, Stephen felt sorry for them. They were just lost boys. He was less concerned about what they would do to him than he would have expected. Let it come, he thought.
He pissed himself, the urine warm and comforting at first, then quickly cold. A day came and went, his abductors out of the house most of the day. Time dripped past. They returned to drink and eat more of his food and laugh and poke his head with stiff fingers. Stephen’s lips were chapped. He was thirsty but not hungry. If this was penance, he would endure it. He would endure it anyway. It was not penance.
The tallest of the young men approached, swinging his arms as he walked, the Sig Sauer in his hand. Stephen felt a subsonic fear, the beating of his heart sounding like someone else’s.
It was obvious what the young man was going to do long before he did it: a swinging right hook to Stephen’s head, the butt of the pistol against his temple. He felt himself fall, his arms struggling to break his fall, the floor rising up to meet him. And then he was out.
*****
Hannah looked up when Stephen walked into the townhouse, after he’d shot another man point blank in the head, a fact he had not even begun to accommodate yet. It was not real. It couldn’t be. She sat at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, eating a bowl of yogurt and granola. She’d slept late, her face puffy from sleep. The night before she’d gone out for a girl’s night with colleagues from the real estate office. He had no idea how late she’d returned. He’d been asleep when she got back, and she’d been asleep when he got up.
She looked at his face then quickly away, shaking the newspaper when he scurried past. If he looked different to her, if she could see the mark of what he’d just done on his face, she didn’t acknowledge it. Didn’t ask him what he was doing home when he should have been at school. Maybe she was afraid of what he would say if she asked, afraid to find out.
He was aware of her downstairs as he shoved clothes into the old army duffel bag he’d bought years earlier at an army surplus store. Knowing where he was going already, and thinking optimistically, he needed all his cold weather clothes. Flannels and thermals. He packed his running shoes, his hiking boots, a pile of books that had been on his bedside table forever. He was not thinking clearly, but he knew he was going to the island. It was a safe place in his mind, the past. He pictured it as a safe haven, as if he could pull the shadows of the trees around himself. He felt like he was forgetting something.
He found a pad of paper and a pen on her bedside table and scrawled a quick note. I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore. Stephen.
Hannah did not look up at him as he walked back through the kitchen. He closed the door behind him, looked back briefly at the townhouse.
He walked down the street, the weight of the bag across his shoulder, the Sig Sauer against his back, wondering how much time he had. It all depended on what Priya was doing that day, how long she was away from the apartment, whether she had her after-school science club. Maybe someone else had discovered the body already. Maybe someone had called 911.
He rented a car and drove up route 93, no more than five miles over the speed limit, glancing at the fall foliage on either side of the highway. It was strange how normal everything felt. There were some leaf peepers around—old men and women driving Lincolns and Oldsmobiles—though it was past peak.
He felt more alive than he had in years. More completely himself. In one way he had transcended who he had been before, reached a higher level of being, in another way he was operating in survival mode. He wondered if this was how it always felt to kill. He could understand, now, how that feeling could become addictive.
He figured he had a week, max, before they found him and he was made to pay for what he’d done. He didn’t actually expect to winter on the island, but he had to have a plan. The island was his plan.
*****
It was early morning at the lake house, the outside world purple. Stephen had been untied. A small mercy. He lifted himself from the floor and rubbed his numb arms. It took several minutes to get feeling back into the muscles of his arms, and he wondered if he would have lost feeling for good if they’d left him tied up, if he would have been paralyzed, marked by this incident forever, physically. His entire body ached from sleeping on the floor—if being sprawled unconscious could be called sleeping. He righted the chair, stepped out of the shadows under the loft, stretched.
The lake came back to life in a series of grays and blues. He was hungry and sore. He had pissed himself again sometime in the night. The cold kept the smell from being too pungent; he shook against it. He did not feel ashamed by the workings of the body, just annoyed.
The house had been ransacked, his things scattered, books with pages torn out, most of his clothes crumpled. Worst of all, his Sig Sauer had been taken. He felt exposed and vulnerable without the gun. He didn’t think they would come back and shoot him, but he had no way to protect himself now.
Words had been smeared onto the walls with what he assumed was shit at first, before realizing it was dried hot chocolate. Fuck the Rich. Eat the Rich. An anarchy symbol in what looked like blood but was probably ketchup, someone’s handprint in red. Vomit flecked a pile of clothes. They had torn the doors off cabinets, smashed the sink, leaving the faucet hanging like a broken bone, flour coating everything. His bag of rice had been burst open and scattered like seed. One of them had left an absurdly neat turd by the sliding glass doors, a turd that looked animal but was clearly human.
Despite the destruction, the vandals had left the windows intact, had not destroyed the firepit or anything in the bathroom, had not wrecked anything he needed to keep himself alive on the island. Another small mercy. They had not found the stash of bills in the loft, still in the paper bag under his brother’s bed. After picking out the guitar strings, which would not burn, he built a fire from embers reluctant to come back to life, rubbed his hands, walked into the bathroom.
He had to wait almost two minutes before the water heated up, then he peeled off his old crusted clothes and stepped inside the stream, waiting for the water to run clear off of him. He scrubbed the dry itchy skin under his beard, rubbed his armpits and crotch and asshole. He felt strangely alive, as if he had defeated the young men, when all he’d done was survive them. He felt like he understood them, even appreciate them. They could have done far worse. They could have violated him. They could have beaten him, broken bones and ribs. They could have shot him. His head still hurt, but he was not injured. He would carry what they had done to him for the rest of him life.
He dressed in jeans, a thermal shirt and a flannel shirt. As he cleaned, he warmed and took off the flannel. He cleaned clothes in the bathtub and hung them up to dry. He picked up an intact can of beef stew from the floor, cooked and ate it, the food almost flavorless, mucky brown and white chunks. It felt good to eat. He imagined music in the house, but aside from the sound of himself, the house was silent.
*****
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