Misery

His lips pulled apart with a minute tearing sound. He hitched air into his lungs and closed his eyes " He had no idea what was going to come out or if anything really was… until it came.

"AFRICA!" Paul screamed. Now his trembling hands flew up like startled birds and clapped against the sides of his head, as if to hold in his exploding brains. "Africa! Help me! Help me! Africa!"

His eyes snapped open. The cop was looking towards the house. Paul could not see the Smokey’s eyes because of the sunglasses, but the tilt of his head expressed moderate puzzlement. He took a step closer, then stopped.

Paul looked down at the board. To the left of the typewriter was a heavy ceramic ashtray. Once upon a time it would have been filled with crushed butts; now it held nothing more hazardous to his health than paper-clips and a typewriter eraser. He seized it and threw it at the window. Glass shattered outward. To Paul it was the most liberating sound he had ever heard. The walls came tumbling down, he thought giddily, and screamed: "Over here! Help me! Watch out for the woman! She’s crazy!" The state cop stared at him. His mouth dropped open.

He reached into his breast pocket and brought out something that could only be a picture. He consulted it and then advanced to the edge of the driveway. There he spoke the only four words Paul ever heard him say, the last four word s anyone ever heard him say. Following them he would make a number of inarticulate sounds but no real words.

"Oh, shit!" the cop exclaimed. "It’s you!" Paul’s attention had been so fiercely focused on the trooper that he did not see Annie until it was too late. When he did see her, he was struck by a real superstitious horror. Annie had become a goddess, a thing that was half woman and half Lawnboy, a weird female centaur. Her baseball cap had fallen off. Her face was twisted in a frozen snarl. In one hand she held a wooden cross. It had marked the grave of the Bossie – Paul didn’t remember if it was No. 1 or No. 2 which had finally stopped bawling.

That Bossie had indeed died, and when spring had softened the ground enough, Paul had watched from his window, sometimes dumbstruck with awe and sometimes overcome with shrieking attacks of the giggles, as she first dug the grave (it had taken her most of the day) and then dragged Bossie (who had also softened considerably) out from behind the barn. She had used a chain attached to the Cherokee’s trailer-hitch to do this. She had looped the other end of the chain around Bossie’s middle. Paul made a mental bet with himself that Bossie would tear in half before Annie got her to the grave, but that one he lost. Annie tumbled Bossie in, then stolidly began refilling the hole, a job she hadn’t finished until long after dark.

Paul had watched her plant the cross and then read the Bible over the grave by the light of a new-risen spring moon.

Now she was holding the cross like a spear, the dirt darkened point of its vertical post pointed squarely at the trooper’s back.

"Behind you! Look out!" Paul shrieked, knowing he was too late but shouting anyway.

With a thin warbling cry, Annie plunged Bossie’s cross, into the trooper’s back.

"AG!" the cop said, and walked slowly onto the lawn, his pierced back arched and his gut sticking out. His face was the face of a man either trying to pass a kidney stone or having a terrible gas attack. The cross began to droop toward the ground as the trooper approached the window in which Paul sat, his gray invalid’s face framed by jags of broken glass. The cop reached slowly over his shoulders with both hands. He looked to Paul like a man trying very hard to scratch that one itch you can never quite reach.

Annie had dismounted the Lawnboy and had been standing frozen, her tented fingers pressed against the peaks of her br**sts. Now she lunged forward and snatched the cross out of the trooper’s back.

He turned toward her, groping for his service pistol, and Annie drove the cross point-first into his belly.

"OG!" the cop said this time, and dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach. As he bent over Paul could see the slit in his brown uniform shirt where the first blow had gone home.

Annie pulled the cross free again – its sharpened point had broken off, leaving a jagged, splintery stump – and drove it into his back between the shoulderblades. She looked like a woman trying to kill a vampire. The first two blows had perhaps not gone deep enough to do much damage, but this time the cross’s support post went at least three inches into the kneeling trooper’s back, driving him flat.

"THERE!" Annie cried, wrenching Bossie’s memorial marker out of his back. "HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT, YOU DIRTY OLD BIRD?"

"Annie, stop it!" Paul shouted.

She looked up at him, her dark eyes momentarily as shi ay as coins, her hair fungus-frowzy around her face, the corners of her mouth drawn up in the jolly grin of a lunatic who has, at least for the moment, cast aside all restraints. Then she looked back down at the state trooper.

"THERE!" she cried, and drove the cross into his back again. And his bu**ocks. And the upper thigh of one leg. And his neck. And his crotch. She stabbed him with it half a dozen times, screaming "THERE!" every time she brought it down again. Then the cross’s upright split.

"There," she said, almost conversationally, and walked away m the direction from which she had come running. Just before she passed from Paul’s view she tossed the bloody cross aside as if it no longer interested her.

Paul put his hands on the wheels of the chair, not at all sure where he intended to go or what, if anything, he meant to do when he got there – to the kitchen for a knife, perhaps? Not to try to kill her with, oh no; she would take one look at the knife in his hand and step back into the shed for her.30-30. Not to kill her but to defend himself from her revenge by cutting his wrists open. He didn’t know if that had been his intention or not, but it surely did seem like a hell of a good idea, because if there had ever been a time to exeunt stage left, this was it. He was tired of losing pieces of himself to her fury.