Bones

©2002 R.G. Liberty
All rights reserved.

Killing her was surprisingly easy. One quick, sharp, unexpected crack on the bridge of her nose, right between her big brown eyes, and she was head over heels across the coffee table. She wasn't dead then, just unconscious. She hadn't known what hit her. One moment she was telling Charlie Dunn he was a no-good, spineless eunuch—the next she was flat on her back, skinny legs everywhere, desperately trying to draw air through her split and swelling snout. Charlie simply stepped over the coffee table and sat on her face, smothering the life out of her. No, she wasn't intimidating then, on her back, chest heaving noisily, arms and legs doing a silly semaphore. She uttered a single long, muffled sound, which may have been a scream, and in a few more minutes lay silent and motionless. And that was that; so very easy, after all.

Charlie got up from his wife's bubbling, bleeding face, his pants sticky with gore. As he did, the corpse let out a thick gurgling sigh as the trapped air in its lungs expelled itself. It's just like her to have the last word, he mused, even in death. Nine years I've been married to this gaunt, pinch-nosed tyrant with the sad eyes of a Basset Hound, he marveled. How did I survive? When they were first married, she was cute. She wasn't good-looking, by any means, but she was at least cute. Her saucer brown eyes had reminded Charlie of a lost puppy, and Charlie had always had a soft spot for puppies.

After their first year together, though, she displayed her true nature. She became an overbearing, demanding, jealous bully. She made Charlie feel like an inconsequential, stupid, impotent little man. He stood five feet eight inches tall and she only five-three, but she towered over him in all ways and in all things. The years of cowering from incessant nagging and painful sarcasm had made him look smaller, too. He lost weight and turned prematurely grey, and his stomach constantly burned from the ulcer she'd given him for their second anniversary. He grew to hate her and fear her company.

The night he killed his wife, Charlie stayed out until twelve o'clock drinking with his few friends. They all knew what kind of a woman Alice was and how badly she treated Charlie. They pitied him. She restricted Charlie to one can of beer a day because of his stomach trouble, so his friends found it passing strange that he was still among them so late, obviously getting progressively drunker. They safely assumed Alice had done some terrible thing to Charlie, again, to cause such unlikely behavior. They couldn't have guessed that Charlie had made up his mind that morning to kill Alice. Their concerns and suspicions were laid to rest when Charlie announced that Alice had left him for another man. There. They had something reasonable to hang their assumptions on, now. This they could understand. Poor old Charlie had every right to get as drunk as he needed, and his friends were eager to help him on his way with as many proffered drinks as he could keep down. They helpfully guided him to his car at exactly 11:46 p.m., hoping they had cheered him, if only a little.

She was still lying with her legs over the coffee table as Charlie opened a can of beer from the box in the refrigerator and returned to the living room to maneuver onto the carpet beside her head. He began to explain himself, more out of the habit of years than as the result of his drunkenness. His tone was easy, almost conversational, in the face of his recent violence. He pulled at his beer every now and again by way of punctuation.

"How could I know, Alice? How could anybody know how easy it is to kill the thing you hate?" he began. "I was terrified, did you know that? Yes, I was. Always. I had an elaborate plan for tonight, to lure you into the basement to see the washing machine. I was going to tell you I'd finally fixed it, but I still haven't gotten around to it. And now I don't have to, do I?

"I was going to get you down there in the laundry room and hit you over the head with my new hammer. I don't know, though, I think I would have chickened out in the end and you'd still be alive. You know me better than anybody, and you know I would have probably lost my nerve and it would have taken me another nine years to work up the courage again. You always scared me, Alice. Why did you always do that to me? I wasn't a bad man, a bad husband. Was I?

"But you settled it for me, didn't you? You didn't think I had balls enough, but you should have worried about my being drunk enough—jeez, even I didn't know how drunk I was." Charlie snorted into his beer can, shaking his head in wonder. "You see, you started yelling at me again. Yelling always yelling, yelling until I wanted to find a hole to crawl into and pull in after me. Just to get away from your yelling!" Charlie yelled.

"And you made it easy for me tonight. I couldn't help hitting you, could I? Wouldn't you have done the same thing in my position? I never dreamed how easy it was to hit you. I really didn't. Poor Alice. I suppose in a way you killed yourself." Charlie finished his can of beer, glancing sideways at his wife's body, and confessed, "Now comes the hard part."

As he rose and gained a steady footing, Charlie grappled one of his wife's legs under each of his arms and dragged her body through the living room to the kitchen and around the corner to the basement door. He dropped one leg to open the door and switch on the light, lifted the leg again, and backed down the stairs with Alice in tow. Her head thudded on each step as he pulled her down, and each time it bounced off a stair, Charlie said, "Sorry, dear," until he reached the gray-painted concrete floor. He dragged her, her dress riding up her back and the back of her head abrading on the uneven cement, to the double laundry tubs near the broken washing machine and hoisted her into them.

He had difficulty getting her body into the tubs, because even though she was bone thin, she kept rolling and flopping out of his grasp. When he finally had her torso face-down in one tub and her legs and buttocks in the other, he went to his workbench, across the basement, to find a box of tri-sodium phosphate to clean the traces of her blood. There weren't many to clean; a few spots upstairs on the living room carpet and one long streak leading through the kitchen to the basement door. Most had soaked into Charlie's trousers.

Before he returned to the cellar, Charlie took his last three cans of beer, still in their box, from the refrigerator. Even though his wife allowed him only one can a night, she insisted on keeping a whole box in the house at all times. Just another one of her little cruelties toward him. Charlie took the beer and the used cleaning rag down into the basement with him to where the corpse lay, bent and crumpled in the tubs, and placed them on the washing machine. Then he popped the top of one can and carried it back over to his workbench.

There were the usual things arrayed across the bench; portable radio, boxes of nails and screws, the hammer he intended using until Alice forced his hand, tape measures, levels screwdriver and socket sets, oil cans, hatchet, wood saw, utility knives, large carpet knife, and a new hacksaw with blades. Putting the package of blades into his back pocket, Charlie selected the hacksaw and put a new blue blade into its rivet and wing nut assembly, tightening it until it hummed. Turning on the radio and tuning it to the classical station he preferred, he turned and paced the distance back to the laundry room, hacksaw in one hand and open beer in the other. He drank deeply as he went, finishing the can as he reached the tubs. He placed his empty can and the hacksaw on the washing machine with the other items. He opened a fresh can of beer, rolled up his sleeves, tugged up his soggy trousers, and bent over the corpse.

With his left hand he grabbed a fistful of hair and raised the head. With his other hand gripping the hacksaw, he began ripping through the back of his wife's neck with the new blade. Charlie soon realized he was in for trouble. The teeth of the blade clogged too readily, causing too heavy a drag on his strokes. He dropped the head and the saw into the tub, both bouncing noisily, and returned to his workbench for the large carpet knife. 'I should have thought of this before,' he chided himself as he cupped his wife's chin and drew the knife across her throat deeply enough to meet vertebrae. That's the ticket, he smiled. The sound of the hacksaw working through pre-cut muscle was like tearing open a ripe pomegranate. When the blade reached wet bone, the sound changed to a wheezing, grinding cough, and the rhythm of the strokes reminded Charlie of an old Spike Jones album he'd once owned. Another of the childish crutches Alice divested him of following their wedding.

When he was on his third beer there was only one leg to go. The carpet knife had definitely made his task easier. He leaned over the tub, taps running a little to prevent clots and clogs, sipping from the can and sweating freely through his shirt, and appraised his work. It really wasn't a bad job for a man who'd never sawn up a woman before, but his arm and shoulder were aching terribly from the exercise. He shook his head and chortled at the thought of how simple all the magicians made it look on television. Gulping the rest of his beer, he changed blades for the final time and went at the last limb. He held the torn buttock by the large muscle and began working the carpet knife through the thigh. Then he switched to the hacksaw. When he was finished, Charlie undressed, rinsed as much as the taps allowed, and went upstairs to the bathroom for a proper shower. The sun was just rising as he slipped into his pajamas and between the cool cotton sheets and fell into a deep, alcoholic sleep.

Charlie slept most of the following day. At nightfall he went to a mini-mart convenience store and bought two six-packs and a package of heavy-duty plastic garbage bags. He returned home and cooked himself a simple supper. Then he went down the basement stairs with his bags and his beer and began to collect all the pieces that had once made up his wife and stored them, individually, in six of the bags and twist-tied the tops of five.

He put his bloodied clothes, the carpet knife and the hacksaw, with blades, into the bag containing Alice's head. Then Charlie rinsed out the laundry tubs, with the tri-sodium phosphate waiting for him on the washing machine; washed the floor where the wet chunks had rested awaiting his attention; scrubbed the rest of the basement floor from the stairs to the laundry tubs; and cleaned his hands and fingernails and anything else that caught his eye or his memory. Obliterating all traces of his wife, save the neat, glossy black bags that were her new persona, he dropped the soiled washcloth and scrub brush into the bag with his tools and tied that closed, too. The stench of blood, partially digested stomach residue and fecal matter had largely dissipated during the day with the constant operation of Charlie's heat pump system. At last Charlie opened his other six-pack and relaxed in front of the television until he dozed off.

By the time he awoke it had grown very late and Charlie felt sure all his neighbors were asleep, so he took his burdens, one by one, out the kitchen door and into his back yard. He systematically buried the evidence of his marriage in six different graves—deep enough to stay buried—then confidently strode back into his house, locked the back door and reclined on the Chesterfield with a warm can of beer to watch the late, late show on Channel Two. He made a mental note to re-tamp the sod after the first big rain.

The sky was green and the landscape unfamiliar, but Alice was there and she was laughing at him. Charlie desperately searched for some point of reference or support, but there was none. Only Alice was with him; otherwise he was completely alone in a frightening place. She laughed and laughed in a harsh nasal whine and accusingly pointed a thin finger under his chin. And while she laughed, flesh fell from her bones and she retrieved it from the ground and fed it to something at her feet. Charlie realized there was a small dog taking shape beside Alice, eagerly gobbling up her dropping meat. The sky became tinged with yellow, so that the meat Alice offered the dog appeared bright orange. When the small dog had devoured all the flesh from Alice's bones, her skeleton stood perfectly rigid for a moment, then crumpled and clattered down and through the solid-looking ground. Then the dog began a low moan that became a laugh, Alice's laugh. Then it spoke to Charlie, saying nasally,

"But, you thought I was cute, didn't you, Charlie? You said I was cute as a puppy. The day you married me you told me I was your own little puppy dog and you kissed me on my nose. Don't you remember? Kiss me now, Charlie. Kiss me! You spineless, sexless bucket of..."

"Oh, God! Oh, jesuschrist, help me..." Charlie awoke with a warm wetness at his crotch and burning stomach acid in his chest. He rolled off the couch and banged his nose on the carpet—on the slightly discolored spot of carpet where his wife's head had rested as he smothered her to death.

The nightmares ended after a week and everyone at work and at the bar he started frequenting on a more regular basis remarked how much better Charlie looked without his wife around to crush the spirit out of him. Gradually Charlie began having friends over to his home. This eventually became a weekly poker game, every Thursday evening ... or rather night, since the crowd rarely dispersed before midnight.

But Charlie's new-found freedom and hard-won autonomy slipped through his grasp the day his brother-in-law arrived on his doorstep in search of Alice. She had been dead three months and Charlie had thought her forgotten.

Of course, he should have been better prepared to deal with Alice's sister and her husband, but events overwhelmed thoughts of caution and precaution. Things had simply progressed too quickly and too pleasantly for Charlie to have taken the negative ramifications of his action into consideration. But now he was faced with Jack Sternadt, state policeman and husband of Alice's twin sister.

Charlie took Jack's appearance with a minimum of anxiety, playing the role of cuckolded husband with admirable sincerity. His excess nervousness and beading perspiration must have looked to Jack like the symptomatic aftereffects of a marital breakdown in its natural progression. But the question remained: where had Alice disappeared to and why hadn't she confided in Sibyl or Jack? Surely she would have told her own sister of her intention to leave Charlie. Charlie pleaded tearful ignorance and ranted in impotent rage (who did Alice ever care about but Alice?), bemoaning his undeserved injuries so convincingly that he overplayed his hand. Jack Sternadt offered to stay, at least until the worst of Charlie's obvious depression passed. Charlie cursed himself as he carried Jack's overnight bag upstairs to the guest bedroom, giving no thought to why his brother-in-law had an overnight bag with him in the first place.

The next day was Thursday. Charlie went to work at the machine shop as usual, leaving Jack with the run of the house. Standing at his milling machine just before lunch hour, he pondered whether or not he should cancel that evening's poker game, and he still wrestled with the dilemma over lunch at the corner bar and grill. But the free and easy banter of his friends soon decided things for him. Charlie confided in the others that his brother-in-law was staying with him and would most likely join their game that night. As his friends were voicing their approval of the prospect of 'new blood' at the table, Charlie was wondering why Sibyl hadn't come herself to ask after Alice. Why had she sent Jack?

When he returned home that evening, Charlie found Jack in the kitchen feeding lean ground hamburger to a mottled brown and white dog. He suppressed the urge to grab the meat from Jack's hands and bit back the curse rising to his lips; in Charlie's mind that hamburger was already well done and between the two halves of a kaiser bun, smothered in fried onions and mushrooms. He'd fantasized about it on the bus ride home.

"How was work?" Jack asked.

"Fine," Charlie mumbled into his chest. "Fine. Ah, Jack, that's my supper you're feeding...."

"Hey, Charlie, chill, son. Look at this poor mutt; he's starvin'. You can always go out and buy more burger. Just look at this sweet little guy, ain't he cute? You can't begrudge a few mouthfuls of ground round to such a feisty little bugger, can you?" Sternadt was roughhousing with the dog as he spoke, his tone intimating that Charlie was the dog in the manger.

Charlie turned quietly and left, digging in his pockets for enough money to buy something to chew on until the game. Jack was a large, robust man and, truth be known, Charlie had always been intimidated by him. Not only because Jack was a policeman, but also because of his outgoing and confident manner, a manner totally opposite from his own. It occurred to Charlie that he was as cowed by Jack Sternadt as he had been by Alice; they both had that way of demeaning him and undercutting his life until all his small achievements paled to folly. Alice had worked hard to accomplish these ends, while Jack was unaware he had this effect on Charlie. Jack bulled his way through life, while Charlie crept timidly on quiet feet.

Later, following a meager supper of canned soup and his seemingly ubiquitous cheese sandwiches, Jack confided in Charlie his real reason for being in the city. "It's like this, Chuck. You're a man and I'm a man, right?" He stared into Charlie's face awaiting a response. Charlie nodded his head at the observation.

"And men sometimes have certain needs that can't be fulfilled in their own beds. Get my meanin'? You see, there's this gash I met a few months back investigating a highway fatal, and, well, you know how it goes, don't you? Her boyfriend's road kill and she's left alone in her apartment with no protection, see. So I had to make sure she's alright, huh?" Charlie assumed that 'gash' was what policemen now called women who put out for them, what used to be known as 'tail off the top' or 'side nookie.'

"She lives here in town and I been seein' her, you know regular, since her loss. She and I sorta have a mutual understanding. Now I just thought I'd tell you, cause I know I can trust you to keep it between us, because you know what Sibyl's like. If she found out it'd kill her." Bony fingers raked Charlie's spine at Jack's choice of expressions.

"I mean, hell, you know what I'm tryin'a say. A man has to check out the opportunities over the next hill once in a while, so to speak, huh? I know you musta done it enough times, married to a cunt like Alice all these years, huh?" Jack prodded Charlie's shoulder from across the kitchen table and laughed at his own witticism.

Charlie didn't know how to respond. He'd never heard his brother-in-law talk like this, not about his feelings about Alice or her sister Sibyl and never about his own leisure-time activities. Charlie was hardly prepared to play the role of father confessor and co-conspirator. The man-to-man intimacy made him decidedly uncomfortable. And all the time Jack spoke, he spooned his empty soup bowl with the drumming action of one hand while scratching behind the dog's ears with the other, driving Charlie to the limits of his patience. What rankled most was Jack's confident assumption that Charlie had been with other women during his marriage. That kind of behavior had never occurred to him, although in retrospect it should have, he supposed. But why were others always so ready to label and file Charlie? Was he that shallow and transparent? So dismissably harmless that he could easily be fitted into only one pigeonhole?

He pondered this as he washed and dried the dishes, occasionally glancing over his shoulder at Jack and the dog. Jack was leaning back in his chair and smoking a tightly rolled marijuana cigarette while tossing bits of cheese sandwich in the air for the dog to catch. It really wasn't a bad-looking dog, given a bath and a collar. It had a sad face and large brown eyes and its mouth turned up into a happy little grin as it yapped and snapped at the crusts Jack flipped its way. What's a little ground round, indeed, thought Charlie, compared to the friendship of a loyal puppy? He caught himself wishing the dog would pay attention to him, instead of Jack.

Within the hour, Sam Porter, Bill Jordan, Bob Sheppard and Dave Holmes were at the door with beer and snacks in hand, eager for the poker game to begin. Charlie introduced Jack around and, after the amenities, they all settled around the oak dining room table Alice received from her mother as a wedding gift and broke the seal on a new deck of Bicycles.

The game was seven-card stud, as usual, and the game progressed as any card game will, with some winners and some losers, some drinking more than others and some minor temper tantrums. Only in a friendly setting like this could grown men accuse others of being cheats and liars without having to back up their accusations with either proof or physical violence.

And all the time the dog was under the table and beneath their feet begging scraps of corn chips and cheese balls, always returning from its rounds to sit beside Jack for an ear scratch or a pat on its head. Charlie felt a curious sense of betrayal. After all, the dog ate his food and was in his house. That should accord him at least a wag of the tail.

It was Dave Holmes who, during one of the few lulls in the game, first commented tactlessly on the dog's presence in the house. Always an oafish and ill-prepared diplomat, both as a shop steward and social drinker, he pointed a scarred and callused finger stub at the dog and asked, "What's up, Chuck? You get the dog as a pet, or a replacement fer yer wife?"

The table went quiet. Beer cans halted in mid-hoist and cards stayed unshuffled as the others looked menacingly at Holmes. Jack snorted and said, "Naw, Charlie didn't find the dog. I did. I was sitting there in the kitchen this afternoon makin' a phone call when I hear this little fella scratchin' at the back door. I let him in an' gave him a drink a water an' a snack. Ol' Charlie caught me feedin' him when he got home. You guys shoulda seen his face, you'da thought I was feedin' the dog gold instead a some over-ripe hamburger, haw, haw."

The tension was effectively broken and the men around the table relaxed back into their easy attitudes. All but Charlie, who was red-faced over Jack's teasing. He fumbled with the cards, attempting a simple shuffle, face flushed and ears burning, when Holmes, impervious to his previous rebuff, continued his observations.

"I only thought Charlie mighta got the mutt 'cause it looks so much like Alice. That's all I meant. I mean, look at it. The same eyes, sharp, pointy nose and there's something about the way the thing grins at ya that just makes ya think of Alice. I wasn't tryin'a be a wise ass, you guys," he defended himself.

The cards Charlie was attempting to force into a shuffle went fluttering over the table as he looked closely at the dog. The blood drained from his face and he began to tremble. The animal did look a little like his late wife. Again Jack stepped in to salvage the situation.

"This dog looks more like you, Dave, than anybody else. Only his ears aren't as long and he's got all his fingers." They all laughed, except Charlie and Dave. Holmes was cursing the others and giving them a gesture with his stub and Charlie was still trembling.

"Here," said Jack, "I've got a picture of Alice and my wife from last Christmas. Let's see who's right, okay?" He dug into his hip pocket and withdrew his wallet, then slipped the photograph from its plastic casing. Holding it up before his eyes for a moment, he turned quickly to stare down at the dog. There was a definite resemblance—more than a mere quirk—the face in the picture and that of the dog both wore the same expression of cunning determinism and haughty superiority. Jack replaced the photograph before letting any of the others see it and managed a derisive snort. "Like I said, Dave, the dog has your ears. I win."

But Charlie knew what Jack saw. He could see it right there in the dog's face; the hatred and the menace and the melancholy eyes of his dead wife.

The game broke up earlier than usual that night and Jack left to meet his 'gash,' who was used to Jack dropping in at any time day or night. He thanked Charlie for the hospitality and his pledge of silence, but he left the dog with him. What else could he do? He couldn't very well show up at the woman's apartment with it, could he? He promised to stop off on his way home the next evening and pick the dog up. He said it'd be nice to have a pet again. And with that, he was out the door and Charlie was alone with the physical manifestation of his culpability.

He sat in his living room, nursing one of the remaining cans of beer, watching the dog. It made itself at home the moment Jack had left, sniffing and snooping through every room on both storeys of the house, then returning to the dining room and snuffling in the paper trash bag to pull out the empty boxes and plastic bags the snacks had come in and rifling through each for crumbs, ripping with paws and teeth. Charlie just sat and watched through the connecting door, sipping his beer. And when the dog jumped up on a chair to scavenge in the snack bowls on the table, knocking over cans and glasses, scratching the rich, dark wood with its claws, Charlie remained, passively watching, watching and waiting. Then Charlie suddenly called to the dog, "Hey, Alice!" The dog ignored him while it lapped up spilt beer and corn chips. Then it dropped down from the chair and urinated on a table leg.

Charlie hurled his near-full beer can with such force that as it struck the dog's snout it opened a deep gash from the tip of the dog's nose to its brow, a crescent of angry bright crimson. The dog howled piteously for long minutes, running back and forth aimlessly, dropping to its belly to cover its bleeding snout with its paws, then running again, echoing sounds like to break a human heart. But Charlie sat where he was on his sofa, watching for Alice to tip her hand.

The dog finally stopped its screaming and began a low, throaty growl, far too deep and resonant to be associated with a dog of its small size. The sound sent shivers up Charlie's spine and made the short hairs of his neck prickle. The thought that he might have been betrayed by his imagination brushed softly across the front of his mind and he blinked it away. He rose from the sofa and advanced slowly on the dog, which hunched down low, muscles bunching, backing into the kitchen, studying Charlie's progress as he continued forward.

The dog maneuvered to face Charlie at all times, teeth bared and blood from its snout mingling with the saliva drooling from its mouth to spatter pinkly onto the linoleum floor. Charlie reached to the kitchen table as he progressed and hefted a weighty glass ashtray, scattering ashes and cigarette butts. He balanced it to throw. The dog, seeming to sense his intentions, backed toward the open kitchen door, but its retreat was blocked by the screen, closed against night insects. Panicking, it crouched even lower, exposing its pointed fangs, ready for mortal combat against a far more dangerous foe.

Then, suddenly, calm washed over the dog's face. It wagged its tail and sat, licking its bloody snout and, tongue lolling stupidly, looked up into Charlie's eyes with the innocence and eagerness to please of a pup awaiting the its new master's affection. Startled by this behavior, Charlie lowered the ashtray. The savage animosity he felt toward the dog vanished as quickly as air from a sigh. Again he felt the brush of a thought—imagination? But, as his body relaxed, the animal lunged.

Burying its fangs deeply into the wrist holding the ashtray, it whipped its head from side to side, ravaging Charlie's wrist until the blood flowed freely and spurted from an artery. His hand and forearm quickly grew numb and cold. The complete surprise of the thing had Charlie so utterly stunned he couldn't react. The pain meant nothing to him; the weight of the small dog, fully off the floor and struggling like a game fish, failed to register onto his consciousness. But the bright, loud sight of his spraying blood finally snapped him out of his stasis, and with a mighty shake of his arm, he flung the dog from him, its still-clinging jaws ripping flesh as its hold was torn loose.

The dog bounced off the wall and dropped onto the table, scattering dishes and condiments, then crashed to the floor, scrabbled to its feet and turned. Teeth snapping with unnatural fury, it was caught up by the scruff in Charlie's uninjured hand and flung from the table through the mesh screening of the back door.

With a yowl of pain and rage, the dog skidded off the wooden deck outside the screen door and thudded onto the re-sodded lawn. As it scrambled to rise and face Charlie, he retrieved the heavy ashtray in his injured hand and threw it as hard as pain and numbness allowed in the direction of the half-crazed animal. Charlie heard a sickening thumping crack and yelp as the ashtray crashed into the mongrel's flank. Then a mournful, whimpering whine as the dog staggered, crippled, from his yard and into the darkness of the night.

As he stood peering through the rent screen door, Charlie felt the same brief triumph he had felt the night he'd last seen his wife alive. Then it was gone, and all that was left was shock and pain.

He spent the rest of that night and much of the next morning in a hospital emergency room, the recipient of numerous stitches, tetanus and rabies shots, all the while remembering the Alice of his nightmares. As the first of the rabies injections were administered into his lower abdomen, Charlie listened to the intern's reassurance of how lucky he'd been, coming in so soon after the attack. But, contrary to the young doctor's prepared 'you'll hardly feel a thing' speech, the needles produced a deeply burning, body-doubling, eye-tearing agony in his belly.

It took three Percodans to get Charlie to sleep that late afternoon when he reached home, even though the intern had cautioned him to take only one every six hours for the pain. He slept. How long he slept, Charlie didn't know, but he was disturbed by sounds now and then, sounds that threatened him, warned him to awake and move. But he couldn't do more than reach, sleepily, to the night table beside his bed and wrestle two more pills from the bottle and swallow them with the warm water from his glass.

The sounds continued throughout his drugged sleep. Sounds of scratching and howling and growling. And his dreams came relentlessly. Dreams of killing Alice and dismembering her as she howled. Like the actual event, his dreams had a sense of detachment, a distancing, without which he could never have been able to complete the task.

He felt, as if for the first time, the horror, the true repulsion of ripping through Alice's flesh with knife and saw, and he couldn't accept that he had actually done it. Far easier to believe she had simply left him for another man. A tall man, a stronger man than he, who had the courage to face her down and dominate her. And stop her howling.

In his dreams she still lived, sublimated by the Charlie he should have been. And the sounds continued, scratching, scraping, digging, as if Alice were trying to emerge from her many graves and howl an apology to save their marriage. Save something or say something. Howl.

But that was just dreaming. Aided by a strong, opium-based drug, he was just dreaming. But he had killed his wife and taken cutting tools to her and divided her—and that was not dreaming.

Nor was the banging, banging, constant banging at his front door. The continual thumping at his front door was real. And the real sound, unlike the dreamed sound, dragged him from his drugged sleep and offered him again to the realm of reality.

The heavy, hollow banging at his front door forced Charlie to throw the sweat-stained sheets from his clammy body and sit up, search for his slippers and fumble them onto his bare feet. It wasn't until he stood from his bed that he realized again the pain from his arm and his belly.

Within that pain he saw again the nightmare of Alice feeding her rotting flesh to the small mongrel dog. As he stood on weak legs groping for his robe, Charlie saw once more the laughing face of the dog from his nightmare, superimposed on the face of the mutt Jack had taken in. He fell back on his bed, reaching for the bottle of pills.

At that moment, Jack Sternadt crashed in the front door of Charlie's house and bolted up the stairs to his bedroom, yelling over his shoulder to be given a minute alone with his brother-in-law. He stood in the threshold of the room, ashen-faced and heaving for breath. He fought to control his voice.

"Didn't you hear? I been knockin' at yer door for five minutes," Jack gasped. "It was the neighbors, Chuck. They called about the noise. They couldn't stand the howlin' anymore, so they called the cops. Now they've surrounded the street and parked on yer doorstep. I heard the call on my radio on my way over here. Only way I got in was by flashin' my badge at the lieutenant on the front door. I only got a few minutes with ya, Chuck, so tell me what happened. Chuck. What the hell did you do?"

Charlie cracked his eyes open a slit and said, "That's your dog, Jack. You promised to take it with you."

"Chuck," Jack whispered, "can you stand up and come with me? There's something I have to ask you about before the city cops get to you." Jack eased Charlie out of his bed and supported him on the way downstairs to the kitchen. He noticed the dried blood splashed across the walls and floor and then Charlie's arm for the first time, but asked no questions. Instead, Jack pointed out the torn screen door into the darkening night.

Charlie saw the red and blue flashing lights flooding his back yard. Behind the lights he could distinguish the movements of many people, neighbors and police alike. In the foreground, bathed in the carnival glow, he saw his newly laid lawn clawed and ripped in six places, revealing as many freshly dug holes.

At the foot of the steps leading from his back deck was a neat pile of blackened and moldering bones. Charlie slumped to his knees and covered his face with his bandaged hand. His shoulders jumped and shivered with his whimpering sobs as he surreptitiously fed the entire contents of the Percodan bottle into his blubbering mouth and chewed.

On the lip of the wooden deck lay the little dog, face and paws torn and clotted with blood from battle wounds and from digging so many little graves. Beneath its bleeding jaws rested Alice's mud-caked skull. Its skeletal grin seemed smug and triumphant to Charlie's glazing eyes. The dog stretched its neck and nudged the skull with its ravaged snout until it rolled to a stop at Charlie's knees. Then the little dog huffed once, closed its eyes and died.

Charlie didn't hear Jack say, "Shit, you don't bury them in your own back yard, Chuck. Not in your own back yard."

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