* * *
Russell climbed the embankment to the idling truck, took a final sweeping glance at the woods, and shuddered. Imagining a red sky above those tall Southern pines was way too easy.
"Animals," he said, pulling the truck onto the road.
He tried his best to divert his thoughts away from what he had just witnessed (and taken part in), and instead focus his attention on what he was out there to do. I’m going to Ursula’s, he told himself, to fix an oven. What happened back there is over now. Forget about it.
Half a mile down the road he spotted the turn-off. It was impossible to miss: Ursula herself had painted her name, along with a huge black arrow, on a large plank of particle-board, which she had then nailed to a pine tree where the big dirt road met the smaller dirt road.
"And she wonders why she’s going out of business," Russell said, feeling as if the worst of the day were now behind him. Turning onto the dusty, narrow path, he almost felt like himself again. And when he saw the slanted, corrugated tin roof three minutes later, he had all but forgotten the cruel boys and the dead dog.
But not completely. A remnant of discord still clanged about inside his mind. When he probed his thoughts to see what was causing it, an image of the brown and white dog covered in blood and mushed brains somersaulted to greet him.
"Animals," he repeated, getting out of the truck and slamming the door shut. Walking to the diner, he looked over his shoulder and noticed a red smear below the truck’s door handle. He then looked at his right hand and saw that it was splotched with drying blood.
From the knife handle. You can wash it off when you get inside.
He entered via the rotting wooden doors and found Ursula’s Diner just as loud and dimly lit as it had been on Sunday. The only customers were the same two cops from last time: the fat one and the skinny one.
"Where have you been?!" a shrill voice jabbed on Russell’s right.
Russell jumped and turned to face his accuser.
Before he could conjure a reply, she spoke again—this time more politely. "Jeffrey said you’d be here hours ago." Then, grabbing his arm with her cold chicken claw, she dragged him past the cops and into the kitchen.
The blue double doors flappedy-flapped behind them. She turned to Russell, who still faced the swinging doors, and said, "They’s just doors. Stop looking at them and look at the oven. It don’t heat up when I turn it on," but her voice was inaudible over the country music blaring from the ceiling speakers.
"What?" Russell asked, cupping his hand to his ear.
Ursula clenched her fists, closed her eyes, and sighed. She went over to the wall and turned the stereo off.
In the dining area, one of the cops said, "Thank God!"
Ursula pointed at the broken appliance with a gnarled finger and said, "Fix the damn oven!"
Russell nodded. "Oh, okay. But first, where’s your bathroom? I need to wash my hands."
Ursula cackled, then spoke over her shoulder. "Get this, José: the kid wants to wash his hands!" She laughed again and shook her head as if Russell had gotten off a good one.
From his station at the deep fryer, José grunted a reply.
"He don’t speak no English," Ursula whispered.
"Then why…" Russell began but didn’t finish.
"Go through those doors, take a right, then keep going. You’ll see it."
Russell washed his hands in the dripping, moldering bathroom, then went outside for his toolbox—Busby’s toolbox, the one he had abandoned on ol’ Mrs. Baker’s doorstep. When he returned to the kitchen, both José and Ursula were nowhere to be found.
Good, he thought, no distractions.
He dropped the toolbox on the gritty, black and white tiles, turned the oven to high, and opened its mouth. The heating element was supposed to glow.
Nothing happened.
"Let’s see what we’ve got here," Russell said, hugging and pulling the ceramic behemoth away from the wall.
As the oven gave way with a smooch and a long scrape, a wave of cockroaches fanned out over the wall and floor. Russell recoiled, then backed steadily away from the approaching black tide. He watched scattered vermin race across counter tops and disappear into open bags of flour. Some ran about erratically as drops of boiling grease from the fryer fell onto their thin, waxy wings. Russell gaped, his back pressed against a bendy, particle-board door, as the insects found nooks and crevices to wedge themselves into. Never before had he hated his job as much as he hated it now, and when he returned to the shop, he planned on telling Busby as much.
And people eat here, he told himself. I ate here.
"But not anymore. I didn’t even want to come last time."
But you did.
"Shut up," he said aloud.
In the silence that followed, a pair of muted voices reached his ears. He turned and looked down: a gap between the floor and the bottom of the door glued together by a one inch thick bar of sunlight.
There’s your cockroach problem right there.
The voices belonged to Ursula and José, who, Russell guessed, were smoking cigarettes by the dumpster. He gave serious thought to opening the rotting door and screaming at them to, for the love of Christ, at least pretend to follow a health code or two.
But he didn’t.
When the roaches were all out of sight and he couldn’t spot a single maddening, wagging antenna, Russell returned to the oven. His plan was to fix the damn thing, return to the shop, tell Busby he quit—that he’d had enough for one summer, thank you very much—then go back home and sleep the remainder of August away. And he would have done just that had he not heard the cop on the other side of the double doors mutter that one phrase. It was that one phrase that set the hair on his arms on end and had his ear pressed to the door two seconds later.
While eavesdropping on their conversation, he couldn’t tell whether it was the fat cop or the skinny cop doing most of the talking. Not that it mattered. His words had wings; they flew to him; he heard.
Russell sometimes complained about hearing and seeing too much, as if having heightened sensory perception were a bad thing, but today he knew that it could be a good thing as well—especially when it made round pegs out of square ones. A lot of questions were answered by those two talkative cops. A lot of questions.
Reflecting on it later, Russell pinpointed this particular pinprick in time as the moment when he’d exceeded the point of no return. It wasn’t what the cops said specifically that made it so, but rather the decision he’d made in his own head.
Russell had to see. That was his curse.
And that curse, combined with his prodding, mellifluous, inner voice, begged Russell to go where he went, to see what he saw, and to do what he did.
He just wished he hadn’t listened.