Wouldn’t do you any harm, you fat bitch, he thinks. His head hurts and he doesn’t really want to talk any more. He wants another beer, maybe two — shit, maybe four — and then he wants to go sit in the living room and watch the baseball game, or wrestling, or anything that means he won’t have to think about any of this.
“Shut up and look,” he tells her. “Just…shut up. I’m warning you.” Mr. Spock, huh? Compared to the crap that fills her head, he is an alien genius. His teeth are clenched so hard now that it’s making the headache worse. He rinses the sugar bowl, dries it off with a paper towel, then refills it from the sugar bag after flicking off a few six- legged explorers. It’s the hot weather. The ground gets dry and the little bastards come in looking for water, but then find out where all the good stuff is. Little shits. His moment of identification with the ants is long gone. Just somebody else who wants to rip him off.
When the clean, dry sugar bowl is full of clean, dry sugar, he takes it to the dishes cabinet and rummages around until he finds a bowl large enough for it to sit in comfortably. Then, with it nesting there like a small boat in a bigger boat, he fills the outer bowl with water and holds the whole arrangement out for Norah to see.
“Get it?” He points to the inch-wide span of water now ringing the sugar bowl. Karl is pleased to get the last word for once — he couldn’t have proved his case against her lazy thinking more completely if he’d had a chance to prepare in advance. There’s absolutely no way for her to refute this evidence. “It’s like a moat around a castle, see? The ants can’t get to the sugar bowl. They try to cross the water, they drown. No ants in the sugar. Get it, Norah? Get it?”
He’s about to set the sugar bowl back on the table when he remembers the stickiness that had sucked at his arm. He wipes the sweat from his forehead. Bad enough the heat, but the whole goddamn house is sticky, too. Ants? The way she cleans, they probably have roaches… Karl puts the sugar bowl up on top of the refrigerator, then pulls the plaid cover off the kitchen table and holds it out toward her. “Go on, make yourself useful. Clean this shit up, the ants won’t even want to get on the table. It’s only because you keep this place like a pigsty…”
He picks up his ax and starts toward the garage. The headache is beginning to ease.
“You…you bastard!” she shrieks. “You stupid, ignorant bastard! Those damn ants are everywhere! What am I supposed to do, bring in the hose and just fill the house with water? Is that what you’re saying?”
He’s not going to argue any more. He showed her — he shut her up — so why won’t she stay that way?
“Don’t walk out on me!” She’s screaming louder now, that voice like a dentist’s drill — he swears he can feel it buzzing in his fillings. “Don’t you dare!”
“Shut your damn mouth or I’ll slap you silly.” He tries to get the garage door open but she’s blocking his path. He grabs her arm and yanks her out of the way. The garage beckons like a cave, dark and cool, quiet and safe. Then he feels her fingernails in the skin of his neck, burning, sharp, and her other hand in a rude little fist, smacking away at the back of his head.
“Don’t you dare turn your back on me, Karl Eggar, you ignorant pig! Don’t you dare! Don’t you…!”
And suddenly something just expands inside him, a great, hot plume like the blast that leveled Hiroshima. He can feel it blaze up through the whole length of his upper body, out of his guts and up his spine and out the top of his head, rising like a mushroom cloud. He has the ax in his hand and suddenly everything has turned hot, the very air is blazing like an oven. Everything is flow, and noise, and movement, and all of it is glowing red — a single hot, moving, expanding thing with him helpless in its midst, helpless but laughing as the ax rises and falls, over and over again. Each time it strikes it makes a sound — skutch, skutch, skutch — as satisfying as sinking a steak knife into a thick porterhouse. He can’t stop laughing. Heat and the glorious pounding — the pounding! He feels like he is hammering the world in half.
For a long time after he has finished swinging Karl only stands, the ax now hanging in his hands, heavy as an iron girder. His limbs tingle, even his scalp prickles. He is drained, as bonelessly weary as if he has just had a ten- minute orgasm. But there is a…thing…on the floor. No, many things, one big and the rest in all kinds of sizes and shapes. It’s hard to make out details because the kitchen is very messy. The walls are spattered and dripping red. Red everywhere.
The exhilaration is beginning to wear off. He sinks into a crouch in the middle of one of the larger scarlet puddles. The strangest, thickest, saltiest smell is in his nose. He’s trying to think, staring at what’s left of his wife. Call an ambulance? No point. No ambulance in the world is going to do any good. All the kings horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put…that…
He wretches up what is in his stomach, a slurry of beer and less identifiable components. The smell combines with the blood and suddenly he is on his side in the warm red goo, unable to do anything further until he has emptied his stomach to its lining, until he is gagging out air and streams of mucus. Then, numb and unable to think about much of anything, he staggers to his feet, drops his shoes and clothes where he stands, then steps carefully over the abstract red splatters as he leaves the kitchen.
He stands under the shower for what seems like hours, hoping in a hopeless kind of way, like a superstitious child, that if he waits long enough and lets enough water run over him, when he goes back to the kitchen things will be…different.
But, of course, they are not. He stands shivering, looking down at the bloody meat and bone, the scatter of pieces that had seemed so inevitably connected once, but now seem as random as an emptied bowl of stew. His stomach lurches again but there is no longer anything in it to throw up.
Think, he tells himself. Think. Don’t panic. That’s when people make mistakes. Don’t think with your emotions. Be a man. Be…logical.
First things first. The shower was a mistake. He shouldn’t have left the room. The police, they have all this equipment now, special lights and chemicals to detect blood stains, even stains that are so small or so old you can hardly see them. He’ll put his shoes back on and stay in the kitchen, and if he has to go anywhere else, he’ll leave the shoes here so he doesn’t track any blood.
But he has to leave the room almost at once because the blood is pooled everywhere across the floor, right to the baseboards. He doesn’t think it will soak through the vinyl flooring, but at the edge of the floor it will definitely get into the gaps between the flooring and the walls and that will be that. So he goes to the garage and gets a big plastic tarp left over from camping and then, back in the kitchen, gingerly lifts the largest piece up onto it — it is surprisingly heavy for only part of a person — then begins piling the other decent-sized chunks onto the plastic as well. He has to stop several times to gag again, but after a while he gets used to the smell and a sort of gray haze covers his thoughts and he can work without thinking too much about what he’s doing. Still, the discovery of a finger with a wedding ring still on it makes him pause for a moment. It’s not that he loved her, or even gave a damn about her, but this…this is so…final. Not to mention the fact that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail if he gets caught, and that’s if he’s lucky. And now he’s cleaning up. He’s trying to hide what he did. That could get him the death penalty.
Karl pauses for a moment, then gives a sort of shrug. Too late now. The bitch drove him to it. Admitting that he did it, calling the police, going to jail — that would be giving her the last word. That would be Norah having the last laugh as he spends the rest of his life, maybe fifty years or more, suffering for what she did to him.
But how will he get it all clean? He’s seen it all on television cop shows. Eventually, they’ll come, and he’ll be the first suspect.
Karl surprises even himself by laughing. Of course he should be the first suspect. Because he did it! He’s sitting naked in his kitchen in a pool of his wife’s blood!
No, think, he tells himself. Look. There are red splatters everywhere, and dozens of pieces flung all over the room still to find. And on top of everything else, ants, hundreds of the little bastards still crawling everywhere, oblivious, and if they aren’t already doing it, they’ll soon be tracking thousands of little bloody ant footprints everywhere. The ants are searching for food — they’ll head right for the blood and bone chips and bits of meat. And even if he keeps them off the body, how will he find all the pieces of Norah and get this kitchen clean?
The idea, when it finally comes, is so good that he begins to laugh again.
You dumb bitch, he thinks. You could have watched Oprah for a hundred years and you’d still never have an idea as good as this!
He gets to work.
Once he has every visible piece collected on the plastic tarp, some of them already crawling with tiny black insect bodies, Karl begins to scrub. He concentrates on soaking up blood first, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, using paper towels and rags from the garage. It takes a couple of hours, and after a while he realizes he is dizzy
