Calamity

Paul laughed again. “You think he’ll notice we take a few?”

Tyler said he doubted it considering how out of it his dad was, but they couldn’t drink them all and get drunk; he had to go back to the funeral home before the viewing ended. There was some kind of coffin-closing ceremony or something.

“Of course.”

At the gate, Tyler nodded to Michael the weekday guard and he pressed a button to open the gate. Did Michael know about Delaney? Did he even care? The community was as empty and lifeless as usual. Some of their neighbors were at the funeral home but most of these people were strangers. Even if they read the obituary page, they probably didn’t realize the dead girl used to live among them.

Paul downed half of one Sam Adams in a single gulp. Tyler sipped his beer, which tasted bitter like it had been sitting past its freshness date. He didn’t care too much for beer; it reminded him of fat guys who ate pork rinds. Whenever he and Paul wanted to get really trashed, they hit up Value Liquor, where the ninety-year-old woman who owned the place never checked ID and they could buy a bottle of Wild Turkey Rare Breed and then slip off into the woods and finish it between the two of them. Dad probably knew of these occasional drink trips to the woods, he’d have to be stupid not to smell the whiskey burning off Tyler’s tongue, but he never said anything.

“Everybody is asking me what you have to say,” Paul said and belched.

“What do you mean? She’s nuts. We’re not in love, we’re not going out, we’re not anything. We fucked but that’s it. A one-time thing. That’s all. Better not even spread that around, though. Just say I took her on a date but she weirded me out and we never did anything and now she’s out of her skull.”

“Nobody is going to rag on you for fucking her. She’s alright. Except for that snaggletooth. I’ll tell them you duct-taped her mouth shut just to be safe, didn’t want to get mauled.”

“What does she think is going to happen?” Tyler was thinking aloud. “I’ll come back and say, ‘yeah, we’re together’? She think it’s going to be beautiful with roses and shit. And prom? What the fuck is wrong with her?”

“You sure can pick ‘em.”

“You told me to go for it.”

“Yeah, but not to make her fall in love with you.”

Tyler sipped his beer, smiled. “What can I say? I’m just that good.”

“Yeah, right. More like that desperate.”

Tyler touched his face where the blood had splattered… . sack rice … luff chide … “It could be worse. She could be spouting all that rape shit. That’d be worse. Right?”

Paul hesitated, downed his beer to the last drop. “There’s something else.”

“Ah, fuck, what?”

“Well, this isn’t coming from her mouth to my ears. This is one of those round about things. This girl said that this girl heard such and such and so on. Okay? This isn’t necessarily anything, so don’t freak. Could be rumors, probably all it is.”

The beer tasted metallic and sloshed in his stomach like oil on ocean waves. “What?”

Paul admired his empty beer bottle. “She says she’s pregnant.”

Tyler almost dropped the beer bottle but part of him had known this was where it was going and he squeezed the bottle instead. Lightheadedness threatened to crumple him to the floor and little black dots even peppered his vision but he ground his teeth and breathed in forcefully as if preparing to lift something heavy. He held the air in his lungs, focused on it.

“This is seriously fucked. If she’s—”

He exhaled the air with the vocal force of an orgasm (like the one that impregnated the weirdo bitch). “I have to talk to her. Now.”

“Whoa.” Paul put down the empty bottle and held up his hands. “You have to think rationally. Thinking fast and acting stupid got you in this mess. We go over there and then what? She’s all happy and everything you came to see her and shows you her sonogram?”

“She had a sonogram?”

“Fuck, what do I know? This is all shit I heard. It might be a lie.”

… sack rice … luff chide … Sacrifice and … luff chide?

“No, it’s not.”

“The odds of her getting pregnant, I mean it was your first time. Jesus. Of all the fucked-up luck. Is it even possible for her to know so soon?”

“You remember anything about Bio? I don’t.”

… luff chide …

“I told you about her mother, how she slipped into the room whispering something and then splashed that blood on me. I told you I couldn’t make out what she had said, but I know now. She said sacrifice and love child.”

“Love child? That sounds like a hippie thing.”

“No, it sounds like a fucking curse.”

“She’s not a real witch. Just some psycho.”

“I didn’t tell you everything.” Tyler filled him in about the rest of the events on Friday night. He explained how angry Sasha had been, how she threatened to call the police and tell everyone at school that he raped her. But how, upon exiting the car, she had mumbled, “Mother is not going to be pleased.” Who said things like that? And, finally, he told Paul about the figure in the window that night whose mouth had been opening closing in silent words. Maybe that hadn’t happened (just a dream), but he saw it so well in his mind that he couldn’t deny it. Each time Tyler said something as if it was a piece of evidence in a trial, Paul said, “Yeah, but … ,” and couldn’t finish his retort. Tyler replayed the experience in Sasha’s bedroom on Saturday, how she had been both come-hither like and also reserved, like she had a split personality.

“She cursed me and you don’t have to believe it but it’s true.”

“There’s no such thing as witches and curses. That stuff is for horror movies and stupid kid stories.”

“Well, maybe it is, mostly, but maybe also there’s a chance that all that hocus pocus shit does work and, under the right circumstances, can work. She cursed me for what I did.”

“Fucking her?”

“Raping her!” His head started swimming again and he had to sit down. He inhaled and exhaled deeply several times. “I did. I raped her. Doesn’t matter if I didn’t hear her say no. She said it and I kept going. I’m guilty.”

“Bullshit.”

“Her mother knew something was wrong because of how Sasha looked getting out of my car, crying and shit. She cursed me.”

“With a baby?”

“Sacrifice love child. I didn’t catch it all. She probably said something like sacrifice this man because he wronged my love child. The love child is Sasha. The sacrifice is me.” He stabbed his chest with his beer bottle and some splashed out of the top and spilled on the floor.

“Relax. Your dick didn’t fall off, did it?”

“She’s not doing stuff to me,” Tyler said. “She’s doing it to my family.”

After a moment, Paul’s eyes went wide. “You think she killed Delaney?”

“I don’t know.” He gulped the rest of his beer in increasingly bitter swallows. “But I have to find out.”

* * *

Paul assured Tyler he was fine to drive (Tyler didn’t really care; he just asked repeatedly to try to calm himself) and belched three nasty beer burps in the car as proof that he had digested the Sam Adams.

“If it’s a curse, why is Sasha parading around school about how you two are so much in love?”

Tyler hadn’t found a satisfying answer to that yet except the obvious one that she was nuts. “If she’s really pregnant then she’s trying to trick herself into believing some kind of fairy tale scenario.”

“Do you think she knows what her mother is doing?”

Sasha had cried for him to wait and not run away after the incident with her mother; she had wanted to