do you? They were in love. Do you understand me? They had a passionate, wonderfully exciting life together, and now it’s all over.”
“Your son is a queer?”
“He’s your son too.”
“No, he’s not. He’s yours by your first husband, not by me. I haven’t been able to touch you for years because of the illness. Besides, how much of a so-called life together could they have in a weekly voice lesson?”
She laughed, keeping her lips tight. “You sleep real heavy-remember? I let Montgomery meet Dave at night all the time. I wanted him to be happy and in love the way I was with his dad. His handsome, handsome dad.” Her mouth settled into a thin, hard line. “They were made for each other.”
I rose and walked out of the house into the August earlyevening heat to get away from her gaunt face and accusing eyes. I walked for hours through the neighborhood, darkness finally coming around eight p.m. and sleep barely coming at all.
Going to work was a comfort the next day-just as it had been for the last twenty-odd years. The bins of nails reflecting the morning light cleanly, as if they’d never bite wood. The tree trimmer blades shining like crescent moons above the Pacific all those years back.
Linehan came in, but this morning he was excited and talking fast. “We got a great one last night. The body chopped up into so many pieces it looked like an explosion at a sausage factory.”
My face went numb. It couldn’t be. He was dead-I’d read it in the morning paper.
“The guy is one angry son of a bitch. He went to town-hacked off everything, even the nose.”
I didn’t want to ask it, but I’d asked every other time: “What kind of weapon?”
“Probably a hatchet, or a cleaver.”
At lunch I walked home. Rosalie would be sleeping, but I didn’t intend to talk to her or Monty. I pulled my key ring out of my pocket and unlocked the side door to the garage. I flipped the light on, and looked for the first time in many weeks at my beloved tools. On the pegboard, they rested on metal supports, just as I’d left them, except for one. Except for the one I figured would be missing-the hatchet.
A small sound behind me caught my attention. I turned and saw Monty, fresh from the shower, hair glistening wet as he stepped inside the narrow room.
He looked me directly in the eye. As always, his pupils were too dark to read meaning there. In his right hand, he carried my small hatchet.
“I’ve cleaned and oiled your hatchet, and I’ve brought it back.” He lifted it to its resting place, the keen blade beautiful against the brown pegboard. “I told Dave he should take the toaster to Southland’s because it’s the best for repairs. You did your best on it, didn’t you?”
His eyes never left my face and the small bit of stoniness I’d seen in them earlier this summer had taken over completely.
“You know, Dave taught me to appreciate tools. How to keep them perfect. How to use them and how to clean them. He taught me a lot, actually. Now, you’re going to continue teaching me. Daddy, you know how.”
“How did you get a key for my tool room?”
“Mom gave it to me. She knew I needed a particular kind of quiet place.” He smiled with the hardness of a man who knows his business.
“What growed you up?”
“Mr. Nichols taught me how to follow them at night and pick one out. How to talk pretty. He’d offer them drugs, food-whatever they wanted. Then we got one who kept trying to unzip his trousers with her dirty little freckled hands. I couldn’t let her do that, could I? It was so easy to do the rest, and even he couldn’t stop me.
“Yes, you’re going to teach me a lot now, Daddy. No more sneaking out at night. No more worries at all.”
MORAL HAZARD by JESSE SUBLETT
The game warden, first through the door, threw up at the sight of it. The rookie deputy almost laughed, thinking it was a joke by neighborhood punks or looters scavenging the suburbs after the storm. The first thing that caught their eyes was the charred remains of a large chair with some junk piled in it. At the foot of the chair was a pair of latex zombie feet, like something from a costume shop. By some miracle, the only other thing seriously damaged in the room was the TV, blackened and half-melted, like the Salvador Dali painting of the clocks. The other strange part was how everything was coated with a nasty-looking pink dust. Plus the horrible smell. Hell of a weird joke.
Crossing the den, the rookie touched the door frame. The pink stuff had a greasy feel to it. He could see now that the burnt debris in the chair had once been a man, that the zombie feet weren’t from a costume shop at all. As he stared, openmouthed, at the blackened skull, one of the teeth dropped out.
The vomit appeared so suddenly it could’ve been the hand of God down his throat. Realizing that some kind of terrible miracle had taken place there, he ran out the front door, praising God and promising that he’d never again download pornography from the Internet or stare lustfully at the young blond clerk with the nose ring at the corner store.
Owned by a former state legislator turned lobbyist, the three-story brick home spread its bulk around a cul- de-sac in an upscale, unincorporated community called Wildcat Oaks just west of Austin. It was one of the areas that had suffered the most in the previous night’s storms, yet the destruction seemed random. Two blocks away, an SUV had been blown apart by lightning, yet in the same driveway a child’s bicycle leaned against a plastic wagon. On the cul-de-sac, a tornado had erased one home down to the foundation and bypassed another next door, zigzagged across the street to obliterate two more, hooked left to make a cloud of splinters of three in a row.
From the street, the brick home on the cul-de-sac appeared untouched, even serene. In the cobbled drive was a black Ford Excursion, its backside sporting two cheerful yellow
On this hectic day for police, cleanup crews, and the media, the TV news van arrived ahead of the sheriff’s department and other officials. In the interim, the petite blond reporter interviewed the game warden, who explained how he came to discover the dead man’s body.
The homeowner’s wife, he said, was in Mexico, and because she knew the game warden from their Bible study class, the dead man’s wife had phoned him at home that morning. She had seen footage of the destruction on CNN and was concerned about the condition of her home. Her husband, who traveled a good deal for business, had not answered her calls or e-mails for the past two days, and their only child, a student at the University of Texas, was “off the reservation,” whatever that was supposed to mean. The game warden told the wife that he’d be happy to go by and check things out. In fact, he called her as soon as he arrived there and reported that everything seemed just fine, that she and her husband were very lucky.
The game warden had already given the reporter far more information than he would have liked. A month shy of his sixty-seventh birthday, the game warden was ready to retire next year and retreat to the two-bedroom cottage he shared with an aging, three-legged golden retriever.
He knew that fortune had not always smiled upon the owner of the giant brick home. Raised on a small egg farm on the other side of Dripping Springs. Both parents killed in a car wreck when he was twelve. Worked two jobs to pay his way through college and law school. Elected to the state senate in 1972 or somewhere around there, defeated for reelection. Went into the lobbying business and apparently did pretty well for himself. After all that time, most people still referred to him as “Senator.” He traveled a lot, all over the world. Sometimes with the wife, but most times on business.
Approaching the property from the left side, the game warden told the reporter, he could see the collapsed back quarter of the home. Possibly caused by lightning strike. The heavy oak front door was unlocked, the huge brass knob warm to the touch. Going inside, he saw the thing in the den.
“But what would you say was the cause of death?” asked the reporter.
