Sherman knew.
Mr. Marks hadn't been dead long enough that he was starting to get stiff. Sherman had been told that was why they had to act soon each time, before rigor mortis set in. He'd looked up the term in his old dog-eared dictionary and knew what it meant, though he didn't quite understand why it happened.
Like the dead cat I found that time out in the swamp…Didn't bend when I picked it up by one leg. Its claws were out, though, sharp, hurt…
Sherman, thinking of other things, any other things, wanting to be in some other place, any other place. Pretending this was happening to somebody else. A different Sherman altogether.
While his mother snipped away with the scissors, Sherman yanked and tugged, and the tattered gray T-shirt and underpants Mr. Marks slept in came off and away from his heavy body. Sherman tossed them into a pile alongside the bed. He knew his mother would burn them later. She rolled Mr. Marks off the bed and he landed on the woven throw rug with a terrible soft muted sound of flesh-padded bone hitting hard.
Sherman and his mother each grabbed a corner of the rug near Mr. Marks's head, and then pulled with all their might to get him moving. Then it wasn't so difficult to drag his body on the rug along the hall floor to the bathroom.
It was more of a struggle to wrestle him into the big clawfoot bathtub. As if he felt the need to resist even though it was too late.
An elbow bonked loudly against the tub. 'Damn you!' Sherman heard his mother say, but he knew she was talking to Mr. Marks. Sherman worked harder to get a long, uncooperative leg into the tub, his own bare foot slipping on the plastic his mother had spread on the tile floor, making him almost fall.
Then Mr. Marks's big soft body with gray hair all over it settled down in the tub, his feet at the end with the faucets, his head resting on the slanted porcelain at the other end. His expression was peaceful. He might have been relaxing, taking a bath.
There was no need for words now between Sherman and his mother. She tugged the plastic shower curtain around the freestanding tub so it shielded the back wall, then went into the kitchen while he went out to the garage and got George's old tools-a handsaw, jigsaw, cleaver, and a power saw with a long coiled cord.
He carried them into the house in a burlap sack, then removed them and placed them carefully on the floor next to his mother's kitchen knives.
His mother began to undress, which was his signal to leave.
He went out to the hall and closed the door behind him, but he stooped and peered through the keyhole, as he always did.
There was his mother, her leg, the rest of her, looking so much paler, smoother, and larger than she did with her clothes on. The shower was running and she was bending over the tub, using the knives and heavier tools. Sherman knew that when she was finished with the knives, cleaver, and handsaw, she'd turn off the shower before using the power saw. Water and electricity were a dangerous mix, she'd warned him. Setting a good example.
She never once glanced toward the keyhole, but he was sure she knew he was watching.
It was the power saw's lilting whine that he could never forget.
When she was finished, Sherman's mother called for him to come back into the bathroom. He waited a few seconds, so they could both pretend he'd been in his bedroom, then he opened the bathroom door, knowing what he'd see.
There was his mother, fully dressed. Everything in the bathroom was meticulously scrubbed. All the fluids from Mr. Marks had been washed down the drain to the septic tank. His pale, clean parts were neatly stacked in the tub, his torso, thighs, calves, arms, then his head. His sparse gray hair was wet and matted, but his face wore a peaceful expression, as if he might be dreaming of his childhood.
The black plastic trash bags were folded in the tiny closet with the towels. Sherman's mother got them out, separated plastic, then snapped a bag in the air to open it out. Sherman helped her to stuff the pieces of Mr. Marks into the bags, arms and head in one, two bags for thighs and calves, one for the torso. The bag with the head in it was always surprisingly heavy, so Sherman carried that one. Always the gentleman, or he'd be scolded.
He and his mother lugged the bags out to the cedar-plank back porch that faced the deep swamp. The alligators were conditioned to being fed from there, everything from fish heads to…everything. They'd be waiting in the darkness, all of them, hungry and expectant; as if they recognized the sounds and knew what they meant. Maybe the whine of the power saw.
Sherman and his mother removed one by one the pieces of Mr. Marks and tossed them to the alligators beyond the porch rail. Some of the pieces the gators dragged back into the depths of the swamp. Some they ate right there. One of the big gators always made primitive, guttural noises along with the crunching of bone. That was another sound Sherman would never forget. A sound that was older than the human race, and might be in the collective memory and needed only reminding.
It wasn't until years later that Sherman understood what it was all about. The elderly boarders would disappear from the isolated shack on the edge of the swamp and be missed by no one. Before renting them a room, Sherman's mother always made sure they had no family. Their Social Security checks would continue to arrive, and be endorsed by Sherman's mother. One of the few useful skills her con man husband had taught her, before leaving her so she could toil alone with child and poverty, was forgery.
She made the most of it, and wasted little time.
Tomorrow she'd place another classified ad in the papers under Rooms for Rent. She knew there'd be plenty of replies. Florida was full of pensioners, lonely and poor and closing fast on the end of life, people who had no family and needed a final place to stay before being claimed by death or the dreaded retirement homes.
There! Dessert.
There was a final grunting and stirring and rippling of water in the moonlight, a parting splash in the darkness beneath the moss-draped trees.
Sherman's mother leaned down and with his help began folding the now-empty plastic bags.
They were the thick kind that could be washed out and used again. Over and over.
Fifteen minutes later Sherman was back in his bed, listening to the night sounds outside his window. A loon cried off in the distance. Closer by, there was the rustling of something moving through the brush. Insects droned and shrilled constantly so that you got used to them and only now and then realized you heard them. The swamp seemed peaceful but wasn't.
The swamp was a dark place that held its secrets close.
11
New York, the present
Florence barely had time to go to the kitchen and have a drink of water from a plastic bottle before the Federal Parcel deliveryman knocked on her door. It must have been a straight shot for the elevator.
She placed the water bottle back in the refrigerator. The cold air that tumbled out felt good on her stocking feet. And the hall carpet felt soft after the tiled kitchen floor.
She opened the door to find the deliveryman smiling at her. A nice-looking guy with a nice smile. That was the word he brought to mind-nice. Regular. And he was cradling a long white box of the sort flowers came in.
'Florence Norton?' he asked, making a show of looking at something on his side of the box, an address label, probably.
'That's me,' Florence said, returning his nice smile, wondering if the box contained flowers, wondering if this guy was married or otherwise attached.
He used a balled fist between her breasts to shove her hard back into the apartment, then stepped inside, closed the door, and lifted the box's lid a few inches so he could reach in and withdraw a gun.
The room spun and her chest ached where he'd pushed her. Anger became fear became paralysis.
'Keep your head,' the man said. 'That might keep you alive.'
Florence felt herself nod. The muzzle of the small, blue-steel gun looked like a tunnel to death. Which was what it would be, if she didn't do what this nice man said.
