Crippled
A Story by Agent Tattletale
Right this minute, Sarah Broome's looking at her best wooden rolling pin. She swings it, testing how heavy it feels. The hard slap of it against her open palm. She's moving around cans and bottles on the shelf above her washing machine, shaking the jug of bleach to hear how much is left.
If she could hear, if she'd just listen, I'd tell her it's okay to kill me. I'd even tell her how.
My rented car is just down the road, maybe one song away if you're listening to the radio. Maybe two hundred steps if you count steps when you're scared. She could hike down and drive it back. A dark-red Buick, covered with dust by now from cars going past on the gravel. She could park it close enough to this toolshed or garden shed or whatever she's got me locked inside.
In case she's outside, near enough to hear, I shout, “Sarah? Sarah Broome?”
I shout, “You've got nothing to feel bad about.”
Me locked here inside, I could coach her. Walk her through it. Tell her how. Next, she'll need to get a screwdriver and loosen the clamps that hold the tinfoil accordion duct to the back of the clothes dryer. Then she can use this same clamp to anchor one end of the duct around the tailpipe of my car. Those ducts, they stretch out, longer than you'd expect. My gas tank is almost full. Maybe she's got a power drill to put some holes in the wooden side of the shed, or in the door. Being a woman, she can drill where it won't show later.
How nice her place looks is important. Seeing how it's everything she has.
“Her life used to be mine,” I say. “I can see the way she thinks things are.”
She can tear off strips of duct tape to hold the hose against the shed. To speed up killing me, she could throw a plastic tarp over the top half of the shed, then wrap it tight to the sides with rope. Turn this into a tight little smokehouse. In five hours, she'll have two hundred pounds of beefstick summer sausage.
Most people, they've never killed a chicken, much less a human being. People, they have no idea how tough this is going to be.
I promise to just breathe deep.
The report from the insurance company, it says her name is Sarah. Sarah Broome, she's forty-nine years old. A senior baker in a commercial bakery for seventeen years, she used to throw a sack of flour up on one shoulder, heavy as a ten-year-old boy, she could balance the flour there while she ripped out the pull-string at the front edge and poured the flour, little by little, into a spinning mixer. According to her account, on her last day at work the floor was still wet from mopping the night before. The lighting wasn't too good, neither. The weight of the flour tipped her over backward, bouncing her head on the rolled-steel edge of a table, resulting in memory loss, migraine headaches, and general weakness that left her unfit for any kind of labor.
The CAT scans showed nothing. The MRIs, nothing. The X-rays, nothing. But Sarah Broome never went back to work.
Sarah Broome, married three times. No kids. She gets a little Social Security. A little company settlement money every month. She gets twenty-five milligrams of OxyContin to treat the chronic pain that follows her spine from her brain and radiates down both arms. Some months, she'll ask for Vicodins or Percodans.
Not three months after her settlement, she moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors.
Right this minute, sitting here inside her shed, my right foot looks put on backward. The knee's got to be broken, the nerves and tendons inside twisted halfway around. Everything below that knee, numb. It's too dark to see, but where I sit smells cow-shitty. The slick feel of plastic must be bags of composted steer manure ready for her new garden plot. Leaning against the walls are a shovel, a hoe, a garden rake.
Poor Sarah Broome, right this minute, she's looking at her power tools. She's sick with the idea of sinking a skill saw into me. Instead of sawdust, the spinning blade spraying a wet rooster-tail of blood and flesh and bone. Well, that's if she has an extension cord long enough. She's reading the labels on paint cans, slug bait, cleaning fluid, looking for the skull and crossed bones. The green frowny face of Mr. Yuck. She's calling the local Poison Control hotline, asking how much barbecue lighter fluid a man would have to drink to die. When the poison expert asks why, then Sarah hangs up, fast.
How I know this is . . . ten years ago I was running kegs of beer between a distributor and too many little bars and taverns. These were places too small to have a loading zone, so you double-parked. Or you parked in the suicide lane, between lanes of fast traffic cutting past you in both directions. I humped kegs. I stacked cases of bottled beer on a handcart and waited for a gap in traffic big enough to run through. Always behind schedule, until, by complete accident, a keg rolled off the rack and creamed me out flat on the pavement.
After that, I got a place almost this nice. A rusted Winnebago motor home that wasn't going anywhere, parked next to a one-hole shithouse, along a wide spot in a gravel road through the woods. I had a four-banger Ford Pinto with a manual transmission to get me into town. A pension for being totally disabled, and all the time in the world.
The rest of my life, all I had to do is keep my car running. I stayed high on so much Vicodin that just taking a walk in the sun felt as good as any massage. As good as a massage with a hand job, even.
Just watching the birds at
