Yardwork Read online

  He reached for the man’s pinkie again, but this time he clenched both hands into fists. Tim couldn’t blame him: he’d have done the same thing. It didn’t irk him in the least. He brought the handle of the sheers down sharply on the man’s wrist and his fist popped open like an expertly shucked oyster. Tim grabbed his little finger before it went back into hiding.

  “Don’t worry.” Tim smiled in the comforting manner his father used on him when he was about to lie to him. “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.”

  Tim slid the blades of the sheers around the finger. The man’s body stiffened and he squirmed to get away, but the ropes held tight. Snot bubbled out of his nose with the force of his breathing; his head banged against the floor. Tim’s jaw tightened, ready for the effort of cutting through flesh and tendon and bone as he squeezed the handles of the sheers.

  The finger came off more easily than he’d expected.

  ***

  Tim knelt down at the edge of the flower garden, the dampness of the moist earth at its edge soaking into the knees of his jeans. With his right hand, he dug into the soil, dirt clogging the space under fingernails in need of trimming a week ago. In his other hand he held his prize tight in his fist. Luckily, the man lost consciousness with the pain of having his finger amputated, so only the chirp of crickets and the whoosh of his own pulse in his ears interrupted the quiet night. Tim excavated a hole three inches wide by five inches long and six inches deep: big enough to conceal his trophy but an easy enough job to dig it up again should he want to see what state it was in.

  With the mini trench complete, he rocked back, sitting on his feet, and held the finger out in front of him, examining it as best the darkness allowed. He studied the finger nail chewed ragged, the dirt-clogged fingerprint, the wrinkles at the knuckles now caked with blood. He spun it in his fingers, considering it from every angle the way a prospector might have assessed a new-found nugget. He breathed deep through his nose, caught the scent of the fresh-turned earth, of decaying leaves and fresh cut lawn, and, he imagined, the coppery scent of blood.

  “Tim?”

  His father’s voice and its proximity so close behind him startled Tim into dropping the finger. His eyes followed its path as if it tumbled to the ground in slow motion, watching it come to rest on the small pile of dirt beside his makeshift grave.

  “What the fuck are you doing out here? How long does it take to put away a goddamn rake?”

  “Nothing.” Tim’s heart felt as though it had climbed into his throat, clogging it. His eyes remained on the finger and he wondered if his father saw it but didn’t realize what it was. “I... I found a bulb lying around and I was planting it.”

  “Yeah right. I better not find out you been sneaking my magazines in the shed, jerking off again.”

  Anger flared in Tim. Three years ago his father caught him with his dick in his hand and a Hustler spread out on the floor of the shed and he wouldn’t let him forget it. Women didn’t do it for Tim, he’d done it because he thought teenage boys were supposed to do such things. His true fantasies were far different than other boys’: bloodier, more violent.

  The sound of his father’s feet moving in the grass flushed the anger out of him, replaced it with panic at the surety he would check inside the shed to see if any of his magazines were ruined with his sons ejaculate.

  “No, Dad. I swear. I haven’t touched your mags.”

  “Better fucking not.”

  The steps halted and Tim noticed the slur in his father’s voice. Drunkenness made him lazier then usual: he wouldn’t waste the time going into the shed when more beer awaited him inside the house. Tim let out his breath and looked over his shoulder at his father, reassuring him he hadn’t been masturbating, but the flat of the man’s hand catching him in the side of the head, setting his ear ringing, stopped him.

  “Get your ass inside.”

  His father’s footsteps retreated across the lawn and Tim knelt by the garden choked with rage and grief. Once more, the asshole ruined one of the great moments of his life.

  He plucked the finger out of the pile, dropped it in the hole, and unceremoniously covered it with dirt.

  ***

  The next day, the temperature dropped another degree toward winter but the sun still shone. Tim stood in the middle of the back lawn with the blue plastic tarpaulin folded into a two by two square tucked under his arm. His father left for work hours ago, his mother likely went down the street to see Mr. Perry where she disappeared a couple of times a week: everyone pretended they didn’t know about her visits, but sometimes cheeks are turned to preserve the status quo. Kyle was at school, where Tim should have been at ten-thirty in the morning on a Monday, but the anticipation, all those hours of listening to teachers he hated while he fidgeted in his chair, fantasizing about taking the nameless man apart, would have been too much for him. He strode across the lawn, noticing a few leaves from the neighbours maple had made their way into their backyard. His father would complain about them later, cursing the bastards who lived next door, then make Tim rake again.

  At the shed door, he stopped, stared at the flaking paint as though he might look hard enough to see through it at the man inside, spy on him without his knowledge. He shifted one foot to the other, the tarp crinkling under his arm with the movement. Removing the man’s finger produced more blood than expected, so he needed to take precautions to keep from making too much mess this time.

  This time, he planned to remove more than a finger.

  He breathed deep to settle the tickle of excitement and nausea brewing in the bottom of his gut and wondered if a surgeon felt similarly before carving into a patient. He closed his eyes and let the breeze which would deposit more leaves in his yard, bringing with them more yard work, play across his face, calming him, bringing him the peace he needed to do his work. When he’d settled it to a dull ache, he opened his eyes again, reached out and pushed the door open. The squeak of the hinges and the sun flooding the small building made the man lying bound on the floor tense, his body going rigid. He writhed, struggling to look over his shoulder. Tim caught the man’s eye, saw his wild look of desperation and stepped through the door. The shed smelled worse than before, multiplied by more excrement and hours of fermentation.

  “Good morning,” Tim said conversationally. He tasted the shit on his tongue. “We don’t have too much time. Shall we get started?”

  The bound man’s cheeks bulged against the duct tape across his mouth; the hinges screamed for him as Tim kicked the door shut.

  ***

  It was close to one-thirty by the time Tim returned with his newly purchased spade. The dismemberment took longer than expected -- the human body proved tougher to dismantle in some spots than had been the finger, even using an axe and saw after the shears did their work -- and he’d needed to shower off the blood and rinse out the tub before going to make his purchase. He looked at his watch again as the key slid into the lock on the front door.

  He’d have to hurry, but he should still have time before Mom finished fucking Mr. Perry. They liked to take their time about it, lay in bed together and act like a happily married couple; in love instead of trapped in shitty relationships and desperate for attention. Tim knew they did this because he’d watched them before: Mr. Perry’s bedroom was on the ground floor.

  “Hi, Mom. I’m home,” he called, just-in-case. “School let out early today.”

  He peeked around the corner into the living room: empty. No sounds anywhere in the house, so he took a couple of steps down the hallway, spade held behind him.

  “Mom?”

  No answer.

  Good.

  He locked the door and hurried down the hall toward the back door. On his way through the kitchen, he glanced out the window. His body carried on for two steps before what he saw rectified itself in his brain and he came to a stop, his sneaker squeaking on the linoleum floor. He stood for a second, eyes darting but looking at nothing, before he backed u
p the couple of steps and looked out the window again to confirm what couldn’t possibly be.

  The shed door stood open.

  All the blood drained out of Tim’s head leaving his cheeks flushed and his brain feeling bloated with air the way his stomach did when he ate soup too fast. He ran back through his actions from the time he finished cutting the man into pieces.

  Did I close the door?

  Of course he did: he’d been extra careful because of the blood on his hands and then, after his shower and before he went to buy the shovel, he’d double checked to make sure no bloody fingerprints were left behind. No, the door had definitely been closed.

  Tim’s mind raced, covering off possibilities. A decade-worth of zombie movies came to mind first. He envisioned the man’s severed body parts inching their way across the uneven concrete floor toward each other, rejoining the body into a hideous parody of itself.

  Not possible.

  He looked at his watch again: still more than an hour before Kyle finished school and a few more before his father would be home. That left his mother, but she never went in the shed. What, then?

  Maybe one of the neighbours saw him and called the cops.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the front door. No, he’d have seen the cop cars parked on the street. Tim chewed the inside of his cheek with his back teeth, the muscles in his jaw flexing and releasing as he thought what to do, his weight rocking back and forth between his front foot, leaning toward the back door, and his rear foot, leaning toward the front. The pull of the shed -- of the pieces of man hidden inside -- won out. He rushed to the back door, stopping with his hand on the door knob as he strained to see through the white lace curtain draped across its window without moving it and alerting anyone who might be watching.

  He thought he saw a figure inside the dim shed.

  The lock clicked as Tim opened the door: he sucked breath in through his teeth, worried the sound would give him away. No reaction from the shed, in fact, if someone was inside, he couldn’t see them anymore. He crept across the deck and eased himself down onto the lawn, careful to avoid the dried leaves scattered across the grass in greater amounts than when he left. As he approached the doorway, the figure standing in the center of the shed, back to the door, became clear. The person was a couple of inches taller than him and wearing a faded denim jacket and black pants. Tim moved closer, the long handle of the spade banging against the door frame as he did.

  Kyle turned his head to look at him.

  “What the fuck?”

  His brother looked back to the item which held his attention. Tim stood on his toes to look over his shoulder and follow his gaze to the blue tarp lying along the back wall: one edge had fallen or been pulled open and a hand no longer attached to an arm showed underneath, dead finger pointing in accusation. The feeling in Tim’s gut exploded through him, electrifying his limbs, threatening to spew from his mouth.

  “What the fuck did you do?”

  “I--”

  Kyle pivoted toward him, face ashen, and Tim saw the button of his pants undone, the zipper down, and one of their father’s porno mags dangling open in his left hand. A sense of satisfaction clawed its way in amongst the fear and anger and excitement and shame jumbling through Tim.

  I caught you. I caught you.

  “What are you talking about?” The calmness in his voice surprised even Tim.

  “What do you mean ‘what am I talking about’? I’m talking about that.” Kyle jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the tarp and Tim giggled at the appropriateness of the expression given how he’d found his brother.

  “What?”

  Tim took a step into the shed, stopped a few feet from his younger brother.

  “The tarp, you idiot.” The pitch and volume of Kyle’s voice rose, pinching into a girlish tone. “The body. The blood.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “‘Don’t play stupid with me. I know what you did to the Albertsons’ dog. What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Still calm, maybe too calm.

  “Then why do you have that?”

  Tim looked at the shovel in his right hand, held it out in front of him, the spade end at eye level. “This?”

  “Yes, you fucking moron, that.”

  Tim shrugged. “For this.”

  The flat side of the spade smashed Kyle’s nose, catching him off guard. He dropped the suddenly forgotten issue of Hustler to the floor and raised both his hands to his face. The second blow caught him in the right temple sending him sprawling to the floor on top of the spread-legged centerfold. He lay there unable to move, blood leaking out of his nose onto the concrete and flowing from the gash in the side of his head into his eye. Tim knelt beside his brother.

  “Who’s the pussy now?”

  Blood bubbled on Kyle’s lips, spattering across the floor. Tim stood, leaned the shovel against the wall by the rake hanging between two spikes, and went to the set of rusty shelves. He grabbed the roll of duct tape which had seen more use in the last couple of days than it had for years, and a dirty wooden stake once used to prop up a long-dead tomato plant, and went back to his brother.

  Kyle’s eyes spun in their sockets, unable to find focus, as Tim tore a strip of duct tape off the roll and pressed it across his blood-covered lips. His body twitched. Tim grinned. He pulled the skin mag from under Kyle’s cheek, flipped it open to a picture of a large, erect cock, a woman kneeling before it reverentially, a look of awe on her face, and set the magazine on the floor by his brother’s face. Kyle’s eyes moved briefly toward the picture.

  “Who’s the fag-boy now, Kyle?”

  Tim walked around behind his brother, grabbed the waist band of his already loosened pants and underwear in one fist and tugged them down. He brandished the wooden stake in the other hand.

  “Who’s the fag-boy now?”

  ***

  Tim’s eyes kept straying out the window to the door of the shed as he stood at the sink washing the dinner dishes. His shoulders and arms burned from scrubbing cement and turning earth, but he still hadn’t buried everything. Two-and-a-half feet down, a layer of clay too thick and hard for a person of Tim’s stature underlay the topsoil. He disposed of all of the nameless man in small bits and parcels -- hopefully deep enough the neighbourhood animals wouldn’t dig him up before he did a proper job -- but the task of reducing his brother to manageable pieces and planting him in the flower bed had taken too long. More than half of him still lay wrapped in the blue tarp in the corner of the shed, awaiting Tim to skip school again and give him a hasty burial. He plucked a dish from the sink and swirled the dishcloth absently across its surface, catching a glimpse of reddish-brown dirt caked under his fingernail in spite of having showered three times. He smiled tiredly. He’d sleep well tonight.

  “Where the fuck is that boy?”

  His father’s voice boomed from the living room, drowning out the local news. Tim pictured his mother’s answer: a slight shrug of her shoulders and a small, high-pitched sound at the back of her throat as she didn’t look up from her magazine or knitting pattern. The lack of real response would serve to further anger her husband: likely the reason she responded in such manner.

  Tim put the plate in the draining rack and grabbed a handful of cutlery from the bottom of the sink and set to scrubbing them individually. When he next glanced out toward the shed, he saw the reflection of his father standing behind him.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  Tim shrugged. “I don’t know, dad.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, really. I--”

  “You’re covering for him. What kind of shit is he up to?”

  “I don’t--”

  The impact of the man’s hand contacting the side of his head made Tim bite his tongue.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me,” his father slurred. “Where is your brother? If you don’t tell me, you’ll get the licking for both of you.”

  Tim bit down on his back teeth
, gripped the edge of the counter hard enough with both hands to make his knuckles go white. He couldn’t let emotion overcome him, not when the job remained unfinished. If his father found out, he’d not only call the cops, he’d beat him within an inch of his life. He had to stay calm until everything was done. He thought of the nameless man, of his blood, of all those secrets hidden inside which only Tim had seen.

  The second time his old man cuffed him, it started Tim’s head pounding.

  “Where is he?”

  Tim raised his eyes, looked out the window. A gust of wind swirled leaves across the lawn, threw them against the door of the shed, telling him what to do.

  “The shed,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I think I saw him go into the shed.”

  Tim saw his father’s reflection in the window, saw the way his expression moved from confusion to disappointment, then anger. Where Tim had been a letdown with his slight frame, disdain of sports and lack of friends, Kyle was the proverbial chip off the old block. For him to be going against their father’s wishes, to be flaunting his authority, must have been devastating. Tim suppressed a smile.

  “That little fucker.”

  He rushed to the back door, pulled on the knob and his hand slipped off, then tried again. Tim pulled his hands out of the dirty dish water and its limp bubbles, wiped them on his pants as he followed his father into the backyard, their feet kicking up dried maple leaves and sending them eddying across the lawn. In his rage and drunkenness, his father didn’t notice the spade leaning against the side of the shed beside the door, normally a punishable offence regardless of the fact the shovel didn’t belong to him. He threw the door open, reeled into the dark shed with his eldest son two steps behind. By the time he found the string attached to the overhead light and pulled it, Tim already had the shovel held in front of him in both hands.

  When the light came on, his father stood for a few seconds, probably confused by the emptiness of the shed save for the tarp lying on the floor at the back: an item which shouldn’t have been there. Tim watched his shoulders sag as rage dissipated, but he knew it would be short-lived. His father’s anger never disappeared: it needed to be vented. With bits and pieces of Kyle wrapped neatly in the tarp, there was only one other place for his ire to find release. The muscles in Tim’s arms tightened.