If It Bleeds Read online

  “Huh,” Gus said, craning. “Skywriting plane. Haven’t seen one since I was a kid.”

  CHARLES, the plane wrote. Then KRANTZ. And then—of course—39 GREAT YEARS. The name was already starting to fuzz out as the plane wrote THANKS, CHUCK!

  “What the fuck,” Gus said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Marty said.

  * * *

  He had skipped breakfast, so when he went back inside, Marty microwaved one of his frozen dinners—a Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie, quite tasty—and took it into the living room to watch TV. But the only two stations he could pull in were showing the photograph of Charles “Chuck” Krantz sitting at his desk with his pen at the eternal ready. Marty stared at it while he ate his pot pie, then killed the idiot box and went back to bed. It seemed the most sensible thing to do.

  He slept for most of the day, and although he didn’t dream of her (at least that he could remember), he woke up thinking of Felicia. He wanted to see her, and when he did he would ask if he could sleep over. Maybe even stay. Sixty different varieties of shit, Gus had said, and all at once. If this really was the end, he didn’t want to face it alone.

  Harvest Acres, the tidy little development where Felicia now lived, was three miles away, and Marty had no intention of risking the drive in his car, so he put on his sweatpants and sneakers. It was a beautiful late afternoon for walking, the sky still an unblemished blue, and plenty of people were out and about. A few looked as if they were enjoying the sunshine, but most just looked down at their feet. There was little talk, even among those who were walking in pairs or trios.

  On Park Drive, one of the east side’s main thoroughfares, all four lanes were jammed with cars, most of them empty. Marty wove his way between them, and on the other side encountered an elderly man in a tweed suit and matching trilby hat. He was sitting on the curb and knocking his pipe out into the gutter. He saw Marty watching him and smiled.

  “Just taking a rest,” he said. “I walked downtown to look at the sinkhole and take a few pictures with my phone. Thought one of the local television stations might be interested, but they all seem to be off the air. Except for pictures of that fellow Krantz, that is.”

  “Yes,” Marty said. “It’s all Chuck, all the time now. Any idea who—”

  “None. I’ve asked two dozen people, at least. Nobody knows. Our man Krantz appears to be the Oz of the Apocalypse.”

  Marty laughed. “Where are you heading, sir?”

  “Harvest Acres. Nice little enclave. Off the beaten track.” He reached into his jacket, produced a pouch of tobacco, and began reloading his pipe.

  “I’m going there myself. My ex lives there. Maybe we could walk together.”

  The elderly gent got up with a wince. “As long as you don’t rush along.” He lit his pipe, puffing away. “Arthritis. I have pills for it, but the more the arthritis sets in, the less they do.”

  “Sucks,” Marty said. “You set the pace.”

  The old guy did. It was a slow one. His name was Samuel Yarbrough. He was owner and chief undertaker of the Yarbrough Funeral Home. “But my real interest is meteorology,” he said. “Dreamed of being a television weatherman in my salad days, perhaps even on one of the networks, but they all seem to have a pash for young women with . . .” He put his cupped hands in front of his chest. “I keep up, though, read the journals, and I can tell you an amazing thing. If you want to hear.”

  “Sure.”

  They came to a bus bench. Stenciled on the back was CHARLES “CHUCK” KRANTZ 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! Sam Yarbrough took a seat and patted the space next to him. Marty sat. It was downwind of Yarbrough’s pipe, but that was okay. Marty liked the smell.

  “Do you know how people say there’s twenty-four hours in a day?” Yarbrough asked.

  “And seven days in a week. Everybody knows that, even little kids.”

  “Well, everybody is wrong. There were twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes in a stellar day. Plus a few odd seconds.”

  “Were?”

  “Correct. Based on my calculations, which I assure you I can back up, there are now twenty-four hours and two minutes in a day. Do you know what that means, Mr. Anderson?”

  Marty thought it over. “Are you telling me the earth’s rotation is slowing down?”

  “Exactly.” Yarbrough took his pipe out of his mouth and gestured at the people passing them on the sidewalk. Their numbers were thinning now that afternoon had begun to edge into twilight. “I’ll bet many of those folks think the multiple disasters we’re facing have a single cause rooted in what we have done to the earth’s environment. It’s not so. I would be the first to admit that we have treated our mother—yes, she’s the mother of us all—very badly, certainly molested her if not outright raped her, but we’re puny compared to the great clock of the universe. Puny. No, whatever is happening is much larger than environmental degradation.”

  “Maybe it’s Chuck Krantz’s fault,” Marty said.

  Yarbrough looked at him in surprise, then laughed. “Back to him, eh? Chuck Krantz is retiring and the entire population of earth, not to mention the earth itself, is retiring with him? Is that your thesis?”

  “Got to blame something,” Marty said, smiling. “Or someone.”

  Sam Yarbrough stood up, put a hand to the small of his back, stretched and winced. “With apologies to Mr. Spock, that’s illogical. I suppose thirty-nine years is quite a span in terms of human life—almost half—but the last ice age happened quite a bit longer ago. Not to mention the age of the dinosaurs. Shall we mosey?”

  They moseyed, their shadows stretching ahead of them. Marty was mentally scolding himself for having slept away the best part of a beautiful day. Yarbrough was moving ever more slowly. When they finally reached the brick arch marking the entrance to Harvest Acres, the old mortician sat down again.

  “I think I’ll watch the sunset while I wait for the arthritis to settle a bit. Would you care to join me?”

  Marty shook his head. “Think I’ll go on.”

  “Check the ex,” Yarbrough said. “I understand. It was nice speaking with you, Mr. Anderson.”

  Marty started beneath the arch, then turned back. “Charles Krantz means something,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “You could be right,” Sam said, puffing on his pipe, “but the slowing of the earth’s rotation . . . nothing’s bigger than that, my friend.”

  The central thoroughfare of the Harvest Acres development was a graceful tree-lined parabola from which shorter streets diverged. The streetlights, which looked to Marty like those in illustrated Dickens novels, had come on, casting a moonlight glow. As Marty approached Fern Lane, where Felicia lived, a little girl on roller skates appeared, banking gracefully around the corner. She was wearing baggy red shorts and a sleeveless tee with somebody’s face on it, maybe a rock star or a rapper. Marty guessed her age at ten or eleven, and seeing her cheered him enormously. A little girl on roller skates: what could be more normal in this abnormal day? This abnormal year?

  “Yo,” he said.

  “Yo,” she agreed, but turned neatly on her skates, perhaps ready to flee if he turned out to be one of the Chester the Molester types her mother had no doubt warned her about.

  “I’m going to see my ex-wife,” Marty said, standing where he was. “Felicia Anderson. Or maybe she’s back to Gordon now. That was her maiden name. She lives on Fern Lane. Number 19.”

  The little girl pivoted on her skates, an effortless move that would have left Marty flat on his ass. “Oh yeah, maybe I’ve seen you before. Blue Prius?”

  “That’s me.”

  “If you come to see her, why’s she your ex?”

  “Still like her.”

  “You don’t fight?”

  “We used to. We get along better now that we’re exes.”

  “Miz Gordon gives us ginger snap cookies sometimes. Me and my little brother, Ronnie. I like Oreos better, but . . .”

  “But that’s the way
the cookie crumbles, right?” Marty said.

  “Nah, ginger snaps don’t crumble. At least not until you crunch em up in your mou—”

  At that moment the streetlights went out, turning the main drag into a lagoon of shadows. All the houses went dark at the same time. There had been outages in the city before, some as long as eighteen hours, but the power had always come back. Marty wasn’t sure it would this time. Maybe, but he had a feeling that electricity, which he (and everyone else) had taken for granted all his life, might have gone the way of the Internet.

  “Booger,” said the little girl.

  “You better go home,” Marty said. “With no streetlights, it’s too dark for skating.”

  “Mister? Is everything going to be all right?”

  Although he had no kids of his own, he’d taught them for twenty years and felt that, although you should tell them the truth once they reached the age of sixteen, a kind-hearted lie was often the right way to go when they were as young as this girl. “Sure.”

  “But look,” she said, and pointed.

  He followed her trembling finger to the house on the corner of Fern Lane. A face was appearing on the darkened bay window overlooking a small patch of lawn. It appeared in glowing white lines and shadows, like ectoplasm at a séance. Smiling moon face. Black-framed glasses. Pen poised. Over it: CHARLES KRANTZ. Below it: 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK!

  “It’s happening to all of them,” she whispered.

  She was right. Chuck Krantz was rising on the front windows of every house on Fern Lane. Marty turned and saw an arc of Krantz faces stretching out behind him on the main avenue. Dozens of Chucks, maybe hundreds. Thousands, if this phenomenon was happening all over the city.

  “Go home,” Marty said, not smiling anymore. “Go home to your mom and dad, poppet. Do it right now.”

  She skated away, her skates rumbling on the sidewalk and her hair flying out behind her. He could see the red shorts, then she was lost in the thickening shadows.

  Marty walked quickly in the direction she had gone, observed by the smiling face of Charles “Chuck” Krantz in every window. Chuck in his white shirt and dark tie. It was like being watched by a horde of ghost-clones. Marty was glad there was no moon; what if Chuck’s face had appeared there? How would he deal with that?

  He gave up walking at number 13. He ran the rest of the way to Felicia’s little two-room bungalow, pounded up the front walk, and knocked on the door. He waited, suddenly sure she was still at the hospital, maybe working a double, but then he heard her footsteps. The door opened. She was holding a candle. It underlit her frightened face.

  “Marty, thank God. Do you see them?”

  “Yes.” The guy was in her front window, too. Chuck. Smiling. Looking like every accountant who ever lived. A man who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

  “They just started . . . showing up!”

  “I know. I saw.”

  “Is it just here?”

  “I think it’s everywhere. I think it’s almost—”

  Then she was hugging him, pulling him inside, and he was glad she hadn’t given him a chance to say the other two words: the end.

  2

  Douglas Beaton, associate professor of philosophy in Ithaca College’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, sits in a hospital room, waiting for his brother-in-law to die. The only sounds are the steady bip . . . bip . . . bip of the heart monitor and Chuck’s slow and increasingly labored breathing. Most of the machinery has been turned off.

  “Unc?”

  Doug turns to see Brian in the doorway, still wearing his letter jacket and backpack.

  “You left school early?” Doug asks.

  “With permission. Mom texted me that she was going to let them turn off the machines. Did they?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “Where’s Mom now?”

  “In the chapel on the first floor. She’s praying for his soul.”

  And probably praying that she did the right thing, Doug thinks. Because even when the priest tells you yes, it’s fine, let God take care of the rest, it feels wrong somehow.

  “I’m supposed to text her if it looks like he’s . . .” Brian’s uncle shrugs.

  Brian approaches the bed and looks down at his father’s still white face. With his black-framed glasses put aside, the boy thinks his dad doesn’t look old enough to have a son who’s a freshman in high school. He looks like a high school kid himself. He picks up his father’s hand and plants a brief kiss on the crescent-shaped scar there.

  “Guys as young as him aren’t supposed to die,” Brian says. He speaks softly, as if his father can hear. “Jesus, Uncle Doug, he just turned thirty-nine last winter!”

  “Come sit down,” Doug says, and pats the empty chair next to him.

  “That’s Mom’s seat.”

  “When she comes back, you can give it to her.”

  Brian shucks his backpack and sits down. “How long do you think it will be?”

  “The doctors said he could go anytime. Before tomorrow, almost certainly. You know the machines were helping him breathe, right? And there were IVs to feed him. He’s not . . . Brian, he’s not in any pain. That part is over.”

  “Glioblastoma,” Brian says bitterly. When he turns to his uncle, he’s crying. “Why would God take my dad, Uncle Doug? Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t. God’s ways are a mystery.”

  “Well fuck the mystery,” the boy says. “Mysteries should stay in storybooks, where they belong.”

  Uncle Doug nods and puts an arm around Brian’s shoulders. “I know it’s hard, kiddo, it’s hard for me, too, but it’s all I got. Life’s a mystery. So is death.”

  They fall silent, listening to the steady bip . . . bip . . . bip and the rasp as Charles Krantz—Chuck, to his wife and his wife’s brother and his friends—takes one slow breath after another, his body’s last interactions with the world, each inhale and exhale managed (like the beat of his heart) by a failing brain where a few operations still continue. The man who spent his working life in the accounting department of the Midwest Trust is now doing his final tallies: small income, large disbursements.

  “Banks are supposed to be heartless, but they really loved him there,” Brian says. “They sent a ton of flowers. The nurses put them in that solarium thing because he’s not supposed to have flowers. What did they think? That it was going to kick off an allergy attack or something?”

  “He loved working there,” Doug says. “It wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I suppose—he was never going to win a Nobel Prize or get a Medal of Freedom from the president—but he did love it.”

  “Dancing, too,” Brian says. “He loved dancing. He was good. So was Mom—they could really cut a rug, she used to say. But she also said he was better.”

  Doug laughs. “Used to call himself the poor man’s Fred Astaire. And model trains when he was a boy. His zaydee had a set. You know, his granddad?”

  “Yeah,” Brian says. “I know about his zaydee.”

  “He had a good life, Bri.”

  “Not enough of it,” Brian says. “He’ll never get to take the train across Canada like he wanted to. Or visit Australia—he wanted that, too. He’s never going to see me graduate high school. He’s never going to have a retirement party where people make funny speeches and give him a gold . . .” He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “A gold watch.”

  Doug squeezes his nephew’s shoulders.

  Brian speaks looking down at his clasped hands. “I want to believe in God, Unc, and I sort of do, but I don’t understand why it has to be this way. Why God would let it be this way. It’s a mystery? You’re the hotshot philosophy guy and that’s the best you can do?”

  Yes, because death brings philosophy to ruin, Doug thinks.

  “You know what they say, Brian—death takes the best of us and death takes the rest of us.”

  Brian tries to smile. “If th
at’s supposed to be comforting, you need to try harder.”

  Doug seems not to have heard. He’s looking at his brother-in-law, who is—in Doug’s mind—an actual brother. Who has given his sister a good life. Who helped him get his start in business, and that’s really the least of it. They had some fine times together. Not enough, but it looks like they’ll have to do.

  “The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”

  “And now my dad’s world is dying.”

  “But not ours,” Doug says, and gives his nephew another squeeze. “Ours will go on a little while longer. And your mother’s. We need to be strong for her, Brian. As strong as we can.”

  They fall silent, looking at the dying man in the hospital bed, listening to the bip . . . bip . . . bip of the monitor and the slow breaths Chuck Krantz inhales and exhales. Once it stops. His chest remains flat. Brian tenses. Then it rises again with another of those agonal rasps.

  “Text Mom,” Brian says. “Right now.”

  Doug already has his phone out. “Way ahead of you.” And types: Better come, sis. Brian is here. I think Chuck is near the end.

  3

  Marty and Felicia went out on the back lawn. They sat in chairs they carried down from the patio. The power was out all over the city now, and the stars were very bright. Brighter than Marty had ever seen them since he was a boy growing up in Nebraska. Back then he’d had a small telescope and conned the universe from his attic window.