If It Bleeds Read online

  He let himself in, expecting a mess, but the cabin was spick and span. Old Bill’s work, surely; it was even possible Bill had given it one last putting-to-rights on the day he killed himself. Aggie Larson’s old rag rug still lay in the center of the room, threadbare around the edges but otherwise whole. There was a Ranger woodstove up on bricks and waiting to be loaded, its isinglass window as clean as the floor. To the left was a rudimentary kitchen. To the right, overlooking the woods sloping down to the brook, was an oak dining table. At the far end of the room were a swaybacked sofa, a couple of chairs, and a fireplace Drew felt dubious about lighting. God knew how much creosote might have collected in the chimney, not to mention wildlife: mice, squirrels, bats.

  The cookstove was a Hotpoint that had probably been new back in the days when the only satellite circling the earth was the moon. Next to it, standing open and somehow corpselike, was an unplugged refrigerator. It was empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. The television in the living room area was a portable on a rolling cart. He remembered the four of them sitting in front of it, watching M*A*S*H reruns and eating TV dinners.

  Plank stairs ran up the west wall of the cabin. There was a kind of gallery up there, lined with bookcases that mostly held paperbacks—what Lucy had called rainy-day camp reading. Two small bedrooms opened off the gallery. Drew and Lucy had slept in one, the kids in the other. Did they stop coming here when Stacey began to bitch about needing her privacy? Was that why? Or did they just get too busy for summer weeks at camp? Drew couldn’t remember. He was just glad to be here, and glad none of their renters had made off with his mom’s rag rug… although why would they? It had once been pretty damn gorgeous, but was now fit only to be walked over by people in woods-muddy shoes or bare feet wet from wading in the brook.

  “I can work here,” Drew said. “Yeah.” He jumped at the sound of his own voice—still nerved up from his stare-down with Moose Mom, he supposed—and then laughed.

  He didn’t need to check the electricity, because he could see the red lamp flashing on Pop’s old answering machine, but he flipped the switch for the overhead lights anyway, because the afternoon was starting to thin out. He went over to the answering machine and hit PLAY.

  “It’s Lucy, Drew.” She sounded wavery, as if her voice were coming from twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and Drew remembered this old answering gadget was basically a cassette deck. It was sort of amazing that it worked at all. “It’s ten past three, and I’m a little worried. Are you there yet? Call me as soon as you can.”

  Drew was amused but also annoyed. He had come up here to avoid distractions, and the last thing he needed was Lucy looking over his shoulder for the next three weeks. Still, he supposed she had valid reasons to be concerned. He could have had an accident on the way up, or broken down on the Shithouse Road. She certainly couldn’t be worried that he was going mental over a book he hadn’t even started to write.

  Thinking that brought back a memory of a lecture the English Department had sponsored five or six years before, Jonathan Franzen speaking to a full house on the art and craft of the novel. He had said that the peak of the novel-writing experience actually came before the writer began, while everything was still in his or her imagination. “Even the clearest part of what was in your mind gets lost in translation,” Franzen had said. Drew remembered thinking that it was rather self-centered of the guy to assume that his experience was the general case.

  Drew picked up the phone (the receiver was the old dumbbell shape, basic black and amazingly heavy), heard a good strong dial tone, and called Lucy’s cell. “I’m here,” he said. “No problems.”

  “Oh, good. How’s the road? How’s the cabin?”

  They talked for awhile, then he talked to Stacey, who had just come in from school and demanded the phone. Lucy came back and reminded him to change the answering machine message because it was giving her the creeps.

  “All I can promise is to try. This gadget was probably state-of-the-art in the seventies, but that was half a century ago.”

  “Do your best. Have you seen any wildlife?”

  He thought of Moose Mom, her head lowered as she decided whether or not to charge and trample him to death.

  “A few crows, that’s about it. Hey, Luce, I want to haul my crap in before the sun goes down. I’ll call later.”

  “Around seven-thirty would be good. You can talk to Brandon, he’ll be back by then. He’s eating dinner at Randy’s house.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Anything else to report?” There might have been worry in her voice, or that might only have been his imagination.

  “Nope. All quiet on the Western Front. Love you, hon.”

  “Love you, too.”

  He placed the funny old-fashioned receiver back in its cradle and spoke to the empty cabin. “Oh wait, one other thing, honeybunch. Old Bill blew his head off right out front.”

  And shocked himself by laughing.

  9

  By the time he had his luggage and supplies in, it was past six o’clock and he was hungry. He tried the kitchen faucet, and after a few chugs and thumps in the pipes, began to get splurts of cloudy water that eventually ran cold, clear, and steady. He filled a pot, turned on the Hotpoint (the low hum of the big burner brought back memories of other meals here), and waited for the water to boil so he could add spaghetti. There was sauce, too. Lucy had thrown a bottle of Ragu into one of his boxes of supplies. He would have forgotten.

  He considered heating up a can of peas, and decided not to. He was at camp and would eat camp style. No alcohol, though; he had brought none with him and hadn’t bought any at the Big 90. If the work went well, as he expected, he might reward himself with a rack of Bud the next time he went down to the store. He might even find some salad stuff, although he had an idea that when it came to stocking vegetables, Roy DeWitt kept plenty of popcorn and hotdog relish on hand, and called it good. Maybe the odd bottle of sauerkraut for those with exotic tastes.

  While he waited for the water to boil and the sauce to simmer, Drew turned on the TV, expecting nothing but snow. What he got instead was a bluescreen and a message that read DIRECTV CONNECTING. Drew had his doubts about that but left the TV alone to do its thing. Assuming it was doing anything.

  He was rooting through one of the lower cabinets when Lester Holt’s voice blared into the cabin, startling him so badly that he gave a yell and dropped the colander he’d just found. When he turned around, he saw NBC’s nightly newscast, clear as a bell. Lester was reporting on the latest Trump farrago, and as he turned the story over to Chuck Todd for the dirty details, Drew grabbed the remote and killed the set. It was nice to know it worked, but he had no intention of junking up his mind with Trump, terrorism, or taxes.

  He cooked a whole box of spaghetti and ate most of it. In his mind, Lucy waved a tut-tutting finger and mentioned—again—his growing middle-aged spread. Drew reminded her he had skipped lunch. He washed his few dishes, thinking about Moose Mom and suicide. Was there a place for either of them in Bitter River? Moose Mom, probably not. Suicide, maybe.

  He supposed Franzen had had a point about the time before writing a novel actually began. It was a good time, because everything you saw and heard was possible grist for the mill. Everything was malleable. The mind could build a city, remodel it, then raze it, all while you were taking a shower or shaving or having a piss. Once you began, however, that changed. Every scene you wrote, every word you wrote, limited your options a little more. Eventually you were like a cow trotting down a narrow chute with no exit, trotting toward the—

  “No, no, it’s not like that at all,” he said, once again startled by the sound of his own voice. “Not like that at all.”

  10

  Dark came fast in the deep woods. Drew went around turning on the lamps (there were four of them, each shade more awful than the last), and then tackled the answering machine. He listened to his dead father’s message twice, his good old pop who had never,
so far as he could recall, said a mean word or raised a hand to his sons (mean words and raised hands had been their mother’s province). It seemed wrong to erase it, but because there was no spare answering machine tape in Pop’s desk, his marching orders from Lucy left him no choice. His recording was brief and to the point: “This is Drew. Please leave a message.”

  With that done, he put on his light jacket and went outside to sit on the steps and look at the stars. He was always stunned by how many you could see once you got away from the light pollution of even such a relatively small town as Falmouth. God had spilled a jug of light up there, and beyond the spill was eternity. The mystery of such an extended reality beggared comprehension. A breeze gusted, making the pines sigh in their sorrowful way, and suddenly Drew felt very alone and very small. A shiver went through him and he went back inside, deciding he’d light a small test fire in the stove, just to make sure it wasn’t going to fill the cabin with smoke.

  There was a crate flanking each side of the fireplace. One held kindling, probably brought in by Old Bill when he stored his last load of wood under the porch. The other contained toys.

  Drew dropped to one knee and rummaged through them. A Wham-O Frisbee, which he vaguely remembered: he, Lucy, and the kids playing four-way out front, laughing it up every time someone skimmed the Frizz into the puckerbrush and had to go get it. A Stretch Armstrong doll he was pretty sure had been Brandon’s, and a Barbie (indecently topless) that had positively been Stacey’s. Other things, though, he either didn’t remember or had never seen before. A one-eyed teddy bear. A deck of Uno cards. A scatter of baseball cards. A game called Pass the Pigs. A top decorated with a circle of monkeys wearing baseball gloves—when he pumped the handle and set it loose, it wobbled drunkenly across the floor and whistled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He didn’t care for this last. The monkeys seemed to wave their gloves up and down as the top spun, as if seeking help, and the tune began to sound vaguely sinister as it wound down.

  He looked at his watch before reaching the bottom of the crate, saw it was quarter past eight, and called Lucy back. He apologized for being tardy, saying he’d gotten sidetracked by a box of toys. “I think I recognized Bran’s old Stretch Armstrong—”

  Lucy groaned. “Oh God, I used to hate that thing. It smelled so weird.”

  “I remember. And a few other things, too, but there’s stuff I could swear I never saw before. Pass the Pigs?”

  “Pass the what?” She was laughing.

  “It’s a kids’ game. What about a top with monkeys on it? Plays ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ ”

  “Nope… oh wait a minute. Three or four years ago we rented out the cabin to a family called the Pearsons, remember?”

  “Vaguely.” He didn’t at all. If it had been three years ago, he had probably been wrapped up in The Village on the Hill Tied up, more like it. Bound and gagged. Literary S&M.

  “They had a little boy, six or seven. Some of the toys must be his.”

  “Surprised he didn’t miss them,” Drew said. He was eyeing the teddy bear, which had the piebald look of a toy that had been hugged often and fervently.

  “Want to talk to Brandon? He’s here.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hi, Dad!” Bran said. “You finish your book yet?”

  “Very funny. Starting tomorrow.”

  “How is it up there? Is it good?”

  Drew looked around. The big downstairs room looked mellow in the light of the overheads and the lamps. Even the horrible shades looked okay. And if the stovepipe wasn’t plugged, a little fire would take care of the mild chill.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s good.”

  It was. He felt safe. And he felt pregnant, ready to pop. There was no fear about starting the book tomorrow, only anticipation. The words would pour out, he felt sure of it.

  The stove was fine, the pipe open and drawing well. As his little fire burned down to embers, he made up the bed in the master bedroom (a joke; the room was hardly big enough to turn around in) with sheets and blankets that smelled only a trifle stale. At ten o’clock he turned in and lay looking up into the dark, listening to the wind sigh around the eaves. He thought of Old Bill committing suicide in the dooryard, but only briefly, and not with fear or horror. What he felt when he considered the old caretaker’s final moments—the round circle of steel pressing into the underside of his chin, the last sights and heartbeats and thoughts—was not much different than he’d felt looking up at the complex and extravagant sprawl of the Milky Way. Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.

  11

  He was up early the next morning. He ate breakfast, then called Lucy. She was getting the kids off to school—scolding Stacey because she hadn’t finished her homework, telling Bran he’d left his backpack in the living room—so their conversation was necessarily brief. After the goodbyes, Drew pulled on his jacket and walked down to the brook. The trees on the far side had been logged at some point, opening up a million-dollar view of woods undulating into the distance. The sky was a steadily deepening blue. He stood there for almost ten minutes, enjoying the unassuming beauty of the world around him and trying to empty his mind. To make it ready.

  Each semester he taught a bloc of Modern American and Modern British Literature, but because he had been published (and in The New Yorker, no less), his main job was teaching creative writing. He began each class and seminar by talking about the creative process. He told his students that just as most people had a certain routine they followed when they got ready for bed, it was important to have a routine as they prepared for each day’s work session. It was like the series of passes a hypnotist makes as he prepares his subject for the trance state.

  “The act of writing fiction or poetry has been compared to dreaming,” he told his students, “but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think it’s more akin to hypnosis. The more you ritualize the preparation, the easier you’ll find it to enter that state.”

  He practiced what he preached. When he returned to the cabin, he put on coffee. In the course of his morning, he would drink two cups, strong and black. While he waited for it to brew, he took his vitamin pills and brushed his teeth. One of the renters had shoved his pop’s old desk under the stairs, and Drew decided to leave it there. An odd place to work, perhaps, but strangely cozy. Almost womblike. In his study at home, his last ritualized act before getting to work would have been to straighten his papers into neat piles, leaving an empty space at the left of his printer for fresh copy, but there was nothing on this desk to straighten.

  He powered up his laptop and created a blank document. What followed was also part of the ritual, he supposed: naming the doc (BITTER RIVER #1), formatting the doc, and picking a font for the doc. He had used Book Antiqua while writing Village, but had no intention of using it on Bitter River; that would be bad mojo indeed. Aware that there might be power outages, causing him to resort to the Olympia portable, he picked the American Typewriter font.

  Was that everything? No, one more thing. He clicked on Autosave. Even if there was an outage, he’d be unlikely to lose his copy, the laptop had a full battery, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  The coffee was ready. He poured himself a cup and sat down.

  Do you really want to do this? Do you really intend to do this?

  The answer to both was yes, so he centered the blinking cursor and typed

  Chapter 1

  He hit return and sat very still for a moment. Hundreds of miles south of here he supposed Lucy was sitting with her own cup of coffee in front of her own open laptop, where she kept the records of her current accounting clients. Soon she would fall into her own hypnotic trance—numbers instead of words—but right now she was thinking of him. He was quite sure of that. Thinking of him and hoping, maybe even praying, that he didn’t… how had Al Stamper put it?… lose the wheels off his little red wagon.

  “Not going to happen,” he said. “It’s going
to be like taking dictation.”

  He looked at the blinking cursor a moment longer, then typed:

  When the girl screamed, a sound shrill enough to shatter glass, Herk stopped playing the piano and turned around.

  After that, Drew was lost.

  12

  He had arranged his teaching schedule to start late in the day from the very start, because when he was working on his fiction, he liked to begin at eight. He always made himself go until eleven even though on many days he found himself struggling by ten-thirty. He often thought of a story—probably apocryphal—he had read about James Joyce. A friend had come into Joyce’s house and found the famous writer at his desk with his head in his arms, a picture of abject despair. When the friend asked what was wrong, Joyce told him he’d only managed seven words all morning. “Ah, but James, that’s good for you,” the friend said. To which Joyce replied, “Perhaps, but I don’t know what order they go in!”

  Drew could relate to that story, apocryphal or not. It was the way he usually felt during that torturous last half hour. That was when the fear of losing his words set in. Of course during the last month or so of The Village on the Hill, he had felt that way every rotten second.

  There was none of that nonsense this morning. A door in his head opened directly into the smoky, kerosene-smelling saloon known as the Buffalo Head Tavern, and he stepped through it. He saw every detail, heard every word. He was there, looking through the eyes of Herkimer Belasco, the piano player, when the Prescott kid put the muzzle of his .45 (the one with the fancy pearl-handle grips) under the chin of the young dancehall girl and began to harangue her. The accordion player covered his eyes when Andy Prescott pulled the trigger, but Herkimer kept his wide open and Drew saw it all: the sudden eruption of hair and blood, the bottle of Old Dandy shattered by the bullet, the crack in the mirror behind which the whiskey bottle had stood.