The Dead Walk in Appalachia

He always looks the same, just as he did the last time she saw him. She wishes he looked like his profile picture had, smiling in the woods with a Frenchie in his lap, his eyes bright and full of life. Or as he looked on the Riverwalk, shy, reaching for her hand with a sly grin. Instead, as she stands in her underwear, frozen at one end of the hallway she sees him as he died. One eye is grey, waxy. The other has disappeared under what’s left of his swollen face. A flap of scalp hangs down over an ear. Most of the buttons are gone from his blue chambray shirt, and it hangs limply open, torn in spots, mottled with dark blood. One of his hands is all wrong angles and black flesh. A ragged gash runs up his pale stomach to his ribs. Something inside is dangerously close to spilling out. He is silent, always, but would he need to say anything even if he could?

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then she turns and steps back into her bedroom, latching the door behind her, leaving him in the dark.

Three years earlier, Alma was in bad shape. Physically, mentally; she was beat up. She couldn’t work, not after the car accident that fucked up her back, so that was one strike against her. And it meant she needed a place to crash for awhile since she already owed three months on her studio over the bar. It also meant she needed to find increasingly creative ways to get the oxys she’d crush up on the kitchen counter and snort or mix into the big screwdrivers she’d gotten in the habit of drinking all day.

She’d turn a trick, sure; most of the women she knew around her age in rural Butler County had at one time or another. She didn’t feel shame in it anymore than she felt pleasure in it. It was a job, was all. And who likes their job? The real problem was that most of johns knew her from either the bar or even high school, and she didn’t like the familiarity. Too close to intimacy. So while she’d do what she needed to when backed into the corner, she’d need to find something a bit more permanent. A bit more lucrative. Luke was the one who thought of the apps. She’d been at his place for three or four days, not wanting to go back to her sister’s, floating on vodka and pills, hot dogs from the 7/11 down the street. She thought they’d fucked, but things got fuzzy when the screwdrivers were bottomless.

“You know,” he said, pointing with a cigarette at one of those news magazine shows on the television, “These rich pricks are all just waiting for some broad to swoop in and clean ‘em out. Pathetic.” He looked over a shoulder at her, took a drag from his Newport. “The right girl, someone who can bat her eyes and shake her ass, hell, she could make a fortune.” Alma laughed, swigged from the stained Big Gulp half full of store brand vodka. But he continued, “I’m serious, man. Hell, they’re so desperate for pussy you’d be doing ‘em a favor by teaching a lesson.”

He brought it up again a week later. They were in his bed, where she’d been a time or three before, and he was passing her a glass pipe with a few dirty crystals in it, brown like old tea, like rainwater on gravel. She flicked a lighter, inhaled, leaned against the headboard. She didn’t know where her bra was, if she’d even worn one that day. He handed a phone to her. She rubbed her eyes, tried to focus on the screen. It was her, a photo of her. Not recent, but one from the summer after high school when she and her sister had driven up to Lake Erie where one of Sam’s friends’ folks had a cottage on the water.

“What the hell is this?” The image wavered in front of her eyes, then snapped into focus as the high crested and rolled through her.

“I got that off your Facebook. You looked fucking good.” Luke reached over, swiped through more photos. “Look at this one.” In the photo, another from years earlier, Alma was all perfect skin and shiny hair. “That phone’s prepaid, anonymous. The profile’s all set up. We just have to come up with some bullshit and start swiping.” Luke stood up from the bed. Naked, hands on his hips, he looked around the messy room. He bent over, started rooting through dirty clothes on the floor. Alma looked at Luke’s pale white ass as he straightened, having found his cigarettes. Then she looked back at the young girl she used to be on the glowing screen.

“Gimme one of those,” she said.

“What do you want your name to be?” He tossed her the lighter, pulled on a pair of basketball shorts. “Why the hell are these wet? Jesus.” Alma lit a cigarette, took a sip of screwdriver. She stared at the phone, didn’t notice Luke pushing the wet shorts down, leaving them on the floor, smelling a pair of sweat pants.

She swished the vodka around her mouth, then said, “Holly.”

It was easy. Fun, even. More than once, Alma lost herself in Holly. She found herself swiping for hours on the air mattress at her sister’s place. She should have been applying for jobs. Instead, she sent smiley faces, replied with a wink to text prompts. She told Andrew in Pittsburgh he had the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. Cory all the way in Sandusky invited her to a baseball game; she said she couldn’t make it because she had to stay at her sister’s that night. Some of what she told these men was true. She sent a picture to Alex of her hand between her legs after an hour of talking dirty; she opened an editing app, airbrushed with her finger, painted away pimples and bruises, the long scar from the accident, the cigarette burns her ex left as marks of possession, branding.

Luke got impatient. We gotta reel one of these fish in, he said over and over, or else what’s the point?

A week later, Holly in flesh and blood walked into Max’s Diner on Highway 68. She was hungover, and she briefly worried the patty melt and milkshake she greedily put down at the booth across from Alex would come back up. But she held it together, smiled, reached across the table and touched his hand. Then she suggested he drive her to the motel down the road.

“Take it all off,” she said, pulling the curtains closed, cranking up the AC. The old wall unit rattled and clunked as Alex kicked off his shoes. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, pretended to lock the door, stuck a piece of tape over the latch. Then she met him at the bed. She was working him with one hand, down to her bra and underwear, when the door opened, a shaft of light silently splitting the room. But just for an instant. Then Luke was inside the room.

Alex had just enough time to put his hands up in front of his face before Luke had an arm around his neck, dragging him naked off the bed. Alma stood, backed into the corner. Luke pushed something sharp against the bottom of Alex’s ribs, and Alex stopped fighting. He raised his hands over his head. Calmly, he stared at Alma, who looked away, down at the floor.

“All right, pervert. You deserve this, you know. You can’t be mad about something you brought on yourself.” Luke tapped Alex’s already shrinking dick with the dull edge of the knife and laughed. Then, to Alma, “Let’s go. Let’s go.” Alma stood for a beat, frozen. Alex’s face was slack, a portrait of defeat and inevitability, but his eyes never left her.

“Let’s fucking go!” Luke shouted, and Alma snapped back into the room like a rubber band pulled taut and let go. She felt Alex’s eyes on her, even as she slipped her dress back over her head, zipped it quickly up the back. As she pulled her phone from her purse and took three photos of him, full body with flash. Luke ducked, hiding his face, pushed the knife against Alex’s ribs just hard enough to break the skin, to send a single drop of blood running down his bare stomach. It hung there, then dripped onto Alex’s toes as Alma knelt, pulling his wallet from his pants beside the bed, opening it, flicking through credit cards and cash.

“Okay,” she said, was all she could say. Luke kissed Alex on the cheek, grinning, then pushed him onto the bed.

“Don’t cancel those cards for two days.” Pointing at Alex with the knife. “We know where you live, pervert.” Then Luke pulled open the door and daylight flooded the room and Alex pulled the comforter over his naked shame. Even as Alma followed Luke outside, as she backed out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her, even then Alex never took his eyes off her.

In the car and speeding toward home, Alma began shaking. Even as she laughed, as Luke shouted triumphantly out the open window, the adrenaline dump racked her body with hitches and starts. She counted the cash. Four hundred. Plus a couple cards that would be useless soon, even if he did wait to cancel them. Back at Luke’s, she crushed two oxys, filled the Big Gulp with vodka and orange juice. She thought maybe Luke fucked her on the couch, but she felt herself leaving, sinking wholly into someplace warm and dark, and she couldn’t be bothered to care.

Morris, a sixty-something insurance broker from Syracuse, started crying when Luke came in. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wailed, like a kid caught misbehaving. Luke hit him hard to shut him up. Alma almost felt bad for the guy; he only had $40 in his wallet, one worn debit card, and several faded pictures of kids who must now be grown. Luke left him with a black eye, a bleeding lip; said they’d send the pictures to his wife, his kids, his grandkids. Said a loser like him doesn’t deserve a family. Morris cried and blubbered. Alma threw his wallet out the window on the highway.

“Waste of my fucking time, man,” Luke said later that night, pacing in the kitchen under a flickering fluorescent light, his sinewy body tense, veiny. “We’re wasting our time with these deadbeats. You gotta step it up.” He stopped, pointed at her, trembling fingers with a cigarette between them. “Stop fucking around with losers.” He scratched at a sore on his arm, swung at an insect. Alma sipped vodka, swiped.

She rewrote her profile. “Looking for the real thing.” She picked at a toenail. She sipped more vodka. “Bright future here. Looking to build on that with someone like-minded. No hook-ups!” She picked up her own phone, began scrolling through photos on her social media pages. She found one from her cousin’s wedding the summer before the accident. She wore a black dress that showed off her figure, smiled brightly. Even her hair was done.

“Yeah, that’s classy,” Luke said, dropping onto the couch next to her. “Catch us a doctor or something.” He lit a cigarette, flicked ash into a half-full coffee cup. Alma looked at him, scabs on his elbows, sharply defined ribs, ‘fuckboy’ tattooed over his heart. He swatted at another insect. She looked back at the phone.

“How about I take you somewhere nice?” Andy countered when Alma proposed meeting up another anonymous greasy spoon. “Come into the city. Do you like seafood?” She hadn’t had much in the way of seafood lately unless you count Popeye’s value menu or those pop-top cans of tuna she liked to drown in tobasco after draining into the sink. Luke was less enthusiastic about the prospect of straying from their proven formula.

“You said yourself we’re wasting time on grease bag losers,” she told him. You want a big fish, we have to go out to sea.” She was proud of the analogy. And she knew she was right. She was also extremely curious what a nice restaurant in Pittsburgh had to offer. Let the girl have some fun, she thought. Not everything has to be work. Not everything’s a fucking chore. She told Andy that sounded great. She could drive in and meet him, she said, on Thursday night. Luke was holding, but was rationing what he gave her. Enough to get her right, but he shook a nearly-empty prescription bottle at her like a misbehaving cat that morning.

“In case you didn’t realize the gravity of the situation,” he said before dropping a single pill on the counter, crushing it, dragging a scuffed debit card back and forth through it. One line. Two lines. Four lines. He did one with a plastic Big Gulp straw, handed it to her. “Shit’s gonna get real dire, man. We’re in a dry county. Prices up.” She wiped her nose, handed the straw back to him. He did another line, then pulled the front of his shorts down. He didn’t ask; he didn’t have to.

Luke shook the bottle at her again as she got out of the car.

Andy was handsome. Not as handsome as picture, maybe, but who ever is. Like she was one to talk. But he didn’t seem to notice that she was nearly ten years and about a million miles down the road from her own profile photo. He shook her hand, then hugged her and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She felt herself blush. He smelled vaguely of peppermint. His blue chambray shirt was soft as she touched his back, his side when they hugged. She hoped she didn’t smell like cigarettes. She’d borrowed one of her sister’s dresses and a small clutch for the night. She hadn’t asked, but she never did. Sam wouldn’t even notice.

Andy insisted she order whatever she wanted, that everything was delicious. She ordered the surf and turf with breaded shrimp, then felt embarrassed when Andy ordered Chilean sea bass. He poured her a glass of chilled pinot grigio, 2012 maybe? She didn’t remember because she forgot it mattered. But it was pretty good wine. And when their food came, he said she needed to try the sea bass, asked if she’d trade one of her shrimp for a bit. She did. The fish melted on her tongue like butter. Andy chomped the shrimp like a pro. If this were a real date, she thought, he’d be scoring lots of points. But even then, on her third glass of wine, she felt the rat in the back of her skull begin to squirm. He’d ordered dessert, a chocolate soufflé that took 45 minutes and thus needed to be ordered with the main course, and she pushed all her weight onto her right hip, hoping it would quell the shaking in her right foot, the incessant tap-tap-tapping that was the rat calling to her.

Time for a fix, babe. What are we doing here when we should be getting right?

By the time the soufflé came, she couldn’t taste it. The warmth of the wine had drained from her, replaced by a chill creeping through her skull and down her spine. She felt her stomach beginning to knot. Andy was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him. Her ears were beginning to ring. She felt sweat bloom on her back, under her breasts. She seized his hand a little too eagerly, pulled him toward her, leaned in across the table.

“Why we don’t we head back to your place?” she tried to coo. Now Andy blushed, smiled nervously.

“Well. Yeah, sure. Listen, there’s a spot just down the river that’s great for a nightcap. We can walk. They have a heated patio for nights like this. It’s a beautiful view.” She agreed, then said she’d just hit the restroom before they left. Breathe, she repeated in her head. Step, she told herself as she resolved not to stumble into any of the two-tops between her and the ladies’ room.

There were three women at the sink. They watched her as she entered. She felt their eyes on her in the mirror, their chatter and giggling hushed down to a whisper as she b-lined for the far stall, locked herself inside. She fumbled in her sister’s purse for the half-bar Luke had given her earlier. She cracked it with her teeth, chewed it, swallowed. It would have to work. She pulled out the burner phone, texted Luke: “riverwalk 10 mins”.

Andy offered her the light jacket he’d brought, as the wind blowing up the river cut the night air like an icy blade. But by the time they were strolling down the brick walk, she felt fine. Better than fine. Her body was warm, and she barely felt her feet on the ground. Andy took her hand, and she felt the heat of his body run up her arm. He squeezed her hand and she smiled broadly. The lights of the tall buildings around them seemed to wink at her, seemed to invite her into their secret club.

Andy was saying something about a condo on the east side of downtown when she pulled him into an alley, pushed him against a wall, pushed herself against him. She put his mouth on his, and it was warm and tasted of wine and chocolate, and her body felt so good now against his. He kissed her back, and she let one of her hands drift down his stomach, past his belt.

Then something pulled her away. Time seemed to stretch, lights streaked, and in the moment she didn’t know where she was, only that it was a place she’d never been before, a corridor, a portal, and at one end were the lights. Her lights. And at the other –

“All right, you fucking hot shot hot shit pervert.” Alma forced herself to focus and her heart dropped as the reality of what she saw pulled her back to earth, back to the alley, back to the pavement, and she lost her balance and fell.

“Holly!”

Alma looked up as Andy reached for her, lunged to break her fall, and she saw Luke bring his fist into Andy’s eye, then his cheek, then his temple, then Andy was falling, too, and Luke followed him down with fists. Alma, frozen, sinking into the pavement like quicksand, watched Luke swing and swing. The knife in his hand left shallow cuts on Andy’s nose, his forehead, his ear. Andy hit the ground, still reaching for her, and Luke swung now with the knife, opening Andy’s scalp. Alma opened her mouth to shout, to tell him to stop. Nothing came out.

“Fucking scumbag,” Luke said, slashing blindly again. A piece of Andy’s ear fell away. Luke was blind with rage, lost in the fix. He saw Andy’s hand reaching for Alma and brought his foot down on it. Again. Again. Andy screamed blood. And then Luke finally saw her. “Get his fucking wallet. Jesus.” Alma didn’t move. Luke knelt next to Andy, patting his pockets. He pulled out a wallet, flung it at Alma. He leaned in close to Andy’s bloodied face. “Fucking pervert loser,” he said.

A gasp escaped Alma. No, more than that, some deep primeval desperation for air. Suddenly she was sober. Suddenly she was here. She crawled toward Andy. She saw he was still conscious, one mangled hand reaching out to her, and she felt her own hand go to it.

Then Luke swung a backhand at her, and her world went white hot for a moment, her body tumbling backwards. She’d realize later this was when her dress tore. This was when she ran a ragged wound into her wrist and palm, embedded gravel and soot into red, angry flesh. She shook her head and heard Andy make a noise like cornered animal. Then she saw Luke fire the blade into Andy’s stomach, just above his belt, and she gasped again. Luke gripped Andy’s hair with his left hand, turning Andy’s head to face him as he ripped the blade and up and up and up and finally out, blood arcing up against the brick wall of the alley and glinting the coffee-stain yellow of the mercury lamp overhead.

Luke might have turned to her then, but she didn’t know. She’d never know, as she was already up and running. His angry voice followed her out of the alley and onto the broad Riverwalk, even as she heard shouts from strangers, calls for the police. She didn’t look back. She ran. She didn’t feel the bricks beneath her feet or the cold wind at her back. She focused on the lights, when she could, her secret club, and some time later – ten minutes? an hour? – she was sitting in a bus stop, her knees pulls up to her chest, and she realized she was holding Andy’s wallet.

A few quick taps and swipes with shaking fingers and the phone was glowing bright white asking if she’d like to set up a new account. She wrapped it in the bottom of her sister’s wet dress, wiping and scrubbing, then kicked it into a storm drain with the wallet. She left everything but the cash. An hour after that she was in the Amtrak station. Then onto the first train anywhere, 11:59 to Cleveland then the Lake Shore Limited all the way to Boston, trying to look casual, trying not to cry or scream, holding her hurt hand wrapped in the ruined fabric of Sam’s dress. There was a motely crew on the northeast trains. No one seemed to notice, but no one sat next beside her, either. She couldn’t imagine how she smelled.

She fell off the train at Back Bay and lie on the sidewalk for an hour or a month before she awoke in a clean bed in a white room covered in fire. She screamed. Her hand was bandaged, and her knee, which she didn’t know she’d hurt. A nurse gave her a pill. The next morning she ran down the hall, dragging an IV drip, and tried to throw herself out a window. Two days after that, she sat sedated in court.

She saw him for the first time in rehab. She’d signed her life away, agreed to shuffle in paper slippers down grey concrete hallways. She spoke little, had given them nothing but her name, a plea for help, a fuck you, an offer a blowjob for a fix. Just one. And no one would know. No one would know, she’d screamed at the nurse, then the judge. Then she was awake all night every night in a cinder block room with eight other women, all of them twitching and foaming. And they were watched, and they were carried, and they were tied. And one night he was there. In the room. At the foot of her bed. Silent. The wet red of his scalp reflected a bit of moonlight. His grey, dead eye looked down at her. She didn’t sleep. He didn’t either. But by morning he was gone and she was shuffling back down the hallway for breakfast and then she was in a metal folding chair in a circle, and if she didn’t scream they gave her cigarettes. Still she wouldn’t talk.

But one day she did. And the other women listened. She used a computer in the library to read about Luke, who had rolled his car fleeing the police. Luke who had fucked her sometimes, who could be kind when he wanted to be, who shook a bottle of pills like a can of pennies; Luke who hit her and killed another and now would never walk or speak again.

The halfway house in South Boston has walls made of wood and plaster, not concrete. And the bars on the first floor are to keep people out, not keep them in. And after the first 30 days, she was allowed unsupervised leave, first for work – bagging groceries at Shaw’s for eight dollars an hour – and then for school. She started night classes in an industrial park. There were eight of them, all of them on shaky legs like rescue puppies, and at the end of the month four of them continued into the next class.

Sober living was better. It was almost like living with friends. But the friends came and went, some of them wailing as they’re shoved into squad cars. Two of them died the first year. One, a young mother named Emily, told Alma the thing she was most afraid of was herself. Sometimes, she said, she didn’t know herself, and she could feel someone inside trying to get to her. Junk, she said, had kept that other Emily at bay, kept her sedate and quiet somewhere dark and far away. Alma was the one to find her, eyes open and cloudy, something like a smile on her face on a mattress soaked through with blood. Alma knelt beside the bed, tried to close Emily’s eyes like she’d seen in the movies, but it didn’t work. The lids remained half open. Emily looked drunk. Stoned. Alma picked up the phone at the end of the hall and dialed. Later she’d pull on latex gloves and strip the bed, bag the sheets, scrub the floor. All while the thing that had been a man named Andy watched silently. She wrapped the mattress in plastic, wrestled it down the stairs. He stood at the curb as she leaned the mattress against the dumpster.

Now Alma’s finished with her certificate. Tomorrow she signs the lease on a studio apartment. Her sister’s coming to visit. Next week she starts her counseling internship. She wakes sometime late in the night. She feels her heart pounding in her chest, hears it. She swings her legs out of bed, sits for a moment breathing with intention. She listens to all the sounds of a sleeping house, the creaks and pops of restless wood. She stands, stretches, and goes to the door.

He’s there. At the end of the hallway. Silent. His dead, grey eye locked on hers. He doesn’t scare her. He never has.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Then she turns back to her bedroom. She closes the door. She crawls back into bed. She sleeps well.