“Henry’s Last Laugh”

 

by Stephen Lochton Kincaid

 

      After it was done and his wife’s body was cooling in the freezer (he’d had to take out a side of beef and three month’s worth of TV dinners to get it to fit), Henry Bickner sat down on the top step of his back porch to enjoy a cigarette.  He hadn’t smoked in ten years and the pack that he had hidden in the garden shed lo those many years ago was dusty and quite stale, but they tasted great to Henry.

          As he smoked, a breeze ruffled the thin gray hair on his head.  How quiet it is! he marveled.  He lived on a small cul-de-sac, and he could hear birds chirping, the wind soughing through the trees.  As the sky darkened to a ripe plum color in the east, a chorus of crickets began chirruping in the grass.

          In thirty-nine years of marriage, he had never known such sweet sounds of silence.  Myrna hadn’t been a nag when he first met her.  No, far from it.  She had been young and sweet and talkative, yes – my little Myrna bird he had called her.  Quite chatty, but not a nag.  She had curly hair and bright copper penny eyes and a mischievous grin.   But had the nag been hidden there, lurking beneath the surface just waiting for the right moment to spring out?  Yes, he supposed it had.  But back then she had just been sweet little Myrna.

          The nag had first reared its ugly head soon after their nuptials.  In fact, he could pinpoint the exact date to their wedding night: as they lay cooling off from their first bout of post-marital bliss in a hotel room in Kansas City, Myrna lying on her back and Henry curled up next to her, his eyelids drooping and the first low snores rumbling from his lips.

          Myrna: “Hen-ry, I’m cold – would you please close the window?”  Her voice had been soft and pleading then.  The shrillness, which would eventually engulf everything else, (like a snake unhinging its jaw and swallowing a rat whole, Henry thought ruefully) was just a faint undertone.  But it had been there, make no mistake, it had definitely been there.  He had heard it and mentally filed it away for later.

          Since then, the nagging had only intensified.  Take out the trash or change the lightbulb over the sink or put some new batteries in the remote or – her favorite chestnut, an oldie but a goodie – fix that step on the back porch, all with the same lusty one-word preamble, the first syllable heavily accentuated with her trademark shrillness: Hen-ry!  It made his skin crawl just thinking about it.  They were childless, and he often wondered, only half-jokingly, if the nagging had made him sterile.  He doubted that he had gotten one single unbroken coherent thought in in the last thirty-nine–

          “Hen-ry!  Are you smoking out there?”

          Henry froze.  The cigarette that had been clutched carefully between his index and middle finger as he was about to take another satisfying drag fell down and rolled into the grass without making a sound. 

          No.  Couldn’t be.  His mind raced.  He thought about that old Edgar Allen Poe story they had read back in high school, which he only half-remembered now.  What was it called?  The Telling Heart?  Something like that.  Was this some kind of Telling Heart situation?  Was his guilty conscience making up some kind of penance for the thing that he’d done?

          “Hen-ry!  You’d better answer me!”

          The cigarette had ignited the summer-dry grass beside the edge of the porch steps.  There was a small crackling flame there before Henry realized it and jumped down and stamped it out.  He stood there looking numbly at his smoldering shoe for a minute, uncertain what to do.

          “Hen-ry!  Have you fixed that step yet?”

          No, he was certain that wasn’t in his mind.  He had actually heard that.  Which meant … what?

          He walked slowly up the steps and put his hand on the doorknob.  He felt his face break out in a cold sweat.  He swung the door open.  Myrna was sitting there at the kitchen table with her flat lusterless gray hair (the curls had inexplicably flattened out over the years, although she had not – she had gained over a hundred pounds and now had the shadow of a third chin) in a flower print dress that could best be described as vintage muumuu (her burial dress, now that Henry thought about it, although her coffin was the freezer in the basement), looking at him as though nothing had happened at all, just as pretty as you please.

          “What are you gawping at, Henry?  Close your mouth, you’re going to catch flies.  And have you taken out the garbage yet?”

          I’m gawping at you, Myrna, or at least your ghost.

          But she looked solid enough; Henry couldn’t see the cabinets or the countertop or the ancient and begrimed Mr. Coffee coffeemaker behind her.  He walked around her, not wanting to touch her, giving her a wide berth.  Her head swiveled around and watched him with mild bemusement until he got past her shoulder, then she turned her body, just as any normal, breathing person would have done (and thank goodness, because if her head had just kept on turning and she had spoken to him with her head on backwards, he thought he would have run out of the house screaming like a lunatic). Nope, she was just as solid from this angle.

          “Honestly, Henry, I don’t know what’s gotten into you!”

          But something didn’t seem right; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

          “Hen-ry!  Check the windows before you go to bed tonight.”

          Then he had it, and his face, already pale, turned a white-gray like the color of old milk: she wasn’t casting a shadow.  The dusty dim lights from the ceiling fan were on and sitting in the shadow of the kitchen chair that stretched out along the floor and up the cabinets was… nothing.  Nothing but emptiness.

          “Hen-ry!  Don’t forget to mow the lawn this weekend.”

          The shock was starting to wear off.  It was replaced by a dull, throbbing anger.  You’re supposed to be dead, Myrna, he thought resentfully.  Why can’t you stay dead?  He wanted to scream it but he was afraid the neighbors would hear.

          Then, almost as if in reply: “Hen-ry!  The air’s too dusty – go change the filter on the air conditioner.”

          He turned around and picked up the closest thing he could grab off the counter.  It turned out to be his coffee mug from this morning (a morning when Myrna was still alive; it felt like a hundred years ago).  The words FRESH OUT OF were printed on the side and below this was a faded picture of a cute red cartoon fox winking.  He chucked it at her.  It sailed through her – he had the crystal-clear image stuck in his mind, like a sunspot after you’ve closed your eyes, of the mug half-submerged in her head – and then crashed into the sink.  Stale coffee splattered the wall.

          “Hen-ry!  You’d better get a rag and clean that up.”

          But he couldn’t take it anymore.  He was suddenly exhausted (murder was hard work, he had found, whether that person stayed dead or not) and listening to Myrna’s harping was going to drive him insane.  He went to the bedroom, slammed the door, and flopped on the bed, still fully clothed.  Mercifully, she didn’t come floating through the door after him like some bloated, nagging poltergeist; she seemed confined, for some reason, to the kitchen table.  It felt like the only mercy he’d had in thirty-nine years.  Unfortunately, the walls were thin, and he could still hear her wail Hen-ry! from the kitchen.  With that nagging every minute or so, he really didn’t expect to fall asleep, but eventually he did, though it was thin and riddled with nightmares.

 

          When he woke up, his mouth tasted like dirt and his first thought was: dream, had to be a dream.

          As if she had read his thoughts: “Hen-ry!”

          Not a dream.  Fuck.  He gritted his teeth, got up, and made some breakfast, trying to keep his distance from ghost-Myrna.  As he was frying bacon on the stove behind her, she bleated another Hen-ry!  His elbow jerked back and nudged the (what?  the zone of her essence?) back of her head and it was as if a freezing cold needle stabbed up his arm to the base of his skull.  He uttered a short gasp and nearly dropped the frying pan on the floor.  He thought he saw the corner of her mouth wrinkle up in a vague smile at this.

          He couldn’t bear to sit at the table, not with her watching him, so he took his breakfast to the living room.  He turned on the TV and cranked up the volume, but it was no good – at every pause in the sound she would bleat again, and he would cringe.  Ah, but that’s nothing new, he thought.  She always did have a knack for interrupting while he was trying to watch TV, especially if a football game was on.

          How do you get rid of a ghost? he wondered.  He snapped his fingers.  Only one way he knew of.  He changed his clothes and drove to the SavR Mart across town.  There, he bought a cheap metal crucifix necklace and a Gideon bible (the clerk at the register, a kid barely out of high school, thought the old man with the wild hair and the dried yellow blob of egg in his beard looked slightly demented).  Then he drove to Christ the Redeemer Church and filled up a flask with holy water from the font.

          He read several bible passages and sprinkled holy water at her.  He shoved the crucifix in her face (but not too close, not close enough to touch; no, he had learned his lesson there).  She looked slightly amused by this.  Of course, the irony that a murderer was trying to invoke the name of Christ to dispel the spirit of the woman he had killed never even crossed Henry’s mind.

          “Hen-ry!  Stop messing around and clean out those flower beds,” she said with just a trace of a smile.

          He didn’t know what to do.  He was living on social security and his small pension from the post office; he couldn’t afford to rent a hotel room, not for long.  Ditto selling the house and moving away, which, regardless, would take months. 

He went back to the SavR Mart and bought earplugs.  That helped a little, but he could still hear her.   Although her voice was fainter now, it was just as shrill.  Just as goddamn irritating.

          He decided to ignore her.  Maybe she’d go away, lose cohesion and dissipate into the ether, he thought.  Or wherever the hell she was supposed to go.  He lasted about a week.  His sleep was restless and, during his waking hours, the nagging revolved around in his brain like a black merry-go-round: mow the lawn paint the fence clean out the gutters wash the car walk the dog (this was the one that really stuck with Henry – they hadn’t owned a dog in fifteen years, not since Beanie, their schnauzer, who had been an old, frail shaking mess when he finally shit himself and died in his dog bed).  HEN-ry!

          Finally, he broke.

 “Goddamit, Myrna!  You’re dead!  DEAD!” he roared at her.  “Even in the afterlife, this all you can do?  Nag?  Haven’t you learned anything new?”

          She looked pointedly at him then.  The corners of her mouth turned up in a delighted smile.  “Why yes, Henry.  I thought you’d never ask,” she said, and a red line appeared on her neck, a cruel second smile, in the exact place where he had slashed her throat with a butcher knife.  Her head tilted back as if it were on a hinge, and the line slowly yawned open, revealing the pink meat and bone and gristle there, like a watermelon with a slice cut out of it.

          “How do you like this, Henry?” the words burbled from her slashed windpipe, spraying blood over the kitchen.  Not ghost-blood, either; he felt it on his face, sticky and warm.  It pattered on the linoleum.  He could see the muscles in her throat working, like an obscene eye blinking.  “Do you like this trick, Henry?”

          He bolted for the back door.  He may have been screaming, he really didn’t know.  All he knew for sure was that he had to get away, away from her, away from that horror sitting at the kitchen table.  But the entire time that he was fumbling with the doorknob and throwing the door open, his head was craned around, staring back at her.  He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight of her, it seemed.  In fact, when he ran out the back door and his foot hit the broken wood plank on the second step, he was still looking back at her.  He tripped and sailed through the air.  With his head turned around, he never saw the large rock laying on the ground in the yard (a rock that he had dug out of the flower bed upon more of Myrna’s nagging insistence and never moved out of the way), even as he rushed towards it.  Not that it would have mattered; he didn’t have time to put his hands up to stop his fall.  His temple struck the jagged edge of the rock and his vision went black.

 

          He came to all of a sudden, as if he had been pushed back into his body.  He heard (or imagined he heard, he really wasn’t sure) the whooshing of air.  He found himself sitting at the kitchen table in a narrow cone of light.  Beyond the light … darkness, nothing but darkness.  But he had the vague notion that something was moving in that darkness.  Scrabbling there.  And if he got up, if he tried to leave the table, it might … well, he didn’t like to think about it.

          He remembered what had happened then and, even before his hand crept up and felt along the bony ridges of the crater in his skull, he knew: this is death.

          Myrna was there, on the other side of the table.  She had a triumphant smile on her face.

          “Didn’t I tell you, Henry?” she asked gleefully.  “Didn’t I tell you to fix that step?”  And then her head tilted back revealing that awful other smile.  The red one with gobbets of flesh hanging loose.  And she laughed … and laughed … and laughed.

 

     Stephen Lochton Kincaid grew up in the flatlands of Kansas.  After spending most of his life there, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he draws upon the lowering gray skies and primeval forests for inspiration to write the stuff of nightmares.

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Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.