Ghouljaw and Other Stories (17 page)

I was about to hoist one of the trash bags up into the dumpster when I heard someone whisper, “Hey, Wally.”

Startled, I dropped the bag in mid-lift. Moss’s pale face was visible in the shadows between the wooden fence and a stand of shrubs. “Jesus, Moss,” I squinted at him. “That’s a good way to get your ass kicked.”

“Sorry,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically meek. There was a buzzing mercury vapor light above us, bugs orbiting around it. Moss shuffled closer and I got a better look at him.

He resembled a handsome corpse. His face was gaunt, which made the scattering of freckles on his nose stand out, the dark scallops under his eyes made his sockets appear bruised. Moss wore dark clothes—a pair of jeans, a dark blue T-shirt—and they looked wrinkled, damp.

Inadvertently, I stepped back and said, “What the hell, Moss? You okay?”

Moss took a deep breath as he dug a crinkled pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “I don’t know, man,” he said, lit a cigarette, and exhaled a short-lived streamer of smoke. “I came to talk to you, Wally.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, relaxing a bit, wondering if he was just coming down from some shoddy dope, or riding out some hideous acid trip. Combined with his calling in sick, this was just more ammunition to break his balls. “You look like you’ve got the flu or something.”

A smile cracked across his waxy face, a curt laugh tore out of him. “I wish.” The cherry of his cigarette glowed. “I felt bad about calling in tonight, but . . .” he trailed off.

“No sweat, man,” I said, “we didn’t have that many reservations on the books.” I smiled, my tone lighthearted. “Besides, slow as you are, you’d have been dead weight anyway.”

Moss fixed his eyes on me. My own smile sagged. “Listen, Wally,” he said. “I need your help.”

For the seven or eight months that I’d known Joe Moss, he’d been completely capable and confident, never asking me for help with anything. “What are you talking about?”

He took another drag from his cigarette and started to pace along the side of the dumpster. I crossed my arms and gave him some space, moving as he moved, keeping my eyes on him. Our distorted shadows took turns stretching and dancing under the light. “I think I’m in trouble.”

I suddenly had the feeling that Moss was baiting me for some sort of practical joke. I glanced around to see if anyone else was around. “So this is where I say ‘what sort of trouble?’ and act like I’m interested. Moss I—”

“I stole some food from the walk-in fridge after my shift Thursday night.”

I held my gaze on him for a second before laughing. “Food? That’s what you’re worried about? Moss, man, I know you’re sort of a pansy, but this is too much.” I didn’t care that he wasn’t laughing along with me. Honestly, at that moment I wanted him to relax. “Listen, nobody’s noticed anything missing. What’d you steal, a couple potatoes?”

“Meat,” he mumbled. “A plastic bag of steaks.”

I’d stopped chuckling and was only grinning. “The filets?” Moss nodded, he was talking about the filet mignons for the Steak Diane weekend dinner special. “We didn’t sell hardly any tonight.” I explained that Drew was unlikely to notice a couple of missing pieces of meat.

“No,” he said and briefly pinched the cigarette between his lips. “That’s not it . . . exactly.”

“What then? Spit it out.”

Moss’s chest rose and fell. “Thursday night, I swiped this plastic bag from the walk-in. Glancing at it—by the shape of it—I thought it was a few filets. The plastic was sort of murky.” He paused, his gaze grew distant, and he cocked his head slightly, as if hearing a dog whistle. “Anyway, I wasn’t on the schedule Friday night, and I had plans. You know that girl, Lacey? The receptionist?”

Lacey.
My heart sank, quickly understanding his motivation for stealing the steaks. “Yeah,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, well, we’ve been hooking up lately. She sort of suggested that I cook dinner for her, a real fancy meal. I said she should come over Friday night . . .”

The code of conduct is rather flimsy among cooks, sort of a
what’s-mine-is-mine-and-what’s-yours-is-mine
mentality. I suppose in our little country club coterie, it was only a matter of time before Lacey moved on to the next young stud. He was supplying some anecdote about Lacey’s body.
Been there, done that, pal.

“Get to the point, dude.”

“Right. When I got back to my apartment, I went to the kitchen and unwrapped the bundle and it . . . it wasn’t what I expected.” I stared at him, hoping my unamused expression would urge him along. “There was a tiny steak in there but most of it was . . . offal.”

A brief digression for the uninitiated:
offal,
noun, pronounced the same way as “awful”—internal organs or trimmings removed from the skeletal meat after butchery. In other words, brains, liver, kidneys, thymus glands, spleens, tongues, feet, intestines . . .

Moss blurted out, “There was a heart in there.”

I was suddenly hesitant to ask why he’d called in sick to work that night. “So what?”

“So . . .” he scanned the back dock. “I want you to come to my apartment so I can show you.”

“Just tell me what—”

“You have to see it. You have to . . . help me, Wally.”

Moss insisted I ride with him. After some profanity-peppered deliberation, I agreed.

Joe Moss lived in an apartment complex called The Beaumont, which at one time may have evoked a sense of regality—with its exposed timber exteriors and ornate, Tudor-style touches—but now looked jilted, like a woman who’d preposterously decorated herself for a suitor who never arrived.

Without a word Moss pulled into a parking space, killed the engine, and got out of car. I’d discarded my sauce-spattered chef coat back at the club, but still reeked of food. I followed Moss along the sidewalk, over to a narrow corridor within an open-air breezeway.

As Moss mounted a paint-flecked staircase, he gave a furtive glance. I suddenly had the absurd notion that he was leading me into some sort of impromptu
ménage à trois.
The thought made me vaguely nauseous—not just him and Lacey together, but me as some sort of sexual second-fiddle. As some sort of accessory.

My heart began to beat in sync with my footfalls as I recounted the story Moss had supplied on the drive out to his apartment.

Moss, shifting in the driver’s seat, had glanced over at me and said, “Have you ever had food poisoning?”

If this truly was a practical joke, I’d play along until the last minute. “Not that I know of.”

“Did you eat any of the meat this weekend?”

Of course
—it’s a cook’s responsibility to control the quality of what was leaving the kitchen. “Nope.”

Moss sighed, and then laid it out.

After discovering that the plastic-wrapped bundle was a meager piece of meat along with a heart, Moss had thought about throwing the whole thing away. Instead Moss had sautéed the filet, eating it while he watched a late-night cooking show. When he was done, he returned to the kitchen.

“There was blood all over the counter.”

“The heart.”

Moss nodded. “I’d left it on the cutting board, just sort of forgot about it. I should have pitched it then, but . . .” He smirked. “I had this urge to keep it. I thought if Lacey was going to come over, I’d gross her out or something.” Moss brought up a jittery hand, his fingers curled into an open-palmed claw, as if invisibly clutching the mass of muscle. “It was gray,” he said, his tone decreasing as if talking to himself. “Blue and purple veins crawling all over it. Stubby valves . . . black chambers.” He dropped his hand suddenly. “It was kind of cool. So I kept it. I slipped it in a big freezer bag and put it in the fridge.” Moss said he drank a beer before heading to bed.

“I woke up the next morning, went out to the kitchen, and it . . .” Moss swallowed hard. “It was everywhere.”

I had a guess, but still I asked. “What?”

“Blood,” said Moss. The pale green glow cast from the console made his face look ghastly. “It was like the fridge had hemorrhaged.”

“Did you look inside?”

“Sure. The heart was there, in the plastic bag where I’d left it. But the bag had split open, or burst.” He looked at me for second. “It wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

I said, “Please tell me you threw the damn thing away.”

“Hell yes,” he said, as if I had just asked a preposterous question. “I tossed it in the garbage and got some towels to clean the floor. But”—Moss winced—“when I checked on it the garbage bag was already filled with six inches of blood.”

“So then what?”

“The only thing I could think to do was drop it in the sink.”

In the sink.
“And?”

“And?”
he said, his tone suggested I should fill in the blanks intuitively. “It won’t stop bleeding. It’s just been . . . draining into the garbage disposal.”

We were quiet for a while as Moss weaved along nightroads. Finally—in my best don’t-fuck-with-me voice—I said, “Moss—if this is some sort of joke—”

“It’s no joke, man.”

I didn’t want to sound too insecure or desperate, but I eventually said, “What happened last night . . . with Lacey?”

“Canceled. Told her she’d have to take a rain check on her classy dinner.” He snorted a laugh. “I couldn’t have her in the apartment with that thing.”

Silence settled into car. Moss’s admission echoed in my mind:
It wouldn’t stop bleeding.

Now, on the second floor corridor if his apartment building, Moss fished a key from his pocket as we approached his door. The long walkway was intermittently lit with faux gas lamps; set in vintage sconces, they had the guttering effect of turning the hallway into a shadowy, turn-of-the-century alleyway.

The teeth of the key scraped into the deadbolt. Moss hesitated, still facing away from me. He canted his head as if listening intently. I could only hear the overlapping baritone of bullfrogs off toward a ravine. TV voices reverberated down the hall. I’d had my hands dangling uselessly at my sides, but now I clenched them into fists.

Moss cleared his throat and twisted the lock.

I waited at the threshold for Moss to flip on a light before I entered, lingering in the narrow foyer. Moss was just about to round the elbow of wall when he said, “Close that”—meaning the door—“I don’t want any bugs in here.”

Moss had disappeared around the corner, and I eased down the hallway. Now I could smell it. I thought of a poorly maintained, poorly ventilated butcher shop. I thought about the dumpster back at the country club.

A light came on up ahead. “In here,” Moss said tonelessly.

The kitchen was lit by a couple overhead banks of fluorescent tube-lights, the anemic glow reminded me of the anonymous sterility of an autopsy room. The floor was far from sterile.

Moss was standing just outside a kiddie pool–sized puddle of blood. He’d tried to use some towels and T-shirts to sop up the liquid. Now they were saturated and clumped around the outer edge of the gruesome little lagoon.

The linoleum was smeared and streaked with varying shades of crimson, some dark and dry, some vibrantly red, slick and glossy.

Without looking at me, Moss said, “I told you.”

I exhaled slowly, shifting my attention from the floor to appraise the kitchen—the tell-tale signs of a cook: a cluster wine bottles, oils, a faced row of seasonings. I noticed the silver handle of a pan sticking out of the sink. Mounted on the wall under the cabinets was a magnetized strip: a knife rack that held a collection of cutlery—a meager assortment for a professional, but passable nonetheless.

I looked at Moss. “Where is it?”

He jerked his face in my direction, as if I’d only now arrived, his eyes feverish. “Where’s what?”

I clenched my teeth for a moment and then said, “The heart.”

“Oh,” he said, and tilted his head toward the sink. “Where I left it.” He began walking toward me, skirting the outer edge of blood. “Go ahead, see for yourself.”

I kept my eyes on Moss as we traded positions in the kitchen, waiting for him circle the puddle before approaching the sink, giving the blood a wide, wary berth.

I edged up on the sink. On the right hand side was a dirty sauté pan, a couple of utensils. The left side of the sink was empty.

I spun around, no longer able to tolerate this. “Moss, where is it?”

“Wally . . . it wouldn’t stop—”

I cut in, raising my voice, “I know, I know—you’ve said it a dozen times—‘it won’t stop bleeding’—”

“NO,”
Moss shouted, his face suddenly fixed and ferocious, “it won’t stop
beating.
”

We stared at each other for a long time.

I said, “Moss, listen, man—”

“I have been listening!” He winced and clasped both hands to the sides of his head, his fingers clawed over his temples. “It just keeps . . . pounding . . .” he closed his eyes, breathing raggedly through his nose.

I tried to inch away from the sink, but my shoe squeaked on the linoleum and Moss’s eyes snapped open. Absently, his hand drifted up and he slipped a large knife from the top of the refrigerator. He stood between me and the corridor leading to the front door.

Moss waved the knife. “The meat, Wally, did you eat the meat?”

Yes. Only a bite
. “No.”

For a split instant, his expression was stricken with disappointment. “I should have thrown it away.”

“Where is it now?”

“In the tub,” he said, and then his pasty lips yanked up into a leering rictus. “They’re both in the bathtub.”
Both?
His grin melted away, his tone became scholarly. “Well . . . part of it, at least.”

“Part of what?”

“The heart,” and then he added in a rush. “I ate some of it.”

I had a hard time getting my mouth moving. “When?”

“In the middle of the night on Thursday.” Moss looped the knife as if writing cursive in midair. “Sorry . . . forgot to tell you that.” He took a step toward me. “It was like the heartbeats became . . . whispers. So I went out to the fridge, sliced off a piece and . . .”