Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(49)
So that is how Tony and Roz have agreed to look at it, at least when they are with Charis, because it makes Charis happier. It takes some doing to pretend that a medium-sized black-and-white dog who wipes her paws on your coat and poops behind logs is in fact Zenia, but they don’t have to pretend all the time: Zenia comes and goes, unpredictable as she has always been, and only Charis can tell when Zenia is present inside Ouida and when she is not.
Billy made threatening noises about suing Charis for his injuries, but Roz squashed that: she can out-lawyer him any day of the week, she told him. Thanks to the extensive search done by her hired detective, she has chapter and verse on his career in matron-fleecing, Ponzi schemes, and identity theft, and if he thinks he can use Ouida as his blackmail weapon he should think again, because it’s his word against Charis’s, and who does he think a jury will believe?
So Billy has gone elsewhere, never to be seen again, and now a jovial retired plumber lives in the other half of Charis’s duplex. He’s a widower, and Roz and Tony have hopes for him. He’s redoing the bathroom, which is a start. Ouida approves of him, and tries to cram herself under the sink when he’s down there with his wrench, and licks him wherever possible, and flirts with him shamelessly.
THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU
The Dead Hand Loves You started as a joke. Or more like a dare. He should have been more careful about it, but the fact was he’d been blowing a fair amount of dope around that time and drinking too much inferior-grade booze, so he hadn’t been fully responsible. He shouldn’t be held responsible. He shouldn’t be held to the terms of the f*cking contract. That’s what had shackled his ankles: the contract.
And he can never get rid of that contract, because there wasn’t any drop-dead date on it. He should have included a good-only-until clause, like milk cartons, like tubs of yogourt, like mayonnaise jars; but what did he know about contracts back then? He’d been twenty-two.
He’d needed the money.
It was so little money. It was such a crappy deal. He was exploited. How could the three of them have taken advantage of him like that? Though they refuse to admit the unfairness of it. They just cite the f*cking contract, with those undeniable signatures on it, including his, and then he has to suck it up and fork out. He resisted paying them at first, until Irena got a lawyer; now the three of them have lawyers the way dogs have fleas. Irena should have cut him some slack in view of how close they were once, but no, Irena has a heart of asphalt, harder and drier and more sun-baked every year. Money has ruined her.
His money, since it’s because of him that Irena and the other two are rich enough to afford those lawyers of theirs. Top-quality lawyers too, as good as his; not that he wants to get into a snarling, snapping, rending contest among lawyers. It’s the client who’s always the cracked-bone hyena’s breakfast: they take bites out of you, they nibble away at you like a sackful of ferrets, of rats, of piranhas, until you’re reduced to a shred, a tendon, a toenail.
So he’s had to ante up, decade after decade; since, as they rightfully point out, in a court case he wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d signed it, that infernal contract. He’d signed it in red-hot blood.
At the time of the contract, the four of them had been students. Not exactly dirt poor or they wouldn’t have been getting a so-called higher education, they’d have been patching frost-heave in the roadways or setting fire to hamburgers for minimum wage, or turning tricks in cheap, vomit-scented bars, at least Irena would; but though not paupers, they didn’t have a lot of loose change. They were getting by on summer-job earnings and grudging loans from relatives, and in the case of Irena, a mingy scholarship.
They’d met initially through a ten-cent-a-draft beer parlour group given to snide quips and whining and boasting – not Irena, of course, who never did such things. She was more like a den mother, picking up the tab when the rest of them were too pissed to remember where they’d put their dimes and quarters or too slippery to have brought any along, not that she didn’t get her cash back later. The four of them had discovered a common need to spend less on accommodations, so they’d rented a house together, right near the university.
It was in the early ’60s, back when you could be a student and rent a house in that area, if only a narrow, pointy-roofed, three-storey, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, run-down, pee-flavoured, peeling-wallpapered, warped-floored, clanking-radiatored, rodent-plagued, cockroach-riddled, red-brick Victorian row house. That was before those houses turned into restored Heritage Buildings worth an arm and a bladder, with historical plaques on them affixed by halfwits with nothing better to do than dodder around sticking plaques on overpriced, snootied-up real estate.
His own building – the building in which the ill-advised contract had been signed – has a plaque on it too, saying – surprise! – that he himself once lived there. He knows he once lived there, he doesn’t need to be reminded. He doesn’t need to read his name, Jack Dace, 1963–64, as if he’d only been alive for one f*cking year, with underneath it the tiny print that says, “In this building was written the International Horror Classic, THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU.”
I’m not a moron! I know all that! he wants to shout at the oval, enamelled blue-and-white plaque. He should forget about it, he should forget the whole episode as much as possible, but he can’t because it’s chained to his leg. He can’t resist peeking at the thing every time he’s in town for some filmfest or litfest or comicfest or monsterfest or other. On the one hand, it’s a reminder to him of his idiocy in signing the contract; on the other hand, it’s pathetically satisfying to read those three words: International Horror Classic. He obsesses over it too much, that plaque. Still, it’s a tribute to his major life accomplishment. Such as it is.