CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

New York City

August 1928

The cheering, screaming, and applauding were getting to him. The sidewalks were filled with rowdy people attending a political rally and march—and they were almost all women, to his disgust. Once women had somehow achieved the right to vote, they seemed to think that meant they had to go out and make spectacles of themselves. There were songs and shouts, cheers and whooping. Among it all, he could see signs made of newsprint and plywood. Many of them said the same thing:

Vote SMITH for a Stronger USA!

He’d been on the way to the baker’s, but the noise in the streets was jarring and the further away from his house he got, the worse the noise became. He’d turned back, feeling the yelling and singing behind him like a wave pushing him back to shore. He could get bread tomorrow. It wasn’t like he had a family depending on him back at home.

There was no wife waiting with a warm meal in the afternoon, no kid to beg for attention and time. There was only his ailing mother, not really ill but certainly mentally unbalanced—always wailing and screeching at him, wanting to know why he was always struggling to make ends meet, wanting to know why he hadn’t married a nice young woman to start making her some grandbabies.

Feeling the thoughts of his mother growing like some raging wind, he pushed them away and focused on his walk. It was six in the evening, the day creeping toward dusk. And though the heat of the day was now dwindling, he felt the headache coming on. Maybe it was the roaring of the crowds, an unfamiliar noise in the streets he called home. Maybe it was the tension of knowing what awaited him at home. Whatever it was, the headache was coming on fast, starting at his jaw, working through his teeth, and reaching up into his skull.

After what felt like forever, he arrived home. It was a simple two-bedroom house located in a section of the city that was not the poorest, but far from the wealthiest.

He closed the door and the crowd noises were little more than a murmur. He stood there for a moment, his fingertips pressed to the door. The house always had a sort of dusty smell with an underlying note of vegetables just on the brink of going rotten. It greeted him like an unwanted embrace as he turned away from the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” the old, ragged voice from the living room asked him.

He looked to the right, and there was his mother. She was sitting in the same chair she always sat in. Over the past year and a half or so, as his mother had given up on any hope of remarrying or starting up a social life after the loss of her husband, he’d watched the empty space of that chair shrink by the week. His mother had put on at least eighty pounds in the last eighteen months, eating cakes and pastries he often brought back from the city.

“Nothing,” he said, finally stepping away from the front door.

“You go out to whoop and holler with all those uppity whores?” she asked.

He noted crumbs in the folds of her shirt and something that might have been jelly in the corner of her mouth. He also noted that her eyes showed that same level of disappointment and anger as she looked at him. Beyond it all, there was the vibrating hum of the political march in the streets and as he stood there, looking at her and listening to that quiet noise, he understood why the sounds of the women’s shouts had unnerved him.

It was her. At some point after losing so many jobs and unable to attract a girlfriend, she had become the embodiment of all women to him. Always leering, always wanting something more from him, always disappointed.

“What the hell are you staring at me like that for, you simp?” she asked. “Get your useless backside in the kitchen and bring me my brandy.”

The headache roared in his head. It was like a bomb, sending little shards of shrapnel into every corner of his skull. He sucked in a breath, chewing back the pain.

“Get it yourself, you cow.”

Her look of shock was mostly muted by the chunkiness of her cheeks and her squinting little eyes. “What did you say to me?”

“You heard me, Mother.”

He walked away from her, fully intending to go to his bedroom and lie down in the darkness. With her eyes on him and with the thrum of marching and yelling outside, he felt his headache getting even worse. If he could rest in a dark room, maybe the throbbing would lessen.

Her voice stopped him as he walked away. “Your father thought he knew what was best for me, too,” she said. “But look which one of us is still alive. Now fetch me my brandy, you useless idiot.”

The headache surged once more, slamming around in his head like a wrecking ball. Black spots filled his vision and something like black curtains waved at the edges of his sight. He grimaced against it and sucked in a lungful of stagnant air. Through clenched teeth, he said: “Yes, Mother.”

He walked down the small hall, his feet treading the old, creaking floorboards. He entered the kitchen but did not stop at the cupboard where his mother stored her brandy. He moved as if pushed by some unseen force, perhaps by the outside screaming of the countless women on the streets. Without even thinking about it, he walked to the back door and opened it. He stepped out onto the back stoop, just a single concrete block that looked out onto their mostly dead back yard.

He closed his eyes, the headache digging into his skull like railroad spikes. He could hear the cheering and laughter in the streets, a million women it seemed, all either encouraging him to do what he was about to do or laughing at him because he was so damned powerless in the presence of his mother.

To the right, there was a small stack of rotted wood they used to occasionally fill the old, almost-defunct fireplace in the living room. Propped next to the house was the hatchet he used to split the wood. It was old and dull and he could remember being a boy, his father teaching him how to shave off kindling and how to find the crack in the top of a piece of wood that would make it easier to split.

He grabbed the hatchet and walked back inside—back through the kitchen, back down the hallway. It pleased him in an odd and almost poetic way to know that the creaks of the hallway floor would be among the last noises his mother would ever hear.

The creaking of the floor seemed to thrum with his headache. Somewhere very far away, he could hear the cheering of all of those women, their long hair warming in the sun, their taunting bodies sweating and forbidden.

The last creak before arriving in the living room, everything went dark as the headache slammed down an iron curtain over his sight and senses.

Moments later, he dropped the hatchet and headed back out through the front door.

Covered in blood, he walked toward the sound of the cheerful women. With each step he took, his headache faded and the joyful sounds swallowed him up, bloodstains and all.