The Way I Die Read online

  THE

  WAY

  I DIE

  DEREK HAAS

  For Claiborne and Jessica,

  who inspire

  THE WAY I DIE

  1

  The way I die is two taps to the head, stuffed in the trunk of a rental sedan, my body set on fire. The way I die is both arms broken, both legs broken, tossed off a cigarette boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, bricks in my pockets to weigh down the corpse. The way I die is acid in a bathtub, pushed out of an airplane, strung up and gutted in an old textile warehouse in Boston.

  My name is Copeland. My name is Columbus.

  The way I die is a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger.

  It is the middle of February on Mackinac Island, a tiny community off the northern Michigan coast that battens down like an old sailing frigate in the winter months. Even the Arnold Line Ferry stops running after December, and until an ice bridge forms between the island and St. Ignace, the residents are on their own. Most of the islanders live in Harrisonville, in the center of the island, about 500 residents total, and they gather to watch school basketball or take cooking classes or drink coffee at the General Store, finding comfort in community. I do not join them.

  The way I die is a knife under the ribs, a knife in my belly, a knife across my throat.

  My cottage is in British Landing, on the northern tip of the island, isolated from isolation. Everyone does not know everyone here as outsiders might think, and I have managed to keep to myself. I live monastically, with just enough warmth, enough food, enough light to survive. Humans have always sought out punishment, begged for it, prayed for it, welcomed it, as though suffering and absolution are conjoined twins. I deserve punishment but not forgiveness. For the darkness I brought to innocent people, God demands pain.

  The way I die is exposure. The way I die is thirty feet from the back door of this island cottage, frozen to death, a coat, snow pants, boots within a stone’s throw.

  I have lived here for eight months. I have enough money to pay my rent and feed myself indefinitely. I have enough money to keep moving from forgotten patch to forgotten patch without need for explanation as to why I suddenly pull up stakes. I always pay in cash, with enough on top to keep landlords from filling out forms or asking personal questions.

  I had a family; I have no family. I had a son; I have no son. I am Copeland. I am Columbus.

  The way I die is forgotten and alone.

  A board in the window frame of my kitchen overlooking the side yard broke loose in heavy winds last night. The pane clattered like a ghost rattling chains, and so this morning, I walk to the general store in Harrisonville. The distance is two miles in the cold, but the wind has stopped raging like so many things do in the light of day, and I leave my face uncovered. A woman waves from her yard as I go by, but it’s cursory, and she’s already spun with her paper and returned inside her front door without waiting to see if I return the gesture.

  The store is thinly populated with residents clustered near the register, steam from their coffee cups warming their faces as they take turns on the day’s events, the weather, politics. Four men and a woman, they nod at me as I enter. I nod back and am grateful that that’s all they need to satisfy the social contract. Maybe I can live on this island longer than I thought.

  I find an aisle filled with hardware and grab assorted boxes of nails, a hammer, a wood planer, a sander. A man named Aiza threatened me with these same tools in the basement of a toy shop in Madrid. That was before he was beheaded, his body stuffed into the trunk of a rental car. Tools made to repair things should be used for their intended purposes.

  A girl in her midteens, short, fat, wearing glasses, moves into my peripheral vision and looms. I turn to face her and she doesn’t lower her gaze, just keeps staring at me with cow’s eyes.

  “I can find what I’m looking for, thanks,” I say.

  She chews on a piece of beef jerky, her jaw working horizontally. “Oh, I don’t work here. My mom’s just getting some coffee.”

  I turn back to the shelves and look over the sandpaper, hoping she’ll get the message. She doesn’t take the hint.

  “What’s your name?”

  I blow out an exaggerated breath, slowly turn back. “Jack.”

  “Meghan. Nice to meet you.”

  I grab the first packet of sandpaper I can find, toss it into my hand basket, and step past her toward the register. I check out, pay in cash, shoulder my bag of tools like I’m Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and head for the door. Meghan stays where I left her, chewing sloppily on her jerky, watching me the whole way.

  The way I die is a rope slung over a barn beam, a chair overturned underneath my jerking feet.

  I’ve got the new wood shaped, planed, and in place when I see her moving up the driveway in the reflection from the windowpane. You’ve got to be kidding me. Did she follow me the two miles back here? If so, what does that say about my diminishing skills that I didn’t see her?

  “Hey, Jack,” she offers. “Meghan. From the store. You fixing a window?”

  “I am, yeah.” I put every effort into my body language to tell her I’d rather be left alone, but she’s incapable of getting the message. She toes the snow on my driveway. Her cheeks are red above a knit scarf.

  “There’s a teacher at my school. Mr. Laughlin? He lets the kids come over to his house and watch movies.”

  I don’t answer.

  “He’s never said it’s okay for me to come. He’s never not said it, but he’s never said it.”

  I get out a nail and pound it into place.

  “I live up the street. I saw you move in.”

  A second nail goes in. She waits for me to stop pounding the hammer, and as soon as I do, she fills the silence.

  “I talk to the horses sometimes. I don’t have my own, but the Prescotts let me go in their barn. They’ve got one named Star and one named Sammy. They’re good listeners. The horses, not the Prescotts.”

  I turn to face her. “Meghan? Listen to me. I don’t like talking. I don’t like listening. I don’t like people, okay?”

  “That’s just sad,” she says with no judgment in her voice. She doesn’t move.

  I turn back to the window frame, but her reflection stays right where it is. I pound a third nail into the opposite corner, watch until the head embeds in the wood.

  “People don’t think you can get lonely here, but you can,” she says.

  I position a fourth nail.

  “I’ll come back when you feel like talking.”

  When the nail’s head hits the wood, I look in the reflection and she’s gone.

  Inside, I fish a beer out of the refrigerator and drain it with my back to the sink in the kitchen. There’s a card on my otherwise empty counter. It came in the mail three days ago. It reads, “Call me.”

  I won’t, but I haven’t thrown it away.

  Mr. Laughlin’s first name is Spencer and he lives alone in a big house on a hill near Four Corners. His parents owned the house before him and his grandparents before that. He teaches English and History at the combination junior high and high school, and he stays late to lead an extracurricular poetry class for a half dozen girls. A few weekend nights a month, he invites a few of the girls up to his house on the hill to watch Netflix. He provides blankets and popcorn and sneaks the girls some beer if they promise not to tell their parents. Meghan, indeed, is not invited.

  I learn all this from standing in the snow, from looking through windows, from making myself invisible the way I have on countless assignments. I’ve seen Mr. Laughlin’s behavior before, a predator’s view of the world, and whether or not Mr. Laughlin is building to a crescendo or this is just the eye of a hurricane, I have no idea. What I do know is he’s going t
o abuse these children who trust him. He’s a wolf, waiting for one weak member of the flock to separate herself. What he doesn’t know is there are animals bigger than wolves in the woods.

  I walk back toward my house, the temperature biting wherever it can find a millimeter gap in my winter gear. What am I doing? I don’t care about these people. I don’t care about myself. I don’t care about anyone anymore. I’m a plane with a loss of cabin pressure, an unconscious pilot, drifting across America, unsure where to crash.

  Meghan waits for me on my driveway. She holds up a hand as I approach as if I can’t see her there from a mile away. “You look cold,” she says.

  “Meghan.”

  “How’s your window?”

  “Fixed.”

  “You go get some coffee?”

  I look back over my shoulder, the direction from which I came. “Yeah.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she says, wiping her nose with a mitten. “You came from Mr. Laughlin’s house where you were peeking in the window.”

  I keep the surprise off my face, just narrow my eyes. Meghan’s expression is guileless. “That’s Laura, Kim, Tiffany, Beth, and Gretchen who go over there.”

  I don’t respond. Meghan sniffs, wipes her nose again with her other hand, then pushes up her glasses. “Why were you looking in his window?”

  “Why were you following me?”

  She shrugs her shoulders as if that’s an acceptable answer. “Gretchen thinks her poetry is something special, because Mr. Laughlin tells her it is. He tells her she could get published. No way. I read it. It sucks. No way.”

  “Meghan, I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I’m tired. I’m going inside now. Don’t follow me again.”

  “Fine,” she says. She starts to move past me, wobbling side to side in her parka as she moves forward, like that much bulk is just too cumbersome to move in one direction. “The snow covers the ground like a blanket, and I close my eyes tight. That’s her poetry. It’s shit. You know it. I know it,” Meghan fumes and marches away.

  I move up the steps, turn my key in the lock, and enter my house.

  The way I die is from indifference.

  There was a time when I would have puzzled over who posed more of a threat to me, the solicitous poetry teacher who has no knowledge I exist or the bovine fifteen-year-old who is following me around the island. There was a time when I would’ve known a not particularly artful teen was trailing me long before she told me, but that time has passed.

  I’m a dull blade, a triggerless gun.

  I’m a sleepwalker.

  I’m drifting with the current, an oarless canoe spinning in an eddy.

  An idea cements in my mind, hardening in a mold. If I eliminate the teacher, I’ll have to move on. Maybe this is as it should be. Take out a few evil people on my way off the planet and balance my ledger with a small measure of good.

  I have skills that are dormant, rusty, but not forgotten.

  I can start here on this island, kill this high school teacher before he ruins the lives of guiltless girls, and disappear to a new town until I find someone else who deserves to have his ticket punched.

  The way I die is righteousness.

  I wake early and go through a routine to activate abeyant muscles—sit-ups, push-ups, chin-ups. I’m alert before the sun arrives, before Meghan comes looking for me, up and out and moving as a morning dusting of snow descends from a gray sky, fat and heavy enough to cover my tracks.

  The high school door has a simple lock, and before I go to work on it, I try the latch and it gives. No one seems to be worried about vandalism or theft.

  The school is a series of brick structures with a few classrooms, a library, a gym with the name Mackinac Island Lakers painted in cursive along one wall, and what looks like an all-purpose room, more of a rec center than a traditional bastion of education. The place is as silent as a graveyard, and I’m starting to feel better than I have in the last two years. I’m in a location I’m not supposed to be, I’m setting a trap for prey that has no idea I’m coming, and I’m already thinking in old, comfortable patterns, seeing kill spots and escape routes.

  Am I supposed to be here? Not killing for money, not serving a master, but transforming into judge, jury, and executioner based on my code, my morals?

  A door clicks open, the same door I entered, and I slip into a classroom, smooth as glass, expending just enough energy to propel my feet forward while I keep my body still. There is a way of moving from room to room when avoiding threats that draws little attention. The instinct to flee causes reactions at a speed that counters intentions. Big movements are what attract eyeballs. Heavy footsteps sound in the room, but that’s not uncommon in this heavy snow, so I can’t tell if it’s a man or woman who entered. I reposition myself so I can use the reflection of a mirror off of a window to catch a glimpse of my co-intruder, and my heart beats faster. It’s Mr. Laughlin, all by himself, hours before the school bell.

  It rings for thee, Mr. Laughlin, I think, and realize this might be the first time I’ve thought of something funny since Risina died and I gave my son away to a safe family. There is the grieving that is endless because the way you grieve is the whole of your life, the sixty minutes, the twenty-four hours of each day. It’s the shut-in, the can’t-get-out-of-bed, the curtains drawn. It’s the cemetery visitor. It’s the I-can’t-bear-to-clean-out-his-room. It’s the lonely island on the fringes of the map. It’s the cold without a jacket. It’s the pain without a salve.

  Then there are the ones who work themselves out of grief, who lose themselves in a higher purpose, in something bigger than individual suffering.

  The way I die is to kill.

  I watch Mr. Laughlin stamp his feet near the door to knock the snow off his boots. He finds a hook for his coat and flips on some electric lights so the all-purpose room is lit in a bluish glow, energy-saving bulbs that don’t quite cut through darkness as well as their predecessors.

  He trundles to a cluster of beanbag chairs, moves a couple of them to form a lopsided circle, then satisfied, he heads to a desk in the corner, whistling a tuneless melody. He behaves like a man who is comfortable, safe in his domain. He is incautious, unobservant.

  He reaches into a desk drawer and removes a journal, takes out a pen, and taps it against his lower lip as he reads. What he’s writing in this notebook, at this hour, I have no idea, but I think I might want to have a look at it when this is over. Maybe take it with me when I leave this island and read it when I’ve put some distance between his body and mine.

  From my vantage point, I search around the room for a weapon that will get the job done, and my eyes fall on a row of plastic bins, one marked crayons, a second colored pencils, a third glue, and the fourth scissors. Without a sound, I cross to the bins and find what I’m looking for, a large set of teacher’s scissors, the grips reinforced and the tip sharp as a knife. I return to my vantage point, and Mr. Laughlin is where I left him, tapping that pen against his lip and every now and then jotting down a word or a phrase or a sentence. He’s absorbed in his work, and he’ll never hear me coming.

  My pulse slows. I’m an athlete who stands at the plate for the first time in years, a pitch hurtling toward him at ninety miles an hour, and my body takes over as muscles twitch and respond and jerk to life. Fifty feet across low light separates the back of Mr. Laughlin’s neck from this pair of scissors.

  He drops the journal from the desk to his lap and swivels his chair away from me, so he’s facing the wall, oblivious, and the world is telling me this is right, this is good, this is the higher purpose, this is what you’re meant to do, take him now.

  I am Columbus.

  As I am about to emerge from my hiding spot, the front door clunk-clunks open and a fifteen-year-old girl enters. Mr. Laughlin smiles, a fat spider on a web. The girl sheds her coat, and underneath, she’s wearing jeans that look like they were painted on, and a tight sweater stretched to the breaking point. I haven’t seen her before, but I’ve seen her before
. I’ve seen her in red light districts in Barcelona, in Paris, in Prague, in Vegas. She has the wide-eyed innocent face of a little girl and the much-too-adult body of a grown woman, hair and makeup and clothes chosen to emphasize the latter when she should be doing all she can to hold on to the former.

  “Gretchen,” Mr. Laughlin says, and the way he says it, he’s expecting her.

  “Mr. Laughlin,” she calls back, already a tickle in her voice.

  “Come here, come here,” he calls. “Sit, sit,” but she moves to the beanbag circle and plops down on the first one, smiling as she does. Her backpack drops next to her and she unzips it and pulls out a folder.

  “Why are you making me come in so early?” she calls out and looks up at the clock.

  Mr. Laughlin finishes writing whatever will be his last recorded words, tucks the notebook in his desk drawer, and stands. “I’m not making you do anything, Gretchen. I offered to take a look at your essay and offered to meet you on my time. You chose to accept my offer.”

  “Whatever,” Gretchen says, the universal word for a teenager’s unsuccessful attempt at indifference.

  He crosses the room slowly, a ballet he wants to extend, a symphony he wants to drive to climax, then drops into the beanbag chair opposite her. She pulls at her hair absently, a nervous tic, then sticks the tips into the corner of her mouth.

  “Show it to me. The essay . . .” he offers, and my grip tightens on the scissors’ handle. He’s toying with her, he’s a shark circling, a monster in the closet, and I despise him, a feeling as familiar to me as an old friend.

  The way I die is to hate.

  She withdraws a journal from her backpack like the one he had at his desk and hands it to him. As he takes it, she holds on to her end, so they’re both touching it at the same time and poor Gretchen is playing with fire and is too dumb to realize it. She lets go, and Mr. Laughlin chuckles like rain beating on a tin roof. He clucks his tongue in an exaggerated tsk, tsk, and it’s all I can do to keep from sprinting across the room and burying these scissors handle deep into the base of his neck, splattering his gore all over her face, but that would be it for me and for some reason I can’t explain, my innate sense of self-preservation remains healthy. I’m going to kill him this morning, but I’m going to get away with it without any witnesses.