Chapter Seven
The mailman's bloated corpse, purple and swollen like a tick that had gorged on too much blood, floated by the window casually, butting up against the windowpane. The water line was up above the window now, so it looked like the mailman was a fish in an aquarium. The image made Edgar chuckle. He’d looked after a goldfish when he was a little boy. Who would have ever thought that the whole world would turn into a fish tank? The best part about seeing Skipperoo, was that now, he hadn't any need to retrieve the corpse and hide it away from the judging eyes of his neighbors. The water was rising. The son of a bitch would be gone in the torrent of water, and in no time at all.
None of that mattered.
Jesus was coming.
He’d been waiting for, ever since his mother had dropped him out her lady-hole this moment. Edgar couldn't resist smiling, tapping at the leaking window, goading the mailman’s cadaver through the glass, ignoring the water that was spilling into the house through the edges of the swelling window frame. "See there. Time for a
reck-a-nin
! Fuckin' aye right!"
Ever since he was a boy and discovered the love and power of Jesus H. Christ, he'd been awaiting
his second coming. His days of wanderin' from one part of the world to the next, like the great carpenter himself, was nothing more than a waiting game. Life, he had always believed, was nothing but a precursor to the next world. "Heaven's Waitin' Room" like his mother called it. It was every reason to be good, and at the same time, every reason to be bad to the bone. Edgar had tasted a bit of both, but mostly the latter.
"I hear you, Jesus. I hear you loud and clear
," he said.
When he met Jesus, would he dare to zing him? No. That would be wrong. With time, after he built up a relationship with
the old boy, he might try to test the waters a bit, but not right away.
The windows were airtight, but they wouldn’t hold for long, not with the immense pressure of the water outside. The water frantically wanted to push through the
front door. The frame looked as if it was bulging, being pushed on by the growing pool outside. The water was certainly over his head by now, so when the house’s tight seal gave out, he’d be swimming for his life, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been swimming. Here he was, all
settled in and settled up
, a family man, and he was about to be washed away. No no no, that wouldn't do. He'd have to take the other two with him as well, his two babies. The little man (Jimmy? Tommy?) and the sweet tramp... what was her name? He couldn't recall. Jezebel? Yeah, it at least rhymed with Jezebel. If that wasn't her name, then he'd make her change it. He liked the name Jezebel. In fact, if he had settled in and settled up a lot younger in the game, he might have named his daughter that.
His beautiful wife.
His muse. Jezebel. Retreating back through the living room, Edgar found the basement door was nailed shut with a series of planks. “Fuck!” he shouted. He didn’t remember boarding them in like that, but it certainly looked like his handiwork. It would explain the lump on his thumb, as he’d never been too crafty with a hammer and nails. “Fuckin’ hell!” Edgar opened up the toolbox that he’d left by the kitchen sink, searching through Christian’s clutter for something to pry the boards out with.
At the bottom of the toolbox, he found a short crowbar with a hooked head, perfect for pulling out nails. There was no time to pull out nails though, nor was the
re time to remove the screws, which he could also see peppered the board-up job he’d done in his drunken idiocy.
As he tried to focus on the basement door, he could hear more water coming in
over the front door’s threshold. It wasn’t going to get any better, so he needed to move fast. He hoped they hadn’t already drowned. He quietly begged Jesus to let his family survive this reckoning.
He went to work on the boards, sweating
, (sweating? He was actually
sweating
.) and toiling with the edges of the door frame. Luckily, he hadn’t done a very good job of it. The boards came off with ease. He was suddenly thankful for his over consumption of liquor the night before. If he’d done it sober, he might never have gotten the boards off.
Edgar kicked at the door and it swung open, with one board still dangling from the frame.
He called down to his family, but found his voice echoing back to him from the completely submerged basement. "Come on up, you two, and stop foolin’ around like a buncha fuckin’ idiots. Somethin' done changed. I think Jesus gon' be here. He gon' be here real soon!"
Silence.
“Get off yer asses!”
Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were sleeping. Several feet of water filled the bottom of the stairwell. He certainly hoped they weren't drowning down there, as that would spell doom for
settling in and settling up
. Scampering down the wet stairs, he continued to call out to them, “Get up, get up, get the fuck up!” He went sloshing around the corner of the stairwell, the water looming near his perspiring chin. Light. Across the basement’s flooded expanse, he found daylight poking through. The bulkhead door was flung open. Water was flushing down the cement steps. The floodgates had been opened. Within minutes, the water would be up to the ceiling. The only reason it wasn’t already completely submerged was because of the restrictive bottleneck of the bulkhead’s width.
Shit on a stick.
It was the bitch. Craftier than she looked. Jezebel had opened the door and tried to escape. This was a family, goddammit. Families stuck together. Didn't they know that? Jezebel was out of her freakin’ mind. Jezebel needed to be taught a lesson, just like he’d done with the kid.
Edgar ran back up the stairs, careful not to slip. He wasn't accustomed to the sneakers he'd taken from Christian
’s closet. He needed those boots back from Jimmy. More so than getting his family back, he needed those fancy wanderin’ boots. If he was gonna meet Jesus in person, then he intended to dress to impress. Only the boots would suffice. He regretted the moment of weakness, wherein, he put the boots by the kid’s bed. How could he have been so limp in the head?
"You fuckers," he mumbled, sloshing into the living room where the water was entering as a matter of its own will power now-- through the edges around the windows, beneath the cracks of the front and back doors, and any other nook or cranny it managed to come through.
It was up to his waist now, and even higher outside the house. Looking to the window, out into the “aquarium,” he found that the dead-as-a-doornail mailman was gone now. Good riddance, he thought.
Jesus had flipped the switch
and things would never be the same again.
The water was a mean son of bitch. Noah wouldn’t have put up with this shit. His animals stayed where they were supposed to, in the fuckin
’ boat. Edgar’s animals had escaped out the back door, as if they didn’t love him. As if they didn’t even
like
him.
As he pulled open the front door
once again, he felt his lower half fighting back against the flowing torrent that encircled him.
Edgar pondered: if Jesus was indeed coming, the
fellow best bring a flotation device.
Edgar wasn't the best swimmer.
No swimmer at all, in reality. More of a sinker than a swimmer. The last time he’d been in the water, he nearly drowned. His uncle tried to teach some silly shit called the breaststroke during the summer after his pop left home, but it hadn’t stuck. It hadn’t made any sense. What was the point of swimming, anyway? It was for morons.
Edgar
opened the front door and accepted the whooshing flood that came into the house, and that moment, the rear sliding glass doors popped open, almost like a gunshot ringing through his ears, rushing the water at him from both sides simultaneously. Before the water overtook him, crushing him like a bug, he begged, "Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me float to my family."
And Jesus answered, with
a flopping, sloshy wave that hurtled him through the front door, violently spinning his body in a cyclone of icy confusion. As he swept by, he held on to the steel light post just beyond the front steps, digging his fingers into it the best he could, crying out for mercy to anybody that might hear it.
“Where you at, Jesus? Where the hell you at?”
Chapter
Eight
The screeching sound came from the front of the house, the unmistakable sound of pure terror elevating above the sloshy din of the world melting all about them. The voice was unrecognizable to Annie, but she could see Paulie's face change at the sound. "Eggah," the boy said, half-smiling.
Even with all that Edgar
had put the kid through, he still looked up to him. The boy hadn't witnessed Edgar's attack on Annie, nor had he witnessed his father's demise. When they'd first escaped the house, the first thing that Annie noticed was the oversized boots on Paulie's feet. She hadn't time to pull them off, nor did she have any alternative for his feet, so she left the subject unaddressed. The boots hadn't belonged to Christian, so she could only assume that they were Edgar's. The fact that Paulie still wore them made her stomach numb.
What had happened between them? The thought made her want to scream. She could only imagine. Someday, when the end of the world was in their rearview mirror, if ever, they would discuss his time with Edgar.
Probably with a therapist in the room.
Paulie re
ached out, away from the steady branches of the tree, reaching out as they watched Edgar drift on down the driveway, emitting a terrible cry. Not only was the water washing him away, but the dummy hadn't a clue how to swim. Annie knew this by the desperate flailing of his arms. She'd worked two summers as a lifeguard during college, so she could pinpoint that desperate brand of fear from a mile away.
Good
, she thought. She hoped the delusional madman was in for a boatload of suffering.
Now he was gripping to a smaller tree on the side of the garage, just beneath them. He called up to them
, his eyes growing large and moony, "Help me, Timmy! Don't let Daddy die!"
The psychotic monster didn’t even know the kid’s name.
"Eggah," Paulie said again, fighting against his mother, pushing away from her.
"Stop it," she said, clutching tight to her son's forearm. What the hell was he thinking?
She knew that he was in pain, presumably from something Edgar had done to him, but still he had some connection to the man that wouldn’t allow him to sit still. Paulie hadn’t a clue about the evils of the world, rife with innocence and seeing only the best in people. After all, he was only four years old, so he wasn’t capable of the hate that Edgar so deserved.
"Eggah, swim,
swim!" the boy cried. Paulie was motivating the murderer, who would surely kill them both if he had another chance. And as the sicko grabbed on to the trunk of their safe haven of a tree, she realized that was a possibility that may come to fruition.
"
Please… no," she said, looking down at the desperate man with the wild grin, pulling himself up the tree, grappling his legs and digging his fingers into the knots of the oak. He'd nearly drowned, but now he was saved by some higher form of fate. He couldn’t swim, but he’d been spared drowning for a bit longer.
"Climb, Eggah, climb!"
Paulie shouted, wiggling in excitement.
* * *
Paulie wished he'd given Eggah back his cool boots. They would have helped him climb up the tree. Instead, Eggah was wearing his pop's sneakers, which were all worn out and stinky and falling apart. Poor Eggah. He’d tried to get him inside of his dream, when everybody had turned to chocolate, but that didn’t change the fact that Eggah was a
scallion
.
It wasn't too late though. He could still give Eggah back his boots
.
It only seemed fair.
*
* *
Edgar could not recall a more perfect sight. His loving family was perched above him, looking down, waiting for him to ascend and claim his spot at Jesus' side. As the morning sun’s glorious rays (
thank ya, Jesus, thank ya much
) poked through the tree's limbs, he could only see the outline of Tommy, the outline of... Jezebel. Oh, so sexy. Oh, so Jezebel. It was like his lovelies were ghosts, drifting just above him, waiting to touch his cheek and make all the bad parts of his brain go away like he’d always prayed.
He could feel tears on his cheeks, salty and foreign. Edgar couldn't remember the last time he had cried
, not since he’d cut the shit out of himself real bad last fall. This was a day of days, one that would forever define his soul, no matter if it existed in heaven or on earth. The King of Kings was just above, using his heavenly brood as bait. The world was being clobbered by a holy flood, one that would make Noah's look like a pink pussy parade.
The world was getting’ clean again.
Cleanliness; it sung from every rooftop and cloud and everything in between. The world was being purged of all the sinners, of all the dummies with terribly knit sweaters and cat piss on their pillows. Of all the spineless fathers and weak-kneed freaks, of all the people who made the world a place of wasted days, a place where the only way to survive was to keep on the move, to travel with an eye on nothing and everything at the very same time.
There it was, just above him, only two branches higher, wishing that it would come closer to him. His legs were giving out and the sound of the rushing water beneath his feet was throwing off his concentration.
A long rope of drool dripped from Edgar's lips. He screeched up at the warm silhouettes of his family, "Help me, boy! Help your Daddy."
When the hard
object hit his face, he lost his grip. Then a second one came, making his eyes and head spin in confusion. It felt like he'd been hit with a hammer-- stars filling his eyes and a rush of pain jettisoned through every inch of his face. He couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down.
As he landed in the water again, he felt the rush of a higher power pulling him away from his home. He couldn't be sure what had struck him in the face
, twice in the face, but as he choked on water, he recollected the musty, oily smell. Something in that smell made him smile one last time.
* * *
The boots. Paulie had thrown the bastard his boots. He'd returned them at just the right time.
"My baby," she said, unsure i
f she was supposed to congratulate him for saving their lives or scold him for killing somebody.
They were both shivering. Paulie started to cry and then so did his mother.
“Eggah,” he said over and over again.