Page 26 of Devil

Blinking away the dots in my vision, I brace one hand on the sink and reach for the antibiotic ointment in the medicine cabinet, and then my trembling hand falters. Drops.

I could just stop.

I could just…stop.

The only reason I kept pushing through day after tired, lonely day was that Busy needed the money I made. But if I weren’t here, she could have the farm. Maybe she’d have better luck selling it. Maybe it would be enough to keep her afloat for the rest of her life. Maybe she wouldn’t let the money fall through her fingers like she did with the property down at the lake.

Because if I get an infection in my leg and it catches fire in my blood, it wouldn’t be my fault; it wouldn’t be suicide, not really. Negligence at most, and surely negligence is the kind of sin that can be worked off in Purgatory?

Maybe in Purgatory, I’d have company. Someone who would make the suffering a little less lonely, although I guess the point of Purgatory is that it’s unalloyed with comfort, that you’re working off your sins around the clock, with all the punishment it takes to purify your soul.

My grandmother used to tell us to offer our suffering up to the souls in Purgatory, just as Christ offered up his agony on the cross. She’d remind us to offer up our pain as she cleaned our cuts and scrapes and she’d remind herself while standing over a dropped pie that had been worked on all day.

And of course, the deeper the suffering, the greater the gift when it was given to God.

I try to think past the pain and offer this up, ask God to use it for something good, but my thoughts are scattered. I still can’t catch my breath, and the pain feels like shimmering metal under my tongue and everywhere else.

I reach for the duct tape and, gritting my teeth, wrap it around my calf until the wound is covered. It’s the best I can do for now. When I take the tape off, I can consider a real bandage or at least medical tape instead.

Or maybe an infection will have already begun spreading, tendrils of deep red darkening to black, a fever in the skin burrowing to my veins and then to my heart, and I will feel relief, relief, relief.

I will think,At last.

11

BIRDIE

My shift is quiet,which is good, because with my shoulder and leg, even just changing out the refrigerated food display in the middle of the station has tears leaking down my cheeks. I take some generic ibuprofen from the grimy bottle someone stashed under the counter years ago, shaking out an indiscriminate number and chewing them to try to get them in my system faster. I think they work—the flaying pain around the gash in my calf seems to dull—and I’m able to lift the crate of new milk off the delivery truck without crying in front of the driver, but it’s a close thing.

The driver, a grizzled guy named Bill, has a good heart and bad lungs. He watches me as he has his customary post-unloading cigarette before he moves on to his next night delivery. “You okay there, Birdie?”

I give him a wan smile. “Had a fight with my ladder earlier today. Got a little beat up.”

He nods and that’s the end of his probing. If I asked him how the arthritis in his hands was doing or about the rattling cough he’s started up with in the last few months, I’d get a similar level of understatement.Always acts up with the humidity. Just a little tickle in my chest.

There’s too much wrong to explain everything all the time to everyone, and generally when it came to anyone who had a reason to be at Buddy’s, it was assumed that you’d share about yourself if you wanted to share. It could be mistaken for pride, but really, I think it was weariness. If you already had to live through your problems, did you really have the energy to explain them too?

Bill finishes his cigarette, and I wave him off when he asks if I want him to loop back by after his route. It’s his gruff and unsentimental way of expressing concern. He doesn’t like that I’m alone here at night, and more than once, he’s helped me with a tough situation: administering Narcan to a collapsed customer or keeping some asshole distracted outside while I secreted a woman with a black eye in the back room so she could use the phone. More than once, he’s scared off shaky, desperate-looking men who were either eyeing the register or me or both.

But all in all, the night shift is fine. A few truckers and a slow leak of people driving to lonely places for lonely reasons. Early in the morning come the nursing students farmed out from a college in Leavenworth to the rural health clinics and the handful of teachers who commute west to Oskaloosa and McLouth. I spend the first half of my shift turning over inventory and cleaning and the second half sketching out schematics for my furniture commissions.

Sometimes I sketch ideas for carvings that I don’t have the heart to make anymore. I’ve drifted away from the popular saints into less common subjects. A surly Jonah under shriveled vines. Job covered in boils, his face turned defiantly up to the sky—I cry to Thee and Thou dost not answer me. Saint Peter upside down on a cross. Saint Bartholomew, half flensed. Saint Agatha with her shoulders hunched protectively around her maimed chest, a hand reaching tentatively up to touch one of the gaping wounds where her breasts used to be.

As sunrise approaches, more people begin trickling in, and I set aside my sketches to ring them up. When the papers come, I ignore the story below the fold—although I do glance at the accompanying picture, just once, just to see it framed by someone else’s perspective. A wooden carving, larger than life-size but not by much, left anonymously in Kansas City, Missouri, in front of city hall. It’s only been a few days since it was deposited on the sidewalk, but it’s already become a viral attraction. Despite some early noises about moving it, the city has left the statue in front of city hall after the mayor intervened. Something about Kansas City being a city of art, Paris of the Plains and so forth, and besides, it’s not blocking any traffic or foot access where it is now. He even took a selfie with it.

TheStar’s photographer chose to take a picture of it in the morning, right as the sun was pushing up and glowing over the world. Fitting for the morning star himself. The golden light makes the statue’s brooding features seem like they’re glowing, and same with the intricately and painstakingly etched hair on the statue’s head. The photographer picked the perfect angle: like this, the sleepy, stretching sunlight throws shadows from the two horns nearly hidden in the statue’s angelic curls.

I allow myself a small smile before I flip the paper over and slide it onto the newspaper display.

I use a post-dawn lull to walk the night’s trash back to the dumpster and find Amber, the day shift cashier, puffing on a vape while she scrolls through her phone. Buddy doesn’t care if we vape at the counter, but Amber hates getting scolded by the nursing students. She tells me they’ll all start vaping or smoking the minute they start working as nurses anyway, but she can’t tellthemthat without sounding bitter, so it’s just easier to top off behind the building.

“Hey,” she says as I walk back from the dumpster. “There was a guy at the bar yesterday looking for your sister.”

That doesn’t surprise me. Busy’s taste in men hasn’t gotten any better, and even though she’s been safe and quiet these past few months, the odds of one of those men still being obsessed or being owed money—or thinking he’s owed money—are high.

“Did he seem dangerous?” I ask. It’s the most important question, and it’s also a question I’ve had to ask so many times over the years that I feel nothing at all when I ask it. Like I’m asking about holiday bank hours or when they’ll finish the new lane along I-70.

And the expression on Amber’s face is like I have actually asked about holiday bank hours. Between working at Buddy’s and picking up bartending shifts whenever she can at the dive downtown, a question likedid he seem dangeroushas become mundane to Amber too.