Rubber Relic
Rubber Relic
Looking
in my side mirror, I saw the cop who’d checked my documents and taken down my
registration stare down at her clipboard for a moment, then tilt her head,
lifting her radio up to her mouth. I caught a glimpse of myself frowning as I
turned my attention to parking, turning the van round on the concrete strip so
the back doors were as near to the unit’s shutter as I could get them. I
noticed my knee was jiggling up and down as I lit a cigarette and picked up my
cap from the dashboard, pulling it on in the way I imagined a man with nothing
to hide would. The padlock on the shutter had rusted in the eleven years since
I'd last shut it; I had meant to come back and change it, but I never got the
nerve up. I figured after dad died I could put some money from the house toward
getting a company to come down, crate everything up and dump it in another
state. At least this way I was saving some cash. The shutter came up, and I
stared for a while at the contents of the unit. Cardboard boxes wrapped in
peeling brown tape, some cheap furniture, a faded rug and something else;
hidden, for the moment, by a heavy tarp in the back.
Someone banged on the side of my van, pulling me out of my
trance. I turned sharply, ready to cuss them out for adding another dent to the
old girl. Thankfully, I saw the badge, the pistol and the crime-scene jacket
before I spoke, and so I didn't.
“Afternoon officer,” I nodded, as he looked me up and down.
“You’re not Jimmy Pearce, “ he remarked, stating a fact. “Too
young, guessing you must be the son? Can’t recall your name…”
“Darby, “ I said, then, feeling bold for some reason, “You’re
too young yourself.”
“Too young to be a cop? Well, thanks for the compliment, but
I don’t feel it.” He said, flashing me a grin. There was something false about
it. But I didn’t feel threatened because, when his cheeks broadened out, I
recognised him.
“Too young to have been around when it happened…say, it’s Dan
right? You were in the grade below me.” I held out my hand for a shake, and he
took it, gripping a bit too tight, like he had something to prove. His hand was
cold.
“Sure is. You’re right, I was too young of course but, well,
I remember the talk.” As he spoke, I didn’t bother trying to hide my grimace.
“I remember it too.” I replied. He nodded.
“Well, it’s a closed matter, but…you don’t suppose you could
satisfy my curiosity? We did a quick search of the units a couple days back,
and I saw the frame under that tarp there, but it was only when I was going
over the paperwork later…” I cut him off.
“Yup, that’s it.” I couldn’t help but glance back. I heard
him whistle.
“Jesus, why’d he keep it?” I saw the cop I barely remembered
as a chubby-faced kid shudder.
“I’m not the one to answer that. I know I ain’t keeping it.
In fact, I plan on burning all of it that’ll burn, first chance I get.” He
nodded, as if there was no other thing that could be done.
“Your father won’t mind?” He asked, after a pause. I
shrugged.
“He’s in the Peace Hospice over in Great Falls. His liver.”
He had the decency to look sad, in that official way they teach to cops and
priests.
“That’s a shame. I guess the drink…” he trailed off, perhaps
realising just what an asshole he was being. “…hey, none of my business. Case
closed. You planning on getting this all out today? I can get someone over to
help.” I shook my head, picking the cigarette stub out my mouth before my beard
caught.
“Won’t be needed. I don’t want to put the old man through
more embarrassment. He’s had enough in this town for a longer life than he’s
gonna get. I’ll be out of it before sundown.” He nodded.
“Well, just holler at Officer Gilroy over at the gate if you
change your mind.” He paused. “It’s a shame what happened.” He said, lamely,
then turned and walked away, probably secretly pleased to have gotten so close
to small town history.
Yes, shame’s the word.
It’s difficult being the subject of gossip somewhere like
Hill County, or even closely connected to people who are. It’s not that strange
things don’t happen there, but not much of it comes to the surface, and rarely
as spectacularly as it did the night Sheriff’s deputies found my mom’s body in
the basement.
The local paper was decent about it, just a brief paragraph;
local woman, accident at home, wife and mother, tragic loss. But someone on the
investigation made sure the story got out with all the details, and it spread
quick and wide, so that within a week of my coming back to school the sympathy
of my classmates had been replaced with whispers and taunts. I wasn’t a small
or timid kid, and for the price of a few weeks in suspension I got the taunts
to stop, but not the whispers, or the occasional stifled giggle.
I lost most of my friends over the next few years, and even
the ones I kept wouldn’t visit our house. It was difficult to blame them, as
dad’s drinking got worse and the place slowly fell apart. I didn’t see him for
days sometimes, though I knew where he was; down in the basement. What he was
doing down there I didn’t really want to know. I hoped he just wanted to be
alone with his grief, and his beer. I thought I knew more than enough about the
basement, though I didn’t know half of what I do now.
I did try and persuade him to come with me when I headed down
to Billings after leaving school; sell the old place, start somewhere new, in
the relative anonymity of a larger town. He’d have enough to keep things
ticking over while I finished my apprenticeship. But he wouldn’t come, though
he gave me some money and his old truck. I thought he just couldn’t bear to
leave his memories, but of course, I’d never actually been in the basement.
He’d installed a lock.
I should have wondered about that, but I didn’t. I got on
with my own life, calling him when I could, deliberately avoiding the evenings
when I knew he’d be drunk. Then I got the job working on trucks up at Elm
Coulee, and the oil business took over. I hadn’t spoken to him for about three
months when I got the phone call, that night in 2006. I didn’t even realise at
first that it was the anniversary; not of when they found her, but of when the
coroner said she’d died. He was incoherent, I thought with drink, begging me to
come over. When I said I’d call the Sheriffs to do a welfare check on him, he
seemed to sober up in an instant. He could be in a lot of trouble, he told me.
I had to come over, alone.
Eventually I ended up having to stay over for several days; I
lost my job at the oilfield over that, but I did bond with my father, in a way.
And I kept the old pervert out of prison, which is a bonus.
I got the first box inside the van before taking a knife to
it where I couldn’t be overseen. I’d rather not have opened anything, but I
knew there was some good diving gear somewhere, and the hospice wasn’t cheap.
Inside the cardboard box was a plastic container; inside that, newspaper that
had become brittle and yellow with age, crumbling at one side to show a flash
of lurid magenta, stark against graying cardboard. I pulled on a pair of
gloves, leather of course, and brushed the paper away, reaching in to pick up
the item inside. It was a dress, made of eye-watering latex. I handled it
gingerly, seeing how it had started to deteriorate where it had been folded,
almost dropping it when I noticed the cut-outs in the breast area. After some
searching, I found a hand-stitched label in the collar.
At least it was mom’s.
I closed the box up, ran a new strip of tape and went to
retrieve the next one.
No person wants to think that their parents have ever fucked,
let alone that they're still fucking. It’s universal. Adopted people are lucky
in that respect; I had too much of my mother’s nose and my father’s hair,
already receding at fifteen, to ever be in any doubt that I was the product of
some unmentionable biological process involving the pair of them. But I still
maintained the illusion through my early teenage years that they might have had
the decency to stop. After all, I had no younger brother or sisters. I was
aware of course by that age of condoms, another of life’s conveniences that I
find it necessary to avoid; if only my parents had kept to such everyday
things.
I ended up putting a lot of their sexual history together
from bits and pieces my dad let slip when he’d been drinking and forgotten to
hide himself away. I tried to tune it out at first, but I guess eventually a
sort of morbid curiosity took over. He blamed himself for the whole thing
because he was convinced that he got them into 'that stuff', but it sounded
like it was mom who first convinced him to take his work into the bedroom.
Back when he was sober, dad was a commercial diver, a good
one. People used to joke it was a strange occupation given he’d never been
within 600 miles of an ocean in his life, but there was plenty of call for it;
mines, quarries, reservoirs, river searches, dangerous but well-paying work. It
was the rubber suits, of course, that first piqued mom’s interest. She wasn’t
exactly a conventional one; she named me after a punk singer who died of an
overdose three days before I was born, and I don’t know how she coped with Hill
County. I guess the little set-up in the basement helped her. They didn’t let
me coming along slow them one bit, from what I can make out, though they
managed to hide it all from me pretty well. If mom hadn’t died, looking back as
an adult I might have had some thoughts about the forbidden basement, but as
far as I was concerned, our family life was fairly normal for that place and
time.
That all changed one night in 1995. I was away at camp, and
my parents had taken the chance to do some more daring things they couldn’t
normally get away with. They’d been experimenting with extreme bondage
scenarios; they’d take turns tying the other up and leaving them in various
predicaments. It sounds like the opposite of fucking to me, but they obviously
got a kick out of it, and it should have been pretty harmless. Except one day,
everything went wrong.
Deep in his cups, my dad used to talk about an ‘incident
pit’. It’s a concept from diver training, how one little thing starts you
sliding down into this imaginary hole, where you can either solve the problem
and climb out straight away, or make more and more mistakes until you sink past
the point of no return, and something that started out minor ends up killing
you. Honestly, it doesn’t really fit; my dad just felt responsible because he
was ‘on top’, and it was like if he’d planned a dive wrong and someone got
pulled out through a spillway or trapped in a flooded mineshaft. But as far as
I can see, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could have done. Sometimes
little things just happen.
In this case the little things were a few thousand Salmonella
typhi bacteria that my dad swallowed with some dirty water when his mouthpiece
slipped in a culvert in Butte. A couple weeks later, he was feeling bad, but he
got himself a bad case of thinking he was some sort of mountain man. He didn’t
go to the doctor, didn’t even really tell my mother about it, just felt
shittier and shittier while they packed me off to camp and got around to their
long planned fun and games. The night it all went to hell, which was two before
I got the call, the plan was that he’d restrain her in this thing they’d made,
and then he’d go out to a bar and forget about her all evening. Then I guess
he’d come home and fuck her. Seems some apples do fall far from the tree,
because to me that sounds about as sexually exciting as a root canal, but of
course given what happened even the sight of a pair of fluffy handcuffs is
enough to turn me cold.
The booze made him feel better, so he had more than he’d
planned, figuring he could leave the car, call a taxi from town or get a lift
up to our house a little ways out of town. Actually, he ended up getting
completely hammered. The doctors said the booze must have accelerated the
illness, dehydration and liver strain, and he ended up passed out in the street
two blocks from the bar, after having the bright idea to lock his wallet in the
truck for safe-keeping. Someone walking their dog tripped over him just before
dawn, and the cops only had to feel the heat coming off of him before rushing
him straight to Northern Montana Hospital. They saw him there in Emergency, but
they didn’t have a bed free, so they sent him by ambulance down to Great Falls,
another link in a chain of chaos. So there was my father, delirious, no ID on
him, rolling his eyes in a hospital bed in another city, and there was my
mother, at our house in the woods, immobilised in the basement.
They'd made this thing they’d read about in
one of the magazines they got delivered in plain brown paper. It was built on
top of an old metal bed-frame, the type with hard slats and a mesh over it to
support the mattress, only instead of a mattress there was a frame of pvc plumbing
pipes drilled with holes, and over all that an envelope of rubber. One of them
would climb inside the envelope, and they’d get their mouth on a scuba
regulator pierced through it so they could breathe. Then the open end would be
tucked up underneath and sealed, and they’d turn on a shop vac that was hooked
up to the pipes, sucking out the air. They’d be pinned there, outlined in the
rubber, able to squirm a bit at first, but once the vacuum had been drawn
completely, not even that.
That was how my mother was for nearly 40 hours, until three
police departments and two hospitals finally sorted everything out and the
Sheriffs went in with my dad’s spare keys.
It shouldn’t have been fatal. He had left her with a little
bit of movement room, enough to avoid any danger of positional asphyxia. She
should have been dehydrated, upset, but very much alive.
But something had happened; something horrible and ironic
that had turned a domestic tragedy into an urban legend.
While she was lying there, trapped naked between slick
sheets, waiting, breathing through the mouthpiece, no sound but the hum of the
basement lights, trying not to piss herself and eventually failing, my mother’s
body, stressed and compressed and pushed to the brink of extremity, began to
develop a reaction. An allergic response to the thing in which she had been
voluntarily imprisoned. My mother, the rubber freak, developed a sudden-onset
latex allergy.
According to the coroner, it took her about 26 hours to die
of anaphylactic shock.
It took me longer to load up the boxes than it did to unload
them, opening up and sorting through, trying not to think too much about what I
found. I’ll say this for my folks, they sure didn’t lack for creativity, and
with his mechanical skills and her arts and crafts they put together some
extraordinary things. Most of it was falling apart, the rubber blistering and
cracking, mismatched metal fittings eating each other with corrosion. I found a
couple of regulators and gauges that looked like they might still be in decent
condition, and some tanks that might still hold pressure. There was also dad’s
old diving knife, at the bottom of one of the boxes. He told me once how they
kept it near when they were up to their business, so the 'top' could always
free the 'bottom, if necessary. It was in the car when they took him to
hospital. He seemed to think sometimes that if he’d left the knife behind my
mother would have somehow been able to cut herself out of the sandwich of
pressurised rubber, despite being immobilised. As I finished taping up another
box for the trash, I looked back over at the thing under the tarp. I didn’t
want to see it again, let alone touch it, but I had to; it needed to be removed
before the police, or anyone else, got a proper look at it.
I hauled the furniture out first, making sure I kept the
carpet tightly rolled; there were some stains on that thing that I didn’t want
anyone else to see. Then, when I had everything else packed down pretty much on
a level, I backed the van right up to the threshold of the unit, hearing the
roof knock and grind against the shutter. It was only three in the afternoon,
but the light had begun to weaken, so I grabbed my flashlight, steeling myself
for what I knew was under the tarp.
Compared to the other rubber items the bed was in remarkably
good shape, especially considering it had been so much more exposed. Perhaps
that had helped its preservation, let it breathe somehow. There’s a lot I don’t
know, and never want to know, about rubber. One of the reasons I tend to avoid
the substance where possible is because I don’t want to develop any sort of
feel for it. I don’t want to know how rubber stretches or breaks, how it feels
or breathes; it helps me keep everything I know and everything I’ve seen a bit
more distant, a bit more abstract.
Particularly, I have always wanted to avoid finding out the
precise chemical or physical process that left the outline of my mother’s body,
spread-eagled and screaming, pressed into the material of the bed.
When I finally got over to the house that night in 2006, it
was nearly three in the morning. Dad was sitting up on the porch, asleep; he
was done up well against the chill, or this might be a different story, but I
didn’t waste any time getting him inside. The place was an absolute wreck;
trash strewn everywhere, each binge its own geological layer of filth. He’d
started smoking, said he didn’t need his lungs anymore after he stopped diving,
and the stink of Marlboros was doing a good job covering up worse things. I
didn’t believe him at first when he started telling me about how he’d been
bringing women home, though it made more sense when I found out he’d been
paying some of them.
I let him warm up for a bit while I tried to find coffee in the
disarray of the kitchen, then I got him awake and tried to get a proper story
out of him. He was a total wreck, and now I was with him I could tell it wasn’t
drink. In fact, he was about as sober as I’d ever seen him those past ten
years. Once he’d calmed down a bit, the first thing he did was wring all sorts
of promises out of me; that I’d help him, that I wouldn’t breathe a word to
anyone else. I got frustrated eventually, demanded to know exactly what all
this was about. He told me to go down into the basement.
I was already putting some things together in my mind, and I
found a bottle of vodka with something left in the bottom and downed it before
trying the basement door. It wouldn’t budge, and I was about to fetch something
from the van to break it down before dad explained that it was locked from the
other side. He hadn’t just been sitting around on his ass drinking the past
eight years. The basement was now a walkout, with its own door, its own
driveway approaching it. He took me out around the house; there was a first
flush of pink in the east, but the woods were silent.
The basement couldn’t have been more of a contrast with the
house upstairs. It was quite clean, at least free of dust, and neat; all the
bizarre objects of my parents' sex life, hung on pegs or racks or stowed in
metal lockers. Half of the place was set up a bit more homely, two easy chairs
and the stained rug. Somewhere to chill out, he told me. The actual dungeon was
behind an inner wall. I felt queasy as I approached, noticing that the floor
and walls inside were tiled; then I heard the noise. How I hadn't before I
don’t know; it was like the opposite of that process where the noise of a car
engine fades into the background on a long drive. Suddenly, it was there, loud
and inescapable.
A shop vac.
When I saw the bed, I felt full nausea before I realised why;
it was because the still, unmoving form of the woman beneath the rubber looked
exactly like my dead mother. Thankfully, at that time, I didn’t know what the
woman had looked like before. I saw the trickle of congealing reddish liquid
running out of the regulator. I didn’t vomit, but I had to go outside and take
a few deep gulps of air. Dad joined me a while later, lighting a cigarette with
trembling hands. He swore he didn’t know how or why it happened. They’d met
online, and 'played' a few times; he drove her up from Missoula. He hadn’t
wanted to use the bed on her, hadn’t thought it right, but she’d begged him
until he caved in. He started to get into details, but I stopped him. I’d seen
enough to keep my skin crawling till the end of time.
What we needed then were solutions. My first thought was to
bury her out in the woods, then torch the house. Over the next few hours we
drank coffee and thought through it properly. Hopefully she hadn’t told anyone
where she was going; if we burned a load of stuff now, or anything dramatic
like that, it risked attracting attention. My dad had a unit down in Havre he’d
been using to store some of mom’s old clothes; it seemed sensible, get
everything out the basement, stick it in there and then deal with it somewhere
down the line. I let him do the boxing and the cleaning, and get his girlfriend
bagged so we could bury her out on the property. I took it all down to the unit,
then drove to Missoula with her keys to fetch her computer. I tried not to
think about the morality of it at the time. I guess if she’d been family I’d
want to know she was dead, but when you’ve lost one parent to something like
this, and the other one threatens to be pulled down in the same sucking pit,
well, it warps your priorities. Sometimes recently I’ve gone whole weeks
without thinking about it. Hopefully in the future those periods will get
longer, once the pain of dad’s final illness is past. I’m not sorry he’s taking
his last illness in a comfortable bed, with bright painted walls and sadly
smiling nurses, rather than rotting in a bleak prison ward. I really don’t
think it was his fault, at the end of the day. I have my theories, but put down
in writing they make me sound way crazier than I hope I am.
Finally, shoulders aching, I got it in the van and shut the
back door. I walked back out into the wavering gray autumn afternoon and leaned
against the battered panels, smoking. I saw the cop on the entrance watching
me, and I gave her a wave before heading back to the unit for the last time.
The shutter slammed down with a crash that was still echoing
off the back wall of the empty room as I started the engine and drove off,
trying to avoid looking in the mirror. I stopped at the Cenex station on 1st
St. and bought two big bottles of charcoal lighter fluid. Then I drove north,
turning off the main highway and heading down fifteen miles of increasingly
poorly maintained roads up toward the Canadian border. It was getting dark
then, and when I was sure I was well away from any nearby habitation I pulled
off the road. I found a hollow that didn’t need much work to clear out, and
there, with the help of the lighter fluid, I burned all that would burn of the
thing with my mother’s face.
I never went back to Havre.
Someone banged on the side of my van, pulling me out of my trance. I turned sharply, ready to cuss them out for adding another dent to the old girl. Thankfully, I saw the badge, the pistol and the crime-scene jacket before I spoke, and so I didn't.
“Afternoon officer,” I nodded, as he looked me up and down.
“You’re not Jimmy Pearce, “ he remarked, stating a fact. “Too young, guessing you must be the son? Can’t recall your name…”
“Darby, “ I said, then, feeling bold for some reason, “You’re too young yourself.”
“Too young to be a cop? Well, thanks for the compliment, but I don’t feel it.” He said, flashing me a grin. There was something false about it. But I didn’t feel threatened because, when his cheeks broadened out, I recognised him.
“Too young to have been around when it happened…say, it’s Dan right? You were in the grade below me.” I held out my hand for a shake, and he took it, gripping a bit too tight, like he had something to prove. His hand was cold.
“Sure is. You’re right, I was too young of course but, well, I remember the talk.” As he spoke, I didn’t bother trying to hide my grimace.
“I remember it too.” I replied. He nodded.
“Well, it’s a closed matter, but…you don’t suppose you could satisfy my curiosity? We did a quick search of the units a couple days back, and I saw the frame under that tarp there, but it was only when I was going over the paperwork later…” I cut him off.
“Yup, that’s it.” I couldn’t help but glance back. I heard him whistle.
“Jesus, why’d he keep it?” I saw the cop I barely remembered as a chubby-faced kid shudder.
“I’m not the one to answer that. I know I ain’t keeping it. In fact, I plan on burning all of it that’ll burn, first chance I get.” He nodded, as if there was no other thing that could be done.
“Your father won’t mind?” He asked, after a pause. I shrugged.
“He’s in the Peace Hospice over in Great Falls. His liver.” He had the decency to look sad, in that official way they teach to cops and priests.
“That’s a shame. I guess the drink…” he trailed off, perhaps realising just what an asshole he was being. “…hey, none of my business. Case closed. You planning on getting this all out today? I can get someone over to help.” I shook my head, picking the cigarette stub out my mouth before my beard caught.
“Won’t be needed. I don’t want to put the old man through more embarrassment. He’s had enough in this town for a longer life than he’s gonna get. I’ll be out of it before sundown.” He nodded.
“Well, just holler at Officer Gilroy over at the gate if you change your mind.” He paused. “It’s a shame what happened.” He said, lamely, then turned and walked away, probably secretly pleased to have gotten so close to small town history.
Yes, shame’s the word.
It’s difficult being the subject of gossip somewhere like Hill County, or even closely connected to people who are. It’s not that strange things don’t happen there, but not much of it comes to the surface, and rarely as spectacularly as it did the night Sheriff’s deputies found my mom’s body in the basement.
The local paper was decent about it, just a brief paragraph; local woman, accident at home, wife and mother, tragic loss. But someone on the investigation made sure the story got out with all the details, and it spread quick and wide, so that within a week of my coming back to school the sympathy of my classmates had been replaced with whispers and taunts. I wasn’t a small or timid kid, and for the price of a few weeks in suspension I got the taunts to stop, but not the whispers, or the occasional stifled giggle.
I lost most of my friends over the next few years, and even the ones I kept wouldn’t visit our house. It was difficult to blame them, as dad’s drinking got worse and the place slowly fell apart. I didn’t see him for days sometimes, though I knew where he was; down in the basement. What he was doing down there I didn’t really want to know. I hoped he just wanted to be alone with his grief, and his beer. I thought I knew more than enough about the basement, though I didn’t know half of what I do now.
I did try and persuade him to come with me when I headed down to Billings after leaving school; sell the old place, start somewhere new, in the relative anonymity of a larger town. He’d have enough to keep things ticking over while I finished my apprenticeship. But he wouldn’t come, though he gave me some money and his old truck. I thought he just couldn’t bear to leave his memories, but of course, I’d never actually been in the basement. He’d installed a lock.
I should have wondered about that, but I didn’t. I got on with my own life, calling him when I could, deliberately avoiding the evenings when I knew he’d be drunk. Then I got the job working on trucks up at Elm Coulee, and the oil business took over. I hadn’t spoken to him for about three months when I got the phone call, that night in 2006. I didn’t even realise at first that it was the anniversary; not of when they found her, but of when the coroner said she’d died. He was incoherent, I thought with drink, begging me to come over. When I said I’d call the Sheriffs to do a welfare check on him, he seemed to sober up in an instant. He could be in a lot of trouble, he told me. I had to come over, alone.
Eventually I ended up having to stay over for several days; I lost my job at the oilfield over that, but I did bond with my father, in a way.
And I kept the old pervert out of prison, which is a bonus.
I got the first box inside the van before taking a knife to it where I couldn’t be overseen. I’d rather not have opened anything, but I knew there was some good diving gear somewhere, and the hospice wasn’t cheap. Inside the cardboard box was a plastic container; inside that, newspaper that had become brittle and yellow with age, crumbling at one side to show a flash of lurid magenta, stark against graying cardboard. I pulled on a pair of gloves, leather of course, and brushed the paper away, reaching in to pick up the item inside. It was a dress, made of eye-watering latex. I handled it gingerly, seeing how it had started to deteriorate where it had been folded, almost dropping it when I noticed the cut-outs in the breast area. After some searching, I found a hand-stitched label in the collar.
At least it was mom’s.
I closed the box up, ran a new strip of tape and went to retrieve the next one.
No person wants to think that their parents have ever fucked, let alone that they're still fucking. It’s universal. Adopted people are lucky in that respect; I had too much of my mother’s nose and my father’s hair, already receding at fifteen, to ever be in any doubt that I was the product of some unmentionable biological process involving the pair of them. But I still maintained the illusion through my early teenage years that they might have had the decency to stop. After all, I had no younger brother or sisters. I was aware of course by that age of condoms, another of life’s conveniences that I find it necessary to avoid; if only my parents had kept to such everyday things.
I ended up putting a lot of their sexual history together from bits and pieces my dad let slip when he’d been drinking and forgotten to hide himself away. I tried to tune it out at first, but I guess eventually a sort of morbid curiosity took over. He blamed himself for the whole thing because he was convinced that he got them into 'that stuff', but it sounded like it was mom who first convinced him to take his work into the bedroom.
Back when he was sober, dad was a commercial diver, a good one. People used to joke it was a strange occupation given he’d never been within 600 miles of an ocean in his life, but there was plenty of call for it; mines, quarries, reservoirs, river searches, dangerous but well-paying work. It was the rubber suits, of course, that first piqued mom’s interest. She wasn’t exactly a conventional one; she named me after a punk singer who died of an overdose three days before I was born, and I don’t know how she coped with Hill County. I guess the little set-up in the basement helped her. They didn’t let me coming along slow them one bit, from what I can make out, though they managed to hide it all from me pretty well. If mom hadn’t died, looking back as an adult I might have had some thoughts about the forbidden basement, but as far as I was concerned, our family life was fairly normal for that place and time.
That all changed one night in 1995. I was away at camp, and my parents had taken the chance to do some more daring things they couldn’t normally get away with. They’d been experimenting with extreme bondage scenarios; they’d take turns tying the other up and leaving them in various predicaments. It sounds like the opposite of fucking to me, but they obviously got a kick out of it, and it should have been pretty harmless. Except one day, everything went wrong.
Deep in his cups, my dad used to talk about an ‘incident pit’. It’s a concept from diver training, how one little thing starts you sliding down into this imaginary hole, where you can either solve the problem and climb out straight away, or make more and more mistakes until you sink past the point of no return, and something that started out minor ends up killing you. Honestly, it doesn’t really fit; my dad just felt responsible because he was ‘on top’, and it was like if he’d planned a dive wrong and someone got pulled out through a spillway or trapped in a flooded mineshaft. But as far as I can see, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could have done. Sometimes little things just happen.
In this case the little things were a few thousand Salmonella typhi bacteria that my dad swallowed with some dirty water when his mouthpiece slipped in a culvert in Butte. A couple weeks later, he was feeling bad, but he got himself a bad case of thinking he was some sort of mountain man. He didn’t go to the doctor, didn’t even really tell my mother about it, just felt shittier and shittier while they packed me off to camp and got around to their long planned fun and games. The night it all went to hell, which was two before I got the call, the plan was that he’d restrain her in this thing they’d made, and then he’d go out to a bar and forget about her all evening. Then I guess he’d come home and fuck her. Seems some apples do fall far from the tree, because to me that sounds about as sexually exciting as a root canal, but of course given what happened even the sight of a pair of fluffy handcuffs is enough to turn me cold.
The booze made him feel better, so he had more than he’d planned, figuring he could leave the car, call a taxi from town or get a lift up to our house a little ways out of town. Actually, he ended up getting completely hammered. The doctors said the booze must have accelerated the illness, dehydration and liver strain, and he ended up passed out in the street two blocks from the bar, after having the bright idea to lock his wallet in the truck for safe-keeping. Someone walking their dog tripped over him just before dawn, and the cops only had to feel the heat coming off of him before rushing him straight to Northern Montana Hospital. They saw him there in Emergency, but they didn’t have a bed free, so they sent him by ambulance down to Great Falls, another link in a chain of chaos. So there was my father, delirious, no ID on him, rolling his eyes in a hospital bed in another city, and there was my mother, at our house in the woods, immobilised in the basement.
They'd made this thing they’d read about in one of the magazines they got delivered in plain brown paper. It was built on top of an old metal bed-frame, the type with hard slats and a mesh over it to support the mattress, only instead of a mattress there was a frame of pvc plumbing pipes drilled with holes, and over all that an envelope of rubber. One of them would climb inside the envelope, and they’d get their mouth on a scuba regulator pierced through it so they could breathe. Then the open end would be tucked up underneath and sealed, and they’d turn on a shop vac that was hooked up to the pipes, sucking out the air. They’d be pinned there, outlined in the rubber, able to squirm a bit at first, but once the vacuum had been drawn completely, not even that.
That was how my mother was for nearly 40 hours, until three police departments and two hospitals finally sorted everything out and the Sheriffs went in with my dad’s spare keys.
It shouldn’t have been fatal. He had left her with a little bit of movement room, enough to avoid any danger of positional asphyxia. She should have been dehydrated, upset, but very much alive.
But something had happened; something horrible and ironic that had turned a domestic tragedy into an urban legend.
While she was lying there, trapped naked between slick sheets, waiting, breathing through the mouthpiece, no sound but the hum of the basement lights, trying not to piss herself and eventually failing, my mother’s body, stressed and compressed and pushed to the brink of extremity, began to develop a reaction. An allergic response to the thing in which she had been voluntarily imprisoned. My mother, the rubber freak, developed a sudden-onset latex allergy.
According to the coroner, it took her about 26 hours to die of anaphylactic shock.
I hauled the furniture out first, making sure I kept the carpet tightly rolled; there were some stains on that thing that I didn’t want anyone else to see. Then, when I had everything else packed down pretty much on a level, I backed the van right up to the threshold of the unit, hearing the roof knock and grind against the shutter. It was only three in the afternoon, but the light had begun to weaken, so I grabbed my flashlight, steeling myself for what I knew was under the tarp.
Compared to the other rubber items the bed was in remarkably good shape, especially considering it had been so much more exposed. Perhaps that had helped its preservation, let it breathe somehow. There’s a lot I don’t know, and never want to know, about rubber. One of the reasons I tend to avoid the substance where possible is because I don’t want to develop any sort of feel for it. I don’t want to know how rubber stretches or breaks, how it feels or breathes; it helps me keep everything I know and everything I’ve seen a bit more distant, a bit more abstract.
Particularly, I have always wanted to avoid finding out the precise chemical or physical process that left the outline of my mother’s body, spread-eagled and screaming, pressed into the material of the bed.
When I finally got over to the house that night in 2006, it was nearly three in the morning. Dad was sitting up on the porch, asleep; he was done up well against the chill, or this might be a different story, but I didn’t waste any time getting him inside. The place was an absolute wreck; trash strewn everywhere, each binge its own geological layer of filth. He’d started smoking, said he didn’t need his lungs anymore after he stopped diving, and the stink of Marlboros was doing a good job covering up worse things. I didn’t believe him at first when he started telling me about how he’d been bringing women home, though it made more sense when I found out he’d been paying some of them.
I let him warm up for a bit while I tried to find coffee in the disarray of the kitchen, then I got him awake and tried to get a proper story out of him. He was a total wreck, and now I was with him I could tell it wasn’t drink. In fact, he was about as sober as I’d ever seen him those past ten years. Once he’d calmed down a bit, the first thing he did was wring all sorts of promises out of me; that I’d help him, that I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone else. I got frustrated eventually, demanded to know exactly what all this was about. He told me to go down into the basement.
I was already putting some things together in my mind, and I found a bottle of vodka with something left in the bottom and downed it before trying the basement door. It wouldn’t budge, and I was about to fetch something from the van to break it down before dad explained that it was locked from the other side. He hadn’t just been sitting around on his ass drinking the past eight years. The basement was now a walkout, with its own door, its own driveway approaching it. He took me out around the house; there was a first flush of pink in the east, but the woods were silent.
The basement couldn’t have been more of a contrast with the house upstairs. It was quite clean, at least free of dust, and neat; all the bizarre objects of my parents' sex life, hung on pegs or racks or stowed in metal lockers. Half of the place was set up a bit more homely, two easy chairs and the stained rug. Somewhere to chill out, he told me. The actual dungeon was behind an inner wall. I felt queasy as I approached, noticing that the floor and walls inside were tiled; then I heard the noise. How I hadn't before I don’t know; it was like the opposite of that process where the noise of a car engine fades into the background on a long drive. Suddenly, it was there, loud and inescapable.
A shop vac.
When I saw the bed, I felt full nausea before I realised why; it was because the still, unmoving form of the woman beneath the rubber looked exactly like my dead mother. Thankfully, at that time, I didn’t know what the woman had looked like before. I saw the trickle of congealing reddish liquid running out of the regulator. I didn’t vomit, but I had to go outside and take a few deep gulps of air. Dad joined me a while later, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands. He swore he didn’t know how or why it happened. They’d met online, and 'played' a few times; he drove her up from Missoula. He hadn’t wanted to use the bed on her, hadn’t thought it right, but she’d begged him until he caved in. He started to get into details, but I stopped him. I’d seen enough to keep my skin crawling till the end of time.
What we needed then were solutions. My first thought was to bury her out in the woods, then torch the house. Over the next few hours we drank coffee and thought through it properly. Hopefully she hadn’t told anyone where she was going; if we burned a load of stuff now, or anything dramatic like that, it risked attracting attention. My dad had a unit down in Havre he’d been using to store some of mom’s old clothes; it seemed sensible, get everything out the basement, stick it in there and then deal with it somewhere down the line. I let him do the boxing and the cleaning, and get his girlfriend bagged so we could bury her out on the property. I took it all down to the unit, then drove to Missoula with her keys to fetch her computer. I tried not to think about the morality of it at the time. I guess if she’d been family I’d want to know she was dead, but when you’ve lost one parent to something like this, and the other one threatens to be pulled down in the same sucking pit, well, it warps your priorities. Sometimes recently I’ve gone whole weeks without thinking about it. Hopefully in the future those periods will get longer, once the pain of dad’s final illness is past. I’m not sorry he’s taking his last illness in a comfortable bed, with bright painted walls and sadly smiling nurses, rather than rotting in a bleak prison ward. I really don’t think it was his fault, at the end of the day. I have my theories, but put down in writing they make me sound way crazier than I hope I am.
The shutter slammed down with a crash that was still echoing off the back wall of the empty room as I started the engine and drove off, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. I stopped at the Cenex station on 1st St. and bought two big bottles of charcoal lighter fluid. Then I drove north, turning off the main highway and heading down fifteen miles of increasingly poorly maintained roads up toward the Canadian border. It was getting dark then, and when I was sure I was well away from any nearby habitation I pulled off the road. I found a hollow that didn’t need much work to clear out, and there, with the help of the lighter fluid, I burned all that would burn of the thing with my mother’s face.
Comments
Post a Comment