Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 2.

Money makes it weird.

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Chapter 2. Money makes it weird.

When Marshall speaks about his theories, it’s important to note that these are all self-concocted, nothing derived from any Youtube rabbit hole or black web documentary. That shit is corny–his words. It’s like painting, the way these visions of destruction sweep the canvas of his mind. There are broad brushstrokes and smaller, more deftly intentional strokes. The colors are vivid, evocative, meant to elicit reaction–though he finds it most exciting when the colors get so big, the landscapes so massive in the totality of their obliteration that the reaction is reduced to an inevitable numbness, a surrender of the human faculties to the inevitability of destruction. This is, after all, the closest to reality.

A theory he’s been toying with recently despite its unlikeliness–getting the answer right isn’t the point, it’s about investing destruction–is that the earth is a listening creature, an indifferent being moving to claim them all so slowly that no one can really see it. We’re not talking about climate change here, none of those obvious catastrophes that scientists have been predicting and hurling at politicians like ineffective spitballs for decades. What Marshall pictures is the ground itself softening and shifting, turning to sludge beneath the foundation of humanity. Something like a sinkhole but it’s all the earth weakening at the crust so that the people will be lapsed into it and they won’t notice until their finished basements with their pool tables and bean bag chairs are suddenly fractured from the newly renovated home and swallowed into the earth, all the highways suddenly cracking into pieces like graham crackers, the escape rockets tilting into the easy muck so not even the billionaires can escape. It would be a magnificent end to the world, an unexpected sinking into death with little explanation. That’s the key, really. Marshall does not care to understand the end when it comes. He merely wants to see the rot of it all curling like wilting petals and have someone ask him what to do about it. And then he will show them.

Beaver says his ma and pa are gone until the evening so Marshall sends him home and tells him to be out of the house with his mother around six pm–take a walk at golden hour, he tells Beaver. Catch the fading light for a while. The days are only getting shorter.

Marshall doesn’t have anyone to talk to about what he does but he finds it important that he be very clear with himself that he doesn’t like doing it. Death brings him no joy. Killing satisfies no bloodlust or need for power. It’s just that once he killed his own dad, most people knew he did it and didn’t really care because his dad really was one of those guys everyone thinks about killing from time to time. And when this girl at school, Mariana, came up in the hall and asked if he could kill her dad too, he said sure and it was pretty easy to reason out because he was raping Mariana and with him dead that meant it wasn’t happening anymore. Mariana moved away after it was done but not before telling some friends about his services. Calling it a service helps. Everyone in customer service does shit they don’t really wanna do.

It doesn’t happen very often, maybe once or twice a year at most. But if someone asks him to kill a shitty parent, he does it because someone has to.

Now, you might be thinking there have gotta be better solutions than killing: call child services? The police? Send that no-good-motherfucker to jail after a long and traumatizing trial with a generally unsatisfying conclusion that leaves everyone involved feeling slightly haunted in an implacable way that may or may not ever be healed? Marshall has very strong opinions about the prison industrial complex, but he does not feel that anyone is entitled to those opinions. The people, usually kids, that ask him to do what he does do not care about whatever form of ‘justice’ America is capable of failing to deliver. They choose Marshall and his backpack and he never says no unless they change their mind which doesn’t usually happen.

When Marshall and his mother talk, they don’t speak of the man buried in the woods because, well, he’s dead and Marshall killed him and they’re both happier for it. Not happy in general, but happier.

She’s sober and awake when Marshall sends Beaver off but that doesn’t mean much. Here or not, sober or high, she is what she is.

Marshall makes a ham and cheese omelet and cuts it in half. Elaine smiles distantly at the steaming plate he hands her, only pulling her eyes from the droning television for the briefest moment. “Thanks, Mars,” she says, her voice dry and rattling like a tumbleweed.

Elaine was a beautiful woman once, before her husband started hitting her, before she took so many needles to the vein in an attempt to recall the idea of pleasure or to indulge in the mercy of nothing. In those old photos where Marshall is a baby, Elaine has a full figure, big blonde hair and tight cheeks. She’d had a button nose and deep brown eyes, the kind that said come on in, you’re welcome here even if you hurt me.

Marshall doesn’t remember ever seeing her like that. She was gone by the time his head was able to take in information and turn it into lessons. He knows her only as she is now, as she has been for years–bony and withered with sagging, sun-spotted skin, permanent purple bags beneath lifeless, shit-stained eyes, hair gray and wiry, teeth rotting in a mouth she only uses to drink and suck dick.

When she finishes eating, she puts her head in Marshall’s lap and laughs at the TV, always laughing just to feel her chest heave. Occasionally, she raises a leg like a tilting flagpole, holds her unwashed foot in the noodle of light slipping through the sunroof and watches the light pass through her untrimmed toenail like a dirty window. This seems to make her happy. And they stay like that, lying and not talking, until he has to leave and all they share is a terse, loveless goodbye, a tiny trailer, and the death of a bad man they may have once loved.

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Marshall works three weekdays and his Saturday doing landscaping in the adjacent town where the wealthy have rooted themselves into the land. He used to hate working for all the rich white people that hired his company, but the rich aren’t just white anymore. Sometimes they’re even Black or Asian because of how good the world is now and still they lock their doors while he and his team sweat in the sun for them. The other guys keep to themselves and the money is pretty good but most of it goes toward whatever Elaine’s drug of choice is at the time. Right now it’s cocaine, which is on the cheaper end of her spectrum so he might actually be able to buy something for himself this week. He’s been looking at a model train on Facebook Marketplace that might bring him joy.

Mostly, Marshall enjoys the physical labor, the feeling of his body making sweat bead on his skin as it tries kindly to cool him off, the satisfaction of getting his hands dirty, sculpting the land into a living work of balanced art. Something beautiful. Marshall drinks beauty like a tall glass of water, slowly and necessarily.

Their client today is one of the kinder ones. She brings them iced tea while they work and wants to see what they’re doing and asks them to make it weirder, more interesting because she wants her yard to look different from her neighbors. If Marshall had the amount of money that she was paying their crew for this job in his back pocket, he could buy a car and drive somewhere weird and beautiful to watch the end of the world from. A high cliff where he can maybe see a boiling sea making putrid shapes out of vapor or the sun growing big like a flower and beckoning the world to nestle up against its anthers like honey bees sniffing for pollen.

He spends most of the day under the sun thinking about Beaver and his metal cap. It’s not the first time that Marshall has gotten attached to a kid whose parent he has to kill. It’s hard not to when he sees the kid reflecting himself like an endless mirrored hallway. He likes John Beaver a lot though and worries what will happen to him once his pa is bloodless and buried.

Marshall doesn’t do much planning when it comes to the killing. He worries that any premeditation, a rigid outline or any thoughtfulness on the matter would make him feel like a serial killer. He’s aware that the nine people he’s killed for comparative reasons would probably be apt to call him a serial killer. Still, he makes the distinction because he has to. No pattern, no method, no keepsake means he’s detached from the action itself and therefore the outcome. He does it for the kid and when he’s done, he’s done. Which means no getting attached, no matter how much he might like a kid or the occasional battered wife. It has to be quick and clean. Just a day in Marshall’s life, nothing more.

By the end of this particular day, the job has taken much longer than expected because the client started getting really specific about placement and arrangement and paid them no more for the extra work. Being micromanaged is one of the things that makes Marshall murderous. He likes his work and he likes doing it his way. If somebody asked him to kill this lady, he’d probably do it.

It’s already six when they wrap up for the day and say goodnight with a few pats on the back and the ass. Marshall likes when the other sweaty men pat him on the ass. He doesn’t have time to change which is just as well because his clothes are already dirty and a little blood won’t make them much worse.

Marshall parks his bike outside of the address Beaver gave him. It’s a modest house, looking dead center middle class with a nice roof and a chimney that probably doesn’t work, old windows but nice dark green shutters. Someone, maybe the mom, took her own stab at landscaping which is obvious because it doesn’t look good. They aimed too hard for symmetry without considering the needs of the plants and clearly weren’t prepared for any upkeep so most of the bushes have browning needles from the direct hot summer sun and the blooms on the ground cover plants are few and far between. Maybe he can convince Beaver’s ma to hire him freelance once he’s killed her husband.

Slinging his bag over one shoulder, Marshall removes a hunting knife from the left side pocket. It gleams red in the angled light of the setting sun. The house is out in the suburbs on a sparsely lined street so when he walks up to the front door, it’s unlocked and he walks right in.

There are carpeted stairs to his right and a linoleum lined hallway marching forward directly in front of him. He takes a few steps forward to keep the carpet well out of blood splatter range and he calls out, “Hello?”

There’s a shuffling of papers down the hall and then a tall black man rounds the corner. He stops a half dozen feet away. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

Marshall forgets the man’s face as he sees it. He commits no features to mind, leaves nothing to remember him by. “You Beaver’s dad?” He asks.

He seems both perplexed and relaxed by the mention of his son’s stupid name. “Yeah,” he says, featurelessly.

“Cool,” Marshall replies. He steps forward to close the gap between them and in one quick motion he drags the hunting knife across the nameless man’s throat.

Marshall sits on the soft stairs while he dies, entirely uninterested in watching the process unfold. Not the collapse, the instant loss of energy that a gaping wound brings forth in the body. Not the pumping crimson wave from the sudden gash where otherwise a throat would have remained sealed until some future death. Not the convulsing on the floor, making angels in his own life force. Especially not the moment when life leaves the eyes, when the lips twitch for the final time, when the fingers reach for something that is not there. He’d watched only once, with his own pa and never again. Sometimes the wounds you inflict are mirrored back onto you but only if you watch. Marshall will never watch.

The only part Marshall is methodical about is the cleaning. It’s not so much about leaving no trace of the killing–he’s not worried about getting caught–but about leaving no trace that person ever existed. The pain that they inflicted on their children is the only stain he cannot wipe away.

The man had tried crawling the opposite way down the hallway either to get to the sliding door in the back of the house or to his phone sitting upright on the kitchen table but he bled out before he got very far.

Marshall drags the body out back, rolls it down a steep hill that ends in a thicket of trees, brush and fallen leaves. A river runs somewhere down there, one he can’t see but he can hear like a dull roar in his ears. That’s all he does. The body will sit at the bottom of that hill. Something’ll eat it. Probably.

Back inside, he rifles through the cabinets for a mop and a bottle of bleach and spends a while on his knees scrubbing the inside parts from the outside. From blue in his body to red on the floor to a memory of a flood. Most is on the floor, a few violent drops tugged across the wall by the erupting nature of a sudden wound. He gathers everything in a trash bag, the mop head, the bleach bottle, the rags, and he’ll dump it in a random trash can on a random sidewalk on his way home.

It’s about eight when he’s wrapping up and Beaver arrives home with his mother. The dark behind them in the door frame is harsh and writhing as though asking to be welcomed inside.

If Beaver hadn’t told him that their moms were of the same affliction, he wouldn’t have guessed. His first thought upon seeing her is to wonder what she takes to get high that doesn’t drain all of the glow and health from her dark, radiant skin. Healthy black locs are stacked atop her head. Her hips are wide and shaped by a tight, long dress. She looks a lot like Beaver with her small, wide nose and dark, curious eyes. She doesn’t look surprised to see Marshall. Her eyes squeeze together in an unsuccessful attempt to cry that is difficult to watch.

Marshall gives Beaver a pat on the back and turns to the mom. “He’s not missing, he told you he was leaving. Has a lover in Brazil or something. That’s what you tell work, family, friends if he’s got any. Tell the cops nothing. Fuck cops.” He turns to Beaver and emphasizes. “Fuck cops.”

“Fuck cops,” his young lips repeat.

“Good man,” Marshall says.

The mom takes a deep breath. Her eyes are flitting about, searching for any sign of the place where her husband lost his life. The smell of bleach suffocates rational thought. “Where is he?” she asks.

“Bottom of the hill. Don’t do anything weird with his body. He’ll get eaten or decompose or whatever. Just don’t worry about it.”

She falters. “Something weird?”

Marshall shrugs. “I don’t know, like don’t drag him back inside and have tea with his dead body and pretend he’s still alive. Weird shit. It happens.”

“Nothing weird.” Mom nods. She is sober now. “How much do I owe you?”

“No money. I don’t do it for that. Money makes it weird.”

“I have to give you something–”

Marshall insists against payment. To make the whole thing transactional means he gave something away and is receiving something in return. Marshall wants nothing from his killing but to know that a child is better off without their abuser. And he’d like to believe that in the killing he does not give anything of himself away. Even if he knows that that is not true. He doesn’t care about sense–what makes sense and what doesn’t. Sense is for the living.

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After he goes over a few more details with Beaver’s mom, she begins the process of shooting into her arm at the kitchen table where her husband had been sifting through papers while Marshall packs. Her eyes are observing the inside of her own head by the time the weight of the apocalypse is returned to its place between his shoulder blades and so he asks Beaver to show him his room and they start packing a bag for him as well. Marshall doesn’t think much about it, he just lets it start happening. Beaver is coming with him.

He asks the kid to pick out his five favorite pairs of underwear, three shirts, two pairs of pants, as many socks as he’s got, whatever shit he can fit into his school bag, the one that’s empty because it’s August and school is a lifetime away.

He sits on Beaver’s bed while the kid carefully rifles through the drawers of his dresser with a discerning eye. His room is small and surprisingly neat for a kid his age. Glow in the dark stars on his ceiling, lamp on the nightstand shaped like a rocket, bedspread covered in various sports balls–Marshall imagines all of these things were bought not for him but to make him. His parents trying to impose a sense of gendered personhood onto their son who is too smart and too real for them to really turn him into anything but who he already is. Where Marshall sees Beaver, the kid that hasn’t been smothered to death just yet, is in the posters on the wall: Janet Jackson, Blondie, Bad Bunny, a detailed map of North Africa, the various structures of a whale’s anatomy, Indiana Jones, Steve Irwin. In the books that line his shelves: Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer, Lord of the Flies, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison. In the items he chooses to take with him: a camp tee shirt from two years prior, a pair of boxers in a bright yellow banana print, a hoodie with Janet’s face on the front.

Marshall sees all the beginnings of a kid with an inestimable breadth of interests, many of which will follow him throughout his life, maybe even become his life if he’s given the space to explore them. Marshall used to carry paint brushes and rolled up canvas in his backpack before they were replaced with knives and army rations.

“What’s your favorite Janet song?” Marshall asks.

His mouth cocks up at the corner, the first hint of a real smile he’s gotten from the kid. “The Pleasure Principle.”

Marshall raises an eyebrow. “Your parents ever tell you that you’re too young to be listening to that kind of music?”

Beaver shakes his head.

“Good.”

Beaver chooses a few more things to take with him. A notebook that says KEEP OUT on the front in big bubble letters. The Robert Frost poetry collection, an old hard cover in dark forest green. His Nintendo Switch. A pack of colored pencils.

With his big blue backpack stuffed full, he drops it next to Marshall’s and looks up expectantly. “When can I get one like yours?”

Marshall knocks lightly on the kid’s metal head. “Let’s hope you never need one, bud.”

Beaver’s mom is slumped over in the same kitchen chair when they leave. She mutters a distant goodbye to her son, lifeless tears staining her dark cheeks darker. Marshall doesn’t think she’ll come after them. He’s got a nose for these kinds of things. She’ll feel terrible for a while, a long time probably but she knows she’s done bad by her kid. Beaver kisses both her hands lightly with cracked lips.

He rides on the front pegs of Marshall’s bike, arms spread wide like Leo on the bow, laughing as the rush of wind slaps his face and pulls tears from the corners of his soft eyes.

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Closed off your door with yellow tape / saw myself dead at the end of a staircase

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