The Little Girl across the Street

Warning: Sensitive themes include physical violence and suicide.

Mornings were improving. He slept almost four hours last night. For months, he had to wait until dawn just as the starlings set up a racket before falling asleep for two or three hours. The sleep was better, too. A fall straight down into a dreamless black void. For months after his return from Syria, he fought sleep, risked acquiring a cirrhotic liver trying to drink himself into a blackout stupor. Then it was like stumbling out of one of those funhouse rooms with tilted floors and distorting mirrors into a windowless room. He used to think of it like an abandoned cottage, everything gray from the cobwebs in the corners to the drywall plaster crumbling in anthills on the floor, neon-glo graffiti tagged on the walls. Most of it obscene or violent. In English and Arabic.

He was grateful for that much rest even if exhaustion explained it.

He and his mind had been at war since leaving the Corps last winter. He still wasn’t sure if he had full control. His counselor helped, he grudgingly admitted. The guy was wounded in Fallujah during “the Saddam War” and medevacked home to Walter Reed as an acute diabetic. He could talk to him.

He talked to more people, too. That was easier since the little girl across the street made a fuss over him every time he came home. If she happened to be in her front playing with dolls, she would abandon them and come running across the street. He taught her to look both ways first. Her useless mother didn’t bother to teach her that much. He guessed her age to be five but wasn’t sure because she was scrawny. Her clothes hung on her like mismatched hand-me-downs.   

Little Patricia spoke with a lisp, owing to her missing front teeth. He didn’t understand why she wanted to be around him. It worried him at the same time. When he arrived back in the States last winter, no one wanted to be around him. He didn’t blame them. Eric, his therapist, warned him about losing his temper: “You’ll wind up living in a homeless encampment surrounded by drug addicts and mentally deranged people, which didn’t sound all that bad.

Renting in a residential neighborhood provided stability. He wasn’t used to being around people who didn’t curse or do violent things in the night. Now he unloaded trucks at night for a big-box store. His interactions with co-workers was minimal but “progressing,” to use Eric’s favorite word. He reminded himself to be careful around the night supervisor. Last night, he was reprimanded—something about stacking pallets behind the warehouse. Before he was able to hear what the man was saying to him, he had to banish the Red Noise.

Frank sat alone in the breakroom during “lunch” at two a.m. It helped to see a group of people intact in their habitat, not mangled by grenades, or cut up by K-bars, or shredded by high-powered weapons, lying around a concrete floor. The married women were full of melodrama about spouses and kids, problems at home. The single girls eyed him cautiously or curiously. The males were louder, one thought he was every girl’s Romeo. Harmless people with lives devoid of horror. He eavesdropped on their chattering like listening to squirrels on different branches of the same tree.

His hands shook when he returned from the talking to the supervisor.

A woman named Gloria was rambling on from one disturbing subject to the next, oblivious to pouring out all the sordid catastrophes of her life in a roomful of strangers. She blurted to her table a twisted narrative involving a son who died at twelve, a niece who drowned in the river, a daughter who planned to abort her only son because she’d had blood infections from a previous pregnancy but changed her mind and they called the boy “Dewey,” which meant “the right hand of God,” and a baby who pooped in the swimming pool at the Y, and someone else who vomited from car sickness—one tedious, ghastly litany of familial woes. He was a captive audience at a Netflix reality show playing in hell. Sometimes he wanted to yell: Shut up! Shut up!

He wondered how fast their limited attention spans would narrow to him if they knew what he’d done in his time over there in those barren, sandy wastes with his combat weapons.

Best not think like that now . . . the Red Noise was bottled but it could get out.

* * *

“You’re saying I’m suicidal,” Frank said.

"No, I’m not,” Eric replied. “I’m simply saying that more suicides happen in spring because nature is renewing and people with suicidal ideation know they aren’t.”

“I am renewing,” frank said.

“You just have to keep building on that progress, man.”

“You’re a jarhead. Semper fi and all that shit. Have you ever shot anyone?”

Eric hesitated. Frank had never asked a question before. War memories were like a bad breakup; they didn’t leave easily or ever. Frank saw Fallujah creeping over Eric’s expression like a shadow, wrinkling his brow.

“I’ve shot at the enemy,” he finally stated. “I don’t need to tell a Special Ops guy what combat situations are like.”

Older by ten years, Eric shrugged, gave him a weak smile. “Different war, man.”

Tisha ran across the street as soon as she saw his car pull in. Frank held his breath when she reached the curb. She stopped, looked both ways, and gave him a big gap-toothed grin before she came running up to him.

Then she embraced his legs, squeezing him. He didn’t remember the last time anyone had hugged him. Plenty of manly slaps on the back after a successful mission, but the last person to hug him was a girl from high school. The hug was his consolation prize. She declined to go to the senior prom with him. His face burned all the way home.

He smiled down at her. Her round, happy face beamed at him. He brushed her sweat curls off her forehead with his hand. She gave off gave off a rancid odor that came from her house. He asked what game she was playing with her dollies and stuffed animals.

“Hothpital,” she said.

“That’s nice,” Frank said.

A piercing shriek from the porch made her jump back: “Tisha, get your butt inside before I beat it with a stick!”

Her mother had a dozen crude expressions like that. Frank had heard them all in his short time. Tisha didn’t look both ways when she ran back to her house.

He was opening the door of his house when the last words Tisha’s mother spoke drifted back to him: “Stay the hell away from him. He’s crazy . . .”

Crazy. He’s crazy . . .

The Red Noise was magical. It could transform from sound into a mangy, clawing animal with a raccoon hump and snapping jaws. It slavered and demanded to be fed. Then it was no longer the Red Noise but the Red Rage. His fists clenched tight until his knuckles whitened to a boxer’s diamond points. He sat in his ratty La-Z-Boy rocking back and forth, trying to dam up the rage flooding his system. (“When you feel things overwhelming you, Frank, sit. Don’t leave the house. Breathe deeply, think of that deep pool. Let your mind go into it . . .”)

Zen bullshit—I’ll kill the slag if she touches a hair on that girl’s head.

He sucked more air into his lungs. Tried to inflate his lungs to the bursting point. Anything to take his mind off the animal with bloody fangs cavorting in his skull.

Frank left the chair for his refuge: his garage with his work bench and wood-working tools, his father’s once. The Victorian vase stand, if that’s what its purpose was, waited for him with its intricate design and undulating lines supported by three turned legs with scrollwork. A handsome piece now ravaged; its mahogany surface was chipped in a dozen places. Previous owners had stained it excessively, ruined the rosewood layering. Bringing it back from the dead was challenging but soothing work. Especially when he felt the animal in his brain stirring.

He didn’t want to quit, but he had to prepare for his shift. He needed an hour of lying down, an old habit from his service days. He hated Syria. He hated sand, hated the yellow grit that got into his tent, worked its way into his pores, lodged between the gaps of his teeth. Eating food without sand in it was the first pleasure he experienced on return.

Tossed out on a general discharge to keep my benefits. Used up like an old war dog and thrown away.

He brought that still pool back into focus to quiet his mind. The hour passed quickly—too fast. He got up, showered, and made his two baloney sandwiches for lunch and fetched his car keys from the countertop.

When he punched in, he remembered to smile at the first people he saw. Once he belonged to the brotherhood of Marines; now he belonged to the same domain of unskilled laborer working the graveyard shift. He stopped speaking to the younger males his own age when he caught a slender boy with a wispy beard making loops with his forefinger at his temple after he’d asked him where he left the electric pallet straddle. The kid denied making the gesture when Frank confronted him.

Driving home after work, Frank saw her sitting on her cement porch steps. It was chilly, still early spring. Frost warnings last night were in place for the inland county but had been removed from the lakeshore, where breezes from Lake Erie kept the bitter chill at bay.

She didn’t look at him while he waved to her. She clutched a rag doll in her arms. She’s not allowed, he knew. The hissing of a broken steam pipe was audible in his ear. Like a robin to spring, it was another kind of harbinger. Eric told him to imagine making a cabinet. Then to imagine locking the beast inside it. (“You’re making progress, Frank.”)

Progress . . .

Frank headed for her house. Closer to the house, the odor intensified. He suspected the interior was a hoarder’s den of fast-food wrappers, beer cans, and pizza boxes scattered across the floor. The men who visited the mother were rough-looking, unemployed males like the last two: an outlaw biker and a long-haul driver who parked his rig in front of Frank’s house. Clapped-out cars and pickups with loud mufflers. The loud arguments started as soon as the men moved in, then the drunken fights, the woman screaming at the man from the porch.

The same script. A cop cruiser would come by to settle things down to be followed by a caseworker from Social Services, a man or woman who would lead Tisha by the hand to the county vehicle where she’d be driven to live with a foster family for a week or a month. But always the little girl would be returned—healthier looking and wearing better clothes. A few weeks would pass, and the mother would have a new boyfriend worse than the one he replaced. Tisha would look the way Frank usually saw her—hair uncombed and tangled; her face streaked with dirt, looking gaunt and unhappy. The clothes she wore when the caseworker returned her would be filthy with stains and torn.

Frank pounded on the door.

The door swung open. The draft smacked him in the face with its ripe odor. The girl’s mother stood there in a terry-cloth robe. She took him in with bleary eyes unaware that she needed to be tucked back in.

“’the hell you want?”

“It’s cold out here,” Frank said. “Put a jacket on her.”

The woman stepped backward into the foyer, as though she’d been slapped across the face. The door slamming in his face created a scratching noise in his head.

* * *

Tisha stopped playing outside. He didn’t see her other than to catch a glimpse of her getting out of the car and running into the house. He saw her one night three weeks later. Tisha stood behind the curtain covering the picture window, which looked more like a bedsheet. She stared out the window at Frank’s house. A pair of bare female arms whisked the curtain aside and grabbed the girl roughly by the shoulders, flinging her back inside the room. Frank caught the swirl of colors of a large TV screen playing.

“I made it worse for you, didn’t I?” Frank mumbled, balling his fists unconsciously.

* * *

Eric shook Frank’s hand.

“What’s that for?”

“We’re done,” Eric replied. “You’re good to go, soldier.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not kidding you,” Eric replied, snapping his heels together and giving a formal salute.

“If you say so.”

“I do and I shall report such to higher command. Semper Fi, soldier.”

“Semper fi.”

Frank felt silly, but it felt good to feel silly after so many months of feeling dragged over broken glass. It was okay to feel silly, he realized. Two bonuses in one day: he’d slept five whole hours, undisturbed by nightmares. Now he wasn’t going to have to drive to Cleveland to keep his pension.

As he pulled into his driveway, an ambulance with running lights pulled up to Tisha’s house. He was used to the woman’s pig sty of a life and assumed a cop cruiser would be the next vehicle to show up. Two EMTs escorted Tisha’s mother down the porch steps. She sobbed theatrically. Frank assumed her latest abusive man absconded before he arrived home.

The cops showed up the next day, two detectives instead of uniformed officers. They were there to interview the mother over the death of her little girl.

He was informed of it by an anorectic-looking woman with dyed black hair, who approached him as the police were knocking on the mother’s door. Frank had just returned from his work shift. Her pinched, oval face gave her a vulpine look. The merest grimace of teeth for a smile confirmed it. She said she lived several houses down from him.

“How?” Frank gulped.

“Poor thing drank antifreeze. She must have thought it was juice,” the woman said. “Poured it into a Dixie cup and drank it right down. They say it’s sweet. That poor mother.”

“That poor mother . . . that poor mother . . . ” Frank repeated it like a mantra, his brain stuck at a crazy angle.

Something about the way Frank said it caused the woman to retreat. She disappeared.

Frank stood in his yard staring at—nothing. He didn’t recall walking back inside his house or sitting in his lounge chair until dark.

“We don’t throw a Marine out for fighting,” the base captain at the Al-Omar oil field told him after his brawl with the duty sergeant. “You whittled a pair of brass knuckles out of wood and wrapped your hands in duct-tape. That man is never going to be right in the head again.”

He was confined to his tent except for latrine duty until transport could be arranged from the Army base in Wiesbaden to fly him out. Frank didn’t tell the captain the reason for the fight. He didn’t want to explain the sadistic, stomach-churning images—some involving children and animals—that tumbled out of the man’s sewer of a brain every time he spoke. Choppered back to base at dawn, often with badly wounded men, the sergeant’s unceasing, pornographic monologues were unbearable. He was just learning about the red beast that took up residence in his brain. Some thought he cracked under the strain and beat the sergeant to avoid more combat.

When he went to put flowers on Tisha’s grave, he learned that she’d been cremated “at public expense and the ashes returned to the mother. Frank thought of the stinking burn pits back in Syria.

The June weather was abnormally hot: five consecutive days of eighty-degree heat. The next-door neighbor of Tisha’s mother called to report a foul odor coming from the house. Dead raccoons under the porch, she thought. The overpowering stench became so pervasive that it reached across the street like tentacles of rot and flicked people’s nostrils as they walked by. Everyone wondered where the foul odor was coming from.

Everyone but Frank.

The virulent stink came from the mother’s decomposing body rotting from its rope noose in Tisha’s upstairs bedroom. Gravity’s relentless tug and the extraordinary heat combined to accelerate decomposition to the extent that the head became detached from the neck and plummeted to the floor where it rolled under the bed until the paramedics found it there. The anorectic woman raced up to Frank, reading the newspaper on his front stoop, to inform him of the grisly details.

“Lord, that poor woman,” she lamented, a ghoulish Job’s comforter.

“She must have been so distraught over her daughter’s death that she killed herself. Can you believe it?” 

Frank said that he could believe it.

While the woman gazed at the house across the street, Frank pulled his sleeves lower to cover his wrist to avoid exposing the deep scratches. She had raked his forearms the entire way up the stairs as he dragged her, kicking and screaming, trying to claw his face, his eyes, whatever her nails could reach. skin. He could have made it easier by knocking her out. He wanted her to see everything that was going to happen. Bound and gagged, she watched him fortify the ceiling rafter with a brace to hold her weight. He used wood from his garage.

The woman turned to him. “Cops said she must have got had her boyfriend build a support. Just imagine that.”

“I do,” Frank replied. He returned to the article he was reading.

-END-