Shredder
by Keith LaFountaine
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Mandy pushed a knuckle into the corner of her left eye. A headache bloomed in the base of her skull, and there was something else brewing in her mind. An anger. A frustration she’d never before felt. A sinking terror, knowing that when she walked through the door, David would be in the garage playing that damned guitar. That the house would be a mess, that dishes would be piled up in the sink, that she would have to yet again dust the living room, and vacuum the carpet, and make the bed, and figure out what they were having for dinner. The entire time she scrambled to maintain their home, after working a hard eight hours, he would be noodling around in the garage, surrounded by a wall of fuzz.
The landline on her desk rang, and Mandy jerked instinctually at the sound. It was too similar to the guitar in some ways. Too musical. With a heavy sigh, she lifted the phone from its cradle and pressed it to her ear. “Yes, this is Mandy.”
“Hi, Mandy. Sorry to be calling, but I wanted to check in on David. This is Albert.”
Albert. As in Albert Pettiford. As in David’s boss.
Mandy cleared her throat. “Of course,” she said. “What’s up?”
There was a brief pause. “Well, I just noticed that David called out sick again today. Usually, I don’t follow up on these things. David’s always been a good worker, but this is the twelfth time in three weeks. I just wanted to see if everything was okay.” Another pause. “It’s an abnormal amount of sick time to take, and he’s going to run out by next week at this pace — of sick time and PTO.”
She bit her tongue and resisted the urge to give in to her guttural anger. “Sorry about that, Albert. He’s been fighting off this nasty stomach bug. Seems to keep coming back around. Last night he had a fever and was hugging porcelain.”
Albert coughed. “I see.”
“I’ll chat with him when I get home today, though,” Mandy said. “I can understand your concerns.”
“I tried to tell him that we’d be happy to set him up with some at-home work in the interim,” Albert said. “I mean, sales is sales; if it needs to be done in the living room on the phone, it can be. He wouldn’t hear of it, though.”
“I’ll chat with him,” Mandy repeated. “Don’t worry.”
“Thanks, Mandy. Sorry for calling on a business line; Lacy is a friend of mine, and she mentioned you worked with her.”
“Not at all, that’s fine. Nice talking with you.”
After hanging up, Mandy buried her face in her hands. She wanted to scream.
* * *
Mandy scrubbed away at the dishes. Flowers of soap spilled onto her hands and arms. Cutting through the grease was a Herculean task, but with David seeming to forgo all responsibilities, she had been forced to make dreaded casseroles and quick all-in-one-pan meals. The kind of meals that produced about as much grease as a shabbily run pizza joint.
A headache beat at the gray matter in her skull. The pain had only grown and solidified since leaving the office. Now, she listened to the swell of impossibly loud rock playing from the garage.
It was so bad that she barely listened to her blues records anymore. For months, that had been her obsession: BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Bo Diddley, Mighty Sam McClain. There was a time when she hadn’t been able to get enough of the stuff. That night at the bar, watching Earl play, had been magical. Except now the memory was tarnished; it was the genesis of something horrid, something monstrous, something grown in a lab, with filaments and mushroom caps and bloated gray flesh.
She scrubbed harder, and the plates squealed in response. As she pushed them into the drying rack, her upper lip curled into a snarl. Open mic night? He wasn’t even that good. What, did he think endless hours of noodling around in their garage would be enough to put him on the same level as Earl? The last time he’d messed around with music was when he’d been an awkward pre-teen, playing bad versions of “American Girl” and “Highway to Hell” on a battered acoustic guitar. She’d seen the videos — his voice searched for pitch like a blind man stumbling through an obstacle course.
All she wanted was to be able to come home, to relax, maybe watch a re-run of Conan, and then to spend time with her husband. How hard of a concept was that? How difficult was it for them to share the household chores? Missing dishes here and there wasn’t tantamount to original sin, but a whole goddamned month? And not just missing dishes, but every other household chore? Calling out twelve times in three weeks just so he could play his battered guitar?
Mandy cut off the stream of water and pushed the remaining dishes back into the sink. As she wiped her hands on the dishtowel draped over her shoulder, she resolved to solve this here and now.
She turned on her heel and marched toward the garage.
* * *
David chomped air and ignored the bite of the strings against his fingers. His eyes wrenched closed as he roared his way through a rendition of “Pride and Joy” with reckless abandon. The Strat purred with every stroke, and even when he missed a note here or there, it never bothered him much. There was an understanding between him and the crowd, him and the guitar. An understanding that mistakes only added to the authenticity of music. Perfection could never be attained, but a mistake showed humanity, and it could be righted.
Whitney climbed on stage with him, and she walked behind him, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and ground her pelvis against him while he soldiered on through the song, feeling her warm lips on his neck, feeling her hands in his hair, tugging.
And then, suddenly, in a gout of sudden static and noise, his guitar was silenced.
He opened his eyes and saw Mandy standing by the outlet. In her hand, limp like a murdered snake, was the amp’s plug.
* * *
The anger that overwhelmed her husband’s face created a flicker of fear in Mandy’s gut. She pushed past the initial apprehension and tossed the pronged plug onto the ground, where it slapped dully against cement.
“I have been in there scrubbing dishes for the past hour,” she seethed, “because you have been too busy messing around with your guitar. Your boss called me today to say you have called out twelve times claiming to be sick. I shouldn’t have covered for you, honestly, but I did.” She sucked in a deep breath, forcing herself to remain calm — to attempt to, at least. The last thing she needed was for David to gaslight her with questions like Why are you being so hysterical?
He stood there, the guitar strapped over his shoulder, his face dull and devoid of emotion. It was like talking to a slab of slate.
“Now, will you please come inside and help me?”
David pulled the guitar off his shoulders, and he held its neck with his right hand. His bicep bulged from the strain of its weight.
“Why are you nagging me?” The tension in his voice, and the vehemence in his tone, cut Mandy to her core. Never had he spoken to her like this.
She held her ground. “I’m not nagging. This is what we agreed on before we even got married, David. We agreed to split this stuff so neither of us would get burned out. And I’ve held my own this entire month while you’ve messed around with your guitar. I’ve been more than generous.”
“Do you understand what I could do for us if I practice enough?” he asked. His upper lip curled. “I could make so much money that you’d never have to work again, you understand? I could be a goddamned star, Mandy.”
“Well, I happen to like what I do, first of all,” Mandy began. But she didn’t get to finish her sentence.
As if possessed, David swung the guitar at her. She saw its cherry red body flying at her head, and for a split second, as her instincts kicked in, she thought she was going to die. Right there, in the basement, with her husband shirtless and sweating, her blood painting the guitar’s wooden body.
But those instincts, begot by cavewomen, were a hair faster than her husband’s newfound arm musculature. The guitar’s body whistled over her head, and her hair danced from the gust of wind that followed.
What happened next was only natural.
* * *
Mandy tackled David to the ground. The guitar banged against the cement, and the strings whined as they grazed the floor.
“What are you doing?” she screamed, scrabbling to hold his arms down. Fear flitted in her throat, coated her tongue, tasting like cobalt.
A snarl escaped David’s throat, and he broke free from her grasp. With his gnarled fingers stretched, creeping, he reached for the guitar’s neck.
“David!” she yelled.
He gripped the guitar and dragged it toward him. The strings screamed against the floor, and the wooden body grated. She snagged his hand and pulled it away, and when she did he yelled a war cry. That hand came sliding through the air, and it slapped her across the face.
Mandy fell back, stunned. She pressed a hand to her cheek. Her skin burned, and as she sat, paralyzed, David climbed to his feet and picked up the guitar. It was then she noticed just how much blood splattered the neck of it. She suppressed the urge to vomit.
Seconds later, David swung the guitar at her again. The cherry red body whistled by her burning cheek, and Mandy dropped to the floor. Veins in his arms stuck out like possessed vines.
He gritted his teeth, regained control over the guitar, and brought it up over his head. That was when Mandy kicked him square in the groin.
His eyes bulged out of his skull. A wheezing whimper crept free from his lips, and his knees buckled. His arms relaxed, and he dropped the guitar. The body of it cracked against his head, and he slumped to the floor. The guitar banged on the cement, and three strings snapped, twanging, scraping.
A thin line of blood trickled from David’s head, pooling around his body. Mandy’s breath caught in her throat. She dashed back into the house, ignoring the nauseating smell of nickel. Was it from the broken strings or her husband’s blood?
She returned to the garage, her cellphone pressed to her ear, the line trilling. But when the woman on the other end answered, “911, where is your emergency?” Mandy stared into her husband’s dull, glassy eyes.
He was dead.
* * *
It took over two months for everything to get sorted out. Police interviews, autopsies, scrounging money to hire a lawyer, taking time off work, the whole nine. By the end of it, the medical examiner deduced David’s heart had burst in his chest. The head wound, while certainly concerning — and something that would have required a hospital stay at the very least — did not contribute to his death. At least, not according to Charlie Maxwell, the man who signed David’s death certificate.
Mandy sat in the garage with the door open. A cigarette sat between her pointer and middle finger. A nasty habit, to be sure, and one she’d sworn she’d never pick up. But after the threat of possibly being booked for her husband’s murder, recounting every painful detail of that fateful fight, only to then be released from the police’s glower thanks to a strange autopsy report, she’d found comfort in the gray smoke that choked her lungs.
And anyway, she’d picked up a different habit as it were. One that was arguably more dangerous and more addictive.
Mandy snubbed the cigarette out on the ground, tossed it in the trash beside the garage door, and turned back to the cement enclosure.
There, sitting pretty in its stand, was the guitar. She approached it, stroked the head, and smiled.
Then, she picked it up, pulled it over her shoulder, and eased herself into another practice session.
* * *
The bar smelled like the inside of a cigarette, and looked about as ashen as one, too. In other words, it was perfect.
Adrienne wandered through the collection of scratched tables, her eyes searching the bar. The smell of whiskey hung in the air like morning dew. She clutched her margarita and wandered toward one of the tables in the front row.
There was a free chair at the round table in the front. Another woman sat on the right side, and when Adrienne approached, she didn’t even have to ask permission to sit. The woman gestured at the free chair and smiled.
“Thanks,” Adrienne said, placing her drink. “You ever seen her before?”
The woman nodded. “In Houston. You?”
“Never.” Adrienne settled into her chair.
“I’m Judy,” the woman said. She extended a hand, and when Adrienne took it, she noticed spiraling tattoos lined her left arm, reaching into the upper sleeve of her t-shirt.
“Adrienne,” she said, licking her lips. “I like your tats.”
Judy glanced at her arm, as if she was surprised to notice she had them. “Yeah. Gotta go in for one more session to fill a few things in.”
Adrienne’s hand lingered, but Judy didn’t seem to mind. When she released it, Judy shot her a keen smirk.
The lights dimmed, and a spotlight shone on the small stage, if the small lip of wood could be called that. Shoes clicked against the floor, and then she appeared. Adrienne’s heart leapt into her throat.
In person, she looked so much more regal and powerful. Sure, she looked amazing in her YouTube videos, but this was different. With the spotlight on her, she retained a godly glow.
Mandy leaned in toward the mic, and in her ragged, throaty voice she said, “This song is for a man I used to know.”
The drummer behind her thumped, ka-thumped, ka-thumped, and then Mandy struck the first note, bending it with expert precision. Her guitar shone under the lights. Blood streaked the frets.
So badass, Adrienne thought.
“Hey, you want to meet up afterward?” Judy asked, leaning across the table.
“Yeah,” Adrienne agreed. “I’d like that.”
Mandy sang, but even as she crooned that old, classic BB King song, Adrienne couldn’t help but notice the way Judy’s eyes glowed under the bar’s yellow lights.
Copyright © 2023 by Keith LaFountaine
