Destroyer Comes Home
The blizzard shook the car. Danny shouted into his cell but to no result. “We need help!” he said. “Please. You have to find us.” The car was half-buried in the snowbluff, the engine run out to broke, and a circle of wild men stood out there in the darkness, just beyond the reach of the headlights. They grouped in the shadows watching Tina and Danny. Occasionally, the men’s eyes caught the light in a strange way and flared green in the darkness. Tina rolled down the window and the cold air slumped in, she leaned out, screamed, “Why won’t you help us?” “Get in here, Tina!” Danny pulled her back into the car. One of the men slung a rock and it bounced on the hood of the car. Another rock, then another—each a boom of thunder. “We have to get out of here,” Tina said. “It’s okay,” Danny said. “It’ll be all right in the morning. We’ll have breakfast,” he said. Danny didn’t get it. 911 didn’t get it. “These people are going to kill us,” Tina sobbed. Another rock. Someone growled. “Please!” Tina shouted, swinging open the passenger door. She made a run for it and the snow was much deeper than she had expected.
Ribs is a big man, 250, all muscle. He drives his once-proud Tacoma across half the country and though he stops in motels, he can hardly bring himself to sleep. A child at a truck stop stares at him and Ribs knows he has been recognized. Ribs winks at the kid, and the child breaks into a grin. “Destroyer!” the kid shouts, raising a fist.
Crossing into the Midwest, Ribs realizes that he’s lost track of time zones. He checks his cell phone for the correct time. Six o’clock. Night falls early this time of year. He crosses the bridge into Illinois. The bridge must be new; it doesn’t look at all like the rickety, narrow one he remembers. Another few hours of driving has him nearly hypnotized. Ten miles outside of town he stops to fill the tank. The gas station clerk, a heavy girl half-asleep on her elbow, takes notice of Ribs and stares him down as he walks toward the restroom. He’s been recognized, but at the register, she doesn’t say Aren’t you The Destroyer? She says, “Aren’t you Ronnie? Ronnie Schmitz?”
“Uh,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
She touches her nametag, “I’m Corrine Teague. We went to Westers High together.”
“Oh, hi,” he says.
“You wrestle on TV right? What do they call you? Mister Brutal or something?”
“That was an old persona. I’m taking a break for a while.”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, welcome home.”
He maneuvers the truck through the long dark roads. Tall cracked elms interrupt the rays of the headlights. He passes the road sign that reads: Merryville Lowlands, Incorporated 1889. Twenty five minutes of driving the bad roads to reach the house. Dad quit properly maintaining the lawn years ago but now the house is going to seed as well. A long stalk of white gutter hangs diagonally from an eave and touches the snowy ground. Chipped paint, cracked windows. “Come on, Dad,” Ribs says in the solitude of his truck. He parks and grabs his bag.
He rings the bell and it takes a minute before Dad answers.
“Ribs,” Dad says, his voice a whisper. “Get in here, get in here.” Dad looks the same: old, tired, paunchy. He wears sweatpants and a Bears t-shirt. An O2 tank stands in the corner. He pats Ribs on the back, says, “Let me take your bag.”
“I got it.”
“Bee’s asleep on the couch. I gotta move her. Then I’ll get you a blanket.”
In the morning, Ribs sits at the table and eats from a bowl of off-brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The house is filled with cold air. Ribs touches the icy radiator with his fingertips, then the windowpane. This is why you’re sick, Dad. The stairs creak out under someone’s weight. Ribs knows from the speed of the footfalls who it isn’t.
Bee comes around the corner in her bathrobe. Her blonde hair piled up on her head, eyes all dark and puffed out. She’s fifteen years older than Ribs and fifteen years younger than Dad. The exact middle.
“Hey, kiddo,” Bee says, rubbing her hands.
“Bee.”
“How was the drive?” She takes a seat across from him, Ribs catches the hot odor of cigarettes on her body.
“Where are all the pictures of Tina?”
“Your father still hasn’t gotten around to putting them back up. He has difficulties with the idea.”
“It’s been six years.”
“Diff-o-culties.” She plays with the word in her mouth.
“Still a little drunk, Bee?”
She slaps his hand, stands. “Mind your manners. Want pancakes? There’s no syrup.”
Three o’clock is a slow hour at The Green Room. Ribs walks in and counts two pool tables occupied by only three players total. Comfortably Numb on the jukebox. The young girl at the counter says, “Hi. Just one?”
“Is Justin here?”
“Are you the one that called? Hang on.” She disappears into a back hall and when she returns a stout young man in a shirt and tie follows her. He’s all grins, hurries up to Ribs and hugs him tight. “Hey, b-b-buddy,” Justin says. “Come on back to the office. You want a drink?”
In the office, Justin looks Ribs over. “How you b-b-been? I ain’t seen you on the TV lately.”
“I’m taking some time off,” Ribs says.
“Yeah? You deserve it. How’s your family, how’s your dad? He’s still married to that woman?”
“He’s old now. Older.”
“Shit yeah, I bet that’s true. It’s b-b-been a long time since you been back. Damn long.”
“Six years. Since Tina died.”
Justin’s face hardens a little. “What brings you back now, dude?”
“I got his name.”
Justin squints. “Whose name?”
“Robbie Hacker. He’s the one that sold to Tina. He lives here. In the Lowlands.”
“Fuck. Ribs, I don’t want to go back to prison.”
“Do you know him?”
“Town’s gotten smaller. Everyone knows everyone. Hacker’s a prick, a joke.”
“I need your help.”
“Ribs, I got two strikes. Besides, how do you know for sure it was him that sold to her? Cops never found out, and they looked, remember how they looked? They questioned everyone. They questioned you. They questioned me.”
“I know it was Hacker. Someone told me. Gave me proof.”
“When?” Justin asks.
“A week ago, what does it matter?”
“It’s just… why now?”
“Tina, Justin. You grew up with her. My sister. My baby sister.”
“I know,” Justin says. “I know this. B-b-but you. You don’t want to go to prison either. You can’t want that.”
“He won’t know it was us. I don’t want to kill him. I just want to put the real fear in him. He won’t know it was us.”
Justin looks at the ceiling. He crosses his arms and tongues a rotten tooth. “Don’t get mad at me for saying this, but, it’s already b-b-been years, right? Is this something you can let go?”
“Let go?”
Justin sighs, looks at the floor and says, “This is a bad move, buddy.”
Behind the house, Ribs breaks up a cinder block with a sledge. Bee leans out the screen door and hollers, “What are you doing?”
Ribs waves her off. She shuts the door and he bags up the shards.
Night falls and Justin drives Ribs by Hacker’s apartment. They park across the street. It’s a grubby corner near a bar called Brixie’s and a Chinese take-out. “I been kicked outta that b-b-bar before,” Justin says. “Remember when we were young?”
“Which one is his?”
“Second floor. That flickering light is his.”
An hour and a half later, Robbie Hacker leaves his apartment, walks down the stairs, and crosses the snowy parking lot towards his late-model Jeep. Ribs is fascinated by the man. Hacker is thin, muscular and strikingly handsome. His face is pale and clean-shaven. His eyes, even at night, even at this distance, are bright and intelligent. He wears a black topcoat and jeans. The last time Ribs saw him, six years ago, Hacker was a scrawny, nervous kid with a lip ring. Where are you going, Robbie Hacker? What are your plans?
Justin drives and Ribs sits shotgun. They follow Hacker’s car through the light traffic. More than once Ribs thinks Hacker has spotted them, but he reminds himself, who would think they are being followed? Who would even check? A drug dealer might.
Hacker buys cigarettes at a 711. He drives to a row of town houses and visits what looks like a house party, where he stays for two hours. When he leaves, they follow him to Time Out, a sports bar down La Grange Road. He enters through the front door, glancing once at Justin’s car.
Ribs checks the time on the car’s dash. Nine thirty. “Is that right? That can’t be right.”
“No,” Justin says. “Clock’s busted.”
Ribs checks the time on his cell phone. Midnight. “Let’s go back to his apartment, wait for him there.”
Hacker walks out of the bar entrance and heads back toward his car.
“That was quick,” Justin says. “Maybe he forgot something.” Ribs feels a low concussion in his head. Fate has decided something for him. “I’m doing this now,” Ribs says, pulling on his gloves.
“What?”
“Pull around the other side and pick us up. Once he’s in the car, don’t speak. I don’t want him to hear your stutter.” Ribs leaves the car.
Hacker stands at the driver’s door of his Jeep and unlocks his vehicle. Ribs pulls the bright orange knit ski mask from his pocket and pulls it over his head. He jogs toward the Jeep, picking up speed, and squares the mask on his face. Hacker straightens at the sound of someone running. He turns around and his eyes bloom with surprise at the masked man running toward him across the parking lot. Hacker fumbles and drops his keys. Ribs sprints. Hacker raises his arms, covers his face; it’s no defense. Ribs raises his hand and slams Hacker’s head into the roof of his car, then takes him up from behind and closes his arms around his neck and head, a sleeper hold that usually—actually—works. Ribs squeezes until he feels himself crushing Hacker’s head. Hacker’s body spasms then drops limp. Justin’s car swings around the parking lot and stops in front of Ribs. Justin jumps out and opens the door and the two men drag Hacker into the car, shut the door, get in themselves, and drive off.
In the backseat, Ribs wraps duct tape around Hacker’s eyes and pins him to the floor with his boots. Hacker murmurs, starts to come around. Ribs stomps on his head. Justin drives toward the predetermined place in the woods.
On the highway, they pass a billboard for the local lava tubes. Someone has spray-painted the words “Gates of hell!” over the sign.
Hacker starts to cry. He whispers, “What do you want?”
Soon, they stop the car and march Hacker into the dark, snowy woods.
When they’re done with him, Ribs and Justin walk back toward the car. Hacker, naked, eyes still duct taped, follows meekly behind, tripping over roots, bumping into trees. His body is bright red from the cold and the beating. “Don’t leave me,” he whimpers. “Wait.”
Distantly, a car horn honks. The sounds of the nearby Lowlands.
Ribs says, “Stay where you are. Don’t touch your blindfold.”
“Why?” Hacker sobs.
“Because you fucking deserve this,” Ribs says.
The car is mostly silent on the drive back until Justin says. “You hardly spoke to him at all. He won’t have any idea who we were.”
Justin is right. Beyond instructing Hacker to swallow the OxyContin, Ribs said very little. What he wanted to say was, “My sister’s name was Tina Schmitz and her boyfriend’s name was Daniel Mueller. In 2001, you sold them meth at a house party. They smoked it for the first time that night in his truck. They drove out into farmlands in the middle of a blizzard. They crashed the truck and wandered into the snow. I’ve listened to their 911 calls. They thought people were chasing them, stalking them. They were terrified. They were probably looking at cows. Their frozen bodies were found three days later. The last thing my sister was known to have said is, Help me, Danny. Please someone help me. You’re the one that killed my little sister. You.
But to protect himself, and to protect his family, Ribs withheld that information. Anonymous men in masks kidnapped Hacker, took his clothes, beat him in the woods with concrete chunks in potato sacks, fed him drugs and left him to walk the six hundred yards back into the Lowlands. All in all, Ribs thinks, that’s light punishment.
Back on the road, Ribs again catches sight of the Gates of Hell graffiti.
“What’s that about?” Ribs asks.
“Some Westers teacher tried to get the students excited about the lava tubes by comparing ‘em to something in Greece. Some cave that people used to think was the way into the underworld. The idea caught on. That’s what they call the tubes now: Gates of Hell.”
“Oh.”
“You never knew Hacker? You don’t remember him?” Justin asks. “He grew up around here. He was a sophomore when we were seniors.”
“No. Don’t remember him,” Ribs lies.
Ribs glances at the clock, remembers that it’s incorrect, and reaches into his pocket for his cell phone. It’s not there, so he checks his other pocket. Then, as adrenaline floods his system, he checks all his jacket pockets, the floor of the car, the back of the seat. “Justin, where is my cell? I lost my cell phone.”
“Keep looking for it,” Justin says.
“Pull over.”
The phone is not in the car. “We have to go back,” Ribs says.
“This is fucked,” Justin says. “You screwed up.”
Ribs sighs. “Let’s just go back and get the phone.”
Justin pulls back onto the highway and looks for his next exit. They drive back to the woods, they find the place they left Hacker and he’s not there. They find their little storm of footprints but no Hacker, and after thirty minutes of searching and calling, they determine there is also no cell phone. On the ride back, Justin starts to sweat. His hands tremble.
“Ribs, this is b-b-bad.”
“Why? Why is this bad?” Ribs asks. “You said Hacker’s a joke.”
“Yeah, he is. But his cousins aren’t. Their friends aren’t.”
Ribs narrows his eyes at the streetlights. The nimbuses of light streak and merge. “Just take me back to my Dad’s,” Ribs says, looking out the window at the dark Lowlands, his home. His heartbeat is heavy and powerful within his chest. You left your cell phone? His error, Ribs knows, was severe. He thinks of the contact list in his phone. He has not simply given Hacker his identity. Worse, he has given him everyone with whom he is close. He has given Hacker the rest of his family.
“It was me,” Ribs says, “that introduced Hacker to Tina at that party.”
Justin says nothing for a while, and then, “So, you did know Hacker?”
“I used to buy from him… I waited six years for this. I waited for him to forget.”
Bee wakes to the yowl of a television playing nothing at all. She opens her eyes and fumbles around, searching for the remote. She knocks over empty beer bottles. She’d fallen asleep watching tapes of hunting shows and now the VCR is hissing and the screen glows bright blue. She finds the clicker and switches off the set and the room falls dark again. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust but they do and she realizes she’s still a little inebriated. She’s alone in the TV room. Tom is, without a doubt, asleep in their bed upstairs. She considers heading up there and flopping onto the mattress herself but instead she climbs to her wobbly feet, wraps her bathrobe around herself tight and walks to the kitchen. She draws a Bud Lite from the fridge—last one—twists the top, leans against the counter and starts sipping. She checks the clock on the microwave. Four-oh-five AM. She flips on the kitchen lights.
The bathroom fan hums from behind the shut door. Someone’s in there.
“Tom?” Bee asks. “Tom, are you down here?”
She knocks on the door and listens. Whoever’s in there snaps a lighter.
“Ribs?” she asks, opening the door.
Ribs sits on the closed toilet. Sweating, eyes shut, he smokes crank from a glass pipe. He exhales, rolls his head on his thick neck and looks to Bee. His blue eyes are wet and fragile. He’s far gone in the narcotic. He stares hard at her and she cannot decipher his expression. Something collapses inside her. The metallic smell of methamphetamine instantly dries her throat and causes her lungs to tingle. Her head buzzes hard. She hasn’t been this close, hasn’t been in the same room with this smell, for years. She sees that her sobriety is a heavy round stone balanced atop a sharp, smaller stone. She nods, inquisitively, at the pipe.
“Cashed,” Ribs says. “Almost.”
“Can I smell? A little?”
Ribs sparks the lighter and sucks hard. He holds the smoke in his body. She imagines the vapor rolling in his lungs. She is entrapped in this moment and wants to live no other, ever. She kneels beside him and places her hands on his kneecaps, she opens her mouth and leans in. She’s like a child now, ready for her medicine, and Ribs leans over to her. She makes an O of her mouth and brings her mouth to his and he releases and she gasps. She inhales and becomes, in an instant, consumed, afloat.
Time cuts out for a moment and when she comes back she finds that Ribs’ tongue is in her mouth. She isn’t sure who started this. She’s on her back, on the floor, in the bathroom doorway. He’s on top of her and he’s so heavy. His body is thick and dull. She thinks of cattle and their hides. She opens her bathrobe for him and she claws at his back. He tears at his belt and mashes her breasts. He enters her and all she can smell is the cold of the house. She turns over for him and the bathrobe bunches up on her back and he twists the material like reins. Bee bucks, chuckles and swings her head. Ribs pulls her hair and she looks over to the staircase and there Tom stands, watching this, shaking. “Bee!” he shouts.
Ribs keeps pumping.
Tom looks so old now—in his hundreds. His eyes crumple and he balls his shaking fists. Bee thinks for a moment that he’ll come over here and try to fight Ribs, or maybe her. Ribs continues undaunted. She wonders what Ribs’ face looks like. Smug? Grim? All business? Tom gags and doubles over, coughing. He wretches into his hand and, bent over, wipes his hand on the wall. Tom turns his face away, his shoulders seize, and he walks himself back upstairs. Bee cries and Ribs orgasms within her.
Shafts of sunlight burn gold through the frozen trees. Ribs sits on the front steps of the house. He inhales the clean, cold air of the Lowlands. His breath smokes before his face. He wears his boots, track pants, gloves and a long sleeve wrestling t-shirt. Despite the cold, he’s sweated through the clothes. He holds Dad’s .30-.30 across his lap. He loads the weapon. It’s difficult to do with this with the gloves but the rounds are too cold to handle.
His t-shirt reads “The Destroyer.” In his career as wrestler, he’s been many characters: Coma, Mr. Brutality and, most recently, The Destroyer. But he’s been quit a couple months now. Now, he’s just himself—Ronald, mostly known as Ribs, mostly unknown. He liked being The Destroyer best. He liked being the heel. In rehab, a few young guys recognized him, asked him for autographs, asked him to put them in headlocks. At first, this was a problem for Ribs. But his admirers eventually cooled out and now they’re friends, they talk on the internet sometimes.
Dad’s weight creaks the floorboards behind him. Ribs doesn’t turn, just focuses on the gun in his hands.
“You get,” Dad says, “the fuck out of my house.”
Ribs looks out at the woods. “It’s not your house, Dad. You can’t take care of it.”
“I’ll kick your ass, Ribs.”
Ribs sighs and looks at his hands. “I have to stay for a while, Dad. I have to protect you and Bee.”
“Protect us? You’ve ruined us.”
Ribs says nothing.
“What are you doing with that gun? What are you doing?” Dad asks.
“I have to protect this family,” Ribs says.
The phone rings within the house. That’ll be Hacker. Or Hacker’s cousins. Or somebody.
Ribs looks out to the woods. The sun is almost full up. “Go back inside, Dad.”
Dad stands in the doorway. His breathing is heavy, injured. Crows screech in the trees. The dogs take to barking. Ribs and the animals sense activity out there in the woods. Maybe some wildlife at fight. Maybe an unknown car on the road. He closes the gun and squares his shoulders. He listens to the morning and the shuddering of the house and the blow of the wind and he understands, perfectly, that he has finally given his whole life away. The cold, unnamable cloud of destructive force that has guided him, forever, from one hurtful moment of his life to the next, has brought him here, past the gates of Hell, to his newest and final role. He has been the destroyer, and now, everything devastated, he will defend the wreckage. Sitting on this porch, his father behind him, Ribs stares ahead and listens.
“What are you looking for?” Dad asks. “What’s coming?”
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