Plumbing

THE WEATHERMAN TELLS US THAT THIS SUMMER WILL BE DRYER THAN LAST SUMMER. PLEASE PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO YOUR WATER USAGE. INSTRUCT THOSE RESPONSIBLE IN THE PROPER USE OF YOUR PLUMBING SYSTEMS. THIS IS PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT FOR THOSE WEEKEND RENTALS WHICH TEND TO BE LESS MANAGED AND MORE FULLY OCCUPIED.

This was the notice stamped across the front of Drake Fulman’s water bill. The letters seemed intentionally large, as if the sender held in very high regard the message running through the middle of the neat black totaling columns, perhaps even more so than the amounts of money they were getting tallied up in those columns.

Drake rubbed his thumb across the bottom of the bill where it was printed in capital and unmistakable letters who had sent it.

TIERRA DEL MAR WATER CO.

Drake bit his lip. A small trail of water slithered down the side of the bubbling kitchen cabinet, like drool. It joined it’s fluid companions on the floor, wobbling slowly up to lick the lint off of his fuzzy socks.

Drake crumpled the bill in one motion and flung it defiantly at the wall.

It hit the window pane with a smack and fell into the kitchen sink, where it bobbed up and down in little eddies as the drooling waterfall carried it up to the corner of the counter and tipped it over the edge.

In a moment, the soggy and crumpled bill was bumping his toes, gently and repeatedly like a very stupid duck.

A sharp rapping at the door distracted him.

Drake had a brief fantasy of pulling the plug on a very full bathtub as he splashed towards the entryway, sending up a spray of water as he skidded around the corner. He reached the door just in time to breathlessly fix his hand to the knob, pulling it inwards with all his strength as Gretchen Clamer pounded on the outside of it, rapping the door’s fresh varnish with her spidery acrylic fingernails.

She carried on for a good two minutes, screaming all manner of things not worth writing down, before moving onto the bay window.

Drake struggled to catch up, keeping pace with her bobbing pink hat as she made her way around the house. Gretchen arrived, huffing like a fish, and shoved her chubby fists up to the window, pressing them to the glass in the shape of round white binoculars.

It was through these fleshy binoculars that she peered as she continued her soundless verbal beating.

It was rather a relief not to have to look at her sickly green eyeshadow.

Drake heaved a sigh, and nodded at her apologetically, rubbing his chin every few moments as if in deep thought over some particular piece of insight that had escaped her fleshy lipsticked maw. She wore herself out presently, and stepped back from the window drawing a breath.

Unfortunately, as she had been standing on her tiptoes, the only view of this he had of this part, was of a fluffy pink feather, the color of cotton candy, rising and falling nearly imperceptibly at about the tempo of someone's breathing.

A small fat claw with sharp pink nails digging into its own flesh to prove it, floated above the feather for a moment and shook itself violently before retreating to its mainly pink body. The light red creature in question waddled across the opposite street a moment later, picking up it’s dragging skirt as it crossed the sewer grate.

Drake watched her go in not-quite-relief, and picked at the curtain nervously, uncertain of whether or not to draw the shades.

Then he picked at his lip.

He eventually decided on pulling shut the drapes, and they fell, at the pull of a cord, heavy, green and succulent across the bay window, the ends of their pompous bodies dropping to the floor with a dismal splash.

Drake looked on, absent-mindedly regretful as the water crept its way up the curtain, turning their color from emerald to sickly seaweed.

The drapes had belonged to his mother. In fact the entire house had belonged to his mother.

In a twist of fate, the elegant Victorian mansion had been left to sir Drake Pulman in a strange will appearing soon after the body of his mother was discovered. It was not that she hadn’t already been considered dead in spirit, certainly she had been considered mostly so since the birth of her third son, it was only that they hadn’t found such tangible confirmation as a corpse before that time.

He brought his palms together in elegant resignation, and drew a shuddering sigh.

The body had been found in a sewage culvert. That’s what they’d been told. Half in, half out, from what the police reports had described it’d been rather grizzly, and none of her remaining family members had any desire to view the photographic evidence.

The police cleaned up the scene, nice letters in a font that appeared politely hand-written were sent out to the four corners of the globe, and her estranged relatives boarded boats and airplanes, in one case a submarine, and came back to Pacific city for a nice funeral service.

That was how the Pulmans did things nowadays. All business.

There weren’t any other Victorian homes in tierra del mar.

The water had reached the stairs now. Drake pressed his thin lips together as it wavered unsteadily to the top of the first step, licking off the wood varnish and leaving bits and pieces of white paint with led in it to float back and swirl in the gravitational orbit around his thin legs in smart black dress pants, just a little too big and a tad too long at the ankles. Just enough room to grow, like his mother had always said.

She’d been fond of saying that.

Button-up shirts that folded over his hands and sagged at the shoulders, shoes needing an inch of cotton or scratchy newspapers stuffed in the toes, ties that swallowed his skinny neck alive and slithered below his waist like deadly cobras in sleek rainforest colors.

She’d always smile in her warm and peculiar way as she adjusted his collar, like her smile was only for her and somehow you’d intruded on something very private by seeing it, but she’d excuse your rudeness because the joke she’d invented was glorious.

He’d thought about her smile as he adjusted his collar in the mirror that morning, and then frowned and left the dry house in clean dress shoes.

Wells had made a comment about the shoes,

“Well well little brother, what’s it this time? weather reports or the funnies, or have your toes really just grown two inches since I last saw you!”

His smile stayed stretched out across his face like that for a long time, and his shoulders heaved up and down in unrequited laughter. Eventually he realized everyone else was looking very solemn and staring at the floor, or the walls, or up through the ceiling, and he cut off his laughter abruptly and cleared his throat, staring very hard at the thick black casket on the stage.

No one said anything else until the service was over. It was a nice service, with an old minister of unknown denomination in a long black robe per The Dame Pulman’s request and an untrimmed white mustache which made him appear very much like a graying walrus. No one pointed this out except Drake’s second cousin or his first cousin once removed, he couldn’t remember, and then no one thought it of any importance because she was only a small child.

Drake's knees were getting soggy. He stared ruefully at his oversized suit, lifting up the squelchy and dripping ends of his shirt sleeves.

He shook like a wet dog, but ended up more like one of those awkward balloon men that waver up and down with the wind outside of used car dealerships.

Afterwards he ran a hand through his hair very fast and looked around even though all the doors were shut and the curtains closed.

Drake turned to look up the stairs in mild concern. The butler had fled through the attic window several hours previously.

Drake drew back his wet sleeve and checked his large silver watch.

Two hours exactly.

There hadn’t been any paying guests in the house, sometimes described as quaint, elegant, gothic, and on one memorable occasion, out-of-place, all that summer.

It wasn't however, unoccupied.

Drake sloshed awkwardly towards the parlor, from which a steady parade of cups and saucers, made of china light enough to float on the surface of a pond, had been trickling out neatly, and making their way down the hall, bobbing politely as they passed. Drake lifted his knees as the water attempted to suck his fuzzy socks from his pale feet.

He rested a skinny hand on the doorframe.

Mother hadn’t been the same since the death of her youngest son.

Stewart the younger he had been called, even though Stewart the older was only a distant cousin no one had seen in years or could remember anything about, including whether or not he existed, but Stewart the younger was what he was called, and so it was what became his name.

Stewart the younger was the only one of his brothers who could properly be described as beautiful, (Drake couldn’t improperly either, or by any fanciful stretch of belief besides). He had pale cheeks like they all did, and golden curls which belonged only to him.

That was the thing he’d gotten from The Dame.

Wells got her devilish smile and eyes that were inexplicably alive, and Drake got her sour face and permanently pinched lips.

Stewart the younger had eyes that couldn’t be described as dead exactly, it was just as if he was always looking somewhere that he wasn’t quite yet, which sounds strange until you take into account the fact that he’d eventually gotten there, and with very little effort on his part.

There was a photograph of him over the stained oak table in the parlor.

Stained brings to mind the color ebony or at least a very dark chestnut brown. Then Dame had elected to stain the place where her children took their meals and deep shade of something that couldn’t be described as anything but blood.

The framed photo hung where he ought to have sat, at the head of the table, over her throne with arms carved of cat’s bones. The 1982 newspaper clipping in the scrapbook on the coffee table said birch wood, but the boys knew better.

They‘d had a cat.

Her name was sweetie and she took gravy in her cream and caught mice most days, and one day she’d developed a limp and stopped catching rodents from the dark corners of the house.

The week after that she’d gone, and The Dame was flexing her pale fingers self-satisfactorily on the arms of the chair she’d gotten as a forty-first birthday present from her grinning eldest son.

Drake used to have a brother too.

Drake hated with a burning passion, all things with impish eyes and smiles.

He hated when he was alone in the dark house that used to eat memories,

and when he would lie awake at night to the lapping tide which one can hear at a surprising distance inland when the night traffic is not too loud,

and he would hate with a hatred that is dark and soaked in regret and pain and thousand other things that had long ago sizzled out to one single fiery coal in the heart of him,

and he hated while that coal had bloomed into an ashtray of a man.

Drake had left the funeral early while the rest of his relatives that were not dead chatted lightly over stale crackers and cheese stuck with toothpicks.

It’s harder to drive a car when there’s black duct tape covering up the back windows, and the background noise hadn’t been preferable either.

Drake slogged through the water to the kitchen. It had reached his thighs and was the color of dirty pool water, the color it gets when no one puts chlorine in or skims the pine-needles off the top.

Drake opened the unnecessary glass cabinets with their show windows displaying a collection of plastic cups which were white and chewed-on at the tops, the color nearly bleached out of them.

He filled one of these with water from the tap and had difficulty getting it under the faucet before that too was completely submerged.

Drake lifted the cup to his chapped lips thoughtfully, and downed the clean water, like an astronaut abandoned on a moon full of cold air, sucking in his last breath of breathable oxygen.

The screaming started up outside again.

Drake waded to the front door, drawing the deadbolts and muttering curses to Gretchen under his breath. He mopped his brow, unexpectedly, drained, and leaned back against the eucalyptus wallpaper, mopping the cold sweat from his pale brow.

He swallowed, removed the matte black wig from his head in one swift detestful motion and flicked it into the water, where it floated like a dead rat in the koi pond in the courtyard.

His mother The Dame had been a maker of wigs.

She could fashion them out of all manner of beasts, and practiced on the horse tails she bought for cheap from dog food factories, but refused to create professionally with anything but authentic human hair. For this reason, she’d let the boys’ hair grow long.

Stewart’s golden curls framed his placid face, innocent, angelic, Drake’s hung in a detestable black mullet, and Wells’s grew long and dark and wild. He’d coat it in grease the day after haircuts, and don a fake cheeky smile.

“C’mon little brother,” he’d tease, “Lemme try some of this in your hair, I bet I could make it slick back nice if you want…”

Drake had backed up shaking his head.

Wells shrugged grinning good naturedly, “Suit yourself,”

and continued working the gel into his own course curls staring intently into the bathroom mirror.

Stewart the younger would pass by sometimes and watch his brothers curiously, but he never asked to join them.

He stood outside, saying nothing, wanting nothing.

And so Drake did the same.

Only he wanted. He wanted all.

The sleek-backed hair, the electric radiant energy, the winning thin-lipped smile, he wanted to be Wells as he leaned over the bathroom counter, rubbing gel into his hair and practicing his smile in the mirror.

The smile started to come out less at home.

It seemed to fade, flickering in the light of his stoic brothers, and The unshakeable Dame herself,

but redoubled with vigor in the presence of his friends.

Drake remembered that from the parties to which he been reluctantly drug, only to watch from the sidelines as his brother laughed loudly in the midst of the inevitable darkness that is life.

Drake rubbed a hand over his pale bald head, smooth as the surface of a decalcified egg left in the fridge overnight in a vinegar solution.

He couldn't remember when he’d got the cancer diagnosis.

That’s when he’d moved back home to live with The Dame, in order to look after her in her old age. To fetch her tea and starch her socks as she sat great and terrible in her throne, and to one day inherit his Victorian childhood home, the only one of it’s kind in Pacific city and a thriving overnight rental.

She’d also made him a wig. A great deal of wigs.

Matte black in slaughtered horse hair with stiff curls that no amount of grease could remove, per his request.

Drake stared at the dark water, and removed his silver watch with shaking hands. It smelled of rich filth and was worthless to him.

He watched the few air bubbles trapped under the glass on the clockface drift to the surface as it sank into the domestic lagoon.

Drake watched it go with a shudder, and rolled up his sleeves.

He slogged through the house one last time, peering through the shutters as he went.

Gretchen had brought with her a small crowd of vaguely concerned citizens who were milling about the sandy courtyard, occasionally running their fingers across a damp spot on the elegant Victorian siding where his heavy use of sealant around the windows had failed him.

Drake pursed his lips in mild annoyance which slipped back into stoic emptiness and he waded towards the study at the back of the house.

His face was not one of careful practice as most other moments in his life, which surprised and might’ve delighted him had the circumstances been different,

of course the reason it would’ve delighted him was because of Stewart the younger, and nothing had much delighted him since his brother’s death.

He pushed open the oak door to the study, from where it stood, ajar and uncertain of itself, wedged between two thick blocks of standing water.

The study was dark and Drake did not bother to turn on a light.

The light switches were underwater and Drake wasn’t certain if they still turned things on.

He cleared his throat and placed his hands elegantly behind his back instead. He would’ve done a hoppy thing, rising briefly to his tiptoes which he did when addressing the public, and had ever since he was a small child, but his wet socks would be hard pressed to suck themselves from the floor, and the cold water was inching up his lower back in an uncomfortable sort of way.

Drake raised his chin in an arrogant manner which did not suit him, and addressed the shadows at the far end of the study,

“Hello….”

The shadows responded.

A muffled scream was uttered from a figure, wrapped in black duct tape and seated in a chair at the back of the room.

It wrenched it’s voice down, screaming angrily through all its octaves and drawing itself out at the end in a furious garble. The live black eyes flashed at him angrily, and Drake wondered at how they glittered charismatically even in the shadows.

“Good day brother.” he responded pleasantly.

The figure harrumphed.

Drake leaned over, crouching in the rising water. His own eyes were glittering now and he did not care. “

I know what happened.” He showed his teeth, “

I know what you did,” he hissed.

Wells knit his brows in a fashion more puzzled than angry. He garbled something that turned itself up at the end like a question.

Drake shook a long white finger in his face and spoke between his teeth, "No see I know what you did,”

He paused to let that sink in.

“I know that you killed him.”

Now Wells glared. He screamed something indigent and incredulous, and then his eyebrows went up at the end, shocked and questioning. The ferocity in his voice wavered a little.

Drake could’ve dreamed it, but it seemed to him some of the glitter went out of his brother’s eyes, and they glowed a bit forlornly, almost like Stewart the younger.

Drake swallowed. His eyes swam a bit.

He shook his head to clear it.

Wells clamped his teeth together and screamed through the tape, spitting through his lips at the end, making it clear he had something to say that could not be said through a gag.

The water lapped the bottom of his neck, and Wells lifted his chin defiantly, but Drake saw a shiver of fear in his eyes.

Just then the study windows rattled.

They were being pounded on by desperate fists.

There was a muffled shriek followed by Gretchen’s hysteric voice, “HE’S GOING TO KILL THEM, BOTH OF THEM! BOTH-OF-THEM-ARE-GOING-TO-DIEHE’S MAD I TELL YOU….MY BABIES I used to watch them….”

here Gretchen’s voice trailed off into warbley sobbing and the voices of two gruff gentleman joined her own,

“Alright ma’am, you’re going to have to come with us,”

“That's right, PCPD….”

“Come with us…”

“Public disturbance...” there was some more muffled voices but it was hard to hear through the window.

Drake turned his attention back to Wells who was staring at him with wide frightened eyes, which were still a touch furious. The muffled garble started up again, punctuated by several determined screams.

Drake licked his chapped lips, leaned over, and ripped the duct tape from his brother’s mouth.

“That’s better…”

His brother’s voice was raw and hoarse. He paused, here was normally where he would’ve run a hand through his gelled hair, and continued.

“Look I know what-this-is and what-this-is-all about, you were always so…” he blinked.

His glittering eyes were as ruthlessly understanding as ever.

How Drake hated those eyes. The fake sincerity within them appalled him. There was only one person he’d know to be really sincere. Taking on none of the world’s senseless pain and struggle, and accepting none of its shallow and unsatisfactory gifts in return.

Drake had failed in both regards.

“Drake I’m sorry…”

His brother was still talking.

“And she was the same to all of us, so believe me I know,” here Wells's eerily sincere voice took on a touch of mania, pain, something violent Drake could not place.

He was the best actor in the world.

“But I swear-to-the-sand-gods I would never hurt our little brother,”

he paused, his eyes wide, as if searching for all the thoughts in the world,

“and if you think, that I would….”

His voice was low and close to cracking as he tilted his chin back to avoid the gently lapping water.

“The body, the body, did you even read the report? Look at the pictures?” Wells’s eyes were wide and desperate.

Drake’s hands were frozen at his sides so he became aware that he was not covering his ears.

“The corpse was in a mutilated condition, burnt and drowned, but from what little our inspectors could discover, the hair had a curious softness for the victim's age, and the shoulders appeared as those of a young man.”

Wells met his brother’s far-away eyes.

“A young man! Our mother’s not,”

Wells swore loudly, “please-just Drake UNTIE ME!”

Drake fingered the knife in his left pocket. The study chair was bolted to the floor. He bit down on his tongue.

How he hated himself in the next moment.

But he was already underwater slashing at the tape.

In that moment Drake was cursing himself for giving up the chance to avenge the death of his angelic little brother.

Wells fought upwards, gasping as he broke the surface of the dark green lagoon, colored by the forest walls of the study.

The door was shut and no amount of wrenching would remove the three-ton barrier from its reinforced hinges. Wells turned and swam for the window, slamming his elbow through the glass. He grit his teeth, and used his mother’s tacky silver plaque from off her desk to clean the toothy shards off the edges of the sill.

She always had a taste for the dollar-costume-store theatrical.

He’d heaved himself half way through the window, like a wet cat emerging from it’s tomb, when he became aware that Drake had drifted back down into the study, now the color of a filthy fish tank.

Drake was troubled and difficult in many ways, he’d long ago adopted a maudlin view of the universe that only leads to pain and frustration for others.

They’d drifted apart long ago, taking different paths, one fighting his own way to the sun, and the other eternally orbiting the drain from which he’d come, worshiping the woman like some kind of dark deity, the same way some ancient cultures used to sacrifice their children and futures to the planetary bodies.

And possibly most of all, his brother might not survive to the end of the week.

Not because he was sick, but because he’d made it clear he didn’t want to.

None of these things entered Well’s mind as he shoved backwards off the sill and dove to the bottom of the flooded study he’d been locked out of as a child.

The only properly Victorian house in pacific city groaned and creaked, straining at its joints.

Presently, it began to drool, as a stream of clearish water ran down the siding, dripping out of the study window, as if the house had made itself sick swallowing up something which didn’t quite agree with it.

Two figures burst suddenly from it’s stomach, and the house spat out it’s dead.

They rolled over on the ground,

the one dark eyed and full of life as a grinning cat, and the other pale and drawn looking, though perhaps the water had rinsed some of the shadow of death from his eyes.

It’d also washed the last of the hair gel from Wells’s head, and he sat up rubbing his scalp. He shook his head like a wet dog, grinning as his hair fell in coarse black curls over his face.

Drake placed a pale and offended hand across his chest, and drew weak breaths, his shallow chest heaving up and down as he croaked,

“Why…” Drake burst into a fit of coughing,

“Why….would you DO THAT!”

He shook his head, “You have no idea…”

Wells interrupted his melodramatic monologue.

“Because you don’t have the guts to try again,”

He glanced ruefully down at Drake, pale bald, and skinny, dressed up in his father’s suit, which didn’t and would never fit him,

“Little brother.”

Drake breathed and said nothing for a long time.

Eventually he spoke. “D’you think it’s salvageable?”

The structure’s creaking Victorian bones groaned with the growing weight of thousands of pounds of tap water.

Wells shook his head resolutely. “Not unless someone shuts off the water.”

Neither man moved.

Wells grinned and Drake sighed. The brothers lay back in the grass and shared cautiously, the first mutual feeling they’d had in a long time,

as they watched their childhood home slowly come apart at the seams, destroyed from the inside, in something like mutual satisfaction.