Pushing Daisy

“… possible 10-54 at 144 Brookside, additional units requested…”

Hearing that call crackle through my radio and a cold shiver runs down my spine, slowly, like an overloaded barge pushing through the Cumberland and Oxford Canal. The rotten memories from a decade prior stink my brain and, as vivid as the day itself, I could smell the blood, I could see the tears streaked down anguished faces, and the wails of horror ring in my ears, like some Wendingo on the hunt through the birch forests off I-95, piercing the frozen, moonless October night…

“… all available units please respond. Emergency unit requested…”

Theodore Marguerite was one heck of a man, a big man, the strong, silent type we would mimic from the matinee movies. John Wayne, Lon Chaney, Eastwood – ol’ Theo was one of the tough guys. We called him “Daisy.” Very much a misnomer for a rough kid turned rugged, grizzly man, and according to his mom, that’s what the family name translated to, descended from the French settlers who moved down from Nova Scotia generations ago. Ever since we were kids, Daisy was always dirty. Always mixing it up, throwing down, and fixing something or other, his bikes in particular. Daisy loved those crazy motorcycles. “Suicide machines,” we would call them, only for Daisy to quickly bellow, “not even Death could catch me!” And even as filthy as a freshly dug grave, Daisy kept his motorcycle spotless, which in part made that night ten years ago to the minute so darned eerie.

“Father? I mean, Chief?”

Dispatch. Caribbean gal, originally from Toronto, or Trinidad or something, I can’t ever recall. Pretty as a picture but nags like she studied the art in school.

“Yeah. On the way.”

“Fath- er, uh, Chief, it’s Helen, she’s-“ 

I shut the radio off. The static isn’t doing much for this niggling hangover and I’ll be on site in just a minute. And the last thing I need is Ellen’s insanity whisper-shouting in my ear over a dicey signal. Bless her, that Helen. Lord, I’ve seen stronger men crumble beneath the weight of the world while carrying a whole lot less than Helen Marguerite. 

Theo called her Hell-en, with an extra stress on the Hell. Heh. Tough gal, from nearby Madawaska. Handled a chainsaw like no one’s business and didn’t take any guff from Big Daisy or any other man, woman or animal in town. But I’ll be damned if she didn’t love her guy. To death? Never proven.

The last decade has been rough on ol’ Helen to say the least. It’s one thing to find your husband dead, another thing entirely if you were to find him lying in a pool of viscous blood still steaming on the cool floor of the garage. But when you find all of that blood, under the motorcycle, steadily seeping across the floor... and there’s no body, no Daisy, no footprints, no splatter... just blood? Lots of blood. Well, I still can’t say much about that, yet it sure explains to me Helen’s selective mutism and constant lunacy.

Ten years ago, Helen arrived home from her shift at the hospital and flung open the garage door, ready to chew Daisy out for not taking out the garbage, or clearing the dishes in the sink, or some other banal thing or another that only a wife could find as reasons for a good, knock-down, drag-out shouting match. Darned near slipped and killed her own self stepping into the bay, as she recounted. Helen always told the same story in soft, somber tones to our department, the state police, detectives from the city, throughout my last few confessions, and every single time that tale was told verbatim. Perfect, like it was scripture. Every time.

Helen arrived home and found Daisy’s bike, sparkling clean as ever, slammed down on the business side and blood slowly coating the garage floor. Aside from a quick crescent-shaped swipe where she nearly slipped walking in, the scene was untouched – no footprints, not one tool missing or out of place, windows closed and locked, and crucially – no Daisy. Investigators couldn’t find a bullet hole, piece of torn clothing, a single unidentifiable hair, or any signs of a struggle… just a pristine motorcycle on its side like a beached whale off the coast of Phippsburg, and a massive amount of blood. Gosh almighty, I can still smell it as I turn down the Marguerite driveway now ten years later. The ambulance has arrived and it looks like just about every squad car in the township has lined the crumbling, uneven paved drive. I start to cross myself, stop abruptly, sigh deeply, and step out of the truck.

“Yeah, Chief, you gotta-“ 

My deputy, Brian Levesque. Good kid, though chatty. Played varsity ball and made the all-state team but blew out his knee the summer before starting at U-Maine. I tried to set him up with Colleen, but with her arts and crafts and crystals and yoga and blasphemous dream catchers she naturally clung to that hippie fella and… well, it’s not my place to judge.

“You don’t give me orders, son,” I say, my voice faintly shaking, and give him a friendly pat on the back. Mostly to give myself time and keep my balance. “Get all of these cruiser's sirens and lights off before we accidentally summon the Devil himself.”

“Yeah, got it. Helen’s just about lost her fuc- uh, yeah, her mind. Neighbors called first on account of the screaming and yelling and as we got here things turned physical. Yeah, Helen’s inside, and she’s not-“

“Lev.”

“Yeah, Father? Chief?”

I try to smile. “Go away. To the station and get everyone back to work. You’re the man tonight.”

“Yeah... got it.” To me, his reply sounded more like a question than a confirmation.

I turn to look at the crooked colonial house before Lev could speak another word. Daisy’s old man and his old man built the ‘stead together with their own calloused hands, and the craftsmanship and attention to detail remains, though it leans just a bit and the big Salem black house at 144 Brookside has taken more of an ashen color, even with the last remaining bright orange rays of autumn sun straining through the pines out back, partially illuminating the house. Inside it’s dark, except for the dining room window shoddily covered at an angle with a dingy bedsheet, where I see a frail, crooked silhouette gesturing softly, arms gently waving, fingers pointing. Her voice is loud but there’s no yelling, at least for the time being. 

Helen, as she told me in confession years earlier, started planting daisies in a raised flower bed at the front of the home the following spring after the memorial. A tribute to Theo, she said, so she would be reminded of him every day at that house. I’m not one for flowers in particular, but even I’ll admit that Helen’s daisies were something else. For one, they were simply massive, easily three times larger than any daisy you’d see in a jar at the diner or decorating the pulpit at Holy Name, choking me with their faint manure smell. And absolutely pristine in appearance, to the point each flower looked just like a plastic toy. Down East and Maine magazines frequently sent photographers in season, with one photo even winning a Pulitzer nomination. Yet as the flowers bloomed each year, Helen’s mental state withered, before folks in town would only see her occasionally tending to the weeds, or watering the same spot in a trance for hours, chasing away small birds and chipmunks and squirrels with far too much verve, and then hardly at all. The daisies soon grew over the flower bed and before long the whole darned four-plus acres which the Marguerite home stood upon was overwhelmed with these mutant perennials. I haven’t been here for a long time. Daisies, to me - Hail Mary - smell like shit.

I stand in the walkway and take a good, deep breath, exhale, and cough out the unexpectedly frigid night air with the unmistakable taste of raw earth dusted over my tongue. I spit. The wilted, petrified, dying daisies surround me and bow in near-frozen silence, staring me down like a Woodstock version of the Terracotta Army. Daisy’s motorcycle, once a gleaming chrome and powder-coated silver 1990 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy - Daisy called her “Seventh Heaven” due to the decorative rings, or something - had long been banished from the garage to the driveway where it now lays in repose, succumbing to rust, overgrown weeds and orphaned daisy petals.

I open the door, nod to the patrolman in a manner that says without saying “Leave,” and make my way down the short hall to the dining room. Hastily framed pictures line the hallway, dusty, and faded by the sun. Each one a photo of Daisy - Weirs Beach ‘72, Daytona ‘81, Sturgis ‘85, and so on - surrounded by motorcycles, his big red face smiling ear to ear, teeth lining his gums like a decrepit graveyard. More than even the motorcycles, Daisy loved a fight after a few drinks and some, lets say, playful banter.

Earlier this afternoon, Helen was discovered by patrol laying on Brookside, naked as the day she was born, with daisies in her hair, spilling from her mouth, clutched in her skeletal hands and crudely shoved, in her, uh, remaining orifices, hissing, seething and convulsing like a car struck animal. When patrol draped her in a safety blanket she lurched upright and bit the officer’s cheek. It took two additional units to pull her off of him, and another two units to sedate the poor guy and transport  him to Maine Medical.   

I reach the dining room and Helen’s voice dims to a whisper, still spouting heresies that I can’t understand, or even want to recognize. I sit.

“Father,” Helen starts, barely audible.

I play along. “Yes, Helen.”

“Please listen to me,” she says, and with the clarity of Jordan Pond’s depths in summertime sunlight, recalls the details of the deadly night ten years ago. 

Helen stayed home from the hospital that day, courtesy of a shiner Daisy had given her that morning after burning his breakfast eggs. He’d been on somewhat of a bender, when a night of drinking turned into a week of smoking crystal meth and disassembling and reassembling his motorcycle. Helen found a pink slip from his current run with a logging contractor outside of Augusta, and fed up with Daisy’s new habit, she confronted him. Knocked her into next week without so much of a warning, and in shock, Helen sat at this very dining table and waited for her opportunity.

When the racket in the garage stopped, the clanking and slamming of tools and incensed calls for his missing 10mm socket dulled to just the sounds of Daisy’s snoring, Helen sprang into action. She only wanted to teach him a lesson, she says, because no one raises a hand to Helen Marguerite. Tip-toeing into the garage, Helen saw that Daisy was sprawled in a stupor next to the bike, his massive chest heaving and croaking and oozing the stench of Wild Turkey and burning styrofoam. Standing before her, Seventh Heaven, in all its glory, reassembled with the careful quickness only a tweaker could muster, gently wobbled on its kickstand held up by a length of two-by-four. Helen placed both palms on the gas tank, and considered giving the motorcycle a good shove. He’d blame the stand, Helen thought, and grinned at the anguish Daisy would wake to, seeing his pride and joy reduced to a crushed can of Coors Light.

Daisy woke like a vampire at sundown, eyes wide and wild and before he could finish asking “what the fuck are you doing,” Helen, startled, fell forward on the bike and all 700 or so pounds crushed Daisy’s skull into the garage floor, his twitching foot tapping to the sounds of classic rock staticly rattling through the small radio on the tool bench. 

Helen pauses. She tells me that in a quiet panic, she cradled herself next to Daisy’s large, motionless frame and sobbed. It was only when she attempted to dry her cheeks that she noticed the pints of blood pumping out of his skull, soaking her clothes and now streaking her face like Algonquin war paint. Daisy’s head had been crushed nearly flat beneath the V-Twin engine and using his own buck knife, Helen severed the neck and rolled the remaining body onto a toboggan and sledded the corpse to the outside of the garage under the cover of dusk.

It took Helen almost an hour to remove the headless Daisy from the garage, she remembered, and upon walking back into the garage, slipped and fell backwards on the blood that now covered the entirety of the garage floor. Propping herself on snowshoes, Helen did her best to clean the shards of skull and clumps of hair and brains from the V-Twin, took the collected pile of gore to the corpse on the toboggan, hid the remains beneath a tarp by the wood pile, and started screaming, and screaming, and screaming until a neighbor’s phone call brought almost the whole town to Brookside Road a decade ago.

Frozen and perhaps preserved by Maine’s long winter, Daisy’s remains stayed with the wood pile until the following spring, when Helen buried him beneath the flower bed that birthed the first few mutant daisies. I attempt to console Helen, somehow, but I’m interrupted with a gut-punch of a statement; Daisy is here, Helen insists, and he’s after her head.

It started two years ago, Helen says, when the lights on the motorcycle would flicker on and off in the garage. Some nights she would wake to the rumbling engine starting on its own, others she would see the grinning, grisly visage of Daisy’s mangled reflection in the gas tank. Last month it was the smell of Wild Turkey wafting from the kitchen sink and toilets. Last week she started hearing Daisy’s size 14 boots stomping down the hallway. This morning, Helen says, she was restrained by an invisible pressure in her bed, her mouth crammed with dead daisy petals stifling her frantic calls for help, and Daisy’s unmistakable bellow calling for Helen’s head.

I try not to chuckle at the absurdity of it all and reach to console Helen’s hand when the front door slams open from a gust of frozen wind. Oak leaves, a blizzard of flower petals and dried fiddleheads swirl in the doorway, a harvest moon casting a spotlight down the hall to the dining room. Slowly, dramatically, a translucent form lumbers towards us and I feel a warm spread of piss soak my tactical britches. It is Daisy alright, minus the head. I immediately recognize the shape of his broad shoulders, the hands the size of catcher’s mitts, legs like the pillars of a Roman coliseum  and concrete slab-like feet pounding the cracked and creaking hardwood of his old home.

The form moves slowly, deliberately to the dining room, dead flowers swirling around its size that nearly fills the entire hallway. I dry-heave at the overpowering stench of daisies, and of Daisy, an earthy, decomposed rot, soaked in blood and whiskey. Debris and shattered picture frames breeze towards us in the dining room and Helen’s piercing screams snap me out of a temporary trance of fixated horror.

She begs forgiveness, pleads for some understanding. Helen tells Daisy she loved him, still loves him, and that she’s sorry. The form continues its slow, determined prowl down the hallway and as it reaches me, again paralyzed in pure terror, I retch and lose my lunch across the table. I barely notice that my nose is bleeding and I’ve been reciting the lord’s prayer over the loud buzz of wind and daisies filling the house like a swarm of locusts. Helen, now littered with dead petals, goes stark white, practically glowing in the dark room and suddenly falls silent. Her wrinkled face is pulled tight in a silent Edvard Munch scream, wild eyes forcefully bulging from the sockets like car headlights buried in snow, and as if the battery died, slwoly dim to darkness. The wind pulls in a backdraft reversing down the hallway, bringing debris, dead daisies and dead Daisy with it to the front door that again slams shut.

I lost my relationship with God just after Daisy disappeared. I wasn’t always a cop. I used to be a priest in this town. What started as a kind gesture, my congregation generously giving my wife and I a trip to the Vatican, ended in unspeakable horror. Joanne was kidnapped on a morning walk and later found tortured, raped, and permanently paused in a vegetative state at a small chapel. It was two altar boys who committed the acts. When I agreed to pull the plug on the machine keeping her alive, I left Italy with god buried alongside Joanne.

I don’t know why I became a cop. I don’t really know much right now. I bless the dead Helen and walk out of the Marguerite home and through the daisies again in full blossom, Daisy’s bike itself blooming, immaculate in the driveway, a harvest moon bringing light and life to the death that surrounds me, and realize I know just one thing for certain; Daisy got Helen’s head, alright.

Hard tellin’ not knowing… perhaps mine as well.