My Leona
Mark Edward Hall
Leona: miraculously young again, curvy, soft; blue eyes glistening; hovering above me, magically naked, like a gossamer goddess suspended on invisible marionette wires. My Leona; rose-colored lips slightly parted, drifting slowly into my open arms. I am yanked suddenly out of the dream by a sound I cannot at first identify. Left gasping for breath, grasping for the Leona that no longer exists.
“What the . . .?” I start to rise.
“Rats,” Leona mutters sleepily beside me.
“What?”
“In the cellar. I think we’ve got rats.”
“Christ!" I squeeze my eyes closed trying to reconcile what I had heard with what I had been dreaming. I lay back down and listen. The noise is gone. It hadn’t sounded like rats to me. But what do I know? In those dreams anything is possible. Perversely I believe in the dreams which are far more realistic to me now than the sterile, bickering world in which Leona and I have grown to occupy. I don’t tell that to Leona, though. And I never tell her about the dreams.
“Go back to sleep," she says, her voice softly muffled against the pillow, strangely comforting. “You can find out in the morning.”
I do not argue, but neither am I able to recapture sleep, not to mention the vision of my young Leona, the way she once was, the light in her eyes, the parted lips, the soft swell of her breasts; instead I spend the rest of the night tossing, waiting for dawn to lighten the room, and praying that the sound of metal scraping against dry, pebbly soil will not return.
“You’re a crazy, paranoid old man, Harold,” Leona says, when in the morning I tell her what the noise had reminded me of. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Metal scraping on soil? She glares at me through those hideous wing-tip glasses that she wears and suddenly I feel as mute as a mannequin. Nuts! That’s what she calls me these days, but if I am, it’s Leona that’s making me that way.
Things have not been good for us in a very long time. The truth is, I can no longer stand being around her. Looking at her, especially at those awful glasses she insists on wearing, revolts me. But the glasses aren’t the only antiquated things about Leona, although they’re probably the most repulsive. She refuses to have them updated. She says they fit her style perfectly. I suppose she’s right. Her style is drab, boring. Her hair has gone gray (she won’t even consider having it colored) and most of the time she wears it pulled back in a tight bun. Left over from her days as a school teacher. She retired two years ago. Her body has lost its curves. Now she’s thick through the middle, shapeless, and I never see her in anything but faded housedresses. It’s no wonder that dream haunts me.
Leona’s not afraid of much, but she’s afraid when I drink, I can tell, although she never says anything about it. Just stays out of my way, glaring balefully at me from around corners. Lately I’ve been drinking too much. Even I know that. I’ve been retired five years and there doesn’t seem to be much else to do except drink, wander around the house and wait for that dark void to come and claim me.
These days, my only saving grace seems to be the dream of Leona when she was young. I can’t explain why it has taken over my life. In reality the dream woman is far better than the young Leona I once knew. I should not kid myself about that. Inexplicably the dream seems to have sexual undertones. I don’t understand it. For a very long time now sex has been virtually non-existent in my life. Could it be a subconscious last-ditch attempt to capture a dynamic that never existed in my life? I don’t know. Christ, nothing seems real anymore. Except that noise, of course, the sound of metal scraping against dry pebbly soil.
“They’re rats,” she insists, although I haven’t challenged her. “They’re chewing on something. Electric wiring or worse. You’d better do something about it soon, Harold before all hell breaks loose.”
I just stand there looking fixedly at her, sorry I’d mentioned it. Sorry I’d gotten out of bed. Sorry I’d been born.
I turn and slump away from her defiant stare, trying to come to grips with going down into the cellar. It is a dark and gloomy place. I’ve never liked it much, and furthermore I’ve never been able to articulate those feelings very clearly. They belong to someone else, I think. They come from a place inside of me that I don’t recognize, a place that frightens me even more than the cellar does.
Down there is where we keep our laundry appliances and deep freeze, and I’ve got a wine rack with maybe a hundred bottles on it. I like wine. Especially the hearty reds. They’re supposed to be good for the health. Lately I’ve been thinking about moving the rack up here so that it’s closer at hand. In truth it’s because I do not want to go down there. The dreams of my young Leona and my fear of that noise have become too closely linked. I don’t understand the connection and I fear what I don’t understand. So now I send Leona down when I need a bottle and she’s the one who does the laundry. That way I don’t have to deal with it.
Half the cellar is crawl space; hard-packed clay with a quarter inch layer of dust covering it. The other half, the half with the appliances, the furnace and the wine rack is dug out, lined with rocks, has a cement floor with long jagged fissures running through it. And it’s not deep enough for me. I’m a tall guy. Six-foot-one. I have to bend down like an arthritic, and usually end up cracking my head on a furnace pipe or a floor joist. It really pisses me off when that happens.
I hesitate a moment too long.
“Come on, Harold, be a man.”
She has a way of making me feel smaller than my six-foot-one frame. The anger and the shame meld together. Finally I snatch the flashlight off the rack and go down. Leona stands at the top of the stairs watching me go. At the bottom I switch the light on. It’s not a very bright one. A single bare forty-five watt bulb hanging from two frayed electrical cords. The only thing it manages to do is cast gloomy shadows. I switch the flashlight on and point the beam into the crawl space looking for the source of my fear. There is nothing there, of course. But I wait, nevertheless, biding my time. Suddenly I see something, a quickly-scurrying shadow that disappears almost immediately. “Rats . . .” I breathe with astonishing relief. Leona was right. Thank God. I’m not about to crawl up there, though, through that dust and all those spider webs. I hate rats, but I hate spiders even worse. I decide to get drunk instead. On my way out of the cellar I grab three bottles of wine.
“What did you find,” Leona asks, looking at the wine with circumspect eyes.
“You were right, boss, rats.” I uncork one of the bottles.
“Well, aren’t you going to do something about them?”
“Later.”
“Have you forgotten, I’m leaving tomorrow?”
“Leaving?”
“Yes, I’m going to Toronto to visit my sister Ruth. You’ve known for two weeks. Are you daft? I’ll be gone seven whole days. When I get back I expect this rat situation to be taken care of. Do you understand?”
I nod and head for the living room with my wine. Relief washes over me; an entire week without Leona. Now I can get drunk and dream of that soft body in peace.
Later that night, drunk, I fall into bed. Leona is already there, snoring softly. She awakens to my touch and brushes my hand away with what feels very much like revulsion. I lay there for a long time staring up at the ceiling, wondering what my life has come to. When I finally do sleep my dreams are filled with shattered images of Leona, the way she never was, the way she never will be, floating above me on gossamer threads. When I reach out to caress her, the face contorts into ridicule. For some unknown reason I feel dirty and so terribly ashamed, and for the rest of the night my dreams are filled with that awful, inexplicable sound, the sound of metal scraping against dry pebbly soil.
Sometime well after dawn I awake with a start. My head throbs with a wine hangover. Leona is no longer in bed beside me. I push the covers aside and step out onto the cool floorboards. My legs are shaky. My head wants to burst. I look at the clock and a deep feted breath escapes me when I see the time. It’s eleven: AM.
In the kitchen there is a note on the table.
“I did not wish to disturb you,” the note says, in Leona’s curt and customary style. “See you in seven days. Don’t forget the rats.”
I pick the note up and crumple it in my hand. “Right,” I say, tossing it at the garbage can. “You take care of the rats.”
I am afraid to go into the cellar, so I get dressed, drive to the store and buy wine. I spend the rest of the day doing the best thing a man can do for a hangover: getting drunk. By midnight I fall into bed, and when I sleep my Leona is there, drifting above me, melding into my arms. My beautiful Leona, My soft sweet Leona. Come to me.
I am awakened suddenly by the sound of metal scraping against dry pebbly soil.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
And I am suddenly sure that it is not rats.
Scrape, scrape, scrape. How could it be? Rats do not make industrial sounds. The fear wants to stop my heart cold in my chest. I try not to let it. I lay there all sweaty, panicky, my breath ragged in my lungs. I do not dare move as those sounds completely invade my senses. I pull the pillow up over my ears and scream, but still it does not go away.
It has been nearly a week now and the sound has not stopped.
Scrape, scrape, scrape, it goes, all day and all night in a never ending cacophony of grating noise that fills my senses and has most probably taken my sanity. The image of my young, beautiful Leona has stopped as well, and for that I am sorry. As much as I hate to admit it, I really miss her. The laundry’s piling up and I’m running low on wine. I don’t want to go down there, but I know I must eventually. The demon is waiting for me; I know that as well, and sooner or later I will have to face it.
Finally, when I can stand it no longer, I get my gun out of the drawer in the desk, and I go to the cellar door, open it, and walk carefully down the steps. At the bottom I switch on that dusty light, glance furtively around me looking for the demon that lives there in the dark bowels of my existence.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
At first I do not see anything because my eyes haven’t adjusted to the dim light.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
But then I look down and see the dried blood on the cracked concrete floor, and the drag marks across the dust that covers the hard-packed clay of the crawl space. And the shovel is there, lying askew in the dirt. And then I see the mound of loose clay where the hole has been dug and refilled, and Leona’s shattered wing-tip glasses are lying there in the dusty clay as if they have been angrily stepped on. I look stupidly down at the gun in my hand, open the chamber and notice that only five of the cylinders are occupied with live rounds. I look back into the crawlspace searching for that peripheral movement. But now I don’t see it. And finally, thankfully, that scraping sound has stopped. Leona was right about one thing. She said I was nuts, and I refused to believe her, but now, dear God in heaven, I can see that she was right.