Gabriel Welsch
In 1977, in the mock Tudor home across the street from us, a man bludgeoned his wife to death with a heavy pipe wrench. According to the news reports at the time, he killed her with only three blows to the head. On the third blow, her head gaped open like a collapsed berry pie.
I do not need to know this. The woman next to me in Capri pants crossed her legs and her face appeared impassive behind enormous sunglasses as she told me this.
“We had just moved here from Montana,” she said, “so my husband could work for Westinghouse. He’s an engineer. I watched carefully for a week to see if he was carrying anything when he walked into our kitchen.”
I didn’t know what to say. How was she making the leap to a random murder meaning her husband, by virtue of his being an engineer, might try to kill her? And if it was a joke, why was she not acting like it, and did she really think it was funny?
Before I could figure out what to say, she said, “It was a stressful time. Maybe I’m just thinking that way because of how people these days know so much about stress. I’m not sure we understood it all that well then. I just knew I didn’t want the baby to cry when he came home.”
Her husband sat behind her, also wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses, his head covered by a cap with PEBBLE BEACH embroidered on it.
My husband got up and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. He was getting a beer. “Bring me and the kids some waters.”
The kids were in the bounce house, sweating in the glare of the July sun. Around them on the recently mowed vacant lot hovered clouds of gnats through which children would pass as they played. You could locate the swarms by the way children swatted as they ran, and then stopped.
“We are in that stressful time,” I said, thinking of a way to move to another topic. “We just moved here ourselves, from Massachusetts.”
She nodded.
“People are very nice here,” I said. “That’s a change.”
She said, “People say it’s like the Midwest here. Only people from the east coast would think that. I find people are pretty short and abrupt here.”
I wished my husband would hurry up.
***
In the mid-1980s, in the ranch four doors down from us, a woman pushed her husband down the basement steps. He had Parkinson’s. She claimed they had agreed that when the time came she was to make it look accidental but was to ensure he was not a burden.
“How did they know he didn’t actually fall?”
The woman shrugged. Her husband said, “Angles and so forth. You know, they actually can tell from how a body is positioned what may actually have happened.”
She put a hand on my arm. “Their son is the one who started asking questions,” she said. “The man had gotten to the point that any kind of moving was difficult. The police said it looked like he had jumped down the stairs. He could hardly walk as it was.”
“The son didn’t know about the deal,” the husband said. I couldn’t tell if he approved or not.
“I would never want to be a burden,” she said, “but I also don’t think I would want that kind of help.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. They both started laughing.
My father had started talking about not being a burden. He had a whole woodshop full of options. I pushed the ghastly thoughts from my head.
“My husband’s work has him negotiating a lot of family deals and surprises,” I said. “He is an attorney and sets up estates and trusts and things.”
The husband said, “I oughta talk to him. Is he any good?”
What did he think I would say? Yes. Good enough that I plan not to push him down the stairs.
“Many of his clients have been with him now for almost two decades,” I said.
I then pictured someone in my husband’s office. A son, a good son, with a family, coming and saying to Brian, I am just not sure what to do because the police are asking questions and I am not sure my mom is being honest. What does he do then? How does he counsel that man? How does he act as the man’s face begins to tighten, his jaw quivering?
***
Two years ago, in a brick colonial at the end of the development’s furthest cul de sac, a man came home to discover his wife in their bedroom, vomiting and woozy. Next to her on the nightstand was an empty pill jar and a suicide note. In it, she blamed him for ruining her life.
For reasons not wholly elucidated by the husband’s testimony, he rolled her over, placed a pillow over her face, and smothered her to death. When questioned by the police, who he called in shock shortly afterward, he said he did so because he “wanted to help her finish the job.”
Brian said, “This neighborhood is like some little town on Murder, She Wrote. A lot of people buy the farm here.” He forced a laugh. I could not believe his statement.
The husband chuckled and adjusted his hat. The wife uncrossed her legs and recrossed them. “I don’t know that it’s that bad,” she said. “We’ve just lived here a long time.”
“I’m amazed you’ve survived,” Brian said. All three of them had a great chortle over that.
“We talk a lot,” she said. Her husband reached forward and put a hand on her shoulder. She patted it.
Brian did not look at me.
I had run a lab at Worcester Polytech. We studied growth hormone, and specifically its effects in near-zero gravity environments. I dealt with men from all over the world and, as a result, dealt with attitudes from barbaric to barely enlightened to ostentatiously virtuous-but-lacking. One senior professor would not address me directly, and always asked a junior researcher to share information with me—even while I stood there.
One of the men there had his fiancé enter the lab one afternoon and hurl an engagement ring at him, announcing to everyone how he had been fucking one of the grad students.
Across the lab and mostly obscured from view by equipment, that student, the participant in the illicit fucking, put down her pipette gun and walked out of the lab unnoticed by the fiancé. We never saw her again.
I left ultimately because my own husband at the time had decided also to fuck a graduate student. When I saw the episode with the ring-flinging former fiancé, something clicked in my mind. I took a few weeks to observe and confirm my insight.
Later, we sat together and I shared what I knew, the way we might discuss buying a house. I had already packed. I had already secured a new apartment in Pittsburgh, closer to my family. I had already ensured I would have a safe place to go and people who knew my plans. He protested, but was overall docile in the face of my calm and my logic. I do not know quite how I did it, given the betrayal I felt, but I did it.
I left and worked in a wholly different job. I met Brian. I moved on. But as I listened to Capri Pants tell her stories and considered my neighbors and the press of traffic just down the hill and the baking heat of the day and the softening of my vision due to the wine I had started to consume, I felt less a disgust at what they were sharing and more of a thrill.
I had a thrill because I wondered what Brian was assuming I was thinking.
***
In May of 2004, in a dilapidated bungalow just before the entrance to our neighborhood, a man first beheaded his wife’s cat and threw the corpse at her and then attempted to stab her to death. Despite fourteen wounds and significant blood loss, she lived. He had left her for dead and left town for several days. A neighbor coming to pick lettuce from their garden saw her bloody leg through the screen door and called 911 soon enough that she lived.
“Bet he forgot all about that salad,” Pebble Beach said. He burst into guffaws at his little joke.
“I don’t know,” Brian said. “At some point appetite returned and he had to eat something.”
Capri Pants re-crossed her legs and huffed a little chuckle.
“I’m going to check on the kids.” I stood too quickly and needed to take a moment to right my balance, to the delight of those still in the lawn chairs, but then strode out to the bounce house with as much calm as I could contain.
They were ruddy from the heat of the day and maybe a touch of sunburn, though I had greased them each to the point of their round faces becoming those of mimes on their little bodies. They stopped to talk with me, chests heaving from having just stopped running and bouncing. So physical suddenly, so substantial, their arms and legs meaty. I asked if they were having a good time and they both nodded vigorously. I asked if they had had any water and they both told me they had juice. No, you need water, I said, and sent them off to get it.
Though the street was closed, my son took his younger brother’s hand and helped him cross to where the coolers were, under a tent where a few dads monitored which people took beers and who took sodas. A few older kids, teenagers, hovered nearby, and I imagined them waiting for a break in the vigilance as the sun set.
It is safe here, I muttered, more loudly than I realized. A man next to me in a Steelers t-shirt said, “It really is. I love this neighborhood. You don’t need to lock your doors, everybody knows everyone. Schools are good.”
An abnormal number of murders happen here. Between spouses. Whether doors are locked or not. But whatever.
I said, “Well, I don’t know your name, and I am pretty sure you don’t know mine.” I meant it to be funny. Then I earnestly wished it to be funny.
He looked caught between a grin and a grimace. “Yeah. So, well, I’m Chaz. We live down at the far cul-de-sac.”
I introduced myself, said, “Those are my kids.”
He pointed out his, then pointed out his wife, standing with some other moms. They all wore skinny jeans with little tears in them. Each woman had highlights. Their sunglasses all had little rhinestone things on them.
Pebble Beach roared with laughter and I saw Brian standing doing some sort of pantomime. Chaz looked toward him as well. “These parties are always a trip,” he said. “It’s nice to sort of meet the real people in all these houses.”
I wanted to say did that woman tell you about all the murders? But in the spirit of the moment and the place, I suppressed the urge.
I wondered if I would say something to Brian.
***
The woman who ran the neighborhood association had a bad back story, I was told. By that point in the afternoon, I was ready to hear that she siphoned off funds from the accounts used to mow median strips and pave streets and had used them to put out a hit on her husband so she could run off with a trainer. Capri Pants had no such story.
Evidently the bad back story was merely that she was on her third husband and the neighborhood wives hated her because she exercised constantly and her newest husband bought her huge fake boobs. Seemed to me the husband deserved more criticism, but I kept that thought to myself. Capri Pants appeared ready to add to the story.
I waited, and nothing more came.
Brian surprised me and said, “What? She didn’t kill someone or their pet?”
“Well, no. Of course not. Why would you think that?”
I caught Brian’s eye and understood that we had An Understanding.
Pebble Beach said, “Actually, it makes sense. All you’ve been doing is talking about people getting killed here. It makes sense. And maybe she did kill her past husbands. That’s what you have to do to live here!” Haw haw haw and the hat jiggling.
“They should call it Homicide Heights!” Brian said. Everyone chortled.
“That’s her husband,” Capri Pants said, nodding her forehead in the direction of Chaz. Of course. I had not noticed anything out of the ordinary about his wife when he pointed her out. She looked like all the others.
“What do the people who live here do? Most work in the city?” I asked.
“Mostly school teachers and healthcare. You know, PAs, a few docs, nurses and such, some administrative folks,” she said. “We’re real close to Allegheny Health Network here.”
These murderers teach school children.
***
Just after Christmas in 2016, a man who lived in the lower end of the neighborhood and worked as a state trooper arrived home having participated in a funeral procession for a fallen comrade. His wife tried to keep things quiet, keep the kids orderly, knowing that such moments were taxing for her husband. When she dropped a plate and it shattered on their newly tiled floor, she arose from cleaning it only to be flattened by her husband’s open palm against her head. After fleeing the room, she encountered him again when he pursued her to their bedroom, where she waited with a handgun. She shot him in the face when he charged toward her.
From jail, missing her children who were then with his mother, she wrote a letter to the editor of the paper, saying she knew that the police force would wear black armbands, speak of her husband’s courage, speak of how they risked their lives every day, and stare down all the people who have reasonable questions of why good troopers protect thugs and bigots in their midst, and why we accept it.
She wrote, “Imagine the people you knew in high school who wanted to become cops. Now realize that most of them did. Does that make you feel safe?”
Pebble Beach said, “Just because she married a bad apple doesn’t mean they’re all bad. We have to respect our boys in blue.”
I expected Capri Pants to nod. Her mouth just pursed, slightly. She went back to placid as she told the rest of the story.
Death threats followed and she left town. No one knew where she ended up. The home was on the market for a long time before a Pakistani surgeon and her husband purchased the property.
Capri Pants said, “They never come to these things.”
Pebble Beach said, “They are pretty stand-offish. I actually don’t understand it. This is a great neighborhood.”
Brian says, “I’ll go check on the kids.”
Our kids were being well checked on today.
I noticed Chaz’s wife at the beer coolers. As she bent to grab a beer, every man there followed her movements. I saw then, as she rose, what her top revealed, what Chaz paid for her to wear about in view of others. One of the men took a long draw on his beer, looking at her while lost in the most predictable patterns of thought, as the others tried to talk to her.
I’d seen this before, of course. And heat was a factor, and the greasy hot dogs and the dislocated fog of being out of the usual surroundings, but nausea hit me. Not overwhelming, but creepy, more slowly, like the way their gazes lingered. When I tried to stand, I did so too quickly, and instead of just wobbling that time I truly fell back into the chair.
Pebble Beach roared, “Ha! Get her another beer!”
I saw Brian pause in his stride. His left shoulder dropped as if he were about to turn, as if he may have wanted to listen for whether I said anything, and then he resumed walking, toward our children who so desperately needed his checking once again. It was a hesitation only I would have noticed. He did not, and would not, know that I saw it.
***
By all accounts, the people from whom we had purchased our house were nice. The home was initially purchased by a single man who worked out of Raleigh but spent a lot of time in Pittsburgh. He had planned to fix it up and flip it, as he had done to a few other properties in the area. The neighbors commented on how he always was working on the place.
He met a woman and they were married about six months before we then bought the place. Their son, almost two, lived in a room painted like a baseball stadium. Their next child, on the way, the husband had already decided would be more of a football player.
When he showed us the house, he spoke of her—specifically of her. “This room is really her space.” “The décor is all hers.” We even met her once, but it was not until the closing documents that we learned her name.
As we painted the house in the week before the furniture arrived, undoing the various painstaking treatments she had applied in the rooms, and considered how often her husband traveled, I wondered what it felt like to be thrust suddenly into caring for a home that was never intended to remain hers, and how thoroughly she had pursued making it into a home.
In the yard, we found little piles of cigarette butts everywhere, determining the husband’s favorite places to smoke. We found BBs strewn under the side of the pockmarked shed, an old can in their midst. Old yard waste bags stacked in the shed gave me a fright on the first day because they looked like a naked person hunched in the shadows. I couldn’t explain it, but his presence around that house felt like a threat to me, as though we now owned something never meant for us, and were trespassing on something hidden.
As the block party started to wind down, all of the detritus around our new home—the cigarette buts, the BBs, the painted walls, the hasty drywall fixes we found, the bruises on the master bedroom door, the cracked light switch plate in the upstairs hall—all of it made it difficult to see the damage as regular. What she had wanted to be a home felt suddenly a vacated lair.
“Did you know the people who owned our house?” I asked.
“Guy’s name was Tim,” Pebble Beach said. “Can’t remember hers.”
“Didn’t see much of her,” Capri Pants said. “We’d see Tim sometimes when we walked, out in the yard. Or walking his dog.”
“He’s in the Carolinas now, right?” Pebble Beach said.
I confirmed. They—or perhaps he, and she followed—moved there for a promotion he took that required him to be at the main office regularly. I found myself thinking, good thing. Otherwise, I could imagine a future party. There was a couple in that nice Cape Cod and she was killed with a BB gun, a freak shot to the neck that ended up lethal. Husband was a hard worker, seemed like a nice guy. Stress must have cracked him.
***
In the early nineties, a man drove home from work as freezing rain started to fall. As with so many driveways in Pittsburgh, the slope from curb to garage was steep, and at this home it went downhill. As he crested the drive, his car slid down into and through the garage door, killing his wife who, at that moment, had been in the garage to get a wrench.
“People say enough ice hadn’t really fallen,” Capri Pants said. “Or that he should have been going a little slower, knowing his own driveway.”
“You know they actually didn’t have anti-lock brakes in a lot of cars then,” Pebble Beach said.
I thought about the ambiguities there. A home can surprise you. The weather can turn. What you think you know can be wrong in more ways than you understand. Not everything we say has more than one meaning, but you can find other meanings if you look for them. The person you sleep next to is, indeed, a whole other person.
I observed once to my first husband, with some delight, that I would sometimes look at him and realize that we were two entirely different people, and it would ripple through me in ways that felt good—a reminder of how we knit together. In the times after we parted when I have experienced that feeling, it scared me.
When we drove through the neighborhood the day before making an offer on our new home, we saw families walking, dogs playing, a few basketball hoops, a cluster of bikes dropped in front of the door at a home with a pool, and it looked like the neighborhoods I remembered, the ones where we grew up. I said as much, even though I had learned to be suspicious of optimism. Brian, who had grown up in an apartment and whose parents were by then deceased, described it as a place he had always imagined.
“I can’t wait,” he said. “Think about it—all those homes, those families. All those stories.”
I almost said to him then, we can learn them together. It made me feel like a greeting card, and I knew we would get a few of those. So, I said nothing. Just pictured labels forwarding mail to a new address. Newspapers at the end of the driveway piling up over a long weekend. What would people think.
#
Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.