A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me by Jason Schmidt

Author:Jason Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374380144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

37

It was around this time that Crazy Mike caught up with Olive in Seattle. It could have been worse. Calliope could have been home when it happened. But at thirteen she was an early bloomer. She was out of the country with her boyfriend when Mike showed up on their doorstep. The way Dad told me the story, Mike took his time with Olive. He beat her in every room of the house. Broke her jaw and some ribs, and knocked out all her teeth. He beat her until he got hungry, then he went into the kitchen to get something to eat. Olive was a tall skinny thing, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, but she had the constitution of a vending machine. When Mike left her in the living room, she got up and went after him.

She hit him with an antique iron. Back before electric irons were invented, people used an actual slug of iron to press their clothes; eight or nine pounds, shaped like a boat, with a long curved handle that was designed to stay cool when the main body of the iron had been heated up in a fireplace or over a stove. Olive had a couple of them around the house, as quaint preindustrial decorations and conversation pieces. While Mike was digging through her refrigerator, she picked one up off the bookshelf, walked up behind him, swung it from down low, over her head, and down as hard as she could—tip-first, right into the top of Mike’s skull.

“It didn’t even knock him down,” Dad said. “He just turned around and looked at her and started kicking her ass all over again.”

The iron didn’t kill him, but it did give him a vicious cut on top of his head, and beating the shit out of Olive was hard work. Mike’s heart really got going. As he dragged her around the house, kicking her and punching her, gouts of blood shot four feet out of the top of his head, spraying across the walls and the furniture. In some places, it was splashed on the ceiling. Between the two of them, they pretty much repainted the apartment.

By that time, Mike had been working Olive over for quite a while, and Will, the late-night crying masturbator, happened to come by for a social call. Will was half Mike’s size, but he carried a straight razor in his boot. He went after Mike with the knife and splashed more blood around the apartment. Mike ran away. Will got Olive into a hospital and put the word out to all our people to be on the lookout for Mike.

“When’s Calliope coming home?” I asked, when Dad was done telling me the story.

“Next week,” Dad said.

“When’s Olive getting out of the hospital?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Dad said. “Be a lot longer than a week though.”

* * *

I caught a bus over there a few days after Calliope came home. I found her in her room, cleaning blood off her comic book collection.

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