Don't Call Me Dead

16. Dirty Laundry

I come out of the hut into the sunshine, holding the old dented wash tub. I shield my eyes from the sun and look around for Marvin. He's nowhere to be seen. I proceed to the drying rope stretched between two trees.

"Morning," Marvin says, appearing from behind one of them.

I jump in surprise, and the tub slips out of my hands. He steps forwards swiftly and catches it before it hits the ground. I gasp, then burst into nervous laughter. He straightens up, smiling, and hands the tub back to me. I take it, and then pause, my smile fading away.

This isn't right. We shouldn't be laughing together, like a normal couple. There's nothing normal about us. He's a madman, and I'm his prisoner.

"How do you like it?" he says, still smiling, pointing at his chin. It's only then that I realize that his beard is gone.

With a clean-shaven face, he looks surprisingly young. I always thought of him as middle aged, but now, it seems he may be still in his twenties. He also seems to have brushed his hair. In fact, now he looks almost...handsome.

I kick myself for thinking that. What's wrong with me? He's a nutcase, and a criminal.

"You don't like it?" he says as I stand there, taking in the changes. "You said I looked like a tramp, so I shaved it off." He looks at me, something surprisingly vulnerable in his stare. "You gave birth to my baby even though you didn't want to. I shaved my beard even though I didn't want to. See, as long as we compromise, we can make it work."

My mind boggles at the comparison, as it often does when I try to follow his trail of thought. And as usual, I choose to just ignore his twisted logic and stick to the facts.

"You look younger like this," I say.

He grins, visibly pleased. "Right? That's what I thought." He takes the wash tub from me again, puts it on the ground and retrieves one of the hand-made baby overalls out of it. He reaches up and hangs it on the rope. "Let me help."

"Not like that, it will dry crumpled." I reach out to straighten the overall. Our hands brush, and I jerk mine away.

He looks at me, frowning. "Then teach me how to do it right," he says. "It's important in a family to help each other."

I pause, turning to him. "Where does all this stuff come from? All those ideas you keep talking about, relationships and family and such?"

He picks another wet overall and spreads it carefully on the rope.

"Mom's books," he says, without looking at me. "After she went to a better place, I read them all. She left many books on how to make it work. "

"Make what work?"

"Family." He throws a sideways glance my way before continuing to hang the laundry. "Family is the most important thing ever. She and Dad wanted to create this settlement, where there would only be family members. There would be no need for us to be slaves to anyone, you know? Just hunt and live from the land. They'd have many children, then their children would have many children, and so on. Just the family, no outsiders."

Having a family with no outsiders would require some serious inbreeding, but he seems completely unaware of the problem. I meet his blue gaze, and struggle with the now too familiar sensation of not quite knowing how to handle his logic. The guy seriously believes there's nothing wrong with what he's telling me, but how could he know otherwise if nobody ever told him? If the only influence he has ever had was his weird father and his mother who, for some reason, only wanted to 'make things work'?

The same goes for "helping" backpackers drown. His nutshell dad taught him that that was the right thing to do to the outsiders stumbling in. Could Marvin be blamed for not knowing better, given that he'd never been exposed to a different perspective? On the other hand, not realizing he's a criminal doesn't change the fact.

"So, why didn't the settlement work?" I say.

He pauses with another little wet outfit in his hands.

"You see, sis was born, and then I," he says, "and then, Mom couldn't have more babies. She thought they should go see a doctor about it, but Dad said we couldn't leave the forest, because a few backpackers drowned already so the cops would have gotten him. But as the time passed, he was getting angrier and angrier, because we were no settlement, just a lousy bunch of four living in the woods." He sighs and shakes his head. "One day, when I was ten, and sis was twelve, he and Mom had a big row. He said he could have more babies with sis, but Mom said it was wrong.

"They had a real big fight that night," he continues. "And Mom shouted to sis to run, and she ran. Then Dad hit Mom, like he did sometimes, but this time he hit her real hard on the head, and she fell and she didn't move." His hands clutch the the tiny overall so hard his knuckles are white. "Dad went to look for sis, and I looked for her, too, but we didn't find her." He glances at me and I'm surprised to see tears in his eyes. "She knew the swamps real good, but it was dark, and she was scared, you know? We never found her. I only found her shoe."

I look in shock as his face distorts and tears come streaming down his cheeks. "He was wrong," he gasps in between the sobs. "He was wrong to do that, to treat us like that, because that's not how families work, okay? So when he fell asleep I took that knife and I just hit him with it. I hit him many, many times, because he was wrong." He wipes his face with his sleeve, as I watch, dumbstruck. "And then I buried him, and Mom, and...well, I never found sis, but I buried the shoe..." He trails off and then, somehow, he's sobbing in my arms, and I pat his back, and, against all my better judgement, I feel sorry for him.