It's a Dirty Job

It's a Dirty Job

I normally like to write stories that are at least close to credible about everyday people faced with difficult situations. This is not one of those times. I suspect that the protagonist is a high-functioning psychopath or is simply broken beyond repair by the circumstances of his life, but I didn't set out to write him that way.

This is a dark, dark tale with extreme violence. I had one thing in mind and the image called to me until I wrote it out. I think you'll know it when you get to it. Please forgive me the violence. There are times when it takes a pen to exorcise the demons. This is, after all, just a piece of fiction.

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I know it must say something about my personality. Maybe it's the guilt my parents used to keep me in line as a child. Maybe it was just my nature. All I know is that even as a kid there were some nights when I would wake up with the most horrible nightmare that I've committed some terrible crime and it's just a matter of time before they come for me. I knew my guilt, I knew the evidence was out there, and I knew I'd get caught. My heart would race and I'd sit bolt upright from a dead sleep and struggle to get back to sleep. The funny thing is I don't have those dreams anymore.

When I met my wife, she was sweet and loving, she giggled when I made a joke, and she won my mother over the first time they'd met. We were married twelve years and all was well those first few years until about six months after our first child, a daughter, was born. That was when she began to change. It was gradual at first and it took years. We had a second child, a son, born two years later. That seemed to cement her new personality, and with every passing year it got worse.

She grew ill-tempered with me and would take sniping shots at the kids. Let's just say that motherhood did not agree with my wife. I tried to talk with her about it more times than I can remember, but those attempts only led to arguments that she would manufacture. I eventually gave up any attempt to fix a marriage broken by forces unknown and we lived two parallel lives. If you asked me what I did to deserve it, I'd be at a loss to answer. She was just an unhappy woman, never satisfied with what she had, and always wanting more.

As the children grew, she found more reasons to be out of the house. These were her distractions, and they grew more numerous with the passing years. I would get home from work and pass my wife in the hall as she was headed out. "You need to fix dinner. I'm going out!" Big surprise. It got so that I viewed those words as a gift. The nights she went out were calm in the house. It was the nights she stayed in that I resented.

I fixed most dinners and I did the food shopping. I knew what was in the fridge and I planned the week's meals. As the children grew older, they gravitated toward me as I became both mother and father to them both. You know, that's just not right. A father hopes his children will be happy to greet him when he gets home, but he knows that their mother is the center of their little lives. My kids seemed to hide in their rooms until I got home and then would burst forth to play with their dad.

I felt I didn't know her anymore. Her mother had cheated on her father and turned her betrayal into a lifestyle. My wife saw what it did to him. His wife threatened to take the kids away, so he stayed, and he suffered until they went off to college, and then he left. My wife saw the pain that her mother's betrayal caused and swore she would never become her mother. That was another vow broken.

The beginning of the end arrived one night in late March. The kids were in bed and my wife came into the living room to utter those words that have made the blood of husbands turn cold for generations, "David, we need to talk." She didn't even call me "Honey". Like a school teacher instructing a wayward child, she explained to me that she would start spending her nights with her lover. It came as no news to me, and as with her nights out I accepted the news with relief. In my wife's case, less was definitely more. I had long ago taken to sleeping in the guest room and her absence would only make our lives less stressful.

At first, I thought she took my acceptance as a victory, but before she left the room I thought I detected a note of disappointment. Was she trying to inflict pain? Did she want me to beg her not to stray? To my thinking, she was just admitting what I had long known, and like her father I was staying for my children until they were raised and out of the house.

The next few months established the new normal and my children never even asked where there mother was. Had she told them? I doubt it. I think they were as relieved as me.

Spring came and I began the usual chores that come with warm weather. We spent a Saturday, my children and I, doing the spring cleaning, airing out the house, dusting and polishing. My wife had now begun to spend weekends away, which was a decision that I embraced. My two children worked hard that day, and I was as proud of them as a parent could be. We celebrated our hard work that night with cheeseburgers and root beer floats.

In the weeks after that I did the things that the children were too young to do. I rehung a shutter that a wind storm had torn from the house. With the windows now open in the warm spring air, I repainted the living and dining rooms along with the entryway. I replaced exterior trim boards that were losing their battle to rot and replaced some weather stripping that was past its prime. Together, we prepared the garden for summer. We had become a family of three.

I do try to maintain the house myself as best I can, but there are some tasks I do not do. I bring in professionals to clean the furnace every fall, and I have the septic truck drain the septic tank every spring. That has got to be the worst job on the planet! They dig up a bit of sod to uncover the lid and then they lower that big hose into the tank of filth until they suck it dry. Even on my worst day on the job, I have a better day that that! They do a fairly good job of restoring the patch of yard where they dig out the septic lid, but you can still see the dirt and mangled sod for a few weeks after.

It was the following Friday night. I knew the kids were with their grandparents for the weekend. I had long ago informed my parents of my wife's activities and they felt it their job to give the grandchildren the occasional weekend of fun as their way of making sure the kids felt loved. My children adored their grandparents.

I came home with carry out expecting an empty house and a quiet evening, but I was met with something very different. In the living room sat my wife and her latest distraction. She was flaunting her affair and he was drinking my good scotch. I didn't give a damn about the affair, but the scotch pissed me off! I stood before them as she giggled and he snickered, and then the lecture began. He was spending the weekend and they would be sleeping in what had once been our bed. She explained that I could watch if I wanted, and for some reason she found that to be terribly funny.

It finally occurred to me as she spoke that it seemed she had a need to systematically escalate her betrayal year after year as if she no longer got a thrill from any existing attempts to belittle me and needed to find new and more exciting ways to destroy me. I wondered where this would lead as if the question posed some abstract academic exercise. I felt nothing for her and little to no pain from her betrayal, but I wondered what I would need to do to protect my children?

I said nothing. I suppose she thought that I was speechless, rendered submissive and surprised by the depth of her depravity, but the truth is that I was trying to decide whether I gave a damn. I had long ago accepted that the woman I'd married was dead. She stood, dropped her dress in front of me to reveal her naked form, and then walked laughingly up the stairs to her bedroom. He walked alongside her and snatched my dinner from my hand. I suppose at that moment I was a wimp, but I had come to find both her and her toys to be so far beyond contempt that they were not worth the effort of confronting them.

At least, I would have ignored them had he not done one more thing that was too much for me to ignore. He bitch-slapped me as he walked by. He laughed and a switch inside me was thrown. I've looked back on that moment many times and wondered why I let that one act change everything. I didn't care if he fucked my wife. She was nothing to me. She was already used goods. He could even take my dinner. I'd go out, instead, and spend the weekend with my children. But the slap was the last straw. I sat in a chair and I planned.

I listened to their first round and I'm sure they were deliberate in their groans and screams. It was all for my benefit and presumed humiliation. I continued to plan as the sun went down. I had a bat by the door. It would be swift and quiet. They started in on round two. Unsatisfied by my lack of response, they were even louder. I refined my plans. I had plastic sheets from the garage that I used for painting cloths and old cloth sheets that I used to absorb the small splatters of paint.

I knew I could be almost guaranteed of secrecy tonight. The moon was down and the sky was overcast. Without starlight and if I kept the house lights off, I could work in the dark. With a shovel from the garage and the lovers suitably distracted, I removed the sod taking care to keep it as intact as possible. Then I dug through the earth and opened the septic tank.

Round three started well after midnight. With the sound of their exaggerated passions masking my efforts, I got the bat by the door and tested my overhead swing so as not to strike the ceiling. When I was ready, I made my way up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom. How mundane, they were doing it missionary style. With all their noise I would have thought them more adventurous.

Without warning I struck him in the back of the head, slamming his head into hers. He was out and she was moaning a very different tune from just seconds ago. A second overhead swing and she was quiet. I was lucky. I had not cracked their skulls but had just knocked them unconscious. I bound their hands and feet with zip ties, although they never regained consciousness, as I worked quickly to complete my task.

I was committed now. One at a time, I carried them outside. I took him first. With his head hanging over the open tank, I slit his throat and slipped him into the filth with more of a thud than a splash. She was second and for a moment I hesitated. My mind was awash with memories of the woman I fell in love with, of dating, and the night I proposed. I remembered standing together before God and family as we took our vows, and then I slit her throat and cast her into the darkness with her lover. Last, I dropped the knife into the tank rather than risk not being able to clean the blood from the hinge or the blade. I closed the tank, shoveled the dirt over the lid, and placed the sod with care until the ground appeared as it had before. I didn't trust my shirt to be clean of blood, so I burned it in the fire pit out back. I showered, washed my clothes, and dressed. With the dirty business behind me, I took a flashlight and began to examine every inch of the bed, hallway, and stairs. Weeks later I would remember that shovel and the messy business of cutting their throats. You always forget something. I found blood on the handle, so I burned the wood and washed the steel in bleach before I threw it in the dump.

I had one more task to perform before the sun came up. I got his keys and drove his car to the worst part of town, and I left it there. I walked back and threw the keys into the sewer one at a time starting about a mile from where I left the car. It was a long walk on a dark night, but I went unnoticed. I was, after all, just another man on a street of faceless men.

When the sun came up, I went over the house again. I was lucky. I was very lucky. If I had cracked their skulls, I would probably never have gotten the house clean again. As it was, I never used the plastic sheets.

My parents brought the kids home Sunday evening in time for me to prepare dinner for five. What was it? Why, it was cheeseburgers and root beer floats of course! My mother commented on my good mood and I simply said, "I had a free weekend and now my sweethearts are home."

My mother asked, "When is SHE getting home?"

"Hell if I know. Hell if I care." That was all I said and all that she needed.

Monday I called in sick and took boxes of her clothes to Good Will shops in several neighboring towns. I tossed her cosmetics at the public dump inside a bag of kitchen trash and her jewelry inside another bag. That last bit was hard to do, but I figured that is where I could slip up. Besides, I'd stopped giving her jewelry a long time ago, and what I tossed was just more evidence of her many betrayals.

I figured it would be a few days before her employer called to ask about her absence. It was two. I told them that I hadn't heard from her. Then I took the one gift she'd left me which was the truth, and I went to the police station to fill out a missing person's report. When they questioned me about why I waited so long, I told them the sad story of my wife's long-standing betrayal and how I figured she was just off with her latest distraction. I told them that I hadn't been alarmed until her employer called me.

They asked me the name of her current boyfriend and I just stared at them. I projected my best version of "You must be dumber than shit!" and finally said, "Do you really think that I want to know his name? I decided a long time ago that she had her life and I have mine, and I will divorce the slut when my children are grown." I guess they accepted my answer.

Two weeks later they came to my door and told me that the best they could figure she ran off with her latest fuck toy. I just nodded, said, "Good riddance", and ended our brief discussion with, "If you do find her, could you warn me?" They seemed to appreciate the joke, and I never saw them again.

That was five years ago and they've been five of the best years of my life. I waited a year and got a divorce claiming abandonment. The kids asked a few times about their mother, but they seemed content that she was gone and never cried a tear. Yes, I will admit that every time I have the tank sucked I worry a little, but I guess the flesh rots and the bones stay on the bottom. I do say a little prayer of thanks that they were naked when I disposed of them. The last thing I need is to have a shirt or a pair of pants come up and clog that truck's pump! I'd have a hard time explaining that, unless, of course, the truck's owner is divorced.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to use the toilet. Never have I enjoyed the bathroom as much as I do now, and when I flush the toilet I picture my gift flowing down the pipe and into the final resting place of my cheating slut and her last distraction.

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I couldn't help myself. The mental image of dropping a cheating wife and her boy toy into a tank of filth was just too delightful to ignore. As always, these are just stories. I don't recommend using this as a manual for ending an unhappy marriage. Divorce is cheaper than prison and it's true that we always forget something. For instance, when I wrote this, I forgot that the protagonist probably left blood around the lid to the concrete septic tank and from his hands in the grass and soil around the lid. That's going to remain for years to come. There was probably micro-splatter in the bed and bat. Sooner or later, something was going to come up from that tank to reveal his crime. I'm sure there's more. We are never as clever as we like to think, which takes me back to the nightmares I mentioned at the beginning of the story.

Now that I've exorcised that demon, I think I'll turn back to finishing a happier story for the Romance section.