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Uncle Leo’s Maid

Steve Doran

    Hildireth was swatting at a fly when she knocked the photo frame off Uncle Leo’s coffee table. It was a photo of Uncle Leo. The first time she saw it, she frowned at the hubris required to believe this was not a tasteless display. At least he was holding a fish. The glass in the frame broke when it hit the floor. The fly was a fat blue one. It buzzed up to the ceiling. Hildireth removed the broken glass and placed the frame where it had been, hoping Leo wouldn’t notice long enough she could deny breaking it. She stood on the coffee table and swatted the fly, which she swept under the rug. Leo had issued her the fly swatter and she had accepted it. Her first job was getting rid of the regular filth flies, the blue and green ones with the shitty feet. Second, she would go after the fruit fly cloud over the sink, and afterward, the cockroaches. The cockroaches had become brazen, no longer scurrying. Seeing a fat one promenading across the rug, she stepped on it, and imagined leaving Leo for good.
    Leo cruised in. Hildireth imagined tugboats steering him, while childhood memories of Leo returned to her, Leo as a slim, handsome terrorist, full of fun and murder. Now he was a middle-aged mountain, having expanded on the inside and weathered on the outside.
    “I heard a clatter,” Leo said.
    “Big flies,” Hildireth said.
    Leo nodded as if he understood perfectly. He was fingering the hand-mirror in his pocket. He would never take it out in front of her. He would wait until he was alone and then check his hair in it. Once, she had seen him in the bathroom smoothing dyed black strands over his bald spot.
    “I have decided to let you see Jack,” Leo said.
    “Thank you,” Hildireth said, outwardly tranquil while the news was electrifying her nerves.
    “After you see him,” Leo said, “will you stay on with me?”
    “I’ll stay.” Hildireth felt her eyes moistening.
    “Your words have brightened my day,” Leo said, the hope in his voice wasted on Hildireth.
    “When can I see him?” Hildireth said.
    “After you have finished the cockroaches,” Leo said.
    The house holding Jack was poorly constructed, in a poorly constructed neighbourhood. The porch was shaky. Hildireth knocked on the door, which was crookedly hung. She heard none of the usual house sounds, no footfall or dogs barking inside. When the door opened it didn’t squeak. It made cracking noises, as if no one had ever come through it. Warm air boiled out, the smell of cabbage curdling Hildireth’s breakfast. The man at the door was asymmetric, as if he had been dropped from a height. His head was tilted, as were his shoulders. His torso was twisted in one direction, his hips another, while his feet pointed at odd angles. The man said nothing.
    Hildireth spoke as bravely as she could, having no idea how a twisted terrorist liked to be addressed. “Leo sent me.”
    The man stepped to one side and pointed toward the end of the hallway.
    Hildireth wondered wildly if she were a naive animal stepping into a trap. When she began to move, the man flattened against the wall to avoid accidental contact. She guessed Leo had instructed him on how to treat her. As she walked past the asymmetric man, she looked at him. His eyes were full of a muzzled savagery, urges restrained by the force of fear.
    The doors in the hall were open. Jack was in the last room. He was chained to the radiator. Hildireth paused, asphyxiated. Jack was missing an ear. When he saw Hildireth, he made to stand, the chains stopping him short of upright, giving him a hunched appearance. When she went to him, she closed her eyes, imagining him before the kidnapping, when he was clean and bright and happy. She fell against him, admitting she didn’t care that he had changed. When he hugged her, she was home. He was her home, and she knew she would work forever to free him, and she knew Leo would be pleased, because Leo had intended that the visit rejuvenate her loyalty to him, which had been flagging lately.
    “If you want Leo to consider releasing you,” Hildireth said, “you must renounce your ideals.”
    “I can’t,” Jack said. “My ideals are all I have.”
    “You have me,” Hildireth said.
    “Of course,” Jack said. “I was talking about my sanity. Have you thought over my request?”
    “I was hoping you had forgotten about it,” Hildireth said.
    “It’s the only way I’ll get these chains unlocked,” Jack said.
    “You’re suggesting I submit to Leo,” Hildireth said. “How could you possibly want me after I’ve lain with him?”
    “I will live with it,” Jack said. “One time won’t spoil you.”
    “Then your talk of marrying a virgin was what, a joke?”
    “No,” Jack said, but you understand how the circumstances have changed.”
    “I do,” Hildireth said, thinking how Leo would never settle for one romp in the sack with her.
    Jack scrutinized her. “I’m trusting you to get me out of here.”
    “I will,” Hildireth said.
    The asymmetric man knocked on the open door. Hildireth and Jack parted without affection. The man led Hildireth along the hall and then outside, where he stood until she was out of sight.
    Uncle Leo wasn’t anyone’s uncle. He had adopted the title as part of an image he cultivated within the neighbourhood, the neighbours calling him Uncle Leo, partly out of respect for his ideals, though mostly for his reputation, which he wore like a cruel cologne.
    When Hildireth returned, Leo was softly singing a romantic ballad, probably cued by the sounds she made entering the house. He was at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of liquid that looked like water but wasn’t.
    “Did you see Jack?” Leo said.
    “Yes,” Hildireth said. “Thank you.”
    Leo smiled. “Have a drink with me.”
    “I don’t drink,” Hildireth said, which they both knew was a lie.
    “Maybe you’ll have one later,” Leo said. “I need you to run an errand for me.”
    “Of course,” Hildireth said.
    Leo pointed to a box on the counter beside the refrigerator. “It’s a gift for my daughter. I need you to take it to her. She’ll be at her mother’s house.”
    Hildireth picked up the box.
    “I’m going out for a while,” Leo said. “Can you start dinner when you get back?”
    “What would you like?” Hildireth said.
    “A nice surprise is what I would like,” Leo said.
    Hildireth left, thinking about Leo’s afternoon visits with the mistress he never talked about.
    Hildireth was younger than Leo’s daughter, which didn’t bother Hildireth because she was Leo’s maid, not one of his women, although the daughter treated her as if she were. The daughter lived with her mother in the house Leo had bought for them. The daughter answered the door and looked down at Hildireth, her expression a mocking, “Hi, whore.” Hildireth handed her the box. She tossed it on the lawn. She told Hildireth to pick it up. Hildireth left it where it was.
    Returning to Leo’s house, Hildireth put together a soup, making sure to throw in big pieces fat, the way Leo liked it.
    Leo came home freshly showered and smelling of hope. “You’re making a wonderful smell,” he said. “If my wife had been able to cook as well as you, I would never have left her.”
    Hildireth laid out a bowl, a spoon, and bread on a napkin.
    “Get yourself a bowl and join me,” Leo said.
    “I already ate,” Hildireth said, pouring the soup.
    Leo gave her a smile loaded with inevitability, and then he started eating.
    “Is there anything else you need from me today?” Hildireth said.
    Leo paused, putting the spoon in the bowl. He began humming the ballad he had been singing earlier, and then he returned to his soup. Hanging her apron, Hildireth walked out, shading her eyes against the late afternoon sun. She returned to her lonely apartment and made herself dinner, her thoughts returning to Jack, his missing ear, his request. She thought about her situation, wondering if she could ever do enough to cause Leo to release Jack. The idea was circling in her head while she ate a piece of tasteless meatloaf. When she finished, desert was a despondence inviting her to climb over her balcony railing and contemplate the ground below. That night, she didn’t sleep, her thoughts a cloud of flies that she was swatting one by one.
    The next afternoon, Leo returned from his mistress’s house unshowered and looking like a child denied his favourite candy. Hildireth turned to the oven and continued dropping chunks of fat into a pot bubbling on the stove. She felt the press of Leo’s stomach first, in the small of her back, and then his hands on her arms. She took time to ready herself, rehearsing her plan. When she turned to Leo, her playful smile initially shocked him, the shock changing to a triple grin if you counted his chins. Hildireth raised a piece of fat on the tip of a paring knife. Leo’s lips began quivering with gastric lust.
    “Before I feed you,” Hildireth said, “you have to answer a riddle.”
    Leo nodded, delighted at her change in demeanor.
    “The riddle is this, when an older man receives the attention of a young woman, what is the second thing he should feel?”
    They both laughed, knowing the first thing a man should feel was an erection.
    “And what is the second thing?” Hildireth said.
    Leo shrugged, his wet grin holding a desire for both the chunk of fat and for Hildireth.
    Hildireth said, “Open wide.” She placed the fat on Leo’s enormous tongue, then she said, “The second thing the older man should feel is suspicion.” She placed the tip of the paring knife in Leo’s eye while he was chewing.
    Leo was unsure what to do next. Should he stop chewing? Should he cover his eye? In the end, he swallowed the fat. He placed the heel of his hand against the eye-socket, as if hoping to hold in the fluid from his ruined eye, perhaps to refill it later. He was making a bleating sound, in a tone reminding Hildireth of the calves on her parents’ farm.
    Leo’s bulk was holding Hildireth against the oven. The heat from the stove-top element was stinging her back, and she could smell her apron strings burning. Hildireth prevented Leo from throttling her by stabbing at his other eye. Leo parried the thrust and Hildireth jabbed the knife in his ear. Leo clapped a hand over his ear, then returned it to his good eye, the paring knife pricking the back of his hand. Hildireth pushed the knife through the thick flesh on Leo’s neck into a spot where she thought his Adam’s apple might be. He spewed blood at her. She gave him a shove. He stumbled backward and sat down on the floor. Hildireth watched him, terrified, the man a sagging montage of blood and spit. Fighting a desire to run from the house, she stayed with Leo, waiting for his throat to swell and close. Leo was spraying healthy quantities of blood, and for a maddening time, he seemed as if he would go on forever.
    Hildireth began to plead with Leo. “I have worked for you so long and so well. If you feel any compassion for me, or just feel you owe me a debt, then please do this one thing. Please die.”
    As if he had heard her, Leo coughed and his head fell onto his chins. Hildireth knelt and took his hand, her finger tips on his wrist. “Thank you,” she said, pressing harder to feel his weakening pulse. When his heart stopped, she kissed his hand and laid it tenderly on his lap.
    Leo had hidden a lot of weapons in his house, and Hildireth knew where they were. The gun she was pointing at the asymmetric man was a tiny pistol. Without a word, the man led her down the hallway to the back room in the poorly constructed house. He unlocked Jack’s chains, and they returned to the front of the house, exiting through the poorly hung door. The asymmetric man watched them until they were out of sight.
    Later that day, in a coffee shop in another part of the city, Hildireth and Jack were arguing, the owner having threatened to throw them out.
    “You don’t love me,” Hildireth said. “You love your ideals but you don’t feel anything for me.”
    “You’re being silly,” Jack said. “Of course I love you.”
    “Then why haven’t you kissed me since I freed you?”
    “I kissed you,” Jack said. “I’m sure I kissed you.”
    “You can’t even remember a kiss,” Hildireth said. “And look at you. While I’m talking to you, your eyes are flicking to the other women in room.”
    Jack shook his head.
    “You’re just like Leo.” Hildireth was yelling. “You wanted me to fuck him as badly as he did.”
    “Keep your voice down,” Jack said. “You’ll get us thrown out.”
    “I don’t care.” Hildireth began thinking of the months of her life she had thrown away, a life Leo had come close to taking from her. She waited to leave until Jack had gone to the men’s room. When she left, she didn’t return to her lonely apartment. Instead, she took a long walk, unable to remember the air so fragrant nor the sun so perfectly warm on her face.

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