I heard that lick. All the way under the house, through the insulation and the boards and the subflooring and the linoleum and the carpet or whatever, I heard it. Larry Holmes has never been hit with a lick like that. I don’t know how it kept from killing her. It hurt me just hearing it. A man should never get to the place where he has to hit his wife like that. She fell on the floor again and the whole floor shook. That made me think he was right about her being too fat. But it wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t want to think about it. All I wanted to do was get the pipe unclogged and leave. I didn’t even want to have to go to the door and give him the bill. I didn’t want to have to look at his face.

Everything went quiet up there. I worked the snake back and forth, pushing everything around in there. I thought maybe he had killed her. And if he had, I was kind of like a witness. I mean, I’d heard it. And if he had killed her, and I was the only witness, he might want to kill me, too. So I decided that when I got out from under the house, if he made any funny moves, I was going to bust him right upside his head with my wrench. I’ll tell you, I was not looking forward to crawling out from under that house.

But after a while I heard her moaning. That was the only thing I could hear. That, and him crying. The line made a sucking noise when the clog broke through, and that was that. I pulled the snake back out and coiled it up and put the clips on it. I got the brass nut out of my pocket and screwed it in tight.

They were saying things to each other in soft voices, in comforting voices. I thought maybe they were sitting on the floor together, holding each other, telling each other how sorry they were for the hurts, promising to not ever do anything like that again, ever, never, ever never ever. Making promises they’d never keep.

“Hey!” I screamed. “Can you flush the commode up there? Hey!” I was screaming as loud as I could scream. I had my face turned up to the floor. “Can somebody up there flush the commode?” I had my eyes closed. I was screaming with my mouth wide open. “One of you guys want to flush the commode?”

Tiny Love