“What would it take to start a new life? Where would you go exactly?”
He contemplated his empty glass for a long time, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t know exactly, but that would kind of be the point. I’d like to have enough money to pay everybody off, climb in my old beater and head out. All I know is west. Then I’d see where I end up. I want to lose myself in a city and see what I end up doing there. I’ve got skills. I’d find something eventually. I just want some time to myself and the chance to look around. I want to—”
“Start again. You want to start again. I get that. I can feel it. I tried it in Cincinnati before the cute guy with the big cock stole my vacuum cleaner.”
He winced.
“Oh, yeah, he was really cute and he was huge. I nicknamed his dick ‘Moby’ it was so big.”
His cheeks flushed red but he said nothing.
She pushed herself up from the chair and disappeared. In a moment she returned with her purse. She pulled out a checkbook, all business. “How much would it take?”
“A million dollars.”
“Let me rephrase, Marcus. What do you owe in debts? What does it cost to buy you out of wage slavery?”
“Serious?”
“As a disease in your lymph glands.”
“Maybe…I don’t know. Car payments…”
“You in an apartment?”
“Still.”
“Would $100,000 do it?”
“More than enough.”
She paused, as if making calculations in her head. When she wrote the check, her smile broadened. He noticed it was a Mont Blanc pen.
She folded the check and held it out. He didn’t hesitate a moment. He snatched it out of her hand and shoved the paper roughly into his shirt pocket. He knew he should be ashamed, but he felt nothing like shame. “Is this half what you pay your therapist?” he asked.
“Roughly, I suppose, but after all that’s happened today I think I’m done with therapy. I’m tired of telling the story of my rotten childhood over and over and now that’s all anyone will want to talk about. I won’t need a therapist. I’ll just need to escape, like you.”
“Where will you go?”
“Someplace far away. I doubt I’ll be coming back.”
“Then we’ll both finally escape. Thanks for coming back for me and getting me out.”
“Don’t thank me. I need to thank you.” She paused. “It’s late.”
Energized, he stood up and looked out the windows on the dark sea below. Beyond the Atlantic lay possibilities. Or he could drive west as far as the highway went. Then he could fly. Potential oozed over the horizons in every direction.
She stood and spun him around, holding him by the shoulders. “You know I hated this place. Every time my father left me with Uncle Joe, we did it—“
“He did it to you.”
“
Right.
Anyway, that’s what he was really all about, no matter what he looked like to the world. The uniform didn’t mean anything. Every time we were alone, Joe would tell me how much he loved me. Every time he said, ‘Wrong is a fluid concept, Betty Jane.’ Blood didn’t mean anything. He did it for so long I’m not even sure I remember the first time. He wore a mask for everybody. I think everybody wears a mask, don’t you think?”
He looked away and she grabbed his chin to make him look into her eyes. “This little village just about fucking killed me. I hated that everyone knew everyone and nothing ever changed. Everything was awful about this place…except you. We watched videos and later we went to the drive-in and we made out and your kisses were always sweet and you were always so gentle.”
“I guess I always thought if I didn’t treat you like fine china you’d break…or I’d wake up from the dream.”
And I wish I’d told you how much I loved you then
, he thought.
She held him tightly and he ached. It reminded him of the truth he would never tell. It wasn’t his ex-wife who compared herself to the nymph and movie star Asia Minor. It was he who made all the comparisons and had always found his ex-wife wanting. Now he felt her warmth, her breasts pressed to him, reminding him why he would never—could never—be as happy as he was as a teenager. Or could he?
“You,” she whispered, “were the best thing about my childhood.” He turned his head to taste her full red lips again, too late. Instead, she kissed his cheek with a chaste smack that reminded him of kissing the bride at someone else’s wedding. Her kiss, so warm and soft, the sort of kiss he fell into in dreams, now felt like a sharp rebuke.
They broke apart abruptly. He couldn’t wait to leave. Their reunion—which he had dreamed of, anticipated so long—now embarrassed him. “I better go.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked away.
“I’ve got to be on the air in another couple hours.”
“Of course. Thanks for coming to see me. I love that you came to see me”
“Yes,” he said, patting his chest shirt pocket through his sports jacket. “It’s been…very profitable. The circle is complete and all that.”
She laughed. “Well worth it,” she said. He made his way to the door awkwardly. “It’s funny,” she said. “I complained about how I was paying all the people around me and the first chance I get, I turn you into someone else I write a check to.”
He looked ashen and grasped at the doorknob. When he looked in her face though, he saw that she hadn’t meant it unkindly. “I guess it’s different when you’re helping out a friend. Uh, Ms. Minor. Have a great escape.”
“You, too.”
She watched him shamble out to the porch and down the hill. “Bye,” she whispered and turned back to the bar and the view of the Atlantic.
He found his car but decided he shouldn’t drive. Instead he sat on the hood and looked back up the hill at the dead cop’s house. There were so many things he wished he had known when he was seventeen. He patted his shirt pocket again, checking to make sure it was there in a superstitious motion.
Marcus pulled out the bent check, smelling it as if it might be scented like a love letter. He opened the check and his jaw dropped. She had made it out to him for the sum of $1,000,000. The bottom of the check read, “For therapeutic services.”
He sat frozen for a long time, shaking his head and smiling. He folded the check neatly and put it in his wallet for safekeeping. Then he dug into his shirt pocket again and pulled out the small digital voice recorder. After a moment’s hesitation, he put the device under his left rear tire and when he pulled away from the curb he made sure he crushed it twice. “Coulda made two million out of that recording,” he said to himself in the rear view mirror, “but how much does one guy need to start fresh…and let an ex-girlfriend escape?”
He laughed all the way down the hill and out of sight.
If Marcus had been looking in the rearview mirror, he might have seen the bloom of flame that shot through the living room in the house at the top of the hill.
Asia Minor, silver screen idol to millions of B-movie fans and object of lust to many more, walked down the steep stairs to the dark beach below. At first, she thought she would rig a Molotov cocktail to throw into the middle of the living room but reconsidered. Odds were better than even that she would set herself on fire, as well. She had always feared dying in a fire, so she wasn’t about to attempt anything fancy.
However, Uncle Joe’s well-stocked bar yielded several bottles of Jack Daniels and some high proof scotch so she threw them to the floor and tossed a flaming matchbook in the open door as she walked out the back. She didn’t look back as the fire spread and climbed and clawed through the house. Instead, she kept moving, leaving a trail of her clothes.
Periwinkles and sharp stones cut the soles of her feet but her straight course to the water did not waver. As she waded out into the surf, the cold shocked her. She was glad of it. The cold would soon numb her wounded feet and she thought if she could swim out far enough, she could finally feel clean.
“Tonight I’m going to fulfill a dream I’ve had from when I should have only been sleeping with teddy bears,” she announced to the whitecaps. The chill water was just below her bare breasts now. “Tonight, for the first time, I’m moving toward something instead of always running away from something, always looking back!” she yelled. The sea floor dropped away suddenly and she went under and came up laughing and treading water.
The buzz in her head from all the booze didn’t matter anymore. She was a good swimmer, “a natural,” her father said. She slipped under the waves into the dark and came up gulping crystal air. She pushed out in a crawl, legs and arms working smoothly, her stroke confident and strong.
This would be a binary choice, she told herself. Either she would swim until she drowned or until she felt really clean. Soon the water would be all there was and she would leave everything behind her. Somewhere up ahead and hours away, the sun was reaching around the earth, coming for her and waking up the world to a new day.
Asia Minor escaped to the Atlantic. If she felt new and cleansed, if her mask fell away to the sea bottom, maybe she would have enough left in her for the swim back. The fiery reflections of the house on the hill chased her wake and she pushed harder. The stars were all the illumination she needed.
Soon the cold would lift the burden of conscious thought. Poeticule Bay would be far behind her, along with the weight of memory’s burden. She started to gasp and slowed her pace. She worked her arms and legs in a steady rhythm, pacing herself, going for distance. She felt lighter and lighter. She had the strength to keep going, straight toward the rushing, burning sun.
The unforgiving light was out there somewhere, crawling toward her, across the waves from the east. Soon everyone would wake up and read their newspapers and their web news and they would read her words. They’d see what she was, helpless underneath her mask. Marcus would know why she lied for so long, even to him. Everyone she had ever known—everyone who thought they knew Betty Jane Minor—would read her love letters to Uncle Joe.
Parting Shots
B
efore he even opened his eyes, he groaned. Burt could feel himself pulled up from unconsciousness toward daylight and damnation. Genie was still dead and Audrey was still alive and now he’d have to deal with that all over again.
The clock radio blared and Marcus, the morning DJ, swam in behind his eyes and started prying his eyelids up. Burt rolled over, hoping Marcus would get to a song soon. However, instead of introducing a song Burt could retreat into, the radio guy was nattering. The radio’s tuning dial was slightly off. Through the static, Burt could tell it was the regular DJ, though Marcus didn’t sound like himself this morning.
A stab of sunlight poked into his brain through the torn curtain and he cursed as he rose from the bed unsteadily and made his way to the bathroom. For a moment, Burt thought he was going to fall but he caught hold of the podium sink, nearly ripping it from the wall. Wouldn’t that have been a terrible tragedy? Old man trapped under own sink!
Nine of ten accidents happen in the home, so why not me
? It would be lonely, slowly dying under the weight of the sink, unable to get up. But dying would be an immense relief, too, wouldn’t it?
After an unsatisfactory squirt, Burt faced himself in the mirror. His eyelids were rimmed with bright pink and his nose looked like a tomato. He belched loudly and tasted gin. Gin made his stomach bleed.
Good.
His bleeding stomach reminded him of Audrey in the hospital. She’d thrown up so much blood, he couldn’t figure how it was possible God had delivered him the tragic miracle. Now Audrey took pictures of elk somewhere in Banff National Park so Japanese tourists could have a never-ending supply of fresh postcards. Audrey. His good daughter. Healthy and whole and a great weight on his heart.
Genie had always been Audrey’s opposite. Audrey slept like an angel through the whole night from six weeks old. Genie had colic and seemed to keep it with her like a curse. Genie stayed cranky right up until her death.
Burt wondered if he should bother with the pretense of making coffee or pick up take-out java and pour in a little morning hooch? Or just take a bottle of 90 proof in each crepuscular hand and get on with it?
His father, Silas, drank himself to death. “Slow suicide is perfectly okay by the laws of man and nature,” his old man had said. “God gave us the grape and the barley and plenty of reasons to use ’em.” Silas always concluded that and similar pronouncements with, “Burt! You’re young and full of blue piss! Fetch me another bottle quick before I sober up.”
His father was a happy drunk and gravely melancholy when sober. Burt decided he must have inherited the same taste for alcohol his father had, but regretted he didn’t seem to enjoy the compulsion nearly as much. Now that Burt was an old man himself, the world had changed the rules on him. Alcoholism was a disease now and that new ugly fact spilled the fun out of each day.
Silas—how come guys weren’t named Silas anymore?—had taken pride in starting each day with a shave so Burt lathered up, too. Maybe that was the trick. Looking better might be the key to feeling better. Then he thought of Genie using his razor to shave her legs and how he had bellowed at her not to do it again. She’d run off for two days that time.
Everything that gives me a moment’s happiness reminds me to be sad.
His wife, Helen, had always been the buffer between him and Genie. Helen was a librarian now. He saw her sometimes, across the parking lot at closing time. He had assumed that, since she had already put up with so much, her capacity to forgive was bottomless. Burt wore her out. After Genie died, his wife didn’t seem to have any energy left to make him feel okay anymore. He had begun to drink more after Genie passed, but he figured he was entitled. If you don’t drink after losing a child, when was a better time?
The DJ was still blathering loudly through the static from the clock radio. “Shut up, Marcus!” Burt said, and kept shaving. The razor was old and cut him several times. “The wages of sin are razor bucks,” Burt said to his reflection. The haggard old face that emerged from behind the whiskers was little better than the hairy mask that had grown over it while he dreamt. He missed half his chin but he had already put three dots of toilet paper on his nicks so he decided he’d drawn enough of his blood for the day.