NINETEEN
Date With Death
Fuck him, she thinks.
He's dead soon, anyway. His ticket's punched. His clock is set. Fate has taken a thumb of black ash and smeared it on his forehead. Nobody's marked his door with lamb's blood. God's got his number. Too bad. Sayonara, big guy.
The dude's got big cash. That one envelope alone had enough green in it to feed her, clothe her, give her a place to stay for weeks on end.
Not your fault. You didn't hunt him down and kill him. You're not a predator. You're a scavenger. A vulture, not a lion. You just found the body. Might as well pick its bones.
Yeah. Fuck him.
Then she sees him.
Miriam's standing in the parking lot of the motel, smoking a cigarette, and he shows up in his truck – the brakes hiss, he gets out, and she sees how he's cleaned himself up real nice. It isn't high fashion: blue plaid shirt, straight-leg jeans with nary a fraying hem or cut in the denim, big black cowboy boots (scuff-free).
And here she waits, plain white T-shirt, hair dyed the color of an oily crow, a pair of jeans with the left knee out and a series of crooked slashes up the right thigh. No boots, just a set of once-white Chuck Taylors, now so stained they're the color of storm clouds.
She feels outclassed. Her mouth goes dry. This isn't like her.
"Shut this shit down," she mumbles to herself as he approaches. "Close it off. Be tough. Don't be a douche. Don't be a coward. Suck it up. We all die."
He gets closer, and she feels small – she is reminded again of his tremendous size, the broad shoulders, the ham-hock hands, the Herman Munster boots. And yet, his face is soft. His eyes cast downward. He's vulnerable. An easy take-down, she thinks but isn't convinced.
"Hey," he says. It's got an aww-shucks vibe to it. He's nervous. That helps her. It's a cruel thing, but she finds herself forever empowered by the weaknesses of others. "You find the place all right?"
"I did," she replies. She drove here in Ashley's Mustang – borrowing his car took some convincing, like she was asking Daddy if she could cavort around town in his Benz.
"It's good to see you."
"You look… clean."
The comment puts him off-balance. She feels mean and awkward.
"I did shower," he says.
"I like that in a man."
"I didn't think you'd call."
She pitches the cigarette. It hits a puddle and sizzles. "Oh yeah?"
"I figured, you were with the–"
"The other guy? Oh, gods, no. That's my brother, Ashley."
Louis looks relieved. Like the wind just caught in his sails. "Your brother?"
"Yep. That's actually why I'm here. Visiting him. I'm thinking of getting a job in the area, an apartment." The lies keep flowing. Once she turns the spigot, the faucet won't stop pouring; her knobs and handles are long-broken. "Of course, he's between jobs, though – Mom and Dad always said he was pretty worthless. Me, I've got a real competitive spirit. I figure I can come down here, find him work, show him who's boss, humiliate him into getting his slacker ass in gear."
"Hope it works. Charlotte's a nice city."
"Nice," she repeats. "Yeah, it's certainly very nice." Nice. She says the word in her head, and it sounds mocking, whiny. The city is nice in an antiseptic way, in a clean lines and polished metal way. She'd much rather have New York, Philly, Richmond: the dirt, the grime, the odd angles, the chemical air, the smell of garbage intermingling with the odor of strange foods.
"You ready to go?" he asks.
The pit of her stomach goes sour. She's not ready to go. She's really not.
"Of course," she says, and she steps toward him to take his hand.
"The chariot awaits."
The movie sucked. Dinner was mediocre.
Miriam feels like she's lost her way. The two of them sat next to each other during the movie, and across from each other at the Italian joint, but it felt like they were a thousand miles apart. He'd move in – a question, a look, a reach across the table – and she'd recede – a dismissal, a look away, her hand withdrawn to her lap. Two magnets turned the wrong way, repelling instead of attracting.
This isn't working, she thought again and again.
Now they sit, back in the truck, rumbling through stop-andgo traffic on the inaptly-named Independence Boulevard. Miriam doesn't feel independent. She feels trapped. Shackled.
"My wife is dead," Louis suddenly says as they're sitting at a red light.
Miriam blinks. It's so unexpected, a boat anchor thrown overboard, a jarring splash.
He keeps talking: "I lied to you earlier. I said she left me. That's true only in the… dumbest way. She's dead. That's how she left me."
Miriam looks down on the floor mat, expects to see her jaw sitting down there, unhinged, the tongue flopping about like a dying fish.
"I don't know what to say," is all she can say.
Louis sucks in a deep breath that he doesn't seem to exhale.
"I killed her," he says.
Miriam's not easy to surprise. She's seen many things, and over time, those things act like steel wool; they abrade any presuppositions she has about the world. She's seen an old black lady taking a shit on the side of the highway. She once watched a woman beat a man to death with his own fake leg because she thought he was cheating on her. She's seen blood and vomit and car wrecks and X-rays where dudes have weird stuff shoved up their asses (like light-bulbs and 8-track cassettes and rolled-up comic books) and at least two instances where guys were stomped to death by the horses they were trying to fuck. By now, the human animal is hardly a mystery; his depravity, his madness, his sadness, all these things are all well-catalogued in her mind, and she's not even thirty years old yet.
But Louis. She didn't expect this.
Him? A killer?
"I was drunk," he explains. "We had a good night. It was warm. We ate dinner out on the patio of our favorite restaurant, this… this little café that overlooked a river. We talked about where we were going, what we were doing. We talked about having kids. About how it was time – maybe not time to try for children, but maybe time to stop trying not to. If that makes sense. We were laughing, and we both had margaritas, and–"
He stops then. Dams up the stream; closes the floodgates. His eyes are steel dots – gun barrels pointed at the horizon, or at nothing at all.
Miriam has an image in her head of Louis wrapping his giant hands around his wife's neck and choking her the way you squeeze a pimple – maybe a tequila worm made him do it, maybe the worm crawled up out of his windpipe and bored deep inside the meat of his big brain.
"We got in the car, and I was dizzy and all torn up from those drinks, but I didn't think anything of it, because I felt like we were unstoppable, that the road was wide open. I lost control of the car five minutes into the trip back home. It wasn't raining or anything, and I'd driven that road a hundred times before, but there was this one curve, and – I took it too fast, reacted to it too slow, and the road followed along the river, and…"
He finally exhales that breath.
"Car went in the water," he says. "Windows, doors wouldn't open. I don't remember getting out. But I ended up on the banks, and I watched the water move around the four tires sticking up out of the river. My wife – Shelley – she was still there. Still in the car. They found her, still buckled in. Lungs full of muddy river water."
Miriam's not sure if she should speak.
Louis runs his fingers through his hair. "After that, I sold everything we had including the house. I quit my job at the factory and took one of those truck driver classes to get my CDL, and then I hit the road. Haven't been back home since. I'm just out here now."
"You really know how to say the sweetest things to a girl," Miriam says. It's a smart-ass comment, hurtful, but she can't help it. It just comes out of her.
He shrugs. "I figured things weren't going so well tonight, so what did I have to lose?"
She laughs, and then he laughs. It's an unanticipated sound.
"You're damaged goods," she says.
He nods. "I suppose I am. I also suppose that's not particularly attractive."
Miriam feels a hot rush rise to her cheeks. He doesn't know how wrong he is.
She's on him in the motel room, white on rice, chrome on a bumper, a hungry velociraptor on a chained-up goat. Miriam can't refuse the scent of a damaged soul. The stink of death is in her nose, and she knows it's deeply fucked, but as her mother would say, it is what it is, and what she is is hot to trot, ready to roll. She wants to be ridden hard and put away wet.
Louis, he's like a goddamn building – she has to climb him like King Kong. Hand on his shoulder, she brings her hungry mouth to his ear, she slides her hand around his barrel chest, she tangles her own leg around his. It must look cartoonish, she thinks, but fuck it. They're not making a porno. This isn't for public consumption.
He moans. He's not sure. He's not comfortable. "I don't know–"
No, uh-uh, he's not allowed to finish that sentiment. Her mouth on his mouth, her tongue is a snake in the grass, a worm in the apple. With her one free hand, the one not clinging to his shoulder like a mountain climber, she starts trying to undo the buttons of his shirt, but they're stubborn as shit, so she just rips them. They hit the wall, a clattering rain.
He protests, but the words are swallowed by her mouth.
So there she is. Hungry. Lustful. Driven into a froth.
And she sees a shadow behind them.
She's on Louis, but behind them is another Louis.
And he's standing there, and he peels up the black electrical tape over his left eye, and a river of maggots starts to tumble out of the puckered, ruined hole.
"Shhhh," Ghost Louis says.
Miriam doesn't mean to, but she bites Real Louis's tongue.
"Ow," he says.
She winces. "Sorry."
She wants to scream to the ghost, You're a figment, shoo, go sleep with the cockroaches. This is a celebration of life over here. It's not twisted. It's not fucked up. Totally normal.
Ghost Louis pulls up his other homespun eye-patch. A coughing burble of black blood runs out next to the still-streaming spout of maggots. He smiles.
"You're going to let me die and steal my money," Louis says, and Miriam drops to the ground and steps backward, her heart hammering against her breastbone like an iron fist. She doesn't know which one of them said it.
"What?" Louis, Real Louis, asks.
"Maggot, vulture, parasite, hyena," croons Ghost Louis in a chirpy sing-song.
Miriam cries out in frustration.
Real Louis looks confused. He looks behind him, and for a moment, she half-expects him to see his own ghostly reflection. But now Ghost Louis is gone, and she's certain that her mind has completely gone too.
"What is it?" he asks. "Did I do something?"
She wants to say, Yes, you manifested as a ghost or demon from my own subconscious and taunted me while I was trying to get some action.
"No," she says, instead, waving him off. "No, it's just me. I can't, uhh. I can't. Not right now. Outside? There a snack machine? Ice machine? Drink machine? Any kind of… machine?"
He clears his throat. "Yeah. Uh, yes. Go out the door, head left. It's in a little alcove just off the parking lot."
"Cool," she says, and opens the door.
"Are you okay?"
She shakes her head. "Not so much. I know it's cliché, but it's me, it's not you. I wholly encourage you to chalk this one up to 'bitches be crazy'."
"Are you coming back?"
She answers honestly. "I don't know."