INTERLUDE
The Interview
"Ben Hodge."
Miriam says the name, lets it hang out there like so much dirty laundry on the line.
"Let's just get this out of the way: Ben was weak. Weak like I was weak. Here was this kid in school. Not ugly, but not a quarterback, either. Mop of dirty blond hair. Freckle-cheeked. Dull eyes, but sweet. We had a lot in common. We were both loners, more by necessity than by any actual desire to be that way. We both were homely nobodies. Both had dead dads and oppressive moms – you know about my mother, but his? Ugh. A haggard, horrible woman. A cavewoman. She was – no shit, get this – a logger. You know, climb up the trees, hug the stump with your thunder-thighs, chainsaw spraying sawdust."
She pauses, because she is remembering.
"Go on," Paul says.
"We weren't friendly, he and I. Never said two words to each other. But sometimes I'd catch him staring at me, or he'd catch me staring at him. We'd pass each other in the halls, stolen glances, all that clichéd crap. So one night, it happened. My mother was not a drinker by and large. Condemned it like it was the milk of Satan. And yet, I knew that once in the bluest moon she'd take a nip from this nuclear green crème de menthe bottle she kept under her bed. I stole it, and I went right to Ben's house, and I did the stupid teen thing where you throw shit at the other person's window to get them to come out – I threw twigs because with my luck I'd throw a pebble and break the window. His house was one of those country farmhouses with the old, warped glass. Fragile.
"He came out. I showed him the bottle. We went into the woods. We sat among the crickets there in the darkness, and we had a great time telling stories and making fun of people at school, and then – we did it. The rumpy-pumpy, the beast with two backs. Up against the tree, like a pair of clumsy, rutting animals."
"Romantic," Paul says.
"You kids and your sarcasm. You joke, but in a weird way, it was romantic. I mean, if you subscribe to this Hallmark fantasy that romance is all about the greeting cards and the dozen roses and the diamonds are a girl's best friend, no, this wasn't that. But it was an… honest connection. Two wayward idiots in the woods, laughing and groping and drinking." She pulls out her pack of cigarettes, sees that she's smoked them all already. She mashes it up and pitches it over her shoulder. "Of course, I went ahead and took a shit all over that beautiful human connection. As I'm wont to do."
"Oh? How so?"
"We get back to his house, and I'm feeling high and giddy and I'm grinning like the cat who killed the mouse, and his mother is waiting for him. For us. She's got one of the local cops with her, this bald prick named Chris Stumpf. Guy looks like an uncircumcised penis. So. Ben's mom starts reading him the riot act, and me, she tells me that if she ever sees me again, I'll be sorry, she'll get me, blah blah blah."
Miriam snaps her fingers.
"That's when it hits me. What we did in the woods. The kindof-beautiful thing he and I shared turns ugly. Shame floods in. I'm like Adam and Eve, made to realize my own nakedness. My own mother wasn't there at that exact moment, no, but Ben's mom did the job well – a perfect stand-in. I could hear my mother's voice clear as the night sky, stripping me of all my dignity, shoving me toward the belching gates of Hell itself. I suddenly felt like I was both used and user, a worthless lazy whore who gave her virginity to some sweet simpleton from down the road. And that was the end of mine and Ben's fleeting half-ass relationship – soak it in crème de menthe, light it on fire, and head home."
Paul shifts uncomfortably. "You never talked to him again?"
"I did, but only in passing." Miriam idly fingers the booze bottle, wishing she had more smokes. She wants to cut this short to go get some, but she can't. Things have to happen a certain way here. Order of operations, and all that. "He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn't have it. I told him that what we'd done was wrong, but he still wouldn't take no for an answer. The dumb idiot told me he loved me, do you believe that? That's when the floodgates opened."
"What happened?"
"I let fly with some of the meanest shit you could imagine. I slung acid in his eyes, pissed in his ears. I called him a moron, a retard, even though he wasn't either of those things; he wasn't even slow, he was smart as a whip but just… came across the wrong way. I told him he had a limp dick, couldn't fuck, wasn't fit to lay a cripple or a coma victim. I mean, it was like I was possessed. I don't even know that I'd heard words like that before, and they came rocketing out past my tongue – I wanted to close my teeth and stop them from coming, but there it was. All that bile. Unstoppable."
Miriam takes one last look at the bottle in front of her. More than halfway empty now. She whistles low and slow, and then pulls back the bottle and drinks. And drinks. And drinks. Throat bulging with each gulp. She's already hazy. Her words, already slurring. Might as well go for broke, she figures.
Her throat burns.
But it goes numb fast.
She gasps, catching air, then pitches the bottle over Paul's head. He winces, ducks, and winces again when the bottle pops against the concrete.
"That night," she continues, stifling a little burp, "Ben goes into the bathroom, his head probably full of all the spew that came out of my mean-ass mouth, and he sits down in the shower stall and he peels the sock off of his left foot. Then he sticks the double barrels of a fuckin' shotgun between his teeth – the two barrels forming a sideways eight, what they call a lemniscate, a sign of infinity, what irony, right? – and then he curls his big toe around the double triggers. A tug of the toe. Boom. He was kind enough to do it in the shower so it required as little clean-up as possible for his mother. Nice guy till the bitter, blood-soaked end."
Miriam doesn't stifle the next belch. She vurps whiskey breath. Her eyes water. She tells herself they're just watering because of the whiskey. It is a good lie; Miriam almost buys it.
"The real bite of it is, he left a note. Well, not so much a note as a, I dunno, a postcard. He wrote on a piece of paper in big black marker, 'Tell Miriam I'm sorry for whatever I did.'"
She stares off at nothing, uncharacteristically silent.