Three minutes until midnight. There should be no question anymore, no uncertainty. It was supposed to become easier but it never did. The first time had been horrible, and successively, it only worsened. But there was no help for it no hope, no chance of redemption. Swallowing so hard that her gum went down her throat like a lump of anxiety, she tugged at the hem of her spandex dress and chose a stool.
Lord God, wasn’t I right? Better the devil you don’t know… Mama, why did you have to die and leave me alone with Uncle Paul? Today I’m thirty-five years old and I am going to hell.
The lighting was dim, the bare bulbs flickering above with impassioned confusion. In the corners of the room, years of grime had accumulated, pushed to the sides by a languid waitress who ought to have retired years ago. Helen was as wrinkled as the receipts that littered the floor, and as much of a fixture as the cracked mirror behind the bar.
Dank, dark, infested with crawling things, this place was a trap for the ancient, the unloved, the forlorn and forsaken. A place where old whores came to die. An old jukebox in the corner, only half the neons still working, the dull needle sawing away at an old Dell Shannon song an intentional taunt. Run-run-run-run-run-runaway….
She was soaring again, soaring like the five year old girl she’d been, clutching her father’s hand as their feet pounded against the ground, the kite streaming behind them, so high it touched heaven. She thought of the angels in Mama’s bible, so round, golden and white. Beautiful and perfect. Chosen by God. A scream built in her throat, but she swallowed it, as she’d swallowed every bitter, disgusting draught that mortality had to offer. Christ, how I hate this fleshly prison.
Her white hands twitched in her lap, two birds with broken wings. So much beauty. Drinking tea in gilded, porcelain cups. Summers at Martha’s vineyard. The paintings she’d seen, Monet’s Waterlillies, Gauguin’s Adoration of the Magi, Goya’s Resurrection, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
Once my life was so much more. Once it was worth living.
Strange odors mingled here, a dog’s delight rat shit baked crisp behind the stove, sawdust and peanut shells, frying meat and bacon fat. The scent of human despair. A hymn reverberating, striking a cord in her, amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saves a wretch like me…I once was lost…and still am lost, she concluded, self-derision cutting with the precision of a razor blade. Like the scars hidden beneath the long, tight sleeves of her red dress, the pin-pricks at the inner curve of her elbow, the slashes running north-south along her wrists.
Just two others in the place this time of night on a Monday evening, drunks playing a haphazard game of darts. The waiting, she thought, the waiting is the worst. She recrossed her legs six times before the door to I-70 Bar and Grill swung open.
Cowboy boots. She saw them first, long before she noticed anything else. Made of good leather with fine stitching, though dusty and battered. Faded denim and flannel. A thick bulge…in his back pocket where his wallet should be. He was young and gangly with a red, Texas tan. A wrangler or truck driver most likely. It didn’t matter, so long as he was buying.
Giving him a moment to choose a table and peruse the sticky menu, she picked up her drink and swayed over, moving as if her hips were a weighted pendulum. “Want some company?” she asked, careful not to smile. It wrinkled her face around the eyes, and men didn’t want the reality, only the fantasy.
He blinked once in sheer mammalian surprise, a mole thrust into sunlight. Suddenly, he looked very young and innocent. “Please sit down,” he said, stumbling to his feet, tripping over his chair in his haste to be polite.
A nice Mama’s boy, not more than twenty-two years old. Good, clean pickings and ripe for harvest. Rimming her mouth with her tongue, she ran a fingertip around the edge of her glass, wiping away the condensation. The scarlet lipstick felt thick and greasy in her mouth, but she had tasted worse things.
As she stared at him, he wriggled in his chair, blood rushing beneath his skin, staining his cheeks crimson. “Name’s Jimmy,” he offered. “What’s yours?”
“What would you like it to be?” It was a cliché response, but she couldn’t dredge up enough energy to invent an exotic alias, a creative lie.
“Elizabeth,” he said promptly, surprising her. Perhaps Jimmy wasn’t the Mama’s boy she thought him. Perhaps he’d been on his own long enough to learn a few games. That was fine, so long as he paid in advance and didn’t expect real emotion.
“Then I’m Elizabeth tonight. A pleasure to meet you, Jimmy.”
“Call me Jamie. Elizabeth was the only one who ever did.”
“All right, Jamie.”
“Can I buy you dinner? A beautiful woman like you needs proper nutrition.” He touched her blonde hair, the only thing about her that was still real, still natural.
She thought about it, deciding a free meal was the most she could expect. “I’d like that,” she murmured, picking up the greasy menu for the first time in all the years she’d been coming here.
When Helen shambled over, he set the menu aside. “Steak fajitas,” he decided with a boyish grin. “Been a long time since I had tex-mex.”
“The same.” For the first time in ten years, she asked for something besides her scotch and soda. Fajitas were the only thing that had ever smelled appetizing in here. She rarely ate anymore, taking her meals most often in liquid form.
There was silence until their meals arrived, sizzling on trays of wood and metal. She was conscious of his dark eyes on her, strangely intense, more hungry than normal, but she would not look at him. Tracing the initials carved on the battered tabletop with one thin finger, her nails chewed to the quick. Showing the perfection of her facade to be a sham, a lie. Her golden innocence was all paint, illusion, and use of mirrors. A midnight magic show for the credulous customer.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered, taking her hand from its wanderings. “Will you ever forgive me? You know I love you. I’ve always loved you…”
She looked at his rough, red hand, chapped with weather, cracked and coarse. “Of course I forgive you, Jamie,” she said with pure and perfect detachment.
Everyone is crazy. The only variance comes in degrees, the degree of neurosis.
Then she took her sharp knife and sawed away at the strips of beef on her plate, thinking of all the dead cows, lying heavy and still with staring eyes, stupid, blank, long-lashed brown eyes. Dumb, incomprehending eyes. She took two bites and pushed her plate away, unable to continue, unable to watch him shovel the meat into his mouth. Predator, carnivore, omnivore.
Man.
Del Shannon still in the background, warning, taunting, keening, run-run-run-run-run-runaway… But like a deer frozen in the headlights in the headlights of a car, she sensed the inevitability of this moment, a scent on the wind, an irresistible call to the dance, and she remained in her chair, looking just over his shoulder. She curled her toes into the hard plastic soles of her cheap red sandals.
“Who was she?” she asked softly, curiously. “Who am I tonight?”
“My sister,” he answered and there was nothing else to say.
When his plate was empty, he paid their bill and asked her to come out to his truck. It was predestined that she would agree. Every hellish, down-spiraling moment of her life had led to this, a torturous highway of bad choices, wasted opportunity, and ruined potential.
The truck was huge and silver, an eighteen wheeler, humming with the refrigeration units. Behind the front seat was a small bunk. After folding her skirt to her waist, she lay down on it. Somehow, after all these years, after all these men, still like a virgin sacrifice. She did not have on any underwear.
He covered her in the darkness, fumbling with his clothes, and then he was in her, screaming, “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I love you! Elizabeth, forgive me!”
But she wasn’t there anymore. She was already separating from her body, the time had finally come, and she was soaring, like an angel, like a kite. His hands around her throat and still he screamed that name over and over, pleading. She saw stars, and heaven, and blackness and felt the heaviness that was her flesh give way.
“My name is Mary,” she whispered, “and I forgive you.”
Above her cooling body, he convulsed once and lay still on her. Fifteen minutes later, he shot himself quietly in the head.
The toes of her cheap red sandals pointed to God with no hint of accusation.
