Racing the Devil

by Jaden Terrell

  She slithered out of my arms and swung her legs over the bed. “I imagine he did. Calvin may or may not love the Lord, but he never could resist a willing piece of ass.”

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, with the Ian moustache gone and my hair back to its natural buckskin, I drove Paul, Jay, and Queenie to the house I used to share with Maria. It still gave me a hollow feeling seeing D.W.’s car in the drive, knowing he was keeping my lawn mowed and my gutters cleaned. Of course, they were his lawn and his gutters now. He drove my son to school. He sat with my family in church.

  The house sat on the edge of Old Hickory Lake, a single-story white stucco with Spanish archways and a fountain out front. Out back, there was a barbecue pit, a swing set, a picnic table, and a boat dock with no boat. As we unloaded Paulie, the dog, one overnight bag, my guitar, and the wrapped gifts, I heard voices from the back.

  “Who talkin’?” Paulie asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Dat my birfday?”

  “I think that’s your Uncle Randall and his brood,” I said, slamming the trunk. Paul and Jay were already headed toward the backyard. Josh met them halfway.

  “Josh!” Paulie threw himself into his cousin’s arms. “You look scary. Rrrrr.”

  “Rrrrr,” Josh growled back. I thought I glimpsed a hint of a smile, but it was gone before I was sure I’d seen it.

  Paulie gave hugs all around, while I put my gifts on the table with the others.

  “Jared. I’m glad you’re all right.” Maria came into my arms as if she belonged there, then pulled away awkwardly and ran a thumb over what was left of my black eye. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

  “Mostly,” I said. “I still don’t know who set me up.”

  “You will.” Her smile settled somewhere in the bottom of my stomach. “You’re a good investigator. Frank’s a good investigator. Between the two of you, I know you’ll solve this thing.”

  “I wanted to thank you and D.W. for helping out with the bail.”

  “Oh, that.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I could hardly let the father of my son languish in some jail cell, could I?”

  She was wearing denim shorts and a pink T-shirt with a picture of mountain gorillas on the front. Most of Maria’s shirts have wildlife on them. So do about half of mine, mostly because she gave them to me.

  Her thick, dark hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, not so much for looks as to keep it off her neck. It was too hot to do much else. Her shoes were leather sandals I’d given her three years ago, imports from Spain. They showed her small, tanned feet with the toenails painted pink to match the shirt.

  I fought the urge to plunge my tongue into her mouth. The look on her face said she was having the same thought.

  Or maybe it was wishful thinking.

  “You look great,” I told her, meaning it.

  “So do you,” she said, “except for the bruising.”

  There was something else in her eyes, a tentativeness, a holding back. You couldn’t be married to a woman for thirteen years and not know when something was bothering her.

  “Okay,” I said. “Spit it out. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Her smile was sad. “You always could read my mind, couldn’t you? All right. There is something I want to discuss with you. But later. Right now, I have to go finish the potato salad.” She turned and called to Jay and to Randall’s wife, Wendy, who was showing Paulie how to blow his party favor. “Wendy, Jay, could you come and help me in the kitchen?”

  With Jay and the two women gone, I decided to bite the bullet and say hello to my replacement.

  He was using a spatula to put raw hamburger patties on the grill. Besides hamburgers, he had hot dogs, chicken breasts, and corn on the cob, still in the husks. I stifled a wave of jealousy. It was a new gas grill, not the one Maria and I had cooked out on. But it was my job he was doing.

  “Hey, D.W.” He was a little shorter than my six feet, maybe five-ten, with a rugged, square-jawed face, a receding hairline, and the beginnings of a paunch. He wore knee-length khaki shorts with a navy and green golf shirt and white tennis shoes, no socks. Jay said he looked like a man you could depend on.

  I thought he looked like a schmuck.

  “Thanks for the bail-out, man,” I said.

  He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “It meant a lot to Maria, getting you out.”

  “Because of Paul.”

  He jabbed at a burger with his spatula. “I expect so. She says you absolutely couldn’t have done this thing. She knows you, I guess.”

  I felt a flush creep up my neck. “You think I did it?”

  He stopped what he was doing and met my gaze. “I don’t think you did it,” he said. “But I don’t know you didn’t. All I know is that my wife thinks you didn’t do it.” My wife. I tried not to wince as he went on. “It means a lot to her that you didn’t do it. So if you did, I’m telling you right now, you’d better never even dream of hurting her the way that other poor woman was hurt. If you so much as breathe on her wrong, I’ll tear out your spleen with my bare hands.”

  You and what army, was my first thought. Then I thought again and knew that, if our places were reversed, I’d be giving him the same speech. “D.W.,” I said, “I would eat hot coals before I’d hurt Maria. Or Paulie. Or you, for that matter.”

  “Well.” He sighed and flipped the burgers. “Well, that’s kind of what I thought. But I felt it needed to be said.”

  My jaw felt tight. “Consider it said.”

  He nodded.

  “Thanks for the bail-out, anyway.”

  He looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “You’re welcome.”

  I wandered over to the picnic table, where Randall sat glowering at his soda.

  “Your face will freeze that way,” I told him, quoting Mom. “What’s eating you?”

  “Look at that.” He pointed toward the swing set, where Josh was pushing Paulie on the swing. Paulie laughed, a smiling Buddha in a striped T-shirt. In the next swing, Caitlin pumped her long, sun-browned legs. With her blond hair and her yellow shirt and shorts, she looked like a human sunbeam.

  “Caitlin’s growing up,” I said, knowing Caitlin wasn’t Randall’s problem. “You’re going to have to fight the boys off with machine guns.”

  “Not Caitlin. Josh. He looks like . . .” His shoulders lifted. Drooped. “Like some kind of freak.”

  “It’s just a phase,” I said. “Like when we grew our hair long and drank beer up in the loft. We didn’t even like it.”

  “There’s a lot worse things out there than beer,” he said. “You ought to see his room. Everything in black. Posters of that Marilyn Manson. What kind of sick shit names himself after a woman and a mass murderer?”

  “The kind who wants to shock people. Remember Kiss? Remember Ozzy Osbourne? I used to hope that son-of-a-bitch would catch rabies or something, biting the heads off bats.”

  “That’s what I mean. We might have drunk a couple of beers in our time, but we knew you had to be a creep to bite the heads off live animals. I’m not sure Josh knows.”

  “He’s good with Paulie,” I said.

  Randall’s sigh was heavy. “I don’t know who he is, Jared. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “You don’t have to have done anything wrong.”

  He looked away from his son. “Then how did he turn out this way?”

  I couldn’t answer him. Instead, we sat in silence for a moment. Looking at my brother, I realized how much alike we looked. He was two inches taller and four years older, but we had the same gray eyes, the same shock of buckskin-colored hair, the same dimples at the corners of the mouth.

  From the time we were kids, he’d planned to follow Dad into the Air Force. He enlisted at eighteen and was four months into his stint when our mother passed away. I was fourteen and probably a pain in the ass, but he left the service to take care of me without a backward glance. Then a construction accident shattered his knee, and the dream was over. At my graduation from college and
later the police academy, he’d clapped louder than anyone else. He’d stood by me through my divorce, the mess with Ashleigh, and my decision to go into business for myself as a P.I.

  He never once blamed me for the end of his Air Force career.

  I blamed myself enough for both of us.

  I was grateful when D.W. announced that the food was done. Wendy and Maria came out, bearing deviled eggs, potato salad, and coleslaw. Jay followed with the watermelon wedges.

  “Save room for cake and ice cream,” Maria said, though how she expected anybody to leave room for anything after such bounty was a mystery. Somehow, we all managed.

  Maria got out her camera and Paulie blew out his candles with a series of staccato, spit-filled blows. Perhaps anticipating this, Maria had placed all eight candles in one corner, thereby preserving the rest of the cake.

  “Yuck,” Caitlin said, grimacing. “He spit all over it. I don’t want a piece from that side.”

  “Hush,” her mother scolded, as Paulie’s smile dissolved. “Paulie, you did just fine.”

  “I don’t want any cake, period,” Josh said. “You guys are just like Marie Antoinette. Let them eat cake, she said. And all the time, the people are starving.”

  “Josh, don’t.” Wendy laid a hand on her son’s arm. He jerked away. She pretended not to be upset. “Your father is the foreman of a construction company. I’m a kindergarten teacher. That hardly makes us members of an oppressive upper class.”

  “My life sucks,” said Josh, and laid his head down on his arms. His black hair splayed over the shoulders of his black turtleneck.

  Maria said, “You’d feel better if you weren’t dressed for Siberia. If you’d go put on a T-shirt, you might not feel so cranky.”

  His head jerked up, eyes blazing. “I am not cranky!” He swung his legs over the picnic bench and stalked down to the boat dock.

  “Kids,” Wendy said. “I hope he gets out of this phase soon.”

  “If he talks to you like that again,” Randall said, “he may not live to.”

  I wondered if Josh was under the influence of some mind-altering drug. People talk about the sixties, but what they had back then was like candy compared to what’s out there today. But no, his eyes were clear, his pupils normal. He wasn’t impaired, just pissed.

  “Me make wish,” Paulie said, proudly.

  “I made a wish,” Maria corrected. “What did you wish for, honey?”

  Paulie’s grin was almost as wide as his head. “Cake!”

  After the presents, I played a few songs on my guitar, and everybody sang, sans Josh, whose life was apparently majorly sucking.

  Maria slipped among the guests, camera whirring, saving moments for posterity.

  “I think it’s gone well, don’t you?” she asked, as I was putting my guitar back into its case. It’s a 1956 Martin, not too pretty to look at, but with a sound like a million bucks. “I’m glad you and Randall came. I know it was a little awkward.”

  I laughed. A little awkward was an understatement. But Maria wants everyone to live in peace and harmony—her married to D.W., and me a part of things like one of the family. A brother, perhaps, or a very close cousin. It didn’t seem quite fair to D.W. or to me, but both of us were willing to give it a shot if it would make her happy. I was surprised to find that I resented it, especially since it was probably the best thing we could do for Paul.

  “Was it too terrible?” she asked. “You seemed to be having a nice time.”

  “It was all right,” I said. “It will be easier next time.”

  She smiled her relief. “I think so too.”

  I snapped the clasps shut on my guitar case. “So, what’s this really important thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

  She leaned against the table, arms crossed in front of her like a shield. She shifted from one foot to the other, uncrossed her arms, pulled her ponytail to the front and twisted a section of hair between her fingers. I knew it would find its way into her mouth before long.

  “You’re moving to Australia,” I guessed. “You’ve been asked to go on the next space shuttle mission to take pictures of space aliens. You’ve signed up for a sex change operation.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  And I said, “Oh.”

  “It changes things, doesn’t it?” she asked, her voice small. “I’ve been thinking and thinking of how to tell you.” “ ‘I’m pregnant’ was okay.”

  “Too blunt? I know. I’ve rehearsed this a thousand times, and then when the time actually comes, I mess it up.”

  “It’s all right. What do you mean, it changes things?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes welled. “It’s like . . . I’ve really lost you.”

  My head felt suddenly light. “You didn’t lose me. You—” “I know. Threw you away.” She grabbed a napkin and wiped at her nose. “But you were still there. You know, for Paul, and for me too, in a way. I know it’s selfish, but . . . I always felt like you were still mine. I was so jealous of that Ashleigh woman.”

  “You never had to be jealous of her.”

  “I know I have no right to feel this way.”

  “I’m still here,” I said. “For Paul, and for you. You know that. Nothing’s changed.”

  “But this baby.” She drew a deep, quivering breath. “It means it’s really over. Our marriage. Us.”

  “Maria,” I said, as gently as I could, “it was over with us when you married D.W.”

  “I know. But it didn’t feel over.”

  I tried to gather a few coherent thoughts. “Are you saying you don’t want the baby? That it was an accident? Or that you want us to be back together?”

  “No. Not . . . No.” Tears spilled down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. “I can’t live like that, never knowing when they might bring you home in a body bag.”

  “They don’t bring you home,” I said. “They take you to the morgue.”

  “You know what I mean.” She stretched out a hand, touched her fingertips to the place where the arrow wound had been.

  “Maria, I have no idea what you mean.”

  “The last time you got hurt, I thought you were going to die. And then I thought I was going to die. But now, you come home late, and I don’t have to worry because I don’t know about it. I can pretend you’re safe at home.”

  “I would have quit,” I said. “I could have joined a construction crew, learned to make cabinets, tried to sell insurance. I didn’t have to be a cop.”

  “It’s not about being a cop. It’s about who you are. How every time we pass a convenience store, you scope the place for robbers. How we walk down the street and you’re looking for muggings or drug deals, or God knows what. And what happens when you see one? I love you, Jared, but I’m not strong enough to live with that.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “So could your father, and look what happened to him.” She touched my chest again. “You’re a hero waiting for a place to happen. That doesn’t change just because you turn in a badge.”

  “So now you’ve got Safe. Everything should be hunky-dory, but it isn’t. What’s bothering you?”

  “I’m afraid of what it will mean for us. You and Paul and me. Do you take just Paul on weekends? Are you going to be Uncle Jared to our baby? Or just that man who picks up Paulie? Will Paul be jealous of the baby? Will the baby feel left out because Paul gets to go with you?”

  “What are you asking me? To take D.W.’s child on weekends too?”

  “I don’t know. Not right away, of course. But maybe when it’s older, if you want to. If you like him. Or her.”

  One big happy family. Right. “What does D.W. think of this idea?”

  “He says it’s all right with him if it doesn’t bother you. He says he gets to have your child five days a week and every other weekend, so you might as well get to spend some time with his, if you want to.”

  “D.W. said that?”

  “Well, he agreed to it. Don’t ma
ke a decision now. I know it’s a lot to think about. But I want Paulie and the baby to be like real brothers—or brother and sister. So why should Paul get to have three parents and the new baby only two? It’s like penalizing him—or her—because of our mistake.”

  “And what mistake was that?” I asked, my voice more brittle than I meant for it to be. “The marriage, or the divorce?”

  “You’re making this so hard.”

  I sighed and put my arm around her, glancing around to see where D.W. was.

  He and Jay had gone inside with Wendy, Paul, and Caitlin. Randall and Josh stood chest to chest on the boat dock, faces flushed and fists clenched.

  I said, “Does D.W. know you’re telling me this today?”

  “That’s why he’s gone inside.”

  I chose my words carefully. “I’m not trying to make anything hard for you. You know I’ll always be here if you need me. You know I’ll love your baby, just like D.W. loves Paul. But it won’t be easy, and it will take time. I’m still getting used to the idea of sharing my son with another man.”

  Not to mention my wife.

  “I’m so scared, Jared.” More tears leaked from her eyes. “I’m just so damn scared.”

  “Scared? Maria . . .”

  “What if it isn’t normal?” Her voice was a strained whisper. “I can’t talk to D.W. about this. He’s so happy about the baby and all. But what if there’s something wrong with this one too?”

  “Maria.” I tilted her chin up and looked into her beautiful, tearstained face. She smelled of oranges and French vanilla. “Your baby will be beautiful. Your baby will be perfect. Your baby will be fine.”

  I would have flayed myself alive for the look she gave me. Standing there in the deepening dusk with my ex-wife in my arms, I felt a crushing grief for everything I’d had and lost.

  Maria had D.W. I wondered if I’d ever find another woman who would fill my spaces like a missing piece.

  Down on the dock, my brother shouted, “And cut your hair! You look like a fucking faggot!”

  And Joshs voice, not yelling, calm—too calm, in fact—cutting through the dusk like a thrown knife, “Dad. I am a fucking faggot.”