Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  He stopped only after she called to say she had put his stuff in boxes and he needed to come over and pick it up. That night she told him about Hal, who was nowhere to be found. Then she told James, “You look gaunt.” That was her word.

  After putting the boxes in the bed of the truck, he checked his face in the rearview mirror and noticed how sunken his cheeks were. Haunted would have been the better word, he thought. She never mentioned him sitting in the driveway.

  He slows the truck down and sees Hal’s car. It’s a mistake to be here, he thinks, but he doesn’t turn around. He studies the house and can’t believe how unfamiliar everything looks even though not one thing has changed since the last night he spent there. The wisteria hangs from the arbor, the crepe myrtles have blossomed. The lights are on and the curtains pulled back, and he sees Lisa and Hal moving through the rooms. It appears they’ve just eaten supper. Her black hair is up in a ponytail, and she moves briskly at the sink, scrubbing the dishes. Hal kisses her neck, his arms wrap around her from behind, and she laughs at something he says, falling into his embrace. James’s face and stomach burn. Then Hal moves away and goes to the living room and turns on the TV and falls onto the couch. James finishes a second tallboy and plucks a fresh beer from its ring. Then Lisa is done at the sink and her back turns, and he sees her in the dining room, turning out the lights. He waits for her to appear in the living room beside Hal, but she doesn’t show up in the picture window behind the couch. He keeps waiting, watching. Hal’s head turns, snaps to the driveway. James eyes the kitchen window through the twilight and makes out her shadow and then her face against the glass. The front door is thrown open and Hal stomps toward him. Before James jumps out, he tries to find Lisa once more but sees only darkness filling the window frame. He moves quickly toward Hal, leaving the truck door open, and the cab’s light spills onto the concrete. The two men meet in the yard.

  “This has got to stop,” Hal says.

  “That’s my house.”

  “It was your house.”

  “Look here, you son of a bitch—”

  Hal nods toward the house. “She’s the only thing that’s kept me from grabbing my pistol, you know that?”

  “You think you’re the only motherfucker in Tennessee that owns a gun?”

  The two men edge closer to each other. James’s head stirs from alcohol and adrenaline. Then Lisa is there with them and James turns to her, ready to reason, to show her how crazy she is to be with this asshole, but before he can say any of this the flats of her palms are on his chest, soft and warm, and she guides him backward. She looks directly at him, as if Hal isn’t even there, and tells James he’s acting crazy. He can’t come by anymore. Doesn’t he have any pride? Things aren’t going back to the way they were, and the sooner he accepts that, the sooner he can get on with his life. And when she says this he understands what he’s just witnessed between her and Hal.

  She has gotten on with her life. This drops him quicker than any punch. Hal steps away from the two of them. The winner, James thinks. He tells Lisa he’s sorry. He won’t bother them anymore, but he speaks to the ground. He extends his hand out to Hal because he feels it’s all he can do, this one small act of grace. They shake. James gets into the truck and drives away.

  “YOU DID WHAT?”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Wrong,” Keith says. “You were thinking too damn much and that’s why you did it. Damn, Jimmy.” It’s loud where Keith is. James hears music and voices. “Hold on,” Keith says. After a moment it’s quiet. “Where are you now?”

  “On my way home.”

  “Fuck that. You need a drink. Come out to Wild Bill’s.”

  “Only college kids and tourists go out there anymore.”

  “The band’s good. I got a table.”

  “I think I should head home,” he says.

  “That damn room ain’t no kind of home I ever been in. You come out here or I’ll drive over and get you.”

  He reluctantly agrees. The air is thick with humidity, and he wonders when those damn clouds are going to burst. He makes his way to Wild Bill’s. On the curb he pulls a plastic flask from the glove box, unscrews it, and takes a swig. He swirls it around and tries to eyeball how much is left, but for the first time in a long time, his heart isn’t in it and he throws it back in its place.

  The sidewalk vibrates from the bass inside the juke joint, and he shoves his way inside to find Keith in a corner table near the band. It’s at least ten degrees hotter in the bar than it is outside, and the women dance with their hair matted to their necks and foreheads. Their bodies curl and contort next to one another, and he navigates past a pair of hips to make it to Keith.

  “Took you long enough,” Keith shouts over the noise. He pushes a chair toward James.

  James sits without speaking. He taps the table, but not in beat with the music, and eyes the quart of beer on the table.

  “Want some?” Keith begins pouring into a plastic cup. “It’s warm but it drinks the same as cold.”

  James sips slowly. His mind keeps going back to his house, to Lisa’s palms on his chest. Polaroids fill up the walls of the joint, and he searches as if he will find their smiling faces in the throng of people having a good time.

  The band takes a break and Keith leans over. “Tell me what happened.”

  James takes a drink.

  “Can’t tell anybody else, you might as well tell me,” he says.

  James starts at the beginning with Jenna, how she tried to enter the shower and how it set him off. He leaves out the part about spending all that time in Lisa’s driveway. Tells him how Hal threatened him with a pistol and how he threatened him back.

  “He said that?” Keith says.

  “Yeah. Crazy fucker.”

  “You even own a gun?”

  “No, but I can get one. Anybody can get a gun.”

  “True enough. You should have strung that little shit up by the nuts. Wouldn’t have done any good, but you’d have felt better for about fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty.”

  Keith’s a few years older than James. Ex-navy. He has scarred knuckles, and where his hairline begins, a scar as long as a finger points downward, almost bisecting his forehead. He’s probably the last guy in the world James would ever mess with and the only one he thinks he can’t outdrink. Keith turns around and surveys the crowd, as if he’s leaving James alone, though they share the same space.

  James watches everyone dancing and drinking, the smiles that stretch their faces, and wonders what they see when their eyes pass over him. If they can even see him.

  “Forget it,” Keith says, turning back.

  “Forget what?”

  “She made her choice. You couldn’t have done anything different.”

  “I could have been better.”

  “Shit. Tell me something I don’t know. We all could be better, but you were who you were and that’s who she fell in love with. Then she moved on. I’m going to get more beer.”

  He twists through the crowd, grabbing a woman around the waist and dancing with her a moment before letting her go and sidling up to the bar. He catches James’s eye, nods toward the woman, and winks. She has on an electric-blue dress, dark brown hair falling to her shoulders in small waves. She walks toward James and asks, “Do you want to dance?”

  He shakes his head. “I like sitting. But that fella right there is going to dance with you all night.”

  Keith heads over with two more beers, and James gets up and offers her his chair. “Go ahead,” he says. “His name is Keith.”

  “You’re leaving?” Keith says.

  “She was looking for you. She’s always been looking for you.”

  “What?”

  “Go with it. Thanks.”

  “For what?” He puts the beers down, quickly asks the woman to hold on a second. “Where you going?”

  “Motel.”

  “Good. Monday?”

  “See you then,” James says. “Good luck.�
�

  The temperature has dropped when he gets back. Leaves and trash fly by him and the tail of his unbuttoned shirt billows. It’s very late. The wind suddenly stops and the world becomes still and silent. Abandoned. In the sky the clouds are milky white and gray and on the horizon are bright swatches of orange and yellow as if they are morphing into nebula—the one term he remembers from an astronomy class at the community college ten years ago—the beginnings of a storm.

  Jenna stands outside his door. She looks almost the same as earlier, and he tries not to think about where she’s been since then. She moves to the truck, and when he gets out, she says she’s been waiting on him.

  “What for?”

  “I missed you.” She thumbs the buttons on his shirt and slips a finger in between the fabric, and her nail is cool against his chest.

  The straps on her top fall off her tanned, freckled shoulders. He notices she’s highlighted her hair, a detail he missed earlier, and he runs the backs of his fingers across it.

  “You didn’t notice earlier,” she says.

  “I had things on my mind.”

  “And do you have things on your mind now?” Her whole hand is inside his shirt now, rubbing his breastbone.

  He thinks of how she bucks under him at his touch, the way she bit his bottom lip earlier, and the shower he took afterward when all he wanted was for her to be gone when he came back to the room but was so grateful when she was still there.

  “You going to let me in?”

  He unlocks the door and they walk in together, and before he can snap on the light she moves against him, strokes him outside of his denim, but he pushes her away, gently, and turns on the light. He wants to take his time.

  He steps back to admire her. She’s knock-kneed. A petite woman, her hair almost brittle in its new blondness. He asks her to undress and waits until she is naked before he undoes his belt and pulls off his boots. He won’t let her onto the bed until he’s naked too. He refuses her help with his clothes so she stands not knowing what to do with her hands. But once they’re both unclothed, he turns her so he can sit on the bed and kiss her abdomen and run his fingers along her rib bones.

  “It tickles,” she says.

  He smiles. He glances at the nightstand, where condoms lay beside the alarm clock, and he leaves them there.

  He pulls her onto him so that she straddles him, and he hardens. Her small breasts are pert and firm. Her nipples bloom at the touch of his lips and she moans and begins to work her hips. He allows himself to close his eyes and listen to her breathing speed up, to feel the hotness of her breath against his neck as she reaches down and takes hold of him.

  This is not how it has ever gone between the two of them, but he is falling away. He lies back flat underneath her, his arms splayed above. He fights against the warmth and sensation he feels. He watches the motion of their sex, thinks of the skin against skin. He closes his eyes again, and gone from his mind are the room they share, the broken air conditioner that hums loudly in the corner, the incessant noise of one motor after another that fills his head all day. He can’t even picture Jenna’s face. He can’t see Lisa or the first night she led him to her bedroom and undressed him in the dark and when they were finished how she pressed herself close, all of her softness against him, and he put his arm around her and made a silent promise to never let go. He can’t envision anything except that in the morning this woman he doesn’t love, that he’ll never love, will be beside him and that outside the red door of this space they now share is a world kept at bay by a lock that costs three dollars at the True Value.

  Jenna quickens her pace. She brings her hands down to James’s chest. She digs her nails into his skin and it peels back from her scratches. He winces, but she doesn’t stop. She’s calling his name. Over and over she says it. James. James. James. He rests his hands on top of hers and he feels his heart beating. There is the sound of their flesh coming together in fast, hard successive beats, and Jenna lets out a wild scream. With that James opens his eyes and lifts himself up and flips Jenna onto her back and grabs her as he always has. Without knowing how to phrase it, what he wants from her—to see in her—is tenderness, but she is languid. So he grabs hold of her hair near the scalp and tightens his grip so that her eyes spring alertly wide. He no longer fights. He slows down and then he pushes deep into her. Her mouth makes an inaudible O. Then he’s working, steadily increasing his pace. His legs and back cramp, but he continues, trying to move as deep and as fast as he can with each motion, looking right into Jenna’s eyes. She is right there with him, her face ablaze, clutching at him with her legs and arms. At the height, as everything in him pours forth, he nuzzles into her neck and falls beside her.

  His head’s awash in endorphins, and now it’s Jenna who rises from the bed and goes to the bathroom. The shower turns on. The sheets beneath him are soaked with sweat, but he doesn’t move. He can’t. He rubs his eyes with his palms and listens to the water falling against the tile. He rolls over and puts on his boxers. He reaches for a beer from the cooler and rests the cold can on his chest. It sends a shiver through him.

  One night, early in their marriage, Lisa went outside to watch the sky just before a hard rain. She sat on the trunk of her Camry with her eyes fixed in wonder on the swirls of light in the sky. “Come back inside,” James said. “It’s dangerous out there.” He was in the doorway that led out to the carport of the little house they rented on Jefferson Avenue. “You ought to come here,” she said. “You worry too much.” The air sirens sounded right then, and James noticed how empty the streets were. “Will you come in now?” he said. Reluctantly, she came inside, where the television showed reporters downtown by the river, standing in rain slickers, the sky behind them bursting every few seconds like a firecracker. Lightning slammed the ground, and the power went out and the streets were pitch black. Rain fell like tiny hammers against the roof and windows. The wind blew hard, and they heard limbs breaking from trees. A loud, piercing whine of splitting wood rushed over the house, and they knew a tree was going to fall, so they huddled together in the middle of the living room. Lisa clung to him, and he covered her head with his hands in the dark room until a tree crashed through the back of the house into their bedroom. Lisa screamed, and he held onto her, rocking her. Tears were in her eyes and he asked if she was okay, but she didn’t say anything, so he guided her head to his shoulder, ran his fingers through her hair, kissed her temple. “I’m here,” he told her. “I’m always right here.”

  The water shuts off, and James turns his head to see Jenna standing in the bathroom doorway toweling off. “I should go,” she says.

  “You sure?” he says. “Might be nice if you stayed.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Want a drink before you leave?” He holds the unopened can up to her.

  “No. I have a long night ahead of me.”

  “I see,” he says. He sits up and picks his jeans off the floor and fishes out the wad of bills, flipping off double what he paid her earlier.

  She comes to him, cinching the towel around her chest, and grabs his hand. “Keep it.”

  “No,” he says, pushing the money toward her.

  “This one was on me,” she says. “I wanted it.”

  “I did too,” he says, his neck bent upward to look her in the eye. He wants to hold her cold, clean body, but she turns away, lets the towel drop. She shimmies into her shorts and pulls on her top. When she faces him again she gently traces the marks she’s left on his chest, as if she’s a painter admiring her work. “I was a real wildcat tonight, wasn’t I?”

  “You were something else,” he says, rising off the bed.

  They stand close. She kisses one set of marks then the other, and the water from her hair runs in beads down the length of his torso. “I wasn’t the only one,” Jenna says.

  He knows life turning on a dime is cliché, but that’s what happened to Lisa and him. It’s as if he merely blinked and she was through with him and the
world shifted in ways he never thought it might. A big wind howls against the motel room, and Jenna is making her move to go, unlatching the chain. “Wait,” he calls and pulls on his jeans. She stops. They can go anywhere his cash will take them, which he knows isn’t very far, but will she go with him? Jenna is silent at this, and in that silence he knows he won’t ever outrun the ghost of his marriage, that he gave the last of what he considers his real self to this woman before him who is a prostitute and who is ready to walk out into the night and away from him forever.

  “I can’t do that, James,” Jenna says. “I’ve got to leave.”

  She opens the door, and with perfect timing, the storm roars in, crowding out all other sounds. Jenna runs for it and, barefooted, James steps onto the breezeway and watches her run through the rain, her small steps splashing in the parking lot. He calls for her, but she can’t hear him over the hard sound of water pelting the earth.

  SOLID GROUND

  I JUST SAW HER get swallowed whole. She might have been twenty yards away, and then the earth was opening up and she was gone. I was on my front porch gathering the mail when that pretty young woman came past in her car, bobbing her head to some song on the radio, and then the worst sound I’ve ever heard came tearing up from the ground. The concrete crackled and screeched and her car vanished. She screamed the whole way down. I couldn’t hear that, but I saw her mouth open and the tendons in her neck straining. I didn’t know whether to go to her or stay where I was. One by one the doors on our street opened to take inventory of the noise, and then once we saw the damage, we made our way to the hole, searching into its blackness and then lifting our heads back to one another. We couldn’t see anything except for the broken chunks of asphalt and dirt. It was like the earth had been hollowed out and there was no trace of that car, only slivering earthworms burrowing back into the exposed soil. The pit was so deep I thought of it going all the way to China like we believed when we were kids, but then I just thought of that hole going on forever—through the earth and into space. I imagined that poor woman falling without end.