by JJ Giles
Jerry continued on: “Tell me about one of the more memorable times you spent with Morgan.”
“Just one? Or just a recent one? Like the night a few weeks before I finally lost my mind altogether. Morgan was working with some guy whose forty years old and can’t decide if he’s gay or not. Been talking to some shrink about it for years. Finally, they called Morgan and she spent a couple of sessions with him and then she had me come. The guy’s really super shy so she staked me to the bed and blindfolded me. She sat down on the edge of the bed and talked him through it. The guy was a like a teenager while his parents were away for the weekend. It certainly didn’t take him long to get over being shy. She had him sucking me and then he screwed me. And then I screwed him.”
“So is he gay?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him again after that. The point is a virgin had me and then I had a virgin. I was exhausted. After that, she put me in the car, threw a six-pack in my lap, and then wheeled through a White Castle and got me two dozen to go. After I staggered up the stairs, she put me in a diaper so I didn’t even have to get up to piss in the night.”
Jerry smirked. He’d be ashamed for anyone to know how much he enjoyed the diaper thing. He certainly understood where Brian was coming from.
“So it’s those little things that keep you coming home even though the world beyond Morgan keeps whispering in your ear?”
Brian hesitated. “It’s the way Morgan serves it up, My Lord. You can throw a steak on a paper plate and slam back a beer with it, or you can place it on fine china, garnish it with clarified butter and serve it with a cabernet sauvignon, eat it in the company of a fabulous woman. It’s still steak, right? It’s just that one fills your belly and the other feeds your soul.”
Filled with pride, Jerry smiled and laid his cheek on Brian’s head. Brian already knew what it had taken him fifty-five years to learn. But Morgan shivered to hear it described like that, that for him, their life together was a refinement of those things she only dreamed of.
“Okay. So...Morgan didn’t know until today that you’re not some little uneducated street urchin, so that couldn’t possibly be the reason she won’t marry you. Why do you think she won’t marry you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if it’s...I’m too easy...pussywhipped. Why buy the bull when you’ve already got the dick?”
Jerry laughed a little having heard a version of that statement referred to women but never men. “But what you mean to say is that sexually you’re submissive and real men aren’t submissive, don’t you? That even though you might be able to handle a whip, yours is not a dominant personality?”
“Yes.”
“But you know that’s not true, right? Some men are just submissive and you happen to be one of them.” Roughly, he shook Brian’s body, expecting an affirmative answer.
“Then why won’t she marry me?”
“Because she’s got some problems, son.”
Quickly, Morgan sheered away from Jerry’s embrace and met him face to face. “Please don’t,” she rasped unable to command her full voice. “I’m begging you, please.”
To hear her voice so strangled, Brian turned also. To see fear etched in her face, carving it into deep creases frightened him a little. “Honey, what is it?” he asked.
“No. You can’t do this to me!” A wildness crept into her expression, something Brian had never seen before.
Jerry held a little tighter to Brian and narrowed his gaze on her. “You listen to me, woman. This is my son. He deserves to know what he’s getting out of a wife. I know you think you can handle yourself, that you’ll never let go of yourself again, but I’m not so sure. I might not always be here to settle things between you and he needs to know this.”
“Don’t you do this to me!”
Even as Brian watched, her expression changed into something animalian. He didn’t recognize her, wouldn’t have recognized her as anything human, rather as something possessed. Her head jerked suddenly like a lunatic, and she rose onto her toes as might a cat about to strike. Her teeth bit down on her tongue and a few drops of blood trickled over her lip.
So miserably sad, Jerry watched her advance, reliving it all over again. Just as she was about to spring forward with her hands ready to strangle him, his arm slung out, his palm open. The slap across her cheek resounded in the room and threw her to the floor.
“Goddamnit, Dad!” Brian hollered. He leapt out of the bed and ran to her. The driver of the Abernathy steamroller just struck her. Gently, he picked her up and laid her in his lap.
Uncontrollably, she began to sob. “If you tell him, he’ll leave me forever.”
Adamantly, Jerry shook his head. “Either you tell him or I tell him, Morgan. He deserves to know.”
“Nooooo,” she cried out. Plagued by insanity, she pulled at her hair, the long beautiful strands twisted in her fingers like the frayed, convoluted threads of hemp rope.
Just then the door opened and Alex peered around it, alarmed at the sounds emanating from this room. Jerry nodded, an indication to stay yet remain distant. Alex melted into the furthermost darkest corner near the bathroom where no one but Jerry knew he was there.
“Morgan, I’m warning you,” Jerry demanded. “He’s going to know about this today and I can promise you he’s not going to leave you over it.”
“Oh, God.” Pitifully, she moaned, unable to prevent it. There was nothing she could do to stop this short of murdering again.
“Dad, what the hell do you want from her?” Tightly, he cuddled around her.
Jerry hesitated. “Son, you know I have everyone I get involved with investigated.”
“Yeah...” Brian nodded heartbroken by the pitiful moaning in Morgan’s throat.
“Morgan...Morgan was involved in a situation that wasn’t her doing when she was a kid. Her father was killed in a trucking accident when she was six...”
Brian nodded. He knew that. He had spent hours with her in her reliquary devoted to her father.
“A few years later, her mother married another man.”
“And eventually beat her to death one day. Morgan was only sixteen,” Brian added.
Sadly, Jerry nodded and glanced up to see Alex shaking his head sadly, his arms wrapped around his body as if to protect himself. “But Morgan didn’t tell you all of it...obviously. I think it’s possible the guy only married her mother to be closer to her.”
The most awful wailing Brian could ever imagine echoed out of Morgan’s soul. “Baby, I’m sorry,” he whispered adamantly. Tighter, he held to her and rocked her as if she were a baby in his arms.
“Between the interviews with the neighbors and the insurance reports, it’s quite evident that he raped her as often as he wanted to.” Morgan quieted a little now, as hopeless in this situation as she had been in the one he spoke of. “That she suffered everything from gonorrhea to chlamydia is evident in the reports and probably quite effectively sterilized her. Her mother became pregnant in that time, but there’s another report of a D and C so her mother obviously miscarried. My thinking is that he beat it out of her mother because he wanted only Morgan.”
Suddenly Morgan sat up. “He did kill that baby! My sister. I watched him.”
“I know, Baby,” Jerry whispered.
It brought tears to Brian’s eyes. She had no siblings at all, yet the night they played ‘pickup’ she mentioned a broken date with a sister. That she had wanted a sister desperately he understood now and that she still mourned that loss was a pain to him.
Jerry continued: “Morgan was sixteen when she came home from school one miserable day in March and found her mother thrown to a corner. I can easily imagine what she felt then.” He looked toward Alex who was silently crying now, Alex’s fist over his mouth to retain any sound from spilling from it. “I can easily imagine what she felt.” He thought of a day thirty-seven years ago when Alex had witnessed a similar crime. “Having been brutalized and abused all of her life. Her only friend, the onl
y man in the world she could count on was a Roman Catholic priest of her parish.”
“Romeo.” Brian smiled bitterly.
Jerry nodded. “Romeo Romanelli, that’s right. But something in Morgan snapped that day, Brian. Something inside of her decided she wouldn’t lay down for it anymore. What neighbors describe as a very large, towering, loudmouthed ass who hasn’t been missed since, died that day, too.”
Quickly, Brian perked.
“I can pretty well assume he was drunk if a scrawny, half-starved sixteen-year-old girl got the best of him. I’m rather certain it was a head injury that incapacitated him, if it didn’t kill him.”
Morgan turned away from Brian now. This was Jerry’s coup de grace, but why? Must want Brian back awful badly. Or to come between them forever so she could be his. Whatever it was, she no longer had the will to fight it or carry the burden of it alone.
“Three days later they found him burned beyond recognition in a car having driven over a cliff in Athens County. The police know she did it because they found a saddle shoe on the ledge where the car went over the cliff. They know the car was pushed over the cliff because the shifter was in neutral, not drive and because it tumbled down the side of the cliff rather than going airborne and landing in the field some distance away.”
“Oh, my God.” Brian reached out for her and drew her into his arms. “Oh, Baby. Why didn’t you tell me this? Honey, you can’t live with this kind of thing by yourself.”
But she only jerked away and jumped to her feet to stare down at him. “I killed a man!”
“That man murdered your mother.” Brian rose to meet her head on.
A little confused, she turned away. “It’s still murder, Brian. And every minute of everyday I live with the knowledge that they could roll down my driveway and put me in chains and haul me away for good.”
“Morgan, that was self-defense. Honey, that’s why you didn’t go down for it when you were sixteen. It was self-defense.” For a moment, he studied his father. “And because Romeo assumed guardianship of her, they didn’t prosecute?”
“Exactly,” Jerry said softly. “That’s what I think anyway. That and the fact the 911 calls to Morgan’s address, thirty-nine in the previous year to be exact, were over. I think they were relieved he was gone.”
Easily, Brian nodded. “Morgan, Honey, this is not the huge deal you think it is. It was self-defense.”
“Brian, it’s still murder. It’s a capital crime.”
Brian saw her insistence that she be punished for this. He understood finally that she expected that punishment, perhaps even vengeance in kind. But what did this have to do with marrying him?
“Honey, I’m not gonna hurt you. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
With her arms wrapped tightly around her, she shook her head. Her refusal to marry him had nothing to do with that really. Slowly, she turned. “Listen carefully, Baby. My lawyer has a copy of my will. I’ve left everything I’ve got to you alone. Everything. Stocks, bonds, the house, the condo, everything. But you have to understand that at any minute of any day, some eager cop with nothing better to do could go through old files and decide to work on some cold case thing. It really wouldn’t be too hard to figure out who killed the son of a bitch. I was young, scared to death, Brian. I picked up a marble table lamp and hit him right here with it.” She pounded her fingers to the temple. “And then I put my mom in bed, thinking all she needed was to rest. I didn’t know her ribs were broken and punctured a lung. Or that he beat her so hard she bled to death internally.
“Somehow I dragged his worthless ass to his car and threw him in it. I think angels helped me. I drove as far into the hills as I could get and saw a place in the guardrail that was already broken. Pushed the son of a bitch over the cliff. And yes...he was very dead before that. Magnificent explosion, just like on TV. And then I ran down the road with one shoe because I couldn’t find it in the dark and I was sure they were coming for me. Hitched a ride with a trucker who wanted compensation for the ride.”
Sadly, Brian bowed his head. She had trusted a trucker because her father had been a trucker. But she had to let that trucker screw her before he would let her go. Might as well call that rape.
“When I finally got back home, I was gonna get in bed with my mom. I knew she was hurt. She was cold already...stiff.” The memory of that frozen flesh made her shiver. “I wanted her to be happy that he was never gonna come back, but she was dead. If I had called an ambulance, she might have survived. If my father hadn’t have died, none of that would have happened. She would have never married that asshole and I wouldn’t be standing here confessing to murder.”
“Morgan, please...” Quickly, Brian advanced on her to cuddle her.
Aggravated, she threw up her hands. “Brian, they could put together a jury of right-wing rottweilers faster than I can blink. It would be real easy for them to convict me not only because I did it, but because I’m a prostitute, too. They could go home feeling real good about themselves knowing they got another piece of trash off the streets. And should I be fortunate enough to cop a death penalty. I don’t want you, my husband, standing there watching them put me to sleep for good.”
“Oh, Jesus, Morgan.” Unhesitant, he scooped her into his arms, his own tears blurring his vision, understanding now how she thought of herself. A lowly prostitute, a murderess, a piece of trash of less account than a dog in the gutter.
“No.” She backed away. “This is serious. I want you to be able to walk away from here and never give it another thought.”
“Do you really think that would be so easy even if we’re not married?”
Her face contorted again. “Brian, this is serious. I mean what I say. I don’t want to know my beautiful husband is watching through a one-way mirror while I’m getting fried.”
In that he understood that the antiquated electric chair was her worst nightmare of being executed and that she had lived it time and again in her nightmares. That’s why the electrical devices in her dungeon amounted to the voltage of a flashlight battery. “Morgan…”
“Goddamnit, you’re not paying attention.” Her lungs pumped to sustain her as her anger rose proportionately to her fear. Her expression filled with animalistic brutality. “Listen to me. You’re so hopelessly submissive, Brian. In this relationship, you...are the one that is going to get killed.”
A protracted silence filled the distance between them as he stared into her. And then he advanced on her and quite roughly grasped her shoulders in his hands. His thumbs found the soft tissue at her throat and pressed firmly as his expression narrowed its focus on her.
“You pay attention now.” He shook her firmly. “I know that whenever you get mad or frustrated something dies. Damnit, we’ve replaced enough windows, doors, mirrors and drywall in this house to build a new one. I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t break something when she’s pissed. But unlike my mother who hurls crystal vases full of roses or lamps still plugged in, I’ve never seen you throw anything at anyone who’s ever lived here. Not me, not Kitty, not Jaxx, not Rick. I’m not so fucking hopelessly submissive that I would ever let you kill anyone.” His anger congealed, directed at her and he shook her again for emphasis.
She trembled in his clutch as he bored into her, his frustration on the edge of insanity. And then he seemed to collapse. He flattened her to his body as if he could force her through his own flesh to keep her within him where she would be safe. “Damnit, Morgan, I never realized.” Aggravated with himself, he stared at Jerry now. “I always thought you cared only for the women who get beat. You’re trying to save the women who get beat by redeeming the tortured souls like yourself who cause the damage...without killing them.”
Full of bitter sadness, Jerry nodded as he stared into his son. “And she’s very successful,” he murmured. “She’s been there.”
For ten years, Brian only understood the other side of the situation. He had believed that she lived to punish those wife-beaters b
ecause of what one of them did to her mother. Only now, with all the facts presented, could he understand her true motivation and understand how she and Jerry fell in love with each other. Jerry and Morgan had their rage and lack of control in common. And Brian had made it so incredibly easy for them.
He released his desperate clutch but still held to her. At his father, he snapped his fingers and Jerry tossed the phone into his hand. She heard the staccato tones of numbers being dialed and she fell on the edge of the bed, frightened of who he was calling.
“This is Brian Abernathy,” he said surely. His voice was full of a kind of command she’d never heard. “I need you to file a motion to pull a file at the county courthouse. It was a murder. The woman’s name was Mary McFaye Small. The man who allegedly murdered her was Arnold Small. He died a few days later in an accident in Athens County. I want everything shredded.”
In horror, Morgan stared at Jerry.
“Thank you,” Brian said and clicked off.
“What the hell are you doing?” Morgan screamed.
“Our lawyers will file a motion to expunge the record, honey. By the close of business tomorrow, the files regarding all of it will be shredded...as if it never happened. Nobody’s gonna come in here and take you away from me...not for that at least. Nobody’s ever gonna hurt you again.”
Disbelieving, she could only stare breathlessly. Unable to support herself, she fell back against Jerry. “It’s not possible.”
“It’s as good as done,” Jerry said. His fingers raked through her tangled hair, his voice softened with his pride in his son.
“No...no, it’s not possible.”
“Honey,” Brian said to gain her attention. “It’s a bogus bullshit thing anyway. It was self-defense. And maybe you did enjoy it. But for twenty-four years now, they haven’t offered to come for you because they are not going to come for you. You, dogooder that you are, saved the courts the time and expense of a trial. They probably appreciate that. And there may be some bribe money involved, but honey, it’s all over now.”
