Trying the Knot

by Todd Erickson

  Nick hurled angrily past Thad, and Chelsea followed close behind. She yelled after him, “Calm down, Nicholas, before you do something else you’ll regret.”

  Standing at the open door, Thad contemplated whether he should call the police, but he could not decide who posed a bigger threat: Nick or Kate? In one fell swoop, Nick plucked Kate off of Ben’s waist and gently tossed her aside. She landed near the customer service counter where she remained crouched and hyperventilating.

  Blinded by his shirt, which bound his hands over his head, Ben lay prone and shaking on the floor as he endured a kick to the ribs. In order to visualize the blows being delivered to his chest, he struggled to get up on his feet. Nick sympathetically grabbed the shirt and tore it off, freeing Ben from his straight-jacket-like constraints. Nick landed his first punch between Ben’s pierced nipples and Ben gasped as Nick pelted him across the jaw.

  “Stop it,” Chelsea screamed at the top of her lungs. “Stop, or you’ll kill him!” She ran to Nick and clung to his arm, but he merely shook her loose while she kicked at his shins.

  “I can’t believe this,” Nick said. Mad as all hell, he lurched closer to Ben. “You turn me away, when I need your help most – so you can come here and fuck my wife!”

  From a safe distance, Thad piped in, “You have it wrong, Nick, that’s not the way it was.”

  “And she isn’t even your wife yet,” Ben added. He rubbed his sore jaw and staggered backwards.

  “She might as well be,” Nick said, pointing at Kate on the floor.

  Soon they were locked in a near-death struggle, with Ben experiencing most of the death. Trying to force him to see reason, Chelsea leapt up on Nick’s back and pounded her fists against his shoulders as she held onto the nape of his neck. Thad stepped up to the three interlocked beasts and attempted to pry them apart. Ben and Nick finally separated on their own accord, out of breath and weary. However, Chelsea remained perched on Nick’s back with her hands gripped around his neck. If capable, she would strangle him with all her might. Nick attempted to shrug her off of his back, but her legs were wrapped around his waist. He tried to pry her fingers from his neck, but they would not budge.

  “Get this crazy bitch off of me,” Nick ordered, “before I trip and fall and crush her to death.”

  Ben and Thad reached for the back of her arms and pulled her off Nick. He unhooked her feet, which were interlocked around his groin, and they struggled to disentangle her. Finally, Chelsea found herself held confined between Thad and Ben. When they released her, she attempted to shove Nick away from them, but he pushed her backwards into Ben, who fell against Thad, who nearly tumbled over.

  “You’re lucky I don’t hurt you,” Nick said to Ben, his eyes reflected confusion and his voice crackled with betrayal.

  “It’s not as if you’ve been able to so far,” Ben said, and he looked around for Kate, but she was nowhere in sight.

  “Where’s Katherine?” Chelsea vocalized their concern. She rubbed her sore arms, which would be bruised by morning.

  Thad ascended the stairs two at a time, and he scanned the newspaper layout room. Lighting a cigarette, he called down, “She’s not up here.”

  Nick cracked his sore knuckles and shook his hand, which hurt from connecting with such force against Ben’s chest. Ever chivalrous, Nick swiped his rival’s shirt up from off the floor and threw it at him.

  “She must’ve left during the fight,” Chelsea said unnecessarily, and she made her way to the glass front door.

  Ben inspected his ripped T-shirt, and he felt his throat to make sure the silvery-blue necklace had not been lost during the scuffle.

  Chelsea returned from outside and announced, “The Jeep is still here.”

  “And her purse,” Thad said, holding it up. “Maybe she spontaneously combusted.”

  “I know where she could be,” Ben offered, sticking his arm through the gaping tear in his shirt.

  “And where might that be?” Nick asked. He was annoyed by Ben’s claiming to know where his future wife had run off to, especially when he had not the slightest idea. “Where?”

  “I bet anything she went back to the hospital,” Ben said, and he watched Nick rush toward the door. Then he taunted lying, “Hey, Nick, even if me and Kate would have done it right here on this floor, it wouldn’t have been the first time.”

  “You sonofabitch,” Nick uttered, charging at Ben, nearly knocking Chelsea over in the process.

  Nick reached out to grab Ben by the neck, and he ripped the chain from his throat. After bowling him over backwards onto the floor, Nick knelt across his middle and aimed a clenched fist at Ben’s face. Ben squinted and contorted with fear as he tried to writhe away. But rather than delivering the deathblow he was surely capable of, Nick slapped his open palm forcefully against Ben’s forehead and pushed his skull into the floor.

  Turning away, Nick said resolutely, “You’re not even worth the effort.”

  After Ben spat between Nick’s eyes, the last thing Ben registered was Chelsea’s shrill shriek and a popping sensation in the middle of his face that sent a stream of blood gushing down the front him while simultaneously seeping in the back of his throat. He never had any idea what a broken nose felt like until now.

  chapter nineteen

  part iii – don’t dream it’s over

  Thad staggered through the narrow kitchen while swiping his bangs away from his face. The silver necklace was entwined in his fingers, and the rhinoceros charm dangled hypnotically before his sunken eyes. As he made his way through the dysfunctional galley kitchen, a mere hallway, it occurred to Thad he had never really liked the house he grew up in. But it was not to keep him from coming back.

  “Um, where have you been?” demanded his sister, who sat at one end of the oversized dining room table. Bent over, lacing up her suede boots, she looked as if she were embarking on a midnight mountain stroll. The wrought iron chandelier dimly illuminated and softened her features.

  “I’ve been working, you know that,” Thad pointed out, nonplussed by her agitated state.

  “Screw you.”

  “And greetings to you, too.” He stuffed the necklace into the front pocket of his khakis.

  “Sweet-ass job, dropout.”

  “You even apply to any schools yet? I got my BA remember, a degree in English? Christ, does everyone think I’m a drop out?”

  “What the hell college graduate would come back to this hellhole?”

  “Where you going?”

  “I was coming to get you. We have to find mom.”

  “What?”

  “Mom thought dad was flirting with skank slut Shayla at the bar, so she ran out and fell down the steps. Then brain-dead asshole watched her climb into a stranger’s car before going back in for last call,” Alexa explained irritated. She put on a fake fur coat that was clearly too small for her.

  “So, mom is passed out in a stranger’s car, and dad is getting drunk with Uncle Ed’s new wife?”

  “He says he wasn’t. But when he finally left, mom was gone – and she has like 800 dollars in her purse.”

  “Wow, she could be halfway to Canada.”

  “I hate pay day.”

  “Where’s dad now?”

  “He’s out looking for her in the station wagon,” Alexa said, walking away. She yelled from the back door, “Hurry up, Thaddeus! I’m tired, and I’ve got to stand up in that stupid wedding tomorrow.”

  Thad thought it sounded like the wedding from hell. The groom screws the bride’s stepsister who then attempts suicide; it was a Jerry Springer episode.

  He tossed her the keys. “Maybe you should drive.”

  “You’re drunk!” She raged, “You pickled motherfucker.”

  “It’s not like I’m wasted or anything. I only had a few drinks at work,” he said with a shrug.

  “Good thing you inherited the alcoholic gene, not me.”

  She was out the backdoor, and he said to no one, “Who knows, our real mothers could be
drunks too.”

  Thad fell into the decrepit Datsun, and Alexa mumbled a flood of obscenities until the engine finally sputtered to life. His fingers sifted through the trash at his feet until he found a crumpled pack of Camels. Stale smoke wafted from the cigarette, and he decided it was surreal they should be combing sleeping neighborhoods for their inebriated mother.

  The streets were as lifeless as a hosed-down after hours morgue. Splicing the silence, Alexa raged on, “I wish we’d find that bitch face down in a ditch.” The car hydroplaned passed boarded up buildings and through the town’s only traffic light. Rather than locating her mother, Alexa was on a mission dislodge her very being from the past as if it was a joint she could pop out of place. They whizzed past a faded sign boasting politely, “Thank you for visiting Portnorth, Limestone Capital of the World.”

  Heading away from town, the Datsun chugged onto the highway and sped along the vast waters of Lake Huron. Perhaps they would find their mother washed up on shore in a heap on the beach.

  Self-inflicting an excruciating pain, Thad pressed the rhino charm between his thumb and middle finger. The tiny metal horn burrowed into his skin. How had he come to repossess this gift from his only girlfriend? They had said their final good-byes months ago in a cold impersonal stairwell. She had slipped the necklace around his neck and let her fingers trace the V that it made as it dangled below his collarbone. It was a trite notion, but Thad had always imagined he would marry the first girl he ever made love to, and he told himself that is why was he never pursued any local Portnorth girls— for fear that such drivel were actually possible. Even now, Thad still believed he would marry the first girl he ever had sex with, and he wondered what she was doing now three hundred miles away while he was searching the dead of the night for his drunk mother.

  “Is that her, over there in a pile?” Alexa asked hopefully. Scrunching up her unibrow, she pointed to the curb across from their parent’s quaint house on the corner.

  “It’s only trash.”

  “Same difference,” she quipped. “Let her sleep in the streets. She can rot in hell for all I give a flying fuck.”

  “Circle the block one more time, Al.”

  She did so without protest. As they rounded the corner, they noticed a door was open to a sprawling old garage behind their house. The enormous structure was now storage, but it once belonged to a gas company. Longhaired, grimy gas guys used to cruise around the neighborhood in their monstrous gray trucks. Back then, they spent more time cruising the local high school parking lot for girls to party with in their hotel rooms than searching for gas. Presently, someone had opened the doublewide garage door and wandered inside, perhaps looking for the remnants of a long forgotten good time.

  “This can’t really be happening, tell me this is only a bad dream,” Alexa said. She stopped the car at the end of the driveway, not far from the open door.

  “This nightmare is your life.”

  “Should we leave her here and go call the police?”

  Their squat mother had trapped herself in the sprawling innards of the garage, and she now crawled mindlessly out from the blackness toward the headlights. Blinded, she was a maimed animal grasping for the white light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. From the bleeding gash above her left eye and the dirt smudged across her clothing, Thad deduced she had been fumbling through the cluttered darkness for no small amount of time.

  Stopped in the driveway, Alexa realized how truly pitiful the sight was before them, and her foot instinctively pressed on the gas pedal. The Datsun lunged forward and rammed into a pile of old tires, which toppled over and besieged their mother with bouncing abandon.

  Thad slugged her on the arm and yelled, “What the hell’s wrong with you? You want to add matricide to list of character defects?”

  “Screw you.” Alexa focused her wild gray eyes on the wreck of a woman who stumbled blindly toward the glowing beams of the headlights. Her square jaw was clenched. At that moment, Jane Feldpausch had the same effect on her daughter as a lone, unsuspecting soccer ball in the backyard – it was too tempting not to run fast and give it a hard kick. Alexa put the car in reverse and once again attempted to mow down the brightly illuminated road kill.

  “Are you crazy?” asked Thad. He grabbed hold of the steering wheel and swerved the car from its murderous course. The Datsun veered sharply to the left and collided into the garage. Once the sound of crunching rusted out metal subsided, the car rattled to a stop.

  “Christ, Al, get a grip!”

  She hung her head low, and her dark shoulder length hair fell forward. She muttered coldly, “You shoulda let me kill her.”

  A smattering of litter trailed behind him as he exited the car. With all the gracelessness of someone feigning sobriety, he fetched his mother and stuffed her into the front seat.

  Oblivious, Jane Feldpausch sat ignoring the matted wound on the side of her head and drying blood trickling from the cut above her eye. The scratches across her cheek looked painfully raw, but she appeared numb. Thad wondered if the all-consuming anguish ripping at her insides outweighed the pain of all else. Her defunct ovaries had squelched her existence of any sort of life-purpose.

  “Should we split the loot in her purse?”

  “Let’s just get her home to bed,” Thad said wearily.

  As he inspected the gash in his mother’s head, he impulsively licked a smear of clotted redness from his thumb. He half expected his mother to taste of alcohol. Jane blathered nonsense while Alexa attempted to revive the dead automobile. Finally, she ordered Thad into the driver’s seat so he could put the car in gear and steer. She pushed the car homeward wearing Tristana’s A-line faux fur coat.

  Once in the house, Jane charged to the refrigerator and cracked open a can of Miller High Life. She raised the beer to her lips with two hands and guzzled it down as if starring in her very own TV movie of the week. She pressed the cold can against her lacerated face and then flung it across the kitchen as she flew into a rage.

  “Go-ta bed! Where’s your father?”

  “He’s out looking for you.”

  “Don’t lie to protect him. I know where he is.”

  “He’s out looking for the paycheck you lost,” Alexa said.

  “He’s with her!” screamed Jane. “He’d screw a snake if he could.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “See how she stands up for her precious daddy,” Jane said. “Like father like daughter.”

  Alexa’s voice cracked with regret as she said, “I wish you were dead instead of Aunt Kaye.”

  Jane lovingly whispered her dead sister’s name, but then she exploded crazy mad. Her eyes became two slits of hatred, and her lips disappeared into crinkled slits. “You don’t know nothin’. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a sister. I know, I’ve been there!”

  “She’s sorry,” said Thad. “Al, say you’re sorry.”

  “She’s sorry?”

  “Say it!”

  “She’s sorry?!”

  “Ok, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry! That’s right, I’m barren, and she got cancer,” said Jane, and she covered her mouth. Unsure whether her mother was going to vomit or cry, Alexa dodged out of the way and backed into Thad. Jane, ever a pillar of strength, fought tears. “I’ll tell you one thing, little girl, I loved my sister.”

  “Then why did she hate you?”

  “She was jealous! She was living a lie! If she were alive today, would her daughter be marrying for money, and would her son be a juvenile delinquent? Would her husband be with that whore?” Spittle showered past her lips as she emphasized, “I loved her, loved her, do you understand?”

  “So what? You’re crazy, and she was a miserable bitch,” Alexa snarled. “I’m only sorry she’s dead, and you’re not!”

  Jane snatched up a half-full glass of lime Kool-Aid from the kitchen counter and tossed the contents into her daughter’s face. Alexa automatically grabbed the plastic pitcher and hurled
it at her mother. Falling to her knees, Jane was blinded as the fluorescent green liquid ran freely down her face, unlike the blood coagulating around her cuts. Dripping green and gasping for breath, Jane struggled to her feet, but her hand felt something damp. She held up a pair of green-stained underwear.

  “Whose are these?”

  “Mine,” Thad lied.

  “Liar!” countered Jane. She did their laundry with religious devotion and knew better. She pointed at him flustered until she could manage to expel the words, “Boxers, not briefs.”

  “I’m into tighty-whities now. They’re all the rage.”

  “Don’t you cover up for that tramp!”

  Hoping to appease their mother, Alexa said off-handedly, “Okay, they’re mine. I got sopping wet in the rainstorm, and had to change my clothes in a hurry.” She was caught off guard when Jane sprang to her feet and pelted her with the elastic waistband of the underwear.

  “Freak!” Jane screamed. Beating on her towering daughter, she reprimanded, “My baby girl, a lezzie, wearing Fruit of the Looms!”

  “Christ almighty,” Thad burst, and he feebly pried his pit bull of a mother off his sister.

  On the verge of tears, Alexa turned to him and asked, “What’s wrong with you? Why would you ever come back to this hellhole? You don’t belong here anymore than I do.”

  She had a point. Flashing red lights shone through the kitchen window, and Thad wondered what the hell he was doing here. When he and Alexa were much younger, their father would impulsively follow fire trucks. Once, it was to a farmyard fire. Unexpectedly, the incredible blaze, which they generally anticipated was accompanied by a horrifying sight of half-charred piglets running into a burning barn. “It’s their home,” their dad explained, “it’s where they feel safest.” With the air smelling cloyingly of bacon frying on a roaring campfire, Thad and Alexa wept for the baby pigs. Even now on Sunday mornings, with his mother in the kitchen making breakfast, he sometimes choked up thinking about the torched piglets.