by John L. Monk
There were so many shows I hadn’t seen, so many movies. I’d missed years of Oscars and Oscar nominees and award-winning TV dramas like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.
For the rest of the evening and into the morning, I drank Scott’s gourmet coffee and ate pizza while watching back-to-back perfection. All the very best stuff and none of the junk, all at my finger tips while I sat there giggling my butt off and having a blast. This was the most fun I’d had in forever—with extra cheese.
Tara came home around 2 a.m. I heard her keys jangle on the countertop in the kitchen. She came into the living room smelling faintly of cigarettes and beer. She’d obviously been out having fun.
“What are you doing up?” she said, slurring a little at the end of it. She wasn’t wobbling around yet, but she was getting there. She’d obviously driven home that way, but now was not the time to lecture Scott’s wife about the dangers of drinking and driving.
“Watching TV,” I said. “You wanna join me? I saved you a slice.”
I pointed out the pizza box in case she’d missed it on the way in.
For the first time, a smile flashed across her pretty face, and then it was gone. She opened the pizza box lid.
“I thought you had a toothache,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “I had to chew on the other side.”
I could feel her thinking about it.
“You seriously ate all that?” she said.
“Seriously, I did. And we’re going to need more cookies, too. Also, we’re out of milk.”
Tara held up an unsteady finger—hold on—and walked back to the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator open and close, followed by the little metal trashcan with the foot lever clank open and shut. Then she came back.
“You really drank all the milk?” she said.
I nodded. “I ate all the cookies, too … I’m sorry, did you want—”
Tara threw back her head and laughed. She had great laugh, full of scorn and personality. And even though she’d been nothing but mean to me since I arrived, I was able to distance myself from it. I mean she was mad at Scott, right? And I suspected Scott was the kind of guy people frequently got mad at.
“See you in the morning, asshole,” she said, and gave me a toodles sort of wave, then headed toward the stairs. I thought I heard more laughing from upstairs, and then it was just me and my big TV again and, oh yeah, that extra slice I was saving for Tara. Her loss, my gain, and Heisenberg just blew up a bunch of bad guys with some sort of chemical stuff.
What an easy ride. Scott had money, great television, and a good-looking wife who didn’t get along with him. It was almost like the Great Whomever was easing me back into the cycle again. I didn’t care why, because mine was not to reason why…
“Mine is but to chew,” I said, and took a bite of Tara’s pizza.
By 4 a.m. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I went upstairs, entered the master bedroom, stripped down to my underwear, and approached the bed.
Tara was sprawled naked in the middle—wow, she looked great. In some ways, this was the hardest part of being me. I stared at her for about ten more seconds—being me—then scootched in and did my best to nudge her over to make room. She was tall, which meant she wasn’t light like most girls.
After what seemed like no time later, I woke up to someone yelling, “Get out of my bed, you son of a bitch!”
Hard slaps rained down from above, and I covered my head to protect myself. I glanced back and saw Tara on her knees, still naked, with her hands raised like claws and her lips pulled back in a snarl that was ferocious and sexy at the same time. When she reared back to slap me again, I slipped off the bed and landed on my butt and elbows and scrabbled clumsily to my feet.
“Would you calm down?” I said.
Tara told me my room was down the hall, “for being a cheating son of a bitch.”
Shuddering suddenly in pain, I said, “Oh boy,” and rushed through the open door to the master bath.
“Don’t you dare!” she shouted, chasing after me.
Boy I dared. I sat down in the preferred location and dared loudly, majestically, with gusto. Tara came in with claws raised, still yelling at me. She held off long enough to see the look of horror on my face and … and … screamed with laughter.
“Seriously?” I said.
Something felt terribly wrong, and I worried she’d somehow poisoned me. Was that why I’d been sent back? Was it the Nate and Erika situation again, with the crazy fiancée replaced by a jilted, vindictive wife?
Tara stood there shaking with laughter and pointing at me. Somewhere inside, it felt like a monster was trying to claw its way free, like something from a scary movie. Soon, even Tara couldn’t stand being in there with me. She left and shut the door. A few seconds later, the door cracked open again and a can of air freshener sailed into the room and rolled to a stop about five feet away, then the door shut again.
Minutes later, after the initial pains had subsided, I realized what Tara’s strange pizza perplexity had been about last night. She’d known something about Scott I hadn’t: he was lactose intolerant. Violently so.
Years ago, I’d caught a ride in a street corner drug dealer who survived by killing other drug dealers and taking over their turf. It had been a weird feeling, always looking over my shoulder for a car to come barreling through an intersection, guns-a-blazin’. Somehow I’d kept from being shot for the entirety of the ride. Then, one day, I bought some shrimp cocktail at a supermarket. I’d eaten a few pieces, then a few more—and then suffocated to death in the parking lot. Ever since, I’ve always tried to be careful around shellfish and peanut butter.
I’d been in one other lactose intolerant ride before, but it had been nothing like this. I wasn’t going to die from it, but if it kept up like this I’d want to.
About ten minutes later, I finally got up and limped over to the sink to wash my hands. I glanced at myself in the mirror—and nearly went blind. I mean, this guy was white. I had red gashes along my neck from where Tara’s Wolverine claws had raked me, but I wasn’t bleeding.
When I got to the bedroom, the bed was made up but nobody was there, and my clothes from the night before were gone. I found them in another room down the hall, tossed on my bed.
I took a shower in another bathroom on the same floor, then got dressed with the clothes I found in the closet and a chest of drawers. When I went downstairs, Tara was in the kitchen making bacon and eggs—for herself. Which was fine. I wasn’t that hungry anyway, though it did smell good.
I cupped my rumbling stomach and bent over in another spasm of pain. Seconds later, it went away.
“Tara, sorry about…”
“Just stay out of my room,” she said, snapping her words off at the end like she was mad at them. “You lost those privileges when you fucked that slut at your job. If she calls here again I’m calling the police.”
Melody, I figured. This guy was a piece of work.
“It’s your room, I know,” I said. “I was just tired. Wasn’t thinking straight and went in there automatically.”
She shook her head and scrambled her eggs more vigorously.
I rooted through the cabinets looking for a cup, but opened the one with the tupperware in it.
“What are you looking for?” she said.
“Not sure,” I said, and opened another cabinet. This one had the dinner plates and bowls. The next one over had the glassware. I got a glass down and filled it with water.
“You’re acting really weird,” she said, pouring her eggs into the pan.
“I’m just not feeling well.”
“What were you thinking of, eating like that? Drinking milk?”
I shrugged: you know me.
“Well, it was stupid,” she said.
For once, she didn’t sound as angry as she normally did, which was refreshing. Even though it wasn’t my fault she was mad at me, my psyche didn’t like it, and it was wearisome.
Tara took he
r eggs and bacon and left the room. In the living room, the television came on. I considered joining her, but she could barely stand me, and I desperately needed to find a bathroom nobody cared about.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As soon as Tara got up to put her dishes away, I shot into the living room and took over the TV. When she came back, she gave me another of those funny looks. She couldn’t understand why I was so fascinated with television. She said it was like I just discovered we had one, and how come I never watched it before?
The Walking Dead was on now. Technically a horror show, but I didn’t find it scary. To me it was simply a neat concept: civilization coming to an end, strangers banding together for survival.
“I thought you hated the whole zombie thing,” she said.
“Have you seen The Walking Dead?” I said.
If we’d had shows like that in the eighties, there’s no way we’d have put up with the A-Team shooting thousands of rounds a week and never hitting anybody. TV had crept slowly away from tame make-believe in the nineties to gritty realism in the early 2000s. But the things they were getting away with now…
“Can you imagine if something like that actually happened?” I said, pointing at the screen. “Zombies running loose everywhere?”
Tara looked at me strangely and left me alone on the couch.
About an hour later, something like a conscience reared its sheepish head, and I went looking for her. First the kitchen, then upstairs, but she was gone.
Maybe I was taking the whole “Tara hates me, yippee” thing too far. Scott and Tara were still married, whatever their problems were, and she was obviously still talking to him. Now that I thought about it, had all that laughing at my expense been malicious?
A person doesn’t go from marriage to breaking up and then suddenly start waltzing around the house acting like nothing is wrong. Bad relationships have minefields of treacherous politics in every tiny thing. Lower or raise the TV volume when someone enters the room and it means something: consideration for her, or lack thereof. Wash the dishes after breakfast? One less thing she has to do, and thank you very much Honey.
Scott could have been trying to fix things between them, and here I was not fixing things anymore. Or maybe he’d been walking around hating her, being a real ass about it, and now I was acting polite and nice and cruelly messing with her head.
And here I thought I’d caught an easy ride.
Sometime in the early afternoon, just when I felt it was safe to leave the house, I heard Scott’s phone ringing in the kitchen. I went in, picked it up, and checked for a picture on the front, but all I saw was a phone number. I answered it.
“Hello?” I said.
“Fuck you!” someone yelled. A woman, but not Tara. And not Pam from the mental clinic. Whoever she was, she hung up before I could put her in her place.
After a brief hesitation, I clicked and swiped until I figured out how to call her back and then did so. Nobody answered the first time, and nobody answered the second time, either. I went to put the phone in my pocket and it rang again. This time from a different number.
“You’re gonna fucking die, asshole,” a man’s voice said, and then he hung up. I was so shocked by the rudeness I forgot to put this guy in his place, too.
Both the man and the woman were angry, and anger makes people do reckless things. Reckless people worried me. That’s why, when I left the house for a drive, I noticed a silver sports car following me a little too closely. Whoever it was made sure to stay a few lengths behind.
I took a sudden turn after the bridge, hoping to lose him or her, but the silver car revved and squealed after me. I took another turn and it followed along easily, keeping pace. I would have turned again, but the sports car shot in front of me and slowed. Beer bottles flew from the driver’s side window landing on and around my car. One came crashing into the windshield, fracturing it with a lovely spider web of cracks that made it hard to see through.
The silver car angled across the narrow lane, blocking me in. The area looked beaten down and derelict and forgotten. With a chain link fence on one side and a hydrant poking out of the sidewalk on the other side, there was no way I could move forward. I put Scott’s car in reverse, already turning the wheel—and promptly bumped into something. When I looked back, I saw a big black Jeep blocking my way.
A young, muscular, Asian guy got out of the silver car waving his hands around and telling me to get out. I stole a glance behind me and saw a tubby white guy get out of the Jeep.
Curious, but unafraid, I got out too.
Casually, Jeep Guy reached in and pulled out a long hunting rifle with a glossy stock and a decorative fur strap.
“Where you think you’re going, dickwad?” he said.
Meanwhile, the Asian guy had gotten out his own weapon—an aluminum baseball bat.
“I told you to leave my sister alone, asshole,” he said with a flawless Midwest American accent.
He rushed me with the bat held low. I hid behind the still open door and crouched down for the first swing. It broke the side window and sent a shower of glass everywhere. I shoved the door hard with my back against the car and he gave a surprised yelp and fell over. As he was getting up, I came around and kicked him a glancing blow to the head, knocking him back down again.
Despite all that, I’m not Bruce Lee. I can’t fight ten people at a time, or even two people. Jeep Guy must have hit me with the butt of his rifle, because I saw stars and dropped to my knees, then my hands and knees, and then my face hit the asphalt.
Someone said, “You okay, Johnny?”
Someone else said, “Smashed my knee.”
My vision was blurry and the world seemed spinnier than I was used to. Someone dragged me up by my shirt and then slammed me against the car.
“He warned you once, and now I’m gonna shoot you,” Jeep Guy said.
“Let me do it,” Johnny said.
Johnny was maybe twenty-five, buzz cut, with a sculpted physique from too many hours in the gym. He would have been scary to someone who hadn’t died as many times as I had.
“I told you I’d kill you if you touched my sister again,” he said, getting in my face, angling his gaze back and forth like he was cornering me.
Then it dawned on me. “Melody’s brother?”
“Shut up!” Johnny said, and punched me in the stomach, causing me to double over in pain.
Somewhat comically, my lactose intolerance blared forth in what may have been a B flat tone, and the air filled with the noxious stench of indigestible milk sugar.
Johnny chuckled.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jeep Guy said, crinkling his nose. “Looks like you hit him too hard. So hey, you want me to shoot him now?”
“I don’t know, George,” Johnny said, pretending to think about it. “I wanna see him cry before we kill him.”
Now it was my turn to chuckle, though I had to force it out over the pain in my sour stomach and my stinging face.
“Hey look,” Jeep Guy George said. “He thinks we’re kidding. Hold him higher.”
Johnny grabbed my shirt and held me up. Then George unslung his expensive-looking hunting rifle and pointed it at my head.
“You want me to do it now?” he said.
Johnny opened his mouth to say something but I laughed again. Not because I wasn’t afraid of death, but because I didn’t think I was in any danger beyond the cooling trickle of blood from my nose.
“Think we won’t do it?” Johnny said. He grabbed my hair and jerked me ouchingly close to his face. “I told you … but you couldn’t leave her alone, could you? Why you wanna die?”
“He’s not going to kill me,” I said. “And you won’t either. Not here, not anywhere. He’s just some guy who likes hunting and country music. Probably has a big mouth, and that’s why you asked him to go on this little adventure. I get it, you love your sister and I’m bad news, and—oh no, who’s that?”
“What?” Johnny said, turning to see where I was
looking, loosening his grip on my hair at the same time.
I twisted painfully from his grasp, losing some of Scott’s frizzy red hair in the process, and grabbed the barrel of the gun. Bracing my back against the car, I held on tightly and kicked George away. The rifle came out of his hands like a sword from a scabbard. I used it like a sword, bashing Johnny hard in his arm, and that brought a not-so-tough yelp out of him. Then I reversed the rifle and pointed it back and forth between Johnny and George, who was scrabbling backwards like a crab.
“Yeah right,” Johnny said, smiling evilly, waving the bat around like he was winding up. “You won’t shoot anyone. You’re gonna stand there while I beat the shit out of you.”
I aimed at the bat, following it carefully, affecting a look of supreme concentration.
“What are you doing?” Johnny said, still swinging the bat, though less fluidly, looking from me to his bat and back again.
“Nobody’ll get hurt,” I said, “if you hold perfectly still. I think I can shoot it out of your hands…”
Johnny’s eyes widened and he dropped the bat. “Don’t do it man!”
“I thought you said he was a pussy!” George screamed, and dove into his Jeep. Then, out the window, he yelled, “You better not mess up my gun!”
Ensconced in his shiny expensive-looking vehicle, George backed up to make room, then accelerated halfheartedly toward me, like he wanted to take me and the still-open car door for a ride. I didn’t bother moving. No way was he going to mess up his Jeep, and he didn’t.
Moments later, they were both gone.
This section of Toledo didn’t look like it got much traffic, so if they’d wanted to really hurt me I suppose they could have. I examined the rifle—a bolt-action, with the safety off. George couldn’t have been dumb enough to point a loaded weapon at me.
On a lark, I opened the breach.
