by John Moralee
“He did that. He hit you.”
“M-my next class will arrive any time.” She continued moving chairs, turning away.
“Abby …”
She scraped a chair along the polished floor. She did not – could not – look my way.
“I’m here for you,” I said, lamely.
I stepped forward, wanting to hold her,
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Leave.”
“But –”
“Leave!”
I walked to the door. She looked once, her sadness sweeping over me like a radar pulse. Then she continued rearranging the chairs. I was dismissed. I knew I couldn’t get her to talk. Maybe she wanted to talk, but she wasn’t ready. I walked down the hall reeling with impotent rage. I could see the bruises on her arm. I could not get them out of my mind. I punched a locker, bloodying my knuckles. I punched it again and again. The grey metal dented.
I wanted the locker to be Sheriff Tom Boone’s face.
Chapter 17
I drove around the town looking for the sheriff. I had a neat plan – I was going to kill him by driving over and over him until he became part of the tread. I wasn’t thinking straight, like I’d been snorting cocaine for a week with no sleep. I was wired. There was a pain between my eyes caused by the anger juicing through me. I couldn’t find him. Subconsciously, I probably didn’t want to find him because I knew that in my dark mood I would end up going to the electric chair. If I’d truly been thinking clearly, I would have broken a window, setting off a security alarm, and waited for him to come to me. But I wasn’t. I could not stop thinking about Abby’s bruises.
How could he hit her? How could he? How could he?
I headed down the coast, letting the speedometer edge up to eighty and my thoughts blur like the sweeping roadside. I killed my speed only when I saw traffic, and I cruised along, my brain in neutral. Hours went by. I pulled over at the fork of the road leading up Ocean Avenue, a romantic spot where lovers used to park their cars and watch the sun set. At the junction there was a crooked oak that looked like a hand twisted by arthritis. I walked under its shadow, disturbing the insects, and put my hands on the cool, rough bark where it looked dented and darker than the rest of the trunk. This tree had killed my brother. I’d often thought of pouring gasoline on its roots and throwing a burning match, watching it burn. I’d fantasised about using a chain saw to bring it down. But today I couldn’t hate the tree. I rested my head on the trunk and breathed in the sweet odour of sap. I thought about Abby. The anger formed a knot in my chest that grew and grew like a cancer until it pulsed through my head. My hands became fists, and I slammed jab after jab into the trunk, increasing the speed and ferocity until the pain from my bleeding knuckles matched the pain in my head. A sheen of sweat covered my body, then, and I pushed away from the tree and looked at the blood and the bark. I could see knuckle imprints in the wood, but that was nothing compared with the raw skin of my hands. Blood dripped from my fingertips onto the dark ground.
“You’re one tough son of a bitch,” I said to the tree.
The tree didn’t say anything, but if it could have, it would have agreed.
I returned to my car.
Next thing I knew, I was parked outside the high school with no memory of how I’d got there. It was near the end of the school day. I waited. I waited for Abby.
She came out after the students left.
She walked across the lot towards her car.
I intercepted her on the way.
She backed away from me, looking frightened. “Mike, what are you doing here? And what have you done to your hands?”
“Forget that. I’m here for you, Abby. I want you to see sense.”
She looked anywhere but at me. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“He won’t stop. I can’t let him hurt you.”
She folded her arms and stopped. “Please don’t make things worse. He only hit me because he was jealous, that’s all. When I explained there was nothing between you and me, he apologised. He didn’t mean it.”
“And that makes it okay for hitting you?”
“He loves me.”
I emitted an exasperated sigh.
“He does,” she said. “You might not think it, but he does.”
I thought of the lines of the Tammy Wynette song: Stand By Your Man. I felt sick. “He hit you, Abby. Nobody has a right to do that, married or not.”
“Maybe I deserved it.”
“What?”
“When I told him there was nothing between you and me, I was lying.”
I was confused then. “What does that mean?”
“I still love you. Tell me you don’t feel the same about me.”
My silence answered.
Flushed, she said: “Mike, I have to get home. If I’m late …”
“He’ll hit you?”
“Yes. No. He doesn’t mean it, though.”
“Like hell he doesn’t. Look, I want you to come with me. You can stay at my place. You’ll never have to see him again. You can charge him with assault.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Please.” I was begging.
“I can’t. Sorry. I can’t.”
I desperately wanted to say something, but there was a gulf separating us: Sheriff Tom Boone.
Abby wouldn’t listen to reason. She was too scared.
“This isn’t the first time,” I said.
Her eyelashes flicked tears. “He’s the sheriff, Mike. He can do anything he likes. I don’t want you to get hurt. This has nothing to do with you. I … can’t … talk about … this. Leave me alone. Please.”
It was useless. She was in denial. I’d been like that with drugs, pretending everything was cool when my life was unravelling piece by piece. Nobody can help you until you want help. That’s what they say at AA. I could only hope Abby would wake up to her situation before Boone did more than bruise her. She ran to her car and I didn’t chase her, even though every impulse was to stop her, somehow, and make her come home with me.
I went home, despondent.
Chapter 18
It was just getting dark outside when Sarah Beck called my cellular phone. She was out of breath.
“I got them,” she said.
“What?”
“I caught them inside my house.”
“Who?”
“The Heaven and Earth creeps. I don’t know what to do now.”
“Call the police.”
“No. Come over. I’ll be waiting. Uh-oh. Bye.”
She hung up.
I tried calling back, but she wouldn’t answer.
Or maybe she couldn’t answer.
I grabbed my keys and dashed outside.
The ferry took an infinite time to load up and cross the water. At least, it seemed like it. It was probably normal, but in my adrenaline-fuelled state, seconds lasted hours. It was the last car-ferry of the night, and I was lucky to be on it. The sky was dark purple, like Abby’s bruises. Once on the far shore, I drove like a mad man to Sarah Beck’s house.
It was twilight when I parked. My headlights illuminated a person standing at the gate. It was Sarah in a suede jacket and tight jeans. There was a speckle of blood on her neck.
“You okay?” I asked.
“They got frisky, but I handled it. They’re in the kitchen.”
“How’d you handle two big guys?” I asked.
“Kickboxing in college,” she said. “I learned after a friend of mine was raped. I vowed that wouldn’t happen to me.”
Her kitchen was dark, the curtains closed. Sarah switched on the lights. She had tied the men to two chairs with thick ropes. They were gagged. One had a bloody nose. He was breathing through one nostril. He didn’t look at all pleased to be there.
For all her talk of shooting people, when the two men were caught in her house, when she’d had legitimate, legal cause to do it, she had chosen not do it. I admired that.
“This is like Reservoir Dogs,�
�� I said.
“What?” Sarah said.
“I forgot you don’t watch movies. Forget it. But these guys know what I mean. Especially the ear scene.”
I could see by their panic-bright eyes they did.
Sarah removed their gags. They said nothing, but they glared at us. You would have thought they had captured us, the defiance I saw in their eyes.
Their emptied wallets were on the table with their keys and money ($400) and IDs. I looked at the IDs. They were called Ecker and Grueman. Names like that had to be made up. But we did the old State Trooper trick for checking licences – asking them to say their social security numbers forwards and then backwards faster and faster – and they could do it. Ecker and Grueman were their real names if the social security numbers were genuine. Ecker had been driving the car that had followed me. Both had little clip-on Heaven and Earth security badges. The other day, when I’d been creeping around the construction site, I’d seen guys wearing them on their lapels. I pocketed them, figuring they could come in useful.
They told us their names but nothing else.
Like they thought they were prisoners of war or something.
Sarah looked at me. “You got some ideas?”
“Torture?”
“Sounds good to me.”
We gagged the men. We left the men alone for five minutes. We discussed what we would do. I think Sarah would have gone through with torture, but I persuaded her to try another way.
So we left the men tied up until morning. There was no way they could untie themselves after I’d tightened the ropes. I used a few knots Wayne Leary had taught me as a kid – they were designed so they tightened if you struggled.
I noticed the back of Sarah’s neck was bleeding from a nasty cut one of the men had given her. It was in an awkward place – there was no way for her to see it with her long hair getting in the way. I said I’d clean it up for her and we went into her bathroom. She sat on a stool in front of a mirror. The cut was hurting her, but she was putting on a brave face. “You don’t have to do this. Really. I can manage.”
“I won’t hurt,” I promised.
“It’s not that …”
“Then what?”
Her eyes locked on mine, then she looked away. “Nothing. Okay – you can help. I’d appreciate it.”
Sarah tipped her dark hair over her face, exposing her neck for me. Her neck was pale, hidden as it usually was from the tanning of the sun by her hair. She winced when I cleaned the cut and applied ointment. It didn’t need stitches, but it would throb for a few days. I put on a Band-Aid. She shook her hair back over her eyes, sweeping it back with a gold-handled brush. There was not a kink or split end in it, despite its length. She looked at me through the mirror and smiled. “Thanks.”
I liked her smile. “No problem.”
She looked about to say something when she shook her head. “I guess I should find you something to sleep on ...”
Sarah disappeared upstairs for some minutes, rummaging inside closets. I called my father and told him I wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, then Sarah brought me a sleeping bag and some pillows and I tried sleeping on her couch. She slept in her room on the floor above. I was tired and needed sleep, but it was a hot night and I could not rest.
Sarah was on my mind. We’d had some kind of connection when looking in the mirror, our defences down, our true selves looking at each other. I found myself more attracted to her.
Sleep, I told myself. It was hard to relax with two prisoners just next door. I discarded the sleeping bag and tried sleeping again. But I couldn’t. I sat up, listening to the night. I could hear the house settling. Bored, I switched on a tensor lamp by the window and inspected the books in the room looking for something interesting to read. There were so many books packed on Sarah’s bookcases I wondered how the floor managed to support their weight. Most were textbooks with titles as long as paragraphs, but I reached up to a top shelf where she kept her fiction. I found it endearing to see classic romantic works among science fiction and literary titles. I picked up a short novel by Martin Amis. I’d read some of his short stories in the New Yorker and I started reading it hoping it would either prove entertaining or make me sleepy.
Across the room, there was a large photograph in an ornate silver frame of Sarah and a group of people standing in a line in front of a bright red tractor. Sarah looked about sixteen. They were all smiling with scrunched up faces as the sun beat down on them and the rich fields of wheat behind them. The wheat filled most of the picture behind the tractor. The horizon was a straight line between yellow and blue. Sarah looked happy in the photograph. She was holding hands with two girls a few years younger, and they in turn were holding hands with smaller, younger girls, all with dark hair and dark eyes. An older man and woman stood in the middle. They were the only ones not smiling. The family looked like they were looking out of the picture at me.
About one o’clock, I heard Sarah pacing her room. The floorboards squeaked like little mice. I got up and went into the kitchen. The two captives glared at me. I ignored them. I looked in Sarah’s refrigerator.
I froze when I saw some beers in the rack. They looked so tempting. Beers. I reached out, touching a cold can of Budweiser, but I said no to myself and looked away, looking for a soft drink. I found some on a shelf.
I didn’t think she would mind if I drank a Dr Pepper. I opened the can in front of the men and tantalised them with it. Then I gulped it down, gasping, relishing the chilled marzipan flavour. I wasn’t very keen on Dr Pepper, but I acted like it was the best drink ever. The men looked as if they could kill me for a single drop. I walked back into the living room and saw Sarah standing in the far doorway. She was just wearing a white T-shirt that stopped at her thighs and some boxer shorts. She had great legs. Her skin was shiny with perspiration.
“How long?” she said.
“What?”
“How long have you been off the booze?”
“What?”
“I came down for a beer and saw you looking in the fridge. You had the same look my father got when he was trying to cut down. He never did, though. I’m glad you didn’t take one.”
“I thought about it,” I said.
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
“Being an alcoholic? My father never talked about it. He would just get violent if I asked him. I drink a few beers a week, but I can’t understand why he couldn’t give up. What’s so hard?”
“Some people are just predisposed towards it. I used to drink to function, like it was food. You can’t give up food no more than an alcoholic can do without a drink. Now I’m struggling to do without it. Every day is a test.” We sat down on the sofa after Sarah went into the kitchen and came back with a Coca-Cola and a tall glass. I appreciated the fact she wasn’t drinking beer in front of me.
“Are you in AA?”
“Me?” I said, as though it was the most ridiculous question I’d ever been asked. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I tried it … once … then twice … then I lost count. AA might work for some people, but I personally can’t do it that way.”
“Why not?”
“All that faith in a ‘higher power’ stuff doesn’t work for me. I had a sponsor – someone’s who’s supposed to keep you off the booze – but he ended up selling me drugs because I was a movie star and he needed the money. So … I can’t do the AA thing.”
Sarah gave me a disappointed look.
“There’s something so depressing about being with a group of people talking about drinking …” I shook my head. “I think the best way to stop for good is just to say no-no-no until it’s like a mantra. If I don’t drink I can’t get drunk … if I don’t get drunk, I won’t need to drink … It’s working … so far.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“Can I ask you something, Sarah?”
“Shoot,” she said, drinking her Coca-Cola slowly, her lips moistening the edg
e of her glass.
“What happened to your father? Is that him in that picture?”
“Yes, that’s him. That was the day we got a new tractor. He was actually happy, not that you can tell. I think he was worried about the money.” Sarah touched her mole, perhaps not even aware of the action. “He died twelve years ago.”
“How old was he?”
“He was 54.”
“Young.”
“I’m surprised he lived that long.” She sighed. “He drank every day since the age of fourteen, which meant when his liver failed from alcohol poisoning I wasn’t exactly surprised.” Sarah looked down at her finger and saw that she was playing with her cheek. She released it and put both hands on her glass. “I wasn’t exactly upset by his passing, though. You see he was a bad drunk. He was one of those men who have an almost toxic reaction to alcohol. It would make him mean to me and my sisters.”
“He was violent?”
“No. Not with us - he never hit us or anything. He would take it out on himself. He was self-destructive. Sometimes, he used to go out to the barn and smash up his equipment after a day of drinking. That was half the reason we didn’t have any money for things. Three or fours times a week he would go into the fields in the middle of the night and yelling at himself for being so weak. The rest of us just stayed out of his way.”
“That must have been tough on you?”
“On my mother mostly. She always hoped he could stop, begged him to stop every day. I think he wanted to stop, but he didn’t know how. He would lie awake at night, sitting on the porch, drunk, telling us how much he wanted to change. He was sincere. But in the morning, he would start shaking and need a drink before his breakfast. He inherited our farm from his grandfather and worked on it his whole life, but I don’t believe it ever gave him a moment of satisfaction. Drinking was his way of coping. I don’t think I ever saw him behind the wheel of our John Deere tractor without a bottle of Jack Daniels by the wheel. He was a slave to it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Alcoholism is a bitch.”
“I shouldn’t have told you all that,” she said. “I bet you now want a beer more than ever!”
