Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  Zach had taken everything with him the morning before when I dropped him off at the airport. He’d probably left his bag there. I wondered for a moment what he had done all last night—drank in some bar, or just wandered. I could feel his presence in the room, sad but at least honest. I sat down on the bed, thought what I would have done to that guy on the road if he hadn’t backed down, and tried to get a grip.

  You’d think all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen. That the rage at even a lifetime’s worth of death such as I had known will dissipate into scrapbooking and volunteer work with Humane Society fund-raisers.

  Well, maybe I’d been kidding myself that I could be that woman. Maybe that’s not how it always is, maybe not how it should be. Of the half dozen lines of poetry I know by heart, there’s, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Howl, howl … or rage, rage … against the dying of the light.”

  This is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging.

  How to express my feelings in that moment, my hatred for that man who had destroyed so many lives and had come back all these years later to destroy mine as well. This man, who was responsible for destroying my life and the only real happiness I’d ever known, was making me mad.

  Mad enough to kill him.

  Kill him and gnaw his still-warm flesh.

  Whoa, Quinn. Slipping off the grid, are we? It’s something Dad used to say, along with twenty–thirty years from now, you’ll laugh at all this.

  Well, Dad, just think. Twenty–thirty years from now, we’ll both be dead. Ha, ha. Isn’t that a scream?

  I paced back and forth, back and forth in the room, wanting to connect and not wanting to connect with another soul. Brother, a Fort Lauderdale cop with a wife with MS, no. Sister with the CIA, who knew where, no. Mom? Not Mom. I dialed their number at the Weeping Willow Retirement Center anyway, the drifting part of my mind slipping out and watching me hit the numbers.

  “It’s Brigid, Mom.”

  “Are you all right?” Her voice took on that tone of someone who suspects that bad news is the only kind there is, that I was calling from a hospital and the only moving part left was my mouth. Maybe that’s how it is for a mother when everyone in your family is some kind of cop. She always said, “are you all right?” rather than “hello.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Good, because sometimes just the sound of your voice gives me an attack of colitis. I worry about you all the time.” Before I could make this something like a dialogue she went on. “I won thirty dollars at bingo last night.”

  “That’s great. Congratulations.”

  “So how’s Carlo?”

  My voice caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak. Why the fuck did I call her before I was strong enough to hear about how I got to be fifty something and still couldn’t do a grown-up thing like keep a marriage together? Or remember that I gave her nervous colitis at the best of times? But it was okay because I didn’t have to go into any of that. She turned from the phone, and I could hear her talking to Dad, could almost hear the impatient ice cubes in his glass, almost smell the bourbon. When she turned her mouth back to the receiver, she said, “Listen, honey, it’s dinnertime. Daddy wants to take me down to dinner now. Could you call back?”

  “Sure. Sure, Mom.” I hung up, trying to get back the several decades of maturity I’d misplaced during our few minutes of conversation.

  That exhausted family. I couldn’t trust myself to call Sigmund, afraid I might tell him things he would have to testify to later at my trial.

  I looked around the room for the first time. I was sitting on one of two double beds. I tried not to imagine the body fluids that would show up on the bedspread under an infrared light. Over each bed was a large print showing a watercolor of a cactus, one a prickly pear with dark red fruit practically bursting from the paddles. I pictured the fruit popping like blood blisters and running down the wall. The other was a saguaro, that tall kind of cactus with arms, capped with little white blossoms at the top. I won’t say what that picture made me imagine.

  Despite this being the safest place for me, I didn’t want to be here. I figured I could keep myself from draining out of my head long enough to reach a bar.

  Thirty-five

  The whole Quinn family was well known for their drinking. Mom and Dad would have parties and my brother and sister and I, mere tikes all, would roam through the house the next morning finishing off the warm highballs left by guests. I pretty much went off the hard stuff for Carlo’s sake, but without Carlo sobriety was just a waste of good liquor.

  I sat at the bar of Emery’s Cantina, on my second vodka over ice in a short tumbler so I didn’t have to worry about knocking over a martini glass. The first sip created that captivating tingle at the base of my skull, then radiated warmth down my spine. By the second drink I was just high enough to remember the waitress told me the owner was Hungarian, and I said, “Egészségedre,” as I raised my glass to Emery.

  He laughed, said, “It sounds a little like you are saying ‘up your ass,’” his Eastern European accent making the little come out like, lily. He tried to help me pronounce the toast correctly so it sounded more like to your health. While I was having a language lesson I scoped him out better than I did the first time I was in here. Not so much an overweight baby as I had at first observed, but definitely the sort of man people call Big Guy, he carried his weight so that even his belly had an odd sexual appeal.

  Contact with a living human being felt good, so I asked, “When did you come over?”

  “About twenty years ago,” he said. For a moment he went inside himself as if watching memories of his own, then told me he emigrated with his family just after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I understand there is, oddly, an unusually large Hungarian population in Tucson so it was easy to find a sponsor. He asked me about my professional life.

  I said, “Copyright infringement.”

  He looked skeptical. “But Cheri has told me you are famous.”

  I lost the inclination for further conversation. Careful to avoid looking into the mirror that runs behind the whole length of the bar, I turned my focus to the bottles of Tarantula Tequila (no fooling) and something called Cabo Wabo. A stained cardboard sign with the witticism SHOTS HAPPEN, a double pun in a cop bar.

  I looked at the jar of pickled pigs’ feet on the bar a few feet away. It reminded me of what you’d see in a medical examiner’s office after a mass fatality. The pink flesh and white gristle of the feet mashed against the glass as if they were looking back and, if they got out, would slime across the bar at me. There was … the way I had imagined with the water sparkling on the mountain, or with the cactus prints back in the hotel room, I started to imagine seeing something else, more violent, more hideously grotesque than before. I couldn’t take my eyes off the jar and felt a bit of the vodka rise in my throat.

  If it wouldn’t have sounded crazy I would have asked Emery to throw a bar towel over the jar. I was sick of seeing these things and disgusted by my own thoughts. You are one fucked up woman, Brigid Quinn. When all this is over I’m going to go back into therapy, I think. Then I thought, what for?

  I finally wrenched my eyes away from the jar, searching for something that showed life was worth it. A vase with a single red rose next to the cash register made me wonder what Emery and Cheri were celebrating.

  Emery must have sensed my mood and started doing that thing that expert bartenders do, pretending to ignore me but wiping glasses just close enough so that in case I wasn’t just talking to myself he’d hear my whisper and head over. He was that bartender that every detective needs, someone I’d be able to talk to now that I was alone again. He went briefly into a room off the bar, probably his office, and when he came back he smelled like cherry-bourbon pipe tobacco.

  There weren’t many people there on a weekday night so I felt okay asking Cheri to turn off the jukebox that was playing a combination of 90s pop and guitar country. She did.
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  Since when did I develop this pathological hatred of music?

  Since I could name one asshole or another who’s partial to every kind there is, from Bach to hip-hop. Since when music is playing it’s harder to hear someone coming up behind you. Since Paul played the cello and every time I hear a stringed instrument it makes me feel like the performer is jabbing the bow down my throat. Certainly I hated music long before listening to Kate Smith belt, “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain” on a hot summer night, the night I lost Jessica.

  I asked Cheri to tell me about herself. “Did you come here from someplace else like the rest of us?”

  “No,” she said. “My people have been ranchers here for nearly two hundred years. We were never slaves.”

  She sounded proud, like she wanted people to know that about her, to see something more than the fact that she was black. I’d heard about that, that small percent of the Arizona population, African American, who found their way here through some means other than slave ships. “Are you and Emery together?” I ask.

  She smiled and nodded.

  “How did you meet?”

  “I needed a job to help pay for school. He knew my family.”

  “How are your studies going?”

  “Good.” That’s all she said, and then flickered sad. Everybody lies.

  I changed the topic again by ordering a burrito with guacamole to absorb some of the liquor, which was getting to me after not eating anything since that bagel in the morning.

  My brief exchange with Cheri about her relationship with Emery made thinking about Carlo unavoidable. Because that seemed somewhat preferable to thinking about mass pig fatalities, I gave in to the memories.

  Thirty-six

  I hadn’t spent that much energy standing in my closet staring at my clothes in a long time. For my first date with Carlo, I ultimately chose a floor-length sleeveless black jersey with a low-slung cowl neck that showed off my relatively firm triceps while hiding my monkey-face knees. I let my hair hang naturally instead of pasting it to the back of my head in a twist.

  Sound of a knock, he didn’t use the doorbell. When I opened the front door it didn’t take a trained eye to see the effect I had. His retinas dilated, and his pulse throbbed in the side of his throat. Surprisingly, I could feel my own pulse accelerate in response, as if our hearts were souped-up engines and we were revving for a drag. I tried to remember the last time I had sex, thought I’d rather go straight to bed, dinner was going to feel interminable. He helped me into his unimpressive Volvo, the back of his hand grazing my bare shoulder.

  But dinner wasn’t at all what I expected. Oh, we went over all the usual backstory. He shared that he was an ex–Catholic priest and had been teaching since he left the Jesuits in his forties. And he talked about Jane, his wife of twenty years, with a seasoned grief that somehow made his face only more attractive. I told him my story as well, the sanitized version, how I was in law enforcement, just a desk job really, retired, not much else to tell.

  “Federal or local?” he asked, ignoring the hint that I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Federal. I investigated copyright infringements,” I added to forestall any more questions about myself, with a small regret that the first lie happened so soon. To turn the focus back on him I gave him a compassionate stare mixed with a “come on, you can tell me” twinkle. “Was it too hard to be a priest? Dealing with so much horror in the world?”

  “No, that wasn’t it. I found people to be essentially good. That was my problem with the church.”

  “Since when?” I said, taking an ever so small sip of wine and glancing appreciatively at the soft-shell crab appetizer placed before us. He had brought me to a very nice place.

  “Since when have people been good, you mean?”

  I nodded, dipping a little leg into a cream sauce and nibbling on it.

  “Since always,” he said. “That original sin business is crap,” he said, but in a mild tone, lacking the intensity with which people usually debate matters of faith. He sipped his Manhattan, with no intention of saying more about that. A little sissy, that Manhattan, but nobody’s perfect. Then he asked, “Why, what has been your experience?”

  He wasn’t bad at focus turning himself.

  “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” I asked.

  “The Shadow knows,” he said.

  We both laughed, that kind of moment when you agree to admit how old you are. But then I saw that he really wanted me to answer, and I needed to tell him something. “My experience has been…” I nearly said something flip, then found myself wanting to impress him, to show I could keep up with him on an intellectual level. “Most good is just a way of hiding an agenda.”

  “Interesting. You’re familiar with Max Beerbohm.”

  While trying not to look like I should have been, I admitted I was not.

  Carlo managed to tell me without sounding patronizing. “A writer. He wrote a story that agrees with your point of view, only with a different result. Do you care to hear it, or would you prefer to shift back to quips and flirting?”

  I was momentarily stunned, a rare experience with any man. Carlo DiForenza had my number, and he was by no means going to let me control the evening. I was uncomfortable with that, but the discomfort felt, in its own way, kind of delicious, and for the first time I went into an emotional free fall without looking for the net. I employed the name that would become my favorite term of endearment, a character in an old cartoon strip called Pogo. “Have it your way, Perfesser.”

  He smiled to show he got the allusion. “Thank you.” He paused to eat his maraschino cherry thoughtfully before going on. “A very wicked man falls in love with an innocent young woman. He declares his love, but she can see he’s wicked. His degeneracy is stamped on his countenance. She says the only man she can love will have the face of a saint. So he goes to a mask shop and finds exactly that, a saint’s face. She falls in love with him and agrees to marry. But now comes the challenge. In order to keep her love, he must keep up the charade. So he gives money to the poor, is kind to children and small animals, visits the sick. All to convince her that he is the saint she assumes him to be. And every morning, before the sun comes up, he puts his mask back on before she can see what he really is. As you said, hiding his agenda.

  “Only one morning, after they have been married for some years, he reaches under the bed where the mask is hidden. He feels nothing but shredded paper. Mice must have nibbled at it during the night and left nothing for him to wear. He begins to weep, knowing that this is the end of his great love. When his wife discovers he has been nothing but a hypocrite, she will leave him.

  “The sun comes in the window, and, as always, his wife rolls over so that his face is the first thing she sees. She looks at him with eyes of love, not the horror he had expected. He cautiously kisses her, gets up, and steals a look at himself in the mirror on her dressing table. And he is shocked to see that his face looks exactly like that of the mask he had worn so long. Ah, the entrée,” he finished, licked his lips with anticipation, and fell to his scallops and caramelized onions without seeming to notice that the muscle at the top of my jaw had clenched briefly, or that it took me a moment to control my breathing and fan the tears dry with my eyelashes before I could mutter something suitable about my sea bass.

  I was grateful for the warning. In that moment I decided I would never allow Dr. Carlo DiForenza to see me without my mask. The tactic had worked well until today.

  Thirty-seven

  I had ordered a third, or maybe a fourth, vodka. Emery didn’t pour it immediately, stood looking at me with a question he was used to asking. I spoke to show him I wasn’t hammered, could still reasonably operate my tongue and lips. “What happened first, Cheri come to work in a cop bar or Cheri studying criminal justice? Or is it just a coincidence?”

  “There is a reason for everything. Cheri lost her older sister in an act of violence. You would understand how victims of vi
olence are drawn to it.”

  “Was it a long time ago?”

  Emery’s eyes grew large with sadness. “What do you consider a long time?”

  “I’d like to talk to her about it sometime.”

  “If you continue to be a customer, someday you will. Just not right away. Are you sure you want another drink?”

  Seeing the way he cared about Cheri’s feelings made me more depressed. I canceled the vodka and asked for my burrito to go. Cheri brought it in a Styrofoam container and tucked it with a plastic fork and extra napkins into a brown paper bag.

  The Quinn family was also used to having designated enablers. Emery told me he’d have Cheri take me home if I’d be able to show her where I lived. I was ashamed for anyone to know I couldn’t go home, that I was staying within a short drive at the Sheraton, and suggested they call me a cab instead. The cab took about twenty minutes to get there so I reordered my vodka while I waited. By this time the place was empty except for me. The three of us talked a little, that inane bar talk that seems like scintillating conversation when you’re half-snockered.

  Jokes are good at a time like that, especially if you’ve told them several times before, because you’ve practiced the words and can get them out with less stumbling. I told the old one about the guy who’s afraid to fly because of the possibility of a bomb on the plane. “His therapist says, ‘The odds of flying on a plane with a bomb are a million to one.’ The guy says that’s not good enough. ‘Well,’ the therapist says, ‘the odds of being on a plane where there are two bombs is a billion to one. So carry a bomb with you.’”

  Thirty years ago that joke was funny, but Cheri and Emery looked at me without laughing. “I don’t know, maybe bombs on planes are not so funny anymore,” Emery said soothingly, placating me as only a bartender could who has avoided attacks by mean drunks on countless occasions. Cheri sat on the bar stool next to me and lightly rubbed my back. I didn’t like her for it.

  “Everything is funny,” I said. “It has to be or we’re all fucked.”