by Ed Gorman
"You headed back to work?" he said.
"Yeah. Different direction. If you're headed to the station, I mean."
He smiled. "Yeah, I'm at the stage where I hang around there even when I'm not on duty. The older cops tell me I'll get over that fast."
I nodded. "Thanks for telling me about Myles."
"It's a hell of thing to have to tell somebody."
"I'd rather know than not know."
"He's got some kind of hold on her, that's for sure." Then: "You see that new SF movie that opened last weekend?"
"I wanted to. But Cindy said it looked too scary. She hates scary stuff."
Except for a well that has an alien in it, I thought unkindly.
"I've got Sunday afternoon off. It you're free, give me a call."
I put out my hand and we shook. I needed a friend very badly at the moment.
"You'll get over it," he said. "I got dumped once."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. This little car hop out at the A&W on old 49?"
"Jeeze, I'd forgotten all about that place." Back in my high school days, that had been the sort of unofficial hangout of the dweebs and nerds. We were far enough out of town that nobody could hassle us. Plus they let us use the cigarette machine even though we were underage.
"Took me a year to get over her, but I did."
"How come she dumped you?"
He tapped his nose. "She got in this fucking car wreck."
"And that's why she dumped you?"
"Nah. She got in this car wreck and had to have all this plastic surgery on her face."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And the surgery turned her into a real beauty. God, she was beautiful. You should've seen her." He shrugged. "Well, anybody who looks like she did sure doesn't want to hang around somebody like me. So she dumped me. Started going out with this really handsome rich kid." He smiled. It was not without bitterness. "But she got paid back."
"How?"
"The handsome rich kid?"
"Uh-huh."
"He turned out to be a peeper."
"A peeper?"
"Yeah, you know, a guy who's always peeping into ladies' johns and places like that."
I laughed. "Man, I guess she got paid back."
He smiled and cuffed me on the arm. "Just hang in there. Maybe Myles'll turn out to be a transvestite or something."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That night I followed her. That's not a nice thing to admit about yourself, that you're the kind of guy who'd sneak around after your girlfriend, like the kind of guy who would call people on the phone anonymously and hassle them.
But I did.
Dark came right after dinner, and when she left the house for the evening I was parked down the block.
She went to the pharmacy first, and then to the library, and then to the mall.
Then she went to the Arby's over on Foster Avenue, and that's where she found Myles.
He was there waiting for her.
I sat in the lot and watched them in the window.
When she saw him, she gave him a quick kiss on the mouth and then sat down in his booth, across from him.
I felt sick.
I had quick, frantic dreams of going in there and hauling her out here. I'd make a strong case for myself, how I was good and true and sensitive and didn't that count for something in this world? And if she needed reminding, I'd remind her of all the terrible things Myles had done to her.
I started feeling self-conscious, the way people checked me out as they went inside.
They seemed to sense that I was a pretty sleazy character, following some poor girl around, unable to take my banishment like a mature adult.
None of it made sense to me. For three or four nights there, we'd spent a lot of great hours together, her constantly telling me how happy she was to be with me instead of him... and then I felt her pulling back.
But why?
Sometimes I looked in the window where she sat and I hated her for what she'd done to me. I couldn't ever remember pain like this.
Tonight, for example, I'd gone into my room and slid out my Penthouse from underneath my mattress where my Mom couldn't find it. Sometimes, just to cut tension (and to have as good a time as you can have alone), I masturbated. But not tonight. I looked at all the naked girls who usually aroused me, and felt nothing. Nothing. Then I'd gone into the basement where I have four small bookcases packed with science fiction paperbacks and magazines from high school. Sometimes, when I'm down, I can go down there and look at them and touch them and feel the kind of solace I used to, that even if I was a dweeb and isolated and scared, I could always hide between the covers of those books and magazines, that there was escape and mercy after all, if only you knew where to find it.
They stayed in Arby's an hour.
Some of the time, they looked to be having a very serious discussion. Other times, they laughed.
When they came out into the warm mid-November night, her arm was around his middle and he was giving her a squeeze.
They left her car there. She got in his.
If he found out that I was following them, he'd beat me up even worse than he had before.
But I didn't care. I followed them.
She sat close to him in the front seat. A lot of people honked at them, and they honked back. King and queen. Royalty.
The night didn't help. It was one of those smoky autumn nights that make you melancholy and restless without you knowing quite why.
They stopped at a jock shop where he tried on a couple of letter jackets. Again, I saw them through the windows. My own little TV show.
Maybe it would be better if he saw me and caught me, I thought. Then we could at least get this over with.
When they came out of the jock shop, they stopped off at a convenience store where Myles bought a six-pack. He was underage but he was also Myles and they weren't going to refuse him, not in this town.
Myles had parked on the dark side of the store. When he came out, he set the beer in the back seat and then they started making out.
Right there.
We'd kind of done that, too, our last night together, wanted to kiss so badly that we couldn't control ourselves, and made out just about every place we went.
I felt sick again, wild with rage and embarrassment and self-pity.
I was so fascinated and repelled by what I saw that I didn't even hear him sneak up on me.
"You want to borrow my binoculars?" he said.
"Hey. How you doing?"
"Guess I should ask how you're doing?"
"Oh, pretty good."
"Right. That's why you're sitting here watching them make out."
He really was a cop, Garrett. He'd easily figured out what I was doing here.
"You must like punishment."
"Yeah, I must."
"Why don't you go have a beer?"
I could tell that this wasn't a suggestion, it was a subtle but definite order.
This was Garrett the cop talking, saying that it wasn't a real good situation when one citizen sat there spying on another.
"Yeah, that's probably a good idea."
He looked at me and smiled. "You'll get over it."
"Yeah, I suppose I will."
"You'll meet somebody else."
Once again, I had the sense that Garrett had become a real adult while I had remained a child. He wouldn't sit here watching her like this. He was too proud, too sensible, too much of an adult.
"I hope it's soon, Garrett."
He nodded, and then walked back to his car.
I did what he wanted me to. I fired up the beast, which was running again after smashing into Cindy's tree, and then I drove away from there—
—all the way around the block.
Garrett was gone.
Myles and Cindy were just pulling out.
I followed them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At first I wasn't sure where they were going.
We d
rove out of town on an old highway that paralleled the Interstate. Everything got dark. I stayed a half mile behind. Farmhouses shone in tonight's red harvest moon. I had the window down and I could hear cows and horses and barn owls.
When he turned west, I knew where he was going to take us.
I had to smile when I tried to imagine him at the well. This hard, unimaginative football hero trying to play along with her fantasy.
Maybe that would drive her back to me, the way I'd been sympathetic and pretended that I'd heard something.
Suggestible is what I'd been.
I'd gotten caught up in her mood and then, while we were making love, my mind had started imagining the voice. At least the voice had been speaking gibberish.
I smelled hay and cow manure and silo corn and prairie night; I saw hill and creek and railroad tracks shining in the moonlight.
And then we were pulling off the road, and he was parking, and they were walking up the hill to the woods that would lead them to the shack and the well.
I gave them a ten minute start on me, and then I was out of the car and walking toward the woods.
It was spookier than I'd thought it would be.
Monsters didn't bother me. But killers did. You weren't safe anywhere these days. Just last year there'd been a guy in the adjacent county who'd kidnapped an eleven year old girl and chopped her up and ate her.
By the time I reached the end of the woods, they were already down by the cabin.
I couldn't tell what they were saying but their words were harsh and angry.
He shoved her, and then he hit her.
I could see it all clearly in the moonlight.
She sank to her knees, touching her jaw where he'd slammed his fist into her moments before.
Their words continued harsh and loud but I still couldn't quite understand them.
I wanted to go down there but I knew better. She might appreciate the fact that I saved her from him but she'd never forgive me for following them in the first place.
And then she was on her feet, and pushing him.
I was surprised at her strength, surprised that he didn't hit her again.
The first time the spasm took him, he was a few feet from the well.
My first impression was that he was joking. I've seen boys try to scare their girlfriends by throwing themselves to the ground and pretending that they're having some sort of seizure.
That's what this looked like.
He started doing a sort of dance, his arms fluttering crazily in the air, his torso snapping and jerking as if in rhythm to violent music.
Then he screamed.
That's when I knew for sure that he wasn't kidding.
The spasms got even more violent over the next few minutes, and so did the screaming.
She just watched.
Didn't try to stop him or comfort him in any way.
As if she knew what was happening here and had just decided to let it run its course.
He fell to his hands and knees and, in silhouette against the blood red harvest moon, he resembled an animal, a wolf maybe, there on the ground by the well.
And then he began sobbing.
This was worse than his screaming, the way it frightened and moved me.
In the Army, I saw a man go berserk after he'd learned that his wife had left him. He took a straight razor to his wrists in the shower. We found him huddled in the corner, beneath the water, weeping.
Myles reminded me of that forlorn man—only Myles sounded much sadder and more desperate, more primal and animal-like.
She got him to his feet somehow, and then she took him to her as if he were her child rather than her lover.
And the odd thing was, I didn't feel my usual jealousy now, seeing him in her arms this way.
For the moment anyway, I wanted her to soothe and succor him. I was being selfish. I couldn't take hearing any more of his strange wailing.
Gradually, his sobbing began to wane but still she held him, even rocking him back and forth a little, gently, gently, once again as if she were the mother and he the child.
It ended then as abruptly as it began. Myles looked spent and dropped to the ground on his knees. There was nothing more to see—or nothing more I cared to see anyway.
Had something in the well set Myles off? Or was he simply caught up in her mood as I'd been when I imagined the voices.
I laughed out loud.
Certainly, it had been nothing in the well. There was nothing in the well but water, and dirty, undrinkable water at that.
So he'd been more imaginative than I'd given him credit for—so imaginative that he fell victim to himself—imagined that something had possessed him, and overwhelmed him.
But his cries had been pretty convincing.
Damned convincing.
I was glad to be out of the woods, and in my car, and heading back home.
Popcorn and Pepsi and Late Night With David Letterman sounded damned good about now.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
But they didn't work for me, neither popcorn nor David Letterman.
I sat on the moonlit screened-in back porch. It was mild as a spring night and it was November. I wanted to be a kid again. I wanted to be anybody but who I was at that moment.
I thought about her and how I'd never be able to love anybody ever again the way I loved her. My first affair and it had lasted all of a week.
There had been a basketball game tonight. I should have gone to that, seen Josh play. It was heading to midnight now. He was likely out with his girlfriend.
A weariness overcame me. I felt a kind of paralysis. The night air was so sweet and sentimental, I didn't want to go inside.
I put my head back and closed my eyes.
I tasted her, tasted her mouth, tasted her sex. I didn't think I'd done especially well at oral sex—I really was a virgin—despite her claims that I'd been "wonderful."
A car pulled into the driveway, headlights illuminating the closed white garage door. Josh.
He put the car away, shut up the garage, and walked up on the back porch.
"How's it going, Romeo?"
That's what he'd started calling me after he found out I was taking Cindy out.
He sat in the chair next to mine.
"You shouldn't call me that anymore."
"No? How come?"
"She dumped me."
"Dumped you? Shit, you've only had about four or five dates with her." He grinned. "Nobody could get sick of you that fast."
I had to smile, though it was painful. "She went back with Myles."
"You're kidding. He beat her up all the time."
"I know."
"You sure about that?"
"I saw them together. And Garrett told me."
"Garrett the cop?"
"Yeah," I said.
"No offense, but when I was a little kid and he was always hanging around here—I thought he was the biggest dweeb of all."
"Yeah, I guess I did, too."
"And he grows up to be a cop." He grinned again. "I saw him strutting around downtown in his uniform yesterday. Always got his hand on the butt of his pistol. Like a western gunfighter."
"Yeah, I noticed that."
He stuck out his very long legs.
"Give her a call tomorrow," he said.
"Who?"
"Who? Cindy."
"Call her?"
"Damned right call her. Tell her it's Saturday and you want to meet her downtown on your lunch hour. No offense, Romeo, but you've got to be forceful with women."
Once again, it was little brother giving big brother advice.
"It's pretty embarrassing sometimes," I said.
"Look, brother, one thing you've got to understand about women. They like it when you embarrass yourself over them. That way they know you care about them. Maybe that's all it'll take."
"Just calling her?"
"Yeah, and showing that you really care about her."
I felt a loopy exhila
ration. Everything would be fine. I'd call her and after a little initial reluctance she'd be glad to hear from me and she'd agree to have lunch and when she saw me at the restaurant she wouldn't be able to help herself any more. She'd rush into my arms and things would be right between us again. The way they had been last week.
"I also got somebody to take care of Myles for you."
"You did?"
"Yeah, there's a sophomore fullback named Nick Reynolds. He can bench press 350. He's also a boxer. When he was a freshman, Myles gave him a lot of shit and Reynolds never forgot it. I was telling him about you and Myles over some brewskis the other night and he said he's been looking for a reason to punch out Myles for a long time. He says Myles gives you any more shit about Cindy, you just tell me and I'll tell Reynolds and Reynolds'll punch his face in."
"Sort of like a hit man?"
He laughed. "Yeah, kind of, I guess."
He looked at me and then did something that surprised me, leaned over and gave me a little hug. "You look like you're pretty sad, brother."
I was afraid I was going to cry. I was a wuss enough already. "Yeah, I guess I am."
"Fuck her. That's the attitude you've got to take with women. I got my heart broke in tenth grade and I'll tell you, man, never again. Now I do everything I can for them but if they want to dick me around and break my heart, I just say fuck 'em and walk away. That's all you can do. It really is."
I'd felt good for a moment there, felt that I was going to make things right with Cindy, but now I felt bad again.
I couldn't say fuck you to Cindy and walk away. I couldn't and I knew it.
"You think you'll ever get around to asking me about the game tonight, Romeo?"
"Hey, I forgot."
"I noticed."
"You win?"
"97-68."
"God."
"And I scored thirty-eight of them all by myself."
"Wow."
"You want to drink a brewski on that?"
"Yeah. That sounds great." I was rallying again.
"I'll steal a couple from the fridge. The old man won't mind." He stood up and walked to the kitchen door. "Remember, Romeo. What's the motto?"
'"Fuck 'em.'"
"That's right. 'Fuck 'em.'"
Yeah, I felt real good right then, and it must have lasted for all of thirty seconds.
