The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

by Norman Partridge

  So he starts crawling after it himself…

  .. .but it’s too late for that.

  And that’s just what Jessie’s dead lover tells her as she lays unconscious in a parking lot, raindrops washing her all the way to dreamland.

  Joe Shepard’s dead lips part and he says, “It’s too late, Jessie.”

  “It’s never too late,” she says. “Unless you believe it is.”

  “That’s the way you see it.”

  “That’s the way you’d see it too, if you’d bother to look.”

  Their eyes meet. Jessie knows that Joe is dead. She watched Oates murder him the night before, saw Joe’s heart chewed by buckshot. Saw the open ruin of his chest, slick and dark as blackberry jam. Saw his dead eyes, cold and green and still full of need, as Larry Oates stood over him with a smoking shotgun in his hands.

  So she knows this shouldn’t be happening — this rendezvous with a dead man — but she trusts her eyes because she sees things other people don’t even know how to look for. Especially in her dreams. In dreams she sees those things dead on, and she never, ever blinks.

  And right now she sees Joe Shepard, the only man she ever loved, a corpse standing in the barn where they first met Larry Oates. Her lover is free of the grave, and the rain has washed a lot of the mud off of him, but Jessie knows he’s not free at all. Not really.

  That’s the way it looks to her. Of course, even someone like Jessie can’t see absolutely everything. She’s human. She misses things now and then. Little things, mostly. Or not-so-little things — like nine hundred bucks pulled from a rip in her lapel by the man who killed her lover.

  So the next thing she tells the dead man isn’t exactly a lie. “I’ve still got the money,” she says. “Every cent, just like I told you. I promise I’ll bring it back if you just wait a little longer.”

  Joe shakes his head, rain-washed face bathed in dim fluorescent light and a few trickles of unhallowed mud like dark tears on his cheeks. There’s not much light in the barn, but there’s enough to see the important things, like the little bit of a smile on Joe’s face, a smile Jessie has seen a thousand times before. A smile that means he understands things in a way she doesn’t. A smile that means he’s got to lay it out for her one more time.

  “That money,” he says. “It was everything to me.”

  “I swear, Joe. I’ve got it. I’ll bring it to you. If you just wait — ”

  He grabs her by the lapels and pulls her close. Digs his dead fingers into the ripped seam. Comes up short one roll of greenbacks amounting to nine hundred dollars.

  “Oates pulled it out when you stabbed him. He dropped the money, and rainwater carried it across the parking lot.” Joe taps his head. “I watched it happen, saw everything inside my skull. It’s funny being dead. You see all sorts of things. You even see some things that haven’t happened yet. Like this — a couple hours from now a little waitress with a pierced belly button is going to step outside for a cigarette break. She’ll spot that nine hundred bucks just before the rain washes it down a drain, and she’ll pick it up, and — ”

  “I’ll go back for it,” Jessie says. “One way or another, I’ll make her give it to me.”

  “Considering that you’re out cold at the moment, I don’t see how you have much chance of getting that done.”

  “Trust me just a little longer, Joe. I can do it.”

  Joe shakes his head some more, and the look on his face is stone cold, a look Jessie never saw when he was alive. “I’m tired of trusting other people,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s time I handled this myself.”

  “No. Just give me one more chance — ”

  “You had your chance. Our deal was that I’d stay put if you brought back every dollar, and now you’ve gone and lost nine hundred bucks. You don’t understand what that money meant to me. I won’t let anyone keep me from it. Not even you.”

  There’s a work table near the barn door. Joe walks over to it. The table is littered with beer bottles and ashtrays and weapons. Joe picks up Larry Oates’ shotgun. “Somehow, I’ve got a shot at a second chance,” he says. “That’s what’s important here. I can feel it in my gut. It’s a new feeling, something that wasn’t there when I was alive, and I’ve got to go with it. See, this isn’t some crazy dream, Jess.”

  Jessie stares at him. His green eyes are set, unblinking, not smiling at all anymore. Alive, his eyes always smiled. But now his eyes are dead, and different, like part of a mask.

  A mask worn by a stranger.

  “If you do this thing,” she says, “you won’t be the man I know anymore.”

  Joe nods his head. “Maybe I’ll be different. Maybe I already am. I don’t know, Jess — maybe losing your pulse raises your IQ. Maybe I’m smarter than I used to be. Or maybe I’m just seeing some things that you can’t see — the same way I see that waitress picking up my money in a couple of hours. Any way you slice it, I know what feels right in my gut, and I’m going to go out and do it. It’s the only way I know to get back everything I lost.”

  “But that waitress doesn’t have anything to do with this. All she’s going to do is pick up some money. Nine hundred bucks — ”

  “You’re wrong. It’s more than money now. A lot more. That’s all you need to understand.”

  Jessie stares at him. A chill travels her spine, because she barely recognizes the man she loved.

  She wants to say more, but Joe holds up a hand. “Here’s my advice, Jess — stop worrying about me, and stop worrying about waitresses you don’t even know. Start worrying about yourself. After all, you’re the one who just knifed a drug dealer. I think he might be a little pissed about that.”

  It’s almost funny, that last part.

  But Jessie doesn’t laugh. Not this time.

  And Joe doesn’t smile.

  Not anymore.

  “Shit,” Smitty says. “Shit!”

  He boots the clutch and his hand chops the gear shift. His knuckles ache like a sonofabitch. Smitty doesn’t like to hit women. They all have hard fucking heads.

  He shakes his right hand. It’s sure enough messed up. Probably busted. And Oates. Man! His partner is in the back of Smitty’s Peterbilt tractor, bleeding in the sleeper, gutted like a fish. If Oates dies… if the bossman doesn’t make it… Man, Smitty can’t handle everything on his own. He’s always been the guy who moves the merchandise, doing the job while he runs redwoods down the coast. He’s no businessman. He can’t handle cops and lawyers and all the rest of it, the way Oates can…

  Shit!

  Smitty glances at the chick. She’s out cold, buckled into the passenger seat. Ankles bound with duct tape. Wrists bound with same. She won’t be getting away.

  Not this time. Last time, they weren’t careful enough. Oh, sure, her boyfriend wasn’t any problem. Just some loser looking to make a buck by moving some dope. They hooked him with a good line and a couple beers in a Portland tavern. That was all it took. After a little drive into the country and a couple more beers in Oates’ cozy cabin in the woods they marched the two of them out to the barn to show the boyfriend the merch. Right then and there Oates did him easy, blasting the boyfriend’s ass as soon as the fool told them what kind of green he wanted to lay down.

  Moron came north to be a player, didn’t even get into the game. The girl was something else, though. She got away while they were searching the dead guy for his bankroll. Had to be that she had the dough, because all they found on her fool of a boyfriend was a withdrawal slip showing he’d cleaned seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks out of his bank account —

  Not much money, really. But they’d killed for it.

  And now Oates might fucking-well die for it.

  And that makes it important.

  That makes it everything.

  Oates is huddled up in the sleeper, bleeding on a mattress that stinks of Smitty’s sweat.

  Bleeding bad. The towel Smitty gave him is soaked through. He looks for something else, but the bedding is
filthy, and the only other thing he spots is a stack of old skin magazines.

  Oates grabs a copy of Hustler and presses it to his belly. He closes his eyes and thinks about the money. Seems like it’s right there in front of him. He can see it clear as day —

  Right there in front of him. There it is. That little green jellyroll trundling across the parking lot.

  It doesn’t look very thick, that jellyroll.

  Not very thick at all.

  But it’s there in his mind. Rolling… rolling…

  Rolling like it’s never gonna stop.

  The barn door creaks open.

  Shotgun in hand, Joe steps into the storm.

  Jessie watches him go. She remembers what he said about having a shot at a second chance, and she thinks she knows what’s driving him. It’s the money, but it’s so much more. Because the money was everything to him, to the both of them. It meant a new start after some really hard times. A future. It was like a dream, a dream they could hold in their hands —

  And Joe died for it.

  That made the money even more important, maybe more important than anything else in the world.

  Maybe the money was so important that it brought Joe back from the dead. Maybe that’s the way it was. Maybe if you died for something, if a shotgun ripped you up because you wanted to hold on to it the same way you hold onto your own heartbeat, maybe something out there in the great beyond might cut you a break and bend the rules a little bit. Yeah. Maybe something up above in heaven or down below in hell might be impressed enough by all that unvarnished need to cheat the reaper for a little while and let you try to get that something back —

  Maybe that’s how Joe sees it. Jessie doesn’t want to see it that way, though. Something inside tells her it’s wrong, the same something that tells her Joe isn’t the same man anymore. She recognizes him, sure. But with Jerry Oates’ shotgun in his hands, he’s a very different man than the man she loved.

  She can’t imagine a second chance with that man, even if she had one.

  The barn door bangs open and closed, driven by a renegade wind. Outside, Joe is nothing more than a shadow, drifting through the rain.

  Jessie wants to run away, but she knows it won’t do her any good. After all, she already tried that. Running in the wake of Joe’s murder, scared of the law, scared of anyone who looked like they might have their hand in Larry Oates’ till. Thumbing her way south, traveling three hundred miles with some harmless college kid before sleep stole her from his car, before her dream took her to the grave in a marijuana field where Oates and Smitty were shoveling mud into her dead lover’s face. Listening as Joe said that he couldn’t rest without the money, every dollar of it. Screaming in her head that he’d come back for it if he had to, that six feet of mud wouldn’t keep him in the ground.

  She knew he meant it. The only reason he hadn’t done anything up until then was that Jessie had the money. Joe gave it to her as soon as he cleaned out his account, saying he’d feel better with her holding it until the deal was set.

  She’d held it, all right. When she woke from the dream in the kid’s car, she still had every dollar tucked in her pocket, and what wasn’t in her pocket was jammed into her ripped lapel, and what wasn’t in either of those places was hidden in her coat lining or her boots.

  She made the college kid drop her at the first exit.

  Then she reversed course, thumbed her way north again.

  But she didn’t make it to Joe’s grave.

  And now she is unconscious.

  And nine hundred dollars float in a puddle in a restaurant parking lot.

  And a dead man named Joe Shepard is walking in the rain with a shotgun in his hands.

  And it is so dark in Jessie’s dream. She stands in the barn doorway, calling Joe’s name. She can see him in the distance, but he doesn’t look back. Finally she runs after him, and the rain pounds down on her so hard and cold that she thinks it will freeze her solid, and lightning flashes ahead of Joe, jagged spears that slice the night, cracks widening and growing brighter and brighter until —

  The chick’s eyes flash open. Right off, Smitty wants to hit her again. Goddamn if he doesn’t want to do that in the worst way.

  But he resists the temptation. He has to keep his eyes on the road. He has to get down to business, the way Oates would.

  The windshield wipers beat time as Smitty fishes his cell phone from his pocket. He calls information and gets the number he needs. Nearly runs off the road while he punches it in, and that just makes him madder.

  The wipers beat some more. The phone rings for-fucking-ever. Then the doctor finally answers. He’s the kind who’s willing to keep his mouth shut for a price. Smitty tells him to get his ass out to Oates’ barn. The smarmy bastard wants to negotiate right then and there, but Smitty doesn’t let him. He tells the sawbones he’d better get his mercenary butt moving and cuts the bastard off before he can argue.

  The chick doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to. Her eyes are talking for her. She’s got those suckers clicked onto hi-beams, emotionally speaking.

  Cool gray eyes, but they’re burning like coals.

  Let ’em burn, Smitty thinks, watching the flapping windshield wipers, the drenching rain. In this kind of motherfucking weather, nothing burns for long

  Not where this little girl’s headed.

  Nothing much burns in a wet marijuana field. Nothing burns at all under six feet of mud.

  Jessie almost opens her mouth.

  Almost. But there’s no sense in it. She can’t explain things to a guy like Smitty. Dream visions don’t exist in his realm of possibilities. Neither do walking dead men. And why should they? A bottom-feeder like Smitty can’t see things the way Jessie can. A guy like that is practically born to blink at all the wrong times.

  And even if Smitty could see those things, he probably couldn’t understand them. Some things are hard to process, even with a bucketful of downtime. Like a man wanting something badly enough to chase after it when he’s dead, or a woman returning to a lion’s den to keep him from doing it.

  But Jessie knows she’ll do just that if she gets the chance. It isn’t over yet. Smitty’s Peterbilt tractor isn’t hitched to a load of logs, and he wants to get Oates to that doctor. In other words, they’re traveling fast. They have another five or ten miles to go before they get to Oates’ farm. The restaurant is a good fifty miles behind them. That means Joe has to travel sixty miles south in the rain before he can do any damage with Oates’ shotgun. That’s going to take some time, even for a dead man who’s as determined as he is cold.

  Jessie figures it this way — Joe will probably take her old VW. He has the keys. They were in his pocket when Oates buried him. She remembers that the bug is parked by Oates’ house, where they’d had the beers while Oates put them at ease. The house was a good mile walk from the barn, through the woods she’d watched Joe enter in her dream, and —

  And then she remembers something else. The VW is down to fumes. Joe was so eager to make the buy that he didn’t want to stop and gas up the bug. Maybe he can make twenty miles, maybe thirty if he’s lucky, but no way will the bug make sixty. That puts the restaurant at least thirty miles out of range, and gassing up is going to be a problem because Joe doesn’t have a dime.

  And dead men don’t carry plastic.

  Jessie laughs. She can’t help herself.

  Smitty ignores her, downshifting as he nears the turnoff. There’s an old Mustang sitting at the stop sign at the bottom of the road that leads to Oates’ spread. It’s black with a couple of thick red bars painted on the hood, and its turn-signal flashes as the driver waits to turn onto the highway going south.

  Smitty spots the car. “Hey,” he says. “That’s my ‘67! Someone stole my goddamn Mustang!”

  The stolen car starts across the highway. Instantly, Jessie knows that Joe is the driver. Her hands are bound but that doesn’t stop her. She grabs the steering wheel and the truck veers left as the Mustang cu
ts in front of it, and the two vehicles miss by the width of a raindrop as Smitty stomps the brakes and whips the wheel and the Peterbilt screams down the highway sideways, hydroplaning like a sonofabitch.

  Smitty’s tractor ends up on the shoulder, sliding though mud and gravel until Jessie’s door kisses a redwood. Smitty grinds the gears and turns the rig around while Jessie watches the Mustang’s red taillights disappear in the storm, like coals burning down to ash.

  One more second and those taillights will be gone.

  One more second and Joe Shepard will be on his way.

  One more second until the storm and the dark hold sway.

  One more second until —

  Smitty just can’t help himself. Not anymore.

  “This is all your fault, bitch,” he says.

  His fist whips out and clips Jessie’s jaw.

  Everything goes black.

  “Hey there, Jess. Good to see you again.”

  She opens her eyes and she’s in the Mustang, riding shotgun with a dead man.

  “That was a close one, wasn’t it? Man, that truck-driving asshole nearly ran me off the road.” Joe winks at her. “Or did you have something to do with that, Jess?”

  Jessie doesn’t say a word. Joe watches the storm through the windshield, as if he doesn’t really expect an answer, as if he’s determined to enjoy a Sunday drive through hell no matter what happens.

  “Too bad Edward Hopper didn’t do pastoral scenes,” he jokes. “He would have loved this stuff.”

  Joe laughs, but it’s like a hollow echo of yesterday. Jessie wants to cry. He’s trying really hard. He always tried really hard. He was a carpenter — still is, she figures, even though he’s dead. But money never came easy for him, and it always seemed to go too fast.

  So their life wasn’t what they wanted it to be. A succession of low-rent apartments in low-rent towns, the kind of towns where a girl grows comfortable carrying a butterfly knife in her pocket. But that’s how it is when you work for someone else. They make the money, you do the work. They live someplace nice, and you don’t. Their wife doesn’t take anything but her credit card when she heads off to the grocery store after dark, your wife makes sure to remember her butterfly knife.