Hell's Highwaymen

by Phillip Granath

  It was past 11 pm when Rachel finally came home, Jerry was still up and still drinking. She came in wearing a different blouse that she had on when she had left for work. This one was brighter and had a plunging neckline that showed off more cleavage than any office would find respectable. She wore the same flowing black skirt and black heels though. Her strawberry blond hair was held back in its usual ponytail, giving her face an even more authoritative look. Jerry had to admit, even after all of this, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  “Well I see you’ve had yourself another productive day,” Rachel said.

  She used the same mocking tone that had come to define their relationship. She tossed her handbag onto the couch and kicked off her heels.

  Jerry sat at the kitchen table and simply raised his half-empty glass of Jim Beam in response. Most wouldn’t have recognized the signs in Rachel, but Jerry did, she had been drinking. When Rachel was drunk, she had a way of tilting her head as if to emphasize each word she said. It was cute in a valley girl sort of way; a comparison Rachel would have loathed if he had ever dared mentioned it to her.

  “The sink is still full of fucking dishes,” Rachel exclaimed.

  She strode angrily into the kitchen and brushed past him heading for the sink. Jerry stood abruptly knocking over his chair, and he turned to face his wife. His sudden movement had taken her by surprise, and she backed up against the counter. The space was narrow, and the front of her blouse brushed up against his chest. Jerry wasn’t a tall man and even with her heels off Rachel looked down at him. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly open, it was clear she didn’t know what was about to happen.

  Carefully Jerry leaned forward and caressed the tip of his nose and his lips across the base of her neck. Rachel responded with a quick breath and a shudder. Jerry kissed her once and then twice lightly up the side of the neck then. She began to slide her arms around him. Jerry inhaled sharply through his nose; she smelled of sweet red wine, sweat, and…sex. The image of her naked, wrapped around another man flashed through his mind.

  “Jerry...,” she began but was cut off as he abruptly pulled back from her embrace.

  He stood there for a brief moment looking into her wide eyes and then turned and uprighted the chair. He retook his seat and topped off his glass of whiskey. Rachel was too stunned even to speak, she just stared at him, her expression slowly changing from a look of shock to anger.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed at him.

  “If you're mad then fucking yell at me! Scream at me! Fucking hit me! Or maybe just fuck me!” she shouted, with tears now rolling down her face and smearing her mascara.

  Jerry didn’t reply; he didn’t even look at her, he just shook his head and took another long slow drink.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? I remember you when you were young, and you gave a shit about something. What happened to you, to us Jerry?” she demanded before running from the kitchen.

  Jerry sat staring down at his half-empty glass and considered her words carefully, in the abstract way that only the astoundingly drunk can muster.

  “Fine then, I don’t give a fuck. If that’s what she wants, that’s what she gets,” Jerry mumbled to himself and then drained the glass.

  He stood on unsteady feet and staggered towards their bedroom door. It was unlocked, and he threw it open with more force than was necessary. Rachel stood there in front of the bed as if waiting for him, she took one look at him and pulled her blouse off throwing it to the side. She hadn’t been wearing a bra. Jerry stumbled forward, took his wife in his arms and fell forward into bed together. She kissed his face, his lips and his chest.

  “Oh Jerry, my Jerry,” she whispered as she stripped off his shirt.

  He kissed her in return, kissing her deeply like he hadn’t done in years. Making up in vigor what he lacked in skill. He kissed down her chest, between her breasts and she shivered underneath him.

  “I want you, Jerry, I need you, I need you now,” Rachel begged as she began to thrust her hips up into his.

  Jerry broke off kissing her just long enough to look down and pull up his wife’s skirt. He found that she wasn’t wearing any panties. Whether she had removed them just before he had come into the room or had come home not wearing any he couldn’t say and at least for the moment, he didn’t care. The move seemed to excite Rachel even further, and she clawed at his belt yanking down his pants in response.

  He looked down at her just then enjoying the moment. As his wife, this amazing, powerful woman, a woman that had been and was still so completely out of his league was here and begging him to love her. He was a lucky man , and then Rachel reached down eager to put him inside of her. But in her haste, she fumbled and awkwardly groped trying to grab him. Jerry looked down eager to help and was shocked at what he found or more specifically what he didn’t find. He had never had this problem before and Both he and Rachel were left to stare down at his shriveled member in disbelief. Jerry looked up meeting her eyes as her expression shifted from disbelief to one of hurt and shame.

  “Jerry?” she squeaked.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, just give me a minute,” Jerry begged.

  Rachel nodded, not ready to give up yet she reached down and gripped his balls. Her hands felt cold, and Jerry instinctively flinched, pulling away from her. Rachel covered her face and began to sob into her palms.

  “It’s not you; it’s, it’s the booze. Just give me a minute sweetie,” he pleaded.

  “What kind of man are you?” Rachel shouted and then a moment later added, “I hate you!”

  She shoved Jerry off of her then and ran across the room and into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Jerry tried to rise and follow her, but his shorts were still around his ankles, and he fell backward awkwardly. He tried to stand again but this time tripped on the sheets and fell forward. At the last moment he reached out to try and catch himself on the nightstand, but in his drunkenness, he ended up only grabbing hold of the bedside lamp instead. He pulled it to the floor with him as he fell and the lamp shattered into pieces. He made one more half-hearted attempt to rise and finding it much too difficult decided the floor would make a much better place to sleep. The last conscious thoughts he had were of his wife and how he would make things different, starting tomorrow.

  Jerry was right, the next day things were different. He awoke to find his right hand mysteriously wrapped in a bloody bath towel. He was even more shocked to learn that the blood was his. Apparently, he had managed to cut his hand deeply when he smashed the lamp. Rachel was gone; she had apparently gone to work as usual, though he guessed he had her to thank for the towel. He was well into his hangover by noon, which was about the time he realized he was probably going to need stitches. Rachel had the car, so he was forced to call a cab to drive him to the hospital where he spent the next five hours waiting for three stitches. When he returned home, he found Rachel had already been there and had emptied out her closet and most of her drawers. Two weeks later he received the first of the papers in the mail and inside of three months they were officially divorced.

  Throughout the proceedings, they never spoke, not directly. Rachel had a lawyer, a good one that worked at her firm and that Jerry remembered vaguely from one of the few company dinners he had been allowed to attended. Jerry didn’t bother getting a lawyer, didn’t argue or even attempt to negotiate any of the terms. The few times they sat in the same room together he didn’t even look at her, though occasionally from the corner of his eye he would catch her looking at him. The official reason for the divorce was, of course, the ambiguous “Irreconcilable differences.”

  “Well, are you going to tell the fucking story or not?” Jamie demanded.

  “Come on lad, don’t hold back, what did she look like?” Oliver prompted.

  Jerry blinked and looked around at the anxious group of hard-eyed killers. Men that it seemed he might be spending the rest of eternity with, whether he liked it
or not. Yeah, not telling them that story he decided.

  “How about…I tell you about…the first time that I had sex?” Jerry offered lamely.

  “Was that with a woman?” Jamie asked.

  The riders broke into a fit of laughter, even Father Callahan laughed, though he had the courtesy to turn away while he did. Jerry didn’t mind the laughter. It gave him a few moments to try and come up with a lie, anything that would keep him from sounding so pathetic. As the laughter died away, the men once again looked at him expectantly.

  “Yes it was, with a woman,” Jerry replied, stalling for time.

  “Well alright, but if it was anything like my first time then that will be an awfully short story,” Jamie said with a grin.

  It was at that moment that Jerry had a sudden realization. These men were more than a century removed from time. He had the whole breadth of modern television and movies to draw from, he could tell them anything, and they would have no way of knowing if it was the truth or not.

  “Well, you see I had just graduated College…,” Jerry began and then paused as if waiting for one of the men to call him a liar.

  “What’s College?” Oliver asked.

  “It fancy schooling, mostly for professor types, those that do doctoring and such,” Jamie explained.

  “Are you a Physician then Jerry?” Oliver asked.

  “Ah no, it wasn’t that type of College. But you see I graduated, and then I went to this party. My father and his business partner were throwing it you see.”

  “Were their girls at this party?” Oliver asked.

  “Yeah, a lot of girls,” Jerry replied.

  “What types of girls?” the Brit prodded.

  “All types, but that didn’t matter because the prettiest girl there wasn’t even a girl. She was a woman, an older woman, a married woman in fact.”

  “OOOOOOHHHHHH…., I know where this is going,” Jamie said as he slapped his leg and laughed.

  “She had a little too much to drink, and her husband asked me if I would make sure she got home safely.”

  From the corner of his eyes, Jerry saw the Priest turn his head, the young man obviously listening to the story as well. His mouth was slightly open, and his head was tilted to the side as if he was trying to recall something.

  “And what was this saucy old bird’s name?” Oliver asked wearing a huge grin.

  “Ah, well…,” Jerry paused, completely unable to remember the woman’s first name.

  “Well her name was, Mrs. Robinson,” he said finally.

  From the far end of the pew, the roar of laughter drew Jerry, Oliver and Jamie’s attention. The priest was doubled over laughing hysterically. The other highwaymen looked over at him in confusion and then as the laughter died away, they turned back to face Jerry.

  “Ignore him, he gave up women even before he was dead, go on,” Jamie prompted.

  “Yes please, go on,” the priest said still choking back his laughter. “But sadly, I think I can already guess how this one is going to end.”

  Gas and Go

  Cort scanned the horizon again sweeping the spyglass in slow continuous arcs. How many years he wondered, how many lifetimes had he spent just like this? Sitting and watching and waiting. It seemed that with each raid they fed upon souls always wearing brighter and stranger clothing, carrying odder and more advanced things. Guns that were smaller, that held more bullets and fired them faster. As he sat thinking his hand reached down and rubbed at his left knee where he had been shot during the last raid, though now his trousers and the flesh underneath carried no trace of the violence.

  From down below the cavalryman could faintly hear the words from their newest arrival. The other men were prodding him for information, for stories, anything to entertain them, to distract them from the torturous repetition of this place. The timid man’s words were broken up by regular laughter and occasional questions from the rest of the riders.

  When the priest had first joined their little posse, Cort had questioned him at length. He had asked the young man of god about his world and tried to figure out how much time he had spent here in this place. It wasn’t easy, the priest was a man of the old country and outside of those borders and the walls of his church he had never paid much attention to world events. In fact, they had been able to find just a single point that each had known.

  “Lincoln was President when I was alive. He was a giant of a man they say, he split rails while there was daylight and taught himself how to read by candlelight. He was the President when I first volunteered to wear the blue,” Cort had told the Priest.

  The young priest had nodded slowly then. “Him I have heard of, in fact, I doubt there are few that have spent any time in a classroom that have not,” he said.

  “He was a tough man, a brave man. It’s hard for a good man to keeps to his principals in a time of war, but he did,” Cort said.

  “Oh, that I know is true. My people have faced their own war for longer than I care to remember,” the Priest replied.

  Cort nodded, though he had no idea what war the Irishman was referring.

  “We saw the same thing happen to many of our great leaders as well,” Father Callahan added.

  Cort remembered the chill that had crawled up his spine just then and couldn’t stop himself from asking. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean assassination, great men cut down in their prime, shot in the back by cowards, by lesser men,” the priest explained.

  Cort was surprised by how deeply the news had cut him. After a life soaked in blood and an afterlife surrounded by death, he thought himself jaded to such feelings. He was nearly at a loss for words; he was just able to choke out.

  “When was he killed?”

  “Oh, the late 1860s I believe, I don’t recall when exactly. Nearly a hundred years before my time,” the Priest replied.

  Cort simply nodded, his words spent.

  “I seem to remember that it was near the end of that bloody civil war you all had. I will give you Yanks one thing. When you do something you do it big,” the Priest added.

  That had been the last time Cort had bothered to ask anyone about the world of the living. What was the point? He asked himself. All it could do was sour the few memories he still carried from his life. Cort shook his head and raised the spyglass to his eye again.

  Jerry was halfway through relating his third episode of Three’s Company. He, of course, had cast himself in the role of John Ritter’s character, Jack Tripper. Admittedly he had taken quite a few liberties with the plot, at the end relating to the boys something more likely to be seen on late night cable than the reruns he recalled from his youth. After he had wrapped up his version of The Graduate, his small but threatening audience had allowed him only the briefest moments of time to think up his next lie. For some reason, the long-running sitcom seemed the perfect thing for the men from across scattered times. A situational comedy with a bit of awkward sexual tension added for flavor, well okay, in Jerry’s version a lot of overtly sexual situations.

  The story was suddenly interrupted by a quick series of sickly rings; the tone sounded more like the dull banging of a steel block rather than a brass bell. The men were up and moving after the first ring, the look of joy in their eyes replaced at that moment by the thrill of the hunt and the underlying need to feed. They gathered around the base of the stairs in the church’s entryway as the Lieutenant stomped down the stairs to join them.

  “What’s the word?” Jamie asked anxiously.

  “Got a trail, it’s a ways out, but it’s hard to miss. Some of that hard-black road you all call…paving?” Cort said, the word forming in his mouth awkwardly.

  “Let’s take them,” Jamie said with a grin, as he walked out of the church.

  The rest of the group followed including Jerry; he noticed that Oliver followed them slowly at the rear of the pack. Cort joined the man walking next to him with a hand on his shoulder. Jamie, Shinji, and the Priest were already mounted. Jerry turned t
o find the Lieutenant and the Dragoon standing just outside of the churchyard. The men were apparently having a conversation, but Oliver wasn’t looking at the Lieutenant, his head turned, and he was facing the graveyard.

  “Oliver damn it, look at me!” Cort shouted.

  Oliver glanced back to meet Cort’s eyes, but then they darted back towards the line of gravestones.

  “Just give me a moment Leftenant,” Oliver pleaded,“I have to have a look.”

  “Oliver we have to go. You know there's no way of telling how long those souls will be out there, or how far out they actually may be. Not here, not in this place.”

  “I know, I know,” Oliver replied.

  “Then let’s go.”

  The two men began to walk towards the horses, but Oliver stopped again after a half dozen steps.

  “You have gotta be shitting me. Let’s go!” Jamie shouted from horseback.

  “What’s wrong?” Jerry asked confused.

  “It’s as I said before, he wants to search the headstones, again. It’s his curse; he’s compelled to search for all eternity. We’ll have to drag him away from this place,” the Priest explained.

  “Come back for me,” Oliver now pleaded, “bring me a soul if you can. If you can’t, I’ll make do.”

  “You know without you with us we may never be able to find this place again. You’ll be stuck here until you can’t fight the urge to walk any longer,” Cort replied.

  “Perhaps, I’m sorry Leftenant,” Oliver said.

  With that Oliver turned away from Cort. The Dragoon walked to the nearest tombstone and kneeled to examine the inscription.

  Cort took a breath and mumbling to himself said, “Yeah, I’m sorry too.”