by Alan Spencer
Parking outside of Cassie's house, Peyton walked him to her backyard where she waited on the deck looking down at the drainage ditch. Perched on the wooden guardrail was a bottle of whiskey, the cheapest brand they could buy when they were teenagers, considering Eric Allen sold it to them at the liquor store for an inflated price. Cassie wore a pair of cut-off jeans and a pair of sandals along with a tight fitting red tube top. She wore this ensemble often when they were younger too. Cassie was a backyard odalisque. She temped Mark and Peyton on many summer days as they spent their last unemployed summer shooting the shit and having fun.
"This might be it, guys," Cassie greeted them with a heartfelt smile. Many concerns were roaming her mind, and it showed in her bleary red rimmed eyes. "This could be our last night here with Mark."
"We don't know that for sure," was all Peyton would say. "We're here to enjoy the night, right? So let's enjoy the night. Then we worry about tomorrow, tomorrow."
Peyton slung his bag of junk food like a hiker's pack and stole the bottle of whiskey from Cassie when she came down to join them. They started down the slope of the hill, the end of her backyard, to the climb down into the drainage ditch. Mark hugged her from behind and kissed the back of her neck.
"Hey Peyton," Mark said, "we'll be right behind you, man. I only need a second with the lady."
Peyton understood. He kept walking.
Cassie faced Mark now, turning slow, though her eyes stayed at her feet. She was already crying. "This is so hard. What I'm trying to say is that I'm scared. What if they don't decide to keep you here?"
"Then they don't."
"That's it. You're not scared?"
"I used to be scared. I was so scared after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I sold my house, piled up what few belongings I had, and I drove in a van to nowhere. I drank alone in hotels. Slept in my van in parking lots. I was afraid that that was it. I'd die, and no one would care. My father died. My mother's dead. But the one thing I didn't doubt was the love I had for my wife. Her memory comforted me.
"So what if don't get to stay? I talk about the dead because it's my past. Elizabeth's my wife. My first love. I'm very fond of you, Cassie, and I can tell you this because you know exactly what I'm saying. You know I'm a genuine person. I'm not using you. And I'll throw it out there, I think we'd have a good shot at life together. Here, maybe somewhere else. But I can't let go of my memories. I won't. Nobody can make me."
Cassie trembled after hearing what he said. "There's no fear in your voice. It sounds like you could go one way or the other, live or die, and you don't care. They have to give you a chance to commit. Because once you do, it's so easy to forget the dead. Your priorities change. Mine did."
"Maybe I don't want to change that way. I don't want to forget who I am."
A dark expression unfolded, more like lack of one, and it confounded him as to what Cassie was thinking. "Maybe you don't want to forget the dead, but this is still a gift you shouldn't turn down. You'd be a fool."
Cassie didn't hold his hand or want his touch Mark as they caught up with Peyton who was enjoying a cigarette in one hand and eating a stick of beef jerky in the other. Mark caught a whiff of his breath. It was like a meat ashtray. He fanned the air around the snacking smoker. "You stink."
"Make out with me, Mark." Peyton joked. "A wise man once said take your clothes off and screw before it gets cold outside."
"You're a regular Derrick Collins," Mark said, trying to move on from Cassie's icy mood. "You should write your own book of isms."
Peyton sensed Cassie's mood. He handed her the bottle without another word. "Here you go, kid." Peyton shook his plastic bag. "I've brought with me another surprise, you two. So don't poop out on me just yet."
Cassie walked ahead of them, taking a mouthful of the stinging bilge, before passing it to Mark without a glance or a word. He tasted her lipstick on the bottle. Peyton had once said taking hits from the lipstick bottle was like kissing her.
They kept walking down the drainage ditch. Mark couldn't stand the awkwardness between them after their short-lived conversation. He had to come up with something good to save the moment.
Do what you always wanted to do when you were a teenager. You imagined it enough times, so do it now.
Surprise her.
Mark met up with her. He held her by the waist and dipped her, as if in a dance, and channeled everything he had into an honest, loving kiss. She mewled so softly he almost didn't hear her at all. Mark had read somewhere that kissing at an angle like that caused the blood to rush to the head and added a tingling effect to person being kissed. It worked. When he lifted her back up, she smiled. Cassie threw her arms around him in a hug, whispering, "Thank you. I needed that."
Peyton cleared his throat and made a farting noise. "I guess I just became the third wheel." The man tipped the bottle into his mouth, and the passing game continued, until the bottle was empty. It was the same as they'd done back in the day. "That's okay. It's still good to be here with you guys."
"I agree," Mark said. "So what's the other surprise you've got in that bag of yours, buddy?"
Peyton removed a bottle of spray paint. He spelled out on the drainage ditch wall: TWO OUT OF THREE MOTHER'S AGREE. ONE DICK IN THE ASS DOES THE BODY GOOD.
Mark busted out laughing. "Where the hell do you get these ideas, Peyton?"
Peyton smiled. "I was always the word guy. Cassie was the artist. But you, Mark, you were the test audience. Judging by your reaction today, it's offensive. A success!"
Cassie worked to spray paint an asterisk for a clenched butthole and a rectangle shape with a WWII helmet for the head of the penis. The picture was over Peyton's words. "Now that's art. And there's a message behind it too."
Mark threw back another swig. "What's the message? Anal is good?"
"It is," Cassie winked at him. "You'll learn one day."
Cassie handed Mark the green neon spray paint can. "Write something lewd on the wall. For old time's sake."
Mark's hands were loose, having had five shots in less than twenty minutes. The bottle would be empty, and he had a feeling Peyton was hiding a fifth in his coat pocket. He was always the type to have a contingency plan when it came to booze.
"Make it good," Peyton cheered. "Impress us!"
Cassie whooped, "Yeah, Mark, you can do it! Be gross! Be offensive! Something sexual! Do it!"
Mark closed in on the wall, standing inches from Cassie's artistry. "All right, all right, I need silence. I have to think."
The silence built up the challenge. He couldn't one-up his buddies. Not in a million years. The magic in the air of Meadow Woods couldn't help him. The whiskey was helping. The idea occurred to him, and it would be a simple drawing. In one minute, he drew a squiggly line beside a squiggly line beside a squiggly line beside a squiggly line, and above it, he wrote. BRILL-O BUSH!
The two guffawed, and Peyton patted his shoulder. "I've thought that myself many times when going down on some chicks. It's like, well, Brill-O!"
Cassie extended her waist band and peered into her pants. "No Brill-o down there."
After shouting "Brill-O" several times, they walked at arm's distance in a line of three. Peyton started the next game. He unzipped his pants and pissed as he walked. It took practice and pacing. He was the best of the three, Mark remembered. After Peyton finished, he proclaimed his victory, "No piss on my pants. No piss on my hands. No piss on my shoes either."
It was Mark's turn next. He whipped it out, and kept walking. He steadied his hands. Forced concentration, and it took many moments to work out the flood of urine that shot out in an even stream, but it was the final capping off that caused drips to touch his clothing or hands in the past. After a balancing and act and squeezing at the right moments, he came out of the ordeal victorious.
"Yes, no piss!"
They turned to Cassie. She said, "Not when I'm wearing a skirt, boys."
They circled back to Cassie's house. Peyton hugged Cassie an
d patted Mark on the back. He returned to The Blue Beast and drove on, promising he'd be back early in the morning to pick them and drive to city hall for Mark's "hearing."
That left him and Cassie standing on her deck overlooking the levee. They held each other for moments, being too drunk to make love. They slept on her bed, and it wasn't long before the next morning arrived, and the horror would begin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sheriff Hildebrandt dragged a wooden chair to the cell Mark had stayed in previously and stood on top of it to trace the marker writing on the ceiling over the name T. Wilkins with his finger. He stifled a chill in remembrance of what he could've prevented, and what was ultimately his fault. There was nothing else he could do but scrawl out the name with his pocket knife and once again attempt to forget the past.
Bruce Parnell looked out at the drainage ditch wall and watched the three friends drink and play. He kept thinking, That guy's dick is as long as tootsie roll. I'm surprised he can even pee out of that thing. He should be the one being banished, not Mark.
Ronald Sexton worked in the backroom of his barbershop. He arranged for a special set-up tonight. A bathtub large enough for two people to lay in comfortably was ready to be used. Francine Coleman was splayed naked in warm water, her face covered over in a towel. She accepted what she would call her own personal pampering fetish. Francine was his lady friend for the past year, and he knew how to pleasure her. He shaved her legs baby smooth. Trimmed her pubic hair and bikini line, and as he did so, she pulled him into the warm water for a bit of fun, because tomorrow's decision about Mark Tripdick had already been decided.
Patricia Lake walked the perimeter of Dr. Albert's house, searching every place she could think of to find her cure. She had bled from the nose earlier. Maybe it was dry sinuses, or was it something else? Cranial hemorrhage perhaps? Her boyfriend wouldn't appreciate an evening with a woman spazzing out over a bloody nose all night, but she couldn't stand the thought of bleeding again. It was a blessing she didn't have periods anymore, and the skin cancer, she shuttered just thinking about it.
After searching the doctor's mailbox and underneath his front steps, she broke the lock with a stone and entered his tool shed. Inside, on the shelf were various items: a badly rolled up garden hose, empty pots, potting soil, and a jar filled with those dum-dum suckers she needed so much. She chose the cherry flavor. She selected five more for the road, just in case.
Reyna Hawkins painted a wishing well. She always wanted to stand in front of one, even as a kid, but Meadow Woods didn't have one. Until now. She painted herself quarters and dimes to toss down into the darkened depths and made many wishes, all of them being the same. That she had made the right decision about Mark Tripdick.
Chuck Flynn was cleaning his grill with a scraper brush. After he cleaned the equipment, he swept the lobby of his eating establishment. Then he turned off the lights and locked the doors. The last duty for the evening was to check the cattle in their pins back at the slaughterhouse. The cattle had been fed and the yard cleaned of manure. It was all done for him. Magic. Another day he had nothing to do with their captivity or their slaughter.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
Now his thoughts concentrated on Mark.
Lindsey Browne didn't have to throw another event for tomorrow, so she was preparing city hall for the morning in honor of Mark Tripdick. Setting up chairs in a semi-circle before the court's podium. Setting up tables that'd be stocked with refreshments. Then making sure Sheriff Hildebrandt's police car had enough gas to drive Mark Tripdick out of Meadow Woods, if that be the case...
Cassie woke in the middle of the night and left Mark in bed sleeping. She stalked the hallway, everything cast in deep shadows, it being three in the morning. A sound woke her. The give of wood, then a slight creak. It was a hesitant step. Someone who was confident they knew what parts of the houses emitted gasps and which didn't, yet in their confidence, had still made one single mistake.
It's not him.
He's dead.
He's dead forever.
That was enough to calm her nerves. The reassurances she knew how to give herself. Duke was gone. Forever out of here life. She laid back down beside Mark and closed her eyes, praying for the best during tomorrow's hearing.
* * *
Dr. Albert finished another bottle of Larks beer and set it in the ocean, letting the waves take it away, the glass now a bobbing vestige to be drowned in the black waters. He couldn't stop thinking about Mark Tripdick, and whether his disappointment in him merited banishment.
Aimee Webb and Lou Jackson stayed under the cover of the woods and watched Dr. Albert set yet another bottle in the waters. They could care less about Mark Tripdick or Dr. Albert, or anyone else's opinion in town, as long as those waters stayed calm.
An upcoming hearing couldn't interrupt the orgy of flesh between the shelves of the library. Velma Codstock was enjoying a moment from the book series called "Ranch House Romance." The other women were absorbed by their fictitious moments, the air in the library rife with used flesh, spent sex, and thick scent of pleasures realized. In a matter of hours, they too would convene on Mark Tripdick, and his future in Meadow Woods.
Peyton hiked to his favorite place, one his mind created, a place Meadow Woods allowed him to be himself. It was a shack in the woods. The shack was literally large enough to be two outhouses put together. The roof was in tatters, the wood somehow becoming a rust color through the ages. No windows, the door closed, there was only a crack in the wooden walls that allowed him to spy the hitchhiker drifter woman who'd stripped down to her bra and panties. The undergarments were stained with sweat, discolored. The clothing was in need of washing, just as her skin and oily hair was in need of a cleaning. A disoriented longing expression spread on her face as she rested her body on the soiled twin size mattress left behind by other stragglers and runaways and scabs. He arrived in time to catch her dirt-caked fingers sneak under her panties, and he imagined what it'd be like for him to touch her, to take her right there, and that's when his hand went down into his pants, and in one hot minute, he was slumped to the ground after the quick release, and then the reality hit him. His friend Mark Tripdick could be leaving him forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The alcohol had rendered the alarm clock useless, even though it hadn't been set to begin with, and the knock at the door jolted Mark and Cassie both awake. Peyton was standing in the doorway with a grim expression. He showered and cleaned up and was wearing an angora sweater and khakis pants. He brought with him a tray of coffee, and Mark stood in the clothes he wore last night, feeling disheveled and sluggish.
"Damn, it's already morning."
Peyton welcomed himself into the house. He sat down in the living room chair and put the drinks on the table. "I got up early, just in case you guys passed out. You two were wasted. I got pretty drunk too."
Cassie got up and took a shower. With the water running, Peyton lowered his voice and went into confession mode. "Do your best up there when you're in the courthouse. Give them a lot to think about. Encourage them to believe you're a good person."
"You people are so crazy." Mark didn't mean to respond so sharply. "I'm not erasing my memory of Elizabeth. I can't. I'll talk about my memories as much as I want. I'm not changing for you people."
"Say you're willing to do that anyway, even if you don't mean it. Once you commit, it's easy. You can lie to them. Tell them what they want to hear."
Mark imagined Elizabeth's pretty blue eyes and flowing brunette hair. Her face beneath the veil of her wedding dress. The first time he'd ran several miles with her in the woods, the both of them covered in sweat and how Elizabeth wore those short red shorts and tight-fitting t-shirt. Then her weakened body in the hospital bed, days from death, reduced to a shell of who she used to be. Mark flew into a rage, stomping out of the house.
"Fuck this bullshit. They don't want me, they won't have me. I'm not changing for them. Let me die. I won'
t live a lie. My memories are mine. It's makes me who I am, and if they want to brainwash me and tell me what to think and who to remember, they can find someone else, and I'm sure they will."
Before he could reach the front door, Peyton was right on him. Grabbing Mark's arm, he spun him around, and as if a battering ram struck him in the belly, he was socked in the gut. Mark fell, his knees knocking against the wood.
Then a .45 pistol was pointed at his face. "I was afraid this would happen. This is because I want you to be here with us. I'm your friend. This is all because I'm your friend." Red-faced with rage, "Can you imagine what Cassie will go through if you go away? She's much happier with you here. We're not going to die here, ever. Not if you don't want to. Not if we keep committing."
Jesus, stop using that word.
Mark kept his mouth shut, fearing he'd be shot.
Peyton's face was wet with tears. He didn't bother to blink them out. "You will be with us. Once you're through this process, you're going to be fine. I'm sorry I have to force you like this."
Peyton put away the gun, tucking it back into his coat pocket. "Now this is how it's going to go down. If you don't tell them you're willing to change, to forget the dead, to commit yourself whole and completely, I shoot you on sight. And when I get done shooting you, I'll shoot Cassie, and I'll set it up to look like Cassie killed you both. It makes sense. A suicide pact."
You selfish son-of-a-bitch. You've lost it. I should've known it from the first time you randomly showed up outside that hospital to pick me up. This was all for you. You're a selfish bastard.
The life went out of Mark's voice. "This wasn't ever for me. It was always for you."
