Blackburn

by Bradley Denton

  Blackburn felt like Jimi Hendrix: He could kiss the sky.

  Dolores quit her job and moved in with Blackburn the following week, right after they opened their joint checking account. Blackburn put his clothes in the dresser, and Dolores took the closet. They spent the Fourth of July in bed. The week after that, on Thursday, July 10, they were married at noon by a judge. They had celebratory sex at home, and then Blackburn went to work. There, he had an inspiration and made a pile of over a hundred sanchos.

  But the Jews for Jesus didn’t return. The sanchos cooled. It was the slowest night since Blackburn had started. He figured he was allowed one mistake.

  * * *

  The newlyweds planned a honeymoon trip to Marin County for the first Sunday after the wedding, but then a Taco Tommy employee fell ill, and Blackburn had to work. He pointed out to Dolores that he would be paid time-and-a-half for the extra hours, so they could take an even better trip later. Dolores said that was fine, as long as the trip wasn’t the next weekend. That was when her parents were coming up from Los Angeles to meet her new husband. Blackburn was not looking forward to the meeting, and he wished that Dolores had given him the same wedding gift he had given her: He had told her that his parents were dead.

  When the visitation weekend arrived, Dolores and her mother spent all day Saturday shopping while Dolores’s father watched baseball games on Blackburn’s TV. He only spoke once, to compliment Blackburn on the Old Milwaukee beer in the refrigerator. When Blackburn left for work, Dolores’s father was still in front of the TV.

  There was another employee shortage at the Taco Tommy the next day, so Blackburn only saw his in-laws for a few minutes in the morning when they came over from the motel. Then he had to go to work again. Dolores’s father complimented him on his initiative, and her mother said that he certainly was a catch. They were gone when he returned that night, and Dolores locked herself in the bedroom and cried. Blackburn drank Old Milwaukee and watched TV until she emerged and ravished him on the couch.

  Blackburn was glad to be Eddie Reese. He was glad to have a horny wife and a steady job. He was glad that he no longer had to survive on the run. He hadn’t killed anyone since Philadelphia, almost a year ago, so there was no reason to leave San Francisco. Most people here were polite, and the dirtballs, if they existed, weren’t running into him. Or maybe he just didn’t mind them so much now that he had Dolores. Thank goodness for Dolores. Thank goodness his old life was over.

  Things didn’t start to go wrong until he had been married almost a month.

  The rent came due on Friday, August 1, and Blackburn wrote a check for it. A week later his landlord telephoned him at work to tell him that the bank had returned the check for insufficient funds. Blackburn didn’t understand it. He promised his landlord that he would clear up the problem.

  When Blackburn came home that night, Dolores was asleep. He didn’t wake her to make love, as was his habit, but instead sat at the kitchen table and went through his checkbook register. He triple-checked the math and then looked at the pad of checks themselves. There were three missing that weren’t accounted for in the register. He remembered the shopping trip that Dolores and her mother had taken. He hadn’t been home when they had returned, so he hadn’t seen what, if anything, Dolores had bought.

  He went into the bedroom and turned on the light. Dolores mumbled and stuck her head under her pillow. Blackburn opened the closet and found three empty shopping bags on the floor. The attached receipts were dated July 19 and added up to over four hundred dollars. The checking account was overdrawn even without counting the rent.

  Blackburn went to the bed and knelt on the floor beside Dolores. “Sweet love,” he said, taking the pillow from her head, “our checkbook is overdrawn. The rent is past due. You spent too much shopping and didn’t record the checks.”

  Dolores’s eyes opened. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Can you take any of the merchandise back?” he asked.

  Dolores stretched, twisting onto her back. The sheet slid down from her breasts. Blackburn started to have an erection.

  “Don’t think so,” Dolores said.

  Blackburn couldn’t help staring at her rib cage, her breasts, her throat. He wanted to hold her and force his molecules in between hers. “That’s all right,” he said. “We have enough in savings to cover the deficit, but that’s all. So we’ll have to be careful for a few months. There won’t be any money to spare. We’ll have to skip movies and eat lots of Rice-a-Roni.” His cock ached for her. It was like a grenade with the pin pulled. “But only until we can save a little again.”

  “Do I have to go back to work?” Dolores asked. She seemed to be waking up.

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  Blackburn didn’t know how it was possible, but their lovemaking that night was better than ever. He really did believe that his molecules mingled with hers and engaged in a million microscopic copulations with simultaneous orgasms.

  Money was meaningless.

  * * *

  Blackburn depleted their savings account, paid the August rent, and then worked his ass off, logging as many overtime hours as his boss would allow. He wanted to be sure that he and Dolores would have enough money to get by in September. Most days he worked double shifts, leaving home by eight-thirty in the morning and returning more than sixteen hours later. He worried that Dolores would feel neglected, but she assured him that was not the case. She was proud of him. However, she did get bored sitting at home, so would it be all right if she went out with her girlfriends now and then?

  He felt guilty that she should even ask such a question. He had been too harsh about the checkbook error. So he held her shoulders, looked into her eyes, and told her that marriage was not slavery. She could do whatever she liked. He only asked that she take care of herself.

  They made love, and Blackburn went to work. When he came home at 1:00 A.M., Dolores was gone. He sat up in bed and waited for her. She came in a little before four, wearing a belted leather jacket that Blackburn had not seen before. Dolores noticed him looking at it and remarked that she had it on loan from one of her girlfriends. She took it off, then stripped naked and leaped on him.

  Blackburn went to work four hours later and had trouble keeping his eyes open and making his fingers coordinate. His burritos and tacos fell apart. In the afternoon, he fell asleep in the walk-in refrigerator and woke up shivering. His head ached for the rest of the shift. Dolores was waiting for him when he went home, but for the first time, he didn’t want to do anything but sleep. Dolores called him “poor baby” and cuddled his head between her breasts. He dreamed of cotton candy.

  He felt better the next morning, but called the Taco Tommy manager and said he wouldn’t be in until the afternoon shift. After hanging up the phone, he began licking Dolores all over.

  “Why aren’t you going in?” Dolores asked.

  Blackburn looked up from her belly button. “I’d rather do this.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Dolores leaned back and didn’t talk for a while. Then she said, “But I have a lunch date with my friend Lisa.”

  “Okay,” Blackburn said. He didn’t know Lisa. He didn’t know any of Dolores’s girlfriends.

  “I’m supposed to meet her downtown at ten-thirty,” Dolores said. “It’s really more of a brunch date, I guess. Then she wants me to help her shop for shoes.”

  Blackburn looked at the clock radio on the dresser. It was nine-twenty. “We still have a little time,” he said.

  “I know. I just wanted to warn you.”

  They did it fast and furious. Then Dolores showered, dressed, and left. She wore the leather jacket. Blackburn wondered if it was Lisa’s, and if Dolores had to return it already. He resolved to buy her one just like it as soon as he could afford to.

  With Dolores gone, Blackburn had nothing to do until three o’clock. He dozed, then turned on the TV and found only game shows and soap operas. He ate some Post Toasties dry. No wonder Dolores liked to get out d
uring the day. The apartment was no fun when you were alone.

  He was brushing his teeth when the phone rang. He ran to the living room to answer it and said a garbled “Hello.”

  “Dolores?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man. Maybe Dolores’s father.

  Blackburn spat out his toothbrush and swallowed the foam. As he was swallowing, the voice spoke again.

  “Dolores, you there? You said twelve-thirty. It’s after one. Where are you?” It was not Dolores’s father.

  Blackburn said nothing.

  “Dolores? Dolores?”

  The phone clicked, and Blackburn replaced the receiver in its cradle. He picked up his toothbrush and went into the bedroom. He sat on the bed and studied the drying paste in the toothbrush bristles. He sat there for an hour, then went to work.

  * * *

  By the time Blackburn came home that night, he had concocted and rejected a dozen explanations for the voice. A few of them had been innocent. Lisa’s boyfriend, perhaps, had confused ten-thirty with twelve-thirty. But Dolores hadn’t said anything about Lisa’s boyfriend joining them. Blackburn thought she would have said something about that. So most of the explanations he had concocted had been vile. He had always thought of himself as cool-headed, and it irritated him to realize that he had fallen prey to something as intemperate as jealousy.

  Dolores was sitting in bed with the sheet pulled up, reading a paperback romance. The borrowed leather jacket covered her shoulders. When she saw Blackburn in the bedroom doorway, she dropped the book and jumped up. The sheet and the jacket fell away. She was wearing a white teddy. Blackburn sucked in his breath.

  “Comeherecomeherecomehere,” Dolores said, grabbing his wrists and pulling him to the bed. “Sit down. Sit down and close your eyes. Oh, come on, Eddie, do it!”

  Blackburn sat on the edge of the mattress and closed his eyes. He saw orange blood vessels. Dolores put something in his lap.

  “Okay, open your eyes.”

  He kept them closed. He was tracing the pattern of the blood vessels.

  Dolores’s hands touched his face, and he shuddered. Her fingertips were hot. She put her thumbs on his eyelids and pushed them open.

  A cardboard box lay in his lap. Dolores removed the lid. Inside, nestled in tissue, were black cowboy boots. They were tooled with designs representing prairie grasses.

  “Happy month-and-a-half anniversary,” Dolores said. “I would have done it at the actual month anniversary, but I didn’t see these until today.”

  Blackburn was astonished. This was the first gift he had received since he was sixteen. He picked up one of the boots. It was solid. It was his size.

  “Cowboy boots?” he said.

  Dolores bounced on the balls of her feet. “Well, you said you were born in Wyoming, and I figured, you know, cowboys, right?”

  The Wyoming lie had brought him a present. But there had been cowboys in Kansas too; it didn’t matter. He picked up the other boot. The box slid off his lap. “How?” he asked. He’d had a sudden thought of money.

  Dolores turned her eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, I’ve been saving my pennies,” she said. “And Mama sent a check. I didn’t use our account, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Blackburn stood and put his arms around her. The boots clunked together behind her back. She loved him. She had proven it every day. She had just done so again. He was a bastard to have concocted vile thoughts about her.

  “I’m not worried about anything,” he said, and kissed her. “I’ll wear them always.”

  Dolores grinned. “Not to bed, you won’t.” She made him drop them, then pushed him down.

  The next day was Sunday, but Blackburn worked anyway. Seven-day-a-week double shifts were becoming a steady thing. He wore his new boots to work and was proud of them.

  The day after that was September 1, and Blackburn paid the rent and the bills. There was enough money left over for him to give Dolores twenty dollars and to set aside another twenty toward a two-month anniversary celebration. He was determined that it would be a special occasion.

  In retrospect, he supposed that it was.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, September 10, Blackburn left the apartment in the morning as if he were going to his first shift at the Taco Tommy. Dolores was still in bed, curled like a kitten. She had switched to a new shampoo and smelled of apples and cinnamon. Blackburn licked her neck before he left. She squirmed.

  Blackburn got into his Rambler and headed for a mall in Oakland. He had seventy-six dollars that he had saved by skipping lunches and shaving the household budget. He hoped to spend forty or fifty on a gift, and the rest on a surprise lunch at a nice restaurant. He would have liked to make it dinner, but he had to work that evening. Money was still scarce—too scarce, really, to spend any on a two-month anniversary. But it would be worth it. He wanted to prove his love with more than words and sex. He hadn’t given Dolores anything since her wedding ring, and that hadn’t been much. Someday he would buy her a better one.

  He didn’t have the money for that today, or for a leather jacket either, but he could still get her something nice. Maybe a sweater. Dolores had only moved from L.A. to San Francisco in April, and she didn’t have much cold-weather clothing. The breeze off the Bay was already chilly. Something to keep her warm would be a fine symbol of his love.

  He arrived at the mall right after it opened, and he found the sweater fifteen minutes later at the J.C. Penney store. The sweater was thick and gray, with a knitted belt and wooden buttons. The color would bring out Dolores’s eyes and set off her hair. It cost thirty dollars. He bought it and had it gift-wrapped, then found a flower shop and spent another fifteen dollars on a dozen red sweetheart roses in a glass vase. The vase had vines and butterflies cut into it. The engraving looked a little like the tooling on his boots. Dolores would appreciate that. And he still had money left for the restaurant. He was pleased with his success.

  He carried the package and flowers to the Rambler, listening to his footsteps on the asphalt. The boots were almost broken in. In another few days, they would feel fine indeed. They already looked and sounded good. Their pointed toes caught the sunlight, and their thick heels made solid chunk noises.

  As he walked, Blackburn experienced a rush of exhilaration that started in his belly and swelled into his chest and head. The air became crisp, and the outlines of cars and lampposts sharpened. Colors brightened. The sensation was so strong that it made him dizzy. When he reached the Rambler, he set his things on the hood and leaned against the fender. He hadn’t felt anything like this since he was ten years old and almost fell from the Wantoda water tower. He had tried to recapture the feeling then, and had failed.

  In the years since, he had learned that joy never came when he looked for it. When it came at all, in whatever strength, it took him by surprise. While he was falling, or listening to his boots. Or looking for a copy of The Kids Are Alright. Or eating fried shrimp. It would never be in the same place twice.

  After a few minutes, the sensation ebbed enough for him to feel safe driving. But some of the joy remained, and he would take it home to Dolores. That would be the best present of all.

  He drove back across the Bay Bridge, to ruin.

  * * *

  In some ways, it was a classic scenario: Husband comes home unexpectedly. He brings a gift. He finds wife in bed with another man.

  In other ways, it wasn’t. Blackburn was unfamiliar with classic scenarios.

  He entered the apartment with the package and flowers hugged to his chest, taking care that the front door didn’t squeak. It was only ten-thirty, and Dolores might still be asleep. He didn’t want to wake her with noise, but with kisses. Once inside, he heard Led Zeppelin playing on the clock radio back in the bedroom. “Gotta wholotta love.” Bwaaaah. “Gotta wholotta love.” Bwaaaah. “Ah-a-aaah, Ah!”

  Blackburn closed the front door and walked through the living room and kitchen to the bedroom door. It was clo
sed. He had left it open, so Dolores must be up. Led Zeppelin was getting louder. Blackburn hesitated, wondering if Dolores might be dancing to the music. He could picture her spinning naked atop the bed. He was afraid that he might embarrass her if he just walked in.

  Led Zeppelin faded into Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” and Blackburn heard a final “Ah-a-aaah, Ah!” It was louder than the radio. It was the voice of a man.

  Blackburn’s heart twisted. The only word in his head was rape.

  Then he was in the bedroom. The glass vase lay in shards on the hardwood floor at the foot of the bed. The roses and water were spread out in the shape of a fan. The J.C. Penney package was crushed in the crook of his left arm. Its blue wrapping paper was ripped. The white bow dangled.

  On the bed, a naked man with a hairy back was on top of Dolores. His face was in her crotch. Hers was in his.

  Dolores looked up from between the man’s buttocks. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  The word rape left Blackburn’s head. Then he wanted it back. Then he felt evil for wanting it back. Then that went away too. Everything that he had become in the past four months went away with it. He heard the hiss.

  He dropped the package and went to the clock radio to turn it off. Bachman-Turner Overdrive stopped in midstutter. Blackburn was standing at the head of the bed now, looking down at Dolores. Her hair was tangled and damp. Her lips were puffy. The naked man had rolled away and was crouching on the floor on the other side of the bed. Blackburn gave him a glance, then looked back at Dolores.

  “Hello,” he said. He blinked. His eyes were stinging. That wouldn’t do. He made them stop. “I brought flowers.”

  “Thank you,” Dolores whispered.

  He looked at the rest of her body. The bikini patches glared. She looked ridiculous in her naked non-nudity.

  Blackburn returned to the foot of the bed and squatted to pick up the roses. The naked man’s feet appeared among them, and then Blackburn saw that the naked man’s clothes were there too. The naked man stooped to collect them, his body bending so that his cock vanished under his belly. Blackburn looked up at the naked man’s eyes and tried to see into his brain.