by Larry Hoy
“—manhood. ‘With Adrian, yes,’ I said, ‘once a year is plenty, but not with you. With you, once an hour is more like it.’
“‘Once an hour? I won’t survive that for more than week,’ Bryan said.
“‘Maybe, but what a way to go,’ I replied.
“He blocked my hand with a pillow, and I put on my best pouty face. That used to get whatever I wanted from the boys in middle school, but Bryan just laughed. ‘I’m going to need a minute. That was quite a workout.’
“‘I’m thinking about teaching classes,’ I said.
“He wagged his finger at my nose and said, ‘Don’t you dare.’
“I remember every detail of what happened next, every smell, every sensation, even the sounds his stomach made when I laid my head on it. It’s like being dead has actually sharpened my memory. I can see it all like a video in my mind. Weird, huh? My brain cells have all turned to mush by now, but I feel smarter than I ever did while alive.
“Anyway, we screwed like rabbits for the next few hours. Adrian was away at a teacher’s conference in Little Rock, and we had all the time in the world. Or so I thought. After the third time, Bryan closed his eyes and finally gave in to his exhaustion and passed into unconsciousness, and I finally let him. I’d well and truly worn him out, poor guy.”
She laughed a little to herself.
“A couple of minutes later I did the same. Everything was quiet and perfect.”
“I always knew Adrian had a temper, but I had never seen him like what happened next. The door frame splintered, and the door swung free to bounce off the corner of the bed. Bryan and I both sat up, and I heard him cry out when he saw a man standing in the doorway.”
“The charming Mister Adrian, I’m guessing,” said Cooper. He sucked the latest cigarette down to the butt, exhaled, and wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction. Another one materialized.
“It was Adrian, all worked up into a state like I never saw before. I married him because I’d had some rough boyfriends over the years, truckers who promised to leave their old ladies and never did, drug dealers who beat me up, even one guy who tried to pimp me out. Adrian wasn’t much to look at, but he had a steady job teaching in the Fayette County School System, benefits, a house he’d inherited from his mother. He wasn’t fat back then, either; that happened after…Well, I’ll tell that in its own time.”
Sweetwater interrupted her. “I hope you don’t think I’m hitting on you, but you’re a damned fine looking woman. Couldn’t you find somebody better?”
“Go ahead and hit on me, what do I care now? But c’mon, Luther, think with your other head, we’re from the same county. Hell, we might have been neighbors. Everybody I knew grew up in a house with wheels, every guy I met just wanted to get into my pants. All except Adrian; I met him when I roller skated to his car at the drive-in near the town square in Semple. He wasn’t like anybody I’d ever gone out with, but he seemed nice. So, when he asked me out, I went. Things went from there.
“He treated me like I was a princess and took great care of me. I can’t complain about any of that. But I’d be yin’ if I said I ever loved him, and sex with him was never better than something I had to tolerate. Then after our only child was born—that would be Herbert—the sight of Adrian started making me sick. Just looking at him made me want to throw up; I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because of what our son became as he got older…
“Anyway, when Adrian caught me with Bryan, he came through the door like some kind of wild animal, waving a hammer and screaming. I’d never seen him like that before, at least, not with me. He’d gone off on other people, sometimes to the point where I thought he’d wind up in jail, but he never so much as raised his voice to me…until them.
“He buried the claws of the hammer into the bedroom wall and pulled out a big chunk of plasterboard and called me all the names you’d expect him to: fucking bitch, whore, slut, all of those, and I’ll never forget the spit flying out of his mouth as he yelled. I knew he’d gone crazy, and I mean insane crazy.
“I knelt and tried to get between him and Bryan, but he shoved me away, and I fell off the other side of the bed and hit my head on the bed frame. I think I passed out for a few seconds. Bryan was bigger and stronger than Adrian, but when I came to Bryan was on the floor with my husband kneeling on him. Bryan called out something like ‘wait, please don’t,’ and tried to grab Adrian’s arms, but I guess it was one of those situations you hear about where adrenaline gives somebody super strength.
“With this twisted, horrible grin, Adrian lifted the hammer high overhead and tried to hit Bryan with it, except they wound up wrestling instead. Bryan managed to catch his arm on the way down, with Adrian still screaming all kinds of stuff about Bryan never fucking another man’s wife again, and how could I do this to him and our son, and all kinds of stuff.
“I tried to make him stop, but I was still naked, and when he saw me it made him so mad that it gave him extra strength. He jerked his arm free of Bryan’s grip and threw his arm backward before bringing the hammer down on Bryan’s head. And that’s when I heard this horrible, wet crunch.
“I crawled around the end of the bed on my hands and knees because I had this sick feeling I knew what had happened, and I was right. Adrian was frozen, staring back to where Herbert lay on the floor, the claws of that goddamned hammer jammed into his forehead. His face was turned my way and his eyes were open. I knew right away that my boy was dead.
“Adrian forgot all about Bryan and fell to his knees beside our son. He idolized that boy; Herbert was his world. He cried and hugged our dead eight-year-old son and kept telling him to wake up, it was all gonna be okay, that kind of stuff. Bryan took off, but I couldn’t move, I just sat there on my haunches for a while…I don’t know how long it was, just a while…and then suddenly I snapped out of it.
“I leapt up and tackled Adrian the way I’d learned playing football with my brother. He was still holding Herbert, but I knew he was dead. I clawed at his face and neck, I tried to get the hammer away so I could use it to kill him, I really don’t remember most of it. But Adrian didn’t really fight back, except to keep me from getting the hammer, he just kept looking at Herbert’s awful, bloody face where—dear God, I’m dead and it still sickens me. Where grayish stuff had started oozing from his forehead.”
“Oh fuck,” Cooper said, all traces of sarcasm gone now. “I have a four-year-old girl—had a four-year-old girl, Nottie we called her, and I guess they still do. Losing her would have killed me; I could never have functioned again. I’m so sorry, Grace.”
“Me, too,” Sweetwater said. “I don’t have kids, but I’m really sorry you had to go through that.”
Grace Allen shrugged. “Thanks, but it sort of hollowed me out. After a while, I quit mourning my son because I don’t think I could anymore. I’d just run out of emotions; I’d run out of grief. That sounds terrible but it’s true. Herbert was dead because I couldn’t control my own lust, and I turned an otherwise decent man into a murderer.”
“I don’t think we’re qualified to judge you,” Sweetwater said. “Least ways, I’m not.”
“What happened to Adrian after that?” Cooper said.
From somewhere else a new voice interrupted the conversation, a female voice, with some sort of beeping in the background.
“Pulse is weak but it’s there,” she said, and then was gone.
Cooper and Grace Allen both turned surprised glances on Sweetwater.
“Who was that?” he said.
Cooper conjured up a cigarette. “I think you might return to the land of the living soon.”
“I’ll hurry it up then,” Grace Allen said. “Herbert’s death was my fault. Adrian wasn’t a prize catch, but despite a nasty streak, he’d never hurt anybody before, and he tried hard to be a good husband. It was me who wasn’t satisfied and betrayed him.”
“Nobody has right to hit somebody else with a hammer,” Sweetwater said. “Except in self-defense. This isn’t you
r fault.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Cooper said with uncharacteristic bitterness. Usually, he wore a smirk and had a tone to match.
Grace Allen shook her head. “No, he shouldn’t have done that, but I think seeing me naked with another man made him snap, and if that didn’t, I know that killing Herbert did. He threw me off and knelt there, holding our boy close to his chest, with Herbert’s brains leaking down his chest. It was horrible.
“His face was red and wet when he looked over at me, and then something changed. His eyebrows went up and he pointed at me. ‘You did it!’ he screamed at me. A big drop of Herbert’s blood dripped from the end of his finger. ‘What did you do, Grace? Why did you kill our boy?’”
Grace Allen turned away from the two men, wiped her nose with a tissue that appeared in her left hand, coughed, and continued.
“I got to my feet because I’d seen that same kind of look enough times to know what was coming. Adrian’s face had twisted with rage, and as I met his eyes, I knew he would kill me if I stayed. He seemed to be looking through me, not at me. A knot of ice formed in my stomach, and I couldn’t move. I once hit a deer on a dark night on Highway 195, just outside of Grand Junction. It just stood there, frozen in my headlights, and I felt the same way. Then Adrian started climbing to his feet.
“Something snapped me out of my trance, and I ran. I abandoned my son and my husband, and I ran to save my own worthless life. I remember shivering and feeling cold, but I wasn’t sure if it was from sweat or terror. I’m still not. I ran down the staircase and snatched the spare keys from the back door.
“Adrian came after me, yelling and pounding down the stairs, but I got to the door in plenty of time to get away and started working on the locks. I should have gotten away clean, except my fingers shook, and I’d started to panic. I fumbled with the chain lock and twisted the doorknob. It took a few seconds to register that it was still locked, and then Adrian grabbed my shoulder. After that…everything happened in a few seconds; it takes longer to tell it than to live through it.
“‘You’re not getting away that easy!’ he screamed at me. I tried to reason with him, but he was way too far gone for that. His fingers dug deep into my skin, and he had the hammer ready to hit me. I didn’t doubt for one second that he’d kill me where I stood. The look in his eyes was…awful.
“I looked around for anything I could use to defend myself. The block of knives by the sink was too far to reach, but I saw the coffee pot off to my right and reacted, there wasn’t time to do anything else. I swung it hard as I could into the left side of his head. Blood and glass flew everywhere, some of it wound up in my hair, and Adrian made this horrible noise, like something you’d hear in a horror movie…but Adrian didn’t let go.
“Any hesitation in his eyes was gone, he raised the hammer and there was nothing more I could do so…so I lunged forward and bit him. I was aiming for his nose, but he turned at the last second and I got a mouthful of his cheek. I bit down as hard as I could. My mouth filled with blood, and he shoved me away.
“Adrian staggered backward, screaming and swinging the hammer blindly, and damned near hit me in the jaw. I’m pretty sure he fell down. I ducked just in time, ’cause if he’d connected, I would have been dead long before you threw me off that building, Two-Bit—”
“I didn’t do that!”
“Hush and lemme finish before you get jerked back.”
“He might stay dead,” Cooper said.
“And he might not,” Grace Allen said. “I had seconds to save myself, and I knew it. I still had the keys in my left hand and this time I got the door open. I didn’t care if I was naked and covered with blood, or that my heart was beating so hard I thought I might die from it. I ran for the driveway. I had a 1987 Olds Firenza with most of the paint gone that didn’t always start on the first few tries, but that night it started up as Adrian came running out the back door. If it hadn’t started, he would have killed me, simple as that. But it did and I stomped on the accelerator, fishtailing as I hit the street. And that was it; I never saw him again.
“How could that be it?” Sweetwater said. “What about your son, wasn’t Adrian arrested for murder?”
Grace Allen hung her head. “I never called the police. Herbert was—there was something very wrong with Herbert.”
“So, what did you do? I mean, you were nude, right?” Sweetwater said.
“Yeah, so I couldn’t stop and ask for help. You know what would have happened in that area of Semple. So, I drove to my mom’s house in Moscow. We’re the same size. She was passed out drunk, but her scumbag boyfriend was there. He’d flirted with me from day one, and the second he saw me, bloody and with gouges in my shoulder, instead of helping me or calling the police, he bent me over a chair and raped me. Right then and there. Didn’t ask anything, didn’t even care that mom was snoring on the couch. He just pushed down on the back of my neck to hold me in place and fucked me until he was done.”
“Oh shit,” Cooper said, genuinely stunned. “Damn…what did you do?”
She shrugged. “By that point I was an emotional wreck; I’d watched my husband assault my lover, my son was killed, I was assaulted and raped. The only thing I wanted was to get away, so I grabbed some clothes from my mom’s closet and told him to either kill me or give me a hundred bucks to keep quiet. He didn’t have that much, but he did give me seventy-three dollars. That was enough to get me to Texas.”
“What happened once you got there?” Sweetwater said.
“Don’t ask. But then I met the ultra-rich Dennis Roy Tarbeau, and the second I saw him I was determined to become Mrs. Tarbeau. He made me sign a pre-nup, but if the marriage broke up after a year, I got three million dollars. So at the end of a year, I turned into the Ice Queen.”
“You didn’t love him, I take it,” Cooper said.
“Oh, but I did. I couldn’t imagine being more in love…until our wedding night. Dennis liked whips, which might have been all right, except it wasn’t the fantasy he liked, it was the welts they raised…on me. His favorite game was Slave and Master.”
“That’s disgusting!” Sweetwater said.
“Don’t be such a child,” Cooper said, sounding annoyed with Sweetwater for the first time. “What goes on behind closed doors in a marriage is nobody else’s business.”
“Yeah, but—” he started, but then began to sink into whatever the whiteness was he’d been lying on. “Hey, what’s going on?”
Cooper saluted with his cigarette. “Congratulations, look like you’re gonna make it. See you soon, Luther.”
“The boyfriend’s name, what was it?” Sweetwater yelled. “Quick!”
“John Cleve Stuart!”
Then he was gone.
Chapter 21
Midtown Memphis, TN
Erebus heard the broken pieces of driveway bouncing off the underside of his car the same way it had the night his wife had to leave. He would never forget that thunk-thunk sound, not if he lived to be ninety. And he would never forgive the man who kidnapped Grace Allen and stole her car, the man whose name he’d only later learned was Bryan. Now that he was on the vengeance trail, if he could find Bryan, he’d shoot him just like he’d done to Sweetwater. And after that, he’d go after the guy down in Texas who kept her as a slave, that Tarbeau guy. He’d get them all.
Speeding away from his house reminded him of that whole awful night ten years earlier. He remembered all the blood and how it stung his eyes, leaving him squinting at the broken coffee pot and the open back door. Somehow, even then, he knew he’d never see Grace Allen again.
After the coffee pot hit him in the face, which he was pretty sure was done by Bryan while Grace Allen hugged him in the kitchen, he was stunned and it took him several minutes to slowly roll to his hands and knees, and then to his feet. When he wiped the blood from his eyes, they were both gone. He staggered outside and heard Bryan driving off in Grace Allen’s car.
The pain in his face forced him back insid
e. At the kitchen sink he wet a towel in cold water and pressed it to his face. When he pulled it away, the towel was soaked with blood. He rinsed it, took a few ice cubes out of the freezer, wrapped them in the towel, and pressed it against his left cheek. He walked back to the staircase, using his right hand on the walls to steady himself. All of those memories were quite clear, but after that, things got fuzzy, which he assumed was due to the head wound. A concussion most likely, although he never had it diagnosed.
Erebus wound up at the foot of the staircase, unable to mount the first stair because there were two first steps. He remembered that part clearly, the double vision and how hard it was to stand up. He leaned on the banister until it wobbled and nearly collapsed, and he felt strength draining away at the mere thought of going upstairs.
Only the vaguest memories remained of walking out the backdoor, like he was seeing everything through deep water, and none of it made sense. Later, he realized Bryan must have returned to finish him off and kill Herbert, and, somehow, he’d seen things through Bryan’s eyes.
On the back stoop he—Bryan—found the gas can Erebus used for the lawnmower and had forgotten to put away. He carried it back into the house and started shaking it, sprinkling the fuel through each room, but hurrying so it didn’t evaporate. A few minutes later he found himself again standing at the foot of the staircase. At first Erebus wondered where he was, since the view was what Bryan saw, but Erebus must have been upstairs with Herbert, which would explain how he saved his son.
As though he were watching a movie, he watched as Bryan poured the last of the gasoline on the staircase, dropped the empty can, ran back to the kitchen, rifled through the drawers until he found some towels, and piled them on the kitchen counter. Over the vent-a-hood he found a box of kitchen matches and lit the towels. Once they were burning, he grabbed one and threw it into the front room. Orange-yellow flames ran across the floor, climbed the front curtains, the chairs and couch, and licked up the walls.
