by J. L. Abramo
She kisses me—it’s long and hot. “Baby, you can keep me as long as you want.” Something in the way she says it reminds me of honeysuckle moonshine—sweet and hot and raw.
After that, all I can think about is taking her like a shot—fast and deliberate, but she leads me on quite a chase as she wanders around my apartment, opening my drawers and boxes, like she’s trying to look inside me.
Yesterday
Lately, all I can think about is getting Melody in my bed and keeping her there. Still, I manage to be professional long enough to hammer out a plan that allows us to make money and for me to use my acting skills.
Phase one happens today. Tomorrow’s payday.
We have lunch at my house, sandwiches and Sprite. As she sips her soda, her gaze flits around my apartment, landing on my bed, my nightstand. I want to ask her what she’s gonna do after, how she’s going to leave her husband. How she’s going to break the news to him.
“I’d be happy to throw in a Package 5 for you. On the house.” At her frown, I add, “That’s the Gatsby package. Boyfriend from the past enters life to make a scene, givin’ you a plausible reason to leave.”
“One package at a time,” she says, and I’m not sure if she’s making a pun or if I just have a one-track mind.
Either way, I grin. “You’re making me want a cold shower. Or, we could finish what we started last night.”
This time, both of our eyes drift to the bed, but I know what she’s going to say before she says it. Nothing had changed in the last twelve hours. “I’m not okay with that, Jenson. Not before I leave my husband. It just wouldn’t be right.”
She leans her head on my shoulder and the warmth of her skin on my own feels like a jolt of electricity.
I savor the feel of her then scan our plan again, images and descriptions tacked up on my wall in a grid. I like storyboards, just like the movies.
An old tune comes into my head and I start humming. “Seven Spanish Angels.” I’ve always loved that song, sensed a camaraderie with Willie Nelson and Ray Charles. Those two sure can put themselves into another man’s shoes—or boots, for that matter.
And make money doing it.
Like old Ray, I love me a good tragedy—a fiction one, that is. I’d planned a happy ending for me and Melody, though—a happy ending, every night if I have anything to do with it.
My mind wanders to the money I’ve got stashed in a pillowcase under the mattress. Package 7 had been popular this year; although Package 3 is the bigger moneymaker. Soon enough, I’d be on my way with a nice pile of cash. New York City. Broadway. Roles where I can do more than mustache twirling.
Earlier this year, I’d done a solo gig. I called it “Flea Bitten.” I’d scoped out a wealthy single woman in my apartment complex, disguised myself as a member of our landscaping company, and asked to use her bathroom. While inside, I planted fleas in her bed. She’d left in the middle of the night, leaving the empty suite and the cover of darkness to my sticky fingers.
The next day—about a thousand dollars in stolen goods richer—I saw her. Her face a swollen mess, and she kept her eyes down as her sister helped her move out. Her sister had railed loudly about the bugs and the theft, but the woman was silent, itchy and beaten. I decided there would be no more fleas. Also, it was time to ease my way out of the business, and up to New York.
Besides, the curtain has to close before it opens again. That’s true in life and it’s true on the stage. I imagine Melody coming with me, sitting in the front row while I headline at New Amsterdam Theater. On her feet, clapping, her red lips curled into a “Bravo!”
I excuse myself to touch up my costume in the bathroom and to change into my black jeans and cowboy boots. I survey my appearance before adding a hat. When this is over, I might grow myself a real mustache
I pose in the doorway. “I look dangerous. The Cowboy Kidnapper, that’s what the papers will call me.”
She laughs a little, but I can tell that there’s something she’s not saying.
As the afternoon sun starts to set, it’s time to enact the plan. It’s always my favorite part of Package 2—well, other than getting a bag full of money. Tomorrow, we’ve only got a one-person audience, but today I’ll have a parking lot full.
There’s this grocery store on the outskirts of town. It’s got two cameras on the parking lot, and is understaffed on Thursday afternoons.
She’s inside when I arrive, and I pull my big van in twenty-three feet away from the front-facing camera and wait. It’s a rental, and I’ve put some rodeo decals on it and covered the license plate in mud. From their angle, the cops could see the van, but not its passengers.
While I’m waiting, stage fright gets to me a little. An elderly woman crosses with her cart, behind a couple and a toddler. Would they be part of my audience? An SUV pulls up, beat blaring, and a big guy gets out. Would he enjoy the show?
My side mirror’s set up so that when she leaves the store with a small bag, I see her. The couple’s gone, but the elderly woman still moves steadily in the direction of her car. A younger woman in a suit walks briskly by. I wish there were more people outside to see the show, but I’ll take what I can get. That’s part of it—what sells the kidnapping. Eye witnesses.
Melody looks every bit as beautiful as she had this morning, and my breathing speeds up. I stroke the handle of my unloaded gun and remind myself who I am. Jenson. Badass.
When she gets to her car—a ripe little Ferrari—she bends over to put her bag inside. I step out of the car, careful to keep my hat lowered, my face angled thirty degrees away from the camera.
No one stops. The old lady has finally made it to her car and she’s loading her trunk one bag at a time. The big dude and businesswoman are nowhere in sight. I hold up a finger, motioning for Melody to move more slowly. Right on time, a convertible full of teenage girls pulls across from us. It looks like they’ve just gotten out of school, and they pile out of the car, all estrogen and LOLs.
I love teenage girls. They make the perfect witnesses—more emotion than sense. Again, the word goofy travels through my head, but I remind myself that I’m The Cowboy Kidnapper. Nothing goofy here.
I wait for Melody to get into position, right behind the car’s trunk. Moving behind her, smooth like a criminal, I take a deep breath. One of the teenagers watches me. She’s younger than the others, thirteen or fourteen, and her eyes widen when she sees me—tall, dashing and dangerous. Next time, I make a mental note to smoke a cigarette. That would be a nice touch.
I frown at the girl to so she knows I’m menacing before grabbing hold of Melody, carefully keeping my face away from the camera.
Her scream is gorgeous. I want to praise her, tell her what an amazing damsel in distress she is, but instead I say, “Quiet, missy. You’re comin’ with me.”
I cover her mouth with my hand, but she still manages to squeak out a “Help!”
Our timing is perfect. After I dump Melody in the back, I start yelling. “I got ya now, and there will be no escape.” I brandish the gun so that the girls can get a good view and bang on the back door with a flourish.
After hopping into the driver’s seat, I speed away. We’re only a block away when she starts giggling from the back. “Did you see that girl’s face? That was amazing.” She laughs some more while shimmying between the two front seats to sit beside me. Her hair has fallen a little bit over her face.
“Get back!” I hiss. “Can’t have anyone spotting us together, talkin’ like old friends.”
“You seem to like scaring young girls. Do you?” She props her feet up on the dashboard. The jeans that had looked so respectable from a distance are distracting up close. “Besides, if they are close enough to see that, then you got a lot more problems than them wantin’ to know our relationship.”
She’s right. A siren blooms its mating call in the distance, and soon another answers, and another until all I hear are sirens. I pull into the shaded car wash and take off the decals.
My car’s parked behind the shop. After throwing my hat and whiskers in the trunk, we head back to my apartment.
On the way, she leans over and rubs her fingers through my hair. The car swerves into the next lane.
“Damn it, Melody.”
From the corner of my eye, I can see her smile creeping up the side of her face, a twisted amusement that tells me she’s all-too-aware of her charms.
It does nothing to lessen her allure, but I gulp and manage to get back on track.
If I can keep steady for the next day, then I’ll have all the time in the world to explore everything Melody’s offering.
Once we get to my apartment, I know we’ve made it. I’ve got my police radio hooked up, and Melody listens to see if they are on to us, but apparently witnesses didn’t notice which way we’d gone and it would take some time to pull up the parking lot cameras.
They are looking for a man about six-four with a handlebar mustache and a ten-gallon hat. I meet my own eyes in the rearview mirror.
And preen.
It’ll be a long night hunkering down in my apartment, but I don’t mind. She’s the best company I could ask for. For some reason, I can’t get that song out of my head—the one with the young, tragic lovers. I find “Seven Spanish Angels” online and play it.
She whispers, “I’ve always loved this song.”
Her lips are so close that I have to taste them. I lean into her and she leans into me, and we lose ourselves in the adrenaline of our afternoon. She licks her lips and pulls away. She sounds a little breathless. “Jenson.”
The name sounds so sweet in her mouth, and I lean down to kiss her again. She pulls back. “Wait. Sugar, tell me more about you. Where you’re from. What you’re about.” It sounds like a prayer.
“Sure, angel.” I take a breath, ready to tell her about growing up on the fifth floor of a Dallas apartment building. My mom worked retail, and the bus used to drop me off at her store so I wouldn’t be home alone. Looking into Melody’s eyes, so blue and expectant, I knew I couldn’t tell her that. I’m a method actor, damnit. Billy Cochran’s past would stay private for a while longer.
“Jenson’s my real name, believe it or not. I grew up wranglin’ cattle. Pa used to keep me home from school to help out on the ranch—weren’t no hand could break a horse fast as I could.” I allow myself a sheepish smile. “Even when I was a kid, always had an eye for the ladies. “
She cups my face with one hand and rubs my upper lip with the other. It’s bare now that I’ve torn off the whiskers. She doesn’t think I’m goofy. I can tell. Still. There’s a question in her eyes—a hesitancy that I haven’t seen before. Then, it’s gone. There’s a hardness, a decision made. For some reason, that makes me nervous. I plop down on the bed and pull her down with me. “This is how you wrangle cattle, baby.”
She giggles and pushes me away.
Today
I found a deserted dude ranch half an hour away, and Melody and I are parked in the barn where we have the perfect view of the dirt road entrance. I’d put up a sign in front of the real ranch name: Valley of the Gun, straight out of our favorite song. Melody can’t stop laughing. It’s perfect.
Her husband shows up right on time. He gets out of the car with bag in hand, just how I’d instructed. It looks full, too. Like it actually has the right amount of cash in it. He’s tall enough, and plays his part well, striding up to the drop off point by the big lonely tree. His suit’s crumpled and tie askew. I wonder if he’s been wearing it since yesterday.
I would have played it a different way. Maybe gone heroic. Maybe brought a gun, waved it around, all, “Come at me, Cowboy Kidnapper.”
Melody’s looking in his direction, but her eyes are lower, more intent on the state of her fingernails, than that of her husband. I grab one of her hands and squeeze. It feels perfect—delicate without being lazy.
I almost miss her husband start pacing, staring at his watch.
“Uh-oh. He better not have called the cops.”
She rolls her eyes. “I told you. He doesn’t have the imagination. He’ll do what you said.”
I like that. How she thinks he doesn’t have imagination. She’s compared the two of us—businessman and artist—and found him lacking. Rubbing my re-applied mustache, I give her hand a squeeze. “Almost there,” I say.
Her eyes sparkle. She’s looking at his bag too, and seeing possibilities.
We’re halfway to New York in my mind. Between this and the stash I’d been working on, I’ll be set for years, with the funds to support my fledgling career and my best girl.
“Alright, get ready,” I say. The plan is simple. I get the money, and he gets her. She goes home with him and meets me next week, once she’s had the chance to get her life in order. She gets her half. I talk her into running away with me.
She slides out of the car and waits. I grab her hands, roughly. I have to be Jenson through and through now. I push her towards the barn opening, gun trained on her. “I do the talking. Remember that.”
She doesn’t answer and I twist her so that I can see the look on her face. It’s terrified until our eyes meet. She winks. “Got it, sugar,” she whispers.
I keep her ahead of me. As we round the side of the barn, her husband comes into sight.
When he sees us, he drops the bag on the ground in front of him, and puts his hands in the air. “It’s all here, just like you said. It’s all here.”
I nod. “Good. Now, don’t do anything stupid.” I’d always wanted to say that.
He stares at Melody, frowning. For a moment, I think he looks more confused than scared. “Sweetheart, are you okay?”
She nods, but I cut them off. “Shut up. Both of you.”
I wave the gun at Melody. “Go get that bag of cash and bring it to me.”
The air is still and the heat bears down, baking us. I keep the gun trained on her as she obeys me. She won’t meet her husband’s eyes. She won’t meet mine either, come to think of it. I have this feeling of imbalance—like I’m about to fall off my horse. I grip the gun tighter. She’s walking back towards me now, bag in her hand.
My eyes wander over the horizon, then back to Melody. “Alright, open the bag. Let me see.”
She does, and it’s all there—beautiful stacks of green twenties.
I adjust my hat and stroke my mustache. “Now. Walk back towards your husband slowly. One wrong move and you’re done.” The husband’s still looking at Melody, eyes scrunched in bewilderment. Can he tell she’s my partner?
She licks her lips and meets my eyes, then his. “I rewrote the script,” she says as she puts a pair of wide sunglasses on. Now her husband and I have matching looks of confusion as she pulls out a slim canister of something—then another from her other pocket. She sprays some in her husband’s face, and he falls to his knees, clutching his eyes.
“First time I’ve seen you cry,” she says, careful to stay away from him. “They told me I’d need extra strength.”
I surge forward. “What did you—”
She faces me. “That there was your last speaking part, sweetheart. You think you’re the only one with a plan around here?”
When she leans close, I freeze. I’m having a hard time keeping up. Improv’s never been my best thing. When she sprays me, I realize what’s in the can. Pepper spray. I’m crying and choking, all at once. My eyes burn, and I collapse into the dirt, too. My lungs seize, and my eyes explode, but something in me knows that the show must go on.
All I can do is crawl after her as she disappears back into the barn, but she throws something else my way—it looks like a bomb. When it explodes, I think I might die until I realize that her Phase 2 is some kind of smoke bomb. I’m crying and crawling and mumbling until she reappears out of the smoke.
She rolls her eyes. Her voice is mocking as she says, “Father please forgive me. I can’t make it without my man.” I’m so disoriented that it takes me a few moments to recognize what she has in her hand. It’s my pill
owcase, the one with my Broadway fund. “Your car seems to have gotten a flat,” she adds, and I realize that her accent had been fake too. We’d been playing each other, but she’d been playing to win.
“You bitch,” I gasp. Coughing hurts. Talking hurts. “Water—” I manage.
She looks down at me and starts pulling something out of her hair. Then another. Then another. She scatters the bobby pins across the ground like discarded grenade pins. It seems to go on and on until finally, she pulls her hair off in one swift motion. A wig falls in front of me, and I use it to rub the chemicals out of my face, my eyes. No wonder her husband had been confused when he saw her.
A dark curtain of hair has fallen down around her face, sleek around her shoulders. She leans down, blinking, and when she meets my eyes this time, she’s removed contacts to reveal brown eyes.
I blink again, smoke and tears clouding my vision. I recognize her now, my leading lady, the girl who had felt like home. She’s the sister of my onetime neighbor in apartment 3B—victim of my Flea-Bitten solo act.
I’m about to call after her, ask her how long I’d been marked, beg to know how she identified me. But pillowcase in one hand and ransom bag in the other, she sidesteps her coughing husband and drives off in his car. I know what I did to her sister, but I wonder what he did wrong. The car’s engine echoes like thunder and freedom.
But the freedom’s not mine.
Back to TOC
JOLENE
Grant Jerkins
It was quiet in the bedroom. Mary Louise felt like she might cry. They had only been in bed for ten minutes and she knew it took Kent at least fifteen minutes to fall asleep.
So they both lay there, awake, in the dark.
She needed to say something to him. To clear the air. She had known about his infidelity for over a week now and finally made up her mind to get it out in the open.
Maybe infidelity wasn’t the right word for it, but it was close enough.