CONTENTS
Open Wide
Author’s Note
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements & About the Author
Tell me what you thought
Special sneak peek of GAMELAND
a new high tech thriller series
‡ ‡ ‡
Open Wide
by Saul Tanpepper
Open Wide
by Saul Tanpepper
Copyright © 2012 by Saul Tanpepper
All rights reserved.
Published July 2, 2012 by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046
(1st published Dec 11, 2011 in Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors)
Cover design Brinestone Press Copyright © 2012
Photo of girl by Andreas Gradin (fotolia)
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LICENSE NOTES
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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Tanpepper, Saul (2012-07-02). Open Wide
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OPEN WIDE
I remember the day the two of them hooked up, Kerry Anne and Dean. The day we all graduated. I remember the relief I’d felt knowing that she’d turned her attention onto someone else. A terrible weight had finally been lifted from my shoulders. Now that weight was Dean’s to bear. Well, good riddance, and all that. Problem was, despite everything that had happened, I still wanted her.
Badly.
The thought had entered my mind that maybe I should warn Dean about her. After all, he’d once been a friend of mine, back in the day, back before either of us had ever met Kerry Anne and had entertained thoughts of what it would be like to be with a girl like her. But by then we hated each other’s guts. In my opinion, he was lower than low: he was sewage. So the urge passed without me ever acting on it.
Not a day passes now that I don’t stop and wonder how differently things might’ve turned out if I had. For one thing, I wouldn’t be sitting here sipping weak chicken broth instead of slicing into a nice juicy steak.
Our falling out—Dean’s and mine—had nothing to do with our natural tendency to compete against each other. Or maybe it had everything to do with it, I don’t know; it’s not worth trying to understand now. As buddies, we’d always tried to best the other in anything we did. Didn’t matter if it was athletics or academics or anything else, one of us always had to win and the other had to lose. But rather than getting in the way of our friendship, our competitiveness strengthened it. If you considered the sum of our talents, we were pretty evenly split: sports was my forte, academics Dean’s. He was much more social than I ever was, but I was the better looking. We acknowledged these differences, embraced them, reflected on them. We celebrated each other’s victories as much as our own and lamented the losses as one.
But when it came to girls…
Well, let’s just say that, for the first time in our young lives, we’d discovered that we couldn’t agree on which rules to play by. It was that inability to see eye-to-eye that fractured our friendship. Kerry Anne was the wedge between us, as well as the hammer that pounded it in.
We both became aware of her at the same time, way back in the ninth grade. I don’t know if she was new to the school that year or had always there and we just never noticed her before that. The subject never came up in the course of any of the conversations I had with her. There had already been a few minor tiffs between me and Dean, since we were both dating by then. Sometimes I got to a girl before he did; sometimes I got his rebounds. It was through these hand-me-down relationships that we discovered the truth about each other: he learned that I was claiming things that had never happened, and I learned that he was denying things that had.
Somewhere during our junior year is where things started getting a lot more complicated. It’s when our competitiveness stopped being about friendship, and instead became fueled by our growing distaste for one another. We undermined the other by making public accusations of lying and cheating and exaggeration. When it came to sexual conquests—or claims of conquest—Dean would do anything to win, and I would do anything not to lose.
I don’t think any of these things was a conscious strategy on our part—his or mine—we just turned out the way we did, which is to say different from each other. Not that he was necessarily evil or I was necessarily honorable. I just wasn’t very good at being bad, and Dean wasn’t very good at being good.
Then came Kerry Anne into the picture. I don’t remember who was the first to notice her, but as soon as one of us did, so did the other. It was inevitable that she became our next trophy. Problem was, Kerry Anne was nothing like any of the girls either of us had ever met before. She was this perfect little angel who apparently rarely ever dated. And when she did, she never put out. We knew this going in, but rather than discouraging us, it made us want her even more. Each made it his personal crusade to win her; at some point she stopped being just a trophy and instead became our Holy Grail. Three years later, in the fall of our senior year, I won.
Or so I thought at the time.
Nowadays, I’m not even so sure it was ever as simple as winning and losing.
The details of Kerry Anne’s and my short relationship aren’t that important. Nothing much happened, though not for lack of wanting it to happen. I was awkward when it came to being physical, which explains the exaggerations. Anyway, what’s important is that after we split up, Dean swooped in. It was the usual modus operandi, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like a blood-sucking mosquito to the purest of light.
That’s not a judgment, just a statement of fact.
I’m sure he believed he could succeed where I had failed—and damn if I hadn’t failed in the most publicly and humiliating way possible. Which is partially why I didn’t give a second thought to warning him: what had happened to me should’ve been warning enough to all the boys in school, but especially Dean, who knew the truth about me.
Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t have my own problems to deal with by then.
I just want to make one thing clear from the get-go: I tried, clumsily, and that was my downfall, but I never—never—did what was later claimed. Kerry Anne was as incorruptible, as unwavering in her chastity, pure as the driven snow. She still was after we broke up.
Did I worry about what Dean might try to do to her? As depraved as he could be, I knew he couldn’t hold a candle to Kerry Anne’s virtue. I expected nothing less to come out of his relationship with her than what had come out of my own. In fact, I even hoped it.
† † †
I tried to forget about them after high school, as if that were even possible. Nothing would have made me happier than to have that part of my life surgically removed from the old memory banks. For a while, I thought I’
d been successful.
After kicking around for a little bit in Edgemont, I packed up and moved away. Not too far, just an hour’s drive up State Route Seventeen over to Stepford. My parents were ailing, so I wanted to be close enough by to keep an eye on them, yet far enough away that I’d never have to accidentally run into anyone I knew. It would’ve been too awkward, thinking I’d have to explain myself yet again. Moving away was a conscious decision on my part to put it all behind me.
I got a job working at one of those home improvement warehouses, stocking at first, then as a sales associate in the bath section, finally as a manager. I liked the hours; I liked the work. I didn’t even mind talking to all the weekend warriors going gung-ho on their do-it-yourself projects. Personally, I’d never been inspired to tackle anything more complicated than painting. After high school I became horrible with my hands. They shake uncontrollably at times. I say it’s why I could never be a brain surgeon, but the truth is, I was never that smart.
I bought a small two-bedroom house on the north side of town, a couple blocks on the right bank of the river. Not the rich side, but not the poor side, either. It was a perfectly average-looking house in a perfectly average-looking neighborhood, modest and comfortable and totally forgettable. I had a vegetable garden in the back—everyone did—which I managed somehow to kill every year. Beans and tomatoes and squash. Oh my.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one with a black thumb in that neighborhood. Maybe there was something in the soil.
Anyway, I couldn’t grow a goddamn thing to save my life. I laugh about it now, all that time and money spent on the stupid thing. Nothing grew—well, except for asparagus. Once they start growing, you can’t kill the fuh…freaking things.
The house was blue when I bought it. Baby blue or—what the hell’s it called, powder blue? Cerulean blue? Anyway, I painted it white—took three coats because I stubbornly refused to prime it first—and trimmed it in pine green. I tended my yard and trees, which were mostly scraggly maple, front and back, but also the one gnarled cherry tree that looked to be about as old as Methuselah and probably was. It was the biggest thing alive in those parts, but you could never eat the cherries as they were rotten before they were ripe. I put out my garbage every Thursday, cleaned my gutters twice a year. Collected my mail and never let the newspaper sit in the driveway for more than a day and a half.
I wasn’t into show is what I’m trying to say. I’d had enough of that scene.
Some people are all about show. I mean, chrissakes, more than half the people you see going into the Depot with their sparkling new Hummers and Escalades ooze the kind of pretense that just makes you want to puke. You can just guess that they’re in over their heads in debt, underwater on their mortgages, drowning in past-due notices. It’s not a judgment, it’s a statement of fact. I could hear it in their voices when they came in asking about heated toilet seats. They’d want to look at the big, expensive porcelain thrones, the ones with the bidets and multiple flush settings. Who in the hell needs a toilet that washes your ass for you and puffs warm air on it to dry? Hell in a hand basket, I say. That’s where we’re going as a society when you expect some machine to wipe your ass for you.
But, of course, they’d eventually talk themselves down from that six grand toilet and drift over to the much more modest, much more affordable, two-hundred-dollar models without all the bells and whistles. I could see it in their eyes as they’d load it up into the back of their SUVs: the shame; the fear that someone they knew might see them with this crappy crapper that they’d bought, as if it made them somehow less respectable. It’s a goddamn toilet, folks. You shit in it, not make love. Or coffee. I don’t know, maybe some people make love on the toilet. Who am I to judge? Chrissake is all I’m saying.
I wasn’t anything like that. Modesty was the name of the game for me. Oh, I kept myself busy with small projects, things I could handle myself. I had a nice little pickup truck—cream-colored—which I bought used. The big projects, like remodeling the back bathroom or replacing the carpet in the living room? I let someone else do that. Like I said, I’m not into the whole D.I.Y. thing. I’m sure I could learn how to do things like that myself, but why bother?
I could go on forever living that way. But, you know, forever is a long fuck…freaking time, ain’t it? And things somehow always end up going into the crapper if you wait long enough, don’t they? Excuse the toilet language. Pun intended, of course. Ha ha. I still get a little worked up about things like that.
My twelfth year in the house, that’s when the bubble burst. I’d just re-fied, too. Even took some equity out to buy myself a few grown-up toys—a boat, sixty-two-inch plasma TV—and to completely landscape the backyard. I’d decided it was finally time to stop punishing myself and to start living again.
The ground where the new sod was supposed to go had just been dug up when the economy took a dump. The market tumbled so far so fast that it made Humpty Dumpty’s fatal fall look like a playful romp in a jump house. Ten times worse than the Great Recession that happened when I was in school, back in the decade after the turn of the century.
In weeks, my property lost half its value; the bleeding slowed, eventually, but it never stopped. It was like—blink—suddenly I was up to my neck in debt.
I held on, though, if you can believe that. Wasn’t easy. Things were tight. For about four more years I held on. I had the rest of the equity money—not much, but some—plus some savings. And the folks tried to help out. They died a couple years ago still owing on their own house, right around the time the bank started sending me notices on mine. Fourteen months they sent them damn notices; fourteen months I ignored them. What else could I do?
I ignored the foreclosure notices, too.
Then I got a thirty-day eviction notice. By then I was a pro at denying reality. I came home from work one day to find the locks had been changed.
I think it was in that moment more than any other that preceded it—more even than what happened between me and Kerry Anne and my parents dying broke and brokenhearted—that did it for me. As I stood there on the front porch of my nice little white and green house that now belonged to some giant multinational bank, I realized that no matter how much you try to play by the rules, sometimes the game you’re playing requires a different set of them.
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s not even about good things going bad.
It’s about good things going utterly to hell.
Things hadn’t quite gotten to that point for me yet, though they were quickly heading in that direction. I still had my truck and my job. In other words, a place to sleep and a way to make a living so that I could buy the necessities. But then I lost the latter soon afterward. Customers started complaining about me. All misunderstandings. I think what happened was someone found out about me and the crap hand I’d been dealt back in high school, and pretty soon word got around.
Despite what I may have said happened back when we were dating, it didn’t. And despite Kerry Anne twisting it around, she was still as unsullied as the day I first met her. I just want to make that clear.
There had been an investigation, naturally. Appearances and all that crap. I was one of those high profile personalities during my senior year, captain of the football team—the Amazing Number Four, as my teammates called me—an all-star quarterback with NFL prospects, even though I was still only seventeen. So much talent and potential that college scouts had my cell phone number programmed into their speed dial by the time I was in my junior varsity year. Half my social media contacts were in one way or another connected to college or pro sports organizations or commercial sponsors.
I denied the allegations, denied my own claims. Didn’t make for a very reliable defendant, did it? People chose to believe Kerry Anne, who’d stuck to one version of the story and never wavered from it. Did I mention she had a reputation as an angel? It served her well.
At first I was benched from practice, from games. I knew it was goin
g to happen, so it didn’t come as any surprise. Can’t have the star quarterback playing under a cloud of suspicion, right? Doesn’t look good for the school.
I was, however, totally blindsided when they yanked me off the squad. Then they arrested me. Suddenly everyone was against me. I was tried and convicted by the only court that means anything anymore: the internet. People I once thought were my friends posted lies about me. I was essentially guilty before proven innocent.
I probably would’ve been convicted by the law courts, too, if my parents hadn’t stepped in and agreed to settle at the last possible moment. Damn near killed them, the trial, the vitriol people expressed at us out in public. Actually, it did kill Mom and Dad, it just took their bodies a few years to catch on.
I tried going back to playing ball afterward, I really did. And there was no reason the school could come up with to deny me. But my heart wasn’t in it. My game was off. All too quickly, the scouts stopped calling, stopped taking my calls.
Winter came and went. Then spring. Then we graduated. That’s when Kerry Anne hooked up with Dean and I finally felt like I could get on with my life.
I should have warned him.
After getting fired, I was able to scrape together a few odd jobs, enough to provide me with food and gas to keep me from starving to death and freezing on the coldest of nights. Two of those months were the coldest on record, if you can believe that after all the global warming we’ve been having. The heater finally crapped out one night with the thermometer frozen in the teens below zero. My earlobes got frostbite. They still itch like hell sometimes, though not as much as my bottom gums do. I bought a little Sterno stove and set it up on the floor of the passenger side to warm up the cab. Nearly asphyxiated myself. Not very bright, eh? If the plastic over the broken window hadn’t blown in, I guess I would’ve died. The irony of it is, I probably owe it to some asshole juvenile delinquent for smashing it in the first place thinking he might find something worth hocking for coke money.
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