Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "Frankenstein," I said.

  Meghan laughed, ha-ha, chopping it off abruptly. "You look—I mean, for somebody who . . . what I'm trying to say is, I wish Doyle kept himself in as good a shape as you do." KA-BOOM. Meghan seemed to shrink a size smaller. I saw the tilt and pucker of her nipples against the synthetic kimono fabric. The lights almost went out, dimming to a coppery glow before returning. "Maybe I ought to light us a candle," Meghan said.

  "Good idea."

  I managed to get the sweater on over my bandaged head. I was feeling calmer, although my hands still trembled annoyingly. Calmer, slightly hazy, vaguely adrift. The Percs were working. My stomach had settled down. I needed to go to the bathroom, and went without saying anything to Meghan.

  When I came out she was standing in the hallway between the den and the kitchen area, with its keeping room and breakfast nook, one side of the hall all windows facing the stake-fenced patio. She had a candle with her, in a glass holder shaped like a swan.

  "We could sit in the den," she suggested. "Would you like something to eat?"

  "Is that cinnamon bread I've been smelling?"

  "You bet! Baked it an hour ago. I just got the urge. I must have known you were coming." Ha-ha-ha—

  "Meggy?"

  "What?"

  "You're a lot more attractive when you don't laugh like that."

  She bit her lip and looked chastened, her face paling in the sizzle of another lightning stroke.

  "I know. It's just something—stupid nervous habit, I don't even know when I'm—"

  "I shouldn't have said anything. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay! I don't mind. I know you're not criticizing, you're not like that. You're—not like any man I've ever known, if you want the truth."

  That made me smile, what I hoped was a pleasant, encouraging smile. "I'm not? Why am I different?"

  "Oh, that would take a book!" She scribbled in air with an imaginary pencil, then gestured hopelessly. "If I could write, which I can't."

  "Would you try to tell me? I guess I need to hear some good things about myself tonight. I'm feeling on the low side, Meghan."

  "Funny. I've been feeling the same way."

  "Have you, Meghan? Why?"

  "Well. It didn't start with you . . . getting shot." She took a deep breath, held it, then said in a rush, "Goes way back . . . we're neighbors, but I'm sure you have no idea what it's . . . been like around here, for me. I don't blame Ricky Gene so much, it's Doyle and his . . . his damn guns and his . . . attitude. Anyway, the accident was almost the last straw, but, thank God, you pulled through! I still can't believe we . . . you . . . were so lucky."

  "Give God most of the credit."

  "I do, I do!" She touched me, near the shoulder, solemnly, not a nervous touch but as if she needed to be firmly convinced I was flesh and blood and not the climax of a nightmare. "Thank you, God," Meghan said in a small tearful voice. "Greg's still here." I almost put my own hand on top of hers, but I didn't, and slowly she withdrew it and dry-washed both hands. "Come . . . sit down, watch TV if the cable didn't take a hit with all of this lightning."

  "I don't watch television very often."

  "I do. Unfortunately. It's just another one of my stupid, boring habits. I'll get the bread, and—how about some hot cider?"

  "Perfect."

  Meghan was in the kitchen loading a tray when the lights went out, without warning. The lightning flashes had become less frequent, the thunder no longer rattled the glass in the windowpanes.

  "Yike!" Meghan said. "Greg? Can you bring the candle?"

  In the kitchen I gave Meghan the candle and followed her, carrying the tray with cider and half a loaf of fresh cinnamon bread and crock butter back to the den. I placed the tray on their big square coffee table, which is like a low altarpiece with a veneer of fossil stone, very handsome. We sat side by side on one of the loveseats, not touching but not far apart either: well within each other's private space. The kimono just covered Meghan's hips when she leaned forward, knees together, to slice bread and butter it generously, pour cider for us.

  One of the french doors was open a few inches to the cedar deck outside. Rain splashed down, dwindling slowly. The cool air flowing inside felt good, like the alcohol baths I'd had while in the hospital. The candle put out a tall, guttering flame that constantly altered the shapes of things, the depths and surfaces of our faces. Changing how we appeared to each other from moment to moment. We were Greg and Meghan, and we were not. Familiar strangers. My headache wasn't so bad anymore. The Percodans, as usual, had made me pleasantly tipsy. I had to do a mild balancing act to keep from swaying on the satiny loveseat. This amused me. The skin on my forearms prickled. My head felt more like a shimmering glass sphere than a bowling ball. Drained of all the impure, rankling blood that had been causing me such torment. But blood must pool somewhere: I had an erection that felt like an I-beam. This amused me too.

  Meghan sipped from her cider mug, winced slightly, put it down and got up from the sofa.

  "Needs a little something," she said vaguely, and she went quickly to the built-in cabinets on the fireplace wall. She bent over to open double doors. The hem of the kimono was right at the bottom of her taut cheek line when she did that. Of course she knew I was looking at her thrust-out ass. I was amused by Meghan too, as I would have been amused by a playful cat or a particularly cunning teddy bear in a toy store window.

  She found whatever it was she wanted in the liquor cabinet, came back and, still standing, poured an amount of black Jack into her cider that would take the rest of the night to burn out of her system. She looked at me, smiling as if she were doing something daring.

  "I thought that was Doyle's weakness," I said.

  Meghan sat down again, differently this time: facing me, legs tucked under her.

  "I don't like it straight up, but it goes good with cider, I found out."

  "So now you drink a lot of cider."

  Meghan laughed, but it wasn't her usual laugh. There was something rueful about her humor.

  "I had this dream the other night. I dreamed I was the one who took the pistol from the house. I was trying to kill a snake with it. Instead I shot Doyle in the foot. He was hopping around on the other foot, just hopping mad. I laughed and laughed. Oh, we were on the front lawn of the church and the minister was watching, so Doyle couldn't swear the way he usually does. He had to make up a lot of strange-sounding swear words."

  I thought about the Doyle I knew, hearty and obtuse, a man astride his native ignorance like a big, American horse.

  "What's Doyle doing to you?" I asked her.

  "Lately? Oh, hiding money when I can't even pay the phone bill, and spending it on women. Ignoring me."

  "In bed, you mean."

  Meghan turned her head aside, to the candle flame, which seemed attracted to her and trembled at a nearly horizontal angle. Her arched lips pressed tighter and higher, and her petite chin wrinkled like a baby's.

  "I think we're getting entirely too personal," she murmured. She raised the mug to her lips.

  "Bullshit, Meghan."

  Her eyes closed halfway. She opened and closed her lips on the rim of the white mug. Her face relaxed as her attention withdrew—from me, from the husband who infuriated and insulted her, from the house they couldn't afford to maintain, from the responsibilities of children and the chaotic, threatening environment of modem life that only occasionally rewarded the odd struggler with a bolt from the blue.

  "I'm thirty-six years old," Meghan said thoughtfully. "And I deserve something. I'm not sure what it is, but . . . something."

  "Cheap affairs are never worthwhile."

  "It doesn't have to be cheap . . . Greg."

  "Finish your cider," I told her.

  Her lips turned up in an ironic smile. "Those who deliberate on sin will be late getting in on all the fun." She drank the cider slowly and steadily, then threw the cup over her shoulder, not caring where it landed. "That was one of my daddy's sayings," she
added. "He was a sly dog." She gave me the merest hint of a sly look herself, then opened her kimono and crouched on the sofa, almost facedown in my lap. One hand finding, clutching me. I looked past her breasts at tan lines, the gleam of underbelly, pitch-dark pudenda.

  "You want to know . . . what it is about you, Greg? You have eyes that say to a woman, 'I'll fuck you better than any man has ever fucked you before.'"

  "That's the Jack Daniel's talking, Meggy."

  I put a hand on her small head. I have large hands. I tightened my grip on her head as she was rhythmically tightening and releasing my cock. She went after it as if she were strangling a chicken in a sack.

  "All the women know it. They talk about you. They all wonder if you—but you've never cheated on Caroline, have you? At least not around here."

  "I take my wedding vows seriously, Meghan."

  Gradually her hands stopped squeezing my cock. Her attention had had an unusual effect, in that I was detumescent without having achieved an orgasm. I lifted her by the short hair of her head, not hurting her very much.

  Meghan's face was inches from mine. She was perspiring. Her face was the face of a drowned thing, but she breathed quite heavily. Her kimono hung from her shoulders like untidy drapes. Her breathy heated aroma, laced with sweet apples and strong Tennessee sipping whiskey, with the sharp fatty tang of sweat and subtle but distinctive labial musk, had the spicy flavor of women in the tropics.

  "Caroline's given me everything I wanted," I said to Meghan. "The least I can do is not betray her."

  Meghan, as if collapsing, slipped part way off the sofa. One of her pale breasts came momentarily into the palm of my hand. It felt as small and light as a baby bird. A bare heel repeatedly kicked a leg of the coffee table, as if she were starting a tantrum from the ground up. Then she burst into tears.

  "You must think I'm awful, just awful!"

  "I don't."

  "Let go. Please."

  I let her go. She kneeled on the rug beside my knee, shoulders hunched, sobbing, a hand across her throat. She wouldn't look at me.

  Outside the rain had stopped. I stared at the now-steady candle flame above the altarlike table with its veneer from the shells of incredibly ancient sea life, and felt at ease. I had come to a decision, about Sharissa and Bobby. I knew what to do, so that my relationship with my daughter would in no way be jeopardized.

  "I never had a chance to meet a man like you," Meghan said bitterly. "I had to go and get pregnant, the second week I went out with Doyle. Two years of college left. You know what I should have done?"

  I looked at her for a time, and at the shadow gang of doubts and false persuasions surrounding her, and thought, as I have many times, that the only true success in life is contentment. It was uncharitable of me, but by then I was bored with Meghan.

  "Don't say it, Meggy. They're great kids, both of them. You'll work things out with Doyle. I think I'd better go home now."

  The lights came back on just as I finished speaking. Meghan flinched, then pulled her kimono together in her fist and stared at me, appalled. I had seen the same expression on the face of our Cocker Spaniel, named Corky, just after she ran into the street and was fatally injured by a car. Not so much pain as guilt: Well, I really messed up this time, didn't I?

  But Meghan called to me as I was leaving by the kitchen door.

  "Greg, take the rest of the cinnamon bread home with you! It'll just go to waste, there's more than I can eat."

  We never lock doors inside our house. I looked in on Sharissa, as I always did, before I went to my own bed. I thought I was being quiet. Or maybe she had a lot on her mind and hadn't fallen asleep.

  She raised up on an elbow and looked over her bare shoulder at me. Except in winter she wore only a tank top and underpants for sleeping.

  "Oh, hi. Mom home yet?"

  "No, she's not here. Are you okay?"

  "Sure. How about you?"

  "My head was bothering me earlier, I took a couple of Percodans."

  Sharissa yawned. "Couldn't find you when I came home."

  "I was at the Kindors'. Meggy made cinnamon bread. I brought some. Are you hungry?"

  "Huh-uh."

  "How was your evening?"

  "Okay. Nothing much doing."

  "Well, good night, honey."

  "Good night, Daddy." She stretched and started to lie down, turned her head again. "Daddy?"

  "What?"

  "Do you like Bobby?"

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "Sometimes I get the feeling you don't."

  "I suppose the more serious you two get, the more reservations I have."

  "Oh."

  "It's just the way fathers are."

  "Dad? Come here. I could use a hug from you."

  I sat on the edge of her bed, and she put her long arms around me.

  "I'm going to Vanderbilt," she said. "And Bobby's probably going to UGA, so—who knows what'll happen?"

  "But in the meantime," I said, "it's really serious." Sharissa looked me in the eye, and smiled.

  "I promise that we're not going to run off and get married or do something stupid."

  I touched my lips to the purplish-brown scar on her right shoulder, where a brown recluse spider had bitten her when she was nine. She'd been a very sick girl for a couple of weeks.

  "I know. I have a lot of confidence in you, baby." Sharissa kissed my cheek and touched the side of my head lightly, where the hair was growing back.

  "I love you. Wake me up for church?"

  "I sure will. Probably I'll let Mom sleep, so there'll just be the two of us."

  I left her then, as I had left her so many nights, curled up on her right side, head on her pillow, right hand cupping her forehead as if she were meditating, her outstretched left hand near the dilapidated penguin named Chilly-Willy, who had been her nighttime companion from the age of three. And all was as it had been, as I wished it to be, in our house; I felt upheld in my love for Sharissa, and my judgment of her, and content in my purposes.

  Two days after I returned to work, the madwoman came to town. It was unfortunate that this was also the day Caroline was able to steal enough time from Claude Gilley's campaign so the two of us could have an early dinner at the Ovenbird.

  I had first seen the woman earlier in the day, outside my store. I noticed the car she was driving before I paid any attention to her. It was a vintage Pontiac that had seen plenty of miles and a lot of bad road. Mud caked in the fender wells, cracks in most of the windows, a redneck's squalid car. I was on the floor trying to convince Carmack Knox to splurge and buy the big-screen projection model he'd been hankering after for months. He said he just might try Circuit City and see what they were getting for their TVs. The woman drove her Pontiac past my store at least four times, slowly enough to annoy the drivers behind her. She appeared to be almost too elderly to be driving at all. She obviously was looking for something, or someone, but she probably couldn't see inside the store: on sunny days I don't keep all of the overhead lights on, to pinch a dollar or two.

  I told Carmack to shop Circuit City, then I'd meet any price of theirs. I made a service call out on Balm of Gilead Road, and returned to town at one-thirty. The dirty red-and-white Pontiac Eight, one of those with the Big Chief ornament on the hood (which does go back a few decades), was now parked in one of the diagonals that surround the square.

  I didn't see the woman who owned the Pontiac on my way to the bank. She might have been eating her lunch with other retirees on one of the benches around the town gazebo. Or shopping at Goldblum's. Goldblum was slashing prices again at his old-fashioned clothing emporium, hoping to lure a few customers away from the mall. He's been on the square for fifty years and is always crying the blues. Fact is he owns half of the choicest commercial property in downtown Sky Valley.

  Mindy Lockard, one of the loan officers at Sky Valley National, came over to chat while I was in line to make a deposit.

  "Did she find you?"

  I was
wearing a Braves baseball cap and I still had a big caramel-colored elastic patch covering most of my forehead. The cap was new and making my stubbly scalp itch, so I took it off briefly.

  "Who, Mindy?"

  "The woman who was looking for you. She came in to cash a traveler's check. Royal Bank of Canada. She had your picture that she cut out of a newspaper. Your famous picture? Hey, your hair's really coming back fast. Without that part on the left, you look young enough to be one of those Aryan Brotherhood kids who hang around the mall wearing suspenders and paratrooper boots."

  "Wish I felt that young, Mindy."

  "Don't we all," Mindy said, looking wistful. She played tennis nearly every day to keep her figure. Her weight was down, but she had serious sun-wrinkles to go with her tan.

  "By the way," I said, "thanks for the flowers."

  "Our pleasure. You really scared us, Greg. You're one for the books, I guess."

  "I've heard of men who have survived worse. Did she tell you what her name was?"

  "Oh, the woman who—no, Sandy cashed the traveler's check for her. Sandy could tell you. But it looks as if she's on her break right now."

  "Well, whoever it is, I expect she knows where to find me. What does she look like?"

  "Old." Mindy shrugged, and elaborated. "White hair. I'd say seventy, or better."

  On my way back to the store I cut across the square.

  The Pontiac was still in the same slot. The red flag was up in the meter window. The owner would be getting a ticket as soon as Alma, our parking control officer, cruised by on her scooter.

  I looked at the license plate in passing. It was as dirty as the rest of the lower half of the Pontiac, but I could tell that the car was registered in British Columbia.

  I had the uneasy feeling I was being closely watched as I continued on to my store. But a lot of people had been staring at me since the shooting accident. I was still considered to be a freak of nature by some people in town, but what could I do? Go about my business and assume it would all be forgotten soon.

  They had a good crowd in the dining room of the Ovenbird by the time I got there, at a quarter to seven. Caroline was late, but we both had expected her to be. Our favorite table overlooks the walled garden, in an alcove away from the traffic patterns. I sat where the quarter-inch of stubble on my head wouldn't be conspicuous and had a Campari and soda.