Raven's Peak: Cold Hard Bitch

by Cole Savage

  “Much to your chagrin, I would Imagine, huh, Nicki?”

  “I was so tipsy on the Whiskey, I swear, Kyle. I don’t remember even being at that race.”

  “I believe you because when I tucked you in bed that night, you called me Karen, right after I kissed you on the lips.”

  Nicki laughed and looked at Kyle, his eyes firmly on the road.

  “Nicki, if it was up to me I’d a put that hillbilly in a wood chipper and you’d probably be hitchin’ a ride home, because I remember clearly how upset you were at each of those Honky-tonks after I took those guys off the shelf.”

  “You’re right. Maybe I’ve just gotten a little thin-skinned over the years. I should be used to sexual advances from degenerates by now.”

  Kyle guffawed.

  “The Tipsy Cow. Isn’t that where you fought that Yankee whose friends called him a thinking man’s fighter. The one that everyone warned you about. Told you not to mess with him because he won some Golden Gloves fight against a negro the size of a Cadillac. Beat the negro so bad it knocked his color off, is what your friend Carter said?”

  Kyle looked at Nicki, who was laughing, looking stunning, her dark hair blowing out the passenger side window, and their eyes met for a moment.

  “Nicki, the years have been good to you. I’m having a hard time taking my eyes off you…But, yeah, I remember the Yank.”

  “What was it that Carter told that Yankee’s friends when they asked him how you dropped the hammer on him so fast? Do you remember?”

  No, I was mad at you because you wore those mini-shorts and I couldn’t handle those Yanks watching you like you were on the dessert menu.”

  “Are you mad that I wore these today?” she said pinching her shorts at the cuff.

  “I make no territorial claims on your ass, Nicki. I have my gentlemanly dignity to maintain, and as such, you are free to roam dressed as you please. I lost that right ten years ago. But if you dress like that again, I’m not taking you to anymore honky-tonks, because, baby girl, your ass is a tornado magnet everywhere we go, that stirs feelings in places I’m ashamed to talk about.”

  Nicki didn’t play the role of a tease like an experienced practitioner, so anxious to move on, she said, “It was something like: hey Yanks, do you”-

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember. When that Peter built mountain of a man asked Carter how I scrambled his eggs so easily, Carter told him, while your buddy was thinking about it, Kyle was bouncing his knuckles off his teeth. Nicki laughed, and Kyle chuckled.

  To tease, Nicki’s voice changed to baritone, and she said, “I took the wicked man into the woods at night, and by morning, had relieved him of the evil spirits blocking the light from his eyes.”

  Kyle looked at her and laughed.

  “Hey, if my recollection serves me right, you always wanted to shove a hand-grenade up a Yankees ass and yell Fire in the hole, to see if he would bleed blue. Is that still in your bucket list, because I still have a few hand-grenades at home?”

  “That’s hilarious, Kyle. I mean the fact that you can laugh about something like that without wanting to pull the pin yourself… Is this a sign of growth? You know, you were not a man born and burdened with gentility. I can’t recollect if I even know the man that’s sitting next to me. Imagine that, America, Kyle showed restraint in the face of adversity. There is hope for you after all.”

  “I’d be more than happy to go back there and take him off the board, if’n the Misses wishes? But to be perfectly honest, my conscience has been bothering me. The men I’ve scrapped with still visit my bedside, and they’re still pissed off.

  “It’s so strange listening to you without that accent that was so prevalent in high school. Whenever you open your mouth, I do a double take to see who I’m talking to.”

  “There’s a few people at West Virginia University who wanted to make fun of my accent.”

  “Did they see your size as an impediment?”

  “Something like that. But at the firehouse there was no holds barred. That’s the reason I wanted to change. I got tired of hearing Toby Keith parodies from the guys whenever I talked over the radio. In fact, dispatch took a few liberties early on, at the expense of my accent and I wanted to reach through the radio and put thumbtacks in their heads.”

  “Turn here, Kyle,” she said pointing left. “Remember, Kyle, in Franklin County when approaching a four-way stop, the vehicle with the biggest tires has the right-of-way, and the median is not a passing lane, like you thought all through high school… Oh, and when you break down, which is a past-time around these parts, never tow a vehicle using panty hose and duct tape, something Catfish Crowder calls religion.”

  “It’s amazing how much you remember, Nicki, but has it really been that long that I can’t remember where to turn.”

  “No. State Road twenty is new. This used to be forest before they clear cut it for wood.” Kyle made a left-hand turn and followed a newly paved two-lane into Franklin. Kyle rubber-necked between the road, that seemed like it was being swallowed by pines, and Nicki. Kyle swerved from his lane, looking at Nicki then back to the road. The brown vest covering her boobs, her tanned legs under her butt, her left arm on top of the badly torn bench seat, repeatedly hooking her loose hair behind her ear as the wind took liberties with it, was overloading the circuitry in his pants.

  “After we find the boys, I want you to share some of your firehouse tales. Can you imagine my surprise when I found out you were a fireman?”

  “It’s really simple, Nicki. Imagine my life before the fire department. Things I did at places like The Tipsy Cow, and add the element of fire.”

  “Do tell? Are you telling me that you got in fights on the job?”

  “More than once, but usually with women… I did throw a drunk out a window, into an airbag once. I was lucky though, because he didn’t remember anything the next day.”

  Nicki couldn’t take her eyes off Kyle, and for a moment she seemed pensive.

  “You okay, Nicki,” Kyle said looking at her.

  “I’m good. I’m still trying to figure out who you are, because honestly, Kyle, I was so angry back there for all the things that mud dog said to me, I wanted you to stuff him and use him as a punching bag or a piñata,” she said. “You know, Kyle, for the first time in my life I understand the violence that lives inside you and always will.”

  “I can turn around if you wish, Princess?” Kyle said almost yelling. The rumble of the engine and the wind passing through the cab felt like they were talking during a category one Hurricane.

  “Nah, I’m good.” Watching him hold his crotch, so he wouldn’t drop his bladder, and seeing the fear in his eyes was enough. Besides we have to get to Franklin. You promised to talk to Karen about the mortgage while I run down to City Hall and talk to the sheriff about the boys.”

  “You’re really gonna make me go, aren’t you?”

  “I know Momma represents a new and higher order of monster, but she’s all talk, Kyle. She’s too old to howl, and much too old to bite. Besides, I’ve never seen her hurt anyone other than Trent, and he was weak.

  “Let’s hope you’re not searching for three people in an hour, Nicki.”

  “I’ll know where to find your corpse if you disappear, Kyle. Momma can’t walk fifty feet without stopping to catch her breath.”

  “I got an idea. I’ll hold her down while you pour cement down her throat.”

  Nicki laughed. “Making her disappear isn’t going to free us of her ghost. We have to burn her in an incinerator, it’s the only way she won’t come back to haunt us…But if it was me, I’d go there with a machete and shield in my hands.”

  Kyle looked at her, Nicki staring at the road smiling.

  “It’s good to see you sitting there again, Nicki, even if it’s for a few days. Whenever you look at me, you fill a void that’s been growing for ten years.”

  “It feels good to be here, too, Kyle.

  “I’m not groveling, Nicki, but I also learned a l
ot in the last ten years. And one of the things I learned was that you only get one chance, one chance in a million to find the one that knows you best, that can love you like no other, and I’m truly sorry for the pain I caused you.”

  For a moment it was like Nicki hadn’t heard the words, sitting stoically, not looking at the road but looking through it, then a single tear ran down her right cheek—she left it untouched.

  Two miles passed and they looked at each other smiling, shedding any pretense of laughter, and Kyle couldn’t help looking at her, like a driver looking at an unsecure load in the bed of the truck—back and forth. Looking ahead at the road, Nicki smiled. He glanced at her baseball cap, a distant memory from high school. Nicki had a baseball cap for every day of the week—her trademark back when Kyle was still the specter of her dreams. Kyle reminded himself that no baseball cap had the right to look that good sitting on top of someone’s head. His cheeks burned, his eyes stung, glancing at a hint of yellow in the shadow between her legs, underneath the frayed edged Daisy Dukes she was crushing, revealing much more than a warm-blooded male could conceptualize, and for the first time in Kyle’s life, his grim reality came to the forefront— the gravity, the depth of what he’d lost had finally registered in his mind as a complete and total cataclysm. He looted glances from her, eyes like a flickering flame on a candlestick, when he could, meeting her green eyes at drift-less intervals; still driving south on Highway 22.

  “Kyle, if you could go back and pick any day, which day would you redo, which day was the most memorable?” Driving with his elbow on the door, Kyle looked at her.

  “Shit, Nicki, that question sounds like a trap.”

  “There’s no ulterior motive, Kyle. I’ve spent ten years replaying our life and I always wondered what day meant the most to you.”

  “Nicki, I hope there’s no wrong answer here, but that’s an easy one— at least for me.”

  Nicki, surprised by his response, pulled her loose bangs behind her ear and locked her gaze on Kyle’s profile, Kyle looking down the road.

  “Was it the day of our honeymoon, in that roach hotel in Alexandria where the water coming out of the faucet was so rusty, you called it liquid steel?”

  Kyle chuckled. “You know, Nicki, I’ve thought about many of our days together, but there’s only one day that I relived every day for six months after you left, and still, to this day, has not faded from my memory…That’s why I started writing, a way to exorcise the memory of that day.

  “Does this particular day have anything to do with sex?”

  He looked at her, a suggestion of humor on his face.

  “Do you remember in the fall of 2002, it was a Saturday, I came home from the mine early, we grabbed some clothes and I took you to the Wynoochee river, at Three Forks, for the weekend?”

  “How could I forget,” she said.

  “That Sunday, that’s the day in my head that will live in infamy.”

  “That’s shocking, Kyle,” Nicki said leaning forward to hear better. “Why, Kyle, why that day? That was an awful day.”

  “There’s that look, Nicki, the same cloudy look you give me before the bottom falls out.”

  “Kyle, that Sunday was our last day together. It was a horrible day.”

  “You asked me what day I think about the most… That’s the day. Sunday, September 24, 2002.”

  “Kyle, we barely spoke that day. Tell me why… Tell me why that damned day meant so much to you…I hated that day.”

  “Nicki, that’s the day you became a Unicorn…You didn’t tell me it had to be a good day, you asked me what my most memorable day was.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she said leaning forward, both hands on the seat.

  “Relax and let me speak, Nicki. Sit back and I’ll explain.” Nicki leaned against the door and crossed her arms, looking at Kyle, forcing herself to be silent.

  Looking straight ahead, Kyle said, “I know you knew, Nicki. I knew Saturday night that you knew about Emmylou, or I suspected you did, but you didn’t say anything. You wanted me to tell you and I didn’t. Sunday morning you were there, but you weren’t. With you lying next to me under the stars, I didn’t sleep that night because I was looking for the words to tell you about Emmylou. The next morning, when I was fishing, you were sitting by the edge of the river in front of the fire sipping hot chocolate. You were wearing my wool turtleneck and nothing else. You had nothing underneath and your holy-shit body was driving me mad. You were hugging your knees with an empty look in your eyes. I had never seen you look so beautiful, yet so distant. It was fitting, par for the course, that until that day, I didn’t realize how beautiful you were inside and out. I was fishing, but my mind was spinning, I don’t even think I had a lure on my hook, still trying to figure out if you found out about Emmy—and how.

  Nicki looked away, biting her lips. “You called me a Unicorn, Kyle. What do you mean? And please, I really don’t want to relive that day.”

  “You asked me, sweetheart.”

  “Why a Unicorn, Kyle?”

  Beyond the screening trees, a truck droned past heading East.

  “The next day, when you left, I knew you weren’t coming back. That’s the moment you became my Unicorn. The fabled Unicorn. A mystical, even ephemeral creature, known only to exist in the hearts of men.

  “I’m failing to make the connection, Kyle.”

  “Nicki, Unicorns are fabled creatures—they don’t exist. That evening, the night before you left, when I was fishing again, your eyes were downcast and I still had hope because from your facial expression and lack of eye contact, I knew you were still thinking about it, waiting for me to say something—anything. But an hour before darkness, the sun was setting big and shiny, and round, it was so beautiful over the river that silver poured from the water. I looked at my line flicking in the dying sun, you stared at me with that quicksilver smile and I saw the golden sunset in your eyes, but the light in your eyes was also dying. I looked at your face and all the love it had to offer, all the life still in it—no fear, no anger, just regret—no sign on your face of all the sorry things I made you feel in our short marriage. All the day’s vicissitudes had resolved into a single wish, and that was to talk to you. To tell you, because even I knew at that moment, as I watched you look at me, that my philandering days were over, because suddenly, you were all that mattered to me, but you had already checked out.”

  “Stop, Kyle. Did you just use the word vicissitude? The Kyle I knew in high school was still struggling to spell one syllable words like DOG and CAT.”

  “I know you already know this, but during the few hours that I wasn’t crying, waiting for you to come back, I managed to earn a Bachelors in English, and of all things, a Minor in Creative Writing—I’m far from the slow-witted Hee-Haw you remember.”

  “Cry—hah! The last time I saw you cry was when Skeeter left your favorite shirt at Bear-hollow. You drove two hours to get it back, and when you got there the swelling river had claimed it as a sacrificial Lamb—thank God, that shirt was hideous.”

  “Hey, sweetheart, I was in the middle of a cathartic moment when you rudely interrupted,” Kyle said, a statement brimming with sarcasm. “You see, Nicki, I learned the word cathartic in college, too.”

  “I’m deeply impressed, Kyle. But go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt your well thought out mea culpa.”

  “Say, what?”

  “Your mea culpa. What, you don’t speak Latin?”

  Kyle gave her a confused look.

  “Your confession, Kyle. Mea culpa is an admission of guilt.”

  “You speak Latin, Nicki?”

  “No, you Blockhead. I only know a few words in Latin that Maylene taught me.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, where was I?”

  “You were saying that your philandering days were over.” Kyle gave her an empty look, then said, “Oh, yeah…So after seeing you by the river that night, it was like something came over me and I knew for certain that you were a
gift from the Gods, and I Knew for certain that I would never cheat on you again, and I wanted to tell you about the other girls, but I didn’t, and the rest of the night seemed to hang suspended, like I was waiting for the inevitable to happen, but the inevitable had already come to pass, I just didn’t realize it until the next day when you were gone. That night, when you stared at me from the edge of the river, smiling, hiding that painful truth, safeguarding your emotions, me too stupid to understand what I had put you through, I knew I had already lost you—that your decision was already made. Nicki, I knew. I knew that was going to be our last day together. I knew you had already made the decision to leave—and I knew, no matter what I said, you had become another one of my casualties—my Unicorn— that you were no longer part of me, that I had become a miasma of nauseating stench for you… If only I had come clean, Nicki. That’s what I thought for years after. I convinced myself that if I had come clean that night, you would have stayed.” Kyle looked at her. “Nicki, look at me.” She crossed her arms again and shifted her gaze to him, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “That was the moment I came to see the hollowness of my life. The moment I saw the tears swimming in your eyes that night, I was astonished because that was the first time I knew how much I really loved you. Everything inside me, from my chest on down, felt loose and in motion. My stomach boiled, I felt dirty and helpless to change our destiny. You didn’t touch me that weekend and I understood why. The coward in me had come to the forefront. That day my heart stopped beating because I had come to realize that you were the only person in the world that could soothe me, that in some weird way, the universe had conspired for us to be together, and I blew it, and ten years later, today, in some measure, I can feel the magnetic pull of the Earth working relentlessly to keep us apart.”

  “Kyle,” Nicki said, the word droning slowly from her mouth.

  “I’m almost done,” he said, about a lecture that had its own velocity. “I didn’t bother you when you were dropping guilt bombs on me, so let me talk…That day was the beginning of the end for me, and I felt helpless to stop the plunge. When I saw you sitting by the river, half naked, I didn’t think about sex, I looked at you in my sweater and I knew I would never be able to feel the softness of your skin, smell your scent, and watch the warm movement of your breath, and it was killing me. You instantly became the fabled Unicorn that only existed in my heart because for all intents and purposes, you were no longer real, you were a specter that would, from that moment on, exist only in my head. And the whole time we were there you said nothing about Emmylou because you wanted it to come from me.” Kyle paused to think.