Every Shallow Cut

by Tom Piccirilli

  Church began to whine. I looked down through the glass-top case. I pointed at one of the items.

  The owner nodded.

  “Good eye,” he said.

  I’d done a lot of research for a novel of mine entitled The Bone Palace. I’d printed out pages of material and studied up.

  He unlocked the case and brought out the Smith & Wesson .38. I handed him back most of the money he’d just paid me. He set the .38 in my hand. I’d never held a gun before. I knew better than to dry fire it. I snapped it open, cocked the hammer, checked the line of sight. I eased the hammer back down. I’d done my homework.

  He said, “I’ll give you the cleaning equipment for free.”

  “Throw in a box of ammo too,” I told him. “And a speed loader.”

  The voice still didn’t sound like mine, but I knew I was going to have to start recognizing it from now on.

  His face registered some surprise. “Speed loaders are illegal.”

  “I know, but you’ve got them. I want one. Get it.”

  His lips parted and he started to argue, but I flared at him and he shut his mouth. He handed me some paperwork to fill out. I shoved it aside. He stared down at it and took a breath. I took one too. It went on like that for a dozen heartbeats or so. Then he got the ammo and the loader and slapped them on the counter in front of me. I filled my pockets. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. My eyes were so black they looked like they’d been gouged out with an ice pick.

  With the Rockies in my rearview I drove east across Denver and pulled into the drive-through of a fast food joint. I ordered four burgers and fries and a large drink. It’s what I used to have for lunch every day when I was busy writing. No wonder I’d been so much fatter and softer and sleepy. No wonder my wife would have to climb up on top of me during sex because she didn’t want my weight bearing down on her. No wonder the minimum wage kids would practically laugh in my face whenever they saw my fat ass pull up again.

  I rolled down the driver’s window and Churc-hill crawled over my lap and balanced himself against the driver’s door with his chin jutting. When we got up to the cashier she was afraid to take my money. Church looked that hungry. I asked her for a cup of ice. She said it would cost an extra dollar.

  “But I don’t want another soda,” I told her, “I just want some ice.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That’s what it costs.”

  “But it’s just ice.”

  “That’s what it costs.”

  My busted nose was throbbing badly. My eyes had started to get puffy and were just going to get worse until I couldn’t drive. I had to get the swelling down.

  “Do you have any aspirin in there?”

  “Aspirin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We don’t sell that.”

  “I know you don’t sell that, I just wondered if you had any. For the employees maybe. In the first-aid kit.”

  “You’re not an employee,” she said. It wasn’t snark, she was actually just reminding me.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “We don’t have a first-aid kit. I have some in my purse, if you want them.”

  “Please, that would be great.”

  She vanished from the window for a moment and then returned. “I can’t find them.”

  I smiled pleasantly at her. “Fine.”

  I smiled pleasantly at everyone. I smiled pleasantly at the bank guy who stuck the foreclosure sign on my front door. I smiled pleasantly when Church was a puppy and caught parvo and the vet told me to have him put down. I smiled pleasantly at my editor when the publisher remaindered two thousand copies of my last novel and I found them stacked in the thrift store with pink stickers, going for a quarter each, and still not selling.

  After I picked up the food, I parked, fed Church three burgers, and ate the rest myself. He contentedly burped, passed gas, then circled the back seat and dug at the comforter until he laid down with a huff of air. He started to snore immediately.

  I adjusted my seat back, wrapped the ice up in a couple of napkins, laid it on my face, and let myself drift to the music on an oldies station. I grew a little nostalgic while I hummed along. I sounded almost happy.

  After an hour the ice had melted and the swelling had gone down. I got back on the road and floored it towards New York.

  I’d come out to Colorado to be with my wife. We met on the Internet in a singles cafe. I really was that guy, she really was that girl. We met face to face in Vegas a few months later and started a long-distance relationship. I’d fly into Denver a couple of times a year and she’d come out to New York to visit me. She hated the bustle and action of Manhattan and spent most of her visits hiding in my apartment with the windows shut, tossing potpourri around to kill the smell of the city. Eventually came the point when one of us had to make a move or we’d have to split. I could do my job anywhere so I went to her.

  The first few years were rough but righteous. I was slowly chipping out my career in the bedrock of publishing. I was the darling of the awards committees and won some pretty, shiny, tiny statues. I hoped the wins would translate into book sales. They didn’t. The reviews got better but my advances got smaller. The bills stacked up. We were hurting financially but had reached a delayed yet progressive spiral of debt by borrowing from one credit company to pay the next, transferring the balance from the second card to pay down the first. I knew it would eventually lead us to hit the wall hard, but I hadn’t expected the wall to rise up so soon or climb so high.

  My wife refused to acknowledge the truth and continued buying whatever she wanted so long as it was on sale. Purchasing three pairs of shoes that had been marked down 30% was her way of helping out the situation. The fact that they’d originally cost $250 each didn’t factor into the formula. Her math skills had always been weak.

  I still held out hope though. I was as naive in my own way as she was in hers. I kept waiting for the break. The crossover. The big push. The major hit. You needed an insane amount of overconfidence to make it in the art world, but it usually cost you in other ways. I could fore-go health insurance because I saw myself one day teaching at an Ivy League school and passing on my fount of knowledge. I didn’t need a European vacation because we’d eventually own a villa on the coast of France like every other hotshot bestseller. Whatever was missing today would be made up for later. I held onto the chance like a retarded kid unwilling to give up a broken toy.

  The grey in my beard didn’t wake me up to reality, but the grey pubes started to spook me a touch.

  Then she got pregnant. My unsophisticated dreams managed to press back the edges of a clinical depression. Church sensed the difference and started prancing around the house like a happy uncle ready to pass out cigars in the waiting room.

  The word father took on a whole new meaning. It stopped being about my old man and started being about me. I saw a little girl in a pink bed holding her arms up and calling for “Daddy” after a bad dream. I saw myself sitting in my library recliner with the kid on my lap, reading her Through the Looking Glass.

  My wife wasn’t as certain about being a mother, but she was willing to ride it out until the serious pain hit and she began to spot. The doctor told her to stay in bed for the next twelve weeks. My wife liked to go out dancing, if not with me than with her friends. Some of the friends were male. I wasn’t jealous, or at least not as jealous as I should’ve been. I stewed behind my obesity and ate even more. I sometimes stopped off at the ice cream shop across the street from the club where she liked to go on Friday nights. Churchill was especially fond of butter pecan.

  She talked abortion. I stayed up night after night sweating it out. I wanted kids. I didn’t want to be alone with my wife for the rest of my life. I knew we were falling apart even then. I didn’t just want glue to hold us together. I wanted someone who needed me, who would help me to fulfill the myth of myself. I thought I could wake up to cries in the middle of the night almost happily. I would pick up my little girl and shush
her with my lips to her chubby cheek and press my forehead to hers and will all my love into her life. She would quiet and coo and giggle, and I’d put her back on her pink pillows and stare at her for another hour in the dim grey light of the wolf’s hour.

  But my anxiety medication didn’t always help out. My mind raced and my teeth buzzed. The money wasn’t there. The marriage was on the skids. I’d overshot being a father by years. I was old and fat. I needed silence when I wrote. I wasn’t going to suddenly get strong and pure this late in life. I was greedy. I didn’t want upset, I’d already had enough of that. How was I going to have a kid when I had no benefits? How was I going to pay off the hospital, the babysitters, the pre-K, the clothes, the food, the college tuition? I heard the baby screeching and wailing and it wouldn’t stop and I was too lazy to get out of bed on my darkest days when the antidepressants weren’t working.

  She made an appointment. That morning, I followed along after her in a state of trauma. I felt the same way I had while watching my mother’s heart monitor continuously slow throughout the course of her last night, stalling, redlining as her breaths came in agonized gasps, and I found myself halfway between hoping it would end and wanting to scream out, “Mommy.” I trotted after my wife to the car and drove to Planned Parenthood.

  Protesters walked their picket line in the freezing morning air, calling for me not to murder my own child, saying my baby wanted to live, please give it a chance at life.

  Christ, if only I’d had a gun on me then. I would have killed every one of those fuckers. I would have used the speed loader until my flesh seared and the shells were too hot to handle. The cops would have potshot and tasered and billy clubbed me before dragging me away in cuffs while I shrieked. I wouldn’t have been able to stand trial. They would have put me in a rubber room. I would have butted my head against the soft walls in a straitjacket, rocking like a newborn myself. Christ fuckall, if only.

  I sat in the waiting room with young men who looked expectantly relieved. Some of them were boyfriends, some only one-night stands. Some might’ve been husbands who, like me, thought about bills instead of baby booties.

  At that moment I realized, This is the thing I will never be forgiven for. This is what is now being written in the great Book of Life by the weeping saints and martyrs. This is the moment God will point to with his burning hand at the hour of my death. This is my chance to have and love my own child and I am freely passing it by. I am committing my baby to oblivion because I’m too fat and lazy and intellectual to work a factory job where I can receive insurance. I am consigning my soul to hell because my taxes are too high. I am sacrificing myself and my blood on the ancient stone altar of mediocrity and the monthly terror of my mortgage.

  A nurse appeared and told me it was all over. And it was.

  I hadn’t mapped out my return home. I didn’t want to shoot back in a straight line. I wanted to do whatever I could to forestall the next step along my journey of the inevitable. I crossed into Kansas and saw flat empty farmland from the flat empty highway. I spotted an exit that promised gas and food and wound up driving through a dead town that looked like the plague had hit it.

  I got back on the highway and passed two other exits before getting off and finding the same thing. Main Street was lined by barren stores with For Rent signs in the windows. Abandoned houses on the outskirts had foreclosure signs slapped on the doors. The word itself made me tighten my fists on the steering wheel. Church glanced up at me nervously. I wheeled past collapsed barns and stone wall-bordered weed-choked fields.

  We were looking at the days of the dust bowl gangsters again. When your average citizen was losing everything, they were forced into desperate, mad actions. Bank robbery attempts were at a thirty-year high. A husband and wife team had tried to take down my local bank and been wiped out by six cops in the parking lot, a couple thousand bucks in hand.

  The media replayed the surveillance footage for weeks. Just before they’d been cut down the couple wore expressions that said they wanted to take the whole thing back if only anyone would grant them a do-over. My old man wore the same expression on his deathbed. I looked in the rearview and thought I was getting there fast.

  I did what I usually did. I wrote in my head. The words drifted in and out, the music of the language singing in my ear. I edited as I went. I had visions of what should be happening. There ought to be a hot teenage girl hitchhiking along the side of the road. She would bring me wild pain and nights of burning glory and ultimate redemption.

  She would mark me with her teeth and I would battle the demons from her past. Maybe a dirty cop who was hounding her just to squeeze information out of her about her drug lord ex-boyfriend. I’d have to be smarter than everybody, sharp enough to take care of the cop, the boyfriend’s killer thugs, the boyfriend who raised piranha, kept a stable of whores, and who’d act friendly to me at first before pulling out a straight razor. He’d slash open one side of my face and maybe take an eye, but I’d overcome because I was pure of soul. The hitchhiking honey with the breeze in her hair and the gams that didn’t quit would love my scarred and brutalized face anyway.

  I didn’t have much but I still had the urge to write. The stories went on and on. I wondered if that would ultimately save me or only doom me further. Was I finally going to write my masterpiece or just hack out an angry vapid potboiler because friends of mine had made money writing angry vapid potboilers?

  I checked off the topics and narrative elements that were hot in publishing right now. Vampire tween romances: When you got down to it that was pretty fucking creepy, really. Centuries-old teenage vampire males sexing up sixteen-year-old sophomore human chippie gals. Then there were the Christian metaphors couched in heart-tugger tales about women having to raise the spoiled children of their condemned sisters about to get the chair on death row. What else, what else. Zombie mashups with classics of literature. Nobody took them seriously, not even the millions of people who bought them.

  The hit authors showed up on daytime talk shows explaining how their characters had whispered in their ears and the books had written themselves. One bestseller called it a divine cathartic expulsion. She claimed God had moved through her body and into her fingers and had tapped out her novel about a werewolf waitress who falls in love with the sous-chef. Her next book was about an alien who comes to earth to coach a pee-wee football league and gives up his homeworld to court a divorcee with a chip on her shoulder. The audience went wild. The host had tears in her eyes.

  Maybe God should stay out of the Sunday literary supplements. Maybe he ought to stay up there on the cross and keep doing his own thing.

  I didn’t have a laptop anymore but I’d brought along a bunch of legal pads and pencils. In truck stops I drank coffee for hours while I filled page after page with a furious angular script I had trouble reading. I slept at the rest stops with Churchill on top of my chest. I sometimes woke up with Church shivering, and I knew I’d been talking or crying in my sleep. He picked up on my mood and shook and groaned. It sometimes took me half an hour to get him calm again.

  I’d get behind the wheel once more and drive the black roads leading me back into the shadows of my own past. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I knew it was going to all be another big mistake in a lifetime of gaffes.

  I drove with one hand in my pocket. I’d fondle the unloaded gun and think about going on a rampage of some sort. But I couldn’t figure out what kind. Who would I take hostage, what would my demands be? How much money would be enough? Where would I want them to fly the jet? Which of the quirky bank patrons and employees was I going to let go first? The elderly old man with the heart trouble or the pregnant Korean lady? What kind of food would I ask for while the negotiations were going on? I hadn’t had New York pizza in ten years. I imagined the SWAT guy pretending to be a pizza delivery kid, a stack of pepperoni pies in his arms, the top box empty except for a semi-automatic. He’d dump the boxes and point the weapon and scream for me to put my hands up.


  And all I would be able to do was look at the wasted pepperoni pies on the floor, my mouth watering.

  The thunderstorms started to hit in Missouri but I bulled my way through hour after hour while the rain smashed down. Even with my wipers on extra high they could barely keep up with the torrent. Visibility was practically nil. Flares lined the highways where fatal pileups had occurred. The state patrol beckoned and diverted traffic through the hills and hollers of Appalachia. Cinder block houses and hammered tin roof trailers dotted the grubby landscape. They still let their kids play barefoot in the flooded meadows and thickets. Every fourth shotgun shack for a hundred muddy miles had an underage girl with long wet hair and a bare midriff on the porch, waving a highball glass at me.

  Maybe I was passing up salvation. Maybe I needed to pull over and find someone nearly as bad off as I was. The girl wouldn’t know the truth. She’d be a sloppy but fun lay. We’d get wasted on moonshine with too much radiator fluid in it. She’d be secretly pleased with my Yankee accent. She’d think I was the one who would get her out of this town and take her someplace else where she could shine in the bright lights, be a model or actress on Broadway. Her father would chase me with a ten-gauge and I wouldn’t run all that fast to get away from him. They shot horses, put rabid dogs down, drowned starving cats, butchered hogs. This might be the place to get done right.

  On the wrong side of a washed-out bridge somewhere in southern Illinois I was forced to hole up in a place called the Sweet Pea Motel. Church and I laid together on the double bed and watched cable and ate from the candy machine. There was a diner next door that charged extra for delivery in the storm. We had fried chicken and BLTs and fresh apple pie. The delivery kid was drenched head to foot but looked happy to be getting the extra buck per order.

  The storm continued but Church and I didn’t mind. We were living better than we had in weeks. Z’s cash came in handy. I was stupid not to have cleaned out the pockets of the two other punks.