Roadman

by Scott Zarcinas

  Looking for the key, he thought, and then suddenly remembered. Shit! I left it in the drawer tonight! Oh, fuck, you stupid drunken idiot!

  There was no choice. He had to confront the intruder, now, without his rifle or his hunting knife. They had left him no option.

  Kill or be killed, Maxy boy.

  His heart pounding, he sprung up and yanked open the door, hoping like hell it would all be over in an instant. He burst into the shed, ready to strangle the crap out of the intruder.

  The intruder obviously hadn’t expected to be caught, and screamed, a high pitch womanly scream, dropping the torch and smashing the bulb on the floor. The blackness was instant, and even though he could no longer see, he was under no illusions as to who was poking around in his shed.

  “What are you doin’?” he said, catching himself and thanking the God he didn’t believe in he hadn’t done anything to hurt her.

  “Max, your frightened the living daylights out of me,” Lorraine said, clutching the locket dangling between the V of her nightie.

  “I thought you were an intruder.”

  She dropped her hands to her side. One, he could just make out, was still clenched. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think…”

  Max wasn’t impressed with her evasiveness, so he asked her again, “What are you doin’ in here?”

  “Just having a look, darling,” she said. “Nothing else, believe me.”

  “There’s noth’n here,” he said.

  “Don’t get upset. Just curious. I want to know everything about you,” she said and made to leave, squeezing past him to get to the door.

  Before she could leave, Max grabbed her wrist and pried open her hand, feeling around for what he knew she had found in the bench drawer. “This is not yours,” he said, retrieving the key to the metal cabinet.

  “Are you sure you want me here?” she asked.

  His vision had now adjusted fully to the darkness and he could see the outline of her face looking up at him, even the glint of defiance in her eyes. He hesitated, then said, “’Course.”

  She unclasped his hand from her wrist, and said, “Then I don’t want us to have any secrets.”

  She went back to the house leaving Max to himself in the dark shed.

  Max pocketed the cabinet key and reached for the near empty bottle of Jack Daniels he had left on the bench top before he’d gone to bed. The bottle was open, its cap somewhere on the floor where he’d dropped it earlier that night and hadn’t bothered picking up. He took a long swig and was about to exit the shed when he felt a chill run up his spine.

  “You gotta kill her before she takes over your life,” Frank said.

  Max spun around. Even in the dark he could still make out the bastard’s ghostly outline. He was grinning. “Go fuck yourself,” Max said.

  “You’re a fool. Ze bitch vill destroy you,” Frank said, sneering. “Get rid of her before she finds out who you really are.”

  “You’re not having her!”

  Frank laughed. Raspy and wheezy, he lifted his Magic Pudding cigarette to his lips and took a drag. “She’s castrating you,” he said after a moment.

  Max considered throwing the bottle of Jack Daniels at the old bastard to shut the fucker up, but decided he wasn’t going to waste good whisky on the prick and took another swig instead. He could feel the liquor burn all the way down his gullet and settle in his guts. The fumes even stung his nostrils, but the burning helped to settle his thoughts. No way was he going to let the German cunt get the better of him.

  “I’m in charge, not you!” he said.

  Frank sneered, took another drag on his cigarette, and casually leaned on the metal cabinet. “You might not kill ze slut now, but sooner or later…”

  Max clenched his fist. “Never!”

  “She’ll betray ya, you know she vill.”

  Max took another long swig of whisky, emptying what was left, his head pounding, the veins at the side of his temples throbbing, his eyeballs actually aching with anger and fury, as if red hot needles were being shoved into them.

  “SHE LOVES ME!” he roared, and hurled the empty bottle of Jack Daniels at his father.

  The old bastard threw back his bald head and laughed, fading into the darkness. The bottle passed through him and clattered into the metal cabinet, denting the door and glancing to the floor just metres away where, surprisingly, it didn’t shatter, just clanged and bounced a couple of times before coming to a slow spinning halt. Max stared at the bottle in disbelief. It was pointing straight at him, like in a game of Spin the Bottle he used to play at lunchtime with some of the local sluts at Serena High. Only this time he wasn’t going to kiss the girl and maybe get a quick grope of her tits while he was doing it. This time the bottle was an omen, and he knew what it was telling him.

  This time he was staring down the glass barrel of a gun.

  Max stormed across the lawn back to the kitchen through the sliding doors, just as Lorraine was entering from the corridor and switching the light on.

  “Max, what’s wrong?” she said, pale and anxious. “I heard shouting and banging.”

  Max paused, gritting his teeth, hating himself for what he was about to say. “You gotta go Lorraine,” he said, finally.

  Lorraine’s eyelids blinked wide and her head jerked back a fraction, as if he had just slapped her across the face. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You have to forget about me.”

  Lorraine’s hand went to the locket around her neck. “Are… are you all right?”

  Max could see the outline of her hips and breasts through the flimsy nighty she was wearing and wondered if this was the last time he would ever see such a magnificent sight. He could feel himself wavering, telling himself he didn’t really need to do this, that she’d be fine, that they’d be fine. That nothing was going to stand in the way of their love. They’d go and see if the old cottage was still for sale and make an offer straight away if it was available. They’d move in and do all the renovations they’d planned. They’d live out their life in happy retirement and forget about all this shit they’d left behind.

  But he knew it was just a dream. Just a fuck’n fairy tale, like her Xanadu, and even if fairy tales did come true they certainly didn’t work out for the likes of the Big Bad Wolf. Nah, he had to put a stop to all this before things got really out of hand. Before Lorraine got hurt.

  He stepped forward and slapped the vase of daffodils off the kitchen table. It crashed into the side wall and smashed to the floor. Still clutching the locket between her breasts, Lorraine jumped back in surprise and fear.

  “You have to leave, now!” he said. “Please!”

  Lorraine stared at him, then glanced at the daffodils and broken pieces of vase on the floor, then back at Max. “You’re talking crazy, Max,” she said, her eyes wide with shock. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

  Sensing she was in the mood for a dogfight and wasn’t going to go without answers, Max rushed to her and grabbed her wrist, leading her to the front door.

  “Max!” she cried, digging in her heels. “You’re hurting me! Let go!”

  Max continued to pull her toward the front door. Having started the process, he was now more determined than ever to see it through. I have to. I can’t be weak. It’s for her own good.

  “You don’t wanna know me!” he said.

  Lorraine twisted her body and wrenched her hands from his grasp, standing her ground. “You can’t do this!” she said, hands on hips.

  Max opened the door and stood back out of her way. She understood the message.

  “I’m not going,” she said, now crossing her arms in front of her, lifting her breasts.

  Max hesitated before saying what he knew would be the fatal blow. But he had to, for her sake. He had no choice. He had seen his future looking down the glass barrel of the empty bottle of whisky.

  “I don’t love you anymore, Lorraine,” he said, knowing full well he was killing her with his words as easily as an
y bullet. “All right!”

  Lorraine’s mouth gaped with shock for a brief moment, as if he really had taken aim and shot her with the Remy, then slammed shut with dogged determinedness. Standing tall, she took a deep breath and walked out the door, slamming it behind her, just as his ex had done almost a decade ago.

  Max leaned against the wall, winded, as if he’d taken a knee thrust into his solar plexus, slowly sliding down the wall and crumpling into a foetal position on the floor. He began to cry, not resisting the flow of tears, surrendering to the agony, giving in to the futility of love. He cried and cried, eventually falling asleep on the floor after what seemed an eternity of pain and anguish.

  The last thing he heard before sleep finally took over was the mockery of his old man from somewhere looming over him: “Alvays said you vas veak as piss.”

  Max woke sometime later to the sound of sirens screaming down the street and stopping outside his house. Although at first disorientated, he soon remembered he had fallen asleep next to the front door. He also remembered what he’d done and said to her, “I don’t love you anymore, Lorraine,” and the sudden wrench of heartache seized his body and almost made him vomit. He swallowed back the acidic bile, feeling it scald the back of his throat, and prepared for what he knew was about to happen.

  The sirens had fallen silent, but the next door neighbour’s fleabag was yapping and growling, carrying on again like it was the War of the Fuck’n Worlds. Max half-expected the SWAT team to burst through the door and pin him to the wall with their patrol rifles, ram his hands behind his back and bind his wrists together with standard issue rip ties. Had Lorraine found out what was in the metal cabinet in his shed? Is that why she left with only a show of a fight? To put him off guard while she called the police and claim the reward for information on the missing brats?

  He actually didn’t give a shit. If it was over, it was over; so be it. He was beyond caring now. In fact, it would be a good thing. Hell, she could do with the money. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have a thousand uses for it. Maybe it was best thing he could do for her given the circumstances, his parting gift so to speak. She deserved it.

  But when the thuds of approaching boots didn’t eventuate and the door wasn’t bashed in, when nothing but barking filtered through the walls from outside, Max got up to investigate what was going on. He creaked the front door slightly ajar and peeked through the gap. Across the street, an ambulance had pulled into Lorraine’s driveway, its rear doors open and its lights still flashing, illuminating the early dawn in strobe-like streaks of disco red and blue. Lorraine was standing near one of the rear doors, now in a night robe, one hand holding the locket to her chest and watching the paramedics load her father into the back of the ambulance on a gurney. Even from this distance through the gap between the edge of the door and the door frame, Max could see that she had been crying all night, her red and puffy eyes constantly dabbed with a scrunched tissue she kept removing and replacing from the sleeve of her night robe.

  He watched the paramedics secure the gurney, then assist Lorraine into the rear of the ambulance. The driver said something to Lorraine that Max couldn’t make out, to which she just nodded before he closed the rear doors and jumped into the driver’s seat. Within seconds, the ambulance had reversed out of the driveway and disappeared down the road. Although, Max noted somewhat as an afterthought, its lights had been turned off and its siren remained silent.

  The only sound he could hear when he shut the door was the fleabag mutt next door barking and growling for a full five minutes after the ambulance had left.

  Friday, 21st November 2008

  Dear Diary,

  Today completes the worst two weeks of my life. I buried dad. It was somehow worse than when mum passed away. Maybe it was the way he went, the final giving up of hope. Maybe it was the cancer, or more to the point, the way he got the cancer—his job, just an ordinary guy going to an ordinary work and doing what he had to do to support his ordinary family—and those bastards on the company board that knew full well what was happening to their workers and did nothing about it. Maybe it was because the day he died was the day Max broke up with me, telling me he didn’t love me anymore, practically throwing me out of his house at 2 a.m. with his bare hands. Maybe it was all those reasons. Maybe.

  Max wasn’t at the funeral. That made it worse too. I don’t know why he didn’t come. I would have liked him to be there, even if we’re no longer a couple. It would’ve been nice, for dad’s sake. Dad really liked him. Geez, it was the reason he…

  Saturday, 22nd November 2008

  Dear Diary,

  Sorry I ended so abruptly last night. I broke down. I couldn’t go on writing. You can even see the smudge of dried tears on the page. Thinking about it even now, why dad did what he did, brings tears to my eyes and causes my throat to seize up. He said he did it for us, for me and Max, so that we can have a future together without him getting in the way.

  Oh dad! Why? Why did you have to do that? I feel so abandoned. Since mum died, you’re all I had. I know you wanted the best for me and Max, but you didn’t have to end it all. We could have coped. Weren’t we coping already? Okay, sure, we didn’t live like kings and queens, but we had each other. Wasn’t that enough?

  I found his note in the morning when I got up to bring his breakfast. His body was cold, so he must have done it quite a few hours earlier, probably when I was still at Max’s house, before Max sent me packing. Dad probably figured I’d be at his house the whole night. Probably figured he had plenty of time to get the deed done without being interrupted (like the last time) or somebody discovered what he’d done before the drugs took effect.

  In fact, he was probably already past the point of no return when I came home in the early hours of the morning, when Max told me to leave. I should’ve checked to see how he was. Normally I do, but I didn’t. Maybe if I had just popped my head in to make sure he was okay before I went to bed, he’d still be alive. But I didn’t. I just went straight to my bedroom. I was too distraught to think straight. I was too caught up in a whirlwind of my own selfish emotions. All I could think about was that Max and I were no longer together, that all our plans had suddenly been ripped apart. All I could think about was that Max no longer loved me, that we would never live together, that we would never buy the cottage in the hills and hear the laughter of children playing outside in the garden. All I could think about was my own pathetic existence. All I could think about while dad was dying in his bedroom, taking his last breaths on this earth, was myself.

  In the past two weeks I’ve actually thought of joining him. I’m not shocked by these thoughts. What have I got to live for now? The pills are still beside his bedside. He didn’t take them all, just enough to send him off to sleep, permanently. It would be easy to finish off the bottle, lay down on the bed and just wait for the sleep to come—and then never wake up. No more heartache. No more loneliness. No more debts. Just peace, and maybe holding mum and dad’s hand again in heaven. Even after all this I still believe in God, that He’s still there, that there’s a better place for all of us when we die.

  But I can’t do it. I won’t give up just yet. I won’t let dad’s sacrifice be in vain. He wanted me to be happy, and maybe there’s a small chance Max and I will get back together again one day. Maybe things will change and he’ll realise what we could’ve had together. I still love him, although he apparently doesn’t love me.

  I still find that hard to believe. I know he’s been moody and acting strange ever since the explosion put him in hospital, but I just put that down to a brush with death. Maybe he’s never been so close to death before. Maybe it did shake him up a whole lot more than I thought it had. Even still, something inside of me thinks he still loves me, that he only said he didn’t because he feels he can’t live up to my expectations. That he probably feels he can’t give me the life I want.

  Which is just ludicrous. All I want is to be with him. Nothing else. I don’t want a fancy house, or
fancy clothes, or go to fancy restaurants and drink fancy wine. We don’t have to live in a castle like we were royalty. We just have to be together. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. We can make our own house our castle. We can make our own little bit of paradise for ourselves. We can make our own Xanadu. I will be his Kira, and he will be my Sonny.

  And then tomorrow I’ll wake up and know that dad is dead and Max no longer loves me. I don’t need sleeping pills to end the misery. The abyss of loneliness will be my poison.

  PART THREE

  The Falling

  CHAPTER 14

  Max gunned the Cherokee up Sellicks Hill. It had been a wet week and the road was still drying from a recent downpour, but despite the cloudy skies and petulant rain, he was feeling fine.

  Damn fuck’n fine.

  He and his BFF Jack Daniels had spent the afternoon together in the backyard shed toying with his souvenirs when he had come up with the idea of heading out to the humpy and getting him and Mr. Jack D some R&R in the fresh open air. Hell, it had been weeks since he was last out this way. So what if it wasn’t the weekend. He’d pulled so many sickies lately that he doubted any of those fuck’n losers would miss him at work. Bill O’Driscoll had stopped ringing him ages ago to find out how he was doing, so it was a no-brainer. For fuck sake, he deserved some time out, didn’t he? Mr. Jack D had thought it was a damn fine idea too.

  All good things come to those who wait, hey? And boy, you can’t say I haven’t been a patient little Buddha, can you?

  Now, as he ascended the hill, images of billowing smoke and ravenous flames and blistering paintwork flashed in his head. He knew the scene of the burning wreck would force its way back into his memory. Had anticipated as such, which is why he had insisted the near-empty bottle of bourbon accompany him on the drive. Mr. Jack D was good that way. He kept all those fucked up images and thoughts where they should; tucked up nice and tight in the dark recesses of the mind and far out of harm’s reach. For now at least.