Raw: A Love Story

by Mark Haskell Smith

Sepp remembered this stretch of road. The narrator of Love Express had said, “Interstate 10 runs in a relatively straight line along the sunny bottom of the United States, linking the earthquake-ravaged blight of Los Angeles to the hurricane-blasted sprawl of Jacksonville. Will this lonesome desert highway be where Sepp Gregory finds ‘The One’?”

  Sepp remembered a date with a woman who called herself a “desert rat” and wore gold sneakers and cargo pants that were filled with odd rocks, loose tobacco, and a lizard skull. She was sweet, with a nice smile and wind-damaged hair, but she had a tendency to laugh out loud at nothing, which, dude, kinda freaked everyone out. Still, he’d enjoyed spending time with her, unlike the tennis pro from Indian Wells. That woman was certifiable. Even Dr. Jan said so.

  Sepp looked at Harriet. Something freaky was going on. He didn’t know what exactly, but whatever was happening was totally not normal and he didn’t need to be a Dr. Jan to figure that out. He was beginning to think that he might be in some kind of danger. Was Harriet certifiable? She seemed a lot nicer than the tennis pro, but then there was a dead guy in the backseat and even the tennis pro didn’t have that.

  Harriet swung her head and glared at Sepp. “Stop staring at me.”

  Sepp looked out the front window. “So, like, did you kill him?”

  Harriet turned to look at him. “What?”

  “I mean, like, how’d he die?”

  “He fell off the balcony. You saw him land.”

  “Actually I didn’t see anything. The sound of it woke me up.”

  “The sound of what?”

  “When he hit.”

  “The splat?”

  “It was crunchier than a splat.”

  Sepp watched Harriet’s face for a clue, but all she did was look off into the dark freeway. He didn’t know what to think. She hadn’t exactly answered his question.

  “So, how come we’re going to Phoenix?”

  …

  Harriet didn’t answer. She just drove. A sign announced they were passing through the city of Colton. Harriet had never heard of Colton. She didn’t know that it was one of the busiest railway crossings in the country, a major linkage point between transcontinental rail lines. She’d never heard of the city’s namesake, Civil War General David Colton. She didn’t know that Morgan and Virgil Earp settled there after surviving the shootout at the O.K. Corral. Harriet wasn’t sure it was even a real city. It looked like part of the never-ending suburban sprawl. Strip malls and car dealerships next to monstrous rectangles called “big box stores,” next to fast-food restaurants that stood in front of strip malls and car dealerships next to monstrous rectangles, all of it a kind of Möbius strip of the rise of capitalism and the fall of Western civilization.

  Harriet wondered what it would be like to live in Colton. Maybe she could hide out there. Would she be bored? Or was it cozy? Maybe the town just off the freeway was really cute and she could get a lot of reading done. She could disappear. Start over. Get away with murder.

  As they headed out toward the Mojave Desert, like a tiny skiff entering uncharted waters, passing dark windmills, strange guardians of the desert spinning against the night sky, it began to dawn on Harriet the exact degree of how fucked she was.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  She looked at Sepp.

  “What would you do?”

  “What would I do what?”

  Harriet bit her lip. She didn’t know why she did it. Maybe somewhere deep in her DNA she had a damsel-in-distress nervous tic that would make her look vulnerable and sexy and bring a prince to her rescue. Of course that was nonsense; she was a postfeminist feminist, she didn’t believe in that bullshit for a second.

  “What would you do if you had a dead guy in the backseat?”

  “It’s not an if. There is a dead guy in the backseat.”

  “Right. So what should we do about it?”

  She watched Sepp think about it, hoping that the “we” might throw him, like he might accept some culpability. After all it was his fault. If he hadn’t been a celebrity and needed a ghostwriter for his stupid book she wouldn’t have come to LA and tried to expose their scam. In a lot of ways he was more culpable for Curtis’s death than she was.

  At first she took his thoughtful stare for some kind of deep and profound thought, but when she followed his gaze she realized that he was staring at the exact spot on her blouse where her cleavage was exposed. Harriet shifted in her seat, twisting her torso so that her breasts’ hypnotic powers could work on Sepp’s reptile brain.

  “I don’t watch a lot of movies, but they do things like this in movies, don’t they?”

  Sepp nodded. “I love movies.”

  “So what would they do in a movie?”

  “Depends on the movie.”

  Harriet sighed. “Say it was a Scorsese movie.”

  Sepp scratched his head. “Chop the body up. Or bury it somewhere. That’s what they usually do. Sometimes they make it look like a suicide or an accident, you know. Leave it in a hotel room.”

  “This doesn’t look like a suicide.”

  Sepp twisted and looked back at Curtis. “He coulda slipped in the shower.”

  …

  They stopped at a gas station just outside of Palm Springs. While Sepp watched the numbers spin on the pump—he couldn’t remember ever seeing them spin so fast—Harriet went inside and asked about motels in the area. Sepp wondered if she was going to rob the gas station. Maybe she’d kill the cashier and clean out the till. Isn’t that what happens in movies? Isn’t that what people do when they’re on a rampage? Sepp wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. They were on the lam, obviously, he wasn’t a moron. But it didn’t feel real. He kept waiting for the assistant director to say, “Okay. Lunch.” But there was no camera, no crew, and no catering truck. Sepp didn’t know how to be on the lam, but he did know how to be in a reality show. You just sit back and let events unfold. Your job is to play your part and stay in the moment. That was the key to being a star in a reality show. Stay in the moment. Even if there are evil schemes swirling all around you, someone wants you to vote someone out of the house and really they know and you know that they’re lying to you, that they’ll vote a totally different way and you just have to sit there and nod and not call them on their lie because that’s the way reality on television works, no matter what kind of scandalous nonsense is being perpetrated, you have to act like it’s totally normal when the cameras are there.

  Sepp looked at Curtis in the backseat. He wasn’t looking so good, but maybe that was the mercury vapor lights. Gas stations have notoriously bad lighting. Sepp had learned that from Love Express. He could see the lights of Palm Springs twinkling in the distance. He considered running off, escaping, fleeing into the black night of the Coachella Valley. But where would that get him? He did have a book signing in Phoenix. What was he going to do, walk there? He couldn’t just split, he had responsibilities. And he left his stuff at the hotel. He’d call Brenda or Marybeth in the morning and they’d take care of things. That was their job.

  …

  The Pioneertown Motel is tucked down a dirt driveway behind a honky-tonk roadhouse called Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. It is completely isolated: off the side road, off the bypass, off the highway, off the charts. In fact it is about as far out of the way as you can get without driving into the Mojave Desert. It is the perfect spot for drunken weekends, stargazing acid trips, survivalist reunions, and spontaneous cremations of dead rock stars.

  Harriet drove the rental past the roadhouse, surprised that any bar anywhere in the world would have the same name as her. Sepp noticed it too.

  “Hey. Harriet. How cool is that?”

  Harriet had always thought of her name as perfect for a stodgy librarian type: a prude and a know-it-all. But now here it was, flashing and gleaming in colored neon, promising cold beer, barbecued ribs, loud music, and rockin’ good times. It was strangely reassuring.

  She resisted an urge to update he
r Twitter account with a call for her readers to make a pilgrimage to the roadhouse. It could be a travel piece or something she mentioned on her blog. First she had to get them a room. Then they had to do something about Curtis.

  …

  Pioneertown was built in the 1940s as a set for movie westerns—the Cisco Kid films The Valiant Hombre, The Gay Amigo, and The Daring Caballero, as well as episodes of The Gene Autry Show, and even more recent films like The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean had all been filmed there. The motel was erected to house the movie stars and directors who came to work on the films and was made to look like some kind of 1870s Wild West way station, a hardscrabble burg carved out of the sun-blasted desert and populated by rattlesnakes, roadrunners, and their human equivalents.

  Harriet learned all this from the brochure while she waited for the manager. Eventually she noticed a box by the office door that informed her that check-ins after midnight just needed to drop a credit card in the slot and to take a room key. Harriet went back to the car, fished Curtis’s corporate credit card out of his wallet, and took a room on the back side of the motel. People in the desert, she realized, were different.

  …

  Harriet told him to duck down in the car and so Sepp ducked down. She thought it would be better if no one saw him and that sounded good to him. He wasn’t a celebrity like Ryan Seacrest, but still, people might recognize him. So he didn’t mind lying low. Besides, slumped in the seat he could relax and look up at the stars. Out here you could actually see them. He cracked his window, and his nose caught a lingering smell of barbecue smoke from the roadhouse that caused his stomach to gurgle. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

  Harriet got back in the car and drove around to the other side of the motel. She parked between two dusty pickup trucks. The trucks had dirt bikes strapped to their beds and it occurred to Sepp that riding a motorcycle out into the desert might be a fun thing to do. Dirt bikes are cool.

  …

  While Harriet scampered out and opened the door to the motel room, Sepp pulled Curtis out of the back of the car. Curtis’s corpse wasn’t nearly as pliable as he had been before. His legs stuck out in stiff scarecrow angles, and Sepp had to yank and jerk a few times to get him out of the small car.

  Harriet came around and grabbed Curtis’s legs. “Quietly and quickly.”

  They hustled Curtis into the room and gently set him down on the floor. Harriet closed the door and locked it.

  They both stood there staring down at Curtis’s lifeless form. He didn’t look good, not at all. His face was white, his lips blue, as if he’d been stuck in a freezer, and dark bruisy splotches were beginning to form on parts of his body as gravity forced the blood to settle.

  Sepp looked up at her. “I’m hungry.”

  “You’re hungry?”

  Sepp nodded. “I think the bar is open until two. We could just make it.”

  Harriet glared at him. “What we need to do, right now, is put this guy in the shower and then hit the road. We need as much distance between this place and us as we can get.”

  Sepp thought about it. “What if I just got something to go?”

  Harriet shook her head in disbelief. “I’m not a pro at doing this, okay, but I’m pretty sure it’s important that nobody sees us.” She looked at Sepp and her eyes filled with tears. “This is stressing me out.”

  She sat on the bed and began to cry. Sepp felt bad. He’d seen a lot of women cry on TV shows but this seemed realer than that.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just . . . I don’t know why I’m here.”

  Harriet wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

  “You freaked out. It happens.”

  Harriet nodded and blew her nose on some tissues. She looked up at Sepp. “Just help me out here, okay? I can’t do this on my own. Just help me and then I’ll take you to Phoenix and then I’ll be out of your life and we’ll never talk about this again to anyone. Okay?”

  Sepp nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

  …

  Harriet’s plan was simple. Make it look like Curtis had slipped in the shower, cracked his head on something hard, and died. It wasn’t an airtight, foolproof, Sherlock-Holmes-will-never-solve-this plan, but she was hoping it would work.

  “Help me with his clothes.”

  Harriet knelt over Curtis’s body and untied his shoes. They were, she noticed, exceptionally nice shoes, nicer than any shoes she could afford, and it made her wonder what kind of man wears such fancy shoes. Is that why he was a sellout? So he could wear fancy shoes?

  Sepp looked at the shoes.

  “Those are cool.”

  Harriet didn’t say anything. She put the shoes by the bed and then unfastened his brown leather belt, unbuttoned his pants, and yanked them off his body while Sepp fumbled with the buttons on Curtis’s shirt.

  Harriet reached under Curtis’s ass and pulled his white briefs off, exposing genitals which, if things had gone better, she might be pleasuring right now.

  “Do you have to do that?”

  Harriet looked at Sepp.

  “Do you take a shower in your underwear?”

  “Well, I could.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t.”

  “Right.”

  Harriet helped him get Curtis’s shirt and T-shirt off. The fact that his arms had gone rigid made it difficult. This, Harriet realized, is why they call dead people “stiffs.” She saw the tattoo on his bicep.

  Sepp read it out loud. “Fail better?”

  Harriet nodded. “It’s a quote from Beckett.”

  From Sepp’s expression she could tell he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “It’s so you’re not afraid to try something. Okay. Let’s try to get him into the shower.”

  Sepp looked at her. “How’re we going to do that?”

  “You’re going to hold him up under the water.”

  “My shorts will get wet.”

  Harriet snorted. “Take ’em off.”

  “You want me to get naked in the shower with a dead guy.”

  Harriet nodded. “I’ll help.”

  Now was not the time for modesty so Harriet pulled off her shirt and removed her bra—her freckly breasts bouncing into view—and slipped out of her pants and underwear. Still Sepp hesitated. Harriet smiled at him. She wanted to be reassuring.

  “The idea is to make this look as normal as possible.”

  …

  Sepp unfastened his shorts and let them drop to the floor. He didn’t wear underwear, preferring to go commando, and, miraculously, once brought into the light, his penis began to rise, telescoping in length, swelling in girth, until it stood straight up. Why hadn’t that happened with any of the other women he’d tried to be with in the past year? Why was it happening now?

  Harriet put her hands on her hips. “Oh my.”

  Sepp felt himself blushing, a pulse of heat flashing across his face. He was feeling distinctly mixed emotions. On the one hand he was delighted to have an erection with a woman and, on the other, he was mortified that he was waving his woody in front of a dead guy. But he could tell it wasn’t the dead guy that turned him on, it was Harriet, there was something about her.

  Harriet looked at Sepp.

  “One thing at a time.”

  …

  Sepp had really hoped his erection would go down, that it would show some patience, bide its time until the appropriate moment, but no, it stayed hard as he lifted Curtis’s body up under the shower and held him there, locked in a variation of the life-saving embrace he learned when he was a lifeguard on the beach one summer. His dick actually got harder as he watched Harriet soap Curtis’s body down—in her quest for credibility she didn’t care where she ran the washcloth—and his cock stayed that way even when Harriet instructed him to let Curtis topple backwards and Sepp heard, for a second time that night, the sickening thwack of human head
hitting a hard surface.

  …

  Harriet adjusted the water so a modest stream sprayed down on Curtis’s corpse. She felt bad about wasting water in the desert, knew it wasn’t the most ecological option, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  She grabbed a towel and went into the bedroom. Sepp was standing there, drying himself off, his body lean and strong, his abs rippling, and his penis bigger and pinker than any she’d ever seen. To think only a few hours ago she’d been so close to having sex with Curtis, to letting physical sensations take her out of her head. Maybe she was out of her head. What was she doing? Covering up an accidental death? It was so random. So bizarre. Completely out of character for her. She could blame it on the champagne, or on the fact that she hadn’t had sex in a couple of years. But would a jury care? Would anyone care?

  Harriet felt that she was doing the right thing. She was sorry Curtis was dead, but then he’d written that book and was planning to write another. They kept paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars and he’d write more of them and before you’d know it, the world would be drowning in fake celebrity novels while real novelists worked at Starbucks or taught freshman comp.

  Harriet dried herself and saw that Sepp was looking at her in a way no man had looked at her before. There was an animal hunger, an undisguised desire in his eyes. She felt a trickle of moisture running down her thigh. It wasn’t from the shower.

  Harriet walked over to Sepp and, without saying a word, pushed him down on the bed. She then straddled him, grabbing his cock with her right hand, and inserted him inside her.

  24

  Arizona

  The eastern sky began to lighten as they drove past Blythe, crossed the Colorado River, and entered the great state of Arizona. The early morning sun backlit the mountains on either side of the freeway, causing sharp and craggy silhouettes to loom forward like an old-fashioned 3-D effect, the Dome Rock Mountains becoming creepy and predatory in her peripheral vision. It felt to Harriet like the world was ready to pounce, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to crush her.

  She wasn’t normally paranoid or afraid of shadows and wondered if it might be her guilty conscience affecting her psyche. Why hadn’t she just called an ambulance and told the hotel that Curtis had fallen off the balcony? That’s what a normal person would do. He was drunk. Goofing around. All she had to do was omit the fact that she’d touched his computer.