Stone Angels

by Michael Hartigan

  Emily and Shoddy were the first to leave. I went to the bathroom and upon returning was notified by Lindsey that they just stepped out. They never returned.

  Around three o’clock in the morning Lindsey and I found ourselves stumbling hand in hand down Duval Street singing Jimmy Buffett songs at the top of our lungs. We still carried our beers from the bar and took a swig every few seconds to quench our parched vocal chords.

  When we reached the hotel Lindsey didn’t stop. I turned to go up the stairs to our room but she didn’t let go of my hand.

  “Not yet, Aquaman. You’re coming with me,” she said, a sensual smile spreading across her face.

  She broke into a trot across the street to the beach, dragging me behind. When we reached the sand she kicked her shoes off and stepped with drunken politeness over the chain blocking the beach entrance.

  The moon was out in full, sending a broad ivory beam over the ocean, across the sand and right to the palm tree Lindsey settled under. She grabbed my shirt and pushed me against the trunk of the palm tree. She pressed a kiss hard onto my lips, forcing me down to my behind as she did so. She knelt in the sand between my legs.

  “You know I hate Hawaiian shirts, Shaw,” she said.

  “Yeah, so what are you going to do about it?”

  She reached under one of the buttons and pulled. The button popped off. She reached farther down and tore a few more buttons off with one rip. Her lips started at my neck and moved down my chest, leaving soft kisses in their wake. When she reached my waist she slid her body fully onto the sand. She was lying down, her lips exploring the skin under my waistband and she unfastened the fly and buttons with expert quickness. She pulled my underwear to my knees and a chill ran up my spine, either from the cool sand on my bare bottom or the warm lips on moving along my inner thigh.

  What seemed like a heavenly eternity later, Lindsey knelt back on her knees and reached up under her sundress. She shimmied off her panties and threw them over her shoulder, a devil-may-care look blazing in her eyes.

  I was still leaning against the palm tree. She climbed on top and reached her arms around my neck and around the trunk of the tree, pulling us closer than ever before. She closed her eyes and threw her head back, letting out a soft squeal. I reached up under her dress and grabbed her bare behind.

  In our slow, rhythmic thrusting one of her shoulder straps fell loosely. Her dress slid down exposing one perfect breast to the moonlight. I bent over and kissed it. My five o’clock shadow must have tickled because Lindsey giggled and pulled me harder.

  The experience grew steadily wilder and soon Lindsey was underneath me in the sand, her legs wrapped up around my waist. Then her legs tensed, squeezing me tight, and her pretty pink painted toes pointed up at the moon.

  When we finished we stayed spooning in the sand under the palm tree. When I tried to move she stopped me.

  “Wait. Not yet. I want to remember this, stay like this for as long as we can,” she said. “You know I’ll always love you, Augustine.”

  I said nothing back. I think we both knew it would be the last time we would make love. We had thrusted and kissed and pawed at each other like we knew it would never happen again. It was years of emotions erupting in one final act of physical desire.

  Lindsey fell asleep in the same position. When she did I stood up and pulled my clothes back on as best I could; my shirt was torn to shreds. I pulled Lindsey’s dress strap back over her shoulder, covering her chest. I made a lame attempt to find her panties, unsuccessfully.

  Finally I knelt down beside her and slid my arms into the sand underneath her body. I lifted her up, cradling her sleeping head on my shoulder. I carried her back across the street to her hotel room. I had a hunch Emily and Shoddy were together in my room.

  I laid Lily in the bed and brushed the sand from her dress. After kicking off my clothes I climbed in beside her and fell asleep, drunk and satisfied and knowing that I’d probably never feel that way again.

  Chapter 35

  Friday morning actually began at noon when Lindsey and I awoke to our room phone buzzing loudly. The front desk was calling to remind us that checkout time was at 11:00am and we had to get moving or else they’d charge us for an extra day. Chaos ensued. There was no morning afterglow or wake up kiss.

  Lindsey jumped out of bed and right into the shower. I didn’t even try to join her. I learned my lesson about that.

  After twenty minutes of hectic packing and a few yells from her to me, we were in the lobby throwing around credit cards and apologies. Emily and Shoddy met us at the car, awkwardness brimming between them.

  Lindsey and I both noticed it immediately. Shoddy was still drunk, slouching, his eyes glassy and drooped. Emily didn’t look much soberer, but stood upright at least. They stood a safe distance apart and never looked each other or Lindsey or me in the eyes. They had slept together, that was obvious, and by the look of things, it was especially raucous and regretted. I chuckled to myself. Alcohol certainly worked miracles.

  Shoddy suggested food. We all greatly obliged and partook in one final breakfast/lunch at a quaint little place called the Banana Café. Greasy eggs, hash and sweet crepes splashed into our alcohol-flooded stomachs.

  We were on the road out of Key West by two o’clock, subdued and quiet, exhausted and awkward. Lindsey asked to take the first leg. She said she was wide-awake. I obliged, taking the front passenger seat and letting Emily and Shoddy retreat to opposite corners of the backseat.

  Lindsey and I weren’t much closer. She had gone cold again. I could feel the tension. I sat inches from her and yet we were farther apart than we’d ever been.

  One of my headaches started bubbling in my temples. It could’ve been part of the hangover.

  When Emily and Shoddy appeared to be asleep, ugly silence remained.

  “Hey, about last night,” I said softly, just trying to kill the quiet. “That was amazing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Shaw. Not now.”

  “Yeah, I know, we will when we get back. But I just wanted to say it was amazing, and what you said to me afterwards . . .”

  “Stop right there. I was drunk. Forget it, Shaw.” Tears started welling up in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just stop, Shaw. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that with you anymore. Not until we talked. And every night since I made that promise, I got drunk and broke my word.”

  The headache started in earnest. I closed my eyes and fireworks exploded in the darkness. Both hands were on my temples, rubbing in a circular motion.

  “Um, alright. I don’t know what to say,” I said, opening my eyes but still rubbing. “Felt like you enjoyed it at the time.”

  “Of course I enjoyed it, Shaw. That’s the problem.”

  “Now I’m really just confused. I really don’t know what to say.”

  “Say nothing, Shaw. You’re much better at that.”

  I caught a glimpse of Emily’s eyes open in the backseat. She wasn’t asleep. They snapped shut when I turned my head her way.

  The easy pressure from my fingers on my temples eased the pain a little. I stopped rubbing. I let some silence build before making my next comment.

  “For what its worth, Linds, I’m sorry.”

  When I said the words, I wasn’t sure if I even meant them. It just felt like that right phrase at the time. In retrospect, I absolutely did.

  She didn’t respond immediately. Her lips straightened and flattened, as they always did when Lindsey was thinking hard on something. Her dimples caved in. We drove up the highway without talking. After ten minutes Lindsey relaxed, her mouth opened and drew in a long, relieved breath. Her dimples evaporated. She arrived at a conclusion.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, so soft our friends in the back couldn’t have heard. “I’m sorry, too Shaw. I’m sorry I couldn’t be her.”

  My only response was nonverbal. I nodded, looked out the window at the rush of traffic and then back at Lindsey
in the car, into our little world. She took her eyes off the road for a second to meet mine. Everything she had to say had been said.

  The remainder of the first leg was uneventful. I pretended to sleep until Emily woke up and started reminiscing about the beautiful beaches and bouncing bars in Key West. Shoddy joined in shortly thereafter and Lindsey and I were saved.

  About six hours from Key West, we saw signs for Cape Canaveral and Lindsey pulled off the highway reckoning if there was a space shuttle nearby, there had to be a restaurant for dinner. We easily found a McDonalds.

  Four burgers later we piled back into the Explorer, soda refills in hand. Lindsey and I switched places and I took over driving. During dinner I had noticed Lindsey’s eyelids dropping at the same rate as the sun in the sky. She had had enough.

  It was just about nine o’clock when I pulled back onto Interstate 95, due north. Within minutes the heavy fast food sandwiches took their toll and my three fellow travelers slipped quietly into dreamland.

  Before she fell asleep, Lindsey asked me if I was alright. I simply nodded and gave her a thumbs-up sign without letting go of the steering wheel. She yawned and I was left with just an increasingly dark road and an increasingly painful headache.

  Chapter 36

  I had spent almost four years tossing blame at Duncan Barker and only grief bounced back. There were intermittent stretches of joy caused by Lily, Lindsey and Shoddy, and up until now I blamed Duncan for taking those away from me too. But not anymore. I carried that burden. I assumed that guilt.

  But what struck me as odd, perhaps a bit cold, was that the guilt I felt over what I did to Duncan was nothing compared to the gnawing uneasiness that slithered around deep inside me on that dark, empty northbound highway. The uneasiness was connected to a thought I was repressing all week in Key West. After all, the guilt alone was hammering away at all my emotional defenses. What else could I handle?

  What bothered me most about Duncan’s death, the origin of the uneasiness, was that if Duncan was gone, whom was I supposed to hate?

  The easy answer was myself. That’s where the gurgling in my stomach came from. The majority of my recent history was saturated with grudge-filled animosity of, at this point, convoluted and immature origins. Having an enemy was comforting. He was always there—in person or in name—to blame, to take out aggression on, to act as a heavy bag for releasing tension.

  Now he was not. And the only logical replacement was in control of a Ford Explorer filled with three sleeping confidants, a few hours from home, a confession and a whole heap of unknown consequences.

  I think I always knew it would come to this. That eventually Duncan would be gone (although I never planned for it to be by my hand) and that I’d eventually have to go it alone. What I never counted on was how hard it would be to forgive myself.

  The week in Key West was over. We were well into our long drive home to Providence and I was well into my long self-imposed inquisition.

  I checked on the passengers: sleeping. How many hours I had been driving, I did not know. Since Shoddy fell asleep with his book on his lap, I was alone with nothing but the music and memories.

  When I turned back, the shadows from the open highway that had bombarded me through the windshield so relentlessly for so long suddenly were not so imposing.

  The darkness that had blanketed our journey since its inception—the darkness that weighed upon the night, permeated the steel shell of my Explorer and filled my brain, my heart and my soul—was lifting.

  We careened towards the horizon, the tops of the large roadside pine trees just starting to silhouette against the sky. The pitch-blackness draped over us steadily lightened into a misty gray-blue.

  A striptease started to play out before me. Daylight, something I had not seen for what seemed to be ages, slowly, seductively peeled off layers of the night, exposing itself bit by bit with a determined purpose.

  I was all at once aroused by the temptation but terrified of what the day would bring. The darkness was my companion for so long, its impending death haunted my already fragile state of emotion. The night hid me, let me alone and isolated me from the world. I was able to wallow in guilt and regret while my friends slept nearby, blissfully unaware of the emotional strain caused by being trapped in my own mind.

  Guilt hammered around in my brain and the gurgling erupted in my stomach.

  I needed to stop. Driving was no longer an option. Something said pull over, get in back and close your eyes, block out the sun and prolong the darkness.

  A foggy blue sign flashed by emblazoned with the unmistakable gas station symbol. We hadn’t filled up since Mo’s station, since I saw that fucking red paper with his commandments, since I confessed a couple things to Shoddy.

  I turned the car onto the exit ramp and slapped Shoddy’s knee with a hard knuckle flick. He bolted upright in mid-snore, eyes still closed, hands grasping for whoever woke him up.

  “What the hell, man,” he groaned and rubbed his eyes with the two hands that had kept his book from clattering to the cabin floor. No longer braced, the book slid off his lap and thudded closed on the car mat. “Damn, where are we? Last thing I remember is slipping the dress off some chick and . . .”

  “That was a dream,” I cut him off. “It happens when you’re overtired and over-horny.”

  He chuckled as I turned the car from the exit ramp onto a two lane local road.

  “Keep your eyes open for a gas station,” I said. “Hopefully it’s not as far from the highway as the last one.”

  “There it is,” Shoddy replied and pointed out the passenger window. “Over there on the right. Looks like another local pump.”

  From the road the station was an orange, shimmering replica of Bobbo’s garage from hours before. Shoddy and I groaned in unison as the hand-painted sandwich board sign came into focus between two gas pumps.

  “Not again,” he said. “This place looks just like the other one you stopped at a while back. You know, the one where you acted like a jackass.”

  What he really meant was don’t start revealing any more secrets. I just nodded and knew he was staring at the back of my head.

  “Bobbo did say his owner owned a bunch of stations up and down the highway. This must be another one of Mo’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, Mo. The guy that owns the place. His name was on the door.”

  “Sure, whatever. I just hope Mo hired a less narcoleptic attendee for this station. If I go in there to pay and the guy’s asleep, I’m jackin’ the place.”

  “Wait a minute,” I replied as I pulled the Explorer up to the first pump. “Wow. Look at these, Shoddy. Brand new pumps!”

  He pressed his face to the back window and gazed in amazement at the series of glistening blue, modern gasoline pumps waiting for the next thirsty traveler to swipe his credit card in their technologically savvy faceplate.

  “Is this a mirage?” he said, opened his door and slid out.

  I followed suit and met him at the side of the Explorer.

  “Mo must be upgrading,” Shoddy said. “Must be doing pretty good for himself to afford these expensive new things.”

  “Good for him,” I said. “Good Karma pays off, I guess.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Shoddy shifted his confused eyes from the new pumps to my face. I shook him off.

  “Nothing, nothing. Never mind.”

  “Driving’s making you loopy, Shaw.”

  I slid my credit card in and instantly saw the numbers flash on the digital reader. Ready to pump.

  I replied as I slid my card back into my wallet. Shoddy inserted the pump handle and clicked it to the automatic setting. “Could you take over driving from here? I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

  “Yeah, sure bro—yawn—I’m sick of sleeping anyway.”

  “Thank you. I could use a breather.”

  “No problem. But first I gotta piss. You want something to eat or anything from inside?”r />
  “Nah, I’m good. I have to piss too. I’ll take a walk with you.”

  As we approached the storefront I noticed the little white letters to the left of the door. I was right. Mo owned this one, but it was a simplified version—no garage, no tow truck but the same storefront windows and a similar inner setup.

  But as Shoddy and I got closer the brand new gas pumps faded away and our hopes of a different Mo experience dwindled. The lights inside the store appeared dimmed or perhaps even shut off. An orange OPEN sign hung in the window but there was clearly nobody behind the counter: apparently another employee of Bobbo standards.

  Shoddy reached out for the door handle but I stopped him.

  “Check it out,” I pointed to a sheet of bright red paper hanging on the glass door to the right of the OPEN sign.

  Scribbled in black marker was the message, “No public restrooms inside—use nature when nature calls.”

  “Dammit!” Shoddy yelled. “Mo fucks us again!”

  “Calm down.”

  “No, I will not. What kind of entrepreneur is this guy? New pumps and no bathrooms?”

  I had stopped listening to Shoddy, who continued his rant against the spectral gas station owner. Something about the red paper gave me pause. It was familiar on a multitude of levels. I inched closer to the door and the faint inside light made the paper slightly translucent. Computer printed black text was barely visible on the paper’s flip side. It looked like a list.

  Something jerked on my shirtsleeve.

  “Come on man, let’s find somewhere else,” Shoddy said. He had a firm grip of my shirt and was already tugging my entire body in his direction. I flipped my head back to try and read the reverse side of the red paper. Was it what I thought it was?