“I thought that was the whole reason why you couldn’t… you know.”
“I would never cheat on you. You know that… don’t you?”
She shook her head. “It happens.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. Maya’s crying increased. Unable to finish the cigarette, she crushed it out. Elijah moved his hand onto the soft mound of her sex. “It happens,” she mumbled again through a thick mouth. He brushed his hand over her clitoris and then stopped, bringing his hand quickly away.
“I need to go,” he said.
“Don’t go,” Maya cried.
“I have to work. I need to go.”
He dressed in a hurry and left the apartment, slamming the door on his way out.
Once in the car, he knew he wasn’t going to work. He was too angry. He didn’t exactly know why. He sat in the hot car, sweat rolling down his face, shaking with anger. Slowly, he composed himself enough to pull away from the curb and take the twisted mess inside his head with him.
Stopping at the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Jim Beam and continued on to the Moston Memorial Gardens. There, he would be able to sit. To contemplate. Sort some things out.
He opened the Jim Beam as soon as he got out to the car and was nearly drunk by the time he got to the cemetery. He pulled the car up near Eileen and Cynthia’s gravesites and stumbled across the freshly manicured lawn until he reached their tombstones. Once there, he sat down in between them, the bottle between his legs.
It was then he decided to sort some things out, to try and figure out why he was so goddamn enraged.
The most obvious fact was that this was the two-year anniversary of their deaths. The grief and anger had never really relented since he had received the call at home to come to the hospital and identify the bodies. The grief, he knew, would have to subside on its own. It would never go away completely. He didn’t expect, didn’t even really want, that to happen. The grief was like a memory. To remove the grief, he would have to take away all the memories of them. He didn’t want that. Memories were the only things he had left.
The rage, though. That was something different altogether. It was something he hadn’t expected and, once upon him, couldn’t figure out how to get rid of. Entangling himself in hostile relationships with virtually everyone he knew didn’t seem to do the trick. That merely rendered him isolated and friendless. It wasn’t just the world he was mad at. It was Eileen, too. If she had been more alert, maybe, or a better driver, then none of it would have happened. He knew that was ludicrous, of course, but knowing it didn’t stop the feelings and the thoughts rushing through his head. Knowing it almost made it worse, turning the whole situation into some all-consuming paradox.
God was at fault too, naturally. Elijah had never been a very religious person but he wouldn’t have considered himself an atheist until that day. A god that would kill a beautiful, successful woman in the prime of her life and an innocent child wasn’t a god worth believing in. A god that would force him to suffer as much as he had after their deaths was a god that was better off dead.
Completely drunk at this point and watching the thunderheads gather up their black dresses of grief and march toward the graveyard, he realized there was a new dimension to his anger and he finally figured it out.
Maya was cheating on him.
The signs were there, he had merely refused to acknowledge them. But now that he did, now that he told himself she was cheating on him, the pieces fell into place.
It started with the way she was acting this morning. How she had told him affairs happened. It wasn’t even the way she said it, “It happens,” it was the way she completely broke down after he had told her he wasn’t cheating on her. Like, after her suspicions were denied, she was the guilty one. It would be completely like Maya to fuck someone to get even with him.
Then Elijah remembered something else. Actually, it was someone else. All last week, about the same time everything became blue again, Elijah had seen the same man coming from the direction of their apartment building. In a small town like Moston, it wasn’t unusual to see the same faces over and over again, but he hadn’t seen this man until last week and he never saw him at any other time.
Elijah remembered touching Maya this morning and how unresponsive she was.
Well, he thought. There’s only one way to prove it.
With that, he stood up, guzzled down the rest of the bourbon, pulled some flowers away from a neighboring grave and put them into the empty bottle, setting it down in between the graves as a small reminder he was there.
On his way back into town he drove straight through the storm. By the time he reached the apartment the storm had subsided and the air around him resonated with the ozone blue of sun trying to break through dark clouds. He did the best parking job he could muster, nearly popping the tire as the car flew up onto the curb. It didn’t matter. He didn’t plan on being there for very long anyway.
He knew what he expected to find and, at this point, a scary thought, it was almost what he wanted to find. He wondered if they would actually be fucking or maybe Maya was now feeling guilty and blowing the guy off. Whoever the creep was, Elijah felt certain he would try and get a little something from her before saying his goodbye.
Elijah threw open the door from the street and bounded up the stairs.
Would they even bother locking the doors?
He had his key ready but, turning the knob, discovered he didn’t even need it. Hell, the anticipation of getting caught had to be half the thrill of it.
One could not see the front door from the bed. It was one of the small touches that made the apartment feel a little less like an efficiency.
Elijah grabbed the aluminum Louisville Slugger he kept propped against the door in case of intruders. It had never really occurred to him before that was probably the worst place he could have kept it if anyone wanted to break in. It would be like arming the criminal. Of course, there was a gun in the bedside table. He anticipated Maya going for that if he didn’t act quickly enough. Elijah hated guns. He had no intention of trying to go after it himself.
As he rounded the corner, his mind took a quick snapshot of what was happening on the bed before he moved in to put a stop to it.
Maya was lying back, her eyes closed, her ass supported by the edge of the bed. Her sundress was pushed up to her waist and there was a man’s head between her legs, his hands wrapped around her hips, one of her legs thrown over his right shoulder.
Elijah moved in quickly, taking a firm grip on the bat’s friction tape and hoisting it above his head. Maya must have heard him. She opened her mouth, trying to say something, but it wouldn’t come out before the bat smashed across the man’s upper back, the fat of it landing on his left shoulder, the very tip of it connecting with Maya’s right leg.
The man let out a pitiful groan as he fell to the floor, struggling to turn over onto his back and identify his assailant. Elijah was on him, pressing the bat down against his throat so he couldn’t yell. He needed this to be as subdued as possible because this wasn’t the end. The more he thought about it, the more gruesome he wanted it to be.
“Everyone needs to shut the fuck up,” Elijah said calmly. “If anyone decides to cry out or yell for help then I’m swinging the bat again. And this time I’ll hit something more vital.”
“Eli…” Maya said.
Elijah put more weight on the bat and watched the man’s face turn purple.
“I think you should be quiet, Maya,” he said. “Now, we’re all going down to the car. If we pass anyone and you try and say something to them, I’ll beat you both to death before any help can arrive. When we get down to the car, you are going to get in the driver’s seat, Maya. Do you understand that?”
She nodded her head.
“Good,” Elijah said. “Loverboy here is going to get in the passenger seat and I’m going to sit in back. We’re driving to Keifer Road, where it meets Salton Lane. Do you know where that is, Maya?”
“Do you think you’re going to have trouble walking?” Elijah asked her.
She nodded her head.
“If you fall down, then I’m taking this bat through loverboy’s head, do you understand?”
She nodded.
“Are you going to fall down?”
She shook her head.
“Good. Let’s go. Maya, you first. Loverboy second.”
Elijah pulled the bat away from the guy’s neck and stood up, backing away from the small battery scene. The man still had his shirt on but now the back of the shirt contained a lump that looked something like a football. He had absolutely no use of his left arm and Elijah found the way he had to struggle to stand up quite comical. He chuckled a little.
This was definitely the guy Elijah had seen on the street in front of their apartment. They must have had some way of seeing Elijah coming so they could get him out of there in time. For some reason, this infuriated Elijah even more. The fact Maya didn’t feel the need to be even more discrete about her affair. The fact neighbors had to have seen this man come into the apartment, never at the same time as Elijah. Elijah wondered if any of the neighbors had heard them fucking, heard the headboard beating against the wall. Surely they must have.
Maya limped slowly to the door, bracing herself on whatever objects she could find along the wall. Elijah didn’t enjoy watching her as much. It had never really been his intention to hurt Maya. When Elijah looked at the man he saw the man with the face like a bruise. Not really, only symbolically. Just as the man with the face like a bruise had somehow taken everyone he had loved away from him before, so this man had come along two years later and done the same. But the man with a face like a bruise was only a spirit, quite possibly a metaphysical hallucination, impossible to destroy. In this man, Maya’s nameless lover, Elijah had a very palpable target for his revenge. Elijah reached out and jabbed the man’s swollen shoulder with the end of the bat, watching the cords in the man’s neck draw tight as he stifled a wince.
They made their way down to the car, Elijah standing outside until he saw that Maya and her lover were in their assigned positions. Still cautious, he slid into the back seat, maintaining a firm grip on the baseball bat. After sitting down, vigilantly leaning forward, there was an awkward pause in the rhythm.
“Start the car,” he barked at Maya.
“I don’t know if I can use the gas pedal,” she said.
“You don’t need your leg to use it, just your foot. Now start the fucking car.”
She did as she was told. Music from the Birthday Party filled the car, Nick Cave’s hooting and barking, along with the churning and screeching of the guitar, matching what Elijah felt in his head. Maya’s hand instinctively reached out to turn the volume down until she thought better of it. Elijah realized he was still in control of the situation.
The storm had now passed completely and the late afternoon was sparkling and humid.
“Roll down your window!” Elijah shouted over the music.
Maya rolled down the window.
She pulled away from the curb and started down the road, where Main Street turned into the Pike. From there they would hit Keifer and be just about where Elijah needed them to be.
Elijah sat in the back seat, studying them—the tense musculature of their necks, the way their shoulders seemed all drawn up. He basked in it. He basked in what he had planned, never once thinking anything would stop it from going off.
But he didn’t want to end anything without getting some answers first. Eileen and Cynthia had taken the open book with them, leaving Elijah to write up his own conclusions and close the book. It was something he didn’t ever think he would be capable of doing. Of course, with their situation he had no control over it. He had simply decided it was the man with the face like a bruise and had spent the next two years of his life searching that man out. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. He had the man with the face like a bruise right here in front of him and he wasn’t going to let him get away.
Elijah slid the bat in between the two front seats and started ramming the stereo violently until it cracked, splintered, and the music went away.
“So, Maya, you never properly introduced me to loverboy here. I mean, in a round about way, I guess we were quite intimate but, shucks, I don’t even know his name.”
“Hunter,” she said.
“Last name?”
“Green.”
“Hunter Green? Sounds like a fucking golf course. So, Maya, how old a man is Hunter?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Oh. Robbing the cradle a bit? Well, that’s all fine, I guess I’m pretty much past my prime anyway. By the way, how big is Hunter’s cock, Maya?”
She was silent.
Elijah quickly flicked the barrel of the bat to his right, smacking Hunter on the side of the head, just hard enough to stun him and make a satisfying sound.
“I never measured.”
“But surely you have an idea. Erect? What, both hands plus the head? Then some, maybe…”
“Nine inches.”
“Hunter, does Maya give good head? I mean, is it up to your standards? I always found it pretty good, except that she could never really go all the way with it. You know, she could never get it all the way in without gagging.”
Hunter stared dazedly ahead. “She’s good,” he said through clenched teeth.
“That’s pretty vague there, Hunter. I mean, if you’re nine inches then you have something on me so I know she wasn’t able to get it all the way in.”
“She tried.”
“Well, sometimes that’s the best you can ask for, I guess. Did you like the taste of her pussy? I ask this because I noticed you kind of feasting on it when I came home today.”
“Yes.”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“Eight.”
“Have you tasted a lot of pussy?”
“A few.”
“So have you ever tasted a ten?”
“Yes.”
“Who was she?”
“Lorna Brett. My sophomore year.”
“So you like the young pussy?”
“I guess.”
“Maya, did you let him fuck you in the ass? Did you fuck her in the ass, Hunter?”
“Once.”
“How was it?”
“Good.”
“Not great?”
“It was good.”
“She never let me fuck her in the ass. Not that I really tried all that much but variety’s the spice of life, you know. It would have been something different, in between all those affairs with girls from the office. Right, Maya?”
“I’m sorry.” She was crying, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“Doesn’t feel good to have your life, your secret life all exposed like this, does it? I mean, my secret life, hell, it only involved me but yours was a little, I don’t know, destructive maybe. Is that the right word for it?”
No one answered Elijah, there were a few seconds of silence, the car flapping along the ill-maintained road.
“So, did you ever come in her face, Hunter?” Elijah quickly pointed off to his right and said, “You’re about to miss the turn, hon.” Maya whipped the car onto Salton Lane. Elijah lost his balance momentarily but quickly found it again. “Because, you know, I always kind of wanted to but I could never really muster up the courage to ask her. I guess it’s just one of those things you either have to be asked to do or you just gotta do at the spur of the moment. So, what about it, Hunt?”
“No.”
“Same reasons? I mean, you wanted to, right? When she’s having an orgasm, you can’t look at those perfect little lips and not have the thought of coming onto them cross your mind.”
“Yes, I wanted to.”
“Okay, slow down a little b
it. Stop at this bend.”
But she didn’t stop at the bend. She didn’t even make it to the bend. Just before the road broke swiftly to the left, Maya cut the wheel to her right and the car rolled off the road and into a ditch. She wasn’t going very fast and there wasn’t really any damage, but everyone in the car was thrown around.
Elijah could tell what her intention was. Her intention was to wreck the car in such a way that he would not be able to open his door. Instead, all the doors were free to be opened. The front of the car had merely run into some small trees at the edge of the woods. Before Elijah could get his bearings, Maya had already opened her door and took off limping into the woods on the other side of the road. But Maya wasn’t really his main concern. Elijah’s main concern was the man in the front seat struggling with his door, trying to assemble some kind of propulsive rhythm with the one side of his body that worked.
Elijah beat him out of the car, baseball bat in hand.
Hunter opened his door, oblivious to Elijah standing outside of the car, and slid his legs out until they found the ground. Elijah, looking at Hunter’s stretched out legs, swung the heavy bat across the man’s knees. He was pretty sure at least one of them shattered. Elijah swung the bat three more times, the sound of connection becoming a little pulpier with each swing. Once he was certain Hunter was no longer mobile, he grabbed him and dragged him outside of the car.
Elijah was pleased to see Hunter was now suffering from hysterics. With his good arm, the man groped for Elijah’s pants leg.
“Please,” he sobbed. “I’ll do anything you want me to do. Just let me go. Please.”
Elijah squatted down next to Hunter.
“There is something you could do for me.”
“Anything.” Tears streamed down Hunter’s straining face.
“Okay. I want you to look at that big sycamore. You can see how large it is. How it sticks up a little bit higher than the rest of the trees. Do you see it over there?”
Hunter nodded his head.
“Two years ago. Two years ago today, actually, my wife was driving a car that smashed into that tree. My daughter was also in the car. Did you know that sometimes God kills people?”
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