by Steve Vernon
Bad
Valentines
2
(six twisted love stories)
by
Steve Vernon
STARK RAVEN PRESS
BAD VALENTINES 2
By Steve Vernon
Cover Art: Humble Nations
ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-17-3
First Printing – February 2, 2014
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“The most terrible thing of all is happy love, for then there is fear in everything.” – Cosima Wagner
“Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it’s a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed – and no weapons were ever used. “ – Norman Mailer
“Don’t threaten me with love, baby.” – Billy Holiday
DO-OVERS AND DETOURS, SOMEWHERE NORTH OF BIGFOOT
Seeing that big black semi rolling along the side of a Texas goat path no wider than a tire tread, was like finding a great white shark wallowing in a mule’s water trough.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
I got that curse from my grandfather. Old granddad never liked taking the Lord’s name in vain, but anybody else in the good book was up for grabs. I can still hear him rolling it out as smooth as diesel, “Judas-holy-priest-by-the-gods-of-war-hoary-eyed-baldheaded-Moses-oh-crap”, all shoved together like there wasn’t a beginning or end.
The rig rolled closer.
I stood there, thumb hooked into the wind, watching this coal black eighteen wheeler looming towards me like the second coming.
It had to be a mirage.
I’d been out in the sun too long.
Well mirage or not, I was going to get myself a lift. The last tractor I’d hitched a ride with had been a big green John Deere, driven by a drunken Texas plowboy with the humor of a crucified leper, the patience of a boiling tea kettle, and one hell of a misguided sense of direction. We argued for about a half a minute before he got ticked off and I got kicked off, smack-dab in the middle of nothing in particular with nowhere else to go but stop.
The rig got closer.
It was a beast, the biggest that I’d ever seen. It was painted midnight black and looked to be twice as large as the national debt of Columbia. All slick and curved like something built by the god of crop circles.
It sure didn’t look like anything crawled out of Detroit - but it looked like salvation to me as it geared down and pulled on over.
Give me some credit.
I had a half of a half second’s worth of second thoughts about how good an idea this might be. Hell, who wouldn’t have? The truck was painted so black you could stick your hand into the paint job and lose it. In the coal cellar of my memory I heard my mother’s words of sagebrush wisdom on getting into cars with strangers.
“Don’t climb into nothing what ain’t got a back door out.”
Well, the truck did have a back door, even though I couldn’t get to it. Just the same I climbed on in. My feet were sore, and up until now the only hope I had was that maybe that drunken Texas plowboy might stick his tractor in reverse.
***
The driver was a big fellow, even sitting down, with a big red beard, tight and curly as a fistful of copper wool.
“Where you heading?” he asked.
“Memphis.”
“Tennessee, Texas, or Egypt?”
I laughed, thinking it was a joke.
“Can’t get to Egypt on a truck.”
The big man grinned like a burning neon sign.
“You’d be surprised how far a fellow can get, if he really wishes.”
Holy Moses. The guy was a freaking Oprah slinger. Worse than bible thumpers, Oprah slingers spread good cheer and hope in the form of meaningless proverbs and all knowing grins. If they aren’t working as truckers they’re often found in bus terminals and airports pressing grimy tracts of unfathomable wisdom into hands that would rather hang onto their luggage.
To hell with it.
A ride was a ride, and I needed one.
“Texas,” I said. “I’m going to Memphis, Texas.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“Not nearly as far as Egypt.”
He nodded like he was listening to Solomon.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“Everybody does,” I said, letting it lie right there.
He laughed at that, a long steady huh-huh-huh, like the sound of empty boxcars rolling over a rusty switch.
His laughter got to irritating me, and I wished he’d shut the hell up.
Just as slick as a turnpike he let the laughter ticker out and we drove the next hour through a desert of silence. Nothing but the wind whiskering past the windshield. I got to regretting my last wish. The whole world seemed lonesome with no words to hear.
Only thing to look at besides the road was a big old pocket watch swinging from the sun visor like a gallows medal. The watch wasn’t ticking. I don’t know if it was broke, or just not wound.
As near as I could figure we were rolling just north of Bigfoot, about a hundred miles west of Corpus Christi. That was fine with me. I was headed for Memphis, about as far as I could get from Corpus Christi without actually leaving Texas.
I fell asleep, thinking about detours and goat paths winding in slow dusty circles.
That’s the trouble with history. Some days you can’t get far enough away from it to ever truly say goodbye.
***
Corpus Christi was where it started, and Misty Abilene set the fuse burning.
Misty Abilene was the prettiest one hundred eighteen pounds of temptation God ever poured into a pair of sunfaded Levi lowrise leg hugging jeans. I met her in a Corpus Christi pool hall, name of The Lucky Scratch.
We’ve all heard stories about fellows tempted by heartless sirens. Heard how some guys were led by their zipper to the unhitching bedpost.
Well that was some other guy. I didn’t need tempting, and I sure wasn’t led. Lay the blame right here, brother. I knew what I was up to from the ready-set-go.
Give me credit. I stopped long enough to look once at the gold ring on my left hand. Dinged in on one side where I’d caught it on a gear at the nail factory.
I thought about Amy, waiting at home with my boy, waiting to share a couple cups of cold coffee and a tired kiss goodnight.
Then I stuck that finger in my mouth, worked up a good half swallow of spit, and wiggled the ring off with my teeth.
Looki
ng back from where I’m at now, I wish somebody’d snuck up behind me and dropped a pool table on my head, before I got much further than that.
***
“Hang on for a moment. I got to pull in here,” the trucker said.
I opened my eyes as the big rig eased to a halt.
“Where’s here?” I asked.
“Just east of Rock Springs.”
We were in the back streets of a one dead horse town. The rig was cosied down a back alley. I must have been sleeping sound to doze through the bent fish hooks the trucker must have turned to squeeze into a snughole like this.
He got out in a hurry.
Was he making a delivery? Or maybe just taking a leak.
It seemed kind of strange, wasting time working this rig into the tiny alley, just to make a pint of dirty lemonade.
Maybe he was shy.
Then I saw her.
She was standing in the halo of an unshaded sodium lamp. Just a couple steps from a door that had last seen paint somewhere around the time Moses got the green light at the Red Sea. A tiny gray haired Mexican doll. She was a beauty, even though she was staring at the wrong end of eighty years. All dusky and petal hued, like a wild rose gulping at the rain. Aside from Amy, the old Mexican lady was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen.
The big trucker walked up to her, and I thought I had things figured out.
Then I heard him speak to her, in Mexican so fluid and graceful it sounded like a slow country waltz molassesing out of the big man’s mouth.
I didn’t savvy half what they said, yet I could feel what they were talking about. Kind of like a slow growing hunch, I felt a certainty in their language. I felt the shape of the words, slow round rolling words like moon and dream and wind; and above all of that I heard the deafening silence of the stopped pocket watch, echoing like the sound of a stone dropped down a bottomless wishing well.
He led her to the trailer. I heard the big doors swing wide open. I wondered if he had a truckload of queen sized mattresses for the use of this beautiful old senora.
He was gone just long enough for me to wonder if maybe he wasn’t kidnapping her, or smuggling her across the border. Then he lead her back out from the darkness. In the side mirror I saw she had a smile on her face like the big man had given her a thousand years of hope.
“Gracias,” she whispered. “Muchos gracias.”
Then she leaned over and kissed his left cheek. Like a dove pecking at bit of spilled grain. She whispered something too soft to hear.
The pocket watch clicked loudly, like a camera shutter. The second hand geared backwards, one distinct notch.
Then the watch was still again.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
Then the trucker was up beside me, like he’d been called. He swung the big door shut. He was in a hurry, like he had to be somewhere else, by yesterday.
We headed out fast, so fast I didn’t see how the rig made the close tight turns.
I looked back. I saw a figure framed in moon and tail light. She looked like she might have been the old woman’s daughter. A young senorita as beautiful as a sigh torn from an angel’s gullet.
In her arms she cradled a tiny baby, wrapped tightly in a homespun blanket.
“What the hell was that about?”
He smiled, a soft kind of forget about it smile.
“Just a little life. A woman. A son that she wished she’d had.”
I didn’t understand.
“You gave her the son?”
He grinned.
“Sort of.”
And that’s all he said.
He revved it up and geared it down and we headed for the open road.
***
I knew about babies.
Amy and me made the boy in our second year of marriage. Hadn’t really planned on it. He just sort of happened along.
We loved him as best we could. We called him Jimmy, after my dad. He grew like a running weed. All forward with no reverse. He kind of aggravated me, nights when I tried to read the paper. He kind of amused me, the way he reminded me so much of myself. All go and no stop.
I laughed out loud every time I thought about how badly my own father had wanted to murder me, when he wasn’t too busy loving me with all his heart.
It was a good life. It was quiet, like a sleep beneath a shady tree. Maybe sometimes I wished I hadn’t been so quick to say “I do”. Maybe sometimes I wished I hadn’t chosen that road of lace and duty.
Maybe sometimes, but mostly I couldn’t complain.
Then I met Misty Abilene, and everything fell apart.
***
Like well-oiled clockwork, we came to another stop.
We were somewhere in the desert.
It looked a little like New Mexico.
Don’t ask me how I knew this. It was like some voice told me. It didn’t make sense though. We weren’t following any road map I knew of. The truth was I couldn’t even remember leaving Texas.
The truck pulled over.
I saw an old man sitting by a wooden dock in the middle of the desert. He was fishing in a dried-out arroyo.
He grinned as we approached. A big moonlike caul hung like a dark penance mark directly over the old man’s left eye. He saw me staring at it, and he winked himself blind with his right.
The scene from the alley repeated itself. First the trucker took the old man behind the truck. I heard the doors swing open. I told myself to go take a look, but I couldn’t force myself to move. It was like my legs had gone to sleep and hadn’t bothered waking my feet.
When it was over the old man hugged the trucker like he was a long lost brother. He kissed him on the cheek and he graveled out a phrase my ears couldn’t catch.
Then he returned to his dry gully fishing.
The rod bent double. It looked like he had caught the mother of whales. The last I saw he was reeling in a fish something the size of a deep water salmon.
The pocket watch clicked backwards, one more click.
It began to rain.
In the side mirror I caught a glimpse of the old man dancing in the downpour.
The truck moved on, and everything became a blur.
***
It was raining on the night that I met Misty Abilene at The Lucky Scratch.
The thing that I remember most was the big neon sign. A rack of pool balls. Then there was this big cue stick, and the balls clicked out one by one. Then nothing but the cue stick. Then the balls, blinking back again, one by one.
A do-over, we used to call that. If you screwed up something particularly well, like a bad bat swing or a missed target, then you blamed it on the sun or a random bumblebee, and you got to do it over.
That’s what I wanted now. A do-over. I wanted a chance to make it right, to make my life back to what it was before I met Misty Abilene.
I should have known better. If I had the chance again I would make things right with Amy and Jimmy. I know I could.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda. The three stooges of destiny, lined up and laughing at me..
I’d tell you a lot about what happened with Misty but there wasn’t much to say.
I got stupid. I fucked up.
No sun, no bumblebee, no do-over.
Just a long detour down a dead end road.
Misty and I wound up in a hotel room with a couple of lazy rats and a half thousand insomniac cockroaches. Bed sheets that stank of wasted sweat and mispent seed. The whole thing was about as memorable as the thirteenth firework on a thousand candle fourth of July picnic.
Three days later Amy found out.
And I ran out.
***
The truck pulled over a third time.
There was a boy, waiting on a large rock in a field that reminded me of Oklahoma. You could hear the wind singing through the grass.
The boy looked a little like Jimmy, in the way all boys look alike. That constant yearning bounce for the sky. That wide eyed, never seen it, never done it before expression
.
When I saw the trucker invite the boy back into the shadows I had to do something. I’m ashamed to say a part of me imagined the worst. That big old trucker and that poor little boy. My mother’s echo again, I suppose. The dangers of stepping into vehicles with strangers.
I felt the same sluggishness overtake me. The same feeling of why bother moving. Nothing could be done about anything.
I fought clear of it. I would not yield, not this time. I had to find out what was happening back in that trailer.
It was a combination of worry for the boy and tomcat curiosity.
I climbed out and ran back, just in time to hear the boy say, “I wish old Duker had never run out in front of that hay truck.”
Then the boy came out of the cave of the trailer, grinning like he’d been handed the keys to the cotton candy dream factory. He stared up at the big trucker, and grinned like a hundred piano keys. Threw his arms around the big man and kissed him squarely on the chin, about as high as he could reach.
Then he said it. Those three words. Like the old man and the woman before him. Those three words , singing as clear as the ringing of a midsummer bell.
“I forgive you,” the boy said.
Then he ran into the night. He ran the way that young boys ought to, all forward and no reverse. Somewhere out in the darkness I heard the baying of a blue tick hound, heard a young voice yelling “Hey Duker”, and I knew without looking the pocket watch hanging on the sun visor had clicked back one more notch.
The big trucker grinned, like he knew I was there.
“You caught me at it, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I have any idea what you’re up to.”
He shrugged, and I felt the sky move above his shoulder blades.
“Wishes,” he said. “I’m collecting wishes. From one end of the country to the other. A whole truckload of wishes.”
“What for?”
He shrugged.
“Payback, I guess. Just the same as you. Sometime back I screwed up a dream so sweet and real it seemed a forever kind of mistake. It didn’t matter that it was what I was supposed to do. It didn’t matter what he told me afterwards. I’d screwed up, and I needed to make things better. Know what I mean?”
I thought about Jimmy.
I thought about Amy.