by Andrew Post
“I didn’t shoot Winston.” Merritt stopped, but it was too late. And since it was too late, there was no reason not to say more. “I hit him with a rock and when I saw he was still moving I choked him and I took that rock, broke into Billy Faudet’s house when his dad was sleeping, made him put his hand on it, then hid it behind their house so when the police would find it they’d think Billy Faudet’s dad killed Winston.”
Winston, seated next to Joseph, took his turn nodding, confirming that’s how it’d gone with him as well.
“You killed that man’s son too, didn’t you? That wasn’t just an accident like you said.”
Merritt looked at his brother. “We did that together. It was mostly by accident.”
Winston waggled a hand. “Eh, kind of.”
“Then you go and kill your own brother and then your father too,” his mother said.
“Yes, Mom, that is what happened. Are you mad at me? I know you’re just hearing it out loud for the first time, but you have to remember all that happened so long ago.”
The silence from Sheila Plains that followed was as dark as it was heavy.
Merritt thought about the gun Felix had mailed to the house for his mother’s seventy-fifth, this little nickeled-out .380 purse gun with pearl grip that must’ve set him back at least a grand. Sometimes Merritt wished his mother believed the story about what her husband did to himself so much that she decided to do the same thing to herself. She had the means, always at her side, right there in her nightstand. What was she staying alive for, really? Just to make sure she soaked up every ounce of misery she apparently felt she deserved? And what she couldn’t soak into herself give to Merritt, force him to share it?
And he was preparing to suggest she shoot herself when the waitress apparently decided right now would be a good time to come by to put the bill on Merritt’s table.
When he brought the phone back to his ear, that dark and heavy silence was still going. His mother had hung up on him again. She’d done it plenty of times before, but it felt different this time. Like it would never happen again.
His stomach started to rumble. The steak and chocolate milk had been so tasty and just what he needed to be a balm on such a shitty day, but now it was turning on him.
Before he knew what had happened, he’d spat up, putting back onto his plate what’d he taken off, albeit his late lunch looked much different now.
That dark and heavy silence seemed to be contagious because it was now filling the restaurant too. He was the only customer in the place, every booth around him empty, but the staff had been talking and laughing and having a good time a second ago and now, having heard him get sick, they were very much not.
Merritt scrambled to get out his wallet so he could put some cash under his empty milk glass and leave. Then the waitress, again, decided to show up at the exact wrong time. She turned the corner, saw the mess Merritt had made all over the table, and recoiled like he’d just put a slug in her. “Oh, Jesus,” she said.
“I need to leave,” Merritt said, struggling to dislodge himself from the booth. He bumped the table with his belly, it rocked and some of his sick was sent sliding off onto the floor, splatting at the feet of the waitress.
“Get out of here, fucking drunk,” she said. “Go. Leave.”
“I don’t drink, I’m not drunk. And I already said I need to leave. Why isn’t anyone listening to me?” He came free of the booth with a stumble but managed to catch himself and not embarrass himself further. “Look at me!” he shouted at the waitress, enunciating clearly so he could not be misunderstood. “These words I’m saying to you right now, they are making their way into your ears, aren’t they? You can hear me, right?”
She just glared at him, that disgusted pout on her face not going away.
“Because I said that I need to leave then you tell me I need to leave, acting like you didn’t even hear me just say that that’s what I was trying to do.”
“I’m going to call the police,” she said.
“The police. The police. Everybody always says they’re going to call the fucking police.” Merritt slapped a ketchup bottle off one of the tables, sending it caroming off a window, leaving a jagged crack. “They can’t protect you from everything, they can’t be everywhere,” he shouted to the whole restaurant, anyone who might be in here, outside, anyone in this fucking city, anybody who bothered to actually listen to him for once.
The waitress turned to throw her voice across the restaurant, “Guys? Is somebody going to call the police?”
“Already am,” someone said.
Because Merritt had no idea what Brenda planned on doing after that cryptic way she’d ended their last call, he’d brought the Beretta into the restaurant with him. He drew it and without him even pointing it at her, the waitress seemed to go dead where she stood, life abandoning her ahead of any bullet touching her. Pale as a sheet, body rigid as if she’d just been chipped out of a frozen lake. Merritt had to admit, despite the circumstances and a possible imminent arrest, he liked being able to make that happen. To see such enormous change occur with him only needing to do such a small thing as draw a gun.
Heeding a whim, he put the barrel to his own temple. Just to see how she’d take that.
She stared, shaking now, going even a few shades paler. The front of the khaki slacks they made her wear here went dark, her pee running out of her pant leg frothy and a healthy near-clear.
He considered committing to the charade and just doing it. Throw in the towel, let Brenda escape, have this be how the story of his life got its finish. It wouldn’t be a lie that hung around for almost forty years like it did with his father and brother. It’d be the truth, in black and white and read all over.
There were probably plenty of people who wanted him to do it. People who didn’t know him, relatives and friends and loved ones of people he’d hurt who likely had an idea of what he looked like or how it sounded when he spoke, but even a thin interpretation of him was still him nonetheless, more strata of himself, just ones he didn’t find in himself but were instead applied to him, masks born from the imagination of others, the bogeyman.
Merritt blowing off his own head, he considered, would go on to be the truth. Because, for one, there’d be witnesses. And it’d be written about in the papers, broadcast across TVs and computer screens and radio speakers far and wide, and he’d probably only be referred to as distraught middle-aged man until they got a positive ID on him, but still told in some fashion, maybe even remembered for a while. A troubling yarn, something that bothered people when they lay in bed at night wondering why, why, why, a knot that can never be undone.
This girl standing in front of him right now in her pissed pants would certainly remember. It’d be the thing that defined her life, something she’d think about every single day, perhaps in less sharp detail as the years wore on, maybe the color of his shirt would change or the light quality of the room would be different, but the moment, the important part of it, the explosive finale, would remain fixed in her forever, an echo that’d never dull. A different kind of ruining then. Worse than the type Merritt was accustomed to doling out. Deeper. Not just the voiding of a person from their body but something that infests and infects, that does not truly destroy a person physically but instead will allow them to stay alive because the memory, like a parasite, needs the warm interior of a mind to keep itself living on and on for as long as it can. Until the story is told to another and then he can live on in them next, imagined like the people who had never seen him but still hate him, conjured through assumptions and experience-based fears lending him scraps of details that’d come together and make him monstrous no doubt, gargantuan and shadowy and awful and permanent.
“Don’t do it,” the waitress managed to murmur, sounding like she was reading this from a cue card just over Merritt’s left shoulder. “Think about your family. Your friends. People you
care about. You still have so much to live for.”
Even if what she’d said was canned and uninspired and likely something she’d heard on a TV show, it made him take the gun away from his own head. Because though her words were hollow, they were still pregnant with some truth she had not intended to give him. He did have so much to live for. She was absolutely right. He was living to lean in close and feel on his face the final exhale of Brenda Stockton.
Merritt tucked the gun away, lifted the money he’d left on the table from the puddle of his vomit, wiped it clean on his pant leg, and started toward the door. He got back in the car feeling divorced from himself, like he was only a floating pair of eyes, like the street ahead of him rushing toward the windshield was just a big TV and he was in a movie and everything was ephemeral and thin as paper and behind that hair-thin membrane of what he was seeing there was nothing but a deeper meaninglessness giving way to another deeper than that, no significances, no resolutions, no purposes. A man driving a car with puke on his shirt, which was borrowed from his father, whom he killed, looking for another person who killed people so he, the man driving the car, could kill her too and maybe get killed himself and none of it means anything. Merritt had four and a half million dollars that he had never touched collecting dust in an account. Not tangible paper cash in a metal drawer somewhere but just like everything else was ephemeral, that money was just numbers on a screen, numbers associated with him and not even his name but his social security number. More numbers. Numbers and numbers, bullets and death and food and loneliness and hurt and destruction and lies and money and blood and the road, the road, nothing but the road, stretching forever but never actually leading anybody to know anything more or become anything more or see anything more except more road. No one ever reaches the end. We either get pushed off onto the shoulder by some force greater than ourselves and that ends our wandering or we pick a spot ourselves to pull over. Like he almost did in front of that girl back at the steakhouse. Even these few minutes on, he was already regretting not committing to it, going through with it, pulling over and just being done.
The light for the intersection ahead went from green to yellow. Even if it turned red by the time Merritt reached it, he wasn’t planning on stopping. Let it happen, if it’s to happen. End my wandering here. But instead of red, the light went backward, yellow to green.
Some kind of sign, perhaps.
But then he saw the true cause. Red and blue lights flashing up ahead, coming this way, the rising scream of sirens. They’d changed the lights. They had the authority to turn red to green.
Merritt pulled over to the side. Two police cars tore past. Neither stopped, neither turned around. Merritt took his hand off the Beretta lying in the passenger seat, returned it to the wheel, and continued on toward the motel. He brought inside the two coolers, each full of half of what Michael Olson gave – and only Michael Olson, not Chaz Knudsen’s, not Brenda’s either. She just had to go and figure it out. She just had to rub it in his face she’d outsmarted him.
He slammed the door closed behind him, enough to make the paintings on the room’s walls flap like the trapdoors of a hangman’s platform.
When he dropped the coolers to the floor, one fell on its corner and tumbled over, the bags of blood rolling out onto the carpet. Merritt, not minding his strength because he was still so upset, snatched up the bag too aggressively. The heat-sealed seam of the medical bag sliced his finger. It made him jump. He dropped the bag and stuck the sliced fingertip in his mouth. A perfectly natural reaction. But then he saw that the bag on the floor, still wiggling like a dropped water balloon that miraculously had not burst upon impact, had sprung a little leak.
The finger in his mouth tasted strange. Like blood, he knew what that tasted like from having bitten his tongue in the past, but his teeth felt funny all of a sudden. Waxy and too large for his mouth. And his throat felt tight, the air scratchy. Then all at once it felt like warm bathwater was cascading down his back. He could hear his heart beating. See the sound of it move about the hotel room’s walls, like they were made out of water and were reacting to the thumps of his heart, making these waves chase each other around him, around him. He turned in place to watch them, but the waves moved too fast and he almost tripped on his own feet so he sat down on the bed.
He ran his fingers back through his hair, loving the feeling of it, both of his fingers in his hair and the feeling of his hair on his fingers.
He felt dizzy like he had before at the steakhouse but it was different this time. Still dizziness, but not an unpleasant, seasick kind. This felt good.
He’d only been kissed once, by a girl named Cheryl-Ann Roberts when they were both in third grade, and how that peck made him feel like he could fly; that’s how he felt now.
He looked at the blood bag on the floor, that fine red line running out of the slit in the plastic, the only way he could tell the blood was moving was because of the ripple of light on its surface, how it moved like a snake, that ribbon of reflected light. He heard the bed springs creak as he leaned forward off the edge, looking at the wiggling strand of light on the running line of blood, and he saw himself in silhouette – inside the light, inside the blood.
There had been no work order sent out for Michael Olson. Felix had not asked Merritt to take his blood. Merritt had only used him as way to test the machinery, so he’d know what he was doing when it came time to drain Brenda. Which meant if Michael Olson’s blood never made it to Felix, it wouldn’t matter.
Winston Plains finished the thought for his brother. “Felix was never expecting to receive that blood, just Chaz’s and Brenda’s.”
“So if this load happens to go missing,” Joseph Plains said, “nobody will ever be none the wiser.”
“Our little secret,” Winston said.
Merritt picked up the bag and held it in both hands, watching the blood dribble out and hit the carpet without a sound. He brought the bag to his mouth and felt around the slippery plastic with his tongue until he’d located the slit, and drank.
Chapter Six
Mel and Brenda sat across from each other at Amber’s kitchen table. Brenda crossed her legs and rested the gun on her knee, the business end of the silencer leveled at Mel’s stomach. “You go first, but if I hear one word about you being in any kind of danger, any mention of where you are now, anything regarding what you’ve witnessed or learned or overheard, anything about me, Amber, Felix, Merritt, or this house—”
“I understand. I thought we were past this.”
For the interruption Brenda burned Mel with a cold stare. “One word, shithead, and you, then Dani, are dead. I don’t mind making the drive to Chicago. We’re probably going to end up there to go see Felix anyway. A second stop to see her would be no trouble.”
“You’re going after Felix?”
“No. We are. You and me.”
Mel looked at the burner phone lying before her on the table but didn’t pick it up.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Brenda said. “We’ve come this far, why not finish it out? All he’s put you through. Threatening you, your aunt.”
“Uncle.”
“Uncle. Felix and Merritt still deserve to die.”
“Brenda, please just let me go home.”
Motioning at the burner with the gun, Brenda said, “Call your girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Whatever she is to you. Tell her you’re okay, that she needs to go stay in a hotel, pay in cash, and then hang up. I’ll give you one minute.”
“If it’s okay, I think I’d rather call the hospice. Where they have my uncle.”
“Not the girlfriend?”
“We’re not together. Haven’t been for a few weeks. Even if I did tell her what’s happening to me here – I won’t, I won’t, I swear – but if I did, I doubt she’d give a shit.”
“Bad break?”
Mel nodded. “I never told her I
work for Felix.”
“She catch you in a lie, or what?”
“No, she didn’t catch me lying, she never knew, I just got too tired of lying. I started to feel like I was pretending to be someone for her. And the more often Felix asked me to go help one of his friends with their car or whatever the hell, the more nights I was out until four in the morning, that meant more excuses I’d have to put together for Dani. And the longer that went on, the more I felt like she had no clue who she was really with. And I didn’t want to do that to her anymore, so in kind of a shitty way I made us break up.”
“Well, throw it on the pile, you breaking up with your girlfriend, reason six hundred and ninety-one Felix’s head needs a bullet in it.”
“Brenda, if you want to go after him, that’s on you. But me and Amber, we’re nobody. We just worked for him, got caught in his bullshit web. In all likelihood, after he made it so you and me would run into each other, he probably figures you did like he thought you would and killed me. For all he knows I’m dead and, most likely, has already forgotten he and I ever met.”
“I told Merritt you’re still alive.”
Mel’s hands went tingly. “May I ask why you would do something like that?”
“What’s the big deal? It doesn’t change anything.”
“Except for the part where I’m still a loose end Felix will want resolved – as in made dead. Jesus. This whole time I was thinking, ‘Well, at least I’m somewhat safe because Felix must think Brenda killed me.’ You should’ve told him you shot me right there in that parking lot. You know, like you were clearly considering. I could walk away at any time and be safe. Relatively safe.”