He suddenly wanted a cigarette, and even though he hadn’t smoked one in years he felt a tingle of excitement and guilt at the idea of unwrapping a pack and tapping it hard on his hand and lighting up, just like he had felt at fifteen. He walked into the store and picked up the first packet he saw, a yellow box of Natural American Spirit cigarettes. There was a man standing by the counter that instantly set him on edge; he was asking the girl serving him for directions. He moved forward and offered him a cigarette.
Where you going? he asked the man and instantly wished he hadn’t.
There were men he’d met in prison, dangerous men whom even the guards were wary of. Not just the gang-bangers, but the ones serving the hundred-year jail terms, those to whom time was meaningless because a hundred years may as well be a thousand years and the only certainty in their lives was that eventually they were going to die in their cell. Those men had tortured and raped before finally killing, they were the men who’d killed again once they were inside. The man asking directions was one of those men, he was sure of it. He checked to see if he recognised him from his time in jail, but if it wasn’t that, then it was the cruel air he exuded, the bleak, dead centre to him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the man pull out a gun and shoot the girl behind the counter in the face. The man was impassive, brooding.
West, said the man.
In spite of himself, in spite of the cloud of fear that was expanding in his stomach, he found that he was smiling. His voice started to break.
No you’re not, he said, and waited for the man to strike him, but instead he turned on his heel, exited the store and got in his car. He exhaled noisily as the car started to pull away and then felt his stomach tighten again as it pulled in adjacent to the washroom and the driver disappeared inside.
You okay? he asked the girl behind the counter and she nodded, perplexed by his concern. He paid for his cigarettes and walked slowly towards the washroom. The bus he’d travelled in on was idling softly behind him, the bus driver calling all passengers back onboard. He walked back towards the bus, grabbed his bag from the overhead rack and jumped back off, the driver – whose name tag said he was Mal – told him they didn’t do refunds.
He walked across the forecourt and past the store and stood close to the washroom door and listened. He could hear the man talking to himself; he sounded like he was holding up his end of a conversation. A loud hey suddenly came through the door and he stepped back in spite of himself, like a boy who had been caught eavesdropping. There was someone else’s voice then, he was sure, then the banging of a door and someone was shouting and he charged in.
The scenario surprised him; someone who looked like a latter-day Johnny Cash was barrelling out of the toilet stall, he was shouting and waving a gun around while the man – this vision of evil – cowered in the corner by the open door, his hands over his face. The Cash lookalike was thrusting the gun at him, jabbing the short barrel at his head and shouting incomprehensibly.
You freak, you fucking freak, he kept saying, pushing the gun into the soft flesh at the back of the man’s neck.
He got hold of the man and pulled him out of the washroom by the back of his belt and spun him around, causing him to land on his knees in the gravel. The short grey man let out a throaty roar and ran towards him. They collided in the doorway and stood there wrestling for a moment, their hands reaching up for the gun. They came careering out, falling backwards and then the gun went off with a sharp crack and both men threw themselves apart and curled up into terrified huddles on the floor, the weapon suddenly small, still and mute between them.
He looked up and imagined he saw the man waving at him, but then he was gone in a slamming of doors and a squealing of tyres.
He rolled over onto his back and sighed heavily; in the distance he could hear sirens wailing as the patrol cars neared. He wondered how long it would be before he’d see the unbroken sky again.
Chorus
He knew he was driving too fast, but he couldn’t bring himself to ease back on the accelerator. He kept attempting to blink the old man in the bathroom stall away, but his face and his gun sat ghoulishly behind his eyelids. He reached under the passenger seat and found his own gun braced there against the metal frame. He looked up just in time to see that he was heading for the side of the road and was being flashed by an oncoming car possibly terrified that a driverless vehicle was headed his way. He pulled the wheel sharply back on course and gave a cheery wave as the other car raced past. Must have thought that was the strangest game of chicken he’d ever seen, said the driver quietly. He was laughing in spite of himself. He checked on the gun again and felt its weight in his palm, admired its shape and drew a thumb slowly across the matt black of the handle. He enjoyed the resistance of the trigger as the safety held.
The first gun he’d seen had been his father’s, but he didn’t know whose it was when he’d stumbled across it wrapped in a oily rag. Their garden was a giant L framed by trees at the back of the house with an oblong pool set at its corner. In the summer his father would bob along its surface, the swell of his belly breaking the water as he grinned and waved his cigar around, his white legs, dashed with drifting swirls of black hair, the inflatable he lay on buckling with his weight. He’d laugh as the ash broke free of his cigar in dirty rings, floating stubbornly as smoky debris before seesawing slowly to the bottom of the pool. His father’s friends would laugh as his mother chastised him for smoking in the water. Hey, he’d say, it’s not like I’m going to set something on fire, and he’d cackle, the cigar playing at his lips.
One afternoon he found his father standing silently in the kitchen. It was a Sunday and it was early for him to be back at home.
Want to go for a drive, kid? he asked, staring out at the garden. His mother wasn’t home. He had no idea where she might be. Soon they were among the fields, his father gunning the engine as they passed a low red barn with acres of moving green beyond dotted with horses. He could see a boy standing among them, his hand reaching out to the tallest of the horses, his gesture making the animal wary, causing its head to pull back in quick jolts, its curious, beautiful eye regarding the approaching hand with caution. The horse took off with a snap of its mane, its tail suddenly whipping the air. The boy jumped back and the horse came at the fence at a gallop, the three-bar fence acting as a rickety sentry between the road and the farmland beyond. The horse ran its length, keeping pace with their car. His father grinned happily and opened up the engine and the horse harried itself on only feet away and they travelled momentarily neck and neck as if both were reaching to break an imaginary wire. The field divided at its corner and the horse spotted it before they did and threw himself back into the heart of the field, bucking and roiling, his head lolling happily, legs kicking hard as he ran out of sight.
His father hit the driving wheel with his open hand. Hey, he exclaimed, hey!
He grabbed his son’s shoulder. Did you see that? he asked, Damn, what a beautiful fucking thing. He looked at him. You don’t have to tell your mother I just said that, okay, he said.
You see that horse? his father asked. He nodded. They’d both been made dizzy by the sparks of energy it had given off.
Horses and dogs, I mean the domestic kind, pets, you know, not pack dogs, the wild kind, his father said. He nodded. He did know.
Animals, like that, they just run for fun, his father said. When we run, we’re running after something or we’re running from it. His father’s voice had changed as if he was shifting down a gear like he did when their car approached a bend in the road. His father became quiet. He found a farm driveway he could back up into, turned around and headed back home. He walked up the steps into the house with his arm on the boy’s shoulder and then walked into his study and closed the door.
The squirrel was sitting on top of the post, silver grey and alert. It was twitching with life, fidgeting endlessly, shifting its weight around. The family dog, Pascoe, a black Labrador, sat at the bottom of the post
patting the earth down with his paws and making a strange low whine that turned into excited yapping. The squirrel clung onto the post and pointed itself at the earth, driving the dog into a frenzy; then it took off with a suicidal-looking leap and darted past the dog and into the thicket of trees that stood at the back of the house.
Shit, he said and raced after the dog as it lurched off in pursuit. Three loping figures in profile frozen for a moment before the squirrel exploded with a burst of speed and hit a tree, running and skipping up its thick trunk and into the higher branches out of sight. Pascoe fared less well and went through a mesh of bracken and bushes, drool gathering at his panting jaws. He chased in after him, calling his name.
Pascoe, suddenly mute, was sniffing around the edges of a dilapidated beehive, a small wooden cube with a sloping roof now discoloured with age. He lifted a leg lazily and added to its patchwork of stains. He pushed the dog back and circled the hive slowly, as if the air might suddenly fill with bees. He touched the panelling on its side and gave himself a start as a piece of wood came loose and hit the floor. Pascoe ran forward barking, his tail making a fan in the air. He shushed the dog and was leaning forward to examine the piece of wood when he saw the tight bundle of oily rags pushed underneath the hive. He pulled it free and was surprised at its weight; he untied it and gasped when he saw the revolver sitting there in his hand. He picked the gun up gingerly and then held it out before him and looked along its barrel. Pascoe whined and backed up behind him. He moved the gun around, aiming the sight at the high branches above him, and then he pulled the trigger. The safety held the trigger in place and without thinking he found the metal nub above the handle and flicked it forward. He pointed the gun at the tiny blossoms of light breaking through the foliage above him and fired. Pascoe ran back towards the safety of the house and he heard the scuttling above him as the higher branches emptied of startled squirrels and birds. Then the housekeeper was racing through the trees followed by his father who he heard before he saw him, his repeated, breathless, Jesus! sounded like a mantra as he came racing across the garden. The housekeeper wrestled the gun from his hand and threw him so violently to one side that he fell. His father came rushing through the brush and clipped the beehive as he did so. His stream of expletives was louder than the gunshot, his face was red and astonished. He dragged him inside the house and beat him around the face and shoulders until he was doubled up with exhaustion and then he locked him in the basement with a hand towel filled with ice cubes to stem the flow of blood and to help reduce his swollen cheek.
He’d wanted to kill his father after that, but he knew he was too scared of him. He could only imagine failing, stalling in his actions as he stood over his father’s sleeping form and his father coming awake to pull the knife away from him and exact some terrible revenge, his mother’s screams in the half-light. He missed his father regardless, he missed him even when he was around, he’d hear him walking about in the rooms above his and his mother was always out of sight, still and watchful in the shadows somewhere. He drifted from room to room in their cavernous house, a figure pinned as a silhouette in the tall windows looking out over the gardens. The kitchen was always full of voices, his father’s friends’ laughter louder and more prolonged as they stretched into the night.
He slept fitfully in his motel room that night as his father walked his dreams as he once had the upper storeys of his house, silently pacing through room after room but never meeting his son’s eye. He was getting ice from the end of the corridor early the next afternoon when he saw the man exiting the room opposite his. As the door opened a woman smiled coyly and placed her hand on the man’s forearm and drew him briefly back in, they both laughed and then she let him go and even before she’d fully closed the door he saw the man’s face, now turned towards him, change from glassy happiness to gloomy indifference. His look of resignation was almost profound.
The driver waited by his door, listening to the toing and froing outside, the cleaner’s cart and the dislocated voices and steps retreating down the hall, and when he heard the woman leave the room opposite his he quickly let himself out and caught up with her at the elevator. He studied her on their descent and then matched her hurried stride across the reception, just beating her to the door that he held open with a flourish. Once they were outside, he asked her about her affair, but he was gentle about it. Her lover’s stony face had rattled him and he felt the shadow of his mother’s sadness pass over him. She bristled though, no matter his tone, she couldn’t understand that he was trying to reach out and help her. He tried to tell her about his father’s affairs, about his mother’s drinking and how eventually when his mother died how his father had taken to drinking with the same bleak enthusiasm.
Ironic, he said. She was mute though, untrusting. He could see that she wanted to be left alone to unscramble the guilt and lust strangling her thinking. He left her standing in the car park and sat in his car and watched her drive slowly past and away. Her face was rigid with thought and he watched her until she disappeared into the traffic that was pulling onto the highway. He sat for ten minutes while the tears gathered in dark blue blotches on his jeans like ink soaking into blotting paper and then he drove sharply off, cutting across a car that was trying to pull in to the motel. The sound of screeching tyres and someone shouting was all he heard as he pulled away and a headache built behind his eyes.
Song 4: Plastic
The day he came to tell her he couldn’t continue the affair, builders were drilling and hammering at the building opposite and she couldn’t catch his words. He was gesticulating at her, mouthing his goodbyes, when she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the cool light and quiet of the kitchen where he broke her heart. Even though he was standing very close, she was trying not to listen so that the words would deflect from her and wouldn’t count, that they wouldn’t have enough weight to drag their relationship down. She stared hard at the pots and pans hanging in an uneven line and tried to address the inverted, ballooning scenario developing in the gleaming reflection of the biggest pot closest to her. She couldn’t hear him, but she could see that he was pointing at her and then she realised that he was gone from the pot, from the kitchen and from her.
Her name was Nancy. He was called Kory and he was married to her sister and had been for three years. She hadn’t been his first affair, he’d admitted that to her the second time they’d slept together, as she was running a finger through the sweat gathering in the small of his back. She looked across at him and knew it was his way of warning her off, letting her know that this was something that would not last, that he would go back to her sister, just not then (though he was gone within the hour and always would be), but inevitably, ultimately. That’s where his life was. He said that so much that it became like a mantra to both of them as if once he left home and came to her that it was in some kind of hinterland, that their actions weren’t concrete in this world, that their fucking was without consequence. That there need not be an outcome to this, it was set in time, like a bug caught in amber.
She thought about this as she looked at her bandaged hand. Her thumbs were uneven – or had been – with a bulb of flesh making an imperfect line on her left hand. She’d all but forgotten about it until Kory touched her for the first time (discreetly and at a safe distance from the house) and she’d felt him flinch when his hand had bumped against it. He’d disguised his reaction quickly and smiled as he kept looking from the house to her and told her how he felt about her, how he’d always felt. She wasn’t stupid enough to believe him, but she wanted to believe something. Her sister came out of the house and he placed his hand back in his lap and smiled at her again and then he stood up to embrace his approaching wife.
Their affair started soon afterwards. Christmas had passed, but winter still lingered long into the New Year. The snow was still on the ground when she first made love to him; she did wonder later whether it was making love for him too or just fucking. Even later still she’d feel silly and girl
ish for even allowing herself to ever think that; he was fucking her against the wall of a generic motel room in a building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed near the highway, and in his memory he always would be.
Cosy, she thought to herself as she tried not to think about the orange bedspread or the lifeless-looking carpets as she first entered the room. Dull light played through the window as he produced a bottle of whisky from his bag and went down the corridor to find some ice. She’d enjoyed it and him, though, despite herself. The sex was good and playful, sometimes rough. She found herself smiling as she sat across him and was happy to feel his weight pushing against her as he covered her body with his. She’d had a mole removed from near her mouth next. It was strange to look at herself in the mirror and not see her hand move to it any more, to caress it lightly and wonder what she would look like without it. Now she knew; there was less of her, there was nothing to see, no punctuation to her face any more, she thought, and then wondered what had made her think that.
You look different, her sister said to her, and for a moment she panicked and thought that guilt and satisfaction really could be seen set across someone’s face. Your mole, her sister said, and she looked at her again more directly as if trying to balance the two halves of her face: before and after. I liked your mole, her sister said again. Why did you get rid of it? She didn’t know, she said, then she said, a mole can indicate cancer, you know. Her sister, a hint of hysteria creeping into her voice leant forward and said in a stage whisper, Your doctor thought you had cancer? She shook her head. No, she said, the doctor never thought that.
Cross Country Murder Song Page 6