Murder in the Rough

by Otto Penzler

  “You can be drunk as a fart and swing that piece of wood, you’re going to do damage.”

  Round that time, he began teaching me Irish-English, I ain’t kidding.

  Sound of barely suppressed laughter.

  You’re laughing, right? Got some of that mick blood in you, that it? I tell you, God’s truth, it’s a whole other deal. They twist English till… fuck, I dunno, till it sings. That’s when he tells me about spittin iron.

  Means you’re seriously pissed, got a rage on you that’s murderous. You shoulda heard that skinny guy say it, spittle flying out of his mouth. They have a way with them, them micks. I mean, they’re deranged ten ways to Sunday but, like, cool with it. You ever listen to the Floyd? Pink Floyd, of course, my mistake. You cops, what is it, country and western, day of mourning when Garth Brooks hung it up? You should get yourself a copy of that band, get down, bro. Grab some of that good weed from the evidence room, do a tote, expand your horizons. See, you’re laughing again, having you a time. Boy, get us some liquor in here, we’d really whoop it up. Anyway, Dark Side of the Moon, that’s where those micks live, but they don’t give a rat’s… yeah, there’s one of them Irishisms right there. Feel free, use it with your old lady, give her a thrill.

  And here’s the kicker. For such hard bastards, they’re real sops at heart. Straight up, who’d have believed it? Sean, his old lady, named Kaitlin, great name or what? He’d given her one of them Irish wedding bands, with the two hands and shit? He’s halfway into his first year in the joint and she fucks off with an attorney. Best bit, the attorney plays golf.

  Long sigh.

  Dumb mother, he adored that woman. The guy was in real pain about the bitch. Me, I go, “Fuck her,” and he went for me, spittin iron so to speak, and I get him cooled off, say,

  “Whoa, buddy, bring it down a notch, what do you say? I’m like… sorry. I was, like, outta line, okay?”

  I don’t get it, she’s a broad, you know what I’m saying, but the guy, he’s lost. The dame has him all fucked-up so I tell him some golf stories, get his mind offa that. Later he told me she’s shacked up in North Carolina, fancy house, fancy guy, and he’s dying as he tells me.

  Me, I don’t do drama. I take it real mellow, no biggie, you hearing me? But I gotta tell you, the little guy, he’s hurting, and like I said, he’s my running buddy. I gotta watch out for him. Those micks, they’ll go through medieval shit, and not raise an eyebrow, then a goddamn woman breaks them like piss on the wind. He said to me,

  “Malone dies.”

  Like that’s supposed to make an iota of sense.

  Did I mention he’d been caught up in the hooch making? Sure, a mick, if there’s booze, he’s gonna be stuck in it. And there was some ruckus with the White Supremacists. I told him steer clear of those crazies. They got a whole other agenda going, but would he listen?

  Would he fuck.

  Said,

  “No bollix takes me drink.”

  They got him in the shower. I was shooting eight ball with one of the Crips and they bled him like a pig. Did that hog gig on his ass too. I was let in the infirmary with him, being his cell bro and all. Took the poor bastard near two days to die. He was weeping, going,

  “Mate, they stuck their things in me.”

  I was trying to hush him. He reaches out his mangled hand, yeah, they broke all the bones, and tries to grip mine. Shee-it, I can’t be holding no dude’s hand, like some kind of pillow biter, but I let him think it was, you know, cool. He whispered,

  “Krapp’s Last Tape.”

  Krapp?… Like crap?

  And asked me to golf with the attorney, I go,

  “What the fuck?”

  And he smiled, all his teeth nothing but, like, bloodied stumps. He says—tried to say—

  “Use the 9, let her see it.”

  Then made some sort of awful twisted sound, like he was feeling acid in his gut, coughed up a flood of blood and croaked.

  The Aryans, come to me, go,

  “You down, bro?”

  Like, am I gonna make some waves? And I smile, ask,

  “Me?”

  The guy, big dumb redneck ox, gives me the look, like he’s got the Militia behind him, says,

  “Bidness, all it is, nothing personal.”

  Fuck couldn’t even pronounce business.

  Night before I get my release, I get in his cell. Had me some Drāno, made him drink it, said,

  “Only bidness.”

  And you know, way I see it, he got to be white inside too, cleansed him through and through.

  First thing you do when you get out is get shitfaced and get a hooker. I did that till it got lame and then moseyed on down to the Carolinas. Nice country down there, even if they talk kinda funny.

  Took me a few days to locate the house, and all the time, I’m running her name in my head… Kaitlin.

  Sunday evening they were home. He arrived round six, the golf clubs on his shoulder. Mr. Sport, looked like he had a few brews with the guys, what is it, they call it? “The nineteenth hole.”

  I let him go inside, maybe give the missus one, get them relaxed, and then I went in.

  She was a looker. After I tied her up, turned my attention to him. He was just recovering consciousness. I’d taken him out with the 9, just under the chin. You’ve got my ass for the other gig so I’m going down, shit, I know that, so I might as well let you have the rest of it.

  I did her in front of him, and you know, I think she got off on it, bit of rough and all.

  When I took out the knife, began to hack at her throat, he screamed,

  “For the love of God, why, why are you doing this?”

  I tried my best imitation of that brogue, went,

  “’Cos I’m spittin iron.”

  HIS MISSION

  Christopher Coake

  Pete answered Rachel’s call on Saturday afternoon; after a bit of small talk she asked him if he wouldn’t want to drive out to Clarksville, to meet her for dinner. She told him she knew she hadn’t called in forever, but Allen—her husband—was on a mission in Africa, and she was sitting around lonely, and had gotten to feeling bad because they hadn’t talked in so long, and they were due for a catch-up sometime, didn’t he think so? Hadn’t it been a long time?

  It had been, Peter figured, over a year. He listened to her naked, dripping wet, crouched beneath the sill of his living room window; he’d left his curtains open and some of the kids in his apartment complex were skateboarding in the parking lot just outside. He looked back toward the open door of the bathroom, where the shower was still running. Steam licked out around the edges of the door, and the dark wet stains of his footprints, spaced wide, arrowed from the tub toward him.

  He told Rachel that yes, it had been a long time, and that dinner sometime sounded great. And—because he always did so when he heard Rachel’s voice on the other end of the line—he remembered the two or three nights back in college when they’d been naked together in his room; the taste of her mouth (the hint of strawberry bubble gum); the way her whispers used to tighten into quick, surprised sighs. Oh, Pete, she’d say, stretching his name between spinning wheels of lust and panic. He thought of her voice, flat, saying, Yes; he remembered a rustle of silk.

  “You’re sure Maya won’t mind?” Rachel asked him now.

  Pete hadn’t told her yet about Maya; he’d been trying his damnedest to avoid that call. He shifted on his aching calves. His wet hair dripped across his eyes; the phone was slick next to his ear.

  “Maya left me,” he said. “About a month ago.”

  “Pete! No!”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Jesus, Rach,” he said. “That’s a long story.”

  “But you two—you were so—”

  He had to hand it to Rachel. She’d called him, he knew, because she was in some kind of trouble—when things were fine in Rachel-land, he never heard a peep from her. But whatever her trouble, she sounded, now, genuinely shoc
ked. Sorrowful, even. She’d always loved Maya, never realizing (or ignoring, for his sake) Maya’s distaste for her. I swear, Pete, I don’t know what you ever saw in that little drip.

  “I’ll tell you about it at dinner,” he said.

  “But is there—do you think—?”

  “We’re getting divorced,” he said. “Soon as the lawyers work it out.”

  He could picture Rachel: she’d be sitting on her couch next to a stack of balled-up tissues, eyes as pink as the blotches on her cheeks, wearing something shapeless—pajamas, probably, like the ones she’d had in college, with the little blue flowers on them—her feet tucked under her. Thirty years old and she’d look just like a teenager rejected for prom. For a moment—just a short one, but a moment nonetheless—Pete was glad. Never mind her dumbfuck husband, Allen, and whatever clumsy thing he’d done to her feelings. Maya leaving Pete—that was real trouble. He tried to imagine sitting across from Rachel at dinner, telling her the ugly parts: So then I told Maya she was a selfish cunt—yeah, I actually used that word, but I’ve never been so mad in my whole life, and it just came out—and then she called me a spineless cocksucker, and then she got up and left and everyone stared. And you know what? She’s living with a guy already! She won’t tell me who. Whoever he is, he’s good in bed—she made a point of telling me that. Seemed pretty proud, too. And last night? Last night I drank so much I can’t quite remember what happened, but according to my cell phone I called her number for five minutes. I spent the time either calling her names again or begging her to come back, and either option makes me feel sick. But that didn’t stop me from running out of the shower to answer the only fucking call I got today. Just in case, you know?

  But, hey, Rachie, enough about me. What about you?

  He remembered his hand on Rachel’s breast, squeezing, heard her voice saying, Pete, in that way—warning him, urging him on, as she arched into his palm.

  “You should have told me,” Rachel said.

  “It just would have upset you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She was crying noisily now.

  “You okay, Rach?”

  “No,” she said, her voice barely more than a blotch of static. “Oh, Pete, I need to talk to you so much.”

  He’d wanted to call Rachel. Every night since Maya had left him, he’d thought about telling her. He was surprised he hadn’t logged a call to her last night, too, when everything had gone fuzzy—or the other nights (more and more of them lately) when he’d lost some hours. But he never had. It was a comfort, he supposed, that even at his worst he’d been able to resist trying to open up all the old doors, to avoid spreading whatever ailed him to Rachel, too. But now—he’d loved two women in his life, and one had told him she wished he was dead, and now here was Rachel again, crying and telling him she needed him, saying his name. The hope that pulsed in his throat was so pure and cruel he almost began to cry, too.

  “When can you meet?” he asked her, rubbing down the lump inside his stubbled throat.

  He heard her sob. She said, “Tonight?”

  Pete told her: “I can leave in an hour.”

  He’d met Rachel in college, just as he had Maya—making him, he often thought, one of those sad guys who’d left everything interesting in their lives behind when they trudged, diploma in hand, away from the hallowed halls. (But that was just self-pity speaking, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have thought such a thing if Maya was still in his bed—would he?) It was funny to think about, really: he’d gone from a childhood in the middle of cornfields to school in West Lafayette—which was, face it, hardly a metropolitan sprawl, and which housed a school that prided itself on teaching ag science—but for Pete, Purdue was a revelation. In high school he’d been a brainy oddball, tolerated at best. But in his first year at college he found enough fellow oddballs to form a tribe. He started smoking pot in ways he could only describe as constructive. He started playing bass in a terrible band, and doing so made him popular with women, despite the fact that he’d started going bald during his senior year of high school, and was short and hairy, and had—he’d always thought—the squat, bandy legs of a chimp. Didn’t matter. He grew a soul patch and wore a baseball cap backward and was generous with his weed and could anchor a groove onstage; he knew how to dance; he was funny. Women ate it up. His sophomore year he switched majors from history to music education, and then a year later to art—he took a photography class on a whim and got hooked. Sometimes he wondered if he’d done all that casting around just to extend his stay. Only Maya’s urging had gotten him to his degree.

  But it was in a music ed class his third year that he saw Rachel. He still remembered her taking the seat next to him, which—since he was wearing sunglasses and a Che Guevara shirt, and since the rest of the class was comprised of prim, plump church-choir-type women—was empty.

  (He sometimes tried to remember the first time he’d seen Maya. They’d met while working together in a movie theater—almost a year after the debacle with Rachel had played itself out; after she’d married Allen and moved back to the countryside whence she’d come. He remembered his and Maya’s easy friendship: cracking jokes with her in a back room, helping her clip her bow tie, smelling her perfume. But that was later. There had to be a time she’d first walked into the room and he’d noticed. But he couldn’t. But then he was depressed, stoned or hungover or both more often than not.)

  But Rachel… she appeared in the doorway of the classroom, blond and tall, round and lush. Her eyes were wide and blue like a cartoon girl’s; she wore her hair pulled back in a ribbon; she wore a buttoned blouse and jeans and sensible tennis shoes. She crossed the room, smiling and chatting with other women—and then she was smiling at Pete, too, asking if the seat was taken, and ignoring (or not noticing) his stammer. Introducing herself: I’m Rachel Beauleaux—she pronounced it Booley. He remembered slipping off his sunglasses when she wasn’t looking. He saw her engagement ring—it was a doozy; how could you not notice?—but it was just part of the Rachel package, another dazzle among many. At some point that first day they had to face each other and do breathing exercises, which was just about the cruelest shit in the world—asking a guy like him not only to breathe deeply but to concentrate on Rachel’s diaphragm and posture. He remembered the crucifix hanging down between the open buttons of Rachel’s blouse. A mole on her collarbone, right next to it. He cracked a desperate joke, and her laughter was immediate and genuine. “See you Wednesday!” she said when class was over.

  He asked around about her.

  She’s not real, a trombonist told him.

  So engaged it’s not funny, said another man, a tympanist, who’d asked her out only because he’d lost a bet. She had, he said, let him down so nicely he felt a little grateful afterward, like he owed her.

  His friend Dave’s face crumpled a bit. “Rachel Beauleaux,” Dave said, “has no idea how dangerous she is. The girl’s good, right? She’s pure good. Not a mean bone in her—except her fiancé’s, maybe, but c’mon.” (Pete agreed—if there was one thing Rachel projected, it was an almost blinding purity. Turned out he was right—even when they were right on the verge of it, the mention of sex almost always made Rachel cringe.) “She has no idea,” Dave said, “how many guys just drop dead in her wake.”

  Then Pete heard about Daniel—a tall violinist, one of the brilliant grad students who hovered over the music program like archangels. The story came to him in pieces, from Dave, from others. During her freshman year, Daniel had fallen for Rachel, and hard. He sent flowers to her dorm room; he dedicated a recital to her; he broke off a near engagement with a pianist in New York. Rachel was touched by him, befriended him; they became so close people assumed they were lovers. She spent one night in his apartment; what happened there was, still, unknown. Then one weekend her fiancé—studying theology somewhere in Pennsylvania—came to visit. People saw the three of them together, Allen and Rachel sunnily in love, holding hands, Daniel trailing behind them in pale, stoop-shouldered s
hock. In the wake of that weekend Daniel was ruined. His playing suffered; it took him a year, some said, to regain his footing. He shaved his head like a monk.

  (And two months later Pete observed—as he walked with Rachel to the library—her greeting Daniel the violinist. They stopped and spoke; Rachel smiled at him brilliantly, sadly. She touched his arm. Pete walked past them, gave them a bit of space, but he heard her say, Oh, Danny, I know you’ll do great, and saw Daniel shy away from her, as though he were a dog and had memorized kicking more than kindness. And Daniel gave Pete a look, one full of deep suspicion, of pain, and maybe—though Pete might have imagined this—full of warning.)

  After hearing the stories, Pete resolved to enjoy Rachel from a distance. He was dating a small, pale, chain-smoking woman who sometimes sang with his band, and they were happy enough; and anyway, he wasn’t stupid. If Daniel the brilliant, handsome violinist couldn’t pry Rachel away from Allen, then little chimplike Pete Shumaker wasn’t going to be able to. He knew, as they said, to stick to AAA ball; his bitter myopic girlfriend was much more his speed.

  But: Rachel, to his shock, wanted to be pals. She kept taking the seat next to him, kept smiling at him in class, kept cracking jokes. (Oh, Pete, she’d say, you’re hysterical. Or she’d say, Oh, Pete, you look so classy in a button-down. Or: Pete! You shaved! You have dimples! She was awesome in her obliviousness.) Once, standing in front of the class, ready to sing some scales, she gave him a wink.

  Then, midway through the semester, they were assigned a project together. And so one night she called him to talk about it, and they chatted for a long time, and then he found himself calling her, talking to her, finding her in no hurry to hang up; and one night he happened to call her right after Allen had hurt her feelings, and she was crying, and told him she could use a friend, and Pete said he’d be right over, and not long after she opened the door to her apartment, she was crying, and he put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him and shook, and he spent the next hour stroking her hair and telling her that it would be all right, everything was going to be just fine. She made them tea. It’s late, she told him. It’s fine, he said, I don’t live that far away. She told him, Just crash here. She smiled. I trust you. You’re a good guy. He nodded and spent the night awake on her couch, looking at the dark outline of her bedroom door, smelling her on the sheet she’d given him. In the morning he pretended to be asleep when she walked into the room. He felt her pause next to him and forced himself to breathe. Then she pulled the sheet up beneath his chin; he sensed more than felt the brush of her fingers on his shoulder.