by Otto Penzler
“I got a couple of things for you,” he said. “One. You love a woman you’ve known a month. You love a woman who threw you under the wheels for her husband. She might think she loves you. She might have said so when you were fucking her—”
Everly’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.
“Yeah. I said it. Because to my mind, son, that’s all Rachel was doing with you. You know what she told me? I asked her why—oh sure I did—and you know what she told me? Ben’s pretty, and I was weak. You like that?”
Everly’s tan had faded to the color of dried-out clay. Pete felt his words vibrating in his chest, even before he spoke them.
“It’s true. You might love Rachel, but not for any good reason. She used you and came back to me. No matter what you heard, she made her choice. And I was in Africa. She could have been anywhere in the world with you by now, if she wanted. And yet here you are, and here I am, and Rachel’s back at my house.”
Everly was staring at a spot on the grass between them, his eyes wet.
“And I’ll tell you something else, boy. So you know what she looks like naked. So you know what she feels like, inside. Good for you. You have it. It’s not mine anymore.”
Pete was surprised to feel his throat close on the words, to feel the sting in his eyes. He stepped closer; he moved himself in front of Everly’s pale stunned face.
“Look at me.”
Everly lifted his chin, looking for all the world as though Pete held him at gunpoint.
“You stole some things from me. I’ll admit it. But there’s ten years of her life with me you know nothing about. Nothing. Ten years of secrets. I know the name of her first pet. I know what she dreams. I know what it’s like to hear her say, I love you. I know what it’s like to hear her say, I do. To say—to say, Yes.” Pete was nearly choking now. He whispered: “I know what she sounded like the first time she ever came. Do you?”
Everly tried to turn his face away. He smelled like bad aftershave and thin, piercing sweat. Pete couldn’t help himself—he reached out and grabbed Everly’s chin with his thumb and forefinger and turned the boy’s face back. “You look at me when I talk to you, you little shit.”
Everly’s eyes bulged, and he swatted Pete’s hand away. Without thinking much about it Pete brought up the golf club’s handle between Everly’s legs, with all the strength he had. Everly groaned and dropped immediately to his knees, bent over himself, the back of his neck and ears turning a sudden firecracker red.
Pete took a quick look around them. He could just see back to the clubhouse—the entire course was still empty.
“It’s a hard lesson,” he said to Everly. “But you best learn it. She’s my wife. She’ll be my wife tomorrow. And I want you out of here. I want you out of my life and Rachel’s. You’d be best off running back to Georgia in the morning. And you’d best beg Jesus for help, every fucking step.”
Everly took a gasping, whistling breath. “Some man of God you are,” he said.
“I’m not perfect,” Pete said. “But let me remind you I never fucked another man’s wife.”
“You’re—” Everly shook his head and sucked more air. “You’re just what I expected.”
Pete stood over him.
“How’s that?”
“From what—from what she told me. You’re not that different.”
Pete couldn’t think of anything to say now.
“She told me a lot,” Everly said. “She told me about the first time. How she begged you to stop—”
The bottom dropped out of Pete’s stomach. “Shut your fucking hole,” he said.
Everly grinned at him. Pete could see—his eyes were crazed. He didn’t have any weapons except this one, and no reason at all not to use it.
“She begged you. Begged you. And she told me what you said.” Everly put a hand down and, wincing, lifted himself onto his haunches, eyes squinted shut.
“Quiet,” Pete said thickly. But he wanted—needed—to know. He felt a tremor in his leg.
Everly stood, hunched, and said, “She was crying. She was in pain. And you told her: Bear it.”
Everly raised his chin and smiled. Pete swayed on his feet. She turned from him in a rustle of silk. He heard her voice, heard her crying on the phone—how many times had it been? She’d called him, three months after the wedding, and told him, Everything’s fine, I’m so happy. And all he’d had to do was open his mouth. And tell her. And because he hadn’t—
“I’ll tell you something,” Everly said, smiling, tears coursing down his cheeks. “I might have fucked her, but I sure as heck never raped her.”
Pete closed his eyes.
If only Everly had stopped. But he didn’t. He was snorting, blinking, drawing up a zealot’s strength. He was going to say everything.
“She begged me, too,” the kid said. “Want to know what for?”
“Stop,” Pete said. His blood was moving strangely, his heart knocking harder and harder.
Everly smiled, just a little. His hair hung across his forehead. “The first time? When we were done? She said, It’s never felt so good. We did it over and over. I told her it wasn’t safe for us to stay all night in the motel, but she grabbed onto me and said, Don’t leave, please, don’t leave me—”
Pete swung the club as hard as he could. The head whispered around and caught Everly on the side of the chest; Pete heard a quick, bright snap. Everly dropped and scuttled on the grass, wheezing; he reached for Pete’s legs. Pete sidestepped him. He saw the sunlight above him, filtered green and warm through the leaves of the oak. He felt himself, his own skin, a burning weakness in his shoulder. He heard a moaning sound that, he knew, was coming from inside his throat. But everything else, all the world apart from the boy on the ground and Rachel’s face, was gone. Stop, he told himself, but his arms were still made of iron, his teeth still grinding. Everly, snuffling, grabbed hold of Pete’s pant leg. Pete lifted the club with both hands and brought the head down onto Everly’s skull. The club and his arms thrummed up to his elbows. Everly let go, and because Pete still had the strength, he performed the same motions again.
Then he returned to himself; the wrongness of what he’d done gushed into his stomach. He was gasping, his shoulder was aching. And Everly lay before him on the grass, jerking, hands curled at his chest, blood leaking from his open lips. His dark eyes flickered up to Pete’s. They weren’t angry, not now.
Pete dropped down next to him. The left side of Everly’s face was swelling. The skin over his temple was split, where Pete had caught him the last time with the club.
Everly’s hands clutched at the grass. His eyes rolled up.
“Get up,” Pete said. Even as he said the words, he knew they were stupid, useless. Fear slid down his throat and turned in his belly like a silvered shard of mirror glass. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Blood bubbled at Everly’s lips and outlined his bottom teeth.
“You stay here,” Pete said, rasping. “I’m going for help.”
But by the time he was done saying it, Everly had died. His tremors stilled. He exhaled—a long sputter—and Pete waited and waited for the next breath. It didn’t come. Something changed in Everly’s eyes—Pete couldn’t have said how, but one second they stared out, and the next they didn’t.
Pete looked at the bag of clubs, the dead boy. He took two or three breaths and stood and looked back at the distant clubhouse. Other golfers had appeared now, were loading their clubs into a pair of carts.
He wasn’t getting out of this. He knew that right then and there. No collection of miracles could point to anyone but Pete. He wanted to plead with the distant golfers: it wasn’t me. But who was it instead? Who’d done it instead? Allen? The empty man who’d swung the club was him. It was him.
But all the same he grabbed two fistfuls of the boy’s shirt and, grunting, weeping, he dragged Everly to the nearby sand trap and heaved him into it. Maybe if the guys coming through were any good at all, they’d miss it. Pete might have a littl
e time.
He threw his clubs in after Everly—even the one that had killed the boy. Then he ran for the trees at the edge of the course, not looking back. He climbed a waist-high fence and jogged back through a meadowful of waist-high grass toward the parking lot. No sirens wailed in the distance. The sun overhead was still warm and beautiful, the tall grass cool and wet against his slacks. He reached the lot, a hitch in his side matching the one in his shoulder. A car pulled in past him; the driver didn’t even glance his way. Pete dug for his keys and unlocked the door of his car. He put his hands on the wheel and saw for the first time that they were covered with a sticky net of Everly’s blood.
He turned the key in the ignition and drove away, doing his best not to speed.
Pete drove deep into the countryside outside of Wakefield—taking turns by instinct, doing his best to keep heading away from the interstate, on narrow county roads with mottled pavement and no center lines. Endless cornfields flickered past his windows.
He thought about what Everly had said. The words that had clicked off the rational part of his brain, that had lifted his arms: Don’t leave me—
He thought about his first night in Rachel’s bed. And his last. He thought about her wedding night.
After Rachel turned away from him in the basement, he’d meant to drive home, but a desperate thought had come to him. He had gone to his hotel room, upstairs from the reception, doing his best to avoid all the other guests, the buzzing party static from the hotel’s ballroom. Maybe Rachel would reconsider. If she changed her mind, she could find him in his room. He could still get her out of there. The memories were fuzzy—he’d stopped at a gas station and bought a bottle of very bad wine—but he could still feel the crazy spinning hope. And he could remember what lay beneath that hope: the cold weight in his chest, the haze of shock drying his eyes and throat.
For two or three hours he kept wait in his bedroom. He paced and clapped his palms together and sweated a sour smell. A floor below, the reception was in full swing; Rachel would be cutting cake. Dancing. Hearing the teary speech from her maid of honor. He took a few sips of wine. Ten o’clock passed. Eleven. Things would be winding down. He sat on the bed, and watched the door to his room. Knock, he thought, he wished. He wished with his eyes closed. He thought of God—Rachel’s God, that smug asshole, that vast handful of string. He wouldn’t pray. He knew he was drunk. He imagined the bride and groom downstairs, making their way out of the reception hall, hearing dirty sniggering jokes from all corners of the room. Allen getting his back slapped enviously by his groomsmen. Taking Rachel’s hand. Rachel’s eyes wide with fright, regret. Pete wouldn’t pray. She’d come to him. She’d know now—it was for real. He watched as the digital clock in his room turned to midnight. They’d be upstairs in their suite now. Allen would be undressing. So would Rachel. He’d touch her and she’d realize. She’d think of Pete and come running. No way would she go through with it. No way. The world didn’t work like that.
Please. Please.
And now Pete knew: sometime that night, while he’d waited and drunk and begged, Rachel had been begging, too.
At four in the morning, his bottle empty, he crept down the top-floor hallway in his bulging cocoon of skin and sadness and put his hand on the crack between the double doors of the honeymoon suite. He laid his ear to the door and listened, but heard nothing. He sat cross-legged just outside the suite and wept as softly as he could, for what seemed like hours. Let someone see, he thought. Fuck it. But no one came. The hotel was quiet, soft and cottony quiet, and his blood was thick and sorry in his temples and eyes. He saw Rachel turning from him in the basement, the empty pits of her eyes. Yes, she said, in the dead voice. She moaned: Oh, Pete—
He woke the next morning on the floor of his room. This did not surprise him. Even drunk, he’d picked himself up and crawled away from her. Like a coward. Like a dog that had the good sense to sneak away to die in the tall grass, where no one would be bothered by the stink.
Pete thought, as he drove now, that he wouldn’t run. Not this time. Not even if he had someplace to go.
He stopped the car at the top of a barely-there rise in the road. He stood, shoulder aching, staring out at the vast cornfield to the east, the short stalks rippling in a breeze just strong enough to move the tassels. A little white farmhouse sat a half mile down the road: the kind of place where he’d grown up, where both Rachel and Allen had grown up.
He took out his cell phone and dialed Rachel’s number.
She answered right away: “Pete?”
He swallowed, then told her: “I took—I took care of it.” He didn’t know if the police could listen in on a cell phone call, so he added, “I told him to leave you alone. I think he will.”
She began to cry immediately. “Oh, Pete, thank you, thank you.”
He cradled the phone against his ear and looked out across the rows of corn. He took several steps and watched the vanishing point shift, the converging rows seeming to turn, as if they were spokes of a giant wheel. He’d thought he might cry, listening to her, but he felt emptied out, spent.
“I can’t talk long,” he said. “But I want to ask you something. It’s important, and I want you to be honest. The answer means—it’ll be the most important thing you’ve ever said to me. And I’m asking now because—because you owe it to me.”
He listened to the static on the line, his voice and her breath bouncing back and forth in space.
“All right,” she said. She’d never sounded smaller, more distant.
“Here’s what I want to know,” he said. “I want you to think about that night in the church. Your wedding night.”
“Pete—”
“Could I have done it differently?”
The power lines buzzed, the field rotated slowly as he paced forward, back. He’d wanted to ask the question for years… but now that he’d said it, he saw how it had changed on him. All it could mean. He almost laughed. But that was how things had always gone with Rachel, hadn’t they? She had a way of changing the meaning of everything he’d ever done or said.
Then, at last, she answered, her voice rich with tears: “Yes.”
A day before, the word would have filled him with hope, or despair, or both in equal measure. But now?
He could only think of one response he knew to be true.
“I have to go now,” he told her. “You might not always think so, but I love you with all my heart.”
Before she could speak again, he closed the phone, then switched it off. It was better that way. No amount of talking could fix them, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. And she should have another few hours before she understood what had happened. A last burst of happiness, hope.
He sat behind the wheel of his car. Yes. In the baking heat he flexed his hands; he watched the lines of blood in the folds of his skin stretch, then contract.
He’d be honest when they asked him what happened. He’d tell them everything. And Rachel would hear, soon, and then Allen would hear. Their church would hear. The newspapers.
The thought filled him with some comfort. No marriage could survive such a thing, no pastor such a scandal. Pete smiled at the thought of it. The story would come out. And then Rachel and Allen could spend their days doing just what Pete would: opening their eyes to this strange, changed world, and all the new truths it would have them believe.
WATER HAZARD
Stephen Collins
Fifteen miles north of Manhattan in the sleepy village of Hastings-on-Hudson, Annie Bridget was hitting a bucket of practice balls. It was one o’clock on a muggy Sunday in mid-June, the sort of day the heat index was created for. In less than an hour, the final round of the LPGA Ladies Invitational would begin. Annie, whom some called Golf’s Bad Girl, while others claimed her as its undisputed queen, felt queasy. She was hearing the Voice again.
Criminal, it had whispered when she opened her eyes this morning. You should be locked up.
Momentarily free of the vicious
ly familiar, punishing sound in her head, Annie drove a ball far and straight into the middle of the driving range of the venerable St. John’s Golf Club. She wiped her forehead and glanced at the sun. Nothing short of a total eclipse would keep the temperature from hitting ninety by tee-off time.
That wouldn’t be so bad, she thought, a total eclipse. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to play today.
The twenty-eight-year-old natural honey blonde was carrying a three-stroke lead over Janet Deeter heading into the last round, with Gail Fahr two strokes behind that. It was anybody’s tournament, but even her enemies seemed to be rooting for Annie Bridget this weekend. Her incredible streak of three straight major wins had catapulted her to the first ranks of all-time women golfers and made sudden fans for her everywhere. If she could hold or improve her lead today, she would earn a permanent spot in the record books, and the Hall of Fame, right alongside Tiger Woods and Nancy Lopez.
Fat chance.
There it was again. She called it, simply, the Voice. No one else knew about it. There was no way to tell anyone without explaining where the Voice had come from, and that had never been an option.
With the edge of her 3-wood, Annie separated a ball from the forty or fifty she’d emptied onto the patch of worn AstroTurf. As she rolled the Day-Glo-yellow sphere toward her feet and lined it up quickly off her left shoulder, she inhaled slowly, taking in the sweet smell of magnolias that were flowering along the outskirts of the driving range. Determined not to overthink today, Annie went into the coiled, controlled backswing that had helped her to the astonishing feat of three straight LPGA major wins.
She struck the ball cleanly, sending it high and straight toward the white sign in the center of the range that read “250.” Her ball smacked the metal sign, ringing it like a church bell, and the crowd that followed her everywhere these days erupted into rapid-fire applause for their newfound heroine.
Luck. That was luck. You’re almost out of it. You were five strokes ahead after the second round, now it’s only three. It’s fitting. You don’t deserve to win.