Nessus

by Herb Scribner

  He drives on the Mass Pike until he reaches I-91. From 91, he speeds through much of Connecticut until he switches over to I-84. Instead of taking himself to New York City and disappearing into the concrete jungle, he moves along until he finds I-80. And from there, he knows it’s nothing but smooth driving all the way to Salt Lake.

  On the first night of his drive, he stops in Youngstown, Ohio, at a cheap Motel 6 that has peeling walls, pot holes and a population of section 8 housing beneficiaries. As he lays in bed that night, he remembers that Youngstown is the birthplace of Alcoholic’s Anonymous. Maybe this is a sign that he can find a fresh start. First Youngstown, and then Salt Lake City after that. Detox from the booze and get clean. Make a better life, and go back to Mary with his heart in his hand.

  You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Zack?

  Really, Zack? Youngstown?

  Like you could ever get sober.

  He speeds off the following morning through America’s heartland. He doesn’t believe how many VOTE FOR TRUMP signs he passes along the way in flyover territory, but the majority of them are still intact and standing straight. One sign has been spray-painted with yellow text — which contrasts nicely against the business blue of Trump’s propaganda — with the words DON’T LET ANOTHER BREXIT HAPPEN painted across. Zack rolls his eyes. If the world realizes it messed up Brexit, it can’t do the same with Trump, right? Second chances are seldom. Zack knows this first hand.

  The second night Zack stays in Omaha. Zack catches a slice of pizza over at the Old Market and spends the night at a nearby Super 8 motel, where the night manager tells him he’d have the “best breakfast in the world.” His pancakes are gray the following morning, and the gravy and biscuits were really just rocks with brown soup on top. He takes two dumps before he hits the road again.

  He finally makes it to Salt Lake on the third day. He stops for gas at a Little America rest stop before he churns his way through the curvy and steep roads that meander through the mountains. He seems to slide down as he zooms past Park City until he opens himself up to the view of the Wasatch valley. He sees all the way to the western walls of the copper mines, where the yellow shield of the sky dips lower and lower towards its bed. A golden haze slants over the valley.

  Zack’s first thought when he reaches Salt Lake is to visit “A Bar Named Sue.” If he calls up Austin, he can get a few beers out of the night before he passes out and starts his next life. But the highway takes him in another direction. Well, really it’s his fault for missing the exit he was supposed to take — the exit for 9000 south didn’t register in his mind, apparently — so he ends up taking another detour, getting off at 3300 south. He hates the grid system.

  “Damnit,” he says to himself, rubbing his temple against his palm. The upper left corner of his head screams at him for sleep. Just a few more hours behind the eyelids. OK, maybe just one more beer first. Zack turns back onto State Street.

  Yeah, Zack, there ya go. Have another beer. That’s what you need.

  Do it, Zack.

  PBR. It’s what you drank that night, right?

  Or Rolling Rock, like it’s college again. The good old days!

  His feet lightly tap the brakes as he gets going on State Street. A sign catches his eye. It’s one of those old motel signs like he’s seen in cheaply-made horror film where the starlet survives and the beefcake boyfriend gets slaughtered because who doesn’t like to see men pay for their sins. The sign reads “TEMPLE CITY MOTEL.” The top half actually features the gates of the Mormon temple, now stained a smoky white, while the bottom side is a rusty wheelbarrow red that has painted the MOTEL part of the sign into a shade of spicy brown mustard. The dark sign stands out against the hard blue sky.

  More importantly for Zack, the word VACANCY glows with a tangerine orange. He has a place to stay.

  But first, he has beers to drink.

  He doesn’t finish at the bar until close to 11 p.m. It’s only a Monday, and Austin’s got to work in the morning so he calls the game early. Zack, in all honesty, can probably go another nine innings (and by innings, he means beers) but so it goes. He dips out of the bar and drives back in the direction from which he came towards the motel. He isn’t exactly drunk, more of a warm buzz, so his drive is almost like autopilot in that he has his hand on the wheel and foot on the gas, but he doesn’t have any control about what’s happening. Not really. It’s muscle memory at this point. But so it goes.

  His tires screech against the ground as he slides into the motel’s thin road of a parking lot. He pulls over to the side, slams his car door shut and stumbles into the hotel office. Rocks and cobblestones outline the walls of the building. Before Zack opens the door, he notices a barbershop resting next to State Street. Maybe he could get a haircut tomorrow. His eyes drift away when the motel’s VACANCY sign flickers on and off. Must be broken.

  You’re not alone tonight, are you, Zack?

  He gets a room — room 11, his lucky number — and drags his car over that way. He kills his engine and hurries out of the car, a cigarette in his mouth.

  The room’s cool air brings his body temperature down considerably. He collapses onto his bed with his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to get the spins. His belly is still heavy from the liquid loaf of beer he downed at the bar. His eyes are dry, and it feels like tiny little knives are ticking away at them, yelling in squeaky voices to sleep or else they’ll rip his eyes out and he’ll never see daylight again.

  But he can’t sleep. He drifts until the nighttime version of a day dream catches him. Every single thought from the last week rushes into his brain and he can’t throw it away. No walls to block it all out. He replays that night in his mind. The night of the last fight he and Marry really ever had.

  He hears the screaming echo through his memory’s foggy cave. He watches the lamp shatter against the wall, the pieces raining down like diamond snowflakes, littering the ground like a fresh mourning dew. He sees himself slamming his fist hard into the plaster wall, little slivers dusting his hand like baby powder. Oh, and the screams. The loud, shrill screams. He hears Mary shout for him to clean up his act and plead for him to not get so jealous, so emotional, so aggressive. She reaches deep down into her vocal chords — maybe even ripping one — as she yells for him to leave her, to walk out, to let her be alone. He can almost taste the salty tears that drip from her eyes.

  And the smoke. Every five minutes when they pause — which was really each of them preparing for the next argument — all they do is puff puff puff puff right away.

  How many cigarettes did you smoke that night, anyway? Two packs?

  And then the cops came. The whoop-whoops echo throughout probably all of downtown Lowell. Zack knows that Omar, the barely legal kid down the block who runs the package store on Tuesday nights, probably loses business because the red and blue lights are too intimidating for a normal Massaholic to risk going to a package store.

  “Are you alright, miss?’ the cops ask. Zack’s eyes narrow on the pigs, one he calls Mustache and another just Portly because, well, so it goes.

  “She’s fine,” Zack says.

  You sure, Zack?

  “We’re fine,” she says, lips quivering, tears once dry moistening again.

  “Miss, would you like to press charges? We’ve heard a lot of screaming tonight,” Fatty says.

  Mary shakes her head. “No, no, he’s a good guy.”

  Right, Zack? Oh, of course you are.

  “Miss, sometimes good people need help,” Mustache asks.

  “She said she’s good,” Zack replies. He already has another cigarette in his mouth.

  While Portly waits behind with Mary, Mustache walks over to Zack, each footfall slapping against the black tar. “You listen to me, son. I know what it’s like to be a prick, OK? You touch this woman in anyway and we get word, I’m gonna lock you up so hard you’ll beg me bring you into the station, not my own personal cell.”

  Zack gets the message. But like the officer says, he’s a
prick. So he just nods and blows smoke out of his mouth. He knows the cops will come again. This has been a repeating pattern for awhile now. One of them says something stupid, the other fights back and soon it becomes the neighborhood watch party of the century.

  Gee kids, come on over and watch Zack and Mary argue over their parents, self esteem issues and even who’s going to make coffee in the morning! Only $15 a ticket!

  Zack tosses over in his Temple City Motel bed, a few weeks removed now from that fight. He knows this isn’t the best area in the valley, but it still gives him the opportunity to sleep for a night. He really needs the rest, after all. Tomorrow he plans to begin again.

  Zack smiles at the thought of a new life. He wonders if Mary has thought about him, or if she even cares where he went. Maybe she’s on a date with another guy, and she doesn’t give any sorts of crap. Or maybe, just maybe, she’s crying because she misses him and loves him, all the same.

  You would like that, wouldn’t you, Zack?

  See those tears again, right, Zack?

  Zack blinks. Something flashes against his eye. He peaks up through his slowly crusting eyelids and sees a flash wash against the glass window. He slides off the bed and struts over. He pulls the shades back. Red, blue and white lights smack him in the face. Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop.

  Someone knocks at the door. Zack backs up from the window, his legs leaning against the mattress. Another three knocks. Clear bullets drip down his face like a waterfall to the bottom of his chin.

  “Zack Tyker. We know you’re in there. Let us in.”

  But Zack knows he’s not going to do that, at least not yet. He needs to think. How had they found him so easily? The motel sign had read “VACANCY” so clearly there wasn’t anyone else here who could have called the cops on him. The manager at the front desk had been a pushover retired coach potato who probably only did this job so he could afford a 12-pack every night. He hadn’t met another suspicious at the watering hole, either. He didn’t even tell Austin where he was staying.

  So how did the police find you, Zack?

  Had this been Mary’s plan all along? Let Zack get all the way to Utah, all the way to his haven, and then get arrested? Typical Mary, always trying to ruin the fun of it. All he wants to do is start over — for her. He just wants a new life so he can come back to her and show her that he has a plan for the future. That’s really all this is about in the end. It’s about her.

  And yet here he is, sitting alone in the motel room, waiting for the police to storm in and take him back across the country to meet his fate. Mary hasn’t given him the chance he wants or deserves. Now, he’s going to have a criminal record, or owe an incredible fine, and he’ll probably spend the rest of his days alone, trying to explain to any new women he met what had happened.

  Nothing will ever work, will it? He’ll end up alone, just like in this motel room.

  But you’re not alone, are you, Zack?

  Zack picks his head up. And then he remembers.

  You’re never alone.

  He shakes his head. Quicker and quicker he rocks it back and forth, back and forth.

  Zack, you’re not alone.

  “I’m always with you.”

  He turns around slowly because he knows who’s waiting for him. Mary’s there, standing with her curly sandy blonde hair drooping past her breasts. Her bright blue eyes glisten like a fresh day at sea. She’s got those bubblegum lips that he just wants to taste, just one more time. She turns her head just to the left a little bit, slowly moving her hands up towards her stomach.

  And through her white t-shirt comes a sticky red pool. Thin maroon worms drip down her legs and settle into the dirt brown carpet below. Zack hears each drop of blood lick the carpet. All that beer climbs up his throat. He turns away, but he knows she won’t be gone when he looks back. He picks up his head and sees the almost black gaping hole at the center of her stomach, traced with confetti of red candies. The shade reminds him of that wheelbarrow. Her arms are frosted with dark gray-purple stamps. Her right cheek looks like a pink tennis ball.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whimpers through tears.

  “Sorry?” she asks. “There’s need to be sorry, baby.”

  He shakes his head. “No, please, no. Don’t make me see her likes this.”

  “But, baby, don’t you love me like this? Don’t you want me to be like this?”

  Zack only shakes his head back and forth. His cheeks are flushed and those tears moisten the dry parts of his face.

  “You mean you don’t like me with a bullet in my stomach? Because, I thought you did all of this for me? I thought you killed me because you loved me?”

  He can’t speak now, there’s no chance of that. He falls to his knees and buries his head in his hands. He sobs, reaching deep within his gut to let out all the stress and anger that’s been boiling inside of him. He just wants to rip his own face off to stop the pain, to end the suffering, to give himself a break.

  He never wanted it to be like this.

  “You never have to worry, baby,” she says. “I’ll always be with you.”

  He picks his head up again. And she’s gone.

  The police lights are out and the sirens have quieted.

  The vacancy sign switches back on.

  But Zack knows he’s not alone.