The Empty Heart: A Collection

by Derek Murphy

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  Cost of Passage

  The river was miles wide at this point and the recent floods hadn’t helped anything. Kellan looked out across the water to where the boat he had stolen was nose-up in the water and sliding quickly downward into it. Just his luck to steal a boat with a leak and a non-working pump. At least he had made it to this sandbar; the current had helped to push him to it and he was grateful for that. God only knew where the briefcase full of cash was. The last he had seen of it, the thing was floating away from him and the darkness quickly hid it. If not for the nearly full moon peeking out from the clouds, he wouldn’t even have a view of the boat.

  Though the weather was sultry and humid, the dowsing in the river had left him wet and cold. It might have been a reaction to nearly drowning, but he didn’t think about that. He was standing upright on a sandbar, only a few feet from the water and he was safe; luck had been with him in this. The fickle bitch had let him down with the boat, but otherwise, things had gone pretty well. The old man’s safe had been easy to open, as had his pretty, young trophy-wife. She had been a sucker for his particular brand of flirtation and once he convinced her that seeking some vicious entertainment away from the old man wasn’t really cheating, she had thrown herself into it, heart and soul.

  In his line of work, when the target accepted the situation he offered, his work was half-done. It was when they became clingy and reckless that he disliked what he did for a living. There was no thought of guilt for the marriage that he had probably wrecked; if it hadn’t been him, she would have strayed eventually with someone else. It was just him that got to her first with soft words and earnest glances. That he appeared the dangerous kind of guy to put a thrill in her life was all to the good. With his natural talents and expertise at separating women from their husbands, if only for a few hours, she had been a pushover.

  His thoughts went to the expression on her face when she awakened and found him plundering the safe. Betrayal, heartbreak. Definitely some disillusionment. It was the rage that had surprised him the most. He’d seen anger on the faces of his unwitting accomplices, but never rage as all-consuming as that on Brenda’s face. She hadn’t seemed so very religious the times they made love, but her words as he slid out the door with the briefcase had surprised him.

  "I pray to God that you go to Hell, Kellan! I’ll see you in Hell before you ever get to enjoy what you took!"

  The door he slammed between them had muffled whatever else she said, standing in the living room in all her naked beauty; breasts heaving, the flush and sweat of lovemaking still on them. "Yeah", he thought, "she was beautiful, alright. It’s a pity I couldn’t take her with me."

  That would have presented difficulties he wasn’t prepared to face. The money, as much as it was, wouldn’t sate his thirst for more. Brenda, sappy romantic that she was, wouldn’t stand for him playing another young wife in order to get into her husband’s pocket. She had the quaint idea that if he was going to rummage among anybody’s unmentionables, it would be hers, and only hers.

  Kellan put the thought of her rage and her words out of his mind as he shivered a little in the breeze that had picked up. His hands went into his pockets, searching for something to light a fire with and found only a penknife, the key to his apartment and his lucky, silver dollar. His habit of carrying his wallet in his jacket had betrayed him this time. The jacket was probably floating somewhere in the river and the seven hundred dollars it held was no good to him, anyway. Maybe he could have used it as tinder to build a fire, but that was all.

  Speaking of a fire, he looked down and began searching the sandbar for driftwood. Maybe he could put that Boy Scout trick to use and get a fire going anyway. Ten minutes of stumbling along the sandbar garnered him a couple of branches, some sticks and part of a log. That they were dry revealed to him that though the river was in flood, the water hadn’t covered the sandbar recently. Putting his supply at what he thought was the highest point of the little spit of sand; he bent to putting his almost lost fire-making ability to use. A couple of reasonably straight sticks and one of his shoelaces gave him a bow and he shredded what little bark remained on the log and branches to produce some tinder. Using his shoe to press down on the upright stick while he worked the bow, he spent an hour or so getting a fire started and breathed a sigh of relief as the tiny flame began to lick at the tinder. He bent and wiped the sweat from his face to avoid letting a stray drop put out his hard-won victory and blew on the minute fire, feeding larger bits of bark to it until it was large enough to begin using the branches. It seemed strange that he was now wringing wet with sweat when he had been so cold earlier. Making a fire did that to you though; you had to expend energy to get the stuff. Since he had built the fire on top of the log, there should be plenty of fuel for a few hours, at least.

  As he curled his body and lay down next to the fire to capture the heat, he thought about Brenda and the old man. Brenda’s religious bent still puzzled him; her tastes in sex were a little depraved. Maybe they were things she had learned from the old man. He knew that rich, old men frequently delved into the darker aspects of sex in their search for new things to control. Or, maybe it was a search for something that they couldn’t control. He didn’t know the answer; didn’t care. He had been the recipient of his victims’ sexual charms and expertise through most of his life and while a lot of what he had learned had not been to his taste; he felt that he was richer for the experiences.

  His lips quirked in a bitter smile. Rich. Ha! That was a laugh! A half-million of unmarked currency had floated away from him and if he couldn’t get off this sandbar safely, the millions he had gulled away from pliant women would sit in his bank account, unused and unappreciated. Fifteen years he had been stealing money from the wives of old men and the thrill was as strong now as it had been when he was nineteen.

  It had all started with his lucky silver dollar. The young wife of his hometown’s banker had carried it on a chain around her neck and objected when he first tried to remove it. The thing was heavy and the chain was just the right length to bang against his teeth when she was astride him and bent over making love. She had called it the ‘cost of passage’, but wouldn’t say anything more about it. When he left her for the last time, he had slipped the gold ring that encircled it so that she could wear it on the chain without piercing it, from the chain and slid it into his pocket on the way out the door. While she slept on, he made off with a cool hundred thousand; his first big score.

  What had her name been? Christina! that was it. The old man had given her his last name; Barker, but her family was Greek and her maiden name had been something fairly unpronounceable. Though she was devoutly Orthodox Christian, she had given him his first taste of quirky sex with her straps, shackles, chains, gags and oddly-made furniture. At the end of each episode with her, he had felt used and dirty and because of those feelings, when he finally raided the safe and made off with the cash, he had rationalized all guilt from his actions. Another thing that contrasted with her religious outlook had been the references she made to Greek myths, almost as though she believed they were true.

  Thinking of her now, he shook his head and remembered something she had said while resting after sex. The blaze in the fireplace burnished her natural skin tones to gold as she lay on the hearth rug, sweating lightly, and with the impressed marks on her skin from the ropes she had insisted he use to bind her standing out like red-gold against the rest of it. Her chestnut hair lay around her head like a dark halo and she smiled lazily up at him as he leaned over her, tired from the sex and tired too, of her, feeling ready to make his move and leave town.

  Her dark eyes welled up with tears and he wasn’t sure if they were from the pain she had endured or if it was some psychic thing she was feeling.

  "If you ever leave me, I’ll curse you, Kell. It won’t be an active thing; you won’t suffer from it directly. You will only suffer if you abandon another woman and she wishes you punished. Tell m
e you won’t ever leave me!"

  She had half-raised herself from the floor and for answer, he pressed her back onto the floor, his fingers rough on her flesh as they forced her down and held her there for another bout of sex. He was sure that she took his actions as a promise not to leave, but he had no intention of staying any longer than a week at the most. Her husband was due back from his business trip then and he wanted to be away from her before the old man returned. Even then, Kellan had felt as though he was prostituting himself while pursuing the large amount of money he could steal from her, and that feeling had never left him. But look at the millions he had banked; enough to live in luxury for the rest of his life!

  This last one was to be the last. Then he was going to find the girl he had loved in high school and regenerate their relationship. Her family had made him feel as though he wasn’t good enough for her because he was poor at the time, but he would show them he had changed! All he had to do was get off this sandbar and make a clean getaway. The half-million he had lost would just have to keep floating down the river; he could live without it. Though this last woman’s old husband had been as detestable as the others, she had been a sweet one. He even felt a certain amount of guilt at gulling her. Her screaming rage as he left her had driven it home more surely than her sweet smiles when they made love. Kellan had fantasized once about stealing her away from her husband and forgetting about the money. In his mind, she was as sweet and loving as the girl he had loved in school. And she had even mentioned leaving her husband for him once. The fact that they were nearly simpatico in thought had scared him a little; enough so that he stepped up his timetable and left earlier than he planned.

  Hearing a sound as of something thumping against the wooden side of a boat, he raised his head to look around him into the night and saw that fog had rolled in around him. But the sound kept up, like a rhythmic clumping sound and he knew that someone without a motor on his boat was moving close to the sandbar. Straining his eyes, he finally spotted a glimmer of light in the fog from downstream and wondered briefly how anyone was able to move a boat against the current with an oar.

  Nevertheless, the boat drew closer and closer and he stood up, waving his arms and hallooing to get the boatman’s attention. When it materialized in the fog, he saw that it resembled a pirogue; being low and with a flat bottom. A man stood in the rear with lantern hanging from a pole that thrust up from the rear of the boat. A long oar was clasped in his hands and as he drew nearer, Kellan was able to see that the man wore a ragged pair of oddly cut pants and had a blanket thrown over his brawny shoulders. Except for the shoulders and arms, the man seemed preternaturally slim, almost emaciated. An end of the blanket was flipped over the man’s head and all Kellan could see of his face was a beak of a nose and eyes that seemed to glow out of the darkness at him.

  As the boat’s side grounded on the sandbar, Kellan saw several men and women sitting in the boat and though they looked up at him with sad eyes, none of them said a word to him, though he greeted them with relief.

  "Hello! Boy, am I glad to see you! My boat sprang a leak and sank a few hours ago and I thought I was going to have to stay here all night!"

  As he made to step into the boat, the man standing at the back lifted the oar to block him and his free hand came up in the age-old gesture for payment. Kellan looked down at the pallid but calloused palm and felt a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t explain. Maybe it was the knowledge that he didn’t have a cent on him except for his lucky silver dollar. Or, maybe it was something else that he couldn’t put a name to; some sort of nameless dread. Hoping that the man would accept anything for payment, Kellan’s hand went into his pocket and came back out with the silver dollar.

  Placing it in the man’s hand, he said, "I’m sorry, Friend. This is all I have. I lost everything else in the river."

  Still silent, the man’s hand clutched the dollar and disappeared beneath the blanket as his other hand drew back the oar to let Kellan board the boat. Moving quickly to the center of the boat, he found a small bench with space between a man and a woman and sat down. He looked toward the man and saw a terrible gash in the side of his head, and wondered that the man was still alive. The gash didn’t seem to bother him, but the man mumbled constantly, signifying some sort of brain damage. Turning his head from the man, unable to bear looking at the ghastly, bloody mess, he turned his attention to the woman at his other side and saw that she was soaking wet, as though she had only recently been pulled from the water.

  She was dressed in something filmy and see-through and though it clung to her like a wet, second skin, he knew she had to be cold. Pulling off his shirt in a practiced gesture of gallantry, he tossed it around her shoulders and smiled when her head came up to look at him through the bedraggled witch-locks the wetting had made of her hair. With a shock he saw that he was looking directly into Brenda’s eyes and started back as she opened her mouth and a small stream of water poured down her chin.

  "Bill came home just after you left, Kellan. The bathtub was handy and when he saw that you had stolen his money, he was angry. Even angrier because I had been your way into his safe."

  Scrambling away from her, he bumped into the man on his other side and heard the mumbling clearly for the first time.

  "The cabbie was drunk. I don’t think he even saw the truck before it hit us. God. Who will take care of Evelyn and the kids?"

  In his panic, Kellan moved to the front of the boat, jostling the men and women sitting there and saw that each of them bore the marks of one kind of death or another. Here, a knife wound, there, a gunshot. One young man in a garish, leather jacket had a slashed throat and a bullet hole in the back of his head. Handless wrists waved in the air as he gabbled something in the language of the streets.

  As he prepared to dive into the water, Kellan felt a rough hand grasp his neck and pull him to sit on one of the low benches between the thwarts. The boatman’s eyes blazed at him from the darkness of the cowl.

  "Your fare’s been paid. You’ll stay here till arrival with the others. They’ve been waiting for you over there."

  Christina’s curse came back to him then and he sat quietly in despair. This then, was the price he was meant to pay for the things he had done. And he had unwittingly paid his own fare with the coin he had stolen from her.

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  Hammer-strokes

  The heat of the forge curled the newly-grown hair on his forearms, eradicating it from the skin yet again and all that remained of it was ash on the freckled, reddened skin. Though he wore heavy, leather gloves, his hands felt as though they were being baked as he picked up the billet of steel with the tongs and moved it quickly to the anvil. Holding the billet in place, he began beating the length of it with the heavy hammer, working his way from the end to about eight inches from the tongs. This pass was the one that would leave the feathery indentations in the steel as though it had been brushed with an angel’s wing.

  When he was finished with the blade, he doused it in the oil-bath for a few seconds and removed it, watching the flames flicker the length of the blade until the oil was burnt away, leaving nothing but a faint scent of burnt oil and a dark sheen to the steel. That would polish away easily enough before he pinned the hilt and pommel onto it. Though the blade betrayed a subtle artistry, there would be nothing fancy about the sword when he was finished. Other craftsmen could waste all the time they wanted on ‘fantasy’ swords that they wanted. They were more art than utility, anyway. Charles was more interested in utility. Any art that showed in his work would be subtle. He believed that the artistry of sword-smithing lay in making a blade that would bend without breaking and spring back, but hold an edge despite any beating it took against other blades or armor.

  His primary business was horse shoes. He was a farrier that was in high demand since this was cowboy country. Any number of people brought their horses to him to be shod, and he drove his trailer around the state servicing several
of the larger ranches. Some ranchers used helicopters and ATVs to herd their cattle, but sometimes, the cattle got into areas where you just couldn’t get to them without a horse. Since that was a truth that couldn’t be denied, every rancher still ran a stable of horses. So, Charles’ business was healthy. Healthy enough that he could afford to indulge in his hobby of making swords for re-enactors and collectors.

  Placing the blade on the worktable, he stood for a moment and removed his gloves to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The swords were nice, but he had always thought that if he had lived in the middle ages, he would have preferred a war-hammer. Maybe it was just his vocation making itself known, but he liked the idea of smashing an enemy to the ground. When he played football in school, he had been a devastating, defensive tackle. That had earned him the nickname, ‘Charles the Hammer’. Given his penchant for medieval history, it appealed to him and caused him to chuckle the first time he heard it used in connection with himself.

  Peggy, cued by the cessation of the hammer-strokes, came from the house with a cold beer in hand and he watched as her figure swayed across the yard to his workshop. Cutoff jeans so tight that they left little to the imagination, paired with a cropped t-shirt that revealed the bottoms of full breasts when she raised her arms above her head, didn’t inflame his mind the way they did the previous week when she asked if she could stay with him. Between boyfriends, she was a friendly port in a storm and at the time, just the thing to take his mind off his ex-girlfriend. He often wondered if Becky and her girlfriends were closet lesbians; the way they hung together when one of them broke up with a guy, and clung to each other when they should have been building relationships with those guys, kind of bothered him.