Just rip it off, don’t make me feel every individual hair as it’s plucked. Please, God, have mercy.
With death, more time didn’t bring peace — it just brought more sufferin’. For the dyin’, it was more time spent fallin’ apart, more pain, and more forfeited dignity. For the loved ones, it was more knotted stomachs as you stressed every time the phone rang, fearin’ the worst.Just rip that bandage off,I thought.Lord, don’t let me wither in no hospital bed with cranky nurses in pajamas all talkin’ to me like a boogered child while they empty out my crap bag. Just let me be there a moment, and then gone the next.
Easy.
Please, Jesus, if I gotta die, gimme a heart attack before you gimme cancer.
I sat just watchin’ the sunny nothin’. It was snowin’ in New Hampshire when I’d left just a few days prior, but this was Florida — swamp country. The air had weight to it, too — it made you feel like you were shufflin’ through a cloud of piss. The place had never seemed a suitable habitat for people, if you were to ask me. But most folks don’t ask much of an ex-con meat cutter, and I can’t say that I blame ’em.
I cursed the brightness and closed my eyes for a moment. I daydreamed, then, of being in a backyard I didn’t have, choppin’ logs made of the fallen trees. I fantasized of the wife I also didn’t have watchin’ me hack wood with an ax, only to see me kilt over, clutchin’ at my chest. I thought of her running to my dead side with big ol’ tears bursting from her cheeks. I liked the idea and made an oath to eat more salty meats.
It was almost 10:30. I’d been up since 5 and still hadn’t eaten. It was too early for a beer or something stronger, but already I was lookin’ forward to drownin’ myself with a few and driftin’ into the gentle numbness that soothed my heart a little. To paraphrase David Allan Coe,I needed to renew my friendship with Jim Beam. Still, I thought it’d be good to get some breakfast in me first, like a mornin’ taco or a nice road sausage. In some places it was easy to find family-run cafes that served all kinds of good fixin’s. But I was back in my old hometown of Melbourne, the soggy and diseased hole of Central Florida, so I’d soon be settling for the very kind of road sustenance that my old friend Ron ate on a regular basis, judging by the floor of the Malibu.
Mom would be getting her treatment for hours, and then she’d be asleep after that. I’d basically come all the way down again to see her for 20-minute intervals, so now I started the car and some bad pop-country music leaked through the cracked speakers on the dash.Damn, Johnny Cash is cool again, but they still play these all-hat-and-no-cattle posers instead. I reckon part of gettin’ old is hatin’ new music. I pulled out of the lot and went searchin’ for anywhere with a lit Boar’s Head sign.
To my disgust, I started thinkin’ about Helen again.
I’d broken up with her nearly a month ago, and I was still playin’ repeats of our arguments in my skull — like watchin’ sitcom reruns on a borin’ afternoon. Her madness and manipulations made for rather memorable miseries, and I found that my headspace had become a minefield of ’em. But even in my current state of heartache with Mama, I didn’t reach out to Helen. I didn’t return her late-night calls or nothin’. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of consolin’ me, because I knew that her Florence Nightingale act was just something she’d later hold over my head or even mock me for. I also knew that nothin’ made a woman claw the walls like bein’ ignored, and after the needless aneurism that she’d made of whatever the Hell we were, I figured I owed her nothin’ but the best in complete disinterest.
It’s a cowboy thang.
Her late-night messages ranged from breathy angel to frothin’ buck.
“I just want to know that you’re doing okay,” she said in Monday’s voicemail. “Even if you don’t care about me anymore, you should understand that I care about you. If situations were reversed, you’d be checking on me too.”
But Tuesday night it was her snide caw, sayin’: “Fine, Bill. Don’t even have the decency to call me back, like a gentleman would have. Like areal man would have. Fuck it all, it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Because you fucking left, just like you always do. Just run away from everything, little boy.”
I deleted her message on Wednesday without even listenin’ to it. Toleratin’ ’em was too much like being back with her: moments of warmth suddenly ruined by her broken personality, leavin’ me with nothin’ but confusing anxiety and directionless rage. That was Helen — a beautiful sex addict with a great sense of humor one minute, and a scratched record of motiveless bitchiness the next. She’d told me once that she’d been in and outta therapy for a mood disorder, but she never stuck to the meds all them shrinks had tried to give her. Havin’ been forced to see plenty of shrinks myself to get my own issues under some control, I knew she needed more help than she could ever admit to herself.
After passing abandoned strip malls that were slathered with graffiti and big ol’ “space for rent” banners, I figured that a grocery store would be my best bet for breakfast, so I pulled into the parkin’ lot of the Publix.
As I did, my cell began to hum. I feared it was the hospital first, always did. Then I thought it might be another rant or love poem from Helen, dependin’ on the coin toss of her heart. But when I pulled it from my belt, I saw that I had a text. I never sent these things, but I got them sometimes from people. I’d only recently learned how to even check them on the damned phone. I hit the button and saw the brief message: “Heard you’re back in town. Would LOVE to see you. Could be lots of fun, babe. Xxx.”
There was a winkin’ smiley face at the end of it — the type of inane crap that people should really stop doing once they hit puberty. My phone identified the caller as someone who’d had my new number for about two weeks, even though I’d known her many years ago, in the bad old days.
Whitney. For Christ’s sake, it was a flirty text from Whitney.
* * * * *
After years of refusin’ to have one due to my lack of interest in technology and even other folks, Helen had finally managed to get me onto one of them social-networkin’ web pages. She’d done it by makin’ a page for me without my askin’. From the moment I first logged in to it, a few weeks after she’d made it, I was immediately put off by all of the old familiar faces that had popped up asking to be my “friend.” All the drug addicts, criminals, sluts, lowlifes and vagabonds of yesteryear flooded my screen and tangled my nerves like a bad acid flashback. The online high-school reunion had begun. When I’d shown Helen how many of my old friends had found me on there, she became jealous.
“I haven’t had any of my old high-school friends find me on here,” she’d admitted spitefully. I remember thinkingWell, that’s probably because they remember you. I then changed my password so she couldn’t spy on me, which she woulda.
I ignored any friend requests that didn’t have personal messages added. That saved me a lot of time and really narrowed down the list. This was good because I actually had no interest in talkin’ to most people, and I didn’t want to dog-paddle through the memory swamp when I’d wasted so much time and rent checks cleansin’ myself from my dark past in the Sunshine State — cleansin’ with cheap white lightnin’ and fistfuls of trazadone and lamotrigine. If I was expected to bother with people in any capacity, I figured they’d better start things off with some sort of openin’ letter like decent people used to do.
Most of ’em didn’t. But Whitney did.
It had been nothin’ at first. I was with Helen, and I don’t mess around behind my woman’s back, not even when she’s a moody bitch who seemed to feed off of startin’ petty fights. Whitney was just a gal I’d gone to high school with. We’d never dated or made out on a crate behind the Jiffy Mart or nothin’. I never took her in the back of my El Camino, like I did with all those young cowgirls, back in the dust of the badlands where we’d all drag-raced ’n’ bonfire-boxed away our poverty-stricken youths.
Whitney’s emails were basic at first, just playin’ catch-up on the last 16 years.<
br />
She was married with three kids. She seemed to love the kids but was bored by her husband. Really bored. She loved country music — both the old stuff, like me, and the new stuff, like everybody else. She’d never left our hometown. She didn’t work, but she was trying to start some sort of outlaw-chicks calendar shoot. I could see why, from the photo shoots she did and posted on her web page with allurin’ pride.
She had a solid body and a lustful, feline face. Her hair was a tornado of dyed flame — gets me every time — and she had very nice, although very fake, breasts. The outlaw flare was obvious. In the photos she was always smokin’ and brandishin’ semi-automatic weapons. Sometimes she’d be runnin’ her tongue up the barrel of a magnum. Sometimes she’d be firing them topless. In one picture, she actually had a shotgun in her hands that was shootin’ milk all over the place. Not sure how she did that one. Soon enough she was sendin’ me private ones that were much raunchier — full nudes and full autos.
It’s a Florida thang.
She wore raggedy jean skirts that were cut so short you could see her panties, and she must have had a treasure chest full of cowboy hats because she always had on a different one. Her ears were riddled with earrin’s that hung about her shoulders in festoons, remindin’ me of my boyhood hero, Mr. T, but somehow arousin’. Her lipstick was always slightly smeared, like she’d just been kissed, and her hair and clothin’ was always rustled, like she’d just been rollin’ in the hay with a grizzly.
Whitney, the redneck wet dream.
We had emailed back and forth a little, but then when I broke things off with Helen I made the mistake of lettin’ Whitney know. Her messages became heavy flirts that I would have responded to if I hadn’t been so despondent over Mama’s ailin’ health and my breakin’ up with Helen — yet another failure in an ever-growin’ line. But just a few nights before my flight to be with Mom, in a moment of drunkenness, I emailed Whitney my phone number, which she’d been askin’ for. Now she was reachin’ out to me, practicallybeggin’ for it, and I needed a distraction from reality. I needed a euphoric painkiller, even if for only a few hours, and the Lortabs the doc had given me for my old prison rodeo injuries just weren’t cuttin’ it. The mind can be so cruel and relentless with heartache. Sometimes sex is the only thing strong enough to really distract a man from real sufferin’. I’d always tried to remind myself that my obsession with it wasn’t as bad as a lot of other addictions and sins. Man is a carnal bein’, after all.
I figured dumbass Ron must have told Whitney I was in town, or that maybe my phone “checked me in” to Florida without me knowin’ it. Helen had certainly set up enough weird and unnecessary applications on the darned thang. At any rate, Whitney knew I was here, and I knew she was makin’ her intentions as clear as the fountain that spews in front of that damn hospital.
But she was married. Unhappily, but married.
Jesus, is this what you’d call a mixed blessin’? Or is this my old friend Lucifer, who doesn’t ever need the Internet or a cellphone to find me? He finds me just fine, and too often at that.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror.
“Shit, it’s good to be home,” I said, “but it’s a bad day for the angel on our shoulder.”
* * * * *
Whitney didn’t want to be called, only texted.
Her text:Discretion, please.
Her next text:I will call you soon from another phone.
I ate my sub while sittin’ in yet another parkin’ lot, watching’ the afternoon clouds move over that flat land, rumblin’. It was hot, but it was better that I stay in the car anyhow. I avoid public places as much as I can these days. People rub me the wrong way, and I rub them even worse — like sandpaper. I deal with ’em enough as it is at the meat counter, and it’s the worst part of my job.
My phone rang.
“Yeah?” I said, hopin’ for Whitney.
“Mr. O’Rourke?” an older woman said back.
“Who’s callin’?”
“This is Nurse Cooper at the hospital.”
“And?”
“I just wanted to let you know that your mom is going to be resting for a while longer now.”
“Y’all make sure she gets water, now.”
“She’s asleep now.”
“Every time I see her, her lips are all dry and cracked.”
She gave me a pause and an exhausted sigh — the nerve of this old witch.
“Sir, we are giving her the best care we can right now, okay?”
The tone seemed condescendin’.
“Naw, she’s dyin’,” I said, “and you’re milkin’ her like a tipped cow.”
Another pause.
“You can speak to my supervisor if that pleases you, sir.”
“Hell, I can speak to anyone I want,” I said. “Just don’t go havin’ the bedside manner of an eel.”
She hung up on me. Folks often do. It was a landline, too, so it had that satisfyin’ slam sound.
I tried to go back to my sandwich but I just wasn’t hungry anymore. Now I was gettin’ the rage heat that likes to burst inside my chest like a dynamited mine.
Not now, Lord. I asked for a heart attack, but not now.
But it was just the anger — the heavy and very physical reaction I have to rage. The nurse practitioner I see for my meds tells me it’s some kind of “explosive” disorder mixed with PTSD, brought on by years of underground boxing, my prison time for manslaughter, and havin’ grown up with a father who thought he was still back in the jungle, killin’ Charlie, when I was a little boy.
I reckon that’s why Pop pulled us all outta Texas ’n’ moved us to Florida in the first place. It was a familiar jungle — just like the one he’d suffered in during the bloody, frenzied dreams that would make him shoot up in the middle of the night and grab his young son, having him lock and load because he thought the gooks were behind the tree line.
Florida. It was hell and home all at once.
The phone rang again, and I wanted it to be the hospital then, maybe a supervisor I could give a solid tongue-lashin’ to.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Billy Joe?” a younger woman asked. No one had called me that since I’d passed 30, except for Mama a’course. And this wasn’t Mama. Dad and Sis being dead, I didn’t hear people call me Billy Joe much. Up north it was just Bill. In prison it was William Joseph O’Rourke, just like at my baptism. Only someone from the bad old days would call me that.
“Speakin’,” I said.
“It’s Whitney, baby.”
Her voice turned sultry. She was givin’ me her best Jessica Rabbit. It was workin’ too. The burnin’ in my chest turned into a stirrin’ in my loins.
“What’s your 20, girl? Where ya’ at?” I asked.
“Somewhere discreet.”
“In Melbourne?”
“Holopaw. But we can’t meet there.”
“Let’s meet soon. You want discretion. That’s understandable. But I’m on a tight schedule.”
She didn’t know why I was in town, or so I guessed, and I didn’t want to bring it up. I was about to ask how she heard I was in town ’t all but she made me lose the thought with her retort.
“Really? A tight schedule? Well, I have something even tighter for you, cowboy.”
I looked at myself in the mirror again for no real reason.
“Tonight?” I asked.
“I have a place picked out. How is Christmas for you?”
“Kinda crass for a holiday, but the town of Christmas ain’t too far from here, I reckon. About fitty miles as the crow flies.”
“Only takes me about 40 minutes on my bike.”
“Still ridin’ that old rice burner?” I asked, remembering her winning races in the badlands long ago.
“Oh, no, no. It’s only hogs for this gal.”
“Nice upgrade. Glad you’re still a rider. Good to see that some things never change, Whitney.”
“Call me Scarlet Red.”
I chuckled at how thick she was spoonin’ out the fantasy.
“Do you want me tonight or not?” she said back, insulted.
“Alright,” I said, tryin’ to laugh it off. “Scarlet Red it is. That’s cool. It suits you.”
“It’s discreet.”
There was a pause. The only one speakin’ was the angel on my shoulder, tryin’ to get me to back out. But Scarlet Red interrupted.
“I like the pictures on your page,” she said. “You don’t have too many up, but you still look great. Still a boxer, huh?”
“No, but I try to stay in shape.”
“Good. Me too.”
“I can tell.”
There was another weird pause.
“So where’s this place we’re going, ’n’ when?” I asked, that devil on my shoulder doin’ cartwheels and frothin’ like a rabid hound.
“Can’t wait to get down to it, huh?”
“I could use a good lay.”
“Likewise, and I remember when Sally Slader fucked you in the back of your El Camino one night. Remember her?”
“Mightin’ if I saw her again. I’m better with faces than names.”
“She sure remembers you. She said you were the best fuck of her life.”
I snorted at that one.
“Come on, shush. We were just teens, her life at that time was pretty short. She must have been 16 at the oldest.”
“Those were the days,” she said, oddly pausing. “So, anyway, there’s an old motel out on Possum Lane. It’s called The Palm Tree Inn. Be there in about ’n hour. I’ll take care of the room. Tell the clerk you are there to see Scarlet Red and he’ll give you a key. He won’t ask you who you are, and you shouldn’t offer it none. Discretion, above all else, please.”
“All right then.”
“I’ll arrive shortly after and will go right to your room. Don’t wait for me in the lobby — it’s shitty anyway. I’ll come to you, understand?”
“Yeah. Can I bring anythin’?”
“Nope. I have everything we need, plus some fun surprises. I’ll be bringing some Natty Ice for myself, and as I recall, you’re a whiskey drinker. I have a bag with everything we need.”
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