Lucinda Smith

I’m knocking back my fourth martini—Mennonites are Olympic fucking drinkers; that’s one of our best kept secrets—when I hear Charlee yell, “Hey, we’ve got one down!”

Being an artist and a yoga instructor, I am more observant than most. Thirty minutes before Charlee’s call to arms, I watched her sashay out of Edith’s house with Z, who was dressed like a giant fucking white rabbit and following her like—well, what else do rabbits do? I looked up at the ceiling and batted the flour out of my eyes (I had powdered myself in self-rising, head to toe, a Mennon-fucking-ite in whiteface for Edith’s albino party) and thought about how sad it was that Z had nowhere to place his Murmur love, so as soon as he set eyes on Charlee, he transferred it to her. What a loser.

Anyway, fast-forward: Charlee is yelling “we’ve got one down” and, of course, we all think it’s the white rabbit, because whom else is she out there with. We stumble like some giant, spastic, drunken amoeba into the cold night, martinis held just so in an effort not to spill a single drop of what is essentially—at this point in the night—gasoline. Edith is waving her boa as if she’s fucking Isadora Duncan. Charlee breaks away from the amoeba pack, running as if she’s some fucking angel of mercy, and throws herself over someone who is writhing on the ground and sputtering truly disgusting obscenities. The white rabbit is nowhere to be seen. And then I, before anyone else except for Charlee, realize who the asshole on the ground is.

“Why, you motherfucker!” I scream. (It’s the vodka fumes that make me do it. Being a Mennonite, I am nearly always in control of my anger. But not this time. Four vodka martinis have set me free.) I run down the steps, push Charlee out of the way, and start wailing on Billy Speare. These hands of mine, artist’s hands, which I protect even though they aren’t producing anything other than fucking seagull paintings, sting and crack as I punch the fucker over and over about his face, his chest, anywhere I can make contact.

Charlee screams, “Stop! You’re gonna kill him!” People—I don’t know who and I don’t know how many—pull me off of him. Blood—the bastard’s blood—mixes with the Dixie Lily, forming dark beads in a shotgun scatter across my skin.

“Goddamned motherfucker!” I scream. I kick him, but they have pulled me too far away for it to do any good.

“Oh my God, you poor man!” Edith flutters over Billy as people help him up. “Take him to Dr. Z’s at once. He must be treated immediately. Oh dear, oh dear.”

Charlee shoots Edith a cockeyed look, as if she, absurdly, is going to break into laughter. “No, not Z’s,” she says.

Billy pushes everyone away. “Leave me the fuck alone, you stupid sons a bitches.” He stumbles toward the road.

“No! You can’t leave in this condition!” Edith warbles.

“Let him go. He’ll be fine. It’s just a broken schnoz.” Charlee puts her arm around Edith and pats the old hag’s back.

“At least take your car!” Edith yells.

“He’ll be okay. He’s probably just going down to the beach for a minute. Let’s go back inside.” What the fuck is Charlee Mudd doing, acting as if she is running this joke of a party.

“Jesus, Lucinda, you broke his fucking nose!” Silas stares at me, his expression hard. “Goddamned.” I can’t figure if he is congratulating or scolding me.

“No she didn’t.” Charlee lets go of Edith. “Dr. Z broke his nose.” She tosses back her hair as if she is the queen of fucking Sheba and brushes past us. The screen door bangs behind her.

“Fuck it,” I say, “I’m going home.”

“Oh, mais oui! Terrible! Terrible!” Edith dabs her eyes with the tail of her boa. I don’t think she is acting. She seems genuinely fucked-up.

“Enough with the fucking bad French!” I yell as I walk down the drive. I hit the road and don’t look back. Not once. Not even when a gale smothers me with the pitiful sound of Edith sobbing.

         

Me? I didn’t cry until I was in the shower and the room was so steamed up that even my cat wouldn’t have been able to detect my tears. And I discovered something: water and flour don’t mix unless you take a whisk to them. So I had to scrub the shit off of me, the blood, too. I went through five wash rags, thanks to the clinging dough I’d inadvertently created.

Once I was clean, I just stood there, letting the water pickle me, damning myself for losing control. What the fuck had I been thinking? How could I have raised a fist to anyone, even if it was that jerk Speare? My hands were sore. I held them up to the hot water, turned them palm up, palm down, palm up, palm down.

“Dear fucking Jesus, please forgive me,” I whispered. “Please don’t let me do that again.” Maybe it was the vodka, just the vodka. I’m not really an asshole, but the liquor altered my center. It won’t ever happen again, never, never, never.

I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel. Just as I was about to run it through my hair, Lucinda Williams’s voice drifted into the thick wet air. She was accusing someone of stealing her joy, and she wanted it back. This was fucking interesting. I hadn’t stopped to turn on the stereo when I got home; I had headed straight for the bathroom. I wrapped the towel tightly around me and tiptoed down the hall and into my living room. Why was God testing me? Just because I asked for forgiveness in the fucking shower didn’t mean he immediately had to challenge the sincerity of my request by putting a freaking weirdo robber/rapist/murderer in my house so that I’d be forced to stand passively by—be the good pacifist, be the good pacifist—while the guy did who knew what to me.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Silas stood at my bookcase, riffling through the CDs. He turned around. “Well, hello to you, too. I just came by to make sure you were okay.” Dressed in a white tee and jeans, he looked like an orderly from a fucking insane asylum.

I secured my towel and stared at the floor. “Thanks.”

“Let’s take a look at those hands of yours,” he said. He walked over to me. He had this funny look in his eyes. It was as if he was trying to be kind. It creeped me out.

“That’s okay. They’re fine, really.”

He took my small painter’s hands in his big rough ones. “No, they’re not. You need to ice them.”

“Hey, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” I said as he sauntered into my kitchen.

“Yeah, Lucy, that’s why you lost it tonight.”

“Fucker,” I muttered, and sat down on the couch. He came back in with two Buds and a kitchen towel full of ice. He pressed the compress on my hands and I winced.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know.” He cracked open a beer and handed it to me.

“Because I fucking wanted to.” I shot him a you-are-dumb-as-shit glare.

“You’ve got one helluva mouth on you, girlie.” He sipped his beer, really dainty like, which was ludicrous, since he was such a big fat fucking redneck.

“I don’t like him,” I said.

“Really. Well, you sure as hell fooled all of us.”

I looked at Silas straight on, this time without too much attitude. I felt myself slipping into a momentary bout of earnestness. Fuck! “I mean it. I really don’t like him.”

“Well, he ain’t my favorite candidate of all time, either. But I just ignore him. No reason to beat on him.”

Since when did you become Mother fucking Teresa? I thought it but, to my credit, kept the insult to myself. I gritted my teeth and adjusted the compress. “Yes, there is. Yes, there fucking is.” And then things went from horrible to an all-out suck, because I started to cry. In front of him. I don’t cry in front of anyone.

But there I was, bawling my head off. And there was Silas—all of Silas—brushing away my tears and smoothing my hair and saying things like “Ah, come on now, things ain’t that bad.” And somehow—I don’t know what came over me—we started kissing and tugging at each other’s clothes (wasn’t difficult, as all I had on was a towel), and we were close to doing, you know, IT. I hadn’t done IT in six years. That and pork. And I really wasn’t into cocks. It was nothing personal. I just couldn’t do it.

Oh yeah, right. I’m such an asshole. I couldn’t do it. That’s why I said, “No, this way,” and I guided his head down there, to my place—you know, down there to my business, where I don’t let any fucking person go. Jesus. And as he did his thing, my mind wandered; it just took to a truth I had been all worked up over to avoid. In my mind’s eye, in my fucked-up soul, it wasn’t Silas going down on me. But Murmur, Murmur, Murmur. Murmur was doing me.

Yes, I know that Murmur’s door didn’t swing that way. And, hell, I don’t know if I have a door that swings at all. But I do know I always wanted to touch her. And to be swallowed by her crazy-ass laughter.

So when I said, “Baby, slow down. Yeah, like that,” I was speaking to my friend Murmur, whom I miss so, so much.

How fucked-up is that?