When a deer bleeds out, its fluids get solidified by the Mississippi sun into a dark red skein on the road. They make great Rorschach tests. It’s been such a traumatic day, I’m half expecting a stag to come smashing through my windshield. Fuck it, I decide. I don’t even care. I welcome you, stag. There are worse ways to go. Maybe I’ll get one of those cool highway crosses that freak everyone out.
Shocked that I finally broke up with Miko—that really happened, right?—I turn onto 315, the Town Car bobbing and lulling, then I call up this guy David at the hospital in Memphis to double-check payment. Right away he gets pissed about having to give me his credit card numbers.
“Hey, you want me to show up or not?” I interrupt him.
After he recites the numbers petulantly, I utter an overly polite goodbye—a trick I’ve learned from Stella—and hang up. We’re off to a bad start, David and me, but who cares? I am sitting on a loaded gun, after all. Don’t fuck with me, I think. Don’t fuck with me.
Twenty minutes later I turn onto a private road that snakes through pine into the whitewashed rehab complex. Halfway into that maze I hit the brakes. There’s a woman in a tie-dye shirt and jeans sitting cross-legged on a boulder surrounded by white garbage bags. For a moment she seems otherworldly, like a goddess straddling her haphazard planet with its orbit of lumpy white moons. Once the brakes have quieted, I roll down the passsenger window and lean across the bench seat to ask if she’s waiting for a cab.
“No, I’m communing with nature here, can’t you tell? God, what is wrong with you people?”
Her accent is hard to place but definitely not Mississippi. The woman—Samantha, right?—is wearing a Ben & Jerry’s tee shirt that I likely tie-dyed in a previous life. I take the shirt as a bad sign. She’s younger than me—about forty, I’d guess—her hair a healthy brown fountain spilling without design onto a face that is round and slightly freckled in a mock-wholesome way. I help her load her trash bags into my car. She is amazed at how large my trunk is.
“Hey, what’s wrong with this cab? I feel like Shaquille O’Neal here.”
I tell her the air shocks deflated, that it happens all the time.
“No big deal,” I add.
“No big deal,” she repeats in a waning voice. Then, as she is getting into the car, she says, “Samantha Gillespie, when last seen . . .”
Once we’re moving—she’s in the front seat—I ask if she had to escape out the window.
“Why? Does that happen a lot? Do you know what goes on back there?”
“A little. I mean, I’ve picked up people here before. At least you got your things. Usually they don’t let you have your stuff back if you leave early.”
“Jesus, do you think I showed up here with garbage bags? I had to throw my shit out the window. They even kept my iPhone. God knows what they’re doing with that. I mean, there’s some pretty personal videos on that phone.”
“They said they’d ship it to you, right?”
“Yeah. Were they lying?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m just repeating things other people said. I had one passenger who jumped out the window.”
“Of your cab?”
“No.” I laugh but then stop when it starts sounding spooky. “He jumped out of the, you know, the hospital—the clinic, whatever—um, window. To escape, like.” I shake my head. “I’ve had a long day,” I add mysteriously.
“You’ve had a long day?” she repeats. “Look, mister Mississippi taxi driver, can I please use your cell phone there so I can actually pay you for this ride? I’ve got to get my husband to transfer money onto my card. I still can’t believe what happened to me back there. I’m in shock right now. Don’t pay attention to anything I say. Seriously, what is wrong with you people?” She pauses. “You didn’t pay any attention to that, right?”
“Right. I take it you’re not from around here.”
“Hell, no.” She crosses herself before picking up my phone with two fingers like it’s infected with Ebola. “I might as well be from Mars the way everyone kept staring at me. Chrome? Who the fuck uses Chrome, dude? Mississippi goddamn. Hey, you’re not going to take me into the woods and do God knows what to me while some retard plays a banjo, are you? Seriously, what the fuck?”
The moment she says this, I get that Deliverance song stuck in my head.
“I’m from West Hollywood,” she adds. “Where the stars go to die.”
I’m curious about what happened to her in rehab, but my sense is it’s better to wait and let it unfurl. Instead of asking her questions, I start searching for deer. It’s odd how I can forget about the deer for hours on end and then suddenly I’ll get all paranoid and start scouring the roadside for that suicide-bomber buck.
“Hey honey,” she says into my phone using a childlike voice. At first I think she’s talking to me that way. “Let me speak to your daddy.” She waits, then, using a more natural tone, this one resigned and gruff, she says, “Hey Frank. Yeah. I know, you were right. You’re always right. I fucked up. Again. Yes, I’m in a cab being driven by an escaped convict with no teeth. Wait. That was a lie probably. Do you have teeth?”
I smile awkwardly, a death-mask grimace.
“Okay, I was wrong about that, too. They’re kinda green, but he has teeth.” She winks at me like we’re confederates. This makes me like her for the first time. It’s weird the things that make me like people. “Yeah, if he doesn’t strangle me then I’m on my way to the airport in . . . where is it? Mount Pilot? Hooterville?”
“Memphis.”
“Hear that? Yes, he sounds normal. God knows where they’ll find my body. No. Just don’t go there now. It’ll be so much more fun to say it to my face. Anyway we’re going to be rich once we sue those redneck bastards.” She raises her middle finger toward the rearview. “In the meantime—okay—do I have to say it again?—look, I need you to transfer some money. And can you please buy me a ticket on the next flight out of . . . what’s the name of the airport?
“Memphis. Memphis International.”
“International? You get that, hon? Memphis Inter-national in say—” She looks over at me, but I’m still listening to banjo boy.
“How long to Memphis, Billy Clyde?”
Again, I’m a step behind. The sarcastic redneck name throws me off.
“He’s had a long day,” she says into the phone.
I try, without much success, to estimate our arrival time factoring in the busted shocks, bald tires, and death-scream brakes. Thinking about my tires reminds me I don’t have a jack. Usually I borrow Horace’s when I get a Memphis run. But it’s too late now.
“Hour and a half, if we’re lucky.”
“My cabbie seems to have no idea, but guesses we’ll be there in just over an hour. That is, if he doesn’t take me into the woods to dismember me. Seriously, his eyes point in opposite directions.” She winks at me again. “Frank, you would not believe what I’ve been through with these imbeciles. I know, I know, but they told me that they specialized in sex addiction. Not everything is my fault, you know? Doctors aren’t supposed to lie to sick people. Look, okay, just transfer the goddamn money so I can pay this poor guy. Otherwise God only knows what he’ll do to me. Will you please tell my husband what you’ll do to me if he doesn’t transfer money into my account?”
She holds the phone toward me.
“God only knows,” I say.
She grins. As her grin subsides, her eyebrows slowly rise—she has awesome eyebrows—then she clamps her hand over the receiver to ask me how much.
“How much what?”
“Duh, baby. How much you going to charge me? God, is that fucking Shakespeare? Am I dreaming this?”
“One fifty.”
“He says it’s two fifty. Plus tip. And—get this—he has a fucking Shakespeare air freshener.”
“It’s Shakespeare-mint,” I whisper.
“You’d tell me if this were a dream, right, hon? God, what if I’m back there in the clinic sound asleep? What if I’m still there?”
While they talk, I put on Beethoven in an attempt to drown out the Deliverance soundtrack, but instead it’s like Beethoven gets infiltrated by some random inbred banjo. Whatever, I’m going with it. Sex addiction? To my eye she looks too suburban for that. I’d expect tattoos or something. Not that I really know much about sex addicts. Come to think of it, my life has been tragically bereft of sex addicts.
She puts my phone back in its holster.
“He says he’s going to transfer the money in fifteen minutes. Is that fucking Beethoven you put on? Beethoven. Shakespeare. Will wonders never cease?”
That confuses me too. The wonders-never-ceasing part. The syntax doesn’t make sense to my sleep-deprived brain.
“Hey, is that Bigfoot?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. It’s, uh, wintergreen. No, wait. Shakespeare’s winter . . . ah, fuck it.”
“We used to call him Big Muddy Man where I grew up.”
“Huh? Why would you call Shakes—”
“Not Shakespeare, idiot, Bigfoot.”
“Oh. But . . . where are you from?”
“Stratton.”
I can’t even remember what state that’s in, but for some reason it makes me think of Rolling Rock beer and the enigmatic number 33.
“Beethoven in Mississippi? I’m pretty sure you’re trying to impress me.”
“No. I mean, I put on Beethoven because you got that banjo boy song stuck in my head. You know, boing-boing-boing-boing.”
She stares at me with spectacular skepticism as I continue to make inexplicable sound effects.
“I’m going to wake up any minute now,” she decides and pulls down the sun visor. But right away she pushes it back up and says, “Gawd!—it’s a fucking broken mirror, dude!—what are you trying to do to me?” Then she pulls the visor down again and smudges her finger across one eyebrow. Next she examines her finger the way my dad always did after he picked his nose. “It’s my own damn fault for being so cheap. They told me they specialized in sex addiction. Back when I was trying to decide which center to go to in order to save my crappy marriage.”
Tall cars keep passing my deflated cab, their passengers staring down at us as if we are children.
“But they don’t,” she adds a minute later.
“Don’t what?” I ask in my charming inbred manner.
I turn to look at her—I’m trying to decide how I should react to her inevitable grope when she goes all Tiff on me—and suddenly I’m positive that I really did tie-dye the tee shirt molded around her breasts. The shirt is so tight it appears the tie-dye has been airbrushed onto her nakedness.
“They don’t specialize in sex addiction. I was the only one being treated for that. Everyone else was junkies. Who all made fun of me. Well, mostly they just stared at my tits with their mouths open. And they kept making passes at me, too. God, and those accents, I mean, seriously, that’s for real? You people really talk that way to each other in private? One guy there had six fingers. Thank God he didn’t make a pass at me. Actually he was nice—he’s the one who helped me throw my shit out the window. By the way, what took you so long to get there?”
I ask how long she had to wait.
“Hours. The first cab company never showed up at all. The nurses wouldn’t even let me back into the office. Finally the one nice person there—the one fucking human being—called you. But it’s not like you exactly rushed over, huh?”
“Sorry. But you’re in the sticks.”
“No kidding? Boing. Boing-boing-boing-boing.”
“Don’t do that. He really had six fingers?”
She shudders and stares forward with the eyes of a figurehead.
A moment later she whispers, “On each hand.”
Once again I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.
“He had—it was like a little extra pinkie finger, just a stub, growing sideways out of the bottom knuckle of his real pinkie. On both hands.”
I close my eyes in order not to imagine that. But I see it anyway. The image develops in my mind like a Polaroid. Then I swerve back onto the road.
“My bad,” I say.
“And Jesus God, group therapy—what they called group therapy, was all these men with gorged-out eyes and cracker teeth just staring at me like they expected me to start masturbating at any moment.”
After a moment of contemplative silence, I say, “You should have gone to Hattiesburg instead.”
“Hattiesburg? What’s that?”
“My hometown. South of the state. It’s where Tiger Woods went for, you know, sex addiction. It’s like the only time Hattiesburg’s ever been famous for anything. There was this photograph of Tiger standing on the roof of the clinic huddled over a cigarette looking like he wanted to jump.”
“Yeah, well, Tiger can afford it. Though by the time I finish suing those bastards they are going to have to name that place after me. The Samantha Gillespie Institute for the Criminally Hypersexed. Hey, you mind pulling into that store? I need some beer.”
Criminally hypersexed? I’m thinking as I park. I wonder if beer will make her lose control. I wonder if I want her to. Then I start thinking about sex addiction and decide she probably has some disease. That’s how they know they’re addicts, right? Maybe she gave it to her husband. Thinking this and other less-than-arousing thoughts, I examine my teeth and eyes in the rearview until Samantha steps outside the convenience store lighting a cigarette. That is definitely one of my Vermont tie-dyes, I conclude. She gets in, removes a Corona longneck from the black plastic bag, and opens it with her lighter. The cap leaps into the back seat like a small acrobat.
“No smoking,” I say.
“Fuck you, Billy Clyde,” she replies and exhales orgasmically.
I laugh. Again, I like her for her abject rudeness.
“Great selection back there. You want one?”
I say no thanks.
“Hattiesburg, huh? So how come you don’t talk like they do?”
I ponder that a moment.
“Too much TV, I guess. When I was a kid I was obsessed with Bonanza. You know, the Western. I forced myself to talk just like Little Joe. I was pretty much in love with Little Joe until I hit puberty. Also Davy Jones. God, I’ll never love a woman as much as I loved Davy.” She studies me clinically as I continue to babble about my relationships with various teen heartthrobs. “And Bobby Sherman. Wow, I’d forgot about Bobby. I had an older sister who raised me on TigerBeat magazine. I used to hang their pictures up on my walls just like she did—I’m sure my dad was concerned. David Cassidy. Oh, David. I bet I still know the words to every Partridge Family song.”
As soon as I say that, the banjo boy in my head starts plucking out “I Think I Love You” with Beethoven accompanying on piano.
“Is this where you turn down the dirt road and take the chain saw out of the trunk?”
“Trust me, if I had a chain saw it’d be hocked. This is where we hit Highway 55 south. North, I mean. You sure you’re going to be able to pay me?”
“Oh. Shit. You mind?”
She takes my phone again and a couple of minutes later reports, “Maybe he’s given up on me this time. Maybe he’s abandoning me to the natives.”
I ease my foot off the gas.
“Please don’t. If you kick me out here, I’ll end up living in a double-wide with some four-hundred-pound guy in overalls and a bunch of kids with fingers growing out of their eyelids.”
I push down on the accelerator in an attempt to dispel that image.
“Fuck it. I’m going to Memphis anyway. You can rip me off if you have to.”
I turn down the volume on Beethoven and spy on her until she catches me and gives me the bug eye.
“Quit staring at my tits.”
“I wasn’t,” I say. “I was looking at your shirt. I think I made that shirt. It’s called a spider. The tie-dye design is. Basically you fold spiders just like spirals except you paint one half a solid color then rainbow the other half in pie slices.”
“This? This shirt?”
She gestures down to her airbrushed breasts. I linger there only a moment before swerving back onto the interstate.
“Yeah. I used to run a teenage sweatshop for Ben & Jerry’s. Back when I lived in Vermont I had the largest tie-dye contract in America—maybe in the world. I was so overworked it wrecked my marriage plus it didn’t pay shit. I’d underestimated costs when we negotiated the contract. They knew what they were doing, those hippie bastards. Yeah, they screwed me over good. Fuck Ben. Fuck Jerry.”
“You seem distraught.”
I lower my bird finger from the rearview.
“That keeps getting pointed out. I’m okay, I think. It’s just that my Adderall is wearing off.”
“Adderall? Ooh, I’d blow a dead cat for an Adderall right now.”
Again, I have to close my eyes. Once we’re back on the road I tell her, “I only had the one. I found it on the floorboard.”
“You found an Adderall on the floorboard of this cab?”
“Yeah. Happens all the time. It’s like these college kids are just raining prescription drugs.”
“And you put it into your mouth?”
I nod. “Also I found this one with it.”
I fish the pill out of my pocket and show it to her. As she takes it from my hand, one of her fingers runs across my palm light as a feather.
“It’s green,” I point out.
“I see it is.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I will once you give me your phone.”
She takes my cell and a few minutes later identifies it as some kind of Xanax knockoff.
“Can I have? Please-please-please.”
“Sure, go for it.”
She puts it into her mouth, her eyes shutting for that one moment of swallow. It makes her resemble a doll, the way her eyes pop open. Then she remembers the beer and sips from that.
“I love this song,” I tell her. “It was found in Beethoven’s underwear drawer after he died. It never even got played while he was alive. It’s a bagatelle.”
“A bagatelle? What’s a bagatelle?”
“I got no idea. I used to know, but now . . .”
My voice tapers off and she lowers the phone as if curious to see what might come out of my mouth next. It’s like her eyebrows are daring me on. She waits another beat, just to make sure, then begins pecking at my phone.
“All the flights are full,” she announces five minutes later. “Fuck me.”
She sets the phone down on her lap in a way that mimics throwing it. Following her hand there, and eyeing the longneck wedged between her thighs, I suggest she try flying standby.
“After what I’ve been through? Fuck that. I’m going to get a hotel room and a big bottle of whiskey. As soon as my dear husband, who’s probably consulting a divorce lawyer right now, comes across with some bread.”
“I really wish you weren’t wearing that shirt,” I tell her.
She gives me another eyebrow dare.
“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s like I’m having a sweatshop flashback. Like I’m about to start screaming at teenage girls. Wear your goddamn masks! Wear your goddamn gloves!”
“And they never understood why he killed her.”
She gets on the phone again. Using her resigned voice, she says, “Sweetie, since there’s no seats available, I’m getting a room and a big bottle of whiskey. Just kidding ha-ha. I really am getting a room, though.” She shoots me a wink and mimes guzzling from a bottle. “Please send me some money so the cabdriver will stop being mean to me. Otherwise I think he’s going to disperse me in the woods. Are you going to disperse me in the woods?”
Again, she holds the phone toward me.
“Anything’s possible,” I say.
After putting down the phone, she reports, “Ten minutes tops. He said to tell you not to disperse me.”
“I’m pretty harmless actually.”
“That’s what all the great ones say. Hmm, I think I’m going to get drunk in a room at the . . . the Courtyard Marriott? Yes, that sounds perfectly lovely. You don’t know what I’ve been through or you’d never stop consoling me. Send the money, Frank. Goddamnit send the money already.” She leans forward to squint at my taxi ID card taped to the dash.
“Lou Bishoff,” she says.
“Yep.”
“Hawaii?”
“Yep. Fuck Mississippi. I’m a goddamn Hawaiian.”
“You were really born in Honolulu?”
“I was. Except my mom—she was from south Mississippi—she hated living on an island and made my father move us back here when I was four.”
“Wow. He must have loved her a lot.”
“No, not really.”
“You’re old. Can you remember Hawaii at all?”
“Nah. Well, I can remember one morning walking down Waikiki Beach toward Diamond Head, and there were all these starfish on the sand—all different colors—and my mother told me they were safe to pick up because they were dead. That’s what freaked me out and made me remember that day. It was like I suddenly understood the concept of death. All the beautiful starfish were, you know, dead, and I was so sad it . . . anyway, that’s my first memory of life on earth.” I cough a few times—I’m allergic to cigarettes—then I tell her, “My second memory is throwing up on a plane to Mississippi.”
I risk another glance-over. She’s staring at her reflection in the side-view mirror and nibbling on the edge of her ring finger. There’s no wedding band there. Maybe she hocked it. Or maybe she lost it in some guy’s anus. Trying to avoid such thoughts, I make myself think about Hawaii, about the time Miko and I hiked the Na Pali trail together. She sprained her ankle and I had to piggyback her through miles of switchbacks until we arrived at Kalalau Beach, the most beautiful place on earth. The paradise where I wasn’t raised.
Oh, Miko. We were happy once, but that was so long ago.
Samantha startles me out of my reverie by saying, “You can read, too?”
She’s holding up my paperback, the one about early Buddhism. I look around trying to decide where we are and how long I’ve been driving on zombie autopilot. My eyes must have stayed open or she would have screamed, right?
“You’re a Buddhist?”
“Yeah, kinda. My girlfriend Miko got me interested in Buddhism. Actually she’s not my girlfriend anymore. I broke up with her today.”
“You broke up with your girlfriend? Today?”
“I told you I’ve had a hard day. Anyway, I bought that book, because, well, I’m hoping it helps me stop flipping people off in traffic. It’s getting to be a problem. One day I’m gonna flip off the wrong dude. We all have guns down here.”
“Do you have one?”
“One what?”
“A gun.”
I hesitate a bit too long to lie.
“What kind?” she asks.
“A nine,” I tell her, which comes out sounding like a question.
“On you?”
“I guess.”
“Can I hold it?”
I think about that. It’s a complicated moment here, what with the gun purportedly being “lucky.” For an instant I imagine Samantha holding the gun while taking me inside her mouth. Then I imagine her pointing the gun and demanding my kitty before potting me in the head.
“That’s probably not a good idea,” I decide.
“Please. I’ve never held a real gun before. Can I at least see a picture of it?”
“A picture? Who the hell takes pictures of their gun?”
Then I think about Kirby, who has a miniature replica of his revolver dangling from the rearview of his cab. Just to make sure everybody knows what he’s sitting on.
“People take pictures of everything, dude. God, I hope they aren’t looking through my phone right now. Does it have a name?”
“Name? What?—does my gun have a name?”
“Yeah. Like the Widow Maker or something.”
“The Widow Maker?”
“Something like that. You definitely need to name your gun. It’s like having a pet.”
“I don’t even like guns.”
“If you don’t like them then why do you have one?”
“Long story. It kinda comes with the car.”
“You sure I can’t hold it?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
She mock pouts for the next mile while I search for deer.
“This is such bullshit,” she says.
When I look over, she’s pointing at something inside the book.
“It says here that everything’s impermanent and that even the cells in your body replace themselves every seven years. But that’s bullshit. Your brain cells don’t replace themselves and neither do the ones in your immune system. They’re the same ones you’re born with. That’s something I learned in Mississippi. That and the medical term poke hole.”
I can’t rally a reply, but while falling back to sleep I think about what she said, about brain cells and memory and dead starfish and poke holes. I dream about Hawaii, about Miko floating naked on the waves off Kalalau. I wake up fast, riveted upright by fear because it’s the only time I’ve fallen asleep and had a dream while driving.
The bank transfer still hasn’t come through by the time we hit Memphis traffic.
“Elvis Presley Boulevard,” she muses as we pass under that sign. “Good God.”
“Not an Elvis fan?”
“You kidding? Elvis was the world’s biggest perv. I read a book about him once. All he did was finger sixteen-year-old girls. He never fucked a grown woman in his life. And he wouldn’t even fuck the little girls he fingered, because then he’d lose interest in them afterwards, so he just kept fingering them to death. Uh-oh. You’re not going to shoot me with your gun for making fun of Elvis, are you?”
I shrug, wait a moment, then tell her, “I never used to like Elvis, either, until I went to Graceland.”
“Ooh, you went to Graceland. What’s that like?” But before I can reply, she says, “I wonder who molested more children, Michael or Elvis? I’d like to see that chart. Not a pie chart, either. Like one with a line of little kids instead of numbers. Probably Michael, I’m guessing. I mean, at least Elvis didn’t build an entire amusement park around fingering kids.”
Imagining that chart makes me forget what I was going to say. And suddenly I’ve got that Public Enemy song about Elvis mixed into the morass of Beethoven meets banjo boy. Straight up racist. Boing-boing-boing. Simple and plain. Da-da-da-dum. Motherfuck him and John Wayne.
“It’s kinda like religion,” I say.
“What is?”
“Graceland. Going to Graceland is. Like you start off as this atheist Elvis-hater in the whatever, the living room. Wall-to-wall cracker heaven, right? It’s a fucking ranch house. Then you enter the gold-record room, and you’re like holy shit it’s like nine million gold records in here!—I didn’t know there were that many destitute black songwriters in the Delta. Still trying to be cynical, you know? Then finally you enter the jumpsuit room and it’s game over. You fall to your knees, and by the time you walk outside to the family gravesite by the cement pond you’re devoted to Elvis forever.”
“If you didn’t like Elvis, why’d you go to Graceland? I mean, you don’t like guns, and you got a gun. You don’t like Elvis, and you go to Graceland. Are you some kind of masochist who likes being tied up and shit?”
I consider that.
“I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve never tried it. It might be cool.”
“Not me. I prefer the other end of the whip.”
We get quiet for a minute as a series of images flutter through my brain like a flip-book in which I am tied to a bed being whipped by a gun-wielding stick-figure Samantha.
“I went to Graceland because I took my son there when he was recovering from a car accident. He had to wear a neck brace for three months and he stayed with me the whole time. I’d never seen anybody so miserable. But he loves music, so one day I took him to Graceland, and it was, I dunno, I’m sorry, but it was incredible. I’ll always love Elvis for that day with my son—even if he did finger sixteen-year-old girls. Elvis is the fucking king.” I take my foot off the accelerator and tell her, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my cab now.”
I wait a second and add, “That was a joke.”
“Oh. Good. I wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah, nobody in Vermont ever got my jokes, either. They take things literally up there. In Mississippi we say the opposite of what we mean.”
She’s about to disparage that custom, but then changes her mind—I can see the transition in her face—and instead she asks me about my son, about his accident, and I give her the brief rendition, which ends with the Bad Motherfucker wallet.
“So he recovered okay?”
“Yeah. He’s fine. Good as new. He owns a record store now and kicks my ass in chess every day. It’s funny—I mean, weird—I still hate getting beat by him in chess even though there was a time when I’d have cut off both my arms to lose a game of chess to him again.”
“You’d have to move with your teeth.”
“Huh?”
“Without any arms.”
“Oh,” I say, but I’m only pretending to understand.
“How long was your son in a coma?”
“Just a couple weeks. Nowhere near the family record.”
“You have a family coma record?”
“Yeah. My mom owns the record at three and a half months. I mean, I guess she owns it. She died—I was eighteen—so maybe hers doesn’t count. In which case my dad would own the record at three weeks for the first time he committed suicide.”
“The first time?”
“Yeah. He botched it. With pills. Was in a coma for three weeks, came out of it, then signed one of those do-not-resuscitate contracts and did it again. That second time he went into another coma, for a month, but I guess that one doesn’t count, either, because he died. I’m the only person in my family that’s never been in a coma—knock on . . .”—I glance around the cab—“ . . . Shakespeare,” I say and thump his monstrous forehead with one knuckle and send him spinning.
“Dude, I don’t know if I’d go knocking on Shakespeare for good luck. I mean, didn’t he basically torture his characters to death?”
I ponder that. Yes, I decide, she’s right. That’s exactly what Shakespeare did. He created the most fascinating people on earth and then made them grovel for their deaths.
“Speaking of torture, how long were you married?”
“Huh?”
“How-long-were-you-married?”
“Oh. Just long enough to get talked into moving to Vermont. As soon as we got there she divorced me, and after that I was stuck in this blizzard that lasted eighteen years. That seasonal depression shit, it doesn’t play around. By May every year I’d be walking through the woods and all I’d do—I couldn’t stop doing this—I’d start picking out good trees to hang myself from. That was my relationship with nature.”
“Hey, I got an idea. Why come you don’t use that gun of yours to kill my husband? Then we could both be rich. We could live in Mexico. Or Hawaii.”
I think that over.
“That’s probably not a good idea, either.”
I’m turning my attention back to the road when I hear a voice inside my head. It’s a new voice, Eastwood-esque, and it says three words and stops and doesn’t say anything else.
“I’m Black Magic,” I repeat.
“What?”
“Nothing. I think I just named my gun.”
“Black Magic? That’s what you’re naming it?”
“Yeah, that’s its name.”
She mulls this over.
“It’s kinda a spooky name, for a gun, if you ask me. But the important thing is that you like it.” A minute later, she adds, “It’d be a better name for a horse than a gun.”
It’s dusk when we get off at the hotel exit and park under the awning outside the Marriott.
“Still nothing,” she says and shrugs.
I have all her stuff locked in my trunk. This is understood between us as I kill the engine and an almost audible awkwardness descends upon the cab. We open our doors when the air-conditioning wears off and steal glances at each other.
Suddenly my phone rings.
“Hon?” she says. “He’s got a gun. Did I mention that he has a gun?” She listens for a minute, nods, and finally she wrinkles her nose and says, “Okay, baby. I know. This sucks. I’m sorry. Thank you. No, I wasn’t making that up, he really does have a gun. It’s named Black Magic. I offered him money to shoot you with it, but he wouldn’t do it. He’s like the last honest cabbie.”
After hanging up she shrugs at me again. Like she has no idea about anything.
“He said he did it twenty minutes ago, that’s all I know.”
“Did what?”
“Transferred the money, idjut.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
We sit there waiting under the flickering blue neon. A grasshopper lands on the hood and makes me wonder if the old farmer I left in that trailer is a skeleton now. Was that yesterday or today? I can’t decide. My life doesn’t really feel divided into days and nights anymore. A different system of measurement has taken over, one partitioned by meals, nightmares, unexpected naps, smoke breaks, bowel movements, tantrums, and near-death experiences.
I start to tell Samantha I’m late to pick up somebody at the hospital, but I don’t, and the reason I don’t tell her this is because I’m half hoping she’s going to invite me into her hotel room. I mean, if she does, I could call Stella and tell her the car broke down. Hell, I could just text her that and turn off my phone. It might be cool. Maybe it’d be like a sign, you know? One door closes, another opens. I’m thinking, yeah, a little whiskey and I might happily peel that tie-dye off Samantha. Maybe that’s what I need. Yeah, maybe I need a California sex addict to tie me up and . . .
“It’s here,” she announces. “Presto chango.”
She hands me her credit card. I insert the doohickey thing into my phone and run it. Then, after it’s approved, I pop the trunk and set her garbage bags on the sidewalk.
“Boy, are they going to be impressed with me. Who’s the redneck now, huh?”
“What about that bottle?”
“Oh, I’ve still got some beers left. Anyway, if I need more, there’s a liquor store in walking distance—didn’t you notice it?”
My disappointment is obvious. Picking up on that, she grins and sticks out her hand for me to shake and then jukes me out and pecks me on the cheek.
“Thanks for not dispersing me,” she says.
And that’s that. My beautiful sex-addict girlfriend whom I might have loved forever is gone, and I am once again driving alone through oblivion.