--SAY ANYTHING
…Happy
Monday.
…I
hope you had a fantastic weekend and that you spent some time with people you
did not know, who are now new friends.
...I
have been immersed in my new novel. It’s
become a bit addictive, which I think is a good thing. I like spending time with the characters.
Here’s
the first chapter…
Rayburn, Wyoming, 2009
Jo
In bed late at night, by herself
again, Jo listened to the crickets chrip while she waited patiently for her
dead husband to walk through the bedroom door.
Monty was late again, as always,
which was his way of teasing her—tormenting her really. Foreplay,
Baby, he liked to say whenever he finally showed. I’m
just stoking the flames.
Tonight, same as every evening, Jo worried that she might
not be able to make Monty appear. She worried,
too, that she’d become a crazy loon like her mother, worried that living on the
fumes of a dead love was not only tragic but perhaps a clear signal that she’d
lost all sense of the here and now. The
only thing Jo knew for certain was that Monty was dead, yet she loved him and
always would.
Gusty winds shook the walls of Jo’s trailer home, rattling
hinges as well as items left on the stubby bureau butted against the end wall
of her bedroom. In the distance outside,
a train chuffed, passing by the town of Rayburn the same way hundreds of automobiles
did every day. The sound of the disappearing
train cut a gloomy arc through Jo’s soul
and so as a buffer she resurrected an image of Monty and her—Jo in a white
wedding gown, Monty wearing a bolo tie and denim tux with a glob of wedding
cake hanging off his chin. The image and
the photograph that was taken of it didn’t show what happened afterward, how Jo
had craned her neck at an awkward angle, mouthing his chin like a trout, sucking
his skin clean all the while giggling like a school girl.
Inside Jo, her unborn child--nearly nine months along now--flopped
and flailed the way it always did whenever Jo yearned for Monty. The baby-to-be was a constant reminder of how
things were different, how they’d changed, and Jo, superstitious to her core,
credited the baby with powers and abilities no human possessed.
“Settle,” Jo said aloud, though in a whisper, patting the
puckered lemon end of her distended belly button. “Do you hear me? Settle down.”
Instead, the baby railed harder, throwing a conniption fit,
making Jo clench and squirm and sweat.
“You rascal,” she whispered, patting again, her fingers
trembling. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Jo thought about turning on the light and reading—something
to distract her thoughts from the scuffling baby, but the only book on the
lampstand was one of poetry and it required Jo’s entire concentration to make
sense of the poems’ hidden meanings. She
reached over and took a sip of water from a glass next to the book of
poems. The water was tepid with an iron
tang. Something was wrong with the well
again, she’d told Shane as much, but like most things Jo told her husband, Shane
passed over them with nary a look of recognition.
She glimpsed the alarm clock’s pulsing red glow: 1:33 and Shane
still not home. Nothing unusual there. It should have been upsetting—her husband out
carousing every night--yet Jo actually preferred Shane’s absence, and of course
with Shane gone that left Jo free to enjoy her imaginary trysts with Monty.
Shane.
Monty.
Brothers.
Twins.
How could two men, twins, be so different?
She thought about them now, how she had married Monty when
she was just seventeen, how only three years afterward Monty was dead, with Jo
gripped by a pull of grief so strong it threatened to bury her, too, until she
did the unthinkable, marrying Shane.
Now the crickets hushed and the whipping shadows along the
trailer windows stalled and, mercy of all mercies, there stood Monty, leaning
against the doorframe, grinning. He
looked happy if not also a bit cocky, and Jo knew Monty wanted her but that he
would stay like that, in a James Dean pose, until she begged him to come to
her.
Jo pulled the covers off and lay on her side and as she did
the baby inside her turned on its ESP and kicked so hard Jo coughed. She pressed her forearm against her belly
trying to still the child, pressing a little too hard maybe, but now that Monty
had arrived, she had no patience for the rummaging in her uterus.
As Monty approached, the child recoiled harder, throwing vicious
uppercuts and jabs, so Jo squeezed down firmly to thwart the blows, wondering
if she clasped enough could she silence the unborn baby once and for all,
wondering next did she mean it, did she really want the baby dead?
Hot tears—tears of guilt and frustration--splashed down Jo’s
bare breasts. She knew she should be
happy. After all, a baby was something
to celebrate, a giddy event necessitating revelation, yet to Jo it felt like
one more warning flare exploding in a sky.
Hey, Cuddle Bug,
don’t you worry about a thing, that kid’s going be all right.
Monty always had the ability to read Jo’s moods and tics, as
if he and Jo were an elderly couple, working from rote memory. She loved this about him, how Monty could recognize
what was eating her below the surface, how he was so unlike Shane in this way.
Gorgeous, what’s
the matter?
“It’s just…” Jo
stared in Monty’s eyes which glimmered dewy brown. She didn’t want to worry him, spoil their
night together before Shane returned home drunk and ornery as always. “I’m so goddamn fat.”
Nah, you’re
beautiful. Beautiful and perfect.
“I sure don’t feel that way.”
Monty sat down on the side of the bed and took Jo’s chin in
his hand, brushing away tears with his thumb.
He had the softest touch, callused hands yet smooth as gossamer.
Look at
me. Jo, look at me. You’re beautiful and the one great love of my
life.
Jo felt herself flush, same as the first time Monty had
labeled her eyes emeralds, said he was a sucker for redheads, especially
redheads with connect-the-dots freckles splashed across their cheeks.
“Stop being so sweet.”
I’m only as
sweet as you make me.
Now Jo felt herself sweating under her arms, inside her
calves, between her toes. “Why did you
have to go off to that stupid war? Why
in the hell?”
They sent me.
“But you didn’t have to.
There wasn’t a reason. You
weren’t drafted.”
I told
you. 9/11. I saw those towers burn and melt, and the
pictures of it played over and over so many times, people dropping from skyscrapers
like puppets…I just felt like I had to do something, you know?
“Like you could change things?”
Yeah. Maybe a little bit.
“And then you died.
You got killed.”
Not only me,
but a lot of others, too.
“You were mine, Monty.
Mine. How am I supposed to go on
without you?”
Shhh.
“Don’t shush me,” Jo said, swatting away Monty’s hand or the
air where it was supposed to be.
You wanna
wrestle?
“Shut the hell up,” Jo said, with a giggle. “I’m pregnant.”
You’re a
breadbasket, do you know that? A--what-do-they-call-it?—a
cornucopia of contradictions.
“I’m just a widow who’s pregnant and miserable.”
You’re not that
miserable, are you?
“Yes, I truly am.”
Here Jo was, talking when she wanted to be making love. “But like you said, I’m lots of things.”
Then tell me
what you are.
“Okay,” Jo said, “for one, I’m lonely.”
You have Shane,
though.
Jo flinched at the sound of Shane’s name and decided to
dismiss hearing it. “I miss you so
much.”
But I’m here
now.
“You are, right? This
is you. I’m not making it up, am I?”
Monty ran his palm across her right breast, tweaking Jo’s
nipple until it became erect. He stared
at her nakedness boyishly, full of awe and wonder, his eyes mobile, as wide as
Jo had ever seen them.
“Make love to me.”
Is that request
or an order?
“Both, I guess. But
do it quick.”
Quick?
“Let’s go already.”
I’m happy to oblige.
Monty disrobed and lay on top of her, his body weightless
yet alive, as real to Jo as the last time they’d made love. He entered her with ease even as the baby
inside Jo started its familiar rummaging.
He was gentle, always gentle, completely unlike Shane, but Jo wanted Monty
to be rough tonight in order to distract herself from the flailing fetus, and
so she urged him to thrust harder.
You sure?
“Yes. Definitely, yes.”
Soon they were bucking, the bed making screeching sounds,
headboard banging. Monty obliged her
request in a wonderfully wicked way, and even though in one part of her mind Jo
knew this was all her imagination’s work, another part believed it was factual,
their coupling, frantic and manic, the most delicious sex she’d ever had.
Jo climaxed in three successions, every nerve ending turning
prickly and electric. She heard herself
scream after the final release. Gasping,
clutching the bedcover in her fist, she felt how wet she was, soaked actually.
“Oh, God, Monty, I’ve flooded the bed.”
I’m not so
sure.
“What do you
mean?”
Have a look.
When Jo inspected the mattress, she saw that she had indeed
flooded it, but it didn’t have anything to do with sex.
Your water
broke.
Getting out of bed, a dizzy spell sideswiped Jo and she had
to grip the edge of the bed in order to keep from falling. She saw shooting spots the size of
coins. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe.
Jo started to dress, then stopped and got her cell phone off
the top of the dresser. She punched in
Shane’s number, but it went straight to voice mail. She left a message, trying to stay calm yet
urgent, and called again--same thing. He
was probably three sheets to the wind.
After work at the mill, Shane spent nearly every evening throwing back
Jack and Coke’s at The Iron Side, a dive bar with prostitutes stationed near
the restroom stalls.
Jo finished dressing and tried to plot her next steps but contractions
came at her without warning--piercing darts that made Jo’s legs wobble. She knew she had to hurry. She wished she had someone she could call,
but her father had passed away and her lunatic-of-a-mother would simply make a
mess of things if she became involved, calling Jo a witch, invoking Satan or
some such nonsense.
Then Jo remembered Sloan, Monty and Shane’s father. Sloan was a good man, kind and soft spoken,
always ready to lend a helping hand without the expectation of compensation. Jo could phone Sloan and have him track down Shane. Yes.
She was about to call his number when the doorbell rang.
Jo checked the red-lit alarm clock: 1:45 am.
Another panic attack seized her, clamping its hands around
her throat, the way Shane often did, and cutting off her air again. She equated surprises at the door with horror
and death. In a flash she saw herself
opening the door of her other house, finding the two uniformed officers there,
dour looks on their square-jawed faces.
Without a word passing between any of them, Jo knew Monty was dead.
We regret to
inform…
We’re sorry for
your loss…
He was a
valiant soldier…
Because of the,
the condition, well you know, the manner in which, well, it was an IED he
stepped on…
He’s been
cremated.
Jo pinched her eyes and shook away the memories. Go away.
Go. Be gone.
Now her lower back ached, as if someone had slammed her with
a steel plank. She stood leaning over,
praying it was Shane at the door, that he’d lost his key.
No, what a stupid thought that was—if he’d lost his key, Shane
would jam his thumb on the bell and keep it there until Jo answered. Then he’d blame her for losing the key and
he’d most likely swear at her, calling Jo names.
The doorbell chimed again.
Jo straightened as best she could and grabbed her robe from the
closet. She flicked on the bedroom light
and the hall light and lumbered with great effort through the wood-paneled
walls and down the steps, clutching her stomach with one hand, her back with
the other. She paused at the door,
wishing she had one of those peep holes that hotels had on their doors. At this hour, anyone could be on the other
side— a fugitive on the run, a psychopath or an axe murderer.
Jo took a deep breath as a flurry of contractions ambushed
her. She almost screamed.
The bell chimed again, no different than the other times, yet
it startled her all the same. The
visitor was persistent.
From the slit in the door she heard someone call her
name. Then, “It’s me, Sloan.”
Sloan. Thank God.
But why was he
here?
When Jo opened the door she knew instantly that something
was wrong. Sloan wouldn’t meet her
eyes.
“Oh, God Sloan, I can’t take any trouble right now. My water broke.”
“You’re in labor?”
“Yeah,” Jo said, choking out the words. “And this damn baby wants out in a hurry.”
Sloan reached out his hand as if to touch Jo’s stomach or
perhaps to steady her but he must have realized how awkward the gesture was
because he withdrew his hand at once, holding it at his side, not knowing what
to do with it. It was the first time Jo
had ever seen Sloan flustered.
Another pang came, leaving Jo gasping, doubled-over. “Can you drive me to the hospital?”
“Of course.”
Jo started to make her way off the porch, then remembered
her daughter, her and Monty’s daughter.
She felt sick that she’d almost forgotten, but she told herself it was
because of the labor pains.
“Would you run up and get Ella? I don’t think I can do the stairs.”
“Sure.”
For a second or two the labor pains subsided and Jo gained
clarity. “Sloan, why are you
here? It’s almost two in the morning.”
“We can talk about it in the car.”
Jo grabbed Sloan’s wrist as he was
walking past. “Tell me now,” she said. “I know it’s bad and I don’t want Ella
catching on.”
“Shane. He got himself into some trouble.”
Of
course it’s Shane. “What happened?”
“He was in an accident.”
“Is he hurt?”
“Not really. I don’t
think, anyway.”
“What kind of accident?”
“He’s okay. He’ll be fine.”
“Goddamn it, Sloan, don’t be coy
with me. Where is he? I’ve been calling him.”
“Well, that’s the thing. He’s in jail.”
“Jail?”
“He’d been drinking and he hit
another car.”
“Oh my God.”
“The other driver is just a little
banged up.”
“But…” But this was Shane’s third DUI.
“Really, Jo. We can’t do anything for Shane right now.”
Jo nodded and released her grip on
Sloan’s wrist. She watched him head up
the steps taking the stairs two at a time, moving with the agility of a
teenager, though he was over forty years old.
She leaned against a wall with her aching back to it, the contractions
sharp as ever. She knew she wouldn’t
make it to the hospital. Neither would
Shane. The baby was on its way with a
fury. Jo wanted to tell it to stay put,
not just for a while, not just until they could get to the Emergency Room, but
forever. She wanted to tell the baby she
was sorry she ever got pregnant, sorry she’d been such a fool to marry Shane,
sorry she’d made such bad choices. She
wanted to warn the child about what life would be like once it arrived because
Jo had a feeling that bad as things were, they were about to get worse, and if
Jo had any special gifts at all, it was the gift of premonition.
Sloan
The girl was as tough as most of the
men Sloan knew, yet this was enough to break her. He wished she’d scream or bawl but the only
sounds she made were chuffs and gasps, as if she was drowning or being
smothered.
A wild, sleeting snow made it
difficult to focus on driving, or Jo, who was reclined in the seat to him. Every so often she heaved and her breath
washed over the truck’s console, sour-smelling like curdled milk. She squeezed the vinyl seat between her
parted legs and each time she did the fabric mewled.
“I’m not going to make it.”
“Sure you are,” Sloan said, careful
to keep his voice steady. “You’ll make
it.”
But the nearest hospital was still
thirty miles away. He was doing seventy
on the freeway despite the lashing snow and winds that kept nudging Sloan’s
pickup nearly off the side of the road.
He should have taken her to Hendricks.
A horse doc was better than nothing, but now Sloan was headed in the
opposite direction of Hendricks and there was no turning back.
In the back seat Ella, Jo’s two year
old daughter by Monty, sat bug-eyed but quiet, sucking on her thumb. Her eyes looked black, yet she had Jo’s fair
red hair and it was long and lank like Jo’s.
“This is bad,” Jo said, her voice
placid all of a sudden, curiously calm, as if she’d gone into shock.
“You’re going to make it,” Sloan
said, hating the futility of his words.
“This baby, it’s bad. A bad seed.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It hates me.”
“Come now.”
“It knows things.”
Jo’s calm nature and comments
spooked him. Jo was one for the
supernatural—a fan of astrology, Ouija boards and tarot cards—superstitious as
all heck, her interest ramped up even farther after Monty’s death, but Sloan
had always thought it playful, a harmless hobby.
“It’s not only inside my uterus,
it’s gotten inside my thoughts and true feelings.”
Sloan wished she’d stop talking
nonsense. Jo was a smart girl, brighter
than most, a reader of poetry, and while this was merely the ramblings of a
woman unwound by her current ordeal, Jo sounded too much like her crazy mother.
“It hates me.”
“You shouldn’t say that.”
“It wishes I was dead.”
“Shush now.”
“It hates me, and I don’t blame it.”
Sloan patted her knee. It was a dumb thing to do but he’d done it
and when he returned his vision to the highway ahead of him he saw the glowing
frame of an animal in his lane. There
was no time to brake or swerve or even blink.
The animal—most likely a coyote—slammed into the truck’s fender,
crumpling immediately under the right wheel well with a grotesque sound like
meat and bone being fed into a wood chipper.
Sloan’s heart was in his throat,
throbbing behind his eyeballs, making him tear up, the windshield a sheet of
water on both sides. He thought he
should pull over to inspect the damage but the truck still flew at the same
speed and there was another twenty-five miles to go.
He glanced back at Ella and forced a
smile. When he looked over the seat at
Jo, her head lolled against the headrest and her eyes were crossed. Drool leaked down her neck, pooling in the
cup of her clavicle.
“Hey, Jo. Jo, you okay?
Jo?”
And then her knees banged against
the dashboard as if Sloan had slammed on the brakes. She screamed now, the scream of a woman
dropped into a vat of boiling oil. She
thumped her head against the dash and would not stop no matter how Sloan
pleaded.
Ella began to cry, too, flapping her
thumb in front of her like a diminutive, confused hitchhiker.
He pulled the pickup over, hearing
the sound of fluid pouring forth from the front engine block. Steam rose over the headlights like sea
horses made of fog. He knew it was only
antifreeze, yet all the late-night TV watching in him made it gasoline. He imagined the gas catching a spark and that
spark igniting an inferno, him, Jo and Ella sent sailing through the
snow-smeared night sky in a red and black explosion.
The engine hissed and in seconds a
great cloud misted over the entire windshield.
Sloan punched the dome light on.
Jo hadn’t noticed they’d
stopped. She continued butting her head
against the truck’s cab like some deranged mountain goat.
“Jo.
Jo, stop!”
But she wouldn’t. Even after he grabbed her wrist, she jerked
away and continued slamming her head. Ella squealed and squirmed, trying to free
herself of the car seat.
“The baby’s coming,” Jo said. “It’s trying to kill me,” she said as she
banged her head.
Sloan got out and was at once
blinded by a hailstorm. It hit his face,
forehead, and eyes. A pellet nicked his
tooth so hard--ricocheting into the black night--that Sloan wondered if it
wasn’t his own tooth that had been broken off and flung away.
Coming around to the passenger side
door, jagged diamonds of hail beat down on Sloan’s head and neck and pinged off
the truck door and glass, a stampede of thundering ice chunks falling by the
thousands, the sound almost deafening.
Sloan reached in and grabbed Jo’s
shoulder and as he did she started to wail.
Her forehead was berry-red with mucus and sweat slathered across her
cheeks. She worked her jaw up and down
as if testing to see if it was broken.
He told her to be quiet, to be still,
and forced her to lie back across the truck seats. This took some doing because she kept trying
to sit back up, but after a while she complied.
A spur of shame ran through Sloan as
he spread his daughter in-law’s legs, but there was no other choice. He looked and saw that the baby was already
on its way out. There was black blood
and slime and the dome of an infant head staring at him.
He was scared but forced his fear
aside and told Jo to push. Jo chanted to
herself, some kind of prayer maybe, while the flesh on her thighs jiggled as
she trembled. Sloan told her to push
again and there was a warning in his voice this time that even quieted Ella.
The plate of the baby’s skull,
looking like the base of a greasy tin bowl, seemed to swell with each push Jo
gave, but still the baby did not want out.
“You need to focus, Jo. Focus and push.”
She gave it a great effort, huffing,
one hand gripping the headrest, the other the steering wheel. She bore down and tried and tried.
They had been at it for fifteen
minutes with no progress. During that
time several cars passed by them on the highway, one blaring its horn. No one stopped. He could be a man killing a woman and no one
would stop.
“Push as hard as you can, Jo. This is going to be over soon.”
When she obeyed, he told her,
“Again. Again!”
Finally the head came out,
shoulders, too. The baby was wearing its
umbilical cord around its neck like some kind of slimy rubber necklace. Sloan uncoiled the cord with great care but
as he did so he knew it was too late.
The child was a cold, navy color.
It did not cry or breathe or do anything.
