As the pickup zoomed towards Davy his last thoughts weren't even thoughts, at least not thoughts as we think of thoughts. They were a burst of feelings, several points of view overlaid in the same instant. If they were thoughts as we think of thoughts, and if they took their natural time to express themselves in words instead of emotions packed into a second, they would have read like this: first, he would have thought about how much he loved the color, the metallic red, of the truck as it barreled towards him. Secondly, bewildered, he wondered why something that was about to kill him would be a color he loved so much. This gave him a sense of betrayal and powerlessness - and an odd relief. And, amidst the sudden swirl of thought-like things, another layer was added when he remembered something Anne had said: "Everyone knows their birthday, but no one knows their death day. Every year we land on both our birthday and our death day, but we only know our birthday, not our death day. What will that fatal day be? October 13? February 7? June 26? We don't know, we don't know..." And now he knew his death day. Then the lights went out.
Watching a TV show, watching the woman hold a nickel-plated revolver to her temple, Corrina wanted her to do it, to pull the trigger, to show them who's boss, to send a hale and hearty fuck you to everyone's who's made life unbearable, to liberate from the suffering, to drop the mess in their collective lap. Let them weep and wail, the tears flowing like the River Jordan. In the pit of their icy hearts they'll know they killed you, they who hammered your weal into woe without a care. Do it.
Corrina's listless life had become an endless stream of crossword puzzles, it was the only thing, besides TV, that she could really focus on. The theme to the one she'd just completed seemed a message written especially to her: 20 Across: Gets into a corner; 37 Across: Meets a brick wall; 48 Across: Comes to a dead end.
The thing is this: unless you love someone, really love them, you're wasting your time and theirs. Even if you've spent your last dime on a new car and they ding a fender the first day, you have to laugh and say, "That's fine, don't worry about it." And you have to mean it. Anything less? It's not love, it's a charade.
"I'll pay to have the fender repaired!"
"Forget it. I like the dent. Every time I look at it, I'll think of you and I'll think of this lovely afternoon, the best Thursday in the entire history of the world, the sun playing in your hair."
Corrina never received that from anyone, certainly not from her ex, Frank, a.k.a. The Rat Bastard. So, her moods were dark, and could be categorized by the degree of bleak, with the tone set by three mantras: on a better day, she'd mutter, over and over, "I wish I'd never been born." On a bad day it was, "I wish I was dead." And on a truly bad day it was, "I wish I was fucking dead." Lately, it'd been a long string of the third. Months ago this round of depression hit her like a tidal wave with an undertow she couldn't fight. Fight? It was like trying to conquer quicksand, struggling only got her deeper. Every day was suffocation.
One evening Corrina started walking up the stairs to her bedroom and froze halfway. She couldn't will herself to move her up or down. She simply stood there for about an hour staring into space.
Davy said to Anne, "When I go for a walk and see a dead animal by the side of the road I always think: it woke up today, full of life, went out searching for food and water, not knowing that this was it's last day on earth. One evening, Mother went for a walk with her friend from across the street. Then, she was struck down by a speeding car that was driving into the sun. It slammed into her, killing her. Instantly, I was told."
Taking a breath he continued, "I've come to this conclusion that everything is a metaphor, that if you pay close attention to the clues, the tea leaves of life, however faint or haphazard, they begin to paint a larger picture, if you allow them to. Once that picture comes into focus, it becomes apparent that everything is a mirage or a dream on some level. A sour dream, almost certainly, but a dream nevertheless."
When Anne, 65, smiles, which is often, you can see her as she was when she was 4 or 11 or 27 or 48. Wisdom and clarity, with a dash of world weary, beam from those eyes. She's a dream, really. Or a mirage? Maybe a crossword puzzle.
Sometimes a mirage is an okay thing, something to help you prevail despite the daunting odds. Even if it proves to be a disappointment, at least it kept you going another mile in the desert, a little closer to water. (Then again, maybe it just depleted your precious resources before the cavalry arrived?)
Anne said, "You never had kids? You should have children. You should have the full life experience!" She gestured, her left hand about two feet in front of her heart, palm turned up fingers spread wide. Her right hand was between the left hand and her heart, palm up, fingers spread wide. Her face pantomimed a look of bug-eyed awe. Or maybe it wasn't mime, maybe she was reliving the moment of holding her child for the first time. Dave had read that cats, when they do that kneading thing, are reliving the happiest time of their lives, as kittens suckling on their mother's teat, and by reliving that moment, they're making the current moment one of their happiest. Maybe Anne's action was something of the same?
"I don't know. I don't think I was cut out for that. I think I'd have been a lousy dad. I would've worried too much, or been too short tempered."
"C'mon! I bet you'd be a good dad."
"I'm too old."
"Get a young wife. What about that girl you were talking to back there?"
"Who? Who was I talking to?"
"That girl. The redhead, on the sidewalk."
"Veronica? Are you kidding? She's just out of college! I'm 50!"
"Great! She's good for bearing many children," she said with that smile, a cocktail of wry and dare. They continued walking along sandy desolate Airport Road that late October afternoon, tall pines looming on either side, casting long shadows. Her two terriers ran ahead, sniffing for all they were worth. City dogs, they loved a country romp.
Anne turned to Davy and said, "I don't know you. We're in the middle of nowhere, no one around. How do I know you're not an axe murderer?"
"I am, but relax. In the 21st century we're incorporated, we're Axe Murder, Inc. We have a code of ethics. The first rule is to lull one's potential victim into a false sense of security, and this is requires 30 years. I only met you, so you have a good 30 years of life ahead of you, fate willing."
Just over six feet, Davy stood tall, but not too tall. His 180 pounds were mostly wiry muscle on a lean chassis, the result of a regular exercise regimen. His once black hair was now salt and pepper, but mostly pepper. He raked it off his forehead with his fingers many times per day, just like he'd always done. His eyebrows were heavy, but not mono. He hated people with monobrows, hated them. He was riddled with irrational but profound hatreds. For instance, in first grade, the kid in front of him had a whorl to his crew cut that Davy detested to distraction. With the decades his hatreds only fanned out, encompassing ever more.
Desperate to meet people, Davy volunteered at a local art center, helping to hang shows, hoping to meet someone, to make a friend, especially an attractive and intelligent female friend, roughly his age. So far, he'd only met church-going grannies and geezers, nice enough folks, but he was lonely and sick to death of chit-chat with the forgettable. He needed life. Then this day, having left the art center, making small talk to Veronica on Main Street, Old Forge, he saw Anne for the first time. Even casually dressed, she was striking: tall, slender and stylish, she exuded elan and intelligence. Her sunglasses were French, and she possessed a fashion model's bone structure. Skinny as a rail, flat as a board, her skin had the waxy translucence of a junkie. She wasn't a local. And she wasn't a kid, her shoulder length page boy was silver, tossing the sun back at itself as she left the diner, walking two white terriers, getting into a black Jaguar XK120. Davy disengaged himself from the conversation, and made a beeline to her. "Hey! Hello! I have an XK120, too! Right across the street, there!" he said pointing to his white Jag. "What on earth are the chances of that?"
Anne said, "Huh," sizing Davy up in a glance. "Follow me to Airport Road. We'll walk the dogs."
A couple of weeks before, Davy went for a walk, one of his morning hour-long walks, out his door, down the hill, around the corner, to the dirt road and into the woods. October, so he wasn't the least bit surprised to hear the gun shots. Some would've stayed out of the woods in such circumstances, thoughts of overeager and drunken hunters dancing in their heads, but Davy's attitude was, If you're gonna hit me, make it a clean shot. Put me out of my misery, not in a wheelchair.
Coming out of the woods, back onto the dirt road he saw a neighbor, Rick, a retiree, carrying a rifle.
"Hi, Rick! How's it going?"
"Okay! How's by you?"
"I'm hanging in there. Been hunting?"
"Yeah. It's powder season. I saw three doe, but..." He bowed and shook his head, "I couldn't shoot 'em"
Davy laughed and said, "That's okay. What's the point of killing them?"
"My son, over on Fairchild, he got a buck." (Rick felt the need to justify his compassionate side by boasting about his killer son.)
"Your rifle is a powder-and-pellet? Like a blunderbuss?"
"Yeah, exactly. I'm old-fashioned," he chuckled.
"Well, it's certainly more sporting than these guys with all their high-powered gear, telescopic sights."
They got to talking about this and that and Rick mentioned that he got a real response, not an auto-reply, from Representative Arcuri's office, his first after many e-mails over the years. Davy asked him what he'd e-mailed about, adding, "No wrong answer here," while at the same time hating Rick's muttonchops. They looked so foolish. Where do the goobers come up with their fashion sense?
Rick said, "That health care stuff. I don't want my tax dollars funding abortions."
"Well, you know, it's been a legal medical procedure for decades. So the insurance companies are already funding it."
"Yeah..." (Rick hadn't thought of that, Davy knew. Fox News and talk radio, of course, remained mum about that. The idiots around here, even the nice ones, can't think their way out of a wet paper bag.)
"And what if a woman gets raped?"
"Well, that's true..."
"And everyone makes mistakes."
"That's true, too. I just don't like it when people use it for birth control..."
Now they stood in front of Rick's little cabin.
Davy said, "This land we were just walking on, I'm told it's owned by a retired abortionist. Do you know him?"
"Oh yeah! Doc Foley."
"What do you think of him?"
"I don't see him much, he mostly keeps to himself, but he's a good guy. When my son's truck was stuck in a muddy ditch last spring, he helped us get it out."
Continuing home, trudging up the steep hill, Davy saw his neighbor from across the street, John the Baptist. John said, "Hi neighbor!" Davy approached him with a sense of dread. Although he concealed it well, Davy had nothing but contempt for John, for everyone around here, but especially for John. Davy didn't want to listen to the windbag go on and one about this and that, and he didn't want to look at bald, wrinkly, potbellied John with the spindly legs, a rotten plum on two toothpicks. He's an old woman, really, forever flagging his Christianity, all the while gossiping like a spinster, on one hand acting like he's all concerned about someone's drinking problem, complete with the weepy expression, when all he really wants to do is spread the dirt about their drinking problem. I can't believe anyone ever married him, bore his eight children, all boys, all replicas of this moron. Disgusting.
Still, Davy knew to avoid arguments wih people he might need in an emergency, so he kept his thoughts to himself, like a black trying to scoot by in the Jim Crow South. After they shook hands and after John vented about his high taxes and welfare bums, John said, "The other day a father and son, from their SUV parked at the bottom of the hill, shot an underage deer - right on my property! That's illegal on three counts: too young, right near houses and from a vehicle. I confronted them, got their names and license number. They weren't drinking, I'll give them that much. I was going to report them, but didn't."
"Why not?"
"Because of the court time. And, who knows? They could come back and shoot at my house or my mini-van. We'd be sitting ducks."
John's the rising sun glinted off John's shiny pate and his mustache twisted from horizontal to a forty-five degree angle as he told Davy, "The kid was a lousy shot, to boot. It took a while for that deer to die."
"Did anyone put the animal out of it's misery?"
"No. Powder-and-pellet. He used his one shot."
"Idiots."
"And they were from out of state. Massachusetts. Dumb as dirt. They had that stupid Kennedy accent."
(Leave it to John to find a way to pin this on the liberals. Last summer Davy was pedaling up the hill past John's house and saw garbage dumped on his front lawn. Davy's immediate thought was, "Fucking rednecks." About a half-hour later, in his front yard, Davy heard John's wife shreik, "John! Someone dumped their garbage on our lawn! Ew! There's diapers, John! Dirty diapers!" A few weeks later, Davy was complaining to John about local litterbugs and John chimed in with the garbage story. "And there was diapers! Dirty diapers! I had to clean that up! Liberals! Only liberals would do such a thing." When the economy cratered in 2008 it wasn't due to corporate stupidity or Wall Street greed, the blame fell squarely on the doorstep of the unions. Et cetera.)
From there, Davy walked a little farther, took a left onto his dirt driveway and walked into the woods to his rust-bucket of a trailer, opened the door and stepped into the gloom that he called home.
Corrina had enough: the decades of depression had piled up to the point of physical numbness, again. After years and years of wishing herself dead about 100 times a day she decided to do it. She went to the basement closet and got out the shotgun, a small twenty-gauge single-shot, the one she'd been given on her thirteenth birthday. She hadn't fired it since 1964. Prior to that day, she used it for skeet shooting back home in Connecticut. Then one Sunday she went hunting with her dad. It'd been an uneventful October afternoon, the sun sinking, the shadows creeping, until her father pointed and shouted, "There!" So she swung around, saw the squirrel, aimed and fired. In a flash the animal went from alive, a happy little citizen of the world gathering acorns for winter, to a gory pulp. Sickened, she realized the foolishness of the entire enterprise. There was nothing there to eat, as if they needed the food, as if they'd eat a squirrel. Corrina dropped her shotgun to the earth, leaned over, placing sweaty adolescent palms on her denimed knees and vomited a breakfast of Cap'n Crunch onto autumn leaves, milky orange on top of bright orange.
She hadn't fired the gun since. Today, retrieving it from the closet, she put a shell in place (she'd bought a box for this purpose last year) and snapped the gun shut, wondering if it would still fire, if it would be able to do the deed. A few years ago she'd had a gunsmith replace the cheap metal trigger that'd crumbled with age. Maybe more metal parts, parts needed to fire a shot, had disintegrated as well? She considered a test shot then thought, "With my luck it'd fire - then a part would break."
In her head she'd written her suicide note so many times it was a breeze to sit down at her computer and type out the e-mail in one fell swoop. She addressed it to The Rat Bastard and to her sister. The letter had instructions for everything: both doors were unlocked, you can enter without a problem, but, please, don't let the animals escape; where to find her corpse; what do do with her property and animals; passwords for this and that. Then she placed it in the "Drafts" file, and got out several bowls for plenty of food and water for the cats. Who knows when her e-suicide note would be read? In a minute? In a few days?
Corrina walked out of the house, shotgun in hand to the ground she'd just designated in the e-mail as her death spot, behind the garage, near the woods. After staring at the dirt and grass for a minute or so, she placed the end of the shotgun barrel to her heart, in the groove between two ribs to avoid any resistance from bone. She'd do to her heart what she'd done to that squirrel 45 years ago. (She'd read an article about a suicide attempt, some dumb kid who aimed the gun to his forehead and managed to live - with the top of his head blown off, the rest of his life spent as a drooling imbecile.) She figured the heart was the route to go, it'd be pretty damn quick and, hopefully, painless. It suddenly saddened and disgusted her to think that her lovely chest would be a mess. She was in pretty good physical shape, all things considered. Her skin was lovely. This was such a waste of a perfectly good girl. It shouldn't have come to this.
Finished with the dress rehearsal, Corrina returned to her house, in the back door and listened to her favorite piece of music, Jack Nitzsche's version of "Da Doo Ron Ron," one final time. With its funeral dirge tempo, minuet strings and martial drums it was an apt exit theme. She didn't cry. Tired to the marrow, the time for tears was a lifetime ago.
Corrina had tried everything, even going back to the religion she was raised in, trying on that old hat again before casting it aside. She'd prayed and prayed until she was blue in the face. She'd prayed for unselfish things. There was nothing Calvinist in her prayers for a happy marriage, a fulfilled life and world peace. But the fervent prayers proved useless. Anti-depressants didn't do much, the side effects were yet another pain, and they certainly didn't improve her financial situation. She was drowning in a sea of red ink, her bank account was overdrawn and her credit cards were cut off while the interest compounded at a ferocious rate. Once you're down, the legally sanctioned loan sharks move in for the kill. Right now she couldn't even afford to replace light bulbs as they burned out. All she could do was put the still working ones where they'd do the most good.
To the powers that be, Corrina wasn't a human being, she was just so much brush in need of clearing.
At her computer, re-read the suicide e-mail, checked it carefully for typos, not wanting to be remembered as a dummy. It was fine.
"Once I hit the send button I have to go through with this. If I send it and chicken out, I'll feel like a real dope. And they'd probably institutionalize me or something." She stared at the screen for about a quarter hour.
She grabbed the phone book and looked up the suicide prevention hotline. It was an 800 number. "That's good. I won't wind up talking to a neighbor..." Then she thought about caller ID, and how if she called to say she was going to kill herself, daring the trained professional at the other end to give her one good reason to continue the agony of her life, would they be pushing a silent alarm button, sending cops or an EMT squad barging down her door, Dudley Do-Rights on a mission to rescue imperiled Nell? Who knows in this day and age? So she closed the phone book, went back to her computer, hit the send button, walked outdoors, as calm as the eye of a hurricane, shotgun in hand, went behind the garage, nestled the barrel between the two ribs, still wondering if the thing would fire. She looked up, up to the mountainous gray clouds and prayed for the damned gun to work. She almost prayed for forgiveness, but decided she wasn't going to go to hell, she'd already been there. Exhaling a "Jesus fucking Christ," she squeezed the trigger.
Ashley was only five when she snuck away from her family's summer place on the lake. She'd put on her favorite smock and a pair of red Keds with white rubber tips. Then she crept across the back lawn on all fours, like an animal, invisible in the deep purple, to the dock.
The forest-green canoe silently sliced the black water, unnoticed. Very far from shore she threw herself overboard. Her long blonde tresses were the last thing to be seen, by a family of ducks paddling overhead, before she descended to the depths, hair billowing like a parachute.
The official story reported the death as an accident, but like all official stories it was a confection designed to protect the guilty and powerful. At five Ashley knew she belonged with the dead.
One November, Lee, 24, decided to commit "suicide by cop." He hated cops and he hated living, so this was an ideal way to kill two, or more, birds with one stone. He loaded the .38, gave the chamber a spin, just like in the movies, hopped in his car and drove to the nearby state trooper headquarters, waltzed in and before the officer at the desk had a chance to say, "What can I do for you?" Lee put a slug in the copper's brain. Instantly the bang sent six troopers piling out of backrooms, a hornet's nest that'd been walloped with one big fat stick. Lee managed to fire off four more rounds, killing three additional cops, wounding one, before he went down. Blood and gore splattered on, then dripped down, the white walls, sprayed framed photos and certificates and diplomas. An old B&W shot of two cops shaking hands next to a trophy was creamed in crimson. Lee went out with a smirk.
As Anne and Davy continued along the empty road, dogs running ahead, he said to her, "I think bringing a child into this world is an act of cruelty. Either it's going to be an asshole committing cruelties, or it's going to be the victim of assholes. So what's the point? There has to be a point."
"Don't you know? Haven't you figured it out? There's no 'point' to anything."
"What about your kid? Why'd you have a kid if there's no point to anything?"
"I wanted to see what giving birth was like, so I did it. The kid? I disposed of it."
"What?! You killed it?!"
"No, I just had someone drop it off in front of a church and ring the door bell. Like in a cartoon or something, right up there with a dog biting a mailman or someone slipping on a banana peel or a safe falling from the sky, landing on someone's head. A gag. I hired a stork to drop it off on a doorstep. Hey! Where'd those pooches go?"
"They're up ahead," he managed to say, despite the wind taken out of his lungs by her casual audacity. She had a kid, just to give it away? This was all part of her idea of kicks? Is this woman insane?
Anne said, "I don't see 'em."
"They're there, trust me. I have perfect vision, 20/20, sharp as diamonds these eyes. I don't miss a trick."
"Let's go to my place, a little north of here, north of Eagle Bay, and smoke some dope."
"Weed?"
"No, you silly. Opium." That smile.
That smile, indeed. Deep within Davy a sweaty muscleman in a loincloth swung a huge mahogany sledgehammer to a shiny brass Chinese gong twice his height. The sound reverberated to Davy's core. This was it. This was love, true love, el yoo vee. All his problems were over. From here on in: clear sailing, blue skies, twinkly stars and a butterscotch moon in a midnight sky, their hearts filled with dozens and dozens of fireflies. He just knew it. He'd bet his life on it.
