Chicago
by Meadowlisp

Much as Tarquin, had he to Lucrece's final pleas relented and fled to what honor would yet have him, pulling that tearing end of his and her acquaintance, worrying through bouts and punctuations of lust both oft- and un-sated, should find no rest under that pendulous night:

John Grady has forgotten what he's running from, but his passenger reminds him that he's running. She does it every few miles between bites of what he thinks are Funyuns and through stained layers of hoodie that encase her from gangling knees to dangling comb-tooth bangs.

She tells it like this: "You got a bad look about you. You sure you bringing me all the way to Chicago?"

And like this: "This beer is warm and you got anything better than beer in here anyways?"

And, no matter the fact he's certain she can't see a thing of the road with how she balls herself up, like this too: "I seen that same car following since way back. I don't know or care what you did mister, but it ain't my crime and best not become it."

Between speech she is a moss-green lump cradled in passenger seat, bulging within itself, subject to a probing protuberant internal organ, the appendage now and then peeking from preputial sleeve to scratch at some bit of the scant exposed flesh before retracting within and resuming digging into the unseen bag of crinkling junk, eating by drawing her mouth down through the collar-line. The bangs shiver all the while, soldier-straight and grease-heavy. He drops her off at the next stop feeling not at all sorry. Junkies like her are a dime a dozen and there's always a poor sap ready to turn his bland life poetic over her.

The attendant is a clean-cut old black man eyeing him through the ceiling-mounted mirror like he's thinking through ways of kicking him out if he spends much more time wandering the aisles, so John hurries himself up and takes his coffee and jerky up the register.

"That your lady out there?"

"No."

"Thought she came with you."

"She didn't."

"Well she wasn't there before and she's there now. Awfully quiet in the morning. Ain't been nobody in but you.”

"Haven't been watching."

"Well tell her to get outta here."

"Okay."

He doesn't say a word to the girl when he passes where she sits hunched on the island curb between two pumps. He just reaches in his pocket and tosses a bottle of pills at her feet. She looks at him with a pair of big beady brown eyes he hadn't seen before then.

The next stretch of road is the first he's driven alone. The silence claws at him no matter how much he cranks the radio up, and the coffee keeps waking him up no matter how much rum he pours in— right along with the rest of the world; the sun is rising from seemingly every direction. The whole salted rim of the horizon is rubbed wet and clean and has been rung.

He would like to tell himself it was in that hazy unremembered section of the night it happened, but he remembers just fine. He remembers crawling out of bed because he was thirsty, sipping orange juice in the kitchen and sneaking one more gulped-down glass of merlot. He remembers the moment when he realized what he was thinking, when he saw within himself how badly he wanted it, how little it would take. He remembers the cold unfamiliar hardwood floors under his feet. He remembers trying to count how many glasses she’d had through the night and realizing he hadn't paid much attention to her at all except when she'd bent over to fiddle with the Bluetooth speaker. She’d had a seltzer, he thought, but he wasn't sure. Maybe a couple. Maybe some wine. He remembers the moment when he decided he didn't care what it would mean.

It wasn't some pure vision of her that did it. She wasn't a freeze-frame of singular beauty etched into his mind. She wasn't a persistent obsessive thought. She was simply something beautiful gor that one night, which he could never have.

"A ten-mile hike just to slip in the parking lot.” Adam had told the story just that night, the same way John had heard it so many times over the past month. And Adam laughed the way he always did after that line, patting the hard plastic of the boot. That was where the pills came from, John figured. It hadn't taken much looking. They had been sitting right there, innocent as could be in the company of aspirin and Band-Aids and allergy meds behind the pop-out mirror of the downstairs bathroom. He had them spilled out in his hand and counted fourteen little white angels. He thought it would be enough. The booze would help. He set them back in their bottle and onto the counter.

Upstairs, through the crack of the door, she lay. He let his head waver back and forth so the thin strip of light resolved into a whole vertical scanline image of the room. She was a small form covered by a sheet, head held in the crook of her own arm. One foot peeked out near the end of the matress. A tower fan oscillated over the whole scene, stirring the delicate edge of the sheet where it hung untucked, but everything else remained so serenely still. She was breathing heavily but not snoring.

He approached quiet as he could.

She didn't scream when he woke her, or even when he breathily and gropingly tried at what he intended. She just sat there, eyes wide and pleading, looking so much like his wife, him running his hands all over her with one bra strap hanging pathetically off her shoulder, asking him again and again to stop. And, for a reason he couldn't quite pinpoint within himself, at this moment so far past the point of no return, he did just that.

He found himself stooped, stepped back and standing there in just his boxers, not sure where to look, skin beginning to goosebump. She had pulled all the sheets up around herself and was sobbing in a deep quaking way that hadn't yet reached her eyes.

“John.”

“Yeah?”

“If you come back in here again, I'll kill you.”

“I know,” he said, and still not turning back, closed the door behind himself.

He needed a cigarette at that moment. Each breath was a disappointment of cold inert air, too easy and almost buoyant with the sweet lilt of alcohol. He needed the satisfying tug against tube and filter.

He doesn't remember much of what happened between then and now. There are fragments in his mind, bits and pieces: finding some clothes, sitting in his car, working through things in his mind, counting and counting the pills in his hand like a loaded gun. Looking furtively around the street light-lit culdesac and tugging at the thing in his pants but finding it limp and useless and crying at that more than anything else, driving past his own home and seeing the lights all off and driving right on by.

The bar was mostly empty. He'd thought maybe this was the one Adam had gone to, when he and his buddies had left John to sleep it off in the guest room. But it wasn't or they had moved on to a more exciting scene. Sitting on the cracked burgundy faux-leather of the barstool, tuned to the clattering of billiards, he recalls steeling himself for an act of grand and wanton self-demolishment. He pictured shot glass upon shot glass stacking up empty, then running into the street and maybe drowning himself somewhere. He made it two shots in before his liver pulsed in protest and he had to hold himself from vomiting. Even if he could've stomached a few more, the bartender was getting an impatient sort of look by then. He still thought it seemed as good a plan as any, so he stopped at the liquor store.

He lingered outside, pill bottling rattling between palm and fingers. He got lost in worries for a moment and knew he was sobering up too much so he cracked the fresh bottle of rum and took a swig. He caught the eye of a lonely-looking girl that was loitering around and offered her a swig too because she looked like she needed one and they got to talking with her. She was heading to Chicago, she told him, and that seemed to John Grady as good a direction as any.

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Pub: 02 Mar 2025 21:15 UTC
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