Something Fierce (32 page)

“Why do you think she would do that?” Tina asked.

Answering the question, he held nothing back, one outrageous notion after the next. How he thought that Kerri may be living a double life, how he suspected that she did things like secretly move his books around and deny it, possibly steal his belongings and then return them days and weeks later. He knew he sounded paranoid and delusional and that was how he felt, as if he were coming apart at the seams and the only thing he could do was keep talking. Keep driving forward. Keep looking for the truth. Seeing his sisters give each other a sad, concerned look, he said, “I can’t prove any of this. I know I sound crazy and I’m sure you think I am but—”

“We don’t think you’re crazy,” Gail said. She explained that his situation with Kerri had been a topic of discussion for a while now and it had been all they’d talked about since his frightening call Sunday morning.

Emptying noodles and chunks of chicken into the large pot of broth and vegetables, Tina lowered the flame and took a seat next to him. “I’ve had several clients over the years—men and women—come to see me because they were having a mental breakdown. Then, after a while, it was obvious that the root of their problem was their significant other. In one case, that person was doing exactly the kind of things you’re describing. It’s called gaslighting.”

They believed him? “Gaslighting?”

“It’s a control tactic. It’s abuse. Emotional and psychological abuse. The victim is made to doubt their own perception and memory. They are steadily broken down over a period of time, picked apart, driven over the edge. Eventually, the only thing they have left to cling to is their abuser. They are obsessed with them, addicted to them.”

“Christ.” He tried to let the words sink in. It sounded like a Dean Koontz novel, he thought stupidly, and must have said it out loud because his sisters smiled sadly at him.

“It’s more common than you’d think,” Tina said.

Shouldn’t there be a sense of relief here? Validation? Someone outside of the voices in his head was telling him that he was not crazy, that his wild assumptions were not absurd. That was a good thing, wasn’t it? But it didn’t feel good. Instead of relief, he felt confused all over again. He’d been trying so hard to convince them that he suddenly wasn’t sure if he believed it himself anymore. “Why? Why would she do that? Why would anyone do that?”

“Cause she’s a crazy bitch,” Gail said, apparently louder than she’d meant to. “Sorry.”

“It’s a defense mechanism. Sometimes it’s done consciously, sometimes not.”

“I’m not following.”

“A person who would do this to such an extent is beyond manipulative and unsympathetic, beyond self-centered. They’re mentally ill. Probably a personality disorder. Narcissistic? Borderline? Sociopathic? They control their own lives by manipulating and controlling those close to them.”

“You’re telling me she’s…?”

“No. I don’t know her. I’m telling you what could be going on here based on looking at and listening to you. Something is very wrong and all I’m saying is that your suspicions are not as off-the-wall or uncommon as you might imagine.”

He had expected them to argue with him, to bring him back to reality, to assure him that he was making something out of nothing. It would have been easier to believe he was overreacting than to accept that she was someone capable of this and he was someone who had allowed it. The adage ‘the truth hurts’ came to mind, and for a moment, it seemed valid. Then he saw Kerri smiling into his eyes telling him she loved him. He thought of the woman she was with him and the man he was with her, the weekends she’d christened their own Garden of Eden and he’d described as the essence of being alive. It was not the truth that hurt. What hurt was letting go of the lie.

Gazing out the window at a humming bird tapping at a feeder full of red, sugared water, he heard himself ask in a voice that was and wasn’t his, “What now?’

“Take care of yourself. Try to heal. Move on.”

“A good start,” Gail said, “is changing your phone number and email address. You don’t ever
have
to talk to her again.”

“She’s right,” Tina said. “Any contact with her right now will only add to your confusion. Just go and stay gone.”

“Seems cowardly.”

“The opposite. Most people don’t have the courage to do it. They get sucked back in and cycle endlessly, making up and breaking up; things get uglier every time, more and more destructive. Or worse, going back leads to a crime of passion. Happens every day.”

“It’s not a normal relationship,” Gail said. “You can’t treat it like one.” She put her hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Why don’t we drop it for a while? We can talk more tomorrow.”

“Eat some soup,” Tina said. “Get some sleep.”

Frog Eyes was the only person at the bar when Seth walked in. He hadn’t seen Frog since high school. He looked too old, too worn out for forty, but it was still obvious how he got his nickname. He smiled wide which showed that he was missing some important teeth. “Seth-freaking-Hardy,” he said.

“Frog-freaking-Eyes.”

“What in the hell happened to you?”

Good question. “In the last,” he counted in his head, “twenty-two years? Everything. Every damned thing.”

Frog Eyes giggled. It was a creepy sound. “I mean your face.”

“Oh. Got in a fight.”

“Cool. Anybody I know?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“What you doing back in the Run?”

Another good question he didn’t know how to answer so he simply said, “Visiting the family.” He’d made the necessary calls to the school and with the few belongings his sisters brought from Ohio, set up camp in Tina’s guest bedroom. Camp Necessity, he thought, Camp Get-Your-Shit-Together. “Anyone pouring drinks?”

“Hey Stink Weed!” he shouted. “You got a customer!” He looked at Seth and smirked, which made Seth wonder if rumors of what really drove him home were already making the rounds. “The famous Seth Hardy. Living the dream.”

“Yeah, right.” He wondered if this
was
a dream or rather another nightmare and any moment now, he’d wake up.

“Hey, you’re famous around here. Or at least you was when that book came out a few years ago. I feel like I should get me an autograph.”

“You bought my book?”

“Hell, no.”

“Fuck you, then. No autograph.”

He giggled again. “How long you here for?”

“Not sure.”

A guy came shuffling out of the back room behind the U-shaped bar. He looked vaguely familiar. He was overweight, unshaven, glassy-eyed, and his thinning hair was a mess. Wearing sweat pants, a t-shirt that was all stretched to hell, and of all things, slippers, he might as well have been sporting a banner that read,
I gave up.

Stink Weed looked at Seth like he was a nuisance. “What do you want?”

“Whiskey.” Stink didn’t ask for further instruction and Seth was fine with the two or three shots of Jack Daniels dumped into a glass without ice. “You Jerry McClain?”

“Don’t look so surprised.” He sat the drink on the bar. “You’re older than I am.”

That was surprising. And sad. For both of them.

Sitting behind Stink Weed and opposite of Seth, Frog Eyes mimicked smoking a joint with his big eyes half closed like he was way stoned. The barkeep didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Must be nice, huh, Stink,” Frog Eyes said, nodding toward Seth, “to come and go like this guy does. Free as a bird.”

Seth’s hand was shaking as he reached for his drink. He was feeling the effects of stopping the prescribed medications too quickly. Last night the symptoms were so severe—leg cramps, the sweats, a monster headache—he almost started taking the pills again. Instead, he’d removed the temptation. The image of dumping them in the toilet at 3 AM flashed across his mind. Like tiny pebbles, they burbled gently and neatly into the bowl, green, blue, and yellow dots drifting in slow motion through the water, coming to rest on the white porcelain bottom before being violently flushed away.

Frog Eyes rattled on. “Not tied down to a wife and kids, not having to work a regular boring-assed job.”

Stink didn’t respond and shuffled back through the doorway. Seth took a hefty swallow of whiskey and said, “Oh, yeah. It’s barrels of fun. ‘Money for nothing and chicks for free.’”

“Dire Straits,” Frog said, naming the band from back in the day like he was a contestant on a game show. “Someone said you was looking for odd jobs around town.”

The delight he took in saying this made Seth want to knock out the rest of his teeth. “That’s right. You still the garbage man?”

“Sanitation engineer,” he said, with a big grin. “Speaking of,” he looked at his watch, “I got to high-tail it.” He dropped a couple crinkled bills on the bar and hiked up his filthy jeans. “I might be looking for some help if you ain’t afraid to get your hands dirty. Guarantee it pays better than anything else you’ll get around here, if’n you get anything at all.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

He imagined himself hanging on the back of a garbage truck, taking orders from Frog Eyes. “Christ,” he mumbled and took another swallow of Jack, watching Frog mosey out the door.

It had been easy enough to have his last classes covered. All the real teaching work of the semester had been done. He had originally planned a few fun activities for the last class that involved looking back at some of the semester’s best discussions and funniest moments but that was above and beyond what was required or expected. There needed to be someone there to give general guidance on the papers or maybe oversee a peer edit. Still, it bothered him that his students would arrive on their last day to find a stranger who would tell them Seth had been called away for a family emergency and instruct them to email him their final essay by the end of the week.

He was letting his students down and was deeply sorry that he wouldn’t be there to tell them goodbye. Yet, he knew this was for the best. Even without the catastrophic outcomes of an inevitable encounter with Kerri, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. His moods were swinging between rage and despair leaving him drained, exhausted, and unfocused.

He’d taken his sister’s advice and changed his phone number and personal email address, but Kerri hadn’t left his thoughts for an instant. What did she think when the phone calls and emails bounced back? Was she worried that something had happened to him, or did she just assume he’d finally figured out what an incredible liar she was? Did she miss him? Was she sorry? Did she ache for him the way he ached for her, or was she already on to the next guy? Or guys? And what about the journal? Did she really have it? Was she reading it right now? Had she been reading it all along? Would he ever truly know the answer to these questions or to any of the countless others that haunted him day and night?

God, he hated, loved, despised, missed, and longed for her; he wanted her to track him down just so he could tell her to go to hell. He wanted to kiss her one last time. He wanted to fuck her into next week. He wanted to forget that she ever existed.

He gulped down the rest of the whiskey and shouted toward the back room. “Jerry?” Nothing. “Yo! Stink Weed!” Still nothing. Fuck it. He reached over the bar and grabbed the whiskey bottle that had been left sitting out. He poured a generous amount and put the bottle back where he’d found it. He took another big drink, closed his eyes as it burned down his throat and exhaled deeply, feeling the fumes blow over his lips like a hot, summer breeze. That was the one, he thought, and felt himself relax a little.

He walked around the place and wound up standing before the jukebox. He flipped through the selections, which were not only old and new Country, as one would expect, but a hodgepodge that included Classic Rock and Pop songs from the seventies to today. In the mood for Classic Country, he put in enough money for two songs and selected a couple that fit the moment well enough: “Crazy” by Patsy Cline and David Allan Coe’s “Jack Daniels, If You Please.”

As Patsy’s sad, timeless voice filled the empty bar, he walked around Cherry Run’s only watering hole, remembering that this is where he’d gotten drunk for the very first time. He’d been barely legal but years behind the kids his own age who were seasoned drinkers by the time they were twenty-one. And it was that night that he’d weighed his options and decided that no one was going to show him the way to his dreams. No mentor was going to take him under his or her wing and help him understand how life worked and how good decisions were made. The only way out of Cherry Run and into the big, wide world beyond was to
just go
, which he did shortly thereafter.

The place had been called the Ruffled Grouse back then, after the state bird. Well, sort of. The actual state bird was the
Ruffed
Grouse. There was no such thing as a
Ruffled
Grouse but most people around here never made the distinction and the old guy who had the place wasn’t aware of the error until he’d already had the sign made up so it had stayed the Ruffled Grouse until he died about ten years ago. It was called Mike’s Place now. (Mike McClain, AKA Hairy Mike, Stink Weed’s dad.)

As the whiskey bathed his brain in that golden glow, Seth noticed the original sign hanging between the two coin-operated pool tables in back paying homage, he guessed, to the past. The sign was faded, weather-beaten, and splintered on one side with a spray of twelve-gauge shot that some bonehead had fired into it when it hung outside. As David Allan Coe was making his final plea to Jack Daniels, Seth went back to the bar and poured himself another drink.

It was quiet then until he heard the old truck outside and had to smile. He’d know the sound of it anywhere. The driver’s door creaked open, slammed shut, and he could almost hear the rust raining down inside the door panel. “How ya doing?” his dad said behind him.

“Well, I’m drinking whiskey at two in the afternoon.”

Earl Hardy sat next to his son at the bar. “That could be good or bad.”

“It’s not good, but I suppose it’s not as bad as it could be. Or has been in the recent past.” Seth pointed to the empty bartender chair. “It seems to be self-serve around here.”