The Next Time You See Me (42 page)

“Maybe that’s not a man worth making up with,” he said, the hand beached awkwardly between them. He tweezed a plastic Fill-Up bag between his index and middle fingers, as if that had been his intention all along. “What did he do? Cheat on you?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Ronnie said.

“Hit you? You don’t want to be with a man who hits.”

Ronnie laughed. “Did you even hear my story? I hit
him
.”

“Whoever he is, he’s a fool to piss off a beautiful woman like you,” Wyatt said in a rush. “If you were mine I’d treat you right. I’d take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Ronnie said. The corner of her mouth twisted a little.

There was a silence. Ronnie stumped out her cigarette, and Wyatt noticed it was only half-smoked.

“You getting tired, Wyatt? You look tired. Why don’t you let me take you home.” Her leg was jogging again, making her half-empty bottle of High Life rattle on the Formica tabletop, and Wyatt felt the first tremor of something other than shame and desperation, thinking again,
You brought me here,
wondering what kind of woman would invite a man home only to sneer at him, to show him to the door. What kind of woman would do that to a man on a night like this one, when she’d already witnessed his humiliation? He wondered suddenly if she was in on it, if the joke was still happening. He looked over his shoulder again, where she’d leveled so much of her gaze this night, and saw the old clock, marking off the remaining moments between them, and a picture window off to the side. Lace sheers hung down, obscuring his view of the driveway, and Wyatt imagined Sam and the rest out there waiting for him. Getting ready for one last laugh.

“I thought you said something about me taking the couch,” Wyatt said.

“I did. But, you know, sometimes it’s better in your own bed. More comfortable.”

“Maybe you could show me your bed,” he said. His voice was hoarse—he hardly recognized it.
It was your idea,
he thought, and then he found himself saying it aloud: “It was your idea.”

“What did you say?” The expression on her face wavered between amusement and annoyance, not committing to either.

“Your bed,” he said. “You could show me your bed.” He added, almost wonderingly, “You brought me here,” because that was the part that got him, the part that made him want to draw his smooth, weak hand into a fist, to make at least one part of himself hard and powerful and impervious to harm. He knew she would say no. He knew, though she had invited him into her home, that he had no claim on her body, her favors. He wasn’t entitled to anything but her respect,
he thought. And she owed him that.
Respect,
he lectured in his head, thinking of not just Ronnie but Sam, Gene, Daniel Stone, all of those guys. Thinking of Jusef, who would sometimes shove him to the side to get a pallet loaded, and Meg Stevens, glaring at him for taking a bathroom break, too young to understand the reality of a fifty-five-year-old prostate, too young to give a damn.
Respect. Not just because I’ve earned it. But because you owe it. Because I’m another goddamned human being, and I need it, and it don’t cost you nothing to give it.

“Old man,” Ronnie said, “I’m not interested.” She pulled a fresh cigarette from her pack, smiling around the filter. Lit, puffed. “I’m not even the least bit interested.”

His face prickled with heat; it streaked across a wedge of his scalp like a grass fire. “You asked me here,” he repeated. “You drove me here.”

“Yeah,” Ronnie says. “And now I’m asking you to go.”

“And you’ll drive me?”

“I would have.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “But I think it might be best now for you to just hoof it. I need my sleep.”

Wyatt was still sitting. His fingers extended a bit and grasped more of the plastic grocery sack that the food came in; there was a crackling as he worked the bag between his fingers and thumb.

“Wyatt,” Ronnie said. “Do you hear me? Time to go.”

“And you can’t even give me a ride,” Wyatt said. “I live on the other side of the hill, at least a couple of miles. And you can’t even stand me long enough to get me there?”

In the quiet that followed Wyatt could hear his own breathing, the eerie speed of it. As if there were a third person in the room. He was panting like a dog.

“No,” she told him, her voice softening a little, becoming almost tender. Pitying. “I couldn’t stand you that long. I can’t stand you another minute.”

He swallowed against what felt like a knife blade, and when she leaned down to ash her new cigarette, his fist closed around the plastic sack. “You shut up,” he said.

“Get out,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

He squeezed the bag—it seemed to sigh, and then a little bubble within it burst like a popcorn kernel. His only thought when he felt himself moving toward her was that he would shut her up, that he wanted to know what her cruel, leering face would look like if he scared her, if he hurt her like she had hurt him. The beer and food sloshed in his belly, and his heart seemed to be rapping on his chest from the inside, protesting, but he grabbed her by the jaw and pushed her against the wall, and she managed to shriek once before he remembered the bag in his hand—it was there as if he’d known all along what he’d need it for—and then her cries became muffled, their grappling strangely quiet, so that Wyatt could hear the cartilage in her nose shifting under his palm, and what he would remember most, later, was the way the bag between her lips crackled, and then three high, sharp inhalations, and then the strangled sound of her gorge rising. Her long fake nails scrabbled against his shirt collar and sliced a painful line across the tender skin of his collarbone, and then, after a long while, the hands simply quivered against his chest, and she was sliding heavily into the floor. Then nothing.

When he emerged from the house thirty minutes later, her body slung over his shoulder, he remembered his sudden certainty that Sam and the guys would be waiting. They weren’t, of course. No one was.

3.

“What are you doing?” Sam repeated.

Wyatt rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved this morning, he’d forgotten to, and his whiskers rasped against his hand. “I’m just out for a drive,” he told Sam, whose hands had drawn into loose fists at his sides.

“You’re tailing my ass, is what you’re doing. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

Wyatt appraised him silently.

“Aren’t you supposed to be laid up?” Sam’s eyes darted between Wyatt and the building. “That’s what I heard.”

“I’ve had a rough week.”

“That’s too bad,” Sam said. “Folks have been asking about you.”

“I hear,” Wyatt said, “that you’ve been telling them all about me. That was real helpful of you.”

Sam swallowed, looked at the Advance Auto again. He backed up a step. “I’ve got to go, Wyatt. I’ve got to meet a girl.”

“You called me Wyatt.”

“Well, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

Wyatt placed his hand on the lip of his truck bed. “I thought it was Tubs.”

“That was a joke.”

“You like jokes,” Wyatt said. “You should have been a stand-up comedian.”

Sam licked his lips and took a shaky breath. “You’re giving me the creeps. And this ain’t a good time for you to go around giving people the creeps, if you know what I mean. I’m just saying.”

Wyatt grinned. “I’m sorry, Sam, but that’s funny. I give you the creeps. I had no idea I had that power over you.”

“You ain’t got power over shit.”

“Maybe I don’t.” Wyatt turned, leaned over the side of his truck bed, and inspected its contents. “But I have got absolutely nothing left to lose, either. You know that?” He grasped the handle of his shovel and pulled it out, enjoying the way Sam’s lips parted at the sight of it.

“Put that thing down.”

Wyatt dropped it, lifted his hands. “All right, then. Fight me fair.”

“I’m not fighting nobody.”

The calm had seeped away, but it had not been replaced by the old cowardice, nor was Wyatt feeling exactly what he’d felt that night with Ronnie, when his loneliness and humiliation had sparked something hidden and dormant within him, a thing that might never have awakened if not for Sam Austen. It was Sam’s fault, all of it. He would never have been at Nancy’s. He would never have been left behind.
He would never have met Sarah, true, but he never would have lost her, either. He never would have taken that ride with Ronnie, and he never would have hoped for more than his quiet life of observing and imagining the pleasures of others.

“If only I had known then what I know now.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “And what’s that?”

“What a chickenshit you are. Just a spoiled daddy’s boy who won’t ever get out of Roma and knows it.”

“You want to shut up now, you fat bastard.”

“Shut me up,” Wyatt said.

He let him have the first swing and took it in the shoulder. It stung, and the muscle in his bicep went hot and loose, but he could tell already that Sam didn’t know what he was doing. There was no force in it. No conviction. Sam was huffing a little and bobbing in place, his hands lifted up in defense. Wyatt could smell the acrid tang of Sam’s sweat—it was sudden, ripe, rising up between them like steam from a sewer grate. Fear sweat, coming in on a wave of adrenaline. His armpits were all at once dark with it.

“You’ve got to do better than that, Rocky Balboa,” Wyatt said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

He jabbed at Wyatt again, aiming for his face, and Wyatt turned to the side, catching it just barely on the ear. More heat, a bit more pain—the punch was no better than the first, but it landed in a tender spot.

“Young guy like you, can’t even hit me. You can’t even hit this fat bastard worth a damn.”

Sam struck again, catching him on the cheekbone. Harder, much more hurtful. An ache splintered out from his sinuses to his eyeball and eyetooth. It was clarifying, even invigorating, and it steadied his nerves to have this part of it over with, to be initiated into suffering, to at last know what he had been worrying about, this worst-case scenario. It wasn’t so bad. He rocketed forward, barely aiming. The worst pain yet was the sensation of his hand connecting with Sam’s nose—worse than anything Sam had subjected him to. There was the unmistakable sound of rupturing flesh, kind of a doughy pop, and
the bones in his hand seemed to shift, as though he’d driven a spike between his knuckles.

Sam shrieked. “Son of a—” he started, and Wyatt hit him again in the mouth to stop his talk, sending another spike up through his hand and arm. Sam backed away from him, head down, hands on his face. A runner of blood was spilling down between his fingers and soaking into the gravel, and Sam stomped, making Wyatt think of that night at Nancy’s, his little thigh-slapping boogie on the dance floor. He mumbled something, but it was muffled, guttural. Probably a curse.

Wyatt’s hand was shot now. He picked up the shovel again.

“Hey! Hey, put that down!” The voice was from behind him.

Sam looked up. His eyes were bright and damp over his red fingertips, and they widened as Wyatt advanced. He held out a hand and shook his head, then turned to run, stumbling, gaining his feet. Wyatt swung the shovel head in a neat arc and clipped Sam right between the shoulder blades, knocking him forward. Sam landed on his palms and rolled over quickly, arms raised in defense.

“No, man, no! You can’t do that! Shane, call 911!”

Wyatt brought the shovel down again, and it landed on one of Sam’s knees, ringing cheerfully. The vibration went all the way up to Wyatt’s shoulders. Sam screamed, and he curled up with his chin tucked down and his knees up to his chest, elbows hiding his face and forearms over his ears. Wyatt hadn’t actually come here to kill him. To hurt him, yes, and to scare him, yes, and to make him pay—but not to kill him. But it seemed suddenly, as he pulled the shovel back again to swing, that Sam’s life was worth half as much as Ronnie’s had been, and so what did it matter? He let the shovel fall, and Sam howled. He swung it again. And again.

He was gasping, heart jackhammering, when he brought the shovel up a last time. He only had the strength for one more, and he wanted it to be a good one.

A familiar ache raced up his left arm, and his knees buckled. He seemed to fall backward and forward all at once and landed on his side, legs bent somehow beneath him, and he squeezed his eyes shut
against a nauseating wave of pain so intense that the world went far away for an instant and a high tone sounded in his ears. He couldn’t breathe. He tried rolling onto his back, was stopped by something, and so only turned his torso. He was able to take one very slow, very thin breath, and then groan the air just as slowly out.

What happened to him? Is he down?
The voice seemed to be coming from across an empty ballroom. It was clear enough, but small, flat.

Looks like it.

Wyatt blinked several times but his vision didn’t clear.

What about
him?

Lord, I don’t know. He beat him to a pulp.

Was he listening to the radio again? The program had gotten very strange.

Oh my God. Oh my God. We should have gotten out here sooner.

What on earth were we supposed to do? The guy’s obviously crazy.

Oh my God. I think they’re dying.

They were gray blurs above him.

He looks familiar.

4.

The night he moved the body, he had found a child’s red glove. He tossed it unthinkingly into one of the garbage bags, assuming it had been there all along.

Chapter Thirty-Two

1.

On Main Street, Christopher Shelton’s mother is making cocoa and trembling with relief that Emily Houchens has been found alive. There was a moment today, so brief that she can almost convince herself it didn’t happen, when she wondered about her son, doubted him. Thought him capable of horrors. She whisks the chopped slivers of chocolate into the cream vigorously, stomach clenching at the thought of so much sweetness. But what else can she do? What more can she offer him? Chris retreated to the guesthouse as soon as they arrived home from the police station, and Nita doesn’t know how to go to him without some kind of offering in hand.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
she thinks, stirring, almost praying. Praying to her son. He is as distant as a star right now. She doesn’t know what it would take to reach him.