Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“He’s really hung up with Michele. He won’t tell me what it is but somethin’s really buggin’ him.”

“I’m supposed to feel bad about it?”

“I’m just telling you is all.”

“Why? Why would I give a shit?”

He glanced over at me. “I shoulda stuck up for you with Bill. The night he knocked you down, I mean. I’m sorry.”

“You really pissed me off.”

“Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry. I really am. I–I just can’t handle being around Bill anymore. This whole thing with Michele. She’s all he talks about and she won’t let him do nothin’. He says it’s like bein’ in sixth grade again.”

I wasn’t up for just driving around. I’d done enough cruising in my high school years. I said, “You seen that new Wes Craven flick?”

“Huh-uh.”

“There’ll be a late show. We could still make it.”

“So you’re not still pissed?”

“Sure I’m still pissed. But I want to see the Wes Craven and you’re the only person I know who’s got a car.”

“I don’t blame you for still bein’ pissed.”

“I don’t blame me for still bein’ pissed, either.”

I didn’t hear from Spence till nearly a week later. After the Craven flick, which was damned good, he started talking about other things we could do but I just told him I was busy. Sometimes, friendships, even long ones, just end. One thing happens and you realize that the friendship was never as strong as you’d thought. Or maybe you just realize that you’re one cold, unforgiving prick. Whichever it was, I wasn’t up for seeing Spence or Bill or Michele for a long time. Maybe never.

I went my glum way to computer classes and my even glummer way to the supermarket.

He was in the supermarket parking lot waiting for me when I got off work. I walked over to his car. It was a warm, smoky October night. Big-ass harvest moon. I wanted to be a kid again in my Halloween costume. I could barely — just quite — remember what it had been like to go trick-or-treating before the days when perverts and sadists hid stick pins and razor blades in candy apples.

I walked over to the driver’s side of his car. I wanted to walk home. October nights like this were my favorites.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You doin’ anything special?”

“Yeah. Nicole Kidman called. She wants to go get a pizza with me. She said she’ll pay for it. And the motel room afterward.”

“Remember to bring a condom.”

“She’s got me covered there, too. She bought a big box of them.”

We just looked at each other across an unbreachable chasm of time and pain. He’d been a part of my boyhood. But I wasn’t a boy anymore. Not a man yet, to be sure. But not a boy, either.

“He’s pretty screwed up.”

“We talking about Bill?”

“Yeah. Had the day off. Drinking beers with whiskey chasers.”

“Good. We need to drink more. Make sure we’re winos before we hit twenty-five.”

“I think maybe we should go over to Michele’s place.”

“Why?”

He stared at the passing cars. When he looked back at me, he said, “You better get in, Jason. This shit could be real bad.”

It was one of the little Silverstream trailers that are about as big as an SUV. Except, given its condition, this one should have been called Ruststream. It sat between two large oak trees on a corner where a huge two-story house had been torn down the summer before. The rest of the neighborhood blazed with laughter and throbbing car engines and rap music and folks of both the black and white persuasion filling porches and sidewalks, most of them trying to look and sound like bad-asses. Her trailer was a good quarter block from its nearest neighbor.

Bill’s motorcycle leaned against one of the trees. No lights, no sound coming from the trailer.

“Maybe he’s getting the job done,” Spence said.

“Maybe,” I said.

The door was open half an inch. I opened it wide and stuck my head in.

“What the hell you think you’re doin’?”

I couldn’t see him at first, couldn’t see anything except vague furniture shapes. Smells of whiskey and cigarettes. A cat in the gloom, crying now.

“Get out of here, Jason.”

“Where’s Michele?”

“Where you think she is, asshole?”

“I wanna talk to her.”

“I told you once, Jason. Get out of here. I knocked you on your ass once. And I can do it again.”

“No, you can’t.”

Two steps led up to the trailer floor. I was about to set my right foot on the second step when he came at me. My mind had time to register that he was wearing jeans, no shirt, no socks, and he had a whiskey bottle in his hand.

He tackled me and drove me all the way to the ground. He meant to hit me with the whiskey bottle, but I had the advantage of being sober. He smelled of puke and booze and sex and greasy food, maybe a hamburger.

As the bottle arced downward, I rolled to the right, moving slowly enough to slam my fist hard into the side of Bill’s head. The punch dazed him, but not enough to keep him from trying to get me again with the bottle. This time I didn’t have time to move away from it. All I could do was grab the wrist and slow the bottle as it descended. It connected, but not hard enough to knock me out. Or to stop me from landing another punch on the same side of his head as before. This one knocked him loose from me. His straddling legs loosened enough to let me buck him off. He went over backwards. He was drunk enough to be confused by all this happening so quickly. Now it was my turn to straddle him. I just wanted to make his face bloody. I hit him until my hands started to hurt, and then I stood up, grabbed him by an arm, and started dragging him to his motorcycle.

“Go get his stuff from inside, okay?” I said to Spence.

He nodded and ran over to the trailer. He didn’t need to go inside. Michele was in the doorway, dropping Bill’s shoes, socks, shirt, and wallet one by one into Spence’s hands. She wore a white terrycloth robe. She had a cigarette going. “You stay with me for a while, Jason?” she said.

“Sure.”

By now, Bill was on his motorcycle, roaring it to raucous life. Spence handed him his belongings.

Spence said, “Looks like her nose is busted, man. You do that?”

“Shut up, Spence,” Bill said. Then he made his bike louder than I’d ever heard it before. Bill glared at Spence for a long time and said, “I don’t know what I ever saw in a pussy like you, Spence. Don’t call me anymore.”

“You beat her up, man. You don’t have to worry about me callin’ you.”

He roared away, grass and dirt churning from beneath his back wheel. He got all the way down the block before I said anything. “I’ll just walk home later, Spence.”

“Wait’ll you see her, Jason. He beat the shit out of her.”

He walked back to the street and drove away.

The light was on in the front part of the trailer now. She was gone from the door. When I sat down at the small table across from her, she pushed a cold can of Bud my way. I thanked her and gunned an ounce or two. My head hurt from where Bill got me with the bottle. She’d fixed up her trailer just the right way — so that you forgot you were in a trailer.

Her delicate nose didn’t look broken, as Spence had said, but it was badly bruised. She had a black eye, a bloody, swollen mouth and her left cheek was bruised.

“Maybe you should go to an ER,” I said.

“I’ll survive.” She made an effort to laugh. “I let him sleep with me but that wasn’t enough for him.”

“What the hell else did he want?”

“Well, he slept with me, but I wouldn’t take my bra or my blouse off. I said I had my reasons and I wanted him to respect them. In some weird way, I’d started to like him. Maybe I was just lonely. I never could pick men for shit. You should’ve seen some of the losers I went out with in L.A. My girlfriends always used to laugh and say that if there was a serial killer on the dance floor, he’d be the one I’d end up with for the night.”