Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“No.”

“Have to do it now, though. Much longer and it’d be hard for them to buy it. You want to do that? Just get out of the car and start walking. Give me a little time to get out of the area, that’s all. And don’t give ’em my name. You want to do that, baby?”

“No. Don’t make me go.”

“Make you? I’d of near died if you wanted to. But I’d of let you.”

“I just want to be with you.”

He took her hand and squeezed it, hard. She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes.

She said, “I just—”

“What?”

“Killing people. Will you have to... do it again?”

“Not once we’re out of this.”

“But until then—”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“I just hate that, Jimmie John.”

“’Course you do.”

“I do! ”

His eyes challenged her. He said, “I seem to remember a certain person lyin’ back on a livin’ room floor and not hatin’ one solitary minute of it.”

“That wasn’t because of the killing.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No!”

He frowned for a moment. “You wearing panties under that skirt?”

“Why?”

“Are you? Take ’em off.”

“What for?”

“Just take ’em off. Now come on over here.” He put his right arm around her shoulders and his left hand on her knee. His hand moved up along her thigh. She parted her legs for him and he touched her.

“Now I’m gonna tell you something. I told you about that man and that woman. Little guy with funny glasses, big fat-butted woman with black hair and makeup and big floppy titties, and she’s all curled up at the foot of the bed sucking on him while he’s got his head propped on a pillow and his glasses on so’s he can watch. Well, I got the car keys, and I got the money from his wallet, and he’s all shaking and her eyes are rolling all over her head.

“So I make her do it again. What she was doing when I came on into the cabin. Told her if she didn’t do it I was goin’ to kill her. And she didn’t want to, see, but I stuck that old gun in her face and said it was suck that or the other and she could decide which.

“So she did it. I just watched her for a minute or so, and wanted to throw up but controlled it, you can control those things when you have to, and I watched her for maybe a minute and then I shot her in the back of the neck and him in the chest. And I left them like that, see, with his pecker still in her mouth. That’s how I left them.

“And I liked doing it. I better tell you that. I liked doing it. Just the way you like hearing about it, because look what it’s doing to you, look how hot you are. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

His fingers stroked her and she wanted to scream but didn’t scream, wanted to draw away but didn’t draw away, wanted to turn lifeless and numb but didn’t. She could not resist him. All he had to do was put a hand on her and her capacity for resistance vanished. Her own passion disgusted her, but her disgust could not cool it by a degree.

Just his fingers. Just his hand beneath her skirt. Until at last she sobbed and trembled and sagged against him, spent, complete.

The car was moving. She was back on her own side of the car, her seat belt again fastened around her middle. Evidently her orgasm had put her to sleep again. It was embarrassing the way that happened.

She said, “You can do anything you want with me. You know that, don’t you?”

“You ought to get some sleep, baby. You want to get in back? I’ll put the back seat down and you can stretch out and get comfortable.”

“I want to stay up front with you.”

“Close your eyes, then. It’s getting late.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I guess I better stay awake, being as I’m the one doing the driving.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“I’m all right.”

“But you were tired before, and then you didn’t get any sleep.”

“I took a pill.”

“I thought that was to help you sleep.”

“There’s others to keep you on top of things. And awake. I took some before.”

“Pills to wake up and pills to go to bed.”

“Yeah. Ain’t science grand?”

“Maybe we’ll open a drugstore,” she said. Her eyes were closed now and she had trouble getting words together. “In Mexico,” she said. “Just the two of us.”

She felt his hand on hers, and then everything clouded over and she slept.

IT is on my mind all the time. I scarcely think of anything else, and most nights I will dream on it. I will dream it just the way it happened, except that it will be stretched out in time the way things are in dreams. The trigger of my police-special will take me forever to pull, and the bullet that hit me, in my dreams it is as if I see it coming all the way just floating at me in slow motion, and I just cannot move to get out of the way of it.

Thinking on it when I am awake, now, I keep trying to find ways to make it come out different than it did. Like dropping to the ground and firing out of a prone position, so as to present less of a target area and get more stability in aiming and shooting. Prone is best and kneeling is second-best and standing is worst of all. I was taught this as a rookie cop and always knew it but when things pop sudden there is so little time. You have no time for thinking but must act right off the top of yourself. Then you have the rest of your life to think how you should have done it.

In dreams, with the time element all stretched out and with knowing how it comes out while it is happening, that has got to be the worst. All of this shooting and missing, shooting and missing, shooting and missing. That is the worst thing there is, to be aiming at a man, shooting at him, and just to miss him time and time again.

And I’m gonna spend the rest of my life

Not comin’ home to you

While she slept, he kept the car radio tuned to KOMA, a clear-channel station out of Omaha. Commercial sponsorship thinned out in the late hours, and the disc jockey would play three or four records in a row without interrupting for a commercial. Every half hour there was a five-minute news summary. He kept hearing the same items over and over — an investigation of meat prices, a four-car collision on Route 64 outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa, a wrecked truck that spilled a load of propane somewhere in Arizona.

And, with slight changes from time to time, the story of what had happened in Grand Island.

The first two newscasts mentioned nothing about the gas station holdup, nothing of the massacre at the Deinhardt house. At midnight he was on Route 30 heading west from North Platte, rolling toward the Colorado line, and the first break came.

The details were skimpy, the facts not entirely accurate. The family name of the victims was given as Reinhart and the number of corpses reported as four. The bodies had been discovered when a neighbor got curious about why all the lights in the house were on so late. She went over, knocked, opened the door, and walked in on the death scene. State and local police investigators were on the scene, and a break in the case was expected shortly.

Sure it was, he thought. If they couldn’t even count dead bodies, how could they expect to get anywhere?

He checked the gas gauge. Just a gallon or two left, and soon it would not be safe to stop. Or was it safe to stop now? They wouldn’t be looking for him, but someone could remember the car later on and the police would know which way they had come. He slowed the car at an open station at Ogallala. There were cars at two of the pumps, and one was a police cruiser. He put his foot down on the accelerator and moved on.