Tom Piccirilli - Every shallow cut

The hit authors showed up on daytime talk shows explaining how their characters had whispered in their ears and the books had written themselves. One bestseller called it a divine cathartic expulsion. She claimed God had moved through her body and into her fingers and had tapped out her novel about a werewolf waitress who falls in love with the sous-chef. Her next book was about an alien who comes to earth to coach a pee-wee football league and gives up his homeworld to court a divorcee with a chip on her shoulder. The audience went wild. The host had tears in her eyes.

Maybe God should stay out of the Sunday literary supplements. Maybe he ought to stay up there on the cross and keep doing his own thing.

I didn’t have a laptop anymore but I’d brought along a bunch of legal pads and pencils. In truck stops I drank coffee for hours while I filled page after page with a furious angular script I had trouble reading. I slept at the rest stops with Churchill on top of my chest. I sometimes woke up with Church shivering, and I knew I’d been talking or crying in my sleep. He picked up on my mood and shook and groaned. It sometimes took me half an hour to get him calm again.

I’d get behind the wheel once more and drive the black roads leading me back into the shadows of my own past. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I knew it was going to all be another big mistake in a lifetime of gaffes.

I drove with one hand in my pocket. I’d fondle the unloaded gun and think about going on a rampage of some sort. But I couldn’t figure out what kind. Who would I take hostage, what would my demands be? How much money would be enough? Where would I want them to fly the jet? Which of the quirky bank patrons and employees was I going to let go first? The elderly old man with the heart trouble or the pregnant Korean lady? What kind of food would I ask for while the negotiations were going on? I hadn’t had New York pizza in ten years. I imagined the SWAT guy pretending to be a pizza delivery kid, a stack of pepperoni pies in his arms, the top box empty except for a semi-automatic. He’d dump the boxes and point the weapon and scream for me to put my hands up.

And all I would be able to do was look at the wasted pepperoni pies on the floor, my mouth watering.

The thunderstorms started to hit in Missouri but I bulled my way through hour after hour while the rain smashed down. Even with my wipers on extra high they could barely keep up with the torrent. Visibility was practically nil. Flares lined the highways where fatal pileups had occurred. The state patrol beckoned and diverted traffic through the hills and hollers of Appalachia. Cinder block houses and hammered tin roof trailers dotted the grubby landscape. They still let their kids play barefoot in the flooded meadows and thickets. Every fourth shotgun shack for a hundred muddy miles had an underage girl with long wet hair and a bare midriff on the porch, waving a highball glass at me.

Maybe I was passing up salvation. Maybe I needed to pull over and find someone nearly as bad off as I was. The girl wouldn’t know the truth. She’d be a sloppy but fun lay. We’d get wasted on moonshine with too much radiator fluid in it. She’d be secretly pleased with my Yankee accent. She’d think I was the one who would get her out of this town and take her someplace else where she could shine in the bright lights, be a model or actress on Broadway. Her father would chase me with a ten-gauge and I wouldn’t run all that fast to get away from him. They shot horses, put rabid dogs down, drowned starving cats, butchered hogs. This might be the place to get done right.

On the wrong side of a washed-out bridge somewhere in southern Illinois I was forced to hole up in a place called the Sweet Pea Motel. Church and I laid together on the double bed and watched cable and ate from the candy machine. There was a diner next door that charged extra for delivery in the storm. We had fried chicken and BLTs and fresh apple pie. The delivery kid was drenched head to foot but looked happy to be getting the extra buck per order.

The storm continued but Church and I didn’t mind. We were living better than we had in weeks. Z’s cash came in handy. I was stupid not to have cleaned out the pockets of the two other punks.

Having maid service was like being taken care of by a loved one. I took hour-long hot showers. I ordered pay-per-view movies. I’d forgotten how much I liked to sit back and just watch a flick. Church did his business six inches outside the motel door and the swirling rainwater immediately cleared it away.

I scrawled on the legal pads. I didn’t even know what I was writing. Maybe it was a novel, maybe a journal. Maybe it was a manifesto. Or a love letter. Or a suicide note or my last will and testament. The pages filled up and I didn’t reread them. When the writing was good it felt like bleeding onto the page. That’s how I felt now. I slept deeply without dreams.

The emergency newsbreaks told of mass flooding. Rivers overflowing, whole towns being washed away. I walked over to the diner through a swirling two-foot-deep vortex in the parking lot, holding Churchill in my arms. The waitress and the cook were husband and wife and lived in back of the place. They had the same worried look stamped into their faces every time I saw them. They were in danger of losing their business, their home, their livelihood.

The delivery truck couldn’t make it through one morning and provisions started running low. But they still managed to have fresh pie. I ate happily. So did Church. The waitress sat with us and stared out the window with terror in her eyes. She patted Church’s back until he went to sleep in the booth beside her. His snores were loud but not loud enough to cover the sound of the relentless, endless rain.

Back at the Sweet Pea Motel I kept writing. I think I went on for a few pages about the drowning world, but I couldn’t be sure. I watched more movies. I sat glued to the news and saw volunteer workers filling sandbags at the edges of various murderous rivers. Three states were declared disaster areas and the National Guard was sent out to aid the citizens.

On the fifth day the ceiling bloated and began to leak through. The manager brought me more ice buckets and waste pails. I spread them around the room under the worst of the drips and the hard ticking and ringing was like being surrounded by a dozen clocks counting off the wasted hours.

I began toying with the gun. I loaded it and unloaded it. I fit ammo into the speed loader so I could snap all six bullets in at once. I kept writing.

The storm became metaphor. It was literary technique: As below, so above. When the hero suffered, so did the rest of the world. My hand cramped up and I sat on the edge of the bed massaging my fingers. My knuckles cracked as if someone was taking a hammer to them.

I wondered if the methers in front of the pawn shop were in my book. I wondered what I was saying about my wife. I could imagine my mother’s values and my father’s lessons filling paragraph after paragraph. Would the story end with a tidal wave washing away the Sweet Pea? I thought Church standing on the roof riding it like a surfboard would make for a hell of a cover. Novels with covers that had dogs on them almost always sold a ton of copies.

On the seventh day the rain stopped and the sky started to clear. The waters slowly began to recede. The news showed the president helping to pump water out of a homeless shelter’s basement.

The diner was completely out of food by then. I was living on the vending machine snacks. It took another three days before the highway reopened. The delivery truck came through. I got to have a last BLT and slice of pie. I settled my bill at the motel. My car started on the first try.

I rolled the windows down and Churchill hung his head out and caught some sun. We hit the road heading east. When we were between towns, without another car in sight, I pulled the. 38 and held it out the driver’s window straight up in the air and fired it like a starter’s pistol. The recoil wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been expecting. No man should ever have a gun without firing it at least once, just to know what it felt like.