Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Lawrence, at last, rises on the backseat. He wipes his forehead. He collects his green banana, his thermos, his small suitcase. He tries a rear door and opens it. He climbs out into the heat. He can feel death, like a low voice calling to him, before he even sees the horse.

Lawrence stands in his kitchen, unsure. If Anne were here, she would get the small red cooler from its place in the basement and pack it with egg salad sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and jumbo pickles rolled in aluminum foil. She’d line the cooler bottom with chilled bottles of water to keep things cold without smashing the bread. She would pack her purse with aspirin and antacids, a book of crosswords, bifocal clip-ons, moist towelettes. She would bring along two pillows because Susan’s were always too soft, and two blankets because Susan’s were always too thin, and a roll of toilet paper for her and a roll of toilet paper for Lawrence, because that was what decent people did.

But Lawrence ruins a dozen eggs in his attempts to boil them and peel them and make something resembling egg salad. He is out of waxed paper. He cannot find the moist towelettes. Bottled water will only increase the likelihood of thermos usage. Lawrence remembers what Susan said: Don’t bring a gift. Just yourself . So he quits. He places the thermos on the counter for tomorrow’s trip, alongside a single green banana and his car keys. The eggs smell strong in the kitchen garbage, so he takes the bag to the curb, to the metal trash can, then returns to the house and washes his hands. He does not look in the mirror at his long jowls and long nose and long ivory teeth, at his face that has not resisted but has just let life have its way. Instead, he puts on his pale blue pajamas and crawls into his cold side of the bed.

In the dark, he stares up at the green light of the smoke detector. He imagines a house fire, burned flesh, a victim’s shiny, noseless face with two black holes for breathing. He imagines raccoons at the trash can, chittering and smart, peeling the eggs like he was unable to peel the eggs. He sees them rifle through his junk mail, past the egg carton and down to a baggie holding a foreskin, which they remove with their tiny black gorilla thumbs and hold up to the moon before dropping it in the middle of the street.

Anne had been the picture of modesty and discretion. A woman who gave off no signs of impropriety, perspiration, menstruation. Lawrence had sensed this when he’d first seen her in the dentist’s waiting room, her ankles crossed, her skirt pleated, her eyes focused on her word find. On their first date, she folded her napkin on her chair seat before going to freshen her lipstick. On their second date, at the end, she offered her powdered cheek to Lawrence. On their third date, Lawrence, bewildered and disordered by wanting more of Anne, was relieved by Anne’s prudence. Back at her place, upright on her sofa, she placed his hands where they were to go and when. It was as ordered as a recipe, a math formula. When they were finished, she put Lawrence’s hands back where they belonged with two concluding pats. This Anne did every time afterward, with the clinical precision of a surgeon. In this way, she ordered Lawrence’s inner world, his latent, perplexing wants, just as his father had ordered his shelves. Anne showed Lawrence how to file lust next to pencils, how to stack his desire like soaps. For Lawrence, this compartmentalization was synonymous with love. He knew he could not live without her.

At some point, the green light of the smoke detector fades away, and Lawrence falls asleep. All night he is fitful, dreaming that he and Anne are horizontal on a sofa that isn’t hers, making out like they never made out, his hand up her skirt like his hand had never been up her skirt, reaching into her, over and over and over again, in a way that is foreign, as if he is reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach, reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach, reaching behind the couch to retrieve a dropped peach. In the morning, he wakes exhausted. He hasn’t slept at all. When he goes to rub his eyes, he thinks for a moment his hand smells of fruit.

The highway to Merona is empty and hot. The sky is the color of gauze. Alongside the pecan farms, there are no signs for pecans but there are signs for boiled peanuts and roasted peanuts and ones warning of Jesus’ return. He Is Risen , they say. He Lives , they warn. He Is Already Here . Near the border, Lawrence passes more billboards he does not want to read but cannot resist reading: No-Needle Vasectomy. Divorce $89.99. Orchid Spa: Truck Parking .

“You know what those spas are, right, Lawrence?” a fellow CPA once said. “You go in for a massage and they give you five minutes of a back rub before they tell you to flip over. You don’t even get a choice. You have to do it. Then they give you a hand job and you give them a Jackson.”

Lawrence had pretended to already know this. He had pretended that it didn’t bother him. He pretended, when he went home that night and watched Anne iron his shirts, that he wasn’t imagining her naked while a masseuse stood behind her, her tongue at Anne’s earlobe, her hands over Anne’s breasts, her fingers spread apart just enough to show Anne’s nipples. Instead, he took his ironed shirts and hung them in the closet the way they were meant to be hung. Blue shirts by blue shirts, white shirts by white.

When Lawrence learned of Anne’s diagnosis, he’d gone home and made eggs of his socks. When she began her descent, he shined his shoes. When Anne was no longer herself, in those weeks of madness, when she turned ugly and crass and defiant, when she lost all control of her faculties, both physical and mental, and walked the house naked and relieved herself in the yard and called Lawrence names he did not know she knew, Lawrence spent his days putting things back in the drawers that Anne had dumped out. He put forks with forks. He filed his disgust next to despair. In the end, Susan came to help. She took Anne someplace else. To a place that knew what to do with her, where like went with like. Susan relieved him. And Lawrence had been relieved.

On the roadside, Lawrence stands for a brief moment as if waiting for a bus. In the heat, he removes his tie and drapes it over his forearm. He removes his coat and does the same. His nose is bleeding good now. He sees: the horse is enormous, a sand dune in the road, almost white in the sun. Lawrence must resist the urge to go to it, lay upon it, feel its coarse, rounded side beneath him. “Hey!” he hears the fence worker call, still from afar but closer now, waving his hat like a flag. “Hey, man!” Lawrence responds by regarding the horse a final time, then walking, then trotting, then running. In a few minutes, he figures he will hear a siren far behind him; the police will come to block the road, to inspect the car, to marvel at the horse. In a few minutes, he will throw his tie and jacket into a culvert, remove his shirt, his belt, his pants. He will find an exit. He will stagger down it in search of a gas station where he can use the bathroom and drink from the sink and throw his plaid thermos into a trash can. He will handle a public phone. He will call Susan to tell her he is running late.

When those things are taken care of, he’ll stand in his briefs and undershirt and loafers, with his suitcase and green banana, and take it all in: the fast-food restaurants serving Angus pressed through sieves, the hotels where men and women crawl over one another’s bodies as if climbing out of hell. He will allow himself to finally see Anne for who she is: buried and dead—a snake winding in one eye socket and out the other, her lower jaw falling from her face like soft fruit, her ruined brain now just a smear of paste. He will allow himself to see who he was before his mother died: a boy who could crack a live turtle with a hammer, who could tie a brick to a deaf kitten and drop it into the creek’s dark bend, smiling. He will allow himself to take another look in his father’s bottom drawer, the one Lawrence opened once and once only, the one with the lined bullets, and the stacked pistols, and the magazines of women sprawled and arched in utter disarray. He’s the sort of man who might visit one of those roadside spas. He’s the sort who might seek one out on purpose, not just on a whim. Lawrence continues on, hot and winded, and he knows, he sees, what will come to pass. He’s running down a road. He’s stumbling down an exit. He’s going up to one of those spas and staggering toward its door to have a better look. If the door is glass, he’ll cup his hands around his eyes and take a good look inside. But if the door is plain and windowless, he’ll have no choice but to knock.