John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

That’s how it will be in a few more years, I was thinking as I felt my way to the basement: we’ll drive all night looking for folks, but in our head.

I plugged in the bulb. It swung on a cord in front of a mirror reflecting a St. Andrew’s cross and a workhorse. I walked to the closet and swung the plank, and there was the bowie knife, its handle wood and its blade curved and I’d forgotten what war it came from.

I was climbing the stairs again when my phone rang.

“Where are you?” said somebody called Damien Warman. “You two think you can treat me like this?”

I decided to practice not being a pussy. “Where are you?”

“Oh, come on, screw you.”

“No, I asked you a question. If you want to live — if you want to survive another minute of your worthless life, answer it.”

There was a gulp. “Where’s Tyrone?”

“Dead. You’re next.”

“Where is he?”

“No, tell me where you are.”

“Downtown Hilton.”

“Well, you best get yourself out of that downtown Hilton.”

What a thrill it gave me, saying those things. I hung up, and then the screen showed the earth in space, the clouds moving in real time. Mountains inching toward dawn. I guess the camera was on the moon. In anticipation of sunrise, my blood heated up. Just as I was about to catch fire, Damien Warman’s name flashed across outer space again. To be a pussy was to answer, “Just kidding,” so I hit “ignore,” found a jug of bourbon, took a swig, and realized the dog should be barking.

I went upstairs to his cage, in which he lay dead. That bothered me. “Sup?” said a new message from Kid, four miles away.

I went out into the night and ran the knife blade along my finger. “Not much,” I wrote, bleeding as I typed. It felt strange, so I pricked another finger, rubbed the blood on my pants.

The cuts stung. I’d gotten so sober that I could feel pain.

As time slowed, I looked up at the moon bisected by the pine. If it was broadcasting my thoughts to Ray, I didn’t care; I was ready for him. I checked the distance. Two miles away: curvy miles, so I figured I had about four minutes.

I typed, “Zeela Tipton 1950–2009,” and read about my ma’s journey to meet the Lord. She was survived by two brothers and a daughter-in-law, said the obituary, and no one else. There wasn’t time to fret about that. I might be meeting the Lord soon myself, and I wanted to show him there was some good in me, so I typed Lisa’s number in and wrote to Lisa, “Ask Dr. Lighter for a blood test.”

The noise of a motor faded and grew closer. The phone said 800 feet. I went in and turned off the lights. A siren blared for a split second and quit. Through the peephole I watched a single shadow climb out. It lurched forward and grew larger. I had read the obituary to help urge myself ahead. She has traveled to meet the Lord, I said to myself, moving from the hinged to the unhinged side of the door.

Last thing before it swung open, I looked at the phone, which said zero feet.

His hand reached through the dark. I clutched the knife and plunged it into his arm. It sank into his flesh. I pulled it out and saw his eyes bulge as I stabbed again. He lunged toward me, spurting blood. I held tight onto the hilt. “Sandra,” he said as he sank, which is when I knew what that siren had meant.

He contorted away, making gurgly noises. I let go and ran out. The cruiser window was open, and I could hear cops on the radio. “How do you know a Kentucky girl’s on the rag?” one of the cops asked, and then they all laughed as the pines heard my own phone ring.

Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.

“Babe?” said Ray when I answered. “I heard you’re back in town.”

“How’d you hear that,” I managed to say.

“I was on my way to you, but I drove into the river.”

“I don’t live at your house anymore.”

“Lisa never answers your door.”

“I gave her AIDS. I caught it from you.”

“But you never came down with the flu.”

“You ruined my life, Ray.”

“I have some crystal.”

The blue of the light bar gleamed in moonlight as Ray told me he was at the S-curve. “I was scared of how much I liked you,” he said.

“That’s retarded,” I said.

“But I’m trying to say things I mean.”

The front door wouldn’t budge. I broke the window with a brick, climbed in, and saw the cop sitting up against the door, meeting the Lord. I reached in his pants for Ray’s phone. I checked the distance against Tyrone’s: 2000 feet. A chill went through me to think Ray had been talking from the cop’s pocket. If I was high, I might have tried to saw down the cell tower, but he was at the S-curve.

I knew that.

I put the phone in my pants with the other two, where they could all signal each other if they wanted. Driving the cruiser, I took Ray’s out to check the messages. Sup. Hey stud. Where u at . One was named Lucifer and he was ten miles away. I imagined him ten miles down into the earth. I passed Dollywood, which is on a back road in a holler, not where you’d expect. Deeper into the forest I pulled off by a precipice. At the bottom of a ravine Ray stood by his wrecked car in water to his knees.

I left two of the phones on the seat, got the knife, and scooted downhill to the bank. “That’s my knife,” he said from across the water.

“I’ll slit your throat with it,” I told him, brushing dirt off.

He opened his mouth, then shut it. “The crystal got wet.”

“I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

“Then get on with it.” He pointed to his neck.

“That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“Mark’s on his way. Cop from the dogfight.”

“I doubt we’ll be seeing Mark.”

“I made a deal with him. He’ll file it as a suicide.”

“Why don’t you piss off, Ray.”

“No, it’s really what he’s coming here for.”

Ray’s eyes were fixed on mine, but it was easy to look Ray in the eye and still hate him. Nor was I touched by the sound of his voice. I hadn’t been prepared, though, for the effect of his breath when I waded into the river. It smelled of bourbon and smoke and instantly I was back in Lubbock drinking bourbon with him, holding him in the bed, thinking he was only a lonely child.

“It’s for my kids,” he said. “If you had kids, you’d understand.”

I stepped onto a bar of gravel and kicked some into the water. I guessed there was a fair chance he was telling the truth.

“I’ve been down in Florida,” I said.

“I like it there. Took Angel and Ray Junior to the Daytona 500. Remember at the Bristol Speedway, when you thought we were dying?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never been to Bristol.”

“You were pretty lit up then.”

“You were as lit up as me.”

“But I was aware of it. You, you acted surprised.”

With no memory of Bristol I tried to imagine that city, which straddles Virginia and Tennessee. I pictured a dotted state line painted down the middle of downtown. I did remember a line like that, but it had been in Mexico. Fast cars racing in circles, steered by remote. They crashed over and over until the stadium was about to explode. Panicked, I dragged Ray out into a country I’d never seen. What happened next, Ray punched me, right in front of all the Mexicans. “Now you’ll have a black eye for your ma’s birthday,” he said. He still drove me to her house but by then we were in Leo, and Ma was a Cancer. I staggered in and found her on the couch with her quilting circle — three ladies who together weighed less than me, sitting in a row like sticks of brittle.

“This is my son,” said my mother.

I can’t account for what came next. I looked down at the quilt, a patchwork maze whose path mapped all that I’d done wrong in her eyes. I saw my house when the bank forced Lisa out of it. I saw her in the future, dying of AIDS. I saw Ma getting sick and writing in my baby book: a list of my firsts, which she was coding into the quilt as triangles arranged in a loop. With that loop she was telling me I would never change. “Up yours with a plunger if that’s what you think,” I said, which Ma must have taken as a response to her words.