Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Oates takes a breath. Fills his dead lungs. He’s ready to tell Jessie something.

But Jessie doesn’t plan on listening.

She opens her own mouth.

She screams Larry Oates’ words away.

Oates starts to laugh, but Jessie can’t hear him. She can’t hear anything. She’s still screaming.

Her finger tightens on the shotgun trigger.

Quite suddenly, she realizes that she knows how to kill a nightmare.

You kill one the same way you kill a dream.

Jessie doesn’t know how many times she fired the shotgun. All she knows is that Larry Oates isn’t moving anymore, and what’s left of his head wouldn’t fill a sock.

Jessie pries the money from Oates’ dead fingers. Smitty doesn’t say a word. Neither does the doctor.

She looks both men in the eye.

She thinks about that little tie-dyed waitress.

She points the shotgun at the doctor.

“Give me your keys,” she says.

He opens his mouth, ready to argue. Then he glances down at what’s left of Larry Oates, and a second later his keys hit the ground at Jessie’s feet.

Jessie pockets them. She finds a roll of duct tape on the workbench and tells the doc to get busy. Before long Smitty is on the ground, half-mummified in silver tape. Then she gets her boots and jacket on, as fast as she can.

“Head for the highway,” she tells the doctor, aiming the shotgun his way. “My advice is this — leave town and don’t look back.”

The doctor knows good advice when he hears it. He grabs his coat and hurries into the storm.

Jessie climbs behind the wheel of the Mercedes and backs out of the barn.

Raindrops pelt the bloodstained hood, washing Larry Oates’ blood over the fenders, into the mud.

Jessie only has one place to go.

She drives fast. She keeps her eyes on the road, but her thoughts travel elsewhere.

To Joe. She can’t see him now. She can’t see what he’s doing… or what he’s done. But she can still see the last vision she had of him in her mind’s eve.

Joe Shepard standing in that restaurant parking lot, swallowing hard, taking his first step forward with Larry Oates’ shotgun gripped between his dead fingers.

She wonders how long it would take Joe to cross that parking lot. It wasn’t what you’d call a long trip. Not really. Not if you measured it in footsteps. But measured another way, it was the longest trip imaginable. Because Joe was walking in a nightmare, not a dream. It was a nightmare that belonged to the woman he loved, and he knew all too well how she felt about the things it demanded of him.

Still, even if he hesitated, it would only take him a minute or two to cross the parking lot. Jessie wonders if that might have been long enough. She tries to remember the things that took place in Larry Oates’ barn. She tries to put everything into perspective.

Oates returned to life about the same time that Jessie regained consciousness. She grabbed the shotgun off the workbench… and then Oates walked across the barn, came at her, ready to tell her something —

That couldn’t have taken very long, could it?

A minute? Maybe two? But maybe that was long enough. Maybe she had fired the shotgun in time. Maybe Joe was still walking across the parking lot when she killed the walking nightmare called Larry Oates —

Maybe killing Oates had changed everything.

Maybe. If killing a nightmare could restore a dream.

Maybe. If second chances — the kind worth having — existed in her world.

Maybe…

Jessie doesn’t know, but she’s about to find out. The restaurant is just ahead. She turns into the parking lot. The rain is really coming down now. She can’t see very far at all.

She pulls to a stop, throws open the door, steps into the downpour.

It won’t take her long to cross the lot.

Not even a minute. Not even that long.

Dull light glows behind the windows, but Jessie can’t see anything inside with rainwater bleeding down the glass. She pulls her coat over her head and hurries toward the door, dodging puddles as best she can. She jumps a big one near a storm-drain grate, sees something half submerged in dark water.

A shotgun.

Jessie stops cold, staring down at the gun.

But you can’t tell if a shotgun’s been fired by staring at it, not even if you’ve got an eye like Jessie’s. There are other ways to find out, though. Jessie is close to the window now. She can see inside the restaurant.

And there’s the waitress, smiling and laughing, showing off her soggy bankroll to a couple of truckers. But that’s not all Jessie sees, not really. Because she looks at the waitress and she sees a woman who’s been handed a second chance and doesn’t even know it.

Jessie knows, though.

Because she’s been handed a second chance, too.

Across the parking lot, a pair of headlights flash at her.

She hurries toward the Mustang.

She hurries toward her dream.

LAST KISS

If you’re like me, there are things you need to tell people, but you can’t get the words out. You want to, but you can’t. The machinery just won’t work, and everything gets all jammed up, churning in your guts long after those people are gone from your life.

You’re stuck with them, and they stay inside you forever.

The things you wanted to say. And, in a way, in memory, the people you wanted to say them to.

All together, stuck inside you forever, and there’s no way to get them out. You can write about them — like I’m doing now — scribble from A to Z and back again, but they’re still with you when you’re done, because writing starts and ends in your guts.

And that’s kind of funny, isn’t it? All that stuff churning inside you, all those people you remember and all those things that you wanted to tell them… it’s funny how it never comes together. I mean, it’s all in there, cataloged and nicely filed, and somehow it seems like you should be able to put it together. After all, you remember the person and you sure as hell remember what you wanted to say. It’s like you should be able to figure out what would have happened had you only said it.

How your life would be different.

How the lives of those other people would be different.

That’s my problem. I keep on trying to figure out what might have been.

Maybe that’s why I still have those dead people stuck inside me.

Maybe that’s why I still have Anelle Carney stuck inside me, too.

We met in high school, of course. Isn’t that where all great American romances start? We shared two classes during our sophomore year, and because my last name is Carter, which is just three letters short of Carney, I sat behind Anelle in both of them.

I was hooked right from the start. She always had a smile for me, Anelle did, and her smile made me feel like someone special. That smile was a toothpaste advertiser’s wet dream — gleaming white teeth surrounded by perfect lips that were somehow just short of inviting. And when Anelle parted those lips and teeth and you heard her voice… Well, it wasn’t the kind of voice you’d expect a teenager to have. It was quiet, but not in a shy way. Kind of sleepy, too — Anelle always talked slowly, like she had all the time in the world, like she thought a lot about the things she said. She didn’t jabber. She considered every word.

That was the same way I talked, back then. Someone told me once that people listen closely to a person who isn’t blabbing all the time. I guess that was part of the reason that I was so quiet.