Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

I settled into a director’s chair stolen from the studio, letting my voice boom so that it echoed in the sparely furnished house. “Well, the trick is not to give her what she wants. That’s how you keep her interested.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

I nodded. That was the truth. It was easy to say, hard to do. The director had never learned that. Neither had the columnist.

“It’s something you have to learn,” I said. “Or maybe it’s an instinct.”

She didn’t look at me. Her eyes scanned the beach.

My eyes scanned her. Lazy, dark curls. Worn jeans clinging to her ass, her thighs. One thumb nervously tugging a frayed belt-loop, the cleft of her back dotted with gooseflesh. And reflected in the window, against the hard gray beauty of the fog, a cotton shirt knotted between her young breasts, the knot rising and falling with some urgency as her breaths came sharp and fast.

I smiled at the thought of how she’d look on the big screen once she made it out of the background, once the camera drank of her and no one else — each perfect little detail magnified, each imperfection snipped away in the editing room. It was easy to see why Layla would do almost anything to get a piece of someone like her, or someone like me. Compared to us, directors and columnists didn’t have much to offer.

“Maybe I can teach you.” I rose from the chair. “Give you something… ”

That got her attention. “A few pointers?”

I grinned. She was really listening now. “No. I’ll give you something that you can use… a little piece of me.”

She came to me then, and we didn’t give the fog a second glance as we settled on the hardwood floor.

But I felt the fog when I hit the road. Running in my bones like cold Pacific tides, stinging deep and clean in the cracked slivers of my chapped grin.

Couldn’t smell it, though. Couldn’t smell the ocean, either.

All I could smell was the Spyder’s guts: oil and gas…

… and a few fresh drops of Layla’s blood.

I see them every now and then on the talk shows. Layla and her starlet, who isn’t so young anymore. They usually want to talk about some TV movie deal they’ve managed to scam, but invariably the host wants to talk about me.

And, after some phony protesting about the sanctity of my memory, that’s what they do. They also show up at my grave every year on the anniversary of my death, along with a bunch of middle-aged folks who tend to favor red windbreakers and white T-shirts. Layla makes a little speech, the starlet sheds a few tears, and then they get down to the business of autographing publicity photos that they posed for nearly thirty years ago.

It must have been tough for Layla, not getting what she wanted out of me. I think it was the first and only time that ever happened to her. Except with the starlet, of course. She must still be working on that, though, because she’s certainly not keeping the alcoholic babbler around out of love. No. After all these years I’m convinced that Layla’s still trying to get at the little piece of me that I shared with that sad, confused woman.

Blood out of the proverbial turnip.

After I totaled the Spyder, the whole thing blew up in Layla’s face. That was the best part, and I’m almost glad that I was still around to see it happen. First the scandal magazines hounded her with stories about witchcraft and voodoo and all that, but those idiots didn’t even realize how close to the truth they’d come. They just made up some junk, ran a couple of Layla’s ghoulish Rigormortia publicity pictures, and let it go at that.

Layla didn’t quit, though. I’ll give her that. Even when she hit bottom, she kept pitching. The director and the columnist faded from view despite her best efforts. She went through a mess of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s, but none of them made it any where. Pretty soon she was left alone with the starlet. That’s when she decided to go into the legend business.

I’m not sentimental about it, though. Layla was the one who wanted to play chicken. I just went along for the ride, so to speak. But if she was the one who lost her temper, well, I was the one who made her lose it.

I guess that makes me the big winner, doesn’t it?

See, I’d realized what Layla didn’t know, what none of the people who worshiped her could ever learn. The wanting, the needing, is the best part. Once you get something, you’ll never hunger for it in that same way again. And once you surrender something, you’ve lost it forever; it’s what you are, and it’s gone gone gone. Ask the director, or the columnist, or the legion of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s.

As for me, I’d decided that it was better to keep the lion’s share all to myself. Layla wasn’t going to have it. The director and those like him weren’t going to strip it away, bit by bit, year by year. I never wanted to wake up and look in the mirror, wondering where it had gone.

Quit while you’re ahead, is what the game is called. That’s how I saw it then. From where I’m sitting now, it doesn’t seem so clear-cut.

But when I climbed into the Spyder that last time, I figured I was headed straight for hell. Layla’s chosen revenge was fine by me — let the Spyder roar and the blood flow. That was how I felt about it. I was going to die young and leave a good-looking corpse and all that. I was counting on the power of legend — a handful of Technicolor hours that would never change — but I never figured I’d be around to see the legend take hold.

I guess I’d never considered the business end of the proposition.

The studio laid it on heavy with my family back in Indiana. The body of his car was aluminum, you see. It couldn’t stand up to such a battering. It’s so tragic. What a future he had, and to be left a cripple. Brain-damaged. Horribly disfigured. Better to place him in a private sanitarium. Let the world think him dead. The fans would pry, you understand, torture him. This way he will always be young. And the desert is such a peaceful place.

Things have been quiet for a long time, but it’s never quiet inside my head. I always demand blue sheets on my bed. When I sleep, I dream of Joselito and Granero and Maera — Hemingway’s bullfighters, all three buried long ago in the rich soil of Spain. I dream of these men in their suits of light, and of angry black eyes and sharp horns.

The walls of my room are a bright and cheery yellow.

Evenings I watch the desert sky. On temperate nights the nurses wheel me outside, my faded red windbreaker draped over my shoulders. Wonderful colors bleed overhead, night after night. Always something different, if you’re willing to watch. Sometimes the sky is as red as blood, but it never seems to make any difference, even though I keep hoping that it will.

I miss the color of blood. Real blood, I mean. I remember the hot brightness rushing out of me as the broken steering wheel speared my chest, remember how I painted myself and painted the Spyder and how the speedometer was masked by a curtain of blood. I remember staring down at the torn pieces of flesh that clung to the twisted metal and clung to my bones and knowing that every piece belonged to me and every drop of blood was mine and everything around me in that moment was as simple and clear as the waxy red shine of that stubby red crayon down in Texas.

And then they came and scraped me out of the car and stitched me back together. And in time the angry scars faded from scarlet to dull, dusty purple. All of it happened so fast, really, and then it was over.

And there was no turning back.

Like with Layla and me. I know that I was right about her and all the others, and about being hungry.