Norman Partridge: The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

None of those things happened in my first novel.

None of those characters appeared.

But in a way, they were all there. Every one of them. Because they were inside me. If they hadn’t been, I never would have written that book… or anything else.

I could go on, dear reader, but I think that’s where I’ll leave you. I feel myself straining to make a point, to make connections that aren’t really there. But this isn’t a game of connect the dots, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that real life rarely has the clarity of fiction. I learned that while riding a bucking muscle car when I was only ten years old.

I still visit the cemetery now and then. My dad’s buried there, close to that tree my friends and I used to sit under when we sneaked out to watch drive-in movies. The old man’s gone and I miss him more than I can every say, but I still remember his stories about bloody footprints and the Green Man, and I still tell them, the same way I tell my own stories.

The drive-in remains, too. It’s still right there, across the road from the cemetery. It’s been closed for many years, but no one has tom it down. These days the screen is in horrible shape. Several of the garage-door-sized panels are missing and it’s more gray than white—like the picked-over carcass of Moby Dick.

I still get a funny feeling looking up at that screen. Sometimes I can still see Gregory Peck pinned up there, beckoning with his dead Ahab arm… and I’m reminded of things I set out to do a long time ago, and things I’ve done, and things I still want to accomplish.

But I’m reminded of other things, too.

Things I saw outside the screen’s four corners.

Some of those things I saw clearly. Some of them I’m still trying to recognize.

I like to think that those are the things I write about.

I hope you’ll find some of them in these stories.

Norman Partridge

Lafayette, California

March 1, 2001

RED RIGHT HAND

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

— Shakespeare

Macbeth , II.2

Claire held the gun in her left hand, the blood in her right.

“You ready?” Arson wanted to know.

She just sat there. Arson was always like that. Impatient. He never stopped moving. Like now his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel of the Ford Roadster he’d stolen up in Bakersfield, gun-oil gleaming on fingernails that danced in the afternoon sunlight.

Arson’s fingers were scarred. He wasn’t worried about any blood. As far as he was concerned, any blood spilled today would belong to someone else.

And that seemed more than a likely possibility. They’d stopped to talk about the job one last time before they pulled it. There was a little town up ahead called Fiddler, and in that town was a bank that Arson had cased a couple days ago. He said it would be easy pickings, because the town didn’t have any law worth worrying about.

But Claire wasn’t worried about the law.

She was worried about something else.

Something that was worth worrying about. Something red, and wet, and hot. Something she couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how many times she snaked the needle through her flesh, no matter how tight she drew the stitches —

“Claire?” Arson said. “You ready, hon?”

The idling Ford purred like a kitten. A cricket sang among the withered cornstalks. But Claire didn’t say a word.

In the backseat, Arson’s brother and sister-in-law picked up the slack.

“I don’t think she’s ready at all,” Hank said.

“Yeah,” Pearl chimed in. “If you ask me, we oughta left her behind. She ain’t up to snuff.”

‘You two shut up,” Arson said, and he didn’t have to tell them twice.

Arson’s right hand closed over Claire’s left. She thought about that. The gun in her left hand, and Arson’s strong scarred fingers wrapped around both. It felt so good, so safe.

“That’s better.” Arson gave Claire’s gun hand a gentle squeeze. “I promise you, hon — it’ll be a piece of cake.”

Claire’s eyes found his. “It’ll be okay?”

‘Yeah.”

“You’ll be with me?”

“Every step of the way.”

“Always?”

Arson’s gaze was sharp, unflinching.

“Until they put one of us in the ground,” he said.

Claire’s breath caught in her throat. She clenched her right hand, fingers closing around the gash. Every muscle, every tendon, every bone ached.

If only the her skin would scab over, and scar, everything would be okay —

The stitches popped one by one, threads slipping through the tiny holes the needle had made. A thin trickle of blood snaked between her fingers. It was quiet in the car, so quiet that she was sure she’d hear the first red drop as it rolled off her knuckles and pattered against the leather upholstery.

She prayed that Arson wouldn’t notice the blood.

He didn’t. He gave her other hand a pat as he let it go. “That’s my girl,” he said, and his voice was warm as summer sunshine.

And then Claire heard that first drop of blood fall, pattering the leather upholstery like a tear raining down on the cold face of a corpse.

She shivered. She couldn’t help it. Another drop of blood welled up in her palm and traveled the trench of her lifeline. Another drop of blood rolled across her knuckles. Another drop, and then another.

Claire almost started crying.

Instead, she bolted from the car.

Into the cornfield.

Thunderheads bumped around up in the mountains, threatening rain. Officer Tate Winters sure enough wished the clouds would blow his way. Without them there was only the unbearably muggy heat, sandwiched between the parched summer earth and the unblinking sun above.

Tate sat on his motorbike. As far as he was concerned, it was too hot to be sitting on a motorbike. Too hot to be wearing a highway patrolman’s uniform, too. Too hot to be doing anything that didn’t involve a tall glass of cold lemonade.

Besides that, Tate should have been off an hour ago. But the couple had flagged him down, and then the boy started talking, and now Tate was stuck.

Stuck under the California sun, in a uniform, on a hot and muggy afternoon.

The couple, they weren’t quite so hot. That was because they were damn near naked. The boy didn’t have any pants. And the girl wasn’t wearing nothing but a little bit of a slip. It was black and it was silk. Hell, the girls Tate knew wouldn’t wear anything like that, not even under their clothes where other folks couldn’t see it.

The boy wasn’t at all embarrassed, though. His name was John Wallace Johnson. Pants or no pants, he was obviously the type of young man who felt that accompanying a girl in a black slip reflected well on his manhood.

Which, truth be told, wasn’t much to reflect on at all.

But reflection seemed to be John Wallace Johnson’s game. Meaning the kid was a talker, even on a hot afternoon devoid of lemonade. The kid talked in a voice that pinched like a fat man’s shoe. Without prompting, he started telling Tate the story for the third time, how he and his girl had been down by Fiddler Creek having a little picnic when these folks came out of nowhere toting guns like they were ready to take on a phalanx of G-men or something, and then the bandits made John Wallace Johnson and his girl strip damn near naked, and pretty soon John Wallace Johnson and his girl were standing there watching his Ford Roadster disappear down Old Howard Road without John Wallace Johnson behind the wheel.