She feeds him half the black tart. He drinks another glass. Leaves a slurred message on a friend’s telephone to say he is out with a girl, a babe, a doll. He is having too good a time. He probably won’t make it tonight. He expects to stay over tonight. He says this looking at Martha, waiting to see her happiness at the thought that he will stay in her bed, will sleep beside her tonight. Martha Grace smiles an appropriate gratitude and Tim turns his phone off. Martha Grace did not want him to use hers. She said it would not do for his friend to call back on her number. Tim is touched she is thinking of his reputation even now.
She pours more wine. Tim does not see that he is drinking the whole bottle, Martha not at all. He inhales more coke. They fuck again. This time it is less simple. He cannot come. He cuts himself another slice of the tart, eats half, puts it down, gulps a mouthful of wine, licks his finger to wipe sticky crumbs of white powder from the wooden table. Tim Culver is confused. He is tired but wide awake. He is hungry but full. He is slowing-down drunk but wired too. He is in love with Martha Grace but despises both of them for it. He is alive, but only just.
Tim Culver dies of a heart attack. His young healthy heart cannot stand the strain of wine and drugs and fucking — and the special treat Martha had prepared. She pulls his jeans and shirt back on him, moves his body while it is still warm and pliable, lays him on a sheet of spread-out rubbish bags by her back door. She carries him out down the path by her back garden. He is big, but she is bigger, and necessity has made her strong. It is dark. There is no-one to see her stumble through the gate, down the alleyway. No one to see her leave the half-dressed body in the dark street. No one to see her gloved hands place the emptied wine bottles by his feet. By the time Martha Grace kisses his lips they are already cold. He smells of chocolate and wine and sex.
She goes home and for the second time that day, scrubs her kitchen clean. Then she sleeps alone, she will wash in the morning. For now the scent of Tim Culver in her sheets, her hair, her heavy flesh will be enough to keep her warm through the night.
Tim Culver was found the next morning. Cocaine and so much alcohol in his blood. His heart run to a standstill by the excess of youth. There was no point looking for anyone else to blame. No-one saw him stumble into the street. No-one noticed Martha Grace lumber away. His friends confirmed he’d been with a girl that night. The state of his semen-stained clothes confirmed he’d been with a girl that night. At least the police said girl to his parents, whispered whore among themselves. Just another small town boy turned bad by the lights and the nights of the bright city. Maybe further education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
No-one would ever think that Tim Culver’s healthy, spent, virile young body could ever have had anything to do with an old witch like Martha Grace. As the whole town knows, the fat bitch is a dyke anyway.
A season or two later and Martha Grace is herself again. Back to where she was before Tim Culver. Back to who she was before Tim Culver. Lives alone, speaks rarely to strangers, pleases only herself. Pleasures only herself. And lives happily enough most of the time. Remembering to cry only when she recalls a time that once reached beyond enough.
The Weekender
Jeffery Deaver
The night went bad fast.
I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the flashers.
Toth started to talk but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.
“Oh, brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.
They were never easy, drugstores.
Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the perco and Valium and the other drugs. You know.
You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the “Fast Cash” button gives you twenty only. Which tells you something. So why even bother?
No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls’s a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why — because like everywhere else, people there need medicine and hair spray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney’s. So they pay cash.
“Oh, brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”
And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.
“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Surely not at a roadblock, where they was ready for us.
“What?” I snapped.
“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”
Toth’s a big guy and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the backseat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.
“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”
“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”
This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.
Toth cranked down the window and let this cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”
“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”
This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.
He pointed out where to turn and I did. He said the town was at the base of the Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls this afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. It’d been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious but sometimes I am.
“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon — Sunday — when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.
I could see the Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.