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She started to work her magic, but stopped abruptly, pulled back.

“Hold on … we need…”

“What? What do we need?” I said, wishing she hadn’t stopped.

“Music!”

She was gone for a moment, but when she came back, she had a small, white device in her hands. It was the size of a bar of soap. She plugged a cord into the jack and started to click away.

“What’s that?”

“An iPod, duh. It’s got all my music on it. I threw the CDs out. Useless now.”

“You’re insane,” I said. “Useless?!”

“I feel like I’m about to show fire to a caveman.”

“Okay,” I said eagerly, “show me what you got.”

K Neon hit play, and a machine gun of bass hits exploded out of the speakers all around us. She rose to her feet and began to move around the room, turning and extending and coming towards me in sync with everything and nothing. She danced around the room, feet never touching the Persian rug. She lowered herself onto me, and the music threatened to level the house, the ocean, the sky, and even me.

It was a good day.

9

I resurfaced into light, descending slate steps. My sneakers crushed the seashells. I felt like I’d dwelled in the darkness for eons. K Neon had kept me occupied for days.

My intention for this new day was to get some work done on the boulder wall along the dunes, but it was raining again.

I left K in the master bedroom, still naked and just starting the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’d be no help to her with that anyway; she was brilliant on her own. She seemed fine with me leaving. Barely looked up. Just filled in blocks of the puzzle in with a green, ball-point pen.

Outside, the sky was gray, and I had no clue what was happening with the forecast; the radio didn’t make it clear. It was triple shot Thursday, so they just kept playing Rolling Stones songs I’d already heard too many times: “Brown Sugar,” “Satisfaction,” “Tumbling Dice.” There was no room for the weather forecast with all that triple-shotting.

I drove away from the ocean, headed inland. To stay on errand, I ducked into a concrete supply yard and got one ton of screened white sand, six bags of crushed white limestone powder, and twelve bags of Portland cement. The sand was loose. It got dumped into my truck by Bernie on the front end loader. The cement came in 75-pound paper sacks. I wrapped them well with clear plastic and duct taped them shut so they wouldn’t get wet and ruined.

I was hungry. K Neon didn’t eat very much. I was starving, actually. That’s all that was on my mind as I cut through town in the rain. Eggs. Bacon. Eggs and bacon dancing together. Eggs pushing the bacon on the ground. Both of them rolling around on the floor, grinding, groping, and me with a fork, swooping in and eating them both while they were distracted.

Near the river, the elevation dropped sharply. I made a left. Even though I’d driven down that hill a thousand times in my life, I was horrified to find how different the hill felt that morning. My truck had no traction due to the weight in the bed.

At the bottom of the hill, a maroon Buick LeSabre sat at the light. The cross street was deserted. The car could have made the right on red, but instead it just sat there with its turn signal on … waiting for some reason.

I stepped on the brakes. The F-250 lunged forward, vibrating as the brake pads rubbed ineffectively on the rotors. My vehicle began to skid — gliding over the wet road beneath it. Madly, I stomped down harder. The truck shuddered, the gap closing. The rear of the LeSabre grew. The bumper was a solid line of dancing rainbow Grateful Dead bears stickers. I closed my eyes and gripped the vibrating wheel.

A violent shockwave. I bit my tongue.

The LeSabre was knocked into the intersection. Thankfully, no cars were coming. We spun out in opposite directions and quickly came to a short rest. A metal shovel shot out of the bed of my truck and landed in a bush in front of an office complex.

Out of the LaSabre bounced a woman. Mid-fifties. Gray turtleneck sweater. A mop of curly, salt and pepper hair. A small trickle of blood below her brow. I cringed. She didn’t appear to be seriously injured, and was, for some reason, walking over to my window in a hurry.

“Hey! Are you okay?” she asked. She had a thick Irish accent. It further disoriented me.

“Me,” I stammered.

“Yeah, you,” she nodded. Then the Irish lady motioned towards the parking lot. She wanted to get off the road. Sure. That was wise.

We moved the vehicles. We were standing out in the light rain. It misted on our foreheads, making us furrow our brows as if we were in pain from it. We stood there and glared at our ticking, hissing machines as if they were unruly pets who’d just misbehaved with each other and had to be separated. The Irish lady was understanding about the whole thing. A little too understanding. I didn’t know how to take it.

“I’d like to handle this outside of insurance, but I’d need to have the money quickly,” she said, “for repairs.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. Cash. We’d do it cash. As soon as possible.

“My brother is in collision,” she said coolly.

“So are you,” I thought.

She bent down and rubbed her open palm on the crunched devastation as if receiving a transmission directly from the LeSabre itself.

“Five hundred,” she said. “Seem fair?”

“No, it seems low,” I said, ashamed again of my driving. “I can give you seven hundred.”

“Sweet, but unnecessary,” she said definitively.

She wanted to see my license. I handed it to her.

“Lee,” she said, looking at my face and the photo on the ID. “I’ll give this back to you when you bring the money.”

She put my license in the back pocket of her jeans.

“Jesus.”

“Don’t bring Him into this,” she said. “You come by tonight. Yeah, 7:30. My husband is out of town, and I need to have the car fixed before he gets back.”

She opened up the LeSabre and fished around inside, came back with a tube of lipstick. Metallic. Silver.

“Halloween,” she said to explain and then wrote her address on the hood of my F-250:

Mary Beth

118 Mermaid Ave.

“The Tin Man,” I thought.

I said I knew where it was, and that I’d come by. It was just a few miles from the Lagoon House.

“Seven-thirty,” she said again as she waved and climbed into her car, pulling out of the lot. “Come alone!”

I jumped in my truck and started to pull away. A girl with an umbrella tapped on my window.

“Yeah?”

She pointed at my shovel sticking in a bush with red berries. I thanked her and threw the shovel into the bed of the pickup, while she smoked a cigarette beneath her umbrella, eyeing me.

As I left the lot, I noticed that the office belonged to a lawyer. I imagined him in one of the upper windows, looking down at the rainy street, at the scene of the collision, and hoping we’d need him.

But we wouldn’t.

People like us don’t use lawyers unless we’re forced.

Feral

Where the fuck did you get that motherfucking sweet viking helmet?” Feral said.

“A girl.”

I set the helmet on the coffee table.

He was on the couch, shirtless and playing Grand Theft Auto.

“Your stitches are finally out.”

“Trish yanked them.”

“She’s good like that.”

“Yeah, oh, mos def. She’s the best when she’s not bitching me out. The best.”

She’d mentioned the problems with Feral to me, so it didn’t surprise me when he said, “She must be getting born again for Christ or something. Getting all Holy Roller. Get this: she wants me to go over to the Mayweather. She says I’ve got a problem. Me. Imagine that! Me, with a problem. I should get her a giant Bible with her name on it.”