“I have to pee too. We passed a restaurant a quarter mile back.”
He pointed across the road. “There’s the bushes. I’m not stopping anywhere else till the motel.”
We crossed the state and got a cheap room in Naples for the night. Carl ordered a pepperoni pizza from Domino’s, no mushrooms for me. The room was clean and the air and remote worked, but it was far from the beach. We sat in bed and ate the pizza. I was trying to stick with the plan for having fun and I suggested we could get up early and drive to the beach to find shells.
“To look for fucking seashells? No.”
His volume warned me. I decided to drop it. I gave him all my pepperonis and finished up my piece. I had a murder book to curl up with. He found a football game on TV.
I was in the grip of a juicy scene when Carl started working his hands under the covers. It was halftime. He found my thigh and stroked inward. I read fast to get to the end of the chapter. He grabbed the book and flung it across the room onto the other bed.
“I’m tryin to make love to you, and you have your nose stuck in a book. What’s the problem? You gettin it somewhere else and don’t need it from me? Huh?”
I shook my head violently. His tone and volume had me scared. “No, for Chrissakes.” His face was an inch from mine. Rather than say anything else, I took his shoulders and pulled myself to him for a kiss. He was stiff, so I started sucking his lower lip and moving my tongue around. His shoulders relaxed.
Pretty soon he yanked down the covers, pulled up my nightie, and climbed on top. I couldn’t feel him inside me — I was numb. Nothing new. I smelled his breath.
I moaned like he expected, and after a few long minutes of pumping and grabbing at my tits, he got that strained look on his face. “I love you to death,” he rasped. “Love you to death.” I felt him get rigid and come hard inside me, and a chill ran all the way from his cock to my head. He groaned deep and let himself down on my chest. “It’s supernatural what you do to me, dollface, supernatural.”
“Mmm.”
He lit up a cigarette and puffed a few breaths in my face. “I couldn’t live without you. Know that? You know that, don’t you? You ever left me, I’d have to kill myself.”
“No. Don’t say that.”
“Why? You thinkin of leaving? I would kill myself. I would. And knowin me, I’d take you along.” He rolled on his side, laughing eh-eh-eh to himself. My arm was pinned, and for a second I panicked. I yanked it out from under him. He shifted and in seconds started snoring. Son of a bitch. He had me afraid to speak.
The woman and the gator came into my head, and I knew her life without having to live it, the casual cruelty and a sudden swift slice that changed her whole future. I could land in her place easy, trapped with a kid, no job, and a bastard of a husband who thought he was God. Carl said he was God at least three times a week. I shuddered — more like the devil. First, he’d take an arm, then go for my soul, just a matter of time. He’d rather see me dead than gone.
There was no thought of a road trip the next weekend, so we both slept late that Saturday. By then, the fear and hatred in my heart had taken over my brain. I was frying eggs, the bathroom door was open, and Carl was on the toilet — his place of serious thinking — when he used the words that struck me with the juicy, seedy, sweet fantasy of getting rid of him.
“I ought to kill my asshole brother-in-law!” he yelled. The words were followed by grunts of pleasure and plunking noises I could hear from the kitchen.
Uh-huh, I said to myself. I pretended to be half hearing — as if that were possible — and splashed the eggs with bacon grease like he wanted them. I didn’t say anything. He was building up rage on the sound of his own voice.
“The fuck went out on Labor Day and left Penny and the kids home. She didn’t say anything about him drinkin, but I could hear it in her voice when I called last night. I can’t keep ignoring this. I oughta get a flight over there and take ol’ Raymond out.”
“How’s he doing after his knife wound?”
“Son of a bitch is finally back to work. I should just take him out. Penny and the kids would be fine with the insurance she’d get from GM.”
“Oh?”
“Those slimy titty bars he hangs out in — like Babydoe’s — I could just fly into Dallas, do him, and fly back. Nobody would think a thing unusual.”
I heard the flush and then his continued pulling of toilet paper. He always flushed before he wiped. I knew if I went in there after him I would see streaky wads of paper still floating. He came striding into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around him, his gut hanging over. He seemed to rock back as he walked to keep from falling forward. He turned and poured his eighth cup of coffee, added milk, held it over the sink, and stirred wildly. Half of it slopped over the sides of the cup. His face was mottled with red and he growled to himself.
I looked away. I remembered that at seventeen he had thrown his father out of the house — for beating his mother. He found out later they snuck around for years to see each other behind his back — they were that scared of him.
I knew going opposite whatever he said would push him. I pointed to the phone. “Calm down and call your sister. Her and the kids might want to keep Ray around.”
“Yeah? Uh-uh. She’s too nice. She’ll give that son of a bitch chance after chance while he spends all their money on ass and booze. If anybody’s gonna take advantage of somebody, it’s gonna be me.”
I handed him his plate of eggs and turned away to take my shower and let him spew. I heard him pick up the paper again and started with how all the “assholes in the news” should be killed.
Before this, it didn’t occur to me as an asset that he was always a hair’s breadth from violence. I’d tried for peace. I didn’t want to know about the trouble he’d been in before we met, his being in jail for violating a restraining order. He’d broken down a door — I heard that from his sister because she thought I should know. I figured he deserved another chance in life. He had a lousy childhood with the drunk old man and all. But now I realized how foolish I was to think that if I treated him nice enough — turned the other cheek — he would be nice back. Thought that was human nature. Wrong. I was a goddamned angelic savior for over a year and not a speck of it rubbed off. He took me for a sucker to use and abuse. It was a lesson I’d never forget, learned too late.
This sounds crazy — but something about the alligator incident made me know Carl’s true capabilities, and I was fucking scared. That alligator told me that a ticket for Carl to Dallas was my only ticket out. It was a harsh thought, but Penny’s husband wasn’t God’s gift either, and if Carl didn’t get him, it was just a matter of time till some other motherfucker did.
At first, I felt scared of the wicked thoughts in my heart. But after a few days, each time Carl hawked up a big gob and spit it out the car window or screamed at me because the elevator at the apartment complex was too slow, the idea became less sinful. He was always saying how he used to break guys’ legs for a living, collecting, and he might decide to find some employment of that kind in Florida since the pay was so lousy for construction. Besides that, there was his drunk driving — if I could get him behind bars, it would be an asset to the whole state. Or maybe I’d only have to threaten.
One morning he woke up and bit my nipple hard before I was even awake. “Ouch!” I yelled. It drew blood and made my eyes fill up.
“The world’s a hard place,” he told me.
“You make it that way.”
He laughed. “You lived your little pussy life long enough. It’s time you find out what it’s all about.” He covered my mouth with his booze-and-cigarette breath, and I knew that was the day I’d make a call to his sister. He wasn’t going to go away on his own.