Steve took a chair at one of the long banquet tables, and watched the couples out on the floor, holding each other, dancing to a slow song, seemingly content with their lives...
He felt miserable.
Then the band — five guys who were also no spring chickens — began to play a song by the Association he hadn’t heard since high school.
...enter the young...
Slowly Steve rose to his feet.
He started to weep.
He bolted from the room and down the wooden steps and out the front door, to his car, where he drove to an all-night liquor store, bought a bottle of bourbon, went back to his hotel room and drank it, until he passed out, on the floor, in his own vomit.
And now, crawling along the expressway, it occurred to Steve — in a revelation — that it was just a few weeks after returning from that class reunion that the anxiety attacks began.
The first one sent him rushing to the emergency room in the middle of the night, certain he was having heart failure. But an EKG and follow-up tests showed nothing was wrong. After that, he suffered them in silence.
The next indignity was Kathleen accusing him of being obsessed with sex. He’d always felt he had a satisfying love life — hell, better than satisfying. He was damn lucky to have such a sexy and obliging wife — and with three kids in the house! He supposed he had been hornier than usual — as if in the mass production of his sperm there somehow held the promise of immortality — but he never foresaw the night when, in a tearful confrontation, Kathleen told him she had had enough, and to get it someplace else.
So he did.
Kathleen kicked him out, of course. He couldn’t blame her. His life was out of control, like a child’s top spinning wildly on a table, heading straight for the edge... and he had neither the ability nor the desire to stop it.
Then came the coup de grace. Somebody else got to be president of the company. A younger man. Suddenly, as if overnight, Steve was perceived — or so he thought — as “too old.” What depressed him more than anything else was knowing the finality of what lay before him: too late to start over with another company, he would go no further up the ladder of success.
Steve needed a fix... in the form of Jennifer who worked at an Orange Julius at a mall. She was dumb as a post, but young and pretty. And between her creamy white thighs was the only place he could get away from his demons.
He left the crowded expressway, and drove to the mall. He’d treat Jennifer to an expensive dinner, he thought, then she would make him feel better... sad pathetic excuse for a man that he was...
He smirked, hating himself, and pulled into a parking place. He turned off the engine and was undoing the seatbelt, when a tremendous force from behind drove him into the windshield, his head cracking up against the glass. While he didn’t lose consciousness, Steve was so stunned he remained motionless for a moment, slumped over the steering wheel.
Then dazed, his head throbbing, he leaned back against the seat, and saw, in his rearview mirror, the car that hit him roar off. Suddenly he sat up straight, given a jolt of electricity in the form of vengeance, and started his car and took out after the BMW.
He caught up to it, after the fourth stop light, but there was another car between them. He wheeled into a corner gas station, came out the other end and went into the intersection, in front of the BMW, to cut it off; he could not see inside the car’s tinted windows.
When the light changed, car horns blared at him blocking the way, and the BMW accelerated, slamming his left backside, spinning him around, leaving him in the dust.
Now nothing mattered to Steve — not his life or the lives of anyone else — in his pursuit of the bastard in the BMW, over curbs and through red lights on their mad race out of the suburbs and into the country.
After a while the BMW swerved off the highway onto a secondary road. On a straightaway, Steve tried to overtake it, but the BMW was just too powerful. He pulled back a bit, saving his engine for the upgrade just ahead as the road began to wind up a steep hill that lead to a quarry.
Was this maniac luring him to some desolate place in order to kill him? Steve wasn’t about to wait and find out; he reached under his seat for the gun.
On a curve up the hill he buried his accelerator on the floor and sped up as close as he could to the other car, rolled down his window and fired. Blam! The back window of the BMW exploded, glass shards flying back onto his windshield and hand.
The BMW careened violently to the left and then to the right, skittering along a metal guardrail that bowed out as if it were a rubber band, straining to keep the car from going over the edge of the cliff. The BMW spun around and came to a halt, hung up on the rail.
Steve pulled his Porsche off to the side and waited.
Operating on adrenaline, legs feeling weak, Steve shielded his eyes from the sun that peered out from the clouds, an interested spectator, as he carefully approached the BMW. He yanked open the car door on the driver’s side, gun ready to use.
But it didn’t seem necessary. A woman in a red dress was slumped over the wheel, blond hair covering her face.
Steve didn’t know what to think; he’d expected a man.
Carefully he pushed the woman back against the seat, revealing her face, which he did not recognize. She didn’t appear to be badly hurt; the only sign of blood was a thin trickle down her left leg.
Steve relaxed his grip on the gun. Was she someone he picked up in a bar for a one-night stand? he wondered. Was that what this was? Some kind of fatal attraction?
On the front seat, next to the woman, lay a purse, opened. He leaned in, past her, to look for some identification.
His fingers were on a wallet when he felt a burning in his side that made him scream out with pain. He pulled back, out of the car, and saw scissors sticking out of his side.
Now the woman came at him, with a wild look in her eyes, and he brought up his hand with the gun and shot her. The force threw her back on the seat, but after a second she sat up like some superwoman and threw herself on him and they stumbled backward, doing an awkward little dance like a pair of marionettes, and tripped on the mangled guard rail and went over the cliff’s edge together in a stunned embrace.
Below, a pair of frightened eyes watched.
He’d been out in the stream, fishing, looking for food to feed his family, when the violence erupted. It forced him back to the bank where he hid in the brush, fearful of repercussions, shivering in his brown fur coat.
After a while, when the sun began to set behind the cliff, its long rays winking goodbye, he ventured out. Cautiously he slid into the stream, and swam toward the humans that lay twisted on the rocks, their limbs entwined like the briar bush he had just crawled out of.
Halfway across, he stopped, sniffing, his head bobbing on the water’s surface. He need not go any further: death hung in the air.
He turned and swam downstream a ways, then dove under and entered a hole in the bottom of the bank that then led upward to his house.
Inside the dark, dank chamber, lined with grass, the female muskrat waited; nestled against her warm body were four tiny babies.
He lay protectively next to her and she snuggled up to him. Tomorrow, he would hunt for tadpoles — but further down stream, away from the vile humans. And she would clean the house and take care of the babies...
Yes, tomorrow would be another glorious day.