“You wanna tell me how the fuck we get rid of her?” he snarled at Tracey, whose apparent fright gave full flower to Marie’s budding terror. That he was handsome — dark-eyed, square-jawed, with full, shapely lips — made him all the more terrifying.
“What was I supposed to do?” Tracey quavered. “Listen, I kept her here for a whole day with no—”
“Where’s your keys?” he roared at Marie.
“Here, they’re here,” Tracey said, fumbling them out of her pocket. “Let’s go, Mike, please, let’s just go.”
“You got money?” he asked, leaning over Marie, one cool strand of his long hair raking across her bare arm. She could hardly breathe, looking into his alarming, moist eyes.
“My purse,” she gasped. “In the car.”
He stalked out, his dirty jeans sagging at the seat, into which someone had sewn a facsimile of the American flag. He looked near starving, his upper arms shaped like bedposts, thin and tapering and hard. She heard the car door open and the contents of her purse spilling over the gravel.
“The premed was a lie,” Tracey said. “I met him at a concert.” She darted a look outside, her lip quivering. “You know how much power I have over my own life, Marie?” She lifted her hand and squeezed her thumb and index finger together. “This much.”
He was in again, tearing into the fridge, cramming food into his mouth. The food seemed to calm him some. He looked around. He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, a man weighted by bad luck and a mean spirit that encased his true age like barnacles on a boat. “Pick up our stuff,” he said to Tracey. “We’re out of this dump.”
Tracey did as he said, gathering the sleeping bag and stuffing it into a sack. He watched her body damply as she moved; Marie felt an engulfing nausea but could not move herself, not even to cover her mouth at the approaching bile. Her legs were lashed to the chair legs, her arms tied behind her, giving her a deeply discomfiting sensation of being bound to empty space. She felt desperate to close her legs, cross her arms over her breasts, unwilling to die with her most womanly parts exposed. “I’m going to be sick,” she gulped, but it was too late, a thin trail of spit and bile lolloping down her shirtfront.
Mike lifted his forearm, dirty with tattoos, and chopped it down across Marie’s jaw. She thumped backward to the floor, chair and all, tasting blood, seeing stars, letting out a squawk of despair. Then she fell silent, looking at the upended room, stunned. She heard the flick of a switchblade and felt the heat of his shadow. She tried to snap her eyes shut, to wait for what came next, but they opened again, fixed on his; in the still, shiny irises she searched for a sign of latent goodness, or regret, some long-ago time that defined him. In the sepulchral silence she locked eyes with him, sorrow to sorrow. He dropped the knife. “Fuck this, you do it,” he said to Tracey, then swaggered out. She heard her car revving in the dooryard, the radio blaring on. Now her eyes closed. A small rustle materialized near her left ear; it was Tracey, crouching next to her, holding the opened blade.
“Shh,” Tracey said. “He’s a coward, and he doesn’t like blood, but he’s not above beating the hell out of me.” She patted Marie’s cheek. “So let’s just pretend I’ve killed you.”
Marie began to weep, silently, a sheen of moisture beading beneath her eyes. She made a prayer to the Virgin Mary, something she had not done since she was a child. She summoned an image of Ernie sitting on the porch, missing her. Of John scraping that plate in the college cafeteria. With shocking tenderness, Tracey made a small cut near Marie’s temple just above the hairline. It hurt very little, but the blood began to course into her hair in warm, oozy tracks. Tracey lifted the knife, now a rich, dripping red. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “But head wounds bleed like crazy.” The horn from Marie’s car sounded in two long, insistent blasts.
“You chose a hell of a life for yourself, Tracey,” Marie whispered.
“Yeah,” Tracey said, closing her palm lightly over the knife. She got up. “But at least I chose.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Ditto. Take care.”
For much of the long evening Marie kept still, blinking into the approaching dark. She had to pee desperately but determined to hold it even if it killed her, which she genuinely thought it might. She was facing the ceiling, still tied, the blood on her face and hair drying uncomfortably. She recalled John’s childhood habit of hanging slothlike from banisters or chair backs, loving the upside-down world. Perhaps his parents were easier to understand this way. She saw now what had so compelled him: the ceiling would make a marvelous floor, a creamy expanse you could navigate however you wished; you could fling yourself from corner to corner, unencumbered except for an occasional light fixture. Even the walls looked inviting: the windows appeared to open from the top down, the tops of doors made odd, amusing steps into the next room, framed pictures floated knee-high, their reversed images full of whimsy, hard to decode. In time she got used to the overturned room, even preferred it. It calmed her. She no longer felt sick. She understood that Ernie was on his way here, of course he was, he would be here before the moon rose, missing her, full of apology for disturbing her peace, but he needed her, the house was empty and their son was gone, and he needed her as he steered down the dirt road, veering left past the big boulder, entering the dooryard to find a strange, battered car and a terrifying silence.
“Oh, Ernie,” she said when he did indeed panic through the door. “Ernie. Sweetheart. Untie me.” In he came, just as she knew he would.
And then? They no longer looked back on this season as the autumn when they lost their second child. This season — with its gentle temperatures and propensity for inspiring flight — they recalled instead as that one autumn when those awful people, that terrible pair, broke into the cabin. They exchanged one memory for the other, remembering Ernie’s raging, man-sized sobs as he worked at the stiff rawhide, remembering him rocking her under a shaft of moonlight that sliced through the door he’d left open, remembering, half laughing, that the first thing Marie wanted to do, after being rescued by her prince, was pee. This moment became the turning point — this moment and no other — when two long-married people decided to stay married, to succumb to the shape of the rest of their life, to live with things they would not speak of. They shouldered each other into the coming years because there was no other face each could bear to look at in this moment of turning, no other arms they could bear but each other’s, and they made themselves right again, they did, just the two of them.
Contributors’ Notes
Born and raised in northern Michigan, Doug Allyn studied the Chinese language at Indiana University and served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
Returning to school on the GI Bill, Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist and a poet and lyricist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle. He later taught creative writing at Mott Community College and presently reviews books for the Flint Journal while maintaining a full writing schedule.
From the beginning, critical response to Mr. Allyn’s work has been remarkable. His first published story won the Robert L. Fish award from the Mystery Writers of America. Subsequent works have won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the American Mystery Award, the Derringer Award for best novella, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award five times. His career highlights include drinking champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark. The Allyns live in frenetic bliss in Montrose, Michigan.
“The Jukebox King” is based on the reality of the Detroit nightclub scene. Rap didn’t introduce gangsters to the music business; the Mob has been in the game since Prohibition. Drawn to the nightlife and easy money, hoods had financial interests in dance clubs, jukeboxes, and even recording studios.