by Jennifer Pashley

Anna points the gun right into my chest, the nose of it against my breastbone. She calls me an adulterer. I call her a murderer.

I ain’t killed you yet, she says. You already slept with my husband.

But I’m not the adulterer, I argue. You can see where this is going. My logic is off. But it’s true. I’m not the married man. He is, I say. I nod at Glenn, who cowers in the corner.

If I’d known in the beginning that it would come to this: me with a goddamn gun at my heart, and her, sweating, her hair coming undone and her fat arms wagging, backing me into the stove, I’d never have started in with Glenn in the first place. But I did. His belt buckle shaped like Georgia, his round hound dog eyes. His legs, bowed and heavy, his mouth, pinker than expected. I started in because out of nowhere at a Stuckey’s in Alabama, he came up behind me smelling of french fries and Pine Sol, leaned into my ear with his lips and said he could suck me dry, and boy did he come close.

Their kitchen is a yellow plaid flowered mess. Dishes piled in the sink, bottles and their parts – nipples, rings, plugs – all over the counter, the stink of shitty diapers coming from the trash bin. The windows are all open, no curtains, only a top ruffled valance, and the rusted screens, the air outside no better than what’s in. Anyone walking by can see the scene within: Anna with her sleek little handgun pushed into the flat of my chest. Where does a lady even get a gun like that? She nudges me. Even if she doesn’t shoot me it’ll leave a bruise. Glenn sinks down onto a metal kitchen chair. The northern tip of Georgia cuts into his belly.

She shoots me in the foot. Just lowers the gun and fires, like someone clanging a bell right in your ear. My ear hurts worse than the toe. At first. But I’m already onto the next scene: my mind, ahead of myself, running down the street, hobbling on that bleeding gimpy foot. The scene pans wide. My legs, high and booking.

– — –

How long can a foot bleed? Gravity could kill me. All my blood going down there and out, like pouring water down a straight pipe. Pretty soon, I’ll be empty. So I prop it higher than my head, call Penny from a pay phone because to her this is funny. The pay phone, not the foot. For Penny, in her apartment, with her cell phone and her laptop, her square white furniture, her square white glasses, chopped carrot hair, her sad eyes, dismal outlook, always the one to find doom in a conversation. the pay phone makes her laugh. The shooting, not so much.

I dunno, she says real slow. I imagine her Googling while we’re on the phone. Imminent death from shot off toe. She’s smoking. I hear the pull through the filter. What would cowboys do? She asks. She is totally doing something else. Half-listening.

I could die, Penny, I say. I try to sound cold, distant, like maybe I’m fading already.

She laughs as hard as she ever does, weak and smoky. I’ll end up hobbling to a park bench, taking off my shoe and sock and wrapping the sock tight around my toes until I can get to the drug store, for a bandage. While I still have her on the phone, I lean with my foot propped high on a metal trash barrel, posed like a rock star or a ballerina, on a street lined with pansies and flowering crabapples. I ask if I can talk to David.

She snorts, like what I’ve said is ridiculous: worthy of ridicule.

Is he there? I say. Where is he?

A pop and a pull through the filter before she answers in that space between inhale and exhale. Where is he? She says. You’re the one who left, Jon.

– — –

Down here, down south, out in eastern tumbling tumbleweed shit hole city, USA, these men are married. It’s better than what you get at home. When you lean back on the motel bed, it’s like they don’t know what they’ve been missing, would never have asked, don’t parade around like God save the fucking queen. Like they’re grateful, like I saved them from some doldrum crummy household buried in toys, dried flowers, baskets of yarn balls and kittens. And the likes of me have never blown into these parts, never another one with the long lean arms and legs, or the heart shaped mouth, the top lip bigger than the bottom like an old baby doll, but both of them just fine to do the job.

Somewhere in the middle of our thing, Glenn says to me, You have a pretty mouth, but he cuts off the Y so it’s just prit-mouth.

I lean in the cab of his truck with some AM talk low on the speaker, some talk about everything that is wrong with America, about how to fix it, only it’s so low we can’t hear it, and we are what’s wrong, are what’s tearing down the foundation of everything normal and good. I watch him work it out.

He says, It makes me goddamn crazy. And when he kisses me, he bites me, draws blood, laps it up like a dog, like a horse eating out of your hand.

– — –

David is not as skinny as he could be, bulky around the shoulders and chest, but quick, always moving. He shaves his head near bald, wears rectangular black glasses, printed shirts. He walks in the park early every morning, writes in a journal, and tears up at everything: the opera, Hallmark commercials, calls from my mother, calls from his mother, church services, weddings, funerals. Which I guess are ok.

My point: he’s like an advertisement. All being. He says it’s hard to just be, that it’s good to practice. He’s present all the time, he thinks and meditates and breathes. He’s present in his breathing.

When I leave, I tell him I’m into doing, and he snorts like I’ve said something dirty, but really, it’s more metaphysical than that.

– — –

I sit at Ticky Flannery’s bar, in a town called Americus, and drink by myself. Maybe I’m not what’s wrong with America, only Americus. Ticky runs a roadside hotel bar like something out of the Wild West, only without the swinging doors, the red wall paper, the painted whores leaning over the balconies.

When she hands me a drink, Ticky says she’s sorry, but that she doesn’t think there’s a place for me here. Eventually, she says, I’ll have to drift along. She sweeps her fingers atop the bar, like she’s shooing along a spider.

I keep my eye on the door. For anyone.

Then, Who’re you getting revenge on?

Myself, I say. I sound like Penny. It’s something Penny would say, low and droll and sad with a trail of smoke leaking from either side of her mouth, drifting up and obscuring her face.

Sweetie Pie, Ticky says. She leans on the bar, her big mature tits swinging low, bigger than anything on my body, including my head. One tit, twice the size of my head. Penny doesn’t even have tits. You’re so pretty, Ticky says. And so little.

Not nice, Ticky, I say.

A new one sits down next to me, a man as wide as three of me on one stool. Perfect.

You’re not gonna hold much more whiskey, Ticky says to me. She pours him a well drink. Tall.

But I wave her on for one more. Next to me, he settles in, big elbows and forearms on the bar, taking up more space than he should. I hold my head, swimming a little. Sweep my hair back. Bat my eyes.

Gonna get in trouble, Ticky says, without even moving her teeth. She sets another drink before me. Double bourbon, neat, splash, cherry sinking to the bottom.

I wait for the danger of eye contact, and then say, What part of this, sweeping my hand down the length of my legs, Would you not take?

I only see his face for a second after that. Scrunched up and angry, eyebrows together like a hard V, and the size of his fist, which I think about later, a heavy rectangle as big as my face, and hairier. It’s the last thing I see, before nothing at all.

– — –

Ticky calls around, or tries to. She calls who she thinks might know me, like the old queen who runs the wig shop. He doesn’t know. I don’t need him. Ticky takes me home, puts me on her couch with a pillow and a bag of frozen peas on my face. I wake up howling. They fucked me up bad, I say. But he didn’t. That’s when I remember the size of his fist. The one punch. That’s all it took for me to tumble, flat backward, out cold with a bloody nose and a split lip.

You’re hungover, Ticky says. Then she talk talk talks at me while I throw up. While I shake and lay on my side in her hallway. It’s a bitch, ain’t it? she says.

I tell her to shut up. My throat burns. I think he poisoned me, that I’m dying a slow awful death from the gut up. My nose, thick, stuffed and sore. It feels flat, bent down in the middle. Ticky, I gurgle, He broke my nose. You have to take me to the hospital.

They don’t do nothing for a broken nose, she says. But you ain’t so pretty no more. She leaves me in the hallway. Steps over me, back to the living room.

I try to focus, but she’s a big paisley blob with a ring of light around her. The living room, paneled and dark otherwise. A running TV. Records on the shelf underneath it.

Where’re you staying? she says to me.

Nowhere, I say.

I don’t mean who’re you shacking up with, she says.

Nowhere, I say. Glenn’s truck, I say then, Glenn’s motel room, Bud’s motel room, Jim’s motel room, Rick’s and Tom’s and Dennis’s. I’ve been in more Super 8′s since I got here than ever in my life.

Sweet baby, she says real low, looking, but not moving toward me. Her head wags like a cow’s. You are whoring yourself around.

I got nothing to say. I want a mirror.

When she brings it to me, she holds it flat, reflection side against her thigh before she hands it over. Who’s David? she says.

David, I say, like it’s the answer to her question.

The one you talk to in your sleep, she says.

– — –

When you break your nose, you get two black eyes, for good measure, to go along with it. I leave Ticky’s little apartment above her bar, and wander the street in the daylight. It feels like days. I want it to be days, to sound tough or resilient or something, but really, it’s a couple of hours. A couple of hours of staggering around town with my face a total mess and nothing, nothing that any cross state Eastern seaboard trucker would ever pick up and love.

I walk out down the highway through the roar of doubles and triples ramping down into the parking lot of the truck stop for a cheeseburger and a shower, I slump down into a butterscotch colored booth, my feet up on the vinyl sitting sideways smoking and drinking a cup of coffee, watching them come and go. One of them takes a slow look and says Fuck me, but he’s talking about my face, the way you might say Dang, and it’s not a call to action at all. Otherwise, I might have taken him up on it. Yep. Right then. Even now.

But it’s nothing if I can’t make decent eye contact, smirk and pout a little. And it’s the second night I’ll spend outside of a motel room. I begin to feel handicapped. Broken, homeless, out of business, Pardon our dust, closed for renovations.

I stop myself from calling home. For a while, I call Penny every day, and then not at all for two, three days. I wonder what they’ll say, what they’ll think.

Well he’s either dead, Penny’ll say, or, He’s getting laid real good.

And I’m fucking neither.

– — –

It’s a mistake to go back to Ticky’s, the way the stupid girl runs toward the attic in the slasher film. I walk in and Bubba, or whatever his name is with the stubbly head and the arms like my waist is leaning on the other end of the bar, watching and talking to his friends who all look the same, like assholes in baseball caps. I walk in slow, eyes wide in the dark, and I think about doing the cowboy thing, challenging him, or just leaning back and opening my shirt, giving him a good target.

Honey you look like shit, Ticky says. She pours me a 7 Up, and I ask her to bring me some chicken tenders.

Well this about does it for him, and I don’t know why but they have a good laugh over the chicken tenders, repeating it but calling them chicky tenders and then all together they start to leave, get up off their stools and head for the door but not before sliding past me real close. I think he’ll hit me again, swings his hand close to my belly. I’m not ready for a belly punch, not ready to fold in, hit my head on the bar, but it feels like he barely touches me, it just burns, hollow and deep and he pulls out and walks away.

Ticky puts a wooden bowl full of chicken tenders on the bar in front of me, with a little plastic cup of barbecue sauce to the side. She says, Honey if you’re gonna be sick, you gotta make it to the men’s room.

Ticky, I say. I pull my hand away from my belly and it’s a cup full of blood, enough to grab, enough to spill out of my hand when I flatten it out. Ticky, he stabbed me, I say, but it’s whispery, and the sight of the blood, it’s enough to drain everything out of my face including my sight, which darkens from the inside out, a ring at a time, like the end of an old movie narrowing in on one point, which just happens to be the bowl of chicken.

– — –

Who called you? I say to David in the tiny room off of triage where they have stitched me up, bandaged me and told me to wait for scripts for pain meds.

No one called me, he says, crisp, correcting. You didn’t call.

How did you know where I was?

Penny knew where you were, he says.

It’s all bullshit, all this talking. He leans with his hip out, his elbow crooked against the door frame with his hand up on his head, rubbing around in a slow circle like he does when he’s nervous. You can see him from the waiting room. I hear snickering.

Ticky sees him and she rushes in, pulls him out into the hall where she can talk to him, rubbing his arm, so glad to see him. I hear her say something like please take him. He is wrecking Americus. I can see only the side of him from there, his elbow coming out of his bright turquoise polo, the curve of his ass in bluejeans. The point of his elbow because he stands, like I said, with his hand on his hip, the way a pregnant woman cradles her back.

Jon, he says, when he comes back in alone.

If I cry I’ll burst open in any given place, and not just tears but blood and guts might come out. So I sit like a kid holding his breath.

Sweetheart, he says, comes closer, pushes away my hair and looks close, at my nose, my eyes, the blood crusted onto my upper lip still, a deep purple black running the length of my lower lashes, and fading to a sick yellow green at the edges. I can’t believe he looks that close. You have to come home, he says.

I breathe real slow but the pressure in my face pushes out, I think, popping it back into shape, like when you push in a doll’s head and then squeeze her ears to make it normal again. I want to say something to him, about calming the fuck down, about toning it down, about not walking around like a goddamn billboard. But he’s going on about getting shot and stabbed and what’s next, but real quiet like, right in my face, petting me like a kitten. I think I can’t go to another fucking opera, that we have to be separate, not separated just separate, different circles that don’t overlap.

The play is over, he says. Up close, his eyes look more red than brown. He puts his hand on my thigh.

I am so not your sad fucking clown, I say. I knew it. But then he smiles, sad and superior and sweet all at the same time.

I know, he says, and looks at me like I’m some kind of dream come true, tearing up, something he’s never seen the likes of before even though he’s seen it a thousand times. For all the awe and petting we ought to be in a Super 8 on the side of the highway and not in an emergency room on a high adjustable table covered in stiff crinkly paper, but the kiss is like a long drink of water. And even though it’s just what you’ve been waiting for, it still sort of hurts going down.

__________________________________

Jennifer Pashley was raised in Syracuse, NY by an accordion virtuoso and a casket maker. She’s the author of the story collection States.

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