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1
Come summer, clouds of moths like souls at the Rapture would flutter up the cone of light cast by the spot mounted over the motel office, but on this November night, the glow only bleached their skin to a sickly pallor, a non-color aggravated by the buzzing green neon Vacancy sign. Their shadows darted before them to vanish with the gravel path in the deeper darkness among the pines.
Madge’s nose wrinkled. The stink of the Merrimack River was on her like the cold hands of the dead. Tendrils of mist eddied over the river. The Riverton Shadow was already plucking at her memory, excising bits and pieces of the day from her mind like a mother might snatch bits of white thread from her daughter’s black dress.
She’d been near raped and her tits squeezed purple, but as soon as Mickey’s Honda passed the Kiwanis and Lions signs that welcomed everyone to Riverton, Madge had to fight feeling wholesome. The Riverton Shadow was no contagious civic can-do attitude; the Shadow robbed her of her heart and mind. She detested that reflexive sense of well-being. It was false, false, false, while the Shadow itself was terribly real. Maybe the Shadow lived in the water or maybe the air or maybe it rose from the ground or maybe it was a curse lurking in Riverton’s DNA. Wherever the Shadow might lurk, everyone in Riverton felt it; a few even whispered about it. A very few, like Madge, resisted its insistent touch.
Madge was neither psychotic nor delusional; Madge was fucked up, was what she was, fucked up and twisted. Riverton people made pretzels look like plumb lines; compared to Riverton, a ball of yarn was a straight and true path.
Back in Haverhill, while they were dosing Bughouse, just before Madge had her tits near ripped off, Aunt Sosha had told her about Chuang-Tzu, the Chinese holy man who dreamed he was a butterfly but awaked to discover he was a man. Chuang-Tzu did not know if he were a butterfly dreaming it was a man, or a man dreaming he was a butterfly.
Fuck that Chinaman. Madge’s problems were far worse. A goat in Riverton might dream it was a man, only to awaken to learn it had become a butterfly with no memory of ever having been a caterpillar, and it might suffer a vague premonition of transforming to a bear.
Butterfly, man, goat, dog, caterpillar. Who gave a fuck about dreams? Bughouse was Aunt Sosha’s hostage. Someone better fucking wake up, and soon. Bughouse’s bony ass was in a sling, and though he needed rescuing, the poor bastard would be dog-meat before his great good friend Mickey lifted a finger.
Never mind occupying Cabin #3 a second time, Madge was thinking she would not even kiss Mickey goodnight. No fucking way. She was thinking maybe instead she would kick her lover in the balls, go home, swan dive into a hot bath, and just this once give in to the Shadow or whatever the fuck it was, let it drain away this terrible, terrible day. Why not allow herself wake up clean, new, healed, to take her place as a happy pig, happy as every other happy pig in Riverton?
Rank mist floated around her waist and between her legs. Madge shivered to think of slimy, pale, colorless things that grew beneath rocks; she hunched her shoulders and pushed her hands deeper into her flannel-lined coat pockets.
Silent, gravel crunching beneath their feet, Mickey and Madge walked side by side toward the dark trees that cloaked her Subaru safe from view.
Not safe enough.
Bellowing, dropped like an egg by the moon, Big Juice, exploded from nowhere. His knees uncoiled and he sprang into the air, a baseball bat high over his head. He came down on Mickey and Madge, horrible, unstoppable, as inescapable as God’s wrath.
The same thighs that could carry the All-State fullback into the end zone with three defenders pathetically clinging to his back churned like diesel pistons. His doughy face twisted with rage. His mouth was a jagged black pit. His eyes rolled, unmoored.
“You stole my girl!”
Back-pedaling, Mickey’s feet slipped on damp leaves. His ass hit unyielding rocks when he fell, but the painful fall saved him; Juice’s bat whiffed, missing Mickey’s skull by inches. Mickey scuttled like a crab swimming backstroke on dirt. His heels and palms ground into the soil and sodden leaves.
Madge launched herself at Juice, but no 126-pound girl was about to accomplish what 700 pounds of defensive linemen could not. She hit hard as a dandelion puff, clinging to his big arm as the bat drew back for a second savage try, shouting in his ear, “Juice! Juice! It’s not what you think!” which of course, it was.
The big idiot lacked all imagination, but he was not blind.
When Juice whirled, Madge’s legs snapped out like wet sheets on a line in high wind. He brushed her off, spun, and raised the bat high over his head for what would have been a fatal blow except that Madge had slowed Juice just enough for Mickey to find the revolver in his pocket.
He fired up from the ground right through his jacket’s cloth. Danny had said to squeeze and aim. Well, no, Danny, no slow deliberation just now. Squeeze, nothing. Juice loomed two feet above him. With five rounds in the revolver, even Mickey could not miss.
The first shot went wildly high over Juice’s shoulder into the darkness. Mickey managed to pull the revolver free of his clothes. The second shot caught Juice’s upper left arm. Juice’s eyes flashed red with the reflected muzzle flash. Mickey’s ears rang, and his nose filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder. Danny had warned that the gun had little stopping power, and though Mickey was unfamiliar with firearms, right then he’d have welcomed the stopping power of an elephant gun. Winging Juice made him spin, and while he spun, he was close enough to touch, a stationary target. Mickey’s third and fourth shots went off quick as firecrackers, just like that, pop, pop, and tore into Juice just below the numbers on his jersey, 00. Juice’s momentum still would have carried Juice forward, but the fifth and final round from the .38 found Juice’s lower jaw. It splintered bone and teeth and ripped out most of Juice’s chin and throat. His face exploded.
The bat slipped soundlessly from his grasp, he clapped both his hands to his neck, and he toppled backward.
“Oh shit oh fuck oh shit oh fuck.”
Madge was babbling. Mickey rolled to his hip to hurl himself across the leaves and dirt onto her. He pushed his weapon into his deep pants pocket where the hot short barrel burned his thigh through his pocket’s cloth. He willed his rigid, shaking fingers to uncoil so he could grab Madge.
Madge squirmed like a snake impaled on an electrified fence. His left hand clapped over her mouth. Her soft body writhed beneath him.
Could the sound of trucks from the highway have drowned out the sound of gunfire? Danny said the Smith and Wesson .38 Special was a woman’s gun, but it made the loudest damned noise Mickey Black ever heard. Maybe it was a woman’s gun because the action was more slick than Madge’s thighs. The effect, however, was far more deadly.
No one ran toward them. They were busy with what people in motels do. Mickey held his breath. His heart danced a rumba with his liver. He held Madge tight.
Maybe this one time, just this once, Mickey had caught a break. Next year, he’d throw a party—the first anniversary of the only day in history Mickey Black ever caught a break. There would be streamers and balloons at the parade. Popcorn and young mothers, floats with waving dancing girls.
Madge’s breath was hot on his face. She was trying to bite his hand over her mouth. Madge’s black eyes rolled. Her lips, teeth, and jaws worked against his palm. Her breath whistled through her nostrils. She screamed mutely into his hand, kicking to get up. Mickey’s legs scissored around her hips and across her stomach.
A foot away, Juice wheezed and gurgled wetly through the mushy space where his throat had been. Locked in an embrace, Madge and Mickey waited for Juice to die.
It took forever. Twice, Juice’s back bowed with the struggle for yet one more breath. Juice sucked wind through what was left of his throat as his lungs filled with his own blood. Then his bubbling breath rattled one last time, he sighed, and the damp velvet night was again filled only by the murmur of the river.
Shadow or no, someone was dead in Riverton.
© Perry Glasser and Gival Presss.
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