It’s 9 pm now and the light makes its first appearance on the distant horizon. I breathe a sigh of relief and take a pull from Jim Beam, feeling it burn its way to my stomach.

This railroad bridge spanning the Rouge River on the edge of Detroit is where I go to pretend all is well with my life. The scaffolding of steel girders painted light blue that stretch out over and beside me is my sanctuary from all that hates me in this world.

Most nights I sit on the rocks next to the tracks under the train bridge, leaning against a support beam. I listen to the trash barges as they passed beneath me, monitoring their way toward the Detroit River, and wait for the water to lap the bank in their wake. I sip Jim Beam and breathe in the intoxicating smells of diesel fumes, sewer water, and dead fish. I close my eyes and wait for the 9:05 out of Detroit.

I always hear it first. The faint, lonely moaning of the train whistle is barely audible over the waves beneath me. I open my eyes to the spectre of distant light hovering above the gleaming steel rails four miles away. Sometimes I lean over and put my ear to the tracks to listen for its approach, but I never hear anything.

I watch as the light materializes into the vague shape of a massive Dash-9 freight engine climbing its way down the city. Its single headlight glows to blinding proportions as it reaches the other end of the bridge. I take two pulls from the whiskey bottle, then a third as the 9:05 out of Detroit  rockets past me at sixty miles an hour two feet from where I sit. For several minutes I hear nothing but the wind rushing past my ears and the squeaks and clicks of the train. I see distant city lights blinking between boxcars and flashing across support beams.

And just as quickly, it is gone. Left behind in its wake an eerie, lifeless silence. That exhilarating head rush fades, and one at a time the sounds of the industrial inevitably return and the melancholy shadow that follows me through life comes back full force. I stand from my perch, launch the empty whiskey bottle into the river, and leave my happy place.

But not tonight. Tonight, when the 9:05 out of Detroit passes through, there will be no coming down from the cloud; no sadness and disappointment in its wake. Tonight when it passes through, I’m going with it.

I look down at the rails on either side as I walk toward the growing light. I know there will be no time for pain and fear; regret, or sadness — only a slight bump into peaceful serenity.

The horn erupts, much louder and I look up. The 9:05 out of Detroit is slower than usual, but I don’t worry about that. I stop, lean my head back and close my eyes. I spread my arms wide as if to greet the raging locomotive. Only seconds left.

The bridge supports creak in protest of the Dash-9’s weight and the ground vibrates beneath me. The bright light pierces my eyelids. It’s too late now for second thoughts.

I don’t feel the crushing impact in the lower half of my body; nor do I remember the great force that pulls me under. Only the endless tumbling end-over-end between the tracks and what feels like water splashing my face.

City lights flicker past the train wheels. For one brief moment I see the stump where my left hand used to be; the spongy tissue white and pale, the blood having not had time to flow.

The full weight of reality hits me: I’m dying. This time it’s not just in my mind, dreams and fantasies. This time it’s real, and it’s nothing like I used to imagine it. I imagined peace and serenity, not seeing my own severed appendages. This is cold and clinical; uncaring and destructive.

Then an image enters my mind: my funeral. The casket is closed. Mom stands there, running a hand across the waxed surface of the coffin. And I hear her thoughts: If only I could see my baby one last time.

The tumbling continues after the last box car passes. The ground and sky blend as one in my new sickly spinning world. I finally come to rest with my head propped on the track, left ear against the cold steel. I have a nice view of the gore strewn down the tracks that used to be me. An arm rolls to a stop a few yards away. My lower torso lies further down the tracks, legs missing from the knee down and intestines trailing off into the distance. The light-blue train bridge is five hundred feet away.

I try to move, but there’s nothing left of me. I’ve reached the end. Was it all worth it? Was my life really so bad that this was my only way out?

Darkness creeps in at the edges of my eyes. I feel cold. Very cold. I try to draw my last breath, but my lungs don’t work. I think of Mom, my closed casket, my so-called problems and all the mistakes I’ve ever made. But none will ever compare to this one,  because the worst mistakes we make in life are ones we can never change.

Timothy A. Boling was a prisoner at Allenwood when he wrote this story. During his incarceration, he authored five novels and has had excerpts and short stories published in several literary journals. Though unpublished, his novels have been well-read and enjoyed, and hand-bound copies have found a home in his prison library. He was working on a sixth novel at the time of his release in January of 2009.

How will I know how you loved me?
I have left you, that is how you will know.
–Carolyn Creedon, Litany

Jude pulled the fender-rusted Buick into his driveway and braked it to a sliding
stop, the tires skidding on the gravel and off into the ankle-high grass. He cut the
engine and just sat, wet under his suit. Wet under his socks. When he got out, he
reached behind the seat for the fifth of Seagram’s and broke the seal and chugged a
long, throat-burning swallow and started for the backdoor. Across the street, near-
sighted Mrs. Roberts throttled back her mower and waved. Jude raised his free hand
and walked all the faster.

“Better get your windows up, Mr. Hardy.”

He turned to where she pointed. Clouds black as singed dogs ran along the
horizon.

“Fixin’ to storm.”

Jude, his back to the old woman, raised the bottle.

“Fixin’ to be a bucketdropper.

He wiped his lips on his shirt cuff and nodded. “Looks like, doesn’t it?”

“We get those this time of year. Common with the change of seasons and all.”

Jude started again for the backdoor. “I better get our windows down. Christine
will be giving me hell from here to Sunday.”

His neighbor frowned. “You shouldn’t speak like that, Mr. Hardy. Your wife’s a
saint. So sweet, always asking after me since my mister passed. She works so hard.
I always hear her coming home at I don’t know what hour.”

Jude did not answer.

He went into the kitchen where he fished out a tumbler from beneath a stack of
dishes greening with pizza sauce and filled it to the rim. He sipped down the whiskey
and looked out into the living room. Through the picture window, shafts of blue-gray
light dancing with motes fell through the panes slant upon the raw cords in the worn
carpet.

He emptied his glass and filled it and walked out onto the front porch and
slumped into their one wicker chair. Across the street, a dozen ducks sheltered
under a tangle of willow branches bowing into the pond. He watched the ducks,
watched the sky darken, the ozone-charged air growing sharp as angel hair. From
the driveway, a rumble like distant thunder from the headers on her Camaro. The
back door screeched. “Jude!”

He started to rise and sat again. He sipped the whiskey.

She walked back to their bedroom calling him, past the towel-strewn bathroom
and through the living room to just inside the porch door, its screen breaking her
face into squares of light. Jude twisted his glass in half circles inside the palm of his
hand.

“Are your ears petering out too? Did you not hear me?”

Beyond the pond, thunderheads knifed into the sky. A downdraft caught a
stray duck as it swooped low, the dark liquid beating of its wings fluid against the
pewter water. Jude jutted his chin. “Too much wind.”

“Too much booze.”

Jude shrugged. He drank.

“So did you hear the news?”

“Did I hear what news?”

Blackness leached into the woman’s eyes. “Don’t start out by copping an
attitude with me, Mr. Lawyer. I’ve had a hard one today too.”

“No doubt.”

He reached with his free hand and loosened his tie and undid the collar button.
“Sorry. I’ve a lot on my mind.”

“So what else is new? You think the whole world revolves around you and your
all so important problems.”

“Did something happen?”

“Yes, it did. Thank you for expressing an interest in something I said.”

“Of course.”

“Betty’s husband called before I left the office.”

“And?”

Dr. Sullivan died.”

Jude nodded. A clammy breeze fingered his hair. “Yes, I heard.”

“Her husband hadn’t heard the juice. Only that Dr. Sullivan was found dead.”

Lightning veined the bruise colored sky, filling the air with a frail afterscent like
burnt iron.

“He killed himself.”

A roll of thunder swallowed Christine’s words. “Jude? I asked you how.”

Jude reached to his breast pocket for his Salems. “He . . .”

The telephone rang. Jude struck a match and flicked it out into the brown lawn.
The telephone rang again. Christine still stood behind the door.

“You know he’s not calling to ask me to meet him somewhere.”

Christine looked over her shoulder to where the telephone sat in their living
room, not on an end table because Jude had smashed the one they had, but on the
carpet beside a stained sofa that smelled of vomit where he had passed out. The
telephone rang again.

“You better pick it up,” Jude said. “If I do, he’ll only hang up, and you don’t
want to spend another evening with me. We can’t afford to lose the furniture.”

Christine pirouetted on one foot. “Be my guest. Prove to me that you have
some machismo and don’t worry. We have no furniture left worth losing.”

The bedroom door slammed, the squares of glass in the living room window
rattled in their panes.

Jude sat, watched the sway of poplars bordering the pond, their quicksilver
clash of leaves. He unfastened the cufflinks she had given him on his last birthday,
the hand-tooled ones she had her old man buy for her on his monthly run into
Tijuana where he traded meth for the chemicals he used to run his lab secreted in a
Mohave arroyo. Jude rolled his shirtsleeves halfway to his elbows and leaned back in
his chair and watched the blackness close in, listened to the murmur of Christine’s
voice drift from the bedroom window she had cracked open. He could not make out
her words, but he recognized the ache in their tenor from long ago, only now she
spoke her words for Tommy Grazioso.

He never saw the two of them together, but he no need to consult Madam Zola
to read him the signs. Like phone calls she took in another room. Late work nights
when she did not crawl into bed until near dawn, sweetly smiling in the moonlight,
smelling of Tequila and expensive perfume and hours-old lovemaking. Never any
purchases by her on their Visa statement, the full amount of her salary deposited
into their bank account, checks going where they always went, but Gucci blouses
and Armani dresses, their snipped tags in the bathroom wastebasket he puzzled
together late at night while he listened for her car.

Tommy worked for Nicolo Dominic, the boss of her firm’s biggest accounting
client. A narc who Jude once partnered with on a case had seen them a month
before at one of Tommy’s bars up on Youngstown’s north side, snuggling in a back
booth, she on his lap, a diamond bracelet dangling from her wrist. Three times in
four years The Vindicator had plastered Tommy’s face on its front page after the
grand jury indicted him, once for pushing numbers, once for running a call-girl ring,
the charges dismissed after Nicolo made his amends with the Democratic chairman
who ran the county. The third time it got serious when the State Police unsealed a
woman from a fifty-gallon drum some kids on a raft found floating down the
Mahoning River after the chain holding it to its concrete anchor snapped. The
woman, pregnant and Catholic, was seen on Tommy’s arm only a week before she
disappeared. Jude never heard what it cost, but he guessed fixing it cost Nicolo
plenty, fixed the election of Larry, Curly, and Moe to the Court of Appeals.

The bedroom window thudded shut. The skew of light thrown by the door
screen darkened across the floorboards. “So how did you hear about Dr. Sullivan?”

Jude stubbed his cigarette into the sole of his shoe. “When I came back from
court this afternoon, his widow was sitting in my waiting room.”

“You never told me they were clients of yours.”

“They’re not.”

“Then what was she doing hanging out in your office?”

“She dated George some in high school.”

“Oh?” Christine rasped a fingernail across the wire mesh. “That seems odd.”

“Does it?”

“Dr. Sullivan must be thirty years older than your brother.”

“I would say.”

“So.” She tilted her head. She smiled. “Younger wife. Older husband. Who’s a
doctor. My, my.”

A skein of lightning spiderwebbed the sky. Christine looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get ready.” She crossed half the living room and came back. “Wasn’t there a rumor making its rounds about his wife seeing someone?”

Jude tapped his wedding band on the rim of his glass.

“Judy, wasn’t there?”

Judy had been her term of endearment for him since college, and when she wanted something she still cooed it to him. They had met at Ohio State, he in law school, she an accounting major. When she teased him then, she sometimes called him Judy and sometimes Judas because Jude she had only heard in the Beatles’ song her mother sang along with when it played on her oldies station on those afternoons when she had not passed out.

Don’t tell me you can’t afford it, Judy Judas, she said if he pled student poverty, groping deep into both his pockets. I know you’ve got at least thirty pieces of silver, and I’ll find every last one of them after I get your dick out of the way.

He fell for her at 8:55 on a July morning, the elevator door opening, his shoes cemented to the marble foyer, the door closing, a giggle echoing down the elevator shaft. Fell for her Hispanic-Indian beauty, her obsidian eyes overflowing with pools of promise, deep and dark as midnight, fearless as she passed through life save for being overlooked, alone, forsaken by God.

Tina, as she was called then, had fled to the Midwest from Fontana, California, a
smoggy town of working-class houses, each painted a differing shade of greasy dogs’
teeth, birthplace of the Hell’s Angels, of which her father remained a redwing member.
Yet despite a childhood where more than one doper dropped dead in their kitchen after
sampling her old man’s product, Tina’s juvenile sheet consisted of a single shoplifting
offense where she had not even been the one performing the pinch, but had her back
to Sonia, picking out a wardrobe in Vogue, as the other girl palmed a pack of Winstons.

Because of her honor-roll grades, the judge gave the girl unsupervised probation, and Tina was thereafter scrupulous with whom she hung out. She had plans. Plans to be gone from a mother who downed a fifth of vodka before noon, gone from a meth mouthed father who snorted as much as he sold. A month after her probation ended, Tina’s guidance counselor called her into his office and handed her a fat envelope, postmarked Columbus, Ohio. Before she finished the first paragraph, tears were rolling down her cheeks, which she could recall happening only once without her having forced them after a customer squished a sleeping Felix in their driveway under his truck tires.

She never would have applied to Ohio State had her old man not been watching the Big-Ten playoffs on a Saturday too rainy to be out on his Harley, sitting on the sofa as he sealed a dime’s worth into Glad baggies, she puzzling her way through Monday’s trig problems, scratching on a tablet at the kitchen table. She took a stretch break at halftime and went in to watch the cheerleader routines when the announcer instead gave a photo tour of the campuses. She sat, a foot away from the screen. The green foliage and blue skies differed as much from the brown sand and browner air of Fontana as did Oz from Kansas. After the second half kickoff, she went up to her room and dug out the Rand-McNally. Columbus was 2500 miles away.

She applied for a scholarship too, but Student Aid regretfully turned her away. She had sent them no financial information. There was none to send. The three of them lived off whatever wad rode in her old man’s money clip. Her parents had never deposited a nickel into a bank account, nor had they ever filed a tax return. Her old man had no social security number, and her mother could never remember hers. The time her father needed one to post bond for a cousin, he rode up to Folsom and with two cartons of cigarettes bought it from a riding buddy pulling consecutive life stretches. He paid cash for their house and as a joke deeded it into the name of an old beau of her mother’s who disappeared at the end of their courtship, his identifiable parts dispersed over noncontiguous counties, no death certificate issued.

So Tina spent her graduation summer muling for her old man, dodging rip-off artists of limited talent and narcs with less, earning enough from the dopers she shorted to pay for her first year’s tuition and a Neiman Marcus wardrobe after she got to Columbus. She left their house on Garcia Street on a Sunday morning in September wearing a red frock that showed off her brown legs and carrying a backpack that held a change of underwear and her summer earnings and walked down to the corner Seven-Eleven. From a payphone she called a cab that carried her to the Ontario International Airport where with white-lined bills she purchased a one-way ticket.

“Christine,” she said, when the ticket seller asked her name.

She excelled in her classes. She paid for her sophomore year by interning at Arthur Andersen, one floor above the law firm where Jude clerked. They spoke for the first time a week after the elevator door shut in his face, eating their Wendy’s lunches as they sat on a shaded bench beside the fountain facing High Street. She could not look away from him. She adored his dark good looks, his wicked, unprofaned humor, his being almost an attorney, the respect he showed her, so unlike the pump-and-dump-undergraduates always putting their elbows to her chest when they bumped into her at bars. Each noon she watched out her window until she spotted him sitting on the bench, their bench. Once she saw him sitting there, rippling in the haze of summer heat, his eyes not then watery from drink, smiling up at her window though she had yet to point it out, and she took it as a contract with her world to come. How could she know it was possible to rush toward disaster the way dreamers rush toward desire?

They married the weekend after Jude passed the bar. The next day they packed all they owned into a four-foot U-Haul and drove the five hours up to Hanna, the town where Jude had grown up. He began his legal career as a prosecutor in juvenile court, and she found a job with an accounting firm whose major client was the Dominic Company, a construction company deep into developing strip malls funded by Teamster dollars.

Prosecuting mental defectives abused since infancy and often dragged crying from the courtroom left an acrid taste on Jude’s tongue that Seagram’s could not wash away. He acquired a few years experience and quit. When Jude opened an office above
the Hanna Bank & Trust, he told Christine it would take time to build a practice. The past April, he showed her their tax return before she had him sign her name to it and pointed out their progress. She saw the numbers but not the progress. Not the way her old man’s wad bulged in his hip pocket. She and Jude both worked, yet they could not buy a home. While they lived across the street from Hanna Park, it was a one-bedroom clapboard, painted white so long ago it had faded to the color of parking-lot snow. They could not start a family, not that she wanted one. She resented life in a do-nothing-but-go-to-church-on-Sunday-town. While she did not miss the destructive hedonism she had left behind, she did the excitement that came with it where a night’s action downstairs was juicier than a season of Dragnet. How many Hanna housewives, their hair rolled in curlers as they sauntered the aisles of Drotleff’s A & P, searching for pistachio ice cream, had, on the way to the refrigerator for her school lunch, skipped over a corpse spread eagle across the floor and head off to catch her bus, stopping only to turn out the stiff’s pockets and pinch his nose pin if its diamond stud complimented her earrings?

Jude’s working late, his attending Knights of Columbus meetings to cultivate clients, made Christine certain he had a woman stashed aside sucking up their money, notwithstanding the nights she had parked outside his office and saw him at his desk, his forefinger to his temple. She trusted few women and fewer men. It had been common when she came home from school to see strangers coming out of her parents’ bedroom. Once she found a man standing on his head in the middle of their kitchen,
naked save his mismatched socks.

“Hi there, sweetie,” he said.

“Hi there, yourself.”

“My name is Cosmo, and I’m a free spirit.”

“You don’t say?”

A dozen times her old man had thrown she and her mother out, and until he exhausted his supply, they passed from the house of one club crony to another.Don’t you be letting no sonofabitchinman pin your neck into the dirt, was her mother’s advice. You always keep a stick at hand, one with rusty-lockjaw-inflicting-spikes asticking out of it – one that’ll keep him on his knees, begging from you like the dog God made him to be.

It was advice her mother ignored. If within a week of throwing them out he failed to sober up, she would step out to Hendron’s or J&R’s or Fibber McGee’s. It took her no more than an evening in the back seat with a car full of the boys before her old man would be knocking on their door, clear eyed and holding two bags of groceries and a bottle of Smirnoff under his arms, smiling a toothless grin as sweet as candy a week after Easter. She always went back, tears glistening her eyes, no matter his strewing their clothes across the yard, no matter her cauliflowered nose. No matter. Until one of the two overdosed, he was all the security her mother would know.

Christine took to heart her mother’s advice, and at the office party last December,  she found her stick. While she waited for Jude to retrieve their coats, Tommy came up  behind and patted her bottom. For once she gave him the time of day. Maybe we should  discuss it over my lunch hour, she said, and smiled when he whispered that what he  had in mind would take more than an hour. Tommy nodded at Jude when he came back  into the room. I ain’t no jackrabbit, honey.

A week after New Year’s when he asked her if she wanted to meet him for drinks,  she asked him where.

“Do you think that’s why Dr. Sullivan killed himself?” Christine said. “Because she  was seeing someone?”

Jude looked out into the darkness. “I don’t know.”

She studied him a moment, fixed him with her black eyes. “I supposed you want  me to believe she told you nothing?”

Jude shook his head.

“Like hell she didn’t.”

“You want me to get it?”

“You stopped answering, remember?”

She walked away and picked up the telephone in the living room, her back to  her husband, her voice low, cooing.

Before retiring to Florida, Tommy’s father worked as a bill collector for the  Dominics, looking so clean and bland when he appeared on a doorstep some debtors  mistook him for a Mormon missionary. His street name was “Thomas and his Singing Hammer,” but the homicide detectives called him Saint Thomas the Philosopher  because in his work he liked to quote the Montaigne the sisters had taught him at  convent school.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, he recited when he swung his ham-thick arm behind his head as the sisters had their rulers, but in the use of time.

Jude was in the third grade when a hardware store that was part of a discount chain opened up across the street from the one owned by the father of his best friend. His friend’s father matched their prices and tried to keep his store open by sitting in on Thomas’ poker table. In a fortnight he ran up a ten-thousand-dollar chit. Jude’s friend began staying over so often at the Hardy house that he kept two pairs of pajamas in Jude’s room. On the afternoon of the last day of classes at the start of the Christmas holidays, his friend’s mother came home from her job as a biology teacher at the high school, opened the garage door, and found her husband sitting on the floor, his gelatinous eyes open, slivers of brain sliming down the wall, in his hand a .32 revolver with its serial numbers filed off she told the police could not be his.

He never even got drafted on account of he had flat feet. What would he be doing with a pistol?

The police labeled it a suicide, notwithstanding the revolver was clean of even the deceased’s fingerprints, notwithstanding every bone in his right hand had been pulverized to rice grain bits and pounded into the worktable. To the left of the bits of bone fingernailed grooves gouged the soft pinewood. Near the revolver lay a strip of masking tape with facial hair on its sticky side, the deceased looking like he had shaved a square around his mouth into which was stuffed a card hand of aces and
eights, all spades.

Christine hung up the telephone and came back to the door.

“So?” Jude said.

“So I think even if she was seeing someone, it was silly of the doctor to check himself out.”

A raindrop thudded on the porch roof, solitary as a church bell.

“Why?”

“He was a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”

“A doctor can’t have his heart filleted out?”

“What’s it matter?” Christine said. “He should’ve paid her some humongous alimony – that would take him maybe a week to earn if he didn’t pay the taxes on it like you would – and moved on to wife number two.”

“Wife number three.”

“What?”

“She was number two.”

Christine rolled her eyes. “Well, you certainly learned a lot about his married life in just one afternoon.”

Jude did not answer. Black clouds crossed the horizon, their dark tendrils following.

“Or was it only one?”

An hour before, Jude had walked the doctor’s widow to the parking lot in the alley behind his law office. She wore no makeup and none of her jewelry except a wedding ring she fidgeted off and on her finger. At the door to her pink Jaguar, she put her arms around Jude’s neck and kissed him on the cheek, and as she drove away she watched him in the rearview mirror until he had shrunk to a flyspeck.She and Dr. Sullivan had celebrated their anniversary ten days earlier with her going on vacation to Nassau without him. They had met the year before when Christine was working as the seating hostess out at the Oak Tree. Their marriage three months later gave excuse for some snickers in town, but most respected the girl for her moxie and said good for her that she could snare a doctor after all she had gone through.

Her parents had died in a car crash minutes after dropping off her and a sister with an elderly uncle and aunt, the account of their deaths retold on endless evenings as their aunt tucked the girls in after returning from her prayer meeting and tipping back the gin bottle a second time. She swore to them she had heard the scrunch of steel, the screams in the gasoline fire and had turned away from her front window where a mile away a pillar of black smoke snaked heavenward and looked at the girls as they sat in their flannel nighties, drinking hot chocolate and watching the Lennon sisters sing on The Lawrence Welk Show and knew they were now hers.

Taking the girls in proved no small hardship for an uncle and aunt who struggled to get by on the miniscule pension Youngstown Sheet & Tube paid for a forty-foot fall their uncle took where he missed by inches dropping into the bucket
that fed the blast furnace. Yet, while there was much the girls would have liked, prettier clothes, a fancier car to be seen in, they never suffered want. Though they were popular, the worst said about them at the time was that for Baptists they knew
how to have fun. Save for his brother who dated Denise when they were seniors. He told Jude he now found his memories sullied after he learned at a class reunion that on those nights when he had stayed home to study, Denise found her way into
more than one backseat.

The week before George left for college, he and Jude drove out to take Denise and her sister on a farewell picnic. Behind the tar-papered farmhouse, their uncle had already laid in a seven-foot pile of coal for a furnace he had not cleaned since his fall.
The next February the house burned down to its sandstone foundation. A son took in the uncle and aunt, but his wife sniffed something of herself about the girls. They were much too pretty she said for her to be worrying whether she had married a
man who could resist anything except temptation. If he did not bed one, he would with the other, no doubt seriatim, and after her hysterectomy she could not again go out and trap a new one into marriage. She doubted anyway if God made men beyond forty that randy and stupid.

The girls rented a one bedroom in town. Denise’s sister took a job clerking at the discount hardware store, and she found employment at the Oak Tree, first washing dishes, then waiting tables. Once outside the kitchen, Denise raised her hemline, catching the attention of the owner’s son who suggested to his father that she was a natural to seat the upscale dinner crowd they wanted to attract. His father, eyeing her from behind, voiced no demur. A week later when the son and Denise stepped into the alley to share a cigarette, he laid a hundred dollar bill atop a stack of liquor boxes and ran along it from a prescription bottle a needle line of cocaine. A line on Saturday nights became a line a day. Some afternoons she did a line so she could roll out of bed before her sister came home and began questioning her about when she was going to come up with her share of the rent for the last two months.

When his wife moved out with their children, Dr. Sullivan started coming into the Oak Tree. He had never learned to cook anything more exotic than an egg sandwich, and he hated going home to a house without children even if he saw them as seldom as he did his wife. He came in early, having quit surgery because he said his focus had deserted him with his family. Denise often sat at his table until customers began to come in, and the two would share a glass of wine from the bottle she had picked out. As they drank, she liked to kick off her heels and watch his face blush when she ran a silk-stockinged foot up his trouser leg past his knee.

The first weekend after his divorce, she pressed him into their taking a flight to Vegas where for a hundred dollars he hired an Elvis-look-alike off a Strip corner to act as his best man. He hung in his office a picture of the three of them on the steps of the Love-Me-Tender chapel, he and Denise shoulder to shoulder, Elvis’s arm behind her, angling down from her waist, he winking into the camera, her eyes darting to him, smiling. When a month later The Hanna Bank & Trust called to ask about the checks a dozen bars had cashed on his wife’s endorsement, Dr. Sullivan closed the account and moved it up to Youngstown.

He soon had to return to surgery, and as he worked late, Denise killed the hours trying to make friends with the other doctors’ wives. When one after another failed to return her calls, she caught up with her old ones. She sometimes telephoned George, who worked the police beat for the Columbus Dispatch, complaining that marrying skinny-legged-Old-Man-Sulkivan was like caring again for her invalid uncle and aunt. She questioned him once if he had ever blown coke. When she asked if he was still there, he told her that every corner hooker he had ever bought a cup of coffee for seemed always to have gotten there by blowing coke.

So Denise returned to the Oak Tree in the evenings. She put on her midnight blue gown cut in the back almost to her sacrum and sat at the bar, wearing her Las Vegas jewelry and drinking champagne cocktails, chatted with Sammie, who, besides tending bar, earned her extra tips as the go-between with Denise’s dealer. One night Jude wandered in after finishing a drunk driving trial that ran late when the jury hung and Judge Biltmore refused to send them home, a night whited out by a blizzard on which Jude dreaded going home to a cold house.

“Or,” Christine said, laughing, “he could have gotten a little chicky on the side. Saved on the alimony. What do you think, hon?”

Jude swiveled the whiskey at the bottom of his glass, considered the storm-darkened night. “So a man discovering his wife is seeing another isn’t sufficient reason to check himself out?”

Christine’s laugh stilled. She studied the silhouetted figure before her for a long minute, and when she answered she spoke in a whispery voice out of their past. “No, of course not.”

Jude shook his head. The storm had broken, and white sheets of rain harried down the street. Phantoms unloosed. “If on the night they first sat together, clinked their wine glasses and smiled into one another’s eyes, she had seen in them the corpse she would one afternoon give her breath, would any of it had differed?”

The wind rose and rippled the pond. Jude sat, his forefinger at his temple. Christine studied him. “What did she say to you?”

He raised his glass as if to drink, but lowered it again. A black Cadillac had turned at the corner. It cruised by and slowed for a moment in front then continued on. It pulled into the last driveway at the end of the street and dimmed its lights. No one got out.

“Jude?”

“Yes?”

“What did she say?”

Jude pulled at a loose thread hanging from his tie. Its seam slowly unraveled.

“An easy chair in their bedroom was turned to the window, looking out over
the corral where they kept the blooded Arabians he had bought for her last birthday.
On the nightstand stood a bottle of Jack Daniels. One, maybe two shots gone. Next
to it, a notepad with her flight number. Her arrival time. The coroner reckons he killed
himself a few minutes before she found him. Maybe as he watched her car coming
down the road.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What did it say?”

He shook his head.

“Jude?”

“No.”

Christine let go a breath. “Well, as this conversation, like so many others, is
going nowhere, I might as well shower. Girls’ night out.”

“Wasn’t that last week.”

“No, you weren’t listening. Last week was some of us celebrating Kathy’s
divorce from her sonofabitchphilandering husband. Not that there is any other
species inhabiting the planet.”

“Oh.”

She disappeared into the darkness of the house. Jude rose and refilled his
glass and came back and watched the rain. Thirty minutes later she returned, doxy
eyed and smelling of the perfume she wore when she came to bed near dawn. She
had on a too-tight skirt and an orange and green sweater that showed off her
breasts. She again had left her wedding ring by his toothbrush. When she leaned
down to peck him on the cheek, she covered with her hand a diamond pendant
pinned above her heart he recognized from a catalog she had dog-eared and left on
the sofa last Christmas, and he had thrown out with the newspaper.

“I won’t be late,” she said. “But don’t wait up.”

She turned on her stiletto heals and went inside. At the door, she looked back,
holding the door open the thinnest of cracks, studied the man at blackness’s edge.

“You going to be ok tonight, Judy?”

“Oh, sure. I think there’s still some pizza in the frig.”

She tapped a plum-shaded fingernail on the screen. “Maybe I should pass on
going out tonight.”

The Cadillac had backed out of the driveway and was driving by their house
again, its headlights out.

“I can if you want me to,” she said softly.

The car stopped at the corner. A cigarette in the back seat reddened and faded.
“Judy?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s ok. You go.”

“You sure? I can, you know. Stay home with you.”

“You need time with your friends.”

“I can have time with them some other night.”

Jude shook his head. “Please leave.”

The nacre paring of a dying moon shown through the clouds. Thinly. Briefly.
“What is it, Judy?”

The air had cooled, and with his words Jude’s breath rose in a gray bouquet.

“He stabbed himself. Standing at the window, he watched her coming up the
road, and with his scalpel he stabbed himself. Dead center in the heart.”

They listened a long time to the hiss of rain.

“When I was a girl, I thought of the past as a thing I could repair. A thing that
existed and the wrongs within it awaited my righting. But what righting is there for a
thing no more? What righting carries a price we are willing to pay?”

Jude said nothing. The windowpanes behind him refracted the staccato
lightning.

“Why did you marry me?” Christine asked. “Why haven’t you left?”

Rainy light from the street lamp fell on Jude’s face. “Because you’re the woman
who loved me. With all your heart. No one will again. Like Doctor Sullivan, I have only
one answer.”

Christine pushed on the screen door as if to come out. The Cadillac headlights
came on, illuminating within their beams the pencil drizzle of rain. She let go the
door. Jude stood. He looked at the glass in his hand and cursed and threw it out
into the night, shattering beside the Cadillac. The driver and rear doors opened. He
went inside as Christine was going out. He waited to hear the deadbolt click home,
and when it did not, he walked back. As he reached for the bolt, the doorknob
turned, slowly, first one way, then the other. Once, twice. Three times.

Scott Kauffman tried dozens of criminal cases, first as an assistant state prosecutor and then as an assistant public defender in a rural Ohio community, which provides much of the background for his first novel, In Deepest Consequences. Scott now resides in Newport Beach, California. He maintains an active law practice, which includes the representation of those charged with white-collar crimes. He is currently at work on a second novel and a collection of short stories. When not working or writing, Scott gardens, reads, and listens to baroque music.

We’re gathered in the big room with its hefty stone fireplace trying to keep warm. It’s a long time ago. We’re all young and hormonal and insufferable. Upstate New York, atop a mountain called Claymoor or something pretentious that ends in moor. Lots of them around, uppity mountains I call them, each pinnacled by a gargantuan fortress. Mansion is the word – this one has about fifteen bedrooms, the whole thing constructed of heavy stone dragged up from the river. Who did the dragging? Sammy says in the past they were financed and lived in by robber barons and tycoons. Sammy owns it now after his father dropped dead at forty-two.

Impressive as hell. Nobody believed Sammy’s boasts back at school when we were undergrads at Tulane. But it’s cold and drafty and we’re all constantly carrying in new logs, stoking the kindling, adding sweaters, bunched together on the three sofas arranged in a semi-circle around the flames. You can literally walk into the fireplace – it’s that spacious. The old 1920s radiators in each room stay icy to the touch even when set at full blast.

We’re still in college or just recently out. One of us is edging through law school now, Rick. He’s here with a girlfriend he will marry in a few months. Sammy, our host, bides his time. With money you can do that. Rick used to be my best friend, way back before college, before I’d even met Sammy. We three belonged to the same fraternity, though I couldn’t stand it and dropped out after the first year. It’s law school that killed me and Rick. His first year and he’s talking about how much power he will have.

Sammy’s father sold historical calendars to the big breweries as premium giveaways.  Just think up some catchy theme – like relating each day of the year to, say, a milestone in women’s liberation – do a calendar, make millions. He should have known better than to fiddle with time.

Some others here too, like my current girlfriend, Rachel, who will fly home next day or so while I spend a few more days with Sammy. It’s an off-on deal with some minor violence thrown in like bitter salad spices. I keep my eyes open. Then the jerk of a law professor, one of Rick’s teachers, trying to stay hip with long, sandy hair, caved-in cheeks, wire glasses and endless plastic sandwich bags full of marijuana. Very good weed, though I regret giving him any credit at all. His wife, Vera, I think that’s her name. Another law professor. Same stringy hair and glasses, long hair, thin sallow face. The two look like male-female clones of each other. Hands-on, hungry, sarcastic jaws working their way up the rungs. He’s debating over teaching versus private practice in D.C, where he says he’ll make a lot more dough.

There are others too, friends of the lawyers, but I can’t remember them. No interesting women except maybe this one called Whitney, a grad student somewhere up here in the Catskills. This is not my territory. I’m deep south, tropical, in grad school myself on a fellowship. Living month to month on the paycheck. The hand I was dealt, so I don’t think about it much aside from occasional spasms of envy and regret.

Sammy, always the mover, likes gathering people together.  He stands
back and watches the intermingling and secretly, I think, enjoys a good
personality clash here and there.  Or maybe he sincerely hopes to nurture us,
bring us all together as some loving, happy family.  He’s the common
denominator, a behind-the-scenes auteur.   And a natural host, providing top-
notch booze and food – lots of caviar, pate, deli sandwiches, egg nog, ham
and turkey roasts.  He drives down to the market every day for supplies.  And
let me tell you, the road is treacherous, what with snow blanketing the earth.
It’s the Christmas holidays after all.  Sammy’s battered old station wagon
slides all over the place.  The other day he wound up in a ditch with a cracked
axle and had to call towers down in the valley.

The truth is there’s not much to do around here.  Can’t get back to
Manhattan,  only a two-hour drive usually; can’t spend much time outdoors
because of below zero wind chill; can’t roam the house because you’ll freeze
to death inside; can’t watch television because Rick doesn’t believe in them
and there’s only a tiny set in one of the bedrooms, an old ten-inch black-and-
white with no reception.  So we all spend a lot of time reading and trying to
make small talk.  The first few days or so we got into serious discussions
about the big issues, clashed, learned to distrust and steer clear of each
other.  It’s as if war is about to erupt.

The one thing we wind up doing a lot is cards, mostly poker, because,
well, what else is there?  I never play cards, shudder at the very idea of table
“games,” haven’t handled a deck since I was a kid.  But my old grandpa
taught me a thing or two about poker.  Back then I had no idea it would ever
come in handy.  The lawyer and his wife must have memorized Hoyle’s
because they know all these fancy, weird gambling games and want to show
off.  But the rest of us protest and finally prevail because without us, it’s
Solitaire, not poker. We wind up with five card draw or  seven stud,  easy no-
brainers.  The lawyers and Rick, of course, have lots of money to bet.  The
rest of us don’t.  I can’t afford to lose one penny.

So I decide to make a little spare change.

The lawyer, Dave, had taken instant aversion to me and vice-versa.  I don’
t like his snotty arrogance and wire glasses.  He hates me because I don’t
want to fuck his wife.  He’s one of those guys – there are lots of them around –
who wants all other men to want to fuck his wife.  It must make them feel
macho and giant balled.  He doesn’t really want anyone fucking her, he just
likes it when they yearn to.  And I’ve made it pretty clear that I have no interest
whatever.  Guys can always tell when other guys are sniffing.  It’s all in the
eyes, the joshing, the feeble compliments and enthusiasm.  In effect, I’m
telling Dave that his taste in women sucks.  Thus he’s peeved and seeks
revenge.

Or maybe I’m distorting the issue altogether.  I am, after all, telling the
tale.  Dave is long gone on one of the byroads of history, and so is his wife –
though I heard later that they divorced.  Maybe Dave can’t even remember my
name.

Mostly it’s Rick, Sammy, Whitney, Dave, Trudy (his wife), this guy Mark
and I shuffling the cards..  Rachel and I aren’t getting along.   I’m feeling pretty
low.  We’d replaced one of sofa’s end tables with a proper game table near
the fire.  The other guests  join in every now and then, but their hearts aren’t
in it.  Mine isn’t either, but I want to make some money and I’m pretty sure I
can.  Anyway, the games become serious after a day or so and now often last
until dawn.

Whitney makes a point of letting us know that she’s one of those
embittered feminists who hold men responsible for all evil.  She presents
herself as such but I can’t decide if she’s genuine or a party-liner.  Anyway,
during the games, the conversation drifts to the difference between men and
women, and, bingo!, every time I say a word she jumps all over me.  As if
there aren’t any differences!   But that’s exactly her position: society alone,
male-dominated of course, creates the differences..  Otherwise, we’re all be
the same.

“That’s preposterous,” I declare.

So we get into hormones, anatomy, the extra Y chromosome . . . all of
it.  But we’re antler-locked because nobody’s willing to yield an iota.
Meanwhile, Dave baits me at every turn with trivia questions.  He must spend
his nights memorizing them for occasions such as this. Historical stuff like,
What’s Herbert Hoover’s middle name?  He thinks I’m a smart ass and wants
to outsmart me.  He’s paying only minimal attention to the Whitney situation,
though Trudy chimes in often enough on Whitney’s side.   Rick and Sammy
won’t help me out.  They hardly say a word but every now and then exchange
glances.   I could use an ally.

The more I drink and toke the better Whitney looks, but she’s fierce,
hostile, poisonous.  I wish she’d take off the wire rims.  Blue eyes, long blond
hair almost to her waist, she’s wrapped in layers of wool.  But there’s a
disconnect between the sweet Heidi looks and all that rage, so I pull the switch
and withdraw from the games – not the poker, just everything else that’s going
on.  Dave keeps passing joints around and I’m feeling all right, comfortable
but withdrawn.  Herbert Hoover, every second word from his mouth.  I just sail
into a sea all my own, with special background music: Herbert Hoover to the
tune of the Hallelujah Chorus.

I’ve won practically every hand.  After a while, when he’s lost another
twenty-five bucks, Dave looks me in the eye and says flatly, “You’re good.”

Not good, Dave, just severe..  The simple, dumb secret of poker is
bluffing.   Bet high and reckless and keep raising the stakes even if all you
have is a pair of deuces.  Keep a straight face.  And never show your cards
even after the game’s over.  Nobody can stand a straight face, and most drop
out after a few rounds and you’re left with one die-hard who thinks he’ll
clobber you with his mighty ace of spades.  That die-hard is always Dave.
Whitney’s one of the first to fold every time.  Then Trudy and the rest of
them.

Maybe the simple, dumb secret of life itself is bluffing.

It’s late Christmas Day and Dave, Trudy and their troupe are leaving in
the morning.   They’re upstairs packing, making a lot of noise and endless
phone calls.  Rick and his fiancee have already left.   So has Rachel.  Sammy’
s down in the valley getting more food and supplies.  I’m sitting alone by the
fire, about seven hundred dollars richer.   But I feel a little hollow and groggy
and decide to take a walk outside.  Behind the house there’s a gentle slope
full of white birches, one of my favorite trees.   Much of the snow has melted
and you can trudge through the stuff without chunks of it sliding between the
boots and socks.   And it’s a little warmer than usual.

So I’m just hiking a bit with a long branch to keep my balance.  I stop a
moment to take in the beauty surrounding me, breath in the cold, crisp air.
From here you can’t see any houses or signs of civilization or people.  Kind of
nice.   I figure it’s all over between Rachel and me finally — and that’s ok too.
We were lonely and sad with each other.   How stupid is that?

I hear a swoosh from one of the white capped burning bushes and out
flies the reddest cardinal I’ve ever seen.  Crystals of snow explode into mist as
the stems fall back into place and silence resumes.  The cardinal
disappears..   Everything is white and cloudy.  I’m surrounded by white birch
and burning bushes.   It’s so peaceful and spectacular that for the first time
since arriving I’m glad to be here.  Delight, that’s what I feel.  I figure that the
only people who know much delight these days are little kids.

But my toes start to freeze with numbness and I’m hungry, so I start back
for the house.  The wood smoke smells good.  Sammy uses only hickory.
Hungry too for some of that leftover ham and pineapple.   Just as I ram the
staff into a soft spot of ground for bearing,  I’m suddenly knocked face down
flat into the snow as if stuck from behind with a hundred or more pounds of
dead weight.  At first I think maybe it’s a falling branch, but no, it’s got arms
and legs that clutch my body like adamant vices.   I’m on the ground, spitting
out snow, cursing, crying out.  The arms and legs ease a bit and I manage to
twist around for a glimpse of what’s assailed me.  Whitney!  She’s wearing a
heavy military looking surplus jacket and thick wool cap.  She just stares at
me, specks of snow dotting her cheeks.  For the first time I notice she has
freckles.

“Jesus!” I cry.  “What the hell are you doing?  Were you following me?”

She doesn’t say a word,  just keeps staring with what I take as pure
hatred.  No expression on her face at all.  She looks like the snow.

I wriggle loose from her body and stand up and brush myself off.   She
now squats on the ground gazing at me.

“What is wrong with you?” I roar.  “You could have broken a bone!”

My face is scratched from scraping against some twigs as I went down.
There’s a little blood.

Whitney squats, saying nothing, like some animal on the hunt.

“You’re crazy,” I say.  I snatch up my staff and thrust it back into the mud,
limp away fast.  The fall twisted something in my left ankle.  All I’m thinking as I
ascend the slope is, “Hell, this is going to hurt.”  I spot the woodpile and
Sammy’s station wagon.  He’s back with more food.  I don’t even look back to
check on Whitney.  She can crouch out there forever for all I care.

And that’s the last I saw of her.  She never returned to the Sammy’s, not
even for her bags and luggage.   For a while we thought maybe she had
wandered off and frozen to death.  Sammy and I searched some, then called
the police.  But later Dave phoned to say she’d hitched a ride with them to the
airport.  So at least she didn’t die.

It’s many years later and sometimes I still think of Whitney.  Mostly she’s a
blur except for the freckles.  I see them clearly, like tiny, scintillant specks of
time.  She’s just some random woman I happened to encounter back in the
days.  I’ve tried to figure out why she attacked me, but every time I think I’ve
nailed it one way or the other, I change my mind..  None of the options are
good.  I have no idea why she attacked.  She didn’t lose that much money.
An odd sexual game maybe, but not the kind of approach that kindled my fire.
I saw no ardor or interest in her eyes.  Only blank ferocity.

A few days later I too flew home to face varied strains of music and
Sammy returned to the city.  I left him a hundred bucks to help with the
expenses, stuffed it between two books on the mantle above the fire, one of
them Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.   I don’t believe anyone
else left a dime of gratitude.  But surely the rich have learned by now that it’s
better to give than receive.

Louis J. Gallo’s work has appeared in American Literary Review, Glimmer Train, New Orleans Review, Missouri Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Portland Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Rosebud, Amazon Shorts, storySouth, Paradigm, Clapboard House, Raving Dove, Flash, Rattle, Babel Fruit, Oregon Literary Review and many others.

Clara pushed herself off the plywood floor and looked down at where her face had been.  No blood this time, but the skin around her left eye was puffy and tender to the touch. Earlier in the year she would have found some snow to put on it, but March had turned it all to mud and she’d forgotten to fill the ice trays in the freezer. Last time he was upset because she overcooked his eggs again, but this time he found a bank statement for a checking account she had just opened in her name. She should have told Eunice at the bank not to send them, but she was in a hurry to fill out the forms before anyone knew so she forgot that detail. Her first deposit was part of her last paycheck from the turkey plant, split so that most of it still went to the joint account, so Stan wouldn’t notice. Of course now he knew everything, but he only had time to rough her up a little before going off to work in the lumber yard. Later he’d make up for that.

Slowly she stood and walked to the stove in the corner of the old log cabin. Only a few sticks to feed the dying embers, she’d have to go to the outdoor pile to get more.  Then she looked at the stack of broken down cardboard boxes behind a chair, waiting to be recycled. A bit of that would get the fire blazing again while she got more wood. She folded a piece in two and thrust it in. She put in another. As it took, the draft pulled strongly and heat radiated into her chilled arms. Then she heard a small crackling coming from the stovepipe itself. In one spot a circle of red grew larger on the surface of the black metal.  A chimney fire. Creosote had been building up there for years, from low fires out of soft wood, and now it was on fire in the chimney. Hadn’t been able to get much besides box elder lately, and that was great for making creosote. Clara knew what to do, damp down the fire and stop feeding it. She reached for the damper handle above the stove, but her hand went to her eye instead and she stared into the red spot that seemed to grow large enough for her to dive in.

Her hand fell to her side and a tear welled up, stinging the tender swelling on her face as it made a trail down her cheek. She hugged herself and bent forward to ease the empty feeling in her belly, and let the lump in her throat grow large, but she did not sit down. Instead she paced the few steps it took to span the small kitchen, to the window overlooking the wooded ravine, then to the opposite wall where a small window in the door looked out on the muddy path that led to the field road. She paced to ease the tightness in her neck and the indecision in her heart. An image came to her from her childhood, of a tiger who traced the same monotonous track over and over in a tiny cage in the old Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, and looked at her with vacant eyes, as though knowing he could get no help from her.

She paused by the stove, listening to the crackling that was always a fire alarm in the past, but now pulled her down a path she dimly realized she was already treading. Some harsh bit of that knowledge welled up from inside like a sudden release of steam that propelled the hand that knew it should turn the damper down, to do an opposing action. It grasped the chair and threw it aside to get to the cardboard. She stuffed all that she could into the firebox and then flew up the stairs to the loft. The stovepipe glared red-hot in two places on its way to the ceiling. She dragged a cardboard box full of old newspapers next to the chimney and it began to smolder. She pulled the old dresser as close as she could and soon mushroom clouds of smoke grew to engulf it. Clara raced downstairs and threw on her chore jacket. She pulled on her mud boots and charged through the door. Her eyes fastened on the path so she could avoid the muddiest puddles. That’s why she didn’t notice the figure on the path until she bumped into him.

“What the…?” said the figure, a man of rugged build, in coveralls and a denim jacket.

Clara stopped in her tracks and looked him full in the face. The veins at his temple were about to burst.

“Go to Marsden’s and call for help,” said Clara. Why had he come back so soon? Maybe the truck had gotten stuck in the mud.

“You didn’t call yourself?” Stan pushed her aside to get past her on the narrow path.

He ran to the house and opened the door. Smoke poured out.

“Too late, the phone wouldn’t work,” said Clara, picking herself up off the ground.

“We’ll just see about that,” said Stan as he disappeared into the smoke-filled room.

Clara considered her options. Continue down the path to the truck, but it was probably stuck, and she didn’t have the keys anyway. She could race out along the driveway to the county road, but that was half a mile over open fields, no place to hide. Better to head to the woods, he’d have a harder time following her there. She started running along the wooded path that led down the ravine. In a moment she heard Stan screaming, “You bitch, you started it! You torched my house. Son of a bitch! Damn, you can’t run away from this!”

Stan was still in good shape, from farm work and work at the lumber yard, so Clara had to escape with something other than speed. At least she had a head start. The trail twisted down at a steep grade. She had to slow down here to keep from toppling forward.

Gooseberry thorns ripped at her pants. Her feet struggled to regain balance over a muddy spot. Down the ravine, she knew she’d have to cross the creek, and hoped it wasn’t so high as to submerge the stepping stones. No such luck, she splashed through the brown water up to her knees. Nowhere to hide, the underbrush was still bare of leaves this early in the spring. Clara glanced over her shoulder, just long enough to see Stan racing down the slope. She left the trail along the creek and took off uphill climbing to the cliff edge above her. No longer able to run because it was so steep, she planted her feet into the moist earth, one after another.  A wave of dizziness swept over her but she put her head down to fend it off and forced her lungs to gulp more air. Behind her she heard Stan plunge through the creek, cursing as he hit the water.

Just under the limestone ledge Clara followed a raccoon trail that traced the contour of the cliff. It ran into a break in the cliff, a grassy slope between two rocky faces. She pulled herself up the steep slope by grabbing on to scraggly branches of juniper. Her hands went instinctively to the live branches, which looked a lot like the dead ones. Only way to know with juniper was practice. Too bad Stan knew how too.

Now on flatter ground above the cliffs that lined the ravine, she thought ahead. The Torkelson’s had left a bit of their cornfield standing last fall, because it was too wet to get the combine in. She picked up speed again, leaping over fallen trees, skirting tangles of brush. There was a place in the barbed wire fence last fall where the top wire was down.

She angled to the right to find it. Yes, still there. She could straddle it there without having to step on the lower wire. The barbs tore into her pants and bit into the skin of her inner thigh, but did not slow her down. She dove into the corn and loped down a row, ignoring the sharp edges of dried corn stalks that scratched her face. Just a few yards in, there was no way to see her from the outside. She could be anywhere in that patch, maybe a half acre of standing corn. But she had to find a spot and hold still. Any movement would give her position away in the still air. Good thing Stan hadn’t brought Truman. That hound would have no trouble sniffing her out.

It was easier to be still when sitting, so she found a place to settle, where some stalks had fallen over. She willed herself to breathe deeply and slowly so she could listen for Stan, but her heart was still too loud. In a few more heartbeats she heard him rustling at the edge of the corn. He cursed quietly now, hoping not to warn her she supposed. Clara saw without seeing the curve of his back as he plunged into the cornfield. He had a way of sliding his shoulders up and forward that gave his back a hunch when he was angry. It was a warning to her, like the fur raised on Truman’s’ neck when he caught the scent of a coon. Stan was too good a hunter to think he could find her this way. He’d have to flush her out or wait her out. Maybe he’d go back and get Truman. Nope, then she’d get out of there. He could wait all day in a deer stand, barely moving. But he wasn’t angry at the whitetails. He wouldn’t last two minutes in this hunt. Clara could keep still. She’d had practice. When a drunken fog gripped him it was best to get out of his way. In their little cabin, the only way to do that was to be still. She’d sit in her red rocker by the kitchen window looking out while he swore at the TV and the government and Maynard, his boss at the lumber yard. He’d forget all about her at such times, unless she got up to get a cup of coffee. Then she’d be the focus of his curses, and the blows would not be far behind.

He was closer now. She could hear the dry cornstalks scratching out of the way.

Suddenly the rattling stopped. Clara turned her head way to the right to see the spot.

Maybe six rows over, a black boot smeared with mud. That was all she could see because near the ground the corn forest was thin with only stalks. The canopy of pale brown leaves concealed the rest of his body. At his eye level there were so many leaves in the way you couldn’t see more than the next row. All he’d have to do was to crouch down and he’d see her. But would he think of this? Clara held still but her heart would not stop beating. The brown fabric of his chore pants stretched over a bent knee, and a hand reached to the ground. His back carved a hunch in profile. He looked ahead, then to the left. When he looked right he’d see her.

She didn’t give him that chance. Like a ruffed grouse she sprang up with a yelp. No matter how many times she’d had one fly up in front of her, it always startled her and made her stop in her tracks. She hoped it would do the same to Stan now. She sprang straight forward in the direction she was facing, the woods. He wouldn’t expect her to go back. Clara scaled the fence at the same place she’d just crossed it in the other direction. Stan crashed through row on row to get to hers and he was fast, but he’d taken a moment to start his pursuit and change directions. The grouse impersonation had worked.

“Damn, you think you can scare me you bitch! This is it Clara, you’re not getting away this time.”

He’d kill her, she knew it. She started back in the same direction she’d come, looking for ways around brush and over fallen trees. Her path angled downstream along the cliff edge to a break she’d climbed up many times before. The slope was so steep and rocky she had to use branches again. Like aerial stepping stones she reached for one, then the next, twisting to go backwards down the draw. They might not support Stan. When she reached the creek she heard Stan starting his descent. A branch cracked under his weight and she heard his boots scuffle. His curses changed from anger to fear for a few moments. But he regained his feet well down the slope.

Clara plunged back across the muddy water and headed along the creek edge to the path that she’d come down from the house. Fastest trail out of the ravine. Too tired to think of strategy. Smoke settled into the ravine, burning her eyes. At a turn in the path she glanced over her shoulder. Stan had gained on her. If she stumbled he would be on top of her. She’d get to the house and put it between them. Close now, she made her legs struggle on though her lungs screamed and spots of dizziness passed in front of her eyes. Another few steps and she was out of the ravine and on flatter land again, twenty yards from the house. Clara raced to get to the other side of it where the smoke was thickest, and ran into something, someone.

“Clara, we came as soon as we saw the smoke,” said Frank, their nearest neighbor.

“Tried to call you, but got a busy, so I called the fire department. Don’t know if they can even get in through the mud.”

Clara could barely speak through her heaving lungs. “Frank, what a savior you are.”

She pulled back from him and let her heart beat twice before saying, “We were checking the woods fence when we smelled smoke.” A little ways back Frank’s grown son, Mike, peered into the windows of the smoke filled house, an ax in his hands.

“Think you can hide from me!” Now it was Stan’s voice disembodied in the smoke.

Then he burst through the screen of smoke, still running. Stan braked when he saw Clara and Frank, but it took several yards for him to come to a complete stop, so close Clara’s feet bit into the soft earth, ready to run again. But she stood her ground when Stan grabbed her arms and shook her hard. “She started this fire, and I’m not going to let her get away with it.”

“Mike get over here!,” yelled Frank, and they struggled to pin back Stan’s arms to release Clara from his grip. “Just calm down Stan, let her be.”

“The Hell I will, she’s trying to destroy everything I worked for, the bitch!” He broke one arm free of Mike, who had to grab it again.

Clara looked at the three of them, framed by the cloud of smoke engulfing the house.

“It was nothing but a cage and you can’t keep me in it anymore!” She took deep breaths to stop her heart from crashing into the walls of her chest.

Frank said “Clara, take my truck, the keys are in the ignition. Amy’s home.”

Stan struggled against his captors like some overgrown beetle in a horror movie, his human guise now shed. That was what she’d lived with all these years. He bent forward in half to lunge against his restraints, so his eyes raged upward from beneath his heavy brow to look a her.

Clara planted her feet to draw strength from the earth and looked down at him. “I’m leaving you Stan.” She took her time to turn away from him, as though she was in a video in slow motion. Her breathing slowed with each step down the path. It was good to be done with running, but it would take a long time to get the smell of smoke out of her hair.

Mary Lewis has published many works of short fiction and has a story in the collection Frank Walsh’s Kitchen and Other Stories. She contributes articles on environmental issues to her local paper and teaches biology at Luther College in Decorah, IA.  Before that,  Lewis worked on a research farm for sustainable agriculture that she co-founded.  Lewis taught piano and dance for a number of years and has a weakness for Beethoven and Chopin.  Skating is another passion, both ice and roller, but wheels work best in parades.