H^{igh and Dry
by Jeff Blechle}

Paul’s wife, who had read herself to sleep on the couch, suddenly tore into the kitchen, bumped Paul out of her way, opened the oven door, reached into a gray rolling cloud with a potholder and yanked out a warped cookie sheet holding a smoldering chunk of black. Winded, she dropped it loudly onto the stovetop.

“Bon appetit,” she said flatly.

Paul slid into a kitchen chair and lit a cigarette.

“I was spacing out. Sorry.”

“Are you able to take out the trash, space boy?”

“It’s Thursday again?”

Paul asked this in the same way that he had asked about it last week: earnestly, as if he expected an answer. But his wife stood silently next to the refrigerator grimacing at the asteroid-shaped meat.

“That isn’t the way it looked in the cookbook,” Paul said, raking a hand through one of the wings his long tannish hair. “You must be aging.”

“Are you high?” she said irritably, checking her watch, “I’m only twenty-eight years old.”

“So what. My grandpa was twenty-eight years old once and look what happened to him.”

Now she was checking the little round mirror in her purple compact the way she had earlier that day, only now she wasn’t in her car and speeding down the interstate. Snapping it confidently and pushing it deep into her purse, she turned to straight-arm the edge of the countertop.

“Okay, what happened to him?”

“He died.” Paul shot out of his chair and rocked around the cluttered table, holding onto his broad shoulders as if for support.

“And here you’re acting like you’re gonna live forever and trying to starve me at the same time.”

“Can’t you ever be serious? Look, I’m going shopping. I’ll see you later.”

She pressed her soft full lips against his soft full lips, grabbed her purse and left through the back door. Paul watched her face float through the yellow light. It carried the same mocking smile he remembered seeing on the nuns from his grade school. With sounds of the playground behind him, he peeked through a window of the convent and saw that the walls were dim and cloudy gray and at the center of one, above a small wooden bed, hung an ornate crucifix, brassy and ancient in a gash of sunlight.

The latching storm door turned his thoughts to the clock high above the kitchen sink. He decided to walk down the street to the Johnson’s and borrow something. Maybe they would get him high. Perfect. Chuck Johnson was a dolt and his wife Pam had smiled at Paul at the grocery store recently and he recognized at once that she was wasted. He thought a moment and then called a friend who worked at Mr. Johnson’s bread store.

Paul’s hiking boots clopped along the sidewalk. The warm night air carried the smell of trash and the voices of idiots so he lit a cigarette and pictured himself singing his favorite song in front of people he wanted to impress. Across the street in the black rectangle of a storm drain he saw a lightning bug flash red. He slowed for another flash, thinking of his yellow porch light and the bugs worshipping it and his wife’s head passing through it and then the burnt meatloaf plummeted into the foreground with a deafening crash and he tripped over a curb and landed one knee in a hard stretch of grass. Did she set the oven timer wrong? Why did he marry for looks and not money and fun? Shopping! He cut diagonally across the street, trotted through a lush yard, turned at a hydrant and faced the only new house on the block. Mr. Johnson had connections, but as a humble show of his status, he always referred to the trailer parks he owned as ‘mobile home communities’ around prospective renters. Paul crossed the long sidewalk, climbed the steps and pushed the glowing green dot.

“Hey Paul, what’s going on?” Mr. Johnson said, standing in the dark entry behind the storm door. He pushed it open, flipped on the porch lights and Paul’s squinting eyes landed heavily on a doughy bald head. Mr. Johnson was wearing a red, blue and yellow golf shirt that was too tight around his belly, which was squeezed it in half by a thin brown belt. To Paul he looked like the kind of man that had to rationalize himself out of bed in the morning.

“You didn’t need to ring the doorbell. I was standing right here.”

Paul snorted.

“Hey, Chuck, do you have a mallet I can borrow?”

Mr. Johnson frowned thoughtfully and rubbed his chin.

“You bet. Come on in. Where’s Crystal?”

“Shopping.”

“Wanna hang out here for a while?”

“Perfect.”

Paul waited until Mr. Johnson turned to go in before pitching his cigarette into the front yard.

“Have a seat. Wild at Heart is on. You ever see it?”

Paul said he hadn’t and immediately thought up a clever insult that would bring Mr. Johnson down the next time he felt happy, and he was about to say it—jokingly—when Mr. Johnson went muttering into his garage. The steel door automatically closed behind him.

Pam Johnson appeared in the freshly lit hallway wearing a white tank top and tight cut-off jeans. Her smile brightened as she approached Paul, who was leaning on a counter next to a fake rubber tree plant where the living room met the hallway. He nodded coolly. She passed in front of him and went to the bar where she squatted before a shelf and flung her damp red hair over her left shoulder and asked him if he could handle a gin and tonic.

“I’ll try.”

Paul leaned over to take another look at the jagged white-blue frays that circled her freckled thighs and Pam told him they were out of gin. He refused a screwdriver and then she told him they were out of orange juice anyway. Maybe she could get her old man to run up to the liquor store. They both looked away and grinned.

Several minutes later Mr. Johnson came back inside with a grimy yellow-headed mallet and, placing it on the kitchen floor by a statue of Aphrodite, mixed himself a drink and joined his wife on the loveseat across from Paul, who was settling into a brown leather recliner.

“Need to knock your old lady in the head, Paul?”

“No, I’m building a coffin and I want to be careful not to dent the wood.”

After declining a vodka martini Paul admitted that he had been having a bad day and, to be quite honest, it was nice to be relaxing and talking to someone besides his wife, who seemed to be aging faster than he was. But then the Johnson’s, perhaps to shift from the unpleasant subject of mortality, got on to the kind of non-confrontational small talk that left Paul numb so he checked his watch and complained about imposing. During objections he thought of getting high with Pam just as soon as her husband had to leave, which would be directly, he hoped. When he interrupted one of Mr. Johnson’s off-color jokes to announce that three was a crowd, Pam teasingly asked her husband to leave and then told Paul that he was welcome in their home any time, and so was his wife—she is so pretty—what was her name?

“I forget.”

Paul held Pam’s eyes just long enough to see the hot tension. Then he sank into a frown and gave her a little furtive head shake as if she had brazenly made a pass at him in front of her husband. This was for Mr. Johnson’s benefit, but:

“It’s terrifying how much money I’ve made this year,” Mr. Johnson confessed in a sigh. His faraway look riveted a dark ceiling corner while his thin lips quivered.

“Yeah, that’s scary shit, man,” Paul said with a cocky sneer, getting a wry laugh from Pam. He stood up with a chuckle, combed his long hair with a thick plastic comb from his back pocket and then sat back down in the recliner.

“You sure you don’t want a beer or something, Paul?” Mr. Johnson asked.

“No thanks. Gin and tonic, that’s my—”

Mr. Johnson shrugged and blurted, “Taxes! Who’s got the time?”

Pam started gulping her drinks, so when Mr. Johnson, who had motored to the bar to pour himself a whiskey on the rocks, appeared suddenly at the recliner’s arm to show Paul his drink glass, she started complaining about the inconveniences of political correctness and how the trash that was moving into the neighborhood made her want to ease up on the yard work. After all, why impress potential criminals? But the men were too busy watching a painted woman lose her clothes to sympathize. Mr. Johnson told Paul that this trick glass was to offend prudes and that at their last party some friend of a friend—a hideous crow of a woman—after accepting a shot of cold gin in this very glass, drenched her front while trying to conceal her moral outrage.

The phone rang through the polite laughter. Mr. Johnson, glowing famously, picked it up, grunted a series of ‘uh huhs’ and ‘yeahs’, hung up as if he was on the verge of some terrible confession, said there was a problem at his bread store—something about moldy day-olds—and then, excusing himself without making eye contact, promised to pick up another bottle of gin for Paul and slammed the door behind him, sending a commemorative Ronald Reagan plate caroming off the granite countertop to wobble face down on the marble floor. Mr. Johnson did all this with unzipped pants.

When the headlights finished their whirl along the dimly lit walls, Paul stopped sneering, retracted the recliner’s footrest, scooted forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He stared at Pam. She stared back.

“I thought your old man’d never leave,” Paul said.

“Me too.”

“Let’s party.”

“I like the way you think.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“I knew it!”

Pam rushed down the hallway.

“Let’s walk over to The Stagger Inn,” she said from the bathroom.

“Walk, hell! We’re taking your old man’s dune buggy!”

He sauntered down the long hallway, admiring his reflection in a mirror at its end, and bumped into her as she stepped from the bathroom.

“Where’s the keys?” he said.

“Hey, listen, Chuck wouldn’t appreciate it if we took his dune buggy.” She had her red hair in pigtails now and Paul felt the urge to walk her back to the bedroom and pull off her rubber bands. He grabbed her tails like handlebars and gently twisted one of them.

“Chuck loaned me a hammer didn’t he? He won’t mind if I borrow his wife and buggy.”

“No, let’s just walk.”

“You gonna make love to me tonight?”

Pam’s face seemed to melt a little, and then it went blank with what Paul thought was ingratitude.

“Listen, Pam, it’s a perfect night, let’s not waste it. I don’t want to go home and watch TV. Save me from that!”

She looked away several times and rolled her eyes.

“Will you let go of my pig—”

“I love you, man. Don’t let me down tonight. Please. Let’s do this. While we’re young. Okay?”

She pulled away, flipped off the hallway light and went to a key rack shaped like a key that was hanging on the wall next to the garage door and from a hook lifted a ring holding two metallic blue keys with chrome tips. She grabbed her purse, slipped on a pair of sandals and, flipping a light switch, stepped into the garage and shuffled across the concrete floor toward the vehicle. Paul followed her.

The dune buggy flashed midnight blue in the dim yellow atmosphere of the garage. The passenger side of the roll bar was completely duck taped. Paul commented on its metal flake paint and dusty chrome rims. It looked like a toy he used to play with. They climbed in and Paul clicked the garage door opener that was clipped over the top of the windshield. He started the engine, ground the gears until he found reverse and rumbled the buggy out onto the driveway. It sounded like a gigantic chainsaw bogging down in an oak’s trunk and when he whipped it out onto the road something behind the dash made the sound of metal clothes hangers sliding along a rack.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Pam said, looking around as if she had never seen the world at night. “Chuck is going to kill us.”

Paul sat coolly next to her. An occasional street light flashed over his face. He lit a Marlboro between second and third gear. Pam was back in high school again and Paul looked like all the good-looking members of all her favorite rock bands rolled into one, only he was built better and, as far as she knew, he didn’t wear make up. Her gaze left his tanned face and moved down to his forearm pressed against the console and then on to his fist around the gearshift. He shifted. She looked up to see that they were turning onto a back road.

“You shouldn’t act that way around Chuck, you know. He’s not an idiot.”

“He’s not?” Paul turned a confused smile on her. “Then why’d he leave someone like me alone with someone like you?”

She shrugged. “Okay, so he’s an idiot, but can you please stop grinding the gears?”

The cornfields rushed by in two unending blurs under the glowing black sky. A bat swooped and fluttered across the road. Paul asked her when she was going to get him high. She reached into her purse and removed a baggie with three joints in it. Her heart started pounding when she realized that she was trying not to think of her husband.

“Did you mean what you said back there, Paul?”

“Back where?” “In my hallway. You said you loved me.”

Paul slid the buggy to a stop on the shoulder and shut it down. He leaned on the console and looked out over his left shoulder across the backlit cornfield at a huge brownish orange moon.

“If you think I love you, man, you can get the fuck out right now.”

Keeping an eye on him, Pam started to climb out slowly. When he turned around she laughed, called him ‘too easy’ and sat back down and lit a joint.

“You’re funny,” Paul said. “You think I love you, huh? Hee hee. Guess I can’t use that line on you anymore.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

He smacked the steering wheel with his hands.

“Man, this is one bad ass ride. I love this thing. Let’s check out the tunes.”

He turned up the stereo and took the burning joint from her hand without looking at her. Pam couldn’t take her eyes off him. She regretted not bringing her overnight bag and her luggage and some of her keepsakes. When he finally exhaled she thought her heart would break. The engine roared and soon they were speeding around curves and ramping over embankments and laughing hysterically. Paul turned onto a farmer’s road and drove through the corn. Stars and music and breezes rushed around them and after a long while the dune buggy jumped over a parking block and spun around several times. When the gravel dust settled they saw that they were bumper to bumper with a car in the parking lot of The Cooked Goose Saloon. A bearded man stuck his head out of his window and honked.

“Get your stupid fucking ass out of the fucking way, bitch!”

“Whatever, dude,” Paul giggled, teary-eyed. This giggling escaladed into jeers and hard laughter. Pam joined him. The bearded man got out of his car and walked up to Paul.

“You gotta problem with me, pretty boy?” the man growled, rubbing his knuckles.

Paul quickly reached up, grabbed a fistful of the man’s t-shirt and punched him five times in the nose.

“Not anymore I don’t, bitch.”

After letting him fall into the rocks Paul’s eyes glossed over and he began driving absently around the tavern, craning his neck and looking in all directions and shifting erratically.

“Where’s the fucking drive-thru, man?”

“Watch out!” Pam cried. “That’s the second time you almost ran over that fucker’s head! Be cool.”

“I’m thirsty as fuck. And I’m horny, too. Hee hee.”

“Oh my God! Park in a parking space! This is a tavern not a freaking McDonald’s!” She stared at him with her mouth open and her eyes wide and waited for him to own up to the joke. He stopped the buggy behind the bar, shut off the engine, lit a cigarette and acted as if he were alone. “You’re a fucking trip, Paul, you know that?”

Paul turned his grin and his eyes on her breasts and then on her startled face. Pam knew she was beaming as though she were under a blanket of fresh snow, and now that she had his attention, she carefully moved her eyes to the fluorescent lights that hummed over the kitchen door and blinked slowly.

“Hey, Pam, go in and get us a six-pack and we’ll party out here. And then maybe I’ll let you make out with me.”

“Huh?” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s just go in and have a drink. Out of town bars are cool, you know, for us.”

“I’m too high to go in. So hurry back with those brews, bitch. Hee hee hee. I’m just kidding. Take your time.”

Gravel crunched in the shadows. A weathered old cook with a body length apron appeared next to a walk-in cooler.

“You ladies can’t park out here. This is where we trap the stray cats.”

Paul sat up in his seat with an indignant expression and the cook’s playful smile straightened.

“We ain’t parking out here, dickbrain.”

The man scratched his chest.

“Then where are yas parking?”

There was a long silence during which time Paul seemed to be struggling with a weighty comeback. Pam sat sideways in her bucket seat with both her hands caressing Paul’s warm forearm, glaring at the cook with her eyes wild and her lips evil.

Because she was certain she was superior to this man she said.

“Got all your affairs in order, old man?”

Paul laughed so hard that his forehead cracked the steering wheel and when he shot sideways in pain Pam grabbed his jaws and pushed her lips into his and thrust her tongue between his teeth so that he didn’t even notice the man he had punched out earlier scramble over to the buggy until he was being yanked by his head up and out of his seat. Paul pulled free and fell into the gravel. He ducked two slow swings and then left-jabbed the man backwards several steps while winding up his other fist, finally taking him down with a right cross. He hopped back into the buggy and tore down the road, parched and shaking.

“That was fun,” he said after struggling to light a cigarette with trembling hands.

Pam saw that his knuckles were bleeding. She reached out for him but he jerked his arm away and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Paul. I didn’t even see that guy come up.”

“That’s because your fucking face was down my throat. Fuck, man. What’s up?”

They drove for a mile or two without speaking. Pam’s favorite song was turned down. She didn’t have the courage to turn it up. A softly lit gas station with a full service pump came up on the left.

“Now, one more time, will you run into this shit hole and get us some beer? I got cottonmouth. I’m suffocating over here, man.”

She bit her lower lip.

“Okay, but it’s getting kinda late.”

“Not for me it ain’t.”

He pulled around to the dark side of the building and let her get out in front of a pair of tall murky garage doors. At the front of the station an old man was sitting slumped behind a grimy little window, partially obscured by a poster of an odometer and a question mark. Pam saw a piece of her reflection in the rearview mirror as she passed behind her husband’s dune buggy. Pausing, she watched Paul’s right shoulder slump forward and heard the stereo volume increase and the station change.

“That’ll be four ninety-nine, miss,” the man said after she placed a six-pack of Bud Light on the counter and reached into her front pocket for a wad of cash. He quickly moved his eyes to his static-filled portable radio sitting on a cluttered shelf beside him and said, “You ever heard a woman sing so pretty about things so sad? Now that’s a special talent. Not like nowadays where everybody’s singing sad about pretty things. Silly, silly world.”

Pam was put off by his elderly remarks. The horrible music grated on her impatient thoughts and she figured that this was why her eyes were burning and her head was throbbing. She nudged the sweating six-pack.

“Can I get my change—tonight?”

“I suppose ya can. Say, you two got hot dates?”

“If I ever get out of here,” she muttered.

“A couple pretty girls oughtn’t tote beer in a fancy hot rod, though. Police around here don’t look favorable on that.”

“What? Uh, we are not a couple pretty girls.”

He reached out to her with a penny in his palm.

“Look pretty to me.”

“Can I get a bag, please? For the beer?”

Pam turned in a fluster to a rack of dusty antacids and shook her head. There was nothing more unbearable to her than a stupid old man with a filthy mind, especially one with slick black hair and big ears that enjoyed wasting away for absolutely nothing in the absolute middle of nowhere. She managed to restrain her scorn. Without looking at him she turned to get her sack of beer and made her way down a narrow aisle to the restroom. She looked around at the small filthy room in disgust and set the beer warily on the toilet tank. Her bladder was aching but the bolt on the door was swinging like a pendulum so she decided to just primp in the mirror and cuss the old man on her way out. But the lighting was all wrong. It made her look older than she wanted to be. A blind clown could have done his make up better than she had. How many more years would she be able to look at herself without shuddering? How would her face look now if she had avoided all those stupid habits? Was Paul fucking blind? She automatically reached for her make up, which was in her purse, which was in the dune buggy. Had she been a natural beauty she could simply splash her face, dry it with a paper towel and step out before the world with her dignity in the right place. Her head dropped and the grimy sink drain scrutinized her. She closed her eyes. A deep familiar growl rattled the building. She grabbed her beer and ran outside. Paul was gone. She deflated next to an ice machine and waited for him to come back for over an hour, and with each set of headlights that eased out of the distance she would stand up, strain her senses and then sit back down in ragged disappointment.

At 8:12, after the old man watched her finish her fourth beer, he turned off the lights, locked the doors by the light of the cigarette machine and then shambled out to padlock the gas pumps. Placing his hands on his thin hips, he offhandedly mentioned that an escaped killer was loose in the area and then whistled over to his tow truck and began clearing off the passenger seat.