All Night Diner part 1

So my producer for the podcast got caught up with some prior engagements, so we’re going to have to wait until February to get to listen to the last three installments of the podcast (Final Punch, and All Night Diner parts 1&2), so I’m going to trudge ahead and post All Night Diner in two parts because it was the longest of the stories in the book and it might bring about some suspense for those of you who follow it.

This story is my version of a “who done it.”  Initially I wanted to play with the narrative a bit and keep it one flowing story where Robert’s ring would roll around the diner and that was how you got introduced to the characters.  I got about twenty pages into it before I realized that it was a failed and flawed attempt and I’d have to go at it from another angle.

This story has a bunch of characters and is very exposition heavy because it’s almost a novel length idea condensed into 55 pages.  I had hoped to finish out the book by having each section be a different genre, you have a horror story, a love story, a suspense story and a gothic moral tale a la Donna Tartt.  I’m not sure it if succeeds, but I loved writing it and I love the twist.

Next Friday will be the conclusion, then I will offer up some more Bowling Alley poems before I post a brand new, never been seen before story “a place you cant come back from.”   Enjoy!

All Night Diner

Part I

Raven’s Diner

     The diner lay in a desolate wilderness ten miles from the town ofCheyenne,Wyoming. It was a way station for weary travelers as they made their way through the depressing flats of theGreat Plains. Its original name was “Capote’s” with a carved wooden sign hanging above the door. Its owner was Jacques Capote who built the place as a façade for a drug and arms trading post. He dealt with gangs, delinquents and bribed the police; all the while developing a taste for cooking and turning Capote’s into a place coveted by the passing trucking and biking crowd…a crowd who could pick up, not only a decent bite to eat, but some uppers for the road. It wasn’t until Jacques’ beautiful wife and newborn son were killed in an altercation with police in the diner that he decided to change his career and in an effort for safety, the bar’s name.

The story goes that the funeral for his family was delayed because a raven landed on the casket of his son. He spent hours staring at the raven, screaming at anyone who tried to move the bird. He raved that it was the spirit of his dead son. Later that night after the bird flew away and the woman and the boy were buried. The raven returned to Jacques. It sat on his window sill, and if you believe some that tell the tale, spoke to Jacques. It gave him instructions.

The next day the wooden carved sign, which travelers strained to find, came down. The day after that, a new neon sign which read “Raven’s Diner” went up. The day after the newly instituted diner opened, ownership of the bar went to Jorge Calaveras; a man who frequented the diner. On the fourth day Jacques put a shotgun in his mouth and displayed his brains on the window of his newly christened “Raven’s Diner.”

Some said the place was cursed. Some said it was haunted. Some said it had the best corn beef hash in theGreat Plains. No matter which story you believe, it was in this place where seven people met and spent the night in a diner which had a view of the edge of the world.

Part II

Robert and Tanya

     “Fuck you! I’m not going to jail! I didn’t do anything wrong!” The greasy biker said from the other side of the diner. Robert looked over at the man out of the corner of his eye, just to make sure he wasn’t going to ruin the night then turned and looked back at Tanya.

Robert drank his coffee in abstinent silence; fingering the ring he brought to the tryst. He looked across the stained Formica into Tanya’s brown eyes. There were slight crows-feet at the corners of her eyes which used to catch excess makeup and make caked lines; spindles out away from the corner of her eyes. Makeup she used to hide the bruises her dead boyfriend gave her.

Robert had saved her from all that. She no longer wore makeup, in fact whenever she passed a counter with a young woman attempting to sell, she would shy away and hide in Robert’s arms. That night was their anniversary. It was a year free from makeup and abuse.

That was the reason Robert brought her back to Raven’s. He wanted her to stand in the diner she used to frequent with her abusive boyfriend and face her fears. Once she did he was going to have the waitress serve her favorite dish, then present the giant diamond which weighed down his pocket. She amazed him with her vitality and stubbornness. He wondered sometimes why she stayed with a man who abused her for so long. Robert intimated that if he were to raise a hand to her she would tear his head off, but then again, he thought, maybe being beaten for a solid year is what it took for some people to finally stand up for themselves.

He remembered the first time he saw those eyes.

A year earlier he was on a poorly run PR tour for his new book “The Ingredients of Life” which featured a poor writer traveling from city to city and trying to find his purpose. The protagonist had sex with prostitutes, did drugs in Portland flophouses, tipped cows while tripping on acid in the Wyoming plains, had a drinking contest with a senator from Texas and eventually died of a gunshot wound in a cemetery in El Paso.

Cheyennewas as far as his publicity company was willing to pay for and Robert wasn’t sure if that was a reflection of their budget or their opinion of his writing.

He was passing the quaint little “Raven’s” when his Dodge Dart’s radiator boiled over. Six months later he would tell Tanya that their meeting had been serendipitous. If his writing were any better, they never would have met.

Her make-up application was thicker that day than it normally was. Her boyfriend, whom she called by his nickname, “Chopper,” had beaten her especially bad the night before. He would usually focus his efforts on her stomach because it brought fewer questions from people; not that he really worried about such things, he just found it easier to avoid questions altogether.

Robert had looked at her, took note of the obvious swamp colored distortion of her skin tone and sighed in absent empathy. She saw him looking and gave him a slight and self-conscious smile, then raised one of her hands and covered as much of her face as she could.

Robert wrote a novel called “Life; Intransigent” three years earlier where the main character was a battered woman. He felt it would be untruthful or perhaps somewhat un-realistic if he wrote about the experience the woman had in the moment, so he focused the battering as a memory, something as fleeting as a dream, used only as back-story so as to give a greater understanding of the woman’s decisions to avoid male contact. She was a villain because of it. A cold calculating bank-robber who couldn’t understand affection because it was something she never had, or if she did, couldn’t remember. The book was a perfect statement of Robert’s ignorance of the broad range of human emotion.

So when he saw her eating dinner with the large man in the leather vest; when he saw her look at him and smile at him, he smiled back then focused on his meatloaf.

Throughout his meal he noticed her stealing glimpses at him. Every so often he would look at her directly and she would smile and very coyly look to the ground.

Robert’s assumption was that she recognized him from one of his book’s dust jackets, but that was only partially true. She did recognize him, she’d read all of his books, and where she thought his writing was a little sub-par, she also thought he understood what it meant to be in peril. Every story he wrote had characters in extra-ordinary circumstances. In “The Particles of Faith” a priest is excommunicated from his church for alcoholism and travels the country as a preacher, stealing and healing along the way. In “Dodger” a young man is imprisoned for killing a man when he’s eighteen and spends his time in jail plotting escape. The list went on.

So she locked eyes on him and tried to convey her situation, covering her bruises only that once and giving him a view of what she represented through her body language.

Robert, whose longest relationship was only a year, was ignorant of her efficacious flirtations. He felt mildly uncomfortable, as if he were starring in a third rate Dukes of Hazzard knock-off, and the large biker would turn around and beat him for staring at his girl. Her gazes were just so resolute.

When he finished his meatloaf he got up and gave her a shy grin as he made his way to the bathroom. He didn’t know it at the time, but this small furtive glance was his downfall. She had been desperately trying to gain his attentions because her perception was that all writers had money and she thought the best way to escape the choking grasp of Chopper was to run away with a man who could solve problems through money. Money could fix anything. He didn’t seem to be responding to her though and as his meatloaf began to disappear from his plate her hope began to drop like the first dead leaf of autumn. Slow but steady.

Then, on his way to the bathroom, he smiled at her and she saw her shot. She excused herself from Chopper’s side (he didn’t even register her leaving, he was busy wolfing down his own portion of meatloaf) and demurely made her way to the bathroom doors where she waited for him to come back out.

Robert peed languorously, searching his mind for ways to avoid contact with her. Robert was a pacifist at heart and the thought of confrontation scared him. His big plan was to exit the bathroom, throw money down on his table and nod his head at her, so when she met him at the entrance to the bathroom door he let out a little squeak under his breath.

She stood before him with her arm on the door jam, her legs spread, her lips full and her eyes held a worldly and knowing gaze. She handed him a piece of paper, then leaned forward and grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his lips to hers. Her lips were glossy and she tasted of coffee.

The kiss lasted only for a moment and when it was over. She slid her hand from the back of his head to his cheek. She looked, not away, but down as she did this. She wanted to show him she understood what she was doing was wrong. She wanted to show him she felt shame for her actions, but the hand on his cheek was meant to display that no matter how wrong it was she wanted it.

There were no words in their first interaction (unless you count Robert’s squeak). It ended there, she walking back and sitting next to Chopper and him fulfilling his earlier plan. He walked over to his table, threw down money then walked out of the diner. The one change in his plan came at the door (next to the neon sign) when he turned back to catch one last glimpse of her. She was looking back at him, her make-up caked face wrinkling with expectancy.

When Robert got back to the hotel he opened the note. There were four words and ten numbers. Tanya Pearson 803-567-8956.

My God! He thought this is like a story I would write!

He called her back the next day.

Initially Tanya used him. Their first meeting she found out he had no money, but that he seemed to be willing to do anything for her. He was like an angel sent from heaven. He was everything she wanted in a man. He was considerate, he listened and most importantly he didn’t beat her.

They met secretly for months, always talking briefly about their separate lives and then spiritedly copulating when the conversation ran down.

Robert was in love from the first moment. He loved her small town mentality and her ineffable compulsion to be needed. Her life didn’t seem to have purpose and she was slowly slipping down into depression. Chopper only seemed to need her as a focus for his outpouring of lust and aggression. Robert though, accepted her and empathized with her. He hated Chopper and often talked about giving him a piece of his mind (Of course this was always taken lightly by Tanya because Robert was so soft spoken and Chopper was three times his size), but when the evenings devolved into intercourse he quickly forgot his anger.

Three months after their first meeting Tanya came to a realization. She was pregnant.  She decided to wait to tell both Chopper and Robert until she knew when conception was. The only way she was going to keep it was if it were Robert’s, if she couldn’t definitively identify the father she was going to abort it. There wasn’t any reason to chance having Chopper’s baby.

A few months later she began to show and immediately Chopper was proud. When he found out he grabbed Tanya in a headlock and gave her noogies laughing and whooping. He said it was a miracle; the doctors told him that (after a fight he got into when he was twenty and got kicked in the testicles…repeatedly) he would probably never be able to conceive a baby, his testicles were just too damaged.

Robert was elated when she told him he was going to be a father. He held her tight and kissed her deeply, then that night after they made love she left him to return to Chopper and he began to formulate a plan to get his new love away from her tyrannical husband.

When Tanya got home she was dismayed to find Chopper even more tossed than usual. He had gone to his local hangout “Stephanie’s” (it was a bar owned by the head of the Vagabonds, his biker gang) and gotten free drinks in congratulations all night long. Chopper tried to fuck Tanya that night, but because of the alcohol, was unable to attain an erection. She tried to buffer his ego by sucking him, but he remained skin taffy.

Chopper, who had never dealt with embarrassment well, beat Tanya unconscious. He had tried to keep his blows to her face and torso, avoiding her stomach so as to save his unborn son (he had no idea that not only was it not his, it wasn’t even a boy); unfortunately in his stupor he eventually forgot she was pregnant and laid a few very well placed kicks and managed to kill the unborn baby.

When Tanya woke she was lying in a pool of blood and immediately knew what happened. She called Robert and told him about the beating, weeping and sobbing into the receiver. They agreed about a meeting spot to discuss what they would do. She wouldn’t have cared if it were Chopper’s baby, but because it was Robert’s it opened her eyes to the reality of her situation. She was not living a real life, but some kind of bizarre, warped Wonderland. She came to the realization that she was the only one who could change her circumstances. She was the one who would have to act. She just didn’t realize Robert would be so willing to help.

“Let’s kill the son-of-a-bitch.” He said it so coldly, with a determined look in his eyes. Tanya thought she saw his nostrils flare.

They came up with the plan together. They would call a rival gang, the Sons of Chaos, and tell them Chopper was selling on their property out in the forest byLakeMeneloua. Meanwhile Robert called Chopper, explaining that he was a friend of one of Tanya’s high school friends and set up a date to acquire some crank.

It was the perfect plan and it worked just how they thought it would. Tanya stayed home so she would have plausible deniability and Robert went out to meet Chopper. Robert got to the meeting spot (out in the woods next to an old run down boathouse) early and was surprised when Chopper got there ten minutes before the scheduled time. Chopper didn’t say a word during the transaction; he just looked at Robert, stared deep into his eyes. They exchanged money for goods and Chopper took a few steps backward, wearily eyeing Robert. Chopper made it a hundred feet when he stopped in his tracks. Robert, knowing the rival gang must have started their move, began to slowly walk in Chopper’s direction.

The kill shot came quick. They didn’t give him a chance to speak; they didn’t even give him a chance to run. He took two .22 caliber bullets to the head and dropped to the forest floor. As Robert walked past, giving the body a wide berth, he raised a hand to the man holding the gun. The man nodded back.

Four months later Tanya and Robert sat, again, in Raven’s diner. Tanya had gone to Chopper’s funeral, then disappeared leaving a note behind that said she was too heart-broken to stick around. She and Robert had been living out of hotels and hostels ever since. She never dreamed her life would be lived in hotels, but she relished every minute of it. The freedom and liberation which came from the road was like nothing she had ever experienced. She felt like she had been released from prison.

Robert pulled the ring from his pocket and brought it to his lap. He smiled at Tanya who smiled back; it was a look of complicit joy and it made Robert’s heart sing.

Robert was so wrapped up in mentally practicing his proposal that he didn’t notice the short, fat, balding man walk into the diner behind him. It wasn’t until Tanya’s eyes widened as a short fat man raised his arm and pointed a Glock at the back of Robert’s head, that Robert realized something was wrong.

Robert turned slightly saw the man’s face and said one word before the bullet destroyed his brain and he collapsed into a pile of useless organics in his seat.

“You!” His publicist would hardly be happy to hear this was his last word.

Part III

The Jocks

     Abraham Gelding Winslock watched in horror as the short ugly fat man barged in the front door and pulled the trigger. The sight of Robert’s head exploding out across the table and covering Tanya was too much for him. Abe turned to the window with his hand daintily covering his mouth, holding in the high pitched screech he felt building within him. It was not the first time he saw someone’s brain exit their body.

Abe was descendant from old money. His father was a banker who graduated from Harvard in the top of his class. His father before him did the same. The Winslock money came from the early 1800’s when the first Abraham founded New England Trust, which rivaled Bank of Italy in prestige. The original Abe’s son, Tristan, sold the trust to the Bank of Italy (which shortly afterward changed its name to Bank ofAmerica) and became a millionaire. That money had been invested and saved and it slowly grew to immense proportions.

Abe’s father was the first to branch out into work outside of investing and became a philanthropist of the first order. He spent his time building soup kitchens and hostels for the unfortunate. His plan was for Abe to follow suit, after he finished Harvard of course and continue the prestige of the Winslock name. For the entirety of his life Abe believed in these goals and strove for them. He was the top of his class in his Academy and had near perfect test scores. He was accepted into Harvard and the first two years he excelled.

Abe was a quiet boy; unassuming and polite. He seemed to live to please people and to serve. His desire to please began at a very early age when he realized he was gay. His father took him to a brothel (a high end, very expensive bordello known only to rich men and ignored by their wives) and let him pick out anyone he chose. Abe couldn’t choose, so his father did for him. When the prostitute took him to her room she instantly recognized the problem.

“Does he know honey? Is he trying to make sure you’re straight or is he trying to make you fuck it out of yourself?” She was crude and beautiful, but the only love Abe felt for her was for her elaborate dressings.

He vowed from that moment that he wouldn’t let his father know and that he’d do anything he could to please him and that meant hiding his homosexuality. Abe saw his sexual preference as a problem, an issue he was unable to resolve, so he decided to ignore it and as a result he grew up shy and anti-social, but extremely intelligent. The quality time he would have spent with friends he languished in the comforting embraces of Proust, Dickinson, Dickens and the Bronte sisters.

He didn’t branch out of his bubble until the second year at Harvard. He met another boy who seemed interested in him, the way that Abe deemed only appropriate between man and woman.

Charles Van Pugh was a beautiful boy. Six foot tall and the perfect Aryan. His hair was delicately cropped and framed his deep blue eyes and creamy skin.

Charles was the captain of the basketball team and loved by everyone at school. The women coveted him and the men envied him. He spent his nights doing anything he wanted and his days sleeping. His father was a man of fairly new money. When Vincent Van Pugh was ten his father started his own insurance company and grew his moderate salary to unforeseen levels. Vincent took over the family business when he turned thirty and his plans for Charles were the same.

Charles, knowing his fate, accepted that he had a direct path and decided very young that he would need to live his life as fully as possible, because once he turned that fateful age, his life as he knew it would be over. So Vincent took care of everything for him. He spent his time at the office and had his lawyers take care of every issue his firebrand of a son had and decided that Charles was just too much of a handful. So Vincent slowly backed out of Charles’ life. The only interjections were to hand Charles favors, like acceptance to Harvard despite his straight D’s, and his trust fund which totaled eight point eight million dollars (which he would receive when he turned twenty-five).

Charles in his all knowing twenty-year old wisdom, decided that sex was the gateway to everything he wanted and since he was lucky enough to be princely bred, things generally worked out for him. He fucked girls for rides. He fucked guys for favors. He fucked his teachers for grades and the school administrators to erase his records. It was during this promiscuous streak that Charles met Abe.

To Charles it was just a fuck for homework, but to Abe it was the first real person who seemed to take notice of him.  Charles was Abe’s first and because of this he fell for him hard.  Abe felt he loved Charles and forgave everything he did.  He knew Charles slept with everyone he could, but Abe just liked being in his company so he put up with it all.  Abe was just waiting for the chance that Charles would see how much he loved him and possibly return the emotion.

Charles’ bad behavior and Abe’s love for him is how they came to be in the diner on that night.

One month before Robert was killed in the diner, Abe met Charles at a party. Charles told Abe the only way he would continue to fuck him was if he was high so Abe met him there with a baggie of weed and a six pack of beer. Abe spent the better part of the day trying to score an eighth and when he did he grossly overpaid. It was just something he had never done before and the dealer, recognizing his innocence raped his wallet.

That night Abe’s plan seemed to be holding up well. Charles smoked most of the bag during the night, sharing with other people and intermittently drinking his beers until he decided there was nothing else of interest (in actuality the girl he was after had left with another guy) so he wanted to go home. Abe offered to drive since he hadn’t done anything but admire Charles’ perfect jaw line, but Charles would have nothing of it. He grabbed the keys from Abe’s hand and jumped in his Aston Martin. Abe barely had time to get in before the car zipped away.

It took Charles ten miles to realize he didn’t have his headlights on and the whole time Abe sat clutching the sides of his seat. Once he realized he snapped them on then looked over at Abe and smiled. Abe was terrified and Charles relished in it.

“Relax, baby. It’s all copasetic. I know what’ll calm you down.” His eyes wavered and he didn’t look at the road, while he unzipped his pants.

“Charles, please.”  Abe was scared and his lisp came through stronger than it normally did.

“You know you want to.”  Charles didn’t even look Abe in the eyes, he just grabbed the back of Abe’s head and pulled it to his crotch.

Abe didn’t say anything, it actually scared him a little the strength that Charles put behind it; slamming his face down into Charles’ flaccid penis. Later he would chastise himself for not putting up a fight, but at that time (actually every time Charles was horny) Abe felt needed and wanted by someone he was attracted to and he couldn’t stop. The more time, though, that he spent blowing Charles the more flaccid his penis seemed to become.

It confused Abe because Charles kept speaking as he liked it “Yeah Bitch! You suck that cock!” There were even a few groans thrown in there, so Abe just kept at it. Abe didn’t realize, though, that in Charles’ state he still wasn’t watching the road and less than a minute into the act the car jolted in conjunction with a loud bang, as if someone had punched the hood of the car.

Abe whipped his head up and Charles slammed his foot on the brakes.

“holy shit.” Charles’ voice was very soft and very calm.

“Whatthefuckwasthat?” Abe said staring at Charles, too scared to look out the window.

Charles didn’t say anything he just gripped the steering wheel and looked through the windshield.

Abe vomited when he dared a look through the windshield. There was red goo all over the windshield, almost like pumpkin innards died red with little bits of gray sludge and white fragments intermittently dispersed throughout.

“That little girl, man. She just popped!” Charles looked out forward through the windshield and Abe vomited again when he heard the windshield wipers start.

Charles only waited until the windshield was clear, then he took the car out of park and began to drive away. Abe never said anything. He was terrified and his stomach was threatening to continue its regurgitation so he kept his face between his legs.

Charles took him to his dormitory and dropped him at the entrance. He didn’t wait for Abe to say anything, he drove away while the door was still open. Abe got one last glance of Charles’ flaccid penis as the stained Aston Martin drove away.

That night he didn’t sleep. He waited for the police to come to his door and arrest him. He waited for Charles’ to come and kill him, for fear that Abe would squeal. He waited, but he didn’t do anything. He didn’t call the police, he didn’t call his parents. He didn’t know what to do and he saw that girl’s brains sprayed about the windshield every time he closed his eyes.

He stayed in his dorm room for a week, waiting. His roommate stopped coming home, his clothes stank, he didn’t shower, he was a wreck. He felt dirty inside his mind. He felt constantly sick and restless, exhausted and sleepless, bored and terrified. He didn’t know what to do.

Then after a week he ventured out to take a shower late at night. There was no one in the hallway and no one in the shower and it was quieter than he’d ever experienced. He crept down the hallway, making sure to be quiet and jumped under the warm water. He felt relief wash over him. He went over the events of the night and decided he shouldn’t get into trouble. After all he never even saw the girl. It could have been a deer. Charles was so trashed that night it could have been anything. He gave himself countless excuses for what it was and took all responsibility off his shoulders. When he got back to his dorm room he fell fast asleep.

He went on with his normal life after that.

He didn’t give that little girl another thought for a week.

But then one night the fog started to roll in over Havard yard. He could see the fog moving in closer, thickening and congealing the air. He peered out into the morass and saw a lone figure standing next to a tree, leaning on the tree to hold its weight.

The fog and his tortured mind blurred the reality of the situation and when the figure began to walk through the milky cloud Abe thought for sure it was the girl. His rational mind left him and fear of being tormented by the girl’s ghost seeped into his conscious mind. He imagined her half shattered body shuffling toward him, scraping a useless leg behind as she slowly made her way to his window.

Abe shut his eyes and sank down underneath the window. He could almost feel the fog beating against the dorm.

He was about to stand again to take another peek, when he heard harsh breathing coming from the other side of the window.

He flatted himself against the ground and looked vertically up to the window. He could see hands cupped over eyes…blue eyes. Charles’ eyes.

Abe lept up and threw open the window startling Charles. Abe reached out through the window and slapped Charles, then brought his face close and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. Abe’s emotions were running wild and he didn’t know what to think or how to act when he finally looked Charles in the eyes.

Through the whole ordeal Charles never said a word and it wasn’t until Abe was finished scolding himself that he realized Charles was as white as a sheet.

The story came out in a slow metered cadence. Charles was at basketball practice when a man in a suit showed up and gave a letter to his coach. After practice the coach handed the note to Charles and gave him a sympathetic pat on the back. Charles ignored it and went to the locker room. Once there, amidst his fellow teammates he opened the envelope which had a Polaroid in it. It was a very clear picture, taken at night with the flash to maximize the carnage. It was the girl, her head half gone the chest caved in and one leg a twisted branch with bone gleaming in the flash from. On the back of the picture a sentence was written out.

“Raven’s Diner at 7PM Tuesday.”

It was that night Abe was thinking about as Robert’s brains splayed across Tanya. The thick fog rolling in from the darkness. They had taken a step out of reality, a ride given by the fog. Now they were stuck in the diner with a man who already killed some one else…and they were told to come here. Someone knew what they did and set them up.

Oh, God, thought Abe. What if it’s the man with the gun?

Part IV

The Prostitute

     The man who’d followed her here looked at her first when the gun went off. She saw that much right away. The two, slightly homoerotic college studs never even gave her a second glance. The smaller effeminate one (Mary thought of him as the receiver) jumped up in his seat and screamed like an arachnophobia prone prepubescent girl while the larger muscular one (this one was the giver) just sneered in disgust.

The business man was the first to react. He leapt from his seat and tackled the tubby gunman, spilling them both onto the floor. She could see them both struggling for the gun, but the businessman seemed much better in such physical disputes. The woman who was with the dead guy was screaming and the pitch hurt Mary’s ears. That bitch had to calm down.

Mary slid back to back of the seat in her corner of the diner and thought back on her night. One of the most fucked up nights I’ve ever had. She had to get out of this diner before someone else died and more importantly before the police got here. A crime scene was no place for a twice convicted prostitute.

She looked out into the dark black night and noticed the deep green sign for interstate 82 down at the end of the driveway to the diner. She looked longingly at the road and thanked God that she had been as lucky in her life as she had been; all she needed now was an extension of that luck and she could get out of here tonight.

Of course her luck hadn’t always been there; when she was a little girl she had been decidedly unlucky.

She grew up without a father and her mother always told her he had died when she was very young. He had been a firefighter and had died in a burning blaze when Mary was still in her womb. He was a policeman who saved a group of nuns from a bank robbery while Mary was being born. He was a priest who died while exercising a demon from a young girl. The story changed weekly.

Mary’s mother faked at being religious. She often told Mary she was named after the mother of God, because she was meant for great things. She was meant for much better things than living at the trailer park with her mother.

Mary and her mother were very poor and to supplement the meager money Mary’s mother, Petunia, made at the Laundromat she dated and tried to find men who would be willing to support her. It was something she very bad at.

Mary was shown early that physical and verbal abuse was something that just happened in relationships. To her it was a normal course of life. Petunia’s first boyfriend used to come home from his construction job and slap her if the dinner wasn’t on the table. He used to put tape on Mary’s mouth if she cried. Then one day he hit Petunia too hard and she fell, cutting her face on a plate she was drying. Mary’s mother told her she needed to be beautiful always because the man who had been so kind as to provide them with food had left because she got a scar from the plate and he didn’t like to look at it.

Mary also learned, very young, that a woman has her place and she learned it over again in a new brand new way when she turned eleven. Her mother’s boyfriend at the time was a slightly overweight, greasy, stay at home father figure. He’d gotten a million dollars off a frivolous lawsuit and used the money to be a disgusting slob and waste his time on a couch. Mary had just gotten into third grade and her mother was taking less and less interest in her, being too overwhelmed by the pressure of life and having a child, so she began to drink. Heavily. Most nights her mother drank with her slob of a boyfriend (who slept all day; that is when he wasn’t watching TV) and they tried, loudly, to fuck. Most nights he was too drunk to get it up, but one night after her mother had passed out in a drunken stupor, this drunken slob of a boyfriend entered Mary’s room and told her what good daughters did for their fathers. Told her what men look for in a woman…and he never had trouble maintaining an erection with her.

Things continued on like this for years until the slob left them. With the money gone and work the only apparent option Mary’s mother made a hard decision. She sent letters out and tried to find Mary’s actual father. While doing this, she sent Mary out to the street to get money. Petunia knew what Mary did with the slob and thought of Mary as a real woman now. She had a brief thought that maybe she named her daughter after that other biblical Mary and then started to drink and forgot the whole thing.

That was how Mary spent her early life, going from one John to another. Making pittances and spending them on pleather outfits.

Petunia died when Mary was seventeen. She literally drank herself to death. It took Mary three days to realize that Petunia was dead and when she finally understood, she closed her mother’s eyes, slapped her face and left the trailer, never to return.

The night she ended up at the diner started off the same as any of her other nights. She was at home getting dressed when she got a call from a new Johnny. She often kept her regulars on speed dial just in case she needed some extra money; also it better prepared her for their special requests.

The call she got was cryptic and intriguing. It asked her to meet at an address and if the John was pleased, payment would be copious. Mary didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded promising.

She arrived at a nice looking townhouse and honked twice in quick succession as instructed. Two minutes later a man in a pressed double pleated suit exited the house and made great care to lock all three deadbolts on the door, then secured the standard knob lock. Mary took no notice, because she was busy practicing her pouting look in the rear view mirror.

When the man got in the passenger side seat he didn’t say anything, but laid his hands meekly in his lap and lowered his head slightly looking down at his carefully manicured hands. Mary looked over at him and smiled at his innocence.

“Where to baby?”

He looked up at her and purposefully blinked twice.

“Go directly to interstate 82 and exit on Meneloua pass and park by the boathouse. Do not speed.”

He blinked one more time then looked back down at his hands.

“Honey, the only speeding I’m gonna cause is when your blood rushes to your dick.” She licked her lips in a lubricious and vaguely vulgar way and put the car into gear.

He didn’t say a thing the entire drive down to the lake, just kept his hands in his lap and kept his eyes trained on his hands.

When she put the car into park she turned the volume up slightly on the radio and turned to him.

“What can I do for you baby?” Her ignorance was due to her luck. She had been doing this for years now and she never had an issue with anyone. She never had a pimp, but then again she never really needed one. No one ever gave her any trouble and when they did they never came back to her again.

He didn’t raise his head. “I want you to take off your top. I want you to rip it off.” He spoke fast and out of breath as if he were turned on already.

Mary smiled and slowly lifted her shirt. “Is this what you like baby?”

“I said rip it off!” Spittle flew from his lips and he raised his eyes from his hands, they burned with fire and drool was falling from his lips. She felt her luck drain. She leaned back against the window and let her satin blouse fall back into place. “Why do they always make me do it?”

Mary didn’t know if he’s talking to himself or her, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out. She reached behind her and tried for the handle of the door.

“You don’t leave!” This time she knew he was talking to her and she felt his strangely large hand cup the crown of her head. “Why do they always try to leave when I’m teaching them a lesson?” He whispered in her ear just before he smashed her face against the window.

For the first time in her life she realized that the abuse she had previously thought normal in a relationship was far darker and more menacing. She wondered if her mother feared, as she did now, that the man abusing might be trying to kill her. Her heart sang for her poor dead mother as she slipped from consciousness.

When Mary came to she was lying on the side of the road. She had her purse with her and her attire seemed in order, nothing ripped or cut. She looked about trying to get her bearings and noticed she was no longer atLakeMeneloua, she was sitting on the side of interstate 82. Groggily, she stood and started to walk down the highway unaware in the darkness of where exactly she was along the interstate.

She walked for nearly two miles before a car passed and she was grateful when it did. While traveling she had a distinct feeling of being watched and at one point, she thought she could hear a crack of a twig from out in the woods, but she ignored it and walked all the faster.

The old Ford Taurus stopped just a few yards ahead of her and she ran to the car, not in elation for getting a ride, but in fear of the man who had hurt her, who was probably following her in the woods.

She whipped open the door and plopped into the passenger side and shut the door. “Thanks Mister.”

“Holy shit! What happened?” The man had long hair, and looked a little greasy, but she felt safer with him than without him.

She looked quickly into the rear view mirror and was not surprised when she saw her face was covered in bruises, but what disturbed her even more was the bandage on her forehead. She reached up and lightly touched it, wincing at the lacing pain.

“Please drive, I’ll tell you on the way.” She glanced into the woods to see if she could see the man and then breathed a sigh of relief as the car started moving.

They pulled into the parking lot at Raven’s fifty miles later after the man who introduced himself as Tommy told her she looked as if she needed some food (and knew he did) in her.

They were there for a short time, not quite long enough to get food, when the businessman walked in. Mary’s new Johnny immediately started to seem nervous.

“That fucking guy has been staring at us since we walked in here. Is he a cop?”

Mary turned around and looked the businessman in the eye.

“He looks like a horny old fogey. That’s what he looks like.” He didn’t though. In fact, Mary found him very attractive and when she looked at him, he stared straight back into her eyes and smiled slightly. She felt her heart flutter and a strange need to have the businessman hold her.

“He better not be a cop. Are you setting me up? You can’t get anything on me. I’m just an innocent bystander!” His voice started to break and Mary realized for the first time she had never propositioned him. All men were the same. Even if they did something nice for you they wanted something out of it. Maybe he thought he could get it for free if he took her out to dinner.

“This isn’t “Pretty Woman” pal, you’re still gonna have to pay.” She turned back to find him half standing.

“Fuck you! I’m not going to jail! I didn’t do anything wrong!” He was loud, but not terribly. She hoped the people on the other side of the restaurant count hear him. She felt strangely ashamed that the businessman could.

She didn’t make a move to stop him and he charged out the front door, sneering at the businessman as he went by. The businessman never took his eyes off her. He ignored Tommy completely.

Mary looked at him and had a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Something about him seemed familiar. It could have been one of the cops who arrested her when she was seventeen, high as a kite selling herself at a biker bar. It could have, but she didn’t think so.

She had nearly placed where she knew him from when the fat slovenly man burst into the bar with the gun and shot the poor bastard at the other side of the diner.

January 6, 2012 | Categories: Short Stories | Tags: All Night, biker, diner, Gay, horror, murder, mystery, Prostitute, Sean McBride | Leave a comment