The Separation
A story by Keith Croes
The ski mask smelled of hot chocolate from a trip to the Poconos. He and Patti Belle squalling around the intermediate slopes. Now, three weeks into a midsummer heatwave, it wrapped his head in itch and sweat.
He was overdoing it, as usual. Going for the drama. Somehow it seemed appropriate. Important. He'd been a lousy husband. It was the least he could do.
He thought of the afternoon search through winter clothes, finding a red ski mask with a leafy green pattern like holly boughs encircling the upfolded perimeter of the cap and a fuzzy red ball on top. He would've smiled if his heart hadn't been ricocheting around his ribcage like a loose bullet. As it was, he managed to cross the bare boards of the dark hallway and lean flat against the plaster wall at the foot of the stairs.
He'd found a dark blue cap he knew was somewhere, though he would've preferred black. Like the long-sleeved turtleneck he wore, picked up on some Bohemian impulse at some indefinite time and place in the past. And the black Pierre Cardin jeans with the tiny white label on the left rear pocket inked over with a fat-tipped black Magic Marker. Just in case.
The gloves were dark brown, Isotoners bought as a Christmas gift on the fitness center wages of Patti Belle. Patti Belle, living with a roommate now in a house with four apartments and no air conditioning.
Sweat stabbed at the corners of his eyes. He blinked at the door to Patti Belle's apartment, heard faint music. His hands were slick in the gloves. With the tip of his index finger, he felt around in the deadly chasm behind the trigger guard of the black-steel .38 in his right hand. His estranged wife, Patti Belle, was living with her new roommate (Mary Lou? Betty Lou? Frito Lay?) beneath a jerk. The Jerk at the top of the stairs.
John Ferguson may have been the estranged husband of Patti Belle, but that didn't mean he didn't care. Inhaling the faraway fragrance of hot chocolate, he took the first step.
He couldn't recall which of them had been the first to voice the need for a new arrangement. They had wakened simultaneously from separate hangovers three months before, simultaneously sat up in excruciating slices of sun through the venetian blinds, and it seemed to him simultaneously said, "I think we ought to separate." Or maybe it had been unspoken. The silent mutual decision of two people close enough to read one another's mind but unable to ignore the inevitable.
He had been with someone else the night before, couldn't even remember exactly how he'd ended up in bed with his wife. That's how it was back then.
He'd been such a fool.
But then, he wasn't exactly sure where she had been that night, either.
There was nothing he didn't love about her except that she wasn't eight or ten different women. And now she seemed to be getting along perfectly well without him. Except for the Jerk.
The Jerk in his little room at the top of the stairs.
The big Jerk in his little room at the top of the stairs.
The Jerk who had touched her, actually shoved her, right here in this hallway a week before. A Jerk so inflexible, so antisocial that he thought a little loud music gave him the right to lay hands on Patti Belle, then disappear into his little room to revel in his misogyny, eat health food, lift weights, and masturbate over photos of traffic accident victims.
Eyes like twin
determined glints. The eyes of a man convinced that success comes to those who
understand the workings of the International Monetary Fund and practice
self-flagellation. The eyes of an MBA candidate at the
If he was
disciplined enough to control his autonomic nervous system through yogic
exercises, the Jerk no doubt thought, Patti Belle should be disciplined enough
to keep her damn music to herself. Only Patti Belle was the least disciplined
human being ever to steal a pair of panties from
The music behind
Patti Belle's door chose that moment to swell, and
The smile fled quickly, chased partly by the realization that the music issued from a stereo system that amounted to several months of John Ferguson's sweat at one of Frank's construction sites, and partly by the weight of the music itself -- that disturbing the neighbors was not something he wanted on the current itinerary. What the hell was she doing up so late anyway?
John snorted softly
through his mask, shook his head, and entertained the fleeting image of Patti
Belle confronting him in front of the dartboard at a local bar, taking on her furious/cocky/smoldering-nuclear-reaction-in-a-small-incredibly-sensual-package
stance, telling him a thing or two more about the Jerk upstairs, this time
including the one piece of unneighborly behavior guaranteed to work on John
like a pebble in the sneaker of a
He had touched her. Shoved her, really. Right in the hallway in front of her new apartment, and right in front of her new roommate, Peggy Sue or Bobbi Jo or Maggie Mae.
He wasn't sure that she meant for him to do anything about it, but why the hell else had she told him? Made it a point of telling him? Sought him out to vent her spleen in a place where 30 or 40 pairs of eyes were locked onto a pair of tits to die for, where 30 or 40 virtual strangers were willing to do immediately what took him a week to work out, who wondered en masse how the nodding goon with the so-what grin could return to his darts with a shrug after hearing about such an atrocity?
It was time to roll out the pebble, that's all. John was pretty fit himself, if not fanatic about it, and taking care of the Jerk was the least he could do.
Do it once, do it fast, do it right.
He decided at that moment that she had said it first. The separation was her idea. He could never have left such a woman. It's what he would tell anyone who cared to listen from then on, to the end of time. It was her idea, brought on by a lack of sensitivity on his part that had the Guinness people interested. In the entire world there existed only one man who might be a bigger jerk.
Do it now.
With the neck of the olive-drab military-type laundry bag clenched in his left fist and the .38 in his right, he quickly and quietly climbed the flight of stairs and stood before the locked door of the Sleeping Jerk, where he realized with a start that he had no idea what to do next.
That
afternoon there had been a plan. The only thing that came into his head now, on
the faint aroma of chocolate, was retreating down the stairs and out to his
His and Patti Belle's bed. The bed where she told him she wanted out, where the sliced sun made him a blind man. That's the bed he could return to. The bed where even now he'd nose through the sheets, searching for the smell of her.
This can't be any worse than the hardware store, he thought. That afternoon, walking in from the full light of day. Digging out his wallet to pay for clothesline cord and duct tape. Waiting for the fat teenage cashier to make change for a ten.
He'd wanted to yell at the pimply kid, smack the know-it-all smirk back into the pipe fittings aisle, hogtie the chubby twerp and explain that, hey, this is the plan, kid. You like it? Instead, he'd held his breath and raced out into the sun.
The hot day had given slowly to a hot night, like the broiler element fading in an oven. John's head itched. Patti Belle's Billy Joel throbbed faintly. He could barely hear it.
"Sonuvabitch," he muttered in the hallway. "I can barely hear it."
With the mouth of the .38, he knocked.
John had never met the boss when he eloped with the boss's daughter. The first time he met Patti Belle, though, he wanted more than a little of her and was given every reason to believe the feeling was mutual.
She was wearing tiny gray Nike shorts and a yellow halter top any male in the world instinctively would know lied about the size and substance of her breasts. She leaned, both palms flat on a stack of plywood. He stood shirtless, spinning a shovel around on its tip.
"So, how's a guy go about getting a date with the boss's daughter?" he wondered.
"You know where we live?" she asked.
John had once
delivered a huge shoulder roast wrapped in white butcher paper to the house on
"Yeah."
"Well, you park in the driveway -- be sure not to block the old man's Mercedes..."
"Uh-huh."
"Walk up the sidewalk to the front door..."
"Right."
"And knock."
John had taken her
out the back door the night they went to
He knocked again.
And if you want something, you get it yourself. It's the one and only thing he and Patti Belle agreed on. He turned down a number of offers to join "management," which he foresaw as the chance to sit on your ass and get fat while at the same time garnering an increasing number of people who hate you. She worked at a fitness club.
They wanted nothing from Frank, and nothing of his life.
You get it yourself. By yourself, for yourself. If Patti Belle had trouble worth telling him about, it was big trouble. And if some robot of an anal retentive carrot-eater was the cause of that trouble, John would do what he could. No muss, no fuss, no use even telling her about it. And it wouldn't be the kind of macho, step-outside-pal solution any guy in a bar might come up with, but something with a little style, a little permanence.
There's not enough permanence in the world, John thought, even for someone with as much style as Patti Belle.
The Jerk was going to leave her alone.
Forever.
It's the least he could do.
Footfalls, and the doorknob turned from the inside.
John timed the kick perfectly with the unlocking of the latch bolt and the withdrawal of the doorknob's tongue past its metal bracket in the frame. He guessed the infinitesimal hesitation of the door about four inches into its swing was the snapping of a chain that did nothing to attenuate inward-driving power that would have up-ended a man twice the Jerk's size.
Still, it maddened him. A big guy like the Jerk using one of those wimpy chains, and if John had been a neighbor seeking a cup of milk for the cat, the Jerk probably would've stretched the chain out and peered through the crack with one hard, dead eye, given a furtive negative shake of his head, and left the neighbor standing there holding an empty teacup and admiring the swirling dustballs on the floor of the hallway.
The guy just wasn't neighborly. He didn't work and play well with others. Closing the door behind him, John rushed the malignant end of the .38 into the forest of the fallen Jerk's curly-carrot hair.
"One sound and you're dead, cat-killer," he hissed.
The Jerk nodded, a quizzical look overtaking his glinty eyes, and John filled with a fresh and unexpected rage. In the low light angling out of a kitchenette to the right, he could see that the Jerk was wearing a tiny pair of gray Nike shorts. They appeared to be all he was wearing. Looked pretty good in them, too.
"Listen," John croaked, dropping to one knee and placing the laundry bag beside him. "Do you hear that?"
The Jerk had been propped on his elbows, and now he relaxed slowly down to the floor until he was flat on his back. John let the .38 in his right hand follow him as he worked clumsily through the glove on his left hand to loosen the drawstring of the bag and reach inside.
"You don't hear that?" Withdrawing the duct tape from the bag, he leaned forward until he knew the Jerk would be able to feel and smell his breath through the sweaty mask. "You don't hear that awful noise?"
"You're in deep shit, mister," said the Jerk.
John searched for Ps so that he could spit through the loose weave of the material at his mouth. "Puh-lease, you putrid pissant." He raised his knee, placed it hard over one of the Jerk's kidneys, and put enough added pressure on the .38 to reaffirm its existence. "This is a possible crossroad in your career, puke-face. You could be seriously delayed from the pussy Yuppie fasttrack, unless you know any vice presidents with jagged holes in their skulls, any corpses at the pinnacles of corporate power, you picky, self-possessed, patrician pantywaist."
It was the best he could do. He gave it up.
"Before you put this tape over your mouth, tell me what you hear, asswipe." Laying the silvery roll on the Jerk's stomach, John stood and retreated a short way past an antique sewing table that served as a lightstand near the door. "Uh-uh-uh, don't get up. Just tell me what you hear."
"I don't hear a goddam fucking thing," the Jerk said firmly from his back, aiming a hot, exasperated gaze straight up at the ceiling.
"The music," John said in a lilting voice, doing what he hoped would look like some kind of quick ballet step but may have been misconstrued as an effeminate idiosyncrasy. The apartment was a tiny studio; the extended sofa bed filled the living room and still bore the rumpled imprint of the Jerk. Until now John had never considered the possibility that the Jerk might not be alone.
"You are in deep shit, man," the Jerk ventured again.
John walked quickly to the open window on the far wall, reached through the curtains and closed it. The Jerk had to be alone. He was always alone. Patti Belle and Sally Sue had said so at some point, it seemed to him, but he knew it anyway. The Jerk was in the self-occupied peak of his life, a stage where women could play only the most transient role. Sometimes as irritating, rowdy neighbors.
"Deep shit, man."
John pulled a T-back chair within a few feet of the prone Jerk and sat down. "It's Billy Joel, her favorite. Put a hunk of that tape over that disgusting sushi-hole you call a mouth or I'll cut your dick off with a pair of scissors."
Going for the drama. Overdoing it, maybe. But there had been no fear in the Jerk's voice, no fear at all, and that was the purpose of the exercise, wasn't it? The guys at the bar the other night would've been glad to come over here, beat the crap out of the Jerk, one or two might even blow him away, but that's not being realistic, is it?
After a week of mulling, he didn't think so. Copious physical abuse up to and including murder covers a range of punishable offenses, and he wasn't looking to punish himself here. He lived in the real world and the Jerk lived in the real world, and chances are the Jerk would continue to live in the real world with Patti Belle. He simply would have to be introduced to real-world reasons why he should keep his distance and mind his manners.
So this was an etiquette lesson. Simply that.
The larger problem occupying the greater portion of his week of mulling, though, was that John's sense of the man took him to be one not easily frightened. Smart as he was, part of him was too stupid to be frightened. Stupid and stubborn and arrogant. He was a bully. John knew the type and was grateful even for the flicker of fear his last remark engendered.
There, and it was gone. The Jerk reached for the roll of tape on his belly, touched it with his hand for the first time, and said, "You mean that stupid cunt downstairs?"
"The tape --" John waved the .38. " -- and make it a long piece. You got a big mouth." He glanced quickly back over his left shoulder, leaned over and pulled the legs out from under the sewing table, turning it on its side and spilling its contents next to him on the beige carpeting. Delighted, he fetched a long shears out of the pile of buttons and spools. "I'll cut it for you," he said.
To John's disappointment, the Jerk's fingernails calmly sought purchase on the roll. But he was sweating. John had him wipe his face on the laundry bag before putting the tape in place over his disgusting sushi-hole.
Women just didn't fit into his current plans. But the Jerk wasn't the only one with plans.
From the depths of the laundry bag the Jerk was directed to retrieve the rope, two lengths of which had been prepared with a slip knot on one end. He installed a loop over each wrist and tightened them. He walked quietly into the kitchenette and sat on another T-back chair. He tied a third length of rope around his ankles. He put the laundry bag over his head and tightened the drawstring. He was participating in a kind of self-bonding experience.
With the Jerk's right arm extended, John groped under the refrigerator, wrapping the rope attached to the Jerk's right wrist to one of its stubby legs. Arm extended, the rope on his left wrist was tied to the stainless-steel faucet.
John accomplished this with only a few terse instructions, tearing off the ski mask only when he was halfway through with the knot at the faucet. Knot finished, he yanked a sheet and a third off the Jerk's paper towel dispenser mounted under a cabinet and wiped his face.
"You gotta know who that woman is, bub." He walked back out into the miniature foyer for the roll of duct tape, continuing the monologue he'd mulled for a week and now had a thrilling confidence he could deliver flawlessly. Like making love to Patti Belle. Something he could not do wrong. This was the lesson.
"You ever hear of Frank Belle?" He detected the tough South Philly accent of Frank and his cronies creep into his voice. He smiled, walking back into the kitchenette where the Jerk was pinned in a perpetual semaphore of the letter J, a roped Jesus held hostage with a bag over his head. He felt a not unexpected sympathy, then forced himself to imagine this man, those hands, pushing Patti Belle, bullying Patti Belle, just as he'd told himself he'd do over the course of the hot, long, mulling week.
No doubt about it, the punishment fit the crime.
The tape came loose around the roll with a ripping sound, and his smile returned full force. "She's his daughter."
John didn't trust the mouth tape to hold, and thought a little extra stuff around the outside of the bag would be good for effect. The Jerk wasn't doing him the favor of struggling, which was okay by him. He knew the Jerk wouldn't do him the favor of struggling. He knew the Jerk would sit as still as possible and kill him if given the slightest opportunity. Only now the Jerk was helpless, and was sitting as still as he could to elicit sympathy, to say "I am a man, and I do not deserve this."
John knew better.
"Well, Mr. Belle hired me to let you know in the nicest possible way that he is disappointed with your treatment of his daughter." John was standing close to the Jerk, wrapping the tape around the bag, feeling his ears and nose and body heat even through the black turtleneck, even in the heat of the studio apartment. He made sure that the nose was not covered. He glanced down at the Jerk's chest and marveled that this specimen of a man could be such a... such a jerk. The guy was cheating women everywhere. "So I'm not going to kill you."
At that moment, John truly wanted to kill him, if only because the guy was cheating women everywhere. It was unnatural.
He continued the lesson.
"Mr. Belle has friends, not just in Philly. Everywhere. Big friends. I'm afraid that if his daughter has just one more complaint about your comportment, that MBA won't even get you into the civil service. Am I getting through to you?"
He stepped back and when no sign was forthcoming, slapped the taped, bagged head of the Jerk with the flat of his palm.
He detected a grudging nod.
He slapped again, harder this time, and the Jerk grunted and nodded with appropriate vigor.
"Good. Because if Mr. Belle ever calls me again about you, I'm going to consider you a pest. And he doesn't have enough money to keep me from tearing your heart out. Kapeesh?"
The Jerk nodded hard again, and John swept the ski cap off the formica counter and shoved the dome of it under his belt. Kneeling, he checked the knots at the Jerk's ankles.
"There's no hiding from Mr. Belle, dipshit. You're a gnat's ass to him. I advise you to get neighborly fast, or find a place to live where you can bother somebody else's daughter. Take that to the bank, bucko. You know about banks, right?"
John loosed a short, weird snigger like nothing he'd ever given rise to before, certain he sounded like a crazed killer for hire. Backing out of the kitchenette, he stopped for a moment to take in the sight and make a quick search of himself for any remorse. How should he remember this? As breaking and entering? Assault and battery? Or as one of those things a man does for a woman that he never tells her about. As a private thing, maybe even beautiful. He hadn't quite decided when he was thrown to the floor by the bursting front door.
Behind the gun was a man in a black ski mask. The gun had a silencer. The ski mask had a fuzzy black ball on top. The man wore a black turtleneck and black jeans. John put several fingers to his right cheek, where the door had hit him.
"
"What the fuck," John remarked, flat on his back in the miniature foyer.
The masked man was hysterical. He stumbled back and turned to John, displaying the side of the handgun and rotating it as if to show how unnecessary it was, how he was laughing much too hard to use it.
Suddenly he turned deadly serious, and his gloved hand resumed the pistol grip. "Let's go, lover boy," he said. "Up, up. Up, up."
The voice was familiar, but the masked man was silent as he followed John down the stairs, nudging the silencer occasionally in the space between John's shoulder blades. In the small vestibule at the building's entrance, John stopped and pointed to a bicycle secured by chain and padlock to a huge radiator.
"One more thing," he said, and reached into the laundry bag for a tile knife with retractable blade, with which he slashed both of the Jerk's tires.
In
the front seat of a
"What's going on, Vince?" he said after a while. "Let me off, man."
Vince grinned ugly in the dash light. "Mr. Belle will want to see you."
"This is none of his business."
"Patti Belle is none of his business?"
Only John called her Patti Belle. She used his last name even now and everyone knew it. Vince grinned like an idiot.
"What's going on, man?"
"What's going on?" Vince dodged some kind of road hazard. "What's going on? You're going to save my butt, that's what's going on."
"How am I going to save your butt?"
"You're going to save my butt by telling the old man that I saw what I saw."
"What did you see?"
"I saw you...in control of the situation."
"Oh yeah? Flat on my back?"
"I saw Mr. Wharton School looking like a bad plumbing mistake."
"So why drag me into it? The guy never saw me. Tell the old man you did it."
Both hands on the wheel, Vince stared silently ahead at the road.
"Tell him you took care of it, Vince. Let me off."
Vince shook his head. "No can do," he said.
"Why not?"
Vince turned a quick, black smile toward John. "I was supposed to kill him."
About ten minutes
later, while John let that sink in, they turned onto
John shrugged. "Hard to tell."
"Well, it's his last chance."
"Yeah." The car came to a stop to the left of the Mercedes in the driveway, and John opened his door. "I told him that."
John had been
inside the house on
Frank was up, waiting for a call, John thought. Now there's compassion -- a man unable to sleep while his employee is on a dangerous assignment. Muffled voices from inside the office chased up and down the emotional scale as John thumbed through a six-month-old copy of Smithsonian. Finally, Vince appeared, waved him into the office and left, closing the door behind him.
Frank Belle was wearing a burgundy bathrobe with silk lapels. A half-empty bottle of Grand Marnier sat in front of him on the desk. It was precisely the scene John expected to see with the addition of a chestful of salt-and-pepper hair on the man behind the desk.
"John, we don't keep you busy enough during the day. You have enough energy to stay out all night. Have a seat, have a drink."
John had decided long ago never to pass up free Grand Marnier. He collected a glass from a bar at the side of the room, stepped to the desk and reached for the bottle, his eyes locking with Belle's. Disconnecting long enough to pour, he gave a little toast gesture and retreated a few feet to a brown leather chair.
Belle swiveled to profile and tapped the fingers of his right hand on a green blotter. "I would be very unhappy for Patti to know of my...involvement in her affairs like this. You know how she is."
John sipped and nodded.
Belle looked at him. "Does she know about you?"
"No. How'd you get...involved?"
Belle shrugged. "She told her mother. All about her nasty neighbor." He swiveled toward the desk and pointed an index finger at John. "You know, that kid so much as breathes halitosis in her direction and he'll be wearing his balls for earrings."
"I know," John said quickly. "He knows."
"He does?"
"He knows."
John started as Belle slapped the blotter.
"Good. Good fucking deal. You want a job? Get you out of the fucking ditches?"
"Nah."
"Nah, nah, nah, nah." Belle made a sour face. "Well then you're gonna be a foreman. Next job. You'll be a foreman or you'll go elsewhere. Kapeesh?"
"Yeah." John swallowed the last of the drink and stood.
Belle settled back. "What you did there, John, that was love."
"Was it? I thought it was pretty stupid."
"Well, love is stupid."
"Yeah." John reached for the crystal knob of the cherry door.
"What's even more stupid is being apart from the one you love. Get back together with Patti."
"It takes two, Frank."
"Ask her. Just ask her."
"Okay."
"You'll ask her?"
"Yeah."
"Jesus." Belle swiveled to profile again. "Twice in one night you're doing what I tell you. I'm on a fucking roll."
"G'night, Frank."
"Night."
"And Frank -- " John waited for the old man to look, then swung the .38 by its trigger guard with one finger. " -- not loaded. You're a murdering shit and I want you to stay out of our lives."
In the living room, Vince looked up from the comics section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Need a ride?" he asked.
"Looks like."
On the way back to the city, John asked Vince about the fuzzy ball and Vince told him that it was the only hat he could find. After intense debate which saw Vince lobby for early November, they decided that John would call the Jerk's landlord later that afternoon after getting some sleep. Before falling into bed, he managed one call to Patti Belle's new apartment, where he apparently disturbed Peggy Lee or Wanda Jo or Barbi Ellen.
THE END
keith@croes.com