“That kind of thing never stops, you know. You pay him once, he’ll come back for more until you’re broke.”
Gently, Nolan put his hand on the small of my back. His touch felt as if he wanted to go dancing. “Let me take you to your mother’s house, just for a couple of nights, okay? When the weather settles down, we can—”
“No,” I said.
“I want to help.”
“I don’t need help!”
“The hell you don’t.”
“Not from you,” I snapped and spun around.
He pulled his hand away and tightened it into a fist. “You’re not the only one who has a dark side, Laurie. Maybe I’m not who you think I am either.”
If only he were, my problems might be over.
Ralphie came back outside of his own houseboat across the dock from mine. He’d put on a shirt and shoes, but that didn’t make him look any more respectable than before. His ball cap was on backwards, with greasy hair sticking out around the back of his neck. He made a big show of stretching his arm over his head and yawning. His jeans rode low, showing a line of pubic hair on his belly.
Then he called, “Everything okay over there, Laurie?”
“Who’s he?” Nolan asked me.
“We’re fine, Ralphie!”
Ralphie squinted at us. “Your friend bothering you?”
“He was just leaving.”
“Laurie—”
“Go, Nolan,” I said, low-voiced. “I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you mixed up in my problems.”
“Too late,” Nolan replied. But he turned away. He pulled his car keys from a pocket. “Will you call me if you have to get away fast? I can be down here in half an hour. I’ll pick you up, take you home.”
I’m never going home, I almost said aloud. It would be like dragging barrels of poison through the front door.
But I said, “Thank you.”
“Is your cell phone charged?”
“Go, Nolan. I’ll be fine.”
He went. He glanced back over his shoulder once, doubtfully taking in Ralphie again. For all I knew, he wondered if I’d given up Dennis, and rejected him too, for the likes of Ralphie now, a houseboat rat who drank too much. Who dealt drugs, peed in the river when the need arose, who ate Slim Jims for dinner and probably never heard of the Impressionists.
When Nolan had climbed into his truck, started the engine, and backed out of his parking space, Ralphie vaulted over the railing of his own boat and landed on the dock in his sneakers. His sweatshirt read, Steelers, in faded black and yellow letters.
He said, “Old boyfriend?”
“I guess that’s what you could call him.”
“Not anymore, you mean?”
“Not anymore.”
“You have a lot of those, don’t you?”
Ralphie had a whippy kind of strength in his body and a loose, happy smile. He might have been a sexy ladykiller once, before he went to seed. He leaned playfully on my railing, absorbing the surge of the boat with his arms. But his gaze was full of something darker than mischief.
When I didn’t answer, he said, “Water’s still rising.”
“I see that.”
“I expect it’ll come up a few more feet before it’s all over.”
“Yes.”
“If we get more rain, and then it’ll wash everything away. Maybe us too, but everything else, for sure.”
He nodded at the tree, still riding the river’s current alongside the dock. The branches twisted, the few remaining leaves wriggling as if in death throes.
Around the tree, the water ran muddy brown, full of silt from upstream, so it was impossible to see below the surface of the river.
But eventually the water would clear, and the view to the bottom would be unobstructed. Dennis’s car would be clearly visible.
Last night, when the car disappeared into the dark water at the end of the boat launch, I thought it was gone for good. But choking back tears, I had watched the turn signal flash for hours. At some point the light stopped blinking like a heartbeat — short-circuited at last. Or maybe the car had rolled over, burying the light in mud. Whichever it was, I had finally gone to bed.
But this morning I had seen ripples on the surface of the river where the car lay submerged.
When the tree had slammed into the sunken car I thought maybe, just maybe, the tree might push the car out into the channel, deeper into the river where it would never be seen or found. If the river’s current strengthened, if the tree continued to push, perhaps the car would wash into oblivion.
If it didn’t wash away, the car would be discovered when the flood receded and everybody came back to put their boats into the river again.
I was in trouble. Deep.
Ralphie said, “We just need another day of rain. Then it’ll wash his car away. Nobody’ll ever see it.”
He grinned at me, and I felt my heart lurch.
Conversationally, he asked, “Did you shoot him first?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard.
Ralphie shrugged. “I was drunk last night, and maybe I slept like a rock, but something woke me up. Must have been your gun. I came outside and watched. I saw everything. You dragging him up to his car, shoving him behind the wheel, putting the transmission in neutral. Where’s the gun now?”
“In — in the car.”
Ralphie slipped a wet lock of my hair behind my ear, and his touch lingered there. “Was he dead when you pushed the car down the ramp?”
“I’m not sure.”
If Dennis had lived long enough to make a phone call from the sinking car — perhaps desperately dialing as the cold water enveloped his bleeding body — well, I couldn’t think about that.
The river surged around us with a dull yet rhythmic roar. Listening to it, I decided it sounded like the pulse of God.
Ralphie took off his ball cap and plunked it on my head. He was smiling at me. “Don’t worry, honey. If this rain keeps up, the car will wash down to the dam and get lost in all the crap down there. Nobody’ll ever find it. Or him.”
He put his arm around me, nuzzled my throat, and breathed the fumes of his first beer of the day into my ear. He ignored my shudder.
“Let’s go inside for a while, huh?” Ralphie slid his hand down inside the back of my jeans and cupped my butt. “You’d like that, right? We’ll fool around a little, you and me. Get to know each other better. And all we have to do is pray it keeps raining, right?”
“Right,” I said.
A Minor Extinction
by Paul Lee
Carrick
The river that persisted namelessly in his dreams seemed to be all rivers at once, black and collusive and oceanic. It carried him along a swift path beneath a star-spattered firmament, and though he knew the water to be ice cold it seemed to his skin to have been stripped of temperature. He was a silhouette projected on the water, in conveyance to a place that was strange and logical, cruel and intimate. And how the stars teemed so impassively above him as he lay in bed, drowning in sleep... how they burned small and cold and bright in all of that unfathomable blackness, like grains of fossilized fire strewn in pitch, as the river pulled him across the earth in a fugue of stark and limitless dread and longing.
He was working in a room of increasing white when he was told the latest news about the elder Gorski brother. It was noon, and they were painting another empty old house in Carrick whose inhabitant had moved or died. The floors were sheathed in plastic. The interior walls had sallowed to the shade of animal fat, and, hearing the news, Mark continued to work as though he had not heard a thing, rewetting the long-handled roller in the pan and applying to the stale walls lucent strips of dripping, viscous white, a slathered rendering of reversed time. “Couldn’t stop his brain swelling,” the other painter was saying sidelong from his perch on the stepladder. He seemed unslighted by Mark’s silence, even a little deferent to it; he had also gone to Carrick High years ago and was still held by the residual sway of Mark’s single year of seniority and former status as a varsity hockey player — the old teenage hierarchy. “Real sad about that family,” he was saying.