Page 83 - WTp Vol. VII #9

of the daylight. She tapped the brake and reached for the headlights switch at the same time. One
of the deer took a step, seemed to coil on itself as the distance between them closed at fifty miles
an hour. The lever that Margie thought should turn on the headlights and paint the instrument panel in a moody blue glow instead sent the wipers in a dry and stuttery arc across the wind- shield. Then she heard the skree of gravel some- where underneath, felt the slingshot of gravity tightening the seatbelt strap across her chest. The horizon rotated fast, and slammed to a stop with a burst of confetti.
Margie, both hands on the wheel, stared over the dashboard at the road she’d just come from, steaming with dust. The three deer stood riveted to their spot in the ditch: they hadn’t moved an inch. Now, in the ringing silence, they stepped gingerly across the road and slipped along the fence until their tails, like tiny white flames, dis- appeared into the swaying stalks of corn.
She held her hands up. No blood. She turned her head side to side, taking in the shattered pas- senger window where a fence post had burst through and punctured the head rest. Anyone rid- ing there would have been impaled. She twitched her feet and found no problem there. But when she looked down, her thighs were dark and wet. Shattered glass lay strewn across her lap like spilled popcorn. She pressed a hand to her thigh, feeling the stickiness that pasted the denim to her palm. “Please let that be booze,” she muttered. She sucked breath through her teeth, brought her hand up, ran her tongue across her life-line. Jack Daniels. As far as bourbons go, the sweetest taste in the world.
~
Bobby Bogue’s place was another mile up this road, and another mile to the right. The sun was gone, the sky bruising evenly from one side to another, and Margie Finn wasn’t going to sit in her wreck waiting for someone to come along. Who knew what might be out here besides white- tailed deer? She left her luggage in the trunk, and
carried only the paper sack from Fred’s with the Bushmills whiskey and the Negra Modelo. Walk- ing along the gravel, she found that her thirst was gone, as if something had clicked in her head and turned off the whiskey switch. Maybe all she’d needed was a good shake-up to break the habit. This would be the test: walking the two miles to Bobby’s house with a sack full of booze, and not sneaking a solitary sip. If driving couldn’t get her clean, then walking would. And when they were finally kicked back on the porch and having a laugh and a smoke, then a drink or two wouldn’t do any damage. Besides, she hadn’t crashed be- cause of the booze; it had been the deer that had thrown her off, and the unfamiliar car. A bottle was a lot easier to control than an automobile.
Without even coming to a decision about it, she set the paper bag on the ground and pulled out the bottle of Bushmills. The cap twisted off with a snap, and she tipped it back for a mouthful of fire. “Hoo-ee,” she said in the twilight while the crick- ets chirped. It would be best to show up relaxed and confident at Bobby’s, with just enough juice in her blood to take the edge off her nerves. She’d walk up the lane swinging one arm, the paper
bag in the other, and she’d whistle at him where he sat rocking on the porch. He’d wonder what the hell she was doing walking around in the dark, where the hell her car was, where in God’s name she’d been for the last ten years—and she’d have a great story to tell. Three goddamn deer!
It would be a hell of a laugh. He’d slip his arm around her in the front seat of his pickup as they headed out to winch her car out of the ditch. Dark fields wheeling past. It would feel exactly like old times, like not a single day had come between them. As if he’d been patiently waiting for her to come back around, just the way her father would have wanted it. It was never too late to start wor- rying about that.
Koch’s work has been published in Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, and River City, and two of his short stories have been awarded first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award at Carve Magazine (2003, 2007). He lives in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches linguistics, dabbles in photography, and plays guitar in Firstimers, a bossanova powerpop ensemble.
74