Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) Read Free Page B

anoint me and bandage me and assure me repeatedly that nothing was broken. Dale and I left the hospital at close to midnight. She got behind the wheel, pulled her long gown up over her knees, started the car, and drove out onto US 41, utterly deserted now. We sat side by side in complete silence. I felt totally inadequate. I felt like a dope. I felt like a sissy. I felt everything I had been taught to feel as a boy growing up on the wild and woolly streets of Chicago, Illinois. Boys weren’t supposed to cry, but I felt like crying. My head hurt, and my eyes hurt, and my mouth hurt, and I was only grateful that I hadn’t lost any teeth this time around. I wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but I didn’t know what I was sorry for. My mind kept circling the same labyrinth of dead-end thoughts. Should I apologize for being a civilized human being in a world populated by occasional barbarians? Should I apologize for not carrying a deadly weapon, the way so many people in America do? Should I apologize for not being the heavyweight champion of the world?
    When I was a boy, whenever my Aunt Nora said anything nasty to my mother, my mother would reply, “Excuse me for living.” Should I apologize for living? What if the reverse had happened? What if I had mopped up the floor with those two goons? Would I be a better man for it than I was now, sitting here in abject silence, nursing my wounds while a woman drove me home? And what was that , huh? Dale had driven me home on more occasions than I could count. Why should it matter now that she was a woman?
    They had really reached me, those bastards.
    I wanted to kill them.
    We passed Marina Lou’s, and we passed Calusa’s redbrick high-school building, and then Dale took a left at the light on Parsons, and we headed inland for my house. We still had notsaid a word to each other. I kept thinking Dale was thinking I was as inadequate as I myself thought I was. I kept remembering her yanking off that sequined high-heeled slipper and going for Charlie’s head with it. I should have grabbed a knife from the cutlery tray. I should have broken a beer bottle or something. I should have gone straight for the jugular. But I didn’t know how to do such things.
    She pulled the car into my driveway.
    “It’s on the visor,” I said.
    “What is?”
    “The clicker.”
    “The what ?”
    “The thing that opens the garage door.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    She fumbled for it, found it, pressed both buttons in the wrong order, then pressed them again in reverse, and the garage door went up. She pulled the car in, cut the engine, and handed me the keys. I got out, unlocked the door leading into the kitchen, and snapped on the lights.
    “I can use a drink,” she said.
    “Me, too.”
    “I’ll make them,” she said, and somehow even that innocuous comment seemed a reflection on my manhood.
    “Sons of bitches,” I said.
    “Yeah,” she said.
    “People like that in the world,” I said.
    “Yeah,” she said.
    She brought me my Dewar’s on the rocks. She was drinking a gin and tonic. Just like the one she’d ordered in Captain Blood’s before the universe started spinning crazily.
    “Cheers,” she said.
    “Cheers,” I said.
    I got up to turn on the pool lights. The pool glowed blue and bright in the darkness.
    “Feel like a swim?” I said.
    “No,” she said.
    “Want to go straight to bed?”
    “No,” she said, but I didn’t detect anything ominous in her voice at that moment. I thought, instead, that she was saying she wanted to finish her drink first. We’d been heading for her house before the traffic jam had changed our plans, to put it mildly. I hadn’t questioned her when she’d driven directly here from the hospital. I figured she’d assumed that a defeated gladiator might appreciate the comfort of his own bed. Besides, my house was closer, and we were both still shaky after what had happened. It was tacitly understood, I thought, that she would spend the night here