Meter Maids Eat Their Young (5 page)

I turned to look at her. Her face had turned dark and serious.

“Look, Teller,” she said, “and please don't take this wrong, okay? I've only known you a couple of months, and I like you. I really do. Even though you are a man. But, from the stories you tell, one would think the five years you spent with her were the only five years you lived on this planet.”

Her words pulled me up short. I stared at her for a long moment trying to decipher the feelings tumbling through me. It wasn't so much that I felt hurt, more like … exposed, jolted into some sort of confrontation with the disjointed thoughts that had been plaguing me since returning. I turned my head away and stared out through the screened windows, watching the kids play in the playground across the street.

“You know, Jaz,” I said, turning back to her, “there are moments when I feel those five years
were
the only ones I've lived on this planet. Feeling alive, anyway. All the years since feel as though I've just been going through the motions.”

I guess my voice cracked when I said it. I'm not good at sugar-coating my emotions.

Her expression turned to one of concern. Pulling her legs from the porch rail, she leaned forward and touched my knee lightly with the tips of her fingers. “I'm sorry, Teller. I didn't mean—”

“Not to worry, Jaz,” I said, brushing away her apology and her hand. “You didn't hurt my feelings.” I stood up from my chair. “Hell, you're probably right. Look, I should go feed the felines before they do something drastic. I'll talk to you later.”

“Teller—”

I waved her off and slipped into the house. Closing the door, I leaned against it and stared up at the ceiling. Back in the Robyn Zone again. Jesus, this was getting old. There were tears in my eyes. My heart was thumping in my chest. And oh how I wanted something hard and harsh with a real kick to bring me down to earth. I started reciting the Serenity Prayer in my head, over and over, the words blurring together. A minute passed. Two. My heart started to slow. I pushed myself from the door and made my way to the kitchen.

I made a production of washing the cats' bowls, lingering over the stacked cans of food in the utility room, trying to guess which flavor would be just the right one to please everyone. An impossible task, of course. Cats are never pleased. But the narrowing of focus, the concentration, brought me back into myself.

What the hell had just happened? We had talked of Robyn before, but I hadn't felt it had dominated our conversations. I tried to remember what I'd told her. There had been the time Robyn had been accused of killing a disco singer. And the time I'd been accused of killing an old nemesis. I was pretty sure I hadn't told her the story of what went down that night with Willy T and Marion. I didn't talk about that to anyone.

It was just that Jaz was such an easy person to talk to or maybe I just needed to talk. But our conversations hadn't been all Robyn, had they? I'd been back in town four months and the border between reality and the Robyn Zone was wearing thinner with each passing day. It was driving me crazy, but I wrote it off as understandable considering that every time I turned around, I was running into some memory of her and me. Probably why I hadn't yet gone out of my way to look up any of the old gang that might be still around.

When I stepped back into the kitchen, the cats were milling about. The neurologically-damaged Doubtful Guest wove right-hand circles in and out my feet as I made my way to the counter. Mooch sat in the corner, doe-eyed and ready to run at the slightest sudden move. Spook started yowling. The Beast jumped up on the counter, eyeing my shoulder, but I skirted away before he could make the leap. Booth eyed me from the doorway of my bedroom, while Feral-When-I-Wanna-Be sat patiently in the shadows of the utility room. Puss Cat scampered in from the living room, scaring Mooch who disappeared in a black flash.

I stood in the middle of the room, shaking. Fifty-something and this was all the family I had. My cats outnumbered my friends. How had that happened? Would I end up stuffing their cremated remains in a wooden box, taking over Morris's place on a sunny bench in the park, tossing catnip bags at kitty ghosts?

Damn, that was a scary thought.

I put the food into bowls and the bowls set out in various places throughout the kitchen and utility room and then walked into my bedroom, all the questions Jaz's words had raised following at my heels, babbling in the shadows.

Applause was coming from beyond the church doors as I made my slow way up the sidewalk. The meeting had already started. This was my modus operandi; arrive late, hang at the back of the room or outside, leave early. My sponsor gave me no end of hell for it.

It wasn't that I disliked the meetings, despite how boring and repetitious they can be at times. It was more that the room was full of people and I don't do well in purely social situations. Without a notebook in my hand, the cover for my journalistic inquiries, I'm as lost amongst a crowd as a boy walking home from his first day of kindergarten.

I'd had the same aversion to social situations back in my drinking days. I rarely went to bars. Being in a bar always made me feel invisible. Sitting at a table, drinking a cold one, watching everyone else having fun; all boisterous loud voices and hand gestures, out on the dance floor twirling about or hunched over a pool table, slapping corner pockets and bank shots. They all appeared to know just what to do, what to say and when to say it. I somehow missed that lesson on social interaction.

They say that booze lubricates the social self. It never worked that way for me. It just made me lonelier.

I sat down, leaned back against the steps and lit one of the rare cigarettes I smoke these days. The speaker's voice was as clear as though I was sitting in the front row instead of out on the steps. I let his words drift through my mind as I watched the sky turn slowly dark. The one positive thing I have to say about meetings is I always got something from them. Each story touched me in some small way or another. Maybe that's why I kept going back. Though the meetings made me feel alone, the stories told in those rooms never did.

***

I met Robyn at a dinner dance on a sultry Sunday evening near the end of June. The woman who normally handled the social up-and-coming was sick and finding myself yet again on HL's shit list, he assigned me to the event. I spent the afternoon, angry and a little drunk, wandering amidst the glitterati, mumbling questions and making rude observations in my notebook. Not owning a suit, I was forced to hit the local Goodwill for something appropriate to wear. The only thing that matched my measurements was a ghastly disco thing in bright, polyester white. I felt like an overdressed ice cream vendor.

Someone hired a street artist to do caricatures and in a moment of boredom I sat in his empty chair. My hair was a lot longer then and still retained much of its original brown color. The goateed artist busied himself with pastel chalk while I sulked. When finished, he scrawled the words ‘Hair by Frank Zappa' across the bottom of the sketch and hung it on the wall with the others he'd drawn. Embarrassed, I skulked off to find another beer.

Toward the end of the evening, long after I folded up my notebook, I was standing at the back bar determined to salvage something from the day by finishing off the last of a case of cold Beck's Dark. A voice behind me asked if Zappa really did my hair. Irritated, I turned, something sufficiently sarcastic forming on my tongue. The words froze there. The owner of the voice stood two feet away, head cocked in question, blonde ringlet curls framing her face, full lips turned up in an engaging smile.

It was her eyes, though, that captured me. Eyes so bright and shiny blue I forgotten to breathe. Mouth agape, I sputtered something inane. The band struck up a slow tune. She asked me to dance. Somewhere in the distance, a roller-coaster car began inching its way to the top of a very steep hill.

Robyn and I danced away what was left of the evening. She invited me to her apartment. I followed her in my car. At each red light or stop sign along the way, she bolted from her tiny Subaru, dashed back to my Fiat, kissed me, and then raced away before I could respond, her laughter trailing behind her, the sound of distant wind chimes on a soft breeze.

She was waiting for me in front of her apartment block when I pulled the Fiat into the parking lot. I nearly tripped getting out the car in my eagerness.

She had my shirt off before we were halfway up the stairs. We left a trail of clothes from the door to the bedroom. We tore the bed apart, scattering sheets and pillows and blankets, and finally ourselves, upon the floor. Somewhere in between the matings, Robyn fed me bits of scrambled egg, potato and ham, pushed between my lips with her fingers while sitting on my chest. By morning the roller-coaster reached the summit.

The momentary flood of panic I felt upon waking receded with the sound of falling water. The musky smell of sex was heavy in the sunlit room. I buried my head in the pillow, inhaling the scent of her perfume, feeling its effects deep inside me. I turned my head, opened my eyes, and came face to face with the ugliest ashtray I had ever seen in my life. A squinty-eyed, unshaven old coot of a cowboy with a rope in one hand and the other resting on the butt of his gun, standing hunched over a pile of crushed cigarettes.

Shuddering, I sat up and swung my legs from beneath the covers. Pushing myself from the bed, I followed the sound of the water, stepping into a bathroom so lime green and thick with steam I felt I was in an aquarium. The curtains parted and there she'd stood, all soap and glistening water. “Good morning, baby,” she said and reached out her hand.

The roller-coaster car had begun its steep descent.

***

The sound of chairs scraping against tile, loud voices, intruded on my thoughts. I could hear the crowd inside the church start to shuffle about, preparing for the holding hands thing. I unfolded myself from the stairs and tried to separate the past from the now. There was a pressure in my chest as though a bubble surrounded my heart, pumping dark memories into my veins with every beat. I looked up through the trees to the sky above. It was filled with stars. I took a deep breath, nodded toward Orion and, with the whispering sound of the Serenity Prayer at my back, started walking home.

As I crossed the street, staring absently at a Budweiser can clattering in the gutter, playing ring-around-the-rosy with a wadded McDonald's wrapper and a dried-up condom, I felt that cross-hairs' itch in the middle of my back that warned I was being watched. It wasn't the first time I'd felt that itch in the last few days. Casually I looked to either side but saw nothing that aroused my suspicions. Still, it was there and I had learned over the years never, ever, to ignore that itch.

I was midway across the street when I heard the roar of an engine, rubber screaming against asphalt. Headlights flicked on and Skeeter's words came back in a rush: One bright, one dim.

 I ran.

The big SUV missed me by inches, bouncing up over the curb as I dove headlong to one side of a large elm like a runner trying to beat the throw to home. I hit the ground, rolled, and watched as taillights disappeared up the street.

“He almost liked the story you sent in,” Felice said as I walked into her office early Monday morning. How she knew it was me with her back turned, I had no idea. But she always did.

“What do you mean he almost liked it?” I said.

“He only tore it in half once.” She turned from the file cabinet to face me. “And only called it rubbish twice … without a single expletive in between.”

“And that's a good sign?” I said.

“Close enough,” she said. “He wants to see you right away.”

“I sort of got that impression from the note he left tacked to my chair this morning.”

She smiled. The way she was looking at me made me uncomfortable.

“What?” I said.

“You two are so alike,” she said. “Do you know that, Teller?”