A Little Unfinished Business - Chapter 2: Gauntlet

Corkle woke up on the sofa. The dog was licking his face. He had no idea what time it was. A skinny young man stood in the middle of the room regarding him with a quizzical smile.

“You must be Kevin,” the boy said.

A slice of Corkle's life had somehow slipped into oblivion. He wasn't sure that he wanted to retrieve it. He studied the boy's face, hoping that he wouldn't find any sign of malice. He didn't.

“And you are?” he asked.

“Stang.” The boy did not offer his hand. “Cheryl said I should stay with you until you woke up. She and Janice went to skating practice.”

“Oh yeah,” Corkle said. “She mentioned roller derby last night. What's that all about?”

“Just something they do. I'm not sure I get it, but they all seem to like doing it—even when they take a beating on the track. I'm heading over there now. You want to come?”

“Probably not,” Corkle said.

“C'mon, Kevin. Maybe you'll make some sense of it. Then you can explain it to me.”

Corkle drove. They stopped for breakfast along the way. Corkle was hungry, but Stang—ravenous. He put away a three egg omelet with sausage links and biscuits and gravy—for all of which he was happy to let Corkle pay.

The Pipe Dreams practiced and held their bouts in a rented warehouse building just north of the I-244 corridor on the east edge of town near Catoosa. With Stang riding shotgun and burping up clouds of spicy sausage, Corkle pulled into the parking lot. The first thing he noticed was the remains of a school bus perched in a large oak tree adjacent to the seedy looking warehouse structure—left over, as Stang explained, from a string of tornadoes that had ripped down the interstate in '93. Limbs of the tree had encircled and pierced the bus over the years so that it was now permanently impaled and forever established as part of the landscape. Stang pointed out Janice's wreck of a car, and Corkle parked next to it.

Inside the warehouse, whether foreshadowed by or in homage to the treed bus, chaos reigned. Women on skates milled about like so many ants from a scattered mound. Fans, family, and hangers-on stood conversing with one another, shouting encouragement to the skaters, and generally impeding anything like an orderly flow of traffic. Cheryl and Janice were circling the central track with some speed, apparently racing one another although to what end, Corkle had no clue.

“They're both jammers,” Stang explained, “the skaters who actually score points by passing players on the opposing team. They're the ones who most need speed and agility.”

The Pipe Dreams got their name from several convergent phenomena. First, roller derby teams and their fans seem to be enthralled with bad puns and double entendre. Second, most of the women on the team enjoyed at least an occasional session with a bong or a pipe, although the use of the term 'laying pipe' as a euphemism for sex figured as well. And third, to give the organization at least a vestige of respectability, Tulsa is a town built with and beholden to oil money and its peripheral enterprises including pipelines—not that there is anything particularly respectable about that.

“They have rules?” Corkle asked. “Seems like barely organized bedlam to me.”

“It's actually pretty simple,” Stang said. “For the spectators anyway. How much do you want to know?”

Sports had never held much fascination for Corkle. He was sure he didn't want to learn much about a new one. “As little as possible,” he said.

“So just the basics, then,” Stang said.

“If you insist.”

“Jeez, Kev. I'm just trying to pass the time here.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Okay, just the basics.”

“Each team has a jammer and four blockers on the track. Bouts are organized into time periods and jams. When a jam starts, the jammers try to work their way through the blockers while the blockers try to keep them in the back of the pack. If a jammer breaks free, she laps the pack and scores a point for every blocker she passes from the opposing team. If she passes them all with time to spare, she can do it again. The jam times out in two minutes or whenever the lead jammer calls it off.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Corkle remarked.

“True, but like they say, the devil's in the details.”

“Meaning?”

“There's a fine line between blocking and assault.”

Stang spread his hands, palms up, and shrugged as if that ambiguous gesture made his meaning clear. Corkle was still trying to figure out what he was even doing there.

Corkle had seen a food truck near the entrance. He walked out to see if he could score a cup of coffee. While he was stirring sweetener and something that claimed to be half and half into his cup, Cheryl skated up next to him and gave him a hip bump. In skates she was somewhat taller than he. She looked like she was glad to see him.

“I didn't think you'd come,” she said.

“Your boyfriend was very persuasive. I only had to buy him breakfast.”

“Sorry.”

Corkle shrugged. “It's okay really. It was my idea.”

“So . . . what do you think?” Cheryl gestured toward the building.

“Not really my kind of thing.”

“I know that, silly. Doesn't mean you can't have a thought about it.”

“You want me to say I think it's stupid, maybe a little barbarous?”

“If that's what you think. You have a hard time speaking you mind, don't you?”

“I'm just wondering why you wanted me to come out here,” Corkle said, “why you'd be interested in spending any time with me at all.”

She reached for his coffee, took a sip, handed it back, and stared at him for a long minute.

“I'm making a project out of you,” she said finally.

“Excuse me?”

“A project. I think you're broken. I thought it last night when I saw your act. You're just drifting around without any sense of purpose.”

Corkle looked into his cup, swirled the coffee around a bit, and then stared at Cheryl. Her face was earnest and open, although comical, he thought, given the neon hair and garish make-up. He wanted to be pissed. Couldn't manage.

“Really?” he said. “You figured all that out from watching me tell jokes? What are you going to do? Fix me?”

“Why not?”

“I have to go now.”

“You kept saying that last night, but I notice you're still here.”

“It's been interesting. I'll give you that, but I really need to leave. Enjoy your life, Cheryl. I hope it all works out for you.”

* * *

Corkle headed east and took Highway 69 south towards Lake Eufala. He was in no hurry. He had no place to go, nowhere to be. This was his usual method of decompression—in his car, alone with his own counsel. He used to call it the Rand McNally approach to self discovery until calling that seemed to make more of a joke of it than it actually was. He'd been doing it for years, whenever he felt forsaken by circumstances or the people who were supposed to love him. He could do it anywhere. Locale wasn't nearly so important as moving.

He never turned on the radio. Music was all about someone else's angst or joy, not his. He liked quiet. When he got to the lake, he'd poke around the lonesome one-lane county roads that twisted and dipped around the promontories and coves.

Even as a young man he'd come here periodically searching for something to connect him to past iterations of himself that had grown unfamiliar, strange even, over time. There had been a girl once. All she'd done was smile, but that had been enough to fix her in his mind, a vision he could always dredge up when it suited him. He would come up to the lake looking for her, hoping against all reasonable expectation that he would see her again. He never did. He probably never would, but that had never stopped him looking. Even now he would keep a eye peeled for her, not because there was even a remote possibility that he would see her, or recognize her even if he did. Because rather the search reminded him what had once mattered to him in a simpler time, when things had made more sense.

The confusion of the past couple days weighed on him. First there was the whole stand-up thing. He didn't know what he'd been thinking—certainly not that it would be easy, but that perhaps it would suit him somehow. He'd dreamed of doing comedy when he was a kid. Not seriously, but fancifully.

His friends had admired rock stars and athletes. He'd always thought the guys who made people laugh were somehow more important in the grand scheme of things. He'd watched Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Dennis Leary, Bill Hicks, and a host of others on comedy specials and on the Carson Show when he was growing up.

He liked their apparent ease with the kinds of social exchange that had always made him feel awkward. He was transported by their use of language and inflection to get a laugh, make a point, show a more enlightened path.

It wasn't that he thought at the time that he could do it. That unhappy notion hadn't occurred to him until just a few weeks ago. What he thought instead was that what the comics managed to do in the midst of the laughter was something worth doing, something that mattered. He still thought that, but there was no way, after the numbing futility he had felt the previous evening, he was going to try again. Of that much he was absolutely certain.

The other thing on his mind, Cheryl, was an enigma to him. Certain as she may be of her own presence and path, she elicited no certainty at all in Corkle. He ought to have no interest in her life or her notions about his, and yet he was strangely drawn to her. He couldn't explain it, not even to himself. It made no sense. He didn't find her attractive. She was pretty enough, he supposed, especially when she smiled, but nothing about her demeanor held any fascination for him. Her attitude, insisting always that he do things he was not interested in doing, was as annoying as it was compelling. Her pursuits—clubbing, garish dress, drugs, and roller derby for God's sake—were all things he'd rather avoid.

So why did he feel so badly that he had walked out on her practice? Left in the middle of a conversation? Why did he wish he had left an avenue open so that he could see her again? There was nothing to gain by it, and yet the impossibility of it that he had crafted for himself left him with an abiding sense of loss.

Corkle shook his head to dispel that disturbing thought. He checked his speed—exactly 60, five miles an hour below the limit, his preferred pace. Everything came together in his car at sixty, the hum of the tires, the thrum of the engine, the roar of the wind, to produce a low E on the musical scale. He'd actually checked it with a pitch pipe once, the kind of thing he would occasionally do to satisfy his curiosity. That's what he told himself anyway. Usually what he was really doing was avoiding something he should have been doing—something like writing for instance. Low E was Corkle's resonant pitch. In his car it was a mechanical 'Om' that soothed his soul. He thought it kept the demons at bay. He'd never seen demons, so he thought it must be working.

Corkle gave himself over to this restful mental state. Somewhere in the depths of his mind a pleasant thought took shape, broke loose, and drifted in the currents of his memory. Maybe he would see her. Maybe he would see the girl who had smiled at him all those years ago. She wouldn't be a girl anymore, but maybe, just maybe, the years had not dimmed her light. Maybe she could still smile that smile, and if she could, he would know her.

A dark SUV, traveling well over the limit, passed him on the left. Too close for comfort. It jolted him out of his reverie. He watched it speed away, Cheryl's face pressed against the back window on the right side, a pleading look splashed across her face. Janice's car came a short distance behind. Corkle recognized it from the parking lot. Stang was gesturing wildly from the passenger seat. Apparently they expected Corkle to follow. He didn't want to follow. He didn't want to involve himself in whatever fresh hell this would turn out to be. He did though. He pressed down on the accelerator pedal, and his restful low E scaled up to G-sharp, a pitch that always set Corkle's teeth ajangle.

* * *

After just a few miles, the SUV pulled into a truck stop. The place was vacant except for a couple of trucks parked in parallel at the far end. Janice pulled up behind the SUV, blocking it from backing out of its parking space. Janice and Stang jumped out of her car. The driver of the SUV exited his car and closed the door. Corkle couldn't tell if anyone was in it besides Cheryl.

Corkle didn't like the guy's looks. He was built like a block of granite with close cropped hair and close set eyes. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, and a thin black tie. The back of the SUV was festooned with someone's narrow view politics. Corkle could only assume that the sentiments belonged to the driver. Second amendment rights seemed to be of paramount importance along with keeping Christ in Christmas, putting prayer back in the schools, and impeaching Barak Hussein Obama, apparently for his middle name, which was printed in bold caps and styled to look Arabic.

Corkle checked the guy again. He was sure he saw the bulge of a shoulder holster under his left arm. Oklahoma was an open carry state, and concealed carry permits were available with few questions and almost no fact checking. Corkle had a concealed carry permit himself, although he no longer owned a gun. He wasn't wishing for one now as he could envision the emerging confrontation devolving into a you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine kind of exchange that could only end in tragedy.

Janice was yelling at the block of granite. Stang was keeping Janice's car between himself and the possibility of getting crushed. Corkle got out of his car. He knew he had to do something. He just wasn't sure what.

“Kidnapping is a federal offense, asshole.” Janice yelled.

“There's no call for that kind of language, little missy,” Granite said.

“Little missy? Who are you? John Fucking Wayne?”

“There's no kidnapping here, missy, no reason to get yourself all in an uproar.”

“Bullshit! You took Cheryl by force. I saw you do it.”

“She was just surprised to see me is all,” Granite explained. “Once she figured out who I was, she settled right down.”

By this time Corkle had moved up to stand beside Janice. Granite gave him a once over, and seemed undecided about his next move. Corkle spoke up.

“Maybe you should let her out of the car, then,” he said, “so we can make sure she's all right.”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?” Corkle asked, spreading his hands in a gesture of reasonableness. “If everything's as you say, you can be on your way. We won't trouble you any further.”

Stang had managed to find something like courage now that Corkle had entered the conversation. He moved up to the passenger side of the SUV, near the window where Corkle had seen Cheryl's face. The front door sprang open and another guy, bigger than the first, emerged. Except that he was also dressed in a black suit and tie, the way he exited the too small opening of the SUV reminded Corkle of prepared dough popping out of a cardboard tube of biscuits. The Doughboy was also wearing a shoulder holster, but he had already drawn his weapon, which he now leveled at Stang's head.

“Jesus!” Stang yelled, and jumped back.

“Jesus is not going to help you, boy,” Granite said.

Janice threw her hands up in desperation. “You douche bags don't actually think you can shoot unarmed people in a parking lot and get away with it, do you?”

“Right now I don't see anything to prevent it,” Granite said.

Corkle put a hand on Janice's shoulder, held the other one up toward Granite like a cop stopping traffic. “Everybody just calm down,” he said. “There's no need for violence of any kind here. We're just concerned about our friend.”

He was about to suggest again that they be allowed to speak to Cheryl when three more cars poured into the lot and surrounded them. Women piled out of the cars, spread themselves in a loose circle around the SUV, and adopted menacing poses. A few of them looked large enough to give Granite and Doughboy trouble in a fair fight. Several of them were still wearing skates and elbow and knee pads from practice. Corkle wondered how the 'fine line' between blocking and assault might shift when the opposition had firearms. He'd heard the phrase, “never bring a knife to a gunfight.” What he didn't know was where a roller derby team ranked in the spectrum of armaments.

Janice was apparently emboldened by the sudden shift in odds. “You bozos don't have enough bullets to take us all out,” she said.

Corkle squeezed her shoulder. “Come on, Janice,” he said. “Try not to antagonize them.”

“Are you serious right now, Kev?” Janice asked. “They kidnapped my best friend, called me 'little missy,' and now they're pointing a gun at us. You don't want me to antagonize them? How about they don't antagonize me? How about John Wayne and his fat side-kick let Cheryl out of their car and then drive off into the sunset singing 'yipee-yi-yay-ki-o?' Doesn't that make more sense?”

Doughboy had cocked his elbows so that the gun was now pointing skyward. He kept shifting his gaze from Stang to Janice to Corkle to the nearest woman on skates and back again. Granite seemed to be at a loss for words. He was chewing on his lower lip like he couldn't decide what to say or to whom. Corkle decided that neither Granite nor Doughboy had much experience being threatened by women.

Janice pressed her apparent advantage. “Stang,” she said, “get Cheryl out of that car.”

Stang looked at Corkle as if for confirmation. Corkle shrugged. Doughboy lowered the pistol again, cupping the grip in both hands and pointing it at Stang's head. Two of the women on skates glided between Stang and the gun, pushing Doughboy back against the door. One of them grabbed the gun and forced Doughboy's hands into the air. The other gave him a vicious knee to the crotch. Doughboy crumpled where he stood, and the first woman came away with his pistol.

Stang opened the rear door to the SUV. He had to lean in and unbuckle Cheryl's seat belt. When she came out of the car, Corkle saw that her hands were duct-taped behind her back. So much for Granite's protestations of innocence, Corkle thought.

“You ready to explain yourself,” he said to Granite.

“It's okay, Corkle,” Cheryl said. “He's a deacon in Granddad's church.”

“Okay?” Corkle asked, more confused than ever. “Deacons carry guns, now? Deacons tie you up and haul you away against your will? That some kind of new conversion technique?”

“They weren't going to hurt me. They were just going to take me home.”

A Little Unfinished Business - Chapter 1: Open Mike Night

Corkle paced the hallway waiting for his cue to take the stage. In was open mike night at Guffaw, a newly opened club in the Brookside district that promised comedy but delivered mostly beer and opportunities to hook up.

Corkle was probably too old to be starting a new career, especially as a stand-up comic. He'd rationalized that he was only testing the waters. It wasn't so much that he longed to stand on stage and make people laugh. It was more that he hated teaching. He just didn't think he could do it any longer. Stand-up seemed like a natural alternate path—one that would utilize the bits of teaching he liked, lecturing and spinning yarns to make a point, and abandon the parts he hated like grading papers and listening to students whine about their marks and the amount of work they had to do just to get by.

He'd scanned his audience on the way backstage—a young, local crowd that came to drink and grab-ass and winnow themselves into brief and casual couplings. They had little interest in comedy, at least not comedy like Corkle's that aspired to more than scatological mental pratfalls. He figured he would relate better to an older crowd. His peers thought he was engaging and witty. His students didn't usually share that opinion, not at first anyway. It took his classes the better part of a semester to warm up to his droll asides. He didn't have a semester to get through to this group. He only had five minutes—the emcee had told him six if it was going well.

He wanted a cigarette even though he'd quit years before. He thought he might like a drink as well, not to steady his nerves, but to loosen his tongue and make him more glib. This young audience didn’t scare him. He got up in front of kids just like them every day of the week at the university satellite campus where he taught freshman composition and creative writing. Their indifference and unassailable hipness frightened him not at all. He did loathe them though, most of them, especially the club-hopping, self-indulgent little bastards he imagined to be in this particular audience.

At age 42, Corkle was working on his own indifference, trying to get out from under the awful weight of it. He thought stand-up might be one way to do it. If he failed, he would be back grading lamentable, angst-laden stories about hormonal vampires and wishing all the while that one of the more violent characters would spring from the page and rip out his throat. It would be a vast improvement over life as he knew it.

When he was finally introduced, Corkle ran through the door and bounded onto the tiny stage with as much animation as he could muster. His effort was not met with a smattering of applause. No one acknowledged his appearance. He had brought no entourage. No one had come out to watch him make a fool of himself. No one cared. Corkle was not deterred. He couldn't afford to be.

He had decided on a nondescript ‘How you guys doin’?’ for an opening line. He was too new at this craft to worry much about a trademark opener. Again, no one acknowledged his presence. He launched into his act.

His bit was a stream-of-consciousness riff on terrorism told from the viewpoint of a young and inexperienced terrorist named Habib. He thought it was funny and edgy—a punk terrorist trying to get noticed, trying to get girls, trying to get respect, but never quite connecting in the way that he wanted.

Corkle saw Habib as the loser in all of us grafted onto a disaffected Middle Eastern geek growing up in America—a kid who would never have fit in anyway. Habib latches onto the Great Satans of Israel and America that he hears about in the mosque as the authors of all his misery. He decides that blowing stuff up is a valid response, only he’s not so good at that either.

He keeps going back to his Imam for guidance and support:

‘Would it be okay to conceal the explosives in a VHS tape case?’

‘No, you idiot. Nobody watches VHS anymore.’

‘Is it necessary to visit the occasional strip club in order to truly appreciate the decadence of the infidel society?'

‘Only if you bring your Imam along to provide spiritual direction.'

'You would accompany me to such a place?'

'Of course, my son, but you must promise to buy me a lap dance.'

Corkle wasn't all that sure of his material. He thought it might be dated. He thought it might seem too sympathetic to terrorists to sit very well with his audience. He thought he might have erred in attempting something vaguely preachy, something instructive, something with an ultimately unpopular message, in an Oklahoma beer hall.

The audience might have agreed, had they been paying any attention at all. They were not. He saw at least two couples making out against the back wall. The clack of balls from several coin operated pool tables punctuated his jokes in odd places. Even the people at the tables right in front of the stage seemed more engaged with their own conversations than his monologue.

Corkle trudged toward his finale. He wanted a big finish, but it depended on winning over the audience before he got there. It didn't seem like that was going to happen. He felt betrayed by circumstances, not unlike young Habib, who finally succeeds in his own explosive conclusion. Habib blows himself into Jihad heaven, and finds himself in a room with gold walls and jeweled fixtures. There is a huge canopied bed covered with silks and damask and brocaded pillows. He is ecstatic. His beatific reward is just as advertised. The door opens and his allotted seventy-two virgins enter.

Habib is aghast. Nooooo! This cannot be. There must be some mistake. The virgins are supposed to be pretty. These are not pretty, although they certainly must be virgins because they all look like Danny DeVito in drag. No burka was ever opaque enough to mollify Habib's disgust.

There was little to mark the end of Corkle's act. Certainly no applause. Not even a heckler to voice relief that it was finally over. Corkle sat at the bar and knocked back a gimlet. He got a second one to nurse, and watched the lime oil swirl like smoke around the ice cubes.

“Pretty grim up there, wasn't it, Professor?”

He turned to regard the reality of the girl he had glimpsed in the mirror behind the bar. The two dimensional phantom between stoppered bottles resolved itself into an agreeable mish-mash of disparate parts—neon hair, multiple piercings, a gingham shirt tied in the front under red suspenders that were superfluous to the job of holding up denim shorts no wider than a belt. Fishnet stockings and high-top sneakers finished the ensemble. Corkle forgot why he had turned around.

“What?”

“Grim…your act was pretty grim.”

Corkle nodded. “I thought it was funnier when I wrote it.”

“God, I hope so.”

“Do I know you?” Corkle asked.

“Yeah, but you prolly don't remember. I took your course year before last. Dropped after the first exam, though.”

“Oh. Did I fail you?”

“Nah. Actually I aced your test. I just thought I had better stuff to do with my time.”

“Oh,” Corkle said.

Her dark, expressive eyes and pointed chin with just a hint of dimple did not make this easier to hear. She climbed onto the bar stool next to his, crossed her legs, and helped herself to a sip of his drink.

“Tasty,” she said. “I'll have one of these.”

Her name was Cheryl. She lived in a rental house with a roommate named Janice and a rottweiler named Zombie. Both she and her roommate skated for a local women's flat track roller derby team called the Pipe Dreams. She worked the copy desk at Staples to pay the rent and buy groceries. She had an on-again-off-again boyfriend named Stang. Currently he was off-again, but it had been two weeks and she expected him to come around any day now looking to hook back up.

“Okay, your turn,” she said.

“What?”

“I told you about me. Now you tell me about you. That's the way it works.”

“The way what works?”

“Conversation. You married? I don't see a ring.”

“Separated.”

“Why?”

“That's kind of personal, don't you think?”

“Then tell me something that isn't. I don't care.”

Corkle drained his glass. He thought about ordering another, but discarded the idea as folly. He stood up.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Take me home.” she said.

“I don't think so.”

“C'mon. I need a ride. My roommate left me stranded.”

“I'm sure there are plenty of young men here who would be happy to give you a lift,” Corkle said.

He thought that would be the end of it.

“I was hoping for somebody who wouldn't try to slip me a roofie.” she said.

***

She told him more about herself during the ride home. Fortunately, it wasn't far. She'd been raised by her grandparents, she and her sister, Patty. They were twins. Patty still lived at home in Joplin. Patty was the good girl. Their dad was the black sheep of the family, but Cheryl felt she might give him a run for his money. Their mom had died when they were toddlers. No one ever spoke of her. Cheryl thought that was odd. Patty didn't seem to care that much.

When Corkle pulled the car up in front of her house, she wanted him to come in. Corkle declined.

“You have to meet Janice,” she insisted.

“Why?”

“You just do, that's all. Don't make everything so complicated.”

Janice, was a thick girl—ankles, arms, hair, everything—thick and sturdy. Her eyebrows had taken the rest of her features hostage. She was curled up on the sofa next to the dog, loading a bong with leaves and buds from an enameled canister.

Corkle hadn't smoked pot in years. Part of him knew this would be a very bad idea. Another part of him, the part that had got him separated from his wife of ten years, thought it might be okay. Cheryl held the lighter while he took his first hit. As soon as the smoke hurled itself into his lungs in a full body slam, he knew he'd done the right thing. His eyes teared up and he fell into a coughing fit. He tried to hand the bong to Cheryl. She was laughing too hard to take it from him. It was way funnier than his act had been.

Cheryl went to the kitchen for drinks and snacks. The dog lifted its head, cleared its throat in a muffled growl, and went back to sleep. Janice stared at Corkle like she was trying to read his mind.

“She's not going to sleep with you, you know,” she said at last.

“Uh . . . okay.”

“Just sayin', in case you were thinking otherwise. She's not that kind of girl.”

“Neither am I,” Corkle said, and giggled.

Janice was no more easily amused than his audience at Guffaw had been.

Cheryl returned with a bottle of wine and a bag of microwave popcorn. They passed the bottle around. Corkle took a swig and wiped the bottle on his sleeve. Neither Cheryl nor Janice bothered so he quit doing it after the first time. Cheryl decided to continue the narrative of her life. Janice yawned and scratched the dog behind the ears. Corkle guessed that she'd heard it before.

Cheryl's grandfather, the one who'd raised her, was a preacher. He had a big church in Muscogee. Its principal affiliation had been Southern Baptist when he'd started out, but he'd grown increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant of any ecumenical viewpoints. Eventually they'd had to change the name of the church to avoid any confusion. He was a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher.

God does not take prisoners, he was fond of saying. God is a slash and burn deity. He might forgive sinners, but He has no truck with those whose faith is not correct. It's not enough to believe Jesus died to save you. You have to believe everything in the Bible without question, and not one thing more. Otherwise you will spend eternity in the fire.

Cheryl thought this was a funny way to preach salvation. She had come to the conclusion, after considerable thought, that God wanted her to be happy. Her grandfather, obviously, did not. He wanted her to be miserable, just like him. Cheryl swore he was the unhappiest man on the face of the earth. That would have been okay if he'd been content to let it rest there. Instead, he wanted everyone else to be just as miserable as he was.

Joy did not come from God. Joy was the outward manifestation of a sinful heart. Even worse, joy was just the tip of the iceberg.

Nothing she had ever done that made her feel like she belonged in the world was correct enough to appease the old man. If she got good grades, she was prideful. If she got mediocre grades, she was lazy. If she wanted to be a cheerleader, she was immodest. If she wanted to go to a dance, she had given herself over to lust. If she wore her skirt too short, she got sent to her room without any supper. When he found out she'd kissed a boy, he came and got her out of school and whipped her with a belt until she'd had no more tears left to cry. Then he made her stand up during Sunday Services while he announced her shame to the congregation. The old ladies who came to church alone and camped out in the pews at the front of the sanctuary clucked their tongues at her.

When she'd turned eighteen, she ran away from home. The first time, he'd found her cowering in a friend's closet. He took her home and locked her in her room for a week. Patty sneaked food to her from the kitchen. The second time, she'd run to her dad's place. He didn't want to have anything to do with her. He let her know straight off that she wasn't welcome. No explanation. She'd shown up in the morning. She was supposed to have been at school. He was hung over, angry that she'd dared to trouble him with her problems.

“Don't be here when I get home,” he said as he got into his truck.

She stuck her thumb out on the highway and got a ride to school, and that was the end of that.

Three months later, she'd tried it again. This time, she went to Tulsa. She'd made her way to the mall at Woodland Hills, and hung out there until she hooked up with some college kids at one of the bookstores. Janice had been among them. Janice let her crash with her, helped her get a fake ID, a job, a new life unburdened by her grandfather's ideas of righteousness or propriety. She'd been gone almost three years now. Life was pretty good. She had friends, she had a job, she had roller derby, and whenever she had a little extra money she took a few courses at the satellite campus where Corkle taught.

She started trying to get Corkle to talk again. The pot had made him more amenable, but he still had reservations about sharing too much. He liked being private.

“C'mon,” she said. “Tell us your first name anyway.”

“Kevin.”

“Better than Professor, don't you think? Saves a whole syllable.”

“I suppose. You've probably gathered I'm not that thrilled with teaching any more.”

“You mean you were once?”

“Probably not. I wrote a book while I was still an undergrad. It won an award, sold a few thousand copies, and died on the vine. I thought I'd do it again, but it didn't happen. I got married instead. Found out I was going to need an income. Somehow I convinced the faculty advisers to credit my book toward a doctorate. That got me fast-tracked through the program while my wife supported us. After that teaching was pretty much the only thing left to do.”

“So what happened to the wife?”

“You sure are curious about my married life.”

“What I'm curious about is why women leave—on account of my mom.”

“I thought you said she died?”

“If she died, where's her grave? How come nobody will talk about her? She might be dead, but that's not all there is to the story.”

Corkle thought about that. She could be right, but it sure didn't have anything to do with him. And his wives? current or former—there were two of them now—they didn't have anything to do with Cheryl or her mother. He really wanted to be out of this conversation, but he was sitting on the floor in her house, smoking her dope, and drinking her wine. Being civil at least seemed appropriate.

“My first wife finally left when I started seeing the woman I'm separated from now,” he said. “Apparently she didn't think I should be dating a graduate assistant while we were still married, even though she hadn't said a civil word to me in years. The real problem was she had a lot more ambition about my future than I did.”

“And your second wife?”

“Same problem as the first really, although in her case it's just insecurity. She thinks if I cheated with her, I'll cheat with someone else.”

“And would you? Cheat with someone else?”

“I haven't, if that's what you're getting at.”

“You've thought about it though, haven't you?”

Corkle shrugged. He hadn't thought about it. Not really. He had neither the patience nor the inclination for philandering, not anymore, not after the first time. He could have just said that and set her straight, but he was distracted by her smile. He would not have thought it possible, until then, for a girl in fishnet stockings, sneakers, and neon hair to capture sardonic so completely.

A Little Unfinished Business: Prologue

A sample for my current work in progress:

Corkle is driving the family Buick, his dad’s pride and joy. The family is all there, mom and sisters in the back, dad and brother in the front. They are on vacation, spending two weeks in a borrowed cabin on Grand Lake. Corkle is seventeen, the oldest of four. His dad lets him drive wherever they go.

They are on their way out to dinner at Frische’s, home of the Big Boy hamburger and fresh strawberry pie. Corkle’s mom loves the pie. So does his grandmother, although she is not here to talk about it, so when his mother says, “I sure am looking forward to a slice of that strawberry pie,” no one responds. There is silence in the car that, thankfully, Corkle’s mother does not interpret as inattention on anyone’s part so she lets the matter lie.

A car approaches from the opposite direction. Corkle crowds the shoulder of the narrow road to make room for the car to pass and to avoid driving instructions from his dad. The approaching car is a dusty bronze sedan. It would be completely nondescript except that it is a ten-year-old AMC Pacer, a car known to Corkle and his friends as the ugliest car ever built.

As the car gets closer, Corkle sees that the driver is a young woman about his age. This gets his attention. He discards his focus on driving and concentrates on the girl. She has a pleasant face and hair the color of late afternoon sunlight. At first he thinks she must be someone that he knows because she is smiling in a familiar way. Corkle tries to remember who she is. He wants to believe that she is smiling because she knows him. He wants to own her smile, to have it be her smile for him, although he knows, without knowing why, that it is not.

“Watch what you’re doing,” his father says from the passenger seat. His voice is stern and abrupt.

 Corkle does not want to watch what he is doing. He does not want to look back at the road. He does not want to stop looking at the girl. Her smile that is not for him is blinding like a flash bulb going off. Everything that Corkle sees is frozen in the brightness of this smile that he does not know. The scene is projected on his mind. A slide show of only one slide. He takes in the details of the car. He sees the girl’s face, the curve of her lips, the turn of her nose. Her eyes shine. Her golden hair is flayed by wind streaming through the open windows. Then she is gone. Dusty taillights retreat in the Buick’s rear view mirror.

Later Corkle will be able to recall precise details about the car and the girl. Now, there is too much going on in Corkle's mind for him to process information. He lets his breath out between compressed lips.

“You almost sideswiped that car,” his dad says.

Corkle closes his eyes and tightens his grip on the wheel. He bends his mind to the scene he has just seen, committing himself to the task of memorizing. When he is sure that he can reproduce a picture of the girl at will, he opens his eyes again. The Buick has not drifted out of its lane.

His dad says, “You know the car will go wherever you turn your head. That’s why you have to keep your head pointed straight. You need to scan side to side with your eyes, but you have to keep your head pointing straight down the road.”

Corkle tries to relax his grip on the wheel. He fails. His mind is in turmoil. A girl. A perfect girl. A girl who is the stuff of which dreams are made is escaping while his dad talks about how to hold your head while driving. It is too much. It is too ridiculous to believe. Why are they here? the rest of them, his family, like a great weight fastened around his neck dragging him into murky depths where the wonderful promises he sees everywhere, every day, are not ever allowed to happen? Why must this always be the way of things? How is he ever to find happiness when circumstances, especially circumstances orchestrated by his family, seem determined always to wrench him away from it?

But Corkle is a dutiful son. He knows these thoughts of his are not the thoughts one shares with one's family. These are the thoughts that one allows to steep in the dark recesses of one's own mind. He takes a deep  breath, and another.

“You’re right, Mom,” he says at last. “That strawberry pie sounds really good about now, doesn’t it?”

Another Hot Mess

(This entry is part of a writers' prompt exercise at Studio 30 Plus. Take yourself a merry little jaunt over there to see some fine writing. Maybe you'll want to join up.)

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

It was a fair question. Necessary even, under the circumstances, as she had appeared unbidden and unannounced and dressed in such a way as seemed calculated to land me in hot water. I'm not talking about a short skirt or low-cut blouse either. She was full-on exotic dancer provocative in thigh-high leather boots and a thong—too much make-up, too little fabric, and jewelry in places that would have been uncomfortable had she made even the slightest attempt at modesty by covering them up.

“Paul asked me to stop by,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Now, Paul is a man of the cloth—a born-again evangelical preacher of the fire and brimstone variety. Paul has a take-no-prisoners approach to the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and his sermons often leave the blue haired ladies who sit in the front pews nodding their heads in judgment while the rest of the congregation squirm in their seats as their spiritual failings are recounted from the pulpit. Paul is not the kind of man who would casually ask a stripper to “stop by,” let alone to stop by wearing one of the costumes of her profession.

Paul has his secrets to be sure—as do we all—dark thoughts and unseemly proclivities and occasional passions that would chill the bones of his associates if ever they were exposed. I know all of Paul's secrets, or at least I thought I did, because I created them. I gave them to him along with his sculpted hair, graying just so at the temples, his twelve hundred dollar suits, his bottled tan, and his honey timbered baritone voice. I gave Paul everything he has and made him everything he is and settled him down to stir the currents and confound the aspirations of the other characters in my next book. Paul is a character in a work of fiction, my work of fiction. He is not supposed to be making life choices I don't know about. He is not supposed to be changing up the mix and adding new actors into my narrative. He's not. He knows this . . . or should.

“What's your name?” I ask.

“Elise.”

“Don't you think you're a little . . . I don't know . . . tawdry for a visit to a parsonage?”

“We're not in a parsonage, silly. We're in your office—the same office where you wrote your last book. What was it called? Speedster? You know, the one that was full of strippers and kinky sex and ridiculous cars and enough dead bodies to fill a good sized morgue. I really don't think I'm too tawdry for the room that spawned that hot mess, do you?”

“I suppose not, Elise, but this is a different book. I like to think I've got range as a writer. I want to demonstrate that range by writing books that are different from the ones I've already written. I don't want to feature exotic dancers in every book I write just because I did it once.”

“Um, who's the most successful author you know?”

“Well, I don't actually know her, but that would be J.K. Rowling.”

“And you think she showed a lot of range, as you call it?”

“Well yeah, I do.”

“Jonah. sweetie, she wrote the same book seven times. Same characters. Same plot. Same audience. Same themes. Voldemort concocts some scheme to get rid of Harry Potter. Potter goes out of his way to avoid confrontation so he can wallow in adolescent angst and increasingly hormonal pursuits. Dumbledore steps in to teach Potter a lesson about destiny and perseverance. In the end, Potter triumphs over evil, usually by accident. Somewhere in the middle there's a quidditch match.”

“So you don't think she's a good writer?”

“She's brilliant. What I'm saying is you don't have to run a different race every time you break out of the gate. You can be a good writer, and successful too, writing the same stuff over and over and over. Once you've found your audience, they're not going to get tired of your schtick. That's what made Harry Potter popular. That's why there are about a million girls my age writing vampire romance and a million women of a certain age writing dirty stories about forbidden love. People want the same thing over and over, and all you've got to do is change the names to keep them engaged.”

“I'm not buying it. You can't reduce literature to some repeatable formula. It's all about bending rules and pushing boundaries.”

“So now you're trying to tell me that Speedster was literature? Please!”

“No. No. Of course not. I wanted to write something commercial. I felt like I needed to make some money so I could afford the luxury of writing something good.”

“And how did that work out for you?”

It was a revelation to learn at this point just how well a naked girl can do smug. Her smile was textbook. She was right of course. I've sold maybe 40 copies of Speedster in the four months since I published it—not exactly keeping my muse in champagne and silks.

“Not as well as I would have liked,” I admitted.

“So you need to write at least one more commercial book, don't you? And if that one doesn't succeed, you'll need to write another, and another, and so on until you can finally afford to be an artist. Tell me I'm wrong.”

“You know I can't do that, else you wouldn't even be here.”

“But I'm not here for you. I'm here for Paul.”

“That again? I may have allowed Paul a certain amount of freedom within the book, but he can't dictate new characters and sub-plots to me. It's just not done.”

“You'll have to take that up with Paul.”

“Paul? I'm the author here. You may be able to show up in my office, but you don't get into the book unless I write you in. It's as simple as that.”

Elise was trying to look thoughtful or distracted as I said this. I couldn't tell which. She probably would have adjusted an article of clothing if she'd been wearing any. As it was, she just stared at her fingernails like she was trying to decide if she needed a manicure.

“I think you know it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that,” she said at last. “If you don't write me in, Paul's not going to show up. I'm a condition of his continued participation.”

“What is this, some kind of work action?” I asked. “A character in my book, a character who is wholly my invention, is going to strike if I don't accede to his demand? And his demand is that I provide him with a stripper? Really, this is too much.”

“Yeah, well, at the risk of sounding flippant, you made him the way he is so it's really on you, isn't it?”

And so it is.

“It seems you and Paul have me over a barrel,” I said.

“I know,” she said, batting her eyelids to emphasize the irony. “So you're going to write me in?”

“Sure, but we both understand you're a product of my imagination, right?”

She hesitated. Something like worry creased her forehead.

“Um, yeah?”

“Then I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you breast implants.”