The Sound of Broken Ribs(6)
Before hanging up, the nice lady lowered her voice and told Belinda, “I’m sorry that I can’t help you. But, if he were my husband, and I found him, I’d remove his testicles with a pair of hedge clippers.”
Belinda thought that, given the chance, she’d take the nice lady’s advice.
*
Unlike her husband Harry, Lei had never had a problem with allergies. Every morning she was reminded how lucky she was as the scents of wild lilac and jasmine accompanied her on her mid-morning runs. Her breaths were deep and even as she took in the fragrant aromas of local flora. A rabbit, spooked by her presence, dashed from the side of the road through the high grass growing alongside the road and vanished into the tree line. It was not unusual to see deer on her route, as well, but it wasn’t the right season for them.
An old blue Ford pickup rumbled toward her. Lei cut out of the road and into the high grass on the side of the road. The driver drifted into the opposite lane to give her room. The country boy in the camo hat and wife-beater flicked a finger off the steering wheel in an approximation of a hello. Lei smiled and waved. This far out, traffic was almost nonexistent, but she did see vehicles on occasion. When she did come across someone driving, she usually recognized them. In that regard, she knew the driver of the blue Ford, had crossed his path before. She assumed he must live out here.
She hit a straightaway. The next curve was almost a mile away, but she wouldn’t get far into it before she hit the vineyard which wasn’t really a vineyard at all; only a property overrun with vine-y vegetation to the point she was reminded of Scott Smith’s novel The Ruins, wherein people stranded on a Mayan (or maybe it was Aztec—she couldn’t recall which) temple are eaten by nasty creepy-crawly vegetation. The man who owned the overgrown property that Lei thought of as the vineyard owned the local hardware store; a dark, dusty building that gave Lei an anxiety attack every spring when she entered its musty realm to buy plant food and potting mix for that year’s gardening. She refused to go to Walmart—an unholy place where shitty people bought shitty products from shitty people managed by even shittier human beings; the place was an uroboros of human suffering, a hateful snake devouring itself. The local hardware store was the only feasible substitute for the chain store. She could drive an hour into the next major city and hit their Lowes or Home Depot, but we are talking soil and processed cow manure here, not life-sustaining medical supplies—so, panic attack or not, she bought from the owner of the vineyard.
One of these days she’d start her own compost pile and be able to brag to her environmentally conscious friends that she was reducing her carbon footprint one cardboard box and orange peel at a time. But that was for another time.
Lei noticed the black shoestrings on her neon yellow trainers had come undone. The ones on her left foot. She didn’t want to kill her momentum by having to tie her shoe again, but she didn’t want to trip and fly face first into the abrasive scrub along the side of the road either. Huffing and puffing, she came to a jerking halt. She dropped to one knee and tucked and pulled and made rabbit ears, just like her daddy had taught her, once upon a time.
She heard a car coming and hopped back a step, out of the road. She pulled the rabbit ears tight, tucked and tied those as well, and then tugged everything tight.
The noise of the approaching car grew louder and Lei awaited the blast of wind as it passed.
It did not pass.
Lei looked up just in time to see the dead insects smashed into the car’s grill before she joined them.
*
Belinda considered killing herself. She could drive her car into a tree at a hundred miles per hour and be done with all this drama and unhappiness. She was jobless, soon to be homeless, husband-less, and flat broke. If suicide was ever called for, she felt that now was the one time God might forgive one of his only unforgivable sins.
She was a non-practicing Catholic, which for her meant she’d once worn a school uniform and barely skirted being molested by every man with a school-girl fetish. But nothing said “God is cruel/God doesn’t exist” quite like a lying, backstabbing thief of a husband.
She pushed the car to over sixty, taking the curves of Highway 607 easily enough in her piece of super-tuned Japanese engineering. Trees flashed by like a deck of cards in the hands of an experienced magician. She barely noticed the forty-five mile-per-hour speed limit signs. If she were pulled over, she’d explain to the nice offer how her husband was a walking, talking, human shitstain and that said shitstain had left her in quite the pickle. Where was she headed? Well, officer, she was headed to her brother’s house. He lived in the country between Bay’s End and Chestnut. Anywhere near Waverly Chasm? Sure thing, officer. Bro’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from that old hole in the ground.
Belinda came to a straightaway. She shoved the accelerator to the floor. Something was moving down the road. It was too tall and slender to be an animal. Too bright and multicolored to be a tree. It could only be a person. Probably a woman. Probably a fucking whore like Melody.
You don’t know that Melody is fucking Dan.
Yes, I do. Even if he isn’t, he’s fucked her in his mind, which is just as bad.
Do you hear yourself?
I can’t help but to hear myself, because, you know, I’m talking to myself.
You sound nuttier than squirrel shit.
Moo, moo, buckaroo.
What does that even mean?