Don't Make Me Stop Now by Michael Parker

Author:Michael Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Right to Remain

ON THE FIFTH PASS of the night, Sanderson pulled the car alongside the curb across the street from her house. He lit a cigarette, cracked his window. Focused his slitty eyes on the blinds in the neighbor’s windows, dared them to peek between the dusty slats. What the hell you looking at? I can see you, but you can’t see me.

Walter, riding shotgun, said, “Why we stopping?”

Sanderson stared past him at her house: a sprightly yellow bungalow he helped her move into the last time she’d left him. The previous owner had left a sculpture in the yard assembled from bicycle parts rearranged to create not a bicycle but an animal at once prehistoric and futuristic. It rose up in the tiny yard where Sanderson thought it better to plant a tree. He had never trusted it. He looked at it in disgust, then past it to the living-room window, dark save for a blinking visible in the back room where she slept. She kept the television on all the time now, he knew from the few disastrous times when he had broken down and called her. It gargled along in the background, a noise just white enough to compete with the buzz between his ears. There were pauses in her responses, when she bothered to respond to his questions at all, that suggested she was actually listening to prime-time television. The pauses lasted for years and were filled with the kind of impatience he felt when a fantasy of the two of them together again was interrupted by something trivial: a guy asking him for a light, a cashier naming the price of a purchase.

“Women always leave me in the winter,” said Sanderson. He tossed his cigarette into a neighbor’s yard and jerked the window up against the chill.

“Maybe you ought to move to a more southerly clime, chief,” said Walter.

“I ought to send that fucker my gas bill is what I ought to do. Many miles as I’ve put on this car lately making my rounds, seeing if he’s showed up yet. I ought to make him pay for an oil change at least.”

“Make his ass pay is right,” said Walter.

Sanderson said, “I knew a girl from New Orleans, she told me it gets cold down there. Real wet cold, too.”

“There ain’t no escape, is there?” said Walter. “You take your chances. It’s a risk, every time you hook up. Like you’re taking your life in your hands every time you unzip your drawers.”

Sanderson started to point out that it was not exactly your life you took in your hands every time you unzipped your drawers. Instead of arguing with Walter, a thorough waste of his precious time, he let himself consider the old boy, seriously. Why had he asked him along to ride shotgun in the first place? He told himself that he did not want to be alone and that he thought having someone along for the ride, a witness, might prevent him from doing the things he woke up each morning having already done in his sleep.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.