ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEVIN KEATING’s stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Story South’s Million Writers Award, and the Ben Hoffer/Best New Writing Award. His essays and fiction have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Identity Theory, The Stickman Review, Mad Hatter’s Review, Underground Voices, Smokebox, Fringe, Perigee, Megaera, Plum Ruby Review, Fiction Warehouse, Fifth Street Review, Juked, and many others.

Lethe

By Kevin Keating


Page 3


3

 

He got on the interstate and left the city for the suburbs.  The bright neon lights gave way to orderly rows of gas lamps.  High rises disappeared on the horizon, obscured by the rooftops of Cape Cods and colonials.  Here the houses were small and white, like island cottages, sheltered by enormous hardwood trees that lined the quiet lanes.  Garrett couldn’t fathom why his wife had returned to this place.  She was a beautiful woman, stunning really, everyone said so, and she deserved something better. 

When they first began their affair, he tried to win her over the old-fashioned way, with love and devotion, but she was a modern woman with modern needs, so he seduced her with the promise of granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, recessed lighting, decorative wall sconces, a wraparound deck, a hot tub, a heated pool.  Her eyes blazed with desire but still she wavered, so in order to seal the deal he offered to pay for her son’s education.  A boy like that, one who was developmentally challenged, speech delayed, clumsy, awkward, a chronic bed wetter, well, he needed the guidance and attention that only a private academy could provide and one that his daddy could never afford.

“This is a great opportunity for you,” he told her.  “You owe it to yourself.  You owe it to your son.  Think of it.  No more public schools.”

“But Malcolm…” she said.

Ah, yes, Malcolm, the pencil pusher, the precise and nervous little man who sat in a cubicle all day, copy-editing operating manuals for water filtration systems.  Was that really the life she envisioned for herself?  “Gorgeous women don’t throw away their lives on mediocre men,” Garrett said.  He believed in the fundamental truth of this statement, understood that in the cosmic scheme of things there were certain unalterable rules, and from this knowledge he drew great strength and courage.

Now he parked the car on the street and marched up the weed-strangled walkway to the front porch.  Everywhere there were signs of children--bicycles abandoned in overgrown yards, swing sets left to rust in the cold mist and rain, jump ropes and basketballs and roller skates scattered across patios and porches.  Oh, it was pleasant enough, yes, but mayhem lurked at the periphery, shrieking hellions playing hide-and-seek like some sinister game of life and death.  In this neighborhood the children ran through sprinklers and sprayed each other with hoses.  No one owned a pool.

Garrett hammered on the front door with both fists, this was serious business after all, and so for good measure he gave it a solid kick. 
A light came on inside.  The door creaked open.  Malcolm stood at the threshold, a thin brooding man in his late thirties, his head shaved like some penniless mendicant who, confounded by God’s indifference, roams the city streets begging for alms, not in sackcloth and ashes, but in a T-shirt and jeans, a whiskey bottle close at hand.   He reeked like he’d been on a terrific bender.  Booze seeped from his pours.  This was not the same person who ironed his shirts each morning before work and who drank nothing stronger than a glass of red wine each evening and always with a meal.  The shape of his face had changed.  Deep furrows cross-crossed his forehead like angry fissures in the earth, and when he moved his whole body seemed to tremble and quake.  He clutched his sides, wobbled back and forth on his feet. 

Though he felt a sudden and inexplicable rush of pity for the man, Garrett backed away, afraid he might puke up the bottle of Jack he’d been nursing all afternoon.

“Easy now, easy.  We can be civilized about this, can’t we?”
Malcolm wiped away a thick rope of saliva from the corners of his mouth.  “You actually remembered my address, you negligent bastard.”

Garrett found it hard to disguise his indignation.  “You’re not making any sense.  I came here to see to my wife.  She’s here, isn’t she?” 
Malcolm scowled.  His words came in a thin whisper from a throat raw with drink.  “You’ve lived a very charmed life up until now, haven’t you, Garrett.”

“Oh, yes, very.”

“Parties every night.”

“Not any more.  Summer is over.  I suppose you’re angry because I never extended you an invite.”

Malcolm laughed with derision and incredulity.  “Oh, yes, that’s why I’m angry.  Because I didn’t get an invite to the wrong parties with the wrong people.”

“Sorry, but it would have been awkward having you there.”

“Well, that’s too bad because it’s just the sort of thing your guests would have enjoyed.  Imagine all of the whispers when they saw your old friend and nemesis, standing beside the pool, having a drink.  It would have been a moving scene actually.  People love reconciliations.  You were the best man at my wedding, after all.  Surely that counts for something.  No reason to end a friendship over something as silly as my wife.”

“She’s not your wife,” Garrett said.  “She hasn’t signed the divorce papers, friend.  Not yet she hasn’t.  That makes her mine.  So says the law.”

“The law.  You’re delusional, you know that, don’t you?”

Garrett sighed.  “Well, it’s obvious that I can’t reason with you.

You’re drunk.  Get out of my way, please.”

He tried to walk into the house, but Malcolm lurched forward and, with quick and surprising strength, clamped his hands around Garrett’s throat, pressing his thumbs into his esophagus, crushing the cry trying to burst from his larynx. 

“I made a vow,” said Malcolm, his voice little more than a thin rasp, “I took a pledge.  I told Peggy.  I promised that if I ever saw you again, I’d kill you.  Kill you with my bare hands.  I made a commitment to her.  But she said you’d never have the balls to show your face again.  That you were gone for good.  That’s how guys like you operate.”

Though he found the whole situation quite absurd, Garrett could not escape his assailant’s grasp.  His knees wobbled.  He was drowning, gasping desperately for air, fighting for every breath.  In a few hours time he would be found on the front porch, blue and stiff, eyes bulging comically from his face, by some gawky newspaper boy making his early morning deliveries.  Though he should have kicked and thrashed in terror, he felt oddly at peace, impervious to the pain Malcolm was inflicting on him.  But just as suddenly as he’d attacked, Malcolm let him go. 

Garrett slumped over, choking, wheezing, clutching at his bruised throat.  He didn’t move, not right away, he was too relaxed, too comfortable, hovering somewhere between life and death, an interesting place to be, and he wanted to enjoy this peculiar sensation for just a moment longer.  He gazed up at the sky, at the unbroken and beautiful expanse of blackness, and when he finally struggled to his feet, prepared to fight, he found that Malcolm had gone back inside the house.  The front porch light went off.

“Coward!” Garrett shouted, rising to his feet.  “Couldn’t finish the job?”     

He straightened his shirt, brushed off his sleeves, but as he walked back to the car something compelled him to stop and turn around, the uncanny sensation of being watched, and when he looked back at the house he saw Peggy’s face, pale and grotesque as a Venetian mask, lurking in an upper window, her features fragmented by a pane of shattered glass.  Suddenly he was afraid.  She had changed, he could see that now, her beauty had vanished, crushed under the solidity and weight of tragic circumstance, her eyes suffused with an exultation so dark and sinister that Garrett knew with absolute certainty that she wished him dead.  She’d always been the sort who enjoyed seeing men fight over her, but this was different.  She wanted to witness an execution. 

A cold October wind rattled the branches of the trees and made a rusty gate creak.  Distant barks echoed through the empty streets.  Peggy lowered the blinds and opened her mouth as if to scream, but Garrett heard only silence, an inescapable, implacable thing, a harbinger of doom.



Published July 2008