This is a short story I am writing. I'm going to post it in parts, since it's a bit long for one entry.
Warning: This contains references to sex and drugs. Alas, there is no rock and roll.
Jerry And Diane, Part I
Diane rolled from her stomach to her back on the deck of the boat. The sun bearing down on the white boat in the middle of the ocean could be brutal. Jerry was asleep next to her, or at least pretending to be. She admired her surgically enhanced breasts, gave them a fond squeeze, and went down to the galley for a soda.
Their wanted posters were taped to the refrigerator. They always made Diane giggle a little, but Jerry hated them. He looked disheveled and tired in his, with an empty gaze directed toward his feet. Dianne knew he hated it because he was so vain and the mug shot was so unflattering. That was part of the reason she kept it on the fridge, to irritate him.
They were sick of each other. Two months on a seventy-five foot boat bobbing around chasing sunshine, not much in common with nothing to do to but work on skin cancer, eat the awful vegetarian meals Jerry made, think about the past and fuck. Even the fucking was half-hearted these days.
Diane pulled on a tight tee shirt that said "Jamaica, ya mon!" and had marijuana leaf embroidered on it. It stretched over her chest and left three or four inches of bronzed skin exposed above her tiny bikini bottom. She fluffed her now blonde and curly hair. She hated the blonde, so much upkeep and the sun was turning it the texture of straw. She thought she'd go red next, a dark sexy auburn.
She flopped down on the worn divan in the tiny living room area and stared at her toenails, painted dark purple. She missed cooking meth. Well, maybe she didn't miss the actual cooking, but she missed the excitement, the crazy buzzing high, the lifestyle. She missed Randy.
She snorted a little bit. "Randy", he sure was. She could close her eyes and relive the last time over and over and practically get off just thinking about it. She was a sloppy meth cooker and Randy lectured her all the time that the chemicals could get her killed, blow the shitty little trailer right up, but she was too high to care about the mess, too high to care about anything but the next buzz and Randy's cock.
That last time before the bust, it was a Tuesday, late afternoon. Diane had been cooking for two days straight. She was strung out, wired, jumpy. Her hands were shaking so much, she was spilling the shit all over. She finally sat down at the filthy dinette and took some deep breaths, trying to get it together. She heard Randy's bike coming up the road and struggled to get control of her pounding heart. He was going to have a fit when he saw the trailer, it was the worst it'd ever been. Beer bottles littered all the surfaces that weren't covered with meth debris, ashtrays overflowed, broken meth pipes and wads of burned aluminum foil were lying around. She tried to remember the last time she'd had a shower, her hair limp and greasy against the back of her neck.
Randy pushed through the flimsy door. He was big and dark, with quick eyes, a deceptive slowness to his walk and hands the size of chuck roasts. "You scuzzy whore," he said. When he saw how much she'd cooked, he smiled crookedly.
"Get in the shower. We'll go to the club."
He gave her almost ten minutes in the shower. It was long enough to get the chemical stink off her skin and the knots washed out of her hair before he pulled open the cheap shower curtain and pushed her face against the wall under the shower head. He grabbed her ass in his big hands. It took three or four strokes and she was moaning and pounding the flimsy wallboard.
Jerry saying Jesus and stomping by her jolted her out of her reverie. She realized her hand had wandered into her bikini bottom and she jumped up, a little guilty.
Jerry was peering into the refrigerator, no doubt planning his next vegetarian assault on dinner, and she wrapped her arms around him from behind. "Sorry, baby."
He grunted and continued rooting around the fridge. Diane rolled her eyes and went back up on the deck. She'd had a lot of time to think these past two months and the more she thought, the most lost she felt.
When she and Jerry reached up at the same time to turn the pages on the wanted fliers, looking for their own pictures at the big post office in Chicago, it had seemed like fate. Some sort of romantic Bonnie and Clyde story for the new millennium. Plus, Jerry was hot and she'd been in the federal lock-up with a bunch of skanky women for months.
They pretended to just be looking at all the cons on the run at first, nonchalant, passing the time. She found her picture first. In it, she was smirking under the hot pink streaks in her bangs, obviously tweaking. She grabbed it, tore if off and giggled. His was buried toward the back of the pile and at first, she didn't believe it was him, he looked so different. She only got a glimpse of it, though; he snatched it so fast and stuffed it into his pocket.
They walked out of the post office together and on the steps introduced themselves. Diane knew that under the punked out hair, her features were plain and she probably didn't have a chance with him. He looked like some sort of hippy high school homecoming king. He was tall and tan with a ponytail and a knockout smile, wearing a hand knit sweater that was sloppy and unraveling. His scuffed Doc Martens peeked out from baggy khakis that were bunched at the ankles. He was impossibly handsome.
He suggested they get a coffee and she frowned and said how about a drink instead. They ended up that night in a flophouse motel, Dianne drunk out of her mind on cheap vodka martinis and Jerry cross-eyed from rum and Coke. She thought they had sex that night, they woke up naked the next morning at least, but she was never sure and never asked him.
Diane had known she was going to skip on the charges if she could figure out how to get out of the federal holding center. She knew where all the money was and could tell from questions the feds were asking that Randy and the rest of the Rabid Wheels gang were locked up. She could tell the feds hadn’t found the money yet. It took time and patience and some nasty maneuvering with a fat guard who stunk of stale booze and liked to smack her when he fucked her but she found the chance to say adios to the lock up and hit the ground running.
Jerry didn't believe her at first when she told him she'd cooked meth for the Rabid Wheels during their pillow talk that next morning in the hotsheet hotel. The Rabid Wheels were notorious and she just seemed like a ditzy farm girl from Wisconsin who liked to party, not some biker's chick and big time criminal, wanted poster notwithstanding.
Jerry finally believed her when she came out of the bank grinning, with her knapsack filled with blocks of hundred dollar bills. The money had been stashed in a safe deposit box she’d rented with an identity stolen by the Rabid Wheels. Randy and the rest of the Rabid Wheels had figured she was strung out and goofy enough to be a trusted enough to hide the money. She'd ditched the black Envoy the guard had let her steal from him in the long-term lot at O'Hare the week before she met Jerry. They hunkered down in a nondescript Ramada in the Milwaukee suburbs, dyeing and cutting their hair, buying colored contact lenses, figuring out what to do next.
Traveling anywhere by plane was out of the question because of 9/11 and the tight airport security. Besides, their names and faces were all over and they didn't trust anyone to print fake passports or papers. Diane knew the Rabid Wheels would have guessed she'd not only split but also taken the cash by now and that they would have put a price on her head. Jerry had a big reward for his capture for jumping bail and a murder charge and neither of them wanted some strong-arm bounty hunter or concerned citizen cashing in.
Jerry was vague about why he was on the run at first and Diane didn't press. She wasn't much given to reflection or prying into anyone else's business and she was too blissed out from the sex after so long without to question him closely anyway.
She'd hear him sniffling and blowing his nose after he took long showers. He’d bang stuff around in the bathroom before he'd come out with his eyes and nose red. She figured he had sinus problems or allergies or was snorting something and it annoyed him to hawk and snuffle so he banged shit around. She was shocked when she found out he had been crying in the shower.
He had finally told her he was crying one night after Diane had scored some weed from a skinny pockmarked bartender in a Yuppie hang out. They were lying on the big king-sized Ramada bed on top of the ugly floral bedspread, smoking and coughing on the THC.
"They think I killed her," he said. Diane, happily buzzed, was relaxed for the first time in a week. She continued staring at the sparkly stuff sprayed onto the ceiling after Jerry’s announcement.
He crushed out the joint in the ashtray on the nightstand and rolled over to face her.
"I'm going to tell you this now. Once. Then, I never want to talk about it again. And we have to establish some rules, okay? If we're going to make it, we've got to stay sharp." He stared at her intently, his normally green eyes a murky blue from the contacts and rimmed with red from the joint.
"Okay," was all she said.
He told her about Sheila, his girlfriend, and ELF. He got a little exasperated when Diane confessed she'd never heard of ELF, which turned out to be the Earth Liberation Front. He accused her of doing nothing but smoking meth, snorting meth, shooting meth, cooking meth, screwing her biker boyfriend and being a junkie, never even knowing what was going on around her in the world. She couldn't exactly deny it, so she didn't say anything, just let him talk. She thought ELF sounded even nuttier than the PETA people did, but she didn't share that opinion with Jerry.
Jerry and Sheila were like some sort of king and queen in the mostly anonymous ELF. Jerry had a master's degree from Cal Tech in biology and was fearless in defending the earth, knowledgeable and well-spoken and not afraid to stand up for his beliefs. Sheila was the spoiled only child of a man who owned huge timber lots. Sheila had denounced her family for making their fortune by destroying the environment. Jerry and Sheila had burned lumber mills and firebombed housing development sites. They were passionate and dedicated to saving the earth from exploitation and the destruction of the environment for profit.
Jerry and Shelia had decided to live in a tree in the mountains in Oregon as a non-violent protest to the clear cut coming that next year. In seven months, they hadn't come down from their shelter in the tree. Some trusted ELF associates knew they were there, but no one else would know until the cut started. They ate from a supply of dried beans and lentils and caught rainwater in buckets. Jerry was exhilarated by the whole experience but Sheila started getting paranoid and picking fights. She got a little crazy, Jerry told Diane. Sick. Unbalanced. Sheila accused Jerry of being a traitor, claimed he was sending signals to Weyerhaeuser, the corporation that owned vast tracks of land that trees were harvested from and in fact owned the very tree they were squatting in. She barely ate anymore, she thought he had poisoned the food supply. She stopped keeping herself clean and cringed when he touched her. She rarely slept and or spoke to him.
It became obvious that Sheila had some sort of mental illness and he had to figure out a way to convince her to abandon their protest and get some help. She refused to listen, paced from one end of the small shelter to the other end, furious, ripping at her hair, spitting at Jerry with each pass.
He agonized for days about what he could do. Finally, he decided he would leave the shelter, go back to the world, and get help for her. He knew he was risking criminal charges and jail time. Sheila had dropped her driver license climbing over the fence at the last development they had firebombed and it wouldn't be difficult for the authorities to figure out they were a pair and worked together. He loved her, though, and couldn't stand to see her deterioration.
Once he made up his mind, he decided to get a good night's sleep so he was fresh for the long walk the next day. He never got the chance to save Sheila, though. When he woke up, she was hanging from a limb, her faded granny dress wrapped around her neck, her body thin and wasted and gray.
He had silent tears running down his face after he finished telling Diane. She held his head to her chest and smoothed his hair, whispering shhh, shhh until he fell asleep.
You have real talent, Lisa. This is gripping.
BTW, it's "tracts" of land, not "tracks."
I know, I know, I'm a nitpicky typo person! LOL!
Posted by: ronni | February 20, 2008 at 09:15 AM
this is great, girl...you are talented...have you ever read carl hiassen? sort of reminds me of this....LOVE it
Posted by: nursenicole | February 20, 2008 at 08:46 PM
This story is great. Really sucked me in! When is part 2 going to be posted?
Posted by: Nikki | February 21, 2008 at 09:14 AM
Wow Lisa!!! This is amazing!! You are so talented!! When do we get part 2??
Posted by: Tomah Belle | February 21, 2008 at 01:31 PM
Ronni, thanks for that heads up on tracts. I hate it when I make silly mistakes like that and don't catch it.
Part II should be up later today, kids.
Posted by: Lisa | February 21, 2008 at 01:36 PM
This is very good, but I want to take all the, "was" out. Because my editor pops me on that, every time!!! Your vision is clear and very visual, the descriptions crystal.
Don't let me start editing, you'll hate my guts.
Posted by: Nancy Liedel - The Goat Rodeo | February 21, 2008 at 03:49 PM