Chaingang

What was it about some men? There were those certain guys who could get on a woman's wavelength. Her junkie lover of long ago, with the wide, lopsided smile so full of unexpected warmth and tenderness, he'd been one of those. He could send her into a mood swing the way north draws the needle of a compass. Explain it? She couldn't even define it.

All she knew was that they occupied two different worlds—physically, spiritually, and sexually—yet he nudged her at the oddest times in a way that could only be compared to the desire for a guilty pleasure. And it wasn't sex, truly. Sam had been a sensual lover and sufficiently ardent and gentle to keep her content in that department. Mary realized that it was something more than sex or romance, a deep and not insubstantial part of her that was drawn to this man.

That night she dreamed of him, watching herself enter a room where Royce Hawthorne was. She sees herself as a vision, suggesting the best of early Perry Ellis and most inspired Marc Jacobs, the classiest Geoffrey Beene tailored with flashes of striking Armani, the tearoomiest Ralph Lauren with a hint of Ms. Herrera, mixed and matched by the latest kids—the ones with the unpronounceable names—and just a spritz of Fredericks. The vision moves.

His beautiful eyes follow the deep V-cut of the double-breasted black gabardine with the gold buttons, devouring her with his gaze. She feels the heat of his look. The vision at her best, striding through the room in a scented cloud of Opium, Poison, and Serpent's Eve—her special bedroom fragrance that triumphs over Royce's masculine aromas and engulfs the room in heady perfume. Royce, captivated, comes to her.

He offers her his arm and she takes it, seeing his old leather jacket with the worn elbows, imagining his forearms bulging with thick, ropy veins between the ridges of hard muscle, wanting to feel his big hands touch her again.

In the car the vision's tousled hair is the colors of brandy and champagne, streaked with highlights, lips glossy and desirable, and as she turns, the skirt rides up on her legs—which he tells her are “still A-one.” She is in the front seat with Royce, in her cognac-colored wool jacket with the stone white poorboy turtleneck, and she watches him not look at her thighs.

Fear-shackled, tragedy-pinioned guilt speaks to her in a familiar man's voice.

“Mary?” She turns and looks for Sam, treading water, doing her best not to drown in the dizzying, unexpected waves of whatever this emotion is.

Royce wanted to open up to Mary. That was a problem. He couldn't. Not right now—the way things were hanging. Too much was going on. There was too much at stake. He was carrying too much baggage.

How could he ever begin to explain it to her—about the dope? He knew that she knew he'd fallen into the cracks, somewhere along the line. Royce could see it in her eyes sometimes, that how-did-you-let-yourself-get-this-way stare. Where does one start trying to explain a life? Your weakness and your vices and your mistakes look so easy to control when one is on the outside looking in.

He'd grown up in Waterton, just as Mary had. Born in 1962, in a hinterlands bump in the road that hadn't changed since the Second World War—Waterton, Missouri, was an American ghost town. The only thing good about it was, a kid could drive across the river to Tennessee and get illegal schooners of cold beer, vodka-laced watermelons, or home-grown reefer that just about everybody tried at one time or another when they were in their teens.

Grass was no big deal. Some kids smoked wacky-tobacky and some drank. Some—like Royce—did both. It was something to do. You fired up a joint, got in somebody's ride with a half dozen close friends, and cruised.

He'd been withering away. He'd have died if he hadn't gotten out of Waterton. He'd wanted all the sex there was, all the high times he could find, and he'd wanted out. Mary'd had a marriage jones that he felt snaking out for him like a hangman's noose. He'd run. Things had happened. He'd met women. Fast-lane types. Big-city junkies who'd taught him how to get his nose open. He'd never been that crazy about weed anyway. One thing had led to another. No biggie—hell, George Washington had been a hemp farmer.

Royce had gotten jammed up in the worst way and had taken the only way out left to him. That's how he'd got himself inserted into this king-shit jackpot. He knew he was going to have to open up to Mary about it soon. She deserved to know. No. That was bullshit. She most certainly did not deserve any part of his act. But he'd already used their friendship—just because she was there, and handy—and he owed it to her to run the whole thing down. He had to make it right.

He locked the car, a study in pensive concentration and gloomy dope-fiend rumination, his mind far away, as he headed for the door of his cabin. He was not alert.

There was a huge presence in the shadows. Hulking. Silent. A man standing very quietly waiting for Royce Hawthorne.