Full Dark, No Stars

years old) smiled indulgently and told her the film was actual y cal ed The Brave One. Mr. Retro Punk told her that for an extra fifty cents, she could get a bag of microwave popcorn to go with. Tess almost said no, then reconsidered. “Why the fuck not?” she asked Mr. Retro Punk. “You only live once, right?”

He gave her a startled, reconsidering look, then smiled and agreed that it was a case of one life to a customer.

At home, she popped the corn, inserted the DVD, and plopped onto the couch with a pil ow at the smal of her back to cushion the scrape there. Fritzy joined her and they watched Jodie Foster go

after the men (the punks, as in do you feel lucky, punk) who had kil ed her boyfriend. Foster got assorted other punks along the way, and used a pistol to do it. The Brave One was very much that kind of a movie, but Tess enjoyed it just the same. She thought it made perfect sense. She also thought that she had been missing something al these years: the low but authentic catharsis movies like The Brave One offered. When it was over, she turned to Fritzy and said, “I wish Richard Widmark had met Jodie Foster instead of the old lady in the wheelchair, don’t you?”

Fritzy agreed one thousand percent.

- 30 -

Lying in bed that night with an October wind getting up to dickens around the house and Fritzy beside her, curled up nose to tail, Tess made an agreement with herself: if she woke up tomorrow

feeling as she did now, she would go to see Ramona Norvil e, and perhaps after Ramona—depending on how things turned out on Lacemaker Lane—she would pay a visit to Alvin “Big Driver” Strehlke.

More likely she’d wake up with some semblance of sanity restored and cal the police. No anonymous cal , either; she’d face the music and dance. Proving actual rape forty hours and God knew how many

showers after the fact might be difficult, but the signs of sexual battery were written al over her body.

And the women in the pipe: she was their advocate, like it or not.

Tomorrow all these revenge ideas will seem silly to me. Like the kind of delusions people have when they’re sick with a high fever.

But when she woke up on Sunday, she was stil in ful New Tess mode. She looked at the gun on the night table and thought, I want to use it. I want to take care of this myself, and given what I’ve been through, I deserve to take care of it myself.

“But I need to make sure, and I don’t want to get caught,” she said to Fritzy, who was now on his feet and stretching, getting ready for another exhausting day of lying around and snacking from his

bowl.

Tess showered, dressed, then took a yel ow legal pad out to the sun-porch. She stared at her back lawn for almost fifteen minutes, occasional y sipping at a cooling cup of tea. Final y she wrote

DON’T GET CAUGHT at the top of the first sheet. She considered this soberly, and then began making notes. As with each day’s work when she was writing a book, she started slowly, but picked up

speed.

- 31 -

By ten o’clock she was ravenous. She cooked herself a huge brunch and ate every bite. Then she took her movie back to Blockbuster and asked if they had Kiss of Death. They didn’t, but after ten minutes of browsing, she settled on a substitute cal ed Last House on the Left. She took it home and watched closely. In the movie, men raped a young girl and left her for dead. It was so much like what had happened to her that Tess burst into tears, crying so loudly that Fritzy ran from the room. But she stuck with it and was rewarded with a happy ending: the parents of the young girl murdered the rapists.

She returned the disc to its case, which she left on the table in the hal . She would return it tomorrow, if she were stil alive tomorrow. She planned to be, but nothing was certain; there were many

strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunny-trail of life. Tess had found this out for herself.

With time to kil —the daylight hours seemed to move so slowly—she went back online, searching for information about the trouble Al Strehlke had been in before his father committed suicide. She

found nothing. Possibly the neighbor was ful of shit (neighbors so often were), but Tess could think of another scenario: the trouble might have occurred while Strehlke was stil a minor. In cases like that, names weren’t released to the press and the court records (assuming the case had even gone to court) were sealed.

“But maybe he got worse,” she told Fritzy.

“Those guys often do get worse,” Fritzy agreed. (This was rare; Tom was usual y the agreeable one. Fritzy’s role tended to be devil’s advocate.)