Small Town

“You were going to bury her in a cornfield?”

“I figured that was perfect. If you pick a recently plowed field, and go do your digging at night when nobody’s around, all you’d have to do was make sure you dug deeper than they plow. The body could stay there forever.”

“You had it all figured out.”

“I couldn’t fall asleep. I sat there in that piece-of-shit motel room while she was lying there asleep with her mouth open—”

“Which is always attractive.”

“—and I thought about killing her. I didn’t want to make anyone at the motel suspicious, so I had to avoid getting blood on the sheets, anything like that. I thought about strangling her or smothering her with a pillow, but suppose she put up a fight? What I settled on was I’d knock her out first by hitting her on the head. There was a tire iron in the trunk I could use, and if I wrapped a towel around it there’d be less chance of breaking the skin and causing bleeding.”

“This is getting awfully real, John.”

“Well, how real was it? This was twenty-five years ago, more than half my life. I can remember being in that room, working it all out in my mind, but how accurate is that memory? And how close did I come to flat out doing it?”

“Did you go out to the car for the tire iron?”

“No,” he said, and frowned. “Hold on, I think I did. Jesus, this is weird. I remember it both ways.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Hang on here a minute.”

“What?”

“John, I read this story.”

“Yeah, I wrote about it. Turned it around some, the way you do, but that’s where the story came from. The Yale Review turned it down and then Prairie Schooner bought it. I’m surprised you remember it.”

“How would I not remember it? I published it, for God’s sake, it was in Edged Weapons. Give me a minute and I’ll come up with the title.”

“ ‘A Nice Place to Stop.’ It was the motel’s slogan. In the story, that is, but either I made it up or it was some other motel’s slogan. It seemed to fit the story, but I’m not sure it’s the best title I could have come up with.”

“It’s not bad. In the story—”

“In the story the guy does go out for the tire iron, and he wraps the towel around it and swats her good, and then he realizes he can’t go through with it. Strangling her, like he planned to do. And it dawns on him that he can just leave, he’ll give her all his money and the car and say goodbye and hit the road, and what can she do? So he waits for her to wake up and he’s going to tell her all this. He’d like to just split and let her figure it out for herself when she comes to, but he knows he’d better wait and tell her.”

“But he can’t, because she’s dead.”

“Right, the blow with the tire iron was enough to crack her skull and kill her, towel or no towel. So now he has to go through with it and bury her in a field the way he planned, and he does, knowing it’s all unnecessary.”

“And he gets away with it, doesn’t he?”

“Well, we don’t know that,” he said. “He’s still free and clear at the end of the story, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t caught up with him yet. But even if he gets away with it, what we get is that he’s not really getting away with anything after all, because he’s got her wrapped around his soul the way the Ancient Mariner had the albatross around his neck.”

“Right.”

“Maybe the title’s better than I thought.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. When did you write this one, John?”

“Not right away. Maybe a year, two years after the divorce, I started running it through my mind and it started to turn into a story. And of course I changed tons of things, and the guy in the story wasn’t me and the woman wasn’t Penny. But that’s why I remembered going for the tire iron, and also remembered not going for the tire iron. One memory was from life and the other was from the story.”

“Writers are strange people.”

“You’re just finding this out?”

“No, but I keep forgetting, and people like you keep reminding me. Oops, there’s a call I have to take. Will you be around for a while?”

“Where would I go?”

“Nowhere for the next hour or so, okay? I’ll get back to you.”

How close had he come to killing Penny?

It wasn’t hard to remember the story’s immediate origin, not where it came from but the spark that got him to write it. He was in New York, living in this apartment, and he was seeing someone new, a trainee copywriter at an ad agency. He’d decided he was getting more involved than he wanted to be, and made plans to tell her that he felt they should both be seeing other people. The person he thought she should probably be seeing was a trained psychotherapist, but he didn’t figure he had to tell her that part.

He didn’t look forward to the whole business, but at least it was early days for the relationship, and he’d be wise to nip it in the bud before he found himself married to her, and looking for ways to get rid of her.