The Annunciation



  The Annunciation

  by

  Jeffrey Anderson

  Copyright 2013 by Jeffrey Anderson

  This story is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Annunciation

  Some nights Zach hit the local bars with his younger brother Mark. They invited Justin to come along; but he was married now and tethered to hearth and home and a demanding wife. Besides, he needed to be up at four to milk the expanded herd and was often not done with night milking till after ten. So Mark and Zach went carousing on their own.

  At one bar, a grungy hole-in-the-wall called 17 Stop after the highway it bordered, it seemed an impromptu high-school reunion with so many of Zach’s classmates, especially teammates from the basketball team, sprinkled about the packed room. Some of those players were already almost incoherent, slurring their words and leaving their arms over his shoulder not out of affection but for support. Others shook his hand like they were trying to break it off or punched his shoulder harder than playful familiarity, asking what he was doing with his life and why he hadn’t gone on to play college ball. Zach kept his responses short and superficial, feeling like he’d been dropped in a surreal dream populated by changed faces he almost recognized but couldn’t quite grasp.

  They finally got a place at the bar when a leather-clad biker with a shaved head and his tough-gal mate with only a black leather vest above her skintight leather pants and jackboots abandoned their seats and headed for the door. Mark nodded to where the bikers had been engulfed by the crowd. “Recognize him?” he shouted over the roar of music and loud voices.

  “Skinhead?”

  Mark nodded.

  Zach shook his head.

  Mark grinned as they sat. “Jack Thompson.”

  “No way,” Zach said. In school, Jack Thompson wore tie-dyed shirts and hair to his shoulders, choosing his long locks over the basketball team when their drill sergeant coach told him it was the hair or the highway.

  “It’s Jack—discovered leather and Harleys and girls that would lay themselves against his back on the Hog.”

  “And a razor for his head.”

  Mark laughed. “That too.”

  “Maybe Coach should’ve used a different tactic, offered bikes and biker babes.”

  “Might’ve won the state title if he had.”

  They knocked back a couple beers, then a couple more, then a couple more. Most of the time they didn’t try to talk over the ruckus, just looked around at the debauched scene that included a fair amount of heterosexual groping and pawing, the occasional drink thrown in somebody’s face, one shoving match and one fistfight (quickly pushed outside by the burly bouncer), and members of both sexes in a steady stream to the one bathroom at the far end of the room with many of those emerging in pairs and trios rubbing at their nostrils. Every so often someone would recognize them and stop by to say hello or raise their glass from across the room. Two guys, both former benchwarmers from the team, bought them shots—tequila for Zach, peppermint schnapps for Mark. The blur of memories and vaguely recognizable faces gradually became the blur of reality.

  Toward closing time with the crowd thinning but the music and voices and desperation only swelling, Susie Erskine left the booth where she was sitting with two female friends and sauntered up to where they were rooted to their seats at the bar. Susie was a classmate of Mark’s whom Zach remembered as a flat-chested eighth-grader with braces. The braces were gone and so was the flat chest, a fact she advertised with her midriff-baring tank top. She had crimped dirty blond hair, glossy lipstick, and an unabashed sultry sexuality. She wiggled her butt and the rest of her body between Mark and the bar and draped her arms over his shoulders. “I thought we’d get one for the road,” she said.

  Mark laughed. “We?”

  “You and me.”

  “You remember my brother.”

  Susie nodded and glanced toward Zach. “Hi, Zach. How’s Allison?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Sorry to hear you split.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You still see her?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Tell her I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  She looked back at Mark. Her hands had drifted into his lap. “Maybe we could have that nightcap at my place. My car’s outside.”

  Mark looked at Zach. Fraternal loyalty had been replaced by a more urgent need.

  Zach laughed. “Go on. I’ll toast you both with my nightcap then head home.”

  “You sure?” Mark asked. By now Susie’s tongue was sliding across his cheek toward his ear.

  “I’m sure.”

  Mark reached for his beer over Susie’s head and finished it with one gulp. Then the two of them moved toward the door. Mark made Susie walk just ahead, on her own, through the gauntlet of bleary watching eyes.

  Zach turned to face the wall of bottles behind the bar, and sipped on what was left of his warm beer. He’d skip the nightcap, finish the beer, pay the tab and head for bed. Tomorrow’s weather was predicted sunny and warm, and he’d have a full day on the tractor.

  A smoky voice that was vaguely familiar, as from some long forgotten dream, roused him from his daze. “Haven’t seen you in this dive for years.”

  He continued to look straight ahead, let the voice remain faceless—some angel bearing a message—for a while longer. “You been checking?”

  The angel laughed, one high-pitched short note like from an organ key tapped by mistake just before the recital, when the audience was silent and expectant. “Often enough,” she said after a pause.

  “How often is that?”

  “When the moon is full and my heart is empty.”

  Now Zach could laugh, though his note wasn’t nearly as riveting as hers, sounded more like one you would expect at a towny bar just this side of closing time on a Friday night. “New moon tonight,” he said.

  “It is?”

  Zach nodded. “Farmers have to know that stuff.”

  She sighed. “Guess my heart doesn’t.”

  “Empty again?”

  “Or too full.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  The messenger thought about that for a few seconds. “Only in the pitch of the howl.”

  “Which pitch is higher?”

  “Oh, the full for sure. Shrill beyond imagining.”

  Zach turned with a smile. “I know that sound.” He faced Tess Horton. Her whole name was Countessa Regal Horton; and she’d always managed to fulfill that auspicious label despite, or perhaps because of, her professor parents’ modest means and eccentric habits. Justin and she had been in an intense relationship years ago—he in a reach above his intellect and she in a stoop to an earthier essence—and she’d attempted suicide when Justin had ended the relationship in a sudden and, in Zach’s estimation, heartless manner. Her father had sent her off to school in Paris just before Zach and Allison got married, and that was the last he’d heard of her—till tonight.

  Her small mouth tilted into a playful tease. “Yours or others’?”

  “What?” Zach said. He was slowly rising toward reality but stopped just short of arriving. Tess had always had that effect on him—an ethereal, otherworldly presence that gently called him into that conspiracy.

  “The shrill howls of overflowing hearts—from you or others?”

  “Oh, always mine.”

  “Echoing off the unyielding walls of the world.” It wasn’t a question. Her face grew briefly grave, though her eyes never lost their vitality—or was it hunger?

  Zach nodded agreement. “Hello, Tess.” He extended his hand.

  She i
gnored the hand and leaned forward and kissed his cheek, quick and fleeting as a child, or an angel.

  Her small apartment in a high-rise in the college town across the river was cluttered with canvases—hung on the walls, leaning against the walls, on easels, one large mural in progress spread across the floor. The finished ones—Zach assumed they were finished—hanging on the walls were garish oils of skittish figures fleeing through stark bare rooms. The works in progress were more haunting—pencil-sketched faces emerging or fading into base coats of beige or olive green, turquoise monochromatic oceans donning lurid horizons.

  Without a word, Tess left him amidst that visual clamor and disappeared into the bedroom. Was he to follow or stay put? He chose the latter course and spun a slow circle to document the gallery. Try as he might, each painting blurred in his mind soon as he turned from it, his mind unwilling—or unable, due to the hour and his inebriation—to store the troubling images.

  Tess emerged a few minutes later shed of her flannel shirt and jeans and hiking boots and dressed in a brightly colored silk kimono and dancer’s slippers.

  “Still The Countessa,” Zach said. It was the name he’d given her in happier times, when he and Allison would double date with her and Justin.

  She laughed. “In here, yes,” she said, gesturing around the apartment. She moved a couple paintings and sat on the couch. She patted the cushion for him to follow. “Out there, I’m Tess. They can’t handle The Countessa.”

  “No?” He sat on the couch where she’d patted, two-thirds of the way to the other end.

  She leaned back against her armrest and swung her legs up onto the couch and across his lap. She purred softly as she nestled down between the throw pillows and the couch back.

  “Why not The Countessa out there?” Zach asked again. It suddenly seemed a tragedy she had to mute her true nature and needs for the world.

  “I tried, remember?” She held forth her arms, hands palm up. A single thin scar—vivid pink against the pale skin, as gut-wrenching in the quiet contrast as the most garish of colors hanging on the wall—traversed each wrist just above the base of her hands. “It didn’t work out.” Her frank stare never faltered.

  Those wrists mesmerized Zach, more by their pale-blue random veins than the straight pink slits. They seemed the most beautiful still life he’d ever seen, simultaneously vulnerable and strong, soft and hardened. He’d not remember any of the paintings around him, but he’d never forget this living one frozen before him. He looked up finally. “I thought that was Justin?”

  She let her arms fall into her lap, her down-turned wrists resuming their privacy. “I thought so too, for a while. But time let me see that Justin was the world, its proxy. I can’t put that much of myself out there, Zach. The world won’t have that, and it will crush me to prove the point.”

  Zach stared at her in silence. She had a model’s high cheekbones and sweeping perfectly curved forehead. Her hair was pulled tight against her skull and collected in a simple bun, invisible at the nape of her neck. At just that moment, frozen against the background of the dark-blue couch, her face appeared as a polished marble bust, refined and cold and androgynous. Then he saw her eyes, bruised yet determined. They refused to let him circumscribe her so easily. Out there, where she was Tess, maybe; but not in here.

  “You know what I mean,” she said with quiet ferocity.

  Zach shook his head. “Not a chance. I’ve been through a lot, but nothing hard as that.”

  She smiled. Her face was so much more beautiful when she smiled. “The hardest part is admitting the loss.”

  He suddenly knew she was right. Something was gone forever from his life, something rare and pure. And he had no idea what to do with the remains.

  The stillness of the whole night—the hour, the room, the alcohol, their unlikely crossing—settled softly over them. The angry cathartic paintings glared down on them. When he could no longer bear the weight, Zach lowered his head to kiss the backs of those hands gathered loosely in her lap. She slowly flipped them over and he kissed her wrists, felt the pulse of those veins, ran his tongue along the cool pink scars.

  The End