Strawberry Jane
The women in the parking lot were yelling again. Glass hit the pavement. Another woman joined in and the argument grew louder.
He growled and rolled over, stiff sheets fighting his every move. Sweating, he sat up and rubbed at his face. No better. He sighed a rough and dreadful sigh; too wet at the throat, too dry at the lips. This just kept getting worse. His eyes went to the gun, then closed; no relief. Open or closed, they felt like boiled onions. He fumbled for the whiskey bottle and took another slug. It burned into his belly like an ember and made him wonder again what kind of poison it was made of. Maybe that didn’t matter. No, that didn’t matter. The real question was more about what he was made of.
This morning, he’d been a man coming home early from a business trip. The guy next to him on the plane had crunched peanuts from crinkly packets and chattered for half an hour about the heat in Arizona. “It was Hell, I tell you. Lord, it was like an oven in Hell,” the man had said, licking salt from his fingers.
It was hot here, too. Oh, yes. He eyed the gun again. Reached for it, changed his mind. He leaned against the headboard and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell was horrible.
The room hadn’t smelled great to start with, had it? No. This was that sort of motel. He’d had no choice: he couldn’t use his credit card. He couldn’t give them his driver’s license. So here he was, wrapped in rough sheets on a hard bed, in a room that had reeked of urine and hookers and everything else even before he’d come along and added his own touch, vomiting whiskey and strawberries first into the toilet and then onto the floor.
Groaning, he reached for the gun again. Why had he eaten the strawberries? What had come over him? At this thought, laughter bubbled out of him in hysterical shrieks. “Oh, that’s right, that’s what I’m worried about. Why I ate all… the… fucking… strawberries.” This time, when his hand felt the gun, he picked it up. It was cold, and he rubbed the barrel against his neck, letting it cool him.
There had been a dozen strawberries, chocolate dipped in patterns. Huge berries, bred for beauty, not flavor. Jane had always loved chocolate-covered strawberries. That was why he’d brought them. It was part of the surprise. So were the roses.
When he rang her doorbell, he’d held the roses in front of his face, hiding behind them like a child, grinning. He didn’t know much, but he knew candy and flowers made his girl happy. She probably wouldn’t notice that he’d already eaten one of the berries on the way over. So what? All the roses were there. He grinned into them, inhaling deeply of their scent.
But when she came, giggling, to the door – before it was even halfway open – she’d said, “Oh, Teddy! You’re so early!”
He’d blinked and lowered the roses. His name wasn’t Teddy. Not even close. Jane had blinked back at him, her jaw slack. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Nothing at all but her high-heels and a mini-apron. He could smell dinner in the oven. The table was set for two. Wine glasses. Candlelight.
She had tried to make him leave, and he’d forced his way into the room. He’d pushed past her to stare at the romantic table setting. Maybe he’d pushed a little rough. He’d only been out of town for three days, after all. He’d come back early to surprise her, and he’d brought flowers, and fat strawberries in drizzled tuxedos. She was supposed to love him, and them. She was supposed to be delighted. But instead, she’d slapped him sharply across his angry face.
And oh, when she’d slapped him…
Now, in the motel room, he traced the edge of the gun along his jaw line, replaying the events in his head, amazed – still – at how far things had gone. Well, that was why he was here now, wasn’t it? That was why he was here in this flophouse with sticky stains on the floor and cracks in the toilet seat and ten-dollar whores fighting in the parking lot.
An oven in Hell, oh Lord. Just like an oven in Hell.
“I’m a rapist. And a murderer,” he whispered at the gun as though it would hear him. “In that order. Please, God, she was alive when I started, right? She was alive when I started.”
She had been, he was sure. Then he’d gotten his hands around her throat good and tight and felt her windpipe fold like a paper cup under his thumbs, and he knew when she died because he felt it happen. He knew. But that hadn’t stopped him. He kept going. He kept going.
Afterwards, he’d eaten the strawberries. All but one of them. He’d left that one, stuffed between her legs. A present for Teddy, when he got there.
He belched. The sour whiskey and strawberry scent wafted up and he felt his stomach lurch again. He glanced down at his chest, covered in scratches and blood. Outside, the fighting women broke apart and slammed doors. In the new silence, he heard sirens. Sirens in the distance, growing closer. They weren’t for him, not yet, not these. But they would be eventually, wouldn’t they? And what then?
What now?
This morning, he’d been a man coming home early from a business trip. A man with a girl who loved strawberries. He’d called her Strawberry Jane.
He put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.