Dave Materna

Pre-mortem

“I don’t understand you,” he said and shot her in the head. He’d been creepin’ about for some time so it finally felt good. The snowfall on the streets was soft and quiet as he crept away to find his car down the block and vandalized. Parked there for maybe ten minutes. And now the mirror was torn off and the driver’s-side window smashed. I can’t do nothin’ he thought and sulked for a second.

A second later came a woman ‘round the corner, not bleeding but looking as if she should be and running from a nun with a knife. He jumped into the car in the nick of time. The nun slipped and slid down the sidewalk and stopped herself by plunging the knife into the ice like a mountain-climber.

The running woman was black and white in all the right places and got in the car and said “I gotta go”

“What’s that fragrance?”

“Meat. Salt. Whatever”

“Oh. Yeah.” He started the car. The nun got up and lashed at the window with her Bowie knife. She finally fell over and they zoomed off in the wreck, trailing sparks.

It was the best decision they could have made. He drove out past the houses and bones and streetlights into the dark and found a place to pull over.

“I can’t talk to you right now,” she said. “I just quit the nunnery. The nun-hood.” She tried a kiss.

“Okay.” He got out and opened the trunk. He took out a box kite and assembled it in the beams of car light. Snow was thick on the bare branches and he thought for a moment about heading south.

“What’s your name?” she hollered from the smashed-out window.

“Jake,” he answered. He fired off a round from the gun and tried to fly the box kite in the winter air. Jake ran up and down the road to get the kite aloft. A puff of wind chill finally took it and he stood on the road, away from the lights, and flew the box kite while he hummed an old tune.

“There’s something I’d better tell you,” she hollered through the smashed out window as Jake flew the kite in the dark.

“Nope. Don’t,” he said.

Headlights appeared and came down the road toward them. The car went past spraying slush and Jake let the kite go. It flew off to nest in a nearby tree as he got back in.

“I’m Gertrude,” she said, but you can call me Ruby.” The lights were coming back.

“That’s what you had to tell me?” The car pulled up behind them. A wolf climbed out with a tree monkey on his shoulder.

“Not so fast,” said the wolf. The tree monkey snarled. The wolf looked at Jake then at Ruby. “Hell, I’d eat her,” he said to Jake. “Oh, and ‘go fly a kite’ is merely an expression.” The tree monkey, a water-eater, whispered in the wolf’s ear. Murder. Killer.

The wolf looked at Ruby. “Don’t look at me,” she said, “I’m a nun.” She lit a smoke.

“Uh huh” said the wolf licking his chops. The tree monkey grinned like a tree monkey can and jumped through the smashed out window into the smoky car.
Take me with you, he rasped.

“Okay,” said Jake as he sped off to leave the wolf without his monkey.

The monkey climbed down and clung to Ruby’s chest.

WOWGODDAMNIT, Ruby said.

“My whole fucking life is a wreck,” the monkey said.

“We’re desperate. Get used to it.” Jake grabbed the monkey by the scruff of the neck and placed it neatly in the back seat. He squirted and squirmed a bit but then seemed to get used to it. Ruby took off her habit. Red hair fell loose and damp across her face and fired her green eyes. “You may be desperate,” she said, “I just needed a ride away from the nun-hood.”

“Too late,” said Jake. “The wolf’s behind us now. And gaining.”

“Yep,” squealed the monkey from the back seat. “He does that.”

Jake swerved down the dirt street spitting snow from worn-out tires. The wolf was indeed gaining. Up ahead was a fork in the road.

“Left,” screamed the monkey from the back seat.

“Right,” said Ruby from the passenger side. She grabbed the wheel and pulled it hard and the car went right in the flash of lights. Cops had lined the old road in wait. Jake slowed and stopped.

“Get out,” he told Ruby, “and take the monkey.”

“You were never right,” Ruby said.

“And I was never wrong,” said Jake. She slammed the car door shut and the monkey stood up on her left shoulder and waved his paw. I never dream about my teeth anymore he whispered in Ruby’s ear.

Jake ran the cop blockade in his big black Oldsmobile. He knew the wolf was in hot pursuit, so he moved fast and forward.

“I should’a not shot my girl like that,” Jake said aloud while he drove and whipped up the winding gravel road, running from the wolf and the eight cop cars.

One by one the flashing lights were left behind in his rearview mirror as Jake sped on in the big car while Ruby and the little tree monkey watched all the cop-lights and tail-lights and sirens dissolve in the mist over the faraway hills into the winter night.

Only one car remained, idling a hundred feet back with the headlights still blazing in the falling snow. Ruby walked with the tree monkey on her shoulder to the empty car and got in. She put her habit back on and turned off the motor. They sat and watched through the windshield and waited.

Jake looked again in his mirror as the last of the lights dwindled and went out, blinking off like bug lights—all gone now in the dark night. Lonesome.

“I shouldn’t-a killed her that way,” Jake mumbled again as he checked his mirror.

First he saw the ears. Next he saw the eyes. Then he saw the fangs. Strands of drool ran thick, streaming from a grinning jaw.

“That’s what I thought as well,” said the wolf from the back seat. “You should’a done it like this.”
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