30 Pieces of Silver

We drove in silence, the snare of raindrops our soundtrack as the headlights of my Impala cut flickering swathes into the oncoming night. I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel, the leather still damp and a little slippery, but thankfully those shivers, that unease was trailing further and further away the closer we got to the state line. Cold gray eyes stared back as I glanced up to the rearview mirror, a drawn and angular face between wet black. A single drop of rain left a tail that reflected in the mirror as it treaded down my forehead, over the blade of my nose and fell. Judith was in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard in an anxious rhythm, her eyes flitting back and forth across the road before us, sneaking sidelong glances my way like she was trying to coax me into a conversation. The runners of mascara had been wiped from her cheeks but her hair still hung damp, framing her face in two wilted curtains of pastel bronze. She moved like a rabbit two feet from the boiler, fidgeting and scratching at her head and behind her ear. I knew it had been hours since she’d had a smoke but I didn’t have any on me and I wasn’t exactly feeling charitable.

“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while, cool down and think, get our heads on straight, you know?” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.

I didn’t reply. My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was a Nine Inch Nails song. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back, we drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time. This was that cover they did for that movie with Bruce Lee’s kid, the old Joy Division song. Not their best, not better than what we heard live, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment.

Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue, but Judith was the kind of girl who heard that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones so bought a Desert Eagle.

We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.

Anna went home with me that night and we’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. Last I heard, she moved to New York and was stripping at some industrial club under the name Anesthesia. I always said I’d pay her a visit one of these days and, considering the circumstances, now was probably as good a time as any.

Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.

So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.
“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into a dappled green and black Matisse.

I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops posted. It just wasn’t cost effective, there wasn’t a good place along the whole road for them to sit and they’d be far better off on a busier thoroughfare than this glorified Indian trail through the Barrens.

“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.

“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”

It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stop. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I settled on switching over to the CD player, and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.

“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.

“I guess so, why?”

“Because all of their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.

“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I handed her a wad of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.

The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”

There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. Fake identification has its risks, but it never really bothered me. There’s a reason they call it a “confidence” game: half of it is looking like you know what the fuck you’re doing. I got back into my Impala and the engine awoke with a throaty roar, drowning out the steady beat of the rain for a few moments. The drive back was brief and empty, same as the drive there.

I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided to get the hell out of dodge and our actual departure. Tossing the strap over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in a futile attempt to keep some part of me dry.

The check-in office for the motel was… actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.

“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.

“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”

He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “Yeah, she’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”

“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain again.

The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways that outstripped physical as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.

“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.

The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material, a large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.

Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in, but I’m not one to judge. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.

“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.

I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.

“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.

“Call me Goldilocks; I always aim for just right.”

“Great.” My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out in the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.

There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.

“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”

“Alright,” I took another mouthful. My brain still screamed at me, asking why I was trying to down a bottle of drain cleaner and paint thinner, but the burn came with less vigor this time.

“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.

“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. Life has run her ragged, so mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.

“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad mumbles seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”

I throw back another shot, “So?”

“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever come back to a normal life; he’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”

I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.

“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.

“What?”

“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk last night.”

Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”

“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”

I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle, “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”

“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it, “It’s thanks to Isaac that I met the god in the cutlery drawer.”

I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new Matisse asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”

“I can’t.” Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “Every time I close my eyes I see Isaac standing there with the steering column hanging out of his chest like some kind of fucking NASCAR cenobite.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.

I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back. Sleeping on the floor never seemed to bode well for me. As it stood, I began to doubt whether we would make it up to see Anna tomorrow.

That is how the world ends, not with ice or in flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side. I closed my eyes with her lips on my neck as I laid there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside.