Black Cat Weekly #93

Chapter 7-2

Mercy took her time revealing herself to me, sharing her stories. I took my time too. It was five days before I told her about Stevie. I thought I had cried all the tears I had for him, but telling Mercy made it new and raw again, and she held me as I found there were a lot more.

When I was all cried out, we held hands, lying on our backs and looking up into the sky. It was the wee hours of the morning, and we were on the roof of Music’s Last Stand in a big sleeping bag she kept in the Bug. She liked being under the stars, even though we couldn’t see very many of them with the town’s lights in the way. It’s why she wanted to end up in Arizona. Out there, she said, there were hardly any lights at all, and you could see the whole Milky Way, spread out just for you.

“So the record’s still there,” she said, after a time. “Hidden in your old closet.”

“Yes. When I have my own place, where it can be safe, I’ll go get it. I don’t want to carry it around. It’s all I have of him.”

“Well,” she said. “We’d better go get it soon.”

I took a moment to savor the we and then looked at her silhouette in the darkness. “Why?”

we “I’m about ready to move on. And you can’t leave it behind.”

“You want me to come with you?” I didn’t know how to think a thought that good.

Mercy laughed.

“Oh,” she said, “pretty woman.” And she rolled and reached for me.

We went to the house two days later, at a time I was pretty sure my father would be at work. He was a warehouse foreman, and his shifts sometimes got moved around, but early afternoons had generally been a safe time to be at the house even back before Stevie left. I thought the house looked smaller than I remembered, shabbier. As far as I was concerned, the place was already receding into my past.

The inside was a mess. I’d given up cleaning for him months ago, and there was a smell I didn’t remember, a combination of dirty laundry, empty beer cans, and full trash cans. I opened a window to get some air circulating and led Mercy to the back of the house, resisting the urge to hurry. I wasn’t trespassing. This was my home too, and if this was going to be my last time in it, I wasn’t going to sneak.

My room felt hollow, staged, and I realized it had been a long time since anyone had really lived there. It was like a museum exhibit of what a girl’s room might have looked like in an unimaginable past. Mercy drifted along, looking at old school portraits and sketches from my high school art class. I could tell she sensed it too.

I remembered a cheap suitcase I’d had for sleepovers in grade school, still under the bed. “I’ll get the record,” I told Mercy. “Will you pack some clothes?” I showed her the drawers where she would find things that still fit. In the closet, I knelt and did the tricky push and slide, the only way to move the loose floorboard.

The record was still there. I realized I’d been afraid he would have found it and started another fire. I set it by the door and looked at the other treasures-in-hiding. A glass piggy bank full of pennies. A doll my father had called ugly and threatened to throw away. A journal I’d written two entries in and then stopped, lacking the language to express the things I was feeling. And then three paperbacks that had expressed them too well, paperbacks I had slipped into the waistband of my skirt and smuggled past the bookstore register, heart pounding. I picked up the top one. The title was Private Rooms, and the blurb on the cover asked, “What turn in the road sends normal women down the twisted paths of lesbian l**t?”

Private RoomsI turned to show the book to Mercy and saw my father standing in the doorway.

Mercy was folding my underwear, her back to the door. I dropped the book, and at the sound she looked up at my face and then spun to see him.

He was still a big man, but the hard muscle that had defined him was beginning to soften, and his stomach bulged a little against his shirt. The tight buzz cut was iron gray now. I’d known these things, known he was getting old, but seeing him now, with Mercy there, was like seeing him for the first time.

He didn’t look at me or Mercy. He looked at the record.

“Guess I missed one,” he said. Somebody who didn’t know him might think he sounded mild, thoughtful.

“It’s mine.” I picked up the record and stood, my back to the wall. “Stevie gave it to me.”

“It wasn’t his to give,” my father said. “Everything he had became mine when he died. If I want that record, you’ll damn well give it to me.”

“I won’t. It’s mine.” I was breathing hard, but I made myself think of Mercy and of Stevie. “I’m leaving. For good.”

He shook his head, and for the first time looked at Mercy. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Mercy.” She sounded calm. Resolved. “I’m in love with your daughter.”

For a second, I forgot to breathe again.

My father’s face twisted. “Don’t be disgusting. You’re not going to bring your sickness into my family.”

my“We’re just here for a few of Lila’s things. Then we’ll be leaving.”

“You will be. Not her.” He looked back at me. “Give me that record.”

I put it behind my back. “No.”

“You think I can’t take it? I’m not that old yet.” He took a step forward. Immediately Mercy glided between us. She held up her left hand in a stop gesture and with the right hand pulled her switchblade from her jacket pocket and flicked it open.

stopHe stopped, staring at the knife and then her.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Mercy said. “But we are leaving, and we are taking the record.”

I find myself back in that moment, all the time, in my dreams. The three of us, frozen in place, all of us waiting to see what would happen.

After a second, I stepped away from the wall and stood right behind Mercy, putting my hand on her hip to let her know I was there. My father watched me do that, looked at my hand, then turned his back and walked out of the room.

Beneath my hand I felt the tension in Mercy marginally ease. “Hurry,” she said. “Before he comes back.” I went to the bed and put the record in the suitcase and closed it. She hadn’t gotten to all the clothes, but I didn’t care. I wanted out of this room, out of this house.

I took her hand. “Let’s go,” I said.

We walked down the hall. Maybe everything would have been all right if we’d gone into the garage and left by the back way. But we went the way we’d come, into the living room, and my father was sitting in the chair he always sat in, and in his hand was a g*n.

He lifted it and pointed it at us. “Sit on the couch,” he said. “Right now.”

Mercy hesitated, just a beat, and he pulled the trigger. There was the loudest bang I’d ever heard, and I swear I heard the bullet pass through the space between our heads. We both jumped.

“Couch,” he said again.

We moved to the couch and sat. I put the suitcase between my feet.

“Don’t do this,” I said. “Where did you even get a g*n?”

“I’ll let you know when you can talk,” he said. “Toss the knife on the table here in front of me.”

Mercy tossed the knife gently. It came to rest on the coffee table a foot and a half in front of my father. I saw he was sweating.

“Did you know that they’re less likely to take only children?” he asked.

Mercy and I looked at each other, confused.

“The draft,” he said. “They’ll try not to take an only child.” He looked at me. “First you took my wife. She died trying to bring you into the world. Then you took my son. If he’d stayed an only child, I’d still have him.”

I could hear Mercy’s breathing. I wanted to take her hand, but I was afraid. I would die before I let him hurt her. What terrified me was, I was sure, entirely sure, she was thinking the same thing.

“You took everything,” he said. “And now you’re going to, what, shame me? Take my good name too? Make sure everyone knows I raised a p*****t?”

everything“Dad,” I said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Just let us go,” Mercy said. “We’ll never come back. Nobody will know.”

“I’ll know,” he said.

“We love each other,” I said.

“Oh, I can see that,” he said, his lips twisting. “If you call that love.”

“Yes,” Mercy said. “We do.”

He shook his head. “You took everything from me,” he said again. “So now I’m going to take everything from you.”

I pulled my feet back and leaned forward, preparing to jump at him, to put my body between the g*n and Mercy, but instead of lifting the g*n, he picked up the phone on the little side table by his chair. Working left handed, he dialed 0.

“Operator,” he said. “Give me the police. This is an emergency.”

Now he did lift the g*n, pointing it at us.

“Police,” he said, his voice rushed, panicky. “My name is Tony Benson. I live at 435 Sycamore. I just came home and found a woman here with my daughter. Her name is Mercy, and she’s robbing the place. She has a knife. A switchblade—yes, she is threatening me. Listen, I think she’s brainwashed my daughter. She’s some kind of sick p*****t, and my daughter says they’re in love, but I think this Mercy woman has her all turned around. She’s a good girl, she’s not like that. Please come. I think this Mercy wants to hurt me. I’ve got a g*n, and I fired a shot to scare her, but I only had the one bullet. Please come fast. I think she’s going to—”

He broke off and dropped the phone to the floor. For the first time I saw he had a handkerchief. He leaned forward with it and grabbed Mercy’s knife. She understood a second before I did and jumped for him, too late. Looking at me, smiling for the first time I could remember, he brought the knife up and cut his own throat.

I told my story, again and again, to everyone, even when I knew they weren’t listening. I told them Mercy had tried to save him, that she was covered in his blood because she’d tried to hold it in him with her bare hands. I told them he had been lying, we weren’t robbing the place, we didn’t threaten him. None of it mattered. His call to the police had been recorded, and as soon as the jury heard brainwashed it was all over. The prosecutor was happy to remind them of the women who’d sat outside the courthouse during Charlie Manson’s trial proclaiming their love, making up alibis, still willing to kill for him. Now our little town had its very own lesbian Manson, and a martyred father who had tried to save his little girl. Every cop and reporter in town preferred that story.

brainwashedSo did the jury.

The one saving grace turned out to be the g*n. Because my father had it, the lawyer appointed to Mercy’s case argued there was an element of self-defense and got murder reduced to manslaughter. With good behavior, Mercy will be out in June of 1983.

Five years down. Six more years to wait.

I visit every week. The guards have gotten used to me. They let us hold hands across the table. At first, Mercy told me not to wait for her, that I was throwing my life away. Now she holds my hand and we count the remaining days together.

I sold the house and everything in it. I still have Stevie’s record. I live in a tiny apartment, work at the record store, and save every penny, except for what it takes to keep Mercy’s Bug running. In my spare time I go to the library and read up on possible places to live in Arizona and the economics of running an independent bookstore.

One of the things everyone loves about “Oh, Pretty Woman” is the irresistible opening guitar riff, a stuttering, immediately repeated rendition of the opening notes of the progression that drives the rest of the record. Record store legend says it sounds like a mistake because it was, the guitarist not quite getting the full riff right the first time through. Orbison decided to keep it, and that gleeful little false start became the key to the record. That’s how I think of the week Mercy and I had together. A little false start before the real music begins.

I’ll be there in 1983, with the Bug fully gassed and ready for the road, a route to Arizona marked out in that same old atlas. The door will open and there she’ll be, a few lines at the corners of her eyes, a touch of gray in the pompadour, but that same gliding step that every guard will turn to look at. I’ll hold out my arms, and my Mercy will come walking.

Back to me.

Joseph S. Walker lives in Indiana and teaches college literature and composition courses. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Tough, and a number of other magazines and anthologies, including three consecutive editions of The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award and the Derringer Award and has won the Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction. He also won the Al Blanchard Award in 2019 and 2021. Follow him on Twitter @JSWalkerAuthor and visit his website at jswalkerauthor.com.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery MagazineEllery Queen’s Mystery MagazineMystery WeeklyToughThe Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year