The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

LAST KISS

If you’re like me, there are things you need to tell people, but you can’t get the words out. You want to, but you can’t. The machinery just won’t work, and everything gets all jammed up, churning in your guts long after those people are gone from your life.

You’re stuck with them, and they stay inside you forever.

The things you wanted to say. And, in a way, in memory, the people you wanted to say them to.

All together, stuck inside you forever, and there’s no way to get them out. You can write about them — like I’m doing now — scribble from A to Z and back again, but they’re still with you when you’re done, because writing starts and ends in your guts.

And that’s kind of funny, isn’t it? All that stuff churning inside you, all those people you remember and all those things that you wanted to tell them… it’s funny how it never comes together. I mean, it’s all in there, cataloged and nicely filed, and somehow it seems like you should be able to put it together. After all, you remember the person and you sure as hell remember what you wanted to say. It’s like you should be able to figure out what would have happened had you only said it.

How your life would be different.

How the lives of those other people would be different.

That’s my problem. I keep on trying to figure out what might have been.

Maybe that’s why I still have those dead people stuck inside me.

Maybe that’s why I still have Anelle Carney stuck inside me, too.

We met in high school, of course. Isn’t that where all great American romances start? We shared two classes during our sophomore year, and because my last name is Carter, which is just three letters short of Carney, I sat behind Anelle in both of them.

I was hooked right from the start. She always had a smile for me, Anelle did, and her smile made me feel like someone special. That smile was a toothpaste advertiser’s wet dream — gleaming white teeth surrounded by perfect lips that were somehow just short of inviting. And when Anelle parted those lips and teeth and you heard her voice… Well, it wasn’t the kind of voice you’d expect a teenager to have. It was quiet, but not in a shy way. Kind of sleepy, too — Anelle always talked slowly, like she had all the time in the world, like she thought a lot about the things she said. She didn’t jabber. She considered every word.

That was the same way I talked, back then. Someone told me once that people listen closely to a person who isn’t blabbing all the time. I guess that was part of the reason that I was so quiet.

The other part, the biggest part, was fear.

Anyway, I get nervous and expectant just thinking about the way Anelle made me feel, even now. What was that old Carly Simon song? “Anticipation,” or something like that? Back then, that could have been my theme song. I still remember the funny rush that crept up my spine every time she entered the classroom.

Summer was the worst time, of course. It was hard to keep in touch with her when school was out. No more than three blocks separated our houses, but Anelle’s house stood at the end of a court that was bordered by a dead end street and a cemetery. One way in and one way out — that was her joke. I didn’t know any of Anelle’s neighbors, and I didn’t have any relatives in the boneyard, so it was tough for me to find an excuse to walk by and try to catch a glimpse of her.

I tracked Anelle like I was a bounty hunter. That wasn’t hard, because her dad bought her a brand new Pontiac for her birthday (June 12th, if you care). So I knew her car and I looked for it everywhere, cruising the streets in a bruised Dodge that was my first car. I don’t particularly have any fond memories of that Dodge, apart from the fact that it was the car I drove when I hunted for Anelle.

Anyway, Anelle always used the same gas station, and I hung out there with a buddy, Pete Hatcher, who worked the pumps. Pete didn’t mind my company. He was always fixing up some junker in hopes of making a big resale profit, and I was pretty handy with cars. The guy who owned the station let us use the equipment when the main mechanic wasn’t busy with it, so Pete had a really good deal going in more ways then one.

So the price of seeing Anelle was a little free work. That was okay with me. I didn’t begrudge Pete my labor, because Anelle gassed up that Pontiac pretty often. She never let the gauge fall beneath three-quarters full, like she had some phobia about running out of gas. I’d fill her up myself if Pete was busy. Believe it or not, I even got a rise out of doing that little thing for Anelle. It was nothing compared to the other things I did for her, but it made me feel good in a tingly way I can’t put words to.

That summer I learned a lot about Anelle Carney: where she bought her cheeseburgers (no onions, extra mayo), where she shopped for clothes (jeans and loose blouses, never skirts), which swimming pool she like to hang out at on hot days (she used Coppertone, and I still dream about rubbing it on her). Damn, I remember spending whole afternoons working on a suntan, just because Anelle always had a deep tan and I figured she’d find that attractive.

She liked to go to the library, too. It was easy to figure out when she’d show up there — all I had to do was count three weeks from the day of her last visit, because that’s when her books came due. On due day, I’d hang around reading until she came in. Anelle thought that I was a real bookworm, and I guess I was, though I stuck to Westerns and didn’t sample the glitzy romances that she liked to read.

The best place to catch her was the movie theatre. She had a job there — nights, except for Wednesdays and Thursdays — working behind the candy counter. The deal with her old man was that she had to pay for her own gas and insurance since he’d popped for the new car. One of those lessons in responsibility, I guess.

It was kind of a drag, that job. Anelle didn’t like the people she worked with. The cashier was a bore and the projectionist was always trying to peek down the front of her usherette uniform. So she didn’t like it much, and I didn’t either, though for me her job had its good points.

It was good because I knew exactly where she was most nights, but it was bad because the movie only changed once a week (this was pre-multiplex), so I couldn’t actually see her that often. And on top of that there were bad pictures that summer. Real turkeys. I sat through at least two Robbie Benson movies, endless disaster epics, even some junk about a mule that played football.

I always went on Tuesday night, because the crowd was pretty thin and I knew I’d get a chance to talk to Anelle.

Tuesday night — my big night of the week. Was then. Is now.

It was on a Tuesday night that I kissed Anelle Carney for the first time.

I can’t remember the name of the picture they were showing that night. That’s not so strange, because I only saw about twenty minutes of it. All I remember is that it starred Doug McClure and a pack of rubber dinosaurs.

Anyway, I watched the coming attractions, not wanting to seem too eager about hitting the candy counter. I always liked to wait until the picture got started before I went for popcorn. By then the lobby was clear, leaving Anelle with plenty of time to chat.

It wasn’t long before I lost patience with Doug and his sad rubber pals. I left my seat and headed for the lobby. I remember all that like it was yesterday. Where I sat, what I was wearing. Christ, I even remember checking to see if my fly was zipped before I pushed open the padded doors.

I stepped into the lobby slow and cool, smiling like I knew the movie was a big joke.

No one appreciated my little act.

The lobby was empty.

I walked up to the counter, figuring that Anelle was crouching behind it, stocking paper cups or napkins or something. But she wasn’t there. I turned and glanced at the glassed-in box office, which was a closed booth outside the lobby, thinking that maybe the cashier got sick and Anelle was pulling double duty. But a chunky girl sat there, hunched over the same paperback she’d been reading when I bought my ticket.

I stood there, glancing from the counter to the door of the ladies’ john. No Anelle. Popcorn popped in a big glass case. Hot dogs revolved on little chromed rollers, tanning themselves under orange heat lamps.

No Anelle.

And then I heard her scream.

I dodged around the counter just as an angry roar eclipsed Anelle’s scream. Pure male. Pure rage. There was a narrow doorway between the soda machine and the popcorn popper. Gold letters on the door spelled out MANAGER. I grabbed the knob.

The door was locked.

A muffled voice came from behind the door, pleading. Another voice shouted down the first. “I’ll teach you, you little — ”

I kicked the door. The bottom half flexed, giving everywhere but around the knob and hinges. Something thudded against the other side. The knob moved, and the door opened an inch. I got a glimpse of a green eye, chestnut hair. Then thick fingers tangled in the hair and pulled the face away.

I pushed through the door.

The projectionist stared at me. He had his forearm around Anelle’s neck. Her blue and red usherette blouse was unzipped. Her skin was scratched where he’d ripped off her bra, and the button of her jeans was undone.

I didn’t want to look at those things. I looked into Anelle’s eyes. They were wide open and wilder than eyes should be.

“Close the door, boy,” the projectionist hissed. “I’ve seen the way you look at this little tease. Take a good look now, buddy. There’s enough here for the both of us.”

His right hand kneaded her breast, and I noticed a red crescent where she’d bitten the soft flesh at the base of his thumb. For a second I wondered how much a wound like that would hurt, and then my hands balled into fists.

Anelle’s lips parted. Her teeth parted.

She said my name, and then her perfect teeth sank into the projectionist’s hairy forearm.

He howled and I sprang. The three of us hit the floor together. I could feel Anelle’s breasts pressing against my chest. I could smell her hair and her breath, and her breath did smell like toothpaste.

She rolled away and my fists were flying. The projectionist’s howls became little mewling sounds, then petered out altogether. His face had gone pasty white, and I stopped punching.

Anelle pulled me off him. I realized that I was crying, and I knew that she saw my tears, saw the confusion in my eyes, but I didn’t even care because there was confusion in her eyes, too. Her arms went around me. Again I felt her breasts pressing against my chest.

There was nothing between us but my thin cotton T-shirt.

Anelle Carney kissed me then.

Not a lover’s kiss. Not the kiss I’d dreamed of. But it was Anelle’s kiss. And it was for me.

I closed my eyes. We didn’t do anything but hold each other. When Anelle pulled away, I was ready to tell her everything.

I opened my eyes. Saw a little smear of blood on her chin and wondered if it was hers or the projectionist’s. It rattled me for a second, but it wasn’t going to stop me.

I swallowed. Opened my mouth.

Then the cashier stepped into the room, one finger jammed in her paperback so she wouldn’t lose her place. “I already called the cops.” She gasped, staring down at the projectionist. “Oh, Jesus. I’d better call an ambulance… ”

The district attorney went hard. The projectionist had quite a record, including a rape conviction, so there wasn’t much trouble about it, especially after he lost his head and threatened Anelle right in front of the judge. Anyway, the guy went off to prison. Fairly quickly, fairly quietly.

Anelle and I were minors, so our names were kept out of the papers. The little word that did leak out enhanced my reputation. Some girls saw me as a knight in shining armor. Pete and the other guys I hung out with thought I was a numero uno badass.

Personally, I think the projectionist would have had that heart attack even if I hadn’t touched him. After Anelle bit him the second time, it was pretty obvious that he was going to have to fight the both of us.

I think that scared the shit out of him.

After it was over, I figured things would work out just fine with Anelle. Sure, I hadn’t had a chance to tell her how I felt in the heat of the moment, and I wasn’t seeing much of her now because she’d quit her job at the theatre, but I figured that I’d have plenty of opportunities to set things right once school started.

My folks dragged me off on a two week vacation. Then it was September. The Jerry Lewis telethon came and went. I bought some new jeans and hit the books once again.

Anelle wasn’t in any of my classes. Pretty soon I discovered that she wasn’t in school at all. I didn’t ask anyone what had become of her, because I was afraid of the answer I might get.

I didn’t want to hear that Anelle’s mind had caved in.

I wanted to call her. I sat down and made a big list of things I wanted to ask her, and things she might reply, and things I could say after that. But none of it seemed real. Like I said, writing things down doesn’t work.

So I tried to pick up her trail. I spent a solid week of afternoons working on an old Chevy at the gas station. Anelle didn’t show, and Pete felt so guilty about me single-handedly rebuilding the Chevy’s engine that he actually paid me forty bucks. I spent my evenings at the library, practically sitting on top of the romance paperback rack.

No Anelle.

One night her mother showed up at the library. She was picking out nonfiction, mostly school assignment stuff. I worked up the courage to reintroduce myself — we’d met briefly at the projectionist’s trial. Trying not to seem overly anxious, I asked how Anelle was doing.

“As well as can be expected,” she said. “There’s been a lot of strain, both for Anelle and for the family.”

I asked when Anelle was coming back to school.

“She is in school. She transferred to the Catholic Academy. We thought a girls’ school would be better for Anelle, at least for the time being.”

I could tell that Mrs. Carney didn’t want to say more, so I left it at that.

The next day I cut class and waited for Anelle outside the Catholic Academy.

Funny. It was a Tuesday. Another big one.

The Tuesday I walked Anelle Carney home from school.

She came down the stairs and I started out like I always did, talking about music and movies and books, but that wasn’t what Anelle wanted to talk about.

She opened up to me that day, but looking back on it I think that she would have opened up to any familiar face. She said that she felt like she was the one who’d done something wrong. Her parents, especially her father, had turned into overprotective watchdogs. He’d insisted that she transfer to a girls’ school, and he’d taken her Pontiac away, too.

“Look at me,” she said, pointing at her plaid dress and knee socks. “He’s trying to turn me into a little girl. I’m not a little girl. It’s time for me to start cutting ties, and he’s just tying them tighter.”

In my head, I tried to twist that into some kind of opening, but everything I came up with seemed cliched. We were cutting through the cemetery, and I knew I had to say something soon if I was going to say anything at all.

I slowed my step as we approached her door. My mind slipped into neutral.

“Thanks for walking me home,” she said. “I really needed to talk to someone, and you’re such a good listener.”

I looked up, trying to smile, ready to tell her that she could talk to me any old time, but then I saw the thing rooted on the freshly mown lawn.

A “FOR SALE” sign.

That night I followed the red Pontiac, but this time I was following Anelle’s father.

Even though I’d never met Mr. Carney, I’d always figured that he was a pretty steady guy. He had a good family, a nice house, and a job that allowed him to buy a new car for his daughter on her sixteenth birthday. So it surprised me, how many bars Anelle’s dad hit that night. Not olive and onion bars, either — these were nasty joints out on the highway.

I didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe Mr. Carney had always been a drinker. Or maybe what had happened to Anelle was breaking him up inside.

Either way, the chances of me talking him out of moving seemed ridiculously long. After all, I was a sixteen-year-old kid. I couldn’t just belly up to the bar and buy the old boy a brew, now could I?

So I sat there in the Dodge, and I wrote Mr. Carney a letter. I told him how I felt about his daughter. It was eloquent stuff. I practically asked him for her hand, his blessing. Yep, I got it all down in writing.

It wasn’t hard to get into the Pontiac. Mr. Carney hadn’t locked the door. I figured I’d leave my letter on the dash, where he’d see it real easy.

There was only one problem with that.

Another letter lay on the dashboard.

It was from Mr. Carney’s boss, and it said that his transfer to the east coast was “a rock solid, incontrovertible, done deal.”

All my carefully considered words were nothing compared to that one-paragraph bombshell. I balled up my useless letter and shoved it into the pocket of my new jeans.

An hour later I was safe at home, cleaning brake fluid from under my fingernails.

I guess Anelle could handle her mom pretty well, because things got back to normal after her dad’s funeral. The red Pontiac had been wrapped around a telephone pole along with Mr. Carney, of course, but the insurance money bought Anelle a nice, sensible Volkswagen. The “FOR SALE” sign came down a week after Mr. Carney was laid to rest in the cemetery across the street — another good Tuesday for me — and I remember feeling that destiny was finally on my side.

Not that things were perfect. Even though Anelle had transferred back to public school, she still wasn’t in any of my classes. And I couldn’t hang out at the gas station anymore, because Pete had been fired.

I didn’t feel good about that, because it was my fault. Just two weeks before the crash, Pete had serviced Mr. Carney’s Pontiac. The brake fluid had been changed — Mrs. Carney had a receipt which showed that clearly. Pete was low man on the totem pole, and the owner was tired of him using so much time to work on his junkers, so Pete took the heat.

So I had a tough time keeping up with Anelle. She didn’t show at any of the usual places. Her life was changing fast, and I knew that I had to do something dramatic unless I wanted to be remembered only as part of a bad experience. I remembered what she’d said about “cutting ties,” and I started to get the crazy notion that she’d been talking about me. I thought about her lips and the time that I’d kissed her, and I knew that I’d made too much of it. That kiss had been more like a handshake than a kiss that passes between lovers.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing her. I’d picture her closing her eyes, opening her mouth to mine as I pulled her close… I knew I had to make it happen, and soon.

So I spent more and more time at the library, waiting. It seemed pretty futile, because lately Anelle wasn’t reading romances at her usual clip. I kept thinking about that line in the old Beach Boys tune: See she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now…

One night I got involved in an exciting Western written by a guy named Ray Slater. I wasn’t really expecting Anelle to show up anymore, so I paid more attention to the book than usual, and I finished it just as the librarian started flicking the lights to signal closing time.

I shelved the Western and headed outside, walking on pins and needles because my left foot had gone to sleep while I was reading. As I shuffled through the doorway, I looked up the street and saw a girl walking toward the library. The dull glow of a streetlight shone on her long chestnut hair.

The girl looked a lot like Anelle.

She passed into the shadows that lay between the streetlights, which were set at each corner. Her stride was slow and unhurried, and even in the shadows I could tell that the girl was Anelle. I’d seen that walk of hers in enough dreams to have it memorized.

A car turned the corner and paced her, lagging a few feet behind, its bright lights turning Anelle into a silhouette. I couldn’t tell for sure what make it was — it looked kind of like a Chrysler — only that it had a bad muffler that coughed smoke.

I started down the stairs, my eyes on the car, and I tripped.

My sleepy foot went out from under me. I hit the stairs, hard.

I was up in a second, but the car was gone.

So was Anelle.

All of a sudden I was thinking about the projectionist and the threats he’d screamed at Anelle. I imagined a prison break, a guy dressed in orange con clothes hot-wiring an old Chrysler. Crazy with fear, not feeling the pain of the ankle I’d twisted on the stairs, I half ran, half hopped to my Dodge and peeled rubber, certain that I could catch the other car.

Three blocks later, looking up and down the main drag, I knew I’d lost it. My forehead was damp with sweat. I tried to calm down. I drove straight to Anelle’s house, hoping to put my fears to rest, praying that I’d see her waving to a friend as she opened the front door. But the house was quiet and dark. Even Anelle’s bedroom window was black; her frilly white shades were wide open.

I knew that she wasn’t there, that her room was empty.

I palmed the wheel and came to a stop at the mouth of the court, thinking that I should call the cops.

Something red flashed in the cemetery across the street.

Taillights.

I rolled down the window and smelled heavy exhaust. Burned oil. It was a long shot, but I didn’t have much else. Killing the headlights, I pulled to the curb.

I took a tire iron from under the seat.

I’d guessed correctly. The car was a Chrysler. There were two people in the front seat, chest to chest. They leaned back as one, against the passenger door.

Anelle and Pete Hatcher.

If I would have given it a chance, it might have seemed funny.

All Anelle’s not-so-subtle visits to the gas station, filling a gas tank that was three-quarters full, chatting up Pete the same way I chatted her up at the movies.

All those romance novels that were going unread in the presence of the real thing.

All that free labor I did for good buddy Pete, my unknown rival.

All those kisses he was getting in the front seat of his latest junker.

All those kisses I was missing.

I don’t remember opening the car door, but I remember what I did with the tire iron, and I remember the way Pete whimpered.

And I remember catching up to Anelle on her front lawn after Pete was dead. I grabbed her and held her close on the same spot where the “FOR SALE” sign had stood, thinking about all those things I wanted to tell her and the way I wanted to kiss her and the way I’d seen her kiss Pete.

My fingers locked around her biceps. Panic swam in her green eyes. Her lips trembled.

I said, “There’s something that I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

Those were the last words I ever said.

Anelle’s lips parted.

Her teeth gleamed in the glow of the porch light. Toothpaste advertiser’s wet dreams, every one.

She started to scream then, and I jammed my mouth against hers because I knew this would be my last chance for that special kind of kiss that only lovers share.

I did kiss her, and it was a lover’s kiss.

I held her tight, my mouth to hers, not letting her breathe.

When it was over, I fainted.

They tell me that Anelle passed out at the same time, just a few seconds after she’d swallowed my tongue.