Running Into Trouble Read online

  Of course, the way things were going, Matt might leave him in the middle of the woods with no way to get home, except for a long, blister-intensive run through the dark in the loafers that Hell had bought for him last year.

  “What’s happening? The winner of the Death March wants to know what’s happening with one of the little people?”

  Matt sped up and swerved slightly, apparently trying to intimidate Eli with his terrible driving. But Eli saw a glimmer of hope, an indication of a genuine misunderstanding. Matt was attributing their estrangement to the fact that he’d unaccountably won the Death March, rather than Haggie’s trash talk about Hell. This was perhaps the first problem he’d encountered all day that he could work with.

  -Helen Kale-

  Under her bed in a locked strongbox, Helen kept a small collection of books that she would be mortified for anyone to see in her possession. Her unspeakable library consisted exclusively of paperbacks with colorful covers featuring happy pastels and calligraphy. Their titles involved men, women, planets, how to, and pseudo-psychological diagnoses. Most of the time, Helen let them gather dust and periodically contemplated donating them to the salvation army two towns over, or just burning them at the Hockville dump.

  But tonight Eli had left without even a word to her. It was, she thought, the first step in a process of distancing that could only culminate in Eli leaving her forever, making it just that much more likely that she’d wind up a lonely old Cat Lady. She had to stop the decay of their relationship before it gained momentum like a boulder crashing and smashing its way down a steep hill. All she needed was the right plan.

  She’d had a plan this afternoon. And it had worked, too, except for the sudden shift in her mood borne of a feeling, as ever-present and crazy making as a mosquito’s distinctive hum, that Eli wasn’t giving her enough. Enough love, enough affection, enough effort, enough caring, enough sex. Eli gave her these things, usually in homeopathic doses. She knew objectively that a little something was better nothing, and that a little something was much better than smelling lots of dirty litter boxes. But somehow she couldn’t stop demanding more. Oh well, she thought, I’ll just have to exercise more self-control.

  The first book she opened, The Love Almanac, combined astrology with numerology to produce “love forecasts.” She looked up Eli’s star sign, rising sign, cusp sign, as well as his mother’s number, his birth number, and his passion number. She did the same for herself. Then she copied all this information, plus the current date and the approximate longitude and latitude of her current location, into a detailed worksheet that took longer than most income tax forms to complete. The end result was the number 271, which was the page in the “common conflicts” section of the book where hopeful prose told Helen she would find some answers.

  At that point, Helen went to make some tea. The mathematical exercises she’d just done had calmed her mind. Putting in dogged effort towards a goal was Helen’s comfort zone, and the fact that she’d spent more than an hour tracking down obscure bits of information and filling it into a grid made her feel productive and in control, like she was actually doing something instead of just passively waiting for her angry boyfriend to finally come home.

  Bringing the hot tea into her bedroom and placing it on the bedside table, she sat down on her bed and picked up the Love Almanac. She touched its cover and savored a small frisson of unlikely hope, similar to what she felt on the rare occasions she would buy a lottery ticket and listen to the winning numbers on the radio as she drove to work. She took a sip of tea and burned her tongue. Then she turned on the small television at the foot of the bed and started surfing through the channels. She decided to wait a while to look up the supposed answer to her problems and hang onto her hope for just a little longer.

  -Eli Hawthorne-

  “So, what you’re saying is…you weren’t avoiding me because you had a swelled head, you were avoiding me because you thought I’d said a bunch of crap about your girlfriend?” asked Matt as his SUV barreled down the winding road on the way to Bob Robertson’s house.

  “That’s about it,” said Eli, relieved that Matt seemed to understand the logic of his argument, which, like Matt himself, was fairly simple.

  Matt paused, apparently to cogitate before rendering judgment. “Yeah,” he said, nodding slightly, “I get that.”

  “Good,” said Eli, exhaling.

  “But, you know, I think you were being a little oversensitive. I mean, what about that time you got all the guys to call me DoorMatt, back when I first met Agnes? Did you see me having a spaz attack?”

  “It’s not really the same—” said Eli, and then he stopped himself. “No, I mean yeah. I totally see your point.”

  “So then—holy shit!”

  -Jennifer Champion-

  “So, what do you think about older men?”

  Jennifer groaned. She wasn’t sure whether or not she was dreaming. She was lying horizontally on a soft surface—probably in bed. Her mouth tasted like it was lined with alcohol-flavored felt, and her head throbbed with one of those motion-sensitive headaches that ruthlessly punished even the slightest movement. She figured that she must be at home, in her own bed, and the vaguely familiar man’s voice must be the aural residue of a bad dream.

  “Hey, honey, are you okay?”

  The voice was annoyingly persistent and now Jennifer noticed that it was accompanied by a sharp smell blending stale sweat with a harsh masculine cologne. Even worse, though, was that someone had started rubbing her back and shoulders with a heavy, jostling hand, somehow encouraging an unseen but all-too-corporeal ice pick to plunge rhythmically in and out of her eye. And then there was the nausea.

  “Stop that, or I’m going to puke!” Jennifer groaned, instinctively rolling her body away from the rough but insinuating hands.

  The mere act of speaking had caused the sine wave of pain in her head to merge into a long, drawn out scream. Jennifer reached out her hands and grabbed a pillow, which she used to cover her head.

  “Oh, c’mon, I’m not that bad,” said the voice in a wheedling tone that cut through the pillow’s thick down filling and was starting to really piss off Jennifer. A heavy hand landed on her back and roosted there like a fat, malignant bird.

  Reluctantly, Jennifer removed the pillow from her head and opened her eyes, cringing from the sudden exposure to light. She blinked several times, forcing herself to focus. Old, withered arms and a brown neck with crepe paper folds poked out of an old, faded 1998 vintage Death March T-shirt. A pot belly, about the size of a small cantaloupe, pushed the T-shirt out, giving the stylized grim reaper that was the official Death March logo a bad case of scoliosis.

  With a barely audible sigh, she lifted her aching eyes to a man’s long, narrow face. Thin, rosy lips bracketed by long, deeply-set simian creases grinned at her, forming a steep U-shaped curve. Weather-beaten cheeks glowed pink under a layer of gray stubble. An invisible string tied bright, hungry eyes to Jennifer’s midsection. Yes, she realized, it’s Bob Robertson. I’m at the Thing, I’ve drunk way too much (stupid, stupid, stupid), and now crusty old Bob Robertson is staring at me like he wants to get laid.

  “Bob, go away, or I really am going to vomit,” she said in a small, tight voice. “This is your final warning.”

  Jennifer glared at Bob while leaning her head over the side of the bed, as if puking really were imminent. She vaguely remembered that Bob Robertson, who’d separated from his wife about a year ago, was rumored to be working his way through the R&M club women in classic mid-life crisis mode—or, at least, trying to. According to the latest gossip, he’d started with fortysomething Sue Dawson, but had no success, as he’d reminded her too much of her ex-husband. Next, he moved on to a couple of professionally pretty thirtysomethings, who liked the idea of dating a guy who had money. But he lost traction as soon as they realized that they wouldn’t be able to actually count his abs.

  Lately, he’d been making overtures to the twentysomethings, hoping to
find someone unspoiled and open-minded who could appreciate his body, his bank account, and his hard-won wisdom, which included a hyper-awareness of the perfidy of women. Jennifer, he’d thought, was an ideal candidate. As far as he knew, she hadn’t had a boyfriend for something like two years, so she had to be horny as hell and, therefore, not too picky. And she had a tight little body, although her face was a little too innocent wide-eyed pixie for his taste. But she’d sucked down the wine, one glass after another, and woozily draped herself over him on the dance floor. He'd figured he had a chance.

  He just couldn’t understand why she was so unreceptive now. Between his property and his cars and his investments, he was worth over four million dollars. Plus he kept in shape (at least for a man of his age), saw a therapist every two weeks, and dutifully paid his full half of the tuition payments for his college-aged son who lived with his first wife in freakin’ Vancouver. He wondered if having won the Death March had given Jennifer an oversized ego. Maybe she thought she was too good for him. And maybe, just maybe, she was the kind of unfeeling girl who sought out male attention, not out of any liking for the man in question, but rather to fertilize the fragile flower her self-esteem.

  Fragile flower my ass, he thought. This woman’s self-esteem was more like the kudzu he’d seen at his second mother-in-law’s crumbling home in Louisiana, an overpowering, demonically healthy weed that filled entire riverbeds and choked more retiring species to death.

  “You’re too good for everyone, right?” he whispered, taking in Jennifer’s flat tummy and the shape of her long, muscular legs under the white sheet. “Too fast?”

  “Wha—” stammered Jennifer, trying to ignore another riff of syncopated head pain. “I don’t—”

  “Never mind,” said Bob, cutting her off. Just like a woman, she was going to make excuses for her bad behavior instead of just apologizing for being an alcoholic bitchy tease who was taking advantage of his hospitality.

  “Fast or slow, you women and your orifices are all the same.”

  With a disgusted guffaw, Bob stood up and watched Jennifer’s flushed face arrange itself into expressions of shock, sickness, and rage. Good, he thought, now she’s had a little taste of how I feel tonight.

  “Just pulling your leg,” he said, before Jennifer’s sick brain could cobble together a response. “Glad you’re such a good sport. People are so over-sensitive these days.”

  -Helen Kale-

  Giant tomatoes were taking over Los Angeles. And The Love Almanac forecast clear blue skies if only Helen could rein in her controlling Scorpio tendencies and exude a more Aquarian aura of acceptance and receptivity. “When your Sagittarian man-child chafes against the confines of domestic routine, let him fly free. He’ll come back to the nest when he’s ready, and he’ll stay longer, once he’s sure that he’ll be nurtured instead of pressured.”

  Why did every single advice book tell her to smile sweetly and do nothing? It was like she wasn’t allowed to want anything, that having desires made her a bad, bad woman who deserved to be alone for the rest of her life. She was willing to do anything to keep Eli: cook better meals, learn bedroom circus acts, delve into his unexplored issues, go to couple’s therapy, spend more time running with him, buy him a new computer, climb Mt. Overreach naked in the middle of winter, anything except for passively waiting around for his delicate feelings to change. And if that made her a control freak, so fucking be it.

  Helen watched the tomatoes roll down wide streets and crush cars. The radioactive tomatoes knew exactly what they wanted—to grow large and strong and to crush the puny humans. They wouldn’t listen to any stupid advice book counseling them to be “as open and soft as a mature, overblown rose.” Now the tomatoes were crushing trailer homes that must have left behind by some tornado. The continuous destruction was pretty repetitive, but anything was better than local news. She closed The Love Almanac and tossed it onto the floor. She was really going to throw it out this time.

  But, having swallowed five cups of tea in rapid succession, Helen was energized and hyper alert. She had to do something. After thinking for a few moments, she opened her laptop. There had to be an action-oriented plan for fixing a dysfunctional relationship somewhere on the Internet.

  -Eli Hawthorne-

  The chances must have been infinitesimal. But, somehow, he’d gotten pretty cosmically unlucky for a single day. Matt had been rounding a corner, talking about the grill he and Haggie had just bought and the barbecue they were eagerly planning, when some large animal—maybe a deer or a Great Dane?—darted into the road. Matt, like Hell, had instinctively jerked the steering wheel, causing his precious SUV to spin out and then roll onto its side where it remained, as helpless as a turtle on its back.

  The cops, an ambulance, a fire truck, and a tow truck—it was still a slow night in the Notch—arrived almost instantaneously after a call from Matt’s cell phone, and they quickly righted the SUV as two firemen debated the relative safety of SUVs and minivans.

  Matt sat on a gurney positioned at the back of the ambulance. He looked sheepish, as though he were slightly embarrassed by his swollen, tender arm that the paramedic said was almost certainly broken.

  “I am so sorry, man,” he said, looking into the night and avoiding Eli’s strangely bright eyes. “I am so sorry.”

  “It’s, it’s—”

  Eli tried to form words, but all he could do was try to master an unexpected laughter that rapidly became convulsive gasps. Two accidents in one day, he thought, it’s unbelievable. Soon, Eli was doubled over and shaking. The whole thing was hilarious.

  “Man, are you okay? The paramedic is right over—”

  “No, no,” said Eli, taking a deep breath and wiping tears away from his eyes. “It’s just so funny. You spun out at, like, the same exact place where Hell crashed. You’ve got to admit, it’s fuckin’ funny.”

  Matt looked shocked. Eli was laughing at the seriously expensive damage to his Explorer. Although the car was nominally his, Agnes would probably shell out for the repairs, but not after making him suffer in all kinds of subtle ways. This was objectively not funny. And neither was his broken arm, which was starting to assert itself with odd little jabbing pains.

  “Do you mean funny-strange or funny-hah-hah?”

  “Both, I guess,” said Eli cautiously, trying not to giggle. “It’s just bizarre that you would have an accident in the same place where Hell crashed earlier.”

  Matt nodded, now thinking furiously about his wounded SUV, Agnes’ inevitably vocal reaction when she had to pick him and Eli at the hospital, and the pain in his arm.

  Eli, aware Matt’s attention was wandering, looked around, watching the flashing lights of all the different emergency vehicles meld into an impromptu lightshow. He knew he should probably feel awful about Matt’s arm and his wrecked vehicle, but all he felt was an electrified lightness, a manic freedom that he thought might have something to do with escaping death not once, but twice, in a single evening.

  He considered going home, where Hell would be awake, drinking cup after cup of caffeinated tea because “it’s relaxing,” going over everything that Eli had ever done wrong in her head until she’d composed a well argued opening statement for an all-night trial. By the time he got home, she would be an agitated Medea, flushed with righteous indignation and prosecutorial fury. He wanted to go anywhere but home to Hell.

  “Hey Rosie, can you believe this?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Officer Rosen and his partner, a tall good-looking guy with a football player’s build and a vacant expression, shook Eli’s hand, one after the other.

  “Your luck must really suck,” said Officer Rosen in a voice tinged with awe. “Or maybe it’s really good. You’re real lucky you’re okay, man.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Eli paused and then turned slightly pink. “But he isn’t,” he said, pointing at Matt, who had been loaded into the ambulance.

  “Bummer,” said Officer Rosen, with what he hoped was
an appropriately sad expression on his face.

  “Real shame,” added the good-looking cop whose name was Jim.

  Several seconds went by as the three men tried to think of something else to say. Just wandering off, they each figured, would be impolite. Then Rosie looked up.

  “So, Eli, can I give you a ride somewhere?”

  “Actually,” said Eli, glancing at Matt and imagining a frigid encounter with Haggie at the hospital, “you could. That is, if Matt will be okay going to the hospital by himself.”

  “No problem, dude,” said Matt, relieved that Eli would not be meeting Agnes tonight after all.

  “So,” asked Officer Rosen, “where do you want to go?”

  -Helen Kale-

  After ten cups of tea and three hours on the Internet, Helen was a vibrating menace. She’d stopped being angry with Eli—he was The One, after all—and she’d given up on finding a way to fix her relationship in five steps or less. Now she was starting to wonder if something had happened to Eli after he left the house. If he’d gone for a run, he could be lying alone somewhere in the woods with a broken leg or a sprained ankle. Or he could be slowly bleeding to death after fending off a savage attack by a mountain lion.