Bertha’s flesh is scabbed from the sea air and the incessant battering of sand carried up the channels of streets even as far as Beddy’s house. Beddy loves Bertha, and would treat her to a new paint job if she could afford it.
Beddy opens the door and tosses her purse onto the front seat. She gets in and starts the engine. After shutting the door, she fastens her seat belt while backing out of the driveway, then sets the windshield wipers at their lowest setting and drives on.
She has too much mental clutter for the instinctual but intricate process of driving. The sidewalk keeps weaving into the road as she makes her way out to the highway. A recycling bin flings itself in front of her. She plows through it and keeps on going, aluminum cans barking on the street behind her. Why can’t she drive on sixth sense muscle impulse alone? Maybe if she had a blindfold she could intuit the road beneath her.
The road meets the highway and she jets along the broad coast through short drifts of sand whipped onto the roadway. Past coveted breaks the surfers had named but she never bothered to know.
What was Todd’s role in this? Was he the getaway driver, or the mastermind? And what’s the difference, really? It’s still a partnership.
She purposefully drove where there would be fewer cars, but simple monotony facilitates thought. The ocean facilitates thought. Who wants to think at a time like this?
Focus. Focus. Focus her negative energy like an instrument of terrifying precision. Strike through the ether. Smite her enemies and snort their smoking flakes of bone.
She coughs. It’s getting harder to swallow. The organ is there again, stretching the muscles of her neck.
It started when she was a kid. One day she went to the hospital complaining she could not swallow, and the doctors x-rayed and shone lights and snaked cameras and said there was nothing in her throat. No obstructions, no growths. Never mind what she felt. They sent her home with an epipen just in case, but she learned on her own how to treat it. If she sank her teeth into her index knuckles, the pain would distract her until the organ started to shrink. Usually, once the blood began to run, she could swallow again.
But she cannot bite her knuckles and still control the car, and so tonight she wails, shakes the steering wheel with both hands, wrings the pleather hoop like a slender neck. Her foot leans in to the accelerator.
Duffy zigzags in front of her car, trying vainly to sprint from death, and she follows his panic like a cool, copper scent trail. His tuxedo burdens him, and he first throws off his jacket then tugs at his bowtie with one hand while looking back at her bearing inexorably down upon him. He must think the bowtie is dampening his speed. He’d be able to get away from her if he just loosened the bowtie. She laughs and, slowing so she won’t run completely over him, nudges him with her front bumper, then brakes. He hits the dirty pavement then picks himself up and keeps running, his hands raw, his white shirt soiled. She repeats this practice, of knocking him down and letting him get up and run again, until she tires of it. Then she runs him down like an errant dog.
She puts the pedal to the floor in sweet release, she is a three ton Swedish steel bullet, fuck them all, fuck them all, vengeance and hot speed, kill them all and let God sort it out. As if he ever does.
She’s at Formal now, and she stalks Kelsey on foot to her car, dangling the mini sledge in her right hand against the back of her thigh. Kelsey is buckled in and about to start the engine when Beddy throws open the door and raises the sledge above her head. All Kelsey can do as it falls is raise her hands in an impotent protective stance. The bones in her left leg separate like graham cracker, and Beddy keeps pounding until thorns of femur tear through the skin and spray plasma all over her and Kelsey, who is shrieking and continuing to say “stop” with her madly wigwagging hands, but what she isn’t doing, and what she should be doing, is unfastening her seatbelt and crawling over the console into the passenger seat, and so Beddy moves on to the other leg…
Beddy does not see the cop car until it is a red light swelling in her rearview mirror.