Sweet Lucinda

Lucinda, long-legged and golden haired, waltzing down the sidewalk. Headed to the park, she says. A party's happening, of sorts. High heels flexed her skinny calves. Big, chocolate doe eyes reel me in. She pauses, hand on hip, and waits while I don my tweed jacket and fill my flask with sweet, sweet bourbon. Arms interlocked, we commenced. The orange sun is falling slowly and an October crispness is verging. Lucinda's an inch or two taller than me, lean and sleek, but I wear her boastfully like a medal. Trumpets spurt and guitars ring and drums attack the night with sound. Electric voices moan and bodies sway as one, dancing on the St Augustine. We pass the flask back and forth, warming the insides. Blending into the mix of people, Lucinda's hips shaking and her pulling me closer. She grinds against my leg and slips her tongue into my mouth. She's warm and sweet, like her Alabama drawl. My Tuscaloosan Princess. The band is grooving and the stars fell on us. Hiked skirt, she leaves a wet spot on my thigh. "Tonight, we feast!" I shout, oddly. She looks at me and rolls her browns and I hope I didn't ruin our rendezvous I have plotted, solely. A sensationalist by nature, she placed my hand under her skirt to a sopping cavern and then suddenly bolts, seeking cover in the herd. Shocked, I don't chase, figuring her to be embarrassed by the gaping wet orifice. I danced drunkenly alone achieving stares from all eyes. Later, worried, I began searching for my debutante asking strangers if they have by chance seen my blonde friend. Finally, I was informed I might be able to find her by the giant oak tree behind the stage. This person smirking as they spoke. I rushed to the tree, behind the stage. I stumbled upon a great orgy, my Lucinda in the midst, taken by two homely looking gent's high fiving each other, penetrating hairy organs into her. Beauty begets disgust. I violently snatched her from the beastly entanglement and caressed her sweaty cheeks. "Sweet Lucinda. Forgive me. This is my fault!" Laughing and crying she slaps me and agrees. Said she saw my stunned face as I felt her and it horrified her, abashedly. Said she received drinks from strange hands while caught in the crowd and accepted with hopes of forgetting what had happened but she got drunk, and horny. "I will kill those hillbilly's!" says I. "Please do." she cried. I ran home feverishly and grabbed my 20 gauge Remington and my cigarettes. I filled my jacket with shells and cursed the moon as I hurried back. Lucinda was balled up, naked still, arms wrapped around bony knees, just as I left her. The two hillbilly's were drinking Old Milwaukee and dancing, shirtless, with two fat women, giant breasts falling out of their tank tops. They saw my crazed face and the shotgun and raised their hands as if I were a cop. I chuckled. "Don't shoot!" they yelled. I caught one in the neck and the other in the face, exploding flesh. They fell in a pile of blood and bones. The two fat women hovered over them wailing. Acting like wives. Smoke and gun oil seeped into my nose and I was manly. A savior. I scooped up Lucinda and we smoked Camels on the sidewalk to my house. Sirens rang as I fell into her, deep, and we rolled in sheets as blue lights came through the windows. She begged for me to take her rear, so I did. She took it all and wanted more, more. I had no more. She accepted that. Months passed by like speeding cars. Me and Lucinda got married in Biloxi where a few of my people still ambled. She had never seen any ocean before and she fell in love with the rolling brown waves and the dirty sand of Harrison County, where I built my castles in the 80s. Afternoons, she baked under the sun in her bantam bikini and I caught fish from the pier. We stayed in a tiny motel and I watched free HBO as she loved me down there, sloppily. Four days straight, loaded on strawberry wine, Lucinda's tanned body lived naked in our room and we embraced hard, to the bone, like a storm thrashing about. Bodies weary and ravaged. Loose in the streets at night under the flashing marquees we were a couple of birds with eyes full of youth. In Harrah's, I won $500 playing blackjack and Lucinda hung on to every sweet word and sentence I offered her, like a child to a mother's hand. We were a lovely couple, her with her legs and heighth, and me with my mysterious European looks. We drank scotch and listened to a colored jazz band bop with sweaty energy and jerk with real feeling, their caramel glazed skin glistening under the dim lights in the casino bar, until the rising sun pulled us out into its unforgiving shine, us being barbarians of gloom. Hung-over, we drove home defeated and red-eyed. But married. The Toyota trembled on the highway and Lucinda slept with barefeet on the dashboard, as we sped. Biloxi cried when I took my fresh-faced Alabama bride from its sandy grasp. A pink sky bleeding in my rear view, just another memory.      I bought a trumpet upon our arrival home and practiced nearly every day. My lips bled and cracked and looked sad. Lucinda became a neat housewife and gave me her rear most anytime. Trim and tan legs all summer in her shorts, and brown toes too. Perfect and symmetrical. She planted flowers and owned the yard and her skin was salty. Rocking in our chairs we guzzled iced sweet tea as birds perched in our pecan trees. I played my trumpet for her and she sat at my feet, longingly, with misty eyes as the stars speckled down on this young affair we brandished bravely. I didn't deserve her. She deserved everything. The powdery Georgia moon was full blown and Lucinda led me to our rumpled sheets and straddled me with tension until we came together, and cried humorously.   Our landlord is a retired Greek physicist who wears polarized sunglasses with his bushy tufts poking out his polo shirts. He stares at my wife behind his sunglasses and I want to strangle him. Needs the rent, he says. I write him his check and he's gone. His Mercedes leaving in a rush of exhaust with its high grade fuel exploding blurry fumes. An easy wind blows through my wife's yellow waves and she's shocking. No wonder the gawking from the Greek. A cheerleader in high school who read difficult novels and experienced with boys before any of her friends had thought too. Still limber, she does the splits for me in our bedroom and chants a hoarse cheer repeatedly. We ate our eggs together and drank black coffee with a newspaper between us. My Hogs lost to her Dawgs and she's glowing with augustness for her dear Alma Mater. I'm not even a blemish on the campus of the jagged Ozarks where I root for my Razorbacks. Dropping out after only a few courses, realizing my genius over the tweed-coated, pipe-smoking professors who taught, because they couldn't do, who peered from podiums with their borrowed ideas and practiced poetry that allured teenage queens with supple lips and dumb eyes back to their stale apartments strewn with beloved books they haven't opened, but own, achieving the literary status needed to seduce said teenage queens. Spite tastes like rotten lemons. "You'll be late for work, honey." Lucinda piped. "Aw, babe. Don't be pushy." I kissed her forehead hard and rose from the table grunting in my pajamas angrily. "Dear wife. Do you not remember my saving you that October evening by the old oak tree from the two rapist brothers with the enormous wives who enjoyed watching their husbands with something pretty and delicate as you? Do you not remember the sirens wailing but me keeping you safe, and warm even, from the chilled night? Do you not remember?"   Tears dribbled down her cheeks and I knew I was ridiculous. I destroyed her beauty and Lucinda was plain and expended now. I stole her brilliance. I detest drama but I am drama. "I'm sorry, love. Forgive me. My words are cowards, as am I. Please cause me pain. Show me you care!" I shouted.     She spoke not a word and smiled at me with lusty eyes and a wet mouth. With strong hands she yanked my shorts down and assaulted my swollen member with vigor and purpose. Pulling and twisting with both hands until I bursted on her ample breasts. She rubbed it in like lotion and lay on the floor and slept in a mess. I have deflated my young wife. My abused lover in a pile at my feet, snoring. All because my own memory is perfect and remembers too much. All because the Old Milwaukee brothers were violent and hungry for my sweet Lucinda. All because a past is forever and never fades. The past feels like a guilty verdict and in return needs punishment. Only by association she is. A smoking gun and a bloody linoleum floor relieves her of my misery. Goodbye, lover.     Later. With shaky hands I grasped her thin ankles and drug her through the desolate house, her nakedness very befitting for the occasion.  A brush-stroked line of crimson chased her tangled mess of bloody hair across the floor like a reddened mop. Her sloe-hued eyes no longer vibrant and curious; now just bereft of life, glazed and cold as the winter wind stinging the window which framed the lambent moon outside in the black. Down the steps we thud, death among us already. The season's blanket of rust-colored sumac leaves flickered with gusts that swirled around us like a fleeting tornado, scant and undeveloped. Windy laments were sung for us. Shouted, almost. The shovel sat against the shed boasting with a purposeful look about it. Maybe a tunnel of light descended down to reveal this sacred instrument needed to finalize this selfish act of evil. It's really unclear to me. Laboriously, I unearthed the strong scent of dirt and rocks and made a neat pile of it. Icy sweat raced down the inside of my shirt, from the armpit; tickling my ribs. My muscles corded and strained for my faded bride. Only for her, I told myself innocently as I peered down at her with a strange necrophilia urge crawling under my clammy skin. She seemed so beautiful, and glowing too. Her legs longer. Her skin smoother, and so on. I decided against the urge and gathered her up into my burning arms. Her body heavier as gravity pulled. I placed her in the minor rectangle and threw the loose dirt and rocks upon her graying nude body. I am a sick soldier of love, grieving self-inflicted loss and horror. Stricken with a lapsing judgment of myself. No mirror reveals the truth in my face, quarter-aged and semi-handsome. A mound of bruise-colored dirt now represents my fallen lady; a sunken Alabaman with treasures clasped to her chest, a last breath exhausted by the dust that fell loosely on her lips. Something like remorse perched upon my shoulders as I unsteadily tramped up the steps into the bleak house, but I wouldn't turn around to face it. Never. It would lurk there forever.  A reminder of her slender, lengthy legs that tied knots around my waist and her flawless toes all lining up in order and depressing slightly like steps going down. Tender breasts and a perky ass buried beneath my ignorant anger. Such a devastating loss, such a loss. My tears are dry like a bone. Grass will grow over that earthly mound concealing, cosmetically at least, the death at thine hands. But the presence of Lucinda dances through the yard swinging on limbs with her dipping arches like a Russian ballerina. Face powdered and painted. The rushing dramatics of an ill-begotten symphony bursting through the shadows of the bent and distorted trees with haunting melodies and staccatos. A loud silence. The loudest, I say. I sat at the dining room table sipping old bourbon from a coffee cup and smoking cigarettes watching fixedly the dried streak of blood that curved into the kitchen, as if it might slither away like a snake, abruptly. The acrid smell of a taken life rose to the ceiling fan and was distributed throughout, settling onto the furniture like a fine film of impalpable dust. The swirling natural characteristics of the cherry stained oak table spinned me out of my mind; into a fitful maze of feelings like perfectly trimmed hedges with the little red berries floating amongst the piercing bushes. I, drunk and dripping with language, held the attention of the lonesome air where there were no ears to reach with the verbal epitaph that hung on the end of my tongue. Dearest, Lucinda. I am terror, embalmed for thee. Imperishable from the weight of love you left me with. A bedraggled specter of my own self. So, who really got death?