by David Macpherson
A little after 3 p.m., the chime announced the third customer of the afternoon. I didn’t recognize the car parked in front, a white BMW covered in road salt. A few well-to-do families in the county drove beamers but I hadn’t seen a white one. I turned the radio down as she entered. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, about my age, and even hidden under what I first thought were layers of silk, down, and cashmere, she was a physical beauty. Like royalty, she strolled the two aisles.
“You sell ice cream?” she called out, not looking my way knowing somehow, I, like any man, would be looking at her openly or furtively. She controlled the room.
I hoped she would remove her coat, certain her body would be magnificent. “Aye. Ah, yes, ma’am. In the frozen case by the door.” I tried to maintain my dignity and convey deference but simply regressed to my root dialect.
She looked at me for a moment and made her judgment. “I expected an Indian or Pakistani.” She was right of course. Asians owned most of the convenience stores in the little Midwestern towns. Who knew why?
Her hair was red, her face slightly freckled. Irish perhaps? Yes, very pretty, but an ugly tone of her voice stained her, like the butt of the cigarette in her mouth. And on closer inspection, her clothes didn’t match, like she had found them at the Goodwill store. “Not from the US, I think.”
“No ma’am, I’m a Scot.”
She grimaced. “Close I guess. Nonetheless me boy, still an immigrant, yes?”
The question seemed rhetorical so I didn’t answer.
“Taking our jobs and such. Got a match?”
“No smoking in the store.”
“I see, Scottie,” her hands touching a bag of chips, “this is a healthy store.”
She looked to be passing through and it seemed better to get her moving before something more grotesque might be revealed, like finding a maggot on the underside of a spring green leaf.
She slid open the horizontal door of the freezer and looked at the small round containers of high-end ice cream. I didn’t stock many flavors—the expensive ice cream didn’t sell. She pulled out French vanilla and double fudge chocolate from the case.
At the counter, her eyes were hard on me, the privilege of her directness founded in beauty, money, citizenship, or some gene I never had.
She paid with cash, a twenty, deftly extracted with a snap, from a thick folded bundle of bills.
I placed the ice cream in a yellow plastic bag and handed it to her. “Have a good day.”
She walked toward the door. “You might expand your selection a wee bit, Scottie.” As she opened the door, the icy wind tore off a flier offering help for addicts. She stepped on it as she walked out. My eyes moved to her backside as she left. I walked to the door, picked up the flier and pinned it back on the corkboard.
Until I closed up, no more customers visited. Knowing she wouldn’t leave my mind, she needed a name—Ice Woman, Irish Bitch, and others crossed my mind. After fantasizing sex on the store counter with her, I settled on Red Death—I had been reading Poe.
Later that night, I ate salt and vinegar chips for dinner. I replayed the fantasies, hating myself for living a life of ridiculous fictions that would never come to be. “Rob Chattan, you’d better get a move on,” I said aloud to no one. I had said it to myself a thousand times, echoing my mother and later, my sister.
My store, “The Little Market”, sat on the edge of town a quarter mile from the farm equipment dealership. Gabe City, a town of three thousand in downstate Illinois, had only my shop for the basics. The nearest larger grocery, part of a large chain, was a twenty-mile drive. The franchise was up for sale last year. I nearly bid on it but lost my nerve.
In mid-winter, on the days when the snow skittered like snakes on the highway, the wind whined through the door. The highways and country roads hid the treacherous spots—once you hit the black ice, there was no pulling back. The farmers spent these frigid days in their outbuildings, repairing equipment, or examining their books. Since I had arrived five years back, three had been injured and one killed when equipment they were repairing crushed them.
I knew a number of local families. Sometimes, the husband would buy the milk or cigarettes or ice cream. For others, the wife would stop in. I rarely saw both members of the couple. I’d get a sense of the relationship. “Oh, Tom doesn’t like the preserves. He prefers the jellies. He’s kinda picky like that,” the wife might say with a warm smile, the way some do when describing the minor endearing faults of their partner. You’d think the men would buy the beer but just as often, the woman would hoist a twelve pack or two onto the counter. Or a pint of vodka and nothing else—not the time for light banter. And to complete the spectrum, a few hobbled in, their faces colored by the bruises of their spouse, reminding me of my mother’s face. When these women left the store, I pretended I’d follow them home, my fists hammering their husbands faces, like I imagined beating my old man when he took his drunken swings at my mother. Another fiction. I better get a move on.
I emigrated from Scotland with no plan other than to escape a life of shearing sheep. Though I reminisced about the creamy hay fields in my home country at times, I didn’t miss the months of clouds and mist. This was the story I told curious strangers. I left out the fact that I ran, tail between legs, from my violent home, unable to witness my sister’s truth telling glances after she had broken up another holiday battle between my parents while I cowered in my bedroom. My brogue was fading and I had learned not to react to the snarling teenagers who called me “Laddie” as they walked out the door with their Red Bull and jerky. Something about me, a voice pattern, an odor, placed me trailing the pack, vulnerable and worthy of attack.
I lived in a small apartment behind the store, a cheap afterthought added years after the original building was erected. Through my apartment wall, I could hear the goings on in the store. A window over my kitchen sink faced the gravel parking area behind the building. Further out, a trio of round-topped silos of the grain company interrupted the precise lines of corn that filled the horizon. The single set of tracks behind the grain elevator carried freight trains that hurtled through at random hours, shaking the items in the store like a minor earthquake. I had wondered about hopping the freight, letting it carry me to Chicago or St. Louis or New Orleans, but it never slowed enough for me to jump on.
The Sunday after Red Death visited, the store was painfully slow, the boredom killing me. The news played out like a TV series as if each episode had been written in advance, the sequence of tragedies adjusted by the entertainment moguls to trap us into viewing the next episode. Maybe it really was all fake news.
I closed the store at 4 p.m. and was washing my dinner dish when a doe wandered slowly across the mud and gravel. It was not unusual to see deer pass through. They were plentiful, surviving on corn and beans in summer and fall, and grasses during most other times. But this one, swasted with gray blue fur and ribs like a wash-boarded dirt road, startled me. Though she held her head low, her eyes were still alive. She looked at me, her body frozen, more likely from exhaustion than stillness intended as camouflage. I opened my back door and stepped outside. She was only ten yards away and remained motionless—as if she knew her time was near. Her eyes begged me to put her down. It would have been an easy shot—I kept a handgun behind the counter of the store. I took a step toward her, thinking stupidly I might stroke her thin coat. She snorted and turned from me almost in derision, walking slowly, tail down, toward the grain elevator, and disappeared into the tall weeds that flanked the railroad.
A week later, I was watching reruns of Law and Order in my room when I heard Red Death’s voice through the wall. Annie, a local girl just out of high school, was working the store.
“Where’s your boss?” Even through the wall, her voice grated. I resisted the urge to rush to the store entrance to see her.
“He’s off today.” Annie’s voice was pleasant. She was mature beyond her age, unflappable.
I leaned closer to the wall.
“Where’s he live?”
Annie was quick. “In town. But, he’s away this week in Chicago.”
“Buying more shitty ice cream?”
“No, ma’am. Visiting his sick mom.”
Annie knew my mother had died in Scotland.
“Tell him the ice cream he sold me was crap. A toilet bowl of ice crystals.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll let him know.”
I couldn’t hear anything for a brief period.
“I’d be happy to refund the money if you have a receipt.” It wasn’t much, but the last phrase held a hint of the disrespect of a teenage girl. I had heard it rarely when I trained her. Annie limited it enough to make it endearing, to me, at least.
Red Death smelled the insolence. “You think I keep grocery receipts?”
“No ma’am, I suppose not.”
“You tell Scottie I’ll Yelp a whole pile of turds on his store.”
Annie and I had reviewed our Yelp ratings just last week—it was important to us—though we only had two in the past month. “Yes ma’am. Most of us country folks don’t use the app—more word of mouth around here.”
“Just tell him.”
It was quiet for a few minutes.
I heard the chime of the front door as Red Death left.
Annie giggled for a few seconds followed by “bitch” aloud. Her capacity to toss off insult far exceeded mine. I learned later from Annie that Red Death bought a six-pack of beer, bread and baloney, a box of Lucky Charms, milk, and two rolls of paper towels. She had become a local, a poor match for the town, I thought.
Annie and I were doing inventory later that day when her older brother, Mark, walked in. He was an addict. Annie had told me the details. The usual story—farm accident, pain pills, moving on to heroin. Slightly more interesting was the fact that he had been seeing some older woman for a few months. Annie didn’t know who she was. He had overdosed six months ago. The local EMTs saved him. Annie relayed these facts with bitter judgment—even at nineteen she could be sanctimonious.
Mark had a shy rugged way like he was going to make it. He was in treatment and looked to me to be doing okay. I liked him. He was a man who could turn a woman’s head, but didn’t seem to know it. The heroin had made him vulnerable, a sick creature trailing the pack, but he was catching up.
“How’s it going Mark?” I said. A broad question to most but to Mark, always the question of whether he was clean.
“Doing well. Need some smokes for the road—Marlboro Golds.”
He did look well—had regained some weight. And his eyes had reappeared.
Mark went to rehab in Joliet, about thirty miles away. Every other week, the center gave him his supply of suboxone. He had told me it kept him clean.
Annie saw the drug as just another narcotic she had told me a few weeks ago. “He’s still using.” She made quote signs with her fingers. “But now it’s prescribed. My Dad should’ve beat it out of him.”
I pulled Mark’s cigarettes from the rack behind the counter.
“Hey, Annie,” he said to his sister.
She didn’t look up from counting the cans of soup.
“Still not talking to me?”
Annie offered no reply.
Mark stayed still like the sick deer for a few moments, pitiful, empty. He paid and walked out, his eyes pulled back from where they were when he arrived.
After Mark’s truck pulled away, Annie walked out the door. “Need a break,” she said.
“You need to cut him some slack,” I said after she returned.
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “You’re a nice guy, Mr. Chattan.”
I braced for the summary judgment sure to follow.
“Mark’s an addict. He’ll always be an addict. You think kindness will help him but it won’t. Kindness will just add to his selfishness. The therapy is just bullshit. Bullshit talking. Bullshit pills. Bullshit Narcan in our kitchen drawer. Oh, if he doesn’t kill himself, he’ll do okay. He’s too pretty not to find some girl to take care of him.”
I thought of posing a counter argument—that some addicts recover, that it wasn’t his fault but I didn’t believe I could convince her, much less myself.
A few weeks later, Red Death returned to the store. Cold rain fell on the fields from low fast-moving clouds—Scottish weather. Her arm was in a sling forcing her to place her basket on the floor to add an item. This visit, instead of royalty, she looked like she should carry a mop. She bought two boxes of cereal, one of which slipped out of her basket as she approached the counter. I could have helped her but elected to stay put. She set her basket in front of me, turned back and retrieved the cereal. I waited for her to mention the ice cream again but she met my eyes only once, like she didn’t know me. In her left eye, blood, bright red against the whiteness, startled me. She paid with a twenty again but I did not see the roll of bills this time. She only grunted to my rote “have a good day” and walked out.
Her visit was so bizarre I began to wonder if it had been a dream. And although I had hated her before, it was hard not to pity her now, even though I knew none of her story. Perhaps she was bipolar and I had witnessed only the extremes. Or some other misery had befallen her.
To ease the boredom, I began working out. I wasn’t an exerciser in Scotland—the work needed on the land exhausted me. But in the store, sitting behind a counter for most of the day left me jittery and disgusted at my growing paunch. I started with walks on the gravel roads, named only by coordinates, 700 N, 1500 W, that segmented the land into precise grids. I started to jog, at first for only a few hundred yards but soon not interrupting the run with any walking. My paunch never completely disappeared but the jitteriness was gone.
During an early morning run a couple of weeks after Red Death’s muted return, I left the straight roads of gravel and tried to run along the creek path. A dense fog, a snake of mist through the fields, laced through the oaks and low brush and lay on the creek bed. The water was calm, opaque with silt. Logs on the bank took the shape of sleeping animals. Too uneven for running, I slowed to a walk.
The sick deer lay curled under a large oak near the water. I first mistook it for a large log. I stopped when the animal’s fur shivered. She looked at me like she had behind the store—weighing the pain of bolting versus accepting whatever fate might have brought her in the form of a man. We stared at each other for a minute or so, the wind calm, the birds silent. She stood and seemed to groan in doing so, like a centenarian rising from a low chair. Her fur was caked in mud.
I imagined shooting her. I might carry the pistol on my runs, in case I saw her again. But my handgun was only twenty-two caliber—it might not penetrate the deer’s skull. Jogging with a pistol would be awkward and I would not likely see this animal again while I ran. Practicalities aside, I didn’t have the courage or gumption or whatever it took. I wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. She snorted again looking at me as if irritated—why can’t you find the courage? After turning from me, she limped slowly away along the creek bank until she disappeared into the fog.
When I got back from my run, Red Death’s white BMW was parked out front. I walked into my apartment to towel off and listened through the wall but heard no conversation. Annie had learned who this woman was—Mark was Red Death’s man. Or boy. Annie and her in my store, un-chaperoned, was like a gas leak waiting for a match. As I moved closer to the wall, I was back in Scotland, ear on door, waiting for my parents’ battle, torn between intervening and hiding. I heard soft murmurs, muted by the plaster.
Better get a move on.
The murmurs, indecipherable in tone or content, continued.
Better get a move on.
I don’t know why I decided to get try to intervene. I walked around the building to the front entrance thinking all along I was making a mistake. But like pornography, I wanted to see Red Death again.
As I entered the store, Annie glanced at me from behind the counter, fear in her eyes, her body rigid. Red Death turned her head and then her body to me. She held a gun, a black semi-automatic, in her left hand, her right hand still in the sling. Her grip on the gun awkward, she didn’t point it at me—it just dangled from her hand, as if too heavy for her to control. Her eyes were dull, and again, didn’t seem to recognize me. In a soft voice of resignation, she ordered me behind the counter with Annie. I walked slowly deciding that, unlike TV crime dramas, I would fail at a sudden move to grab her gun.
With Red Death’s eyes turned toward me, Annie pulled my pistol from underneath the counter and aimed it at her head.
“No, Annie,” I said. I cursed myself for leaving my apartment. Red Death could have simply robbed my store and left. There was no need for anyone to get hurt. I imagined Annie and Red Death’s blood mixing underneath the counter.
Red Death, her gun pointing toward the floor, turned back and looked at Annie’s gun. “Go ahead. Do it,” she said not with a voice of bravado but as a plea.
I walked toward Annie. “No,” I said.
Annie clicked off the safety, her eyes moist.
I stopped. “Let it go,” I said.
Red Death looked at the gun that might end her misery. The store was quiet with only the background hum of the freezer audible. She turned and faced me. Through some haze of drugs or withdrawal or depression, she seemed to recognize, appraise me and then hate me for preventing her mercy killing. She walked to the door. The chime rang as she left my store.
We called the police as her BMW pulled away but they were on the other side of the county. Red Death disappeared.
On a cold windy spring day a few weeks later, Mark pulled onto the gravel parking area of my store as I was about to start a run. He told me that Red Death and a pimp or supplier or just another out-of-control man had been found dead in a squalid farmhouse in the next county. “She was into meth,” Mark said, his face blank. I imagined a box of Lucky charms on the kitchen table with two bodies on the floor. The newspaper carried no story—drug deaths are like heart attacks and cancer now, the individual event not worthy as news.
After Mark drove off, I started my run. Half of the fields had been plowed, prepared for planting in a few weeks. The remaining land displayed last year’s grave marks of stubble. My mind works well when I run. Maybe Red Death’s evil came from the meth or some broken circuitry in her brain or an abusive father—I would never know. I was good at making excuses to avoid judgment. On my way back, I walked the creek path again, to escape the wind and look for the deer carcass.
I found her near the spot I had last seen her. By some miracle, she had gained weight, her ribs now hidden, her fur thicker, covering most of her former sickness. As before, she stilled when she saw me.
David Macpherson is a retired internal medicine physician living on a small farm in western Pennsylvania. He began writing fiction in 2016. His fiction has appeared in Scarlet Leaf Review, Adelaide Literary Journal, Front Porch Review, Rind Literary Magazine, Everyday Fiction and Typehouse Literary Magazine.