Roy by Patti Santucci

I thought killing her would be gruesome, something that would haunt me for the rest of my life. Christ, the way she flirted with Johnny over at The Brass Lantern. He gets us free drinks, don’t he? she used to say. Like in her little mind, she thought spilling her cleavage on the bar was equivalent to pitching in for rent.

And he wasn’t the only one, mind you. Becky gained a bit of momentum once Roy come around. The way he hovered ‘round her like she might fall off her gilded pedestal was enough to make me wanna slap him sideways. I mean, I never thought he was anything to worry about, what with his little toad eyes and his little toad body. But still. The way he looked at her? Man, oh man.   

Roy ain’t never had a girl, ‘cept the ones he paid a premium for. He was just so ugly and so damn weird that women, and most men for that matter, divided themselves into two camps: those repulsed by him and those that pitied him. There was no in between. 

‘Cept for my Becky. They’d sit ‘round his firepit, drinking beers and catching fireflies. She paid no mind to Roy’s gun collection or the way his trailer smelled like formaldehyde and old meat. When Missing Dog and Cat flyers started showing up on light posts and rumors began floating that Roy might have something to do with it, she just waved it off.

“Not my Roy,” she’d say. “He’s as sweet as pie.” She’d stare straight into my eyes and draw out the word pie, egging me on.

Taking care of her took a lot out of me. I worked year-round, six days a week. These calloused hands laid brick, tarred roofs, put up drywall and broke up concrete. Did it all just so that Becky could have a better life than her skank of a mother had. But Becky was never satisfied, giving me the cold shoulder ever since I put down old Sugar. Dog was twelve years old with a tumor in her left front paw the size of a grapefruit.

“It’s a dog. A frickin’ dog, Becky,” I told her. Sometimes that girl had no sense whatsoever.

But she was beautiful. She could wear her Sunday-to-church clothes all buttoned up tight, and every last man would draw her naked in their mind. Pastor Rich included. The way she walked into a room. The way her hair fell ‘cross her breasts. The way she curled those lips into a smile that said: Take me ‘fore I eat you up. Man, oh man.

I could tell, ever since she come into a little money, after her grammy died, that things was changing. She started hanging out more with that little toad. Started getting cocky, saying things like Roy thinks I should go back to school. Roy thinks I should cut my hair short. Roy thinks I oughtta see the world.

“Roy goin’ to pay for all that, let you live here rent free, and throw money at your momma so she can bar hop from jail to rehab?”

I’ve been takin care of her momma ever since she found out Becky finally landed herself a man with a job. Becky shot me that hangdog look of hers and I think that was the first time I started thinking ‘bout how much easier my life would be if she wasn’t in it.

The more Roy come ‘round, the more mouthy she got. Now, I can’t say, for sure, that they ever done the deed, but I do know they was plotting some kind of dark bullshit together. The sudden silence when I’d walk in the living room, the way they’d laugh at some joke then say I’d never understand it. Well, that just made me mad as hell. I mean, don’t pee down my back and tell me it’s raining.

But I lived with it for a while. I thought for sure when the local paper started printing stories ‘bout those missing pets and that reporter started poking ‘round Roy’s place, that Becky’d see what a weird little germ he was, but she seemed to relish in it. She’d hook her arm in Roy’s, like he was some kind of celebrity, and strut with him down to Harry Reid’s hardware store. When he’d try to buy snail bait and antifreeze, she’d giggle like a schoolgirl, nearly wet herself when Harry’d refuse to sell to Roy.

Really got me, you know? She damn near froze me out when I put Sugar down and there she was, cozying up to the neighborhood animal killer. That weird fog that hung on Roy like bad cologne was wearing off on my Becky.

Becky, who’d never been artsy a day in her life, started making these carnival masks. She’d spread out butcher paper on the dining room table, sit on one side. Her bottles of Mod Podge, paint, sequins, feathers, glitter, cardboard forms strewn all crazy-like. Roy on the other side, his cans and bottles of GunSlick foam, WD-40, Hoppes #9 solvent, his bore brush and patches all spaced out perfectly like soldiers at attention. And all pooled in the middle, he’d have his pistols, piled up like some kind of redneck centerpiece.

The whole scene was just too weird. But I gotta admit, Becky got pretty damn good. After she mastered carny masks, she started making ones that looked like celebrities: Snookie, Bristol Palin, Kim Kardashian, shit like that. I reckon folks couldn’t see the irony at my dining room table when Becky started raking in the cash to construct masks that looked like their lost pets.

I saw the shift in Roy. His steps growing longer, his shoulders squaring off under a clean shirt. His movements no longer spastic and small and there were days when, if you didn’t know any better, he looked normal. Why he even got himself a haircut at the Jolly Razor on 43rd.

I hated Roy coming over all the time but then I got to thinking. When they’re here, at least I can keep an eye on them, make sure nothing unsightly occurs and the cash she started bringing in was helping. We was building a little nest egg, you know?

But then shit hit the fan. So, I go to work, right? Like every other goddamn day only this time, my boss tells me that this is the fifth time I’m late this month. One day too many, he adds as he hands me my final paycheck. I tell him we only got one car, that Becky’s been using it to deliver the masks, pick up supplies, shit like that. I remind him how much his wife loved the mask of their missing shih tzu she made them last fall.

He looks at me like I’m one dumb son-of-a-bitch and says, “Listen son, I know the wife hasn’t put it together yet, that simpatico relationship Becky has with Crazy Roy Morgan. And, I never liked that damn dog, was glad to see him go, so I got no beef there. But this little threesome you guys got going on is starting to effect my business.”

“Threesome?” I say. “What’re you talking about?”

Then he says, “Look, you make money any way you want on your own time. But there’s a Home Depot lot on Tenth with plenty of men who’ll show up on time and work twice as hard.”

I drove home, fit to be tied. I stormed through the front door, past the dining room table with all their crap piled on it and followed the rustle coming from the back of the house. The bedroom.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” I said, my teeth gritting so hard, I thought I heard a molar crack.

I rounded the corner and couldn’t believe what I saw. Becky’s bare ass hopping from the waterbed as Johnny from the Brass Lantern reached for his Levis. I couldn’t even make a sound at first and then I started to feel the low rumble of insanity swell inside.

“I’m gonna kill you, you goddamn prick. That’s my wife.” I turned toward Becky who was tying her bathrobe closed, the red one I bought her last Christmas and said, “What the hell, Becky?”

I didn’t hear the front door shut, the footsteps that musta come down the hall. I only remember turning when Roy said, “Hey Beck, I found that plaster you—”

The bag Roy was carrying hit the floor and burst open, a mushroom cloud of white dust settling on our boots. Roy took it all in, his face a case study in betrayal. His eyes moved from Becky to the bed and settled on Johnny’s bare chest, his mussed hair. I watched Roy draw in a long breath knowing the smell of sex, their sex, had spread inside him like one of them flesh eating diseases.

Poor, pitiful Roy. For once in his sorry ass life, he had thought he’d finally found a place where he fit in this big old world. He figured he had gotten the girl of his dreams. And as much shit as he caused me, I’ll admit there were times when I had grown to tolerate the toad so I guess it ain’t no huge leap that he come to think of me as family. And, all the while, he’d found a way to fill that disturbing little part of his mind that always spun off kilter. The missing pets worked out, to his way of thinking, what with Becky benefiting from it and all.

I felt some of that anger drain out of me as I studied Roy’s face. I mean I ain’t never seen a man look so small. I was pissed, no doubt about that. But Roy? Roy was broken. And in my experience, there ain’t nothing more dangerous than a broken man. They ain’t got nothing else to lose.

I swear the snap inside Roy was audible. Minute I felt it, I turned to grab him. But here’s the thing ‘bout small guys like him, they might not be big, but they’re fast little fellas. He slipped right through my arms, a tornado of pasty flesh and stuttering F-bombs.

Johnny started to roll his eyes, thinking that he could squash Roy like a bug. That is until he saw the bowie knife in Roy’s right hand. I tried to pull him off Johnny but Roy was uncontrollable. It was as if all the tormenting he’d endured in his life, all the whippings he musta taken as a kid, all the lockers he musta been stuffed into, all the girls who’d dismissed him, all the bosses who’d fired him, had taken up residence inside Johnny. By the time Roy stopped, his hair stringy and wet, his hands still shaking with rage, he had stabbed Johnny at least twelve times.

Roy was still breathing heavy when he looked at Becky who was crouched and blubbering in the corner. An eerie calm seemed to settle on that boy, like his brain hadn’t quite caught up to what he just done. Everything in the room slowed: Johnny’s blood oozing onto the hardwood floor, the wave of the waterbed sloshing. And Roy, his arms dangling, the knife hanging limp from his right hand. Without saying a word, he pushed past me and headed down the hall. 

Becky come at me on her knees, begging for forgiveness, crying hysterically. She started saying Johnny meant nothing, that she messed up, that she still loved me, shit like that. I stepped away from her and bumped into Roy who was holding one of his .38’s, pointing it right at her heart.

“No, Roy. This won’t help nothing. Give me the gun,” I said, positioning my body between him and Becky. His eyes rose slowly, met mine and what I saw there dropped the temperature in the room. He cocked the trigger and I knew he was fixing to kill her, even if it meant shooting straight through me.

We wrestled, crashing ‘gainst the waterbed, falling to the floor. Roy all wiry and elbows and stronger than I thought possible. When the pistol went off, Roy and I both watched it spin cross the floor.

The gurgle that came from Becky stopped time. She pulled her hand away from her chest, looked at it like she had no idea how so much blood had gotten there. Then she looked at Roy, her eyes brimming and said, “Roy, look what you did.”

But like I said, Roy was broken. He just stood up, looked back at her, his eyes grey and vacant, and walked, real measured-like, down the hall and out the door.

I knew I was the one who’d pulled the trigger, felt my index finger squeeze it just before it hit the floor. It all played out real slow-like in my mind as I dialed 911. Becky didn’t die, not right away anyways, and when the police got there, she told them Roy’d stabbed Johnny and shot her before he runned off. It was easy to play the grieving husband and corroborate her story, most of it being true and all.

They picked up Roy walking down Highway 49, weaving in and out of traffic and he ended up getting life without parole. Funny thing, though. The pets in the neighborhood just kept disappearing.

# # #

Patti Santucci is an emerging artist and writer who lives in Fair Oaks, California. She has been published in American River Review, Piker Press, Literally Stories and previously in Dime Show Review. Recently, she received first place in the 2017 Literary Magazine Competition (Pacific Western Region) for her non-fiction story, “Looking for Signs”.

Photo: Ihor Malytskyi

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