The Last American Martyr (20 page)

When I finally finished and she’d gotten us both a fresh drink, she sat back down and said, “I don’t know how anybody could go through all that and keep their sanity, Tom.”

“Well…I don’t know how much of my sanity is left or how long it will last, but I’m doing the best I can.”

“You’ll be alright in the end. It’s easy to see you’re a very strong man.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but with no end to all this in sight, I really don’t know how long I can hold out.”

One of the few things I hadn’t told her was about the Glock and what I almost did with it at that Florida rest stop three months earlier. Wanting to bump the conversation in a less somber direction now, I said, “How about you, Julie? You’ve got one heck of a nice place here. This scenery has to be some of God’s finest work, but what brought you all the way out here…to Montana, from New Hampshire?”

Turning her head to the side for a moment, she looked into the towering mountains alongside us. It was if she was searching for something in them. The expression on her face went from sympathetic to nostalgic. Then she looked back at me and said, “It’s more a question of what
pushed me out
of New Hampshire.”

I took a sip of beer, then said, “Maybe it’s something
you
don’t want to talk about. If not, I understand.”

“I was married once also, Tom.”

“I kind of figured that. You’re a very attractive lady.”

Waving me off, she allowed herself a brief smile. But it melted as quickly as it arrived, and she said, “Sixteen years…I was very happy for sixteen years. Then, in the end, the last two years, well, I never in my life saw anybody change like he did.”

“Was it another woman?”

“No, if there was another woman, I didn’t know about her. It was two other things. First, he started gambling. Up until our fourteenth anniversary, he’d never in his life gone to a casino, a racetrack or anyplace like that. Neither had I, but I thought it would be fun. But then I…I guess I blew it.”

“
You
blew it? How do you figure? He was the one with the problem, right?”

”Yes, but I started it all. It was my idea. You see, on our fourteenth, I asked him if he wanted to take a ride down to Connecticut, go to one of the casinos. I figured since it was almost three hours away from where we lived in Portsmouth, we’d spend the night in a motel, have a little getaway. Heck, he didn’t even want to go. He was probably the only man in America to do a stint in the military and never once play cards. He didn’t even know how to play poker.”

“Okayy, but what did you do wrong?”

Julie then paused and lit her second cigarette. She exhaled toward the sky and continued, “I asked him a second time, and he said yes. I know he only agreed because it was our anniversary. He’d always been somewhat considerate. Anyway, we drove down there and the worst possible thing happened.”

“What was that?”

“We won. He won. For a few hours we’d win and lose, a little here and there, but slowly the machines whittled away the hundred and fifty dollars we each came with. I lost all mine, and he only had about thirty dollars left, no, I remember, it was exactly thirty-two. Anyway, I looked at my watch and it was way past dinner time. The time had flown by, and we were both starved. I suggested we give it up and get something to eat. He agreed but wanted to put the last of his money into a five dollar machine. He figured he’d lose it in six pulls and we’d leave. Up to that point, we’d only been playing a dollar a spin.

Anyway, he gets nothing on the first spin, but on the second he wins twenty-three hundred dollars.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“Yes it was, and it didn’t end there. He still had twenty dollars from his original one-fifty, so that left four more spins. After that we were going to take the money and run. But no, on his very last spin he won another nineteen-hundred. We walked out of there with forty-two hundred dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money. You both must have felt pretty good after that, but I think I know where this is going.”

“We had no problems financially, Tom. I did okay teaching at the community college, and he did so-so selling furniture, but it wasn’t cheap living in Portsmouth. Even though we had a modest house, the mortgage payments and taxes were quite high. So was everything else, you know, heating bills and all that.

At any rate, being it was wintertime and there wasn’t all that much to do, two weeks after winning we decided to go back to that casino. This time we lost three-hundred each, and he insisted we take another six from an ATM. Needless to say, we lost. I was cured. I had no desire to go back after that, but he sure did. Since he worked in retail and had mostly weekdays off, he started going to Connecticut while I was teaching. In a year and a half, he went through forty-seven-thousand dollars. Almost everything we’d saved. ”

“Geez, that’s a crime. I’m sure you tried to stop him. You had to know what was going on.”

“Of course, and we started to fight. I begged and pleaded with him to stop at first, but it soon escalated into all-out fights. He started drinking a lot, especially when he couldn’t go gambling. Then things got real ugly, real fast.”

“That gambling can become a real horror,” I said. “If someone has an addictive personality, they can easily get hooked on it. I know people back in New York who became consumed by it. One couple lost their dry-cleaning business, and shortly after that, their marriage went all to hell. No, let me correct that, I know two couples who lost all their money and wound up getting divorced.”

“It gets worse, Tom. You see, when he was drinking he started getting a little quick with his hands. And he was a big guy, six-five.”

“You mean he hit you?”

“At first it started with just shoving.
Just shoving …
would you listen to me? Anyway, after a while, he started coming home from the Connecticut casinos not only broke but drunk as well. It was a miracle he never got caught—driving a hundred and fifty miles in the condition he was in. But he did drive and he did get plenty drunk, and when he’d get home, all hell would break loose. I’d give him all sorts of hell, and he’d get belligerent and right in my face. I got tired of that fast. One night, after it had happened a few times, I put my hands on his chest and told him to get away.”

Julie paused then and shook her head. For a moment she was back in time. I could tell because the hurt was visible all over her delicate face. She managed to keep the corners of her mouth from drooping, but it was easy to see the pain hadn’t completely left her yet. When you are stabbed by the knife of a loved one, their blade is always the sharpest and the wound the deepest.

Her brown eyes were now moist, and that deep hurt reflected clearly in them as she went on, “I only put my hands on his chest, Tom. I didn’t push him. I just laid them there. In a way, they were begging, pleading with him to be the man he had always been. For a long time, he was a thoughtful, good man, and we were very close. Our minds had always been attuned to each other’s. All I wanted was for the gambling and drinking to stop. He was going through our life savings, drifting away from me, and ruining our marriage.”

“I never could comprehend how a man could hit a woman,” I said, as I straightened up on the bench, still looking at Julie alongside me, “especially a good man. I don’t know, I suppose some people, even the ones you’d never suspect, can have a bit of the beast lurking inside them.”

“I suppose,” she said, looking more angry than hurt now. “But his beast broke out the first time he shoved me. We were in our kitchen, my palms on his chest like I said, and he pushed me so hard I flew back and hurt my back on the table. When I hit it, my legs came to a stop, but my back flexed so far back I could barely get out of bed for four days. He pushed me, I don’t know, two or three times after that, and he was always sorry in the morning. But it wasn’t good enough. The irreparable damage had already been done. Then, the last time we went face to face, with my fifteen-year-old daughter standing right there, screaming for us to stop, he slammed me in the side of my face with the heel of his hand. It was just like a punch, Tom, and he knocked me out cold. When I came to he was gone. I called the police, and that was the end. I pressed charges, and he was put away for five years.”

“I don’t know what to say, Julie. I am so sorry. I just don’t understand how…”

“That’s okay,” she interrupted, slowly waving her hand to one side, “I’m long over him now. It’s just that an experience like that, with someone you were so sure you knew, makes it awfully hard to totally trust anyone ever again. I was never what you’d call a gullible person. I’ve always considered myself a pretty good judge of character, but when something like that happens, with somebody you were so close to…well, it pretty much shoots all to hell your faith in people. Can you blame me?”

Of course, I told her I didn’t blame her. After she got us another two drinks, we talked some more. We were getting deeper and deeper into each other’s souls. She told me her daughter, Marcy, was her only child. That they’d moved to Montana six years earlier. Julie’s mother had died when she was in her twenties, and her father passed on shortly after her marriage went all to hell. He’d owned two hardware stores in the Portsmouth area and when he died, Julie and her two sisters sold them and split the proceeds. That’s where she’d gotten the money to buy her Montana place. Once Marcy graduated high school, being young and bored to tears in the country, she went back to New Hampshire. She’d been accepted at Keene State College, and was, by this time, finishing her senior year.

I really enjoyed myself that afternoon. Our conversation had been, by far, the longest I’d had with anyone since Elaina’s death. Even during the two months I’d stayed at Franklin Dewitt’s in Florida, we never spent more than an hour or so conversing. Though Franklin turned out to be a genuine prince, our talks were mostly about guy stuff. With Julie it had been much deeper, and I was finally able to tell somebody about what I’d been through. Not only that, but I was getting very close to this woman and she seemed to feel the same way about me. But when the sun was just about to set behind the mountains, it got cold, and it was time to leave. Though I was curious (so to speak) and thought about it more than once, I hadn’t asked Julie about Sean Garrity’s visits. There were two reasons for this. Number one, who she saw was certainly none of my business; and number two, I knew I had to keep myself from getting too close to Julie Dubois.

But that wall of discipline I was trying to keep intact could not keep out all my emotions. As I walked back to the camper with Solace in the fading daylight, I suddenly felt a stab of jealousy—a sharp, piercing stab. Sean Garrity had entered the clearing from the entry road in his sheriff’s cruiser. He was a good distance away, but I could still see his face beneath the low-tilted brim of his cowboy hat. He saw me, too. I lifted my hand the casual way men do when they say hello. He didn’t react right away. He kept his eyes on me for a moment, as he continued toward Julie’s. Eventually, he gave me a slow nod. It was really a slow half-nod, and there was nothing friendly about it.   

Chapter 19

Over the next month and a half, I didn’t once make eye contact with Garrity again. For one reason or another, he was showing up at Julie’s place far less often. But she and I sure saw quite a bit of each other. She took me horseback riding a few times, which was a first for me. For two full days, I helped her repair the split rail fence around her small corral. She cooked dinner for me several times and since the spring weather was rapidly improving, we spent more and more time together on her back deck.

In the beginning, we talked often about my plans to go to Maine and what I’d do after getting there. Every time one of us brought it up, Julie acted a little sadder, and I’d get a hollow feeling inside that seemed to be swelling. After a while, I made a concentrated effort not to bring the subject up, and if she happened to, I immediately swayed the conversation in a different direction. We were becoming very, very close. The distance I tried to keep between us was constantly shrinking. What was not shrinking was our cerebral and physical attraction to each other. That was undeniable. The more we got together, the harder it got for me to keep Elaina between us. But I was vigilant and would not give in. Then, one evening after that sixth week of my stay, another force came between us.

I was sitting outside the camper with Solace, taking in another peaceful sunset when Sean Garrity rolled into the clearing again. This time he didn’t go to the cabin. He made a right turn and drove across the new grass towards me. I still hadn’t met him and hadn’t allowed myself to ask Julie about him.

When the cruiser got close, I stood up and tried to quiet Solace down. She wouldn't stop. Her barking was fiercer than usual and mixed with growls. I opened the camper door and lifted her inside.

“Hi there,” I said a moment later, ducking down to the passenger window, looking at Garrity on the other side of a computer and an upright rifle.

No answer. Instead he opened his door, stood up, and walked around the front of the car towards me. I just stood there watching. If it wasn’t for his hat, he’d have been about the same height as me. He looked a wee bit bulkier and maybe ten years younger; right about Julie’s age. His sideburns were gray, trimmed close, and he carried himself like a brigadier general.

“Sooo, “he said, standing in front of me, first assessing the camper then sizing me up, “Julie tells me you’re her cousin from back east.”

I had no idea she’d told him that and tried to hide my surprise. Glancing at his wry smile then back at his narrowed eyes, I said, “You’re Sean, right?”

“Yupper, I’m Sean alright.”

“Well, I’m pleased to meet…” I started to say, extending my hand.

But he wouldn’t have any part of it. He put his hands on his hips instead, just above his gun belt, and interrupted, “Look,
friend
, let’s not beat around the bush here. I know you’re not her cousin.”