THE ANNIVERSARY WEEKEND
by Keith Rawson

Jeanie had been in the box eight hours; eight hours was a new record.

The longest Raff had kept anyone in there was five hours, after he’d caught his oldest jerking his knob into a pair of his baby sister’s panties.

Sick little shit.

Raff got that his oldest was thirteen and dumb and full-a-cum, but it was just wrong blowing a load into a pair of powder blue underwear with a bunch of care bears frolicking around on the seat.

Eight hours.

When he first stuffed her in there she was set and ready to peel his face off with her fingernails and make a meal of the scraps. She almost did it too until he laid into her hard with a couple swift jabs between her mosquito bite tits.

The first few hours inside, she kept up a steady line of bullshit threatening to chop off his nut sack, put a bullet in his head, cut him up with a chainsaw, blah, blah, blah.

Like the bitch would even know how start up a chain saw, right?

But some time around four o’clock in the morning, she went quiet. No more cussing, no more pounding. He figured she’d finally come down a little and simply passed out from her struggling. Around seven a.m. though, his ass was starting to worry a bit and he was pressing his ear to the top of the box to listen for her breathing. Jeanie was a snorer. In their fifteen some odd years together there hadn’t been a single night when she didn’t sound like a starving brown bear getting ready to inhale a troop of cub scouts, but there wasn’t a sound coming from inside.

By eight thirty he was pacing the linoleum chaining Camel wides.

He’d hit her pretty hard, but goddamn, not hard enough to crush her sternum or collapse a lung or any of that shit. It was ten o’clock now and he needed to make a decision:

Open the box to find Jeanie curled up sleeping, or open the box and figure out what to do with the body.

Shit, he sucked at this crap; this was why he kept Jeanie around, so she could make up his mind for him.

   *     *       *

The box wasn’t originally designed to hold a body.

He’d slapped the 6- foot-by-2-foot plywood box together on a whim after two days of attempting to organize the cluttered practical board counters and oil stained concrete floor of his garage/workshop. Two days of moving the various piles of crap from one corner to another, he finally figured out the solution to his dilemma was all a matter of storage and his sheer lack of it. At first he thought a set of shelves would work best, the whole problem being a lack of basic materials and knowing the limits of his oversized ambition.

Raff suffered from the dual middle age male afflictions of project-itis and I’ll-get-around-to-it later. You know the diseases: thirty or so year-old dude starts in on a bit of carpentry or plumbing with vigor and excitement one day and then spends the next six months blowing off completing said project. Besides, building shelves required him getting into the truck and heading up to the site where the builder had suspended construction on track homes up near Prescott Valley; and besides not wanting to make the thirty minute drive, the cheap fuckers had  two numb nut security guards who thought they were the FBI, so he made due with the scraps he had on hand and knocked the box together in a little under 2 hours.

The idea of using his newly created storage space as a form of punishment came right after he finished up installing the hinges and stepped inside the house for a quick beer. When he came back, he discovered the two boys sitting on top of the box giggling like lunatics as their three year old sister screamed and pounded away at it from inside with all her toddler strength.

Raff came tearing in, swinging wild and knocking both the boys off the box, yanking the lid open, and gently easing his little girl out, cradling her to his chest and making gentle shushing sounds. After she’d calmed down, he sent her along inside the house with orders to grab a cup of grape Kool-aid and watch some cartoons with her mom. She dutifully stomped off, turning her head as she left and sticking out her tongue and giving the boys a raspberry.

The boys knew what was coming; any time they got caught picking on the baby they were going to catch a beating. Instead of lashing out, Raff stared calmly down at his two boys; they could tell he was set to bust a nut; the little blue vein leading into his thin, sandy hair was throbbing and dancing beneath his shallow, pasty skin.

“Stand your asses up.” The boys snapped to like soldiers, standing stiff and rigid, their eyes tracking the movements of Raff’s hands, waiting for the hard flash of horny knuckles connecting with their flesh. But instead of a fist, they watched his finger extend and point to the box.

“Get the fuck inside.”

The boys’ scrambled, at first trying to lay side-by-side, the oldest attempting to spoon his little brother; that shit just wasn’t happening, no way was his oldest going to be rubbing up against his youngest son’s ass. So Raff arranged the boys so each had to curl up in a tight ball; the oldest in the top half, the youngest scrunched down at the bottom. He hadn’t gotten around to installing a lock yet, so he took his nail gun to the lid and sealed them in tight; his chest swelled with something resembling pride when he saw how snuggly the lid fit.

After 4 hours inside the dark with nothing but the stink of saw dust and their own sour breath to keep them company, Raff gently pried the lid off with a crowbar and let the boys out.  The two of them hardly made a peep over the next two weeks after their time inside.

So now, instead of the box being used for lose nails and rusting screw drivers, it was reserved for when the kids started getting mouthy and Raff and Jeanie needed a little peace and quiet after a long day of them running wild. And God knows that at least one of the kids was always talking some kind of shit to him or their Mom or one of them was setting anthills or Barbie dolls on fire and needed to be put in their place; even the baby had spent ten or so minutes inside for spitting Mac-n-cheese all over her mom for no good God damn reason other than spitting it all over her mom.

The box worked real good for keeping the house in line; the real bonus was not having to explain facial bruises to nosy ass teachers anymore.

  *   *   *

Jeanie ended up inside the box ‘cause the old girl just didn’t know when to keep her goddamn mouth shut and she had to go ahead ruin their first weekend alone in God knows how long.

Raff’s Ma had taken the kids up to Flagstaff for a little time in the snow, something she would typically never do. She always had some excuse to why she didn’t want to take her grand kids no where:  The boys were too unruly, the baby too demanding of her time; the snow made her arthritis act up to the point that her hands turned into twisted balled up stumps and stiffen up her back so bad she wouldn’t be able to lay down for a week. Of course, she didn’t want the kids in her house neither; she’d offer the same excuses, except she’d add in there that she didn’t want the kids wrestling and stumbling around and possibly breaking one of her souvenir plates. Cheap pieces of junk, she used to give him and his little brother the exact line of shit back in the day when he was the same age as his oldest and she was just starting to collect ‘em.

“Stop your fucking around before you go and break one of my plates!”

The way she acted, it was like she never wanted anything to do with him, and his clan. But if he went a week of not giving her a call, he would sure as hell hear about it. His Ma drove him up the wall, but the way he figured it, who’s Ma didn’t do that to their kids?

She only took the kids because he claimed it was him and Jeanie’s anniversary and they wanted some time on their own and not have to chase the kids around all weekend.

It took a couple of weeks of coaxing, (and a forty dollar Presidential inaugural commemorative plate.)  but the old girl finally came around, and on top of taking the kids for the weekend, she slipped an envelope into Jeanie’s hands with five twenties in it when she came to pick them up, whispering in Jeanie’s ear to go slip out on her own sometime over the weekend and buy herself something nice; there wasn’t a chance in hell Jeanie was spending that cash on no dress or a pedicure or any shit like that.

A hundred bucks was more than enough to cook up a nice fat batch of tweak.

Truth be told, Raff and Jeanie didn’t exactly know when their anniversary was; they just used it as an excuse to get the kids out of the house and their assholes for a couple of days; the money was just a nice little bonus to go along with their free weekend. Originally, they planned to do nothing more than lay around on the couch watching  rented DVD’s (Maybe even slipping in a porno or two to get themselves worked up) and maybe make the trip into Prescott for Chinese buffet and maybe a couple of beers down on Whiskey Row.

It’d been awhile since they tweaked; almost a couple or few years. Back before the kids (or at least before their baby girl had been born) both of them were sporting righteous  fucking habits, and Raff made their cash by cooking for some crazy asshole down in Phoenix named Raines. It was good cash and it kept ‘em in gack 24-7. But for one reason or another, they just kind of started drifting away from the life.

No real reason, the shit was just getting old, plus, Raines was getting  weird, real hardcore and it scared Raff so bad it gave him the squirts.

But they still liked to party, and besides, the house needed a good scrubbing, and the only way they were going to get around to it was getting good and high.

In Raff’s opinion, he was just about the fastest speed cook in the west.  He could cook up a glorious bouncy yellow ounce of it in around 45 minutes.

Their anniversary stash took just a bit longer mostly because he was out of practice and he wasn’t much in the mood to set him or the house on fire. He

finished up in about an two hours, and he had to admit, when he took his first hit from one the glass pipes Jeanie had stashed away in her underwear drawer, that the batch was probably  the best he’d ever cooked. It was a gorgeous white flake—not the usual yellow urine stain color he produced in rush jobs—that, to the untrained eye, could easily be mistaken for high quality Peruvian marching powder.

And the rush: GODDAMN!

Maybe it was because it’d been a couple of years since his last good jag, but the anniversary stash kicked his ass so hard it nearly knocked him through the kitchen wall and out into the front yard.

Jeanie pretty much had the same reaction.

They loaded three pipes over the course of thirty minutes and after another hour staring off into space and chain smoking; they went bugshit with the cleaning. Jeanie took the kitchens and shitters; Raff the living room and the bedrooms. After a couple hours the place was spotless and he was contemplating going to town and renting a carpet cleaner from Home depot.

Jeanie had other ideas.

She snuck up behind him ass naked and sporting another pipe full.

It’d been three or four months since the last time they screwed, and Raff had to admit, even after pushing out three kids, her skinny ass looked damn fine, especially with the glass dick clamped between her teeth.

They fucked hard.

They fucked like Mormon newly weds. Sloppy wet kisses, changing position’s every four or five minutes amazed at what their bodies could do given the proper motivation. They climbed off each other after a couple of hours stinking of astroglide and asshole, and Jeanie wanted to get out of the house and pour some beers down her throat, and since Raff was no better than zombie whether he was tweaking or not, going out and grabbing a few beers sounded pretty fine to him.

                               *    *   *

Raff was out of smokes now; three packs in 24 hours, his lungs felt like sacks of wet concrete, plus he was starting to hack; it was a nervous tick he’d developed back when he was a kid. When ever he knew he was going to get the shit knocked out of him by his step dad for a bad report card, or for what ever fucked up thing his simple brain could come up with, he’d feel his chest tighten and his breathing would become shallow and his lungs would attempt to come up his throat. The hacking had started in a few hours back. But the lack of smokes was what was really pissing him off.

You come to a point when you’re tweaking, the skag in your system levels off; it’s not that it stops working, but the high isn’t as intense and you need the little extras like smokes to keep a body going. But he wasn’t about to pack himself back into the truck to go and score another deck or two and leave Jeanie all alone.

His lungs seized up again and he coughed hard into his fist; his eyes stinging and watering. He bent over, resting his trembling hands on his knees. Once his breathing calmed, he stared at the box, raw red rage coursing through him.

“You goddamn fucking bitch!”

Raff hit the gas and ran full bore at the box, winding up his right leg, and letting a kick fly into the rough, unfeeling wood. His bare foot connected and his big toe went red and liquid.

   *  *  *

Aces over on Whiskey Row up in Prescott would do the trick just fine for what Jeanie was wanting to do. They shrugged back into their clothes (neither one of them even considered washing the monkey house stench off their bodies, not like anyone at Aces would notice anyway.) and were in the truck and heading up the valley at 80 miles an hour singing along to best of Garth Brooks at top volume. Raff had a pocketed some of the anniversary stash before heading out; it was Saturday night and no doubt there’d be some folks around who were looking to party and they could make his Ma’s hundred bucks back easy.

Aces was the one bar on Whiskey row that hadn’t turned into a pussy joint catering to the college crowd from up north or the tourists from all over. It was the last true biker joint on the strip and when Raff and Jeanie were kids back in high school, it was the one place in town that would actually serve them without the benefit of an ID. Yeah, sometimes the boys got a little busted up by bearded, toothless bikers, and the girls got their titties or asses grabbed, but other than those few minor inconveniences, it was still a great place, and the only place they went to on the rare occasions they had a free night.

Aces was at its Saturday night best; folks in leather and denim crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, the air stinking of sawdust and piss; a cloud of cigarette smoke blanketing the air, despite the fact the state of Arizona had enacted a state wide ban on smoking indoors. (Like a cop would ever show his face in Aces for anything short of a killing.)

As soon as they stepped inside, Jeanie caught sight of her two best friends Marla and Christi and ran over to them for a couple of big hugs and senseless happy babble that only life long friends can share. Both Marla and Christi was a couple of sluts back in high school (Sluts for everyone except him, and God knows he tried getting into their panties on more than a few times.) and they were still a couple of whores now. Raff more or less couldn’t stand the sight of either one of them. So instead of tagging along behind his wife and just standing there all night listening to their bullshit about no good kids and their half a dozen dead beat dads, he let his old dealer instincts kick in so maybe he could unload some the anniversary stash and make a few bucks.

It was never much work unloading product at Aces, all Raff really had to go and do was head to the bar and have a few words with the lead bartender, Will. Will was one of those paranoid mother fuckers who should have given up the life a good ten years ago, but was too fucked up all the time to realize that he was turning his brain into Swiss cheese; and for as long as Raff knew him, the skin and bones, toothless ass wipe had made up code for just about everything from asking about the weather to where you could score a cheap blow job from a hooker; hell, you couldn’t even just order a simple beer from the guy without him getting all shifty eyed and conspirital on your ass. He had to take a couple of minutes trying to remember what Will’s little code was a few years back when Raff was spreading his shit around thick.

“Will, why don’t you gimme a red bull and vodka?” He shouted into Will’s waxy eardrum.

At first, all Will did was squint at him like he was getting ready to take a shit or come out from behind the bar and bust out his teeth with a baseball bat.

“Come on, man, you know what I mean, Will? A red bull and vodka!”

Will finally came around, giggling a little bit and giving Raff a good long look at his black, diseased hole of a mouth.

“Shit, man, I stopped using that one six months back. I was pretty sure the pigs were catching onto it.” He said. “I’ll get right on it. You need anything else?”

“Yeah, how’s about a beer?”

“A beer?”  Will made gestures with his hand like he had some skank bobbing up and down on his balls. “Are you sure? I mean, with your wife here and all?”

“No, Man! Just get me a Budweiser, Dude!”

It didn’t take long for Will to round up a few buyers. Most of them were good old boy bikers and long time customers who’d been trying to coax him out of retirement the past couple of years and were happier than shit to get a piece of his good old fashion pixie dust; they didn’t even mind the fifty bucks a quarter he was charging them. The biggest surprise of the buyers Will lined up for him was Glory Danners.

Glory was the A number one cause of most of his wet dreams during high school. Back then she was all waist length blonde hair, big firm tits, and tight little butthole. She went for the athletic rich boy type back then, even though her and her daddy lived in a rusted out piece of shit single wide trailer. Who knows, maybe she would’ve gone for him if he grew a sack and actually talked with her instead of just staring at her and rubbing his hard on through his jeans pockets.

She didn’t look all that much different from high school. Yeah, she’d sprouted a bit of a muffin top around her middle, and her big glorious fun bags looked like they were doing more than their fair share of drooping, but she was still a knock out.

The only problem with selling to her is the good old girl only had a twenty spot to set herself up with, but he was feeling pretty generous, and he’d made Ma anniversary gift sprout from a mere one hundred to close to four with the sales he’d made to the other customers; so what the hell, he told Glory they could go and share a couple of lines with each other out in the truck and she could keep her twenty bucks to drink with. Glory got all excited and threw a big hug around Raff’s shoulders and they started heading out to the truck. He cut up three big fat lines a piece for the two of them out in the truck and headed back in without a word between the two of them and split apart immediately once they were back inside.

His head was spinning and he failed to notice Jeanie and her two best friends scowling at him from over by the juke box.

Jeanie started in on him about Glory as soon as they were headed out to the truck a few minutes after last call.

“So what’d that bitch?”

“What bitch, baby?”  He asked as he tried looping his arm across her shoulder, she dodged it fast and angry. He’d forgotten all about Glory.

“You know who, you fucking liar! Glory!”

“Oh. . .I don’t know, I think I sold her a couple of lines. . .that’s all.”

She wasn’t buying it. No way were they gone that long just to go and do a couple of lines. He just kept shaking his head, denying what ever was coming out of her mouth. By the time they got home, Jeanie had herself so worked up she was sporting a goatee of foamy white spittle, just like a fucked up old rabies dog.

It probably wasn’t such a hot idea to mention this to her.

Jeanie came at him right as he was unlocking the door between the garage and the kitchen; a flash of red fingernails and gnashing cigarette yellow teeth.

She only managed scratch him once across the neck before he dropped her and dragged her struggling form by the scalp over to the box.

                        *  *  *

Raff writhed and screamed on the floor gripping his ruined big toe for close to ten minutes. .Once he calmed down he built up the courage to take a look at the damage.

Goddamn he’d fucked himself good.

The nail had pushed up and out and stood at a gory, cock-eyed right angle. It also took out a couple of big junks of skin and meat along with it, and he could swear that he saw bone. And so much fucking blood! You’d think from the tacky, thick puddle forming around his foot he’d cut his whole Goddamn leg off.

He dragged himself over to the box, propping his back up against the solid weight of the wood and the body locked inside.

“Baby?” he blubbered, “I think I hurt myself real bad. I’m gonna open up the box. I need you to take a look at it for me, baby?”

Raff fumbled around in his pockets and pulled his key ring out with slick trembling fingers. It took him a couple of minutes to find the right key and slide it home into the lock and snap it open.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so exhausted and hurt, he could’ve better defended himself when threw the lid of the box open and jab at his eye with something sharp and jagged. He did manage to roll to the left with the force of Jeanie popping out of the box like she did, screaming her ass off and a hundred times more pissed than when he’d dragged her in there.

“You stupid fucking asshole!” She was on top of him, all over him. “You leave me in there . . . You leave me in there after you go fucking around on me . . . On our goddamn anniversary!” What ever she was stabbing him with hurt like hell, she was opening him up good. With each blow he’d feel a new cut, a new puncture.

He tried pushing himself up on his elbows, leaving his face completely unprotected; she saw her opening and jabbed hard at his right eye.

The world went red and blank, and he couldn’t figure out if it was him screaming or Jeanie. What he did know was something hot and liquid was dangling from his eye socket and he couldn’t feel Jeanie’s weight on top of him any more. He reached up and felt the thing sliding around on his face; the bitch had put out his eye! He heard Jeanie crying and the garage door rumbling open. No way was the cunt leaving him here to bleed to death!

Raff scrambled to feet, all of his pain gone in a flash of adrenaline; he didn’t even notice his dislodged eye with carpenters nail driven through the middle of it banging against his snarling teeth.

He caught up with Jeanie in three big strides; they were outside now, in front of Raff’s truck. He could feel the sun on his face, the sound of birds. Him and Jeanie should’ve been sleeping right now, dead to the world after another righteous night of fucking after the bar. But here they were, his hand wound through her hair and the other gripping the waist of her jeans shorts, his eyeball sliding around his face.

She gave out a panicked little yelp when he yanked her off her feet and bounced her head off the rusted bumper and grill of his truck. She went stiff, her hands flailing around her head trying to get him to let go of her. He drove her head into the bumper again to teach her not to struggle.

Raff slammed her hard to the ground face first and climber on top of her, getting a good grip around her stick thin neck, and squeezed.

“Daddy!  No!” Such a thin neck, he’d always loved her neck, so . . . what was the fucking word? Elegant? Swan like, some shit like that? “Daddy, stop!”

He stared up from his work and saw his boys, both of them clean scrubbed, their skin pale, mouths and eyes big wide O’s of shock. And there was his little girl, crying, yelling at him to stop; and his Ma, dressed up in her old lady going to church clothes, her arms full with one of those fancy Cost-Co cakes; white cream cheese frosting—Jeanie’s favorite—and written across the top of it in red and gold: HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MOMMY AND DADDY!”

BIO: Keith Rawson lives in the Phoenix, AZ suburb of Gilbert with his wife and daughter. He has had fiction published (or waiting to be published) in such venues as DZ Allen’s Muzzle Flash fiction, PowderBurn Flash, Flashshots, Darkest before the Dawn, A Twist of Noir, Bad Things, Crooked, Pulp Pusher, CrimeWaV.com (podcast), Plots with Guns, Flash Fiction Offensive, and Yellow Mama. He is also working on the final draft of his first novel which is tentatively titled, Retirement. Check out his blog http://bloodyknucklescallusedfingertips.blogspot.com/