Read Online You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook - Free Book Online Page A

I can fake many things—greetings, farewells, I can chuckle on cue, but I can’t fake a good night’s sleep. I went out, walked around the hem of the sea and up and down the one road I knew.
    When I came back inside, she was at the door. She kneeled down and untied the wet laces of my shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I lifted my feet, one after the other, so she could peel off my drenched socks. I pulled her wrist until she stood up. I steered her down the hallway. She tripped and fell to her knees. I yanked her to her feet again. She was limp, insubstantial as a scarecrow. I hooked my elbow around her neck, tightening my hold. I dug myother forearm into her shoulder blades to guide her. In the back room I shoved her onto the bed. I snapped her bikini underpants off her legs and tossed them. She started stuttering elementary words, fearful words, which sounded so clean and genuine, I was impressed. Her honesty aroused me. I fucked her the way I wanted. I can only describe it this way: I fucked her keenly. Then I started over. She sniffled at penetration, during, and in between. If it was rape, Lane never said so, but I guess it was. She cried out throughout our soulless endeavor. “Oh, God,” she said, then she just said, “God,” without any recognizable inflection, without faith or blame or surprise.
    I pulled the car into the crowded parking lot of a small rock-and-roll club that looked like an old Esso station with the garage bays cemented up.
    “I’m not going in there,” she said. “I’m late for a party. They sent invitations.”
    “I’ll engrave you one now,” I said. I took my knife out of the glove box, a small blade I used for gutting and scaling fish. I saw it impressed her somehow. She didn’t know the difference between a weapon and a utensil. I put it in my pocket beside the exiled king, the unknown soldier. I told her she would like the band, the Swimming Pool Cues. “Now that’s a band with a sense of humor,” I said.
    “Only for a while. Then you promise we’ll go straight to the party,” she said.
    Lane knew that the party depended on her presence. She was happy to be a little tardy. She would enjoy their notice upon her arrival, their relief and excitement at seeing her. The pages don’t turn without her.
    The place was thick with smoke, as if Hollywood had placed its smudge pots and dry ice in all the niches. The band was loud, clean, using the same four chords to enhance the heartfelt in everything. I was suddenly happy just about the music, and, for a few blesssed moments she didn’t figure in it. As usual, men gawked at my scar. I was competitively handsome until they noticed my disfigurement, then I was a curiosity, a shock. Soon they saw Lane. The crowded tables, the men pinched against the horse-shoe bar, dropped out of their conversations in a hushed, spasmodic response to her beauty.
    Lane was with me.
    People couldn’t ignore us, one on one, and coupled we really buzzed the crowd. It was a gut reaction sort of thing. Tonight she had tied her hair up and it made her look like every guy’s favorite grammar-school teacher. And who is teach’s date tonight—a
GQ
Frankenstein’s Monster.
    That night must have been hard on the band; the crowd seemed irritable and unwilling to follow their ideas. “Is this the Swimming Pool Cues?” I asked a man at the bar.
    “Beats me,” he said. He noticed my face, the deep line running down my forehead, through my right eye, down my cheek and jumping two inches to begin again at my throat. “Hey, Ron, look at the scarface,” the man said.
    I was turning away, but the patron was drunk and his curiosity had him. He wouldn’t let me get back to where Lane waited and watched. I was quite familiar with comments about my scar. It was a provoking sight, a perfectly straight line, almost a cleft, that halved my face and intensified its features. The scar made me appear twice as hard, twice as edgy or sly, twice as