“Looks like rain.”
Clark grunted to himself. Eugene always thought it looked like rain. He was one of those “glass is half empty, and there’s probably a hole in the bottom” kind of guy.
“Eugene, there ain’t a cloud in the sky, ‘cept for over toward the west, and we ain’t likely to see them come our way, being the wind is blowing in that direction.”
“You don’t know, it could be.”
“Yeah, well if we get rain, I owe you a dollar.”
Eugene and Clark often bet on the small things. It made the small things seem bigger, which gave life a little more meaning somehow.
“Sounds like a plan. So what if I lose?”
“Then you’ll shut the hell up. That’s plenty payment enough for me.”
It was Eugene’s turn to grunt then.
“Fine,” Eugene replied as he moved back into the cabin. Clark took another look toward the clouds and gave a second grunt to assure himself that he would definitely not lose a dollar on this bet – then he joined Eugene back in the cabin.
“What’s for lunch?” Clark asked as he walked from the sun-filled deck.
“There you go askin’ stupid questions again. It’s fish. It’s always fish. It’s always goin’ to be fish!”
There he goes again with that whole half-empty glass shit.
“Fine. We doing it the same way as always?”
“Yeah, Clark. Same fish, same way.”
“Well, at least we’re eating. Could be worse.”
“Eatin’ the same shit every day IS worse. I’m thinking being dead would be better.”
“I really wish this guy would shove a positive thought in his head for once,” Clark thought.
Although the prospect of his eventual demise did occur to Clark on occasion, it’s not something he ruminated on – lest he forget himself.
They ate their fish in the usual way without much chatter between them. Both just stared out the windows of the cabin as they chewed, memorizing the horizon for a reason they could not comprehend.
The night wore on in much the usual way. Not much conversation, just a whole lot of staring and thinking. They thought of their childhood, their memories of better days and happier times. Conquests and failures, light times and dark times were all fodder for the memories that helped to pass the time.
Clark remembered the senior prom where he and Darlene McGovern danced until their dogs barked. Then they kicked off their rented shoes and danced some more.
Eugene remembered his first heartbreak at the hands of Moreen Sweeney. She owned him with her eyes and her playful smile, but she liked the older, more athletic boys. So Eugene and his bookish ways got a pass.
Most of the evening and the next morning slipped by as they often had, with barely a word between them. Finally, the next afternoon, or maybe the one after that, conversation broke out.
“I haven’t been happy in a very long time,” Eugene began as he broke the long-standing silence.
“Yeah. How so?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Crappy wife, crappy kids. I just thought I deserved better. Wife couldn’t keep the house clean worth shit, and the kids just didn’t amount to much of nothin’. And that damn job I had all those years. A toeless monkey coulda done that job. That factory took the best years of my life, then spit me out with not so much as a thank-you Ma’am.
“I just… I just did the best I could, but it seemed like I was always coming up short on everything – especially money. Money was always an issue. Never enough. Soon as I’m thinking we was gettin’ ahead, one of the damn kids needed something, and well, there it went. You just get to a point in your life, look back and think, ‘what was the point?’”
Clark wanted to interject and encourage Eugene, but he could see his point. What’s worse, Clark’s life was a peach compared to Eugene’s. Clark had been married for years to a beautiful wife who adored him. The sun rose and set in her eyes, and he looked forward with great anticipation to their weekly date night. Not that the date would always end with sex, but it did enough times to keep it interesting. Besides, he just liked being with her outside of the normalcy that could swallow everyday life.
Clark’s children loved him as well. They went on adventures when the kids were young and still got together regularly once they were grown to wear laughter like a raincoat as they shared their favorite memories. As far as providing, the family always had everything they ever needed. Sure, they never had enough to travel overseas as Clark desired, but they got along alright.
And Clark’s job was nothing glamorous, either. But he enjoyed the people he worked with and made lifelong friends there. Every week, the gang from the ironworks department were at one of their kid’s birthday parties, sipping on the separate batch of punch they always brewed up for the adults and laughing their fool heads off.
There was a long silence while Clark contemplated beginning a soliloquy about his life that would have rung of bragodocia. But Clark, who always abhorred the blowhards, kept his mums in the garden where they belonged. Eugene seemed content to leave the conversation in the muck at the basin of the forest, but Clark was determined to not let it die there.
“I do miss making love,” Clark blurted out in a clumsy effort to pull the conversation from the mire. “I miss the way my wife felt in my arms. I want to just feel her beneath me and around me. I felt I could swallow her whole at times, and she was in danger of consuming me as well. My one slight from her is that I liked to snuggle afterward and just feel her body against mine. She was prone to feeling suffocated and would roll away within a few minutes. Once, she even heaved me to the floor when I wouldn’t relent the ground I had gained against her beautiful body,” Clark laughed.
“Mine was the same way when it came to snuggling,” Eugene returned. “I admit to the desire, I just never had much of a chance. It seemed my lady wasn’t that interested in me and, I gotta be honest, after so many years, I lost interest in her. But we managed and got along and partnered up when it came time to create a united front with the kids. It wasn’t all romance, but we got the job done.”
Clark was comfortable with where the conversation landed, and they sat for a few moments in silence. Unexpectedly, Eugene decided he wanted to talk some more.
“At least she was faithful,” Eugene ruminated in a sigh that sounded a lot like an afterthought.
“You think your wife was faithful?” Clark asked, in far too accusatory of a tone.
Eugene eyeballed Clark suspiciously.
“Well, yeah. I got no reason to believe otherwise.”
Clark knew this was going to be an uncomfortable conversation, but he felt that Eugene had been fooling himself for far too long. It was time for the old bastard to face his sins, once and for all.
“You know Mary was a flesh and blood woman, right?” Clark began.
“Well, yeah. So what’s your point?”
“And you know that flesh and blood women have emotional needs that tie in with that physical part of them, right.?”
Eugene just gave Clark a blank look – kinda like he was asking him questions in Swahili.
“Eugene,” Clark started. “Your wife was so bored with you she couldn’t stand it. All the endless hours talking about the damn kids and what you were going to have for dinner – she wanted to claw her eyes out. You two stopped being a loving couple only a year or two after your eldest was born. Truth be told, you became roommates. Look, I know Mary acted like it was OK, but it wasn’t. She missed being intimate with you, and she took your emotional absence to mean you didn’t desire her anymore.”
“That’s a damn lie!” Eugene bellowed. “Besides, how would you ever know anything like that?”
“Because we talked, Eugene. We talked and she told me how she felt, and she told me what she needed.”
Eugene anticipated where Clark was going with this, but he bit down on the rage so that it wouldn’t show itself until he was sure of Clark’s destination.
“What are you telling me, Clark?”
Clark hesitated. But there was no use in denying it now.
“I made love to your wife, Eugene. Mad, passionate love. She moaned and screamed and did everything a vibrant woman does when she gives herself completely to someone. And no woman is going to open that way to a man she considers nothing more than a roommate. She needed to know she could let go, and she told me you shamed her when she tried to let go.”
“You lie! She was never unfaithful! She would never do that to me!”
“Well, then you’re a damn idiot, aren’t you.”
Eugene pounced on Clark in a move that defied gravity, and buried his thumbs into Clark’s trachea.
“You killed my life!” Eugene yelled as he bore down on his grip.
“Open your eyes,” Clark gasped. “I saved you! Your life was shit without me!”
Eugene paid no heed to Clark’s pleas. He felt only the despair of a wasted life and the bitterness of betrayal. All the years of quiet desperation forced their way through Eugene’s thumbs and put an end to Clark’s life.
Epilog
The body of Eugene Clark Fitzpatrick was found by a passing freighter from the east coast of Africa. The industrial shipping vessel rode low in the water with roughly three billion items of merchandise that could be produced for a sixth of their selling price. No one on the freighter witnessed what had happened to Eugene Clark Fitzpatrick, they only discovered what was left of him, floating adrift in a sailboat whose mast had broken many months earlier.
It was eventually the coroner who pronounced that the cause of death was the fact that EC Fitzpatrick had somehow swallowed his own tongue. It was likely the only time that this form of death was ever recorded in the analog of fatalities from the Caribbean.
The coroner added to his report that there was an extraordinary amount of saline in the victim’s bloodstream. This indicated that the victim had either drunk seawater or urine in order to stay hydrated.
The coroner confirmed that this level of saline would have undoubtedly caused madness, flights of delusion, and fits of schizophrenia.