“Do you know why I love small towns, Darrel?”

I’d been trying to sleep since we left Garden City that morning, but every time I nodded off, Deirdre woke me with some inane remark about a squashed prairie dog on the side of the road or a herd of tumbleweeds. I might not have minded had it not been for the five cop cars that came screaming into the hotel parking lot last night around midnight, and they didn’t leave until sun-up. I’d stayed awake the whole time, watching them work the crime scene at the room across the parking lot from ours. Deirdre slept. Around one o’clock, two bedraggled officers had knocked on our door and asked me if I heard any gunshots, or if I’d seen anyone suspicious. I’d said no to both.

Answering questions about my own suicide was exhilarating; at least until I saw the paramedics carrying the bodies to the ambulance on stretchers. Crimson stained the white drop cloths. Until now, Dee and I had never awoken in the same hotel we checked into the previous night, so I’d never seen myself dead, even from a distance. Curiosity kept me peeking through the vertical blinds until the last police cruiser pulled slowly out of the parking lot at daybreak.

“The first time you see it is a bit disturbing,” Dee admitted an hour later as we pulled out of the parking lot in a black ’67 Camaro, our car for the day. “You get used to it though.”

For the first time, I wondered how long she’d been doing this.

When I didn’t respond to her question, Dee elbowed me and said, “You know what’s so great about small towns?”

Behind my closed eyelids, I still saw my limp hand hanging over the side of the ambulance gurney. “What?”

“We get newspaper coverage every time we pass through. We shatter their perfect little country world, and they gossip about it for months to come.”

I nodded, squinting in the bright light pouring through the rock-chipped windshield.

“The old men ramble about it at the feed store and their wives whisper to each other before church on Sundays. But the kids…oh, the kids are the best part. They talk about it like they’re the ones who discovered the body.” Deirdre put on her best teenage-boy voice and said, “‘Her entire face was gone, man, like she’d stuck her head in a thresher.  It was fucking nasty.’”

I dragged my fingers across the line of her jaw, from ear to chin, and said, “That’s because nothing exciting ever happens out in the sticks.”

“The thresher would be interesting though,” Deirdre continued. “Gruesome, true, but…interesting.”

“You’re not sticking your face into a thresher,” I said, letting my hand fall back to the dirty white vinyl seat.

“Sometimes you’re a real pansy, Darrel.” She then smiled and said, “You know what today is, don’t you?”

“I haven’t known what day it is for two months,” I said.

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Men! Always forgetting important dates. It’s our anniversary.”

“Of course it is.” I knew it was coming up, just didn’t know today was it. Two years now…or was it three? Somewhere along the way, I’d lost count. It felt odd to not know for sure even how old I was anymore.

I leaned over and kissed her behind the ear. “We’re going to celebrate?” I asked.

She thought about it for a moment. “You could say that.”  She slowed the Camaro as we drove up an off-ramp to an overpass and I rolled down the window for a better look.

The road climbed a hill overlooking a small farm town with a main thoroughfare no more than a mile long. A set of railroad tracks sliced off the southernmost portion of town and I might not have guessed people actually lived there if it weren’t for the three small dirt streets lined with cracker-box houses. Beyond that lay miles of alfalfa fields and cattle pastures. Just outside my window, clusters of vibrant yellow Black-eyed-Susans populated the ditch. “Wow, party central,” I said. “Where are we?”

“Genoa,” Deirdre said, leaning against the steering wheel. “It’s just a little smudge on the map, right smack in between Limon and Burlington. The town’s not much to look at, but they’ve got a really cool museum.” She pointed to a red and white tower just to the west, nestled behind a gently slopping hill. Without another word, she burned the tires and headed down the frontage road.

The cracked pavement ended when we turned onto the long dirt driveway and the Camaro swam back and forth as Deirdre drove over the ruts at twice the speed limit. We raced past horse fence decorated with bleached-white steer skulls. When we reached the parking lot, she slammed on the brakes and the Camaro slid to a stop in front of a faded wooden bench. Igneous rocks, geodes, rusty farm tools, and Ball canning jars—in light green, blue, and clear—cluttered picnic tables out front. “It looks like a Red Lobster,” I said, gazing out the open window up at the lighthouse-shaped building.

 “It’s the Wonder Tower, Darrel,” Deirdre said. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Wonder Tower?” She opened the door, letting in a flood of heat and making me long for the air conditioner again.

 “It’s a wonder the thing’s still standing,” I said, noting the peeling paint on the siding and the chipped rock-wall base.

 “You can see six states from the top.” She paused to stare up at it. “Every time my parents took me and my brother on road trips east, we always stopped here and climbed the tower. It’s the most sky I’ve ever seen in all my life.”

Her moment of calmly sharing a remembrance shocked me. She rarely spoke of the past, except in moments of irritation or anger at me, and then she’d blurt out something she obviously never intended to share. Like how she got in her car one afternoon and drove to Kansas, leaving her husband behind. Or how she plowed her car into a rig just outside Topeka, taking away that normal life she so desperately wished to escape. I knew about it without her saying anything, for I’d been there too, felt the thrill of leaving all normal life behind in pursuit of something new and exotic. It was perhaps the strongest bond for us, but probably the only reason she shared her bed with me. “You have a brother?” I asked quietly.

She ignored me and got out. I followed, stopping to stretch my aching back. I turned just in time to see Deirdre tuck a forty-five-caliber pistol—her drug of choice—into the waist of her jeans and cover it up with her white tee-shirt. She carried it everywhere she went, like a child’s security blanket. She grabbed my arm and pulled me inside.

Clusters of old baseball gloves hung from wires in the Antiques Room. Hammers, wrenches, saw blades, aluminum coffeepots, and buckets decorated the hallway ceilings, each piece carefully nailed in place. Deirdre beckoned me inside Grandpa and Grandma’s Room where she showed me a two-headed calf. The beast’s heads connected at the jawbone, one looking left, the other right, with black marbles for eyes. I stared, repulsed yet unable to look away.

 “Freaky, huh?” Deirdre asked. She looked the part of a reverent convert worshiping before the altar. She belonged in this room, with the two-headed calf and his friends the eight-legged pig embryo and the albino rattlesnake. She could hold a sign declaring, “Behold the world’s only suicide junky!” and perform her show twice daily for the tourists. This place was just as freaky as she was—just as much as I was. The thought made me shudder. I didn’t want to be a freak.

Deirdre caressed one of the calf’s noses and giggled.  “It’s just as bizarre as I remember it.” She nodded a silent goodbye to it then led the way up the winding staircase leading up to the observation deck.

The rickety steps twisted and turned through the bowels of the Tower, sometimes doubling back. We paused to look at the various rooms offered along the way, each full of more unorganized mess. Despite the weak railings on the narrow, steep final flight, Deirdre barreled forward like a foot-soldier in a rolling front. I lost my balance twice trying to keep up with her. We climbed out a small square opening in the floor of the Tower’s observation deck.

Heat roiled up off the gray asphalt shingles covering the floor. Flies and yellow-jacket wasps buzzed about. Two figures built of red fabric, water-warped two-by-fours, and rags for stuffing leaned against the south railing. Each wore battered straw hats perched on their faceless heads. A hollow metal cylinder fitted with an old monocular scope sat in the middle of the platform.

Deirdre leaned against the wood railing and peered over the edge. Today, she was nondescript, with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and medium build. Just another body to toss away at the end of the day just as someone dusts sock lint from their toes. Instead of changing our clothes every day, we just put on new bodies. Brown-haired one day, blue-eyed the next.

I couldn’t recall how many different bodies I’d gone through since the first time. I didn’t even remember now why I accepted her invitation that day I first saw her in the little mom-and-pop grocery store where I worked in Maljamar, New Mexico. Back then, she had long red hair that ruffled in the hot desert breeze and she smelled of daisies. She’d made me hear my pulse in my ears. I suppose being nineteen and stupid had something to do with it. Or maybe depression, or something else curable by medication, but if I thought about pills at all, it was to wonder how many I needed to take to break that fragile barrier between near death and the real thing. I didn’t tell her I thought about such things, but she knew anyway.

“Muslims say that when the Angel of Death approaches, he is terrible, but when he finally arrives, it’s bliss,” Deirdre had told me while we sat on the hood of her blue Mustang, watching the moon rise over the mesquite and rabbit brush. I hadn’t known her more than a couple hours, but already my love for her was cemented. It was as if my missing half had walked out to me from the dark, barren desert.

“Anything’s better than this,” I’d said.

“Anything?” The pistol she pulled out had a spectral quality in the moonlight. “I bet you can’t handle it though.”

“I can.”

And she’d pushed the weapon into my awkward hands and said, “Prove me wrong.” I’d so convinced myself that a bullet could solve everything that I accepted without question.

Deirdre ran two fingers over my chin, beckoning me back to the present. Her simplest touch still made me catch my breath. “Why so gloomy?”

With a weak smile, I said, “It’s not everyday you see yourself dead.”

“Don’t dwell on it, Darrel,” she said. “It wasn’t really you after all.”

What did she mean by that? I’d never given much thought to the mechanics of what we did, but now questions tore through me like a tornado. Whose bodies were these? Who were they before I extinguished them from existence? Was I a murderer? An unpleasant numbness crept up on me.

Deirdre pulled the pistol out. “Wanna shoot up?” She chuckled as she said it. She always did.

I stared at her, dumbfounded. Had she done this so long that she really didn’t care anymore? Was the woman I loved really so callous, so thoughtless? She couldn’t be. My gaze wandered to the gun. Was this what my life had become, if I could even really call it a life at all? If I’d known this was what her gift of immortality was all about, I would have turned her down long ago. “We need to talk, Dee.”

“Can’t it wait?” Deirdre flexed her right index finger on the trigger, testing the resistance.

“It can’t,” I said. She just stared at me, so I continued. “I can’t do this, Dee.”

Deirdre laughed. “I know, you prefer driving the car over a cliff, dig the adrenaline rush of the freefall. Utterly predictable, Darrel.”

I shook my head. “No, Dee, not even that. I can’t do this at all anymore.”

“Not at all?”

“Never again.” The words fell off my tongue like lemmings plunging into the sea.

She frowned and blinked in confusion and hurt. “Are you leaving me?” she asked softly.

I took her free hand in mine and held it to my chest. “No, not at all. You know I love you more than anything….”

Deirdre’s sharp brown eyes narrowed. “You are leaving me.”

“I want to get help for you, for both of us. We have a problem.”

Deirdre yanked her hand away from me. “Don’t patronize me like I’m some back-alley junky, Darrel.”

“But you are!” I said, angry at her blindness. “Just look at yourself, coddling that gun like it’s your child!”

Deirdre glared at me and said, “If you don’t want to be with me anymore, just say so, Darrel.”

“You’re not listening,” I said and grabbed her by the arms. But she struggled against my grip.

“I was right about you all along,” she said, her voice a volatile mix of anger and devastation. “I said you couldn’t handle it, and I should have known better than to let you come along. But you begged me, Darrel, you begged me!”

“I didn’t know what I was asking, and you don’t know what you’re doing either.”

Deirdre jabbed the pistol in my face, against my right cheek bone. “Don’t let fear ruin everything, Darrel.”

“You won’t shoot me,” I said, though my rational side didn’t agree.

“If it will help you get over it, I will,” Deirdre said.

“You won’t.”

“Don’t test me, Darrel.”

I shook my head. “We don’t murder each other, remember?”

Her face softened, the glare replaced with a tenderness that reminded me of the way my mother always looked at my father when he laid crashed out in his recliner after a long day in the oil fields. Deirdre let the gun drop away from my face.

She then jammed it under her chin, but I wrestled it from her hands and threw it over the edge.

“Just go, Darrel,” she said, dismissing me with a wave. “You want to go, go then.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” I said.

Swift as a jungle cat, she jumped up onto the railing. I lunged after her and grabbed her wrist just as she went over the side. I held on tight, my chest pressed painfully against the wood railing, Deirdre’s body swaying gently below me in the hot breeze.

“Let me go!” she shrieked, kicking back and forth, but I still held on.

“I’m not going to let you do this!” I said between gritted teeth. “We’re stopping this insanity.” The nails holding the rail together screeched and pulled free of the boards. I looked over just in time to see the railing give way and fall forward. I grabbed hold of the horse fence with my free hand, but this time it went over the edge along with the railing.

I cried out as we fell, but just before reaching the overhang fifty feet below, the fence finally held up top and yanked me to a stop. Deirdre’s wrist slipped from my sweaty hand and she hit the sloping roof then bounced over the edge.

My own fingers failed to hold onto the wire fence, and I crashed into the hot shingles, my ribs breaking on impact. I rolled sideways down the incline, towards the edge, but just as I went over, I grabbed hold of the gutter. I hung for a moment, struggling to regain my wits then pulled myself back up onto the roof. Pain blazed through my chest but thankfully I hadn’t broken my back.

I gazed over the edge to see Deirdre lying in the dirt, her unmoving body twisted into an awful S shape. I called to her, but she didn’t answer. The pistol lay on the ground just out of her reach. “I’m coming right down!”

After breaking out a couple windows to get back inside, I staggered down the steep steps into the museum. The owner wasn’t at the front desk so I slipped outside without any questions.

Deirdre still lay sprawled out on the dirt, and when I struggled to kneel, she started muttering to herself. “It’s going to be okay, Dee.” I placed my hand on hers. “I’m going to take care of you.”

“No hospital,” she said thickly.

“Don’t worry. No one’s taking you to the hospital.”

“You’re going to leave me like this, aren’t you? Keep me in this crippled body so I can’t hurt myself anymore,” she sputtered.

“Maybe I’m a fool, but I can’t stand to see you suffer like this.” I kissed her forehead and squeezed her hand. She didn’t squeeze it back, but I’d like to think that she couldn’t because of a broken neck. I picked up the gun and placed it under her jaw. “But don’t go thinking you’ll lose me by hopping to another body. I’ll find you again, even if it takes the rest of this life.”

Deirdre didn’t say anything, just stared up at me with glassy eyes. I’d never seen her cry. I closed my eyes. “Happy anniversary, my love.”

A moment later, I hobbled back to the Camaro, holding my shattered side with one hand and still carrying the pistol in the other. I climbed inside and shocks of pain made me cry aloud as I settled into the driver’s seat. I stared at the gun for a moment, my breathing difficult. The police would be looking for me with accusations of murder and I needed to have my ribs looked at. I had no money for a doctor, let alone to buy gas or get a motel room for the night. I held the cure to everything right here in my hand. I’d wake up next to Deirdre again, and we could work things out. Everything would be fixed.

But I set the safety and threw the gun out the window. It landed in a nest of spindly bushes next to the Tower wall. No matter how bad the pain, that just wasn’t an option anymore.

I shoved the car into reverse and slammed on the gas, tires spitting up dust and gravel. As I took off down the driveway, the Tower’s owner peeked out the museum’s front door, the phone to his ear. I’d have to ditch the Camaro before the cops caught up with me.

My gut told me I needed to drive east if I wanted to find Deirdre again, so I headed back towards Kansas. If my luck held up, I’d get to Burlington, find a different car, and be back on my way before anyone even noticed I was there. I’d find Deirdre again. I couldn’t just throw it all away, not even if she wanted me to. She needed my help.

Yet as I drove down the highway, I knew I’d have to work hard to resist the temptation to flip the car. Already the sweat was gathering under my eyes.

~    ~    ~

First published in Gothic.net, 2004