Chapter 2: What to Do After the End of the World

The next few days are a little fuzzy in my memory, because I don't think I was ever sober for more than 30 minutes to an hour. Just long enough to walk from the dive I was renting to a liquor store on the corner. It was down on 8th street in downtown Jacksonville. Pawn shops and video shops and hamburger joints and hookers in short shorts watching the cars go by and sometimes stop.

I've never been really sure how I got there. I've lived in Jacksonville on and off for 30 years and I've driven through the neighborhood often enough that I know what 8th street is like.

Guys that look and dress like me only show up to buy crack or pot or hookers. The cops would give me an odd look, and once or twice they asked me for ID, which I gave them. I was so drunk I don't know why they didn't put me in the drunk tank, but these young men and women seemed to be just embarrassed about confronting a sobbing man old enough to be their grandfather.

Sometime – it could have been five years or three days – after I checked into the Heart of The Southland motel someone was tapping me on the face and then trying to drown me. I coughed and wondered who the hell would be water-boarding a 57-year-old bank executive. Had I somehow run afoul of Homeland Security?

Someone turned my head to the side and I first coughed and then vomited over the side of the scummy bedcover. God only knows what had dried on it. I really didn't want to think about it. I gasped and choked and thought I was going to die there. It felt like water had gone down into my lungs and I couldn't breathe in oxygen too.

Somehow I was on my feet with two sets of strong arms supporting me. I was hacking and coughing, still trying to draw oxygen into my lungs. For those few terrifying seconds I just knew I'd never inhale another breath and I was going to black out in this cheap suburb of hell.

For the first time in a long time I remembered my son and my daughter. Why the hell had I done this to myself? Why had I decided to commit suicide in this cheap motel room. Then I remembered why and I wanted to forget again, or get drunk again, or just black out and never have to worry about anything again, but some asshole kept pounding my back and telling me to breathe. I remember vomiting again, after which I found myself breathing once more. The next thing I knew I was leaning back against cool leather, swaddled in clean-smelling towels that wrapped my naked genitals, naked arms and naked legs. Hell I was stark naked. And I smelled a familiar scent.

I managed to pry my eyelids open. As I thought, I was sitting in the back of Gail Hunt's stretch Rolls Royce. She was sitting across from me, dressed as immaculately as ever, cool in green and blue blouse and skirt. It was cut low enough to show the swells of her breasts. Her cold blue eyes, so brilliant they seemed to gleam against the overhead lights, were focused on me. Her legs, which gave her breasts a run for their money in terms of showiness, were crossed and garbed in sheer silk that was sexier than nudity.

"H-hi - boss. Fancy meeting you in hell."

I could see Percy Coals sitting to one side of me. For a guy named Percy, he was the biggest hunk of manhood you'd find outside most NFL locker rooms. Despite his size, he was as gentle a man as I'd ever met. He was the Vice President for Personnel for the Hunt bank chain.

On the other side of me sat Bobby Beaufort, Vice President for Financial Planning of the Hunt banks, and the only man I'd ever seen put Percy down in the arm wrestling championships that were among the favorite spectator sports of the semi-annual team building weekends Old Man Hunt had instituted to build team morale 20 years before.

Percy was whiter than typewriter paper and Bobby blacker than the inside of a coal bin. I had known both of them more than 20 years and had held Percy's head, while he threw up into a wastebasket at his desk, the day his longtime lover had told him they were through and he had found another man. I had pulled Bobby's black ass out of a Beaches biker bar the night he found his wife with his brother and had invaded the Biker Bar challenging any and all comers to trade punches.

"Hi guys." I paused, then continued on, "You should have left me where you found me. I'm dead. Just take me a little while to make it official."

"Shut up, Hugh," Percy said, not unkindly.

"And please try to stop throwing up on us," Bobby said.

"Go back to sleep, Hugh," Gail said. I tried to remember why I had never even thought about fucking her over the nearly 30 years I'd known her. She was a beautiful, big-breasted, blonde worth, conservatively, 50 million dollars. What was not to like? Then I remembered that she had been a little girl when I first met her and that was always the way I'd looked at her. Also that her grandfather, Old Man Hunt, had been one of the finest men I'd ever known and he had hired me and I'd built my life around his bank.

When I woke up again I was in clean sheets, didn't smell of vomit, I couldn't hear roaches rustling in the corners of the room and my mouth didn't taste of blood and alcohol. I was wearing stiff, clean white pajamas.

Memory came back with the clean smell and feel of the room and I wondered how long I'd be able to stay out of hell this time. However, it wasn't fair to Peter and Nicole. They were married, had children and I was one half of their parents. I had lost my father too early and my mother only a few years later. It was one of the few things in which life had not treated me kindly. How could I make them semi-orphans, just because their mother had turned out to be a fucking whore.

But how could I go on breathing when it felt like one of the sandspurs, those little round balls of sharp spikes that used to grow all over the yards of my childhood, had somehow gotten lodged deep within my heart and every breath made the spurs tear my flesh. There had to be a trick to it. If I could keep breathing long enough, I'd find it.

The door opened and a vision in pink and white silk glided in and sat down on the bed beside me. As she moved, her heavy breasts swayed to and fro under the dressing gown. I tried to understand how Gail Hunt could be here in what had to be sometime during the late morning judging by the light coming in through the large French windows. Why wasn't she at the bank?

"It's Saturday, Hugh," she said, reading my mind effortlessly.

Saturday? Mary had flown in on a Monday and this was Saturday? What had happened to the week?

"You've been drinking yourself into a stupor for most of the week," she said, again reading my mind.

"Why, Gail? Why all this?"

I gestured to the room around me. I knew where I was. I was in the Hunt estate's main house, a 20-room Shangri-La that had been started and mostly finished by her grandfather. I had been here during parties. I had been here when she was married. I had been here when she announced that she was leaving her husband, a high school teacher, because the marriage hadn't worked out.

I watched her face as she beamed upon the tall, good looking, evil son of a bitch who everybody knew she'd been fucking around with for months before her idiot husband ever had the slightest idea of what was going on. I'd wondered then how any human being could be so stupid. Now I knew.

I'd been there a year later when the evil son of a bitch made the mistake of backhanding her in front of his crew of thugs. Only before I could reach him Percy had broken both his arms and threw him through a door.

And Bobby had sent his three cronies through a large plate glass window, one at a time.

They say love is blind. But it only took that one blow to dissolve her second marriage. And now she, like me, was enjoying the single life. Of course, she had a head start on me.

"You didn't show up for work, Hugh. That was all it took. We couldn't find you. And when I finally tracked down Mary, she would only say that you had left your house and wouldn't be coming back. She had no idea where you were."

She looked at me and the pity was clear in her eyes.

"She flew up to Chicago Tuesday, the day we learned later you'd started trying to drink yourself to death. We talked to her on her cell. She didn't say, but we found out she was in Chicago. She didn't waste any time. She was so closed-mouthed that I started checking around. You obviously knew about it.

"His name is Richard Kelly. Forty five years old. Assistant Superintendent for Purchasing of Textbooks and Academic Supplies. Makes $110,000 a year because he has an uncle on the Chicago City Council and his family has been deep into politics for a hundred years.

"He was married but six months ago he split from his wife, moved into a townhouse and has been seen frequently with a lady that very closely resembles your Mary.

"Mary has been staying in his townhouse since she arrived there Tuesday night. She took a two-week leave from McDaniels."

She reached out and put her hand on mine.

"I got pictures, video and audio. It wasn't hard. If you need anything – anything – for whatever legal action you want to take, just ask and it's yours."

I reached up to wipe the moisture away from my eyes.

"Why?"

"Because you're a very valued member of the Hunt organization. You're a good man and you're the closest thing to a real Uncle I've got in this world. I loved Mary like an aunt, and I still can't believe what I saw and heard."

I stared at the streams of sunlight refracting through the window.

"Thank you, Gail but, I won't need any ammunition."

"You're not going to divorce her?"

"No, she'll divorce me, I guess. I don't plan on remarrying and, in any case, I've got more than enough money to be comfortable. We don't have anything we need to fight over. I imagine she will file. It looks like she's going to try to - make a new life - with this guy. I won't stand in her way."

She stared at me.

"You were married for 36 years and you're not going to do anything? Just let her walk away?"

"She's been seeing him for six months and hiding it from me. She's been talking to me and pretending to be my loving wife while he was naked in a bed with her, and probably inside her at the same time. She was thinking about him when she was with him, and thinking about him when she was with me. It's probably longer than six months, maybe back to that first time she met him nine months ago. She hasn't been my wife in almost a year.

"She told me she's missed meetings because she couldn't bear to tear herself away from his fucking. He's 12 years younger than me, which translates to a more vigorous lover. She told me, in a round about way, that he can go three and four times a night. It's been decades since I could go four times in a 24 hour period.

"Really, she wants to be with him. The minute I walk out she flies to him, and he left his wife, almost certainly to be with her. Who am I to stand in the path of true love?"

She grabbed my hand and squeezed.

"Hugh, I am so sorry. If there was any couple in the world that I thought would make it forever, it would have been you two."

I squeezed her hand back. If there was ever a time I wished I were twenty years younger, it was right now.

"I'm showing my age, Gail, but there was an old show called Gunsmoke on television. It was a great show. They had one episode where the hero, a marshal called Matt Dillon, met a gunslinger who was faster on the draw than he was. That never happened. Everybody was stunned. But Dillon wasn't surprised. 'Never a horse that couldn't be rode, never a rider that couldn't be throwed.' That's a short way of saying, 'never say never.' Nobody is guaranteed anything in this life, except dying."

She just shook her head and stood up.

"Are you going to be back to work Monday? I'll give you more time if you need it."

"I'll be in the office. I think I'm all boozed out, business doesn't stop and I need to work."

She was at the door and stopped. She just stood there for a moment and then turned back to me.

"You haven't said anything, Hugh, but I know you have to be thinking about me – and Robert and Cameron."

"No. No. That was you. This is me."

"You don't have to be in 'uncle' mode, Hugh. I know you're thinking it. Robert loved me and I cheated on him for months, I screwed Cameron in boardrooms and in motel rooms and in limousines. Then I dumped Robert after Cameron and his friends nearly killed him. After I dumped a good man, the man I loved turned out to be a world class shit."

"Things happen, Gail. I stopped judging people a long time ago. And if you look at me as an uncle, I have to admit I've looked at you as a kind of niece. I thought you were making a mistake. I thought you were hurting a good man and I knew Cameron was a piece of shit who would hurt you. Everybody knew it, except you, but it was your life."

She ran her hand through her mane of blonde hair. The sunlight gleamed on it like a soft helmet. She was a beautiful woman. I loved Mary and there was no woman in the world I would have chosen over her for my bed, but I knew objectively that Mary was just an attractive woman, and Gail was a stunner.

But she slept alone except for the regular turnstile of tall, dark and handsome studs that she ran through her bedroom since she'd thrown Cameron out. Meanwhile Robert Sandler, who had loved her, had vanished off the face of the earth as far as the Hunt Banks were concerned. No one could mention his name in her presence. I thought sometimes that she fought too hard to ignore him but, like I'd said, it was her life.