tyler

A profound scent of new mahogany clutched easily to the apartment, bathed in a stale tenebrosity.

           Sal Cosway was slumped and half swallowed by the recliner as he fell into it and ignited a premium cigarette. An empty fog occupied the atmosphere and danced lustily ahead of his torpid brown eyes.

           Keys rhythmically penetrated the lock. Marion Wendell lunged boldly into his view and ruptured his previous contentment.

           ‘Hey baby!’ Her frizzy words attempted to caress him. ‘Baby?’ She repeated following his absence of reply.

           He mumbled an affirmative as she tore a cigarette from his pack. He winced.

           Loudly sitting in the chair in front of him, she said: ‘I’ve been talking to Jenny about wedding cakes and she hasn’t a clue what I’m on about. She’s crazy sometimes.’ She laughed, though it was vacant.

           She continued: wedding this, wedding that; bullshit he didn’t want to hear. He wondered when he should break the news.

           ‘Hey! Wake up Mr Cosway.’ He knew just as well as Tyler did about her ‘financial tendencies’.

           ‘I’m awake. Whaddaya want?’

           ‘You are my fiancé. You should be listening, grumpy pants’.

           ‘Was.’

           ‘What do you mean was, silly?’

           ‘I mean what I mean. Past tense.’

           ‘But we’re getting married!’

           His soul almost imploded with opulent laughter at her ignorance.

           ‘No. No we’re not.’

           Silence so omni-consumptuous that even the sizzle of their cigarettes was a focal sound.

           ‘All we wanted was you to twist the knife, Marion. I never loved you.’

           Tears orbited her perfect frame of a skull, tears desperate for money and ‘true’ love.

           At such a revelation, cogs of deep fury revolved within her and she whipped the pampered pistol from her handbag and took aim at Sal’s forehead.

           ‘By murdering me, you will achieve nothing.’ He remained effervescently calm as he savoured every bite of her fall, just as she had savoured Tyler’s.

           ‘No one chooses me for me! No one.’ Archaic childhood memories smothered her.

           He calmly punched the pistol from her manicured hands. He scraped over her and forced her into a corner, buried in mahogany shelves and unread books.

           ‘DON’T YOU THREATEN ME! ADDICT!’ His spidery olive hands coiled around her porcelain neck.

           Porcelain slowly fades to pink.

           ‘Please, no.’ Her voice merely a scratch on a submarine.

           Pink to crimson.

           His infamous grin, painted wildly across his face; veins bulging at his forehead.

           Crimson to wine.

           Eyes rolling back, the arcane left her smeared mouth.

           Wine to purple.

           He dropped her body with a distorted thump and resumed his nicotined slump.

           Purple to porcelain.

Sour smoke rose from the sparsely decorated shack as Tyler Robert lit the day’s fire and poured his first whiskey.

It was late 1948 and, having very narrowly side-stepped death once again the previous year, Tyler Robert had fled immediately from New York and the bloated mafia to a remote forest in North Dakota.

Exactly a year and three days had passed since the Italian-Americans had killed his replica and, on a morning where the frost felt daggerous in the passive air and the ovacular blobs of state-fluid water skiied along the curvaceous roof of the shack like the bootleg whisky now steaming the inside of his stomach, he received a rapid triplet rap upon the door.

Cautiously, he teased the door open with a dramatic creak, more so for fear of the piercing organic light than an intruder.

His jaw fell like suicide.

‘Marion’, his voice crumbled at the hard shock of his ex-lover’s presence and the fact that he hadn’t heard his own voice in many months.

‘Tyler Robert,’ her voice was clinical and perfect and loitered in the air for just the right amount of time. ‘You look fucking terrible’, she remarked at the denseness of his filthy beard which had become a lot like the forest in which he then resided.

He stared unflinchingly at her for a very uncomfortable amount of time before she billowed past him, without virtue, her nose unfurling and stomach curling as the molten of wave of stink attacked her senses virulently.

She sat sullenly on a deck chair encrusted with dust and surveyed her grim surroundings. Tyler drowned into his own respective chair, not bothering to unleash smoky waves of whiskey into Marion’s glass.

After more murderous silence had elapsed, Marion said: ‘I knew you were alive.’

‘Why did you care?’ He replied instantly, obviously having waited for Marion to make the first, sordid move.

‘You know I care, Tyler,’ she stated boldly, though even the dirt around her was unconvinced.

‘Like fuck you care,’ buried anger coated his brittle voice. ‘All you care about is money. Money, money, money. As soon as the money dried up, you ran along to find a guy with a bigger dick and more money.’

Silence.

Marion stirred uncomfortably.

‘Look at your ego!’ She suddenly yelled, clearly attempting to deflect conversation away from her financial enslavement.

‘I was the man.’ His voice trailed off in a nostalgic way. ‘I was the king of New York. The king of jazz; that was me. Boy! What went wrong…? I was the king.’ He was boasting like a little school boy does about a mediocre grade. Marion was unaffected.

‘Now I’m a fucking bum! Hiding like a coward in the middle of desolation; slowly killing myself with booze,’ he preached monotonously. He had lost his appetite. He took a long streaky sip of whiskey.

‘Lay your head back,’ Marion ordered calmly.

‘What?’ He wanted to sound bitter and angry again, but he knew it was over.

‘Lay your head back and close your eyes,’ she repeated with added ornamentation. ‘Let me tell you why I still love you.’

‘Save it, Marion. I’m done.’

‘You know you still love me.’

Those words. Those frozen words sliced him open and scathed him. It was true.

His head lulled back and he closed his tired, immature, old eyes obediently.

A cataclysmic explosion of sound.

She sheathed the slender, glittery pistol slowly, drawing out this moment, savouring Tyler Robert’s pitiful, ego-addled failure.

Blood trickled stupidly from his sewage pipe mouth into the murky foliage of his facial hair, mixing with the fervent grease to form thick clods of hairy blood meteors.

‘Didn’t you think the mafia would trace you?’ She was now inches from his dirty face. ‘They knew it wouldn’t be that easy to kill old Tyler.’ Her voice sounded like it did in 1945. Just after the war, before the pernicious greed, her voice bounced diatonically in the easy New York air. He never thought the same voice would accompany his murder.

She left as she had re-entered his life: silently, with a miniscule laugh that penetrated his thick skin deeper than any bullet could.

As the sun tiredly rolled along the Earth’s boundary, readily waiting for the metallic moon to clock in for his shift, Tyler let his dry, alcohol infused breath attempt to preserve his name.

Jaded, faded, and baked, he stumbled along the endless road as dust whirled and swirled around his feet and viscously entered the pores of his beaten desert boots. Of course, he wished to fall flat on his face, anything to numb the throbbing stitch in his stomach, though he felt a dull energy propelling him.

His beatnik shirt smothered itself in sweat and clung to his arched back like Lennie Small on steroids; the sun beat down like a brooding psychopath, its rays almost burning him alive, penetrating his work-brown skin to sizzle his soul likewise.

The horizon seemed to fluctuate and warp with the unbearable temperature and the sand, reflecting the vivacious star’s intensity, blinded him frequently.

Marion still pulsated through him; he ached for her cloud-white skin and the way she ignited his loins. Oh, how life had changed since 1947. He had been gently floating on Bird’s virtuosic saxophone, his personal favourites being ‘Ornithology’ and ‘Confirmation’ respectively. A quart of whiskey in one hand, Marion in the other, and a cigarette between his pursed lips, life couldn’t have been sweeter for Tyler Robert.

One bad game of cards and it all fell apart, much like a great skyscraper making it rain $50 notes as it crumbles under its own brilliance. Marion, like Zappa, was ‘only in it for the money’ and thus, kicked dirt in his face with a petite tailored sandal. The mob, however, made him eat the dirt with haphazard chunks of glass.

Shots rang out for miles to come. Tyler fell, face first, to the ground majestically, just as he had wished. Sal Cosway lowered his revolver; pleased with the salmon pink hunks of fresh strewn around Tyler’s head of greasy hair, a smile creased mischievously on his olive face.