Krantz's House

She wandered around the house picking at things, futilely trying to clean it up in a way that made him wholly uncomfortable. Clean was an adjective far too feminine for a place like this, a place that hadn't seen a woman's touch since Cheryl.

Terra picked up a grease caked bit of metal, held it at arms length and put it with some other grease caked bits of metal she'd found earlier and piled up in as orderly a manner grease caked metal bits could be piled.

"This place," She stated matter-of-factly, "Is a dump."

Leroy nodded his head slowly in agreement. He nodded his head, because it was, in fact, a dump; there was no contesting that fact, and he nodded it slowly because anything faster than a slow nod at this stage of insobriety was somewhat unsafe.

"Someone should have cleaned this up last decade." Terra was curious, "What ever happened between you and Cheryl?"

A startled shot glass hurtled through an unopened window with a melodic tinkling and rolled fitfully about in the uncut grass.

Terra glared.

"Leroy, why don't you put that fucking bottle down and tell me about it, hm? What was it? Another guy? Your self absorption? Talk about it, dammit. Say something."

An equally startled bottle of Jack Daniels sailed silently through the unopened but now broken window in search of the shot glass.

The only thing more startled by this pitching fervor than either the shot glass or the whiskey bottle was Terra, who started shaking a little bit. This was not the Leroy she went to school with.

"Don't you ever mucking fention her again, you.. thing.." Leroy careered wildly out the door in search of a car to sit and meditate on.

Terra collapsed heavily on the couch and melted into it in a way that, were she not human, would have left a stubborn, sticky stain. A Johnny Carson rerun was playing just slightly too loudly for comfort in the background as she groped fitfully around the sofa for something decidedly alcoholic to consume. Finding none, she got rather uneasily up and decided to look for Leroy.

Through the shattered window, she could see him sitting cross-legged on top of a gutted Nova, scribbling furiously in the moonlight. She would end this nonsense once and for all.

Terra hadn't shouldered a rifle in nearly 20 years, but it was somewhat like riding a bike. The skills came back to her as she moved. She clicked the bolt release, and slid the charging handle slowly forward. Terra lined up the front sight post with the blast of moonlight glinting off the top of his bald head and pulled the trigger.

Three rounds whizzed past Leroy's head, and even in his stupor it shocked him. He reeled and flagellated wildly with his arms for several seconds before toppling off the car and landing more or less on his face in an undignified heap.

Terra kicked him, and he didn't move. Definitely out. She climbed up on top of the Nova and inspected the pad he was writing on. There were words, lots of them, that had no connection to each other at all. The disjointed writings of a clinically insane drunk. A clever clinically insane drunk but a clinically insane drunk nonetheless. Terra was sure he hadn't been quite this erratic in school, and was more than certain he wasn't as bad about the booze as he was now. This was, she noted mentally, a man that had some bad things happen.

Leroy had begun to come to, and was rolling to and fro on the grass in a feeble attempt to hide himself in it. Terra pounced on him from the top of the car and gave him another good kick in the kidneys. Leroy stopped rolling and started moaning.

"You shouldn't kick dead people… Something about respect for them, I think."
"I'm going to kill you now"
Leroy nodded
"I think that I could deal with that."
"First you're going to tell me about Cheryl."
Leroy nodded some more
"I suppose," he noted "I shall have to."

Cheryl was Assyrian, with eyes that made the Afghan girl's from National Geographic look like a desiccated carp. She swung naturally, and had a great body, replete with olive skin. None of that mattered, really, beyond superficiality though to Leroy. She could read and understood literature, which in his mind was more beautiful and important than pretty much anything he could have asked for. He was in love with her on a level that transcended sex and stupid things like that.

He'd had his shot, though, messed it up, and in the end she had given up and gone for a moderately more exciting business computer repairman who lived in DeKalb. The only time she wrote anymore, for the most part, was to complain about their 6 kids, how controlling her husband was, and to wonder why he didn't write anymore.

"And the reason I don't write anymore is that I'm too busy eating my liver over the whole thing," Leroy confided "When I'm not too busy trying to pickle it."

"But why did she leave?"

"I understand cars. I understand engines. I don't quite understand women. We agreed on so much, but I think that in the end what she was looking for was exactly what she hated, and I suppose probably still hates. A possessive man. Maybe we agreed too much."

"Hm"

Leroy pressed through the fog with immense mental strain

"I think that maybe she felt more appreciated when she was so controlled. Made her feel valuable or something, yknow? Maybe I couldn't give her that. Whatever."