Alice Kinerk

Let us first examine our protagonist. She is an older woman in that menopausal time in life where women grow into their bosoms, taking the shape of a saltbox house, all slope and substance, skin like reused tissue paper, hair stiff as a broom. Her face is soft, a pair of upturned curvatures forming at the bottom of her cheeks.

She is dressed appropriately for a middle–aged woman of her social class, middling, AKA suffering quiet financial distress. A flowered top, gypsy style, puffy sleeves drawn at the wrists, fabric designed to imitate chiffon but cheaper and easier to launder, polyester, likely rayon. Blue jeans, tight, lightly stonewashed. This woman remembers the eighties.

Full face of makeup, hair sprayed and ribboned. Black ballerina shoes. Jingly gold jewelry. Big purse.

And now our setting. The Touchdown Tavern on the westside of town, on Fir Street where it crosses Seventeenth. A Friday night in June. Eleven forty-five pm.

Let’s get more specific. She is outside the Touchdown, strolling the cracked pavement parking lot, among the cars, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. And not just any Friday night in June. It’s the Touchdown Tavern’s Fifth Annual Talk Muddy to Me Ladies Mud Wrestling Competition, now wrapping up its first hour. The sound of cheers is erupting periodically from inside. The voices are male, inebriated, emphatic.

Is our protagonist on site to view or take part in the mud wrestling competition? No, she is not.

After a time she puts the unlit cigarette back into its box, puts the box back into her purse, and enters the bar. She surveys the crowd, who are, for the purposes of this story, our antagonists.

There they are. See them, smell them. Dressed in various shades of dun and hunter green, dirty jeans, oil-stained work boots, and ratty baseball caps with the edges of the brims curled down. Bad backs, bum legs, sunburned. Blue-green fuzzy tattoos. Many are balding, and most are overweight in the way of alcoholics, small town middle-aged alcoholics who have been tossing back ten, twelve, fifteen beers every night for the past two decades, and developed round bellies to hold such volume.

They don’t notice her, of course. All eyes are on the bikini’d gals duking it out in the kiddie pool.

Almost all eyes. The bartender juts his chin. He asks what she’s having to drink.

“Sprite with lime, please,” our protag tells him, which he fixes quickly and slides over gratis, likely assuming she’s some dude’s DD. She’s not, but accepts it with a nod. Nothing further is said. Nothing further is necessary. She wants above all not to draw attention to herself, not to get her image lodged in anyone’s memory. To remain unseen. More about that later.

She perches at an unoccupied table toward the back. It’s slightly sticky. There’s some Michelob empties and a red plastic basket with a half-dozen crinkle cut fries, dead soldiers in ketchup. She sips a microscopic sip of Sprite. Gotta make it last as she won’t be ordering more. She digs out her phone. But her eyes aren’t on it. They’re scrolling the room. She’s a hunter in a blind, awaiting game.

What is she hunting precisely? A man with signs of wealth. Relative wealth, of course. This is small town America. She can expect no millionaires here. She’s scrolling for name brands. Carhartt, Dickies, Wrangler, Caterpillar, Levis, Timberland, Keen. Fresh barbered haircuts. Straight backs, white teeth, clean jeans. Words pronounced with a fully intact letter r. Silvery watches. iPhones. Hands not stubbed and stained. Microbrews, hefeweizens, and so on.

Unfortunately for our huntress, the pickings are slim. America today. We’re running on fumes.

She’s also listening. Her ears are perked for any reprehensible comments. Her ideal prey is a man sporting name brand clothes and spewing misogyny. But the way she imagined it in front of her bathroom mirror is not the way it’s turning out in real life. For one, the bar’s too loud. There’s some sort of awful pop-country fusion blaring. A twangy announcer on a scratchy microphone, detailing the muddy blow-by-blow. And all heads are turned away from her.

She moves to a different table. This one’s less cluttered but more sticky. She holds her Sprite to her chest and scans each potential victim, thinking Yes, No, Maybe. A man approaches her on his way to the bar. He’s short. Kind of elfin. He leans in and asks if she wants to dance. She can smell him.

She steps away. “Get out of here before my boyfriend comes back from the restroom.”

He goes.

She stifles a yawn, and considers whether this plan was foolish. What is she doing here, at her age, at this time of night? Shouldn’t she be home in bed? Regardless, she’s not leaving.

A timer dwindles. The ladies slosh. There’s a ding. The announcer calls a break. By now she’s picked a potential victim. Several men head toward the bar, but she only has eyes for her guy. He produces a box of cigarettes and shakes it toward his friends, who exit to the parking lot, continuing their robust conversation.

She sucks down her Sprite and follows.

In the parking lot, she spots the victim and his buddies sparking smokes behind a jacked up Tacoma. The night air feels clean and quiet, like leaving the sauna and jumping into the pool. Her victim is speaking. She hears incompetent bitch…no business being manager. There’s laughter, cocked elbows, simulated fucking. The victim turns toward the truck, wipes a hand against some bit of debris on the tailgate, invisible to her at this distance.

Happiness flutters. She’s picked a mark and she’s ascertained his vehicle. She waits for the group to return to the tavern, then strolls toward his truck. No bull bar, nothing but a shiny chrome grill. She casually records his license plate number via the Notes app on her phone.The unlit cigarette goes back in the box again. For a nonsmoker, she’s left a lot of lipstick on that filter tip tonight.

The second half of the ladies mud wrestling competition passes without incident. Our protagonist needs to pee, but she’s holding it.

The competition ends. A muddy gal is declared victor. The announcer sets down the microphone. The drinking continues.

Now it's one forty-five a.m. The music stops, the lights come on. The bartender sweeps all the begrudging drunks out the door into the night.

Our protagonist exits quickly. Her heart thumps. She’s a startled deer. This is the part she’s fantasized about as she drives past the Touchdown on her way home from work. This is the part that could go wrong or right.

But now let’s pause to consider the Touchdown’s landscaping and the context in which all this is set. There is the cracked pavement parking lot, as described, with a wide turnout on the right. But beyond that, amid the row of faded feather signs proclaiming Hot Wings! Cocktails! Ice Cold Beer! the lot is rimmed with unkempt bushes, packed close so the mulch serves as a catch-all for soggy cigarette packs and energy drink cans and similar flotsam.

Our protagonist skedaddles toward the bushes nearest the intersection. Quick backward glance to ensure she is not being observed, then she ducks down, between the bushes, into the shadows.

She waddles forward, shoving her way through the foliage, until she has a good view, not only of the intersection but also the turnout where the parking lot spills drunk drivers into the world.

There’s no crosswalk at the corner of Fir and Seventeenth. This town’s too small for crosswalks. But as a self-taught scholar of state law, our protag understands that all intersections are legal crosswalks, marked or unmarked, and drivers must yield to pedestrians.

Squatting, anticipating, now she really has to pee. She tells herself not yet like a disapproving older sibling. A sharp branch digs into the soft folds of her abdomen. She allows it.

All around are the sounds of drunken goodbyes and the cha-whirr of engines starting. She watches as each vehicle turns left on Fir Street. There’s nothing to the right of course, except the factory.

The flow of exiting traffic slows. It had been a hot day, but it’s cool now. Still, a fine sweat forms on her face. Her muscles are tight. Her heart goes thump-thump. It occurs to her that perhaps she’s missed him. While waddling in maybe, he slipped out.

A minute passes without any traffic, and she imagines he’s standing behind her, dick out, wide stance, moments from relieving himself on her back. She doubts herself, anticipates possible regret.

There’s a thunderous engine. It’s him. She’s stake-her-life-on-it sure. The Tacoma appears in the turnout. There’s the briefest hesitation before he hits the gas.

She leaps up and dashes to the intersection. Her legs move without input from her brain. Impossible to explain what she’s thinking now, basically ohshitohshitohshitohshit. The time to reconsider has passed.

Our protagonist knows the possibility of pedestrians surviving crashes from vehicles at various speeds. The chance of survival if hit at 23 miles per hour is ninety percent. Google it, it’s true. How many Americans are desperate enough to take those odds? That’s a number impossible to Google. But with eggs now ten bucks a dozen, well, surely there's a few.

His truck approaches. He’s accelerating, but just starting out. Speedometer’s sub-twenty, for sure.

Headlights flood her. She’s a spotlit star, temporarily blinded. He brakes, but it's too late. She does a last minute impulsive leap, preferring to land on the truck rather than underneath it.

And that’s what happens. The bumper slams into her thighs, lifts her off her feet, and up she goes, up, up, up, over the grill, onto the hood, her bosom bouncing across the metal, her forehead bashing into the windshield. She’s hit, but not concussed. Is she injured? She does not yet know. He lights up from the dashboard, eyebrows a drawbridge, mouth agape, the expression of drunken surprise.

His brakes squeal. She grips a windshield wiper to keep from sliding off.

The truck’s door opens. He’s standing there, spewing words such as what the fuck and oh my God and sorry. He hasn’t even pulled over to the side.

Our protagonist has never been good at asking for what she wants. It’s why she’s never gotten a raise. Why she’s broke. Why both her marriages failed. She is accustomed to living in the shadows, seeing without being seen. The helpful hand, the supportive soul, the strong woman behind the man. In a way perhaps that is the lot of all menopausal women, those of us with the gall to age beyond our prime mud-wrestling years. Crone, hag, babushka, old bat, shrew.

But that’s another story. No need to get into it here.

Except now, lying prone on his idling truck, bruises forming, she is uncharacteristically direct.

“You’re drunk. You hit a pedestrian crossing legally. Venmo me or I go to the police.”

Immediately, he’s thumb-mashing his phone. “What’s your number? How much do you need?” His voice is quavery. The phone is shaking too.

She grabs it. His bank app says Credit limit $13,500. She types her number into Venmo and transfers everything he has.

His hand is on his neck and he’s rubbing it.

She shoots him a death glare. Holds out his phone, powered off. In a moment she’ll slide off and hobble away to her own car with her prize.

But not yet. There's still the cherry to place atop his sundae. She tells herself okay, now.

And finally, she pees. On his truck? Yes, right on his truck. She just does it. Lets herself go.