Micah's Curse
by Rich Logsdon

Woe to those who plan iniquity,
to those who plot evil on their beds!
At morning’s light they carry it out
because it is in their power to do it. (Micah 2: 1)

I. I was driving the highway 93 alternate through hard desert rain in central Nevada, rain pellets exploding on the car’s metal. It was a steady, relentless mid-day deluge in July, the sky growing darker by the minute. I was tired of travel, my thoughts tied to nights I had just spent in Arizona. The droplets on my windshield assumed a crimson hue, no doubt due to atmospheric chemical residue of Nevada. An image of decapitation thrust itself into my thoughts and I grew sick.

To steady myself, I slowed to thirty-five. When you go over sixty in a flood like this, your car travels on a film of water separating tires from asphalt. The image of skidding out of control, leaving the road, and rolling-over kept playing in my head. It had happened once before. I’ll tell you about it. Three and one half years ago in a similar rain in northern Arizona, my van left the road at ninety and rolled several times, crushing and decapitating a woman I was considering marrying. I was so high on speed that I felt no pain.

Crawling through the broken passenger window, my vehicle upside down and roof partly crushed, I looked back at Jenny’s bloody, mangled form belted upside down in the passenger seat and thought to myself, "I have done this thing. God, forgive me." Standing outside in the driving rain, drenched in my own blood, I stood mute until four in the morning, when the highway patrol finally arrived.

Spiraling into the quicksand of depression during the following weeks, I left medical school and was banished from the church. Family and friends disowned me. Confessions and attempted exorcisms did not free me from the guilt and memories. With loads of money in my family account, I became a wanderer, one of the soulless thousands traversing this country’s landscape.

After the accident, wandering with no destination, I began living under the curse. I call it "the curse" because it is as real and tangible as my bad leg. Everywhere I went—and I traveled across the country several times—I wove a web of death. Whoever I spent some time with on the road had a chance of ending up dead. It didn’t matter if the person was another male with whom I discussed the weather or stock market prices or an attractive female whom I spent the evening with; chances existed that that person would wind up dismembered, poisoned, shot, drawn-and-quartered, or hanged.

Sick stuff, I know. My avenger—there had to be someone else in this sick little drama--likely was someone who knew Jenny, a relation, possibly her brother or her father, individuals who had respectable professions—one a college professor, the other an accountant. Or perhaps the avenger was someone Jenny never told me about, someone lurking in the shadows. Maybe it was someone who knew me. I knew it had to be someone.

II. Thoughts of the curse filled me as I drove through torrential rains in central Nevada. Although the air conditioning was on full blast, the humidity was oppressive. I had difficulty breathing, and my clothes were saturated. To take a break—I had been driving seven hours straight—I decided to stop at a crossroads casino thirty miles south of Ely.

Half a mile from the casino I saw the van, at first a blur through the constant rain and the thud, thud, thud of the wipers. I slowed to about thirty when I made out a blue GMC van with its four-way flashers on. I crept past the van and leaned over to look out the passenger window. I could see no one in the driver’s seat—all the other side windows facing the road had drapes. I was about to drive on when I saw a red smear on one of the draped passenger windows. I pulled to the side of the road in front of the vehicle and stopped. I had to stop. I felt I had no choice.

I shoved my car into neutral, put on my brown leather hat, grabbed my leather jacket from the back seat and put it on. Then I opened the door and began the walk back to the van. I had about twenty yards to go. My progress through the rain was slowed by my having to drag my right leg.

Sludging through gravel and mud, I prayed everyone in the van was all right. When I got there and looked through the front windshield, then the driver’s window, I could see no one inside. I limped around to the driver’s door, opened it, and leaned in. "Anybody in here?" I said. "Hello? Hello?" The keys were still in the ignition and the engine was idling. The thunder crashed overhead and then I heard a whisper. Then another. Then another.

"Hello?!" I shouted. "Need help? Anybody in here?" As I waited and took a few deep breaths, I smelled the ozone and the metallic odor of blood. The thought of someone bleeding made the skin around my temples contract, my jaw and legs twitch. Determined to carry out my repentance, however, I hopped into the van.

Between the last two seats—it was a ten-seater--I found the body. She was rolled up in a ball, smeared in blood from head to foot; I was reminded of a fetus. I hunched over the woman, looked at her face, my limbs growing cold as I felt the iron cloak of familiarity. I felt for her pulse in the wrist and then in her neck. This young woman, once a beautiful blonde, was dead.

Since Jenny’s death, I’d seen plenty of dead people; corpses generally didn‘t bother me. This one did because this corpse belonged to the woman I had just spent two nights with in Flagstaff. Her name was Madeline and she had described herself as a "highway hooker." As I studied the body, I felt the creepy, sickening sensation of being followed. Clearly as if I had heard the voice of God, I knew that whoever had left Madeline’s body was watching me.

I knew someone was watching because I could feel invisible pin pricks on the back of my neck. Slowly, then, afraid of what I’d see, I looked up at the front windshield. A clown’s face was plastered to the window, staring at me. I froze, waited motionless, and in the next few moments watched the face fade; I had, I think, just experienced a delusion. As a child, I had been afraid of clowns.

I looked back at Madeline. As the rain beat on the van, I struggled to collect my thoughts, briefly saying a prayer to guide Madeline’s soul away from Hell, wondering what had caused her death and who had driven the van. The what would remain a mystery. The who had an identity that I needed to know. After the prayer, I examined her head and body. I could see no bruises, no puncture wounds, nothing to indicate that she had been beaten, stabbed or shot. Nor could I figure where the blood had come from; she hadn’t been cut. Her death was a mystery.

I was now alone, in an abandoned van with the corpse of the woman I had spent the last two nights with. The cops, I realized, would likely be here any minute. This situation would look bad to any officer. Not relishing the thought of being convicted and going to prison, I considered alternatives. Realizing that I could neither stay with nor report the body, I decided to leave, knowing that whoever had done this thing had had me in mind.

I turned and moved to the open door to return to my own car. As I did, I looked through the van’s front windshield. While the rain continued to come down in sheets, I couldn’t see my car, but as I stared, I saw a figure walking towards it. I peered, forcing my gaze through the rain. This, I hoped, was also a delusion, a symptom often accompanying depression.

Stepping out of the van, I began to walk in the direction of my vehicle, fairly certain that I would not find it, when I tripped over something. I landed on my side in the gravel next to the road and, in the downpour, sat up and looked back. About ten feet from me lay the headless body of a pig. Blood had coagulated in a thick pool around it. I wondered why I had not seen this thing from the front of the van. Then I walked around the dead thing, and looked in the distance for my car. My car was gone.

I could not stay with the van. I had no other option: moving around the pig, dragging my right foot, I decided to walk the distance to the crossroads casino five hundred yards down the road. As I began walking, slipping in thick mud, the rain abated, and I could make out the casino about a half a mile in the distance. Against the dark sky, its red neon sign blazed, the words "Black Eddy’s" beckoning travelers from miles around.

After twenty minutes, I entered the casino parking lot just as the dark sky exploded with thunder and lightening and the rain began coming down again in torrents. As I approached the double glass doors, I glanced at the few cars in the parking lot and spotted my own--a fire-engine red 1962 Chevy Impala—in the first row from the door. I counted seven other cars—there may have been more-- and, patting the side of my jacket and assuring myself that I had my grandfather’s twelve-inch hunting knife, I entered the place. I felt that if I could find the person who stole my car, and who had no doubt murdered Jenny and many others, I could free myself of the curse. Ready to sing, the blade quivered against my skin.

For a moment, I stood in the dark entrance, my eyes adjusting to a small casino consisting of two black jack tables, a poker table, and slot machines placed against the walls. A cloud of bluish gray smoke hovered near the low ceiling. The lighting seemed slightly red. Seated at the slot machines were four or five people, all elderly, all smoking, all staring at me. A tall black man with gray hair and trembling hands stood behind one of the tables, dealing to two customers. His eyes bulging from their sockets, the dealer looked at me, and as he did so the man and woman sitting at the table turned in their chairs.

"You Black Eddy?" I asked. At 6’4" tall, I was half a foot taller than this man.

"You Micah?" he asked in a gentle, almost timid voice. The question stopped me. I was expected.

"Yes," I responded with my accustomed formality. "Now, you Black Eddy?"

He looked down and shuffled the cards, then looked up at me again.

"Do I look like Black Eddy?" he said, this time in a low soft voice. I paused. It was playing a game. I made my move. "Yeah, you look like Black Eddy. You’re Black Eddy."

"That’s ‘cause I am Black Eddy," he replied, smiling hugely. The place was absolutely silent. I could hear only the steady, muffled drip of rain outside. Black Eddy said "Careful, Micah," and went back to his dealing. His two customers, the man and the woman, turned to glance at me.

The male customer was a short, stocky blonde with a ponytail, angry blue eyes, and a red and blue flannel shirt. He had square, bulldog head, a goatee and mustache, and after he looked my way, he glanced at the floor and spat. The woman, Hispanic, was gorgeous: wearing a flimsy black dress, she had raven hair cascading down her back, dark brown eyes, red lips and finger nails, and wore a thin black dress that was cut so low that it revealed the nipple of her left breast. Around her neck, she wore a cross I had given her four years ago.

III. "Hello, Micah," she said, melancholy, perhaps a bit drunk.

"Hello, Nina," I responded; "read any good books recently?" I felt aroused, as always, in the presence of this woman.

Nina smiled, brought her cigarette to her lips and inhaled. After she exhaled, never taking her eyes off me, she commented, "You fucking pig. Last thing I read was the one you left me with nearly three and a half years ago. Something by Augustine. Just before your accident. You fucking swine."

"Confessions," I responded, remembering that the last time Nina had been with me at a fine restaurant in Vegas she had told me that she loved me, had cried and expressed her desire to live with me. I had, after all, slept with her many times and, during one desperate point in my life, had lived at her place for seven weeks. For some reason, over Beef Wellington, I had agreed to allow her to move in with me the following week. "The name of the book was Confessions of St. Augustine," I stated.

I had given Nina the book after I had met Jenny Santana, a young innocent who dealt blackjack at Binion’s and fucked like a demon. With Jenny, I fell under some kind of spell. Vowing to Jenny never to see another woman again, I had dropped off a copy of Augustine’s work at the night club where Nina worked; on the inside leaf, I had written something like, "To Nina, the sexiest woman I know. Have a good life. I love you. Micah."

For years, Nina had been an exotic dancer, and until I met Jenny I had thought her ideally fitted to my idiosyncrasies. Nina was good in bed, stunningly beautiful, and shared my fascination with Western mysticism. After I dropped the book off at Little Sweethearts, I had hoped never to see Nina again. I had, after all, pledged my soul to Jenny. A week later, the rollover had taken Jenny’s life.

Seeing Nina now at Black Eddy’s, I remembered the letter she had sent me after the accident; in it, she had threatened suicide, branded Jenny a witch, and told me that I didn’t deserve to live. "You have wounded me to the depths of my soul," I remembered that she had written. Now, with the woman in front of me and a dead girl in a van
five hundred yards down the highway, my heart quaked.

My thoughts were on my knife as I glanced at Nina’s neck. You rotten stalking bitch, I forced myself to think, struggling to accept that Nina had been following me for over three years. Then, I turned my gaze upon the short chunky man with the pony tail. I don’t forgive an insult, so I limped up to him, my eyes locked with his, looked down,
spat on the sawdust floor, glanced up and said, "You’re sitting in my place, little man." His nostrils flared as he glared at me.

I allowed him to step down and face me before whipping out my hunting knife and jabbing it towards him. I held the blade at his throat. He was muscular but by no means stupid. "What’s your fuckin’ problem, Jack?" he said, backing off a bit. I could see his hands trembling and enjoyed the rush of power. As I kept my eyes on him, my knife at his neck, he moved back again.

"Leave him be, Micah," Nina said, slowly. She had turned slightly and was facing us. "This is not worth it. He’s not in it. This is between you and me, Micah, you and me. This guy’s not even a dot in the equation."

"Micah." The voice belonged to Black Eddy. It boomed across the room like the voice of God. "No trouble here." The place remained silent, all eyes on me.

I paused, breathed deeply, began to relax and took my knife away from the man’s throat. Realizing that I had nearly killed a man I had never seen, thinking now that perhaps he had not intended to insult me, I took the blade of the knife in the other hand and presented it to him, handle first.

"Please accept this as a token of my apology," I muttered. My quarrel would be with Nina, not this man. "Please forgive me, Black Eddy," I said, looking at the dealer.

Forgiveness, however, did not come. It rarely does on this planet.

The man pointed the knife up at my throat, then looked at Nina. "I’ll remember this, what, Micah is it? I love to play with knives, Micah," he said, his voice shrill and hollow as death. Then he pulled the knife away from my neck and inserted it behind his belt. Spitting again, he walked towards the door.

I turned back to the table, sat on the vacated stool, and played through about ten hands. Noise gradually returned to the room as Nina played next to me, and we sat in silence, making no eye contact.

Finally, tension growing, I said, "You’re gonna come with me tonight, Nina. We’ve got unfinished business." I looked at her.

Nina turned and smiled weakly at me. She was a beautiful as ever. I wondered why I had passed her up.

"Unfinished business? Is that what you call it?" she snapped. For Nina, anger was rare.

"That’s what it is," I asserted.

"You walked out on me, Micah, you son-of-a-bitch. I never wanted to see you again." I looked into her eyes.

"You have a funny way of making that point," I commented, and I couldn’t help but think of the trail of ten or twenty corpses in the past three years.

"I never made that point. You made the point. You never came back."

"So," I began, "so you follow me around the country, like some psycho bitch...."

"Micah, godammit, I haven’t followed you anywhere," she snapped. I could see fire in her eyes. "I’ve done my best to fucking forget you. What do you mean ‘followed you around’? What do you mean ‘psycho bitch’?"

I was getting impatient. Nina had to be lying. Up to this point in my life, I had murdered no one. If my courage and
determination held up, Nina would be my first.

I leaned on the table in her direction, put my right arm around her, and said, "But tonight, you’re coming with me." I grabbed her arm and squeezed. "You’re mine now." She winced, and I realized that physical force would not win her back to me.

"Hey, buddy," Black Eddy said softly so only Nina and I could hear.

"You leave this girl alone. You leave Nina alone. Things are rarely as they seem, Micah."

I looked at the old man, took a deep breath, and started over.

"I’m sorry," I said, studying Nina’s face. I paused for a minute, hoping my words would sink in. I could hear the slot machines clinking around me and figured the old people had gone back to their games by now. As I looked at Nina, mustering all the sweetness I could find in my dark heart, I saw a tear roll down her cheek and thought to myself,
Jesus, this is just too much. "Nina, honey, sweetheart: please forgive me. Please. I am behaving savagely. Please forgive me. My God, you are gorgeous as ever, " I said, hoping to play her emotions.

She looked at me long and sad, took a drag on her cigarette, and then looked away. "It’s all right, Micah," she said in a subdued voice, and I remembered my first impression with her, years ago, as I held her in a back room of the nude bar: this woman tended to be incredibly naive, willing to forgive and forget anything just to have a relationship with a male. "It’s all right, Micah. All’s forgiven."

I looked into her sad eyes. "You know, Micah," she added, "I have prayed for this night of your return. I have prayed and prayed. I guess God answers prayers, huh?"

"I guess so," I said, trying to remain emotionless, noncommittal.

It was then that I did something that surprised ever me: pulling her toward me with my right arm, with my left hand I grabbed her face and forced her to look right at me. Then, slightly exhilarated, I kissed her on the mouth as hard as I could. "I still love you, Nina," I whispered, breathing as much sincerity into my voice as I could.

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure that I didn’t still love this woman.

When I slowly pulled back, I noticed she had her eyes closed. I remembered that Nina always kissed with her eyes closed. I could feel her tranquil spirit and knew she had enjoyed the kiss. I kissed her again, this time more gently and for a longer time, and felt almost guilty thinking about the task at hand.

"I’ll be right back, Micah," she said, slowly drawing back. "I’ll clean up in the ladies’ room and come right back. Then we can leave together and, I dunno, start over. Just start over. I’m glad you’re back."

"Be careful, girl," said Black Eddy, looking at me instead of her. Eddy knew there was poison in the air.

"I’m ok, Eddie," she said.

She slipped off her stool, brushing her hands between my thighs and squeezing my hardness, and walked to the women’s restroom. Determined not to lose her, I tipped the dealer twenty dollars and followed. When she looked back at me with a coy I-want-to-fuck-you-again smile, I blew her a kiss and said, "I just want to wait for you outside the restroom, Nina. I can’t wait."

"Be right back," she said, winking, even giggling, then entering the restroom. This was the old Nina. I knew she wasn’t going anywhere this time. I had her where I wanted her. I would gladly wait, so I took out a pack of Camels, opened it, took out a smoke, and lit up.

IV. I must have waited twenty minutes, leaning against the tile wall, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Curiously, no one went in, and a few fat elderly ladies came out. Finally, I moved to the entrance, stood just inside, and strained to listen. At first I couldn’t hear anything. But I could smell, very faintly, the sour thick metallic smell of human blood, but I thought little of it, figuring that part of my mind was remembering the scene in the van.

Then, I heard a banging, a cracking almost, that came at regular intervals. I didn’t think much about it until it occurred to me that the only thing in the restroom capable of making that sound was the toilet seat—someone had to be operating the seat, banging it up and down on the porcelain. "What the hell?" I muttered.

I felt sick at heart. Ice choked my veins, and my body felt numb—a textbook reaction to stress so great that the body no longer feels the fear, only the complete killing of physical sensation. Shouting "Nina! Are you coming out? Nina! Nina!" I stood at the entrance, hoping to hear her voice or see her emerge only to learn that she had take twenty
minutes to doll herself up. Instead, I heard a whisper, a lengthy susurration, as of someone letting out a long breath. It sounded like the wind; it sounded like death.

Shaking, I walked into the restroom just as the toilet seat clacked again and again. The restroom was not large, with perhaps five stalls, but the floors and one wall was streaked with blood, likely a message to me. My head spinning, I heard the toilet seat bang again, from a stall at the back, and as I moved towards the sound I noticed the back
window was missing. The opening in which the window had sat was about two feet by two feet and approximately five feet off the floor. Someone had taken the window out from the outside, I speculated. I saw another streak of blood just below the opening. Then I turned to the last stall.

Bloodied legs extended under the stall, and as I opened the door I saw Nina: she was still fully clothed, but her dress and arms were coated with blood from a gaping wound in her neck. Her glazed eyes were open, dumbly observing me, and a crimson thread trickled down one side of her mouth. I noticed that the tips of her raven hair, flowing over her shoulders, were stained dark red. The knife lay next to her, on the pink tile. I looked at the weapon, reached over, and picked it up. It was my knife, I realized, the one my grandfather had given me. My name was lettered on the handle.

I howled like a jackal, moaned like an owl. I had been caught in the middle of a horror film, a victim of some inhuman predator. I was no more than an insect caught, once again, in a monstrous web. My head spun and I felt sickeningly borne out of myself. For a moment, I had the sensation that the ground was becoming quicksand, sucking me into the dark Pit. I waited for the portals of Hell to explode through the walls, releasing hordes of demons.

I commanded myself to breathe slowly, steadily. Gradually, coming back to myself, I turned my gaze back on Nina. This was not supposed to happen. My life with Nina had predated the accident. An hour before, I thought, just before I entered the casino, this beautiful, broken woman had been playing cards and talking to Black Eddy. Now she was a
bloody, clotted mess. I couldn’t find the words to pray that she might be released from the dark powers of the world.

I knelt in front of Nina, inwardly begging her forgiveness, wondering if she could hear my thoughts. She was approaching death’s kingdom. I saw her mouth moving as she attempted a few words, but no sound came out because her throat had been slit. As she labored to breathe, she did so in the long gasps that I had heard form the door. As I watched, without warning, she sighed, and mercifully her breathing stopped. Eyes still open, Nina died.

I stood, my legs trembling, trying to recall The Lord’s Prayer. Thinking of the man with the ponytail, I wondered what kind of diabolical being would commit such an act. Knowing I had to get out of the casino as quickly as possible, I leaned over, picked up my knife, wiped it carefully on my jeans, and then escaped through the window. For obvious reasons—I had stepped into the blood, had smeared it on my clothes; besides, I didn’t want to be seen—I couldn’t walk into the casino.

It was just as I was climbing through the opening for the window that I heard the voices of two or three elderly women coming into the restroom. They yelled and screamed as I jumped from the portal and landed on the wet ground just beyond the wall.

From the back of the casino, in a drizzle, I walked through the desert back in the direction of the van. The blanket of clouds overhead still darkened the sky. When I finally reached the road, I found that the van was gone. The headless corpse of the pig was still there. Sirens were approaching from the north.

I cut back through the desert behind Black Eddy’s, the way I had come, walked for another hour, and found the abandoned motel about one mile north on highway 93. The motel had been built about one hundred yards off the highway, a fact that favored me tremendously. For few days, I lived off what food I could find in the desert and behind the casino. For a man accustomed to the desert, as I was, this wasn’t difficult.

In the three days I stayed in the motel, winds of death whipping violently through the area, Black Eddy’s went crazy with cops. One morning, I counted seven Nevada Highway Patrol cars out front of the casino. Obviously, someone had found Nina’s body. For a reason I attribute to divine protection, no one checked the abandoned motel, which my father and I had stayed in thirty years ago. Creeping around the back lot of the casino on the third night, I picked up a two-day old newspaper and read that a nude female body had been found in the desert about a mile down the road. The article said that, according to the autopsy report, the body had been smeared in pig’s blood. The newspaper
included three photos: one of the van, one of PonyTail and one of me. In the article, Black Eddy had described us to a tee.

V. As I write, I am sitting in a room in a truck stop in a little town forty-three miles north of Twin Falls, Idaho. I was fortunate to hitch a ride on the other side of Ely. As far as I know, the trucker (some unshaven, overweight kid in his twenties who had memorized Charles Dickens by heart) is still alive. Hoping that PonyTail must be in this area (since he goes where I go), I have been asking if anyone has seen a 1962 fire engine red Chevy Impala. The car is so rare that I figure if anyone saw it, he would remember. A couple of high school kids told me the other night, when I was eating dinner at Taco Bell, that they had seen a car matching my description last week at a speedway just outside of Twin. The kids might have been lying, but I can’t take chances. I’m going to head over that way soon. I’ve still got my knife,
which carries stains from Nina’s murder and which sings nightly for the blood of my avenger.

© Rich Logsdon