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Fun with Dick and Jane

Jon Say

    Before he’d even identified the sound, Dick’s stomach clutched with fear. The sound stopped, but it was too late – his brain had already come up with a label for it. It was the short, high-pitched scream of the second last step leading downstairs to the living room. Dick hadn’t heard that sound in three months, at least not when he wasn’t the one causing it. He sat paralyzed, his back to the staircase.
    The only sound was the blonde on television carefully inserting compassion into her voice as she read the next story on the teleprompter. Dick sensed the presence behind him. He tried to tell himself it couldn’t be, but he was still frozen, unable to move, his mind stuck on the panic mantra of Oh God Oh God Oh God. He remembered only too well what usually followed that stair screech, or at least what had followed it over the last two years. It was usually a vase, or a plate, or a picture frame or something that would explode against the wall above the TV.
    This time there was no explosion. And the silence was worse. He knew she was standing at the base of the stairs, knew that she knew he had heard her, and she was just.... letting him sit.
    He glanced at the end table without moving his head and what he didn’t see there caused a fresh wave of terror to wash over him.
    Sitting on the end table was a small dish shaped like a sunfish that one of his brother’s kids had made for him in a sixth grade ceramics class. It was where the key rings were usually kept, and sometimes a wayward paper clip or coin wound up there as well. And for the last three months, it had held one other item. A delicate gold ankle bracelet with a charm hanging from it on which the words “I Love You” was engraved in script. It had ended up there the night they were supposed to attend the Emmys because she had come late from the studio and had forgotten to take it off upstairs when she was quickly getting ready. On the way out the door she remembered it was still around her ankle and had bent down, removed it, and tossed it into the sunfish. She normally wore it all the time, but that night it clashed with the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Harry Winston loaners around her neck and wrists. She normally would have put it back on as soon as she got home, except she had never returned home. Dick did, but she was no longer with him. She was in custody by then.
    Dick had never removed the ankle bracelet from the sunfish. Some part of him knew that she had been the last one to touch it when she put it there, and that knowledge made him reluctant to touch it himself. Not out of disgust, or fear, but because some part of him still loved her. Not the way she was now, but the way she had been five years earlier when they’d married. He could still close his eyes and see her on their honeymoon in Acapulco, her raven hair dancing across her face as she grinned happily at him, naked except for the fine gold chain around her ankle flashing the slanting afternoon sunlight at him from the big king-sized bed.
    The sunfish was empty.
    “Honey, I’m home!”
    Her voice broke his paralysis and he leapt off the couch, whirling to face her.
    She stood at the base of the stairs and through his fear he was still drawn to her beauty. She was dressed in denim shorts and a gray sweatshirt. The gold ankle bracelet was linked just above her right foot, as usual. The 9mm handgun from their bedside table was in her right hand, aimed slightly below Dick’s stomach.
    “Jesus,” Dick said.
    “No, still just Jane,” she replied. The gun was rock steady. “Well, Dick, I’m surprised. With it only being Thursday, and with a couple of hours to yourself, I thought sluts-her-name - Carmen, isn’t it? – would be here.”
    “God damn it, Jane! How many times do I have to tell you there is nothing going on with Carmen?! Or anyone else, for that matter.” Dick had raised his hands without even realizing it.
    “You should never argue with a woman when she’s pointing a gun at your dick, Dick.” She giggled at her own joke. Dick didn’t. “Was there a picture of me on the news? I didn’t hear. I was upstairs.” She waggled the gun a little as if to explain what she had been doing up there.
    “No. They didn’t even identify you.”
    “Fucking news people. Well, the cops must not have told them. The networks would kill baby seals to lead with Jane Harmony, prison escapee.”
    Dick was silent. She was right. Before her shocking arrest and incarceration Jane had been the host of the number one afternoon television talk show in the country, “In Harmony”. For the last eight years, thousands of couples had walked into her studio and bared their marital problems to a panting America while Jane counseled them back to bliss. And America loved her for it. What America didn’t see was Jane Harmony, colossally failed wife and mother, control freak extraordinaire, husband beater and heroin addict. Until she was arrested for possession during a routine traffic stop on the way to the Emmys, that is. Then America got a close up view of Jane Harmony heading to prison and Seinfeld reruns in her afternoon time slot.
    “What happened to the other two?”
    Jane had been looking around the living room and snapped her attention back to Dick when he spoke. The gun was still zeroed in on him.
    “Other two?”
    “Your fellow inmates. They got caught. You didn’t. Why not?” Dick’s mind had started to work again. He had to figure out how to protect Nell. That’s the only reason he could think of that Jane would come back to the house.
    “They agreed to the dangerous part of the plan. They failed. I didn’t.” Jane did everything but shrug. She sounded bored.
    “How did you get them to agree to that?”
    “Oh, Dick, it’s easy to make friends in prison.” She smiled but her eyes went blank. “Everyone wants to be in Harmony.” She laughed and the sound made Dick’s teeth rattle. His lips drew back in disgust and he thought he would scream. Then he thought of Nell and everything morphed into rage. This perversion of a human being, this monster wanted to take his little girl. No. That wasn’t going to happen.
    Jane saw his features change and she took a small step backward, her heel touching the bottom step. She raised the gun and put authority into her voice.
    “All right Dick. Where is she? Tell me. NOW!”
    “Fuck you, Jane.” Dick lowered his hands and took a step towards her. He had no idea what he was going to do.
    His ears exploded and he fell to the ground as Jane fired the gun, and a clock on the wall shattered. Jane brought the gun back to bear on Dick. He looked up at her, the fear filling him again.
    “Get up and shut up, Dick. Tell me where she is. I won’t change my aim next time.”
    Dick stayed silent. His ears were ringing. Where the hell where the neighbors? Christ, the whole world must have heard the shot.
    Jane raised the 9mm and grasped her right wrist with her left hand to steady it.
    “I’m counting to three, Dick. One.”
    “You won’t shoot me. If you do, you’ll never find her.”
    “Don’t flatter yourself, Dick. I found you, didn’t I? All I’ll have to do is wait for her to come home. Two.”
    Dick stared at her. He felt something warm in his lap and realized with dismay he had wet his pants.
    “Th....”
    “OKAY, okay.” Dick was breathing hard. “She’s at the Baxter kid’s birthday party. She’s going to be gone for another two hours.”
    Jane looked thoughtful. She raised the gun and tapped it against her cheek.
    “That’s right. It’s Jesse Baxter’s birthday, isn’t it? Well, we’ll just have to wait for Nell to come home.” She looked at him on the floor, and noticed the stain. “Oh for God’s sake, Dick, be a fucking man, will you? Did you actually wet yourself? Christ, I should shoot you for being a disgrace to males everywhere.”
    Dick stared at her malevolently.
    “Under different circumstances, I’d let you change your pants, but I don’t want you out of my sight until Nell gets home. So you get to lay there in your own piss.” She looked at him with active disgust, a look he recognized. From his position on the floor he glanced towards the living room curtains, and out them, and surprise raced across his face before he caught it and forced terror to replace it. He cowered on the floor the best he could.
    “I..I’m sorry, honey. Look, just let me change, okay? I’ll cooperate with you, I promise.”
    “You are such a sorry piece of shit, you know that?” She started to pace slowly back and forth, her look growing meaner by the second as the heroin addict took control of her mind and body. Dick tried not to watch the gun in her hand. The gun made this risky, but he didn’t see any other way. “Just think about it, Dick. You’re lying in your own piss because you can’t even stand up to your wife.” She started pacing faster. “And I’ve only been home for... thirty minutes!”
    “Honey, listen, you’re right, I’m sorry..”
    “SHUT UP SHUT UP JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
    Dick watched as she paced wider and faster, wider and faster, only a few more feet, please God please oh pretty please God....
    Dick covered his head as he saw Jane raise the gun and point it at him. Her voice seemed to take on an echo when his ears exploded with gunfire for the second time.
    Dick didn’t notice he was crying. His sobs sounded more like dry screams as the living room door burst open and the SWAT team poured in, covering the room with their weapons in jerky motions. One of them ran to Jane’s body, which had been thrown over the back of the couch by the force of the sniper’s bullet. The last thing Dick had seen before covering his head was Jane walk in front of the living room window. Her ranting and pacing always went together, and once he had seen the man dressed all in black hiding behind the chimney of the house across the street he knew that if he could get Jane to walk in front of the window he might have a chance.
    The news people might not have Jane’s name, but the cops sure as hell did. And where is the most likely place an escaped convict might go, especially if she had a three-year-old daughter? Home sweet home.
    Dick slowly picked himself up, not hearing the officer asking him if he was all right. He was staring at Jane’s body. At her ankle. The fine golden chain with the charm that said “I Love You” was flashing the slanting afternoon sunlight at him.

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