Cyril in the Flesh Read online

  Cyril in the Flesh

  Ramsey Hootman

  Copyright © 2021 by Ramsey Hootman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design courtesy of James at www.goonwrite.com

  For more information contact [email protected] or visit www.RamseyHootman.com.

  Other books by Ramsey Hootman

  * * *

  Courting Greta

  Surviving Cyril

  Contents

  Stage 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 1.5

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 2.5

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 3.5

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 4.5

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 5.5

  Chapter 6

  Stage 2

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Stage 3

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Stage 4

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Stage 5

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Ramsey Hootman

  In celebration of my Aunt Wendy

  and her bold, generous, joy-filled life.

  * * *

  Had your story had been mine to write,

  you’d be with us still.

  Be proud and bitter to the world, my friend; but, privately, just say, “She doesn’t love me.”

  Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Harold Whitehall translation

  Stage 1

  Anger

  Chapter 1

  Now

  Lots of shit happens after this asshole gets his best friend killed. For the sake of brevity, we’ll cut to the day he's released from prison. Lest the reader assume his incarceration unjust—it's always tempting to give the protagonist the benefit of the doubt—it was not. Cyril Blanchard deserved every last moment of those five-to-ten years. The indictment says he exposed thousands of pages of highly classified military intelligence; of that crime, anyone with an internet connection is well aware.

  What most will never know: hacking the Marine Corps was just the icing on the shit cake. If there were a hell, the crimes which would condemn this asshole to eternal torment include betraying his best friend, getting him blown to kingdom come, and fucking his widow. Not physically, mind you (yeah, he wishes), but with words alone. He’s good with words.

  That he is released after five years, three months, and nine days is not due to some saintly reformation or presidential pardon, but the happy accident of a global pandemic colliding with America’s overcrowded criminal justice system. No; he worked that prison like a bitch.

  Which is how this asshole comes to be sitting at a deserted bus station in Taft, California, wondering where the hell he is supposed to go. His pretentious shrew of an ACLU lawyer said she’d have it figured out, but judging by the season and the sun, it’s well past noon. Typical.

  It’s possible this day will end with him digging in a dumpster. Not for lack of money; his pocket bulges with the two hundred he was allotted upon release, in small bills. The first thing he did when they dropped him off was mask up and hoof it to the nearest burger joint—where he stood like an idiot, staring at a menu so vast it boggled the mind. Eventually, someone asked if he needed help, and he got angry, and the manager told him he could leave immediately, or leave with the police.

  His stomach complains. He regrets not having gone around back to find the dumpster when he left the restaurant. Eating someone else’s garbage would have been unthinkable, five years thence, but prison has lowered his standards considerably. But he hadn’t done it, and now it’s too late, because if he wanders off, he may miss his ride. Assuming one is coming.

  He sits on the cinder block bench for another hour, maybe two, feeling the smart of sunshine crisping his pale epidermis. It’s more trouble to shift his bulk than it’s worth to go in search of shade. When, finally, a cherry-red Ford Ranger rounds the corner at the end of the block, he knows it’s there for him by the way it slows when he lifts a hand to shade his eyes. You’d think he’d be grateful, but the flash of relief only ignites a powder keg of anger: six hours for his goddamn lawyer to find him a ride? Phone a fucking Uber.

  Getting to his feet is not the herculean ordeal it once was, but it still requires more effort than he likes to expend, especially in the heat. The bench sits on a rise, and his deflated gut swings like a fleshy hoop skirt as he negotiates the graded slope down to the sidewalk.

  The late summer sun glances off the pickup’s windshield, obscuring his view of the driver. It had better not be a fanboy, or some lunatic script kiddie. He doesn’t have any relatives willing to acknowledge shared genetic material, so no worries there. Most likely it’s whichever one of his lawyer’s west-coast colleagues owes her the biggest favor.

  He yanks open the passenger door, mouth open to ask this douche whether he’s at least getting a hand job out of the deal, and—

  The words stick.

  It’s her.

  Not the lawyer, dumbass. The other her. The widow. Jesus Christ.

  Chapter 1.5

  Twelve years ago

  He took philosophy for her. It was a general-ed class, not even remotely a requirement for a computer science major in his third year. He arrived late and sat in back, most days, ignoring the droning lecture as he committed her image to memory in photo-perfect detail: her hair, which she’d flat-ironed in those days, sleek and lustrous as a blackbird wing. The way the ends had brushed across her bare shoulders, separating like the delicate teeth of a comb. The quirk of her asymmetrical eyebrows as she turned to listen to a classmate’s opinion, disagreement registering only in a slight flare of nostrils. Her open-mouthed, utterly unselfconscious laughter, as if nobody in her entire life had ever been able to bring themselves to shush her joyful noise. Every inch of her perfect, except—

  Except that she kept saying “all of the sudden.” This was down in Cal Poly's main study hall—she was not with him, but nearby—and he cannot have been the only one bothered by her butchering of this ridiculously common idiom. He’d leaned across the long table and pointed it out. The way one might do an acquaintance the favor of pointing out a flipped tag or an unzipped fly.

  She had not appreciated the courtesy, and told him so in no uncertain terms.

  What reaction had he hoped for? A coy laugh, followed by introductions (he already knew her name was Robin) and an invitation to join her little study group? Yeah, probably not. What he hadn’t expected was the utter lack of recognition in her withering gaze. The 3 PM section of PHIL 126 was capped at thirty students, and as far as Robin was concerned, she’d never in her life laid eyes upon this slovenly, basement dwelling specimen.

  She had just finished telling him to take his negging bullshit and shove it up his ass when Tavis arrived, fresh off the bus from boot camp with nowhere to bunk down but the floor of his childhood friend’s dor
m. Lanky and lean as a half-starved wolf, he and his crew cut might as well have sucked all the air out of the room. Only Robin, a Navy brat herself, had seen too many earnest young sailors to be impressed by his crisp uniform and confident stride. When she saw Tavis greet Cyril with a hearty slap on the back, she’d gathered her books and headed for the door.

  It was not Cyril, then, but Tavis—smitten by the blaze of fury in her eyes—who rushed after her to offer an apology for this asshole’s offense. That evening, he’d dropped out of a tree and into her path, with the coy insistence that he’d fallen from the bright full moon. And that was how Robin and Tavis Matheson fell in love.

  This is the story everyone knows. It is the narrative their friends and family have become familiar with. It is the tale Robin will one day tell her grandchildren. Mostly, it’s true.

  The story lacks just one small detail: Cyril had known she would be in the library that day.

  Oh. He never mentioned that, did he?

  It was not stalking, exactly. Not yet. Robin had simply caught his eye, first outside the student union, and then repeatedly in the campus dining hall. Almost without intent, Cyril had found himself frequenting those spots, hoping for another glimpse of her broad, toothy smile. There were only a few Black students on campus; it had been easy enough to discover her name. Her major. Her dormitory. The password to her university account.

  So he’d known when and where she planned to meet up with a few classmates to prep for their final presentations. Robin didn’t belong to him, but he’d wanted to share her, somehow, with his best and only friend. Though he would have denied it, perhaps some part of him had hoped that Tav’s charismatic presence would, somehow, open the door for him to... what? Step in and stun her with his wit and charm?

  How naïve he had been, to imagine Tavis wouldn’t fall for Robin, too.

  Chapter 2

  Now

  This now-formerly-incarcerated asshole doesn’t speak to Tavis Matheson’s widow for two fucking hours. Not only because he’s an ungrateful piece of shit, but because she doesn’t deserve to hear the things he wants to say. Five years she’d left him to bake in this central Californian hellhole, without a single visit or phone call or even so much as a note jotted on a postcard. He had given himself up for dead. And now—now she has the gall to roll back into his life, as if no time has passed at all?

  Of course, he has no right to this fury. She owes him nothing. She made no promises. Five years ago, when she’d dropped him off in the prison parking lot, her body had been a freeway sign flashing sayonara. He had never expected to see her again.

  He adjusts the air vents, and then adjusts them again. A couple years into his sentence he’d obtained a small handheld fan, but this is the first time he has felt genuine AC since he went in. He is still hot. He is always hot. He plucks at his shirt—the musty bin of Goodwill castoffs set aside for graduating felons had contained nothing in his size, so he wears the same unwashed cotton shirt he’d traded for an orange jumpsuit the day he self-surrendered. It is stiff with the salt of her angry tears.

  Camarillo, where Robin had lived and laid her husband to rest, was south and west of Taft; now she drives north, past an endless vista of flat yellow fields. This asshole does not ask why she is here, or where they are going, or what the ever-loving fuck she thinks she is doing. He shifts, knocking his head against the roof of the cab as he attempts to find some position in which the seatbelt does not cut into his gut. It is a position which does not exist.

  She doesn’t speak, either, though he feels her evaluating him out of the corner of one eye. He is good at reading her, but the black cotton mask covering her nose and mouth obscures most of the nonverbal data he might use to do so. No matter. When she wants him to know why she has come, if she wants him to know, he will know. She has never had a problem speaking her mind.

  Perhaps she is silent now because there are simply too many things to say.

  The truck breaks the stalemate, in the end, with a beep of warning.

  “Oh, shoot—I'm empty.” She flips on the blinker—sunlight flashes off the diamond in the wedding band she still wears—and swerves just in time to make the exit on the right. They’re on I-5, so the next offramp could be forty miles.

  At the pump she hops out, tugging the mask down to her chin for a breath of gasoline-infused air. He watches through the glass as she plugs the nozzle into the tank and squeegees the windshield, drinking her in with his eyes.

  Close-fitted cotton shirt, the outline of her sports bra just visible beneath. Faded, paint-spattered jeans—not a fashion statement, but the real deal. Work boots with leather laces worn thin around the hooks and eyes. She is the same as he left her, but different in a thousand subtle ways. Her body a little thicker, a little more muscle in her arms. Her face harder, leaner, etched with the first few indelible lines. Her thick black curls, once shoulder-length, now cropped close to her head. Only her hands are rough; everywhere else, her brown-gold skin is so fresh it glows. She yawns and stretches, and his eyes follow the arch of her back.

  She is beautiful. She couldn’t not be. Not ever. Not to him.

  She disappears into the station, and then around back, presumably to pee. When she slides back into the cab, she tosses a cheap spandex mask onto his thigh. The tag is still attached.

  “Had it,” he tells her, adding the mask to the receipts, blueprints, and napkins which clutter the dash. The thin paper covering he had been allotted that morning sits crumpled at the bottom of his pocket. “Tested positive, but all I ever got was a runny nose. And yeah, they isolated and tested me again before release."

  She rips her own mask off, the elastic snapping back against her fingers, and closes her eyes as she exhales exasperation. “I’ll give you this much, Cyril. You never change.”

  “Pretty sure I fucking told you so.”

  He had. She knows.

  She inhales again, slowly, and when she opens her eyes, she nods at the Burger King across the street. “I know it’s a crappy first meal, but I’m starving. What do you say?”

  As if they’re just two old friends, catching up after all these years. Why is she here? Why is she treating him like a decent human being, instead of the man who made her a widow? He snorts and turns to gaze out the passenger window.

  “Really? You planning to spend the next four hours pretending I’m not here?”

  “Sure as fuck gonna try.” This is how he speaks to his best friend’s wife.

  She shakes her head and pulls into the drive-through line. When the car in front moves forward, she lowers the window and hooks and elbow over the door. “Gimme a bacon cheeseburger with medium coke and fries.” She glances over one shoulder. “Last chance.”

  He doesn’t look. Not because he doesn’t want the food—look at him; he wants the food—but because he might freeze up again, and then she will know he has not emerged from prison unscathed. He’ll pick hate over pity every time.

  His stomach betrays him with a long, low growl.

  She turns back to the microphone. “You know what, just double my order.”

  At the window, she dons her mask long enough to accept two top-heavy beverages and a crinkly bag spotted with oil, then lets the truck roll forward a few yards to accommodate the car behind. She wedges the drinks into cup holders and drops the bag onto the console between them before steering back into the street. With one hand on the wheel and her eyes on the road, she reaches into the pocket in the door and retrieves a bottle of hand sanitizer. At the first red light, she pumps a generous glob into her palm and thrusts the bottle toward him in a way that suggests compliance is not optional.

  Sanitary precautions seem almost quaint after five years in a human petri dish, but he humors her. The evaporation of alcohol is pleasantly cool on his skin.

  Still driving single-handedly—merging onto the freeway now—Robin pulls a burger from the bag and tears back the wrapper with her teeth. The smell makes his mouth water.

  “Didn’t
stop to eat,” she explains around a mouthful, though he hasn’t asked and doesn’t care. “Your lawyer called last night to tell me you were getting out. Wasn’t sure I could make it before you got on the bus to Bakersfield.”

  Is that what he was supposed to do? Fucking lawyers. When he’d asked the woman where she expected him to go in the middle of a pandemic, she’d suggested calling around to his “friends.” Seeing as the only person who’d ever deserved that title was five years dead, he’d declined, but she’d apparently taken the initiative.

  Robin’s left hand leaves the wheel long enough to flip the blinker. “We’re up in Healdsburg now.” She eases into the fast lane. “Wine country. North of the bay?”

  Her window is still open. He rolls his down, too, and drapes an elbow over the door, plucking again at his shirt. The smell of bacon grease mingles with the tang of his own sweat. He clenches and unclenches a fist.

  She finishes the burger and then the fries, licking salt from her fingertips before wiping her hand on her thigh. The next time she reaches into the bag, eyes still on the road, she pulls out the second burger and extends her arm.