Crossroads by JP Relph

from The One That Got Away: a Pistol Jim Press series

Crossroads by JP Relph

Nobody got away from me. They all paid in the end. They’d try though: going off-grid in some honkytonk backwoods or fleeing across country. One fella even faked his own death. I’d find them whatever, wherever. Once they signed that contract, it was ticktock on the clock, and then me and the hounds would collect.

I used Randy Toot’s Roadhouse for my business. Randy looked the other way and I arranged for a stream of secret boyfriends—his bruised soul to remain all his. The Roadhouse squatted in the meeting of two roads to nowhere. A suncooked, windblasted crossroads that even lizards avoided. Crossing here were listless drifters, losers running from something, lonely truckers with bad raps. Like shooting squirrels in a barrel for a top salesman like me.

I’d sidle up to them, offer to buy a round or four and soon we’d be chitchatting like old pals. Bitching about wives and kids and girlfriends and the woke and the fucking unfair state of it all. I’d wait until their rage was cooking like the asphalt outside—because they knew it’d never get better, they’d only ever have endless busted roads to nowhere—and I’d say, “I could change all that.”

Most asked for money. These were not complex men. Some wanted love – or their version of it – and now and then, they needed someone dead. Then five, maybe ten, sometimes even fifteen years later, they saw me again.

“Was it worth it?” I’d ask before releasing the hounds.

And they’d say yes, they were happy. Lying even then, with hot spit dripping on their faces.

“Good on ya,” I’d say and the pups went to work.

I racked up a sizeable soul portfolio. You might say I was a bit of a legend. Old school, my brethren said. But there’s something about life-beat, road-beat men. They’d give it up for five years of top-shelf whiskey money or a woman to cook like their mama did, then thank me.

Then I met Sherm and got played harder than a thrift store fiddle.

#

Sherman P. Brantley (call me Sherm, friend) was a salesman too. Magazine subscriptions, pitched at your very door. Thirty years in the game and he was tired. Road’s gotten tougher, friend. So unlike my regular clients—no bad news, no trouble on his tail—he was warm and dry as parking-lot weeds.

Just as unassuming. Just as tenacious.

After telling me about his wife and grown-up kids and his vegetable plot and his dog who was more like a best friend, I doubted he’d bite. I pitched anyway.

“I could change all that.”

Then good ole Sherm turned to me with a strange smirk on his face, said,

“How about we change each other, my demonic friend.”

#

Sherm’s proposal was ludicrous: I laughed so loud, Randy Toot reached for his .38. You see Sherm was bored senseless—I’ve reached a crossroads you might say—wanted something new. Something a little down and dirty.

“We trade for a year. You get my life, Marsha, and the kids; I stretch my salesman muscles for real results. Don’t you want to know if you’re really the best?”

Like I said, thrift store fiddle.

#

So we traded. Body and life. I thought I’d be bored, mired in the human everyday experience—I wasn’t, not once. It was the food mostly. Damn, Marsha could cook. Stews, chowders, pies, biscuits. I put the magazine sales online so I could stay in the house with all the food. The dog loved me. The kids looked up to me. I basked in it. Made good money. Tended my vegetables. Took Marsha to the theatre and Las Vegas. We made love. You heard me. I got kinda fat, but I didn’t mind. I liked it. I liked it all.

Was Sherm this content in Randy Toot’s Roadhouse, watching road-beat men sign over souls Sherm couldn’t collect? Did he miss this?

When the calendar started to run out, dates rushing at me like thorned tumbleweeds, and every bite of pie felt like my last. I wasn’t going back. I wasn’t giving this up. I’d beat the system. If anyone could…

Hell, I’d fake my own death. I was Sherman P. Brantley now. The best of him. The one that would get away. I didn’t have a soul to lose, but I had Marsha’s peach cobbler and soft thighs and Hell if I wasn’t hanging on tight to both.

Bio

JP Relph is a writer from the Northwest of England, hindered by three cats. Tea helps, milk first. She mooches around in charity shops looking for haunted objects. JP writes about apocalypses a lot (despite not having the knees for one) and got a zombie story onto the Wigleaf longlist, which may be the best thing ever.

X : @RelphJp
BSky: @therelphian
https://linktr.ee/JPRelph