Mekk didn’t want to marry Nit. He didn’t have anything against her. But he wanted out of the sticks, out of Chang Saen, on the road, down to Bangkok, out where he could make his own name. Here in Chang Saen he would someday run his father’s grocery, making him the grocer. Right now he was Nit’s Fiancé. In ten minutes he’d be at the district office and he’d sign the papers and then he would be Nit’s Husband.
He was sitting on his puttering motorbike with Nit behind him, waiting for the light to change at the market intersection. She kept wanting to put her arms around him, but he shrugged her off. Other motorbikes were running the red light, swerving through the slow-moving cross traffic, but he stayed put.
“We are rock-solid,” Mekk’s father said. “People will always buy vegetables and toothpaste and ice and Coke.”
Mekk nodded, and kept at the drudgery around the grocery, stacking goods, counting change. Sometimes, though, he got to make a trip to loading docks for supplies. He lingered in the shade of the jackfruit trees with the truck drivers, drinking rice whiskey. Pretended he was one of them, bound for a road anywhere. He used his pocket money to keep the whiskey flowing, to keep their stories flowing. Bedding a girl on a stack of rice sacks, fisticuffs with a rival syndicate’s truckers on a Bangkok wharf, saline pools shimmering with blue electric light as a lightning storm crashing across the salt farms, gunning away from a gang of insurgents on a lonely mountain road down south.
He returned to the grocery with booze reeking from his pores to find Nit had been waiting on him for hours. She sat demurely on a stack of rice sacks, not meeting his eyes. He wanted to fuck her right there but had barely completed the thought before his father cuffed him and shoved him into a storeroom.
Mekk shielded himself from more blows, but they did not come. His father sighed.
“No more, boy,” he said. “Learn your place. This grocery will fall apart without constant care, same as a man without a wife. Nit is the perfect bride. All else will grow in time. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Mekk.
Mekk understood, all right. What could you say against Nit? She really was everything everyone said, lovely and gentle and smooth-natured, of good name and repute. In her quiet way, Nit loved him. Mekk knew that much. After this became a generally agreed-upon fact, they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t much talk about anything, sitting across from each other at endless meals in restaurants where she ate whatever he ordered. He didn’t even know what her favorite food was. She had replicas of Pooh Bear and Doraemon attached to her phone, and he didn’t know why, or which she liked better. They sat in theaters, primly not holding hands like the other bantering couples, waiting for the movie to start.
One time he brought her to the rock outcropping just off the highway overlooking the reservoir, his favorite spot in the whole world that he knew of, so far. He thought the beauty of the overlook would provoke some feeling, in him, in her, but it didn’t. Nit had nothing much to say, then as on any other time. She was content to be wherever he was, like a cat that only purrs in the presence of one person.
“What if we made a run for it?” he said.
What are you talking about?” Nit said. “Run where?”
“To Bangkok! Start up a whole new life.”
“What?” she said.
“Never mind,” he said, hurling a rock into the water. “Will you be happy running a grocery with me till forever?”
“Forever,” Nit said.
Mekk was pretty sure that was the only word she heard. Come to think of it, it was the only one he’d heard, too. What would they say to each other for all the coming years? He in his place, she in hers. The Grocer. Forever the Grocer. Sure, everyone knew the only love that lasted was the kind that started off at a slow burn. But he was already burning fast, there at the market stoplight in the exhaust fumes.
He twisted on the accelerator and Nit almost fell off the back of the bike.
“Where are we going?” she shouted.
But he pretended he didn’t hear through his helmet, the silver one with the shiny opaque facemask. He liked wearing this helmet on. He liked to smirk at the town from behind it. Without the helmet, he always had to keep a straight face.
Mekk swerved through the traffic, away from the District Office, out of town. He didn’t look back or slow down. They burst into the green of the countryside, swooping past the overflowing sugarcane fields and the stilted huts where poor farmers and old people lived, whining around slow-moving trucks belching black fumes on the winding road. Nit held on to him tight, trusting, plaited hair flapping in the wind, head between his shoulder blades. Sure, he was supposed to be marrying her right now, but right now he had the helmet and she didn’t.
Ahead was the reservoir and the road jogged sharply right around the outcropping that jutted into the road. He twisted back the accelerator far as it would go. Rocks looming big in his facemask, he grinned and leaned the bike over hard left.
***
Court Merrigan has been published widely, including in PANK, Night Train, Blackbird, Evergreen Review, and Shotgun Honey. You can find links at http://courtmerrigan.wordpress.com/short-stories/. He lives in Wyoming’s banana belt with his family.
Wow! I could feel his frustration and all I could think of was the ending of “Ethan Frome” and wondered how Mekk’s world would end. Great story!
Great fiction, but wait a minute. Court lives in Wyoming with YOUR family? Gee, R. Thomas. I’m surprised you bought his story.
Excellent story.