I was married on a cold day in the month of Slova. My bride, a mere child really, shuddered as the last words of the vow were hissed from between her clinched teeth and as if foretelling the future a pair of blackbirds seemed to drop dead and fall from a high tension wire as we walked out of the church. Her mother and father eyed each other wearily from their group and you could sense the animosity that had leached into the two small tribes as their eyes rolled to and fro between the bridesworks and the enemies.
“What a monstrosity.” Mumbled the preacher as he stuffed a wad of cash into his tunic.
I picked up my bride and carried her down the steps while cold metal clouds sloughed off the horizon and began shooting down pellets of ice. The wind picked up and a hand full of rice flew back over the crowd’s heads and rattled off the church windows. My mother in law’s hat flew off and away.
“We must be living on Mars.” She said as she buried her face in her husband’s lapel and began sobbing.
“You carry me over the threshold, not down the steps.” Said my bride.
Holding her to my chest with one arm I opened the door and placed her in the back seat. I turned to the wedding party who were torn between glowering down at me and glowering at each other. I just made a brushing away motion toward them with my arm and went to the other side of the car. Just as I began to open the door someone shouted, “But she’s just a girl for God’s sake!” and just as quickly someone shouted back, “She’s a cheap whore!” And that was it. The two groups set upon one another like wild dogs. Instead of getting in with my beloved I opened the front door and pulled out the driver then took off in a huff of black smoke that helped obscure the commotion and disheartening scene in the church yard.
“Well, that’s that.” I said as I sped the car through its gears and tried to wipe the ‘just married’ words off the window. Then I realized that there was something was wrong with the car. “Jesus Christ! What else can go wrong? It sounds like the car’s falling apart!”
“It’s the cans! It’s the cans!”
“Holy Christ, I feel like I’m escaping from prison!” I said. I pulled the car over and ripped the cans off but when I got back to the door I was locked out. “All right you little rat. Unlock that door.”
“Put the cans back on.”
“What?”
“I’m not going without the cans.”
“What the hell’s it matter. We can’t leave them on all the way to Kentucky. They’ll fall off and we’ll be arrested for littering.”
“We’ll leave them on ’till the hotel then.”
“That’s sixty miles. They won’t last.”
“I don’t care.”
I tied the cans back on and got into the car. On the highway I got the car going fast hoping that the cans might become air born and they did make less noise but after a couple of minutes the engine began clicking so I had to slow down.
“Well, I’m not pregnant.” Said my little wife.
“I knew it! I knew it was a lie the whole time! You little rat! All those people back there think I’m a pervert just because you wanted to be “betrothed.”
“Now you’re my husband and you have to take care of me and buy me stuff.”
“Well that’s where you’re wrong. This whole thing’s a joke.”
“Well you promised in God’s house in front of a preacher.”
“I think you have to believe in that stuff for it to count.”
“Well, you’re a Christian.”
“No. I’m not. I think all that stuff’s a crock.”
“Well, the law’s on my side.”
“What do you know about the law, you can hardly read.”
“I know my rights.”
“You don’t know much at all. I knew you weren’t pregnant when you refused to show me some test results and if you think I bought that ‘don’t you trust me’ crap for one second you’re crazy because no I don’t trust you and I never have trusted you. You’re a complete rat. I’ve never had sex with you–that I know. I may have been drunk on pills and faulty in the head but I knew I didn’t do anything with you. Now, I’ll give you credit for this… you definitely manipulated a confusing situation to your advantage because your dad does have some fearsome friends and my parents are definitely fools when it comes to a sob story. But here’s where you made one crucial mistake. We now have the pesos and the law doesn’t mean a thing to me. So, in a nutshell, you’ve purchased the matrimonial farm.”
Looking into the rearview mirror I could see that little face looking at me with her oily black eyes wide open and her sharp little teeth glistening in her mouth. She ran her fingers back over her head and said, “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I can’t see you doing all of this for fifty thousand pesos.”
“Like I said, you made a crucial mistake. We have a date in Covington with someone who has something that will please me and you’re going to see that 50 thousand disappear in one fell swoop.”
“Hey, that’s my money as much as yours!”
“No it’s not. It’s a dowery. It’s what they pay me to take you off their hands.”
“Right. But you have to spend most the money on me. That’s why they give it to you.”
“Well, that would be partially true if we were living in feudal times and I chose to obey the conventions of the time, but now that we’re living in post inquisition America and the laws are splattered around like chewing gum on the sidewalk and just as insignificant… and in light of the fact that I don’t care for these laws or any other laws for that matter…”
“You’ll care when my dad gets you.”
“I don’t know why you’re going on like this. If you want me to take you back I will. If you want me to dump you off somewhere in Kentucky I’ll do that too. Actually, I’ll do just about anything you want except listen to you. I’ve got too much to think about and not all that much time to think about it.”
“What do you mean not enough time to think about it. We’re going to be driving for hours.”
“I don’t expect it to take hours to travel sixty miles.” But just as I said that I turned onto a highway that was packed with cars as far as the eye could see. There were people milling around on the berm and some cars even had birds sitting on the roofs. “Well, we’re not going this way.” I said as I began backing down the entrance ramp. The car was rolling backwards and the cans must have become caught up in the breaks because when I tried to slow down the pedal didn’t move at all. Then I tried to get the car into some gear so that I could use engine compression to slow us down but the gears just ground and would not engage. And, unfortunately, my little one had an excellent grasp of automotive mechanics because as we developed a truly terrifying head of steam going backwards she said, “You should have left it in reverse instead of being so impatient and wanting to roll faster than the law allows. And I can’t believe you forgot about the cans again. You can’t run over something like that and not expect trouble. Also, here comes a car.” And sure enough there was a car coming up behind us that didn’t seem to apprehend that we were coming at them at 30 miles an hour. “What idiot!..” I shouted just before we slammed into the car and sent all sorts of metal bits skittering down the road. The accident didn’t much phase us and, in fact, left my wife sharp enough to tell me that we’d just crashed into her family’s car.
“This is a living nightmare.” I said as I ran off into the woods with the bag of money. I ran for about a minute before stopping to catch my breath by a small pond that was evidently close to the main highway since I could hear radios playing and people talking. Looking behind me I saw my bride coming up fast, jumping over logs and ducking under branches like a real animal. “God, why can’t she leave me alone?” I wondered. She was not at all my girlfriend and really, I don’t think anyone that knew either of us would for one second claim that we were even nice to each other. The entire marriage thing was a joke and the only reason it happened was due to one fact and one phenomenon. The fact was that my bride was insane and the phenomenon was that she had a streak of lucid thoughts one fateful day that allowed her to say just the right things to just the right people. She was obsessed with getting married but to whom really didn’t matter. She could have married Chairman Mao for all it mattered to her. She just considered it to be something that had to be done. I had no desire to be married but I didn’t mind the idea of collecting a small pile of money from the parents if they were so foolish. When she got over to me she grabbed the bag of money and threw it up in the air where it blew all over the place. Then she jumped into the pond just before her dad came bounding over the brush like Danny Boone. “He threw me in the Pond!” She shouted. That was that. That was also fifty years ago and we’ve been discussing things ever since.