Red 1-2-3

Epilogue: The First Chapter

He took the gun and cracked open the cylinder. It was a snub-nosed.38-caliber Smith & Wesson type favored by fictional police detectives in the noir books popular in the ’40s and ’50s because it fit snugly into a shoulder holster that could easily be concealed beneath a suit coat. A zoot suit, the Big Bad Wolf thought. Detectives who wore snappy fedoras on their heads and said things like “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The Wolf knew that it was an inaccurate weapon, although singularly deadly at very short range. It was no longer in common use. In this modern era real cops preferred heavier semiautomatic arsenals that carried more bullets and delivered more impact. He had purchased this weapon from a private gun dealer in nearby Vermont and had paid a premium price for it because of its slightly antique and romantic qualities. The dealer had asked few questions when he’d seen cash.

The Wolf removed five of the six bullets from the cylinder and placed them upright in a row in front of him. He had performed this procedure every morning for more than a month. They were directly adjacent to a new passport and a fake social security card. Run and become someone new. Die. Two choices. Neither good.

He closed up the weapon with a satisfying click!

Holding the weapon out in front of him, he paused.

Hemingway. Mishima. Kosinski. Brautigan. Thompson. Plath. Sexton. He pictured them and many others.

An abrupt shaft of tension creased through his chest. He could hear a distant siren somewhere in his neighborhood. Police, fire, or ambulance-he could not tell the difference. He hardly breathed as he listened. The siren grew louder, closer; then, to his immense relief, it began to fade away, and finally disappeared.

The Wolf walked across the bedroom and stared into a large mirror. He lifted the gun and placed the barrel by the side of his forehead, thumbed back the hammer, and teased the trigger with his index finger. He wondered just how many pounds of pressure it would take to fire. One pound? Two? Three? A real tug or only a slight caress? He held that position for a good thirty seconds. Then he shifted the gun, so that the barrel was now in his mouth. He could taste the harsh metal resting on his tongue. Another thirty seconds passed. Then he moved the gun a final time in a ritual as familiar to him now as brushing his teeth or combing his hair, so that the barrel was pointed up, prodding the flesh beneath his chin. Again, he remained frozen until he was no longer aware whether it had been seconds, minutes, or even hours. One more murder, he thought. When he slowly lowered the gun, he could see a reddish indentation where the barrel cylinder had been pressed against his skin.

He thought he could no longer recognize himself.

Gray, thinning hair. Crow’s-feet lines around his eyes. Teeth yellowing. Eye sockets receding. Vision out of focus. Veins protruding. Chest sunken.

It was as if he-just like the distant siren-was fading away. He knew that soon enough he would look in the mirror and see a dead man. And when that minute inevitably arrived, he would finally pull the trigger.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf stared out her office window at the graduation ceremonies beginning on the quadrangle in front of the administration building. She could not bring herself to go down to join them. She lifted the window sash, and could hear the soaring music of a bagpipe band that marched the graduating seniors into their seats with pomp and flourish. Through a tangle of green-leafed trees that swayed in the sunlit breeze of the fine early June morning, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf searched the collection of proud parents, friends, and family who were there to honor the graduates. From her vantage point, it was impossible to make out faces or identify forms. Twice she imagined she saw two red-haired women in the audience sitting together, and then, when she looked through the branches another time, she was completely unsure. The only Red she absolutely knew was there would happily prance across the stage to receive her diploma within a few minutes. The nice thing about graduation is that it is all about the future, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf thought. Limitless, unrestrained future. She left the window and returned to her desk. She had spent many lonely days and nights since she’d managed to slice the duct tape from her wrists and ankles in time to get to her job, just as the doctor had told her to.

She had never spoken to her husband about that night.

She did not have to.

“How things change,” she whispered. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf centered herself in front of her computer. She was filled with fear, doubt, and a near-certainty that what she was about to do was somehow terribly wrong and terribly right all at the same moment. She could feel a little nervous sweat gathering beneath her arms as she adjusted the keyboard so that her hands rested comfortably above the letters. She glanced around quickly to make sure that no one was watching her. She clicked a few keys.

A new, blank document flashed onto the screen in front of her. She paused again and told herself that there would never be a better moment. She wrote:

Chapter One: The Three Reds

She indented a few lines, and then she typed:

I did not know on my wedding night that the man who crept beside me into bed was a vicious killer.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf looked at the sentence. It wasn’t bad, she insisted to herself. It might just work. She did not know much about nonfiction or memoir, but this didn’t seem to her to be a poor start.

She asked herself whether somewhere within her there was another sentence to follow, and where she might find the language to construct it. And in that most rare of moments, spectacular arrays of words suddenly burst from her imagination. Words rollicked and rumbled, shined and shouted, they bounced around within her, suddenly unchained, adventurous and yearning to be free, exploding in the heavens like fireworks, gathering together into a great pyrotechnic display of phrases. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf felt a wild hot rush of excitement and hunched over, eagerly bending to the task at hand.