Three Corners -- #!

Martin Rayne Kirby tried to cry, but there were no tears left.

He looked around the room. He couldn't have picked a more appropriate place to end his life than the dingy New Orleans hotel room he found himself in. The room mirrored his life, because it had been dingy in every respect. Martin's soul had been lost in some remote corner of the last eighteen years of rabid attention to the pleasures of the body.

He picked up the bottle of cheap bourbon setting on the scarred table. He brought it to his mouth and the liquid seared a fiery path through his throat. He drank without stopping until he began to choke, spewing whiskey onto the dirty green carpet. Only then, did he slam the bottle down on the table.

Although real tears refused him, Martin Rayne Kirby was crying in his core. He sucked in a ragged breath. Except for not being able to shed outward tears, he actually felt good about what he was soon to come to pass. Maybe tears weren't needed.

Soon it would be over. While everyone in New Orleans and the rest of the country drunkenly brought in the New Year, he'd blast his brains all over the grimy walls of this squalid hotel room of broken dreams.

Like they say, when you've nowhere to run, run to the gun. The little blue-steel .22 revolver lay between the bottle of whiskey and the Gideon Bible. One pull of its trigger and everybody and everything would cease to exist.

Female laughter erupted from outside the door. He hoped it wasn't the lunatic whore. He'd made a mistake when he brought her to the room earlier in the night. She'd made herself available as soon as she walked into the sleazy hotel bar downstairs. She approached him as he nursed a beer and said, "Buy me some schnapps and tell me what nasty things you're going to do to my body after we get buckass naked, stud."

He guessed it was his last pointless effort to reach out to another human being. One more desperate attempt to find a soul which wasn't corrupted. Instead, she left him more debilitated than before.

He picked up the small piece of paper setting beside the whiskey. As he read, he mouthed the beginning of his suicide note. The words mocked him. The paper was wrinkled, because he'd balled it up and thrown it away three different times. He had been unable to compose his final thoughts.

To whom it may concern.

It sounded like a rental agreement instead of an unfulfilled man's last groping thoughts. That Martin had no one to address the note to was another sad confirmation of his futile life. His time on earth had been a dismal failure and not one person would give a damn whether he died tonight or not.

He wadded the note up and once more sailed it across the room, then swallowed long and hard on the whiskey. When he put the bottle down, he absentmindedly picked up the only other thing on the table. The Gideon Bible.

Every hotel or motel in America had these bibles he had noticed over the years. Did anyone read them in these lonely rooms? Who put them there? His mouth creased into a thin smile as he conjured up images of little Gideon fairies swooping down and leaving them behind.

Opening the bible near the beginning, he read where Abraham was pleading with God to not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Martin recalled Miss Pierce teaching him the same lesson in Sunday school back in Three Corners, Arkansas. He remembered other things about Miss Pierce. Sunday school lessons wasn't all she taught to the boys in her class.

The lunatic whore swam back in his thoughts. Before he discovered she was a lunatic, he already wished he'd never met her. The fact was, he couldn't perform. It wasn't her fault he had to admit, God knows she did her best, but it was a hopeless situation. He was dead.

Dead.

The word echoed inside his head like the wail of a far away distress signal, prompting Martin to swallow more bourbon and shove the Bible away. He didn't need to read about old Abraham. He knew the story well.

He'd tried to talk God out of destroying the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God told Moses if could find fifty righteous people in the two cities he wouldn't destroy them. Old Abe couldn't find that many. He wheedled God down to forty, then thirty, twenty, until finally God said if he could find just ten good people he would spare the cities. Old Abe, now, there was a con man.

In the end, God took Sodom and Gomorrah out. Martin wondered if he could even find three people in the world who would be saddened by his impending death.

The lunatic whore sure didn't. She was self-centered, like most people he'd known for the last eighteen years. She was turned on when he admitted his plans to her. She wanted to watch him do it, and became possessed, renewing her efforts to arouse him, thereby assuring herself she would be the last woman he would ever have.

"All right!" she'd screamed. "Do it to me. I'll get you up, you'll see. It's gonna be one badass fuck, I just know it. Oh, baby, I wanna watch you eat the bullet, man! Maybe I'll be on the six o'clock news. My girlfriends will just die from envy."

When he threw her out she called him a queer. He smiled at the word. No, he wasn't queer, although he'd had more than second-hand knowledge of the shadowy, gay community. Early in his wanderings, Martin found out how easy it was to pick up a little money by being nice to them. That didn't make him one though. No.

He picked up the pistol, put the barrel in his mouth and wondered if it would hurt. He stared his image in the cracked, yellowing mirror hanging by a wire on the wall above the desk. Fathomless gray eyes looked back.

The whiskey bottle fell from the desk when Martin slammed the pistol down beside it. He picked it up, laughed aloud at the empty room, the lunatic whore, and the man in the fucking mirror.

"Martin, old son, you're shit-faced."

His voice, spoken aloud, startled him. He brought a slender, almost delicate hand to the scar, as he stared at his image in the mirror. The scar was jagged and ripped across otherwise neat lines and features of his face. A face some had said was too pretty for a man, but that was before the scar. It meandered from the corner of his left eye diagonally across his cheek, ending at the earlobe. A constant reminder of a drunken barroom fight.

Women found the scar irresistible. It gave him the dangerous persona many women find mysterious and stimulating. He told a different account about how he got the scar, according to the woman asking. Even before the scar, women were attracted to him, but after it, more sophisticated females found his company intriguing. Some came from the halls of polite society; it was to these thrill-seeking sluts that he wove his best tales.

The chair ripped the moldy carpet when he pushed back from the table to get up. Unsteadily, he maneuvered the few feet to the tiny bathroom. It was going to be easier than he thought, his last night on earth. All he had to do was drink himself silly, and he'd already managed that.

He stood over the commode, braced both hands on the wall and urinated down his leg. He thought about old Abe's search for the ten righteous people. He frowned, wondering again if there would even be three who cared whether he lived or died. If there were, then . . .

Martin, old boy, you trying to chicken out? the voice asked.

"No," he answered his demon aloud and staggered back to the table, barely getting in the chair.

He slumped from the chair to the floor, the Bible fell from the table and he jammed it under his head for a pillow. In the twilight world before sleep, three images from his youth appeared to him. It was a sign, he drunkenly thought. These three people would still care for him, even after all these years and after his many sins.

"Three Corners," he whispered, then succumbed to the whiskey's intoxicating slumber.

The sun's rays streamed through the curtainless window blinding Martin when he dared peek through the slits of his eyes. His head was on fire inside and the sun was baking it on the outside. He struggled to get his bearings and painfully moved his head out of the sun's relentless rays. He recalled bits and pieces of the night before, realizing he had, again, failed to follow through on something.

He shifted his body to relieve a numbing pressure in his side. He reached under him and found the reason for it. It was the Gideon Bible he'd used as a pillow. Everything came back to him as he stared dully at it. Abraham and his ten righteous. Martin and his trinity from a long ago past.

The lunatic whore. Thank God she was gone. Wincing, he recalled the scene he'd played out with her, and the obscenities she'd hurled at him through the closed door.

He pushed himself upright, fighting waves of nauseous. Nauseous won the day, and he turned his head to throw up, no chance he could make it to the bathroom. He shoved his head under the table as a second round of soured whiskey gushed from his mouth as though flushed from hell. Afterward, stumbled to the bathroom and the shower. The sluggish, smelly water caressed his body for a long time as he propped his hands against the wall of the tiny cubicle for support.

A diminutive, thread-bare towel hung from a nail beside the sink. As he dried off, he wondered how many other lost souls had used the towel during its life. It was a depressing thought as he shaved, using the sliver of soap on the wash basin.