MOST WANTED
When Bill was sent for a thirty-day evaluation at the psych hospital, after police found him siphoning anti-freeze from a pickup truck behind Tom’s Diner, his fiancé, Jessica, decided she had had enough. Though it wasn’t like their life together was anything close to perfect or normal. It wasn’t as if they were good for one another. There was the time Bill got fired from the Dollar General for stealing M&Ms; the time he fell asleep with a cigarette burning in his lap. There was also Steven. Jessica and Steven had been seeing one another for close to two months when Bill was sent to the hospital. It was back in mid-February, and now that spring was in bloom, Jessica made her move. It seemed like the right time.
When Bill returned home, he found the small studio apartment not only empty, but a mess, as if a tornado had touched down. Jessica had taken the grubby yellow sofa, the quilt Bill’s grandmother had made, and the Mr. Coffee maker. It wouldn’t be long before he discovered she also left with their life savings of $793.12, as well as his self-esteem and his sense of manhood. It wasn’t enough that he believed that the doctors and nurses in the bug house turned him into a Klingon, but now Jessica had skipped out, abandoned him in his time of need, only to move in with Steven, who despite living in his mother’s basement, was not only, not crazy, but had a full-time job as a line-cook at Denny’s. He also had ambition, or so Jessica was fond of reminding him.
“He’s got a plan to get us the fuck out of Dodge!” she’d say, laughing that sickening laugh of hers, that sent shivers up Bill’s spine like nails on a chalkboard.
What Steven’s plan was, Jessica never informed him. All he knew was that she was gone. It felt as if his entire world was crashing down around him.
Alone in his studio apartment, Bill spent his days drinking cheap beer and vodka, and doom-scrolling. It wasn’t a comfort to know the rest of the world was spiraling as well, that inflation and unemployment were on the rise, that the president was more concerned with his comb-over and building a ballroom, than the fact that Bill, and thousands like him, found it increasingly difficult to survive.
As the weeks wore on, Bill stopped looking for a job and started obsessively checking the sheriff department’s Most Wanted page. In his drunken depression, he thought, he could find a woman there. He’d always dreamed about being a hero, a man’s man, someone who was intelligent, someone who knew all the answers, someone with swagger, like Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek.
Bill grew a mustache like Alex and bought a three-piece suit from Goodwill. Maybe, with facial hair and nice clothes, people would start to take notice of him, he mused. Maybe his life would start improving, and if he couldn’t win Jessica back, then screw it, he’d find someone else. Someone sexier. Someone who appreciated him for who he was, instead of someone always trying to “fix” him.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. He was looking through the Most Wanted page for the fourth or fifth time. There was an empty bottle of vodka on the table next to him, a half-eaten ham sandwich. After passing on those accused of weapons possession, possession of controlled substances, violations of parole, his curser came to a stop on Betty. Despite a tattoo of a third eye inside a sun, on her forehead, she was cute: 26 years old, with pale skin and long, stringy blonde hair, like a cross between Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton. Betty was 5’ 5” and weighed just 97 lbs. She’d been charged with petti-larceny and assault. Her last known address, as fate would have it, was 763 Clinton Street, just four blocks from Bill’s studio apartment.
Later that night, after downing another pint of vodka, Bill decided to walk to Betty’s apartment. Who knows, maybe she was there hiding out in plain sight, averting the cops, who were no doubt stuffing their mugs with stale donuts, or shaking down some low-level dealer for a few grand, enough for a night out at O’Hanlon’s, or Pussycats Lounge.
763 Clinton was an old, three-story brick building coated in soot from the long-defunct steel mills. Bill checked the mailboxes but couldn’t find one with Betty’s name on any of them. So, like a detective, he staked the place out, sitting on the stoop of a building across the street.
Bill waited about two hours, when suddenly, at 12:18am, she appeared like some strung-out angel, dressed in a ratty summer dress. Bill stood silently watching, as she danced beneath the glow of a blinking streetlamp. When her left shoe slipped off and she bent to pick it up, Bill stepped out of the shadows. When she looked up, she staggered. Then, holding her left shoe in her right hand, Betty eyed Bill with suspicion and burped.
Visions of the two of them on the run like Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers, played in his mind like the trailer of his own movie. He imagined them holed up in abandoned warehouses along the river, or some busted-up plywood shack in the woods, getting wasted and fucking as the moon shone down through a shadeless window. He imagined a high-speed chase with the police, or a shootout, the two of them going down in a blaze of glory. Bill felt certainty, like he’d never felt before, like something was happening, or about to happen, something cosmic, like his entire life had led him to this street, where Betty stood, staring at him with a curled lip and a confused glow in her eyes. Maybe Jessica’s leaving him for Steven was all part of some larger plan, maybe it was God’s voice that whispered in his ear all those months ago, promising Bill, that if he’d drink that anti-freeze, everything would work out, he’d find what he’d been searching for his entire miserable life.
Jason Irwin is the author of the memoir These Fragments I Have Shored, as well as the poetry collections, The History of Our Vagrancies, A Blister of Stars & Watering the Dead. In 2022, he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, writer Jen Ashburn.
