The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman by R. P. Lester

the least
bit concerned if she joined me in the demise.
     
    ***
     
    I
was at a very dark place in life, so close to the edge that some of my dealers
pondered an intervention. They opted out when they realized I was eighty
percent of their gross. Satan exacerbated the downward spiral when he gave me a
perfect addition to my self-destruction, a wife. Her name was Raptious de la Cray
and we were wild together: parties lasting days, enough acid in our bodies to
fuel a car battery, and experimenting with Martha Stewart’s engrossing
bestseller Martha’s Meth Cook: Speedy Recipes For the Sniffer in a Rush.
    It
was a hasty courtship. Raptious and I met at a local bar, discovered we had
nothing in common except drug suppliers, and after only a few weeks we
foolishly got married. In the beginning it was great, the ideological romance
of newlyweds still fresh on the table. It didn’t last long. Within a month of
our nuptials, I began to suspect something was awry.
    One
day I returned to a still house. I called out for Raptious and heard echoes in
response. Her brand new Buick was in the carport so I knew she was home. I
walked through the faded-wallpaper living room, passed the glass table
supporting a Pyrex bong and a pile of weed, wending past the white plastic wall
shelf holding lines of crystal divided on a cookie lid, down the hall
stretching to our bedroom. I found her kneeling on the floor at the foot of our
bed sitting on her feet, the lobe-length auburn hair chaotic as a bird’s nest,
her chunky frame hunched over a pile of clothes with her back to the doorway.
Hiding one of my Zippos in her hand. The lamps in the room were off, the only
light being that streaming from a globed sixty-watt in the hall. She wore only
a holey pair of black underwear and a pink wife beater. I knew then that
something was wrong; she never wore wife beaters because they cut into her back
fat. The air was teeming with the scent of freshly poured lighter fluid. My
sympathetic nerve system rushed to life and I didn’t know what to expect.
    I
suddenly began kicking my own ass for not replacing the expired fire
extinguisher in the kitchen.
    I
meekly called to her, “Raptious?”
    She
shot up like a ninja, whirling her corpulent body and planting both feet in the
carpet. The words came screeching. “Don’t come any closer, motherfucker!
I’ll do it! I swear to God I will!” Her eyes were wide, wild, like a newly
captured tiger biting the bars of its cage. Before I could ask as to the
trouble, she lit the Zippo and swung it back and forth, grasping the lid,
letting the fiery bottom case dangle over the malodorous heap of cloth. She
laughed like an orphan plotting the murder of its abusive caretakers.
    In
that instance, I was able to talk Raptious down and confiscate the Zippo before
she lit the fabric ablaze, possibly destroying our home and killing us both in
the process. The experience was my first whiff that something in her mind was
broken, but it wouldn’t be the last.
    I
soon realized my new bride was made of sugar, spice, and everything nice.
    And
lunacy.
     
    ***
     
    It
was a blustery Sunday in January and it couldn’t have happened on a better day.
After all, Sunday is the day of worship and domestic violence, so sayeth the
Lord.
    I’d
created a bend in our river of bliss when I cheated on Raptious the night
before with a cashier from a convenience store. My cousin had concurrently been
in their living room fucking her roommate. For reasons that remained unclear
for quite some time, that asshole told Raptious all about our boys’ night out
(years later, I came to realize that they were maybe probably definitely sleeping together). She asked me details about the assignation
between bouts of assault. Her angry fists landed madly for two hours and I had
reached my breaking point.
    Not
concerned with my marital faux pas so much as my well-being, I said I was
leaving our love shack, vowing to return when I was high enough to deal