THE CARROT, THE STRING, AND THE STICK

“Don’t drink that,” Marci said in her deep-rolling voice, “it’s Elliott’s -- he knows he left it here.” “You sure?” Matt asked looking at the quarter-inch of Black and White scotch in the bottom of the pint bottle, then setting it back on the kitchen shelf. There was a snap-shot of Elliott on the shelf, wearing a cowboy hat and holding a hunting rifle. “Yes I’m sure,” she said brushing the snow off her coat hung over a kitchen chair, then reaching to take a bundle of paper diapers out of the shopping bag sitting on the chair. “So you got to make yourself scarce -- after tonight.” “Count on me,” Matt said grinning. Elliott was Marci’s latest attempt for a secure life. He was a wealthy architect with an office in Santa Fe, but he also had a wife and four kids down there. After Elliott divorced his wife, he and Marci were planning to move to Seattle. “There’s three Budweisers in the fridge,” Marci said taking a can of baby formula out of the bag and putting it in the cabinet over the sink. “Leave one for me -- I got to feed the baby now.” “Okay,” Matt said closing the refrigerator door, then brushing the melting snow off his coat front as he sat down at the table. “I need a drink -- bad.” He reached up for the bottle opener on a string that hung from a cartwheel chandelier overhead. “Did you see all those bottles of booze on that shelf behind the check-out counter at the supermarket?” he said and slowly took a long drink of beer. “You could have a party for a solid week -- you and your friends.” “Yeah,” Marci said from the stove where she was warming the baby’s food, “that’s a lot of firewater.” Then when she began to stir the formula with a spoon she hesitated, and asked, “What’s your last name? I know your first name is Matthew --“ “Coates,” he said grinning. “You know, like the coat you put on to keep warm.” “My last name is Bartlett,” she said turning to look at him, smiling. “You know, like the pears.” She looked like a pear, Matt thought, in that loose tan sweater and her round rump in those cord slacks she seemed to wear most of the time. But there was more to her than looks that made her attractive; the way she talked, she let you know she would keep up her part of any love-making. She was hard for a man to resist, and Matt found that out last night when they met in the Pueblo Bar over in the Taos Plaza. They were both drunk when they came to her house late and made love, and Matt, fell off the narrow bed in the studio room, and they both laughed out loud. That was when Marci said, putting her hand over Matt’s mouth, “Sh-h, we’ll wake Margret -- she’s got school tomorrow.” “Margret?” Matt whispered. “My daughter – by my first husband,” she told him. “She’s a teenager.” Naked in the dark, Matt was not interested in how many husbands she had, he liked instead to listen to her low voice, that some people called a “Whiskey Voice,” that reeked with sex. Her husky voice is what first attracted him at the bar, when he heard her talking with another woman at a table.