It’s different on the border. Things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else and, really, since the borderland is neither here nor there, not the U.S.A. but not quite Mexico, the kinds of things that happen here can be said to perhaps not happen at all. How can something happen if it isn’t happening in some place? And, since this isn’t really a place but the place between two other places, how can things really happen if they happen in no place?
Out there in the desert with the big empty watching and waiting near the ruins of what used to be, miles from anything and I can see that if there really is a line dividing two nations, it’s worse than invisible and it’s locked up on a map in a book a thousand miles away from here and that magic invisible line has nothing at all to do with the snakes and the starlight and the tarantulas and the people and the wild dogs and the nobody-really-knows-what-else moving back and forth, across and over, up and down. This is all for the good, believe me.
If I was you, I wouldn’t be out there, but if you was me, you would. You’d be parked in my 1975 Ford F-150 on a dry hill among the brushy gray bushes, the black outline of a new moon hanging among a thousand million million stars to illuminate the landscape enough to see how dark it really was.
Out there, things are moving. Some of them are animals, some of them are people, and some of them have to be classified as “other.” If I’m quiet enough long enough, long enough for the motor to cool down and stop ticking, long enough for all the things I scared away to move on, new things that don’t know I’m here come by. Sometimes it’s an animal, a skunk or a skinny mule deer or even a peccary, and sometimes it’s a person, some skinny brown man or woman or child big eyed in the night or sometimes even La Migra, a broad-shouldered white man with a rifle and a badge. And sometimes, you know, there on the border at night under that black moon, sometimes it’s something else entirely that moves through the brush and close enough to smell until suddenly I don’t even want to know what it is anymore or what it could be and I’m just very very quiet until it goes away.
During the day, out by the vague ruin of a failed ranch melting back into the earth or out on the long dry flats, deep in the termini of steep-cut canyons or high on a windswept promontory, I find all sorts of leftovers. Rubber tire sandals and plastic water bottles, dry bones and fresh feces, the brass casings of spent ammunition and old horseshoes and the charred carcasses of motorcycles, blood soaked altars of haphazardly stacked stones, inverted forged iron crosses draped with garlands of plastic flowers and dried fingers, the skin of a young woman stretched out on a forgotten section of barbed-wire fence dividing ranchland long without cattle or cattleman, sacks and bags and packs filled with the strangest things, all sorts of weird stuff like underwear and drugs and a thousand snapshots of someone’s family and money and dried fish and jewelry and five hand-carved wooden dolls: a mommy, a daddy, a little boy, a little girl, and a baby.
As often as the wind here carries the odor of cactus blossom or the dusty tang of a rainstorm coming up, it carries also the miasma of gunpowder and blood, of sweat and fear, of semen and rotten meat and iron. As often as a coyote howl or an owl hoot breaks this still air, so too will the screams of women and children fly out across the desert to disappear without echo or consequences. Names whispered in the darkness, supplications to deities both conventional and obscure, lost children wailing for their mothers, mothers crying out for their lost children, a full variety and variation of shrieks to convey indignant pain and horror, pleas for mercy, petitions for release from torture, and soft begging for the kindness of swift murder all dissipate in this borderland atmosphere; they spread out unheard over a landscape unconcerned.
I’d been tracking this fellow quite a while and I had a pretty good idea what he was up to. He seemed the type. He kept moving around, setting up an ambush, waiting, waiting some more, moving again, setting up again, waiting. I kept him in my sights, watching with one eye from, oh, I’d say a half-mile away. He had no idea.
But he knew what he was doing. And about the fifth time he set up his little ambush, he caught himself a brown girl. It was slick and it was sweet like he’d done it a hundred times before; he just stepped out of the brush and slipped his big old knife under her chin and that was that. She dropped her pathetic bundle and her plastic water bottle, and she kicked a little bit as he lifted her up with his other arm wrapped around her waist, and she lost one of her rubber tire sandals. I was watching this through the scope, lining up the shot.
He half carried, half dragged her back into the brush where his kit was laid out and ready; he had stakes already in the earth, lengths of rope ready for her ankles and wrists, and duct tape for her mouth. He got her down, tied her spread-eagle, taped her, and kneeled down between her legs to start cutting away her clothes. I got the shot and his head disappeared, all bone and brain and tooth become a variated mist traveling fast and away. The neck stump fountained thick towers of blood until the body crumpled across her right thigh, spastic movements rippling through its limbs. One shot, one kill. The earth disappeared what poured out of the body.
It makes me feel especially…it makes me feel really…it makes me feel full to be able to do that, to look at someone from so far away and to point and to reach out and take his head off from a half-mile away. I doubt if the girl even heard the sound of the shot that killed her attacker. He sure didn’t.
All the way walking over there to where the girl lay draped with that fellow’s corpse, I was not doing much more than enjoying the feeling. By the time I got there, my breathing had mostly calmed down and I kicked the body off that girl there all splayed out in the dirt. I took a few of the fingers so I could add them to one of those upside-down crosses I liked out in the desert. Without the head, though, the body didn’t have much left in the way of trophies—no ears or nose or scalp—and I sure didn’t want anything to do with his pizzle though I know some folk what don’t feel the same. They’ll cut a fellow’s business off and do bad things with it. That girl was all big eyes and little squeaking noises behind the tape.
I stood there above her looking down and still feeling that good full feeling inside me.
“How you doing?” I asked her and she stopped making those noises. I could see all sorts of things going through her head fast. She looked up at me and past me with those big brown eyes; she looked all around as much as she could but there wasn’t nothing else there but me and a lot of blank black sky.
I squatted down where that other fellow had kneeled before and I picked up his big knife. As I started in to cutting off the rest of her clothes, I was talking to her the whole time, talking soft like I would talk to any frightened creature no matter how badly it was suffering, and I kept talking to her like that as I started to cut away much, much more than just her clothes.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
26 June 2009
27 April 2009
My First Trip To A Casino
It sounds stupid now, but I had my heart set on a Checker cab and I wouldn’t ride in any other. That wouldn’t have been hard to do ten or maybe fifteen years ago, but the Checker Company folded some time back and most of the yellow or green cars for hire are Chevys or Fords these days. I just wanted some room to stretch out on what I hoped would be leather seats, the kind of leather that is soft and starting to even crumble at the corners and there should be a kind of dimple there where a million people just like me have parked their butts and taken a ride. When I finally saw a Checker cab, I waved like crazy but not too crazy I guess because it stopped and I climbed in.
The cabby barely glanced at me as I slid across that soft, leather, dimpled bench. She was making marks on her clipboard. There were jump seats facing me and a laminated copy of her hack license. I smiled at the notion of jump seats, that I was in an automobile large enough to be equipped with something extra like a fold-down stool, and remembered how I had liked riding backwards and looking at the adults when I was a little kid. Her license said her name was “Connie Lieberman” which was short for Constance probably, a good Pilgrim name, and meant First Man in German. Her picture was not flattering though she seemed to be an attractive woman in real life but I suppose that was the best idea for any woman driving a graveyard shift Checker cab.
“Where are you going tonight?” she asked and she had the microphone in her hand ready to call it in.
“I really don’t know,” I answered. “Could you just drive around for a while?”
“We don’t do that, mister,” she said. “I need a destination to call in.”
I leaned forward enough to let a fifty drop over the front seat.
She scooped it up and eyed the mic.
“Forty-five, pick-up at the Marriot for Sandia Bingo Palace,” she said and dragged the flag down and put the car in gear and we were both moving off into the sodium-lit night.
I wasn’t bleeding much at all but I knew that it was probably bad. I just tried to keep the towel against the wound. I could stretch out and I did and I just rested while all sort of things went past my vision but I only looked at a few of them.
I remember when the doctor came out to tell me Polly had “lost” the baby and my first thought was “Well, find it. You’re a doctor.” and then I sort of knew what he meant and then I didn’t really care anymore.
It was like a big, thick blanket had been dropped over the part of me that could care about things like that. There was a dim outline of that part of me but it was too indistinct to identify and certainly too covered up to actually feel. Then he said that Polly was resting and under sedation and that I could see her if I wanted but that I shouldn’t say or do anything.
I thought about asking him, “Just exactly how smart do you have to be to be a doctor?”
Of course I wanted to see her and just what did he think I might say or do? Did he think I was responsible? Did he know or really understand or even care to understand the ways I was exactly responsible?
She was laid out flat in that hospital bed and right there, that was wrong. Polly always curls up on her side when she sleeps and I can slip into bed behind her and kind of spoon up my arms around her and the top one goes between her little breasts and the bottom one is under her head and my top leg just fits between hers. Flat on her back like that with little sweaty bits of hair stuck to her face was wrong. I picked up her hand and put it between my own but that was wrong, too. I had to quickly and shamefully admit that I would never do that kind of thing unless I thought someone might see me holding my girlfriend’s unconscious hand. What I really would have done was I would have crawled into bed with her, rolled her onto her side and folded myself around her spoon-wise but I wisely guessed that was against a rule.
Her eyes kind of rolled open and she seemed to see me.
“Hey,” I said as softly as I could. “Hey there.”
Polly didn’t quite focus on me and she was looking past me and around me to figure out where we were.
“Hey, kitty,” I said. “It’s me.”
The sound of my voice seemed to give her a reference and her hand tightened up a little tiny bit on mine. I could see right into her heart. I swear it, like all skin and bones and muscles and fat were a kind of tricky glass, and I could see her mashed-up, messed-up heart just quivering.
“I fucked up,” she whispered. “I really fucked up.”
“Shh,” I said and there was a nurse at the door. “You just rest now. Everything is going to be okay.”
There were little tiny tears in Polly’s eyes and she was already drifting back to where it wouldn’t matter for a while.
Out in the hallway, the nurse put her hand on my right forearm. Her laminated ID badge said her names were “Dolores C.deBaca” which means Sorrowful Cow Head in Spanish.
“She’ll be fine,” Dolores said. “She just needs to sleep and to get better. But now, what about you?”
I was surprised by that kind of kindness. I hadn’t expected anyone to even notice me and all night the nurses and orderlies had been checking up on me and giving me coffee and once even a sweet-roll. The doctors, as I’ve mentioned, weren’t that great, but it was an emergency room so I didn’t expect much of anything at all.
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just need to take care of a few odds and ends. How soon before she wakes up for real?”
“It’s going to be a while. Probably not until tomorrow afternoon, really. Or this afternoon. Maybe,” Dolores said as she looked at her watch.
“Think I could go out and take care of those odds and ends? Would anyone mind if I took off for a while and came back?”
“You go do whatever you need to do, sweetie,” Dolores said and she said it like she maybe had a general idea of what it was I was gong to do. “We’ll take extra-good care of your girlfriend until you get back.”
“You guys are really nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
On my way past the nurses station, they all gave me eye contact and that kind of smile that isn’t a happy smile but sure isn’t a fake smile, either. Even the janitor, his ID said his names were “Ernest Lamberson” which means Sincere Son of a Shepherd said, “Take it easy, man. Hang in there.”
I decided I would do both.
“Hey,” I said. “Could you just take surface streets?”
“I don’t care,” she replied and did something technically illegal to keep us off the interstate.
I leaned forward to drop another fifty beside her. I could feel a tug and a little rip where I had been stabbed and I figured there was going to be a little more blood.
“Would you describe me, please?” I asked her.
She looked at me in her mirror, looked at the bill and looked at me again.
“I see a middle-aged black man wearing a dark suit and tie. You talk with a southern accent and told me your name was Edgar and that you sell medical equipment all over the country. How’s that?”
“Got me pegged,” I told her and Connie knew a lot about her job, but I expect that from a Checker driver.
Then, it had been just “get to the hospital get to the hospital get to the hospital” over and over and over in my head and that thought had pushed everything else out of my head. There was no room for anything other than that. Polly was moaning and limp and the bed sheet I pressed between her legs was heavy with blood and I didn’t know there was that much blood in my sweetheart and I wasn’t thrilled to find it out. She was bleeding to death and having a miscarriage and that was all I could think about. I had to get her to a hospital and that was what I did and that was all I had time to think about or do.
After, though, was different. I started to think a whole bunch of other things and I started to think them real clearly.
“You from Albuquerque?” I asked her.
Her eyes flickered in the mirror.
“Look, mister,” she said. “You just gave me one hundred dollars to keep quiet. You want your money back?”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re right.” And I shut my mouth. The farther we got from the hospital, the more the scenery changed to what it once had been before it started changing into the way they were making it look now. There was an alfalfa field; there was an old wooden house and a huge cottonwood tree. There was a real dairy. It seemed like I was scabbing up pretty good but I didn’t want to look.
I left the hospital, left Polly floating between agony and oblivion, and I started walking back downtown, back to the Marriot. It wasn’t that far and it was going to be a lot shorter walking than it had been in a hotel courtesy van with Polly in my arms and me holding that mess between her legs and rocking her back and forth saying, “Okay, sweetheart, okay, it’s going to be okay” as calmly as I could and she was merely whimpering.
It was going to be a lot easier to walk back into that hotel than it had been to stumble out. My fear was changing into something sharp that glittered with hard points of clear light. I wasn’t scared that Polly was going to do something because I knew she wasn’t and I wasn’t scared that the baby was in trouble because it was too late to worry about the baby. I was still afraid, but it was a clear feeling and it was changing and it was getting clearer and it wasn’t so much a fear of what would happen if I didn’t do everything right and perfect but it was a clear awareness of what was going to happen when I actually did do everything right and perfect.
It was getting near 3 a.m. and the orange sodium-vapor lights along the streets made everything look even more gray than usual and I thought that was weird and spent a few minutes thinking about how an orange light took every color away from every thing. How did it do that?
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and took a little detour to walk past a house I used to live in a long time ago when I was still in school at the University of New Mexico and hadn’t even met Polly yet and hadn’t met Milo. I looked at it but I wasn’t sad or anything. I just wondered who lived there now and what they were doing and how they were getting along. I wondered if the hardwood floors were holding up. I wondered if in a few years these tenants were going to be as surprised as I was to find out where they’d ended up. I sort of doubted it, but you never can tell. They might have been in that house at that instant making big mistakes and wrong choices and not even knowing it. Or everything might be going great. Who knew? I didn’t stop walking to dwell on those ideas but I did whisper, “Be careful, you guys.”
I started thinking about what I was going to do and how that was going to fit in with all the other things I’ve done and all the things I still want to do and all the things I was still hoping would happen for Polly and me. I was trying to talk myself into believing that I had some kind of plan and that I knew what I was doing and that I fully appreciated the consequences of what had been done to Polly and that I knew what I was going to do about it.
Looking back, it is easy to say what I should and shouldn’t have done starting with I shouldn’t have let Polly go up to Milo’s room by herself because I knew that something bad was going to happen and I should have listened to the hesitation in my own head and in Polly’s voice when we talked it over in the bar before she went up there. I shouldn’t have listened to her when she said it would be okay, that she and that we could handle it and put it behind us and we could move on to a better place and better things. I should have said something other that what I said and I should have stopped her because I already knew that it couldn’t be okay, even if it all went right, that we wouldn’t be okay. But I didn’t and I was going to have to do something about it.
I could see the Marriot all lit up with steam coming out of the red pyramid on top of the building. I didn’t want to walk under the railroad tracks so I cut over and down to the Grand Street overpass and started getting closer and closer to the hotel. When I got inside, the desk clerk recognized me. His plastic nametag said his name was “Anthony” and I don’t know what that means. Hours ago, when I was carrying Polly out the door, he had called the Marriot courtesy shuttle van to take us up to Presbyterian Hospital.
“Hey, man,” he called. “How’s your wife?”
“She’s going to be all right,” I told him. “I really want to thank you for all your help. I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, man. No problem. I just hope she’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
We didn’t know what else to say to each other then, so I walked to the elevator and pushed the “up” button. The elevator doors opened and I got in. When I turned around to push the “7” button, he gave me a what-can-I-say? look and I gave him an I-really-don’t-know look back and the elevator doors slid shut and I was going up to have a visit with Milo.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I think I’ll just get out here.”
She shrugged and said, “Twenty-six fifty.”
I gave her forty and got out. I zippered up my jacket and the towel seemed to be pretty well stuck to my wound and even though I could feel everything clotted and scabbed tug again but it didn’t split wide open up fresh again. Connie wrote something on her clipboard and headed up to take the freeway back to town. Even though it was past four a.m., there were still plenty of cars in the casino parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Mikey, man, come in.”
And he closed the door, slipped the chain and opened the door again. He was in a thin bathrobe and he had that greasy cocaine sweat all over him.
“Oh, shit, Mikey,” he said. “I mean, shit, is she okay?”
“She’ll be fine, Milo,” I said and I looked around the room. It looked like he’d tried to clean things up. He sat down on the bed with his hands spread back behind him and his left hand was pretty near a pillow. I knew what was up.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry,” he continued. “Things just got a little out of hand. I really don’t know what happened. Is she going to be all right? I mean, shit. This is so fucked up.”
“Milo,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s all going to be taken care of. Don’t worry about it. We’re going to be just fine. Everything’s okay.”
He wiped his face with his right hand and his left hand stayed where it was.
“Did you take her to the hospital?” he asked and I knew he was waiting for the right answer.
“No way, man. You crazy?” I sort of laughed. “She’s not that bad. I just took her home and got the bleeding stopped. It always looks a lot worse than it really is.”
“Oh, man,” he said and he seemed to relax a little bit but I knew he wasn’t because Milo never relaxes. “I am glad to hear that. It would be fucked if you’d taken her to a hospital.”
I knew what he was thinking because I knew he knew where we lived.
I did that little inside twist to broke his grip on my left and quickly knocked his lower jaw off-kilter away with the heel of my newly liberated hand. The next few seconds were a little frantic. I couldn’t really feel any pain; my hand stung a little as I started breaking things on Milo’s face, but my belly felt fine. A little warm but fine. Adrenaline, I guess, and Milo was too coked to feel much of anything except paranoid selfishness and goofy confusion and it took me a little while to finally beat his skull open with an icy cold bottle of imported Mexican beer.
I washed up as best as I could and I jammed a hand towel against my side against the knife wound there and I buttoned my torn shirt over it. I took the money. I took Polly’s purse. I took some of the drugs and I left Milo dead on the floor between the window and the bed.
On the way through the lobby, the clerk looked up and asked a question with his eyebrows.
“Back to the hospital,” I answered. I put $300 on the desk. “For any inconvenience I may have caused.”
“Good luck, man,” he said and pushed the money back toward me. “Come back and see us again.”
“Thanks,” I said and I picked up the money, jammed it back in my pocket.
The greeter at the door to the Sandia Indian Bingo Palace was sleepy but he swept the door open for me. The embossed tag on his greeter’s jacket said his names were “David Maestas” and I knew that “David” means “beloved” and that David killed Goliath and was the Second King of Judea and that he wrote a bunch of the Bible but I had no idea what Maestas meant except that it was a pretty common Spanish surname around here. Sort of like Johnson or Anderson for Anglo names. Not quite Smith or Jones, but not too unusual at all. The sound of slot machines, electronic sound effects, background music, bells, ice in glasses and the sound of a huge room full of people breathing, talking, laughing, smoking at 4 a.m. and the sound of a man calling bingo numbers poured out of the building when the greeter tugged the glass panel open for me.
“Good morning, sir,” he said. “Feeling lucky this morning?”
“What?” I said. “Oh, yeah. I guess I do feel pretty lucky today. Lucky is what I feel like.”
The noise was clearer when I was in the lobby, blackjack to the left of me and bingo to the right, slots right down the middle. I heard that bingo caller man’s voice say “G-19. Life is but a dream” several times and then he said “O-24. We all want a little more” but before he could say the whole thing again, I could hear a woman’s voice shouting: “BINGO! BINGO! I’VE GOT A BINGO!”
The cabby barely glanced at me as I slid across that soft, leather, dimpled bench. She was making marks on her clipboard. There were jump seats facing me and a laminated copy of her hack license. I smiled at the notion of jump seats, that I was in an automobile large enough to be equipped with something extra like a fold-down stool, and remembered how I had liked riding backwards and looking at the adults when I was a little kid. Her license said her name was “Connie Lieberman” which was short for Constance probably, a good Pilgrim name, and meant First Man in German. Her picture was not flattering though she seemed to be an attractive woman in real life but I suppose that was the best idea for any woman driving a graveyard shift Checker cab.
“Where are you going tonight?” she asked and she had the microphone in her hand ready to call it in.
“I really don’t know,” I answered. “Could you just drive around for a while?”
“We don’t do that, mister,” she said. “I need a destination to call in.”
I leaned forward enough to let a fifty drop over the front seat.
She scooped it up and eyed the mic.
“Forty-five, pick-up at the Marriot for Sandia Bingo Palace,” she said and dragged the flag down and put the car in gear and we were both moving off into the sodium-lit night.
I wasn’t bleeding much at all but I knew that it was probably bad. I just tried to keep the towel against the wound. I could stretch out and I did and I just rested while all sort of things went past my vision but I only looked at a few of them.
*
I remember when the doctor came out to tell me Polly had “lost” the baby and my first thought was “Well, find it. You’re a doctor.” and then I sort of knew what he meant and then I didn’t really care anymore.
It was like a big, thick blanket had been dropped over the part of me that could care about things like that. There was a dim outline of that part of me but it was too indistinct to identify and certainly too covered up to actually feel. Then he said that Polly was resting and under sedation and that I could see her if I wanted but that I shouldn’t say or do anything.
I thought about asking him, “Just exactly how smart do you have to be to be a doctor?”
Of course I wanted to see her and just what did he think I might say or do? Did he think I was responsible? Did he know or really understand or even care to understand the ways I was exactly responsible?
She was laid out flat in that hospital bed and right there, that was wrong. Polly always curls up on her side when she sleeps and I can slip into bed behind her and kind of spoon up my arms around her and the top one goes between her little breasts and the bottom one is under her head and my top leg just fits between hers. Flat on her back like that with little sweaty bits of hair stuck to her face was wrong. I picked up her hand and put it between my own but that was wrong, too. I had to quickly and shamefully admit that I would never do that kind of thing unless I thought someone might see me holding my girlfriend’s unconscious hand. What I really would have done was I would have crawled into bed with her, rolled her onto her side and folded myself around her spoon-wise but I wisely guessed that was against a rule.
Her eyes kind of rolled open and she seemed to see me.
“Hey,” I said as softly as I could. “Hey there.”
Polly didn’t quite focus on me and she was looking past me and around me to figure out where we were.
“Hey, kitty,” I said. “It’s me.”
The sound of my voice seemed to give her a reference and her hand tightened up a little tiny bit on mine. I could see right into her heart. I swear it, like all skin and bones and muscles and fat were a kind of tricky glass, and I could see her mashed-up, messed-up heart just quivering.
“I fucked up,” she whispered. “I really fucked up.”
“Shh,” I said and there was a nurse at the door. “You just rest now. Everything is going to be okay.”
There were little tiny tears in Polly’s eyes and she was already drifting back to where it wouldn’t matter for a while.
Out in the hallway, the nurse put her hand on my right forearm. Her laminated ID badge said her names were “Dolores C.deBaca” which means Sorrowful Cow Head in Spanish.
“She’ll be fine,” Dolores said. “She just needs to sleep and to get better. But now, what about you?”
I was surprised by that kind of kindness. I hadn’t expected anyone to even notice me and all night the nurses and orderlies had been checking up on me and giving me coffee and once even a sweet-roll. The doctors, as I’ve mentioned, weren’t that great, but it was an emergency room so I didn’t expect much of anything at all.
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just need to take care of a few odds and ends. How soon before she wakes up for real?”
“It’s going to be a while. Probably not until tomorrow afternoon, really. Or this afternoon. Maybe,” Dolores said as she looked at her watch.
“Think I could go out and take care of those odds and ends? Would anyone mind if I took off for a while and came back?”
“You go do whatever you need to do, sweetie,” Dolores said and she said it like she maybe had a general idea of what it was I was gong to do. “We’ll take extra-good care of your girlfriend until you get back.”
“You guys are really nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
On my way past the nurses station, they all gave me eye contact and that kind of smile that isn’t a happy smile but sure isn’t a fake smile, either. Even the janitor, his ID said his names were “Ernest Lamberson” which means Sincere Son of a Shepherd said, “Take it easy, man. Hang in there.”
I decided I would do both.
*
Connie was taking us up on to the freeway.“Hey,” I said. “Could you just take surface streets?”
“I don’t care,” she replied and did something technically illegal to keep us off the interstate.
I leaned forward to drop another fifty beside her. I could feel a tug and a little rip where I had been stabbed and I figured there was going to be a little more blood.
“Would you describe me, please?” I asked her.
She looked at me in her mirror, looked at the bill and looked at me again.
“I see a middle-aged black man wearing a dark suit and tie. You talk with a southern accent and told me your name was Edgar and that you sell medical equipment all over the country. How’s that?”
“Got me pegged,” I told her and Connie knew a lot about her job, but I expect that from a Checker driver.
*
When I left the hospital I knew I needed to think about where I was going. It had taken so much frantic effort to get there that I really hadn’t thought about much else.Then, it had been just “get to the hospital get to the hospital get to the hospital” over and over and over in my head and that thought had pushed everything else out of my head. There was no room for anything other than that. Polly was moaning and limp and the bed sheet I pressed between her legs was heavy with blood and I didn’t know there was that much blood in my sweetheart and I wasn’t thrilled to find it out. She was bleeding to death and having a miscarriage and that was all I could think about. I had to get her to a hospital and that was what I did and that was all I had time to think about or do.
After, though, was different. I started to think a whole bunch of other things and I started to think them real clearly.
*
Connie was taking us up North 4th Street and we were in that area where it’s light industry--factories and warehouses and massage parlors inside mobile homes with hot tubs and signs outside that said Fantasy Island and Cherry Blossoms and Seven Seas. Convenience stores every couple of miles. A strip mall with a nail salon and an auto parts store every five miles or so.“You from Albuquerque?” I asked her.
Her eyes flickered in the mirror.
“Look, mister,” she said. “You just gave me one hundred dollars to keep quiet. You want your money back?”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re right.” And I shut my mouth. The farther we got from the hospital, the more the scenery changed to what it once had been before it started changing into the way they were making it look now. There was an alfalfa field; there was an old wooden house and a huge cottonwood tree. There was a real dairy. It seemed like I was scabbing up pretty good but I didn’t want to look.
*
I left the hospital, left Polly floating between agony and oblivion, and I started walking back downtown, back to the Marriot. It wasn’t that far and it was going to be a lot shorter walking than it had been in a hotel courtesy van with Polly in my arms and me holding that mess between her legs and rocking her back and forth saying, “Okay, sweetheart, okay, it’s going to be okay” as calmly as I could and she was merely whimpering.
It was going to be a lot easier to walk back into that hotel than it had been to stumble out. My fear was changing into something sharp that glittered with hard points of clear light. I wasn’t scared that Polly was going to do something because I knew she wasn’t and I wasn’t scared that the baby was in trouble because it was too late to worry about the baby. I was still afraid, but it was a clear feeling and it was changing and it was getting clearer and it wasn’t so much a fear of what would happen if I didn’t do everything right and perfect but it was a clear awareness of what was going to happen when I actually did do everything right and perfect.
It was getting near 3 a.m. and the orange sodium-vapor lights along the streets made everything look even more gray than usual and I thought that was weird and spent a few minutes thinking about how an orange light took every color away from every thing. How did it do that?
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and took a little detour to walk past a house I used to live in a long time ago when I was still in school at the University of New Mexico and hadn’t even met Polly yet and hadn’t met Milo. I looked at it but I wasn’t sad or anything. I just wondered who lived there now and what they were doing and how they were getting along. I wondered if the hardwood floors were holding up. I wondered if in a few years these tenants were going to be as surprised as I was to find out where they’d ended up. I sort of doubted it, but you never can tell. They might have been in that house at that instant making big mistakes and wrong choices and not even knowing it. Or everything might be going great. Who knew? I didn’t stop walking to dwell on those ideas but I did whisper, “Be careful, you guys.”
I started thinking about what I was going to do and how that was going to fit in with all the other things I’ve done and all the things I still want to do and all the things I was still hoping would happen for Polly and me. I was trying to talk myself into believing that I had some kind of plan and that I knew what I was doing and that I fully appreciated the consequences of what had been done to Polly and that I knew what I was going to do about it.
Looking back, it is easy to say what I should and shouldn’t have done starting with I shouldn’t have let Polly go up to Milo’s room by herself because I knew that something bad was going to happen and I should have listened to the hesitation in my own head and in Polly’s voice when we talked it over in the bar before she went up there. I shouldn’t have listened to her when she said it would be okay, that she and that we could handle it and put it behind us and we could move on to a better place and better things. I should have said something other that what I said and I should have stopped her because I already knew that it couldn’t be okay, even if it all went right, that we wouldn’t be okay. But I didn’t and I was going to have to do something about it.
I could see the Marriot all lit up with steam coming out of the red pyramid on top of the building. I didn’t want to walk under the railroad tracks so I cut over and down to the Grand Street overpass and started getting closer and closer to the hotel. When I got inside, the desk clerk recognized me. His plastic nametag said his name was “Anthony” and I don’t know what that means. Hours ago, when I was carrying Polly out the door, he had called the Marriot courtesy shuttle van to take us up to Presbyterian Hospital.
“Hey, man,” he called. “How’s your wife?”
“She’s going to be all right,” I told him. “I really want to thank you for all your help. I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, man. No problem. I just hope she’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
We didn’t know what else to say to each other then, so I walked to the elevator and pushed the “up” button. The elevator doors opened and I got in. When I turned around to push the “7” button, he gave me a what-can-I-say? look and I gave him an I-really-don’t-know look back and the elevator doors slid shut and I was going up to have a visit with Milo.
*
I must have dozed a bit because when Connie stopped the cab, all the bright lights surprised me. She turned around to look at me.“Now what?” she asked.
“I think I’ll just get out here.”
She shrugged and said, “Twenty-six fifty.”
I gave her forty and got out. I zippered up my jacket and the towel seemed to be pretty well stuck to my wound and even though I could feel everything clotted and scabbed tug again but it didn’t split wide open up fresh again. Connie wrote something on her clipboard and headed up to take the freeway back to town. Even though it was past four a.m., there were still plenty of cars in the casino parking lot.
*
Milo opened the door a crack and he’d left the chain on.“Oh, shit,” he said. “Mikey, man, come in.”
And he closed the door, slipped the chain and opened the door again. He was in a thin bathrobe and he had that greasy cocaine sweat all over him.
“Oh, shit, Mikey,” he said. “I mean, shit, is she okay?”
“She’ll be fine, Milo,” I said and I looked around the room. It looked like he’d tried to clean things up. He sat down on the bed with his hands spread back behind him and his left hand was pretty near a pillow. I knew what was up.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry,” he continued. “Things just got a little out of hand. I really don’t know what happened. Is she going to be all right? I mean, shit. This is so fucked up.”
“Milo,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s all going to be taken care of. Don’t worry about it. We’re going to be just fine. Everything’s okay.”
He wiped his face with his right hand and his left hand stayed where it was.
“Did you take her to the hospital?” he asked and I knew he was waiting for the right answer.
“No way, man. You crazy?” I sort of laughed. “She’s not that bad. I just took her home and got the bleeding stopped. It always looks a lot worse than it really is.”
“Oh, man,” he said and he seemed to relax a little bit but I knew he wasn’t because Milo never relaxes. “I am glad to hear that. It would be fucked if you’d taken her to a hospital.”
I knew what he was thinking because I knew he knew where we lived.
*
“Grab a beer and get me one,” he said and I figured he’d think I would put a bottle in each hand but I pulled two Coronas out of the ice-chest with my left hand and held both out for him to take the one he wanted. I was actually ready when he grabbed my wrist instead. His left hand was under the pillow and then out with a blade and rather than attempt to block the knife or pull my wrist away, I came down and in and close, shoving him back flat onto the bed and I just let him stab me in the side before his thrust gathered any strength. Then, I grabbed that wrist of his so he couldn’t twist the knife inside me or pull it out and away for another stab. I kept that hand of his busy and I knew I should take some pain.I did that little inside twist to broke his grip on my left and quickly knocked his lower jaw off-kilter away with the heel of my newly liberated hand. The next few seconds were a little frantic. I couldn’t really feel any pain; my hand stung a little as I started breaking things on Milo’s face, but my belly felt fine. A little warm but fine. Adrenaline, I guess, and Milo was too coked to feel much of anything except paranoid selfishness and goofy confusion and it took me a little while to finally beat his skull open with an icy cold bottle of imported Mexican beer.
I washed up as best as I could and I jammed a hand towel against my side against the knife wound there and I buttoned my torn shirt over it. I took the money. I took Polly’s purse. I took some of the drugs and I left Milo dead on the floor between the window and the bed.
On the way through the lobby, the clerk looked up and asked a question with his eyebrows.
“Back to the hospital,” I answered. I put $300 on the desk. “For any inconvenience I may have caused.”
“Good luck, man,” he said and pushed the money back toward me. “Come back and see us again.”
“Thanks,” I said and I picked up the money, jammed it back in my pocket.
*
The greeter at the door to the Sandia Indian Bingo Palace was sleepy but he swept the door open for me. The embossed tag on his greeter’s jacket said his names were “David Maestas” and I knew that “David” means “beloved” and that David killed Goliath and was the Second King of Judea and that he wrote a bunch of the Bible but I had no idea what Maestas meant except that it was a pretty common Spanish surname around here. Sort of like Johnson or Anderson for Anglo names. Not quite Smith or Jones, but not too unusual at all. The sound of slot machines, electronic sound effects, background music, bells, ice in glasses and the sound of a huge room full of people breathing, talking, laughing, smoking at 4 a.m. and the sound of a man calling bingo numbers poured out of the building when the greeter tugged the glass panel open for me.
“Good morning, sir,” he said. “Feeling lucky this morning?”
“What?” I said. “Oh, yeah. I guess I do feel pretty lucky today. Lucky is what I feel like.”
The noise was clearer when I was in the lobby, blackjack to the left of me and bingo to the right, slots right down the middle. I heard that bingo caller man’s voice say “G-19. Life is but a dream” several times and then he said “O-24. We all want a little more” but before he could say the whole thing again, I could hear a woman’s voice shouting: “BINGO! BINGO! I’VE GOT A BINGO!”
09 April 2009
Werewolves Everywhere You Look
Number One
Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.
Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.
The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.
Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.
Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.
"Whoa," said Mark.
Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.
"Hey, Don," she said.
"Hey, Julie," Don said.
She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.
"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"
Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.
"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"
Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.
"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"
Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.
"That was harsh," said Mark.
"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."
Number Two
It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.
At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.
I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.
I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.
""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"
His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."
The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."
I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.
Number Three
Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.
Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.
"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"
"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"
Stuff like that.
When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.
"Cleaning up in here!"
"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"
Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.
The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.
But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.
While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.
"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."
Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.
Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.
The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.
Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.
Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.
"Whoa," said Mark.
Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.
"Hey, Don," she said.
"Hey, Julie," Don said.
She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.
"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"
Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.
"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"
Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.
"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"
Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.
"That was harsh," said Mark.
"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."
Number Two
It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.
At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.
I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.
I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.
""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"
His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."
The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."
I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.
Number Three
Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.
Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.
"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"
"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"
Stuff like that.
When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.
"Cleaning up in here!"
"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"
Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.
The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.
But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.
While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.
"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."
27 March 2009
And, Yeah, We Found the Money. So What?
I couldn’t believe what the old man said.
“Say that again,” I told him.
“I said, ‘If you want money so goddamn bad, go get you some.’ Go dig up some of that money in the basement if you want money so goddamn bad, goddamn it,” he snapped. The old man snapped, barked, hollered, and yelled a lot. His volume knob never seemed to go below 8.
“What money? You’ve got money in the basement?” I asked.
“Hell, yeah, I got money in the basement. Buried in the wall behind that big old clown painting of your mother’s. Been there for years.”
I just stared at the twisted up old fuck, that knot of wasted human life just too furious to do anything other than rage. And drink. And use drugs. And fuck around on the mother. My old man was quite a guy in quite a few ways, but money-stasher was a new one on me.
“How much money are we talking about?” I asked.
“Twelve fucking thousand bucks,” he answered. “You little shit.”
“You have $12,000 buried in the basement? What the fuck for?”
“So you, your retard brother, and that nightmare corpse of your mother’s upstairs couldn’t never get your greedy fuckin’ paws on it.”
“So why are you telling us now?”
The old man clamped his mouth shut, his face collapsing around the toothless hole.
“Seriously, old man. Why are you telling us now?”
“I got my reasons.”
“Such as…? I mean, how long have you been sitting on this little stash of cash?”
“Long enough,” the old man answered. “And I got my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”
And, yeah, we found the money. Down in the basement in a hole in the wall behind one of the clown paintings the mother had done in her paint-by-numbers days right where the old man said it would be. Or, rather, what was left of it—a rotten, rat-shredded, moldy wad of slimy scraps and fiber. If you ever want to know what $12,000 looks like, do not ask me. All I can tell you about is what $12,000 looks like after my retard drug-addict old man hides it in a wet, dirty hole in our cellar’s wall and doesn't tell anybody about it for ten or eleven years. That’s not all we found, of course, but finding those sludgy lumps of cash pudding was awfully disappointing. The mother had died, chocked to death in her slum-queen’s bed on a chicken bone, and this was very much more disappointing than that. We never told anyone she'd died because, really, who would care? She’s still up there rotting away, though, in case any of us wants to visit with her for awhile and that doesn’t help the generally odiferous nature of our home much. I think the old man thinks she’s still alive.
Toby stood there for a moment looking at the money-slop and the rest of it; then he just bolted upstairs. I mean, he spun around and he was pounding up the steps and the next thing I heard was his heavy boots thumping across the floor above and the meat-sounding smack of his close-fisted blows to the old man.
“You stupid, worthless piece of shit,” Toby’s voice, though muffled, was clear and the space between each word was filled with the sound of another blow. “You…insane…piece…of fuck…shit.”
Stuff like that. I couldn’t hear much of anything from the old man, but that was not in any way unusual. I can’t remember the last full sentence I heard him speak aloud before tonight and I’d stopped reading his little notes years ago. They didn’t make sense anyway when I did read them. “Cancer dog at the back door,” I remember one of them said; “Claws and beaks are all you eat,” was another one. They were like fucked-up fortune-cookie fortunes or something.
So, I just stood there in the basement leaning on my shovel, listening to my brother beat the crap out of our father, and staring at all that ruined money and the skeletonized remains of one of my childhood classmates. Sierra Lebonowsky disappeared when we were in the 8th grade, her folks moved away a few years later, and she slipped away from my memory. But I instantly recognized her sweater; it was not a particularly noteworthy sweater other than that I remembered it as hers. A cardigan thing with a belt, it had a geometrical pattern in gray and cream colors. I could see her wearing it while she waited at the bus stop in the morning, steam from her warm breath pluming away from her mouth. Obviously synthetic, it hadn’t deteriorated much in eleven years. Sierra had, but the sweater hadn’t.
Toby came stomping down the stairs from behind me.
“Asshole cocksucker,” he announced. “Fucking useless perverted toothless piece of shit.”
He was talking about dad.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Toby.
“Fucking bleeding, man,” Toby answered. “Sitting there in his fucking Laz-ee-Boy recliner, crying like a bitch, and bleeding.”
“Did he say anything?” I asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” He answered my question with a question and I hate that.
“Did you know about any of this?” I asked him.
“About the money or about Sierra?” Again with the question for a question.
I gently poked her ribcage under the sweater.
“Any of it.”
“No,” he said, almost indignant.
I poked a little bit more.
“Then why did you ask?” I wanted to know.
“Why did I ask what?” Toby was having trouble answering me straight on.
“I asked you if you knew about any of this,” I explained to him. “You asked me, ‘About the money or about Sierra?’ If you didn’t know about this, why did you ask which one?”
“Why did I ask which one what?” This was getting painful.
“Why did you ask me which one—Sierra or the money?”
Toby just stood there, blinking and thinking, while he tried to figure out what to say next. He already knew it was too late and the shovel in my hands was connecting with his nose, splitting it open with a gush of crimson, before he could adequately frame his next question. Toby sat down hard on his ass on the basement floor next to the pile of worthless cash and what was left of Sierra Lebonowsky.
“You fuck,” I told him. “You fucking knew. Didn’t you?”
“Glub?” Toby answered through his already blackening, swelling lump of a nose and the gush of bright blood. “Glub glum glub?”
“Stop answering my questions with more questions, you asshole,” I told him and smacked the top of his head with the flat blade of my shovel. It made a dull ringing sound and vibrated in my hands.
“Ooowww,” Toby moaned and at least that sounded like a statement. My family had a suddenly renewed interest in beating up each other.
I thought about Sierra Lebonowsky for a second. A flood of quick memories followed my recognition of her sweater: Sierra on the school bus sitting next to Debbie Skinner and talking about boys; watching her dance with another boy at a school sock-hop about 6 weeks before she disappeared; Sierra in 5th grade crying when she got 2nd place in the science fair because she had worked on her project entirely by herself and the winner, Mike Tullman, had so obviously gotten help from his dad. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t gotten any help from my dad, of course, but my project sucked. I can’t even remember what it was, maybe some last minute thing with lima beans or food color or something. I couldn’t believe Sierra had been in my basement this whole time. And I had almost forgotten about her.
Toby was curled on his side on the dirt floor.
“Anything else I need to know about?” I asked him, ready to kick him if it even sounded like he was going to ask another question.
“Nobe,” he straightforwardly answered me. “Nuh-ting else.”
I looked down on the little corpse and damned if it didn’t appear as if there were tooth marks on the long bones of her little legs. The old man hadn’t always been toothless; before the meth fucked up his mouth, he’d had quite a set of choppers.
“You sick motherfucker,” I told him and then, realizing what I’d just said, had to smile a little bit. Fighting wasn’t all this family did with each other.
“Tommy has a girlfriend, Tommy has a girlfriend,” Toby, chanted while he danced circles around his big brother.
Tommy lunged at the gadfly, narrowly missing a grab at the boy’s winter coat.
“Shut up, brat,” the older boy commanded, though futilely.
“Tommy and Sierra, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Toby sang as he dodged a punch-kick combination. “First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes Tommy pushing a baby…OW!”
Toby rubbed his thigh where his brother’s boot had left the beginnings of a good-sized welt. Tommy was able, in general, to land only 1 blow in every 6 attempts, so he tended to make them count when he could. It was the same strategy their father used to raise his boys.
All the way to their home, the younger boy limped in front of, behind, and along side his older sibling in a manner both mocking and defiant though he made no further vocalization. Tommy scowled, though not at his brother’s teasing. In fact, Tommy scowled because he did not have a girlfriend and that Sierra Lebonowsky specifically was not his girlfriend. Toby’s teasing reminded Tommy of that fact and, since he truly wished that Sierra was his girlfriend, that the two truly were k-i-s-s-i-n-g, in love, getting married, pushing baby carriages, and since Tommy knew that something like that was never ever going to happen, Toby’s teasing ignited a slow red fire in his head and in his heart that, once smoldering, would be hard to dampen. What had started as love was already becoming rage.
“I HATE HER,” he roared at his brother as if that would stop the frolicking.
The boys slammed into the house, dumping their coats and backpacks onto the jumbled pile of clothing, sports equipment, and assorted detritus next to the kitchen door. Walking into the house was walking into a wall of overheated, moist air heavy with the odors of cat-piss, stale cigarette smoke, rotten food, old grease, and unwashed bodies. Those smells were just one of the reasons Tommy would remain without a girlfriend; among many other things, the way those smells clung to the boys was off-putting to their peers. The boys jealously suspected that other households hid secrets just as foul as their own. The only difference, they hoped in their impotent squalor, was that other households merely applied Lysol to the stink with more vigor. And for that, the boys hated those other households and the children reared in those households for having the luck, if not the blessing, of good hygiene and the USDA food pyramid. The boys could have accepted and lived with the foul secrets, for foul secrets were part of all the life they’d ever known, but good food and clean clothes would have made a difference and to be denied such simple amenities infuriated the boys.
“Where’s the fat bitch?” Tommy asked his brother as he looked inside the barren refrigerator.
“Probably stuffing her fat face,” Toby snickered.
“I’d like to know with what,” Tommy said. “And then I’d like some, too.”
“Fat chance,” Toby laughed. “Get it? ‘ Fat’ chance?”
Tommy reached behind to idly swat at his younger brother.
“I get it, asswipe.”
“Got any money?”
“You wish.”
“No shit, I wish.”
“Well, shit in one hand and wish in the other. Watch which one fills up first.”
“Quit trying to talk like the old man. It doesn’t fit you.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
Tommy closed the refrigerator door. His stomach was knotted with hunger and shame, his feet burned in his stinking boots and unwashed socks, his hair hung in greasy ropes across his crusted eyes. He honestly didn’t know how much more of this he could take. Later in his life, Tommy would be sadly surprised to look back and see just how much more it had been.
He’d apparently kidnapped the object of my schoolboy desires and, at the very least, chewed on her legs though I know that’s not all he did, and he didn’t even tell me or ask me if I wanted some. Like I was ever going to get another chance to be with a girl like Sierra Lebonowsky no matter how long I lived. Just looking at her bones wrapped up in the remains of her clothes was giving me a hard-on.
I kicked my brother again.
“You asshole,” I reiterated before climbing the stairs into the kitchen.
I sat down at the table in front of a cold cup of instant coffee. I could see through the doorway, past the dining room, and into the living room. The old man was sprawled on his recliner, blood was trickling out of his mouth, and whether he was alive or dead did not matter to me in the least. I brought the mug to my lips, blew upon the liquid as if it were scalding, and took a sip.
“That hits the spot,” I said to no one. “Nothing like a good cup of coffee to really hit the spot.”
They could hear the television from upstairs.
“I wonder if she’s awake,” Toby said.
“Go and find out,” Tommy answered.
“You go.”
“I’m not going. You go.”
“I’m not going.”
If the mother was asleep, they might be able to swipe some food from the debris in her room. If she was awake and saw them, she would either scream at and vilify them or wish them closer so she could slobber upon and touch them. Neither prospect appealed to either boy at the moment.
“Shit,” Tommy muttered as he headed for the garage and the gas can. Toby followed behind, silent and limping.
I’ve often wondered how it is possible for me to stand such a cruel life surrounded by such cruel people acting with such cruelty. I search my own interior for that same cruelty and, rather than dismay, greet it with joy when I find it. As fucked-up as the family may be, we don’t get to choose our relatives and I would rather fit in with my own blood than be a stranger in the world. I can’t imagine how lonely it would be for someone to not have blood kin, people who aren’t just like you but are actually part of you and you are a part of them.
We talk about blood a lot amongst each other.
“It ain’t no gaddamn cliché,” the old man used to say before his brain melted. “It’s just true. Blood is thicker than water and thicker than mud and that means they ain’t no kind of binding or any kind of holy oath that’ll put you closer to another human being in this world than the blood you share in your veins. That’s why I married your mother and that’s why the blood inside you boys is holy.”
That last part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the first part rings true. Even monsters have mommies. Even if their mommies are also their aunties or maybe their big sisters, it still counts.
I remember being real little, just probably 2 or 3 years old because, in my memory, all the furniture and stuff is really big. I remember standing in the hallway and looking into the big bedroom and watching the old man and the mother go at it in a sexual way. Now I know she couldn’t have been much more than 15 herself, but at the time she seemed old as water and about that solid; she was just sort of a wispy, misty old woman even when she was still a kid. It wouldn’t be too much longer before she got real fat but back then she was still just a skinny little thing. She was probably pregnant with Toby though how would I have known? The old man was doing her and it was either really good or it hurt her something bad because she was making all sorts of noises and you know how sex is—sometimes it sounds like people killing each other. I never knew the mother’s mother, the old man’s wife before they had my mother, but I know her name was “Jeanette” because that’s what the old man would grunt when he was fucking his daughter and that isn’t the mother’s name. The mother’s name is Dumpling and he never grunts
“Dumpling” when he’s fucking her. That’s kind of weird, I think.
Anyway, I remember standing there in the hallway and being just a little kid but still having this vision of how we are as a family, how we are like a silver ring or a group of interlocked silver rings and no matter which ring you set to follow out of the group, you always loop back and find yourself tangled up in someone else’s silver ring. That’s the family for sure. The reason the rings are silver is that gold doesn’t tarnish.
The range of her cruelty had been limited by only and both her lack of intelligence and poverty and I thanked heaven every day that she was both stupid and poor.
One of her favorites was to make me wear a dress and watch as she fucked the old man or one of her tricks. She’d stand me on a chair and she’d suck cock and take it in her smelly pussy and her dirty ass and she and the old man or the trick would laugh at me there crying in a dress on the chair watching the mother fuck strange, drunken men including but limited to the old man. She would be drunk, too.
She must have known what she was doing. How else to explain why she’d punish me with bare-bottom spankings while jerking my little prick. She must have known stuff like that would have long-term consequences. Why else would she make me stand naked in the bathtub, flick burning matches at my crotch, and all the while whisper how she was going to cut my penis off and make me into a girl?
Toby was still moaning downstairs. I was sitting in the sick heart of the rancid rat’s nest we called our home and I was just sick of us all, tired and sick and bored and infuriated and deeply saddened by our lives. There I was surrounded by illness, decay, and deviance with a pile of rotten cash and the corpse of my childhood sweetheart down in the basement and I just didn’t know what to do anymore.
The old man was making some choked, wheezing sounds from the living room, so I guessed he wasn’t dead, that Toby hadn’t killed him. Yet. Of course, my own boots felt like having their own chat with the old man, so he was by no means finished with the evening’s entertainment. I was just waiting for him to rise to a suitable level of consciousness so that my efforts could be properly rewarded. In the mean time, sipping my ice-cold coffee, I turned back to my mental family scrapbook.
“When the fuck are you gonna get you some pussy, boy?” the old man asked me. “Don’t you like girls? Are you a little faggot? I’m not having no cock-sucking, ass-fucking faggot in my house, you know.”
It was at times like these I wished at least one of the television sets piled in the living room would work. I could watch Dialing For Dollars or The Match Game and pretend the old man was talking to someone else.
“I’m talking to you, boy,” he reminded me. “I’m talking to you, you little faggot no-pussy-getting boy. Jesus fuck Christ, I had kids in school when I was your age.”
I was 15 then, which meant that if the old man was telling something even a little bit truthful, he’d been since he was 10 or 11 and that seemed almost reasonable.
“I reckon you know what pussy is, don’t you?” he asked while peering at me. I think he thought he was making a joke. He was drinking something white and caustic out of a cracked, milky ceramic coffee mug in between hitting his glass pipe. They’d just invented crack and the old man loved that shit. “I mean, you seen pitchers of pussy, ain’t you?”
I’d indeed seen pictures of pussy and I’d seen the real thing between the mother’s legs and was still confused how the one could look so tantalizing and beckoning and pink while the other looked dark and ravenous and foul. I kept that thought to myself.
“Do I have to go out there and drag some pussy in here for you?” he asked but I was pretty sure the question was rhetorical. But, thinking now, perhaps it wasn’t. “Do I have to go out there and buy some fucking pussy for you to stick that little wizzer you call a dick into? Do I have to hold it for you and push your bony ass up and down, up and down?”
That was a thoroughly ugly thought and I pushed it quickly from my head.
“I know girls,” I said in a moment of weakness.
“You know girls. I’ll bet you know girls,” he cackled. “But do girls know you? Huh? Do the girls know you?”
I know I blushed. I hated myself for doing it, but the old man had me pegged. Sure, I knew girls from the neighborhood and from school, but not a one of them even looked at me. How could they with me in my dirty clothes, dirty hair, and smelling of this madhouse reek? How could I even approach them? I wasn’t totally resigned to a sex life of the mother’s intermittent blowjobs delivered while she wheezed and pinched my nipples until they bled, but I was getting there. I wasn’t happy about it, but that’s what resignation is all about; I’d give up even the hope of happiness and holding hands and sharing sodas and making out in the back seat of parents’ cars and resign myself to the fully awful sexual ministrations of the mother. She’d flop over amidst the filthy detritus of her bedclothes and hiss.
“In mah ass, boy,” she’d rasp. “Stick that dinker of your’n in mah ass.”
And I would.
When he made it to the kitchen door, Toby leaned against the jamb, blood dripping down the front of his shirt.
“Whadda gonna do now?” he asked me around the mess on the front of his face.
“You’re asking me?” I answered and felt good to give him a question instead of an answer.
“Yuh. Whadda gonna do?”
“Well,” I said and raised the coffee to my lips. “I’m going to sit here until the old man wakes up enough so’s I can go back in there and kick the shit out of him all over again. You got a good start, brother, but I’m going to finish the job.”
“Buh whadda gonna do den?” His busted nose sure made him talk funny.
“You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. Maybe I’ll call the cops and they’ll throw us all in jail where we belong. Maybe I’ll take some of that $12,000 and go to El Paso.”
“Bud thad muddy no good,” he answered me for once. “Ain’d no good fer nuddin.”
“Well, dear Toby, we’re aren’t much good for ‘nuddin’ either.” I was wishing the mother was still alive so I could upstairs and kick the shit out of her, too. “So, I guess it sort of works out the way it was supposed to work out. Maybe I’ll join the army and kill people legally. You might want to try it yourself.”
“De arby?” he moaned. “I d’wanna go inna arby.”
“Okay. No army for Toby. Maybe you could be a cop. You’ve got the temperament for it.”
“I don wanna beeda cob,” he moaned again and I think he may have been crying. It was hard to tell.
The old man was stirring in the living room. I heard him fall out of his chair and I got the beginnings of a plan formed. I stood up to go back in there and stomp his head open, grind what was left of his evil brains into the scarred woodwork of the dirty floor and, if I still felt like it afterward, I would walk out the door and keep on walking and never come back. I felt the intense need for new blood in my life and I figured it was about time to spawn. I was going to look for some pussy. Some real pussy.
“Say that again,” I told him.
“I said, ‘If you want money so goddamn bad, go get you some.’ Go dig up some of that money in the basement if you want money so goddamn bad, goddamn it,” he snapped. The old man snapped, barked, hollered, and yelled a lot. His volume knob never seemed to go below 8.
“What money? You’ve got money in the basement?” I asked.
“Hell, yeah, I got money in the basement. Buried in the wall behind that big old clown painting of your mother’s. Been there for years.”
I just stared at the twisted up old fuck, that knot of wasted human life just too furious to do anything other than rage. And drink. And use drugs. And fuck around on the mother. My old man was quite a guy in quite a few ways, but money-stasher was a new one on me.
“How much money are we talking about?” I asked.
“Twelve fucking thousand bucks,” he answered. “You little shit.”
“You have $12,000 buried in the basement? What the fuck for?”
“So you, your retard brother, and that nightmare corpse of your mother’s upstairs couldn’t never get your greedy fuckin’ paws on it.”
“So why are you telling us now?”
The old man clamped his mouth shut, his face collapsing around the toothless hole.
“Seriously, old man. Why are you telling us now?”
“I got my reasons.”
“Such as…? I mean, how long have you been sitting on this little stash of cash?”
“Long enough,” the old man answered. “And I got my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”
And, yeah, we found the money. Down in the basement in a hole in the wall behind one of the clown paintings the mother had done in her paint-by-numbers days right where the old man said it would be. Or, rather, what was left of it—a rotten, rat-shredded, moldy wad of slimy scraps and fiber. If you ever want to know what $12,000 looks like, do not ask me. All I can tell you about is what $12,000 looks like after my retard drug-addict old man hides it in a wet, dirty hole in our cellar’s wall and doesn't tell anybody about it for ten or eleven years. That’s not all we found, of course, but finding those sludgy lumps of cash pudding was awfully disappointing. The mother had died, chocked to death in her slum-queen’s bed on a chicken bone, and this was very much more disappointing than that. We never told anyone she'd died because, really, who would care? She’s still up there rotting away, though, in case any of us wants to visit with her for awhile and that doesn’t help the generally odiferous nature of our home much. I think the old man thinks she’s still alive.
Toby stood there for a moment looking at the money-slop and the rest of it; then he just bolted upstairs. I mean, he spun around and he was pounding up the steps and the next thing I heard was his heavy boots thumping across the floor above and the meat-sounding smack of his close-fisted blows to the old man.
“You stupid, worthless piece of shit,” Toby’s voice, though muffled, was clear and the space between each word was filled with the sound of another blow. “You…insane…piece…of fuck…shit.”
Stuff like that. I couldn’t hear much of anything from the old man, but that was not in any way unusual. I can’t remember the last full sentence I heard him speak aloud before tonight and I’d stopped reading his little notes years ago. They didn’t make sense anyway when I did read them. “Cancer dog at the back door,” I remember one of them said; “Claws and beaks are all you eat,” was another one. They were like fucked-up fortune-cookie fortunes or something.
So, I just stood there in the basement leaning on my shovel, listening to my brother beat the crap out of our father, and staring at all that ruined money and the skeletonized remains of one of my childhood classmates. Sierra Lebonowsky disappeared when we were in the 8th grade, her folks moved away a few years later, and she slipped away from my memory. But I instantly recognized her sweater; it was not a particularly noteworthy sweater other than that I remembered it as hers. A cardigan thing with a belt, it had a geometrical pattern in gray and cream colors. I could see her wearing it while she waited at the bus stop in the morning, steam from her warm breath pluming away from her mouth. Obviously synthetic, it hadn’t deteriorated much in eleven years. Sierra had, but the sweater hadn’t.
Toby came stomping down the stairs from behind me.
“Asshole cocksucker,” he announced. “Fucking useless perverted toothless piece of shit.”
He was talking about dad.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Toby.
“Fucking bleeding, man,” Toby answered. “Sitting there in his fucking Laz-ee-Boy recliner, crying like a bitch, and bleeding.”
“Did he say anything?” I asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” He answered my question with a question and I hate that.
“Did you know about any of this?” I asked him.
“About the money or about Sierra?” Again with the question for a question.
I gently poked her ribcage under the sweater.
“Any of it.”
“No,” he said, almost indignant.
I poked a little bit more.
“Then why did you ask?” I wanted to know.
“Why did I ask what?” Toby was having trouble answering me straight on.
“I asked you if you knew about any of this,” I explained to him. “You asked me, ‘About the money or about Sierra?’ If you didn’t know about this, why did you ask which one?”
“Why did I ask which one what?” This was getting painful.
“Why did you ask me which one—Sierra or the money?”
Toby just stood there, blinking and thinking, while he tried to figure out what to say next. He already knew it was too late and the shovel in my hands was connecting with his nose, splitting it open with a gush of crimson, before he could adequately frame his next question. Toby sat down hard on his ass on the basement floor next to the pile of worthless cash and what was left of Sierra Lebonowsky.
“You fuck,” I told him. “You fucking knew. Didn’t you?”
“Glub?” Toby answered through his already blackening, swelling lump of a nose and the gush of bright blood. “Glub glum glub?”
“Stop answering my questions with more questions, you asshole,” I told him and smacked the top of his head with the flat blade of my shovel. It made a dull ringing sound and vibrated in my hands.
“Ooowww,” Toby moaned and at least that sounded like a statement. My family had a suddenly renewed interest in beating up each other.
I thought about Sierra Lebonowsky for a second. A flood of quick memories followed my recognition of her sweater: Sierra on the school bus sitting next to Debbie Skinner and talking about boys; watching her dance with another boy at a school sock-hop about 6 weeks before she disappeared; Sierra in 5th grade crying when she got 2nd place in the science fair because she had worked on her project entirely by herself and the winner, Mike Tullman, had so obviously gotten help from his dad. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t gotten any help from my dad, of course, but my project sucked. I can’t even remember what it was, maybe some last minute thing with lima beans or food color or something. I couldn’t believe Sierra had been in my basement this whole time. And I had almost forgotten about her.
Toby was curled on his side on the dirt floor.
“Anything else I need to know about?” I asked him, ready to kick him if it even sounded like he was going to ask another question.
“Nobe,” he straightforwardly answered me. “Nuh-ting else.”
I looked down on the little corpse and damned if it didn’t appear as if there were tooth marks on the long bones of her little legs. The old man hadn’t always been toothless; before the meth fucked up his mouth, he’d had quite a set of choppers.
“You sick motherfucker,” I told him and then, realizing what I’d just said, had to smile a little bit. Fighting wasn’t all this family did with each other.
*
“Tommy has a girlfriend, Tommy has a girlfriend,” Toby, chanted while he danced circles around his big brother.
Tommy lunged at the gadfly, narrowly missing a grab at the boy’s winter coat.
“Shut up, brat,” the older boy commanded, though futilely.
“Tommy and Sierra, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Toby sang as he dodged a punch-kick combination. “First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes Tommy pushing a baby…OW!”
Toby rubbed his thigh where his brother’s boot had left the beginnings of a good-sized welt. Tommy was able, in general, to land only 1 blow in every 6 attempts, so he tended to make them count when he could. It was the same strategy their father used to raise his boys.
All the way to their home, the younger boy limped in front of, behind, and along side his older sibling in a manner both mocking and defiant though he made no further vocalization. Tommy scowled, though not at his brother’s teasing. In fact, Tommy scowled because he did not have a girlfriend and that Sierra Lebonowsky specifically was not his girlfriend. Toby’s teasing reminded Tommy of that fact and, since he truly wished that Sierra was his girlfriend, that the two truly were k-i-s-s-i-n-g, in love, getting married, pushing baby carriages, and since Tommy knew that something like that was never ever going to happen, Toby’s teasing ignited a slow red fire in his head and in his heart that, once smoldering, would be hard to dampen. What had started as love was already becoming rage.
“I HATE HER,” he roared at his brother as if that would stop the frolicking.
The boys slammed into the house, dumping their coats and backpacks onto the jumbled pile of clothing, sports equipment, and assorted detritus next to the kitchen door. Walking into the house was walking into a wall of overheated, moist air heavy with the odors of cat-piss, stale cigarette smoke, rotten food, old grease, and unwashed bodies. Those smells were just one of the reasons Tommy would remain without a girlfriend; among many other things, the way those smells clung to the boys was off-putting to their peers. The boys jealously suspected that other households hid secrets just as foul as their own. The only difference, they hoped in their impotent squalor, was that other households merely applied Lysol to the stink with more vigor. And for that, the boys hated those other households and the children reared in those households for having the luck, if not the blessing, of good hygiene and the USDA food pyramid. The boys could have accepted and lived with the foul secrets, for foul secrets were part of all the life they’d ever known, but good food and clean clothes would have made a difference and to be denied such simple amenities infuriated the boys.
“Where’s the fat bitch?” Tommy asked his brother as he looked inside the barren refrigerator.
“Probably stuffing her fat face,” Toby snickered.
“I’d like to know with what,” Tommy said. “And then I’d like some, too.”
“Fat chance,” Toby laughed. “Get it? ‘ Fat’ chance?”
Tommy reached behind to idly swat at his younger brother.
“I get it, asswipe.”
“Got any money?”
“You wish.”
“No shit, I wish.”
“Well, shit in one hand and wish in the other. Watch which one fills up first.”
“Quit trying to talk like the old man. It doesn’t fit you.”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
Tommy closed the refrigerator door. His stomach was knotted with hunger and shame, his feet burned in his stinking boots and unwashed socks, his hair hung in greasy ropes across his crusted eyes. He honestly didn’t know how much more of this he could take. Later in his life, Tommy would be sadly surprised to look back and see just how much more it had been.
*
To stand there looking at $12,000 and a perfectly good girl wasted like that just made me madder and madder. All those macaroni and cheese dinners right out of the box with no milk or butter; all those rotten socks and gray underwear 2 sizes too small; all those empty Christmas stockings, forgotten birthdays, and that sick fuck upstairs had been sitting on 12 grand, letting it rot away rather than spend a dime of it on his kids.He’d apparently kidnapped the object of my schoolboy desires and, at the very least, chewed on her legs though I know that’s not all he did, and he didn’t even tell me or ask me if I wanted some. Like I was ever going to get another chance to be with a girl like Sierra Lebonowsky no matter how long I lived. Just looking at her bones wrapped up in the remains of her clothes was giving me a hard-on.
I kicked my brother again.
“You asshole,” I reiterated before climbing the stairs into the kitchen.
I sat down at the table in front of a cold cup of instant coffee. I could see through the doorway, past the dining room, and into the living room. The old man was sprawled on his recliner, blood was trickling out of his mouth, and whether he was alive or dead did not matter to me in the least. I brought the mug to my lips, blew upon the liquid as if it were scalding, and took a sip.
“That hits the spot,” I said to no one. “Nothing like a good cup of coffee to really hit the spot.”
*
The hungry boys roamed through the bottom floors of the house searching for something to eat or money with which to buy something to eat. Toby carried the sugar bowl with him, dipping his finger into its hardened, darkened crust and licking up the grains that stuck. Tommy puffed away on long butts rummaged from overflowing ashtrays. If they didn’t find something soon, they’d have to go into the garage and huff gasoline. No matter how hungry they got, a few lungfuls of gasoline vapor put them in a drooling stupor in which food had no place. The headaches could be fierce, but everything was always a trade-off.They could hear the television from upstairs.
“I wonder if she’s awake,” Toby said.
“Go and find out,” Tommy answered.
“You go.”
“I’m not going. You go.”
“I’m not going.”
If the mother was asleep, they might be able to swipe some food from the debris in her room. If she was awake and saw them, she would either scream at and vilify them or wish them closer so she could slobber upon and touch them. Neither prospect appealed to either boy at the moment.
“Shit,” Tommy muttered as he headed for the garage and the gas can. Toby followed behind, silent and limping.
*
I’m not sure how long I sat at the table. The old man never moved and Toby never came upstairs. It could have been hours. It could have been five minutes. I just kept thinking about the money and about Sierra Lebonowsky, about what I could have done with either or both.I’ve often wondered how it is possible for me to stand such a cruel life surrounded by such cruel people acting with such cruelty. I search my own interior for that same cruelty and, rather than dismay, greet it with joy when I find it. As fucked-up as the family may be, we don’t get to choose our relatives and I would rather fit in with my own blood than be a stranger in the world. I can’t imagine how lonely it would be for someone to not have blood kin, people who aren’t just like you but are actually part of you and you are a part of them.
We talk about blood a lot amongst each other.
“It ain’t no gaddamn cliché,” the old man used to say before his brain melted. “It’s just true. Blood is thicker than water and thicker than mud and that means they ain’t no kind of binding or any kind of holy oath that’ll put you closer to another human being in this world than the blood you share in your veins. That’s why I married your mother and that’s why the blood inside you boys is holy.”
That last part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the first part rings true. Even monsters have mommies. Even if their mommies are also their aunties or maybe their big sisters, it still counts.
I remember being real little, just probably 2 or 3 years old because, in my memory, all the furniture and stuff is really big. I remember standing in the hallway and looking into the big bedroom and watching the old man and the mother go at it in a sexual way. Now I know she couldn’t have been much more than 15 herself, but at the time she seemed old as water and about that solid; she was just sort of a wispy, misty old woman even when she was still a kid. It wouldn’t be too much longer before she got real fat but back then she was still just a skinny little thing. She was probably pregnant with Toby though how would I have known? The old man was doing her and it was either really good or it hurt her something bad because she was making all sorts of noises and you know how sex is—sometimes it sounds like people killing each other. I never knew the mother’s mother, the old man’s wife before they had my mother, but I know her name was “Jeanette” because that’s what the old man would grunt when he was fucking his daughter and that isn’t the mother’s name. The mother’s name is Dumpling and he never grunts
“Dumpling” when he’s fucking her. That’s kind of weird, I think.
Anyway, I remember standing there in the hallway and being just a little kid but still having this vision of how we are as a family, how we are like a silver ring or a group of interlocked silver rings and no matter which ring you set to follow out of the group, you always loop back and find yourself tangled up in someone else’s silver ring. That’s the family for sure. The reason the rings are silver is that gold doesn’t tarnish.
The range of her cruelty had been limited by only and both her lack of intelligence and poverty and I thanked heaven every day that she was both stupid and poor.
One of her favorites was to make me wear a dress and watch as she fucked the old man or one of her tricks. She’d stand me on a chair and she’d suck cock and take it in her smelly pussy and her dirty ass and she and the old man or the trick would laugh at me there crying in a dress on the chair watching the mother fuck strange, drunken men including but limited to the old man. She would be drunk, too.
She must have known what she was doing. How else to explain why she’d punish me with bare-bottom spankings while jerking my little prick. She must have known stuff like that would have long-term consequences. Why else would she make me stand naked in the bathtub, flick burning matches at my crotch, and all the while whisper how she was going to cut my penis off and make me into a girl?
Toby was still moaning downstairs. I was sitting in the sick heart of the rancid rat’s nest we called our home and I was just sick of us all, tired and sick and bored and infuriated and deeply saddened by our lives. There I was surrounded by illness, decay, and deviance with a pile of rotten cash and the corpse of my childhood sweetheart down in the basement and I just didn’t know what to do anymore.
The old man was making some choked, wheezing sounds from the living room, so I guessed he wasn’t dead, that Toby hadn’t killed him. Yet. Of course, my own boots felt like having their own chat with the old man, so he was by no means finished with the evening’s entertainment. I was just waiting for him to rise to a suitable level of consciousness so that my efforts could be properly rewarded. In the mean time, sipping my ice-cold coffee, I turned back to my mental family scrapbook.
*
We were having one of those father-to-son heart-to-heart talks I’d learned to love so well.“When the fuck are you gonna get you some pussy, boy?” the old man asked me. “Don’t you like girls? Are you a little faggot? I’m not having no cock-sucking, ass-fucking faggot in my house, you know.”
It was at times like these I wished at least one of the television sets piled in the living room would work. I could watch Dialing For Dollars or The Match Game and pretend the old man was talking to someone else.
“I’m talking to you, boy,” he reminded me. “I’m talking to you, you little faggot no-pussy-getting boy. Jesus fuck Christ, I had kids in school when I was your age.”
I was 15 then, which meant that if the old man was telling something even a little bit truthful, he’d been since he was 10 or 11 and that seemed almost reasonable.
“I reckon you know what pussy is, don’t you?” he asked while peering at me. I think he thought he was making a joke. He was drinking something white and caustic out of a cracked, milky ceramic coffee mug in between hitting his glass pipe. They’d just invented crack and the old man loved that shit. “I mean, you seen pitchers of pussy, ain’t you?”
I’d indeed seen pictures of pussy and I’d seen the real thing between the mother’s legs and was still confused how the one could look so tantalizing and beckoning and pink while the other looked dark and ravenous and foul. I kept that thought to myself.
“Do I have to go out there and drag some pussy in here for you?” he asked but I was pretty sure the question was rhetorical. But, thinking now, perhaps it wasn’t. “Do I have to go out there and buy some fucking pussy for you to stick that little wizzer you call a dick into? Do I have to hold it for you and push your bony ass up and down, up and down?”
That was a thoroughly ugly thought and I pushed it quickly from my head.
“I know girls,” I said in a moment of weakness.
“You know girls. I’ll bet you know girls,” he cackled. “But do girls know you? Huh? Do the girls know you?”
I know I blushed. I hated myself for doing it, but the old man had me pegged. Sure, I knew girls from the neighborhood and from school, but not a one of them even looked at me. How could they with me in my dirty clothes, dirty hair, and smelling of this madhouse reek? How could I even approach them? I wasn’t totally resigned to a sex life of the mother’s intermittent blowjobs delivered while she wheezed and pinched my nipples until they bled, but I was getting there. I wasn’t happy about it, but that’s what resignation is all about; I’d give up even the hope of happiness and holding hands and sharing sodas and making out in the back seat of parents’ cars and resign myself to the fully awful sexual ministrations of the mother. She’d flop over amidst the filthy detritus of her bedclothes and hiss.
“In mah ass, boy,” she’d rasp. “Stick that dinker of your’n in mah ass.”
And I would.
*
I could hear Toby start to stumble up the stairs and I had no idea what his intentions might be. I could hear the old man starting regain his senses in the living room. I wondered which one I’d have to beat senseless first.When he made it to the kitchen door, Toby leaned against the jamb, blood dripping down the front of his shirt.
“Whadda gonna do now?” he asked me around the mess on the front of his face.
“You’re asking me?” I answered and felt good to give him a question instead of an answer.
“Yuh. Whadda gonna do?”
“Well,” I said and raised the coffee to my lips. “I’m going to sit here until the old man wakes up enough so’s I can go back in there and kick the shit out of him all over again. You got a good start, brother, but I’m going to finish the job.”
“Buh whadda gonna do den?” His busted nose sure made him talk funny.
“You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. Maybe I’ll call the cops and they’ll throw us all in jail where we belong. Maybe I’ll take some of that $12,000 and go to El Paso.”
“Bud thad muddy no good,” he answered me for once. “Ain’d no good fer nuddin.”
“Well, dear Toby, we’re aren’t much good for ‘nuddin’ either.” I was wishing the mother was still alive so I could upstairs and kick the shit out of her, too. “So, I guess it sort of works out the way it was supposed to work out. Maybe I’ll join the army and kill people legally. You might want to try it yourself.”
“De arby?” he moaned. “I d’wanna go inna arby.”
“Okay. No army for Toby. Maybe you could be a cop. You’ve got the temperament for it.”
“I don wanna beeda cob,” he moaned again and I think he may have been crying. It was hard to tell.
The old man was stirring in the living room. I heard him fall out of his chair and I got the beginnings of a plan formed. I stood up to go back in there and stomp his head open, grind what was left of his evil brains into the scarred woodwork of the dirty floor and, if I still felt like it afterward, I would walk out the door and keep on walking and never come back. I felt the intense need for new blood in my life and I figured it was about time to spawn. I was going to look for some pussy. Some real pussy.
09 March 2009
Ethics in a Gunfight
Pike Bishop: He gave his word.
Dutch Engstrom: He gave his word to a railroad.
Pike Bishop: It's his word.
Dutch Engstrom: That ain't what counts! It's who you give it to!
The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah
1969
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