by James Grady
Come midnight, P.V. cut himself to save the bar his payout for work that wasn’t there for him to do. Broke house rules, hit the marijuana vape pen he had a Maryland medical card for—would have shared it with Molly, but she wasn’t there. Climbed those concrete stairs.
The moon was up. Newly under construction behemoth buildings loomed all around where he emerged, security lights on their girder-revealing way up there roofs and skeletal giant praying mantis cranes rising into the misty darkness. Felt like everything was slipping into Blade Runner, a sci fi vision gone mad.
A pair of headlights snapped on half a block down and across the deserted street, two yellow hunter’s eyes parked in front of the gun shop, the car’s red taillights pointing at him.
The car pulled away from the curb and rolled a 180 so those yellow eyes caught him standing alone on the corner.
He heard a car window whir down. A dark form loomed behind the steering wheel.
Faye’s voice called to him from inside the car: “We’re both still alive. I got nowhere to go and no one there when I do.”
Her engine grumbled in the night.
“You’ve got no better choice either,” she said. “You know that’s true. Let’s go.”
He heard himself say: “Go where?”
“Your place. Probably closer. Your car’s parked somewhere around here. Drive you to it.”
He got in her dark blue car. Closed the door with a thump that couldn’t be any louder than his slamming heart. God, the smell of her, the closeness!
“We haven’t even kissed,” he said.
“When we do,” she said, “I’m not gonna stop.”
She drove him to the county’s all night public parking aboveground pancake garage four blocks away, the level where he stashed his ordinary and thus invisible gray Datsun.
Got out, got in, turned the Datsun’s key. It didn’t blow up. She didn’t race away.
He leaned out and called back to her: “Follow me.”
“That’s the plan.”
The settlement money after they let him go covered the down payment on his three-story, two-unit townhouse just over the DC line, nine minutes from the bar. Since he didn’t have a family (yet), he lived in the bottom unit under his fifth set of tenants. The housing shortage in the nation’s capital meant the rent he got covered his mortgage, plus.
Middle-class in spite of.
Molly owned a smaller, further out, thus cheaper duplex house, the same make-it plan she’d inspired in him, get set up so you can be free of the shift life.
As if.
He parked at the curb in front of his house that first night.
Waved Faye’s sleek dark blue car into his driveway.
She sashayed past him without a word, without a touch, to his front door. His hand trembled and repeatedly stabbed his door key at the lock.
Until she put her velvet warm hand around his, said: “I got this.”
Slid his key into the lock of his door, opened it and let him lead the way inside.
Pulled the door shut behind her. Locked the deadbolt.
She flipped on the overhead light to illuminate his living room/bedroom/kitchen home swollen with no one else there. Like she’d never seen them before, her eyes took in racks of DVD’s and VHS tapes from the closed video store where he first worked after they’d let him go. Shelves of novels and short story anthologies. His silver laptop that he used for playing DVDs, for video games, for his Quarry House shift scheduler gig, for checking Facebook to be sure distant cousins were alive and Molly was OK, to surf and search for what wasn’t there to be seen.
Faye’s gaze drilled him down to his bones.
“So you’re an old tech freak? A collector?”
“It’s not the tech.”
“But the movies. Get them online. You don’t have to own them.”
From his bones: “Books, movies, keeping them: it’s honoring the stories.”
She took her time, flowed to him.
Touched her blood-colored fingernails to his forehead: “The stories are in here.”
Let her fingers trail softly down his check. Touch his pounding heart: “And in here.”
Her fingers stayed on his heart, gentle firmness that kept his here a reach away from her.
“We’re both here,” she told him. “And I don’t even know your real name, P.V.”
What came out of him was the now truth: “Paul. Paul Vineyard.”
“That’s a start,” she whispered.
He fell through the musk of her perfume to their kiss.
Paul felt himself in a movie, a ballet to his bedroom. Everything worked, their mouths learning each other, the tingling velvet fire of her tongue on his, the rose shampoo of her dyed red hair, the perfumed musk warmth of her flesh, her soft firm curves in the palms of his hands.
She stepped back, told him it had been two years and three clear physicals since. He told her he carried even more untouched and certified clean time. They both bought that as true.
Her smile said: “What about Molly?”
Paul said: “We’re just friends. Nothing about her.”
“Good,” said Faye. Somehow her blouse fell away. She wore a black bra.
Unfastened it from the front between the reveal of pear breasts.
Said: “Want to see it all?”
Seeing yet not believing even as he danced their embrace into his bedroom, his shirt, his unsnapped jeans, his kicked off shoes and socks left behind before they bumped against his unmade bed. She touched her toes to pull off her black slacks plus everything underneath, then on her rising back up stretch, pulled his boxers down and off and filled her hand with his eagerness, pushed her thumb in a spot just so that sent control back into the rest of him.
Oh, and he took what she gave him, devoured her with his kisses, his mouth, his caressing hands, and of course he went down on her, her eyes closing and her back arching her swollen breasts up to the night sky ceiling as he knelt before her on the side of the bed Ohh! and she pulled him up, let him press his back on the cool sheets over the firm mattress like it was where he’d been heading all along and she straddled him, the rhythm of their flesh and her moans and cries, his gasps, and he was sure that she seized his coming with her own spasm of true.
Second time, they held each other like intertwined sitting stars of an art noveau movie from back in his parents’ daze when sex was still shocking.
The third time was slow and easy as she held him on top of her in the last of the moonlight.
Morning meant high noon, the nightshift clock.
Wondering woke him and she was still there.
How they had sex then doesn’t matter.
Faye said: “Do you have coffee?”
A few individual serving packets he’d taken from a roadside motel during a week’s refresher course in Nacogdoches, Texas, six months before when Quarry House had still been closed from the fire and the flood. He heated water in a tea kettle he’d salvaged from a rummage sale after someone had let it boil dry.
“How do you take it?” he asked her after he dropped an instant coffee packet in the steaming cup he’d carry to where she lay on his bed checking her cellphone with its news alert stories about Russian hackers breaking into the Democratic National Committee.
“How I can get it,” she said.
Slow-sipped away half her cup of wake up, smiled, said: “You’re good with silence.”
“Have to be.”
“Not even The Washington Question: ‘What do you?’ so you know my rank in this town.”
“That’s not important. Or defining.”
“Really. Does how I make money to live not interest you?”
“I’m more interested in how you live to make money.”
“What movie is that line from?” she said.
&
nbsp; “The one we’re in now.”
“Make this a movie.” She frowned in thought. Smiled in conclusion. “Yeah. That might work. Keep all this from getting … complicated.”
“Ah,” he said. “Complicated. Like a job, a career.”
“A career can let you be who you were meant to be.”
“Do you like your career?”
“Treasure hunter,” she said. “A woman who works her own hours scouring the Internet and estate or yard sales and backroads looking for what’s cheap that the people who can afford lots more don’t have time to find. It’s a me I like fine. Or at least enough.”
She stretched out on the bed, rose on her right elbow, the fullness of her front facing him as he did the same pose but left elbow down.
Faye said: “What do you want?
“And I don’t mean here,” she added, her fingers brushing across the wrinkled sheets, touching his chest with tenderness and stay at the same time. “I mean: What do you want?”
“To be happy. To matter. To have love that’s more than but still me.”
“You might have to settle. One out of three ain’t bad. Throw in some kind of two, not so shabby of a life.”
“They’re not choose-one-or the-other things. They’re a triad, a whole.”
“Yeah, well, you go down holes, you disappear.”
“So what do you want?” he said.
Felt her pull back up and away from where she lay in front of him.
She answered: “Clarity.”
They breathed the air between them.
Neither rolled away, hid their naked front.
He said: “What color do you call your hair?”
“Which batch?”
“You know what I mean. What the world sees when you walk by.”
“I call it me,” she said. “Chose it, made it, walking it right at you.”
“I like crimson,” he said.
She blinked.
Saw his interest rising beyond words, checked her cellphone on the bedside table, said: “Gotta go—your shower work?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it big enough for two?”
Was, and afterwards standing on the bathmat as she dried him off and his towel lingered here and there on her flesh, she smiled down at what she saw, sank to her knees, opened her smile and leaned toward—
The man named Paul pulled her up to her bare feet.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Puzzlement lined her forehead beneath her damp dyed red hair. “You’ve got to be the only man in the known universe to turn down a blow job.”
“I, ah, that …”
Faye frowned: “Bad memory? Or saving the special from or for true love?”
“Nothing like you’d ever believe.”
“So, just like that, never mind?”
She saw his eyes harden. He backed her out of the bathroom and she let him scoop her off her feet, carry her, drop her on the bed to loom above her and all she said was: “Your shower better not run out of hot water.”
After that, she edged herself into his routine at Quarry House or showing up at his house when got off work while most of DC slept. They never went to her place.
Molly knew the first shift she shared with him after.
Shook her head. But worked an honest smile to him as she bumped his fist.
“It’s OK to not know what you’re doing,” Molly told him, “but don’t do it stupid.”
“You always know what you’re doing,” he said.
“And just look at me, here I am, standing tall.
“But her?” said Molly as she wiped the bar and Paul stacked the glasses. “She’s got a whole lot going on she ain’t showing and you ain’t touching—don’t give me that look.”
Paul told Molly: “I’m the one who’s job it is to tell you to be careful, watch out.”
“We aren’t working that shift now,” said Molly, who he knew to be working tough enough and toughen up and move on after having just dumped the latest asshole who’d been lucky to get some level of her yes.
“You’re an all the way kind of guy,” she said. “You’d drive all night and then back again, just so your girl wouldn’t need to take the bus.”
“I’ve never gotten that far,” he said.
“Big scary if you did,” said Molly. “But know that this Faye wants to take you to her version of far and she’s driving the bus, whether you want that or not.”
Molly turned away to check the jungle of bottles by the cash register and he turned away to make sure the bar had stash glasses full of clean metal forks and knives.
Went on like that until the night he came in for his shift only to find Zane clattering the set-ups behind the bar. Paul made the Quarry House shifts schedule in a shared-user online app. Zane wasn’t posted as working that night: this was Paul’s shift, he’d programmed it that way.
Faye sat at the bar in slinky stylish dress.
Leaned across that polished wood.
Made sure Paul heard her say to Molly: “I told you he wouldn’t run.”
Faye spun on the barstool away from Molly’s silent eyes.
Twirled in seemingly slow motion, crimson hair floating in the underground air as she slid off the bar stool, didn’t miss a sway or a step as she smiled up to him, sent her heart side hand around the back of his head to cup/trap his skull and said for everyone nearby to hear:
“I’m so glad you picked tonight to meet my folks! They’re waiting in the back room.”
She kissed his unresponsive lips, tenderly slid her perfumed cheek alongside his and whispered in his ear: “We know who you are, Condor.”
He watched her hips sway as she walked away to where he knew he had to go.
There’s one short concrete step up from QHT’s main service area, a red stone archway with the fabled jukebox off to the left as you step into the red-walled back room, two rows of tables split by a wide service aisle that ends at the for everybody bathroom just after the last round barstool table, where that night sat Random Dude who’d introduced Paul to Faye.
Paul knew that he was truly, deeply fucked.
Knew it wasn’t Random Dude who really mattered.
—wasn’t the three tables of real customers—two sets of regulars and one pair of Tinder date newbies—who counted as only more innocent bystander casualties if. The regulars sent P.V. smiles. The Tinder couple were too nervous about getting caught ranking each other to see what else might be happening.
Wasn’t crimson Faye who mattered.
Was the four-top table near the back she led him to, no other customers seated close by.
The four-top table where they might have been somebody’s parents sat.
Sat with their backs against the cushioned bench red wall.
Sat with pay for their presence mugs of golden beer and a basket of tatter tots.
Don’t call her Mom’s shoulder-length hair showed silvering from blond that Molly could expect if she lived that long. This older woman wore a sparkling gold jump suit. Vacant eyes.
Who sat against the wall beside her mattered.
Could have been her husband. Cut short, thinning silver hair. Steel-blue eyes. A black hoodie he didn’t need on this warm summer night, but a guy his age could sell wearing that as him being sensitive to air conditioning. His lips widened in call it a smile.
Faye pulled out the chair across the table from that older man.
Held it for the man she’d fucked.
“You first,” Paul told her.
“No, all this is all about you.”
Random Dude watched with no expression.
He who’d been tricked sat in the chair Faye commanded. She sat on his right.
The old man told his guest: “I’ve been dying to meet you.”
“Who are
you?” said Paul.
“I’m you.”
The jukebox vibrated the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil.
The old man smiled. “I’m Condor. Number One to your Number Two. Or rather, your Number Three. The CIA gave one of the Watergate burglars our codename before he did what made him famous. Then they rotated it to me. Then from me to you after I got locked up in their secret loony bin. Then I got out and you—”
“Got out.”
The old woman with silvered blond hair said: “You don’t need me anymore. I came and did visual verify for your cover. Let me …”
She smiled sincere but oh so not there: “Let me ride the lemony with happy, not this.”
Old Condor nodded—as much to Faye as to the woman he’d come with, who slid from behind the table, drifted to the jukebox. Paul felt her strain against the leash she’d obey but.
“That’s Merle,” said Old Condor.
“She’s stoned.”
“The lemon drop THC edible is the least of it. The best of it. She … requires meds.”
“Bet that’s all because of you.”
“We all have our accidental casualties.”
“You need to remember that,” added Faye. “You really do.”
Merle stroked the curved glass dome over the jukebox.
A hand-black-inked, white paper sign Scotch-taped to that glass read:
FREE TONIGHT—
BE NICE & LIMIT TO
5 TRACKS PER PLAY
Merle flipped the levers to display CD’s and their set lists, selections from Buddy Holly and Bruce to Southern rock and Patsy Cline, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and The Supremes, CD’s heavy on the Searing Seventies Sounds from one of the bar owner’s youth.
Old Condor said: “After lunch one ordinary day, I came back to work at our CIA black site up on Capitol Hill and everyone else was dead. Silenced machineguns.