by J L Aarne
He stared at the motel sign across the parking lot, at the letter E in “Chance” flickering like the light in a bug zapper, and he hated Steve then in a way that burned deep in his guts.
A shadow fell over Jack and he looked up to find a tall man in a white T-shirt and a trucker cap standing over him. He was blond, face a bit sunburned, freckles and a farmer’s tan on his thickly muscled arms, a shifty look in his eyes that Jack knew by rote.
“How much?” the guy asked.
Jack blinked at him in surprise and sat up. He looked down at himself and he was suddenly angry at this man for taking one look at him and knowing what he was. Jack was wearing faded jeans and a ratty Metallica T-shirt, his hair was uncombed, he was tired, irritated and waiting for Steve to finish with Emily so he could take a shower and go to bed. Still, something about him had screamed WHORE to this stranger just the same.
“What part of this fabulous ensemble of mine says hooker to you, man?” Jack demanded, gesturing at himself. “I’m sitting here minding my own business. I look like I want to be bothered? I look inviting at all? No? Didn’t think so.”
The guy quickly backpedaled and held up his hands, shaking his head and looking around in case anyone had heard. No one had, but no one would have cared anyway. It was that kind of place.
“Jesus, sorry. I’m sorry,” the guy said. “I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Jack said. “Fuck off.”
“Fine. Hey, sure. I don’t want any trouble.”
Jack watched him go, hurrying down the walkway to his room at the end. He flicked his cigarette butt after him and slumped back over his knees.
Steve was still at it. Steve could do it for a while depending on his mood and he was apparently in a mood tonight.
Jack hated Emily. He hated all of Steve’s girls. He hated that in the years since he’d met Steve Walker, sitting on the bench outside was as close as he ever really got to him. He hated his own inability to walk away and leave him alone with his dead girls because, dumbass that he was, he loved the bastard.
A loud groan from inside the room made anger and jealously curl like hot smoke in Jack’s belly and threaten to crawl up his throat. Before he could make himself sick thinking about it, Jack stood and paced a little away. He glanced at the closed door of the room where he’d watched Trucker Cap Guy go. Room 10A.
With a sigh, Jack walked down the walkway and knocked on the door to room 10A. There was some movement inside, the rustle of a paper bag, the click of the safety chain lock. Then the door opened and the blond guy looked out at him. He frowned.
“Seventy-five,” Jack said.
“What?”
“That’s how much.”
The guy looked like he wanted to tell Jack to go to hell. Then he stepped back into the room and held the door open for him.
The guy introduced himself as Ron. He wanted Jack to wear his hat while Ron lay back on the bed and he rode him. Jack had done a lot weirder for a lot less, so he put the hat on. The trick was keeping it on while he moved and Ron thrust and the mattress bounced.
When he left Ron’s room, Jack was seventy-five dollars richer, more tired than ever and Steve had finished with Emily and left. He was somewhere disposing of the body. Jack took a shower then decided to go see Zane.
Zane Bledsoe was part black, part white and part Indian. The last part was the one that counted the most to Zane. His mama had been a Cherokee Indian and she’d raised him alone. No matter what else he was, he said it didn’t matter because he didn’t identify with those people. He wouldn’t go on about it at annoying length though like some Jack had known, which was nice. Jack had once heard Zane jokingly describe himself as being “black and white and red all over.”
He liked Zane. He didn’t even mind fucking him if Zane wanted that more than his money, which he sometimes did. He was nice to him, which was more than Jack could say for a lot of men, especially drug dealers.
Zane wanted a little of both tonight. He offered to cut Jack a deal for “a poke”; a term he’d recently picked up and taken to because of a western movie phase he was going through. He was particularly fond of Gus McCrea and the written works of Zane Gray, though Jack figured he liked the latter more for the author’s name than the words on the pages. Zane wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t much of a book reader.
“I can’t tonight, Zane. I’m tired. I’ve got the money, just let me pay you this time,” Jack said.
Zane looked disappointed. “You still with that creepy fucker? What’s his name?”
“Steve,” Jack said. “Yeah.”
Zane tossed a little baggy of creamy yellow powder down on the table between them. “You be careful with that one, Handy. He’s likely to kill you one night and fuck your dead body.”
Jack stared at him. Zane didn’t know anything, but he’d never liked Steve. A lot of people didn’t. Steve could be nice and charming and even funny, but he still put people off. Jack sometimes wondered what it said about him that he’d been attracted to Steve almost from the first rather than repelled by him as others were. That even knowing him for what he truly was did not make him run away.
Jack wasn’t like most people though. He’d seen worse than Steve and survived. He’d learned a long time ago the bittersweet seduction of evil.
“Nah, he won’t,” Jack said. He passed the seventy-five dollars along with another twenty-five over to Zane. “He doesn’t like men. He’s straight.”
“Shit, Handy, I’m straight,” Zane said. “Poke’s a poke though and what can I say? I like it. And you’re pretty, Jacky. Pretty enough to have a man rethinking his sexuality.”
Jack smiled, acknowledging the compliment though he didn’t really believe it. “Look, can I fuck you next time? I’ll suck your dick, but I’m tired and I’m sore and I’ve got the fucking chucks.”
Zane grinned and swept a hand down at his lap, inviting him to it. “Have at it, Jack. Tell you what, I’ll fix you up with a shot of mine—a little extra for the road—if you do it right.”
“Fine,” Jack said.
He could have rolled his eyes—he’d been doing it “right” well enough to suit Zane for over a year now—but he didn’t. He stepped around the low round coffee table, went to his knees and opened Zane’s belt. While he was blowing him, Zane stroked gentle fingers through Jack’s hair, but he didn’t grab him or thrust into his throat. He watched him, dark eyes intent on Jack’s face, on his cock sliding wetly in and out of Jack’s mouth. His interest and focus made Jack uncomfortable so he closed his eyes.
When he was done, before he had licked the bitter flavor of Zane’s come off his lips, Zane reached down and caught his chin in his hand, pulled him up and kissed him. It surprised Jack and he tensed. He hadn’t been kissed in a long time. Not a real kiss. Zane pressed his tongue against Jack’s lips and he opened to it more in self-defense than out of desire.
Zane broke the kiss and let him go and he was smiling faintly to himself. He reached over Jack’s shoulder to pick up a small rolled up cloth pouch where he kept his own personal stash.
“Why’d you do that?” Jack asked.
Zane shrugged one shoulder, took a full and already prepped needle from his kit and held it up to the light for Jack to see the fluid inside. “You look sad, Jack,” he said. “Looked like you needed it. And I kinda wanted to, I don’t mind saying. You kiss me back next time and we might really have something. Now give me your arm.”
Jack put his arm out on Zane’s leg. Zane expertly slipped the needle into the vein under his skin. He was the only person Jack knew who could do that every single time without fail without a tourniquet. He depressed the plunger and Jack moaned and slid to the side against Zane’s thigh.
“Yeah. That’s good, ain’t it, Handy?” Zane asked. He petted him again and sat back on the sofa, watching him lay there and enjoy it.
Like most drug dealers who were also at least part-time partakers of their own wares, Zane kept some of the best stuff for himself.
Jack was feeling good. He was feeling really good. Then he looked up and saw the clown standing in the corner of the room.
The clown looked like any other clown. Except maybe meaner. He had black hair in curls that you could tell were fake. There was a line around his forehead where the wig became his face. His makeup was flaked, but it had once been very well done. His nose was red and the paint was flaking off, his lips were soot black, making his pointed little child’s teeth appear yellow. His costume was the black and white argyle diamonds of a harlequin fraying at the seams and cuffs. He stood there by the window, the faint glow of the streetlights outside cutting stripes across his face, dancing light in the facets of the rhinestones placed haphazardly over his outfit. When he noticed Jack looking back at him, he lifted his hands and slow clapped.
Good work, you stupid junkie whore. Very nice. Classy. One gold star for little Jack Handy.
He didn’t say a word. He never did.
“Fuck you, fucking buzz-kill,” Jack said, slurring it somewhat. “You are killing my buzz. Literally. You are a killer of buzzes.”
Zane’s hand stilled on his head. “What? You owe that buzz to me, Jack. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Not you,” Jack said. He brought an arm up and pointed to the clown standing in the corner watching them. “Him.”
Zane glanced there, but he didn’t see anything. “Him who?”
“Phineas,” Jack said. “Evil clown. Bastard. I hate him.”
“Uh-huh,” Zane said. “You’re having a weird trip, Jack, that’s all it is. Ain’t no one there.”
“You can’t see him,” Jack said. He sighed. “No one can.”
“Okay. You sure you’re gonna be okay to go on back to wherever you’re staying at? You need a ride?”
Jack shook his head. Then he braced his hand on the couch between Zane’s legs and pushed himself up. “Nope. I’m fine. Gotta go. Steve will be back.”
“Then I guess you better get,” Zane said, though he didn’t sound happy about it.
He was probably thinking again about how one day Steve was going to kill Jack and fuck his corpse. Because Zane liked him, it bothered him to think about it, but Jack was a junkie and a whore and it happened sometimes. He didn’t let it bother him too much.
Jack walked some of the way back then caught the bus and rode the rest. Phineas sat across from him on the bus and rode home with him, his bright green eyes judging and mocking Jack all the way.
He was still high when he returned to the motel and was actually pleased when he went into their room and saw Steve there stripping his bed. He looked up and saw Jack, noted his glassy eyes and went back to what he’d been doing without a word.
“You feel better?” Jack asked.
Steve smiled, picked up the soiled bedding and stuffed it into a laundry bag. “I do, yeah. You? You’re looking…”
“High,” Jack supplied. “Yeah.”
Phineas stood behind Steve lewdly mimicking a blowjob with his hand and tongue pressing his cheek. Jack tried to ignore him.
Steve walked by Jack and patted him on the shoulder. “You did good tonight, Jack.”
Jack didn’t want to be, but he was pleased. He dropped his eyes and said, “Thanks.”
“Go on to bed,” Steve said. He walked to the door and opened it, jangling a handful of quarters in one hand. “Got to take care of this.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Goodnight, Steve.”
Steve smiled again and nodded. Then he was gone and Jack was alone.
He took his shoes off and crawled up the bed to sit with his back to the wall. He still felt good. Until he looked across the bed and Phineas was there sitting on the foot of it watching him, smiling his weird, taunting smile with his cracked makeup and his yellow baby teeth. Jack sighed and stared back at him, resigned to his company.
“I hate you,” he told the clown.
Phineas’s smile widened. I know.
Jack had first seen the clown when he was about ten. He remembered because it had started after the first time one of his mother’s boyfriends raped him when she was at work. That was when they still lived in the apartment in Louisiana, before Kate hooked up with the rich guy from Texas and they moved away. It had been a weekend and Jack was watching cartoons in the living room while he ate a bowl of Trix cereal. His older brother, Shane was gone at a friend’s house for the day. The boyfriend’s name had been Hal and Jack had liked him before that.
Phineas showed up after. At first, Jack liked it. He had an imaginary friend and though he didn’t talk, he took Jack places and sometimes made him animal balloons. He took him away when he was alone with Hal and Hal would start trying to lick and kiss his mouth and touch him places he shouldn’t and tell Jack what a beautiful boy he was. And no one else could see Phineas, so it was like the best secret ever. Because even if he talked about it, it was like a secret; no one believed him. It was a better secret to have than the secrets Hal made him keep.
Shane couldn’t see Phineas though and Jack had always felt bad about that because sometimes Shane got in the way. Sometimes Shane took his place.
Jack named the clown Phineas after a name he read once on a wall somewhere. It wasn’t like Phineas wuz here ‘02 in paint on a wall though. The wall had been a place in an old cemetery; a map of the dead and buried. He’d seen the name on the gravestone of a baby that was born the same day it died sometime back in 1898. It only occurred to Jack years later, after he had stopped finding any joy in his new “friend,” how really morbid that was.
Those were the places that Phineas took him. Places that Jack could never have gone without him. Phineas liked old swamps teeming with mosquitoes, the water squirming with a thousand kinds of unclassified vermin, with air that smelled like half rotted banana peels and trees that looked like if they came alive they would talk to you in hissing whispers as they slowly impaled you on their jagged branches. He liked old graveyards lost far out in the trees where the stones were crumbling from hundreds of years of moisture and the moss that had grown into the cracks in the alabaster over the years, where the dates on said stones were so long ago that the place had been forgotten and the hills where the dead had been buried were no longer hills, but almost deep enough to be called trenches because they had started to cave inward like the pits of rotting teeth. He liked crowded alleys behind whorehouses, their gutters lined with the limp membranes of used condoms and the broken shine of used, infected, poisonous needles. He liked the smell of Bourbon Street after dark—and even better at high noon when the stench of whiskey, urine, vomit and shit were cooked in the sun.
Phineas liked the shifty way men and women both looked at young Jack. He liked to watch.
Phineas really liked Steve. He thought Steve was a grand old time. He loved the way Jack loved him and how it tortured him. He even liked Steve’s little kindnesses to Jack because he knew, as Jack did, that they were like scraps and biscuits being tossed to a favored dog. Steve liked Jack, maybe even cared about him, but to Steve’s twisted mind, Jack was like a pet. He was a useful possession.
Jack knew it. Still, he stayed because he loved Steve no matter what Steve felt. He told himself that Steve didn’t have to love him back, that he knew that wasn’t how it worked, but he wished it was different. He had never liked stories and poems and songs about unrequited, one-sided love. And he did wonder at how really screwed up he had to be for a man like Steve Walker to be the one for him. At how crazy it was to be jealous of all the corpses.
Jack still believed that it had been Phineas’s idea to run away when he was sixteen. It had been Phineas who gave him the idea to sell himself the first time. Not bad ideas in themselves. The rich Texan had wanted the same thing from Jack that Hal and a couple of other boyfriends of his mother’s who came after Hal had wanted from Jack and his mother didn’t get tired of the man and leave him. She’d stayed. Then at sixteen, Jack was on the streets and he had to eat and he had to get out of the rain, but he had nothing. Except even when
he had nothing, he still had himself and there was always someone willing to buy. It had saved him, but it had also shaped him into the wreck of a man that he was now and he suspected that Phineas had known it would from the start.
Phineas had been there in the alleys when Jack went down on his knees for money the first time. He had been there when Kate’s men were fucking him over the arm of the sofa while the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battled evil-doers. He was there the first time Jack popped a needle into a vein and the first time he went a little nuts because he couldn’t find one and had to stick it between his fingers. He stood by and grinned when Jack met Steve.
The clown had appeared as salvation, but he had loved every minute that had twisted and broken him.
Steve had been all Jack’s doing though. He didn’t blame Phineas for that. That was all him.
“Go away,” Jack said.
Phineas stuck his tongue out at Jack, but he got up and walked out of his line of sight.
Jack closed his eyes and dozed. In the room behind the wall where he was propped a woman started screaming at someone named Jamal. Whoever Jamal was, Jamal don’t be nothing but a fucking nigger, according to the woman, who sounded like she was also black. Jamal called her a cunt. She threatened to cut his dick off and club him with it.
Jack and Steve were going to have to move on to someplace else soon. They had been living at the Last Chance Motel for a month, but they never could stay anywhere long, even if they had wanted to. If Steve settled down, Steve might get caught. The thing about keeping Jack around was, he was useful and helpful in catching the girls, but Jack more than Steve was likely to be remembered. Even now, with ten years of prostitution and eight years of moderate to serious heroin addiction under his belt, Jack was striking. He did not have a forgettable face.
He was asleep when Steve returned from the Laundromat with his newly washed bedding. In the middle of the night, Jack woke up thirsty and rolled over to see Steve sitting on his own bed smoking a cigarette while he watched Jack. The curtains were closed, but a slat of light fell between the curtains and the window and illuminated one side of Steve’s face, turned his faded denim blue eyes electric.