by Luca Veste
I heard the fluttering of the helicopter alter slightly as it moved away. The sea, behind the police, was making steady progress up towards us. For a long moment, Hague and I stared at each other. And then the spell was broken. He came back to life.
“Well, I guess we’d better get moving. You keep your eyes open, Jonathan. Let us know if you see anything.”
I nodded. As they headed off, I watched him talking into his radio, and I knew that he suspected. Something, at least. Something that was too alien to make any real sense to him.
That’s the way it is though.
In my own way, I’m as incomprehensible as God.
***
Eight months ago, when I volunteered to walk with Hague, it had been out of frustration. Every day, I’d watched him trailing alone along the shore, knowing the whole time he would never find the little boy. I’d wanted to make him understand. Or maybe, more simply, I’d wanted him to stop.
At some point, as we walked, I tried to explain the truth of the matter. The little boy is gone, I told him. Because that is what the sea does. It only takes; it never gives back.
We stopped walking.
“Not necessarily.” He looked at me strangely for a moment, then shifted gears as empathy took over. “I mean, I know we never found Anna – but we looked. We walked then. I – ”
I missed the rest of what he said. Memories washed the words under. Her soft, brown arms, clear beads of water clinging to her skin. The tangled dreadlocks of her wet hair. The coconut scent of her suntan cream. And then the look of fear on her face as the sea’s strong fingers circled our waists and pulled.
Swim.
Jonathan – swim.
Her screams, after we were separated, the sound of them slashed apart by the waves.
The last I heard of her.
I interrupted him.
“It would be wrong, wouldn’t it?”
“What?”
“It would be wrong. If it got to choose.”
“Jonathan…”
I should probably have noticed how uncomfortable Hague had become, but I didn’t, or else I didn’t care.
“No,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be fair. If it took Anna and didn’t give her back, for no reason at all, why would it be different for anyone else? Why should it?”
He stared at me, helpless, not knowing what to say, then gestured at the sea: a motion that didn’t need accompanying words. It’s chance, he meant. Chaos. It must make sense on some unfathomable level … but we can never understand. All we can do in the face of it is walk the shore.
Take whatever scraps are thrown our way.
That’s what he meant.
I shook my head in disgust and walked away from him, not looking back. But I felt his gaze following me as I left. I don’t know what he thought.
I do know that, after our conversation, Hague stopped looking for the little boy.
***
Later – after I’d put the stinking rucksack at the far end of the cellar – I went outside again and made my way down the beach. The police and helicopter were gone now, and the sea was retreating. I spent some time following it down, stepping on its angry edges. If I was swimming in it then it could and would take me. But the beach and the coast were mine. It needed to know that.
“Fuck you.”
I knelt down and flicked at the water with my fingers.
And I told it that it couldn’t choose people and single them out. I wouldn’t let it – and I didn’t care if it didn’t understand, or if it was angry about that. Here, on the cusp of incomprehensibility, we would meet each other halfway, or not at all. It could decide what it took; I would decide what it gave. And if it wouldn’t give me Anna back then it wouldn’t give anyone anything.
“Fuck you if you think she’s going home.”
As I stood up and walked away, I sensed a groan in the faraway water behind me, a melancholy whale-song of sound. The scent of coconut oil followed me as I made my way back up the beach. But there was no contempt in it this time. I understood deep down that it was simply giving me all that was left of her now.
I didn’t acknowledge it – just kept walking.
The sea was giving me all it could. And perhaps, in its own vast, alien way, it was unable to understand why that wasn’t enough.
BIO: Steve Mosby lives and works in Leeds. He is the author of THE THIRD PERSON, THE CUTTING CREW, THE 50/50 KILLER, CRY FOR HELP, STILL BLEEDING and BLACK FLOWERS. His novels have been translated widely and longlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Award. Find out more at: www.theleftroom.co.uk.
SMALL CHANGE
By
Les Edgerton
Long as the dude kept buying, I’d keep talking. Hot air for cool drinks. The trade made sense to me.
‘Tell me that part again,’ he said. He was trying to take notes and I kind of talk fast. ‘What’d you say you called him?’
‘Six Bits,’ I said. ‘You know, seventy-five cents.’
‘Cool name,’ was his reaction. I leaned over, saw he’d written the name down.
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘Six didn’t like it much.’
‘Why’s that?’
I squinted at the guy. ‘You kidding me? You’d like to be called ‘Six Bits? Me, I’d rather be called ‘Million Bucks’ I was named after cash.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. He scribbled something down in his little notebook. ‘I see what you mean.’
I could see the bottom of the glass. I crooked my finger at the barkeep and he came down. ‘Keep the old ice,’ I said. ‘Just add new. Make it a good color this time.’
He gave me a look, but didn’t say anything. The dude was paying cash and after every drink and that made him king shit, this kind of bar. Been just me…
The dude watched me get the new drink and waited until I took a glug.
‘So he tried to hold you up?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Tried to jack me with this punk-ass .22.’
He wrote something and I looked over. He’d written ‘.38.’ I just shrugged. He was buying the drinks, made no never mind to me what he wrote.
‘I mean, who jacks up a guy looks like me with a pissy-little .22?’ I didn’t expect an answer. ‘A guy who’s named Six Bits, is who. Why he wasn’t never named Million Bucks.’
‘What happened then?’ the dude said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just laughed at him.’
‘And that’s when he shot you?’
‘Yeah. Little fucker shot me. In the arm. Here.’ I pointed to the spot on my shoulder, pulled the sleeve down so he could see the scar. ‘With that little pissy-ass cap gun.’
‘What’d you do then?’
I signed to the barkeep again. He came down—before I could say anything, he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Old ice.’
‘What’d I do then?’ I looked at him like he was simple. ‘I already told you what I did. I took his little toy from him and shot him.’
‘In the head, right?’
‘Well, shit yes. Think we were gonna trade slugs like when you’re hitting your homeboy in the shoulder, trying to see who can knock the other guy off his feet? Fuck yes, I shot him in the head. That’s a particularly bad place to shoot somebody with a .22.’
The dude laughed. ‘I’d think the head would be a bad place to shoot a guy with any kind of gun.’
I looked at him. Was this guy for real? ‘Well, a .22 works different on the noggin than say a .38. Works a lot different than a .45 or a .357.’
‘How so?’
‘How so? Well, dude, it’s a little bitty shell. Not a lot of powder behind it. See?’
He shook his head.
I sighed. Straights…
‘Look, man, you shoot a guy in the head with a .38 with a .357, it’s gonna come out the back with a lot bigger hole.’
‘Okay,’ he said. It was plain he was trying to figure out what I was saying, but just wasn’t getting it. Looked like I needed a crayon to draw him a picture.
‘The kid pi
ssed me off, shooting me like that. So, I shot him in the melon. What happens when you shoot somebody in the melon with a .22 is it doesn’t go through like a bigger shell will. It does all kinds of weird shit, but it almost never goes all the way through. I was teaching him a lesson.’
‘A lesson?’
I was getting tired of being patient with this dude. If he wasn’t buying drinks as fast as I could put ‘em down, I would’ve walked out. But… it was Jack Daniels he was buying, not that Wild Turkey crap, so I told him what he wanted.
‘Sometimes a .22 kills you dead. A lot of times it doesn’t. A lot of times it just runs all around the inside of the skull, and next day, you’re good as new—just got a headache. Sometimes, it runs around and then hits the right area and you end up in a coma and you’re like that for the next ten years. And, sometimes, it kills you. But, it’s never a for-sure with a .22 like it is with a .45. Way I looked at it, I was hoping he ended up in one of those coma things and had ten years to think about how he’d fucked up. Know why I’d laughed at him. Learned a lesson. You know.’
I could tell looking at the guy he didn’t know.
Fuck it. What did I care if he got it or not? The answer was, I didn’t. All I cared was that he kept the drinks coming. And he did. He asked a bunch of other questions and I told him. Happened in New York, down in Times Square—the old Times Square, not the way they got it now. No, I didn’t get nailed for it. Hiked on down to Miami, laid out on the beach for the winter, came back when the snow melted.
After awhile, he folded up his notebook, held out his hand to shake, and then he was walking out the door. He’d left a twenty on the counter for me.
I looked down at the barkeep, crooked my finger at him.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You know who that was?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A guy who has more money than sense. A guy who doesn’t have a life, needs other people’s lives to make his feel like it’s interesting.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re wrong. That was Tom Waits.’
Like I was supposed to know who the fuck that was.
I drank the twenty and then left. Took me ten minutes to make it to the door. My legs weren’t working all that well. I went out the door and felt something and looked down. Looked like I’d pissed myself.
Fuck.
BIO: Les Edgerton is an ex-con, matriculating at Pendleton Reformatory in the sixties for burglary (plea-bargained down from multiple counts of burglary, armed robbery, strong-armed robbery and possession with intent). He’s since taken a vow of poverty (became a writer) with 13 books in print. This is a good year for him as he recently published two novels with StoneGate Ink—Just Like That and The Perfect Crime. He also has two novels coming out from Bare Knuckles Press this year—The Bitch and The Rapist—and a new short story collection, Gumbo Ya-Ya, from Snubnose Press. He is also editor-at-large for Noir Nation. Stories of his have appeared in Murdaland, Flatmancrooked, Noir Nation, and Best American Mystery Stories, among others. He writes because he hates... a lot... and hard. Injustice and bullying are what he hates the most. He can be found atwww.lesedgertononwriting.blogspot.com/
I WANNA BE YOUR DOG
By
Heath Lowrance
My Dad never done nothing for me. Everybody was saying I should be sad now he was dead, but they didn’t know. He was a first-class sonofabitch and I was happy he was dead.
All them stupid bitches, friends of my Mom, kept piling in and out of the house all day, clustering up in the front room where Dad was laid out in a coffin that cost more than he ever earned the last ten years of his life. They sobbed and bawled and carried on, then shuffled out into the dining room to shove pie and cake down their throats. The men were quieter. They’d come in, look at the body, then nod as if they were certain now of something, and then they’d move on.
Me, I sat in the wooden chair in the hall and looked at the floor. Three or four times one of the biddies would try to draw me out, cooing words in my ear, but I wouldn’t look at them, wouldn’t say a word to them.
I heard one of them whispering to my Mom—is young Rex okay? He seems to be taking it hard—and I almost laughed out loud.
He was no good, my Dad, and they all knew it and they all acted like it wasn’t true. They all acted like him dying was some great fucking loss.
I was fifteen years old, a gangly little punk with bleached-out hair and bad skin and homemade piercings in my ears and nose. I was nothing. And I still knew better than all of them.
For most of the afternoon I sat there in the hall as so-called mourners shuffled in and out. I’d promised Mom I would do that much, at least. But by four-thirty I had enough. I got up from my wooden chair, stretched out the aches from sitting so long. From the front room, I could hear someone sobbing over Dad’s coffin and it made another wave of anger surge through me. I bit it back and headed for my bedroom.
On the way there, I had to pass the kitchen. Four or five women, friends of Mom’s, were in there, sitting around the table and yakking it up in quiet voices. Since Mom was stuck in the front room, the women didn’t feel like they had to talk on and on about the horrible fucking tragedy of Dad’s death. I stopped just outside the doorway and listened to them.
They were talking about Martina Wilkins.
They still haven’t found her, one of them said. Three days without a trace now? It pains me to say it, it really does, but I’m certain she’s dead by now.
Heavens, don’t say that. As long as we keep praying, if God sees fit, He’ll return her to her poor parents.
Yes, that’s right. Why, just last night Frank and I attended the prayer vigil, and—
Yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but you know they say that, if the victim hasn’t been recovered in the first twenty-four hours then she’s most likely dead. I’m just saying, be realistic.
I knew Martina Wilkins, sort of. I mean, we weren’t friends or nothing, but we shared a couple classes. She was one of those popular girls. Cheerleader and all that. Wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of a low-life punk like me. And three days ago, she disappeared. Ran away, snatched, killed… no one knew what. But her disappearance had been all over the local news.
I didn’t like that the old bitches were talking about her. More mad now than ever, I stalked off to my room and shut the door quietly, even though I wanted so bad to just slam that fucker. But I did it quiet, and stood there for a bit with my hand on the knob and my face against the wood. I could hear murmuring voices out there, some half-hearted sobs. It all seemed really far away.
My room stunk like wet dog, even though we never let the dogs in the house. It always smelled like that, I don’t know why. Even when I cleaned it and vacuumed it and sprayed pretty-smelling shit everywhere, it still stunk like wet dog. The rest of the house never smelled like that. I couldn’t figure it. Dad once told me it was because the stink came from me, came seeping out of my pores like a disease, he said. Came from my glands, because I was a stinking fucking dog.
I locked the door and stripped off the bad-fitting suit, and put on some jeans and my old Iggy and the Stooges tee-shirt. My dog collar was on the dresser and I stopped in the middle of the room and looked at it and felt a funny feeling clawing at my stomach out of nowhere.
That dog collar, it was the only thing Dad ever gave me, back before I started doing the punk rock thing. Way before, really. I was eight when he gave me that.
Put this on, boy, he says. You wear this when I tell you to, you be a good boy. If I ever see you wearing it when I haven’t told you to, I’ll beat the shit outta you, you get me?
And after that, a couple nights a week, when he’d wake me up at three in the morning and tell me to put on the collar, I’d know it was time for training. I’d put on the collar and Dad would attach the leash, and it would be off to the barn behind the house. Down into the cellar, me naked and on all fours.
I’d learn to beg, to speak, to sit. He used a Taser to punish bad behavior. He used M&M’s t
o reward good behavior. It didn’t take long to learn what I needed to learn.
From the time I was twelve, Dad would sometimes take me out of school and we’d drive all over the county searching for mean-looking dogs. He had a tranq gun he’d use on them, and we’d load them in the back of the pick-up and take them home. We never had less than three or four dogs in the barn, ready to go.
And so would come another night he’d wake me up and I’d strip and put on the dog collar and hurry out to the barn.
This one, Dad would say, nodding at the rotweiller or pit bull snarling at the other end of the cellar, This one is either gonna kill you or fuck you. You gonna let him do either? And I’d fight, I’d fight so hard. Scared at first, bloody and torn by fangs. But after a while, a fight didn’t scare me anymore and I could kill an opponent with ease.
And me and Dad would sit in the barn and he’d look at the fresh dog corpse I’d made and he’d pat my head and feed me M&M’s. I’d look up at him.
It was the only real time we spent together.
But the sonofabitch was dead now. Coroner said that one of the dogs had ripped his throat out, they didn’t know which one. So every last one of them got put down.
I hated that the dogs were dead, but it had to be done.
The dog collar fit snug around my neck and I pulled on my Docs and climbed out the window. I headed out toward the barn at the far end of our property.
The cops assumed it was one of the dogs, anyway. But shit, man, humans have teeth too, and with a little training anyone can rip someone’s throat out.
I went in, closed the barn door behind me. It smelled like blood and sweat, even up here. I unlocked the cellar door, took a few steps down into the darkness, closed and locked the door behind me. At the bottom of the rickety steps, I flipped on the light switch.
I had two dogs chained up down in the dark, a couple of mean-ass Dobermans I’d found the day after Dad died. When the lights came on, they started barking and growling and snarling, straining at their chains to get at me.
From the other side of the cellar, the girl whimpered. I turned to look at her. She was naked, streaked with dirt and sweat, her arms and legs tied to posts with rope.