The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  He was most jazzed by the boarding call that permitted him, as a first class passenger, to board ahead of the rabble, just after the feebs and children. The normal passengers (the cheapskates) were thus compelled to stare at him sitting in his extra-wide seat, giving the hostess his drink order while they were still jostling and grunting and packing themselves in. The first class hostess, whose name was Tawny, had legs that could tempt mere human men to commit vehicular homicide. She seemed to have a shorter uniform skirt than the coach stewardesses. Tawny smiled without end at everything -every dumb executive bon mot, every crumb of leering chat, each conversational triviality. Her teeth were so perfect you had to stare hard to see the lines separating them. Up in the front of the plane, the service was linen and glass instead of paper napkins and plastic cups. Tawny constantly and happily recharged Cruz's cuemavaca. It never did hit bottom. He was dismayed to discover, as he attempted the shave Rosie had suggested, that he had gotten quite blitzed.

  The jet slam-danced over pockets of turbulence en route to colder northern climes. The alcohol Cruz had dumped down suffered a head-on collision with the adrenaline blow-back from Chiquita's swan dive. He cut his upper lip with the safety razor. At the sight of his blood in the 737's stinky chemical bathroom, his metabolism finally tossed the towel and he spent the next fifteen minutes vomiting into the oblivion pit of the airline toilet. The stench of the blue freshener kept him heaving long after he was empty. With jittering hands he did two medium lines from the coke vial to stabilize, then asked Tawny if she could scare up a bandaid.

  Of course she could. Right away. Smile.

  Cruz's genetic makeup had never favored body hair. His chest was as unhirsute as that of the average Japanese. His moustache had been one of the great triumphs of his late teens, though he had never been able to coerce it into being more ambitious and to travel, say, down toward his chin, perhaps to seed a beard. He had been proud of what he had been able to raise.

  Gone now; razed rather than raised. A little something turned into nothing. One more check drawn on Cruz's pride account, made out to Emilio and payable on demand.

  He rinsed down and dabbed his face with water, pale and still shaking. The mirror did not lie: You have the pallor of a ghost in need of a strong fix. He applied the bandaid to his upper lip; his lower still hurt from where he'd bitten it when Rosie smacked him. He had been too high to feel genuine pain then. Now was rawly different.

  He slumped on the still open toilet seat and rubbed his face hard to urge forth blood and bring back some color. Amazing, how your whole fornicating life could unravel in fast-mo. If Emilio ever suspected him, Cruz's life would not be worth the sock on a wino's foot.

  Would Emilio see why Cruz had blown town? No, Rosie said he'd deal with that one.

  Cruz ached to punch the rewind button on the whole day. Go back and change the story in the telling so that it was exactly the same… except that it would leave that dumb cunt Chiquita alive and him on the ground in Miami instead of midair, somewhere over Tennessee.

  His aloha shirt was besmirched with puke. He balled it up on the stainless steel micro-counter. After swabbing out his pits and smearing on deodorant, he wriggled into a pink Miami Vice T-shirt he'd purchased at the airport's souvenir shop. It was crisp and stiff. No airport ever seems to stock clothing without slogans or signs on it. He had picked up a sweatshirt that read LIFE'S A BITCH, THEN YOU DIE. He reversed it so the white seam stitching showed and pulled it on. He thought of Boris Karloff's sheepskin jersey in Son of Frankenstein. Start a trend.

  He stuffed his aloha shirt into the blue nylon gym bag he'd bought. It read NIKE TEAM in cheap silkscreening. He didn't want to throw away the shirt; he'd gone unexpectedly sentimental about it. Maybe he could keep it, save it, wear it on his eventual return home… if everything worked out. Already the idea of flying in the opposite direction was swooningly seductive. Sometimes the future was just one big come-on.

  Captain Falstaff announced their gradual descent into

  Chicago. Local landing time would be 10:45 PM. Tawny smiled and checked his belt. She had to have a boyfriend who was a blond hunk, probably a karate instructor. Cruz wondered if she smiled that way when Kung Fu was banging the tits off her.

  Did people this cheery ever have sex?

  Upon touchdown at O'Hare, Cruz found himself reluctant to surrender the warm cocoon of the plane. It would be another link severed. There were two edges to the blade Cruz was riding: For every ounce of homesickness, he knew Emilio was that much farther away.

  He wondered what Emilio was doing, right this minute, as he searched in vain for clocks in an unfamiliar terminal. He felt absurdly glad he had kept the coke vial, the aloha shirt. They reaffirmed his identity when he felt he might be losing his mind.

  Chicago had only looked good from thirty-three thousand feet up. During descent, the patches of snow and ice dotting the night-time landscape grew ever more ominous. How many times, he wondered, had a scab of runway ice frozen at the right place to wreck a plane? The only thing that might slow down a gigantic, ass-skidding jumbo jet might be a nice, solid building full of people. Maybe that was why they called them terminals.

  Back in Miami he had swapped four hundred in cash for a cherry Minolta 35 mm camera. It weighed down one end of the Nike bag. Big airports always had a gift shop plus other, more serious venues, generally labeled shoppes so customers would expect astronomical prices. A card of AA batteries costing a buck could run four or five times that in an airport gift shop. The cheap ones. Cruz had used the camera to smuggle his coke vial on board, tucking it into the film bay and handing the Minolta over for hand inspection at the metal detector. No problem.

  He supposed he could teach himself how to operate the camera sometime. Fill those hours.

  Most of the Eastern passengers retrieved their baggage from the assigned carousel and evaporated. He felt the air traveler's usual stab of worry: Would the sentries at baggage claim request a ticket for luggage he had carried onto the flight? It had never happened in the nearly one hundred air trips Cruz had taken, but he always thought of it. Strange. He smiled in passing at the uniforms, the same way he'd smiled at the armed and unsmiling folks back in Miami, the ones staffing the metal detectors. Who, me, guilty?

  Electronic-eye doors ground slowly apart and Cruz got his first whiff of Chicago.

  No new snow was falling; that condition had permitted Cruz's flight to land on time. He saw old snow bulldozered onto a row of curbed cars. It gradated from white to gray to slushy black at the bottom of a four-foot pack. The air smelled like engine lubricant. The wind had at him, blasting, wind-tunnel cold, rattling the heavy sliding doors in their tracks. Unmelted flakes lifted from the snowpack and swirled in the air, grains of albino sand. The in-flight weather update had let everyone know that the wind-chill factor was minus twenty and dropping. Cruz's first inhale felt like tossing back a straight shot of Everclear. Once fully outside, with the cold carving through his sweatshirt, he inhaled again. His nose hairs froze together. They thawed when he exhaled. Now they were damp, icing up even faster with his next breath.

  He had seen his breath condense before. The twin plumes of vapor jetting from his nostrils were the consistency of locomotive steam. That seemed weird and a bit thrilling. He leaned on a trashcan to check the traffic in the white zone. It was the surface temperature of the moon, and touching it was like immersing his bare hand in liquid oxygen.

  Cruz was just beginning to feel truly lost and miserable when a flawless 1971 T-top Corvette sliced slush and nosed its way into the available curbspace. It was beaded with water and its billowing exhaust was the same color and density as Cruz's breath.

  The horn beeped twice, curtly. Cruz bent down to look and saw his own face in mirrored glass. Then the passenger window buzzed down and he got his first glimpse of Rosie's Chi-town pal, Bauhaus.

  FOUR

  'Lookee here what the dawg drug in. Jesus H. in a Handi-Van!'

  Road weariness prevented J
onathan from turning fast enough; his spine was compressed into the infamous Greyhound S-curve. His grip on his rucksack relaxed. He untensed a notch, in the manner of a gunslinger just prior to the whirl and the killing draw. No flash of gunmetal tonight, though. He knew the voice too well.

  'Naw, on second thought, Jesus Christ was better nourished. And uglier.' Body warmth and one enormous shadow blocked the cold air flowing toward Jonathan from the depot's automatic doors.

  'You mean I won't get any movies made about me?'

  Jonathan let his smile come.

  'Cleaver of Love Rated R!' Big hands lit on Jonathan's shoulders and massaged roughly. 'I want two tickets now.'

  Jeffrey Holdsworth Chalmers Tessier spun Jonathan, who was weightless as a marionette in the clutches of the larger man, and enveloped him in a raucous bear hug incorporating mucho macho, back slapping and incoherent grunts of welcome. Jonathan saw the brown German shepherd pupils widen to drink in the image of a friend too long absent. Jeffrey's horsey grin infected him pronto.

  'The Bash man,' Jonathan said. He felt an absurd sense of family, hugging Bash there in the terminal.

  Bash retrieved Jonathan's surplus baggage, an overstuffed olive drab sport duffel with red leather straps. Bash had always been big in the shoulders, strong in the arms, and he was wearing a dark green overcoat that made his frame appear even larger. Beneath the sweeping, cloak-like hem Jonathan saw faded black denims and scuffed rock climbing boots with bright green laces.

  'C'mon, ace - you loiter around this garbage dump much longer and I might feel sorry for you. Give you some spare change.'

  As if cued, Jonathan snapped to and noticed where he was, apparently for the first time. Beyond them a black dude in a ragged fatigue jacket meandered out of the men's room. He was barefoot. The soles of his feet looked ashy and frostbitten. From the john spilled retching noises, amplified by the tile acoustics. Then the door pulled itself shut and deadened the sounds.

  Wherever he glanced in the terminal, his gaze was thrown back with hair-triggered urban hostility, as though the denizens of the depot resented being noticed at all. Jonathan met that glare too many times in too few moments. He felt all eyes in the cavernous room shifting to him, the alien, the outsider, the interloper with his newish boots and clean face. Unblinking, they watched him, and found him lacking.

  'Fuck these assholes,' Bash said. 'Half of 'em will be dead by morning.' The man who had left the bathroom was drifting past their position to the left. 'Ain't that right, jerkoff?'

  'Tol' bitch hom my money,' said the bum, correcting course and weaving off toward the payphones.

  To Jonathan it looked as though Bash's mere presence had physically repelled the bum. He kept staring at the bum's feet, which were calcified, rotten, irretrievable. If someone tapped Jonathan for spare change just now, he would stand and stare moronically. Fine. He was too drained. No batteries. Let Bash shield him for a while.

  Jonathan shook his head. It did not clear. He was wearing the depleted and off-kilter expression of a person just roused unduly from sleep. 'Hi there,' he said.

  'Hi your ownself,' Bash returned. 'Welcome to Hell. This way to the riverboat.'

  He led the way to a Toyota longbed with an all-weather hauling shell and snow chains.

  Bash. Why Bash? It fit Jeffrey's character sketch snugly enough without a linear explanation. Bash. It sounded like this big man. Everyone Jonathan had ever known had come attached to some sort of nickname… except, of course, his own self. Amanda had been Cookie and Green Eyes and Gorgeous, depending on how sexy the phone chat had to sound. They both addressed the shorthaired terrier next door as Dog Face even though his tags announced him as Doc. Amanda called her cat Pookie; its real name was just as cloying. While sloughing through pick-up electives in Classic Philosophers and Anthro 101A at the University of Louisiana, Jonathan would gang over to Grizzly's Tavern to tip back Mason jars of beer with Bash and Stretch and Fungo and Mad Max… and apart from Jonathan, he had never been called anything else. In grade school he had been Jonathan-plus-initial, to differentiate him from all the other Johns in the classroom. He fit in with the plague of Mikes and Jeffs and Cathys and Debbies, all boringly named in those fabulous Sixties; he supposed he was lucky not to have been named Glyph or Rainbeaux or Sativus. His real last name was stunningly prosaic.

  Just Jonathan. Hey you, shithead. Yeah, you.

  He thought now that everyone possessed another name, an alternate face. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the flip side of a person you thought you knew five-by-five. Sometimes it wasn't pretty. Some people spent lifetimes not seeing the ugliest aspects of those closest to them.

  Bash was talking about beer, deftly manhandling the truck's stick shift and correcting whenever they began to hydroplane or slide ass-backwards in the slush. Jonathan hung on.

  '… how you say, interesting local breweries close by the city. That's the single aspect of provincialism I enjoy. Regional beer. Can't wait to introduce you to Quietly.'

  'Who's she?'

  'No. Quietly Beer.' Bash was a good comedian; he paused to let it sink in.

  'Quietly Beer.' Jonathan couldn't stop his face from breaking an honest smile. It felt unfamiliar. It almost hurt. 'Quietly Beer?'

  'Absurd, ain't it?' Bash was grinning like a talkshow comic. 'You haven't let Jesus into your heart, or anything dumb like that, since the last time I saw you. Have you?'

  'No. I like beer fine.'

  It was wine Jonathan could not bring himself to drink any. more. He had invested the last parts of his twenties in carefully cultivating a casual taste for basic wines. He enjoyed knowing what to order when restaurants did not have his first choice. No longer, not now. He did not drink wine anymore because…

  'Gotta give you the skinny on Quietly Beer,' Bash was saying. 'You'll laugh till you cough up a lung.'

  Jonathan nodded. The smile set on his visage like drying cement. The smooth, velvet undertow of memory dragged him under and tried to drown him one more time. It had made him weep on the bus, and locked his throat shut just now.

  Jonathan did not drink wine anymore because…

  ***

  It was one of their last Dinners from Hell, and it was going badly. Too many ossified silences.

  Jonathan thought you could always tell married couples in restaurants. They're the ones not talking to each other, paying more attention to their plates than their partner's eyes. Ditto for established relationships - the ones heading at high speed for the septic tank of spoiled human emotions.

  This goddamn meal will cost fifty bucks, exclusive of tip, Jonathan thought, and Amanda has got her brat knob turned up full crank. She doesn't care. And neither of us can taste the food.

  Tonight Amanda ran her full menu: She was getting old. She was getting fat, wasn't she? She wasn't making enough money. Jonathan didn't care that her job in home mortgages was not paying enough and never would. Jonathan didn't care about anything but Jonathan. Nobody had ever truly fallen in love with her, her alone. Nobody ever would. She was closing fast on thirty and had not yet reproduced. If Jonathan cared he would have done something by now. She hated her entire fucking life.

  And - oh yes - Jonathan didn't really care. Did he?

  At which point he was supposed to protest that yes, he gave a damn. Several damns. His concern had ruined his meal.

  But she cut him off, certain he cared not at all, and by the by, I've been thinking a lot about suicide lately.

  Forever unspoken, her accusation was that she was nailed to a cross she loathed, and Jonathan was the guy holding the hammer and spikes. Amanda despised culpability, even for her own lot in life.

  He knew what was coming out of her mouth next.

  'You don't want to hear this shit, Jonathan. Why don't you just tell me to fuck off?'

  Too goddamn easy. It was exactly what she wanted. If she could goad him into saying those words, then he could be blamed for terminating their relationship. One more little death. Amanda's view o
f a hostile and destroying world devoted to crushing her would be reinforced another degree if she could successfully drive someone as tolerant as Jonathan to the boiling point of rage.

  Amanda was an on-off smoker, a knuckle popper. She picked at scabs until they bled anew.

  Jonathan would never give her the satisfaction of easy rage. Allowing her to piss him off would not solve any of their problems. He told her this.

  'Oh, great. So you're saying that I'd be happy if I could make somebody who cares about me give up. Terrific.'

  His hands vised shut on air. It was like trying to build a computer from ectoplasm. Or fuck tears.

  No, he told her. But it seemed as if she could only be fulfilled if life was as miserable as she persisted in believing it was. She nurtured her unhappiness because it was familiar turf, and bitching was easier than actually doing something, taking action. He expected her to snap back with the usual rejoinder: Never mind, Jonathan; it's no big deal, right? You don't care, you don't understand and you never will.

  Instead, she tossed half a glass of white Bordeaux in his face. Maybe she had been watching too many movies that week. A bit of televisual melodrama.

  He spluttered while she stomped out. Ambient conversation in the restaurant switched instantly off.

  The atonic white wine seeped past his eyelids with a disinfectant sting. He heard Amanda walk away while his eyes flooded. Everyone was looking, all right. Somewhere behind him he heard a laugh, abrupt and feminine. Then came hushed whispers. None sounded sympathetic.

  He had not let Amanda's party line gnaw at him. Congratulations. You won. Big fucking deal.

  He mopped his face. Their waiter brought a fresh napkin. Jonathan ordered a cappuccino. Maybe he could sit here until all the witnesses finished their meals and went home. Five minutes later he was drier and no longer blushing. The cappuccino tasted like barium. He overtipped.