Unloaded

by Eric Beetner

  He owns a nice little place in Prescott city proper, right in the downtown historical district. The house is over a hundred years old and was originally built by some dipshit silver miner. He shares the house with his wife and two sons. The wife has the look of a woman who used to be considered pretty but fucked herself up with cigs, booze, child birth, and the lethargy of being a stay-at-home mom for too long. She owns a touristy candle shop a couple of blocks from the house. I’m pretty sure Mike’s income is what supports their house and the shop is just a way for her to get out of it a few hours every day.

  I don’t give a shit about their kids, they just look like a couple of teenage assholes, which I’m sure they are.

  How would you get into the house, Cole? Through a window, or would you try to snap the lock on the backdoor?

  I call Mike Bob because I think he looks like the killer from Twin Peaks. He doesn’t mind me calling him Bob because he likes to think there’s a certain level of ambiguity to our relationship. That by not knowing the details of his life, he’ll be somehow harder to find. Bob’s one of those assholes who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he earns a good living. Bob thinks his money insulates him and that I don’t know any of these things about him. I’d like to think it’s willful ignorance on his part, but I know it’s because he thinks he’s superior to me. And he’s right in some ways. I don’t have all the American conveniences that make it so easy for people to find out who you are. It makes me a little sad because I want these things, but in the same breath, I don’t want these things because there’s a certain amount of comfort in being a ghost.

  An open window would be best. And open window on a beautiful spring night. All we would have to do is cut a screen and we would be free to do whatever we wanted.

  I grab a fresh smoke from the dashboard and try to avoid looking at the pictures Bob has spread across it.

  Ma got sick while I was gone. Her heart gave out, or one of the pumps in it did. She didn’t have the money for a doctor to find out for sure. She died the first time at work. She flat-lined and everything. The paramedics who brought her back to life at the bar she worked at used their paddles and brought her back. She was in the hospital for only one night and was discharged the morning after. She went home after filling her new prescriptions, laid down, and had a second heart attack. There wasn’t anyone there to shock her back to life. Her boss at the bar was the one who found her when he came to check and see how she was doing. He ended up breaking a window to her bedroom when he saw her sprawled out.

  The Army let me come home for two weeks. All I did the entire time I was home was sleep. I’d wake up at ten, be conked out on the couch by one with a movie playing in the background. I kept Ma’s bedroom door closed, I didn’t need anything out of it, and the window was still busted. I didn’t have a funeral for her, we were never the most social of people, and I think she would’ve been embarrassed if it was only me and her boss watching her get lowered into the ground. I had her cremated and put her in her bedroom once I boarded up the busted window. I locked the door behind me, it felt appropriate.

  After my two weeks of leave was up, I didn’t go back, and they haven’t come looking.

  I go out on my own on the days when Jerry has real construction work, that’s how I met Bob.

  Land developers thought Prescott Valley was going to be where the next big Arizona housing boom was going to be. They were wrong. The boom stayed in Phoenix, but it didn’t stop them from building a few thousand track homes on the city outskirts near the RV dealerships and the scuzzy self-storage facilities. They sold some, but it was a bust, and most of the folks who bought the mass produced tinder boxes ended up giving them back. The developers made tracks, left the homes to rot and be picked over by scavengers like me and Jerry.

  When we first got started salvaging, we went for the high-end items: Air conditions, sliding glass doors, toilets, dishwashers. The thing is we weren’t the only smart fellas in our little corner of red dirt nothing. All the high-end junk went fast until all that was left was what was buried in the walls. The thing with scavengers is they’re lazy. They don’t mind busting their humps lifting a two-thousand-pound air-conditioner, but if they have to tear up some drywall to get at some copper wiring or aluminum pipes, they get all jiggly in the knees. This left the salvaging playing field wide open for more industrious types like me and Jerry.

  It was December 2nd, Jerry was a month into a three month job slapping together an enormous apartment complex in Phoenix. He offered to try and get me on the crew even though he knew I’d say no.

  The Mexicans work without ID. They don’t pay ’em shit, but they don’t pay no taxes neither.

  He was offering because he didn’t want to be lonely. Phoenix is a two-hour drive one way, and with the price of gas, he was going to rent a cheap room close to the site during the week. Even though I barely saw them speak a word to one another when I was around Jerry and his wife, I knew he’d missing having a body to share space with. I was an adequate enough body, plus I would chip in on the cost of the room.

  I didn’t want the job, though. Not because I thought the Army would come looking, but because I didn’t want to leave, ever. So instead of waiting out in front of my trailer for Jerry to come and pick me up, I used Mom’s old Dodge. It was a gas guzzler and it leaked oil, but the tags were current and it got me up to Prescott Valley just fine.

  I was working a development that they were going to call Mountain View. Three square miles of crackerbox track homes, most of them complete. It was hog heaven for salvagers when they abandoned work on it. Jerry told me when we first started coming up here that fellas would get into fights over the flat-top ranges and air-condition units. It got so bad that there was even a couple of shootings. By the time we made it up, there was nothing left but the copper in the walls, quiet for miles around, and the occasional security man who seemed to never got out of his patrol car. We’d hump our gear in and lug it and our spools out, so we never gave him a reason to stop. Not like he seemed able enough, the old boy looked like he was in his seventies and carrying a hundred pounds of heart attack weight.

  I was working near the center of Mountain View, a couple of blocks away from where the dry Olympic size swimming pool and clubhouse were. It was a risky spot because the security guard kept his station there. But I was working at four a.m. with a headlamp strapped around my hat. If I was the sort who spooked easily, I would’ve been in a cold sweat.

  I was pounding through the drywall of in the master bathroom of a two story place. When I started work on it at two a.m., I was surprised to find no one else had gotten around to tearing the place up. The range, microwave, and stainless steel refrigerator were still in place. It was a gold mine. But I wasn’t there to pick up major appliances—I’d have to come back over the weekend when Jerry was back in town—I was there for copper and pipes.

  While I was yanking the toilet away from the wall, I felt something touch my shoulder. At first I thought was just a piece of drywall crumbling off and hitting me in the shoulder, but then it tapped me again, the distinct slap of a hand. The army gets you weird. It gets you jumpy. Not so much from the time out in the desert, but from other guys constantly fucking with you. You get touchy and mean.

  I turned without thinking and buried the claw end of my hammer in a woman’s skull. Her mouth and head were wrapped in duct tape, silver ribbons of it hung from her wrists. Her forehead and cheeks were dusty, dimpled with shallow cuts. My eyes went glassy as the woman fell backwards, my hammer still in her head.

  A couple of seconds or a couple of hours later, there was Bob, sweaty, holding a box cutter.

  After we buried the woman, I thought I’d found my anything in Bob.

  I’ve killed plenty. Enemy soldiers, civilians, my fellow soldiers.

  Lots of those shitbirds.

  No one wants to ever say it, but I’ve got no problem with it because I was one of them: Just because you’re a
soldier don’t mean you’re hero. It don’t mean you’re a good guy. It just means you’re some asshole who loves raping and killing, and the Army pays you to do it to as many brown people as you can.

  I thought Bob was the answer because he loved raping and killing, or at least said he did.

  The woman we buried was his first, and he hadn’t gotten around to doing either.

  I listened to his spiel the first time over a cup of coffee at a Denny’s out near the I-17. The spiel made sense.

  Maybe what I was missing wasn’t the order and discipline?

  Maybe it was the killing?

  We agreed to meet at the same house in Mountain View two weeks later. We went back to the same Denny’s, and I listened to his bullshit again. This time I figured out the only reason Bob wanted me around was because he didn’t have the balls to actually kill anybody, he needed me there to do it.

  He needed me there to take the fall in case we got caught.

  I started follow him after the second meeting, gathered my intel.

  When we met again at Mountain View, we didn’t go back to Denny’s, we came to this house in Prescott Valley. We parked across the street and Bob spread his pictures of the three women who lived in the house across the dash, and he told me what he’d do—what I’d do—to the three women.

  I smoked half a pack of Marlboro’s, and when I was done with my last one, I grabbed Bob by his stiff, jelled down hair, and I pushed the orange cherry into his cheek.

  I held him steady while he tried to hit me.

  I blocked out his screams.

  I savored the old favorite smell of burning.

  I slammed his head into the steering wheel and then showed him my pictures.

  The pictures of his house and car.

  Of his wife.

  His sons.

  I told him about grabbing the boys when they were walking home from lacrosse practice, or whatever fucking privileged sport they played.

  I talked about Mountain View, anal rape, and how much I missed it.

  I talked about inserting candles into his wife.

  I talked about dousing him with gasoline and how he’d smell while he was on fire.

  I told him it wouldn’t smell like the puddle of urine he was sitting in.

  I told him if he ever came back to this house, to these women, I would do everything I’d just told him I would do to him and his family without a second of hesitation.

  I broke his nose before I left the car and stole the rest of the cigarettes.

  Back to TOC

  CREAMPUFF

  Rob Hart

  People called him “Creampuff.”

  No one knows if it was a nickname thought up by the staff, or if he actually called himself that. That’s just what people called him.

  It could have been like when you call a big guy “Tiny.” Cognitive dissonance. Here’s this big black guy, and he answered to Creampuff, like it was John or Paul.

  There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Creampuff, but here is what is known: He was huge, like a recurring childhood nightmare. People say he was nearly seven feet tall, but that’s just the way truth gets warped by word of mouth. He was more like six-three, which is still pretty big. He had gauges in his ear wide enough you could fit your thumb in, and a thick beard like a jumble of cables that reached down to his sternum. And always he was wearing a gray wool skullcap, even in the summer.

  He had one tattoo. A series of black lines running parallel down his left forearm. It started with five lines. The last time anyone saw him, when the morning shift found his body in a thick pool of blood, throat cut ear to ear, there were seven lines. No one knew what they stood for. Nearly everyone had a theory. Most of those theories had to do with how many people he had killed.

  Which is a little heavy, and not really based on anything. Creampuff was only a bouncer.

  Granted, he was a special kind of bouncer, with a skill-set tailored for these strange modern times. He was required to deal with a hugely diverse range of people—brain-dead tourists to rich yuppie jerks to bridge-and-tunnel trolls to the most dangerous animal in New York City: Moms pushing baby carriages.

  Creampuff was a bakery bouncer.

  The kind of job that didn’t exist ten years ago and suddenly is in such demand, colleges should teach a course on it.

  You know what a canelé is? It’s this little pastry that originated in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. It gets cooked in a copper mold, which forms a deep bronze crust on the outside. Inside is light custard flavored with vanilla and rum. They’re the perfect little mouthful, barely bigger than one bite, and you can get them in a lot of places in New York, but only a few places actually do them right.

  Patiserie in the East Village is one of those places, going back to the 1940s, when the store first opened. But as with any business that isn’t a bank or a real estate agency, one day, they found themselves struggling to meet their rent. Their canelés, being a thing of legend, did good business, but still, were barely keeping them afloat. It’s hard to keep the lights on when your star product sells for three dollars a pop.

  So the owners of Patiserie brought on a hotshot pastry chef—a kid with half his head shaved and cooking utensils tattooed up and down his forearms—to put a new spin on the menu.

  And this new chef considers the canelé.

  It’s classic, but as a canvas, a little blank. He tinkers with it for a few weeks, and eventually figures out a way to get rum-infused ice cream on the inside.

  Think about that.

  Instead of a warm custard, it was still-cold ice cream. To properly caramelize the crust of a canelé you’ve got to hit it with a ton of heat. Plus, introducing alcohol into the mix screws with the melting point of the ice cream. All that, and there was still cold, perfectly-unmelted ice cream on the inside. This thing was a marvel of modern kitchen engineering.

  Word spread, and within a week of it hitting the menu, the chef was on Good Morning America, the plastic-faced anchors making a show of begging him for the secret to his cooking process, which of course, he wouldn’t reveal. They did come up with a new name for this treat: The Creamelé.

  So that goes viral, and the next morning, there’s a line down the block and around the corner. Everyone wants a creamelé.

  Suddenly all the employees who are supposed to be cooking and baking are working crowd control. That’s no way to run a business. Especially since three people needed to be assigned to the creamelés, which were made in a back room with blacked-out windows that no one but the chef and his helpers were allowed inside.

  Enter Creampuff.

  Nobody knows where he came from. He just showed up one day, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes cold and unmoving like blocks of chipped ice. Some people thought he was the embodiment of order, attracted by the gravity of chaos, here to bring order to an entropic universe.

  Truth is, it was probably a job posting on Craigslist.

  Patiserie only had the capacity to make two hundred creamelés a day, and you could only buy one at a time. There was no calling ahead to reserve them. You had to wait on the line. And they were a ten-foot treat, meaning you had to eat them within ten feet of the bakery. Wait too long, and the ice cream would melt.

  Every single day, people who wanted ice cream for breakfast would line up as early as four a.m., when the first shift of bakers would arrive.

  Doors opened at seven a.m.

  By nine a.m., that day’s allotment of creamelés was gone.

  So you’ve got a line to control. There are people running outside the bakery to eat their creamelé. And then, there are all the people trying to game the system and get in without waiting on line.

  This is what Creampuff faced, every single day—because he worked seven days a week. But he had a system.

  If you were there for a creamelé, you got on the creamelé line. Five people were allowed inside the store proper at a time, and only
five people. One person in, and one person out. Even if you were with a group of people, even if you were with your husband or wife, you got split up to go inside. Creampuff only made an exception when parents had their kids with them—not that kids could have a creamelé, because there was alcohol in it.

  In front of the store, on the sidewalk, there was a sign on a pedestal explaining how the line worked. Plus a lengthy explanation on Patiserie’s website. Not that it helped much. Because people in New York think they are the center of their own little universe, a lot of Creampuff’s job consisted of dealing with people who didn’t want to wait.

  There were the Richie Riches who would stride up to him and wave a bill under his nose. Usually a twenty, sometimes a hundred. Creampuff would take it, stick it in a pouch on his belt that read “donations for charity,” and cross his arms.

  No one ever asked for their money back.

  Two celebrities and the chief of staff for the mayor walked to the front of the line like it wasn’t even there. Creampuff surely had no idea who they were, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Even after they pitched a fit, invoking the “don’t-you-know-who-I-am?” protocol, Creampuff shrugged, put his hand up, and waved them toward the back.