by Eric Beetner
Remy’s gone.
The pain’s far away like the stars. I punch through the window and close my hand round his neck. Drag him out by the scruff like a kitten. His partner’s out the door.
My boots crush the hood as I go over. Get him by the neck too. My fingers touch my thumbs. Smack them together like one man, and their feet kick above the ground.
People swim through life never knowing it’s there. Then they suck air wide-eyed like big fat carp dragged from the water. Like Mama’s eyes when the smoke cleared. Crying even though she’s gone.
Her tears splash my face and I wake up. “Your girl’s all right, huevón.” The pretty lady with the gray pit bull is holding Remy up to lick my cheek.
I drop the police by the car, still breathing.
“Thank you.” I take Remy in my arms.
I run back into the park. One cop stares and the other spits up.
Two fish thrown back today.
I wake up cold everywhere except where Remy is curled beside me. After I found Ike beneath his trestle, he led me to a cave in the trees where he keeps some blankets, cans, and a spare jug of wine. It’s more like a cubbyhole cut into the side of some rocks with a dead oak stump for a roof.
In the morning, we eat one of Sandy’s cold plates together. My arm aches under the cloth where Ike tied it. But it’s stopped bleeding, and it ain’t broken.
I tell him what the deacon said, that Mrs. Kolb has no children.
“Said to ask her,” Ike says.
I leave Remy with him and head back to my truck. Long way around the park. A police car eases through Mrs. Kolb’s neighborhood. I see a landscaper’s truck, men blowing leaves around, with headphones on. I take a garbage bag and bag leaves with them until the police car goes by. The men look at me weird as I walk away.
Mrs. Kolb is sitting on the porch in her housedress.
“There you are. The voices were bad last night.” She looks bad as me, and I slept in a cave.
I drop to one knee beside her porch swing. Tell her I hear voices, too. She can tell I ain’t lying. I ask her what they tell her.
“Terrible things,” she says. “Let’s go inside.”
She fixes two cups of yellow tea.
“When I was young, I made a terrible mistake. That’s why these voices torment me.”
I sip and listen.
“These houses all around us, the people might look happy, but most of them live in fear of one kind or another. You know how they look at you,” she says, pointing with her teacup. “When I was young, I thought I was different. But when it came down to it, I was just as afraid as the rest of the people sheltered away in this little enclave. I made the wrong choice, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
I’ve done things I can’t take back too. I tell her with a slow nod.
I ask if she has any children.
“No, Denny. I do not.” She looks into her cup a long time. When she looks up, her watery eyes turn hard as marble. “I can’t tell if you’re being cruel, or if you just have rocks in your head. You should go.”
There’s still one section of fence left in the yard. So small I could tear it out with my truck. I feel bad leaving it.
I stare at those curtains across the way before I leave. Don’t know if those neighbors are looking. His big black car isn’t home.
I go home to the junkyard to wash up and get a change of clothes. Keep thinking about those cops, and how Mrs. Kolb turned mean, and bad thoughts cloud my head. I hit the weight pile to get my mind right. But that’s not enough. I get under the back of a truck with no front wheels and lift it high, over and over, until I can’t no more. I wash up again, trade my black do-rag for a white one, lose the uniform for an old pair of overalls. In disguise, I drive to the park.
Ike’s got plates from Sandy, and we eat on the other side of the lake with the sun to our backs, far away from the roads. The lake glows as the sun goes down and I think of the carp down there, and the cars and the bodies down with them.
“People talking about what you did last night. Some folks court trouble, but you got its nose wide open.”
I say I thought they killed Remy.
“Well, she’s right here, ain’t she?” He kneads her neck as she eats. “You talk to that old lady, or you just terrorize the city?”
I tell him she said she had no kids.
“Really now.” He bends a plastic fork against his chin.
He slips a pint bottle from his pocket, offers. I wave it away. Don’t like the taste, and it would take a couple of those to get me high.
“I never knew my real folks. They didn’t have foster homes back then, like you had. Just the orphanage. The nuns, man, they could be mean. But the good ones, they were good as gold. You know the good ones.”
He drinks some.
“Sister Kathleen, she was one of the good ones. I liked to sing choir. Was real good, before my balls dropped.” He laughs, takes another drink. “She took me aside one time, told me my father was a great jazz trumpeter. I didn’t believe her. Music’s sure not in my blood. She gave me a recorder, you know those? They’re like a flute. Well, I might as well have used it to shoot spitballs, for how good I played. So for a long time I thought she just told me that stuff about my father to make me feel good. But the more I asked around, more I heard that Moody Joe Shaw got a rich girl in trouble, around the time I was born.
“Her family hushed it up, got him sent away. Just a nickel marijuana beef, but he got beat pretty bad in there. He kept playing, but they say he wasn’t the same after that. Angry. Got killed in an argument over money down South. He threw a fist and the singer pulled a knife.”
Ike wrings his hands. They’re dry and cracked, but the way he folds them. Like two doves shivering, close together for warmth.
“Need you to do this for me, Denny. Tell her who I think I am. And if, and if she wants to see me, you come get me in your truck. Will you do that?”
He knows I will, but I tell him anyway.
Miss Stacey had a step stool she used to get things off high shelves in her kitchen. Like her instant coffee. She needed a cup when she stayed up late to watch me. I got a lot of bruises on my legs and little crescent scars under my arms, while I waited for her to need something off a high shelf.
When she got on that ladder, I grabbed Caesar’s tennis ball. He growled and bit down hard on my leg. I threw that ball, he ran and knocked the step ladder clean over.
Miss Stace’s hip cracked like a dead tree branch.
“Dial nine-one-one, Denny!”
I gave her the phone. It was the old kind, numbers all around like a clock. I looked at the numbers on the dial like I didn’t know what they said. Asked her which one was nine. Which was one. I dialed a lot of wrong numbers before the ambulance came.
She went to the old folks’ home and I went back to juvie.
When I get to Mrs. Kolb’s I start working without calling on her, so she can’t tell me to go away. Figure with the fence done, she might be in a better mood. It comes out easy.
I knock on her door. No answer. I hear the Jive Bomber album playing. I knock harder, then try the knob. It opens. I look around, then go in.
No smell of gas. I call her name over the music, walking slow, so I don’t give her a fright. She ain’t hanging upside down from the staircase, either.
The trumpet fades and I look at the shelf of records, thinking of Ike listening to them with her, eating tunafish sandwiches. Feels almost as good as me seeing my mama again. The record spins down and the needle lifts.
I call her name.
“Up here,” she cries.
I trip over the carpet at the top of the stairs. It’s come undone again. I find her in the hallway beneath the attic steps, all twisted. She clutches a little black box in her waxy white hands. I help her up and she hangs like a doll. Her legs dangle wrong. She cries and the box drops from her hands. Batteries spill out when it hits the floor.
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Down below, the record starts up again. Low trumpet, creeping like the sun through the trees in the morning.
“Told you I’ve still got my marbles,” she says, her voice cracking. I sit down and cradle her, careful. She winces and shakes. “The voices kept me up all night. They said terrible things. That you were here to steal my house. That Deacon Bennett and I were having relations. In the crudest of ways.” She nods toward the box. “It’s a radio of some kind. I found it in the attic. I got so piping mad that I slipped and fell.”
Her head lolls to my chest. I think she’s gone, but she gathers breath and starts again.
“Wish I could dance to Moody Joe one last time.”
I pick her up by the waist, and turn to the music. Her forehead is cold against my shoulder.
“Had a boy like you, once,” she says. “Let him go. I was afraid, angry. Afraid of my father, angry at myself, and the stupid…cruel…hateful world.”
I tell her I know her boy. And that he’s a good man.
There are tears on my shoulder before the music ends.
In my eyes, too.
I set her down gently. Thinking how I’m gonna smash the window next door, tear open those curtains, and close my hands around the neck of the hardhat man and his wife. I’m about to go downstairs and get the record to leave on her chest like flowers when I hear a voice over the music.
“Mrs. Kolb?”
Carmela. I step back in the bedroom, quiet.
She walks up the stairs. Stops when she sees the body, and sighs.
“Oh, honey.”
She kneels to pick up the batteries. They clatter across the floor. “If you’d only listened and moved out, you’d be yakking it up and boring their heads off in the senior center, where you belonged. You’d have had to sell the place to pay for it. Maybe they would’ve let you play your damn jazz records.” Another long sigh. “Now we’ll have to fight the church over that school.”
I step out.
She gasps. “Oh, it’s you. You scared the shit out of me.”
I hold out the last battery.
“You ought to leave.” She tucks the black box in her purse. “You don’t want to be here when the police show up. I called them.”
She snatches the battery and runs for the stairs. I don’t even chase her. She trips over the rug and hits the landing with a crack and a scream.
I stomp down the steps. She crawls for the door, shrieking.
“No! You don’t understand! She wouldn’t listen!”
She drags herself across the floor. I bring my boot down on her bad ankle. Moody Joe’s trumpet wails from the dusty speakers. I turn the volume up so Carmela don’t ruin it. When the song’s over, I tip the shelf on top of her.
The floor bounces with the weight of all those records crashing down. The needle jumps off the record. I take the disc and slide it into the sleeve, then hold it up. Moody Joe smiles at me.
I take him to the park to see his boy.
Back to TOC
PEEP SHOW
Holly West
Jimmy Price hates the sound of sirens. They remind him of the night Mama died, eight years ago.
Tonight, they wake him up. He doesn’t glance at the digital clock sitting on the upturned milk crate he uses as a bedside table, but it reads 4:53 a.m. It’s still dark out; the sun won’t begin to rise for at least another hour. The wailing is distant but getting louder. He puts his hands over his ears and squeezes his eyes shut.
His little dog, Trixie, yaps. She doesn’t like the sirens either. “Hush,” he whispers, uncovering one of his ears long enough to shove her under his blanket. The apartment manager, Mrs. Hosharian, had given him a stern warning when she discovered the furry fugitive he’d been hiding: “She can stay, but keep her quiet. If someone complains to the landlord, she has to go.”
The threat of losing Trixie has loomed since he found her, a fuzzy white mutt tied to the parking meter outside of a coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. The day after he took her home, someone stapled “STOLEN DOG” posters on several telephone poles in the neighborhood. That dog, named Bella, looked a lot like Trixie, which concerned Jimmy. What if someone mistook her for the lost animal? He tore all the posters down, stuffed them into his pockets and ran home as fast as he could.
Tonight’s racket taunts her and she wriggles to free herself, nosing his arm. He pins her down too tightly and she lets out a squeal. He’s a big man, six-foot-five and over three hundred pounds, and Mama always said he didn’t know his own strength. He tries to be gentle with Trixie but sometimes he forgets. He forgets a lot of things.
The sirens are so loud now that he can hardly stand it. His heart thumps and he ignores Trixie, who’s barking with abandon. Most of the time, he doesn’t mind living alone but the neighborhood isn’t as good as the one he lived in with Mama and sometimes he gets scared.
To soothe himself, he thinks about Regina, the pretty Oriental lady who lives upstairs. She’s kind to him, always taking a moment to say hello when they meet at the mailbox. He keeps an eye out for her through the peephole in his door to make sure he catches her when she gets her mail.
Once, on his way home from walking Trixie, he saw her standing on the street, smoking a cigarette, all dressed up in a short skirt and high heels. Mama didn’t like girls who smoked; she said it make them look trashy. But he’d never seen a girl as beautiful as Regina and decided he could overlook the smoking.
“Your dog, so cute,” Regina said, bending at the knees and resting gracefully on her haunches to pet Trixie. Her accent was thick and exotic. She’d told him where she’d come from once, but he could never remember where it was.
“You can walk her with me if you want,” Jimmy said.
Regina shook her head and stood up. “I go to work now.” She finished the cigarette, dropped it, and extinguished it with a pointed toe. “I wait for ride.”
It was getting dark and he didn’t like the idea of her being out alone. “You be careful. It’s getting late and I don’t think it’s too safe around here.”
She giggled. “I be fine, Jimmy. You big strong guy. I got you to protect me.” She raised herself on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, which made his stomach flutter. After she was gone he picked up the cigarette stub, marked pink with her lipstick, and put it in his pocket.
Bertie, his friend from the community center, once asked him if Regina was a tranny. Jimmy didn’t know what he meant. “A transsexual,” Bertie said, wriggling his index finger in front of his pants, pretending it was a ding-a-ling. “Everyone knows the tranny hookers hang out on Santa Monica Boulevard near your apartment.”
Jimmy didn’t know whether to believe Bertie about the hookers, but he knew Regina wasn’t one of them. He stopped talking to Bertie after that.
He’s calmer now with the vision of Regina fresh in his mind and he scrambles after Trixie. She’s stopped barking but her ears stand at attention, her throat vibrating with the effort of a low growl. He presses her ears down against her head so that she can’t hear, then realizes that the sirens have stopped.
Flickering red lights show through the slats in the vertical blinds, blinking on-off, on-off. He carries Trixie to the window, moving the hard plastic strips out of the way to look outside. There’s not much to see; his only window is perpendicular to the street and all that’s visible is the stucco surface of the apartment building next door, illuminated red by the flashing lights.
There’s a loud bump just outside Jimmy’s front door and Trixie barks in response. His heart jumps and he curls his fingers around her tiny mouth. She shakes her head in violent protest but he keeps a firm hold.
He moves toward the door and stubs his toe against the metal bed frame. Seized with pain, he drops Trixie and she hops away from him, yapping with excitement. He limps after her and scoops her up, quieting her in the process. He continues to the door and puts one eye against the peephole.
The fluorescent light
s in the building’s small entry way brighten the stairs leading up to the second floor. There are people moving around, but it’s hard to see what they’re doing. Someone passes in front of his door, blocking his view. He backs away, nervous that somebody might guess that he’s watching from inside. He waits a few beats then looks out again. Two men carry a long black bag down the stairs, one on each end of it. Jimmy doesn’t know what might be in it, but nevertheless, his stomach lurches.
A second later, there’s a knock on the door. With all Trixie’s barking tonight, he’s certain that whoever it is wants to take her away. He has to hide her. He snatches the blanket from the bed and wraps her up, fighting against her indignant squirming. He hurries to the bathroom and closes her inside the cabinet under the sink and turns on the faucet to mask any noises she might make.
He opens his front door and finds Mrs. Hosharian standing there in her dingy pink bathrobe. Her face is free of the heavy makeup she usually wears and her eyes are puffy. She looks as old and tired as Mama did before she died.
“Trixie is barking,” she says. “The police are here and the owner is on his way over. You know I’ll get in trouble if he finds out about her.”
Jimmy is relieved—no one’s after Trixie—yet. He just needs to keep her quiet. But why are the police here? And what was in that bag he saw being carried out?
“Is something wrong, Mrs. H?” he asks.
Mrs. Hosharian raises her hand to mouth and shakes her head sadly. “Regina is dead, Jimmy. Someone killed her last night.”
His legs turn rubbery and he leans against the doorframe to steady himself. This must be a joke.
“That’s not funny, Mrs. H.”
“I’m sorry, I know she was your friend.”
The blood rushes to his head, blinding him. He grabs Mrs. Hosharian by the shoulders.