by Shaw, Johnny
*****
Heading north on 16th Street South. Traffic’s late-night thin. I drop my speed down to the limit. Eyes ahead. Eyes to the rearview. A cruiser passes me going the opposite direction, the uniform’s eyes strafing my ride. Dicey. Window rolled halfway down, a blood-spattered nigger driving a boss crate with a brutally traumatized white girl in tow. No questions would be asked.
Goosebumps. The sticky warm night feels cold and I roll the window up. Jenny’s hunched down in the passenger seat, her moaning like a constant electric hum. Primal—she’s shutting the world out.
I put a hand on her arm. She flinches. She kicks and bites and claws my hand bloody. I reach across the seat and pull her close, her thin body going limp as the sobbing of incoherent words are being choked and jerked from her mouth.
My voice is placid, telling her the same untruths I told Audrey, over and over and over:
“Everything will be okay, sugar. I promise.”
*****
There were two of them. Two second-tier crackers I’d sent to Union County for a deuce. Time served. Shyster’s working overtime.
They served six months.
I took six months from them and they ripped my fucking life apart.
I won’t make excuses to justify. I opened their stomachs while they were still alive and watched them die a slow and bloody death in an abandoned Midtown warehouse for two long days. I’d do it again. Even after the swarming greenbottle flies and the smell of men losing control and their begging, I’d do it again. I’ve already crossed the line and I’ll keep crossing it until He hears me.
Until He understands what living is doing to me.
*****
Next morning, early.
I throw my shield on my Sergeant Brice’s desk. He’s sitting in his shirtsleeves with blue veins plumped out on his forearms and biceps, a reluctant seat shiner. He looks at the shield, lights a cigarette and then stares me down while talking in his raspy phlegmatic voice.
“Don’t let ‘em beat you like this, Mike. Don’t let this...society we live in and what happened to Audrey dictate your life.” He points at me with the cigarette crushed between two nicotine-stained fingers. “We’ve been through this a dozen times in the last two years, so just pick up your badge and walk the fuck back out that door.”
Society. Ghosts. One and the same.
In a nigger drawl, I give him a bullshit self-serving excuse. “Yeah, wouldn’t want the department to lose another token jig.” Bulge those eyes. Shuffle those feet. “What would da colored folk think then?” I shake my head, dig down deep for a grin, come up snake eyes. “Listen…it’s time, Sarge. We’ve both known it for a while now. I’m no good for this anymore. I just can’t fucking do it.”
Brice stabs out his cigarette in a heavy glass ashtray filled with two days worth of half-smoked butts. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t raise his voice. “Token—don’t lay that crap on me. I’ve never been that person, Mike. If you want to call it quits, fine. If you want to make excuses, fine.” The corner of his mouth jerks up and he leans forward on his desk, lacing his battle-scarred hands together. “But you’re not being rational. And you’re a mess, kid. I can smell you from here.”
I want to respond, but have nothing left to say. Sarge still has plenty, though. He takes a breath and lets fly.
“Don’t know if you heard, but the Hughes girl showed up last night.” A head shake. “Bad shape.”
Calm and easy. “Yeah?”
His steel-gray eyes run down and then up my body before settling back on my face. “Somebody dropped her off downtown at the hospital ER and split. Left a note with her. Just a scribbled address, but it was the right address. Fucking bloodbath. Her white trash loser cousin and a couple other model citizens. Looks like the cousin was selling her for cash and dope to his buddies. Him and a fat boy were DOA. The third guy managed to crawl outside, but bled out on the back porch steps. Femoral artery and gut shot. That’s a hard way to eat it.”
I shrug. “Doesn’t sound like much of a loss.”
“Neighbors must feel the same way.” Brice snatches up a pen and gives a rat-a-tat-tat on the desk. “At least six shots were fired but nobody heard anything. And not one person got a plate number or even noticed the make of the getaway car. Tire-burn marks for twenty feet and no one saw a goddamn thing. Sled had to be a beast to lay rubber like that.”
Blood thumping. Mouth like cotton. I dry gulp and nix the car conversation: “Say what? Telling me no one at the ER had anything worth a damn to add? Not one motherfucking thing?” I shake my head, lay it on thick. “Seems kinda hard to believe, I mean, joint’s jumpin’ all day every day. Shiiiit—cops and staff must’ve been all over that motherfucking place!”
“You’d think. But all they heard was the admittance door buzzer. Girl was sitting outside in front of the door. She was sitting there alone in her own fucking blood and just...humming to herself. One of the attendants lost his chow and set off a chain reaction. Whoever dropped the girl off slipped in and out tout suite.”
I lick my lips. “How is the—?”
Brice cuts me off. “I think you know how she is, Mike.”
My right foot starts tapping out of control. My brain’s telling my foot to play it cool. Play it Billy D. Fucking Williams cool. I spread my legs, dig my toes into the carpet and lock my knees. I don’t answer him.
Brice, chewing his lower lip bloody. “Come on, you’ve seen this kind of thing before. Jesus. You know how she is today and you know how she’ll be twenty goddamn years from now.”
I don’t push him. I put my shades on beneath the buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights. “Yeah, I know, Sarge. I’ll see ya around, huh?”
Eyes down, Brice bobs his head of thick black hair, palms flat on the desk. “Yeah.”
Through the cubicles, through the rows of questioning eyes watching me. My legs nearly give way as I step from the building’s sterile air conditioning out into the heat of a new day. I breathe deep—dig that nasty smell oozing from my pores, snuffing out the fresh summer jasmine.
I walk through the parking lot and to my car, the blood-smeared seats covered with beach towels and already frying pan hot. My stomach gurgles. I open the door and heave up yellow bile. I put my head between my knees and mutter the one word which seems to makes sense: “Hold.”
Don’t fall apart.
Don’t lose your fucking mind.
Hold it together.
Ten minutes go by before my hand is steady enough to put the key in the ignition and drive away.
*****
Hindsight and conscience rips and tears at me. Not them, never them. Her. I’d given Audrey the worst years of my life and those same years are what I now have left to live with. I try to tell myself that if she’d left me on her own, because of the man I was, I wouldn’t feel this way because at least she would still be alive. She would have moved on and eventually, I’d have done the same.
Nothing is a lie if you truly believe it.
Only I couldn’t.
*****
Booze and blow, blow and booze. I’d left a running tab with Full Time Freddy and orders to keep product coming until my funds dried up and my credit was gone.
Till there is nothing left.
Drifting. Days turning into weeks of highs and lows, fear and depravation. The phone ringing, me hiding—paranoia at its zenith: It’s Audrey and she knows about my transgressions. The sweet Lord has told her why our lives turned out this way and now she’s angry. She wants to hear the truth from me.
Two weeks in, I rip the phone cord from the wall. It still rings. I chug bourbon. I loop one end of the cord around my neck, the other around a bedpost. Ease into it. Feel that cord go tight around my neck. Feel my head getting light. Feel that badass floating sensation.
Feel that cheap-ass cord go snap!
On my feet and screaming: “Now what, nigga!”
Flip the bed over. Turn the chest of drawers into kindling. Beat your head against the
wall until blood’s running in your eyes and down your chin.
Blood blind and raging: “Now what nigga!”
Closet, top shelf. Grab the 9mm, shove it in your eye, pull the trigger—click—click—click. Check the clip and stare in disbelief—what clip?
On my knees, blood dripping on the floor, nothing left. I taste the blood on my lips and mutter to someone I used to know: “Now what nigga?”
Five weeks and fifteen lost pounds later, I hear a knock at the door. Judas window view gives me little Jenny Hughes standing on the concrete landing in a little pink dress and little black shoes over frilly white socks, hands behind her back. The world behind and around her is a radiant summer yellow and hurts my eyes.
I hesitate. I run my sticky tongue over sticky teeth. I haven’t showered or shaved in weeks. The living room is a reeking pigsty. Delivery food boxes filled with moldy food litter the house. Empty bottles of booze stand like desert sentinels watching over the drifts of coke residue on the coffee table. Curtains pulled. Room dark. The a/c is turned down to seventy, countering the subtropical heat outside and I’m freezing.
Hand on the doorknob. My teeth rattle with the cocaine shakes as a voice inside my head begs: “Please don’t do it!”
Betraying myself—you crazy looped-up nigger.
I open the door and Jenny walks in with a large manila envelope appearing in her hand. She turns on a living room lamp I haven’t used for a year.
Pushing a pizza box aside, I sit on the couch and wrap myself in a blanket. Jenny’s picked a picture off the coffee table. Two faces I don’t recognize anymore are smiling against the backdrop of a blue clear sky. She puts the picture down, looks at the hole in the wall and the mess on the floor I never bothered to clean up. Then she turns to me, speaking in a voice as timid as she is small.
“I wanted to die, you know. All that time. I’m scared most all the time, even now, Mr. James. I still don’t sleep so well and my stomach always hurts...but I know...” She stops and bunches her eyebrows and tightens her lips as if she’s searching for a word or an answer and hoping maybe I can provide one or the other.
And then it starts, her tiny hands gripping her pink dress. She’s pleading with me.
“Hmmmmmmmmmm.”
She can’t stop and she’s looking at me and I’m falling apart at the fucking seams. I want to ask how she knows my name, how she found me and how I can possibly respond to the horror she’s been through and will continue to go through. Only I can’t look at her, can’t talk to her. All I can hear is her throbbing hum. My hands go to my ears and I press down tight.
Her hand falls light on my arm. I push her away until she puts both arms around me and pulls me close and I’m crying like a baby on her shoulder, telling my life’s story to a twelve-year-old girl.
Audrey.
The money.
The bloody reprisal.
All of it.
Twenty minutes go by before I can pull myself together. Jenny’s stopped humming, but doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t tell me everything will be okay.
Before leaving, Jenny hands me the envelope. I follow her to the door and see a car waiting for her. Sergeant Brice at the wheel of a navy blue unmarked. He gives me a wave. I hold up my hand and watch the two of them drive away into a bleached-out horizon.
I open the envelope. A school photo of Jenny. Her dark brown hair in pigtail braids with something passing itself off as a smile drifting across her pale face like clouds moving across the sun. She’s trying to tell me everything is all right, only those baby blue eyes deceive and fail to contain her innocuous lies.
I turn my eyes up to the bright sky and then to the brilliant colors of white blossom oleander and rusty crotons growing in my own and neighboring lawns. The sun is warm on my face.
I put the picture back in its envelope, go inside and lock the door. When once again safe in the darkness of my bedroom, I slip Jenny’s photograph into Audrey’s book and proceed to drink and pray and hate myself into a sweet and bottomless oblivion.
*****
Two months down and the cycle repeats itself. I try to right the wrongs. For myself. For others. I hope life will work out for people like Jenny at least.
I live off my hope.
Exercise has taken the place of hate. No, nothing can fully take the place of that. I try, though. I take long runs and I lift weights and I sweat out the anger. Some of it, anyhow.
I’ve talked hours with my old Sarge over beers and bourbon. Brice confessed how he knew it was me who found the Hughes girl. Said it wasn’t easy. The girl couldn’t give a useful description, save for he was black and tall and had dark wet spots the size of silver dollars on his knees. And he stunk like hell. That was all she remembered. The detectives chalked up her fuzzy memory to post traumatic shock. The girl was safe, the bad guys were dead and the case was put in the back of a random file cabinet somewhere downtown.
Only Brice put the timing of my exit from the force and Jenny’s scant description to work. He knew the whole story that morning I stood in his office. My knees. My car. My fetid smell. But he let it die a fast death on an official level.
A few weeks later he showed my picture to the girl and now the three of us hold a secret bonded in blood.
And against doubts new and old, I still pray to God, Falconer in my hands, Audrey in my hands. My knees will never stop bleeding and the terrazzo floor will always be cold and hard. But I continue waiting, knowing full well that God and Morpheus and booze will never let me have her. I know this.
I’ll live out my days and nights reaching and grabbing for her in a blood red world left untouched evermore by a clean white sun. Audrey, only a few steps away, but never within reach. Her smile. Her clean sweet scent. Her iridescent green eyes and soft brown skin.
Halcyon days are gone forever.
Spinning free.
Luck
by Johnny Shaw
Violence Cortez is not a subtle man. His nickname, neck tattoo, body language, and facial expression all communicate the same thing. The same word. The same danger. Nothing clever or open to misinterpretation for this guy. Violence is violence.
Closer to a yellowjacket than a rattlesnake, Violence has a reputation for his no-quit tenacity, rage-fueled insanity that makes him avoided as much as feared. The kind of erratic personality that makes everyone nervous, that can turn a good night bad. Violence likes to brawl, an avid hobbyist, needing little more than a sideways glance to start round one. If that’s your kind of fun, all the power to you. But most folks would rather have a good time.
Most folks, but not Scrote Henning, Violence’s only friend. Somewhere between a sidekick and a toady, the inseparable duo spend their evenings mining every ounce of havoc from the night and a whiskey bottle.
But when the front door of the Top Hat Saloon swings open and Violence stomps in alone, the last thing the bartender Marco is thinking about is Scrote, figuring he’ll show up soon enough. Marco says a soft prayer that Violence doesn’t aggravate the hangover that he’s been nursing all day. Sometimes all you can do is hope your trailer is standing after the tornado. You can’t run, hide, or fight a force of nature. You can only have enough good luck to survive it.
Marco cracks open a Coors Light, sets it on the bar just as Violence sits, and acts like he’s happy to see the dumb psychopath.
“You seen Scrote? Scrote Henning?” Violence asks.
“There more than one Scrote?”
“Don’t know. Could be. You seen him?”
Marco shakes his head. “Ain’t seen him since when you two were in. What was that? A week, ten days?”
Violence nods, his eyes never leaving Marco’s. “You sure you’re telling me the truth?”
Heat rises to Marco’s face. Having his word challenged is not something he trucks with easily. But looking at Violence—eye twitching, breathing forced—Marco douses the flames with a big splash of What The Fuck Are You Doing?
“Got no reason to lie,” Marco say
s through a strained smile.
“Everyone’s got a reason to lie,” Violence says with his own smile, albeit one that would make a child cry. “Just saying. You’re pals with Scrote, kind of. Maybe he tells you to tell me you ain’t seen him. Like that. You being a friend.”
“We ain’t friends, really. Just a guy I see. A guy who comes in the bar. If you don’t know where he is, I sure as hell don’t.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing. Can’t find him. Ain’t heard from him in days.”
“Maybe something’s wrong?”
“Sure as hell is. Because when I find him, I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.”
*****
Violence Cortez and Scrote Henning leaned against Scrote’s Filipino-blue Toyota pickup in the parking lot of the FastTrip, drinking tall boys and chucking the empties in the truck bed. Neither would go so far as to call it a ritual, but since Violence got back from up north, this was how they spent their Saturday nights. Other than the casinos, there wasn’t much else to do in Indio. And neither man had extra money to gamble.
“Some people just got more luck than others. More good luck. More bad luck. Luck wouldn’t be a word if it weren’t a real thing.” After ten beers, Scrote always leaned toward philosophizing and pontificating. He wasn’t smart, but he had ideas. “We, the two of us, you and me, we’ve always had bad luck. Not our fault none of the things that happened.”
“I don’t buy that shit.” Violence spit on the ground. “I ain’t no puppet, got no choice. I control me and mine. Big difference between bad luck and a fuck-up. Give me a smoke.”
Scrote dug out his pack and handed it to Violence. “Just saying, if I wouldn’t’ve had the bad luck three years ago—Connie coming home early on the one day I was finally able to talk Sinnamon off the pole at Hot Lipps and back to my house, then I’d still be married and a regular dad and all. Like getting struck by lightning. Bad luck. Couldn’t be anything else. I mean, you remember Sinnamon. Not like I had a choice.”