THUGLIT Issue Sixteen

by Devon Robbins

  Plans have changed, and this guy, Jeremiah, watches the negotiation from the living room. Laid out on the coffee table are our new identities. Driver's licenses and birth certificates. Social security cards with frayed creases for Jacob McKinnon and Rachel Dotter. Jeremiah checks his watch, swings the car keys around his finger and catches them in his fist. "Five minutes. And she better get her shit together," he says, and steps out the sliding glass door to the balcony.

  "Everything you wanted is in the palm of your hand," I tell her, sliding my fingertips down the door, as if combing them through her hair. "And you're letting it slip through your fingers."

  Her crying turns to a whimper, then she goes silent. Her voice comes soft and small. Words barely reaching under the door. "I want to go home."

  "It's too late to change your mind." I press my lips to the door, pleading. "The damage is done."

  Jeremiah steps into the hallway. "Time's up, guy."

  I push myself away from the door and breathe deep. And I'm waiting for the gun to go off. A clean shot under her chin. The last image of her stepping into the bathroom burned to the back of my eyelids. Pale skin flushed pink. Hollow black trails left by tears on her cheekbones.

  The lock clicks and Marcy eases the door open. I take the pistol from her and slide it in my waistband. Throw the duffel bag full of crisp, hundred-dollar bills over my shoulder.

  "Don't worry." I kiss her forehead, as if a child, and take her hand. "It'll all be over soon."

  "No," she says, wiping her tears on the back of her hand. "It won't."

  The moon is the light of a police helicopter swaying in the distance. The sky, a filthy brown blanket of smoke from burning buildings and charred bodies. We follow Jeremiah to a maroon BMW parked on the street. He opens the back door and waves us inside, the whole time staying silent.

  The urgency that Jeremiah forced upstairs doesn't seem to apply here. He drives casual as a thief, leaned back in his seat with one hand on the wheel. Marcy trembles on the seat beside me, leaning into my chest, passing her tremors through me. Her grip strangles my fingers. Bunching them together, ready to break them. As if my hand were constructed with the fragile bones of a baby bird.

  Marcy cries silently as we weave through the side streets. Her tears, warm, soaking into the fabric of my t-shirt. Distant sirens fill the air. I stare out the tinted window at the ruthless habitat around us. Somewhere out there, a child is going to bed hungry. A family is losing their home. A daughter is dancing away her dignity for a stack of singles and a mother is waiting for her son's body to come back from the war.

  Emergency vehicles fly through the intersection ahead in both directions. Ambulances and Gold Cross SUV's. Jeremiah lurches through the green light and enters the freeway. The interstate swings wide around the edge of the city, showing the damage from a bird's-eye view.

  Two hundred and seventeen dead. Another six hundred wounded.

  Red and purple lights dance around the base of the Monroe Federal building. Smoke flowing from the top as if a giant black finger snuffing out the stars. The structure itself is missing its face. Seventeen floors of insides burning together, falling to the earth. Police and news helicopters fight for airspace, weaving through the chemical smoke.

  Jeremiah's cold dead eyes watch me in the rearview. His cheeks raise under his eyes and I can't see it, but he's smiling at me. I ask him where he's taking us and get no response. A disconnect of eye contact. A cold shoulder. And we glide out into the darkness. Away from the bright lights into the dead desert night.

  April 1997

  "We should go to Barcelona," Marcy says. She sits on the dusty table against the back wall with the legs of her jeans choked up around her calf muscles.

  "Barcelona?"

  "Yeah," she says, beating a bottle of shock blue nail polish against her palm. "Get some culture."

  "Why not Paris, or Australia?"

  "I don't know. I just like the way the name feels in my mouth." She pulls her knee to her chest and brushes the paint onto her toes with slow, deliberate strokes. "Bar-ce-lona," she says, to herself, adopting a Spanish accent.

  I clean the last of the crystals from the angel hair filter and place them in the pan. Slide the pan onto the table next to Marcy's pretty blue toes. Stacked in the corner are bags full of empty bottles of ammonia and formaldehyde. Empty containers of nitric acid and an assortment of glasswares, all of them cleaned thoroughly.

  Marcy looks over at the pan of crude crystalline solids. "What would you do if the cops came in here?"

  "They won't."

  "But what if they did?"

  "I guess we'd be going on permanent vacation."

  "Doesn't it scare you?"

  "I try not to think about it."

  I kiss her forehead and begin washing the final batch. Dissolving the crystals with acetone in a pan of warm water. Pack the pan in ice and filter the reformed crystals. After the mixture is boiled down and cleaned, I weigh the final yield. Two hundred and thirteen grams of RDX explosives. Ready to be plasticized.

  "What does that make?"

  "Just over two hundred pounds."

  "That's it, right? We're done?"

  "That's it."

  We leave the package four miles south of Deer Creek. Inside a sun-rotted five-gallon bucket, halfway buried in the dirt a hundred yards off the road. We take the long way home. Marcy sifts through the static to find a radio station. She lights a cigarette and hangs her foot out the window. Her blue toes flexing back and forth and she exhales streams of menthol smoke. "You ever wonder where all that stuff is going?"

  "No."

  "Don't you feel, like, that it's morally wrong?"

  My eyes move to the rearview, back to the road. "Ethics don't get you anywhere."

  "Okay."

  "So, if some people robbed a bank and were going around handing out hundred-dollar bills, you wouldn't take one?"

  "Sure, I would."

  "Well isn't that morally wrong?"

  "How so?"

  "It's not yours. And why are we even having this conversation?"

  "Just a thought." Marcy flips her cigarette out the window, pulls her sunglasses over her eyes and stares through the windshield. "I bet Portugal is nice."

  September 1997

  4:10 A.M.

  The car stops and the transfer of momentum pushes my eyes open. My body is stiff from passing in and out of consciousness, hard as I tried not to. Headlights burn through the windshield, as if looking at the sun, split in half. Jeremiah pulls the keys from the ignition and steps out of the car. His figure silhouetted as he passes through the beams of light.

  I nudge Marcy's shoulder. Push her head away from my chest. She presses her fingers into her swollen eyelids, asks where we are.

  "It's bad, Marcy."

  "What do you mean?" Her voice is panicked. "What's going on?"

  "I don't know."

  I pull the pistol from the front of my pants and Marcy falls apart. I ease the slide back, holding it to a frail bit of light to make sure it's loaded, and stuff it back in my pants. She tells me she's scared, reiterating how I told her that we would be okay.

  "If I tell you to run, you need to run."

  "I don't want to," she says, crying again. "I don't want this."

  I stare straight-faced through the windshield, knowing that whoever is in the car in front of us is watching. "You've got to fucking pull yourself together." I clench my teeth to keep my voice down.

  I kiss her cheek and refrain from licking her tears from my lips. Jeremiah's silhouette passes through the headlights again. He peers through the window as he passes. He opens the trunk and I take four bundles of bills from the duffel bag and stuff them into Marcy's hoodie pocket. She's unresponsive.

  "You're going to have to run, Marcy." I tell her, holding her cheeks in my palms. "Run as fast as you can and don't turn back."

  The trunk closes and Marcy's door opens. Jeremiah dips his head down, making eye contact. "Get out." He steps ba
ck to make room, the headlights in front of us reflecting off the pistol in his hand. Marcy slides out the door and Jeremiah puts his hand out, blocking me. "Just her."

  He goes to close the door and I put my foot to the ground, letting my shin take the blow. The door bounces back open and Jeremiah grabs it with both hands. I suck my leg inside before it's crushed and Marcy is already running.

  Jeremiah fires a single shot. Misses. The headlights shining through the windshield swing right as the SUV pulls away. I yank the door handle and I'm locked inside. Marcy runs across the barren desert sand with the SUV's headlights illuminating her path. Jeremiah rips the door open again and this time I have the pistol ready. He reaches in pistol first and I scramble away from him, flattening my back against the far door.

  Bright white flash. The percussion expands and rushes back to its origin. Both of my ears pop, and I've gone deaf. In the time it takes for the spent casing to bounce off the back window and land in my lap, the bullet blows through Jeremiah's cheeks and carries on through the atmosphere.

  He goes down. Like he should. Jeremiah's teeth are jagged bits of crushed pearl, clinging on to the edge of his blown-out cheek. I take the keys from his jacket pocket. And he's saying something, the words lost in a harsh mix of bloody vowels.

  The SUV's brake lights paint the air the color of wilted roses. Three strobes of white light flicker, as if tiny strikes of lightning. Each white flash has its own dull pop attached to it.

  There is an electric charge pulsing through my veins, forcing my hands to shake. Rattling my bones. I jam the key in the ignition. Shift into drive. And the rear wheels throw buckets full of sand over Jeremiah's body as I follow the dirt road wherever it is that it will take me.

  August 1998

  "I'll see you in the morning, Jake." Terry says. He slips me a fifty and nurses the blister on his palm. "Appreciate you helping an old man out like you do."

  I give him a smile and a nod. "Thanks for taking a chance on me."

  The old man shifts into gear and the rusted Ford rumbles up the hill to the farmhouse. I stand there in the dust a moment—watching the road, wondering if today is the day they'll find me—and carry my six-pack up the steps of the Sheepherder's cabin.

  Pop the top on one of the beers and peel my shirt off. I sit down at the table and kick my boots to the floor. The back of my sock is spotted with blood from the raw spot on my ankle. I click the radio on and stare out the window at the old man's spread of land he has worked his whole life for.

  Marcy always wanted a place like this. A little chunk of nature to call your own. It's so quiet out here, away from the city. Lonely quiet.

  "Mr. Jones" comes through the speakers and I tap my finger against the can in my hand, following the chord changes. I like to think she got away too. That she's wandering around Barcelona, having the time of her life.

  I close my eyes and I can see her dancing barefoot in the street, her hair shaking side to side in wild black wisps. Her skin smells of vanilla and coconut. And she's always smiling. Her voice crossing the ocean as she laughs and spins in circles.

  The sun sinks into the hillside. Taking its warmth with it. I drop the last can on the table and press my palms into my eyes. Then I kneel down in front of the wood stove, scoop out two hundred thousand dollars worth of ashes.

  The stack of kindling takes. And I watch the tiny flames dance a flamenco number inside the iron box, thinking about Marcy, and everything that went wrong. The flames crackle and the pile topples over, because nothing beautiful lasts forever.

  The Beard

  by Ed Kurtz

  Seeing Larry Stockland at Discovery that night froze me stiff, mid-hip-thrust, somewhere near the middle of the dance floor. The vapid twink I'd been fumbling over kept gyrating, something green in his glass which he somehow managed not to spill. He hadn't noticed that I'd stopped. I couldn't remember his name, only the bump we'd shared in the men's room, scooped out of a vial with a car key—some for him, some for me. Keys rattled in every stall. They always did at Discovery.

  Stockland was at the bar, hunched over a sweating brown bottle, which meant he specifically refused a glass. He wasn't talking to anyone, and no one seemed particularly interested in talking to him. His eyes trained on the bottle, the house music thumping, his top button undone, but his tie still as tight around his throat as ever. Larry fucking Stockland. I couldn't believe it.

  By the time the music changed, so had the guys on the dance floor. I half-shrugged, unable to care less when I realized my twink had done a vanishing act—thinking something along the lines of dime-a-dozen as I wormed my way closer to the bar. I raised an anticipatory finger to Jules, who was making a margarita, shirtless. Jules never wore a shirt. The way he was put together, I vaguely hoped he never did. He sure as shit didn't have to.

  Jules offered me a non-committal nod, but went to work on my usual sidecar anyway as I sidled up to the bar far enough away from Stockland to keep an eye on him but remain unseen.

  "On my tab," I said when Jules set the drink down. "What's his deal?" I stabbed a thumb in the general direction of Larry Stockland.

  Jules shrugged. "Comes in sometimes. Usually stays at the bar. Doesn't talk much."

  "Usually?"

  "Left with a guy the other night. Wednesday, I think? I dunno. Younger guy, think his name is Mark. Or Matt. Shit, I dunno. Why?"

  "I just know him, that's all."

  "Yeah?" He said it like he didn't really care at all, which I knew he didn't.

  "I reckon his wife doesn't know he comes to a joint like this," I said.

  Jules laughed.

  "They never do," he said.

  He'd seen it all; nothing fazed Jules. Discovery may have been one of Little Rock's only two gay bars, but it was the secrecy—the old school, backwards-as-hell, in-the-closet shame of it all for guys like Stockland that tended to make the place wilder than you'd imagine. Guys like Stockland, but apparently not Stockland himself. Seemed he was fairly low-key, at least according to Jules, and Jules knew everything that went on in there. Including the fact that a married, otherwise presumably straight, definitely conservative attorney had left a queer nightclub with a younger man inside the last week. I could have danced a jig.

  "Thanks, Jules," I said, pushing off from the bar like an Olympic swimmer, my drink in hand.

  I took the sidecar down in three gulps en route to the door, handed the empty glass to a bouncer named Francis, and went out to the parking lot. Where I waited.

  He took forever. I went through half a pack of Salems before closing time, when he emerged from the club with his head down and a blond close by—my dance floor twink. I wondered if he shared his nose candy with Stockland, too? Did it matter? Another hit for the list wouldn't hurt, but what I had was more than enough. Stockland was going down, I figured, and hard. I fished the cell out of my jacket pocket and readied the camera as the two of them veered right, crossing the lot to the slots in between Discovery and the lousy Tex-Mex place that opened up the previous winter. Creeping between the parked cars, I followed.

  They slowed to a stop in front of a vintage Vette, cherry red with gleaming chrome, where Stockland lunged at the twink for a hungry kiss. The blond accepted it, tongue and all, with obvious resignation—though if the lawyer noticed, he didn't seem to mind. I made sure the flash was off and snapped half a dozen pictures in rapid succession. None of them came out worth a shit. The flash went back on. I held my breath, leaped out in front of them, and bathed them in strobing white light for another nine shots. These were solid, if not particularly artful and a bit on the blurry side. The point was that they showed what I wanted them to show.

  The twink cringed from the flashes. Larry Stockland bellowed, "What the fuck?"

  I gave a limp-wristed salute to a fellow fruit and beat feet. My retreat was made in an '86 Subaru hatchback, hardly a classic Corvette, but something told me that car was going to be property of the erstwhile Mrs. Stockland in no time at all. I couldn't help
but giggle all the way home, despite losing my "date" to a piece of dogshit like Larry.

  My sister was no saint, but she was a good mom. Technically, I suppose, she remained a mother even when the State of Arkansas took her babies from her and dropped them into the full custody of a violent sociopath. She'd divorced said sociopath almost as soon as she was released from another hospital stay—another stay due to the son of a bitch's fists, feet, alcoholism, and patent psychosis. But she wasn't allowed any contact with her kids whatsoever, by court order, until they turned eighteen. The eldest was still four years away from that point, the youngest seven. Anissa's court-appointed attorney was a fucking joke.

  Her ex landed Larry Stockland.

  The ex beat my sister so badly she'd been hospitalized seven times. But Anissa? Anissa smoked grass sometimes, admitted to briefly having a live-in girlfriend in college, and liked to roleplay in the sack. Armed with that, Stockland turned her into a dangerously unstable pervert who couldn't prove any of her injuries came from her husband. An elderly, conservative judge thought that made perfect sense. She was relieved of her duties as a parent like she was being demoted from the counter to the drive-thru at Andy's.

  Her next hospital stay resulted from the colossal Vicodin and OxyContin cocktail she swallowed down first chance she got, which happened to be the day of the ruling. This time she wasn't released, on account of there being a morgue in the same building where she died.

  Good old Arkansas.

  I emailed the photos to myself as soon as I got home that night. Then I enjoyed a celebratory cran and vodka, over which I emailed the very same photos to the Gazette, the Post, and even the Arkansas Free Press. Subject line: "Attorney Larry Stockland loves cock."

  Fuck it. I was piss drunk.

  She showed up at my apartment two days later, around eleven in the morning, which meant I was dead asleep on the sofa when she began battering on the door. I awoke with a start that quickly turned from apprehension to outright irritation, whereupon I shouted, "Fuck off!" And crammed the pillow down over my head.