by Andrew Post
Beth pushed her glass of clear something or other, with lemon, into my hands. We fumbled with it for a while, spilled a little, and began creating a scene. People around us were looking.
“Either you take this thing or I’m letting it go, and we’ll really have everyone’s attention,” Beth teased.
I took the glass in two hands, rested it on my knee. It was cold on my fingers, but I didn’t feel the dark ring it was making on my jeans.
“Come on, then. Can’t exactly get a buzz staring at it.”
On the rig, Mom and Dad had found a few bottles of wine, which they drank from only on special occasions. Birthdays, anniversaries. I honestly never had any interest. On the trendoid’s hard drive, I’d found Leaving Las Vegas, which didn’t make drinking look like a good time at all.
“Take a sip,” Beth said, raising her palms. “Come on, bottoms up. Up-up. Up-up.”
“Fine,” I said, just so she’d shut up. The scent immediately reminded me of Darya’s nail polish remover. I’d later learn it was gin, straight, with a twist.
As soon as I took that first swallow—cringed, screwed up my face—a cheer went out. Beth threw both hands above her head like she’d just crossed a finish line. I made her take the glass back.
She left me alone for a while but returned to drop off a glass of my own. “It’s not gin,” she promised. “White wine spritzer. Perfect for a lightweight like you.”
“Please, please take it back,” I said, holding it out to her.
But she left me there and backed up her wheelchair, shaking her head and smiling. “There’s no crime greater in the Siren House than wasting booze. Now that it’s in your possession, it’s your job to tend to it.”
I drank it in tiny sips. If anything, it made the smokiness of the place more tolerable.
I people watched for a while and forced myself to smile and wave if I accidentally made eye contact. Everyone was nice and smiled and waved back. Someone must’ve turned on the heat. I struggled my sweater off.
I caught the gaze of a guy at a table along the far wall. He had choppy dark hair, wide-set brown eyes, and a neatly manicured goatee. Took me a second to realize it was the guy from the boardwalk when I’d first come to Duluth earlier that week, the one who was wearing a scarf despite the heat.
This time he wore a stocking cap, pushed way to the back of his skull. How it hung there is beyond me, but I think bobby pins were somehow involved. Dark denim jacket over a V-neck shirt, skinny jeans, new-looking work boots. It was as if he’d come to the Siren House with the intention of clashing.
Everyone here was in full trendoid apparel: frosted tips, insanely baggy jeans with back pockets big enough to smuggle koalas, red baseball caps worn backward.
I smiled at stocking-cap guy, and he returned it. Big, toothy. I waved, but he didn’t return it. He just kept smiling, staring at me. A friendly smile, sure, but somehow distant, as if he were watching me from behind a one-way mirror or something. We lost sight of each other a few times when someone walked or danced into our eye line, but each time I caught him again, he was still gazing at me as casually as one would watch a fish in a tank. I looked away to be courteous, but when I glimpsed him again, he was still looking at me, smiling that frozen smile. I gave him a few minutes to fix his paralyzed mug, took another sip of my spritzer, and when I looked back, his table was empty. All that remained was his drained highball, the only evidence he’d existed at all.
When the place quieted down, my attention was stolen away from searching for the mystery man. At the head of the room, a man with gray-streaked hair, reading glasses, and a baby-blue waistcoat climbed up to stand on the banquet table.
“Tonight, I retire from my position as a writer for the Siren House. It’s with a heavy heart, but I’m afraid I must. My daughter-in-law is pregnant, which is a blessing, and my son needs help on his ranch. That is, if you all want to continue having cheeseburgers now and again! But I leave knowing we told some tremendous stories, put on a lot of great shows, and had a wonderful time. I love you all.”
Big applause. Even though I’d never met the man, I clapped as well. This get-together hadn’t been a retirement party for him, but he’d chosen it as a venue to announce it. Tears brightened his eyes, and he accepted a lot of hugs the moment he dropped down off the table. The party resumed.
Later on, I met Ricky, the head cook of the Siren House. His forest of dreadlocks were wrangled under a complicated series of rubber bands, bandannas, and string. “New to town?” he asked with a beautiful smile.
“Nope.”
“Going to be working for Thadius?”
“Yes.”
“Know how to cook?”
“I don’t.”
“I’ll teach you. I’m looking for a new cook.”
I pointed at my crutches. “Will these be a problem?”
“No. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” He kissed my hand and went to mingle.
It was a pleasure to watch him walk away. Did I just have a boom, romance?
I raised my glass to my lips to hide my admiration, and not a drop fell out. My spritzer was empty. Beth swooped in, put a replacement in my hands, and wheeled off. This time, I didn’t give her nearly as much of a fight.
I’d nearly died the day before. The scare still swirled around me, and I was glad to raise a glass at it, give death the finger. I may’ve actually done this, by myself at the corner of the bar.
“Having a good time?” With all the noise and confusion, it took me a second to find the voice’s owner. I was hoping for Ricky or Scarf Boy, but it was the guy with the chin tuft.
I turned away from him. I had plenty to say—piss off or take a hike—but for whatever reason, my mouth wasn’t working.
The second wine spritzer had pulled a vanishing act. Also like a magic trick, Chin Tuft appeared on my other side.
Everything was swirly, loud.
“These yours?” he asked, picking up my crutches from the bar. He put them under his arms, hovering on them, his face way too close to mine.
I pulled myself back—carefully, so as not to fall off the stool. “Please put them back.”
“So they are yours. What happened?” And before I could even tell him it’s rude to ask such personal questions to strangers, it was like he forgot he’d even asked. “My friend, back in the day, used to do flips on the swings. He did this move once where he went upside down and got his legs twisted up in the chains—broke both his legs at once. Man, I’d never heard a sound like that before. It was like a gunshot. You old enough to remember life before the A, back when it was all mowed yards and puppy dogs and trips to McDonald’s?”
“Yeah,” I said flatly. “I remember just fine. I was a kid, but yeah.”
“That’d make you . . . what, twenty? Nineteen?”
“I’m twenty-one,” I said. Not sure why. I didn’t want to continue talking with this jerk, but my mouth seemed degummed now. Couldn’t stop.
“Still, you’re just a pup. Just a little puppy dog. Puppy Girl. That’s what I’ll call you, I think.” He hovered there, rocking back and forth on my crutches. I imagined the pads would smell like BO now.
So this is what it was like to be hit on by an asshole. Fantastic. What a great time. I’m learning so much.
I turned away from him on the stool and nearly fell out of the thing.
He caught me, laughing as he did, and tipped me back onto the stool—and copped a feel while he was doing it, roughly crushing my breast in his hand.
I slapped his hand away and gave him a shove that I hoped would launch him across the room but barely budged him.
He giggled. “Sorry, sorry, Puppy Girl, ’twas an accident. Swears.”
“All right,” I said, patience bested. “Here’s the deal: just leave me alone.”
“Say, is it just your legs that’re hurt or is everything south of the border—?”
“Fuck off,” I said. I’d found my words, the right ones and in the right time, to
my satisfaction. I think I smirked.
“Maybe I’d like to fuck you off,” he said, in this moist whisper right in my ear.
I gave him a shove, snatched my crutches back from him, got them under my armpits, and clack-thumped through a space in the crowd. The bathrooms were around the far end of the bar. I accidentally went into the kitchen, backed out, and found the women’s restroom hoping Chin Tuft had enough brains to not to follow me in there.
I saw myself in the mirror and nearly gasped. Bloodshot eyes, kind of pale everywhere except for my cheeks and nose. My hair was all messed up too. I tried splashing some water on my face. Now I just looked bloodshot, pale, and wet.
The bathroom door opened and closed, but I was too preoccupied with trying to scrape my humanness back together to look up. When I heard the door lock, I angled myself around to see. Chin Tuft had come in and was pushing open each stall door, as if he couldn’t see me standing there at the sinks, leaning against the counter and holding one crutch.
It hit me. He wasn’t looking for me. He knew right where I was. He was checking to see if there was anyone else in there.
While he shoved open the final stall, I got my crutches under my arms and tried to get to the door. He caught up to me and, with one sweep of his leg, knocked my right crutch out from under me. I tried throwing the other one forward, but it was no use. Gravity yanked me to the tiled floor.
“Whoa, where you off to, Puppy Girl? I just got here.”
“Let me go.”
Someone knocked on the door.
Chin Tuft looked down at me, his hands working at his belt buckle. “Tell them it’ll be one minute.”
“No.”
He bent down, took a handful of my hair. “Tell them it’ll be one minute.”
My scream was all it took for the person on the opposite side of the door to summon a set of keys. Chin Tuft heard it and, quickly fastening his belt, fumbled to get me to my feet. He was going to play it off as if it were no big thing.
I wanted it to be Thadius charging in, maybe with his harvester rifle. In an ugly little daydream, as the switch on the deadbolt fumbled side to side, I imagined Chin Tuft getting harvested—his molecules rearranged.
The door opened, and Beth rolled in, shoving the door aside, leaving the keys dangling where they were.
Chin Tuft backed away, leaving me on the floor, no longer attempting to feign he was helping me up. It was then that I noticed he had actually undone a few of the straps that kept my legs together. The top button of my jeans was also unfastened.
“Back off,” Beth snarled, pumping her arms to propel herself closer. She reached down to give me a hand. I accepted. While pulling me up so I could get ahold of the counter’s edge, Beth’s gaze never left Chin Tuft, trapped in the corner of the bathroom.
“Your mother survive the A?” she asked him.
“What?”
“Your mom. Is she alive?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s alive. What’s—?”
“You’re going home tonight to tell her what you tried to do to this girl. You can come back to the Siren House only when you have a permission slip saying she thinks you’re okay to be around women again.”
He sneered. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Beth looked at me to make sure I was able to stand on my own, unassisted. She needed her hands free. To draw her gun.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Chin Tuft said, presenting his hands and falling into the last stall. I guess he was drunk enough to think he’d be safe in there with the door closed.
Beth moved forward, shoving one palm against the door.
Chin Tuft teetered on top of the toilet.
She wheeled into the stall’s opening, pushed the gun against the tip of his nose. “Scratch all that. If your momma said you were Jesus two-point-oh, I wouldn’t allow you back in here.” She paused.
From where I stood, she seemed to be studying his face, but it was hard to tell. I could see only her blue hair, an arm reaching out, the gun barrel flattening Chin Tuft’s nose, and the terror in his watering eyes.
“Beth,” I said.
“I’m going to lower this,” she said to him with horrifying evenness. “You’re going to leave. And you will never come back, understand? If I ever see you in here again, I’ll rip your face off, ball it up, and stuff it right up your dickhole. Get it?”
He couldn’t really nod with the gun pinning his head to the wall. “Okay, okay. Whatever you want.”
She lowered the gun and backed out of the stall to give him room.
He bolted past us, without even looking at me, and was gone. The bathroom door shut itself behind him.
Beth stashed the gun deep inside the wheelchair, somewhere in the frills of her cupcake dress. It reminded me of the file-in-the-cake bit from the cartoons. “You okay?” she asked.
Reality flooded me. My hands were shaking. “Not exactly.” Even though my crutches were under me, I had to find the wall to stay upright. “Holy crap,” I stammered. “Holy crap.”
“You need to be careful. The Smocks act like the cops, but they don’t watch out for shit like this. All they care about are the goddamn scratchers. You got to look after yourself.”
I wanted to accuse her of pushing drinks on me, then leaving me alone. I wanted to tell her that I’d never been to a thing like this, this kind of party. I was used to standing around the gym, back to the wall, drinking warm pop and watching other people dance. But she was right; I had to look out for myself. I wasn’t anyone’s responsibility; I was my own. I wasn’t on a man-made island out in the middle of the lake anymore. I was here, around people. And not all of them were good.
I finally looked at her. Her arms casually draped her wheelchair’s armrests, and she sat forward, aiming those icy blue eyes right at me as if she wanted this speech of hers to be remembered verbatim. It would, whether I wanted it to be or not.
“Thank you,” I told her. “Seriously.”
Her face softened. “If you gotta take a leak, I’ll come with you. Just make a hand gesture. Something like this or this or something. Our little code, all right? Assholes think just because you can’t walk means you’re fair game—the wounded gazelle or some shit. You got a gun?”
I nodded.
“I assume since you didn’t use it, you don’t have it with you tonight. Bring it next time. Gazelles have horns—keep ’em sharp.” She straightened her hair, looking past me into the mirror. “Drinks on me the rest of the night. I’d say you earned it.”
“I think I’m done, actually.”
She stopped eyeing herself in the mirror, caught my reflection. “That’s fine. Just . . . don’t say anything, okay? About my piece?”
“Sure,” I said and thanked her again.
Track 14
BEGGARS & THIEVES
I drank entirely too much that night. For someone who never drank before in her life, any more than a sip was probably too much. I didn’t want to bother Beth, so I went behind the bar and started getting glasses of water for myself. Apparently I was going to be an employee from that day forward, so I thought I might as well get used to waiting on myself. I remained back there for a while, wanting to go home because—of all things—I missed the taste of the water on the rig. Sure, it was a weird color and tasted like lake, but it’s what I was used to. But I wanted to see Thadius first. Safe behind the sturdy oak bar, I scanned the thinning crowd for him. I hadn’t talked with him all night.
The jukebox began playing songs with a not-so-subtle you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here message. When that didn’t get the few remaining people to move, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” began. Only then did they gather their things and stumble toward the door.
Ricky emerged from the kitchen and went around picking up trash and flipping chairs onto the tables. No sign of Scarf Boy.
Thadius found me after escorting a young couple out the door, the actors who played Namaste and Jeff. Apparently, their romance carried o
n offstage.
“I’m going home,” I told Thadius as soon as he’d walked up.
He looked disappointed. I remembered he had something big to tell me, but I really didn’t care to hear about it now. Between nearly getting harvested and assaulted, I was through with this week.
Thadius placed his hands on the bar, fanning out the fingers, and I tried my best, in my still-semidrunken stupor, not to stare at his nub thumb. “If that’s what you want to do. I was thinking you’d probably crash here tonight.”
“I would’ve just left, but I wanted to see you to tell you I was leaving.”
“You’re more than welcome to stay, kiddo. There’s plenty of places to sleep around here.” He pointed upstairs, at the kitchen, the auditorium. “Any place you find to lie down, consider it yours. Some beds upstairs too. We all do it.”
“Thank you, really, but I just want to get home.”
He put his keys on the counter, his wallet. He rubbed his hip on that side, grinding his knuckles into the muscle. He seemed like he was about to complain about hip pains and aches that came with aging, then, maybe, remembered who he was talking to. I’d gladly take whatever aches dished out to me, if it meant standing without two pieces of metal.
“Can you write?” he asked, grave. “Because I’m sure you saw we’re down a writer. We’ll need another. I mean, I already know you can write, but—” He winced. It seemed like a deliberately slip this time—the others, I can’t say, but this time, it was like he wanted to spark this conversation and have it be my idea.
I took the bait, if that’s what it was. “About that . . . How do you know so much about me?” The booze in my blood made me bold. I didn’t care who was still in the lobby bar with us, but he sure seemed to.
He released the keys. “Never mind. Sorry. I guess I imbibed a bit too much tonight. Either way, drum up some ideas, take some notes. We need help plotting Namaste & Jeff.” He rapped a knuckle on the bar, strolled off. “Gotta tend to something before I lock up. I’ll see you tomorrow.”