by Paula Cox
One day, I’m sitting in the booth when Chester returns, showing no sign that he remembers reaching through the booth and making my stomach churn with acidic vomit, showing no sign that he remembers ever making my skin crawl with the legs of a thousand spiders. He just sits there, cap pulled low over his ears, shading his face, vest as stained and flabby as ever. “Coffee,” he grunts, and I freeze. Not just that I stand still. I feel as though ice has encased my bones and is holding me in place. The only thing that doesn’t freeze is my mouth, which falls open in disbelief. Disbelief that he would show up so nonchalantly, brazenly asking for a coffee after what he did.
Then I see Chester’s eyes go wide and look over my shoulders.
“Is something wrong?” Kelly asks, using her Friend Radar, as she calls it. She said to me once: “I know whenever one of my girls has a problem, babe. It’s like an alarm bell in my head.” Now, she says, staring down at Chester with all the weight and threat of a lioness: “This is him, isn’t it? This is the man you told me about. Oh, hello, Chester. Yes, Chester, I know what sort of man you are, what sort of little man. Oh, yes, stare at me with those big hateful eyes. Stare! Go on, keep staring at me! Better yet, get out of that car! Get out of that car and I’ll come out and meet you and we’ll see what kind of man you really are! No, I mean it!”
Chester’s cheeks tremble, anger and uncertainty dancing across his features, as he watches Kelly waving her arms and half leaning out of the booth.
“Am I not being clear?” Kelly hisses, leaning so far out of the booth now I hover my hand near her legs, ready to yank her back in. “You molested my friend, Chester, and you’ve returned to the scene of the crime, Chester, and now I’m going to slap you’re redder than your fat ass.” Each time she says his name, she pokes a righteous finger at him.
Chester stares at her for a few moments, and then puts his truck in reverse, backing down the road and then pulling a one-eighty and screeching away.
Kelly moves back into the booth, dusting her hands together like somebody does after a job well done, and then looks down at me, her features softening at once. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. I laugh. The laugh gets louder and turns almost manic, and then Kelly is laughing with me. “You were so angry,” I say, and then burst into teary laughter all over again. I stand up and mime-point a stern finger at the coffee machine, snapping, “Don’t you dare talk to my friend like that, Chester! You are evil, Chester!” Kelly grabs onto my shoulder for support as the laughter whisks us up.
After it passes, both of us dabbing at our eyes with napkins to make sure the tears haven’t ruined our makeup, we sit down at the foldout table, making sure to keep an eye out for customers.
“Seriously, though, are you okay?” she says.
I nod. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
Kelly squints at me. She has this almost magical ability to look past the face you’re presenting and see your true face underneath. It made me uncomfortable at first, but now I welcome it. It’s relieving to have somebody who knows your moods, or at least can guess at them, without you having to come outright and say it. It gets rid of a lot of awkwardness.
“What is it?” Kelly persists. “It’s something. Is it Chester?”
“No, no. It’s—him.”
“Oh—him.”
We both know who him is. I’ve probably mentioned Kade to Kelly twenty or so times, first detailing how we met and our passionate night, and then in passing.
“I guess seeing Chester brought that morning back to me.”
“And the night.” Kelly has a wicked smile on her lips.
“Yes, alright,” I say, rolling my eyes, “and the night.”
“You’re like a princess in a fairy tale,” Kelly says, scribbling something in her notepad. The notepad is full now of our Twin Peaks Comic Book, a collection of characters who drive through the Twin Peaks, with Kelly’s sketches and my captions. “Waiting for your Prince Charming to come into your life once again, to set everything straight, to make sweet, tender love to you.”
We both giggle.
“Oh, no.” Kelly grins like an in-the-know courtesan, both dirty and elegant. “You want something more than that, you sick, depraved girl?”
She slides the pad across to me. It depicts me, boobs and ass enlarged for the purposes of the illustration, leaning out of the Twin Peaks’s booth window with a handkerchief in hand, looking forlornly off into the distance. She hands me the pencil.
“And the caption.”
I don’t have to think. I write: Come back. Just one more time.
For the rest of the morning, we serve customers, giving us little chance to talk further. But the whole time I’m thinking about Kade. Chester—Kade. That was the morning, wasn’t it, when my outlook changed, when I realized I could take control, could go to bed with a man and have the best sex of my life without attaching countless strings. And yet, one string would be enough, just one—just enough to pull him back to the Twin Peaks for one more meeting.
Because Kade has been haunting me this past month. He’s there when I close my eyes and there in the back of my mind and there hovering at the peripheries of my vision. His naked, muscular body, his massive cock, the sensation of him biting on my neck, the feeling of his pectoral muscles pressed hard into my breasts.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in the booth I have to cross my legs just at the thought of him.
I want him, one more time, two more times, three more times, four . . .
Often, I mutter to myself just before sleep takes me, Mom’s shopping channel quiet through the walls: “I want him. I want him. I want him.”
Chapter Nine
Kade
Duster and I stand at the far edge of the Portland docks, next to an abandoned warehouse and on the very edge of the water, which would glisten in the late-afternoon sun if it were not for all the filth running through it making it hard to see the bottom. Duster, who still looks like that blonde-haired little kid to me, stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks to the edge.
“They’re taking their time,” he says.
The men are ranged all around us. Mountain, called Mountain ’cause he’s about the biggest bastard any of us has ever seen. Earl, with his grey hair and his chewing tobacco and his way of looking at you without really looking at you. Glover, Barge, Noname, Fowler, Copeland. All of them in the Tidal Knights leathers, all of them packing pieces, all of them waiting for this Portland shit to be over. A month, we’ve been down here now. One goddamn month and fuck all has been sorted. I hear the impatience in Duster’s voice and it takes me back, all the way back to the trailer park. He’d had the same impatience in his voice back then.
“They’ll be here,” I say, though I’m not so sure. Italians are always a risky bunch, with their rituals and their made-men horseshit, thinking that because America has collectively decided they’re cool and mysterious that they are in fact cool and mysterious. Me, I only care about their guns and business. Business is all that I give a shit about when it comes to men who don’t wear the Tidal Knights leather.
Duster spits into the water and then turns to me. “I don’t like this, Cross.”
I don’t even bother telling Duster to use my first name. We’ve been calling each other Duster and Cross for so long neither of us can remember calling each other anything else.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. “But this is their last chance. We’ll meet. We’ll sort it.”
Duster shrugs and paces over to me, turning and looking out over the water at a cargo-leaden boat drifting out to sea. “Do you remember that book I had?”
“Goddamn, Duster.” I laugh. “You’re always desperate to go down memory lane.”
“Fuck yourself. Do you remember it?”
He’s talking about an old travel book he found almost soaked through with rain in the trailer park. He dried that thing out for days and then made sure anyone who touched it handled it gently like it was some kind of anci
ent document. That’s where he got the name Duster, as far as I can remember, but it might’ve been because he was damn good with bikes, too. I don’t know; it was a long time ago.
“You know I do.”
“That was the shit, man,” Duster says. “I remember when we spent a whole afternoon under one of the trailers just looking at that and thinking about all the places we’d go.”
“Was Portland in the book?” I ask.
Duster grins. “Don’t think so. We didn’t get as far as we planned, Cross.”
“Nah, but we got far enough, I reckon. You’re just getting antsy.”
He spits again. “Damn right I am. The fuck is wrong with these people?” He nods down the dock, about a half-mile, where dockworkers load and unload cargo. “I know we’ve paid them off, but damn, why are we meeting in broad daylight, and why here?”
“Their leader is a man named Manuel,” I say. “Apparently he’s sketchy, maybe ill up here.” I tap the side of my head. “That’s what they tell me, anyway. Doesn’t trust us enough to meet us at night.”
“I remember back in the park when Noah Marsh kept us waiting when we were meant to trade some porno mags with him. Do you remember? Noah Marsh, two years older than us, and we sat around in that junkyard for two hours like goddamn idiots waiting for him to show. When he didn’t, I wanted to leave it. You remember? I wanted to go home but you said, ‘Fuck that,’ and dragged me to his parents’ trailer. He came out . . .”
“Him and three of his pals. Yeah, I remember.”
“And they started in on us, and did you we stand tall, Cross? Did we stand fuckin’ tall?”
“Boss,” Scud mutters.
Scud is the third in command, a lean, taut man who I don’t know too much about except that he gets the job done without question.
We turn and watch as the Italians drive to the waterfront in black tinted-windowed cars, four in total. The cars come to a stop and the Italians step out, dressed as usual in sleek suits with slicked-back hair and not a tattoo in sight, wearing big gold rings and chains, some of them with their shirts open and their chests on display to better show off the chains. Their leader, Manuel, is a wide man who’s always sweating, a bald shiny red head, and thick fingers which constantly worry at each other like ten wriggling worms.
He looks at me, nods, I nod back, and then he waves a hand.
We form a circle, the Tidal Knights one half, the Italians the other. Three Italians carry a crate between them into the middle of the circle.
“Thanks for coming,” Duster says, a little too loudly. He looks Manuel directly in the face. “We’ve been waiting a while, you know?”
I tap Duster on the arm. “They’re here now.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“We are here now. Listen to your boss.” Manuel squints at Duster.
“Sorry, amico, but he’s not my boss.”
“Enough shit,” I say. “Let’s get a look at the merchandise.”
“I will show you,” Manuel says.
He waddles to the crate, waits as one of his men cracks it open with a crowbar, and shoos them away and kneels down next to it. This is an effort for him, involving huffing and clutching at his knees with one hand and holding his other arm at the side for balance. But eventually he’s down near the guns: assault rifles, both SWAT-grade and Middle Eastern; submachine guns; handguns; grenades and flash-bangs and tear-gas; bulletproof vests. An all-you-can-eat buffet for gun nuts.
“Christmas has come early, Cross. Let’s see old Mr. Matthews give us detention now, eh?”
I grin despite myself. He’s right. Christmas really has come early.
Then Manuel starts handling the guns in a way that reminds me of my father, of the way my father would carelessly dance around the trailer with the revolver, waving it here and there, until eventually he waved it at the wrong angle and tripped and pulled the trigger and the top half of his head fell away like a section of rock dislodging from a cliff and tumbling to the land below.
“Maybe you shouldn’t—”
Manuel is as crazy as they say. He looks down the barrel of an AK-47 and his hand strays to the trigger.
I don’t think I’ll ever know if he wanted to do it or if it was an accident. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why his men, who clearly saw how it happened, assumed it was some kind of trick. I don’t think I’ll ever understand any of this shit.
He looks down the barrel of the AK-47 and he pulls the trigger. The bullet enters through his eye and exits through the back of his head. The fat man falls aside like all the bones and tendons and all the shit that holds him together has just been snatched from his body. “Uh,” he mumbles, as blood pours from the bloody eye socket. “Uh, uh, uh.”
And then the Italians are firing on us before anybody can talk any goddamn sense.
And then the Tidal Knights are firing back.
I wrench my pistol from my waistband and open up on them, hitting three men with ten bullets, and then kneeling down in the gravel to reload. Viper’s teeth bite into my side. Or that’s what it feels like. Two snake’s teeth biting down on my side.
“Fucking bastards!” I roar, snapping a clip into the pistol and opening up again, blood seeping through my shirt and into my leather. “Fucking idiots! The goddamn fool shot himself!”
Around two-hundred birds flutter from the eaves of the abandoned warehouse and fill the sky as bullets ricochet off gravel and slap into the water.
The Tidal Knights fire bullet after bullet into the Italians, peppering their cars, until there are more Tidal Knights left than Italians. The remaining Italians climb into their cars and roar away, one of the cars making a thunk-thunk noise as its burst tired grinds against the concrete. I grit my teeth, watching them go, the smell of gun smoke and blood and shit all around me, my ears ringing from the repeated gunfire, my eyes hazy from sweat, stinging.
“Boss,” one of the men mutters.
Someone snaps: “What the fuck was that?”
“Fuckin’ killed himself.”
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, fuck—Duster. What the fuck? Boss. Boss.”
When I see Duster laid out on the floor with bullet holes in his chest, I forget about my own wound. I walk on my knees across blood and spent cartridges and lean over him. He stares up at me blankly. Duster has always had an open face, the sort of face people like. He was always the popular one at school, the one girls giggled over, the one the bullies would leave alone because he could make them laugh. He was always the emotional one, the one who said if he thought something wasn’t fair. He was always the one who wasn’t scared to talk about the past, even though the past held bad shit for both of us.
He grins at me; blood seeps between his teeth, staining his gums, and drips down his cheeks.
“Sorry—Cross.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “I guess—I ain’t so—handy—after all.” He laughs, a nasty ragged sound.
I look around at the men, willing somebody to do something, but then I see it in their faces. They know death. We all know death. And Duster’s dying.
We gather round, looking down at him as he breathes his last.
When it’s over, I stand up, gritting my teeth at the tugging pain in my side, and limp to where Manuel’s fat dead body rests.
“Fuckin’ bastard,” I hiss, kicking the corpse. “Fuckin’ idiot.” I kick him again and again until the blood turns my leather crimson.
“We have to go, Boss,” Scud says. “We need to get to a safehouse. Rest up.”
“I know,” I say. “Pick Duster up. We’re not leavin’ him here.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Scud lays Duster over the back of his bike. I climb onto the back of Mountain’s bike, riding secondary because of this damned wound, head feeling like it’s about to just slide clean from my shoulders, and the Tidal Knights ride out.
Chapter Ten
Kade
For the next few days, I lie in bed as a Wave-hired doctor sorts out my bullet wound.
I have Duster cremated, something he mentioned to me back in the day, and his ashes are stowed in an urn which sits on the TV stand of this nowhere motel room. A motel room like any other, but we’ve hired the whole damn place out as a Tidal Knights hideout, every room occupied with Tidal Knights soldiers and the elder lot and then the women, here to care for their men, or else here to care for whatever men need them.
That’s what I need, I reckon. A woman. A woman to make me forget. I think of Lana just as much as I think of Duster, maybe even more. It’s strange, ’cause I knew her for less than a day, but Lana is probably the person I’ve felt closest to, barring Duster. I knew Duster all my life, and yet Lana comes damn close. How the fuck does that work? Yeah, I need a woman, something to make me forget about the way the blood turned Duster’s smiling teeth red.