THUGLIT Issue Eight

by Patti Abbott

  "It's not even my decision to be part of this grift or this game or whatever you're calling it. It's your decision to be part of me. I've given you plenty of outs. Marcel owns—"

  "Shut up about this Marcel guy. Okay, sure, I admit that I'm trying to own a few fake scars. But you've got real ones you won't even claim."

  "Real ones you're just trying to sell to strangers for profit."

  "Why not profit for both of us?"

  *****

  Edmund pays for our meal in change. He claims a bathroom break, but I see him sneak to the parking lot, dig through the glove compartment of his coat-hangered car, and return with enough change to fill the bill and top with a generous tip. It's sweet, the way he creates an obstacle out of nothing then goes out of his way to circumnavigate the obstacle. I decide to try sneaking 'infomercial pitchman' into conversation.

  "Why are you really interested in me?" I pull another sip from his mulatto coffee. "A couple-thousand-dollar split between two people isn't much."

  "You think we could get more?" He shows those beautiful teeth again.

  "I don't think this is about the money. Or the grift." I measure my next words. "Did you do anything to me, in the hospital…when I was unconscious?" His offense is genuine. I know that reaction. I've used that reaction. "Forget it."

  "No. If we're doing this, we've got to be honest. I don't want you pulling out last minute, maybe actually falling for the target or something after you've embedded yourself. I've seen movies like that. They're fucking pathetic."

  "I just meant that I was unconscious for three days. You're a stranger with a cock. I'm a body without the ability to fight back. I'm sure you've seen those movies too."

  "Are you serious?" He's pulled the name list away completely, hidden now in his pocket.

  "What's your last name, then?" I wait a few beats, enough time for a geriatric couple opposite us to trade phlegmy coughs. "See, I don't even know that. I wind up raped and I've got nothing but your face, your car, and your first name to go to the cops with."

  "You've got my address. My employer."

  He's right. "You know, it's not easy to have breakfast with a stranger who's seen Marcel's scars. It's like knowing a stranger has seen your homemade fuck flick."

  "How the hell is it anything like that?"

  "Think of Marcel as an infomercial pitchman." Not the way I wanted to use it—but Marcel, Edmund—they're merging. "He invents a problem that doesn't exist; me not being desirable enough, then offers a solution to that problem—he, seeing some hidden beauty in me. Logically, it's fucking bullshit, I know. I have a pussy and a heartbeat; I'm desirable at least on some level. But when you're a child, the first person to look at you as something more than a child, that person stays with you. Sometimes only as a memory. Sometimes as a series of stitches and scars."

  "Maybe I should meet this Marcel guy." He leans back into the booth, sleeves a toothpick from a cupful on the table, and uses his lips to toy with it like a prop.

  "That wouldn't be a good idea."

  "Maybe I should find someone else, then." He stabs the toothpick into a napkin like a stand-in cigarette butt, takes a last sip from his mug, writes his phone number on a napkin, then tells me to call when I'm ready to own my scars.

  *****

  I haven't really seen Marcel since the trial twenty years ago. He's vapor. But he's still around. He's living in a sublet basement not far from here. In the phonebook even. I walk by the house sometimes, glancing into the basement windows, but all I've ever seen are shadows. It's ridiculous, but I check the parking lot for unfamiliar vehicles, necklaces and flowers hanging in rearview mirrors. I wonder if he's cut any other girls.

  The waitress without a name badge waits until Edmund is out the door, car gone, black exhaust dissipating, before approaching the table. "Can I get you anything?" she asks. The brunch crowd swells. She's noting needed coffee and water refills in her periphery.

  "Direction," I mutter.

  "Where to?" She's gathering unused plates and silverware from the table.

  "Never mind." The Please Wait to Be Seated area is overflowing. "Just some water to go." When she turns away, I sneak the tip money into my pocket.

  I leave without my water. Edmund was my ride, so I hobble past the Wait to Be's—out to the parking lot, unsure what's next. He's waiting for me, car idling, black exhaust fuming. "I had to make a show of it," Edmund says. "I just wrapped the block once and came back."

  "So you did."

  "I saw you take the tip money." He's found another toothpick. He manipulates it like a conductor's baton.

  "To be fair, I didn't know you were coming back. Consider it alimony."

  "You're the one with all the money-making scars in this relationship."

  The sun has warmed the parking lot. My stitches itch. "We've only known each other for two days. That's not much of a relationship."

  "I'm three days ahead of you, remember. And I'm still here."

  *****

  When I tell Edmund to take me to Marcel's house, his swagger deflates. The toothpick falls limp in his mouth. "You sure," he says multiple times en route. I respond only with directions. At the final "turn left" I tell him to park a few houses away. "You need me to come with you?" he asks.

  "It's the basement of that house," I say, pointing to a white, weathered two-story duplicate of the houses lining this street for blocks. The others maintain their charm with trimmed hedges and proper paintjobs. The overgrown grass and dead shrubbery of Marcel's sublet mock the neighborhood. "Keep the car running," I say. "Just in case."

  "In case what?"

  "He won't be happy to see me."

  "Wait." Edmund reaches across my lap and unlatches the glove compartment. He fishes through auto repair receipts and insurance forms to come away with a butter knife. "Here."

  "What's this for?"

  "Stabbing." He takes back the knife, wipes each side of the barely-serrated blade on his jeans, then returns it to my still-open palm.

  "I'm not stabbing him. Especially not with this."

  "What are you doing, then?"

  I shrug. "Taking a peek."

  "Take the knife," Edmund insists. "You might not know if you're capable of using one, but you know Marcel is."

  I pocket the knife and open the door. Before stepping out I turn back to Edmund and thank him. "Really, what were you thinking when you watched me for three days?"

  Edmund relaxes into his seat. "The blood. I overheard the nurses talking. They brought in so much blood, they said. Bag after bag after bag. I pictured what you'd look like without the blood, all sunken and deflated, like some weird leather cartoon. I couldn't get that image out of my head. Until you woke up. I hadn't thought about that image since then, until just now."

  "That nurse said my injuries were superficial."

  "Compared to what she assumed you had gone through, with all those other scars, yeah, superficial is probably accurate."

  I let a tiny chuckle escape. "For three days you thought about blood?"

  Edmund nods, slow. "Not just the blood, but also who the blood might have come from." He exhales. A dog chases a squirrel up a tree. "It was weird, seeing the new stitches on your body mashed up against the old scars. I wondered how the doctors felt about putting a body back together that's obviously been broken so much in the past. Were they half-assing it so they could move on to someone more worthy? Or did they feel like art restorers, unsure of the significance of the project but fully aware that if it's survived this long it has to be worth keeping around longer. Like cave drawings." He grins, shifts his gaze back to me. "Hurry up so we can start making money."

  I ease the car door shut and walk in the grass like I'm stalking him. Weeds mask the basement windows, grown thicker since my last casual walk-by. I round the house and approach the rear door, Marcel's entrance as evident by the ½ tacked on to the 3423 street address. A rusty mailbox hangs from the concrete stair railing.

  In twenty years, this is th
e closest I've been to Marcel. The dead, hardened, collagenated skin he left me starts to burn, like his proximity itself alters the psychology of my scars. I knock.

  He starts as a dull visage through the glass storm door. He's gained weight and exhales deep, painful breaths as he lumbers his broken body up the basement stairway. The arms materialize, those same arms responsible for my own broken body. When he reaches for the storm door handle, I wince.

  The door opens. "Yeah," he says. That's all he says. He squints against the sun.

  "Marcel Stiegl?" I grip the knife in my pocket.

  "Not interested."

  He pulls the door, but I grab the handle. I can feel his strength. It's enough for my eyes to moisten. "I'm not here to bother you. I just, I'm new to the neighborhood."

  "Oh. Welcome. It's a shitty one."

  I have to fight a grin. "You look familiar," I say, hoping to coax a closer look out of him. "Have we met?"

  He offers a glance, more out of obligation it seems than mutual curiosity. "Sorry."

  I pull back the handle once more. "I'm Kaity," I blurt. My scars are on fire.

  Marcel turns back. He spends a few moments with my face. "Sorry. I've known a lot of girls in my day. Can't help you." We let the door close.

  Surely I'm more than a forgotten bag of scars.

  I find my way back to Edmund's idling car. He reaches across the seat to pop the passenger door open for me. "You okay?" he asks.

  *****

  Russell looks exactly like one would image the widower of a computer programmer to look. He's puffy at every joint. The haphazard part in his hair flips rogue strands to the rhythm of his burdened, wheezy gait. He's holding flowers, scanning the restaurant. A wallet-sized picture of Deborah—his deceased wife, my "heart donor"—pinned to his shirt. A sweaty, nervous child without a mother. I call him over to the table.

  "Mary?" he asks.

  I nod. It's easier than I thought it would be, to let go of the tears. It's easier than I thought it would be to say "thank you."

  He sits, still holding the flowers with one hand, dabbing away tears with the other. I let the man compose himself. He sets the flowers on the table, neither offering them to me nor keeping their proximity too great for me to reach. "Can I see it?" he asks. "The scar. Can I see it? You have no idea how happy it would make me to see Deborah's scar."

  "Sure," I say, and I forfeit one of Marcel's scars for this crying stranger.

  Nothing To Lose

  by David A. Summers

  The dirt lane was about a mile past the old Shiloh cemetery, right where Tammy said it would be. Russell followed it across a brush-covered field until he saw the rusted-out stock tank she told him to watch for. So far, so good.

  He parked his Camaro even with the stock tank and signaled with his lights, then cut the engine and waited. No activity up ahead that he could see, just a wisp of gray smoke curling above a thick patch of woods a half a mile or so further down the lane. Did they live somewhere in there, he wondered, or was that just where they did their cooking? No way to tell. Must be why they want you to stop right here, keep you from seeing too much. Pretty cautious guys, he thought.

  He was just beginning to wonder if he ought to flash his lights again when a pickup emerged from the woods and headed toward him, going slow, the driver taking his time. As the pickup got closer, Russell could make out that it was an old F-150, dusty, mud-splattered, plenty of rust on it, just like countless others he'd seen around Paxton over the years.

  He was able to make out a man behind the wheel, and another one in the passenger seat. Probably the two brothers, both of them coming out to meet him. Still moving pretty slow, but nothing wrong with that. Wouldn't want them coming at him like a bat out of hell, like he was some kind of intruder who had to be scared off. Russell smiled at the thought.

  Just as the pickup was starting to get close, the driver surprised him by swerving out into the field and going around, instead of pulling up and stopping nose to nose, like Russell expected. For a second, he wondered if they were going to just ignore him and keep on going, but then he saw the tires of the pickup plowing up loose soil as the driver spun the wheel sharply and did a 180, bringing the pickup around behind the Camaro, stopping about fifty feet back. The driver cut the pickup's engine, and for a few seconds there was dead silence, nothing but the sound of cicadas and some crows cawing in the distance.

  Using his rearview mirror, Russell watched the two men get out of the pickup. Each was holding what appeared to be a 12-gauge autoloader. He quickly reached into the glove box for his .357, but then thought better of it. He knew the odds would be heavily against him if it came to that.

  Besides, he told himself, these boys were only being careful. Pulling up behind him and coming out with their shotguns was the smart move, just what you'd do to stop someone from grabbing the stuff and taking off without paying. He was in their place, he'd probably do the same thing. No need to show his piece, at least not yet. Keep it friendly, get to know each other, see if we can do a little business.

  The two men began walking slowly toward the Camaro, carrying their shotguns casually, muzzles angled downward. Russell guessed they were in their mid-thirties, about his own height, maybe a little taller. Lean and wiry-looking, wearing grease-stained overalls. The dark stubble on their sharply chiseled, unsmiling faces gave them a hard appearance. They didn't look like a couple of easy-going farm boys who just wanted to make a few extra bucks, that was for sure. No, these guys looked tough, and they didn't look like they were real happy to see him either.

  Russell gritted his teeth and waited, fighting off a growing sense that Tammy's bright idea might not have been as good as it sounded.

  *****

  Tammy's idea hadn't come to her right away. Sitting there with Russell in their lawn chairs behind the double-wide they rented out by the edge of town, at first all she could think about was the long weekend ahead and them not having any crystal—not even any weed. "It sucks, Russell, it just sucks," she said, raising a cold bottle of beer to her lips.

  The late afternoon sun still glowed hot through a soft haze, heating the heavy air that blanketed them. They'd only been sitting there for ten minutes and already they were sweating. It was supposed to be even hotter tomorrow, first big heat wave of the summer—at least that's what someone at the Market told her a few hours earlier, someone who'd come through her line. What's new about that, Tammy almost said, this is Kansas.

  What was new, she thought, was going into a long weekend with nothing, not even a roach. It just plain sucked, that's all there was to it, and she couldn't let it go. Pretty soon Russell let her know her whining was getting on his nerves and she'd better quit. "You know Rico's my only source," he said. "If Rico don't come by the store, there's nothing I can do about it, so just quit your whining."

  Even before Russell figured it out, Tammy had a pretty good idea Rico wouldn't be coming by today. She knew because of what Luanne told her while they were on afternoon break, and Luanne ought to know because she lived with Rico. According to Luanne, Rico was out of town for a couple of days. He got a call from some guy over in Colby last night, Luanne said. The guy told Rico he'd pay top dollar if he could get the stuff to him right away, so he headed over there first thing this morning. Took all their crystal, even took their weed. Left her with one skinny joint.

  It made Russell hot when he heard what Luanne said about Rico. "The guy ought to satisfied with what he's making right here," he said. "But no, he's got to make a little more so he takes off and leaves us high and dry. I'd drop the greedy bastard in a heartbeat if I knew someone else to buy from."

  "What about checking with Brad or some of the others guys at work," Tammy said, "maybe one of them has a little extra."

  "Not a chance," Russell told her. "They're long gone, every one of them, headed out of town for the holiday. Even took off from work early to get a head start. Great bunch of guys, leaving me stuck there with the boss till closing."


  Tammy could see Russell was getting into one of his bad moods and she needed to be careful, but she wanted him to know that she'd been thinking about the two of them, that she'd made plans for tonight.

  "I don't mean to whine," she said, "but see I had all these plans about how we could start the weekend just right. Jim slipped me a couple of nice t-bones today, and I thought I'd put them on the grill, have them with some of that early corn that's just come in. I thought we'd do a little crystal just before everything's ready, at least have some weed, and everything would be perfect."

  Right off, Russell wanted to know what she was doing taking t-bones from Jim.

  "Oh baby, he don't mean nothing by it, he just knows people who work there don't make much, so he slips everyone a little something now and then, all the guys in the meat department do it. He's just being helpful, that's all."

  Russell wouldn't let it drop. "I ever find out there's anything going on, you can kiss your ass goodbye—and if you have any doubts about this, maybe you need to think about that time at Brad's party when you got too friendly with that guy, talking to him half the night. You want to look like that again?"

  "Course not, Russell," she said. "All I'm saying is that I had something special planned for us, have us some crystal, then I'd take good care of you, real good care of you, and after that we'd have something to eat, mellow out later with some weed. That's all I'm saying, just thinking about you."

  "You can take care of me without any crystal, and you better."

  "You know I will, Russell. It's just that a little crystal makes it special, like it always does, but now we don't have any, that's all I'm saying. I just wish we could think of something."