by John Prindle
“Seet, seet,” he pleaded. “Vee watch zuh Veel of For-toon.”
Dan the Man shook his head, no, and counted out the money.
Eugene took the bills, brought them up to his nose, and breathed them in like they were fresh-cut lilacs.
“Ain't you forgetting something?” Dan the Man said.
“Like vuht?” Eugene said.
“The necklace. The gold chain.” Dan held his hand out and waited.
“I sot you no like eet, else I surely gave eet back,” Eugene said, producing Ricky's gold chain from his pants-pocket like he was performing a magic trick. He dropped it into Dan's open palm, and the chain curled into a solid mass.
“Eastern Europeans,” Dan said, right into Eugene's face, like he was condemning half a continent. Then we left the cabin.
Eugene didn't shut the front door for quite a while. You could feel his eyes on your back, and the strange yellow light from the house poured out like it wanted to come along with us.
“I knew he'd try to keep that chain,” Dan the Man said as we walked to the car.
“Because he's Ukrainian?” I said.
“Because he's a creep. And he listens to ABBA.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Abba,” he said, like he was spitting out an almond husk that had been stuck between his teeth for a few hours.
“Dancing Queen's all right,” I said.
“Not for a guy who lives alone in the woods.”
“Maybe they're big in the Ukraine.”
“Eastern Europeans,” Dan said again.
“Hey—you like Sade,” I said.
Dan the Man had the key in the car door, and he was looking at me over the roof of the Park Avenue. “Everybody likes Sade,” he said. “That broad can sing.”
He coughed, and a wheezing fit carried right through as we got into the car. He waved his hand as if to tell me that he was all right, and he reached under the seat for his bottle of water. He drank some, and then he rubbed two fingers along the side of his neck like there was a gold coin hidden in one precious spot that he'd yet to find.
“What's with you?” I said.
“I'm fine,” he said.
“I got a great doctor,” I said. “You should go see him.”
Dan put the car in gear. I saw Eugene's silhouette, standing like a cigar-store Indian in the living room window. I couldn't see his eyes, but I could feel them sending loneliness out into the woods, cone-shaped, like some kind of dreary sonar.
Eddie told me that Eugene lived mostly off of a legal settlement. His old man, some kind of government official, hanged himself with a belt after getting sent to the nuthouse back in the Ukraine. Eugene's Mom sued, and in an effort to hush-up some kind of corruption and negligence, the institution settled. Eugene gets a check every month for the rest of his life, but so what? He's broken. His only friends are Vanna White, Pat Sajak, and the never-ending cans of Olympia beer.
AL DENTE!
We drove toward Love's Auto-Mall to dump Ricky's Buick Park Avenue. Ever since we clipped off his little toe, I hated seeing Gideon Cash. He had this edge about him now. He talked a lot of smack: like since we'd hurt him once, so what if we hurt him again?
Eddie really put the cuffs on him. He cozied right up to Art Love—the greasy fat bastard who owns the dealership—and started paying him a little something to keep the VIN operation going. Eddie made it clear that if Gideon ever left the business, so did our money. He told Gideon that he worked for us until five of the original nine grand was fully paid (answering the age-old question, how much is a little toe worth? Four thousand bucks, it turns out). But even reduced to five grand, the thirty percent interest would keep Gideon stuck in a dead end job—literally.
His walk was a tiny bit off, but you'd never know he was missing that pinky toe. Not unless he took off his sock and showed it to you. I thought back to that day when Gideon slunk into the office, his head low, his cap in his hand, to renegotiate the terms of his loan…
“What did you do with it?” he asked Eddie about his toe.
“I ate it,” Eddie said.
Gideon laughed. A guy who can laugh at his own problems is a hell of a lot better than one who can't. Then he turned to Dan the Man.
“He didn't really eat it, did he?”
“On a plate. With a fork and a bottle of Dijon mustard,” Dan the Man said.
“Al Dente!” Ricky said in mock Italian, and he kissed his fingertips and flicked them out and open, like he was setting free a tiny bird.
“You dumb twat,” Dan said to Gideon. “The only toe Eddie'd eat would be attached to some tasty Asian broad.”
“You know where I can find one?” Eddie said with a steely grin, tapping a book of matches on his desk. He held up the matches, kind of using them to point at Gideon. “You find me an Asian girl, and we'll forget the five grand.”
I was replaying those scenes in my mind, thinking how sad it was that Ricky Cervetti would never say “Al Dente!” again, when we reached Love's Auto-Mall. We parked at the chain-link fence and Dan blinked the headlights off and on a few times. A minute passed. Then Gideon Cash materialized from the hazy blue darkness. He nodded, raised a hand, unlocked the gate, and we pulled through. Dan the Man stopped next to Gideon and rolled down the window.
“We're closed,” Gideon said. He leaned in and surveyed the backseat.
“Just the car,” Dan the Man said.
“If I crush the car, how you gonna get back home?” Gideon said, kind of proud of himself, like he'd thought of something that had never crossed our minds.
“You're driving us,” Dan the Man said.
“Hundred bucks,” Gideon said.
Dan the Man looked at me. “This guy's a full-fledged taxi service all of a sudden.” Then he looked back at Gideon. “You got a Turban and a meter too?”
“Look—I get up outta bed when Eddie calls, I open up shop for you, and I gotta drive you back home? Come on, Dan. Don't Jew me.”
Not a whole lot of guys have the balls to make a Jewish crack right to Dan the Man's face, so it was an outright shock to hear some chump like Gideon Cash bust out a line like that. I closed my eyes and waited for a gunshot, thinking maybe we'd be visiting Eugene's basement again before the night was through.
Dan the Man chuckled. “Finally growing some balls,” he said. “And right after his wife up and leaves him.” He rolled the window up.
“He wants to act tough—let him,” Dan the Man said as we drove back to the crusher, the wheels crunching over a million pebbles. “Guy can't even raise five thousand bucks. Christ, you'd think his family'd give it to him or something.”
“But are you gonna Jew him,” I said with a grin, “or give him the hundred bucks?”
“Hey now. That ain't cool,” Dan said. “Eddie should send you to one of them, you know, whatchamacallits for Suits who look at asses.”
“Diversity workshops?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. Coexist, man.”
The crusher sat there before us in the darkness, like the carcass of a dinosaur. We got out and shut the doors, and the sound echoed through the stacked rows of dead cars.
“It ain't true anyway,” Dan said. “That whole cheap Jew thing.” He lowered his voice. “But I will say this: my old man was tighter than the bark on a tree.”
“Does it bug you when Eddie calls it his shy operation?” I said. I held my hands up to the sky and yawned. The night air was cool and the moon hung sideways under a veil of tired fog.
“Why would it bug me?” Dan said.
“You know. Shylock? The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare?”
“It's anti-semantic?” Dan said.
“Semitic,” I said. “And yeah, Shylock was a Jew and he really stuck it to the folks who borrowed from him.”
Right then Gideon Cash walked up, carrying a boxy flashlight. He set it on the ground, put his hands in his coat pockets, leaned stiffly forward like a scarecrow, and looked at us like he was studying two unwelcom
e birds in his corn field.
“Did you know that Bill Shakespeare was anti-Jew?” Dan said to Gideon.
Gideon frowned in a gentle way and shook his head, like he was considering a point of some importance.
“These old English writers,” Dan said. “Buncha fags in tights with feather pens. I'll take a good movie any day. Something with Stevie Seagal. Schwarzenegger. Marlon Brando.”
“Brando was a fag,” Gideon said.
Dan the Man looked like he'd just opened up an audit letter from the IRS.
“Get outta here,” he said. “Superman's Dad?”
Gideon nodded and smiled, happy to have dented any little part of Dan the Man's psyche.
“James Dean, sure. Not Brando,” Dan said.
“Fuck Marlon Brando,” Gideon said. “I don't even wanna be here right now. Can we get this shit done, or what?”
Gideon turned the flashlight on and handed it to me. I aimed it while he took the battery out of the Park Avenue, drained the air-conditioning fluid, and tinkered around with a few other things that needed to be removed.
“You're up,” he said. He lit a cigarette and watched us as we went through the Park Avenue for any important items. I took all the papers from the glove compartment; Dan the Man looked around under the seats.
“Check it out,” Dan said to me, holding up what looked like a dead black jellyfish. “Ricky's gloves.”
“Let me see,” I said, and I walked around to his side of the car. He handed them to me. I tried them on.
“Perfect fit,” Dan said. “Keep 'em.”
“Nah,” I said and took them off.
“Keep 'em,” Dan said. “Ricky would want you to have 'em.”
I put them in my back pocket. A few minutes later, the Park Avenue was in the machine and getting squeezed; the metal screeching, the glass exploding. I thought about what Dan said—how Ricky would “want me to have them.”
We love to speak for the dead. They tend to see things our way. But Ricky wouldn't want me to have those gloves. I killed him. I had the feeling that if I ever ran into him after I died, out on that lake of ice in Dante's Hell, he'd probably spit in my face, split my skull with a hatchet, and carve my Femurs into cross-country skis.
SUPPRESSOR
I slept for thirteen hours when I got back home. It was a deep sleep, but not pleasant. Each scene was one of terror; every landscape was slightly tilted, or soured by an unnatural hue. I went through most terrain without even using my legs, somehow floating just above the ground as if pulled along by a cruel magnetic force.
Amid the many foggy nightmares, one stands out. I was at the office. Everything about it felt wrong, like the whole gang had vanished.
“Hello,” I said.
No one answered.
Eddie wasn't there. Neither was Dan the Man. I sat on the couch and waited, like I was at Doc Brillman's office. I watched the fish swim by. In the dream, the aquarium was grander than it was in real life. Full of anemones and clownfish. An octopus stared back at me with sinister eyes.
Tall Terry walked out from the back room. I was quite shocked to see him, considering he'd been dead for a long while, but in a dream you quickly adapt to the improbable.
“Terry,” I said. “How goes it?”
He didn't say anything to me. Just stood there with his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. That's when I saw the other hands floating there a few feet away from him.
“Whose hands are those?” I asked.
“They ain't hands,” he said. “They're gloves.” And he was right. I watched them hover, bobbing up and down like they were riding on a warm current of air. Black leather gloves, empty on the inside, stuffed full of invisible hands.
“Hey Terry,” I said, getting nervous, “whose gloves are those?”
“They're your gloves,” he said and pointed at me; and when he said it, it was like the spell of a sorcerer, for they started drifting toward me.
“No, no. They're Ricky's gloves,” I said. I made a crucifix with my index fingers and held it up, not wanting the gloves to come any closer.
“They're yours now,” Terry said. Then he gasped, put a hand up to his chest and held it there flat. He leaned over and put the other hand on his knee. “My chest,” he said.
“Heart attack,” I said.
“Thanks, Einstein.”
“How can a dead guy have a heart attack?”
“Ask the man upstairs.”
“Some afterlife,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Tall Terry said.
The gloves came closer and closer, until I could even see the blemishes in the leather, and the fingers moved around like worms and reached for my neck like they were teaching themselves the best way to strangle a guy. They say that if you die in a dream, you die in real life. It wasn't my time, I guess. As soon as the gloves started killing me, I reared up in bed and tried to unwrap myself from the tangle of damp sheets. It took me a second to realize that I was still alive and back on the short-side of eternity.
I sat at the window, wishing I had a cigarette even though I'd quit many years ago. If there was ever a good time for a smoke, it's when you're awake in the middle of a cloudless purple night, with the window open, staring at the other distant buildings, imagining other lives. All of the world gets damp at night, like the earth keeps blinking its watery eye.
I made a cup of black tea, and I took my Gulliver's Travels off the shelf and read Emily's inscription, over and over, pretending that she was simply in another room. I could hear her voice if I really worked at it. I closed my eyes and summoned her face against the black space, and it floated there reluctantly, and sometimes broke apart like it didn't want to visit me at all. I watched her for a little while, forcing her to stay until she finally broke apart for good and spun off in every direction, followed by a gang of weird green triangles and squares.
Then I went back to a conversation I'd had with Emily, many years ago, while we were lying in bed on a similar kind of night…
“I got a letter from a dead man once,” she said.
“Yeah? Who was it from. Mark Twain?” I said.
She got up out of the bed and grabbed her purse, and she fished around through a million jingly things until she found her pack of smokes. She clicked on the little bedside lamp, lit a cigarette, and passed it over to me. Then she got another one going for herself.
“Senior year of high school… Mister Julian, the English teacher, he gives us this assignment. Since we're about to graduate and go off into the real world, he tells us to have one of our parents write us a letter, and we're s'posed to write one to them. He said how letter-writing was a dying art form. Most of the class thought it was dumb, but I kind of liked Mister Julian. He was cute. That was all we had to do for our final paper in his class: get one of our parents to write us a letter, and we write one to them.”
“What were you supposed to say?” I asked.
She ashed her cigarette. “Anything. I mean, I think his whole aim was to have them give us their advice for a bright future, you know?”
“Sure,” I said.
“He collected all of the letters. In a pillow-case. To hold, and mail them exactly one year later, so we could see how much we'd changed since the end of high school. See what our parents wanted to say to us, but had a hard time saying to our face. A letter is good for that.”
“Did he pay for the stamps?” I said.
Looking back on it, I was always asking some kind of dumb question like that.
“That would be, like, sixty-some stamps,” she said. “Of course he didn't.”
“So you brought them in already stamped.”
“Duh,” she said.
“All right, all right. So what happened?”
“You know what happened,” she said.
I thought hard, but I didn't know what she meant. You'd need two cabinets to file away all of the dates and names and memories that a woman will expect you to remember.
“The accid
ent,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking at me like I was a dolt.
“Christ, I'm sorry,” I said. “I forgot you were that young when it happened.”
Her Dad had died in a car accident, one of those odd ones that never get put in the movies. He was driving by himself, out on a country road, and a deer ran in front of the car. It rolled up and broke through the windshield.
“I forgot all about the letter,” Emily said. “Everything was a daze, just taking care of my Mom. Bringing her hot washcloths to lay over her eyes. I barely remember that year. I didn't go straight to college. My Mom was a wreck. Craig was still in high school, so I stayed at home. I stayed at home and I did what was right.”
She was crying a little, but Emily was tough.
“One day Mom goes out to the mailbox, and when she comes back in, her hands are shaking. She drops the bills all over the floor, and hands me that letter. Dead for a whole year. I hugged my Mom and we cried, and it felt like we were slow dancing in the hallway. Her head on my shoulder. I put the letter under my pillow at night. I held it up to the light. But I couldn't open it. Once I opened the envelope, I could never have that moment again—where my Dad would be saying something new to me, like he was still alive.”
“What did it say?”
“I'm still waiting to open it,” she said, and pushed a hand from her chin across her face and right through her hair. She crawled on top of me and I pulled her in tight, like I was trying to meld us into one stronger person.
They always talk about other fish in the sea, but what that really means is that your big tuna got away, and you're stuck sorting through smelly sardines. One time I gave Greedy Pete Bruen a hundred bucks to run a background check on Emily. She's remarried. Two kids. I bet they all pile into their minivan, go to the Christmas tree farm, and chop down a perfect tree; and when they get back home and kick the snow off their boots, the whole house smells like potpourri and warm apple cider.
I let Emily drift away from me for good, and I shut the window. I grabbed twenty bucks and decided to take a walk to the 7-11. I didn't even know what I wanted to buy, but it was something to do. Thank God for all-night stores.