by Jerry Stahl
Manny clung to the hope that Tina wasn’t even there. That Zank was so tweaked he was babbling to phantoms. He discovered he couldn’t stand and tried to push himself off the carpet, to free his gun. But the pain in his stomach glued him to the floor. He couldn’t roll off his own weapon. Even crawling was impossible. He watched, with a kind of detached wonder, as the man who was going to kill him dragged himself closer, his eyes like balls of rotten jelly, forming what could only be kisses with his purple lips. His sing-song taunts sounded at the end of a long tunnel.
“Say good night, donkey-dong…. Ass-fuck an angel for me!”
Zank tottered a foot away. Near enough for his sticky breath to stain Manny’s face. He grunted happily and walked the .357 in front of him, like a mountaineer planting a spike. When he got close enough, he raised the gun off the carpet. A trio of muzzles fluttered before Manny’s eyes, circling each other. Pain was making him see triple. Or maybe it was blood loss. If he looked down, he could see the brown puddle spreading underneath his middle. Brown meant liver. That much he knew. But he didn’t feel it if he stayed still. What really hurt, insanely, was the thumb in his pocket.
“Baby, come here! Look at his face,” Zank cried, his voice a giddy rasp. “This here’s a brave cowboy.” He smiled through his spoiled tomato mouth. “Tina, where are you, baby? I’m gonna count to three.”
That’s when Manny saw her, stepping silently through the door, cuffed at the wrists, her straight razor open in front of her.
“One!”
Manny forced his eyes straight ahead. If Zank noticed him looking, the next bullet might be Tina’s.
“Two!”
“Hey Tony,” Manny called, though the effort seemed to press some pain lever in his middle. “Hey Tony, I know about the Boy Scouts.”
Tony’s smile froze. He held the gun where it was. “You what?”
“I saw your juvenile file.” Every word was a fist in his viscera, but he had to keep talking, to keep Zank from turning around. “I—shit—I know it’s illegal, but I got a friend who works at the court. That’s”—keep fucking going—“that’s really a shame about what happened.” If he could talk without breathing, he’d be okay. “Your daddy being the Scout leader and all, that had to be embarrassing, huh? What were you—fuck!—ten or eleven?”
“Shut up!” Tony hollered. “Shut the fuck up!”
Tina was across the room, moving closer.
Manny made his interrogation face: the wrinkled brow, the faux concern. “That’s why you killed him, right? You were embarrassed? I don’t blame you. My daddy was a weeny-wagger and a pedophile I’d probably do the same as you. I—” Manny gasped once, fighting the pain buzz-sawing his guts—“I mean, that had to fuck up summer camp, huh?”
Zank flinched. Manny willed the words out of his mouth.
“It’s okay, man. It’s not genetic. You’re a normal guy! It’s not like your dad getting caught trying to fuck one of your little scout friends means you’re messed up. Even if he fucked you once in a while, you’re totally cool, right? You”—hang the fuck on—“you worked it through, right?”
Zank ripped a ripe scab off his earlobe. A dozen expressions careened over his features simultaneously. Two steps behind him, Tina raised the straight razor, clutched in her cuffed hands. She dropped to a crouch and her eyes met Manny’s over Zank’s head. She bit her lip, ready to strike, when suddenly, like a peroxide jack-in-the-box, Lipton popped up screaming from under the exploded sofa.
“You lied to me, Tony! We had a deal!”
Zank was so stunned he barely moved, even when Lipton produced the tiny derringer.
“You were never going to call about the picture, were you? Were you? You were just making carnival with me!”
Lipton closed his eyes to squeeze off a shot, and Tony watched like it was happening on TV. After the bang, a small flower of blood appeared on his shoulder. He regarded it with mild curiosity, then plucked out the bullet and flicked it away like a dead fly.
Lipton struggled to reload, his hands shaking violently. With a weary sigh, Zank hoisted the muscular Colt Python and waved it at his wanna-be assassin. He called to him in a pleasant voice, just a couple of friends talking death over the back fence.
“I’ll tell you a secret, Lipton. Some people fuck, some people get fucked. It’s just nature, buddy. Nothin’ personal.”
Lipton lifted his eyes in time to catch Zank fire the shot that splattered his face off the window behind him. For one wobbly second he continued to stand, spraying blood from the neck, as though no one had let his body know it was dead. Then his left arm twitched north, in reflexive good-bye. His knees folded beneath him and his torso tumbled forward onto the floor.
“Twenty-two,” Zank said, to no one in particular, “I pick my teeth with a fucking twenty-two.”
“You’re a sick piece of shit,” Tina said quietly.
A grisly smile lit up Tony’s face. “Sweetheart, you came back!” He swung around, delighted, and the girl of his dreams dissected his Adam’s apple. Tony’s throat opened into a pink yawn, and before the blood started to gush she slashed him again. Tony made a sound like a guffaw. He lifted his gaze to hers with something that might have been love, might have been relief, then looked at the gun as it fell from his hand onto the spongy carpet.
Zank angled himself back toward Manny, coughing out a wad of tarry scarlet as he tried to speak. “Pipe…pocket…one hit….”
Manny and Tony locked eyes, and Manny understood. Or thought he did. The killer knew he was dead and wanted to go out with a rush. Deep down, Manny knew, if someone had a gun to his head, and offered him the chance for world peace or a bang of heroin before he pulled the trigger, he’d probably go for the heroin. Staring down the barrel, all bets were off…. Strip everything away, and that’s what this moment came down to: one dope fiend cadging a high off another one.
While Zank gurgled, Manny turned to Tina. Her face was a blank, whether from shock or anger he couldn’t tell. So he went ahead.
With the four fingers of his mangled hand, Manny tapped Zank’s chest, plucked the glass pipe out of his pocket, and worked it between the killer’s trembling lips. Then he reached back down for the lighter. With no thumb, it was tricky. But after three tries he got a flame. He lifted it to the tip of the pipe, where a rock was already planted. Which proved, in retrospect, to be the single most stupid act of his entire life.
Zank sucked hard, and a puff of smoke escaped the bloody little mouth Tina’d made in his throat. That’s what Manny was staring at—that puff of throat-smoke—when Tony, mustering the last strength he owned to have some fun on the planet, launched himself forward and jammed the hot tip of the pipe in Manny’s right eye.
Manny screamed, then Zank’s head hit the carpet and he expired, face-first, his crack pipe still jammed between his bloody teeth.
After that things got foggy. Tina seemed to loom over him, looking more Faye Dunaway-ish than ever, and Manny thought he heard her call him an asshole before he passed out in her arms.
FORTY-THREE
BONDAGE.
That’s the first thing he thought when he came to. I’ve gone to hell, and it turns out Satan’s into S & M.
When he was alive, he never told anybody he believed in Satan. But now that he was dead, it didn’t matter. Manny felt the restraints: the straps on his ankles, the clamp at his throat, what seemed like steel claws over his wrists and a manacle all the way around his waist, and knew he’d either been drop-kicked into hell or Maximum Security. Maybe there wasn’t any difference. He’d seen the Devil once, staring out of his own eyes in the rearview mirror of the car he was living in when he kicked heroin. It occurred to him that he needed to tell Tina about that. Not only because it would explain the codeine—instead of hitting himself in the head with a sledgehammer, he’d switched to a rubber mallet—but because it could help explain life as a cop.
Darkness pressed down on Manny’s eyes like damp cotton, and he realized that he’
d never seen the Big Picture until now. Until waking up dead, in this bondage parlor, stinking of starch and disinfectant, and waiting for the blanket of narcotics to lift and let him feel the screaming pain he knew, in some grim corner of his psyche, was roiling underneath it.
Now it all seemed obvious. The only world more hellish and revolting than a heroin addict’s was a policeman’s. The difference was, as a junkie, hell was your home address. As a cop, you occupied other people’s nightmares. Which made your own reality—the desolation and solitude, in Manny’s case, he’d been hanging on to with white knuckles since crawling off the hard stuff—more endurable by comparison. That was the beauty part: The policeman was his own perp. On permanent lockdown in the Big House of fear-driven weirdness and gainful employment. With the key rotting in his pocket….
It took getting gut-shot and mangled, half-blinded and burned, to make him remember who he was. In the aftermath, a single thought ricocheted off the back of his eyeballs: I am too fucking scared to be alive. The truth was mortifying.
ENOUGH! he moaned. All these words lodged like metal shards in the pulp of his brain. And all he wanted was something to rip them out.
A cool hand brushed Manny’s brow and he wondered if he’d been talking out loud. Then the hand moved down, and he heard the sound of tape being ripped off skin before he realized the skin was his. His left eye blinked through the blur. The hand dabbed at it gently. In a few seconds the fuzziness cleared, and she was there. Her hair pinned up and her lithe body poured into a white nurse’s uniform.
“Tina….”
“That’s Nurse Tina to you.”
“How long have you….” He let his voice trail off and she smiled.
“I decided I needed a new job after you were admitted. Just a coincidence. You’ve been in the hospital a week. They kept the patch on your good eye until they did what they could for the other one.”
“So then?”
“So the doctor said they do wonders with glass. But, personally, I think you’ll look hotter than shit in a black patch.”
“Jesus!”
He managed to raise his head, and saw that he hadn’t dreamt the restraints. He was strapped to the bed frame by his bandaged left hand and his healthy right. What felt like a fat gauze belt bound his stomach, and his ankles were strapped with the same worn leather as his hands. One tube ran somewhere under the blanket he didn’t want to think about. Another drained from his chest.
Tina let him take in his shattered body, then said, matter-offactly, “It could have been worse. They’ve got your thumb on ice. You totaled some ribs. And a gang of bone slivers lodged in your lungs.”
“Tell me later…. What’s with the restraints? Is this the prison wing?”
“Not yet. You were throwing yourself around a lot, which wasn’t good. Bad dreams. You have to stay still or you’ll never heal.”
He looked down at his middle, then back up at her, afraid to ask.
“Relax,” said Tina. “Your new liver is taking nicely.”
“My WHAT?”
“You lucked out. They had a nice fresh one when you got here. In the same ambulance, as a matter of fact.”
“Zank?” he made himself ask.
“They considered it, but with his you’d have come out of postop like a big crack baby.”
“Don’t tell me….”
“You guessed it. The late Mr. Lipton. Turns out you two were very compatible.”
“Jesus,” he croaked again. His vocabulary seemed to have been sapped along with his strength. He wasn’t exactly loaded, just numb in a comfortably toxic way. But all the special effects were back: the basso squawk his voice took on on smack, the itch in his nose, the glaze of putrid sweat…. But mostly, he felt so chewed up it was hard to tell nausea from intoxication. “What am I on?”
“Demerol. But your last shot was hours ago, so it’s probably faded. You can have your codeine back tomorrow.”
“I don’t want it,” he said, surprising himself, and instantly regretted the statement. Who was he kidding?
Tina watched him squirm. Pleased. She smiled in a way he hadn’t seen before and unbuttoned the top button of her uniform.
“Maybe we’ll find you a better drug.”
She undid two more buttons, then pulled a prescription bottle out of her pocket and dropped it on the night table.
“What’s that?” he said, gripped with equal parts dread and excitement.
“Toradol, handsome. Nonnarcotic painkiller. Kills the pain without the euphoria. Strong as the real stuff. Just no fun.”
“And that’s the better drug?”
Manny felt something cave in his chest. He already had that steel-wool-on-the-nerve-ends feeling. In a few hours the air would sting his skin. His hair would hurt. There were a couple of years on junk and a decade on codeine before the little taste of Demerol.
“I didn’t say that was the drug,” said Tina, and stepped out of her uniform. This was the first time he’d seen her naked, and the sight made him religious. She watched him watch her for a minute, her expression hard to read. He one-eyed her breasts, the aureoles purplered half dollars around nipples already erect. Then his gaze fell to her belly and he realized what she was waiting for him to see. A lavish scar, the same shade as her nipples. As thick around as the cord on a vacuum cleaner. It ran at a smooth diagonal from her left hipbone to her navel, then dog-legged down and curved around her right side, where it stopped.
“First time I saw a straight razor,” she said, with a shrug that contained a lifetime.
Manny wanted to let her talk, but she said nothing else. Her eyes were inside his.
“One of Mommy’s boyfriends?”
“The one I married,” she said. “Don’t ask. I was fifteen and a half.”
Then she turned around to lock the door, and showed him her other surprise. On her back, in brilliant reds and blues, was a tattoo of a nine-armed goddess. It looked a little like Betty Page, in full lotus and bare-breasted, hurling diamonds, arrows, snakes, and hearts in a fan pattern that converged on the cleft of her teardrop ass.
“Kali?”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
“Don’t be. I eat in front of the Learning Channel.”
“Whatever. It was Marv’s idea. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I feel like the cover of a menu in an Indian restaurant. Mostly I don’t think about it.” Tina plucked her nurse-wear off the floor and tossed it over the visitor’s chair. “But we can talk later,” she said, when she turned off the bedside lamp.
“Okay,” said Manny, suddenly wracked with the sense that one eye was not enough to absorb the vision before him. He felt strain in ocular muscles he never knew he had. His eye wandered over her breasts, moved south to her sweetly shaved pussy, then traveled upward, returning to the thick cord of scar tissue. It was the scar that obsessed him, at once beautiful and tragic, startling and exotic, and erotic in a way he could not explain. Everything, in short, that he felt about the woman who bore it.
He didn’t know he was choked up until he spoke. “The bastard must have gutted you.”
“Actually, he gave me guts, baby. Now don’t move. And don’t peek, either.”
Manny closed his eye and she stepped out of her shoes. Then she eased the blankets all the way down to his ankles. A drainage tube ran from under the gauze cummerbund at his middle. She eased it sideways and reached beneath it.
“The nurses were all impressed,” she said huskily. “The one who trimmed your pubes took a Polaroid.”
“I don’t want to hear anything about Polaroids.”
“Live by the sword, et cetera,” she said, and took him in her hand. “I hear the doctor dropped his scalpel when he saw you.”
Manny talked with his eye shut. “I thought they kept the patient covered up.”
“They do. You got an erection during the operation. Nearly poked his eye out.”
“He can have my glass one,” Manny said, and gave himself over to the sensation. Tina
leaned down and let her breasts drift across his face. He parted his lids and she slapped him, lightly.
“I said no peeking.”
His eye went wide then shut obligingly. After she kissed him, she ran her tongue over his face, down his bruised-blue chest. She unpinned her hair, let it fall over his skin, and repositioned herself on the south side of that giant bandage. When she licked his inner thigh, the stirring in his penis was a relief. He’d heard about guys, after major surgery, who couldn’t get it up without a pump. But by the time she’d run her tongue to the base of his shaft, that particular doubt was allayed. She licked him gingerly, working her way to the head, then took him in her mouth, taking her time about it. He felt the urge to thrust and panicked, imagining what that would do. He pushed once, from the hips, and the pain was like a vampire’s teeth in his spinal cord.
“Oww, shit…. Hey Tina, can we do this?”
“I can,” she said, kissing the now swollen head of his cock. “You can’t move. Can you take it?”
“What do you mean?”
He stared up at her, saw the smoky softness clouding her eyes. She raised her face reluctantly. “God, it’s like a taffy apple.”
Manny squirmed. “What did you mean, can I take it?”
“It means I can fuck you, but you can’t fuck me. Can you deal with that?”
“So I wasn’t just having bad dreams. You tied me up when I was asleep, so you could do me like this.”
“If you have a question or complaint about medical procedure, the patients’ advocate is in the nurses’ station every morning from nine to ten-thirty.”
His left hand was a solid gauze paw. He opened and closed his right one, working his wrist inside its taut canvas strap. “Tell me straight, is this you, or is it the doctor?”
“As nurse, I have authority and responsibility for the comfort of my patients.”
“In other words, you did it.”
He tried to glare at her, but she ignored him. “I thought I told you to close your eyes. I mean, eye.”
Manny kept it open, staring up at her as she climbed on the bed. Gripping his IV bar for balance, she squatted no more than an inch or two over his face, straddling him.