The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  It started with this lady I got fixed on one day, a yoga instructor, her mat always hooked over her shoulder. No particular reason I got stuck on her either, I don’t guess. Or, no. At the time, the reason she looked good was that there’d just been two blondes in a row. And they’d been about the same height, could have been sisters. So, what this one lady had in particular, it was this long black hair. Down-to-her-ass long, I mean, like she was filled with oil and it was spilling out the back of her head.

  Ladies like that never see guys like me, either. Not in a thousand years. Not in ten thousand.

  Until it’s too late, anyway.

  I didn’t follow her back to her place like I kind of wanted to, so I could step out of the pantry behind her when she went for a wine glass, get that priceless little gasp from her, and that’s the lucky part of all this, really. If I had followed her home, I’d have seen the gates and the house and all of it, and maybe just reached down for second gear, eased on by.

  You don’t want to go to their houses, though. Somebody always sees. No, I don’t think she was having any rugs taken away that afternoon, I thought it was her stepbrother Michael, he has a blue jacket like that, and on and on, right down to the tire tracks you leave in that one part of dirt by the road: APB, all cars, suspect’s in a Chevy minivan, ninety-two to ninety-four model. Just wanted for questioning, but shoot on sight if your badge ends in an even number, or if you know somebody whose badge does.

  You can’t think of everything, but you can try not to be too stupid, anyway.

  Look at Bundy, say.

  You can be as bloody and as sick as you want, just don’t do it where anybody can see, and never stay in one place long enough to start making the news.

  It’s what kept me in the game those first thirteen years.

  But then Belinda. That was her name, the lady with the black hair and the limber spine.

  Just for the rush, I took her on the sidewalk, right in the middle of everybody. Just brushed my hand against her wrist then latched on, pinching through into the deadspace, so that her hand flopped up, those long red fingernails so light on my forearm.

  The rest of her pretty much collapsed.

  Not because of some trademark ninja move or anything. I’m mostly American here, if my dad’s to be believed. The reason she fell into me like she did was just because she wasn’t used to being hurt. As simple and as complicated as that. And that pain inside your wrist right there, especially if you haven’t worked packing meat with a dull knife for ten years, gotten your arms all ropy, it can floor you.

  After she gave me her weight, all I had to do was guide her up against the wall.

  Because there were people walking all behind us, in their own little worlds but ready to look into mine if there was suddenly this screaming thrashing woman in it, I did what I had to: snaked my head forward, pressed my mouth over hers.

  The first thing I did there was the last she probably expected. I could tell by her eyes, how they saucered out. I made a seal with my lips, sucked out all the air she’d been planning to scream.

  Next, before she could breathe, I bit down. Hard.

  She didn’t pass out from that, but she did get knocked a bit silly from slamming her head back, into the brick wall.

  They do it to themselves, right?

  After that it was a simple act to maneuver her into my car, then get her yoga mat too, so there’d be no definite place to start the search, no epicenter for the grid, the canvas, whatever.

  Just drive, Billy boy.

  Not too fast, not too slow. Her shoulder belt on, the windows up, all the tail lights in perfect working order. A cap down low in case any traffic cameras are on, the license plate just a temporary thing, but off the same model car all the same.

  Like that, Black Haired Belinda disappeared into the world.

  Except that’s the wrong name for her.

  Halfway back to the storage unit I had planned, I had to kind of bonk her head into the side window, remind her what a good passenger she was.

  Only, when I pulled my hand back, her hair came with.

  A wig.

  She was as blonde as the last two.

  I closed my eyes against the city, the world, all of it, and wanted to take it out on her but slammed the heel of my hand into the dash over and over, until the lady at the light beside me had to pretend she wasn’t watching. I waited until she couldn’t pretend, then wrenched the radio knob from the crashed-in plastic, flicked it into the floorboard, Belinda pressing back into her seat, away from all this. The lady smiled with just her mouth, like she understood.

  How could she, though?

  If I wasn’t careful here, the walnut hair dyes were going to start running low all over town, if you know what I mean.

  And that’s not the kind of attention that helps.

  “You’re screwing this all up,” I told Belinda, taking a corner slow and gentle, half my mind on the rearview, like always. The lady going the other way.

  “You don’t—you don’t—” Belinda tried, but was snorting and crying and couldn’t finish.

  Bitch.

  I decided then and there to keep her alive for at least forty-eight hours. Maybe a shock collar or two, for if she tried to make some noise. Or maybe just the tongue pulled out at the root, the blood collecting in her throat like she’s drowning, so I could tell her to breathe, to control her fucking breathing, that’s the secret to all of this, right?

  I still remember all of it, yeah.

  Everybody says it’s the first one you never quite shake (Mark Dashiel-something, from the carwash), but for me it’s Belinda, the last one. The last one from my other life. From before I died and went to heaven. Apartment 439, Chessire Arms.

  You don’t get to a place like this without dying a little bit first, though.

  So it was with me.

  Right when I was most alive, too.

  I was squatted down over what was left of my yoga instructor. It had been two days. Her lips were in a jar, her tongue was in a twice-used rubber, and in her belly where I’d just put it was the little toy of a dog I’d found yapping in one of her bags. We were going to stage a birth was the thing. Then the door of the storage unit rolled up all at once.

  I looked back to the line of suits at the door like they were what they were: an annoyance; an interruption. The guy at the back of the theater leaving the door wide open until his eyes can adjust, never mind the rest of us normals.

  I squinted from the sudden light, jerked my hand up for a visor, and the little dog barked once.

  Like that, a row of pistols settled on me.

  Behind them, this long black eel of a car.

  And, in the middle of it all, this one silver-haired man, shaking his head at me. No gun, but just because all the guns were his.

  As apology, I held the dog up.

  The man stepped forward, took it, stroked his hand down over its head once then held its head like you do a chicken, when you’re about to pop it around. But then he didn’t.

  It told me he had some idea, how a body can fall apart in your hands. But that he also knew how to keep it together.

  “I’m guessing you’ve got a knife in there somewhere,” he said, nodding down to the floor.

  I held one up and all the guns stepped in, right against my forehead, so that I almost wanted it, to see what it would feel like.

  “Now now . . . ” the man said.

  His skin was perfect, his breath a dream, his eyes delicately lined black, like a stage actor.

  I flipped the knife around, handle-first.

  What the man carved from the back leg of that yelping little dog was some bullshit computer chip thing. A tracking device for if it ever ran away, for if anybody ever decided to take it hostage, or if Belinda, his yoga instructor, ever left it in her Porsche then forgot where she’d parked.

  He dropped the chip, crunched it with his heel.

  “Mr. . . . ?” he led off.

  I stood, looked him al
most right in the eye—I’m five-eight, barefoot like I was—and lied.

  He knew it but smiled anyway.

  “Her name was Belinda,” he said then.

  “She didn’t breathe right,” I cut back, using my fingertips to show where the breath was supposed to come from in a yoga instructor: deep.

  He stopped smiling, handed the yapping dog off.

  “Now I’ve got to deal with her father, did you think of that?”

  “You really loved her, you mean?” I said.

  Two loyal hammers clicked back.

  “She was a rare find in this city.”

  “So what are we waiting for here then?”

  He nodded, looked down along his line of muscle, their sunglasses all the same exact black, their hair perfect.

  “I was thinking we could just close this door again,” he said, shrugging, stepping closer to me, so that he was on some of what Belinda had been leaking. It made her groan a bit. Some of it must have still been connected. “Close this door and do as the good book says. In recompense, of course. Justice. Because of course vengeance, it’s not mine.”

  He shrugged. I didn’t flinch.

  “Do you think you could last two days?” he asked then, his face right up to mine, his right hand snapping back for a gun, Belinda’s hand pawing at his shin.

  With the boning knife straight up under my chin, our eyes locked, he shot down at Belinda four times until he found her head.

  It popped like the watermelon it was.

  What got to me worse than that was that he was doing this without shutting the door. Doing it out in the daylight. I guess because he knew if any cruisers responded to a shots fired call, he could do the same to them. To however many came. And still walk the fuck away.

  As I’d been to Belinda, he was to me.

  But still.

  “I’ve had a good run,” I hissed right against his lips. “Do your worst, bub. Here, let me—” What I did was take my index finger, already bloody, and trace a dotted incision along my side. “If you cut here, and angle it over the first time you touch bone, you miss everything vital. I can still live for three days like that. You can watch the maggots boil out if you want. Take some fucking pictures to jack off to later, and use the maggots as lubrication. It’s an experience I wouldn’t want to deny you.”

  He considered this, considered me, then rubbed his nose all at once, handed the gun back to a waiting hand, for delivery to some river or acid bath or property clerk.

  “I think,” he smiled, then nodded. “I think the punishment should fit the crime, as it were.”

  “So you did love her.”

  “I don’t give you the satisfaction,” he said back, and came forward with the knife, drove it right into the line I’d traced. “Like that?” he said.

  I tried to smile, couldn’t quite.

  “A small price to pay?” he read off my face, then laughed, turned around, taking the storage unit in. “How about this. In two days I come back to this charnel house. We’ll be locking it from the outside, of course, and renting all the adjacent units, and having a discussion with the manager. So you won’t be disturbed. But, when I come back in forty-eight hours, I want this evidence, Belinda. I want Belinda gone, Mr. Williams.”

  “Billy,” I corrected, letting the fake name go like a balloon.

  “Billy,” he repeated, his voice just as flat. “That was smart, using a form of your real name for the other one. Easier to remember, right?”

  “There’s no drain in here,” I told him, about disposing of Belinda. “And I didn’t bring my—”

  He shook his head no then, and two of his Armani goons stepped forward, lifted me by arms to slam me up against the cinderblock wall.

  “Actually, you did bring your—” he said, clacking his jaws—“your implements.”

  Like the gentlemen he was, then, Mr. Singer—in two days I’d know his name—pinched his slacks up and knelt down to Belinda, stroking the side of her face with the cup of his hand. Then he reached down to one of the hesitant, embarrassing cuts I’d made around her breasts, and he pushed his fingers through the slight heal, came up with some slimy meat that looked like a bladder but was probably the milk sac she’d been saving for someday.

  When I wouldn’t open my mouth, his goons did it for me, with a pry bar I had on the floor.

  It cost me two teeth, and filled my throat with blood.

  It helped that first mouthful of Belinda go down.

  I’m a vegetarian now, yeah. Fucking strict, serious as a heart attack.

  You would be too, if that’s what you had to do in the dark for forty-eight hours straight.

  When Mr. Singer came back, he let me in on what this was all about: one of his many properties had a vacancy. And, due to circumstances beyond his control, one of his most dependable men wasn’t going to be with him anymore, it didn’t look like. Alas alas, his arm over my shoulder now, his hand massaging the back of my neck.

  “And?” I said, a flicker of hope in my eyes I couldn’t help.

  I was naked too of course, because I’d had two days to hide blades all over my body.

  “Have you ever heard of the sand lion?” Singer said to me.

  I narrowed my eyes. Between my cheek and gums on the right side was a razor blade. And in the thick callous of my heel. Crusted with some hard-earned semen into my pubic hair. Hidden in the wig in the corner, in case I got slung over there.

  “What it does,” Singer went on, “what it does is beautiful, really. It burrows back into the sand and makes this funnel right above itself, and then just sits there waiting, so that whatever walks by, an ant, a caterpillar, a grasshopper, it slips in. Lunch.”

  He stopped, came around to face me, so we could be sure here.

  “I can be your funnel, Billy,” he said then, for all the world like a preacher trying to steer me on the right path here. “I can have them knocking on your door, man.”

  “Them,” I said.

  He nodded, didn’t need to say it, and instead of pay, what I got was an all-bills-paid, one flat forever, so long as I took care of business, no questions asked.

  Like I said: heaven.

  Like the milkman in a movie, I whistle to pass the time, dolly Kid Hoodie’s thirty gallon drum through the cutaway door in the back of the closet, deposit it in the apartment just left of mine.

  Same as always, it’s the only one there.

  What I picture is some wooden warehouse out by a swamp, the drums stacked two deep along the side wall already, just waiting for that next flood to come along, pull the whole place down, leave the entire burial ground bobbing in the water, finally gurgling under like the toxic waste it is.

  In the drum is a cocktail of lye and acid and camphor and ammonia and baking soda and straight feces—mine.

  Each disposal runs Singer about four hundred dollars, I figure, not counting my room or board and whatever transport cover he has rigged up for the drums. Plus the two grand or so he could be pulling by the month from the flats to either side of me, and the one directly above, and the three I asked for below as well.

  What it does is put me at the heart of a five-story cross, one buried right in the center of the Chessire Arms.

  I’ve never slept so well.

  On the dry erase board beside the drum, I write down a list of the vegetables and supplies I’m going to be needing this week, then add a couple of blue movies to it too, just to keep up appearances. Real hardcore, underground stuff.

  Like clockwork, I know they’ll be on the counter in the empty kitchen tomorrow morning.

  Some guys are just born lucky, I guess.

  It takes two more trips to get Mr. I-Don’t-Have-Time-For-This and the pit bull through the closet, the dog microwaved to kill any tracking chips. And yeah, it gets its own damn drum, just so Singer can get the report: Three? But, but.

  He’ll never call, never come by.

  We talked exactly two times, and both of those were in the storage unit. The only th
ing connecting us anymore are the missing. And they’re not saying anything.

  Instead of bringing a dry drum back to my apartment with me, I kneel in the living room, cut up a square of carpet to replace what Kid Hoodie messed up. Usually I’ll just put it on the list if there’s none leaning against the wall, CARPET, even add an extra T on the end—it’s comfortable for them if they can spell better, if they can explain me away by a bad education—but this’ll match my place more. It’s not an unlimited supply or anything, but it’ll look good for a few days. Be a nice change.

  If I want, too, I can put a G up in the corner of the board.

  This is a request for a girl.

  Not in the lefthand apartment like supplies, though she is, but knocking on the door like the rest.

  Come in, come in.

  If it’s somebody Singer was getting fed up with for one reason or another, all the better, I suppose. Though I’m finding, now that I’m almost thirty-five, that it’s the ones who aren’t quite twenty yet that do it for me the way it needs to be done. When you’re twenty, just out of high school pretty much, all I am’s just one more trick to fake your way through before you can go back to being who you really are, another number to erase from the debt you’ve already stacked up. One more ride to forget.

  You’ve got a lot to learn, I mean. And I’m nothing if not thorough in my teaching.

  Maybe there has been a Cheryl, I don’t know.

  One of them around Christmas that first year, a gift I’m pretty sure, she was even the spitting image of Belinda, yoga mat and all, nevermind that Singer had already sent Belinda’s dad knocking early on that first month. From what he said, I was supposed to be the guy who had some idea where his daughter might be. His last ditch longshot maybe-baby pie-in-the-sky wish upon a star.

  The story I told him was that me and Belle—that’s what Belinda was to me, for him—had been kind of an item for a while, back around last November. That, and this was just to rub it in, she’d even gotten pregnant on accident around then, but then cried and cried because it would disappoint dear old Dad. So we did the perp walk down to the clinic, on the condition that we’d have one the right way when the time was right. After she’d introduced me all around, and we’d got established on our own, all that.