Man Down

by Roger Smith

  He shook his head at Tanya who was doggedly fighting to lift herself from the mess of broken crockery and spilled food.

  “How’re you doin down there, my little battle buddy?”

  She grabbed hold of the kitchen counter with her good hand, tried to stand and slipped again. Shorty seized her by the arm and hauled her to her feet.

  “Jesus, just lookin at you makes me lose my appetite.” He shoved her toward the sink. “Go wash yourself, for fuck sake.”

  She obeyed, wetting a kitchen towel under the faucet and dabbing at her face and neck.

  Bone, looming over Turner who had not moved from the floor by the couch, emptied the bottle of tequila and slung it out the open door toward the electric blue pool. The bottle fell short and shattered on the deck.

  “Girl throw,” Tard said, giggling, meth smoke still veiling his masked head.

  “And since when were you Peyton Manning you gimpy sack of shit?”

  “I’m just sayin.”

  “Hey, Shorty?” Bone said.

  The small man, standing vigil over Tanya at the sink, looked back toward the living room.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m getting bored with this, man. You promised us sports.”

  “I did. I promised you sports and sports there will be,” Shorty said, guiding Tanya with gloved fingers cupping the small of her back, bringing her into the living room. “But I also promised you money, so it’s time to take a little commercial break.”

  He looked down at Turner.

  “I’ll need your credit and ATM cards.”

  “They’re in here,” Turner said, gesturing toward the hip pocket of his chinos.

  “Let’s see them.”

  Turner removed a billfold and took out his two MasterCards, one for his personal use and the other for the business.

  “Those the only cards you have?” Shorty asked.

  “Yes.”

  Shorty indicated Lucy’s pen and notebook that lay on the dining room table beside the mess of torn magazines.

  “Get the book and come back here and write down the card numbers and the PINs.”

  Turner did as the small man ordered.

  Shorty looked at Tanya. “You have cards?”

  “One,” she said. “In my bag.”

  Pointing toward the purse lying on the kitchen counter.

  Shorty crossed to the counter and upended the bag.

  Car keys, tissues, tampons and—Turner was surprised to see—a trio of single-pack condoms fell onto the table. Shorty lifted a wallet and opened it, removing a card that he spun across to Turner.

  “Write down the PIN for this one.”

  “I don’t know it,” Turner said.

  “Tell him,” Shorty said to Tanya, “and don’t fuckin lie.”

  Turner looked at Tanya and when she recited the day and month of their daughter’s birthday he knew his wife, a rabidly unsentimental woman, was lying, and couldn’t help, once more, feeling a sneaking admiration for her pluck, as suicidal as it was.

  Shorty spoke to Tanya. “Okay, now you’re gonna show me your jewelry.”

  “I don’t have jewelry.”

  He shook his masked head. “You’re a woman. All women have jewelry.”

  “I’m not some fucking Barbie doll,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, you got that right.”

  Shorty shoved her toward the passageway. “Let’s go. You and me gonna go to your bedroom.”

  He saw the look on her face.

  “Relax, Professor you’re not my type. If you’re lucky you’ll get some of that later, from the suave Mr. Tard here.”

  “Show her, Tard,” Bone said. “Show her what you’re packin.”

  Tard whinnied. “Aw, I’m gone all shy.”

  “Yeah, show the lucky lady,” Shorty said.

  Tard seized the right leg of his sweatpants and pulled it tight over his inner thigh, throwing into relief the fat tube of flesh that dangled toward his knee.

  Shorty looked at Turner. “And Tard has a taste for man meat. He acquired quite the skill set in prison, so you’re not gonna be left out, sweetheart.”

  The masked men laughed and then they all looked toward the door when they heard the low grumble of an engine and the squeak of brakes coming from the driveway.

  “Ford Expedition,” Tard said, cocking his ear like a retriever.

  Bone sprinted for the front window and peered out into the night.

  “Goddamit, you’re good, Tard,” he said. “You got the fuckin ear of piano tuner.”

  “Expecting anybody?” Shorty asked raising his weapon.

  “No,” Turner said.

  “Keep the bitch quiet,” he said to Tard who clamped a hand over Tanya’s mouth, pulling her to him, smothering her with his soft bulk.

  Shorty got behind Turner, prodding him with the barrel of his pistol.

  “Let’s check this out. Nothing dumb, now.”

  They moved toward the front door and through the window Turner saw the SUV parked in his driveway, bathed in the amber glare of the motion-activated spotlight.

  The passenger door opened and Lucy stepped down, carrying her backpack.

  The father of the friend she was meant to be spending the night with appeared around the side of the Ford and he and Lucy walked up the driveway toward where Turner and the gunman stood.

  10

  The boy opened the door and said “Professor” in that whispery drawl of his.

  Hearing him call her this made Tanya regret coming here—made her regret, after ten days, finally weakening and driving her Subaru to this shitty neighborhood, regret that after circling his apartment building like a jet in a holding pattern she had slammed the car to the curb, ratcheted up the emergency brake and taken the stairs two at a time as if outrunning her rational mind.

  “How do you know that?” she said.

  “How do I know what?”

  “That I’m an associate professor? And don’t fucking tell me you saw it.”

  “But I did,” he said. “I saw it.”

  He was shirtless and scratched at his hairless, concave chest.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  The boy shrugged and retreated into the gloom and wandered across to a table cluttered with magazines and junk food containers and beer cans.

  He rooted around in the mess and held up one of her cards from the college.

  “I saw it on here. Tanya Turner. Associate Professor. Law Faculty.”

  She stepped inside and the acrid smell was thick in her nostrils. Sweat, unwashed clothes and something dank and burned and she wondered what his drugs of choice were.

  “Where did you get my card?”

  “You dropped it the other day.”

  “Bullshit. You stole it from me.”

  “Now why would I do that? Steal a card?”

  It must’ve fallen from her purse when she’d dug for the hundred dollars she’d given him after he’d come in her mouth. Paying him to placate some primitive dread, to convince herself that all that had passed between them was a meaningless sexual transaction.

  He slumped down on the mattress.

  “What else do you see?” she asked

  “I see that you’re lookin super stressed.”

  “Fuck, you really are gifted, aren’t you?”

  His face took on the blank look she remembered from before and when he gazed at her she was relieved that it was too murky to see his mismatched eyes.

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” she asked.

  “I know why you’re here.”

  “Oh, right. Of course you do.”

  “You’re here because you’re scared.”

  “Not because I want more of your cock?”

  “You’re here to talk about the bloodshed.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you want to suck my cock again.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. But you can’t.”

&nbs
p; “Why? You picky all of a sudden?”

  “No. I’ve got the clap.”

  When she involuntarily touched her fingertips to her mouth, he sniggered.

  “Relax. I caught it after your visit.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Pretty sure.”

  He lay looking relaxed and serene, gazing up at her.

  “Anyway, you know you only blew me because you were scared.”

  “Because I was scared?”

  “Yeah. You wanted this thing with me to be something you could understand. Control.”

  “Jesus, now you’re a shrink.”

  He shrugged again, lit a cigarette and watched her without expression.

  Tanya wanted to leave but something made her stay and she sat down on the mattress beside him, the stale funk of the greasy bedclothes getting up her nose.

  “Okay, just understand that this is quite a fucking leap for me,” she said.

  “What’s quite a fuckin leap?”

  “Believing in this gift of yours.”

  “I don’t know as I’d call it a gift. I’d call it a curse.”

  “Whatever you call it.”

  “But I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me what you believe.”

  “So, can you tell me any more about it?”

  “About the bloodshed?”

  “Yes, about the bloodshed.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He shook his head and, gazing at a spot over her head, blew a succession of perfect smoke rings and she fought an urge to slap his pimply face.

  Favoring her with a placid smile, he said, “What you need to understand is that when I see it’s not like I turn on a TV and get this neat little package.”

  “What’s it like then?”

  “It’s a jumble of stuff. Just flashes and fragments. Sometimes it makes no fuckin sense at all.”

  “But what you told me was very specific.”

  “The blood thing?”

  “Yes, the blood thing. Where did that come from?”

  “Okay, think of a comic book.”

  “A comic book?”

  “Yeah. In one of the panels is a drawing of you.”

  “Okay.”

  “And above the drawing is one of those little boxes.”

  “A speech bubble?”

  “No, not a speech bubble. Or a thought bubble. The other.”

  “A caption?”

  “Yeah, a caption. And the caption reads: ‘You will be redeemed by the blood.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And your advice? To embrace it?”

  He released another trio of lazy smoke rings.

  “That wasn’t advice.”

  “No?”

  “No, I was just sayin what I felt.”

  “So you see and you feel?”

  “Hey.” He shrugged one narrow shoulder. “But I know you will.”

  “What? Embrace it?”

  “Yeah, I know you’ll embrace it.”

  “That’s fucking vague.”

  “It is what it is.”

  “Is it always like that? Like a comic book?”

  “No. Sometimes it’s a smell.”

  “A smell?”

  “Yeah, like with what happened long ago. I’m smelling something.”

  “Long ago?”

  “What happened to your family.”

  She stared at him, unblinking.

  “I’m smelling something sweet. Like perfume. Like old lady perfume.” He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his greasy hair. “It’s heavy in the air but you can still smell the shit and the blood.”

  And Tanya was back in that suffocating bedroom in the canefields twenty-five years ago and she didn’t a fuck want to be there and neither did she want to be here so she stood and he opened his eyes and looked up at her blankly.

  “This was a fucking mistake,” she said and headed for the door, jumping at shadows as she escaped down the stairs.

  Tanya, struggling to breathe around the huge hand that clamped her mouth shut, a hand that stank of bodily secretions and worse, fighting vainly to free herself from the sea of soft, rippling flesh that enfolded her, watching as the small man—the one who’d called her “Professor” in a drawl uncannily similar to the creepy boy’s—held a gun to Johnny’s head at the front door of their house, knew to a bone certainty that she had drawn this to her, conjured these men and their masks and their guns and their madness from a humid Petri dish of American savagery, and that the very thing she had been running from for half her life was right here, right now.

  11

  As Lucy and the bald guy—in his panic Turner, even though Tanya had recently dragged him to a mind-numbingly boring barbecue at the man’s house, struggled to remember his name—approached the front door, Shorty leaned in close and Turner could feel the warmth of his breath through the mouth hole of the mask.

  “You open the door, get rid of that asshole and bring your kid in here. Don’t fuck up. You hearing me?”

  “Yes,” Turner said, his voice raw with fear.

  Shorty shrank back, hugging the wall, his weapon pointed at Turner’s head.

  A movement caught Turner’s eye and he glimpsed Bone cross the room, slip out of the glass door and move past the pool, the beam of one of the underwater lights catching the long blade of the knife he held in his gloved hand.

  Turner heard Lucy’s key in the lock and fixed what he imagined was a look of benign surprise on his face as the door opened.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he said, “what’re you doing back?”

  The man, Peter—Turner suddenly recalled his name—spoke.

  “John, hi, we’ve had a family emergency. We tried to call.”

  He was tall and running to fat, with a nose broken from some contact sport he’d played in his youth. He and his freckled wife were reborn Christians who spoke about Jesus as if he were on the PTA, their Ford bearing a bumper sticker that read, “Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.”

  “Hell, sorry, Peter,” Turner said, “I think my phone’s in my office and Tanya has a migraine. She’s resting and her phone’s off.”

  “We tried your landline, also,” Peter said.

  “Weird, it must be down. I’ll check that out.”

  Lucy stepped into the room, out of Peter’s view and saw Shorty, her eyes widening and her mouth opening to scream.

  Shorty grabbed her, clamped his gloved hand over her mouth and put his gun to her head, pushing her against the wall.

  “What’s happened, Peter?” Turner asked, fighting to keep his voice level. “What’s the emergency?”

  “My mother-in-law up in Alaska fell and broke her hip. Beth and the kids are on their way to the airport right now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks, John. It took some knee-time with Jesus to get them on a flight but, hey, he came through for us and they’re booked for Anchorage. I’ll tie up some business tomorrow and fly out and join them.”

  Turner nodded and cleared his throat.

  Peter stared at him. “Everything okay, John?”

  “Sure,” Turner said, aware that he was sweating, beads of perspiration dripping into his eyes. “I think I’m going down with something. The flu, maybe.”

  Peter nodded. “Okay, well, you take it easy now.”

  “Give our best to Beth. I hope her mom’s going to be okay. And sorry for the trouble, you having to bring Lucy home.”

  “No trouble.”

  The man smiled and waved and then he turned and headed back toward his car.

  Turner was closing the door when he heard a hoarse yell.

  Tanya.

  “Peter! Help! Get the police!”

  12

  Tanya’s voice was choked off but the bald man swung around, heading back toward the door that Turner hadn’t yet shut.

  “What’s going on, John?”

  “Nothing. That’s just th
e TV.”

  Peter shook his head, peering over Turner’s shoulder into the house. “No way. That was Tanya. I think you’d better let me take a look.”

  “Peter, please, just go home.”

  As Turner started to close the door the bald guy reached into his pocket for his cell phone, prodding at the keypad.

  Bone appeared from the shadows behind Peter, wrapped a thick arm around his chest and drew the blade across his throat.

  Turner saw the Peter’s eyes widen as a rush of blood pumped from the man’s neck and then he could see only the string of bad choices that had left him stranded out here far from the known world.

  Part Two

  We are so accustomed to disguising

  our true nature from others,

  that we end up disguising it from ourselves.

  ― La Rochefoucauld

  1

  As Turner stepped into his skivvies—snapping the elastic over the stiffening cock that was greedy for more—he was struck, as always, by the sheer American scale of the woman sprawled naked across the motel bed: endless legs junctioning in a thicket of unpruned fuzz; wide hips and breathtaking ass; heavy, pink-nippled breasts dragged by gravity toward the mattress and a full-lipped, strong-jawed face half hidden by a thatch of blonde hair.

  It was as if she’d tumbled from the screen of the drive-in Turner had haunted as a kid, the screen on which Monroe and Mansfield had loomed like giant sex goddesses amidst the mine heaps and veld in the grim town west of Johannesburg where on summer nights he’d fled his house (his father out drinking and whoring, his mother anesthetized by Valium) and pedaled his bike the mile to the drive-in, sneaking in through the fence, ducking beneath the projector beam that played over the roofs of the dented little Japanese cars, watching movies that were old even back then—scratched, with torn sprocket holes that caused them to jump and judder—gaping at the majestic American women and dreaming himself into some bounteously carnal future.

  Grace Worthington’s blue eyes flickered open.

  “John,” she said, blinking, pushing her hair away from her face, “come here.”