Man Down

by Roger Smith

  Grace shook her head. “It’s not you. I haven’t been drinking much since . . .”

  She waved a hand and looked out the window, watching the red light strobing on the wingtip as the plane rumbled toward Las Vegas.

  A week ago Turner had been sitting at his computer pretending to analyze sales figures, allowing his mind to skim over the surface of his empty life like a hovercraft, listening to the soft, measured clack of Grace’s fingers as she typed, so different from Tanya who had to replace her keyboards regularly because she hammered at them as if venting an inner fury.

  The typing paused and Grace said, “John?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “I dunno if this interests you, but I have an invite here from the APSP.”

  “What’s the APSP?”

  “I’m sorry. The Association of Pool and Spa Professionals.”

  “Why would they send us an invite?”

  “Well, we’re members.”

  “Since when?”

  “I signed us up a few weeks ago.” She moved a strand of hair from her eye. “Is that a problem?”

  “No, not at all. What’s the invite for?”

  “To a convention. In Las Vegas.”

  Gambling was one of the few vices that had never gained traction with Turner and Las Vegas held little allure for him.

  He stood, laughing.

  “Jesus, a bunch of pool people in Vegas. That sounds unmissible.” He saw her face and said, “You think it’s worth going to?”

  “Well, maybe not.”

  Her confidence evaporating.

  Turner hovered over her shoulder, catching her scent mixed with the traces of stale tobacco. A mixture he found powerfully erotic.

  On the monitor was a gaudy display of pools and spas and the words “Pool Con. Just add Water!”

  “I thought maybe it would be a chance to network,” Grace said.

  “You’re right. It is an opportunity.”

  “Maybe I could go?”

  A dangerous notion rose in Turner’s mind and he felt like a high diver approaching the board, stepping onto it, testing it, approaching the lip, taking a small jump and then landing back on the springy wood.

  “Sure,” he said, ready to withdraw, “you do that.”

  Then he felt the board bend beneath his toes as he launched himself into space.

  “Hell, why don’t we both go?” he said.

  She looked up at him. “You really want to?”

  “Yes, I want to. Do what needs to be done.”

  He walked out into the sunlight, his head spinning.

  That night Turner sat alone at the dining room table, eating warmed-over chicken. Lucy was watching TV, picking at her plate, and Tanya prowled the open plan kitchen, spooning something from a bowl, half an eye on the reality program the girl was glued to, ready to heap scorn on this manifestation of America at its ugliest, half an eye on Turner who sat with his gaze on his food, not willing to be drawn into another bruising encounter with his wife.

  She slammed her bowl down on table across from him and leaned her elbows on the wooden surface. He caught the tart wiff of her body odor mixing with something foul in the bowl.

  “C’mon, spit it out,” she said.

  He sighed. “What?”

  “There’s something you want to tell me isn’t there?”

  Tanya reading him like a body scanner.

  He shrugged. “I’m going away for the weekend.”

  “Where to?”

  “A pool and spa convention in Las Vegas.”

  She hooted. “Wow. Livin it!” The last words bellowed out in a nastily accurate impersonation of an American daytime TV host.

  Tanya stood, running her hands through her cropped hair, a fall of dandruff floating to her shoulders like an upturned snow dome.

  She sniggered. “Are you taking your veep with you?”

  Turner narrowed his eyes in confusion.

  “Your vice president of sales.” Tanya laughed. “She left one of her business cards out on the pool deck. Jesus, Johnny, is that what it takes for you to get into a woman’s pants these days? Calling her a veep?”

  Turner glanced toward his daughter but she was lost in the netherworld of reality TV, inured to this warfare between her parents.

  “Jesus, this fucking country,” Tanya said. “Everybody’s a fucking vice president of something.” She tapped her spoon on the table. “So? Is she going with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s this, some kind of what happens in Vegas thing?” When he didn’t answer she shook her head and said, “Go. Go Johnny go to your little empire of kitsch with your fat blonde. Screw her. Get it out of your system, then come home and be a good boy, okay?”

  Throwing the last words over her shoulder as she went to the sink and dumped her bowl inside with a clatter.

  The plane had wandered into heavy turbulence, yawing and heaving as the cabin lights were doused. The jet banked and flung itself toward the earth, Las Vegas’s gaudy neon bleeding into the night.

  The landing was rough, the plane bouncing, tires mewling, the fuselage buffeted and rocked, before the jet gave a final shudder and trundled like a cowed animal toward a man in hearing protectors, waving reflective bats.

  “Looks like we made it,” Grace said.

  “Yes. We made it.”

  She ran the pad of her index finger from Turner’s wedding ring toward his wrist, the pale hair that grew on the blade of his hand bending at her touch like wheat in a breeze.

  The sensation was electric to his skin and when she removed her hand he had to fight the urge to seize it in his.

  Grace stared at him and then she stood, reaching for her bag in the overhead locker and without looking back she set off down the aisle, leaving Turner with the certainty that something had been set in train that could not be stopped.

  4

  Tard threw Turner to the floor near Bekker’s body.

  As his vision cleared Turner saw Tanya hunkered down beside the corpse, her arms dangling between her knees, staring at the masked man with empty eyes.

  Turner heard the rumble of the castors of the sliding door and the slap as it closed. Looking away from his wife he saw Bone turn the tumbler to lock it.

  “Tard,” Bone said, “get hold of them shears before this bitch goes all Hell’s Kitchen on your ass.”

  The hulking man, presenting Turner with a view of a butt crack as vast as the Continental Divide, wheezed and grunted himself to the floor beside Bekker, seized the handles of the poultry shears and withdrew them, blood dripping onto his gloved hand as he inspected the blades before he sheathed the clippers in the hip pocket of his sweats.

  Tard looked down at the body, prodded at it in the manner of a curious child and then gripped the black balaclava and yanked it off, revealing the look of disbelief that was Bekker’s death mask.

  Tard laughed. “Shit, don’t Shorty look vexed?”

  Tanya stared at Bekker’s face.

  For a long time she remained impassive and Turner, holding his breath, was about to relax when he saw her body tense and twitch, as if an electrical current had been run through it.

  When Tanya stood the giant gained his feet in a series of jerks and lunges, ready to quell any further homicidal impulses.

  But she was intent only on Bekker, getting closer, leaning down and inspecting him.

  Staring at the dead man, taking in the lips twisted into a sneer beneath the thick black mustache and the good eye stretched wide, like that of a traveler confused by his arrival at an unexpected destination, Tanya transposed his features onto those of the slender Latino whom she’d encountered on the stairs in that piss-stinky apartment house a few weeks ago.

  Black hair swept back from his forehead. Check.

  Facial hair. Check.

  But, as Tanya attempted to align the mouth half-hidden by the brush of glossy bristles, align death’s rictus with the sneer of the man on the stairs, she was yanked back to the
moment after she’d sprung from the floor driven by a primitive hormonal cascade and jammed the shears into his eye with such force that she felt the tips of the blades jar against his skull bone, the moment when those hair-fringed lips had parted obscenely through the mouth hole of the mask, saying something that was lost to her, deafened as she’d been by the wild spike of her blood pressure.

  But she heard them now, heard the two words that had death-rattled out of the mouth of the dark man:

  Fokken kont.

  Fucking cunt.

  Not Spanish but Afrikaans, the language indigenous to South Africa, the mongrel spawn of Low Country dialects that during Tanya’s childhood and adolescence—hothoused in defiantly colonial Natal, more English than England with its polo and cricket and gins and tonic—had been the hated language of the dour Calvinist regime, its hawk and spit harshness perfect for articulating the brutally prosaic lunacy of apartheid.

  And her journey through time to identify the face of her assailant accelerated and she was back in that sordid Johannesburg cottage ten years ago and a man—this man—this dark haired man, sans mustache but absolutely fucking definitely for sure him, was crouched over Johnny, holding a gun to his head that he’d lazily holstered as he’d displayed his teeth in an arrogant grin and although she’d taken him for a Latin—Portuguese? Italian?—when he’d spoken it was in the slightly Americanized accent of the TV-reared urban Afrikaner, and, now, in her Arizona living room, she understood who this dead man was.

  And what her husband had brought him here to do.

  5

  Turner drove the unconscious girl to the perfect stage for what was to come: the ugly mongrel of a house where the Afrikaner family (Pa, Ma, a toddler and a swaddled infant) had built a trap for themselves of high fences, razor wire and twelve gauge bars, fish in a barrel for their marauding killers—teenagers born the year Nelson Mandela walked free—who had pillaged, plundered, raped and murdered with a ferocity that could only have been fueled by race memory.

  Turner, his shadow a black stain on the bleached grass and red earth, stepped down from the shuddering HiAce and unlocked the gate in the perimeter fence, nosed the vehicle through, then locked up again.

  He parked the van behind the house and pulled on the ski mask that Chris Bekker had left for him in the glove box.

  When he raised the rear door of the HiAce Turner saw that the girl was still unconscious but he kept the mask on, to hide from himself more than from her.

  He unlocked the barred front door of the house before going back and sliding the girl out of the van, wincing when her head bumped against the side of the HiAce.

  He carried her into the bedroom, laid her on the mattress, untied her hands and ankles and peeled free the tape that covered her mouth.

  The pain of the removal drew a small sigh from her and her eyelids flickered. She was floating close to consciousness.

  Turner left the room and locked it after him, removed the mask, retreating to a corner of the living room far away from the ominous stains and bullet holes and sat down on the carpet, all at once terrifyingly straight and sober, exhausted, a boneless skin bag of toxins and terror.

  His hands shook.

  His legs spasmed.

  He felt an overwhelming anxiety, a feeling of breaking loose, falling and tumbling, of the earth giving way beneath his feet, and he was twelve-year-old Johnny Turner again in that cramped mine house with its tepid light and its cheap furniture and its smell of stale food and despair.

  His mother, numbed by Valium, sat hypnotized by St. Elsewhere, his two-year-old sister asleep on the couch beside her. Turner changed the child’s diaper and without waking she clutched his finger with her tiny hand.

  He left the house, straddled his bike and rode to the drive-in, sneaked in through a gap in the fence and dozed through the final act of Rocky III.

  It was the second half of the double feature he’d come to see: The Misfits. As the old black and white movie juddered and stuttered onto the huge screen, the tramline scratches and projector-burns in the aged print echoing the fissured face of the nearly-dead Clark Gable, the cars leaked away until there were only a few left, mostly couples fucking, but Turner was entranced.

  Marilyn Monroe, well into her thirties—older than his pill-head mother—possessed a fragile, shop-worn sensuality that aroused something in the boy, an indefinable longing that would grow within him on his path to dissatisfaction and dissolution.

  The film ended and a fat, geeky guy in a white coat carrying a flashlight rousted the lovers who clattered away in their little cars until it was just Turner and the rows of speakers genuflecting at the empty screen.

  He fell asleep on the grass and it was dawn when he awoke, the ground bucking and heaving beneath him, undulating like the waterbed he’d bounced on in the Bradlows showroom in town until a salesman had violently ejected him, the speakers clattering and shaking like a legion of beggars on their pole mounts.

  Tremors like this, caused by rock falls in the tunnels that honeycombed the earth beneath, were all too common and he found himself saying a child’s prayer for the men who worked all night miles below, chipping and drilling and blasting gold from the rock.

  The tremor ended but as Turner rode his bike through the deserted streets, the headgear of the mine black against the red dawn, he heard the mewl of sirens and knew that there had been a calamity.

  As he neared his street the sirens grew louder and when he arrived at his house he saw a clot of emergency vehicles and then a sight so surreal that he thought he was still asleep and dreaming.

  His house had gone, disappeared into the maw of a gaping sinkhole. His neighbor’s house listed on the edge, buckled and twisted, like a tent with its guy ropes severed.

  A cop pushed Turner away from the danger zone and as he stood amongst a group of people in nightclothes, staring, stunned, a car weaved up and his father lurched out, drunk, another man’s wife left sitting in the passenger seat.

  Billy Turner, smelling of sweat and brandy and cigarettes and cunt, embraced his son who fought him off, cursing. The cops, who knew his father well, tore him loose from the boy and took him away.

  Turner never saw his father again.

  Later that day his mother’s parents—genteel Johannesburgers who had disowned their only child after she became pregnant by the handsome, alcoholic gold miner—appeared in a sleek Jaguar and took Turner to their Edwardian mansion in Westcliff, where they stared at him as he grew each day to look more like his father.

  But his mind—and his omnivorous consumption of books, and, later, chemicals— was all his mother’s.

  He became educated.

  He lost his virginity to two rich party girls.

  When he tasted booze and smoked weed and popped pills filched from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet he felt that he had come home, finally, after a very long and lonely journey.

  In his eighteenth year his grandparents died in successive months and left debt as his inheritance.

  Turner was alone.

  Alone with a void within as yawning as the hole that had swallowed his mother and sister, living a life that had a way of subsiding beneath him into holes of his own excavation.

  6

  When Tanya, hunched low over Bekker’s body, looked up at him, Turner saw the venom restored to her gaze.

  “You fucker,” she said and suddenly she was flying at Turner who, still winded from Tard’s tackle, could do little but scoot his ass along the wooden floor as she aimed punches at his head.

  Wheezing and giggling, the giant enveloped Tanya in a bear hug, lifting her from the floor, her legs kicking like a furious toddler’s.

  Gasping, fighting vainly to free herself, eyes locked on Turner’s, Tanya said, “That’s fucking Chris Bekker.”

  “You’re crazy,” Turner said.

  “You think that stupid Freddie Mercury mustache can fool me? It’s him, you bastard. You brought him here, with these psychos, to kill me, didn’t you?”r />
  Turner shook his head.

  Bone stepped up.

  “Okay, hold on just one goddam minute. You sayin you know Shorty Henderson?”

  “His name is Chris Bekker,” Tanya said. “He’s a South African. Like us.”

  “You’re South Africans?”

  “Yes, we’re South Africans.”

  “I thought you was British,” Tard said.

  “Tard here would know, he enjoys nothin more than putting his stinky feet up after a long day and binge watchin Downtown Abbey.”

  “And I aint ashamed of that,” Tard said.

  “No shame in it, Tard.” Bone looked at Tanya. “He’s got the ear of a fuckin gun dog. If he says you’re British then you’re fuckin British.”

  “We’re South African. Check our passports if you don’t believe me.”

  “Then why aint you niggers?”

  “Because we’re white South Africans.”

  “You’re shittin me,” Bone said.

  “I am not.”

  He pondered this for a moment.

  “Now you raise it, I always thought there was somethin slant about Shorty. But I put it down to him bein a smackhead.”

  Tard shook his immense dome. “But he always spoke American.”

  Tanya said to Bone, “Didn’t you hear what he said? When I stabbed him?”

  “Well, I know he weren’t happy.”

  “Fokken kont.”

  “Say what?”

  “Afrikaans for fucking cunt.”

  “What’s Afrikaans?”

  “It’s a language. A South African language.”

  Bone nodded. “Bitch is right. Them words weren’t American. Sounded like Kraut to me.”

  “Or Creole,” Tard said.

  “Creole?”

  “Creole.”

  “What do you know about fuckin Creole?”

  “My mamma was Creole.”

  “Shit, Tard, you didn’t have no mama, you just crawled fully formed from the bottom of an outhouse.”

  “Now that’s just plain uncalled for.”