The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “How’ve you been, Heather?”

  “You know,” Heather says, letting fall the hair she’s been chewing. “Things are good.”

  Things are not good, by the look of things. Or the smell. She’s not doing laundry as often as she needs to. Her shoulders are slumped and no matter how many times she tries to uncross her arms they keep on crossing. Heather’s mom has her two daughters. Heather’s spent two years trying to get them back. Failing just enough drug tests to keep that from happening. Based on her body language today, she knows she’s about to fail another one. When she was so fucking close.

  Heather loves her girls. Zelda knows this. She’d do anything in her power to get them back. It’s just that staying clean is not in her power.

  This, though. This will be.

  “You still at 310 State?”

  “Yeah,” Heather says. “For now. My friend’s apartment.”

  “What happened, exactly, at your last address? Your own place. I don’t recall.”

  Zelda recalls. Heather was one of the numbers she called, from Attalah’s eviction list. Never got hold of her. Number disconnected.

  “Creative differences with my landlord. He got creative with my rent and doubled it, and I wasn’t creative enough to come up with that kind of money on any kind of regular basis. Now I think he found where I’m staying, at my friend’s house, and started slipping death threats under the door.”

  “Asshole,” Zelda says.

  “Exactly,” Heather says, with something like gratitude.

  Poor Heather. No one ever takes her side.

  “Can you shut my door?” Zelda asks.

  “Is that allowed? I thought it was some kind of social services rule. Don’t wanna risk us deplorables jumping across the table and strangling you when no one can hear or see.”

  “More of a guideline. And more for the clients’ safety than ours. Once upon a time we had a case manager here, a man, and, well, he took some liberties.”

  “Men always ruin everything for everyone else,” Heather says, and leans back to push the door shut. “What’s up?”

  “When we test your urine today, what are we going to find?”

  Heather puts her hands to her face. Presses hard, like she could fold herself up into nothingness. “Nothing good,” she says, when she lowers them, and her face is splotched with red.

  “This was gonna be it,” Zelda says. “Wasn’t it?”

  Heather nods. Not like this is even something particularly unusual at this point. It’s the eighth time she’s fumbled the ball at the brink of scoring the point.

  “Here,” Zelda says, and places a specimen cup on the table between them. Not empty. “That’s clean urine, from another client of mine. I had her do two, told her the lab machinery had been getting glitchy. I’m going to submit this as your sample for today, and when the test results come back clean on Thursday, I’m going to mark you down as fully compliant, and recommend resumption of full custody.”

  Heather’s jaw drops. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why would you do something like that? People lose their jobs for shit like that. People go to jail for shit like that.”

  “Not if they do it right. And not if nobody snitches.”

  “But why?”

  “I need your help. I need you to do something for me.”

  “Anything,” Heather says, leaning forward. Flushed; aflame.

  “Your old landlord. He owns an antique store. Did you know that?”

  “No, but it figures.”

  “I want you to go in the middle of the night and throw something through the plate-glass window of his store.”

  Heather laughs. “Are you serious? Shit, I’d do that for the sheer pleasure of it. Getting my girls back’d be icing on the cake.”

  “I figured.”

  “But it’s not a bomb, is it? Because terrorism becomes some homeland security shit, and if the feds roll in here, they’d have all kinds of crazy technology and who knows what they could turn up. I mean, I know how to be careful, but if they got fucking spy-cam satellite footage of the fucking sidewalk when I do it, and they can, I don’t know, rewind it and follow me home or whatever, I don’t know about all that.”

  “Relax,” Zelda says, thinking, This kind of crazy paranoid shit is exactly why some people shouldn’t fuck with meth. “It’s not a bomb. It’s nothing that would go any higher than Hudson cops, and we know they can barely trace a fucking license plate. I’ll mail you a package by the end of the week, with the object and the address and some suggestions for how to do it and not get caught. Not that I think you can’t figure that out on your own. It’ll be easy. Go by late at night—I got a friend on the force who will be patrolling Warren Street at that time. He’ll turn a blind eye to what you do and say he saw someone with a completely different description.”

  “Is this connected to those YOU ARE HATED buttons?” Heather asks.

  “Indeed,” Zelda says, producing a fistful. “Give some to your friends.”

  The rest is details, and gratitude, and paperwork. Heather’s crying, she’s so happy.

  For a second, Zelda’s professionalism flickers in her brain. You’re putting two kids in danger. Sending them home with an addict who’s currently using—that could go real wrong, real fast.

  But her tracks are covered. Even in the scenarios where terrible things happen, and Heather goes to trial for neglect or endangerment, and she snitches on Zelda and says she knew she wasn’t ready to get her kids back, it’ll be easy to dismiss as the desperate fiction of a damaged addict failure of a mother. She’ll have the clean tests, the paperwork. And Heather’s girls are not helpless children. Not anymore. They’re thirteen and fifteen. They can fend for themselves if Mommy goes feral.

  And anyway it just feels so good, this weird new thing, this tingle. This ache above her heart, between her ribs. This hate.

  * * *

  “YOU SEE IT, don’t you?”

  Lilly is working from home, since the Penelope’s Quilt office has been completely consumed by last-minute campaign work and it is impossible to concentrate on anything else. So she sits on her bed, scouring compact discs full of photographs digitized from negatives found in a State Street attic—when the memory comes to her with a vividness that’s almost unsettling. The first words Jark ever said to her: You see it, don’t you?

  Nine P.M. on a Friday night and Lilly was the last one in the office—or so she’d thought, when Jark plopped a chair down beside her desk. Five years ago; six months after she’d started at Penelope’s Quilt.

  “See . . . what?”

  “Hudson.” He smiled. Such a smile! Who could say, whether the light that shined out of it had always been there, and is how he became such a big deal, or whether becoming such a big deal had filled him up with the kind of confidence that looked like magic, like light. Or whether it’s all in my head, she’d thought, the magic light of stardom all in the eyes of the observer. “You see how special this town is. What it was, what it could be. I’m right, aren’t I? I see it in your eyes.”

  “Yeah,” she said, buzzing inside at this kind of attention from the superstar boss she’d barely exchanged eye contact with since she arrived.

  “You’ve been doing a great job on research,” he’d said. “But I think it’s a waste of your talent, and your passion. I’m creating a new position, and I want you to fill it.”

  “What’s the position?” she asked, even though of course she’d have said yes to whatever he asked.

  “Director of Community Engagement and Community Building.”

  “That’s a mouthful,” she said. “You probably wanna workshop it a bit with marketing.”

  “Fuck marketing. What do you say? I want you to lead our efforts to involve community residents and create cultural programming in support of our vision for this city’s future. We can make something magnificent out of Hudson. You and me.”

  She’d felt so seen, after that. So va
lued. And she’d worked her ass off ever since. She smiles, remembering. Feeling suddenly, superhumanly exhausted.

  Looking back now, she figures all Jark saw was a workaholic with no social life, who was hungry in a way he could exploit. It didn’t matter. She did love Hudson, and she’d done amazing things since Jark gave her the new gig. She knew she was a small piece of a big machine, and she couldn’t take sole credit for all the incredible progress that had been made—the world-famous chefs who opened up Warren Street restaurants; the New York Times articles; the references to Hudson on hip mainstream television shows. But she knew she was a part of it. And the two of them were going to make the world see what a special place Hudson was.

  She falls asleep at her desk, remembering. In the instant before drifting into dreams, she’s dimly conscious of the distant sound of screeching tires and a loud booming crash.

  * * *

  JOE ALLEY IS HUDSON’S SHORTEST: three houses deep. Theories abound as to who Joe was or why he got an alley named after him. It branches off Frederick Street, a similarly insignificant thoroughfare situated right where Hudson’s urban grid gives way to the curves and hills of the county beyond.

  Rich Trappan lives alone in the last house on Joe Alley, the one he grew up in, the one his father left him. An aging, flimsy, single-story structure, built cheap back in the fifties, Hudson’s last big boom. A bitch to heat: thin walls with ratty sheets of insulation that do little to hold warmth in. The house, and the recliner he’s sitting in, and the failing refrigerator, and everything else in his life he values: it’s his father’s.

  It’s lucky Rich doesn’t need to pay rent because his employment is intermittent at best. Seasonal work at Wal-Mart; helping out with a buddy’s contractor business in summer. One of these days he’ll get around to cleaning the place up, building a wall or two to make a second bedroom out of half the living room, start renting it out on Airbnb to these New Yorker assholes who have no problem paying $250 a night for some of Hudson’s shittier spots. Of course to do that he’d probably need to stop smoking inside, and deal with some significant plumbing challenges, and, really, who has the time or money or willpower for any of that?

  Thursday night is bitter cold, a slice of February in late October, and he’s watching television under three blankets. The Voice is on. Pretty young creatures shrieking their hearts out. Holding out bloody hands, offering up the desperate dreams they’ve torn out of themselves. All these shows—America’s Got Talent, American Idol, Top Chef—the aspiring bakers and acrobats and dancers and models who weep in agony or ecstasy every episode. He doesn’t know which he likes more: when their dreams come true or when their dreams are dashed.

  His head is cold. He puts the blankets over it and grins at the flatulent smell under there. But then he can’t hear the show so well—he’s well past due for a checkup, and something is seriously wrong with his ears, but he lacks insurance and anyway if there’s something really wrong he doesn’t want to know—and he emerges from the safety of the blankets.

  He wasn’t always like this: some poor sad fuck getting old in a stinking shack. Once upon a time he roamed the night in crowded cars, him and Stubb and a rotating crowd of lesser boys addled by drugs and drink and lust for blood and sex, blasting horror movie soundtracks and the most aggressive hip-hop, striking terror into the hearts of decent citizens lying awake in the dark and praying that they’d pass on by.

  Rich hits mute during the commercial break. The wind makes noises like whale cries overhead. The night is still out there. It always has been. Anytime he wants to, he could open that door and step out into it. Why hasn’t he?

  Brakes screech outside. This is not normal. No one ever goes down Joe Alley. His neighbors are old, infirm creatures. One of them lost her driver’s license last year.

  Rich listens.

  An engine revs. Something big: a pickup truck, probably. It turns. Slides to a stop right in front of his house, shining their brights through his windows. Whoever it is, they know he’s in there—because, where else would he be? They know he’s terrified.

  Rich wants to say something, do something. He can’t. As if from a distance, he hears himself fart.

  Outside the engine shrieks again. Tires screech. And then: the walls thud.

  What the fuck

  What the fuck

  They just hit my house with their truck

  But not hard. Not like they really wanted to break something. Like they were toying with him.

  Rich reaches for his cell phone. It’s plugged in, on the table, too far away—it’s ancient, the battery is always dying on him—and somehow he can’t bring himself to budge. Like if he just sits there, very still and very quiet in the safety of his blankets, he’ll be fine.

  I deserve this, he thinks. I should tremble in fear, after all the times I made scared old people tremble in fear. This is just karma. Dumb kids fucking around.

  It’s not kids, and they’re not fucking around. Tires screech again.

  The sound is like thunder, striking during the finale of a fireworks show. One big boom and a whole lot of little ones, and then there’s a truck in his living room.

  Someone just drove a truck through the wall of my house, he thinks, and he still can’t bring himself to scramble for his cell phone. Run for another room. Out the back door, into the night.

  The driver’s side door opens. A man steps out. Wearing a mask on his head: a big blue papier-mâché whale. Behind the man, Rich’s roof lurches to the side with a screech.

  This whole house is about to collapse on top of me, Rich thinks, and pulls the blanket up over his mouth to keep from screaming.

  “You told,” the man says, and pulls something very long and sharp from behind his back. A harpoon.

  “Told . . . who? What?”

  “Told everyone. What we did together. Otherwise why would I have random strangers asking me about it online?”

  And then Rich recognizes the voice, even though he probably hasn’t heard it in five years. Once, it had been the most important voice on the planet for him. Once they had been best friends. Once they had terrorized the town together. And more than once—many times, in fact—they’d fucked.

  “Stubb?” he whispers, and then there is a harpoon in his throat, windpipe pierced, the blade between two vertebrae, spearing him to his father’s recliner.

  Chapter Thirty

  RONAN

  Morning hurt.

  So much sun came in through my uncurtained window that I felt positively vampiric, about to burst into flames or fade out of existence altogether like a silent movie monster.

  Pain. I was made of pain. Probably I had had worse hangovers in my life, but I certainly couldn’t remember one right then.

  What the fuck had I done last night? I remembered the Iron Horse, the musty smell of it, not like a bar at all but more like a basement (like a tomb) where centuries of spilled beer had accreted, and like old wet burned wood. Eyes on me. Smoke and laughter in the crowded bar. I remembered stumbling home, half dragged by someone. And I remembered a whole lot of crazy dreams.

  Including Tom Minniq standing over me in the street.

  Katch was right. He wasn’t a ghost. He was something horrible. Something else was hiding inside that human body. I’d smelled it on him, heard it in his voice—something deep down and dark and ravenous—and been terrified by it even as I was also aroused.

  I stumbled to the bathroom. Drank six glasses of water. Turned on the shower as hot as it could get. Stepped inside with all my clothes on, and screamed. My scream became a laugh. My laughter maybe became crying.

  ***

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: TRY to remember New York.

  The memories were there—I could list them in my mind, the stuff of stories, the building blocks of relationships—but the sense impressions themselves were gone.

  Photographs helped, sparked visual resonance, but even that stayed strictly visual.

  There had been that one 3:00 A.M. subway ride,
stalled forever between stations, a packed car full of people heading home from parties, the woman who projectile vomited and people started screaming and moving away and spraying perfume on it and putting down newspaper and then someone else puked, and then another . . . there had been the man who caught my eye walking home from an event on Central Park West, who bummed a cigarette and then led me into the safe forbidden dark.

  I’d told these stories so many times I could conjure them up again, but I couldn’t remember the smell of her puke. The taste of him in my mouth. The squish of soft park mud under my knees.

  * * *

  “JESUS, RONAN—what the hell happened to your head?”

  Attalah pointed at the scrape on my left temple. She’d taken one step inside, so no one would see her speaking with me, but she would come no further.

  “I fell,” I said. “Had a few too many at the Iron Horse last night.”

  She opened her mouth like she had something to say, then shut it. Then said it anyway: “You know the Iron Horse has been closed for thirty years, right?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Did I say Iron Horse? I meant—”

  “We can’t do this,” she interrupted.

  “Can’t do what?”

  She showed me the draft nude-photo-blackmail email on her phone.

  “Of course we can,” I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from some deep well inside me. Is this them? I wondered. Are they pushing me? But I knew I had no such excuse. This was all me.

  “If just one person snitches—”

  “They won’t.”

  I could still smell the rot-and-alcohol reek of Tom Minniq. Where the hell had I been drinking, if not the Iron Horse?

  “Pay attention to me, Ronan. This is . . .”

  “I know what’s at stake,” I said, still deep down the well. “And I don’t care.” Half of me felt like my whale ghost overlords would magically fix everything, keep the matter from coming to light or give the grand jury strokes at the pivotal moment. The other half of me felt like that wouldn’t happen, and I’d get caught for sure, but it didn’t matter, because I’d take a short walk off the Rip Van Winkle Bridge before they ever came to put the cuffs on me. “Whatever happens, I’ll take the fall for it. You gotta believe me on that, Attalah.”