THUGLIT Issue Twelve

by Marks, Leon

  "I'll leave," I had my hands up, as though Officer Denton's finger could fire at me. Then I remembered; guns were useless without bullets. "I'll be right outside, Connie."

  Connie waved.

  I slipped through, leaving the door ajar and stepping once again into the night. It slammed shut from the inside.

  The fog sprawled and I watched its twisting amorphous shape. Gunshots or a cordial exchange, either was possible now. I wondered which played more to my favor. Sure, a shootout would attract trouble, but I wasn't in the room to be shot. I could always grab the bags, take the van, and run. But, if Connie made the trade and the cops left, it'd just be me, with no gun, entering a room with two armed men I didn't trust.

  I sat down on the rim of a heavy flowerpot, its dead soil still clutching the skeleton of a hydrangea. Head in hands, I marveled at the weight of my skull, and my brain, and my mind, all the things making the decisions leading me to these moments. I wondered how much control I had over any of it.

  From around the corner I saw her figure first, obscured by the night and the Kansas State Wildcats hoodie she wore. Still though, even with her hands snug in its pocket, her steps were lithe and elegant, a girl, a woman, I guessed, anachronistic to this shitty motel.

  "The Salesman," she said.

  "The Launderer," I replied.

  "The Graduate fits more appropriately."

  "My apologies."

  "I didn't even know they had rooms on this side of the hotel."

  "I hate to be the one to tell you this but, this isn't a hotel."

  "When you've been in as many Eastern European hostels as I have, this place may as well be the Waldorf."

  "I've never had the pleasure."

  "It's not as advertised."

  Muffled voices permeated the wall behind me. She looked at the window adjacent to our motel door. I had no idea if the outer walls were thick enough to stop a bullet.

  "How come you're not inside with your friends?"

  "How come you're walking around in the fog at night?"

  Her nose scrunched bitterly. She nodded back towards where she had come from, or at least, where I thought her room was. I realized then I didn't even know for certain if she was staying here.

  "I think I've been looking for you, actually."

  "For me? Thought it was my job to go door to door."

  "I don't know. Somehow, when I left my room, I had a feeling I'd find you exactly like this."

  "How's that?"

  "Silent and sullen, sitting outside your door."

  I stared at her fair complexion, taut over her faint features. I thought of her head, as I had my own moments before. But I didn't think of the ways this nice girl made bad decisions to end up in an ugly place like this. Instead, I thought of her skull, nestled there behind her pretty skin, waiting to one day be released, showing the world just what all that beauty amounts to in the end.

  "You ever spend so much time with a group of people you start wondering what the hell you had in common with them in the first place?"

  I nodded towards my own room.

  "Yeah, I may have a clue."

  "I've driven all this way with these people, these friends, and now that we're halfway to where we're going I feel like I'm twice as far from home."

  Here I couldn't relate. It had been a very long time since I called anywhere home.

  She smiled finally, showing me those teeth of hers and we laughed and flirted some more. Then, as though the entire time we were talking it hadn't existed (or rather, now that our growing sexual tension had drained away into a quiet puddle of awkwardness between strangers), she pointed to Officer Denton's ride, a stark reminder of the reality of people meeting in dingy motels on Kansas back roads.

  "Are you a cop?"

  "Me?" I pointed at my chest with a thumb. "No, no I'm not a police officer."

  "Are the cops in your room?"

  "They are." There was no reason to lie other than all those reasons not to tell the truth.

  She looked at me crossways, realizing only now, after seeing the police here, perhaps I wasn't the man she was looking for.

  "You know what they say about this place, right?" she asked.

  So, instead of adding up all the reasons to stop talking to me and going back to her room, getting in the car with her friends and leaving this despicable motel in the corner of this forgotten state, she was not only going to entertain me with the telling of a horrific story I myself had just told, but she also wasn't going to heed that story's moral—the best and only illustration she needed to run the fuck away from me as quickly as she could.

  "No," I indulged her. Recklessness. I had my weaknesses too. "No, I hadn't heard."

  She glanced to her left and waited, for what I didn't know. For the ghosts maybe. For the ghosts to turn their heads and cover their ears and save themselves one more retelling of their grisly demise.

  "People were murdered here." She didn't quite whisper it, but she said it low enough that the words were almost swallowed up before I heard them.

  "Murdered?"

  "Yup. Seven people. A few years ago. People said it started as a domestic thing. Some guy fed up with his wife. They got into an argument." She reached her hand out, picked up an imaginary object. "Took the iron, the shitty one they hide in the closet. He picked it up and bashed her brains in."

  "Did he now?"

  "Mm-hmm. But that's not the sickest part." There it was again. Sickness. Illness. The woes of the world mounting in this one story, but endemic in the very vocabulary of our culture. All hope would soon be lost. And I would be here to see it.

  "What could be sicker than knocking an iron into your wife's skull?" I knew the answer, but was mystified by her eagerness.

  "The manager came out to see what all the yelling was about. He had already called the cops, so Lord knows why he felt compelled to look into it himself. He knocked on the door but the guy left it unlocked. The manager walks in, sees this woman, blood on the floor, her brains leaking from her ear, and he nearly vomits. The guy though is standing there, right beside the door. The manager turns to leave and guess what?"

  "Another head bashing I'm betting."

  She stopped, her arms pressed deep into her hoodie's pockets. Her brow furrowed. "You don't like this story."

  "What's not to like?"

  "I'm—" she stopped and looked into the mist. The ghosts pulled their hands from their ears because we all knew the story was over.

  "Well anyway, seven people was his final tally." She shrunk before me now.

  "Seven people. Appalling I guess."

  "Just a ghost story." Her voice was small now too.

  They would disagree I thought.

  The moisture in the air swelled. It was so quiet.

  "Where you from, Launderer?"

  She hesitated, but soon came back to me. "Muscotah originally. We moved to the city before I was in grade school though. I headed straight to England after graduation. I've been home just once since coming back from Europe. When we were finally back in the states, we figured we should learn a little more about our own country. We drove through fifteen states. Now we're touring Kansas one last time before settling down."

  "Touring Kansas. There's one I haven't heard."

  "Atchison is something of a shit town, sure. When I'm there all I can do is think about leaving. But when I'm gone for too long, I miss it deep in my chest."

  "Never heard someone talk so fondly of Kansas."

  "My mother always said we lived in the beating heart of the country."

  "I guess that's one way of looking at it."

  "Oh c'mon now, it's a great state."

  "Every state says that about themselves. But they're all wrong."

  "All of them? There are no great states anywhere in the union?" She kicked the gravel at her feet. "You're a salesman though, if anyone knows, I guess it'd be you."

  The fog wisped in front of her. A breeze from nowhere unsettled the air. I looked at her
as though from the end of a hallway, faraway but perfectly focused, or more accurately, down the barrel of a gun. A bullet, she was, but this time I had no doubt the gun was most definitely loaded.

  The door behind me opened and Connie stuck his head out.

  "The hell you doing out here?"

  "You told me to wait."

  "Now I'm telling you to get in here."

  He closed the door.

  She raised an eyebrow but stayed silent. The grin I offered wasn't returned.

  "Don't be upset. I was just kidding about the states. They're all wonderful. Like you said, I should know. I've seen every one."

  She kicked some more gravel.

  "You're not a salesman are you?"

  I didn't reply.

  I gave her a meek wave and said I'd catch her around and she nodded. But she didn't move, not even after I climbed the short step to our room. I looked back before closing the door and she stood there, staring at me as all that moisture closed in around her.

  Inside things looked better than I could have hoped. The duffel bags were zipped closed in the officers' hands and a much smaller duffel bag lay splayed on the bed, cash bubbling from its intestines. Connie leaned against the window and Tate hadn't emerged from the bathroom, unneeded cavalry still lying in wait.

  "A hundred and thirty-five in total." Connie nodded at the bed. "That sit okay with you?"

  "What are you asking him for? Thought we were done here?" Officer Salvador said. Now with a duffel bag in each hand, he didn't have a third to hold his gun steady in his holster. He must have been feeling extra insecure.

  "'Cause if it wasn't for him, this deal wouldn't have happened in the first place." A voice of support from Connie. I was happy to hear it, but it wasn't enough to change my mind.

  "One thirty-five. Yeah, whatever, I trust whatever you can get Connie," I said.

  Denton's turn came to speak up. "'You can get'? You can get whatever I decide you can get for all this dirty merch. And what I decided was fair, is sitting there on the bed. Or I can just zip it up and bring you all in, keep the bags, keep the money, and go about my day. Which do you prefer?"

  "Chill, Denton, chill. He said it was cool." Connie's hand rested on the doorknob awaiting any opportunity to open it and vent the cops back into the Kansas night for good.

  "I fucking care what he says." Denton couldn't resist.

  "We're good," I interjected. "You officers gave us more than a fair price." They didn't. "I think we are all satisfied with how this went." We weren't. "And our night is complete."

  It wasn't.

  Connie turned the knob and the two police officers left, barely fitting through with our bags. After closing the door, Connie stared through the peephole and I, in turn, stared at the pistol handle pressing against the back of his shirt.

  I heard three distinctive thumps, the trunk no doubt, followed by two doors closing.

  "What a bunch of pricks," Connie said, mouth to the door, waiting for them to pull away. "Can't believe how badly they ripped us off too."

  Outside we heard wheels spin and gravel spray.

  In between the silence in Connie's words, I crept closer until I was an arm's length away.

  He kept staring as the sound of their tires died on the damp air. "One thirty-five ain't gonna go far after we split—"

  I made my move.

  Connie's breath caught in his throat.

  It's happened to me plenty of times, and always because of the same type of circumstance. But unfortunately for Connie, anytime a gun was pointed at me, I still made it out alive.

  "The fuck you doing?"

  "Agreeing with you."

  "Agreeing with me? Looks like you just stole my fucking gun from me."

  "You're right Connie. One thirty-five doesn't go very far after we split it."

  "You assholes came to me. I set this entire thing up for you."

  "I know, and I appreciate all that you've done. Regrettably, I'm going to need a lot more than forty-five grand."

  The bathroom door swung open. Tate emerged, shotgun in his hand but slung low, the barrel at his knee.

  "The hell you doing, Franny?" His eyes swam repeated laps between Connie, the pistol and me.

  I shifted the gun to Tate. I aimed high, so there was no mistaking where the bullet would go.

  "Sorry Tate, it's just the way this has to go down."

  "What? But me and Connie—"

  "You're my dealer Tate, that's it. And no offense, you're a fucking moron. But when a guy comes across a shitload of merch he can't move, his dealer is the first person he calls."

  He looked to Connie, eyes pleading, unable to make a decision without a grownup telling him what to do. I almost felt bad. He epitomized everything about modern youth just then. Outspoken, sheltered, and utterly incapable of knowing what comes next.

  "Let him take the money, Tate."

  I took a step towards the bag on the bed. "Yeah Tate, let me take the money."

  I forgot one other thing he reminded me about young people. They're spoiled fucking rotten.

  "No, that's our cash! You can't just take it."

  "Tate don't!" Connie yelled, but he and I and all the quiet ghosts in the room knew it was already too late.

  Tate lifted the shotgun to his hip. But he still needed to cock it. He still needed to aim it. He still needed to pull the trigger.

  I, however, only needed to squeeze.

  It took just one shot, the bullet spinning nearly supersonic through the air, slicing into the left side of Tate's neck and exploding out the back, neatly imbedding itself in the wall behind him. The shotgun clanked to the floor while his two hands clasped the wound. He looked like a restaurant poster, the one of the cartoon man choking and the Good Samaritan behind him, performing the proper Heimlich maneuver. Only tonight, Kansas was all out of Good Samaritans. The blood ran in rivers down his arms and he stared at me, the color draining from his face, until his white eyes went blank and he fell face down to the floor.

  I turned back to Connie. He shook his head at the kid on the floor.

  "It didn't have to be this way." I shrugged a semi-sincere apology to him.

  "Yea it did. These things always end up this way," he said to me with the exhaustion of a lifetime's worth of deals gone wrong.

  "I guess you're right."

  When I left the motel room, I placed the duffel bag on the doorstep before clicking the door closed and making sure it locked. Then I used a towel to wipe my prints from the doorknob. Inside the room, I had used the same towel to wipe down the gun before placing it in Connie's cold hand and wrapping his finger around the handle and trigger. The placement of everything wouldn't hold up to a thorough investigation very long—and failing that, a cop would immediately realize they were both killed with the same gun. But I figured it would be confusing enough to give me a head start. Besides, there was no one left who could place a third person at the scene.

  "That's it, huh?"

  Startled, I spun on a heel. Instinctively my hand went to the small of my back, but there was no weapon there.

  "You scared me," I said. I slung the bag over my shoulder and brushed past her to the van. I could feel her eyes; her smile was gone, those beautiful teeth covered by a sad frown. "You been out here the entire time?" I asked a question I already knew the answer to.

  She stood as a weather vane; dug into the ground so firmly by disbelief her feet stayed pointing at the motel door even as her torso twisted to watch me load the van.

  "What happened in there?" She responded with a question she too already knew the answer to. This amused me; the two of us parlaying via a verbal do-si-do.

  I slammed the sliding door shut on the van and stuck the key in the driver's side door.

  "Where you headed now?" She tried a different tack to get an answer out of me. It worked. I stopped and considered the question a few seconds longer than I should have. Those cops probably hadn't gotten very far. Regardless of how crooked they were,
they'd be the first on the scene if someone had already called the police.

  "What's behind there?" I asked pointing to the fields abutting the back of the motel. "Beyond all this corn I mean."

  She looked at the cornfield, her feet still cemented in place. "It's just one farm here. He owns something like eighty acres. His farmhouse is somewhere that way. A road runs in front of his barn. You take that a few miles west and you'll hit Route 7."

  I mounted the driver's seat of the van with considerably more ease than Connie had. He was dead now. The thought appeared alongside his ghost, floating there with the rest of them.

  "Thanks, Launderer." The irony of her name struck me when I glanced over my shoulder and saw the bag of cash sitting in the back. I could take her with me. Give her undisclosed sums of money to go out and buy the stuff of life. The money would cycle through the many and varied transactions of commerce and come back to me clean, untraced, and wonderfully ready to start a new life.

  "I heard gunshots."

  I wiped my mouth with my hand.

  "Where're you headed?"

  "I don't—" with great effort her feet pulled free from the earth and she turned to face me.

  "Come with me."

  "With you?"

  "Yeah. Come with me. The van's not as scary as it looks. Especially after you see what I have in this bag back here."

  "But my friends."

  "Screw 'em."

  "I don't think I could do that."

  I looked at the clock on the dash. I was wasting time. I put the van in reverse and wheeled it around. I stopped beside her, so close I could lean out the window and touch her forehead if I wished.

  "Remember that story you told me. About the murders?"

  She solemnly nodded.

  "There's nothing special about it. People have been murdered everywhere, all over, and for all time. Whether in illness, in anger, in war, or in chains. The entire country is just like this backwoods, Kansas motel. I'm old, girl. I don't look it, but God I'm old. I've seen too much of this dark republic to think that scorn and hate don't fill every goddamned corner of it. I've seen it in Augusta, Montana and Blacksburg, Virginia; in Springer, New Mexico, on Medford, Long Island and even in the dewy morning fields of Ashburn, Georgia. Blood and murder everywhere I've been."