The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  ‘The straight-edgers are having a show tonight,’ she explained. We passed door after door covered by plywood until we reached one that wasn’t.

  ‘Hold your nose,’ she said. We stepped inside and I smelled a barn full of animals, the blood from a butcher’s apron and the men’s john at a Greyhound station. The stench clawed at me, watering my eyes, getting up my nose, in my mouth, into my clothes. I pulled the collar of my shirt over my face and followed the tangles of graffiti climbing every wall, thick as ivy.

  ‘Don’t worry. Our place is nowhere near here,’ she said as we crunched empty plastic vials and avoided bloody wads of toilet paper. I followed her along the hallways illuminated by the lights of the overpass.

  For months, we hung out every day. I made friends with the squat kids, the young crusties and the old hippies. There were so many kids in the rooms and halls it felt like a college dorm. We dumpster-dived or shoplifted food. We snuck into theatres and shows. We got fucked up. We did nothing. I made this time and place with Karla home. I forgot about Jack.

  It took a day to undo it all. We were awoken by what I thought were the cops bringing us their pepper spray and eviction notices. I told Karla to stay there, and I’d check it out. I unlocked our room by taking down the board that barred the door and rolled the concrete bollard out of the way. A few steps from the door a guy known as Crackers lay with his head cocked against the baseboard as if using the wall as a pillow. He had lived at the squat the longest.

  He knew what form to send to delay evictions. He knew what to tell the cops, and how to say it to get them off our backs. He had scams for days and was the RA for our dirty hobo dorm.

  His leather jacket had the metal tops of disposable lighters clamped along the zipper like two rows of fat metal teeth and was covered in the patches of all my favourite bands. That morning he was a tangle of limbs, a dead spider in a windowsill. The white face, the colourless lips, told me I had seen my first corpse. Someone had already gone through his pockets looking for whatever he had OD’d on.

  I went back into the room to tell Karla. She was close to Crackers. Her tiny body shook in my arms. We decided to get drunk in the park where Crackers used to hang out. We left our room. The body was gone. As we left, Karla cussed a group of people clotted in mourning heaps, calling them tourists and fakes.

  By the afternoon we had scored some forties and were sitting on Crackers’ bench.

  ‘When I was a kid, I heard my Mom die . . . I was on the phone with her and she had a brain aneurysm. I thought I had caused it.’

  ‘Where was your dad?’

  ‘She was the love of his life. He fell apart.’

  ‘Is that why you ran away?’

  We continued getting drunk and maudlin until three teenage micro-gangsters came up to us.

  ‘What’s up, pussy bitch?’ one asked me.

  ‘Listen, our friend just died. Could you—’

  When you aren’t expecting it, even a weak punch can knock you down. I went over the bench. Before I got my wind back, they were over me, holding onto the bench to drive the kicks home. As soon as I kicked and punched my way up, I was down again. When you fight two people at once it’s better to focus on one until he quits. If you get him, the second will have doubts and nine times out of ten you don’t have to fight your way through both. But this time I couldn’t land anything. I caught a glimpse of the third kid holding Karla down with one foot. He was laughing at her as she struggled to get out from under his Nike. I moved for him, heard her scream my name but didn’t see who or what hit me. I came to with her crying over me, her cheek rouged with a smear of my blood.

  In the hospital waiting room, the pain throbbed through my entire body. I held my broken jaw as every motion caused bolts of pain. A grandma in curlers looked at me with worry as groans escaped me. She opened a change purse from which she unwrapped a handkerchief to show me a robin’s nest of blue Percocet. Karla plucked out two and went to go crush and mix them in a glass of water.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I grunted through my teeth and fought back vomit.

  ‘Sugar, many, many are the afflictions of the righteous.’

  I nodded, holding my jaw, pretending I understood. After four hours I got my x-ray. After four more I had a bed. I lay there trying not to hear the nurse repeatedly asking the drunk and sobbing woman in the next bed if she wanted the rape detection kit.

  Karla kept talking about something, anything, to drown out the conversation. She schemed ways about how to get those fuckers back. I listened, still holding my jaw, scribbling short responses on Karla’s notepad.

  I wrote, why don’t you go home?

  ‘I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here. Then we’ll go home together.’

  She kept talking, making sure I was okay, looking at me pitifully.

  Why was he called Crackers?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Stupid name.

  ‘Don’t be an asshole.’

  He had a real name and a family somewhere.

  ‘Who were assholes, which is why he left,’ she said impatiently.

  Maybe it was like in the movies. Somewhere in Wisconsin his mother dropped her tea cup, it shattered, and, as she sopped up the liquid with a Green Bay Packers kitchen towel, she knew her son, who was such a lively little boy, always up to no good, who used to love baseball, was dead. He would never phone her again on Christmas like he did a few years back crying apologies.

  I thought of Karla pinned like an insect. She was tougher than I would ever be. She had survived a sicko stepdad and a mom happy to look the other way. But this world wasn’t done abusing her, and I was never going to be able to protect her.

  I’m going home.

  ‘What?’

  I’m going back to my dad’s house.

  ‘What are you talking about? Because you got your ass kicked? Big deal. Who hasn’t got their ass kicked? Don’t we matter?’

  You can keep Fat Elvis.

  She laughed at me. ‘Fine. Fuck you,’ she said, her eyes wet, and left.

  Jack said once that a boy’s hands were too callow for a thing as fine as a girl’s heart. He was right about a lot of things.

  After four weeks in the hospital, two weeks hitchhiking and one Greyhound ticket scam, I was back. On the road, I had survived on McDonald’s milkshakes. By the time I was walking up our street to Jack’s house, I was sunken eyes, cheekbones and baggy clothes. Smoke had thickened the early morning mist until it clawed around buildings and tore itself apart in the front-yard pecan trees. It smelled of burnt wood and plastic. The house two down from Jack’s was an empty nest of charred brick and beams. The best-case scenario was the family was safe and had spent a sleepless night elsewhere, the smoke still in their nose, the ashes ringing the hotel bathtub. All of them thinking, what now?

  Our house, as usual, was unlocked. Jack wasn’t home though. I wrote a note, ‘I’m sorry’, and left. I went to Mom’s grave and lay beside it. The chamomile Jack and I planted was bursting with new fingers of green. I plucked a blossom and pulled the thin petals one by one. A loneliness so complete gripped me that I wept.

  44

  Marco struggled for each breath while his left hand languidly scratched at his bare chest. Dotted with a few notes of grackles, a stave of telephone wires cut across the empty sky outside his window.

  Sarah pulled up a chair next to Marco’s bed. She reached over the railing to hold his hand. The sealed sterile bags containing tubing or shining metal instruments, continence pads stacked like beach towels and red sharps containers that leered above us on shelves no longer worried me. Amongst the medical supplies was a pencil drawing of Marco I had done for his birthday. Their father had framed it and set it on the shelf.

  ‘Is he okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Dialysis wears him out. Sometimes worse than others.’

  ‘We’ll hang out here tonight. He likes when I draw for him. We’ll have a sing-along. We don’t have to hang out with The Store people every n
ight.’

  Sarah rewarded me with a smile.

  Marco’s eyes widened as he forced out a sentence. The noise came as a whimper. His brow creased with effort. Anxiety flitted through me, but Sarah watched calmly to divine his meaning. I still was never sure when he was distressed and that bothered me.

  ‘He wants to show you his quarters,’ she said and Marco’s head wobbled assent. Sarah pulled out a knitted bag from the dresser.

  ‘I made this for him,’ she said.

  Marco struggled and sat upright. His chitters and squeaks always made me smile. If Marco didn’t suffer as he did, so profoundly and so often, would he still have had his easy and contagious joy. Was that the trade life made for him? Should we be jealous of his serenity rather than pitying his disability? Even if we knew for certain that we would be happier, I suspect none of us would make the trade that Marco had no choice to make.

  Marco pointed at the Superman logo on the bag where Sarah had replaced the red and yellow S with an M.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of time on my hands,’ she said.

  I hefted the bag, half-filled with quarters, and nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Casino!’ Marco’s high-pitched voice drew out the last ‘o’.

  ‘Did he say casino?’

  ‘Ask him,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said and repeated my question to Marco. ‘Did you say casino?’

  Marco’s eyebrows shot upward and he nodded fitfully.

  ‘Take a chance, make it happen.’ Marco sang the theme song for a casino whose commercials were always playing on his radio. He waved his arms and kicked his legs. ‘Pop a cork, fingers snapping.’

  ‘He’s been obsessed. He does chores for Dad around the house. The quarters are his allowance.’

  ‘What chores do you do?’

  Marco made a circular motion, still singing.

  ‘Dishes?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been doing dusting too and helping Mom with her garden in the backyard.’

  ‘Let’s take Marco to the casino,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s pretty far away,’ Sarah said. Marco waved his hands like a conductor and I sang along with him.

  That weekend, I rapped shave-and-a-haircut on the window, and Marco shouted my name in greeting.

  Sarah was at the back door.

  I held out one of Jack’s old suits. ‘For the high roller. We can’t just go to the casino. We have to look sharp.’ I showed off the lining of the suit I was wearing. It was also Jack’s.

  ‘That better be a wig.’

  ‘It’s a businessman number four, blue-black.’ I doffed the wig.

  ‘And the briefcase?’

  ‘It’s for Marco. For his winnings,’ I said, following her to Marco’s room.

  ‘Are you feeling good enough for an adventure?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Casino!’

  She said to me, ‘I’ll get dressed up. Something Gordon Gecko Eighties seems to be the theme. Can you help him?’

  Although unsure of how to help Marco, another grown man, get dressed, I agreed.

  ‘Okay, how can I help you?’ I asked him.

  ‘This down.’ Marco tapped the bed rail. ‘Legs.’

  I helped him put his legs over the side and felt the balsa-wood bones.

  ‘Look at those gnarly toe nails,’ I said as I put on his socks. ‘After you win your first million, we’re buying you some clippers.’

  Marco giggled and threw off his blanket.

  ‘Woah! Where are your drawers, son?’

  Sarah stood at the door in a long cream-coloured dress. Her hair was pinned up to show off two small pearl earrings. Her lips were a shining autumn-leaf red.

  ‘Marco, is Jarred molesting you?’

  Marco pointed at me. ‘Pervert.’

  They both laughed and Marco waggled his penis.

  Sarah slid a pair of boxers up to Marco’s knees where he could manage them the rest of the way.

  ‘Look how beautiful she is,’ I said. ‘We’re lucky men, Marco.’

  Sarah got shy at the compliment. We helped Marco with his pants and shoes. Sarah went off and came back in heels.

  ‘Look at my handsome men.’ She wolf-whistled.

  Their dad popped his head into the room. ‘You guys be careful. Call me when you get there and when you leave. You have his meds? His day packs?’

  ‘You sure you don’t want to come?’ Sarah offered.

  He hesitated before shaking his head. ‘Just text me when you leave.’

  I-35 was unusually clear of traffic and the sky was Texas-sized. The trunk of Sarah’s car held our two wheelchairs. I had gotten over those moments of sitting uselessly in the car while she dismantled and assembled my wheelchair. It was normal, something all girlfriends did. Marco in the back seat behind me was singing softly to himself until the choruses, which he belted out with screeching glee. Sometimes he reached over the seat and patted my shoulder. Other times he put his hand out the open window and laughed as the wind rudely pushed against it.

  Sarah watched him in the rear-view with a smile. His chin was raised toward the fresh air and sun coming in over the trees. She smiled easily but especially for Marco.

  ‘I worked at a casino in Nevada for a few months,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ We drove on and the steady rhythm of the car and the tyres on the road was making us all drowsy.

  As we hunted for a parking space, Marco, wearing the black-haired wig, bounced in his seat; he hung his head out of the window to scream the casino’s jingle at the people shuffling toward the entrance. Sarah half-heartedly tried to calm him down. She patted my knee.

  ‘This was a good idea. Thank you.’

  Marco’s song fell away as we entered. His eyes darted as he took in the cavernous space of the casino. The rows of machines glowed and flickered their screens for attention. Clang, clatter, ding-ding, the 8-bit music of winnings, beeping and the noise of conversation bounced around the canopy of the ceiling high above, which had a false night sky, including a shimmering LED Milky Way.

  Marco raised his hand, and I gave him a high-five. Sarah pushed him toward a row of slots decorated in bucking broncos and cowboys with guns drawn. I followed. A woman watched us with a mouth like a dog’s asshole.

  ‘What are you looking at? The buffet’s that way,’ I snapped as we continued past her.

  ‘Ha! Fatty,’ Marco said.

  ‘Marco! Jarred, don’t be an ass.’

  ‘She was staring,’ I said.

  ‘What are you? Three? Who cares?’

  We found the quarter machines near the back. Sarah put in the money while Marco banged away at the buttons. He clapped at the spinning wheels. He clapped when they stopped. He clapped when a payout came up and the quarters banged against the pan. He rubbed his hands through them, cackling. His glee was ours.

  ‘He’s getting low already,’ she said. I had been waiting for that and drew out two rolls of quarters from one pocket and three from the other. I let Marco have a sip of my beer. Sarah protested but only a little. After a while, she suggested we get lunch at the casino and head back.

  ‘How’d you do, Marco?’ she asked.

  Marco rattled the quarters in the briefcase in his lap. ‘Pretty good.’

  ‘Lunch is on Marco,’ I said.

  The restaurant overlooked the casino floor. Marco smiled and watched the people thread between the machines. He squealed any time a machine announced a jackpot. I cut Marco’s burger into manageable pieces. It made me feel useful, but he didn’t eat much. I worried that I had done it wrong. As we waited for a slice of triple chocolate cake to share, Marco was scratching and staring off into space.

  We exited through the gift shop, and I shoved a teddy bear with the casino’s logo up his shirt. He hunched over holding the bear tightly.

  ‘Marco, what’s the matter? Does your stomach hurt?’

  He giggled and shook his toothy grin back and forth. ‘No!’

  ‘What are y
ou two up to?’ Sarah asked me.

  I shrugged innocence.

  As soon as we were in the car, Marco chucked the teddy bear into the driver’s seat, cackling madly, singing the casino song and bouncing in his seat.

  ‘Marco!’ Sarah said. ‘You stole this! You are in big trouble.’

  Marco was asleep before we got out of the parking space. The sudden change scared me.

  ‘Is he going to be okay?’ I asked repeatedly.

  ‘I can’t help worrying about him. I think I sometimes worry to worry,’ she said. ‘I kept us out too long.’

  ‘Shh. We had a fun time. Marco loved it.’

  ‘He’ll be talking about this for years. Thank you.’ Her phone rang. ‘Shit! I forgot to call Dad.’ She answered her phone, ‘Hello . . . Yes . . . Sorry. We’re on our way . . . He’s fine . . . Yes, we had a good time . . . He’s fine . . . No, he’s sleeping . . . I know. I’m sorry . . . Love you. See you soon.’

  We crested a hill and before us lay a long line of traffic, moving but slowly. She kept craning her neck to check on Marco in her rear-view.

  Marco slept through the whole journey. We pulled up to the house. Sarah’s dad was on the porch, pretending not to be worried. As soon as he saw our car, he was standing, arranging a smile and waving. I heard a softly crooned ‘casino’ as he carried Marco into the house.

  ‘Did I say thanks?’ Sarah said, delivering my wheelchair to the passenger side.

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘Did you listen?’

  ‘Once or twice. When we were in the car, you said you worried about Marco, because it was easier than worrying about yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Is that me? For you?’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s never that simple. We’re all a big bundle of fuck-ups and mistakes. So what? Here’s an idea: maybe I like you. What are you going to do then?’

  45

  At the far end of the parking lot of the hippy grocery store was a picnic bench where the employees smoked and gossiped on their breaks. Sarah and I were sitting at the bench drinking takeout coffees and chatting before I started my shift.