Pillow

by Andrew Battershill

  ‘Listen, bro, seriously, come let me buy you lunch. I’ll … There’s a kid I want to talk to you about. He’s perfect for you. I know you’re working out, but are you training anyone?’

  ‘No, I’m serious, I meant actually next year. The year hasn’t happened yet.’

  Julio laughed, guessing and hoping it was a joke. He held the umbrella open down around his ankle. Passersby had to hug the other side of the aisle. Pillow grabbed Julio’s wrist and moved the umbrella between them.

  ‘Do me a favour – come to my gym. Look at this kid, help me out with him.’

  Pillow shrugged and toed the ground. ‘I’ve gotta go, Jules.’ Looking at Julio, Pillow could tell he needed to say something else. He decided to make it a true thing. ‘My girl’s pregnant, I’ve got chores.’

  ‘Congratulations! Great, man, that’s great. Fuck, that’s great. But, come on, she’ll want you to make some money. I have to tell you about this kid. We could use you down at the gym. Really.’

  Pillow reached across and palmed the top of Julio’s head. ‘What? You got some beanpole with a decent jab? You want me to teach him some tricks?’

  ‘Pretty much, man. You should see this kid, it’s like watching you out there again. Fast hands, good legs, six feet tall and he makes welterweight. Come on, man, you show him some of your old stuff, some of that cute shit. We’ll give you a percentage, you teach a couple of the group classes. We pay you what we can. It’s a nice set-up. He’s a great kid too, you’ll like him.’ He spread his hands out wide. ‘Come on, let’s have lunch.’

  ‘No, kid, I, uh, I can’t do it. I can’t be around it. It’s … Yeah, I just miss it, y’know? Gets to me a little bit.’

  Julio nodded and squeezed Pillow on the elbow. ‘Yeah, man, okay. I felt that way too. For a long time, long time. But it feels good to get back too.’ He threw his hand up in the air and then fumbled around in his breast pocket, pulling out a rumpled red business card with a picture of a speed bag on it. ‘If you change your mind, you need anything, a little money, whatever, man, whatever, I’ll try to help you out when I can. We have to stick together, fighters, right?’

  Pillow grabbed Julio behind the neck, pulled him over and kissed his forehead. ‘Right. Yup, we do. I’ll, uh, I’ll think about it. It was good to see you, Julio. And, really, thanks.’

  Julio just nodded, smiled and walked away, not looking either way before he sprung the umbrella back up. Pillow flicked the business card twice, ripped it in half and put the pieces in his pocket. He left the stand without paying for his fruit, and on the way back to the car he stepped into an alley.

  He whacked his head into the wall a couple times, knelt down and started biting the webbing of his thumb. He kept biting it harder until he drew a little blood and then he stopped, watching the blood collect and then get thinned and hustled down his wrist by the water. He laughed.

  Pillow looked into the rain, enjoying the squinting, incomplete view and feeling the flow of it on his face. It’s a shame how difficult it is to get a shower to that temperature. Pillow figured you probably needed the whole sky for that.

  The day passed without any news on Artaud. Pillow had hung out at the Bureau playing Hollywood Gin with Don for about three hours longer than was fun. When he got home that night he put his head on Emily’s lap, and she told the side of his head that if he was going to be coming home upset he needed to keep her in the loop. He told her about seeing Julio, and she seemed relieved to find out the source of the wound. This time it was Emily who waited a few beats before answering.

  ‘Okay, I know that I’m not supposed to tell you to “just do” stuff that’s a significant, like, mental-health deal for you. And if you really won’t be comfortable doing it you shouldn’t, and that’s cool. But maybe you should just do it. You know? We need them billz, Pete. With a Z. That’s how serious I am about money right now.’

  Pillow thought about it; he opened his eyes and tried hard to focus them on her upside-down face. ‘Maybe. I would if I could.’

  ‘I understand, and I’m with you on whatever you want, sweet-ums. I’m using that one now, by the way, sweetums. But you threw me up the spat, buddy; you threw me up it pretty hard. And I don’t feel bad asking that you try. You have to try to try. No more of this already-happened-already-decided stuff.’

  ‘I get you. I will if I can.’

  ‘And how’s the, y’know, the stuff with the coins?’

  Pillow used the time it took to sit up and look in her eyes right side up to mentally recheck his story. ‘It’s okay, Gwynn’s confident. Now we just need to find Artaud.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘We’ll see when we find him. Is that all you wanted to know?’

  She tilted her head to the side, her mouth twitching neutrally. ‘Boom. Boom means yes. That’s another one I’m trying on.’

  After Emily was finished eating a decent portion of a dead pig, and Pillow had eaten all of several dead plants (while avoiding looking at her plate or mouth as the food went in it), they were both still hungry. Suddenly and without warning, Emily burst into tears as Pillow was teaching her how to make kale chips (kale plus oil plus rock salt plus heat). It occurred to Pillow that they were playing a sort of sadness ping-pong. Not that whiplash high-level Asian style. They were playing basement ping-pong: a double-bouncing, swing-and-a-miss, hold-the-ball-while-you-try-to-remember-whose-serve-it-is style. He found it difficult to make out exactly what she was saying, but she seemed unable to believe how mean and strange people had been to her in romantic situations for a lot of years and situations in a row. Pillow took the time he needed to collect his thoughts, pulled her to standing, took a step back and stuck out his right hand.

  ‘Let’s agree. Let’s agree to be really, really kind to each other. We can manage that for sure.’

  Emily laughed a piece of mucous straight onto Pillow’s cheek; he wiped it away with his left hand without changing his expression or moving his shaking hand.

  ‘For sure.’ She moved past the hand, and they hugged until the fire alarm went off, and Pillow almost tried to take the kale chips out of the oven with his bare hands when Emily gently stopped him.

  Before they turned the lights off in the bedroom, they spent a long time looking at the ceiling, and Emily didn’t quite agree that the white stucco looked like mountains seen from an airplane. Pillow rolled over and buried his face between her breasts in a lighthearted enough way not to be vulgar.

  He spoke into her chest skin. ‘Tell me a story.’

  ‘Hmmmm. I don’t know, man. Shit, I am totally cracking under the pressure.’

  Pillow started moving his head around.

  ‘Dude, that is not less pressure. Shitshitshit. Okay. Okay!’ She pushed him off and sat up cross-legged. Pillow rested his chin on both his hands.

  ‘So once upon a time there was a badger. And he was a sad badger because he’d never known another badger. He would walk around all the time looking for other badgers, but he never saw any. He was alone. So, on a hot but breezy summer day he took to the streets and –’

  ‘Wouldn’t he not know what a badger was? I mean, if he’d never seen one.’

  ‘That’s true, I suppose he’d never seen another badger. But he would go to bed at night and he’d think, “I’m a badger. I just know I’m a badger.” He’d think that phrase three to five hundred times a night before he fell asleep in his one-badger apartment. And he would go out in crowds to ask about other badgers, but very few other animals would talk to him because he was very anxious around other critters, and he would rub his teeth with a small piece of quartz he carried around with him to calm down, and the quartz would make a sound like a train going really fast on tracks that aren’t quite the right size for its wheels and the other animals would get scared and run away, mostly because trains are pretty scary.’

  She flopped onto her back in a vaguely mummified posture.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Oh, that was it. It ju
st kept going on like that for a while.’

  Pillow had barely been back in his apartment long enough to change and get coffee brewed before Avida and Simon walked in without knocking. Pillow wished without hope that he’d start remembering to lock his front door someday. He nodded good morning but didn’t offer them coffee. They stood in silence a minute.

  Simon scratched himself. ‘I have to shit.’

  He walked into the bathroom, closed and locked the door.

  Pillow had decided he wasn’t going to talk first, and he wasn’t going to ask them any questions. He wanted to get the best of this one. Neither he nor Avida talked for another minute. Avida seemed less relaxed than last time, her fingers fidgeting along the hem of her blazer. Pillow turned to pour himself a coffee.

  ‘We’ve got your fingerprints at the scene. How does that make you feel?’

  Pillow finished pouring, then he turned around. He held the cup an inch below his lip, grinning into the steam.

  ‘It amuses you? You sit there like a lump when I’m cracking sweet puns, and being sincerely implicated in a double murder amuses you.’

  Pillow lowered his mug and placed it on the stove without drinking. He shrugged. ‘I’m just in a good mood. Your news doesn’t do much for me either way.’

  ‘Ooooh, look at you. Basic reasoning like a big boy. Sure, we can’t put you there that night, you’re a sketchy fuck-o and you hang out in sketchy places. It’s starting to paint a picture, though. Do you mind if we search the place?’

  Pillow figured that was what Simon was already doing in the bathroom. ‘Sure. Knock yourself out.’ He winked. ‘Maybe you’ll find some more of my fingerprints.’

  Pillow took inventory of the fridge and made a very short grocery list as the two cops searched his apartment. He felt once again annoyed by how quickly the more flavourful vegetables rot.

  He had just remembered his coffee when Avida cleared her throat and prodded a shirt on the floor, using her toe to prop it against the base of the wall into the only bright circle of sunlight.

  ‘It’s amazing. Everything you own is soaked in sweat, and all your apartment smells like is one flower.’ She looked over at the plant by the sink. ‘A flower that isn’t even a flower. The reason, in my opinion, is that there are two kinds of sweat. The first is nervous sweat, which stinks. Nervous sweat has some content, something went into it, somebody cared. And then there’s exercise sweat, which is water you’re done with. Just something for the wind to touch.’

  Pillow blew on his coffee. It wasn’t hot.

  ‘Reminds me, that cartoon you were talking about, Sarge, what was it, the cat?’

  Simon let the couch fall down with a thump. He walked over to the chair, looked at it, then he took another couple of paces and leaned against the wall, which didn’t collapse or anything like that.

  ‘It was a really good one. In this cartoon, Betty Boop sold her house. Do you know who … Oh right, I don’t give a care if you understand. Anyway, Betty sells her house. It’s a farm, really. She sold the farm, and as she was leaving there was a cow being milked by a cat. The cat was really tugging, and the cow was frantically drinking bottles of milk and crying and the milk was flowing. The price of the house kept dropping, and then they grouped the house with another and the price still kept dropping, and they kept selling more and more land for less and less money. Then the moon sold the earth to Saturn for twenty dollars, and Saturn took the “gravity magnet,” you could tell because it had a big label on it, anyhow he took it out of the earth and everything floated away. But I didn’t care about the world, all those Okie-cabin-dweller-yellow-brick-road motherfuckers can keep on floating, doesn’t bother me one bit. I cared about the cow, crying and drinking milk as she’s having it pulled out of her … that cat.’ Simon’s stomach rumbled disturbingly in three descending tones. He touched it with his palm, put his head down and walked straight out of the room.

  Pillow emptied his mug into the sink. He moved close enough to Avida that they could feel each other’s breath without trying. Pillow grabbed the lapel of her suit jacket precisely between his fingers. It was a very surprising fabric, maybe velvet. He checked the other side of it, it was the same colour. He looked down at her hairline.

  ‘The fingerprints, you made that one up at home, right? Beforehand. You imagined how I’d take it, the look on my face.’ He let go of the lapel and smoothed it back over. ‘A lot of people have tried to guess the look on my face. They all saw me flinch, in their heads.’

  Avida tipped forward, dug her face into his chest and took a loud deep sniff. She fell back onto her heels, fastened her fingermoustache to her upper lip. ‘Do you want to guess which kind of sweat I smell?’

  Breton seemed to want to find and revenge-kill Bataille a whole lot more than he wanted to find the coins. Since the heist he’d been working his way through the members of the Acéphale Society, a group of university weirdos who’d read a bunch of Nietzsche and were into human sacrifice. Bataille was one of the founders. The story was that they’d all sworn they’d be the one who got killed, but as of yet nobody had agreed to do the killing.

  As soon as Pillow arrived at the Bureau, Breton hustled him right back out to help roust Jack Prevert, a degenerate gambler who owned a sewing-supply shop. Jack Prevert looked like a suicidally depressed guppy with hair plugs. Jack Prevert made it seem possible to smoke roll-your-owns at the bottom of the sea. Jack Prevert shovelled chips onto the table like he was bailing out a rowboat. Jack Prevert looked you in the eyes the same way most people look out their windshield on the Autobahn.

  Pillow had accidentally put Prevert in the hospital a couple years back, so Breton figured he’d be useful to have along. Pillow had been trying collect on Prevert’s marker from a card game, and was only supposed to slap him around a little. But Pillow’d had a bad headache that day, wasn’t feeling totally himself, and somewhere between giving Prevert a light tune-up and stomping on the guy’s head until his nose was a part of his cheek, Pillow had zoned out for a bit, gotten into something of a rhythm with his hands and feet and come out of it looking into Prevert’s unconscious face. Pillow’s foot had been pulled back a good ways off the ground, and he’d been surprised enough to lose his balance. As he righted himself, he noticed the specks of blood on his cheek, and in a voice that didn’t sound entirely like his own, Pillow had said the phrase Whoopsie poops for the first and only time in his life.

  Pillow was somewhere between ashamed and excited to see Jack Prevert again, and somewhere else between scared and excited that Breton was still on the wrong track.

  The walls of Prevert’s sewing shop were the kind of walls where off-white meets dirt and they get married and then after a few years invite water damage to live in the guest room and help pay off the mortgage.

  There was a wire rack with five sewing machines and a fold-out plastic table with random bobs and needles on it. The cash machine was resting on a table almost its size.

  Prevert was sitting on a plastic chair, staring at his hands, when they walked in. He stood as they entered. Pillow pushed him back down.

  ‘Hey, Jack.’

  ‘I don’t owe anything. I’m paid up.’

  Pillow grabbed Prevert’s neck at the base of his skull, gave it a hard squeeze. ‘Quit being so squirrelly, Jack. We haven’t even started yet.’

  Breton had walked straight over to a display of sewing machines. He poked at a needle and watched it bob up and down.

  Prevert was popping beads of sweat like corn in a frying pan. ‘Please. Please, can we do this later?’

  ‘Georges Bataille’s your pal. You guys are always hitting the tables together, and if I was a degenerate shitbird like you I’d have already bet good money he already came to you for some help.’

  ‘Fuck, please.’ Jack brought his hands to his cheeks, lifting his jowls with some effort.

  Pillow wondered if Prevert trembled all the time or just when he was around. ‘Listen. You have options here. My man over there –�
� Pillow let go of Jack’s neck, turned and took a couple steps toward Breton, who had now moved on to arranging threads in a loose, colour-based tapestry ‘– has big, big fish to fry, as I’m sure you’ve heard. So tell us what we want to know, and maybe you and me don’t do the same dance we did last time.’ Without moving any other part of his body, Pillow threw his leg back and kicked the base of Prevert’s chair sharply. Then he looked back and bobbed his eyebrows.

  ‘That’s quite sufficient, Pillow, thank you.’

  Breton pulled himself away from the coloured threads momentarily and walked over to the storeroom door. He opened it and peered around the corner. ‘See, you are a bit mistaken this time. Jack has no information. Jack does not even know how many fingers to put up his own asshole to have a good time. I wish, simply, to limit Georges Bataille’s options, to make the fact of his capture more crystallized in its already-existent, but yet to be grossly apparent, reality. So it will be sufficient for me to simply say –’ Breton cleared his throat and spoke around the corner ‘– that Jack lost a large amount in our gambling club the other evening. And he needs to pay us back.’

  Breton looked back at them, smiled, walked to the front door, put a hand on the handle and then stopped.

  A woman with string-bean-length curls in her hair and duffel bags under her eyes careened in from the storeroom. ‘Jack, what did he just say? Have you been gambling again? Did I hear that?’

  Prevert dropped his cheeks and started toward her, moving his hands up and down as if he wanted her to slide into third base. ‘Marie, it’s not what you …’

  Somewhere in the back a kettle started whistling.

  ‘No! No more, Jack.’

  Prevert started trying to grab her and she slashed the air with the side of her palm, then she turned on her heel and made for the kettle. Jack’s soul sagged at the shoulders. He sat back down and turned to Pillow. ‘Please go. You can’t be here.’

  Pillow was very confused. He looked over to Breton, who was just smiling, tapping his fingers against the door. Prevert reached up and grabbed Pillow’s wrist, startling him. ‘Please.’