THUGLIT Issue Fourteen

by Scott Sanders

  Heart

  by Dan J. Fiore

  "Yo, white girl," someone behind me says. "Watch your car for five dollars."

  I shut my door and look over my shoulder. "You talking to me?" I ask the black guy sitting there.

  He leans back on his stoop, a hand-rolled cigarillo between his fingers. He takes a long puff and lets it out slow. "Can't be too careful in a neighborhood like this," he says and I think about the snubnose tucked behind my belt.

  Jangling my keys in my palm like dice, I glance down at my decade-old gray Saab then to the watch on my wrist. In my other hand, I feel my grip on the six-pack cooler grow slick already with sweat. "I'm kind of in a hurry."

  A silver BMW skids to a stop on the far side of the street. Avon bumper sticker. Vanity plate: SUEETP. Dangling from the rearview is a shiny mini disco ball. A short guy with fake hair gets out and Cigarillo shouts over, "Watch your car for five dollars, boss."

  "Fuck off," Mr. Sweet Pea says head-down and he dashes into a building past two tall women with bulges in their throats and skirts. The Beemer chirps after he's gone.

  "Must be in a hurry, too," Cigarillo says, staring at me as his free hand rubs the chrome chain around his neck.

  I feel sweat trickling down my forehead now and another glance at my watch only makes it worse. Fishing cash from my pockets, I ask Cigarillo if he's heard any gunshots.

  He takes my money still leaning back. "No," he says, drawing the one word out with his eyes wide. "What they sound like?"

  "I mean recently," I say. "Very recently."

  He gets halfway through counting the ones I gave him and stops, thinks. "Maybe," he says. "Be honest, I stopped keeping track a long time ago. Know what I'm—"

  Then it happens. Two loud cracks, maybe three. Echoing. Close.

  Without straightening, Cigarillo says, "Shit." He turns from the direction of the shots and stares at me with his lower lip nearly touching his bare chest. "You one of them clairvoyant bitches or something?"

  I tell him no and lock my car. Breaking into a sprint across the street toward 433 Coal Street, Apartment 3C, I say, "Just late."

  There are only two things that give me comfort doing a gunshot job like this. Well, three things really. But I can't think about her right now.

  One: the cops take forever in this kind of neighborhood. And two: when shots ring out around here, no one's looking for the white girl.

  There's an ATM across the street on Norwood. I don't know if it has a camera in it or not so I have to take an alleyway around the corner building and into the back entrance of 433.

  I pass a guy coming down the back stairwell as I go up. He's Mexican, maybe. Or something like it. Big and covered in tattoos. The way he makes it a point not to look at me too long tells me maybe he's the button man, and suddenly I make it a point not to look at him. At all.

  Barely anyone lives here, and the ones who do don't open their doors, pop their heads out, and ask who's there. They know better, so the hallway's empty. But I can still hear a voice drifting down from somewhere.

  My free hand goes under the back of my shirt, wraps around the revolver's grip. I've never had to use it before and today doesn't feel like a good day to start.

  3C's door is half-open, one shot blown right through it with splinters littering the carpet inside. Standing off to the side in the hallway, I reach around the frame to ease the door the whole way open with my fist. The lingering scent of gunpowder still lingers, stinging the back of my nasal cavity as I peek inside.

  Another look at my watch and I realize I forgot to clock the time of the shots.

  Amateur.

  I leave the door open when I go inside, because the last thing I need is an obstacle on the way out.

  The television coats the room in blue pulsing light. On the screen, two elk are going at it, charging head-on at each other over and over. A British voice booms from the speakers, talking about nature. With a knuckle, I lean in and hit the mute button on the side of the TV. I hold my breath. Wait. Listen.

  Nothing.

  Yet.

  They told me he'd be clean, but the powder-caked mirror on the coffee table tells me otherwise. Now I'm wondering if his blood will even match like they said it would and my heartbeat picks up a step or two.

  Along the floor in the corner, two legs draped in denim stick out from behind the couch. I go to the window and pull the curtains aside. White light fills the room, revealing the body sitting against the wall with two holes in its torso.

  Ice water floods my veins.

  I rush over to it and drop the cooler to my side. With a few tugs, I rip the shirt from the body's chest. The higher of the two shots is close.

  Way too close.

  Behind me, out the window, beyond the alley, and who knows how many blocks away, the sirens begin. I listen to make sure, and before I can take a deep breath to calm my hands and steel my nerves the body gurgles.

  I fall back flat onto the carpet.

  Blood bubbles from the mouth as the limbs jolt.

  It's still alive.

  He.

  He's still alive.

  I've seen a lot of dead bodies. Different ages. Different genders. Different colors. You don't grow up with a father like mine without seeing a couple.

  But, this. This is new.

  I crabwalk backwards as the body—the guy—tries to speak through the crimson gushing from his lips. Red spit flings at me and lands between my legs. His eyes flutter open and closed again and again as his head just barely bobs.

  Outside, the sirens slowly grow louder.

  Closer.

  Like fate, he's some kind of Latino, which I guess might mean this was inner-gang. But who knows? Third Party Parts doesn't offer those kinds of details. Not to a harvester. Just time and place, set up through Roy by any trusted outfit or individual.

  For a finder's fee, of course.

  I remind myself I can't waste time, so while the guy's there dying, I open the cooler beside me. The gloves are on top, on purpose, and I snap them on without breathing. Next is the poncho. I unravel it and pull it on. Everything's cold from the ice at the bottom. There's a baseball cap there. A garbage bag, too. I set both of those aside.

  My brother would kill me if he knew I do this sort of stuff for his old friends.

  Of course, this time's not for them. And my brother's body ended up on Dad's embalming table almost a year ago. So even if he does know, wherever he is or isn't or whatever, there's nothing he can do about it now.

  Plus it's a lot better than what he used to do for them anyway.

  In the cooler, sitting on top of the crushed ice:

  My tools.

  But the Latino's still breathing. Barely. Just enough that a little red bubble in his right nostril inflates and deflates. His eyes have stopped doing whatever they were doing and now they're just open—sort of, looking down at the pool of his own blood closing the carpeted gap between us.

  This isn't right. By the time I arrive, they're always just bodies.

  In my pocket, my phone hums.

  No time.

  The sirens.

  My options are limited. I could bolt, but then I leave with nothing. Alone. Truth is, I need this. Maya needs this. We need this. So we can be together.

  But it's a guy. A human being. A living, breathing human being. A son. Maybe a father. Then again, maybe that makes it okay.

  Maybe that makes it fair.

  Before I can even finish the mental high-wire act to justify it, I've got one hand behind his head and the other palming his mouth with two fingers pinching his nose.

  For Maya.

  It takes a second, but his eyes go wider and his stiff, tired arms try to push me away. It's like they're being controlled by wires from across the room.

  "I'm sorry," I keep saying. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

  He gets a wet hand on my face and pushes, but I just turn my head and both of his arms fall back down to his lap. They flop there like two
gasping catfish.

  A few breaths—my breaths—later and he's gone.

  I'm shaking now as I let go of him but I don't have time to think about what I just did. I don't have time for a breakdown. My hand makes a tiny sign of the cross because that's what Maya would want me to do, I think. And anyway, what's it hurt?

  I pull him from the wall by the pants legs and away from the thick puddle of blood around him. Kicking the coffee table over, I bring him into the middle of the room and grab my cooler.

  There's no space for a saw in there, so the scalpel will have to do the hard work. The blade separates the flesh of his solar plexus like peach Jell-O filled with jam. A straight line down to his belly button, and I've got a way in as the sirens sound like they're almost right outside.

  After hiking the gloves up with two quick snaps, I dive my fingers inside and spread. A little world of reds and purples and blobs and bulbs and bridges, all smooshed together in their right places until I start pulling them out and plopping them onto the living room floor.

  Spleen. Stomach. Liver. All onto the carpet. Just one kidney's worth a semester of med school, but I throw those aside, too.

  It's still weird feeling it all before it goes cold.

  A smell slaps me in the face—either the body's voided its bowels or I ripped something unfortunate open by accident. Either way, I keep working and repeat in my head: for Maya, for Maya, for Maya, for Maya.

  It takes the scalpel again to get through the diaphragm. It's like cutting cardboard.

  From there, I'm blind. Reaching in forearm-deep and feeling around like I lost jewelry down the kitchen drain.

  The lungs are easy to find. Two thick porterhouses to the left and right. But the heart can be a bitch when you're digging from the bottom.

  Tires scream down in the street and I wonder how specific the 9-1-1 call was on location.

  I've got both hands in now, one chopping away with the scalpel as the fingertips of the other do the searching. Jungle guide and the explorers.

  Sweat is pouring down onto the man's—the body's chest as my legs straddle his hips. It's an odd position for this sort of thing, for sure, and it makes me think of him. He's a law student and does CrossFit and drives a Lexus and that's all she bothers telling me about him because she knows I don't even want to know that much. Him and his rich goddamned daddy.

  But I can't focus on all that right now.

  Again, my phone hums and I say, "Kinda busy here."

  It feels like I should be nearly to the clavicle when my free hand finds its way through a wirework of arteries and veins to wrap around that tight knot of meat that only seconds ago stopped beating. I clear what I can around it.

  Like I'm starting a lawnmower, I yank.

  Car doors slam somewhere outside.

  I ignore the voice in my head telling me I'm ruining the thing and just keep pulling harder and harder. It takes more tries than I'd like, but eventually the thing comes loose and I drop it in the cooler.

  Off come the soaked gloves and the dripping poncho. I ball them up inside-out and shove them in the garbage bag. I throw my tools in there, too. With a paper towel, I turn on the kitchen faucet and rinse my hands as clean as I can. I don't bother turning it off.

  The garbage bag gets slung over my shoulder as I toss on the cold, damp baseball cap. I grab the cooler, close it up. Then I'm out of there.

  I hear heavy footfalls coming up the front as I slide into the back stairwell. My feet skip two steps at a time as I let gravity get me to the bottom. I pray I don't twist an ankle and fall and crack myself unconscious with an open heart I just stole from a dead body lying at the bottom of the stairwell next to me.

  I explode into the alley and break into a jog until I'm at the street I parked on. I downshift to speed-walking. More sirens grow near. Voices drift around the corner like they're chasing me. An ambulance rolls by and I keep my head down, pull the hat on my head as low as it'll go. Its wheels skirt around the corner behind me and when I look up at where I parked my car, my own heart might as well be on ice.

  Just an empty frame up on bricks. No doors. No seats. No tires.

  My lower lip quivers.

  Someone calls out from across the street, "Best five bucks you ever spend?"

  I look up and see Cigarillo still sitting there on his stoop, still leaning back like he never moved. Then I realize I'm on the wrong side of the street and my Saab's right where I left it, totally fine.

  For what feels like the first time in forever, my lungs suck in air.

  I cross the street with my head down.

  "Thanks," I say as I pass Cigarillo.

  He smiles, playing with the chain around his neck.

  I pull out my keys, unlock my car. The trunk pops open and I drop the garbage bag inside, shut it.

  "Yo, girl," Cigarillo says.

  I turn around, my pulse finally slowing.

  He tosses me the shirt that was sitting on the step next to him.

  I catch it and almost throw the sweat-soaked thing down until I see Cigarillo point to his face.

  I turn to my car, look at my reflection in the window. Smeared on my right cheek is a big, bloody handprint. I glance back at Cigarillo and he winks. The shirt smells like stale smoke and onions, but I bury my face in it anyway.

  I tell him thanks again as I jump in my car. The cooler and his shirt go under the passenger seat.

  "Don't mention it," Cigarillo says and I notice what's hanging from the chain around his neck.

  A shiny mini disco ball.

  With a smirk, I drive off at exactly the speed limit.

  The Xanax helps, but nothing's perfect. What really keeps me calm is imagining the look on Maya's face when she finds out.

  She can never know for sure. I can never tell her. If she knew what I do to pay my bills, she'd never talk to me again. She might even turn me in. But over time, I can drop enough hints, mention enough details I wouldn't or shouldn't know to make her wonder. And maybe a part of her will understand in some small way what I did for her. What I did for us.

  Maya loves a little mystery anyway.

  I pull into the hospital lot and park in the back. Cigarillo's shirt and the garbage bag are gone, now at the bottom of a trash bin in Schenley Park, smoldering. The cooler comes with me. As I shut my door, I pull the burner from my pocket and a text from Roy asks how it went, if it was worth it, and I decide I'll text him back later. I lock my car and head inside, nodding to Hank at the front desk as I pass.

  By my timing, the heart's only got two hours left so I need to get it to Ken on the fourth floor soon. For a grand he'll take care of everything, no questions asked. Fake paperwork, phone calls, and all.

  But more than anything I need to see her first.

  Just for a second.

  Even though it's visiting hours, the ninth floor is a ghost town. Hallways quiet. Rooms cast in sad shadow. Nurses taking their time from room to room.

  She's not there when I walk in and the disappointment makes me heavy with longing. I take a seat with the cooler in my lap. Sleeping in the bed next to me is her father, tubes everywhere.

  I've spent countless hours sitting in this same spot, wondering how hard it'd be to pull just one of those tubes loose. Everything solved in such a clean, simple way. I imagine it being easier now, and for a second too long I see the Latino's face go lifeless between my fingers all over again.

  When I think the beeps filling the room are about to break me, she comes through the door from the hallway and it's like seeing a ship from a desert island. Smooth, shining hair draped dark and straight. Skin like iced coffee and cream. She's a Colombian princess in thrift store finds, and all the more perfect for it. I think about what I've done for her and my heart comes alive, trying to pound its way free so it can run to her, grab her, and hold her before even I can. I set the cooler on the chair next to me.

  Standing, I smile.

  "I have been trying to call you all day." Her accent trickles off her tongue
like a tropical drink. She takes my hands in hers, holds them there between us. Her touch is a shot of morphine to my bloodstream.

  Telling me she has good news, she looks over her shoulder and there's a tall, dark-haired guy standing in the doorway, grinning with his hands in his pockets. "This is Artemas," she says. She lets go of my right hand and reaches for him. He steps forward, her fingers landing on his shoulder.

  Heat erupts in my stomach.

  He says hi. "Call me Art," he tells me and holds out his hand. I set mine limp inside it. He shakes it firmly.

  Through my teeth, I say, "Maya's told me a lot about you." My cheeks hurt, trying not to frown. I look at Maya and I can tell she's pretending, too. Her lips smile while her eyes apologize.

  "So, what's the good news?" I ask, afraid.

  She looks at him to answer, but he just grins, nods to her.

  "Artemas… Sorry, Art spoke to his friend on the hospital board," she says, glancing at him then back to me, "like I told you."

  "My dad's friend, actually," he says through his grin. "They belong to the same social club."

  Maya's dark features brighten. She grips my sweaty hand harder. "Art got my father on the list," she tells me.

  "Top of the list," Art clarifies.

  My guts churn. "You've got to be fucking kidding me." My face fizzles hot then numbs. I can't breathe, and I think about how the guy in apartment 3C must've felt. A thick ball of nausea floats higher and higher in my throat.

  Maya's smile spreads wider. "I know," she says. "It is unbelievable, right?"