by Jeff Somers
“I miss her so much, Tommy,” Miriam wailed into me.
“Sure, sure,” I murmured.
“I was a fucking terrible sister.”
“Sure, sure.”
I stared around the room, seeing nothing. I had to get free of all of them. Starting with Henry.
• • •
Bickerman was talking to me. The Harrowseseses standing there with vague, painful smiles on their faces. They’d been talking to Bickerman, and then he’d called me over. His insane tractor beam latched onto me and I floated toward him, limp and helpless. Bickerman was talking to me like the Harrowseseses, the parents of his dead wife, were not there.
“Henry’s avoiding me,” he said.
“No, he isn’t,” I said, anxious to be away, to be free. I had no idea if I was lying or not. I didn’t care. I felt the million threadlike legs of Bickerman’s body enveloping me, heard the clicking of his pincers. The rattle of his stinger.
“He is,” he said authoritatively. “We need to keep an eye on him. We need to be sure of him.”
I looked at Mr. Harrows. He was shrinking. He’d shrunk since the last time he’d gone clothes shopping, because his elegant and expensive black suit was a little too big for him. He was pink-faced and had the World’s Largest Tumbler of Whiskey in one gnarled hand. I fully expected to be able to look that up in The Guinness Book of World Records and find a picture of Mr. Harrows, scowling. Mrs. Harrows was grinning. It wasn’t an expression, which implied intent or emotion. It was just a tug of muscles. The way cats sometimes looked like they grinned. They’d lost their daughter, and now they were maybe realizing what, exactly, their daughter had married.
I didn’t remember seeing them at the wedding. Which was odd.
“He is,” Bickerman repeated, drifting, losing focus. “He is.”
• • •
Denise was not talking to me. Her eyes were closed. The top of her dress was down. Her bra was still on. Her brow was beaded in sweat. Her hair had come loose in a mess of lazy curls. Her hands were on my chest, pushing down. Her knees dug into my sides. Her throat made little grunting noises, like chirps.
Afterward, we lay next to each other in her bed and I tried to figure out if I was on Henry’s side of the mattress or not. The ceiling was cracked.
Denise was crying. I became aware of this in stages. Jesus fucked, she was crying.
“Just go,” she said in a wavery voice.
I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. I had this effect on people.
XI.
THANKSGIVING
“What’s wrong? Is something wrong? Was that Bick?”
I slid the phone back into its cradle and sat in the cool air of Denise’s bedroom. I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me.
“It was Tom. I’m not sure. They want me to come over.”
“Now? Henry, it’s three in the morning.”
“Yes.”
There was dark silence for a moment. “And you’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
A lot of words hidden within that one. A loose translation, I thought, was “Your sad devotion to these immature friends of yours is pissing me off mightily right now.” To dot the Is and cross the Ts, she rolled over so her back was to me.
I sat there for a moment, hearing Tom’s voice in my head. He’d only said a few words. He’d said, “Hank, it’s Tom. I’m at the Bickermans’. Something bad’s happened. We need you to come by.” His voice had been muted, strained. I hadn’t heard Tommy sound that way, ever. He sounded panicked. He sounded like he was sitting in the dark, alone, for the first time in his life.
I could feel Denise icing over next to me, the frigid tendrils of the glacier spreading outward from her tense shoulder blades. It pushed me, gently but inexorably, out of the bed, onto the floor.
• • •
I dressed in her small bathroom, pulling on dirty clothes amidst the slight mildew smell that filled it. I dressed quickly and silently, my own breathing loud and grating, rapid and acidic in my throat. Tommy’s voice, it was sitting, stagnant and unfamiliar, in my head. The more I thought about it, the more my hands shook. I stopped and pushed them into my pockets and stared into the mirror for a minute. My hair was standing up in odd ways, my eyes looked sunken and darkened in the glare of Denise’s makeup lights. I looked yellow and plastic.
I buckled my pants on and opened the door. Denise stood in the doorway, looking sleepy and annoyed.
“So, Bick calls at three in the morning and you just run over there?”
I shrugged, pushing past her. “There’s trouble.”
“What kind of trouble? They having trouble drinking everything in sight? Those two are fucking alcoholics, Henry.”
“Tommy’s there.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel better.”
A moment, then, of icy silence.
“So you’re going to drive over there?”
“Jesus, yes.” I regretted the nasty tone and swallowed my annoyance. “Look, it sounds like trouble. They’re my friends. They ask for help, I show up. It’s that simple.”
“Uh-huh.” She sat down on the bed and watched me hunting for my shoes. “You’re always doing their shit work, you know that? They fuck up like the retarded booze monkeys they are, you scuttle over there to clean it up for them.”
I found my shoes and sat down on the floor. For a moment I just looked at her. “Jeez, you’re giving me the idea you don’t like Tom and Bick.”
She nodded. “Or Mary. They drink too much, and they’re mean.”
I nodded. “Okay.” I pulled a shoe on, began tying it.
“So you’re going?”
I clenched my teeth. “Yes.”
“What if I ask you not to?”
I looked back at her. I tried to broadcast despair and weariness to her. I tried to get it across, invisibly, through the air that I was completely unamused by this. “What’s this, power games? Right now? Does it have to be right now? There’s absolutely no better time to fuck with me over this?”
“I am not fucking with you.”
“The hell you’re not,” I snapped. Standing up, I tried to adopt a moderate tone and expression. “Can we please just talk about this later?”
“Sure.”
Her attitude was pissed-off.
“Don’t do that. It’s blackmail.”
“What’s blackmail?”
“This. This sudden demand that we discuss something. If you’re bothered by it, why now? Why not earlier? Last week? Tomorrow? Why now?”
She lay down and pulled the covers over herself. “Sorry if my timing isn’t convenient for you. Just go, then.”
I stood there for a moment, and then I thought, fuck it, I could stay here and argue until it was too late to do anything, which is what she wanted. So I turned and left the room. I wondered if I’d left anything there I was going to have to fight to get back.
• • •
The roads were icy and the car’s tires were bald, so I took it slow, playing talk radio and smoking cigarettes. I was in no hurry to get to Bick’s. I didn’t know what I was gonna find there, but experience told me I wasn’t going to like it.
I thought about Denise. I wondered if we’d just broken up or if it had just been a fight or if I understood anything about her, really. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she didn’t understand me. But I was a fucking simpleton: It was just beer, baseball, and sleep with me. What was there to understand? Don’t forget to buy something pale and domestic for me, don’t change the channel when the game was on, and don’t ever wake me up before eight in the morning. I was a simple guy.
I opened the window and let the cold air in, the smoke out.
The guy on the radio was saying that children who were caught buying or dealing illegal drugs ought to be put in jail like any other criminal, no matter how old they were. He sounded very sure about this.
>
I pulled up outside the Bickermans’ apartment building and put the car into park. Listening to the engine click and cool, I looked up to the sixth floor and saw a light on. Every other window was dark; only my friends were sufficiently fucked up to be awake. I sat and finished my cigarette, staring up at the window and the odd shadows that appeared there, sudden and quick-fading. I couldn’t tell who was who, but I had an idea that the blurry form that stood before the drapes as if posing for a shadow-watching world he knew was out there must have been Bickerman, and the elusive splotch that quickly made its way was Tommy. I didn’t see anything that looked like Mary, and I wondered if she’d up and walked out on him. They were the kind of married couple that made you wonder if the cosmos was fucking with you, to show you a couple like that.
And Tommy was sitting in the dark, and staring at me, by himself. He had a tumbler of whiskey in one hand. I didn’t know where David was. Getting help, maybe. Why was Tommy just staring at me? I wanted to ask him, I wanted to shout at him. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t raise my head, I couldn’t move my lips, I couldn’t even breathe. I couldn’t even move my eyes from Tommy. He was sitting in the dark, and staring back at me.
It’s so cold. Tommy looks cold too, but he’s got something nice in a glass to keep him warm, but I’m on the cold wood floor. I’m not shivering, though. I can hear David. He is talking to Tommy.
“Is he coming?”
“Yeah.” Tommy sounds weird. He sounds quiet. I’ve never heard Tommy without the high-pitched whine of mania in his voice.
“Why do we want him to come again?”
“We need help. We can’t do it alone. Someone’s got to watch our backs.”
“Maybe we should call the cops.”
“Go ahead.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself, then.”
“Go fuck yourself, Bicky.”
There’s a stillness, then, with Tommy staring at his glass as if something were happening within it, and David standing behind him, hands at his sides but with that gangly bent-elbow look that hinted at a readiness to do something.
“Ah,” David suddenly spat, throwing up his arms. “To hell with you, then.”
“To hell with you.”
“You think I wanted this to happen?”
“Bickerman, you don’t want to know what I think right now, okay?”
David threw his arms up, but Tommy wasn’t paying him any attention. “Well, then thank goodness Hank’s heading over because you’re useless.”
Tommy just sits there and stares at his glass for a moment. Then he takes a really deep breath and says, “You didn’t need my goddamn help pushing her down the fucking stairs, did you?”
A shock went through me. Or, I expected a shock to go through me, and was pretty surprised when nothing did. David walked a few steps out of my frame of vision, and I couldn’t move my eyes to follow him.
The doorbell rang, and David and Tommy got very still. The blurriness around them stopped, and I could see them clearly for a moment. They looked old. Tommy had some gray hair on his temples; I’d never noticed that before. David’s slumping had gotten worse—I’d been trying to get him to stand straighter for some time, but it had never worked.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
“Go get the door,” Tommy said, draining his glass. “Your servant awaits.”
David just waved a hand at him in disgust and left the room. Tommy got up and crossed to the bar, where he refilled his drink. I was terribly thirsty, too, and wished he would bring me something to sip. Maybe if he lifted my head and held the glass to my lips, he could get something in me. When David walked back into the room, Tommy didn’t turn around, just stayed at the bottles, one hand on his glass, busy bringing it up to his mouth, the other on a bottle.
Henry walked in behind David and stopped, looking at me. Poor Henry! He always looked about to cry, I thought.
David was being quite rude, too, and stood with his back to Henry.
“Oh,” Henry said.
“Jesus, is that all you got to say?” David said, running a hand through his hair.
“Welcome, Hank,” Tommy shouts, spinning around, spilling booze all over the cream rug we just bought! “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: This is some fucked-up joke we’ve cooked up for you, that maybe we’ve been in here blowing rails all night again and we thought this would somehow amuse a fucking saint like you. But it’s no joke. Sorry, man.”
Henry stepped backwards, seemed to lose his balance, and caught hold of the couch. He looked damp. Poor Henry!
David finally turned around. “We were arguing,” he said, understating it as always, the fuck. “And I admit I was intimidating her, coming at her. She didn’t look where she was going, and she backed onto the stairs. I dived for her—Christ, I did! But she just went over. We … we haven’t moved her.”
“It’s true,” Tommy sang, choking on the rest of his drink. He was bright-eyed and red-faced again, drunk as hell. “I know you’d believe that Bicky pushed the bitch, we all would, but that isn’t what happened.”
“Shut the fuck up, Tom. Keep drinking.”
Tommy held up his finger at David and went back to the bar, listing a little.
Poor Henry was still holding onto the couch as if gravity had shifted to the left. He licked his lips. “Did you call … someone?”
Tommy was pouring different liquors into his glass, mixing them into something horrible. “The cops, Hank? Hell no. We’re concerned because they’ve been here once tonight.” He turned to look at Henry, winked. “Domestic violence, you know.”
“Tommy, I swear, if you don’t shut the fuck up—”
“Bicky, we’re on the first floor of this place, so I figure I’m safe from you.”
“Christ,” David swore. I hated when he used the Lord’s name like that. He did it sometimes in front of Daddy, and it killed me. He looked up at Henry. Henry was still staring at me. I wanted to make him feel better, let him know I was okay, really.
“We were arguing, I told you. One of the neighbors called the cops, and we had to sweet-talk a fucking uniform who stopped by. Took a fucking stroll through the whole place, too.”
Tommy had a dark glass, filled to the rim, which was bourbon and gin and tequila and who knew what else. He turned, smiling, filled with something, some spirit I’d seen him with before, something like …
Glee. It was the Glee. I saw it in Tommy and felt nauseous, because there was something else going on here. Something other than Mary, which scared the shit out of me as it was. Something cold was growing inside my stomach, and the floor was trying to buck me off, and Bick and Tommy were standing there like the Worst Fucking Rat Pack Ever, boozy and open-collared and assholes assholes assholes.
“Come on in, Henry!” He shouted at me. “Bicky’s got nothing to hide, right, Bicky? We’re inviting everyone over for an open house. A party! We’ll drape something stylish over Mare and she’ll be the ultimate conversation piece.”
“Shut up,” Bick snapped.
I opened my mouth to tell Tommy the same thing, but I couldn’t make words.
“Jesus, Hank, you okay?”
She was lying on the floor at the foot of their stairs, one arm twisted behind her in a terrible way. She was dead. I thought of every time I’d pictured her naked and felt nauseous. The cold thing in my stomach got bigger.
Bick was Sinatra, freaked out and wasted. Tommy was Dino, red-faced and indecent. I was Joey Bishop: No one gave a fuck about me one way or another.
“Call the motherfucking cops, Bick,” I croaked.
“He can talk!” Tommy shouted, drinking recklessly.
“Sit down, Henry,” Bick ordered, shoving Tom aside and heading for the bar. “Let’s talk,” he added over his shoulder.
“Talk?” I couldn’t breathe and my legs had broken again, snapped silently and numbly. I could hear the gravel-like sounds of the bones rubbing together within.
“Sit down.”
&nbs
p; I closed my eyes because it looked like Mare was staring at me. It even looked like she was smiling. “Fuck you.”
“Too late!” I heard Tommy sing out. “He’s already fucked himself.”
I heard, somehow, nothing but a tense silence. Then Bick.
“Tom, I swear, shut the fuck up.”
I opened my eyes again. Mary seemed to be encouraging me. I struggled to remain on my feet with a cannonball of ice in my belly and no air in the room, finally wobbling on my feet. “What the hell is there to talk about? Jesus, how long has she been lying there?”
Bick let out a frightening laugh, a single derisive note. “Hank, focus, okay?”
“You’re here to be a witness, Henry,” Tommy said. He was extremely drunk, which you could tell with Tommy because he passed through slurring and stumbling into a sort of stone-faced impassiveness, where he appeared steady and sober, if expressionless and bitterly sarcastic. “Bicky’s afraid that with the domestic complaint and my general unreliability and habit of coming off as a liar, people might get the wrong idea. So we want you, as a mildly upstanding young man, to back us up.”
“That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard. You want me to say that I saw it happen? Why, for God’s sake?”
Then I knew why. I saw it in the way Tommy could barely keep the Glee at bay. He wanted to whoop, he wanted to run around with the joy of it all, the excitement, the security of knowing that someone else had fucked up.
Suddenly Bick was right in front of me, his boozy breath all around me and his hands on my shoulders.
“Hank, Hank, it was, I swear it was, an accident. I swear to you. On our friendship. I didn’t mean it to happen. I swear. I wouldn’t have ever hurt her. I swear. I was so fucking angry, Hank, so angry you just don’t know, I pray you never know how it felt, and I didn’t see where she was, and I reached out and fucking Jesus—then she was falling and hitting her fucking head on every goddamn stair.”
He let go and turned on Tommy, his shoulders tense, and he hissed at Tom so low I almost didn’t hear him.