Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

“I don’t have dinner ready yet. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not hungry, sweetheart. It’s fine.” I slough off my trench, hang it on a nail jutting from the wall. “Come sit with me.”

  She says just one second and continues to lather oil on the sofa’s arms, buff it with the cloth. She kneels, threads the fabric’s corner between the spindles, pulls it back and forth. When she’s dusting, scrubbing, polishing, scouring, her hands regain their graceful sculptor’s gait. As soon as she comes to rest, her body begins to vibrate at a frequency that nearly creates music.

  “How was your day, darling?”

  I point at the bruised rainbow beneath my eye, but she’s entranced by the whorls of our hardwood floor. “He had some fight in him, just not enough.”

  “That’s wonderful.” She curves her face into a smile. The outside corners of her eyes tremble, skin pulled taut to the point of tearing. “I don’t have dinner yet. I’m sorry.”

  I shake my head and tell her I ate at the warehouse. Her sigh is audible relief and she’s consumed by the floor once again. “How are you doing?”

  She pauses for a breath, and gives a sadder but more natural version of her smile. “I had a long conversation with Elias today.”

  I walk to the kitchen for some water, stepping around wet spots. “And what did he have to say?”

  “Oh, he’s not doing so well. I wish I could go by to help him, but there’s so much to do.”

  “It’s enough for him to know you care.”

  He’s not doing well because he was miscarried years ago. He’s not doing well because his ghost is a black stain on a sidewalk. He’s not doing well because he only exists inside Mona’s cross-wired brain.

  She starts to say something but it’s trampled beneath the rattling glass and shaking dishes as the train crosses our window. I down a cup of water before the sediment settles and crimp the wires falling from the wall, shove them back behind the spackle I used to patch the hole when she ripped the phone from its jack four months ago. The train passes and she’s still talking, scrubbing the floor with religious fervor, her foundation cut through with tears. Her shorn fingernail spreads blood over the floor which she scrubs harder which spreads more blood which makes the tears flow faster which makes her hands press harder which makes the blood flow faster, and I lower myself to my knees beside her, wrapping her hand with my shirt, holding her body against mine. The jagged bit of fingernail pokes through the fabric and snags the skin of my stomach. Her breath is hot and smells of sawdust. She twitches, and an elbow clips the bridge of my nose, throwing rainbow sparks against the front of my head. I breathe through my mouth and tighten my grip.

  Slowly, I pull us to standing, walk her back to the bedroom. She circles the bed while I pull one of her two pairs of pajamas from the reconditioned dresser and lay them on the mattress for her. I rearrange the dead flowers on her nightstand, straighten the rug and comb out threads to cover the bare spots, push all of the empty metal hangers to one side of the closet. I do anything I can to occupy my hands while she changes, to stave off shame of her scarred and sunken stomach, to look away from what could’ve been to what is always there. She clears her throat and I turn around, peel back the sheet for her to climb under and drape it loosely around her neck. Her skin is dry on my lips and I tell her I love her, turn on a light in the closet.

  I close the door and plod through the apartment, stopping for a bag of frozen peas before gathering her sculptures and arranging them to look over the couch.

  I pour two fingers of rye then press the vegetables against my face, sip carefully and watch the shapes coalesce on the back of my eyelids. An arm slashes out, blade sparking blue and yellow, cutting through athletic tape, sending slivers of honey and glass through the air. Thin ribbons of song in a foreign tongue seep through the fractures, binding together a skull split in six parts. Two shapes converge on a frail splinter, swarming and swerving until the splinter liquefies and dissipates into darkness.

  The man’s jacket hangs on him like borrowed clothing. His right arm curves outward, starting mid-bicep. His elbow appears intact and fully functioning. Wrist and hand, too. The sharper angle in the lower humerus says that particular bet was especially large, the bone completely breaking. The other points were fractures. He must feint with his left, load cards or chips with his right. I don’t recognize his mug, and if he’d trespassed here in the Gurney, both arms and hands would be a jigsaw of bones.

  Him and his friend shutting their mouths while I’m trying to listen to the music inside would help, too.

  “You know you got open tables in there.” He pulls on a thin cigar, letting smoke drift from his nose. He smells of old chemicals. “Why you trying to make us freeze out here when I could be paying your wages in there?”

  I readjust on the stool. “As soon as I get word, you get a seat. Now, kindly shut your mouth.” I lean closer to the entrance, trying to collect every note that slips through the crack between door and frame. Her voice flutters, carries a hint of fragility. It seeps through my skin, winds through my ribs, warms my chest like a mason jar of whiskey.

  “Seriously, bud. We’re here for five more minutes, I’m going to find somewhere else. I got tons of places want my money.” He gestures down the street to the few neon signs casting the rest of the parlors in a garish light. Show clubs keep with neon, figuring they’re following some kind of tradition. The light attracts attention, anyway, giving their girls more pockets to supplement the pole’s tips. The parlors, though, we keep it low-key. We need asses in chairs and wallets in our coffers, but we can’t let in any punter from the alley.

  The torch singer throws herself into the refrain, straining her voice to the point of crumbling, pushing us to the edge of a building, daring us to take that step then pulling us back, weaving a slight lilt into the outro to coddle us, brush back our hair, smell her sweet breath. I peek around the doorframe, watch her gyrate and throb, her wrists pressed to glassine cheeks. The guitar player tosses his head back, unleashing a baritone harmony.

  The man with the bent arm says something to his friend, but I lose it in the wind. I turn toward him, stare. He drops his shoulders, straightens his spine. Starts to step forward, but just raises his foot and lowers it.

  “Go or stay.” I slip off my stool, stand before him. “But shut your mouth while the lady is singing.”

  He steps forward now, saying, “You need me. You need my grip.”

  “I don’t need a fucking thing from you and your feral friend there. You want to shut up, or you want to leave?”

  He smacks his friend on the arm, knocking him two steps sideways. “Buddy boy here thinks he’s a hard case, thinks he can command people because he’s got a fancy stool.” His left hand reflects the lights. I clock a blade in his palm. “He thinks we jump on his say-so.” The man looks to me. “That how it is, buddy boy?”

  “You’re nothing but a little bird with a broken wing.”

  He flashes his knife. I duck back, catch it on my shoulder. I lay into his cheek and the crush of bone is audible. He lurches back, screaming through the fluid collecting in his throat. His friend catches him, shoves him back at me. I jab a quick left to his jaw, follow up to his gut with a hard right. He sits, swiveling. Blood flows over his chin, collecting on his jacket. Metal clatters on the pavement. I fold up his blade and slip it back into his pocket, his friend standing and staring and scratching his wrists, avoiding eye contact.

  The door opens behind us, Sal’s voice preceding his body. A stumpy fat man keeps alongside him, squat legs moving twice as fast to keep up. The fur ringing Sal’s collar waffles in the winter breeze.

  “Yeah, he can do it like that,” Sal says. “But make sure he knows he’ll end up with the hogs.”

  The fat man says he’ll pass it on, then lowers his head to the wind and totters down the street.

  Sal looks at the baby bird with the broken face, turns to me and says to come close. He leads me to the door, points a crooked finger to the last o
f three tables along the wall. Daymo, one of our dealers, slides cards across the wooden table to three gray men and a woman with a face to match her beaten leather purse. “That one on the right, with the hawk nose? He stays here till I get back.”

  The sound of wood snapping. A heavy grunt. I clench my fists. Down the street, in front of the old Ritz, the fat man rocks himself off a pile of scorched and discarded boards, keeps moving down the street.

  “No problem, boss. The man stays.” I don’t particularly care to know what he’s done. It’s easier if I make him stay.

  “He tries to walk, you shatter his kneecaps.”

  I nod. Sal starts to walk away then pauses and points at the man on the ground.

  “Throw him in the dumpster or something, yeah? Son of a bitch’ll freeze over the sidewalk.”

  The night passes in fits and starts. The broken bird and his friend scatter after Sal’s cleaning orders. Two girls from Norma Jean’s come in giggling, leave crying. I sit hunched on the stool for twenty minutes, letting globs of saliva fall to the sidewalk, wagering internal bets on how long they’ll take to freeze over. I count the stars—comets, maybe? asteroids?—sprinting through the sky, lose count after an hour, start over. My hands ache no matter how much I breathe into them.

  Sal returns a couple hours later with a lightness to his gait and flecks of blood on his cuffs. I nod to him, relay that hawk bill’s still leaking money. He pats my shoulder, then glances down to where my hands should be and hands me his coffee cup, heads inside with a smirk. Barely lukewarm, but it helps. I sniff it and catch some brandy. All the while, the singer lays her soul to waste over the parlor floor, the cadence and tone of her voice filling my head with visions of tan hills tinted with scrub brush, olive groves twisting their way through salty air, leading a path to a pale blue ocean. A street girl calls out and reduces the scene to compost. She asks if I feel lucky. Her underbite makes her slurp when she speaks.

  The parlor begins to quiet as the night sky pales to gray. The baby bird’s puddle has frozen in a wine-colored sheen. I bring the stool inside so it won’t end up kindling in an oil drum blaze.

  Sal sits at a corner table, thumbing through stacks of bills. A bottle of brown liquor at his right hand, sheathed switchblade at his left, he oscillates between cartoon gangster and carnivore. Next to a table, the torch singer cocks a hip. Her hands float along the shoulder of a gambler’s jacket, a finger slipping through the hole in the burlap. Daymo calls his bet, and as the gambler tosses down his chips, to show her he’s worthy to share a bed with, she presses her skin to his back and filches a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Daymo calls the bluff and the gambler slides his chair back, leg catching on the knothole in the wood-plank floor. He looks to the space where she was, sees her now chatting with the guitar player, smoking a stolen cigarette.

  I sink into a chair across from Sal.

  “Only a couple more till you’re the big one. How you feeling for this next guy?”

  “Two to get to the big one.” The winner gets fifty grand. The rest? Nothing. “Three to be the big one.”

  “Who’s counting?” He pauses his tally, sips at his brandy, continues. “What is he, Mexican? Thai? One of those Spanish countries.”

  “Brown doesn’t mean Spanish.”

  “How much do I want to put on you, is my question.”

  “He’s got an anvil head, but tries to be too nimble. I keep him back with stingers, he’ll tire out by the fourth or so. Two kisses on the chin and he’s breathing in canvas.”

  “That quick?”

  I wave my hand at the cocktail waitress, ask for water. The crescent of her left ass cheek sinks below her skirt when she turns, displaying a rupture of blue veins. “You know anything about physics? How much energy you think it takes to move that lug around?”

  “Have you seen that right, though?”

  “Yeah, it’s frightening. But he’ll never get a chance to use it.”

  “So you’re saying you’re confident.”

  I start to reply but he clears his throat, calls out, “Carissa,” and motions her to come over. The singer meanders over, stands behind me. I smell her sandalwood perfume. I don’t look up, and I can feel her not looking down at me.

  He asks her for a cigarette and a slender wrist offers the pack.

  Carissa.

  I’ve been coasting on the warm current of her voice for two months and never knew her name. He lights the cigarette and focuses on me again.

  “That’s all?” she says.

  He flips his hand to dismiss her. She says something in a tongue I don’t understand and when she’s gone he gives a hard smile. “Go on.”

  “What I’m saying is, the real question here is how much do you want to win?”

  This brings a laugh. He slides a thin stack of pre-counted bills in front of me. “There’s some extra in there for those boneheads last week. You did good keeping them out.”

  I slip the money into my pocket, say, “Appreciate it, Sal.”

  “I aim to please.” He rifles off a half-inch of bills, lays it between us, and leans back, arms crossed over his chest. The waitress drops my water before me, splashing over onto the table. “So you’re saying you’re confident?”

  “I’m saying I’ll win.”

  He swirls brandy inside the cracked glass, nodding to some rhythm pulsing in the dark matter of his skull. A beetle crawls across the table, iridescent wings twitching. “How’s Mona doing these days?”

  My teeth click on the glass, I try not to bite it off. “I won’t lose.”

  “It’s all relative, you know?” He nudges the stack.

  “We’re fine.” I lay my hands palm down on the table, away from the money.

  With a single motion, he flicks open the knife and sinks it through the middle of the beetle’s shell. The beetle kicks its legs, death throes.

  “He’ll go down before the fifth.” I stand up, keep my hands steady, leave the stack next to the dying beetle. “That’s all I’ll give you.”

  Turning toward the door, I button my trench and shove my hands deep into the pockets. I catch Carissa watching me watching her. I cross the street, duck into the blacked-out windows of Mom’s Bar for a rye, waiting for my heart to stop throbbing.

  No amount of rye can make the television tolerable, definitely not while Arthur fucking Reiss blathers on about the City’s economy, how now is the best time to invest in the future and have confidence in your leaders, while his lapdog lurks in the unfocused background. Still trying to convince the population there’s a future in cash, more to keep his safe weighted down than for any notion of social stability. There’s a bright blooming sun in the background, though, so this must be rebroadcasted. Still.

  I drop a few bills for the drink and tip, eyeball my already-thin roll, take two bills back and leave. I yawn into my fist and start toward the train. My heels click down an eerily quiet street, the neon and breaking sky casting the same obscene hue over the city.

  Around the corner, I spot a silhouette twenty feet in front of me. Faint music in the air. Its left leg pivots beneath a slight frame, a heavy black bag counterbalancing on the right shoulder. My legs carry me closer, and I realize the music is humming. The tone is familiar and I step quicker for a half a block, trying not to sound threatening, however I can do that. Tiny fists at the end of her jacket sleeves.

  “Hey,” I call out.

  She continues, leg twisting, fists flexing. I call out again.

  “I work at the Gurney. With you.”

  She stops and spins, blade glinting in her hand. Relief covers her face like a cloud. “Why didn’t you say that before so I wasn’t hauling ass for the last two blocks?”

  I want to tell her that I’ve watched her from afar for months, that her voice is the thing that gets me through the night. Instead, I shrug.

  She hooks her chin down the street. “Come on. I’m going to miss my train.”

  I offer to take her bag, but she swats away my help, whit
e-knuckles the handle. Her whole torso shifts with each step, as if her body were built on a fault line. The way she contorts herself when performing, I’d assumed it was passion, not dilapidation.

  “Which stop are you?” she says.

  “Up north to Adams. I train over that way.”

  “Ballet?”

  “Boxing.” And I don’t catch her smirk until after I answer.

  “Shame.”

  “You’re not a fan of boxing?”

  “No,” she says. “You’d make a beautiful ballerina.”

  Two cars speed down the street past us, the brown sedan swerving, exhaust pipe sparking, the driver either drunk or poorly evading. The Cutlass behind keeps a steady bead on the bumper, probably waiting for the sedan’s driver to make a mistake and kill himself. The gust of wind when they pass tears a poster from the lamppost and makes it tumble down the street. As quickly as the cars arrived, they disappear.

  She pauses, lights a cigarette. “Thanks for not saying anything to Sal.”

  “What was all that?”

  Breath and smoke clouding her face, she says, “Bullies,” and the flat way she responds doesn’t make me ask for clarification.

  A radio car cruises by, weak lights seeping reds and blues on us, engine whining like a mule with a full cart and broken legs.

  “So what are you singing about, anyway?” I stammer as I ask the question, visions of a weeping Mona in my head. “You sound very intense, is what I mean.”

  “Stories,” she says. “Mothers, lovers, leavers. Whatever people sing about.”

  “I couldn’t understand any of it.”

  “Você não fala português?” she says. “It’s fado.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s old.”

  “Right.”

  “Most are songs I learned growing up. Some are pop songs, translated. One or two I make up as I go along, singing about the crowd, what they look like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look around that place. There are so many degenerates, losers, fuck-ups.” She pulls hard on her cigarette. “But they really commit themselves to it. Before Sal breaks their arms, at least. There’s something romantic about that.”