Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  It was a strange feeling, the bottom dropping out of everything. It wasn’t bad, per se, just strange. The sitches were bad, but this, this just felt like . . . falling. His anger was gone. What had taken its place was a particular hollowness. The wind changed outside and sleet ticked against the window.

  “I’m really sorry, Mark,” Whitmer said, and Sandoval believed him. He was a good guy, had always been a good guy. His belief in Whitmer’s inherent goodness would years later sour to a kind of miasma of resentment; he would come to consider the old man a prig, too adherent to propriety, academically stifled and stifling in return. But right then, on that dark and sleet-battered Friday afternoon on Capitol Hill, it felt almost like a father admonishing his son. “You’re a hell of a researcher, Mark, and a terrific writer. You have years of site studies and books and papers and professorship inside you, if you want it. But that’s the thing.”

  “I have to want it,” Sandoval murmured.

  “You have to want it. And I’m just not sure if you’re there yet.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be there.”

  Whitmer nodded. “And that’s okay too,” he said softly.

  “So I’m just kicked out? There’s no process in place?”

  “We’ve been sending you letters, Mark. I know Carlisle’s sent you at least two, three letters about putting you on probation, not to mention the phone calls.” Softly, he said, “Are you not opening your mail?”

  “Honestly, I’m not spending a lot of time at home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Marital troubles.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  And that was it. Don Whitmer wrapped Sandoval’s clammy hand in his warm, work-roughened ones, and bid him what was essentially goodbye. He walked down the halls, down those brightly lit, right-angled corridors that did their staunch duty in keeping the outside world at bay, in stopping the elements from gaining entrance, in halting the disparate combinations of things that could encroach and cause chaos. His last time there. Gone were the last tenets of orderliness and normality. He was fired.

  He was screwed.

  Wind, like someone’s furious searching hand, ran along his body when he stepped outside. His guts chortled, cramps tightening him up. Sleet smacked loud against his jacket. The red taillights of cars along Denny Avenue flared in the darkness.

  It was evening now, and it hit him once he got outside: Sick for sure. itching, cramps, cold sweats.

  He stopped at a payphone with crude swastikas scratched into the glass and dumped in a handful of change. It was night in DC; she might already be at the club, just starting her shift. Missing her had its own pulse, its own backbeat.

  Three rings and her answering machine.

  There was a Thai place across the street and he talked as he watched all the people inside. “Well, I just got booted from school, Dani. You believe it? I appear to have hit a rut, yeah?” His laugh sounded like someone stepping on a branch. “Listen, I really miss you. Marnie’s at home, so don’t worry about calling. Guarantee she’ll throw me out the door when she finds out about this.” He dipped his head against the scarred glass. “Anyway, yeah, I miss you. I wish you were here. I’ll give you a call when I can.”

  He considered scoring, heading down Broadway or into Cal Anderson Park, but then thought of Marnie hearing the news about losing his job and seeing him smoothed out on top of that and decided it’d be better to face the music first. She could always tell if he was pinned at all, even a little bit. So, okay. He’d tell Marnie, get it over with, then go score. Or maybe bring some to Marnie and then tell her?

  Or just kick, he thought. Just knock it off. Christ.

  They lived in a one-bedroom not far from school, a ground-level apartment with a nice lobby and a big picture window that faced the street. Spent needles and dog shit dotted the shrubbery in front of the place; homeless men would frequently thread their way through the shrubs to knock on their window to ask for money or, in one case, to hand Marnie a pocket bible and inquire about her soul.

  When he came into the apartment after the chill of the walk, the smell hit him. The place stank. Dirty laundry, the reek of dishes sitting too long in fetid water. Garbage can mounded high and rotting under the sink. His coat dripping with sleet, he flicked the light in the front hall and nothing happened. He walked into the kitchen and flicked that switch. Nothing. The clock on the stove was black as everything else.

  “Goddamn it.”

  He considered copping again—Marnie clearly wasn’t home, and what was the point of staying here if they’d shut the power off? But then another flurry of cramps seized him, and he flicked his lighter and walked like a blind man to the bathroom, his free hand pressed to his guts. He lit a bunch of Marnie’s hippie candles on the back of the toilet tank and took a grueling, watery shit. When he was done, he blew out most of the candles and took a few into the living room where he could at least watch the street and wonder where the fuck Marnie was and try not to think about scoring. Somehow it seemed unfair that she should be gone now when he had this news to unload. They’d been married five years; she’d been on a full ride to Cornish for painting when they’d met. She’d managed to graduate, barely, after Sandoval had eventually gotten her turned on to coke and then snorting heroin. She’d graduated to popping by the time she got her diploma, and yeah, he felt bad about it. God. Of course he did. He carried the candles—the scents of pine trees and sugar cookies ghosting in his wake—and set them down on the coffee table. Outside, the sleet had turned to rain, and the frying-oil sound of it in the shrubbery was comforting.

  He sat down in his green chair by the window. He felt something under his ass and reached down. Yet another bill, he figured, but in the scant candlelight, he saw her handwriting. She’d written on the back of the electricity bill, and that was some irony, right?

  He squinted, leaning close in the candlelight.

  Mark

  I’m so done. Finally.

  You can keep everything. I don’t care anymore. You’re a train wreck, and an addict, and a thief and a liar, and I’m stepping off this train before you take me with you. Go fuck yourself, and I mean that sincerely.

  —M

  Then he noticed that all of Marnie’s paintings—crude, menacing, heavy-stroked things, canvasses of bright, neon-colored women being mauled by wolf-men hybrids, dog-men, cat-men, cartoonish things, backgrounds that consisted mostly of triangles and circles and fierce drips of primary colors—were gone from their familiar spots on the walls. A train wreck? A thief and a liar? A drug addict?

  They had split and gotten back together a dozen times. She spent more time at friends’ places than she did at the apartment these days. Even spent a few months at her mom’s place once. Never left a note, though. Never taken her stuff before.

  He was sick in his guts. He walked the small apartment holding the sugar cookie candle. It did not entirely cover up the odor of the terrible things he had done to the bathroom, just kind of merged the two scents together in a way that was somehow more horrific. He kept wanting to try the light switches. He kept scratching his arms. He kept sniffling his runny nose and palming the sweat from his face.

  “I need to get clean,” he said to a spot on the wall where a painting had once hung. The candle’s flame trembled. Shadows writhed. “I feel like that would definitely alleviate certain issues.”

  He lit a few more candles and brought them one by one into the bedroom. He sat on the unmade bed and spent an hour or so going through Marnie’s things, seeing what he could sell or trade. If he decided to. There wasn’t much; some clothes, some shit jewelry. But the bookshelves were full of Marnie’s art books from school. They would fetch at least some cash. This was his life then: he’d become reduced to this simplicity, to an engine of need.

  He was pulling books from the bookcase with his sugar cookie candle nex
t to him when there was a knock at the front door. It was a confident knock, a knock that reverberated throughout the small apartment. Sandoval froze. He was a statue, breathless and still. The world became so quiet he was sure he could hear the candlewick hissing, the flame devouring oxygen, his eyeballs rolling in the lubricated beds of their sockets.

  Only two people in the world would knock on his door like that.

  “Open it up or we’re gonna knock it down,” Dieter said, already sounding bored.

  Sandoval tiptoed into the living room, goose-stepping toward the picture window, and saw Julian standing there with his hand cupped against the glass, staring in at him.

  “Mark,” he said through the glass, “quit messing around. I can see your candle, numbnuts.”

  Sandoval stared directly at Julian through the glass and blew out the candle.

  Julian smiled. “You little fucker.”

  He was wearing a trench coat—Julian always wore a trench coat, it was part of the evil-villain shtick he cultivated—and in a whirl of fabric he stormed off through the shrubs, presumably to the front door of the apartment building to assist Dieter in smashing the door in. Sandoval tiptoed to the window and gently slid it open, the tang of night air glorious after the apocalyptic potpourri of his fusty, soiled, closed-in apartment. Mist kissed his face like a lover.

  He gently set his feet down on the spongy ground and started speed-walking down the sidewalk and Julian stepped out from behind a dumpster and punched him in the ear. Sandoval stumbled to his knees. The pain was galvanizing, gigantic, and he let out a breathless little scream while staggering and clutching at his ear with both hands.

  “You dummy,” Julian said, cinching a hand around Sandoval’s bicep and hoisting him up. They marched back to the shrubbery in front of his building, and Julian escorted him back through the open window. Back into his stinking, lightless, Marnie-free apartment. At least she’s not here to see this bullshit, he thought. Maybe if he yelled, someone would call the police. It was still Capitol Hill, after all. Sure, the bushes were gleaming with spent rigs, but this was still a nice neighborhood. He stood in the darkened living room while Julian pushed himself in, then shut the window.

  “Stay put,” he said, and walked past Sandoval and opened the front door.

  “The lights don’t work,” Julian said to Dieter in the hallway.

  Dieter said, “You know a junkie that pays their bills?”

  They walked into the living room, looked around. Dieter’s nose curled. “It smells like shit in here.”

  “Got any more candles?” Julian asked.

  “In the bedroom,” Sandoval said, still cupping his ear. The side of his skull felt hugely swollen, like someone was trying to park a car in his head. Fear had cinched his asshole up like a bag with a drawstring, as if he’d never need to visit the bathroom again.

  Dieter told him to shut the blinds and he did.

  He told Sandoval to sit in his green chair, and Sandoval sat in his green chair. Julian brought candles back and forth from the bedroom and the bathroom until all the candles were alight on the coffee table. The room trembled with a greasy, uneasy light. All those buoyant scents—peppermint, watermelon, apple, cookie dough, vanilla—fogged together to make something wretched.

  Julian said, “Now it smells like fairyland and diarrhea. Great.”

  “Why isn’t your power on?” Dieter asked, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I don’t know,” Sandoval said.

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The fuck do you know,” said Julian.

  “She left me.”

  Dieter said, “Yeah, right. College man like you? The Professor?”

  Sandoval held out the note to Julian. His mouth moved with the words as he read it. Julian handed the note to Dieter. Dieter had a ponytail and a linebacker’s build that he packed into a leather jacket too small for him. His hands were dainty things, tiny, the knuckles dimpled. He held the electricity bill between his thumbs and forefingers.

  “That sucks, man,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He flipped the note over. “And you owe like a hundred and eighty bucks to the power company.”

  Sandoval sighed, checked his fingers to see if his ear was bleeding. It was, a little.

  Julian gazed down at him with something that was almost respect. “You are having a bad day.”

  “Okay,” Dieter said. “So.” The two of them crowded Sandoval in his green chair by the window, the candles backlighting them. Julian, besides his gangly scarecrow body folded into that trench coat, had his wiry red beard done up in a pair of rubber bands. A kind of casual cruelty, an offhanded willingness to do great and brutal harm, exuded from both men like bad cologne.

  “I mean, you know why we’re here,” Dieter said.

  “And clearly I don’t have it,” Sandoval said, gesturing at the walls, the candles, the darkness.

  Julian punched him in the thigh. It was surprisingly effective: pain sang along Sandoval’s nerves, great and generous bolts of pain shooting down to his ankle. He huffed and grabbed his leg and leaned over the arm of the chair. A pair of brass knuckles caught the light on Julian’s hand.

  “Whoo. Break your cocksucking leg if I do that again,” Julian crowed, happy about it.

  “You understand,” said Dieter, “how an economy works, yeah? How goods and services are traded under the expectation of monetary reimbursement? The implied exchange? The good faith? It’s like the cornerstone of society, that expectation.” Dieter had once told him that he’d taken a year of business classes at UW Seattle before the heroin business proved too profitable. “This is a reasonable expectation we have for you.”

  Sandoval sat up, his hands laced around his thigh, breathing hard through his nose.

  Dieter sighed, stuffed his little hands in his leather jacket. “Mark, get serious. You’re into us for six grand. That’s money owed. That’s a package of dope you were supposed to flip for us. Instead, you and your wife either shot it into your arms or, I don’t know, spent it on paints for her shitty artwork—”

  Sandoval gasped and said, “Don’t talk about my wife’s artwork.”

  “Whoa, did she take her paintings?” Julian suddenly said, looking around. “Damn. She took her paintings.”

  “—and it’s money that we had to front for you. Me and him. I don’t like carrying your debts. It’s unjust.”

  “What do you want me to do? Pull six grand out of my ass? I lost my job today.”

  “For reals?” said Julian, tugging on one of his beard-thatches. “Man, you are really in the shit.” He crouched down, his forearms on his knees, trench coat pooling behind him. Sandoval could see candle flames reflected in his eyes, running bright along the ridge of the brass knuckles. That stupid, stupid beard done up in rubber bands.

  “Listen,” Julian said quietly. “This isn’t a new spot for us, Mark. You’re nothing we haven’t seen before. But look”—and here he took the knuckles off, dropped them into his coat pocket—“we’re giving you a break. See? We’re willing to work with you, but you gotta work with us, man. Make an effort. I mean, Jesus.”

  Sandoval thought of Don Whitmer saying You can’t float on charisma, Mark. Saying that he was a hell of a researcher and writer. He thought of Dani, her willful scars, her tattoos, her litheness. The way she lit him up. How she was over at the other end of the country. He thought of Marnie, sweet and shy and idealistic and now, thanks to him, carrying around a sizable monkey of her own, sweet skinny Marnie, his wife with smears of paint on her tights, thumbs poking out of her sweater cuffs, her little crooked front tooth, their love lost and pissed on, squandered, his infidelities, his selfishness, his habits. All of these people he’d either infringed upon or brazenly, repeatedly disappointed—because what else did he do? What other avenue was
there for guys like Mark Sandoval to walk down? He was who he was. He found himself suddenly weighted down with hatred for these men before him while simultaneously suffocating under a coffin-sized brick of self-loathing. He and Dieter and Julian might as well move in together, might as well get matching tattoos: they were triplets from the same wretched shit-pile. They were the same.

  Sandoval leaned forward and gazed into Julian’s hooded, soul-dead eyes. Very slowly and clearly he said, “Don’t you have some other errands to run, Julian? For people a lot smarter than you? Huh? You dumb little sandwich-boy shit-rat lackey fuck.” It was the best he could come up with.

  Julian shrugged. “Okey doke.”

  The beating was quick. A flurry of arms in the half-dark, arms with missiles and boulders and bombs attached to the ends of them. Sandoval and Julian and Dieter all gasping, grunting with effort in that little corner of the room, the violence as intimate as sex. Sandoval tried to curl up on the chair and protect his face and they grabbed at his hands and fell on top of him, balancing with one hand against the wall, against the back of the chair. Starbursts of pain and the bright animal acknowledgment of being hurt, of a body infringing upon his body, the feel of skin split and blood running wet down his face, pain where there had been no pain before, rings and fingernails scratching down forearms and cheeks, lips pulped, the sounds so personal, the sea of candle flames shuddering on the table nearby, Sandoval by the end of it loosing spluttering, childish sobs, begging them to stop, spit and blood hanging in great loose strings from his face, strings that trembled and caught the light and then finally broke under their own weight, pattering to the carpet, his shirt, the chair.