by Keith Rosson
They leaned before him with their bloody scraped hands on their knees, panting like they’d done wind sprints.
Dieter stood up and retied his ponytail. “We’ll be back in a week,” he said, still breathing heavy. He ran his hand under his nose, left a streak of Sandoval’s blood there. “Seven days, payment in full.”
Julian said, “And don’t call me that again, Mark. I’m not dumb, and I’m not a rat.”
Gasping, weeping, Sandoval bled in his chair.
Dieter turned at the front door and appraised him. “And if you don’t have the money? Mark, you listening to me? Nod if you’re listening. Okay. If you don’t have the money next week, Mark, me and him will saw your head off and throw it into the Sound. Okay? Hand to God, man. Your debt is my debt and that’s no good for me. It’s time for you to get serious.”
6
The widening gazes of his fellow pedestrians, a taxi driver’s moon face at a stoplight asking if he needed help, Sandoval waving him away and staggering on. He’d left the apartment in a hurry, shoved shit in a backpack. His jacket was ruined, bloodied, and he’d grabbed one of Marnie’s windbreakers from the bedroom, the dark one with the inside pockets. Blood kept falling on it and he kept wiping it off.
He walked downtown, and inside Cooper’s, the line of regulars sat curled over their glasses as if they’d atrophied there, men gone too long without sun. Ropes of neon gleamed on the bar top from the signs on the walls, some shitkicker music on the jukebox. He turned heads as he walked to the ATM at the far wall by the bathrooms. Murmurings, quiet hoots of commiserate laughter. He pulled out three hundred dollars, the most he could withdraw at once, and tucked it into his wallet.
At the Greyhound station he got more hoots from the smokers gathered outside the doors. He hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and zipped up his jacket and walked into the bathroom. Paper towels spilled from the dented garbage can, tiles wet with piss and God knew what else. A scratched, unbreakable mirror warped the ruination of his face.
Someone in a closed stall let out a pinched, tremulous fart and then laughed. At the sink, Sandoval wetted paper towels and gingerly dabbed at his lips, cleaned the blood from his nose, from the oozing cuts around his eyes. Watery pink dimes of blood fell to the countertop. The man in the stall farted again and giggled, “Eee-eee-eee!” Sandoval’s adrenaline was souring. He was shaky and sick again. He wanted to cry. Marnie’s windbreaker was dark enough to hide the blood.
People clustered at their gates. They sat disconsolately in the orange bucket seats, plugging quarters into tiny televisions mounted on the armrests. A mother sat with three sleeping children lined up in the seats next to her. They went from biggest to smallest like little nesting dolls. The mother looked at him and quickly looked away.
He waited in line, ignoring the furtive glances he got from other people waiting their turn, and when it was his turn, the ticket agent’s eyes grew big and she said, “Just a minute,” and walked into a back room. A moment later she returned with another agent who wiped his mouth with a napkin and threw it in the trash. The man looked him up and down. “Help you?”
“I’d like to buy a ticket.”
“I can’t make you out, man.”
“I just want to buy a ticket,” said Sandoval, enunciating.
The woman said, “Honey, an ambulance is what you need. You need a hospital, is what.”
“It’s worse than it looks,” Sandoval said, and took out his wallet. “How much is a one-way to DC going to set me back?” He thought of smiling, then worried his lip would split open again. His hands were cold, racked with tremors.
The man had a hawk-like nose and sleepy, bloodshot eyes. He had creases in his shirt like he’d slept in it. He shrugged and said, “Man wants to go to DC, Sharise, who are we to say?”
“I don’t even know if the driver’s gonna let him on, a face like that.”
“Money talks,” the man said, and asked Sandoval when he wanted to leave.
“Yesterday,” Sandoval said. A lifetime ago, he thought.
The man nodded, tapped at his keyboard. “That’s about what I figured.”
The woman walked back into the office, shaking her head. The man took Sandoval’s money and in return gave him a sheaf of tickets stapled together, pointed to the spots on his tickets that showed layovers, boarding passes. Four and a half days on the Grey Dog, Seattle to DC.
Sandoval pocketed his change, adjusted his backpack. “Is there a gift shop, anything like that?”
“A gift shop?” The man lifted his chin, motioning behind Sandoval. “Got a little kiosk back there, coffee and shit, but it closes at ten. What you need?”
“I was just hoping for some aspirin or something.”
“You good with your tickets, you see how all the layovers and things are gonna work?”
“Yeah, thank you.”
“Okay, hold on.” He walked into the back office and came out a moment later, placing a travel-size bottle of aspirin and a few Band-Aids on the counter. “You still bleeding from your eyebrow there, just so you know. Better cover that up or the driver probably won’t let you on.”
“Thank you,” Sandoval said. His vision swam with sudden tears. “Thanks a lot.”
“Blood on your shirt there, too. Yeesh. Zip up your jacket, man. Yeah. You got it.”
Through the wreckage of his mouth, Sandoval slurred, “I appreciate it,” and cracked open the bottle of aspirin.
“Man, you not the first guy to get stomped in his life, you know? Four, five years ago, I got jumped by a bunch of good old boys in a bar in Bremerton. There for my brother’s wedding.” His laugh was musical, generous. “Bunch of rednecks from the naval base. Boy. I didn’t look as bad as you do, but I wasn’t far off. Bus leaves in ninety minutes. Good luck to you.”
Sandoval wanted to shake his hand, wanted to lean over the counter and hug him, wanted to be his friend and work at the Seattle Greyhound terminal alongside him, dispensing aspirin and life-saving acts of kindness, but instead he swallowed down his tears and took his Band-Aids and aspirin and walked back into the bathroom. The giggler had vacated. He put a pair of Band-Aids on his eyebrows, and one on his cheek where someone’s knuckles had laddered up the bone and scraped the skin raw and oozing red. He still looked horrible—worse, now that some discoloration was starting to come into play—but he was no longer a walking open wound.
He ate some aspirin and when he went to put the bottle in the inner pocket of the windbreaker, he felt things in there. He took them out.
Jesus. A joint—a fat, misshapen joint—and half a pack of Juicy Fruit gum.
In a bucket chair, he fed a few quarters into a television and gazed numbly into the little green-tinged screen. A Christmas tree leaned disconsolately in a corner of the terminal, its lights burned out, the linoleum beneath the tree dusted with dead needles. When the bus arrived and he stood in line waiting to board, there was some distant part of him that expected Dieter and Julian to walk into the station, as if they’d known he would run. But a larger and more significant part of him was simply fatigued beyond words. Poor Marnie. Had she gone to her mom’s in Reno? Was she still in town? Sandoval imagined Dieter and Julian striding into the station and him just dropping to his knees, just begging them to finally end it for him.
The bus was quiet and dark, almost full. He kept his head down and the driver didn’t look twice at him. Sandoval shuffled down the aisle and near the back, after shoving his backpack in the overhead compartment, sat down next to a black man with shoulder-length dreads and an olive-green field jacket. The guy wore a knit tam and his eyes opened in sleepy irritation when Sandoval slumped next to him. He seemed wholly unimpressed with Sandoval’s face, but maybe it was just too dark to see.
“Cool if I sit down?”
“You already are, man,” the guy said, and closed his eyes again.
A few minutes later they were off. Sandoval listened to the sound of rain on the roof and watched the city lights slowly peel and curve across the glass.
7
Oh, kicking the monkey on the Dog. It was a small monkey he had, sure. Of course. But still: it was straight misery. A case of blind acceptance. The wheels of the Dog churned slow. Time crawled. There was just so much of it.
Time for one’s broken face to swell like something independent from the rest of one’s body, to pulse symphonically with one’s heartbeat, as if the pain was being directed by the world’s most uncreative conductor: POOM poom POOM poom POOM. Pain for miles, hours. Time to sweat, to cramp, to keep a straight face through it all—he wasn’t one of those dopeheads that needed three days and a mattress to kick; his sitches were light. He’d be damned if people on the fucking Greyhound would get to look down their noses at him.
But time. Time was a killer.
He envied those passengers with their Walkmans and Discmans, their horseshoe-shaped neck pillows, their books. He sat in the dark of the bus as it rolled stolidly through the night, this steel tube packed with the scent of body odor and unwashed feet and cigarettes and the hope of going somewhere else. The night peeled away to show darker night, then later to the constellations of far-flung towns glowing in the distance of the freeway, of old ruined agricultural buildings lurking in the blackness, buildings long shed of their usefulness. Gas stations and truck stops simmering under sodium-lights, billboards ticking past endlessly. There was nothing to do but think and quietly kick and try to leap from his skin and feel his dumb animal heartbeat pulse in his face.
Daylight arrived on the horizon like someone filling in a pencil sketch. Softly, everything in muted bands of gray. Only the highway’s yellow lines and the other cars sang with any color, and even those seemed leached out. A dim, dark, morose morning, and yet if it wasn’t explicitly hope that Sandoval was feeling, it was something similar. A lightening. They were in Idaho by now and he was feeling a little better. He’d made it out of the city.
Try cutting my head off when I’m staring at the Washington Monument, you assholes. Try teleporting. Come get me.
Come try it.
•
“Shit, man,” Nathaniel said quietly, gazing out the window, “a guy wasn’t depressed before, he’s depressed now.”
“I love it,” Sandoval said, and it was true, he did. “We live here for a reason, right? Bring on the gloom, I say.”
Nathaniel shrugged, tilted his bag of trail mix, chewed. “I guess, man. Shit bums me out.” He’d surprised Sandoval by waking up at dawn and taking in his seatmate’s wrecked face with little more than a comment hoping that Sandoval had gotten a few swings in.
They talked, tentatively at first, and then more animatedly as the folks around them awoke, as the morning brightened. Morning on the Dog: as close to a metamorphosis as it got. People yawned, stretched in the aisle. Began the slow ceremony of destroying the toilet in the back of the bus, the ministrations of too many doing too ungodly much in too small a space. Still, he felt better. He’d spent a decent amount of the previous night composing rich, detailed fantasies in which he’d walked out of his apartment, blood-swathed, with Dieter and Julian begging for their lives behind him, the two of them professing fealty and unending buckets of dope for their right to continue breathing. It’d helped pass the time.
The bus stopped in the early morning at a gas station called The Pump’n Pig. Atop the roadside sign sat a bubblegum-pink pig holding a giant gas pump. The pig was joyful, laughing, inexplicably wearing black dress shoes and a bow tie. A statue fifteen, twenty feet tall, weather-worn and spattered in years of calcified bird shit. It seemed a testament to Sandoval that anything was possible. It was a sign, this gas station pig, this Idahoan nudist, this grand, stupid gesture to gaudiness and excess. Sandoval walked past the gas pumps into the convenience store and shopped and waited his turn in line. He bought himself cigarettes, a bottle of juice, a box of crackers. He got a handful of quarters.
He and Nathaniel stood and smoked under the awning of the store, the pig before them a dazzling hot pink beneath that gray sky. Nathaniel rolled his cigarettes poorly, frequently spitting and pulling shreds of tobacco from his tongue. Sandoval offered him a Marlboro and he took it. The other riders mostly gave Sandoval the side-eye. He tapped some aspirin into his palm, swallowed them down with his orange juice.
“That’s a platinum-level beating though,” Nathaniel said when he saw Sandoval probe his swollen eye. “Dude know martial arts or some shit?”
“It was a couple guys.”
“I hear you.” Nathaniel nodded, spat again, examined one of his dreads and tossed it over his shoulder. “What I’m thinking, I’m thinking you put your wick somewhere it did not belong.”
Sandoval laughed, which hurt.
“Am I right?”
“No,” Sandoval said. “You’re giving me way too much credit.”
The bus driver walked out of the store and yelled, “Ten minutes.” He lit a smoke himself, milling around and kicking at gravel in front of the bus. The sun came out through a dark bed of clouds.
“Catch you back on the bus,” Sandoval said, and walked over to the payphone in front of the store. Dumped quarters into the slot. The thunk of the coins felt definitive; he just knew Dani would be home, and she was.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said.
“Shit,” she said. He smiled into the receiver, felt his scabs tug. “You got fired? Jesus, Mark. I thought you were getting clean.” They’d always been like this—eschewing formality, falling into a quick familiarity that not even Marnie could match. He and Dani had met when she moved to Seattle two years before. She stripped while working on her piercing and body mod apprenticeship at a shop in Belltown, and he’d met her after a random visit to her work; he could count on one hand the times he’d gone to a strip club. She’d talked to him, he’d bought a dance, it’d gone from there. It’d been a sustained, fevered affair, one that he’d done a piss-poor job of hiding. It had undoubtedly compounded the complications of his marriage, helped it toxify. Eventually it reached the point where Marnie would do dope with him as a way to keep him home. Their love gone that rancid, that terrible. Six months ago a friend of Dani’s had offered her a slot in her shop in DC and Dani had taken it. So now he called, pined for her, left messages.
“I’ve got it nailed down,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“Yeah, right.”
He leaned his forehead against the steel case of the payphone. She was right: he was in deep. He’d played the I’m getting clean, I promise song so many times she could mouth the words along with him. Before she’d gone to DC she said, “It’s getting away from you. I love you, Mark, but you’re in it deep.”
“That’s not the half of it,” he said to her now. “Things are crazy.”
“Oh God. What happened?”
“You sure you want to hear it?”
“Oh, fuck off. Of course I do.”
He let it all go in a rush. He was surprised not at his honesty with Dani, but at the fact that he was truth-telling to her in ways he hadn’t even done with himself during all those previous hours on the bus. All through the dark night before, he’d been deflecting blame, ignoring it, and here he told Dani that it was his fault that Marnie left, of course it was, that he’d gotten her hooked—the thing latched on her back not as fierce and long-fingered as the one on his own, but surely nothing to sneeze at, either. His wife! He’d done that to her! How the world had slipped away from him, how everything had at first been soft-edged, how he could see why people liked the stuff when he started smoking it, and definitely when he got up the guts to shoot it, but she had been right, Dani had been right. There was no corralling it: it was a faucet that was either cinched tight or going full force. He was in trouble. He doubted that Julian would really kill him over a six-thousand-dollar debt, but w
ho could say? He told her about Marnie leaving, about Don Whitmer, the beating, pulling money out of the ATM, buying a bus ticket. The operator came on and he fed more quarters into the payphone.
“Wait,” she said, “where are you going?”
He paused, turned and scrutinized the horizon. God, that pig. That beautiful, hideous, ridiculous pig. He wanted it to wrap him up in its hot pink arms, he wanted to fight battles with it. The two ugliest things alive, he and that pig, strolling down the backbone of the world together. He didn’t have to say where he was going. His silence was his answer.
“Wait, you’re coming here? Mark.”
“You don’t want me to come?”
“Well, are you straight or not? Are you off dope?”
“I will be.”
“Mark—”
“Seriously, Dani, I just got the shit beat out of me. That guy, Deiter? You met him once at the Comet. Dude with the ponytail, the baby hands? He said he’d cut my head off. Okay? Said he’d cut my head off and throw it in Puget Sound.”
“Christ,” she said. “You’re not really selling me here.”
“I’m saying I’m motivated. I’m scared shitless. I can kick. I feel good right now, actually.”
“You can kick, huh? You can kick. Where have I heard this?”
Sandoval kept his mouth shut.
“What, you’re gonna live with me? I live in a house with four other people, Mark. I work forty hours a week at the shop and pick up shifts at the club. I can’t just be like, ‘Hey, my dope sick sometimes-boyfriend’s gonna stay with us, cool? Oh, and he’s married and owes money to drug dealers.’”
“I’m not dope sick,” he said, sounding like the churlish, dope sick infant that he was.
The driver climbed on board and tooted the horn.
“I need you,” he said.
“Oh, Mark,” Dani said. “I’m really mad at you right now.”
“I love you,” he said.