Blood, Guts, & Whiskey

by Todd Robinson

  “This guy, used to be on the town board around here, till he moved,” Jimmy said. “Now he owns a store and used car lot over by Saugerties. Cal Sheely and his oldest son.”

  I drank a beer like it was water. “You don’t say,” I said. “How much is he into you for?”

  “He’s owed me eight grand for over six months,” Jimmy said. “I just thought about it today and started to get angry.”

  “Do you know where he lives?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I know where he lives.”

  I emptied another beer and so did Jimmy. “Let’s go talk to him,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go talk to him.”

  We got in Jimmy’s work truck and Jimmy drove over the bridge, into Kingston and headed north. He cut off the main road, until we were riding north right along the Hudson River, with big houses and huge lawns on either side of us. It was almost dusk on the river. Isolated by at least two miles from the other houses was a white, Italianate fake mansion with an attached garage.

  As soon as we pulled into the driveway, a black German shepherd mix came out and started barking at us. Jimmy pulled a silver whistle from his pocket and I knew it was a dog whistle, but I couldn’t hear it. The dog put its tail between its legs and lay on the driveway. Jimmy and I got out of the truck and walked through the open garage. I was carrying a claw hammer that I’d picked up off the floor of the truck.

  We walked through the garage, through the house and ended up out back by the pool. There was a young girl and boy there, probably neither of them more than fifteen. The girl was in the water and the boy was sitting under a big umbrella, talking on a phone. He stopped talking when we came out of the house, through the back screen door.

  “Hi,” the boy said. “My dad isn’t here.”

  “Is he at the car lot?” Jimmy said. “He’s selling us a car.”

  “Oh,” the boy said. He looked at the hammer I was carrying. “He should be home any minute.” The girl kept swimming in the pool, glancing at us.

  “Where’s your brother?” Jimmy said. He pointed at the phone next to the boy and the boy tossed it to him. Jimmy tossed the phone in the pool.

  “Cape Cod,” the boy answered. He picked his head up and listened. “I think that’s my dad,” he said. A car door slammed from the front of the house and we heard the dog give some friendly barks. The boy was smarter than he looked. “Don’t hurt my dad,” he said very softly. The girl stopped swimming.

  After I smashed his arm and shoulder with the hammer, Cal opened the floor safe in his bedroom and paid Jimmy what he owed him, plus the rest of the contents of the safe. We brought him back downstairs, out to the pool. The boy still sat under the umbrella and the girl was wrapped in a towel next to him. The dog lay on a chain run in the back of the yard.

  Cal got up off the grass and started to run for the trees at the edge of the property. He was trying to carry his right arm, the one I’d smashed, with his left. He was limping. He was overweight.

  Jimmy pulled a pistol with a silencer out of his coveralls and drilled Cal once in the back and then again in the side of the head. The blood flew, like a red shadow coming out of Cal’s head in the last of the fast fading sunlight. Then Jimmy shot both of the kids, the girl and boy, twice each, through her towel and through the baseball shirt the boy was wearing. We got back into Jimmy’s truck and left. We didn’t speak, all the way down the road and across the bridge. When we stopped at the garage, I got out and got into my truck. I might have waved as I left. I forget.

  The outrage in the community, not for Cal Sheely, but for his children, was tremendous. The BCI questioned Jimmy twice, at his garage. Nothing ever came of it.

  I didn’t see Jimmy for a while after that, but I was out in the woods working in the spring and I turned around and there was his blue beat-up work truck.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” I said.

  He waved. “You were never there,” he said. “So sleep easy.”

  I nodded. He got back into his truck and pulled out, down the logging road I had cut.

  I thought about the list of men in the old fire engine. I didn’t belong on that list. Maybe I had never belonged on that list.

  Trauma Dyke

  Derek Nikitas

  This whole fucking country’s got a motto. It’s pura vida, and it means pure life, it means chill, it means when life gets you down, put up your feet, sister. But I’m fired up with purpose and I lift my legs for no man.

  Costa Rica can kiss my ass, but I’m here anyhow with a bunch of off-season tourists. Americans like me, Canadians, Germans, Swiss. We lean over this bridge abutment and gawk down some fifty feet at the crocs lazing in the muddy Río Tárcoles. Just their backs eased up from the muck, studded with traction like truck tires. The bus driver said locals fling live chickens sometimes, just to see the frenzy.

  So it’s like I figured: fuck pura vida when there’s something to kill.

  Our tour bus waits outside the dusty lot of an open-air market where you can buy big green coconuts with straws stabbed in them, or little lottery tabs that the natives snap open and toss on the floor when they’re losers.

  On the road from San José to Quepos we stop at every rickety village to grab a handful of native Ticos from the dusty roadside, bus crammed past capacity, so they stand in the aisles with wet armpits in your face, lunging at you as the bus rounds mountain curves. It’s what you get for a three-buck fare, five sweaty hours each way.

  I paid a couple thousand for a last-minute flight from Buffalo, transfer in Atlanta. Closed up the consignment shop, packed my duffel bag, dusted off my passport, and scrammed. So fast, my girl Jess had no clue I was gone till I called her from the airport in San José last night. Told her I was in Cleveland sorting shit out with my dad. Lied to protect her from my ... my whatever. Absconding, you could say, but you’d be wrong.

  At customs they asked my intentions. I said kayaking, zip-lining, and surfing—all the same shit Cameron Diaz did on her travel show. They eyed my dreads and the studs in my face and my bulldog forearm tat and my scratch marks, but they let me pass. They’re used to granola lesbos flooding down for Endless Summer, I guess. Nothing memorable about me, which is just what I want.

  What I didn’t tell Jess and I didn’t tell customs was this: I’m here to kill a man named Moose Walther. I’m here to saw off his cock and cram it through his left eye socket. Or better yet, store it on ice, cart it back to this here bridge, drop it down for the crocs to chew. Tell me how you break that news to your girlfriend while she sobs long-distance on the phone?

  We bus along the coastline and hit Quepos, a concrete patch with beach-themed shops, then onwards past forests where the belladonna and the birds-of-paradise burst color among leaves big enough to swaddle a dog. The bus hemorrhages its passengers at a surfboard rental shop, the Miguel Antonio National Park just across an inlet from the beach, and the coconut oases. Taxi drivers sitting in their windows, leaning over their roofs, barking the obvious.

  I got nothing but a rucksack to my name, and here nobody knows that name. I pass the clay artisan booths, hit the nearest palm-roofed cabana, and order a chilled Imperial, the national beer. The bartender tries to stuff a lime in it but I snatch his wrist to stop him. Three fresh scratches run down my forearm, sliced through the middle of my bulldog tat, and the bartender grins banana-wide. You’re something else, lady.

  I studied the maps. I’m a couple kilos away from Moose Walther and I can feel his old venom stinging in my blood. I need his scalp right now—no delay, no recon, no plan. I’m past the dream of scot-free, ever-after vindication. Instead I’m just praying my info is legit and current. Praying to God, praying to Satan, I don’t give a fuck. I’d be a better bitch, but I’m just the one that Moose Walther made me, twenty years ago.

  It’s kicking a hundred degrees, even at dusk after a flash monsoon, and I walk the upwards slope away from the beach, past little b&b haciendas and rental bungalows. A long brownish snake rippl
es up the roadside opposite, keeping pace. I wonder if it plans to tempt me.

  I’m all wet dog and panting by the time I reach the hilltop, beer boiling in my gut. My tank top is drenched. Squat brown howler monkeys sway through the tree canopy overhead, and their call is like a bar full of men hooting at a pole dancer. My starvation points me to an open-air restaurant just seating for dinner. The tiki bar and live calypso band tell me this is no bargain joint, but if it’s to be my last dish, I want the coconut crusted mahimahi.

  I sit along the panorama overlook and vie for a view for Moose Walther’s joint. No numerical addresses in Costa Rica, just landmark directions. His I have engraved on my brainpan, a kilometer east of the Parque Pacifica Resort. But I can’t see it from here because everything’s buried in foliage, and I don’t have my bearings. Soon enough, the end of this.

  Craggy islands rear up from the silvery Pacific—valleys so lush with green, the purple stormcloud horizon. The overlook is level with the treetops, so cue the gangly squirrel monkeys. They swing in from the branches, cat-sized with wrinkled pygmy faces. They pose on chairbacks and tables for food scraps and the shutterbug tourists are suckers for the con. Calypso shimmers metallic on the night.

  I stuff my contempt a few minutes straight and think of Keira, our daughter. Jess’s daughter if you want to get biological. Keira’s four and trades on and off month by month between us and her dad. This is our month, and I’m gone, and I may never make it back. Costa Rica is everybody’s heaven, but away from Keira I can only appreciate the longing it delves out of my soul. I got a crayon sketch of hers folded up in my pocket—three stick figures all in dresses, holding hands with their heads together like they’re the spokes of some wheel that almost seems in motion.

  My fish, asparagus, and white wine arrive, and on the far side of the tiki bar three people take a candlelit table. Two of them are Ticos, or at least Hispanics—a woman in a floral print dress and a girl about ten with rainbow-beaded hair and a one-piece swimsuit. The third is Moose Walther.

  The gouges on my arm slow burn and I can feel his violations all over again. I’m twelve, on display in my half shirt by the light of Toledo truckstop vending machines, holding Zelda’s hand while a fat faceless trucker sticks his pinkie in my navel. I’m swooning with the mainlined dope Moose used to twist my mind for six months straight. Moose is not there, is everywhere, omnipresent.

  Moose is here, firing through time and flaring up like a chronic blight. He’s got two new females within his reach, a dour-faced pair gussied up to look like sunshine. One of them’s just a little girl, the same—

  I was still prepubescent the night of my rescue, the big Toledo police truckstop sting of ’88. Zelda and a posse of truckers arrested, three underage abductees saved, but pedophile pimp Moose Walther was a phantom in the night, an FBI profile, a televised most wanted exposé, a Costa Rica refugee, after all this time.

  To see him now, he’s gone mostly bald, gained thirty pounds of flab—but he’s still the seven-foot slouching beast I remember. He’s still a lecher, his arm around that ruined Tico girl, smearing her against him. Twenty years of healing gutted with a pitchfork, but I brought this on myself by coming here. From across the restaurant he sniffs his nose at me. Not a flicker of recognition, and I’m almost insulted.

  The dinner knife in my fist is sharp enough to stab between ribs, but I’m starry from beer and caught off guard. My adrenaline drains like a menstrual flood. Who the fuck am I all of a sudden? I’m a wannabe riot grrl who runs a consignment shop in Buffalo. I don’t put blades in people’s hearts, especially not ghosts like Walther, flashbacks who aren’t even there.

  My wicker chair scrapes the floor behind me. The purple clouds are pulling back from the sea, and the squirrel monkeys scatter, chirp warnings at each other. I weigh nothing and everything at once and the axis tilts and the mosaic floor is moist on my cheek. I try to sleep. The attic windows are boarded but the winter seeps in. I lie on the floor because the bed is tainted. I can’t escape because Moose and Zelda know my home and they promise to slit the throat of everyone in my family if I try. My address, the life I lived before.

  A damp napkin on my face brings me around. My medics are a waiter, a bartender, a few leering tourists. They lift me back onto my seat and offer orange juice, a blanket, a taxi, but I hold my head and wave them off. Moose is twenty feet away and watches with the smirk of an eel, his smoldering power.

  He used to tell me there was an invisible thread connecting each of us to God, twining out of the crown of all our skulls. He told me if I scorned him, he’d cut that thread, and I wouldn’t be lifted to heaven when I died. His worst threat of many, and to exorcise it, I’ve cut the thread myself, every day. I fold it into a little loop pinched between my fingers, and snip it with scissor fingers. Easy.

  I pick at the fish, pay my bill, muster the guts to walk the gauntlet past his table. The sunset spreads red through the restaurant and Moose has donned his sunglasses. The little girl hangs her face and eyes me askance. I flex my hands. The tendons in my neck are taut enough to snap twigs against. The trees are alive with the twitter of birds.

  When I’m out of sight I sprint, cut through the resort complex past the suites and the pristine pools shaped like water droplets. The banana trees curve their fruit upright in virgin green bunches. Don’t let the beauty distract from your hate.

  Just one private residence at the end of the road. The mission clay-tiled roof emerges from the canopy, then the stucco walls and the garden fountain, the marble-tiled courtyard, everything wrapped in a black iron fence with ten-foot rails. The gate doors are clasped with a wrapped length of chain and a padlock.

  I hunch in the dusty road with my hands on my knees and gasp for air. Two iguanas peer at me from a shaded brush. Inside the gate, a Tico guard in a white tank top and cargo shorts stands to attention from his lawn chair. He’s got a machete in his grip and his brow folds low over his eyes. He wraps his free hand on a fence rail and watches me like he’s the one who’s an inmate.

  “Do you speak English?” I say, still heaving from my jog. I take gulps from a water bottle stowed in my rucksack. The road behind me is empty save the darting mosquitoes.

  “English, sí,” he says, and there’s the grin I expected.

  “Who lives here?” I ask.

  The guard taps his machete against his shin. He says, “I don’t tell.”

  “You’re not allowed to say? I’m looking for my uncle’s house, but there aren’t any address numbers around here, so I’m trying to figure it out, you know?”

  “Is no yours uncle house here, lady.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Is private name,” he says.

  “You don’t even know who he is, do you?” The iguanas have retreated, like they know, like they smell the fear I give off in my sweat. The guard shrugs in answer to my question, so I say, “How long have you been working here?”

  “Eh, maybe, fie weeks.”

  “How much do you get paid a week? Slave wages, right?”

  He shrugs again and stops tapping his blade. He looks back at the house.

  “I know he’s out to dinner right now,” I say. “I’ll give you seven hundred American dollars if you let me inside. Before he gets back.” I crouch and reach back into my rucksack. The gesture spooks the guard, but his skeptical brow lifts when he sees the money stack. “Here it is,” I say. “All of it, right now. In your hands.”

  The guard raises his chin, nostrils flaring, like he’s offended. He says, “Two thousand American dollars.”

  I push the money through at him, flap it around like a dead trout, but he doesn’t grab. I say, “Listen, señor, I don’t have time for negotiations. This is all the money I have. There’s no two thousand dollars. There’s seven hundred. I didn’t want to mess around with you, so I just went ahead and offered all I had.”

  “One thousand eight hundred dollars,” he says.

  I reach through the fence with my left hand, in
dex and middle fingers in the shape of scissors. I mimic a cut just over the top of his head. His eyes pivot upwards almost white. “Snip,” I say to him, then I kiss the v-shaped crook of my own two fingers.

  “You should leave now,” he says. He lays the flat end of the machete over his shoulder and hoists his chin even higher. I see his jugular pulse, and I think back to—Jesus, just yesterday, think back to Zelda slinking into my shop around closing time, fresh off parole and seeking teary talk show forgiveness. The thick veins running under the crude black prison tats scraped into her neck.

  She said, “I’m sorry to come here like this, and I don’t mean to cause trouble.”

  Right now I push that bitch from my brain and tell the guard, “All right, Pedro. If you don’t take this money now, I’ll have to come back later, and you might get hurt.”

  He chuckles with his tongue shoved in his cheek.

  I continue, “The man who lives here is named Kyle Walther. People used to call him Moose, but I doubt they still do. He’s an international criminal, wanted by the FBI for running prostitution rings in the United States. His prostitutes were mainly underage girls, most of whom were kidnapped and drugged and held against their will and raped, repeatedly.”

  The guard sits back down in his lawn chair, lays the blade over his lap.

  I say, “Maybe you know this, maybe you know zilch. I’m one of his victims. I was twelve years old when he drugged me and stole me from a party and kept me prisoner for six months before I was rescued. It took me twenty years to find him, but here I am. I intend to make him dead, even though I know it won’t prove anything. But that’s my business. I’m going to do this, or I’m going to get myself killed trying, but either way, here’s your money. If you don’t take it now, I’ll be back later. I don’t think you want to get hurt, and I don’t really think you want to hurt me, now that you know my story. So the best thing to do is take the money and let me inside this gate, isn’t that right?”