Blood, Guts, & Whiskey

by Todd Robinson

  “What are you offering?”

  “It gets in the car, and you don’t go in the trunk.”

  Cass pauses and looks at Christina, who meets his eyes unflinchingly. Exactly what Cass needs to see.

  “No,” Cass says, turning to go. He feels, less than hears, Christina sigh.

  “Yes,” the voice answers, as a barrel pushes itself out of the darkness behind the window.

  Cass looks at the gun, and then cranes his head down a little to look into the darkness, only to have his eyes met with nothing. He lifts back up and turns his eyes to the road ahead and lifts the hem of his shirt.

  “I’ll fight.”

  “So will I,” Christina pipes up.

  “You’ll die,” the voice answers.

  “So you’ll have nothing but bodies. And I promise, I won’t make it easy,” Cass says.

  Silence answers from the window. The barrel goes back inside. A hand reaches out, manicured, adorned with rings. The smallest finger sports an elongated nail. Between the rest of the fingers is pinched a folded wad of cash.

  “My second offer. Put the slip in the car.”

  Cass looks at the money for a moment and then turns away. He drops the hem of his shirt and the pair moves on, leaving the car behind them. Cass waits for the shout, or the shot, or the movement of the car. But none comes. What he does not do is look over his shoulder to check. He just walks, and after a few feet he says to Christina, “So, you’ll fight, huh?”

  Christina lifts his head defiantly.

  Cass snorts and releases his arm, letting him walk on his own.

  The road stretches.

  Slowly, whether it’s dawn, or functioning streetlights, the world gets brighter. Cass looks around him and sees that some of the buildings sport lights, some of them are even whole. Towards the center of the block is one brownstone far larger than the others. It looks the way city houses must have looked before enterprising landlords chopped them up into apartments. A crowd sits around the entrance to this one. The gathering has the look of a thug’s red carpet. Skinny junkies sit alongside iron freaks studded with jail ink, fresh from Gen-Pop. Impassive men in monochrome seem to twitch constantly, hands reaching for the deadly lumps that used to be underneath their clothes. Ladies stand among them, black, white, chicana, and boriqua, each looking like razors dipped in silk and gold.

  As Cass and Christina come close, eyes swivel to take them in, but they are still a block away. Cass slows up, and Christina looks at him sideways as he mutters under his breath.

  “Fuck.” Cass’s hand twitches to be filled and it rests just on the outside of his clothes near his belt.

  “It’s okay,” Christina says, placing a hand on his arm and shaking it a little.

  “The fuck you mean, ‘It’s okay’?” Cass asks.

  “This is the place.”

  Cass looks again, sees the building is in good shape, that this isn’t just another pimp/hitman/crack house sitting in the middle of the squats like a hornet’s nest in the swamp, spewing out fast-moving danger. As they draw closer, Cass sees that there is nothing aimed at them. No guns, no knives, and not even a look. They are watched, but the eyes seem to look at them, and then beyond them, like there is another image to see.

  Cass hangs back, unsure. Christina, for once, is ahead and is already heading up the stairs when he looks back at Cass’s hesitant form.

  “It’s okay,” says Christina. “This place is safe. I know people here.”

  “I did what you asked. I got you here. What else is there?”

  Cass is looking at Christina, noticing that there is nothing of the boy-victim in Christina’s eyes now. Christina watches him a little before answering.

  “You might as well come in and rest, get a cup of coffee.” Then Christina sniffs—very meaningfully and very fey. “A shower?”

  Cass looks around at the crowd and then realizes what is so odd about the whole scene. The crowd is totally silent. Nobody is talking shit, nobody is posturing, hitting on the women. Nothing.

  Cass looks up at Christina again, who throws up his hands and flounces back down the stairs. He grabs Cass by one arm and walks him up the stairs to the entrance.

  “C’mon, it’s not a big deal. Besides, you helped me out, maybe these people can give you some clean clothes or something to eat.”

  “A drink?” Cass asks, remembering the empty bottles by his bedside.

  “We’ll see,” Christina says noncommittally as they enter through the open archway. As they pass, a collective sigh goes up from the group behind them.

  The front room holds nothing beyond a large, graffiti-scarred wooden desk. Cass eyes the room, right hand straying close to his belt buckle, the other held a little ways from his body in an absent warding gesture. Christina, moving with a confidence that Cass sees for the first time, walks straight up to the desk. Cass leans with his back against the desk so that he can see the whole room. He looks over his right shoulder and down to see the book set on the desk. Christina is busily writing his name into it with a cheap ballpoint pen that’s attached to some dog-eared packing twine with a piece of lint-crusted duct tape.

  “Christian?” asks Cass.

  “Parents,” Christina answers.

  “So ...” Cass trails off, the question audible in his tone.

  “They gave me the other one when they saw what I was,” he says again, his tone dull. He steps away from the book and gestures for Cass.

  “I ain’t signing shit,” Cass says, looking around the room again.

  “You have to or we can’t go in,” Christina says.

  Cass sees that there are two doors leading out of the room. They’re currently shut. Cass looks at Christina and defiantly walks to one of the doors and gives the handle a no-bullshit jerk. The door doesn’t even flex on its hinges. He looks at the door again, then walks to the other across the room and pulls. Same.

  “Told you,” Christina says, mouth twisting into a smirk.

  Cass shrugs as if he was never really concerned, walks over to the desk, and signs the registry.

  “Cass?” Christina says.

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s it? Just ‘Cass’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No last name?”

  “Forgot it.”

  Christina looks like he’s going to push the issue when the right-side door swings open and in walks a stone-faced woman, gray hair done up in dreads. They’re bound at the back of her head with a blue bandanna. One lock has escaped and is hanging down the side of her face. Her face looks as open as the two doors had been. It’s decorated with a nose and eyebrow piercing; one side sporting a faded tribal tattoo. It looks like the years must have been rough. Looks like she’d been rougher.

  “What,” she says. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t exclaim.

  “I was told to come here if I needed to get tested. I need to get checked out. I was raped last night.” Christina says it the way you’d explain something that happened to you years ago.

  “Who’s that?” the woman says, indicating Cass without actually looking at him, using a hand missing two fingers.

  “He helped me get here in one piece.”

  “Okay. Follow me,” she says.

  Christina starts to walk, and then turns to check on Cass, who hasn’t moved.

  Christina widens his eyes, and impatiently gestures at Cass to follow. Cass starts forwards, getting almost to the door before the woman turns and acknowledges Cass for the first time.

  “You can’t bring weapons in here.”

  Cass does his best puzzled look.

  “I’m not.”

  The woman just looks at him, then she extends her right hand, palm up, her left arm crossed, the left hand resting in the crook of the right.

  “You look like the kind of guy who hasn’t been unarmed since he was in utero, and even then I’m sure you were trying to figure out a way to strangle something with your cord.”

  Cass looks at her a minute, then lift
s the hem of his shirt and places the object in her hand, holding on to his end for a moment.

  “Nobody is born like that,” Cass says, holding her eyes, “and I want that back.”

  They both look down at the sharpened screwdriver that Cass always carries. When he looks up, she is watching him, and smiling.

  “Point,” she says, and turns around to lead them through the door.

  The three walk into the next room, with its humans standing in clumps that probably should have been lines. The nature of the place gave organization the finger.

  A woman with two children rests against one wall, their burns conspicuous against otherwise beautiful, coffee with cream skin. The wounds look fresh. Cass guesses that this place was probably closer than the hospital. The woman would push herself from the wall and yell for somebody to come help them. Cass thinks to himself good luck—but to his shock, somebody comes right over with rolls of gauze, disinfectant, and tubes of something. Cass isn’t sure if it’s going to be enough, but at least they are being helped. He looks away, and the person that ran to the family’s aid was getting one of the kids to uncertainly smile and then giggle.

  Just as Cass is looking away, Christina grabs his sleeve and tugs him along.

  “Take a seat here,” the woman with dreads tells the pair and walks away.

  “Thanks, Izabel,” answers Christina.

  “Izabel?” Cass turns to Christina. “You know these people already?”

  “She introduced herself while you were staring off into space,” Christina answers.

  “This place is strange.”

  “Why?”

  “People here are getting help, that’s unusual for a shelter.”

  “It’s not exactly a shelter,” Christina says.

  “What do you—?” Cass starts just as Izabel returns and beckons to them. Christina jumps up and tugs Cass along by the arm.

  They are taken into a different room, where Izabel moves to sit behind a weather and God-knows-what-else beaten school desk. She takes some forms from a drawer. When she sees the pair still standing, she waves impatiently to two chairs on the supplicant side of the desk. The pair sit. Izabel tries unsuccessfully to get her pen to work before fishing inside the desk for another.

  Izabel turns to Christina.

  “Name?”

  Christina answers.

  “Reason for being here?”

  Cass listens to Christina answer in a monotone, and watches Izabel being impassive. Because he’s heard enough nightmares, and seen plenty of people who didn’t react to them, he wanders off to look at the rest of the shelter.

  He ducks through the doorway, briefly looks over one large shoulder to check if his leaving is noticed or if it even matters, and sees Christina and Izabel talking to each other, absorbed. So he turns left and collides chest to chest with a dead man.

  Cass jumps back from the unexpected contact and his hands raise up a little, his right twitches towards the now vacant spot behind his belt.

  While his hands and body do the automatic, his jaw drops when he recognizes the face.

  “Scabs?”

  The man just looks at Cass and smiles.

  “But, I saw ...” Cass remembers the night years ago when the kids had come through the squats. Kids, yes, but in adult bodies, and looking for fun without consequence. Harsh young men with mean habits. Scabs had tried to get them to share. Scabs, being the kind that was looking to get whatever he could into his body, hadn’t been thinking. He was probably still not thinking when the last boot had fallen on his twitching corpse. But here he is in front of Cass. Whole.

  Scabs just smiles at Cass again, his eyes unfocused, vague.

  Cass stares at him and says: “So you made it after all? What did you do? Come all the way here? Somebody help you?”

  Scabs just smiles, and pats Cass on the shoulder as he moves past him and around another corner leaving Cass to stand in the hallway.

  Cass shakes his head, says to himself, “Brain damage is a bitch.”

  Cass keeps going into the central room, crowded with faces and stories all fighting for validation. Harried workers, distinguished by their focused looks, dart among them, passing one so they can be free to help another. Cass walks towards a staircase near one corner, expecting to be turned back at any second, but he isn’t. Even when his feet touch the bottom step, and then eventually the top landing, he is ignored.

  On the second floor quiet spreads out, rising like heat from the noise below. On this floor, rooms flow off the main hall, each lacking a door, each empty until he comes upon the last room on the right. He looks in and sees a young boy sitting on the edge of a bed, at the boy’s feet is a man hunched over. As Cass leans further into the room, he can see that the man is lacing the boy’s shoes. Cass sees the boy’s face, and recognizes him from years ago, when he had beaten a man to death to save the boy from violation; the kid hadn’t changed a bit. He looks up at Cass, this time with none of the animal fear in his eyes that was there the last time. Cass raises a hand, palm out, and the boy smiles shyly in answer. Cass turns his head and looks at the man.

  And looks into the face of a man he had beaten to death those years ago.

  The face of a man bent on raping a child.

  The man’s eyes are as empty as Scabs’s. His hand pauses around the boy’s feet, still gripping the weathered sneakers. The same hands that had held the boy’s head down as he fumbled at his belt, now tie the boy’s shoelaces. Cass roars and bowls the man over, slamming him into the corner, upsetting a table with a crash. Cass levers his shin and knee across the man’s hips, his weight pinning him in the corner. His left hand twists in the neckline of his shirt, his right crashes into his face, once, twice, three times.

  With no visible effect.

  Cass keeps hitting; he switches hands, he stands and stomps, down heels leading, and while he can feel his hands and feet hitting something solid, the man just stares at him and does nothing. There is no blood, the man’s face is whole, his body does not rock with the impact.

  Cass stands and stops hitting. His breath comes in heaves and chokes. His victim still hasn’t moved, and when Cass feels a light pressure on his arm, he whirls and sees the boy there, watching him and smiling. Cass turns fully to regard the boy when the man, from his place in the corner, scurries around Cass and hides behind the child, cowering.

  Cass reaches to move the boy aside and have a fresh crack at the rapist but the boy won’t move.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Cass says in a loud voice to nobody in particular.

  “If you’re finished flexing, I can explain it,” Izabel says from the doorway. Behind her Christina looks on.

  Cass points at the man behind the child. “He’s a rapist. Of children.”

  “We know,” says Izabel.

  “I beat him to death three years ago.”

  “Oh? Was that you?” Izabel says.

  “He was trying to rape him,” Cass says, pointing first at the man and then the boy. “He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “He is,” Izabel says.

  “What?” Cass hears his voice rising as he moves further from his normal self-control.

  “Come downstairs,” Izabel says.

  “Not leaving him alone with the boy. What the fuck’s wrong with you people?”

  “Charles is fine. Perfectly safe.”

  “If you motherfuckers are pimping kids out of this fucking place, I swear to God!” Cass yells.

  “Downstairs. Now.” Izabel’s voice is its normal, even tone as she turns and walks away.

  Cass, at a loss of what else to do, follows.

  Downstairs, somebody has placed a cup of coffee between Cass’s fingers, which he clutches like a prayer.

  Izabel watches him. The way in which she does is not one that Cass could remember seeing for some time. Appraisal without fear. A look that had not been turned on Cass in the fifteen odd years since he got his growth.

  Christina sits off to one side,
watching Cass, but with every inch of the fear that is absent from Izabel.

  Cass looks up from the steam hovering over his cup. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “You’re dead.”

  Cass shifts, the balls of his feet touching down, grinding into the floor, ready. “You’re going to press charges for a piece of shit like that? Besides he’s not even hurt.”

  “No, I mean that you are currently dead.”

  “Right ...” He looks up at Christina.

  “These people of yours are fuckin’ nuts. You want to stay? Cool, hang out with the cult. I hear the Kool-Aid”—Cass looks down at his hands, still gripping the cooling coffee, and adds—“or in this case the coffee, is great.”

  “Cass ...” Christina starts.

  “I’m fucking out of here.”

  “How else do you explain what you’ve seen here?”

  “That I spend most of my free time drinking, and that it’s bound to have some effect on my mental state. I just didn’t expect it so soon.”

  “You’ve seen two dead men here. And you know it to be true,” Izabel says.

  “Maybe I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I thought with the child-fucker.”

  “What about your friend in the hallway?”

  “That junkie retard was never a friend of mine. How the fuck do you know that anyway?”

  Cass stands up and walks towards the doorway.

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  “I’m going back home.”

  “You’re past that point, all that waits out there are circles and jackals.”

  “That’s different for me how?” Cass asks, looking behind him at the blue eyes between the dreadlocks, now unbound and framing the severe face.

  “You died last night. Alcohol poisoning. In two days your body will start to stink with enough rot for some of your neighbors to move and lean against another warehouse.”

  “I didn’t drink enough last night for that.” But as Cass tries to bring up a memory he finds himself reaching for things with less substance than the steam rising from his coffee.