Helsinki Blood iv-4

by James Thompson

  “Why don’t you have Sweetness take you?” I ask.

  “If you took one look at him this morning, you’d know. Besides, Mirjami promised.”

  “Take a taxi,” I say.

  She yells at me. “If I wanted a fucking taxi I would have called one, and if I want your advice I’ll squeeze your fucking head!”

  I’ve been yelled at quite a bit in the past few hours, I think unjustly. I cover my head with a pillow and mind my own business. But Anu starts to cry. There will be no late-sleep-in hangover. I get up to tend to my daughter. I’m in her room and hear the door slam as I’m rocking her. Sweetness and Jenna sleep in the spare bed in her room. Sweetness doesn’t even stir at the sound of Anu’s screams. His hangover must be a killer. I told Mirjami she could use Kate’s Audi whenever she liked. They must be taking it.

  From outside, I hear a whoom. It must have been loud for the noise to have penetrated the thick, bulletproof windows. I lay Anu down in her crib, grab my cane and hobble to the big window that looks out over Harjukatu. The Audi is in flames, sooty black smoke rolls off it. Jenna is on the sidewalk, not moving. Mirjami is in the road, rolling around. She wore cutoff jean shorts and a light top with straps. They’re burning and her hair is scorched off.

  At the top of my lungs, I yell for Sweetness and grab my cell phone from the table beside my chair, dial 112, emergency, and explain that a car has exploded, at least two people are hurt, and request ambulances and firefighters.

  Sweetness comes out of the bedroom with a hand in his underwear, scratching his balls. “What the fuck?” he asks.

  I just point. He looks and tears out the door, runs to the scene in his underwear. He’ll take immediate care of them as best he’s able. I may be at the hospital with them for many hours. I pull on jeans, a shirt and sneakers, put Anu in her carriage and toss everything she might need for the day into it with her, grab Sweetness’s clothes from last night off the floor where he tossed them before passing out, throw them and his shoes in the carriage as well and then go down to the street. A fire truck, police cruiser and ambulances arrived in the ten minutes it took me to make my way down. A good response time, thank God, and the fire is out.

  Jenna is in an ambulance. I look in. She’s conscious. She had on shorts as well. They’re soaked with blood and her legs are smeared with it.

  The EMTs have placed Mirjami on a gurney. Her burned-away clothes are stuck to her skin in places. The burns lessen in severity where the flames traveled up her body. She’s quaking, in shock. The EMTs inject her with something and insert an IV in her arm.

  Sweetness and I talk to the cops. I tell them that Mirjami’s parents live in Rovaniemi. Sweetness gives them Jenna’s parents’ names and address. They’ll notify the girls’ families.

  Sweetness pulls on clothes while I arrange Anu in her car seat, and we follow the ambulances to the emergency room.

  After identifying ourselves, we’re allowed into the theater where they’re being treated. A doctor reports. The brunt of the fire, inside the car, must have been under the floor of the driver’s side. Jenna has only minor burns. The doctor discovered, though, that Jenna was pregnant, and the shock of the fire or flinging herself from the vehicle-something about the trauma of the incident-caused her to lose the child. Otherwise, she’s fine. Tears bead up in the corners of Sweetness’s eyes.

  He panics about his mother being in danger, calls and explains, asks her to stay in a hotel. She refuses, says she’s not going anywhere. He buries his face in his hands.

  Mirjami, however, suffered severe burns. Apparently, in panic, she had difficulty opening the car door so she could get out of it. Her legs are burned so badly that they’re charred in places. She’ll require skin grafts. Possibly on her midsection as well. Her neck and face are singed and look worse than they are. The scarring in those areas will be minimal. She’ll be in severe pain when she wakes. Therefore, the doctor wants to keep her unconscious for a couple days, start her on a morphine drip as soon as she awakens. He advises me to go home. There’s nothing I can do here. He takes my number and promises to call me so that I can be with her when they bring her out of the coma.

  Sweetness, Jenna-in a hospital gown-Anu and I ride home in silence. We’ve been at the hospital for eleven hours, with nothing but coffee and tasteless sandwiches. During that time, we mostly sat in the hallway without speaking. To talk would have led to the discussion of who might have done this, and neither Sweetness nor I was prepared for that yet. It would have turned to anger that we couldn’t vent in an ER.

  We drive through Hesburger and go home. The Audi is gone, towed away by the police to investigate the cause of the fire.

  The bags of burgers and fries sit on the dining room table. After the events of the day, no one has an appetite. My everything hurts. I do as my brother, the good doctor Jari, instructed and take some meds. Fast-acting opiated painkillers dissolve in water and bring a near-immediate rush of relief. Jari was right. Tossing out the crutches and relying on a cane puts more pressure on the shot-to-pieces joint in my knee, and I’m paying the price. The cortisone and mild dope keep me mobile, though.

  Jenna says she feels disgusting and goes to the shower. Sweetness brings us beers, a kossu bottle and glasses. We sit on opposite sides of the table, the junk food between us. We shoot down the shots. He refills our glasses.

  “This is one time I’d like to get brainless whacked,” I say, “but I can’t. I have to look after Anu.”

  Sweetness says, “Jenna has been off booze, maybe she’ll do it.”

  This is about the most selfish, thoughtless, mindless thing he could have said. She’s been through hell and back today, and he suggests asking her to take on responsibility, rather than do everything in his power to see to her comfort. I’m glad she didn’t hear it and am about to tell him so when she walks in wearing only a towel, her wet blond hair hanging down to her ass.

  Jenna is five foot nothing and max a hundred and ten pounds. Approximately half that weight is in her breasts. She snatches the kossu bottle from the table and turns it up. I count at least four mouth-full chugs. She slides it back across the table to us. “Bottoms up, boys.”

  She just had a miscarriage. To my knowledge, she didn’t know she was pregnant and Sweetness didn’t know he was going to be a father. Given her illness and being disgusted by alcohol, I should have guessed it. I decide I should get out of the way. “I need to sit somewhere more comfortable for a while,” I say, take my beer and shot and go to my armchair. I put my feet up on the footrest, have a sip of kossu, and tune them out. Anu is in my lap. Katt climbs to the top of the chair and puts his paws on my shoulders. Within a few minutes, I’m almost asleep and miss what sparks the fight.

  “Haista vittu”-Sniff cunt-Jenna says.

  “Suck my dick.”

  “Suck it yourself, cuz you’re never getting sex from me again!”

  So much for my nap.

  Jenna is pissed off as hell. “You know why I’ve been sick and why I was going to the doctor today?”

  Trepidation begins to replace anger in his voice. “No, why?”

  “Because I was gonna get an abortion, you oversized lump of shit.”

  Now the anger and trepidation are gone, replaced with sorrow. “I was gonna be a father, and you were gonna do that? Why? It would have been my baby, too. I had a right to know.”

  He’s sitting, she’s standing over him, so because of their size difference, they’re looking almost directly into each other’s eyes.

  She laughs in his face. “Your rights. Your fucking rights. You lied to me. You promised to stop drinking twenty-four/seven. Your job is beating the shit out of people.” She points at me. “You were a nice guy until you met him. Now you’re a drunk and a violent criminal with a police card. You fucking lying bastard.”

  Now it’s my fault? His brother’s death made him a violent drunk. I just gave him a job.

  “And in case you haven’t noticed,” she says, “I’m sixteen fucking ye
ars old and like to have fun. You think I want to spend my young life changing your baby’s diapers? And don’t lie to me or yourself and tell me you would fucking help.”

  He screams. “You were going to kill my goddamned baby!”

  He rears back, winds up to hit her. If he does, he might kill her. I scream “Stop!” I take my.45 from its customary place under the cushion of my chair and point it at him.

  Anu is in my other arm, upset by the commotion and screaming her lungs out, adding to the chaos.

  Sweetness pauses and looks at me. His laugh is so sinister that it’s hard to believe it came out of him. “What? You gonna shoot me now, pomo?”

  “You can’t hit her,” I say. “You’ll break her in half. I won’t kill you, but I’ll take your legs out from under you.”

  His mouth moves, but nothing comes as he tries to form some half-assed rebuttal. I watch both of them. Jenna bunches her hand into a little white fist-not much I can do about it, as I’m not going to shoot her-and hits Sweetness with a solid roundhouse to the nose. He saw it coming and let her do it. I hear it snap and his nose folds over onto the side of his face. Blood runs out of it, drizzles like a water tap with a bad gasket.

  He doesn’t react or complain, just pulls a wad of napkins from a Hesburger bag, spreads them out on the table and leans over them, to keep from making a mess.

  Jenna grabs the kossu bottle and chugs some more. “Fuck both you guys.” She takes the bottle and disappears into the bedroom they share with Anu.

  I put Anu in her carriage, walk over to Sweetness and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” I say.

  “Naw,” he says, “you did right.”

  “Want to go to the hospital, or do you want me to set your nose for you? The hospital might leave you prettier.”

  “Fuck it. Just set it. Gimme a stiff drink first.” Luckily, he buys kossu by the case.

  I give him a couple of my painkillers and a half water glass of kossu. He drinks both down. He sits and bleeds for a few minutes, waiting for the combination to take effect.

  “OK,” he says.

  We go to the bathroom, where the light is good and the blood can fly and be easily cleaned up. I grab his nose with my thumb and forefinger and jerk. I hear and feel the grinding of cartilage, but it doesn’t quite make it. He doesn’t make any noise, but it brings tears to his eyes. I have another go at it, and I feel it almost snap back into place, but not quite. This time he winces and yelps.

  “Goddamn,” he says.

  “Sorry. I think I can’t pull straight enough with my fingers. I could stick pencils up your nostrils and jerk. That might give me the right angle.”

  “Fuck that. Give me the bottle.”

  The break looks clean, since his nose is folded over on the side of his face instead of crushed. “The trick,” I say, “is to lift your nose off your face, pull it out and over so it sits back where it belongs.”

  I go get the bottle and he swigs deep. I have a gulp myself. He looks in the mirror, grabs his nose tight with the meat below his thumbs, and jerks it forward. Cartilage and gristle crackle. His nose settles back in the right place. “Fuck,” he says, “that feels better. That dope you gave me, at least with kossu, helps a lot, too.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “it does. All of a sudden, I’m hungry as hell.”

  “Me too,” he says.

  He jams toilet paper up his nostrils to plug up the bleeding, then we go the dining room and scarf double cheeseburgers and fries.

  “It’s not my business,” I say, “so feel free to tell me to fuck off, but don’t you and Jenna use birth control?”

  He has half a burger stuffed in his mouth. It takes him a minute to answer. “Sure we do. The rhythm method. Usually the rhythm of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re Jenna’s favorite fucking music.”

  22

  The sound of the door opening wakes me. I hear the trundle of suitcase wheels. Kate is home. I pull on sweatpants and go out to greet her. Her eyes are flat, lifeless. She looks like she’s aged ten years in a week. Milo is behind her, as if to cut off her escape. I hug her. She allows it, but doesn’t return it.

  “I missed you,” I say.

  She slurs, “Where is Anu?”

  “In her crib, sleeping.”

  “Would you get her for me?”

  “Of course.”

  I knock on the door, wondering what kind of scene I’ll find after Jenna’s anger and her TKO of Sweetness last night. “Come in,” she says.

  I find them in bed, her head on Sweetness’s chest. It seems all is forgiven.

  “Kate is home,” I say. “And Jenna, I think you have an impression otherwise, but I didn’t have sex with Mirjami. She just wanted to sleep in the same bed with me. Nothing happened.”

  “Not my business,” she says. “Why tell me?”

  “Because I don’t want some innuendo about me cheating on Kate slipping out unintended. I’ve never cheated on her.”

  And then it comes to me. I intended to change the bedding. It will be redolent of Mirjami. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

  I bring Anu to Kate. She takes Anu in her arms, squeezes her so hard I’m afraid she might hurt her, and Kate starts to cry. Not just crying, but wailing from grief. The kind of crying one would expect if her baby was dead, not reunited with her.

  Milo whispers in my ear. “She didn’t sleep for the whole trip, so she’s been up for almost two whole days. Plus, she’s been drinking the whole time.”

  Anu starts to cry, too. “She hates me,” Kate says.

  “Of course she doesn’t hate you,” I say. “She loves you. She’s just upset because you are.”

  “I abandoned her and she hates me for it. And she should, I deserve her hatred. And I don’t deserve her. A woman like me doesn’t deserve a baby.”

  She sits on the footrest of my chair, holds Anu, rocks back and forth, and just cries and cries. I don’t know what to do, so I sit on the couch and wait.

  Milo whispers, “Got any tranquilizers?”

  I nod, get them and hand him a sleeve of Oxamin.

  He goes to the kitchen, and I see him crush some of them to powder with the back of a spoon, make a stiff drink with kossu and Jaffa, and stir them into it. He takes it to her. “Here, Kate,” he says, “this will help.”

  She wipes away tears and snot. “My kidnapper and bartender,” she says, and sucks down half the drink in one go.

  Her crying stops as she finishes the drink, and her eyes start to close. “I have to go to bed,” she says, hands Anu back to me, and wobbles to the bedroom.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

  Milo sits beside me on the couch. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s confused and she stays drunk. Not much of what she says makes sense.”

  “Have you had any sleep?” I ask.

  “I didn’t have much time to sleep in Miami, so I caught a few Z’s on the plane, where she couldn’t get in any trouble. I’m in OK shape.”

  “Thank you for this. I owe you.”

  “You’re welcome, and no you don’t. You would have done the same.”

  “A lot has happened,” I say, “and none of it good. We need to trade stories. Who goes first?”

  I sit in my chair. He lies back and stretches out on the couch, legs out straight and feet crossed, hands on his stomach and fingers laced. He closes his eyes while he talks. “I guess I can. Like I told you when I got there, John was speedballing and Kate was drunk. I spent time listening to their conversations through the open window. Kate going on about how killers can’t be mothers, talking about a man who fell burning from the sky. Crazy shit.”

  “She has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say.

  “That was apparent, and it was also apparent to me that it was only a matter of time before she picked up his bad habits. She was curious, asked him what speedballing was like. He said, ‘Like falling down an elevator shaft.’ I saw that the idea appealed to her. He’s a ‘one more day’ junkie. ‘Another day and I’ll go to rehab.’ W
hich, of course, she believed. So I went to a place called Walmart. Ever heard of it?”

  “They talk about it on American TV.”

  “What a freaky place. As big as a shopping mall and they sell everything imaginable. If a nuke went off, you could survive for years in there without ever leaving the building. They have like a hundred different kinds of potato chips. The place is so big that they have electric carts to ride around in. You would think mostly geriatrics use them, but almost all the people riding around in them are just too fat to walk. It’s the fattest fucking place I’ve ever seen.”

  Milo and his stories of biblical length. I wish, just this once, he would cut to the chase.

  “So anyway, I bought a hunting knife in there. My disguise was a baseball cap and sunglasses I got at a gas station. The gas stations are weird, too. Huge. They stock like a hundred different kinds of energy drink. Why the fuck would you need a hundred different kinds of energy drink?”

  I’m resisting the urge to yell at him.

  “John’s daily routine consists of going out early, buying eight balls of heroin and cocaine, flogging most of it, and using the rest to support his habit. I followed his dealer, B amp;Eed his house, and stole an ounce of each. The next morning, I met John on his way out to buy dope. I told him Kate was leaving with me. He got all indignant and threatening until I put the knife to his throat and showed him the dope. I told him I would trade him the dope for Kate. The price: he could never, ever, have contact with her again. And I lectured him, told him he could either put the shit up his nose, or sell it and pay for rehab. He snatched the drugs out of my hands and told me to come pick up Kate later in the day. He sold me his sister.”

  “No surprise there,” I say.

  “So I showed up in the afternoon, she was half in the bag, and I told her to start packing, that she was going home now. She got haughty and told me to make her. I showed her the knife and said if she didn’t, I would kill John on the spot. He played his role, backed me up, told her she belonged with her husband and child and he was kicking her out.”

  “How did she take it?”