by Jeff Johnson
“I help you?” the fat man rumbled. His voice was mixture of cigar smoke and rock grinder.
“Here to see Cheeks.”
He looked me up and down and then peered out into the snowy parking lot. “You pig?”
“Just a dude.”
He stood aside. “C’mon then.”
Cheeks was sitting on the floor in front of a turntable, looking at an album cover. He was probably six foot four and a hard 250. I’m five eight, but solid. In his eyes, I was half his size. To me, he was just plain big. He looked up at me and smiled, revealing a grill of gold teeth.
“Motherfuckin’ Darby Holland,” Cheeks said brightly, even warmly. “I thought I saw you sittin’ in your piece of shit Nazi wagon across the street.”
I kept my hands in my pockets. Cheeks showed me the album cover he was holding.
“Sylvester. Original. Now that nigga knew his shit.” He gestured at the records stacked around the turntable. “CD is for pussies. I’m old-school vinyl. This fuckin’ record here might get me five bills on eBay, but I ain’t sellin’.” He casually took a huge gun out from under a scarf sitting beside him and pointed it at my face.
“What the fuck you sellin’, boy?”
The fat guy chuckled.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I’m buying.” I slowly took my hands out of my pockets and held them up, palms out. Cheeks’s massive hand tensed. “I’m looking for Monique.”
Cheeks cocked his head, playful. “Really. And for that little drunk-ass crackhead you disturb my evening. While I’m getting’ me some Sylvester. I been looking for this wax for three fuckin’ years. Then it snows an’ my bitches run up a cab fee, an’ then you knock on my door.”
The gun never wavered. His eyes narrowed.
“Know how I know you, tattoo man? You let my bitches into the bathroom at your old place. Always watching’ ’em, ’cause you know, it’s what I do.”
“You probably have to,” I said, sympathetic.
He squinted. “I thought you might be gettin’ a free tap on some ass, an’ shit, I’d a put chunks o’ your brain in that john. Bitches squat behind a dumpster they need to shit. Fuckin’ pee in their pants. I own every hole on they bodies, ain’t no one gets in free.”
Cheeks got up, the gun still on my face. “But you never tapped that.” He laughed and his eyes grew wide, the size of chicken eggs. “Maybe ’fraid of what might happen to your precious little white pecker, ’fraid you might get a crab off some bitch’s ass.” He laughed and the fat guy did, too. “’Cause they got em! Red Lobster buffet up in them G-strings.”
Cheeks took a step forward and touched the barrel of the gun to my forehead.
“Thing I can’t figure out,” he said softly, “is why you ain’t afraid of me.” The humorous period of the conversation was over.
I shrugged.
“Just stupid, I guess. My friend Delia thinks I’m having a mental episode. Shock.”
He whipped the butt of the gun into the side of my head, and as I went down his knee crashed into my face. The fat guy kicked me in the ribs at the same time. The gun hit me again on the top of my head and a foot went into my stomach. I was blind when someone stomped on my hand. Then something heavy put a dent in the back of my skull and I was out.
Consciousness returned at a glacial pace. I found myself contorted in a cold, rancid-smelling darkness. My left eye wouldn’t open, but when I turned my head I found a ribbon of blurry light with my right eye. My ears were ringing like I had my head in a giant bell someone was repeatedly ramming a car into, and I was shivering in seismic jerks and shudders. Even through all of that, I was able to size up where I was.
I was in a dumpster.
I pushed a bag of trash off my chest and tried to sit up. Pain exploded through my chest and stomach and I vomited something coppery and lukewarm down my chest. My right hand was just a numb thing dangling from my wrist, so I pushed at the heavy lid with my left, praying it hadn’t been locked down. It groaned open and I flopped out over the side into two inches of snow.
When the shivering forced me to think about getting up, I spent a lost period of time dragging myself up the side of the dumpster. With one eye, I looked around. I was in the NW industrial area outside of a warehouse. It had a sign on it, but I couldn’t read what it said. The sky was black and starless, but the snow had stopped falling. A wild tremor ran through me and I almost went down. If I did, I knew I would never get up again.
My coat was gone, and so was one of my boots. Everything was gone. My pockets were empty. I looked down at my numb foot and the sock was covered in blood. When I tilted my head down a few drops of blood rained out of my nose and pattered into the new snow around it.
“Gfug,” I gargled. That was when I discovered my jaw had been dislocated.
I thought about screaming, just howling like a mad animal, but my ribs were too sore to get a breath. The vague memory of being beaten on by two black guys in a motel room swam to the surface and I felt a sudden spike of fear. My head lolled to either side, but I didn’t see any cars.
I’d been left for dead.
I took as deep a breath as I could and blew out a white plume and coughed. Then I staggered along the side of the warehouse. When I reached the corner, I stood swaying and shivering in a light wind and studied the street sign. I knew some people who lived around here. Jane Shannon. A crazy old bartender who worked the stick at the Mallory. She had a big red neon heart in her living room window. Off to my right I could make out a row of old houses. One of them had a reddish blob. I started limping toward it. The world was spinning and I couldn’t breathe, so I paused at every pole and sign along the way to steady myself and breathe. When I finally got to her front steps, an eternity of staggering later, I knew I’d never be able to climb even one of them. I summoned the last of my strength, every ounce of anything I had left, and collapsed on the wooden steps and started pounding on them with my left hand.
I’ll never know how long it was before hazy yellow light touched my eyelids. A woman screamed. My left arm was still pounding away, like some broken robot appendage. I couldn’t feel it and I couldn’t make it stop. Something impossibly hot touched my cheek and I tried to open one of my eyes.
“Darby?”
I suddenly remembered who I was.
“No cops,” I lisped. And then the blackness swallowed me again.
Somehow that tough old broad dragged my dead weight up her stairs onto the rug in her front room and covered me with a dusty flap of it. When I came to, she was wiping my eyes with a wet dishtowel or a sponge. It hurt like fire. I tried to slap her hand away, but my arms didn’t seem to be working.
“You need a fucking hospital,” Jane sobbed. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“No,” I managed. “Cops.” My jaw had slipped back together, but I couldn’t close my mouth.
“Fuck, Darby,” she said. “What if you die or go into a coma? Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“Sit up,” I whined. Jane Shannon was wearing a bloody pink bathrobe. Her gray and brown hair was a mess, her eyes wild. She reached down to take my right hand and drew back.
“Fucking Christ,” she said again, sobbing.
“Booze,” I tried to say, though it came out as “pooze.” “Thigarette.”
I held my left hand out and she pulled me into a sitting position. I would have screamed if I could have, but I could only gasp a few times as she propped me up against her ancient green sofa. I closed my eye again.
A minute later she was back and tapping my cheek. She’d tossed a blanket over me. I opened my eye and almost started crying. She was holding out a shot glass full of something brown and a lit smoke.
I reached out with my right hand and noticed that my pinkie was jutting out at an odd angle and that the whole hand was crusted in dried blood. I took the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger and tried to get it into my mouth. I think I rammed it into my forehead and my bad eye a few times before Jane guided it to my sw
ollen lips.
“Good,” I said as I exhaled. I took the shot glass into my shaking left hand and dumped it into my mouth. A line of fire traced its way all the way down into my groin. I took another drag.
“Thousand bucks,” I murmured. “Cash. For one more drink. Advil.”
“What happened to you?” she asked. “Where’s your car?”
I was about to answer when I passed out again.
The next few days were a blur. Someone making me drink lukewarm tap water. A brief, bright pain in my right hand. Pain everywhere. The gong of a concussion ringing in my ears, flashes of light and long periods of darkness. I was incredibly thirsty most of the time, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My swollen, cracked lips could barely contain my massive tongue, and the back of my throat felt like someone had branded it. When I was finally lucid enough to moan something like a real word, Jane was there. She’d been sleeping in a chair next to the sofa I’d been levered onto. I was warm, covered with a gore-spattered comforter. My entire body felt like it had been stomped on, which it had.
“Water,” I rasped.
Jane padded off in the direction of the kitchen and returned with a pint glass. She’d reset the pinkie finger on my right hand and wrapped it in an old shirt with a tongue depressor sticking out of it. I propped myself up on my elbow and took the glass in my left hand. It felt as heavy as an anvil. I drained it and my mouth watered like I was drinking the tears of angels. It was the best thing anyone had ever given me.
“Thanks,” I managed. “Thank you.”
“You’re incredibly fucked up, Darby,” Jane said in a flat, angry voice. “I set your pinkie. Stitched up the side of your head. You peed out some blood on my couch a few times. Whoever beat on you carved an X into one of your ass cheeks. I stitched that up, too.”
She sighed and fired up a Pall Mall, then held it out for me to take a drag. I looked at the lipstick around the base and cracked my mouth open. The second best gift of my life.
“You’ve been out for three days. That first night you stopped breathing. I poured some water on you and slapped your bad eye. It worked, so don’t bitch about it. I didn’t know what else to do. Cops are looking for you. Your face is all over the papers, not that they’d recognize it now.” She laughed a little and then coughed to cover a sob. “Had my boy come over and get you up on the sofa. Wasn’t too happy about that. Why in the world did you come to my place?”
I thought about it for a minute. Both of my eyes were open, but my right eyelid felt like it was fighting a strip of Scotch tape. I made a motion with my head and she held the cigarette out again. I took a deep pull and leaned back.
“Fuckers tossed me in a dumpster a few blocks from here. Sorry.” I was breathing a little better, but the ribs on my right side felt like a horse had stepped on me.
Jane blew out a plume of smoke and squinted though it at me.
“What you feel like doin’?” She asked the question in a casual way, but I could tell she was tired and scared.
“I dunno,” I said honestly, “but it’s gonna be way fucking stupid.”
Jane rose to her feet and retied her bathrobe. My dried blood was still all over it, like a giant rust stain. She’d washed it more than once, I could tell, but it was never going to be pink again.
“I got to get to work now that you’re awake,” she said. “I’ll get you some more water and some Advil before I go. No more pissing the bed.”
“Deal. I’d love you forever for a couple of those smokes.”
She took four out of her pack and put them on the coffee table.
“Just light ’em on the stove.”
I stopped. I was out of words.
“You just be calm,” Jane said gently. “Try not to go back to sleep.”
“I owe you.”
She smiled sadly. “You owe me big time, Darby Holland. Way super fuckin’ big time.”
I lay there for the better part of an hour, smoking and thinking. Mostly thinking that I had to take a leak and I didn’t want to get up and see myself in a bathroom mirror when I did. I also didn’t want to see what my pee looked like. I didn’t want to throw up the pint of water in my stomach if my head started spinning, because I doubted I could clean it up, and I was already pushing my welcome.
I thought about Jane, too. All the late nights I’d spent at her bar and then given her a ride home. The time I’d come over for Thanksgiving dinner with a random pack of misfits almost a decade ago. I hadn’t seen much of her over the past few years, just like hundreds of other people I knew in Portland. I sort of felt bad about that now, all things considered.
I thought about Monique and the Lucky, how it looked like I’d been right about some kind of connection there, how it had been her on the phone, and how Cheeks knew about it. Those thoughts took about a quarter of a cigarette. For the rest of it, I thought about how I was going to get whatever information I needed out of Cheeks before I beat him to death.
Jane appeared in the doorway, dressed in black for a shift behind the bar.
“Old Crow on the kitchen counter, if you can make it that far. Pack of smokes in there, too. Don’t overdo it. Sardines and crackers in the cabinet. Advil is in the bathroom. By the toilet.”
“Sardines. Yummy. Have a good night. I promise to be a good boy.” I stubbed the butt out in the ashtray on the coffee table she’d pushed up next to me. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”
She cocked her hip.
“I’m not an idiot. Moron.”
I tried to smile and my lips felt like they were going to crack and burst like microwaved hot dogs. The cigarette had made me light-headed. I felt like I had the worst hangover of my life and I’d just eaten half a jar of mayonnaise.
“I’ll get you some money,” I said, trying not to move. “Soon as I’m up. A couple thousand. Swear to fucking Christ.”
Jane frowned.
“Considering my nursing skills, you might want to pay me in Monopoly money. But the couch, Darby. You ruined my couch and my carpet and my robe.”
“Yeah. Shitty. And I owe you a thousand bucks for that drink, too. I remember that.”
She smiled.
“I’ll see you tonight when I get home. Maybe we can watch one of my old movies.” It was then that I realized something both fortunate and sad. Jane was lonely.
“I fucking love old movies.”
As she walked past, she reached out to pat my head and drew her hand back. A half cough came out of her again. The door clicked behind her. A bad indicator about what I was going to find in that mirror when I took that leak.
Still, a drink sounded good. Especially some of that tap water and about eight Advil. Old Crow was a cheap, sweet whiskey, in my advanced opinion, but beggars didn’t even get to pick their city sometimes, much less what they planned on paying an imaginary thousand bucks for. I smoked another cigarette. I smelled like piss, vomit, shit, and rotting trash. I’d destroyed the sofa. Jane was right. I did owe her a thousand bucks for that drink that was waiting about fifty small steps away. I also owed her another double handful of bills for stitching up my foul body. It was time to pee.
Getting up took several painful tries. Eventually, I got my knees underneath me when I fell off the couch. The carpet looked like someone had dumped a bucket of rust on it. My blood, all dried up. It was a fake Ikea Persian, but still, it was too bad. I got my legs underneath me and stood there. I still couldn’t see too well out of my right eye, but the spinning had turned into something like waves. There was some sensory distortion, but I could see and I could limp.
Jane had dressed me at some point over the past two days in green sweatpants and a green hoodie. The socks were thick and white, spotted with red on the swollen foot I’d walked on with no boot. My right ass cheek hurt almost as bad as my eye, and the sweatpants were sticking to it. Bummer.
The ribs hurt especially badly on the right side, but my stomach seemed almost OK. I worked out a lot, mostly out of paranoia, and that was one of th
ose instances where a few hundred sit-ups a day paid off. So I went in search of the drink before the mirror.
I limped into the dining room and headed for the bright light of the kitchen. It took some time. My legs felt like they were made out of wet clay. My back made several alarming crunching sounds and my neck felt like a toothpick holding up a pumpkin. My vision had tremors in both eyes, very high speed, like a J. J. Abrams movie, very vomit-inducing. But the Old Crow was on the counter as promised, and next to it was a full pack of Pall Malls. I tucked the bottle up against my sore ribs with my right arm, spun the cap off, and poured some into the waiting tumbler with the hand that worked, about four fingers. I’d need it before I went into the bathroom.
The first sip went right into the sink. I rinsed my mouth out with some tap water and tried again. The next one burned all the way through me. I shook a cigarette out of the pack and fired it up on the gas stove. The taste of bourbon in my mouth and being upright with a smoke dangling in my good hand cemented the fact that I was alive. I took another sip of cheap booze and gagged on it, then another fast mouthful and the glass was empty. I puffed on the cigarette and leaned on the counter, feeling my heartbeat. I did that until the smoke burned down to my knuckles. I put it out in the sink and dropped it into the pop-top trash can that reminded me of a dumpster. It was time.
Whiskey sometimes made the hideous into the forgettably nasty, transformed the bland into the desirable, the beautiful into pure fantasy. Evidently, I’d need the rest of the bottle to climb up to the bottom rung. I looked like a leper fresh from a high-speed car wreck. My face was a swollen mask of blue and yellow. My nose, already flattened several times, was a little flatter. It was a good thing there was no cartilage left in it to break. My eyes looked like oysters, the right one with sauce in it. A long cut, stitched up with black thread, ran out of my matted hair and down my right cheek. Jane was right. I’d seen better stitching jobs on animals. Much better. She’d probably been half drunk just to deal with such a grisly mess. I sighed.