A Long Crazy Burn

by Jeff Johnson

  “Oh my God,” Suzanne moaned, eyes closed. I took a small, medicinal sip of Jameson’s and handed her the bottle. She took a small sip while I started working through the mountain of green beans, snapping the tips off. When I was done I added them while she watched, and then I took the lid off the quart of frozen stock. The outside of the container was thawed enough so that when I upended it over the pot then entire thing fell out in one frozen mass. I put the lid on the pot and turned the heat down while she lidded the rice and turned that down, too. Suzanne folded her arms. I scratched the top of my head.

  “What do you call this?” she asked. I shrugged and smiled at her.

  “Our first dance with our clothes on?”

  Suzanne laughed while I took another plate down and put the rosemary rolls and the cheese on it. I squeezed the olives in on the side, still in the container in case she didn’t care for them.

  “Snacks while that cooks,” I said. “Grab those fancy beers you brought.”

  Suzanne followed me out to my dining room table. I sat down and watched her move as she set the beer down and pulled out her chair. The long, corded muscles in her forearm rippled as she gripped the back of the chair. When she sat, she ran her hands through her hair and briefly massaged the back of her neck. From that angle, lit by the rainy light from the window behind her, I could see the fine white fuzz that trailed down the back of her neck. She raised her head and opened the beers. Her fingernails were short and she wore no rings or bracelets. Everything was spare, except for her stature. She noticed me watching as she plunked a beer down in front of me.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You look like a women’s fitness model. Like for yoga pants or something,” I observed. “I’d feel confident climbing a mountain with you. You could give me a piggyback ride when I needed a smoke break.”

  “I climbed Ranier last year,” she said. “We got snowed in at our base camp. Three days of freeze-dried food.” She picked up a roll. I did, too.

  “So,” she went on, “you were telling me about golf last night, briefly, before we moved on to the wine bar’s restroom.”

  I shrugged. She nodded slowly and tore her bread. Evidently she was prepared to wait until I continued.

  “I’ve had an interesting, like, six weeks.”

  Suzanne picked up an olive and set it back down. She still hadn’t eaten anything.

  “I …” I trailed off and shook my head.

  “Interesting dinner conversation,” she said finally. There was a tiny hint of irritation in her voice. I sighed and put my roll down.

  “Suzanne, I like you. Totally fucking smitten. I’m sure you can tell. But right now, today, tonight, I don’t really want to talk about what you want to know. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you when I say that I want to be perfectly honest with you, if that makes any sense. But if there is going to be anything between us, then you have to cut me a window of slack, timewise. I’ve been up to some questionable shit, even by my own standards, which are what they are, but a case could be made that … it will seem more understandable once you know me better. Essentially, you caught me at a strange time, and it would be great, just really, really great, if you would let me prove what kind of guy I am most of the time, instead of the alarming guy I have to be part of the time. Is that totally lame?”

  Suzanne didn’t meet my eye. She studied the olives with a serious expression.

  “Darby, I read the papers, if that’s what you’re worried about. I know that the tattoo shop that blew up in Old Town was yours. I put all that together this morning. The mug shot they used, and I can only guess why they had such a recent mug shot. Recent or not, you didn’t have the scar on your face. Your eye … Last night when you were passed out I watched you for a while. You are a fucked-up man, Darby Holland. I’ve never seen so many scars, old and new. That X on your ass. All your tattoos. What I’m trying to say is that I find you motherfucking beautiful, and I know you’re in some kind of trouble right now, and I can tell from looking at you that it isn’t the first time, either. I want you to understand that I don’t understand, if that makes any sense. But I really want to, because I, too, am smitten.”

  I nodded. I ate some bread without tasting it and had a hard time swallowing. She was still looking down.

  “Well,” I said, forcing some lightness into my voice, “at least we know where we stand.”

  “We do,” she said, “and some day you will have to tell me the truth. All of it. But I do have one question that won’t wait. It can’t. Take your shirt off.”

  My heart didn’t skip a beat. It was not the prelude to anything I was going to enjoy and I knew it. I took my shirt off and dropped it on the floor next to me, shook a cigarette out of my pack and lit it, then leaned back and tried to look casual. It wasn’t working.

  There was an old, vaguely crappy dragon tattoo on one side of my chest. Big. Across my abs, in an arc, it read it florid vato script, also big, “It was You!” and then, below that, just under my belly button, “Run.” All of the writing was upside down, a comical but predictably accurate suggestion to myself in those all too common moments when I’ve just regained consciousness and there was some question as to how I lost it in the first place. Delia thought it was hysterical, but Suzanne … maybe not so much. In the center of the writing, just below “was,” were three old stab wounds, years healed. They weren’t even that bad, just the tip of a cab driver’s knife, because I’d been wearing a leather jacket with a zipper instead of snap buttons. The old knife scar across my ribs on the right side was even older, but a little more gnarly. The even coat of bruising on my ribs in general, courtesy of Cheeks, was close to gone in some places, still somewhat ugly in others. Suzanne reached out and touched the heel-shaped purple mark Ralston had left on my sternum.

  “I’m an athlete,” Suzanne began. “I know injury. Most of what you have is around six weeks old, maybe more. Except for this. This is only a few days ago, maybe the day before yesterday. The day before I met you. I want to know how it happened, or I’m sorry, really sorry, but I don’t think I should stay for dinner if you won’t tell me. And I really want to stay.”

  I smoked and watched her for a moment. If I told her the truth, it would only be the tip of a very black iceberg and she would know it. I decided to anyway. But first I put my shirt back on.

  “OK,” I said. “I had bad business with this guy. Some of it was straight-up vengeance-related on my part, some not. I kicked his ass, but he started it. Sort of. Anyway, he kicked me. Cowboy boot. Long story short. Satisfied?”

  She looked sad as she toyed with her bread. When she finally met my eyes there was real pain there.

  “No,” she said softly.

  Suzanne got up. So did I. We looked at each other and something hard in my chest fell apart. She turned to leave and I reached out and lightly brushed the back of her arm. She stopped.

  “Please,” I said desperately. “The fucking guy blew up my business and a fucking Korean mini mart. The police tried to frame me for it, but the motherfuckers were just trying to get me to stir the pot so they could see what floated to the top. So I stirred it. And I did have a choice. I could have left town like a total pussy. I could have gotten a lawyer out of the phone book and done whatever he said, but I fucking didn’t!” I was yelling now. Suzanne turned around.

  “So you beat up some guy because he blew up your shop rather than call the cops?”

  “I sure as fuck did.”

  Suzanne sat back down. Then she slumped. I sat down, too.

  “Darby, do you think … do you think that with the right kind of person in your life, you might handle things like that a little differently?”

  Without telling her about Dessel and Oleg and Cheddar Box, Delia and Nigel and poor Monique, insane Dmitri and all the rest, she couldn’t have known that it was a question I couldn’t answer, so I stayed as honest as I could.

  “Maybe,” I replied. Suzanne nodded, once, and then she smiled.


  “Then I’ll stay.”

  I waggled my eyebrows.

  It didn’t surprise me that Suzanne could eat as much as me. She was an Amazon with a hangover, and she also worked out to the point where one of the side effects, other than her magnificent, hard, spare and powerful body, was a continuous and impressive appetite. I eat like a jackal—fast and without refinement—and it can be off-putting. What surprised me was that Suzanne did, too. There was no way I was going to get my fingers close to her mouth while she was feeding.

  We finished off the bread and cheese in silence. After the awkward “Ralston’s Boot Heel” moment, I had a crazy confessional impulse to keep going and ruin everything, so I didn’t say anything at all. Suzanne seemed residually pensive, but she also may have been a tiny bit embarrassed at being the intrusive voice of reason. Whatever the case, she finished another beer, two rolls, and a quarter pound of cheese about a second before I did.

  “Now I’m hungry,” I said, breaking the silence.

  “Lead me to it,” she said. She gave me a smile with only a touch of push around the edges.

  We went into the kitchen and she watched as I got down two mismatched china plates, one with blue jays and brambles and the other with Christmas holly and tiny yellow chickens. I turned the burners off and removed the lids. The rice was a sticky, steaming mass. The steam that billowed out of the stew pot instantly filled the kitchen. I added some salt and last-second basil and stirred. Smoky tasso, the rich stock and pork fat, a hint of bourbon. It made me want to listen to zydeco.

  “That smells insano good,” Suzanne purred. “Can we just stand here and eat at the stove?”

  I shook my head. “I try that about once a week. Burn my mouth every single time.”

  “I do the same thing. Mornings, mostly.”

  I made rice mountains on the plates and then ladled out stew until both plates were close to overflowing. “Carry these out? I’ll get the soup spoons and the hot sauce.”

  “Roger.”

  She carried the plates with a tongue-out, mincing caution that told me she had never been a waitress. I poured us two Jameson’s and joined her at the table. Suzanne was almost guarding hers, one long arm draped out over the table around her plate, palm up, ready for the spoon I slapped into her hand. I sat down and dumped about a quarter of the Tabasco bottle in the center of my steaming plate in a red puddle. Suzanne was already chewing.

  “Tabasco cools it down, temperaturewise,” I said. I slid the bottle in her direction.

  “Mff,” she managed, then made a puddle of her own. I picked up my spoon and got down to business. The stew was just what I’d hoped it would be: the pork medallions were falling-apart tender, the tasso had stained the sauce a deep red, and the green beans had a little snap left. The French garlic sausages were fat and rosy and added something unexpectedly herbaceous. There was more than enough sauce to drench the rice all the way through. About halfway through my plate I slowed down and watched Suzanne, who eventually looked up midshovel.

  “What?” she complained. “I did my advanced rock climbing class yesterday. Four hours of hard core Spider-woman, and then I met you, and I’m pretty sure we skipped dinner.”

  “I see,” I said. “Save room for dessert. Crepes. I know it sounds wussy, but they’re so easy to make and I fucking love the things.”

  “Goom.”

  We ate in companionable savagery until we were done. When she pushed her plate back and licked her lips, there wasn’t a single grain of rice left in front of her. I finished mine while she watched and with a groan I sat back from an equally clean plate. I wanted to drink my shot of Jameson’s, but it was sitting just out of reach. I wouldn’t have minded a smoke for that matter, but they were next to the shot glass. I could have asked Suzanne for help, but I didn’t have the energy.

  “Can we lie down now?” Suzanne asked.

  “Don’t expect me to be on top,” I cautioned.

  She laughed softly and stood up, held out her hand. I took it and she pulled me to my feet like she was curling a sack of cement. Holding hands, we walked into my bedroom. Suzanne glanced at my two walnut bureaus, restored in my half-assed way, and then at my neatly made bed with its old-lady quilt. Chops and Buttons had moved their operation to the center of the bed and were giving us their calm assassin look.

  “Scoot over,” I said. I crashed into bed with my boots on and the cats scattered. Suzanne took her running shoes off and lay down next to me. She sighed pleasantly. She was too long to fit, so she laid at an angle with her head on my pillow and her feet sticking off the edge, about a foot past the floorboard. I could smell her hair.

  “This is nice,” I said. “I was planning on stuffing myself, taking a nap, and then working out a little.”

  “I’m glad,” she replied without sarcasm. “That’s exactly what I had planned.”

  “You fit right in, don’t ya?”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  “You keep telling yourself that.”

  She placed a long hand over the top of my smaller, meatier, scarred one.

  The sun peeked through the clouds outside and for a moment the windows lit up, watery gold, with shadows of unfallen leaves. The house was afternoon quiet and I could see motes of dust in the air. I felt warm, inside and out, and the feel of her hand, hard and calloused, was the feel of something outside of the dream I knew I had been in all of my waking days.

  I fell asleep.

  When I woke up two hours later, Suzanne had taken over most of the bed, with the help of the cats. She was mostly in a pile in the center, with a few lengthy extremities flung wide. Chops was sprawled in the negative space behind one of her legs. Buttons had commandeered my pillow, so I was in the cramped remaining area that had the rough dimensions of an army cot.

  Suzanne was something to look at, even in her sleep. I took my boots and socks off and thought about waking her up, but right then her fingers curled and her eyes moved underneath her eyelids. She was dreaming.

  I closed the bedroom door and padded out into the kitchen. My house looked somehow better than normal with Suzanne sleeping in my bed. I felt lighter. Somehow, in between making dinner and her coming to some kind of terms with Ralston’s boot heel, some of the filth had been sluiced from my soul. Then again, maybe it was the nap, but whatever the case, I felt better than I had since the Lucky had blown up. Maybe it was the beginning of a roll.

  I made coffee and quietly washed the dishes while it was brewing. When it was done, I wiped my hands on my pants and poured some in my favorite mug, chipped old porcelain with a faded ring of tiny blue cornflowers, and then I went into my office.

  Office isn’t really the right word. It implied that some kind of work went on in there, which was seldom the case. Library was too snobbish, book storage room too utilitarian. Sanctuary was embarrassingly hippie, sanctorum too Marvel Comics. I’d reluctantly settled on office, a word with a sense of depression about it, and considered it temporary.

  The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered all of the wall space, and even branched out over the door. There was a space under the window I’d left for my drafting table and a freestanding lamp. There was only one chair, a green overstuffed thing on springs that leaned pretty far back and stuck like that if you worked it just right. I used to have my collection of thrift-store microscopes interspersed among the books, but it irritated me after a while, so now there was a single six-foot shelf reserved for non-book items. Sixteen microscopes, all of which I’d taken apart, cleaned, and brought back into working condition. Scattered between them were my Italian marbles, several small fossils, two tiny meteorites in test tubes, a hummingbird nest I’d found on the sidewalk, and a piece of amber with a mosquito in it I’d scored at the Saturday Market. Gomez had offered me a mummified mouse he found under his house a few months before, and I wondered what had become of it.

  Loving books is a good thing. A solid thing. Having a big collection of good ones is important, or at least it seemed that
way on every single day until you moved, and then it seemed like one of the worst ideas you ever had. I let my eyes wander over the shelves and I could see patterns. Fourth shelf up, second case from the door. Two years ago. Dancing Bear by James Crumley, an all-time favorite. I’d been full after rereading it, but that had been in February, when Portland was reliably miserable, with the entire city was half drunk around the clock, hunkered down in the darkness under the continuous freezing rain. I never minded the weather, but the people usually got to me right around then. Next to it was Idoru by William Gibson. Change of pace, which evidently led me on to One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, with some of Li Po’s greatest hits and introductions by Kenneth Rexroth. The book was the most dog-eared, fucked-up, worthless, abused thing I owned, all of the damage done by me. I thumbed through Rexroth’s introduction to his introduction. I’d never liked any of the poets I’d ever met in person, and I’d generally found poetry aficionados to be awful, voyeuristic human beings, but that was probably because I’d had the bad fortune to meet the wrong ones. But an introduction to an introduction brought out the special, scornful smile I reserved for academia, and I felt that rude grin on my face for the first time in ages, even though I’d enjoyed both introductions a dozen times, hence the condition of the book.

  It went on and on. I must have been a little depressed that winter, I realized. The order of books was personal version of a feel-good mix. Two years ago and it seemed more like twenty. People who experienced long years often wished they’d been short, and vice versa. That’s what I was thinking when I pulled my most recent sketchbook off the next shelf up. I looked at it for a few heartbeats and then carried it over to the green chair in front of the window and sat down.

  The sketchbook was on the small side, just bigger than a standard paperback. It wasn’t big enough to work out tattoo ideas in, but it was rainy-day portable. I thumbed through the first few pages. Those were always the hardest ones in a sketchbook, because you always had a superstitious feeling that they set an unbreakable tone, like the opening chapters of a novel. There was also an unpleasant governing instinct to establish a less-than-psychotic continuity in case you lost it or someone found it after you died. As a result, there were some constipated flower sketches on the first three pages, and then the lines became blown out and blowsy, with almost no refinement as I tested the ether of my imagination for signs of a theme. It finally came up on page seventeen; a sketch of a spindly tree frog, mid-leap. From there it flowed; a bird wing, a busted umbrella, a plastic grocery bag curling on the wind. Unusual motion. I took a shuddering breath. I’d been yearning for the journal because it was one of my most intimate tools. I skipped to the first blank page and took my mechanical pencil off the lip of the drafting table.