It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  I took a deep breath. I said, as gently as I could, “Harley, go home.”

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  All the men laughed, and she seemed to think they were only laughing at me. But there was contempt in their eyes for her. It was unabashed; the hatred men like that had over women who could sometimes make them beg or crawl on their hands and knees, things they swore nobody could ever do to them. It was in their stance, in the loud bikes they rode, pathetic demonstrations of their need for people to turn their heads as they passed, and think: there goes somebody who lives on the edge. Only they didn’t, at least not many of their kind. People who really live on the edge don’t run in packs because the pack is smothering, living by their illusions, upholding a code that seems ridiculous if they take five minutes to appraise it.

  The man behind me said, “Elmore, just let it go, come on, let me get you a drink.”

  Lincoln said, “Run along, little doggy. Your bark doesn’t scare anybody here.”

  Harley said, “Just go away, James.”

  I took a deep breath, stared at the kid Shane. He laughed and nudged the fat guy standing next to him who was trying way too hard to look serious. I pointed at the kid and said, “You’re a clown.”

  Harley said, “James! Enough!”

  She sounded strangely like our mother.

  But Shane had stopped laughing. He tried to stare me down, his eyelids at half-mast. He said, “Come out in the parking lot, motherfucker, and we’ll see who the clown is.”

  “Touch my sister again,” I said.

  He licked his lips, his eyes darting from face to face as if seeking direction. I’m sure it’s hard for some people, when they’re the youngest of the group, and feel they have to prove themselves to their seniors, but I really didn’t give a shit.

  Lincoln waved for everybody to sit down. He pointed at me and said, “You too.”

  “No thanks,” I said. Harley was walking away, her face red in the colored lights. The hand on my shoulder fell off. I wasn’t sure if it was a sign that the man had given up and was saying that we were all free to kill each other, or if he was ready to club me in the back of the head with a sap if I so much as made a move. I figured by then that it was Robert. His little brother had said he had a thing for Harley, and I wondered if I could count on him to have my back with men who didn’t shy away from rough-and-tumble games.

  “Well?” Lincoln said. “Don’t just stand there. If you’re going to do something, do it.”

  “I’ll sit,” I said. I sat. I said, “Is my sister your girlfriend?”

  The biker grinned in a lopsided way. There was a playful warmth in his eyes as if he thought he was one step ahead of me, that perhaps I was a simpleton and he would humor me. He said, “Define girlfriend, El-More.”

  “Is she more to you than something to put your shriveled little dick in?”

  Shane slapped the table and made to stand, but Lincoln grabbed his wrist and eased him back into his chair. He looked back at me, lazily, showing everybody how in control he was. He said, “Are you asking if she also cooks and cleans?”

  The man behind me said, “Watch your mouth if you want to stay here.”

  I was sure by then it was Robert. My sister’s knight in shining armor. Only he did carry some weight if he was what Derrick had said, and worked as Fat Lou’s bodyguard. Fat Lou worked to make himself a lot of money and worked with others, including cops, bailiffs, hookers, drug dealers, and bikers. He paid out enough favors that somebody was always in his debt. I figured people like Lincoln always thought of the long term and their business first. It was kids like Shane and me who went off half-cocked that disrupted a goldmine business.

  Robert said again, “Don’t talk about the girls, you hear me?”

  Lincoln nodded, he said, “All right,” to Robert, then stared at me a moment before saying, “You’re no longer welcome at this table, Ace. Pack it up, move out.”

  I sat a few seconds longer than comfortable. Robert tapped my arm, said, “Come on. We can all put this behind us and have a good night. Lou doesn’t like trouble between the dancers and the clientele. Most people who come in here just want to have fun.”

  I stood on weak knees. I wasn’t angry exactly, but there was adrenaline and an excitement coursing through my veins and without any outlet to express it, I felt cheated. I figured Shane at least felt the same way. Bloodlust is something that should terrify us all, how easily it is to let it carry us away into the darkness, but for some, it’s like a drug, its living, it’s a release we can’t find in all the playacting we do to appear civil.

  Shane said, “Stop by your sister’s place sometime when we’re all there.”

  “Visit much?” I said.

  “We’ll be waiting for you,” Shane said.

  “I hope you are,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll have much trouble with you.”

  He looked and Lincoln and said, “I’m going to knock every one of his teeth out.”

  Lincoln waved a hand in dismissal. He said, “Hit the road before I let him try.”

  “He can try, he has my permission,” I said.

  Robert grabbed my elbow and turned me toward the bar before I could dig any more of my own grave. He slapped my back to get me moving. I stepped robotically beside him. Out of the corner of my eye, he looked strange in the light show, with the music blasting louder than it had seemed a minute ago. When we reached the bar, I saw that his little brother Derrick looked pale, as if he might puke, and I thought he wasn’t cut out for the line of work he was in. But Don Gray was standing next to him, sipping his drink, as solid as a mountain, and he was grinning madly. He mouthed, “Here’s to your funeral…” and tipped his drink at me before finishing it, his thick lips smacking, his knuckles white around the glass.

  Robert said, “What the hell are you doing back here? Don’t you think you’ve caused your family enough trouble already?”

  “I have,” I admitted, glancing at him. He had not aged well. His hair had thinned considerably and his eyes appeared heavily bagged and his clothing looked too big on him as if he’d recently lost a lot of weight. I said, “Are you doing okay?”

  “It’s this life,” he said. He waved for the bartender and pointed in front of us. She brought us each a drink and wrinkled her nose at me as if I had brought in a healthy dose of leprosy for everybody. Robert ran the tip of his index finger around the rim of his glass. I looked at my plastic cup. I said, “Your brother told me you like Harley. It’s too bad she wasn’t dating you, you’ve always been a decent guy.”

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “My mom is dying.”

  “You haven’t been in their life for a decade. What’s it matter now?”

  It was a good question and one I didn’t have an answer to. “I don’t know,” I said. “But it matters to her, maybe that should be enough.”

  “Her who? Harley? Or your mom?”

  “Both of them, I guess.”

  “I don’t think it matters to your sister.”

  “You’re killing me,” I said.

  “Loving her the way I do kills me,” he said, quietly. “From the time she turned seventeen I’ve been going by your mom’s house, trying to help out any way I could: going grocery shopping for her, mowing the lawn, fixing things around the house that your dad used to take care of. It was partly selfish,” he said, “I wanted your mom to convince Harley that I was a good guy, and—”

  “You are a good guy,” I said. “Which confuses me, hearing that you’re working for Lou DiMaggio.”

  “It’s not all bad,” Robert said. “The money is good.”

  “And what’s the truth?”

  “What?”

  “You like dealing with shit heads?”

  “I like keeping an eye on Harley,” he said.

  I nodded. “You’re working for Lou because she is. Unbelievable.”

  “Nobody else will watch out for her. What have you done? Don’t judge me.”

>   I swallowed more Jack and Coke. I never understood love. I thought I had once. I said, “You can’t make her love you back. You’ve been trying for four years, right?”

  “I don’t need her to love me back,” he said, and then finished his drink. “I just need to know that she’s okay and not somebody’s doormat. She’s really fallen in with the wrong crowd.”

  “No kidding. Who are those guys?”

  “Trouble, James. Lots of trouble.”

  I pushed myself away from the bar. “Thanks for looking out for her. And thanks for the drink.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Mr. Gray is itching to snuff your wick,” he said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You don’t seem bothered by it.”

  “Then I’m a better actor than I thought.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I’ll watch out for Harley, James. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Your brother said you had a beef with me.”

  “I do,” Robert said. “But it doesn’t mean we can’t both look out for her.”

  I began to sweat profusely. I wondered, briefly, if Don or someone else had slipped something into my drink. I waited for everything to grow fuzzy, my fingers tight on the bar. The music seemed to wobble with the room. I closed my eyes tightly for a second and then opened them. Everything seemed garish, unreal. Robert said, close to my ear, “You better hit the bricks before something bad happens.”

  I’d been incredibly stupid many times in my life, despite my I.Q. or my upbringing. I said in a hollow voice, “Do you know where those bikers all hang out?”

  Robert said, “Messing with them won’t help Harley.”

  I regained my balance. The room came back into focus so sharply it hurt my eyes. I said, “Maybe you’re right.” By the look on Robert’s face I must not have sounded very convincing. I slid away from the bar and made for the door. Behind me, I heard Shane yell something obscene, and to my right I could feel Don Gray watching me with all the patience of a panther. I knew if I made it out of the parking lot alive, things would be looking up.

  The parking lot was dark. The door to Electric Lady Land swished shut behind me, cutting out the music almost entirely, the calls of loons and owls and the splash of something large in the water taking its place. The lot was gravel, packed with cars. The bikes were in a neat row, chrome gleaming in the yard lights. I listened a moment longer for the sound of anyone in the darkness, waited for a car to turn in off the road and into the lot, illuminating me in its headlights, standing there in the open space with what I assumed a manic expression. I pulled the Buck knife and knelt by the first bike and lopped the air stem on the back tire, sickened by what I was doing and the trouble it might cause, but honestly, it felt good sometimes to take risks like that. The air whooshed out of the tire. I cut the stem off every tire on every bike and the rush of released air was like music and it was singing in my blood. I almost wanted them to come outside and catch me. I dumped a handful of gravel in each gas tank. I bent the mirrors out of shape. I cut the wires that ran from the throttles and brakes to the motors and calipers. These were men who looked upon their noble steeds as what defined them. I wondered, idly, if after the anger subsided, they would feel as if they were ravaged, maybe the way a helpless woman would feel beneath their drunken dead weight.

  I stood there shaking and I figured I should visit my mother. It was almost nine thirty at night.

  From my experience, the dying seldom worry about the lateness of the hour…

  3

  My mother’s house was only six blocks from downtown Kendall. It was a quiet street staked and lived on by her generation, one quickly declining, and worried about the way the world would go on without them. I sat by the curb for a half hour to make sure that Lincoln and his boys didn’t pull up in some redneck’s pickup, the lot of them barreling out with chains and baseball bats, before I exited the vehicle with the present I bought for her at the tourist store earlier that evening and had wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  I ran a hand back through my damp hair. The night was humid and smelled of rain. There was a light on in the living room window and I could see the corner of an upright piano I’d spent countless hours practicing on in my youth, a lamp with a rose-colored shade on top of it, the light cutting softly through the window and over the hibiscus and young palm that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen my parents’ home.

  I knocked on the door, feeling more nervous at that moment than I had in the Electric Lady. I heard my mother shambling toward the door, just a simple piece of wood separating us, and I heard her ask who was there, and I heard myself answer in a voice that sounded very small, “It’s me, Mom.”

  A heavy silence stretched out. An old man in a house across the road was looking blatantly out his front window, his hands cupped around his face. My mother unlocked the door. I looked at the lawn and the flowerbed and the fresh sealing on the driveway. I wondered how much time Robert Stevens had spent here taking care of a woman he desperately wanted to be his mother-in-law. I think he would have helped her regardless though.

  The door opened slowly, a chain shining in the light as if my mother thought someone was playing a cruel prank on her. I could only see one of her eyes, half of her lips, her mouth opening slowly, her breathing suddenly shallow. She glanced at the small brown paper package I held tight to my left side.

  I said, “It’s really me. May I come in?”

  She hesitated for a second and then shut the door on me.

  A moment later I heard her slide the chain free of the latch and she opened the door all of the way, giving me a full view of her.

  It is a horrible thing to be away, and to return, and find a person you once loved wasted away to nothing. She wore a faded white flannel gown and had to hold herself up with the aid of a walker. Her eyes were sunk deeply into her thin, bony face. Her lips were long drained of color. The veins stuck out as thick as an extension cord on the backs of her hands and along the slope of her neck. She said, “Harley told you.”

  “She had to,” I said. “Despite what I did, you’re still my mom.”

  “Is this supposed to help me? Seeing you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “You’re my mother,” I said. “Do I need any more reason than that?”

  “And your father?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  I wanted to step inside the foyer but I was afraid she would scream and the neighbors would call the police. “It’s me,” I said.

  “I can see that. I’m dying, not blind.”

  “I wanted to know if there is anything I can do for you.”

  “For what?”

  “To help you,” I said.

  “Maybe you should worry about yourself,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. It made me feel strange. She coughed into the crook of her elbow and looked like she might keel over any second. I went to reach for her but her hand flashed out and she said, “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare!”

  I paused, and then retreated back across the threshold, feeling as helpless as I sometimes felt around her and my father when I was nine or ten years old. Anytime back then that I’d seen one of them hurt themselves, I always ran to them and tried to make them feel better. Jesus, how far we fall. I looked at her stricken face and said, “Maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “You think so, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think, but I understand why you hate me. It’d have been the same if Dad had killed me even though I was robbing that bank. You would have hated him, you would have asked him, screamed at him, why he didn’t do something else instead, something less violent, something less permanent. Right?”

  “You are so much more like him than you realize,” my mother said.

  “Not that I can tell.” Although there were instances I had thought t
hat very same thing. I said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Horrible.” She looked around me and said, “Mr. Dubois is watching us.”

  “I saw him,” I said.

  “You better come in before he comes over.”

  “Okay.” I stepped inside and shut the door softly. The house smelled of a medicinal odor, and urine and freshly baked cookies. I said, “Should you be baking things in your condition?”

  She gave me a troubled look over her shoulder as she used the walker to move slowly down the hall. “Your sister made them before she had to run off.”

  “I see,” I said. Harley made our mother cookies before she debased herself for men. It made my stomach feel sour. I rubbed my face and followed my mother into the living room. She didn’t offer me any cookies and I didn’t ask for any, although I wanted to. She sat in her old rocker with the thick cushions and stretched her legs, massaging one and then the other with her feeble fingers.

  I said, “The house hasn’t changed much.”

  “And you expected it to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t look any worse for wear,” she said.

  “I guess I’m not.”

  “You have a nice tan, you haven’t gotten too fat or too thin.” She eyed me up and down, openly, the way only a mother can. She said, “I’d always thought there would be some physical mark showing that your mind had shattered.”

  “My mind didn’t shatter.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You say that a lot, and it sounds like an excuse to me,” she said.

  “Maybe it is.” There were ferns in the corner of the room behind me, family pictures on the walls, the soft tick of something mechanical clacking its tongue deep inside the old house. I said, “Robert Stevens tells me he’s been helping you out around here.”

  Her face softened then, her eyes took on a merry glow. She smiled and said, “He’s a good boy.”

  “I think he loves Harley.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, “although he’s never told me. But I’ve seen him working in the yard when she’s stopped over and he almost becomes like a young man again, she knocks the years right off him, smooths all of his rough edges. She’s doing well for herself, too, she’s the highest Mary Kay seller in Florida.”