by Thomas Pluck
Stacey smiled and the light caught the sun spots and crinkles a moment before they vanished behind her show-face. She climbed into his lap and rubbed her breasts against his cheeks. He closed his eyes to relive his last night of freedom with Ramona, her strong swimmer’s legs pinning him to the ground. He breathed slow, to keep his control.
Stacey gripped him through his pants with one hand and unbuckled his belt with the other. She slinked to her knees and thumbed the head of his erection through his boxers, ran her silk curls down his chest and taut belly.
Jay dug his fingertips into the chair’s leather arms. The wood creaked beneath his grip. She opened the window of his boxers and hot breath seared his penis. Hot sulfur filled the air, and his hands clawed into fists.
“What is wrong?”
“Just dance,” Jay said. Teeth chattering.
“It’s paid for.”
“Sit in my lap,” Jay said. He forced a sly grin.
She shrugged, and straddled him in the chair. Grinding while Jay gripped her behind and buried his face between her breasts. The skin so soft he might disappear into it. He screwed his eyes shut against the rage inside, images flashing across his eyelids. Brushing the locks from Ramona’s face, leaving her beneath the trestle sleeping. Walking home in the morning chill to the police cars waiting.
Jay kneaded Stacey’s hams and shuddered. Clutched her close and muffled his cries in her chest. He drove against her satin-sheathed crease until he collapsed dead.
She pushed his face from her cleavage. “Like a little boy.”
Jay gave a flushed grin and caught his breath. Watched as she bent over to reholster her girls in her brassiere, and wiggle into the teddy.
“My name’s Jay, Stace. What’s yours? For real, I mean.”
She smirked.
“I won’t follow you around. Just want to know.”
She mussed his hair. “Oksana.”
Jay took her hand. “Thank you, Oksana.” He left two of Cheetah’s hundreds in her palm. “You tell ’em I gave you a wild ride.” He watched her leave, and breathed his four fours until he knew it wouldn’t do any good.
He staggered past a bouncer who said, “Zip your fly, bro,” into the blue lights and thumping music, floating like a ghost over battlefield slaughter as he slow-walked to the bar where Cheetah squeezed his shoulder and said words he didn’t hear.
Randal exited the men’s room with Mariko, rubbing his nose while she wiped her lips. He shot Jay a look. Jay ignored him. Play the game, Okie said. Hell, act afraid a little. Like you’re squeezing in a turd. Some dogs gotta bark, and that’s the only way to shut ’em up.
Cheetah and Raina came back downstairs, smelling of sex and weed.
“You look green,” Cheetah said. “You O.D. on pussy?”
Raina rolled her eyes. “Pobrecita. He’s not used to living.”
“I need some air,” Jay said. “I’m gonna bunk early. Some of us got to work in the morning.” They smiled and embraced. Jay felt no fear from them, like he had from Tony, Billy, and Ramona. He thought about it as he walked to the Challenger. How he’d fought in two different wars, with different friends. One crew had made it home, while the other was still shell-shocked. He fished for his keys, wondering which battlefield had been worse. Rahway had been hell, but a predictable hell of violence.
Joey Bello had wounded all his childhood friends in unique ways. Jay had thought on it endlessly in his cell. Why had Matty turned on him after Jay had set him free. It made no sense, but people rarely did. Matthew’s secret smile from the witness stand burned into Jay’s eyes like the rictus of a mad creature about to feast on his insides. And yet Ramona loved him. Jay’s teeth clenched at the thought.
A door slammed shut. Jay stopped and scanned, back in coyote mode.
Three shadows emerged from the black Cadillac truck and crossed the parking lot, cutting off the street exit. Even with drink-dulled senses, Jay recognized Randal’s silhouette. Two gym rats flanked him. Top heavy with skinny legs.
One flipped a billy club length of heavy gauge electric cable. Another slapped his palm with a miniature baseball bat. Randal sneered and swung his arms, stretching. Gave Jay that you-ain’t-shit look Bello had been so fond of using.
Okie’s counsel echoed in Jay’s ears, but he ignored it. Instead, he shucked his suit jacket and sank at the knees, hands held in guard. “Know what they call that shit on your face, Randy boy? Prison pussy.”
Randal charged bare-fisted and Jay leapt to meet him. Traded a knee to Randal’s gut for a beefy shoulder to his own. The gym rats closed in. The cable thumped Jay’s ribs and the ragged end tore shirt and skin.
Randal slammed him into the bricks and Jay sucked wind. He covered up and fists pounded the meat of his forearms. His head bounced off the wall and the pain went far away like distant artillery. Randal plowed an uppercut through Jay’s guard, and blood splashed bright salt in the back of his throat.
The air turned sulfurous and the night misted red.
Jay launched a head butt to the chin that staggered Randal back. He pounced with a wild snarl, the gym rats’ clubs beating a wild rhythm across his back. He sank his teeth into the side of Randal’s head like a piece of overripe fruit.
Randal shrieked melody while Jay bit down and tore.
“Get him off me!”
Jay pushed himself away and grinned bloody around the mouthful of Randal’s severed left ear. He panted, his breaths flicking the hanging lobe.
The gym rats stared fish-mouthed while Randal chased his own tail, blood pattering to the pavement, his ragged scream punctuated with sharp yelps each time he reached for a chunk of his face that was no longer there.
Jay reared back and spat. The ear rolled past its owner and Randal ran after it.
A gym rat raised the length of cable and stepped forward, tentative. The end of his weapon gleamed ragged copper.
“Fuck with me again and I’m taking eyes,” Jay hollered, and ripped off his shredded shirt. Blood poured from his nose and ran over his scar-puckered chest. “You ain’t nothing but meat on my table!”
They piled into Randal’s Escalade and lurched out of the lot, jumping the curb.
Jay reared back and his howl echoed off the bricks.
Chapter 16
Jay woke in bed with his face to the wall, his heart thundering. He was too amped to sleep. He threw his legs over the side of the bed. The alarm clock read 1:47 a.m.
Cheetah had been pissed about the fight. Like he was supposed to take two beatings in one day from that jag-off. Raina refereed, pushing them apart like always.
Jay stood, stretched, and fell to the floor into a push-up and banged out fifty. Then five singles for each arm. Getting his blood up drove the ache from his ribs. He took a hot shower and finished it ice cold, more a distraction from the pain than anything else. Patted his face dry and looked in the paint-flecked mirror. His cheekbones had some puff to them, rouged with abrasions. His knuckles wept a little blood. He covered the cuts with exes of tape.
When he woke nights as a boy, he’d sneak out for a walk and do some thinking. Inside, there were nights he never thought he’d walk free again. This night was as good as any other.
Outside the apartment, he plucked a hair from his head and licked his fingertip. He stretched the hair across the space between the door and the jamb and swiped his wet finger across it, gluing it with spit. If anyone opened the door, he’d know.
Jay kept his foot light on the pedal and rolled the Hammerhead through Branch Brook Park. The cherry blossoms had gone with spring, and left the branches grasping like twisted hands from the earth. The road crossed the stream below, and he cruised to a stop. Killed the engine and walked along a crooked path along the water.
He soaked in the night’s emptiness. Crickets and leaves ruffling in the summer breeze. The quiet of the small hours had always brought him peace. The magic hour, Mama Angeline called it. She’d sat on the bayou smoking weed in the moonlight, serenaded by spring
peepers and bull gators. Jay would join her, or sneak past and walk the roads, quiet like an animal on its nightly rounds while man slept.
He followed the creek’s trickle. One boot before the other. If Mama Angeline was alive, maybe she was a grandma now. Maybe she cut her hair short like older women seemed to do. He thought of how her letters had hurt, with their poetic ambiguity. Disguising herself as if hunted. Knowing the letters would be read before they got to him.
Voices through the trees cut short his reverie. Midway between street lamps, the ruby glow of tail lights made brief twin embers through the trees. Human shapes in the quarter moonlight. Footfalls in the leaf litter. He pulled back the hood to give his eyes free rein.
A fit man in jogging shorts beckoned with a wave from between trees. Sharp nose, carved legs.
Jay loosened his shoulders and kept walking.
The man loped closer, half a smile on his face. “New here?”
“Out for a walk,” Jay said.
“Sure.” The man smirked.
Jay strode past him and followed the worn asphalt trail as it dipped and doubled back under the bridge. Lamps set in the concrete painted the walls in shadow. Jay stopped as he saw figures in the tunnel.
A kneeling silhouette pantomimed an urgent act of supplication.
Jay’s fists clenched and the air turned to ice in his lungs.
“Fuck off,” the standing man said.
Jay stalked back toward the car. He snorted out the night’s sudden sulfur stink, even though he knew it originated in his mind.
The jogger he’d met earlier loitered outside the streetlamp’s yellow light. Jay flashed him a prison yard glare and passed him in a headlong gait, smoldering.
The jogger spat in the leaves. “Fucking pig,” he said, and ran into the trees. Several cars came to life, lights flashing amber as they pulled away.
Jay found the Challenger where he left it. He reached for the door handle and pulled his hand away as if stung. A used condom drooped over the door handle, dripping. Jay wiped his hand on the back of his jeans.
In the morning, Jay asked a girl at the drug store for some touch-up paint he could use on his face. She had some fun dolling him up. Mack had said to see his woman Yvette at the DMV in an hour.
When Jay made his way to the end of the line, she had all the cheer of a prison matron who’d learned her dog died. She took Jay’s photo and his envelope of cash, and two hours later he had a license, insurance card, registration, a handicap sign for the rearview mirror, and a printout of the home addresses he’d asked for. Jay dropped the handicap sign in the trash and stood outside peering at his license photo. Looked like a mug shot.
The phone buzzed in his pocket. Unknown number. He flipped it open and listened.
“Hey, Creep.”
Ramona’s voice tickled in his chest.
“I talked to Matthew about the bribe,” she said. “That was pretty shitty.”
Jay said nothing.
“If you want to grab some disco fries, I’ll tell you what I know about your parents. I don’t know what it will help,” she said. “But I think you should know. And that’s all I can offer.”
She said to meet him in a train station lot. Jay drove there and waited, listening to an AC/DC mix tape Tony had left in the Challenger until a blue Aston Martin DB9 pulled nose to nose with him.
Ramona grinned above the wheel from behind black shades.
On the highway, she winced at the red marks on his nose and cheek. “If I wanted to help you, I should’ve gone to med school.” She weaved through traffic and drafted behind a box truck, the spy-car’s nose to the bumper.
“Way you drive, it’s good you’re a lawyer,” Jay said. “Maybe you can teach me sometime.”
Ramona wore navy slacks and lipstick that gave her the prim air of a strict schoolteacher. “I trained on the Nürburgring,” she said. “Driving here’s easy. Just expect everyone to behave like a complete jerk or a total idiot.”
The Tick Tock Diner gleamed in the fading sun, a castle of red and chrome on a rise of highway crushed with strip malls. Her favorite after-school haunt, sitting around a plate of fries with milkshakes. She downshifted and swerved into the parking lot.
They sat across from each other in a red leather booth. Waitresses cruised the aisles as Dion belted out an appreciation of the roving life. Jay flipped through the tableside jukebox’s offerings. Wandering had begun to sound like a good life choice. Ramona ordered cheese and gravy fries, and Jay a vanilla malt with a cheeseburger and onion rings.
“This place never changes. That’s the one thing you miss when you travel,” she said. “A good diner where you can get waffles, cannoli cake, or a plate of disco fries twenty-four-seven.”
Diners had always seemed like a dream to Jay, with their menus thick as a phone book. Like a deal with the devil, offering anything you could possibly want. Okie always said if he’d busted out, they could shoot him dead soon as he got two things: a face full of a big bouncy woman, and a truck-stop meat ’n three in his belly.
Jay raised his water glass in a silent toast.
“What’s that about?” Ramona said. She tapped her phone and tucked it away.
“Thinking on what you said, about starting over.”
“Never saw you as a mechanic,” Ramona said. “Thought you wanted to build houses.”
“I already knew carpentry,” Jay said. “So I learned everything they taught in there, and plenty they didn’t.”
Ramona smirked. “Well, I suppose it’s good you kept busy. Mother always said you didn’t use your full potential.”
“She said a lot of things,” Jay said. He pumped a few quarters in the juke. “Thought you never paid her any mind.”
“She wasn’t as dumb as I thought.”
The waitress brought his milkshake. Jay jabbed his straw into the shake and took a hard draw, until his head flooded with malt and vanilla. “Oh, that’s good.” He spun the cup so the straw faced her.
She inspected the thick contents, white flecked with tiny specks of vanilla bean, before she ducked and took a sip. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
His eyes flicked to her cleavage and he hauled them back up. “I’ll take what I can get. I just want to find my folks, but now I’m curious why everyone wants me gone so bad. Feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t know the punch line.”
“Well after what you did, you can’t expect a homecoming parade.”
“All I regret’s going to jail for it.”
Ramona looked into his eyes. “Don’t say he ‘needed killing.’ From his parents’ perspective, so do you.”
Jay took another draw at his shake, licked his lips and smiled. “Maybe so, but it don’t mean I’ll let ’em put me down.”
She looked away.
“So, you had something to tell me?”
“Matthew’s parents split during your trial,” she said. “He won’t talk about it. Rumor was, Mr. Strick gave his wife herpes. Remember Donna DeVane? She told me she used to blow my classy father-in-law in his Porsche when she was a sophomore.”
“He’s a real charmer. What’s this got to do with me?”
“The night your parents left town, your mother went to Matt’s house. She told his mom something that made her go after his dad with a lead crystal ashtray.”
Jay looked into his shake. Mama Angeline caused a minor scandal when she arrived in town with her Fawcett cut and tied-off shirts and cut-off jeans. Strick couldn’t keep his eyes off her, but few men could. “You saying they…”
“All I know is Matt hates her, and he testified against you because of it.” Ramona swirled the ice cubes in her water glass. “You know how he idolized his father. They didn’t get much in the divorce. His father’s lawyers were too good for that, and Matthew’s been paying him back for it ever since. It’s what drives him, and I keep him sane. I’m not asking you to forgive him, just understand him a little. He’s as angry about that mean little town as you are.”
&
nbsp; “Still can’t imagine you and him. He must’ve changed a whole lot.”
“He grew up,” Ramona said. “He’s got the same fire in the belly you always had. But he uses it differently.”
Jay sipped his shake. Watched the endless stream of traffic go by until the waitress brought their meals on white platters.
“Can I get a Coke?”
“Make that two,” Ramona said.
Jay put an onion ring on his cheeseburger and took a large bite.
She twirled a gravy-soaked steak fry in strings of melted cheese and bit the end off. “Damn,” she said. “This isn’t El Bulli, but I do like my gravy fries.”
“Trade you a ring for couple.”
“Knock yourself out, there’s no way I can finish this.”
The waitress brought their Cokes. Ramona sipped hers. “Beloved strange chemicals.”
“You always said the town dumped Valium in the drinking water.”
“If they didn’t, they should have. That place was uptight,” she gave a husky laugh. “You know that Nutley was once considered boho? My art teacher, Miss Foote? She said the houses by the Mud Hole used to be an art colony, started by…what was his name. He painted portraits of Harlem, in the 1850s. Now they’d burn his house down.”
“They’d at least talk and give him dirty looks.” Jay traded her an onion ring for a scoop of molten cheese atop a crisp French fry.
The jukebox kicked into an ’80s tune by the Cure. Ramona frowned at the speaker and kicked Jay under the table. “Did you play this?”
“I kinda feel in between days myself.” Jay grinned and tucked into his burger. They ate in silence while the juke spun through the music of their youth.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away,” Jay said while she sucked the cold dregs of his milkshake. “Friend of mine’s woman got stomped real bad in the prison parking lot. Like, wish she was dead bad. I didn’t want anything like that happening to you.”
“No use crying over it now,” Ramona said, tilting the cup to get the last sips.