Her attention flicks to the bird, who shakes her head and keeps her eyes low, hidden under her bangs. The waitress angles me a cold look before she shrugs and struts off.
“There’s one thing that I don’t understand,” I begin, once we’re alone again. “Why do you want to protect that man?”
“Who says that I do?”
“Your actions say you do, princess. Unless you’ve got a fetish for being knocked around, none of this makes sense to me.”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’ve talked to his boss and your sons. I—”
“I know.” Her hands spasm into white-knuckled fists.
“Yeah.” My eyes sweep over her jawline, already swollen into softness. “I can see that.”
The waitress returns, deposits my order on the table along with an unordered stack of pancakes, drizzled with caramel and banana slices, right in front of Abel’s mom. When I begin to protest, she twitches a lean shoulder, walks away without another word. Small kindnesses, I suppose. The bird doesn’t move.
“You’re going to get my boys hurt.”
“Staying with him is going to get them hurt.”
“You don’t understand.”
I sigh and cut into a stretch of sausage. The crisp skin bursts beneath my fork, grease oozing. “So, explain it to me again. Make me understand. Because I’m about two hash browns away from taking this out of your hands, you know what I’m saying?”
Her head jumps up. “No.”
The little mouse’s got some claws. Good.
“I know—I know what you’re thinking,” she begins, licking her mouth as she pulls the plate of pancakes into reach. The cutlery clatters in her grip. “I know. Trust me. I know. But it’s not that easy. I’ve been—I’ve been saving money, on the side. And it’s—”
The bird drinks a long, long gulp of air.
“It’s not easy. He gets in my head. Every time I get the nerve to tell him I’m leaving him, he—he talks me down. Makes me sit. He tells me that this is the best it’s ever going to get. And it’s true. I know it’s true. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a degree. This house, this life—where would I take the kids? Every time I try to walk away, he tells me this. Over and over. He—he—” Utensils stammer from nerveless hands. I can hear a sob rustling in her voice, trying to slough off her calm, trying to rip it up.
Now, the diner’s listening too. A pool of quiet spreads from our table. I keep my attention on the bird. To her credit, she’s still hanging on to her composure, clutching it with a hanged man’s obstinance.
“I can’t leave. I want to, but I can’t leave. I have to think about the boys, you understand? I have to. I—”
I spoon baked beans onto a slice of buttered toast and let out a gusty sigh. “Parents?”
“No. Impossible.”
I take a bite of the bread. “Social services.”
“No, no, no.” Her voice dies to a whisper. The words rattle like dice in a cup, an echo, a half-memory. No, no, no. “They wouldn’t ever let me see my babies again. No, no. No, please—”
“Easy. I’m not taking them anywhere, lady.” I extend a hand across the table. She surprises me by latching on to my fingers and squeezing harder than you’d expect from a dame of her size.
The contact sends a shotgun-jolt of images, too brief to process, but also the sensation of brittleness, of papier-mâché and porcelain. Like eggshells. Whatever McKinsey had done to her, it was different from what he’d done to the other two. The infection in the foreman, in Sasha—that was organic, tumescent and alive. This tastes like anticipation, smooth and unyielding and richly salted.
I unknot my fingers from hers, slowly. “But staying isn’t going to help them either.”
“I know, I know.”
I smell him before I see him, before the chime of a bell announces his entrance. The sickness in him. In the confines of the diner, it seems bolder, thicker, hungrier. I look up just as his silhouette falls across our table.
“What are you doing with my wife?”
“Phillip—” The bird lets out a squeak, recoiling.
“McKinsey.” I turn and loop an arm around the back of my bench, mouth cocked into a smirk. “Was wondering when you’d show up.”
“You macking on my wife?” he says again, slamming fists on the table. The plates leap. A pancake flops backward off its perch, smearing the wood below with syrup and fruit.
I cut myself some bacon. Bite. Chew. Chew. Swallow. Try to ignore the sweet tang of infected meat in the air. Wife, he said. Even though no legal department in the country would collaborate. Such a small thing, but it gets on my nerves, this unlawful ownership. Everything about the asshole gets on my nerves. The least that I can do in return is inconvenience him. “No offense, McKinsey, but I’m trying to eat here. The thought of being a worm so low he’d fuck someone else’s wife is going to make me hurl.”
He bristles instantaneously. “You saying my wife ain’t hot enough for you?”
To my surprise, his attention snaps to the bird, eyes full of a strange, fierce hate. Before anyone can react, he backhands her. The blow catches her unexpectedly. It sends her into the divider between booths, head bouncing off, a whimper puffing between her teeth. As she twitches upright, McKinsey raises his hand again.
This time I catch him.
“McKinsey, McKinsey, McKinsey.” I rise, teeth bared, as he launches into a soliloquy of curses. He pulls at my grip, but I don’t let him go, only increase the pressure. “We need to do something about your command of the language, chump. And that temper. How do you expect self-respecting gumshoes like me to tremble in your presence if all you do is repeat yourself and beat up women?”
I won’t lie. Testosterone can be a social lubricant, albeit the kind that leads two grown monsters to bump pectorals. I widen my snarl and broaden the set of my shoulders. McKinsey’s scent plucks at the tendons of my patience, already stretched taut. This close, all I want to do is
rip tear bite cut
expose the artery, flay the vein
eat chew eat tear
devour muscle, gobble up viscera,
consume until there is nothing left, until meat subsumes the weight of millennia, the bone-beat longing for vengeance, the memory of—
My nails dig into his skin, and then I breathe out. I’ve spent so long holding on to this form, so many years stubbornly human. If I lose control, it won’t be for this fat palooka. “If you want to take our problems outside, I’m more than happy to.”
McKinsey grins in return, giving another experimental tug, his skin writhing, like he has worms sandwiched between epidermis and subcutaneous fat. I don’t let go. “Tough guy, are you? Sorry. But I don’t deal with chavs.”
“I’m a chav now, am I?”
“Guys—” The waitress’s voice cuts into hearing.
“On a good day.” McKinsey cocks his head, ignoring the skirt as she saunters up. “Right now, I think you look more like a wog.”
“Guys. Seriously. Break it up. This ain’t your mama’s house, you know?”
The waitress, fearless, shoves herself between us. I feel a hand flatten against my sternum and push.
“Ah. Racial pejoratives. The last bastion of the desperate man.” I concede the space and release McKinsey’s wrist, let the waitress nudge me a step back, the urge to damage, to injure, to eviscerate still drumming the blues in my bones, syncopated to the thin shriek of rage from my host.
“I’m taking my wife home, and if I ever see you within ten feet of me, I’m gonna call the cops.” He loops his fingers around her upper arm and drags her upright, the bird limply acquiescing.
“This really what you want?” I look to her, a wilting lily under her man’s silhouette, even as the waitress folds her arms. A busboy has run up to exchange whispers with her, low and urgent, their eyes full of danger.
The bird doesn’t reply. She strokes a lock of hair from her face as McKinsey hauls her into a stuttering march.
Almost unnoticed, the busboy glides away.
“A guy like this? This the kind of role model you want for your boys? What would their real father say?”
She flinches, but keeps her silence under an expressionless mask. McKinsey glowers at us both, daring her to speak, daring me to goad her forward. In the end, just as the busboy returns with a frown and the gravity of borrowed authority, she whispers:
“Nothing.”
“Sir, we’ve spoken to the police. If you and your friends won’t leave—”
“We’re going,” says McKinsey. “Remember, if I ever see your face again, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“I thought you said there’d just be cops.”
The mook works his mouth like he’s chewing gum, cheeks inflating, deflating. At last, he spits out, “Yeah.”
I laugh in his face. “I’ll be holding you to it.”
5: BORN TO KILL
The street is getting dark, the pavement tiger-striped by halogen. It wears the fog like a dame’s best scarf, slightly jaunty, with an edge of challenge. For hours not a soul, not a rat moved, but now shapes are emerging into the chill. A housewife and her brood. A drunk in a cheap overcoat, sleeves caked in yesterday’s lunch. Gangbangers in oversized hoodies, cheeks addiction-gaunt, eyes feverish.
I wait, burn my way through the rest of my cigarettes, and open a fresh pack.
Halfway to seven, a bus unloads the kid onto the pavement. He skips the last step, pivots, extends a hand to his brother. Under the streetlight, his eye socket blooms indigo. I scowl.
From what I can tell, the bruise hasn’t done much to dampen the kid’s enthusiasm. He’s laughing as he pulls at his brother, half-jogging, half-scampering between the other kids. Together, they navigate the sidewalk, Abel always careful to march them around every crack and every obstacle in their route.
They strut to their house, knock on the door, and it opens to their stepdad’s silhouette and the wire-sliver of their mama’s figure. Instantly, their postures deflate. The kid keeps between the man and his brother, chest puffed as the lug dips down to his knees. They exchange words like prizefighters, the kid’s breath thinning with every round, until his chest shakes like a man having a seizure. When the man finally touches his head, Abel flinches but he doesn’t back down, only snakes around the adults, dragging his brother along as he goes, always keeping his body wedged in between, always glaring.
That kid’s got a lot of moxie.
I sip smoke and dig into an oil-soaked bag for my last festival. A street away, the man straightens, turns to spit something hard at the broad. She mouths an answer and he slaps her, a blow that smashes her head against the doorway, before he clomps back into the house. The chippie doesn’t follow. Not immediately. She lingers at the entryway, sinking to her knees, hands clenched around bony elbows, sad eyes searching the dark. Maybe for me, maybe for answers, maybe for nothing.
Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it. After a minute, she gets up and goes inside, locks herself in with her monsters.
• • • •
I catch glimpses of the family through a birdshit-encrusted window, the skirt vacuuming, the kids darting through with toys in their hands, a vision of milquetoast normal. The stepdad’s the first to take roost in the living room, slouching into a leather recliner, beer can held like a scepter. He pops open the lid, chugs.
I salute him with a sip of my spit-warm coffee.
Asshole.
It takes about an hour, but eventually they come back to the living room, huddling around an old-fashioned CRT as Downton Abbey crackles to life.
The bird tries to fence the boys off with her body. She sits tits-out, back curved, a mouse playing at coquetry. The first time the man gestures at the boys, she moves to sit on his lap, one arm looping over his shoulders. He allows it for a while, hooking a grip around her waist, then squeezing her belly like it’s something more risqué.
But his attention doesn’t linger. They talk. The chippie evacuates, and he rises to pick up Abel and put him on his lap. He uses the boy’s thighs as a tray for his Sainsbury, all the while holding the trembling bird’s gaze. Like he’s goading her to do something about it.
She doesn’t.
• • • •
They finish eating. There’s a short argument. The bird wants the kids out of the room, it seems, but the stepdad likes his lap ornament. To my surprise, it’s the skirt who wins the squabble. I don’t know what she promised him in exchange, but it was probably big. The mook lets Abel scuttle off and slumps deeper into his chair. He flicks through television channels, looking for all the world like a bulldog with opposable thumbs, before eventually settling on a football match.
The kids don’t return. Occasionally, I see them flickering past the doorway, eyes wide, faces haunted.
• • • •
Another hour passes. Two. A bull rolls up halfway in between to rap politely on my window. We talk. In not so many words, he expresses concern that I might be a neighborhood voyeur, a vengeful ex, a foreign talent looking to knock over a local family. Plenty of those around, he tells me, apologetic, meaningful. I shrug and flash my credentials. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you accumulate spare badges.
He leaves, richer by a cigarette. I go back to my vigil. Not too long after, the living room lights blink out, and the lamps in the two rooms upstairs blink on. The blinds hiding one window are tweaked aside. I see Abel framed against a messy room, the walls a galaxy of childish drawings and posters, the cupboards stacked with toys. His brother enters, and Abel turns to hustle his sibling up their bunk bed before returning to the window. Stares out with his old-man eyes.
Whatever is coming next, I realize, he wants me to see.
• • • •
Night comes. Real night. Not just the chronological byproduct of Earth pirouetting around the sun, but a blackness that shoves the lizard brain nose first into the dirt and hisses for caution.
Nothing moves. Even the alleys sit quiet like dogs in a court of wolves, hunched down, antsy. I glance up at the second floor, bare now of soft white bodies fucking, squirming like worms in the earth.
I crank the window down. The air is wet and cold as Yahweh’s tit. In the distance, a woman howls her rage at someone who did her wrong. I hear the crack of flesh on flesh. A sob. But it’s not my business.
Then, I see the kid’s door open. I see something like a man stretched in the dark. A gleam of teeth, a glimmer of naked skin, pale as salt-scrubbed bone. It lurches toward the bunk bed.
No, anger wrenches at the body, pulls on instinct and neural pathways, a clamor of fury that supersedes all thought of reason.
Not on my watch.
Before I know it, I’m clambering out of the car and sprinting toward the door. This time, I don’t knock. Instead, I flatten my palms against the walls. The house, it shivers like a joy girl with a millionaire john as it takes me in deep.
• • • •
I swim through the concrete, thought and fibrous muscle, no longer discrete, no longer trapped between vein and vertebrae, but protean and primordial, a sludge of atoms worming through molecules.
Images metastasize, oiling together like a watercolor painting gone to rot, as I crawl up, up—
teeth and tongues and eyes, a thousand eyes, replicating without pattern, pustules of optic nerve dribbling into new maws, new sclera; invasive, furious, predatory, seeking to take take take take feast feast EAT—
A gasp of stale, musty air. I tumble out, hit the carpet with a snap of calcium, heat blooming razored along my skin. I bite down on a curse, not wanting to alert the family to my intrusion, or worse, my indignity. Wincing, I sit up and study my environment, cataloging my aches under my breath.
It’s quiet. There’s a sound that sleeping houses make. They breathe, with brick lungs and ribs of wood, creaking and groaning, snapping in places. But this house is still and pregnant as a corpse.
Pregnant? The word surprises me, even as it
arrives with the rest of the thought, but only for a second. Yes. That sounds exactly right. The air is aching, swollen, like a vast entity frozen in paroxysms of birth. I unroll onto my feet and take the stairs two at a time, soundless in this taut, breathless silence. Inside me, cartilage rejoins with cartilage, tendon with sinew. And my flesh, my flesh it sings.
• • • •
Nothing.
The room that Abel shares with his brother is empty. The beds are unmade, covers and quilts strung about like guts in a murder scene. It’s clear that they were just here. Their warmth lingers in the atoms of the air. I can almost feel them, frenetic and kinetic, youth at its most volatile, a gilding of clean fire so unlike everything else that hangs in this house. But there’s nothing in the room to tell where its occupants might have gone, or if something had happened to them.
I scowl and dig incisors through my thumb, splitting the meat. Blood drips, crystallizes, slithers along the hallway, branching outward, searching, hunting.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
My grimace deepens. Something is trying to play with me, and I don’t like it. Out of habit, I settle fingers on my revolver, the metal cold and reassuring against my skin. I step out of the room and into the corridor, my back to the door. The walls seethe with my blood, a web of ink and rust, like overgrown vines, quaking for an answer the house will never release.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I grumble, vicious. I know how monster movies work.
Nothing stirs. But I can smell it now, an illness permeating the air, sticky, sour, challenging. I lick my mouth, taste rot. Any regular mook would be suffocating on the fumes. Instead, the stink just makes me angry. So, I unbox myself a cigarette and ignite the tip, breathe out carcinogens by the lungful.
Carefully, I navigate the other rooms. The storage cubby is dank, dimly lit by a single flickering bulb, and crammed with old baby things and household supplies: eight-for-two toilet rolls, rubber gloves by the dozen, cheap shampoo, dusty cans of Spam. The bathroom is dense with mold, the plumbing corrugated from years of disuse, the patina of rust so thick it flakes like dandruff on the tiles. Someone threw up in here recently, but hadn’t bothered to clean up. I don’t look behind the shower curtains. As I exit, I snatch a look at myself in the cracked mirror and the sight stops me.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 50