Curtains

by Scott Nicholson

  Hutson put his hand back on the burner.

  “One…two…”

  Hutson screamed again, searing pain bringing him out of shock. His hand reflexively grabbed the burner, pushing down harder, muscles squeezing, the old burns set aflame again, blistering, popping…

  “…three…”

  Take it off! Take it off! Screaming, eyes squeezed tight, shaking his head like a hound with a fox in his teeth, sounds of cracking skin and sizzling meat…

  “…four…five…”

  Black smoke, rising, a burning smell, that’s me cooking, muscle melting and searing away, nerves exposed, screaming even louder, pull it away! using the other hand to hold it down…

  “…six…seven…”

  Agony so exquisite, so absolute, unending, entire arm shaking, falling to knees, keeping hand on burner, opening eyes and seeing it sear at eye level, turning grey like a well-done steak, meat charring…

  “Smells pretty good,” says one of the thugs.

  “Like a hamburger.”

  “A hand-burger.”

  Laughter.

  “…eight…nine…”

  No flesh left, orange burner searing bone, scorching, blood pumping onto heating coils, beading and evaporating like fat on a griddle, veins and arteries searing…

  “….ten!”

  Take it off! Take it off!

  It’s stuck.

  “Look boss, he’s stuck!”

  Air whistled out of Hutson’s lungs like a horse whimpering. His hand continued to fry away. He pulled feebly, pain at a peak, all nerves exposed-pull dammit! — blacking out, everything fading…

  Hutson awoke on the floor, shaking, with more water in his face.

  “Nice job Mr. Hutson.” Little Louie stared down at him. “You followed the agreement. To the letter. You’re off the hook.”

  Hutson squinted up at the mobster. The little man seemed very far away.

  “Since you’ve been such a sport, I’ve even called an ambulance for you. They’re on their way. Unfortunately, the boys and I won’t be here when it arrives.”

  Hutson tried to say something. His mouth wouldn’t form words.

  “I hope we can gamble again soon, Mr. Hutson. Maybe we could play a hand or two. Get it? A hand?”

  The thugs tittered. Little Louie bent down, close enough for Hutson to smell his cigar breath.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing, Mr. Hutson. Looking back on our agreement, I said you had to hold your right hand on the burner for ten seconds. I said you had to follow that request to the letter. But, you know what? I just realized something pretty funny. I never said you had to turn the burner on.”

  Little Louie left, followed by his body guards, and Bernard Hutson screamed and screamed and just couldn’t stop.

  "— KILL YOUR DARLINGS-"

  I was wiping down the counter with an old shirt rag when he came in. The man in the yellow slicker. I saw him without looking up, drank him in the way my customers downed their Scotch and water. Years of bartending had made me a quick study. Call it survival instinct.

  Big guy, woolly Groucho Marx eyebrows, but his nose was small and sharp, more like a hawk's bill than an eagle's beak. He was an easy 6' 2" if he was an inch, and he was at least an inch. He was slouching down into the collar of his slicker, trying to make himself invisible. Fat chance.

  He shook off the afternoon rain that had collected on his broad shoulders. Even in the dim light of neon beer signs, I could see his black smoldering eyes roaming over the joint. He wasn't here for the atmosphere, though we had plenty of that. A television in the corner, tuned to a 24-hour sports station, the sound turned down. A row of ragged barstools, their cotton stuffing oozing out from under the vinyl seats. A jukebox by the restrooms, broken down and so old that it featured "The Brand New Hit from Hank Williams!" A couple of regulars slouched in a booth, deep in their cups despite the early hour, whiling away the day until it was time to get down to some serious drinking. And all of that was doubled back in the long, foggy mirror that covered the wall behind the bar, the mirror that had a perfect round hole from a passionate gunshot maybe twenty years ago. He wasn't here for the scenery.

  And he wasn't here for the smell. Stale urine laced with crusted vomit that never completely dried, just sort of congealed half-heartedly. The musty smell of the soggy carpet, worn down to the threads or, in places, all the way through to the rough pine planks underneath. The odor of old cigarettes which had seeped so deeply into the walls that you could kill a nicotine craving by chewing on a piece of the peeling wallpaper. And, of course, the grainy smell of every kind of imbibement known to man, at least the stuff that was under twenty bucks a bottle.

  No, despite all this decadent splendor, he was here for something besides a blind date with a watered-down slug of rotgut. He was looking for someone. He walked across the floor to the chipped bar and sat down in front of me.

  "What's your pleasure?" I asked, still not looking up, rubbing on a cigarette burn I had been working over for a few weeks.

  "Business is my pleasure," he said, his voice husky and raw, his throat a clearinghouse for phlegm and bitterness "Honey, time to go to work," my wife called from the kitchen. She put up with my writing, humored my foolish ambitions, and served as a whimsical sounding board for my evolving plots. She even let me use our apartment's overgrown pantry as a study. At least my new hobby kept me at home, unlike my earlier flings with surfboarding and collecting Civil war relics. My writing was fine with her, as long as the bills were paid.

  I gulped down the gritty dregs of my coffee and looked at my wristwatch. "Coming, dear."

  I left Marco in the middle of his story, along with the guy with the raincoat. I thought of him as "Fred," but that would probably change to something more noble and tough, like "Roman." Yeah, Roman would work just fine. Roman would be looking for his wife, who had run off in the middle of the night with his best friend. Naw, that was too banal "Honey!"

  "Okay, I'm really coming." I hit the "save" button on the word processor and jogged out of the study and into the kitchen and gave Karen a husbandly peck on the cheek. I turned before going out the door. "Be home this evening?"

  "No, I've got to pick up Susanne after her soccer and then I've got a fundraiser meeting at the library."

  "Then I'll grab a burger on the way back in."

  "No, you're going to heat up the pot roast and microwave some potatoes for us."

  "Oh, yeah. Bye. Love you."

  I was two minutes late at the magazine stand where I worked. I liked the job. From my position at the register, I had a clear view of the street, and the company was good, mostly educated people who actually relished honest differences of opinion. And it was great place for scoping out characters, finding faces that I could press into the two-dimensional world of fiction.

  Henry, the store owner, gave me a little ribbing about being late, but he was never in a hurry to be relieved. I tried to picture his life outside the shop, but when my imagination followed him down the street, with a couple of newspapers tucked under his pudgy elbow, my imagination always gave out when he turned the corner. He was like a minor character who served his plot purpose and then dutifully shuffled off the page.

  I restocked a few monthlies and had to rotate a couple of the afternoon editions that had just rolled off the presses. One of my favorite parts of the job was getting to smell the fresh paper and ink. I'd open a box of magazines or comic books and take a big relaxing sniff, like one of those turtlenecked actors "savoring the aroma" of a cup of expensive French roast.

  To me, words on paper were magic: entire universes lined up in neat rows on the bookshelves, filled with heroes and heroines that dared to dream; fantastic voyages to the outermost edges of the cosmos or the inner depths of the mind; unthinkable horrors and profound rhapsodies; the vast revelations of consciousness, all for cover price and tax.

  I was arranging the cigar showcase when Harriett Weatherspoon came in. She had parked her poodle by the d
oor, and it pressed the black dot of its nose against the glass.

  "Hello, Sil," she said, in her canary voice.

  "Afternoon, Mrs. Weatherspoon. What will it be today?"

  "I think I'll just browse through the bestsellers today."

  "We've got the new Michele McMartin in. And probably a R.C. Adams or two. Seems like they come out every couple of months nowadays."

  "Now, Sil, you know those are ghost-written. They come out of one of those prose-generating computer programs I read about in Writer's Digest."

  "Million-sellers all. What does that say about the state of literacy today?"

  "Charles Dickens is rolling over in his grave."

  "Along with the ghosts of several Christmases."

  Mrs. Weatherspoon bought a paperback and a couple of nature magazines and went out into the bright spring afternoon. She stopped at the door and unhitched her poodle's leash, and for a split-second, I thought she was going to hop on the little varmint and ride off into the sunset. But she wrapped the leash around her wrist and went down the sidewalk, chin-first.

  I was watching her slip into the human stream when I saw the man in the raincoat. He stood out from the crowd because the coat was canary yellow and also because the day was sunny and warm, with not a cloud above the skyline. Unexpected showers occasionally blew in off the coast, but most of the other pedestrians needed only an umbrella in their armpit for security. The raincoat-wearer was on the edge of a meaty crush at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and in the next moment he was gone.

  "Canary yellow," I said to the empty store. "Good piece of detail. Roman's slicker will be canary yellow instead of just plain yellow."

  I searched my memory to see if I could dredge any more fictional sludge out of the fleeting vision. He had been Roman's height, and he had a jot of black hair. Not the dark brown that most people call black. This was shoe-polish black. But I could steal no other features from him, because I had only seen him from behind.

  Arriving home after work, I started warming up dinner and went into the study. I turned on the word processor and began spewing words, with my tongue pressed lightly between my teeth the way it does when I'm onto something and I forgot where I am, when I get sucked into a world that is trying to create itself before my eyes.

  "Business is my pleasure," he said, his voice a clearinghouse for phlegm and bitterness. I hadn't heard that corny line in a few months, but I wasn't about to bring up his lack of originality.

  I looked into the pits of his eyes. His pupils were as dark as his shoe-polish black hair, and they were ringed by an unusual reddish-gold color. Our eyes met for only a second, and mine went back down to the bar.

  In that instant, I had seen plenty. Pain. Anger. And unless I'm a bad judge of character, which I'm not, a touch of crazy as well.

  "Odd place to do business," I said, with practiced carelessness.

  "I'm looking for somebody." His voice was grave-dirt.

  "Ain't we all?"

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly his hand was on the bar, palm-down. The back of his hand was a roadmap of blue veins, lined with tiny creases, and wiry black hairs stuck out in all directions. But what really caught my eye was the fifty-dollar bill underneath.

  "Bartenders see things, know things," he muttered under his breath.

  It was an occupational hazard, all right. I saw lots of things and knew things I wouldn't tell for twenty times that amount. But a fifty didn't walk in every day, and a G-note never did. I nodded my head slightly, to let him know I understood.

  His hand suddenly balled into a fist, his veins becoming swollen with rage.

  I smelled something. Smoke. I ran out to rescue the pot roast and was just sliding its black carcass out of the oven when my wife and daughter walked in.

  "Order out for pizza?" I asked in greeting.

  We ate the pizza, then I plowed ahead with the story. After a couple of pages, I was fighting for words, torturing myself through painful paragraphs, dangling from the cliff-edge of plot resolution like a sixth-grader's participle. What do I do with these people? I needed some fresh ideas.

  After work the next day, I stopped down at Rocco's Place. Rocco was a short, paunchy Italian who was born into bartending. He wasn't a close friend, but I figured he was fair game as a model for my story. Marco. Rocco. Close, but he'd never know the difference. He probably dangled from the cliff-edge of literacy by a thin rope anyway.

  His bar was much cleaner than the one in the story, but this place was too sterile to make good fiction. Readers wanted fantasy, not reality. They got plenty of reality. They got plenty of hard-backed chairs and plastic potted plants, scores of vapid muzak melodies piped through polyester speaker grills. I sat in one of the hard-backed chairs and ordered a beer.

  "You that writer fella?" Rocco set a frothy brew in front of my face.

  I was surprised. I didn't make a habit of telling people I was a "writer." I didn't wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or chew thoughtfully on a thick maple pipe. I might be crazy for trying to write, but I wasn't insane enough to advertise. But it was also nice to have my humble accomplishments recognized.

  "I've published a little," I said, trying not to swell.

  He wasn't looking at me anyway. He was wiping down the bar that was already so shiny customers were afraid to set down their drinks.

  "Fella was in looking for you."

  I stopped in mid-hoist, sloshing a little sticky liquid on my cuff. Who would look for me in a bar? I wasn't Hemingway. I could barely afford this beer, much less becoming one of Rocco's house fixtures.

  "Big guy. Kinda mean-lookin'."

  I laughed. "Let me guess. He thinks I'm messing with his wife, right?"

  "Some people don't think it's funny. Especially certain husbands." His words were clipped and he kept his eyes down. "You're an okay guy. Don't spend a fortune, but ya never cause trouble. Been known to tip."

  I was wondering if he was waiting for me to grease his palm, perhaps with my measly pocket change. But he continued.

  "I know it's none of my business. But I thought I'd give you some advice, friend to friend. Keep an eye out for him. He's the dangerous type. Seen 'em before." He nodded to the perfect round bullet hole that was the only blemish in the clean silver glass of the bar mirror.

  I played along. "What did he look like?"

  "Beefy guy, black hair, black like licorice kinda. Weird eyes, a color you hardly ever see. And he was wearing a big yella raincoat, and we ain't had rain for a week."

  Karen must have put him up to this. She must have read my work-in-progress and planned this little joke. Surely she didn't think it was me that was having the affair?

  I paid Rocco and left him to wipe up the ring my half-empty mug had made. I ran the three blocks home and went into the study to re-read what I had written last night. Sweat was pooling under my arms and my scalp was tingling, the way they always did when I was lost in an unfolding plot, only this time my intestines were unfolding along with it.

  His hand suddenly balled into a fist, his veins becoming swollen with rage.

  I was staring at that fist, that big hunk of ham that looked like it could smash a city bus. I waited for it to relax, for the little muscles to stop twitching. When it was back in his pocket, leaving the bill, he said, "Wimpy little smart-assed writer type. Shifty-eyed know-it-all, been in here with a tall blonde. You woulda noticed her. Green eyes. Legs all the way down to the floor."

  I had noticed, all right. Some hoity-toity wiseacre getting a looker like that, and us lonely bartenders paying through the nose for our company.

  "What of 'em?"

  "The fifty's for you. A fringe benefit of knowing things. And it's got a twin here in my pocket."

  "Knowin' is cheap, but sayin' ain't."

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a greasy smile slip across his face.

  "Double or nothing, then. The double's for forgetting you ever saw me."

&nbs
p; "Saw who?"

  He laid another three fifties down on the bar. I eyed the joint in the mirror to make sure no one was watching. Then I swept the money away with my towel and had it in my pocket, where it would stay until I caught up with Leanna tonight.

  "Lives three blocks down. Number 216 East."

  He stood up, making an awfully big shadow on the scum-stained bar. Then the shadow, and the man in the yellow slicker, were gone. I felt sorry for that weeny little guy. Any minute now, he was gonna hear a knocking on his door The words danced in golden orange on the black screen of the word processor. Bad writing. A little too much Spillane and Chandler. The story had gotten away. Time to dive in, chop out its heart. Where to begin? Better finish reading it first.

  A pounding on the door interrupted my thoughts.

  — knocking on his door, then he's going to hear a yell, a crazy voice of phlegm and bitterness The crazy voice that was outside the apartment door, yelling "Hey, scumbag, open up or I'll bust the door down"; yelling "I'll make you pay for all the misery you caused"; yelling "Nobody's going to mess around with my wife, especially some snot-nosed fancy boy like you."

  — kicking at the door with those big heavy boots, reaching inside that canary yellow slicker, grabbing a fistful of cold gat And the boots were on my door, making the hinges groan under the splintery strain.

  — busting through and standing over the poor little loser, who's lookin' up at his killer, beggin', pleadin', offerin' up money he ain't got and prayin' to a God he don't believe in And the man in the yellow slicker is standing at the study door, holding a gun, his reddish-gold eyes blazing with insane hatred. I can see his finger tightening on the trigger. It's like a Stephen King story gone south, without the plot twists. Writer's character becomes real and comes to get him. It's been done too many times. Too trite even for me.