by Alan Trotter
I thought it over and had to admit that I couldn’t remember us ever having cut off an ear.
_____ sat in the chair, where he’d be the first thing Cain would see when he walked in. I would be standing behind the door, hidden from view. So I stood behind the door, and we waited.
*
It took some time for me to feel my legs beginning to lock into place. I stayed still. I watched _____ sitting in his chair, watching the door.
I wondered how long we would wait if we had to, whether _____ would still stare at the closed door through another day if the sun came up and the door still hadn’t opened and Cain still hadn’t returned. I guessed that we probably would—this was the only job we had to do.
And then it was so dark I could barely see _____—just his outline, just. I had lost all the feeling in my legs—I was half a person. We waited.
*
When Cain opened the door and entered the room, he was back-lit from the corridor. He was a large man, tall with long arms that hung from wide shoulders with an aspect of weighted force, like a piece of prospecting machinery. He stood facing _____ sitting in his shadow and his chair. I swung the door shut behind Cain and the light slid away like it sensed trouble. The last thing it showed was his face turned to me, a good-natured face trying to figure out what joke we were playing on him. Then the darkness had crossed him and the three of us sunk to the bottom of it.
*
Soon we had the lights back on, and Cain dragged into the chair. _____ pushed back his forehead—his hair was cropped too close to grab—and gave him a couple of slaps around the face. He told him to pay attention and, as he put his hand toward his pocket to get the knife, I saw for the first time that Cain was unbalanced when it came to ears.
The left was as it should have been, but above the central hollow of the right there was nothing and below it there was only a mound of flesh like drooping wax, which ended in an earlobe.
_____ had seen it too. He held the knife down by his side and looked at the half an ear. It was peculiar. We’d decided to do something, and here it was already done for us. _____ pressed a finger at the side of Cain’s head, as though he was testing if it would hurt him. It didn’t seem to. Cain’s head bent away from the pressure, but he didn’t wince.
_____ took his cigarettes from his pocket and lighted one as he inspected the missing ear. The top of the half-ear was lined with darkness that mottled and sent chubby wisps of black into the remaining pink flesh. And in the red outline of the whole ear—from when it had been whole—there was a gallows, a sickly yellow colour.
Cain looked at us both from the chair. He rubbed at the base of his back. His face went from _____ to me and back. He looked awake. He looked keen to find something to feel good-natured about. _____ drew on his smoke and told him to sing out. And when Cain’s face again turned to me, for explanation _____ pushed his finger into the grisly red where Cain’s ear wasn’t.
Cain started to say something about money, and _____ said ‘Nix’ and prodded the ear again. ‘Tell us this story.’
*
When Cain told it, it was from that place that people keep stories they’ve told so often they no longer see anything past the words they’re using. The words have become shapes that they know from experience construct what they mean to reconstruct. He said how he’d been an iceman a long while, carrying ice on his shoulder wrapped in a sackcloth. He’d wear a wool shirt and a leather vest and a sackcloth would go around the ice. Except one day, not long after he started carrying ice, so he was still probably seventeen at the time, maybe eighteen, he forgot to take his sackcloth with him, and he was already slow doing his round so he couldn’t go and get it.
He found another wool shirt, and draped that across his head and shoulder to give him some cover for the ice, and didn’t even notice how cold he had become. He said that you were always cold carrying ice—probably the first thing he should have noticed was how quickly his head stopped feeling cold, numbed. And he said that at the end of his route the ear was yellow and, when he touched it, like it would have been happy coming clean off, if he’d been able to get a grip on it. It felt wet, like he was reaching his hand into a bucket of ice water with an ear sat in the bottom, not something attached to a head, certainly not to his head. And then the ear blackened and hardened, and most of it did come off.
*
Cain gestured with his hands, like he was sorry his story didn’t have much of an ending. _____ didn’t say anything, just leaned down toward him, putting his hands on the chair’s armrests, and kept leaning, so far forward that Cain pressed himself into the back of the chair and had to turn his head to the side, leaving _____ staring at a missing ear, which he did. _____ didn’t rush. There was no rush for us, not with our job already done.
Then _____ pushed the flat of his hand into Cain’s head, pinning it to the chair, and raised his knife. Cain watched it like there was fishing line from his eye to the edge of the blade. When it had almost reached him, his body threatened to make a move, and _____’s hand widened and pushed him more firmly back. _____’s knife touched the half-ear, and slid slowly, deliberately along and down its blackened edge, tracing it like a barber shaving a well-liked customer’s neck.
*
That night there was another card game, larger than usual. It started with five players. _____, Lydia, a Greek barber who lived in the building, an ex-buzzer called Palmer, a dog handler from the track.
And the kid, the talker, was there—Holcomb, who sank into a ball when he got a bad hand and about bust through the ceiling when he had the goods. He was on cheerful form. He made it clear that he’d just been paid, talking about it and then, when that didn’t get the acclaim he wanted, taking the money from his pocket and fanning it for us all to admire.
Only now that he had some money, for the first time he didn’t seem to have any interest in losing it. He made himself comfortable in his chair, sitting out as many hands as he played.
One hand he folded his cards before the flop, then pulled out from under the table a small calfskin case that looked new and opened with a snap. From the case he took some wine glasses, enough for everyone at the table. A red scale curved inside each base, a wine stain. He took a bottle from the case and half-filled the glasses with whisky.
Then he sat back and swirled his glass lazily and started talking. His subject was how much he liked getting paid, and particularly how much he liked getting paid by the word. (Holcomb, it transpired, wrote stories.) He spoke for a long time about the various feelings having some money in his pocket gave him. The other players sipped at their whiskies. None of them listened.
Lydia went to smoke a black cigarette at the window and look out at the street. The apartment manager was gone and she didn’t know where. If anyone at the table knew they were too kind to tell her. I sat in for her.
Holcomb reached quickly the point in his bottle and the evening where his glass butted against his mouth when he lifted it, and drops of the whisky slid down his chin, and when he set it on the table more slopped over the side. He said,
‘The beautiful thing about being paid by the word is that it supplies us with an exchange rate between reality and language. Wait, no, that’s getting ahead of myself, that is abrupt and ugly, a dull edge. We shouldn’t allow dull and brutal things,’ he said, looking at me—I guess because I was the only person still giving him the attention he wanted, ‘when we speak any more than we would when we write.’ I had low suited connectors in my hand.
‘The beautiful thing about being paid by the word,’ said Holcomb, ‘is—well, let’s say all my money comes from my writing and all the writing I do is paid by the word. I write for the love pulps mainly. Terrible things, too coy even to have the dignity of the earnestly seedy. Some science fiction too.
‘Now obviously you could go through my apartment, and for each of my belongings you could attach a label with the cash value of that item. I paid this much for the typewriter, this much for the desk, this m
uch for the brandy. Each word I write I get paid a nickel. Sometimes it’s less than that, sometimes it’s even a bit more. But let’s say a nickel. If you know how many nickels I paid for something you could figure out a word that I’ve sold the necessary number of times to pay for that thing.
‘Now we’ve got a new set of labels for my belongings. It’s not a number and a dollar sign. The scotch is labelled “suddenly”. The typewriter’s got the label “lusting”. There’s plenty of lusting in love pulps. But the desk’s even more expensive, so it’s labelled with a pronoun maybe, or a conjunction. Perhaps “because” is enough to buy the desk. I see your “rugged” and raise you “wistful”!’ he said and threw a couple of chips into the pot, though he’d folded the hand without even looking at his cards. _____ gave him a look and the kid pulled them back, being careful not to disturb the pile.
I folded. Only two players, _____ and Palmer, were still in the pot. Palmer had got early retirement from the force when he was photographed selling guns out the back of his prowl car. We’d met him when we had to break his hand over a small debt. _____ called a raise and dealt another card. Holcomb drew on his cigarette with a look of great concentration.
_____ took the pot and passed the deck for the dog handler, sitting on his left, to shuffle and deal.
‘What’s beautiful about being paid by the word,’ said Holcomb, ‘is that we know exactly what everyone in this room is worth.’ He crossed his arms and took another drag on his smoke. ‘Assuming that they’re worth anything.’ He was offered a card and rejected it, and the game carried on without him. I got another bum hand and folded to a low raise. From the window, Lydia said, ‘What’s horrible about low-rent writers being paid by the word, is that they feel the need to keep going on even when they’ve run out of things to say.’
‘Think about how many words anyone’s going to spend describing you,’ Holcomb carried on, looking at her. ‘Maybe your beau’s composing sonnets right now instead of at a leg show or haggling prices for a lay. Could be.’ Lydia threw a look at him, spat it. ‘And maybe Mrs Palmer’s at home right now filling notebooks with beautiful similes, pages and pages of heartfelt whimsy.’
‘There ain’t no Mrs Palmer,’ said Palmer, though I don’t think Holcomb heard him. ‘Not presently, leastways.’ Lydia smoked her black cigarette and looked out at the empty street however people look at things that don’t mean anything.
I nearly said something to all this, but I couldn’t find the words or the energy. If Lydia had been the kind to take offence I might have worked harder at it.
‘Let’s suppose they are! Right this moment—they’re hard at work behind a pile of heretofore unexpressed affection and rhyming dictionaries. Unimportant—it doesn’t matter. What I mean is, how many words would it take to plumb the depths? How many nickels before they, or anyone else who might turn their pen to the task, scraped bare the walls of the soul they set out to describe?’
The dog handler pushed in half his chips, the stub of his cigar rolling from one side of his mouth to the other. It was the most he’d moved all night. He was like an old Basset Hound which didn’t get excited for much of anything lately, not since its owners had it put down. He kept his hat on at the table, the smoke from the cigar catching and then deflecting on the brim, so it tumbled like a waterfall upended.
The only others left in were me and _____. I called, _____ folded. Palmer laid another card on the table. The old dog handler didn’t raise his old runny eyes, just pushed in the rest of his chips, worked his cigar with his big jaw. I called, and looked round to find Lydia had turned from the window and moved toward the game, watching as I doubled her chips, which felt good. When I’d turned my cards to show the droopy hound, I looked to her and she smiled at me, a small smile like it was something she’d whispered, so just I’d catch it. The dog handler took his jacket from the back of his chair, straightened his hat on his head, nodded to the room and left.
Holcomb watched the door close behind the dog handler. ‘A paragraph and a half? Maybe two? What’s that, two hundred words? Five cents a word gives us five dollars for a hundred words. So ten dollars,’ he said and turned around to look at Palmer, then Lydia, then at the Greek barber. ‘How much for this whole room? How much for you, loogan?’ he said to me. I stood up and he backed off as if I’d pulled a gun on him, and Lydia took her seat at the table. Holcomb lighted a cigarette, trying to look casual. ‘How many words for you, Box?’ he said again. I filled my glass at the tap and sat and watched the game for a while longer.
I didn’t even own a rod.
Neither did _____.
*
After he’d quit talking, Holcomb found himself in a room where all there was for him to do was lose money, but still not in a mood to do it. Losing he could do when it made him feel a victim, but the bills in his wallet were too big a cushion for him to be anything but comfortable, at least in a small stakes game like this. And he was all but incapable of winning.
If only he hadn’t been so lousy at cards. It must have been bittersweet for him—a writer that easy to read.
I didn’t think of that line, that’s something Lydia used on him once at the table. A good one.
*
In the uneasy relationship between Jarecki and Danskin, we were an incursion or we were payback, depending on how you happened to approach the issue. One of Danskin’s boys had got on the wrong side of Jarecki. Whether or not he knew he had wasn’t a question for us.
He was called Gabriel. He had knocked around a girl—something he’d done before, but in the past it had always been one of Danskin’s girls, and with Danskin, Gabriel enjoyed immunity. He didn’t get that freedom with Jarecki, and this time he’d taken it out on a girl who belonged to someone who belonged to someone, who belonged to—and at the top of the chain was Jarecki, and then it becomes politics.
We took him off the street outside Danskin’s club, where it would be clear that we knew exactly who he was. The club was called ‘The Little Death’, which is one way to bring in the crowds.
*
We took him to a hold-up outside the new quarter: two rooms and no neighbours.
Soon we were mainly waiting for the times when he regained consciousness. I was drinking water and _____ was throwing his knife into the wall, and Gabriel would wake cautiously and maybe feel around his mouth with his tongue, counting the missing teeth, touching the split across the edge of his lower lip.
The eye that could still blink, blinked. He moved one leg off the bed clumsily, like it was weighted. Then the other, then he stood in a push of effort. One arm was no good, but his legs could still carry him. Maybe they couldn’t if he still weighed what he did a week ago, but now his ribcage was visible through the sagging armholes of his vest. He tried a slow turn of the bad arm and his shoulder resisted unevenly, like its rotation was through different thicknesses of hurt.
_____ would throw his knife a couple more times then we’d get back to the business of bouncing Gabriel off the walls.
*
Finally we were told to return what was left of him, and we left it back outside The Little Death, still breathing.
We were enjoying our relationship with Jarecki—it was honest work and it kept us busy. Then it stopped.
Interlude
Hector kneels, inspecting the object where it trembles, insectile, from the movement of the train. It holds one fluttering wing up in the air, and he takes it between his fingers.
It is a white matchbook with a black and red emblem reproduced on the upper-side of its one white wing. Like vertebrae in a foreshortened spine, the black ridges of the sulphur-tipped matches run half its width.
‘A completely ordinary object,’ Hector says, and Charles nods. ‘But it feels interesting. What is interesting about it?’ He tucks the wing into its place, as if he is tucking a sheet beneath a cadaver, and holds it, flat on his palm, towards Charles, who turns it on its back. The emblem seems to resemble a stain, a camouflage. Beneath it, in black t
ype, there is an address that means nothing to either of them.
‘Intrinsically,’ says Charles, ‘you would have to say that there’s nothing. I’m sure I have its twin in my pocket right now, and if I don’t I’m sure I did yesterday and I don’t care much either way.’
‘We’re agreed that we don’t find matchbooks as a rule fascinating,’ says Hector.
‘Yes. Not any matchbook I can remember. Not the one that might be in my pocket, not one you might buy from any pretty girl with a tray. No more interesting than the girl, or the man who dropped this matchbook, or the railing he went over. But.’
‘But. We are agreed that this one has interest. A strange kind of interest. Because the interest would be of the same character if the colour of the thing was different, if the address belonged to the opposite side of its street or to a different street or city, if it was full of matches instead of half robbed of them.’
‘Because the interest,’ says Charles, ‘is extrinsic to the matchbook.’
‘It is attached to the matchbook but belongs to the man,’ says Hector, ‘and though we met only briefly I think we are confident the man is of little interest also.’
Sometimes, though not now, Charles despises the sound of Hector’s voice. He finds it nasal and pinched, and once these qualities prickle his attention, which they occasionally do, the awareness overfills him and he finds his partner’s company intolerable, to the point that he imagines committing violence against him.
Mainly though, as now, he focuses not on the pitch of his voice but on his words, and finds it not unpleasant at all, in fact he finds it deeply pleasant, soothing in the way the noise and motion of the train is soothing. His own thoughts often come to sound like Hector talking and he takes great delight in listening to the sound of his own thoughts. He coaxes Hector, ‘We are confident that the man is of little interest. So.’