A Good and Useful Hurt

by Aric Davis

  Mike was unsure of what to say or do when the movie ended. He tried to think it through. Deb had seen the movie already, but she had brought him anyway, with no warning. She’d known. They sat in silence while the credits rolled, and when they finished she stood and he did as well.

  She was grinning at him and said, “What did you think?”

  “I think that was the most fucked-up movie I’ve ever seen.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “What was there to like? It was disgusting.”

  “You didn’t leave.”

  “I wanted to see what awful thing was going to happen next.”

  They walked outside, and snow was falling.

  “So you liked it.”

  “I didn’t like it. Wanting to know what comes next and liking a movie are two different things.”

  “Disagree.”

  “You can’t disagree with an emotion!”

  She laughed and bounded ahead of him. She turned, smiled, and stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake. “If you stayed to watch it, you liked it. It’s a fact.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Nope.”

  “A movie that makes you feel that awful isn’t good.”

  “But that’s what makes it good.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He caught up to her and tucked an arm around her. She hugged herself close to him as they walked in the snow.

  “It makes you feel something. As long as a movie doesn’t make you want to leave the theater, it’s doing a pretty good job. What makes Happiness so good are the same things that make it so hard to watch. Like the scene where Bill is trying to drug Johnny with the tuna fish sandwich. You don’t want to watch it, but you have to. A part of you, maybe a really rotten, slimy part, even wants Bill to do it. He’s pretty much made it his life’s work at that point.”

  “I didn’t want him to rape that kid.”

  “There was still tension when you’re waiting for that kid to eat the sandwich.”

  “Well of course there is—the poor kid’s about to get molested by some pervert!”

  “You liked the movie.”

  “I suppose by your definition I did. That doesn’t mean I’d want to watch it again.”

  “Hell, I didn’t really want to watch it again.”

  “Why did you bring me then? Are you just trying to fuck with me?”

  “I brought you because it’s an amazing movie that makes you feel bad for bad people.”

  “That’s not very satisfying.”

  “Life never is, so why should entertainment be so different?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Never debated that.”

  “It’s not a bad crazy, though.”

  “You did like the movie. It’s coming to you now and you feel bad, so you’re being nice.”

  “I guess I did, I just couldn’t tell you why.”

  “Probably the worst date movie ever.”

  “Was this a date?”

  “If I take a boy out to a movie, and pay, the least he can do is admit that it was a date.”

  “Fine, it was a date.”

  “Is a date.”

  “Is. Fine.”

  “That’s better.”

  “So if it’s still a date, why don’t we get inside somewhere?”

  “How about there?”

  “We can’t go in there.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “It’s an abandoned building.”

  “So let’s explore.”

  Deb walked over to the building and leaned down to pull at a board next to the door. It came loose easily, and she threw it aside.

  “What if somebody sees us?”

  She finished clearing the doorway and squeezed inside. Mike heard her call, “Come on!” from inside, and so he did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was musty and black, save for the beam of light coming from the flashlight in Deb’s hand.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “My purse.”

  “You keep a flashlight in your purse?”

  “You never know.”

  Mike thought about that for a second. It was certainly true, but at the same time, without the unnecessary exploration in the first place…

  “So what now?”

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

  Mike, who had always felt himself to be curious about any number of subjects, would never have included urban spelunking among them. “Curious about what?”

  She sighed, and he could almost hear the scowl that accompanied it. “Look, we need to get you some practice, and this is as good a way as any. This place doesn’t look like it’s been closed too long; we should try and find some souvenirs.”

  “You lead.”

  She did, and they left the entryway to emerge into an enormous room. The floors were warped, and Mike’s feet betrayed him on small patches of ice that collected in the creases. As best he could tell, though, Deb was having no issue maneuvering whatsoever. She seemed to glide ahead of him, as the flashlight’s beam skittered about her feet. He felt clumsy in her wake, but he could think of no way to remedy the problem. They maneuvered around a pile of splintered old desks, and he felt his equilibrium veer away from, and then back into, his control, but she never seemed to waver or slow. Workstations were scattered about haphazardly, but his eyes were unable to negotiate any of the gloom save for that scraped by Deb’s light.

  Weirdly, he was enjoying himself.

  They walked past two more piles of desks, through a smaller room filled with cubicles and false hallways, and then finally into an aged office. An empty safe sat plugged into the wall across from them with its door gaping. An old, but much nicer desk than the ones they’d seen piled about the larger room sat beneath the safe. Deb walked around it, knelt, and began opening drawers. Mike watched, unsure of what to do as the light was eaten by the search.

  Finally she stood, slamming the last drawer shut and making him jump. “Nothing,” she said. “Did you see any stairs?”

  “I think I might have seen some in the big room.”

  “Here.”

  She handed him the flashlight over the desk, and with it Mike felt the urgency to explore come over him. Before, he’d been a passenger, but now he felt like he was steering the course, and it was a different animal indeed. He led them from the office, past the room of decrepit cubicles, and finally back into the vast expanse. Mike flipped the light around, then marched with assurance toward what had to be a spiral staircase. He could see a balcony ringing the room; the only question was its point of access. He noticed as he walked that his feet were alive beneath him again, and the awkward waddling of before was gone. With the light in hand, everything was different.

  It was indeed a staircase he’d seen, a small metal thing that looked as though it had once been painted red. He pushed a foot onto it to test it and gave it a hard pull with his free arm. Not sure of what to look for, and happy with the results his tests had given him, Mike started up the staircase.

  When he’d ascended the thing and turned to look at Deb, he was surprised to see her still on the ground. He stepped off of the metal platform onto the balcony and said, “What are you waiting for?”

  “For you to get off the damn steps. You’ve got at least eighty pounds on me. Figured I might as well let you test how well the thing’s bolted down before I climb it.”

  “Nice.”

  “You were fine. I just didn’t want to put more weight than necessary on it.”

  Mike watched her ascend and spared a thought to the danger of being a floor up. He pushed it away as politely as possible, and they got back to their exploration. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but his adrenaline was roaring, a pretty girl was at his side, and the majority of the building lay ignored. He was smiling, not that anyone could see it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to know that Deb was too.

  They left the balcony through the first doorway on the
right. Deb strode at Mike’s side now that there was room, and they ducked into a supply closet together before striking into the next room.

  Mike had been unsure what exactly Deb was looking for, but he was pretty sure they’d just walked into a treasure trove of it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Marcia Ruiz knew pain. Pain was a husband who beat you, day in and day out, and took what he wanted when he wanted it. Pain was knowing that that same husband, when he wasn’t raping her, was screwing some other woman. Pain was knowing all of that but still being young and dumb enough to birth three boys by such a man, in yearly increments. Pain was spending the last two months of a pregnancy ignored, called every name for livestock in the man’s vocabulary, only to be raped two days after expelling the child.

  The first son she’d named Renaldo after his father. Marcia thought that the gift of a son might dull the abuse in some way. It hadn’t, and she’d been desperate to never let the mistake of another pregnancy hold her tighter to him, but she had no luck and no education to keep her from making babies. Her second son was born eleventh months after the first, and she named him Jose after her own father. Renaldo refused to sign the birth certificate—he’d hated her father—and so, in the eyes of the law, her beautiful baby was to be a bastard. The third and final son was named Paulo. He was born twelve months after his older brother.

  Paulo was a miracle. Marcia was beaten badly enough during the third pregnancy that she was hospitalized for six weeks of it. That was how she had discovered it in the first place. It was how she learned that Renaldo was killing her, and it was how she learned, separate from the abuse and the hate and the holes it wore in her heart, that she had worth. He had given her three beautiful boys, and she intended to see them grow untainted from that man.

  With help from people she hardly knew, the doctors and nurses of her wing at the hospital, she was shipped to Michigan. She had housing paid for, and she gave birth to Paulo. Where Jose had been a bastard by the choice of her husband, Paulo was born a bastard by the choice of his mother. As an adult, to say he was proud of that choice would have been a grave understatement. To a one, none of her boys were ever given pause to wonder at the lack of a father because of the wonder of a mother they had as their caretaker. For her, there could never be enough done for her boys.

  Marcia saw the help of that hospital floor fade over the years, but she knew it had been meant to be a jump start and not a sustainable livelihood. She took work from contacts that one of those Dallas doctors had in the area. He managed to get her two jobs cleaning houses. She did the work, never once questioning why the wives, so similar to her, were unable to clean after themselves or after their own children. For Marcia, life became a broom, mop, and dustpan. More than that, it was worth living. No husband wasting the money on drink and whores, only to come home and beat her. The work was hard, life was hard, but every day there were three smiling faces waiting for her return. Marcia found her own education in theirs. Twice in Renaldo’s second year of school, he’d needed help with his math that she couldn’t give him. The teacher, a young woman whose skin reminded Marcia of creamed coffee, knew Spanish, poverty, and education. Soon enough, all four of them were in school.

  Marcia fought ignorance the same way she fought shit stains or feline vomit—with elbow grease. She was no better equipped to learn than anyone, but she’d bobbed apples out of a far deeper tank than most will ever have to. She learned English slowly—not the speaking, but the writing—yet took to math and science like a wizard. Four years after the project had begun, the teacher helped her earn a GED and gain acceptance to the local community college.

  Even with no spare time, Marcia knew that she had but one life to give her children, and so she gave her days to cleaning, her dinners to studying, and her nights to school. At no point did she ever feel she was deserting her boys, and at no point did they feel deserted. They rallied in the way only those who truly love can. The boys knew it was for them, and so in the mornings they would make coffee and breakfast, they would bathe each other at night, and they would go without. For Jose, this meant several fights at school until his mother begged him to stop. Together the boys grew as fighters, and this was to be their undoing.

  With Renaldo at her side, and Jose and Paulo sitting at their feet, Marcia watched the twin towers fall in New York City. She listened to Renaldo as he spoke, and three years from that afternoon she took him to join the Marines. The proudest moment of her life was to greet him off the plane after boot camp. Five months later she met his body at the airport. Behind her was the legion of workers she by then employed, the vast majority of the owners of the houses her people serviced, and even a few folks from that hospital floor in Dallas.

  Eight months later, Jose joined the Marines. He died, too. A raid on some unpronounceable town that had turned out poorly, but the image of those towers and his brother’s coffin had driven him there, regardless of cause.

  Marcia was hurt, of course, wounded beyond reason to lose two sons at all, much less in such cruelly quick succession. It took a great deal of work for Paulo to convince her that he should be allowed to join as well. When that third flag was handed over, Marcia forgot about her money or education or anything else. Her sons, the reason for all of the work, were gone. Ash and tri-folded flags were all that was left.

  She bore those losses as well as she could, though her days were hard and long. The boys who had been a beacon to her seemed as though they’d never been there at all. She had pictures and memories, but it seemed she had nothing else. Some nights she’d sit in her chair and look at the three urns atop the mantle and wonder what the point was. Why had she suffered any of the hardships, just for none of it to matter in the end?

  The man who did her taxes said something to her in a meeting, but she didn’t think anything of it. A month later when they reconvened, he showed her his arm and he was less guarded with what he said about it. He told her about his loss and what he’d done to cope. It was impossible, had to be untrue. But, she reasoned with herself, he was a good man. He didn’t seem crazy or on drugs. She remembered his loss and how he’d been last year, and that one day the misery washed off of him like a layer of soap. She listened, and even though she knew it would be a letdown and couldn’t be true, she went knowing that her heart could be broken no more than it already was. She took a pinch of their ashes with her, just a few granules each, which she placed in a small envelope.

  Deb walked into the studio with their find under her arm. She threw the parcel on the counter, and Becky walked over.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “Mike and I found it last night. Who’s working?”

  “Mike is.”

  “I thought he had an all-dayer?”

  “He does.”

  And so Becky told Deb that there had been a third person, a woman named Marcia, to be tattooed with the ashes of dead loved ones. Deb listened quietly, and the discovery in the old building seemed a lot less interesting in comparison.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Phil was trying to catch his breath and failing miserably. Gas thick in his chest made him think heart attack! But Phil pushed that ridiculous thought aside and grabbed two cans of Busch Light from the refrigerator. He popped both tabs at once and slammed one of the cans. He belched loudly, then performed the same trick with the other one before belching even louder. The painful cloud in his chest dissipated, just like clearing his nose of snot when he was sick. He turned and took two more cans from the fridge, popping the tops. It was time to think.

  It had been four days since he’d followed Hladini home from work, four days since he’d punched her too hard and made her fall awkwardly. He’d ruined everything. Phil slammed the beer, crushed it in a mammoth hand, and let it drop to the floor. Women were not like these beers, after all. He couldn’t have an endless amount, and if he was going to go through them like that, there was going to be no respite, no breaks at all.

  After he’d punched Hladini, he’d dragge
d her in the house and attempted to fuck her. With no struggle from the shallowly breathing oil change employee, though—no panicked eyes, no weak hands beating about his chest—he couldn’t get hard. Even when he wrapped the rope around her neck and squeezed the breath from her, he still found no release, not from his groin and not from his mind.

  She lay dead, and he slumped next to her, tears welling in his eyes. She’d died for nothing. He hated her for it. He hated all of them, but this was different—this was supposed to be special, it was supposed to tide him over for a while. He’d never plucked someone so close to his real life. She’d ruined everything.

  Phil tried to make himself hard with his hand, but he couldn’t manage it. He kicked the body twice, hard, and then felt his prick again. Still limp. Was he impotent? Was that what this meant? Phil pushed the thought away, along with the memories of some particularly terrible moments from his short time in college. Goddamn bitch, she ruined it.

  Phil stood, ignoring the body and any possible souvenirs, and then fled. Next time will be special. It has to be.

  The memory made the heartburn rush up high and thick in his chest, the gas feeling like someone was sitting on him. Phil took a long slurp of beer, then stood and walked to the bathroom.

  Phil didn’t go to the doctor. He didn’t trust college people anyways, and what was some fuck in a white coat going to tell him that he couldn’t figure out on his own? His medicine cabinet was full of over-the-counter heartburn remedies, and Phil chose two of them at random. Once the pill bottles were open, Phil knocked back two each of the things, pushing them down his throat with a mouthful of beer before returning to the kitchen.