Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  A castle against it all, the agony and everything else. A mote of ice, towers of glasses. Drink until the booze filled him and blanked him and gushed out the gash in his stomach. Until he flooded himself.

  He pushed himself off the table, the gash kicking up a silent scream when his feet hit the rubber kitchen mat.

  Tommy walked with his useless eyes shut, fingers out front of him like a teevee sleepwalker until he made it into the main room.

  A streetlight spilled through the windows. The red neon Red Stripe sign above the bar cast the clear bottles pink and the green ones black. Rain thudded on the window. An angry man wanting in.

  He lifted the drawbridge of the bar and walked inside. A highball glass. And whiskey. He poured. The smell like gasoline vapor filled his nose. The whiskey would be sweet. Sweet as southern tea. And dark.

  In the red neon light it looked like a glass of blood. He lifted it. Thought about Nikki. About running from pain and running back to it.

  He threw the glass across the room. Shards flew. He fell on the floor. Something inside him exploded. He took the pain. He lay there and accepted his share of it. He lay there in sweat and tears. The pain didn’t leave. Neither did he.

  The rain pounded against the window and the blood pounded in his head. Tommy got up off the floor. The pain went through him and he took it. He walked out into the storm. It soaked him. Washed off the blood and the sweat and the stink. He stripped off his shirt. Ran a hand across his stapled stomach. Lived with the pain.

  Down the street the neon lights of the Pickled Punk glowed. Tommy walked toward it. Laughed to think how Nikki would scream when he walked through the door. And then maybe would smile.

  There was that question, the one Lambert had asked him. If he wanted death so bad, why’d he fight it so hard? And he had his answer now.

  He still had to pay his tab.

  YOUR FINEST MOMENT

  Maybe you should kill her first, seeing as how she was the one who promised you true love forever and then went and sat on another man’s dick. That is the first thing you think when you come back from a fishing trip early, drop by your girlfriend’s place, and walk up to the apartment complex parking lot just in time to see her lead Danny Fucknuts in through her door. Your first thought is to take her and break her, jelly her face up with a rock, a tree root, something ancient and jagged. Smash her, crush her, make her slick and wet with blood.

  You get drunk instead. You drink in a bar with a jukebox that some asshole has loaded up with country songs, old ones about lying cheating women. You start to doubt yourself. You wonder if you drove her to this. If you’re to blame.

  You take another shot and say fuck that shit. You ask for a bill. You mention being a cop and the bartender rips up the bill. You give him two twenties for the half-full bottle of tequila and he gives it to you.

  You wander through the streets near her place, where right then she is leaning back on her bed with Danny Fucknuts grunting over her. You think about barging in, about causing a scene, and something in you tells you not yet. You think about that portrait on the wall of her apartment. She made you pose for it at Sears two years ago, fresh out of the academy, fresh in love. You in your patrol uniform and her with her hair teased up to the sky. Your friends called you pussywhipped but you didn’t care because it was true love. That photo of you is right now watching her bang Officer Danny Fucknuts. In your drunk haze you see yourself in that photo coming to life, breaking out of two dimensions, stepping out of the frame and strangling her right then and there.

  You wake the next day floating in shit. You don’t know who you are except a giant ball of drifting meat, poisoned and alone. Then it all smacks back into you and again you want her dead. But then you drink a little water. The iciness hits your stomach and spreads through your veins and you get cold and you get smart and you know, you fucking know, the first person the detectives would go to is you. They always suspect the boyfriend or the husband first. Who else could hate a woman that much but someone who let her crawl inside? Could be they’d look the other way. Could be they buy that blue brotherhood talk enough to let you slip by on a murder. It’s happened before, maybe it would happen for you. But maybe not. And you can’t risk it. You aren’t some prick who is going to prison the rest of his life just because he fell in love. No sir.

  But that doesn’t mean that you are going to let this one ride. Somebody has to die. And you aren’t a suicide. You are strong. You might have sliced off your dignity for that high-test bitch, but you still have a stub left. And so here you are standing over Danny, watching him sleep, standing here so you can kill him. But kill him smart. Ice-water cold, my man. You have done it all cold as hell.

  You run through the checklist. Your head is shaved bald, not too radical a hairstyle change from your everyday cop flattop. You aren’t going to leave any hairs lying around. T-shirt, jeans, underwear, bought from JC Penney’s today, paid for with cash money, straight out of plastic that evening, no chance to pick up secondary fiber evidence. No fake alibi. That’s just another lie to get caught in. You haven’t gone elaborate with the planning. Plans are threads for the homicide boys to grab.

  You parked your car on an empty side street and walked here through the night, passing no commercial buildings with their security cameras. You’ve come at three in the morning, after the last of the last-call drunks are asleep but before even the shittiest-job-holding sad bastards’ alarm clocks ring. You walked. You didn’t sneak or creep. You walked up to Danny’s place and walked in the garage. Danny has that cop certainty that no one will rip him off. Danny’s little plywood door in the garage, the only thing he saw fit to put between himself and God’s cruel universe, between him and the man whose woman he is porking, that door you opened up with a goddamn credit card.

  You know Danny is alone, because you said good night to her a few hours earlier, and you drove past her house on the way here and saw her car. Danny hadn’t gone to sleep without a load on in maybe a decade. He won’t wake up unless a gun goes off next to his head. Funny, that happens to be the plan. But you don’t think Danny will wake up with 145 grains of lead parting his hair and his frontal lobe.

  The gun is the genius stroke right there in your hand. It belongs to Danny. Your backup piece is strapped to your ankle, but you don’t see any reason to chance it when here is Danny’s own pistol. Not his department-issue, but that World War II .45 he keeps in that box by the teevee. You can drop the gun right here next to him like you’re a movie mafioso. Let them run every ballistics test in the world. Won’t prove a thing. A perfect murder to leave the boys in homicide scratching their heads till their scalps bleed. And leave the bitch wondering. You smile when you think about how she’ll lay awake and wonder . . .

  You pull the trigger. The gun explodes in your hand, blowing off your trigger finger and the first joint of your thumb. The stumps sizzle and bleed as you drop the mangled piece of metal.

  That bitch, that bitch, look what she made you do.

  Past the weird darklights of the flash you see Danny sit up wild-eyed, floating in silence and gun smoke. With barely time to curse Fucknuts for taking shit care of his piece, you jump on top of him. With the first punch your half-gone hand screams out pain, but you hit Danny again. Crunch crunch. You grab the bedside lamp, both hands to keep the grasp, and you bring that lamp down with a thud and a pop as the fuckwad’s skull breaks and then everything is quiet but your own stuttering breath.

  Back comes the ice water and even in the dark you can see what you’ve done. Your perfect crime has devolved to shit. Chock-full-of-DNA blood is everywhere. Mixed together, you and Danny, just like you’re both mixed up inside her.

  The pain of your hand is once removed, like some other guy is telling you about it. That is just adrenaline keeping you in the fight, but you can’t let it run the game. There is still time to make this smart. Not perfect, but smart.

  First, off comes that pristine JC Penney’s T-shirt to wrap your hand up. Your bel
t cinches tight to slow the bleeding. You have two choices. You can dump the body, but that is a fool’s fucking errand. Stick the body into your trunk, leaving DNA everywhere. And then hide the body where? Bodies get found, and that is a truth that you know for sure. So that leaves option two.

  Fire. You find a gas can in the garage. You turn on the gas jets in the kitchen to fill the house. The kitchen isn’t far from the bedroom and the gas fumes will hit the flames and foomp goes the house, every little scrap of DNA sizzled like bacon.

  You hear the car before you see the lights. The blue and red cherries light up the room like a disco, flash flash flash. The gunshot led to someone calling the cops. Didn’t they know one was there already? You peek out the window, thinking maybe you shouldn’t have turned the gas on so soon. Tendrils of the invisible stink sting your nostrils. Frank Robinson—you know him a little, talked to him over third-shift coffee and cop-bar beers—has parked his squad car in the driveway and is walking up the drive. Frank rides his squad car solo except for Bruno the German shepherd locked safe in the backseat. So you have only one cop to kill. One more, that is.

  You pull your backup piece from your ankle holster left-handed and put it to the wall just to the right of the door where a good smart cop like Frank or you would stand when knocking on the door of a dark house. You wait one long second. Then comes the knock and you pull the trigger. And the whole world catches fire.

  The clouds of gas filling the house catch spark from the gun, and the air itself blazes alive with fire for less than a second. You come out the other side of the flame cloud smelling the stench of your own burning hair. But it worked. You can hear the steady rage of flames on Danny’s bed chewing up all that DNA. Too bad about Frank. He lies on the other side of the wall dying out loud. You look out the window past Frankie’s body to see the car door open and some rookie shitfuck climb out and take cover on the other side of the Charger, barking into the radio. Looks like Frankie has gotten himself a new partner after all.

  The house burns faster. You can go out the back and try to make it home and try to explain away the missing fingers and burns, but you know it is way past that. You’ve been fucked from the start of this, trying to play it cool and rational when it was simple and savage. You should have cracked her skull the way you were built to do. It isn’t too late. Maybe too late to do it perfect. Too late to do it smart. But not too late to do it right. You come out the front door with a caveman yell and pop a few shots to keep the rookie down as you run past.

  You hear the rookie let slip the dog, but you’re full of animal joy and keep right on running. Heading toward her. You run fast and free toward your fate. It is your finest moment.

  The dog takes you down in the street. Your front teeth shatter on the asphalt. Bruno tears out a tendon as you struggle to flop onto your back. You fire the gun into the air. You shoot down the moon. There are arms around you. You scream with a broken mouth.

  That bith!

  That bith!

  That bith!

  JOHNNY CASH IS DEAD

  I drove all the way across town to cut up this son of a bitch, but it’s these three flights of stairs that got me worried. Usually when a man goes to see another man on business, it’s the other fellow that he needs to be worried about. But my leg was my problem. My left knee started stinging something fierce while I was coming from old North Springfield to the southeast where they built all the malls and new apartments. Some old folks just like to complain for being left alive so long. I’m not like that, but my knee is. I smashed it thirty years ago at Marion, wrestling with a convict and taking a tumble down some steps. It never liked walking up long stairs since.

  In the Ozarks we get about two weeks of spring before it gets hotter than a whore in church, and this was one of those fine April days after the cold and before the thunder and the heat. A fine day for bad business. The whippoorwills were still singing when I got to that big apartment building on the corner of Glenstone and Cherry, and there wasn’t any stirring in any of the apartments I could see. The building was cheap yellow siding with concrete decks for each apartment. Most of the decks had little black grills and a few beer bottles on them. Mostly young folks from the school lived there, and not many that age see the sun rise unless they didn’t sleep at all.

  There was a tiny red sports car, just like Mandy told the police, parked across two spots. And above it sat three stories’ worth of concrete steps to the door of his apartment, number 309, just like it said in the arrest report I had there in the truck. There was a good chance I’d be using both hands on the railing before I made it to the top, and out in the open where I could look like an old man in front of God and the world. I parked the truck next to his car, cutting “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” off in the middle. My grandson tells me that folks his age are listening to Johnny Cash, but he’s just a man in a costume to them. They can’t feel the music in the aches in their bones. He’s dead now besides.

  I pushed the .38 into my pocket so I wouldn’t have to hunt for it, made sure that the rope was in the bag, along with the knife and stone, the gauze, and the papers I’d taken from the courthouse. I reckon that was stealing, taking those files, but the court already decided that they’d done all they’d cared to with them. One of the papers was paper-clipped to the photo of Mandy, her eye blood-clotted, that they’d taken at the hospital. I shut the bag.

  The climb burned hellfire on my knee, and my lungs started to feel like they were coated in molasses. Lucky not to have keeled over on the landing between floors, I leaned over against the wall a spell. I thought Louise would curse me for a fool for climbing them at all. I knew damn well she’d call me a lot worse than “fool” if she learned what I had planned for the rest of the morning. So I pushed her from my mind, got up that last flight of steps, and knocked on number 309.

  It took a few times before I heard some rustling from the other side of the door. Heath Jackson opened it, looking all gummed up in the face and confused, wearing nothing but a pair of drawers. In court, he’d been spit shined and in a suit, but standing there in that doorway he looked gruff and dumb just like the sorry bastard he was.

  I guess he didn’t get too many old men with guts hanging over their belts and faces full of sweat coming to see him. He just stared at me without a hello or nothing. And he didn’t see the gun until it was right there in his face.

  “Son,” I said, “you and I have a little business to take care of.”

  When I walked the turn at Marion, I fought a lot of convicts bigger and meaner than Jackson, and I’d always gone man to man. I figured that although it might feel easier to clout the man with my club, he might figure the next day he could whup me in a fair fight. I finished that idea before they even got it. You get the best of a man because you had a piece of iron and he didn’t, well, you didn’t best him at all. The fellow who shot Jesse James proved that. So it pained me to have to use the gun to get Jackson’s attention. It was all bluff anyway. I had the drop on him, but the .38 wasn’t cocked and there weren’t but two feet between us. That young fellow could have snatched that gun from me right quick before I could have pulled the trigger and spoiled my day.

  He was a big son of a bitch, too. He played ball in school, and had those fancy-cut muscles the young men have these days. They look real nice, but to me they’re like flowers grown in a hothouse that would die if you planted them out in the real world. In my time I knew some farm boys who baled hay all day long, and maybe you couldn’t pick out every muscle they had but you’d sure as hell know they were there if that fellow pasted you.

  Like I figured, he couldn’t make a move. It don’t look like much from the side, but a barrel can look awful deep when you look straight down it. It grabs your attention. So I pushed my way inside, brushed right past him, and shut the door.

  His place smelled like an old barroom. Empty beer cans with bits of ash around the hole were piled next to the phone on the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the r
oom. That was where the sink was, and a garbage disposal, and I was going to be needing that later. The bigger part of the room had a couch facing a teevee four times the size of the one I have, and a small little dining room table with two chairs, which was just what I needed.

  “Now you just have a seat and mind your manners and I won’t paint the walls with you,” I said.

  He might have been half asleep when I got there, but he sure was awake now.

  “What is . . . who are you?”

  “Don’t remember me? Well, a man sitting in the dock has other things to do besides look for old men sitting in the stands, so I don’t take offense. I’m John Hendrix. Mandy Pearson is my granddaughter.”

  Every day he was in court, I was there. Just watching him talk with his lawyers. Looking all smug and serious and innocent as the judges and lawyers read motions and whispered at the bench. I sat there every day because Mandy needed representing, and her mother was barely able to make it through the day and her father is worthless and lives in another state now besides. I was there until the very last day. Charges just thrown out the window because Mandy took a shower to wash the stink of his touch off her before she got the nerve to call the police. “He said, she said,” they said, and that was all they were going to do about it. I saw Jackson’s cute little mask come off when the judge rapped the gavel. I saw that smile bloom on his face like a flower growing on cow shit. And I saw that prosecutor not look me in the eyes as he walked out of the room, and that was when I knew that if someone was going to stand up for Mandy, then it was going to be me.