Tales from the Crossroad, Volume 1

by Tom Piccirilli

  When he finished she said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Mullo.”

  She said it Mule-O. “That the guy smacking you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not for nothing, but you could probably put that runt through a wall. Why did you take that from him?”

  She seemed to seriously consider it. “I don’t know.”

  That’s all there was. She gazed at him like she was expecting him to berate her for it, but he said nothing. If anybody asked him how he’d wound up where he was, he’d have the same answer, the same lack of an answer.

  She went to the closet and got out a small suitcase. “It’s just the way things are. We need to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Your place?”

  It froze him to the floor. Christ no, not there. He shook his head. “No.”

  “Wife?”

  “No,” he said. The thought of going back to his place scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t go back to what and where he’d been, lost and alone and looking for a slice of pizza. The burden of inactivity and mediocrity being all he knew how to carry. No one deserved that damnation.

  He said, “It’ll be all right.”

  “No, it won’t,” she said. The dried blood was still on her face. For some reason he was glad she hadn’t washed it off. It lent a marble aspect to her beauty. “We just need a couple of days. Until he cools down. We’ll hide in a hotel. I know a couple. Then, it’ll all work itself out.”

  “It’ll work itself out anyway.”

  He finished the food and walked around her apartment, liking everything he saw. She had a nicer couch than he did, a bigger television. He stepped into the bedroom and sat on the bed. The mattress was firm but lush. There was an afghan folded and laid atop the covers, the kind your grandmother would take twelve years to crochet and give you for a wedding gift. There was a stuffed unicorn nuzzled between the pillows.

  She said, “I’ve never taken a trick here.”

  He nodded. She finished packing some stuff up. Then she stripped and took a shower, maybe expecting him to waltz in behind her. He laid on her bed and fell asleep, and when he woke the sun had gone down. She was there beside him, a little night light on in the kitchen. He couldn’t see much of her face but he didn’t need to. He used to stare at it for hours, while they sat in English class, while she ran around on the field doing cheers. His past was written into his DNA, she was woven into his cell structure. He reached for her across the dark and she slid toward him.

  “We need to–”

  “Unpack,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  It didn’t sound like him at all. Something in his voice got her hot. She tore at his clothes and abruptly he was surging forward, on fire. He didn’t know who he was anymore, and he liked it.

  He’d never made love or been made love to like that, not even by her on prom night. She’d learned her trade well. Maybe that was a lousy thought or just an honest one. It didn’t matter because it was all he had. He expected his normal gut response–the raging jealousy, the overwhelming curiosity about other men–but none of it needled him.

  He felt sharply contented, a strange and weighty sense of peace blunting all the fine points of pain. On his game for the first time in years. Maybe forever.

  There were noises outside her window. Maybe cats, maybe the homeless guy.

  In the darkness, her voice heavy with potential consequence, Lori Ann said, “Aren’t you going to ask me how I wound up walking the streets?”

  Feminine grace in the murk.

  It somehow made her more real, the fact that he could hardly even see her. They could be anyone in the night, even themselves.

  He rolled over on top of her again and told her, “No.”

  Two days later Mullo showed up at the door flanked by two burly thugs. Collie stood there, shirtless and barefoot, yawning. Mullo opened his mouth and showed off all the slivers of teeth again, pointing every which way. He said, “I told you, man, I told you I was gonna get your gizzard!”

  “What is that anyway?” Collie asked.

  “You rotten jerk, I told you that–”

  “Did you just call me a ‘rotten jerk?’”

  “I call you a–”

  Collie didn’t let him finish. He kicked out and caught Mullo in the knee, then tried again and scored the groin. It’s a move that guys are trained not to do–sort of a cheat, kinda wimpy, especially when you know it’s gonna hurt in that special guy way. But the hell with it, you’re staring down three guys you don’t have much choice.

  Mullo bent over and Collie lifted his knee into the mutt’s face and felt a nice satisfying crunch of bone. The little pimp went over backwards into one of his buddies and they both hit the floor in an awkward splay of limbs. Collie turned and threw himself against the other tough, who was gawking like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now. Everyone was the same, unsure of the next step to take, waiting for a cosmic sign.

  Collie threw the second punch of his life into the guy’s throat–well, the first one was more of a chop, but this was a punch–and listened to him make a weird gagging sound, “glck, glck, glck.”

  He didn’t know where he’d gotten this thing about hitting people in the throat, but he wasn’t about to feel guilty about it.

  He ran forward and stomped the other thug’s belly with his heel. Something inside burst. The tough let out a yelp more animal than human. Mullo struggled to get to a sitting position, holding his mashed nose between both his hands while blood poured out from between his fingers. Collie kicked him in the face. Blood looped into the air and nearly hit the mailboxes.

  He grabbed Mullo by the collar and dragged the little pimp down the length of the hall until he got to the front stoop and then threw the fucker down the stairs. He didn’t bounce so well this time. Collie moved back down the corridor to where the thugs were both rolled into tight balls, sobbing, sucking air between their clenched teeth. Collie stepped over them, went inside the apartment, and shut the door.

  In the dark, her hair spread across his belly, she asked, “Any kids?”

  “No.”

  “You wanted two. A boy and a girl. To live with you and your wife in your big house on the hill.”

  He didn’t remember ever discussing that with her back in the day, but there it was. What else had he forgotten? He reached for her hand but she was holding a cigarette in one and a glass of JD in the other. The red tip burning, the ice clattering.

  ”Whatever happened to your Charger?” she asked.

  He thought about it for a long time. By the time he spoke, she was asleep. “I have no idea.”

  The next time he saw Mullo, the mutt was coming up the stoop stairs with a switchblade out. His eyes were a burnished black, and his nose twisted in three or four different directions across his face. It would never look normal again, no matter how many operations he went in for.

  Collie knew almost nothing about knives, but even he knew a switchblade wasn’t a good weapon. Back when he was racing he’d seen two guys with a Fifties fixation go at it behind the airport once. Both wearing identical leather jackets, hair combed into perfect ducks’ asses, thinking more about Jimmy Dean and West Side Story than actually hurting one another. You could tell that when they moved they had a theme song going through their skulls and they were trying to dance to it. One guy stabbed forward, missed, and the blade snapped off against the drivers’ window of the other guy’s car. Just as well. The other one’s switch had gotten stuck, the little gizmo failing to lock. His knife looked like wet spaghetti. They made up and everybody got trashed.

  So Mullo made a move for Collie right there on the steps in broad daylight. A few people around but not many. The homeless guy still there, maybe dead now behind the trash can.

  Mullo was serious about this gizzard shit. Who could’ve guessed? Guy mentions cutting off your gizzard you figure, maybe it’s a metaphor. Makes a little more sense on
a figurative level. But no, this one here, he’s actually making little sawing motions back and forth as he approaches.

  Waiting, Collie felt calm and filled with an unnatural patience. It shook Mullo. He ducked down, like he was trying to be a snake in the grass, slithering unseen. He moved up the steps doing a zig-zag, serpentine, having watched too many ninja movies.

  Collie continued to wait. It was taking forever.

  He let loose with a sigh and stood on the top step looking around, feeling a million eyes on him. The city forever watching its children.

  The mutt finally got there but said nothing.

  No talk of gizzards, no cussing, no insults. He stabbed his switchblade toward Collie’s belly and Collie almost thought he should let it enter him, part the flesh and go in deep to dig out all the venom inside him.

  Instead, he drew in a breath and the blade missed him by an inch.

  The force of his own swing twirled Mullo around in a wild pirouette. He whirled on the top step until he was facing away from Collie and using his arms to try to keep his balance. The wind moved against Collie’s back, patting him, pressing him on. The hands of a ghost, perhaps his own, gave him a push.

  Collie booted the runt in the ass and Mullo shot down and landed on his face on the sidewalk. He lay there unmoving with blood seeping across the concrete, lapping into the cracks. Mullo tried to get to his knees but couldn’t make it.

  Collie sighed again. He’d forgotten what he’d come outdoors for in the first place. He gave a final look around the street, scratched his chin, and went back inside.

  In the dark, with her face pressed to his sweaty chest, she asked, “Don’t you need to go to work?”

  He said, “No.”

  “Nobody’s going to miss you?”

  “There’s no one to miss me.”

  “Somebody.”

  “Nobody.”

  He thought he should ask her the same thing, but didn’t want to touch on that aspect of her past. She’d either given up the life or put it on hold while he was here. Sometimes men would call her cell and she’d tell them she was busy. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer. Once it was her mother. In five seconds they were screaming at each other. Collie drew the cell from her hand and hung it up.

  They listened to the nightscape. Hearing the traffic that never eased up, sirens, horns, occasional shouts, and the odd murmurs of neighbors on the floor above and the floor below. The distant groans and the creaking of bones and buildings, alive or dying, or already long dead.

  “What happened to you, Collie?” she asked.

  It took him a while to respond.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s ever happened to me.”

  Next time he saw Mullo, the mutt was breaking in the front door. Collie stood there naked and watched the little creep come at him with a 9mm. He wondered which of them was more stupid. Which had less to lose.

  Mullo yelled, “Aye gwanna keelyah!”

  Collie frowned. Not only was the guy’s nose nothing more than a smashed mudpie swathed in bandages, but he’d bitten off the tip of his tongue at some point too. Mullo fired once and Collie felt a whining insect go flying by his ear. He walked forward, the hands still pushing him. Mullo fired again and a small but painful burn erupted along the side of Collie’s head. He smelled burning hair. He tapped at his temple and sparks floated down. He hoped it would take out some of the gray.

  Time went nowhere fast. Mullo seemed unsure of what to do next, of where to point the gun as Collie continued to approach. He stared at the weapon as if something might be wrong with it. He lifted the 9mm higher and tried to make a better effort of aiming. He was concentrating so hard that the nub of his tongue appeared between his lips. Looked like there were eight or nine stitches in it.

  Collie got his hand on the pistol, pulled it aside, and punched the little mutt in the guts. Mullo let go of the 9mm and slowly turned around in defeat like he was just going to leave. Maybe thinking, Damn, I’ve screwed it up again. No big thing.

  Collie let out a chuckle, a weird enough sound that it made the little pimp turn around and stare at him again.

  He cracked Mullo in the forehead with the butt of the 9mm. The pimp fell backward into the hall. Collie did it again and Mullo moved another few feet back. It took three more tries before he was out on the front stoop. Blood poured into Mullo’s eyes. He grinned with red lips. Everybody was always grinning with red lips. Collie was starting to get the same sense of this life as he’d had in the other one, that the things he was doing weren’t affecting enough change, that he was living in a ceaseless pattern of repetition. His calm dissipated and a terrible panic filled him.

  He extended his arm and shot Mullo through the head. He watched the lid of the guy’s skull snap apart and veer into three different directions, a pulse of blood and brain whipping against the tree growing there with the roots busting through the concrete. The little pimp tottered on his heels for a second and then dropped straight down.

  Collie had just killed a man, but all he could think about was, Well, at last, here’s something new.

  Someone screamed. It was the homeless guy, who didn’t look all that worse for wear, really. He was maybe twenty-three, had some light peach fuzz on his chin, a sixty dollar haircut. Not homeless at all, just some suburban punk hanging around spending his father’s money, getting loaded night after night, sleeping it off. Collie thought of shooting him in the ass on general principle, teach the creep to go home and do it right.

  The guy shrieked again and backed away down the sidewalk before turning and running, waving his arms in the air. Up the block a cab stopped and some people got out. An old woman started yelling in Yiddish.

  Collie stared at Mullo’s body and had no idea what to do. Leave it there? Drag it into the alley? Throw some garbage bags over it? All further action seemed beneath him. He was still holding the gun and clenched it to his chest. He turned around and went back inside, thinking about what the counselor might say about all this, wanting to pop that judgmental prick too.

  It was kind of funny, actually, the way they were shouting into their bullhorns. You couldn’t hear a damn thing anyone was saying. Boots stormed up the stairs and stomped across the floors above. Shadows filled the corridor and slid under the door, they were moving all around the building but nobody had so much as knocked yet. So much for the negotiations.

  In the dark, she waited with him and he said, “You should leave.”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  “You could go back home.”

  “I don’t remember where that is.”

  He started to tell her but he’d forgotten it himself. What town had they lived in? What school had they gone to? He thought if he fought for the memory hard enough it would emerge and present itself, but the dreams continued to gather and he couldn’t focus.

  With the cops heaping into the building, he figured, Well, here it is. That was all right, it was better than whatever he’d had a week ago, utterly alone and without purpose. He felt his soul drift a moment. It was a beautiful, wondrous revelation. Lori Ann moved in behind him and kissed the back of his neck, pressed her face between his shoulders. He moaned because it was so good, so right. It gave him another moment’s edge when his will might’ve been waning. He felt her lips moving into a broad smile against his flesh, her body shaking as she began to giggle, and then his own laughter was rising from him. The door opened and the room filled. He heard music again, filling him. He lifted the 9mm. He saw the house on the hill, watched the door open, saw Lori Ann and their two kids–a boy and a girl–come walking out, dressed fancy for some holiday. Maybe Easter.

  PREVIEW FROM:

  Nightjack

  EDITOR'S NOTE: The Following is an excerpt from the novel Nightjack by Tom Piccirilli. This is Chapter One.

  One

  Are you cured?

  They actually ask you that right before you step back into the world. While you’re standing there in the corridor, twenty feet fr
om the front door, holding tightly to your little bag of belongings. You’ve got a change of clothing, five or six prescriptions, the address and phone number of a halfway house. A few items they let you make in shop, what they called the Work Activities Center. Maybe a birdhouse. A pair of gloves that didn’t fit.

  Pace had an ashtray and a folded-up pair of pajamas that he’d stitched together himself on an old-fashioned sewing machine. It reminded him of the one William Pacella’s grandmother had in her bedroom. She used to make clothes for the whole family, had this big sewing basket with two thousand miles of multi-colored threads and yarn. She’d crochet sweaters for him every year for Christmas. Always in the hairnet, wearing black, she’d say, Non strappi questi, mie mani sono vecchio. Don’t rip these, my hands are old. Pacella would hug her and hear the click of her poorly-fitted dentures as she pressed her wrinkled lips to his cheek.

  Are you cured?

  A final test to see if you’re really on your toes. Like you might suddenly drop, fling the pajamas aside, and thump your chest with your fists. Cry out, No, I’m still insane, you’ve found me out, seen through my thin charade, damn your eyes.

  But then again, you could never tell, it had probably happened before.

  So they escort you back to your room, unfold your pajamas, put the ashtray back on the nightstand, and get your slippers ready for your feet again. You step into the lounge area and all the other headcases look at you like the prize screw-up you are. Sort of laughing while they say, You botched the question, didn’t you. We practiced and rehearsed but you went and told them the truth, that you were still nuts. The hell’s the matter with you?