by Adam Howe
His lips pursed in a tight, humorless smile. Then he said to Charlie, “The left pinkie, I think.” Like he was ordering from a bill of fare. “For starters.”
Charlie growled in my ear as I struggled. “Quit wrigglin’, lover boy, or I break the arm.” He wrenched my arm out in front of me, like a flatfoot fingerprinting a reluctant suspect. The cuck clutched my arm at the wrist, forcing my pinkie inside the cigar cutter, the guillotine blade shaving the hairs off my knuckles.
I cried, “Please!”
The blade crunched through flesh and bone with a sound like a chicken leg being torn from the carcass. My pinkie plopped to the carpet. Blood jetted from the stump. The cuck turned up the music, the crooner muffling my screams.
“Now the ring finger,” he said.
And then he took that one too; it landed right next to the pinkie.
The cuck snatched his handkerchief and daubed at his sweaty red face. My screams didn’t seem to satisfy him, and that worried the hell out of me; then he slowly teased open my robe, and that worried me even more, because I was naked as a jaybird underneath, I’d never felt more naked. He glanced down at me and clucked his tongue in disappointment. Given how scared I was, he must’ve wondered what his wife had ever seen in me. The good news for the cuck was that now, in my fear-shriveled state, I would fit inside the cigar cutter. Light glinted off the guillotine blade as he took me in his clammy hand.
Now I’m a lover, not a fighter—that’s why I was in this mess—but for as long as I was intact, I was all man. With a desperate cry, I slammed the back of my skull into the bruiser’s face. Charlie’s nose exploded like a blood-filled balloon. He gave a nasal cry but didn’t let me go. Bracing myself against him, I lashed out with both feet, kicking the cuck clear across the bedroom. He thudded into the wall, denting the plaster and slumping to the floor. The cigar cutter flew from his hands. He doubled over and sucked for air. I jacked my heels into Charlie’s kneecap—the patella popped like a pistol shot—his legs buckled and we crumpled to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Thrashing free from his grip, before he could rise, I snatched the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket on the nightstand. Wielding the bottle by the neck, I clubbed him across the temple like I was launching a ship, and he dropped to the floor, out cold or dead, I didn’t care which. Gripping the jagged bottleneck, I turned towards the cuck. He gasped and begged and pleaded as I stalked slowly towards him; with the bottleneck lodged in his throat, he could only gargle blood, his final breath hissing like a punctured tire. I sank to my knees in front of him, watching and waiting for him to bleed out. As his pupils dilated, I studied my reflection in the black mirrors of his eyes. I’d always been a lady-killer. Now here I was murderer. But I didn’t look, or even feel, any different. Had this killer been inside me all along?
The stumps of my fingers were leaking like a faucet. Blood spattered the severed digits on the carpet. I considered putting them on ice in the champagne bucket till I could find a quack to patch me back up. Picturing myself fleeing the scene with the ice bucket tucked underarm like an urn, I gave a squawk of panicked laughter that flew about the room like a trapped bird. Keep it together … I didn’t, I’d be leaving my mind here along with my fingers.
I had to get out of there. Fast. At best, the neighbors would’ve complained to the super about the gramophone playing too loud; at worst, they’d already reported the screaming to the cops. I plucked the handkerchief from the cuck’s breast pocket and bandaged my mauled mitt. Then I threw on a change of clothes. Rifling the dead man’s pockets, I found a little cash money pinned together with a gold clip—enough to buy me a bus ticket out of town—and his hipflask, a gift from a cheating wife. I slugged from the flask and glanced about the room to see if I was forgetting anything—apart from my fingers. I was about to leave the apartment and hit the road, when the cuck lurched to life with a rattling gasp, his arm snaking towards me, his hand snatching my shoulder—
And I let out a cry and my eyes snapped open and I looked up in terror at the black faces peering down at me. I shrugged off the hand that was shaking my shoulder. “We stopped, suh,” said the colored fella who’d been riding in the truck bed beside me.
Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I looked to see where we were.
For a moment, I thought I was still dreaming.
The truck was parked outside a tumbledown tonk that squatted on stilts above a swampy pond. An electric sign towered on a pole over the parking lot. THE GRINNIN’ GATOR was branded on the night in red neon, replete with an alligator that snapped his jaws when the lights flashed. Moths haloed the sign. It looked like the alligator was hungrily snapping at them. The sign seemed pretty fancy for these parts. I was surprised they even had electricity way out here.
Rusty sprang from the truck like we’d just arrived at Shangri-La.
“Comin’ inside, mister?” he said to me. “Or you headed to dark town with your friends?” He was still laughing at that doozy as he pushed through the doors and went inside the tonk. Before the doors closed behind him, I heard a chorus of wolf whistles I guessed wasn’t for Rusty—who had the kind of face only a blind mother could love—and someone murdering a tune on the piano.
A drink sounded good to me. Anything to shake off the nightmare and dull the throbbing pain in my paw. I climbed down stiffly from the truck. The coloreds were already trudging away down the unlit, unpaved road towards dark town. Except for the fella who’d woken me. He’d lingered behind to light a hand-rolled cigarette. Shaking out his match, he glared up hatefully at the red neon gator.
“Something wrong?” I said.
He started, blinking the hate from his eyes. He glanced around the lot as if to make sure he wasn’t overhead. Then he said to me, “I was you, suh. Prone to accidents an’ all.” He nodded at my bandaged hand. “I’d jest keep walkin’.”
He tipped me a tired salute and started following his friends.
I watched him ghost away into the night. Then I turned and went inside the bar. When the hell had I ever taken good advice?
2
The place was packed. Liquored-up yokels with red faces and redder eyes slouched on stools around barrel tables, pounding pitchers of beer and shots of hooch that damn near steamed when it spilled. The men corralled a crude crate stage where a dead-eyed burlesque girl was shedding her undergarments. The piano player wasn’t making it easy for the doll to kid herself what she was doing was art. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or stone deaf, but his playing—if you could call it that—was throwing off her rhythm. Not that the audience seemed to care, so long as her brassiere and britches came off, and when they did the men raised the roof. I broke into a grin. This was my kind of place, and after everything I’d been through to get here, probably more than I deserved.
Above the heads of the crowd I saw the sign for the washroom. I started clawing my way through a thick wall of cigarette smoke towards it. The bare wooden floorboards were strewn with sawdust and spackled with blood and glistened with chaw spit that’d missed the spittoons. Whoever built this place wasn’t much of a carpenter. Through the gaps in the floorboards—and there were plenty—I could see the swampy pond over which the building stood. Not to mention smell it. The owner might’ve picked a more fragrant spot, like a cesspool.
Snoring on a stool outside the washroom door was a fat man with an empty bottle in his lap. A fly buzzed around his open, largely toothless mouth; drool dangled from his bottom lip like a limp lasso. The brim of his hat was pulled down like an eyeshade. A tin sheriff’s star was pinned to the breast of his uniform shirt. Out here in the willywags, the law seemed to take a more tolerant stance on old Amendment 18 than they did in the city.
I crept past the lawman and went inside the washroom. Above the sink was a mirror. I studied my sorry reflection, cleaned up the best I could, took another look at myself and then wondered why the hell I’d bothered. My eyes looked like cigarette holes burned through a wino’s rumpled paper bag. I could’ve used a shave and then
the razor to cut my throat and put me out of my misery.
Gritting my teeth at the pain, I gingerly unwrapped the handkerchief from around my hand, choking down my disgust as I examined the scabbed stumps of my pinkie and ring fingers. The wounds didn’t look infected, just hurt like a sonofabitch. I rinsed the blood from the handkerchief under the faucet, wrung it damp, re-wrapped my mitt, took a deep breath and returned to the barroom.
The burlesque girl had just finished her routine. Before the crowd could rush the stage, she bundled her clothes to her breasts and fled out back. The piano player had a puss like a redneck Picasso. He played even uglier than he looked. Not that he seemed to know it. Hauling himself drunkenly from his stool, he took a bow as if the crowd was cheering and whistling just for him.
I went to the bar at the back of the room. Rusty was in hushed conference with the barkeep, the two men standing on either side of the long slab of oak. Behind the bar, the walls were adorned with stuffed gators, gator hides, and photos of gator hunters standing proudly with their feet propped on dead gators; the owner might not have known art, but he knew what he liked.
The barkeep cut his eyes my way and smiled around an unlit cigar stub. “Be right with you, hoss,” he said, rolling the stub from one corner of his mouth to the other. He poured Rusty a glass of hooch from a mason jar and then clapped him on the shoulder like he was petting a faithful dog. Then he started limping along the length of the bar towards me, his left leg dragging stiffly across the floor in his wake. He seemed unashamed of his infirmity. Even proud, like it was an old war wound. I wondered if I’d ever feel the same about my missing fingers? I doubted it.
I counted the change I had left on the counter and came up short. But the barkeep took pity on me. I smacked my lips as he poured. “Welcome to The Grinnin’ Gator, friend.” His voice was a rich, folksy drawl. “The name’s Horace Croker. The Double G’s my place and you are most surely welcome.”
Horace Croker was a barrel-chested, no-necked, tree stump of a man. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed to the pink of his scalp. His face was more leathery than the gator hides decorating the walls. He wore a butcher’s apron over a sweat-soaked collarless shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal smudged tattoos on his beefy forearms, a gator on one, a naked girl on the other. Around his neck was a silver chain looped with three gold wedding rings.
He slid my drink across the counter. Grinning around his cigar, flashing gray gums and brown teeth, he said, “Something happen to your paw, pardner?”
I fed him the same line I’d used earlier.
“That a fact?” he said, a knowing gleam in his eyes. “Mister … ?”
“Smith,” I said.
He arched an eyebrow. “Not John Smith?”
I feigned surprise. “You’ve heard of me.”
He leaned across the bar as if to impart a secret.
“You know,” he whispered, “I kinda took you for a Jones.”
I shook my head, “Jonesy’s my cousin.”
We both chuckled politely.
I raised my glass in a toast and then knocked back the hooch. It burned down my gullet and set my guts ablaze. I leaned against the bar and started spluttering. Croker chuckled as I struggled to compose myself.
“Goddamn,” I managed to wheeze.
“Amen,” he nodded.
“That’s good stuff.”
It was better than good; I sopped up the dregs with my finger and rubbed it into my gums.
Croker tapped his nose slyly. “Old family recipe.”
He poured me another. Knowing now what I was dealing with, I sipped it with respect. No wonder this joint was jumping. This was grade-A firewater.
“So,” Croker said, “Mister Smith—”
“John,” I insisted.
He gave a thin smile. “Rusty tells me your car broke down?”
I stifled a snort. “His name really Rusty?”
“Fits him, don’t it?”
Like a glove, I agreed.
“Then I guess you’ll be wanting a tow?” Croker said.
I grimaced apologetically. “I might’ve told Rusty a little white lie.”
“Your car didn’t break down?”
“Kinda hard to,” I said, “when I don’t even have a car.”
“How ‘bout that.”
“Truth is, Horace— Do you mind if I call you Horace?”
“I’ll be hurt if you don’t.”
“Horace,” I said. “The truth is, I’m looking for work.”
He glanced dubiously at my wounded hand. “What exactly can you do?” Like he struggled to believe I could even wipe my own ass without help. And I’ll admit it had become harder recently.
I jerked my head towards the piano player. “I can make that godawful racket stop,” I said, wincing as the guy kicked another tune while it was down.
“You play?” Croker said.
I shrugged. “A little.” A rare display of modesty.
Croker and Rusty exchanged a glance.
Then Croker fanned his arm towards the piano.
“Well, shoot, son,” he said. “Be my guest.”
Before the next coochie gal came out on stage, I weaved my way through the crowd to the piano, and told the dope perched on the stool I was cutting in.
He said, “Like hell you are—”
“Lyle!” Croker barked at him.
Lyle sprang from the stool like he’d sat on a tack.
He shuffled back from the piano, glaring daggers at me.
I shot Lyle a wink, slumped down on the cratered piano stool, and helped myself to the cigarette he’d left smoldering in the ashtray on top of the piano. I slotted the cigarette between my lips as the next burlesque girl sauntered onto the stage. She did a double take when she saw my unfamiliar mug behind the piano. She was built for both dairy and beef and I waggled the cigarette between my lips approvingly. I said to her, “Just follow my lead, toots.”
And then I broke into a one-handed boogie-woogie that lit up the joint like a firebug’s vision of hell, and she started tearing off her clothes like they burned. I hadn’t played a note since the cuck took my fingers, and I’d forgotten how good it felt. Music heals all wounds, and I played through the pain, hammering the keys with both hands now, my mangled mitt smearing the ivories with blood as I closed the show and the place erupted.
The coochie gal dragged me up off my stool to take a bow with her. Before tottering backstage, she whispered something in my ear that I might’ve been agreeable to if I wasn’t sworn off dames for life. And now that the music had stopped, my hand was screaming like a banshee. I needed fresh air and somewhere private to cry me a river.
At the back of the room, double doors led outside to a gallery deck.
I started butting through the crowd, yokels slapping my back and offering to buy me drinks, which I’d gladly accept just as soon as I’d composed myself. About the only person unimpressed by my performance was Lyle. He was pacing around the piano like a rider who’s been bucked by his horse and is nervous about getting back on. When he finally plucked up the courage and retook his stool, the crowd cursed him and pelted him with bottle tops and beer nuts.
Croker shook his head and said to him, “I reckon that’s your lot, Lyle.”
Lyle protested, whiningly. “Hell, Mister Croker, I can play that nigger music—”
“You can leave out the front door,” Croker said, “or the back.”
Lyle’s face bled white.
He chose the front door; I continued out back.
3.
The deck ended at a waist-high wooden rail overlooking the pond. The water was tar-black, treacle-thick, the surface patched with duckweed. The pungent odor of stagnation and rotting meat choked the air. Mosquitoes swarmed in a humming cloud above the swampy soup. Corrugated sheet metal formed solid walls around the pond, the walls cratered in places, as if hammered from within by a giant anvil. In the middle of the pond, a cypress tree stump lay on its side like a fallen goliath, gnarled
roots snaking up from the depths. A tattered shirttail flapped from the roots like a forlorn white flag of surrender.
Slumping against the deck rail, I unwrapped the blood-sodden handkerchief from around my hand. The scabbed stumps of my fingers wept scarlet tears that spattered my reflection on the inky black water below. The sight of the blood made me queasy. I choked down my gorge and inhaled deep breaths.
I’d thought I was alone outside. Then I heard the crackle of burning tobacco leaves as someone in the shadows dragged on a cigarette. Startled, I dropped my handkerchief, watching as it fluttered down into the pond and floated on the water like a bloody lily pad.
She stood in profile to me, silhouetted against the low full moon like a bust carved from marble. And speaking of busts, she had plenty; straining against a white silk blouse that was maddeningly close to translucent in the moonlight. Flaxen hair cascaded off her shoulders, a golden waterfall that plunged down the graceful arch of her back, before it crashed against the rounded rocks of her rump. Her lips were painted stop sign-red. She exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke that will-o’-wisped into the night … and then she cocked her head towards me. Her left eye was blackened, but it was the kind of imperfection that only drew attention to how perfectly put together the rest of her was, and I might have admired her awhile longer if I wasn’t sworn off dames for life.
“You play pretty good,” said a voice that was sin dipped in honey.