by ed. Pela Via
———
I scrub the handcuffs clean with an old toothbrush. Pink foam collecting in the drain. I rinse them down and let the water take care of the sink before I tiptoe in the bedroom and clip the cuffs back to the headboard, slow and easy so the clicking doesn’t wake her. She’s wrapped herself in the entire blanket and spread out to take over the whole damn bed. She the-opposite-of-snores. Some nights I wake sweating and wonder if she’s even breathing. She always is.
Her leg’s sticking through the blanket, the only exposed skin on the bed. I can see the tattoo wrapping around her ankle, script doubling back on itself, but it’s too dark to make out the “Don’t mourn; Organize!” that she covers with her slacks or boots before going to work every day. She explained it to me once, but I don’t quite remember what it means. Something about being the only communist around and without her organization when we moved to this town, she felt like she had to get it. She explained the dialectics of drug dealing to me, too, and though I’m a poor study at such things, I detected the sarcasm.
She’s got the bed pretty well staked out, so I take the couch in the living room. I lie back and close my eyes but there’s this restlessness I can’t shake. My mind’s clear now, empty, but there’s this twitching feeling in my legs and I feel like I have to move. I feel alert, in control. Assertive. It’ll fade tomorrow at work but for now I lie still and enjoy it.
———
The lack of sleep clings in a film to my eyes and I’m blinking too much. It’s just the new guy and me this morning. When I told him to take the register, he didn’t argue. It’s a bit less work than stocking shelves if we’re not too busy, which is always. He took a look at my face and decided not to ask questions.
I’m feeling good, all told, but I don’t feel like dealing with customers, especially if one knows Andy, asks why he’s not here. And it took me a bit to fall asleep last night, so I look worse than I am. The trick here is going to be to sink into stocking shelves, like I’m blocking out everything I’m thinking and just going through the motions. It shouldn’t be too hard.
I get seven DVDs into the bin of new releases I’m working on, to which of course my free-movie perk doesn’t apply, before a haggard, salt-and-pepper bastard hauls two young boys in and unleashes them on the children’s section. I take one look over at the new guy at the counter and try not to grin to myself. The kids have voices like razor blades. The dad’s face is resigned and tired and there’s no damn way that he’s getting the kids out of here in less than an hour. After a couple of seconds indulged watching the new guy sweat, I turn back to the bin of movies. Company protocol is to ask if you can help him every twelve minutes. I glance to the clock, not that I want to call the kid on it. I just want to see. He called old Andy “sir” when he first started a couple weeks ago, and though my stomach did a little tap dance, it set Andy anew on his rising-up-the-ranks, by-your-own-bootstraps kick, the fading of which I’d enjoyed. I try not to think about what happened next and focus on the shelves.
While the new guy handles the poor dad I slip a gory little slasher flick behind an animated children’s film. I’m seeing a manicured mother storming in with fire and brimstone and offense taken at little Jimmy seeing such things, the new guy’s flustered face as he calls the boss in to handle it, the other customers trying not to look like they’re watching. It’s beautiful and I’ll be long gone by then. It’s a pathetic form of rebellion, but here I am.
My last shift ends in twenty minutes.
———
I walk the thirteen blocks to Stephanie’s diner after work and take a table in the far corner. It’s like walking into a cloud of grease and disinfectant. Incandescent lights burn themselves low before anyone thinks of replacing them, so the place feels like a relic, a museum representation of a long-dead breed of greasy spoon. It’s a charming little hole, run by an old married couple who probably remember sharecropping and treat their employees accordingly.
I don’t recognize Stephanie at first, as usual. Her hair is tied in a loose, functional ponytail and she plays up the Southern-waitress charm angle, calling everyone at the table next to me “hun” or “sweetie” as she gives them their receipts. I watch the transaction as discreetly as I can, by the reflection of the participants in the dirty window, and I still almost miss it. The leather booklet she hands them, filled as it is with four people’s separate checks and credit cards, barely shows the extra bulge of a carefully-placed baggie. I smile to myself, masking it as best I can with the menu. She’s at least better than Andy.
Andy’s code was never particularly subtle. The customer came in, picked out a movie, and brought it to the register, making the joke about how his girlfriend or wife or buddy told him that, out of five stars, they’d give it ten, or twenty, or, on a lucrative day, fifty. I kept waiting for one of them to slip up and say “grams” instead of “stars,” but Andy catered to a young, hip clientele, and they seemed to get off on the spy-film kitsch. He’d stuff a baggie, the large kind, so the shit was sufficiently spread out, into the movie case, under the counter where the well-accounted-for security cameras couldn’t see it, and gave the customer far too little change before sliding the movie to them with a warning about the due date.
I catch her eye and she glides over. “How’r’ya doin’ today, darlin’?”
“The accent is flawless.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Just brilliant caricature.”
She pulls out a new waitress pad, without the worn edges or phone numbers in the back, borrowed, and flips to an empty page. “Getcha somethin’?”
“Coffee. How’s business?”
She casts her eyes around. “Look at the place.”
“Yeah. How’s business?”
“Oh. It pays the bills.” She nudges my leg with her foot. “It’s a better system than Andy’s got, anyway.” I’m glad that the poor lighting has my face in shadows. I’ve decided I won’t tell her. Just let it ride. She leans in a little, like she’s asking me to repeat an order or explaining what’s in a menu item in case anyone’s watching, stalling for a little break.
The makeup she never wears anywhere but work is caked on a little more today so the bruises under her eyes just look like she’s tired. I wonder how she manages the charm angle, sometimes, with how much she clearly hates doing this. The way I ride the movie rentals at work, though, she provides us with groceries lifted from the kitchen a few times a week. This is a bit more useful than my contribution, I suppose. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t get by without petty theft, but it would be a damned sight harder.
She mock-scribbles in her pad. “You’re heading home, yeah? Off work?”
I nod. “Slow day. I kinda like that job sometimes.”
She snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s peaches.” She’s turning the Southern thing back on. “Coffee’ll be up in a sec, darlin’.”
She closes her pad and heads for the kitchen. I fold the napkin into smaller and smaller squares on the table, watching her go. She leans in through the order window and shouts something. Someone yells back, because she has to turn around and repeat herself. She touches her fingers to her temple, briefly, and I can only imagine what goes on in her head all day. She used to talk to me all the time about her coworkers, like a grand army just waiting to be mobilized. Maybe she’s right, but in this town, when you talk about a union you’re talking about the Civil War, and she left her organization behind when we left the city. She hasn’t really talked to me about it since, but it seems like she forces it down when she goes to work and plasters that smile on her face. I wonder if it’s something like schizophrenia for her, working.
———
Waiting for Stephanie to get home, I realize that I didn’t tell her at the diner that I’d quit my job. It takes me a minute to process. I don’t have any plan, and I suppose it’ll raise a couple eyebrows with the cops, if they bother to look, that I quit right after Andy died. This should trouble me, I know, but it just glides i
nto the mess of the last few days, another point I can’t quite make sense of, and I’m starting to get those too-late second thoughts, the feeling the suicide case gets the moment after his feet leave the bridge. My breathing picks up a little bit and I can feel the sweat beading on the back of my neck until I turn on the television and flip to a movie channel. A diversion. I’m already missing the free rentals, but it’s a third-tier horror film. The channel’s got my number.
The killer in his rubber mask has just hacked a cellar door to splinters when the front door’s kicked open and I jump so hard I spill bourbon down my shirt. Stephanie stomps into the house dressed in the black smock and white apron from work. She sets her waitress pad in its place next to the oven and dumps her coat on the kitchen table. The door creaks to a stop, short of closing. She curses to herself and walks back to close it, pushing it slowly closed with one finger held forward like she’s miming a gun. She comes back to the kitchen and looks over at the television, to me, and back at the television. She very nearly smiles and goes to the bedroom.
I wipe ineffectually at the bourbon on my shirt and succeed only in spreading it around. The woman onscreen comes to a bad-omen gas station with dark windows and Stephanie slinks back in. I almost don’t hear her footsteps. Her skin’s blue in the light from the screen. She’s changed clothes, something black, now, and not much of it, which means she’s probably ready to talk.
I run my thumb around the rim of my glass.
“Hey you.”
She walks toward me, slow, one foot in front of the other so heel touches toe. It has a distracting effect on her hips.
“Hello.”
We exchange pleasantries and I find myself somehow blindfolded with silk, being led to the bedroom with a demented fervor that’s still charming. Hell, she looks like a teenage babysitter when she puts her hair up, but it doesn’t do for a blindfolded man to get too lost in thought. I focus on not tripping. There are no stairs, thank heaven, and I manage my way to face-up on the bed without embarrassing myself.
I know before I hear the clink of metal that she’s going for the handcuffs, because of course that’s how it would happen. I think I’m about to have a problem with this but she fastens my wrists to the headboard and puts one hand flat against my chest and I forget to.
We’re well underway and I’m still cuffed and blindfolded, which is unusual. Most times she wants my hands free. She’s having fun, blowing off steam. My head is clear. I’m picturing her face, thinking that I can imagine her expression and not thinking much else. She’s all fingernails and teeth for the moment.
She bites down hard on my collarbone and my whole body jerks. The cuffs dig into my wrists. My voice catches in my throat. The silk over my eyes smells suddenly of dust and spilled coffee and the blood in my head is the faint whine of a power drill and I’m slipping, slipping. Long, jagged breath. I’m writhing around, slippery with sweat. Stephanie gets the cuffs and blindfold off one-handed. My eyes are confused. The first thing I make out is her smile as she pulls me over on top of her. She thinks my ragged breathing is a good sign, and maybe it is, I can’t tell anymore, but I would have no idea where to start to explain and so I go with it. My mouth has gone dry but we’re not exactly kissing.
Some time later her face is lit by the end of her cigarette. She’s got the smile on her face that means she knows she’s doing the Hays Code pose for me, smoking so the audience gets it without the director actually showing sex. Her body goes gradually limper and I can feel her drifting to sleep.
The bedroom is a sauna but I can’t stop shivering.
I nudge her with my foot. “Stephanie.”
“Mmm.”
Deep breath, Jim. “You remember saying we should move?”
———
We pull together what little money we have saved and pile boxes into Stephanie’s Pontiac. The landlord grumbles a bit about the late notice but mostly doesn’t care; we were usually late with the rent anyway. Stephanie points the car west and it seems as good an idea as any. I’m trying to be dramatic about it, looking for new-beginnings sunshine or a symbolic rainstorm, but it’s a boringly pleasant day. Partly cloudy, a little breeze. It’s an un-cinematic move but it’s a move, and I can fairly feel Stephanie trembling and grinning as we blow past the city-limits sign. She flicks her cigarette out the window at it, hits it, too, but suddenly looks a bit bashful about wasting half a smoke. I reach under her arm and snake one out of the pack when she flips it open, like somehow she won’t notice. Seems I’ve un-quit since my intimate evening with Andy. There’s probably something to that, but I don’t have to think about that anymore, try to make sense of it. I pop out the car’s lighter and hold it to her cigarette, meeting her very curious look with a rough approximation of a charming smile.
We trade off driving until we hit the desert and check into a sexy little motel, all peeling paint and mysterious stains. Stephanie flips the comforter off the bed with a sneer and sniffs at the sheets. She raises her eyebrows and shrugs, which I gather means approval.
She pulls the handcuffs from her overnight bag and closes them around the top of the headboard. “There. Home away from.”
I think she’s embracing kicking her uniform for the moment, in a too-big rag of a flannel shirt and incongruous combat boots. She turns the thermostat all the way down and flops in the chair and shakes her hair so it falls in front of her face. The hair is defiantly without ponytail and I start to relax for the first time in days.
We lounge about to network television a while until Stephanie sits up straighter and gets a serious look on her face. “Hey, Jim. I want to tell you something.” She brushes the hair out of her face.
I shrug.
She looks down. It gets my attention. “You remember the other night, yeah? When . . .” She motions to the fading bruises under her eyes.
My stomach turns to ice and I focus on keeping my face still. I thought we’d agreed on this. I thought we’d agreed without speaking that we weren’t going to go back there. No, Jim, no, that was just you.
I nod. “Yeah. Not real easy to forget.”
She maybe blushes. I can’t tell in the television light. “Yeah, well. It wasn’t the door at work. Though they never did fix it.”
I nod.
She hesitates a bit. “I went by Andy’s after work.”
“Oh.” I think she hears something in my voice because she looks over, but lets it go.
“Yeah. He was pissed about, well, doesn’t really matter. He tried to . . .” She snorts, a smile threatening the corners of her mouth. “You know how he thinks he’s a hardass.” She looks up and the smile spreads. “Anyway, I figured I’d let him stew for a bit, cut off contact. I can just see how his face’ll look when he hears we split.”
No. No, she can’t.
I just want to get this over with but don’t want to push too hard. Speak slowly. “I’m not sure I—”
“No, no, not anything like that. It’s just, I needed to vent a little, yeah?” She shakes her head. “Went by a bar after. Rock show, right? Dark inside.” She pantomimes with her elbow. “Caught one in the eye.”
My mind jerks forward in little starts. I look over to the wall, fighting down the muscles in my face and some truly stupid urges to run from the room, scream, something. I breathe deep as I can. Easy, Jim. Easy. I swallow hard and look back to her.
She shrugs. “I was embarrassed about it.”
Standing still is too much. I feel like pacing, fast, but lean against the headboard instead, slumping down until I’m lying on the bed. The floor has become unreliable.
——————————
This Will All End Well
by Nik Korpon
The bum won’t take no for an answer, and when I finally push him aside, he stumbles on his blanket and a cabbie swerves around him, falling on the horn like it’s his mattress after a twelve-hour shift. I pop the collar of my peacoat up over my neck as the wind shoves a stained diaper through the Dunkin’ Donu
ts parking lot. Half the boards in the windows have been torn away, taken to fashion lean-tos, reinforce squatters’ doors. Broken glass glitters under the streetlamp, a thousand green eyes tracking me, hiding between the spikes of grass spearing through concrete. Behind me on Boston Street, an ambulance screams past, tossing red and blue all over the place. Maybe the cabbie wasn’t as quick as I’d thought. Maybe the bum should’ve found a job instead of relying on charity. There’s a limited amount to go round these days, and I don’t fancy wasting it on him.
Adele made Thai last night, but I could really go for it again. Something that makes me sweat when I eat it. If not Thai, at least talk her into throwing together some curry, coconut naan or something. Mom would’ve taken to her nicely, Adele being a kitchen alchemist and all. Mom never was one for culinary experimentation but if anyone could’ve done it, Adele’d be the lady.
She’s a good one. By no means perfect—and with a penchant for creating situations I have to remedy—but she’s a real good one. I should make her honest, one day.
The empty street slumbers. Sneakers pendulum on the phone lines. The chain fence slinking around our building is curled at the corners. Adele said it reminded her of flapper hair, probably trying to turn the place into something classy. Feigned elegance. I told her it was the humidity that did it, but that was just because my skull had been blanched after our window unit gave up the ghost. Can’t blame her for ignoring me. With my knife, I cut two flowers from the vines clinging to the brick, twist the stems together.
Inside the hallway, sound is nothing but a memory. They marketed the building as a new artists’ haven, but there’s a high price tag on culture in this neighborhood, and WIC doesn’t cover the esoteric. A few months after we moved in, there were still only a handful of tenants in four stories of studios and the landlord had become a ghost. The privacy is nice, but I figure it won’t be too much longer till BGE turns the place dark.