by Poppy Brite
The back door stood open, as if she had been ready to leave in a hurry. The girl stood frozen at the register, catlike face a mask of shock and fear, wide eyes fixed on Kinsey, a sheaf of twenties clutched in her hand. Her open handbag sat on the bar beside her. A perfect, damning tableau.
“Rima?” he said stupidly. “What …?”
His voice seemed to unfreeze her. She spun and broke for the door. Kinsey threw himself over the bar, shot out one long arm, and caught her by the wrist. The twenties fluttered to the floor. The girl began to sob.
Kinsey usually had a couple of local kids working at the Yew, mostly doing odd jobs like stocking the bar or collecting money at the door when a band played. Rima had worked her way up to tending bar. She was fast, funny, cute, and (Kinsey had thought) utterly trustworthy, so much so that he had let her have a key. When he had another bartender, he didn’t have to stay until closing time every night; on slow nights someone else could lock up. It was almost like having a mini-vacation. But keys had a way of getting lost, or changing hands, and Kinsey didn’t entrust them to many of his workers. He had believed he was a pretty good judge of character. The Sacred Yew had never been ripped off.
Until now.
Kinsey reached for the phone. Rima threw herself across him, grabbing for it with her free hand. They struggled briefly for the receiver; then Kinsey wrested it free and easily held it out of her reach. The phone cord caught her purse and swept it onto the floor. The contents spilled, skittered, shattered. Kinsey tucked the receiver into the hollow of his shoulder and began to dial.
“Kinsey, no, please!” Rima grabbed futilely for the phone again, then sagged back against the bar. “Don’t call the cops …”
His finger paused over the last number. “Why shouldn’t I?”
She saw her opening and went for it. “Because I didn’t take any money. Yes, I was going to, but I didn’t have time … and I’m in trouble, and I’m leaving town. Just let me go and you’ll never see me again.” Her face was wet with tears. In the half-light of the bar Kinsey could not see her eyes. Her wrist was so thin that his hand could have encircled it two or three times; the bones felt as fragile as dry twigs. He eased his grip a little.
“What kind of trouble?”
“I went to the Planned Parenthood clinic over in Corinth …”
Kinsey just looked at her.
“You want me to spell it out?” Her sharp little face went mean. “I’m pregnant, Kinsey. I need an abortion. I need five hundred dollars!”
Kinsey blinked. Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it. Rima had arrived in Missing Mile just a few months ago. Among local guys who had asked her out and been turned down, the word was that she carried a torch for the guitarist of a speed metal band back in her native California. So far as Kinsey knew, she hadn’t been back to California recently. “Who …?” he managed.
“You don’t know him, okay?” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “An asshole who wouldn’t wear a rubber because that’s like taking a shower with a raincoat on. There’s plenty of ’em around. They shoot their wad and that’s the last thing they have to worry about!” Now her mean face had collapsed; she was crying so hard she could barely choke out the words. “Kinsey, I slept with the wrong guy and he’s not going to help me out, he won’t even talk to me. And I don’t want any goddamn baby, let alone his.”
“At least tell me who. I could talk to him. There are things …”
She shook her head violently. “NO! I just want to go to Raleigh and get rid of it. I won’t come back to Missing Mile. I’ll go to my sister’s place in West Virginia, or maybe back to L.A.… Please, Kinsey. Just let me go. You won’t see me around here again.”
He studied her. Rima was twenty-one, he knew, but her body seemed years younger: barely five feet tall, breastless and hipless, all flat planes and sharp angles. Her straight, shiny brown hair was held back with plastic barrettes like a little girl’s. He tried to imagine that childish body swollen with pregnancy, could not. The very idea was painful.
“I can’t give you any money,” he said.
“No, I wouldn’t—”
“But you can take your last pay envelope. It’s there on the bulletin board.” Kinsey let go of her wrist and turned away.
“Oh, God, Kinsey, thank you. Thank you.” She knelt and began scraping together the contents of her purse. When she had searched out everything in the dimness of the bar, she went to the bulletin board and took down her envelope. Kinsey was hardly surprised to see her glance into it as if making sure enough money was there. She turned and stared at him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to say anything else.
“Good luck,” he told her.
Rima looked surprised, and a little guilty. Then, as if the milk of human kindness were too heady a potion for her parched soul, she spun on her heel and left without another word.
There goes my mini-vacation, Kinsey thought.
Thirty minutes later, with the lights turned up and the swampy area behind the bar half-mopped, he found the little white packet.
It was nestled in a crack in the wooden floor directly below the spot where Rima’s purse had spilled. With the lights off, as they had been when Kinsey caught her, it was unlikely that she would have spotted it. Kinsey bent, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. It didn’t look like much: a tiny twist of plastic, the corner of a Baggie perhaps, with an even tinier pinch of white powder inside. No, it didn’t look like much at all. But Kinsey knew it for what it was: a towering monument to his gullibility.
She could still be pregnant, he reasoned as he walked to the restroom. She really could need money for an abortion. Somebody could be giving her coke. Maybe she was even selling the shit to get the money she needed.
Yeah, right. The things she had said about the father of her embryo—if embryo there was—hardly suggested that he would be giving her free drugs. And Kinsey knew that the market for cocaine in Missing Mile was very poor indeed. You could hardly turn around without bumping into a pothead or a boozehound, and they treated psychedelics like candy, but coke was another thing. Most of the younger kids seemed to think it was boring: it didn’t tell them stories or give them visions, didn’t drown their pain, didn’t do anything for them that a pot of strong coffee couldn’t do for a fraction of the price. They would probably snort coke if it was handed to them, but they wouldn’t spend their allowances on it. And most of the older townie crowd couldn’t afford it even if they wanted it.
Rima, though, seemed to have had a constant low-grade cold for the last couple of months. She was always going to the restroom to blow her nose, but she always came back still sniffling. How clear was hindsight.
You could still call the cops, Kinsey told himself as his cupped palm hovered over the toilet bowl, ready to tip the little packet in. Show them this stuff. She couldn’t be far out of town yet.
His hand tilted. There was a tiny splash, barely audible; the packet floated serenely on the still surface of the water.
She had every intention of ripping you off. Bust her.
His fingers found the flush lever, pushed it. There was a deafening liquid roar—Kinsey thought the plumbing in this building was of approximately the same vintage as the Confederate boardinghouses up the street—and the packet was gone.
Pregnant or not, she’s in some kind of trouble. That’s one thing she wasn’t lying about. Why make it worse for her?
Later, mopping the floor near the stage, he glanced up at the art wall. The words WE ARE NOT AFRAID gleamed softly at him, and he knew that wherever Rima was now, whatever she was doing, those words did not hold true for her.
He could not resent letting her take her last pay, though. There was always a chance she would use the money to help herself, to get away from whatever (or whoever) had made her stash cocaine in her pocketbook and steal from people who wished her well. There was always a chance.
Yeah. And there was always a chance that John Lennon would rise from the dead and the Be
atles would play a reunion show at the Sacred Yew. That seemed about as likely.
Kinsey shook his head dolefully and kept mopping.
Zachary Bosch awoke from fascinating dreams, pulled the pillow off his face, rubbed his eyes, and blinked up at the green lizard on the ceiling just above his head.
He slept in a small alcove at the side of the room, where the ceiling was lower and cozier than the rest of his lofty French Quarter apartment. The plaster here was soft and slightly damp, cracked with age, yellowed from two years of Zach smoking in bed. Against the dingy plaster the lizard was a vivid, iridescent green. Children in New Orleans called such creatures chameleons, though Zach believed they were actually anoles.
He reached for the ashtray next to the bed and the lizard was gone in a brilliant flicker of motion. Zach knew from experience that if you were fast enough to catch them by the tail, the thready appendage would come off, still twitching, in your hand. It was a game he often played with the little reptiles but seldom won.
He found the ashtray without looking, brought it up and nestled it in the hollow of the sheet between the small sharp mountains of his hipbones. In the ashtray was a tightly rolled joint that had been the size of a small cigar, a panatela or whatever the things were called. Zach hated the taste of tobacco and its harsh brown scorch in his lungs; he never touched the stuff. His friend Eddy put it simply if inelegantly: “If it’s green, smoke it. If it’s brown, flush it.”
Zach had smoked half of this particular green the night before, while concocting a news story to plant in the Times-Picayune just to amuse himself, a tasteful little number about some petrified fetus parts removed from a woman’s womb ten years after an illegal back-alley abortion. If it wasn’t true, it ought to be—or rather, the public ought to think it was. In today’s moral climate (cloudy, with a fascist storm front threatening), illegal abortions needed all the bad publicity they could get.
He had made sure to stress that the woman suffered great pain, bloated grotesquely, and was of course rendered infertile. By the time he finished writing the article, Zach had caught himself feeling tender, almost protective, toward his hapless fiction. She was a true martyr, the finest kind of scapegoat, a vessel for imaginary pain so that real pain might be thwarted.
Zach felt for a book of matches on the floor, found some from Commander’s Palace, lit the joint and sucked smoke in deep. The flavor filled his mouth, his throat, his lungs, a taste as bright green as the lizard. He stared at the match-book, which was a darker green. The restaurant was one of the oldest and most expensive in the city. A friend of a friend who was deep in hock on his American Express card had taken Zach to the bar there recently, and charged Zach’s four extra-spicy Bloody Marys to his Visa. They always did shit like that. Stupid patterns, intricate webs they wove that ended up trapping themselves most tightly of all.
Geeks, marks, and conspiracy dupes. In the end they all amounted to the same thing: sources of income for Zachary Bosch, who was none of the above.
His third-floor apartment was full of dust and sunlight and tons upon tons of paper. His friends who knew his reading habits, his smoking habits, and his squirreling habits swore the place was one of the most hair-raising fire hazards in all New Orleans. Zach figured it was damp enough to discourage any flames that escaped his notice. In deep summer, water stains spread across the ceiling and the fine old molding began to sweat and seep.
The paint had long since begun to peel, but this never bothered Zach, since most of the walls were covered with scraps of paper. There were pictures torn from obscure magazines that had reminded him of something; newspaper clippings, headlines, or sometimes single words he had put up for their mnemonic effect. There was a large head of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, High Epopt of the Church of the Subgenius and one of Zach’s favorite personal saviors. “Bob” preached the doctrine of Slack, which (among other things) meant that the world really did owe you a living, if only you were smart enough to endorse the paycheck. There were phone numbers, computer access codes and passwords scribbled on yellow Post-it notes whose glue would not stick in the damp. These last were constantly fluttering down from the walls, creating canary drifts among the debris on the floor, and sticking to the soles of Zach’s sneakers.
There were boxes of old correspondence, magazines, yellowing newspapers from all over the world and in several languages—if he couldn’t read an item, he could find someone to translate it inside of an hour—distinguished dailies and raving tabloids. And books everywhere, crammed into shelves that covered one wall nearly to the high ceiling, spread open or with pages marked beside his bed, stacked into Seuss-like towers in the corners. There was every kind of fiction, telephone books, computer manuals, well-thumbed volumes with titles like The Anarchist’s Cookbook, High Weirdness by Mail, Principia Discordia, Steal This Book, and other useful bibles. A cheap VCR and a homemade cable box were rigged up to a small TV; the whole setup was nearly hidden behind stacks of videocassettes.
Pushed up against the far wall was the heart of the chaos: a large metal desk. The desk was not visible as such, though Zach could find anything on, in, or around it in a matter of minutes. It was heaped with more papers, more books, shoeboxes full of floppy disks, and the unmistakable signature of the ganja connoisseur: an assortment of ashtrays overflowing with ashes and matches, but no butts. Marijuana smokers, unlike those who indulged in tobacco, did not leave spoor.
In the center of the desk, rising above the ashtrays and drifts of paper like some monolith of plastic and silicon, was a computer. An Amiga with an IBM card and Mac emulation that allowed it to read disks from several different kinds of computers, a sweet little machine. It was equipped with a large-capacity hard disk, a decent printer, and—most important for his purposes—a 2400-baud modem. This inexpensive scrap of technology, which allowed his computer to communicate with others via any number of telephone lines, was his meal ticket, his umbilical cord, his key to other worlds and to parts of this world he had never been meant to see.
The modem had paid for itself several hundred times over, and he had only had this one for six months. He had an OKI 900 cellular phone and a laptop computer as well, with a built-in modem to keep him mobile in case of emergencies.
Zach hunched himself up on his elbows, stuck the joint in his mouth, and raked a hand through his thick black hair. Some French Quarter deathrockers spent hours before the mirror trying to achieve the precise combination of unnatural-looking blue-ebony hair and bloomless translucence of skin that had been visited upon Zach by simple genetics.
It came from his mother’s side of the family. They looked as though they’d grown up in basements, not that most of them had ever been anywhere near a basement, since they’d been in Louisiana for five generations or more. His mother’s maiden name was Rigaud, and she hailed from a muddy little village down in the bayou country where the most exciting thing that ever happened was the annual Crawfish Festival. The hair and dark almond-shaped eyes, he guessed, came from her Cajun blood. The pallor was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it came from all the time she had spent in various mental hospitals, in gloomy dayrooms and harsh fluorescent corridors, as if such a thing could be inherited.
She was probably in some lockup now, if she was still alive. His father, a renegade Bosch who claimed a lineage back to Hieronymus but whose visions had all been seen through the bottom of a whiskey bottle, had long since disappeared into some steamy orifice of the city’s night-side. Zach had just turned nineteen, and though he had lived in New Orleans all his life, he had seen neither of his parents for nearly five years.
Which was fine. All he wanted of them was what he carried with him: his mother’s weird coloring, his father’s devious intelligence, a tolerance for hard liquor that exceeded either of theirs. Drinking never made him mean, never made him bitter, never made him want to punch someone young and small and defenseless, to bruise tender flesh, to steep his hands in blood. He supposed that was the main difference between him and his parents.
Zach had a habit of pulling his hair and snarling it around his fingers while he was reading or staring at the computer screen between keystrokes. As a result, it grew into a kind of mutant pompadour that cast the sharp planes and hollows of his face into shadow, exaggerated his pointed chin and thin peaky eyebrows and the gray smudges of computer strain around his eyes.
Last year a ten-year-old kid on Bourbon Street had run after him calling Hey, Edward Scissorhands! He hadn’t known what it meant at the time, but when Eddy showed him an ad for the movie of that name, Zach was as close to shocked as he ever got. The resemblance was scary. He held the picture next to his face and stared in the mirror for a long time. At last he took comfort in the fact that he never wore black lipstick and Edward Scissorhands never wore big, round, geeky black-rimmed glasses like Zach’s.
The movie bothered him, though, when Eddy took him to see it. He always enjoyed watching Tim Burton’s films—they were eye candy, for one thing—but they left him feeling vaguely pissed off. They all seemed to have an agenda of relentless normalcy hiding behind a thin veil of weirdness. He’d loved Beetlejuice until the last scene, which sent him storming from the theater and left him kicking things all day. The sight of Winona Ryder’s character, formerly strange and beautiful in her ratted hairdo and smudged eyeliner, now combed out and squeaky clean, clad in a preppy skirt and kneesocks and a big shit-eating sickeningly normal grin … it was entirely too much to bear.
But that, Zach supposed, was Hollywood.
He took one more drag on the joint and snuffed it out in the ashtray. It was excellent pot, bright green and sticky with resin that smelled like Christmas trees, quick to set the brain buzzing and humming. He hoped somebody at the Market would have more. Zach felt around on the floor again, found his glasses, and put them on. The world stayed blurry at the edges, but that was just the drugs.
Something nudged his hip beneath the sheet. The remote control for the TV and VCR. He aimed it at the screen and smiled as he thumbed the ON button.