by Michael Pool
When she followed him to Gary, when they’d given up on New York, she discovered this town was Rich. Park waters a beautiful polluted green and failed manufacturing. Liz gripped the wheel and leaned hard on the gas. She was greeted with fifty billboards on the highway:
Had an accident? Suffering from Black Lung, Cancer, Emphysema? Free Complete Pulmonary Evaluation. Don’t give up. Plinski and Danforth can help!
Night Angels Gentleman’s Club.
Whispers. Discount Furs. Impress her!
Yep. Fast money.
Rich still hadn’t texted when Liz pulled into Victor’s Steak and Tap, the last strip club before the Illinois state line. It was a favorite not just with truckers, but with people not wanting to pay Chicago’s strip club prices. It was a strange crowd. It had a few patrons who looked burned out and ready to hide.
She parked behind the building, hiding her car from the road. She lit a cigarette, struggled with her prescription. She needed people with their shit together. She craved it. But she also wanted people who were real, and that was sort of the rub, why she moved someplace rural. Her mom’s family and friends were fake. Brooklyn had been full of fakes. Now she was way the hell and gone from where she thought she would be. She tipped her head back, swallowed, put the envelope in her purse.
Inside, she scanned Victor’s. Janet was nowhere. Liz sat down at the bar, ordered a whiskey and waited for the Xanax to kick in.
This was one of those dive places to strip. She had always done better, made a grand a night. Don’t talk to her about daddy issues or hearts of gold. That was the mythology of stripping. And she had no problem going back if needed.
But dancing at this place would be like working at Denny’s if you were a good waitress. Depressing. She downed her whiskey and ordered another. A dude with longish black hair who looked out of place was giving her the eye. He looked like Joaquin Phoenix.
Her phone buzzed. Rich. Where the fuck are you?
Victor’s. Answer your texts next time! No response. She laid down a veiled 'fuck you.' Get a ride with Derek!
Derek managed to be less reliable than Rich. If Rich was Gary, Derek was Gary’s dirty cousin. His ass was supposed to be at Victor’s too. Of course, he was nowhere to be found. Liz had texted him too. Surprise. No response.
Joaquin’s double was giving her a gross look, but she was bored, so she didn’t stop him from taking the seat beside her. "Hey, I’m Cary."
He smiled at her and continued, "You wouldn’t believe it. They were shooting a movie down at the river. Some cop show," he said. He was drunk but still seemed a little dangerous.
"No they weren’t," said Liz. She shot her whiskey to make it more tolerable to talk to him.
"Is that hard to believe? I guess beautiful girls have a hard time believing second-hand stories."
"It’s a little early to flirt like your life depended on it."
"Don’t flatter yourself. Did you ever see Silence of the Lambs?" said Cary.
"Everyone has seen The Silence of the Lambs." She stressed the word The. He didn’t notice.
"You know how that guy just fools girls into getting into his van?"
"That movie is so disturbing."
"But, you know what I’m talking about?"
"I’ve seen the movie. It’s on cable all the time, dipshit."
"Well, you know how he just gets them to climb in the back of the truck, and then like pushes that heavy piece of furniture into them? Then he gets them to his house. But after he kills them, he weights them in the river. "
Liz hoped he wasn’t the kind of drunk to spool out unconscious thoughts. "It wasn’t my favorite movie." She slowly wiped her mouth and raised her hand for another drink.
"Doesn’t have to be. I’m just saying, that down there by the river, they had kind of one of those dead-body-in-the-reeds-thing happening. And, that’s what they were filming."
"Really?" She tried to convey she wasn’t interested. She stopped mid-sip, when the bartender gave her the "too-fast" eye. Everyone feels they need to parent an attractive woman. But they can fuck off.
"Yeah. It’s hidden back on the Calumet. I guess they’re going to make money in some poor town where they don’t have to pay much to use the land. Movies are kind of a big business, what with all the franchises."
Liz turned to look at him like he wasn’t for real.
"It’s all the Marvel Comic adaptations," said Cary.
Something in this dude reminded her of her brother. He and her mom were huge film nerds. The three of them went to The Music Box weekly. She relaxed a little. "You seem like a freak for movies." And also an idiot, she thought.
"Me and my mom used to go a lot. When I lived in the city," said Cary.
They swapped stories about Chicago. Liz had forgotten Janet, and was drunk by the time Derek arrived and gave her a shitty look. "Bitch," he mouthed from the door. He walked up to Cary, picked up the dude’s whiskey and downed it. "Fuck off," he said.
Cary laughed.
"Derek," said Liz. She put a hand over her drink and smiled up at him.
Derek said nothing, but nodded toward the back of the bar, where Janet sat alone in a booth, looking freaked out.
"You fucked up, Liz," said Derek.
Liz realized she had been talking to this dope, Cary, long enough to miss Janet’s arrival. Fuck. Liz threw down a twenty. "Nice talking to you."
Rich was standing at the door. He had spotted her and looked super-pissed she was talking to some dude. Rich was sensitive, but everyone was, so Liz couldn’t fault him. It was hard to tell when someone was really going to leave. Once he became jealous over a bartender hitting on her, and he called her nothing but "slut" for a month. She’d matched him with "pussy" for that same month, aware of the irony. To her, it wasn’t a bad thing. Fuck him if he took it negatively. She wanted to explain the irony to him, but didn’t have the energy.
When they walked to the table, Liz tried to pry her mind out of the film talk—specifically The 400 Blows, which she had studied in film class. Cary was going on about it. Some dude in Indiana knew about French New Wave. Amazing. She couldn’t get her head back on their task and Rich looked like an alien, sad and pathetic, just staring at her.
He took her arm. "I called you," he said.
Liz pulled her arm away.
"I didn’t see you guys. I thought you pussed out," said Janet. She smoked her cigarette incredibly fast. She was so high, the words spilled out in an explanation of what she’d done since they saw her.
"Let’s go outside," said Derek.
"Wait a sec. Are we leaving?" said Liz.
"I ain’t doing shit here," said Derek.
Rich’s fingers pressed into her upper arm, and he smelled of cigarettes and booze. The thrash metal made it hard to hear, so she leaned closer. "Let’s get this done," he said. It sounded meaningful, but he was looking at Derek.
There were those times in Liz’s life when a realization began to surface, but retreated again without warning—some small fish swimming to the top of her consciousness. Who knew what it meant? But, she stood there and blinked.
"Hold on. I have to piss," she said. She wrenched her arm away, and Rich looked at the floor. "That’s what I thought," she said. Whatever optimism he exuded last night was gone, and his expression had become one of terror.
Liz ran to the bathroom, feeling nauseated and breathing heavily. She reached into her purse, pulled out the envelope and fumbled with it. She stopped. She took a deep breath and wished she were already in Chicago. She could just walk out and tell Rich to fuck off, drive to see her mom, who would listen without judgment. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, her pale skin feathered with lines. She pulled two grand from her thick stack. She would give them the two grand, say she wouldn’t have the rest until Monday. She’d say her mom still had it. It was safe.
Someone was knocking. "Fucking wait a second," she said. She reached into the paper towel dispenser, slid the large stack—eleven thousand mi
nus the two—as far up as she could get it. She scraped her hand on the lip of the dispenser trying to do it.
"Hurry the fuck up," a woman yelled through the door.
She thrust her hand under the sink tap. She could easily get this when she came back for her car. If something worse happened, some stripper would find it when washing the stink off. More power to that bitch. This place was an inglorious, industrialized strip-tank. Hopefully, she would realize she could do better.
She cleaned away the makeup smudges in the mirror and walked out.
Rich was waiting. "What the fuck? Are you trying to make me crazy?"
"Nothing,” said Liz.
"Don’t ruin this," said Rich.
After all that, Rich and Derek "had to talk to the owner" and made Liz and Janet wait outside not speaking, Janet slowly sipping her flask and staring at the highway. "You’re an awful bitch," said Liz.
Janet took a drink from her flask and didn’t turn around. Whatever camaraderie there was between the dudes inside, it was totally gone between Janet and Liz. Shivering, Liz watched the highway too.
Derek and Rich came out. Rich told Janet. "We’ll follow."
"Another location?" said Janet.
"I said we ain’t talking here," said Rich.
They followed Janet’s Chevy past Denny’s, the Citgo, out of Gary, and south on the highway. Liz thought of Cary, her family, and school. She watched Rich drink bourbon from a Coke bottle, smoke a cigarette. Liz rubbed her arm absently where he’d grabbed her. The soreness was small, a bloom that promised to open larger.
When his depression would hit, Rich could be nearly immobilized. Last time he hit bottom, he didn’t leave the apartment in Bushwick for days and Liz was surprised he didn’t off himself. But once he could crawl his way out of the mud, he came up swinging. She’d mistakenly thought he was brooding, only to find out he was mentally ill. Then the Olanzapine.
Rich turned around, eyes narrow, a perfectly rigid face, Plasticine. He had explained this plan like she were a child as they ate Thai food at this dive near her crappy rental. Janet had come by the stuff by screwing a dealer.
"You think it’s stolen?" said Liz.
"I know it is. Now she’s going to steal it from that jackass Tom."
"Not surprising."
"Nobody gives a shit about her," he said.
"Yeah."
"It’s not like she’s a good person anyway. She’s a cock-sucking thief," he said.
Calling Janet a cocksucker was, at best, obvious. Liz hated it when Rich said stupid things. But, it also inspired pathos, which she couldn’t resist.
"It’ll be easy. I promise," he said.
Liz didn’t mind double-crossing Janet either. She felt like everyone had a part to play, and Janet was playing the victim this time. It became clear they were going to make Janet the dog in this. Liz had been the dog before, so it was only fair she come out on top this time.
Derek was driving like a maniac past the wind farms. He grumbled that Janet was speeding up. "She’s trying to get away," he said.
"Why the fuck would she do that?" said Rich.
"Because she doesn’t have dick. She smoked it all," said Derek.
"I’ll beat the shit out of her if that’s the case."
"You’re always talking big," said Liz. She lit a cigarette. "If she smoked it that fast, she’d be dead."
"Fuck you, Liz." Derek looked at Rich nervously, to see if he crossed a line. But, Rich didn’t care. Apparently, he wanted to be defended. He cleared his throat and threw his cigarette out the passenger window.
There were a couple weeks, when they all first met, when Liz had been intermittently sleeping with both of them. In Derek’s more contemplative moods, he rambled about his days as a Marine. It nearly always degenerated into a rhetorical discussion of violence, in which Derek stared off in the distance. It felt stagey. Liz distrusted that he was ever sad about killing people. She doubted he really knew the difference between the real and the unreal. He was pissed when she ended it. But, how could she deal with his profound ambivalence?
She took out her phone and checked her messages, texted a friend from Chicago, and slipped the phone into her coat, watching the towering poles, the airplane propellers spinning slowly in lazy discontinuity. Rich gave her a half-smile with a crooked attempt at levity, reached back, and smacked her leg.
"C’mon. It’s easy," he said.
"It’s not," said Liz.
"She kind of deserves it." He raised an eyebrow and made a face.
"That may be true," said Liz. "We all kind of deserve shitty things."
Last fall she’d had a particularly rough time with Rich. It was partly her fault. She had her head in the clouds, constantly oscillating between thinking too largely, and letting herself drop back to reality, knowing all the while, you had to work with your own assets. She stopped stripping for a while. She cried a lot.
He was always having those crazy stars in his eyes. Rich could fool people, because he could be fooled himself. He was always lured by money. And, he wanted all of it. He could be greedy. Last time he thought he had a fast deal turning over those cars with Derek, he’d really gotten in shape. Talked only of money. He kept his body perfect, ran each morning, coming home in his sweats, flushed. He looked good. He’d cook deer meat in the slow cooker, his mom’s recipe. Predictably, he talked about his parents then.
It was at that moment she couldn’t stand him. She felt mismatched, like his bullshit was hers. But, she did want to protect them both. With the fifty thousand, they were going to get an apartment in Roger’s Park, better jobs, a better shrink. Liz would go back to school, and if they parted ways, they’d both be better off. She hadn’t told him yet.
On a dirt road, they paralleled the river, past poplars and oaks heavy with snow, half-shattered sheets of river ice where the water sometimes bubbled through the fissures like oil. They were headed into the woods. No one driving by would notice them, but you could still catch sight of the highway over the rise. There was one burned-out building, but nothing else. Shit. It was poor here. But beautiful. New York had its interesting neighborhoods, museums, but let’s face it, she spent most of her time in her hovel in Bushwick. New York was for the rich.
The low-hanging branches spanned the road, as if heavy with child, and reached backward toward the rushing water. But the area was deserted, and she thought about Victor’s and the Low Down and Ms. Turley. If you wanted decline, but beauty, this was the film location.
They pulled into an empty campsite and parked near a pit of charred wood. They got out of Derek’s car and he walked around to the trunk, where he pulled out some Budweisers and set the six-pack on a log. "Here they are," he said. As if the beer had been missing.
Liz watched the Calumet rush by, destined for its putrescent state by the lake. People still fished and swam in Lake Michigan where the Calumet rushed in, filled with industrial runoff and pollution. She marveled at the swift current, free of large debris, brownish-gray, fast and deep.
Derek and Rich exchanged looks and were shotgunning their beers, too busy drinking to speak. Rich was entering one of those bipolar descents where it looked like he didn’t even know her, like he could see right through to the back of her skull. It chilled the fuck out of her.
Liz began to worry about everything now. "What if Janet doesn’t have it on her?"
"She’s got it," said Derek. "I seen it in her purse."
"Does she have both bags?" said Liz. "Because we need all three pounds."
"She does." Derek looked at Rich.
Janet got out of the car. "You got my fucking money," she said. "I’m done dicking around with this." She came toward them.
Liz opened her mouth to tell Janet it was a consignment deal; that was Liz’s role—the mouthpiece. She was going to tell her there was only two grand, down from fifteen—sorry about your fucking luck. Then when the argument started, Rich and Derek would take over. No rough stuff. But, Janet and her drugs would pa
rt ways. Sometimes Liz hated herself. In those few seconds, Liz sensed she would come out with scars, collateral damage for involving herself with the wrong people, the wrong shit.
"Janet, this is how it’s going to go down." Liz’s voice grew large.
"Don’t you fucking talk to me. I’m dealing with them."
Liz was ready to put Janet in her place, but a car turned off the highway and distracted her. Across the field, past an expanse of white, there was a growing bloom of whipping snow as an old Chevy sped down the dirt road. They were so far out in the middle of nothing. Undercover cop, thought Liz.
"Who the fuck is that?" said Janet.
The car gathered speed, spraying up snow and mud. The driver seemed too drunk to be the police. Liz’s neck prickled, a snaking up, like cold water thrown over her bare back. She kept thinking fuck.
Fuck. Fuck.
Like it was the only word left in her mind. And she began regretting everything, even being alive.
She wondered if maybe it was what some people in this Bible Belt town called the Holy Spirit. But she didn’t believe in that shit, and she hated herself for being reductive. She was feeling freaked out, and that’s all. The car slammed to a stop.
Somehow she was not entirely surprised to see Cary. Something hadn’t felt right about it. He was too smug. He wore steel-toed boots, had a gun visible beneath his open jacket.
"Hello, you pussies."
He pulled his gun out and so did Derek—something from the military, a high-grade weapon, probably illegal. They pointed them at Janet. Only Rich looked rabbity, frightened, like he might fly apart. Liz silently willed him to look at her. When Derek yelled something unintelligible, Rich pulled out a gun as well.
Someone shot Janet, who fell over lightly, like she’d just lost her balance, like she’d been walking along and slipped on the ice. She put her hands up to her cheek, smearing mud over her face, blood shooting from her ear and neck. It didn’t last. She settled down softly, eyes open.