The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

by Paul Carlucci

  For the rest of the night I sent my other two drivers to the reserve. We didn’t use dispatch radios because Forty-Two Taxi was too local an outfit. Instead we used cellphones. All the calls came through me and I assigned the fares via text message, except when I was sleeping and I set up a voicemail getting folks to call one of my guys. It was a smart little system. Thought of it in prison. You lost some range without the radios, especially around here where sometimes people wanted you to drive them out to their cabins and there was no cell coverage that far out of town. But I didn’t have to pay for a dispatcher or an office or any of that shit and the drivers had to cover their own phone bills. I sent them home with their cabs and they weren’t eligible for the job if they didn’t have a fenced-in yard or a garage. It never used to be that way but with Scotty running a business over the past couple years it was safest to keep my assets as secure as I could.

  The only problem was my own car. There was no security in the high-rise parking lot and my vehicle just sat out in the open all day long while I slept. I always knew he’d bring the vehicles into it and it wasn’t even hard to believe that a grown man could stand in the high-rise parking lot in broad daylight and beat my car with a hammer and no one would bother to call the cops. It was all part of the scenery over there, a madman destroying commercial property.

  It was because Scotty wasn’t smart enough to be subtle. He always had to be violent because that was the way his mind worked. If I reported one of his drivers to the cops, say suspected drunk driving, then maybe a week later he’d run one of my guys off the road and good thing no one was hurt. Let’s say I saw one of his fleet parked outside a house with the engine off and maybe I let the air out of the tires. Couple days later I came out of the high-rise and he’d slashed right through my own rubber and I had to call a tow truck and buy new tires. Escalation. He was always doing it.

  When I walked in the door, Becky said, “You’re home early.” She was wearing tights and a T-shirt that showed her stomach. She was spread out on the floor doing stretches in front of a police drama on the television. Her stomach was a bit saggy when she bent to touch her toes but I tried not to think anything of it because I was old now too. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat on the couch behind her and I said, “Slow night. Figured I’d come home so we can catch up.” I sipped my beer and then I said, “It’s not like I don’t have staff to drive for me, right?”

  We didn’t say anything for a while. On TV the cops were in a laboratory examining severed body parts for clues. On the floor Becky was bending her legs in every direction and the strands of hair on the nape of her neck were wet and dark and curling. My head hurt so I got up for another beer and a couple Tylenols plus a Percocet, which sometimes I took when I was worried about getting a migraine or feeling socially awkward.

  From the kitchen I said, “What did you do today?” The couch was blocking her from view but I could hear her body pressing against the floor and I saw one of her hands fly over the backrest as she shifted positions and it was like a fish jumping out of the lake and then back in again. “Second,” she said and all the sounds got more intense and hurried until she shot to her feet, her upper body rising from beyond the couch and her stomach bouncing a tiny bit.

  She strode into the kitchen and asked me for a beer and I said, “For sure. No shortage of beer in here,” and I smiled. Our fingers touched just for a second as she took the beer from my hands and hers were warm and the beer was cold and I wasn’t sure about mine but they were tingling. I was done my second beer and I opened another. I watched her face to see if she noticed how fast I drank. She didn’t.

  She drank her beer and wiped her wrist across her forehead. She leaned against the counter with one hand and one of her hips was jutting out and her stomach hung a little bit and she said, “I went to the old house today. In Shorelines.” She sipped her beer again and trailed off, then she said, “But I couldn’t even go inside, Gib. I mean. Have you seen the place? It’s like it just rotted on the spot. It looks like a war-zone or something.” She drank her beer again and she was quiet until she said, “I feel so terrible. I can’t imagine what my mom would say if she knew her house looked like that now. Dad wouldn’t care, but it’s not about him, you know? He never cared. You know how that is. But mom. Mom would be devastated.” She sipped her beer again and I could tell by the way it hit the counter that it was empty. So I opened the fridge and with my chin I gestured inside at all the beers on the bottom shelf, all the cans and bottles and she said, “Wow. That really is a lot of beer,” and she took one and so did I. We drank in silence for a minute or two and then she said, “And what’s with the fucking attitude in this town, eh? Like in this building?” I turned around and opened a cupboard and from the cupboard I took down a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses and she started to say something, probably how I’d had enough, but I interrupted her by saying, “This building is basically a freestanding ghetto and everyone in this town is a piece of shit or else they don’t leave their house.” By the time I was done saying this the two shot glasses were full and the Perc was rippling under my skin and I handed her the shot and said, “Cheers,” and then we drank and then my headache was immediately gone. I was looking at the vodka but I noticed Becky staring at me from the corner of my eye. She was pushing against the counter, both her palms gripping the edge and she sucked in her stomach and arched her back and her nipples pushed through her shirt and she said, “Gib. Gibby? You don’t need to drink like this tonight, okay?” I smiled and said, “Oh, I know. It’s just that I don’t work tomorrow. It’s my Friday.” I drank my beer. “Nothing to do with you.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You’re sweet.”

  And then all of a sudden there was this drilling sound and it filled the whole apartment and I jolted and knocked the vodka off the counter. The bottle fell and smashed on the kitchen floor. “Shit,” said Becky, pointing at her cellphone vibrating on the counter. “Shit, I’m so sorry. It’s him again. Shit shit fuck.” She reached for the drill-sounding phone but before she could grab it I snatched it and threw it across the room and it made a whistling sound as it sailed into the TV screen, where the cops were standing around pointing flashlights at a corpse, and then her phone exploded into a lot of pieces.

  I was about to apologize but I didn’t and instead we turned and faced each other. This was the closest look I’d had of Becky’s face since we were kids and I noticed many of the same features, like the tiny beige mole above her left eyebrow and the way her nose was shaped a bit like the handle of a fancy mug, very thin at the top and with a swooping curve on the bottom. I recognized her whole face in general. The shape of it and the dampness of her mouth, even though her lips seemed thinner now and there were lines around the corners of her eyes and across her forehead.

  Instead I said, “I almost came to visit you when you first moved to Toronto, you know,” and then I dropped my eyes and looked at the shiny pieces of glass on the floor in a splatter pool of wasted vodka. I could feel her breath on my cheek and then I heard her say, “Yeah. Mom told me.” And then we both bent down at the same time to pick the glass off the floor. “Watch your feet,” I said, our faces inches apart as she leaned across and kissed me, very gently, just for a second, but long enough that I dropped a big piece of glass back into the vodka and it clinked loudly and broke in half.

  “You leave the house a lot, Gibby,” she said, her eyes still closed from the kiss. I took her by the hand, like her fingers were made of spiderwebs, and I said, “What do you mean?” She stood up and we stepped around the mess and she laughed and said, “I just mean that you go out and you’re not a total piece of shit.” On the TV the cops were putting on their sunglasses and climbing into their cars and there was a black tarp over a body and other cops stood around marking bullet casings on the pavement with little numbered cards. Becky’s body pressed against my beer gut and her fingers flew up into my hair but didn’t know what to do there and settled for my earlobe instead.


  We were tilting ever so slightly toward my bedroom and even through the fading Percocet and all the booze and the dull but rising return of my headache I felt horny. She tugged my hand, stepped away from the kitchen, toward the bedroom maybe, but then her shoulders kind of stiffened around her ears and she winced as she stepped on a piece of her broken phone.

  Almost to change the subject she said, “And I did meet someone this afternoon. After getting all pissed off about how rude everyone is.” Out the window there was a little crack of sunset orange on the horizon and the rest of the sky was a dark and gloomy blue. I asked her who she met and now we were walking down the tiny hallway leading to my bedroom, past the little empty closet that a woman would’ve filled with extra towels and face cloths. “You ever hear of a girl named Marly from the Shorelines? She’s younger than us. Grew up down the street from my house.” We walked past the bathroom and I could still smell the bleach I used to clean the toilet. “We went to dinner in the new part of town,” Becky said. “She’s nice.”

  The bedroom door was getting closer and closer and I could even see the corner of my bed when I understood what had happened and I stopped walking so abruptly my whole body slipped out of her hand.

  I said, “New part of town?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah. The restaurant down there. It was disgusting, but she had gift certificates.”

  I saw her react to a hard look on my face and I said, “Bit of a walk. How’d you get there? I didn’t get any calls for a taxi.” She hesitated and her mouth tightened and she wiped her nose but didn’t answer.

  I had to warn her so I said, “He hasn’t changed, Becky.”

  My finger between us like a shard of glass and she shrank back and said, “You’re not still angry at him, are you? Nothing ever happened, Gibby. And it was ages ago anyway, you know?”

  “You see my cab?” I stepped toward her with my shard of a finger still between us. “You see what he fucking did to the door of my fucking cab fuck?”

  She held her hands up like someone working nights at a convenience store when a shotgun is pointed at her. She said, “He said you got in an accident. He said you’ve been drinking on shift, Gib. He said he’s worried about you.”

  These words made me very upset and there was a sound in my head that wasn’t really a sound at all but more like a kind of pressure and I heard when Becky said no please no in a sharp whimper and I heard when my bedroom door slammed but there was a lot of louder sounds right around my hips and chest and dust flying in the air around me and after a time I realized that I’d been punching holes in both walls in the hallway.

  My hands were bleeding. I heard the door shaking in its frame and Becky crying and I knew that she was leaning against it to block it with her weight. In the kitchen I avoided the pieces of her phone smashed across the floor but I forgot about the glass from the vodka and I stepped on a piece and would need another Percocet and I hoped she didn’t discover the face cloth under my bed.

  My hands were bleeding and my feet were bleeding and I left the fridge door open while I began drinking the rest of the beer. On TV the cops were consoling one another in a strip club after the shooting death of their captain.

  IV

  At first I didn’t remember anything. There was only pain. My eyes were open and I recognized my apartment but was surprised to be in the living room, on the couch, which had been unfolded. There were covers over me and I was still wearing my clothes. Bad things were happening inside my skull like ice grinding drunks to pulp in the river.

  In the kitchen I grabbed two Percs and a beer and I drank as fast as I could then opened another and drank more slowly. The sun was way up in the sky and the apartment was warm even though the living-room window was open and the curtains were fluttering in the breeze.

  The previous night came back to me in scraps and it was a bit like stray dogs tearing at a rotten fish, like I couldn’t help devouring these little shreds of memory even though they stunk and disgusted me. I remembered bonding with Becky and then I remembered the fight we got in, the holes in my drywall and the broken bottle of vodka. I remembered leaving the apartment and dropping my keys in the elevator and dropping them in the parking lot and dropping them in front of my car. I drove over the little parking barrier and Metallica was on the radio and I pointed my cab at the trailer park.

  I grabbed another beer and leaned against the counter because once I started remembering I couldn’t stop. I was my own captive audience and I remembered being kind of smart about it, leaving my car on the road outside the park and lurching through the barking dogs and yellow puddles of streetlights toward Scotty’s place. His cab was there and the lights were off in his trailer and I broke the glass and took a shit in the driver’s seat, a vile shit-spray of beer and medications, and then I ran off without wiping but the dogs all howling and lights snapping on in the windows of everyone’s trailers.

  Bad scene.

  But at least I didn’t destroy the vehicle.

  I heard the floor creak behind me and I turned around to see Becky standing there in jeans and a light jacket. The look on her face was cautious concern, a tilt of the head and a slight arch of the eyebrows. My hands were on the counter. Her expression changed, ever so slightly, and I knew she’d seen my beer.

  She almost stepped toward me, restrained herself, said, “Are you okay, Gib?” Even though my head was a smashed bottle of vodka I said, “Yeah. Yeah and I’m really sorry about last night. Sometimes. Sometimes when it comes to Scotty I get emotional. Lot of history there. Fuckin’ Scotty. But I didn’t mean to scare you.” She relaxed and only then did I realize just how tense she was. “Come here,” she said. “Let’s sit on the couch and watch TV for a bit.”

  The couch was still unfolded and we climbed onto it and leaned against the back with our legs splayed out in front of us. We didn’t quite touch but we were close and I could feel her anyway. The TV wasn’t on and there was an awkward silence so I said, “What did you do today?” Her thin lips spread into a smile and she said, “I fell into a hole and was covered in toads.” A warm breeze blew through the window and there was a peculiar smell.

  I didn’t say anything and she mistook my silence for another question so she said, “I took Marly to the old house and we went right inside. Gibby. You can’t believe the inside of this place. It’s totally ruined.” She gave me a searching look and maybe saw that my attention was drifting. “So I fell in a hole in the floor and got covered in toads, right? Toads! My mom used to love these toads. And then Marly, I guess she was joking, but then Marly says, let’s knock down the house and make a toad sanctuary.”

  She took my hand. I stood up and said, “Do you smell that? What time is it?” My hand slipped from hers like a piece of broken glass and I approached the window. The river had cracked up and pieces of ice were bobbing and twisting in the flow. Happened every year and there was always a bit of flooding but it wasn’t so bad right then because I could see cars driving down the roads and even though they were covered in water it wasn’t super deep.

  From behind me, Becky pulled herself off the couch and I looked from the road to where my parking spot was and noticed that my car was a blackened fucking smouldering fucking wreck with yellow police tape around it and the surrounding floodwater like a rainbow. From behind me, her hand landing softly on my shoulder, Becky said, “The police want to speak to you about it. They were at the door this morning. They’ll be back soon, Gib. It was nice of them to let you sleep.”

  As I turned around she twitched and I saw a microsecond of terror flash across her face and obviously her husband was hitting her. “Fuckin’ Scotty fuckin’ Scotty fuck! ” I was at the door stepping into my shoes and pulling on my coat when Becky said, “Wait wait,” but I ignored her and threw open the door and my phone vibrated in my pocket and I expected to see some kind of insult from Scotty but it was a message from Nancy and it said, “Where are you?? Same deal as always??”

  I

  He held his bre
ath for almost a minute, which wasn’t bad for a smoker. He counted through the long seconds of the closing stretch as pressure built in his chest and bubbles shot up from the corners of his mouth. When the water settled, the bathroom ceiling resolved into view. Black spots rotted away the eggshell finish. With his feet probing the end of the tub, Percy found the drain plug, felt the gummy rubber between his toes, and dislodged it. An urgent, tin-pitch suction rattled the enamelled steel walls. The hair on his big toe dove toward the drain. Percy imagined his whole body sucked into the plumbing, spinning through the canal like a human auger corkscrewed into another world. But when the water was gone, he remained: shivering in the tub, naked, gasping, and brown, with barbed-wire tattoos around his forearms.

  “Hands up, asshole,” said Sergeant Morris, pointing a gun at his head.

  II

  Uncle Kurt’s truck crunched over the underbrush, and there was the occasional comical sound of small, twisted roots springing back from beneath the weight of the tires: thhhpong! Percy rode shotgun and ran his finger back and forth over the hair on his upper lip, some of which was getting coarse. They’d left his little brother Jimmy at home with his mother. She’d be dead before they got back. Kurt would gently take her by the chin, tilt her head, and examine where the shovel had collided with her skull: thhh! pong! Tearless but trembling, Jimmy would watch this from under the table and never mention it directly.