I shook my head and started the truck. “No, I don’t. I’m just good at it.”
I didn’t have a sadistic bone in my body. But I didn’t have many empathetic bones, either. I probably should have joined the military. Maybe they could have unleashed me at a proper target. But I had a problem with authority. I also had a problem with others deciding what was worth fighting for. I could figure that out on my own.
You’re a thug.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling out of the parking lot. “I’m a thug.”
But I didn’t add to the collective misery of the world.
Beating people up isn’t adding to the misery?
Robbing?
Killing?
“The people I beat up and rob and kill are bad people,” I said to Earl. “No one is crying for them.”
Sure. You’re some kind of hero. We both know why you only pick on other criminals. It isn’t your conscience.
“I know.”
According to statistics, I should be in jail. Like my brother. But my arrest record was pretty light compared to the crimes I’d committed. It wasn’t because I was a Boy Scout. Or because I was smarter than the police.
It was because the bad people I preyed upon didn’t go to the cops.
You’re as bad as they are.
“I never hurt anyone helpless.”
Not true. You hurt Annie.
“I never laid a finger on Annie.”
You hurt her in a different way.
Annie made me feel… human. Like I could walk into a room and not have to automatically assess the threats and check for exits. Being with her made me question that maybe the world wasn’t just predators and victims.
She gave you hope.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
And you ran away.
“That was your fault. You showed up and ruined it.”
You want to blame it on me?
“We could have been happy,” I mumbled.
You’re a scumbag. You don’t deserve happiness. That’s why you left.
I told Annie the laparotomy was an appendectomy. That’s when I got the news that Earl had metastasized.
She came to visit, and you told her you didn’t love her.
“I had to.”
Lied to her. Said there was another woman.
“It was better that way.”
How she managed to track me down after I moved out, I’ll never know. Maybe she just followed the trail of coke. When she showed up at the Michigan Motel and saw me snorting blow off a whore’s tits, she turned right around and walked away without saying a word. I thought that was the end of it.
But she started writing letters.
Every month I’d get a letter from her. And every month I put it in the drawer without reading it.
I’m weak when it comes to Annie. If I read her letters, I’d want to see her. Then she’d know I had cancer. And the only reason I left her in the first place is because I love her so much I’d rather have her hate me than have to watch me die.
You think you’re saving her pain.
“It’s the right thing to do.”
You’re full of shit.
“I’m strong enough to get through this. She’s not.”
Get through this? What do you think this is, a college course? You’re dying, dumbass. You can count your weeks left on both hands. There’s nothing to get through. And you could have spent this time with the woman you loved, instead of with hookers and drugs and your non-stop pity-party. You so want to be the hero. But you turned and ran. Newsflash, tough guy. That’s what cowards do.
The only way to get Earl to shut up when he was ranting like that was drugs. I pulled over, did a line off the dashboard, hopefully sending him back to the Quiet Room.
Earl was right about me dying. And maybe he was right about me being a coward.
I was pretty sure I could deal with death. And Annie was probably strong enough to deal with it, too.
But I wasn’t strong enough to watch her while she was in pain. Not when I couldn’t help. Not when I was the cause.
Let her think I was a bastard. Which I was. Both of us were better off.
So why does she keep writing you? Earl whispered.
“It’s hate mail,” I said. “She’s telling me what an asshole I am.”
Is that what you want? For her to hate you?
“I hope she does.” The road was getting blurry. I wiped my eyes, and my hand came away damp. “I hope she hates me. I’m good with that.”
Because when I hear my coffin calling, when I’m down to my last few hours, I’ll open all the letters, and savor their script like fine wine even if they damn me to hell.
What if the letters don’t say they hate you?
“They do.”
What if she still loves you?
“It doesn’t matter what they say. They’re from her.”
Earl didn’t answer. Maybe the coke had finally shut him up.
I sniffled, wiped my nose, expecting blood.
Only snot.
Maybe those letters did say she still loved me.
I’d be okay with that. Love or hate. Anger or forgiveness.
They could be written in Swahili for all I cared. Because when I finally read them, Annie would be with me again, for a little while, so I wouldn’t die alone.
It was creeping past eight o’clock, and I wasn’t sure whether to try Pasha at the clinic, or at her apartment. I really needed to get a cell phone.
The clinic was closer, so I swung by, saw a Corvette in the parking lot with a license plate BIGDIK. Had to be McGlade. I pulled in.
The front of the clinic was strewn with garbage, wet, and smelled disgusting but familiar.
The door was locked, the CLOSED sign facing the window. I knocked until Harry answered, armed with a Super Soaker squirt gun.
“What were you going to do, cool me off?” I asked.
“Protestors were back. This gun is filled with my urine.”
“Seriously?”
“Nothing takes the fire out of a guy like getting sprayed with piss.”
I sniffed the air. “Is that what that awful smell is?”
“I’m on antibiotics. Condom broke. Don’t worry, it’s just chlamydia. Also, I ate a bunch of asparagus. That combo produces an unusually powerful odor.”
“Can you get chlamydia from urine?”
“That would be hilarious.” He squinted at me. “Jesus, Phin… what the hell happened to you? Looks like you got into a fight with an ugly stick, and the ugly stick kicked yer ass.”
“I wasn’t smart enough to have a pee-pee gun.”
McGlade let me in, did a quick sweep of the street with his squirt gun, and then locked the door behind me. We walked inside the clinic, which seemed to be empty. McGlade picked up a Big Gulp cup from the magazine table and took a loud sip.
“Refueling,” he said. Then he jerked a thumb over at one of those five gallon Thermos coolers, the kind with the spout on the bottom.
“Is that full?” I asked.
Harry nodded, smiling as he sipped more pop.
“That’s just from today.”
“Hell, no. I’ve been saving my urine.”
“Do I want to know why?”
“You do not.”
Moving right along then. “That your Vette outside?”
“Yeah. Had to give up the Mustang. Manual transmission and prosthetics don’t mix.”
“How’d you get that license plate?”
“BIGDIK? I got a friend at the DMV. So, what happened with Mulrooni? Other than you getting beat like Motörhead’s drum kit?”
“I pissed him off. And he’s going to come back at us, hard.”
“Do we need help?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“Phin, no offense here, but some of us plan on reaching our next birthday. How bad is this going to get?”
I considered all outcomes. “It might get bad.”
“I’ll make some
calls. You have a cell phone yet?”
“No.”
“You need to let me know this shit before it happens. Get a cell phone.”
I nodded. Harry walked off to make his calls. I wandered inside and found Pasha in her office, the lights out. She sat at her desk, head in her hands.
“I heard you come in,” she said. “Your friend Harry is quite the agent provocateur.”
“That he is.”
She rubbed her eyes with her palms. “I was supposed to have twenty-seven appointments today. Normal day, with walk-ins, involves seeing more than forty women. Today, only five came in.”
“Loss of business is rough.”
“It isn’t the loss of business I care about. It’s the women who need help, who aren’t getting it.”
She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her temples. Obviously disappointed in the Neanderthal who didn’t understand.
She had it wrong. I understood. I just didn’t give a shit.
“I’m going to follow a lead tonight. Harry will stay with you. He’s also getting more help.”
Pasha sighed. “More men.”
“It won’t cost you any more money. This is out of my cut.”
“It’s not about the money. What right do men have to tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her body?”
“Is that rhetorical? Or are you really asking?”
“I’m asking.”
“We don’t have a right,” I said. “But we do it for two reasons. First, because we’re bigger. Which means we can get away with it. The more power you have, the more you abuse it. That’s the animal kingdom for you, and believe me; we’re all animals. Second, because women have something we want.”
“Sex,” she said.
“All men want sex, all the time. But that requires consent, so they can’t have it all the time. Most women can pick and choose their partners and get laid whenever they want to. Most men cannot.”
“There are sex workers.”
“That’s illegal in most states. The same religious yahoos who protest abortion are also against prostitution, and as long as we’re a nation that has In God We Trust on our money, those with power have religious justification for telling others what they can do with their bodies. Men want sex, can’t get it, and get angry. They try to control women as much as they can. Can you name a country, a culture, where men don’t subjugate women? It’s ugly. It’s wrong. But unfortunately, it’s universal.”
“These men have mothers. They’re raised by women.”
“Not all men treat women badly.”
“It doesn’t matter if some men don’t. All women are harmed by it. All women, Phin. And some of those protesters were women. Explain that. How are we supposed to stand united and fight sexism and misogyny when some women will not only put up with abuse, but side with the abusers?”
“People suck.”
“It’s learned behavior. When we’re children, we all understand sharing. We understand equality.”
“Not all children,” I said, thinking of my brother.
“I’m exhausted. I’m not up for having a nature vs. nurture debate right now. I—” She flipped on her desk light, her expression changing to shock. “Oh my, what happened to you?”
“As I said. People suck.”
She stood up and hurried over. “What happened to your hands. Let me see your hands.”
I let her cradle my hands. Her touch was soft.
“Are they broken?”
“Stitches.”
“You went to a hospital? This is the worst bandaging job I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m okay.”
“And your nose. Your nose is broken, isn’t it?”
“I’m okay, Pasha. This is my job. I’m used to it.”
“What kind of life have you had that you can be used to this?”
We stared at each other for a moment, and I took my hands back.
“How well do you know Dr. Griffith?” I asked.
“Not well. I’ve bumped into him a few times.”
“When did he tell you about me?”
“I knew he’d been dealing with protests. I called and asked him what happened. He told me he took their offer. But he also gave me your name.”
“Were you and Griffth rivals?”
She hesitated. “No.”
“Is he a good doctor?”
“I told you, I didn’t know him well.”
“So what was your quick impression?”
“I had patients complain about the care they’d gotten from him. Nothing unethical, but they felt he didn’t care. That he was more interested in billing insurance companies than helping women.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
Pasha shook her head. “Phin… this is getting too violent. Maybe I should—”
“Leave Flutesburg?”
She nodded.
“It’s an option. But I don’t think it would end there.”
“Why not?”
“Let me tell you something about bullies, Pasha. If you back down, even once, it follows you. Might as well get a shirt that says WELCOME, because for the rest of your life, people are going to be wiping their feet on you. Fear is like candy to guys like Mulrooni. They can sniff it out. They feed off it. And it won’t stop. The powerful prey on the weak. Once you choose to be a victim, you’ll always be a victim.”
She snorted. “You think victim-blaming is tough love.”
“I’ve already stated my philosophy twice, but I’ll state it again. People suck. We don’t live in a world where everyone gets treated fairly. We all may deserve protection, but we all don’t get protection. Life is a jungle. The stronger you are, the faster you are, the smarter you are, the less likely you are to get eaten. The predators will go after easier prey.”
“How did you become so cynical?”
“How can you not be cynical? When wolves are hunting, they don’t go after the strongest member of the herd. They pick off the sick, the young, the weak.”
“We’re not wolves. We’re human beings. The sick, the young, the weak… they need the most protection.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “And who is going to protect them? The powerful? They can only stay powerful if they keep others down. We all grow up being told we’re special. That’s a lie, Pasha. We aren’t special. We’re all lumps of carbon that replicate and believe self-awareness makes us different. But at the end of the day, it’s all just survival of the fittest.”
Pasha put her hands on her hips. “I don’t buy it. The only reason we have civilization is because we have the capacity for caring. We do things together. As families. As communities. As countries. We create. We build. We heal. And life gets better, for everyone. I don’t see the world like you do, Phineas Troutt. I don’t like your world.”
“Too bad,” I said. “Because you live in it.”
“No, I don’t. I live in a world that I’m trying to make better, by—”
“FIREBOMB!” McGlade screamed from the lobby.
And then there was a CRASH! and the whole world exploded.
According to Harry, the car caught him with his pants down. Literally. It pulled up while he was topping off his Thermos. Then a guy in a ski mask got out and lobbed a Molotov cocktail through the window.
The sprinklers kicked on immediately, dousing most of the flames, leaving more water damage than fire damage.
But they weren’t enough to wash away the stench coming from McGlade.
“I barely had a millisecond to react,” he said, soaked to the bone.
“So you dumped five gallons of your own piss on yourself.”
“Probably saved my own life.”
“The firebomb hit over there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the lobby. “It missed you by five meters.”
“My training just kicked in. It was automatic. Muscle memory.”
“Training? You’ve trained to pour urine on yourself?”
“I’ve done things,” Harry sai
d. “Terrible, terrible things.”
I had to get away from him, because the odor was making me gag. Pasha was in the second office, frantically clawing paperwork into a garbage bag.
“You have insurance?” I asked.
“Of course I have insurance,” she said. “These are patient files. The older ones aren’t backed up on computer yet. Where’s the damn fire department?”
“Fire is out.”
“Only they can turn off these damn sprinklers. This place is going to be flooded for days. Maybe weeks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m just trying to help this town. Do my part to make the world a better place. How is that wrong?”
“It’s not,” I said.
“What’s that horrifying smell?”
“McGlade spilled five gallons of asparagus pee. Can you get chlamydia from urine?”
“What? No. Urine is sterile. Plus, Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria can’t survive outside the body for very long.”
We heard a siren in the distance.
Pasha resumed her frantic mission to stuff six file cabinets worth of papers into a single plastic bag.
I thought about the coke in my Bronco.
Eventually, the firefighters and cops arrived, the sprinklers were shut off, Pasha got on the phone with her insurance company and a 24 hour flood clean-up service, and McGlade left to change clothes and get supplies.
I stayed in my truck. Watching cars. Snorting blow. Drinking from my jug of water. Thinking.
Firebombed. Pasha’s clinic had been firebombed. They wanted her to leave.
They got Dr. Griffith to leave.
Why close down abortion clinics? How could a mobster benefit from that? If there was a birth control racket, I didn’t know of it.
It wasn’t quite midnight, but I couldn’t leave Pasha without Harry coming back. He was right. I needed a cell phone to stay in touch with him. And her.
My stomach began to make unhappy noises, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything. I decided to take a chance and leave Pasha to the tender mercies of the flood crew, and took a quick drive down to the corner convenience store, just up the block. I swapped legal tender for candy bars, Fritos, and a hot dog that tasted like it had peaked in flavor last week.
“You got cell phones?” I asked the stoner dude behind the counter. He was a white guy with dreads and a hemp Baja pullover that would probably give you a contact high if you stood too close.
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