by John O'Brien
“Rudd downstairs?” she asked. Okay, now they knew too, the snowflakes.
Miles and Osmond glanced at each other. God! the things she knew about them, these men. Things the fuckers had no clue about. These guys were just big kids building snowmen out of snowflakes. Or taking them from their ribs.
“Come keep me company, my dear,” lilted Langston from the front of the room. “I’m a drunk and now I’m blind, and I suppose I’m old too.”
He sat up, but she could see only the top of his head from behind the bar.
“Hell of an offer, no?” he continued. “How’s the Beretta?”
She fingered the outline of the gun jammed into her pocket. This was how she preferred to carry it though the men had offered other options. Maybe that was why she carried it like this: it pissed them off. “I can field strip it faster than you, I bet. Got it down cold.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Langston. “I was hoping you were just glad to see me.”
The men all giggled. Some of them snickered and others tittered.
Jill didn’t even crack a smile. “Let’s start a pool on what joke gets told the most during our time together here,” she said. “I’ve got dibs on that square.” She turned toward the stairs.
“You’ll find him down there,” volunteered Fenton, who alone felt sympathy for her, at least at that moment.
She paused at the top of the stairs and turned back to have a look at Fenton. There was a beat of decision for effect, the kind you supply when the decision has already been made, before she walked over to where the man sat alone on the long side of the bar. Everybody watched this but nobody looked, except for Fenton, who did her the courtesy of turning to face her approach. These were two people now. It was one of those special moments, like a flavored coffee commercial only real.
“I need to ask you a favor,” she said to him, very close, bowing her head to his ear and knowing that he would remain motionless as she did so. This was not an opportunistic man. “I need to ask you something.”
He nodded slightly, vertically. “Of course,” he said.
None of the men could hear any of this and it made them feel fucked in a backhanded way. Masturbating with your left hand.
She whispered, “I need to be undisturbed, downstairs I mean.”
He whispered, “You shall be.” And then he said, “Understood,” before returning to his drink. A tribute of sorts, both these things.
Rudd found himself growing impatient by the time he heard Jill padding down the steps, and it was only then that it occurred to him that he had no concrete reason to expect her at all, no reason period, at least not then, not enough reason to be sucking ice cubes.
But then these thoughts may have had more to do with an empty glass than with the situation, and when she arrived in dry-storage Jill found Rudd fully prepared for her arrival. Her ego, reasonably yet inexplicably, was bruised.
“What a nice surprise,” he said.
She swallowed this. Okay, she thought, we’re through that.
“I guess I’m out of scotch.” He held up his drink, then retracted it quickly lest she mistake this for a request when really he was just trying to think of something to say. A drink would be nice though.
“Maybe you won’t need it,” she said, tossing her hair gently, hoping for an effect of some sort. She decided to go with it, and that thing about lie back and enjoy it flitted through her head then was gone. She wondered why. The stairs were behind her. She had legs. There was an impulse (there would be). She bit it back and wondered how that looked to men-to Rudd-when she tossed her hair like that.
Rudd felt a twinge of panic. This was real; you never believed it until … well, until you believed it. Suddenly it all seemed much bigger than an erection, and that worried him and the thought that he was worried worried him because he knew all too well where that could lead. Then he remembered he was fairly drunk and was able to relax. “Come sit,” he said, moving his chair as close as he dared to the other one that had been placed down here. Stupid, he thought, that looked stupid, I should have pulled over the empty one. Too leading?
I don’t have time to come sit, she thought, realizing that there was the whole problem: she could-perhaps would-sit forever. Why did she need this? Why. She did, she always did. Good Lord, she thought, what if I can’t make it happen? What then?
She couldn’t think about that now; she couldn’t afford to. She ignored the chair, trying hard to make that itself into a gesture, and with surprising (and reassuring) grace straddled Rudd’s lap and lowered herself onto him for what should now be a kiss. C’mon, she thought, you know how to do this.
Snap to! he thought, and wondered what to do with his glass. This stuff never goes smoothly for him. He hoped it was that way for everyone. Can’t just drop it; it would shatter and that would break the mood. Rudd realized that Jill knew what she was doing, kept up the motion, one fluid move from the time she walked toward him to this moment, her lips heading for his. He held the glass, doing his best to hug her with it in his hand, and received her kiss. Now make her feel that erection.
“Just a second,” he said, pulling away when he deemed the kiss confirmed. He turned and placed the glass on the shelf behind him, keeping her braced with one arm. A strong arm.
Then he took her fully, the two of them necking in the one chair there like a couple of teenagers. If you could forget everything for a moment, if you could pretend that this was supposed to happen, well then it felt pretty good.
Awkwardly, yet still a good movie move, Rudd stood from the chair, lifting Jill along with him and pressing her into an alcove formed by an absence of liquor shelving against the far wall and in the right corner. It wasn’t so bad and she said,
“Wait a minute.”
He backed off long enough to let her unsnap and pull down her pants, panties going right along because she figured it would give him less chance to screw up a so-far-so-good performance if she did it for him. There she stood, self-satisfied at being able to achieve a wetness in herself and an erection in him. Having been through this scene a godvillion times she knew now that it was time to wait for his hand between her legs, his can-only-hope-they’re-clean fingers to penetrate her like some sort of advance scout for his penis.
Time to touch her,
thought Rudd, and he was pleased to find her wet, waiting and willing to receive his touch, is what that was supposed to mean. Of course just before-during?-being pleased he felt that instant of shock, like this is reality, and it made him want to pull away, want to scream out something like: Whoa! Wait a minute! I didn’t think it would be like this. She parted and he pushed a middle finger tentatively into her which cued her to part further which cued him to push a second finger in. Some short minutes were spent here, and the kisses were ongoing and nice. Then acceleration took over, or maybe it was anticipation or maybe merely knowing the play, but he said,
“Okay,”
absurdly like it was his place to say such a thing, and then he pulled down his own pants, which snagged on his erect penis and hurt him momentarily so that when he took down his underwear he wondered about guys in porn movies and the abuse their penises seemed to take, wondered if he was overly sensitive down there, or overly sensitive in general. Compared to a guy in a porn movie, that is.
Jill took this opportunity to remove her pants totally from her feet, though one pant leg remained pulled to constriction around her right foot. Still the access was there now, and she figured the dangling pant leg wouldn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Right away, when he lifted her by the buttocks and inserted himself into her
rather skillfully, he thought, like those insensitive guys in the porn movies (was he insensitive?)
she knew she was wrong. Wrong about the pant leg. Her feet were airborne and that otherwise weightless piece of cloth was pulling at her ankle like some fucking insane cotton conscience. He didn’t hurt; in fact he felt okay, pretty good even, if you wanted to get optimistic about it
, yet all she could think about was that pant leg dangling there, twisting her ankle. She’d never walk again. And the worst part: the men wouldn’t care. She sort of tried to shove it off with her other foot, but her heart wasn’t in it because after all what could your foot do that your hand can’t? Run?
He probably thinks this is how I move, she thought.
“I got it,” he said apprehensively.
Reaching back with one hand while effortlessly supporting her with the other, he deftly shucked it from her foot, utterly flustering her. They resumed their rhythm, and Jill was so close to coming when Rudd finally ejaculated that she had to award him the point anyway. He did get it. A technical thing. A percentile thing.
There was this afterthought that snapped like a stretched rubber behind her eyes in front of the mirror of the ladies’ room as she later wiped the residue of Rudd from between her legs with a paper towel. It always came down to this, her alone with herself and a mirror and a bunch of goo and the feeling that if she’d tried a little harder then everything wouldn’t seem so empty at this moment. This was a day. These fucking lives we lead, they always even out, rear their little heads no matter how fucked up the outside world got. Like being homeless, what about being homeless? Does anything really change besides the scenery? She thought about masturbating but that really would be maudlin, the perfect cap to solitude. Best to mitigate the blame, was the specious presumption under which she had always operated. Rudd remained down in dry-storage. Jill headed out to be with the other drunks, the men at the bar.
It was pretty smooth, stepping out there. She knew it would be. She felt empowered and they were all docile, considered her enough of a person to not say anything hostile or untoward. They were all drunk and she was so afraid of that damn bathroom she kept retreating to. What would they say? What could they say if things were terrible? She couldn’t begin to fathom the possibilities. Did they even want her around? Would Rudd speak to her again? Did he think he owned her, the stupid lumbering fuck. After all he wasn’t her father.
She smiled at Fenton, also at Langston because why not? But she sauntered over to where Miles and Osmond sat next to each other at the bar. “I’m ready for a drink,” she said, music-video saucy and her Self positioned in the space between them, a step back but insistent like: let me in.
Osmond was a deer in the lights; no surprise there. Miles lifted his ass and hopped down a seat, parting the sea.
“Join us,” he said, smiling. Most of the right moves for all of the wrong reasons.
Now that’s what I call tonic, she thought. “Maybe something sweet?” she ventured, looking at Osmond demurely as a way to look at Miles. Fenton was watching her, Langston listening. Good, she thought.
She felt Miles rise behind her, held Osmond’s gaze momentarily before turning to his touch on her shoulder.
“I’ve got just the thing,” he said as he slipped behind the bar.
She knew it would be a one hundred proof something that looked and tasted like Kool-Aid. Good again, that’s what she was here for. She thought briefly about the busboy, but what would be the point. Osmond put his hand on her leg and said something to her. She responded. He gurgled something back, and she could tell he thought he’d succeeded at being witty, maybe even charming. Well he had; this was success. Osmond grew bolder with Miles’s return and replaced the hand on her leg with his other hand then moved the former to her back. He did it without ever completely losing contact with her as if she might run away or was a hologram that he’d managed to touch and was waiting for his friends to take over touch patrol while he alerted the proper scientific authorities. She sucked down her drink and looked at the empty glass and laughed at something Miles said as he went to fetch another. She awaited the proper authorities. Slipping softly now Jill was but still fingers on the ledge like the twenty fingers on her body what with two men and two hands each moving from tentative placement on her back and thighs to aggressive probing. Their boldness grew exponentially. Each failure of No meant a louder Yes. She knew that. If these guys had any guts they’d cut out her liver with a butter knife, but she knew that the most she could hope for would be a slap or two from Miles. Then she could go back to the ladies’ room and be alone. She slipped into autopilot and settled back to watch the show.
Then it was as late as it gets in a day, and Jill sat, not in the ladies’ room where she had envisioned herself, but in the kitchen. Vacantly she tore strips of chicken off a carcass that had been removed from the freezer by the busboy the night before. The men didn’t eat much, so the kid had been forced to forage for himself. This was no problem, of course, once he got used to averting his eyes from the unnatural shape of the bartender in the back of the freezer. Jill wasn’t thinking about that or even the chicken. A tear was latched in the corner of one eye, refusing to break loose, and she was damned if she’d help things along, pull the finger from the dike. The busboy, fed up with chicken yet resenting Jill’s participation in the spoils, sat impassively reading an old People magazine in the very far corner of the kitchen. He wanted to look scary. He was beginning to suspect that his role here was yet to be revealed. He wanted to be a virus.
Jill was fucked. Fenton and Langston seemed unlikely though it hardly mattered now, and the busboy wasn’t even in play. Her head pounded. She was nauseated. It wasn’t until she noticed, in her peripheral vision, the kid lift his head to look at her (her thinking Okay, fucker, you got something to say, say it! something to ask for, just try to ask) that she heard the yelling from just outside the back door. Heard it maybe, but didn’t differentiate it from the usual sounds of violence beyond that terrible door until the kid looked up at her and she saw the question that really was in his face: What you gonna do with that?
Carey had seen the smoke rising from the ventilation system the night before, but nobody had emerged since then and he wasn’t sure what he was getting into banging on the door like this. They had to be white, he knew, and he hated to think that that was the reason he was trying to get in. But it was.
“Hello! I really need to get in!”
Carey remembers swearing once before a group of people that he would never enter a bastion of Republicanism such as Tony’s, would in fact sooner die. Maybe they wouldn’t answer. Would he? He was making too much noise, but there weren’t a lot of other options. He couldn’t face another night in the laundry room of his apartment building, couldn’t go upstairs ’cause it was charred rubble. He never should have stayed-he was totally surrounded now in never-never land—but he couldn’t come to terms with running, hiding in some shelter behind a phalanx of Blue. The Man. One look at the Guardsman lowering the concrete barricades into place around the YMCA and Carey’s skin began to crawl. The Revolution had come, just as he and his friends had predicted during endless nights of discussion and espresso, but it turned into nothing more than a bunch of recklessly armed opportunistic assholes carrying VCRs under their arms and mugging for scared-shitless TV news crews shooting from INside their remote vans. Latter-day Trojans, those news crews, going nowhere fast. He’d seen one of those vans overturned and heard the screams from inside as the mob fell upon the doors and windows. The first black eye he met after that told him You’re in the wrong place. Well, be careful what you wish for.
Jill knew this was a white guy in trouble. She couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying through the door, but the intent was clear: save my white ass. The busboy, when he saw in her face that she would open the door, disgustedly drifted back to his People. Jill got up and started working the locks, thinking, do this before one of them stops me. The Beretta, still tucked in her pocket was more something to be possessed than used. She realized this when she failed to pull it out even though she remembered it was there and the time would be now. But then there were plenty of reasons to be opening the door. These guns, the thing men didn’t get about them, you take it all on a case-by-case basis. Use it now, maybe not later. Depends. A man, you hand him a gun and his finger falls right into p
osition on the trigger.
Carey heard the locks turning and prepared himself for his fate. When the door finally whooshed open and he stood face-to-face with Jill he was caught completely off guard. A white woman was probably the closest thing to a safe minority right now. A best-case scenario for a man who couldn’t make up his mind whether he was looking to bunk with Rodney King or Daryl Gates.
Why is this guy still alive, was Jill’s first thought upon seeing the man before her. He was frail and afraid with thin dark hair and wire-framed glasses. She wondered what kind of gun he carried.
“I saw smoke from the ventilator last night,” he started in, wanting to say a lot in a short amount of time, to justify his knock.
“That was chicken cooking,” she said. Well it was. She looked past him into the night. Scattered fires glowed against the clouds, the dome of the city. “You’d better come in.”
Rather than step away she tugged on his arm, and he willingly followed her lead. When they were both inside Jill closed the door and both of them fell upon the locks, he working as if he’d just returned home.
I’m locking myself inside Tony’s, he thought.
Langston, who had heard and dismissed the opening door, was certain now that something was up in the kitchen. Miles and Osmond were technically passed out in a booth and Rudd was still in dry-storage.
“Fenton,” he said, instinctively reaching for and not finding his Beretta.
“I got it,” said Fenton, wondering if he should alert Rudd after spending all this time being grateful that his friend was downstairs and missing the unseemly bulk of this evening’s activities. No time, he decided. He drew his Glock and moved silently to the kitchen.
By the time he got there he was certain the locks were being worked and he prepared to spring around the corner with his gun leveled at approximate chest height. For an insane moment he wanted to yell Freeze! like some deranged omnipotent TV cop, but he knew it was probably just Jill slipping away into the night, departing this nightmare for another, more anonymous one. He stepped into the kitchen, ready to lock the door behind her, his Glock held halfheartedly away from his thigh.