He told her he’d try harder and she turned her attention back to her son. The room was stuffy and Kelley regretted pulling down the shades.
“The things I thought I knew about Ronny, I knew the least,” she said. “He had me fooled.” She tossed her son’s hand onto the bed and turned from him. “Do you do that, Officer Kelley? Do you fool your mother?”
He thought about it. It was a trickier answer than yes or no. Was omission fooling? He wondered about her word choice. If fool meant lie, then yes, he fooled his mother. He remembered a time when he was a teenager and he cursed his mother, called her a bitch—for what, it didn’t matter. She slapped him and ordered him into the car. She drove him to the church and sent him inside to confess. He instead sat at a pew and cursed her over and over in the presence of a hanging bronze Jesus, never entering the confessional. He always felt bad about that day.
“I don’t,” he told her.
Gail looked shaken now and rubbed her face. Kelley imagined her being fooled by Henderson. A phone call asking for money. Cigarettes slipped from her purse. A car wrapped around a tree, Henderson fleeing on foot into the woods. “She hit me first,” he’d tell her.
“You boys. Bred for lying,” she said. She watched Kelley’s reaction, which was nothing at all. He suddenly didn’t want to play anymore. He wanted his shift to end. He wished Gail would leave. He hoped the nurses wouldn’t come in, led by the doctor, with their hands in front of them, solemn but resolved, like heretical blue-scrubbed agents of death.
“Tell me one time you lied to your mother,” she said. “And don’t lie about lying. I’m not good at seeing a lie.”
She wasn’t going to give up. As much as he didn’t want to be there, he was there. He thought about sharing the confession story with her, but decided on something tamer, something to slow the conversation down. He told her about how, when at college, he asked his mother for money to buy a book for a class but spent the money on beer. He omitted never needing the book to Gail, having stopped going to classes early in his freshman semester, and failed out the following one, earning only three credits.
“Please, I wish Ronny did that,” she said. “At least he would’ve had to have been in college.” She sat for a moment looking at her son, then sighed. “What do I do here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re no help,” she said and wiped her teary eyes. “Did you know him? Was he happy or is this really what he wanted? People do this as a cry for help. That I know. But Jesus, Ronny. Look at you.”
Kelley only worked Henderson’s unit for overtime one night. He remembered Henderson only because of the mustache and how he walked the tiers with a short Spanish inmate, hip to hip, talking, like old men exercising in the mall. In the suicide prevention course in the academy, Kelley learned most people are at their happiest once they’ve resolved to going through with it.
“I met him once,” he said. “I couldn’t tell either way.”
“On the plane I thought this would be easy. But seeing him laid up, he looks comfortable, almost like he could stay like this forever.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Gail,” she corrected with a playful, raised finger. Her eyes were watering harder now, but she was holding back any real crying. “Do you think you could give us a moment?”
Gail looked away but Kelley nodded anyway. He left the room and went out into the hallway. Nurses moved about, and he welcomed the noise of commotion and quick feet. He called Rachel. She didn’t answer. He hung up and wanted to text her but didn’t.
He went back into the hospital room and saw Gail with her arms around Henderson’s neck, his head lifted a few inches off the pillow. She didn’t see Kelley come in as she rocked her son, cradling his head.
Gail laid Henderson’s head back down gently and noticed Kelley standing there.
“Don’t ever let your mother think you were something she made up, like she’d mistaken carrying you, mistaken your crying. You make your mother know you’re really here,” she said, and Kelley couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or her son.
“I will,” he said. He almost felt like he meant it, like when the lights were off and he drove the county vehicle back to the garage and punched out he’d be sure to reach out to his mother, let her know she’d never been mistaken. He couldn’t decide if his mother would tell him that she, in fact, was questioning that very thing. She might say you never call me. I can’t smell you in the house anymore. What ever happened to those football trophies you won? I could’ve sworn I heard you come up the stairs the other night, the way you always skipped a step, but when I came to the door you weren’t there.
Gail inspected Henderson as Kelley had. She looked methodical about it, like she was looking for something.
“It’s funny. If he didn’t do this to himself I might be sitting thinking if he was real or not,” she said. “Him dying makes him alive.”
Kelley wanted to say again that he wasn’t dead yet. But there was no sense in trying to calm her. He knew she wanted him to say something but nothing came.
“I’ll stay long enough for the funeral but not a minute more,” she said. She laughed clumsily, hid her mouth with her hand, as if the laugh surprised her. “His funeral should be something. Nice and empty. He never let anyone know him. He’d hurt them or run off long before they could. Such a damn waste you were. I could’ve birthed you straight into a casket and it would’ve made no difference.”
Gail ran her hand down her son’s cheek, and then sort of pushed his head side to side. Quickly, she snapped her hand and slapped his stiff face. It startled Kelley, and with another quick fling that seemed to come from her elbow, she slapped him again. Then came an eruption of slaps that made Henderson’s body flop on the bed, the green straps coming down his chin, and the machines started to alert disharmony. Kelley ran to Gail and put his arms around her, pulling her away from the bed. She let her body go limp and collapsed to her knees. She felt like merely bones under her jacket, his cheek against her hot cheek like it was still burning from the sun reminded him she was more than just bone. He held his arms around her, and he felt her hand cover his hand and squeeze.
The nurse ran into the room, followed by a stream of nurses directing each other, and they huddled around the bed. Gail was shaking and crying softly in his arms, clutching his hand. He imagined the nurses behind him unplugging the machines, discarding the bags and tubes, changing the sheets, raising the shades, as if Henderson’s body were already removed.
Gail rocked in his arms, then swiftly sucked in her breath and stopped her crying, as if she willed it, as if the extent of her mourning were done. She was done with it. He couldn’t feel her breathing, couldn’t feel her heartbeat through the jacket. Her body swayed as if strung from a pivot. Kelley wondered if Henderson had ever held her like that. If he had ever held her like she were both alive and dead at the same time.
Part III
NUMBERS
Big Mike / Cookie Jar
“The Mouth”
Chun-Li was a bipolar Asian girl on Saturday night’s JV squad. She stripped where I bounced weekends: the Cookie Jar. Chun-Li was her stage name, a somewhat successful attempt at playing off anime fantasies, coupled with a pubescent sexual attraction to an oriental, large-tittied, thick-legged video game character from my childhood. We’d have drinks after shifts. She’d be done dancing and taking customers by midnight, would sit and drink bottles of beer that looked enormous in her tiny hands. She’d look almost normal in her T-shirt and jeans, normal to most men probably, but tough for me to forget her getup from a few hours before.
I’d join her when I was done clearing the place out, and Tito let us stay until four on most nights, sometimes longer, especially when the college girls were bartending, wanting to collect tips for as late as they could. Chun-Li told me she wasn’t even Chinese. Her name was Rosa. Well, not Rosa, but her Cambodian name was too hard to say as a kid so they called her Rosa. She said if her
father saw what she did, how she dressed and made money off pretending to be Chinese, he’d kill her. Her father escaped Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, carried her sister and sometimes her mother, too, for ten days, from Cambodia to Thailand. That had nothing to do with being Chinese; she’d just disguised a heritage he’d tried so hard to protect.
“My father was a doctor,” she told me. “Anyone with an education or glasses was the first to die. He walked almost blind. He falls asleep with his glasses on now—I think, out of spite.”
I equated the girls many times to the inmates I watched during daytime hours. They seemed to be somewhere they couldn’t find a way out of: drugs, sex, lies. The girls were imprisoned within themselves. I found myself attracted to this self-imprisonment. I had a need to try and save them. I tried it with an inmate once, but it didn’t work out. She couldn’t keep herself from going upstate, and if they’re too far from saving, then what good am I?
I wanted the most for Rosa. I wanted her to tell me what brought her there, what could have been so bad to make her put on that stupid outfit, rub herself on dicks, betray her father’s valiant trek. I asked her once one night when we were both a few beers deep—her being able to keep up with me beer for beer should have been a red flag, but I was into it—when was she diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She sat the beer down on the bar. She wore contacts that messed with her eye color, contacts that were chemical-spill blue, blue like porta-potty water. “I was fifteen and out of control. Sleeping around, disappearing. My father pretended like everything was fine,” she said. “My mother, she knew. Someone spray-painted Rosa sucks dick on the side of a convenience store near my house. My mother had me tested right after.”
“How’d she know?” I asked her.
She told me her mother was bipolar. Her father pretended like her mother was fine, too.
We were friendly but not sexually involved. That changed one Saturday night in September. I arrived at the club for my shift. The sea breeze from the Atlantic came ashore in a swirl and wrapped around my freshly shaven head like I’d stuck it in the freezer. I walked through the gravel parking lot sporting the boots that I wore to the jail, the boots also moonlighting at the Cookie Jar. The boots stomped more heads at the club, courtesy of my boss Tito’s old-school kick-his-fucking-teeth-in approach to ass grabbers and pussy fingerers.
Outside, I packed a lip, mainly for show. I looked out across from the lot where the demise of the south end beach was apparent: empty batting cages, a darkened go-cart track, a shuttered ice-cream stand, and a carless two-lane highway that seemed to run right into the ocean. The bar next to the batting cages was dark, alternative ’90s music coming out the propped-open front door. There were lines of motorcycles parked outside. My lot was full of work trucks, ladders hanging on the racks, toolboxes and wet saws in the beds, dashboards covered in crumpled cigarette packs. The post-summer months brought in the workers, the lower-middle-class laborers and painters, at the beach for summer home repairs and cheap off-season rent. The beach strip was bare of free pussy, save for some motorcycle club’s tattooed barflies, so the men came to the club hoping for a hard-on to start, and, after a few drinks, a paid-for rub and tug to finish. Some would even beg for an over-the-jeans handy.
I swiped the dip from my mouth and went into the club. It was ill-lighted. I’d actually never seen the place in full light, and I was probably better off for that. The front lounge had a dozen round tables that’d fill up as the evening went on. A long bar was on my right. On the walls were photos of guest dancers, promos framed and signed by porn stars. Jenna Jameson back in ’04. Asia Carrera in ’05. The place smelled like a wintergreen car-air-freshener tree. Chun-Li was sitting at the bar with her left tit actually on the bar. She was drinking a bottled beer, and she sort of tipped it at me when she saw me. I wanted to smile at her. But every time I saw her in the club, I had to remember we were two actors in scene. I nodded at her. There was an Indian man sitting with her. He looked over his shoulder to see where Chun-Li’s attention had gone, and he smirked at me. The Indian man was a regular; his name was Arun. He owned a tax preparation business in Salisbury. He always had cash, and he didn’t drink, spent most of his time talking to the girls, trying to get them to leave with him. He was rarely successful.
The music was loud. Georgia was bouncing on the stage for a dozen or so patrons seated at the curve of it. She was banging her heavy heels on the black wood, a trick the girls did to make it seem like their pussies made harder contact with the stage than they did. Rosa brushed Arun’s arm to excuse herself and made her way over to me behind the DJ booth. DJ Salazar paid no attention to us.
“All I’ve eaten today is a banana.” Rosa rubbed her bare stomach. She had on just the midi skirt from her blue Mandarin costume that Tito ordered online for her act, something he would do if pitched the right idea. Her costume and name were enough for the men who recognized who she was emulating, and her tits were enough for everyone else, which were really something on a petite Asian girl. Rare like an innocent inmate. “Do I look bloated?”
“Not at all.”
“I feel pudgy,” she said. She didn’t have an accent, didn’t even try to have one.
“You look great,” I told her.
“You must be sweet to everyone,” she said.
I knew she was waiting for me to share my coke but she was nice enough to not make me feel rushed. I took the small bag out of my pocket. I sprinkled half my coke on a broken pub table, cut it up and lined it with my county ID. She rolled up a bill and leaned in and did two small lines. Then I cleared the rest. Georgia hung upside down in a full split. Everyone seemed to be behaving themselves.
“I just thought of something, Big Mike,” she said, looking like she had just sneezed. “You’ve never tried to fuck me.”
“I respect the workplace relationship too much,” I said. We did flirt a lot and she once told me I looked mean, which meant I was a good fuck.
“Try sometime,” she said.
Georgia walked between us, hand in hand with a smiling laborer, leading him past the bathrooms to the private stalls. I figured she’d gone behind the stage to get my attention.
“I got to keep an eye on this,” I said, pointing to Georgia.
“Find me after.” Chun-Li smiled but it was tough to get all cozy and warm inside as she turned away and her bare tits swung with her.
The three private stalls were normally full from ten till two. Men followed the dancers in with hopes of banging them, maybe a blow job, but only the girls who wanted to lose their job did that. The bouncers listened for any signs of funny business. We were pretty strict about it. If guys wanted it that bad, or bachelor parties came with the wrong idea, they could go south a hundred or so miles to Providence and do whatever they wanted to the girls.
Georgia was a redheaded girl who looked like she’d never been in the sun, had tiny tits and bright-pink nipples. She liked her job too much and didn’t do the extras. I felt the coke kick in. It heightened the impact of everything. The music, the lights, the dancers—it all seemed to be for me. From underneath the door, I could see Georgia’s slinking shadow grinding up the filthy customer, the shadow exiting the stall, covering my feet, coming for me, then being sucked back away. The man grunted a few times and gave a few uh-huhs.
“Mike!” Georgia yelled. “Mike, you out there?”
I pushed the door in and Georgia backed out.
“He tried kissing me,” Georgia said.
The guy had on jeans smeared with grease and a sweatshirt that read GARY’S TOWING. He was drunk. I told him to get up.
“It’s not like I grabbed her pussy,” he said.
“Kissing is worse, asshole,” said Georgia.
“Come on,” I said and grabbed the guy’s shoulder. He told me not to fucking touch him. I had maybe half a foot on him, probably sixty pounds. I head locked his thin neck and pulled him out of the stall. He smelled awful, like marsh sewage. He didn’t put up much of a fight. Georgia yelle
d some more obscenities at him as I walked him out of the club.
I found Rosa in the powder room. She was alone, still in her outfit, texting on her phone. She had another hour of work, maybe two more dances in her. She smiled when she noticed me watching her from the doorway. Some R&B song played on low volume from her phone.
“You caught me,” she said.
“Caught you doing what?”
“Being a girl. Come here.”
I went to her. I was turned on, highly, and the thought of fucking Rosa in the powder room was unreal. There were mirrors all around, low lighting from the strung-up Christmas lights, and a soft sofa.
“Big Mike, in my arms,” she said. We kissed; her breasts were pillowy against my stomach. She took my shirt off. I unbuttoned my pants, and she shimmied them down to my knees, taking my boxers with them. I was afraid I’d get coke dick but didn’t.
She went at it for a bit then took her mouth off and stuck my balls in her mouth and rolled them around like they were hard candy. She stopped.
“Is there something wrong with you?” she asked.
“No.” I felt myself begin to shrink.
“One of your balls,” she said as she retreated back to her chair, “it’s hard and way bigger. Like a golf ball.”
My doctor made a similar face as Rosa had. She held my balls in her fingertips and scrunched her face, as if she were trying to find out if a peach was ripe. Not concerned, but prudent. There was a problem. She wouldn’t need to sell me on it. I spent my entire drive home from the powder room fiasco two nights ago feeling my balls, trying to come up with any reason as to why one was squishy and the other was like my dick had swallowed a rock. I called out of work and avoided touching it again. All I could think of was my dad and what he went through with cancer, much different cancer, throat and stomach. How small he got, exponentially during the span of a single summer, until he was nothing and no longer.
I’d made my own Law and Order marathon on Netflix and ordered Chinese food three times. I’d resigned myself to being on a clock I couldn’t see, the hands spinning around and around in hyperspeed. I had tried to sleep but couldn’t. I kept constructing images of a cosmic hourglass in the sky, just beyond our atmosphere, tilting sideways, something or someone monstrous holding it, laughing at me deeply. I left the dishes dirty, the laundry too. I kept thinking about what the point was. All the shirts I’d ever cleaned, loose bike chains I’d looped back over sprockets, ground balls I’d muffed—what was the point of any of it?
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