by A. R. Moxon
“I certainly don’t know why, either. Given that I’ve explained all of it to you.”
Push the cart aside. “Most of all, I don’t know what you even mean by ‘the plan’ anymore.”
“It hasn’t changed.”
“Remind me again about the part of the plan where we switch over to another boss after Ralph’s gone.”
Daniel says nothing to this. She comes in near and gives him the fish-eyes.
“Daniel, pay attention to me. I know you. Remember? Understand? Tricks won’t work. I need to know. Because if you don’t tell me, starting now—right now—I’m assuming we have different plans. And then I’ll work my own plan my own way, right away, tonight. And then I’ll be gone.”
“You won’t leave.” But he doesn’t smile when he says it.
“I will.”
“I can stop you.”
“I’ll fight whoever you send until they kill me. If you decide to do that, I suppose that’s how it will play. But I’ll still be gone for good. And I’ll have been right to not trust you.”
“You’d leave without our stash? Everything we’ve saved together?” As if they don’t both know they each have their own accounts separate from the main. Push the cart aside. She can hear in his voice he’s weakening.
“In a heartbeat.” Hating the weakness of her tears, but at least he can see she’s earnest. What’s worse is, the structural damage may be done already, the foundation cracked, maybe crumbling. The fact it’s taking this much to get you to tell me…
But then the idiot says something she can’t process at first.
“Good,” he says.
He says “Good.”
Good.
Good?
He’s smiling. Not grinning, but smiling. There’s a sadness and a finality to it. She can’t read his expression—of course she can’t. He’s managed to stay on top of the power structure of Loony Island. When have the contours of his roads ever been drivable? Whenever you think you’ve found a straightaway he’s always ready to present you with an unnegotiable curve.
“Good,” he says again, and he sounds sincere—real again, for the first time in days. He reaches beneath the counter where the register had, until recently, been resting. From some compartment he produces a bottle of smoky liquor, the only unlooted hooch in the store.
“I got this years ago,” he announces, “For now, I guess. The guy told me it’s some of the best. Afraid I don’t have any glasses.” He opens it, drinks, gives it an appraising nod, and hands it to her. She stares at it as though he’s handed her a large trout.
“The loonies have been given something,” he says at last. “Some dose. By Morris. Drugs. It started political but now it’s an angle.”
“And what does that have to do with us?”
“Morris has other plans,” Daniel says. She can tell it’s the truth. He’s going to tell her at least some things now, though he’ll do well to know she’s not going to stop pressing until she understands why. Daniel continues: “He contracted with me a couple weeks ago to make sure all the loonies got the boot at once, helter-skelter, which they did.”
“You’ve been working with Morris all along?”
He looks at her without shame or guilt. “Since a couple weeks ago—yes. He wanted the loonies out. One of his people found me with the proposal; I followed the thread, and it seemed promising. He’s going to use loonies to take over. He’s given something to help.”
“Which is what?”
“I don’t know. It’s supposed to make them easier to deal with. Whatever it is, I’d say it’s working.” As if to furnish demonstration, Garf enters through the automatic doors, bringing with him a rush of hot city air. “You didn’t tell me how long to wait,” he says, looking socially unsure, as if he senses he may in some way be responsible for Bailey’s tear-streaked face—but also possible his fidgeting may be due to whatever chemical slurry is now thunderstorming merry devastation through his bloodstream.
Daniel glances at Bailey, then says to him, “It’s OK. It’s fine. Take the sack and spread it. Tell as many others as possible, and tell them to tell as many others as possible. Go. Play until morning. The city’s yours. I’ll meet you where I told you.”
She watches until he’s gone. “So. You’re organizing for Morris now.”
“Yes. For now.”
“Morris replaces Ralph.”
“No. Morris ends Ralph. As bad as Ralph deserves.”
“It doesn’t matter how bad.”
There’s a nothing in his face. “It matters to me. It needs to be bad. Morris can do it bad.”
“And then we leave?”
“You leave tonight. I join you later.” But she hears the hitch.
“Later? When is later?”
“For now, it only means later.”
Something terrible twists inside her. It’s true after all: He’s fallen in love with the life. “And so you carry on like you have, but with another guy in charge. And without us. Just like that.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It sounds exactly that simple.”
Enumerating for her, finger by finger. “We need to get Ralph. Right? That’s the first thing. Right?” But now she’s reexamining, looking at old things as if new. She thinks—Do we? Do we have to “get” Ralph? Why, exactly? In service of what? For the appreciation of whom? To mend what? To restore what? When she says nothing, he says: “We get out safe, right? Isn’t that the next thing? Am I wrong? Do I have it wrong?”
No, Daniel. No. You don’t have it wrong. That’s the thing with you. You never have it wrong. But she doesn’t say anything, and he starts to look a bit desperate. He moves around the counter so he once again faces her.
“Well, we don’t get Ralph without Morris. With him, we don’t get out safe, unless I stay behind. You’re nothing to him right now, but I’ve…caught his interest.”
“You have what he wants. Keys to the kingdom.”
“That’s not what he’s after.”
“All this is a favor. He’s doing it all for you.”
“He’d take over without me. It’s an afterthought. He’s taking over because taking over is what he does. From me he wanted something else.”
“Something other than the whole thing? Something other than everything?”
Daniel smiles his most irritating smile. “Loony Island isn’t ‘everything’ to most people. Certainly not to him.”
“So what does he want?”
“What we thought he wanted—the flickering man.”
“What did you tell him?” Bailey asks, but with awful assurance, she knows.
He requisitions the bottle from her and pulls from it. She can’t read his expression; the nothing has returned to his face.
“I told them to follow Julius.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“I requested not.”
“You requested.”
“Yes.”
We’ve gone badly, she thinks, when we right our wrongs this way. There’s never a move on the board, it seems, that doesn’t sacrifice one piece for another. Is Julius—a friend, a guest, an ally who has earned more of their trust than any other—now a pawn to be beveled unknowingly into enemy territory and shunted, defeated, to the edge, taken out of the game, a bleeding tactical victim of the bloodless enactment of strategy?
“Daniel, you have to warn him.”
“It’s too late. They’ll have taken their guy by now.”
“And Julius, too.”
“Probably not.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t eyeball me. He’ll be fine.” He says it again, this time for himself. “He’ll be fine.”
But she lacks Daniel’s ability to discriminate, his connoisseur’s taste for selecting only the choicest of reality’s cours
es. He swims in the river of now, glides through the current of today’s information, trusts to his belief that he can shape what is to be simply by concentrating on those parts of what is that most favor him. But she swims in darker liquors, in clouded pools of what might be. In the river, he can see only one possible Father Julius: stymied, saddened by the loss of his intriguing, flickering friend, but still safe and alive. But in her pool, the light refracts and bends. Down here, she sees infinite Fathers Juliuses: Julius stabbed, chopped, garroted, beaten toothless, buried in cement, pitchforked through the neck (pitchforked? Yes, even that), marbled throughout the amazingly perfect cube of a compacted former automobile…
And Daniel can’t possibly see as clearly as he usually does. How could he? Look out there. Outside is chaos, outside hundreds of loonies or more have risen dormant from the sediment of the riverbed to assault the natural predictable order, inserting themselves into the equilibrium of the ecosystem, scattering detritus until the water clouds to madness. This is more than a riot. This is a revolution. “Why aren’t the gangs stopping this?” She says it to herself, not to him, but he answers.
“I told them not to, on Ralph’s orders.”
“But Ralph didn’t give that order.”
“No.”
“Ralph will find out…” But then she realizes. If Daniel’s not telling, Ralph will have to discover it through slower channels…and, when the news finally reaches him, he’ll immediately recognize the perfidy of his trusted right hand. As if anticipating this concern, Daniel says: “Ralph will find out when it’s too late. He’ll know it when the cardinals nab him.”
“When?”
“Soon. They may have him already. They’re keeping him for me before they finish him.”
She’s quiet for a while. She picks up the bottle where he left it and takes a measured sip. “It’s good stuff.”
“Guy said it would be.”
“You should have told me.”
“But then you’d have wanted to stay here with me.”
“I do want to stay with you. But not here.”
“Like I said, I’ve caught his interest. He isn’t the kind to let you go.”
“You just said he’d take over with or without you. ‘As an afterthought,’ remember? He wouldn’t hunt you.”
“He’d hunt me. I’ve made promises to him he’ll expect me to keep.”
“I’m not leaving if you’re not.”
He twinkles then. “You already promised you would. ‘A heartbeat,’ remember?”
“You decided for me.” She’s not sure why she’s surprised. It’s so clear; he’s decided everything. He’s been deciding everything, hasn’t he, since the moment they saw Yale travel between sky and ground? Now he’s getting impatient. “Our stash is already moved. The whole thing. You know where. It’s ready for you. Get it, and get out.”
“Come with me.” Bailey grabs his hand. “You don’t have to stay.”
He snatches it back. “I do.”
“Why?”
“I told you.”
“He’ll kill Ralph either way.”
“If I leave, I won’t be there to see.”
“That’s acceptable.”
Did she think there had been a certain nothing in his face before? It pales to the void she sees now as he corks the bottle and sets it down. “Not to me.” In that moment, there remains no range of possibilities. She sees only one Donk—the one who stays, captured not by avarice or pride, but by vengeance. She’s envisioned a thousand deadly ways she might lose him, but this was never one of them. He’d fall in love with the life; she’d imagined that—but no. He’s fallen in love with the death. He’d rather have the revenge than the escape.
“You never talk about Yale. You only ever talk about our plans after.”
“Well, you know me.” She does. In this sense there’s no separation between her Daniel and Ralph’s Donk. With both of them it’s always the things not spoken. She’s been like the rest; all these years, fooled by the twinkle, the spark that insinuates, flatters, confirms you and me, baby. You and me against the world. But no; it’s him. It’s always only just been himself.
“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”
“This gives you less time to think of ways not to go.”
He’s not wrong. Is he ever wrong? Goddammit, Daniel—and god damn you.
The doors open again, and a magic trick on wheels comes bursting through. The magician is dressed as a loony, pushing a sort of handcar with a sheet covering it. Floating inches above it, face up, is Father Julius, bloody and unconscious. She looks at Daniel, at first presuming, irrationally, the magician is somehow here as part of Daniel’s plan, as though his machinations have become so meticulous, they’ve attained subatomic levels of probability—Daniel anticipating their conflict and arranging for a convenient distraction at this precise moment—but a glance disproves this, he is…not angry, no, but floridly annoyed…and she suddenly realizes the loony is none other than Tennessee. The logorrheic loon is responding to Daniel’s shooing with desperate babbling listen no listen no listen, you gotta, you gotta help us gotta hie hie hide us but she can’t understand why Tennessee is performing magic or why Julius is assisting him or most of all why they would choose now of all times to show off their act and Daniel has snatched up a broom—thank God he didn’t go for the shotgun—from the checkout stand and is brandishing it threateningly, Bailey, still bemused, almost dizzy with the effect of familiar things combined in wantonly unlikely ways, wondering what exactly Julius is playing at with his comatose act and what the hell is Tennessee saying, hide us?—since when has the audience been enlisted to disappear the magician?—and the act seems to have been preceded by some sort of “saws in half” number, because there’s blood covering the tablecloth beneath which Julius is so solidly hovering, when Tennessee at last says something to restore her equilibrium:
“He’s coming for us. More more Morris is coming.”
Daniel, now moved from pique to desperation, swings the broom handle into Tennessee’s skinny back and Bailey realizes that the empty space beneath Julius is about the depth of a…flickering man. And Morris, who knows ways of killing cruel enough to satisfy Daniel’s apparent need, is obviously coming. And Tennessee is shouting. And Daniel is swinging. And Julius is bleeding. And the man beneath him, somehow, though unseen, is. And Morris is coming. He’ll be here soon. She knows a moment before it starts exactly what’s going to happen. Daniel is about to complete the brutal math that began with betraying Julius to this fate. He stops mid-swing and feigns as though he’s seeing the priest for the first time.
“Wait. Is that…Julius?”
Tennessee is nearly comic in his relief. “Yes! Yesyesyes! There’s bad trouble on the way, I swear. You’ve got to help us till he’s gone.”
Donk allows himself a moment of theatrical reluctance. “All right, over there.” Pointing with the stick to the stock room—toward the Fridge. “Wait there for me and I’ll take you the rest of the way.” Tennessee grabs the stretcher and hauls ass. Daniel turns back to her, pleading. His coat-sleeve’s got a long smear of blood and his hair’s standing up. She’s never seen him wearing this expression before. “Listen,” he says. “This is important. It’s the whole plan now. I can’t have them running. There’s no choice. Understand? There’s no choice. Bring him right back to the Fridge, and then run. Get safe, and I’ll…I’ll leave it all behind. Ralph and the rest. I’ll come find you, I promise. I promise. Please. There’s no choice. Please.”
She watches him go, then thumbs the latch beneath the counter releasing the shotgun. There he goes, the idiot she’s in love with, having delivered his final order. It’s the whole plan now is it? Just help me push my friend and his accomplices off the roof so the wolf waiting below can eat, and then leave without me as I run wolf-errands for an indeterminate time, and then, when I decide the
time is right, we’ll finally have whatever version it is I’ve constructed of whatever it is I’ve decided you and I both want.
There’s no choice?
“The hell there isn’t,” she says to the place Donk has absented, and walks out the door. She feels the thick weight of the shotgun on her shoulder.
* * *
—
After only a few minutes of scanning the mob she sees him coming: Morris Love. A short man, hair spiky-wet, a gash on his forehead, limping through the crowd, eyes controlled but rage-filled. Blue T-shirt wet with blood. He’s fashioned a crutch out of what appears to be a sheared-off street sign. The leg clearly pains him badly as he makes his way toward her; you can see the wince as he levers forward.
She puts the danger into her eyes. “Hold it right there,” she barks once he’s close enough. “We’ve had enough of our shit stolen tonight.”
“Donk.” He snaps the name as though calling a tardy waitress, but he pulls up, likely aware of the Mossberg; up close, it can bisect you.
“And who are you?”
“Get that donkeyface out here. Now.”
“Donk’s out. I’m making sure no more soup cans walk off the shelves.”
“Have you seen a stretcher pushed through here last few minutes? Hospital stretcher?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but it’d be easy enough to miss in this circus.” He has to allow her the point, doesn’t he? They’re climbing the streetlights. Napoleon could ride a zebra through here and you might not clock it.
“When did he leave?” Beneath the calm he’s got a frantic shine on him. It worries her; she’s seen it before. When a junkie is after a score, he’s a little dangerous, but not as dangerous as when an anticipated score has failed to materialize. That’s when the pain starts to erupt, molten, out of him, and you’d better have a plan. She pantomimes considering whether to tell him even the little she’s about to release. “Hour ago. He was talking to some of these loonies.”