Tin & Spit

Driftwood

2010-07-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

Driftwood

a short screenplay

by Sam Ford

***

Ext – Construction Site – Day

A sledgehammer hits brick. A brick wall. And again. And again. Dust rises. And reveals…John Sumner. 30 years-old. Dark hair, dark eyes. Already some leather on that skin. A little too much life beneath it.

His hands are on the hammer. It swings again and again. The wall goes and goes. Pulverized.

The sun’s up. John’s wipes a gloved hand across his forehead. He’s in a big t-shirt. Fucked-up Carhartt’s. Work boots. He’s done this a while.

Other men’s voices are there. Shadows move across the earth. Hard-hats on hard heads. Cigarettes dangle from chapped lips. Black. Dark white. Mexican or Puerto Rican or Whateverthefuck. Jackhammers glisten and pour into the ground. Backhoe engines farting through the air. In a few months it’ll be a high-rise. Or a strip-mall. An American thing.

But our focus is John. That sledgehammer goes hard. Over and over. He breathes a little. It’s about 10 AM or so.

Ext – Construction Site – Later

Men are sitting around eating sandwiches, potato chips. Drinking Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew. There’s a little poker game going on. Four men. Everyone’s winning and everyone’s losing. Voices cursing. Laughing.

John is off by himself. Eating a sandwich. No hero. Turkey and cheese between two slices of white bread. He’s away from the rest of them. Not ‘cause he’s better or worse.

A black construction worker approaches him. He’s in his mid to late 20’s. He’s pissed but off-handed with it. His name’s Justin.

Justin

Foreman wants to see you, man.

John

What about?

Justin

Some fuckin’ bowshit, that’s what.

Justin walks off. John watches him go. Then he gets up.

Ext – Construction Site – Day

The Foreman is on a cell-phone. He’s early in his 50’s. Wears a beer-belly, plaid work-shirt, jeans. Soft eyes.

John approaches him. The foreman notices him. But he’s on his phone.

Foreman (into phone)

Right. Mmm-hmmm. (pause) No, I got it. (pause) I will. Yup. Uh-kay.

The foreman shuts his cell-phone closed. He glances at John.

Foreman

I’m sorry, you’re gonna’ have to tell me your name.

John

John Sumner.

Foreman

Sorry yeah. Sorry. John uhh…I’m getting a call from the company and they’re telling me I gotta’ cut half a dozen men. The schedule’s been shifted around a bit. I dunno. I’m sorry. I don’t have too many more details for ya’. But I gotta’ cut the guys been with the crew the least amount a’ time. I’m sorry.

John

I understand. Not the first time.

Foreman

For any of us. You know how it goes. Some checkbooks ain’t novels.

John

Do they want me to finish out the day?

Int – John’s Car (moving) – Day

It’s a late 80’s/early 90’s sedan. American made. John’s driving. Just off work. Smoking a cigarette. The sun is slowly setting.

Ext – Extended Stay Motel – Dusk

A worn-in motel complex flanked by strip-malls and gas stations. John pulls in, parks his car, gets out, walks toward a door on the lower level of the complex. He’s got a grocery bag cradled in his arm. He opens the door.

Int - John’s Motel Room – Dusk

John tosses his keys on a table by the window. He puts the grocery bag on the same table. He removes a six-pack of something domestic from it. Cracks one of the cans. Flips on the TV. Kicks off his boots. Shirt. Pants.

Int – Shower – Night

John drinks a beer in the shower. He cleans the day off of himself. Runs his hand through his hair. Takes a drink. The hot water hits his back. He stands there under it for a moment. He’s in thought for a moment. The moment gets away from him.

Int – John’s Motel Room – Night

John’s in a clean pair of pants and a clean polo-style shirt. Any stubble on his face is gone. His hair’s wet and combed back. He’s sitting on a chair facing the bed. The bed’s made. John’s smoking a cigarette.

Outside the sound of engines is on the wind. A dog lets its voice go somewhere in the distance. A woman cackles, half pain half joy.

John smokes.

Int – Bar - Night

A bit of a hipster joint. Gentrified boys and girls in skinny jeans drink Jameson on the rocks and PBR. There’s a local crowd as well. Union men unbutton their blue collars over Budweiser bottles and shots of Jim Beam. MGMT or some other new indie band of the month plays alongside Johnny Cash. People talk about themselves and even then there ain’t much. A lonesome thing drifts through the place. Everybody wants an answer but they won’t ask the question. Good-looking boys, pretty ones, are smiling without laughing. Or laughing without smiling.

It’s Los Angeles.

Some people know each other. There’s some kinda’ party going on. Someone’s birthday?

Pool tables. A photobooth. Seems like fun.

John’s at the bar drinking that bottle of Bud with a shot a’ brown behind it. He’s alone there. Knows no one. It must be 10 PM or so. A school night.

There are others at the bar. A girl with two piercings in her lips. Dark make-up. Purple sorta’. Tattoos. Her voice is big and talking to the bartender. John watches her. Then he looks away.

John can see a cluster of girls in an adjacent room. They’re all dressed to be undressed. Lots of talking over each other. Laughing on top of each other. John watches them for a moment.

Int – Bar – Later

It’s getting on midnight now. The crowd has thinned some. The party of girls have dwindled to three and they are at the bar nursing mixed drinks. John is there. There’s another man at the other end of the bar drinking something amber on the rocks. A few other assorted patrons bop about. A new game of pool gets broken with the crack of the cue.

John finishes a bottle of beer. The bartender, a good looking fella’ in his early 30’s hands him another. John’s got some cash in front of him on the wood. He takes six out of whatever’s there.

Then suddenly one of the girls at the bar is next to him. She’s tall. Dark hair. Late 20’s with a nice smile. She’s pretty drunk.

Girl

Hello.

John

Hello.

Girl

Oh…hello.

John

Hi.

Girl

It’s my birthday.

John

Happy birthday.

Girl

You been sitting here a while.

John

Yeah. I guess I have.

Girl

Could we have a little toast on my birthday?

John

Sure. What’s your name?

Girl

Anna.

John

Well happy birthday, Anna.

Anna

Thank you, sir.

John

That’s a nice name.

Anna

Thanks again. What’s your name?

John

John.

Anna

I never woulda’ figured you for a John.

John

Really? What then?

Anna

I dunno. Tyler. Or Brandon.

John

Those seem a lot fancier.

Anna

John’s a good name. My grandfather’s name. How ‘bout that. Now you know my grandfather’s name.

They smile at each other.

Anna

John, it’s not nice to ask a girl how old she is.

John

That’s why I’m not gonna’ do it.

They laugh.

Anna

Are you a sad man, John?

John

I don’t think so.

Anna

‘Cause I don’t want any sadness on my birthday.

John

I don’t want any sadness on your birthday either.

Anna’s friends ease in behind her. They’re about her age. Sally and Kim.

Sally

We’re gonna’ get out of here, dumplin’. Happy birthday birfday birfday.

The girls all hug.

Sally (to John)

Don’t fuck around, you. Her father’s a mafia don. (to Anna) Call me tomorrow, Annalee. Call me in the morn. We’ll get a waffle.

They hug again. Kim, the quiet one, shoots a bit of a sideways look at John. Then she and Sally are gone.

Anna

Ah…waffles. Do you like waffles, John?

John

I’m more of a pancake guy.

There’s some silence then. It ain’t comfortable. It’s getting late.

Anna

Thanks for the birthday toast, John.

John

You’re welcome.

Anna

Do you live around here?

John

Sorta’. I’ve got a room in this place. Let’s you rent by the week.

Anna

Oh. Wow. Like a hotel. Like a hotel? Or a motel? Where are you from?

John

I’m from Pennsylvania originally. A town called Warren.

Anna

I’m from Connecticut originally. A town called Greenwich.

John

Well we’re both from back east, I guess.

That ol’ silence.

Anna

I think we should go back to that room. The rent-by-the-week room of yours. How would that be?

John

I think it’d be fine. It’s your birthday.

Anna

That’s right, John. Don’t you forget that. Birthday for me.

Int – John’s Car (moving) – Night

The windows are open. John and Anna each smoke cigarettes.

Anna

I like driving around this town late at night. That’s the good driving time.

John

Yeah. It sure is brutal during the day.

Anna

I once got stuck on the 101 for four and a half hours. Can you imagine that?

John

That’s a long time.

Anna

Yeah. A whole lotta’ stuck.

Silence.

Anna

I hate this place ‘cause I’m scared to leave it. You know?

John

I used to feel that way about my hometown.

Anna

No serious talk, John.

John

Okay. No serious talk.

Anna

Let’s talk about the…how ‘bout them Dodgers? Let’s talk in that style.

John

Unfortunately for me I’m a Pirates fan. That’s the one thing I took with me.

Anna

I miss the snow. That’s one thing I miss. I like a good change of seasons. But I also like a good taco and they have those out here.

John

What’s your favorite place to get tacos?

Int – John’s Motel Room – Night

Anna sits on the edge of the bed with a beer in her hand. John is in a chair by the window facing her. He’s got a beer too.

Anna

I gotta’ tell you something. And I’m sorry. But it’s you I gotta’ tell, y’know what I mean?

John

Sure.

Anna

I’ve got a boyfriend. I mean we’re having some trouble right now. It’s pretty bad actually. But he’s my boyfriend. And I need to tell you that because here we are, y’know? And it’s okay if some things happen. Birthday me. But I gotta’ say it ‘cause it’s something. It’s a true thing.

John

I don’t mind talking for a while.

Anna

Are you an actor?

John

Nope.

Anna

That’s good. About the best thing you can be is not an actor.

John

I work in construction mostly.

Anna

That’s about the best thing you could be.

John

I paint too.

Anna

Really? Like what kind of stuff?

John

Houses mostly.

Anna

Oh.

John

Sorry.

Anna

For what?

John

It’s nothing too exciting.

Anna

I’m an actor. It’s only as exciting as I pretend it is.

John

That’s a tough business from what I hear.

Anna

Business business business. I wuv business like I wuv a nail in my foot.

John

I was on a construction crew for about a week and a half and they canned me today.

Anna

That sucks. I’m sorry to hear that.

John

I was sorry to hear it too. I’ve only been here a few weeks. I was living up in San Jose doing some work with a friend. Some construction work. But he had to go back home to PA ‘cause his father’s got cancer. So I dunno. I came down here. Figured I’d give it a try.

Anna

Do you like it here so far?

John

I’m not sure yet. It’s sort of…real relaxed.

Anna

It’s like everyone’s got a thumb up their ass but they’ve gotten used to it to the point where it tranquilizes them.

John

Wow. You don’t seem to like it too much.

Anna

Nah, nah. I’m just losing perspective.

John

What’s going on with your boyfriend?

Anna

He’s a writer who can’t sell anything. Including himself.

John

What’s that have to do with you?

Anna

Right. Takes it out on the one he loves. Fuckin’ post-collegiate blues. His’ve lasted five years.

John

Why don’t you just break up with him?

Anna

The history’s thick, y’know? We moved here together. The whole thing.

John

What’s his name?

Anna

What?

John

What’s his name?

Anna

Mark.

Silence. Anna lights a cigarette and finishes her beer.

John

You want another beer?

Anna

Yes please. It’s mighty good beer.

John cracks her a fresh one. He lights a cigarette.

Anna

I just turned 26. 26 years-old.

John

Where do you live?

Anna

West Hollywood.

John

Do you and Mark live together?

Anna

Yeah.

John

Is he gonna’ wonder where you are?

Anna

I’m not sure at this point. Probably. But that’d be a reflex.

She takes a long pull from that fresh can. A long drag follows it.

Anna

I spend a lot of time trying to remember what my expectations were. I hate thinking. The older I get, the more I think. There’s more to remember the older you get. Makes sense, right?

John

Yeah. And I’m even a little older than you are.

Anna

I keep thinking I’ll go back to school, go back to school. (she lays down across the bed on her back.) And it’ll all work itself out from there. If I just create…another diversion. I’ll land where I’m to land. You look so hard at the moment. I’ll drink and drink. Or I’ll watch a movie at somebody’s house. I’ll talk about politics like I know shit. Or I’ll audition. No, see, I’m auditioning. I had an audition today, dad. That’s what I did. I had an audition for a Taco Bell commercial. I’m playing the belle. The belle of the fucking ball. And I’m just like all my friends when I think about it. Truly. We are all sitting on the edge of the same pool. With our fucking feet in. But nobody’s gonna’ jump and swim or drown or whatever it takes. Because all the while none of us wants to be the crazy bitch that does. And none of us are young enough or pretty enough now. Wow. That moved fast. I’m 26. Past my muhfuckin’ prime.

John

Is that really how it works?

Anna

I dunno. I think so. Or maybe I’m just creating a diversion.

Silence. Anna lays there with her hand on her forehead.

Anna

Fuck. I feel bad. Real bad all of a sudden.

Anna gets up and hurries to the bathroom. Then she’s puking in there. John takes a deep breath. He moves towards the bathroom.

Int – Bathroom – Night

John holds Anna’s hair back while she loses it. He moves his hand to her back. He rubs her back. She heaves.

Then she’s done and she slowly pulls away from the shitter. She’s sweating. There are some tears in her eyes. She claps her mouth open and shut to try to swat away the taste of vomit. She wipes her mouth. A pretty mess.

She sits with her back against the bathtub.

Anna

Tell me a story or something.

John

Well. I guess…I’m married.

Anna looks up at him.

John

She was my high school sweetheart from back home. And we got married when we graduated, y’know. And…I got a job at…Home Depot...kinda’…stupid job but…And she…sorta’ didn’t know what she wanted to do. She went to Penn State. They’ve got a campus kinda’ close. She was studying English I think. But I don’t really think she knew why. She never said why. I think she just sorta’ chose something, y’know. Anyway. We were married like that for about six years. That’s a long time now thinking about it. She never graduated from college she…dropped out after two years. She waited tables for a while. And then one day she left. She just…moved away.

Anna

Where’d she go?

John

I don’t know. I never heard from her. Haven’t talked to her in five years.

(Silence.)

I know I’ll see her again someday. I mean I figure that’s gotta’ happen down the line. With the internet or something, y’know. But I just really wish I knew where she was now. Just to know she was alright.

(Silence.)

I think maybe I wasn’t enough for her. She was a little more adventurous in a way. She talked about traveling a lot. Leaving town. And I was a little more…I dunno…down home, I guess. I think it’s hard falling in love when you’re young. If that’s what it is – falling in love. ‘Cause you just don’t know shit. You just don’t really know about anything. Maybe you know a little bit about the way it’s supposed to look. But you don’t really know about the way it is.

(Silence.)

She used to read things I didn’t understand and…I think I got real scared.

(Silence. To Anna)

You feelin’ alright?

Anna

Yeah. I think that was a single hurl affair.

John

Well that’s good. Do you want me to take you home or something?

Anna

Not really. I’d rather sleep here.

John

Okay.

Int – John’s Motel Room – Night

Anna pulls her party dress up over her body. She’s standing there in her underwear. John hands her a t-shirt. She puts it on and takes her bra off underneath it. She gets into bed. John sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his boots off. He takes his socks off. Anna is leaning against the headboard watching him.

He sits there a moment.

Anna

Can I use your toothbrush?

John

What?

Anna

Do you have a toothbrush I could use?

John

Yeah it’s…It’s in there. Just use mine. I mean it’s okay.

Anna

Okay.

Anna heads to the bathroom. John sits there on the edge of the bed breathing. And thinking some things. He can hear Anna in the bathroom singing Foreigner’s “I’ve Been Waiting For A Girl Like You” while she brushes her teeth. He hears the sink run. He hears her spit. He hears the sink running. He hears the sink shut off. Anna comes out of the bathroom.

Anna

I’m sorry I was sick earlier. But I’ve recovered quite nicely, don’t you think?

John

Yeah. I think you have. Good as new.

Anna

I like that. New.

Anna moves towards him.

Anna

I’m gonna’ take your shirt off.

John

Okay.

Anna

It’s my birthday.

John

I remember.

Anna pulls John’s shirt up over his body. She touches his face.

Int – John’s Motel Room – Morning

The sun cuts through the curtains, spilling pale yellow on the shitty wall-to-wall carpeting. John’s eyes slowly open. He’s hearing Anna talking. She’s sitting by the window. On her cell-phone. She’s got her dress back on. She’s wearing the t-shirt over it.

Anna (into phone)

See you in a bit…okay bye. Bye. Yes. Huge strawberry milkshakes, muhfucker. Bye.

John pulls himself up. Leans against the headboard.

John

Gonna’ meet your friends?

Anna

Yeah. Waffles and milkshakes. These girls don’t give a fid-uck.

John

Well I’ll drive you to wherever you’re going.

Anna

Well you should come have breakfast with us. Pancake-man.

John

We’ll see. But I’ll definitely give you a ride.

They look at each other a moment.

Anna

There’s a lot to figure out, isn’t there?

John

I think it’s…either a lot…or it’s just one thing.

Anna

I had a really good birthday time.

John

Me too. And it wasn’t even mine.

Int – John’s Car (moving) - Morning

Anna and John are there. She’s still wearing his t-shirt. She’s got these big sunglasses on. He’s in a new shirt, same pants.

Anna

My father’s been talking a lot about money lately. I’ve never heard him so scared in my life. He’s like the guy in Seven. The guy who’s forced to fuck the girl with the knife-harness thing.

John

What does he do?

Anna

He’s a real estate developer in New York City. Have you ever heard of Williamsburg?

John

It’s in Virginia isn’t it?

Anna

No, it’s in Brooklyn. It’s this old neighborhood and my father’s been building all of these high-rises there. It’s just a weird time. There’s all these brand new buildings that’re empty.

Silence.

Anna

Do we have the same hangover?

John

I’m actually feeling alright.

Anna

Ugh. I’ve got that big blah on me.

John

“Big blah.”

Anna

Man, it’s a big’n.

Ext – 101 Diner – Morning

John pulls his car into the parking lot of the 101 Diner.

Int – John’s Car – Morning

Anna

Are you gonna’ involve yourself in breakfast, sir?

John

I think I’m gonna’…I’m gonna’ head back to the motel. I gotta’ take care of a few things. I really gotta’ try to find some work.

Anna

On an empty stomach? Sheesh.

John laughs.

John

Yeah I…I really had a good time hanging out with you.

Anna

Me too. I’m glad you were sitting there all alone.

John

Should I ask for your phone number?

Anna

Yes. I believe that’s a good idea.

John

What’s your phone number?

Anna

It’s 323. 709. 8809.

John puts it into his cell-phone.

John

I’ve got one of these pay-as-you-go phones.

Anna leans in and kisses John. They kiss there for a moment.

Anna

Call me sometime. Maybe even soon.

John

Okay.

Anna hops out of the car. She shuts the shotgun door. John watches her walk off.

Int – Extended Stay Motel Office – Day

John walks into the office. A clerk, Middle Eastern descent, stands behind the desk. He’s got a comb-over. Pleated khakis. Glasses.

John

I’m gonna’ be checking out. I’m paid up for the week but…I’ll be leaving today.

Clerk

The payment is non-refundable.

John

That’s alright. I just wanted to turn in my key and everything.

Ext – Extended Stay Motel – Day

John loads a suitcase into his car. He watches a maid emerge from one of the rooms with her cart. She’s short. Hair tied back. She sees him looking at her and she quickly moves to another room. She knocks on the door. He hears her say “room service” through a south of southern accent.

John moves to the driver’s side. He gets in his car. After a moment the engine kicks.

Int – John’s Car (moving) – Day

John smokes a cigarette. He passes gas stations, strip malls. Every hair, every pimple on the skin of Southern California. He drives for a bit.

He comes to a stop-light. After a moment he cracks open the glove-box. There’s an envelope in there. He pulls it out, opens it, slides a wedding band out of it. He looks at it a moment and then puts it on his finger. He looks at it there. On his finger.

He’s got his bags packed in the backseat.

He looks up at the red-light. He waits for it to turn green. He waits for it to turn…

Green.

END.

for Marty Papazian

Veteran

2010-02-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

Veteran

by Sam Ford

Lottie worked as a waitress at the Trail’s End Cafe in Coutell, South Dakota just off Interstate 90. It was a small diner, no more than thirty seats. On Saturdays and Sundays the Trail’s End was jammed with folks from as far away as four counties. During the weekdays there was an early morning rush of hunters and laborers on their way to work. Lunch had its own crowd of locals, truckers, gossiping housewives, and people passing through on their way out further west. The dinner crowd was the same minus the housewives. The place stayed open till midnight. Lottie favored the late shift because it allowed her to come straight home without having to figure out what she was going to do with her evening. If she did work an earlier shift, sometimes she’d drive to the Hilltop Drive-In in Gregory.

She lived in a small single story house on the edge of Coutell. She was 48 years old. She read pulp novels by her wood stove in the winter. In the spring and summer she tended to a decent sized vegetable garden on her property. Sometimes she’d sell the vegetables at the farmer’s market in Hayden.

It was a Tuesday in May of 1974 and Lottie was taking a smoke break in the rear parking lot of the Trail’s End. She pulled a Virginia Slim from her purse, struck a match, and lit it. Two truckers were talking shop by one of their rigs about twenty yards away. Lottie watched them share a laugh and shake hands as they parted. She liked truckers and had certainly known a few in the extra way.

Back inside the restaurant, the late night rush was long over and the place was dying down. It was getting on 11:00. A few stray loners sat at the counter drinking coffee, finishing their meals. A family of four got up from their booth and waved goodbye at Lottie. She waved back as she filled refilled a trucker’s chipped porcelain cup.

The cook, a Lakota named Luke, was starting to break things down. He moved the produce to the fridge along with all of the prepped items, the eggs, the meats, and the cheese. It’d been a fairly mellow night for the kitchen. A handful of burgers and other sandwiches. Maybe a t-bone or two. Luke was fifty-seven years old. He had long hair that he held back in a net. His face had canyons carved across it. He didn’t speak much. His assistant was his nephew, James. James was twenty and full of fire. He moved one hundred times as fast as Luke and talked one hundred times as much. He was a good-looking kid and he always had someplace to be.

The dishwasher was a Mexican kid named Carlos. He was sixteen; fresh eyed, fresh faced, and barely spoke a lick of English. He lived with his mother in a trailer one county over. He smiled whenever James said anything but when Luke spoke he did exactly as he was told.

Lottie put the glass coffee pot back on the warmer. There were three men sitting at the bar, each separated by three or more seats. She yawned and walked back to the kitchen. Carlos was scrubbing down a series of cast-iron frying pans and he looked up and offered a timid grin at the sight of her. James was on his way back from the payphone. He breezed past Lottie and threw an apron on.

“Any big plans tonight, Jamie?” she asked him

“I always got big plans, miss,” James said.

Luke and Lottie shared a look.

“You want somethin’ to eat?” Luke asked her.

“I’m good, thanks,” Lottie said.

“How many left out there?” James asked.

“Just a few at the counter. It’s coffee and pie from here on out. You guys can break it all down.”

Lottie made her way back to the front.

“I’ll take my check,” she heard a man say. He was long-bearded and stout; his gut hung over his brown leather belt with a brass Siskiyou buckle that read, “Ride The Wind”. Lottie tore his check from her pad. The fella’ threw down a five and two singles, lit a cigarette, and walked out.

Lottie stared out the window, watching the headlights fly across the interstate. Another customer dropped a five on the Formica and walked out without a word. Lottie watched him lumber off, his wallet chain clinking against his keys like spurs. There was one man left sitting at the far end of the counter. He was wearing a short-sleeve western style shirt, a mesh hat, and work boots that were beaten to hell. He appeared to be in his late 20’s. A week’s worth of stubble covered his face and his eyes were far away and tired. His skin was raw from the sun. Lottie’d seen a hundred like him. The wayfarers. The almost-hobos. A guy who’d be pumping gas one week, picking oranges the next.

He was sipping coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike. Lottie walked over to him.

“Get you anything else?” she asked.

“I’m fine, thanks,” the fella’ said, cracking a gentle smile. His teeth were pretty bad but the smile worked. Lottie allowed herself the attraction. “If you wanna’ get outta’ here,” he said, “I’ll pay up and go.”

“You’re fine,” Lottie said. “I’m gonna’ go ahead and start closing the place but you let me know if you need anything.”

“Will do,” the fella’ nodded.

Lottie started breaking down the stainless steel blender, cleaning the countertops, bringing the cakes and pastries from their display cases into the kitchen. The fella’ watched her. He looked at her in her pastel pink uniform dress. He watched her and then he looked outside. He put his knuckle to his mouth.

Lottie started sweeping around the booths. She leaned back and stretched, blowing her hair away from her face. She looked over at the man at the bar. He was watching her. She leaned the broom up against the counter and moved toward him.

“You need anything?” she asked him.

“You know a place to stay in town?” he asked her.

“Where’re you comin’ from?” she said.

“Well...” the fella’s answer faded into a bashful smile.

Lottie looked at his neck, his forehead, his lips. It’d been a while.

“There’s a roadhouse,” she said. “Maybe you passed it. About a quarter mile down the highway. We could have a drink.”

James burst out from the kitchen, startling Lottie and the fella’.

“See you later, miss,” James said, and he was gone, out the front door and into his truck.

A silence fell on the diner. The hum of the neon sign whirred like a horsefly.

“I’m not lookin’ for anything,” the fella’ at the counter said.

“We’ll have a drink,” Lottie said.

“Are you married?” the man asked.

“No,” Lottie answered. He was even younger than she’d thought.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “I might be a bad guy.”

Lottie snickered. She turned and walked into the kitchen.

Luke was almost done shutting things down. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Carlos was hard at the dishes. Scrubbing the hell out of a cast-iron skillet.

“You let Jamie out pretty early,” Lottie said to Luke.

“I was young once too,” Luke said.

Lottie smiled. “I’m gonna’ finish sweeping. Do the receipts. Then I’m gonna’ get going. You okay locking the place behind me, Luke?”

Luke paused a moment. He took a drag and rubbed his bark-brown eyes. “Yeah.”

“Thanks,” Lottie said. She turned to walk back into the dining room.

***

The roadhouse was called The Range and it was pretty empty save the occasional trucker and local fly. Conway Twitty was crooning from the jukebox and it mixed with the shattering of pool balls from a billiard table. There was an empty stage straight ahead from the entrance. Peanut shells and cigarette butts were scattered across the hardwood floor and in between the planks. A neon Schlitz sign flickered some.

The bartender, Ralph, a beer-gutted crew-cutted man in his early 50’s made his way over to Lottie and the fella’.

“Fixing to shut ‘er down pretty soon, Lottie,” Ralph said. “I’ll give you one fer last call.”

“That’ll be fine, Ralph,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “What’ll you have?” she asked her companion.

“I’ll have a shot of rye and a Pabst Blue Ribbon,” the fella’ said.

“How ‘bout you, Lottie?” Ralph asked.

“I’ll have the same,” Lottie answered.

“You got it,” Ralph said. He placed two shot glasses in front of them, pulled a bottle from his speed-rack and poured the whiskey. Then he opened two bottles of PBR and sat them on the bar. “That’ll be nine altogether.”

Lottie laid a ten and two singles on the bar.

“Much obliged,” Ralph said, ambling off. Lottie and the fella’ heard the punching of the register, the drawer flying open. “Last call,” Ralph barked.

“What’s your name?” Lottie asked the fella’.

“Chris,” the fella’ said.

“Nice to meet you, Chris,” Lottie said. “I’m Lottie.”

“I heard,” Chris smiled at her. He pulled out a soft pack of Lucky Strikes, cracked open a Zippo, and lit one. He put the Zippo on the bar. Lottie picked it up and examined it. It was engraved: “VIETNAM / BINH LONG / 70-71 / If I had a farm / In Vietnam and / A home in hell / I’d sell my farm / And go home”.

A man in his early 70’s with a well-worn fedora and suspenders holding up dark blue pleated pants got up from the bar and staggered out of the place.

“Don’t ever get old,” he grinned toothlessly at Chris as he passed.

“I’ll do my best,” Chris said.

“What brings you to this town?” Lottie asked.

“I’m passing through,” Chris drew from his cigarette. “I’m trying to get out to Los Angeles. I’ve got a friend there who works building movie sets. Says there’s a job, he’s got a job for me if I want. So. I dunno. Figure I’ll get out there and do that for a while.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Originally from Indiana.” Chris drank his shot down. He exhaled and took a slug from his bottle of beer.

Lottie took her shot. She winced a bit. Chris looked at her in her waitress uniform. It was pink and seersucker and it had some lace along the collar and it buttoned in the front. It had a few stains on it and her shoes were big shoes like the ones nurses wore. He noticed a tiny bit of grey in her light brown hair. She had a few freckles on her face. Her breasts were full and he caught their shape pretty good under that pink seersucker waitress uniform.

“You live close by here?” he asked her.

“Why?” Lottie said.

“’Cause I wanna’ take you back to your place.”

“And do what?”

Chris felt his mouth get dry. He stole another sip from his beer and dragged long on the Lucky. Conway turned into The Stones. Chris shut his eyes for a moment.

Lottie touched his arm. Chris slowly opened his eyes. Lottie looked in them. The smile he tried to muster made them sad in the dim bar-light.

“I’m not looking for anything,” Chris said. “Just a place to stay.”

“I’ve got a place for you to stay,” Lottie said.

***

They pulled into Lottie’s driveway around one in the morning. The house was small. One story with a small front yard. Chris followed behind her as they made their way to the front door. There were a billion stars in the sky. Crickets were piercing the night with their song.

Lottie flipped on the kitchen light once they were inside. Chris sat himself at a little table by a window. There were flowers on the table and Chris leaned in to smell them. They didn’t smell like much to him but they looked nice. He noticed some assorted pieces of junk mail mixed with a small pile of photographs.

“You want a beer?” Lottie asked, making her way to the fridge.

“Sure,” Chris said.

The kitchen, and as far he could tell, the whole house looked as though it hadn’t left the 50’s. The wallpaper was peeling in places and in other places the wood was showing through. There were assorted trinkets and souvenirs in places. Tiny porcelain animals lined the kitchen windowsill. Chris picked up a lion and examined it. One of its ears had chipped off.

“Where’d you get these…little critters?” Chris asked.

Lottie turned and looked at him. “They come from all over, I guess,” she said.

She handed Chris a bottle of Budweiser. She had her own and she sat down across from him at the kitchen table. They looked at each other a moment. Chris felt nervous and he sipped his beer. Lottie got up.

“I’m gonna’ put on some music,” she said. “Is there anything you like?”

“Whatever’s good,” Chris said. “I’m not picky.”

He watched Lottie move to another room. He picked up one of the photographs and saw Lottie, some 20 years younger, holding a baby in her arms. She was smiling at the kid, ignoring the camera. Her hair was straight and long and she wore a summer dress. Chris put the picture down and reached for another. There was a teenage boy holding an old Daisy BB gun. The kid had a guilty grin on his face, his eyebrows curled like trigger-fingers. Chris stared at it a moment. Then he heard a man’s voice from the other room. It was music and it sounded pretty good. The man’s voice was soulful, Chris understood. He put the photograph back on the table and Lottie walked back in the kitchen.

“What’s this you’re playin’?” Chris asked.

“Charlie Rich,” she answered, sitting down across from him again.

“It sounds pretty good.”

“Where’re you from in Indiana?” Lottie asked him.

“Umm…little town called Farleigh. Ever heard of it?”

“Nope. I’ve got a cousin in Indiana though.”

“Where?”

“I think the town’s called Taylorsville.”

“Never heard of it.”

They came to another silence. Chris took a long drink of his beer. Lottie shut her eyes and leaned back in her seat.

“You got any…whiskey or anything else?” Chris said.

“Nah,” Lottie answered. “Let’s go to bed.”

She led him to her bedroom. It was dark and Lottie turned on a lamp beside the bed. Chris could make out a lot of dark wooden furniture and rocking chair in the corner. He saw a closet and a painting of some sort of flowers in a field or something. They were different than the flowers on Lottie’s kitchen table. Chris looked at her moving in the narrow light. He stared at the floor and tried somehow to know her better.

He felt her move close to him. Her hands touched his ribcage and then across his back. She put her hands on his ass and held on. He looked into her eyes. She smiled at him. She moved her hand to his collar and pulled on it, pulled him closer to her.

“Touch me,” she said.

Chris caressed her face, running the back of his fingers beneath her cheekbones and down across her chin. He put his hands on the small of her back.

She kissed him. Chris felt her tongue in his mouth and he gave her his and they stood there. Chris could feel his heart pounding in his stomach, his knees, his throat. They kissed and then he kissed her neck, running his tongue from the crook to the earlobe. He heard Lottie’s breath quicken. She moaned.

Chris stepped back and they looked at each other again. Lottie moved against him and pushed him against the wall. She tore his shirt open and her mouth was on his chest, licking and biting through wisps of hair. Chris pulled her away and ripped her dress down across her body, the buttons popping off like skipped rocks. Lottie’s eyes widened and she leaned in and kissed him again. Chris picked her up and moved her to the bed. They fell there together. Lottie’s bra came off and Chris kissed her breasts, seeing the stretch-marks and a scar above her bellybutton. The whole dress was off and Chris got her cotton panties off and his face was between her thighs and she pulled him into her, her fist full of his hair.

Chris was sweating and gasping when Lottie pulled him up against her. She reached her hand down and got his pants unbuttoned, unzipped. She had her hand on him and Chris grunted and pulled her hand away.

“Wait wait wait,” he groaned.

He pushed his pants down across his legs, got his underwear down and felt himself inside her barely a second after. She arched her back underneath him and Chris tried to gather himself. He mustered five thrusts before he wailed out a curse and his body shook. Lottie was giving something back in his ear but Chris sensed it was more the reaction to his orgasm than her having her own. He collapsed on top of her like a sledgehammer, her legs opening to receive him. She folded her arms around his back and felt the tide of his breath, heavy as a coffin.

“I’m sorry,” Chris whispered.

“For what?” Lottie said.

Chris rolled off of her. He ran his hand over his forehead and it was like he’d dipped it in a river. He thought about answering. He thought about an answer and couldn’t find one.

Lottie turned and stroked his stomach. She could see his tanned skin. Her skin was so pale compared to his, she thought.

“You tired?” Chris asked.

“Not really. But you go ahead and fall asleep whenever you want.”

Chris liked her hand on him. She was on her side and she moved her hand to his chest. He felt her fingertips tracing maps across him. Chris saw the maps in his mind. He’d looked at so many maps. He shut his eyes and understood that reading a map was one thing he could do really well.

***

Lottie’s body tore itself awake when she heard the scream next to her. It was the sound of horror like she’d never experienced. Like someone being burned alive. She looked at Chris and he was crying out, his face twisted like a broken limb, snot and spit pissing out of it. His breathing reached a frantic pace and suddenly he was upright, his eyes bursting open, tears filling them like blood in a syringe. His arms swung out with the desperation of a child being taken away. He screamed and screamed.

Lottie realized he didn’t know where he was and her lack of familiarity made her anxious. She feared comforting him. She sat there watching him fight his way through himself.

He put his face in his hands.

“I wanna’ go home,” he wept. “I wanna’ go home…I wanna’ go home…I wanna’ go home…I wanna’ go home…” He cried and cried.

She finally touched his shoulder and the feeling of her hand sent a jolt through him. His neck went limp and his head collapsed as he sobbed. She laid a blanket across him. She put her arms around him and he plowed himself into her embrace.

She held him until the sun came up.

***

When Lottie awoke, she could tell from the light through the blinds that it was getting on the afternoon. She rubbed her eyes clear and turned and Chris wasn’t there. She put a robe on and walked out of her bedroom. He wasn’t in the house and Lottie sat at the kitchen table. She saw the photographs sitting there and she picked one of them up and stared at it for a moment.

She peed and brushed her teeth. She ignored herself in the bathroom mirror.

She made coffee, lit a cigarette and stared out the window. Her neighbor, Tom Easley, had the hood of his pick-up open and he was fiddling around under it. He was in his 60s, wore a tobacco-stained tan hunting vest and had big waterproof boots on. He slammed the hood shut and stared up at the sun. His front yard had five cars on it, three of them with “for sale” signs in the window. There was also an old basketball hoop attached to the garage, a dirt-bike, and a rusting pole stuck in the grass, its flag hanging motionless in the non-wind.

Seattle, WA (2/10/10)

I Work With These Men

2009-05-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

I Work With These Men

by Sam Ford

I was 19 years-old, grinding out an early morning job, and drinking a lot of beer and whiskey at night. The job was for a landscaping company called Garland’s, and their clients and customers included some of the wealthiest folks in the United States of America. I’d originally gotten hired on to work at one of the cash registers inside the central store that sat right smack in the middle of the company’s nine-acre property. The store sold everything from trowels and spades to seeds to plastic gargoyles. I was gonna’ stand behind a cash register and scan the items with one a’ those red lasers and it was gonna’ appear on the computer screen and I was gonna’ tell the customer the amount and then he or she was gonna’ hand me some money or some plastic. Even though I was doing some serious drinking, I was still a fairly able bodied fella’ back then and it didn’t take my bosses long to realize that I’d be better used “in the field.” They also discovered that I spoke I tiny bit of Spanish when one of them overheard me talking to one of the gardeners while we were on a smoke break. Next thing I knew I was given my own van and a crew of three Mexicans – Julio, Jose, and Miguel. I was told to deliver plants, flowers, and even small trees to places. I was told to plant them. Julio, Jose, and Miguel were told to assist me.

It was summer. I had no woman, no car, and not a whole lot of exciting ideas. After my workday was done, I’d go over to a tavern called Kempner’s on the town’s main street. It was a meat and potatoes joint. Mostly older folks would eat there – bleu cheese on their hamburgers, baked potatoes, soups, ceaser salads, maybe some pie. I’d show up there about 8 o’clock and of the twenty-five available tables, maybe three were occupied. There was only one waitress per shift and she was about as old as the folks she served. Twilighters. People too old to spend their money. Drinking their manhattans and gibsons. Eating shepherd’s pie. Big bifocals. Pacemakers. Hair coming out of their ears.

I liked the place because it was quiet and I liked the place because of the bartender. His name was Sean McMannus and he stood about six feet three inches, weighed about two-forty, and had a pair of puppy-dog Irish eyes that narrowed and puckered when he smiled. I was often the only one there at the bar. Sean and I became fast ol’ friends. He checked my fake ID once and that was that. The Jameson flowed. The pilsner flowed. The conversation flowed. I told him my name about four times when I first started showing up. He was never able to remember it, and we eventually reached a point where I knew he’d be far too embarrassed to ever ask me again. So I would make up stories in which people would refer to me by name so that he’d at least be able to utilize it on that particular night.

“So then, Sean…This girl says ‘fuck you, Jack. I’m done. I never wanna’ see you again.’ And I says, ‘but baby, I still owe you a hundred and twenty dollars.”

We laughed some and there were plenty of stories and eventually he was back there drinking as much as I was (which was a lot) and my tab would never appear at the end of the night, which was a shame ‘cause I actually had the money to pay for it. I sat there and closed the place with him night after night. Most nights it’d be just the two of us from about 8:30 to 11 or whenever he wanted to close. He often had to give me a ride home.

He told me about going to the gym three hours a day every day:

“There’re some guys in there, man…I swear ta’ God. Roided-out like you wouldn’t believe. I mean guys that’re five foot five and just like…I dunno…oak trees’re something. I dunno. Today I was on the bike for a while. The bench is good. Y’know. I mean that’s what I’m focusing on. But you gotta’ do the cardio too.”

“Yeah,” I’d drink. “The cardio.”

He talked to me about leaving town and opening a construction business down in Florida:

“It’s…there’s…think about it. There’s a turnover in Florida, y’know what I mean? Lots of people dying all the time. So there needs to be new construction going on constantly.”

“Why can’t the dying people just take the place of the dead?”

“Whaddayou mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Whaddayou mean? I mean, ‘cause they’re already dead, that’s why. I dunno, the point is you’re just constantly building nursing homes. Strip-malls. Condos. Assisted living type facilities. There’s just a big need for building things down there. I dunno. You could come down, man. I’d hire ya’ in a heartbeat. I mean, if you’re not doing anything up here.”

“I ain’t much for Florida,” I’d drink. “It’s like someone left the oven on but there’s nothin’ in it.”

“It’s warm though.”

“Yeah.”

We’d drink the Jameson and the Bushmills and the Powers till we were emerald green. He was my only friend for a while there. We were just what we needed to be for each other.

Most times I’d show up to the landscaping job with half a hangover. The sun was always big and accurate that summer. Wasn’t long before my farmer’s tan set in and my hair started to lean red. I met and shook hands with most of the other employees at the company. Ten minutes later I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup. I was nowhere to be found but exactly where I was. I smoked cigarettes in the delivery van. I listened to a lotta’ old Tejano country music. Me and the Mexicans would curse a lot in Spanish. Gawk at young girls in their summer dresses. Laugh at what we couldn’t understand between each other.

One day Julio showed me the tattoo on his chest of Christ hanging broken on the cross. In his broken English he told me he got it in prison. I asked him what he’d gone to prison for. Best I could make out it had something to do with his father. My imagination did backflips.

Whenever we’d arrive at a job site we’d immediately behave ourselves. I’d do all the talking of course, and the Mexicans would get quite as mice. There we were sweating and heaving and plowing on multi-million dollar property. Planting huge floral installations, trimming four hundred yards worth of hedge, unloading the occasional tree. The rich folks would occasionally bark orders or ask questions of the Mexicans who would then defer to me, looks of fear and embarrassment creasing their faces like tooled leather. The whiskey would leak out of me as I assured the homeowners that we’d be careful, gentle. That we were professionals.

The Mexicans were. They worked tirelessly, taking their breaks, but breaking from them when the time was up. They spoke too each other through glances, nods of the head. Their days would die with their arms covered in dirt to the elbows. Slugs of water in the back of the van. Thousand yard stares out the window.

They became themselves to me slowly.

Julio was from Oaxaca. He was the oldest of the three and was in America legally, despite his prison record back home. He was forty years-old. A well-maintained mustache swept across his mouth and it suited him, especially when he smiled. He had a bit of a potbelly that I imagined he was born with. His dark eyes were creased at the corners. A scar traced his chin, just beneath the lower lip. The man had quite obviously seen some shit. He quickly established himself as the leader of the three, yet always did as he was told by yours truly, more than two decades his junior. He spoke a couple times of his three kids back home. He hadn’t seen them in fifteen years. Every two weeks he sent eighty percent of his check back home. He had a dozen brothers and sisters. He stood about five foot, eight inches. He wore an old belt buckle with a picture of a scorpion in the middle. He’d been working since he could walk.

Jose was young and a bit of a wildcard. He was from Juarez, known in part for being the place where Steve McQueen sought an alternative cure for his lung cancer, and also home to the most notorious drug cartel in the world. I never found out his exact age but I would guess it was somewhere in the twenty ballpark. He had a devil’s grin and eyes to match. He was a lanky five foot nine. A face smooth as the air itself. Shitty teeth. A big cheese grated scar down his forearm. After the day was done he’d often get picked up in some sort of Ford hatchback with four other fellas inside. They weren’t going for ice cream, I know that.

Miguel told me he was twenty-four one day when we were in the van. He looked like he was twelve. Julio later told me he was seventeen. He was very quiet even when he spoke. Big bright brown eyes that only winced in the worst sun. He was around five foot five and musta’ weighed a buck and a half. He had a smile sweet as peach cobbler and he seemed almost ashamed to use it. One day, while I was wrestling with a grizzly of a hangover, I called him Mikey. It got a big grin out of him and he put his thumb up. So he was Mikey from then on out. Or Mikey Boy. I wondered where his parents were.

They were my crew. Eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. I saw them and Sean more than anyone else I knew. My hombres and I worked and worked like mutts in the sun and then I’d head over to Kempner’s where I’d drop the day down on the hardwood. Any disconcertion I felt over watching the man serving me get as drunk or drunker than me flew out the window real fast. Sean and I talked and talked about nothing. Even soused on the emerald label, he was still a mystery. I followed suit. Close as we got, the friendship was contained rigorously within the confines of the bar. Talk of women was hypothetical. Talk of sports was forged mostly from our general testosterone and was accompanied by very little fact. We were passing time. Cats lying across windows. Stray quarters on the sidewalk waiting to be pocketed. Tumbleweeds with no wind.

My face took on a little burgundy hue from that open sun. A freckle or two emerged on the nose and forehead. My shoulders and arms swelled some from the labor. My lungs suffered from the cigarette smoke.

One day in the van en route to a large planting job I noticed that Mikey had a bruise underneath his right eye. He finally fessed up to scuffling outside some bar the night before. He said he’d gotten caught in the middle. I believed him. His bicycle had also gotten all fucked-up in the chaos. A blown tire, the body somehow bent. I knew he needed that bicycle to get around. He would catch a ride with some of the other guys occasionally, but mostly he was on that bike. We pulled up in front of a sandwich shop. I went in and got some ice put in a plastic bag. I told Mikey to hold it on that eye.

The next day I rode an old bike of mine to work. It’d been maybe a decade since I’d been on it or any other of its kind. I’d filled the tires with air from a hand-pump. I’d picked the cobwebs from it, shined it up a bit. It was green. A mountain bike. From another life.

My sweat must’ve had a proof as I pedaled in the heat. I was your functional alcoholic. Lonesome, liquored, and alive. When I met up with my crew, I presented the bike to Mikey. He didn’t understand that I was giving it to him.

“Take it,” I said. “It’s for you.”

“Por que?” he asked.

“Porque I want you to have it,” I answered. “I don’t ride it. It’s yours. Tu necesitas una bicicleta, Mikey Boy.”

He didn’t say anything. I didn’t consider it charity and I hoped he didn’t either. People oughta’ give people things. Bicycles. Boots. Rides. Hugs. Sugar. Music.

He didn’t smile and he didn’t look at me. But he did say, “muchas gracias, senor Jack.”

“Your welcome,” I said, rubbing my brow. “Yo soy un borracho.”

“No,” he said. “Borracho?”

“Si. Mucho whiskey y cerveza en mi systema.”

“Okay senor,” he said.

Julio seemed to approve of my actions. Jose seemed envious. Either way there was a new sense of closeness that we all suddenly felt towards one another. Feelings bloomed some. I’d extended myself past the van and the job-to-job life. Cigarettes and smiles and broken languages. Bottled water and potato chips. Miguel would look over at me sometimes, his eyes soft, not saying anything. It wasn’t a crush. It was a highly tenderized gratitude. I was too hungover to feel threatened or embarrassed by it. He was becoming my friend.

I told Sean about giving Mikey the bike. He seemed somewhat disinterested.

“You better tell ‘im to be careful. It’s pretty dangerous riding a bike, y’know, especially if he’s riding it at night.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It is dangerous.”

“I was in there lifting for like three hours today. I added another forty to the bench. Feelin’ it though, man. Big time.” He exhaled and bulged his eyes.

“I guess feelin’ it’s the point,” I said, crunching the booze out of an ice cube. He poured me another. At a corner table a six hundred year-old couple shared a slice of cheesecake with some cherry compote on it. I watched them for a moment wondering if it was called compote or compost. Cherry compost. They ate it and ate it. I thought of them growing up without television and wondering how long they’d been together. (Later in my life a friend and I would discuss television being the great destroyer of marriages. Real work and communication being thrown at the window as thumbs swelled and cable companies thrived.) I watched that old couple and felt sad. Sad for what would and could never be again in the United States of America. My country.

“I’m thinking of going on a diet,” I heard Sean say. “Like that Atkins diet. No carbs, y’know?”

I didn’t know what a carb was. I didn’t know what many things were.

“Well,” I said.

The owners of the company we worked for, my crew and I, were among the richest families in the county if not the state. They were a husband and wife team. Pink skin. Convertibles. Well fed but in perfect health. Eyes the color of Midwestern skies. Maybe they’d worked once. Now hundreds were working for them. They had a son named Sumner. Sumner was my age, taller and fitter, a bashful smile that raised a skirt or two. He had one of those artist’s beards. A sensitive beard. I didn’t hate him for it. I just sort of understood it.

The boys and I were on our way back to the Garland’s shop from a job. Jose was telling a story about some “rubia” he’d met the night before at a dive bar on the outskirts of town. He’d tried to pick her up but’d felt an uneasiness about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Later that night he couldn’t help but feel her six o’ clock shadow start to emerge and the reality of her adam’s apple became unavoidable.

“Ella era un hombre de mierda! Un maricon!”

I didn’t really believe the story. Thought it was mostly to get a reaction out of Miguel. But nonetheless we all laughed. Jose told it was such gusto and genuine shock it was as though we’d all felt the bulge. We lit cigarettes and stared out the window. Half comrades in the whole of the workday.

We pulled into Garland’s and I went into the main office to turn in some paper work and get the location of our next job. One of the managers was there along with Sumner Garland. We’d exchanged glances a few times but’d never really spoken. I walked into the office and the manager, Fred Leddick, introduced me to Sumner. We shook hands. It meant about as much as a pigeon farting in the breeze.

“Here’re the papers on the Johnson job,” I said, handing Fred a signed contract.

“Thanks,” Fred said, taking it from me. “Any trouble.”

“They weren’t even home,” I told him. There was a brief, ugly silence. Then I said, “What’s next?”

“Sumner has a job for you guys. It’s on-site here.”

I was puzzled. I’d never met him and now he had a job for us.

“Let me meet your crew,” Sumner suddenly spoke. “It’s my car. I’ll take you guys to it.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Come with me,” he said. “Where’s your crew?”

“They’re outside,” I said. He was the son of the owners of the company I worked for. I could’ve been him if a few stars had fallen or a ship had sunk. I was dirty from head to toe. My face had traces of soil on it. My fingernails were black. My clothes were stained beyond bleach or washboard. Yet somehow he regarded me as though his was the more difficult job. I’d heard about the way he asked workers to do things. He spoke as though he’d plowed a billion acres and planted a million seeds.

I led him to my crew and he ordered the four of us to follow him about two hundred yards to an open area on the property. His Mercedes SUV was there. Black. Windows smoked-out. A very expensive automobile and it was the year those things came out. He had one. Miguel had my bike. But that was okay. That life slice. Somebody cooks, somebody eats, somebody cleans up.

Next to the Benz there were three buckets, a hose, soap, sponges, car wax, Armor-All. I was shocked and then I wasn’t. We were a good crew. We belonged “out in the field” working. Planting, gardening, landscaping, delivering. But today we were gonna’ be told to wash the boss’ son’s Mercedes Benz.

“I need you guys to wash the car and then hit it with a coat of wax,” I heard Sumner say. I wondered if he’d be springing for the beer as well.

“I’m not gonna’ do that,” I said immediately.

“What?” he said.

I looked at Julio and told him he didn’t have to wash the car. Julio looked at me, his brow furrowed, his mouth twisted pensively.

“No lave este coche, hermano,” I told him. “No es su trabajo.”

“If you don’t wanna’ wash the car,” Sumner told me, “that’s fine. They might need you in the shop or something. I mean I’m not gonna’ make you wash my car, man,” he said.

I looked at Julio. He was telling Miguel and Jose to get started. Jose fired up the hose and aimed it at the Mercedes. I looked at Miguel. He glanced back at me, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.

“You’re gonna’ make these guys wash your Mercedes, man?” I asked Sumner.

“Whaddayou mean?” he said.

I walked back to the central store where they put me to work unloading plastic gargoyles with “made in China” stamped on the bottom. They were selling the gargoyles for $249.99 each. I did that for a while. Then they had me make three solo deliveries. When I got back from those I went to check on my guys. They weren’t there. But the Benz was. Shining like a prom queen.

Later on I saw Julio. He was loading trees into the back of a box truck. I asked him where the other guys were. He said he didn’t know. He seemed pissed-off and damned if he wasn’t pissed-off at me. I asked him if he was okay. He didn’t really answer me. He just heaved another tree up onto the floorboards of the truck. His clothes were soaked with his own sweat. New lines were being carved into his face by the minute.

He was with three other guys. I’d never seen them. There were so many men there that I hadn’t met.

My shift was over. I looked at Julio.

“Adios, Julio,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer.

Less than an hour later I was sitting in front of Sean trying to figure it out. We’d started in on a fresh bottle of Bushmills having knocked one apart the night before. There was also a pint of pilsner and baseball on TV. Sean was massaging his arm.

“Oh man,” he said. “Put in like three hours today.”

It was because I had left them. I’d left them while they washed the car. I had a choice and they didn’t. And I chose to let them do it without me. And in an unconscious moment, a moment that’d felt like somewhat of a stand, I separated myself from those guys. My instinct was to say “no” to the rich fucker with the smile. Their lives didn’t afford them that instinct.

Sean poured me another and I drank it. I was “drinking to get drunk”. Like some pamphlet would warn you about. To thin the blood in my veins. To escape my troubles and fears and doubts. This is why I was drinking.

I wanted to apologize to Julio and Jose and Miguel. But it wouldn’t heal what’d already been scarred. I could know all the Spanish in the fuckin’ world. It wouldn’t put me on their side.

I looked up at the TV. It was a nationally televised game. I watched that baseball for a little bit. Once there, for a while back there, I’d played some baseball. Started as an infielder and ended up a catcher. I played and loved playing. Then it stopped or I stopped or however those things go. I was good but to really play you have to be better than good. You have to be touched. Extra-ordinary. I thought about all those young ballplayers. Not drinking. Thinking about the sport. Watching footage. Playing catch. Wind sprints. Batting cages.

I might as well’ve been seventy years-old. Sitting there. Thinking and thinking there. Forever.

The next day I told Fred Leddick I was quitting. I gave no notice and didn’t even work the day. Tucked my tail and walked off like a dealer leaves a table.

I didn’t see the guys on my way out. I saw Miguel’s bike chained up in the parking lot. It was another scorching day. A “scorcher”.

A worker wearing a Garland’s shirt passed by.

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Going alright,” I said.

It was too early for Kempner’s to be open but I went by there anyway. The door was locked. It opened for lunch at noon and it was only nine o’clock. I got in my car and rode around for a while.

I’d have to find another job. Maybe I’d try painting houses or something. Maybe some construction. I knew some rudimentary woodworking. I’d washed dishes one summer. That was something I didn’t wanna’ get into again. No man wants hands that soft.

I couldn’t help but feel a great sadness. It lumped my throat and ached my head. I turned on the air conditioning and felt sick and guilty for doing it. I pulled into a Texaco and parked beside a pump.

Inside the store I told the clerk “Twenty on number four.”

“Twenty on four? No problem.”

He punched a few buttons on a computer.

“You’re not hiring by any chance are you?” I asked.

“Huh?” he said.

I threw the nozzle in the tank and squeezed. The numbers on the pump slid down till they stopped at $20. I looked around and saw a few people walking along. Businesses opening. A Chevy Blazer was pulling out of the McDonald’s drive-thru.

I had the sudden thought of going to the local shelter and adopting a dog. An old dog. One that was already established. Maybe a little tired. Then I realized I’d need some real money to take on a dog. I’d at least need a job. I’d have to get another job and then maybe I could adopt a dog.

I looked up at the sky and it felt like it would be morning forever.

And I tried and tried but I never really made it out of that town.

NYC, NY (5/27/09)

Don't Let Nothin'/Nobody Stand In Yer Way

2009-04-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Don’t Let Nothin’/Nobody Stand In Yer Way

by Sam Ford

And I started with me. On a good Friday. An average Friday. Surely. A good one. And I thought to myself. And I thought and I thought. Musta’ thought. My God, you know how to drink, son.

See: My old man’d called me earlier. An American man he was…a sentimentalist.

And he was talkin’ about about about. The time his son went fishing in upstate New York (“y’see it ain’t all…aint’ all…” vile motherfuckin’ brick and and the breakin’ of, papa). Y’see it had its…had its. Moments – wha? Ripping nightcrawlers from the earthiest earth. Watching them writhe. Before the word writhe. I mean…watching them fuckers writhe. Come a scratched record-setting sunfish. I lived for that truly worm. Writhing like an insomniac.

Mama was gone gone goes so it was: Papa’s…don’t let yer babies grow up to be…

And there was papa, cellular as a homecoming queen, wiping 29 years from his eyes, trying not to not cry. I wondered how I’d ever thank him for all he’d done. If I’d ever find a bucket big enough. For such a huge heart.

His phone-call sure did make me lonesome and sad.

And I was still living in, living in. New York City. With the shelves. And the sirens. And the big sunglasses. And the big beards. And the bricksbricksbricks. And the demands. And all the dogs shitting on sidewalks trying not to look embarrassed. And the skinny jeans. And the suffering dreams.

And the money – have money/make money/have money.

“Y’see, S***y Boy…” the bartender said, as he refilled the Brooklyn. “Here. Ya’ gotta’ have money to make it.”

The place was packed and I was thinking about that phone-call. Getting the knot out. Or tying it tighter. It was one in the same, maybe.

I ordered a shot of Turkey and thanked my friend the bartender. In addition to being a bartender, he was also an excellent songwriter. And sensitive. The worst kind of excellent.

The place was packed. A forever Friday. Millions of rats and roaches trying to get along in a closet. Praying tomorrow wouldn’t come but if it did, they wouldn’t have to wait too long to be seated for brunch.

The speaker system was threatening to melt down. Top-of-the-pops hits were playing and some were singing along and some were crying along and some were dying along and I might as well’ve been the oldest one there. It was the first big warm day and all the lil’ girlies were blessing the lil’ lads with pale flashes of skin through tanktops and miniskirts.

It was a sad story. The place’d once been a quiet, lowlit Irish speakeasy. Things got written and discussed there. Friends were made and kept. Men cocked their heads to the side and listened to the women and remembered the things they said and remembered their names. And the women had real troubles sometimes and sometimes they spoke a little bit about them. Sometimes the women smiled and showed that their teeth were a little fucked-up in places. Yeah, virtually everyone in the place was human back then.

Then then then…

The local university shattered the place like a walnut. The veal started drifting through the doors. Loud and fast and savvy. A generation raised by a thousand channels and the highest speed internet ever in the history of all of time. They sat in groups, each one on their phone, sending text messages to people who weren’t there. The boys ordered Pabst Blue Ribbon ‘cause it was cheap and they could drink twelve and feel accomplished. The girls ordered vodka and rum drinks with diet mixers. They were wondering why they were there. They were thinking about where else they could be. The same magazine was telling them how to be independent and how to please a man. Well jeez, that shit must be tough.

It was throbbing like a wound, the place. The bartender reached out his hand and it looked real good so I took it and shook it. We were both drowning.

“Somewhere there’s a life for both of us,” I told him.

Outside was worse in a way. You could hear the whole town trying to talk above itself. The streets shook as packs of men, the ones who weren’t gonna’ end up getting laid that night, barked and cackled and threatened each other.

“Fuck you, dude! Naw, fuck you, dude! Did you see that bitch? I’m fucking starving, dude. Let’s…is there a fucking pizza place around here?”

I tried to move past these guys. They were drunken towers threatening to fall. One brushed past me and I took his weight against my shoulder. It nearly spun me around. And, see, I was drunkles too and I called out into the night:

“Watch it, shitbird!”

But he and his friends were gone and others were moving toward me and I had to dodge them as well. Dozens of taxi cabs made the avenue a yellow ocean. They were on their horns. Pulling over and pulling out. Blue balls for a fare. The beads on their seat covers all stained with sweat.

“Hey, fuck you!” one of them said in an English that wasn’t.

It was shaping up to be a crowbar of a night. I was gonna’ try, really try, to make it home unscathed.

There were no trees. But there were streetlights. There was no grass. But there were gutters. There were no stars. But there were bricks.

And I was still thinking of papa bear’s call. I was drunk off it and everything else. I puked in an empty trashcan and heard laughter from all around. I hung my head over the orange wrought-iron. More vomit came and it hurt to get it out. I could feel sweat running from the back of my head and down my spine. It was hot as hell outside and I was not a rich man.

Not even Friday could help me. I worked on Saturdays and I’d be working through a hangover like a hatchet-man clears a vault. To work through the working. Grinding like a southpaw in need of Tommy John. And I was so grateful to have a job it made me puke some more.

A large hand gripped my shoulder and I spun around. It was a man’s hand. A large man-hand. His largeness was over seven feet tall. He had a beard that hung to the middle of his chest. His face was caked with dirt. Shitty sooty dirt. He was wearing a grey satin robe that was also filthy, stained yellow and green in places, holes the size of golf balls appeared there and here. His teeth were the color of morning eye-crust and they were piranha-like in shape. His nose looked like a circumcised dickhead and it drooped down over his mouth, bobbing up and down as he moved. He wore a perpetual scowl, the corners of his mouth off-white and dry. The sound of his breathing was a high-pitched moan. Like a hound with a freshly broken leg. He set his gaze on me and a gust of freezing wind pulled itself across the earth.

He was a warlock. They call it a warlock and he was one.

“This is my garbage can, you son of a bitch!” he said.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“Say again?!” he bellowed.

“I said ‘sorry,’” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“But fuck you,” I said.

His face broke into a maniacal puzzle of twitches, curls, and snarls. He raised an arm to the sky and summoned a giant mutant pigeon down from a rooftop. The pigeon landed on his shoulder and immediately shat on him, the white fecal liquid running down his arm like a toddler on a slide.

“This is Ernst,” the warlock said. “He’s here to kill you.”

With that, Ernst flew toward me, his pink talons spread wide as mouths, ready to rend and tear at my flesh. I quickly lunged to the side, fell to the sizzling concrete, and rolled away from him as he soared over my body, his claws missing me by inches. Ernst whooped and cackled, shitting on everything he flew over – mailboxes, cars, no parking signs. The warlock watched in contentment, his arms folded across his body, his lips tangled in a putrid smile like two slugs fucking.

“ARGHHHH!!!” I screamed, knowing the city would never hear me.

Ernst came diving in, his beak open and excited. He was aiming for the prune in my chest. That poor little thumper. Yes, Ernst was gonna’ tear my heart out and eat it and then shit it out like it was nothin’ at all. It would be just another grey-white blotch on a playground somewhere. Something for a dog to sniff at or a mother to tell her kid to stay away from.

I held my arms out and grabbed Ernst by the wings. He seemed shocked at this, as though no one had ever dared attempt to thwart him. I used his surprise to my advantage. I wrestled him to the ground where he cried out and lunged at me with that dirty purple beak. I pinned him by his shoulders but his will was strong. I could feel his talons grating my stomach, drawing blood, hurting. He drove his beak toward my neck. The snaps of his bird jaws were like gun reports reverberating off the bricks and windows.

I mustered a lil’ extra sauce from my jar and broke one of Ernst wings. It made a jagged, unnatural sound and he screeched screeched screeched. I moved my mouth toward his neck and bit down, tearing through the feathers and into the neck-meat. I ripped his head right off his body and spit it out toward where the warlock stood. Blood ran down the corners of my mouth and my eyes turned coal black and spun in their sockets. The warlock stared at me, his mouth agape, an unfamiliar fright seeping from his pores.

“Looks like Ernst is gonna’ need another head,” I told him.

“No one has ever bested Ernst,” he told me.

“There’s a first time for everything, asshole,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said. “And now it is time for you to die.”

He let out a concise fart, gathered himself, and rushed toward me. I ducked and put my boot heel in his kneecap. He yelped and staggered. He moved toward me again, this time with a limp. I slipped his lunge and threw a left to the side of his head. It struck his temple and I heard something pop in there.

“No one has ever bested Ernst!!” he yelled.

He collapsed to the ground and the metropolis shook a virgin’s last virgin moment.

I leaned over him and wailed away with right and left hooks to his muhfuckin’ face. I could hear the bones in my little hands shattering with each blow that struck him. I tore the skin across my knuckles on his wiry beard. Sweat exploded from my face and onto his. I worked on that face till it was useless as a watermelon rind, a three of diamonds, a politician’s handshake.

The warlock. Was dead.

***

That night as I lay in my bed, I asked the Earth, my only god, to forgive me for the killing of Ernst. He was, after all, an animal, a bird, and I felt incredible remorse for his death. I wept a bit, got up to take a shit, checked me email on my cell-phone, and got back into bed.

My window was open and I could hear the far away cries of millions just like me. Looking for a way out with both eyes closed.

NYC, NY (4/30/09)

Where Are You, Baby?

2009-03-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

Where Are You, Baby?

by Sam Ford

Jamie hated the hospital. Everything pale and clean. Everyone either terribly concerned or exhausted. Too fast. Too slow. No news. Bad news. Waiting. Waiting, waiting. Leaving.

But, like most other things, Jamie had accepted it as life. He didn’t believe in complaining, just bitching, but the hospital seemed like too big a deal to bitch about. People lost real things there. Jamie was used to bitching about the local police or the price of gas. The hospital made those hardships seem like cake.

His mother was lying there sleeping. She could’ve been dead for all Jamie knew. He was all too used to seeing her stretched out between the metal rails, eyes closed, looking starched as the shirt he wore to his prom. That shirt’d ended up covered in dirt and blood from a fight that night. Jamie still had a scar over his eye from a set of brass knuckles that blind-sided him. His hand brushed over the dented flesh and he let out a rumbling sigh. Medical machines whirred and beeped. Lights flashed. Jamie could hear voices in the hallway but could make out no words.

His mother was being overtaken by the lung cancer that three packs a day for over thirty years had made inevitable. Her face was a pinkish grey prune, wrinkled as linen. Her lips had vanished and she had no teeth left. She looked like a dying monster. Jamie had seen pictures of her in her 20’s, her skin soft, her smile like a shooting star. It was as though that girl had been slowly erased, feature by feature. She’d been all he had for most of his life. Now he was all she had. And soon she’d be gone. And Jamie wouldn’t have to come to the hospital anymore. And the loneliness that’d swallowed him most of his life would finally shit him out. He was terrified and furious.

He was thirty-two years old. He was going bald. He was a couple inches over six-feet. A ruggedly handsome man with piercing ice-blue eyes and tobacco-stained teeth. He cursed. His dog, Sarge, was old and faithful and dumb. Jamie had a goatee and a tattoo on his arm – a skull with a knife and a serpent through it. The court’d taken his driver’s license away from him for a DUI a year and change ago. He loved his mother. His real father had died when he was nine years old. None of the other men came close. None tried.

There was a clock on the wall and Jamie drew his eyes to it. It was a little after eight in the morning. And that meant Jamie had to go to work.

He touched his mother’s hand. Nothing about her changed. Nothing much changed about him either. His younger brother lived in Northern California and Jamie hadn’t spoken to him in two and a half years. He wondered how he’d take the news when it came down. He hated that he’d have to be the one to call. He’d have to call a few people. They’d all care for a little while.

***

Jamie took the bus to the parking lot of Archer’s Steak & Eggs in the middle of Main Street. It was there that Harry, his friend and co-worker, picked him up. Harry was about five foot five and his big beer-belly pushed out over his waist and hid his belt-buckle, which read “BOSSMAN” in tarnished brass. Harry had long hair combed back and wore a black leather biker vest over a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He had kind eyes and a goofy grin. He was somewhere in the first half of his fifties. His bum knees made him seem older and his personality made him seem younger.

Jamie hopped into the shotgun seat of Harry’s pick-up. He slammed the door and Harry threw the shifter into drive. He handed Jamie a cup of coffee. Jamie took it from him without saying thanks, rolled the window down and lit a Lucky Strike. Harry began coughing immediately. He waved his hand in front of his face and rolled his own window down.

“C’mon,” Jamie said. “Jesus.”

“It’s only two months I been quit, Jamie. Show some sensitivity.”

Jamie blew a waft of smoke in Harry’s general direction. Harry gagged and Jamie chuckled. The sun threw a blinding shot against the windshield and Jamie’s eyes narrowed. He looked out the window at a lone kid riding his bike down a hillside. He took the kid for nine or ten. He could feel his heart beating in his chest.

“Did you think about what I told you about this Tanya?” he heard Harry say.

“What?” Jamie said, turning to him.

“I’m tellin’ ya’ that, y’know, Sharon says there’s this new girl at the vet’s office and her name’s Tanya. And she says to me that you should meet her. ‘Parently she’s a pretty gal. Smart. Y’know, but pretty. And Sharon, she’s been asking about ya’. Yer mom and all with that. She’d like to see you meet a nice girl, she says to me.”

Jamie scratched at his cheek and took a drag. “We’ll see,” he said.

“Yeah, ‘cause we could all go out and go to the Longhorn’s or something. Get a dinner and some beers.”

“Maybe. Whaddo we got today?”

“Doors and windows. Over in Adamsville. Garvey’s gonna’ meet us there. We’ll get them doors in today, front and back. Couple days then on the windows.”

“All the materials in?”

“Yeah, already delivered from what I know. Hopefully it’s the right shit this time.”

“That’d be nice.”

“How is yer mom, Jamie?”

“She’s alright.”

Harry was looking over at Jamie. Jamie flicked his cigarette out the window and glanced in his mirror in time to see the cherry hit the pavement and break apart.

***

Garvey was waiting for them at the worksite, a single story house with a full-length deck and a modest yard. He was similar to Harry in size but had a long beard that stretched down across his chest. He rode his Sportster everywhere. He had a tattoo of a Mac-10 on his shoulder. The words “Please, Fuck With Me” were inked underneath. He wore cheap wayfarer sunglasses, dirty blue jeans, and an old Bad Company sweatshirt. He was smoking a cigarette and walking in a circle when Harry pulled-up.

“Hey guys,” Garvey coughed. “Hey Jame. What’s new?”

Harry trotted toward Garvey. They shook hands. Jamie moved toward the house. The new doors and windows were leaning up against the wall. Jamie took his jacket off and tossed it on the railing of the deck. He lit another cigarette and stood one of the new doors up.

“Home Depot?” he asked Harry.

“Yeah. How’s it look?”

“Looks fine,” Jamie said.

“I’ll grab the gear,” Garvey said, heading toward Harry’s pick-up.

“This house’s got a list, huh?” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “It was moved from Cormac County I think. Back in the fifties. That’s what happens when you put it on a hill.”

“Hope you got plenty of shingles then,” Jamie said.

“We should be good. And I gotta’ get started on a rock wall at the edge of the property line today.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” Jamie grinned.

“Of course you will,” Harry said.

Garvey returned with crowbars, hammers, and two power drills.

“Charge up them spare batteries, Garvey,” Harry said.

***

Within the first three hours the men had removed both old doors and nearly completed the installation of the new ones. The first one had been relatively painless. The second one required a lot of trimming and Jamie had to reposition it in the frame twice to get the reveal exactly how he wanted it. He was a perfectionist, and that’s why Harry hired him on for jobs. As much as he bellyached about this or that, he never left something half-assed.

“Hey Jamie,” Garvey said, as he finished drilling in a new doorknob.

“What?” Jamie said, checking the open and close on the first door.

“Whaddayou call a guy who accidentally chops off his buddy’s hand with an axe?”

“I dunno.”

“An axe-hole.”

Garvey laughed and Jamie grinned, more at the way it sounded than how funny it actually was. Sometimes Jamie felt really young around the guys and sometimes he felt really old.

Harry came waddling on up to the house, his face glistening with sweat.

“That’s lunch, guys. And that goddamn wall is kickin’ my ass today.”

“I got my sandwich, Harry,” Garvey said. Garvey would buy a roast beef sandwich from the local gas station every morning, stick it on his dashboard, and let it sit in the sun till lunchtime. About that time the cheese was all melted and the mayonnaise had actually been infused into the meat.

“You wanna’ go into town and get something, Jamie?” Harry asked.

“Nah,” Jamie answered. “Just bring me back something. Turkey sandwich or whatever.”

“Okay, I’ll be back in a little bit then,” Harry said, getting into the truck and pulling out.

“You want half a’ my sandwich, Jame?” Garvey said.

“Been roastin’ in the heat all mornin’ hasn’t it?” Jamie grimaced.

“Yeah. ‘S good that way.”

“It’s all yers,” Jamie said. He lit a cigarette. “I’m gonna’ walk around a bit.”

***

The property was surrounded by woods. Jamie pushed his way through them. He could hear chickadees and thrushes singing to each other. When he was a boy he’d grab his Swiss Army knife, a canteen, and a pair of plastic binoculars and go off into the woods on his own. It honed his sense of direction and sense of solitude. He’d talk to himself out there, pretend he was a soldier separated from his battalion. It made him feel less lonesome but more alone; for every story and experience he carved out in his imagination, he felt more and more detached from the other kids at school. He never got bullied because he had a short temper and would react violently if teased. But he never went out of his way to make friends either. Soon the Swiss Army Knife turned into a gun. The canteen turned into the occasional bottle. He liked to go hunting and fishing. Occasionally he’d find himself with a woman, but never for long enough to get truly open. The women who saw him as a project would break themselves trying to figure him. The women who saw him as a fuck-up would use him for their own lonely reasons. The only one who’d ever told him she loved him was his mother. And for a while he even rebelled against that.

His father’d died in a car wreck. On a fifth of Alexei, he’d skipped the median and been smashed to pieces by a semi. His body’d been virtually obliterated. There’d been pieces of him as far as forty yards from the crash.

Jamie knew he’d loved his father but he couldn’t remember why.

He found himself in a clearing and sat down on a long flat rock. The sun was glowing through the leaves and limbs and Jamie laid on his back. He heard the wind dance across the trees. His mother’s name was Debbie. He’d never really thought of her name much. But now he started saying it to himself. Debbie. Debbie Aldridge.

Jamie tried to cry. He tried to push the tears out of his eyes but none came. After a while he stood up and started to walk back to the house.

***

The sun was going down and both doors were in and functioning perfectly. They’d even gotten started on a couple of the windows.

“Beer time,” Garvey smiled, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “See ya’ll down there.”

“We’ll see ya’,” Harry said.

Garvey hopped on his bike and revved the engine. Shots of gravel flew up behind him as he motored off. Harry and Jamie climbed in the pick-up.

“What’s the name a’ that girl?” Jamie asked, looking away from Harry.

“Which one?” Harry said.

“The one…the one that Sharon wants me to meet. Tryin’ to set me up with, y’know?”

“Oh. Uhh…Tanya. It’s Tanya I think.”

“Well maybe we can all meet up soon.”

“Yeah? When would you wanna’…”

“I dunno, y’know. Whenever. Sometime soon. Like tomorrow night maybe.”

“I’ll talk to Sharon about it, sure. You wanna’ go to the Longhorn’s?”

“What is it with you and that fuckin’ Longhorn’s?”

“I like the place, Jamie. They got a good ribeye.”

“Place is overrated.”

“Beats the hell outta’ Friendly’s. Don’t ya’ think?” Harry paused for a moment. He tugged at the skin around his adam’s apple. “Although I like those fried clam strips they got there at Friendly’s.”

“Hey Harry,” Jamie said, turning to face him.

“Yeah?” Harry answered. He couldn’t remember the last time Jamie called him by his name.

“Don’t make it a big deal. The whole thing. The goin’ out. Just…make it seem like, y’know…You three are goin’ out…You, Sharon, and this girl and…you just invited me along at the last minute.”

“Sure, Jamie.”

“I just don’t wanna’ turn it into some big thing.”

“I understand. We’ll keep it a casual kinda’ thing.”

“Just…not even that though. Don’t even call it casual. Just…like it happens to happen. Nothing prepared, y’know what I mean?”

“Well…they might take reservations over at that Longhorn’s if we do it tomorrow. It’s Friday night after all.”

“Jesus Christ. Alright whatever. I just don’t want it to be some set-up thing. A double-date or whatever.”

“Alright, Jamie. I understand. Hey we did good today.”

“How’re those knees a’ yers?”

“Worth about as much as a limp dick in a whorehouse.”

Jamie chuckled and lit a cigarette. This time he rolled down the window.

***

The following evening, Jamie took the bus to the Mountain Hill Mall in Deansboro. He insisted Harry not pick him up for fear that they might have picked Tanya up as well. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the backseat with his armpits leaking and his hair disappearing by the minute.

The final decision to meet them for dinner had been plowed over dozens of times. He contemplated shaving. Changed into at least four outfits. He consulted Sarge, who laid on the floor and cocked his head to the side as Jamie asked him, “whaddayou think?” Sarge was a bulldog with some yellow lab and hound in him. He often seemed confused.

There were plenty of cigarettes, but Jamie pledged to himself that he wouldn’t drink. He knew if he went at it too hard he’d never leave. Or if he did leave, he’d be a wreck at the dinner. He finally settled on the cleanest pair of blue jeans he had, a decent looking dark blue button-down shirt from TJ Maxx, and an old pair of simple black Tony Lama cowboy boots his mother had gotten him when he turned 30. He’d only worn them once before and that was to try them on.

He looked good, he guessed. As good as he was ever gonna’ look. Then he quickly realized that the way he looked was an attempt. An attempt to get dressed up. He didn’t look like himself. He looked like a teacher or a banker or a guy working at TJ Maxx. Some kind of owner of something. He looked down at the cowboy boots.

“God, you fuckin’ idiot!” he shouted. Sarge’s ears arched back but his position on the floor didn’t change. Maybe he farted.

Jamie started to unbutton his shirt. He caught a glance at the alarm clock next to his bed and realized he didn’t have time to change again. It was 6:28. He had to meet them at 7. And the bus took its time.

***

The Longhorn Steakhouse was one of the nicer restaurants throughout the area. There was a hostess that greeted you at the door, a full bar with three big screen plasma TV’s, and free in-shell peanuts at every table. The menu listed everything from t-bones to ribeyes to filet mignon to burgers. Swordfish. Tuna. Garlic and lemon chicken. Linguine with a creamy shrimp sauce. Baked potatoes.

Jamie finished a cigarette in the parking lot. He dug a pack of Doublemint out from his jeans, coiled up a piece and tossed in his mouth. Butterflies were crashing into each other in his stomach. Jamie looked out across the horizon. The sky was on fire with the sunset.

He eased his way through the entrance of the Longhorn where he was met by a petite girl of about seventeen. She had strawberry blonde hair and big blinking brown eyes.

“Hi sir,” she said. “Did you have a reservation?”

The place was packed. Jamie couldn’t really see into the dining room but he could hear a cacophony of voices talking, laughing, eating, slurping. He felt like he was gonna’ puke.

“No,” he swallowed. “But I’m…I’m meeting some people.”

“Okay. Was there a name for that party? They might already be here.”

“Uh…Try Harry. Harry Oaks.”

The girl glanced down at a clipboard in front of her.

“Yes. Oaks. Party of four. They haven’t arrived yet. If you’d like to have a seat at the bar while you wait for them…”

“I’m sorry, but what time is it?” Jamie asked her.

“It’s ten after seven. So I guess they’re running a little late.”

Jamie gnashed his teeth together and took a deep breath. “Okay…I’ll be at the bar,” he said.

The bartender was a kid in his late 20’s. He was tall with pale pock-marked skin and curly hair. His smile showed a gap in his two front teeth.

“How’s it goin’?” he said to Jamie.

Jamie slid into a seat flanked by two empty ones. He didn’t answer the kid.

“What can I get ya’?” the bartender asked.

“Just…a coke please.”

“You got it.”

Jamie looked up at one of the big TV’s. It was basketball. NBA basketball. He pretended to be interested. He’d played some ball in high school. That felt like a million years ago. The bartender returned with his Coke. Jamie took out some money.

“It’s two,” the kid said.

Jamie put three on the bar. He took a sip of the Coke. It was some of the best shit he’d ever tasted in his life.

“This is a really good fuckin’ Coke,” he felt obliged to say.

“Sometimes all you really want is a Coke,” the bartender said.

Jamie nodded. The bartender walked off. Then Jamie thought about that. It was right. Sometimes all you did want was a Coke. He took another sip. It tasted even better. He eased back into the barstool.

“Hey Jamie.”

It was Harry’s voice. Jamie’s heart sunk into his feet.

“Sorry we’re late.”

Harry again. This time Jamie craned his neck toward the sound of the voice. There were three of them there. Harry. His wife Sharon. And another woman. A tall woman with long dirty-blond hair flowing across her shoulders and down her back. She was a beautiful woman. Jamie knew that like he knew how to use a sabre saw. He was happy he wore his hat but he wondered if he’d have to take it off when they sat down to eat. He elected not to. No matter what.

“Hi Jamie,” Sharon said. “I’d like you to meet my friend Tanya.”

Jamie looked at Sharon. Then he looked at Tanya. There she was. Looking at him. She had green eyes. Jamie had never seen green eyes before.

“It’s nice to meet you, Jamie,” Tanya offered.

“Nice to meet – nice to meet you too,” Jamie stuttered.

“They say our table is ready,” Harry said, glancing at the beers on tap. “So maybe we’ll just sit then.”

“Sounds good,” Sharon said.

The foursome made there way over to the dining room. Tanya stole a glance at Jamie’s feet.

“I like your boots,” she said to him.

Jamie froze for a moment. He peered down quickly and then looked back up at her.

“Thanks,” he said.

Tanya was wearing a handmade summer dress, cream colored with blue and yellow flowers everywhere. It was hanging over her bare shoulders. Her hair was falling over everything. She was almost as tall as him. She had a thin scar running across her neck. The wrinkles in her forehead had become permanent.

“I like your dress – that dress,” Jamie said.

“Thanks for sayin’ so,” Tanya smiled.

She walked in front of him toward the table. Jamie’s stomach gurgled. He exhaled.

It was a booth in the corner of the restaurant. Sharon and Harry eased in next to each other. Tanya took the inside of her row. Jamie sat next to her, mindful of leaving a little room between them. He could feel a drop of sweat trickle down the inside of his arm. No matter how much deodorant he used, he always seemed to penetrate it.

His hat was on. He was in his seat.

A waitress came by with four menus. As far as Jamie was concerned, she was a splitting image of the hostess. Right down to the cloud white teeth.

“How’s everyone doin’ tonight?” she smiled.

“Just fine,” Harry offered.

“Great. My name’s Abby and I’ll be your waitress tonight. Can I start you all out with something to drink?”

Harry spoke first. “I’d like a beer. Coors Light if you’ve got it.”

“Sure do,” Abby said.

“I’ll have a Coors Light too,” Sharon said. She glanced over at Tanya.

“I’ll have a Sauza Silver on the rocks with a couple a’ limes.”

Jamie felt his throat swell and go dry. He was afraid. He heard a voice inside of him ask his mother if he could have one beer. Before she could answer Abby said:

“And how ‘bout for you, sir?”

Jamie felt as though a searchlight had exploded upon him. He even winced. He didn’t wanna’ be there and he didn’t wanna’ be anywhere else.

“I’ll have a Coke,” he said.

“Just a Coke for you? No problem.” Abby scratched it all into a pad. Then she was gone.

An hour long minute passed before anyone said anything. Jamie was grateful Harry chose not to comment on the Coke.

“So how’s that house going, Jamie?” Sharon asked.

“House?” Jamie asked. He didn’t expect to be talking.

“The one you and Harry are working on. The doors and windows and all that.”

Tanya was looking at Jamie. He suddenly wondered how long it’d been since he’d q-tipped his ears.

“It’s goin’ okay,” he said. “The house’s got a bit of a lean to it so…we’re havin’ deal with that I guess. But it’s...goin’ okay.”

“How long have you and Harry been working together?” Tanya asked him.

“Well…” Jamie started. He glanced at Harry. Harry was throwing a bit of a cockeyed grin at him. Jamie frowned at him. The two women picked up on it. Everyone giggled. Even Jamie who felt real good right then. He’d known Harry a long time. Harry was like his funny little uncle.

“I’ve known Harry a long time,” Jamie said. “He’s like my funny little uncle.”

That brought about more laughs from the table. Jamie didn’t know why and he didn’t care. The lady, Tanya, the one sitting next to him, had a nice laugh. It had a gentle snort to it. Her teeth were a yellow-brown, the product of too many filterless years. It was honest, the whole thing. Jamie took his hat off.

“I learned how to fix things. Cars, houses, whatever when I was a kid. And Harry’s known me since I was born. Early as I can remember he started hiring me on to do jobs with him. I guess since I was fifteen or so.”

“He loved to work,” Harry said. “I remember all the other kids from the area’d go down to the lake to swim and mess around all day in the summer. Jamie wanted to work. He’s the one that came to me asking for a job. Remember that, Jamie?”

Jamie could feel Tanya looking at him still. Her chin was resting on the back of her hand. Her eyes were still green. He wanted to put his arm around her. Maybe say something in her ear. Maybe get lucky and make her laugh.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember that, Harry,” Jamie said.

“Jamie comes to me one summer. Comes by the house. You remember this, Shay?” Harry turned to his wife.

“I do,” she said. She was smiling at Jamie. He couldn’t help but blush. But this time he didn’t mind.

“He’s just a scrawny scarecrow of a kid,” Harry continued. “And he wasn’t no fifteen. More like eleven. Maybe even ten.”

“Wow,” Tanya said, widening her eyes at Jamie. “Youngster.”

“I think it was fifteen,” Jamie said.

“It was ten, eleven.” Harry tone was surprisingly firm. “He was fresh as a raindrop. And he knocks on our door and Sharon answers. And he says in this little squeak of a voice, ‘is Harry around?’ And Sharon says sure and he comes inside. And I’m sittin’ there watchin’ Bassmasters or whatever and I’m sittin’ there in my lazy-boy recliner chair, real Godfather like, y’know? Like the Don Corleone, y’know? And he’s just this little crusty-nosed kid. Overalls and all that. And he says, ‘I was hopin’ I could start workin’ for you.’ And I say, ‘ain’t no work right now, son.’ And he says, ‘well when there is, you call me first.” And I say, ‘well why should I call you first?’ And he says, ‘well ‘cause I’m the hardest worker you’re ever gonna’ meet.’ And I say, ‘I don’t know about that. I know some pretty hard workers.’ And he goes, ‘not like me.’ And that’s the thing that stuck right there. ‘Not like me.’ So the next few days I caught a big painting job up in Sheldon County. I took him with me. And one other guy. Three day job, we got it done in two. Been callin’ on him ever since.”

***

They ate their meals and there was more conversation, more laughs. Jamie didn’t want the night to end for fear that he’d never get it back. He was afraid of having to go home, go away from it, and end up thinking about it to death. Analyzing it until it would’ve been better it’d never even happened.

Tanya did some talking. She told the men about where she grew up. Her parents. Her brother in jail for armed robbery. Jamie was able to hear some of it. The rest of the time his nerves clogged his ears, or his eyes made him deaf while they stared at her neck, her eyes, her shoulder, her lips. He even forgot her name a couple of times and though no one knew that but him, he still got red and had to turn away and hit the Coke pint to straighten himself out.

He hadn’t kissed a girl in over a year. The last time he’d gotten laid, he paid cash. No one knew him well enough to say he was a lot like his father. But he knew he was.

Harry bought dinner. Jamie was a little too thrown to put up a fight. In the end he figured it was Harry’s show anyway.

Jamie’d shake Tanya’s hand. Nice to meet you. Okay. Well. See you tomorrow, Harry. And then on the bus. Home and he’d feed Sarge. Let him out in the yard for a while. Drink a beer. Maybe a shot of Kentucky. And go to sleep. Dreaming would be the next big thing.

Out in the parking lot they all exchanged goodbyes. Tanya and Sharon hugged with a see-you-on-Monday. Harry and Jamie didn’t bother shaking hands.

“Pick you up at nine,” Harry said. “Want a ride home?”

“I’ll take the bus,” Jamie said. “Thanks.”

“Suit yerself. Pick you up at nine.”

“What time did ya’ say?”

“Nine, wise ass.”

“Better make it nine.”

Harry scooped his arm around Sharon’s waist. They walked off together like that.

Jamie lit a cigarette like it was winning scratch-ticket. He watched Tanya reach into her handbag, find a Marlboro Medium, and do the same.

“It was nice meeting you, Jamie,” Tanya offered.

“Yeah,” Jamie stuttered. “You too.”

There was half a moon in the long smoke-blue sky. Stars were joining in. Jamie started counting them.

“Here’s my phone number,” Tanya said, writing it on a piece of scrap paper from her purse. “Call me sometime. There’s a pretty good bluegrass band coming to the Red Hen next Friday. Do you like music?”

“It’s okay,” Jamie said. He didn’t know what the question was. But he had her phone number in his hand.

“Well use that number,” Tanya said. And she walked off. Jamie watched her do that. He knew he’d never forget it. That walking off. At night. Early summer. In the parking lot of the Lonestar Steakhouse.

***

Weeks stole away. The bluegrass band must’ve played. Maybe Tanya went but she didn’t go with Jamie. He worked side-by-side with Harry. Finished the Adamsville house. Finished another one up in LaGrange. Started another one in Adamsville. Masonry. Jamie hated cement. But not as much as he hated himself for not calling Tanya. The girl and the woman and the one who told him to call her. The number she gave him was in his wallet. It’d been there since the parking lot.

“Did ya’ give Tanya a call?” Harry asked.

“Not yet,” Jamie grumbled. “Off my ass about it, huh?”

“You’re gonna’ regret not callin’ her. She liked ya’. It don’t need to be a rainbow to glow, y’know.”

Jamie chuckled. “Fuck’s that mean?”

“Means beggars can’t be choosers. A sardine’s still a fish. A dent in the fender don’t mean the engine’s shot.”

“Jesus Christ. Fuckin’ Socrates over here. When’s lunch, oh wise one?”

“When you sprout a few hairs on those nuts a’ yers.”

“Hey,” Jamie snapped. “Back off. I’ll call ‘er if I wanna’ call ‘er.”

“You wanna’ call ‘er. That ain’t the problem.”

Jamie spit in the gravel. His face was red and wet from the May heat. He slipped a cigarette between his frowning lips. He didn’t know how to last with someone. That was the problem. He didn’t know how to make it regular. A regular thing. Something that would lead to living. Living with. He wiped his forehead. He hated the summer. It rubbed everything in.

***

They were in front of Jamie’s house. In Harry’s truck.

“See you tomorrow,” Harry said.

Jamie slammed the shotgun door and walked across his yard. The crickets were at it early. Sarge was barking from inside. Jamie opened the door and Sarge came bopping towards him, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a log of pepperoni. Jamie the spot behind his ear a good scratch. He pulled the soaked shirt off his body and tossed it on the couch. The hairs on his chest and stomach and shoulders were matted down and tangled. He was into a week and half’s worth of beard. He had some money saved up now. He contemplated buying a new gun.

He saw his answering machine flashing its red eye at him. He pressed play and a dry digital voice told him he had “one new message.”

“Hi Jamie. This is Doctor Eastman calling. If you could come by the hospital at your earliest convenience. I’m…afraid we have some bad news. Your mother took a turn for the worse this afternoon. We tried to stabilize her but…she suffered a full cardiac arrest at about a quarter after four. I’m very sorry. I’ll go into the details a little further when you arrive here. Again I’m…I’m terribly sorry, Jamie. I’ll look forward to seeing you here as soon as you can get by.”

That was it and then the voice was back with “no more messages.” Jamie drew a long breath in and let it slowly fall through his nose. A wave of fatigue wandered through him like a church bell. He was in the kitchen and there was a small kitchen table with a couple of chairs and he let his body fall into one of the chairs. He wasn’t sad then. No sadder than his whole life. But he could feel his comfort zone cracking. It was the one he’d built up as his mother lay in the hospital. Getting ready to die. But still alive with that. And Jamie wouldn’t have the hospital anymore. He wouldn’t have the routine or the easy feelings that came with it.

He knew he was gonna’ drink and drink. At least tonight. He was gonna’ drink a river.

***

At the hospital Doctor Eastman used terms like defibrillation and endotracheal tube. And how surgery wasn’t an option given the advanced stages of the cancer and and and. Jamie sat there listening to the summer rain kiss the windows of the doctor’s office. There were framed documents on the walls. Family photos on his desk. He was Jamie’s age. Combed blond hair. Strong, blue-grey eyes. Jamie decided he was the smartest man he’d ever met. He thought it’d do them both good to give the doctor that. The doctor with the bad news.

“As I said on the phone, Jamie, I’m terribly sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.”

Jamie wondered how he knew that. He flinched away the wondering if it was true.

“What happens now?” he asked, clearing his throat.

“Well,” Doctor Eastman began, “you can contact the funeral home. Or I can do it for you if you like. They’ll then come and pick the body up. After that, you’ll work out the arrangements for the funeral with them directly. Have you prepared for any of this…?”

“No,” Jamie said. He was solemn and exhausted. “Where’s the funeral home?”

“Well there’s a few in town. My uncle died a couple of years ago and I can give you the number of the folks who took care of him.”

Folks who took care. Jamie needed a drink like an eye needed a lid.

“I guess I’ll work it out tomorrow if it’s okay. I’ll give you a call tomorrow if it’s okay.”

The doctor looked at Jamie for a moment. He saw the nicotine on his skin and on his neck and in his cheeks.

“That’s fine,” Eastman said. He extended a hand to Jamie. Jamie looked at it a moment. Then he rose from his seat and shook it. It was a limp hand and Jamie wanted to puke. He wanted to puke and he hadn’t even had a drop yet.

“Appreciate it,” Jamie muttered. He wasn’t sure why he said anything it all. He’d never see the doctor again. Maybe at the Price Chopper. And the doctor would give him the same sorry look. Maybe he’d have his kids with him.

***

Jamie caught a Greyhound instead of the county bus. It took him across the state line and dropped him at a station in a town called Story Lake. He’d never heard of the town and he’d never been in the state before.

It was growing darker by the minute. He’d bought two packs of cigarettes and a fifth of Jack Daniels before the bus. The fifth was almost kicked by the time he got off. He tore into the cigarettes as he stood on the station platform. He could make out a small restaurant across the road. There were some people inside and he wondered if it had a bar. He smoked back-to-back squares there under the lights of the station. He heard a couple a few yards away from him talking about a movie. He didn’t get it. She told him that was the point.

Jamie thought about his brother for a moment. Out there in Northern California. Jamie knew there’d been some crystal meth in that tale. The last time he’d seen his brother one of his front teeth was missing and he had bruises all over his arms. Part of Jamie was grateful his brother was far away.

He finished one, flipped it away, lit another.

***

The restaurant had a bar and the bar had a seat for Jamie. The TV was on with no sound. A couple of locals were sitting there as well, all of them watching the screen dance in silence. There were some occupied tables. People were eating beef and chicken and pork and maybe some shrimp. Nobody was talking really. A lot of the men were older and wore baseball hats over their white hair, their grey hair. One of the baseball hats said “NAVY” on it. The man wearing it had downcast eyes and a scar on his chin. Jamie took him for seventy-five. The man was eating a chicken breast with some rice nearby it. He wore khaki pants and sneakers with velcro on them. His wife was a small woman with great hair tugged back over her scalp. She wore oversized glasses with thick lenses and had a plate of fettuccine alfredo in front of her. They ate in silence.

And Jamie ordered a double Jack Daniels neat. He ordered a bottle of Heineken behind it. He asked for an ashtray and the bartender, a man in his fifties with brown hair and a lisp, gave it to him. Jamie lit a cigarette.

He saw his mother on the couch. Smoking. Watching “The Young and the Restless.” Once she cried while watching the show and Jamie cried because she cried.

The double bourbon was gone and Jamie ordered another one. One of the men at the bar took notice of Jamie’s pace but said nothing. He tilted his bottle of Miller Light toward Jamie and smiled. Jamie tilted his Heineken bottle back at the old-timer.

“Fuck death,” Jamie said. A couple of people turned and looked at Jamie. “Know what I mean?” he said.

“Sure do,” the Miller drinker laughed. “I tell ‘er to suck me every mornin’.”

Jamie had tears in his eyes while he chuckled. He brushed them away with the hairs on the back of his hand. The old man might as well’ve been his best friend. But then the old man got up and stumbled out of the place. His suspenders held his blue polyester pants above his ankles. The cuffs swished against his legs as he moved. He didn’t say goodbye to Jamie on his way out, didn’t even look in his direction.

Jamie finished the first beer and the second Jack and ordered one more of each and soon he was drunk as a roach on its back. He could hear his heart down there in his chest. His heartbeat was clogging his ears. He pressed the fresh bottle of beer against his forehead.

He thought a little bit about death. How much and how little it meant. He wondered how his mother would matter now that she was gone. Jamie didn’t know too much about the world, so he had a hard time casting any of it in a greater light. He tried to think about God. He wondered whether or not he believed in God. He’d been baptized Catholic and that was it. He wasn’t qualified in Jesus. He was sorta’ scared of Jesus. Scared Jesus would tell him he was too late.

Jamie could see his mother scrambling eggs in the kitchen. Shaking her hips to Bob Seger for a man she’d lost or hadn’t found yet. The forever cigarette dangling from a lost and lusting pout. Big auburn waves falling across her back.

He could see her pulling her ’73 Continental Mark IV into the driveway after a day waiting tables at the Motor Diner & Cocktail Lounge. The big dual exhaust V8 coughing monoxide into the dusk, choking the crickets and the sparrows. She’d have the cigarette, denim jacket, a bag or two of groceries. The day’s make-up falling apart on her tired face.

He could see her sitting on a man’s lap. The TV on and glowing across their bodies. Him with his handlebar mustache, western shirt tucked into Wranglers, work boots, smelling like too much Stetson. Her cuddling into the beef of his arm, snuggling her cheek against his shoulder, want want wanting to say “I love you” and have it said back. Right there. Like that. Jamie would sit on the couch. Starsky and Hutch. The Six Million Dollar Man. Taxi. His mother would laugh on that lap. The man would drink his Pabst. Half a hard-on choking beneath her ass.

Jamie was crying then. He had his head down in his glass, trying to keep things hidden from the strangers around him. The only ones he ever knew. His mom, she was his friend, he figured. She’d taken him horseback riding. Bought him a straw hat with a plastic sheriff’s badge glued to the front. Red bandanna. She even bought a pair of cap-guns and they’d have shootouts together. That was extra shit, far as Jamie was concerned. There was no father so she went farther than most would’ve. And still shouted her whiskey downs. And still poured the bottomless bean for men who would’ve let her keep her uniform on and her hair done-up.

Jamie found himself wishing he would’ve kept her from being so lonely in her life. But he sat there being her. And he knew that would’ve been impossible.

There was snot on his wrist from the sobs. Sweat on his temples and underarms and forearms. The room was starting to tilt. He could feel the other patrons shifting in their seats, whispering to each other. The bartender approached but before he could say anything Jamie gathered himself and spoke:

“Can you tell me the name of this town?”

“It’s called Story Lake,” the bartender said. “Are you okay, fella’? Can I call somebody for ya’?”

“I’ll call her,” Jamie said. “Do you have a phone here?”

“It’s in the back by the bathrooms.” The bartender pointed somewhere and Jamie got up out of his stool and started moving towards it. He could feel a dozen eyes rolling across him as he staggered towards the payphone.

He pulled the number from his wallet. He threw three quarters in the slot, unsure of how far away he was and how much it would cost him to get where he wanted to be. The ink on the paper was fading. What he thought was a three looked like a two. A seven looked like a one. He took his best guess and punched the numbers in.

“Hi, it’s Tanya. I can’t get to my phone right now. Please leave me a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Thanks.”

There was a beep and it startled Jamie. He hung up the phone and pressed his head against the metal housing it sat in. He understood he’d have to leave a message. He’d be talking not to a person, but to the idea of the person listening later. It wouldn’t be easy. He practiced a little bit.

“Shum…Heys…This is Jaim- Jamie callin’…I just wanted to…talk about it.”

He quickly grew frustrated and stopped practicing.

The payphone rang.

It put a shot into Jaime. He picked it up almost instantly. Somehow he knew it was the thing to do. Once the phone was in his hand he took a moment. Then he put it to the side of his face.

“Hello,” he said.

“Who is this?” Tanya asked.

“It’s…Jamie. Jamie. I’m sorry.”

“What’re you sorry about?”

“I’m sorry I’m callin’ you. I’m sorry I’m callin’…”

“Well that’s why I gave you number, right? So you could call me.”

“I’m sorry I waited so long to call you. I don’t know why I waited so long.”

“Probably ‘cause you’re a little shy. Been a while since you had a girl’s phone number?”

“Yeah I guess.”

“Whaddayou want, Jamie?” she asked him.

“Well…I been drinkin’ some. I feel like I gotta’ tell you that.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“My mom was pretty sick. She had cancer and she died today. I’m not tryin’ to make a big deal out of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Tanya said. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”

“Could I see you?”

There was a pause. Jamie felt the hook underneath his lower lip.

“When?” she finally asked.

“I mean…” Jamie put his hand to his forehead. Tears fell from his eyes again. He talked through them. “Would you come get me? Would you come get me if it’s alright?”

He heard Tanya exhale. He listened with all his might.

“Where are you, baby?” she said.

“I’m in a town called…Story City. Story…”

“Story Lake?”

“Yeah. Do you know where that is?”

“I’ve heard of it. I think it’s just off seventeen.”

“I’m in a place…a restaurant just across from the bus station. I took the bus here.”

“Okay. Just stay there. Don’t make me drive all the way and then vanish.”

“I won’t vanish,” Jamie said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’s gonna’ be a big omelet in the morning, Jamie. And french toast.”

“Okay,” Jamie said. It got him. He cried on it.

***

When she pulled up at the Station Grill, she could see him through the window sitting at the bar. He looked like a million men on any night. His broad shoulders were hunched over the wood, the day was slowly sliding off of him. The bartender was cleaning shotglasses. Most of the chairs were on their tables.

She stepped inside the place. She sat in a seat next to Jamie. His broken eyes turned to face her. She touched his face.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Not a word passed between them on the ride to her house. The highway was empty save the headlights of Tanya’s Corolla. Every window was open and the nocturnal orchestra of summer filled the air. Jamie watched the woods whip by him. Tanya smoked a cigarette in long drags.

In her bedroom she sat him on the edge of the bed. She pulled his boots off. She stood him up and pulled his shirt off. She unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his pants. She pulled his pants off of him. She got him in the bed. The air conditioner in her room hummed like an old man trying to remember something. Jamie watched her pull her dress up over her body. She was naked when she got in the bed with him.

She pulled him into her. Ran her fingers through his hair. Kissed him over his eyes. He could hear her heart thumping beneath her breast. They were both breathing hard. They kissed a little bit. Jamie cried some. The room spun for him. She held him close.

***

The sun snuck between the blinds and pried Jamie’s eyes open. Tanya was lying there asleep next to him. His head felt like it’d been run through a brick wall and then set on fire. His mouth was a desert. Her bedroom was small with a dresser and a single closet tucked in one corner. A nightstand stood on her side of the bed. There was a glass of water on it. A book called “The Crimson Hunter.” A bottle of Excedrin.

Jamie got up and found the bathroom. It was tiny but clean. The powder blue floral wallpaper looked recent. The tub was white as a tooth. Jamie made sure to wipe around the toilet when he was finished pissing in it.

He returned to the bedroom to find her leaning against the headboard with a pillow behind her. She put those green stars on him. Jamie felt self-conscious in nothing but his boxer-briefs.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

“Come here,” she said.

Jamie moved to the bed and got underneath the sheet. Tanya had a tattoo of a crucifix covered in thorns and roses right above her bellybutton.

They sat there for a moment. Tanya was looking at him. Jamie was looking at her and looking away.

“Thanks for gettin’ me,” he said.

“I’m only gonna’ do it once, Jamie,” she said. “And you might have to do it for me once. Understand?”

Jamie looked at her. He looked at the scar on her neck. It’d been there a while he guessed. “Yeah,” he answered.

“You work real hard,” Tanya told him. “You’re a hard workin’ man.”

That made Jamie smile. She smiled back at him.

“You work too hard,” she said.

They smiled at each other again. The sun had almost completely emptied into the room.

Jamie swallowed and touched her hand.

LI, NY (3/1/09)

The Deer

2008-09-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Deer

by Sam Ford

Susannah was a dancer at Cable’s Topless Bar & Steakhouse just off of I-75 in Dayton. She lived in an apartment in Trotwood, which she paid $375 a month for. It took her about twenty-five minutes to get to work in her 2004 Nissan Maxima. She was 19 years-old and seriously considering a move out west to Vegas or Los Angeles.

Saturday night at Cable’s was the big night. The night when the local boys came out and hammered away at their Sunday mornings. Hundreds of dollar bills in their pockets, their faces glistening with aftershave. The truckers pulled in from off the interstate. The university kids. The high school kids with the good fakes. Some ordered a Cable Burger (bacon, onion, mushrooms, cheddar) with mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese on the side. Some ordered bottles of champagne and never took their sunglasses off. Some sipped their beers and tried not to stick out. Some took off their wedding rings. Some tried to take the party home with them. All were lonesome. Some even knew it.

Every Saturday, Cable’s had a featured dancer who had two shows to herself – one at 9 PM and one at 11 PM. Other than that, Cable’s runway usually had at least three dancers on it at all times. There were seats surrounding the stage where men (and the occasional woman) could sit and watch up close. Perhaps slide a dollar or two into the thong of the girl they fancied. Just beyond the runway were larger tables where groups could sit and watch the dancers and maybe enjoy a nice meal (although appetizers could be ordered at the runway as well). The menu consisted mostly of standard American cuisine – steaks and burgers, pasta, individual pizzas with a variety of toppings, chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, club sandwiches, etc. The cook’s name was Santiago. He had a long, thin mustache, steel-toed boots, and often bragged of wearing no underpants. Susannah thought that if the patrons could get a look at Santiago they might think twice about ordering something from him. He had a habit of flicking his tongue at the dancers as they moved past the kitchen, which had no door and was located just across from their dressing room

Boomis was the Saturday manager, a pale, heavyset man in his late 40’s. He wore a large-brimmed felt Bailey cowboy hat and a bolo tie he bought online from a discount Native American jewelry store. He had thick, hairy fingers and affected a deep Texas accent even though he was from Cleveland. His goatee was neatly trimmed and his Old Spice scent was palpable. He ate his ribeye with french fries every Saturday at 10 PM. The girls considered him one of the better managers. Fair for the most part. A pretty good sense of humor. Hardly ever crossed the line.

Susannah had never been a featured dancer in her eight months at Cable’s. She was quietly gunning for a featured spot. The money was better. You got your name on the marquee. Sometimes a correspondent from Hustler or Penthouse might come by to check you out. One girl had even been on Howard Stern. Susannah believed she had what it took. She was slim, had good skin. Even though she had contemplated implants since she was in high school, she decided that the market for natural breasts was large enough for her to be successful. She had her heart set on a vast pictorial career and definitely some movie work. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to go into hardcore, but was definitely game for some late-night cable.

At about 8:15 she was in the dressing room getting ready to go on stage with two other girls, Sadie and Nadine. They were each fixing their make-up, costumes. Nadine, who liked to wear wigs, was choosing between a blond perm and a neon blue bob. She held up the latter at Sadie who laughed.

Susannah was wearing her trademark Hanes sleeveless undershirt and boy’s briefs. Some men it did nothing for, but those it worked for couldn’t get enough of it. Once a fellow had told her that it “made him feel like she’d spent the night.” Susannah wore it well. A little shift in her hips, her arms long and relaxed across her body. When it was time for the tanktop to come off, she removed it like she was in a movie. Men often didn’t cheer for Susannah. They were too busy trying to catch their breath.

“Yo, Suzie,” Nadine said. “Blue or blonde?”

“I like that blue,” Susannah said.

“It reminds me of a smurf,” Sadie said. “Papa fuckin’ smurf. Go ahead and wear that shit. I’ll be gettin’ yer money.”

“Fuck you, Sam,” Nadine said, grinning. “There’re some freaky fuckers out there. They love the blue.”

“Blue fuckers,” Sadie said.

The three of them laughed.

Boomis never bothered to knock before he entered. When the door flew open he was standing there with a sour apple blow-pop in his mouth.

“Cooking tonight, motherfuckers,” he said. “Already cleared five, it ain’t even ten o’clock yet. Christ I love Saturdays. The dumbest boners you ever seen all in one room.” He took a savage lick of his lollipop and grunted. “Ya’ll been dancin’ up a storm tonight. So keep it up, right? Blue their balls.”

He winked at them and shut the door.

“Fuckin’ coke fiend,” Sadie mumbled. “Coach Coke Fiend.”

Two other girls returned to the dressing room – Silver, and Gina-Raye.

“Terry’s still out there,” Gina-Raye said. “Ya’ll had better scoot.”

Susannah, Nadine, and Sadie left the dressing room. Nadine was wearing the blonde wig.

On the way to the runway Susannah glanced over at Santiago. He was cooking a t-bone, a Lucky Strike dangling between his lips.

The three girls stood at the backstage area behind the runway. They were separated by a rhinestone curtain. After a moment, Terry came pouring through the beads completely naked, save her black lace g-string stuffed with cash. She had a broad smile on her face.

“Kill ‘em,” she said as she pushed past the girls.

Susannah heard Buddy the DJ’s voice over the loudspeaker:

“And now ladies and mostly gentleman, the party doesn’t stop! Let’s give a warm welcome back to the runway, the lovely Miss Nadine, Sadie, and Susannah!”

The three of them crossed through the curtain. The lights were like desert suns. Nadine spotted one of her regulars sitting at the front of the runway. She undid three buttons on her little western shirt and moved toward him. Sadie made for one of the three poles that were fixed throughout the center of the stage. Susannah took her time and moved slowly across the platform. She fingered at the hem of her tanktop teasingly. Then she ran a hand through her hair and put her index finger in her mouth. She could see silhouettes of men through the mad glow of lights. She approached them.

At the edge of the platform, she squatted down like a catcher, her forearms resting against her legs, her wrists dangling over her thighs. A man with thin red hair and thick, metal-rimmed glasses was staring at her. She spread herself open in front of her. He admired her soft, milk-white skin with a trace of embarrassment. He had a mustache. The rest of his face was raw with razor-burn. He was wearing a light blue short-sleeve button-down shirt from a catalogue. Khaki pants he bought in the same phone-call. Susannah gave him her profile. She ran her fingers across her neck. The nails left red marks. Everything was on purpose.

“You are so beautiful,” she heard him whisper.

His vocal chords cracked. She watched him shift in his seat. The buffalo wings in front of him were getting cold. The blue cheese sauce was getting warm. He took off his glasses and laid them next to the basket of wings and bones. Susannah figured him for late 30’s.

“My name’s Mike,” he said almost to himself.

“Hi, Mike,” Susannah said, achingly. “Do you want me to take my shirt off?”

“Oh god, yes,” Mike said. “Oh god, please. Oh god.”

Susannah let her knees hit the stage. She arched her back in front of Mike. She pulled her tanktop off like she was shedding her skin.

“Fuck yeah!” the man next to Mike barked.

“Please!” Mike snapped sideways at the man. Then he softened and turned back to Susannah. “Please.”

Susannah turned her body and angled her hip toward Mike. She felt him nervously slide a ten into her underpants.

“I’ll see you later, Mike,” she said.

Mike wiped beneath his eyes with the back of his hand and took a sip of the Dr. Pepper he was drinking.

Susannah continued down the runway. She stole every eye in the place. Occasionally she used the poles. She knelt before the men and the men rewarded her. Sometimes she’d smile. Sometimes she’d pout. She showed them her ass. Her stomach. Her feet. Her jaw. She asked one man if he wanted to fuck her. She ignored another man. She danced with Nadine. She danced with Sadie. She crawled to the end of the runway. She let her spine rise and fall like an ocean.

She knew she was a star. She knew she could make men forget themselves. Lose their jobs. Leave their wives. Develop bad habits. Kill each other. She knew that some girls just danced and shook and winked. And she knew that she could break into men’s skulls and burrow into their minds. She knew they took her home with them. She knew she had fans.

“Let’s hear it for these three lovely ladies!” Buddy’s voice called out. “Once again, the lovely Susannah, Nadine, and Sadie. They are available for private dances as well. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

The three girls left the stage. Susannah tied her hair back in a ponytail once they were through the curtain. Boomis was there to meet them on the other side.”

“You motherfuckers were incredible,” he said. “Fuck ‘em all. We got the best gals state of Ohio, ain’t that it?”

He followed the girls back to the dressing room.

“Time for my supper, Santiago!” he called out over his shoulder.

“Suck me, maricon!” he heard Santiago reply.

“I swear to Jesus Christ our lord and savior, you fuckers are special. Special ladies you are.”

Nadine opened the door to the dressing room. It was a large room. There were nine other girls in there. Some were changing. Some were just hanging out. Boomis stepped inside and stood in the middle of all of them.

“It ain’t right we should have so much talent in this sombitch.” He took off his hat, wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. “Christ, it’s hot in here, Jesus. Well. I’ll leave ya’ll to it. Five hundred straight for the champagne room tonight. Once in there it’s up to ya’ll. Two for a private. Make sure you come see me before you take just any john’s hand. And make goddamn sure you tell Glen or one of the other boys. For those a’ ya’ll don’t know. Some cocksucker put his hand on Riva’s hoo-ha last week. Bruised her up a bit. Covered her mouth, couldn’t scream. Glen’nt know about it. Boom. The sombitch got away with it. Warrant out for his arrest. Law says “fuck it, it’s a strip club.” Case closed. Moral the story is: tell one a’ the big guys before you disappear with john the lucky dickheart.”

“Is she okay?” one of the girls asked.

“Couldn’t say,” Boomis said. “Hospital she went. Hell, I think she went a’ spend some time with her family. Where? Maybe some a’ ya’ll know. It’s Saturday. We go late. Love ya’ll.”

Boomis scratched his inner thigh and left the dressing room.

“She went home to Akron,” Silver said. “I talked to her a few days ago. She’s doin’ okay. Just a bit shook up. But she’s planning to come back I think.”

Nadine walked up to Susannah. She had a towel around her neck and was drinking a bottle of water.

“Goddamn, Suzie,” she said.

Susannah smiled. “What?”

“I was gettin’ hot just watchin’ you.”

“I got bills to pay,” Susannah said.

“Yeah right,” Nadine chuckled.

The door opened again and Boomis was there.

“Suzie Q!” he yelped.

Susannah turned to face him. “Yeah?” she said.

“Come here, girl,” he said.

Susannah moved towards him. He tilted his hat up with his finger. He had a single silver tooth and he tongued at it.

“There’s a fella' out there what’s from California. Wants a word. Freshen up and come yer ass on out here.”

Susannah’s grin gave way to an unabashed smile. She jumped up and threw her arms around Boomis. He felt her bare breasts mash against his beer-gut.

“Easy now. Jesus. I’m probably your uncle.”

He walked out of there.

Susannah turned and went to her mirror. She threw on a turquoise one-piece and touched her lips with some Revlon Raspberry Mousse.

Once in the dining room she spotted Boomis sitting at the bar with a young black man in a three-piece suit. He was quite good-looking with long, clean dreadlocks and a muscular build. Boomis saw Susannah and waved her over. She could feel her dress hugging the cheeks of her ass as she moved toward them. Before she made it to bar she was intercepted. It was Mike. From the runway.

“Um, I’m sorry. Hi, I’m sorry. I’m Mike? I – I…met you earlier. I was sitting there. And uh…while you were dancing.”

“Hi,” Susannah said. She looked over Mike’s shoulder. Boomis was talking to the black man.

“I’ve never been to one of these places,” Mike said.

“Is that right?” Susannah said, sarcastically.

“No, I’m telling the truth. Seriously. I don’t really go to places like this.”

Susannah looked at him with a wry grin. She checked over his shoulder once more. Boomis was still talking to the black man.

“I’ve just been kinda’…lonely lately,” Mike continued. “Sorry I mean…that’s not really important.”

Susannah looked at him but said nothing. She threw her weight into her right foot. Her pelvis eased out to the left. She put her hands on her hips. The one-piece was cut just low enough to fuck a man’s head up. Mike’s eyes kept falling there. He had sweat stains under his arms. One of his sneakers was untied.

“Could it be possible to have a private dance with you?” Mike asked.

Susannah checked on Boomis one more time. He waved at her with the back of his hand as if to indicate that he wanted her to attend to business.

“I’d love to dance for you,” Susannah said. “Tell me your name one more time.”

“It’s Meeke. I mean – Mike…it’s Mike,” Mike said.

Susannah took his hand and led him towards a large door backlit in neon blue. Above the frame was the word “private”, glowing in the same color.

Mike’s mouth opened involuntarily. Beads of sweat were leaking out of his scalp.

“I really think that this is y’know…” Mike’s thought trailed off. His lips were chapped and he wiped his tongue across them like a paintbrush.

Behind the door, one of the bouncers, Fortress, was sitting in a stool eating a roast beef sandwich. He was 6 foot 4 and black, with big bloodshot eyes that rolled through his head like two world globes. He stood up as Susannah and Mike entered. He was guarding a long corridor with doors on either side. Each door was covered in a different artificial animal hide. Fortress squeaked out a small fart and glanced at Susannah and Mike to see if they noticed. It seemed they didn’t and he smiled and gave Susannah a hug.

“What the deal, Suzie?” he said.

“Hey, Fort,” Susannah said. “This is Mike. I’m gonna’ dance for him a little while.”

“Aight, the Zebra Room’s all good.”

Susannah moved down the dimly lit hallway. Mike attempted to follow her but Fortress laid a meat-hook against his sternum. Mike stopped in his tracks.

“Deez da roolz, pa’tnuh,” Fortress said, sucking his teeth. “You don’t touch my gurl evuh. Not evuh. Keep yo’ hands by yo’ side at all times, won’t be no reason a’ break a neck in dis muhfuckah. Rool nunh deuce – don’t say no offendin’ shit to my gurl. She sensidih. I am too. If you start talkin’ kinky on some, “I wanna’ take a shit on yo’ head and eat it type shit”, I’m a’ come a-knockin’ and come a-knockin’, youknowwhatI’msayin’?”

“Yes, but I’m a gentleman,” Mike offered.

“Good f’you, nigga,” Fortress said. “This hea’ after alls be a “genelman club.” You keep it genelmanly, it be all good. Good as Hollywood, nah’mean?”

“Orrt…” Mike’s word came out as gibberish. Fortress snorted and picked a wedgie out of his asscrack.

“Lass rool,” he said. “Keep it in dat room. Don’t be waitin’ fuh my gurl out in the pahkin’ lot, nah’mean? Don’t be shittin’ out yo’ eyeballs at ‘er all night, nah’mean? Juss keep it cool. Don’t fall in luh wid a killa’. Yo sho’ ta’ die.” Fortress smiled broadly at his own words. “Unh. Yeah.”

“Yes,” Mike stammered.

“Whatchu’ got, whatchu’ got?” Fortress moved towards Mike.

“I – hey!”

Fortress threw Mike’s arms up and started frisking him.

“I can assure you…” Mike began.

“Whatchu’ got, cracker barrel?” Fortress grunted.

“Nothing. No,” Mike grimaced and wiggled as Fortress’ hands patrolled his body.

“Aight, baby,” Fortress said. “Two hunned. Boom.”

“I’m sorry?” Mike asked, bewildered.

“Two hunned bones, nigga,” Fortress bellowed. “Private dance go two hunned.”

“Ah yes…hundred, yes.” Mike extracted a roll of bills from his khakis and peeled off four fifties. He placed them in Fortress’ huge hand.

“Aight, dook,” Fortress said. “Zebra Room. Third on yo’ left. Remember dem roolz, playboy.”

Mike straightened his pants out and ran a nervous hand through his comb-over.

“Thank you,” he swallowed, and moved towards the third door to his left.

He ran his hand over the fake zebra skin and turned the knob.

It was a small room with a single chair in the middle. There was only a faint trace of red light beaming down from a ceiling that Mike couldn’t quite make out. It looked like nothing but dark space and Mike remembered a movie he’d once seen about alien abduction.

“Sit down,” he heard Susannah say from somewhere.

“Yes,” Mike answered, and quickly put himself in the chair.

“The guy at the door told you the rules, right?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “He told me them and I understand them.”

“Okay. Then we should have a good time.”

“Yes but…” Mike looked around for Susannah. “I was wondering…umm…this is a little embarrassing. I’m sorry.” Mike waited for Susannah to say something but she didn’t. So he continued. “I’ve got a thousand dollars in cash. I…do you think we might do a little extra?”

“Sorry,” Susannah said after a moment. “I don’t do that.” Then she appeared through the darkness like a lantern being lit. Mike inhaled and took his glasses off. “But don’t worry,” she told him. “You’ll be fine.”

Mike tried to put his glasses back on but Susannah took them from him. She folded them up and laid them under the chair. “Just rest your arms at your side, baby” she told Mike. “And relax...”

She stepped four feet in front of him and turned to face the corner of the room. She held up three fingers and suddenly there was music. Mike heard long droning guitars rolling on top of each other. They were backed by a slow electronic beat that seemed to echo off the rooms. Mike felt a tingle in his legs. His throat started to lump and dry out. He looked at Susannah with a toddler’s eyes. She looked back at him. She didn’t smile. She stared into him like a judge about to pass sentence.

“Do you like me?” she asked him.

“Oh my god,” Mike whispered.

Susannah began moving her body. She wasn’t dancing exactly, but shifting inside the sound. There was no choreography. She used the music like a tracker uses the wind. Mike’s mouth was agape. Susannah had forgotten his name again.

She took two steps toward him. She let the sleeves of her dress slide off her shoulders. Then the dress was on the floor. Her naked body glowed in front of Mike like a church candle. He wanted so badly to touch her that he whimpered. His eyes ascended across her body like a sunrise. He looked at her thin ankles, one of which was tattooed with a vine and roses. He looked at her legs, smooth and taut. She had not a trace of pubic hair. Everything had been waxed till the skin was bare as the day she was born. Her stomach wasn’t muscular but was still pretty slim. Her belly-button was pierced. There was some sort of gem hanging out of it, trying desperately to shine in the low light. Mike looked at her breasts. They were small but beautiful, the nipples erect, a small birthmark just to the side of the areola on her left breast. Mike looked at her collarbone, her ribcage, her earlobes. He shifted in his seat. He could feel himself getting hard but he silently shrugged off any shame. She turned her body around. Her back was arched, the shoulder muscles opening like little whirlpools. Tiny patches of cellulite clung beneath her ass. She had a tattoo on her lower back of a large star surrounded by smaller stars.

She backed in towards him. Then her hands were on his legs. Mike could feel her fingertips in his thighs and then closer to his crotch. Her spine was brushing over his chest and stomach. He could sense each vertebrae caressing the cotton fibers of his shirt. Her hair smelled like citrus and it fell across his eyes and lips and neck. She wrapped her hands around the back of his head. Her ass was grinding against him. Across his hard-on. His breathing became labored. He felt the muscles in his arms explode as he forced them to remain at his side.

“Do you like this, baby?” Susannah whispered to him.

Mike was straining. A large purple slug-like vein appeared in his forehead. He started moaning. His hands touched her hips. She pushed them off easily, like spreading peanut butter on bread. Mike’s hands closed into fists. He was shaking like a puppy in the rain.

“Ahh God!” he hollered. “I’m…gonna’…come…”

He cried out and she felt him buckle underneath her. She moved off of him slightly, right before he ejaculated. She was bracing the chair’s arms, her head tilted back over the front of Mike’s shoulder. He was gasping for air. An impossible look of pain and relief was twisted into his face.

“There’s a bathroom at the end of the hallway, sweetie,” Susannah said, folding her dress back over herself. “I hope you had fun.”

Mike was dabbing beneath his eyes with the collar of his shirt. He wiped his lips with his tongue and found his glasses. He looked down at the semen stain on his pants and attempted to chuckle.

“Oops,” he grinned. He looked up and Susannah was gone.

At the bar, Boomis introduced Susannah to the black man he’d been talking to.

“Suzie, this is Angelo Cross. He’s from out west. Wanted to meet you.” Boomis smiled and showed that metal tooth but Angelo Cross just looked at Susannah with his warm burgundy eyes. He took her hand and kissed it.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Suzie,” he said.

“The pleasure’s mine,” Susannah answered, a small blush gently bursting across her pale cheeks.

“I’ll let ya’ll too get acquainted,” Boomis said. He picked at the tip of his nose and walked away.

“You’re quite a dancer, Suzie,” Cross said. His voice was deep but young sounding. He smelled like coconut. A small gold crucifix dangled around his neck. He smiled and Suzie could feel herself smiling back at him.

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that.”

“Let me buy you a drink,” Cross offered.

“Okay,” Suzie said. “I’ll have a Bacardi and Diet.”

“One Bacardi and Diet,” Cross told the bartender.

“Comin’ up,” the bartender said, winking at Susannah.

“Thanks, Sam,” Suzie said, winking back.

“Yeah,” Cross said. “You really stand out to me, y’know?”

“I hope that’s a good thing,” Suzie said, her eyelids batting at him like moth’s wings.

“Oh yeah,” Cross said.

Sam put Suzie’s drink on the bar.

“Just put it on my tab,” Cross said over his shoulder.

“You got it, ace,” Sam said, tapping his knuckles against the marble and moving off.

“What is it you do in Los Angeles, Mister Cross?” Susannah asked him.

“Please call me Angelo, Suzie. Mister Cross sounds so…cross.”

Suzie giggled like an infant. “Okay. Angelo.”

“So much better,” Angelo said.

“So what is it you do in Los Angeles…Angelo?” They both shared a chuckle.

“I’m a photographer. And a filmmaker.”

“Oh wow,” Susannah said. “Are you pretty successful at it?”

“Yes I am,” Angelo said. He launched another easy smile at her. She tossed it back at him.

“I love your dreds,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. He ran them back over his shoulder and smoothed his tie down against his chest. “Have you ever done any modeling work?”

“Not really,” Susannah said. “I mean I’ve really wanted to get into it for a long time. But it’s a little hard in Ohio, y’know?”

“Sure,” Angelo nodded. “That’s why I got the hell out.”

“Yeah,” Susannah said. “I’m thinking of that myself.”

“Oh you definitely should,” he offered. “You’d be dynamite out in L.A.”

“You think so?”

“Hell yeah, girl. You’re the heartbreaker in this place. Have they given you your own show here yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well fuck ‘em. Come to L.A. and you’ll be world famous in a week.” Angelo took a sip of his Jack and Coke. He grinned at her from behind the thin red straw.

“What sort of modeling?” Suzie asked. “I mean I’m assuming…”

“I’ve shot for everyone,” Angelo said. “From Hustler to Hefner.”

“You’ve shot for Playboy?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“Wow.”

“And I make adult films for Savage Movies. Have you heard a’ them?”

“Of course,” Susannah said, even though she hadn’t.

“I’m trying to negotiate a deal with Cinemax to develop a new erotica series. I’m calling it “Camp Eros.” The whole thing takes place at a summer camp. You can’t have the kids involved, y’know…but the counselors. That’s what it’s about.”

“That sounds cool.”

“It’s gonna’ be, definitely. And if it doesn’t work out, we’ll shoot it hardcore and it’ll be even better.”

“Wow,” Susannah said.

“Got a lotta’ things poppin’, Suzie. A lotta’ things poppin’.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I’d love to get you involved.”

“Well I’d love to be involved.”

“Yeah?”

“Definitely.”

“How bad?”

“Well…I mean real bad. I’m not tryin’ to stick around the state of Ohio for the rest of my life. I wanna’ go places.”

“You wanna’ be a star?”

“Absolutely. I know I’ve got what it takes.”

“Like what? Like Jenna?”

“Absolutely.”

“…’Cause y’know, Jenna’s like a one in a million type, y’knowwhatI’msayin’?”

“She’s like a hero of mine.”

“Alright. Cool. Well. I’ve seen what you do to the boys in this place…”

Two big pink clouds spread across Susannah’s face again.

“Geez, Angelo. Nobody makes me blush like this.”

“Yeah so…like I was sayin’…I’ve seen what you do to the boys in this place…”

“Yeah?”

“But what’re you gonna’ do to me?”

Susannah stuck her fingernail between a grin. Her eyebrows arched like two cat’s tails. She could hear the men around the runway hollering. She could hear ice being shoveled into a glass. She could hear Angelo breathing in front of her. Then she heard none of it.

“I’ll give you a night you’ll never forget, Mr. Cross,” she said. “And then you’ll take me to L.A. and I’ll tear that town to pieces. I’ll be the one making you famous.”

Angelo loosened his tie and took a sip of his drink. Susannah moved close to him and put her hand on his crotch. She kissed his lips, long and full. Then she let go. Angelo took a deep breath. He turned to face the bar and adjusted himself.

“Well, Suzie,” he said. “Meet me at my hotel tonight. I’m having a small party with some close friends of mine. We’ll talk more then. And we’ll do other things we need to do as well. ‘Cause you got me hot as a motherfucker, baby.”

Angelo reached for a bar napkin and extracted a pen from his inside pocket. He wrote the hotel, the room number, and his phone number on it. He handed it to Susannah.

“I’ll come by when I’m done here,” she told him. “See if I can get out a little early.”

“Cool,” Angelo said. “I’ll be waiting.”

“Good,” she said, and walked off.

Boomis was sitting in his office going to work his Saturday steak. The spread was laid out on the big desk in front of him. So were a ton of loose papers, a stapler, a stack of “Cable’s” t-shirts, and a small figurine of a puppy that read: “I’m the Boss!” Boomis’ lips were moist and bits of beef were stuck in his teeth. The sound of him eating was like an obese woman being spanked.

The office door was open but Susannah knocked anyway. Boomis shot up as if he’d been caught digging under the Christmas tree before the big morning.

“Shee-it, Suzie, you scared the wings off me!” he declared. “Tryin’ to eat this feast in peace. You know this feller needs his privacy when he’s havin’ supper.”

“Sorry, big guy,” Suzie said. She pulled up a chair on the other side of the desk. Boomis rolled his eyes.

“Lord,” he said, giving her a pitying look. “What is it then?”

“Any chance I might be able to get outta’ here at one tonight?”

“C’mon, Suzie-annah. There ain’t no way. Two maybe.”

“Pretty pretty please with sugar on top.”

“Not even if you added some sprinkles on the sombitch. I can’t have my best gal callin’ it that early. Hell, you’re supposed to be dancin’ up until three tonight. That queer lookin’ boy in the khakis. He’s gonna’ want at least one more private dance. You got a billion fans out there.”

“It’s eleven-thirty now. I’ll do one more runway, give that guy a dance if he wants it, and then I’ll sneak out.” Susannah clasped her hands together. “Please please please…”

“Aw Jesus, Suzie. You’re killin’ me here.”

“I’ll come in tomorrow and work the day. Sunday daytime, Boomer. That’s unheard of. I’ll work a double. Have some a’ yer buddies come in tomorrow. I’ll dance for ‘em all day.”

“Oh man. Well. We already shattered last year’s take for tonight. The big Mid-July. Fuck me. And it. Okay. I can’t believe I’m sayin’ okay but okay.”

“Ohmygod, thank you so much, Boomer!” Susannah yelped. “I owe you so big.”

“Goddamn right. Come clean my apartment or something.”

Susannah sprung out of her seat and bopped out of the office.

“Hey this ain't about that boy at the bar is it?!” she heard Boomis yell behind her.

Back in the dining room Susannah found herself face to face with Mike again. He’d poured some water onto the stain in his pants but it hadn’t quite faded all the way yet. Susannah got a real good look at his mustache for the first time. It looked bristly and she could see something buried in it.

“Excuse me, Susannah,” Mike said. “Would you like to join me for dinner? I was eating some buffalo wings with the blue cheese sauce earlier, but now I’m having a real full meal. I’ve got a table just over there. Would you like to join me?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve gotta’ go back on stage in a little while. I can’t really sit down. But how about a rain-check?”

“Oh. A rain-check? No, you got it. I’d love that. You know. I mean. I’d love that. Is that okay?”

“Definitely. I’m here every Saturday night.”

“Okay yeah well…I know this is probably not the standard thing. The standard y’know…thing to do but…I-I…wanted to give you my card. It’s just..y’know if you felt like meeting up sometime for coffee. Or a or a…beer or something. Y’know?”

Mike handed Susannah a business card. She glanced at it. It read:

Michael Pluckman
Labrotech Inc.
Research & Data

(937)566-8059
mpluckman@labrotech.net.

“My cell number’s on the back,” Mike offered. “I wrote it down. The other number’s my office number.”

“Okay Michael,” Susannah said. “Remember to come see me next Saturday. I’ll be looking for you.”

“Yeah definitely,” Mike said. “Or, y’know…gimme a call sometime if you feel like it.”

“See you later,” Susannah said with a wink.

Mike watched her slide off toward the bar. He watched her share a laugh with the bartender who Mike thought was too young and serious looking to be working at that kind of a place. Mike watched her leave his business card on the bar. He watched Susannah laugh again. He looked at her legs and her hair.

A waitress bumped into him from behind. She was wearing a white bikini and white assless chaps. She had a large tray of burgers and sandwiches high above her head.

“Excuse me,” she said, moving past him.

“Yeah right,” Mike growled, wiping his nose. “Yeah right.”

Mike stood there and watched as Susannah disappeared behind a door marked “employees only.” Then he went back to his table and started eating his roast beef au jus sandwich.

At quarter to one, Susannah was getting ready to make her exit. She had on a skin-tight sleeveless black dress that matched her black heels. The bottom hem hit just below her asscheeks. If she were to sit, she’d give it all away. Her hair was pinned up. Her make-up was fresh and she wore a gold crucifix around her neck, similar to the one Angelo had been wearing. She said goodbye to the girls who all looked at her with envy and confusion.

“I gotta’ go meet my dad,” Susannah joked. Nobody laughed.

As she passed by the kitchen she heard Santiago call her name. She stopped and walked back to him. He was sitting on a milk-crate smoking a cigarette. A chicken breast was on the grill. The yellow skin popped and spat as it met the heat.

“Sooh-cie,” Santiago said, blowing a tunnel of smoke out from between his lips.

“Yes honey,” she replied.

Santiago got to his feet. He ran his thumbs underneath the waistband of his pants and lifted his eyebrows rapidly. Susannah tried to laugh.

“Chu porget chur chift meal. Chu wahn ay…? Begtehbull burger?”

“No babe, I gotta’ go. Sorry. But you can make me some pancakes in the morning.”

“Oh…caing I, princhess?” Santiago said, his eyes droopy with sarcasm. “My pleahsur…”

Susannah winked at him and walked off. Santiago flicked his tongue out at nobody and flipped the chicken.

Susannah left through the front door. Glen, the head of security, was there. He stood six feet, six inches. Glen did all the hiring for Cable’s security and he made sure that all his guys were African-American, at least 6’ 2”, drug free, and had no criminal record. He wanted to build the whole thing in his image. He wore black jeans, black Rios cowboy boots, a black t-shirt that read: “Don’t Fuck With This”, and a black Stetson that covered a bald head.

Susannah tapped him on his left shoulder and moved around him on his right when he turned to look.

“Suzie Q,” Glen said, swallowing her in a playful hug. “Where you off to so early?”

“Got a date with destiny,” she told him, unable to hide the smile that came stealing across her face.

“Careful with destiny, baby,” Glen said. “Destiny’s a thief sometimes. Destiny usually wants something in return.”

“Like what?” Susannah asked him, playing along.

“Wants you to read to it in bed or some shit. Maybe buy it a pair of shoes or a house.”

“Aww,” Susannah cried.

“I’ll walk you to that Max a’ yers,” Glen laughed.

They made there way to Susannah’s car. She hit the alarm on her key chain and two digital groans echoed across the asphalt.

“How’s Ayanna doing?” she asked him. “Didn’t you say she was going to the doctor or something?”

“Oh…well…she found a lump in her breast, y’knowwhatImean? So. They’re runnin’ some tests. I dunno. She ain’t tellin’ me nothin’ till there’s somethin’ to tell me, know’msayin’? I’m a little worried though.” Susannah touched Glen’s arm. It was like a gnat landing on an elephant. He tucked his lower lip into the upper one and tried to frown out a smile. “It’ll be aight,” he offered.

“Just let me know how everything goes,” Susannah told him. “Lemme know if I can help.”

“I will. Thanks, Suzie Q.”

She kissed his cheek. He smiled appreciatively. Susannah got in her Nissan and turned the ignition. She rolled down the window.

“Be careful out there,” Glen said.

“Always,” she said, and drove off.

Susannah pulled the bar napkin from her purse and dialed Angelo’s phone-number. After three rings he answered.

“Yuh,” Susannah heard him say.

“Hello there,” she said.

“Is this the lovely Susannah?” Angelo asked.

Susannah could here voices in the background. Music. Maybe television.

“It sure is,” she said.

“Well. You musta’ done quite a job charming your boss. I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you for another couple hours at least.”

“I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Good for you. That’s a good quality to have. ‘Specially where I’m gonna’ take you.”

“Sounds like you got some people there.”

“There’s a few folks here. It’s cool. How long you gonna’ be?”

“I’m not far. About to get on the interstate. Should be there in like fifteen minutes.”

“Cool.”

“Should I bring anything?”

“Just your pretty little self.”

“I can do that.”

“See you soon,” Angelo said.

“Okay,” Susannah said.

“Peace.” And he hung up.

Susannah had it up to ninety on I-75. She turned the air conditioner off and rolled the windows down. The radio was playing Fergie’s latest single and Susannah turned it up. The highway was empty. There wasn’t even a semi in sight. It struck Susannah as odd but she shrugged it off almost as soon as she noticed it. The sky was impossibly full of stars and Susannah remembered the glow-in-the-dark planets and stars that she stuck on the ceiling above her bed when she was a kid. She suddenly wanted to tell Angelo about those stars. She wanted to take his shirt off. She wanted to lick across his body. She wanted him to take her picture. She wanted to shower with him. She wanted him to introduce her to everyone he knew. She wanted them to go gambling together in Las Vegas. She wanted to kiss him again.

When Susannah saw the deer in front of her, it lasted less than a second. But even in that time she found herself asking where it’d come from. She hadn’t seen it run into the road. She hadn’t seen it up ahead from afar. It was as though it had appeared like a flicker in a movie theatre or some sort of unforgettable snapshot from a nightmare.

She hit her brakes with all the force she could conjure and yanked the steering wheel to the left. The deer didn’t move. It stood in the middle of the road like a child watching his parents scream at each other. Susannah made eye-contact with it as she swerved. She heard the Maxima grind and screech. And she felt the front end crush the deer like a bundle of twigs. She screamed so loud she almost lost her voice instantly. The car had stopped but her heartbeat had her feeling like the needle was buried. Her ears were ringing. She was crying and heaving but no tears came.

There were still no cars. No trucks. No traffic whatsoever. Susannah wondered how that could be. Then she got out of the car.

As she slowly made her way around the hood, she noticed that the damage was minimal. In fact, it was barely negligible. Her mouth dropped open and she shook her head. Aside from a slight dent and a crack in the headlight, the car was almost completely untouched. She pulled at her hair nervously. She didn’t want to look at the deer. It was maybe ten feet away. It was still alive. It was trying to pull itself up with its front legs. Its hind legs were completely useless. One had been completely torn off. The other was so badly severed it hung off the torso like a banana peel. The deer’s face was expressionless. It pushed and pulled at the asphalt. Its eyes were wet. It shook where it lay.

Susannah was on her knees. Moaning and sobbing till it echoed off the woods that surrounded her. She wiped her face and looked around her. The white lines on the blacktop were almost blinding. She took off her shoes, held one arm against the hood of the Nissan and puked. Then she went into her purse, got he cell-phone and dialed 9-1-1.

She told the operator it was the interstate. Interstate 75. Just outside of Dayton. Well, probably still within the Dayton limits. She wasn’t sure what exit. She saw no signs. She was somewhere in Ohio. Just outside of Dayton. She was fine. The car was fine. The deer needed help. It was suffering. She’d hit a deer. She didn’t understand why there were no other cars out. She needed the operator to send someone to help the deer.

The operator told her there’d be a trooper there in a matter of minutes.

Susannah hung up and tossed the phone on the shotgun seat. She got out of the car and went to the deer. It had stopped moving but it was still breathing. Susannah knelt beside it. She reached her hand out. The deer turned its body towards her as if to receive her touch. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Susannah shook her head in slow-motion. She wanted to apologize. She felt the heat of the pavement on the palms of her hand. She noticed the crucifix around her neck. Then she looked up at the sky. There was only a half-moon up there.

The wail of the siren slid through the summer air till it was no longer necessary. The state trooper pulled his cruiser over to the shoulder and left the lights spinning. He got out and walked over to Susannah. She felt his hand ensnare her shoulder. She knew he was a white man. She knew what he looked like before she even picked her head up.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” she heard him ask.

“I think so,” she said.

“Do you have any injuries? Are you hurt anywhere?”

“I don’t think so. I hit a deer.”

“Okay. Ma’am, if you want to just take a moment and sit. If you wouldn’t mind sitting in the passenger seat of your vehicle. I’ll check on the animal.”

Susannah moved back to her car. Her knees were filthy and it occurred to her what she was wearing. She got in the passenger seat. She felt her cell-phone jam up against her butt and she took it and hurled it into the backseat. She was looking into the woods. Then she looked towards the trooper.

He was knelt over the deer with his hands on his hips. He took his hat off and wiped his brow with his forearm. Then she saw him get on his radio. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. The receiver was clipped to his belt and the transmitter was attached to the epaulette of his shirt. He looked like he was talking to some sort of little creature on his shoulder.

The trooper finished his radio conversation and approached her. He moved his hands from his hips to his gun belt. When he neared her she noticed the name beneath the badge on his chest. It was Smith.

“Ma’am, there’s nothing we can do for that deer. She’s beyond care. I’m afraid I’m gonna’ have to dispatch her.”

Susannah looked up at him.

“Whaddayou mean?”

“I have to shoot the deer, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. She’s suffering right now.”

“Okay,” Susannah heard herself say.

“So you may wanna’ turn away or…and you might wanna’ cover your ears.”

“Okay.”

The trooper blinked purposefully and gave a consoling look. Susannah paid it no mind. She felt exhausted. On the other side of the interstate she saw an 18-wheeler rip by. She felt it in her neck.

The trooper was standing over the deer again. Susannah got out of her car and slowly moved towards him. The trooper drew his pistol. He snapped the safety off, checked the chamber, and took aim. Susannah froze. She didn’t hear the report but she watched the trooper shoot the deer in the head.

She wanted the deer to vanish. To fade away off the face of the earth as easily as it had appeared to her before she struck it. She wanted it to teleport in front of her very eyes. Instead it lay there on the road, still as an empty bottle, the humidity and blood bringing insects.

“Why didn’t you shoot it in the heart?” Susannah asked the trooper. “In the heart.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I know but why did you shoot it in the head? Why didn’t you shoot it in the heart?”

The trooper was confused. He swallowed and thought for a moment. Then he looked up at Susannah.

“Not sure I could find the heart,” he said. Then he said, again, “I’m sorry.”

Susannah stood there watching as he dragged the deer off the highway, onto the shoulder, and into the woods. She wondered if he had kids.

“Do you need me to take you anywhere, miss?” he asked, approaching her.

“Where?”

“Well, I dunno uh…is your car runnin’ alright? Doesn’t look like there was much damage.”

“No. There wasn’t much.”

“I’ll have to file a report stating my actions here, but…so you’re free to go. Do you wanna’ take a ride over to Dayton Memorial just to get checked out real quick? Did you hit your head at all?”

Susannah stared out across the interstate. It seemed endless as the ocean.

“No. I didn’t hit my head but…thanks. Thanks for coming out and helping me. I think I’m just gonna’ go on home.”

“I think that’s probably a good idea.” The trooper took one last look at her and got in his car. “You have a good night. Drive safe, okay?”

She heard his engine turn over. She heard him drive off. She watched his taillights fade in the distance.

Peru, MA (9/12/08)

LGA

2008-08-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

LGA

by Sam Ford

Dave was sitting at the bar drinking Johnny Walker Black on the rocks. He hadn’t slept right in two days. His blue eyes were raw and his face was covered in stubble. He was still wearing his work-tux, the bowtie and collar undone. Night before, his boss’d told him it was his last chance. “You look like shit, Dave. Don’t show up looking and smelling like this again.” Then his boss sent him home.

Dave was a caterer. He was an actor and a caterer. He was a caterer.

The TV set was muted on CNN. Dave glanced up every once in a while. There was always a lot to read on CNN. Dave took a tilt of his scotch till it was down to ice and water. He rubbed his eyelids. His head hurt.

“Excuse me,” Dave said to the bartender. “Do you have an Advil back there? Or an Aleve or something? Aspirin?”

“Sorry,” the bartender said. “But they sell all that stuff in the terminal. There’s a shop just down around the corner there.”

The bartender held out his arm and pointed a finger somewhere.

“That’s okay,” Dave said.

The bartender was a heavyset man in his late fifties. He wore a white button-down shirt with a maroon vest and black tie. His gold plastic name-tag said “Carl”. His teeth were grey and he had big liver-spotted hands.

“I’ll have another drink,” Dave said.

“There’s always that for a cure,” the bartender smiled, refilling Dave’s glass. Dave caught a whiff of the bartender’s breath and turned away. It smelled like old salmon. Dave's eyes started watering. He took a long pull off the fresh glass.

He wished he could smoke in the bar. In the terminal. In the airport. He’d smoke and smoke. He’d smoke four of the Winstons that were in his polyester tuxedo jacket back-to-back-to-back-to-back.

He was 29 years-old.

According to CNN the time was “2:46pET”. Dave wished he had a good book in front of him. A book that’d make him look attractive but nothing from acting school. No Shakespeare or Beckett. And no bestsellers either. Maybe some poetry. But nothing too obvious. Randall Jarrell. Charles Simic. Why would he be reading that shit? He barely understood any of it anyway. No. A novel would be better. Something hard-boiled. Jim Thompson. Dave couldn’t remember the last time he’d read a book. He wondered if he could still get through one. Occasionally he’d leaf through a magazine but for the most part they made him feel suicidal.

It was 2:52pET. Dave was waiting and he knew it. The sound of turbines hummed through the windows. A woman four seats away from Dave was talking on her Blackberry.

“I kno-oh-ohw...What’d I tell you…”

Dave could feel his pulse knocking around in his neck like the chest-burster from Alien. He loved airports. Transit, movement, energy, technology. Contained. He hated airports. Transit, movement, energy. Contained. It occurred to him to check his cell-phone. A missed call from his mother. He took another long drink. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand.

“You got a paper back there?” he asked the bartender.

“Paper?”

The bartender handed Dave a piece of scratch paper and a pen.

“No like…a newspaper.”

“Sorry. I didn’t hear you say newspaper. There’s a newspaper and magazine shop just around the corner there.”

Dave through a twenty and a five on the bar and walked off. His mother’s voicemail vibrated in.

He made his way over to the departures/arrivals screens and found Lacey’s flight. It was 112 from LAX and it was arriving on time. Hers would be baggage claim C. Dave took the escalator to baggage claim C.

Thousands of humans were moving about the area. Families. Couples. Soloists. Old folks. Young folks. Moving past each other. Through each other. Against each other. A Latin boy no older than three was crying as he held his mother’s hand. A teenage girl in a halter-top and huge sunglasses was staring at her iPhone. A clean-looking man in a suit was yanking a suitcase off the conveyer belt. “C’mon, Goddammit,” he barked. His cell-phone rang and he quickly picked it up. “Yeah?” he said.

Dave located claim C and plopped down in a seat nearby. Legs and feet and the footsteps they created were ripping through his line of sight. His head buckled and throbbed. He was sweating three days worth of booze. He pulled off the tux jacket and stuffed it behind his back.

“Don’t say it, Doris, don’t say it,” an elderly man was speaking to his wife as they dragged their luggage across the floor. “I don’t want to hear any of your mouth, that mouth of yours right now.” He was wearing a turquoise polo shirt and plaid shorts. She was in a purple blouse and tight leopard print pants that showed off the various rolls and ripples in her aged body. Her lips were smeared with bright red lipstick that overflowed just under her nose and down around her chin. He was fast and far ahead of her.

Security guards were everywhere. Airport cops. Dave could just see at the other end of the terminal - two men in full army fatigues with assault rifles and helmets.

Dave was originally from Indiana.

He wondered if Lacey would look different. If she would be different. They’d been apart for six months. Dave looked down at his black shoes. He’d bought them at the Astor Place K-Mart for $24.99. They were holding up well, he thought.

A digital clock on the wall shot 3:12 at him. He got up and walked through the sliding doors onto the pavement. The sun was shining and he could even hear some birds. Dave lit a cigarette and wiped his face with the cuff of his white shirt. It was better outside. Less frenzied. He liked outside. In general. He wondered why he didn’t go out more. Up to Central Park. Or Washington Square. Or some of the Brooklyn Parks. He lived in Crown Heights. Prospect Park wasn’t too far. He liked that park. He’d never been there but he liked it.

It was 3:19 when he made his way back inside the baggage claim. He looked around and couldn’t believe it when he spotted Lacey. She was standing in front of the conveyer belt waiting for her luggage to appear. Just like everyone else. Dave was suddenly so overcome with joy that his throat lumped and pin-size tears started to bloom in the corners of his eyes. For a moment he forgot who he was. It was an incredible feeling. He’d had moments like this in acting school. Freedom.

He made his way over to Lacey. In his mind and in his heart, all of the billions of people in the room were stopping what they were doing and turning to watch him move toward her. There was complete silence. People were awestruck. Dave had played Richard once for a Shakespeare benefit show at his school. It’d only been one scene, but he’d left the audience completely shattered. It was like that now. The little Latin boy was no longer crying but instead stared at Dave as though he were watching a shooting star in slow-motion. The girl on her iPhone was gazing at Dave as if he were Brad Pitt proposing to her. The irritable man with the luggage and the ringing cell-phone fell to his knees and re-thought his entire life. And the elderly couple joined hands and kissed ever so gently on the lips. She wiped the lipstick he inherited from her off his face. “Oh Phil,” she said…

Dave bumped into a large black man in a security uniform.

“Excuse me,” Dave said.

“Watch where you’re going,” the man said and stepped around him.

Dave’s stomach turned and he felt other people move around him and brush past him and bump into him. He could hear voices all around him. Whispering. Talking. Making plans. Where for dinner? Cab. Where’d you park?/How was the flight/Did they feed you?/Wow, you’re so early/We would’ve been here earlier if they hadn’t circled/How was Curacao?/How was Amsterdam?/How are you?/I love you/I hate airports/Do you want some water?/I’m just gonna’ use the bathroom/Hi!!!

Dave pushed past them all. He was drenched in sweat. Lacey was still standing there waiting for her luggage. She was wearing a black tank-top. Jeans. Her long light-brown hair was pulled back. She was the same height. The same weight. Dave recognized her clothes. He recognized her.

He came up behind her and touched her arm. She jumped and turned to face him.

“Hi,” he said.

She threw her arms around him and he put his arms around her and they stood there like that.

“I missed you,” she told him in his ear.

It made him feel good. He said it back.

“Where’s your luggage?” he laughed.

“I don’t know. Geez, I’ve been waiting here a while.”

They were looking in each other eyes. They were smiling at each other.

Lacey was just one year younger than Dave. They met when they both had guest spots on “Law & Order: SVU”. They played brother and sister. When the cameras weren’t rolling, they told each other stories. Lacey was originally from Texas. She’d studied drama at U.T. and had only been in the city three months. But she was pretty and thin and she’d quickly found herself both a good agent and a manager. Dave, on the other hand, had gotten his audition by submitting his headshot and resume himself. Luck had leaned on him a little stronger in those days.

“You look a little rough, baby,” she told him. “Been into the whiskiss much?”

“I’ll fake it through the day…,” he sang softly.

She kissed him.

“You need a shave and a shave,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I been rolled a bit.”

“Why?”

“Miss my baby.”

“Aww…”

She took his hand.

“How was Los Angeles, Lacey Jean?” he asked her.

“Oh, it was pretty good,” she said.

“Where’s your luggage?”

“I just don’t know,” she laughed.

They turned and watched the suitcases and bags and briefcases shuffle past them. Then Lacey spotted hers. It was canary yellow and almost as big as she was. Dave pulled it up off of the belt.

“Could we maybe get a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Sure,” Lacey said. “Where?”

“How ‘bout here,” Dave said.

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

“At the airport?”

“Here at the airport, yeah. I know a charming little café just around the bend. I just need a little hit a’ the old bean. Then I’ll be ready to take back my woman from the land of the slowly dying.”

“You look like you’re the one slowly dying, sonny boy,” she said. “And I thought you were gonna’ ease back.”

“Yeah I thought so too. I was wrong. C’mon. Coffee me.”

They walked to Figs restaurant in the central terminal. They were seated in a booth and Dave told their waiter “just coffee.” Then they sat there across from each other. Holding hands across the table.

“Why’re you still wearing you’re armor, baby,” Lacey asked Dave. “Did you sleep at home last night?”

“Yeah. In my armor. I just had to rough it up a bit.”

“Where was the event?”

“Lincoln Center. Insult to injury.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. So how was Lah?”

“It was good. It was real good actually.”

Dave bit the inside of his lower lip. He could feel his nerves tingle throughout his body. The waiter arrived with the coffee. Dave through milk and sweetener in his. He took a long sip. It seared his tongue but he shook it off, grinned to himself.

“Fuckin’ hangover,” he said.

Lacey just looked at him.

“I’m sorry so…how was…how was it?” Dave asked, squeezing a smile across his face.

“Well…I was auditioning a lot so…”

“That’s good…”

“It…Yeah it was good. And some things were hit and miss, y’know. And a lotta’ that stuff’s just trash. Y’know like…They’re re-doing 90210…”

“Really, oh shit…no shit…”

“Yeah…And I mean it’s garbage, y’know but…”

“Yeah but, y’know, you gotta’…”

“Anyway so…yeah, I mean…Anyway but….A few days ago I tested for this pilot.”

“Tested, whaddayou mean like…for the network?”

“Yeah.” Lacey smiled sheepishly and looked away.

“Well that’s great. That’s great. I mean, that’s great.”

“Yeah. I mean I was pretty nervous but....it went really well.”

“Fuck man, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well I didn’t wanna’ jinx it, y’know? And I didn’t know how you’d feel about it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Whaddayou mean?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

They stopped holding hands. Dave was looking at her. She was turned away. Looking around the restaurant. Figs at LaGuardia’s Central Terminal.

“Well did you get the part or not? I mean…”

“I don’t know yet,” Lacey said. “We haven’t heard yet. We’re waiting.”

“What happens if you get it, you gotta’ move out there, right?”

“Well, I mean…I don’t have it yet. It’s not a done deal.”

Two well-dressed young men passed by Dave and Lacey’s booth. One of them looked over at Lacey.

“Hi,” he said.

Lacey ignored him.

“David,” Lacey said. “I don’t want you to worry. I just want to enjoy being back here for a while. I miss New York.”

“Well you’re back,” Dave said. “You can’t miss it if you’re back. You’re talking about it like you’re still gone.”

“Yeah, no…I am back. I’m back. So let’s just enjoy being together.”

Dave’s lungs tightened like a fist. He could smell himself and it made him want to puke. He was shocked he hadn’t already. His mind started drifting to his credit card debt. He was pretty sure it was somewhere around six thousand dollars. He hadn’t been on an audition in close to three months. The last one had been for an off-off Broadway revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It would’ve been unpaid. After his monologue the people in the room said, “Great. Thanks for coming in, Mike.”

“What’s the…what’s the part?” Dave said. “What’s the show?”

“It’s actually…don’t laugh. It’s actually for a Zach Braff project. But it’s TV. It’s just a pilot but…he’s the executive producer and...”

“Why would I laugh at that?”

“…He’s directing the first…I dunno.”

“I like Zach Braff.”

“You hated that movie.”

“Not really.”

“You said that movie was like watching someone fart as loud as they could, cry, then smile, and then dare someone to fart louder.”

“I said all that?”

“Something like that. I remember the ‘cry, then smile.’”

“Whatever. Guy’s got a huge fuckin’ ego. Who doesn’t?”

“Are you gonna’ be like this for a while?”

“I’m sorry. I’m turning thirty soon. I’m starting to get a little worried. Last night I served gin and tonics in plastic cups to six thousand year-old women in black sequins and men in shawls. So I feel a little fucked-up about the plan, y’knowwhatImean?”

“It’s gonna’ be okay.”

“Yes it is. And I’m really happy for you, Lacey. And I knew that this would happen and it scared me and it scares me. Okay? That’s the God’s honest. Things are getting real very fast. And I’m a fuckin’ slowpoke. Midwestern.”

Dave heard a cell-phone ring. It was Lacey’s. She looked at it and picked it up.

“Hi, mama…I just landed a little while ago…Yup, he’s here…He’s doin’ good…Aww, the flight was alright…Yeah, they gave me a little somethin’…Yeah….Listen, lemme call you later, ‘kay?...Yeah, ‘cause we’re just sittin’ down here and talkin’ for a little bit…Okay, I will…Okay, talk to you later…Love you too…Bye…”

Lacey looked up at Dave.

“How is she?” he asked.

“She’s the same.”

“Is she excited about the pilot and everything?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t really know what it means.”

The waiter came by with a fresh pot of coffee. Neither Dave nor Lacey required a refill. Dave looked at the waiter. He was a fresh-faced Latino kid. He looked like he was fifteen years-old.

“What’s your name?” Dave asked him.

“Freddie,” the waiter replied through an accent.

“Thanks, Freddie,” Dave said.

“No problem,” Freddie said as he walked off.

“I missed you, David,” Lacey said.

“I missed you,” Dave said.

Lacey’s eyes were green. People often had to look twice.

“I don’t want to go back to Los Angeles,” she said. “If I have to I mean. I really don’t wanna’ have to be there.”

“There’s always Mexico,” Dave said. “A little villa somewhere near Freddie’s hometown. We’ll raise burros. Drink coffee and mezcal. Die simple.”

“You are such a fuckin’ depressed fucker,” she said giggling.

“Did you kiss any other boys while you were out there?” Dave asked.

“I had to kiss a boy for the audition for this Zach Braff thing.”

“What was he like? A handsome fella?”

“He was an Abercrombie model who couldn’t stop telling me about his boyfriend.”

“Hmm.”

“Are we done drinkin’ coffee yet?” Lacey asked. “Mama needs some low-lit, high thread-countin’ action. Catch my drift, drifter?”

“Phew,” Dave said.

He put ten dollars on the table and they got up.

Lacey’s cell-phone rang. She looked at it.

“Shit, it’s my agent,” she said. “She probably just wants to know that I got in okay. Just gimme a second, baby.”

Lacey walked swiftly ahead of Dave and answered her phone. Dave stood there watching her. She kept moving further off. Dave looked at her long body. Her cowboy boots.

Dave thought of Humphrey Bogart. He pictured Humphrey Bogart. Real hard until he felt like he almost was him.

It helped a little.

for my friend Brooke

LI, NY (8/11/08)

Texas

2008-04-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

Texas

by Sam Ford

It was deep summer. I’d just gotten off my shift and was headed home. Tuckered and a little drunk. Me, Nick-the-bartender, and Jose-one-of-the-dishwashers put in a little overtime. By that I mean we threw up the chairs, eased off the lights, and made ourselves familiar with the scotch shelf. I’d dropped Jose off at the little apartment complex where he was staying with some other guys. They were all kitchen guys.

I’d been talking with this woman on the internet. She lived in Tucson and we’d been discussing her maybe flying to Pennsylvania to meet me. She’d emailed me her picture and she was pretty nice looking. She was a dental assistant. She drove a Mustang. Her “one indulgence.” That and the “Willie Nelson ice cream.” The Ben & Jerry’s kind. I tried it per her suggestion. It was pretty good.

Anyway I was sorta’ looking forward to getting home and talking with her online. We’d agreed to chat once I got off work. She had a sixteen year-old kid she was raising alone. Apparently he was quite the outfielder.

I drove with the windows open.

It was Highway 22 near Cresson. Texas was walking on the other side of the road. It was late. Not a lotta’ traffic to say the least. She watched me whip by her in my Corolla. I slowed some, checked my rearview. She’d stopped walking. She was watching me. I came to a stop. I thought she might be hurt. Needed help. Something.

I was forty-three years old.

I made a u-turn and drove towards her. She was still standing there. She had long light brown hair. She was on the tall side, I guess. Pale skin. She was sweating. White t-shirt. Backpack. Jeans cut off just below the knees. Adidas. I figured her for early 20’s. I pulled along side her, rolled down the passenger side window.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Would you mind giving me a ride to Altoona? It’s pretty close isn’t it?”

“Well…”

“You were going in the opposite direction. I’ll pay you twenty bucks.”

I looked at her. She was smiling slightly. Her eyes were open and shining there in the dark. It scared me that she was out walking like she was. Hitch-hiking. It scared me that I was the one to find her. But it was also a relief.

“You don’t have to pay me anything,” I said.

I wondered how I looked to her. Someone once told me I had a kind face. That always seemed somewhat unnerving to me. I wondered if she thought my face was kind. I wondered if that made her more apprehensive.

“Okay, well –” I said.

She took off her backpack, got in the Corolla, put the backpack on her lap, shut the door. The temperature in the car got noticeably hotter. She inhaled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her bangs were soaked with sweat.

“Thanks,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s hot out there,” I said, throwing the car in gear.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“Sorry the air conditioner’s busted,” I said. “The guys had to order a part.”

She smiled generously at me. I wondered if she knew I’d been drinking.

She pulled some spearmint gum from one of the smaller pockets of her bag.

“Would you like some?” she offered.

“No thanks,” I said. She took a piece and put it in her mouth.

“Where’re you coming from?” I asked her.

“California,” she said. “Los Angeles.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah. Long way.” She smiled.

I went for my Camels.

“Oh we can smoke?” she said. She spit her gum out the window and pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from her bag. She lit hers and lit mine. I liked that she did that. Then I tried not to care.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

“Just had to get outta’ L.A. You ever been there?”

“San Diego for a weekend.”

“Not quite the same.”

“I guess not.”

“I was out there trying to be an actor. The town fucked me up a little, y’know? It’s lonely. Really isolating in a way. So I did things to not feel lonely. Bad sorta’ things. Then I decided I didn’t really wanna’ do those things.”

“So you hitch-hiked or…I mean you’re hitch-hiking?”

“Yeah. I sold my car out there. Figured it’d be more fun to do it this way. It’s been fun sometimes. Scary. Boring sometimes.”

“You’ve made it a long way,” I offered.

“Sure have,” she said. She took a long drag off her cigarette.

I knew I wouldn’t know her very long but I wanted to know her forever and wanted to know everything and everyone that’d come before.

We smoked for a little while.

“Where do you think you’ll end up?” I asked her.

“New York City,” she said. “I still wanna’ act. I just don’t wanna’ do it out in that fuckin’ place.”

She had a ring on her finger. A Cladagh.

“Are you Irish?” I asked her.

“A little,” she said. Her little eyes smiled. She smoked her cigarette down. Flicked it out the window.

“My name’s Ed,” I told her. “Ed Ganley.”

“Hi, Ed,” she said. She put her hand out. I looked at it and then shook it. I felt about a million years old.

“I’m Texas,” she said.

“Texas?”

She nodded.

“That’s an interesting name,” I said.

“It sure is,” she said.

We sat there for a minute. In silence there for a minute. The air swept past us as we drove. Crickets. Engine. There were a lotta’ stars up there. I could feel sweat tickling my hairline. Dripping down behind my ears.

I’d been a waiter on and off for 25 years.

“Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” I asked her. “Or…”

“Sure,” she said.

***

I took her to a diner in Cross Keys. I’d eaten there a few times. It was 24 hours. The burgers weren’t bad. It was a place people came to alone. That night the air conditioning was on.

The waitress brought us two cups on saucers. She looked to be in her 50’s. No make-up. T-shirt. Late shift.

Texas poured milk and Equal in her coffee. I poured a little milk and sugar.

“Whaddayou do for a living, Ed?” she asked me.

I hesitated for a moment. There was no reason to lie. The sun would be up soon.

“Wait tables. I’m a waiter.”

“Oh yeah? Where?”

“The Sparrow’s Inn. It’s in Altoona actually.”

“Is it a fancy place?”

“I guess it’s fancy. Kind of expensive.”

“Fine dining?”

“I guess. I wear a uniform.”

“Is the money any good?”

“It can be. Summer mostly.”

She shook her bangs from her eyes, tucked some hair behind her ear.

“I worked in a bunch of places in L.A. Bartending mostly.”

“Pretty good money I bet.”

“It’s pretty good but it’s obvious.”

I wondered what she meant but I didn’t quite have the balls to ask. She seemed restless. Or maybe I just thought she was.

My lips were suddenly chapped. I guess from the a/c.

“Do you live alone?” she asked.

I looked at her. Her face was honest and straight.

“Yeah.” I paused for a second. Her expression didn’t change. “Yeah I…I was married once. She was my sorta’…high school sweetheart. I used to be a football player then. I was…but I mean I’ve never left Pennsylvania. Anyway she…we divorced about four years ago. Now she lives in Colorado with her new husband. They ski.”

Texas smiled but she didn’t say anything. We were sitting in a booth. She looked out the window.

“Do you have a boyfriend or anything?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I got a lotta’ stories though.”

She was still looking out the window.

***

I bought her the coffee. We walked out of the diner and she lit a cigarette. I lit one too.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

The diner was in a strip-mall. All of the storefronts were dark. The big parking lot lights poured down across the asphalt. Texas looked up at them.

“False suns,” she said to herself.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The lights,” she said, pointing at them. “They’re like big fake suns.”

We started walking. There were stores with clothes for pregnant women. Stores with clothes for fat women. Stores with clothes for businessmen on a budget. Stores with sporting goods. Stores with pizza. Stores with pet food and pet items and certain kinds of pets. Stores with music.

Texas sat down on the curb in front of the fat woman store. I sat next to her. We smoked. I tried to swallow a yawn but she caught me.

“Are you tired, Ed?” she said.

“No…I’m alright.”

“Well you worked all night. You should be tired.”

“I guess I am a little,” I said.

She smiled at me.

“The truth is,” she said, “I’m lonely as the devil, Ed. I’m so lonesome I could cry. I’m lonely, Ed. And I don’t know how not to be. I’ve run away from just about everything I ever dared to start. I’ve run away from everything I’ve been too scared to finish. I was an actress in Los Angeles. That means somewhere along the line I decided not to be real. And once I convinced myself that acting was a good and noble endeavor, I was filled with resentment for having to convince myself in the first place. I want to be a truck driver. I want to be a veterinarian. I want to be short order cook. I want to be a wife. I want to be a basketball player. I want to be a journalist. I want to fall in love and never look back. And I don’t know how to take any of those wants and turn them into reality. I don’t know how to take what’s in front of me and be it or do it or even really know it. I’m afraid of giving myself to something that won’t let me be free. And I’m afraid of never knowing what it’s like to be held down by something I love. My parents love me. My brother loves me. There’s even a town somewhere in America that knows me and probably even loves me. I’ve met some boys and some men and fucked some of them and loved some of them and known some of them pretty well. I’ve met some of their families. One of them even bought me a ring and put the fearsome four on me. And I’ve always felt on the outside. Of all of it, Ed. I’ve been a waitress and a bartender and a babysitter. I’ve blown cocaine and drank local whiskey. I’ve planted gardens. I’ve campaigned for a congressman. I went to college and graduated. On the outside, Ed. Not looking for pity. Just stating a fact. On the outside. And getting older with the shit. On the outside. And so I meet people that maybe sit in the same bleachers and we get along but then we get wrong ‘cause we recognize those parts in each other. And things get busted up. And I keep running. Running toward…what? Getting older? Is that what I’m running toward? The day I wake up and I’m not running anymore? The day I wake up and I’ve grown out of the running? I’m more mature? I’m an adult? I’m married? I’ve got not one not two but three or so kids? I’m adopting kids? I’m working in a job that I can’t explain to anyone ‘cause it doesn’t matter to anyone except the people I work with? I don’t hate anyone. I don’t need anyone. I love everyone I’m supposed to love. My dad says I should go back to school. The just sounds like a way to pass the time. What am I gonna’ study? Engineering? Philosophy? English? Massage therapy? I like to travel, Ed. But that takes money. I’ve learned that. It doesn’t necessarily take much. But it takes some. And I’m to the point where I know that my travels are keeping me from something else. Something more important? Maybe. But something else. Something that makes people get older. Something that makes people watch TV. And I can spend a lifetime avoiding it. But that’s what my life will come to be about. Avoidance. And I guess that brings me here, Ed. To your ears. Lonely as the devil. Lonely as a man.”

She stopped then for a second. Then she said:

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Sorry I ramble sometimes,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I understand a lot of what you said. I feel the same way in a lot of ways.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. And I did.

“Yeah well…sorry. It’s easy to talk to strangers sometimes. Easier in a way.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’ve been a waiter for really 25 years. On and off.”

“Wow,” she said.

***

I dropped her off at a Budget Inn off of I-99.

“This is perfect,” she said as we pulled up.

“I mean…how are you gonna’ get to…wherever?”

“Keep walking,” she said. “Hope for a couple more Eds.”

“You’re really trying to go to New York?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I’ll get there. Truth is I got enough money to rent a car if it comes to that. A lotta’ this is just pretend.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Thanks for the coffee and the conversation,” she said.

“No problem,” I said.

I could see the sun coming up. I could feel it.

“Do you have a long way to drive?” she asked.

“Not much. Ten miles. Twelve miles or so.”

“Well get home safe, Ed,” she said. Texas said.

“Okay,” I said, yawning.

“Okay,” she said. She smiled one more time at me and got out of the car. I watched her go into the office. The guy in there was Arabic, I guess. Or Indian. He had a mustache and a comb-over. A red polo style shirt. He was sleeping. I watched her ring the desk bell. I watched the guy jolt awake. Texas looked out at me. She saw I’d been watching. She mimed a big “oops.”

***

When I finally made it home, I kicked off my work shoes, unbuttoned my work shirt. I curled and uncurled my toes. The sun was up. I was thinking about Texas. I wanted to know how it was gonna’ go for her.

I turned my laptop on. Birds were gossiping outside. I could hear the sprinkler in my neighbor’s yard.

I got online. After a few minutes the woman in Tucson sent me an instant message.

“Where you been, baby?” she wrote.

“Just hung out a little after work,” I wrote back.

“Got a wild hair, huh?” she wrote.

“Something like that,” I wrote back.

I liked her. This woman in Tucson. She’d been through some things and it’d left her with a bit of an edge but not too much of one. She was pretty cool. Her name was Linda.

NYC, NY (4/24/08)

All Good Things

2008-04-04T01:47:00.000-07:00

All Good Things

by Sam Ford

The night we got laid-off, the line cook was wasted early. He was a Wisconsin guy. A hard drinker. Lonesome fucker. Few aspirations. A good cook. Big tired smile. Unwavering sadness. I liked him. My kind he was. My kind. I’ve always gotten low for the lowdown cats and dogs. Daddy didn’t raise no stone-heart. We were liberal. We were professors and Jewish and poor and middleclass and upper-middleclass and cowboys and agnostic and metropolitan. We were wannabe farmers in western Massa-aaah-aaah-choo! (bless you). And we knew it were hard out there. Hard out there. Hard as a casket. Hard as Christ when they took the spikes out. Hard as a jilted lover getting the regret call. Daddy knew. He’d torn through three wives and was on four. Four was about right. She knew how to care. Angel ways. But it takes time to find that good woman slide.

I’d never lost a job before. I was of the walkin’-away. I was of the greener pastures.

The line cook shook my hand. Touched me on the shoulder. Smiled the ol’ scatter grin. Like a toddler taking his first toilet-shit. His eyes widened and got wet.

“All good things,” he said.

Man, he was drunk. Ridiculous. Flawed as art. I could tell he hadn’t bathed in a stretch.

“I’m gonna’ see you Saturday, Jimmy,” I said. (The bossman’d given us a week's notice.) “Don’t say yer goodbyes just yet, midwest.”

He smiled. He laughed. His hands were thin and scarred. Too much prep. Too much carving board. I thought of the thous-upon-thous-upon thousands just like him. Bleeding on onions. Drinking vodka and Vitamin Water. Praying they’d get their dicks hard and get ‘em off come the get-home. Thinking of the dress they saw earlier in the front-of-house. The Angelina cover. The internet porn subscription. Lord, the whatever-it-takes. To pass out. To be a man. To make our grandfathers proud.

And I touched line cook’s shoulder then. Smiled my own at him. Hell, I was drunk. Once I got the bossman’s word, I figured I had nothing to lose. Might as well drink it down some. Why not, I was the bartender. It was easy as “go fish.” Pint glass to spout. Hand to tap. Heart to fuck-it. Let ‘em go, let ‘em go, let ‘em go. His blood was wine. His blood His blood. Is wine. His blood is…beer?

I put some a' that blood away. Then got into the Irish whiskey. ‘Cause there was Irish involved as well. (Mama and her red tressels. Pink cheeks. Catholic almost. Gypsy eyes.)

Sure. Surely. I was drunk. Afterall. I’d just been laid-off. Told I wouldn’t have a job come next weak. Come next next next…weekIwouldn’t. Be able to pretend I was still on my way to making it. Job. – Look, dad. I’ve got a job. A job sorta’ thing. –

It was New York City. Fresh April. I was still here. More people were coming in. The Euro was high. The dollar was dying. But them Euro-folks weren’t spending them good Euros at my job.

“We gotta’ close down, man,” the boss’d told me earlier that night. “The concept…it just didn’t work out.”

I thought of men being told to shave their asses and wear thongs. I thought of women being told to shave their heads and wear suits.

Concepts, kiddo? I thought of infomercials like when I was a kid. Aussie accents. Caffeine. A studio audience enraptured. “Wawtch thees staynes cahm royt owt. Eet’s lyke eet wahs nehvah theyah.”

Not only do you get the get-the, but call in the next fifteen minutes, and you also get the get-the…free.

We were closing. We. That meant us. That meant them. And me and Jimmy were soon to be unemployed. And FEMA’s New Orleans refugee trailers were filled with formaldehyde. And presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton was on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. And the New York Yankees pulled out a 3-2 victory in the latter half of a night game at the Stadium against the Toronto Blue Jays of Canada. And a New York Times poll showed that 81% of Americans thought the nation was headed on the wrong track. And actor Ryan Phillippe was in a new film entitled “Stop-Loss”, about an American soldier’s return from the war in Iraq and his subsequent decision to go AWOL. And it rained and then it didn’t.

I got on my cellular phone and text-messaged my closest friends about my stop-loss…errr…job-loss. I squeezed out the drama, making it sound like it was the end of an era. Depression era. Hard times a-comin’. Feel for me. I am of the president’s victims.

GC gave me Yankees updates.
Sister said it “could be good in the end.”
Chuckles congratulated me.
They were alright. And damned if they weren’t all right in their own way.

I drank beer and then Irish whiskey. I thought of the trabajadores verdaderos in the kitchen and what the motherfuck they were gonna’ do come the news. These fellas busted it wide open for minimum wage and then the feds, only to send it on home to children and wives they’d barely seen. The short end was their way. What then for the short end of the short end?

“Don’t tell the guys in the kitchen,” the bossman had said. He knew they’d flee if they found out they’d be without a paycheck come next Saturday. And if they fled, who’d wash the dishes? Who’d fry the shrimp? Who’d speak the Spanish? A gringo? Perish the thought. Perish it.

We threw up the lights. We threw up the chairs and bar-stools. Jimmy had a quiet bottle of Jameson that he’d stashed for nights like this. Losing-my-job nights. He broke it out. Told me to partake. I poured one for each of us. We drank. Mumbled. Laughed. Talked it over. Hindsighted and saw everything.

Jimmy: “This because this fuhckin’ place is…

Me: “Bullshit it’s bullshit they shoulda’…

Jimmy: “You start…”

Me: “Start I mean y’know you start with wood. A wood bar…”

Jimmy: “ ‘Cause it’s like you don’t wahnna’ drink…”

Me: “Like a toilet it is…”

Jimmy: “It’s just not comfortable comfortable like a bar and food should be, y’knoh…”

Me: “Fuckin’ gutshot…Worst timing in the world, Jimmy…”

Jimmy: “I never been invahlved in a restaurant that failed…”

Me: “It’s not yer fault…”

Jimmy: “Juhst wish there’s suhmthin’ I couhlda’a done…”

Me: “It’s not yer fault, Jimmy…”

Jimmy: “Who is this who’re we listenin’ to?...”

Me: “Bob Dylan, Jimmy…Nashville Bob…”

Jimmy: “Doesn’t sound like Bahb…”

Me: “That’s ‘cause he’s in Nashville, Jimmy…”

And Jimmy and I drank a little bit more.

And then the chef came out and joined us. I liked the chef. He was what they call in the Manzana Grande, a “celebrity chef.” And what I liked about him was he didn’t give a good fuck about that celebrity stamp. He built armor for their arrows. The “foodies.” The magazines. The maggots making a living off of food trends, opinions, and expertise. He tried to hide. He tried to die in this restaurant only to be slowly reborn and perhaps move on. Coach little league. Cook for the block association. Love his wife right. Little did he know the restaurant would die first. He was a family man. He made good food. Shat his heart out into it. Cared. Snorted coke and drank a little too much. Was just barely hanging on. A genius with no ego. An egomaniac with no ambition. Sure. My kind, papa. Our kind.

I pulled him a pint. We toasted. Me, him, and Jimmy. He smiled. His eyes twitched and buckled. A chef’s distress. Kinesis. That yayo too. It all takes its toll.

“I hate failure,” he said.

“It’s not yer fault,” I said, wondering when I’d become Robin fuckin’ Good Will Huntingdon Williams for this fuckin’ place.

We sat there. Me behind the bar. The cooks in front. I wanted to say things. I was drunk and what did I know?

“We’ll find you something,” Chef said to me.

“And the funny thing is, I ain’t tryin’ to be a bartender,” I said.

The chef took a slug off his pint, checked his cellphone. Jimmy laughed at nothing. It was a little after 11 PM.

The owners of this place were about to close it down. They weren’t gonna’ declare bankruptcy. They weren’t gonna cut their losses. They were gonna’ try again in a month after they renovated and created a new concept.

Stain remover. Car wax. Teeth whitener. Ultra comfort mattress.

The chef was all over his phone. Wife and kid things. I looked at him. His own brand of frantic. Yet slow. Sensitive. A fuckin’ human like the rest of us. Some of us anyway. Messenger bag across his forty year-old back. Van Gogh with a Blackberry. He looked at me.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“I gotta’ get this train,” he said.

We smiled at one another. In two months this man would be but a memory.

He left me and Jimmy to our (de)vices.

Quick went that emerald isle brown. We got outta’ there. The kitchen lights snapped shut. A once over across the dining room. The front door got locked. Jimmy and I shook hands, touched shoulders; the boozers adios outside the place.

“All good things,” Jimmy said again. I wondered how many times in his life he’d said that. How many bartenders he’d known. Where in the world wide world he’d be come ’18. Dead and making pancakes in heaven? Alive and making pancakes in Tribeca? A lucky fourth wife type woman?

“All good things.”

And what are those things, Jimmy? I wanted to ask him. What are the good things? ‘Cause it’s Thursday and I feel a little off track tonight. I feel late 20’s with it all and just gettin’ started and already been through it and not quite there and just short of almost and sorta’ kinda’ lived it and can’t quite see it and still hopeful for it and starting to question the whole of it and…

What are those good things, Jimmy?

‘Cause I’m a romantic, Jimmy. ‘Cause I’ve grown slow and slow and pessimistic, Jimmy.

A couple walked by dressed in black. Him holding an umbrella. Her on her iPhone. He – good haircut. She – good shoes. Just after midnight.

I’d spent some time in the country and thought about more time.

Texas. Oregon. Both Carolines. I’d seen ‘em. Breathed ‘em. Held ‘em for a spell. I wondered if there was legs in the living them.

Jimmy walked off toward “home.”

I needed more booze. I wanted the old college kinda’ early morning. Oh, the kids, the kids. I was gonna’ go on home and play basement Elliott Smith. Weep and bleed and drink on the QWERTY. Pretend I was the writing kind.

On my way I passed a couple arguing on 6th Avenue:

Him: You said you wanted to go to a bar, what’s wrong with Daddy-O’s?

Her: Whatever. I don’t wanna get into a screaming match. I just…

Him: But didn’t you say you wanted to get a drink?

Her: Whatever. I don’t care.

Him: Wait…

And by that time I’d crossed the big 6 and put my feet deep into Bleecker. Past my old elementary and middle school. Past all the storefronts that were not the storefronts I grew up with. Past the bars and clubs. The bars and clubs. The bars and clubs with no natives. Nothing but imports. All of the easy skinned-out suckers waiting for that easy ride home to nowhere. (Goddamn, I’d become one helluva judgemental and pessimistic sombitch over the years.) That’s right, waiting on a dollar to turn into a dime. Waiting for love to fuck them in the face.

I shuffled past a nightspot between Sullivan and Thompson with a crowd out front.

“Lick my balls, bitch!” a gentleman in a turtleneck and black jeans yelled at one of his male friends. He laughed and the friend laughed. I looked up to see if it was a full moon. I couldn’t find it.

At the Morton Williams supermarket I opted for the Bud Light as it was both health and wallet conscious. The lady behind the register weighed close to four hundred pounds and wore a mustache comparable to mine. She had her headphones buried in her ears. I could hear the muscles in her breathing. I wondered if she’d requested the nightshift, been offered it, or been subjected to it. She had on three gold necklaces and two rings. She checked her cell-phone before she ran my beer through the red laser. Her hair was yanked back in a wavy onyx ponytail. I wondered what would happen if she and Jimmy ended up alone in a room together.

She scanned the six-pack. Didn’t ask for ID. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or insulted. It was late. I was old looking. Unemployed. Caucasian.

“Seven sixty-three,” she said.

I handed her eight. It was all the money I’d made at the bar that night. Eight strutting bucks in cash. Yeah, baby. And that was after we’d tipped out the busser. And that poor bastard walked with two dollars. Just enough to take the train home to wherever the fuck. They’d just hired him recently.

“Don’t tell, Pedro,” the bossman had said, regarding the restaurant closing. He knew he’d flee if he found out he’d be without a paycheck come next Saturday.

Some were trying to make it, some were making it, and some were it.

“It’s business,” my father would always tell me when I was failing and trying and learning and failing as an actor and as a man. “It’s a business.”

And then I fell in love with every woman I ever met. And then I fell in love with none. And then it was like I’d know them forever. And then it was like I’d never known them at all.

I looked at my phone. All the names. The chances. I thought long and hard.

“You are drunk. You are drunk. You are drunk,” I told Myself. “Do not make those kinds of phone-calls.”

And the six-pack of Bud Light beer was in a plastic bag and it was in my left hand and it was heavy in my left hand and I walked it on home to the apartment, my apartment, where I was staying, where I lived. The doorman was there. He was watching television on the internet.

“How’s it goin’?” I asked him.

“Good,” he said.

Best news I’d gotten all night.

After the doorman in my doorman apartment building with an elevator, I rode the elevator up to the 18th floor. There was the door to my apartment and I found my keys and opened that door.

And didn’t I have it all set-up:

- Put on the early Elliott.

- Weep it on out like the saddest Sammiest bastard the vorld had ever seen.

- Get through that six. Line up them skeletons across the desk like little league trophies.

- Do not make those kinds of phone-calls.

- Write a lil’ sumpin’-sumpin’.

- Do not make those kinds of phone-calls.

- Go to sleep. ‘Cause after sleep there is the promise that what happened…man, what literally happened the very night before, don’t mean nearly as much. It’s but a cigarette butt. A brutal pair of eggs over easy. Sausage. Home-fries well done. A hooded sweatshirt. A story. A fishtank. A feeling. Just. A. Fuckin’. Feeling.

They say Elliott Smith stabbed himself in the heart. But the case is still open. The case is still open.

And I sat down at the dude-yer-gettin’-a-Dell and fired her up like an afterburner. Lord, she whirred and hummed. And then I double-clicked on that ol’ Microsoft Whirred and got started.

Y’see, ‘cause I’d never been laid-off before. I’d heard George Jones sing about it. Heard the hard collars in the deep south and dead north tell me about it over plastic cup suds and discount tobacco.

It ain’t fired. It’s different.

My old friend Kevin had been laid-off once. I remember we sat in Union Square and talked about it. I didn’t drink coffee then. It didn’t make sense to me. He was smarter than the average bear. Those kinds of bears, they don’t get laid off. Do they, papa? Is it business?

Laid off? ‘Cause Someone decides to do something different?
Laid off? “Cause it’s cheaper in China?
Laid off. ‘Cause they didn’t tailor my suit right?
Laid off? ‘Cause the economy’s in the shithouse?
Laid off? ‘Cause the FED cut the NASDAQ and the DOW fell below the sub-prime rate of Bear Stearns and the GOP told NATO that the cost of BUD LIGHT was getting out of hand?
Laid off? ‘Cause 81% of Americans thought that the nation was on the wrong track?
Laid off? ‘Cause the bar was made out of metal and not say…wood?
Laid off? Because…because…
Laid off? ‘Cause the concept was wrong? The concept?
Laid off? ‘Cause New York City was just so damn competitive, difficult, all about trial-and-error?

New York City. Town I’m from. My hometown, Boss. Town I’m from.

So’s Ma. Nila. GC. Case is on the show. Chuckles was wearing green before the hipsters caught on. Frankie’s pulled the bricks outta’ the street. Catalina’s burning up the stage. Bear’s making them listen. Hustling and he’s got a wife. Ben Umanov. Hell, his dad’s still slingin’ axes on Bleecker and Cornelia. A staple.

We’re still here. And those I’ve missed or’m missing…They’re more here than most.

And we don’t get laid-off.

And when the bossman laid me off he said, “we really appreciate everything you guys’ve done for us.”

And he couldn’t look me in the eye, as most powerful people can’t when they’re wielding their power. After all, they don’t wanna’ appear cruel. (I’ve found police to be the only exception.)

He was younger than me. Considerably. He had a fake mohawk, or “faux hawk.” I’d once heard him mention that his t-shirt cost seventy-five dollars. I’d once heard him mention the “concept” of the restaurant. I’d once seen him snort cocaine like the whores I used to hit off. I once laughed with him about the oddball customers that would walk in with their eyeballs bulging out of their skulls because they didn’t understand the concept. I once talked to him about finding a good man or woman and holding on to her like I’d failed to do at least once and seen some of my friends succeed in doing. He listened and nodded. I felt like a sage. Worth a nickel but worth a shit at least. Now he was not quite firing me. Laying me off. I found myself looking at his t-shirt.

Hours later, the dishwasher, with his limp and hopeful smile would ask me for Sprite. We spoke in Spanish that would’ve made Patrizia proud. I wanted to tell him the place was fucked. Finished. Terminado. No mas. Ido con el viento. Swear all that sombitch would’ve done is smile and limp and wash them goddamn pints and wines and waters and rocks. That smile. Like Bonnie looking at Clyde for the last time.

I guess it all sorta’ served to make me think of what I’d done up to that point. I’d studied things. Hell, I’d even studied things I believed in. And for worse or for better, I’d left ‘em for something else. And here I was.

Old man, look at my life. 28 and there’s so much…well…I’ve done some things…but…not quite all I wanna’ do…y’know?

Laid off? ‘Cause…

nah, I won’t trouble you with that again.

I tried the early Elliott and it only made me tired. Nostalgic. Orn’ry.

I opted for Lightnin’ Sam into Jimmie Rodgers. Olden type shit. Tumblin’ things. Damn it made me yearn for…

(HEY!!! DO NOT make those kinds of phone-calls!)

I missed Ryan and Paulie Balls. I missed Nicky. The kids that knew and still know. They were out there. But everybody’s out there. Maybe it’s that 20’s kinda’ time.

It was 4 AM. Outside my window the streets were damp and quiet. It was now Friday. Most folks were asleep. I was a rooster. Halfway through the six. Wondering a little. Wondering a little what I was gonna’ do. Maybe, I thought, maybe take a few more risks. Maybe get better at making and returning phone-calls. Maybe get better at being honest, which would require me being more honest with myself. Maybe not worry so much. Maybe worry a little bit more. Find another job. Keep working. Learning. Living.

It made me smile a Jimmy-like smile to think of Jimmy wasted and sleeping in his apartment. Tomorrow, sure-as-shootin’, would be another day for that ol’ dog. He’d be grindin’. Preppin’. Cookin’. Drinkin’. Laughin’. Livin’ in his way.

“All good things,” he’d said.

They are, Jimmy. It is. We are.

We got laid-off today.

We’re still here.

NYC, NY (April 4, 2008)

Two Owls

2008-03-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Two Owls

by Sam Ford

It’s a little before midnight. I squeeze out the mop, put it in the bucket, wheel it into the supply closet. The last thing on the list. I wrapped and put away all the meats, veggies, sauces, dressings, etc. I cleaned off and wiped down the countertops. I cleaned the bread ovens, tossed the stale loaves, turned the ovens off. I counted out the register, left the cash drop in my manager’s office. I restocked napkins, straws, cups, lids. I restocked the cooler. Took a small inventory. Left a note for my manager telling him we were out of Nestea.

I go into the office and take off the polo shirt I have to wear for a uniform. It’s all washed out and faded. I’ve got four of them but I like this one the most for some reason. I think it’s the first one they gave me. That was almost two years ago.

I get a text message from Danny telling me to meet him at the Route 1 Diner. I thought we were gonna’ go out to The Bullhorn and tie one on, but I guess Danny’s got other plans. I’m actually pretty bushed myself and could use a cup of coffee before we tear it down, so I figure the diner’s not a bad idea. I text him back that I’ll meet him there in fifteen minutes.

I turn off all the lights, leave the place, find my keys, lock the front door. It’s fuckin’ freezing outside. I get out a cigarette and realize I don’t have my Zippo. I tend to leave it at home. It was a gift from my ex-girlfriend. I wonder if that’s why I keep forgetting to bring it.

I get in my car. It’s an ‘01 Chevy Impala that I could barely afford when I got it but somehow managed to pay off in time. It’s fast as hell. It’s what the highway patrol uses when they’re not driving Crown Vics. I had a pretty decent sound system put in it. Good woofers, a cool console.

I hit the ignition, turn the heat all the way up and wait. I can see my breath dancing in front of me. It must be like ten degrees outside. I push the cigarette lighter down with my thumb. After a moment it pops up. I put it to the tobacco end of my smoke and take a puff. I’ve been smoking cigarettes since I was about thirteen. My mom still smokes. And I remember my dad did when he was around.

I’ve got a six CD changer in the trunk but I don’t feel like listening to music. I check my phone real quick even though I know it hasn’t gone off. I tend to do that. It’s like a nervous tic. I sorta’ hate myself for doing it. To try to justify it, I scroll through all the names, wondering if there’s someone I could call. A girl someone. There’s this girl I met a couple of weeks ago at church. Weird. We saw each other a couple of times. I like her. I dunno. I dunno what’s wrong with me these days.

I put my phone away. My ex-girlfriend once dared me to throw my phone into the lake. I told her she was crazy.

***

The Route 1 Diner is actually off of Highway 22. I guess they call it the Route 1 Diner ‘cause it sounds better than the Highway 22 Diner. I don’t think anybody would care that much.

I pull into the parking lot. Danny’s red Jeep Cherokee is there. I park next to it. He’s got this bumper sticker on it that says, “I eat hippies - They make me shit peacefully.” I don’t know where he got it or really why he got it. Far as I know he doesn’t have anything against hippies.

Danny’s at the counter when I walk inside. The place is open 24 hours. There’re some folks scattered about. A small group of drunk high school kids eating french toast and cheeseburgers and milkshakes. A trucker at the counter, gnawing on a toothpick, reading the local paper. Two waitresses. One of them’s pretty good-looking for an older woman. Red hair. Nice body. Nice smile. I’d figure her for about forty-five or so. She’s been working here a while. I’ve been coming here since I was a little kid and I still don’t know her name. But she knows me. She calls me “sugar.” It always makes me blush.

I sit next to Danny. He’s got an ashtray in front of him that’s already overflowing. His pack of Newports is there too, with a matchbook on top of it. Cup of coffee. Danny’s a pretty handsome kid. We all knew he was, like, sorta’ the pretty boy of the group when we were in high school. Straight dark hair, blue eyes. He used to get a lotta’ girls. In other counties too. Whenever he would go on trips with his folks he would come back and brag about the girls he’d slept with. On this one trip in particular to New York City, Danny returned with the story of a threesome involving to models he met on the street. He had to sneak outta’ the hotel he and his parents were staying in. He said it was the first time he did coke and he and those models were up all night going at it. His parents woke up and when he wasn’t there, they called the police. Big mess, whatever. Danny never traveled with his folks again after that one. A lot of us didn’t believe him when he told the story. To make themselves feel better, a couple of the guys tried to change the story so that the models were actually male models. But I always believed him. Danny later confided in me that he was scared of what happened. “I didn’t use protection, man,” he told me.

Danny’s wearing a Yankees hat cocked to the side. He looks tired under that hat. He stubs out a cigarette, take a sip of his coffee before he even notices me.

“Hey, man,” I say to him.

“Oh shit, hey dude,” he says. He gets up and hugs me. I can feel him shaking a little bit. I wonder if he’s fucked-up on something. He sits back down and I can tell he’s happy I’m here.

“Did you work today?” I ask him.

“Naw, man. I dunno. That job’s bullshit.”

Danny works at the Wilco Travel Center off of exit 54. He’s been working there almost as long as I’ve been working at the Subway. They recently made him a junior manager. He started there working overnights as a stock-boy. They like him there. They joke about his good looks and that he doesn’t belong there with them. I think he agrees with them but stays on because he likes the attention. But then again, what do I know?

“You been sayin’ that for two years,” I tell him.

The waitress comes by. She’s wearing a small gold cross on a necklace. She’s got green eyes.

“Can I get you something, sugar?” she asks me.

“I’ll have some coffee,” I say, my face red as a corvette.

She winks and walks off.

“…And your phone number,” Danny says, halfway under his breath.

“Shut the fuck up,” I say, shoving him.

“That’s just what you need, man,” he says. “A nice nurse-like woman to treat you kind.”

I shake my head and light a cigarette to put an end to the subject.

“Why aren’t we out drinkin’, man?” I ask him.

“We are drinkin’,” he says, raising his cup. “Coffee.”

On cue, the waitress put my cup in front of me.

“Ya’ll let me know if you need anything else.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am,” Danny says.

He’s grinning a sorta’ devilish grin, but I can tell something’s wrong underneath it.

“So what’s up?” I say. A yawn creeps out. Danny looks at me and kills the yawn with his gaze.

“What the fuck, man?” I say.

“Man…” he says. “Lindsay’s pregnant, dude. She’s fuckin’ pregnant. I’m fucked.”

I don’t say anything at first. And then softly I say, “Oh shit, man…”

Lindsay’s a girl he’s been seeing for about two months. She’s pretty cute. Sorta’ quiet, or at least she is around his friends. I think she works at the Wal-Mart just down the road from the Wilco where Danny works. He walked into Wal-Mart to buy a DVD player and I guess he just charmed her right out of her blue smock. But I’m not sure how serious it is. I’m sure it’s not serious enough to have a baby.

“I’m fucked,” he repeats. “I mean. I guess it’s an abortion. Right? I mean.”

“I guess,” I say. “I mean have you talked to her about it?”

“I mean she just told me tonight, dude,” he says. His voice is starting to get louder.

“Okay, man,” I say. “Well…I mean was she upset? How did she sound?”

“Well she told me on the phone, man. And…I mean…I don’t know how she sounded. Not really like anything. Maybe upset I guess. Shocked or something I guess. But not really. I dunno.”

“Well you should talk to her in person,” I tell him. “I mean obviously. You should talk it out with her face to face. Figure out what you’re gonna’ do together.”

“Yeah but what if she wants to have the kid, man. I can’t afford no kid. Fuckin’ Jesus, man. I mean I can’t afford to have a fuckin’ baby right now. I mean I don’t even…I hardly really even know this girl. Whatever, y’know?”

He lights a cigarette. I drag on mine. It’s like I can feel his heart beating or something. I feel like we’re alone in the diner. People are probably looking at us but I feel like we’re alone. I drink a little coffee.

“How much are abortions?” he says.

“I dunno,” I say. Then I pause for a second and say, “I’ve never had one.”

Danny doesn’t laugh and my smile quickly retreats.

“I’m surprised we’re not out drinking,” I say.

“Whaddayou mean?” Danny says, turning to me.

“I dunno. I mean I just…this just sounds like a drinking type a’ conversation.”

“It’s serious shit, man,” he says. “I don’t wanna’ drink just like some asshole.”

But this isn’t the first time this has happened to Danny. When we were seventeen he got a girl from a rival high school pregnant. We knew her from parties and football games. She was a cool girl. I can’t remember her name now. Something with an A. Abby maybe. Amy. It was sort of a one night drunken thing that Danny swore he didn’t even remember. But two months later, the girl sent him a letter with a copy of the receipt or whatever from the abortion. Attached to it was a note that said: “Don’t worry. I took care of it.” Danny never talked about it to anyone except me. And when he did, he never let on how he felt about it. He tried calling that girl a year or so later but her parents said she’d moved away.

I won’t bring that up now. I think Danny’s done his best to forget about it. As far as he may be concerned, it never happened.

“The rubber broke,” he says. He stubs out his cigarette and pushes his fingers against his forehead. We’re both twenty-four years old.

“Why didn’t you tell me when it happened, man?” I ask him.

“’Cause I didn’t wanna’ even think about that it did happen, man,” he says. “I fuckin’…shit, I didn’t even tell her. I shoulda’ though ‘cause then she coulda’ took one a’ those after morning pills. Morning after. Whatever.”

My girlfriend and I only had sex a few times before we broke up. I miss her sometimes. Man, she was strange though.

“I still think you should just sit down and talk it through with her,” I tell him. I light another cigarette. The last one in the pack.

“Yeah, but I mean…There’s nothin’ really to say. I can’t have the kid. I mean I can’t be a father right now.”

“Why not?” I say. I’m not sure why I say it, but I know it’s genuine.

“Why not?” he says. “‘Cause I ain’t got the money. ‘Cause I hardly know this girl. ‘Cause I ain’t ready. I ain’t ready, man. Period.”

The waitress returns with a pot of coffee. She refills our cups.

“Ya’ll doin’ alright?” she asks with that gentle smile.

“Fine,” Danny says.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

She walks off. I watch her. Danny shakes his head.

“She’s gotta’ have an abortion, dude.”

“Well what if she doesn’t want to?” I say.

“Well then fuck me,” he says. “Fuck us both I guess.”

“Well then maybe you get another job or work nights and go to community college or whatever to try to start finding something better. But if she wants to keep the kid, man. You gotta’ try to respect that.”

“Whose fuckin’ side are you on?” Danny asks. He’s pissed now, but he’s also exhausted. Even the coffee’s making him tired. I think he’s just tired of being himself. We all get that way sometimes I think.

“I’m not on anybody’s side, man,” I tell him. And that really is the truth. I’m not on anybody’s side. I wonder if that’s a problem.

“Well if you were on my side you’d be approvin’ the abortion option. ‘Cause that’s what has to happen.”

“I gotta’ take a piss,” I say. Danny scoffs. I get up and head over to the men’s room. I pass by the table full of high schoolers. I overhear a little of their conversation:

“Whatever, dude. In Amsterdam, A – they’ve got the best weed, and B – it’s all completely legal. And if America would just do that shit, we’d all be a lot better off.”

“Yeah, man. Everyone at this table would be a lot better off.”

Laughter.

In the pisser, I think about what it would be like to be a father. I actually think it’d be pretty cool. It’d certainly give you an opportunity to change your life if you were looking for one. Change your focus. Maybe that’s what Danny needs.

I shake my dick dry and flush the stall. I wash my hands and look in the mirror. I need a shave. Surprised my manager didn’t bust me. I wonder if girls are scared off by guys with facial hair. If they don’t wanna’ kiss them. I remember my dad had a big handlebar and my mom would kiss him full on the lips. So I guess it doesn’t matter all the time. The trucker from the counter walks in.

“How’s it goin’?” he says. You can hear the mileage in his voice. He walks over to the stall.

“Okay,” I say. I open the door and walk out of the bathroom.

Danny’s still there when I sit back down. He’s got a new cigarette. There’s some pop song from the late 80’s playing. I can tell it’s aggravating Danny. I’ve always wondered why he didn’t go out to Hollywood to try to be an actor or something. Another friend of ours did. Brian. I think he did an episode of CSI or something. He played a college kid. And I saw him in a commercial not that long ago. For Long John Silvers I think.

“I think maybe you should think about having the kid,” I say to Danny.

“What?” he says.

“Just hear me out. I think maybe it’s not such a bad thing. I know it might be hard with the money and all, but it might be sort of good to put your energy into it. It’d force you to get another job, y’know, a better job. And like I said, maybe go to community college or some sorta’ school thing. Some sorta’ trade school. It might sorta’ be what you need.”

“How do you know what I need?” Danny says.

“I don’t,” I say.

“I know what you need,” Danny says.

“What?” I say.

“To get laid.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“To get laid and get a girl pregnant and have to fuckin’ deal with it.”

“What would you tell me to do?”

“Abortion,” Danny says. He sorta’ smiles to himself. “I ain’t pro-choice, I’m pro-abortion.”

I smile back at him. I’ve known him a long time. When you’ve known someone as long as I’ve known him, it’s impossible to even think of that person changing.

“Well, either way, you’re gonna’ talk to her, right?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course, man. Jesus Christ, I ain’t that big a dog. I like her. I mean. Yeah, I like her, y’know? It ain’t...whatever.”

“Do you love her?”

“Love her?” Danny says the words like he’s four years old and being told Santa Claus isn’t real.

“Yeah, man. Or could you love her…down the line?” I like that expression, ‘down the line.’ I like myself for using it just then.

“Maybe,” he says. “Jesus, I don’t wanna’ talk about that shit.”

We laugh then. I think about touching him on the shoulder but I’m worried that’ll stop the laughing. The waitress walks up to us.

“Do ya’ll need anything?”

“What’s your name?” Danny asks. I almost resent him for being the one to ask her, but of course only he would.

“My name’s Kathy Ann,” she says.

I’m looking in her eyes.

“That’s a nice name,” I tell her. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach for some reason.

She turns to me.

“Thanks,” she says. She‘s looking in my eyes. “What’s your name?”

NYC, NY (3/14/08)

The Devil's Bastard

2007-12-21T22:33:00.000-08:00

The Devil’s Bastard

by Sam Ford

They picked me up in a motel room just outside of Valdosta, GA. Feds, stateys, even the local tan and browns. It was five in the morning, the blue was just starting to break. A lone crow on a power wire shitting his pants over something or other. Stink of fresh creosote on the wood of that utility pole. A gypsy moth smacking against the screen window. Big spotted wings like old bark. Like a nightmare.

They were coming for me. If they weren’t outside already.

I’d killed one a’ those cops in Tennessee. You can slaughter a family. Piss on their graves. Still make a jury bend. You can rape a pregnant woman in broad daylight and be home in time for Survivor. But you kill a badge…That’s the guillotine.

***

Night before I’d gone out, taken it on a bit. Some loose southern shithole called Monty’s. Old pastel exterior. Bar painted black. Filthy brass accents. Condom machine in the back. Statler Brothers on the juke. ‘Tender smelled like too much sport deodorant covering man-stink. Cold sore the size of Gibraltar. He licked it every once and a while. It was like a second mouth.

Monty’s had a woman or two between its walls. Blondes from bottles. TJ Maxx all over their asses. One of ‘em made her way over, sat it on down next to me.

“I’m Felicia,” she said. “Ferocious Felicia.”

I was drinking Gentleman and it wasn’t quite kind enough.

“Come again?”

“Ferocious Felicia. ‘Cause I’m ferocious. What’s your name?”

“Asshole. ‘Cause I’m an asshole.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Ferocious Felicia said. Three of her front teeth were missing. She had a gold necklace with a pendant. The pendant was a word: ferocious. I took a long toss of my bourbon.

***

How did I know the law was creeping up my skirt? That old dirt-doer’s radar. I’d done six years in Jefferson City for armed robbery. Everything about that bid stuck to me. When they threw me inside, I’d developed some sorta’ spider-sense. I could tell when the CO’s were at my gate. I could tell when some fuckin’ long-timer was wetting his chops, looking to throw some Maybelline on me, make me his regular thing. My ears stood up like prairie dogs, my skin tingled like a boy virgin in a whorehouse, and my hands balled up into fists so tight they could crush a mason jar. I vowed I’d never get caught again. In jail or out. And if I did, I’d be expecting it.

***

Ferocious ordered a cocktail off the drink menu. “The Choc Sucker.” Vanilla vodka, crème de cacao, dash of grenadine. She smiled at the bartender, stuck a pinky up her nostril and flicked away what she found in there.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked me, knocking the x-toe of her patent leather cowboy boot against the wood.

“I’ve robbed some people. Cash is best. Jewelry gets pawned. Stolen some cars. Sold ‘em to chop-shops...”

She didn’t believe me and she laughed. It sounded like a toddler farting.

“So you’re a regular outlaw, huh?” she said. Her drink arrived. She put her hands around it, lifted it to her lips, slurped it out of its housing. “Ooohh…that’s real good,” she said.

I was lonely then. Lonelier than most times. It occurred to me that I was missing a person. I was missing any person. Nobody knew me. There wasn’t anybody in all the years and gears, highways and byways and goin’-my-ways?, state lines and road signs, that actually knew me. What a pity.

And what was there to know anyway? “Mama tried.” “I was the only hell she ever raised.” Etc. I’d been hustling and robbing since I could drive a car. I’d laid with some ladies in my time but there wasn’t a permanent finger amongst them. The only folks I could call “friends” were built on fleeting conversations at roadhouses, juke-joints, truckstops, and hash houses all across the fair fifty. Never even got their names.

As for family, well, prohibition was my daddy’s heyday. He liked to compare bootlegging to protesting. Said booze was a human right. He caught the clap at the age of thirteen. Bought a Cadillac at the age of seventeen. Died in prison at the age of forty-three. Apparently his last words were: “Oh shit…I’m fucked.”

I’d had a brother’d gone to Vietnam but he took a punji stake through the intestine and came home horizontal. My mother’d been committed to an open unit back in Nebraska, the state she hatched me in. I guess her husband being a fornicating ex-con, her one son dying in Pleiku to defeat communism, and her other son being a career criminal were enough to send her to the loony bin.

Ferocious finished her drink. It turned her tongue brown.

“I’m gonna’ use the shitter, Mr. Outlaw,” she said. “I hope you’re still here when I get back. I like you.”

She clip-clopped and sauntered off. I heard a man whistle and figured he musta’ been blind. The bartender moved toward me. He was sweating.

“Get you another?” he mumbled.

“Sure. And get yourself one.”

“Thanks but I’m nursing a hangover.”

“Ain’t a believer in that ol’ hair a’ the dog?”

“Yeah. Not for me.”

He filled my glass and took five from a stack of bills I’d placed on the damnwood. I realized how fuckin’ hard it was to make friends out in the world. You either said too much or too little or the right thing that made ‘em feel stupid or the wrong thing that made you feel stupid. You couldn’t win. I guess that’s why I took to breaking the law.

I ran the back of my knuckles across a clean shave. It was getting late and I wasn’t there to get shitty. I just wanted to be out in it a little bit. For a moment I considered sticking the place up but figured it’d be fruitless. It’d be more outta’ boredom than anything else. And I don’t believe in boredom.

I got outta’ there before Felicia got outta’ the can.

***

I walked it on back to the motel. It was a hot limp Dixie summer. I had a little over four grand back in the room. My suitcase had two half-full boxes of CCI full metal jackets, two changes of clothes, a hunting knife, a carton of Marlboro Reds, a beard trimmer, and a couple of porno mags. I thought about Mexico maybe. Senoritas and sunsets. Tacos and tequila. But that faded quick enough. One thing I’d learned about myself was I was real good at spreading some thick romance on stale bread to make it taste better. I pulled a pack of those red fingers from my shirt pocket, pulled one out, lit it and smoked it like a teenage girl’s thigh.

And I was biding my time. I knew the bloodhounds were on my scent. Didn’t expect the federalies to get involved, but shit, you never do know how bad you are until you see who shows up to take you down.

This was ‘cause of Memphis. While I was locked up in Missouri I’d caught wind of a North Memphis pimp and drug dealer called Silly P. Silly’s story was he’d been born and raised in Frayser, done his dirt up there, and then “retired” to Germantown. He was letting his people on the street handle the grunt work while he sat back getting the perpetual blow-job. The brothers on the inside loved jawing about this guy. The color of his Lexus, where he liked to party, his favorite gangster movies. But the thing that stuck with me most was that he always kept at least five thousand dollars on him; a clean roll of hundreds. He also carried to twin Glock 17’s in shoulder holsters. Apparently nobody fucked with this guy. I decided I might color myself the exception. I wouldn’t be in town long enough to feel the aftershocks.

When they finally turned me loose, I decided to take a little journey down Memphis way.

***

On the approach to Memphis, I stuck up a convenience store in Blytheville, Arkansas with a Lorcin .25 I’d bought from a trucker in the lot of a Flying J. He was a few eggs short of an omelette, but I needed a gun so we worked out a deal. I jerked him off, read him Horton Hears a Who twice, and gave him 20 bucks. He gave me the pistol, some extra shells, a cheap bowie knife made in Pakistan, and a lift to Blytheville.

The clerk at the Yellow Bird Food Mart was a sweet-faced looking kid reading an issue of X-Men. Acne scars dented his cheeks and made the peach fuzz on his chin look sad. I was grateful to see him and not some fuckin’ Punjab with a quick temper and a 12-gauge behind the counter. I hustled into the place wearing a black bandanna around my face, four dollar truckstop shades, and a Cardinals hat. The little Lorcin looked ridiculous in my hand but at least it didn’t have any orange plug in the barrel. It spooked the youngster good enough. He cracked the register but didn’t have the combination to the safe. That bothered me. So I took his car.

And there I was, sure as shootin’, puttering down I-55 in a Toyota Tercel, cumshot white with no air conditioning. I figured I’d slip that state line before I ditched the piece a’ shit in a lot somewhere and found something a little bit more in line with my demeanor.

I did just that. Left the Tercel behind a Wal-Mart and found myself a Ford Ranger with Mississippi plates. I took the Tercel plates and put ‘em on the Ranger. Threw the Ranger plates under the shotgun floor-mats. I had the Lorcin in the back pocket of my Wranglers. What cash I had in the front pocket. I lit a blood red and took a moment for myself. It was getting on midnight at that point and I figured I’d do best to find myself a cheap room somewhere, bed it on down till morning, make my move on Silly P the following night.

***

The shat-hole I checked myself into was the Super 7 Inn on East Brooks Road, Memphis, Tennessee. I’d heard of the Super 8 but never the Super 7. I guess they were too fuckin’ cheap to make up the difference. They put me in room 12, smoking w/ king, on the bottom floor. It smelled like an old man’s asshole.

I went out and had it my way over at the Burger King on East Brooks. Whopper, fries, and a vanilla milkshake. It damn near made me puke right there on the linoleum, but I held it together, made it back to room 12, passed the hell out, and dreamt me some 80’s Basinger.

***

I woke-up with the realization that I was gonna’ need some more firepower if I was gonna’ try to squeeze Silly P. I decided I’d try walking into a gun shop and leaning on the clerk a bit. See if I could get him to sell me something outright. It’d worked before in my time. You get the local dealer who needs the money, hates the government, etc. Maybe he’s looking to unload something.

I cracked open the yellow pages and turned to the firearms section. I found one that sounded about right. Phil’s Sport & Militia. I made a phone call:

“Phil’s…”

“Howdy, is Phil around?...”

“Speakin’…”

I hung-up and looked over the area map in the front of the phonebook. I figured out the directions to Phil’s from where I was. 10 minutes tops. I checked out of the Super 7. I left the Ranger in the parking lot and sped off in some poor sucker’s ’94 Honda Accord.

***

Phil’s was a house off Highway 61. A faded plastic sign outside read: “Phil’s Sport & Militia / Guns-Ammo-Hunt-Fish-Archery”. I pulled up and parked out front.

The inside was smaller than I thought. Three racks were mounted on the wall. Shotguns of various actions and gauges rested in them. Most of them looked used. A single glass cabinet had two shelves worth of handguns and one shelf worth of knives. There was some fishing gear in an adjacent room as well as two or three compound bows hanging on another wall in a corner. A barrel filled with arrows sat in the same corner. The plastic neon fletchings were dirty and old.

The whole place had a musty quality to it. I was where I needed to be.

Phil was there behind the counter, smoking a Swisher, wearing a Panhandle Slim snap-button western shirt that hugged his gut like a latex glove. An off-white Bailey U-Roll-It sat atop his silver haired head, and a gold plated arrowhead bolo tie rested inside his collar. He looked up at me. I figured him for 62. And no sheriff’s friend.

“Help yeh?” he said, the cigar jammed in his mouth.

“Well I surely hope so,” I said with a touch a’ the ol’ Cheshire Cat.

“How’d that be?” he said.

“Whaddaya’ got in the way of small arms?”

I approached the cabinet and had a peak. Nothing looked new. That was a good thing.

“Ain’t got much,” Phil said.

I spotted a Browning High-Power. 9mm. 13 in the butt, 1 in the gut. Wood grips. Looked like it was in halfway decent shape.

“How much for that Belgian beauty?” I asked.

Phil looked down, not knowing which pistol I was referring to.

“Which one’d ya’ say now?

“The nine-millimeter Browning.”

He peered through the glass. I pointed to it. He followed my finger, pulled the gun off the shelf. It had a tiny tag on it, hanging from the hammer by a string. Phil read it.

“Five-hundred,” Phil said. He coughed hard for a minute, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yanked out a wedgy.

“Give you four hundred for it. Plus this little twenty-five auto I got here.”

I pulled the Lorcin from my jeans and put it on the counter. Phil wasn’t impressed.

“That thing still got the serial number on it?” he said.

“Why wouldn’t it," I said, my shit-eating Kool-Aid grin still intact.

“I seen more a those little turds come through this place than you’ve seen in a lifetime a' trips to the captain’s chair. First off, them things blow up in yer hand after fifty or so rounds. Second, the only sombitches comin’ in to buy ‘em are them goddamn monkey gang members without any real money to spend. So I ain’t interested.”

I looked back down into the cabinet. Three Lorcins sat there in a row. Phil took a hard tug off his Swisher. I’d forgotten how rancid that tobacco was.

“Well, sir,” I said, “that’s fair enough. But I’ll tell ya’, I’d sure like to have that Browning there. I’m happy to pay you five hundred dollars cash for it. Only thing is, I’d like to walk out with it today.”

Phil folded his arms over each other and let them take a siesta on that big belly of his. A twinkle somewhat akin to piss hitting a mirror appeared in his eye. His smile was yellow and it added two more chins.

“Is that right?” he said. “Well you just tacked on another three hundred to the price tag, my friend. Instant grafistation costs extra.”

“Then that brings the price up to eight hundred, sir?” I said. “That’s a bit outside my budget.”

“Afraid I can’t help you then, partner,” Phil said. “You’re asking me to break the law for free. I’m still an American, y’know. I gotta’ get somethin’ for it.”

I looked back down at the selection of handguns. Nothing else looked appetizing. A couple of single-action revolvers. Those other .25’s. An old black powder replica. A cheap .380 with oxidation issues. It was the Browning or nothing. And I didn’t wanna’ spend the whole day trying to pull a rabbit outta’ the hat. Phil was the guy. I just had to talk him into it. Or kill him.

“I can understand that, Phil. I can understand I’m asking you to do something a bit outta’ bounds.” My eyes narrowed and I cast them downward. I made my voice crack ever so slightly. Touched my forehead with my hand. Tucked my upper lip inside the lower one. Continued: “You remember those ‘monkey gang members’ you were referrin’ to?”

Phil’s face already betrayed a look of concern. He swallowed and nodded.

“Well. Those…motherfuckers…they attacked my wife last week while she was on her way home from work. She’s a nurse. Pulled up at an intersection at the corner of…at an intersection…and…they car-jacked her. Held her at gunpoint. My wife she’s…she’s a tough gal. She refused to give them the car. They pistol whipped her. Dragged her outta’ the driver’s seat. Left her lying in the middle of the road. Two way traffic, Phil. She got hit. She’s in the hospital as we speak. The hospital she works at. Coma. So I’m sorry if I walked in here with a bit of a weight on me. You seem like a good man. Lord knows I’ve tried to be one my whole life. And I’m sure Memphis PD’ll do their damndest to catch the…scoundrels who did this. But in the meantime…I gotta’ start thinking and acting for myself. Know what I mean? So I turn to you. I’m not sayin’ I’m gonna’ walk outta’ here and turn into Chuck Bronson. I’m just sayin’…it’s my wife, Phil. Can you understand?”

“My wife walked out on me fifteen years ago.”

“So you know what I’m sayin’?”

“I…yeah. I guess, yeah…I do. I do understand. It’s the feelin’ of pain. Pain that’s deep in the heart.”

“Yeah. Deep as it gets.”

We stood there in silence, looking in separate directions. Phil's eyes got cloudy. Tears came. I was truly the devil’s bastard.

“So, Phil,” I whispered. “I got five hundred dollars in my pocket. It’s cash. Most the ATM machine would let me withdraw. I wanna’ give it to you. I’ll take that pistol there. Not for the sake of revenge. Not for the sake of violence. But for the sake of love.”

Phil wept. I touched him on the shoulder. He pulled a used tissue from his pocket, used it more. His crying subsided.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Yer story brought somethin’ outta’ me. Well…I reckon we can make a deal here.”

Phil had a Leatherman clipped to his belt. He extracted the file from it and started rubbing the serial number off the Browning. I admit, the sound of it was somewhat disturbing. It sounded like exactly what it was. A man forgetting himself.

Maybe it’s easy to make a man forget himself. But sometimes I’m of the mind that all men want to forget themselves. They just need an excuse to do it.

After he was confident the pistol couldn’t be traced back to him, he handed it over to me with a box of full metal jackets and an extra box of .25 shells for the Lorcin. He took my five hundred dollars regretfully.

***

From what I’d heard in lock-up, Silly P favored a club called Dirtee Catz on Jackson Ave. Apparently he had some stock in it and was there on a nightly basis. Come one in the morning, I pulled up across the street from the place. I could see clearly enough who was walking in and out of the place and had a solid second-hand description of Silly. The knuckleheads inside described him as a “fat bald nigga with a limp.” That was good enough for me. I figured he’d be well-dressed and put together based on his rep. I staked Dirtee Catz out, chain smoking and nipping from a bottle of 101 Turkey I’d picked up at a discount liquor store.

Come 1:30 in the morning I saw the man walk out. He wore a cream colored suit, cream colored derby hat, and cream colored loafers. He solved his limp with a cane and wore his sunglasses at night. His gold ’03 Lexus was waiting for him in front of the club. He opened the door and the car seemed to swallow him as he barreled his way inside. He pulled off and I followed him.

He drove slow. Windows open. Chronic smoke floating out. And that deep southern rap music sounded like mortar rounds flying from his trunk. His license plate spelled his name. People on the street slowed down as his car passed by. Some waved at him. Some ran away. I was asking for trouble fucking with this guy. But with me it’s never really about asking for trouble. It’s about taking it.

***

Silly P pulled into a late night Kentucky Fried Chicken, parked and pushed himself out of his Lexus. It was like a Rottweiler squeezing through a mailbox. He hobbled his way toward the KFC entrance. I pulled into the parking lot. Cut the headlights.

I wanted his roll. Five thousand greenbacks could last me a good stretch. A nice long shit-kickers ramble. Maybe I’d get me a mail-order bride and try to get it right for a while. Maybe he had more that five large on him. What if he had seven? What if he had ten thousand goddamn dollars in the pocket of those silk trousers? I’d get the clerk to pop the register for me too.

The air was quiet. The stray pedestrian appeared here and there but it wasn’t anything that was gonna’ keep me even. I yanked a round into the Browning’s chamber. Did the same with the little Lorcin. Cardinals hat. Sunglasses. Bandanna. I don’t get bored.

There were two kids working in the KFC. A boy and a girl, both black. The girl screamed as soon as she saw me walk in. The boy hit the deck. Silly didn’t even bother to look my way. His big bear’s hands reached between his armpits for those two Glocks. I was hoping I’d get the drop. No bullets. Just threats. That wasn’t gonna’ work for Silly. I let one go from the Browning. It got him in the shoulder. A pebble hitting a mountain. He got one of those Glocks out. It was ready. He fired thrice. I dove behind a table. Glass shattered. More screaming. I shot back. He was quite the target. One in the gut. He felt that one. Grunted. Staggered.

“You fuckin’ dead, muhfucka!!” he shouted.

He got the twin out. Bullets flew from both of his hands. I was pinned down. I thought of my brother and suddenly felt a wave of guilt crush me like a preacher’s voice. I took out the Lorcin and crawled forward, hiding myself beneath a bolted bench. Silly made no effort to move. He stopped firing. I could tell he was holding his stomach. Cops’d be showing up soon. Then it’d be Beirut. I had to get out or finish the fuckin’ thing.

I laid the Lorcin on the floor and took aim with the Browning. I let off five rounds, three of which tore into Silly’s ankles and feet. He let out a bonafide moan and came crashing down like an old Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. That was that for Silly P. I fired three more times. One missed him. One hit his neck. One hit his head. I got to my feet and walked over to Silly. He was still lying there, dead as Elvis. I went into his pockets. Sure enough, a healthy wad of rubber banded Franklins found their way into my life.

I looked around for the two kids but assumed they had gotten themselves out somehow. Maybe a back entrance. I was grateful for that. Killing people ain’t a pastime for me. Sometimes it happens. I feel better when it doesn’t.

I had left the Honda running and quickly realized how smart a move that was ‘cause as soon as I opened the door to exit the KFC, a black & white pulled in, punched the brakes hard, and two of Memphis’ finest flung the doors open and took cover behind them. I was shooting immediately. Slugs tore at the hood, doors, and windows of the squad car. One of the officers let out a scream. I’d hit him. Those CCI’s musta’ torn right through the exterior. I heard more sirens. The slide on the Browning slammed back and stayed there. I thumbed the release and kept firing the Lorcin. It was enough to get me into the Accord. I tore ass away from that Kentucky Fried Chicken like it was wired.

***

It wasn’t long before three squad cars were after me. Not up my kiester, but close enough. I knew soon they’d have a chopper spotlighting me. It wasn’t fun, this.

I had the Browning’s clip in between my thighs and was loading it with one hand while I drove. It was rather difficult. I found myself really wanting a Bonnie at about that point. Just someone to steer the ship while I fucked up our lives.

I made I-40. Red lights flickered behind me in the distance. Sirens. I was doing a buck-forty. The needle was buried. The engine sounded like an elderly woman climaxing. I had to ditch the Honda. I had to be on foot. I had to run. Into the woods. With trees I could hide behind. I needed God to do me a solid.

I pulled the Accord over on the shoulder, jumped out, and ran into the woods. I heard the Crown Vics rip by and then all screech to a halt in unison. I ran and ran as hard and as fast as my Marlboro Reds could carry me. I was heaving, gasping. My chest was erupting. I threw-up as I ran.

It was a half-moon. I heard an owl. It wasn’t comforting.

I made it to a town called Dancyville. There was an old auto repair shop off the main street. Old domestic beaters sat parked out in front. Some had for sale signs. Some were rusted beyond repair. I opened the rear door of an ’85 Lincoln Town Car Limo, crawled inside, and laid myself across the seat. The windows were tinted. I cocked the Browning’s hammer back and waited for what I hoped would be nothing.

***

The sun split open the sky and I realized I was as close to heaven as I’d ever get. I peered out the window of the Town Car. I figured it for 5:30, maybe 6. All was quiet. Miracles do happen.

I got out of the Town Car and roamed the lot looking for a vehicle I might commandeer for my journey to salvation. Wherever the fuck that might be. All the while the Browning stayed firmly in my hand. I was gonna’ be somebody’s paranoid lamming son of a cunt for longer than I’d be proud to admit.

An ’87 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme looked respectable but I got nervous when the door opened as easily as my hand could thumb the latch. Nonetheless I climbed in and ripped open the housing beneath the steering column. My favorite kind of pasta spilled out. Yellow to yellow. Black to yellow. Blue to black and yellow. The Cutlass roared to life and I pulled the blue starter wire away from the others.

“Take me to the River, you grumpy old cocksucker.”

I threw her in drive and drove.

***

Alabama was a day. Took her down and crossed the state line under the stars. I slept in the car just outside of Atlanta. Woke up and headed south. Florida sounded good. Warm. Palm trees. Dinner at four in the afternoon. Maybe I’d get a boat somewhere. Cuba. Freeport. Fuck it.

I got the room in Valdosta to shower, shave off my handlebar, cut my hair and dye it. I found myself in a Walgreen’s perusing the hair coloring section. I selected the Revlon Colorist Expert Color and Glaze System in Blue Black. I figured it’d be a far cry from my graying locks. Bought a mustache trimmer. A Gillette Mach 3 razor. A bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. A pack of peanut M&M’s. A carton of Philip Morris’ finest.

The girl behind the counter was chubby and pale. Glasses. Curly brown hair. She rang my stuff up and smiled.

“Starting yer own salon?” she asked.

“That’s right. Can’t do it without Gatorade, chocolate, and cigarettes.”

She snickered, a goddamn sweet little geek of a girl. She was 26 and had probably never been laid. Actually, that’s bullshit. I was in Georgia.

***

Looking back on it now: could it’ve been her? Me with my change-yer-whole-appearance-in-an-afternoon set of purchases. Her with her American Justice TV marathon and her quiet, thoughtful eyes.

“Valdosta police department…”

“Hi, this is Jane over at the Walgreen’s on North Ashley Street.”

“How’re you doing today?”

“Oh I’m fine, thank you. I was just callin’…it’s probably nothin’ and it may seem really weird, but a man just came in here and bought some hair dye, and a razor, and a beard trimmer and whatnot…”

“Yes…”

“And well…I mean it was women’s hair dye, like permanent hair dye, and it was a blue black color like a black person would get. And to buy a beard trimmer and razors. It just seems like he’s really intent on changing his appearance, y’know what I mean? I mean…I mean I know it’s probably nothin'…”

“No, go on…”

“It just seemed really strange to me.”

“Did he pay by credit card?”

“No sir. Cash. A hundred dollar bill actually.”

“I’m gonna’ send an officer over there to ask you some more questions, miss. Maybe show you some pictures. Thanks for callin'.”

And even if it wasn’t her. I slipped. ‘Cause see…I ain’t no pro. I’m just an American. There are others like me. And some not like me. Dumber than me. Smarter. Wealthier. Poorer. Taller. Better. Better at living than me. I ride the wind. Someday I’ll be gone and it’ll be like I was never here.

***

Whoever was on the bullhorn introduced himself a federal agent. I poked an eyeball through a slit in the blinds. He was small and bald. He had his Sig P-228 in his lefthand, the talk switch in his right. A fuckin’ southpaw. I killed a cop.

Georgia SWAT was out there too. I pictured those blue boys back in Tennessee. All wanting a piece of me. Pissing themselves that the easterners were gonna’ get to take me down.

The Browning and the Lorcin were on the bed. Staring at me like two puppies in the rain.

“Hard to be a Butch without a Sundance,” I told them.

I’d taken to talking to myself.

I should’ve brought Felicia home. At least then I would’ve had a hostage.

“COME OUT, JOHN! THIS IS THE ONLY WAY! WE’VE GOT THE AREA COMPLETELY SURROUNDED! WE’RE NOT GONNA’ HURT YOU!”

I sat on the bed. Sharpshooters on the rooftop across the highway. Those SWAT sombitches flanking either side of the door. Oh shit, papa…I’m fucked.

“COME ON OUT, JOHN! WE’RE HERE TO HELP YOU!”

What’s the difference between a government man and a confidence man?

One gets paid in cash.

“JOHN…”

They were getting ready to move. Maybe there’d be some young hotshot Memphis defense attorney that could turn it all upside down. Get me off on insanity. Smear the police department. Throw me on a throne:

*** Vigilante Angel Kills Notorious North Memphis Criminal and is Subsequently Attacked by Police ***

The loudspeaker was quiet. I thought of prison. Trying to play every side. How hard that was. Minding my neck. Working. Killing whoever tried to fuck me and fuck with me.

I was a boy once. But what man wasn’t?

***

They had me interlock my fingers. Turn around. Walk backwards toward them. Get on my knees. I felt boots on my spine. Handcuffs imported from China ensnaring my wrists. Somebody spit on me.

That badge is a brotherhood. My brother died.

It was a perfect summer morning. A light, balmy breeze slipped through the air and tickled the live oaks. The crow on the wire had been replaced by a robin. She sang for a new day. There were tears in my eyes. And the sky was so blue I had to smile.

for Ryan Judd

NYC, NY (12/22/07)

Arrowhead

2007-08-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Arrowhead

by Sam Ford

It was 1957 and Charlie Dyle was 11 years-old. His light brown hair was tightened up in a crew-cut, and his hazel eyes narrowed as he took in the sun. Springtime had landed on Cormitt County, taken nature’s hand and made love to it. The air was clean as a baptism and winter’s cape had given way to color and sound.

Charlie was sitting in the middle of a field, whittling the bark off a long branch. An audience of wildflowers surrounded him, as though he were a lone gladiator in a coliseum. He was shirtless, and his torso had various scrapes and burns from youth’s calling. His Levi’s had been cut into shorts which fell right above the knee and revealed more scab and boo-boo action up and down his pale legs.

A brown thrasher sang the blues in D and Charlie tried to spot him. He heard a stirring in the brush about five yards from him, and the bird took off and out across the horizon. Charlie watched as the little fella faded from sight. His mind wandered momentarily; a quiet, almost melancholy look eased across his face. Then he snapped back into himself, found his pocketknife and went back to work.

Charlie had with him a small Regency pocket radio that was tuned to the local country station. He had stolen it from his Feedler’s house when they were away at church. It was the day he had lied to his grandma so he didn’t have to go himself. Normally she would’ve thrown nothing but skepticism at his belly-aching, but not on a Sunday. God came first. God was the one thing she took for herself and she wasn’t about to miss a session. Charlie had crawled into the house threw the doggy-door. It was almost too easy. Sinning on Sunday. Charlie wondered if hell had different departments.

Lefty Frizzell came in over the airwaves. Charlie sang “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” as he picked through a cluster of rocks and stones he’d come across. He found one he liked, spit on it, rubbed it clean on his denim. He held it up to the sun and watched the beams of light reflect off the mica. He tossed the stone away and kept searching.

The arrowhead he discovered was made of flint and still sharp. He held it up in front of his eyes and felt its ghosts move through him. Charlie stood up and looked around. He wanted someone to show it to. His mouth opened and a small, stifled grunt came out. Out on Highway 14 Charlie saw a red Fairlane float by, its big 312 humming like a drum-roll. He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. Flakes of crust came loose.

Charlie didn’t have many friends. And he didn’t have any interest in imagining any. He put his arrowhead in his pocket. The sun was slowly starting to spill down across the horizon. Charlie heard a crow cackle from the wires. He started walking.

***

He could feel the arrowhead in his shorts as walked. The tip dug gently into his thigh and he liked the way it stung as he strode forward. Main Street was alive with early evening traffic. Men were shuffling in and out of Maysie’s. Some had already put the day away and some were just getting started. Charlie could smell the smoke as he walked by. He could hear the dogs laughing, glass hitting old wood, the jukebox coughing out Ray Price. As he walked past the alley next to Maysie’s, he spotted a four piece band moving they’re gear through the side entrance. One of the members was leaning on the hood of a Bel Air smoking a Lucky Strike. His hair was greased back and his gabardine shirt was pink with vertical black stripes. He winked at Charlie. Charlie didn’t know how to wink so he moved off.

Charlie passed the barber shop, the general store, the candy store. A woman patted him on the head as he shuffled by her on the sidewalk. She knew his name but he didn’t recognize her. She was heavyset and wore a tight cream colored dress which clung to her like a mouth on a nipple. The fellow she was had his arm locked around her waist. He had a pencil thin mustache and his black Leddy boots clomped along the pavement. For a moment Charlie wondered if they were his parents.

At Main and Grove he stopped and stared into the windows of the Sip N’ Shake. He felt like having a large strawberry malt and a double cheeseburger and french fries. He’d only been there once when his uncle came in from Branson to visit his grandma. Uncle Jerry Lloyd Dyle. He drove a Plymouth and smelled like horseshit. When he smiled at Charlie, a dirty gold tooth revealed itself. They sat at the counter side by side. “Try the french fryers, Charlie,” he said, gazing at the waitress, snorting and licking his lips.

The Sip N’ Shake was crowded with teenagers, loud and loose with the impending summer. They scared Charlie with their new and uncertain bodies, their driver’s licenses, their curse words. Especially the boys. Charlie saw how their eyes changed over time. How they got mouse quiet or jackal loud whenever a female crossed their path. Fighting with each other, fighting with themselves. The fat ones talked about guns. The skinny ones tried to get bigger. The ones in the middle did their best to stay there. Charlie wanted to be a country singer. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about any of it.

Through the window of the Sip N’ Shake Charlie saw Katie Jay Lawson. She was sitting at a small booth, her hair a long deep gold that poured down her back. She was wearing a light blue cotton dress, the straps tied in bows at the shoulder. She was sipping a fountain drink, letting her legs swing under the tabletop. She was ten. Charlie knew because everybody knew everything about the Lawson’s. They were one of the wealthiest families in the county. Generations strong.

Katie Jay was sitting across from Betty Henderson, the Lawson’s black housemaid. Betty was tired looking but sturdy in the shoulders and hands. Her eyes were narrowed with work, dark and even. Her hair was pulled back tight, her face gently made up. She watched Katie Jay drink, watched her thin lips pursed around a red and yellow striped straw. The occasional sideways glance landed on the black woman and the little white girl. Most everyone knew the relationship and accepted it with little more than a frown.

Charlie crossed Main and moved toward the window. He’d forgotten he was shirtless and suddenly felt like he should be a little more covered. He glanced down at his chest and stomach. His skin was milk white and the bones of his ribcage pushed out from under it like fists. He felt smaller than he ever had.

Katie Jay turned and looked out the window at him. Their eyes embraced. Katie Jay put her cup down and smiled at him, true as the sun. Charlie’s face flushed red, he felt his heart swell and his stomach tighten. On instinct, he put up his hand and held it next to his cheek. Katie Jay did the same. They stayed like that for a good while.

A mosquito landed on Charlie’s shin. He bent down and swatted it flat against his leg. When he came back up Katie Jay and Betty were gathering themselves to leave. He watched Betty take Katie Jay’s hand and lead her out of the Sip N’ Shake. He followed their exit from the outside of the place, peering from window to window. Katie Jay looked back over her shoulder, just catching a glimpse of Charlie’s face through the glass. Charlie saw them get into a long black Cadillac Fleetwood. He watched it pull out and rumble off down the end of Main Street and onto Cedar Lane. He turned his head to the sky. The day wasn't quite done.

***

The Lawson property sat on 12 acres just off Hudson Road and out toward the Ten Belly Lake. The family house was a huge chalk colored structure that stood atop a lone hill overlooking the entire county. It was surrounded by well-plowed fields and sparse woods. It had once been a plantation house and the slave’s quarters still sat about 200 yards off to the edge of the hill. A winding snake of a driveway stretched from the base of the hill, passing a huge old barn on its way to the top.

The sky had slipped into a smoky orange glow. Crickets were starting to sing. A mild breeze sailed through the grass and chilled the air just slightly. The lights of the Lawson house were on. The Fleetwood was parked in front of a three-car covered garage. Betty was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette, stretching her legs out.

Charlie had walked three miles to Hudson Road. He stopped at the bottom of the hill and stared up toward the house. It was so quiet this far outside of town that even from where he stood he could hear the sound of conversation, forks hitting dishes, the general rumblings of a family around a dinner table. Charlie never understood the idea of devoting a significant portion of the day or night to sitting around and simply eating. He believed eating was secondary to whatever the day brought. He wiped his nose and started up the hill.

About three quarters of the way he moved off to the side and hid out of sight from the house. He squatted down and waited. Night was coming fast. Betty mashed her cigarette in an ashtray and slowly stood. The screen door shut behind her as she entered the house. Charlie wondered when he’d start smoking. He heard a dog bark from inside the house and a female voice cry out, “Oh, Rosco, hush…”

Charlie waited there. He took the arrowhead from his pocket and ran his thumb over its grooves and angles. When he was seven he had had one friend, Beeler, who’d eventually moved away with his family to Bakersfield, California. Beeler was extra small in size and voice. Somewhat of a pipsqueak. He pronounced his r’s as w’s and would introduce Charlie as his “fwend Charlie.” They had played cowboys and Indians together in the neighborhood and Charlie would always find a way to be the cowboy. But holding the arrowhead in his hand he realized how fun it might’ve been to be an Indian at least once.

A light came on from a second floor room and Charlie could make out Katie Jay’s silhouette. She was brushing that long river of hair from what Charlie could see. His stomach tumbled again and he moved toward the house.

The front door flung open and John Earl Lawson stepped out, cigar in hand. He took a hungry pull and his exhale stung the air with Cuban tobacco. Rosco the dog was sitting by his feet. Rosco was pure German Shepard. His tongue hung out of his mouth like a limp dick and his panting was loud enough to cut through the quiet.

Charlie ducked away, stepping on a few twigs as he did so. Rosco’s ears jumped up like soldiers and his bark was a ferocious crashing of vocal chords. Lawson tugged at Rosco’s collar and held him back.

“What is it, boy?” he asked, disinterested. Rosco kept barking.

Charlie found himself laying behind a tree stump, out of sight from the house. He waited and waited until he heard the screen door shut. Then he took a breath and looked toward the house. There was no one on the porch. Fewer lights were on now. Charlie moved closer.

Katie Jay’s window was shut, the light to her room off. Charlie stared up at it. The moon was bright and shining. It cast the essence of Charlie's shadow against the white shingles of the house. Charlie searched for small rocks at his feet. He found two amidst the dirt and grass.

Charlie didn’t have much of an arm. His first throw sailed over the entire house and landed on the other side of the roof. Charlie’s little frame shook as a quick wind shot through the dusk. He threw the other rock. It hit Katie Jay’s window and he was grateful for little miracles. He waited. Not a stir from the room. Charlie hunted for more rocks and found nothing. It was getting too dark to see anything without pawing for it first.

From the pocket of his Levi’s, Charlie pulled the arrowhead out. He inhaled, exhaled, and hurled it toward Katie Jay’s window. It struck the glass with a loud clap, nearly breaking right through. A light flooded the room and Charlie saw a figure move in there. He’d never been so purely excited in his whole life. Two small hands raised the window and peered out. Katie Jay was there. She looked out into the night. It took her a moment to see Charlie. When she finally did, a look of shock turned from to confusion to joy in a matter of moments. She moved off and Charlie stood there in the belly of the night. He scratched his collarbone. He waited.

The front door squeaked open and Katie Jay was there in a cotton nightgown with hearts on it. She glanced over her shoulder back into the house. Then she stepped carefully toward Charlie. They stood before each other. Charlie was eleven years-old. Katie Jay was ten. He took her hand and led her down the driveway.

In front of the barn, Charlie took her other hand. Not a word was said. They stood frozen and uncertain as their lips met. Charlie moved his hands to her waist. They kissed a while longer.

Charlie knelt down and pulled a wildflower from the earth. He handed it to Katie Jay. Her eyes lit up and Charlie swore he’d never forget the smile that bloomed across her face. She ran back up the driveway toward her house. Charlie watched her till she vanished in the dark. He couldn’t hear the screen door. He knew she was being careful not to wake anyone.

Charlie couldn’t read. He could ride a bike. Once he made and sold lemonade. He felt lucky as he started walking. He saw the lights of town in the distance. They were all he needed to find his way.

for C.F.

NYC, NY (8/10/07)