Queasy

It was the day of my Uncle Alvin’s funeral when they came for me. I always knew they would.

I’d started drinking by breakfast, and I feel queasy by the time Alvin’s widow Brenda retrieves the bottle of liquor from her handbag at the crematorium.

At one point I consider climbing into Alvin’s casket for a lie-down, but then I remember the dismembered state of his corpse, and think better of it. So much of him was missing that the morticians filled the coffin with polystyrene to stop the body from shifting position during transit. They forget to remove the polystyrene before they burn the body though, and a toxic stink fills the small chapel.

***

The wake takes place at the Dirty Lemon. I’m drinking shots at the bar with Brenda, and feel halfway to oblivion. She’s a scorched-looking brunette who dresses like a streetwalker. She turns heads, just not always in a good way.

The room goes quiet when they walk in. Two men wearing overcoats and full-face balaclavas. I recognise them, despite the woollen masks. Their names are Rudy and Ron. Earlier this year they thought that they had nailed a big score when they ripped off the Sex Shop on Winner Street. All they found was a shoebox full of dusty family bones and a few choices extracts from Dirty Harold’s private porn stash.

The safecracker they hired was a drunk named Arlo Noakes. He blew his own fingertips off with plastic explosive because he was too lazy to do the job properly, and obliterated a crate of nearly-new dildos in the process. Arlo later claimed that he stemmed the blood-loss with a back issue of Tailgunner, but I didn’t believe him – the paper would be far too glossy.

Afterwards, Arlo hired me to deliver a message to Rudy and Ron, and paid me well for my time. Things got bloody, as they often do, but I was happy to snap a few bones. Ron was jailed for gross indecency in 1989 while running a video shop, and he hasn’t held down an honest job since he got out of Channings Wood. On his 50th birthday he was arrested for trying to chloroform a boy at the Crossways Centre. Rudy is a part-time morgue worker and ex-weight lifter – he’s the really scary one. His face looks like a fucking Halloween mask.

Rudy snorts a bump of something – probably homemade crank – off his hand. He has a tattoo of a tombstone on the fleshy patch of skin between his finger and thumb.

Ron’s scarred eyebrow crumples as he winks at me. Up close, his cologne smells of gutter water. He has a claw-hammer up the sleeve of his overcoat. What a lovely surprise.

He dents my skull with the flat end, and my vision goes blurry. I start to fall and he hits me again – behind the ear this time.

***

When I regain consciousness there is a fat dog pissing on my leg. I realise that someone has dragged me out of the pub and left me on the wheelchair ramp. My hair is sticky with blood and there is a tender crater on the side of my head. The dog is chained to the railings. It looks dangerous, so I slowly detach its collar and point it towards the bus station. It’s someone else’s problem now.

I can taste blood in my mouth. I must have bit my tongue when Ron hit me with the hammer.

I wrap the dog-chain around my right hand. It will have to do. It might break my fingers, but I’m hoping that it will also be sufficient to break a nose or a cheekbone, maybe a fucking eye-socket.

***

When I push my way through to the back-room, Rudy and Ron are still loosening their belts, which means I can’t have been knocked out for long. Feeble sunlight filters through the greasy window, and I feel a jolt of nausea as I see Brenda sprawled across the piss-coloured linoleum, fishnet tights round her ankles. I can see the tattoo of Alvin’s name on her pelvis.

I grab Ron by his greasy hair and slam my chain-wrapped fist into his face. I feel a couple of knuckles pop, but I hit him again, regardless. My third punch knocks him out. Rudy retrieves his hammer from the top of the chest freezer. He hits me on the shoulder blade, and I feel hot sick rising in my throat.

If he hits my skull again I’ll probably end up fucking brain-damaged.

I let the dog-chain unravel and whip it across his face. He’s a tough little cunt, and he barely makes a sound as it crumples his misshapen nose and knocks him off his feet.

I stand over him, thick blood dripping from the chain.

He reaches for the hammer and I stamp on his wrist. He reaches for it again, so I stamp on his mouth instead.

I look down. Jesus. His ruined face looks like a vaginal infection. In the half-light, the blood on the floor looks black.

I wipe the blood off my right boot and pick up his hammer. I fake a lunge with the tool, and hear an erratic splattering sound – followed by a thick, evil stench. He gurgles teeth.

I help Brenda to her feet. Her red eyes look out-of-focus and her skin looks chalky.

When she kisses me she tastes of blood. Blood and black-market cigarettes.

She presses up against me, looking dazed. Her nylon underwear feels wet against my leg.

“Is he dead?”

“No…”

It hurts when I talk, and my voice comes out as a thick-tongued slur.

“…but he will probably have difficulty remembering his own name in future.”

***

Outside, the early evening sky looks bloodshot. I dump the dog-chain on top of an ashtray and we drift towards the sea-front, arm-in-arm.

“Who were those men?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She lights another cigarette.

“You know what Alvin used to say?”

I shrug.

“There is a price we pay for the mistakes we make.”

I shrug again.

“Well, he would fucking know.”

Strangers In Strange Fucking Lands

There once was a woman named Nancy Botkin. She’d always wanted to be a writer, but she’d had a son Nick with a deadbeat poet named Frank Beachwood who disappeared ten minutes after he saw his newborn spawn. And for sixteen years, she tried to raise Nick to the best of her ability, making sure he was clothed and safe. She took him to school, to piano lessons, chauffeuring him around as though he were a fucking king. And she tried to love him, but a part of her saw a kind of tyrant, a sort of emotional Pharaoh weighing her down with demands. Love me. Focus all your attention on me. Nick clung to his mother like Superglue, following her day and night. And he criticized her because she wasn’t the sort of tender, weepy mother in the old movies. She grappled day and night with her feelings. She tried to say she loved him, but it was near impossible, especially since he reminded her so much of Frank, with his long nose, his dreamy hazel eyes. So she kept doing things for Nick, trying to fill in those gaps, to express things she couldn’t say.

After sixteen years of motherhood, and Nick’s complaints about her mothering style, she up and left. Nick had complained about how she was too obsessed with writing and how she needed to accept shit. And that had filled her with a sensation, a feeling of both dread and possibility. She saw the painful present, she saw a future calling her like a sultry seductress.

For forty years, she wandered across the country, occasionally writing Nick. She wandered across vast cities with bustling crowds, through small towns, staying in old motels and in shacks along the coast and she felt a sense that something vast was unfurling, as though the world were becoming something new. She was Nancy Botkin. She was a writer. An artist. She was no longer someone’s girlfriend or mother.

But after forty years of bliss, ever the good writer, she felt the inevitable urge to drop back to her old town, to remember the roots from which she came. She was curious about the things that had gone on without her and felt a kind of stirring, something pulling her back toward the vortex of the old world. She was horrified to discover that Nick was now the producer of a successful TV show, “Runaway Moms”, a sitcom about mothers running off, with a very obnoxious laugh track. Nancy wandered into Nick, while he was directing an actress playing a drunk mother, telling her she needed to truly hate the actor playing her son.

The minute Nick saw her, all he had to say was “you need to see a psychiatrist, Nancy. Forty years. Amazing.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?” she said. “You’re the one producing this godawful show.”

“Because you left me.”

“Your father left you too,” Nancy said. “Produce a show called Deadbeat Dad.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t really know him.”

“What you mean is because he’s a man,” she said. “Mothers are different.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you, Nick,” she said. “You never asked about your father. You just needed me to be there for everything. That’s my role, no doubt.”

“You were gone for forty years.”

“I needed to get lost.”

“You need to see a psychiatrist,” Nick said.

“You need to see a psychiatrist,” Nancy said. Surprisingly Nick agreed to go see one.

They went to a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Greenlee. He focused entirely on Nancy’s problem. He asked her about the towns she’d been in. When she told him about the lighthouse she’d visited along the coast, he said, “Well then, you truly craved a man all along.”

“What does a lighthouse have to do with men?”

“A lighthouse looks like a penis,” Dr. Greenlee said. “Therefore you subconsciously clamor for a man’s penis.”

“Bullshit.”

“What did you have for dessert last night?”

“Ice cream. Is this relevant?”

“Another penis shaped object,” Dr. Greenlee said. “My advice is forget the wandering, and find a man. Go back to your natural sphere.”

“Things look like penises because men have too much power. Men make objects in their own image,” Nancy said. “What does that have to do with Nick?”

“Semantics,” Dr. Greenlee said. “I’m just saying perhaps you need a family. Perhaps the penis represents a lost lover. And perhaps Nick by extension. Nick has been denied much. We must focus on this poor child.”

“I don’t want to have sex with Nick.”

“I’m just saying he represents a need for male companionship on your part, and a need for female love on his own.”

“He’s fifty-six. He’s my fucking son.”

“Semantics,” Dr. Greenlee repeated. “Don’t make this about you. We need to focus on the truly traumatized Nick here. Only if we dissect Nick like a frog can we learn about you.”

“What about Nick? He produces a show about bad mothers. He hasn’t lost his ability to live.”

“That’s a normal manifestation of grief. It doesn’t mean he hates you. It’s an avenue Nancy,” the doctor said, nodding his bulbous head, stroking his Freud-like beard.

“Fuck it,” Nancy said.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Greenlee said.

“So is my need for escape.”

“We can talk about that later.”

She waited for Nick to say something but he was nodding, hypnotized by Dr. Greenlee, who had begun to laugh maniacally, like a villain, as if amused by all this. In his laughter, she thought of Frank Beachwood for the first time, thought of the ease with which he left. Nancy stepped outside the door, flipped the bird to her son and Dr. Greenlee, and wandered out into the wilderness, to never be heard from again, until one day, a group of actors from “Runaway Moms” found a very recognizable woman in the desert, holding a sign next to their filming location.

The sign read: If you like freedom, ban “Runaway Mothers.” Run away mothers. Runaway mothers unite!

The Great Kwik Stop Heist

Two weeks before they became accomplices in murder, Jimmy and Kelly met at the Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse. Kelly was trying to meet the terms of her probation and Jimmy was lonely and bored. Neither were alcoholics.

Kelly held herself out to be the mistress of heists but was really just the kind of girl that would stick $15 worth of Dollar General makeup in her pants for the rush. Five different times. The judge was ready to sentence her to serious time when she ditched her public defender and found a bulldog of an attorney whom she let suck her toes in lieu of cash payment. The afternoons of propping her feet on his mahogany desk paid off and she got a stint at AA as punishment.

Jimmy should have known she was trouble the first night he met her.

“You’re hot. Wanna go in the bathroom and fuck?” she asked without an ounce of shame.

“Not in the bathroom,” he said. “Let’s get out of this shithole.”

***

Jimmy and Kelly were half way through a bottle of whiskey, naked on a consigned couch at the corner of Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn, when they decided to steal the mini ATM at the Kwik Stop Food Mart.

“You really want to knock over the Kwik Stop,” Kelly laughed.

“It’s the only way to get the big bucks,” Jimmy slurred.

Jimmy Swindell had never been particularly business savvy. Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn was an ill-conceived whim after his father passed away and left him with a quarter million dollars and a small box of Kruggerands. He had one made into a necklace so he could flaunt his new wealth. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” was his motto. It worked—kind of. “Jimbo! Can you spot me a couple hundred until payday? I’ll give you my stereo as collateral,” his favorite bartender asked him one day. Thus, Jimmy’s Guns and Pawn was born.

These days, the shop was fewer guns and gold coins and more expired baby car seats and dusty disco balls, along with an assortment of hunting rifles his old friends would come by to hock for Xanax money.

Jimmy needed cash to stay afloat and a heist seemed about right.

***

In the backroom of his shop, Jimmy collapsed against the wall, sweat rolling down his face, his eyes darting back and forth from Kelly to the locked door.

“You fucking shot him. For $180 and a broken tabletop ATM.”

“What? It was a heist? What do you think happens in heists?” Kelly asked, incredulous.

“Well, what now?! You fucking killed a dude. An innocent dude.”

Jimmy knew Kelly was stupid but didn’t realize the extent until that moment.

For a petty thief who had just committed her first murder, Kelly was oddly calm. “We can call my lawyer.” The more Jimmy looked at her, the more disgusted he became.

“The toe sucker? Really, Kelly? We need a real plan.”

“Run? I have a friend in Texas we could crash with for a couple weeks. Go to Mexico after? Just me and you. I’ll be your Bonnie and you can be my Clyde.”

“Fuck off, Kelly.”

***

Jimmy, having never stolen more than a pack of gum and Kelly, petty thief extraordinaire, didn’t know anything about heists beyond what they saw on TV.

“Should we go with ski masks?” Kelly asked.

“Nah, too hot. And a little cliché,” Jimmy said.

“Pantyhose?” suggested Kelly.

“Maybe.”

The mini ATM was near the slurpy machine and coffee makers, near the back of the store. Jimmy had done some casing and noticed only two security cameras at the front of the store: One outside and one inside.

“You a good shot?” Jimmy asked Kelly.

“Yeah, of course I am,” Kelly said. “I used to go squirrel hunting with my daddy all the time.”

“Good. You think you can handle shooting out the security cameras then? With a .22 maybe?”

“Definitely.”

The next day, it was a go. Kelly drove, since Jimmy’s Suburban had the Guns and Pawn logo on the back window. They parked around the corner, Kelly with her .22 and Jimmy unarmed, so he could grab the ATM and run.

It was Sunday night and the Qwik Stop looked empty.

“Ready for this?” Jimmy grinned.

“Damn straight,” said Kelly.

They each pulled a pair of panty hose over their heads and stormed the front doors.

“This is a holdup!” Kelly screamed a little too loudly.

The guy behind the counter, a pimple-faced 40-something, looked up from his phone, annoyed. “Shit, y’all. I haven’t even been here a week.”

“Shut up and no one gets hurt!” Kelly yelled.

Jimmy headed to the back of the store and tried to lift the ATM. It wasn’t any bigger than a large microwave, but was heavier than he expected. He wiggled it off the counter, not noticing the handwritten note taped over the screen: Out of order. No cash.

He almost buckled under the weight of the machine, but remembered the future of his shop was at stake.

“All the cash in a bag!” Jimmy heard Kelly yell.

The register wasn’t part of the plan.

“Kelly, the cameras?!” Jimmy struggled with the broken ATM.

“C’mon, bitch. Y’all got the ATM,” the clerk said, annoyed.

“In a bag. Now.” Kelly meant business.

As Jimmy struggled to push open the Kwik Mark double doors, he heard it: A pop. And then another.

***

Kelly calmly counted her nine $20 bills. “I’m telling you: We need go to Texas then head on down to Mexico.”

“Screw that,” said Jimmy. “What even happened back there?”

“He wasn’t fast enough. And I didn’t like his face.”

Jimmy didn’t have a chance to respond before heard a knock at the front of the store. “Police, open up!”

“Shit.” Jimmy whispered. He felt panic welling up in his stomach. He looked at the back door and then to Kelly. “Mexico?”

“Si, Monsieur Clyde!”

And then they were off.

Cat’s-Eye Bullet

The old man says, “Cancer’s like having termites in your house,” sitting there in his shitty bathrobe with his skinny legs. “I’ve been tented and fumigated twice and it’s no fuckin’ picnic.” He rattles a giant vial of Norcos and tilts two into his mouth. He squints at me with one eye while he chews them, then he takes a hit from a bottle of Tanqueray and breaks into a coughing fit.

Frank is the sickest of my five cancer clients, with stage-four lung cancer. He lives on Dilaudid patches, Norcos, and booze, but tells me that the weed I bring him is the only thing that quiets the pain. The rest he’s just stuck with ’cause it’s too hard to stop. Most of my clients are healthy: stockbrokers and gym trainers, a restaurant manager, some housewives, and a few teachers at the local community college.

He fires up a pin joint and takes a long hit. It crackles a bit, which is odd. When he hands it to me I say, “Is this mine?” He waits until he’s ready to let loose a billow of white smoke and then says, “Yeah, kind of,” which is also odd. I take a hit, even though it’s earlier in the day than I like to start.

Something strange happens right away. The room contracts and then stretches. I have tunnel vision and there’s a buzzing in my head, like hornets in an echo chamber. I look at Frank, who seems far away, and say, “What the fuck?” but I’m not sure if real words come out of my mouth or if I’m just beaming the thought. Frank is chuckling, chuckle chortle chuckawalla Chick-fil-A—Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with me?

For some reason there’s a gun in Frank’s hand. “What did you do?” I beam at him.

“DMT,” he says. “It’s good for you. Clears the mind.”

“What are you fucking talking about?” I manage to say.

“It’s been preparing me for the big event,” he says, “and now I’m ready.” He puts the gun barrel to his mouth for a second, then thrusts it out toward me.

“But why me? I thought you were my friend.” I try to get up, but it’s not happening. My heart sounds like a basketball pounding on a gym floor, but I can’t make my body do anything. The hole at the end of the gun looks big enough to shoot marbles. I imagine a tri-color cats-eye flying at me, and for some reason start cracking up. The world goes dark and I see a glowing cobalt sphere; I envelope it and perceive it from all angles at once and become the sphere and shoot out a ray, like a laser, and another and another. I am a glowing cobalt sea urchin whose spines shoot out like questions into the Universe and then retract, unanswered.

“I am your friend,” Frank says, and now he’s squinting at me again. He’s laughing like an idiot and pointing the gun at me. “Fact is,” he says, “I just don’t want to do this alone.”

For a brief second I see myself through Frank’s eyes and then the gun goes up and turns and Bang! Frank’s brains are on the wall. My mind is infinitely elastic; there is nothing it cannot accommodate. The questions go out and come back unanswered. The rays go out and retract like breathing. The breathing accelerates, it pulses, it oscillates, it hums, it harmonizes, orchestral now, and a voice—Frank’s—says, “Hey, fuck, Robert, come back, what the fuck?” He’s trying to hand me a black glass pipe, but I’m in love with the music.