Even when he didn’t have my knife, I’d have to keep an eye on him. Sometimes he swiped the knife Cynthia used to cut up lemons and limes.
My sixth brother killed himself once.
I found him hanging from the light fixture in the men’s room by his belt, and he was stone dead. I remember how heavy his body was when I brought it down, how mottled his face was, his tongue lolling obscenely out of his mouth. And I remember him waking up the next morning, whimpering like a puppy, with purple bruises around his throat. He’s held his neck funny ever since.
My third brother, that asshole, he just pummels the wall when it gets to be too much for him. It fucks up his knuckles, leaves blood smears on the walls that we have to scrub off again, but I don’t think he’s thinking about that when he does it. I think he likes the pain it brings.
And me? I drink. We had plenty of money when we first got here, and I drank it away. Not by myself, of course. We ran out a long time ago, so I do my drinking at night. At night we don’t pay, I don’t know why, except I think Cynthia’s giving us the chance to do the night over, to do something right. I see myself in the mirror and I can tell the alcohol is wrecking me, but that’s better than the alternative. I feel the liquor corroding my body from the inside out, breaking me down into dust and poison. Or maybe just releasing the poison that had been there all along.
My hands still shake, if I don’t concentrate on keeping them still.
Those were the days of living death. But the nights were something else entirely. In the years before the girls showed up, at night we felt okay again, and okay was so much better than we’d felt during the day that we went wild. But by the time the girls got there, there was damn little of that left. By the time the girls got there, we were spending the nights slumped at the bar, bleak hopelessness etched into our faces.
The girls were obviously slumming, but then, so were we, or we had been at first, pretty boys down from the big house to mix it up with the squatters. Now we had the broken noses and rotten teeth of real diehards, but we hadn’t started out like that. I carried a switchblade, but I never pulled it. Anyway, the girls were clearly coming from Daddy’s mansion to rock out with the real punks. Twelve of them with ratted hair and liquid black eyeliner making cat’s-eyes an inch long, black leather bustiers and Doc Martens. They might have been meant for us, and I swear, I could see our salvation in their eyes. We all could, I think.
But we played it cool, leaning up against the bar and downing beer and eyeing the girls when they weren’t looking, while they were still blinking in the dark, trying to get their bearings among the pounding beats and flaring matches.
The oldest made her way to the bar, right where I was waiting for her. Maybe she’d seen me eyeing her after all. I sauntered over a few steps and met her.
“Buy you a drink?” I asked.
No, that’s not right. The music was shaking the floor, glasses were rattling behind the bar, and I leaned over to her and half shouted, half mouthed, “Buy you a drink?” close enough to her ear that she could feel my breath on her face, my breath, which smelled of smoke and beer and late nights and rotten hope and self-destruction.
She cut her eyes at me, and her eyelids glittered with caked-on silver eye shadow. I wanted to bend her over backward in a movie kiss right then and there, but I kept my hands to myself, took a drag off my cigarette instead while sonic fireworks exploded around us. I could see my brothers gravitating toward the other girls.
Then she smiled, shouted “Why not?” at me, and mouthed, “cider.”
I put my arm around her waist and she let me. I got her a cider—we never had to pay, not at night, because we were paying every day—and gave her a cigarette, and lit it for her. She coughed and pretended it wasn’t her first. I remembered my first, how I hadn’t coughed at all, but had sucked the coarse, harsh smoke straight down into my heart, where it wrapped around that beating machine like a protective cocoon. The smoke’s still there, but it’s been getting thinner, no matter how much I force down my throat.
She stood with her hip pressed up against my leg. “What do you want?” she shouted in my ear.
“I want to dance with you,” I shouted back. “Because…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, so I just let it hang in the air like an afterimage.
She drained her glass and slammed it down on the bar, but the music was so loud that I couldn’t hear it hit. Her face lit up, flushed with drink and heat. “Let’s go, then!” She grabbed my hand and together we pushed and shoved our way to the middle of the seething mass of people, my brothers, her sisters, and we became the center of the storm and the lightning struck and we danced. We danced the band dry and the DJ sore, and still we moved like machine gun fire, like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and I knew that this was it, that she and her sisters were the ones.
We danced the sun up, not that we could see the sun through the tattered walls. No, we were lit by neon and dim incandescence and the flares of cardboard matches, but the space emptied out and the music faded until finally we could hear each other speak, and there were holes worn through the soles of our boots.
“Where d’you live?” she asked me as we leaned against the bar sharing a bottle of whiskey.
I gestured around the room a little unsteadily. My socks were damp with sweat and with something nasty on the floor. “Here,” I said. “We live here.”
“You got nowhere you could take me?”
“Honey,” I said, “I can’t leave.”
She took a pull off the bottle. “Why not?”
I ground out my cigarette and told her.
My brothers and me, back when we were really young, not trapped in youth, but genuinely new, we heard the beats from our black disks and they pulled each of us by the balls. We knew we had to come here, that here was where our life should be, in the dark and in the noise. So we got the gear first—went down to Trash and Vaudeville with ready cash and remade ourselves.
We swaggered in here like young Turks, chains clinking against our legs, our hair combed just right, and we tore up the dance floor, and we knocked back shots of tequila, and we hassled the girls. We were real assholes, spoiling for a fight.
It was me who got one.
Not even a fight. You couldn’t call it a fight. He was just a kid, barely older than my tenth brother, barely shaving. He was just a fucked-up kid. But I was always angry, and when this junkie kid barreled into me on his way to the men’s room and puked on my boots—part of it was wanting to impress Cynthia with how hard-core I was. I didn’t know about her then, didn’t know what kind of power she had, just that she was the bartender, and she was cute—long black hair pulled back in a French braid and bright red lipstick. Knotwork tattoos. But then a lot of it was pure rage. I was always seething, always about to boil over. I don’t know why. Testosterone, maybe. Or maybe just being cramped inside my skin, of needing to get out, of needing release.
It doesn’t matter why, I guess, but I beat the shit out of that kid. He didn’t … look okay afterward.
Cynthia came out from behind the bar with the Louisville Slugger she keeps back there, but I didn’t even feel it hit me, I was so hopped up on adrenaline, so it wasn’t until my brothers pulled me off the kid that I stopped and saw what I had done to him. Sometimes I wonder if he survived the night.
Sometimes I wonder if I did.
Cynthia gave twenty bucks to the kid’s friends and told them to get him to the nearest hospital, NYU, I guess. Then she turned and looked at me.
“You,” she said. “Out. Don’t come back.”
But the fire was still burning through my blood and the shame was starting to seep in through the cracks in my rage, so I stonewalled. “Fuck, no,” I said. “That kid owes me new boots.”
“That kid,” she said, “owes you nothing. Get out. You’re eighty-sixed.”
I sized her up. Cynthia’s not a tall woman. I looked around and didn’t see a bouncer. “No. I’m not done drinking.”
&n
bsp; “This is my bar,” she said, “and you’re done.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You’re not?”
“No,” I spat. “And neither are my brothers. We’ll fucking sit and drink and dance until we’re ready to go home. If you don’t like it, call the fucking cops.”
“No cops in my bar, boys,” Cynthia said, kind of husky, and back then I thought it was capitulation, but now I think it was a warning. She looked around at my brothers. “He speak for all of you? Any of you leaving?”
My brothers stood tight next to me. I … I’m still a little proud of that, still a little grateful. They must’ve heard the menace in her voice, but not one of them budged. Not even my third brother.
Cynthia’s gaze lingered on my youngest brother. He’s only fourteen, and he looks it. “You sure?” she said, and she spoke kindly, for her. “You sure you want to stay with him?”
My youngest brother looked at the door, looked at me, and didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move, either.
Cynthia nodded. She went back behind the bar and turned the music back on and I thought I’d won. And she acted like nothing was wrong, like I hadn’t beat a kid maybe to death in front of her, like I hadn’t flung her authority back in her face. She set us up rounds and even smiled so sweetly at me that I thought I had a shot with her.
When I woke up that first morning and saw her behind the bar setting up for the night, I just thought I’d passed out and she’d left me there. I felt beat to shit, but I’d woken up feeling that way before, and not remembering why. Then I tried to leave.
As soon as I tried to set foot outside the door I curled up in agony. The air felt like knife blades skinning me alive, the rising sun seemed to pour molten metal down on my skin, and the ground, ah, the ground seemed to swarm up around me like a mountain of stinging beetles. Every inch of my body blistered and burned.
I crawled back into the bar on my hands and knees, gulping the stinking air. I couldn’t feel anything but pain and rage.
I woke up my brothers, and when my third brother realized what had happened to us, he actually went for Cynthia and she broke his collarbone with the Louisville Slugger. He fell down and she stood over him—she seemed to tower over us.
“What did you do to us? What are you?” I asked her hoarsely.
“I’m the bartender,” she said. “And don’t you ever fuck with me. Not in my bar.”
Cynthia’s always here, and I don’t think she sleeps.
* * *
So every morning, I told her, we wake up in the same beaten shape I put that kid in, and every day we do everything Cynthia tells us and we can’t set foot outside the bar. But it could end, I told her, if there are girls, if there’s dancing, 101 nights straight, we could leave. Maybe even go home again. If we still have a home. Maybe we could find a home.
All the time I told this girl our story, she drank whiskey and nodded in the right places.
“Home’s overrated,” she said.
I thought about asking, but didn’t. “Look,” I said. “I’m not like that anymore. I don’t do that. I just … I don’t. I mean, if somebody gives you trouble, I’ll lay him out. But I don’t … I don’t let the rage take over anymore.”
She nodded. “How long has it been?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Years. Things don’t change here. People come and go. We don’t age, but the circles under my eyes, they get darker.”
“Yeah,” she said. “First thing I noticed about you. Under your eyes, the skin looks like charcoal.”
She put her hand on my thigh, leaned over, and kissed me. I put my arms around her, and she broke it off and pulled away. While I caught my breath, she put the whiskey bottle in my hand and slid off the barstool, her purple miniskirt riding up to the very bottom of her ass. She tugged it back into place.
“I’ll see you,” she said.
“You coming back tomorrow night?” I asked as her sisters began filing out. I tried to keep the desperation from my voice.
She grinned. Her dark lipstick was smeared from our kiss and her black eyeliner cat’s-eyes were long gone, sweated off while we danced. The rips in her stockings had gotten bigger. “Yeah. We’ll be back.”
“And the night after that?”
“Could be,” she said. “You never know.”
“Wait,” I said. “You know about me now. I’m Jake. What’s your name?”
“Isabel,” she said.
“What’s your story?”
“I don’t have one yet,” she said.
“Come on,” I persisted. “What brings you here?”
She grinned again, but this time it looked a lot more brittle. “Nothing.” She shrugged. “Hey—anything you want? From outside?”
I thought about pushing her harder for a minute, about trying to find out what it was she wanted to get away from, and decided against it. I couldn’t risk pissing her off, not when I still barely knew her.
“A clean T-shirt,” I said. “Maybe a peach? I kind of miss peaches. They used to be my favorite.”
“Wrong season,” she said. “Peaches won’t be any good for months.”
“An apple, then?”
“Okay.” She smiled at me, and then she walked out. The door slammed and bolted, locking my brothers and me in for the day.
Our first few weeks in there, we’d torn the place apart every night, wrenched the stools apart and used them to smash up the bottles and the mirror behind the bar. But the club just rebuilt itself around us. It didn’t heal completely—the mirror was still shattered like a mosaic and walls were charred in places. But the place didn’t look much different from the run-down punk dive it was when we’d first walked in. The cuts on our fists took a lot longer to heal.
After the girls and the other patrons—the ones who came and went as they pleased—had left, my brothers and I settled in for the day, after that first night, contorting ourselves on benches and against walls.
“It’s gonna happen,” I said happily.
“I don’t like them,” my youngest brother said.
“What do you mean, you don’t like them?” I asked. “They’re our girls, the ones who are going to set us free. You can’t not like them.”
“The one I was dancing with was boring,” he said.
“And mine didn’t like it here, I could tell,” said my fifth brother.
“We want to get out of here, don’t we?” I said reasonably.
“You’re just cheery because you and your girl were making out on the dance floor,” snarled my third brother. He’s always been the worst of us.
“Look, guys,” I said. “There’re twelve of them. Twelve of us. They’re the ones. Just go to sleep.”
My third brother was right about one thing. I was deliriously happy. I haven’t felt that way since.
They came back the next night and the night after that, and I danced with her all night, ’til our boots were worn through and our heads were caved in with the beats. And we drank so much that when we fell down we bounced, and when we got hurt we roared with laughter instead of pain. We were wrecks, me trying to shuck what was left of the bullying asshole I had been, and her running from … whatever she was running from, two drunken, dancing banshees. Twenty-four, really.
She told me about the weather, which I liked. The bar was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but I’d almost forgotten about the beating sun and gray pinpricks of rain. She told me about her calculus class, which made me feel stupid, but I didn’t really care. She smelled like parks and asphalt and street fairs and the outside that I missed. Every few nights she’d come in morose and rageful. She wouldn’t talk and wouldn’t smile. All she would do was knock back shots of bourbon and dance. By the end of the night I was holding her hair out of her face while she vomited into the toilet. I didn’t mind. I guess I was falling in love. I think she was just falling. She’d do that for a few nights in a row, and then come in back to normal, chirping about her cousin’s new baby and showing me pictures
. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a baby.
We both had our hands full taking care of the others. I’d laid down the law to my brothers: no bitching about the girls to me. I didn’t want to hear it. But they didn’t get along with them any better, and it was just as clear that the girls didn’t like my brothers. The oldest was the only one who bothered to dress up; the others slouched around in jeans and T-shirts, which was fair enough, because that’s what we were wearing. My third brother pissed off one sister so much that she threw her drink at him. I shoved him up against the cracked wall of the bar.
“What the fuck did you do?” I shouted at him.
“Go fuck yourself,” he spat at me.
I banged his head against the wall again. “I swear to God, Max, if you screw this up for us—”
“What?” he shouted. “I’ll get the shit kicked out of me? That’s how I wake up every goddamn morning, thanks to you!”
We stared at each other for a couple of minutes. Finally I turned away. “Just don’t, Max,” I said.
Isabel had been talking her sister down. “Please don’t go,” I heard her saying. “C’mon, don’t go. Tomorrow’ll be better. I promise. I promise.”
The next night Isabel brought in a bag of weed and some rolling papers. “I think this might help,” she told me, and it did. It helped Max, anyway, who stopped pummeling the walls if we saved enough for him to smoke up during the days. Every night after that she brought in something. I didn’t know where she got the drugs or the money for them, but she was able to hold them over us and enforce good behavior.
Sometimes I think the only things that united her sisters and my brothers were the desire for the drugs and their resentment of the two of us. But we took care of them, and we kept them in line.
There was nobody to keep us in line.
A couple of weeks after I first met her, she pulled me into the bar’s back room, pressed me into one of the darker corners, and kissed me. My arms went around her and I found the gap between her T-shirt and her purple skirt.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 9
