Men of the Mean Streets

by Greg Herren

  So I left the rug where it was. I had sopped up the blood on her chest with the paper towels from the men’s room. I had had the forethought to grab a pair of latex gloves like the kind we used when handling the older books so that I wasn’t spreading blood everywhere—or my fingerprints where they shouldn’t be.

  I lay the bubble wrap on the floor and rolled Belinda’s body into it, moving her into a fetal position so she would fit in the shipping box.

  Once she was in the box, I called Cam. It was still only 7:15.

  He answered on the first ring with a slightly startled hello. “Darling,” he said, “I’m so knackered.” He had fallen asleep watching the news—he hoped I could drive, he was dead tired and wanted to sleep in the car if that was okay.

  His voice reminded me of everything normal—that he loved me, that we were going away for a weekend with one of my best friends, that maybe I didn’t have a dead woman in my office.

  “I have one more thing to clean up, and then I’ll be home,” I told him. “And of course I’ll drive. You rest. I’ll see you soon.”

  I could do this. It would all be okay.

  *

  One never hears birds in the city. Not really. Other sounds mute the sounds of birds. You see pigeons everywhere, of course. That’s the requisite city bird. Just like the rats in the subway—they’re part of the landscape. But you don’t see the other birds much, except in the parks. And you don’t hear them.

  So I was actually startled awake by the sound of birds at such an early hour as I woke in M.J.’s guest room, Cam still sound asleep next to me. It wasn’t quite light yet and the birds seemed unnaturally loud, so unused to hearing them was I.

  I had left my office in its usual state of disarray. I had thought about tidying up, but realized that would be more suspicious, not less so. I checked the rug carefully. I saw no blood. There had been a few drops on my desk and a smear on my desk lamp. I wiped those off with the Clorox wipes Alana uses for the phones, since she’s a germophobe, and hoped it hadn’t had time to seep into the wood. Normal people don’t keep Luminol in their desks, so I had no way of checking for sure.

  I’d been lucky with the box. It wasn’t as heavy as I had expected and the freight elevator had been empty and no one had been near the rental car in the garage. I had been able to leave easily and unnoticed. The garage guy didn’t know me—I never had a car except in the summer, and besides, he was new and would likely only remember that I had been there, if asked, but not remember if I may or may not have had a large box in the back of my car that could have held a dead author.

  I knew Cam would still be sleeping. I could tell by his voice when we spoke. Now was the time to rid myself of this meddlesome author, to paraphrase Eliot. But where? The river seemed the easy answer, but bodies float and there was likely to be some residue of something that wouldn’t wash away immediately and I didn’t want Miz Walsh surfacing before I did. Plus, I honestly felt it would be wrong to have her eaten by fish. I was starting to feel some unpleasant twinges of guilt about this whole thing, even though I felt my actions had been both un-pre-meditated and entirely justified. But now it wasn’t about the self-defense—it was about the cover-up. And not getting caught.

  I would have liked to have dumped Belinda in another borough—Queens would be best, I thought—so many mafiosi—or someplace ungentrified in Brooklyn—but I couldn’t risk driving over a bridge with her. So Washington Heights it was. I’d head up to 171st Street and leave her in DDP territory and hope for the best. The Dominicans didn’t deserve her any more than I did, but in gang territory, bodies get found a lot more slowly. I was also hoping the near-freezing temperatures would skew the time of death.

  I had to get her out of the box, of course. That was dicey. It meant looking for a side street with a Dumpster. I couldn’t risk the box being somehow linked to me. And I didn’t want her to be found immediately—or identified quickly.

  *

  Killing someone, disposing of a body, and then making a getaway to another state for what was supposed to be a calm and restful three-day weekend takes a lot less time than one would think if one focuses. Cam and I had indeed been on the road by nine, Belinda having been left, finally, in a scraggy little woodsy area near 174th where the surrounding buildings were tagged with DDP signs and the occasional bold Crip tag that had been struck out, obviously by the Dominicans. I was feeling grateful for that gang book I had edited last year and even more grateful for the cold as I laid Belinda carefully under a little plot of bushes that led into what I was certain was an area where sex and drugs would be available in another hour or so. I was fortunate to have missed the traffic—drug dealers and prostitutes and men who have sex with men but can’t commit to saying they’re gay. It was a fitting place to leave her. She’d always talked about going to “one of the scary neighborhoods” and then writing about it. Now she could experience it without fearing violence. That part had already happened.

  *

  I rolled over and put my arms around Cam. The sky was getting lighter, the birds less vociferous. I didn’t know if Belinda would be found right away, or if her expensive everything—clothes, jewelry (I had left it, but no doubt someone would strip the body before they called it in), hair, manicure, and of course that La Perla underwear—would make it easier to identify her, since she had been so thoughtful as to leave all her ID sans one credit card (which I pocketed and which would indeed end up in the river) at home, as very little fit in her chic but tiny purse.

  Part of me knew I should turn myself in—explain it all, hope for the best, throw my lot in, hoping for mercy from the stock characters of TV police procedurals and murder mysteries. But I just couldn’t risk it. Down the hall were M.J. and her husband and their soon-to-be-born baby. Beside me was the love of my life. Back in Manhattan was the job I had loved before Belinda and which I hoped I could love again. In among my things in the duffel in the closet was the now-bleached letter opener that had belonged to W.H. Auden and which had been a gift from my Great-Aunt Tillie.

  I hadn’t meant to kill Belinda. But I wasn’t nearly as sorry as I should have been or might have been if she hadn’t been Belinda Sondheim Walsh and if she hadn’t imposed herself on me to the point of crossing not just a personal line, but a criminal one. I would have to content myself with that thought—that she had made her choices and so had I. And we’d both been wrong—dead wrong.

  I settled in next to Cam to the fading sound of birds and the overwhelming calm—dead calm—of the quiet Connecticut morning.

  An Appetite for Warmth

  Neil Plakcy

  It was like a vacation driving down to Miami with Red. He was a horny fucker, for sure, and I must have given him a dozen blow jobs over the couple of days it took us to drive from Albany. The farther south we went, the warmer it got. The snow was gone by the time we hit Maryland, and I could shuck my jacket by South Carolina. Somewhere around Palm Beach I stripped off all my clothes and sprawled on the front seat next to Red, letting the warm air rush all over me.

  We met at a truck stop where I used to hang out. He was a burly, copper-haired driver for a big transport company, and I guess you could call him my first boyfriend, though he was nearly forty and married, and I only saw him every other weekend when his rig stopped in Albany on a regular route between Chicago and Boston.

  “Man, you are one sexy bastard, Sean,” Red said. We were barreling down the turnpike when we came to the exit ramp for I-595. I was giving him one last blow job before he had to drop his load when the ramp curved steeply and I heard him say, “Jesus Christ on a stick!” and then the truck smashed through the guardrail and went plummeting into space.

  He was wearing his seat belt, company policy, so he stayed in the cab as it crashed to the ground thirty feet below. I went sailing out the window, and I remember thinking this must be what it felt like to fly. I landed in the crotch of a tree, perched above the burning truck, and I felt warmer than I ever had in my life. I thought for a while
I’d died and gone to hell, where I’d always known I was going, and then I must have passed out and toppled out of the tree.

  *

  I always had an appetite for warmth. Growing up in a small town in upstate New York, I never could get warm enough, except for a few weeks in the summer. My dad left when I was about five, and for the next few years my mom struggled on her own to raise me and my sister. She kept an eagle eye on the thermostat all winter long. Then when she got married again, my stepfather used to knock me around if I so much as looked cross-eyed at turning the heat up.

  I started making my own money when I was fourteen, cleaning up at a construction site. One of the carpenters felt sorry for me and showed me how to hang drywall, nailing the big sheets to the aluminum studs, then taping over the seams and sanding them down. In return, I gave him a blow job once a week or so, something he said his wife would never do.

  By the time I was seventeen, I was making good money hanging drywall, then spending it getting drunk on Saturday night. Then I’d drive out to the highway rest stop and give blow jobs in the men’s room until two or three in the morning.

  When I was nineteen, somebody sent my mom a picture of my dad and told her he was dead. Looking back now, I can tell it was AIDS, but then all we knew was that he’d wasted away. “He was so handsome once,” she said to me, just before she tore the picture up in little pieces. “You look just like him, Sean.”

  I figured it was time to stop screwing around and get my life in order, so I got married, to a fat waitress named Donna I’d known in high school, and we moved down to Albany to get ourselves a fresh start. I picked up drywall work pretty fast, and she got a job waitressing at a bar called Your Place. It was probably the only bar in town where I never had a drink.

  The beer warmed me up. I’d work all day, and by the time the foreman let us call it quits, I’d be chilled down to my bones. A couple of beers later, I’d start to feel warm again. Donna was good for that, too; I could squeeze up against her, my skinny chest, arms, and legs up tight against her cushiony flesh, and sleep. We even had sex, now and then, and though I could do it, I didn’t much like it. Back then, I thought that’s the way it was; the sex you were supposed to have was lousy, and only the sex you weren’t was any good.

  The first time I was arrested at a rest stop I managed to keep it a secret from her, but she found out about the second time because a bastard cop came to our house and told her. He said she had to protect herself against disease, and she made us both get tested and then made me promise not to go out there again.

  It took me a couple of weeks til I found my way to a truck stop at the edge of town, a place the big rigs pulled over for a breather before the long haul to Boston, or going the other way, down to New York. There was always a supply of horny truckers waiting out a mandatory rest period.

  It was around then that Donna got pregnant. She’d gone off the pill without telling me, and it made me so mad I drank two six-packs of Genesee Cream Ale and then worked my way down the line of trucks, giving one blow job after another, letting the guys do pretty much anything they wanted. One guy took me into the shower at the rest stop, stripped us both down and then peed all over me. I didn’t care a bit.

  Then I figured I owed it to the kid to sober up and be the kind of dad I never had. For the rest of Donna’s pregnancy I hardly drank at all, and only fooled around with Red, because like I said, he was kind of like my boyfriend by then. Hell, I was only twenty-two, and I could see the walls closing in around me for the rest of my life. Sucking his dick and getting plowed up the ass by him was about the only good thing I had going.

  Donna gave birth to a little boy, and she wanted to call him Richard. I said okay, only if we called him Ricky—not Dick. I had enough problems without thinking of blow jobs every time I called the kid to dinner.

  Donna started to get real distant after Ricky was born. She went back to Your Place, working nights, and I had to stay home and look after Ricky. She wouldn’t get home till two or three in the morning, and I’d be shivering under the covers, but she wouldn’t let me cuddle up against her.

  I was working at this big mall, and somebody had screwed up the drawings for the steel, so one end of it was still open, even though we were working inside trying to fix up the interior. We enclosed the open storefront in plastic and brought in salamanders, these little space heaters, so it was warm enough for us to work, but still, I’d be freezing by the end of the day.

  Then one Saturday when I met up with Red, he dropped a bombshell on me. We were sitting back in the little sleeping compartment behind his cab, after sex. He was smoking a cigarette and I was drinking a can of beer, both of us naked, my cold feet pressed up against his shins to try and get warm. “They’re giving me a new route,” he said. “Chicago to Miami.”

  His wife and kids lived in Chicago, so he had to keep that as his base. But whatever customers he had in Boston had gone out of business and the company was shifting him around. “I come back from Boston this time, I head straight down to Miami,” he said.

  “Aw, hell,” I said. “I’m never gonna see you again.”

  “Come to Miami,” he said. “I’ll pick you up next week when I pass back through. We can fuck our way down the entire eastern seaboard.”

  “And what do I do when I get there?”

  “Exactly what you do here. Put up drywall and suck my dick.”

  “What about my wife? I’ve got a kid, too, you know.”

  He shrugged. “You do what you gotta do,” he said.

  And just like that, I thought, “I’ll move to Miami.” It was February, and ass-chilling cold in Albany. I could finally warm up down there, run around in shorts and T-shirts all winter and still feel good.

  I decided I was done with women, too. There was no doubt in my mind by then that I was a faggot, and I had no business living with or sleeping with a woman. That night, I picked up Ricky from the neighbor who was watching him, and after he went to sleep I stayed up waiting for Donna to come home from Your Place.

  “You’re up late,” she said, when she came in the front door, a frosty breeze following her that made me shiver. I had my hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate, wearing long johns and a flannel nightshirt, and I still wasn’t warm.

  “Wanted to talk to you,” I said.

  She started pulling off her layers. “You could roast a chicken in here,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking, and I want to move on,” I said. “Get a divorce. Move down south.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” she said. “I’ve already got me a real man to replace you.”

  Maybe she was expecting to get my dander up, start some kind of battle over who got to claim her, but if she was, she was disappointed. “Guy from Your Place?”

  “Jerry. The night bartender. He’s been saving up, gonna buy the place when Ethel gets ready to retire and sell it off.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “And I won’t have to worry about him sucking dick at rest stops, either,” she said.

  “You never know.”

  She slapped my face then, and I suppose I deserved it.

  By the time Red pulled back into the truck stop the next Saturday, I’d sold my truck and given away everything I couldn’t pack into a single suitcase. “You be careful not to end up like your dad,” was all Donna said when I left the house the last time.

  As the cab pulled away, it finally dawned on me that my father’d been a faggot too, and that’s why he’d left my mother. Poor Ricky, I thought. Only a year old, and his dad was already bailing on him. But maybe this bartender Jerry would be a better influence on him. I might have gotten out of his life just in time.

  *

  The company Red drove for had a strict policy against picking up hitchhikers, so I left the hospital with nothing but a set of clothes, a pocketknife that had survived the truck fire, and bus fare to the homeless shelter. Instead of getting off there, though, I stayed on across the caus
eway to South Beach, where I’d heard all the faggots hung out.

  It was just nightfall, the lights on Lincoln Road coming on. I walked past the funky stores and fancy restaurants until I came to a gay bar I’d seen advertised in a newspaper I’d read at the hospital. I pulled off my shirt and slung it over my shoulder, letting the pants, which were too big on me anyway, ride down to my hips.

  I leaned up against the wall outside the bar, and I hadn’t been there more than fifteen minutes when this guy came up to me. Maybe thirty, thirty-five, fat as a Thanksgiving turkey, wearing one of them short-sleeve shirts with the little horse and rider on his chest, and a Rolex on his wrist.

  What kind of asshole wears a Rolex to a bar where he wants to get laid? That’s just asking for trouble, in my opinion. “What’s a good-looking guy like you doing hanging out here?” he said. “The action’s all inside.”

  I put on my best innocent look. “I was a little nervous about going inside,” I said.

  “Come on in with me,” he said, putting his arm around my bare shoulder. “I’ll take care of you.”

  I followed him inside, where he bought me a series of drinks, and I started to feel that pleasant sense of freedom that alcohol had always brought me. The music was fast and loud, a sexy Latin beat that made me horny. I put my finger in my mouth and got it all juicy, then pressed it against the crotch of his khaki pants so there was a wet spot there. Against all the soft rolls of fat I could feel him getting hard. I licked my lips and made a five-zero out of my hands.

  He was panting for it. “You got a place we can go?” I yelled into his ear.

  He grabbed my arm like he was afraid if he let go he’d never get blown again, and I followed him out of the bar and into the parking garage just behind. The dude drove one of those big Land Rovers, and I regretted that I couldn’t just knock him on the head and leave him naked and quivering in some dark corner of the garage.