Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Hey buddy, seriously,” Deacon says, pointing a finger at the guy’s forehead. “If you don’t calm down I think you’re gonna blow a corpuscle or something—”

  “I’m picking up the phone, Deke. Do you see me picking up the motherfucking telephone?” and “Yeah,” he says, “I see, and I know you mean it, Sheryl,” enough calm in his voice to keep her from dialing the police for at least another fifteen or twenty seconds, so she just stands there, holding the receiver, glaring at him and chewing at the stainless steel ring in her lower lip.

  “But we’re not gonna need the cops, are we, buddy?” Deacon asks the fat man, and now everyone else in the bar is watching, all those booze-and-smoke bleary eyes squinting from the shadows, all those faces waiting to see how much more interesting this is going to get.

  “You’re gonna need a meat wagon, you say one more word to me, you crazy Jew fairy,” the fat man growls. “I don’t have to sit here, in a public place, and get myself verbally assaulted ’cause you believe everything they want you to believe. Jesus, I oughta have my fuckin’ head examined, even comin’ in a place like this.”

  And Deacon’s up and moving then, hands faster than the eye, too fast for the fat man to do anything much but make a small squeaking sound, stepped-on mouse sort of sound, and then Deacon’s left fist is tangled deep in the man’s long hair, right hand holding tight to the seat of his baggy jeans. Almost like the fat man’s suspended on piano wires no one can see, dangling weightless, half an inch off the dirty tile as Deacon shoves him towards the door. The fat man hasn’t turned loose of his beer mug, and he’s trying to use it as a weapon, cut-glass cudgel flailing side to side and beer splashing the walls, splashing Deacon until the man manages to hit himself in the head with the mug and yelps.

  Six, maybe seven feet left before the closed door, and there’s already blood streaming down the man’s face, blood in his eyes, and Deacon is beginning to wonder in a sluggish, drunken way if he’s strong enough, or the man’s heavy enough, if there’s enough velocity, enough momentum, to break through the redpainted glass. But a skinny kid in a yellow Curious George shirt opens the door, quick sidestep as the fat man sails out of The Plaza and into the brilliant July afternoon, trips on the sidewalk and lands on his ass in the middle of the street.

  Deacon quickly pulls the door closed again, turns the dead bolt fast, and for a moment they can all hear the man cursing, bellowing out there in the heat about papists and homos and fucking space aliens before the screech of tires drowns him out, car-horn blat like an exclamation point; Deke thanks the skinny guy who opened the door, stares a second at his banana-colored shirt, and then heads slowly back to his stool at the bar.

  “You’re crazy,” Sheryl grumbles, still holding the telephone receiver. “One day, you’re gonna pull that shit with the wrong guy and get your sorry punk ass kicked to hell and back. You know that, don’t you?”

  And yeah, he says, yeah, sure, whatever you say, boss lady, but she’s setting the receiver back in its cradle, anger traded for disgust, pouring him another beer even though he hasn’t asked for it and there’s still at least three inches of the waterthin draft left in his mug.

  “On the house, you crazy fuckin’ drunk,” she says, frowning, and Deacon Silvey finishes off the warm beer before he lets himself start on the cold.

  Ask Deacon Silvey where and when his life first landed in the shitter, how it got there and never really climbed out again, and every time he’ll point to an October afternoon and the ratmaze-neat Atlanta suburb where he grew up, October 1970, when he was eight years old and his mother lost her car keys. Had promised to take him to the movies, and he can never remember which movie, never mind, it doesn’t matter, but she’d promised, and then she couldn’t find the car keys. His father out back raking leaves and his mother searching the house, annoyed, probing under sofa cushions and then down on her knees to peer beneath the recliner, beneath the china cabinet, Deacon watching the clock, and pretty soon it wouldn’t matter, another ten minutes and it would be too late to make the matinee, anyway.

  So Deacon going to her purse on the coffee table, then, because that’s where the keys should have been, that’s all, opening the metal catch and the pungent smell of new patent leather before he began to feel sick, suddensharp pain at his temples, stomach rolling, and when Deacon opened his eyes he was lying on the carpet staring up at his mother bending over him, the pinched look on her face that said she was scared to death, and “Deke, oh god, honey, are you okay? What happened?” and he told her that the car keys were in the pocket of her coat. Long and silent second as her expression changed from worry to confusion, finally helping him up off the floor, and Deacon’s legs unsteady, helping him to the sofa, and, “They’re in there, Momma. Really,” he said. And they were, right where she’d left them the night before. “How’d you know that, Deke?” but it didn’t matter because his head hurt too much to go to the movies, hurt so bad that he spent the rest of the afternoon in his bedroom with the curtains pulled closed and didn’t even come out for supper.

  A trip to the doctor after that, several trips, several doctors, specialists, and after the tests each of them assuring his parents that their son wasn’t epileptic and, no, he didn’t have a brain tumor, either, and neither his mother nor father mentioning the car keys. Like that wasn’t really a part of the story, just the blackout and the headache afterwards. His father complaining about the bills the doctors sent when there was nothing even wrong with the kid, but no one asking Deacon about the keys again, and a month, two months, and the whole thing forgotten by Christmas.

  But that was the beginning, that’s where it started, not nearly as dramatic as the story about Davey Barber’s beagle puppy, nothing grisly or sad about lost car keys, and later everyone would always point back to the dead dog, never the sunny afternoon and the lost car keys.

  Five minutes left until Sheryl’s shift is over before anyone remembers that Deacon locked the door, convenient amnesia, and then a fist pounding hard on the glass, bang, bang, bang, and Deacon thinks maybe it’s the fat guy come back with the cops and so maybe he won’t have to go to work at the laundromat tonight after all. Sheryl glaring at the door and cursing Deacon, glancing up at the Budweiser clock over the bar and cursing because Bunky Tolbert is late again. She steps out from behind the counter and Deacon swivels on his stool, turns to face the door just in case it really is The Second Coming of the Fat Guy.

  “You locked the fucking door, Deke,” Sheryl says, then she yells at whoever it is outside to please stop banging on the glass, give her one second for Christ’s sake.

  “You ain’t heard nobody complaining,” Deacon says coolly.

  “You’re gonna get me fired, you asshole,” she snaps back, door open now, and it’s not the fat guy after all. Just Sadie in black polyester and the eyeliner she never bothers to wash off, easier just to put more on so she always looks a little like an anemic raccoon. Sadie Jasper, with her silver purse shaped like a coffin, and Deacon smiles for her, easy drunken smile, only a little disappointed that it isn’t Mr. Kill-All-The-Motherfuckers and he still has to go to work.

  “Hey babe,” he says, and Sadie sits down on the stool next to him, kisses Deacon on the cheek, and she smells like clove cigarettes and vanilla oil, comfortable, safe smells, and “You didn’t happen to see a really fat son of a bitch dead in the street out there, did you?” he asks her. Sadie stares at him with those eyes that still give him the willies every now and then, heavy-lidded and her pale, blue irises surrounded by all that smudged eyeliner and her coalblack hair.

  “No,” she replies. “But I wasn’t paying all that much attention,” deadpan solemn but enough of a smile that Deke can tell she knows he’s joking, and “More’s the pity,” he says and kisses her back, tastes her waxy black lipstick, and he can think of so many things he’d rather spend the night doing than watching Highland Avenue yuppies separate their whites from their colors.

  “You want anything, Sadie?” Sheryl asks
, talking to Sadie but looking at the clock and she should have been out of here five minutes ago. Sadie scowls at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, squints hard at the long row of bottles lined up back there, all concentration like she ever orders anything different, and “I think I’ll have a White Russian, please,” she says, finally, and Deacon would bet ten dollars she’s never had anything else, that somewhere, sometime, a White Russian was Sadie’s first taste of alcohol and she’s never seen any point in trying anything different.

  Sadie opens her shiny coffin purse and digs out a wrinkled five, lays it on the counter while Sheryl adds vodka to ice cubes and half-and-half. “And give dumb-ass here another glass of that cow piss,” she says and grins at the bartender.

  “Jesus, it must be my goddamn birthday,” Deke says. “Two free beers in one afternoon,” and he finishes his PBR, sets the mug down and slides it towards Sheryl as she puts Sadie’s White Russian on a cocktail napkin with a flaming eight ball printed on one side.

  “No, just guilt money from home,” Sadie says and takes a mint-green slip of paper from her purse, a check with her father’s name printed neatly across the top and enough zeros that at least they won’t have to worry about paying the rent for another month. “As long as my mother’s new therapist keeps telling her it really is all her fault that I turned out this way, I figure we can expect a steady trickle,” and Sadie takes a sip of her drink before she puts the check safely back inside her purse and snaps the little coffin shut again.

  “Well, it’s reassuring to know that at least one of us isn’t burdened with a conscience,” Deacon says, and Sadie punches him in the arm, not hard but he groans like she’s broken a bone, groans until she leans over and kisses his shoulder.

  “Jesus, you guys are making me sick,” Sheryl mutters. “You know how long it’s been since I even had a date?” and Sadie sticks her tongue out at the bartender, tongue the color of milkstained bubble gum, and then turns back to Deacon.

  “I saw your friend Chance at the post office today,” she says, and Deacon sips at his fresh beer, and “How’s she holding up?” he asks; Sadie shrugs and stirs at her drink with a red plastic swizzle stick.

  “Beats me. She was buying stamps. You know she doesn’t like talking to me.”

  “I don’t think Chance much likes talking to anybody these days, baby. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure she thinks weird rubs off,” Sadie says and lays the swizzle stick on her napkin, stares at Deke with those unreal blue eyes like something in a taxidermist’s shop window, eyes like glass, and “She’s a very detached young lady.”

  “Yeah?” and Deacon watches her in the mirror, watches her between the liquor bottles. “Well, I expect you’d be pretty detached too, Little Miss Pickled Sunshine, if you’d been through all the shit Chance has been through lately.” And she doesn’t say a word, no response but another shrug, Sadie’s eternal answer to a whole messy world of things she’d rather not think about.

  Deacon runs his fingers through his short, mousebrown hair, not quite pissed at Sadie yet and hoping he didn’t sound that way because now she’s pouting, stirring aimlessly at her drink, and her lower lip looks like something a yellow jacket stung. But sometimes her callous goth-girl shtick is hard to stomach, sometimes like now, and suddenly Deacon feels very old and very tired, all the hell he’s caught, and he honestly can’t imagine how Chance Matthews is alive, still walking and talking. Someone like that almost enough to make you believe in bad luck or karma, the fucking sins of the father, someone like that enough to keep things in perspective.

  “You didn’t have to yell at me,” Sadie says, almost whispers, and “I didn’t yell at you, Sadie,” Deacon says, and now they’re talking to each other through the mirror, too bad his parents never figured out this trick. It might have saved a lot of broken dishes.

  “It’s not my fault she doesn’t like me,” and that’s enough to light the short and ragged fuse that’s never far beneath Deke’s skin, enough to get him up off the bar stool and moving towards the door. Forget the beer, forget Sadie, because he really doesn’t want to be anywhere near her or anyone else when the bomb in his head goes off.

  But she’s already calling after him, still hasn’t learned when to let him go, when to shut up and sit it out until the shit blows over. “What the fuck did I say, Deacon?” she asks, raising her voice and Sheryl’s watching them both now, starting to look a lot more worried than she did about the fat man. Her smokedusty eyes doing all the talking, and Just keep walking, Deke, she’s trying to say without opening her mouth, Just keep on going, and she’ll get over it, and you’ll get over it, and nobody gets hurt this time. But Deke stops halfway to the red door, and “Every goddamn thing isn’t about you, Sadie. This isn’t about you.”

  “I never said it was,” and god he hates the way she can flinch without moving a muscle, flinch with words like she’s afraid he’s going to hit her when he’s never laid a hand on her. “All I was saying—”

  “All you were saying, Sadie, is that you’re just too goddamned simple or shallow or selfish or whatever to figure out why someone who’s lost everything, everyone she ever loved or gave two shits for, why someone like that can’t stop being miserable for five minutes to smile and make you feel like the sparkling center of the goddamn universe.”

  Not even looking at Sadie in the mirror now, that much a coward, that much a jerk, but everything he needs to see right there in Sheryl’s green eyes, like just exactly how unnecessary that was, like how someone who spends every day hiding in the hooch because he can’t deal with his own life has a hell of a nerve telling anyone else to get a clue.

  “Whatever,” Deacon Silvey says. And he turns away from Sheryl and Sadie and the cold beer he’s hardly touched, stalks past the cigarette machine and out of The Plaza’s crimson door, out of the mustycool shadows and into the merciless heat and sundrowned day he deserves.

  Deacon had just turned nine and the beagle had been missing for three weeks, three stickyhot weeks in the middle of August, too hot to be outside, but him and Davey Barber and some other boys playing football behind Davey’s house, anyway. Someone passed Deacon the ball and he lost his balance, fell and tumbled crash into the puppy’s doghouse. Boys laughing and Deacon disoriented, his right ankle hurting, but he was about to get up and run for the garden hose stretched across the grass for a goal line when he smelled oranges, something like orange peels or raw fish, and he’d never even noticed how the two smelled so much alike.

  “Hey, you okay, Deke?” and more laughter, then, Greg Musgrove calling him a pussy, and “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m fine. Just got my feet tangled up,” but that orangeandfish smell so strong, strong enough it was making him nauseous, making him gag, and he leaned back against the abandoned doghouse, eyes watering and trying not to puke.

  And “Jesus, man, what’s the matter with you?” Davey asked him, but Deacon’s head hurt too much to answer, too much to even think, and if he opened his mouth he knew he’d puke for sure. The football rolling from his hands, bump to the ground, bouncing away, and by then all the boys standing around him while the smell dragged Deacon Silvey down and down, falling like something in a fairy story his mother read to him once, falling and going nowhere fast, and he saw the puppy, the older kids that took it away one night when everyone in Davey’s house was asleep, and “Oh,” he said. “Oh shit,” seeing the rest, seeing it all, but nothing else out of his mouth before he was vomiting, his lunch sprayed all over the nearest pair of sneakers, and someone was running for Davey’s mother, shouting, scared, and the world folded up like a crumpled paper cup, and Deacon tumbled into the black space left behind.

  Straight to the hospital in an ambulance that time, paramedics and a stretcher and everything; not that he remembered the ride, the sirens blaring, or the emergency room, nothing but black and dreamless sleep until he opened his eyes in a white room that smelled like medicine and Pine-Sol, and his mother was crying.<
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  “They killed it,” he said, words all croaky because his throat was so dry and sore, but needing to talk before he forgot, and his father turning away from the window, then, his father looking angry, inconvenienced, embarrassed, something Deacon knew was inappropriate, but his father looking that way, regardless. His mother crying louder, and “Davey’s dog,” Deacon said. “They killed it. It’s in the field.”

  His father took one step closer to the bed, and “Son,” he said, “if you’re doing this just to get attention, you better tell us right this minute. Right now. Before it gets any more out of hand than it already has,” and the dazzling sun, sun setting like a fireball behind his father, too bright to look at, so he looked at his mother, instead.

  “They killed it,” he said again, speaking to her because she only seemed frightened, not angry, not ready to blame him for whatever was happening, and she shook her head, not understanding, either.

  “Killed what, Deke? We don’t know what you’re talking about.” And neither did he, not really, but telling her anyway while his father turned away, turned back to the window. Deacon telling her how the boys had stolen the puppy and beat it to death with a hammer, beat it until all its bones were broken, and then they’d nailed it to a tree in the field behind the high school and left it there. Telling her as fast as he could talk, before he forgot all their names, boys he didn’t know, and he could see she thought he was crazy, crazy or lying or both, maybe.

  “You hit your head,” she said, talking to him like he was five years old or seventy-five, talking the way she talked to his grandmother at the nursing home. “You were playing football at Davey’s house, and you hit your head. Don’t you remember playing football, Deke?”

  “I didn’t hit my head, Mom. I just twisted my ankle. I didn’t hit my head, I swear,” and his father turning around again, angry father framed in fire, and his mother was already uncovering his bare feet, and “His ankle’s swollen, Marty,” she said, mothervoice like something thin and brittle, like something strained.