The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  Only when he screams “Look at me” do they dare to do so.

  What they see: a man with no clothes on, forty going on seventy, possibly handsome once, his whole body sagging and full of folds now. Soaking wet, they think, except for a couple of people standing very close, who smell the sharp reek of gasoline and step back.

  “Look at me,” he says again. “We burn for you.”

  The ticket taker recognizes him. “Stubby?” he calls in the instant before the mayor’s son lights a match and sets himself on fire.

  * * *

  JARK TROWSE IS TRYING TO HAVE FUN. Even having fun takes care, planning, strategy. It’s essential to make even his fun functional.

  Hence, the Helsinki. Hudson’s biggest spot for live music and expensive drinks. A spot at the bar, front and center, where everyone can see him. A bright salmon shirt. His customary round of drinks on the house.

  He’s taking a break from working on his speech. Not the one he gives when he wins the election; that one’s been written for weeks. But Winter Fest is just a couple of weeks after that—and with it the groundbreaking at the Pequod Arms construction sites—and he still hasn’t found the right note to strike. He wants humility, respect for Hudson’s specialness—but he also wants to assert himself. Lay claim to its future; ensure that everyone knows he is the engine that powers this ship.

  By the standards of Renaissance Hudson, the Helsinki is downright historic. Almost twenty years old, part of the first wave of Culture to come feed on Hudson’s carcass. Masterminded by a “California producer and visionary”—well connected, wealthy, able to bribe and cajole famous musician friends into coming up for impromptu shows in the sticks. Some big-deal chef to come cook “elevated soul food” (Jark wondered if what made it “elevated” were the extremely high prices or the fact that the chef was Caucasian). At the Helsinki, upper-tier locals rubbed elbows with big-deal new arrivals. Everyone spent too much money, drank too much, descended together into a shared buzz.

  Down the bar, Jark spies Rick Edgley. The big burly locksmith had worked on his office and his home—Jark was a firm believer in hiring locals for any work whatsoever—buying goodwill one contractor gig at a time. The fact that Edgley was adorable, in a bald bearded pugilistic daddy kind of way, only increased the pleasure of his company. Jark shifts stools to sit beside him.

  “Hey, Rick!” he says. They shake hands, exchange hellos. To the bartender, Jark says, “Two more of what he’s having.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Rick says, wounded pride edging into his voice. So hard to tell where largesse will be met with gratitude and where hostility.

  “You can get the next round,” Jark says. The bartender brings over two bottles of beer. His name is Joe Davoli, a local Italian boy whose troubled brother owns the failing pizza place on Eighth Street. Thanks to his friends on the Chamber of Commerce, Jark knows exactly how well every business in town is doing. “You just looked a little glum tonight is all.”

  “That obvious?” Rick says, laughing, rubbing the back of his head. “Yeah, it’s been a tough week. I got a little too big for my locksmith britches, I guess. Decided to try to play real estate mogul.”

  “The real estate game is tough,” Jark says. “People think it’s easy.”

  “Amen, brother. Anyway I bought this house out by Claverack, fixed it up, figured I’d flip it. Like I got any goddamn idea what the fuck I’m doing. Fully furnished, ready to move in. I had someone all set to buy, and that just fell through.”

  They sip. The wheels turn, in Jark’s mind. “Fully furnished, you say? Ready to move in? How much do you want for it?”

  Rick names a price.

  “That’s high,” Jark says. “No wonder you’re having a hard time finding a buyer.”

  “I know, I know,” Rick says. “But my dumb ass spent too much. I lower the price any, my profit margin gets shredded.”

  “Sorry, man. You got pictures?”

  Of course Rick does. He shows him, on his phone, and Jark assures him that it’s a damn lovely house and someone will be damn lucky to end up in it.

  They drain their drinks. Discuss other things. Drink other drinks. Order Cajun truffle fries, which they both agree are not so great.

  “You know Ohrena Shaw?” Jark says, after carefully biding his time—because it’s one of his gifts that no matter how drunk he gets, his timing remains impeccable.

  “Course.”

  “She’s a tenant of mine. Looking to move out, but hasn’t been able to find the right place. Yours looks perfect.”

  Rick laughs. “Just between you and me, Mister Trowse, but Ohrena Shaw’d never in a million years be able to afford it.”

  “Call me Jark, please. And actually I was preparing to make her a buyout offer. I want her building for the Pequod Arms project, but I didn’t want to just boot her out.”

  “That’s a damn nice offer, Mister—Jark. But Ohrena would never in a million years accept charity like that from you. Trust me on that. Me and her go way back.”

  Jark nods. More drinks come. More truffle fries, too, because they’re drunk enough that anything salty and greasy would be great.

  “Maybe I could talk to her, Jark. Tell her I talked to you, and we worked something out where you’d stand the loan for her mortgage, she can keep on paying you the same amount she’s paying in rent but it’ll actually go to pay off the loan at a reduced rate . . . Something like that. I don’t know anything about the legalese that’d be involved—maybe this is all fucking crazy—and maybe you wouldn’t be interested in something this shady—but—”

  “I’m very interested,” Jark says, and then has to repeat it over the sound of the firetruck screaming past. The amount he’d make if he could get her out of that building is thirteen times what he’d spend paying cash for that house. “Interested enough that we can figure out how to make the legalese work if we have to. Talk to her first. Find out what she’d be comfortable with. We’ll go from there.”

  Jark is drunk. He knows this; takes a moment to compliment himself on being such an expert negotiator even while intoxicated.

  “You got yourself a deal, Jark. You’re a hell of a good guy. She deserves something this nice, after all she’s been through with that piece of shit husband of hers.”

  Rick sticks out his hand. They shake. Then they hug. For the first time, Jark notices his ears: how both are battered and bent. He actually had been a pugilist. Mixed martial arts. Something. It should scare him, he knows, but instead it makes him like him more.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES SIMPLICITY IS BEST. Classics are classic for a reason, after all. No sense reinventing the wheel when you want to scare someone.

  And anyway everyone forgets, in this age of email and cell phone calls you can silence with a finger, the profound psychological power of a ringing telephone. How something so banal can suddenly become so terrifying, after the sun sets. So invasive.

  Zelda sends lists, to people who responded positively to her initial YOU ARE HATED entreaties. Names and phone numbers. Some guy on Tinder sent it to her, a little hottie with jug-handled ears who started a convo by saying he liked her profile pic—a close-up of a YOU ARE HATED button. Said he’d been collecting info on the new arrivals for a long time. Waiting for someone who would know what to do with it.

  She gives her pupils no specific instructions, other than scare the shit out of them. Creativity is important, is something she wants to cultivate in her apprentice (offspring) terrorists. She knows they are full of great ideas. She believes in them.

  Connor keeps it simple. Sometimes he just screams when someone answers. A blood-curdling shriek of anger or pain or fear. Other times he’ll start right in with threats and profanity, bellowed in a low monster voice.

  Sally is more of an artist with it. She starts out all business, sounding like it’s a real call. A kind voice from the doctor’s office, a Quinnipiac poll. Something believable, something that won’t make the person hang up right away.
And then a couple of sentences in she’ll start to turn it around, following Do you ever wonder what it would feel like if someone slid a knife into the meat of your thigh and dragged it all the way down to your feet? or That dog I hear barking in the background, do you ever worry you’ll come home to find it gutted with its entrails ripped out and the body cavity stuffed with screws and nails and broken glass? In a voice as sweet and slick as honey.

  All night long Zelda’s chest has been throbbing, a jagged something pressing up against her heart. She likes the throb of it. It tastes sweet, like hatred. It means her pupils are hard at work. Phones are ringing all over town. Distant sirens sound. People are lying in bed, shivering from fear. Telling themselves everything will be all right. Knowing it won’t.

  ***

  TREENIE HEARS IT on her police scanner, the one she made her father get her way back when, so she could hear about every arrest and ambulance call and arrive at school well armed with gossip and inside intel.

  We’ve got a fire down at the Hudson train station. Reports of nude white male. Apparent suicide situation.

  It’s Stubby, says the cop who calls it in. Steve. Steve Coffin. It’s the mayor’s son.

  “What the fuck, Steve,” she whispers, shivering. She knew the boy wasn’t well—everyone did, even back in high school when he was just one more bully—but there had been something, even then, in his eyes, in the veins in his neck, that let you know there was something far scarier than standard adolescent anger going on under there.

  Setting yourself on fire in a public place—that’s a political act. Or at least: it’d be easy to spin it that way.

  Treenie puts her coat on, pockets a handful of YOU ARE HATED buttons. She snatched them up from a bowl in the ladies’ room at the Plaza Diner, without knowing why, and she congratulates herself now. A skilled operative anticipates opportunities well before they arrive.

  She knows where Steve Coffin lives. And she knows, from listening to the police scanner, that the cops have been looking for him since his truck ended up in Rich Trappan’s living rom. A poorly kept secret, that one. Cops talk. She’s heard it from three other people.

  She’ll go to his house, which if she knows the skill level of Hudson cops—and she absolutely does—will be poorly secured if it’s secured at all. She’ll plant those buttons. She’ll call Vernon from the Hudson Gazette, and tell him that the man who’s been terrorizing Hudson was One Of Them. She’ll discredit the movement. They’ll all move on from this obnoxious interlude and get back to the business of making Hudson big again.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  RONAN

  The whole town buzzed with word of what the mayor’s son did. You could smell the excitement in the air—and also the actual stink of burning flesh. Gawkers thronged the train station, took pictures of the blackened spot on the ground.

  Attalah filed a second motion to postpone the election, but we knew it was futile. We made phone calls, got people to commit to sign affidavits maintaining that they had stayed home from fear, calling on the board of elections to decertify the election and call for a second one, but we didn’t have much hope for that, either.

  Fear did not, in fact, hurt voter turnout. Nor did the end of the Coffin mayoralty or the superstar candidate give a boost. The Columbia County Board of Elections would later report a total number of votes that was statistically equivalent to the last three mayoral elections.

  Attalah voted at St. Mary’s Academy.

  Dom voted at the Hudson Central Fire Station, on North Seventh Street, on his lunch break.

  I didn’t vote. I wasn’t registered in Hudson. I wasn’t registered anywhere.

  * * *

  I WATCHED THE POLLING SITES. Tried to place each voter who walked in and out—old Hudson? New Hudson? Sometimes it was harder to tell than I’d ever have admitted.

  I walked Warren Street. Every antique store I entered, the staff was on me immediately. Smiling, Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, but nervous, and never letting me out of their sight, just as they hovered near anyone else who entered. I took great pleasure in each new entrance.

  I scoured every shop for weapons. Some ancient object invested with supernatural power. Something that could kill Tom and set my city free from the madness that was swallowing it whole.

  “Everybody’s on high alert today,” I said to one chubby boy who backed off slightly when he saw how my clothes said Hipster instead of Hudsonian.

  “Yeah,” he said. “With what happened at Historical Materialism—and that horrible tragedy down at the train station—to say nothing of what’s been going on all over town . . .”

  “Going on?” I asked, all innocence.

  “There’s been a lot of anger stirred up, among the locals. A few of them have been . . . acting out. And there are these YOU ARE HATED buttons.”

  “Hated, wow,” I said, smiling flirtatiously, fingering telephones. “Such a strong word. Why do they hate you?”

  “Who knows?” he said. I had seen him on Grindr. He’d told Tom Minniq some of his deepest, sickest secrets. “Most of them are homophobic, and they say we’re all a bunch of immoral gays and liberals.”

  “Is that it, though?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” His smile was suspicious.

  “I mean, is that why they hate you? Or is it because you’ve stolen all their stuff and transformed their town into something they don’t recognize or feel welcome in?”

  Dangerous stuff, playing devil’s advocate this openly. All I really came for was a weapon. Something old, something magic.

  Also, a month before, there had been harpoons on the wall of every antique shop. Now, when I needed one, there were none.

  “Change happens,” he said. “What can you do?”

  His innocence was unfeigned, his stance unassailable. He felt entitled to this place.

  “This space we’re standing in, it used to be a bakery. I’d buy apple turnovers for fifty cents, on Saturday mornings on my way to work at my father’s butcher shop two blocks down. And now it sells doorknobs and glasses that cost hundreds of dollars. And now you’re working here, all by yourself, in a place that used to employ ten people at a time. So you don’t think people have a good reason to hate?”

  “I understand their anger,” he said. “But it’s not like I did anything to anyone. I need a job and a place to live as much as they do.”

  Realization hit me, wet and rough upside the head. How hard our brains work, to keep the sense of self intact. How they will filter out anything that threatens to shine a light on how we are horrible. I could practically hear the unspoken mantra playing out in his head—the same one playing in mine. I am a good person. I do my best, and sometimes I fail, but I would never willingly hurt someone. If harm is caused by my actions, like if I buy the cheaper bag of rice at the grocery store and keep peasant workers enslaved, the blame belongs to the systems I am a helpless pawn of. If someone hates me, it’s because something is wrong with them.

  It’d take a lot more than a billboard to break all that.

  I picked up a phone receiver; heavy black Bakelite. I held it to my ear. No dial tone, of course. No Tom. I debated buying one, leaving it unplugged, waiting for him to call. Then I debated smacking Smug Antique Shop Boy in the face with it as hard as I could. Neither course of action made any sense. But neither did anything else lately.

  “You coming to Winter Fest?” he asked, sounding apologetic, like he had broken the Customer Service Prime Directive by not agreeing with everything I said. “Big deal. Party in the streets.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, and swam deeper into the store. Past flags with fewer than fifty stars, and framed photographs of generals and well-dressed families. Newspapers and Life magazines from the day we landed on the moon, the night when Sputnik hit the sky, the time we dropped atomic bombs on crowded cities. Antique stores were like little museums, where the past was for purchase. Where anyone with a ton of money could pick up a piece
of history and walk out with it. Put it on their mantel. Proclaim their ownership of it. So poor people could watch through the windows with hungry eyes.

  Excuse me, sir, you wouldn’t happen to have a whale-blood-rusted ghost-killing harpoon for sale here, would you?

  My cell phone rang.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “Ronan?” The voice was fragile, cracking. Wind laughed at it in the background.

  “Wick? Are you okay?”

  “It’s my mom,” he said, and I could hear how he’d been crying. “She’s . . . I don’t even know. But I’m scared.”

  She found out, I thought. That Wick is gay. She found out and she did or said something awful. “I’ll come get you. Okay? Where are you?”

  “Outside. Prison Alley, between Fifth and Sixth.”

  “I’m on Warren,” I said. “By Third. Stay there, okay? I’ll be right there.”

  I hurried out of the store, avoiding eye contact with Shop Boy. At the bottom of Warren Street, blood orange sunset clouds were climbing over the Catskill Mountains. The day had gotten ten degrees colder since I’d started hate-shopping. On the radio, Miss Jackson had said it might snow tonight. I walked east up Warren, turned north onto Fourth, and then headed up the alley.

  “Here,” a voice called, and I looked up to see Wick standing two stories up on a set of back stairs. He wasn’t wearing enough layers.

  “Uh . . . is that your house?”

  “No,” he said, climbing higher. “You coming?”

  I looked up the alley and down it. Genteel scheming was one thing; trespassing was a different sort of crime altogether. “Come on!” he called, annoyed at my hesitation.

  Fuck it. You’re damned already. And if it’s the criminal justice system you’re afraid of, you should have thought of that before you started manipulating and framing people.