As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  Beth eased up. “What’s your home number?” she asked, phone held ready to dial. “Bet your mother would loved to hear how you’ve been spending your free time.”

  “Please, lady. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, it’s ‘lady’ now? What happened to ‘skank’?”

  “Please, lady. Please. I’m sorry.”

  Beth grew up with kids like this one. A lot of them had wound up behind bars, even more under the dirt. She eased up. “You don’t change that attitude, you will be sorry.”

  She stepped back. He scrambled to his feet, brushing past her without another word. She could still see him wiping away blood, snot, and tears as he disappeared around the bend. Beth knew that the beating she’d just handed him would pale compared with what was waiting for him as soon as he met back up with his “friends.” They’d give him the business but good. He hadn’t just been punked—he’d been punked by a girl. There would be no mercy.

  Beth swatted the grime from her skirt as she made her way toward the dog. Its matted fur was dusted with broken glass. It bent low, growling through bared teeth. She reached for the snagged collar. “Easy, now,” she cooed. “Easy.” She undid the clasp, and the dog was off like a loosed arrow. “Thanks a lot,” she said to the now empty alley.

  Beth glanced at the frayed nylon webbing clutched in her hand. No tag, just a notch where it had been sheared off. Looked as if someone had cut loose the family pet, someone who couldn’t afford to feed it anymore and didn’t cotton to the idea of some Good Samaritan bringing it back.

  She checked her cell. “Fuck me.” Her fifteen minutes had stretched into forty-five, and she still had ten blocks to go.

  Two

  Axis’s wide bay windows glared at Beth like the eyes of a disappointed parent. Chest leaden with dread, she crossed the street far in advance of the door. As she approached, she spotted a couple of burly barbacks unfurling a scrim of polyester spider web. They hung it against the glass, while almost pornographically attired cocktail girls strategically stuck plastic spiders among the fibers. She waited until the window was all but obscured by the webbing, then sprinted past it with her head turned streetward, praying she wouldn’t be spotted.

  The club sat at the far end of what remained of New Harbor’s storied Strip. Once this section had been home to a battery of chic lounges, seedy pool halls, karaoke bars, live-music venues, LGBT pickup joints, and assorted watering holes that defied designation. One by one, they’d all closed down or been pushed ever farther from the University’s manicured grounds. Shuttered façades stood monument to long-gone bacchanals. Now only Axis remained, and the Strip’s last nightclub had bloated to take up the slack. It had become the place to play after dark.

  Beth made it to the iron-strapped oak door. She fished out her keys and clicked open the door quickly and quietly, hoping to blend into the fray as if she’d been there all along. No management in sight, just a cocktail girl in a latex nurse uniform at the end of the hall who was struggling with the telescoping arm of a chrome IV stand.

  “Let me give you a hand with that.” With a couple of twists, Beth had it assembled. She reached for the plastic pouch full of red liquor marked “Type O Neg” sitting on a table chockablock with disposable neon shot glasses.

  “Thanks a million.” The girl eyed the deep red liquor as it flowed from the bag and down the clear tube attached to it. “Jeez, that stuff looks like real blood.”

  “Yeah, but it tastes like cherry Nyquil. Not sure that’s an improvement.” They both laughed.

  “You’re late,” came the voice Beth had been dreading.

  She looked up to see her general manager descending the grated steel staircase. He wore no costume, just his habitual uniform of polo tucked into straight-leg blue blue jeans. His complacent mug was topped off by a spit-curl swayback haircut, his skin spray-tanned an orange that unintentionally matched the jack-o’-lanterns flanking him.

  “I’m sorry. You said something, Hank?”

  “I said, you’re late, Becker.”

  “Just marginally.” Beth headed into the main room. The sour smell of last night’s spilled beer pummeled her yards before she got to the bar.

  “Becker? What are you, like, thirty years old?”

  “I’m twenty-four.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re late. You’re always late. Everyone else around here shows up on time. Everyone else here pulls their weight.”

  Beth ducked under the bar’s folding trap. “Hank, when have I ever not been set up and ready to rock by the time those doors open?” She was already making a mental checklist of what needed to be restocked.

  “Look, don’t be late, okay? If you get set up early, you can always help out someone else.” That didn’t exactly sound like everyone pulling their own weight to Beth, but she let the comment slide, hoping that Hank would slide away right along with it. But he didn’t. “Besides, I can’t have you setting a bad example for your trainee.”

  “Trainee? Are you for real, Hank? It’s the second-busiest night of the year, and you want to saddle me with a trainee?”

  “What better time to learn?”

  “Yeah, but why me?”

  “Because, Becker,” Hank said almost grudgingly, “you’re the best bartender we’ve got.”

  Beth sighed. Flattery or not, the last thing Axis needed was more staff. The club hadn’t been pulling in the type of money it used to. Hank might be looking to remedy that by replacing the senior staffers with fresh faces. Beth had been there three years. She’d be the first to feel the ax. “All right, send in the next victim.”

  Hank turned on the heel of his Frye boot. A moment later, he was replaced by a girl, nineteen, maybe twenty. Her blond hair was teased high and held back with a black tulle headband. She sported vintage Ray-Bans that were too big for her. More than once, she had to push them back into place. She wore a deconstructed frock that Beth pegged for a Patricia Field knockoff and held a crate of liquor bottles in her lace-covered hands. It was a Madonna costume, she assumed. And the girl did look the way the singer did on her first album cover—that is, if the diva had had a face molded from uncooked dough. The girl was pretty, no argument there, but she looked unformed in a way that Beth knew she never had.

  “Let me take those.” Beth reached for the liquor crate. “What’s your name?”

  “Kelsey. Place looks different in the daytime. Smaller. Not as, I don’t know, glam.”

  “Yep. Very little about Axis is all that glamorous without the fog machine.” She dropped two tumblers onto the bar top, then reached for a bottle of Canadian whiskey and poured out generous fingers for both of them. “Welcome aboard.” Beth raised her glass with a sly wink.

  Kelsey eyed hers nervously. “Is that allowed?”

  “It’s pretty much required. Part of the gig is being the life of the party. So in the words of Heywood Gould . . .” Beth knocked back her shot. “Drink or be gone.”

  Kelsey sipped half of hers. A shiver rumbled through her at the eighty-proof burn she clearly wasn’t used to. “Drink or be gone,” she parroted before polishing off the rest. “Who’s Heywood Gould?”

  “A writer. A very underrated one.”

  “I’m a writer,” Kelsey chirped, impossibly perky. “Well, that’s what I go to school for.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” Beth said, hoping Hank hadn’t accidentally hired someone attending the local charter high school. Which, given Kelsey’s youthful air and exuberance, wasn’t out of the picture. “Where do you go to school?”

  “Here.”

  Beth gritted her teeth. Here always meant the University to the undergraduates who attended it. It was as if, to them, the dozen assorted local and municipal colleges—not to mention the multitude of technical schools—were simply invisible, just like the rest of New Harbor, persons and places alike. “That’s nice.”

  “My d
ad’s a television producer. And when I graduate, he’s going to get me a development deal for this idea I have for a show about girls in an Ivy League school and all their problems.”

  Beth resisted the urge to reach for the bottle once more. “Your dad’s a television producer, and you want to work here? Why?”

  “So I’ll know what it’s like having to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Like, for research.”

  Beth realized then that the Patricia Field dress was no knockoff, and despite the likely fact that the only boots—let alone straps—that Kelsey owned either were purchased at Bergdorf’s or were the type that slot into skis, she swore not to hate her. Not until Kelsey had really done something to deserve it.

  Beth rubbed her right knuckles. The wallop she’d laid on that twerp was already causing them to blush purple. “Grab a mop.” Beth pointed to the closet. Kelsey might never really know the terror of living paycheck to paycheck, but she could experience, in all its glory, what it felt like to muck Technicolor vomit out of a men’s room stall.

  “Omigodomigodomigodomigodomigod!” Kelsey shrieked, backing up in horror at a flood of cockroaches that streamed from the broom closet and over her open-toed pumps.

  “Sorry.” Beth hopped over, kicking as many of the roaches as she could back into the darkness and shutting the door. “Should have warned you. It’s the tunnels.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “Yeah. Miles of them. The building’s linked to an abandoned aqueduct system. All bricked up now, but some things still manage to wriggle through.” She slammed her empty tumbler down on the bar, then scraped the remains of the daddy of all roaches into the trash with the butt end of her bottle opener. “Got to make sure they don’t hop into the drinks.”

  Three

  Zoë did her level best to keep her eyes on the nail she was filing, rather than on the platinum-set three-carat Tiffany paperweight that jutted glacially from the finger it was attached to.

  “Reverse French manicure,” the twenty-three-year-old PR executive repeated. She said it slowly, and too loudly, in the manner reserved for addressing nonnative speakers. “Reverse. French. Not regular. Reverse. Understand?”

  “Yes, Miss,” Zoë murmured demurely. “Reverse.” She even went so far as to make sure her Ls came out as Rs.

  “I just want to make sure,” Miss Perfect—soon to be Mrs. Perfect—huffed. “Last time, the girl got it all wrong.”

  “Sorry, Miss. You want massage after? Complimentary.” Again, Zoë modulated her voice comically, like an anime character, the Ls to Rs and vice versa.

  “Fine.” Miss Perfect rolled her eyes so hard she almost dislodged one false lash. “After the day I’ve had, I deserve it.” Zoë wondered what life would look like if everyone got what they deserved—what they actually deserved. “I just want everything to be perfect for this party,” the woman added. “You only get engaged once.”

  For a hot second, Zoë thought about telling her that with a divorce rate topping fifty percent for first marriages, Miss PR Perfect was just a coin toss away from getting another party a few years down life’s highway. It might have been worth it just for the look she’d get, and Zoë would have done it if she hadn’t been counting on this tip to pay the light bill. She buttoned her lip and pressed through the rest of the necessary trimming, filing, decuticling, buffing, lacquering, setting, drying, and so on—all the while wondering, Who throws an engagement party on Halloween?

  Soon the chair was empty, and it would stay that way until tomorrow. Zoë shoved all of her tools into the autoclave, sterilizing them. “Checks are in,” the cashier called from her podium as she fanned a banded stack of envelopes. She held Zoë’s check firmly when she reached for it. “Why do you let them talk to you like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like some FOB.”

  Zoë tried not to flinch at the term—FOB, Fresh Off the Boat. It was one of the more colorful, if outdated, ethnic slurs she’d heard hurled at Asian-Americans. “The less they know about me, the better.”

  “But . . .” The cashier glanced down at the paycheck. “Rakoczy? What is that, Polish?”

  “Hungarian,” was all Zoë offered up. “My dad was Hungarian, my mother Korean.” It was the was that made all the difference. Both of her parents fit neatly into the was column. “What difference does it make what’s printed on my paycheck? Let the idiots think I’m just some gook.”

  “That’s racist!”

  “Then call the NAACP.” Zoë snapped up the envelope and was gone.

  Having exchanged her paycheck at the X-Bankers for eighty percent of its already grim face value, Zoë plodded down the sidewalk in search of a costume. She had about two hours left before the festivities got under way. Her roommate had insisted that they match: Zoë angel, Beth devil. She ducked into the Brooks Pharmacy, hoping against hope that she’d be able to cobble something together from the picked-over contents of its tornado-struck aisles. She dug through the disordered heaps, tossing aside PVC-packed caveman togas and naughty stewardess outfits, open packs of rubber witch noses, and plastic Dracula fangs.

  Eventually, she snagged a set of feathery—if bent—wings and a wig of curly blond tresses. No luck locating a wire halo, but she was supposed to be an angel, not a saint. Along with the slim silver A-line she’d pulled from the closet this morning, all she’d need was a touch of lip gloss, some strategically smeared body glitter, and a couple of strips of toupee tape to keep from exposing too much too soon. She was in business.

  She had shuffled to the register and was already digging in her purse for her wallet when an armload of odds and ends spilled onto the counter ahead of her. She scanned the pile: a bag of charcoal, a gallon jug of pesticide, a roll of baling wire, not one but two old-fashioned wind-up alarm clocks—and the mass kept growing. The man piling it up was tall, six-foot-two easy. His strong jaw betrayed the first hint of a five o’clock shadow. He had a thick thatch of wavy brown hair, biceps like softballs, and long-lashed ice-blue eyes that flicked every so often over his shoulder to the door.

  “Having a barbecue?” Zoë asked, eyeing the pile.

  “Something like that,” came the reply, terse and raspy, as if the man wasn’t used to speaking much. He wore a well-pressed security guard uniform, APEX stitched on his jacket’s sleeve. He had the air of someone who took his job very seriously, and would also know how to take a woman seriously.

  Zoë fidgeted with her purchases. “You the chef, then?” she asked, scanning his uniform’s name tag. “Jack.”

  If Jack heard her, he didn’t let on. He just kept piling item after item on the counter, all the while stealing glances over his shoulder.

  Zoë knew that no one would ever peg her for runway material, but she could usually turn a head or two, especially in New Harbor, especially with guys who had a touch of the yellow fever. Nothing ventured, nothing lost, she always preached. “So this something-like-a-barbecue-but-might-not-be that you are possibly the chef for . . . you got room for a plus one?”

  No answer. He just dropped his billed cap flat on the counter and rubbed his brow. Zoë peeked inside. She’d dated enough cops to know that the plastic window stitched to the roof was usually reserved for sweethearts and wives. But inside his, she saw something different: a laminated prayer card of Saint Michael, his greaved sandal crushing the neck of a serpent wriggling between an outcrop of jagged, fog-rimmed rocks. The archangel’s silver spear was stuck through the demon’s fanged skull. It was an image common enough, especially to a lapsed Catholic girl like Zoë, but she’d never seen one so visceral, so gruesome.

  She cleared her throat. “Well?” She added a coquettish lilt to her voice and gave her head a matching tilt. “This something-like-a-barbecue . . .” She brushed his sleeve lightly with the tip of her finger. “You look like you could use some company.”

  He finally made eye contact. Zoë thought she saw somet
hing there in his unyielding stare, something tugging at him, striving to break out of the prison of his gaze. “Sorry, don’t think it would be your scene.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Try me.”

  Suddenly, the room grew cold. Arctic. “I know,” he said, just before he disappeared into the autumn twilight.

  Four

  Grime stuck to the knees of Beth’s new stockings. The caked-over concrete floor of Axis’s basement had claimed yet another pair. It would just figure that tonight was the night everyone was clamoring for Harvey Wallbangers, the forgotten cocktail à la mode. The key ingredient was a liqueur called Galliano, a dusty, baseball-bat-shaped bottle of which had sat neglected next to the cash register the entire three years Beth had worked at Axis. Tonight it had run dry in less than an hour, and here she was, on her hands and knees, scouring the basement for another.

  Sixty watts of weak light dribbled from a single wire-wrapped work lamp. She crawled toward the back of the liquor cage, pushing past rickety, rust-spotted shelving. Past the musty, moldering cardboard crates crammed with years of nightclub jetsam, until she finally reached the back, where the concrete gave way to packed hardpan. She pushed aside a mildew-pocked box of tinsel garlands, and there was yet another empty shelf. There would be no more Harvey Wallbangers served at Axis this night, it seemed.

  Beth felt something scuttle over her foot. Something furry, with claws. She jerked back, caught her heel, and landed on her backside with an electric thud. Looking up, she spotted a rat not five feet away, sitting on the shelf like a greasy gargoyle. Beth didn’t mind the rats so much, not even this ten-pounder staring at her with its shiny doll eyes. The place used to be crawling with them, but they’d been gone for months. Perhaps this gnarled old bastard hadn’t gotten the memo.

  “Don’t think you’ll find any cheese down here, buddy.” She rubbed her bruised tailbone as she got to her feet. “Try upstairs. There’s a whole truckload of cheese up there. Cheesy costumes, cheesy dudes, cheesy music.” The rat paused for a moment and then scampered off. On its way out, it knocked over one of the boxes. Tangled strands of Christmas lights spilled onto the floor like entrails.