Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

  While she’s rooting around in her bag, she gives me an easy smile that can only come from some hidden place inside her chest. Her palm holds the small tin of salve. “I thought you’d need this after what he did to you.” She motions around her entire face, meaning mine, then lays a cool hand on my cheek, leaves it there long enough to thaw my chest before heading inside.

  I stare at the tin in my hand.

  A low whistle. Fancy smiles that goddamned smile, rocks on his heels.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t say nothing.”

  “Fuck you, Clancy.”

  He holds his arms up, gives me something like jazz hands, sings, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.”

  His laugh echoes behind him. He tosses his scarf over his shoulder like an old fighter pilot, strolls over to Mom’s, disappears inside. I press my fingers into the tin and spread the salve over my face. I slip the tin into my breast pocket, cross my arms, lean against the wall, and concentrate on the warmth rolling up my face.

  The sky separates in slashes of pink and orange, morning exhuming itself from night. The tea and brandy is now cold in my cup. I’m not sure if Sal is trying to stay in my good graces with the hopes of convincing me to dive, watching out for his investment and investment’s hands, or slowly poisoning me. Each is as equally viable as the next, and I don’t care to know which it is.

  As the streets begin to wake, Carissa steps from the door, knee-length pea coat swishing as she moves. She’s got her black bag now, and I didn’t notice her bring it in.

  “You look better,” she says.

  I raise my cup to her.

  “Fancy a drink?”

  I look at my watch, though I know damn well what time it is and that I should be going home to sleep and see Mona for a while before heading to the gym and then back to the Gurney for my shift, but hear myself say I would before I know I’m saying it.

  “Mom’s?” she says. I shake my head, point to some arbitrary point farther down, and we set off. Her twisting lope keeps me from moving too fast. A number of watering holes and show bars reel through my head, but I can’t decide on a particular one. Not one I frequent, but one where I know we won’t get butchered. We come to a wooden-plank door reinforced with rust-pocked iron bands, and I open it and usher her inside.

  An animatronic racetrack with die-cut metal dogs rings the ceiling. Dust hangs in the air and the stools have crescent moons cut in the seats. I pull one out and offer to take her bag. She hangs it on a nail beneath the bar.

  “What are you having?”

  “A good Beaujolais, not too fruity, not too dry.” She twists her fingers around her chin.

  “This isn’t quite—”

  “Loosen your panties.” Her knuckles sting my shoulder. “Whatever you’re having.”

  I ask the woman behind the bar for two ryes. The jukebox starts playing an old country song. I remember the melody, but not the words.

  “That guy was pretty massive.”

  I look over the place. Two humps in the corner, tossing match-sticks and homemade cards back and forth. A bored streetgirl at the next table, smoking a thin cigarette while watching the card players. Chained up in the corner, a TV broadcasting a story about two more kids gone missing. Must be fifteen in the last month. A waif of a little girl runs slalom between the tables. She’s maybe four or five years old, with a tattered dress and skin discolored by olive and black splotches. No one acknowledges her.

  “The guy you just fought,” she says.

  “Right.” Blood rushes through my face. “Yeah, he was.”

  “Why didn’t you knock him out in the first part?”

  “Shit, did it look like I wasn’t trying? The guy was made of clay and rubble. I’d hit him and he’d absorb it, reform.”

  The bar matron clomps over to us, both glasses cupped in her right hand, the empty left sleeve of her shirt pinned to the body. She stares through grease-smeared lenses. “How you paying?”

  “Cash?” I say.

  The bar matron grunts, says twenty. I pull a few bills from my pocket, thumb a few coins for a tip. She plods away.

  We clink glasses. “I thought you weren’t interested in boxing.”

  “I never said that.”

  I sip my rye. “It was implied.”

  “Then I guess you weren’t paying very close attention.”

  If only you knew, sparrow.

  “I asked around, heard good things about you,” she says. “Colored me curious.”

  I lean back, surveying, ask what kind of things she heard. She sips her drink to hide what I believe to be a smile.

  A tug on my leg. The discolored girl holds out her empty palm. Olive and charcoal splotches dot her milky skin.

  “I don’t see anything there, sweetheart.” I glance at Carissa, for some reason.

  The girl presses a finger into her palm. Curls and extends it. Telling me to give her something.

  Before I can stop it, a vision of her and Mona flashes before me. My broken and discarded daughter, bruised before birth. Mona’s distended stomach, necrotic and oozing. Walking beside each other over downtown sidewalks, licking ice cream, trails of effluvia behind them as if they’re leaking tar.

  Tugging on my leg again. I dig in my pocket, pull out a few coins. “Can’t you say please?”

  She shakes her head.

  “If you can’t say please I’m not going to give you anything.”

  She parts her lips to display a tongue severed at the frenulum then presses her finger into her palm again. I drop the money and turn back to the bar, ask for another drink.

  “You shouldn’t have given that to her,” Carissa says.

  “Are you joking?”

  “She’s going to keep asking for more.”

  “She’s four years old.”

  “Just saying.”

  The bar matron drops another glass before me. I hand her more bills.

  “So I’ve got a question for you,” Carissa says. “A proposition, actually.”

  “Oh?” Beneath a corner table, the girl folds a piece of cardboard into a series of squares, creates a tiny fort. She walks her fingers into it, her other hand knocking on the door, asking for a cup of sugar.

  “I need some help.” She pulls a cigarette from her jacket pocket, lights it with matches sitting on the bar. “I’ve got a part-time job of sorts.”

  “What are you, a madam or something?”

  She smiles through the smoke, points up at the jazz tune scratching through the air. “Such a great song,” she says. “No, if I was a madam, I’d have enough money to leave here and not have to be a madam. I work with Sal, procuring items, running Favors for, well,” she points behind me, “him, actually.”

  I follow her finger to the corner above us and see Arthur Reiss on the television. His hair looks different from before, but there’s the same beautiful weather and I wonder what’s with all the repeat news.

  “Okay.” I hold some rye in my mouth, let the bouquet seep up into my sinuses, feel it warm my throat.

  “You look like a man who knows his way around, anyway.” She raises her glass to me. “And everyone says you’re honorable to a fault. After watching you with that hunk of cattle the other night,” she says, gesturing vaguely. “Basically, I could use some help. Backup, you know?”

  “You need a bodyguard?”

  “Not a bodyguard. Someone there in case some shit goes down.” She tosses back the rest of her drink, squints, and shakes her head. “Backup.”

  “I don’t know.” I think of Mona, of the two blanks between us and the Plantation, of the cherry blossoms in her hair.

  “You’ve got to be bored sitting in front of that place all night, staring at the same sad fuckers who march in just to get thrown out until they can’t march anymore. Think of the adventure you could have. It’s like fighting, but doing some good in the process.”

  “I earn money fighting. For a good reason.”

  “I’m not saying it�
��s bad.” She takes a long drag from her cigarette, regrouping. “But this could be fun.”

  In my head, I see Mona, the Plantation and cherry blossoms, the old man with the broken wrist, Fancy Clancy and his perpetual shuffle, Mom’s, the Anvil’s fist coming at me.

  “You know you’re bored,” she says. “Jesus, I can see it broadcast across your face every night I walk in.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She holds her arms out. “Look around you, Marcel. This place fucking sucks. If you’re not trying to get out, you don’t realize you’re stuck in it. You need to learn how to have some fun or just fucking kill yourself now.”

  Fuck it. I swallow the rest of my glass. “All right.”

  “Good.” Her hand touches mine. “Come on.”

  I slip off the chair when she pulls. “Where are we going?”

  The look on her face says it should be obvious if I weren’t a punching bag.

  “Where else?” She shrugs. “Work.”

  The orange and pink morning has given way to gray, and in the Financial District, the skyscrapers’ peaks and clouds are indistinguishable from one another. Commuters hustle along the streets, flow in and out of buses, bound up and down the train steps, none of them paying us even a passing glance. Uniformed men trace the sidewalks, sweeping away trash. Singed pieces of what look to be hundred-dollar bills sit crumpled in the gutter. Boys with the haircuts of the privileged stand on the corners holding up signs. Paper is profit. Cash, not ass. Money will save you where Jesus has failed. Basic courtesy is forgotten, or maybe disregarded. Briefcases wielded, coffee splashed, wingtips crushed. I feel safer among the disease and cinders of the Red Light than here.

  We pass a park rimmed with an eight-foot chain-link fence. A girl with pigtails sprints through a loft of pigeons, sending out gray, feathered shrapnel. Walking along the edge of the fence is a pregnant woman with hair like cherry blossom bark, carrying two sacks of groceries, a bag with protruding scraps of metal hanging from her shoulder. A bus passes and she’s on the ground, one man repeatedly kicking her while the other tries to pry the bag from her shoulder. None of the passersby stop. She curls fetal, trying to protect herself, her baby, but the bag’s strap is wrapped around her arm and pulls her straight again. Black sludge spills from her. They look up for a flash, and I can see they’re not men but boys, too young to grow facial hair. I go to her—sprint to her, trying to be there when it happens again—fist reared back and ready to destroy them, and before I get to the park the street explodes into white specks.

  The cab blares its horn, the tone splitting my temples. Cool hands under my armpits. The scent of sandalwood.

  “What the hell?” Carissa says.

  I blink away the static and look around. I’m standing two feet from the sidewalk. The cabbie flicks me off and chirps his tires. Carissa keeps me upright.

  Across the street, the pigtail girl stalks another loft of pigeons. Businessmen and -women scuttle along the sidewalk. Men sweep the gutters. There is no woman, no black stain.

  “I got dizzy.”

  She thumbs back my eyelids, examines me. Snaps three times in my face, moves her hand in the pattern of a cross.

  “Yeah, you need some part-time work. Boxing is definitely not the best profession for you.” Carissa pulls me between two palm trees painted on the brick wall. “Come on, this is it.”

  Grass skirts edge the bar, tiki torches propped up in the corners, flames constantly recoloring the room. The center of the floor is reinforced glass covering a sapphire pond stocked with koi and some fish I don’t know, though the spotted one has the dead black stare of a shark.

  I slide into a booth, lay my head against the granite table for a moment, my breath making a halo of condensation.

  “You okay?”

  I nod, tell her I’m worn out.

  “Need to get you some coffee or something.” She points at the bar, says to go order three Mai Tais.

  It’s not really a drink becoming of me, but maybe I could use the vitamins.

  The bartender’s shirt is ugly enough to induce seizures. He needs to turn sideways to get in and out of the bar. His eyes are rounded with heavy lids and his forehead is flecked with black. He must dye his hair and fake tan to keep the whole Polynesian vibe. I lean against the counter and order our drinks.

  He shifts to the side, looking over my shoulder toward our booth. “Thirsty?”

  “Dying.”

  “Right,” and he threads bottles between his fingers, pours them into a metal shaker. A suited man sits at a raised table along the edge of the pond. The cloth of his suit could pass for scorched tinfoil, not unlike his skin. He’s rapt by the TV over the bar. More Reiss, more reruns, yet still a different one.

  The bartender sets two drinks in front of me. “I’ll bring the other one over,” he says.

  I catch an explosion of color below me as I cross, the school of fish scattering as the dwarf shark comes close. I slip into our booth again, hand a bouquet to Carissa. We clink glasses and the citrus in the drink burns my throat. That aside, it is easy to drink. I don’t know that I could bring myself to order this without her at my side, however.

  “What’s this title thing all about?” She pokes at a pineapple chunk with her straw.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s,” she gestures inarticulately, “the point of it?”

  “Why do I do it, you mean?”

  “Sure.”

  I take a swallow and realize half the drink is gone. “I don’t know. Why not?”

  “There are fifteen books on our street alone. Why not take bets? Make your own bets.” She looks to the side and nods. “You could probably make more money that way. Not that it’ll do you much good, but—”

  “You wouldn’t want to be champion of something?”

  “Champion gets me fuck all. A pretty belt I can use to kill rats and bills to wallpaper my bedroom with.” She pulls a cigarette from her bag, slides it between her fingers. “It’s all worthless.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “There is no point. That’s the point.” I toss the cherry in my mouth, swallow the fruit and chew the stem. “Not everything needs to have a reason or result.” Things never have a reason, or a result. A puddle of amniotic fluid and a suitcase of blood money are as valuable as cherry blossoms in hair and reflective wood floors.

  “I don’t get it.” She says it to me but her head is turned to watch the bartender, who sets the third Mai Tai before the suited man and nods in our direction.

  “You sing because you like it, yeah? That’s reason enough.”

  Still not looking at me, waving with her fingers at the suited man with her fingertips. “With my grandmother, I liked it. For Sal, I endure it.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a living.”

  I pull her waving hand to me. The force with which I snatch it surprises us both. I drop it as if it will bite back. The brief, crushing thought passes that she is a whore for Sal.

  “No. What are you doing now?”

  She opens her mouth, to scream, to answer, to tell me to fuck off, but the suited man plops down in our booth before words crest past her lips.

  “Hey there.” He sets his half-empty drink down, extends a hand. “Tim Dermott.”

  Shaking his hand like a fawn, she says, “Muito prazer. Eu vou para abrir o seu corpo,” with such a smile that I don’t need to know what it means to know I want to break Timothy Dermott’s precious little face.

  “Exotic,” he says, raising his glass. “I’ve always loved French. Rolls off the tongue so,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “sweetly.”

  He takes a long drink, sucking at the orange slice when the liquor is gone. “Hey, three more over here.” He doesn’t look back at the bar when he orders.

  “So, Tim Dermott,” Carissa says. “What do you do?”

  Still, the son of a bitch hasn’t looked at me. Orders anothe
r drink for me, but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge my presence. I press my knuckles against the corner of the table, imagine the shape his face will make when I crush his tender little cheekbones.

  “Well, I can’t quite talk about it, confidentiality and all. But Mr. Reiss—” He shakes his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, drink must’ve gone to my head.”

  “Quite all right,” she says, touching the back of his hand. “Go on.”

  “Right, well.” His eyelids flutter and he looks around the room. “What was I saying?”

  “You were telling us about—”

  And she doesn’t need to finish because Timothy Dermott collapses face first on the table.

  “Thank fuck,” she says.

  I look at her, at the back of Timothy Dermott’s head, at the bartender flipping through channels. She’s already pushed the body out of the booth, his deadweight arm slung around her neck.

  She slaps two bills on our table. “Give this to Brian.”

  “Who the fuck is Brian?”

  She doesn’t answer as she drags Timothy Dermott out the door.

  I catch up twenty yards down the street as she’s turning into an alley. The morning air is near freezing but her face is covered in sweat. I touch her shoulder.

  “I got it. It’s fine.” Her words are rushed, breath short.

  “Carissa.”

  “I got it.”

  I unwrap his arm, push her aside, and heft him over my shoulder.

  She’s almost knocked over by his legs when I turn. “Okay. What the fuck are we doing?”

  Her cheeks are glistening and flushed, clouds rush from her mouth, but she still keeps a tone. “We’re working.” She shoves a grease bucket away and opens the door, motioning for me to follow.

  Green light sluicing through a wire basket. Wooden shipping palettes stacked seven high, nearing the ceiling. Bits of straw and hay, broken glass bottles. She constructs a makeshift table, tosses a wool blanket over it.

  “Lay him down here.”

  I do as I’m told because I don’t know what else to do.

  Timothy Dermott’s chest rises and falls, shallow but constant.