Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

  “The last bout’s coming up soon.”

  “That’s great, honey,” she says, rinsing one side of the pan, running her hand over it, rinsing the other, inspecting, rinsing, inspecting, rinsing.

  Tapping the bone in my hand like a Neanderthal conductor so I won’t flap my hands and fly away, I clear my throat. “I made it to the championship, you know.”

  “You’re doing so great with that.”

  Washing her hands now.

  “Yeah, it should be a good one. Good opponent.” I have no idea who I’m fighting. “Maybe the best I’ve fought so far.”

  “I’m sure you’re better, darling.” A sponge now, scraping at her hands, trying to get the red off. “Is this the one that will—that I can,” she trails off.

  “It is. This’ll take care of you, Mona.”

  Grunts and an animal whine.

  “Mona.”

  Heavy breathing.

  “Goddammit, Mona.”

  I hurry over to her. Steel wool sloughs away her skin. I snatch the pad from her hand and grip her fingers in my palm, hold her arms tight against her body. Bleeding lines cover her forearms. I squeeze her against me, keep her from thrashing. Her body vibrates and her shoulders writhe against the seam of stitches on my chest. Some of her muscles spasm, maybe the heave before a cry, and her head lurches back, cracking against the hole in my face. Blood rushes beneath the skin, bile riding a charge of pain up my throat. My knees disappear and I squeeze her tighter as we tumble to the ground, my shoulder breaking our fall against the cabinet. Her body is self-destructing, alternating between nestling in my chest and scrambling to be unencumbered. I make the shushing white-noise sound. By the time the thrashing subsides, my mouth is dry.

  “Another week, just one more. We’ll call and get you on their list.” I start to hum a tune to calm her so she can sleep without medicine. It’s not until the second chorus that I realize I don’t know the lyrics, only the melody, because the words are Portuguese.

  A long sigh and her body shifts forward, dry lips breathing on my forearm. She’s fallen asleep. I lift her up inch by inch, the adhesive and thread spanning my torso threatening to give up the ghost and let loose my insides. Twisting sideways, I get through the door and drape her across our bed. I fetch the gauze from my gym bag and wrap her hands like a fighter’s, keeping the layers thin so the wounds can breathe. I give her an air kiss, an inch from her forehead to avoid waking her, and resign myself to the couch.

  It was inevitable, really. Beautiful things, dependable things, they’re only as permanent as the attention they’re paid. A garden left untended will wither and die. Talent untapped will turn to ash. Without appreciation, we’re no better than those we scorn.

  I keep this in mind as I watch two fucktards use the leg of my stool as a spit to roast a hunk of meat. Apparently I left it outside, and now it has returned to the earth. Farewell, friend. You supported me well.

  I nod at patrons as they approach the Gurney, search them for weapons or dummy chips or decks of cards, hoist them from the concrete and toss them in the alley when they depart. Gamblers come and go, the sun rises and falls, the City awakens and slips back into its coma.

  At some point, the moon hanging high, Fancy makes his way over. He’s full of conciliatory words about the Monolith, what a cheating piece of shit he is, how someone should really crack down and enforce the rules to keep fights fair.

  I nod, say definitely.

  He breathes fumes, though, so I assume this bout of camaraderie is more a lack of oxygen to the brain than a desire for pugilistic reform. He winds his way to the upcoming fight.

  “The real question is, how you feeling about it?” he says. “Luger’s a real son of a bitch.”

  “That’s the word on the street.”

  “I fought him twice, back when.” Fancy takes a slug from an eggplant-colored glass bottle. The smell leads me to believe it could strip the warts right off half the girls from Norma Jean’s. “That bastard hid packets of acid under his tongue in case he needed it.”

  “Needed it for what?”

  Clancy looks at me like I’m a talking ape. “To spit in your face.”

  “What if it’d broken and he swallowed it?”

  “You got to hit him in order for it to break.”

  I step aside for one of the madams from Mom’s, motion politely inside, turn back to Fancy. “And this is the guy I have to fight with the wind whistling over my face like a goddamned milk jug?”

  “Don’t have to fight him, but yeah.” He shrugs, knowing that it’s never a question of have to. “Still feeling so cocky?”

  I scratch the back of my neck, tempted to tell Clancy that it’s not being cocky but confident, and if I can’t be confident that talent and blood-draining determination will ultimately defeat cutthroats and cheats, I might as well jump in front of a train. Before I can enlighten him, Sal throws the door open, nods for me to join him inside.

  “Who’s going to watch the door?”

  He looks side to side, says we’ll be fine. Clancy ambles back down to Norma Jean’s to waste more money.

  I pass between chipped tables, felt tops scarred with cigarette burns, spilled drinks, and knife marks. Carissa and the guitar player perform in the corner, she in a blue dress reminiscent of the one I’d imagined. She curves her back and neck as she sings, makes her body the scythe with which she attacks the soul of anyone listening. The gamblers, though, they focus on their cards, their hands near each other’s chip piles and pockets.

  I slip into the corner booth, across from Sal. The table’s wooden top is bare but for a sweating drink and serrated knife. He stares at some point behind me. I fight the urge—knowing he’s staring at Carissa—but I am weak, and when I do turn, she looks at the same time. Our eyes meet as she leads into a crescendo, arching her body, using her twisted leg to make the scene more dramatic, though I’m the only one really watching, really listening. Because what she’s saying, I know she’s saying it to me. I twist back to Sal and his fingers are knitted together the way children fashion a church steeple with their hands. The slight fault line of a smile on his lips.

  “Any idea what she’s saying?” he says.

  “I don’t speak French.”

  The smirk shifts slightly. “How’s Mona?” he says.

  I grab the cocktail waitress as she passes our table, ask for a cup of coffee.

  “Doing that well?”

  “She’s sleeping better without the medication. Seemed like it made her dreams a little better but knocked her deeper down.”

  “So now she wakes up screaming every night?”

  “At least she can wake up.”

  He sucks his lips in, swirls the ice cubes inside his glass. The waitress returns with my coffee.

  “Heard this final’s going to be a tough one.”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  “You feeling froggy?”

  I point at my cheek. “I think I can beat him, but apparently I’ve underestimated the lengths to which fuckwits will go to win.”

  “Appears so.”

  “But, yeah, I think I’ve got him.”

  He looks over my shoulder again. This time I manage to resist. “Noticed you two around recently.”

  I take a slug from my coffee, nearly have to chew it down. “You know that Mona doesn’t go out anymore.” We both know Mona’s not a part of this equation.

  “That’s about what I figured.” He pours the rest of the drink down his throat, waves his hand to get another. “Let me get down to it. I’ve seen you fight. I know you’re a good fighter, a great fighter. I’d go so far as to say you might be the best fighter in the City.”

  “I appreciate that, but—”

  “I’m not finished.” He fingers the blade. “There ain’t no way you’re putting down Ezekiel. You can’t take it like you used to, and they keep it straight Old Testament out his way.”

  “Clancy said it was Luger.”

  “Clancy’s Juice-pickl
ed and punch-drunk.” He laughs to himself, gives a low whistle. “Luger had his face blown off at a whorehouse last night. Some crazy fuck looking for his daughter went buck wild with a shotgun. Luger was tied up all sexy-like and the man walked in, went bang bang.”

  “Shit.”

  “This isn’t a bad thing for you, you know.” He pauses for a moment as the waitress places his drink on a stained napkin. He gives a thin smile, telling her to kindly fuck off. “You had your time, Marcel, but that time is gone. I want you to know all of this, because I’m putting fifty thousand on you to lose. I’m doing you a favor.”

  “How is that a favor?”

  “You fall in this fight, not many people think twice about it. ‘He’s getting old,’ they’ll say. ‘Great pug in his time, though.’”

  “I don’t need to fall. I can beat him.”

  “You’re not listening, kid. Your reputation will stay with you, and this whole shady business doesn’t leave the booth. But you make sure I get my spread—” He nods behind me again. “—and me and her can have ourselves a nice conversation on the ride to the train station.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You don’t need to keep up airs by asking rhetorical questions.”

  I swallow the rest of my coffee, feel it gurgle through my guts.

  “And before you feel the need to ask, should you get all noble on me, the other conversation will be between her and my axe on the way to the farms. And you, dear friend,” he taps the back of my hand with his blade, leaving a thin leaking line, “can pay me for her.”

  Words swirl and bash against the inside of my skull, none of them coming anywhere close to my tongue.

  “Or, shit, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just double hers and what you owe just for pissing me off. Who can tell these things?”

  “Those don’t sound like wildly different options.”

  “They do if you’re that little sweetheart over there.”

  “Still.”

  “You’re missing the point, Marcel.” He leans forward. “Yes, you very well could beat him, but you’re coming out damaged, if you’re even coming out.”

  “He’ll be a test.”

  “You need to go down. She needs you to go down.” He leans back against the booth, knits his hands behind his head. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe even Mona needs to you to fall, too. Point is: your face is in the canvas or her head is in a vise.”

  He diverts his attention to a table two down from the corner, where a Chinese man herds a large pile of chips, brings them into his fold. I no longer exist at this table. I toss back my cup, though there’s nothing in it, and make for the door.

  Carissa yelps, Nao, throws her body forward, working it into the song. Arm out, fingers curled, trying to touch me from across the room. The guitar player slams his hands against the strings, coerces every bit of life from them. Her voice creeps from a low register, climbing notes like fire escape steps to a bedroom window, shouting the highest notes until her voice shreds, falls in ribbons around her, us. Head pointing down, lips resting on the microphone, she looks up. With a throat coated in sandpaper and broken glass, she lets go a deep sigh, says, “Nao me arrependo de nada.” Breath courses over the microphone, a slight flutter in the rhythm.

  I press my hand to my mouth, tip it slightly, as if I’m sneaking her a kiss, before turning toward the door.

  I trudge through the Red Light’s streets, passing an old Vietnamese restaurant with scorch marks along the walls, stepping around thin bones I hope are canine. Paper bags stained the color of mud, a few winking needles and singed foil. Stardust and un-children are nonexistent yet omnipresent in this neighborhood. A door swings open and almost crushes my nose. I take it as a cosmic sign that I need a drink.

  Liam’s Pint House feels more like an actual Irish pub than an authentic Irish pub. Weathered red and green paint, wood and tarnished brass accents everywhere. Bottles of near-empty whiskey hang behind the bar, rimmed by a dozen shields indicating various beers. Two wooden kegs sit at the end of the bar.

  I pull out a stool, and a shrunken nub of a woman appears from below the bar. “What’ll I have you?”

  “Whatever people in here like to drink.” She gives a toothy smile and grabs a glass. A couple stools down from me, a man breathes into his beer. His jacket looks softer than my bed sheets; the beard covering his face seems haphazard, rushed. He waves his hand for a refill, then surveys the bar, scouring the layers of dust for someone trailing him. Something familiar about him.

  “Hey.” I point my finger at him. His nose has been broken and poorly set. “You’re the lapdog.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re Arthur Reiss’s guy.”

  He has little response to this, continues waiting patiently for his beer.

  “Why aren’t you drinking caviar wine in some marbled bar with little Polynesian children serving you?”

  “You don’t watch the news very much, do you?”

  “Only when I’m drinking.”

  He smiles, tips his glass to me. “Good man.”

  My beer tastes like it’s been sitting on a windowsill all day. “Sorry, miss.” I lean over to her. “This beer tastes like trough water.”

  “It’s cask ale, love. Supposed to be like that.” And it’s not so much not understanding the beer as it is the way she cups my chin, like a child who’s finally figured out not to shit in their pants, that sends blood through my cheeks. I lower myself into my stool and replace stale with cultured.

  “So, you hiding or running?” he says.

  I look around, though there’s no one else in the pub. “Neither.”

  “Contemplating.”

  A swallow. The smell of old, damp wheat. “Sure.”

  “The Greeks once said that no man is an island. No one can change the world.”

  “I’m not sure that was the Greeks.”

  He slurps his drink. “Whoever it was, they were right. There’s only so much one man can control, you know?”

  I can only nod, take half of the glass in a quick, large gulp. When I thump my chest to move it down, I feel a dripping down my chin. I touch my cheek and find my beer has seeped through the stitches. This cannot bode well for the fight.

  “What can you do, though—just give up?” I say.

  “No.” He smirks. “Drink.” Another down his throat. I hope he doesn’t live far from here.

  “There is that, lapdog.” I follow suit and finish the barnyard beer.

  The barmaiden appears from nowhere. “Another, love?”

  “God no.” I pull a few bills from my pocket. “Four fingers of rye, please.”

  “The past is fucked, as far as I can tell,” he says. “We try to pretty it up, give the revisionist version of our crises, but the bones are just as brittle and soon enough, the whole body will collapse. You just have to pull yourself together and chop off the thing at the neck, build your own body.”

  For a flash, I see it as a conversation with myself, each arm craned up to the heavens, Mona’s head perched on one hand, Carissa’s on the other. They chatter like hens, my thumb inside their lower mandibles. I don’t know what they’re saying because they’re such good friends they’ve established their own language, and I only know that the overall feeling of the conversation is grotesquely optimistic.

  “What do you do with the parts? What if they can make a new body?” She sets a glass at my hands and I drink half in one gulp to wash away the decapitated image.

  “Old parts are a joke. They sit there and remind you of the body that’d been there. If you put them together, you have a mangled creation that will only walk into walls. They serve no purpose but to torture you every time you pass by.” He takes a long, considered sip, holds it in his mouth, then sets his glass down with a thump and turns to me. “You have extra parts, you sell them and move on. If they’re worthless and you can’t get anything, light them on fire to warm your hands.”

  The apartment
is silent. The special kind of emptiness that only follows some complete revelation of violence. The kind of silence that lurks around our apartment every night.

  Dumb son of a bitch. Don’t you remember drinking too much makes you maudlin?

  I peel off my jacket and pull the fucker’s decaying tooth from my pocket. Since when has it become acceptable to continue badgering someone, an ordinary citizen, for dope money even after said citizen repeats in a polite tone they’d love for you to go fuck yourself? Since always, if I’m being honest, but why is that all right is the real question. I flip on the faucet, run my knuckles under the cold water, scrub some soap into the gash his tooth left. I don’t particularly want coke-procuring cum seeping in my veins.

  After my hand is suitably clean, I stick my face under, let the water shock my nerves, get my head straight. Lapdog had the amiable ability to make me drink like a moron. I suck down water until my stomach is bloated, let the anger drip out my fingers.

  I kick off my boots, shove them under the couch, and creep down the hallway to our room on exaggerated tiptoes.

  Mona lies fetal in the middle of the bed, a shallow-breathing kidney bean. The curve of her back, nubs of her perfectly aligned spine, pressing against the sheet. Her mother was of the book-balancing persuasion and made Mona walk the length of their house with a surgical textbook atop her head. Each time it fell meant a rap over the knuckles with her wooden cooking spoon. Mona would complain that her mother had ruined her, but when she lost herself inside a sculpture, her hands ducking in clay crevice, smoothing the curve of a woman’s hip, bringing the point to a garish elbow, her posture remained perfectly straight, the iron rod of her mother’s psyche implanted in her spine. Her hands were magical things. I’d sit and watch them scoop ten pounds of wet earth from the oil drum we kept, plop it on her platform and begin to pull it skyward, stretching and compressing and smoothing and bending until it wasn’t a glob but an anthropomorphic representation of Earth. She’d brush flyaway hairs back from her face with the back of her wrist, blow them away with a short puff to keep clay from her face.

  This creation, though, she metered it. She brought into existence real things where there had only been mass. She created something from nothing. Why can’t I do the same? If her attack created a need for space, for cleanliness, and I gave her that, could I accommodate her for too long? The absence of touch and dirt had created its own need within her, and by trying to help her for too long I’d done more damage. What could the Plantation give her that I couldn’t? Like they know her better than her own husband. I can love her, even if it’s loving her into oblivion, and rewire the synapses in her brain. Carissa can have the money from fighting because I will heal Mona myself.