Thrust

by Tom Piccirilli

  He could hear the clatter of the trash cans going over. Doreena's wild moaning continued to echo up and down the empty icy streets and the woods that bordered the yard. The old man spent two hours out there as the snow came down. He stepped back inside holding a shovel.

  Is it you or is it him? Chase asked. You do your best to hurdle your own history, the black stubble of that hated face clinging to the sides of the sink, as you pull aside the shower curtain and look down, into the bubbles of your secret hells, asking what did your father really do that night and where's the goddamn baby?

  Then, maybe for effect or maybe because he was getting horny, he tried it himself. Suck it down, baby! Suck it down, fine mama! Didn't have quite the same effect.

  Now the ladies gaping with distaste and loathing, the husbands ready to beat the goddamn shit out of him.

  In the end, Chase had to be hustled off by Shake, the rage coming up so strong that he was nearly howling by then. Timmy vaulted the bar. Jez stubbed out her cigarette and faded into the consuming blackness.

  He wildly reached for her as they took him over backwards.

  The pair of ivory girls in front went "Hee hee," and smiled brightly. Sure, why not. He chewed up his tongue trying to stem the tide of his words as he hit the floor. Shake clasped one of those powerful hands over Chase's mouth until he couldn't breathe. Blood poured out between dark fingers. The applause was deafening.

  2

  Shake Sunshine Jr. told people he lived in Harlem but he'd never been above 34th Street in his life. Even when they were releasing him from the Garden Falls psychiatric facility out on Long Island he wouldn't let the driver go over the Queensboro Bridge at 59th.

  He threw such a bad scene in the van that they thought about turning around and taking him back to the hospital. They finally assented and came through the Midtown Tunnel instead, but they made Shake pay the toll himself. It pacified him, and he wrote a series of loving poems to the attendants. Odes to George & Jeff.

  In Shake's apartment on Fourth Street, around the block from the Narrative Bone Palace, Chase washed his mouth out at the sink and stared into the mirror, eyeing the reflection of a bottle of JD on top of the refrigerator. That awful tickle was back in the center of his chest, and only liquor or the hardcore mood equalizer meds could burn it out.

  He wanted to fall into the old pattern because it gave him some kind of structure, a way of moving from one point to another. After six years of college, five teaching high school English, two months in a mental hospital, and a year and a half in the can, Chase still wasn't sure which institution had come closer to doing him in.

  Shake's place was decorated in a retro-70s, pseudo-mock-black militant style that was a holdover from when he used to perform in a beret and hold up banners of Chi and Eldridge Cleaver.

  Before that phase he'd been caught up in this African ancestry thing and wore a dashiki and turban and called himself Babawanda Mugwanda. There was still a snakeskin drum and a kudu antelope horn in the corner that Chase would hang out the window and blow when he was drunk.

  On the walls were photos of Shake's grandparents, a black light poster of Hendrix, the check from his first poetry sale—$1.33—and a centerfold of Jennifer Jackson, the first black Playmate from back in '65. He'd bought that one off eBay for thirty bucks and considered it a part of his personal history.

  You found your love wherever you could. You made it up as you went along if you had to, pulled it in from the outside. Somehow Shake had made peace with all his own various facets and aspects. It was a trick he just couldn't teach Chase.

  Shake glanced over, plucking at his chin. He was angry but nobody would know it by looking at him. He showed no emotion as he sat on his busted couch, expressionless but steaming. Fluff from a torn cushion wafted through the air and caught in the thick hair on his arms. The prongs of his beard had started to droop a bit.

  Okay, so here it comes.

  Plant yourself, get ready.

  "What're you going on about Garden Falls again for, man?" Shake asked. His voice was calm, low, and perfectly even. You'd never guess he was loaded with the kind of phobias they didn't even have names for yet. Really ridiculous shit you couldn't make up.

  Like an irrational fear of poofy linen pirate shirts, Irish guys named Connor, chickens with only one leg, fingernails longer than two inches, Rod Serling impersonators (but not Rod Serling), the last inch of Mayonnaise at the bottom of the jar, kids in diagonally striped pink shirts and shorts so that they looked like peppermint twists. Gum. Cotton balls.

  They were such outrageous hang-ups that you'd never know anything was wrong unless you saw him go catatonic while staring at Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, the poofy shirt completely flinging him out of his mind. You never asked him to make you a tuna sandwich in case he didn't have a fresh jar of Mayo on hand. You were always checking the crowds to see if some mick named Connor might be heading your way. Chase could count off about thirty of Shake's phobias and figured he still didn't know at least half of them. You never knew what might set him off, send him into a fugue state.

  "Listen—"

  "Don't give me listen," Shake said. "These whitebread kids and aging yuppies don't pay to deal with that sort of senseless display."

  "You sure about that?" Chase asked. "What, you didn't hear them screeching for an encore?"

  "They're easily amused," Shake admitted.

  "Then be happy. We gave them a show."

  "It wasn't the show I wanted them to have."

  "It's not your choice. Not only yours anyway."

  That stopped him. Shake sometimes forgot they were partners. He'd become so successful and stable it was easy to leave Chase and his different brand of craziness behind.

  "Saying what you've got to say so you can deal with the world is one thing, Gray. But all that shrieking and peculiarity, man, talking about blood, biting up your own tongue. Haven't you had enough of that yet?"

  Chase thought about it seriously for a minute. "I ask myself that same question all the time."

  "Have you ever answered it?"

  "I'm working up to that."

  "Strive harder."

  "Hey—"

  "There isn't any hey—"

  They hit the same impasse as always. Shake had been in the Falls with Chase for about six weeks of overlap, but he didn't have nearly as rough a time of it and didn't believe the stories Chase told him about Arlo Barrack and the fourth floor. He figured they were just hallucinations and Chase didn't want to argue. Besides, he wasn't so sure himself anymore.

  "How much did you drink tonight?" Shake asked.

  "Nothing."

  "The truth."

  "Nothing. I'm not lying."

  "Then what is going on with you? I do my part, I'm here to listen." He kept staring at the centerfold on the wall, still wanting to get his hands on Jennifer Jackson's melon-sized tits. "But you've got to talk to me. I thought you were beyond all this."

  "That's just a foolish statement, my friend." It was, really, when you got down to it. Like Shake could handle some of those long fingernails coming at him? The really lengthy ones, the Halloween ones, that started to curl?

  "You say that as if you're proud."

  Chase rubbed the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth, squeezing out a drop of blood. The bitter taste matched his mood. You took your conceits and grabbed your self-esteem wherever you could find it. "Proud enough." Shake tended to get a little judgmental at times. "How about you?"

  It got Shake so riled that he threw some heat into his words. "Well, you explain it to me then. Now what's going on? You been out of the hospital for five years, out of prison for nearly three and a half, and you're acting more reckless and runaway than when you were inside."

  "I have an addictive personality."

  "You've got a whack's personality."

  "Hey," Chase said, "that's just being mean now."

  "Talking about your father and babies again?" Shake dug into his beard, pul
ling, petting. It was something he did when he got uptight but was still trying hard to keep hold of his chocolaty cool. "He didn't kill any baby, Gray."

  "No?"

  "His battery was dead and he went next door to Mrs. Godfrey's home and borrowed her car. Do you remember that?"

  "Hm," Chase said. He wasn't sure.

  "She came and stayed with you while he drove the babysitter to the hospital. Darlena."

  "Doreena."

  "Yes, Doreena, that's her. She was a college freshman, married, you know, to her high school sweetheart. She wasn't retarded the way you sometimes think, man. She was a chemistry major. Your father took her to the hospital and she had a baby boy. Do you remember any of that?"

  "Hm."

  Mrs. Godfrey. She had pink hair and used a walker topped by two silver roosters in each corner. She made gingerbread cookies and read Dr. Seuss books aloud. Doing all the weird character voices. Fox in Socks. The Lorax. Mrs. Godfrey babysat except for when her bursitis was acting up. Then Dad called Doreena, who was married to a guy named Phil. Both of them were in college, that's right. Doreena stayed with him, doing her homework. Quantum Chemistry and Molecular Spectroscopy. Calculus. She showed him the Cosine buttons on her calculator. Played the stereo low listening to baroque classics. While he watched television, hearing the violins crying in the background.

  "I saw Jez in the crowd," he said.

  Shake snapped forward as if somebody had kicked him in the kidneys. "What's this now?"

  "She was there. Walked into the Palace right as I hit the stage."

  "That's not possible, man." Looking a bit sad, like he might be inching toward the phone, call George and Jeff up to come carry Chase off. "You know it's not."

  "I saw her. She still has great legs."

  "She's dead, Gray. She died in the fire."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "You sure you didn't take a sip of gin? You're acting out, man. You got to let it go."

  He knew that but it didn't change anything. He knew what he'd seen. Nurse Jez had wandered in to take a peek at him, see how he was doing. "She wasn't wearing any stockings."

  "What're you saying? She couldn't have been there. Nurse Jez is dead. She's been dead for five years."

  "Maybe not."

  "The hell. You're deranged again. For serious."

  This is when things could get dicey. Two lunatics staring each other down, trying to find reality in the middle of their delusions. Chase felt like jogging up the block, buying a box of cotton balls at the corner store, coming back and showering Shake with them. Watch him blank out for five or six hours. Who the fuck was he calling deranged?

  Sometimes you had to start with the idea that you were insane and work your way backward from there. It gave you plenty of room to move.

  To try to carry out what you couldn't do normally, to become capable. You might build a hell of a lot of confidence that way, knowing you were the craziest bastard in the building.

  "Stacy?" he asked. "Was there ever a little girl named Stacy?"

  Turning his head, Shake shut his eyes and tried to make it go away. Sometimes it worked for him. He looked back and Chase was still staring grimly, waiting for the answer.

  "Yes."

  "There was a car accident, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Quit saying it like that, Shake."

  "Like what?"

  "Like the way you were."

  "Sorry, man," he said, without being sorry at all. Disappointed and distracted, like he was going to run outside waving his hands about his face, yelling about the strange guy to the cops. Wonder how it'd go if the first cop was Sgt. Connor, his red hair curling out from beneath his police cap.

  "So what happened to her?"

  "Don't you know?"

  "I think I do, but I need to hear you say it."

  "Why?"

  Another good question. It helped to find validation when somebody almost as freakyass as you happened to agree.

  Shake got up off his couch. The busted spring in the cushion let out a nasty clank of metal on metal, and the fuzz on his arms drifted off and spiraled to the carpet. He put on one of those faces he used to make all the time when he was Babawanda Mugwanda. Down with the Man. Pigs eat shit.

  He said, "She died too, Gray. In the accident. The one you caused. Right after you saved her from her daddy. Remember the little dead girl?"

  Chase had it now and said, "Oh yeah."

  3

  Their names, printed violently in red and black smeared marker, on the poster hanging in the front window of the Narrative Bone Palace:

  PERFORMING TONIGHT: SHAKE SUNSHINE JR.

  & GRAYSON CHASE

  LET THE WORDS ABSOLVE AND REDEEM YOU

  And below it, on the concrete and nearly hidden by the wind-swept trash, two pair of ladies' panties, pink and purple. You didn't know whether to be impressed or disgusted.

  To the opposite side of the door was another overly-designed placard, this one made from a fairly recent photo of them, with a stippled effect so they were blurred along the fringes. Fading into one another, black on white, surging like tidal foam.

  They had their arms around one another, Shake with his head angled and giving the slow long squint. Chase with the corner of his mouth drawn back just enough to imply an embarrassed grin, the same face he had in grade school photos, the high school year book, chess club, his mug shot, the jacket of his first collection.

  Both of them dissolving outward and dovetailing together into a funky haze, suggesting friendship, cosmic love, maybe even sex. It was the kind of symbolism Chase used to enjoy before C-Block.

  He scanned the room. Jez wasn't anywhere. The stragglers clung to the corners. Their gazes sort of clashed and skittered, guys scoping the drunk chicks, moving in. If this wasn't polite society they'd already be whipping out their johnnies and marking off their territories.

  Chase could see the one everybody wanted: big, goofy smile, teased hair caroming over her ears, jaunty chest straining against her yellow blouse, with a pretty nice tight bottom in her black leather micro-skirt. She hadn't come in for the show, must've wandered off the street looking for another drink after escaping somebody's clutches down the block.

  She was going over in her seat and some dude propped her there with his palm flat between her bony shoulder blades. A growl eased loose from another guy nearby. A touch could cause a death match at 1am.

  It was late, the last hour of the desperate soul, when you had to get laid to keep from becoming a ghost.

  Timmy Wiggs held court with his usual post-slam gathering of drunken neo-beatniks lined up at the bar.

  Two in sunglasses talking too loudly about Proust. An underage wisp of a blonde fey girl waiting for someone to make the trip into the city worthwhile. A couple of goth chicks who'd wandered into the wrong bar a while back but liked what they'd found, for whatever reason.

  Three more women fixated on Shake Sunshine Jr. hoped he'd come around after the show. Chase wondered which of them might still have their panties on.

  And behind them, looking on, depressed and a little too kinetic, stood Jasper Cox, who had a lot of talent as a writer but was too hooked into the themes of his small dick and his dead father.

  Timmy wore black chinos to go along with the silk shirt and bow tie he always left loose around his neck, easing among the dim lights back there behind the bar. Colors thrown from liquor bottles splashed against the side of his neck. Green, yellow, like week old bruises. He had an accommodating aura that made everyone feel settled and welcome, talked with his hands a lot, animated but not in-your-face. The burn scars never made it into the topic of conversation, you couldn't really track them with his arms waving in the air.

  At fifty, he still held himself like a man only half that age—solid, mature, but not really adult the way your parents were adults. You'd never imagine him living in the suburbs, mowing his lawn, talking to life insurance agents. A lot of youth and wild party nights remained into the trenches ar
ound his eyes. The face was poised, mostly unmarked, not entirely handsome yet well-refined. He had a toothy smile and a boisterous laugh you could trust.

  It made you want to stand near him, think of him like a big brother mack-daddy who'd take you to ballgames, let you drive his pimp mobile around the neighborhood. He kept his hair short but a few curls flitted out around his ears so that he looked like a Roman senator. Some silver had worked in at the temples and straight up the middle, but that torso retained the perfect V-shape of a sportsman who had never fallen from grace.

  He drew his chin back when he caught sight of Chase, unsure of what might be coming next. His pecs flexed and he checked around the room to see if there was any other trouble approaching, if he was going to have to knock anybody else to the floor, dive over them and protect the pretty girls with his own body.

  It grieved Chase that his friends always had that same sense of wariness whenever they saw him, like he had a bomb strapped to his chest, the numbers counting down.

  Timmy met him at the far end of the bar, away from people. Chase stepped up and Timmy poured him a ginger ale, the intent clear. Stay back a little. Don't be doing any flippy shit.

  "Heck of a night," Timmy said. Saying it with dismay, really saying oh Christ, the hell you doing here. "You sure you shouldn't be at home with your shoes off, relaxing with a grilled cheese sandwich, watching the Playboy Channel?"

  So—was that how they thought of him when he got behind closed doors? Holding a box of tissues and jar of petroleum jelly, covered in shredded cheddar?

  "You think that might calm me down some?"

  "Well, no," Timmy admitted, a touch guilty. "Now that I reconsider it, maybe not. You think about hitting the Korean massage parlor over on Broome?"

  Everybody always thinking he had to pay for it.

  The sales table, where all the books written by the various slammers were stacked in orderly piles of mostly equal height, had empty spots where Shake's and Chase's poetry collections had been. At least they went—no matter what happened on stage, the work managed to get out there where it belonged. He did a quick calculation. Sixty copies sold. "Looks like a good night."