Thrust

by Tom Piccirilli

  They've got it down to a science. They leave you there only for a few moments, long enough so that you actually begin to enjoy the frigid feel of the icy water against your skin, cooling the heat at the back of your skull. You begin to waft away, and they drag you back out.

  There's enough time to catch one deep breath, and then you're back in.

  Once you were terrified of drowning, when your father took you to the beach, put you on his shoulders, and calmly walked out until his head was under the waves. You thought he was committing suicide and taking you with him. The idea of the two of you dying together has been with you ever since.

  Your breath starts to give out and you begin to inadvertently struggle, kind of hoping this will be the end to all your history, the loose ends tying up here in the dirty water.

  You are nothing if not hopeful.

  The tension in your arms is fiery and powerful and you jerk as they shift their weight to get a better grip on you. Barrack hauls your knees higher so you lose the leverage.

  But still, a deep part of yourself knows you can make a hell of a ruckus and get free if you want to. You're stronger than any one of them. Maybe even two, if you had something you wanted to live for.

  You let yourself go slack and wait another couple of seconds until they lug you out again.

  Once more, Mr. Arlo Barrack says, "How you feelin', Killer?"

  You form an answer as you gasp, but before you can give it voice they immerse you again.

  There's been no time to fill your lungs. You won't last another minute.

  Stacy shows up right around then, while you're at the bottom of the tub, looking up into their joyous faces.

  The bubbles flow from the corners of your mouth like a string of verse for others to follow you down to hell.

  The poetry starts up. The fringes of your vision grow red and then white as you slip into death. A fragment of yourself is perplexed by the fact that you're still holding your breath, trying to hang in. Another time this whole set-up would've been a windfall, a lucky break, and you might've simply rolled with it until all the savage aching was gone.

  And up there stands Jez.

  Storming into the room with her face heated, scowling, almost snarling, like she's about to kill Mr. Arlo Barrack.

  But still not reaching down to pull you up and save you from drowning.

  You think, these people have got their priorities a touched skewed.

  Stacy draws your attention to the left, where she stares at you through the fog of the water, her small face leaking strings of blood that float past your eyes to the surface. Jez yanks you back up toward your unwanted life.

  Two minutes later she's fucking you in the tub.

  6

  Everybody has their defining moments, Shake Sunshine Jr. once said from behind his sunglasses as the girls looked on. But that minute is always moving away. Transient, baby, ephemeral, know what I'm sayin'? Know who I'm layin'?

  The women nodded in agreement as if he'd spoken some unbearable truth, never knowing that Shake's definition of himself pretty much changed depending on his mood.

  Chase really only had the one.

  It had come at him in a roar of tearing metal, among the stink of gin, listening to a child's mewling.

  He could still feel the devastating agony shooting up his arms and through his knees whenever he got behind the wheel. His shoulders would begin to hurt, the muscles of his neck suddenly inflamed. Those and other phantom pains would crawl through him even before he turned the key, like old friends coming back for a visit.

  He parked in front of Shake's favorite diner over on Broadway and Fifty-fifth. The wait staff sang 50s tunes in between serving the customers. Chase hoped they'd dance across the tables and perform the big numbers, swinging around and doing cartwheels and backflips, like in West Side Story.

  But the girls just sang some of the slower love tunes and all the guys tried to play like Frankie Vallie, yanking up the high notes from their nuts. It was ten a.m. and Chase had only slept two hours.

  Shake was already inside and seated, doing his black mofo death gaze thing to everybody in the place. He'd combed out and reshaped the twin prongs of his goatee so that they came to perfectly spiked points.

  They were all aware of him but nobody dared to look.

  Cotton balls, Chase wanted to shout to them, protect yourselves with cotton balls.

  "This is a little early for you, isn't it?" Chase asked.

  "Yeah, but I'm having lunch with the ladies."

  "Now which ladies are these?"

  "The ones from the Learning Annex. Remember I told you about them?"

  "The Jane Eyre fans."

  "That's right."

  "They wanted to know if Victorian literature pissed you off because it had no black folks in it."

  "And it does," he said, slowly chewing his bacon. He had to nibble every mouthful 32 times and sometimes he counted along. If he messed up his count, he had to start over. "But I don't hold those nice ladies accountable. They're taking me out for tea. I'm going to meet their bridge club members later. They've already helped me sell sixty, sixty-five books."

  "Think they read passages to their grandkids at night? Give the wee ones sweet dreams?"

  "They don't read them at all, just set them out on the shelf for all the other upper tax bracket folks to notice. But I don't mind, I need to pay my rent. And I like to play Bridge too."

  Shake had something on his mind but he was having a hard time getting it out there and saying it.

  "Just drop the bomb and run," Chase said. "It'll be easier for both of us. What's on your mind?"

  "I wanted to tell you something, but I don't want you to flip."

  "Okay."

  "Don't just say okay. I want you to mean it."

  "I do mean it."

  Shrugging his massive shoulders, Shake had to finish his mouthful of food before he could go on. Chewing 30, 31, 32. "Isaac got mugged early this morning, about three a.m., on his way home from the Palace."

  "But—" Chase said and hit the wall. That couldn't have been more than twenty minutes after Chase walked out of the club.

  "Somebody knocked him over from behind, beat him on the head and kicked him around the curb. He said it happened so fast he didn't see much of anything at all."

  "He called to tell you?"

  "Yeah."

  "When?"

  "After he stumbled home."

  "And he's okay?"

  "Yeah, pretty much. Says he's got a goose egg on the back of his head and broke an upper crown. He had to make an emergency dental appointment."

  "Why didn't he call me? I was up then. He knew that. I'd just left him."

  "Guess he figured you needed a rest."

  Chase had to control his breathing, the impotent anger swarming through him. He felt his scalp prickle with sweat. "How much did they get off him?"

  "Nothing. They didn't take his wallet or his watch. Must've been somebody trolling, looking for a fight."

  "With a seventy year old man?"

  One of the waitresses came by, started singing Leader of the Pack, smiling emptily as she nodded into the microphone. She had a couple of steps she did as she sang, tap tap slide tap, competent and meaningless. Shake waved her off and she slipped among the other tables.

  A young couple were arguing quietly a few booths away. Both in their late teens, with that tired look like they'd been up all night, out in the scene, and now were ready to put it behind them. Get to bed by noon and sleep the entire day.

  The boy fumed as he gripped his fork and knife in his right hand, maybe thinking about where he could stab her with them. In the arm, in the neck. The girl wearing a black skirt, nervously fiddling with the hem, tugging it down towards her knees. But it would slip back up.

  Chase saw shadows on her upper thighs, bruises the shape of fingers.

  "What is it?" Shake asked. "What are you seeing?"

  He had his back to them, unaware.

  The
girl looked over at Chase and mouthed the words, Stop him, please stop him.

  "You seeing your daddy again, Gray? Do you want me to help you go over that whole thing one more time?"

  "No."

  "Isaac is going to be fine. He's not dead. He wasn't murdered. You understand?"

  "Yes."

  "You're slipping," Shake said without judgment.

  "Yes."

  "You should see a doctor. You need to get back on Haldol. The mood stablilizers."

  "I can't take the muscle spasms."

  "They'll give you one of the new muscle relaxant or anti-spasm meds to go along with it."

  "I see and feel more weird shit with that than without it."

  "For serious?" Not quite a question, more a statement. Saying, you're full of shit.

  "Yes."

  "You don't have to commit yourself. A voluntary admittance. You'll roll through and be discharged in two weeks."

  Chase looked at him until Shake glanced away. Shake was trying to help but he should've known it wasn't the right thing to say. Going back to the Falls was as bad as going back to prison.

  In state facilities, it was all about discharge, moving the patients in, out, and on. Medicaid only paid for a certain amount of treatment, and the hospitals were geared to getting the patients back to where they started. After three weeks or so, they begin losing money on the cases.

  When the Falls first opened back in the 60s, people could stay for years, even decades. But that was over unless you were sentenced by the court. Lots of cons think they'll float through the system faster acting crazy, but once they're in the state hospitals they can wind up inside twice as long as they would've in prison. While the psychiatrists played with experimental drugs and continually toyed with the dosages. New treatments, trial surgical procedures, the shit could get funky.

  The waitress brought him a beer.

  "I ordered milk," he told her.

  "Excuse me?"

  Staring at the glass and still seeing beer. "I wanted milk."

  "That's what this is."

  "Thank you."

  Chase had once been a binge drinker, like his father. He'd go months without liquor and then, without any reason he could name, he'd stop at the store and buy a bottle. The cap would be off before he got back into the car and he'd take three or four long slugs as he was pulling out of the parking lot.

  There was no sense to it. He hated the taste and would grunt while the sickening heat coursed into his stomach. He'd groan and want to die as the nausea hit, but he couldn't stop.

  At the time, he'd been a substitute English teacher out on Long Island, giving a few poetry readings in the city on the side. The life suited him. They shuffled him across the district from school to school. Eleventh and twelfth grades. You had half a classroom full of punks who just wanted a free day and another half filled with kids so well-trained that they actually had expectations of him. He kept his meds in a cotton-packed plastic bottle so the pills wouldn't rattle. He worked the chalkboard while the troublemakers made their noise, playing sick, moving seats around, and slipping out the door. He waved as they left. Nobody gave a damn.

  Chase's worn briefcase bulged in the middle and the corners would creak when he flipped the locks. He'd read them the poets that the school boards were terrified of—Ginsberg, Bukowski, Corso. Maybe he was looking to get fired, but it never happened. The kids got weirded out, expecting centuries-old English romantics and instead getting verse about the racetrack, the skids, the vagaries of suicide, urges you got when on your knees. It sure kept them quiet.

  He'd spend hours circling town, driving back and forth between the community college and the library, heading out on the parkway to gun past Garden Falls, where the shadow of the buildings sliced down alongside the moon. He'd stop off at bars and have a few more, speaking to no one. He did that for a couple of years, biding time, feeling a slow movement and rise under his skin. That was all right.

  The end came on an autumn night, with the leaves drifting in heavy patterns like snowfall.

  The kid, still holding his knife and fork in his right hand, gave his girlfriend a playful half-jab with the left, like he was this close to slapping her for real. Letting her know he could do it any time he wanted. Nothing too rough in public, just enough to keep her in line. She flinched and dropped her gaze to the table, pulled her shoulders in.

  Chase came out of his seat in one fluid motion and covered the ground to the other booth in two strides.

  He grabbed the boy by his collar and hauled him up until he was on tip-toes, clawing at the air.

  "Jesus Christ, dude!"

  Chase smacked the silverware from the boy's hand. The music masked the clatter. He yanked the kid closer until they were nose to nose, and stared into his eyes. Chase let out a noise that wasn't far up the evolutionary ladder than a snarl. Primal.

  So was this it? Was this where he finally did it?

  "Let him go, Gray," Shake said, standing behind him. Rubbing Chase's back with that wide, powerful hand, a gently loving motion.

  "Not just yet."

  "You said you'd stay calm."

  "You think I'm not?"

  The boy was scared but not enough. Already he was getting used to this, falling back into his cool Manhattan attitude, his hipness, whatever it might be. "Dude, the hell's up with you?"

  "I don't like bullies," Chase said.

  "Bullies?"

  "Yes."

  "What do you mean? What?"

  "You should be nicer to your girl, otherwise she might castrate you one night while you're sleeping."

  The kid glaring now, but still panicky. "Castration? Her? Are you crazy?"

  "Yes," Chase said. "I am." He loved when they fed him the straight lines.

  With this kind of rage always seething, you couldn't trust yourself. There was too much inside always ready to take you over at any minute. You never knew when someone else might put on your skin, cause all kinds of hell wearing your face.

  "Just sit back down, man," Shake told the boy. Then, leaning in on him, asking, "You hit your old lady?"

  She said nothing, sort of enjoying the scene. Her fists left her lap, and she began eating her food.

  "No," the kid said meekly, but realized it wasn't enough. "No, ah, sir. No, I don't do that. Really. I don't."

  "Respect your woman. You hurt her, and I'll find and hurt you. You dig that shit?"

  "Yes. Ah, yes, sir. I do."

  "You cannot believe I'm lying."

  "No, sir. No no."

  "That's right."

  Shake led Chase back to his seat, past a waiter down on one knee crooning Sea of Love.

  With the leaves drifting in heavy patterns like snowfall, the end came on an autumn night.

  The bottle, that time, was scotch. Chase sat in the school lot, his car idling a little too high, with the heater blasting out against his knees. He'd been set off again, but at least he could trace it to a small reason.

  He'd gotten between two jocks fighting over a girl with limp frowzy hair and sorrowful eyes, thin wrists and no bra.

  She turned to Chase in the hall and whispered, "Stop them, please stop them," and he immediately moved in between the boys.

  It was stupid. He took a shot to the ribs from one guy, a roundhouse to the chin from the other. His head snapped back. Blood splashed against his teeth.

  Both boys quit instantly, watching him, waiting for repercussions. Chase said, "Beat it before a teacher comes."

  Forgetting that he was one. Supposed to be one.

  He searched the hallways the rest of the afternoon looking for the girl. He still tasted blood at the end of the day, and the spot under his heart hurt.

  She found him after the last bell as he moved down the staircase towards the gym, where he parked. He was wary—he still had enough of his senses to be careful in moments like these—but she only stood there staring at him. This could be ominous.

  A dozen lines of poetry flashed through his mind and
she turned the other way and disappeared down the hall.

  That night he drove along the back roads behind the shopping centers that had gone out of business, passing dimly-hit homes of former classmates who were too scared to turn up the heat because of gas bills.

  He'd failed somehow and didn't even know at what. He had more white hair than his father'd had in his casket.

  Around nine p.m., with the traffic thinning and the kids tucked in, middle America comfortably settled on the couch to watch sit-coms. Chase was still thinking about the girl. The ache in his chin had dulled into a slight warmth that warmed his whole jaw the way caresses had once done. It still threw him.

  He passed Garden Falls again, whispering along to slow songs on the Oldies station. He saw only the rows of darkened cube windows of the hospital, but could imagine faces peering down at him.

  Clawed fingers tapping at the glass and dusty mouths saying his name, dried lips cracking.

  Chase sang louder trying to press back the images and he reached for the bottle of scotch between his legs. It was empty.

  The music changed to another era and he felt himself rising through time.

  He took the exit a little too fast, coming back through the wide lawns and perfectly shaped hedges of the Falls, as the curve brought him around to the entrance ramp of the parkway.

  A viciously bright white light swept over and engulfed him. At the edges, in the distance, weaker gleams of red and blue flashed. The brilliant high beams immersed the car as he jerked the wheel hard to the right.

  The liquor had shaved a second off his reflexes and kept him from stomping on the brake in time. The explosive sound of sirens swallowed him whole—why hadn't he heard them before?—and the blaring of a single enraged truck horn cut through everything else.

  My God, Chase thought, looking over.

  It was a pickup on a deadly angle not even ten feet away, and then only five, then two. Christ, that fucker is—