The guard spits on the courtyard tile and refuses to look at me. From around the bend in the road behind me hails the slow crush of rocks under tires, the squeal of suspension springs. I only have time to lift my rucksack before a dark SUV pulls up with its headlights burning my pupils. Dusk has moved on to night while I’ve talked with the guard, and now the streetlights kick on with an electric rush.
The guard begins to work the chain wrapped around the gate. The tinted driver’s side window melts with an automatic whir. The wheelman’s a portly Tico with a penciled-in mustache and a dinner jacket. He’s the driver, but Walther and his two victims are in there, in the backseat, just out of reach. I know without seeing them.
“What are you doing here?” the driver says.
The stars on the skyline twirl. I have to shove my hands in my jeans pockets to keep them from shaking. My eyelids go slack for the improv skit where I tell the driver, “I’m just looking for something to eat, dude. I been on the road all day and—”
“No beggars,” he says, and shoos me off with a limp wave.
Back down on the beach the cabana’s in full swing. One by one I peel fives off my money stack and convert them into canned beers. The swash tumbles in white flashes out on the dark shoreline. The sea chides me.
I rent a hammock and beachfront camp space, but I’m swimming in beer and forget where it was I meant to sleep. There’s a bonfire draw and I’m the moth. A mariachi plays for loose change. I sit in the sand and hug my knees and swoon and think how this might be if I were someone else.
I greet people with names and mix them up too soon, but everybody smells like spice and the sea. A girl with blond cornrows and a bikini top dances against me. Where I touch her skin it’s dusted with dry sand. She’s from Germany and her arms are greened like gauntlets with overlaid tattoos, scenes from the Garden of Earthly Delights.
I have never loved any other but Jess. I have never loved. Someone spots a sloth lousing in the crook of a tree. The German girl’s named Astrid, or ought to be.
“I’m here to study the turtles on the Atlantic coast, an internship,” Astrid says.
“A woman named Zelda told me this was the best place to hide,” I reply.
“From what do you hide?”
Men sing in unison and the bonfire embers linger like insects on fire. I say, “Men who chew girls like tobacco,” and Astrid has draped herself across my shoulders. Her mouth, my neck, her hands, my flesh. Shirtless men hoot like howler monkeys, a camera flashes. I shove Astrid off her driftwood perch. She pitches backwards in the sand. My beer can glances off her forehead. She curses German and hunts for her lost sandals. She screams at me like a nursery rhyme: “Trauma dyke, you’re just a poseur trauma dyke! Would’ve been straight if not for the rape!” Simian hoots of approval accompany her song.
But I’m already stalking beyond the light. I cannot be loved except by hurt. I cannot be at rest, unless death. I’m laced with his ugliness all the way down to the marrow. Pura fucking vida.
The road is black as I climb it again, sweating even at night. I pass rental bungalows tucked in the trees every hundred feet along the roadside, built into the thickest trunks like elvish enclaves. Behind the slatted shades, families and honeymooners dream under spinning ceiling fan blades in the shape of ficus leaves.
Tico guards are posted at each hobbit gate, and one sits in his lawn chair with his head hung forwards, snoring like a call to the jungle. Even my footsteps don’t wake him. I slip his machete off his lap. The hilt is padded with electrical tape but the blade is sharp.
My rucksack and money are lost, and I don’t know where, and I am beyond the need. This demon in me took wing the moment I recognized Zelda. She stood in my store beside my checkout counter and said, “I’m on parole now. I know I’m the last person in the world you wanted to see, and I was so afraid to come here, so ashamed, but I wanted you most of all to know how much I repent, how much I owe to God.”
Over the years I learned not to think her name anymore. I learned to pantomime a self that even I believed—an entrepreneur trading in vintage and ragtag clothes, a woman’s lover, a substitute mother. I didn’t drink or go to nightclubs. Foreign film rentals came in the mail on weekends, and I suppressed a growing urge to scrapbook. That was before yesterday, before Zelda came.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked her while I folded capri pants into a pile.
“I don’t concern myself with people like him anymore,” Zelda said. Nobody else was in the store except the faceless mannequins. The sign was flipped to CLOSED, but Zelda had tested the door and found it unlocked.
“If you honestly repented, you’d let them know where to find him.”
“I just want to forget about the past.” She spoke with a sedative drawl.
“You can’t repent and forget,” I said.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me, I really don’t.”
“He abandoned you, and you protect him?” I said.
“My only concern is God. Have you been saved?”
The width of a counter was between us. I said, “You goddamn know where he is.”
She spread her hands on the countertop and weighted herself against them with a long sigh, like I was just too much to bear, too unforgiving, too unredeemable. She wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt and a small gold cross around her neck. Twenty years ago she sat on my chest with her knees crushing my arms while Moose Walther broke through my body. She’d stood guard outside the trucks.
Now at the Walther property the streetlights again paint my shadow. The chain that earlier twined the gate doors now sits coiled like a rattler on the marble tile. The guard’s lawn chair is empty. This is my grace because I would’ve been helpless otherwise, even with my weapon. I’m only sorry that I can pay the guard nothing but karma. He’s not here to thank.
The gate creaks like a question. The tiles are slick under my sneakers. The small fountain spills its contents endlessly and my fingers slip through its reservoir as I pass. I taste the water from my fingertips. The night humidity pulls me out of my own pores, and I’m adrift on the drunk I have nurtured. All along the forest the monkeys watch from their thousand perches and recognize this ceremony as their own.
The door latch clicks and pulls me into a room decked with Tico folk art, clay monkeys, and pinwheels. Bright birds chirp inside of three suspended cages, and the floors are more marble tile. The light cones upwards from two lamps on either side of a leather couch where Moose Walther sits hunched forwards with his elbows on his knees, sweat on his scalp.
He says, “I thought I recognized you.”
“You’re the one who left the gate unlocked,” I say as I shut the door behind my back. Through the archway the house spreads out in compartments that blend ever more deeply with the lush forest beyond it. I can see the ocean from here, I think. I can hear its rush.
“It was an invitation, not a trap. Whatever happens, I want you to know I’m through with all that. I live here without drugs or alcohol, or anything of the sort.”
“You’re surrounded by whores. I saw them, a woman like Zelda and a child like I was.”
Walther flinched, sucked air through his nostrils. “They’re my family. My daughter.”
“Your family,” I say, and I don’t want to believe. He has lived utter lies before.
In the Buffalo ArtPark is a ten-foot sculpture of a monkey cobbled together with rusted junkyard parts and found art—Keira’s favorite piece. Last summer when we were admiring the monkey, Keira spotted a friend of hers from preschool. She introduced me to the girl’s parents as “my mommy’s wife.” Right now I’m too drunk to think deep about why that occurs to me—people and monkeys cobbled together out of junk.
“How did you find me?” Moose Walther asks.
I shiver even in the stinging heat. His voice is the echo of the drugs that stole months from my life and anesthetized the pain, until the daylight delivered it all back to me in one blinding burst. I tell him, “Your old w
hore Zelda gave it to me.”
He kneads his swollen face. “I figured as much,” he says.
I step to the nearest birdcage and clumsily unlatch the mesh doorway. Walther doesn’t stop me. He watches the machete I hold against my thigh. The parakeet inside the cage flitters from perch to perch, unsure of itself, until it warbles in a tuft of color through the archway, towards the sea.
Yesterday evening I took flight. In my consignment shop, I burst over the counter, and I haven’t stopped lunging since. I tackled Zelda into a clothing carousel and we were a jumble of other people’s abandoned attire. She was trapped beneath me. My hands clutched her neck. Cartilage snapped and shifted deep inside her throat. Her eyes went wide and wet and her face tinted violet. Her frantic fingernails gouged three parallel lines across my arm. She had already told me where to find him, but she wasn’t absolved. I tore away her gold cross necklace and fed it into her wide, silent mouth. I left her, the door unlocked, for the world to witness, for Jess.
“We spoke on the phone a few days ago, Zelda and me, after she was released,” Moose says. “She told me she found you and Jessica—”
“Don’t you dare use her name,” I say.
Moose raises both hands and nods demurely, mockingly. “I’m sorry—I’m just saying she was glad to find out that you two had made your lives together and put what we did to you—put it behind you. I know how difficult it must’ve been. I think about who I was every day.” He reaches for the table beside him, but it is only a glass of red wine he grasps. He swishes the liquid in the glass and sips, a gesture I remember, the emperor who turns down his thumb.
“We cope,” I say. I scratch the denim on my knee with the blade.
“You don’t know how glad I am to hear that. I want you to be happy. If there’s anything that I can do to make you happy, I want it. I have money for you, and for Jess. I’m glad to think that in spite of all this ugliness that I put you through, when I was young and foolish, at least something good came of it.”
“Sometimes I wonder if her and I are tainted, because you brought us together.”
“No, don’t think that. Just be happy in your life.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do, and fuck your playing cupid bullshit.”
His surrender pose again, wineglass dangling by its stem from his crooked thumb. He says, “I understand your anger. I’ve felt it against myself a million times, every day.”
“I came here to kill you,” I say.
“I was hoping we could talk through this instead.”
“Tell me something. Why didn’t she roll over on you? Zelda. If she knew your whereabouts all this time for twenty years. She could’ve had a plea bargain. Don’t tell me you’re all that mesmerizing.”
He downs the rest of his wine, wipes away what dribbles on his chin. Maybe down here in Eden he found God walking among the mango groves. Maybe what he thinks he’s drinking is the blood of Christ. He says, “She didn’t know until she was released. I reached out to her then. I got in touch with her because I knew we could have a chance to forgive each other. I even invited her down here.”
“Funny,” I say. “She wanted the same from me. Did you send her to find me?”
“She wanted to. All I did was encourage her.”
“But you didn’t expect her to cough up your address.”
“I knew it was a possibility. Look, forgiveness is for your own mental health.”
“I know the routine. I’ve seen Oprah.”
“Zelda and me—”
“Zelda’s dead. Within five minutes of asking my forgiveness. I strangled her.” The shudder in my voice, the stage fright. This moment, rehearsed in my nightmares for two decades, but I couldn’t prep for the swarm of old pains and fears that frenzy around my head. He’s faking meek, the puta. Any second this man on the couch will leap forth and devour me. He has that power. His talk is poisoned honey. Doesn’t matter that I have a machete. It dissolves in my hand.
We both hear it at once: the stick of bare feet padding across tile. Moose lifts himself off the couch with his face contorted. I almost lose my balance, still dizzy from drink, thinking I’m cornered for some ambush. But into the archway comes his supposed daughter, the little half Tico girl with her hair all beaded, white nightgown. She squints in the light and holds between her cupped hands the bird I released. It bobs its tiny pink head.
“Papa,” she says to Moose, but continues in crystalline Spanish I can’t understand.
Moose halts her with his hands and with a command. He is suddenly afraid of me.
“Do you speak English?” I ask the little girl, and she nods at me suspiciously.
“I taught her, from when she was a baby,” Moose says. He’s trying to feign that I’m just another American friend dropping by for a drink, one of daddy’s old associates. I can see he wants it to be true, wants me to harmonize, for the little girl’s sake.
“What’s your name?” I ask her.
“Miriam. My bird flies into my room.”
“But you caught him,” I say. “Good job. How old are you?”
“Miriam ... ,” Moose says.
“Nine years,” Miriam says. The thread is invisible, but still I can see it winding upwards from her crown, up through the ceiling, up into the heavens. She raises the bird towards me.
“I was a little girl once,” I say.
“Miriam—”
The black tape wound around the machete hilt is slick with my sweat, but I won’t let it go. The blade sings like a distant wave on the shoreline. Somewhere on the beach, a vendor cracks a coconut in half and the meat inside is flawless white. Here in Moose Walther’s home, the pastel green walls are showered with a hundred tiny plastic beads. They dribble on the floor like candies, and soon the grout between the tiles channels liquid red. I have a daughter I will never see again. The bird flitters against the ceiling, frantic for exit.
Moose drops in supplication, beats his palms on the marble. Out in the night stray monkeys squawk answers to his howls. I crouch beside him and whisper, though I’m sure he’s beyond hearing.
“Forgive me,” I say.
Before I leave, I wash my wet hands in his fountain. I listen to the music of the tropics.
’Demption Road
Justin Porter
Cass always woke slowly. He moves his feet, feels the dense, worn-down heels of his boots rasp on the wooden edges. He moves his hands, runs them over his body. Scratches where he finds an itch and rubs sore, scarred knuckles.
He draws up his heels, bridges a little, lifting his lower back off of the assortment of blankets padding the pile of wooden planks he slept on. Rolling onto his side, he puts his hands together like a prayer between his knees. The joints would ache if he allowed them to pillow each other. He would never be able to sleep like that, his hands so occupied, so confined. Eventually he sits up, opens his dun-colored eyes, and looks out at the place he’d built.
His place.
Sunlight streams in through the windows, dust motes playing within the rays like ecstatic children. Between each aperture, an accentuated dark. The corners seem to swallow light and pass shadows.
When Cass had claimed the warehouse as his own, his bed had lain in the heat of one of those windows. He had woken, angry and abrupt, his eyes opening first, to those hellish rays of sun. That night he slid the pile of boards to a darker corner, his hands soon studded with splinters. They still sported dark spots where bits of desiccated wood lay driven beneath the first layers of skin.
Head aching, throat dry, he casts about his bed for the bottle from last night and, like most mornings, it’s empty. He shouldn’t have bothered. If he woke to find a bottle at all, it would always be empty.
Cass stands up, shirking his clothes around him, his pant legs out of the tops of his boots. His belt buckle sits dead center. He reaches overhead, stretching, passing his hands through the sunlight from a higher window, feeling warmth. Turning, he drops to a crouch and slides a hand under
his rolled-up jacket. The jacket that held his head as he slept. He notices with distaste a sizable wet spot from when he must have drooled the night before.
Under the jacket, his hand bumps something and grasps it. Cass slides the object behind his belt buckle and makes sure to pull the hem of his ripped and spotted shirt over it.
What Christina awakes to is an unyielding hardness in his back, shoulder, and under his ass. His knees ache at their awkward position. He could see the alley around him and feel that the parts of his body that weren’t protesting were against garbage bags.
Rubbing at his face, he smells the perfume that he had put on the night before. “My flypaper,” he had joked to his roommate as he got ready to go out, indicating a small bottle. His roommate had shaken his head, mystified, but secretly happy with himself for being cool with so counterculture a roommate.
Christina smells the rancid garbage on two sides. He smells his skin and clothes, which hold traces of the things he had done the night before. The things he had done willingly and with enthusiasm.
And the things he had not done willingly.
The enthusiasm of others.
Both had been part of his plan when he left the house the night before.
Christina was thin, delicate even. Narrow of shoulder and hip, willowy and beautiful. His face’s bones, his large eyes, and his harshly pouting lips made some of the baddest faggots gasp. Forget themselves, forget not to fight over these bitches. Christina knew that. And loved it. Loved to make these men put the boots to each other.
Thugged out, heavy knuckled, and big dicked.
Christina loved them all and they loved him.
He feels that maybe they had loved him a little too much too far this time, as he braces himself against the alley wall and stands up. Feeling the sore places on and inside his body, like the echoes of a canyon scream.
He pushes off the soiled brick and puts his weight on his left ankle. Crying out shrilly as the joint buckles, Christina topples into a pile of garbage. Cries of outrage replace cries of pain.
Blood, Guts, & Whiskey Page 10
