by T. Braddy
“I’m sure they do. Now, this guy – you need his name?”
I stopped wiping down the countertop. “No, I think I can suss out who he is, based on your description.”
“That’s good. Now, the next time we try to contact him, it probably won’t be directly.”
“Oh, yeah? You going to get everybody in Savannah to give him the message?”
“No, just a few people in particular. We’ve met some friends of his, and if we are going to be in contact, they’re the first ones we’re going to visit.”
I let the silence between us linger. I still wasn’t looking up, but the speed of my work had become nonexistent.
He continued. “Couple of people who might be able to help out. Two trashy drug addicts with very succinct and easily discoverable addresses. Might start with them.”
“Sounds inefficient.”
He ignored me, sat up straight. It’s the first time I noticed the hand cannon holstered against his ribs. A .357 Magnum revolver. A goddamned movie gun, not something people just carry around.
“They don’t matter much, in the long run, so they probably won’t be helpful. I think a single father and his teenage daughter might be, though.”
I put down the towel and picked up the knife. Not the knife I’d been slicing lemons with; that might have only pissed him off. There was a bigger knife nearby, used to carve pineapples. I got that ready. It would do some major damage. The baseball bat we kept under the bar was a few feet away. I thought about going for it.
This was the first time I got a good look at the guy. Clear-eyed. Intense. Perpetual smirk. His hair was tightly-trimmed. A neater version of the caliber of scumbag normally in his line of work.
And for the first time since leaving Lumber Junction, I felt fear. Without the brimming, blind self-confidence of a bellyful of alcohol to buoy me, I was laid bare. A more intense version of what happened the night Willie the Dog had gone missing.
My hand tightened on the knife. I figured I could get one good swipe at the guy’s throat before he reached for his weapon. I was a better fighter when drunk, but I could still get the job done. Mickey was dangling from that ladder of his, and there was no way he’d be able to get down and duck before the other asshole pulled his heat on the both of us.
“I’m in the program now,” I said, my voice quivering with anger. “I used to be a drunk, and it must sound weird for me to be working in a bar, but that’s the way things have shaken out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“One of the things they teach is making amends. Alcoholics tend to survive off forgetting the thoughtless debauchery they perpetuate, and though drunks have an antagonistic relationship with booze, the Bible says to love your enemy. Anyway, the program, it says you’ve got to go out and put things right, or at least acknowledge wrong.”
“Addicts take and take and take,” this guy said, interrupting me. “That’s what makes it difficult. See, I knew this one bitch. Thought she was smart and slick, so she took some shit wasn’t hers, and thought she could get away with it. Typical junkie behavior. Being all geeked out, she left a very clear path to follow. Like breadcrumbs through the forest. Now, she’s gone, but the, uh, impropriety still remains unresolved. So that has to be paid up, for everything to be square.”
“Can’t atone for somebody else’s sins.”
“Tell that shit to Jesus.”
“Or to people seeking revenge.”
“Sometimes it’s too late for putting things right. You fuck around and make it look like you don’t care about what’s correct, and sooner or later people won’t believe you, even when you mean it. You think you’ve reached that point in your life?”
“Can’t pretend to know that. If somebody is beyond forgiving me, then that’s something I have to accept, I reckon.”
He must’ve been through the program, because he said, “I’m no scholar in the realm of Bill W.’s philosophy, but a couple of the steps before you go and start blabbing about your past mistakes include admitting helplessness and surrendering. Surrendering sounds about right, doesn’t it?”
“If it’s forced, then it’s no good.”
“Well, then, there’s only the alternative.”
“Go fuck yourself.” I had the knife ready to go. Not brandishing it or anything, just giving it the right grip for a swipe at the jugular.
He smiled, perfectly straight teeth shining against the backdrop of the filth he spewed. “If there’s some of me left over. I’m fucking you first.”
“What I think,” said Mickey, still standing on the ladder, “is you and your buddy down there need to leave your drinks and get the fuck out. Never come back, unless you want an assload of buckshot. Give me the fucking time to get behind the bar, and I’ll make sure that happens.”
The man, who had remained nameless, stood up and tipped over his barstool. It clacked like punctuation on the floor.
He smiled. It was the smile of a man who enjoys a game. A man who carries a gun but doesn’t mow down men who threaten him.
Because he likes the tension. The thrill of toying with his prey before he tears it to pieces.
And it was the first time I got a real look at him. Light-skinned dude. Improbable eyes. Tattooed. Scarred. The kind of guy who shouldn’t be able to hide in plain sight, but somehow he does.
He was still smiling that smile. He said, “Add one more person to the list. Consider yourself tagged, old man. And remember: when it’s too late to make amends, it takes everything burning around you to realize you’ve made your own personal hell.”
I wanted to kill him, wanted to end this. To push the blade all the way up to the hilt and send his blood spewing all over the fine wood of the bar. Just so I could sleep again.
But I’m no killer.
I’m no assassin.
I watched them go, and when they had disappeared around the corner, I moved to go after them, but Mickey stayed me with his signature airtight logic.
“You going out there will only get somebody put in jail by this afternoon, so why don’t you hang back and fill me in on just what the fuck that was about?”
I stared into the crowds beginning to form on River Street.
“Old ghosts come to haunt me,” I said.
* * *
I gave Mickey a quick rundown of my situation, from Vanessa’s death to the briefcase and the thugs from the bar. I felt like I could trust Mick, and to his credit, he listened without judgment, without reacting, really, which made things a whole lot easier.
“Jayzus fucking Christ,” he said, when it was all done. “You got a gun?”
I nodded.
“You got any idea of what you’re going to do?”
I shook my head. “Call the people he threatened, tell them to lay low. I don’t know how much I can do, but I doubt people will listen to me.”
“It sounds crazy.”
“It is crazy.”
“Well, then, you can’t force people to do the smart thing. You can only do what you can do, and nothing else.”
It sounded like Lumber Junction all over again. “This might spiral,” I said. “It might become something that send me into the bushes.”
The old man scratched a tuft of unruly white hair and said, “When I was your age, I was still getting my shit together. Snorting coke off toilet tanks and seeing too many red-eyed sunrises. It took me getting held up at gunpoint for my predicament to become entirely clarified.”
He sat in silence, spinning the glass of scotch on the bar in front of him. Outside, a group of middle-aged men with t-shirts tucked into their jeans drifted by, ogling a handful of co-eds flipping idly through their phones. I watched the men disappear, their eyes practically assaulting the young women where they stood.
I said, “I could have gotten into a real bad spot back home, and I reckon the circumstances and the shock kept me from getting the full tabloid treatment. When the media got ahold of it, the story turned out to be about a semi-famous politician and his murderous son, not a loca
l drunk who muddied up the whole business.”
Mickey grunted, eyeing me.
“Vanessa got an obit her folks paid for, and Emmitt Laveau turned into some kind of symbol for both sides of a weird argument. That’s from all the things I’ve heard. There’s still racism in the south; it just hides under other transparent names.”
“Them fellas want some money.”
“Right,” I said.
“And you’re not willing to give it to them.”
“They don’t just want the money. They’re torturing me, tormenting me. Pouring birdshot down my throat so I can’t hop. And once I’m too weighted down to move–”
“Kablammy,” Mick said, pulling an imaginary trigger with his right hand.
“Exactly,” I said. “ But now I know their faces. Now I know what they look like. Why would they risk their biggest playable card just to come and taunt me?”
“Maybe they’re about ready to collect.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. It just doesn’t seem likely. Seems like they were starting to have a little bit of fun having me over a barrel.”
“Then I’m sure it serves a purpose for them to come in here. You’ll find out sooner or later.”
“I just don’t know, Mick. What the hell do I do?”
He sipped his scotch, leaned back in the chair. “Had a buddy, one time,” he said, “Got caught up with a married woman. He was a sailor, went off on months-long excursions, but he came home to be with another man’s wife. She told him she was married, said she probably shouldn’t go off with him the times she did, but she did it anyway, because some people get a kick out of it.
“Fella she was married to, he didn’t know. Real bad guy. Jealous. Violent. Biker. Whole nine yards. I reckon my friend got a kick out of it, too, because he didn’t slow down. Went and fell in love with her, or vice versa, or at least that’s what he told me.
“One day, he comes to where I worked – I was a religious man then, not a barfly with a business – and starts crying, asking me for some money to get him out of town. I was a real tight-ass about money back then, couldn’t scrape two pennies together, not because I didn’t have them but because I was afraid of dropping one at the wrong time.
“Instead of loaning him the dough to bust town and run off with that girl, I told him to stand up for himself, make a bad situation into a better one. ‘Follow your heart,’ I thought would be good advice. This was the early ‘80s, when I had a slicked back preacher’s mullet of a hairdo, and I was a much more sensitive man. Fucking naiveté, you know?
“Well, I didn’t hear from him for some time. The existential clock continued to tick. I did my thing: walked on water, healed invalids, and pulled rabbits from my shirt sleeves. He came back months later, battered-looking and high on something I, myself, wouldn’t even take. This girl’d left him after her husband got wind of their affair. My buddy had tried to confess the whole thing and ended up in a coma. He thought she’d leave her husband, that announcing the whole thing publicly would put her under some kind of spell, and suddenly she would see the light. So to speak.
“But that’s not what happened. She freaked out, sided with her old man. Blamed the whole thing on my buddy, who was so shocked by this turn of events, he didn’t even fight back when the husband went for him. She watched as her lover got his face pounded into the pavement. Crushed eye socket. Teeth broken off at the gums. The whole enchilada. It left him bitter. Angry.
“Anyway, I tell him, ‘Now, how’s your heart?’ Thinking maybe we could have a good laugh over a shitty situation. But no, that sent him into a different place, foaming at the mouth angry and all that. He said he was leaving town, going off make some money to bring back and convince that girl to run off with him, this time for good.”
I sipped my soda, replaced the can on the bar. I asked, “And what did happen?”
“He did a stint off the Maine coast, lobstering. Made some pretty good money, bought one-way tickets to some foreign country or another. My mind fails me. Either way, he got back from that northern coast and bought himself a pistol, expecting to kill the husband. Thinking, I guess, she’d have no reason to stay. Instead, he walked into the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun and died before he could make his final plea to the woman he loved. She didn’t even hold his hand as he passed. She stayed inside, left him on the porch to bleed out. It was a neighbor called the cops.”
“And what’s the moral message of that story?”
He clapped the table with the bottom of his scotch glass. “Fuck if I know,” he said. “It just haunts me sometimes to think of him crying to me and then getting his goddamned head blown off. You feel better about your situation?”
“No.”
“Well, I do, at least a little bit. Maybe you can see him in one of your ghost dreams, tell him to leave me the hell alone. In your own type of way. I can’t help but think about him all the time.”
“Regret is a hell of a thing.”
“Tell me again, Sam,” he said.
“You ever wish you could turn back those things?”
“Now, why would I go and do such a goddamned stupid thing as that? If I could go back and make everything right, what reason would I have to be sitting in a bar right now?”
“What happened to the husband?”
“Did a stint somewhere in Louisiana, somewhere real rough. Got out and started running drugs for one of the cartels. Ended up with his guts strewn all over a hotel room in Venice Beach. Good riddance to that motherfucker. He was mean as a viper and twice as ugly.”
“And the woman? What happened to her?”
“Oh, I married her.”
He laughed, and I didn’t know if it was a joke. The scotch went down in a single gulp, and Mickey replaced the glass in its former spot.
“Now, how about I go back to the lights, and you do whatever the hell it is you need to do to keep your sanity and your sobriety. I can handle this brokedown palace all by my lonesome.
It wasn’t until later that I noticed one slight change. My knife had disappeared. Not the big one I’d threatened the pricks from earlier with, but the other one. The smaller one, the one I’d been using to slice lemons.
I searched the bar for it, checked every nook and cranny, including the back room where I’d picked up the bucket of ice. Nothing. Nada. No knife. Off into the sunset it had gone.
Now, what use could somebody have with a tiny little paring knife?
tenth chapter
After all that, an evening meeting seemed like an imperative rather than a suggestion. An excitement to commune with my kind had crowded out the anxiety and anger I had felt after my run-in with my new nemesis, but when I stepped inside the meeting place, the emotional high I had been experiencing deflated in a sloppy mass of confused emotions. Everyone in the church hall stared teary-eyed into their coffee cups, their voices barely rising above a whisper as they palavered about this and that. All of the air seemed to have been sucked out of the room, and I didn’t quite know what I was stepping into.
“Tayquan is dead,” Winston told me, as I poured my coffee.
I met Winston’s gaze. I appropriated the mask of shock but let the implication of this coincidence seep way down into my bones. “Dead? How?”
“Dead, like, dead,” he said. He palmed one eye and wiped. “Found strangled in his place, off Montgomery.”
I put the cup down, stirred in some sugar. Sugar for booze, booze for lost love, lost love for emotional fulfillment. I was merely swapping around the replacements for the essential elements of life, and sooner or later I’d be left with nothing. Even the coffee was beginning to affect me negatively.
We stood in unhappy silence for a few moments, me stirring my coffee and Winston swaying back and forth on his feet. He was practically sideways with grief.
Finally, he said, “Come on over here.”
I followed him outside, down near the curb, where he placed his hands in his pockets. “There was a struggle. Busted in the door. Pistol-whipped
him. Strangled him. Put two in his face.”
Seemed to give him some comfort to discuss it with me, as though I existed outside the plane of the other friends of Bill W.
“Christ. Robbery?”
Winston shook his head. “Didn’t take nothing. Left stuff instead.”
I sipped my coffee, swallowed a gulp of the scorching liquid. “Left stuff? Like graffiti, a message?”
“Like things. Items. A bracelet. Some little figurines.”
My heart kicked into a higher gear.
“How did they know those things weren’t there before?”
“Left on the body. Unless Tayquan sat up and put them on his chest, they were placed there after the fact.”
I tried to hide my dismay by blowing onto the surface of my drink. “That’s strange.”
“No stranger than the fact he was drunker’n a skunk when he got his.” Winston let that fact sink in before he continued. “Now, listen, nobody knows about this, none of it. They know Tayquan’s dead, but they think it was a break-in type situation, like you said. Random act of violence perpetrated against him. They got no idea about the other stuff, the drinking and the gunshots.”
I wanted to quiz Winston about why he might burden me with such information, but I kept it to myself. Instead, I started to contemplate how it might play out if somebody tied me to items left at the crime scene.
I felt the walls slowly starting to close in on me, and to combat that, I did the only thing manageable at the time: I went back in and tried to help everybody through the evening. I stayed late and packed up, and I didn’t get home until somewhere near upon midnight. Winston’s words echoed in my head as I made my way through the back entrance.
He’d stood at the head of that congregation of lost people and given them not necessarily the hope they wanted, but perhaps the hope they needed.
“For some of you, Tayquan was the first brother of yours to be lost, and it’s all right for you to be crying. It’s all right for you to be angry. Hell, it’s all right for you to lose faith in humanity. It’s the natural human response, and you can’t get much more real than emotions. They come when they want, and they drag you through their fields and their furrows, and you come out dirty.
