by Ed Kurtz
"If you don't get a ride out, meet me here at 11:30 tonight," I said. "I can get you a shower at least."
She tilted her head toward Jeremy.
"Him too," I said.
Her look said that's all, a shower? But she went with it, no doubt figuring she could weasel more cash or something substantial out of me later. The gym closed at eleven. I could get them cleaned up a little and send them on their way. I wasn't going to take them to the trailer because I knew it wouldn't be easy to get rid of Ms. Vagabond once she burrowed her way into that cozy nest, no matter where she claimed they were headed.
After I got home, Danny walked across the potholed drive with my mail, and I gave him his. Home was one of eleven health-hazard trailers wedged into a narrow lot between a transmission shop and a perpetually failing hot-tub supply store. There was space for twelve trailers, but one had burned before I moved in and had never been replaced. The empty space, our outdoor lounge, had a surprisingly expansive live oak that shaded a semi-permanent collection of mismatched kitchen chairs that sat in a loose circle around a slowly disintegrating fiberboard coffee table.
Danny, whose name is actually Danilo, was a wiry little Honduran that lived in my old trailer with a rotating cast of illegal aliens that worked in various facets of construction. Immigration had been looking for Danny for a couple of years so they could deport him. He would get arrested every once in a while for driving without a license, which he originally lost because of a DUI. This seemed to draw the ire of the government. Danny didn't want to move out of the trailer park for some reason, which I didn't understand—I would have bolted in a second if I could have afforded anyplace else.
On a Friday night we were sitting in the lounge being showered by oak pollen while Danny's friends were drinking themselves senseless and throwing a knife at each other's feet—Mexican mumblety-peg I called it, even though most of them weren't Mexican. I came up with the idea of switching trailers, but not telling anyone so we would keep our addresses. I didn't mind moving my few belongings, and one ramshackle aluminum-clad box was the same as another. Except Danny's had a missing top step that threatened to cripple anyone that forgot about it.
Danny had just helped me replace the brakes on my Korean lemon and refused to take any money, so I felt like I owed him. More importantly, he was a friend. The absentee park owner didn't know about the arrangement and didn't care as long as the rent checks got in the box. After that, Immigration came and banged on my door between six and seven in the morning every few months, usually about a week after Danny got another traffic ticket. I would let them walk through the trailer with their unnaturally bright flashlights and poke around in the closets while Danny and his buddies peeped through the blinds across the way. The immigration guys stood outside looking perplexed for a while before they left.
Danny knew they'd get him one day. They'd get smart and wait for him outside the trailer park one morning, or the jail would decide to hold him for immigration instead of releasing him on bond. In the meantime he made money and sent as much home as he could.
"Can you do me a favor tonight?" I asked Danny.
He nodded without asking what it was, but I explained to him anyway, without going into details of my past history with her. I basically wanted someone else around because I didn't trust Ms. Vagabond or her junkie friend, and mistakenly thought a second set of eyes would let me do a good deed without having it rammed up my ass as thanks.
They were standing in the same spot by the dumpsters when we pulled up. Danny eyed Ms. Vagabond avariciously. "Es una tetona," he said, in awe.
"Wait until you get a whiff."
They walked over to the car and I introduced Danny. Ms. Vagabond was in an expansive mood, smiling like it was her that was doing me a favor. Jeremy looked sick. About thirty seconds into the five minute trip the smell rolled up from the back seat. Danny and I cranked down our windows almost simultaneously. I left the anemic air conditioner on to have as much air as possible blowing over us. Danny didn't look at me. I knew he was wondering how I knew people that could smell like this. I never talked much about my past. Danny knew me as a guy that worked at a gym and seemed to have his shit together, for the most part.
We pulled up in front and I had them wait in the car while I slipped around the building to the back door. This was the cheapest gym in town, and looked it. The owner, Lonnie, was a former cop with a penchant for obsolete security devices.
He had installed cameras a few years back when it was open 24 hours for the select few that paid extra for a key, and he wanted to make sure members weren't slipping in non-member friends at night. He decided to discontinue the 24 hour operation after a cabbie working out alone one night dropped a loaded bar on his neck on the flat bench and was found dead the next morning. The tapes showed that he had thrashed for a while, and the coroner said he probably could have been saved if someone else had been there to lift the bar from his neck.
Lonnie still left the tapes running all night in case someone broke in, which never happened. He didn't bother reviewing them and reused the tapes after a week. Still, I didn't want evidence of my complicity in the distribution of non-member after hours shower privileges, so I let myself in the back and went through the darkened gym to the office and turned the recorder off. A little-known vulnerability of the system was that the camera trained on the back door had been broken since before I worked there, so I made it in unsurveilled.
I turned some lights on and let the others in the front. I got them a couple of towels and led the way to the locker rooms—men's for Jeremy and women's for Ms. Vagabond. I didn't know their exact relationship, but neither protested. She pulled some clothes out of a battered backpack that she divided up between them so I guessed they at least had something semi-clean to wear. I went into the office when I heard the two showers start running. Danny wandered to the far end of the gym and sat on a leg machine.
When my mother was still alive she had given me a religious medal on one of my trips home, when she could tell I was in bad shape. The way I was existing, on the edge of things, I could have been dead. The last thing she would say as I stood on the steps with my duffel bag of freshly washed clothes was, "I'm praying to Our Lady of Mercy for you."
Sleeping-bagged in dusky urban woods, warm cars humming past, I felt almost safe with the medal around my neck. My mother, if not Our Lady of Mercy, looking out for me. Religion never took, but I knew that my birthday was on Our Lady of Mercy's feast day, because I grew up hearing it every birthday.
I made it home a few times after that and my mother made sure I still had the medal hanging around my neck. I know she would have driven down to the church store, bought another, and had it blessed by the priest if I lost it. The medal was the one thing I managed to hang on to in the years when I lost everything else.
I sat at the desk and leaned back in a chair, staring at my reflection in the window, flipping the medal with my finger. I was feeling good about helping out a couple of people that needed a hand when I saw the wispy image of someone coming up fast behind me. I thought it was Danny goofing around, but the internal report that I had never, ever, seen Danny goof around made me turn just in time. A chipped black ten-pound disc weight gripped by a hand with grime-caked fingernails grazed my nose and hit me square on the collar bone. A crack followed by intense pain told me it was broken. A rancid stink and glimpse of a snarling lip with an oozing sore told me the aggressor was Jeremy. He had a little more life than I'd given him credit for.
I stopped congratulating myself on my magnanimity, and swore off all future good deeds. In the meantime, I fell to the floor and tried to crawl under the desk before he could swing again. Jeremy wasn't as weak as he looked, and a ten pound plate could do some damage, even in the hands of a shaky junkie. The next blow got me on the thigh because I was halfway under the desk, and digging deeper. I started kicking back because I was getting mad. I managed to get a good shot in at Jeremy's ankle and had the satisfaction of hearing him s
cream like a girl.
He didn't have much concentration, or sense, because when he reached down to grab his ankle, I kicked him in the face as hard as I could from my little hole under the desk. He toppled over into a protein drink display, and two-pound plastic containers tumbled around him. I think he was realizing the error of his ways and was down for good at that point, but Danny had heard the commotion and was doing what I brought him to do—watch my back. And Danny didn't fuck around. He came into the office fast with a twenty-pound dumbbell, effectively doubling Jeremy's firepower. It wasn't one of those rubber-coated dumbbells that the nice gyms have either. It was a blunt, brutal, old-style, solid steel dumbbell that had shed most of its paint twenty years earlier. Danny took no notice that Jeremy wasn't moving much anymore, and was lying under thirty pounds of protein, moaning to himself. He found a clear spot around Jeremy's head and held the dumbbell over it. I tried to wave him away but the pain was too much when I moved the arm. I couldn't seem to speak either, so all I could do was watch Danny drop the dumbbell.
The thunking wet crunch of Jeremy's head erased all doubt. He looked directly at me, sighed once, heavily, as if supremely disappointed in us both…then nothing. Jeremy had committed his last not-so-petty crime. I crawled from under the desk clutching my bad arm to my chest. I looked around for Ms. Vagabond, half expecting to see her charging in brandishing a six-foot Olympic bar as a spear. I thought about calling 9-1-1 for about half a second. I wasn't going to lose this job because I let a scumbag in for a shower. Not to mention catching a possible manslaughter charge. Danny wouldn't fare too well in the deal either, although at the time I don't know if I was more worried about him or me. Probably me.
"Get some towels," I told Danny. He grabbed some from a hamper. Dirty towels for dirty Jeremy. I tried not to look at Jeremy's face while I lifted his crushed skull and had Danny place some towels underneath before the blood could soak the floor. My collarbone was killing me, so I found Lonnie's back pills in the desk and took three of them. I leaned back on the desk and looked at Jeremy and at Danny, both waiting silently for what came next. Danny crouched next to the body and looked up at me calmly, as if he were waiting for me to give the word to clean up some broken glass in aisle four. I don't know what he thought I was going to do, and I wasn't too sure myself.
"The fucker never intended to take a shower," I said.
"Pendejo," Danny said without emotion. "Fucking ladrón."
"What the hell was that all about?" I said.
Danny shrugged. Who could fathom the ways of unwashed junkies?
I stood, and felt faint from the pain. I wanted to see what Ms. Vagabond knew. I walked unsteadily, without knocking, into the women's locker room—now smelling of steam and soap—and almost ran into her standing naked with a towel around her head. Her face went from relaxed, to surprised, to something like a puzzled welcome, and I knew she hadn't been part of Jeremy's dopehead scheme to rob, kill, or whatever.
"Carl," she said. "Are you okay?"
I looked her up and down without meaning to. She was big, but looked good with the extra weight. I wasn't sure that I had seen her totally naked before. Our time under the overpass wasn't exactly steeped in domesticity. And it was pretty dark in the box when the flaps were closed.
I eased onto a bench. "How close are you to Jeremy?" I asked.
Her eyes moved from the pain in my eyes to the arm I was clutching.
"What did he do?" she said.
"Tried to brain me with a weight."
"That dumb shit," she said. "I told him to accept the favor and move on without trying to rob anyone." She still made no move to get dressed.
"Is that what he was doing?" I asked.
She pulled the towel off her head, and I watched her breasts. Despite the pain and the numbness of mind from knowing that Jeremy was dead in the office, I began to get hard. It made me wonder what kind of person I was, but that type of introspection would have to wait.
"He was asking if this place would have any cash lying around," she said. "And that's when I told him to forget it." She started going through her semi-clean clothes and I could see self-preservation start to kick in. "Carl," she said, bending over very un-self-consciously to put on some plus-sized panties. "Can you wait before you call the police so I can get out of here?"
"I'm not calling the police," I said.
She looked puzzled as she put on a man's thick black sock. "Okay," she said. "I'll get him out of here right away then."
"You'll have to," I said. "Because he's not going anywhere under his own steam."
She stopped dressing, and looked at me. "Is he hurt?"
I looked back at her. It was a long moment before she asked. "Dead?"
I didn't say anything. I knew what we were going to have to do, but now I was waiting to see of it was going to be with Ms. Vagabond's help, or without.
I watched her face as she stared at the wall over my shoulder for a second, and I wondered if she had felt anything for Jeremy, or enough to take exception to his death. She looked down at me after a moment. "I'm not sure he was going to live a hell of a lot longer anyway," she said. "He was in pretty bad shape."
Good old Ms. Vagabond, she hadn't changed a bit.
I let her dress and went back into the office. I told Danny to clean the weight and dumbbell and put them back on their racks. I did what I could with one arm. By the time he was done I had the protein containers and their stand back in place. Then the two of us wrapped Jeremy in more used towels and taped him up with some adhesive tape from the first aid kit on the wall.
Ms. Vagabond came in and watched without saying anything. I wanted to get the place cleaned and get out before a passing cop wondered why the lights were on. They carried Jeremy out to the car while I kept a lookout. Then we cleaned the office floor. It was tile, so we got the mess wiped up fairly easily and brought the bloody towels with us. Danny took a towel, a clean one thankfully, and fashioned a sling for my arm. It helped a little.
I locked the front door and checked the men's locker room to make sure Jeremy hadn't left anything. I turned off the shower that the formerly tricky Jeremy had left on to mask his intentions. His clothes that passed for clean were on a bench and a couple of lockers were open, like he'd been going through them.
Something glistening on a sign mounted on the wall caught my eye. It said: Gym Not Responsible for Lost or Stolen Items and had a big glob of spit tracing its way down the sign along the wall to the floor. A rebel to the end, that Jeremy.
I grabbed the clothes, wiped the sign, gave the office a once over, and thought about the security tape. I was going to take it, but there was nothing unusual on it. I decided to put it back in and hope Lonnie didn't notice the thirty minute gap. I turned the lights off, popped in the tape and got out through the back door.
I decided to drive, despite the arm. Danny was both sober and uninjured, but wasn't a good bet for maintaining our freedom. I didn't want to chance getting pulled over with Jeremy in the trunk. I figured I could take another few hours of intense pain rather than ten years in a correctional facility.
They didn't ask where we were going and I didn't say. I got on the highway and headed north. Traffic was light at that time of night and I stayed under the speed limit. Danny glanced over at me a few times. I'm sure my face looked bad in the dashboard light. After almost an hour I took an exit and headed east on a county road. At a lone live oak just past a bridge, I turned onto a narrow dirt road and drove into the woods. The darkness was almost absolute back there, broken only by my slightly misaligned headlights. I knew there was a quiet, slow-moving river off to the left. I opened the window to draw in the clean smell of the pine woods.
Ms. Vagabond hadn't spoken since we got in the car, but finally couldn't help herself. "Where is this?" she said.
A few months earlier Lonnie had invited the few of us that worked at the gym up to his cabin on the river for a cookout. He had about five acres and I knew he only came out on weekends and
was gone after dinner on Sunday. I was counting that I could find it again in the dark, and I was hoping that Ms. Vagabond couldn't, just in case she decided to tell somebody about this…someday.
I didn't answer her. I wanted to keep her a little scared because once she realized she had the upper hand she would use it against me. It's just the way she was. I slowed when I recognized the mailbox, shaped like a largemouth bass, then continued a hundred feet and parked on the side of the road next to some palmettos. I shut the car off and darkness surrounded us.
"Wait here," I said. I looked at Danny. He would know to keep an eye on her. Then I disappeared into the night. There weren't many other houses built out there yet so I didn't expect to see anyone else. I stuck to the sandy road while my eyes adjusted, then saw the driveway. I took it for a minute until the cabin appeared. I stood cradling my arm. The small comfort that Lonnie's pain pills provided had worn off. I really wanted to get the arm immobilized, but knew it would be a while.
The house was dark, so I moved toward the shed around back where Lonnie kept his grill and some rusty tools. The key was hidden under a rafter and I found it after a minute, hoping not to disturb an angry spider with my groping. I got the padlock open and felt around inside until I found a shovel. I stepped out of the shed—and for the first time since I got sober, almost soiled my pants. A woman stood ten feet away.
