Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  Brody spotted his lens charger atop the machine, a new wire hanging out of the side. It was plugged into the face of the large machine that he now realized was a generator. “A kick-start gas genny? Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

  Thorp stood doubled over at the waist, catching his breath and glaring at the uncooperative machine, the dials of which were dark again. “No outlets in the house and there’s no way to wire your lens charger to the main wiring since the electric company has to set up any appliances, even in a farmstead. So this is the best option we have for a nonapproved electronic device.”

  He kicked the bar, his boot slipped, and the foot pad of the bar sprang back up, in what Brody thought looked like retaliation, and caught him on the shin. Thorp cursed and gripped his skinned leg. Without a moment’s hesitation, he kicked the bar down again and again, now with more ferocity driven by annoyance. Each time the generator gave a series of clicks, a whirring as if it were attempting to hold the charge, then slowly it would fade out again and the lights on its face would die once more. Thorp kicked the generator hard on its side, nearly overturning the hundred-pound machine. “Goddamn thing.”

  Brody removed his coat. “Let me try.”

  They took turns trying to kick-start the generator. When Brody had broken a sweat, he stopped and let Thorp take over. The two men worked, the cold air rushing in through the open doors, for half an hour before Paige appeared behind them. She leaned over the stall door and petted one of the horse’s snouts.

  Brody wanted to drive back to Chicago, but he couldn’t without his lenses. When Thorp was too out of breath to continue, Brody gripped one of the support beams along the wall, jammed his boot down again and again. The generator looked like it considered turning over but refused.

  Finally, when Thorp’s turn came, it started with a puff of black exhaust, then a distinct rumble from its engine. The generator vibrated, Brody’s lens charger kicking around on top, tethered in place only by its newly grafted-on cord. Thorp opened one of the windows to allow the exhaust out and looked at the generator proudly.

  Over the noise, Brody hadn’t heard Paige step close to him. She tugged at the elbow of his shirt, and when he turned to her, she had her hand cupped next to his ear. Her breath was hot and moist. “When do you think we can get out of here?”

  “Soon,” Brody whispered.

  Paige, seemingly satisfied with the answer, strolled away to the stalls to pet the horses again.

  The lens charger beeped twice, indicative that Thorp’s electronic wizardry was a success.

  Thorp pulled the plug on the lens charger and wrapped it around the device and presented it to Brody like someone who was displaying a diamond he had cracked out of coal by sheer will alone.

  “How much time do you suppose I’ll get out of them?”

  Thorp shrugged. “Hard to say. Didn’t want to overdo it and cook the resistors. You’ll just have to put them in and find out, I guess.”

  “Good work, handyman.” Brody clapped his friend on the shoulder.

  Handyman. Handyman.

  Handyman had been Thorp’s nickname in the service, and no one had called him it since. Thorp watched Brody walk through the front door of the barn with Paige, glad he could be of help. Up until then, Thorp felt like a helpless idiot who was just hampering his friend. But helping Brody see in color again gave him a surge of self-assurance. It was good to use his hands, to get out of the house and away from his thoughts.

  As he took a seat on the still-warm grille of the generator, he couldn’t help but notice the crashed Darter in his backyard—and all of it came flooding back, ripping the temporary pride away.

  14

  Stepping out of the upstairs bathroom, Brody saw the world coming into focus. He waited for the charge indicator to come on, and when it did he was pleasantly surprised that it read any charge at all. 04:59:59. It would be more than enough time to drive into Chicago, drop off Paige, head to Nectar’s apartment, and get back. He decided to keep Seb’s car for the time being and dispose of it at the train station parking lot when he went to catch the train home later that day.

  As he tromped down the stairs, he realized he felt calmer in Thorp’s farmhouse, but there was something to living with Thorp that he couldn’t deny: a certain contagious mistrust. Whenever he got a spare moment to himself, he mulled over the idea of Nectar being held hostage somewhere, a car battery hooked up to her. Weeks of endless torture. It was getting harder and harder to shake those images from his head. He displaced the undesirable delusions with the fantasy that when he entered her apartment, she’d be sitting on her couch wondering who the hell he was. With relief, he’d explain the whole zany story, sweeping Thorp’s suspicions cleanly aside.

  In the car heading back to Chicago, Paige was quiet. They had the radio tuned to a talk show. The topic was the new liposuction clinic that recently opened at the Mall of America. Paige turned it to her favorite station, suggesting that even Brody might like it since they played what she called modern rock. To Brody, it was all distorted noises and screaming, but it was better than what they had been listening to so he made no argument.

  The song ended, and after the station identification a news brief came on, detailing more about the massacre. The newscaster referred to the killer as Alton Noel, ex-Marine. They were going to release the names of the murder victims, and before the first one could be uttered, Paige switched off the radio.

  After a few minutes and further silence between them, Brody glanced over at Paige. She was selecting names from her contact list on her cell and deleting them.

  “Don’t you need those?”

  “Not if you don’t talk to them anymore. I don’t really keep up with people much. I might exchange numbers with some guy or girl and go see a show with them. After a while, I’ll give them a ring and maybe they won’t answer or they’ll say they have plans—pretty much telling me they think I’m boring. Most people will keep the numbers, just in case they’re throwing a party. Me? That’s it. I erase them. Good-bye. Have a nice life, dick.”

  “I see,” Brody said. The road returned to pavement, and the farms began to thin out in favor of new neighborhoods and the odd gas station and greasy spoon.

  “Here I am, going down my list and who do I come to? Nectar. After all this with you and Thorp and I don’t even get to see her? And on top of that, she won’t even know I was worried about her. She’ll come back with her head shaved and talking in a British accent none the wiser of what kind of disturbance she’s had on your life. No, I’m deleting her. Fuck it. And her keys? You keep them and give them back to her when you find her.”

  “Okay.”

  “With Nectar—it’s so fucking irritating. She’s a cool chick and has a good head on her shoulders, but she doesn’t get it. She lets people tell her whatever they think is the undeniable truth, and she goes along with it until she gets bored. And then I have to hear about how Mateusz said this or Abby said that.”

  “Those friends of hers? Happen to know their last names?” Brody asked.

  “No, I mean, when she talks about them it’s a flurry of stories, and I only remember the names she mentioned the most. Abby is apparently Nectar’s new role model, and Mateusz is just some guy, one of her various maybe-boyfriends. I didn’t really want to know so I didn’t ask. I’d be surprised if even she knew his last name or any of their last names.” Paige glared out the window as they entered Chicago’s city limits.

  Brody made a mental note: Mateusz. Abby. He wanted to ask Paige more but figured she had reached her limit. If Nectar had a boyfriend or any close friends worth looking into, there’d be evidence of them at her apartment—phone numbers, dates to meet up scribbled onto a calendar somewhere, something.

  They drove in silence for a while, the road rumbling under the battered Fairlane’s wheels.

  Paige smirked to herself and said, “Nectar’s a little strange, but for the most part, she’s really sweet. Kind of a mischievous monkey at times. She
kind of moves imperceptibly between the two. She’s just as likely to bring you soup when you’re feeling like shit as put death kisses on your favorite shirt for shits and giggles.”

  “Death kisses?”

  “You never did that to someone when you were younger? You take a drag from a cigarette and find some piece of your friend’s clothes, right? Preferably something white. Then you blow the smoke through the material, and it leaves this nasty yellow stain. A kiss from death. It washes out, but it’s kind of like putting a hickey on someone’s clothes.”

  “And what’s the point?”

  “It means you have a secret for that person. At least that’s why she does it. Look.” Paige pulled down the collar of her coat.

  There, faintly, was a small oily yellow smudge in the oblong shape of a pair of puckered lips. Nectar’s lips. A death kiss from Nectar’s lips. Brody felt as if he had just been presented with cemented proof that ghosts existed.

  They turned the corner and passed the railcar diner, made another corner, and arrived at the curb in front of Mama Wash.

  Paige stared out of the passenger window for a few moments at her mother’s business. The windows were foggy with steam, but there were no shadows beyond. The sign hanging on the door read Closed, but Paige informed him they often forgot to flip it when they were open so apparently it didn’t mean much. She asked Brody to wait and she got out before he could refuse. She went to the front door and tugged. It was locked.

  She came back to the car and leaned down in the open door. She smiled. “All right, well, I’m going to head in to work on some stuff that I should’ve gotten done before all this fun and adventure.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to your apartment?” Brody asked, hands on the wheel.

  “Yeah. Mom won’t be coming in today, not after a scare like yesterday, so I’ll have to finish our orders for tomorrow. Got to keep the customers happy, right?” Paige smiled again, but both times seemed forced. The waver in her voice had returned. She was scared, but he’d learned there was no changing her mind on anything.

  02:59:59 blinked, prodding him.

  It would be dark soon, and already tiny flakes were falling, soft and small as pinched tufts of sparrow down. Despite all that, he wanted to make sure she was going to be safe. She had been crucial in this whole process, and he was more than appreciative.

  “Good luck finding those receipts,” Paige said.

  “Thanks. Call me if Seb comes looking for his car,” Brody said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he will. But fuck that guy. Take care,” She closed the door and walked up to Mama Wash.

  He waited until she was inside with the door locked before he drove away. The snow alighting on the windshield shifted from those tufts of down, easy to ignore, to genuine clumps. When he flipped on the windshield wipers, only one worked—and it was on the passenger side. Before long, Brody found himself nearly lying across the middle seat to see where he was going. He was glad Nectar’s apartment wasn’t that far, and after a handful of lights and intersection music, he was there. He had to circle the block twice to find an open space only to realize the massive car wouldn’t fit, so he circled another couple of times until a pickup left and he could steal its spot. He now remembered why he didn’t own a car.

  Back inside Nectar’s apartment, he closed the door behind him and threw both dead bolts. He stood there for a full minute, slowly taking the whole place in. From TV cop dramas he knew how basic police work was done. Look for signs of struggle, notes or letters, stuff out in the open that someone else may have been looking for. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Nothing looked ransacked or pilfered. The apartment was uniformly tidy, clean.

  He stepped inside on the soft beige carpet and glanced at the lime-green vinyl couch and set of chairs. On the coffee table—just some magazines ranging narrowly in subject from fashion to celebrity gossip.

  A wink of green near the far wall of the apartment caught his eye. He bent down and found a thumb-sized router tucked against the wall with a knitted tea cozy draped over it. From the ceaseless flickering lights, it was apparent the unit was still connected. The router was old, reminding Brody of his own phone as well as the heap of stuff in Thorp’s barn. There was no need for a personal router anymore; the wireless connection blanket went online across the country about the time Brody was in third grade. A personal wireless router—generally picked up on the black market and tweaked with the added ability to encrypt anything received or sent—was about as incriminating as owning a pager or using pay phones once were.

  Still, this was a sign that Nectar hadn’t embraced the entire flower child mind-set and abandoned all electronic devices. She had an ordi somewhere, and that would be the best place to find personal information. He saw this as spoor indicating a potential pot of gold waiting to be found somewhere in the apartment and began looking for the stashed ordinateur.

  He opened a storage closet along the wall of the kitchen, and a set of lights flickered to life. Under them, an impressive display of tiny oak saplings in individual cardboard pots, all withered and yellowed. Beyond their crumbling leaves, Brody could see a partly obscured banner. As he pushed the saplings aside, their stems snapped like dried, ancient bones. The banner, hand-painted on a length of burlap, read: Every New Life Is Another Step Forward. This Is the Way of The Mothers was written beneath it in smaller print that was nearly illegible because of the painter’s crude handiwork.

  He searched the bottom portion of the closet. A large bin of potting soil with a plastic scoop in it, a watering can, a few spare unused cardboard pots. When he opened the bin a deep, musty smell came out. He rolled up his sleeve, drove his hand down to the bottom of it, and flexed to find anything with solidarity to it. Nothing. He dusted his hands off and closed the closet door and moved on, repeating the banner’s mantra aloud until he had it memorized.

  The Mothers.

  The bathroom was immaculate. The toilet looked recently cleaned, and the shower curtain was throwing off a rubbery smell which told Brody it was new. The linen closet was full of neatly folded towels. Each one he gently karate chopped to make sure nothing was folded up inside. He pulled the lid off the tank of the toilet and peeked inside. Everything was as it should be. No ordinateur or collection of spare brass knuckles sealed in waterproof bags like in his apartment. The washer and dryer in the bathroom closet were both empty, the lint trap clear. He went into the bedroom next and found the bed made, with throw pillows and a folded comforter at the foot.

  Everything Nectar owned was in muted shades of green and brown. The color palette made him think of someone who was environmentally minded, someone who liked nature and spending time in it, someone who might go so far as to chain herself to a tree or spend an entire weekend planting saplings in public parks, a task she was obviously prepared to do.

  Brody started going through her drawers but stopped, wrist-deep in blouses, and withdrew his hand. Why am I going through all her things like this? Airline tickets or stubs, purchase agreements printed off the Internet—that was what he was here for. He left the bedroom, wondering what had gotten into him. He thought about how he’d taken the lid off the toilet’s tank. What the fuck was I looking in there for? What did I expect to find?

  At the foyer, with a recalibrated sense of what he was seeking, he found there was nothing readily out in the open that he could go through, no mail holder or anything by the front door. He took a deep breath and held it, cast his gaze at the set of windows over her living room—the sheer curtains drawn, the gray light of the overcast afternoon filtering through. Brody took stock of what he was feeling. He slid two fingers into the collar of his shirt, loosened his tie, even undid the top button of his shirt as well as his coat. It didn’t help. The tension was still there, the scaly skin ever present.

  He turned on his heel and paced the carpeted hall to the bedroom. He opened her drawers again. As he peered inside at the neatly folded collection of undergarments he said,
“She’s out of town. She’s finding herself. She’s just out soul-searching.”

  The next drawer contained a collection of socks in different colors, a silky nugget of balled-up panty hose in the corner. He pushed on the oblong shape to make sure nothing was hidden inside.

  He muttered, “I have to find her.”

  Brody closed his eyes and grimaced at the slip of the tongue. He withdrew his hands from the drawers a second time and placed them in his pockets. He gazed up and caught his own reflection in the dresser mirror. Orange eyes, held at half-mast out of frustration.

  He told himself, “Don’t. Just look around, find her ordi, an airline receipt, a bus pass—and go.”

  But as soon as he no longer held eye contact with himself, his hands dove back into the dresser on their own. He heard himself mutter the same claim it had made before. He didn’t stop, knew by struggling the grip would just tighten more. He sighed as he watched his hands open the next drawer—jeans and dress pants. Some looked new, and others looked like they’d been worn for decades due to their ragged holes.

  Next he went to the closet and threw open the double doors. Paige had been right; it looked like a wardrobe for someone with multiple personalities. Every style of dress one could imagine, ranging from the dark fishnet assortment to the silken classic mermaid cut to the evening gown to the saucy miniskirts. When he activated a fiber-optic cocktail dress, it displayed the phrase: We Only Get One Earth. After upending each shoe box and turning out every pocket of everything hanging in here, he clicked it off and closed the doors.

  Brody exited the bedroom, shutting off the light as he went. He stopped in the doorway and thought about his own apartment, where he kept his secret things, his accordion file of important paperwork. His social security card, the first laminated jigsaw card he got when he was ten, all the mail from the Army, the carbon copies, and the like. Under the bed.